Wayne Turmel dives into the intricacies of digital transformation in remote and hybrid work environments. Joined by Jay Goldman from Sensei Labs, co-author of "The Decoded Company," they explore how companies can embrace change, optimize operational excellence, and tackle the challenges of digital adoption. Listen in for an enlightening conversation about leveraging technology, managing change, and enhancing team collaboration in a virtual workspace.
Key Takeaways
1. Embrace a mindset of constant transformation: Understand that digital transformation is not a one-time project but an ongoing process.
2. Develop digital proprioception: Familiarize yourself with new tools and data to navigate digital environments more effectively.
3. Start small with transformation initiatives: Focus on achievable goals within your team before tackling larger-scale transformations.
Timestamps
00:00 Introduction
01:06 Understanding Digital Transformation
03:02 Data, Process, and Human Impact
04:57 Navigating Digital Transformation
13:45 Proprioception in Digital Contexts
19:31 Practical Approaches to Digital Transformation
22:27 Conclusion
Related Episodes
Additional Resources
- Learn more about Wayne Turmel
- Email Wayne Turmel
- Connect with Wayne Turmel on LinkedIn
- Purchase a copy of The Long-Distance Leader
- Purchase a copy of The Long-Distance Teammate
- Purchase a copy of The Long-Distance Team
- The Kevin Eikenberry Group
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:07):
Hello, everybody.
Greetings.
Welcome once again to the Long DistanceWork Life podcast, where we try
to help you thrive, survive, generally
make sense, and keep the weasels at bay
in this crazy world of remoteand hybrid work.
My name is Wayne Turmel.
I am very excited to be with you.
(00:29):
Marisa is not here, alas.
But don't go away, because we havea really, really excellent,
very smart guest.
And we're going to be talking aboutdigital tram transformation
inside companies and what that means andwhy you care as remote or hybrid worker.
And so to do all thatI bring into the room,
(00:50):
Jay GoldmanJay's with Sensei Labs up in Toronto
and he is the coauthorof The Decoded Company.
Jay. How are you? I'm great.How are you in?
I I'm not claiming greatness,but I am just dandy.
Thank you so much.
No weasels.
You know,the weasels are firmly at bay today.
(01:12):
So full
question for you, man.
The decoded company.
Let's start there.
What the heck are we talking about?
Code A company is a book that I wrotewith three coauthors.
It is almost at its 10th anniversary,which is a pretty amazing thing.
It was our attemptto answer some questions
(01:32):
both about what we were building atClick Health at the time,
which is now in whileit was founded in 1997.
So, you know, it'squite a mature business at this point
and has grown significantly.
Ten offices around the world, 1500plus people, a few hundred million
a year in revenue.
So it's grown to be a pretty sizablebusiness.
(01:53):
And cricket clickis really a pretty amazing growth engine.
It has, for most of its history,sustained 30 to 40% year over year growth,
and that is harder and harder thing to doas the numbers get bigger.
And so we would get asked a lot abouthow were we able to continue
to sustain that kind of growth.
It's pretty easywhen you're a small company.
(02:13):
It's much harder as you scale.
And so we wanted to tell the storyof how we were doing that,
using a combination of technology and datato build a talent centric workplace.
And so we set out to tell that story.
The book was written by myself,Lior Segal and Aaron
Goldstein, who are two of clicksco-founders and a friend of mine.
(02:34):
Roth Our FishRoth is a world renowned expert
on digital anthropologyand on understanding how people use tools.
At the time, she was working withthe World Economic Forum in Switzerland,
understanding the way that organizationswere approaching digital tools.
And so she joined us to write the bookand do a lot of research into companies
(02:56):
other than click and how they had similaradventures with data and with talent.
Now, so you I'm I'm going to stop therebecause you said something
that is worth notingand this is where data
and processand all this stuff come together.
Right?
(03:16):
A lot of organizations gather dataor think they gather data.
A lot of people, myself included, worry
less about artificial intelligenceand more about natural stupidity
because all this data comes in contactwith human beings at some point.
And that's where things get messy, right?
Absolutely.
And in in waysthat we're not very good at predicting.
(03:39):
And that's part of the problem.
So with all kinds of mental biases,we might look at a training set of data
and say, this seems likea complete set of data to me,
and then train someAI on how to make use of that data
and not identify the gapsin the training set
that are now going to lead to carrying
(03:59):
that same bias forward into the AI,
which can have very serious consequences.
We are past the point here of
AI might not generate the right imageand into air,
might not make the right funding decisionon someone's mortgage application
or make the right treatment decisionin a health care context.
(04:20):
Because the training set of datawas incomplete in a way
that the people who trained itdidn't notice was missing from that data.
So we're getting into the potentialfor some scary situations.
Yeah, and whether it's AI or data,the point is that what is going to make
remote work workis people need access to information
(04:40):
and they need access to the abilityto make decisions
and they need to be able to communicatewith each other.
Having the same baseline reality.
And this is where
I really want to talk to youabout how organizations do this or not.
This idea of digital transformation,taking what's been walking around
(05:01):
in people's heads and kind of soakedinto the paint of the office
and turning it into something usable?
Yeah, Digitaltransformation is an interesting term
because before the pandemic
it was emerging well, emerging as a term,
but in a lot of caseswas not transformation.
It was more so that I.T.
(05:24):
departmentsand and PMOS had kind of figured out
if I had a project that I've been tryingto get funding for for a long time
and I couldn't get funding for it,
if I call it a transformation,I can get funding now.
And so that's not really transformative,could be digital.
So in some cases
that was things like we really needto migrate to a new ERP version
and no one will fund this project,but if I call it a transformation,
(05:46):
we'll get funding and now we can migrateto the new ERP version.
And there's nothingtransformative about that.
And it was often viewed as sort ofone time fixed duration project.
So we're going to start our ERP migrationor whatever it is.
It's going to take us ideally a year,probably two or three years,
and then we'll be done.
And then our transformation is finishedand we take issue with that idea.
(06:11):
That transformation is a one time projectbecause you will potentially
be transformed on the other sideif it's a real transformation.
But if that project really doestake you three years,
everything aroundyou will have changed as well.
And so the real goal here ultimately
and the term that is starting to emerge
(06:32):
more often is operational excellence,which is we are going to go from
a state of transformationto a state of constant transformation
where we acknowledge that really to
to execute operationallyat the highest standard of excellence.
We have to be in that sort of constanttransformation state in a kind of change
is the only constant mentalityand in a posture of agility
(06:56):
that allows us to continuously takein those new market conditions,
those new signals, those new other things,and be able to adapt to them
and make those changes.
So take me back a little bit.
What is it that we're transforming?
I mean, we have offices, we have peoplein them, we have remote employees.
They're out there doing stuff.
(07:18):
What are we transforming before we get towhat we're forming?
Do what is it that needs to be transformed
in order for this new kind of work
to take place and be excellentand all of those things?
The word transformationgets thrown around a lot to mean
different kinds of programs.
So let's first start off with
(07:39):
what are we not talking aboutin this context of sort of work life?
So we're not talkingabout a transformation
at a cost transformation level.
So this isn't an exercisein reducing cost of production
or cost of goods delivered.
So we're not talking about sortof the procurement finance transformation
piece here,
a very valid type of transformation,but less sort of the topic at hand here.
(08:04):
We also work with our customersand our partners on lots of transformative
programs that are sort of largebusiness processes that have happened,
something like a post-merger integrationon a M&A
transaction is a good exampleof a very transformative program,
but not the kind of transformationthat we're talking about here.
Digital transformation,maybe this sort of shift.
(08:27):
Often it is internal.
So if we think about what really happenedduring the pandemic from a way
we work perspective,we created forcing functions
that we all collectivelyhad no choice about at all.
Everyone had to go homeand work from home.
And so it forced us to make probably
a decade of technology adoptionin a six month period.
We had no choice.
(08:48):
We had to now all work from homeand we had to figure out ways to do it.
We saw new platforms emerge.
We saw new ways of working emerge,
and we saw rapid adoptionbecause there was no option,
which is kind of a forceddigital transformation in a way.
So that I would say very muchin that sort of long distance work life
balance question fits into that scopeof that sort of transformation.
(09:09):
I had the opportunityto speak at an event about a week ago
and we were talking about the four dayworkweek, which is something
that we've adopted at Sun Labs,which is a very interesting topic.
It's kind of a separate topic of happyto get into it if you'd like.
But no, not a rabbit hole.
We're going to go down a deep, very deepand very full of rabbits.
It is very happy rabbits, though,as it turns out.
(09:31):
So and no weasels at all.
So happy to talk about that at some point.
But our our session at this eventwas about 40 week.
But the broader eventwas all about the changing world of work
and hybrid and remoteand how we're adapting to those things.
And the most consistent messagefrom all of the speakers who were there
was we all go to a tool mentalitywhen this topic comes up.
(09:54):
So we start thinkingabout digital transformation.
How do we enable our hybrid work teamsto connect
with each other, to collaborate, sharefiles, video meetings, that kind of thing.
And the reality is 80 to 90% ofthis is a change management question.
It's not a tool question.
The problem isthe change management part is hard.
It's the soft, squishy bits that relateto humans and emotion and fear of change.
(10:19):
And because it's those parts,we tend towards turning this into a tool
conversation because it's much easierto make a tool based decision.
Should we deploy teams or use Zoomor should we collaborate on SharePoint
or Google Drive or whatevertooling decision we're making in there,
Those feel more manageable, easierto assess.
There's good vendor reviews out there.
(10:41):
You can make up very pragmaticbuying decision about those things,
but if you don't think about the changemanagement impact when you deploy them,
you're going to result in no adoption
and a very turbulenttime for your team members.
Really, 80 to 90% of that effortshould be in the change management impact.
As a CEO,I want to run a theory by you right,
(11:02):
because you're both in the space and yougo to work every day leading your company.
I have this theorythat once you get past a certain basic
set of tools, it really doesn't matterwhich one you use.
Well, I think that you're.
Either going but use it, use it correctly,
you know, have the right mindsetand use it, or you're not.
(11:22):
And if you're not, it doesn't matterwhich one you have.
Right?
This has always been true for almost any
form of tooling that exists.
I think back to thissort of world of productivity.
And it's so easy to fall into this trap of
if I just figure out the right personalproductivity system,
(11:46):
I will unlock this state of blissin which I am eternally productive.
And the truth is,you will spend a good third of your time
looking at productivity systemsor not being productive,
because the truth is it doesn't matter.
You find the one that worksthe best for you, whatever that thing
is, whether it's GTD or whether it's,you know, some other system.
(12:07):
And as long as you stick with the system,you'll get the output from it.
It really the tool itselfdoesn't actually matter.
And so that's absolutely true herefrom how we think about enabling
remote work and hybrid work,there is a basic set of tools.
Some percentage of your organizationwill become power users of those tools.
The vast majority of the peoplewho work in your organization will not
(12:30):
they are just not minded in that directionin terms
of figuring out all of the intricatedetails of how something works
and how to get the best value out of it,and they will probably use it wrong.
And that'sjust the reality of deploying tools.
We findwe're a microsoft based organization,
so SharePoint and OneDrive and teamsand that kind of thing, and
(12:54):
I have yet to have anybody explain to methe difference between SharePoint
and OneDrive in a waythat makes any actual sense
in terms of how I should use theseand where I should put the file.
How our organizationonly operates out of our shared
SharePoint volumes and the other halfonly operates out of their OneDrive.
So all of the files are storedin their OneDrive and shared from there.
(13:14):
No one will ever make this makeany amount of sense outside of Microsoft.
It doesn't matter.
Now in terms of making sense
in your book, in your
and in the speakingthat you and your coauthors do.
I came across a concept that I lovebecause we're talking about
digital transformation.
And it makes sense that in terms of work,
(13:35):
you need information when you need it,you need to know where to get it.
You need to be able to
create context by it, and everybodyhas to share the same information.
So all of that makes perfect sense.
But you and your team talkabout a concept called
proprioception, which is from kinesiology.
(13:56):
It has to do with our bodies.
Can you explain how this fitsinto that idea?
Because I thought this was the singular,coolest,
most unique thingabout what you guys are talking about.
Proprioception is your own sense of whereyour limbs are in relation to your body.
So you don't need to be able to see whereyour hands are to know where they are.
(14:17):
If you close your eyes,
you can still reach outand touch your nose.
That's proprioception.
It's that awareness of whereyour limbs are in relation to yourself.
When we apply it in a digital context,we think of it as
a similar level of awareness.
Are you aware of the tools aroundyou, the data
that's around you, and how it relatesback to what you're doing?
(14:38):
Is it second nature in the same wayas your awareness of your limbs are?
Where do I need to go to find this thingand to retrieve it?
And that will it relate
in many ways to the frequencyof the thing that you do?
So little kids, babiesdon't have great proprioception.
They're new to this.
They haven't spent that much timebeing aware of where their limbs are.
(14:59):
They smack themselves in the face.They can't pick things up.
We get that sense developed over timeas we learn about those things.
And thankfully for humans, it developsfairly quickly because otherwise
we would be quite uselessmuch longer into our lives than we are.
But if you think about how you learna new tool, you're you're digital.
Proprioception within that toolis pretty novice at the beginning.
(15:23):
It all kind of feels like you have onehand tied behind your back,
which relates obviouslyback to that sense of proprioception.
It feels like unnaturalthat you're using this, and depending
on the type of person you are, itmay remain at that level,
especially if you don'thave to use the tool that often.
So as we deploymore and more digital tools, we create
a category of users in those toolswho will be perpetual novices.
(15:46):
They know interact
with the tool often enough to ever becomeanything close to a power user.
If you think aboutmaybe a corporate reporting system,
you might go in once a monthand have to update a few numbers.
Every time you go in there,you'll be at that novice level.
Your proprioception is very low.
You're learning it againevery time you go back in there.
So that tool will never really feelnatural to you.
(16:08):
Someone else might use that toolon a daily basis.
Maybe it's a member of the finance teamor the PPMO.
When they go in there,it feels like second nature to them.
They know exactly where everything is.
They know where to retrieve that from.
And so they're able to go in thereand be a power user
where you're not able to necessarilydo the same.
The other thing that's really relevanthere is around how we develop
(16:30):
an awareness of where things existin that digital ecosystem.
So less about a specific toolthat I might go into,
more abouthow do I get a question answered?
And so I was just spending some timewith one of our customers
who is a vice president of transformationin a very large enterprise overseas,
in this case,
a whole bunch of post-merger integrationprojects that are coming together.
(16:52):
And he has a large teamof project managers who report to him.
One of the jobs as projectmanagers have to do is on the strategic
portfolio management side.
So identifying business cases,putting them forward for review
is this a project that we want to go aheadwith?
And writing those business casesis actually a very challenging thing to do
because to do it properlyand to get to a place
(17:14):
where it's not garbage in, garbage out.
We had bad business cases, we made baddecisions, we ran that project.
You need a fairly high degreeof sophistication
from a business modeling perspective,and you need a bunch of inputs into that.
So this organization has a lot of fieldtechnicians.
If you're doing a calculationabout the cost of running a particular
type of program, you might need to knowwhat the hourly loaded cost
(17:37):
is of a field technicianin different regions in the U.S.
in orderto put a proper business case for it.
So one of the challenges they haveis that process just takes too long.
The PMS don't have that informationfor them to go and find.
It is a really labor intensive exercise,low proprioception in terms of where
that data exists in the organization,which results in shortcuts.
(18:00):
So they end up just guessing at a numberand plugging it in.
You make a bad decision and you can end upcosting the organization
millions of dollars in this caseat the scale that they operate
because a project gets greenlitwith bad data that was in there
or doesn't get greenlitand should have been.
But you had the wrong numbersinvolved in that calculation.
I think there's going to be
an emerging category of tools herethat are going to help with this
(18:23):
because it is a thing that I,if you've adjusted it correctly
to a low hallucination rate,because obviously you don't want to give
people made up answers that are incorrectand are now going to get plugged
into these.
But if you think about.
The parable,some of us have made a career of that.
Sure, sure.
But if we're building toolsthat do this, in our ideal state,
we're playing into reallythe strengths of an AI system.
(18:46):
So go outand take in a huge amount of data,
far more than any individual personcould do,
internalize that data and understandthe relationships between it
and be able to answer questionsfor someone who can't go digging
through all of that data.
So if deployed correctly in that way,and I love Microsoft's
language of copilot as an assistant here,
(19:08):
I should have a personal assistantthat I can ask those questions to.
They should be able to be questionsabout anything we do as an organization,
and it should be able to either answer itor at least point me
in the right direction as to who I couldask or where I can get an answer from.
And that to me might end upbeing one of the highest value
categories of AI in an organization,especially in large enterprise.
(19:31):
This isI could geek out about this for a while
and we are out of time already,which is terrifying.
I'm let me ask you this.
If somebody isn't at your level ofsophistication, which is 90% of humanity
in terms of digital transformation,what are the one or two things
that they absolutely have to knowbefore they begin?
(19:54):
This is a big scary topic for peoplebecause we've turned it into
a big, scary topic.But it doesn't have to be.
It's the old thing about how do you eatan elephant one bite at a time, right?
If you turn your transformationinto a capital E enterprise level
transformation,you have to create a transformation
management office and hire peoplewho are transformation leaders.
(20:16):
You can do thatif it really is of that scale,
but you're turning this into a much morecomplicated thing than it needs to be.
If you are early in a transformationjourney
and a low level of maturityas an organization.
And I would draw a clear distinction herebetween a traditional PMO
who are very good at executing projectsand a transformation team
(20:38):
because it is really a different mentalityand a different way of thinking.
We sometimes go back to a quote,which allegedly is an Einstein quote
You can't solve today's problemswith the same thinking that created them.
And we think about transformationin the same way.
If we were successful at executingall of the projects we needed to do
and our operational excellence was high,we'd have no need for transformation.
(21:01):
The fact that you have to runa transformation is in and of itself
a failed state in the sensethat things have gone wrong.
To get to this point,
and we now have to correct for the thingsthat have gone wrong by running a process
which has to be different by definitionthan the processes that have come before.
But if you're at a low level of maturityin doing that,
(21:21):
don'ttry to do the entire thing in one shot.
The best advice I can give islook for small opportunities to develop
those transformation musclesby building out a small set of
transformation projectsthat you're going to run
that do have a finite time periodand a real transformation outcome.
But it can be a really small one.
You can start within your own team.
(21:42):
What would be transformative
for us as a teamin increasing our operational excellence?
Articulate a hypothesisthat has a measurable outcome on it,
and then run that as a transformationand start to build up that muscle
of thinking differently,of running different practices, of
measuringhow you approach those things differently,
and you'll start to level up that totaltransformation ability across those teams.
(22:06):
Excellent. Thank you so much.
I can't thank you enough.
Ladies and gentlemen, You heard it.
It's there's so much to talk about.
And if you're tryingto get your head around it,
visit the transcript for this show.
Long distance work dot com.
We will have links to Sensei Labsand Jay's book and Jay and all that
(22:27):
good stuff.
Let this be the beginningof your journey into this.
If you enjoy the show, if you have enjoyedthe podcast, please, you know the drill.
Like subscribe.
I'm not going to get all YouTube
and tell you to smash buttons,but you know the drill.
We appreciate it.
If you have questions,show ideas, guest ideas, pet peeves
(22:49):
that you want us to tackle,reach out to Marisa or myself.
Our emails are there on the screen.
Wayne or Marisa at KevinEikenberry dot com.
Find us on LinkedIn.
We are happy to connect.
And if you are looking at your teamand thinking we need to fix this,
(23:11):
a good place to start is Kevin Eikenberryand my new book,
The Long Distance Team.
You can visit long distance Team BBC.com
and begin your journey there.
Thank you so much for joining us,Marisa will be with us next week.
And the world said yay.
In the meantime,thank you for being with us.
(23:33):
Check out past episodes of the showand don't let the weasels get you down.
Hello, everybody.
Greetings.
Welcome once again to the Long DistanceWork Life podcast, where we try
to help you thrive, survive, generally
make sense, and keep the weasels at bay
in this crazy world of remoteand hybrid work.
My name is Wayne Turmel.
I am very excited to be with you.
(00:29):
Marisa is not here, alas.
But don't go away, because we havea really, really excellent,
very smart guest.
And we're going to be talking aboutdigital tram transformation
inside companies and what that means andwhy you care as remote or hybrid worker.
And so to do all thatI bring into the room,
(00:50):
Jay GoldmanJay's with Sensei Labs up in Toronto
and he is the coauthorof The Decoded Company.
Jay. How are you? I'm great.How are you in?
I I'm not claiming greatness,but I am just dandy.
Thank you so much.
No weasels.
You know,the weasels are firmly at bay today.
(01:12):
So full
question for you, man.
The decoded company.
Let's start there.
What the heck are we talking about?
Code A company is a book that I wrotewith three coauthors.
It is almost at its 10th anniversary,which is a pretty amazing thing.
It was our attemptto answer some questions
(01:32):
both about what we were building atClick Health at the time,
which is now in whileit was founded in 1997.
So, you know, it'squite a mature business at this point
and has grown significantly.
Ten offices around the world, 1500plus people, a few hundred million
a year in revenue.
So it's grown to be a pretty sizablebusiness.
(01:53):
And cricket clickis really a pretty amazing growth engine.
It has, for most of its history,sustained 30 to 40% year over year growth,
and that is harder and harder thing to doas the numbers get bigger.
And so we would get asked a lot abouthow were we able to continue
to sustain that kind of growth.
It's pretty easywhen you're a small company.
(02:13):
It's much harder as you scale.
And so we wanted to tell the storyof how we were doing that,
using a combination of technology and datato build a talent centric workplace.
And so we set out to tell that story.
The book was written by myself,Lior Segal and Aaron
Goldstein, who are two of clicksco-founders and a friend of mine.
(02:34):
Roth Our FishRoth is a world renowned expert
on digital anthropologyand on understanding how people use tools.
At the time, she was working withthe World Economic Forum in Switzerland,
understanding the way that organizationswere approaching digital tools.
And so she joined us to write the bookand do a lot of research into companies
(02:56):
other than click and how they had similaradventures with data and with talent.
Now, so you I'm I'm going to stop therebecause you said something
that is worth notingand this is where data
and processand all this stuff come together.
Right?
(03:16):
A lot of organizations gather dataor think they gather data.
A lot of people, myself included, worry
less about artificial intelligenceand more about natural stupidity
because all this data comes in contactwith human beings at some point.
And that's where things get messy, right?
Absolutely.
And in in waysthat we're not very good at predicting.
(03:39):
And that's part of the problem.
So with all kinds of mental biases,we might look at a training set of data
and say, this seems likea complete set of data to me,
and then train someAI on how to make use of that data
and not identify the gapsin the training set
that are now going to lead to carrying
(03:59):
that same bias forward into the AI,
which can have very serious consequences.
We are past the point here of
AI might not generate the right imageand into air,
might not make the right funding decisionon someone's mortgage application
or make the right treatment decisionin a health care context.
(04:20):
Because the training set of datawas incomplete in a way
that the people who trained itdidn't notice was missing from that data.
So we're getting into the potentialfor some scary situations.
Yeah, and whether it's AI or data,the point is that what is going to make
remote work workis people need access to information
(04:40):
and they need access to the abilityto make decisions
and they need to be able to communicatewith each other.
Having the same baseline reality.
And this is where
I really want to talk to youabout how organizations do this or not.
This idea of digital transformation,taking what's been walking around
(05:01):
in people's heads and kind of soakedinto the paint of the office
and turning it into something usable?
Yeah, Digitaltransformation is an interesting term
because before the pandemic
it was emerging well, emerging as a term,
but in a lot of caseswas not transformation.
It was more so that I.T.
(05:24):
departmentsand and PMOS had kind of figured out
if I had a project that I've been tryingto get funding for for a long time
and I couldn't get funding for it,
if I call it a transformation,I can get funding now.
And so that's not really transformative,could be digital.
So in some cases
that was things like we really needto migrate to a new ERP version
and no one will fund this project,but if I call it a transformation,
(05:46):
we'll get funding and now we can migrateto the new ERP version.
And there's nothingtransformative about that.
And it was often viewed as sort ofone time fixed duration project.
So we're going to start our ERP migrationor whatever it is.
It's going to take us ideally a year,probably two or three years,
and then we'll be done.
And then our transformation is finishedand we take issue with that idea.
(06:11):
That transformation is a one time projectbecause you will potentially
be transformed on the other sideif it's a real transformation.
But if that project really doestake you three years,
everything aroundyou will have changed as well.
And so the real goal here ultimately
and the term that is starting to emerge
(06:32):
more often is operational excellence,which is we are going to go from
a state of transformationto a state of constant transformation
where we acknowledge that really to
to execute operationallyat the highest standard of excellence.
We have to be in that sort of constanttransformation state in a kind of change
is the only constant mentalityand in a posture of agility
(06:56):
that allows us to continuously takein those new market conditions,
those new signals, those new other things,and be able to adapt to them
and make those changes.
So take me back a little bit.
What is it that we're transforming?
I mean, we have offices, we have peoplein them, we have remote employees.
They're out there doing stuff.
(07:18):
What are we transforming before we get towhat we're forming?
Do what is it that needs to be transformed
in order for this new kind of work
to take place and be excellentand all of those things?
The word transformationgets thrown around a lot to mean
different kinds of programs.
So let's first start off with
(07:39):
what are we not talking aboutin this context of sort of work life?
So we're not talkingabout a transformation
at a cost transformation level.
So this isn't an exercisein reducing cost of production
or cost of goods delivered.
So we're not talking about sortof the procurement finance transformation
piece here,
a very valid type of transformation,but less sort of the topic at hand here.
(08:04):
We also work with our customersand our partners on lots of transformative
programs that are sort of largebusiness processes that have happened,
something like a post-merger integrationon a M&A
transaction is a good exampleof a very transformative program,
but not the kind of transformationthat we're talking about here.
Digital transformation,maybe this sort of shift.
(08:27):
Often it is internal.
So if we think about what really happenedduring the pandemic from a way
we work perspective,we created forcing functions
that we all collectivelyhad no choice about at all.
Everyone had to go homeand work from home.
And so it forced us to make probably
a decade of technology adoptionin a six month period.
We had no choice.
(08:48):
We had to now all work from homeand we had to figure out ways to do it.
We saw new platforms emerge.
We saw new ways of working emerge,
and we saw rapid adoptionbecause there was no option,
which is kind of a forceddigital transformation in a way.
So that I would say very muchin that sort of long distance work life
balance question fits into that scopeof that sort of transformation.
(09:09):
I had the opportunityto speak at an event about a week ago
and we were talking about the four dayworkweek, which is something
that we've adopted at Sun Labs,which is a very interesting topic.
It's kind of a separate topic of happyto get into it if you'd like.
But no, not a rabbit hole.
We're going to go down a deep, very deepand very full of rabbits.
It is very happy rabbits, though,as it turns out.
(09:31):
So and no weasels at all.
So happy to talk about that at some point.
But our our session at this eventwas about 40 week.
But the broader eventwas all about the changing world of work
and hybrid and remoteand how we're adapting to those things.
And the most consistent messagefrom all of the speakers who were there
was we all go to a tool mentalitywhen this topic comes up.
(09:54):
So we start thinkingabout digital transformation.
How do we enable our hybrid work teamsto connect
with each other, to collaborate, sharefiles, video meetings, that kind of thing.
And the reality is 80 to 90% ofthis is a change management question.
It's not a tool question.
The problem isthe change management part is hard.
It's the soft, squishy bits that relateto humans and emotion and fear of change.
(10:19):
And because it's those parts,we tend towards turning this into a tool
conversation because it's much easierto make a tool based decision.
Should we deploy teams or use Zoomor should we collaborate on SharePoint
or Google Drive or whatevertooling decision we're making in there,
Those feel more manageable, easierto assess.
There's good vendor reviews out there.
(10:41):
You can make up very pragmaticbuying decision about those things,
but if you don't think about the changemanagement impact when you deploy them,
you're going to result in no adoption
and a very turbulenttime for your team members.
Really, 80 to 90% of that effortshould be in the change management impact.
As a CEO,I want to run a theory by you right,
(11:02):
because you're both in the space and yougo to work every day leading your company.
I have this theorythat once you get past a certain basic
set of tools, it really doesn't matterwhich one you use.
Well, I think that you're.
Either going but use it, use it correctly,
you know, have the right mindsetand use it, or you're not.
(11:22):
And if you're not, it doesn't matterwhich one you have.
Right?
This has always been true for almost any
form of tooling that exists.
I think back to thissort of world of productivity.
And it's so easy to fall into this trap of
if I just figure out the right personalproductivity system,
(11:46):
I will unlock this state of blissin which I am eternally productive.
And the truth is,you will spend a good third of your time
looking at productivity systemsor not being productive,
because the truth is it doesn't matter.
You find the one that worksthe best for you, whatever that thing
is, whether it's GTD or whether it's,you know, some other system.
(12:07):
And as long as you stick with the system,you'll get the output from it.
It really the tool itselfdoesn't actually matter.
And so that's absolutely true herefrom how we think about enabling
remote work and hybrid work,there is a basic set of tools.
Some percentage of your organizationwill become power users of those tools.
The vast majority of the peoplewho work in your organization will not
(12:30):
they are just not minded in that directionin terms
of figuring out all of the intricatedetails of how something works
and how to get the best value out of it,and they will probably use it wrong.
And that'sjust the reality of deploying tools.
We findwe're a microsoft based organization,
so SharePoint and OneDrive and teamsand that kind of thing, and
(12:54):
I have yet to have anybody explain to methe difference between SharePoint
and OneDrive in a waythat makes any actual sense
in terms of how I should use theseand where I should put the file.
How our organizationonly operates out of our shared
SharePoint volumes and the other halfonly operates out of their OneDrive.
So all of the files are storedin their OneDrive and shared from there.
(13:14):
No one will ever make this makeany amount of sense outside of Microsoft.
It doesn't matter.
Now in terms of making sense
in your book, in your
and in the speakingthat you and your coauthors do.
I came across a concept that I lovebecause we're talking about
digital transformation.
And it makes sense that in terms of work,
(13:35):
you need information when you need it,you need to know where to get it.
You need to be able to
create context by it, and everybodyhas to share the same information.
So all of that makes perfect sense.
But you and your team talkabout a concept called
proprioception, which is from kinesiology.
(13:56):
It has to do with our bodies.
Can you explain how this fitsinto that idea?
Because I thought this was the singular,coolest,
most unique thingabout what you guys are talking about.
Proprioception is your own sense of whereyour limbs are in relation to your body.
So you don't need to be able to see whereyour hands are to know where they are.
(14:17):
If you close your eyes,
you can still reach outand touch your nose.
That's proprioception.
It's that awareness of whereyour limbs are in relation to yourself.
When we apply it in a digital context,we think of it as
a similar level of awareness.
Are you aware of the tools aroundyou, the data
that's around you, and how it relatesback to what you're doing?
(14:38):
Is it second nature in the same wayas your awareness of your limbs are?
Where do I need to go to find this thingand to retrieve it?
And that will it relate
in many ways to the frequencyof the thing that you do?
So little kids, babiesdon't have great proprioception.
They're new to this.
They haven't spent that much timebeing aware of where their limbs are.
(14:59):
They smack themselves in the face.They can't pick things up.
We get that sense developed over timeas we learn about those things.
And thankfully for humans, it developsfairly quickly because otherwise
we would be quite uselessmuch longer into our lives than we are.
But if you think about how you learna new tool, you're you're digital.
Proprioception within that toolis pretty novice at the beginning.
(15:23):
It all kind of feels like you have onehand tied behind your back,
which relates obviouslyback to that sense of proprioception.
It feels like unnaturalthat you're using this, and depending
on the type of person you are, itmay remain at that level,
especially if you don'thave to use the tool that often.
So as we deploymore and more digital tools, we create
a category of users in those toolswho will be perpetual novices.
(15:46):
They know interact
with the tool often enough to ever becomeanything close to a power user.
If you think aboutmaybe a corporate reporting system,
you might go in once a monthand have to update a few numbers.
Every time you go in there,you'll be at that novice level.
Your proprioception is very low.
You're learning it againevery time you go back in there.
So that tool will never really feelnatural to you.
(16:08):
Someone else might use that toolon a daily basis.
Maybe it's a member of the finance teamor the PPMO.
When they go in there,it feels like second nature to them.
They know exactly where everything is.
They know where to retrieve that from.
And so they're able to go in thereand be a power user
where you're not able to necessarilydo the same.
The other thing that's really relevanthere is around how we develop
(16:30):
an awareness of where things existin that digital ecosystem.
So less about a specific toolthat I might go into,
more abouthow do I get a question answered?
And so I was just spending some timewith one of our customers
who is a vice president of transformationin a very large enterprise overseas,
in this case,
a whole bunch of post-merger integrationprojects that are coming together.
(16:52):
And he has a large teamof project managers who report to him.
One of the jobs as projectmanagers have to do is on the strategic
portfolio management side.
So identifying business cases,putting them forward for review
is this a project that we want to go aheadwith?
And writing those business casesis actually a very challenging thing to do
because to do it properlyand to get to a place
(17:14):
where it's not garbage in, garbage out.
We had bad business cases, we made baddecisions, we ran that project.
You need a fairly high degreeof sophistication
from a business modeling perspective,and you need a bunch of inputs into that.
So this organization has a lot of fieldtechnicians.
If you're doing a calculationabout the cost of running a particular
type of program, you might need to knowwhat the hourly loaded cost
(17:37):
is of a field technicianin different regions in the U.S.
in orderto put a proper business case for it.
So one of the challenges they haveis that process just takes too long.
The PMS don't have that informationfor them to go and find.
It is a really labor intensive exercise,low proprioception in terms of where
that data exists in the organization,which results in shortcuts.
(18:00):
So they end up just guessing at a numberand plugging it in.
You make a bad decision and you can end upcosting the organization
millions of dollars in this caseat the scale that they operate
because a project gets greenlitwith bad data that was in there
or doesn't get greenlitand should have been.
But you had the wrong numbersinvolved in that calculation.
I think there's going to be
an emerging category of tools herethat are going to help with this
(18:23):
because it is a thing that I,if you've adjusted it correctly
to a low hallucination rate,because obviously you don't want to give
people made up answers that are incorrectand are now going to get plugged
into these.
But if you think about.
The parable,some of us have made a career of that.
Sure, sure.
But if we're building toolsthat do this, in our ideal state,
we're playing into reallythe strengths of an AI system.
(18:46):
So go outand take in a huge amount of data,
far more than any individual personcould do,
internalize that data and understandthe relationships between it
and be able to answer questionsfor someone who can't go digging
through all of that data.
So if deployed correctly in that way,and I love Microsoft's
language of copilot as an assistant here,
(19:08):
I should have a personal assistantthat I can ask those questions to.
They should be able to be questionsabout anything we do as an organization,
and it should be able to either answer itor at least point me
in the right direction as to who I couldask or where I can get an answer from.
And that to me might end upbeing one of the highest value
categories of AI in an organization,especially in large enterprise.
(19:31):
This isI could geek out about this for a while
and we are out of time already,which is terrifying.
I'm let me ask you this.
If somebody isn't at your level ofsophistication, which is 90% of humanity
in terms of digital transformation,what are the one or two things
that they absolutely have to knowbefore they begin?
(19:54):
This is a big scary topic for peoplebecause we've turned it into
a big, scary topic.But it doesn't have to be.
It's the old thing about how do you eatan elephant one bite at a time, right?
If you turn your transformationinto a capital E enterprise level
transformation,you have to create a transformation
management office and hire peoplewho are transformation leaders.
(20:16):
You can do thatif it really is of that scale,
but you're turning this into a much morecomplicated thing than it needs to be.
If you are early in a transformationjourney
and a low level of maturityas an organization.
And I would draw a clear distinction herebetween a traditional PMO
who are very good at executing projectsand a transformation team
(20:38):
because it is really a different mentalityand a different way of thinking.
We sometimes go back to a quote,which allegedly is an Einstein quote
You can't solve today's problemswith the same thinking that created them.
And we think about transformationin the same way.
If we were successful at executingall of the projects we needed to do
and our operational excellence was high,we'd have no need for transformation.
(21:01):
The fact that you have to runa transformation is in and of itself
a failed state in the sensethat things have gone wrong.
To get to this point,
and we now have to correct for the thingsthat have gone wrong by running a process
which has to be different by definitionthan the processes that have come before.
But if you're at a low level of maturityin doing that,
(21:21):
don'ttry to do the entire thing in one shot.
The best advice I can give islook for small opportunities to develop
those transformation musclesby building out a small set of
transformation projectsthat you're going to run
that do have a finite time periodand a real transformation outcome.
But it can be a really small one.
You can start within your own team.
(21:42):
What would be transformative
for us as a teamin increasing our operational excellence?
Articulate a hypothesisthat has a measurable outcome on it,
and then run that as a transformationand start to build up that muscle
of thinking differently,of running different practices, of
measuringhow you approach those things differently,
and you'll start to level up that totaltransformation ability across those teams.
(22:06):
Excellent. Thank you so much.
I can't thank you enough.
Ladies and gentlemen, You heard it.
It's there's so much to talk about.
And if you're tryingto get your head around it,
visit the transcript for this show.
Long distance work dot com.
We will have links to Sensei Labsand Jay's book and Jay and all that
(22:27):
good stuff.
Let this be the beginningof your journey into this.
If you enjoy the show, if you have enjoyedthe podcast, please, you know the drill.
Like subscribe.
I'm not going to get all YouTube
and tell you to smash buttons,but you know the drill.
We appreciate it.
If you have questions,show ideas, guest ideas, pet peeves
(22:49):
that you want us to tackle,reach out to Marisa or myself.
Our emails are there on the screen.
Wayne or Marisa at KevinEikenberry dot com.
Find us on LinkedIn.
We are happy to connect.
And if you are looking at your teamand thinking we need to fix this,
(23:11):
a good place to start is Kevin Eikenberryand my new book,
The Long Distance Team.
You can visit long distance Team BBC.com
and begin your journey there.
Thank you so much for joining us,Marisa will be with us next week.
And the world said yay.
In the meantime,thank you for being with us.
(23:33):
Check out past episodes of the showand don't let the weasels get you down.
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