Today on episode number 790 of cxo talk we're discussing business transformation and secrets of the unknown. Our Guest is teef Rafiq. He's the former president of MGM Resorts International and he's had an extraordinary career.
I really came up through digital native tech companies and I've been part of startups, as well as Tech, Giants and Rose to a GM level at Amazon and I ran a fairly sizable business unit in 2013. Many Industries began to see that technology would reshape how those Industries work and there began to be more technology focused roles in more traditional companies outside Tech and I then went on a 10-year run starting as a chief digital officer for McDonald's
and over that 10-year period i Rose to the president level. In this case that a large global company called MGM Resorts so I have Kind of been in the pure Silicon Valley culture and also in the traditional culture of other large businesses T. If you wrote this book, it's called decisions Sprint. Tell us about that. The sound bite is a lot of people are calling decisions for an atomic habits for Innovation.
And the reason why they say that is because it is very focused on Innovation. But what's different about it is looking at Innovation and looking at the specific building blocks of how Innovation Works what the pitfalls are and how to avoid them so that you can get a higher hit rate on your Innovation, some more quality but also move faster with more velocity, which is something I think every every company in it, any industry is looking for a little to be a little bit more
specific. The book helps you make the leap from ideas to action by confronting the unknowns and I have really chosen to focus on I believe is the hardest part of turning ideas into action which is embracing the unknowns. So in the book, I introduced the notion of Upstream work, which is where promising ideas, face more questions than answers that's in constant contrast to Downstream, which is the
execution part of an initiative. So there's an upstream part that I feel hasn't really been elaborated on in enough detail. And so I focused on that I walk through the hidden structure. Of Upstream work and introduce the methods that any team can use to apply it to a specific thing that they're working on. When you talk about Upstream work, can you be a little bit more specific? So that we have a clearer picture of what that actually is.
The first thing you realize after having a bright idea, is that there are more questions than answers and what one typical response to that is essentially To build a plan and moving on to start to build something based on the things that are known inside the company. What do we know about this problem?
We're trying to solve, but what typically happens is that along the way you realize there are blind spots, there are unknowns they come up and they're very disruptive to the you know to moving the idea forward because these blind spots, make us have to basically go back to the start and start again from
scratch. And so when I talk about Upstream, Like I'm talking about the process of actually servicing all the important unknowns and knowns at the beginning and getting to the bottom of them and some structured ways. So making the unknowns actionable so it could be as simple as developing a great question list of organized by subject matter and giving a team space a week or two to run an exploration which is essentially a discovery process around the key questions and develop Think
something like an FAQ. This is a very common practice at Amazon for example, in every single initiative that they work on and on the basis of that high-quality detective work, that's when they move onto alignment. So they don't move on to the suspend judgment on. What's the right course of action or strategic Direction, they spend time on exploration and Discovery.
They do a really great job of it and then they move on to alignment then when people start nodding their heads because they're standing out, high-quality understanding of A problem. They're ready to move on to execution. And so there is a little bit of a sequence that a structure to how you go from the ambiguity of a great idea. However, great it is to being able to get a company to commit resources and be confident enough to move on to execution. How is this different from
traditional approaches? I think anybody who's running a project of any type will look across the landscape and come up with With some type of list of what we don't know. What we're what the uncertainties are, or the risks? How is this different from that? I think it's really two main differences. The first is making Innovation, more purposeful, and the second is making, it more inclusive, but without being slow. So let me walk for each one.
A lot of times when we have a bright idea, we rush ahead to developing a plan to realize that in start building it. But instead, we might start with a problem statement and really getting a lot of clarity around the problem that we're trying to solve. Like if you take an example in the world today, let's say your Netflix and you have a problem with password sharing, all right?
If you define the problem in in one way versus another, you're going to get very different recommendations that the team puts on the table. If I say the problem or Netflix is to, you know, kind of crack down on password sharing that's very different than saying the problem is trying to find a balance. Between the needs of the user and the commercial needs of Netflix and trying to find the
fair fairness within that space. If we start out with the right problem statement, the team is going to produce very different work along the way. So when we I think when we look at Innovation, it's not just having a bright idea, moving on to start building a prototype. We need to, for example, make it more purposeful by anchoring it in the right problem statement, and then running our exploration against that problem statement.
Now that leads me to my second Point around more inclusive because it's my belief that the kinds of problems were solving. And business today are complex, meaning. You cannot solve them at one corner of a company and so when I talk about being inclusive, I mean really getting enough of the right brains of the company. Around the problem we're trying
to solve. This doesn't happen enough in business because we think Innovation is the job of one corner of the company, but when we do that, what happens is that, you know, the idea moves forward a bit It but then it runs into roadblocks because of some missed items or some blind spots. And then the project experiences some fits and starts because people are not confident because
they can poke holes. So I'm providing a workflow and methodology where you could be purposeful and more inclusive, but not slow and bureaucratic. And I think that's The Sweet Spot of innovation that we need in this era. Give us some examples of how this This works in practice because I think the goal that you have the or the goals, I should say that you've set out, which is to be very clear to be thoughtful and inclusive around where you're headed again.
Everybody would kind of take that as motherhood and apple pie. And so what is different and how do you address this challenge? Because it is such a profound challenge. For many organizations. Well let's say you form the team around a strategic initiative, you're up to start, you don't have to be able to start. But let's say you are what happens in companies will teams spend weeks and months and they go through a process of putting recommendations on the table socializing, those
recommendations. And if those things look good, then they get move on to decision making where the company commits to the necessary actions. Now, this entire process takes So weeks and months. What I'm suggesting is that we break it into three main stages of forces, exploration. And exploration is a concerted effort to surface the right considerations, especially the unknowns, and get to the bottom of them. Now, when you do exploration, it's a very neutral process.
So you're not leaning one way or the other. You know, with this idea is too crazy. It's too small. It's the right direction. It's not the right direction. It's a More neutral exercise around servicing the important consideration, especially on knows but also the knowns and developing enough of a high-quality ground to to then move on to the next page, which is alignment and Alignment is about bringing together. What's been explored to draw conclusions?
Now, this is an important point because in my book, I write about a mistake I made where I banned the word alignment in companies and being in the c-suite managing. Also the people, you know, that was a big decision. The reason I banded is because I was reacting to the tendency and companies to align before they explore and that led to very small thinking because if you don't explore then you don't know if something is really risky or hard to pull off.
It may be very achievable but if you rush ahead to align on the known Commodities you generally do a line on very small. Oh thinking and produce small outcomes, which I didn't want and I write about in the book, how I, you know, I refrained my thinking and it wasn't about banning a line and that wasn't the right move. It's about reframing alignment so that you do exploration before alignment. And so I started to preach the Mantra explore, then a line.
And so teams got that, I gave them the space to do their exploration, but the second phase of a line. Is about drawing conclusions but you need to do that based on a really good process of exploration and Discovery. When you do that, you tend to get very easy alignment and companies because people tend to now their heads because they can't poke holes, the blind spots are covered, you know, they can see how you got to the recommendations.
That can draw the Red Thread between what you're recommending and how you got there, which is very essential and that is common, as you would like in companies. And once you have alignment, your third phase is decision-making which is identifying the necessary actions and those are usually very layered that you need to begin executing. So if you bring this together into a flow it becomes very very powerful.
Today is very unstructured. It sounds like, you're fundamentally driving a culture change based on a shifting mindset shifting Away from structure first and decisions. First in order to reduce the ambiguity instead you're saying let's have an open field at first. And let's narrow down from there based on our initial goals. Is that a correct way of looking at this?
Yeah. In fact I refer to it as input Obsession like you want to be obsessed to get inputs, especially up front and that up for Upstream stage because Cuz that's really going to save a lot of pain down the road. And when I talk about input, I mean things like what do we know? What do we not know? What could go wrong? What do we need to get, right? And you should be hungry for those inputs at the start because they're not like casting judgment on your idea.
They're just trying to help you develop a mature that idea and make it super strong. And in a company it's not one corner of a company that has enough of these. Inputs. And this is a big problem today because, you know, if you look back as last 25 years of innovation and you have different models where you say, okay, let's have an autonomous team that's doing Innovation.
Nothing wrong with that to start, but eventually you need to get input from the center of a company or the core of a company in order to see hey, how can you contribute to our exploration? What should we be thinking
about? I'm trying to find the sweet spot where the core of the company is not going to crush the idea because that happens a lot and that's not good but also we're not doing autonomous isolated Innovation that eventually fails to scale because it missed a whole tranches of considerations that it didn't build into how it's all through the idea if that makes sense. So there is a sweet spot to Leverage, The Connect collective, intelligence of the organization.
But do that up front. So that as your Developing and maturing the idea winning the recommendations on the table. It just feels like it really holds together and that's where people start to nod their heads provide their support and the idea gets momentum. And so that's what I'm trying to propose and I think if you look back, we've the pendulum, the all the swings and companies between autonomous Innovation, and sort of doing innovation in the core. And I think neither is exactly, right.
So I'm trying to offer an alternative T''v the problem that you've just described is so endemic. You know, we hear the term and anti Innovation antibodies in some cases that when a business wants to go down a new or a changing or a different path, you have the entire weight of existing processes and compensation plans and incentives and All many, many, many different kinds of reasons to keep going with what we're doing, especially if we're successful. And what you're describing.
Seems like a seems like a, like a really big almost unobtainable kind of goal for many large organizations. It is hacking the system, that's for sure. And I have a chapter on how to hack a company's culture and I have a chapter on personas related to Innovation and the reason I put in the personas Michael is because in my view, you can Take advantage of the Skeptics in an organization and actually, you can flip the script and the way to do that is to take their input. Actually.
So not to ignore them but to take their input and take it as a neutral input in the form of a question. If someone get, if I have a bright idea, I'm at the, I'm at the start and I have a question. I can do something about it. I can make that question actionable. I can get to the bottom of it. I can say we looked at it and It's not as big a barrier as we thought, or thank you so much that actually made her idea stronger.
However, if that question comes up Downstream, when we have the one, we're at the big meeting with the recommendation and the ask then that question turns into questioning. The idea itself is very different. So the reason I'm obsessed with this idea of Upstream work is that if you get that input of front, make it actionable, you can do something about it. You can hack the The organization, even Skeptics actually.
So I do look at all roles in the company as being contributors to Innovation. People who are, you know, let more skeptical about ideas fine list neutralize their input and take it as a let's build it into our question list, people who are Visionary and who get it and who are living in the future. Great, let them take advantage of that input to make their ideas stronger and more sound. Don't Get, please subscribe to
our newsletter. Hit the Subscribe button on our website and you can subscribe to our YouTube channel, check out cxo talk.com. We have amazing shows coming up. Can you give us an example of where you took a situation in any one of your various really interesting positions that you've had and and applied these principles, there are many examples in the book just to culture Two real quick.
I mean, at Amazon, which is, you know, very forward-looking and open to new ideas and pushing new territory. So, culturally, it's aligned. But it does face hard problems where it doesn't always know the answer. So when I was running a part of the Kindle business where we allow authors to independently publish their books without a
publisher. For example, we wanted to introduce the an exclusivity program where they would incentivize The only publish with Amazon which would really help the company quite a bit and we would give them more royalty. So it's out. It sounded like a good idea that we could probably pull off. But the challenge is it's Amazon, it's a behemoth and so you don't want to do things where you're already strengthening your already strong position in the marketplace, you have to be very
careful and sensitive. So when it comes to things like making sure people honor their commitments and this Lucidity program and compliance and monitoring and governance and all that stuff. It was an easy stuff things in terms of how you enforce the policies. We definitely had a lot of ambiguity around that. So, looking at The Stance, we should take when someone violates a policy. Like, should we be directly enforcing it? How strong should we be?
We use the idea of servicing the things that could go wrong and developing the right questions to to come to the Right. Sort of sweet spot of finding that balance between enforcement and not trying to be, you know, an overbearing, John giant of sorts. So that's one example and Volvo cars and something where no, I wasn't necessarily directing, but I think it's very relevant, you know, bulldoze big on the
idea of sustainability. And so, you know, right person in the company had an idea which was about the Interiors of the cars and the idea was Was vegan leather? So, you know, of cows, have a lot of emissions, how about producing a leather? That's, you know, from sustainable resources. There's a bright idea. I think it's part of the sustainability, positioning of the company, but is it something that the company should act on?
There's a lot of questions, you know, is a feasible to get enough materials for vegan leather. What kind of customers would be customers pay more for it? For example, could you even try Back the materials and verify that they're actually, you know, from sustainable sources. Could we get enough volume for the amount of cars were going to produce, you know, a lot of questions before, you know, hey,
this is a good idea or not. And so embracing those questions at the start and making those questions, something you get to the bottom of it before you draw conclusions or have a strong opinion. It is something that was helpful to the company. In that case we have a really interesting question from Twitter from our Salon con, Our Salon is a regular listener and I always ask is very thought-provoking questions and he says this. So I'm going to ask his question and then broaden its lately,
okay? He says digital transformation is an enterprise-wide effort. Not everyone is interested in doing it. And now, here is his question. He says, how do you create a pipeline of innovation? That is not only done by the R&D department? And then I want to broaden it to the larger issue of you spoke about alignment earlier, and inside any large organization, you have so many conflicts of interests and different goals
and silo. Rose. And as I said before, compensation incentive plans that produce certain outcomes that are entirely at odds with this this unified approach that you're describing and so building on our salons question. How do we, how do we bring the pieces together? Every company needs a North star and some strategic pillars. And I find companies are
generally pretty good at that. So to use an example, when I arrived at McDonald's, And we can talk about my transition from Amazon to McDonald's but the, you know, the idea was okay, digital transformation. But people didn't know what that was. So I didn't you really use that
term? I talked about convenience because in my mind McDonald's for over 60 years has been about 3, things taste value and convenience, and I got a lot of nodding heads when I spoke in that, and that way, And then I talked about reimagining convenience and you ways to use McDonald's because there were a couple ways to get your food from McDonald's. And how about, we invent a couple more we've been so successful.
If we invented a couple more compelling easy, convenient ways to use McDonald's, you know, could we grow the company and people understood that line of thinking? So the first point I think is a company needs a North star. It needs some strategic pillars and needs to be in A language. So it's not about lingo, it's more about the heritage of the company but reimagining it in the modern sense, that that
makes sense. And so I doubled down on convenience and then I could talk in detail about the more lingo like we need to new service models. These service models need to be technology-enabled, they will be digital experiences for the customer and in order and in the process. Providing this, you know, next level convenience through digital experiences, we're going to become a direct-to-consumer company.
We're going to have a lot of profiles and data and be able to be personalized with each customer and and that's sort of a business model shipped as well. So the digital experience for the customers for the customers shifting to a different way of looking at the business. So now you have a cohesive sort of strategic right now, that's not part. It is within my arrival at McDonald's. That took me about 45 days to put together that together, the rest of the years were about
making it real. And so that's where we come to the actual Transformations. That, you know, that are a part of this question which is essentially that, you know, any given idea, okay? Curbside pickup at McDonald's. You just drive into a parking spot of your food is brought out to you, or let's say table service which is basically you order a Kiosk take a seat and we bring the tray to you to new ways to use. McDonald's didn't exist before.
There's a lot of hairy things that need to be thought through. So it's not easy to know exactly what the execution plan would be. That's where this idea of Upstream work creates the space for teams to. It's okay for them not to know the answers to questions in the beginning. As long as they know, the right questions, they should be exploring.
And then if they drive that, At through a method of of, you know, exploration Discovery where we can have them draw the right conclusions and be convinced about the things that are recommending, that's the way to make the glue. And of course, when it comes to corners of the company, some folks are more on the day-to-day, but they also need to contribute because they have good input.
So I would recommend saying hey you know percentage of your time goes to helping us innovate because Aviation is kind of in some respect, everyone can contribute to it. We hear people talk about Clarity of goals and use, you will spoke about that earlier. Would it be accurate to say, based on your comments, that Simplicity of goal is also crucially important here? I think 100%, I mean, it needs to be conversational. So if I walk in an elevator with a normal person is not in the company.
Honey, I can explain where our organization is headed, and that could be, you know, like I said, convenience in the case of McDonald's that could be in the case of Volvo that, you know, a car and all the tech in the car, from the Safety Systems to the infotainment to the cloud, controlling my car, through my app, you know, it's it needs to be easy easy-to-use and simplify your life, you know, you need to be able to explain that.
High-level direction would supposedly but I have one point to make around goals which is that companies are pretty good at setting goals and objectives and you have ideas like okay ours but those are incomplete because if you look at okay are you have the 0? Which is the objective and then the result which is all the way down here but in the middle it's a lot of hard hard work and so team spend weeks and months.
Figuring out. How do you convert this objective into a concrete initiative and what's the nature of that initiative and all the Contours of that initiative? And what are we actually going to execute in order to achieve that result? And that's that's where I focus and I guess my overall point is that, that is where we need, not just the clarity of the goal, but we need the clarity of thinking and the clarity of thought How do we actually
develop this idea? You know, across, you know, in all and every different Contour of this idea? That's, that's the hard part in my view. But when we talk about the goals and simple goals, and conversational goals, and that's just great advice for anybody, and really, really hard to do to distill down and come up with the concept, the right concept, the simple concept.
And then the right words, the simple conversational words around that But in a large company even getting folks to agree on the goal is sometimes in almost impossible feat to accomplish. And so in your experience, you've had these very diverse set of senior management positions. How did you do that? How did you how did you heard these cats is my view that people, you have a very hard time getting people to agree on the solution generally like They agree with the North Star.
I mean, let's say your MGM Resorts and you do a great job of catering to people who gamble, but then you realize, well, there are a lot of people who open up the wallet and they don't gamble they go and attend shows, they spent a lot on very nice restaurants, they buy sweets and hotels. There's a lot of big-ticket spending going on, but those people don't Gamble and we don't do a great job. I'm just rolling back a couple years ago to coming in.
Progressed a lot, but we weren't doing a great job of being customer-oriented, treating them, you know that are recognizing them being, you know, generating a loyalty and rewards for them. For example. So generally, I think people agree though, that's the Gap, that's where the growth is going to be the objective is to really grow that part of the business, okay? Fine, and the solution is where people, you know, well, this one work, or that's too. Our door.
This is the right solution, etc, etc. That I think is very hard and companies so the way to herd the cats is I think to see really what I'm pushing is the idea of suspending judgment you know creating a space and actual space in it, actual workflow to do something like exploration. So in my case, if a team came to me and said we have the big idea, we don't know what the solution are done.
A nation is yet. We don't have the plan to xq yet, but we're going to spend one or two weeks, and we're going to build an exploration. We're going to get input from the right. You know rains in the company.
We're going to make a list of all the right questions and we're going to start with these questions and that the end of this week or two we're going to deliver to you an FAQ and and that's really going to help us begin to kind of converge are thinking on what actually makes sense in terms of That the solution we need to go after I would say that's a really good use of time and I would support them and that's why I'm advising, you know, generally speaking is that we create a
space for to build and run explorations to feed. The alignment is necessary in companies in order for something to actually happen. To be explicit at the outset that there are things, we don't know, and stop the posturing and the Means that we are the Masters of the Universe who know everything to be explicit about that, and build that build that time and capability in essentially is what you're
saying, 100%. I think we're all part of the problem as my overall point, because we like to blame the person who says, I've been here 30 years and I know that won't work and we know that's not the right answer either, but as a very Innovative person or the person brought into in it, help a company innovate. I've been part of the problem too because I said, well, No, I've said the opposite. I said, no that's a wonderful idea.
Let's, let's start concepting, and prototyping, and let's get 10 people on this right now and start to test it and experiment, and let's just get going. And sometimes, that's not also the right answer because you, you need to be explicit around, you know, more purposeful around what you're experimenting
around. It's not just about getting started with the prototyping and the experimentation it's about We need to learn and making the experiments based on the gaps and the unknowns that would help us be much smarter about things. So, I think whether you're you lean towards Innovation or lean towards like business as usual, you know, we need we need a way that's kind of mitigating. Some of the, you know, the downside of both approaches are salon.
Khan comes back with another great question and I'm Our Salon listens a lot and I'm afraid that our two minds are sort of becoming very similar because I love this that the questions he asked, sometimes it's like, oh yeah, I should be asking that. Okay, so he says this great question. He says, why should a front line employee be involved in Innovation after all? They don't get incentivised. Nor are they? Eat enough to do this.
Executives might care about Innovation because ultimately that's going to be connected to their performance and their compensation. But why should Frontline employees care about this at all? It's like you know, just I'm serving hamburgers or whatever it is that I'm doing just leave me alone so I can do my job. Usually, we have interfaces to the from lightworkers so it's not like you put a front light worker in your, you know, your Innovation squad, or your strategic initiative team or
anything like that. But I mean, you typically have, you know, some field level manager, old people who are listening and have a pulse of, you know, what the front line, you know, workers seeing with customers. And so, that's what I'm assuming. So, really, my book, and my ideas, and my background, quite frankly is really more for knowledge workers, you know, in different corners of the company, they could be incorporated, they could be in the field, but they're generally
knowledge workers. Who are ya trying to figure out what makes sense for the business and for customers. So I'm not suggesting that you know, the from length will be part of that Innovation Squad here presenting to the CEO. But of course they have you'll see some patterns in what they're what they're sharing and I think those things are obviously need to feed it into things but you know it's a guy like the question because I think Too often.
If you had a project in a company, what happens? Well, it's the same three or four people that you're meeting with every week or every month about the idea. And then you think, well, this organization is 40,000. People are 10,000 people or 2,000 people. There's got to be more input than just these three or four people. I think that's important in companies is finding a way to say, okay, what are we not seeing that someone in this company?
You might might be seeing there has to be a way to do that and I think a way to encourage getting that input is curiosity is an obsession for input and and if you accept that as an expectation, then there are probably ways to to kind of get to to get your hands on it. It strikes me and maybe this is an obvious point but it strikes me that to do what you're describing. Choirs, the senior leaders to actually have an interest in change, in this kind of
exploration. It helps a lot, but it's not required. Because and here's why it's not required. Because typically the interaction with senior Executives is on some Cadence it all Bi weekly check-in or a that we gave you the assignment. For the big idea, come back in a month and tell us how we should be thinking about this. You know what, you're recommending so that Executives, probably are not involved in the brainstorms, the Deep Dives, you know, the work, the team level
work. So what I'm suggesting and I write about this in the book is that teams as opposed to having unstructured, deep, Dives and rainstorms and and then you know it's three days before the meeting and that we're not really clear like what we're going to put on the table, you know, bring some approach to it like like decision Sprint. And now in the end, what the executives will see, is the content, which is essentially, mmm. I'm able to follow where you started.
What? You investigated the conclusions, you drew the recommendations you're putting on table based on those recommendations. Here's the commitments and actions to company needs to take on and whether that's great or not great I think they'd be able to follow it. And so the way you drive change, Team level up bottom up, is by just producing that better having that better interaction that better content. Then what happens is the executive Satan?
This is so much more streamlined than my last meeting. What did this team do different? And they'll say, you know, we have a different methodology. Like we actually have brought some method to the chaos and and Executives will be like wait, we should apply that to other things, we're working on. So that's That's the way to help Drive change in a company. I believe that change can absolutely be bottom up.
The senior leadership is really interested in seeing results, and if you can demonstrate any kind of result, interim results included than a smart, senior leader is going to take that ball and carry it or suggest that you take that ball and and run with it. Further if we Define result is basically your work product. Is easier to follow and allows for confident decision-making that I've you're making the life of an executive so much easier because the job is very hard
decisions are very hard to make. It cannot predict the future, but if you can help the organization stand, on much higher quality, ground of information or confident decision-making, you've really, really helped your company and a good executive will say how how are you approaching that? And how can we scale better? Across more of the organization and then also it shifts. The role of the executive, the executives tend to then give space and release a control
orientation. And then moved to what I call calibration over control. And what I mean by that is they help become a thought. Partner in your work, it'll tell you what to do and they don't, they are much better listeners and they help calibrate your thinking. To improve it but they don't don't go back and regress to the tendency of saying, this is what I want the answer to, because that's always going to be very risky.
Even if someone is senior in a company for one person to be saying this is the right answer is very dangerous. That's why we have teams that if we are almost out of time, can you share advice for I'm thinking that maybe specifically for a Two different roles. Starting with the CIO, you were a Chief Information officer so you have so you understand that
role? Certainly can you can you share your advice given all of this for cios the CIO months, one of my roles, always shifted the conversation to be, you know, not just having the it organization.
I rebranded it as Enterprise digital, not just be an order taker, be like a true bona fide partner in Thinking things through, but for any role in an organization, I think the the what good looks like to me is basically the engine behind the work and embracing the idea of exploration before alignment, you know, getting people to postpone judgment, not Russia had to sing. This is the answer, this is the solution and to really invite people to to really do The
Upfront Discovery around. And what could go wrong? What are the right questions? How do we give team space just a week or two? To get to the bottom of these questions and then use something like even if they cues help drive, you know, some common understanding of the Strategic Direction. So whether it's a CIO or any other role, I think that's really what, you know, being a senior leader is all about, is being able to kind of direct the collective intelligence of the team.
The right kind of brain trust and give them the space to do these things and then help calibrate their ideas because you probably see more information in your higher level role if that makes sense. So, it's more of the workflow. I like to think of the next big role in the company. In fact, the role of the CEO, I think in the future is the chief workflow officer. And because if you can get the workflow right around How people progress ideas and plans and
actions? Then, you know, you are really really helping the company. Then why don't we finish up with advice to CEOs on managing being aware of encouraging? This Upstream work, the CEO. Basically you have the North Star. You have the Strategic pillars. Your you're putting this in front of Wall Street, it's in all your board decks, you know, we get it, but we all know that. Inside the four walls of the company. You know, these initiatives are very hard.
They're very complex and it's not obvious what needs to be done? And so if we want momentum, you know, the idea of building a sequence, like, if you have a big initiative, we would your team in three steps. You know, the first meeting is the messiness, like you mentioned Scott spoke, okay? Share with me all the messiness.
I don't need any any Others. We're not deciding anything that's going to come later, but show me you did a good job of canvassing, the messiness that's progress in it of itself. Your second meaning, you got to the bottom of the messiness. Did you make sense of it? Give me one or two, or three or four conclusions, you're drawing from having gone deep into this messiness, on the deep end. And then number three, like now, what is the solution? What is the direction?
Because if you do it, if You orchestrated in that way. You have fewer blind spots, fewer surprises. You've done the best job you can is as Executives. We are responsible to be on top of the nodes and the known unknowns. If there's anything else, you know, we don't predict the future, but those first two, we've got to get them. Right? We have to be on top of them. And we have to be able to connect them to the actions, the company's going to proceed with.
So I think these three steps Oops could be a good use of time for everybody. Great. Well thank you for the insightful advice and with that, we're out of time. So I want to say a huge. Thank you to Chief Rafiq. Thank you for being with us today. I really appreciate it. It's been a pleasure being with you Michael.
Thank you so much and huge. Thanks to everybody who watched you guys are a great audience and don't forget, please subscribe to our Our newsletter, hit the Subscribe button on our website and you can subscribe to our YouTube channel, check out cxo talk.com. We have amazing shows coming up during the summer. Our newsletter will notify you of all of them. Thanks so much everybody. I hope you have a great day and we'll see you again next time next week.