How to Build Elite Teams for Extraordinary Impact with Meir Adler - OrgDev Episode 43

Who are the real drivers of value in your organisation? Often, it’s just a few key teams—software engineers, R&D scientists, portfolio managers—who shoulder the lion’s share of impact and growth. These elite teams are the cornerstone of organizational success, but how can leaders ensure they’re fully supported and operating at their highest potential?

In this episode, we dive into what it takes to optimize these high-stakes teams, exploring how to provide the right environment, resources, and leadership to help them thrive under immense pressure.

Joining us is Meir Adler, Managing Partner at Adler Advisory and a seasoned expert in HR, Organizational Development, and Transformation. Meir shares invaluable insights from his extensive experience driving high-impact outcomes across industries, helping leaders unlock the full potential of their most critical teams.

💼 About our Guest
Meir Adler
Managing Partner, Adler Advisory

Connect with Meir here:
  / meiradler 

With over 15 years of experience leading multi-disciplinary teams in HR, Organizational Development, and Transformation, Meir Adler brings deep expertise across operating model and organization design, agile practices, talent management, change leadership, team effectiveness, and leadership development.

As the former Head of Organizational Development for International at Novartis, Meir led a team in a 27,000-strong organization spanning ~100 geographies, contributing to 55% of Novartis’s revenue. Prior to this, he worked across diverse industries, including retail, technology, banking, gaming, and pharmaceuticals, driving high-impact organizational transformations.

Now Managing Partner at Adler Advisory, Meir has delivered over 40 large-scale projects, from acute interventions to enterprise-wide transformations, utilizing innovative methods like zero-based design and agile models. He is passionate about creating value through talent and organizational development and thrives in navigating complex, high-stakes transformations that redefine ways of working, technology, and

Thanks for listening!

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Our professional and highly skilled consultants focus on delivering engaging, results-focused and flexible solutions that help our clients achieve their business objectives.

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Transcript

Transcript:
(00:00) hi and welcome to the org Dev podcast so who are the real drivers of value in your organizations in many companies it's just a few key teams the software Engineers the R&D scientists the portfolio managers who are responsible for the line share of impact and growth these high stakes teams don't just contribute they're the Cornerstone of the organization success but how do you ensure that these essential groups are not only supported but developed to their Highest Potential in this episode we're exploring what it takes to truly
(00:30) optimize the teams that create the most value how can leaders and consultants and HR teams provide the right environment resources and support to help these teams Thrive under pressure of carrying the organization success on their shoulders to help us explore this fascinating challenge we're joined by mayor Adler who's managing partner at Adler advisory providing hrod change and transformation Consulting Services now met is a brilliant guest to have on he has such an extensive career he's managed over 40 large scale projects
(01:00) across more than 30 major multinational organizations from acute interventions to enterprise-wide Transformations with traditional and radical methods like zerob based design and agile methods and Danny and I would love to know more about zerob based design as head of organization development for international at neatus he led a team within a 27,000 strong person organization spanning 100 geographies responsible for 55% of Nas's Revenue now nastis is a fascinating organization with their highly public publicized goal
(01:31) of creating an unbossed environment and they also used to be seber gy which kind of rung a bell for me because they're actually one of the main case studies in edar shine's all-time classic book organizational culture and Leadership so hopefully we'll be a to sign a little bit of a light there mayor has extensive experience working across various Industries including retail technology consumer goods transport government departments banking gaming and big farmer which we're really hoping to tap
(01:58) into today so thank you so much for joining us may we're really delighted to have [Music] you just to kick us off just tell us a bit about the work that you do and what your your work looks like and involves yeah so I find myself working across kind of the broad spectrum of or development um and in my head I know I've listened to quite a few of these podcasts actually your own and often people are defining it in multiple different ways in my head that is kind of or design and transformation um change management so how do you move
(02:33) people from to adopt new things processes Technologies ways of working um structures leadership development which is a critical component of organization development because leaders seem to have an exponential impact on the organization versus those they lead critical roles and talent um in those critical roles so you mentioned earlier Garin like certain teams have extra value it's the same thing with certain roles in an organization they are the ones that carry a lot of the risk or opportunity or own it and so focusing on
(03:06) them and how they're set up and then team Effectiveness so not an individual and not the whole system but the unit of performance in a system that really kind of owns your most valuable aims as an organization and how does your approach differ to kind of maybe others I don't know if it differs there's a lot of people um doing good work out there I think um the when we talk about um for example team Effectiveness uh there are many kind of practices out there that talk about um that intervene kind of oneoff uh or in
(03:45) uh Workshop style um with kind of a qualitative assessment of a situation you kind of go in try and fix it and move on right and that's less about the people who are intervening the practitioners and more about often what people are buying and how they understand right so often people pick up the phone and say hey we really need help with a senior leadership team that's struggling can you come and do some intervention work right or we've got an offsite and we really want everybody to be much more collaborative
(04:11) than they are today we can play Bingo for the next hour by the way um yeah um uh and can you come and help us kind of lay that out Etc um in the last couple of years I've had the opportunity to sit within a role not as a consultant but as a head of or development in a very large organization that has critical work and so rather than kind of coming in and out at certain moments we were able to start looking at um the workflow itself uh and how we can make that workflow more effective um and what was really
(04:45) interesting which kind of brings it back to why I'm kind of in this work but what was really interesting about that is a huge part of what was getting in the way of the work was just the humans and the system in which they worked and how it affected them because um whether you're a launch Team in a pharmaceutical company or a launch Team in a gaming company or a transformation team in the NHS or which of which there are many being stood up as we speak right um or if you are a uh project delivery team leading on kind of 20
(05:17) billion submarine uh building programs the first time you meet you often don't know each other right you're a group of experts in different fields you know in the world today we have this amazing um breadth of remit in organizations a very complex task that we're trying to do you know to launch something or to build something that complex requires multiple disciplines coming together and working over a long period of time often with great ambiguity um and breaking new ground right in our largest kind of most
(05:49) successful organizations in the world um and they kind of have to work together they've never met each other you know Bob's getting divorced Sue hates Jane um uh Danny has uh been there for 20 years super talented really Keen Garen just joined the company right so he really keen and talented but doesn't know where to go right Maya has been there for 20 years but is a lazy layabout and and just doesn't really want to be engaged right so that's how you start it's a group of human beings in a complex
(06:19) organizational system um and rather than coming and intervening once or twice with them to kind of get them going which is the classic team Effectiveness approach we were able to work with them over time to get them from being a group of random individuals let's say in some ways to being a really high performing team and when we talk about high performance in team Effectiveness I talk about um increasing the effectiveness of the outcome so the team is trying to do something right and so are they better at doing that is that thing done better
(06:50) and the happiness of the people involved so uh if you are a talented team with Goodwill and working effectively you should be happier you should be more engaged and your work that should be one of the the the main drivers so being able to kind of focus that over the long term and build and learn kind of an approach uh not from a top- down assessment or a once off but really in real observation with the business and the teams um was quite a unique experience which changed my perspective on or development quite a lot
(07:22) fascinating and where did you start with that say you got that group of disperate individuals coming together where did you start so I'm not going to talk only about the work I didn't have artist and I probably won't name things because I also don't want it to be too um uh closely linked but you know um where you start is where the team is so it's funny right we come with Frameworks come with theories come with methodologies um you know people love or hate lenion people love or hate right there's there's a
(07:49) whole load of things that people have different right then we come we say we need to do some kind of assessment we're going to do interviews we're going to do this we're going to do that at the end of the day the team will be at a certain point in their journey and that could be brand new and raring too that could be they've got a new leader that could be they're halfway through and they're a total crisis and depending on where they are depends on what mood you're going to find them in how much time and patience
(08:12) they have um and what they're willing to discuss right because the interesting thing about staying with a journey a team for a while is that you start to build trust with the team and psychological safety but also with yourself as a facilitator um I always talk to people about you know people say you have to bring yourself to work we should be authentic I know many people um and sometimes myself included who are inauthentic and lie to themselves regularly right and to our partners and to our closest friends and then we come
(08:40) to work in a you in our social context where we have no stricture of worrying about my job or needing to look good from a performance perspective we don't always bring ourselves to every context and then at work it's even harder so it's not just your social self but also with the kind of fight ORF flight survival mode system of well I need a job and I need to pay for my mortgage right and so in that those two contexts with teams that are often going through a lot of transformation you kind of just
(09:08) have to meet them where they are and the way we do that um is we do a quantitative assessment and that's a survey which is a great place to start and the way that survey works is it's based around the components that make up team Effectiveness um there are some really good um so Ruth wagerman um from 16 conditions has some really great resear on this and she does this um and and a team with her does this quite a lot and um on rework site by Google um there was Project Aristotle where Google basically looked at you know what makes
(09:41) great teams there's a few other um methodologies that work in a similar way right so um if it's actually a great way if you're if you're trying to use a team development uh a team effectivess consultant or startup team Effectiveness and looking for a vendor to use a good thing to ask them is um you know what are the kind of components they assess and try and measure and manage through their team effectivness interventions because broadly they turn out to be the same things which is in in each of the
(10:11) methodologies and the research which is you know a team needs to um have a shared and clear purpose a team needs to be clear on the way it's structured and how it makes decisions so roles responsibilities amazing how many times you kind of bring a team together and everybody says there's a one line on a PowerPoint which says we're going to make make x billion or we're going to do this in the Market at one layer down from that single line of bullet point and PowerPoint everybody's got a different idea never mind the personal
(10:38) stuff like I said about Bob really just thinking about his divorce right but but while you're in the room we talking about what this purpose is and I'm shaving it but even if you're all focused and all talented right there there are many ambiguities and unknowns right so really getting clear on what we're here to do and how our work is interdependent um Ruth werman actually talks about um she always says the first thing I ask a team is are you a team so often in big organizations we have a whole group of people have chucked
(11:08) together around a task to be done let's say um and often they're not really interdependent in their skills they're kind of a working group they need to update each other and make sure they land certain things within a certain time frame together they don't really need to work together as a team kind of day in and day out and so you know defining the team and then saying like I said um are you do are you clear and and aligned your share purpose do you have the right constructs roles responsibilities governance decision
(11:34) rights do you have the right behaviors um which folds into the last thing really which is psychological safety actually sorry I missed one thing which is um before you get to that you also talk about your stakeholders so and the context system in which you're in so you know if you're a team you can become brilliantly effective at working together right you can be really clear you could be best mates with everybody and they could all be really talented um but the system in which you work right so if you're a launch Team at narst for
(12:03) example there might be 17 um leaders on that team that come together different expertise areas with people who report to them who do a lot of the work as they go through but that's only a small handful of people compared to the 27,000 people in your business unit or the 100,000 people in narst I did some work for a Activision Blizzard King who now just got bought by Microsoft it was a similar thing I was working with their game studios um around how to become more Innovative the core of King is 700 or it was at the time 700 people who
(12:39) work in software development across three game studios very agile very Innovative um kind of the the the perfect org development right they were already working because that's what they did the scrum was their way of life and so they were already advancing they had great coaches um but the system in which they got put into which was 2,000 other people in the organization who worked in a very standard way from the big paent companies that they ended up with um con strain their ability to be effective in their own teams right so what happens
(13:13) there is that you the team operates in the context and so you need to take into account the context so that's one piece and then uh finally out of all of that if you can get that right comes psychological safety um and psychological safety is something I've been thinking about and researching a lot recently because or I'm trying to and I've started speaking to people about what it feels I ask them three questions I say what does it feel like to be psychologically safe or unsafe I want to I want to hear from people The
(13:40) Experience um I'm really thankful that people are willing to share because it's often quite painful um I've been in that space myself right and it's quite a traumatic thing to experience and share um what does it look like can you see things that are psychologically safe or not you know consistency of messaging from leaders that's one thing that comes out right clear roles and responsibilities comes out of something that's needed these are things you can see in a psychologically safe
(14:04) environment these things are clear in an unsafe environment they're not right and then is there anything you can do to manufacture it but the reason why I'm so focused on psychological safety in the context of teams is that uh step Fleming talks about uh from UCL he leads the metacognition lab there um and he talks about um I've been really interested in his work recently because he he basically thinks about metacognition which is the ability to think about thinking so how self-aware broadly are
(14:29) you of your thoughts and how capable you are or not right and what that means is a you know he he believes that similar to IQ it can be measured and it's a separate mechanism to cognition in our brains which is you know a whole interesting space for development and leadership development um and coaching but he talks about the research that says if two people are trying to complete a complex task they get a better outcome than doing it on their own if the following thing is true that for for example if Danny and I were
(15:00) doing a piece of work together I could say to Danny hey Danny I think we should do this right I don't know for sure and I'm like 25% confident and I can say that in safety and Danny can receive that safely and then Danny can say well may that's so interesting I think we should do why and I'm 60% confident so the ability to put forward your view and the level of confidence you have in it which we pause for a moment to think about like that's not a very normal thing to happen in the workplace right
(15:28) people are constantly 100% sure of something they just heard about right because because that's the way we've been uh conditioned to work but if you're able to share in that way um you get a better outcome on a complex task together and and when I heard that something just lit up in my brain because that for me was a definition of psychological safety that for me was a definition of actual collaboration and so if you are able to do that as a team of interdependent experts who have 20 years of expertise in separate Fields if
(15:57) you can come together then maybe you can do Aristotle said right and become the whole becomes more than the sum of its parts and that's that's what everybody wants in their working life so that's for me that's why I've come to kind of see this as critical but that's the process right so the framework is to say how do you you know and you do an assessment you do it um qualitative assessment looks like observation so you sit down with a team and you literally observe them in action you just sit in
(16:22) the room watch them and then take from that you do interviews and you do a quantitative assessment against the area you choose right that you say this is how we're going to think about teams so structure purpose uh stolder ecosystem psychological safety and then the reason why it's really important to measure is because you can keep measuring over the time you work with the team because those things should get better if they don't then they're wasting their time and money with you really loads of
(16:47) things you've just talked about there that I'd love to pull on just apologies to anyone watching the video the only pen that I have is Danny and I take notes as we're doing this and the only pen that's on my desk is a fluffy star pen so daughter my uh my six-year old daughter would love that pen feel posting it to me let me know if we ever open a distinction orev podcast shop this gonna be merch so there there were three threads I just wanted to pull on there um and I'm sure Danny you've got ones as well
(17:18) so first one is just that that teaming is kind of priced into forming of teams isn't it it's like surely everyone should know how to be on a team and how to behave but if you are bringing a high value team together then you're often bringing subject matter experts in there that may be sort of Lone wolves that work out in the organization you know you got such a NE specialization they're kind of sort of treated as gurus and all of a sudden they're kind of expected to be in a team and to perform at that
(17:43) level does is that something that organizations sometimes get wrong I don't think organizations get that wrong I think the way we think about I don't think it's the expertise thing that's necessarily the problem right or the not being having been in a team before I think there are two things that that that matter about kind of how you form the the team it's interesting you said like it's assumed that kind of working in a team is I don't know if it I don't know if it is natural right um we often
(18:07) get thrown together in teams you have a standing team in your organization you have a line manager it might take you two years to become and on average a team takes about two years to become highly effective to become really comfortable with those people and be able to share in the way that I described it's more valuable often in today's world leadership teams and kind of static teams because of nature of the kind of work you know the nature of the way that organizations are structured which is not what we're talking about
(18:34) but happy to talk to you about that at any point right it's really interesting kind of the way we've structured from you know I don't know 1900 till now right stays the same but the way that workflows in organization has changed quite drastically so often the team you work in is not the team you work with so you might be in the marketing function which is your team but you might be working on marketing fresh grocery at Sainsbury's so the people you're actually going to be working with sit in
(19:01) another siloed team right so your team is around kind come together around the work and I think that people are put in difficult positions because they have a functional home where their performance is managed and you know you have a whole structure of thinking and career development Etc in a team and then the work uh is different so one I don't know how natural it is to just be working in teams right I think that comes with a whole load of person personal personality social pieces and then the kind of politics and economy at work
(19:29) work and I actually think we're quite bad at teaching people how to just exist in a team or how to work together I think it is assumed that everybody can just do this right but I don't know how natural or easy it is I'm sure some people have been on teams with me and being like Oh God that guy does not know how to work in a team right whereas I think I do so you know who knows um but I think the second thing that's really hard is the nature of the work has changed the nature of the way the work
(19:52) flows so you're you're constantly working with people outside of your function and um in other functions but also so in today's vuka world and I do this because it's used as like an industry maker to sell change and transformation constantly we do have a lot of decisions being done and undone and people moved around so you could be put together as part of a team 10 new people put together you've got a chance and then there's a marketing transformation and a headcount cost reduction and a portfolio divestment and
(20:21) so even these 10 people just because of all the stuff that's happening in the organization right just constantly chopped and changed so from a kind of soop iCal safety perspective that's very hard to keep up with and literally just like the change in the organization is constant right people deck chairs are being moved around constantly and so it's hard to keep steady and stable against the task which is what the team's really there to do the the head of agile coaching at King said to me you
(20:48) know it takes two years for a team to become highly effective and when you talk about highly effective in the world of coding you're talking about you know literal quality of code and volume of output over time so you're saying within a Sprint the quality of our code used to be at 80% and now it's at 95% and we used to Output 100 lines of code and now we're outputting 200 lines I'm making these stats up right but it's it's a it's a it's a measure so they used to measure how long it took Peak
(21:17) Performance if you think about the way most teams are put together and organized and changed today you barely have time to breathe before you're off the team that you would just put on as the number one priority for the company right so what it probably requires is some higher level thinking which is also how you start to contract with this work which is you know if you contract at the team level it's very hard because there's so much in the system that affects them if you contract at the right level people need to understand
(21:40) that are certain value streams of work in a business should be protected in some way right so in every business there there's a very valuable work and for that valuable work to be done most effectively you want teams around it who have stability in their personal relationships in the team and in kind of the way the work is done and their rights and responsibili in that so they can get comfortable and expert at it and if you're constantly transforming and changing it's almost impossible to do that so it becomes a question of like
(22:09) you know you might need to cut cost for example by the end of the year but how do you protect the growth drivers of your business and think about them differently it's holding your nerve isn't it and the other question about was a really important part there there's often missed with a lot of sort of Team Effectiveness development is about the fact you are in in context and every organization you know these teams are performing different places and it kind of reminded me um there's a I work with a really well known insurer they
(22:38) sort said their operator model is basically you know we collect the premiums and that's obviously what the consumer sees but the money is made by the Traders so we get we take the money from the premiums and this very small group of 100 people they're the ones that make the billions and so this team and so the the HR people were like if you're going to work with them if you're going to take them offline then they better be damn good and you need to really compel them so there there there's a there's a whole little culture
(23:03) around them isn't there as well and I guess some organizations appreciate that this is the high value creation team other organizations may not see that they're the high value creation team and keep messing with them and podding them and all kinds of stuff as well how important is it for an organization to work well and provide a healthy context for these teams to do their best work uh I mean it's it's it's it's critical I I say so if you there's um uh I'm going to try and find his name very quickly Tim
(23:29) Timothy Galloway who was a tennis coach wrote a um book about high performance and uh somebody else I worked with used to use this in kind of presentations to get people to think about what performance really is and and I've I use it with a Bandon as well because I I really like it as a definition but he talks about performance equals potential minus interference so if you think about from an org Dev perspective potential is the talent you have it's a critical question right you you could do all of the team factionist work in the perfect
(24:01) context where if you have the wrong Talent you're going to be only as effective as they can be so one you've got the right talent and you've put the right investment behind it so you know if they need 50 million or 1 million or 200 million then you've given them the right amount of money so that's let's say we've got that it's the potential that is a few hundred people building a new game with Microsoft uh or a small you take the NHS as a great example there will be hundreds if not thousands
(24:28) of people I'm sure uh that West streeting is putting on the transformation of the NHS as we speak right if they're not on it already and it will grow and build and they'll be loads of phenomenal people doing phenomenal work on the flip side there's 500,000 to two million people depending on how you look at it and vendors Etc who are doing things the way they've always been done right and moving to the slowest common denominator and so that is all interference right um there are so many agendas and so many things to be
(24:57) done there's no no large organization in the world today of any kind um profit or not profit who only has one thing they're trying to achieve right one objective a CEO would be laughed off stage he has to have like three to six even though we want them to prioritize she's like no they're all high value they're all high importance they're all high urgency I will not be backed down from it right because you need to have multiple planks to the strategy because you don't necessarily know what's going to come and how it's
(25:24) going to work it's fair but what that means in organizations is you have a whole heft the dog um the weight of the dog is wagging the tail I suppose which sounds like the right thing to be doing but actually here you know especially with Innovation um you want the the tail to do the wagging you want the tail to be that that that that thing of value needs to be more important than the system so I think it's really important that they're set up to succeed quite desperately it's really interesting in
(25:51) some uh organization so supercell um supercell which is a uh in 2019 was the largest Mobile gaming company and in 2023 I don't think was in the top 10 the CEO has written a lot about it you can read it um it's great website they talk about us and their culture um but they've made a decision that their managed games their live games which is how they kind of keep their revenue going are going to be managed in one way but um their growth drivers their new games are going to be managed totally separately so a group of people Talent
(26:21) are going to be given money which equals potential and then to reduce the interference they've been told you can go do whatever you want with the rest of the company won't even talk to you so some some one game team has decided to move off site so they've moved they've gone and rented their own offices with part of their money right they're they're saying we're going to we're going to manage the whole thing here right now that's an extreme way to think but it's a totally different way of
(26:42) dealing with the interference problem right but that company is saying we know that this Behemoth of a con a context right never mind the external context and the customers and everything else we are getting in your way so how do we get out of your way uh I think it's harder in more regulated Industries but but if you don't spend the time and money and effort focusing there and creating enough space for that team to succeed you lose all your value right it's like if you have the scientists who come up
(27:12) with the drug first you beat the market if fisa or Ro or neatus does then they beat the market and so um a part of that will be the people that you get in to do that work and a Hu and the teams you put and how they work together a huge part of that will be the ecosystem in which they operate what was your journey into OD when we first met obviously we had a quick look at your LinkedIn Prof and it literally it's a fascinating study and lots of interesting context that you've work in isn't it I fell into this um I I
(27:46) don't have any training in it I I should say I have training in it but I don't have education in it I there was a friend of mine who was a manager at Accentra I I came out of University and I didn't know what I was going to do with my life I still don't really I I work for charity um teaching uh sex ed actually in religious schools all over the country so in the UK we have religious schools that also State schools and so they have the national curriculum and so you have to teach them uh sexual health education and the
(28:17) teachers in religious schools across the country are quite um they don't want to do that task so there was I worked for a charity that went and did that all over Catholic schools Muslim schools Hindu schools and and Jewish schools around around the UK um uh 15-year-old teenagers being taught sexed are difficult stakeholders wonderful this feels like it deserves its own episode everyone's pois and how did you do that yeah there was something there that has stayed with me throughout my career which is like you get real life
(28:48) observation of feedback and and positivity in the moment in the room with and that was always wonderfully energizing and it stayed with me you even in the team fist work forget the big things that we're trying to achieve the organization when somebody comes to you in a hallway and says you know until you came in to clarify like which direction we're going in and who's making which decisions and how we're working together you know I've worked for 20 years and I've never felt like I've been had my back against the wall
(29:16) like this I just I walked into the situation I thought it was going to be great and I don't understand how it turned out like this and thank you for kind of helping me move through that process like that still that individual kind of value um still feels really it makes me happy I suppose it gives me value it gives me fulfillment uh back but um and I work for commercial art gallery and a startup and then literally over a weekend uh I was sitting with my friend and she was like I'm a manager uh and I'm running a new Assessment Center
(29:45) fun for Accenture um to join on their grad scheme uh we've got some spaces free you don't really know what you're doing with your life do you want to join us and I did and I was there for 3 days and on Monday they called me and they were like you've got a job on our grad scheme um and I was a really keen and excited uh Accenture Consulting uh analyst and then um I just simply uh through my journey through Accentra Del KPMG I stayed in this space of people I fell into it right it was that my first
(30:14) project that I got given was in L&D Consulting and then I stayed in the people in organization Consulting space and always was doing kind of organization design change management operating model transformation I found that I had a knack for it and I've always had more of an act for the for the kind of solutioning and the process and the design and delivery of the work versus the politics of the work actually um which is a really interesting thing um because the politics in this work is is big and then I left KPMG and uh
(30:46) started working for myself for a while and then a arst offered me this job um and you know going in house uh I would say to anybody if they're going to work in this space of or development I would spend time as a consultant um if you don't have any background in it working in the big Consulting houses is a really great way to learn process Consulting right this is how you do an this how you take a client through Contracting uh you know analysis high level design detail design delivery right you could you can learn how to do
(31:14) that via a kind of a contract route where you're kind of doing more of it yourself from the thinking to the end so not in a big team but then spending time in house um has fundamentally changed my understanding and belief set in in or development so that for me the last kind of four and a half years n artist has been a wonderful learning experience to see kind of how does all of that theory and methodology and process land for real in an organization that you sit in for a while right so there were things I
(31:46) did on day one when I joined narus and three years later I looked back at it and like I would never do that thing the same way again right this is me me I'm talking about my personal work and output right um because I didn't understand context uh and context is hard to get when you're not in the organization uh for long enough cuz a lot Garen you know a lot a lot of what great talent does is whatever context they put in they find a way to kind of work through it because it's so hard to manage context right it's changing all
(32:15) the time you're saying it's C it it's really hard to manage and keep managed you know often these big programs and and kind of lines of work are multi-year so the context is changing you know every six to 12 months it's a great talent learns how to navigate it and the only way you can learn how to navigate context in reality is by sitting in it for a while we have a lot of people that watch this that are either just at the beginning of their career or just uh looking as an option what can people
(32:42) that work internally take from consultants and vice versa what cons Consultants take from those that work inside to be better practitioners that's a great question what can cons what can people internally take from Consultants Contracting structure process logic I I don't want to be rude in any way I'm just talking about the things that Consultants are good at right and and I think that we could learn internally like I said I have no education in this I've done 15 years of this work day in and day out right um for my sins I wake
(33:13) up sometimes thinking about it um I don't know why I sometimes wish I had done something you know uh that everybody else thought was more interesting um I'm like reading a book in bed about the history of Human Resources development my wife is like you're the most boring man I know like what what's wrong with you like you know so I don't know but um uh we we you say logic is it like the objectivity of being that external person the objectivity in the flow right so so what do I mean so when you think about um
(33:43) when you think when you think about Contracting just to start with that internally we're horrific at Contracting so a leader calls you up and says I need this thing done tomorrow right and a de partner would say absolutely here's how I'm going to do it this is what I'm going to do for you and that time period This is how much it's going to cost this is the resource I need uh Etc Mackenzie Partners is the same right Contracting is really important for the person doing the work because they get clear on
(34:06) what's expected of them required of them how they're going to have to act and what they're going to have to do but even more importantly when you're internal most of the time that leaders or work comes your way it's badly defined it's very sloppily defined we need to do X by y you know do we even have a definition of X we need to become customer Centric in the next six months well I mean literally you know literally there be dragons with it exactly like that is exactly so Contracting is about
(34:35) getting definition on the thing you're trying to achieve otherwise you've got no hope in a complex system so so that's really and and Consultants are great at that because it's about how much they make and whether they make their margin or they lose their margin so they they've got to be good at Contracting so that that process that strategic process of Contracting where you're really defining the job to be done is critical um and in the same way you know when it comes to logic and the pro you know
(34:59) process Consulting of you know the idea is that we have to make a change we have to transform and there's a way to do that we have to restructure whether it's for cost or for Innovation right let's say now it may be that it's a hard thing to do and you don't get it right but what the reason why we run a process is because we increase the chance of success right we're making it more objective making it standard we're making sure that we don't let anything fall through the cracks right so often
(35:25) uh in h in house we say oh let's just skip that bit the leaders don't want they they already know the answers or whatever it is right let's move on let's jump to you know I want to make Talent decisions for the top tiers of the organization think about organization design and you're like we haven't even started with design principles so we don't even know who's going to have jobs I mean but the people putting people in jobs already seem to know right so so the whole idea of process is that it it
(35:50) basically it creates a vessel an objective vessel for in all the inputs to be gathered and then some design thinking to be done and outputs to be created right so increases your chances of success of getting it right that's the way I always think about process Consulting so what I would take again is like strength in that internally and then logic is like you know a consultant I once had a senior partner when I was in Consulting he said to me may you know not all the numbers need to work but the numbers in this deck need to add up
(36:18) right which I always thought was funny it's like but but act you know you can't turn up to a client with an illogical thought process right because they'll quiz you they're paying you a lot of money they'll say well what do you mean by that why are you saying that that would work tell explain to me the sometimes they'll go to Theory sometimes they'll tell you your boxes aren't aligned and sometimes they'll be like I've never observed this to work at all right um uh so so that that you know you
(36:42) have to present a logical you've got to go from data to uh potential assumptions to you know to hypotheses right to outputs you can't just jump to an answer or take you know internally it's much easier to fall to like what we call the hippo problem right which is the highest paid person's opinion in the room well but that's not logical and and the interesting thing is when you come to change management you're standing in front of 20,000 people and telling them about this whole big thing that you've
(37:12) designed and changed right without objectivity and without process they don't believe you S surprise surprised right because they're like well I can I can see that those things I know you're putting them on the slide together on left you know the left hand side with some nice arrows on the right hand side but I know I work in this business I know that's not true right so so we need to become stronger at that I think internally and I think Consultants can learn internally um uh you know I just
(37:39) talk about the lesson I learned the lesson I learned when I moved from Consulting to kind of working in a business um was uh I probably hadn't done anything until that point in my career and doing something real is very very different from developing a design or a PowerPoint especially when it comes to people right it's different you could you could literally take I mean this has never happened but you could be a uh technology architect and you could develop an architecture on a design software platform or a PowerPoint and
(38:08) then you could present it and that thing could be implemented in real life you literally the company could take your PowerPoint and make it into the real life architecture right so so it's it's like an architect when when we had an architect do our house the 250 page PDF and the Builder obviously came and did their craft but they followed the architect's rules I've never seen an organization design chart or an or development chart or a change management plan or a strategic Workforce plan that
(38:34) um becomes real in that way in kind of such a binary way right we say well where should we put the light switches well no it's all measured out already it's this many millimeters from the floor and this m many millimeters from the side of the wall right um you're dealing with complex changing systems human beings all the people that you wanted to have x with right have decided to leave and go to competitors if you think about like after covid the most you know astroica um lost a huge amount of its scientists of no choice um but
(39:08) because they felt that they hadn't um uh grabbed the market opportunity in the way that fisa did and they were all very frustrated right so so human beings in that system mean that you you can't do just the thing that's on the paper and it takes time right so you design it and then a year later The Works Council sign off um and it get it happens and by that time as one of my friends always used to say you know birth death and marriages in organizations happen all the time so many things have changed so making real
(39:38) change in an organization looks and feels very very different um and is much harder than it is to feel as if you're doing it in Consulting before the call Danny and I were discussing an article that you wrote on LinkedIn and you've mentioned it a few times there which is the it was about a large scale change that you did but you talked particularly about PowerPoint and you know the bigger consultancies do tend to sort of use PowerPoint as a medium to sort of uh articulate ideas and you know Solutions
(40:05) and that as well what does that do do you feel the fact that we do have this we've agreed between ourselves that you know PowerPoint is the platform that we're going to and for all its benefits and challenges what what does that do and and how do clients actually consume PowerPoint uh language is um it's very hard to communicate it's very hard to communicate as a human being it's very hard to communicate there are many many times in my life where I have wanted to somebody to experience me in a certain way or I
(40:35) believed I was expressing myself in a certain way and I was experienced totally differently to the way that I was trying so it's really hard and the more complex and the more wide ranging Concepts and topics become the harder it becomes to communicate so it might not be all PowerPoints fault but I I think that for me the biggest problem is that people think that the thing that we do in business is we don't spend enough time and effort actually having a conversation with the right people in the room about what really matters and
(41:11) what doesn't and so PowerPoint can be a great facilitative tool to get to that but what it can't be which is often what it is is a replacement so I've worked for many many large organizations as a consultant and inhouse and what I see often is and you know I'll tell you this and I'll see if you smile and if you smile I'll I'll take that as you've also seen it too right smiling you haven't even said it yet yeah ex so um this team my team or another team right um have been working
(41:43) on something for three to six months it's something that is touted as one of the most important things from a cost perspective or an Effectiveness perspective or a value perspective in the organization you know it'll be in a um it'll be in a list of top three to four strategic imperativ for the CEO or the chro or the FD right so so it's it's as important as these things get right they might even be talking to the public market about it um and every three to six months they might go to a board for
(42:12) this piece of work right so a senior exec team or senior exec minus one team Etc and in half an hour which sometimes gets cut down to 10 minutes um uh they present I don't know design options right for organization or the change management plan or um or kind of talent and leadership development uh gaps and issues or aims right so pick pick your choice of things in or development um and because in theory the PowerPoint is perfect and all the work is done you know and you're either in all in green or whatever it is on your rag status no
(42:53) con real conversation is had at all at that moment which and and if you're not having that conversation you know what are what are you actually doing I had this weird I had this weird realization at one point which is like it's a funny old thing when we talk about talent and making them able to work so imagine Gavin and Danny I hire you right to do your job and the reason why I hire you is because I think you're wonderful lovely people um I've seen your work I think it's great and you've kind of come
(43:24) to me with ideas and expertise that I never thought about so you're far Advanced from me and this is a common thing that happens in larg organizations right execs are hiring people who are uh more wonderful and competent themselves right everybody should have such a problem yeah um and then you go off for three to six months and you do your design your work and you come back and you say you know well the way we can solve the problem of how we digitalize our customer interactions uh for the next 10 years versus what we've doing
(43:53) for the last 20 years is a you know we can either go the route of a b and c I prefer be you're in a governance board you're going get money signed off I prefer you know B at which point a group of people who've not been involved in that work at all maybe somebody's just joined for finance for the last five minutes of the call starts to challenge you right and says well I don't know right so you're in this governance board you're having this conversation the two of you who are the experts and you have
(44:17) the Goodwill and you're saying this is what's going to work right if that governance board chooses differently to what you prefer then isn't that a problem of talent as in we don't trust your choices or like an arbitrary Choice it's a very odd thing to me that we have these things in place where you kind of go along you present a very small slice of information and choices are made by people who aren't close to that uh Choice set at all and I think that's the problem right of PowerPoint that's the
(44:45) problem of like we live in a world where we're not spending enough time really focusing on the problem at hand and discussing it that might be because we don't have enough time or it's not important a lot of the time it's because we don't care or it's very uncomfortable right and and when we don't care it's really sad to me it makes me sad and frustrated that people kind of are willing to waste and don't care about things that at the end of the day affect people's lives right well at the end of
(45:13) this transation some people might lose their jobs or not so we should care we should give it the time or they're uncomfortable and if they're uncomfortable the really interesting thing is how do you that's then going to factor in on your work because that discomfort is coming from something that you need to address um but it's very hard to do in large organizations so I think that for me is it's less about the modicum of of expression I suppose like such as PowerPoint but more the kind of
(45:40) well it's done in a PowerPoint and it's all green so let's just like all you know whatever like it's all red so let's take it offline actually you know what happens is if it's green then you don't talk about it and if it's red you don't talk about it because nobody wants to talk about it so you take it offline and we'll sort it out and we'll come back in two months right but the thing yeah exactly the thing you need to do is stop and discuss because if we all share what we think
(46:05) with the level of confidence we can do we can we can do better but that that requires people to stop and and have a real conversation where they help each other out yeah generally what we find is those things that are green are watermelons green on the outside and red on the inside there's a huge that that whole structure of governance and rag statuses and power it's a real invitation isn't it to people to oversimplify what they're doing and you just make it look lovely and straightforward so it doesn't doesn't
(46:32) inite nuance and discussion it come a lot of these processes in large organizations come from risk management procedures and they're they're required either for quality assurance you know pharmaceutical for example like quality assurance and and ethical risk is is a big deal it needs to be managed very carefully all the way through but we apply the same kind of governance to to everything right whether it's like people's expenses sometimes end up in these m governance meetings like you hear these stories all the time you know
(47:00) everything above 200 the CEO has to sign off or something crazy right to um to Innovation right which which fundamentally like dies in a hierarchical governance flow yeah it's funny we don't have Nuance that's that which may come from the lack of conversation we're actually having right it's like there's no discourse it's just you're either you're either doing it and you're doing it well or like you're scared because you're worried about your job right so the only choice you have is
(47:29) do it well I once sat with a leadership team and we were talking about the change management plan for a whole transformation that had just been done and new processes and structures and everything else and they it's a very senior leadership team and they said to me you know one of them said well what we really need to do is kind of work on our culture we need to kind of move from this culture of fear you know uh we need to move to psychological safety um people need to stop thinking that if they fail you know failure needs to be a
(47:53) positive thing if they fail um you know they're not going to get fired all the the right things right I've just said in a very small very few words you know what people say on stage we're a great place to work this is the kind of culture we are Etc right so I said to them I said well the first thing you need to do is um if somebody fails you mustn't fire them and everybody just kind of giggled cuz cuz they weren't willing to make that choice right so so there's a lot of presentation ISM it's
(48:21) not presentism right is not about you being there but it's presentation ISM and I think uh it just the thing that I carry away from that is just sadness that you know many people are turning up to work wanting to do their best job um and have some fulfillment in these hours between when they're sleeping and with their family and friends but it makes it hard right PowerPoint is almost like a a symptom right if you if you talk about Jeff Bezos and what he did with PowerPoint he's literally forcing people
(48:46) to do what I'm talking about he's saying no PowerPoint you have to write it down the word document we get to a meeting and a proportion the first proportion of the meeting is dedicated to silent reading of the word documents so in the first 10 15 30 minutes of this meeting we all have the same Knowledge from the white paper and now we can have a real discussion so you know it's it's kind of really pushing people to discourse when you think about the the field of or development or design what's really
(49:15) interesting you what's really sparking your interest at the moment there's one thing from a field perspective uh both in HR and OD that I'm trying to that I'm really interested in which is like um moving us towards more of a discipline so like you know uh I was hooked on this um from this history book about HR uh the Greeks had this concept of epistemy which is like things we know to be intellectually true so what we could call science and facts right and then techn which is like what is the craft
(49:43) how do you come bring that to life so you might know about the way marble works but then how do you craft it into a beautiful um you know Michelangelo's David as the different different things um and and really advancing that field and one of the things that I've spent a lot of time I'm uh reading about uh inspired by many other people is kind of you know evolutionary psychology behavioral genetics personality psychology like new burgeoning Fields um it's amazing actually AI has sped up the field of um behavioral genetics uh
(50:14) massively because we're able to basically do geneic testing at a much cheaper and much faster rate than we ever were before on much bigger data because AI can do that stuff really well so there's many more studies coming out about you the relationship between behaviors personality and and genetics and what we know and what we don't know and the reason why I'm interested in that is because uh the field of HR and OD you know from 1920 1950 till now are based upon paradigms of psychology that are themselves being Rewritten by these
(50:44) new paradigms that are requiring them to have a different you know level of um rigor and scientific robustness right you it's no longer good enough to just observe a group of people and say I think that all of them are anxious because of X right you now need to do you now need to do a study where you're doing that but with you know identical twins separated to bir and together and fraternal twins right you've got you've got to be able to show that you're you're disassociating the cause and the
(51:13) effect right versus just observing some sort of correlation and and so the question for me of how that all of that tracks into our practice in HR which is from the 1950s to now um based on a certain set of beliefs systems right and psychology both in kind of human adult development and in the way organizations work even though they've changed drastically in every other field right apart from ours I think that's really interesting me at the moment and the second thing is this team effectivess thing I just I I you know I I can't get
(51:43) away from it because what I've come to see is that um I think leaders are really important but you often have to make do with what you've got because they're the ones Contracting you in or or you know there you don't have choice and second of all I'm not not 100% sure how easy it is for people human beings to change right I mean have a long conversation about that it's probably an important conversation to have in HR and OD and talent but but I don't know how easy it is so I don't know how many
(52:09) levers you have to pull in the leadership space when you think about the whole system which is what I've done for you know 15 years how do we redesign a whole Enterprise to be more efficient more effective custom Centric agile pick the buzzword I haven't seen that be successful yet I have seen a couple of organizations be successful in one way which is you know I was working at Tesco as a consultant when Dave Lewis came in after they just overstated their profits by 50% there was a massive overhaul they
(52:37) were doing really badly and similar to what is happening at Bayer now uh the whole organization was just hit with a sledgehammer so the problem the problem that that needed to be fixed was the thing we have now is not fit for purpose so Break dealify It smash it just start again make drastic change and that would be better than what we have now um but when it's like targeted or acute or strategic right harder to see that pull through and and the reason why and what I've come to think about whether I
(53:05) believe it yet or not is you in a large organization whether you're a corporate with 100,000 people across 100 markets or a charity or the Civil Service uh or you know in any public service in any um in any country you you are you are a very large unwieldy thing organization right a social a socioeconomic iCal construct which has humans working in it operating in a very wide uncertain context and so you just have to assume a certain level of ineffectiveness right you know one of the things that I find hardest in this whole world we work in
(53:39) is how people are totally willing to moan about or see the complexity in which they work but they want the solution on one single page of PowerPoint right and I've never under something that is a complex problem probably should have a complex solution I I don't know why you would think anything else right and so and and I think that you know organizing a whole system in an organization to do a certain thing in a certain way is is a pipe dream and and not possible I think large organizations live with a certain
(54:07) amount of ineffectiveness right for me it's like margin over you know it's it's margin it's overhead buildings manufacturing sites cost you a certain amount of money same as getting all this work done so then the question is where can you add value because leaders is tough to like leave there's some really good work you can do there and at an organizational level there's some really work good work you can do there but it's very hard to focus it acutely on what matters well the winning place to go
(54:30) then is teams because there's going to be a team between that whole context and that individual leader that is actually accountable for delivering a lot of your value right paro's curve would tell you that which is you know 20% of your 80% of your value is created by 20% of your work so you could you could do a qu quite simple analysis in every organization and say well which teams are most important so I've just been working with pharmaceutical I've worked in fals beforehand in Pharmaceuticals
(54:59) you know the pipeline is really important the pipeline is fed by three teams um science Innovation teams m&a teams and um drug development teams who take it through kind of to sign off and then how you commercialize is really important and that's launch teams and sales teams there are many other teams that are critical deeply expert massively valuable really important in theatis supply chain ethics risk compliance quality all these things they not the things that generate they're not the teams that generate value they're
(55:30) not differentiators um they're things that you would buy or commoditize and in every company or every type of work there's value and so rather than trying to go for the whole system right um and by the way I say that I very flippantly I'm sure there are many things that each of these teams do that could be argued is critical right um if you think about it and AI today and how it's going to be used and right there there's loads of things that could be critical value you just got to choose right because you
(55:57) can't do everything so in that whole context you know finding those teams and making them effective at delivering that that 80% of value feels to me the the thing to do because it also feels like the only thing we can actually get on top of and what what I've had what I've been able I've had the privilege to observe is that if you facilitate a team over time in the right way the work they do can get better and faster and they can become happier and so if you're already focused on the most valuable
(56:30) work in your business everyone's winning right the employer winning the employees winning the work's winning the customer and the patient winning right whatever's happening you're going faster and you're doing it better which I've I've never seen such a direct correlation in the other work we do in or development or or causation line from what in my own personal experience um from work we do to Value if you look back at your career what would you say was the one biggest lesson you've learned um one has to
(56:56) become really aware of and okay with who they are and how they turn up and how that affects the work they do and I think you know one of the things I learned from some really great coaches and mentors over the time of my career is that you know who you are and the way you turn up as a consultant in these human systems is in itself a environmental variable that you need to be aware of and learn to be aware of and and learn how to you know adapt and balance or just become okay with what that means um and the reason why that
(57:32) was really important for me is that it started to make me have empathy with other people who are going through this process right it's very easy to come in okay we're going through the process yeah we're going to got to take 10% of the headcount out or we've got to do this massive change that nobody in Germany really wants because their process is already better or you know whatever it is personal situations in the team and we just kind of pretend that the work we do and the process we're running can just work ignoring all
(57:55) of that and if you remember that y human turning up in this way people mourn don't they they they lose colleagues they've worked with for years they've they've B strong bonds done late nights you know all sorts of things and and often it's like it's it's on to the next thing isn't it and that space is really important to allow people to process these things something I think it's really important I think in large organizations you know I hope this isn't when people are listening to this I hope
(58:18) this isn't their lived experience but in many large organizations today you know you you can't go 24 months without your job being at possible risk right you could be senior Junior but you're you know there's a marketing transformation and then a portfolio divestment and then Geographic reduction or expansion and then we do a big merger and then the CFO comes out and says oh I need 20% headcount cost reduction across the whole piece right and so not only are you operating as humans right and in
(58:47) this process of just human emotion you're also operating in context often where you know fight or flight is is the name of the game and so being aware of yourself and others uh and by the way I say it's my biggest learning it's probably my biggest learning in terms of what I know it's the thing that I I mean I I'm so bad at it it's a really hard thing to keep front in mind and center right so I think that for me is my my journey as well is to become better at seeing myself and others in in their
(59:19) human context of this work hopefully giving enough having enough time to do that even right is there a resource or a book or more more than book that You' you'd recommend others read yes we love a book reference we do love a book reference and these whatever you recommend we will put in the show notes as well okay amazing the two the two um the two sites that I like one's rework by Google so they've just relaunched it it was Japanese only for a while they've just relaunched it they've got amazing
(59:44) research it's all open source you team effectivess leadership training and development um there's literally guides tools you could you could read through their team Effectiveness uh page and do team Effectiveness yourself right I mean you know the difference would be practice versus knowledge I it's really really amazing what they've kind of done in open source across many things and then MIT sponsor a Big Five personality test um which I find really interesting you can take it for yourself you can
(1:00:11) then also compare yourself to other people who've taken it um you know personality is a measurer like IQ that seems to track the real world outcomes and is about yourself and it stays static over your lifetime and it it's interesting to observe yourself from that perspective right who who kind of how do I who am I how to turn off and sometimes even I've you know I've done it with my friends and my wife for example and it's really interesting to see where you diverge and converge and what that means you can talk about how
(1:00:37) that uh appears I I really find that interesting a great way to kind of become self-aware and then um there's a book called personality by Daniel nettle which I think is really good about human beings and blueprint by Robert pman which is about behavioral genetics um and then there's a book called the blank slate by stevenh Pinker um which is about kind of some of the mythologies about humans and psychology Etc and then for me from an or development only because I think to do org development really well you have to have a wide
(1:01:05) ranging understanding of business context and a whole set of um uh human Concepts and context right and then the process and and practice of doing this type of work and but Reinventing organizations for me um there's loads of books out there that are good at um you know taking you through the process like noomi Stanford for example if you want to learn about o design change there's loads of things where it take you through the process or methodology Reinventing organizations I loved I'm sure you guys have know about it but you
(1:01:35) know Frederick laoo simply sat in observation and he said you know whether you like it or not here are companies that work in a totally different way this is true some of those companies no longer exist some of them don't work that way anymore but at the time right he was able to capture in a really uh articulate way there's also a 2hour um uh talk from him where he just basically talks through all all of his findings but um I think it's a wonderful way to to try and help you expand or help one expand perspective on what this whole
(1:02:05) thing's about not that everybody needs to go to that model but more sometimes when you're in something it's hard to see the wood for the trees right so he's just saying hey there are some people living in totally different forests you know there's a guy over here living in a in a in a in a in a jungle right um so so why don't you just he helps us experience that what advice would you give to someone who starting out now obviously you you have a particularly privileged position because you've
(1:02:30) you've been in both worlds and you've sort of seen um how to begin so what advice would you pass on I think you need to go with your eyes open I think you know what is taught um is far today in most schools um universities so wherever you're kind of your your way into uh OD often it will be through some kind of academic process and I think what is taught is a far cry from what is practiced and I think you have to think about um what kind of job you want to do right because in or development you're
(1:03:03) not a decision maker you're always a facilitator right and you're rarely going to have you're rarely going to be able to see the direct outcome there's a great book called the pleasures and Sorrows of work by El de baton where he just goes through um different people's lives he tries to understand what makes us happy or not and he lands on what is actually funly enough through his observation quite well researched which is know what makes a good job and he talks about autonomy complexity and
(1:03:27) meaning right autonomy is you make decisions you do the things complexity is a funny one because it's an Ever moving Target something that's complex on day one is not complex on day 90 right necessarily and uh meaning is not I'm saving the world but I see the output of my work I used to direct a lot of theater at uh University like 60 hours in the theater instead of doing my studies and uh and um opening night after six weeks of intense prep there's nothing in the world whether it's a flop
(1:03:55) or or a hit there's nothing in the world that feels like that because you see the thing that you've literally never seen come to life come to life for the first time right so seeing the meaning of your work I think in od we have a lot of complexity I think autonomy is an interesting one because you are always facilitating others and so I think you need to find the place where you can become you can find that autonomy in kind of how you work and meaning is also tough right because we're working with
(1:04:18) such complex things from kind of Human Social inter political emotional interactions to uh complex organizations and ecosystems that you know seeing the impact of your work sometimes is there and it's wonderful and other times it's it's quite ephemeral so I think it takes a I'd almost like try it out as much as possible and then if you feel you have a like love for it or an act for it then you can kind of grab it with both hands but I think there are so many people by the way doing or development that just
(1:04:50) haven't been told or haven't realized that that's what they're doing leaders individuals teams I'm not talking about people in even h like all the stuff we talk about like making teams effective there are just I'm sure there are millions of people all over the world who are constantly thinking about and trying to do that in different ways so yeah it's like a very natural thing to do right we want to kind of make our lives better and make the system we work in better and be more fulfilled and and
(1:05:14) have greater impact on the world like it's kind of cool that human beings seem to have a desire to to go and do that and so OD is like the thing that excites me about it is you have an opportunity to help others to do that well thank you so much Mar it's been a really great conversation you've brought like a real refreshing honesty and humility to the conversation but also a real kind of sort of deep insight into corporate life and what it's what it is actually like and what it is to you know create change
(1:05:42) in these organizations what the Landscapes like as well there's there's loads of takeaways from it but Danny what are you taking away from the conversation today as usually in conversation so many things I think um creating space for conversation around po Powerpoints and so important if we can do that then we're we're we're doing massive things I think the team as a unit of kind of Interest I I love what you said about you know it takes two two years for a team to become highly effective but how often do we allow a
(1:06:08) team that stability we don't protect them so protecting kind of our our high value teams enable them to be highly effective you stolen some of mine but this just a really good reminder as one of it is that is the team you working is not the team you work with and I think that's really forgotten and you know when you start to operate across borders and it's different professional identities coming together trying to complete one task which is really useful I love what you're sort of saying in
(1:06:32) terms of what do consultants learn from internal and vice versa as well and that for internal how badly the commissions land on your desk and because of that power differential we don't necessarily push back and say what on Earth do you mean by customer Centric and that would create a lot of reduce a lot of waste as well and again the PowerPoint thing is really important we just like we've all agreed that that is the media you're going to use but it's become the thing whereas you know it's really it's the it's the thing that
(1:07:01) creates the the structure for us to have the good conversations as well so it's been brilliant M you've said loads of interesting things and you you share a lot on social media if people want to follow your work follow your thinking or reach out to you or understand more about your consultancy services that you provide what's the best way for people to reach out to you um you can just connect with me on LinkedIn and and connect and follow um I and if anybody ever wants to talk I'm super interested
(1:07:26) I'm I'm actually finding that I'm learning a huge amount from the community in which we work in and and simply by every conversation I have I come away being like a light with energy of like things that people have said that have have made ideas arise in my brain and everybody's got so many different experiences so I'm I'm super Keen to see all the stuff I talk about and work and I'm super Keen for people to reach out if they have places and spaces where they think this stuff is being done really well and I can observe
(1:07:54) it and learn from it uh and if people need help then as well well well thank you so much M we we've really enjoyed the conversation and it's definitely an angle that we haven't looked at um yet so I know that our viewers will get loads of value from it too um if you are watching this um please feel free to hit the like button because the Google algorithm loves that kind of thing and also feel free do it yes please and feel free to reach out and share it with others as well that you think might benefit from it too this is we get these
(1:08:21) podcasts out regularly um you can listen to us on Spotify and all the normal channels and also YouTube as well but if you've enjoyed it please subscribe and we'd love to hear your comments as well so if you've agreed with what May's shared today if you want to let us know what you think of the resources that you shared then please drop us a comment too but thank you again for tuning in but most important thank you so much M it's been a really great conversation and a really great way to end our Friday as
(1:08:41) well so thank you thank you really thank you for having me it's been wonderful bless you [Music] he [Music]