Based on real life case studies and reflecting the most common challenges facing any change ninja, today's book is a story where you get to make the decisions at each stage and discover the impact of every choice. It's a great pleasure to welcome the author of that book, the Change Ninja Handbook, an interactive adventure for leading change. Tammy Watchorn, welcome to the show. thank You very much. finally, that's long way, Tammy, getting you on the show.
So much so I've even changed many of the platforms I record on since we first got in touch, but great to have you. I have a copy up for grabs. Just sign up to the innovation show sub stack, and you will be in with a chance to win a copy of that book. And I tell you, when you listen to the show, you'll just need a copy. It's full of toolkits. Frameworks, and so much scar tissue of what it's like to be a change maker.
So let me share a little excerpt to open up your mind and give you some context today. Working as a change leader in a large public sector organization, harder than private sector, I'll tell you that myself, and Tammy knows this, I found myself asking, is it me? This is the protagonist from today's story.
While scratching my head at the seemingly illogical decisions and processes that seemed designed to block you doing what you've been asked to do, it was almost as if you were being tested to see how far you could actually get before the big game over sign flashed up. I naively assumed it was just my organization, but when I started working more at national level across organizations, I quickly realized that it wasn't me and it wasn't just my organization.
It could often seem that people individuals and organizations were determined to prevent progress but i soon recognize that other than one or two most people were just trying to the best job they'd been asked to do to the best of their abilities. i thought that was a very very important aspect to lean on.
And maybe open up and then we'll explain how the book is laid out and what the context is but i thought that was such an important thing that most people are just doing what they believe they're asked to do or what they're measured on. And they're not getting in your way.
It's just the system is I worked for the health service for many years, driving innovation and the biggest, that bit, I think comes from the book where I was being asked to write a project plan, a three year project plan for how we were going to innovate the health service. And I was like I can't do that. I was like, but just write a project plan of what you're going to innovate and by when. And I genuinely didn't know what they were expecting, but they were just following process.
They had a job to do as the program office. That's what they did. They collated program plans and project plans. They put them in the system. They asked for your highlight reports and all of that stuff. And it was a real battle. And there was a, At some point, I think my boss called me in and said, just do what they're asking you to do. Those are the processes we follow. And it was at that moment I realized this was nothing to do with the process.
This was the system we worked in and the system wasn't going to change. So we had to, I had to start thinking about how I approached people and dealt with people in different ways because they were doing their job to the best of their ability. They couldn't understand why you can't write a three year. project plan for innovation because, what is it? We didn't even have a place to start innovating in. We didn't, we didn't have a problem statement.
So I realized that it was more around understanding where people are coming from and why they're behaving and reacting the way they are. That they're also human beings with their own views and opinions and stuff going on outside of work, and nobody knows what state of mind anyone's coming into work in, and we're all kind of playing this part and mostly trying to do the best. So how do you.
Realize that and then how do you shift your approach on a person by person basis to try and get a real understanding of how they're going to respond and react so that you can approach them in a way that doesn't frighten them. And we're not all running around at work frightened of change. People say people are afraid of change like that. Most of us aren't afraid of change if we know what the change is and if we know that it's going to be good for us.
But if we don't, then we're going to respond in a way that's a bit more emotional. And if you, as the person receiving that emotional response, don't realise what's happening, you will also respond emotionally. And you'll be like, what do you want me to do? I can't write a project plan. So realising that and then finding ways and techniques to avoid that happening in the first place is a real challenge. It's really difficult. It takes time.
But if you do it, you will make much faster progress in the long run. So I was thinking about how you got approached to do this. There's there's often either somebody brought in as a head of innovation, or there's somebody who is just a different type of character who's always learning, who's open to change and they go, Oh, Tommy would be great at that. So there's that type of person who's then given this job.
And what i noticed even when you answer that question was you mentioned the word people many many times and as heads of innovation we we don't originally realize this but it's not about. Frameworks just frameworks or just toolkits or shiny new things it's actually about the people and engaging the people and you use the frameworks.
To engage and unlock the people rather than on gauge and unlock thinking with inside the people so you need to change their frameworks in order to change things and this is something that you talked about right at the top of the book. I have a bugbear beef, if you like, with stakeholders as a word. Every person I talk to around change is like, do you do a stakeholder map at the start of your change? Like, yes, we talk about how important people are, how influential they are.
But we're not seeing them as individual human being people with thoughts and opinions and views and their own life and their own things going on. We put them into this bracket because it's part of the framework and the process. We need to know who's important in a, from a stakeholder perspective. And I think that dehumanizes them as people. So thinking of people's people, we might say, for example, HR are really important on this project or this change.
We need to have HR on board, but Jim in HR is completely different to Joe in HR because he's got, they've got different experiences, different expectations. So if we just treat them as HR stakeholders, we're not going to know how to deal with it. We're not going to know what their responses are and how they're going to respond to a change. If we say it's Jim in HR, what do we know about Jim?
What's the best way to get Jim interested in this project as a good thing for Jim, then we're much more likely to get him on board and as an advocate for the project. So thinking about the individual people and how they might respond before you even talk to them is a real ninja move, because they won't notice that you've prepared for them as an advocate.
as who they are, they'll be expecting you to come in and do your usual, this is great, it's going to deliver all of these benefits and outcomes. No one's listening. If they've decided your project or your change is not good, they don't care about the benefits. They're not listening. It's like telling someone to calm down when they're angry. They're not listening and they're not going to calm down.
So knowing that all of this is going on all of the time can really help you to just stop and pause and think, okay. What do I know about this? What might they do? How might they react? How do I make sure they react in a positive way? You mentioned jim and jim is actually a character from the book as well there's always a Jim but speaking of characters tammy. The book is laid out as an interactive game. You make a choice, go point A, go point B, give up very, very early.
I was saying to Tommy before we came on air, I worked in a similar organization to where Tommy worked in the NHS. And I left, I decided to take the option to just game over after eight months, but it was so valuable having gone through that experience, having experienced the characters that you call out in the game . And I'd love you to share just some of these characters because people will recognize them.
And the reason I want to do this is one of the reasons I do the show, Tammy, is to help our listeners know those people who are driving change. You are not alone. This is a challenge that so many of us face when we drive change. You have the same characters, they show up in most organizations, and they have different names, different types of Jim. But there's also different types of characters, and I'd love you to share some of them, Tammy. I came up with generic characters.
They are based on people I worked with, but there's no single person in them. I'm not called out anyone because we're all human and we all have our own things. They're an amalgamation of behaviours. So we have your boss, your boss might be great, your boss might not be great, but they are human beings with their own lives and family stuff. I think we can forget that, if they come in and they're in a bad mood, maybe stuff's not going so well for them. We forget that because they're our boss.
We've got the mini cheddars, all of those that are trying to clamber up the greasy pole as it were, and we'll do anything to get that next career move. The steely governance manager, the person who will say no, irrelevant, regardless of what you're trying to do because of process sorry, policy and too risky and all of that. We've got the blockers, people who will just say no because they don't like change.
Jim is the kind of meaning, but possibly slightly bad jokes, bad dad jokes, doesn't always behave as well as he possibly could do and then somebody, mayor, we've got who just tells you this is the way it is, just get on and do it. So there's, there's a bunch of characters. What I always say to people, though, is all of those characters will exist in your organization, without doubt, you'll recognize characters. But we are all those characters as well.
I've been the person who's been slightly inappropriate and said the wrong joke. I've been the person that said that's never going to work or that's too risky as policy gets. So we've all done all of those characters, those behaviors at some point. If anybody says they never fold their arms and say that will never work, then they're lying. Because there's always something going on in the workplace that we think, Why are we doing that? It's a waste of time. So reflecting that.
we are all those characters can really help us understand a bit more about where those behaviors are being driven from, which means we can then intercept them early so they, they don't happen. I was telling you, Tammy, before we came on air, I have the practice of wearing the pin for those regular listeners who know that. And I have a ninja pin and I couldn't find it anywhere. I was raging this great little ninja pin. I remember buying it and going, it'll come in handy someday.
But I decided to take a different pin, which is be the change you want to see. And the reason is because of exactly what Tammy said there. And I always think about those really difficult people, not just in innovation, but in life, and I, I really do like the idea that they're there, they're, they exist in your screenplay in order for you to discover something about yourself. Maybe. It's something that you're doing.
So for example, one of the characters that came up for me a lot and was a huge blocker. I call them Dr. No. And he was just one of these people that everything was a no, but I probably should have brought him in under the kimono a little bit and actually engaged him because if I engaged him early, And be able to find out where the blockers can be.
I could maybe have unlocked other people and yeah, he, he might be an ongoing blocker, but at least he will have taught me something that I could deal with early. And this is, again, something you talk about and a tool that you introduce. I mentioned so many of the tools. One of the tools is stakeholder management, and it's something we've talked about on the show before, Tammy.
Just to really hammer this home, I love the story of the stakeholder management exercise where everybody forgot about one key person and that person was the main blocker of the entire workshop. Maybe you'll share this. This was a story that was told to me.
Somebody had been working on a huge event and they'd done a great job, they'd been months and months in the planning, they'd got big dignitaries come in, the local MPs, all of that, the mayor, all of these people come in to launch this thing and they'd got the catering sorted, the venue, so they'd done everything. It was going to be, and then it got to 11 o'clock when everyone was meant to arrive and nobody was there. And they were like, Oh, did we get the time wrong?
So they're running around checking they've got the time right. Quarter past 11, still nobody arrived. And then the phone started going. It's like, what's happened? Has there been an incident? And it turned out, just to cut the story short, it turned out that the one, they'd done all of the stakeholder mapping, who was important, who was influential, contacted everyone. They'd forgotten about the car park attendant.
And the car park attendant ruled the roost when they come to get in your car into the into the venue and through the barrier. So there's a bunch of all of these cars full of important people not able to get into the venue because they couldn't get the car through the barrier. So when it came to doing important and influential stakeholders, nobody thought about the car park attendant because it wasn't important. It wasn't influential.
Nobody had even considered him and it turned out they could actually stop the entire thing. So they were, they were late. They were 30 minutes late at least and all then in a panic. So no, they'd all been quite calm, this great event. So everything then impacted on the entire day. People coming in late, People grumpy, I think it was raining as well and just because they'd forgotten to think about who are the actual people that we need this to make this thing happen.
Who could stop this thing happening as individual people in the organization? Because that person wouldn't have even featured on that high important influence stakeholder map. So thinking about the stakeholder maps can be useful, but think about who do I actually need? Do they understand what I'm trying to do? And do they agree? And making sure you've got them all in the quadrant where they understand and accept. And if you've got that doctor, if you've got that doctor, no, are they disagreeing?
for the sake of it. Do they understand what you're trying to do? If they understand and they're disagreeing, they might know something you don't know. So go and find that out. If they're disagreeing and they don't understand, educate them on what the problem is that you're trying to fix and get them to come up with their solution. And if you can get Dr. No on board, they're going to become your best advocate.
The worst thing that's going to happen with getting that person on board is that they'll tell everybody it was their idea and you've just got to accept that, but they're going to make it work because if everyone in the organization, even Dr. Noh thinks this is a good idea, then everyone's going to be much more engaged with it. So sometimes you have to let somebody else take a little bit of the credit.
But if you can get that person as an advocate and get them dealing with all the other difficult people, then Again, it's going to save you an awful lot of time and it's much more likely to lead to success. Well said,, and we'll come back to that because that is such a key point about giving others the credit . I wanted to just go back to the start. Mentioned about how some people are voluntold, they're now out of innovation.
Some people are decided that they'll be that way because of the way they are, maybe they're quirky, maybe they think a little bit differently. And then sometimes people are hired in.
And when I read what you did, so there was this big meeting where it's a big change initiative, there's going to be a reorg, you're volun told perhaps that you're ahead of innovation, everybody takes out sharpie pens, and you, because you're a different thinker, say, hey, wait a second, Let's figure out what we're trying to achieve here and people who are senior executives of an organization look at you and throwing their eyes to heaven, rolling their
eyes, totting, saying, Oh, we expect that type of behavior from you quirky types. This is something that again, that so many change makers experience and there's a quote by George Bernard Shaw that all progress comes from the unreasonable man or woman.
And it's about that exact point that you should be able to speak up you should have the psychological safety to actually call it what are we trying to achieve here, because we have this bias for action that often masks what we're actually trying to achieve in the first place maybe you'll share that because it's an often overlooked but extremely important point that you made in the book, it's When I got the role, there was no definition of what we even meant by innovation.
There was no, it's the health service. So there's a burning platform, but there was no burning platform that we were saying, this is a problem that we need to fix particularly. It was not clear if it was for innovation for our particular organisation. As the health service is made up of many organisations, or if we were looking at supporting other people doing innovation. So every single person around the executive board had a very different understanding of what this thing meant.
So they'd come up, we need to be more innovative. Let's fill the role. Tammy's not got anything better to do and she gets things done. So let's give her that role and see what she comes up with. So everybody had a very different expectation. The book is about how I failed at this, if I'm being honest. It's not about I succeeded in making the health service this huge, innovative place with a great culture. It's about how I failed and learned from it and started to do things in different ways.
So there's no clarity around that. There's an expectation that it will meet certain needs of the organization. There was a real need to innovate. around gadgets. So let's just get in some gadgets and it became a procurement thing for some people. And so when I realized I couldn't do what was being asked because there wasn't a proper ask and nobody was aligned around it and I realized it was all about people and not gadgets and widgets.
and yet there was still this need to fill in the paperwork and do the plan and show that we were delivering some innovative things and meet the KPIs. I found a way to provide that that didn't really take much time. So if there's no clarity around it, you can find something that will match people's expectations. So I just went to talk to people and says, what are you doing? that previously would have been improvement, but now could be branded as innovation.
And that became projects we were working on innovatively. I was given a KPI of how many ideas the organization had every month, which is just mental. So I was like, what's a good target? And it's like, maybe 30, 30 new ideas a month. I was like, right, okay. It was green every month because I have about 30 ideas in the shower every day.
Without being too rebellious, I was able to meet those high level demands that kept the bosses happy, the big cheesers, if you like, because they could see things were happening. They weren't interested in whether anything was actually happening in terms of outcomes. I could find a few key projects out there in the bigger world that I could be involved in at arm's length distance and says, this is happening over here. So all of this was using up a couple of hours of my time a week.
Meanwhile, I'm doing my stealth like moves, working with people in different ways, bringing in teams, teaching them I mentioned Cube on the, in the book, which is a virtual 3D world. And it was about how do we manage projects in a much more effective way, virtually, much more efficient, getting things done, dealing with people as stake, stakeholders as people rather. So we get lots of people. So I was supporting lots of that going on.
And it, nobody really noticed because it was slightly under the radar. So I was delivering the stuff I had to do to keep people happy without spending time on it. Meanwhile, I'm beavering away with these stuff. I'm making all of this good stuff happen. And once that starts to happen, it starts to bubble up and people start to take notice. And at that point, I had a kind of good wind behind me. I'd learned lots of things, was doing things in very different ways.
So then I could hit the ground running. with the stuff that I wanted to do, which was around this way of working differently virtually. This was like eight, nine years ago, way before we had Teams and Zoom and all of that. So I managed to get, create the evidence for what I thought we needed without anyone noticing what I was doing. Meanwhile, doing all the stuff out there that people were expecting and didn't really care about the content.
So there's, there's some kind of balance in there around how you carve up your time to do that, but not. appear to be being too difficult not doing what the expectation is by a bunch of people who have no idea what they want anyway. It was so uncanny for me and also comforting that I went through the exact same thing, , these crazy metrics and most of my learnings also from the same things, from , the failure. And the, Oh, I should have done this better. And the whole idea is , that you learn.
And I think this is one of the things why I became a consultant and I write like you. Cause I want to share it. So don't make these same mistakes. Cause it, it is exhausting. And it's funny because the way you position the book is like you. can pick decision A or decision B, where it's like, Oh, at this stage.
So when Tammy goes through this, there's the big reorg, she's given this option to be head of innovation, she has to take out a sharpie, agree to metrics, create a project plan, that's a project plan. That's the same for any other planets, a waterfall, it's a Gantt chart. It's a Prince two project plan that does not work as for innovation, but you're told to do this and so many people at that stage. So this is right at the start go, okay.
And if you are differently minded, if you were a kind of head of innovation, real, true transformation artist, a change Ninja, you will die on the inside and as you point out as well, you will give into the golden handcuffs. So you're, you're you look in the mirror and you go, look, this is an easy role. I just have to take these boxes.
I don't really have to do any real change, but if you're actually trying to drive change, you really die inside and you witness the birth of a zombie organization. If it isn't one already. And I thought that is such an important thing because. Many of our audience, Tammy, are like you and like me, and they decided not, they weren't going to do that, or they decided, I'm going to do the best I can, I'm going to keep going until I run out of runway, or they get rid of me.
And I would always say for your own peace of mind, that's the right thing to do. And if the organization does get rid of you or you leave, you'll feel better and you'll have developed some serious skills to take forward. I think this is something we don't talk about enough in innovation, probably talk a bit in private, but it's something that needs to be shared for the mental health of so many people. Absolutely. And you quite often you're on your own.
There's no one, you need to find, you need to find your crew. So you need to find other people like you in an organization or in other organizations for that support, because you will think it's me. There is, It is easy to give up and put your feet up. It's easy to think, okay, I'm going, I'm going to win this one. I'm going to take this one down. I'm going to go into battle, but that is just, you're not going to get there because of all these other people that all think in the way they are.
You might, you might win some, you might make some small wins and some small inroads, but it's going to be absolutely exhausting. because you're constantly in battle mode. And the trick is to not do that because it's so exhausting and your brain doesn't like it, you'll make yourself ill, you'll spend all your time, you'll go home and have the conversation around the dinner table. It's not good for anyone and it doesn't really get us anywhere. So find a crew if you're going to do it.
I did get, I did get really fed up at points and I did think about moving on, but I wasn't quite ready and I wasn't quite ready to give up on it. because I knew there was a lot of good people around and I knew they just needed some help to, to start doing things differently. So I could see that there was a need for what I was doing, and there was an open door with some teams in some areas.
But what I did do to manage it for myself is saying, okay, what can I get out of this that's going to give me value short and longer term. So I started training around things. that I was interested in that would be useful for me if I went to another organization or if I change career. So I had the longer term plan with, I didn't know where I was going to be in five years. Who does? I hate that question.
I had no idea where I was going to be and what I was going to do, but every time I decided to put my energy and time into doing something, where I had a little bit of choice, I made sure it, it was going to be valuable to me. So will this work for me? Is it something that's going to benefit me as a person, either within this job or elsewhere? So you can start, and that's how I ended up working for myself, you can start to build that up.
So thinking about, and I say, it's funny you mentioned zombies because I've just started book three and I'm calling it, at the moment, it's Ninjas in Zombieland, because we are, we work in zombie organizations with zombie people because everyone's had their mojos zapped because of the way we work and it's really hard to keep motivated and going and that being stuff. When I was going to join the equivalent of the NHS, a guy said to me, he knows me well, he said, you know what happens?
He said, good people go in there. He said, there's some great people go in there. And they literally don't want to, but they're forced to take their brain out and put it in their desk and push their drawer in. And they've slowly die a slow death by a thousand cuts and are miserable. yeah. And you don't notice it when you're in it. So as soon as you step out of something like that, you can see , how bad it was and how miserable you were. But when you're in it, it's because it's, it's, it's.
death slowly. It is just taking that bit and bit away and it's easier to just say, why bother? I can just do this and take the salary and get the pension and just do little bits and it'll be fine. But it's eating away at you. So, or you can try and take it on, but you're not going to be able to take it on. because of all of those characters that exist, across everywhere, because everybody has their own reasons for behaving and doing the way they do.
And we quite often blame the system, but I think we use the system as an excuse. So the policy person who says you can't do that because it's too risky, is using the policy of risk. instead of thinking about it properly and doing something because they've probably withered and given up a little bit as well. So it's easy to use the system as the excuse for not doing the change. because it allows you to do that.
It can be an excuse to not do the work, to not do the thinking, to not think, okay, this is risky, but do you know what, it's worth it because it's, the outcomes are going to be worthwhile. But it's too easy for a lot of people to just say, we can't do that because, IT, HR, policy, all of those things that can really stop a really simple bit of work moving forward, because it's easier to say no and hide behind the system. Then it is to say yes and do the work.
, yeah, to that exact point is do you want to do it and also what you did about. i'm gonna learn at the worst scenario here is i'm making progress and you've linked now and highlighted the selection of guests on this show, Tammy. So recently we had on Teresa who wrote a book called the progress principle. And it's about this point that people become the zombies when they're not making progress.
And that is so against the human instinct of creativity and creation and bringing something new forth into the world. And when that's blocked, you become this just trapped individual and it's so depressing. So that's one of the reasons we had Teresa on. And then also in, in the past, we've, we've covered, we had, we had Bob Mesta on, on, he said this, he said. He was talking about me in this role.
He said, the reason you left, he said it was because you could no longer make progress and when you're no longer make progress again, you become this kind of shell of who used to be the zombie once again. And I say all that to say the characters that you introduced earlier on that you mentioned, the gyms and the doctor knows.
They will also gaslight you and they will make you think you're the problem and that's why again to your point of, you need a crew you need this other change makers to change ninjas with you to create a dojo a place where you'll feel comforted or you'll feel warm that you feel understood. And one of the things I found so interesting was what you did at the start was exactly what I did was like, we need a space, we need a space where we can almost hide from everybody.
And even the words you used, like, I was like, yeah, we should get down some fake grass and put it on the ground. I'd love you to share that story because I had one very, very similar. I'll explain afterwards what happened to me, but it was very similar to what happened to you with the fake grass. I had the teeniest of budgets like go and innovate, but you've got no money. You've got no team.
I had no people which was fine by me because I don't like managing people like managing like working with people in teams, but I tried to find some people who were up for this and their bosses would be up for it. Yeah. I worked in what I call the corridor of gloom. It was just this awful square building, just desks, rows and rows, rows and rows of gray desks and wires and gray carpet and gray walls. Everything was gray. It was just the most uncreative space.
And there was this little bit of a corner that was no longer being used for anything. I found out that there was no plans for it. So could we borrow it for three months and use it, turn it into an innovation space, got some people together. What will we do with this space? And somebody said, let's get fake grass. It was at that time when everyone was oogling the Google offices and all of that kind of stuff with the ping pong tables and on all of those fun things. So we tried to do that.
Fake grass cowhide bean bags, bring in some plants. White paper on the walls so people could scribble on the walls. It was, it was going to cost about two pound fifty. Somebody said they could get the fake grass for free. And I went away, came back on Monday morning to find the head of policy person who is in the book as a character, said you're not doing this, it's too risky. There is no risk, zero risk whatsoever. And it was, it's a decision in the book.
I'm not going to, I'm not going to do the spoiler alerts there around which decision to make. But in that moment I had to decide how much does this matter? And should we go down this route of really pushing for this creative space so we can start to do lots of idea workshops and that kind of thing? Or do I just give in to the police police on this? So every time somebody says no, you have a decision to make of whether this is a battle worth fighting over.
And if it is, what is the issue you're fighting over? Because quite often when somebody says, no, I don't agree with you on that solution, you start fighting about the solution and they might have a really good reason why your solution is rubbish, or they might not, they might not understand it. But instead of battling on the solution, this is one of the big learnings in the, in the, the book, one of the tools.
Don't battle on the solution, battle, if you're going to go into battle, battle on the issue. What is the problem we're trying to fix and what do we know about that problem? And take all of the emotion out of that conversation because it's the emotion that we're mostly, if you think about when you've got into a heated debate with somebody, there'll be, there'll be opinions and beliefs and all of those words that are emotional laden, rather than facts and figures.
We know that it costs this much to run this. We know that So we've got 7 percent turnover of staff. We know we've got 3 percent of staff off with sickness and mental health issues. Just bring up the facts around the issue. So, and then ask them what they will do about it. What do you suggest we do about it? What are you going to do to change this around? Nine times out of ten, they will come, come around to your solution because they don't want to do anything.
They've said no, because they don't want to do work. So they say, go and do it, but just monitor it. That's it. So we did that with the, with the space. Do you want me to reveal what happened with the space? Pretty soon. alert. It's the answer. You're stuck on that bit of the book. You're like, what, what decision do I make? Do I, so I had to decide, do I go into battle with the policy police or do I, give up on this and go away and think of another idea.
I did decide to go away and think of another idea because I thought it wasn't actually going to deliver that much. It wasn't the battle to fight, but if I had have done, I would have gone into why there was an issue around creativity and why we needed the space or we needed a solution for the creativity thing. Instead, I went back to Seema and said, I'm sorry, we're not going to be allowed to do this. So, come back together next week and come up with other ideas.
About three hours later, I got a phone call from the person who had organized the fake grass for free, which was from her husband's firm, saying there was a problem. And I was like, what is the problem? She says the grass has been delivered. It's all outside of reception, front of the building. So this is a big health service building. It's got a big presence. And I says we'll just, we can't use it, but just bring it inside and we'll, we'll find a home for it. So we can't bring it inside.
Because it's not fake grass. They've actually delivered turf. Still, it's this huge mound of fresh turf outside of reception desk for a big health service Right in. it didn't go down very well. equivalent for me was i exact same as you head of innovation no people no budget the job was actually to be the head of innovation, is it just the title and just sit at your desk and pretend to be doing stuff and do some lipstick on a pig.
Performance every X amount of time, not even speak at events or anything. I got actually given out to for doing that. And one of the things I did was I, I noticed like you, I actually, the building had been recently renovated, but the feeling in the room, the, the energy of the lack of energy, I remember actually going, Oh, one must be the height of the ceilings or something. There's something wrong here. And then there was, I found that there was this.
underutilized area outside that had a recording studio in it. And I was like, that's cool. What if we renovated that and created an innovation lab and we could run workshops and hackathons, et cetera, et cetera. Right. So that was what it was, but it also, what it was really about was creating an energy space. A space where could have So like you, I wanted the fake grass, right? But I wanted to actually wrap the room with graphics cause it was all this kind of wrecked old room.
And I wanted to buy these graphics and wrap the rooms to give it a bit of energy. So I, I went ahead and I booked those, but then my boss didn't like it cause I hadn't gone through the policy police and she blocked it. And she was happy to pay for it, not to be done. So, so all we didn't have to do was pay for the installation, but actually pay for the things.
That were printed but not done just so i wouldn't get that kind of progress and i was just this early warning sign that was like oh my god and there's a reason i share that because later in the book this happened to you you often got these emails in the inbox I'm particularly when things were going well and message from your boss to go i need to urgently see you about metrics of success etc etc, i was really as if it was pulling you by the reins to go i'm in charge here,
i'm one of the things that happened you later on was when you had a really successful hackathon or you have somebody else really really well, with a workshop some other part of the organization you got a rap on the knuckles from your boss because they didn't get enough credit for your work. And that's again part of I think being a change ninja is letting other people take your ideas and just going with it's a good idea. I want it to work if someone else takes the credit. I know I've done it.
people I work with know I've done it. And two, if you are a little bit too successful, you will, you'll get put down. So again, keeping it slightly under the radar, that's why I call it ninja stealth like moves. If people can't really see what you're doing until it's too, you might get pulled down a peg or two if it is successful, but you'll still get the thing done.
So, be prepared for that because people don't like it, particularly if, if they're your line manager and you've done something that they're not involved in. So be prepared for that. And that happened to me and I did try and get my boss on board with something. She didn't think, she, the only reason she supported, I say she didn't support it. She let me away with it because I managed to get some other people involved.
and she knew she had to say yes to some things because she said no to lots of things but she just assumed it would fail so she took no interest in it and it actually became a really really big success. So we did it again the year after and she took much more interest in it that time You do need a thick skin. Oh, hell yeah you do. So, and again, I'm sharing this, obviously we've got the arrows in the backs and the wounds to prove it. But I am so happy I went through that experience.
I wouldn't know what I know, even reading all the books I can read now. I read them through that lens of the experience. And I don't think I'd be as good a keynote speaker or consultant or workshop running workshops facilitator. If I didn't go through that, I think it's such an important thing to go through.
But I say all that to say, one of the things that was really helpful was a having a crew so your, your ninjas and by the way, the way I, the way I visualized you as I was reading the book was that I don't know if you ever saw the movie Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, and there's a ninja and she runs along the roofs and she's really light footed, nobody can hear her because you have to be so stealthy with the really meaningful stuff.
Meanwhile, you're like a magician, you're going, look over here. And you're doing this other thing over here that's actually meaningful, but that's the way I pictured you as you're doing this. But one of the things then is so important is to reach out to the outside world. And one of the people that was really helpful to you was Professor Eddie Obeng. I hope I'm pronouncing his name right. And you reached out to him and he gave you some critical advice.
And one of the first things that is, So often overlooked is a defining what innovation means for your organization, but then what type of change are we dealing with here? Because this will also frustrate you. If you think you're working on massive transformational, rigid religion, religious transformation change, and the organization just wants tiny little incremental change, you're going to have this constant clash and you're both going to be really disappointed.
So I'd love if you'd share this this. Also introduce Eddie to this story. Yeah. So Eddie Obeng is he's he's amazing. You should look him up. He's got a TED talk. It'd be a good place to start. He's written lots of books. And he developed something called Qube, which I mentioned earlier. It's a 3D virtual world way of working. And it's full of all of his tools. And he's let me use the tools in the book. So there is tools really. But they're just very good.
Good ways to get, we all talk about collaboration and alignment and all of this good stuff doing projects, risk management, and yet we seem to stick to process rather than people. And again, it's the people that will make the project work. So how do we really collaborate working out loud together, coming up with new ideas? How do we make sure we're all aligned around on the same page? So I mentioned my exec board, none of them knew what innovation was.
Nobody aligned themselves around what they were looking. For as a result. And he came up to do a leadership program and he introduced Qube and I met him a week later and we started, I started working with him on Qube. And so he introduced me to that as a way of working. I recognized it was really going to transform how we work. So for me at this point, innovation was not about widgets. It was about innovating how the health service could work. doesn't have any money, doesn't have enough staff.
It will, it doesn't matter how much money and staff you throw at it because the demand is always going to, to outweigh supply. So we needed to innovate how we worked and how we delivered things, rather than worrying about what it was we were going to work on and innovate. because a lot of it just needed really, really good improvements or scrapping and starting again, not going out to market for, for shiny gadgets. And so I started working with teams.
I started developing innovation training on cube so we could start to spread it out without people coming together get some real workflow. And I worked with him for about six months on cube and he trained me up to be a super facilitator, which meant I could then start to scale this thing up.
And again, when I talk about, I don't, I don't know if I mentioned it in the book as such, but I do talk about it quite often when we mention things like innovation transformation, we think of these huge things and it's top down and we're going to roll this out and scale this up across the whole organization. Unless it's.
That's not a great way to do things because you've got all the people stuff to deal with, but if you start at the ground level with some people and you get them enthused and doing things differently, they'll talk to other people and viral is not a good word or a good term now because we've had the pandemic, but But if you can do things virally, if I work with a team of six people on something and they think it's amazing, and then those six people go and work with a team
of six people in this amazing new way, you start to scale up from the bottom up. And again, that's, that thing started to bubble up and it started to get awareness. And at that point, the boss was like, yeah, I thought this was a great thing all along. Or they try and stop it. But if you can get that groundswell from, from within and below at the level that's needed at the level where people are actually delivering the things that they're there to deliver.
So not your big cheeses and your big execs, but who's actually getting on and doing things and delivering things and making things happen. If you can hit that level. And that's what, that's what Eddie taught me and brought me, supported me in doing that.
There was something I was going to mention which is another one of these decisions that you have to make earlier on and this one was sometimes you get as You Your role might be head of transformation, head of innovation, it may be even head of ESG, right? And you'll get thrown this total wild card. Oh Tammy's not busy or Tammy's always open for doing something different. So let's give her this project to run. And you're given some total random thing. That's not related to your job.
For me, what happened to me was it was a diversity. So to, to bring in diversity, but I saw that I was, when it did come to me in real life, I was like, Oh, actually. Diversity, neurodiversity, thinking differently, I'll do it. But, again, this happened to you, this landed on your plate, and you made the decision. And one of the things that happens out of this, which is really important, is you get brownie points.
Or, You get to know other people inside the organization and you build a network with inside the organization, you get credit and you can use those brownie points then as exchange later on when you need them. And we don't see this sometimes in the moment, but it can be critically important for later progress. Yeah, brownie points are a good thing. So doing things that you don't want to do that will get you brownie points.
The key to earning brownie points is not just the doing, it's reminding that you've done. So there is a tool that's not in the book I use called Blind Trust. If somebody asks you to do something, do it, do it early. Tell them you've done it early and the next time they ask you to do something, remind them that you did that thing the last time and you did it early. So it's a way of, because people will forget that you've done the stuff.
So remember when you asked me to do that piece of work because nobody else wanted to do it, and I not only did I do it, but I delivered it two weeks before you expected it to do it. Remind them of the thing you've done, and three or four times of doing that, you will have earned lots of brownie points that they will remember, and then save those brownie points up for. the thing that you want to do, which I did with cube.
So don't go into battle on everything because you're not going to win and you're just going to be seen as being obstructive. Give up on some things but remind them that you changed what you did rather than getting them to change what they did. So you're building up those brand words because eventually it's like you want me to be head of innovation. You've said no to this, this, this, and this.
I have done this, this, and this that you asked me to do, which isn't even innovation, but I helped you out. So now I need your help on this. Can you just support this? So just be mindful of all of that and reminding people of the things you have done, particularly if they're not things that you had to do. But you decided to it would be a good thing to do.
When I asked about Eddie, there was a tool that I thought was so useful for the very start of your whole quest, excuse the pun, which is to figure out what type of transformation the organization's after, which also helps you decide what type of tools you want to use. So The first is paint by numbers, which was clearly what the organization expected from you.
Then there's movies, then there's quests, and then there's just or a foggy process, which is exactly what most of us are going through, particularly in times of rapid change. I'd love you to share these four because it's useful terminology for people to understand even where they are. Yeah, this was this is the kind of learning you think I wish I'd known that 30 years ago, but that's why we are where we are.
So Eddie taught me that there's four types of change and you need to know whether you know what to do and you need to know whether, know whether you know how to do it. So have you done it before? then you'll probably know how to do it. And do you know what to do? A lot of organizations, particularly health service, follow the PRINCE2 sort of methodology, which is a typical paint by numbers project.
When you know how to do it and you know what to do, you've done it before, you've done, building hotels for a job, for example, you just know how to build a premier in, you're on your 20th one, it follows the same path. And PRINCE2 lends itself well to that. Most projects that we run in organizations. are paint by numbers projects. It's very, it may be rolling out the next windows update or something. You've done it before, you know how to do it, but most of them aren't.
There's then projects when we don't know what to do, but we know how to do it. So a good example here, particularly in the health service, is a nurse following a protocol for treating a patient. They don't know what's going to happen until they take all the measurements and the vitals after they've administered the treatment, but they follow a process to apply the treatment. Making a movie is a know how, but don't know what.
You know all the bits to make the film, but you don't know what it's going to look like until the end. We then have a know how, but don't know what, which we call a quest. So thinking about King Arthur, wanting the Holy Grail. Very clear vision. I want that. to find the Holy Grail. No idea how to do it because he'd not done it before. So gathered his knights, gave them some money, gave them an area to go and search and gave them a timeframe.
So go up three months, see what you can find, come back, report back, and we'll plan the next step. Agile lends itself quite well to a quest because you're doing things in time box, two week sprints, that kind of thing. We're going to design this bit. We're only going to focus on this. We're going to find out what we learn and then we'll plan the next stage. And we might have parallel work streams for something like that. And then there's the fog.
You're on the mountainside, the fog comes down, you can't see a path, you have no idea which way to go to get to safety, you can't stay where you are. If you do a project plan and make big decisions, you might walk off a cliff. Which you don't want to do. Follow the instructions, follow me everybody, you might lead you off a cliff. Instead, you take tiny, tiny steps and keep assessing where you are. Can I hear water flowing downhill? Can I see a path? Are we all still tied up together?
Do we know where we're going next? So taking tiny, tiny steps until you start to track your way down the hill, this fog starts to lift. A transformation program, if it really is transformation, is a fog because you haven't transformed before and you have no idea what you're going to transform into. If you think about a caterpillar into a butterfly, that's true transformation. There's no going back. You can't really imagine that future because you've not done it before and it's transformative.
I think most transformation programs aren't transformation. The change in how we do things, but it's still the same thing at the end. And I, when I ask people what it is that transform and there's, I've not had an answer yet from anyone. Why do you need to transform? You might need to implement new technologies, but why do you need to transform? But most trans, true transformation programs. Oh, foggy. You don't know what to do. You don't know how to do it. You need to take tiny steps.
A project plan is pointless because you have no idea what you're doing, but you take tiny steps and keep reassessing, tiny steps and keep reassessing until you end up in a quest where you've got a clearer vision of where you're trying to get to and you can start chunking it, but still you're doing it in sprints rather than planning the whole thing out. Once I'd understood that, I knew that the old project plan for innovation was complete. I knew it was pointless anyway, but I could explain it.
So I could take people through that and say, what kind of change is innovation? Because when you can educate people around the problem and what it is you're trying to do, rather than telling them that they're wrong, rather trying to persuade them that you're right. get, educate them on why, they'll get their own insights and when they've got their own insights they'll understand it more and they're much more likely to shift their thinking.
You can't change other people but you can help them change their own thinking. And you know what, I think that's why so many of us go into education, corporate education. It's why I love what I do going in as a speaker, going in and running workshops is because exactly that you're not telling people you're actually helping them realize and go, Oh, okay. And you see those moments. That's one of the most fulfilling parts of the job is seeing people go.
Now I get it, or now I see where I was going wrong. You don't tell them where they're going wrong. They realize it. And I think that's so beautiful part of the job. But I wanted to maybe, maybe conclude on this part because I think this piece is absolute gold and we're going to take a visit into cube for this part because it was interesting that you like me were trying to develop some type of space to bring everybody.
And this brings us full circle right back to the start where you realize it's not really about the space. It's about the people it's about working together. It's about being on the same page. And you introduced this virtual world cube. Most importantly, you started with an alignment activity. So this is not just about alignment, about. What does innovation mean to the organization?
What type of innovation are we trying to create inside the organization, but also about any aspect, any project, you have to start with this alignment and the tool you introduce here, and we're going to do in cube is the five P's. So here we are in Cube, Cubeland, where we have these boxy avatars. You can see this is me in front of you. I have to remember to click on the actual cube and not on the video recording.
So this is the Ninja Dojo we've created to go along with the book, where we do just in Here's Tammy in Qube, we're going to have a bit of empathy for our listeners. Most people listen to the show and don't watch it. Tammy's wearing a beautiful purple number in the Qube platform here, all in purple, including her skin to, to anonymize herself entirely. So over to you, Tammy.
Brilliant. So Qube is a 3D or 4D world, really, if you can imagine being in a great environment for workshopping with whiteboards and glorious views out the window and everybody's smiling at you. That's what Qube looks like. It's full of whiteboards and tools. we have a, The Ninja Dojo, which goes along with the book. So it's all about just in time learning. I'm going to take us over to the whiteboard and one of the tools that you mentioned called five Ps, which is a really good alignment tool.
So imagine if you're given a project to do. And you need to write a project brief or a communication around it. And you'll go away, and you'll squirrel away in your little office, and you'll come up with something, and you send it out, and it'll come back with loads of track changes, and it's all colourful, and you have to spend all that time editing it. If, instead, you get everybody around a whiteboard and you pull up the tool called 5Ps and just get everyone to write on sticky notes.
So I'm going to ask you if there's anything you want to add to this 5Ps. But the first one, first P is purpose. So what is the purpose of today? What is the purpose of this today's chat? It's to share some ninja stories and learn some new tools. What are the principles of today's podcasting?
It's going to be an informal Q& A session and I would like a little bit of time to think about some of the answers, or for you Aidan to come back to me and say that wasn't quite what I was asking, let's do that again. The third P is people, so we've got yourself, we've got me as the change ninja, and we've mentioned Eddie. So Eddie is the brains behind a lot of these tools and particularly for Qube. What is the process we're going to follow?
We started off, I think, with before you started recording the session with our hopes and fears. So what are our hopes for today? Anything we're worried about? Any questions? We've done the five P's. You'll edit the video recording, I'm guessing. You'll then advertise it and post it on LinkedIn and various places and we'll get some feedback and comments. So that's the process for this particular podcast. And then performance. What does performance look like?
that you and I have a great time, because that's important that we provoke some new thinking. So people listen to this, get some new ideas, some new thoughts. Growing your listeners of the podcast would be great. I would love it if people went out and bought the book and let me know about it.
And I do have, which I'll mention more at the end, a ninja community, which people are welcome to join if they're interested in talking to other ninjas and creating that peer network I was talking about, that support group for being out and ninja ing. So that's a very quick way to write the brief for a project or a communication or for the reason we're doing this podcast. Is there anything you would add to that, Aidan? One P I wouldn't add is Prince2. Definitely not Prince2 as an addition.
It's a great tool. It's funny that you actually had pre banked this because I considered starting with, this tool, but I was like, to the point of the very point of everything, it was like, it wouldn't make sense if we did to the audience. It'd be like, what the heck are these guys doing? And we couldn't do it then. But it's something that you learn way too late.
I think is that when you do this, even if you're not involved in innovation, but if you do something like this and even have a very clear aligned. Objective to come out of a meeting or a project with the difference in the speed at which you can move is just incredible. And I just thought maybe it's not a P, but it's a pace. I'd add pace that the pace increases massively as a result of this. Absolutely. So I've added your thing there around Prince2. So we're going to avoid jargon and process.
So now you feel like when you read this back later, you were part of pulling together of this piece of work, this brief, this communication, whatever it is. So imagine doing that in a meeting with everybody. What is the purpose of this meeting? What do we think? It will speed up because people are writing things around the 5P. So it will speed up your pulling together of all the information. So you save time. But everybody will have collaborated on the content.
And so everybody, I would just check then, do you, are you happy with this? And if you're happy with it, we're all aligned on it. I don't need to write it up because I can just take a snapshot of that and send it out to everybody. I can send it to my boss saying, this is what we've agreed to put around this particular podcast. So you're saving time. You've got collaboration, new ideas, everyone's aligned.
I don't need to write it up because we've got a snapshot of it and it just, yeah, all of those things, it's just captures all of that in a really quick way. You can write a project brief in about 10 minutes with a team and it's, it's enough. You might need to write it up to go into the system, don't fight that because you're not going to win. Just write it really quickly and stick it in. No one's going to read it anyway, but you can save your time working in this way.
And when we say collaborate, it's not about sharing documents. That's just sharing documents. Collaboration is thinking out loud with your team so that you're all aligned around what it is you're trying to do. And working with these tools in this way just, it absolutely changed my life. . It freed up so much time and progressed projects so much more quickly that I was motivated.
And again, that drudgery of the way we work that can make you switch off a little bit, put your feet up thinking it's not worth it. It just shifts you away from that. And one of the things you mentioned as well as it saves so much budget, and I don't mean just financial budget, but time. Of getting to the meeting.
And you talked about this, even from when, when people are like, we need a workshop, you're going, do you need a workshop and ask that question right up front is, is such an important aspect. Tommy, I thought we'd maybe start landing the ship on today's show. And there was something that I thought was important to reiterate or to emphasize a little bit further. And it's that. And I don't mean this to be a downer, but it's a reality check. And this is useful.
I think in any aspect of life is that sometimes when you're a change maker, you look for a pat on the back for the work that you've done. But unfortunately, if you're not the CEO or you're not a big cheddar or big cheese inside an organization, you're not going to get the credit. And even at that, you don't get the credit because if you're the.
Spark that starts the change, the fire, just like a match, there's a catalyst in there and the catalyst gets burned up or is just invisible in the transaction that becomes the spark later on. And I think that's such a harsh but realistic realization for so many change makers.
When you leave the organization, all the changes that you've started The things that took hold, the things that went viral, not a great word, as you said, particularly in the NHS, the things that took off and the things that you started, you will barely, if ever, get the credit for, and we have to let go of that and realize that that's the case, because you can't waste your precious energy on that, and I thought maybe you'd share your thoughts on that as well. Absolutely.
You have to be comfortable with that. One way to do it is just make sure you celebrate every day. Celebrate the stuff you've done because it rewards the brain and the brain likes that. So it will make you feel good. Even, you can tell the story of it's not fair. I didn't get that credit or you can tell the story of I did this and I know that it's resulted in some good things. And the story you tell yourself is really important to how you think about it. So you can reframe it.
You need to learn to reframe those stories from the negative to the positive. If you've got your network, irrelevant of where they are, join a network, whether it's within your organization or with peers that you've met in training courses, you will all know what you've done. So make sure you have, and I, I, we do have a have a tool called catch up, which is around celebrating all the good things I've done because it boosts you and motivates you and energizes you. So make sure you're doing that.
And if you can do it with other people, even better. There are things you won't get credit for. I'm pretty sure, in fact, nobody who I used to work with has been in touch since I wrote this book. And I know that they know I've written the book. So people that left who I really got on with have been in touch, but the people that are still there. haven't been in touch. So, they probably think it's rubbish, but everyone's got a different view of reality.
Everybody will remember that the stories are all true, but everybody will remember them in different ways. So that's part of that story as well. It's like, just because this is how I see it doesn't mean it's how somebody else sees it or how they see it. But you do have to let go of the fact that you may not be seen by other people as being that, that catalyst. But you need to be in it because you want to do the good things. So being a change ninja, doing those stuff, it's invisible leadership.
It's not the big shiny up there, I've been on a course at Henley, it's the invisible stuff, but that is mostly how good things happen. Well said, and I have a theory of why, so those people who don't reach out to you after you've left. Or you can be damn sure when you leave that they'll say, Oh she wasn't up to the job anyway, or, lost her mojo, all that stuff. And there's a reason why that is. And it's because, they've stayed. So they to have a story that's bigger than you.
They have to have a story that you were the problem because they've stayed. In particularly the leadership, because the leadership is going to want people to stay. So they can't have you being the right person that made the right decision leaving the organization. So don't worry about that again for those people out there and for you, particularly because you've done extremely well since you left.
Tammy that, of course, they're not going to be in touch because they can't let you look like you've won because then they've lost. And that's part of the scarcity mentality that's everywhere. In organizations that are obviously stuck as well. I thought I'd share one last little excerpt from me, and then I'm going to hand it over to you to close today's show with your recommendations or your advice, your closing message, your call to action, your manifesto for.
The change ninjas out there because you're on book three and there's a book two as well. I'd love you to share where people can find you, but I'll read out this little excerpt because I absolutely loved here. What you said at the end of the book, you were like, you realized after all that people are into the decisions were better than shiny gadget orientated decisions.
You took a bottom up approach, giving staff the tools and confidence to do their job better, to explore and introduce new methods and ideas, to shift behaviors and how teams did things. And it wasn't about telling staff they were empowered, but about giving them the tools, confidence, space and environment so they could actually feel empowered to do things differently and spread the learning wider. So what next? You wonder.
The organization has once again shifted, The big cheese who started the big program has moved on, so have a lot of , the good ones, the mini cheddars, the old soggy, slightly stale, mini cheddars, the blue cheeses, are still there and seem to be growing in number and trying to revert things back to the good old days. You want to do more of what you're doing, but have reached the end of this particular journey. Are you ready to jump ship and go in search of a new adventure?
And as we found out that Tammy stroke, Sammy did just that. So Sammy, where can people find you? And I'll let you read the book to find out what I'm talking about there to find out more about your work first, and then. What's your final message to our audience? So I'm quite easy to find, there's not many Tammy Watchorns in the world, the book is on Amazon, that's a good way to find me, or www. change-ninja.com But I am pretty easy to track down. Please do get in touch. There's lots going on.
So there's the book. There's a training program that goes with the book which has been really, really effective in the last two years about, again, shifting the thinking and finding tools so that you can engage better with people. So don't communicate with stakeholders, engage better with people, and to do that you need a lot of tools because there's going to be lots of things that come at you that you need to respond to in different ways. So the training is associated with that.
Book 2 is out in October, which is the Change Ninja Returns, and this time it's personal. And that is more around people. big emotional change, which might be at work, you might be being bullied by your boss, you might have a job you hate, but can't find something else, or it might be at home. And it's based on my story of a big emotional life change that happened to me unexpectedly. And I, I had a decision to make very quickly of how do I manage what's going on?
Because my life completely shifted around me and I didn't know what to do. I had no idea what to do faced with utter uncertainty. I thought I'm a change ninja. So if I teach about the neuroscience of the brain and managing change and all of these tools to manage all of these characters in the book, how might it work on my own big emotional change? Because when you're dealing with emotional change, the blockers aren't other people, they're actually you.
They're your own doubts that get in the way telling you that this is too risky and that would be a really stupid thing to do and we can't make decisions on that just yet. So I applied all the thinking to me and it worked. So that's what the second book is about. It's still storified but it's my personal story and it's really around we have an awful lot of skills and knowledge of doing things.
You probably, if you've got kids, you're probably really good at persuasion skills for getting them to put their shoes away and clean up their room but you forget about those persuasion skills when you get into the workplace. Because you maybe think it's not a professional approach, but actually it will work. Equally, you go on all the leadership management courses, project management courses at work. You learn how to manage things really effectively.
How often do you go home and have a review about how the holidays are going? Your lessons learned from that disastrous holiday, or aligning everybody with something like a five Ps around the next holiday. So once we start to realize that we have all of these skills that we actually leave behind this glass door. How we can start to shift things really effectively without any more learning. So we've got a lot of that stuff already. So how can we use all of that learning skills?
And then I did mention book three, which I've just started, which is around killing the zombies. So, working title just now around zombie stuff. But a lot of what we do at work, Zap Samojo. There's a lot of, there's a lot of books out there and advice on time management. But. Do you know if that works? The works not going away. There's nothing's changing. You're still going to get dragged into meetings all the time.
And you get to the end of those days when you've been in meetings all day and you've not really done anything, but you feel drained. So it's around managing your energy, because if you manage your energy to do things at the right time, you'll be much more motivated because you'll be doing things at the right time. And when When you're motivated, you do, you do things faster, so you save time, but it also gives you energy, so you can do more with your day.
So you can't add more hours to the day, but you can manage your energy. So yeah, and there's a retreat also that goes with it. There's lots going on, so if anyone's remotely interested in ninja ing, just get in touch or buy the book and then get in touch. Just to tell you, good, really good friend of the show and a guy based in the UK worth reaching out to. I don't know if Elvin Turner, Blast I don't, but on my reading list. Great guy. We've done an episode with him.
I'll touch base with you afterwards and share that with you. Great guy, really fantastic guy and a great book as well. He's also working on a second book. But Tammy, it's been an absolute pleasure speaking with you. I'm sure, So many of our audience have related to what you're doing. Lots of our audience also work in healthcare change, so I'm sure they'll be in touch with you as well, but for now, author of the Change Ninja Handbook, Dr. Tammy Watchorn. Thank you for joining us.
Thank you for having me.