PAPod 516 - New Ideas for Old Problems: Navigating Sustainable Change

Okay, let's take a break for about 16 minutes here and stop recording this audio for this audio book. Man, that is like, I don't know. It seems like that would be a really, like if you had to torture somebody, that would be a good way to do it. We'll be right back. Music.

Hey everybody todd conklin pre-accident investigation podcast how are you it is so good to hear your happy voice and to spend time with you so i have lots of reporting to give you this week big excitement at the winfield bluegrass festival oh yeah that was fun really had a good time saw lots of friends the weather was kind of weird it was either incredibly hot or so rainy and lightningingly lightning ish what is it how do what's the word

when there's lots of lightning there was so much lightning that that you either were melting and having heat stroke or they couldn't do the show because of danger so it did start a really interesting discussion between the idea of risk and chance. So luck and risk or bad luck and risk. I always see chance as kind of a negative thing. It was a very interesting discussion to have with, you know, just people like normal people.

So I think risk, you have some agency over chance. You don't have agency over. So then we could, I mean, it was a really interesting discussion because we were talking about getting hit by lightning is, you know, you have agency. You probably, you know, don't stand in the middle of the field and fly a kite with a key on it. Ben Franklin, get in here, but also it's lightning. So it was a very interesting discussion, but we had a really good time.

I was going to look up really quick, the name of this band that I thought was so good in Winfield that I can't remember the name of that to introduce you guys to because it's totally worth getting introduced to. And they were great. It seems like if I can do this correctly, let me think. It seems like they were from California. And they were kind of blue. They were definitely bluegrassy for sure. No question about it. But they were also really jazzy, kind of.

And so that was interesting. I don't know. It seemed like a really good, it was fun. I mean, it was, we definitely had a really good time. And they played great stuff. I mean, really great stuff. Let me see. Can I find it? Oh, here's an article of everything that's ever happened at Winfield. All the bands that ever played there. Well, that's because everybody's played there. So that'll be kind of a list to everybody. AJ Lee and Blue Summit. I found it. Ha-ha.

There it is. There were also other great bands that were fun to listen to, but I really enjoyed AJ Lee and Blue Summit. They were worth listening to, and it was a pretty darn fun time. And then I drove around. I really had a good weekend. I mean, it was a good time, but had by all, if you think about it, and that's a good way to do it. And so that is kind of the fun that was had. Today's podcast, we're going to have a – let's jump into it. You want to? That would be a good idea.

So as much as it sounds like we should have a discussion on risk and chance, and maybe we, you and I should have this discussion on risk and chance. Today, I'm going to talk to you about a little thing that's been going on that I haven't talked about at all for lots of reasons. One is, is that the timing didn't seem right to talk about it, but it's now probably right. I just actually put a new book up and some of you found it clearly.

And I don't know how I feel about that because I'm not really sure where I am on this book at all. I did some presentation, let's say a year ago. It was a while ago. And it became really clear to me that there's a part of the discussion around diffusing this new safety stuff, hop and all the sundried items that go with it, that is not being talked about very much.

And I thought there was a need to talk about it. And it's really not – this book's really not a book about human performance practices and safety. It's really a book about how to create sustainable change in the organization. And the back story is that people were talking about how difficult it is to get an organization to change. Well, that's not new knowledge. It's hard. I mean, it's very difficult. Change is hard, and it's always hard.

And because it's been hard a while, there's been a lot of great people in the world that have gone out and really done some work around this on how change happens. And that became really – it just became really obvious to me that that's part of the discussion that wasn't being had. And so I thought, well, I kind of feel like, not that I wanted to write a book, because that's not, I didn't have that problem. But I thought, I kind of, I felt sort of obliged, like I owe some thoughts on this.

And so I thought, well, I'm going to try to put this book together, but I'm going to do it differently than I do other books. This one, I want to focus on how we look at change, but I want to do it with mostly just kind of a series of lists. I mean, just kind of bulleted lists that sort of review not my experience.

Theory and work because it's not my theory and work but the theory and work of people who do who do lots of change like edgar shine whom we talk about all the time and peter senge if you don't know him you know there's tremendous amount of research and then everett rogers it keeps coming up in the diffusion of innovation and new ideas and i thought well you know that's he was my advisor. I mean, I know lots about that because I used to hang out with him. He comes to the house.

I mean, it was, it's, he was a friend. I mean, so I had lots to talk about. So I thought I'm going to write this book.

And so the book is entitled new ideas for old problems, a human performance approach to sustainable change. But it's not, it's not a book. It's just different. Like I'm noticing as I'm reading it for the audio book, because Because that's really an important thing to do. And so that's what I'm doing right now, actually. I stopped to actually record the podcast for the pod. This is a book that I thought, I'm not going to write this...

With a bunch of case studies and talk about how the safety program diffused through the organization because they're always so different. I mean, there's not two that are going to be alike. What I'm going to do is focus on really some lists of things that will actually help people maybe trigger knowledge and trigger ideas and build a hunger to look at this more and to think about change not as something that's accidental, but as actually something that's kind of deliberate.

The problem with thinking about change as deliberate is that the process of changing Changing has some very deliberate moments, but change itself happens kind of at its own rate of speed. And so I put this book together and it's not very long and the typeface is big. I think that's definitely a function of me getting older. But it's not a book that promises, it's not like the other books I've written. Let's just say that. But it is a book and it sounds like I'm making excuses. I'm not.

I mean, it's a book that really talks about using lists and bulleted highlights on some things that are important when you think about change. And it's only it's in six chapters. There's an introduction to sort of produce this idea. Then we talk about the new safety ideas for old safety problems, which is kind of what we talk about all the time anyway. So that's not even terribly interesting. Then we talk about the speed at which change happens, the speed of improvement.

And that discussion is a pretty interesting discussion because change happens not when you put it on the plan, not when you put the calendar together, not when you create the strategy, but change happens as people start changing. Right. And the one thing you don't have a tremendous amount of control over is how people take these new ideas in, think through these new ideas, and then start to practice these new ideas. That's happening at their rate of speed, not at your rate of speed.

And so that's a really important discussion. And the other thing I'll tell you, just because I think it's worthwhile, is that your organization doesn't change as one thing because your organization is not one thing. It's kind of the origin of the word organization. There are many little individual parts that come together to perform some kind of function. That's the definition of the organization. Those individual little parts are going to move at their own rate of speed and in their own way.

And so one part of your organization will move quicker and differently than another part of your organization that may move slower and more methodically. Then the fourth chapter, we talk about leadership success will take an organizational change. So they're really connected. How leaders respond and how change happens aren't separate things. One creates the other, and it's kind of like a cycle.

It's like an endless loop that as leaders understand and change what they want from the organization, the organization begins to understand and change what it gives to leadership, and the cycle continues. On and on and on and on. But one of the ways you can get different outcomes is to ask different questions. So one of the ways organizations can change is in fact by managing or strategizing or measuring or monitoring or asking for different things.

So that connection between leadership and change is really an important part of the process. Then the fifth chapter talks about the fact that the change is a journey of continuous improvement, which that's a term you've used your whole career.

I mean, that's a term that's maybe a little bit tired and worn out, but it's actually a really pretty good way to talk about how organizations function and organizations that are vital and effective, and usually that means profitable and provide high-value, critical products, make the world a better and different place, those organizations are vital because they're continuously improving. They're constantly getting better.

And then the final chapter is just a kind of a list of things that I thought were kind of important to include, but don't really need a lot of discussion, like start immediately. I don't know what else you say other than once you say start immediately, what do you say? Do you define what start means and then what immediately means and then rephrase it in three different languages?

They're just tidbits of information that are taken from the body of knowledge that exists out there around organizational change that I thought were most profound and probably most important but read that with a grain of salt to actually making change happen. And that's kind of the entire book. It's a little, it's not very, I mean, it's not big. It's not scary. It has a pretty cool cover. I like the cover, but you shouldn't judge a book by its cover.

But that's the discussion. And what this does is not through a series of stories, not through a series of case studies, which would have been, I mean, that's a great book and someone should write it. But it's kind of the beginning conversation of sustainability. And that's a pretty important conversation to have because one of the big lessons that I learned over and over again is that change is not permanent and improvement is not permanent.

And so when we talk about sustainability, we're not talking about once we get to point X, we're there and can move on to point Y. No, organizations ebb and flow. They move forwards and backwards. And that's pretty normal. And because that's pretty normal, that's kind of how things work. And so that becomes kind of depressing. And there is kind of a depressing angle to this, but also kind of exciting. And you'll see I use a piece of Greek mythology.

I don't use it well, but I use a piece of Greek mythology to really talk through the potential frustration that everyone has in trying to get an organization to get better. And it is kind of a big job. And what's amazing is you work really, really hard and you gain ground and then you lose ground and then you gain ground and then you lose ground and it happens over and over again.

And so that is important to recognize early because one of the things that maturity and experience gives you is a pretty realistic understanding that the idea of creating continuous improvement is just that. It's a continuous effort to get better. And so think about it, not necessarily organizationally, but think about it in your own personal life, that you're kind of on this constant journey of getting better, getting smarter, getting faster, getting thinner, getting healthier, getting better.

And that it's a continuous journey. And that journey is best defined by saying there are periods of great success followed by periods where the effort ebbs and we backslide a little and that that's normal. And what the scholars in this field talk about is how we have to try to backslide less each time and that that is, in fact, an improvement.

And so that's a really interesting discussion. And then finally, and I kind of teased this earlier, finally, there's a really nice discussion with the theory of diffusion of innovation, which is kind of really important. And you've heard about it before, because it's a big part of the discussion of how organizations and new ideas happen. And it comes from this guy, Everett Rogers. And you've probably seen his work.

He's got a little chart he's drawn. And that chart sort of helps us understand how people diffuse information. And he's got... And really, there's five categories of people. They're not really categories. He divides the organization up into five distinct types of people. And his research is great. I mean, we talk about it a bunch. It actually comes from the study of hybrid seed corn. But what he did is he looked at how new ideas spread out.

And he said, it's really interesting. There's a small percentage of people that he calls innovators. And those are the people that are trying everything new all the time. They've got the best cell phone and the coolest car and the latest computer and the latest pen and the latest notebook and the latest tablet. They're innovators. And that's a pretty small group of people, but your organization definitely has innovators in it.

And those people try things early. early they know stuff will fail and they know that nothing's permanent they're really comfortable with that but what they're interested in is what are the newest latest ideas and so those people those innovators they need one strategy to help change and that strategy is very different from the other four categories the second category talks about our early adopters so they're right on the heels of the innovator.

They wait for the innovator to buy the new tablet. They look at it and they think, I need one of those. And they go out and get one almost immediately. And early adopters are a larger percentage of the organization. In fact, there's probably, you know, almost 20% of the organization is either an innovator or an early adopter. So that's a pretty large chunk of the organization. Once the early adopters get it, then Rogers talks about something called the early majority.

And then he talks about the late majority. And between the early majority and the late majority, that's about another 70% of the organization. So the bulk of your organization is really pretty good with changing. The early ones, the innovators change very quickly the next day. There are the adopters change within the next week. The early majority changes within the next month.

I'm making these times up. And the late majority follows within the following month, and you've got almost 90% of the organization with you. And then he talks about the last final 10% or so, and he calls them the laggards. And those are the people who change is hard for, and they're going to wait and test the theory and see what happens and see where it goes. And you have to strategize change, like a safety change, like moving safety from a program to a practice.

You have to strategize a new and different way to approach safety, knowing that all of those populations will accept this information and process this information and begin to practice this information at different rates. And about 10% of your organization is going to really drag at the bottom. And so he talks about how some strategies for changing that.

And I thought those lists of strategies that he's talked about my whole academic career, and I've sat in a room and talked with him about it a million times, probably more likely with Ev. We sat in a restaurant somewhere having lunch and talked about it. But nonetheless, that's still a room. Those changes are really important as well. And that's kind of what this little book is doing.

It's just a list of information. And I'm noticing as I read it out loud that it's maybe the first book I've ever written that I think makes more sense in audiobook than it does in the printed version, which I don't know what that means, but I'm noticing I like it better as I hear it than as I read it. And I kind of think it's just how, how information is given. I'm really trying to give this information to you in a new way and we'll see if it works. It's just an experiment.

It's I'm, I'm just trying it, but I felt like it, the message was important and it's a message that I owed you.

And so here it is that that's what that book is set up to do. Music. So it's called New Ideas for Old Problems, A Human Performance Approach to Sustainable Change, and it's available any place you buy stuff. And the audio book will be out really soon, I promise, because I'm sitting here reading it even as we speak. In fact, I took a break from reading the audio book to tell you about this book for the pod. So that's good. I hope everything's going great for you.

It's a time of transition. It always is. This is a transitional time for weather and seasons, but it's also kind of a transitional time for organizations. It's always kind of an interesting time this time of year. It's maybe one of my favorite times of year because it is kind of transitional. And this is sort of when change starts to happen. And as we walk down this trail together, like we've done many times before, I'm kind of glad we're doing it.

To me, when I get really frustrated and I think, oh man, I just remember that the work we're doing is done for the right reasons and it's good work and you're making the world a better place and you're good at it and we get to hang out together and talk about it. So that's good. Lots more coming up. I'm super excited about the pod. I mean, there's pretty interesting stuff coming up.

It's really interesting stuff coming up that I'm not supposed to talk about until it's formalized, but I'm very excited about that and kind of everything else we're doing. So with that, I think that's what we're going to talk about. I hope you had a good walk with the dog or a good drive to work or whatever you do when you listen to the podcast. And I hope you at least kind of check this book out and look at it and see what you think.

It's We'll see if it worked or not. It's kind of up to you to figure that out because I can't answer that question. Until then, learn something new every single day. Have as much fun as you possibly can. Be good to each other. Be kind. And for goodness sakes, you guys, be safe. Music.