Stan Deetz Finale - Navigating Organizational Transitions

We've been waiting for this one i thought i'd cap off a brilliant twenty twenty four massive growth for innovation show with the capstone part three of three with the author of leading organizations through transitions, Stan Dietz. Welcome back to the show. Thank you so much. We both had to listen back to our episodes. , it's nearly spanned a year since I started reading your work and dipping in and out and then releasing the episodes, writing about them. And . I feel connected. And then.

We both had to listen back and through listening back, it brought me right back, but also helped me compound the lessons I'd had. So really enjoyed our chat so far. Yeah, no, it's been seven or eight months since our last one. So it's really great.

Yeah, and you've gone and popped out another book as well. And how's that going for you? I actually have gotten two books out. But the big one won't be out publicly to February. And so I really don't know. It's a massive, and so it's hard to know because it summarizes a lot of the theoretical work I've had and so forth. The other one has been the more personal account of how do you actually get here as a human being? And that's actually getting quite a lot of nice reception.

And it's a shorter book. It's an easy read. It's kind of fun. And so, each in, their own ways. And of course, I've had a couple other projects since we last talked that have each in themselves has been really interesting because organizations are going through a lot right now. And of course here, the political climate adds on top of all the other things that are taking place as, as organizations adjust to a really different kind of government economic model and so forth.

Me and Stan have been on for the last while talking to each other, we're going to collaborate with on projects in the future. So if you're interested as an organization in a culture change, if this content has resonated with you, get in touch with either of us.

So let's jump in here because i unfortunately brought us down, many off piste rabbit holes off track up down sideways etc but i really wanted to talk about the subjects of chapter seven eight nine and ten, which really get into technological change m& a what m& a means to culture and then how do you put it all together. But one of the things that's often look, you tell us when it comes to disruptive technology is not the fact that the business model.

or a product or service is disrupted but rather that the organizational structures are severely disrupted there is a redistribution of power and that power often ends up with those less experienced in an organization and less ofay with the politics culture and often machiavellian ways. In which an organization runs. I thought that was a great way to set us up.

I wrote about this recently and I thought about things like Macbeth and the robes don't fit very well when somebody who maybe has digital skills or now AI skills is junior in the organization, hasn't built that muscle to be able to navigate and now is in charge and it causes all kinds of ruckus. There's aa number of different ways I think this occurs. We're seeing it, of course, happening right now with AI and so forth.

There's one, what I call the sophomoric effect. And, , having taught university for a long time, sophomores are interesting creatures. Because they don't just enough to be a problem and they always think they know a lot more than they really do know but they want to make sure they tell everybody what they know and, I'm obviously overgeneralizing and all that kind of stuff, , but that's one of the things that happens in organizations is you suddenly have a group of people.

who are empowered in a very specific way, but don't really know the limits of what their power is and so forth. We saw that particularly when technology came in and, there was a certain kind of arrogance of the tech departments which was ungrounded in any possible way, but it was, you were always at fault. It didn't matter what was taking place technologically, the user was at fault.

And so I think we have that phenomenon and that's a hard one because I mean, what you're really trying to do here is to both empower and recognize a new expertise. and to be able to integrate it into organizational life in a meaningful way. And so that deals with this kind of emerging kind of new world I call them new rich organizations, which have a very particular kind of lifestyle that they bring into this stuff. And so you have that problem.

And then you have on the other side, the threat problem. And that is technology is a disruptive. What is that disruption going to do to the stable positions people are in?

And let's take AI as, the contemporary example of that, for 30 years, we've spent a lot of the research and organizations looking at knowledge workers. And because knowledge work was suddenly, probably the value of a lot of organizations. We talked a lot about social and intellectual capital as being much more meaningful than other types of capital all of a sudden within organizations. Because the real wealth of the organization, it went out the door at night.

And so you always were working with systems to get them back in the next day. And you're trying to figure out ways to capture that knowledge so when people left, you didn't lose it. And so forth. And , so a lot of work was done on knowledge workers and the knowledge based organization. And no surprise, AI, of course, comes right to the core of that. Because AI is a system which challenges knowledge workers. And we don't fully know how that will occur.

And, a number of different things we're seeing happening. The one is that, knowledge workers are in some sense being de skilled. Because the presumption is that the AI system may in fact be able to do your job better than and that can be at any level of professions. You know, I hear doctors being threatened by it radiologists and pathologists are interested in whether or not an AI system could replace their pattern recognitions. And so on and so forth.

So, so even at the high ends of a lot of professions, there's a lot of threat that takes place. But there's also a different kind of threat that comes into the organization, not just what the person feels.

But AI systems are, by their nature, biased. You know, they have values embedded within them. Otherwise, it couldn't make the selection between something which is good and something which is not. But the question of what is good and what is not, what is valuable and not valuable, is often in a hidden logarithm that the organization doesn't know. And this leads to a number of different kinds of consequences.

One is the, one of the pieces of de skilling is the development of what I'll call the lazy worker around AI. In fact, in the United States, almost all the advertisements for AI systems present you with an incompetent or lazy worker, in which AI, so the person hasn't prepared for the meeting. And so, in the process of walking from their seat to the front of the room, they've typed in the AI command and the AI has now summarized it. the meeting for them so they can be smart, right?

And so, so it really has marketed itself to the lazy worker or the incompetent one being the person doesn't know how to write the email, writes bad emails, and, and so the AI does it for them. But of course that's where the real danger rests. As I was talking to an organization the other day and I said, you have to understand at the outset that AI is a plagiarism software.

It's whole value is, of course, to steal intellectual material that somebody spent a lot of time doing, whether it be news people or academics and so forth, and to repackage it in a way, minimally changing it so it doesn't violate copyright laws. But, but when you think of it as a plagiarism software, you have to always remember, again, as a teacher, students plagiarize. The trouble is you almost always can tell because a student who's willing to plagiarize doesn't know what to plagiarize.

And so they're just as likely to plagiarize wrong and bad material as they are good material. And if you're not a vigilant worker in an organization, you can't tell the difference. I was working, or talking to a company that deals a lot with chemicals and products, cosmetics and so on. That's principally in this predicted case. And so they're having AI search for a lot of relationships among different kind of products and so on and so forth.

And finally, at some point as the people were quite impressed with some of these things, a chemist walked into the room and said, you understand that the chemistry is bad in that, that there's no way that those relations could hold if you even knew the most simple things of chemistry. Well, I mean, the AI system wasn't trained to know chemistry in such a way to do that. And this cuts across the basis. the need for incredible vigilance around these systems.

Pathologists are reporting the number of false results because they are trying to use it. Incredible number of false reports because the AI system not only lacks frequently the kind of knowledge that it would need to have, but it also lacks wisdom. And that is the knowing how to apply knowledge. Aristotle's old notion of phrenesis the, the understanding of the relevance of this to that, which is only acquired through a kind of tacit knowing and experience and so forth.

And so that's disruptive, and it's disruptive because on one hand it's replacing a knowledge worker. On the other hand, that knowledge worker is the only one who has the type of expertise To really monitor the AI system at the very same time that the AI systems asking people to be lazy and not vigilant by letting it do the work for you.

And so, so I think it's a very complex set of relationships, a new elite, a threatened old elite, and a complex system that we have not yet figured out how to make it transparent. We haven't figured out ways to get behind its development to understand embedded value systems, and whether or not those value systems resemble the value systems the organization wants to put in place, and so on and so forth.

And this is on top of just the standard forms of discrimination and so forth that come by using, you know, analysis of past successes to predict future successes, when the past successes are based already in bias and systemic racist systems. Man, I tell you what, you're sending me down rabbit holes again. One thing just to say on this is I wrote about this recently.

I had a brilliant lady called Naomi Barron on the show and her book was called Who Wrote This, and it was about increasingly people using AI to write their work, not even going through the struggle. And I, said to her, it's through. What I believe the struggle of actually reading, for me, I read All the time for the show and say, for example, , we spanned a year, me reading this book and dipping in and out of it. I purposely edit the show myself.

So I go through another bite at the cherry to learn again. But what it does is it's like lens on top of lens on top of lens. And , then you have a unique way of collecting dots and then connecting them.

And I, and AI is that if you don't go through that process which is just like going to the gym for me you don't build the muscle and the more more you outsource it to the machine the less and less people will have without skill which will become a real skill it will enable you to be a better story teller to be able to think differently than other people etc. I'm sure this this is right gone right back to philosopher philosophers i don't

know who said this first who was talking about written word would actually destroy thinking first one of them said that, but then you're actually seeing this so with students for example there's a software now being presented to me for example is a professor to go, use this AI to correct the essays and i'm just picturing that on one side of the marketplace.

the students are using AI to write the essays on the other side, the professors are using AI to correct it and it's the whole thing is, well you know the machine doesn't get tired, it hasn't had a late night, it doesn't have bias, it's gonna do a fair job, i'm going but who's the overseer here to make sure it's done correctly. Yeah, because fundamentally it does have a bias. and and the biases are built into the learning process itself.

And, and while the machines get better because feedback and other things presumably help it learn. But there is a fundamental gap there in terms of how it works. I mean, it was Plato that said the thing I'm writing, but Dreyfus said it, I think better in terms of his fear, you know, years ago, when we started building some of these knowledge systems, the fear ultimately is not the machines will become like humans. The fear is that humans will become like machines.

That in fact we will rewrite our own neural processes to resemble them rather than the other way around. And I don't mean that necessarily in a literal sense of the neural processes, but you have to understand that institutional practices and policies are in a sense neural processes. They are the brain. of how an organization connects things and connects things together. And so I think it's so it's interesting.

I mean, I mean, I'm glad that you're interviewing me rather than an AI representation of me. But one of the things I've asked people to do in organizations other places is have AI write a report on you. Mine is terrible.

Most of the things that it pulls from is actually an undergraduate textbook in which they do a chapter on my work, in which the chapter is simplistic and often wrong, and even worse than that, what it does is that one of the things that this textbook does is ask students, To produce reports on the scholar is highlighted in that textbook and of course the students do all sorts of things. Some of them really fun. They do these animations. They do all these things right?

But the AI often picks those up as sources about. And it doesn't understand people like me that cross maybe four or five areas of specialty. It has to decide which of those areas of specialty is going to hone into as to who I am. And so, so those kind of things remind you of what's taking place all the time in an AI system. That it is it is It's by the nature of making selections and being able to identify things , and we can't really get back to that.

World Health Organization has done a lot of work trying to get itself into how are these health AI systems working, but the, but there is, a firewall because AI systems are highly proprietary because of the competitive situation they're in. And so it's almost impossible to get behind that firewall to see. How the logarithm themselves are being produced and what the values are that are embedded within them.

It's, in some sense, it's no different than the situation 40 years ago I was working with people at the London School of Economics on critical theories of accounting. Because, you know, it was the awareness that accounting system, which seems so neutral, is a highly value laden system. It chooses to calculate and present certain things. What is an asset and a liability is not an easy determination in many cases.

You know, we fight in the United States as to whether or not social security is an entitlement, the kind of thing the government pays, or is it in fact, something you've paid into and you're only getting your money back? Reagan changed the way we calculated that. And in a slip of the hand of the accounting, we changed totally. An asset went to the government rather than a debt for the government. And we did this with every retirement system in America.

We treat it now, the holding of a retirement fund as an asset of the company, not a debt of the company. And, and so that changes radically how these things are. And so, if things like accounting systems and that we are fully understanding, the powerful elites produce a predictive value structure that defines things in predictive ways that have consequences. AI is exactly the same. Every technology is the same. Every technology enables certain things. It constrains other things.

Every technology is highly value laden. The trouble with all technologies, like AI, is that they appear to us to be transparent, as if there's nothing standing between us and the world. That they're, they're like a good pair of glasses, right? They simply allow us to see the world well, without us seeing what the glasses do.

And and that I think organizations are failing to take into account and failing to take that into account is causing dislocations, both conflicts among different parts of the workforce, a competition across knowledge systems that tend to now favor a particular kind of mechanical system and so on. You remind me of the Marshall McLuhan quote of first we make our tools and then our tools make us, or first we shape our tools and then our tools shape us.

And I thought about that actually in the context of your book, because you mentioned a study. , 1996 Carol Grolo and James Taylor. And it was about a shift in the purchasing process of a large organization that demonstrated how a failure to account for the embedded nature of work process in organizational life can lead to ineffective implementation, and that will mean gobbledygook without some context.

So I'd love you to give context to this because while back then you were talking about the process of digitalization of. paper based data tracking essentially now we're seeing if we look at this and listen to stand here as a template and go well what am i doing now as i shift from. Stuff that's been digitalized to now actually be a i based Well, let me just pick out a little piece of this, the power relationship itself.

So what happens when I walk into the doctor's office and I've already carefully investigated my disease and now the doctor and I are an interesting relationship, right? Because I easily can claim to have greater expertise than my doctor, right? Because I have the wisdom of all medical science.

And perhaps the doctor just did the same thing before they walked into the room too, but, but so, so now we are in a new knowledge clash in which expertise as we normally would have known it now is put aside in favor of a new kind of system, which is proclaiming to be experts. Now, at the medical level, this is kind of an interesting thing because the doctor still has to make all sorts of judgments.

I'm still an expert in knowing what my symptoms really are, but the doctor is still an expert in trying to understand the contextualized way that you do medicine. But let me put it in a bigger context to show how the problem really plays itself out. American political system in which now billionaires own almost every form of information and communication in the United States, and they pass out incredibly inaccurate information to to support certain kinds of ideological positions.

Now, we've got an entire public. Who is this expert equal to the science? And this has played itself out, for example, in global warming, right? In which the person says, well, what I just saw on the internet is really more important than what the consensus of sciences in America are. The fact that they've given their lives and done hundreds of studies of research isn't as important as I just saw this on the internet.

But that's, well, it's crazy in the international situation which ends up with, you know, us getting crazy leadership. But, but it's very important inside an organization because the same process is taking place. In which people are beginning to be presumed to be experts based upon systems that themselves are held heavily value laden, and that's being placed within the system.

And so the concept of knowledge changes and the, the particular cost is around something we've always called tacit knowing. And that is the particular kinds of insight that one has by working on it that is different. And so I was doing this work with a gas company and, and, and, You know, they kept hiring in college graduates into their management positions, and the people in the trenches had worked there for 20 years.

And if you've ever looked at gas companies trying to work on pipelines, you know, they've got 50 different kinds of metals down there. Everything is placed at a depth that you don't know where it's at. And not only metals, you have different generations of plastic, some of which work and don't, and so forth.

And so you run into all these anomalous situations in which your guidelines can't give you an answer because the guidelines can't take into account every particular anomaly that will occur here, right? And so in these anomalous situations, they defer to management to make the call as to how I violate procedures. And so all of a sudden here we have a highly informed, knowledgeable person Deferring to somebody who's never been in a trench and an AI systems invite this, right?

Because what they are is a knowledge system over here based on all sorts of historical things, but I've never been in a trench and therefore they make these recommendations. And so, you know, half the safety I observed in this particular company was because people worked around. These knowledge systems, they couldn't violate the instruction, but they had to work around the instruction to make work what took place within a context in which they knew better than the system.

What in that particular context was needed. And so we will see this play out in an organizations at different locations in different ways. As we have this kind of interesting competition between a knowledge system that we trust without reason and a person that we trust that we don't feel certain about their knowledge. The beautiful serendipity is happen when i was saying about connecting dots so this is something definitely in a way i will ever be able to do i was.

I was on my youtube i usually listen to meditations on youtube music that's what i use it for but a clip of, a Clint eastwood movie heartbreak ridge popped up i don't remember it's like nineteen eighty eight and his role was this guy called gunny highway highly decorated general who was training people in the army and.

Add a certain point so this is the exact clip that popped up while i'm reading your book i don't know if the computer is that sophisticated with it's algorithm it was a this guy who was highly highly decorated. Any how to new boss that he had to report to and the boss had never been in action he'd never seen any action in war and at one stage he's.

He's reprimanding this guy going to hide what highway the clint Eastwood character and he's speaking to me is giving out to him and the camera slowly pans in as he looks towards all these badges all these awards that he has on his chest and this guy is clearly angry about it because he has none cuz he's never seen any action. I was exactly when i read that clip from your book about the idea that.

You have no leaders in an organization who don't know what it's like in the trenches who don't know what it's like in the action making decisions devoid of that tacit knowledge, and i connected it then to a personal experience where i'm on the board of the national broadband ireland here in ireland where we were rolling out broadband to the most remotest parts of the country to have, Ireland is the most connected country from a broadband perspective, , but even, From my knowledge

i didn't really understand what it was like in the trenches so that the board decided to actually go out in the field and look into these trenches that are like you said wired there's dead rats in them sometimes they have to clean them out and until you have that visceral. Stench of what it's like to actually have to go and do this work. You just don't know what the difference is.

I'm connecting this Stan. And then I thought about what you were talking about, the communication gap that then happens in an organization as a result. So you have people at the top making decisions devoid of actually what it means down the trenches. And that's a huge problem. I think it is. And you know, using the military metaphor, we've always understood the fog of war. And that is in the reality of a war situation, there is so much degrees of uncertainty.

So much conflicting knowledge and cues that are taking place. So hard to know how to follow regulations and rules and how they might apply in that particular context, right? And organizations are endlessly in the fog of war. You know, that is the reality of organizational life. And so you have systems which are very good at one level of looking through the fog. They're better than us in that sense.

They're able to pick out relationships and understand things are not being attended to that are inherent in natural cultural biases Individual biases might lead us away from that and so at that sense It's very very powerful. On the other sense this system has never been in this place at this time. , and that leads to inevitably both enablement and of course a constraint that comes with that.

And, and that's fine if we treated these in fact as what we should treat them in organization is now let's put knowledge systems in competition. It's like we, we have the possibility here of increased diversity. It's like we brought in two different kinds of systems and ways of thinking into a context, and if we can keep them in competition, we're actually going to get something really good. But when we let one begin to dominate, And either one can, right?

The person with experience can say, I'm not going to listen to the damn system. Or the system can be treated as if it is somehow, you know, more god like than the individual, right? So, I think the trick for organizations right now is to figure out how to keep this notion in, how to use a system for its efficiency, and yet stay vigilant to its deficiencies. And to keep people sufficiently skilled that they would actually know what to look for in being vigilant.

And of course, you know, ultimately, of course, we want to get somehow get back into the system learning phases itself so that we can understand how to embed social and ecological values into systems that are right now largely only concerned with economic and strategic successes. Nothing you said about knowing what to look for see that both a threat and an opportunity where i so for example if i'm. Here's a good example your book so with this book leading organizations through transition.

You give the main points. So you give an overview of the chapter of what's to come. Then you give main points that you're going to cover in that chapter. Then at the end you have, and throughout each chapter is discussion points and questions to ask yourself. And I used to see that as kind of filler in the past until I wrote my own book. And somebody said, you need to do this in the book. And when I realized that what it does is it switches on the salience lens.

So you go, well, what is the person going to say?

then say it then ask questions on it and what i felt was if you don't have that being dictated by a human in some ways you're outsourcing it to the machine and the machines then just leaning on all biases or false information as in your case for your bio for example, i'm that's a threat and i'm connecting that then to the Groleau taylor paper that you mentioned from ninety six because back then, people were collecting information down the information chain.

And the corporation was trying to then fast track the collection of this to increase productivity, which is absolutely perfect. But when they computerize that process, they missed that the quality of the information was accessible to people along the pipeline. That's something that's missed and then connected to the leader gap if you have people at the top of the organization making strategy and they're missing all these really salient points along the way the strategy is gonna be flawed.

yeah, so let me start with a very simple thing, because we all fill out forms all the time, and, most of us think of a form as a relatively innocent thing. Forms are incredibly political, in the sense that a form decides to collect this information and not that. And somebody makes the decision. as to what information is collected, and what information is not collected, what is left out in these things, okay?

And so, but we get the next step, and it's presumed that this is just objective information, devoid of the notion that it was selective around what it measured and what it didn't measure. And then we get organizational life, which says is, that our objectives will endlessly be directed toward those things that are measurable, and we will not attend to those things that are not measurable.

And so now the decision of the form as to what we collect now becomes deeply embedded within organizational decision making. Now, and, and there is nobody necessarily in that system, which is, you know, the Taylor argument here. There's nobody necessarily now in the system that can recognize what is not being collected. You know, what are the kinds of attributes? Okay. So, so we have a famous football player here in my town, just won the Heisman Trophy and all this kind of stuff.

And it's very easy to throw out the numbers. And okay, this may, this is the records that are set and so forth, but everyone here knows that he will be drafted high because of all the, what we call intangibles, which is simply all those things that don't go on the form. He is an incredible team player that works hard and gets everyone around him excited and working hard. That's not on the form. And, and, and so if you're taking an organizational, in this case, it gets over, it gets fixed, right?

Because our professional teams know full well that those intangibles are a lot about what makes for a good player. But in a business organization, it doesn't necessarily mean that any of those intangibles are remembered at all. Because they themselves within large systems, a famous football player. Yeah, we know these things, but in an organization with 20, 000 workers, that kind of information is rarely collected and they make it even worse.

Now, with AI writing the letters of recommendation, those letters of recommendation all are. Lookalikes, right? They write the right recommendation based. Well, you know, it's no different than I as a professor where I had five letters of recommendation for students. You either got letter 1, 2, 3, or five, you know, because I wasn't gonna write letters for a thousand students.

And, and so I think it's really important when we look at these things to understand that part of it, that as we digitalize and put these things in the form system, it becomes increasingly difficult for us to forget what we've left out. And when we leave them out and don't make them measurable, organizations will not work toward things that they cannot measure.

And so these systems, you know, become, if separate, reproductive in the sense that what they have measured begins to determine what is successful. Then they get based in a historical record, which now says we look for success based upon these attributes. And no wonder when you look at those things, why AI tends to discriminate against women very strongly.

Because the types of attributes frequently that organizations need women bring to the organization are not historically the attributes that have been listed on those type of things. It's a great point. And to further worsen things now, AI is also filtering the resumes before they even get to a human, if they do at all. I was talking to Howard Gardner about this before, and he was much more optimistic than me. I was saying, I probably would never get to an interview.

But if i did i'd probably get on well with the interviewer because we connect and i'll be able to answer the questions well but i wouldn't get there because like you with your diverse polymathic, background that doesn't score well.

On a on an ai score sheet but i'll connect it here to keep us moving through the chapters to something that then happens in an organization so you might have a founder of an organization or you might have the founding leadership team, i think maybe brilliant as hiring for the right type of attributes they have in the organization and then as you talk, About in the book, they might pass they might pass away. They might move on. They might be lured by an attractive offer somewhere else.

So they've moved on and then there's an information gap and there's a cultural change as a result of that. And then you won't see it straight away, but eventually there'll be this kind of erosion of whatever that was that they brought, which could have been a bad thing as well in the past. And maybe we'll use that as a nice segue between. This point about data and then the transition as the leadership team combination changes. right. Well, so many things are packed into that.

I mean, I think it's a natural tendency for most leaders to overestimate their success being based upon themselves and their skills. And it's no surprise, right? Because you don't normally begin in those positions and if you really believe in yourself and so forth, but they really only usually external circumstance luck and all the other kinds of things that come into this.

And therefore, in hiring process, it's not unusual for them to look for attributes in others that are attributes that they have. Because, in fact, those are the things that they believe led to success in it. And often, you know, that does at some point, especially in a startup, lead to certain kinds of successes and some quick movement forward. They're all on the same page. They all share the values. They all and all of a sudden the organization, once it's bigger, None of these things work.

It's now we've got a bunch of self centered people running around trying to run an organization that has to be much more diverse than that, a changing economy, a changing market conditions, and so it's not unusual for organization leadership to, to get out of touch in that, in that sense, and AI system can just simply reproduce that. The terrible thing about AIs writing resumes, the AIs are writing resumes to AIs, that are trained in the same, and in some sense, we all look the same, right?

I kind of joke based upon an old movie in the United States, maybe you can just put my resume on pink paper, at least but when you follow hiring patterns, especially in America, right now, because of the information systems and because hiring is, national and even global. Almost all hiring is taking place because of an inside contact. How else should you distinguish any of this stuff?

Which has its own bias of reproducing certain types of elites and the people that went to certain types of schools and so forth. Because the system wall appears to make it more fair, right? That we now have opened the position to everybody, we're using objective information to make the decisions on the position, have made it so that it's overwhelmingly the number of people who look alike. that how do you make the decision and you do it based upon the personal contact.

And so I think there's a number of flaws that each of these systems produce for us. And again, I don't think we can do something to fix systems to get away from those flaws. I think what we can do is to build people in organization whose job is to be vigilant. In terms of AI, I think every organization should have a C level executive whose simple job is to investigate the consequences of their actions. of the AI systems that they're implementing.

That to do vigilance around such things as bias, to look at how the values are embedded in it and how that's shaping what the organization is doing, how it's changing social relationships, how it's changing hiring patterns and to whatever it's possible to get behind the firewalls. To really see how diversity is being built into these systems.

Where, and so that they're not caught at the other end was simply having a set number of systems, all which are designed to meet a market but in meeting that market, omit too many different things. And so I think, , organizations it's like everything else that I believe is that.

The difficulty in organizations is when we take conflict out of them, because when you take conflict out of organizations, they tend to skew in particular directions, which may be very functional periods of time based on certain market conditions, certain competitive situations that become dysfunctional as those things change because they lack the ability to get out of their skewing that has actually been very powerful.

And moving forward, but becomes disastrous and moving now again forward into situations in which we actually invite the type of diversity and difference in knowledge and knowledge systems that keep constantly these things a competition. The competition amongst these things both generates more creativity, and the competition among these things leads us to constantly investigate, what are the processes by which we form this?

And what were the values that got based into what we built? I mean, if we're right, and I think Sartre said it before McLuhan, but we are the products of our products. And if it's the case that we are in fact, the products of our products, then we have to understand what our products are. What they, what they enable, what they constrain, how this constraint and enablement plays itself out in a changing world situation with a lot of complexity. Man. There's so much in there.

I'm going to try and move us on. I said, we'll try and finish this as the capstone We will do that. We will do that.

we did, we're doing pretty well. That piece about the leadership changing, it's also. Institutional knowledge is lost. And that's one of the things I thought that if you do systemize everything and it's heavily based on the machines making those systems stable. So I often think about one of the jobs in an organization and building it is to put order on chaos. And then have as little chaos as possible, but it's in the chaos that the creativity can come out.

But if you've got rid of all the people who are comfortable in chaos, you can't do that.

And this is a nice segue for the next piece, because I'm going to quote a piece here, and this is about organizational transition owing to economic, personal, and market changes. I love what you say here.

The environments in which organizations exist vary in both complexity and stability at one extreme is a non complex and stable environment in which events are predictable and placid companies in such environments are familiar with their surroundings and do not have to worry much about unanticipated market shifts at the opposite extreme is a turbulent atmosphere that is dense, dense, dense, Complicated and quick to change an organization with such surroundings lives in continual

anticipation of environmental changes and never knows whether organizational actions may result in unanticipated consequences.

So these two environments service symbolic poles of a continuum of different types of organizational situations but also, different products that suddenly can be changed for example you mentioned a gas company could be deregulated it was a government company before all of a sudden, the entitlement that would run through an organization like that they go i have a job for life changes.

I'm so do the skill sets needed to manage now all of a sudden the chaos in what i thought was order before but i've lost the muscle to manage chaos,

Yeah. And so, I mean, COVID, if nothing else, taught us the placid environments are a bit of a myth. Because supply chains can be disrupted in ways we never thought possible. Work processes can be, and so even the most stable environments suddenly experience all sorts of turbulence. And, and of course climate change is going to create, and is already creating, incredible amounts of turbulence, as well as the attempt to respond to it.

For example, the stability of a gas company that has 100, 000 miles of pipeline underneath a major metropolitan area It suddenly has a mandate to be carbon neutral and, you know, at every level of the engineers in the company and so forth, it changes because now you have to have somebody that understands how you put hydrogen into pipes.

You have to have somebody who understands when green gas goes in different than the kind of dry gas, how that affects, I mean, so you, you're constantly here, even in very stable places. Confronting, erupt, these kinds of disruptions that take place. And so disruptions, I think, are going to be, and we should expect to be, more and more the case in the kind of stability that we see. You know, for example, you take a toothpaste industry.

You know, after we de evolved fluoride, we thought everything was pretty stable. What are you going to do? I mean, there's only so many ways that you can do toothpaste to do these things, right? And, and so, so there are stable things except that supply chains and, and a global situation can rapidly transform a business. Including, and of course, even a sudden kind of environmental concern with a particular product can suddenly change a business.

So I think every business has to recognize a greater sense of which it may become turbulent. And it can fight that, it can try to kill competition, it can try to, do all these things.

But, you know, ultimately, I think what we're going to find is that companies that build in, you know, this kind of complexity and diversity, what I called earlier, the notion of, of different antennas. So we have different creatures in the organization paying attention to different things. And with that, what is the most important thing is it's easy to convince people to hire. more broadly in that sense, even though it's difficult, right?

Because if you look at this massaged resumes, and then you look at the notion that you're relying on personal contact to get your employees, it is really actually quite hard to maintain a diverse workforce in the sense of complex ideas and so forth. And in the United States, there's a tremendous governmental pushback against diversity and other kinds of things, right?

But so, but even with all those things, it's relatively easy to convince companies that they have to have more antennas, more sensitivity, that changes can take place, more creative practices. But it isn't enough to have that if you don't have systems to work with that. In other words, you know, we find all over the place, okay, I'm going to hire a more diverse workplace, and I'm going to work very hard to make them like me.

And, and, so, so these require much more complicated and sophisticated communication skills, capacity to deal with conflict, the invitation of the expression of difference. In other words, a whole bunch of systems need to be made, put into place that turns a mandate of hiring into the actuality. a responsive, creative company. And I think that piece is missed.

It's easy enough to talk about bodies and it's very hard to talk about practices and very hard to get highly successful people to understand what we call the right and left hand thing. Highly successful people, it's very hard for them to understand that you fundamentally have to do your meetings and do your discussions differently as we work into a complex situation with rapid change.

i love the antennae people that we talked about before and i'm gonna put a little bookmark here and remind myself to come back to, that idea of communication needs to change it will also need to change through mergers and acquisitions and reorgs because when you're starting to put a new combination together, You have to consider the cultures as as you say kind of a marriage you have to match the marriage very very well but just wanted to mention one thing cause i'd love your opinion on this.

Many of the listeners of this show will have experienced this where they are the person with the diverse antennae. They see things differently they may have been responsible for some new business model or new product or service inside the company they were responsible for that it then goes through its own s curve of growth it gets to the top and, they are in this kind of holding position where they're now.

Sensing the market shift for the next one in comes a new boss a new ceo a new leader a new leadership team and all of a sudden they're seen as this wasted resource what money they bring in and they're gone on a well, she's the girl who brought in that new business model and they're what you do now and they get ousted. Or they get not considered as profitable, you know, per hour, whatever metric is put on them that happens all the time.

And I often wonder, you can blame the leadership team for coming in, but they're measured on some type of reorg, unfortunately as well. So what do you do in those instances?

A lot of what you're seeing, of course, is actually an implication of the quarterly report and the paying of executives based on bonuses based upon short term measurements. And so, you know, the, the investment model is much more, I mean, The microseconds of which people own stock based upon quarterly reports and anticipations does not lead to a healthy business environment.

Because the kinds of things that we have to do to anticipate long term changes to become resilient are not the things that necessarily show up in the next quarterly report. It's why we see constantly the use of cost cutting as a way to deal with an economic situation because cost cutting can quickly show up positive in the next quarterly report. But of course be disastrous in a longer frame of these things.

And so what you often have is a manager who comes in, does really well in the quarter report, is moved up and beyond, the next person has to come in and figure out how to do better on the next quarter of the report. Now with a depleted workforce, lacking the kinds of resilience and so forth. And so it becomes a really bad negative cycle.

And that's based partly on how we do executive pay, And based upon the too narrow of a measurement system we have for it in response to stock markets, rather than in terms of organizational health. And, and, and that I can't fix. I can recommend to organizations that in fact, we need to look at longer terms, that they ought to revamp and rethink their, ways of rewarding managers.

And the system right now of basically overpaying managers who get passed on to the next one with the golden parachute, based upon them all being from the same Ivy League school, is just not a good business model. So they constantly try to enforce efficiency at the bottom with a model at the top that isn't particularly functional.

And so I think we need to build in, again, it's the question of reward systems, how can you argue for A, which is long term health and development of organization, and reward B, which is how do you cut costs so that you look good on the next quarter of the report. So that's an inherent problem in contemporary organizations. And I do not know of an organization that is freed from that problem.

I do think that an organization can be smarter about how it understands retention of resources in the long run. And I think that, that doing that and, and showing how that is healthy within particular industries. has tremendous advantages. And of course, some of these are easier than others. The ones that are relatively more stable situations have the greater capacity here to make long term decisions and to plan ahead.

The, even though they are probably less needing of it than the persons that are in this relatively unstable situation. And, so what we have is often, a lot of throwing the spaghetti at the wall. Because we don't have in place a very good sense of intelligence around what we do well and what we don't do well. We don't use AI to get the right data to us. We use it to substitute for, the kind of decision making that people should be making. I don't have an answer to it. I can specify the problem.

I can tell you when historically that problem arose, why it arose based upon retirement funding and other things that led to it. You know, institutional investors not being particularly interested in long term. How you get out of it is is harder. In companies I work with, I, I at least ask them to recognize the problem. And if you recognize the problem, at least you can say, perhaps cost cutting is not our best way out of this. that we can't just automatically do that because that's popular.

That in fact, there are other options of being creative of developing workforces or developing products that probably are more healthy for the society and more healthy for the organization and certainly more healthy for its workforce. again, it's this pole of say, for example, an organization that's heavily.

heavily share driven IPO versus a family owned business where the family owned business go look we hire these people we know them when i look after them, and it's somewhere in the middle that you need you don't want to be a Kodak that won't let go of people that don't have the skills they need to take it into the future but you don't want to be letting people go like the tide as your stock price goes up and down, which happens so often.

I, that one makes me sick when I see brilliant people who have made huge personal sacrifices, often putting their own family on the line to work for these organizations and then are just discarded, they're used up, they're thrown away, they're the wrong age, they're the wrong gender, whatever it might be, and they're let go after giving so much to companies that we see all too often.

We see it all the time and it's partly because we don't value You know, the old social contract that I will work hard and you'll give me lifetime employment went away a long time ago. And the place of this, of course, is that in many cases, some of the best people are the people getting hurt because a dedicated person, in some sense, we have valued mobility. The more mobile you are, the more you're worth. And what we really need in many companies is to value stability.

Universities in the United States is a tremendous case of this. Staying at the same institution over a lifetime is deadly. Because the only time you really get a pay raise is when you move to another institution. And so it fosters this kind of, the more mobile you are, the more rewarded you are. And in companies, of course, every time somebody moves, you've lost an incredible amount of understanding and knowledge. Social context, the intellectual and social capital is very important to that.

And the worst cases are not just the cases where this enables a stock price rise or when the company buys back its own stock for the sake of the wealth of its handful of investors. The wealth of its handfuls, right? The worst cases, of course, are mergers and acquisitions, which we haven't gotten to, in terms of what this will do to stock prices, as well as the kind of financial analysis of something.

Because this company is cash rich and that one is not which has nothing to do with the quality of the product, nothing to do with its health and well being in terms of society, and it has disastrous effects on individuals. I often think Stan of the old way that they divided a country so the british empire or the french or whoever was, take over an area and then they go there's a river there's a mountain. Let's carve up the land based on that. That's a new country.

You own that Britain will take this France, whatever it was. And for me, a lot of that happens when you have a takeover, a merger and acquisition, and you have these people just absolutely split apart. and this is the hard piece you don't know, or you're depending on data that's been handed to you based on maybe somebody who was an interim, a consultant, even that had nothing to do with the company making that decision.

And this is where I was saying that the more removed that is from the people who knew the difference, this salient data, who knew what the real, you know, often qualitative data.

That can't be quantified they know the difference that is lost in translation in many cases when this all of a sudden is trust upon companies Yeah, and you know, AI again makes it worse because sometimes since AI is the perfect consultant because AI comes in and investigates these things and look at all sorts of very long complex relationships, see opportunities where it might not otherwise have been seen and and so forth, right? But the AI system has a value.

Based in it, and often that you don't even know what that is, and it changes the way things look. And, you know, I think the land division is an interesting sample of that. I mean, so a lot of these lines were driven around things that made sense in the European context, right?

A river was a nice boundary, because in the old days, a river sort of served as a way in which you could guard yourself against something, and then you go into country or society's areas, in which the river was the center of a civilization. Because everybody living around the river was the same, in contrast to the ways away from our camp.

And then you drop a European model on top of it, saying the river is a divider, and therefore half the community is here and half the community is there, without ever realizing they just destroyed a community. Because the model that they came in, which was presumed to be neutral, that is a river is a divider, not a river is a uniter. It's the wrong model. Right? And so, so, so we're seeing this over and over again. And, and we don't I mean, the consolidation is so immense.

I mean, the U. S. being perhaps a good example of that, you know, it's less really than eight companies. That owns somewhere around 80 percent of the products of American. You know, and so it is so terribly integrated in these ways in which complex decisions are being made around relatively narrow economic criteria and relatively short term economic criteria that really do affect the society. as well as the workforce.

And, and then of course, you know, it leaves people understandably bitter cynical blaming towards something. And so you develop a kind of workforce, which is not a terribly good workforce because you don't commit the second time like you did the first.

That's a huge point man about i often think about that, don't saying the gulag archipelago guide, Never pronounce his name right but well fed the horses don't rampage and i think about then Yuval Noah Harari's is the idea of the gods in the useless and that if that gap gets bigger and bigger and then you have, bigger global giantism in corporations and then you have, Lower and lower level and that gap getting bigger and bigger.

And then the people at the bottom are just doing these meaningless, really tough tasks, 10 of them living in an apartment that is owned by the elite. It I'm not into that whole, you know, at least I think wealth is important. The wealthier are the happier you can be. The more fulfilled life can be. I do believe that I'm not.

Talking about a bitterness in any way but i just mean that if that gap goes crazy wild you're going to create a world it'll be like living in a gated community where outside the gates are just is mayhem it's like those zombie apocalypse movies that it's not a pleasant world to live in. No, I think that's, partly the case. And we have to match our commitments with the commitments of people for whom we work. And I think that's really important how that plays out.

And I'm not an anti capitalist, but I also am a person that recognizes very clearly that there are many, Capitalism plays itself out. I think markets make some decisions very well, but I also know that monopolies contrived markets and, and therefore they're not capitalistic anymore. They're in fact, quite the contrary of capitalism.

They're what Adam Smith in Wealth of Nations, developing capitalism warned us against, you know, he endlessly believed that corporations would be the death of capitalism. And to some extent, that was right because, you know, capitalism has become more and more a managing a competition rather than responding to competition. , I would like to recover a lot of aspects of this, and I'm not into trying to go back to an old way.

I do believe that we underestimate the quality ity of a worker who is developed rather than the quality of a worker that's replaced. And I think that organizations forget , that really development and empowering a person into these new things. I don't find, , corporations keep treating people as if they're resistant. I don't think they're resistant. People are scared, which is different.

And if you give them a positive path forward, put the resources into training them, I believe you get a far better worker than you do getting rid of them. And replacing them. But that requires a particular kind of understanding. I think it's cheaper. Replacing workers, and bringing them up to speed, is extraordinarily expensive. Not only what you pay to get rid of a worker, but also now what it costs. to bring a person in.

And if you actually did the economic calculation of presumably replacing an older worker with a younger one because the salary is lower, it doesn't add up. It's a mythology, an ideology of an organization that they do these kind of practices. And so what I think you do is that if you can create situations of less fear and more opportunity for development, then you get a very, very positive place.

And I think that if you actually did the bottom line analysis of that, you're going to find in most cases that pays off. People are natural learners. They don't learn well when they're scared because they pull in and protect themselves. Organizations are natural learners, but they don't learn well when they're scared.

If we look at these kinds of things, again, looking at more complete balance, statement do full costing rather than these kinds of short term monetary kind of thing, but do full costing of things that we find that developments is actually a very good idea and allow us to overcome the greenness. You know, the sophomoric nature of some of these new systems. I love that. And I often think of it like trees. I grew up in a very natural area. My dad oversaw this park that we lived in and.

They were replanting the avenues at one stage. And the whole idea was to replant a tree in between more mature trees. And , I developed this metaphor over time of this idea that it's almost like an older citizen passing on knowledge while protecting a younger one. And then that Chinese proverb of the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago, that you plant the tree before the older tree needs to retire and needs to move on.

And that piece that you're talking about, that organizational knowledge, that handing of the baton of knowledge that cannot be captured, it's qualitative knowledge as well as data, the way, and it's not, it's often sees a scene maybe as, Oh, we need to move on. Some people are like that. Yeah. Some trees have disease. There's so much positive knowledge that needs to be passed on from one generation to the next and that's lost in translation as well.

And , that brings us nicely to multinationals because sometimes then I can actually pick a tree that doesn't work in a different soil. So I might import a tree, try to put it in the soil and this is where you expatriate. Some of your people from who are brilliant workers in this country, and you go, we're after buying a plant over in France, need you to run it Aidan off you go. Yeah. Oh, so many things.

I mean, I mean, one thing we've, , learned even here in the United States in agriculture, the old idea of control, which is slash and burn and plant and fertilize , really doesn't in the long run turn out to be a very good agricultural practice. We get away with it because we're overproducing agricultural products.

At least for producing in the sense that we don't give it to people who need it, we the, and we've heard they're doing regenerative agriculture and finding that in fact commitment to the quality of the life of the soil and so forth actually has long term productivity gains, and so organizations have lost that lesson too, and that is to understand that simply control systems themselves frequently miss the larger systemic way that these things actually occur.

And I think that's true on , the multi, the national, looking at this as to understand culture is real and that what one works in a place, they work in a culture, and you can't simply implement one in terms of the other.

And, I've worked with some German companies that moved to the United States and, , they, The chaotic world of the United States and a German executive don't necessarily fit well in the same space because, , there is a different way that these things operate , and of course, the most of the multinationals now are getting away from implementing their management style, but what they're not getting away from is implementing their particular economic advantages.

And so, you know, for all the talk of nationalism in America, those same people talking about are moving their companies to Mexico. And they're not going into Mexico and trying to manage like an American, but they're going into Mexico trying to produce a particular form of cheap product using underpriced labor and so on and so forth. And so they're not understanding that, those kind of cultural effects.

, that in fact you are doing things to the culture that have certain kind of consequences, even when you're not implementing simply your country's management style. , and so I think , that's important as part of this. And I think there's a greater sensitivity today to multinationals understanding , what a nation is. And what's people needs than what the props was in the past where there's a lot more of a kind of colonial attitude.

But that doesn't mean that there aren't particular kinds of stresses that are put on these situations. Some of the companies I've worked with are using ex pats less. Just simplifying the expat model. And a lot of countries are making it harder for them to do expats because they're limiting the visa times and other kind of things because an expat actually is in most cases a way to keeping a native workforce underdeveloped.

Because, you're basically taking the managerial positions they might grow into away from them by using external labor. And so countries have a national interest in reducing expats, but it's also good because what it does is mean that we're forcing more homegrown managerial talent, which means that they understand better. In the international context, the particular culture with which they're working, and yet they understand international markets and are more able to bring those together.

The expat is more likely to try to implement their preferred way of doing things on a population. But when you look at an international that grows internal executives. We have really quite a nicer situation where , we're both growing the society, really quite a nicer international understanding. I mean, our difficulty right now, I think, is not so much the international leadership and so forth, is that we are so internationally locked.

You know, that the peaches are grown in Argentina, packed in Thailand, shipped to Canada to be imported to the United States. And one, those are, of course, ecologically incredibly costly systems in the ways in which they operate. , but more importantly, , COVID taught us that, you bottle up a port and have a lot of ships sitting out there for a long time because they can't pass a quarantine or whatever else. We don't have dock workers that can unload them.

It means that we really have to think about this In a better systemic way, they actually look at the ways in which internationalism works, the way an international company works, around the ways in which we customize it both to the local circumstance, but also recognize how disruption is likely to take place in the new context. , severe storms. , you name the things that are new to our context.

And , so I think the internationalization has to more understand today how to work around disruption than it has to worry about like it used to do. That is the difficulty of cultures mixing in a production process. You reminded me of this old story of Eric, the red, this I think it was a Norse Viking and and it was 10th century. They went and they create a settlement in Greenland and they brought all the.

All the skills and all the agricultural processes that they had from Europe over to Greenland and they absolutely bombed, they totally failed, most of them died, , while the intuitive, the locals had obviously honed these practices for years to match that environment and it came to mind when you talked about that, that It's again, back to the antenna and maybe we'll wrap on that idea of trying to force your ways onto a culture that just doesn't work. I often think about it.

Like , my granny, may she rest in peace. When I was a kid, it was great. I had a great upbringing. I lived in essentially like in a field. It was like a feral kid. I told you this before. And one of the jobs she got me to do was paint in the summers. And she had this old rusty gate and she wanted me to paint it. So she gave me the tin of paint. She gave me a wire brush and she went into her house and she came back and I'd painted all over the rusty gate without using the wire brush.

And she's like going, okay, well. Now I'm going to have to dock the price of the paint from the money I was going to pay you. She goes, you have to rust it down. You have to take it away. And I often think that's what we do. We paint over the cracks all the time rather than deal with it because it's easier because we're measured again on that short termism versus.

Okay this is gonna be an absolute pain i gotta strip this thing right back i gotta find the cracks i gotta find the toxic workers i gotta find the blockages i gotta interview everybody across the organization in order to actually paint this thing and that will only get me a certain distance once again and then i have to start all over again.

Yeah, I think the trick of today is customization. And that is, can we customize our work processes, our products and that to a particular environment with a particular kinds of assets and resources and so forth. We've all long known that customized products are more valuable. The generic products are cheaper than a customized product. I mean, that's pretty obvious, right? Because a customized product takes time to develop into specific needs.

But, but customized work processes are also more value. Because what they do is instead of running against the grain, is to constantly find a way to produce with the grain. And when you can produce with the grain, people are happier. They're more productive, they take less training, and so forth, and have less resistance. And so, so I think what we're understanding here is a broad sense of how do we customize. How do you think about what you do and what you're trying to do?

And this is why we, you know, we talk about the notion of looking at this in the sense of a group of objectives rather than a management as a group of practices. Because when you come in with what we're trying to achieve and look at the situation you have in terms of the best way to achieve it, you're doing something very different than when you come in with a preferred system and slapping on top of what exists there.

And so, when we think about management as a customized practice, it's if it's customized around the notion of, What are we trying to achieve? And what are we realistic about? What are the skills and capacities that are there that this becomes simply a much more effective way to do international work. Last one for you and this is a gift for those people who have followed us all the way through thoroughly enjoyed it.

As i said, i even listen back to the two episodes we did together which i don't normally get to do so i really enjoy listening back to those as well i think you for great voice as well and i enjoyed it Thank you. But i, wanted to just share for those people who have as a little present as a little easter egg as they call it.

How do they start so you're an organization you've gone through this need for change this need for transition maybe it's technologically driven maybe you need to reorg maybe like that the trees that you have today need to be replanted somewhere else. Are they need to be moved on you need to plant some new trees what are some of the steps where do you start how do you read invigorate the culture and

I mean, I think I had an advantage coming to a lot of these things by being a Hick Farm kid. Because there's no way that I could enter any situation without being humble. The presumption was always that people there knew things that I didn't know. And I would say every organizational change begins with humility. That is not coming in with this, I know what we need to do, but coming in with, I know I need to learn.

And to the extent that we can really come in with that sense of humility and there's a number of researchers, and change agents, which understand how being humble becomes really a key piece of how life works.

And so I think it begins with that, that if you can both be humble and be clear as to what the outcome is you wish to achieve, and to work between the learning process and the With people around outcome and learning that you've got a tremendous advantage when you're try to, put things in on top of people. I think you fail. You get resistance. You get half commitments. You get labeled as we've done that before or we've been through this before or so forth. Come in and listen to people.

They know a lot and they know a lot about how things can work and how they won't work. And they have trust of people around them that you don't have. And so, you know, the humble sense of going in and listening, being sure you understand the world in which you're entering, but never forgetting that you do have outcomes you're trying to achieve. And you're trying to work out with them how to get outcomes. And an outcome for me is, is not my system.

An outcome is if we wish to develop new products, greater creativity, if we wish to have this or that, what would be the culture that would get us that? There's something that I need to learn, not something that I already know. And that the people there can help me learn in such a way as to achieve that. That for me is always the first step. The second step always is to make it measurable.

That whatever you're doing along the way, once you start doing a change process, is we endlessly need to know how we're doing. And if we need to know how we're doing, it also means that we are open endlessly to the idea that we have to adjust. And so, so, so if you wish, it's simply continuing the notion of humility. And that is that I am not going to guess that if I do this, I'll be successful and if I'm not successful that somebody's at fault.

It is the understanding that I need to be a very careful about how I'm measuring and very willing to work with other people to make the adjustments. And, and so for me, those are the two things. There's the notion of humility and the notion of a measurement and adjustment. that if you've got those, you're a long ways into the process.

i think they can't on a personal level as well right we're coming into new year's this will be released over christmas, work on the new year and i always think that habit change is exact same as org change. Humility, you know, you're not always going to get it right. You're going to fall off the horse, but also then some type of measurement.

And, you know, Stan, as you've children, you, you were telling us the last day about your, your son, teaching them to turn the other way and use the other hand. One of the biggest things I saw with my own children that they got was they, I mean, I mean, this clicked with them.

Was the fact that they felt they were making progress and if i always praise the progress and praise the hard work they did rather than the outcome that that's what they became kind of addicted to and that's the essence of this idea of the growth mindset so. Yeah. I mean, a lot of people, and we do this when we confront the New Year resolutions, have what we call an IFD disease. They've overly idealized what the outcome is. They can't be frustrated and therefore they become demoralized.

And the idea of setting up incremental measurements is to get away from the idealization and frustration demoralization cycle into small wins. Reward and pleasure, more commitment. And so we can twist that way that the, we work, cause I know way too many people that are going to lose 15 pounds, right? And are demoralized within a month.

I mean, they have to get the back away from this idea to, into what are the measurable steps I'm going to have and how am I going to reward myself as I make those things? And how will that invigorate me? So I think that's really important as a part of it.

Beautiful beautiful Stan, absolute pleasure man i do hope we get to work together again on a couple of projects in the future for people who want to find you in the meantime where is the best place, It's always to go to my website is simply Stan Deetz, one word. org. author of leading organizations through transition communication and cultural change stand eats thank you for joining us. Thank you so much.