Ep. 49. How To Make Big Things Happen At Work
About this episode:
Original Air Date: September 30th 2024You've built the asset. You've done the comms. You even held office hours (that no one came to). And still…nothing changes. Sound familiar? These moves are still everyone’s go-to plays for substantial transitions in the workplace, even when we have decades of experience that they fall flat.
In this episode, Rodney and Sam dig into one of the most underexplored problems in organizational life: how you actually get people to do the new thing. Not just understand it. Not just nod at it in a meeting. Actually do it. They walk through why the classic change playbook (comms, training, socialization, stakeholder management) keeps failing, and what a real system of activation actually looks like.
Mentioned in this episode:
change management is not the way: AWWTR Ep. 26 with Michael Bungay Stanier
Comms and change management: BNW Ep. 3 with Deirdre Latour
In this episode:
Rodney Evans
Sam Spurlin
Listen now:
Episode transcript:
Sam Spurlin:
If you are an expert brand designer and you go off into your brand cave and you come back bringing the tablets of the new brand, that's all within your expertise as a professional. But the service design of bringing people along to contribute to that is probably not what you went to school for and what you spent a lot of time thinking about.
[Intro music]
Rodney Evans:
Hi everyone. Welcome back to At Work With The Ready, a podcast about work design and how organizations can make change work in their favor. I'm Rodney Evans here with my co-host, Sam Spurling.
Sam Spurlin:
Hey, Rodney. How's it going?
Rodney Evans:
You know, it's okay.
Sam Spurlin:
Okay, great. Well, companies, you know those things. They're facing more change than they were built for. And the problem is organizations are still running on management ideas from a completely different era. Rodney and I work with leaders and teams who are redesigning how work actually gets done so change becomes fuel of the tank instead of sand in the gears.
Rodney Evans:
On this show, we share patterns we're seeing inside of organizations, what's working, what gets in the way. Today we are going to talk about how you actually get shit done, which amazingly we've never covered on this show in this way before. It's exciting. But first we have to check in because how you do something matters just as much as what you do. Sam, what's today's question?
Sam Spurlin:
Rodney, we are both of an age and I'm wondering if you have any tech habits that clearly label you as an elder millennial/Gen X sort of person. I don't know exactly where you fall in. For me, it's an elder millennial, but there's definitely some things that I've caught for myself. I'm thinking about things like maybe you have an aol.com email address or maybe you feel like you can only make big purchases from a real computer and not your phone, things like that. My main one that just I shake my head at myself a little bit every day is I check yahoo.com for the news at least once a day. I don't know why. It's not a good news site.
Rodney Evans:
Wow.
Sam Spurlin:
It was just like a banner there and there's like usually 15 little headlines and I'll go to yahoo.com and just take a look there. It's the only thing I do on Yahoo. I don't even understand what Yahoo is anymore, but what it is to me is 15 news headlines that somewhat change throughout the day. And that's gotta make me old...weird and old.
Rodney Evans:
Wow, that's really funny. My answer to this question is going to be somewhat disappointing and non-specific, but you can tell that I'm older and not as internet native as you are because I don't even know what those things are. I'll watch someone younger than me do something on their phone and I'll be like, "Oh, I didn't even know you could do that." So it's like I don't even really know what my tells are because I don't even know how you're supposed to do it. But I do know that whenever I'm observing Alastair or Jack using literally any piece of technology, I'm like, "Oh, is that how you are supposed ... Oh, I didn't know. " So basically it's everything. My tech habits are all of the tech habits. I think any younger person who observed me interacting with technology would be like, "Bro, what are you doing?"
Sam Spurlin:
"What's wrong with you?"
Rodney Evans:
Exactly.
Sam Spurlin:
I mean, we did spend a solid 90 seconds before we started with you being somewhat confused by what happened to your screen in terms of the layout.
Rodney Evans:
Why does it make a split screen? What's going on? How do I turn it off? I get so excited when it happens because I think I want it, but then also I don't like not having control over it.
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah. All right. Well, I think we're checked in now.
Rodney Evans:
Good check-in, Sam. Okay.
Sam Spurlin:
Thanks.
Why “getting shit done” doesn’t get enough airtime
Rodney Evans:
So what we're going to dig into today came from a conversation I had with a member of The Ready about basically how you move from asset or an idea or a thing to action or activation. The idea of just getting people to do shit, literally anything that's different or new. I don't think it gets enough airtime and I still have clients who think that classic change management is the way. I think we have interrogated that idea enough on this show to agree that it is not the way, but it still seems just mystifying for people to go from like, now we're convicted about the thing to like, how do we get everybody else doing the thing? And so that's what we're going to talk about today.
Sam Spurlin:
Okay. So would you agree that this is a similar idea to the "comms as change management" approach? If we just comms harder, everybody will understand what's going on and we'll just do the thing.
Rodney Evans:
I mean, I think that's part of it. I think there's a lot about how people believe change happens that's broken. So I think part of it, like comms-ing it to death is one move, project managing it is one move, training people is one move socialization is one move, stakeholder management is one move. There's a bunch of ways that people think this works and none of them work. And so I want to talk about that.
The three-step chain from information to understanding to behavior change
Sam Spurlin:
Okay, great. Let's dig in there. I mean, I feel like each one of those has its own kind of branching path that we could go down to really, really explore. I mean, the first thing that comes to mind for me is just that information is not understanding and understanding is not behavior change, which I feel like encapsulates a lot of what you were talking about there.
Rodney Evans:
Woah, Sam. Say that again.
Sam Spurlin:
Information...so sharing information does not necessarily imply understanding of that information and understanding does not necessarily imply any sort of behavior change. And I think for a lot of folks in kind of change leadership points of view, that's a hard thing to wrap your mind around because it seems very logical that if you understand the thing and you agree with the thing, then you would just do the thing.
Rodney Evans:
Just do the thing.
Sam Spurlin:
And I mean, that's not how it tends to go.
Rodney Evans:
That's not how it goes. This is such a good nugget that I almost feel like this is the whole thing. I'm really tempted to just now go right into a very specific example of this that I think-
Sam Spurlin:
Let's do one. Yeah. Let's do an example.
Real example: Rodney’s role change at The Ready and the governance process
Rodney Evans:
Okay, cause you just unlocked something in my brain. Okay. So we just changed our structure at The Ready and part of that was regoverning my role as Strategy Steward and it is quite different now than it used to be and it's like a 25% role, which it did not used to be. So Trad would just publish it. Obviously Trad wouldn't do anything. They'd just be like, "Well, the CEO does whatever they want and nothing ever gets written down." But let's just assume that we wanted people to know about this change. I think the basic move, the not even 101 move is the information move of like, "I rewrote this role, here it is." What we did was govern it as a system. And the reason I'm sharing this, this is not an episode about governance, but I had the experience going through the governing and election of my role where I definitely was like, people are nitpicking about things and weighing in on things that are going to have no impact on them and that if we hadn't gone through this process, they never would have even noticed and they're digging into this because we're doing this process and it's kind of annoying.
And what I came away with afterward because I didn't get a lot of reactions that ultimately changed anything, but what that process did of saying to the whole company, "Here's the asset. Here's the information. Now we are going to go through processing this where you have to ask questions to make sure you fully understand it and give me your reactions to it" got to the understanding level. And even though for me as the asset creator in this situation, the understanding process felt a little bit like a dental appointment, it's not totally for me. Now sometimes when you're doing that and you're the asset maker or the proposer, you legitimately are getting really helpful and important feedback. And I have certainly integrated and changed assets and proposals that I've made by 50% in the process. This just wasn't one of those times, but even if you're not getting feedback that you use, it's not really for you.
It's to create that level of understanding in the end users who will be impacted by this role in some way. Before I go into the behavior part, I want your reactions to that.
Recognizing the asset creator’s blind spot
Sam Spurlin:
That is an astute example of a point that I was going to make around there's a lot of work in going from like zero to one to an asset and then sharing that one with everybody else. And as the creator of the asset, I think it's easy to make this assumption that what you experienced in the creation of the thing is being translated in the final version of the thing.
Rodney Evans:
Totally.
Sam Spurlin:
Of course that's not happening.
Rodney Evans:
Of course not.
Sam Spurlin:
People only see the final thing and they haven't had that lived experience of having to like wrestle with whatever that artifact represents. So of course they have this like very shallow understanding of what you just described with governance there is like a way to bring them along, which is still somewhat time consuming, but less time consuming as this whole group making the thing from scratch.
Rodney Evans:
Yes. Or less time consuming than pushing the information, having a bunch of people passively consume it and go, "Got it. " And then dealing with a bunch of friction later when I'm not doing things they assume I will be doing, I actually am living into the role that I have articulated not the role that I had for the last two years, but like you're doing work upfront to avoid a bunch of friction later and I'm having like a real time "A ha!" because I think we are generally pretty good at getting from the information to the understanding part, but moving from understanding to behavior requires something that a lot of us don't feel very comfortable doing. And I can think of a couple very present examples of this, which is the next time I am going to do something differently as a result of this new role saying, "I am now not doing this Ashley is doing this because we governed this role and it's no longer mine or I am reserving this decision right and I am going to make the final call on this because it is the decision right that we articulated in this role that we all consented to."
It's like I'm responsible for remembering the behavioral part that got documented, but then also orienting everyone else to go, "We're doing the thing now that we said we were going to do." So if you're confused or irritated or disoriented by this, it might be because you forgot that we're not doing the old thing anymore, we're doing this thing now.
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah. And I think that's a really ... I could see it being an annoying thing if you have to do it forever. I think eventually you kind of get to the point where it just becomes like, okay, we all get it. But I think that verbalizing of a mental process for the benefit of everybody else is actually an incredibly valuable thing to do in that kind of transitionary period between the old way of doing things and the new way of doing things and not in like a, "Hey you idiots, remember we did this, we agreed this thing," but just a very neutral sort of, "Hey, you may be surprised or whatever because we're going from this to this. Just saying that out loud so that we're all on the same page" I think is a useful thing, especially if you're in an organization and like lots of things are going on. Like your role change is not the only thing that I'm sure that is different between six months ago and now. So it can be difficult to keep them all straight. So that kind of talk track, the kind of director's commentary of what is happening is actually I think really, really valuable.
Rodney Evans:
Totally. And it's also a good reminder for the person who is instigating the change. Yeah, for you. Yeah. I also have other things going on. And I also forget that actually we said that Sam is going to make that call now instead of me. And so it's helpful to me when she says, "I'm exercising this decision right that is new." And you know what I mean? Because I forget too, like I also default to old patterns even when I'm the one in this case who was like the author of the change. I really love what you said because I do think that information is the precursor to understanding and understanding is the precursor to behavior and it's very easy to take any of those as the off ramp and be like, "I think we're good. I think we got it. "
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah. So in this case, it's a type of change where it sounds like it's not particularly contentious. It's more of just like, "Oh, this is like an update on what we're doing." And you may not remember, but I think there's also other flavors of not changing or not doing things that are more overtly not like, "I just can't remember," but it's more like this change actually does not benefit me. So I am going to either quietly or loudly resist or I'm going to try to protect this thing that the change is moving us away from that used to be a thing that I really cared about, which I think is also a whole genre of not changing in organizations that often our work starts to bump up against.
Rodney Evans:
Yeah. Can you think of an example of that?
Sam Spurlin:
I mean, where my head goes is any sort of prioritization changes in terms of the work that we're going to do. We used to do A, B and C and they were our most important things. We made all of our money from that and the teams who were doing that had a lot of power in the organization and for various reasons related to our strategy, we are now emphasizing D, E and F. And some of you folks who are working on A, B and C may be kind of shifting over to D, E and F, and some of you are going to continue working on A, B, and C because that's not going away anytime soon, but that represents a major shift in maybe how people view themselves in the organization or what is valued, which I think is not just as clear cut as like, "Well, now we're going to go do the new thing."
How to live into your authority
Rodney Evans:
Right. I think that's a great example. One of the things that comes up for me that feels related actually to what you just said about prioritization and to the sort of behavioral change part is like I often think that we skip over the authority piece of change because I'm seeing this at a client right now. So they're trying to roll out a new technology to support sales and it's a really good technology. It's like a best in class technology and they're trying to replace some other software that was not working as well for them. And there's a fair amount of resistance and there are people who are like, "Well, I'm just going to keep using the old thing because I don't like this new thing or I don't understand this new thing or whatever." And the old thing is still here and I still have a password and it still has all my data in it. So like, "Who's going to stop me?" And I think that is the question is like-
Sam Spurlin:
Who is going to stop you?
Rodney Evans:
Yeah, who is going to stop you? Often when this kind of stuff happens, when it's like we're changing a role, we're changing a tool, we're changing our priorities, we're changing our strategy, we're changing something that is real, we don't say clearly like who has to do what when that change is made. So what did not happen with this rollout of this new sales technology is like, first of all, the leader of that organization, I don't think...I could be wrong, I wasn't there, but I don't think said, "This technology rollout is going to support our strategy in the following ways. This is where we're headed and this is an enablement tool to get us there and that's why we have to do this." I think that part was missed. So it feels a little bit like, "Well, why are we doing this?"
And then as the sort of rollout crew came through, I don't think anyone ever said like, "Okay, so if you're a sales rep on Monday, you have to start using this tool instead of that tool for all of your calls and to track all of your deals. And the old thing is going to be shut down on Friday so you better get your data out of there and oh, by the way, the metrics that we collect that determine whether you made your quota and are going to get paid also will come out of this new tool. So Monday it is, got it?" People don't say that. They're like, we're doing change management, we're doing comms, we're posting Slack messages, there are video tutorials." And I'm like, I do actually think the authority part gets missed of like, what about this is non-negotiable? And in cases like this, it isn't really a participatory decision? A leader has said to do what we need to do, we need to use this tool so we're going to use it, but it doesn't get sort of like communicated that way.
Sam Spurlin:
Sure. All those things are kind of necessary but insufficient on their own without the very clear bright lines around when you have to be into the new tool, for example. I'm not going to talk for all people, but a lot of people are really motivated by really clear deadlines. So you can have all of the best intentions of the world like, "Okay, I know there's this thing. I'm supposed to be moving into this new tool. I know there's some stuff that I can watch about it. I've got a vague sense of how it's better. I totally intend to do that. " And because most organizations aren't exactly great at protecting people's time to think about work and structure their own time, that stuff gets deprioritized and it's quite different when you know very clearly like, "Oh, on Friday the 31st this thing goes away." It can be a gift to be very clear about things that are going to happen and people would much rather have that clarity than a vague sense that they're supposed to be doing something and wondering if they've actually done it correctly.
Deciding which changes need enrollment, and which just need execution
Rodney Evans:
100%. And having been on the receiving end of a lot of these kinds of changes, including at the early days of The Ready, the good news is you don't have to like it and it can still happen. It's like I wasn't particularly thrilled when we switched from Trello to Notion and no one asked me for my opinion. It was just like, "This is what the company is going to be run on now. So if you want to work at the company and also get paid, this is where you go to do that." And I was like, "Well, I hate this and I think it's stupid." And also it doesn't really matter. And with a lot of change, there's a lot of like, "What's in it for me?" and "winning hearts and minds" and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And sometimes there are changes where it's just like, “This is happening, so do it.”
And I think it's really helpful to know which of those kinds of changes you're making. Are you making changes that people need to be excited and energized by and believe in their heart or are you making a change to a sales software because you're not selling shit and you need your sales reps to sell shit and this is the tool that's going to help them. It doesn't really matter what they think ultimately, they just have to learn how to do it. And humans, we are always going to resist these things. And so I do think we're going to resist because it's like it's unfamiliar, it's annoying, there's a cost of change. There are rational reasons to resist. And I think that to your point, clarity is really helpful in those situations because it helps me just be like, "Okay, well, I'm just like grumpy about this, but there's a shelf life on that because it's happening on Monday."
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah. And I think if you have nothing but a relentless drumbeat of these top down changes that make people grumpy, I get a little bit skeptical of like, "All right, what exactly what is going on here?" But I do think having a more nuanced take about the types of change that need to be more participatory and really do need hearts and minds versus just like honestly things that probably people don't really care about. If they care about, they care about it in the very short term of like, "God, this is annoying. I got to learn a thing, but I can learn a thing and in two days I'll be up and running." Those sorts of changes don't need to ... They are not of the same type as a major strategic shift, for example, or something else that is just maybe a litle bit more nebulous.
So do we have different plays to run for those things or do we treat everything like a huge deal even when it's not?
Rodney Evans:
I think that's exactly right. And it would be interesting, I don't have one in mind right now, but it would be interesting to have sort of like a filter for when to just be clear and explicit and deadline oriented and really lean into process and when to do the adoption campaign and to really try to get people enrolled and enlisted, like which kinds of things require which kinds of motions.
Sam Spurlin:
Just the thing off the top of my head is that my mind just immediately went to complicated complex. So a complicated tool where it's just like, this tool just lets us do something a little bit better, like just get on board. Come on. Well, make sure you're well trained and you've got the information you need and it's just a matter of getting in there and doing it versus some sort of shift and I don't know if I have a good example off the top of my head that is more like we need people, we need your intrinsic motivation and creativity to make this thing actually happen that I don't think you can really top down your way into doing particularly well.
Rodney Evans:
I think that's exactly the shorthand. When it's like we're moving to a different corporate credit card, everybody download the app. That's just complicated. When it's like we're moving to a completely new brand position and we need you all to start speaking or writing or using these kinds of visuals, that's complex.
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah, totally, totally.
Rodney Evans:
I love that. I think that's really smart. Okay, everyone, Sam figured out...you're extra smart on Thursday mornings. Is this our new recording time? I don't know.
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah, maybe. I guess so.
Rodney Evans:
Two bangers in under 30 minutes.
Why the big reveal keeps happening and keeps failing
Rodney Evans:
Okay. So let's talk a little bit about why people don't do that because what I see a lot is some version of the following. The people who are making the asset, whether that is the brand work or the culture deck or the new org chart or the strategy, whoever sort of has the pen on making the thing spends a lot of time like beautiful minding and maybe is getting feedback but not including the end users, maybe is getting feedback from a closer or safer or more insular circle and then they spend a lot of time perfecting, I'm just going to call it the asset for shorthand and because that has taken so much time and so much labor and so much love, they're like, "We're done." Big bang reveal. Why do people do that? And then reality punches back and reality is like, "I don't think you are done. I think you're just at the starting line."
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah, I mean, there's probably a lot of reasons why. I think where my head just went to is that on the off chance that that works, like you do the big reveal and people are like, "Oh yeah, this is cool as hell, good job That feels really good." And I'm not saying that's impossible to happen, like you can potentially make something like that and you get that sort of reaction and you feel like you really nailed it. Your craft is being respected and people are like, "Oh, this is so great." So chasing that dragon, I think sometimes—
Rodney Evans:
Chase that high?
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah. It sets people up for that process that ultimately results in the real letdown. And I also think what makes you good at creating an asset is likely not the same skillset for creating a process for bringing people along into that. So if you are an expert brand designer and you make dope brand designs and you go off into your brand cave and you come back, bring the tablets of the new brand, that's all within your expertise as a professional, but the service design of like bringing people along to contribute to that is probably not like what you went to school for and what you spent a lot of time thinking about. I wonder if people shy away from that messier process of bringing people along or getting feedback because it is somewhat outside of their expertise.
Rodney Evans:
I used to think a lot about this at my old job because I had a real tendency to be in the cave and then do the big reveal and then the organ would get rejected and I would just be like, "That's because you guys are stupid."
Sam Spurlin:
"You idiots don't see my genius!"
Rodney Evans:
Yeah, exactly. You guys don't understand me, which was also true as incidentally, both things can be true.
Why big bang rollouts often avoid user feedback
Rodney Evans:
And one of the reasons that I did that is because I actually found significant feedback quite difficult to integrate to work in progress. If someone gave me feedback when the idea was half done and they were just like, "This is completely off base. This should be like this and blah, blah, blah, blah." For my brain at the time, I found it very difficult A, to have the discernment or the taste level to go like, "Okay, this is what about that is really right on and I should integrate this and this is what I can willfully ignore and this is really going to make it better." Where my mind would usually go is like, "I have to start over or I have to shut this person up." And I don't know what changed for me in the last 15 years that I don't feel that way anymore.
And I feel like even if in feedback on work in progress, people tell me some truly wacky shit I feel like I have a pretty good way of using it helpfully to make work product better, but I didn't always and I don't know how I learned to do that, but I think it really changed my posture on getting feedback because now I really trust that whatever the end user throws at me, I'm going to use it for good and it's going to be helpful and it's not going to be derailing, but I don't know how that happened.
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah. Well, I think what you're describing is the development of taste, right? You're basically saying that early on before you really had developed a sense of taste, it was hard to tell whether the feedback was useful or not on base, off base, whatever. Now that you've gotten a bunch of reps, developed a bunch of taste around this, feedback is something that is filled with more information that you can actually do something with and you have the skillset now to incorporate it into a work in progress and not have to kind of go back to the drawing board every time somebody shares something with you that is not what you had in mind.
Rodney Evans:
Yeah. I also think this is a place where AI is really, really useful. Once a day I will feed AI a draft of something that I'm working on and Granola notes of a round of feedback that I've gotten on it and be like, "Give me a new draft with the best of these insights incorporated." And it's pretty good. It takes a lot of that processing out. I say this because I think the big reveal, we made a perfect asset and now we just need to socialize it and get people to use it. I feel like it's so, so common and I do think that there are some behavioral roots and I'm conscious that there's fear of failure, there's fear of conflict, there's fear of criticism. There's a lot of stuff wrapped up in it. And also I just see in myself the way in which for a long time I just didn't have the ability to effectively integrate feedback.
I think it's like a skill to develop and it makes work in progress much less scary when you're like, I can always find a way through this. It's a different way of being.
Ira Glass on developing taste
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah. A few years ago there was a quote going around at least in the various circles that I travel from Ira Glass talking about taste. Are you familiar with that?
Rodney Evans:
No, but I'm obsessed with Ira Glass.
Sam Spurlin:
It's pretty long.
Rodney Evans:
Oh, say the whole thing. Let's give Ira Glass some air time on this show. It's pretty well. It's the reason I have a podcast.
Sam Spurlin:
Okay. So he says, "Nobody tells this to people who are beginners and I wish someone had told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste, but there's this gap. For the first couple of years you make stuff, it's just not that good. It's trying to be good. It has potential, but it's not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game is still killer and your taste is why your work disappoints you. And a lot of people never get past this phase. They quit. Most people I know who do interesting creative work went through years of this. It was only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I've ever met.
It's going to take a while. It's normal to take a while. You've just got to fight your way through. And I think that's the experience thing. And I think what we sometimes just collapse down into experience or age or wisdom is what he's talking about right there. It's the reps of actually doing it a bunch of times.
Rodney Evans:
Yeah. Okay. Side note, I lived in New York City for a long time and the only time in my tenure of New York City that I was actually starstruck was when I saw Ira Glass. And I basically stopped in the middle of the sidewalk and grabbed onto Ed's arm and I was like, "It's Ira. It's Ira Glass." And he was like, "What?" And Ed, who was not undone by seeing Ira Glass in the wild, Ira and his wife were reading one of those stands with a menu on it outside of a restaurant. And Ed was like, "You should go—"
Sam Spurlin:
They're just normal people like us!
Rodney Evans:
Just people like us! He goes, "You should go ask him if he'll read that brunch menu aloud to you." I was like, "No!" And then I ran away instead.
Sam Spurlin:
Good one, Ed.
Rodney Evans:
Anyway, Ira, I hope you hear this. Your biggest fan. Yeah, I think that's right, Sam.
How to iterate as you go
Rodney Evans:
And the other thing as you were reading that that I realized is part of the reason that I also used to be afraid of feedback was because I was afraid of how much work it would take to redo something.
Sam Spurlin:
Sure. Yeah.
Rodney Evans:
And there are a couple of ways to get out of that. One is don't finish it before you show it to anyone and then you won't be so precious about it because you won't be like, "I thought I was done." And two is I feel like now what I know is if I wait too long and then I have to redo work, it's actually more time consuming than if I iterate along the way. And so even if the iteration that I'm having to make is big and unwanted, I still know it's less work ultimately than if I try to push it and pray at the end.
Sam Spurlin:
It's realizing that when you're getting to the phase where you're asking for feedback, you're not anywhere close to being done.
Rodney Evans:
Exactly.
Sam Spurlin:
An example of that is like if you watch or if you hear a really seasoned novelist talking about their writing process and getting the first draft done in my head of a guy who's never written a book, I'm like, "First draft done, you're almost there. You've got the whole thing."
Rodney Evans:
Barely started.
Sam Spurlin:
You got 100,000 words. And the novelist being like, "Yeah, that's kind of when the work starts. I'm going to rewrite this thing two or three times and I'm not anywhere close to being done." And that's the difference between someone who has done a thing a lot of times and someone who has kind of a rough grasp of what it actually takes.
Rodney Evans:
I think that's exactly right. What else should we talk about in terms of making work happen?
Why change management is marketing inside your own company
Sam Spurlin:
I think I have one other thing maybe that we haven't directly hit. I don't remember who I first heard talk about this. Somebody working in change work, but really kind of looking at it through a marketing lens. So when you are doing marketing, you don't just kind of define the one person that you are trying to market to. There are personas and getting really specific about the different sorts of people who you're targeting with your messages and which message you're targeting to which sort of persona and where are they in the funnel.
I think it is interesting to think about change work using a similar idea in that there's a bunch of different types of folks who are potentially going to be participating in this change and they are very different from each other. And it is tempting to kind of lump them all together either into just like one group of just people who need to change or in just some really coarse groups of like, these are the people who are stoked about it and these are the resistors and that's the two groups that we're kind of talking to.
I think there's something interesting about getting much more specific about the different personas that exist within any sort of change effort and then doing interesting things in terms of how you talk to them and the experiences that they need. And this is obviously more in the realm of the type of kind of complex change and not the one where you tell people what to do. But if you're going to be in this complex sort of change space, then I think you need to bring some, you got to kind of meet complexity with complexity. You can't oversimplify it and trust that you're going to get to a good place.
Rodney Evans:
I think that's right. And it's also like, I see this a lot in M&A, which is a very complex change because you're bringing two complex systems together and it's usually unclear if one is eating the other or you're trying to blob tag them or what's happening is there's not a lot of that persona work of like, what does this mean for you, for you Sam as the end user versus for you Rodney as a different end user and what do we need you to do differently and what's going to change for you on Monday? And it's like if things are just going to change and you can be a passive consumer of that, then probably that's not that hard. If things are going to change and like we need you to alter your behavior as a result of that because of a specific role that you play, it's probably like a different motion with you in terms of understanding your relationship to this change, your appetite for it, your support, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
So I think that's really smart and we've talked on this show before about like the cake baking problem and this is essentially what this is, is just the idea that like it's very easy as any kind of creator to go away and make the world's most beautiful cake and then bring it out to a group of people who didn't ask for it who don't particularly want it and then be really disappointed when you're like, "But cake is good, you should have this. " But that's not like thinking about the end user. It's not designing with the end user in mind, which great marketers absolutely do,
Sam Spurlin:
For sure. Should we talk about some specific things to do?
Rodney Evans:
Yeah, let's talk about what to do, Sam. You go first.
Tip 1: Lower activation energy with explicit, clear asks
Sam Spurlin:
All right, okay. My first thought is about what does it look like to lower the activation energy for people to participate in something? I'm thinking about this right now because I'm doing a project with an organization where everybody is at 110% at least allocation and there's no time to really do anything, but there's this group of people who have hand raised to work with me as a core team to figure out a thing that we're going to do for like a design sprint.
And I have really tried to focus on making it extremely clear how they can play and how they should play right now because I've really gotten the sense that they want to contribute but they do not have any time to just like figure shit out. So we've been doing some asynchronous work over the last couple of weeks and I've kind of been going back to my high school days of writing instructions on worksheets.
It's like, "Here's precisely what I want you to do. Take no longer than 20 minutes to do it. Here are the three questions. Send me your answers when you're done." And just really trusting the fact that while it feels a little top-down, it's meeting them where they actually are-
Rodney Evans:
You're helping them.
Sam Spurlin:
And helping them actually contribute. And I've been thinking a lot more about where are other places to do that? Where can we give people the gift of clarity in terms of how to play and not kind of just invite them to an open space that's just like, "Hey, we'll just figure it out as we go along." So there's always a time and a place for things like that, but I've been kind of leaning into the opposite of that a little bit more nowadays.
Rodney Evans:
I love that. I think that's great.
Sam Spurlin:
What do you got?
Rodney Evans:
And the thing just to add to that is you're treating the activation as the real work in that case, like you're not overly concerned about the asset or the thing and it's like the work to be done is this interstitial stuff.
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah. I want your actual answers to these questions because we're going to use that for things coming up in the future. I don't want to waste your time you figuring out that stuff.
Tip 2: Run a system of socialization, not just an event
Rodney Evans:
Totally. I love that. Okay. I'm going to talk about socialization because people think about socialization as being an event or a series of events and it's not, it's like a system and people think that you go asset socialization done and that is not correct. So here's what doesn't work. Just talking a bunch about stuff doesn't work. Having office hours and thinking anyone is going to show up to them to learn about this thing that they don't give a shit about also does not work and anything that's in a deck basically is not going to work. Those are the things that I wouldn't do. And when I say in a deck, I don't mean as the asset, I mean as a presentation You can just assume that people have gone on a little mental vacation or opened their phone if what you're doing is running them through a deck.
Here's the sort of arc that I generally follow when I'm trying to do something new. First is early signal. Something's coming. Something's coming in this vein for this reason. This is the tension. Let's all understand the tension. Eventually you are going to see a proposal to solve this tension but not right now. And I will telegraph that shit every single week for six months until there's a proposal just to be like, "I know we're still feeling the tension. Tension right? Proposal's coming." Then when we introduce the new thing, and you've seen this already, I have a tendency to start with narrative and why and emotion. So a lot of times before the big reveal, I'm like, here's a video explaining why we're doing this work and what it means rather than here's the asset. So it's like we've gone from the tension to the origin story and the emotion around it.
Then the launching of the thing with a specific ask, "Here's a document, get in there and drop comments. Here's a proposal we're going to govern it on Friday. Here's the deck. I would like your feedback on the following three slides with this client persona in mind." Specific asks to get people marinating. Then some kind of interactive forum, which we've talked about can be generative, can be governance, can be feedback oriented, can be whatever you want it to be and then some kind of ongoing reinforcement, which we've also talked about, like narrating the adherence back to the change. To me, that's what a system of socialization looks like, not "I shipped it and I'm available for questions."
Sam Spurlin:
Right.
Rodney Evans:
Which is what I frankly usually see.
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah. Well, what I love about what you just described there, I know narrative was like a step in it, but also that is also the whole thing is kind of like a narrative arc as well that shifts in energy and ways to interact and ways to be thinking about it and like a pleasing sort of conclusion.
Rodney Evans:
Totally. I think in the best case, that's exactly, exactly what it is. What else you got?
Tip 3: Remove things and make space before asking for more
Sam Spurlin:
All right. I've got one last one, which is just, and I feel like this is actually a piece of advice that I've given on lots of different episodes, which is an interesting pattern, but stop doing things, remove, remove things, remove, remove, remove, stop, make space, stop, remove. Change...if you want people to do something different, that is not in most cases a one-to-one replacement. Doing something new takes extra attention and energy and time. And if you are not creating any space for that, then that is not going to be done particularly well. People aren't going to put much time into it. They're not going to think about it that much. So if you're asking people to do something that requires more of them, do your best to try to make more space for that.
Rodney Evans:
I love that. That's really cool. I mean, always. Always more space. Always. For all the things. Use AI, get more space.
Tip 4: Keep it ugly to get better participation
Rodney Evans:
My last one, which came from a client, I'm going to send this to her, but I thought this was so smart.
We were leaving an offsite a few weeks ago and basically we had like a follow-up for the rest of the team and we've tried to do this same follow-up move before and we haven't gotten a lot of traction even though I know that it would really be beneficial to them. And basically I was trying to get them to move into proposals based on the work that they've done and that has not gotten traction. And so she was like, "Let's in a document put all of the proposals that need to be made with a couple of lines of notes." And the overarching advice that I thought was so smart was that she was like, "Don't make it too pretty." She was like, "Leave it ugly, leave it drafty." Because part of the problem is when you give people something that looks really polished and you ask them to interact with it, they then feel like they have to do a lot of work to respond with polish.
And actually this does not require polish at all. This isn't going anywhere. We literally just need people to write three bullets on what they want to do next, like no punctuation, no intention behind it. And I thought it was such a smart design choice of like keep it ugly so that they can be scrappy because that's actually what we need. And if you give them something that feels overdone, they're going to not do it because they don't want to overdo it.
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah. No, that's so good and it's so simple. I love this idea of like keep it ugly as long as possible.
Rodney Evans:
Keep it
Sam Spurlin:
Ugly. I feel like that it works in a lot of different contexts.
Rodney Evans:
It really does.
Sam Spurlin:
My personal life...woot! Just kidding. I was going to set you up for that.
Rodney Evans:
That's so rude. I would never say that to you.
Sam Spurlin:
I know. That's why I said it to myself.
Rodney Evans:
Oh, that's really funny.
Sam Spurlin:
No, that's so good though. I like that. I feel like that type of thing that I've never articulated, but I've felt in my bones because I've definitely had people share things with me and I'm like, "Oh my God, I can tell so much time has gone into this." If I don't have anything good, really good to offer, I'm just going to kind of throw my hands up and be like, "Good job, dude. You did the thing."
Rodney Evans:
Right. It does not feel like this is wet clay that's still to be molded. It feels like this came out of the kiln and anything that I do is potentially going to break it.
Sam Spurlin:
Totally. Well, and to my point, my last one about the time thing, if I'm also feeling pressed for time and you hand me a pretty thing to get feedback on, I'm like, "All right, this is going to take significant time for me to really engage with this and give you what it deserves back." I'm not going to do that. So it's just not going to happen.
Rodney Evans:
Keep it ugly, folks.
Sam Spurlin:
Keep it ugly. All right. Are we done? Did we do it?
Rodney Evans:
We're done. We did it.
Sam Spurlin:
Great. Hey, everyone. That's all right. I'm talking to you. We're always looking for new topics for the show. So if you have an org pattern that you're having trouble changing, shoot us a note at podcast [at] theready [dot] com.
Rodney Evans:
This show is edited and mixed by Taylor Marvin at Coupe Studios and produced by Jack Van Amburg. At Work With The Ready is created by The Ready where we help organizations around the world change the way they work. Thank you for listening.