So Abraham Maslov said, in any given moment,
we have two options to step forward into growth
or to step back into safety.
And I think part of what we're gonna try
and do today is give you some frameworks
and ideas on how to step forward bravely
safely with confidence.
So my name's Stuart Easton, and I'm the CEO
and one of the founders here at Transparent Choice.
We do these webinars every month.
They're, they're, they're not about our product
or our company or anything like that.
It's really just things that are interesting in
and around project management, portfolio management,
strategy, execution, those kind of areas.
So if you're into change, delivering change
and transformation, which most people on this session are,
then this is a great place for you to come.
And I encourage you to come back again and again and again.
A shock, for example, comes to almost everything that we do.
Um, so it's always great to see him piling in here,
and I'm sure he will be very chatty
as the session gets going and asking questions.
And that's key, right? I want you to be involved.
Get in there, ask questions, make comments.
If Rebecca says something you like,
let's have some thumbs up and hearts floating up the screen.
If she says something ridiculous, you know what to do.
All right? But make it fun.
Let's have some fun, let's have comments.
If you've got stories that, that reflect
what we're talking about, please share
'em in the chat, right?
And, and where I can, I will in, in integrate
that into the conversation.
All right. So those are the ground rules.
Um, gimme a quick thumbs up
or a quick heart on the screen
to let me know that you got it.
There we go. We've got some thumbs ups. Fabulous.
I've got a good feeling. Thank you guys.
So let me introduce our guest.
Rebecca is, um, is on mute, just in case you're not aware.
Rebecca, you are still on mute.
Rebecca is on mute,
and Rebecca runs, uh, Rebecca Reynolds Consulting, which is,
um, an organization that works with leaders
of mostly government agencies
and not-for-profits and things like that.
Um, with executive teams who are wrestling with change,
who are wrestling to deliver the change
and to deliver the, the results, the business results
that they're trying to achieve.
Um, I call her the executive whisperer
because her job is to say the things to the execs
that perhaps other people can't say,
to have the conversations
and the hard conversations
that other people might not be able to have
with the executives safely.
We've worked on a couple of projects,
and Rebecca can tell you a little bit about some of that.
We've worked on a couple of projects together,
bringing communities through change,
not just the leadership team,
but whole communities through change.
And for today, there, there are really a couple of couple
of three dimensions that I want to bring out.
So the first is, um, you know, change is happening.
How should you be thinking about change so
that you can navigate it more easily?
But also, most of the people on this session are project
leaders or portfolio leaders, or transformation leaders.
So you are leaders of change.
So what should you be doing as leaders of change
to help others get through the process?
And then thirdly, what I hope we're gonna be able
to do is weave in just a little bit of the perspective from
that executive tier, right?
What does it feel like as an executive
to be navigating through change?
Because, um, they don't get, you know, they, they're,
they're making decisions in extreme uncertainty, conditions
of extreme uncertainty, and yet they have to try
and project clarity and direction
and everything else so that, so
that an organization can align behind that.
And it's not easy. That's a difficult thing to do.
So we, so we, if we've time,
well weave some of that in as well.
So, with that, Rebecca, I would like to invite you
to introduce yourself a little bit in a more eloquent way
than I have, uh, anyone, by the way,
who's into 17th century opera singers.
I think it was Rebecca, if you have any questions.
18th. 18th. But whenever,
18th century. Okay. 18th
century, or they're gonna be
Italian though, I'm afraid.
So, 18th century Italian opera singers.
If you have any questions on that front as well,
love them into the chat, and we'll try
and stump the chump later on.
Go for it, Rebecca.
Well, thank you, Stuart. This is, uh, just so much fun.
I've been really looking forward to this,
and I'm delighted to get to talk with your community today
and hear from them about, you know, where they are.
And also, I wanna just give you a shout out
for the May newsletter that came out.
It had some really cool, uh, connections and synergies,
and the theme was very much what we're doing.
So if you guys haven't seen that, it's awesome.
So thank you. Uh, I'm gonna just do a little, like,
you know, 10 minute kind of, uh, frame
for our conversation a little.
Uh, it'll bring up some concepts, some ideas, also
to talk a little bit about where I came from
and how I got this sort of change expert
or change guru sort of thing going on.
Um, so I'm gonna just share my screen really quickly,
and we're gonna look at just a, you know,
just have a little visual as I'm
going through some of this stuff.
All right, here we go.
See if it's gonna do it.
Got, It's just taking a sec.
No, we can see it. You're
Okay. Great. All
right. So let's see here.
So, by way of background, as Stuart said, I'm, um, the CEO
of my, uh, consulting firm that's been around since 1991.
I had a couple of jobs before I realized that
I really liked change myself.
So I realized being a consultant meant that I would get
to do lots of different jobs over my career without looking
like a flip exhibit.
So that's why I became a consultant.
I mean, it was that simple. And I,
after, you know, a few years of kind of,
I started in working with nonprofit organizations
'cause that's where my jobs had been,
I'd been an executive director in a,
in an arts organization.
But I started to realize that I was developing these sort
of core competencies in my firm.
One was leadership advancement, so really working
to grow great leaders.
So working with people, I think, you know, he said I'm a,
you know, sort of executive, uh, whisperer.
I do think that's right. I've spent my whole career working,
you know, more or less with C-suite type folks,
but also, you know, moving that down.
Because the second thing
that often I noticed was the reason great leaders were
calling me and were, I mean, excuse me,
the reason leaders were calling me
and were feeling stumped was
because they were facing something huge that was, uh,
kind of insinuating that some sort
of organizational
transformation was going to need to happen.
And I think they were feeling like, whoa, right.
I need some help with that. And then three,
when you're doing organizational transformation
transformation, you've gotta get collaborative
because one person at the top cannot see it all
and doesn't know everything.
And we've seen that the sort of the, um,
the cata cata catastrophic results of
C-Suite just thinking they know everything, right?
And then implementing a change and it doesn't work, right?
And there's all this pushback
and it can even kill the organization.
We've seen that. So these three things,
So let's, let's, let's just pause there.
So yeah, so give, give, give us a thumbs up,
or a, actually, Mary's in there with an amen, right?
Give us a, give us a quick thumbs up if,
if that resonates with you.
What, what Rebecca just said resonates.
'cause that I, I hear that kind of thing all the time.
There we go. Lots, lots
of thumbs up kicking around that one.
And, and what I think, uh, was happening a lot
of times is the, that these leaders had maybe had a sense of
what was happening, but they oughta also had a sense
that they didn't have
yet the capacity themselves to take it on.
And so they, there was no language for this.
You know, people would say, I think we
need to do strategic planning.
That was always a sign to me that, that something was afoot
because they really didn't know what it was.
So, strategic planning, right, is about looking
at the, the terrain.
So my job was to support these folks, these, these leaders
in pretty much facing large, uh, large scale change,
large scale reinvention type situations.
Um, the, the other thing I wanna say though, is a core piece
of my work was getting lasting solutions.
And the only way you can do that is if you make sure
that whatever is being done is aligned
and works through the entire organization.
Like I, what we were talking about when we first were
planning this was the head cannot
be separated from the body.
So I was acting kind of like the neck, you know what I mean?
Getting that flow up
and down, you know, so that we can, that's
what creates agility in an organization.
So let me just move on.
The first time I worked with Stewart, I was,
I had been using, I had used some decision software before,
and I really liked it.
I was really blown away by what was possible with it.
But I was looking for something new,
something a little bit more agile, easier to use.
And I had a federal government client that, uh, needed
to prioritize projects across a two
and a half million acre, uh, landscape
of mixed jurisdictions.
They weren't just dealing with their, you know,
their stewardship land.
They were dealing with private and industri industry stuff,
and all kinds of different, uh, stakeholders.
And that was very important. So
that presented two primary challenges.
Number one, we wanted to make sure
that clear strategic outcomes were driving the
prioritization, not just low hanging fruit,
which is a very typical way, right?
As you guys all know, to, to, uh, you know, choose projects.
Something that's easy, something that's, you know,
not too expensive, you know, whatever.
Um, or the thing about in my backyard, like
it's normally I don't want it in my backyard,
but these treatment projects were about restoring land
to prevent wildfire and other things.
So people wanted them in their backyard.
And so we had a lot of deep opinion
and vested right interest in that.
So managing that was clear, strategic
and agreed upon outcomes was gonna be critical.
The second one was involving hundreds
of diverse individuals, some
of whom were very deep SMEs on forestry
and water chemistry and so on.
And then there were other people that just, you know,
were lay people who lived there
and had, you know, sort of a, a, a,
their hat in the ring, if you will.
Um, the cool part was, uh,
this was my first experience of working with Stewart.
We had a gas, you know,
it was really fun talking about everything.
And I was really wanting a pushing for transparent choice
to help me do that strategic alignment in integration.
And so we came up with all kinds of cool, clever,
and very efficient methods, um, using transparent choice,
and were able to accomplish both of these objectives.
Um, the other thing that was great,
and anybody that's used transparent choice knows that
our results were inclusive, they were clear,
they were compellingly conveyed in cool graphics,
and all of that made the priorities obvious at the end
of this process, which was, it took time.
I'm not saying this stuff is fast, but we had no pushback.
Zero. It was unprecedented.
So that was my first experience working with,
And if I can jump in for a second, Rebecca, right?
Yeah. So right away, we've,
we've hooked into something about making change happen is
that I think most people are not
actually resistant to change.
They're resistant to having change done to them, right?
So if you take them on the journey with you,
so they are part of the change, then actually
we can deal with it, right?
And I suspect we're gonna cover that later on.
But that was a really, that was
so clearly demonstrated on this,
that involving people in the process meant
that change wasn't being done to them.
And they were list, they were hearing other people's points
of view, not just sitting in their own little echo chamber,
but they were hearing other people's point of view.
So when they didn't get exactly what they wanted, they kind
of understood why, right? And could go,
That's, that makes sense, right?
And they actually saw the benefits
of doing it somewhere else for themselves.
That was the cool part.
It wasn't just like, oh, I'm being a nice guy or a nice gal.
They were actually seeing, oh, if we do that first,
that's gonna make my project easier
when it comes into the queue.
So yes, it was socializing, it was building understanding.
It's what I called moving the change process
through the entire system, not just at the top.
Okay. So we'll get more to that for sure.
We'll get to that. We'll get
to that. Yeah. Keep going, keep going.
So now, how did I start?
When I first hung my shingle, I was not saying,
Hey, I'm a change agent.
I knew I liked it,
but I didn't realize that that's actually what I was doing.
It took me a while to discover that.
Um, but these words that you're seeing on the screen were,
have been on my website since the beginning for 30 years.
So 30 years ago when I started this, I was noticing the pace
and scale of change are continuing to increase.
And I wanna talk about that very specifically.
Um, I also have said that staying abreast
of the change curve, that's exactly how I wrote it,
is a highly evolved skill.
And leaders must have it
because why else do you have leaders?
Unless they can move you through change
and keep abreast of it.
You know, if you're, if you're driving a car
and you only look in front of the car,
you're gonna hit something pretty soon, right?
The leader is supposed to be, the driver is supposed
to be looking out and looking,
you know, using peripheral vision.
So it's definitely a skill for leaders,
but it is also a skill for the entire organization.
And that is something I felt very strongly
about from the get go.
And then third, this particular skill
I noticed was often the difference
between average performance and extraordinary results.
So that was a harbinger.
I mean, I was a, actually a, a tenant of my work is
that people would say to me, we got
so much more than we ever thought was possible.
I don't know how you did that.
So I, I didn't either actually at the time,
but I started to, you know, really think about that.
Um, so I, I wanna say that I sort of realized
that I was doing change, um,
and that that was what I was particularly good at.
So if I get a call from somebody,
and I would say, you know, if you just wanna move pieces
around the board, if that's all
that's needed, you don't need me.
But if you need to question the board itself,
that's my work, right?
So I started to get that about, about my concentration.
Um, and so what do I mean
by large scale change or reinvention?
I think we've all known when an organization hits some kind
of major world force or, you know, technology trend
or something, that means they're gonna have
to really look at their business model,
product line, whatever it is.
Also though, there I was working with a lot
of government clients that were in charge of sort
of setting the frame
for large areas in natural resource
management, in it, et cetera.
And so they were having to really push
brand new policy law regulation, right?
So it was both an internal kind of change
that was the reinvention,
or it was something that was gonna be pushed out to,
you know, guide a whole bunch of people.
So these were very large projects, um,
that were very complex, involving lots of moving pieces.
Um, so let's see.
I wanna make sure, yeah,
so I wanna make sure I was very clear that it was very clear
to me from the beginning that you couldn't just have
that change agility
nor that strategic viewpoint just at the top,
because the, the strategic plan needs to be owned
by everybody because it provides a strategic map of where
of what you're dealing with.
First of all, if you have no map, right,
it's gonna be very difficult to make a change
because you don't know where you are, right?
So the strategic plan is that map, right?
If it's only for the top, they'll say, well, we need
to make a change over here and do it right away.
And, and here's how.
And the people that are in that area, they don't see it,
they don't understand it.
So it just feels sort of like an attack,
like change is happening to them.
As, as Stewart said. So when I was doing strategic plans,
I was engaging the entire system,
and that's why TC was so transparent.
Choice was so important, because at first when these tools
didn't exist, I was doing it all myself.
I mean, it was intense work doing that.
All right, so lemme just move to this, uh, last one so
that we can, um,
move into our more interactive conversation.
So, uh, it was about, I think about 2013
that I finally really started to say, all right,
if I'm gonna, how can I make this, this thing
that I do and that I use?
And it's very effective in across all kinds
of content and context.
I worked in every subject matter.
And my clients would say, have you ever done it before?
Have you ever done fire stuff before?
Have you ever done water?
And I'd be like, well, no, but I've done things similar.
Um, but I realized the content really was not that relevant
because I was using something else.
So I started to ask myself, what is it that I'm using
that makes this easier and makes for greater results?
Well, I came to the realization that what I was working
with was something I refer to as the change process.
I don't mean how we react to change, that's very,
very different across people, right?
There's changes in our own lives that we love
and change, that we dread, right?
So if you use our reaction to change to understand it,
you're gonna, it's gonna be really
confusing and very variable.
So I started to notice the change, like climate moves
through a sequence of very specific stages
that have indicators that are common across content
and context, whether you like the change or don't.
And it was, that's what I was using.
So I was helping my clients.
I didn't teach this to them
because I didn't have any language for it at the time.
But what I did is I helped them to align with what part
of the change process they were in.
Just like the farmer doesn't plant in winter.
If the farmers in North America,
that's a very bad idea, right?
And we all know that if you don't align with the seasons,
or, you know, you wear a fur coat on the beach in June,
you're gonna be uncomfortable.
So we know that about, about climate,
but with change we don't.
So I realized this was like change, GPS, you know,
we could figure out where are we in it,
what is the stage asking of us?
And when we start aligning with it,
it became so much easier.
And all the energy that had been going to resisting change,
whether intentionally
or not, could now be go into working with change.
That's why we were getting incredible results,
that it was that simple.
So I basically invented a model for something
that is not new.
The change process happens all the time to everything as ch
as, uh, Stewart put in, uh, some of the posts,
change is a constant.
It's the only thing that's constant,
constant hair colitis said that.
So it's been, we've known this for a long time, right?
But we are a little slow on the uptake on how
to, how to work with it.
So, um, so anyway, so the, the threshold
of change is a four stage process
that is iterative when we go round and round.
And being able to know where you are,
where any particular situation in,
in it makes it much easier to deal with.
So I just will say, there's a book on this.
It's out right now. Thresholds of change,
audiobooks coming, if you like those.
And then also you can, you know, I'd love
to support people in, in this work.
So that's all I'll say. And now we can move on.
Awesome. Awesome. So, um, that's fantastic.
Good, good intro. Good, good starter for 10, as they say.
The Brits will know what that means.
Um, so Ashock has fallen for your, your little bait there.
He's already asked what liminal means.
So we'll get to that ashock, I promise.
Um, uh, before we do, just really quickly, right?
So most of the people on, in, on this webinar
are in the business of making change happen projects,
transformation, that kind of thing, right?
So, so the feeling out there is that, you know,
change is just coming faster and faster and faster.
Um, the nature of that change is itself changing.
Um, the, the, the pace is changing, the complexities
of change is increasing.
Um, so, so is that, is that just, it,
doesn't everybody always feel that?
Or is that real, do you think?
Yeah, I'm glad you asked that.
Like I said, 30 years ago,
I was talking about pace and scale.
What I started to, when I, when I've been teaching this,
now, I'm just starting to, to get into this more.
I looked at some statistics about pace pa the pace
of change is increasing.
And the reason is technology, right?
If you think how long it took us to invent the wheel
as humanity, and then the distance between the wheel
and the printing press, right?
So the wheel was like this, right?
Then the printing wheel
and printing press, now we've got changes, boom,
boom, boom, boom, boom.
And they're, they're just exploding.
Like, the internet exploded us. But now look at ai, right?
So you are not wrong.
If you think the pace of change is increasing,
it definitely is.
The other aspect of why change feels like
change to the fourth power.
As, as, uh, Stewart mentioned in his newsletter today
is ubiquity.
It's everywhere. Now, why is that?
Change has always been everywhere.
Always everything changes every part of life.
But technology is also helping us be aware of it.
We hear about it on the internet,
we hear about it in news, we see it on social media.
We're hear, you know, it's just constantly,
humans are barrage
by change happening all over the place all the time.
The third aspect of why change feels more is scale, right?
That we are, we have reached a place also, I think
because of technology that we were built to change ourselves
and our little situations, right?
So our families, our little jobs for, for millennia humans
had a little sphere of what they were good at in terms
of managing change or dealing with change.
Now all of a sudden, we are aware of
and struck by scales of change that are global.
We're all dealing with, uh,
global environmental change, right?
Impacts and the ideas of it.
Um, and so our little muscle for dealing
with change is not necessarily built
for dealing with the scale.
So I think it's those three, those three aspects
that make change so much harder.
And why I felt it was so important to write this book so
that I could help people more to deal
with the process of change.
We need to build our muscu musculature more. So,
So a question for the audience then, right?
So, you know, jump into chat
and just give me a a, yeah,
if you feel like change is a little overwhelming,
if it just all feels a bit too much sometimes,
not all the time, but sometimes I'm gonna put my own hand up
and say absolutely all the time.
Um, so just drop, drop, drop something in. Yeah, sometimes.
Thanks, Ashak. Uh, anyone else willing to admit it?
'cause I know you wouldn't be here if you didn't feel
like that sometimes, right?
Um, so, uh, there we go. Nice one J. Yeah, good one, Kevin.
Um, yeah, absolutely.
So, so the first message I think is you are not alone.
This is normal. Everyone feels like this. It's real.
There is a lot of change out there.
And, um, figuring out how to deal with it is, is one
of the key challenges of our time.
Um, so, you know, this is, this is a good time to,
to dive into this.
So, so Rebecca, here's one of the,
so here's a quick question, right?
Change comes in so many different guises, right?
So, so many different types.
There's technology change, there's organizational
change, there's change at home.
Is there, are there any sort of common threads
and themes that you have seen that, that sort
of tie them all together?
Well, that's exactly what the change process does.
It's the underlying process that's under all change,
no matter what scale, what it's about.
That's what enabled me to go into organization
after organization, dealing with very different content,
very often, very complex content,
and still be able to see the way through, right?
Because I was using this underlying change process.
It is what is common.
Yeah, a absolutely. So I'm reading the, the comments.
Well, me too, yeah. While listening. Um, yeah.
So I, I think that's, I I love, I I love, uh, actually, Joe,
I love what you said there, which is that you have
to learn how to handle the change.
And part of that is about learning how to handle yourself,
but also, um, you know, one of the things that I, I,
I liked in the book is that you've sort
of broken it down into, into stages.
And we're gonna get into that liminal thing in a second.
Um, and, and I've gotta warn you guys, just,
there may be a little bit, bit
of geeking out at some point here.
Rebecca and I are both a little bit nerdy, a little bit kind
of intellectual at times, whether
that's good or bad, I don't know.
But let's put it this way, when I, when I found that word,
the first thing I did was jump onto the online dictionaries,
discover that different dictionaries had very different
definitions of the word.
And so then dived into the etymology
and the root of where it came from
and all that kind of good stuff.
So we were gonna get to liminal.
If you don't know what it means, don't worry.
Neither did I, um, we're gonna get there.
But talk to us about the different stages,
the different phases of change,
Right? So,
just like I said, you know, uh, climate moves
through the seasons, change moves through stages.
And I was really feeling those over every
project for years and years.
And it took me a while to bring it
to my conscious mind and to create a model.
And I love creating models for stuff that I'm,
I am kind of a geek that way.
So when people would bring me in,
it was usually an instigation.
That's the first stage.
So how do we recognize instigation in any change situation?
Something that has worked
or something that was stable is no longer.
It's as simple as that. You go out, you try to start,
your car doesn't, it doesn't start,
and you're like, uhoh, what's going on here?
Right? So it can be something small, you know,
you might get on the scale and be like, whoops,
gained some weight, right?
Or lost some weight, or whatever.
So it can be small like that,
or it can be new organization
I was talking specifically yet, Stuart.
Exactly. Um,
or it can be something big in your organization,
and it might be something that happens one day
and it's catastrophic, so you know,
you're in it fast, or it can be subtle.
It can be things that happen over time.
So you're kind of watching for, did this thing
that happened, this event, is it actually repeating?
So it's becoming a trend.
So instigation is very much for noticing.
Now, if you don't have any kind of a strategic map
for your organization, nobody's sort
of keeping their eye out on the road, it's gonna be harder
for you to notice these, these signs
of instigation happening, right?
Makes perfect sense. So that's why a lot of people,
individuals, and organizations feel broadsided.
I didn't see that coming.
And I'll go in and say, you know, let's look back and see.
And they'll actually, in retrospect, be able to see some
of the, the signs of change.
So noticing is a huge faculty.
And also the other thing is not
thinking we know exactly what those signs mean.
We have to belay our sense of, I got this, I know
what this is, because that's often reductive of
what these signs are actually showing us.
So, I mean, I could go on
and on about this, so I don't want to,
but instigation is where I was often brought in,
because what is, what the next threshold is into
what I call the liminal.
Now, why did I name it such a kind
of unusual use, such an unusual word?
Number one, I wanted to call attention to it,
and I knew that if I used a word that was well known,
people would go, oh, yeah, I got that.
And I don't think we got that in, particularly in Western,
you know, European cultures.
Uh, we tend to be a bit on the analytical side
and think we know everything,
especially once we reach a certain level of our career,
certain educational, right?
And the whole point of change
is we're going into something we don't know.
And there's a reason for that change is the agent
of our growth and our learning.
So by definition, we have to go into something
that we don't know, and leaders, especially execs saying,
whoa, I really don't know.
That's a scary place to start.
But it's a really important one
because that's where the growth
and the opening starts to happen.
So I use the term liminal.
It's from the Latin word for threshold.
Lyman means threshold
or lemon, maybe is how you pronounce it.
I'm not sure. So I it's also used in anthropo in
anthropology by anthropologists
to describe the state in a rite of passage, right?
Maybe from adolescence to adulthood,
when the individual is neither one nor the other.
And you all who are parents understand
how painful that period is.
They're not children anymore, but they're not adults either.
We call those the teenage years.
So in the old, you know, all of the old cultures,
there were rituals to support that transition, right?
And that was really smart because the liminal is
a time of confusion.
The, I know mine doesn't know what's going on, really.
It's new to it. So we can freak out.
And depending upon your comfort with not knowing,
that's probably dictating your reaction to change, right?
So that's the liminal.
The liminal is actually a space of
actually receiving what's going on as opposed to initiating.
And that's very difficult in business to find ways
to get people into more of a receptive mode.
Frankly, the easiest way I found is strategic planning,
because you bring people out of their normal moments,
their normal day-to-day, you put them in a space that's sort
of, you know, this, this special little container
where they do strategic planning.
And my strategic planning is simply asking questions
of leaders, and they have to talk about it
and answer them together.
And that often opens right them to whole new, uh, you know,
uh, ideas and revelations.
So after we're in the liminal for
what, do you want me to stop there?
Yeah, no, no, I'm, I was gonna jump in before we,
before we get into the, the, the next couple of stages.
Yep, yep, yep. There, there's a couple of comments in the,
in the chat, which I think we could, we can throw in here.
So, so Mary was sort of saying, you know, good
with most change, but
what I don't like is essentially when change is done to you,
so arbitrary, arbitrary looking decisions are handed down.
Um, there's lack of process, lack of inclusion, lack
of information gathering, all that kinda good stuff, right?
Uh, so, so there's that.
And then, and so that's an interesting point.
And I think it underlines what you were just saying
about both the instigation and that liminal phase, right?
Is we need to be listening.
Um, then,
and then Ashok asked the question,
is change is change known at the start or evolves as we go?
And the answer by definition is a little bit of both.
It, you know, it, you, you start off knowing
that change is coming,
but you don't quite know what it's gonna be.
And, uh, you know, when,
so when Rebecca's talking about the strategic planning
process, that's really the process, a process of discovery.
It's, uh, uh, you know, which is why you were talking about
it as questions, right?
It's a process of discovery and listening and done.
Well, it's a process of collaborating
with different levels of the organization.
'cause at the end of the day, let's be honest,
and I wanna see lots of hearts fly when I say this.
Let's be honest, the executives don't actually know
how the business works at a day-to-day level, right?
So, so they need to be involving
the people in the guts of the organ of the organization
or the community or whatever it is,
because they're the people
who know where the bodies are buried.
They're the people who know where the roadblocks are.
They're the people that know that if you turn off
that little switch over there,
this thing over here catches fire.
Right? The execs don't know that that's not their job
to know that they have another job.
They've got a different set of things that they need to do.
So it has to be this sort
of inclu if it's gonna work well, it has
to be inclusive. And,
Well, I also think the other thing that I wanna stress is
the leaders have to be willing
to admit that they don't know.
That's a very, very important threshold for them.
And that is actually
what gets you into the limit when you finally say,
I have just tried everything,
and I'll come into organizations
who have literally been trying to solve the problem
for a decade, and they're just, they're like,
they're just so exhausted.
And so I come in and I'm like, oh,
I got you just where I want you.
Right? So I, I wanted to also respond
to a Shaq's comment about, um, first
of all, yes, herding cats.
I used to remember that commercial that they did.
It was a, I think it was a Wrangler
commercial, or I don't remember.
But anyway, they had a herd of cats
and there was a cowboy, her name.
It was hilarious. I used to start my meetings with it,
because what, what that is saying is there's
so many different inputs
and they're coming from all over the place
and nobody can make sense of them.
Well, that was my job, is to do that.
Um, but I also wanna say strategic planning is not about
options yet.
It's too soon for options.
Strategic planning is about seeing the map,
it's seeing the landscape, right?
And getting a sense of
where we wanna head on that landscape.
Once we've got that
and it's a shared understanding that has grown our viewpoint
and our view shed, then we can start looking at options.
So I find that in strategic planning, we try to get
to options too fast, you know,
and then we're like, just sort of trying to, I don't know,
pick 'em, and we're not using any common frame of reference.
So that's, that's been my experience,
That that's really key.
So I, I'm gonna bring this down a level
'cause I know there are some people on here who are sort
of project leaders and portfolio leaders.
And so the, what,
what Rebecca just talks about is absolutely critical, right?
If you, if you own a portfolio projects
and you've got responsibility for delivering,
maximizing the impact from that portfolio
to the organization, if,
if the organization doesn't actually know
what impact it wants, how can you maximize the value?
You can't. And getting,
sometimes getting the leadership team to understand
the impact of their behavior
on simple things like project success rates, project delays,
overruns, things like that, right?
Things that, things that
as PMOs you might get measured on, right?
Is things like, was my project delivered on time?
And, um, to, to scope and things like that, right?
Usually the, the root, root cause of those delays
and overruns is the fact
that the organization doesn't
really know what it's trying to achieve.
It's trying to do, do too much all at once
instead of staggering it.
And so you get resource collisions and change overload
and everything falls apart.
So how do we get the leadership team to listen if you are in
that PMO role, right?
How do you get the leadership team to listen
and to, to engage in this conversation about putting a
little more structure around it.
Now we've, we've got a little process that we go through.
If Lenora is on, if you could paste that link again, Lenora,
we call it the case for change,
which is a dis it's basically a little workshop
that we take you through to prepare your conversation
with the leadership team so that you can make it visible
that you know, the, the reason
that the things aren't landing that you want to land is
because the fundamental planning isn't in place, right?
And to ask for the help to change that.
You're not saying you guys are
idiots, you're not doing your job.
We're not saying, you know, we're not saying that,
but we're helping them understand the causal link between
the organization's inability to deliver the goals
that they want with their inability to give you the clarity
that you need, right?
And, and to be inclusive
and to take you with them on the, on the journey.
Um, so Le Lenora will drop that into the chat in a,
in a moment, but do click on that link
and, um, book yourself a case for change.
We, this is free, we do it, you know,
and you get an hour for free to, to walk through that.
Um, awesome. It'll get you set up to, to start the process.
And Ashok, who's on here, I think he went
through a little workshop where
we did it with a group of people.
Um, uh, so, you know, we, we, we do this all the time.
So if you're in that position, click on the link.
I know Lenora put it in there a little earlier.
She's maybe gone off to make a cup of tea or something.
Um, but, uh, uh, it,
it's in the chat a little higher
up if you, if you have a look.
Um, so, so let's come back, Rebecca,
to kind of the rest of the process.
We got to this sort of liminal phase where we're,
we're sort of in transition.
We know, we know that we can't stay where we are,
but we, we need to kind of move, move on
to something else. Then what?
So, well, I just wanna say also, um, one of the things
that the, the two first stages, instigation
and liminal are the hardest.
Um, not when we want change.
When we want change, we fly through these, right?
In instigation we're seeing signs of change
and we get excited and we're thrilled, like, oh, you know,
maybe I'm gonna get a new job,
or I'm gonna move to a new place.
So I just wanna be clear.
Change is not always any one thing.
It is completely dependent on situation and the person
or people who are heading into it.
And that's another thing that I found in my organizations is
that there were people for some who felt like, oh,
this change is a no brainer.
It's like, I'm happy to do it. Let's go.
And they'd be really impatient.
And then other people would be like, this is huge.
It's impossible. I can't do it.
So the thing that's operating, there's a lot
of emotion in change, a lot.
And it can be so much that what we see is actually numbing
because people have been so unable to change for so long.
The only way they can manage themselves in the
organization is to go numb.
It's one of the saddest things
that I see when I go into organizations is you're basically
death by unwillingness to change.
So, but I'm also dealing with defensiveness and anger
and, you know, cynicism
and, you know, the, I can't, we can't, we can't, we can't.
All this stuff is really, um,
preventing us from leaning into,
from moving into the change process.
So once we've actually been in the liminal
and really done that well,
and I would say that that's one of the hardest things
that's ever done, especially in corporate,
because the timetable of corporate is fast.
So one of the things I always ask the people that hire me,
I say, do you, are you willing to put the time into this?
And do you have this stamina?
Because this ain't gonna be fast.
If you wanna fast fix, go to somebody else.
'cause what I'm seeing here is
that your whole organization needs to go
through this change process together,
and that's gonna take some time.
But on the other side, you're gonna get stuff
that's gonna blow your doors off.
So it's up to you. You know,
I always just say, it's up to you.
So we have to be able to deal
with the emotions that come through.
And that's another reason I'm often hired,
because a lot of people in the C-suite don't have those
skills, and they know they don't.
And so big change and involving lots of people scares them
because they don't know how to manage all this stuff,
and they don't know what it means, right?
So that's, that's one
of the great gifts when you can help people,
you know, to get across.
Now, once you've been in the liminal for a while,
what I always notice is
that the metabolization stage just starts to show up,
and metabolization shows up in a different kind of energy.
People start, instead of being dark and kind of heavy
and confused and bummed
or whatever it is, low energy, all
of a sudden they start to laugh.
Things start to be funny, things that were really serious
and really annoying and really difficult.
All of a sudden they see a funnier side to it.
They also start getting like, ideas
that they never had thought of before,
or they'll tell me stories of things they've been able to do
that they've wanted to be able to do and couldn't.
Like one guy was my, was a, a head of, was a CIO
and he'd go into his management team presenting his budget,
and he would just get great over the coals.
They didn't understand what he was doing, they didn't like
what he was doing, and they never gave him money,
and it was just so hard for him.
He was just beaten down.
So he went through the liminal process,
and one day he calls me
and he goes, Rebecca, you're not gonna believe this.
He had gotten his whole budget,
he'd had an interesting phone call,
and I knew that was a sign that he had changed,
but he couldn't see it.
So I had to talk to him about, all right, what are you doing
that's different so that he could actually own it
and nurture it and incorporate it.
So metabolization is exactly that.
It is metabolizing the change in the system, whether
that's an individual, like a leader,
or in an entire organization.
And it takes as long as it takes to, to do
that sort of metabolization.
And we can all recognize, you know, we'll say,
wow, I did something.
And I have absolutely no idea how that happened.
That's the sign that we're moving into a new space.
So, so related to that, actually, Kevin, um, uh, just,
just shared something here, um, that, uh,
uh, you know, there's another fundamental thing, uh,
at play, which is people deciding
or not to accept the change, right?
Making sense of change.
So that's something that you talk about quite a lot, right?
Is is almost like a grieving process sometimes.
Mm-hmm. Well,
and I also love what he's saying here about organizational
changes made up of an accumulation of individual changes.
So I'm so glad you said that, Kevin,
because I always thought of myself like a conductor
of an orchestra, you know, the conductor has the score,
and the score for me was the change process.
Okay? So I'm working to get them through that process.
And while I'm working with the entire orchestra,
which is the organization, I'm also working
with the string section, the vi, you know, the,
the ani, right?
I'm also working with individual musicians.
I'm talking to the horn, you know,
the trumpeter or whatever, right?
So just like a conductor, we've gotta be able to synchronize
and work with all of the change inputs.
So if we've got somebody, for instance,
who's involved in a change in,
in bringing about a large scale change in an organization,
and they're going through a deep personal change,
like they've gotten a divorce, they've gotten a, a,
you know, a a an illness, a diagnosis of something,
they're looking at retirement, those people are also going
through change, and that's gonna have an impact
on the larger system.
So I think, I mean, I don't know if that's exactly
what you were meaning, but that's what it,
that's what it looked like for me.
Yeah, exactly. That's exactly, no, I like that.
That's great. Well, and,
and so, so I, I, I, I, I know Kevin,
so thank you for the comments, Kevin.
Um, the, so part of the challenge there is not just
implementing change as a project leader and a project
and portfolio leader, not just implementing change
and making an environment that is conducive
to change happening,
but also helping the executives
change their behavior.
And so, what do you, in, in your experience, are there any
tips for how to really wake up
the leadership team without committing career suicide?
Yeah, I think that's really, really tricky.
But we call that leading from, you know,
different places in the organization.
And I completely believe in that.
And I think you alluded to it earlier, Stuart,
when you said, you know, just asking questions,
not questions that are, you know, loaded with accusation
or blame or, you know, you're a bunch of idiots,
but really asking for, for that direction
and saying, you know, I, we feel a bit confused down here.
Could you help us with,
and then asking for those questions, that's a beginning
or else showing relationship between what you're trying
to do and what you need from them.
And just saying, you know, if we could get this,
we'd really be able to, to rock and roll.
So you're showing causation,
you're showing you're being gentle.
I also think you need to read the room.
I mean, if you've got execs that are just
to completely think they know what they're doing,
and they're very shrouded, they don't open their decisions
to anybody, it, that's not a great situation, right?
They need a consultant to come in
and kick their, you know what, you
Know what that, that sometimes that is the answer.
Bring someone from outside. Um, you know, I,
Yeah, because I have, there's no risk for me, you know,
I would say to people, if you don't
like what I'm saying, fire me.
I, I'm, I'll walk out the door right now,
but here's what you gotta hear.
Absolutely. And my guys generally would be like, oh God,
you know, she's right.
But I also wanna talk, you asked me to,
to mention something about
what goes on in the C-suite, right?
These are people, they're people just like all of us.
They're no different. And they have everything we have.
So when I was working with one guy in particular, he was,
he knew that there was a huge change in front
of his organization that he was not fully able
to bring about or even to get behind yet.
And the guy started getting migraines, intense migraines
so badly, he had to stay at home.
And I said to him, you know, I think these migraines are,
your brain is sort of exploding, and that's a good thing.
I said, I know migraines are horrible,
but just ride through it, relax, know
that I've got this over here for the time
that you need to step away.
And it was really amazing.
He did get through, it took him about three months,
and he came back and he was like a changed person.
He was able to sort of pick up where we were
and, and move forward with it.
So, I mean, I had seen some really bizarre things
when people are going through change
Ab Absolutely.
Um, there's another little comment
or question saying is it is change.
Do you see change being easier when the people where the,
the change is affecting,
have a stake in it, have a voice in it?
Um, and, and I think, you know, I mean, my my view on
that is really, really are very, very loud.
Yes. Right?
So, so, um, leadership team selecting projects, right?
They said, you know, or, or doing even above that,
doing the strategic planning, right?
If they're not involving people from across the business,
then, then the chances are there's gonna be pushback to
bits of the decision, right?
But even within a project, if you're, if you're,
imagine you're, you're sales team, um,
or there's a bunch of people for the NHS, right?
Imagine someone just says, great,
we're gonna buy a new machine
that goes ping for the cardiologist.
If the cardiologist weren't involved in
that decision, what's gonna happen?
Right? That machine that goes ping isn't gonna go ping.
Um, so, so the getting people involved is,
is really critical to landing change.
I also wanna say that's, that's another place
where leaders often feel, um, nervous
because once you open that door, they, if they don't know
how to herd cats, right?
Or they don't have any tools to help them,
then it's just like, oh, where am I?
So I just wanna say again, right, that providing leaders
with ways to involve people that are efficient
and that, that, that are productive
and not just sort of like a, you know,
getting people's all their little fussy things
and then you don't, it just ends up being a
mess is a big hurdle.
Um, I also wanna say that when you say this,
a stake in the business area, one of the,
I think really big challenges
and also big gifts of leadership is to be able
to make the connections between areas.
It's like, that's, let's go back to the orchestra,
um, metaphor.
If the ani think that everybody's boring
and that they're loud and they're cool,
and you know, they're better than the,
than the strings, right?
You're gonna have a problem.
So, but Ani understands the role of strings.
Strings understands, ani understands horns.
Everybody kind of appreciates all the musicians, right?
Even if they're not an expert in that area, right?
Then we have, we have a great, we have a, we have a chance
to do a great symphony, right?
Absolutely. So we've talked,
we've talked a little bit about, you know, there are,
there are different phases to change.
We've talked a bit about, you know, inclusion,
we've talked about the importance of inclusion, um,
talked about the importance of having a vision for
where we're going to, but not having that vision
just arbitrarily,
but taking time to develop, learn,
get different perspectives on that vision.
Mm-hmm. And which, you know, a again, is where
a really good consultant can help and,
and really good software can help structure
that process in a way that that's, so, you know, this
and this is what we do all the time.
Um, but then let, let's, let's take this sort of
along a couple of notches and, um,
'cause we, we've got about 10 minutes left.
So let's, let's talk a little bit about, okay, you're,
you're, you're a manager.
You're managing a portfolio project.
What are the things that you should be thinking about as a,
a leader of people who are doing change to other people?
What are the things that you should be thinking about,
the capabilities you should be thinking about
building in the organization, the training maybe
that we give to project managers, the culture
of having change management
and project management working together rather than fighting
for who's better, right?
All of these things. So what
are your, what are your thoughts there?
So real practical, making stuff happen. Advice,
Well, I guess I would say that
alignment all the way down an organization based on
that sort of change ability, that's what I call it.
Change ability, ability with change is really critical.
And if you're running anything, if you're managing anything,
having an uh, a facility
with change is absolutely imperative.
And what I find unfortunately is
that we don't hire with that in mind.
We don't hire for,
am I looking at somebody who's got capability in dealing
with change, not only in themselves, right?
Because we have a lot of people who are just, you know,
I'm really good at change
and what's wrong with everybody else?
Well, that's no good, right?
Everybody has different change aptitude, just like we do
with sports or numbers or even fear of heights, right?
Everybody's different. We want people in the lead
who are good with change because it's gonna happen, right?
And to build that capability, no matter at
what level you're at, just thinking
that change is being led at the C-suite is nuts.
Change is happening all the time everywhere,
at every scale, at every level.
We all know that. So making it sort of like
a baseline criteria for hiring people who are in charge
of other people and in charge of areas to me,
seems like critical.
And if you are in that area
and you don't, you feel threatened by, or freaked out by,
or, you know, your main response to change is not good.
I would say you need to up your game
and change to be able to do your job well.
And that's what thresholds of change is for, is
to help you see the change process,
help you see those indicators, see what needs
to be done in each of those ch stages.
You know, that's, that's would be my recommendation is
that you, you know, do a course on change.
Right.
Excellent. All right. I shock, I'm gonna ignore
that comment, but
Aw, that's excellent. Yes, we should,
Yeah, it sounds, sounds good.
Bit of rock and roll guitar and,
and operatic voice would be fantastic.
I used to be in a rock band too, so I can do both.
We can do both. Excellent. Yeah. Excellent.
I do enjoy a little bit of opera myself. Um, cool, cool.
But not, not at the level that you do. Um, fa fantastic.
So the, the, the key I think is, um,
is just setting that culture of change
and the expectation of inclusion, right?
So, you know,
if I'm a project manager implementing a project,
it's not my job to force people to do something.
Your job is to serve people to enable change, right?
Not to force change, it's to enable change.
And that means changing people.
So, so a shock, I I I get where you're came coming from
with the comment about, you know, it's,
it's about data that's part of it.
But you've, you've gotta carry, you've gotta carry the head.
That's where the data comes in.
But you've also gotta carry the heart
And the whole Yeah, Right.
You, you've gotta, you've gotta, you know, it's
what you were saying earlier that connecting the head
with the, the body and,
and this, this process, if you like, of managing change,
I is the, is the neck that,
that connects the two. So you've gotta connect. I
Don't, I'd also like to speak
to Mary's comment really quick before we end,
because it's very much about you and Transparent joints
and the people that are my folks that are on here today,
I think came to learn about it.
I just wanna say that the thing that's extraordinary
to me about decision software and,
and so much fun about working with Transparent Choice
and Stewart and his team is that it is,
it is not making the decision for you.
What it is doing is it is exposing some of the elements
of decision making that are very hard to see
unless they're built into a software.
If you have to load a software with strategic criteria
that makes sense and that are shared, now all
of a sudden you gotta do that, which is what a lot
of leaders aren't doing, right?
So that's a beautiful thing.
The other thing that transparent choices so great for,
and I said this very early in the,
in the conversation today, is you can bring in hundreds
of people into a decision space efficiently.
And when you have big change, you want to bring in lots
of people, not just inside the organization,
but also outside.
So I encourage anybody that's facing big change
and asking a lot of questions to reach out to Stewart
because transparent choice is just rock and cool.
It is rock and cool. I love it.
That's super nice of you to say.
And, and Mary, thank you for, for that, uh,
Mary, yes, absolutely.
In fact, the, the situations
where Rebecca's used it has not been in a for-profit.
It was, it was, uh, very much around forestry and,
and, uh, for mission type organization.
Um, and, and, and the, you know, the reason,
the reason the software works by the way is because,
because we're, we're not super clever,
but we're clever enough to know that if there's
research out there that clever people have done
that tells you how to do something, the smart thing is to go
and read that research and then build software
that does it, right?
So the software works
because it's built on the psychology research,
the decision science research into what actually works,
how groups of people make decisions that stick.
Uh, and, and I actually have books up on the shelf in front
of me here, uh, about, about that
and how bad people are at making decisions
and why decisions fail.
We've got those, at least two Nobel laureates up there
talking about decision making
and how, how, how it fails, right?
So, um, it's not rocket science.
It's well understood, but not well
understood by enough people.
So, you know, come get involved
and that'd be, that'd be awesome.
Um, so just before we, just
before we wrap up, um, with the thank yous, um, don't forget
to book that case for change.
So if you are that, uh, you know, if you're in that sort
of portfolio lead role
or the cha transition, uh, transformation role,
and you're struggling to get the executives to really focus
and support you in this change journey the way you need,
book that case for change,
and we will help you put together a case for change, right?
Make, make something, something happen.
Um, uh, so with that, I, I see
that all the applause going up.
Thank you Rebecca, for sharing your thoughts and wisdom.
That was great. Um, we have, uh,
a question from Rebecca actually for the audience, um,
which is, we were talking about, um,
doing a session on strategy, right?
Strategy as a word, gets thrown around an awful lot.
So what is it and what, you know, what do you need
to know if you're in the change in transformation space?
What do you need to know about strategy?
You hear strategic alignment thrown around all the time.
What on earth does that actually mean? Who does strategy?
Whose job is it? The answer is all of us, by the way.
Um, uh, so if you would be interested in that session,
drop me a quick yes please into the chat,
and we will, we will make
that happen at some point in the, in the future.
Uh, so there you go. We got, we got at least
one, one little vote in there.
Um, super. So there's a, there's a few of those coming in so
that, that feels like something that we, that we need to do.
Um, and, uh, so we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll, uh,
we'll bring Rebecca into that and maybe one or two others
because that one, that's one where there are
as many definitions of strategy as there are people
who know how to spell it. Uh,
Well, I just wanna say too, I'm totally open to chatting
with anybody about your situation.
I'm fascinated by this stuff.
Literally, I'm a geek about change.
So, you know, feel free to reach, reach out.
I think we put my website and stuff so people can find me.
Also, the, um, the LinkedIn platform is there.
So, brilliant. Yeah, I'm really open to talking to anybody.
And, and Lenora will be sending out an email in the next
day or so with the recording
and with the slides, so you can pick up Rebecca's details
from the slides and, um, you know, do go get a copy
of the book so you can kind of digest some of these ideas
on, uh, on your own time.
Um, definitely worth, definitely worth reading.
Um, so thank you
Stuart. Becca,
thank you as ever.
It's an absolute pleasure speaking with you for once.
We've managed to keep it to an hour.
Um, when we were working together, by the way, um,
because of the time difference, it was always late at night,
my time and, and I'd, so I'd go onto a conference call at,
you know, eight in the eight in the evening,
and my wife would say, is this with Rebecca?
I'm like, yes, I'm just gonna bed.
I'm not even gonna try and wait for you. Right?
I'd crawl into bed at midnight.
So we managed to keep it to an hour. Hey, well done.
So thank you everybody.