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The Product Experience
The Product Experience features conversations with the product people of the world, focusing on real insights of how to improve your product practice. Part of the Mind the Product network, hosts Lily Smith (ProductTank organiser and Product Consultant) & Randy Silver (Head of Product and product management trainer) “go deep” with the best speakers from ProductTank meetups all over the globe, Mind the Product conferences, and the wider product community.
The Product Experience
The illusion of quick fixes in organisational change - Steve Hearsum (Consultant, Author)
Can organisational change truly rely on quick fixes, or are we missing the bigger picture? Join our engaging discussion with Steve Hearsum, Author of "No Silver Bullet: Bursting the Bubble of the Organizational Quick Fix." Steve shares his journey into the field and reveals the flawed belief in miracle solutions for complex challenges. We tackle the often-overlooked challenges faced by product managers who are expected to perform at senior leadership levels without adequate support.
Featured Links: Follow Steve on LinkedIn | Buy Steve's book 'No Silver Bullet: Bursting the Bubble of the Organisational Quick Fix' | Edge + Stretch | 'The Life Cycle of a Silver Bullet' piece at What's the PONT Blog
Our Hosts
Lily Smith enjoys working as a consultant product manager with early-stage and growing startups and as a mentor to other product managers. She’s currently Chief Product Officer at BBC Maestro, and has spent 13 years in the tech industry working with startups in the SaaS and mobile space. She’s worked on a diverse range of products – leading the product teams through discovery, prototyping, testing and delivery. Lily also founded ProductTank Bristol and runs ProductCamp in Bristol and Bath.
Randy Silver is a Leadership & Product Coach and Consultant. He gets teams unstuck, helping you to supercharge your results. Randy's held interim CPO and Leadership roles at scale-ups and SMEs, advised start-ups, and been Head of Product at HSBC and Sainsbury’s. He participated in Silicon Valley Product Group’s Coaching the Coaches forum, and speaks frequently at conferences and events. You can join one of communities he runs for CPOs (CPO Circles), Product Managers (Product In the {A}ether) and Product Coaches. He’s the author of What Do We Do Now? A Product Manager’s Guide to Strategy in the Time of COVID-19. A recovering music journalist and editor, Randy also launched Amazon’s music stores in the US & UK.
Hey, lily, did you know that there's one thing we can do to fix all the problems with this podcast and with our organizations Is?
Speaker 2:it getting rid of the co-host.
Speaker 1:No, that's actually not a silver bullet to make it work, no matter how much we might want one, which is why we're actually speaking to Steve Hearsom today.
Speaker 2:Good choice. He's an organizational development consultant and the author of no Silver Bullet bursting the bubble of the organizational quick fix.
Speaker 1:Let's get right to it.
Speaker 2:The Product Experience Podcast is brought to you by Mind, the Product part of the Pendo family. Every week we talk to inspiring product people from around the globe.
Speaker 1:Visit mindtheproductcom to catch up on past episodes and discover free resources to help you with your product practice. Learn about Mind, the Product's conferences and their great training opportunities.
Speaker 2:Create a free account to get product inspiration delivered weekly to your inbox. Mind, the Product supports over 200 product type meetups from New York to Barcelona. There's probably one near you.
Speaker 1:Steve, thank you so much for joining us this week. How are you doing tonight? I'm good. Thank you, Delighted to be here. Excellent. So you are an unusual guest for us in that you're not in from the world of products, but you have been in the world of developing technology products in the past. You're in the world of organizational development and change. How did you get into all this and what is it all about?
Speaker 3:How did I get into it? So there is a field that is called organization development and about 20 odd years ago, uh, when I worked at the guardian, I probably started off doing this kind of work without knowing it. So I was a an internal at the guardian. I did commercial stuff. I then got involved in a large organizational review of processes and after I left the guardian I was a jobbing consultant for a while doing change, consulting, as many people who leave organizations do. When they become a consultant, they call themselves something but they're not really quite sure what they are. Um, and after a few years I washed up on the shores of a place called rothy park, which is a leading institute for leadership development and OD, and about three months in, one of my colleagues said to me oh, you're one of them now. And I said what do you mean? She said well, you're part of the OD group, the OD faculty, and I said I've never called myself that and she went ah, matter, and it was like joining the Freemason, because I never called myself OD and OD in a sense.
Speaker 3:Often people who do this kind of work are people in organizations who are interested in the organization as a whole system. They're interested in what goes on between things, in the gaps between things and people, and that's how I fell into it. I was fascinated by what happened between things and people and that's how I fell into it. You know, I was fascinated by what happened between things and between people is my own hypothesis in in the early noughties, as I worked at the guardian, was everything, it seems to me, in organizations seems to come down to relationships. And if this person just spoke to that person, well, that bit tied up with that bit, wouldn't things work a little bit more easily? And apparently, apparently that's organization development in a sense You're trying to make the connections and to scaffold conversations that people find very difficult to have. And actually, randy, I just say that most of my time I spend scaffolding conversations that people find difficult to have with themselves and with each other.
Speaker 1:Ooh, that's a good one and one of the reasons we had you on because this sounds a lot like product and, for anyone who doesn't know, the Guardian is a British newspaper that has a rich tradition of really fantastic product management. Folks come out of it. But, steve, you've also written a new book about this and about how it's not as simple as people make it sound sometimes. Just give us the quick breakdown.
Speaker 3:Summary, sell us the book very quick.
Speaker 3:So, in a nutshell, if you ask most people, is there a silver bullet to complex organizational challenges, cognitive and intellectual?
Speaker 3:They go well, of course we know there isn't one, but that's not how we behave and that's not how organizations behave and that's not how consultancies behave.
Speaker 3:My hypothesis is, or was, that there are unconscious patterns of shame and anxiety that drive the decision-making processes of leaders and organizations, that lead them to look for certain solutions to complex problems, and that need is met by the purveyors of silver bullets who are quite happy to sell them certain solutions, however illusory and delusory and absurd they are, and sometimes also because they need to manage their anxiety is, if they were to admit that their model, their methodology, their product innovation solution was not guaranteed to work, they might have to deal with their own insecurity and their own shame and their own anxiety. So the hypothesis, essentially, is that we're engaged in a vast functional collusion. We're all colluding with the idea that there are silver bullets and most of us or certainly many of us, as I'm starting to notice, because nobody's told me my hypothesis is wrong, by the way we're all colluding with this, even though most people, when you ask them the question is there a silver bullet for complex problems? Will go no, of course there isn't. But that's not what organizations do.
Speaker 2:And when we think about organizational design or when you talk about it, to me it means like the structures within an organization, so the levels of hierarchy, how people kind of interface with each other and report to each other and things like that, and then maybe communication and processes. Is there more to it than that, or is that kind of?
Speaker 3:Yeah, broadly speaking, there's two fields that sit in adjacent spaces. There's the two ODs org design and org development. And, in very simple terms, org design tends to deal with or concern itself with the structural element how you organize in terms of teams, spans of control, how you position the various elements of your organization. And, in simple terms, organizational development would concern itself with behavior, with culture, with relationships, with values and all that human side of that. The reality is, to do org design well, you have to have a really good appreciation of org development and, I would also argue, to do org dev well, you also need to have some understanding of org design. There are purists in both fields who would tell you oh no, no, no, that is not the case, but there are moves in both communities to actually bring them together.
Speaker 2:And one of the challenges that I often hear and have experienced recently myself at BBC Maestro, but with other product leaders, is designing the structure of their teams and you know, thinking about where to place certain people or where to you know how to organize their teams towards goals and objectives and outcomes and, obviously, org design and development. That's like both of those things. So for a product leader who has no experience in this type of field, how should we approach it? Is there a great starting point?
Speaker 3:I think we can get really hung up on lots of the literature about all design and organizations and management and leadership, and let's break this down really simply. Let's take a product team that you need to build, or you're bringing together a number of people to come and work together. What you're fundamentally doing is you're bringing together a group of human beings that need to collaborate, so then you need to ask what are the conditions you need to create such that these people can work together? And I actually think it's relatively simple on paper. So you need to be really clear on task, you need to be really clear on role and you need to be really clear on boundaries.
Speaker 3:You also need to contract with each other really clearly and rigorously around how you're going to do the work, and that includes the relational aspect, which includes well, if we get, if we fall out, we get into conflict, how are we going to work through that? And you need to contract around tar. But I can count on one handily the teams I've worked with in over 20 years of doing this kind of work you've actually had a A, a contract. They've negotiated with each other before I've turned up and B and this is the kicker actually can hold each other to account, and if you have a team that does that elegantly and well and rigorously and prepared to work through conflict, the rest of it actually is secondary conflict.
Speaker 2:the rest of it actually is secondary. What does a contract look like in practice, and what does holding account look like as well? Is that like hey you? You said you were going to do that and you didn't do it?
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, I mean, let's be really clear about it. Okay, and what does a contract look like? I mean, I think all of us have either been married or are married or been in relationships. I mean, you enter into a contract when you get married right, and the reason why I'm still married after how many years is because when we do enter into breach of contract, normally me and I've left something lying on the floor that I shouldn't have done like my underpants or they're hanging over a kettle that my wife will hold me to account and normally I'm the one who has to go. Yeah, really no, I'm sorry. And we recontract. Sometimes I learn, and sometimes, after how many years it is, she still if you're relatingly for her has to hold me to account. But, being slightly less flippantly, I mean it is about.
Speaker 3:So let me put it like this there's one contracting process I I've sometimes used with groups and I have had clients that have used this with their teams, and it's four questions. So what is the culture or climate we want to create in this team? What would help us thrive or flourish? How do we want to be when things get sticky or difficult, and what can we count on each other for Now. If you can, amongst a team of any number of people, collectively answer those questions and come up with a very simple set of agreements, and then you have the discipline, as you just said, to hold each other to account, you have the basis for effective teamwork.
Speaker 3:An old colleague and old friend of mine who's done lots of research around high-performing teams, I once asked him what was the difference and made a difference between high-performing and low-performing teams, and he just looked at me and he said it's one thing they're able to do conflict. Well, they can have straight conversations with each other. That is it. But the difficulty is in organizations. We find it very hard to do that. I mean, I've been working relatively recently with an organization where the senior leadership team of a broader leadership team of nine and thirty people from the outset were saying the thing we need to get better at is we need to talk about the things we're not talking yeah, so you then say to them so what are the things you're not talking about?
Speaker 3:and repeatedly so they all say well, we need to talk about things we're talking about now, five, five months in, in, finally, when I'm working with the exec team, one of them says this again and I say after five months well, can you tell me one of the things you're not talking about you need to talk about? And this person finally said it's this Five months, wow. And then subsequently, we now have the wider team. They've started to name these things Wow to each other, to connect, to work through. Differences are not ones. Typically we recruit well for we teach in our education system or we encourage people to learn once they're in an organization and I'll climb off my pulpit.
Speaker 1:Steve, this obviously sounds incredibly hard. We know it's hard and we know it's hard enough to do with people that you know that you're in a team with who they acknowledge that they're in the same team. Product managers have this challenge. It's not unique. We think we're special and unique, but we have this problem that we're working with the team. We're working to change the organization. We are change agents, whether we admit it or not, because we're trying to, by definition, add new features and new things to the products, and we're also often being asked to do it faster and more efficiently and cheaper. So, which means changing the way that the organization delivers things and putting a change in the organization. So we're middle managers who are being asked to exert fundamental change on an organization that doesn't always admit that it wants that.
Speaker 3:I don't think product managers are middle managers. I think fundamentally they're something different.
Speaker 1:Fair enough, but not always considered to be at the senior level of the organization, but being asked to influence at a senior level. So I'm being a little self-deprecating there. But to that point You've got a conflict there where people now need to have that contracting relationship with people who they're trying to influence, who may not agree that they should be. You know that they're on the same team or that they want that change. How do you handle that? How do you handle influencing people that don't necessarily want the change in the first place?
Speaker 3:Well, let's break this down a bit. Let's just backtrack. So the first question is what is the role that we're asking these people to do? The first thing you have to actually acknowledge is that what you're asking these people to do is not simply product management or middle management. What you're asking them to effectively do is be change agents. They're catalyzing change. In some cases, I would imagine, depending on the level of seniority, they are change leaders.
Speaker 3:Now, if you look at how change agents in organizations often are located and how they're developed, they often have the label of development or HR or digital transformation or change.
Speaker 3:Maybe they have the level of product I don't know. Maybe they have a level of product I don't know. One client I interviewed a few years ago, prior to developing a whole community of practice and a cohort of internal change people, he said to me during this interview. He said we need these people to operate at several grades above their payload and think about the implications of this for a moment. So he was saying I need these people who are two or three levels below me to have the ability to speak truth to power, to be direct with senior leaders, to understand culture, to communicate well, to think strategically, basically to be as effective in some of the core capabilities and competencies as seen as a senior leader, probably not to have the organization really understand what they're asking them to do and not give them necessarily the permission or protection to do it and will pay them a lot less, and I would argue that is exactly what your product manager has been asked to do yes.
Speaker 1:So, being in that situation. How do you Right? So here comes the part. I know how to support these people, but I've been in that situation. I didn't handle it well, right.
Speaker 3:So then, the real challenge is is there an acknowledgement within the system, within the organization, of what the ask is Now? If the organization understands what it's asking of these people, then you can have an honest conversation about both. How do we build their capabilities to do this and how do we contract to give them the permission and protection to do this work? That's one thing. Alongside, and connected to that is well, do you actually understand the capabilities these people need to develop? And, if so, are you going to pay for it? And I would argue that the kinds of skills that these people need to develop, and, if so, are you going to pay for it?
Speaker 3:And I would argue that the kinds of skills that these people need to develop and tell me if I'm wrong would be that they actually need to learn consulting skill. They need to learn how to do entry and contracting incredibly well. They need to learn about power. They need to understand their own relationship with power. They need to be able to probably work through differences and understand conflict, which then, in turn, means, if they're really going to become good at it, they need to work on their own relationship with conflict. So you're actually asking people to have quite a sophisticated understanding about the nature of change, human change and organization, and I wonder my hypothesis. From what I understand of your world, randy, and the way I hear people talk about it, the product management, I imagine, is construed in quite a technical bit of pin sometimes, whereas actually I suspect it's a quite subtle art and it's a change practice, but it doesn't get acknowledged as that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, interesting. So you've kind of mentioned a few times about contracting, but then also about conflict. I don't think I'm particularly great at, or I'm very good at, avoiding conflict. I know that, that you know psychological profiles and blah, blah blah. I've definitely learned that about myself and I don't like conflict. Blah blah. I've definitely learned that about myself and I I don't like conflict. But is there a way, if you are in a situation where there is conflict, if you're in a situation where the other person is not great at conflict either, like, can you be good at conflict and come to a good conclusion if the other person isn't great at it? Or you know, are you, just are you?
Speaker 3:are you restricted, I guess?
Speaker 2:by the the situation that you're in, or is there a way to? If you're good at conflict, is there a way to always get yourself into? You know to come out shining well, no one.
Speaker 3:No in answer to the last one no, there's no guarantee to it. I mean you're in a relational dance. I mean we know this from our personal relationship that if you want to navigate conflict in a family system, it's more art than science. We were talking about kids before we came online and I think all of us, as parents, know that rationality goes out the window sometimes when you're trying to do conflict with kids, and organizations, bluntly, are no different. It's a myth that they're rational.
Speaker 3:So there's two key things I think that are worth saying in response to your question. Firstly, in that scenario, you need to be really clear on your intent. And is this context one where you are coming at it with an intention to help this other party engage in a conversation with you, to work through difference? That's the first thing, and what I mean by that is you're not trying to score points or be clever or exert power or whatever. You generally have a positive intent. Second question, then, is what's your understanding of how to work with conflict and what options might be open to you? So this is where I'll drop in just a wee stat for you. There's some research that shows that 80% of conflict in organizations is down to unchecked out stories and assumptions and the actions we take in response to those. So think about that for a moment. 80% conflict is because I have an assumption or story about you, lily, and often what happens is people will make up a story. I think that Lily doesn't like me because in the meeting last week she looked at me funny. It's probably because that thing I did for her she didn't think was the right standard. And so long as I don't get checking out that story with you, I get to be righteous in my belief about it.
Speaker 3:And I'll give you a lovely example. We worked recently, myself and a colleague with a leadership team where we use a particular approach to sense making that gets people to work at um, reducing the perception gap between people and increase their interpersonal alignment. And this, this woman. We created a situation where people had to go up to each other and check out their stories about each other, and what she said after we'd done this exercise was it was. It was amazing, but I'm absolutely blown away because this person told me the story they had about me and I am I just. I don't know how they could ever come up with it. It's just and she literally was was gobsmacked, and this other person had a story running that was based on what? So you actually, in order to really work with conflict, you have to be willing to check out your stories and assumptions and be open to the possibility that they might be wrong, because they often are. So I was just going to say the last.
Speaker 2:The last thing I'd say is the last thing there is, and that may require courage yeah, uh, one of one of the big sort of revelations that I ever had in life was um reading uh, love brené brown, love a bit of brené brown. I think it was rising her book, rising strong and in that she talked about how, you know, we make up these stories about situation um, when we don't have all of the facts to try and make make sense something and that they're normally kind of critical or negative, like that's usually.
Speaker 2:That's usually the place we go to and I was like oh my god, yeah, I actually do this all the time, and since I read that book and I really check myself all the time, now yeah, it's really it's made a huge difference to to my life, for sure. How do we get? How do we do that, though, and how do we get good at it?
Speaker 3:uh, you don't get rid of it, you just get better at it. I mean, it's, it's. I mean there's a longer conversation here about the nature of learning. So so you know, if you want to get better at something like conflict, you've got to work on yourself and develop your practice yeah, your practice of working with and through and in conflict. So in my case, you know, as the son of an alcoholic who wasn't physically violent and was a lovely man but ran the dinner table after a few drinks, you know he had to become very careful because he could be brutal in his kind of intellectual bullying. So I had to learn in my late 30s and 40s. Right the way through to my late 40s, I had to really work on myself so that I could get comfortable and come to terms with what's going on in me before I could even remotely have a chance, in a relationship with you or Randy, of working through in an adult way the conflict we would be having. So it requires us to work on ourselves. Firstly, paul.
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Speaker 1:Learn more today at pendoio slash podcast. Steve, I'm curious. Well, first, for someone who is maybe not middle management but is situated in your chart in the middle of the organization, is that a position from which you can create change?
Speaker 3:God, yes, oh, totally. I mean, let's be really clear there's consequences to your action, but it comes down to the individual choice that you make relative to what your role is and the task you're contracted to do. I can think of people who I've worked with who are not senior, who've taken real risks, because sometimes what I do with internal change agents, I will sometimes say to them when I'm working with them, there's two questions you need to consider, and they're actually often in opposition. The first question is what do I need to do or say and how do I need to be of service to this organisation? Not? The same question is how do I need to do or say and how do I need to be of service to this organization? If not, the same question is how do I stay or move up in it? And that is the kind of the nub of a question that you've just asked, randy, which is if you genuinely think that to be of service, you need to say to a senior leader I think your strategy for this product is batshit crazy in so many words. That's probably going to require you to both a have some courage and b have the skills to be able to really um, but absolutely like, do it either?
Speaker 3:One guy I keep thinking of who, not particularly senior, he's uh was internal change guy, hr guy, and he picked up some from something I was working with him. He took something to heart. I said to him which was you know, I never talk about giving people feedback. I talk about offering my observations, because when you say to, I said to you, lily, can I offer you some feedback? What's your first response?
Speaker 3:oh, it immediately got me yeah, right, right, if I, lily, can I just offer you an observation?
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's much more chill, right?
Speaker 3:So what this guy did was he worked with directors in his organization massive UK retailer and he said to me he just changed how he spoke to them. Instead of saying can I offer you some feedback, he would say can I offer you some observations? And what he said to me was he was able to be far more direct and far more probing by simply reframing how he, how he said things and delivering the message. And that's what I mean. You know, you, it's a practice, you, you know you need to think about how you scaffold and architect your conversations with people, but absolutely you can influence. There's another little bit in here which is, in order to do that, you actually have to contract with your senior colleague.
Speaker 3:If Randy was the CEO of the business, I would have to contract with Randy and say to you Randy, can we just talk? Are you up for me telling you what I really think here? Can we just talk? Are you up for me telling you what I really think here? And and that would be my, my, my kind of counsel to internals in the context you're talking about is if you, if you don't contract to get the permission, then absolutely probably you might want to either leave the organization or keep your mouth shut that was going to be.
Speaker 2:My next question was you know, if you're in an organization where you know you don't feel like you can operate at the kind of level that you're talking about, or you've tried to have those conversations and you have just come up against, you know the conflict hasn't been healthy and you haven't come to a conclusion like what are the options? Is it literally like you put up with it for the paycheck or you leave?
Speaker 3:well, there is somebody once said to me, I don't know, I think they said there was four possible approaches. One is you, you kind of suck it up and you just, you know, just carry on. Another one is you walk, another one is you try and change things, and the other one is you get fired because you go too far. Those are probably the four main options, and I think that's a very personal and subjective choice.
Speaker 3:One of the reasons why I am an external is because, as somebody once said to me, the best organizational consultants have an ambivalent relationship with organizations, and that's me. I'm a lot better on the outside asking you questions. Having me on the inside for too long would probably be a total nightmare, but I'm really useful to have around for a while from the outside Question. Having me on the inside for too long would probably be a total nightmare, but I'm really useful to have around for a while from the outside, and it's an interesting one, because people sometimes ask me what should I do?
Speaker 1:And I always avoid that question, giving them a straight answer Because one, I've got enough experience to know better. But the second is I'm not them, I'm not you. That is a very delicate balance of deciding which of those routes is most important to you in your situation, and you cannot outsource that decision to somebody else. You can have somebody else facilitate it and walk you through that, making up your mind, but you can't depend on someone else for that making up your mind, but you can't depend on someone else for that.
Speaker 3:Well, what you've just sparked for me, Randy, is one of the threads in the book is about how we construe expertise and what we project on to people who are considered to be expert, and I would imagine that in the product world that you are deemed to be expert, there's an expertise that's associated with people who do product development. So I'd be really interested in what some of the projections are that are at play. So what has been projected onto you as somebody who is notionally a product manager or a senior product or a director of product development, and to what extent are those projections challenged? When are they helpful and when are they helpful, when are they not?
Speaker 1:I'm going to avoid the question in how it relates to somebody like me. I'm going to go the other way. There's a lot of frustration in the industry. Every time you get a group of people, product people together, it turns into a group therapy or a venting session. And this has been a great conversation. We've gone through some really hard truths and some things that people will, I'm sure, feel very familiar with. You've talked about a couple of practical things, about contracting and things like that. I'm just curious is there anything else that you'd recommend as something practical that people, something that people can put into practice when they are on the lower end of a power dynamic of trying to create a better relationship with people?
Speaker 3:Well, and there's a long and a short answer, but if I'm not shallow, come back to this thing about. You used the R word there, randy which is, you know, this is about relationship. So what do we have to do as human beings if we want to become better relationships? Normally we have to work in ourselves and then we have to experiment and practice relation to each other in different ways. How do we do that? Well, we engage in learning that enables us to learn about ourselves.
Speaker 3:I will also add to that that I would suspect that for you two certainly for me any learning that has been really developmental for you and useful in your life is probably really preceded by some discomfort. Occasionally we have epiphany, but you know, the stuff that's really helped us in life has normally been preceded by some mutual discomfort. So I would say you need to work out where your edge and your stretch is and you need to make a choice to go towards it. Now that might mean you just read the book. It might mean that you go and do some personal development, fresh development, and it's a very, again, personal choice as to what kind of work you're doing. I would also say that if you are really serious about developing your skills, your capability to do what you're described in Landy. Then think about how you can develop your practice.
Speaker 3:By practice I do mean in a sense, your change practice, which to me is utterly congruent with the product stuff that you're talking about, for example, really cheap. They come and work with me because I do capability building for people who need to build change practice. And there are other people like me I'm not saying just me, but there you know organizational development chain. There's some very good people in that space who, it's totally translatable. The stuff that we teach there, the learning we offer there, would translate beautifully into the context that we're talking about here. For your kind of people, your tribe, steve, I'm curious one of the approaches I take for your kind of people your tribe, steve, I'm curious.
Speaker 1:One of the approaches I take with a lot of people, and I'm curious about your take on it, is when people are having trouble with a relationship, I offer to go in with them and facilitate a session. So it changes the dynamic. Now it's not the two people talking at each other or against each other. Now it's not the two people talking at each other or against each other. Now they're talking to me to facilitate something and they're collaborating. Is changing the dynamic? Is that something that you'd recommend? Or bringing in external?
Speaker 3:facilitators. It's a qualified yes. I mean it depends on your relationship with them. Because with the three, three is an interesting number because it can set off a parental dynamic and you get pairing, and if two pair, then there's one, there's an odd one out. So you just need to be really skilled at managing the psychodynamics of that kind of situation. But having a third person who is skilled enough A, skilled enough at facilitating dialogue and B is sure enough of themselves not to get hooked into the very conflict they've been sent into out-mediate with, then yeah, yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 2:So if you are in an organization and you see an opportunity to change it you know, change the structure of the team or change the processes or anything like that how do you put together a really compelling business case and pitch to the rest of the business to get buy in for this change?
Speaker 3:pitch to the rest of the business to get buy-in for this change. Well, I think part of the challenge is there's some of the conventional or conventional way we think about it and in a sense, you know, when I hear you frame it like that, that that sounds quite exhausting, which is that if I'm in that situation, so I see an opportunity, if I take it on, as I've got, to persuade the entire organization. And the way in which we do it in this organization is by putting together business cases and I need to get by, and I think that to me that sounds exhausting, and my experience of changing organizations is that that's not actually how it happens. So, just as an aside, I mean we need to kind of tip our hat to the way that power works in organisations. In some organisations, the way things happen is because particular people in particular roles and positions have the power to literally make shit happen and, whether you like it or not, stuff will happen. It doesn't mean it'll be successful and some people may be dragged quite rightly, in the sense that they might be right in their kicking and screaming, kicking and screaming, screaming after that, but less delivered from the point of view, you generally see an opportunity for the organization to evolve, to change, to move into a new space, to develop a product that it currently isn't, and the larger the organization is, then the more. I think the only way you can do it where you, or the way you do it, to maximize your chances of re of, of reaching an agreement and having people signed up to move in a direction where things happen, is one that is is grounded in effectively inquiry, inquiry and conversation. So let me just go to a side place.
Speaker 3:In my research for my book, I asked all the people I interviewed. I interviewed people who were, you know, been consultants, were consultants, senior people in organizations, people who are regarded as world leading in their thinking when it comes to org design and different theories, and I asked every single person A do you think there's a silver bullet for conflict problems? The answer from everyone was no, and I also asked them another question as a follow-up In the absence of one, what's the next best thing? And every single one of them said pretty much the same thing Lily, they said it's inquiry. In simple terms, you need to get as many people in the organisation together or, at the very least, a representative of every part of the organisation that's affected, with permission to ask any question, and then just maybe you'll work out both what the problem is and what you do about it.
Speaker 3:And I would say the same is true here when you talk about a change initiative where you see an opportunity, you need to bring together a representative of every part of the system that has a stake in that, potentially with permission to ask any question with real clarity around what frame is for the conversation, which is I want to talk about the possibility or whether or not this, this might be the way of evolving things and get into a what does everybody think conversation, and well, facilitated. That is how you do change. The business case thing in a sense, for me is a red herring. If it comes before that conversation, if it comes after it, then it makes total sense, because then you're actually costing something you've actually developed the commission and the investment from people to do the emotional effect. So that's the way I would say you can do it. You have to work out who needs to be in this conversation and invite them into a conversation.
Speaker 2:When I've kind of like looked into high-performing teams or into, you know, organisations and cultures and things like that team culture. One of the big things, one of the big themes that comes up again and again and again, is trust. What's your sort of take on how to build trust in an organization and with a team?
Speaker 3:um? Again, I think it is. It is at face value, it's actually really simple, but it's in human terms. We find it very challenging. I mean, there's many what's the technical term really? There's one hell of a lot of bollocks talked about things like this in the sense that that you know, we, we can.
Speaker 3:The big alarm for me is when we turn things like trust into an abstraction. So we do this with change, we do this with culture, we do it with management, we do it with leadership. We turn these things into objects that we can poke with a large stick, which means we then get to treat them as something we can wheel into a room. We need more trust. We turn it into an object, therefore we can manage it. We'll buy more of it.
Speaker 3:Trust is a function of relationship. Two things to more of it. Well, trust is a function of relationship. So two things to say about it. Firstly, if you look at one of the models for trust, it's the trust equation, and the three elements that it suggests are key is that trust is a function of that's four actually reliability Do I do what I say I'm going to do? Plus credibility Do you believe that I'm capable of doing what it is I'm going to do, plus intimacy. Do you know enough about me such that you feel able to also reveal enough of yourself? It doesn't mean that you're a total extrovert, but it doesn't mean you need to reveal enough that I feel safe enough to use the something of my truth. All of that is then subdivided by self-orientation and self-interest, so the more active I've got my needs above everything else, then that will erode trust. So of those facets, the most important one is intimacy. Now, that then means that the first thing here is, in order to build trust, you need to be open and open yourself up. Now, in a situation where actually there was low trust, that is paradoxical. I don't trust Randy because my experience of our relationship is that I don't trust how he's going to respond. But if I am going to build more trust with him, paradoxically I'm going to have to open myself up even more. There's no other way that I can build trust around it. So in transactional analysis, which is an approach to human relationships and adult ego states and personality, there's a lovely approach to again contracting.
Speaker 3:It talks about, uh, three p's, and the three p's are um, permission, protection and power and the way they kind of break down. It's probably worth actually bearing in mind our previous conversation, just just touching on on what these three are. The first one, protection, is the kind of procedural, social level. It's all the practical stuff. Protection sets the boundaries in terms of date, in terms of. These are the tasks I want you to do, these are the responsibilities, this is what you're accountable for. That sets the boundaries, that offer the protection. The permission is the aims and objectives. It's what I actually give you permission to do. It's surprising how often those are not clear and even if they're negotiated and well understood, you can still find out you actually don't have it. One of my colleagues who introduced me to this approach described me working with a client where she thought she'd got permission, protection, but when the shit hit the fan she very quickly realized that her client wasn't going to give protection.
Speaker 3:But the third one is power, and this is the psychological level, and the power in this sense comes from us talking about the things that we find difficult to talk about and working that muscle such that we trust each other enough to work through the things that are hard, and the metaphor that my colleague helen uses is that of a bag of rotting fish and smelly fish and the own, and you have to take out one smelly fish at a time and the smelly fish is the undiscussable or the taboo or the difficult conversation. So fine, you take out a small smelly fish first, but you're going to have to start talking about it. So you know, in a sense, really, when you talk about trust normally with people, you say, well, what's the impact of low trust? We don't talk about the things that matter. Well again, paradoxically, the only way you get better at talking about the things that are Well. Again, paradoxically, the only way you get better at talking about the things that are difficult to talk about is by talking about the things that are difficult to talk about. There is no substitute. At some point you have to go.
Speaker 3:Well, okay, lily, there's something I want to talk to you about and we can negotiate the kind of permission, protection and the stuff around it. And we can negotiate the kind of permission and protection and the stuff around it and we can prepare, but there will still be that moment where I have to say to you look, this is my truth, yeah, and we have to find out whether or not the relationship can hold it. So that would be my suggestion or my encouragement, which is, you have to pay attention to the levels of intimacy, particularly in the relationship, and openness and couple that with making sure that you've negotiated the kind of permission and protection. But then the real kicker is are we actually going to experiment with talking about what we find difficult? Otherwise, just to say otherwise, all you will do is carry on talking about the fact you need to talk about things, as I see in many organizations, and people do that for months, if not year. We need to talk about the thing that we need to talk about, but no, steve.
Speaker 1:There is one thing we do need to talk about at this point in the episode, which is we've run out of time. This has been fantastic. Thank you very much. Or at least it was fantastic up until the end where you said that you didn't trust me and totally damaged our relationship. This has been really wonderful. I've really enjoyed it. I know we've gotten a lot out of this. I think our listeners are going to get a ton out of it. Thank you so much for joining us. You're very welcome.
Speaker 1:Thank you for the book. It's a lovely book. Good Thanks, Randy.
Speaker 3:Thanks, Lily.
Speaker 2:Thanks, Steve. The Product Experience hosts are me, Lily Smith, host by night and chief product officer by day.
Speaker 1:And me Randy Silver also host by night, and I spend my days working with product and leadership teams, helping their teams to do amazing work.
Speaker 2:Luran Pratt is our producer and Luke Smith is our editor.
Speaker 1:And our theme music is from product community legend Arnie Kittler's band Pow. Thanks to them for letting us use their track.