No Way Out
Welcome to the No Way Out podcast where we examine the variety of domains and disciplines behind John R. Boyd’s OODA sketch and why, today, more than ever, it is an imperative to understand Boyd’s axiomatic sketch of how organisms, individuals, teams, corporations, and governments comprehend, shape, and adapt in our VUCA world.
No Way Out
Ditch Outsourced Thinking: Unleash the Power of Red Teaming w/ Dimbleby & Corella
Ponch, Jose, and Marcus discuss the critical importance of internal capability within organizations, the dangers of outsourcing thinking, and the transformative power of Red Teaming. They explore the role of the chief of staff in driving change, the necessity of training and development, and the challenges faced in agile transformations. The discussion also touches on mental health in leadership and the need for a holistic approach to organizational change, emphasizing the importance of relationships and empowerment in fostering a thriving workplace culture.
Learn how to cultivate a culture of openness and accountability where strategies are challenged fearlessly. The conversation underscores the significance of expert guidance in leveraging complex tools, akin to receiving expert advice in sports. Delve into compelling examples of how red teaming can revolutionize corporate strategy by addressing nuanced challenges and promoting agility through varied perspectives.
Rounding off the discussion, we reflect on the evolving roles within leadership, spotlighting the Chief of Staff as a pivotal transformation agent. The challenges of implementing Agile principles throughout organizations are scrutinized, revealing the potential pitfalls of misapplication. With insights drawn from high-reliability fields and personal development, discover how adaptive leadership and strategic alignment can foster environments where new leaders emerge, creating a dynamic and engaged workforce ready to tackle the future.
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Substack: The Whirl of ReOrientation
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Recent podcasts where you’ll also find Mark and Ponch:
All right, let's not outsource thinking. It's a good place to start. Today, our guests are Jose and Marcus. They are calling in from Dallas and Cyprus respectively. So right before we came on live, we talked about not outsourcing thinking. I want to start there. Why do you bring that up? And, more importantly, why shouldn't organizations do that?
Speaker 2:Marcus, why don't you get us started? And I can layer in uh, how that's come to life, how we do that?
Speaker 3:yeah, exactly so. Jose knows well about this. Because why shouldn't you do this? Because, as we often say, we think a lot of the answers if not all of the answers lie within the organizations themselves. So if you're going to outsource to the big consultants who we know we all love to hate and allow them to come in and think on your behalf, allow them to come in and take over the cognitive domain as you will if your organization, then you shouldn't be surprised when things don't work out as you planned. Or if they do, then after the consultancies leave and you're left behind to pick up the pieces that it's not worked out again as you expected.
Speaker 3:So we like to say that outsourcing thinking is not a good idea. Outsourcing a lot of capability is not a good idea, and the way we're moving today, so much of the world, requires bespoke tailored capability. So you've got to have that internal capability, your own people and that's requiring the upskilling that we're seeing today. So there's a lot of old skills out there. We talk about Barry O'Reilly and his book Unlearn. If you've not read that, I highly recommend that to the listeners. We've got to unlearn a lot of the things we learned previously and relearn or learn new skills that are going to allow us to go forward, and they've got to be internal.
Speaker 3:Yes, we bash consultants constantly and it's because it's not consulting. It's because they've taken what consulting is and used to be and used and abused it. If you need consulting which is bringing in expertise that you don't have, that's great. Do that. That's what we get brought in for to help people unleash that thinking internally. But once you've done that, you don't need anyone else to do it for you. You've got that internal capability. You're now insourced, and that continuous drive and evolution is something that you can then organically grow and take you forward.
Speaker 1:Hey, marcus, that's a horrible business model, by the way. I know Right, I know Exactly. You run yourself out of an organization because you're building internal capability.
Speaker 3:That's not going to scale? Man, I've got bad news for you. Doesn't need to, because you've got people queuing up at the door to take you to the next place, so it's high volume quick turn, and that's what we need in the world right now.
Speaker 1:I agree you think about outsourced thinking right now. I think we're all susceptible to it with our electronic cigarettes here, our iPhones, our access to the internet, our electronic nicotine. I know a lot of my thinking is done by Fox News and CNN and whatever else somebody that I'm following and the echo chamber that I'm following. We just saw some recent developments from large corporations that are potentially providing information to people. That isn't surprising. So, using some language from some of the things that we talked about here on the show, people do not like to be surprised by information. So when you go into an organization and you tell them that you have some potential tools that they can use and we can talk about red teaming tools a little bit later on but you provide them some tools that look different from what the large consultancies are giving them, they're more than likely going to push you away, and that's what I've seen over time. I just want to get your thoughts on that, both of your thoughts. Have you seen that as well and if so, what can you do about it?
Speaker 2:Hey, marcus, let me take a stab at that, because I do think there's some utility to bring outside in thinking, right, fresh thinking, but I think it's the consulting piece. Tell us where our problems lie. It's to come in and you have to. Almost the internal organization has to train them first on the business and I think the biggest miss is that they come in and do the thinking, they create a plan and then that plan has to get executed by the organization. So very few consultants will come in and talk about the how right. Which is kind of what you're pushing at.
Speaker 2:Punch is that when you come in and you're teaching teams and saying, hey look, you know your strategies, you know your categories, you know where the biggest opportunities lie in terms of growth and driving growth for your business and for all of your stakeholders, including your shareholders. Let's talk about how do we unleash that excellence within the organization. That's different than coming out and saying these are the problems, you have the problems. No one's going to know your problems better than the internal organization. So it's really important to distinguish that you do want some fresh outside thinking, but it's really focused more on the how you execute versus here's the things that I need you to execute like in terms of the why and the big sky thinking that's different.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 1:So there's a point I want to bring up here about control is outside and bottom up right, and what we mean by that is generally, if you're developing a product or service, the control of your organization is going to be driven by your customer or client, right, the whole purpose of an organization is to create a customer, and if that customer doesn't exist, then you're going to implode as an organization.
Speaker 1:The same idea is true as outside-in thinking, by bringing people in who have a different perspective, mainly of the external environment.
Speaker 1:They're the right people to bring in to help you see things that you couldn't see before because you've been looking I guess it's an insert, look looking inside your organization, and something that Jose and I were talking about before we hit the record button there was the number of jobs that we've held, either because we spent time in the military or we spent time in corporations, has allowed us to see things that an executive who spent 25 years with a Fortune 40 company hasn't been able to see.
Speaker 1:So we bring those new sets of perspectives, if you will, to an organization and, by the way, we bring this crazy thing and again we're going to hit on this for a moment maybe a couple of things the concept of red teaming and maybe even the concept of chief of staff. So I want to kind of go in that direction because I know you're big into red teaming. Looking at your book here how we can leverage mitigating cognitive biases, critical thinking and so forth but building on the chief of staff concept and red teaming, tell us what that brings into an organization if you're looking at it from the lens of a leader.
Speaker 2:I'll start with red teaming and Marcus, flip it over to you to kind of share your perspective when we first started working together. And so, yeah, the concept of red teaming is the how right. We'll talk about the strategy. I was in global marketing at the time in a previous role, and it requires a leader to say you know what? I love the work that my team is doing. We have a good strategy, we have a business case, but, hey, jose, I need your help. So, on the global marketing side, and this president of the business unit said I need your help in help me think differently about this potential area of improvement. And so it starts there. You have to have that sponsorship at the highest level. It's going to break the ties, it's going to continue to drive accountability within the organization and for the project. And so it was a great opportunity for me to say, all right, cool, let me bring all the vast experience that I have the diverse experiences, the variety, you know, chief of staff stuff and in military intelligence and everything that I've done to bear.
Speaker 2:And I landed on red teaming as the way to help interrogate a strategy without having to bring an outside consultant to talk about the strategy. It's more like we have a strategy. We know, we know what the product is, we know what the consumer is, we know what the unmet need is. We had all this stuff. How do we make it better? Red teaming is the way, and that's when marcus and I met and we started talking about how to make this particular, this team, this idea, this initiative, that much stronger, almost basically, uh, what is the best? Ideas are done through the crucible of fire. That's where red teaming comes in way into play.
Speaker 3:Marcus any builds on that yeah, just Just to build on the top level support. I think if you want to do the formal red teaming, where you are formally doing the deep dive analysis of a plan, of a strategy, something that somebody's baby and you don't want to be going and calling it ugly in the wrong way because that's going to get you fired very quick. That is a bad business model. So I think, formally, if you're going to do this analysis, having that top level understanding is crucial and where we've had our most success with clients previously is where you've had the C-suite sponsorship and they really get it and you don't have to spend a lot of time with them. You just educate them very quickly in 90 minute workshop so they're aware of what it's all about, understand what it's going to give them. But then you're getting their backing. And if they can go into the room and go hey, everybody, here's what's happening, you've got my full sponsorship, you've got my full backing to think differently, to challenge each other, to call out what you think is the BS of this plan, et cetera, then that just opens the door. So it saves your job of trying to be the outsider coming in to push the door open, which the tools allow you to do. But just having that sponsorship just makes it so much more slick and we've talked about that. I mean that spine of seniority throughout the organization helping you at each level. And then I think, once you then upskill the teams in it, it's you bringing in the outside in thinking, but you're then unlocking the internal thinking and that's the beauty of that. And that is the bad business model where you can quickly do that and step away of that. And that is the bad business model where you can quickly do that and step away.
Speaker 3:And I, I think, and someone said to this recently, they said, the secret sauce that you guys have aren't the tools and techniques you use, it's the way you enable the people to use them. And this, this has come from the army, you know. You go through their handbook and there's 50 of these, what look like really complex tools, but the way they've mapped them out and the way you do them, apply them, them, it's super quick. The sort of pedagogical approach to learning, steps one through seven. Do it this way off you go Very similar to liberating structures.
Speaker 3:So you can literally teach people in an afternoon using it on their current work, on their strategy. So it's not training. So if you get in the budget constraints, you're doing actual consultancy on real work. But then the next day they're off to the races, they're using it themselves, they're training their own teams with it and you're onto the next technique, the next set of tools. So very quickly they can almost have an armory of capability that, as you step away, it's there for them to then use at their own abusive nature, as they need to do. But again you've got that authority, which is what allows it to then permeate across the organization.
Speaker 1:So I think you know Nigel Thurlow. He once shared with me that you know there's people out there that have a lot of experience right and it's that experience that we bring to the fight, if you want to call it a fight or to the corporation. The UFMCS Red Teaming Guide is available online. Anybody can download it for free right now. Anybody can pick it up and go out there and say this is what you need to do. Why is that a bad idea to have somebody just download that book or that free guide and just try to implement it? I mean because they can right, or is it a good idea?
Speaker 3:I think it's a bad idea. It's like anything. I can take any book, any manual and I can interpret and go and have a go, which is fine and we've seen that happen. But it's like anything. If you just have a consultant, slash expert, show you. It's like you know, I don't play golf. I could spend all day at the golf range swinging the bat. As long as it takes Ten minutes with an expert, just show me some positioning, some stance, some swing positioning boom, I'm off all day long. I'm 100% improved within five minutes. So, yes, by all means, have a go.
Speaker 3:But also, as we know, with these tools and tanks, they are very powerful and used in the wrong hands or used the wrong way, and literally we had a coach go off and do think, write, share and kudos to them. They came back and they said we made a complete hash of this. It all went. It went really bad. We hadn't pre-briefed the team about how powerful this is, what it's going to do. It unleashed a massive can of worms. Everybody started getting really antsy and I'm like wow. And he's like what did I do wrong? So I asked what he did and then I walked him through what he should have done he's like I can't, but I can't believe I missed the fundamentals, but that's all it is.
Speaker 1:None of this stuff is hard.
Speaker 3:But if you're arrogant, stupid, under pressure enough to go and just grab something off your shelf, I wouldn't give my kids the car keys and go. Go and read the highway code and go drive the car. Yeah, you know an hour in the car is going to give them a fighting chance, and I think that's why you shouldn't do that sort of stuff.
Speaker 1:You know, I have a similar experience. We used Dave Snowden's Ritual Descent and Red Team so an external, internal view of the world and I remember it got spread around the company and then somebody asked me hey, can you come in and do a ritual descent? I'm like, okay, and they explained what they wanted. I'm like that's not what this is. You need a red team which we can provide you red teaming techniques, and ritual descent could be one of them. However, what you're asking me is not a ritual descent. And they went and said, well, that's what we want. And I'm like, okay, well, I happen to know somebody who wrote a book on this and that's not what it is.
Speaker 1:So, uh, yeah, I, I, I agree with you, the, the, and I want to go back to your military experience, both of your military experience and red teaming. Uh, or why you have 20 plus years of red teaming experience. Um, that experience that you know I had in the cockpit, red teaming which we didn't call it red teaming back then, which is just, it's just good practice, right, we live this for. You know, I don't know how I spent 28 years in the military, something like that, but that 28 years of experience, I've seen strategy. I've seen operations, you know, I've done air show demonstrations, I've done all these things. That helps me bring that. I hate to call it a mindset, by the way that, thinking over to an organization or corporation, I want to get your background on it. Where did you first come across red teaming? Was it in your military service? And just some ideas on that. Where did you come across this the first time?
Speaker 2:Yeah, for me it started in school Squadron officer, actually reserve, I think. School we read a couple of different books centered around red teaming, the OODA loop of course, just everything. Military doctrine. You kind of learn the doctrine right. They didn't say, okay, now apply this to your everyday jobs, everyday jobs. And then, as I became, when I went to active duty, I actually used it in a classroom scenario planning when I was in military intelligence school. So then I knew the idea, the thinking of red teaming and what it's supposed to do and, to your point, we didn't really call it that. We just kind of it's more about interrogating the strategies from an outside end perspective where things can go wrong. But then I grew up in the corporate world. You never heard about it. You would see it as called as war gaming, which I think is I don't really like that term. It's kind of a dumb term. It's like you're not really gaming war. War isn't a game.
Speaker 2:So it's kind of, why are you doing that? So I said hey, I don't like this term. Why did kind of, why are you doing that? Um, so I said hey, I don't like this term, but why did this introduce the concept of red teaming? And then that started to catch a little bit more uh momentum behind it.
Speaker 2:And about breaking that inertia, I do want to revisit something you said punished in terms of outside in thinking. And how do you break the inertia of, hey, I want a consultant to come and tell me what I need to do. And then that company that hired you said I want to do specifically this one exercise because I read about it in this book and they don't want to change it because they're trying to find that sweet spot of I don't want to bring in this big consultant to teach me the what, but I also don't want to learn or relearn or unlearn how I've been doing things in the past and how I'm going to get to where I need to be. And I think that's really critical.
Speaker 2:Is that finding that nuance where guys like you, like you know, like, like you punch and Marcus are, find that niche where you say I'm going to bring in a certain level, a different type of thinking and a different type of application. But then I'm going to go away because I need you guys to execute it. You own it, you know the idea, you know where the opportunities lie, but to kind of bring it full circle. Yeah, that was my experience using Red Team early in the military and then really trying to introduce it into the corporate world, and I used it on a discrete project for a global marketing when I was in my global marketing organization and then when I transitioned to corporate strategy and transformation, I trained my whole team on how to do it, because we were talking to business units and agile teams and product teams and every type of team you could think about. We use red teaming as the way to deconstruct the barriers of adoption.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so I have a similar experience as you on the US side. Actually, I went to Air Command and Staff College, so that's where I first got exposed to some of the formal training and, of course, the loop down there as well. But, marcus, you might have a different experience. I believe there's some red team documents out of the uh, it might be the royal air force actually. So, yeah, yeah, a little bit different experience hands.
Speaker 3:But, yeah, my background fighter controller, so I was controlling guys like you screaming around the air, doing air combat and obviously in the UK, our position in with Russia. So we had the Red Forces coming over often, as they are still doing now, most recently and then we were running Blue Forces, so Red 4 v Blue 4. And the whole concept then became, as you mentioned, jose, this war gaming, which is still going strong, and I just did a blog on this the other day. Somebody commented about it and it was like you know, war gaming without effective red teaming is ineffective war gaming. You can't do one without the other. And so often the military guys believe they are red teaming when they're just war gaming and they're not. And that's why often it's just about, well, who's going to win? Where really war gaming is about learning. It's about doing analysis and learning insights to see what might happen and how you're going to implement that.
Speaker 3:And then, going through my career, I did a tour with the us marine corps in arizona 2000 to 2004, a game deployed to iraq, with them constantly planning what, what is the enemy going to do to us? And again, that that's not war gaming. That was constantly making our plans and then spinning the table around and sitting on the other side going right. If we do this, how could this be perceived by the local populace of the nation we're going into? The enemy isn't always the dude firing at you. The enemy could be the customer's perspective. The enemy could be the host nation you're going into and, as I moved into then the commercial world and got into, I'll say it, punch agile Again. Why were we effective at delivering transformations and capability and business agility? Because we read team things. We considered the enemy in this case was the customer, the business, the executive. You know, when everybody thinks it's just you doing this at the front line as the agile team, well, no, we all need to be this. So why aren't the executive understanding this? Why aren't the business playing ball? Why is just IT interested? And ultimately, the ultimate enemy as business is the customer.
Speaker 3:As you said right at the beginning. If you don't have that outside in, coming in and you're not considering that, and just, I remember one of the metrics we created was cause again, I'll punch all these different scrum metrics that we all love to hate I just I went into one's team. I said, right days till a day since I last spoke to a customer, get that on your JIRA board and you know every time you go back and if it's like seven days later, 14, so you haven't spoke to your number one enemy customer in what 14 days? Now 21 days, and then all these problems are backing up and what? And you've still have. Hey, marcus, we've got a problem. I know you do. Look at your board. What's your screaming problem? We're on day 28. Uh, day 28. You haven't spoke to the end user of your product. Yeah, do you think?
Speaker 3:you should. No, I get that. So to me that's always been this and again, we've never used the term red teaming per se. It's just this alternative perspectives. So again, understanding who your stakeholders are, understanding who the influence is outside of that stakeholder ring. Somebody's going to have influence and the more we're connected today, as we know, with social media, with external input, geopolitical landscape, we're all hyper connected. So somebody, something, somewhere, is going to impact what you're doing. And if you've not taken that alternative perspectives approach and not only understood it and I know steve rockoff talked about, but but respected it, you have to respect your enemy and if you don't, you're a fool. And when things go wrong and you haven't done that, then you've only got yourself to blame.
Speaker 1:Mark it's one of the things that I we try to help uh, clients with this understand, um, what you can do within a team and what you should do externally. So, just using the three of us as an example, um, and you put a boundary around us and say, hey, the three of us are on a team and we have some external customer or opponent it doesn't matter, right now it's somebody on the outside of our bubble. What are the tools and techniques from you know, red teaming tools and techniques that you would use internally to help us understand the external environment?
Speaker 3:So internally. So we are a collected team, high performing, know each other, trust each other. So we would be a red teaming. Yeah, we've got tools and techniques that allow us to be red teaming the collective name for using these tools and techniques. So we could use something like think right share, and this was a.
Speaker 3:This is a great point I want to emphasize here, because one of the game, one of the coaches, used this the other day with a team and she came back and said they pushed back and said we don't need that, we have psychological safety and trust. That's only one reason. A you think you do and you may well. But also the flip side of think right shares. It removes the bias because, again, if I use think right, if we ask each other a question as I start to write something or say it and you hear it, your cognitive bias is by default because your brain's lazy, it's going to go hey, we'll follow what marcus said and riff off of that. Yeah, rather than taking that moment of mindfulness to come up with your own thoughts.
Speaker 3:So the two for one, if you will, with think right share, is yes, you can get anonymity, ergo psychological safety, quickly if you need it. But B, even if you have all of that and even if you do, you don't, you just think you do, but even if you do have that, then you get that bias prevention. So that's a real simple tool. And then looking at the outside environment, simple stuff stakeholder management, stakeholder mapping, influencer mapping, whatever you want to call it real clarity on who is out there, who's around you. And then, as Jose mentioned it, scenario planning, alternative futures analysis is what they call it what-if analysis. So really drawing that circle of control around you, then the circle of influence and what's beyond those, and seeing which of the tools, almost the domino effect of we topple it. Where does it?
Speaker 3:take us we could do a pre-mortem almost the domino effect of we topple it. Where does it take us? We could do a pre-mortem, use the analysis from a pre-mortem which we know from Gary Klein. And that's what I love about all the tools and techniques there's over 50 in the handbook and there's a British handbook, there's an Australian book, there's CIA so many great tools and techniques out there. You blend them in with liberating structures, blend them in with some of the agile toolkits and capabilities out there and you've got a real sweet, sweet, if you will a suite of tools that is really effective. And if you've got some smart people who've been upskilled on how to use them they've not just pulled them off the shelf and taken the car keys then you can get a real, real, powerful outcome very quickly. And what I also love about it, it brings alignment.
Speaker 3:I've talked to three clients this week. The root cause analysis of all of their problems was a lack of alignment. So they're all working in the old stovepipes massive cross-team dependencies. Nobody's talking, zero alignment of just the basic clarity and understanding of what they're all trying to achieve. And once you get that very quickly using certain tools and techniques, everything there is, you're pushing an open door. It just starts to be a lot easier because, again, as we say, most organizations die from self-inflicted wounds. Most of the problems, 70% of the problems an organization is facing are caused by internal. What do you call it, jose?
Speaker 2:MVB, minimal, viable, bure, viable bureaucracy is what we're trying to achieve, and I want to pick up on that, yeah yeah let me pick up on there, because I think you were talking about external.
Speaker 2:You both said kind of like the external enemies could be customers, competitive environment, the political landscape, whatever it is right, one of the things that this goes back to. I'm going to kind of tie back to punch your question about the role of the chief of staff can do and or generals can do. That's internal and they're charged to be the and I can't think of a better metaphor but like the lightning rod, essentially, but also the ultimate dot connector is that. So, yeah, there's absolutely red teaming techniques that you need to do when you're looking at putting something out and you, you have it in your system. Punch in terms of the flow system customer first, value, delivery, right. Always focus on the customer first.
Speaker 2:Customer doesn't care about all of our internal strategy, about how we do anything like that, and so what I've really focused on and all the roles that I've held, especially over the last four years or so, is almost the enemy within, and I think you just covered it, marcus, right, it's what is that? Bureaucratic inertia? How, internally, are we clear on what the priorities are in terms of how we work and how we communicate to our teams and the chief of staff's ultimate job is to drive congruency across all of those departments. We did a simple exercise that I basically kind of created from my boss, brilliant woman. She says like hey, I wonder if our team just our leadership team has clarity on what our number one priority is. And so I just went and asked each individual what is the number one thing that we're going to do?
Speaker 1:And I came back with 14 number one things, and then we also did the activity you did or actually did is basically a think write, share, because you went to them individually right, but collectively you can still do that in a room using TWS. We did it both.
Speaker 2:We did individually first TWS to get that. Yeah, we did it both. We did individually. First, you tell me what you think my priority is and lay out the priorities for all of your team members. It was a really cool exercise, a think-write-share exercise focused on prioritization. And then we collectively got together and I put it up. I put a big grid on the screen and everybody was like, oh interesting, we came up with, you know, 12, 24 different priorities different, or you think I should be doing that? I didn't know. You thought that's what I should be doing, so it was also just tracking that. Inertia, bureaucracy, whatever it is, and just lack of communication, psychological safety, I think I mean, yeah, that's an ambition, but it doesn't happen automatically when you said that no, we don't need to do this.
Speaker 2:We don't need to do think right, share, because we have psychological safety. That's like an immediate red flag, right? I mean, you have to constantly do think right, share, yeah, what is that it's an assumption, isn't it?
Speaker 3:and you know we've got the key assumptions. Check as a tool itself which we look at the documentation, the strategies, the plans. What are the assumptions in these? But go back a step. What assumptions are we all making? The three, the strategies, the plans, what are the assumptions in these? But go back a step. What assumptions are we all making?
Speaker 3:The three of us come into a room together and you see this all the time with the big room planning strategy sessions. You walk in a room and everybody has an assumption about everybody else, that everyone knows a certain level, has a certain thing, is bringing a certain capability. And as you go through the day you realize that that assumption is just wishful thinking. But you've wasted so much time and one of my big mantras is slow down and speed up. And if you just take 10 minutes, 15 minutes, to level, set the room again, going back to alignment, what are assumptions? Am I walking in here? I'm assuming that, jose, you've read the documentation, you're up to speed, you've brought all the skills I expected you to do, have you? Well, no, great, in that case, everybody. Let's just take 10 minutes to read up on the document. So we're all at the playing field level, or? Hey, ponch, I believe that you were working here last year and you did this there. Is that true? Well, no, I did that. Okay, great, I'm so glad I knew that, because I was expecting you to come in in two hours in this next set of techniques we're going to be doing, and bring that piece of information. You don't have that. No, do you know who does? Yeah, susan, great, let's call Susan and get her here because we're going to need that.
Speaker 3:So, this fundamental simplicity of what is human nature, the assumption that we've all got psychological safety, so we don't need to do think right. Share, the assumption that we all know what each other's thinking and they're bringing to the game, yeah, just things that we don't take the time to just consider because we're all under the cosh of speed, we're all in a rush to just get on with it and do that. Solutionizing and I think that's one of the most powerful things that we see with clients is just just chill, let's just take some time, let's just, let's just look out the window, let's just talk to each other, let's just make sure that we're all on the same song sheet on the level playing field. Because if you're not and you set off, you ain't going to be going as fast as you think you are, and when you get terminal velocity, all the wheels are going to come off and you're not going to know why.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's one of the best approaches for a retrospective or debrief is to begin put it towards the top clearly, and that is to ask folks what is it you were trying to do?
Speaker 1:What was the shared goal? And then, if you have the 14 shared goals or, excuse me, 14 different goals, you were never a team to begin with, right, and sometimes you know that's okay, because some of the games we play if you want to use game, you know sports as a metaphor here Sometimes we're a wrestling team and we do have 14 different goals because we have 14 different matches or whatever, and that's all context dependent. And then I want to go back to what Jose was talking about with the lightning rod metaphor. That's what I kind of feel like when we're consultants, because we bounce around throughout the organization, we do these red teaming techniques and we see things that leaders don't necessarily see because they're behind their PowerPoint and their outlook. But the chief of staff role, if I'm hearing this correctly, jose, as we're running around as lightning rods, as consultants and helping build the internal capability, and maybe that's a leading question who should be leading this type of initiative throughout an organization once the consultants leave because they have a bad business model?
Speaker 2:That's the chief of staff. You said it right. I feel like you were setting me up. You're like here's the softball and boom, and that's the key. I get to be an internal lightning rod and I can bring in outside in help or wherever needed to kind of drive that congruency across the organization, because you don't want consistency. Consistency could sometimes lead to groupthink or consensus. We don't want that right. The external environment changes so fast that you just need to be rowing in one direction versus necessarily all kind of just being what's it called reaching consensus towards the lowest common denominator.
Speaker 2:So that lightning rod metaphor is exactly right and because I report to the principal, to the head of the business, it works out such that I have the what's it called the authority, the credibility, the wherewithal to be able to say this is going to help the entire organization.
Speaker 2:She has a business unit leader, she's driving, she's making sure she's communicating upwards to our stakeholder, internal stakeholders, to our c-suite, all that kind of stuff really driving innovation, bringing in the right people. There needs to be someone that's going around connecting all those dots, looking, looking for barriers, breaking down those barriers and bringing that back to the organization, back to the internal leadership team to say, okay, do you all know what's happening in your organization? Because they're telling me and it works, because they, I'll give you a different perspective If I was an outside in person, coming in and trying to be that lightning rod. As soon as I leave, they're not going to do anything. But since I'm there persistently, I'm able to continuously be that change leader, that transformation leader, that red teamer, that what's it called the challenger of all the strategies, not because I'm just trying to be a pain in the butt, but because my job is to eliminate barriers, reduce friction, minimize the bureaucracy. So, internally, so that we can satisfy our commercial excellence, so that we're focused on the consumer and the customer.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:So do you think?
Speaker 1:back to. Sorry, go on. No, I was just going back to the chief of staff role. We've seen it grow a little bit over the last five or seven years. Are you still seeing it grow in other organizations other than the one you're in?
Speaker 2:I am. So I recently joined the chief of staff association. It's an organization out of the UK, I think, and I joined them just this year because I obviously took on the role and I wanted to benchmark myself and continuously drive my learning and my development. I did a chief of staff role when I was in the Air Force we call them probably exec officers, right and I love that role because it kind of played to my strengths. And so they're now coming into the commercial world. You see it in startups as well, because startups have so many different things happening into the commercial world. You see it in startups as well, because startups have so many different things happening Through the work.
Speaker 2:With the Chief of Staff Association you see I've talked to, we did a recent what's it called just work group meeting with, I don't know, 20, 60, something like that. It's a huge number of chiefs of staff and I was put into a room of 20. And just in the room we were talking about the various roles that we each all have within our organization nonprofit, for-profit, startup, you name it. We kind of covered the gamut and although we all see similar problems, similar challenges being that lightning rod, being that transformation agent, building the capability, challenging the leadership all the things that you would kind of tick off for a chief of staff. It comes to life differently, but ultimately we're all in service to our customer, our principal, as well as the organization which we serve.
Speaker 2:And so you're starting to see that the chief of staff role, especially at the high levels of leadership because you need that sponsorship that Marcus was talking about is creating more incremental value because it's a persistent role, not necessarily a one and done come in for three to six months and just kind of do our strategy and leave. I get to do all of that. I get to do the strategy, I get to do the operations, I get to do the commercial excellence, I get to build the capabilities. So I think in the next five to 10 years people are going to start seeing the value of having a chief of staff role that can make the connect those dots, be that ultimate generalist that's independent but also dependent, and drive that transformation within your organization for sure.
Speaker 1:Can you bring together a disparate maybe disparate ideas, such as I'll use human and organization performance, hop from the safety world, safety to safety differently and agile Is that? Is that something that the chief of staff role should be doing, as well as looking at on the spectrum from resilience, agility to innovation, or do those need to be broken down into silos?
Speaker 2:I think they need to be looked at as a suite of tools, a suite of practices dependent on the challenge, right? Because in corporate you create annual business plans, you create annual operating plans, but you also create three-year, five-year strategic growth models all this kind of stuff and getting the thinking through the organization in service to creating incremental value for your end user or your primary customer. You might have to use one or multiple of those techniques, depending on what you're trying to do within the given year. The context If you have a lot of innovation coming through, you might need agile teams or some agile practices, maybe some scrum teams to kind of to get the innovation launch faster. If you're trying to scale a learning or scale a capital investment across multiple regions, you might have to do some other type of scaled learning or scaled adaptation of lean or waterfall or something like that.
Speaker 2:So it just depends on where you are in the organization what's the big objective for the year? Because you have to track all your performance on a quarterly basis, especially if you're a publicly traded company. So the chief of staff needs to be able to work with their principal and the leadership team to say what tools and techniques do we need. Where are we? We need to assess ourselves first. It always starts internally first. Do we have the right capabilities and the right and I know the mindset word can be polarizing, but do we have the right mindset to be able to do the things we need to do? If yes, once we're operating as a high performing team and we're cascading and pushing the decisions down to the team and it becomes a two-way street, then the techniques and tools that we apply just vary depending on the business need.
Speaker 1:Hey, marcus, you had something before. We jumped into that and if you don't recall then I'm going to throw something at you that may be hot. And that's the state of Agile.
Speaker 3:State of Agile. Yeah, we'll come to that. No, I was just thinking, as Jose was talking about Chief of Staff, and thinking back to the days where and you'll remember this in the military, the knowledge wall you go in these big operations rooms and you've got these multi-screens. It started off with the old boards and China graphs but obviously moved to digital and you'd walk in and there'd be 20, 30, 50 screens running and there's live feeds, there's data, there's spreadsheets, there's chat rooms going on and the general's there, the senior in charge, is looking at all this and taking all this information and this has all been run by some super smart whip, junior, young lieutenant and the XO's in there helping that lieutenant get the feeds up, get who, so he he's calling out, he's like the ringmaster, the orchestra conductor who's enabling all this. And that's what I'm seeing the sort of chief of staff role becoming nowadays in businesses and many organizations are creating the awful term the war room of what's in big banking. They have this war room where you walk in and again there's tv screens everywhere and with the amount of data coming in and ian con said this is now revolution, not evolution we can't keep up. There's too much stuff coming in that literal hose pipe effect, but it's multi-hose pipes now. So you need some smart group and I think this is going to go beyond the wit of a single chief of staff as we start to grow and see the requirement of this.
Speaker 3:Ultimately, knowledge management or information management, to turn it into knowledge, to turn it into how you make quality decisions. So I think the chief of staff is going to be he's the ring master of all of that. You're going to have the, the team below him, running around coordinating, collecting all this information and data, doing the analysis and then presenting, be it digitally, be it on a one-page memo, whatever, to give the executive the information they need to make decisions or to give whoever. Again, we need to move away from the executive decision-making, we need to devolve it. But somebody, somewhere and I think we're in an age now of knowledge and information management that's moving so rapidly and I think we're in an age now of knowledge and information management that's moving so rapidly, that's so dense, so congested and contested out there Somebody in an organization has to be coordinating all of that and corralling it and filtering it, because it's just too much In the military.
Speaker 3:I remember in Iraq there was just too much intel coming in too many target prints, just like overloaded, literally T much too much Intel coming in too many target prints, you know just like overloaded. You know literally TMI too much information. So I think that is a. As the cause is becoming a, a recognized role, I think let's get ahead. If you're out there listening to this organization, get ahead of the game. Start creating this cause. Team capability that is going to be ultimately your information management, organizational capability to filter and feed everyone else up and down the chain.
Speaker 1:So it's a common operational picture with human sensors feeding into it as well. Right, so it's still using a red teaming technique to collect the wisdom of crowds or leverage the diversity cognitive diversity and, to be honest, when we started our company, that's the direction we wanted to go was how do we get to a common operational picture where we take all these cool things and there are companies doing this now and it's not. You know, AI is going to be able to enable some of these things, but it's not going to be able to do the things that humans can do, right.
Speaker 3:Correct, I'm sorry, when it comes to the thinking and the human sensor. I know Dave talks about that a lot, but having this human sensor enabling collective intelligence to give you that common operating picture, whatever that looks like for your organization, for your sector, I think that's the future. It's not it's now, but that's the future that we need to be aiming for in organizations. To enable that, with AI as the tool to support it, not do it and lead it, because if you do that, it's all going to go crazy but it's not to be just um, I hate to say shared, but only viewed in the exec suite or oh, absolutely not.
Speaker 3:As I said, this is a capability. 100.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah so, uh, you know it's. It's funny to see some of the ai tools come online right now. Where they're? You get into processing capabilities, maintenance things and things that are, I would say, more in the ordered system using the Kinevin framework more clear, complicated type of work that's repeatable and everybody becomes dependent on that, forgetting about the stuff in the complex environment. And I think that's what's important with the cost role and this common operational picture is how do you balance that out in an organization and it's not to say that some companies don't have this already, it's. I think they miss out on the most important thing, and that's the people side, and that's really what you're bringing to the table right now is how do you leverage that cognitive diversity in your organization to see what's going on internally and externally? Which brings me to my next question. There, ready for this, marcus, you did some work in Agile and I'm sorry you had to do that.
Speaker 3:I'm kidding, I know, I know that's right.
Speaker 1:Cross I bear. Yeah, I love it. I want to hear a little bit about your experience coming into Agile and where you think it is right now current condition and where you started.
Speaker 3:So I came in pretty fresh, which is fortunate again bringing that fresh pair of eyes. So I left the military, went into consultancy, learned some Agile PMO change management type stuff with them. Didn't stay there very long because of the lack of ethics, but then went into banking, started doing Agile with a great team of really good, experienced leaders who've been doing this for years, from the tech IT delivery, really up for doing things differently. And the more I started to understand it, the more I thought I've been doing this for years. I was doing this back in the early nineties in small teams in the military testing, learning, iterating, having a go, seeing if it works, and then, as we went into banking, obviously I then started to be surrounded by the big consultants. You name them. They were in there. I've hired them, fired them, worked with them Great people.
Speaker 3:I bash consulting. I bash Agile it's all just clickbait and good banter. There are some amazing people out there. Agile, it's all just clickbait and good banter. There are some amazing people out there. I bash big consultancy for the way they operate. I love consulting and I want to get proper consulting back into mainstream. And I bash Agile, not because of the capability of Agile, but I bash how it's been used and abused and I know Nigel loves this bullshit jobs and all the certificate PDF warriors out there and I did a podcast with Nana Rabban not long ago and it's just basically having a good laugh about how there's.
Speaker 3:The agile bench now is full of coaches and scrum masters All of them pretty much talk themselves out of a job over the last five to 10 years and organizations are wising up and it was disappointing. I did another show recently and I was looking at the latest State of Agile report and the Business Agility Institute. And in 2018, I remember doing a presentation in London and I put up the Business Agility Institute the top 10 challenges to why agile transformations are failing Number one leadership and management. And then 2019, I had two slides up. It was 2018, 2019, leadership and management, and this year again, 2023 ineffective leadership and management yet again. And what's hilarious and I'm going to read this out the state of agile report 97 percent of c-suite members believe they role model agile behaviors, but only only 2% of delivery team members agree 2%. So that's a disparity between 97% and 2%. This is the problem and I blame this to the agile coaching community previously.
Speaker 3:We focus too much on the front end, the team, and we've not taken this capability, as Jose said, up the spine to the top and got the right people on board and engaged. Yes, I know it's hard, yes, you might get fired. I've been there, seen it, done it but when it works it's worth it and it actually then physically sticks and Agile becomes a great singing and dancing capability that does what it says on the tin. That's what I bash that inability to make it holistic. And, by the way, you might want to involve the customers in this as well. They're kind of important rather than me and my little scrum team. And we've got to get our velocity working, our big shiny graphs and charts working and everybody's overly aligned, you know, or you've got to do it this way and say it that way.
Speaker 3:That doesn't work and it's still happening. This is the problem and there's so much data now that's showing we're almost on groundhog day and I think we're now seeing, finally, that Agile is getting cleared. House Companies are just firing everybody who's got that title and the recognition that we need to do things internally, but what is it that they need to do? They don't have that house. So I think, coming in and the great work you guys are doing with flow and really helping people educate what's important and the flow of product, the flow of people, the flow of information and how you, then where we come in, is unblock the road barriers to that. As you go through the organization, as you go through the customer journey, that's all you need to do. Call it agile, call it whatever you want, it's irrelevant. But it's going back to this really understanding flow of things, flow of stuff, whatever that may be along that journey, that you have to understand as well.
Speaker 1:People just don't even understand the journey that they're supposed to be going on so I have your book here big things fast a filled manual for new team leaders seeking breakthrough performance. And this performance, peak performance, is flow. You know in your book what's that? That's the key bit Peak performance. Yeah, yeah, it's okay. So let's talk about performance. Peak performance can be known as flow. We can't always be in a flow state, but that's not what we're saying with the flow system. I don't think that's what you're saying either in your manual here, but the two of you wrote this in the last year, I believe, and it was published within the last two months.
Speaker 1:I think it is yeah yeah, it's a new year gift, I'm looking through it. You have VUCA, you have OODA loop, you have red teaming in there, the four pillars of red teaming. I just want to know what's the intent behind the book. How's this going to help leaders do what they need to do?
Speaker 2:I'll start. This book was born back in 2011. I just didn't know it yet and so I'd spent. That was my fourth year in corporate America. I had done three different finance roles. I was sitting in a manufacturing plant doing financial analysis and I'd spent, like I said, 10 years in the military. Now I've been doing finance and I was like there's some things that are just I need to write them down. So I started writing down a bunch of different things in terms of what does adaptive leadership look like and are we training? I'd spent four years in. I just started in the corporate world and I'd gone through maybe two pieces of training, and in the military you go through dozens of training.
Speaker 2:You spent what 30 something years I think you said Ponch and in the military, you probably have gone through more training than regardless of rank right, we know that four stars have to go to training. We know that second lieutenants have to go training, Enlisted have to go through training. There's bad training in that too. There's bad training, for sure, but at least there's training. I mean, in corporate world, you kind of go through and maybe you get your onboarding training. You do some 70% of it. The 70-20-10 model is on the job and then, all of a sudden, you get promoted, you become a manager, you become a senior leader, Then you can become executive and maybe you don't go to choose training at all and I would Too busy. Yeah, I would ask your C-suite, your VPs, presidents, and say when was the last time you did some training Actual formal training on people development, leadership, critical thinking, adaptive leadership and they'll probably tell you maybe I took a course, I did a workday training, and so, going back to 2011, I just started kind of writing in terms of the differences between corporate America versus military and leadership and how it adapted and evolved, and I just kept writing and kept writing, and kept writing.
Speaker 2:And then I met Marcus, of course, and one of my best friends asked me he's like, why don't you write a book? And I said what do I say in this book? And he's like well, just take everything you've got that you've ever written, drop it in a Google document and see what you get. And so I did that over one Christmas holiday break and ended up being like I don't know something like 500 pages of just stuff, lots of stuff, just stuff, Right, and so then I reached out to Marcus and I said all right, we've got something here.
Speaker 2:And the key area I want to focus on because I spend a lot of time in mentoring and coaching is on new team leaders brand new, because they're at that inflection point right. Maybe they're individual contributors, they're rock stars in terms of executing, maybe they've done some project management work, but they didn't get that applied. They didn't get a tool, they didn't get some kind of formal training on the key areas, because they now need to deliver excellence through others. It's no longer did you do your job? It's did you build other leaders, Did you help others do their job? And they don't get a tool. They don't get a tool, they don't get a training, they don't get a constant companion, which is what you need throughout their evolution as a manager.
Speaker 2:So that's why we wrote the book and Marcus and I just started writing and adapting it and changing it and adding on different perspectives, and that's how we landed on those four waypoints, right. So develop, it's all around the minimal strategy you need so that we're focused on experimentation. Develop is on all those things you need to develop as a new team leader, as a new manager, as well as your teams. What are the tools that you can use, Like we actually walk people through the tools, Deliver, that's all around. Execution, right Red teaming, agile, lean, whatever it is, OOIL, loop systems, one systems, two, thinking, and then the endures pulling all that together around. Okay, great. Now let's say you're in this now virtuous cycle of leading through others, facilitating growth through others, leading your businesses. Do you have the right mechanisms to be able to revisit that and challenge yourself? And that's kind of how the book came together.
Speaker 1:That's great. Yeah, like you said, there's a lot of overlap between what you have in the book and what we have in the flow system. So I mean it's a great conversation to have. We can really pull from or learn from each other. One of the things that you touched on and I brought this up in a recent training or a recent conversation with some leaders and that is in the military.
Speaker 1:Yeah, we get 99% of our time to train and what matters you know what you put in that training matters.
Speaker 1:But, more importantly, when you're in corporate America or any corporation, you get 1% of your time to train and 99% of your time to execute. Doing safe training is a horrible thing to put in that 1% of your time. And I'll give you a couple of examples. Several years ago and I remember we started doing some red teaming things with a financial institution, I took them through a one hour about 20 members through a one hour training session with me. One hour, about half of that group went on to four days of design thinking. Right, they came back from that design thinking course and said we learned more from you in one hour than we did in four hours or four days of this and I'm like, okay, now we're getting somewhere. And I think that's when I started to realize the value that we bring is we have to reduce down the things that we learned in that 99% of our time training down to you know, what can I show you in this one hour? Because that's all I get sometimes.
Speaker 3:That's the secret sauce. That's the key thing that we're bringing to the game is the speed of effectiveness.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and Marcus, one of the things that I've seen over the years is hey, we've gone from two days of training and, to be honest, with Nigel and I do our flow system training. It's five days. Right, I mean, we we go deep into things and it's it's a lot of stuff, but you can't take leaders through five days of training and then focusing on the how you know that that's what matters. So how do you distill that down to a group of people that go hey, we want a workshop, but we want it at the. We want your two hour workshop at the end of our four-day offsite. And you're like, boy, you got this wrong.
Speaker 1:You want this at the front of your offsite Right at the front, upload it, yeah, and, by the way, everything I'm going to show you is going to accelerate the quality of output you get in those four days. I just want your thoughts. Where are you right now as far as workshop time and your view on what leaders? How do you help leaders see that not necessarily more time, but the quality of input we provide them is what they need.
Speaker 3:Exactly what you said. It's this upfront first. So we often get asked to come in and I've had this twice in the last two weeks is away days. Hey, I've got a two day away day. I'd love to use you as a wrap up. You know it's a cool, sexy've got a two-day away day. I'd love to use you as a wrap-up. It's a cool, sexy thing. We'll have you close out.
Speaker 3:I'm like no, no, no, no, no. Talk to me what your plan looks like. Okay, well, here's where that's all going to potentially go wrong. If you put me up front, then what's going to unlock A? They'll accelerate smoothly On the timings, same as you, ponch. We've got a five-day, we've got a 10-day to really what we call. That's a trainer-trainer program. If you want this internal capability, then this is what your people need to go through so they are competent and you're confident that they're then capable of doing this rather than just taking the car keys. So that's your core cadre.
Speaker 3:In the middle, however, let me give a 30-minute conversation webinar to 5 000 of your people, right? So everybody's like oh, wow, this is the stuff these ninjas are doing in the middle. That's what they're all badged and capable of doing. I now understand that. I've just had a quick overview and, by the way, they gave me two great tools, so your whole organization gets it. And then give me 90 minutes with your exec, top of the pyramid now. So I'm going from the base of the pyramid 5,000 people I'm training up, 15, 20, 50 in the middle, however many you need and then at the top, just give me 90 minutes with your board, your exec, just to take them through some real world thinking, some real world tools and techniques and help them understand what's going to be happening now below them, because what you don't want is unleashing this capability and then some executives getting very scared when they start to see challenge coming in, because we know what happens then. So it's no good empowering and this goes to psychological safety it's no good having a room full of people who are going to surface great ideas, challenge each other, load up the bucket full of great stuff to take away.
Speaker 3:Then the executives go, yeah, thanks, and throw it out the window. We're not interested. You've got to have that balance of receipt to allow you to give an open up and be engaged, because the minute you don't have that receipt and people go well, why did I do that. It's like filling out surveys, isn't it? Every time you get a survey, I'll fill it, fill it out and then, when nothing happens, I'm not going to fill out the next survey. And there's so much of that going on. So for me it's a real two-way street.
Speaker 3:And engaging with the executive and again short sell, I'll just say, guys, do you play golf? Yeah, we all play golf. Great, so you can cancel golf next friday and spend 90 minutes with me to make your organization sing and dance. Who wouldn't want to do that? It's almost it's too good to turn down. And therefore they go yeah, okay, that's what? 90 minutes, is that all? Yeah, because the. And then, if you need more, go and speak to Bob and Sue. Right, they're going to be your train, the trainer competence. And, by the way, your whole organization is going to be talking about Think Write Share next week. So if you meetings, somebody will step up and start using it and then watch what's going to happen. And you'll get a phone call in three months going wow, wow, just total culture shift, total enlightenment for all of us, not just, you know, the front line or the exec. Everybody's now seeing, thinking, engaging and behaving differently, and you can't buy that yeah it's, it's a.
Speaker 1:It's a powerful site to see when not just a team but like a business unit takes ThinkRight's share and just applies it, Even if they get some things wrong here and there, that's okay. But the ownership of it and one of the things we saw during COVID, when we were working remotely and I had a conversation with Keith McCandless on this we turned it into think chat, send, Think about it, put it in chat and send it to not the main chat, but a facilitator or whatever right, so you can maintain that well that shallow dive into chaos.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I love that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, but it works right. So these things are very powerful. And again, how do you getting leaders to buy off on this? Because the large consultancies aren't talking like this, right, they're talking big training and all this and uh it's, it's just. I don't know about you and I'm going to my mental health right now and dealing with this is. You know, at some point I get burned out. I'm like it's the same thing over and over.
Speaker 1:It's like being an instructor in the F-14 for four or five years and you're like here, let me write down, let me debrief your flight right now, because here's everything you're going to mess up. I'm going to put it back here. When we come back, I will show you that you did all that wrong. Right, yeah, yeah, it's pretty consistent. It's yes.
Speaker 3:So where are you guys right?
Speaker 1:now on your yeah. Where are you on your mental health when it comes to this? Are you tired? You burned out?
Speaker 2:personally, I'm fired up.
Speaker 2:I'm seeing god no, I mean, I think we said, we said in the book right, it's like the very first thing you need is a steadfast internal drive. It's the first thing we talk about. We say if you're, if you're the chief of staff or you're the person that's going to be held accountable to continue to push to the organization. Let's say, marcus, or you punch, go in and you have and you train the trainers, right, you come, you come in, you do the right, effective job. Now you've got a handful of folks that are not in the COE, they're not in the community of practice and they're not in the HR learning and development, because then, to your point, there's just no skin in. They don't have skin in the game. It has to be within the unit, which is why, back to your point, the role the chief of staff can be, that they're in the business unit and they're accountable for continuously pushing that out. You have to have that internal drive that what you're doing is good for the organization and you're building capabilities. And so my mental health is yeah, this is what fills my cup.
Speaker 2:Having not the fight the fight is such a strong word but having those debates internally, challenging the leaders and then seeing the leaders change their mentality and how they communicate and you said it, ponch an organization. They start using the terms that you used and, just talking to leadership, all of a sudden you see somebody else come further down the chain of command or whatever it is in the organization. They go, hey, this concept of acceptance criteria, I was using it with this and they're like, oh, yeah, it's great. Or, hey, think, write share. I'm like, wow, cool, it's coming full circle.
Speaker 2:That gives me energy because I know that the leaders are changing their behaviors, they're adapting their ways of working and it's getting into the organization. That's what drives a culture shift. It's not a one and done. It's not going to happen in three months. It's going to take time and persistency. So, yeah, that's steadfast internal drive. You've got to have it. Clearly you both do, because you keep banging your head against the wall and seeing the same problems. But hey, it does drive cultural transformation if you have the right sponsorship and internal championing within the business unit.
Speaker 1:So I know you read. Both of you read quite a bit. What are you reading now? What gets you excited, what gets you out of bed in the morning? To when it comes to professional development what am I reading right now?
Speaker 2:professional development? I don't really know if right now. I know I'm reading uh, one flew over the cuckoo's nest. I'm reading that at night. I don't know if that applies to professional development. Marcus, what are you reading right now?
Speaker 3:I'm reading lead generation. So alex holmosi, who I I discovered on his podcast a while ago and the guy is obviously an ape of a man incredibly ripped gym owner, made millions on selling gym programs and then he's he's got something called acquisitioncom so he's trying to enable small businesses to grow and basically he's giving away how you be an entrepreneur, how businesses grow and scale, for free. So I've been really listening and engaging with what his products are and what he's putting out there and I've just found it makes a lot of sense, not not just from selling. I'm understanding how, how do I bring this into an organization, how do I use his technique of selling something for my technique of getting an engaged executive, getting somebody in an organization. So when I'm having conversations with clients, I'm using the same techniques that these huge marketing and sales guys are using to get the hook and rephrasing things and understanding how you talk about the problem, talk about their personal life, talk about what's, what's their thought process, and really trying to bring multiple things together rather than just saying you need to buy this, this off-the-shelf cookie cutter. That we know is what the consultancies are doing. And, like jose, why I'm sort of steadfast and pumped about this is I'm seeing the shift.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I was disappointed to read the Business Agility Institute for the seventh year running. See the same leadership problem. But again, this is a long game. This fight is continuous, as we know, and I'm starting to see slowly. You're seeing it on LinkedIn, you're seeing it in Harvard, you're seeing it on Twitter, wherever you are. You're seeing people waking up to this requirement and I think the more AI is coming in, the more people are getting seduced by this, the more people are waking up to hang on a minute, yes, great, but if we don't parallel move at the same pace, we're going to get left, not even left behind. We're off the table. We're not even on the space anymore.
Speaker 3:So I think this recognition that you've got to start getting people back into the heart of the game, because think about it 10, 20 years ago, when we're doing project management, what was it? Always people, process platform. Boyd says it just the same. Over time that's flipped as we've been seduced by tech. It's now tech process people. Yeah, you know, the lead singer of the band has been ditched and we've got this duo now of tech and process and the people are going. Hey, you go in organizations. I talked about surveys, three of the big organizations I've worked in the last three years. The number one feedback of concern on their Pulse survey, both quarterly and annual, was personal and professional development.
Speaker 2:That's it.
Speaker 1:Lack of.
Speaker 3:And if you're not providing that? So this goes to me and this goes to one of my philosophers people want to get up in the morning, go to work, do a great job, have a good time, come home and feel proud and call their mom on the weekend and tell them what they did and be boastful about that because it's a good thing to do. Nope, very few people are the old psychopath.
Speaker 1:What are they actually doing? What are they actually doing? Are they getting up and desk scrolling the internet and Twitter?
Speaker 3:Yeah, they're going to work, they're quietly quitting, they're not engaged. I mean, what's the latest? Galloping Again, these reports I keep reading 23% global engagement in the workplace, 13% in Europe. You, you guys are the top at 36 percent in america, but 13 percent, that's just appalling. So these, exactly, exactly that's what I thought. But so you've got this poor workforce going to work, disenfranchised, disengaged. Why? Because the leadership at the top hasn't shifted. They're still in the old school command and control mindset.
Speaker 3:But everybody wants to do this. You know, it's not that they don't want to, but they're said in this always. And you know, I believe you can teach an old dog new tricks, and that's really what. What we try and do is help unlock that ability to shift your mindset, to shift your thinking, because once you do, you unlock the engagement, the people will follow. Yeah, there'll be a few laggards and there always is but people want, they want that authoritative leadership to come in and go right. This is what we're all going to be doing now. I don't know how that's where you guys come in, but this is where we're going. This is why we're going there. Please help me, get there and you get leaders showing that vulnerability, that humility, but that empowerment and we talk about that awful world of empowerment, but actually, to me, empowerment is creating the environment within which those people can then flourish.
Speaker 3:And one of my things is you know, there's a dormant superhero in every one of us. If you're not looking how to unleash that as a leader and Jose talks about leaders, create more leaders then what are you doing? You're failing your organization, you're failing your people, you're failing yourself as a leader and even if you're at the other end of that spectrum, if you're the follower going in, leadership isn't something that happens upstairs. Leadership is a capability we all have and that's where I love big things fast understanding that. As a youngster going into the workplace, I teach my kids this stuff all the time. There are many leaders running rings around me now.
Speaker 3:Things you've got to be careful what you wish for. But they're competent and they're capable and they're confident because they know how to engage. They understand what's going on, they get people. They understand why their boss in the coffee shop is behaving like he is at the weekend. That's okay and they're cool with that and they understand it and they know how to deal with it.
Speaker 3:And it goes back to being that chameleon like individual. That's not being insincere or inauthentic. It means you are adaptive to the scenario, to the situation, to the environment that you're operating in, and whether you're a young intern in a coffee shop at your weekend job or whether you're the 60 year old board member, if you don't have that adaptability and the resilience to be flexible with what's coming and we know what's going every day and we know what's coming in 2024 this ride is not going to get any smoother. Sit down, strap in hold on, read these great documents, talk to good people and learn what you need to do to evolve, going forward. So that's why I'm reading these kind of books, because it's just bringing different perspectives that I've not really had before, which is great.
Speaker 1:Well, I want to turn it over to you to see if you have any questions about the podcast, what we do and, more importantly, how can our listeners get in contact with you? The books out there website, anything like that. What do you have for them? And any questions to me? Launch the plug.
Speaker 3:I would say Launch the plug.
Speaker 2:Launch the plug. No, I do have a general question punch. How did you get involved in all this? I mean, you have a really diverse background, varied roles, lots of different companies. I think there's kind of a common thread that ties it all together. And you said your mental health. It can get challenging sometimes because you're a change agent or a transformation person or whatever you want to call them. You're constantly pushing water uphill. How do you you know? How did you get started Then? What keeps you going?
Speaker 1:I was just curious. You know fighter aviation. I think um really forces you to challenge assumptions, look around, keep your keep your head on a swivel. So that culture worked out quite well and I'm not going to go into my childhood or anything like that, but that that that led to a lot of this and you see, a lot of you know you think about Scrum. The co-creator Scrum's a former fighter pilot. I mean, the list goes on.
Speaker 1:You can make connections to Holacracy and the connection to aviation If you, if you're into Holacracy, you just dig around quite a bit and you find that a bunch of former aviators are doing these types of things in healthcare or in safety, but nobody was really doing this in agile.
Speaker 1:And I met Jeff Sutherland in Amsterdam several years back, 14 years ago, and he recommended that you know, hey, take a group of former aviators, first responders, special operators and go stomp out all the bad scrum and agile out there. And that's maybe like two months after I learned what a CSM was, a certified scrum master. So very little knowledge of that, but our exposure to things like high reliability theory, aviation crew resource management, which is the foundation of team science, all the mission command stuff we learned in our education program, or joint professional military education, joint operational planning, working at different geographic combatant commands, fighting and combat all these things. It changes who you are, it changes your orientation. You see things a little bit different than the rest my belief, than the rest of my belief, but the pathway. I think of myself as a Forrest Gump of agile or management, because I get to meet all the coolest people in the world on accident, from Dave Snowden to Jeff Sutherland, keith McCandless, gary Klein you name it Everybody who's on a reading list?
Speaker 1:Yeah yeah, I'm like, hey, pick up the phone and call him if I wanted to, which is just crazy when you think about it. Uh, chet Richards, all the folks that were Boyd's, uh, uh, acolytes back in the day that are still living, um, we have, you know, access to them. So it's. There's another aspect to this and that goes into the. When you're, when you come from a peak performing team or a flow state or a high performing team, you always want to get back right. Well, I'll never get back to that, that incredible flow state that, uh, I had in, the, uh, in the cockpit flying air shows.
Speaker 1:And, marcus, when you go skiing, there's a reason. You go skiing right, um, you're, you're trying to be present and you have some risks and things involved there. That's what you're trying to do. When you do that In a work environment, you bring that over to a work environment. You create something that's very powerful for an organization and that's the why behind all this is when you experience coaching and a flow state at the highest level anywhere, you want to bring that back to others, and that's why we're doing this, or that's why I'm doing that. And the other piece is the market. The market really intrigued me because it's a flow system. It's a complex adapted system. You can make money in it. You can lose a lot of money in it. But if you think about anti-fragility or anti-fragile and you look at Taleb's books on Black Swan and things like that Wismacrouds I forgot the other name of the book. Is it Wismacrouds? No, it's not, not from him.
Speaker 1:Anyway, his background is in understanding derivatives, options. So optionality to me is something that we had in the cockpit all the time. Where am I going to land? What am I going to do? What am I going to do? What's going to happen next? Right, so that connection between the market and aviation and, of course, what's going on with agility is strong as well. And then I'm kind of rambling here, but you get into the safety aspect. You guys know.
Speaker 3:Gareth.
Speaker 1:Locke, right, very well, yeah, his background in taking aviation to diving, and then, by the way, everything he's teaching can be applied to an organization, right, why is that? Because humans are humans At least they used to be. I don't know if they are today. No-transcript, I can just take everything I'm showing folks and apply it to the market, make a lot of money and be happy. Right, I can do that. By the way, if you learn these things, if you use red teaming tools and apply it to a market, a hedge fund or whatever you want, to a mom and pop shop or your personal approach, you're going to do quite well. Because biases are what drive you to hold on to losers and winners too. Right, you have to cut your losses, sunk cost fallacy, all those things that are out there can be applied to the personal level. So I'll wrap it up with this.
Speaker 1:The other thing that I'm learning about is, you know Dr McCabe, delia McCabe, her background with neurobiology and all that. What's fascinating about the brain is it's a fractal, right. Everything in the universe is pretty much a fractal of one another. Everything in the universe is pretty much a fractal of one another. The mental health aspect of what's going on today globally, from PTSD, tbi to anxiety in children, right, which may or may not be a real thing. You can't you know. If you have menu anxiety, maybe you just need to learn how to order off the menu. You don't need a drug or anything like that, because that could lead to bad things in the future. So I'm talking the suppression of a symptom rather than solving the underlying problem.
Speaker 1:So the connection between peak performance, like Marcus going skiing, uh, right to what you're trying to do in an organization, it's a clear line of sight for me. There's. There's no difference, right? And that's what makes it so exciting now is we got lucky with the Flow System name. We got lucky with the no Way Out podcast, just because we went in the archives and we're like hey look, the conceptual spiral was once known as no Way Out, perfect, right. So here we are. So that's a long way to say yeah, I'm fired up to have you guys in the network and you know, carry on the conversation and things like that. But more importantly, how can our guests get in contact with you? Because we don't have the.
Speaker 2:we can't cover down on everything you know and I know you can't as well, marcus, why don't you wrap us up Absolutely? Why don't you wrap us up with what you're doing?
Speaker 3:Yeah, the new work you're doing with Effective.
Speaker 2:Direction.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so Effective Direction. Drop us a line info at effectivedirectioncom. You can find us on LinkedIn Marcus Dimbleby, jose Carella. If you want more information on the book, bigthingsfastcom, it's out there, available on Amazon. The manual itself available on both the print-off version as well as now, kindle. But yeah, reach out, engage. We love the conversations. I'm pretty prolific on linkedin. It's always good engaging. That's where I met ponch and where it's again one of my mantras. Life's about relationships and that's where all these beautiful relationships have developed and I look forward to continuing them with everybody and anybody out there who's on board for making a difference in the world, because that's what we're trying to do here.
Speaker 2:That's it, punch. Thanks again for the time, thanks again for imparting all the wisdom and um I'm I'm looking forward to get looking into the flow as more. I just put the order in for the book, so I appreciate that and I had a great time talking with you guys and obviously just reach out to marcus or me anytime.
Speaker 1:Awesome. Always a pleasure, well, I appreciate your time today and that book again is Big Things Fast. Great to have you on here and we'll definitely do this again, so until next time we'll wish you well.
