February 16, 2025 • 40 mins
Join us for an insightful discussion with Jason L Zimmerman, Founder and Chief Strategist of 3Fold Collective, who brings a revolutionary approach to business strategy by combining psychology, economics, and organizational sociology. Based in Chicago, Jason's journey begins with a childhood passion for economics, sparked by helping his mother with everyday math problems.
After completing his undergraduate studies at Indiana University and earning his MBA from Northwestern's Kellogg School of Management, Jason honed his expertise in Fortune 500 strategy consulting before founding 3Fold Collective. His firm now helps businesses of all sizes leverage the power of interdisciplinary approaches to organizational development.
In this episode, Jason unpacks his thought-provoking "1+1=3" philosophy and explores the practical applications of Social Network Analysis in modern change management. Our conversation delves into how these frameworks are revolutionizing traditional business thinking and preparing organizations for future challenges.
We conclude with a fascinating discussion about AI's emerging role in organizational strategy and its potential to transform how businesses approach complex challenges. Whether you're a business leader, consultant, or interested in organizational development, this episode offers valuable insights into the science behind successful business transformation.
After completing his undergraduate studies at Indiana University and earning his MBA from Northwestern's Kellogg School of Management, Jason honed his expertise in Fortune 500 strategy consulting before founding 3Fold Collective. His firm now helps businesses of all sizes leverage the power of interdisciplinary approaches to organizational development.
In this episode, Jason unpacks his thought-provoking "1+1=3" philosophy and explores the practical applications of Social Network Analysis in modern change management. Our conversation delves into how these frameworks are revolutionizing traditional business thinking and preparing organizations for future challenges.
We conclude with a fascinating discussion about AI's emerging role in organizational strategy and its potential to transform how businesses approach complex challenges. Whether you're a business leader, consultant, or interested in organizational development, this episode offers valuable insights into the science behind successful business transformation.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
This is the Startup Still Safe podcast. Thank you for
joining ken you as a favor like, subscribe on YouTube
or LinkedIn, and be sure to give us repeat them
Hope you enjoy this episode. Hello everyone, thanks for joining
us on another brand new episode of Startups. They'll say,
we're joining you here after a few weeks break, And
I'm delighted to bring to you this episode because this
(00:23):
is a pretty special and unique episode because we've not
had someone who's coming from this particular background as our
guest on this call. So I'm excited for all of
you to know our guest here. Jason Zimmerman is joining us.
And I got to know Jason a few weeks ago
through a mutual friend, and I've been super impressed at
(00:44):
what Jason's been up to. Don't worry about it, Jason.
Dogs are welcome. So Jason and his doggies on our
podcast today. And Jason, why didn't you kick us off
by telling us A oh, I should say?
Speaker 2 (01:01):
I mean I know Jason as a few things.
Speaker 1 (01:04):
I mean in my two or three weeks of knowing him.
Jason is an economist. That's what he studied when he
did his bachelor's program. He's a strategist. You know, he's
focused on a lot of strategy and I mean, and
I must also say, given his new adventure, Jason will
also call himself a founder, right, so he is going
(01:25):
to tell us about Threefold Collective. I know three things
about Jason already, So how about that for a start, Jason,
So give us a little bit about a background and
we'll go from there. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (01:35):
No, I appreciate you having me on first off, So
thank you. Yeah, the time that I got to know you,
I told you this before. I love your style. It's organic,
use your quick wit intelligence to sort of prompt up
the right questions. And so this is a real treat
for me, and so I genuinely appreciate you having me
as a guest, as well as my dog, who will
(01:57):
make an appearance at some point. So yeah, So, as
you said, I founded Threefold Collective, which is a brand
new consulting organization that leverages my background in three specific areas.
As you mentioned economics, where I actually studied behavioral economics
and applied that to certain areas. And so there's the
(02:19):
research component in the research element that a lot of
my work is grounded. But at the same time I
used that, and I pushed it into sort of an
applied understanding of strategy. And so I moved into consulting
and from there what we were looking at leveraging a
lot of the sort of psychological elements of the economics
(02:40):
background and applied it into organizational sociology and from there
and we'll get into this, I'm sure, but I applied
that directly inside of an organization of Fortune five hundred firm,
where I got to experiment with those ideas and really
inform all the way back into how strategy, how recent
can approach a problem in a new way, in a
(03:03):
very holistic way. So I used that to found Threefold Collective.
And yeah, so far I've had some early successes and
I'm excited to share the journey with you.
Speaker 2 (03:12):
Perfect.
Speaker 1 (03:12):
So let's I think rolled back a few years, right,
I mean I've always maybe it's just me, economics was
always a boring subject, right, I mean, you know, not
a lot of people will say, you know what I
want to do economics, you know, and in your case,
behavioral economics.
Speaker 2 (03:33):
I'm like, my goodness, I would never pick that.
Speaker 1 (03:37):
So what what what made you even pick that as
something that you wanted to start your you know, college
journey with and of course, I mean, you know, based off.
Speaker 2 (03:47):
Of that, Yeah, you're going to build your career as well.
Speaker 1 (03:50):
I mean, was there a pull of any sort that
kind of drew you to the adjacent.
Speaker 3 (03:55):
Yeah, it's a great question. There is a pool behind there.
So if we go back to me as a child, right,
I was growing up with my mother and she was
a very creative type, and she, for whatever reason, could
not figure out how to balance a checkbook. That always
became finance has always became a little bit of a
struggle for her and for me. I looked at that
(04:16):
as a young child, and it only took me years
later to actually articulate what that was. But it was
simple math. It was simple addition and subtraction, and for
whatever reason she couldn't put those two things together. It
took me some time to realize that after injecting the
sort of psychological component of that. When you start to
(04:37):
think about how money plays a role in society and
you start to think about sort of the representation that
money can have in terms of status and even the
reflection of who you are, this very simple math injected
with psychology became this almost non Euclidean geometry. For her,
it became so complex that she couldn't necessarily interact and
engage with it. And so for me, money, I think
(05:00):
became a really fascinating topic very early on, which is economics,
or at least it can be market traits, and those
sort of things can really be part of what economics
is founded on. It's trade, it's bartering back and forth.
Right when I got out of school, you know, twenty
years ago now, behavioral economics coming out of University of
(05:21):
Chicago and Richard Taylor's work was just coming to the forefront.
And so when I came across that, it became sort
of the voice, the articulation that I was always looking
for to sort of understand at a very micro level
at this point what it was that was blocking my
mother and at this point a lot of people that
I saw around me when it came to money and
(05:44):
sort of its role not just in society, but in
terms of who we are as individuals.
Speaker 1 (05:49):
Fearful, I mean, I always love the backstory to these things.
I mean, you know, yeah, more often than not, it
starts somewhere in our childhood, right right, And I mean
I've had twenty episodes so far. I mean, then you're
not the first person who said it started with my mother.
But I always love those stories where you know what,
(06:10):
I saw my mother doing this and it was so
great that she did it, or you know that triggered
me to do something like that. I mean, you know,
we all thank our mothers for what we are right now,
and I guess in your case it's no different.
Speaker 3 (06:24):
It's exactly yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1 (06:26):
Yeah, so so very cool. So, so you did your economics.
I mean I believe that's in the Indiana University.
Speaker 3 (06:34):
Yeah, university to study economics. Yeah. I walked through degrees
in finance and accounting as well, so you can see
the quantitative underpinions of sort of where I began.
Speaker 2 (06:46):
Yeah. So, and then I'm trying to build up to
what you're trying to do.
Speaker 3 (06:50):
Row.
Speaker 1 (06:50):
So you went on to do your MBA as well.
I mean, I'm assuming Kellogg's was a great experience.
Speaker 3 (06:56):
Yeah, Northwestern calog it was a great experience. So there
is a little bit of of story between there. So,
coming out of undergrad I had intentions of going to
get my PhD in economics and really pursue the theoretical
component I always you know, even as a kid, I
just really loved thinking about a problem and that was
(07:18):
my intention. But at some point when I was applying
to PhD program, someone told me, They're like, you know,
you might have a better experience if you get a
little bit of real world experience underneath your belt.
Speaker 2 (07:29):
That would help you.
Speaker 3 (07:30):
Understand not just economics and the theory, but it would
help you understand the economics in the applied sense. And
so that's where I found myself. At a small research
consulting firm where we were I got very fortunate to
get connected in with a researcher at the time who
was looking into the shift of our government clients from
(07:53):
defined benefit plans to define contribution plans. And what his
major thesis was is that benefit plans being driven by
professional money managers, and you know that shipped into defined
contribution plans run by individuals like my mother for instance,
had significantly lower outcomes. And what we were trying to
(08:15):
use or think about was how to apply economic incentives
mixed in with psychology to drive better outcomes. And so yeah,
that intervening period between getting my master's where I really
focus on organizational sociology in my MBA started out by
(08:37):
looking at the individual and its role, and that sort
of propelled me into consulting, where I worked at Mercer
on the mergers and acquisitions team, looking at both pre
and post acquisitions. And if you think about that thread
that kind of weaves through there, that thread relies on
(08:57):
the individual. If you take two organizations is coming together,
the success of that organization is going to be based
off of whether those people can connect. Right, people are
a very sasset of any firm, and tapping into that
is what we were trying. Compatibility basically, precisely, precisely, yeah, yeah,
And so that's that thread of sort of how behavioral
(09:20):
economics can be extended not from the individual but more
to a macro view like an organization and a sociologist.
Speaker 2 (09:26):
So fascinating, Jason.
Speaker 1 (09:28):
I mean, I will admit I have absolutely no idea
into this field, but every time I speak to you,
I learn a lot, you know. I mean, of course
I understand the whole change management aspect of it, which
comes along with it, but I mean that's just a
miniscule aspect of what goes into this. Right to even
(09:48):
see to your point, is there a good fit if
it's an M and A. You know, if it's just
an a part of the M and A, is that
even a good fit for them to come in Because
the end of the day, it's not.
Speaker 2 (10:01):
About what you acquire or merge with. I mean, it's
about whether those people can work together.
Speaker 3 (10:06):
Right, Yeah, no, is this is what I said at
the start of this, Like your raw intelligence and curiosity
allow you to pick up on an idea and articulate
it in a beautiful way, and that's what you just did.
It really is. I like to think of it sort
of like any organization coming together or any change event
coming together, is how do you make it greater than
(10:27):
some of its parts. One of the things you hear
me say over and over again is I care about
one equation, and that's making one plus one equal three.
And that is you know, any change of any evolution,
whether it's us as individuals or an organization, that change
allows us to get to a better place. But there
is I believe a fundamental underlying conceit within that that
(10:50):
change is hard. Right, we don't know necessarily what we're
getting into, or maybe there's certain hurdles or barriers or
certain friction points that we have to get it through
and that is a purely psychological problem. And I do believe,
especially in the arena that I work in, you think
about it from an organizational standpoint, and now you're starting
(11:12):
to talk about how individuals interact with each other, and
so the sociological component of how that operates gets in
obviously economics. You're working within a capitalistic society and at
the end of the day, we are trying to make
money for our organization, and so it's it really is
this interdisciplinary approach to what I like to say is
(11:36):
just to accelerate that change, to make that change less frustrating,
to make that change, you know, less full of friction,
to allow people to sort of regain clarity and control
as they move into that new change. And by doing that,
I think you can benefit both the employees of an organization.
You can benefit yourself as an individual, but you can
(11:57):
also benefit the goals of the organization.
Speaker 1 (12:01):
Well, let's move on in a little bit in your journey, right,
So you did your MBA. You obviously you told me
about the real world experience. I think whoever gave you
that advice was very wise. I mean, I wish everybody
does that right, because I mean, especially before doing an MBA,
I think the real world experience really helps you connect
(12:22):
to a lot of the things that they teach you
in the NBA.
Speaker 2 (12:25):
I found that out myself. That's why I can speak
to that.
Speaker 1 (12:28):
And then you mentioned earlier Jason, you you were in
a fortune one hundred, fortune five hundred company for a while.
You did a bunch of roles. There a lot of
that to do with economics. You also did a lot
of strategy right in terms of you know what the
company should be doing or the different departments.
Speaker 2 (12:49):
How did that experience?
Speaker 1 (12:51):
Tell us a little bit about that experience and how
that has helped you to get to where.
Speaker 2 (12:56):
You are right now. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (12:59):
The one thing that maybe think about sort of the
shape this part of the story is there's research out
there by John Cotter coming out of Harvard, and a
lot of people listening to this may know this work,
but it's John Cotter's similar work that says seventy percent
of strategies fail and when you look at the eight
reasons that he came up with, they fail at implementation,
(13:22):
summarized by me as employee resistance, by certain psychological factors
that individuals that companies struggle with when it comes to execution,
and so for me, because theory was always my end game,
because I just wanted to develop sort of the next
horizon of thinking, especially within behavioral economics, I shifted into
(13:46):
strategy thinking that was the next level down. And while
I was there, I brought this quote this research to
one of my global directors and I said, how do
we know that our strategy isn't part of that seventy percent?
And paraphrasing a very long conversation, I was basically told,
why do we care? We've already been paid, And that
(14:08):
propelled me to understand and think about that at a
deeper level. If I could understand how execution works, then
I could make better strategy, which that better strategy would
then go into a better theory. And so, having spent
six seven years in this research in theoretical and strategic place,
(14:33):
I had an opportunity to move in with this financial
services firm and they allowed me to really begin to
think about how to execute these things. I worked inside
the executive office for most of my time there, and
what I was doing is taking the strategy that that
executive office was coming up with and connecting it back
(14:56):
into the organization, and so I was directly close using
that gap that John Cotter identified, that seventy percent gap.
And so I spent thirteen years inside the organization doing this,
and I think had a lot of success doing it.
You know, I there are some failures there, which of
course we all learn from our failures, but by continuing
(15:18):
to learn and evolve from that, I ended up getting
to a place, given my research background, where I would
actually be much closer to a not a seventy percent
failure rate, but much closer to a thirty or forty
percent failure rate. So I would really be successful maybe
sixty to seventy percent of the time. And that is
(15:39):
not exactly reassuring, But when you think about the complexity
of a fifteen thousand percent organization and moving a firm
through that change, you know, the thirty to forty percent
failure rate is astronomical. It's it's really a very pusial number.
That yeah, I think I attribute a lot to sort
(16:02):
of my experimentation and learning back in theory and research,
but also just obviously the people surrounded with me, and
you know, the organization itself to really allow that experimentation
to take shape.
Speaker 2 (16:13):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (16:14):
So I'm glad you said successes and failures because that
is going to be my next question, and I'm going
to make it a two part question. Right, So obviously,
I mean, like anything else, you have some wins and losses.
You know, you might come up with a certain strategy.
You said, you know that's seventy percent, I mean the
thirty percent all that good stuffs.
Speaker 2 (16:35):
And to your point, you.
Speaker 1 (16:36):
Know, if you can't make that one plus one equal
to three, I mean, you know, at least in your words,
I mean, it's it's a failure, you know. So you
also mentioned research, I mean, and I believe that's a
big part of you know, the success as well, if
you I mean, I've known cases where people just go
by gutfield versus research, which is such a bad.
Speaker 2 (16:58):
Thing to do. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (16:59):
So I mean, have you done any sort of correlation Jason,
to see, oh my research was wrong or I studied
the wrong inputs in this case are the wrong parameters?
Have you seen any sort of correlation between research and
actual success of whatever program you went through or initiative
(17:20):
you went through.
Speaker 3 (17:21):
Yeah, I mean it's always a complex answer, right, the
answer is yes and no. So as a a researcher,
I want to have this in a lab where I
can control all the variables and say this is exactly
what's pointing to it. And unfortunately that research, not only
through myself or even in the industry right now, is
(17:43):
still very nascent. It's still growing, and it's just not there.
I am engaged with a few consulting firms that I
hope to announce pretty soon where we are actually going
to try to run those controlled experiments in a much
greater way and hopefully produce some white paper so that
we can identify those So from the traditional research background,
(18:05):
it's just that's not there yet. But from a practiced
researcher who understands correlation, causation and the scientific method, I've
done my best to really try to isolate a single
variable and make that change. And by understanding that one
variable within a larger system, I can start to get
(18:27):
a more intuitive or experienced or even anecdotal evidence that says, yeah,
this is what is driving that. And so I do
have a bunch of that that I was able to
explore with and sort of understand at a deeper level.
And a lot of those cases, including the early success
of threefold collective is on our website for people to explore,
(18:51):
and so a lot of that comes down to just
looking at sort of communication patterns and how individuals communicate
and how silos may be for and what interjections you
can play in order to drive that communication forward in
order to close that communication silo. Right At the same time,
(19:12):
some of the greater success that we've had is thinking
about and learning about the adoption curve and what it
is that allows people to embrace change as opposed to
reject change or to resist change. A lot of those
things come down to more of the psychological factors that
are heavily researched and we can point back to in
(19:33):
terms of just loss of clarity, loss of control, and
just the general nature of influence that we can tap into.
And so there are some interesting tools and techniques that
allow us to measure and quantify how an organization might look,
and by doing that, we're able to retest those measures
(19:55):
and see how these interventions can sort of drive a
certain outcome that we're looking to have. So yeah, we
we we've definitely approached this as scientifically as we can.
Speaker 1 (20:04):
But yeah, yeah, I mean again, you know, frameworks, I
love frameworks because at least they put some discipline in
your thought process, you know, I mean, some of them work,
some of them don't work, but at least there's some
sort of organization to it.
Speaker 2 (20:23):
And to your point, I mean, you know, based on
what you said, I.
Speaker 1 (20:26):
Mean, that is the way to go, right, I mean,
and even even with Threefold, maybe that's a good segue
for us to get in the research strategize and execution
of that is super important. So why did we jump
into your pet project then?
Speaker 2 (20:42):
Jason? What? What?
Speaker 1 (20:43):
What made you move on from what seems to be
like a pretty exciting role at the Fortune five hundred
company to do your own thing? I mean, what what
was the trigger?
Speaker 2 (20:54):
Yeah?
Speaker 3 (20:55):
So Threefold Collective exactly as you said, it's a whole
stick strategy consulting firm in which we focus on organizational transformation.
We focus on bringing a company from point A to
point B. And our skill set, I think our trait
is really focused on some of the tools within sociological research,
(21:17):
things like social network analysis that will allow us to
quantify an organization and sort of their fingerprint, if you will,
the informal network behind the formal network, in order to
accelerate change, and as I mentioned earlier, by accelerating change,
there a certain benefits that both the employee and the
organization will reap from accelerating through that change. So in
(21:42):
my time at this Fortune five hundred firm, I was
fortunate enough to stand up three different organizations to guide
this organization to set up these divisions and drive that
change from the ground up. So there was one failure,
as I mentioned that we stood it up been it
survived for about twelve to eighteen months, but it actually
(22:03):
came out just before the COVID nineteen pandemic, and so
it didn't have enough time to really take route. But
we did learn from those things, and so the next
two iterations of this we were able to get better, smarter,
be more thoughtful about how we went through that, and
by applying those lessons on this third launch, we were
actually working with one of the big bulge bracket consulting firms,
(22:25):
and they told us that by going through this change,
which affected fifteen thousand people across the organization, it would
take anywhere from five to ten years, which anybody who's
worked with the consulting firm knows they're going to be
more on the optimistic side of those timelines, But having
worked in those firms myself, I said, hey, listen, we
(22:46):
need your expertise. That knowledge sharing of what other organizations
have done and sort of the friction points that they've
come up with is important. We also sort of need
the traditional change management techniques that these firms are are
really known for. But let's interject this social network analysis.
Let's interject the psychology of the organization, the sociology of
(23:09):
the organization to identify where those friction points are and
really who are the influencers in that organization to accelerate it.
And so if you take even just the more optimistic
timeline five years, we were able to drive this change
in two and a half years, and so that is
doubling of the adoption rate by using the traditional change
(23:33):
management methods, but just complementing it with these concepts from
sociology social network analysis to identify influencers, to leverage those influencers,
and to really propel the organization not from the top down,
but from the bottom up, to use the people, to
use the core asset of any organization to propel it forward.
(23:54):
And so by having this success, do you answer your
question directly. I thought, well, what's my next move? And
I've always gone back to, you know, the organization. They've
always been been very favorable and saying, cool, here's sort
of the next thing that we want you to do.
But I thought, why not do this on my own,
you know, why not go out with Yeah, exactly. I
(24:16):
enjoy the theory, I enjoy the strategy, I enjoy the
application of it. But you know, there's a selfish component
of it of you know, why not benefits myself. But
at the same time, why not be able to really
focus on what I love and what I think is
that real driver of success. So, as we said, what
are sort of the techniques that I've learned over the
(24:39):
past twenty years, and that really is social network analysis,
and our approach to that data collection and to processing
and interpreting that information is something that we get threefold
find to be our value, our skill, our proprietary sort
of you know, proper position to the world. And so yeah,
(25:01):
I wanted to take that out and see if we
could apply that in a much greater scale. And so
that's that's the journey run.
Speaker 1 (25:10):
Yeah, So Mishily all the best first of all, and
I've heard this from many a founder, right, I mean
early days they say, Man, it's very lonely out here.
Speaker 2 (25:20):
It's a it's a it's a scary world. So how
has the early days of Threefold been?
Speaker 1 (25:27):
I mean, and do you feel validated that, Hey, Jason,
this is the right move for me to do. And
I mean, in other words, I mean, where are you
in your journey as a founder as threefold and what's
what's coming up with Threefold?
Speaker 2 (25:43):
I think both can be true.
Speaker 3 (25:48):
I do feel validated in the early days, not just
with the results that we have been able to accomplish
for our clients, but just the feedback that I am
capturing from from different folks, including yourself when you and
I first met. And there is some white space in
the market for this. John Cotter's research, for instance, came
out forty five years ago, and if you look at
(26:08):
some of the research coming out by McKenzie and PwC,
we are still at seventy percent failure rates. And so
nearly half a century later, we're not getting any better
at implementation. And obviously that has to do with a
lot of complexity in our current environment and our current
ecosystem and all those other factors. That for a drive
(26:31):
that but the idea is there is a way to
get better at that and by having some of these
early results that I've been able to replicate at least
you know, four times now and be able to share
that with clients and say here is something that is
developing and I think brand new that can that can
really accelerate your ROI yeah, we've had a lot of
(26:55):
really good success, but at the same time, it is
a lonely space and I wish I knew more about
that feeling coming into it, because it can be frustrated
at times, which I know a lot of your guests
have shared as well, and you know, and a lot
of our cases. We're developing a new market and we're
developing something that people haven't necessarily seen or heard about.
(27:18):
And again we can apply the same notion that I
work in is change is hard, and so adoption of
something new is.
Speaker 2 (27:25):
Going to be hard.
Speaker 3 (27:26):
And so there is a lot of work that I
think any founder has to do in order to establish
that market and to really build the following. And that is,
as you know better than any of us. That is
partly you know the results, the quantitative, the things that
you can point to, but it's also partly the qualitative.
You know, who you are as that founder and the
(27:48):
people you surround yourself with, but also the people that
you connect with the clients and what their challenges are
and how you can connect with them. And it really
is a You've got to form that deep, interconnected relationship
for all of those elements, and at least for me,
never having done that, I'll say this, I'm I'm glad
(28:09):
I have an experimental, scientific mind, and you know, there
have definitely been some failures along the way, but I
am learning from those failures and getting more successful. And
like I said, I think we're getting a lot of
success with our clients as well, and you know, really
developing this and moving in the right direction.
Speaker 2 (28:26):
Beautiful, beautiful.
Speaker 1 (28:27):
I mean, obviously there's no reward without risk, right, and
a lot of us regret saying, oh, man, if only
I had done that. Yeah, that's always the thing with
the founders, right, people who never became founders, including I
mean myself, even this podcast. I mean, I've been thinking
about it for a long time and I was like, man,
(28:49):
I mean if I don't start, I would not ever
do it. So I just start, you know, so I'm
so glad I did so. I mean I can echo
that feeling.
Speaker 2 (29:01):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (29:02):
One of one of the things that I picked on
what you said is you said social.
Speaker 2 (29:07):
Network analysis Jason, right.
Speaker 1 (29:10):
And in the world we live in today, I mean,
especially in the US, I mean, it is so complex.
You know, you have you have people from so many
different cultures.
Speaker 2 (29:21):
I mean so many.
Speaker 1 (29:23):
I mean that's who we are as a country as well,
you know. I mean and in today's world, I mean
at the well even more complex factor of you know,
people of all ages and different dynamics coming together. I
mean have you have you seen in it from through
your lens? I mean, that's a big part of what
(29:44):
you need to analyze. I mean, what are the things
that have struck you as like an aha moment? I mean,
you know, just in terms of you know, how that
impacts a yes or no decision as part of the
strategy or you know, to say, you know what, I mean,
this is great because of that. I mean, I'm just
(30:05):
trying to understand how that factor has evolved over the
last two decades that you've been doing this.
Speaker 3 (30:11):
Yeah, No, it's a great question because social network analysis
is one of the tools that I will say, is
the game changer in the industry right now. And social
network analysis has been a lot around for a long time.
It's an easy concept to understand. Right We're all on
social networks. For instance, we're all on Twitter, I guess X.
(30:32):
Now we're all on LinkedIn, and that is our social network.
And there is a term out there that we also
use as sociologist called influencers. And what influencers are, if
you get into the nerdiness of the math that I
really enjoy, is called eigenvector centrality, and eigenvector centrality is status,
(30:54):
is influence. And so if you can identify who has
status or who has influence based on that social network,
because influence will change and evolve based on the environment
that you're in, and so it's it's it's it's critical
to understand the psychology of how influence begins. But once
(31:17):
you can look at and quantify mathematically that igenvector centrality,
that status, you can start to identify who holds that
power in an organization. And when you start to translate
it in that way, that's what I think really connects
in with people qualitatively. If we all assess our own networks,
(31:39):
we know the people that are well connected within there.
And so if we want to get something done, if
we want to connect in with somebody at a different
organization that we may not know, Say we're looking for
a new job and we know somebody works to that organization,
we will qualitatively ask our friends if they know somebody there.
What a quantitative approach allows is it really allows for
(32:04):
not just the scale of that at a much larger
sort of footprint, but it also allows us to be
really precise. And so social network analysis in this way
eigenvector centrality and all the mathic sort of goes behind
it is a descriptive sorry, a descriptive statistic and that
(32:25):
just allows us to describe how the world looks today.
But by understanding that, it allows us to intervene. And
so if we get back to sort of the original question,
and what that context leads up to is if you
know who holds the power in your organization, then you
can leverage their skill set for several different things. If
(32:46):
you're going through a change, you can invite that person
into the conference room and say, hey, here's the approach
that we want to go with.
Speaker 2 (32:54):
How would you.
Speaker 3 (32:55):
Think this might look or operate within your environment? Is
there anything we need to do to change that. Assuming
that they might buy into that, then maybe they want
to become a person that becomes a champion of that.
Then they can go back and they can help to
spread that word to say, you know, hey, I've experimentmented
(33:16):
with this and this is a great tool for instance
that we're using. I think we should all adopt it.
And if you're a person hearing that from somebody that
you consider influential, right, because influence is always dependent on
you the person receiving that. So beauty is in the
eye of the beholder, and if you can tap into
that and you can influence people, you can scale that
(33:40):
learning curve much more quickly. And so if you think
about it from a perspective, we've all been involved in
change in some way, shape or form, and maybe it's
the CEO of your company and you've never sat down
with that CEO.
Speaker 2 (33:52):
You know they.
Speaker 3 (33:53):
Certainly have authority, and that's a certain type of influence.
But if you can hear that same message from the
colleague that you've worked with for the past fifteen years
and they have embraced that change, and that's somebody that
you trust and you know has your best interests at heart,
then you're going to be a little bit more open
to accepting what that might look like. And it's that
(34:16):
nature of the psychology mixed in with the mathematics of
sociology applied to change that allows us to really begin
to accelerate that. And yeah, so it's influence is sort
of the name of the game, and that's exactly where
social networking house this allows us to identify, or at
least that is the primary application that we're experimenting with
(34:39):
at this point.
Speaker 1 (34:41):
Fascinating again, Jason, And there's so many layers to this, right,
and as humans, we take we understand all this, but
I mean, you know, I mean not to the level
that you just explained. So I'm glad somebody like you
is looking into all these things, you know, checking all
those books is and making sure the math adds up
(35:02):
before those big decisions where a lot of lives are impacted.
I mean literally, yeah, right, so so so cool that
you're doing that.
Speaker 2 (35:12):
So I want to pivot to something on the research side.
Speaker 1 (35:15):
And I mean, this is something that everybody talks about
these days, so I might want to get your perspective
on that too. So obviously a lot of research is
data driven, right yep. And in today's world, I mean,
everybody wants to use AI for a lot of these things,
right yeah. So what what's your I mean in the
in the three fold approach to what you do with threefold?
Speaker 3 (35:41):
Right?
Speaker 2 (35:42):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (35:43):
Where where do you see AI kind of helping you?
I mean, I'm assuming there as a play, especially on
the research and data analysis aspect of it.
Speaker 2 (35:52):
Have you given it any thought, Jason?
Speaker 3 (35:55):
Yeah, so, especially from running the calculations, and I think
when you take any large data set, they're in order
to just run those calculations much more quickly and look
at that from various different perspectives and different angles to us,
that just gives us more opportunity to see something that
maybe we haven't seen. And so there we have worked
(36:19):
with AI in order to apply that, and there are
some applications that will allow us to accelerate that math.
And I think that's great because that gives us more perspective,
but it also cuts down the time in order to
start interpreting it. There are some challenges I think right
now with the data collection side of it. And so
(36:39):
right now, intuitively, as I mentioned, influence is you know
within the holder, right beauty is in the eye of
the beholder, and so influence is defined by the person
that you're talking to. And so right now, collecting that
data is still a very human based effort. But there
(37:00):
are like Microsoft Copilot is out there and they will
do a certain level of social organalysis that a lot
of us maybe are familiar with. Right and so in
Microsoft Copilot, within teams, they have this clout calculation, and
that clout calculation is driven by AI, and what it
does is it looks across the ecosystem and it says,
(37:21):
who is this person emailing with, who is this person
sitting in the conference room with? Who is this person calling?
And there are limitations within that that we should be
aware of. Is, even though you and I may sit
in a conference room together, it may not identify the
(37:41):
nature of the relationship that you and I have. We
have all been in a conference room where somebody has
derailed a conversation, for instance, and so Microsoft Copilot or
AI as it looks today, may look at that and
sort of say, oh, they're in the same room, so
they have influence, they have connection to each other. But
if you actually try to tap into that influence of
(38:01):
that person, who's derailed it. They may not get you
to where you want to be. So it's still i
think comparative at this point in terms of AI to
do the data collection in the traditional sense, but we
can process it through AI and run those calculations much
more efficiently than we've been able to in the past.
Speaker 1 (38:21):
That makes sense, Yeah, because I mean, you know, whatever
AI model you might have, I mean, your output is
as good as the data input and then your I
mean to your answer, I mean, if you don't have
that initial good data for the model to take in,
I mean, what you're going to get is I mean
as good as not using it.
Speaker 2 (38:40):
So that's right, that makes total sense.
Speaker 1 (38:42):
I mean I'm assuming you know, much like everything else,
I mean, this ill the wall as well, and you
can get a lot more out of it. But I
mean I would say we're still in such an early
stages of what is possible and not. I'll be fascinated
to see how you apply to befold as well.
Speaker 3 (38:59):
Yeah, I'll be interested to see how it unfold.
Speaker 2 (39:03):
Yeah. Perfect, So thanks so much, Jason.
Speaker 1 (39:06):
I mean, I as always, I mean, with any conversation
with you, I learned a ton. Uh. It looks like
threefold is something that a lot of companies not just
trying to do M and A, but I mean even
with strategy and especially in the ever changing world that
we live in, UH could use. So I wish you
(39:29):
and the team the very best and I would love
to have you on sometime in the future to tell
us how you're doing both as a founder as well
as you know everything that you love to do, so
on behalf of our podcast. All the best of you, Jason.
Speaker 2 (39:44):
Thank you very much.
Speaker 3 (39:45):
I appreciate it, and like I said, every conversation with you,
I think I learned something as well. So I appreciate
everything you're doing and just the platform you're creating, not
just for myself like for other founders. So in the
same way, you know, keep up the good work that
you're doing and just know we appreciate you.
Speaker 2 (40:00):
Thanks so much, Take care all right. Thank you,
This is the Startup Still Safe podcast. Thank you for
joining ken you as a favor like, subscribe on YouTube
or LinkedIn, and be sure to give us repeat them
Hope you enjoy this episode. Hello everyone, thanks for joining
us on another brand new episode of Startups. They'll say,
we're joining you here after a few weeks break, And
I'm delighted to bring to you this episode because this
(00:23):
is a pretty special and unique episode because we've not
had someone who's coming from this particular background as our
guest on this call. So I'm excited for all of
you to know our guest here. Jason Zimmerman is joining us.
And I got to know Jason a few weeks ago
through a mutual friend, and I've been super impressed at
(00:44):
what Jason's been up to. Don't worry about it, Jason.
Dogs are welcome. So Jason and his doggies on our
podcast today. And Jason, why didn't you kick us off
by telling us A oh, I should say?
Speaker 2 (01:01):
I mean I know Jason as a few things.
Speaker 1 (01:04):
I mean in my two or three weeks of knowing him.
Jason is an economist. That's what he studied when he
did his bachelor's program. He's a strategist. You know, he's
focused on a lot of strategy and I mean, and
I must also say, given his new adventure, Jason will
also call himself a founder, right, so he is going
(01:25):
to tell us about Threefold Collective. I know three things
about Jason already, So how about that for a start, Jason,
So give us a little bit about a background and
we'll go from there. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (01:35):
No, I appreciate you having me on first off, So
thank you. Yeah, the time that I got to know you,
I told you this before. I love your style. It's organic,
use your quick wit intelligence to sort of prompt up
the right questions. And so this is a real treat
for me, and so I genuinely appreciate you having me
as a guest, as well as my dog, who will
(01:57):
make an appearance at some point. So yeah, So, as
you said, I founded Threefold Collective, which is a brand
new consulting organization that leverages my background in three specific areas.
As you mentioned economics, where I actually studied behavioral economics
and applied that to certain areas. And so there's the
(02:19):
research component in the research element that a lot of
my work is grounded. But at the same time I
used that, and I pushed it into sort of an
applied understanding of strategy. And so I moved into consulting
and from there what we were looking at leveraging a
lot of the sort of psychological elements of the economics
(02:40):
background and applied it into organizational sociology and from there
and we'll get into this, I'm sure, but I applied
that directly inside of an organization of Fortune five hundred firm,
where I got to experiment with those ideas and really
inform all the way back into how strategy, how recent
can approach a problem in a new way, in a
(03:03):
very holistic way. So I used that to found Threefold Collective.
And yeah, so far I've had some early successes and
I'm excited to share the journey with you.
Speaker 2 (03:12):
Perfect.
Speaker 1 (03:12):
So let's I think rolled back a few years, right,
I mean I've always maybe it's just me, economics was
always a boring subject, right, I mean, you know, not
a lot of people will say, you know what I
want to do economics, you know, and in your case,
behavioral economics.
Speaker 2 (03:33):
I'm like, my goodness, I would never pick that.
Speaker 1 (03:37):
So what what what made you even pick that as
something that you wanted to start your you know, college
journey with and of course, I mean, you know, based off.
Speaker 2 (03:47):
Of that, Yeah, you're going to build your career as well.
Speaker 1 (03:50):
I mean, was there a pull of any sort that
kind of drew you to the adjacent.
Speaker 3 (03:55):
Yeah, it's a great question. There is a pool behind there.
So if we go back to me as a child, right,
I was growing up with my mother and she was
a very creative type, and she, for whatever reason, could
not figure out how to balance a checkbook. That always
became finance has always became a little bit of a
struggle for her and for me. I looked at that
(04:16):
as a young child, and it only took me years
later to actually articulate what that was. But it was
simple math. It was simple addition and subtraction, and for
whatever reason she couldn't put those two things together. It
took me some time to realize that after injecting the
sort of psychological component of that. When you start to
(04:37):
think about how money plays a role in society and
you start to think about sort of the representation that
money can have in terms of status and even the
reflection of who you are, this very simple math injected
with psychology became this almost non Euclidean geometry. For her,
it became so complex that she couldn't necessarily interact and
engage with it. And so for me, money, I think
(05:00):
became a really fascinating topic very early on, which is economics,
or at least it can be market traits, and those
sort of things can really be part of what economics
is founded on. It's trade, it's bartering back and forth.
Right when I got out of school, you know, twenty
years ago now, behavioral economics coming out of University of
(05:21):
Chicago and Richard Taylor's work was just coming to the forefront.
And so when I came across that, it became sort
of the voice, the articulation that I was always looking
for to sort of understand at a very micro level
at this point what it was that was blocking my
mother and at this point a lot of people that
I saw around me when it came to money and
(05:44):
sort of its role not just in society, but in
terms of who we are as individuals.
Speaker 1 (05:49):
Fearful, I mean, I always love the backstory to these things.
I mean, you know, yeah, more often than not, it
starts somewhere in our childhood, right right, And I mean
I've had twenty episodes so far. I mean, then you're
not the first person who said it started with my mother.
But I always love those stories where you know what,
(06:10):
I saw my mother doing this and it was so
great that she did it, or you know that triggered
me to do something like that. I mean, you know,
we all thank our mothers for what we are right now,
and I guess in your case it's no different.
Speaker 3 (06:24):
It's exactly yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1 (06:26):
Yeah, so so very cool. So, so you did your economics.
I mean I believe that's in the Indiana University.
Speaker 3 (06:34):
Yeah, university to study economics. Yeah. I walked through degrees
in finance and accounting as well, so you can see
the quantitative underpinions of sort of where I began.
Speaker 2 (06:46):
Yeah. So, and then I'm trying to build up to
what you're trying to do.
Speaker 3 (06:50):
Row.
Speaker 1 (06:50):
So you went on to do your MBA as well.
I mean, I'm assuming Kellogg's was a great experience.
Speaker 3 (06:56):
Yeah, Northwestern calog it was a great experience. So there
is a little bit of of story between there. So,
coming out of undergrad I had intentions of going to
get my PhD in economics and really pursue the theoretical
component I always you know, even as a kid, I
just really loved thinking about a problem and that was
(07:18):
my intention. But at some point when I was applying
to PhD program, someone told me, They're like, you know,
you might have a better experience if you get a
little bit of real world experience underneath your belt.
Speaker 2 (07:29):
That would help you.
Speaker 3 (07:30):
Understand not just economics and the theory, but it would
help you understand the economics in the applied sense. And
so that's where I found myself. At a small research
consulting firm where we were I got very fortunate to
get connected in with a researcher at the time who
was looking into the shift of our government clients from
(07:53):
defined benefit plans to define contribution plans. And what his
major thesis was is that benefit plans being driven by
professional money managers, and you know that shipped into defined
contribution plans run by individuals like my mother for instance,
had significantly lower outcomes. And what we were trying to
(08:15):
use or think about was how to apply economic incentives
mixed in with psychology to drive better outcomes. And so yeah,
that intervening period between getting my master's where I really
focus on organizational sociology in my MBA started out by
(08:37):
looking at the individual and its role, and that sort
of propelled me into consulting, where I worked at Mercer
on the mergers and acquisitions team, looking at both pre
and post acquisitions. And if you think about that thread
that kind of weaves through there, that thread relies on
(08:57):
the individual. If you take two organizations is coming together,
the success of that organization is going to be based
off of whether those people can connect. Right, people are
a very sasset of any firm, and tapping into that
is what we were trying. Compatibility basically, precisely, precisely, yeah, yeah,
And so that's that thread of sort of how behavioral
(09:20):
economics can be extended not from the individual but more
to a macro view like an organization and a sociologist.
Speaker 2 (09:26):
So fascinating, Jason.
Speaker 1 (09:28):
I mean, I will admit I have absolutely no idea
into this field, but every time I speak to you,
I learn a lot, you know. I mean, of course
I understand the whole change management aspect of it, which
comes along with it, but I mean that's just a
miniscule aspect of what goes into this. Right to even
(09:48):
see to your point, is there a good fit if
it's an M and A. You know, if it's just
an a part of the M and A, is that
even a good fit for them to come in Because
the end of the day, it's not.
Speaker 2 (10:01):
About what you acquire or merge with. I mean, it's
about whether those people can work together.
Speaker 3 (10:06):
Right, Yeah, no, is this is what I said at
the start of this, Like your raw intelligence and curiosity
allow you to pick up on an idea and articulate
it in a beautiful way, and that's what you just did.
It really is. I like to think of it sort
of like any organization coming together or any change event
coming together, is how do you make it greater than
(10:27):
some of its parts. One of the things you hear
me say over and over again is I care about
one equation, and that's making one plus one equal three.
And that is you know, any change of any evolution,
whether it's us as individuals or an organization, that change
allows us to get to a better place. But there
is I believe a fundamental underlying conceit within that that
(10:50):
change is hard. Right, we don't know necessarily what we're
getting into, or maybe there's certain hurdles or barriers or
certain friction points that we have to get it through
and that is a purely psychological problem. And I do believe,
especially in the arena that I work in, you think
about it from an organizational standpoint, and now you're starting
(11:12):
to talk about how individuals interact with each other, and
so the sociological component of how that operates gets in
obviously economics. You're working within a capitalistic society and at
the end of the day, we are trying to make
money for our organization, and so it's it really is
this interdisciplinary approach to what I like to say is
(11:36):
just to accelerate that change, to make that change less frustrating,
to make that change, you know, less full of friction,
to allow people to sort of regain clarity and control
as they move into that new change. And by doing that,
I think you can benefit both the employees of an organization.
You can benefit yourself as an individual, but you can
(11:57):
also benefit the goals of the organization.
Speaker 1 (12:01):
Well, let's move on in a little bit in your journey, right,
So you did your MBA. You obviously you told me
about the real world experience. I think whoever gave you
that advice was very wise. I mean, I wish everybody
does that right, because I mean, especially before doing an MBA,
I think the real world experience really helps you connect
(12:22):
to a lot of the things that they teach you
in the NBA.
Speaker 2 (12:25):
I found that out myself. That's why I can speak
to that.
Speaker 1 (12:28):
And then you mentioned earlier Jason, you you were in
a fortune one hundred, fortune five hundred company for a while.
You did a bunch of roles. There a lot of
that to do with economics. You also did a lot
of strategy right in terms of you know what the
company should be doing or the different departments.
Speaker 2 (12:49):
How did that experience?
Speaker 1 (12:51):
Tell us a little bit about that experience and how
that has helped you to get to where.
Speaker 2 (12:56):
You are right now. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (12:59):
The one thing that maybe think about sort of the
shape this part of the story is there's research out
there by John Cotter coming out of Harvard, and a
lot of people listening to this may know this work,
but it's John Cotter's similar work that says seventy percent
of strategies fail and when you look at the eight
reasons that he came up with, they fail at implementation,
(13:22):
summarized by me as employee resistance, by certain psychological factors
that individuals that companies struggle with when it comes to execution,
and so for me, because theory was always my end game,
because I just wanted to develop sort of the next
horizon of thinking, especially within behavioral economics, I shifted into
(13:46):
strategy thinking that was the next level down. And while
I was there, I brought this quote this research to
one of my global directors and I said, how do
we know that our strategy isn't part of that seventy percent?
And paraphrasing a very long conversation, I was basically told,
why do we care? We've already been paid, And that
(14:08):
propelled me to understand and think about that at a
deeper level. If I could understand how execution works, then
I could make better strategy, which that better strategy would
then go into a better theory. And so, having spent
six seven years in this research in theoretical and strategic place,
(14:33):
I had an opportunity to move in with this financial
services firm and they allowed me to really begin to
think about how to execute these things. I worked inside
the executive office for most of my time there, and
what I was doing is taking the strategy that that
executive office was coming up with and connecting it back
(14:56):
into the organization, and so I was directly close using
that gap that John Cotter identified, that seventy percent gap.
And so I spent thirteen years inside the organization doing this,
and I think had a lot of success doing it.
You know, I there are some failures there, which of
course we all learn from our failures, but by continuing
(15:18):
to learn and evolve from that, I ended up getting
to a place, given my research background, where I would
actually be much closer to a not a seventy percent
failure rate, but much closer to a thirty or forty
percent failure rate. So I would really be successful maybe
sixty to seventy percent of the time. And that is
(15:39):
not exactly reassuring, But when you think about the complexity
of a fifteen thousand percent organization and moving a firm
through that change, you know, the thirty to forty percent
failure rate is astronomical. It's it's really a very pusial number.
That yeah, I think I attribute a lot to sort
(16:02):
of my experimentation and learning back in theory and research,
but also just obviously the people surrounded with me, and
you know, the organization itself to really allow that experimentation
to take shape.
Speaker 2 (16:13):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (16:14):
So I'm glad you said successes and failures because that
is going to be my next question, and I'm going
to make it a two part question. Right, So obviously,
I mean, like anything else, you have some wins and losses.
You know, you might come up with a certain strategy.
You said, you know that's seventy percent, I mean the
thirty percent all that good stuffs.
Speaker 2 (16:35):
And to your point, you.
Speaker 1 (16:36):
Know, if you can't make that one plus one equal
to three, I mean, you know, at least in your words,
I mean, it's it's a failure, you know. So you
also mentioned research, I mean, and I believe that's a
big part of you know, the success as well, if
you I mean, I've known cases where people just go
by gutfield versus research, which is such a bad.
Speaker 2 (16:58):
Thing to do. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (16:59):
So I mean, have you done any sort of correlation Jason,
to see, oh my research was wrong or I studied
the wrong inputs in this case are the wrong parameters?
Have you seen any sort of correlation between research and
actual success of whatever program you went through or initiative
(17:20):
you went through.
Speaker 3 (17:21):
Yeah, I mean it's always a complex answer, right, the
answer is yes and no. So as a a researcher,
I want to have this in a lab where I
can control all the variables and say this is exactly
what's pointing to it. And unfortunately that research, not only
through myself or even in the industry right now, is
(17:43):
still very nascent. It's still growing, and it's just not there.
I am engaged with a few consulting firms that I
hope to announce pretty soon where we are actually going
to try to run those controlled experiments in a much
greater way and hopefully produce some white paper so that
we can identify those So from the traditional research background,
(18:05):
it's just that's not there yet. But from a practiced
researcher who understands correlation, causation and the scientific method, I've
done my best to really try to isolate a single
variable and make that change. And by understanding that one
variable within a larger system, I can start to get
(18:27):
a more intuitive or experienced or even anecdotal evidence that says, yeah,
this is what is driving that. And so I do
have a bunch of that that I was able to
explore with and sort of understand at a deeper level.
And a lot of those cases, including the early success
of threefold collective is on our website for people to explore,
(18:51):
and so a lot of that comes down to just
looking at sort of communication patterns and how individuals communicate
and how silos may be for and what interjections you
can play in order to drive that communication forward in
order to close that communication silo. Right At the same time,
(19:12):
some of the greater success that we've had is thinking
about and learning about the adoption curve and what it
is that allows people to embrace change as opposed to
reject change or to resist change. A lot of those
things come down to more of the psychological factors that
are heavily researched and we can point back to in
(19:33):
terms of just loss of clarity, loss of control, and
just the general nature of influence that we can tap into.
And so there are some interesting tools and techniques that
allow us to measure and quantify how an organization might look,
and by doing that, we're able to retest those measures
(19:55):
and see how these interventions can sort of drive a
certain outcome that we're looking to have. So yeah, we
we we've definitely approached this as scientifically as we can.
Speaker 1 (20:04):
But yeah, yeah, I mean again, you know, frameworks, I
love frameworks because at least they put some discipline in
your thought process, you know, I mean, some of them work,
some of them don't work, but at least there's some
sort of organization to it.
Speaker 2 (20:23):
And to your point, I mean, you know, based on
what you said, I.
Speaker 1 (20:26):
Mean, that is the way to go, right, I mean,
and even even with Threefold, maybe that's a good segue
for us to get in the research strategize and execution
of that is super important. So why did we jump
into your pet project then?
Speaker 2 (20:42):
Jason? What? What?
Speaker 1 (20:43):
What made you move on from what seems to be
like a pretty exciting role at the Fortune five hundred
company to do your own thing? I mean, what what
was the trigger?
Speaker 2 (20:54):
Yeah?
Speaker 3 (20:55):
So Threefold Collective exactly as you said, it's a whole
stick strategy consulting firm in which we focus on organizational transformation.
We focus on bringing a company from point A to
point B. And our skill set, I think our trait
is really focused on some of the tools within sociological research,
(21:17):
things like social network analysis that will allow us to
quantify an organization and sort of their fingerprint, if you will,
the informal network behind the formal network, in order to
accelerate change, and as I mentioned earlier, by accelerating change,
there a certain benefits that both the employee and the
organization will reap from accelerating through that change. So in
(21:42):
my time at this Fortune five hundred firm, I was
fortunate enough to stand up three different organizations to guide
this organization to set up these divisions and drive that
change from the ground up. So there was one failure,
as I mentioned that we stood it up been it
survived for about twelve to eighteen months, but it actually
(22:03):
came out just before the COVID nineteen pandemic, and so
it didn't have enough time to really take route. But
we did learn from those things, and so the next
two iterations of this we were able to get better, smarter,
be more thoughtful about how we went through that, and
by applying those lessons on this third launch, we were
actually working with one of the big bulge bracket consulting firms,
(22:25):
and they told us that by going through this change,
which affected fifteen thousand people across the organization, it would
take anywhere from five to ten years, which anybody who's
worked with the consulting firm knows they're going to be
more on the optimistic side of those timelines, But having
worked in those firms myself, I said, hey, listen, we
(22:46):
need your expertise. That knowledge sharing of what other organizations
have done and sort of the friction points that they've
come up with is important. We also sort of need
the traditional change management techniques that these firms are are
really known for. But let's interject this social network analysis.
Let's interject the psychology of the organization, the sociology of
(23:09):
the organization to identify where those friction points are and
really who are the influencers in that organization to accelerate it.
And so if you take even just the more optimistic
timeline five years, we were able to drive this change
in two and a half years, and so that is
doubling of the adoption rate by using the traditional change
(23:33):
management methods, but just complementing it with these concepts from
sociology social network analysis to identify influencers, to leverage those influencers,
and to really propel the organization not from the top down,
but from the bottom up, to use the people, to
use the core asset of any organization to propel it forward.
(23:54):
And so by having this success, do you answer your
question directly. I thought, well, what's my next move? And
I've always gone back to, you know, the organization. They've
always been been very favorable and saying, cool, here's sort
of the next thing that we want you to do.
But I thought, why not do this on my own,
you know, why not go out with Yeah, exactly. I
(24:16):
enjoy the theory, I enjoy the strategy, I enjoy the
application of it. But you know, there's a selfish component
of it of you know, why not benefits myself. But
at the same time, why not be able to really
focus on what I love and what I think is
that real driver of success. So, as we said, what
are sort of the techniques that I've learned over the
(24:39):
past twenty years, and that really is social network analysis,
and our approach to that data collection and to processing
and interpreting that information is something that we get threefold
find to be our value, our skill, our proprietary sort
of you know, proper position to the world. And so yeah,
(25:01):
I wanted to take that out and see if we
could apply that in a much greater scale. And so
that's that's the journey run.
Speaker 1 (25:10):
Yeah, So Mishily all the best first of all, and
I've heard this from many a founder, right, I mean
early days they say, Man, it's very lonely out here.
Speaker 2 (25:20):
It's a it's a it's a scary world. So how
has the early days of Threefold been?
Speaker 1 (25:27):
I mean, and do you feel validated that, Hey, Jason,
this is the right move for me to do. And
I mean, in other words, I mean, where are you
in your journey as a founder as threefold and what's
what's coming up with Threefold?
Speaker 2 (25:43):
I think both can be true.
Speaker 3 (25:48):
I do feel validated in the early days, not just
with the results that we have been able to accomplish
for our clients, but just the feedback that I am
capturing from from different folks, including yourself when you and
I first met. And there is some white space in
the market for this. John Cotter's research, for instance, came
out forty five years ago, and if you look at
(26:08):
some of the research coming out by McKenzie and PwC,
we are still at seventy percent failure rates. And so
nearly half a century later, we're not getting any better
at implementation. And obviously that has to do with a
lot of complexity in our current environment and our current
ecosystem and all those other factors. That for a drive
(26:31):
that but the idea is there is a way to
get better at that and by having some of these
early results that I've been able to replicate at least
you know, four times now and be able to share
that with clients and say here is something that is
developing and I think brand new that can that can
really accelerate your ROI yeah, we've had a lot of
(26:55):
really good success, but at the same time, it is
a lonely space and I wish I knew more about
that feeling coming into it, because it can be frustrated
at times, which I know a lot of your guests
have shared as well, and you know, and a lot
of our cases. We're developing a new market and we're
developing something that people haven't necessarily seen or heard about.
(27:18):
And again we can apply the same notion that I
work in is change is hard, and so adoption of
something new is.
Speaker 2 (27:25):
Going to be hard.
Speaker 3 (27:26):
And so there is a lot of work that I
think any founder has to do in order to establish
that market and to really build the following. And that is,
as you know better than any of us. That is
partly you know the results, the quantitative, the things that
you can point to, but it's also partly the qualitative.
You know, who you are as that founder and the
(27:48):
people you surround yourself with, but also the people that
you connect with the clients and what their challenges are
and how you can connect with them. And it really
is a You've got to form that deep, interconnected relationship
for all of those elements, and at least for me,
never having done that, I'll say this, I'm I'm glad
(28:09):
I have an experimental, scientific mind, and you know, there
have definitely been some failures along the way, but I
am learning from those failures and getting more successful. And
like I said, I think we're getting a lot of
success with our clients as well, and you know, really
developing this and moving in the right direction.
Speaker 2 (28:26):
Beautiful, beautiful.
Speaker 1 (28:27):
I mean, obviously there's no reward without risk, right, and
a lot of us regret saying, oh, man, if only
I had done that. Yeah, that's always the thing with
the founders, right, people who never became founders, including I
mean myself, even this podcast. I mean, I've been thinking
about it for a long time and I was like, man,
(28:49):
I mean if I don't start, I would not ever
do it. So I just start, you know, so I'm
so glad I did so. I mean I can echo
that feeling.
Speaker 2 (29:01):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (29:02):
One of one of the things that I picked on
what you said is you said social.
Speaker 2 (29:07):
Network analysis Jason, right.
Speaker 1 (29:10):
And in the world we live in today, I mean,
especially in the US, I mean, it is so complex.
You know, you have you have people from so many
different cultures.
Speaker 2 (29:21):
I mean so many.
Speaker 1 (29:23):
I mean that's who we are as a country as well,
you know. I mean and in today's world, I mean
at the well even more complex factor of you know,
people of all ages and different dynamics coming together. I
mean have you have you seen in it from through
your lens? I mean, that's a big part of what
(29:44):
you need to analyze. I mean, what are the things
that have struck you as like an aha moment? I mean,
you know, just in terms of you know, how that
impacts a yes or no decision as part of the
strategy or you know, to say, you know what, I mean,
this is great because of that. I mean, I'm just
(30:05):
trying to understand how that factor has evolved over the
last two decades that you've been doing this.
Speaker 3 (30:11):
Yeah, No, it's a great question because social network analysis
is one of the tools that I will say, is
the game changer in the industry right now. And social
network analysis has been a lot around for a long time.
It's an easy concept to understand. Right We're all on
social networks. For instance, we're all on Twitter, I guess X.
(30:32):
Now we're all on LinkedIn, and that is our social network.
And there is a term out there that we also
use as sociologist called influencers. And what influencers are, if
you get into the nerdiness of the math that I
really enjoy, is called eigenvector centrality, and eigenvector centrality is status,
(30:54):
is influence. And so if you can identify who has
status or who has influence based on that social network,
because influence will change and evolve based on the environment
that you're in, and so it's it's it's it's critical
to understand the psychology of how influence begins. But once
(31:17):
you can look at and quantify mathematically that igenvector centrality,
that status, you can start to identify who holds that
power in an organization. And when you start to translate
it in that way, that's what I think really connects
in with people qualitatively. If we all assess our own networks,
(31:39):
we know the people that are well connected within there.
And so if we want to get something done, if
we want to connect in with somebody at a different
organization that we may not know, Say we're looking for
a new job and we know somebody works to that organization,
we will qualitatively ask our friends if they know somebody there.
What a quantitative approach allows is it really allows for
(32:04):
not just the scale of that at a much larger
sort of footprint, but it also allows us to be
really precise. And so social network analysis in this way
eigenvector centrality and all the mathic sort of goes behind
it is a descriptive sorry, a descriptive statistic and that
(32:25):
just allows us to describe how the world looks today.
But by understanding that, it allows us to intervene. And
so if we get back to sort of the original question,
and what that context leads up to is if you
know who holds the power in your organization, then you
can leverage their skill set for several different things. If
(32:46):
you're going through a change, you can invite that person
into the conference room and say, hey, here's the approach
that we want to go with.
Speaker 2 (32:54):
How would you.
Speaker 3 (32:55):
Think this might look or operate within your environment? Is
there anything we need to do to change that. Assuming
that they might buy into that, then maybe they want
to become a person that becomes a champion of that.
Then they can go back and they can help to
spread that word to say, you know, hey, I've experimentmented
(33:16):
with this and this is a great tool for instance
that we're using. I think we should all adopt it.
And if you're a person hearing that from somebody that
you consider influential, right, because influence is always dependent on
you the person receiving that. So beauty is in the
eye of the beholder, and if you can tap into
that and you can influence people, you can scale that
(33:40):
learning curve much more quickly. And so if you think
about it from a perspective, we've all been involved in
change in some way, shape or form, and maybe it's
the CEO of your company and you've never sat down
with that CEO.
Speaker 2 (33:52):
You know they.
Speaker 3 (33:53):
Certainly have authority, and that's a certain type of influence.
But if you can hear that same message from the
colleague that you've worked with for the past fifteen years
and they have embraced that change, and that's somebody that
you trust and you know has your best interests at heart,
then you're going to be a little bit more open
to accepting what that might look like. And it's that
(34:16):
nature of the psychology mixed in with the mathematics of
sociology applied to change that allows us to really begin
to accelerate that. And yeah, so it's influence is sort
of the name of the game, and that's exactly where
social networking house this allows us to identify, or at
least that is the primary application that we're experimenting with
(34:39):
at this point.
Speaker 1 (34:41):
Fascinating again, Jason, And there's so many layers to this, right,
and as humans, we take we understand all this, but
I mean, you know, I mean not to the level
that you just explained. So I'm glad somebody like you
is looking into all these things, you know, checking all
those books is and making sure the math adds up
(35:02):
before those big decisions where a lot of lives are impacted.
I mean literally, yeah, right, so so so cool that
you're doing that.
Speaker 2 (35:12):
So I want to pivot to something on the research side.
Speaker 1 (35:15):
And I mean, this is something that everybody talks about
these days, so I might want to get your perspective
on that too. So obviously a lot of research is
data driven, right yep. And in today's world, I mean,
everybody wants to use AI for a lot of these things,
right yeah. So what what's your I mean in the
in the three fold approach to what you do with threefold?
Speaker 3 (35:41):
Right?
Speaker 2 (35:42):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (35:43):
Where where do you see AI kind of helping you?
I mean, I'm assuming there as a play, especially on
the research and data analysis aspect of it.
Speaker 2 (35:52):
Have you given it any thought, Jason?
Speaker 3 (35:55):
Yeah, so, especially from running the calculations, and I think
when you take any large data set, they're in order
to just run those calculations much more quickly and look
at that from various different perspectives and different angles to us,
that just gives us more opportunity to see something that
maybe we haven't seen. And so there we have worked
(36:19):
with AI in order to apply that, and there are
some applications that will allow us to accelerate that math.
And I think that's great because that gives us more perspective,
but it also cuts down the time in order to
start interpreting it. There are some challenges I think right
now with the data collection side of it. And so
(36:39):
right now, intuitively, as I mentioned, influence is you know
within the holder, right beauty is in the eye of
the beholder, and so influence is defined by the person
that you're talking to. And so right now, collecting that
data is still a very human based effort. But there
(37:00):
are like Microsoft Copilot is out there and they will
do a certain level of social organalysis that a lot
of us maybe are familiar with. Right and so in
Microsoft Copilot, within teams, they have this clout calculation, and
that clout calculation is driven by AI, and what it
does is it looks across the ecosystem and it says,
(37:21):
who is this person emailing with, who is this person
sitting in the conference room with? Who is this person calling?
And there are limitations within that that we should be
aware of. Is, even though you and I may sit
in a conference room together, it may not identify the
(37:41):
nature of the relationship that you and I have. We
have all been in a conference room where somebody has
derailed a conversation, for instance, and so Microsoft Copilot or
AI as it looks today, may look at that and
sort of say, oh, they're in the same room, so
they have influence, they have connection to each other. But
if you actually try to tap into that influence of
(38:01):
that person, who's derailed it. They may not get you
to where you want to be. So it's still i
think comparative at this point in terms of AI to
do the data collection in the traditional sense, but we
can process it through AI and run those calculations much
more efficiently than we've been able to in the past.
Speaker 1 (38:21):
That makes sense, Yeah, because I mean, you know, whatever
AI model you might have, I mean, your output is
as good as the data input and then your I
mean to your answer, I mean, if you don't have
that initial good data for the model to take in,
I mean, what you're going to get is I mean
as good as not using it.
Speaker 2 (38:40):
So that's right, that makes total sense.
Speaker 1 (38:42):
I mean I'm assuming you know, much like everything else,
I mean, this ill the wall as well, and you
can get a lot more out of it. But I
mean I would say we're still in such an early
stages of what is possible and not. I'll be fascinated
to see how you apply to befold as well.
Speaker 3 (38:59):
Yeah, I'll be interested to see how it unfold.
Speaker 2 (39:03):
Yeah. Perfect, So thanks so much, Jason.
Speaker 1 (39:06):
I mean, I as always, I mean, with any conversation
with you, I learned a ton. Uh. It looks like
threefold is something that a lot of companies not just
trying to do M and A, but I mean even
with strategy and especially in the ever changing world that
we live in, UH could use. So I wish you
(39:29):
and the team the very best and I would love
to have you on sometime in the future to tell
us how you're doing both as a founder as well
as you know everything that you love to do, so
on behalf of our podcast. All the best of you, Jason.
Speaker 2 (39:44):
Thank you very much.
Speaker 3 (39:45):
I appreciate it, and like I said, every conversation with you,
I think I learned something as well. So I appreciate
everything you're doing and just the platform you're creating, not
just for myself like for other founders. So in the
same way, you know, keep up the good work that
you're doing and just know we appreciate you.
Speaker 2 (40:00):
Thanks so much, Take care all right. Thank you,
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