Speaker 1: 0:00

All right, it's February 13th 2025, season three, episode one of that Chain Show, and I can't figure out how to open these without sounding like a used car salesperson. I don't know why. As soon as I hit record, it's just like hey, come and watch and join, but for every car you buy, I'll eat a bug.

Speaker 2: 0:18

Yeah exactly, I've stayed up way too late many times.

Speaker 1: 0:23

So I'm just getting over a pretty nasty flu, so hopefully I'll hit mute whenever it comes time to do a giant coughing fit. But as I was thinking of this episode, for those of you who don't know, this is Don Gray and we've known each other for 15 years almost. I think it was the very first AYE Amplify your Effectiveness that I got shitted into going to. I was working with a fellow named Eric Mead. Do you know Eric?

Speaker 2: 0:53

Basically I don't know him well, but I know him some.

Speaker 1: 0:56

Okay, yeah, he was working as an XP coach in one of the telecoms where I was working as an agile coach, and I don't know how the topic came up and he just said, yeah, have you ever heard of this AYE thing? And I'm like, no, what is it? And then he told me a little bit about it and he said, yeah, you should go and pick, pick the session that makes you feel the most uncomfortable. I was like all right, so I did, and it was Steve Smith's satiric curve one where he had the groups enact all the different parts of the model. And it just scared the complete crap out of me the way that it ran and I was like, oh my God, this is so great. And that just transformed my whole trajectory as a change agent.

Speaker 2: 1:35

So was that the Satyr Interaction model.

Speaker 1: 1:39

Yeah, I was in the status quo group and then there was a star and then the new status quo had to drag the star across the conference center to a new area and we had to prevent that from happening. And then it got a little physical. So we we looted the hotel for tables and chairs and we physically built a structure in our corner of the room to keep the person there and the new status quo was tearing stuff down and chaos was like banging pots and pans and just yelling and making noise and stuff. And then we started like elbowing each other to put the wall back up and steve had to stop the session like 10 minutes in and it was just like you've got set. You know 50 highly enlightened change agents and agile coaches who almost got into a brawl. You know, you just can't control change welcome to change.

Speaker 2: 2:26

That's pretty, pretty accurate actually.

Speaker 1: 2:28

Yeah, yeah so I was actually thinking this morning um don and I did a session at agile 2012 13, whenever it was 12 on culture yeah, in uh grapevine, I think Was it in. Texas. Yeah, it was Texas.

Speaker 2: 2:45

Yeah.

Speaker 1: 2:46

And I remember they moved us to a bigger room because of the demand and I remember you said something like oh you know, this is perfect, let's just put up some, let's put up a sign that says we've been moved over there and let's just see what happens. Because the session was basically about how people react to change and I remember, uh, we asked them not to set up any chairs, just left them in piles, and then we started watching the patterns happen and it was just like a master class in how, uh, people react to changes in the environment. I remember some people were really upset. Oh, the sign was pointing that way, but if I would have went that way, I would have ran head first into a wall. You should have made a better sign, like just noise and stuff, how people react. I I just uh, I thought it was great remember that.

Speaker 2: 3:39

Yeah, so this is Don looking for this. So what we were playing with is a landscape. So this is looking at agreement and certainty, and so where the arrow is, that's the self-organizing zone, and a lot of times when you go to a conference, you end up in this close to certainty, close to agreement. All of the chairs are set up, there's a microphone, a podium, everything is ready to go, because you're close to certainty and close to agreement. In our case, we were at the other end. We had a mess for lack of a better definition, and we chose to see how the group organized itself and what sort of patterns emerged from it. And yeah, I still smile.

Speaker 2: 4:47

But yeah, we were playing with well, patterns, how a pattern is? Our similarities, differences and interactions that can create a and create a? Well, it creates a pattern that has meaning over time. So if you have a brief, short interaction and then it's done, that's not really a pattern. A pattern gets formed and continues over time until another set of similarities or differences, a different set of exchanges and interactions occurs, and then that's when patterns shift. So that's what we were playing with and, you know, sometimes it's just fun to stop. Let things be disorganized. Now, in our case we had three hours, we had a room, so it wasn't like we were going to ruin the entire conference. If you're working with large scale organizational change, you might not want to approach that from that casual of a hey, let's do this and see what happens standpoint yeah, I remember what some people were.

Speaker 1: 6:07

They really wanted the chairs set up and they started putting them in nice rows and then other people would take the chairs and just kind of put them wherever, and then people who seemed to need a little more structure would nicely organize them and and the system kind of settled itself and and then I don't know, I felt this moment of we need some system intervention to move on past the response, like it just felt like the group was ready to get started with the session at some point after the kind of the chaos wore off. And the one thing I always remembered from you know all the AYEs and the PS, psls is there's a there's. You can rob people of learning if you help them too much in chaos. Right, like you should be that you should be able to support people through it, but they have to get through it internally yes, we are.

Speaker 2: 7:02

So I mean well, yes, of course, almost every parent in the world knows this. You know, there's a tremendous amount of at least in my case standing back and going okay, they'll learn more if I don't get involved. And in fact, we have Esther and I Esther Derby, who is a colleague of mine. She and I facilitate the Problem Solving Leadership Workshop. Our next newsletter for the congruent change is going to be on that exact topic, which is don't solve problems for people because you do deprive them of a learning opportunity. I think Marvin's second great secret from Secrets of Consulting by Jerry Weinberg goes to the effect that if you repeatedly cure a system that can cure itself, you'll create a system that will not be able to cure itself.

Speaker 1: 8:08

So I remember a really I think it was in the Gift of Time book where somebody told the story one of Jerry's first and I wouldn't say first uh, early on, uh consulting, uh engagement, where he was hired to help programmers debug programs or something like that. And they're working on reels, yes, and um, as the story goes, he's sitting beside a programmer who's debugging something that is not the actual program that he's supposed to be working on, but it's close enough. That is not the actual program that he's supposed to be working on, but it's close enough. So something like that. Um, and then, you know, jerry asked him a question and he finds out that it's not the actual program and he's like oh, oh, which, where's uh? How do you get the other program? You go, well, it's across the street, in the archives, like in the basement and something, and I just don't have time to go get it. And jerry goes, well, I'll go grab it for you if you need it. And it was just be useful, but don't fix people.

Speaker 2: 9:09

Be supportive. Yeah, help, work around the edges and at some point in time, we should probably share that. When we say Jerry, we're referring to Jerry Weinberg, gerald M Weinberg if you care to Google it Great Wikipedia article, nice website I can send you the website. It's shifted from where it was. So we were both fortunate in that we got to meet Jerry. I was very fortunate. I worked with Jerry for 14 years on the Amplifying your Effectiveness conference and then in 2017, when he was no longer physically able, I was asked to step in and co-facilitate problem-solving leadership with Esther, so he holds a very special place in my memory, my heart. He was a wonderful person Moving along before I start to cry.

Speaker 1: 10:10

Yeah, same yeah. So you know when we're talking about that sending people into chaos in that Agile 2012 session and them getting through it and then finding that moment where it was time to intervene and inject, uh, something, some foreign element into the group to kickstart them into the activity. I think one of the the, the patterns I guess, that I see in change, cause I do see a lot of what I would characterize as traditional change agents. You know, not coming from an agile background, if you will haven't really been exposed to these ideas, haven't been exposed to complexity, thinking, systems, thinking, satire, and when they discover them, they're just like oh, that's what's missing. Because there's such a strong desire to help, they tend to put their foot on the gas with a tool and a framework. You know, I don't see this system changing the way my stakeholders, who are pressuring me to get it to change I have to step on the gas when sometimes we need to take our foot off the gas.

Speaker 2: 11:44

So when you think about school, how we are educated, how we learn, pretty much time I said this. You know, Gray's axiom for success is if it doesn't move, get a bigger hammer, as I've. I've quit saying that as I've gotten older, because it really does not work when you deal with people, and every parent knows this. It's amazing how I keep coming back to parenting. But yeah, so we're used to thinking in terms of linear relationships and that gets back to that bottom left-hand corner where you have a finite system. It's closed, there's no extraneous inputs, it's low dimensions, few connections and it's linear. It says right there in the drawing that does not adequately describe complex systems. You mentioned complexity, described complex systems. You mentioned complexity. The other corner is where most organizations actually live, if they'd care to admit it, because there's massive entanglements between people and work relationships. It's open to the environment, there's people working inside, outside the company, there's people working across the company into different organizations, different teams, and it's highly nonlinear. The causes of nonlinearity would stem from time delay, which is a standard systems thinking item, and then the number of connections of themselves, and so we talk about this thing called the butterfly fly effect, where you have this little perturbance somewhere in the system and it's hard to notice. Faint signal is another word for it. You know weak signal and then suddenly the entire system shifts.

Speaker 2: 13:54

So, continuing with the complexity idea, I hadn't come across human systems dynamics when you and I did that session in 2012. That was actually when I started going through the program, and so they have a drawing similar to what I showed you earlier, that they call the landscape diagram. In the bottom left they have stable and the top right is unstable Now and the top right is unstable Now within the unstable environment, that area. It does not mean everything's in chaos, because there are places of stability. There's places of coherence. That corner simply means these are the places, these are the items that are more likely to shift quickly and with less effort than the items. You know the functions that are in the bottom left corner.

Speaker 1: 14:55

That's a good point, because so many people talk about. When you use the word chaos or unstructured, or unstable, it's applied to the entire system and I think part of that is a consequence of just the world that we live in. We seem to jump to the top shelf extreme crisis Company is going to die, like just. We go right to that end extreme and we blanket the entire system. You know, if it's in telecom, for example, you know, or in consumer products or anything like that, we label the whole system as unstable. It's in disorder, it's in disarray. We need to shift that entire system and we forget that the pockets of those interactions and some of the smaller subsystems within there, um, might not need fixing, but we just observe an outside system and we label the whole thing and try to shift it.

Speaker 2: 15:49

Well, that saves thinking. You know, you don't have to think as hard when you try to just and labeling. We don't have time to talk about labels. We'll have to schedule that one sometime in the future, that label show. I'm not sure how far it would go, but um, yeah, we label things because it makes them easy to separate in our minds, it makes them easier to deal with because you're masking the complexity and uh, it just, it's, it's what we do, it's, you know, we're trying to replicate the world in a finite space, which means I'm trying to represent the world in my mind and it's very limited space Now it's spectacularly large at the same time. But you have to remove items. You have to remove items, you have to remove detail, and I mean that's basically what a model is is. It's a simplification of reality.

Speaker 1: 16:54

Yeah, and backing on that, something that has been kind of a focus of work that I'm doing with Ken Rickard is this idea of the levers that we pull. So we label a system and we pull the easiest lever. This is why we see so much superficial transformation because we pull. We focus on the right side of this. We focus on processes and technologies because they're simple. Anybody can draw like a framework on a napkin. How hard is Scrum.

Speaker 2: 17:30

It's three walls and five ceremonies. That's what it was back in 2008. I'm not sure where it is today. Yeah.

Speaker 1: 17:40

Or a piece of tool or technology. Certainly, we see all this with AI nowadays because those are easy. I will say they're easy to measure, even though those measurements typically don't matter or have any real meaning behind them, but you can physically see something. It's like when agile software development came around. You know you got to see software sooner, which gave you the feeling of progress. And then when you start to use these ideas in a non-software context, you can't always observe changes in the system as fast as you can with software changes. So we kind of forget the stuff on the left and we forget that sometimes it's our structures that are preventing this change from happening. But we make one change in one area, it's going to have that butterfly effect in the other areas.

Speaker 2: 18:30

So let's go back to where you started this conversation, set the Wayback Machine to 2012. And you just pulled the screen away from me, so you've got the right-hand side, which is processes technology, the left-hand side, which is processes technology, the left-hand side, which were strategies and technology I'm sorry, strategies and structures. Where would you put culture on that? Where does culture fall?

Speaker 1: 18:53

For me, it emerges from the interactions between these five things. Ah an emergent property.

Speaker 2: 19:01

Yeah, welcome to complexity.

Speaker 1: 19:03

Yeah, Welcome to complexity. Yeah, Like one organization a long time ago that I was working for at Telecom, we had gone and collected a bunch of data that basically showed that this group their median delivery time was 12 to 14 months-ish I won't say average, but you know that was kind of the majority of projects were delivered there. They wanted to do an agile transformation and the main stakeholder of business transformation was smart enough to know that as soon as you give this thing a schedule and a budget and a name, it ain't going to work because we're going to be focused on fulfilling the budget and the schedule and blah, blah, blah. That is blah, that is smart. And he said deliver something every six months. Like really threw an asteroid into the pond, like a very, very strong foreign element.

Speaker 1: 20:01

And what happened like the ripple effects of that was some teams were like well, fine, we'll just cut our scope. Aha, smarty pants, we met your objective. And he's like great, you know, it's probably going to take three or four years, but your stakeholders are going to learn. They don't have to wait 14 months to ask for stuff. That's why they ask for so much, because they don't get a ceremony or an opportunity to put changes into the software organization. They're eventually going to learn. They're going to reliably get something every six months. They're going to ask for less stuff. It's going to force them to prioritize and it took, you know, two to three years, Some teams right away. They were able to deliver stuff sooner depending on their context and stuff, but I think it's just the way he was attenuated to the system was he just knew the reaction it was going to have and we often try to not want that reaction because we label that as resistance.

Speaker 2: 21:13

Oh, resistance is. So you're reminding me of a paper by Donald Schoen based on how you pronounce his last name, Donald Schoen, if you don't know the umlauto Dynamic Conservatism, which is from 1976. And he highlights a lot of things about organizational change, why they don't change, and I was reading it First time I saw the paper was early, well late, 24. I'm going why? Yes, I recognize every one of these. We are still doing this. It's a fantastic paper. I'll try and get you a copy of it. You can find it on the internet, but if it makes it easier, I can just send you a copy so that people can access it. But resistance means I don't see the value in what you want me to do.

Speaker 2: 22:07

Everybody you know you were back to the AYE session on change chaos Everybody has something they value and when you put them through the change cycle or when you ask them to change, many people are afraid of loss. They've done research, psychological research, that says people are more afraid of loss than they hope for gain. I forget exactly what the bias is. We can look it up if it's important, but this is a documented fact of the way most people, most of the time process gain and loss. So if I think I'm going to lose something, it didn't change.

Speaker 2: 22:53

Somebody always loses. They lose status, they lose power, they lose position and, having talked about valuable stuff, you know like work and getting value to the clients, I'm talking about internal processing. So, yeah, that's why a large amount of I'll be honest, I've never worked on a large transformation that succeeded. That succeeded because people were always trying to transfer everything, transform everything all at once, instead of taking little slices, like the gentleman you referred to, and said well, just six months, let's go for six months and see what we do in six months, making smaller slices, instead of of trying to eat the whole elephant at one time yeah, yep it that that, um there we underestimate the value in the response people have to change, like when we just blanket it with resistance.

Speaker 1: 24:01

You know there's a lot of good data in how people are reacting to changes in the environment and that's the data that we use into let's just call it the next planning cycle or the next set of experiments or the next things that we want to do, because it's almost better. I would rather have a lot of people upset about the foreign element than for nobody to care. Right, apathy is worse. So you know we've looked at we've.

Speaker 2: 24:28

You don't know if they're interested. You don't know if they're not interested. You don't know if they're on board. Off board you get nothing.

Speaker 1: 24:34

There's no energy to work with yeah, yeah, and that actually that same telecom. I went and worked in another division a few years later where they every year, like clockwork, in january they did a reorg. So then, there's know, the response to that was always apathetic. You talk to people and they go well, I report to Biff instead of Sally, but I do the same thing. So I don't know. But they would do that just to shake the system up and to try to get people to think differently about their work. But it wasn't strong enough to do anything meaningful. They just kind of shuffled the org chart around a little bit. You know so, but nobody was ever upset.

Speaker 2: 25:17

They just expected it. It was a norm in the system and it didn't really have any meaning for people. And going in in in summer with that, similar to that, I worked in a large internet company, or I worked in a large internet company, or I worked with a large internet company and they had layoffs every 90 days and they had a horrendous whip problem. You know, work in process could not get the teams to. You know, it's like you only got this much done last time. You had that much on your plate. Now you got to finish that website and you're taking that much more. Why?

Speaker 2: 25:51

And uh, we never did actually figure it out, but we suspect that the fact that you're getting somebody near you or you will be gone in 90 days, and it was a way of looking important, a way of looking like you were providing value um, oh, it was a facade, but, um, it was something that people could do to feel more comfortable and hope that they would not be the one who found the door right. We've been talking about the change model, um, secure model specifically. We've thrown out foreign element, we've thrown out chaos. Would it be okay if I showed a quick picture of that?

Speaker 1: 26:31

Yes, I think it'd be important to talk about that. And then also, we've used the word congruent a few times. I think some people know what that is, but I think it would be useful because there's a good piggyback on what you just talked about, about congruency when it comes to too much whip in your system.

Speaker 2: 26:54

So one of the things Jason and I have been referring to is a model that was created by Virginia Satir. Virginia was a family therapist and her major contribution she had a lot of contributions, but she was the first therapist in the 50s who said what we really need to do is treat the family as a unit, instead of Johnny coming to me and we work with Johnny and Johnny's fine when he hits the door, but when he gets home he reverts back to his original behavior. And so she started treating patients in the family unit and the family as a whole. And this model comes from Virginia Satir. This is called the change model, where we have the first area, called the late status quo, where things are in Jason's example, it's now January 1st. You have had 11 months to get used to the latest change and we're now pretty much just cruising along. Everything is happening.

Speaker 2: 27:54

The foreign element January 1st we're going to reorg and that throws everything into this period of a time called chaos. The foreign element can be a reorg. Your company could get bought. It could be new tax tables if you're involved, or new tax laws. So you have to go and do things. It could be a trade show that you now have to buff some sort of a prototype for. So transforming elements come in many varieties.

Speaker 2: 28:28

In a period of chaos, you just kind of try to cope as best you can and then after a while somebody gets what's referred to as we refer to as the transforming idea and it's. You know, during this period of chaos you're doing multiple things. Some things get you a little better, some Some things don't, but eventually you've got enough knowledge in the new domain or the new culture, the new system, that you can start a period of integration and practice, integration and practice. And then you get to the early status quo and that's where things are finally humming. It's now October 1st and you're cranking happily along and the early status quo turns into the late status quo. So it's a cycle. It's a continuous cycle. It's not a one and done. A lot of times it's my impression that organizations think, well, we're going to make this change and then we're done. It doesn't happen that way in the world. The context changes, your competitors change, your users change, your people change, so change is a constant. Your people change, so change is a constant. One of the observations is the longer you've been in late status quo, the more difficult the foreign element is going to hit you. It's going to be more difficult to change. So, jerry, when Jerry's writing, he was saying you know, somewhere around here is a good time to think about having another change, because change, like any other skill or practice or habit, is the more you do it, the better you get at it. So that's the SatirChange model Up top.

Speaker 2: 30:30

Excellent book Managing Transitions by William Bridges Comes up with three steps. He's got the ending. Ending comes with a certain amount of loss, and then there's the neutral zone where you're trying to figure things out, and then you start the neutral zone where you're trying to figure things out and then you start a new beginning. So once again, it's cyclical. You mentioned repeating every year One of the things, one of the models. Actually it's a method from Human Systems Dynamic that I like is Adaptive Action, which has three parts what. So what? Now what? And as soon as you get done with now what, you're back at what. And so it's got the built-in cyclical nature of change and working in small bites.

Speaker 1: 31:32

And the interesting thing that I liked about when you were talking about early status quo and late status quo, that little box was. It was I think it was the first AYE and everybody had the opportunity to do one-on-ones with everybody so with you and Johanna and Esther and Steve and Jerry and I remember I was having my one-on-one with Esther and it was like four days in or something. I think it was Wednesday afternoon, so it was already like four days of just brain explosion and I remember saying something stupid like how can I go back and inflict this on my organization and get them to change, because this is so good? And and all she said was jason, it isn't about you.

Speaker 1: 32:12

And that box got my my brain thinking about the window of opportunity, because when you talk about, you know when's when's the best time to do a new change. Well, it's kind of in. That box is a good spot. But how do you know? And you know by feel. You feel the window of opportunity opening. You can see body language. You can see you know people don't appear to be as stressed out. You can feel the shininess wearing off from the early status quo by how you're interacting with people and stuff. And then it's kind of a good time to gather some new insights, figure out some new options and move forward. But it doesn't work on a timetable.

Speaker 2: 32:51

Well, it does not. And so you talked about the best time to attempt or to start another small change. This area, right here, is the absolute worst time. Now the Lord, high Ruler of the company has sent out the edict that, yes, we are going to be agile. So they kick it off. And so there's the foreign element, and suddenly everybody is now doing Scrum.

Speaker 2: 33:22

And I am not hammering Scrum per se, I'm not against Scrum, it has its place in the world, but it doesn't belong everywhere in the world. But so you spend a bunch of money, and then you're right about here and things are horrible. People are unhappy. I'm spending all my time in meetings. I'm not getting anything done. Oh, and if you have a matrix organization, I once worked with a client out in California and they had this very important guy who was on three different teams. He was spending 60% of his work week in meetings and wondering why no work was getting done. So if you put a foreign element right here I don't know if they can see my cursor or not you've introduced a new foreign element, which means your productive productivity, your performance, goes even lower, and eventually you keep stacking these things and you're off the chart.

Speaker 1: 34:31

Crashing in chaos, yeah crashing in chaos. Yeah.

Speaker 2: 34:36

All right.

Speaker 1: 34:39

So the last thing I wanted to add on top of that was because you started a story with or part of the Satir model, with that foreign element could be a reorg, it could be company got bought, et cetera. And it reminded me of a story when I was doing a workshop at the end of day one. It was with a boutique consulting firm over in Australia I don't remember how many people maybe 80, 90 people in the organization and at the end of day one they got summoned to the all hands meeting at 6pm that night and then the next morning everybody came in just white as a ghost. They had been acquired by gigantic consulting firm number one and everybody was like, oh, those idiots, they don't know how to run a blah, blah, blah and this sucks and blah, blah, blah.

Speaker 1: 35:22

So we did this little activity, which date beginning of day two was actually talking about the Satir stuff, and I was like, okay, this is awesome, but I don't want to use the model, I don't want to go now. See here, the foreign element made you blah, blah, blah Because what had been put in place and again this was from you guys, psl and AYE what has been put in place with emotion cannot be undone with logic.

Speaker 2: 35:46

Oh no, You've got to deal with that absolutely yeah, you have to deal with that response.

Speaker 1: 35:53

So we did this little activity. So think, think of a change that you did. What was your reaction? Response to it? Just the emotion. So it was well. Some were excited, they felt empowered, confusion, they were somewhere a little scared. And then what was your reaction? When you heard about being acquired so something you didn't have control over, and it was loss of control, annoyed shock, but optimism. And it was kind of a conversation around.

Speaker 1: 36:18

We always assume negative reaction to change. But it's not true. People aren't. They don't go into shock, denial, anger, frustration, uh, for every foreign element that comes into the system. Some people might just be waiting for that foreign element to happen. They're like finally, the shackles are off and I'm excited about this and we often underestimate that. And that's the people, those are the movers we want to latch onto because they are going to be, um, the informal change agents, if you want to call it that, that are going to help other people through chaos or at least help spread the goodness about the change. So I wanted to. I assume people are thinking about this. They're wondering what the heck is that background that you've got going on there? Is that all the rivers that you've been kayaking down.

Speaker 2: 37:12

Oh it's no, it's my impression of a Native American firebird. Let me see. So I've been thinking about change for a while. Let me see. I think it's that one. Nope, wasn't that one. Somewhere here, let's come to it. So this is my mind map of change. Let's see Somewhere here we can. That's what it looks like. Let's see Somewhere here we can. That's what it looks like. This was my attempt to hide the mess of my office behind me, and so that's Don's mind map of change.

Speaker 2: 38:02

And what's interesting is the distinction between a map and a model, or a map and a method. A map simply says this is the territory, these are the mountains, these are the rivers, there's a road that goes here. There's a destination over there. It doesn't tell you how to do anything, it just identifies stuff. So there's a lot of things on here. I started it in like 2011. I've made some adjustments to it recently, and this is by no means everything that's involved with change. This is my view of it. Other views exist in our pile and are every bit as valid, but this is based on I don't know. I've been coaching, consulting, for 20 years. I was doing software development for the 20 years before that, so this is sort of a synopsis do the colors represent something, categories, themes just difference.

Speaker 2: 39:14

It just means this, this branch is different than that branch. Okay, I guess I could do that, but that would involve a lot of time, and then I would start to make categories and it would reveal how my mind models stuff and how I clump things together.

Speaker 2: 39:32

Yeah, and it would be, then you have a framework, I would be inflicting help, and we've learned that we do not want. If we get nothing else out of this session today, don't solve other people's problems for them. Yeah, be useful, assist when possible, but let them figure it out.

Speaker 1: 39:52

Yeah, yeah, yeah, people ask that about. Uh, you know where's the framework diagram for lean change? And why is it called lean change? I said because how jason's brain works, nobody's going to buy a book called that. This is my worldview, this is how I see stuff, this is what it's influenced by. And there you go. I can't tell you how to do it, but I can give you some clues. All right, I think we're about the end of our time. Yes, we are. So tell everybody.

Speaker 2: 40:22

But I've got 14 more things to talk about.

Speaker 1: 40:25

Oh man, I could go. Yeah, I just. I've mentioned this a million times. It's, you know, in all the books. You know all of my thinking is influenced from the five of you, and not a day goes by and I mean that sincerely that I don't think about something that happened at one of those sessions, something that just comes into my brain and goes maybe I wasn't thinking about that the right way, maybe there's this thing or this door I can open. It's just, it's the gift that keeps on giving. So I know you've got one coming up in May or May Actually May is correct.

Speaker 2: 41:04

Problem solving leadership workshop. Next one is scheduled for March 30th through April 4th. Okay, and it's in Albuquerque. Again, it's in Albuquerque, new Mexico. You can find more about that. Go to congruentchangecom. And then, look, we never did get to congruence. We have to come back together. We didn't finish the conversation about congruence, so yeah, congruentchangecom. And then you can go to workshops, and the first workshop that pops up is problem-solving leadership, which we refer to as PSL for short.

Speaker 1: 41:43

Yes, and all of this stuff will be in show notes. So if you're listening on the podcast, you can go to thatchangeshowcom or leanchange. Yes, and all of this stuff will be in show notes. So if you're listening on the podcast, you can go to thatchangeshowcom or leanchangetv. If you want to see the video version of it and all the links, ai summaries, all that fun stuff will be in the show notes. All right, any final thoughts or words or what change agents should be doing to be more effective?

Speaker 2: 42:08

That's a whole, nother episode. That's not a conclusion, that's a segue.

Speaker 1: 42:14

Yeah, exactly, this will be part one of two. Well, you don't know that it could be one of N? Yeah, exactly, all right. So where else can people find you on LinkedIn, social media stuff like that?

Speaker 2: 42:28

LinkedIn, donald E Gray, there is a congruent change page on LinkedIn. So if you look for congruent change on LinkedIn, it should take you to the page. Let's see. I'm on actually I'm on Mastodon. I have left Twitter or X or whatever you call it, um. So I've gone to Mastodon and, cleverly, as Donald E Gray and my website, donaldegraycom. I may be wrong, but at least I'm consistent.

Speaker 1: 43:02

Yes, All right, well, thanks so much for taking the time. Enjoy the wonderful weather. We'll enjoy the foot and a half of snow and up here in the great white north, and we will chat again soon. So thanks for taking the time. Thank you for having me have a great day, you too.