Stan Deetz - Leading Organizations through Transition Part 2

welcome back to part two of leading organizations through transition with the author of this book Stan Deetz welcome back sir Thank you so much.

Good to see you it's great to have you back we've had a little bit of a break both of us have been working Stan's working on a new book and i was traveling over in the US in fact so it's great to be back with you stand i thought we jump straight into something that I find a lot happens with innovation in that it's not pretty. transitions, are not pretty. And actually I was thinking, I was telling you, I wear a pin to try and reflect the show.

And I was going to put on a butterfly, this great metamorphosis of the caterpillar and the butterfly. And I was like, you know what? It doesn't quite do it. This is a moth and a moth has the same transition, but actually it's just a little bit uglier. And I was like, well, that's the truth about this.

And I thought we'd check that assumption because you say that one basic assumption of this view is that cultural assumptions are strongly held by most people before the change process is considered, you may wish to consider moments when your own view of how things work and what is right and fair were challenged. Consider for example the death of a young parent or child. Are your feelings about the justice system after OJ verdict or a divorce settlement.

The first time you were offered a dog or cat to eat. The promotion given for political reasons when you are more qualified. All these things question your assumptions and it's easier to understand the horror and disbelief when culture change is attempted and the accompanying sense that the gods must be crazy." i thought that was really really important point that's often glossed over it is not easy and some of us.

Many of the audience of this show Stan, love change and we can't understand why the rest of the organization doesn't want it but you say we need to check that assumption. well, I think we do, because we love change in part, because many of the changes that we're loving don't challenge our values. In fact, they're trying to get other people to go along with our values. And of course, that's more comfortable, right? I mean, the idea that I can get more people like me does feel good.

I do think that we have to be really, Conscious of what does the change really mean to a human being in a location and, the real effort that it takes to do it.

And, you know, I sometimes use very simple metaphors with this, not the more complicated things of, you know, where have you really been challenged, you know, basketball is a big sport in the US. And I remember teaching my son basketball, and , he was such a marvelous basketball player with his right hand.

Very proud of himself and so forth but I kept telling him that, of course, you're not very tall, you never will be very tall, and so you've got to learn to go left because they'll quickly know that you always go right. And, of course he looks at me, like I'm absolutely crazy. And so I finally said, , I'm going to tie your right hand behind your back, so you only can play with your left hand.

And of course, if you've ever done this, you know, what it's like to dribble with your left hand when you haven't done it, it's, it's this real weird. thing and how long it takes even that very simple thing of redirecting it so that your left hand can work. And so if you think about a cultural change, really you're asking everyone to suddenly whose right hand to go left. And it looks like a remarkable simple skill because you've been doing it with your right hand for your whole life.

But it's not easy because when you go left you are, retraining the entire body, its reactions, responses. to a large extent, that's what you're doing with culture. You're changing the very way a person sees a situation, the natural moves that they have. They know if they go right, they can do it pretty well. But going left is awkward. It's going to be awkward for some period of time. They're going to look incompetent in situations they're used to trying.

They're always going to want to go right. And, and so, you know, the, the concept here of trying to get used to the idea. that you will go through a awkward phase.

And that awkwardness will be greatest among the people who are most skilled because they have learned to rely mostly on the capacity that they've been trained to have and therefore, you know, getting people into this idea, not only is it extraordinarily challenging, and I think some of the examples there of things that, you know, just absolutely turn people off, right? The idea that I actually could do that and, you know, but it's not hard to come by.

I mean, many of us are challenged right now because of the situation in the Middle East. and we understand, you know, as I talk to people, different persuasions, how deeply held some beliefs and values are that they really wouldn't even be honest with because they're so important to them that when they become challenged in a situation like this, They really don't know where to go and what to do. They don't know how to talk anymore. They don't know who to talk to.

And these experiences we have are very important for us because they are our experiences to understand what happens to everybody in an organization. If you want to do a fundamental change. I love it man you sent me down a rabbit hole already man and we already started we intended to get the whole book done on episode one i don't know if we're gonna make it through episode two, one thing that came to mind stan based on what you said was.

Building on the metaphor of the left handedness if you want to call it that i thought about this before that the word sinister actually comes from left it means sinistry means left in latin, it's actually because they thought that left handed people were evil and in schools i don't know about in the us but certainly in ireland, these to punish people for writing with their left hand and.

Indeed some research shows that because of that people develop stutters because their brain didn't develop in the right way because of that that pattern being interrupted, but i say that to say that there are left handed people many of them out there and if you take that as a metaphor for the change maker inside the organization the person who's comfortable with their left in a world that is dominated by right handed there often, Reprimanded and punished and reviled and

attacked and maybe you'll share a word on that because many of our audience are those their change agents, their transformation agents, their heads of ESG, even an innovation and they, Are often subjects to this attack and maybe a word of encouragement but also why in your expertise that you see that happen. Yeah. A couple of things, I think first is the we went through the same history of left handedness in the United States.

It was probably everywhere that you try to do this, but there's two pieces of this. I think are important. One are the explicit punishments to take place and now the implicit structural and systemic things that still remain against left handedness. Even though it's no longer punished and, , to see the first is important, but also to see the second. It's, it's my left end of people that try to decide where they get to sit at the table.

So they don't interrupt the people as they eat and, and the understanding at every moment when they go to eat with a group of people, they have to think about where they sit. That's different, right? It makes them a different kind of human being within these contexts. And it makes the notion of punishment constantly a set of microaggressions.

Right, and so I think , the change agent has to understand both the explicit anger that people have toward them, but also the incredible array of systemic micro things that take place that are also very important to how they are perceived and understood in these situations. The larger question, why do we hate difference so much? I think it's interesting too, even my son, right?

And when I tie his hand, after some level of frustration, he finally says, you understand that I'm right handed as if the proclaiming of something as being natural is an end to the argument. And, every organization I know, people make this argument of naturalness, right? Well, hierarchy is natural.

Well, of course I can look at my son and with my kind of funny pro processorial G look at him and say, but you understand as Aristotle says, the fact that the right hand is stronger does not mean you can't make the left as strong. Quoting Aristotle always helps in these situations. The, I'm kidding of course. But I think the idea that. My way is the way, my way is based in nature. It is the natural way that we are.

And we see this across social movements, the treatment of individuals who are gay. You name your issue, right? And in organizations, we are filled with things that are presumed to be natural because they are comfortable in my way. I know how to succeed in that world. And I believe That is the natural world.

And so I think there's a, that when one suggests a change, not only you're asking people to do something different, you're asking them to give up a fundamental belief in the way the world is. And that is really tough. And difference always does that. The presence of difference means that there's a challenge against this. And, the philosophers talk about this in different ways. Giddens referred to this as ontological insecurity.

In the United States, we now refer to this as an existential threat. Which is, , the right political parts of the United States, the virtually everything taking place today as an existential threat. And what they mean by that is that a threat, not to me, it's a threat to the world. Your difference is going to remove the natural world.

And so when you think of it in that terms, you understand how strong these feelings are, how much insecurity comes with change, why it is we are so afraid of entering into this insecurity because it's, we don't treat it just as me. Retreated is now, as I refer there on the famous movie at that time, The Gods Must Be Crazy. And so I think that's why, I think we underestimate the extent to which people's worlds are put under threat when we ask for fundamental changes.

Made me think of something we talked about the last day we talked about the analysis of culture and how it requires multiple methods of studying the variety of ways culture is produced and reproduced in organizational life and one of those is the metaphors we talked about that in part one when we talked about the machine metaphor for example, because we're on this point i'm gonna jump to it You talk about the importance of stories myths legends rites, rituals

and routines as well there's a lot in that as well but i think people miss this because when they talk about culture. it's always hard to define and people default to it's the way things are done around here but the metaphors we use the stories the myths the legends of the organizations the rites rituals and routines, they all either reinforce it or create it in the first place. Yes, that's true.

I'd love you to share this because I'm speaking to a group of a hundred scale up leaders, CEOs of developed startups.

They've got to a level of success and they're worried about the future or they're, maybe they're not worried about the future, which also says a lot as well about them, because you get to that level of I've made it now and there can be complacency, but you talk also about the importance of the culture starts with the character of the founder or the leadership team that begins the organization. Yeah, for good and ill, right?

The initial leaders in most organizations put a very large stamp on how the organization is seen. They self selectively hire into people that believe in their story. They reward people who believe in their story. And so it isn't very long at all until the leaders understanding the world is totally institutionalized and totally peopled in the organization. And it is, , almost always the case that when an organization gets to a certain size, one of two things happens.

One is that the leader now is challenged because you can't any longer hire people like you. , in other words, you're already now in a situation you've got to deal with diversity and other things, or in other cases, the leader can't give it up.

That the culture they're required to become successful is not the culture required to sustain one's capacity, and it's very hard for a leader to understand that , their way of being, which was extraordinarily essential for this to come into being, is not the same as institutionalization. , I've talked to some leaders of these kind of startups, and I said, you have to understand the fact that you were really great at courtship and ended up with a fantastic spouse.

in no way means that you know how to be married. I mean, these are fundamentally different things, right? And, not that there isn't plenty of courtship in a marriage to keep it working. But on the other hand, you have to understand that the kinds of things that become institutionalized, And the ways in which one does these things with kids and mortgages and so forth is different than the excitement of making something.

And so I think that there, I think it's very much the case that a leader has tremendous impact. Especially in a small organization that grows into something, but even at particular moments, the right moment of the right leader coming in, you think of like a GE or something where all of a sudden at a transformative moment, the right leader was there that voice things in a way. Welsh was able to capture something at that moment, which in some sense, maybe changed the culture.

The, but that didn't last, right? And in fact, the very way that this changed the culture itself was in many cases a transitory moment. And so I think that an organization has to understand that while there are many things built into it, the thing that really is successful of course is the organization that builds into it is capacity endlessly to not get hung up in its stories and myths.

, to treat them as the fairy tales you once told children, which are no longer the fairy tales you want to live your life by and that requires a maturing of culture that is really quite different than we frequently see happen.

Let's, extend that because in this same chapter, you talk then about, the legends or the stories that you tell inside the organization, those all nighters that you pull, et cetera, , because later hires have no interest in that type of dedication to the business that you built often most of the time.

But then there's things like the rights and rituals that may have been developed in those early stages that may not be politically correct anymore maybe the world is changed maybe it's moved on, there is then the types and processes with conflict people speaking truth to power and even things like espoused values in companies. In the documents in the mission statements even if there is a mission statement Yeah, no, I mean, it's, it's all these things that transform.

I mean, we see this in, you know, some of the debates about the millennials coming into organizations and, you know, the boomers who have a very different idea about how work works and what you do are in these kind of clashes. And really, they want to make millennials into boomers. And, and, and so you, you get these kinds of things that takes place. And of course, some of them have been, I mean, the gender thing has been very important in this, right?

I mean, I was in one organization where their complaint was that the the, the women just didn't work the long hours that men did. And so I did actually analysis of this. No, actually, what was the case is that women came in earlier because they came in when they dropped their kids off. And they did a lot of the work before anybody was around to bother them.

And they went home at six when the guys, Then begin to hang out and put that final drive in because it didn't get anything done today, and this because of the concept that staying late and working hard were the same thing that it totally, , creates a misunderstanding of what things are, and those are the kind of changes that take place all the time as a younger generation comes in. We see these kinds of changes that.

The sympathy, what we call the conjoining of things that should not be related to each other. In other. words, working hard should not be conjoined with the notion of working late. But they are, and it becomes very hard for organizations to do what we call disarticulation, that is, to break apart something that got put together that didn't have to be put together.

And so this is an endless kind of process as worlds, as markets change, as worlds transform, each of these things becomes very difficult because we have all these packages. And taking these packages apart is very difficult, especially when the people who are challenging the package are less powerful because the more powerful still believe if we just taught them our culture, they would get over it. Not understanding that, no, they are, it isn't just an organizational culture.

They're coming in out of a world which has itself lots of, Pressures and expectations and so forth. The organizational culture is one piece of that. And when the world changes, the organizational culture can't simply make believe that it can stay the same. you remind me of one of my favorite jack welsh quotes which is, if the rate of change on the outside exceeds the rate of change on the inside the end is near.

So yeah great lines like that but one of the things you remind me of because aristotle was that you touched on this. socialization process and Aristotle famously said, or as a supposedly said, give me the child until he's seven and I'll show you the man. And this idea of socializing the individual.

And you talk there about the boomers wanting to make the millennials into boomers, and that will happen again with the next generation and the cycle will probably continue is pretty much what happens inside organizations, try to. Almost brainwash or socialize i suppose is the more politically correct term people into the way things are done around here when maybe that's not the right thing, No, it's, it's, it is how it worked. Before. And, I understand the pressure to try to do that.

The this fine line between, enculturation is being very important, because we don't want everybody to stay a seven year old. On the other hand, on what ways does it have to be transformed? , and I think one of the things that, , organizations are coming to grips with is that it really doesn't matter how old you are. It matters much more when you are young.

which is a different way of saying Aristotle's, that, , the, that particular world that you found your way of making sense in is what's important. , and that grows into organization. And it's not only when you're young, but where you were young. Which is also something that in this more globalized situation, we often forget to and the culture is a set of practices in your family and home, your way of driving and everything else. And these come to bear on the organization itself.

you are telling me Stan shared with me that he was brought up on a dairy farm and that meant getting up with the crack of dawn and that's your very point you still do get up at five am start writing early in the day. I was thinking about that only recently. I live in the city now, but I'm from the countryside and I was basically nearly a feral child raised in the field, essentially lots of space around. And I'm pretty sure that has to have an effect on my brain and that my brain feels.

claustrophobic in an urban setting and to your very point that you get in cultured in a certain way and then when you are a fish out of water you certainly are a fish out of water and that's when it's embraced, that neurodiversity can be very powerful but oftentimes suppressed. is and Weber had the term for this notion of the liminal is being absolutely essential to being a sociologist. Being caught being in between is the only way you can see either.

And I've also felt that way about the farm, is that every middle class organization I go into is really weird. Because I was raised in an isolated farm community. And none of the things work the way they do. I often laugh is that, many of the people I work with in organizations grew up in places they think they can control their world. On the farm, everything is fate because all the important things in the world cannot be controlled. The weather, the cows, , you name it.

And so when you, when I come in and see this, I see something somewhat different than a person who grows up into it. And this is particularly important as workforces become more diverse. Because as so many of the managers come out of in the United States, Ivy League schools and particular kind of homes, and then they're put in situations in which the workforce is much, much more diverse than the management groups.

It's very hard for them to understand how culture can work, what the specific limits are, and what you can and cannot do. Because you mentioned milk all the time i'm writing a new book i was telling you before and i have this concept called the spilled milk effect and what it's about is tone and emotional expression and it's something that you touch upon in your book.

I'm very rarely see this written about but the whole idea is basically i'm teaching my child to eat their cereal i'm very patient that i'm going to go and it's ok there they're taking their first spoon of cereal to spill the milk all over the counter i'm like don't worry about it i'll clean it up now same situation.

But I'm under pressure to get to a meeting on time, kids spills the milk and I'm like, and I'm like, given the huff and my facial expression looks angry, the kid probably feels some type of version of shame and I've changed the entire learning experience. And I see that so much times when it comes to innovation. So somebody is at a board meeting. They announced that the project didn't work out the way they had planned.

Which is perfectly normal when it comes to innovation because how could it if it's something brand new and this is such an important point and you wrote about it decades ago and i'd love you to share it.

We can praise every mistake because we recognize that as being learning. In learning, we understand that mistakes get made and therefore they should be praised. And I think most organizations forget that what they do is praise, successes, and almost always success means that you have perpetuated doing something that you've done before. And even if it doesn't work, the managers please, because at least you did what they would've done themselves.

And so I think the real critical part of the new organizational life is , to be able to distinguish between mistakes that happen that you should praise and the stakes that happen that are problems. And I don't think we have attuned that capacity. And I think the child example is, is really good with that, is that, , we criticize children for trying new things often because in fact the new things are the things that are hardest for us to deal with, which is different than simply misbehavior.

And I think attuning ourselves to trying to understand the difference between really understanding normal. Mistakes that take place in the learning process or the fact that you've tried something and now we know that it doesn't work as being very valuable. These are the kind of things that organizations typically do not praise. And you're right, we don't praise them most often when we're under other pressures.

The interesting thing is that when the world is coming in on us and we have trouble, those are the points that we should most praise innovation, which comes with it with mistakes. But as you're right, at the point that we're under the greatest period of pressure, we most want them simply to behave so I don't have to deal with them. And so I think, I think your example is a very good example of how organizational life works and the absence.

of the kind of innovative cultures that really invite people to try things out, to make mistakes, and to understand that, that if everyone's clear as to what the mission is, that their ability to innovate even in a mistaken way around the mission Is, is is extraordinarily important. and to remember that in almost every case of organization, I know the people who are working are smarter than the people who are managing the least smarter about the things that they're doing.

And you've teed us up beautifully for the next segment that I have here. There's a great line from the book. I can see this being quoted all over the place. You say, "usually people only feel the need for a change when there is a clear and undeniable evidence that survival and people's chances for success, are at stake."

So we wait and we wait and we wait and sometimes we wait to see, is it happening anybody else and sometimes they're the people exiting the market before us because they realize before us that this market is no longer desirable.

I'm this is such an important point because it picks up something else you say earlier in the book where you talk about the cadence of change you talk about change can be done slowly over time, can be done in one fell swoop and it often depends on the environment or the reason behind that change i'd love you to share this time. yeah. Wow.

The timing of change, of course is one of the hardest things ever to do because, we always forget the most important thing in most systems is when, not what we know that in terms of any open system analysis, it's not just the input from the environment. It's when that particular input hits the system that has the effect. And so I think in change, we have to think about those kinds of things., I mean, most organizations I work with are deeply in trouble before they really talk about change.

Because they keep thinking before that they can fix it. And part of that is deeply embedded in organizational life. , managers don't get a lot of support for telling people what's wrong. They get a lot of support for telling people what's right , and their ability to fix what's wrong. And, and so, you know, the organization itself typically becomes, especially at the upper levels, quite out of touch with the growth of difficulty. until it's at some kind of crisis point.

And of course, once you're at a crisis point, we always forget that people change least well when they're scared. people do the greatest changes that are good when they're happy. And so what happens is that we're out of touch, we're out of touch, we're out of touch. And oh my God, I have to deal with it. And now you're facing, you know, people being laid off. You're facing all these other kinds of things, right? And so it's not a good time for change.

And so, you know, I think the capacity of an organization to, to read its environment Somewhere out there, which requires, I think, hiring some people whose sole job is to pay attention to the things that we're not paying attention to. You know, if you think about any, any system, any creature has only, has only certain antennas, right? which means that those antennas allow them to be in touch with this part of the world and not that part of the world.

And they get in trouble when the world suddenly has something as a threat to them that they have no antennas for. And, , so it's very important in an organization to develop the capacity here to have these kind of emergent antennas. And or to have at least parts of things that are paying attention to what people are not paying attention to, because, in most every case, when a crisis is coming, there are people who know nobody wants to listen to them because things are going well. Right?

And you certainly don't help your career by talking about them. So I think organizations, if they want to really be on the edge of things, have to build in as capacity here to surveil parts of environment. That it has not been paying very much attention to, My fellow countryman george bernard shaw had this saying that all progress depends on the unreasonable man or woman, often the left hander inside the organization the person who's the square peg.

Is the person who sees the world differently cause their antennas have grown or have developed differently yet, they're often attacked and this is one of the huge dilemmas that we see.

In the interest of time i thought i'd use that you mentioned mission and mission and vision are not the same and you include a chapter on vision and explore what vision is.

And show how some of the world's premier organizations have turned a commitment to a strong vision into unparalleled success and that's because as you say it acts as this boundary or this gravitational pull to communicate to the organization where we're gonna be playing in the future and what we think it's gonna look like i'd love coming from you and particularly cause you've done such deep research in this for decades.

That you'd share your concept of vision and what it means to the organizational transformation, Let me start with the simple things. Two very simple ideas that we may have touched on last time, but there's two things , I think, to be deeply true about people. People are like strings.

They're more easily pulled than they are pushed. And that herding cats is not hard if you have a bucket of milk. Both of these try to attend to the notion that we operate best when we have something that is, that's pulling us. and not pushing us. And that we believe in that in, in some way, right?

Even if you remember the Little Prince, the famous French book, basically at some point it says, , if you want to build a sailboat, don't find carpenters, find people who love the wind and water because they will build a more beautiful boat, right? Because they're touching. so a vision has that quality. It has that quality to pull at us because we can believe in a future that can exist. And that vision then becomes constantly open, right?

Because a vision of something that can exist at the same time recognizes that the world constantly is changing. That this is my way of engaging the world is not an answer. Because an answer is an answer to the world that we have, and more often the world that used to exist. What it is, in fact, is an understanding of where I want to be. And the looking forward to that. Which pulls us, right? It doesn't mean that, people treat this as, oh, you're motivated.

Motivation is what we do when the work is uninteresting, right? When we're doing something that's stupid, then we have to motivate people to do it. This is not motivation. This is drive and love, okay? This is that I, I want to do this because I know where it's going. I'm sailing. And I'm feeling that movement in some way with this. And the leader that can provide that kind of a vision is very important to us and very important to predict the startup companies and those kinds of things.

And it doesn't always mean that the vision can be fulfilled. Because, in some sense, , the real trick of successful people is to be simultaneously fully committed and ready to give it up., And the readiness to give it up can't distract from the notion that I am willing to give this my all, but giving it my all in the face of now finding that it didn't work is okay, right? That isn't the absence of something beautiful. That's in fact the presence of being a human being.

And I think that's where vision happens. And that's why mission statements and other things I think often fail, is they talk too much about, , some world that exists in some way and too little about "so where do I want to go?", "What do I want to be?" And so vision is not just about the company. It's to me about people. When I commit to something, I become a different human being. Is that the human being I want to be?

And is that how I want to work and, and, , is this how I want to integrate my family into it? So vision to me has this really broad sense about being a way in which we are committed to inventing a future in all the different ways that future plays itself out. And of course, always being willing at the same time to not lose a critical sense about that.

Beautifully articulated, man, because again, you then build on this and say, , the language we use in that vision or the language we use in the organization is absolutely critical to how people think about the organization because we think in language. And i love this quote you said, "ideas that may seem absolutely normal, real and unquestionable, for example, business concepts such as productivity, consultancy and total quality management are actually produced through language."

I thought this was such an important point and one that i'm studying which is how i came across your work because you're an expert in language and how language creates organizational change and the role of language inside organizational change. i'd love you to share some of the Stan because. It's so important and it's one of the huge challenges we see in transformation or innovation or new business models is that often there's no language for them.

So it's hard for the change maker to actually articulate what they're trying to say and then they lose credibility because people think in the old language.

Yeah, I mean, let me get two different sides of this. One is the absolute, sheer difficulty of speaking in a fresh way. Without being spin or something else. I'm finishing another book, a more personal one, about the death. And part of it is about the death of my sister. And at some point I say, is it, It's like all the good words have already been used up and, there's no way I can express the feelings because every Hallmark card already has them. And a business person's in the same place.

Right? You're coming forward with this notion that in some sense, everybody's already grabbed all the good words. And when I use those words, it sounds like a slogan or something like that. But those good words are very important because of course they become the shape. And so that's one half of it, I think, is the struggle. against all the good words being turned into some damn slogan somewhere. And therefore you come out sounding trite.

The other side of it is how important subtle differences in expression are that are not new at all, but change everything. One of the little teeny controversies people asked me a comment a while back was a group of people want to change the way we treat the Salem witch trials in our history books. Because everything talks about burning of witches. And, but there's a group that wants to say, no, they didn't burn witches, they burnt women.

And let's get real clear that when you say we are burning witches, our attention is directed towards the parts of the society that have religious mythology and all these things. When you say they burnt women, your attention shifts to a totally different aspect of how that culture worked. And so subtle changes like that can mean everything.

And it's not just that this is a new metaphor, which sometimes are important to us, but it captures very well the very notion of what it is that we're trying to do. And that's why language is so deeply important. in organizational life and why the leader who can come up with a good way of expressing something that has been very hard to say. A great leader is truly always a poet, right?

The person who can turn the phrase in such a way to use ordinary words to now say something it has been hard to say before that. And it can be simple things, whoever invented the term, in which I do know exactly where it was invented, I know who wrote about it first, high performance organizations. Well, that turned our attention, right? We've always thought about some organizations doing better than others.

But to treat this in this particular way changes our way of thinking about how we go about evaluating. Organizations. And so, so for me, the understanding in a particular company, that, okay, , I was working with a company in Trinidad in which the Trinidadian government was trying to put more pressure on the company to have less expats and more locals in management positions.

Which they felt was very important to both the safety of the operation, as well as, of course, the development of their society, their economics and, and so forth. And so how do you talk about the organization in this new way? And so that it becomes very clear that when we talk about this, we're not just simply saying, Oh, I'm going to do diversity. I'm going to have more Trinidadians in management, but how to talk about this.

And, and, and so part of this was to get the idea that, that we are in fact, going to energize our company with this idea that the local does better. , and in fact, some of the concepts that came up were, how do we say the local? Homegrown talent. the capacity to understand the full context of organizational life.

In other words, we're inventing ways to describe this that doesn't turn into a move of kind of wokeness, that is, we're going to be nice to people, but turn it into an understanding of how to capture here very well what it is that is trying to be achieved. And to see that in this, in the way that it is. going to be healthy for the organization, and can be communicated to outsiders. And that's a trick. I have sat in many rooms with organizations trying to say, but how do we talk about this?

Because we don't have a language yet to talk about what we have not yet talked about. And I think it's important. I think there's been a lot of attack in this country around diversity programs, inclusion, and so forth. And part of that is because it's been presented. And most organizational life is doing something which is nice, it's fair, and not being presented into.

We have now built an organization that's more responsive and the way we frame our way of talking about something like bringing diversity in matters entirely in terms of how it will be accepted, what we'll look for in it, how we'll use it in forming meetings and groups of people and so forth.

It's like you're bringing in different types of antennas that see the world differently and if people can relate to that and see the results of that i think that's one of the big things and again you point this out but, many of us have been guilty of sending an email and your gut feeling is like telling you that's not clear enough that email you just get that out of your desk that's gonna come back and bite you in the ass and you see this so much with organizational

communication it's fire and forget. And one of the things, Stan, when I retired after professional rugby, I coached for a few years and one day I got it into my head. We had a problem with the players, not doing weight training and weight training is essential to play rugby, but not to be big and not to look good on the beach. That may be an outcome of it, but actually it's essential for tackling for breaking tackles to get an offload away.

And because you mentioned your basketball metaphor, I thought I'd bring this one up. One day I got the guys to bring the weights onto the pitch and I started to show them how certain exercises, like a clean and jerk exercise or squat co relates to certain movements on the pitch. And then we had much more adherence.

And later on in the book, you say for employees to identify with a company's vision and culture, they must not only understand new ideas, but they must also see how new programs and ideas relate to the job. That is so often just given the short shrift, people forget about it and just move on or just assume that the employee will get it for themselves.

And you know, when you're watching a movie, And they make the plot really clear and they remind you of something you like coming on do i saw i saw that i got it you didn't have to show me that what you do for some people, you have to show them because maybe they're not as au fait as you are Yeah, no, the metaphor is beautiful. I mean, the idea of lifting weights is so different from the idea of getting free from a tackle. I mean, just in terms of your whole mental sense, right?

And when you see this activity as that, you, it's not only is your muscle doing different, but your head is doing different about the activity, right? It's now integrated into a motion. That is not repetitive, but a motion, which in fact is something that one has to do. So I think that those kinds of metaphors are really very important. And I don't think organizations spend much time of actually working at how this cultural change will influence how you do that activity.

And frequency it is a matter that we just simply underestimate the skill that it takes to do something different in life. You know, how hard it is to actualize. That's a cultural thing in motion, that if you have a new theory or concept of how conflict should be held in an organization, and you expect by telling people they're going to be able to do conflict differently. It just doesn't work that way. It's no different than telling my son you have to use your left hand.

That doesn't do anything, except him getting angry and resist. So I think you're, you're right. I mean, the more we can integrate. the kind of change we want into the routine and regular activities of people, and to demonstrate that it works better.

One of the things I think happened, Teams is an incredible idea, a very powerful idea, but organization after organization committed themselves to Teams, and then threw people into dysfunctional meetings, and thought that they would come out believing in Teams. It was just absolutely wrong. It's no different than in this country. We decided teams were important. And so second grade teachers used to start putting their kids in teams to do exercises.

And what kids really learned was, I wind up doing all the work if I want to go to a good grade. Well, probably it was the right lesson because that's how teams work in the organizations too, but it's wrong, right? Because we don't understand that. In saying this is important, it's only important if done with a certain level of skill and capacity. And that skill and capacity takes a long time to develop. And I think that's where the culture change fails so often.

It's just words, it's concepts, it's not integrated into the life and activity the person must engage and live. well said well said Stan, in the past leaders became divorced from managers became divorced from actual executors those people on the edges of the organization, i like you said those people on the edge of the organization often have a totally different type of intelligence those people at the top and obviously have developed different type of antennae.

And those antennae don't communicate right back to the people who are making the strategy often times the people making the strategy it's a source to some consultant it's one of the jobs i do i want the first question i ask is how are we, holding and gathering information from people at the edges those people that not only so they know they've participated or feel they were to participate in the strategy, put their information is absolutely essential cause you don't

have it in this room and again this is something when i read your book is like on stand, was way out of the game on this one i'd love you to share it again Oh yeah, I mean, there's so many pieces of this. I mean, it isn't just a top to the bottom. It is often just simply one layer.

I was working with a large gas company, and one of the problems they were confronting was that their people that are in the trenches are older and retiring, and they keep hiring in these people at the level above them, the supervisors, who have never been in a trench. And the difficulty of this is, from their standpoint, is that there's so much tacit knowing here.

But, if they want to violate a a principle, which often is needed because of the particular circumstances there, they have to have the supervisor's permission. How do you ask the supervisor who's never been in the trench to give permission for something to take place, especially when their ego's at stake, if they don't take control of this? I mean, so that's, that's just one layer. It is not the big piece of this. And so a number of different pieces.

One is that I've spent a lot of time recently on this notion of tacit knowing, because organizations are always trying to capture the knowledge of anybody leaving. And the thing they can't capture is the tacit knowing, the wisdom built out of experience over years. And virtually no manager I know has that tacit knowing, and they have virtually no way of capturing that. And it's made worse. I mean, you take about your memo, have that memo now written by an AI program rather than you.

Where it steals from some other way that somebody else did this memo sometime that has done both perfectly right and totally insensitive to the ears of the listener, right? So we're in this situation where, , we're, we've got tremendous amount of knowledge at the lower levels of organization that is being lost. And it will continue to be lost because our concept of management, especially high paid management, is bringing more and more people in without work experience.

They're not working up through the organization. They're being brought in by the side or their consultants or this problem is outsourced to somebody. And so I think there's a major gap there. And that's a growing gap for us as salary inequities. So does to the inability to capture the relevant knowledge in the organization because people at the point of production know all sorts of things. That are known no other place. And so I think the knowledge piece, part of this is very important.

The gap is very important. And it's not just, it is partly just getting people to be encouraged to pass information up and to pass it up far enough that it actually makes a difference. And also for people, when they want to send a message down to actually listen to people before they do it, those are important things that ought to be obvious. But they're not.

But the more subtle things are the ways in which we're asking people to do all sorts of new things and yet they're doing it with aging equipment. We're asking people to innovate and then we're laying off people or doing early retirement of people that have incredible amounts of knowledge. So there's a real mistake. Being made here in the way we're doing this, and the society pays for it because all it really means is our goods and services are of less quality and cost more.

so ultimately the society pays for it even though the organization is deeply at fault because of the particular ways in which they are now reacting to changing technologies, changing populations and so forth. And, I think it is becoming for many a crisis.

i was thinking about this recently Stan, it's like technological taylorism, so taylor, what freddie green slow taylor brought in the whole idea of the machine metaphor essentially this whole idea of the process and he divorced managers from workers and managers actually became productivity viewers and then that gap started to become more and more so but now we have AI as a layer watching people. And how productive they are. And that's actually doing another version of Taylorism.

But the problem is that's great. If you want to reinvest those funds into the organization to hire more people, but instead we're going to go, Oh, we don't need more people.

We're more productive now so we can be more profitable but what happens all those people and what happens to the next generation of those people to your point that has a learning goes out the window cause the machine can't learn it that way, i'm the way i thought about it stand i speak french and i was pretty poor french until i went to college university level until i lived in france.

And then I learned words and I actually didn't know the English translation for the words because I'd learned them in France pointing to things and sometimes there wasn't an English equivalent for that word and I was like, Oh, that's, that's what the problem is that trying to capture that and actually translate it back, like you say, into a document, so it can be captured or else uploaded to some machine and it's going to lead to a game of musical chairs and the chairs are going to run out.

That's right. No, you have to translate a worldview. You can't translate a word , and that's hard to do.

And, you know, the AI thing is especially important now because it is having a lot more impact. And I think even most of us understand when I look at how many people are using it and how many ways. I mean, Chomsky recently said that we're absolutely mistaken to call it AI as if it's artificial intelligence. What really is, is plagiarism software.

And if you think of it as plagiarism software, all it really is doing is collecting hard work that other people have done and putting it into a document as if it's its own. It has no intelligence. And the way that we're using it to replace human intelligence Is a failure with that because the capacity that people have to have to understand connections and reason and and the fear, of course, is not that they're simply going to. I mean, Braverman's term. I like better than even Taylor's.

This is a de skilling operation is taking away the skill of a worker into a routine. Right? Well, we're de skilling management right now. I mean, each of these programs really, in fact, are, are making managers. mechanical operators of a piece of equipment that has de skilled them. The lawyer is de skilled to the extent that they don't have to know the cases anymore, that AI does it, if they don't have the capacity here to do intelligence.

And that is the real capacity here to think of a situation, to understand the options, and most importantly, to create and invent. And, and so, so I think there's a, you know, we're reaching a difficult time with some of these new technologies, in which we're going to see a very high paid, de skilled management.

And, and we're going to have a lot of costs in that, as it, as the AI and other systems reproduce old biases, reproduce assumptions that were based in other people's work that are now lost as we simply take the outcome and not look at how it was produced. And, and so I think there's a number of kinds of complexities here that are, are going to create for us a number of different kind of problems.

I bring this full circle a nice way to wrap up today's episode like you said at the very start of the show those people who have got to the top of the organization, in the past who are in positions of power authority, well remunerated, all of a sudden find themselves outside the job or outside a new paradigm that they don't belong or they don't feel they don't belong, that always leads to trouble and that's something that we're definitely facing if we don't address it

I think we need to learn from past mistakes. I mean, the 1990s, as we flattened organizations, we got rid of a lot of middle managers. And part of that was good because middle managers were often just passing paper from one place to another and weren't essential in the way this could operate because knowledge existed below them. But losing middle managers suddenly put organizations in all sorts of problems.

Not only did they create a societal problem, college graduates suddenly had none of the positions they routinely went into, but they also created an organizational problem because in the little squeezing the middle manager out, they lost a lot of the spaces in which judgments were being made and social capital existed and so forth. I think we need to think of that. Now, we're, I'm working on a big project right now with a network system of environmental individuals.

Working primarily with resilience, but they're asking the question, what does AI do to our network system and because our system has been based upon trust and sharing and long term context, understanding local conditions, what is AI's presence in this? It does some good things, right? We can find people working on things and retain knowledge that we weren't getting before. But what is it doing to trust?

And so some organizations are looking at this and asking the serious questions about it, but others are not. And that's a culture really of, are we a smart culture or are we gaming something somewhere? Probably Stan, one of the beautiful things about doing this show is that you can't do it with AI. , I can create an AI of me. I can write it in a script. It can ask questions, but it won't be authentic. It won't be real.

And actually I love these conversations because you learn and you have to be present. You can't be like on a zoom meeting and you're like doing something else and pretending you're paying attention, nodding while writing emails, et cetera. And I love learning this way. And I think that's one of the beautiful things that it's actually a competitive advantage to be able to have a conversation where you're present. You're not listening to respond. You're actually listening to interact as well.

And I want to thank you for that experience, okay. Just to fill you in, Stan and I just had a chat there. I didn't want to put him under pressure on recording, but he's agreed to do a part three may end up being part five or six. So we don't know yet, but. He's on a deadline for his book, so I'm gonna leave him alone for May. That's when we're recording this.

But it will be an absolute pleasure to learn from you again, and to spend more time and to share this brilliant book, leading organizations through transition, communication, and cultural change. Stan, for people who want to find you, where's the best place to reach out? mean, always go to my website, which is simply standeetz. org. You can get materials there. I have contact information there.

Easy enough to follow And i will link to that website as well help your seo stand it was a pleasure speaking to you once again and good luck with finishing the deadline for the current book, Stan Deetz thank you for joining us Thank you. Thank you so much.