Speaker 1: 0:02

Welcome back to that change show. Thanks for checking the episode out today. I'm your host, jason Little, and I haven't done one of these Q&As in a while. But this is a good opportunity because I did a talk at the Change Management Review Conference this week around Beyond Frameworks, so how we can move more towards using sensemaking as agents of change. So, whether you're an agile coach or, I guess, what you would call a traditional change manager working on project-based change or transformational change, if we get away from thinking about these frameworks and tools and steps to follow and we focus more on sense making in real time, so we can move towards more of a feedback-driven approach, and all that means is we're constantly adapting and adjusting to the day-to-day reality of what's going on instead of following a prescribed set of steps. So there were a bunch of questions in the Zoom that I couldn't finish, so I thought I would go ahead and take all those questions and just do a hopefully a quick episode. But if you watched the show before, you know I kind of like to think with my mouth sometimes and I'll try to be as concise as possible.

Speaker 1: 1:05

So let's get into the premise of this talk in the first place. So the main premise was we move away from thinking of change as a set of steps and phases and we move towards a more fluid approach, which I like to say is a balance between exploration and action. So we're always exploring the organizational system and poking it and seeing how it responds, and then we're taking deliberate action on it. And that's you know. If you want to think about this, within phases of traditional change management, of your typical, you know, analysis, planning, create the comms, all these things execution, closeout you're going through this explore, act in all of those. So even if you are locked into a phased based approach, you can still get the benefit of knowing when you need to learn something versus when you need to actually take action. So that's really the core premise of the talk, and we're always starting from insights. So we're always talking about what do we know now, what are some things that we need to know and what assumptions do we have, so we can't create the current state at the beginning of the project, paint a picture of the future state and manage towards it. That current state is evolving as our system evolves. So think of doing a weekly insights meeting where you're understanding the actions you've taken over the week what you've learned, what's changed since then, the actions you've taken over the week, what you've learned, what's changed since then. Now you've got new insights to create another micro plan for the change next week. So we're always starting from those insights.

Speaker 1: 2:32

Then change is always about trade-offs, so we're always trying to make the right trade-off at the right time, instead of thinking we have to get everybody on board and then move forward. That's never going to happen, of thinking we have to get everybody on board and then move forward, that's never going to happen. But if we can focus on trying to accept reasonable consequences, knowing that not everyone is going to agree in the same way at the same time. So we have options and we steal an idea from Agile called the last responsible moment. So at this stage, we don't want to commit to actions. We want to defer the decision to. We absolutely have to, but at least we've got some options, given our insights and given the context. Next, this is pretty obvious Now we are in ACT. So what's the hypothesis we have, given the option that we think is the best for right now? What are our measurements? How long should we run it? So we really want to think about.

Speaker 1: 3:24

Experiments are great for learning stuff and sometimes, when we're facilitating change, our goal is to learn something, not necessarily to get to an outcome. You know, if your change is more logistical moving printers from the first floor to the second floor you can make a set of tasks for that. Anything more complex than that, and you've got to run experiments and it's really important to make those things visible. And then, at the end of the week or whatever your work cycle is and that's too broad of a question to give an answer to maybe you can run weekly change sprints, maybe it has to be every two weeks. Really depends on the context of your change. But what is it that we did that worked? What new information appeared? What are we going to do next? And now we've got a decision point. So should we pursue, keep going down this path? Should we pause and stop because it's not the right time or not the right change, or should we pivot a little bit? So we've got a decision to make after whatever that cycle was? So that was the premise. Basically, let let's go through this insights, options, experiments and use sense making so we're always knowing what our current reality is so we can take the most appropriate action in that context. Frameworks and steps can't give you that because they're not aware of your context.

Speaker 1: 4:41

So let's get into some of the questions that people asked. So here's a little bonus tip I'm going to take the Zoom transcript and I'm going to plunk it into ChatGPT and I'm going to ask it to extract our questions. So we do a lot of these tips and tricks in the AI and Change course. You can find a link to that in the description, but this will save me some time from having to scroll, so let's give it the instructions. I'm going to give you a Zoom chat text file and I would like for you to extract the questions the audience members had Period. Here is the chat text, all right. So there's all the questions and obviously, if you're listening to this in your podcast listener thingamajiggy, I'm going to go through each of the questions. You can find the actual questions in the show notes as well. Can you go back to the last slide? Yes, and I did. Can you drop the link from the last slide? Yes, and I did. Number three let's start with that one.

Speaker 1: 5:46

So they were fascinated by the golden retriever concept. Can you talk about that role? Now? This was something that people either like or they're really offended by. So the context was talking about a persona, of a change agent. I guess and I mentioned that when I was doing a lot of traveling from 2014 up until COVID all the companies I worked in that seemed to be doing better with change had somebody who was like a golden retriever and by somebody. It might have been a consultant or a change manager or a manager or a leader, but they had that temperament. Everybody loves golden retrievers. Everybody loves to be around golden retrievers and these catalysts, if you want to call them that were just people that everyone knew they were there to help. They knew they were genuine. They weren't there to push, process or force people to do change. They weren't leading the change. They were facilitating and helping and supporting. So it's not like it's really a role, it's more of an attitude and there are a lot of change folks that come from a service background that see change management as a service function where I'm helping and facilitating and serving. That's kind of the golden retriever mindset and mentality. And, you know, maybe some people don't like being compared to a dog, but who doesn't love golden retrievers? I mean, come on. So that was really the idea is be genuine and be helpful. Most change people. I know they do change work because they like helping people. That's really the only thing you need to worry about. You don't have to worry about the frameworks and the steps and all this type of stuff. Bring yourself and that attitude to change and you'll be amazed at how people latch on to that and connect with you. All right.

Speaker 1: 7:30

So examples of how and when they were effective, and that's in reference to the golden retriever question. So, in particular, this one organization that I was working with, the uh, she was an external consultant. Um, she just had this way of bringing leaders in for conversations, so leaders kind of accepted that she was going to help them and coach them for stuff. So, as an example, we were going to run a Lego serious play session with about 200 people uh, c-levels and VPs and directors and managers. In the context of this transformation, multi-year transformation she was the one who started socializing that. I remember we were in a conference room having a call with one of the leaders who just put absolute trust in her because he knew that she was always going to do the right thing for the change at the right time. Whatever that was. It wasn't grandstanding, it wasn't something laced with you know, whatever that person's agenda was, they just had this way of having that trust built up with leaders in a very strong and solid way, and it was just a frank and honest conversation. So there was no buzzwords, none of that stuff. It was just. We think this is the best idea. For these reasons. It's going to be something that's different. It's going to get people really engaged. It's going to generate some good conversations. It might generate some data around how people don't like what this change is. So it was just just this person knew how to have those conversations. They weren't gaslighting or filling the leaders heads with all the good information and hiding the bad. It's really hard to say. It's just they know how to build trust, they know how to have strong relationships and she was great at doing this constantly. All right.

Speaker 1: 9:24

The next question was how do you start a discussion with leadership or sponsors about balancing absolute process and allowing for art in a program? So this was based on me talking about the art and the science of change, so things like as a change agent. Sometimes you feel the energy has kind of gone down and then you find the window of opportunity that opened up, where you can kind of dive in and intervene in the organizational system. That's what I mean by the art of change. A process can't teach that. Now it's reasonable for leaders and sponsors to want to have a step-by-step process and, to be honest, they don't care about that stuff. They just want to know you got your shit together, that's it. So we don't really have to rely on those steps and phases, but we need to worry more about the art side. That's using our intuition, that's using our gut feel, and you don't necessarily have to directly talk to sponsors and stakeholders about this. You know. Uncover what's underneath the ask.

Speaker 1: 10:21

Change leaders don't want a giant strategy and a giant step-by-step process and a giant plan. They may be asking for those things, but the art is knowing how to have a conversation with them to pull out what unmet need exists. What is it that they really want? When you boil away all that stuff? They want to feel some sense of certainty that we're headed in the right direction. So if you've got that in your back pocket, that is the art. So you don't have to explicitly talk about it. When they want process and stuff like that, you can use it as a way to have a better conversation about what is it that we actually need right now. That's going to help us take three or four steps forward.

Speaker 1: 11:03

All right, moving on to the next one, if you are tasked with the comms side of a change, what can we do to help this issue? So the context for this question was we were talking about the full stack change manager. So, in a world of AI, being just the comms person isn't enough. Being just the training person isn't enough, and you've probably heard full stack developer before. So you know, 20 years ago you could just be a Java developer. Now you're a full stack developer, so you know a little bit about a lot of things basically, and I think the same thing is going to happen with change.

Speaker 1: 11:39

So if you've been tasked with just comms, don't think of it as having to write content and blast it at people. Look for opportunities to create meaningful dialogue. That means maybe you don't send a newsletter out, maybe you do a lean coffee session. If you do a town hall, don't script it. Don't precede the questions, because employees see that coming a mile away. So don't do things that are for optics and don't do things that are for optics and don't do things that paint a pretty picture about the change if it's not a pretty picture. So you always want to focus on trying to create dialogue that brings meaningful insights. If you remember that insights, options, experiments, loop, you want to do something meaningful that gives you good enough data so you can figure out how to move forward. And if you're always hiding stuff in comms, plans and making everything look rosy and shiny, you're never going to uncover what's really going on and then you won't really be able to do anything about it. So I see comms as not, you know, broadcasting at people Always create dialogue, and difficult dialogue is a good thing, not a bad thing. All right, right.

Speaker 1: 12:45

The next one was what types of data are you using to leverage AI to reflect on how could you do things differently? Have you used that in conjunction with the team retro, done live? So the context of that one was I talked about how, if we're doing change readiness and stuff, we don't have to dumb down our surveys anymore, because AI can help analyze massive amounts of data and you can do it in real time. So if you're having a live retro with teams, you know you can paste screenshots into AI. We do this in the AI and change course. We do this live and it will analyze all of those sticky notes and it will find patterns. So you can basically go through that. Insights, options, experiments loop almost instantly and with a team right on the spot. So you can capture live sticky notes on the wall by taking pictures of it and uploading it to any AI system that you want to use. But the real benefit is you're getting real-time insights and now you can have a conversation on a summary of data. So a lot of people like to think it's either AI or it's the change manager. It's both. You can use this stuff in your day-to-day context. It's going to save you a lot of brain processing time.

Speaker 1: 13:59

Next one how do you get leaders to embrace co-creation? For me, you just do it that way. So if you're going to start a change canvas maybe, you don't bring the artifact. You facilitate a conversation based on the objective of the session. So if you're there to talk about the strategy for the change, who's affected and how kind of the high level starting point of the change, you don't bring the canvas in and say, let's fill this template out. You set the expectation that we're going to do some kind of facilitated activity. You know I do movie posters a lot because I think people really like that and it's basically if they were going to make a movie of this change six months from now, what would the movie poster look like? And then you have a conversation that helps you create a visual vision instead of just using words. That's one small part of the canvas, but that's co-creation, because you're involving the people impacted by the change in the design of it.

Speaker 1: 14:54

Now, with the canvas, you're not creating the strategy canvas and then giving it to people and saying here's the strategy, go follow it. You're giving it to them, but you want them to poke holes in it, so you want feedback and insights from people who are affected. You want to challenge all of your assumptions, so you don't get the leaders to embrace co-creation. That's just how you work. That's just the job. You know, when I was doing a lot of agile coaching, I'd work with teams that would say well, the management won't let us automate our testing, or they won't let us use this tool or this approach because they think it's time consuming and expensive. And for me it's like that's the job. You know you don't tell them that they can't use Microsoft Word, they have to use Google Sheets. Their job is knowing the tools and the things that they can do to do their job the best they can. It's the same thing in development and it's the same thing in change management. You don't ask them to embrace co-creation or try to convince them. That's just how you operate, and if you operate and you work that way, more people are likely going to engage in that.

Speaker 1: 15:58

I'm going to share the short story because I mentioned this in the conference talk. I was working in a large organization. They wanted me, as the external Agile coach, to tell them what Agile Utopia was. So I had to come in and present to all the VPs what the plan was and instead of doing that, I brought some Lego to do Lego serious play and they started swearing at me. So I put the Lego away and I had plan B. And plan B was I collected a bunch of data and insights about how the change was going from multiple perspectives and I had that up on the wall already and I just had it covered with some of those big pieces of flip chart paper. Then the activities that I did with the teams and the managers and the other people affected I did with the leadership team as well.

Speaker 1: 16:44

Well, and basically did a live perspective map, and the net result was the VPs were not aligned on the change at all. So my question was if we're not aligned in this room, how can we expect people on the teams to follow? So now we're talking about co-creation, so that switched the stance from leaders to somebody else is going to make the plan and get those people to change to. Oh crap, we actually have to participate. So don't try to convince them, just do it and behave that way, and you're going to bring them into the conversation, most likely the five levers, which is the most challenging to pull.

Speaker 1: 17:21

So I chatted about this awesome book from Ken Rickard and I, to plug it, you can buy it in the link in the description below, anyway, but we talked about the five levers, and the five levers is basically a model that helps you understand the interconnectedness of organizations, and the premise was we always look to process first, so we always change processes because it's easy. So one of the things I said was you know, it takes no talent to create a process model. Anybody can draw a process model or a set of steps or a framework or whatever. That's not really difficult to do. So that's the lever we always pull, because we can see something you know, like we can see our big waterfall framework and then we can see the new agile one on a piece of paper and we can see what the differences are. It gives us the illusion of progress. So we tend to pull the process and the technology lever so we can just create a better process or we can buy a better tool and we ignore the other two. So to get to the question, which one's the hardest to pull? Probably well, it's hard to say because they're all interconnected.

Speaker 1: 18:29

But I would pick more things on the left-hand side of this picture. Structures in particular, because when you're talking about changing structures that might be org structure, that might be deep ingrained processes that's very difficult to change because somebody stands to lose by changing structure. Strategy is another one that's really difficult because strategy is it's one of those things that means different things to different people. So you know, I got asked a lot in another meetup I did. You know what's? How do you create a change strategy using lean change? And for me the answer is pretty easy I plan to replan. That's our strategy. So we're always going to use real-time, current information to make decisions for what to do next, and it didn't compute with that audience at all. But that's not a change strategy. I'm like well, what is it? What's your comms plan? What's your blah, blah, blah. For me those are tactical things that fall out of the strategy and strategies it's really hard to define and to put into words so people can really understand it. So those levers are harder to pull because, while structures you can see different org chart and different org design styles, it's extremely difficult to change, and strategies is more elusive and fluffy and it's hard to nail down. You can't really see it. You definitely don't see an outcome soon if you make a change to your strategy compared to some of the other ones. So that would be my answer for which one is the most difficult to pull. But the levers is really. You pull one of the levers and you have to accept the consequence and the ripple effect it's going to have in the others. Okay, so I'm getting to the end.

Speaker 1: 20:05

How do you use Legos? That's because I shared this story. This is what $25,000 US of Lego looks like. We did a Lego serious play session with the company that I mentioned earlier and we had everybody create models about what they believed the future of the organization looked like in the context of the problems they were trying to solve. So I talked about Lego Serious Play.

Speaker 1: 20:29

Playing with Lego is not Lego Serious Play. Lego Serious Play is its own method that helps people explore extremely complex problems so they can decide what to do and take action. If I oversimplify it. But teaching people stuff by using Lego is not Lego Serious Play. So there has to be meaning and intention behind it. It's not just something fun that people can blow off some steam. So look up Lego Serious Play.

Speaker 1: 20:56

I've been doing Lego Serious Play for probably 15 years, if not longer. I don't do it as much anymore because obviously everything is virtual, but that's how I incorporate it, and it's incorporated when I feel it's something that is completely opposite from the cultural norms, meaning it's going to shake things up and it's going to scare people. No, I shouldn't say scare people. It's going to get them to think differently about the task at hand and sometimes it works. And if you remember the story where I told, where they swore at me when I put the Lego on the table, sometimes it doesn't work, but either way, it's a good activity to explore highly complex things that we can't verbalize or we can't really put our finger on, because it tends to draw that out through the conversation and the process of building the models.

Speaker 1: 21:45

All right, and the last one was about AI. What tools do you use for surveys or collection or summarization? So I have my own, so I've built basically my own models here. So I'm going to just quickly share one that I use OpenAI's ChatGPT for our ongoing. 70% of changes fail. So people take the survey and it's just a one. Well, I've already done it, but it's a one question survey that just asks you here's the claim that 70% of changes fail. Here's where it came from, what do you think about it? One question. And then, as people fill it out, where it came from, what do you think about it? One question, and then, as people fill it out, my AI automatically summarizes it and attaches sentiment to it. So these numbers are generated automatically. So, ongoing it takes people who agree or strongly agree, people who are neutral, people who strongly disagree or disagree, and it generates this stuff automatically. So now you can go here and you can filter by whatever sentiment you want. So this is all the people who disagree with that statement. These are the people who strongly agree with it, and it's color-coded, so it's really easy to do.

Speaker 1: 22:54

But the point of using AI wasn't so much like. Here's the tools and things you can use. It changes your approach as a change agent, so you don't have to dumb down any of your surveys. You don't have to use numbers and rating scales. You can use open-ended questions because you don't have to worry about your brain processing all this mass amounts of information. You can have AI do it and then you can have better conversations around those summaries. If you'd like to learn more, click the link below to find out more about our AI and change management course.

Speaker 1: 23:22

Sorry, that was pretty terrible. So that's it. I'm going to wrap up with this open Q&A. I literally just did this off the cuff. It wasn't planned, but hopefully you got some value out of some of these. If you're listening in your podcast listener thingamajiggy, you can always go to lean change or sorry, thatchangeshowcom, and you can find the video versions if you want to see some of the references and visuals that I mentioned. And that's it for now. If you've got a question, thought or comment, drop it below if you're watching the video version, and we'd be happy to do another follow up. Also, if you want to talk change and be on the show and you're not just interested in promoting stuff but actually talking about the future of change and how things are shifting in the change world, drop a comment below and we'll be in touch as well. We like to try to keep this as an informal, just open-ended show. So thanks for watching, thanks for checking it out. I'm your host, jason Little. Hit, like and subscribe. We'll see you next time.