PAPod 508 - Leadership and Capacity: A Deep Dive into Modern Management

I love the fact that it's a collab just because I get to use the word collab. So I feel like a YouTuber kind of. We are officially in the digital era of all the things. We're collabing. We're collabing. We're doing the big collab. We should ask Mr. Beast to be on with us. Mr. Beast? Mr. Beast. Who's Mr. Beast? Mr. Beast is like, I don't know if he's the largest. I think he might be the biggest YouTuber currently. Really? So big that he has his own network on Hulu.

I'm so out of it. I'm so out of it. I'm not sure it's a bad thing to not know who Mr. Beast is, but he does give away like millions of dollars every week. I'm checking it out. Yeah, you should. I'm going to go check it out. Oh, yeah. Okay. So I'm going to have a moment. Music.

We'll be right back. Hey everybody, Pre-Accident Investigation Podcast. It's Todd Conklin. I'm the host and I've been here the entire time. Yes, it's true. So today's fun because today it's a collaborative. Well, you can tell because you heard the introduction. Jennifer Long does a podcast on leadership with her friend, but her friend wasn't there. So I I don't really know who her friend is, but anyway, it's usually with her friend and it's quite a little podcast.

It's fun and stuff. And she asked me to be on it. And you know, the rule, if I'm on your podcast, you have to be on my podcast. That's all I got to say about that. And in fact, she's been on before, so that wasn't too hard of a sell. She knows it's pretty painless. And plus we're getting ready for this conference that we're having in September. And so we just had a lot to talk about, and that's what we did. We talked about it.

How are you doing? How's the summer going if you're in North America or, you know, our hemisphere? How's the summer? How's the winter going if you're not? It's fair enough because you're on both sides of the equation. For us, in the midst of summer, it's a hot one, baby. It is a hot one, and so much is going on. It's a little crazy. I'll just be honest. I think all the things that are happening in the world are affecting how I sleep and stuff.

I'm a little too close to it. I'm having to go on a little news hiatus to back away a little bit and enjoy doing other stuff, which has been okay. I mean, that's as good as any. It's a little bit of denial. It's not a little denial. It's a lot of denial. It's a denial fest, but it's helping me cope. And isn't that what we all want to do is cope. Plus I've been out a little more than I planned on in the summer, but sometimes that's how it happens. Staying busy. How about you? Are you busy?

I'm hoping you're getting some time to just hang and relax and do the stuff you want to do. Cause that's pretty important. I mean, the more you look at it, life's pretty darn short and you might as well do stuff you want to do, do stuff that's satisfying and fun. Do stuff that's meaningful, you know, good work done well for the right reasons, as opposed to doing stuff you don't want to do and stuff that's not very fun and stuff that's not very meaningful.

I'm a big believer, and this may be a function of the fact that I've become an old man, but I'm a big believer that if stuff's stupid, we should probably call it out. You know what I mean? We should just call it out. And I'm in the process of fighting a big fight over a zipper line. I think they actually call it Disney-style queuing, but it's the queue where you stand in the little maze of stanchions and you go back and forth, back and forth, and then when you get to the front, you're in, right?

I'm in a big argument with the airport because they have a really long queue.

Zipper line a really long queuing line and never any people so you have to walk a whole a lot farther not and i don't mean this as a lazy guy although you know i certainly qualify as a lazy guy but it just it's so incredibly inefficient to walk through crowd control when there is no crowd, and what that does is it makes you think the crowd control is stupid even though i'll be the first to admit, if there was a giant crowd, I'd be kind of glad that thing was there.

But if there's never any people, you have way too much capacity and not nearly enough efficiency. And it's the classic Eric Holnagle trade-off of efficiency versus thoroughness. But it's bad when it goes really, really, really deep into thoroughness. Completely obliterating efficiency. So I complained about it. And I was told that they need it because the line's really long. Except every time they've told me that, every single time they've told me that, I've been the only person there.

And so I say, but there's nobody in line. Well, other times it's busy. Well, then other times you should have the stanchions up and available. And when there's no people here, there should be a little cutoff, a little shortcut, an efficiency, a shortcut, a workaround. round. These are all words that we've given sort of bad meaning to until you need them. And then they're the perfect words. And unfortunately, the last time I had this conversation, the person told me

they didn't care what I thought. Sir, I don't care what you think. And I said, well, that's pretty obvious. I mean, I can tell that, but I do. I care a lot about what I think and efficiency matters and it matters a lot, especially in a place like an airport. So we'll see. I mean, it's probably not going to go well, but it could. I mean, it could, sometimes you win, sometimes you lose. I find with airport security though, I'm often on the losing side of this equation, but details will follow.

Let me stop whinging on this because that is plenty. And let's get into this conversation with Jennifer. Jen and I have been friends for a long time. We've known each other, honestly, for tens and tens and tens of years, since we were little kids.

Kids and so this conversation's got that air of familiarity which is kind of nice i mean you'll enjoy it and i certainly did plus she's just a incredibly smart human being who thinks about the world in a way that's different than most people think about the world and anytime you find those people hang out with them that's my theory so without much further ado that's french let's listen to this conversation join us will you it's just the three of us it's jennifer myself myself and you,

and we're going to talk about, well.

It. Can you hear my fan? No, you sound amazing. I sound amazing to you. Yeah. Okay. But my team is going to go, what the hell is that background noise? Get rid of that fan. Jennifer, the fan. Let's take a moment while Jennifer shuts the fan off to describe Jennifer's recording studio. It's the entire studio is lined in velvet. There are gold candelabras, like giant ones too. Like I would say Liberace Plus, Candelabras. So, yeah, it's a gorgeous facility. I'm describing your studio.

For those who can't see the video. How are you, Mr. Todd Conklin? It's so exciting to see you again. I'm good. I know it's so much fun to see you too. One of my favorite people in the whole world. Yay. Yay. Hey, I am curious to talk to you about – so I have spent six months doing a leadership development program for one of my clients. Perfect. And I also spent some time with them introducing them to the HOP principles. How'd it go?

It was good, but I did it in a leadership context. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because you are constantly talking to leadership in all the organizations that you work with. And so I just kind of wanted to have a chat with you to talk about this idea about building capacity and this idea about how leaders, right, what is the leadership role in the capacity thing and really applying the principles in a change management format, in an innovation format, in a leadership mindset.

Mindset, because that was immediately what I glommed onto when I heard the, I was like, oh, these work in so many different ways. And so, because you have those conversations, I was kind of curious to talk to you about how you, how you turn their heads inside out in the right way to get them thinking differently. I think you're right. I mean, I completely agree with you. There's two things that I would start this conversation by saying.

The first one One is the realization that improvement is a deliberate effort. It oftentimes takes leadership teams quite surprisingly, which I find interesting, not because I'm smart. I don't think that's the problem at all. But because I think they think they're going to accidentally get better. And I think they think if we do all our work, we will just accidentally get better.

And so when you help them understand that improvement is a deliberate effort, that you're defaulting towards improvement, anytime you're left with a decision, always make the decision that makes you smarter and better, right? Which seems – when you say it out loud, it's just super obvious. But I think that's a huge foundational piece. And then the second foundational piece, which totally fits your question, is I'm pretty convinced – and I'd really like to hear your feedback on this.

I'm pretty convinced the only two things leaders actually manage, aside from administrative budget, stuff like that, let's put that aside for now, the actual leadership component, the only two things they actually manage is confidence and capacity. Yes. Tell me more. I was going to say that to you. That's not fair. Well, so when you say confidence and capacity, how are you defining – I mean –, Confidence in, say it again. Confidence and capacity.

So confidence in their organization, confidence in their leadership, confidence in their people, confidence throughout the organization. That if an organization doesn't feel confident, then it's clearly not going to do things. And yet that seems so woolly and touchy-feely. It does. Because when we talk about leadership is inspiring, I think that's getting at confidence. Because if they are inspiring people, what they are demonstrating is I'm confident.

I'm confident in you. I'm confident in your capabilities. And you're the people who are going to take this organization where we need it to go. And it feels woolly, but it's really not. Because if I am confident, my ability to translate that in my communication is exactly what we mean when we say be inspiring. I agree completely. And what's amazing to me is that having that confidence begets more confidence.

And so – but I think confidence is really – you have confidence in your people, confidence in your ability, confidence in your team, confidence in your leadership group, which always puts you in a position where probably two things happen right away. One is you'll increase diversity of information because you're confident. So nothing frightens you. More information is better. More information from different places in the organization is better.

You know, everything's just data. And so you want as much as you can. And secondly, and I think this is the big one, is that you also realize that you don't know. And not knowing as a leader is, at least in my observation, is a way sexier place than knowing. Because not knowing actually allows you the ability to understand your organization better because you're learning. Yes. Yeah. The learning thing, right, is the best leaders are the best learners, right?

And they're not afraid of that. They're not afraid of not knowing the answer. They're not afraid of asking the dumb questions. And the heroic leader is kind of not a thing anymore because business is just so complex and it works at such a clip. The environment is such that they've got to work together. Right. Leadership teams put you in a place of not knowing and more brains are better. And if you're really doing the collab with your leadership team. Right. Yeah.

That's that's the power. And to feel safe in that in that not knowing. And the only way to to to make better decisions is to have all the perspectives. Yeah, to have more perspectives, right? Which takes us to your question. The final part of that is the capacity. And I look at capacity as having the space to do what you need to do. And by space, I'm using it kind of metaphorically. I have the money. I have the skills. I have the right people. I have the right resources.

I have the right approvals. I have the right confidence. I have the right faith in my people. They have faith in me. And so that capacity, I always think about capacity as kind of a margin. So one interesting thing that's going on right now, and there's quite a bit of interesting stuff going on right now, is the astronauts that are trapped on this space station or whatever it's called, the USS or the Skylab thing, but it's not called Skylab. The space station, right?

Yeah, right. So that seems really frightening and scary. Except that they have so much extra food, they have the ability to generate their own oxygen, they can have other crafts from other countries get there, and they're not in a hurry. So if it doesn't work this time, wait one more orbit around the Earth and maybe it'll work next time. That's capacity. Capacity is this extensibility, or David Woods calls it graceful extensibility, which I actually really like that image.

Graceful extensibility for an organization to flex, adapt, improvise, problem solve. And so the idea that we're constantly building capacity is really, it's really important, but it runs counter-thetical to our traditional view of organizations. And the best example, actually, so does confidence. That's counter-thetical. It's against – but the best example I can think of how this runs opposite of what we think it runs is capacity is not something you can measure, but you can monitor.

Talk about that. Talk about that. Because, you know, when you're working with leaders, right, a lot of it is we can talk about capacity, and that's a great idea. Because, you know, I'm always talking about capacity in the individual, right? How do you build capacity in a person as you're leading that person? And how do you give them a workout such that they can expand themselves in ways they didn't think they could? Which is capacity. That's a beautiful definition of capacity. Yes. Voila.

So – but when you get to this resource-constrained mindset, when you get to this place where they are feeling – and you said something and I totally got off track in my brain. Yeah. But when you say counter-ethetical, that defeats their ability to really engage with it at some level. So that's where I'm kind of curious is what's the hook? So part of it is the – and this is really inside baseball. But part of it is the difference between a linear organization and a nonlinear organization.

So a strong organization that's filled with engineers, right? Like, let's make one up, a shipyard or an airplane factory. I mean, we could – A tractor factory. Yeah, refinery, right? There's zillions of them. They want to believe that their organization is a linear functioning thing, that step one happens, then step two happens, then step three happens, then step four happens, and evermore shall be so. And if we do a good enough wire diagram, we can fully understand how this organization

functions. The problem is, is that organizations are non-linear, much more adaptive. And so they're much more on the complex side of the house, the non-linear side of the house. And so now all the tools we use to understand linear systems, metrics, right, clear wire diagrams, simplification, those tools, which are beautiful if you're fixing an engine. I mean, they're beautiful. They're beautiful if you're inventing a new, I don't know, machine.

Printer or something, you know, they're vital for that, don't apply in a more complex world. And so now you have leaders who oftentimes find themselves in leadership positions because they're very good at the technical aspects of the work, which is important, but they're now put into a system that doesn't behave like a technical system behaves. So it's a nonlinear system. So all their tools become really, really less than optimal, which is the big thing.

So you've heard it said a million times, you know, if you can't measure it, you can't manage it. Well, so that's really, really a comfortable thing to say because then it says we just – we need to seek the perfect metric. And when we find that perfect metric, then our management problems go away. The problem is, is it's not a very realistic thing to say because lots of what we do, we manage, but it's really difficult to measure.

And capacity kind of weirdly, capacity kind of fits into that category. So you have an organization that's got a lot of potential capacity in problem solving. So you're not using all your problem solving tools all the time in your organization. At least I hope not, because that would be a sucky place. It would be exhausting. It's so awful to work there, right? So you always have excess capacity that you can expand as needed.

So there's like a little resource pool of capacity to problem solve that's just waiting for problems. Well, every day you wake up, you should thank God that's there because every day some of that is used and you as a leader don't even know it because workers are constantly detecting and correcting and fixing problems in real time. They don't even know our problems.

That's what I think about when I think about capacity is, is your system so lean and so brittle that any kind of variability causes it to snap? Because that's a system without enough capacity. That's a non-resilient system. And when it fails, it fails from zero to icky immediately. And a system that fails without margin, that fails without capacity, always is going to fail. Not always, but oftentimes, at least in my experience, always, but oftentimes fails catastrophically.

So that's why I talk about, like, if somebody dies at work, they didn't die because the company failed to prevent the accident. They died because when the accident happened, there was no capacity between the accident and the consequence. It went immediately to dead guy. There was no little safe space. There was no recoverability.

And so you think about that, and that's when you start introducing ideas like safe to fail, right? And leaders kind of get, at least in my experience, you'd be better at this because you talked to way more. But leaders kind of understand the safe to fail idea when they're talking about it kind of in the bigger world. It's harder to understand when they're talking about it in their little kingdom phylum species.

Well, and I think it makes them nervous. Yeah, I think that because the the cortisol related to failure, the ego related to failure, the implications of what failure really might embody. Body, they don't want to go there and they don't believe it's really safe to fail. And which is true. And in a resource constrained environment, which pretty much most leaders are in, that's kind of a normal place to be. They're constantly sort of cleaving out the excess capacity in order to create savings.

Yeah. Right. And so cost effectiveness. Yeah. So they can they can say, well, we don't really need three engineers here because two will do. So they get rid of the third engineer and now they've lost that little additional pool of problem solving that they had that they didn't even realize they had because it's hard to know when it's being used.

I mean, that's the one thing I think that the pandemic did to many companies is, you know, senior leaders were genuinely surprised that without the leadership team, the organization functioned and they delivered toilet paper was delivered. M&Ms were created, right? What they don't realize is that capacity was always there and was always being used. It just never had a chance to be seen by the headshot.

Yeah, so when you introduce this idea of, right, leading capacity and leading confidence, and they're going to inevitably say, how do we know we're getting capacity? Well, so that's where the old adage, if you can't measure it, you can't manage it, loses its power. You can monitor capacity like you monitor a gas gauge. So do we have enough capacity? No, we do not. I mean, this is sort of – like my work, it's really changed. Because we used to go out and tell people to identify

risk. You do the same thing. Look in the organization and find the places where risk is highest. Well, so that's a pretty important question, and I think it has value. What's weird is I'm realizing now that the better question is go out into your organization and identify where capacity is low. So don't look where risk is high. Although when I say that, you probably should look where risk is high. I don't mean that. That's more of a- Don't ignore that.

Yeah, that's more hyperbole than actual advice. But actually, what's much more interesting and what's much more important is where capacity is low. Because you know, wherever capacity is low, then you can pretty much guarantee that's going to cost you money. It's either going to cost you an efficiency, time, you're going to have an accident, a quality defect, you're going to miss a deadline. mine.

You're going to overspend. I mean, and so instead of saying we failed at the, or we cost more money, which I guess is failure in our world. We cost more money in this project because the risk was high. I think what you have to say is none of the risk is probably the risk. I mean, it's pretty dynamic. It changes all the time. It's pretty normal. The reason you weren't ready is not because the risk is high. It's because your capacity was low. So that's a much different way to manage the world.

But when you look at companies that are super good at this, they're super good at it. Like I was working with an airline. I'm not going to say the name because that would get me in trouble. But one of the senior leaders said, well, we count on the warrior spirit. Right. And I said, I don't understand. Yeah, what is it? Please sign me up for that. What is that?

I mean, I don't even know what that means. What I think he was saying to me was they count on the additional capacity within their people to actually make up for the shortcomings of the organizational design or the organizational structure or the leadership capability. Those kind of things are always in question. I mean, there's always going to be poorly designed organizations and crappy run projects.

That's normal. So what they count on then is the excess capacity, and they're leveraging that excess capacity to create, in this case, market success. So when does leveraging capacity become burnout? Oh, I think soon. I also think if you don't monitor that, and if you're not aware that's happening, then you're in for a big surprise. eyes. Because at some point, employees are going to say, you know what, I'm not staying late tonight. I've stayed late the last six nights.

I'm doing my work, plus I'm doing additional work because we don't have enough people to do this work. And my kids got volleyball. And so then it doesn't happen. So I mean, I think that goes back to the diversity of information and sort of the confidence. I mean, all those things. Because if the worker has confidence in the organization, then the worker can say, we don't have enough people to do this work.

So, but I think leadership has to go out and ask, not where risk is high, where can we lose money next? That's, I mean, that's a pretty self-serving question. What we ought to be asking is, where do we have the least flexibility? Where do we have the least room for variation or mistake or bubble or blip or whatever we're doing to use? Because that, I think, that's a pretty cool way to look at it. Yeah.

Do you feel like you have this conversation with leaders, you come in and they go, aha, and they're like, yes, this makes sense to me, right? So I spent a lot of time, I don't know if you're familiar with the Kenevan framework, are you? I am. I'm not a fan. Should I be? Well, I think it's a really great way for people to understand, especially engineers, to understand that... It's a sense-making diagram. It's a sense-making model that's there to help

you understand what kind of problem are you looking at? What is the situation you're facing? And once you identify that, understand there's a different way to approach it. And so when we talk about complex adaptive systems, right? Your approach to that is experimental, right? You sense and you experiment, right? Versus if it's a complicated system, which is the mechanical, we've got the wireframe dialogue. That is an expert.

That is who knows how to do this and it's good practice and let's bring in the expert, let's analyze and let's fix it. And so what I think it helps leaders to understand, teaching it from a leadership context, is that if you're not standing out of your problem to understand that you can't, if you keep approaching your organization from a complicated perspective and putting in experts, right? Bringing in the McKinsey's, bringing in the whoever. Yeah, I mean, McKinsey comes to mind, yeah.

Look, there's a bunch of 23-year-olds in here. There's a bunch of 23-year-olds with a lot of experience that have some databases who can tell us what the recipe is. And if you keep applying that solution to a complex adaptive system and stop wondering why it doesn't work because you're not even taking the appropriate approach. And I think that's what the framework helps you understand is how do I approach this to begin with?

Because if I'm not even thinking about that, I'm going to default to what I prefer. Right. Well, but that's so. Yeah, absolutely. But it's not what you prefer. It's kind of how it's your frame. It's how you see the world. Right. So, yeah. So what you're accustomed to. Right. Yeah, you're going to have a bias. And the challenge I have is that we hire people into these jobs because of this bias. But then we expect that bias to be changeable, and it's not changeable.

So maybe I can fall in love with this cartoon, the Kenevan framework. I just need to spend more time on it. I do think it's much more of an input problem than an output problem. So if I see a senior leadership team that's really struggling, I almost immediately assume, and normally this works out pretty well, that it's not the leadership team.

Team it's the data that's being fed to the leadership team so i might be super naive because i'm pretty naive on stuff but i kind of figure if you give the leaders good information they'll make pretty good decisions. Yeah. Yeah. Right? What we know is the higher they push the information up, the more modified and palatable that information becomes.

I mean, it becomes important that we don't oversimplify. So, the biggest – I think one of the biggest problems we have with leadership is that we simplify information before we push it up. So, we have this really context-bearing information that goes up to the senior leader's desk because, you know, they're so damn important. You know, you can have three minutes with with Jerry's going to give you three minutes. So if you give me three minutes, then all you're going to get is a three minute

solution. I mean, this is a problem. It's a problem. And I promise you, when someone dies or a plant blows up or whatever bad thing happens, you'll give me all the time you have.

I mean, you'll stay late and come in early. So the challenge I think we have, and when I managed all these database administrators and these developers, these DevOps people, because I had to do that for a while in my career, they really taught me a big lesson. And that was that if you're having difficulty developing a piece of software to solve a problem, you don't have a good definition of what the problem is. It's not the software developers. It's not the development process.

Says, it's the definition of the problem. It's bad input. And so one of the things I've really had to learn is that if I see a team struggling, the first thing I do is try to change the input, change the data they're being given. And I'll ask them to go out and ask entirely different questions. And they'll say, well, what do you want me to ask? And I'll say, what do you ask now? And they'll tell me and I say opposite of that. You know, you're smart. Figure it out.

But whatever you're asking now, that's giving you this input. If you want different input, ask different questions. And all this crap, this is the problem is it sounds so easy, but that's actually a big deal.

Well, it is a big deal, and it's really, really hard. And I found a lot of these leaders struggle with they want to execute, they want to do, they want action, they want to move the needles, but they don't spend the time to really ask the hard questions of what is the problem I'm trying to solve. It's almost worse, too, because I can point you to leaders – I can actually show you one that has a sign that says, don't bring me a problem, bring me a solution.

Okay, so that must feel really like you're a super guy and that, man, how can you walk with that much confidence? You know, equipment. You know what I mean? I put that quote, wow, other men must want to be you, that kind of, but you realize that that is perhaps one of the dumber things a leader can say. Because the solution's the least interesting part of the problem. And in fact, not knowing the problem means you're probably going to fix the wrong thing pretty aggressively.

And the worst people to solve the problem are the people who lead the people who have the problem. It's always the case. I mean, they're terrible at it. Right. They can't see it. They can't see it enough. And they've, oh, we've tried this. We've done this. Yeah, we've done everything. We know all the reasons of why. And yeah, you don't understand. What do you think about when you think about capacity like that?

Well, it's just this weird kind of, it's almost poetry in a way because it lives in so many things. Leadership. Do you have the capacity? Are you creating enough capacity in your own mind to stand out of things, right? Do you create capacity to think through as opposed to just make decisions, right? And I think when you get people who are newer into a leadership role and have been in an execution that standing out of something and thinking through something doesn't feel like work,

doesn't feel like anything's moving forward. Yeah. When it comes to working a problem and working, so managing capacity, which is really about what is the problem we're trying to solve and how are we going about it, that it asks for time and it asks for space and it sometimes asks for other perspectives that you wouldn't think to go get because time is money and we need to move the needle. natal. So how do you, I completely agree with what you just said.

And what I often think is it's way sexier to fix a problem than it is to analyze a problem. So how do you get them to fall in love with the analysis? And it should be by all rights, that should be easy because most of these people are engineers. They're highly technical. They totally vibe on, you know, if you get into the dirt, they love it. But for some reason on the leadership level, they don't want to do it. Yeah. Somebody's told them that you don't have time for that.

And I think that's a huge mistake. Cut to the chase. I'm the guy who gets the slide with the three bullet points. Yeah. Right? I'm not the one who needs to have capacity. Y'all need capacity. Yeah, that's it. I'm just – I think you actually might have just solved the problem. But that's the case is that leadership capacity – and that's why, like in the five principles, I talk a lot about how leaders respond.

And when that first came out, a bunch of these lily-hearted snowflakes – I don't want to say their names, but I can see them in my head – changed it and said, no, everybody – everybody – how everybody responds matters. And I said, no, that's complete bullshit. No. No, that's not it. It's how leaders respond matters. And if you take away the leader part, then you just have some kind of platitude that's just like, well, we should be nice to everybody. Well, yeah, we should.

But specifically, the onus for change is not on the people who work in the organization. It's on the leaders who lead the organization. And so how they respond makes a huge difference. Yeah, it does. It does. And I added to the end of your hot principles, my favorite sentences as I taught them, this is it, no one's coming. Isn't that funny? You are the leader and no one's coming to help you.

And so you have to have the capacity because if you don't, you can hardly lead it, let alone manage it in anybody else. You're exactly right. That's your next book. Seriously. No, that's your next book. This is it, no one's coming. I mean, that's a really, really good idea for a book.

It's because when you are in a change, when you are in an innovation, when you are in even turning around, doing safety differently, right, you are asking people to engage at a different level. And if you think it's just them who has to do it, if you haven't done your own work first, if you haven't gotten your own capacity under clarity for yourself, there's no way you're going to be able to bring that to anybody else. Amen. You're exactly right.

And that's the crazy thing. That's why safety is a pretty good Trojan horse. It's important. There's no question that it's not important. But what we're really talking about is exactly what you talked about, which is leadership. So if we want a better organization, we need to have better leadership. I mean, that seems like those are directly connected to one another.

Yes so i mean and i think that's the challenge that's you know my interest in sort of when you when when you are done talking to these leaders what's the what's the when somebody gets let out of jail and they go back what is that recidivism so progress is weird progress ebbs and flows and there will always be so i'm a hundred percent convinced you're always one new senior leader They're away from starting again.

So as soon as they change the top guy or gal, it's all going to – you're starting again. But almost if you have one change on the leadership team and that person's got enough input into the power, they'll change the whole thing. Yeah, and they will. The good news is that I think it's an incremental change. And the best way to observe the change is you can really observe it in the language they use. Because they start using language that's more focused towards curiosity.

They become much more interested in what, not who. The one I've listened for, and this comes from Edgar Schein, is they become much more interested in how, not why. Right. And that's, and good conversation changes. Yeah, totally. And good leaders hardly ever ask why. Yeah. It's weird. They ask how, even though Simon, what's the guy's name? Simon Sinek. Simon Sinek. Yeah. Who wrote getting to why, or you have to ask why he's made his fortune on why. Right. Yeah.

Yeah. Cause people do business with you because you're of your why. Yeah. So the bottom line is, is that what, what shine would have told you, is that why is interesting, but not nearly as interesting as how. And it's funny, when you think about the difference between how and why, they're pretty different. They're incredibly different. Why did you hit your brother versus how did you hit your brother? I mean, that's... Well, which in accountability is the same thing,

right? When you go to context, it's all about the how, right? Yeah. How are you thinking about it? Well, what was going on in your brain when you made the decision to do that or not do that? How did that impact? And so that gets kind of hardwired. And I do think we're seeing – I'm probably naive, but I do think we're seeing a change in that. But I think the world's changing. I mean, definitely employment is changing.

And then just the whole – there's just this whole weird – I don't know, this weird authoritarian push that's happening kind of globally. It's really bizarre that I don't get it. But it doesn't seem to be very closely reflected in organizations. So one thing that I think is super interesting is that organizations are getting healthier and governments are getting less healthy. Yes. And I don't know what that means, but I bet it means something. I bet it does mean something.

And I'm very curious to see how that plays out because I have the same sensibility. I'm like, why is government turning, you know, I feel like, you know, the White Arm Republic, it's like, what's happening?

How is this going going in this direction yeah and it's global i mean it's yeah we're not the only one yeah i mean it's it's all over europe it's it's it's global i mean it's just it's it's i mean this week bolivia went berserk i mean which is interesting kenya went crazy which is interesting on the same day. Yeah. This is, that's a whole other point. Yes, that is. I'm sorry. Edit that out. Edit that out. Oh, my God. But I do feel like the, so the conversation changes.

And so when we look at what to measure, right, those are the leading indicators. And those are the more meaningful indicators. Because I think it's a snapshot. Yeah, exactly. It's a snapshot into how, what you're really looking at, what it's a leading indicator to. Is that those are the evidence that we're given that they're thinking differently about the problem. Right. Because how you talk about it is how you show it. Yeah.

I mean, it's definitely how you're categorizing it in your head and how you're conceptualizing it. If you are a big believer in kind of the Worf-Sapir hypothesis, which says that language controls thought. Thought does not control language. Language controls thought. Then those are pretty good indicators. That's also another podcast. Exactly. But so, I mean, that's, so when you look at, are we doing capacity?

Are we really creating it? Is it happening? Are you talking differently? Are your conversations changing? Is the first question. Yeah. Are you asking different questions? Are you monitoring different things? You know, and they really have to go. And what's funny is that most leaders, because they're so desperate to know what to do, tell me what to do. I'll do it. Tell me what to do.

Just what's the answer? Or the one they ask all the time is, what do other organizations who are very successful at this do? Right? Well, that's a cheesy way to say, tell me what to do. Cheesy way to tell me what to do. Yeah. But generally, if you can get them to sort of become interested in larger data sets, more diverse data sets, small data diversity, you just get better leadership. The best leaders, what did you say earlier? Leadership is learning?

Learning is the best learners. Yeah. I mean, the best leaders are super curious about their organization. So they're super curious. They're really interested in what's happening when nothing bad's happening. Yeah. That whole, like, let's think about it. Let's look at what we're thinking about and having the conversation as opposed to answering the mail, answering the questions all the time, being the source. And instead of being the source of the questions as opposed to the source of

the answers. Yep, exactly. Which, you know, is super satisfying because it's a very circular conversation in the way that it's easier than you think and harder than you think at the same time. Because you're not listening hard enough, first of all, because you can't tell if anybody's having a different conversation because you're so busy being in a conversation. And I think that's the nuance of it. And when leaders slide back into the fray of the culture, they don't stand out

of the meeting long enough at a distance. They don't distance themselves to really hear. They don't distance themselves to really observe and pay attention at the level they need to pay attention to see if capacity is actually being addressed.

And they can do some things like they can change their tools so they can change they can change the form they give to people to present to the board of directors or they can get rid of the give me three bullet points, you know, and replace it with give me a narrative one page long. It tells a story of how we got to where we got to. And stories have a beginning, middle, and end. So it needs to have a beginning, middle, and end. It needs to be narrative by nature.

I should be able to read it on the toilet.

Right. And enjoy the whole arc. That's right. The entire arc. The entire, the toilet arc. Oh, well, this has been very, very insightful. The pleasure's been mine. Thank you. I appreciate having this conversation because I do think that there's so much to the hop relative to all the things leadership, all the things innovation. What do you think? I told you it was a great podcast. A little long. I owe you 15 minutes. My bad. Sorry. Sorry. I hope I didn't make you late for dinner.

But it's worth it. I didn't know where to cut. It's hard to cut. But until then, have fun. Learn something new every single day. Have as much fun as you possibly can. Be good to each other. Be kind to each other. And for goodness sakes, you guys, be safe. Music.