Psyched For Business Podcast Episode 13
Episode 13:
Building the foundations for a progressive organisation in 2023 with Richard Wood
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Episode 13 - Transcript
Voiceover 0:00
Welcome to Psyched for Business, helping business leaders understand and apply cutting edge business psychology principles in the workplace.
Richard Anderson 0:10
Hi, and welcome to Psyched for Business. I'm Richard Anderson. Thank you for joining me. In this episode, I'm joined by Richard Wood from The Ready. Richard is a business psychologist and organizational development and transformation consultant. In this episode, Richard outlines how progressive organizations have a very unique way of working. And he talks through some of the steps that can be taken to modernise the workplace in 2023. Thanks for listening. Richard would welcome to Psyched for Business. How are you doing?
Richard Wood 0:40
I'm good, good to be chatting to you, Richard,
Richard Anderson 0:42
Great to be chatting to you too. And obviously business psychologist, organizational development and leadership consultant, I know that you do some great work. You've been living abroad for a few years. But I'll let you give your own intro. And I think you know, as far as this podcast is concerned, I think we've got a really interesting topic. And you've got a really unique and interesting approach to how you support individuals and organizations to become better places and better individuals at their job. And I know that you've got a very unique question that you're asking, we can get into the ins and outs of that throughout this podcast. But if you'd be happy to maybe give a little bit of background first Richard, if you tell us kind of who you are, and what you do,
Richard Wood 1:19
I'll try to keep it brief so you can get into the the juicy stuff. So I'm Richard Wood, I said business psychologist, psychology through my life, from a levels to university to my post grad for quite a few years later, especially focused on occupational Organizational Psychology, like the psychology of work and business and how people show up inside the organizations where they spend a lot of their life. That's where I am now that a lot of my journey workwise happened in China, I was in China for 14 years, coming back in 2020. Back to the UK. And that was fine. I did a lot of stuff in education, teaching English teaching international college programs, and then moved into consulting when I found my kind of passion of leadership and organizational culture and employee engagement and psychometrics and that type of thing. And then continued in that individual development place like management, development, leadership development, those types of things for finding a new area of born out of frustration with like how things are looking at how things could be I looked at the future of work, new ways of working different ways of organizing. And then that led me to where I am today at the ready and doing consulting for different companies on how how they can work better and how to evolve and make progress as an organization as a whole. So focus on the organization now, and less on the individual.
Richard Anderson 2:36
Fantastic. And how different was it working across in China to over here?
Richard Wood 2:40
Massively different. And I found the question slightly differently, how different is it working in the UK to working in China because most of my career is there, like a third of my life has been there. And most of the previous years he was when I was a child, but that really count. Everyone emphasizes the the differences, obviously language and culture and all of the visible things. But there's a lot of similarities. When you start talking about work, you know, there's hierarchy, and there's internal politics, there's communication is how they show up is different, but the themes are really, really similar. Saying that, you know, training was a big challenge to learn how to operate inside a new environment, not just the language, but how things work is really different. And I've had the reverse culture shock coming back here where the paces is slower in getting things done, in some ways, but also it's less chaotic and sometimes more more predictable, which is has its benefits. So you might might take longer, but you get exactly what it says on the tin.
Richard Anderson 3:36
Yes, of course. I guess in future it might open up additional working opportunities across both nations as well and obviously you'll be fluent no doubt in Mandarin.
Richard Wood 3:48
Yeah, I am. That's something I've worked at as a way to become an independent functioning human inside that environment. I didn't have to rely on other people to help me do things. Yeah. Plus using it as a working language once I got to a certain level I landed on the streets in a taxi and the restaurant but also did some formal learning as well as a as a foreigner in a Chinese University education program. So I felt that as well which gets you into the culture as well because it's a Chinese style of education.
Richard Anderson 4:14
What was the most useful just out of interest because I'm not having an okay level of French I did that to a level of very, very basic level of Spanish but I'm by no means I mean, I couldn't barely hold my own in conversations, but I would imagine the informal conversations will be almost as useful as the formal stuff is that fair?
Richard Wood 4:32
It is fair because that's what you're doing day to day, like going to the shop to find something in the supermarket or asking directions and just having a chat getting to know someone is is always the first step so building relationships needs chitchat or casual conversation. I think that is the key view it can be really good at their professional stuff, but no one wants to talk to you because you haven't connected them getting where you want. You're not winning, you're gonna lose gonna lose out on that one. Also, they're very forgiving. The Chinese are very forgiving for a foreigner speaking the language made. So it's kind of a surprise, a shock, also a really pleasant experience like, oh, wow, someone has made the effort to say, yeah, if you say hello, thank you people were like, wow, you speak Chinese, you're so good. If you actually string a sentence together, or a paragraph or do a speech or a training session,
Richard Anderson 5:14
it's often the other way around. Because obviously, this English is the international language in the the business model. And everybody, you know, uses English, but Well, yes, that's why I'm always in awe of anybody who can who can speak other languages, fluently as I am of people who speak English, when the name of the speaker of the language is so brilliant. So getting back to the kind of the juicy part of the podcast talking about organizations and how they work, how they operate. And you mentioned something before, and I made a quick note of it. So how things are at the minute, versus how things couldn't be. And I know that you've done a lot of work around kind of how organizations are set up traditionally and historically versus how they could be set up in the future. So tell me a little bit more about about how you look at organizations and how they how things could be within organizations,
Richard Wood 6:00
there's so much here, if you look at some of the historical reasons why the organizations are like they are, it can be quite troubling, look at workers don't get to make decisions, because they weren't considered to be smart enough to make decisions, they just get told what to do. And that's the birth of management almost like we will tell you how to do this manufacturing process, because we designed it the way we think can be done better. And you just learn that and repeat it. And it takes away the autonomy, and the agency from the the individuals. So if you look at that, from a manufacturing point of view, and then that gets replicated inside what we call an alcohol knowledge work, the same thing that you need to do this process, do it this way, because of compliance because of quality control. And it takes away innovation and takes away the chance for new possibilities and ways to make things easier. So there's a lot of load, inside of cognitive load inside people's work. That is not actually the work, it's thinking about all of the things that are constraining or holding back or guiding the work, which isn't necessarily what grown up adults need. They're just like a space to be able to work and know where they're going and what they're supposed to be doing that run free. You know, they can they can, they can figure things out and maybe find new ways or better ways, or that's the basis of it. Also, when we do a presentation, at the end, we have one slide and it's what's this, and it's an organizational chart, you know, Organa gram, and you've got the little boxes and the lines going down and down and more and more boxes as you go further down and ask the question, when is that from? When is this picture from and people like I have a guess that you can't see it, but you can picture it in your mind.
Richard Anderson 7:36
I can imagine. I'm gonna say it was quite a while ago, I wouldn't I guess but yeah, 50 years, maybe 60 years.
Richard Wood 7:43
It's the one that shines like 100 years? Well, luckily, 110 over 10 years now. And then what's the difference? For one for 2022? Pretty much nothing. Yeah, everything else we've done has changed in those 110 years. We communicate how we travel, how we live or the devices we have. But if we still organize or represent our organization in exactly the same way, something's amiss, the society has changed, cultures have changed, technology has changed. All kinds of things have changed because of the interdependencies between those different things. I think why is it kind of impossible for me that that the organization's haven't evolved at the same in the same way at the same rate?
Richard Anderson 8:24
Yeah. And we just accept that it's the way that things are. It's just the way that an organization is set up. And I guess that that's probably for anybody who wanted to start a new business tomorrow there would probably follow that structure of that diagram that we're talking about. Yeah,
Unknown Speaker 8:38
Exactly. So you look at some people say that I'm a startup. And that's great, because you don't have all of the baggage of 100,000, people and organization, all of the bureaucracy and all of the layers that come with it. But if you take the same approach, it has the same problems, it just might not kind of manifest themselves immediately. Because if you've only got three people, it's hard to have a big hierarchy, but it's still there, the foundations are still there. So if you kind of if you feel good start as you mean to go on, it's easier to design well at the beginning than it is to try and change a company when it gets when it gets really, really big.
Richard Anderson 9:12
And I would imagine and correct me if I'm wrong here, Richard, but I would imagine a lot of its knowledge. I mean, I started, we could even talk about my company. If it will be useful, though, you know, we're a small outfit, we have seven staff and I guess we would loosely follow that broad organizational structure of which however many 1000s of other companies do already but but for me, it's maybe a knowledge piece as well. So what are the alternative ways of looking at how I can structure my organization? And I guess what would the questions be that you would go into an organization and ask people in order for them to help change or maybe look at how that's set up? The first thing
Richard Wood 9:49
is, it's not the chart necessarily. That is the problem if it's like this is the structure of where things are. There's just there's a certain value to that because at least it's it's written down is visible people can refer to it, if you believe that that is how information flows and how work gets done. That's quite different. Because the value flow from department to department is not, it's not shown that how the work gets done is not shown in an organizational chart. So that's just where people sit or who's reporting to whom in, in a chain of command type of approach, which has a certain value, but if it's the only way you look at it, it's the only lens you have, then then it's more problematic. So that's part one is kind of disclaimer, too. I, there's nothing inherently wrong with that unless you Yeah, no, no, no, you did. And that's what happens inside the organization. Or we can't do this, because it's in that box, not my box. And that's only because there's a box, yeah, why do these things have to go into two separate boxes. So you know, familiar with, with silos, if you create a silo, then a silo is there if you break that down or work across silos, so one of the things we do inside already, and there's other approaches to this, there's holacracy. And so sociocracy is based on on circles, just to change your shape, maybe. But also, it's not because there's distributed authority inside a circle, and it's not layered upon layer, there might be a, an overarching circle, that includes the heads of all of the different circles for making the organizational wide decision. So like, the head of the head of the hiring circle, the head of the training circle, the head of the psychometric circle, all come to gather inside the master circle, so to speak, of a super circle. And it's a different way of organizing, because there's more equality of the distribution of power, and people are close to the decisions that affect them. And it's very clear line between what they can and can't decide what they are or aren't responsible for accountable for. So it's, we have this authority, and we have this amount of money that we can spend as this circle, if we need more, we have to go one step further up. And you can be on multiple circles, you can have multiple roles. So there's just more dynamism about it. And imagine a whenever the round Knights of the Round Table, if you're, if equal, you're looking at each other, there's no one that's necessarily at the head, someone is the head of the circle, that doesn't necessarily mean that the person with all of the power, they might have certain rights that are afforded to them, because they have been elected into that role. But they still can also be deselected from that role, and somebody else can be nominated. So it's much more dynamic, where the role is not your job. And the role is one of many roles that you have, yes, you feel as needed by the organization, or how the team or the circle believe you're still serving the purpose of that group. If that changes, you can change the person. So it's much less less fixed, more agile, more nimble, more flexible, whichever word you'd like to use. And maybe that's hard to imagine. But it can work. And it takes a lot of effort to change from one to another or to start like that at the beginning.
Richard Anderson 12:54
Yeah, I can imagine it would and just trying to visualize and kind of picture those circles as you're talking. Now. I think the fact that there's more dynamism, the fact that it's more agile, I guess, one of the things that I was thinking about, as you were speaking, there is quiet quitting, which is this popular term that we we all hear about, I guess you're if you've got silos, and you've got a very rigid structure to your day, and this is what you do and nothing else, you're more likely to probably experience or quiet quit. And maybe if people have got more responsibilities or more dynamism, or the ability to work across multiple teams, or have different roles and responsibilities across the organization, there's going to be more buy in to the organization from its staff. Is that Is that something that you found? Have you found that people become more engaged employee engagement increases for things like that?
Richard Wood 13:42
I think that's right, because partially, there's the choice, you can choose to a certain degree where you would like to go, which circles you'd like to be what role you would like to take inside circle or whichever structure you you have. And sometimes you be involved in the co creation of defining what that role is, what what is its purpose, what are the accountabilities? What decision rights does this role have? And once you've decided to it, and everyone has consented to it, then if you there's also built into that, and if you don't do it, you how you will you will be held accountable. And it's not about how many hours you've done or what output you've got, it's the results that are the outcomes that you're looking at on the role level and on the team or the group or the circle level. So once that's been defined together, steering as a group, people, do you feel more ownership because they literally have that and it's not if there's a mistake and you fail you, you will be gone? It's like no, it's the collective responsibility of, well, how do we solve that we didn't hit our targets therefore, something is getting in the way or we're not doing something we could be and that's continually have life cycles of learning and evolving how we are doing this. So we can better enable us moving in the right direction towards the goals that we've set. So it's, it's a change of mindset as well. It's not just our being engage is also being fully accountable and putting things down. So you can enable yourself to continue to be engaged. If you've defined that yourself, and you define it in a way that doesn't inspire you, then you've set yourself up for failure. I mean, who would do that? Well, yeah, very few people, some people would, but very few people will do like we believe people inherently want to do good work. They're motivated, they don't want to go to work and not work. But choose the wrong place, or they've been hired into the wrong position. If there's a problem fairly early on in the funnel. If they've been selected correctly for the right kind of role, then they want to do the work. And they want to do well, because that's how humans do it.
Richard Anderson 15:38
That's what why and of course it is. Yeah. So if you're going into an organization, Richard, and you're speaking to the leadership team, or whoever it is that you have these initial conversations with, and you're looking at an organization that's maybe done things that traditional or the old school, we're talking about that that kind of chart from 100 odd years ago, what are the telltale signs for you, when you're speaking to people that would lead you to believe well, actually, this is we may need to modernize this, this organization.
Richard Wood 16:06
A lot of times people are, they're stuck. As in, we've tried all kinds of stuff. We've tried culture change, we've tried training, we've tried a whole host of other consulting interventions and things aren't happening, or we had, we made some progress. And now and now we're stuck in our head of reorganization, and we've got a new structure a core. And so you've got the What have you got that the how, if you're, you're stuck and talking about people aren't doing this, they aren't doing that. If you're blaming the people, well, that's interesting, because people can only do what the system or the you know, the environment allows them to do. If you allow them to not do anything, then that is something that will happen if you have a place that nourishes them, and they can find the way to do the work in the easiest way to get better results, then that will also happen. So we talked about the fish in the aquarium. So if you blame the fish for what's happening in the aquarium, it's like, well, if it's around aquarium, you can only swim in a circle, you know, it changed the shape that people can swim slightly differently. So if you, even if you take the fish out to learn something new, and they come back, they can still only swim around around around in a circle. So you have to look at both of them. If you want to massive change, and you need to change the environment, change the aquarium change the system change where people are actually doing the work.
Richard Anderson 17:25
Yeah, because when I was doing a little bit of reading, before this podcast, it was that as part of the article, it said, you know, leaders might blame members of staff, the staff might say we've got the wrong leaders in place. But if we're not going to change, fundamentally the system itself, then this is gonna go on in perpetuity. Yeah.
Richard Wood 17:44
And the blame is difficult when it's easy to get into the blame game. But saying like, people are lazy, they just don't do it is visible, someone's not doing it that you can probably deny that. But the reason why and the root cause are really sometimes difficult to identify what is actually causing Richard to not hit his sales targets, is he rubbish at sales, or as our product rubbish or our prices wrong? It's like possibly none of those things, it might not be so, so tangible, something completely different. They spending 25 hours a week filling out a spreadsheet to report to somebody who doesn't read a spreadsheet about how many hours you spent talking to clients like it can be that like, Well, why is that? Why you're saying well, because I spend too much time filling out stuff about sales when I'm not when I should actually be out selling? And it's okay, that makes sense. Why don't we stop doing that? Okay, let's stop doing that. Oh, you sound more? Okay. It's very simple to say. But it's hard to break down some of the processes that are already there.
Richard Anderson 18:44
Yeah, of course, that was a brilliant example that you said about sending the spreadsheet, somebody is not going to read it because we've all seen and heard of these things happening in organizations. But one of the things that really gets me is so many meetings and meetings about meetings and meetings about a meeting about a meeting. And I would imagine that, you know, I've seen that happen in small businesses, I would imagine it happens a lot in larger businesses. I mean, if you tally of all the times that are all the time that it takes to have all of these wasted meetings, let's pull it I mean, if you started quantify that, and think how much money that's going to cost longer term, I mean, I would imagine that's crazy.
Richard Wood 19:18
Yeah. And you pull on meetings, it's a good one. It's a lot of where we start when we have an intervention with a client, because it's when people get together. It's also there's too many meetings, the wrong type of meetings, the wrong people at the meetings, meetings, to prepare for meetings, all of these things. And also, if you got an executive team, or all of the people are on X, hundreds of 1000s of dollars a year and you got 20 of them in the room for two hours a week. That's been really, really expensive if, especially if it creates no, no value. So one of my pet hates on a personal level is the Monday morning update meeting. Well, you've just come back from the weekend. Yeah. So you want to hash out what happened last week? Who you updating for? Why does it have to be a meeting? Is there a better question? Is there a better time for that meeting? I mean, I wouldn't put it on Friday afternoon, either that's just find a time or even do it doesn't even need to be a meeting, could it be done using modern technology or something else? So I think the Monday morning meeting can be a killer. I mean, there's there's always exceptions, that could be a well designed meeting on Monday at nine o'clock, just because that's the only time people have they then do that. But not just to satisfy the boss's curiosity that everyone has been busy last week, expect them to remember what they've done last week, on the Monday morning, before they've had their first cup of
Richard Anderson 20:39
coffee. And then it becomes habitual. And everybody's doing it every single Monday, and nobody wants to be there. And nobody's really listening. Anybody else is up there. They're just waiting for the chance. All of that sort of love to me been sitting original job doesn't always happen like that. But there's all of those things that to probably for that. So again, if you're if you're talking about these things on an organizational level, and you're trying to dig deep when you go into an organization to find out what are the barriers, and why do we feel stuck? How do you go about doing it? Do you speak to individual contributions and leadership teams? How does that,
Richard Wood 21:11
how does that work, but don't try to do the same thing for every single member of the organization at the same time, it's too big, and you won't get anywhere that would be the takers, but also, on an individual level, possibly too small. So I like the A team would we'd like the unit and engaging multiple teams, depending on the scope of the work, and keep it small, so and safe. If you've got eight people, 12 people, if they do something slightly different in a organization of several 100, several 1000 10s of 1000s, then it might even be a blip on the radar. But it could be the place where momentum starts to start small, get people doing different things. And then from that, Team A who do they work with most closely at teams BCD. And then kind of you go out there and some people like it seem to be getting good results. What are you doing? Or are your team seem to be happy and productive? What are you doing differently? Just kind of pique the interest of the people around you that way? You've seen everyone's different? You didn't? Yeah, we didn't do all of that kind of supervisory management stuff. You seem to be doing lots of enabling things like how does that work? And just just is a natural, sometimes is an organic way of that progressing? Sometimes you kind of need to be saying like, are you worried it a lot that's going to discuss how you can work better with it? Because yeah, it's not there yet. Somebody has to be really explicit that they do that, because there's an interface there that is struggling, and everyone's frustrated. So let's get it all out on the table. Like, why are you frustrated are because of this and that, alright, let's find a way to overcome that and see what see what works. And if it works, then we go to the next thing. If it doesn't we we try something else
Richard Anderson 22:46
is that about having an open forum where people can speak very candidly and very openly about some of the challenges that they come across in the workplace, because one of the things that we do a lot of as you would imagine this 360 feedback and part of 360 feedback is that there's a prerequisite that certain parts of it, have an element of anonymity there. So you know, you can feedback on your manager, but you don't necessarily want the manager to know who those individuals are. How do you kind of navigate that part of the process?
Richard Wood 23:15
Yeah, that's a really good question. And there's no right answer here, because it'd be cool to start where they are, if the team are in that area, and that mindset that psychological states where they don't feel that they can be totally open. Yeah, then go with some anonymity of, well, you know, ask that question, what's holding you back from doing the best work of your life? And just people know the answer to that? Will they share the answer that is two different things, people know what annoys them will get gets them down? You know, what, you know, some extreme cases are what makes them cry on the way home from work, you know, they know what court is causing that. And if you can find a way to get that out onto a set of sticky notes or shared document where you don't know who's done what, and just like, oh, wow, seven people said they feel stressed out about doing the annual budget thing, because because it's theater. All right, well, that's a signal. Of course, it doesn't necessarily mean it's the answer, but it's a signal. Okay, what's behind that, and then you dig into that. So using some of the tools online collaboration tools mural, for example, we use quite a lot inside of Microsoft Word document on online or Google Doc or something where you don't have to show who's doing what you can just get the things down there. And it doesn't have to be done verbally, it doesn't have to be done live or synchronously can do it asynchronously, which helps sometimes really anonymity if you don't know who went in where, but it can really get some of that stuff out. At the same time. You need to build the space and the environment of the group. So it's easier to share those things proactively at the time when they're happening not let's wait until the next big intervention or the best big workshop is I will how can we make it so it's easy to do that? There's no answer to that for it depends on on the team, the selection of individuals, exactly what the issue is, but there are a selection of approaches that you can do to get at that.
Richard Anderson 24:59
Yeah. Oh, brilliant. So I would imagine one of the things that you'll do if you're collecting all of this information, you're giving people a forum for feeding back about what's, what they're struggling with, or what's holding them back in their roles, you're inevitably going to end up collecting lots of data, whether that's sticky notes, whether it's mural Word docs, whatever, what like, what do you do with that data? And how can you go about taking that data and Megan recommendations, as a result of that, there
Richard Wood 25:26
was something called the operating system, Canvas. So people are familiar with operating system on your phone, same kind of thing. But for organizations, and this is a tool, I'll briefly briefly introduce it. So it includes 12 dimensions, or 12 fields of the canvas, which have been found to cover a lot of progressive organizations do things differently in these 12 areas. It's not the only things that that are done differently inside progressive or evolutionary organizations. But it's 12 are the ones where a lot of them are doing things differently, for example, purpose and strategy, workflow, membership, compensation, these types of things. And we might color code as well, like, what are we doing? Well, it's not just what's what's going on? And what are we doing? Well, what are we doing? Okay, what are we doing? Not not so well, and map it on the canvas? And like, oh, look, actually, our meetings are mostly yellow, so they're okay. But authorities is, there's a hell of a lot of red. So we kind of that is our problem. And that's like flashing warning flags here. And you look at not just what the like, for example, the sticky notes, say, but you look at where they land. Okay, we have a, we haven't potentially have an issue here in authority. But it might be that the root cause of that comes from inflammation or strategy, because what showing up as a problem with authority that I don't know how I can make decisions, it might just because you don't have a clue what decisions need to be made, not because you don't have the actual authority to make the decision is just that the strategy is lacking clarity. So it could be I don't know if I can make that decision, I understand what I'm supposed to be doing. But I'm not sure I am allowed to. So you have to kind of dig one layer down into Oh, really? What is that? And this tool, the canvas is one way of just making sense of it to to organize or structure the input as a sense, making tough what is going on? What does that show us about the themes and the underlying root causes of the good things? And not so good things about how we how we are working? And then we say like, would we make recommendations? Yes. But would we also say, Okay, what, what can be done about this? And that's a hard question at the beginning, because the same thing, I don't know what can be done, like, just pick something that you think you can't do? And then let's see if we can just do that, or something that you're doing, you don't want to do? Can we just stop that? What is the smallest thing we can possibly do based on what we've seen, I don't know if I can make a decision. Alright, so you can choose not to make the decision. Or you can just to make the decision and see what happens. And if you all agree like Oh, for the next month, we're just going to make the decision, we think is right and see, if we're still alive at the end of the at the end of the month, as long as I like business critical has to be safe. So it's not going to bring down the entire organization, but it's within a certain boundary or certain constraint, just don't make that decision. So it's like
Richard Anderson 28:02
experimental things that you would progressively monitor over a period of time, something you've never done before that you could try and see what the impact is.
Richard Wood 28:09
Exactly. And it's about experimentation that what is the the tension about the problem? What is the practice that we could do? So the tension is, I don't know, whether I can make decisions, practices can be alright. Either you clarify what your decision rights are, which takes quite a lot of effort. Or it could be just try making the decision. And the experiment would be let's do that for four weeks, six weeks, 12 weeks? And then we do a retrospective like that. What difference did that make? Did that unblock the work? Or did that cause more problems? And doesn't mean if it cause more problems? We don't do it? So well? What are the other problems? And what do we do with those and just keep on covering and this like the snowball effect, it could feel overwhelming, it could be that at least I have a small piece that I know that I'm trying something with. And just to build that sense of autonomy, about a half, I get this one thing. And then there's other things that I will ignore for a bit. And then once this is been tested, we either go again on the same issue or we go again, on a different issue, because that one is under control. It's good enough.
Richard Anderson 29:08
Yeah. And of course, I guess the alternative to not experimenting or not doing these things, whether it's recommendations or experimentation is that things will remain the same. And there'll be no progress next time. Because one of the things I was thinking, Oh, well, how much pushback do you get from organizations to implement new experiments and those types of things? But I guess and I'm not deliberately answering my own question here and jump in, is if you've been commissioned to do the work in the first place, then there must be at least often to an element of change.
Richard Wood 29:34
Yes, I must say yes. And no is one of my favorite answers. Like, yes, there'll be someone who is like, yeah, we need to try something different. We, we understand that and people are good. We're really open to experimentation and like, okay, cool. We really want the team to do an expert. Oh, hang on. You want the team to do experimentation? No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Also you like also you should team you. If you don't experiment with giving away some of your power. That you kind of expect other people to suddenly suddenly Magica this extra power that you haven't given up, because you those things are in conflict with with each other. So it sort of kind of that's quite a simple way of looking at it. But it is it is important that. So that's where we come up sometimes like, oh, no, no, not not me. Yeah. But no, no, that's number one. Let's start there. Like, yes, you are you collective view is where we're starting in not, you versus them. That's, that probably is one of the dynamics we're trying to, we're going to cut down on. Yeah, that
Richard Anderson 30:29
makes total sense. Then you talked before about progressive organizations. Normally, I know that you didn't use the word adhering to the operating system, Canvas book, but kind of align themselves more to the more traditional, I'm using the word traditional, again, you know, I'm probably using the wrong terminology. But you know, where I'm going with that, what makes an organization have the appetite to go from that more traditional, old fashioned model, if you'd like to be coming up progressive model, and maybe looking at things like the canvas as it is a productivity, because you give the example before it was a really good one, when you said that people were felt stuck, and they've tried a lot of different things, and nothing seems to be working? What's the real kind of the straw that breaks the camel's back to for somebody to get in touch? And say, Look, we need some support. Is it outpour? Is it employee engagement? What What kind of causes people to engage your services?
Richard Wood 31:22
That's a good question with quite a few answers. So broad, broad stroke things as good imagine that it could be are that the pulse survey or the employee engagement survey showing that stress levels are high or workload is too high, or people are thinking of quitting. So that's the kind of the people side of things could be a trigger for that could be business outcomes. We're trying to achieve something big, we've got all these massive targets or objectives that we've been given. And the way we are working, it hasn't done the done the business yet. So it's we are striving for something business. And we need something radical, because business as usual, is not serving us anymore. Does that realization of I can't do this by myself. So that'd be a leader of a business unit or a project team or a whole whole organization, aren't there? That's, that's not right. But you've never heard this before, the pandemic had a big impact as well, like, because when that happened, everyone started going doing virtual meetings. And it brought up quite a lot of opportunity for our well now, in London, we're doing all these meetings online. So why don't we just include London and Paris and Frankfurt, and even Singapore and like, that just becomes a standard. And that's a whole new way of working. So it creates an opportunity also created a whole heap of challenges. So we thought that was a cool idea to finally do this cross functional, international grouping to get all of these experts together working on on a team tickets spot that was inspired by agile or something, but we don't know how to do it. And we need someone's help with the with the ways work, how do we set up the team? How to run the team? How do we know it's working and with that, so a brand new clean slate that we we know we need to do this, and we don't know how it's just complete helplessness or despair, complete data that trigger there, because of the situation we've been thrown into because of external factors.
Richard Anderson 33:10
Of course, I think that, you know, the fact that the pandemic came about, and that we completely changed the way in which we work and abroad was forward however many years quicker than, than we were expected to move forward. Anyway, it's probably, I don't know whether this is true on the whole, but I guess a lot of more, a lot more people see new ways and innovative ways of working and experimentation is maybe they see it as less risky now than they might have done at one time, because they've seen how much things have changed when we've been kind of forced into working in a particular way and how productive a lot of people have become as a result of
Richard Wood 33:43
that. Yeah, and it brings about some of the things you've already broken the traditional model, in a sense, so if you don't know how it's supposed to be then you have the opportunity to deliberately and intentionally designed how it how it will be. If you do that in a more collaborative or human, more people positive way that a unit believe that people can do it, if you give them the space, then that will bring something else because you can't look over someone's shoulder when their shoulders are 1015 miles away 100 miles away so you like Deuce do something else. You can't just walk up to someone at the coffee machine when it's not there. And then when you go back to the office you can keep keep some of those some of those things like oh, we should have a set rhythm of meetings because we we have this for needs and we kind of mush them together in this terrible meeting. Why don't we have like the coordination meeting and the one where we get stuff done and then the one where we talk about the communication with the rest of the organization you can have different way of thinking and organizing the work means that just build up new hassle and muscles and habits have this new way of working on it. It will almost by osmosis just seep into the ways of working no matter where it started if it started in the face to face or it can go into the yeah Virtual advisor and vice versa.
Richard Anderson 35:02
Brilliant. So what do you find Richard the most rewarding when it comes to bringing about organizational change? Because I would imagine changing anything is going to be hugely rewarding if you've supported in bringing it about, but is there anything in particular, any examples that you might have of things that have felt really rewarding?
Richard Wood 35:21
There's a couple of things that stand out actually. One is like when people call you out on kind of violating one of the principles that you introduced to them, like, oh, hang out, that doesn't seem to be yeah, like I call you, you've now you've now passed you've graduated from? Because it's, there's different principles we talked about, you know, like default to transparency like you didn't share that in advance you know, you didn't that was that was on your computer, not in a shared document, you didn't share the link like, okay, cool. You are, you're right. And it's that call out because you know, that someone is taking it to heart and it's not somebody else telling them that you remember this. The other ones are like the reflections of people that have been doing stuff for a while and say that this has changed my life, not just my work. So one example would be, we have this safe to try principle. People don't just use it at work, like is this idea is this proposal? Is this experiment safe to try they use it at work that we're going to buy a house and we need to re mortgage the house? And like, Is this safe to try for us and they do it with husbands or wives or partners and children and stuff? Like Well, that's that's cool, because it isn't just about work. These these approaches can be used anywhere really, as long as it's, you know, people feel you're a bit quirky in a bit strange, but that's okay. Because it does. It gets you in the right conversation. Like is it cetera? I'm not sure I'm feeling uncomfortable with XYZ. Cool. Let's have a look at how do we make it safe to try or we can't afford a house that much. Let's bring the price down. Okay, now I feel, you know, take 50,000 Off the top price range. I feel more comfortable with that. I think we can afford it that okay, cool. A lot people don't communicate, but they're making it really explicit. And watching people just run with it and do it in their own their own ways is really, really cool. And then they like, report back whenever I catch up with them. Like, yeah, I do it like this. And I do that with my mom and the dad. And it's really funny. Like, okay, cool. I unexpected, tangential experiences that they they create themselves. No, absolutely.
Richard Anderson 37:11
Fantastic. Brilliant. Just to kind of finish finish up, Richard. I've loved the love the conversation. And I think we'll finish on if you're happy just to talk a little bit about the ready, maybe and and yourself and how you can support organizations. I know that obviously we've talked throughout this podcast around that and do the thing I was going to ask is, is there any way that we can point people in the direction of more information on the operating system canvas? Because I know that it's a nice document that's downloadable that people can can look through as well?
Richard Wood 37:39
Sure, yeah. So the ready is a future of work consulting company. They're doing organization design and transformation in the form of workshops and advisory services and full on transformation services. So that's good for different sizes of organizations and scopes of work. And what that entails is, as you can imagine, from the conversation, all kinds of stuff. So we would really, we're really interested in speaking to people who are like passionate about changing the world of work, changing how they work. Not that we have all the answers of what you're supposed to be doing. But we can help with that. How are you going to get there? How can you do that in a better way that less friction more smoother, more human friendly, that's everything. So go to the ready.com If I can plug another podcast on your podcast the the brave new work podcast on Apple, iTunes, and any anywhere you get your podcasts from, and from me look me up on on LinkedIn. Richard would that'd be good. And I'll share a link to the article that has the operating system canvas, which explains what it is and it gives you the ability to download and that'll be that's a medium workspace that already has it has other articles and other interesting pieces that people might want to have a look at.
Richard Anderson 38:51
Fantastic. Well, Richard wood, thank you very much for your time really enjoyed speaking to and we'll catch up soon. Thanks, Richard. I really enjoyed the chat. Thank you. Me too. Take care.
Voiceover 39:00
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