Transcription of podcast with Lisa L Levy
Russell: Hi, and welcome back to Resilience Unravelled. And welcome to my guest, who is standing in front of a fascinating picture of what looks like the brain. So, I'm hoping we're going to be talking about that at some stage. And two books, so I'm guessing we'd definitely be talking about that at some stage. So, my guest for me this evening is Lisa Levy. So, hi, Lisa. How are you?
Lisa: Russell? I am great. Thank you so much for inviting me to the conversation.
Russell: Pleasure. Tell me where in the world you are at the moment.
Lisa: In the world right now, I am at my home base. I am in Phoenix, Arizona.
Russell: Okay. Fantastic. I've not been there. I'm no knowledge of it. Really? Are you hot or cold at the moment?
Lisa: We are hot. Colder than we would normally be at this time of the year. But for everybody else, that's still kind of it's hot.
Russell: Wow. Fantastic. I like the heat. Well, tell us a little bit about what it is that you do and a little bit about your background, if you would.
Lisa: Absolutely. I am like so many people, I guess, right now, I am an author, I'm a speaker, I'm a coach, I'm a consultant. All of those things sort of came into fruition during the pandemic as were learning how to use our skills and capabilities in different ways. But at the heart of all of it, I'm an entrepreneur. And 14 years ago, I left corporate America to start a consulting firm because I was bound and determined to do that better than anyone else was doing it. Because I think that the practice and the discipline of consulting has been compromised over the years in the pursuit of revenue and profit for consulting agencies, we've lost sight of taking care of our clients and helping them better tomorrow than they are today. And that is the whole basis of everything that I do.
Russell: Right. Interesting. So, your contention is that consultants don't look after their clients. Is that a thing that's unique to America? Because it's not my experience. However, I'm saying that with a smile on my face just to give you ammunition to be able to talk.
Lisa: Well, from my experience and my experience is not just the US. But I'm poking fun at, I guess, the big four and the large consultancies that charge millions of dollars and build a co-dependent relationship with their clients. And what I mean by that is they come in, they do a strategic plan, and they then sell the services to implement the plan and they put more and more resources in. I like to talk about it as landing and expanding and that is not from my perspective what a good consultancy should do. The premise that I'm working from is that we are there to help our clients build skills, capabilities, solve problems, but build their self-reliance so that whatever we've attacked and tackled for them with them moving forward they can do for themselves.
Russell: Yes, that's a very altruistic model. I thought you were going to refer to the famous New York firm that got caught repeat sending out the same proposal with different client names on the front. But I mean allegedly I think it's the trick we're talking about there.
Lisa: Is right, and it isn't in any business, in any service model we want to be able to rinse and repeat but there's an element that has to bespoke because what one business is experiencing is not exactly the same as somebody else's. The root cause may be similar, it may be exactly the same but the people, the processes, the technology that they're using make some of the situation’s difference and we need to be able to respond to those effectively and efficiently.
Russell: So, your stick, your thing, your propositions as about future proving by the looks of it because just rampaging around your site at the moment, I see it mentioned all over the place. I know you wrote the book, I'll come to that but what do you mean by future proofing? I mean it's obvious but what do you mean?
Lisa: Well, and it is obvious and if you google future proofing books, you're going to find dozens of them. Right. So, it means something different to every author and in this case, I'm talking about leveraging best practices that large enterprise corporations invest millions and billions of dollars into. But with my adaptive transformation framework we're taking project management, process performance management, internal controls, organisational change management, combining the golden nuggets of all of those things into a usable tool set for a company of any size without that huge multimillion dollar investment. It gives small and emerging businesses the capabilities to grow and scale.
Russell: Right. So, you're very much on the operational side. Is that your own personal background?
Lisa: It is. I came up in the project management space in technology and in that learned that projects fail, technology projects fail most often because we don't understand the business process that we're trying to enable or automate or improve and so we have to understand and then we also don't understand the people who are doing the work. So, I work with an equation and it's really simple. We take our people plus our processes, multiply that with technology and that's how we get growth in scale. It is linear.
Russell: Yes and it's fascinating. All right, interesting, fascinating. I've seen that depending on what your own personal perspective is each way around. So, it's quite fascinating talk about that. But come on. The thing is, I just look around your website. What's all this about Porsche cars? You've not mentioned that so far.
Lisa: Oh, my gosh. Yes. The Porsche for me was originally a declaration of independence. I bought my first one following a divorce and I had the realisation that as I was standing on my own as an adult at around 30 years of age, my whole circumstances had changed. But all of a sudden, I was totally in control of my money, and I had a surplus of it for the first time in my adult life. And so, I bought a car, a really expensive one, and I had a blast driving it.
Russell: Good.
Lisa: Until I realised that it could pay to fund the start-up of my business.
Russell: Yeah, that's the problem, isn't it? And you discovered that it's worth a lot less than you paid. Oh, some Porsches hold their value quite well, don't they?
Lisa: Well, I was fortunate enough that it gave me the runway for building Lcubed Consulting.
Russell: Yes, and it's no surprise to me that with your approach, with process and project management, that you would have chosen a Porsche. Let's be honest, I couldn't imagine you're driving a Maserati, for example.
Lisa: I love that I have never actually thought of it, but that is hysterical.
Lisa: Russell I think from a pure pop psychology thing, I think the cars you drive and the shoes you wear say so much about you. And I mean, I'm talking a lot now about just opinion and fun, but let's go back to the reality of what you're talking about.
Lisa: Well, I guess let's just have one more bit of fun with that. Russell, I have pink fuzzy slippers on right now.
Russell: And so, do I. So that we are kindred spirits. No, but the thing is, I think what you've hit on here is something because obviously I focus on the people side, but I have a process background myself and I find too few managers really understand process because theories of lean management, kaizen and all that sort of stuff go back on. The idea is that if something has gone wrong, it is the process that's gone wrong. It's not the person performing the task. Because if the person was performing the task against the process must be wrong for it to have gone wrong in the first place. So, it's quite a liberating way of thinking about process. And I find that most organizations spend too much time making processes onerous and complicated, in a sense, really, to defend themselves. And I think that's what's fascinating about what you're saying is when you're small and nimble, you create processes to create opportunity and when you're large, you take all those processes, throw them away and they're really about risk mitigation.
Russell: So, I can see how you would flex one to the other. That makes a lot of sense to me, but I'm sort of putting words in your mouth and you might not think that at all.
Lisa: No. And it's an astute observation on your part. So let me do the couple of definitive things. I have expertise. I am a Six Sigma master. Black belt. I am a certified project management professional. These are things that I have been doing my whole career. And my take on process is really simple. We have to have processes. Things have to be repeatable. So, Russell, if you were to win the lottery, somebody could step in and do the work that you do. Right? We need to have it documented, somebody needs to understand it. But once we get to that level, then we get to figure out how to break it. And that's where the fun comes in because that's where we get to be more innovative, we get to be more effective, we get to be more efficient. But we have to have something to start from before we can make it better.
Russell: So, all of this talk is about feeding into continuous improvement.
Lisa: Yes. But it's more than that, isn't it? Because what's interesting about process and process building is that systems are created from processes. And the problem is, and I find this in measuring human performance, what ends up happening is you build a process, and the system designers say, we can't have that. This is what you can have. And so, the process gets corrupted because the systems are incapable of following the process. And therefore, you end up with this healthy, unhealthy dialogue argument, continuing row between process builders, people, and system providers. Because often it's the same as measuring what you'd really want to measure the people. You end up measuring what the system can tell you. So, I wonder how you cope with that when you're breaking all the process, when you still have to have systems which don't break.
Lisa: So, systems but systems do break. Russell oh my gosh.
Russell: But they're not meant to. But they usually break.
Lisa: No, but they are meant to. And one of the things about systems, and I love that you put it in the words you write, they're telling you it can't. I will throw a big red BS flag on that.
Russell: Good.
Lisa: The system can do anything that we can do in a human process. We have to have a development team willing to do those things. So, we buy a system. And when we buy any system, we're going to make some compromises because it is designed to work a certain way. So, it is imperative that when we're doing our vendor selection process, we understand and have documentation of our business processes. It is the only way we're going to get to 80% or 90% alignment with the system.
Russell: And the vision.
Lisa: And the vision. And that is something that we lose sight of all the time. And then we start to make huge compromises and I can't tell you how many engagements I've done with clients where my teams come in at the 11th hour of a system implementation because the people are ready to revolt because it doesn't do what they do.
Russell: Yeah, exactly right. I say that all the time from the people side as well. Exactly the same problem because the software is going to produce a wonderful bell and whistle, but it still can't do the actual fundamentals. Or you bought a package from the shelf, and you say, well, we'll just compromise and have that, and you may as well just have something that's cheap it works and then bespoke and doesn't work. Sorry. So, tell me, if you're a business owner or you're a board member, what you should be thinking about, because you mentioned culture and you've talked a little bit about future proofing, what are the sort of critical processes you need to really be aware of to future proof to do that to the organisation? Future proof it I challenge you ten times fast. Future proofing. Future proofing. It's not possible. So, we all stumble over that phrase.
Lisa: Thank you.
Russell: The most important piece is the mindset and it's the alignment logic. Do you have the right people in the right roles doing work that is repeatable and enabled by technology?
Lisa: Right.
Lisa: So, your kind of checklist through those steps and if you are confident with your people and you have the right people in the right seats, that their processes work to their best of their capabilities, then you're enabling with technology. And the word enabling is important because the technology only does what we tell it to do and if we're asking it to do the wrong things or we're not using it to its fullest capabilities, we're not getting that enablement, that lift out of it. And it's very frustrating for some of my clients along the way, they want to replace the technology because it's bad. And when we go in and we really look at what's happening, it isn't configured properly, it wasn't configured completely. Things that are pain points are functionality that the system might have that they've never paid to learn how to use. And so, you have to have those three things aligned and working together.
Russell: Yes.
Lisa: Getting to that is an organisational change exercise. Right. Understanding what's in it for me as an employee and why I would want to use the system that I currently hate, how we can change it, how we can make it better. But so, as leadership, as an owner, that high level flyover is the alignment of those three things.
Russell: Yes. That's fascinating. And I hear that phrase so many times and of course my bit is the right people. And I often query that word, what is the right person? Because you can have the right person with the wrong processes and you've got the wrong person, but you have the wrong person potentially in the wrong role. Does that person add value in a different role.
Lisa: Yeah, but also you can have the right people with the right processes in the right seats and a heinously poor manager and none of it will work anyway.
Russell: Right, but that's still a part of that people part of the equation.
Lisa: It is, but I think sometimes what happens is leadership management processes are left to chance and it works when the organization has a sound process and it's got a self-governing, a self-managing system and that's a great culture to have. But the vast majority of managers leaders that I bump into, they are the records because of incompetence rather than anything else. And its leadership management process is so hard to get rid of. I mean it's quite interesting. In the recent speaking gig, I was in I just asked when will leaders be replaced by AI? Because it's quite easy to understand the questions that should be asked and how you hold people to accountable. Why the heck don't people just do it? So, it's interesting about how you ingrain that board process or leadership process into your processes to build that culture.
Russell: So, you gave me a fun phrase in there, right. That idea of self-managing is the role of supervisor manager really necessary? If we have high performing teams, I'm sorry, and good process. If you have high performing teams with the understanding of the vision, the commitment to drive the results, they should be able to manage themselves. Right? We don't need somebody walking around with a clipboard in their hands checking off oh, they've done this, they've done that. Oh Russell, you didn't do this, why didn't you do this? That is outmoded thinking.
Lisa: Right, but you're so right and I totally agree with you and I'm sorry to be just violently agreeing with you all the way through this conversation, but just look at the argument around working from home. The reason that people are pulled back into home is because of poor leadership management practices, not because of efficiency, because we know a lot of people and not everybody. And there is a place for the hybrid working thing. But most people have been pulled back into work because of incompetence in leadership management. That's a bold statement but I'm going to stick with it, and I will violently agree with you because you're absolutely right. And this desire and hearing large corporation CEOs who have big megaphones in the media making these declarative statements yeah, I.
Russell: Don't know who you mean.
Lisa: There's three of them. The problem with that is they don't get that everything has actually changed. We have ways of describing that leadership. Some of it might, we might be calling it the Peter Principle, we might have the halo effect. Right. We have these studies that are old, they have been around for a long time. We promote people to their own level of incompetence. They don't belong in the organization anymore. No, we take good Doers tactical subject matter experts, we promote them into leadership, and we don't train them how to be good leaders. And so, what do they do? They focus on the steps of the tasks, of the processes that they were really good at doing. And then they drive everybody else crazy because that's not what they need from a leader.
Russell: Yeah, and part of that is poor process. And part of that you see, my view has always been that the reason you have poor process is because of poor leadership. Because you have good leadership, you have good process. But most leaders don't understand process. So, I'm loving what you're saying, and it all makes sense. So, you've written this book called Future Proofing, which I'm guessing encapsulates many of your ideas. Tell me what's in it, what would I expect to find it in it? But also, critically who's it written for.
Lisa: Okay, so Future Proofing Cubed takes us through the experience of the Adaptive Transformation Frameworks, how we're using all of those best practices, the project management, the process, performance management, internal controls, and organisational change and why bringing all of those together is so impactful. There are stories from leading CEOs who some do this naturally, they didn't know they were doing it. Some have learned the hard way why it becomes important and they're just great stories about growth. The book is written in a way that anybody can read it and consume and take away tactical ideas that they can leverage, and they can use. But it was really written for leaders who are growing a business from start-up to emerging. They're starting to build their C suite team and formalizing their business into a more mature organization on that growth journey, getting ready to actually scale. So, I've given the secret sauce. It's all there. And a dedicated individual can take it and execute.
Russell: And so, is it meant to be a manual or a reference book?
Lisa: It is not that tactical. It is not a college curriculum type book. So, it's going to give you the ideas. It's going to give you the broad strokes of the concepts. It'll give you a high-level tutorial on each of those four best practices, but it is not going to make you an expert in them.
Russell: Okay, so walk me through some of the sort of chapters that we can look forward to reading.
Lisa: My favourite chapter is the chapter on what keeps leaders up at night and walking through all of those problems that we have. The challenge of we do the same thing over and over again, but it's not actually driving the results. So, we change it and six months later we go back to the way we've always done it. What is the problem with the way we've always done it is that's that process that you've created that has never been vetted, validated, or understood to be effective or efficient. And you fall back into that habit because it's comfortable. Because as people, we are resistant to change. And when we make changes happen. If we don't take the people on the journey with us to get that buy in so that they get that, what's in it for me? Understood. They will never adopt the change and make it stick. And that's just one example of something that we play through in the book, that is that opportunity to solve a problem once and move on.
Russell: And where does resilience fit into your book? Because obviously I would say it's pretty critical, but you may have a different view.
Lisa: So, resilience, I talk more about adaptability would be the word that I'm using, and it is fundamental. Right? This is the premise of everything. Our world is constantly changing. A pandemic came out of nowhere. The book was launched during the pandemic. Being able to build in the idea to continuously improve starts with an innovation engine and having the capability as a team, as a business, to constantly ideate new ideas. What are new products, what are new services, what are pain points that our customers have that we can solve? Having that influx of ideas is what is the fuel for the engine of running a business. And so, we'll talk through how to run that ideation engine so that when something we have success with a product or service, we have a growth cycle. That's awesome and it's fun, but growth cycles end and so you want to constantly have the next thing percolating.
Lisa: So, in the innovation engine process, we're getting the ideas, we're conference room prototyping. Ten of your best employees sitting in a room poking holes at the idea. How can it work? How wouldn't it work? You're investing time, but not actually hard dollars in R and D to come up with ideas. And you take the top two or three each quarter and invest a little money in an actual prototype or a small market test. Learn from those outcomes. The things that work really well, take them to market. If something fails gloriously those are my actual favourite. If something fails gloriously, take all of that information you learned and funnel that into the next idea.
Russell: That's an R and D strategy, isn't it?
Lisa: It is.
Russell: And the thing is, what happens is people become cash rich, become lazy, they don't innovate. And then what happens is they start running out of cash and they don't have the cash to do the innovation and the R and D. So, you have to be looking at the next idea while you're still successful, rather than that sweating. That is the old Boston box, isn't it? Before the thing turns into a cash cow, you've got to do the Sigma curve.
Lisa: Absolutely right. And so, everybody gets excited when they start to see the J curve or the hockey stick growth happening. Right. And you see that one image of it and everybody's all excited. But the problem is that's really just one of what should be many. Absolutely right. And we need to as soon as that rocket ship growth and I wish for everybody listening that they have the rocket ship growth experiences, that's when you actually really have to make sure you go back to the beginning and keep the new ideas funnelling in.
Lisa: And what I find fascinating about the J shape, or whatever you called it, is that it's down there. No one ever mentions how we got down there. Then it's fascinating, isn't it? So, for me, one of the things about feature proofing is our ability. I love you, so let's talk about ideation. But for me, learning is at the heart of this sort of organization, that learning process not planned to review. It's a genuine sort of thoughtful, methodological process that allows proper learning to take place. Otherwise, the organization will do just what you said, which is to continue doing the same thing over and over again. Absolutely fascinating. Good. All right, then. So, love it. Now, if I wanted to get myself a copy, and I'm already looking at it, so I know where it is, but for the benefit of everybody else, what's the cold?
Russell: How do we find it?
Lisa: Future proofing cubed is available on Amazon.
Russell: Yeah, it is. And if we want to find out more about you, Lisa, how would we do that?
Lisa: The fastest way to find me [email protected] and that will take you into all things about me and Lcubed consulting the business.
Russell: Very good. And maybe another time we can talk about your women in business contacts as well, because I see you've got some expertise in that area, and that's often fascinating to talk about as a different way of thinking about business. Brilliant. It's been a joy. It's a long time since I've talked to a pink slippered Porsche driver. So, there you are. You're going to go down. You're sticking in my imagination. So, thank you for spending time with us today. I've been an absolute pleasure. And you take care.