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Speaker A I wanted to start off and give a framework that I have found very useful in exploring issues within organization. And then a concept that I have found very useful in terms of implementation. Understanding client behavior, to some extent understanding colleagues behavior. Now, a reason why I wanted to look at this is that I find that requisite organization as a discipline has actually three distinct levels to it and the same levels that occur in any discipline medicine, civil engineering, and any other field. And that when you're exploring differences, it's important to know is your difference at this level, this level or this level? Because differences are resolved differently at different levels. And the reason why this is important is we have differences of belief within the room. And you're going to find presenters in one session who have a somewhat different point of view from a presenter in another session or different from your own point of view. The differences, I think, are really important. A community that has no differences is either stagnant or a cult. And I think we want to be a growing field. The differences will only help us grow if we confront them, if we explore them and try to resolve them. And the resolution may either show one point of view better than another, but we'll sharpen it, or we'll say we need a higher organizing principle. And I find it's important to know at what level we're differing if we're going to have that conversation. So that first level of the three is what I call a conceptual framework. It is yesterday, several of the CEOs referred to reckless organization as having given them their organization, a common language. In part, what they mean by a common language is everyone in my company, when we use the word manager, we know we have the same meaning for it. But in another sense, the framework focuses us, gives us our lens for understanding what for making sense of the data in the organization. So we look, for example, not at attitude issues so much, not so much at fixing the employee. But what we're focused on are roles. Properties of roles, such as the level of complexity of the work in a role, attributes of a role, such as what would feel fair compensation for that. We look at entities such as employees, properties of employee. Now, property is an objective aspect that you and I could come to the same understanding of what it is for the person. So level of capability of the person by delineating the entities, the properties and the attributes that we're focused on. The conceptual framework is what helps us make sense of the organization. It's. What? In Thomas Coon's Structured Scientific Revolutions, he talked about paradigms. Talking about the paradigm here when Elliott said you can only do a diagnosis if you have a theory, I think by theory this is what he was referring to. This is how we make sense of the data. What's important about this level? I think by and large, we agree in this room on the conceptual framework. I think we may have some differences in conceptual framework, how we conceive issues like personality, values. The whole issue of minus T is an area where I think we have some disagreements that we would benefit by resolving. But differences in conceptual framework are not resolved by giving someone another few data. If you believe that, if you are an evolutionist, find a creationist and try to find one piece of information, that's going to turn around how they look at those data. And if you're a creationist and you find an evolutionist and say, what are the data you could give? Because the framework is how we assimilate and make sense of data. I'll give you just one example. Rob Pearce was saying yesterday that how could you not know that people have different levels of capability? Isn't that obvious to all of us that with enough effort and opportunity, not everyone can be prime minister or president? I have some colleagues outside the Requisite field who don't see that, and I'll say to know, I'm talking about matching the level of capability of a person. Well, what do you mean by level of capability? We'll talk about it. I'll say, well, I don't get it. I'll say, well, and it's the same example that Rob gave. Do you really think with enough effort and opportunity, anyone could do what Einstein did? Anyone could do what Mozart did? And she says, well, no, only Einstein could do what Einstein did. Only Mozart could do what Mozart did. Her conceptual framework is people have different strengths. And there are always ways in which I'm going to be better than you and you're going to be better than me. But on overall measure, there is no such thing. It didn't make sense to her, and there wasn't a single piece of information I could give her that would change her point of view. Kuhn says that paradigms change in a science not just because we discovered something new, but because the old paradigm has problems in it that can't be solved within that paradigm, and a new paradigm helps you solve it. And so when you're in a conceptual the difference of conceptual framework with someone, you need to get inside their framework and you need to try to find the contradictions in it and show that your way of understanding solves those contradictions. And it's not easy. The other thing that's really important about conceptual frameworks is that they are choices. You know, the Bishop pictures that the picture that you can look at is either a pretty young woman or an old AG, or the picture that you can look at as a vase or two silhouettes facing each other with two different ways of making sense of those lines. And the issue of right and wrong doesn't apply here. True or false doesn't apply here. This is how I make sense of things. And if you make sense of things differently, it's going to be a hard struggle for us to work that out. The next level is the level of science. And in science, I'm not aware of any. Science is the world of conceptual truth, of objective truth, by which I don't mean this is what God sees, but objective truth says, here's a method for measuring the diameter of a table. I use it, I get 2 meters. If you use it, we'll get 2 meters. Objective truth is what's shareable within the species. And science is the laws of cause and effect. It's measurements of norms, measurements of constants and data directly come into science. They change science directly in a way that they don't change conceptual. You may have noticed, I think there was an overhead. I think it was one of the overheads Ken put on yesterday of one of the early books. I think it was of Elliot's. And it showed the scratch and one scratch, two time span, family at one month. If you caught that. But this was one of his earlier works, showed that family at one month. He worked more, collected more data, and said, you know what?
Speaker B I need one month.
Speaker A It's three months. His writing just changes. That a challenge we have when we're talking with people outside of our field is other approaches for organizations. I think we're largely missing this. You're not grounded in a science. Third level is engineering. Engineering is an art grounded in a science. It's the construction of methods and templates for solving real life problems. So for us, an engineering template would be the method of having one managerial level for scrapbook or pay people according to the healthcare papers. These are methods we use to solve real life problems. I don't know about you. When I first was introduced to requisite organization, this is what I thought the deal was. I thought it was the engineering templates. And so I would go into a client and I would say, oh, you got a manager at five, subordinate at three, you need someone at four, because that's all I had. All I was aware of was thinking of was the templates. And it's kind of like if you look at I don't know what I imagine bridge building was before civil engineering, before physics was well understood. We might know as a craft that if you want to span a ten foot creek, you need to use a log a foot in diameter. But only our experience would say, when can we use it bigger? When can we use it smaller? Does the type of wood matter? Physics is what allow us to really manipulate those templates. The science is what allows us our science is what allows us to manipulate the engineering templates. So the issue to a client isn't, you're missing a role at four. You're wrong. You go back to the science and say, what's the cause and effect? Why do we want a role at four? Well, we want a role at four so the manager will actually coach the subordinate so the manager doesn't have to do strategic. And if the client comes back and says, you know, that manager at Five used to be a school teacher, really enjoys coaching, really enjoys the challenge of coming down to that level and exploring things. And there isn't a whole lot of work at strategy four for that person to do. And let me tell you the headache that's going to cause me to pay now salary. We can have a discussion at this level that allows us to decide which template. So I find it very useful. It may or may not be useful to you, but it's something I have found very helpful in exploring some of the differences. To say the level that an issue is at depends on how determines how we're going to resolve it. The other concept I wanted to mention is one that I've gotten from Jerry Harvey's writings. The concept of Anaclesis anna is a Greek word for leaning on. Cleesis is to lean. We're talking about things we lean on to make sense of the world as a place. We have some control. What Jerry says, and it's written very nicely in Musings about the elephants in the parlor or who the hell is Elliot Jackson? And I'm going to give a couple of references there where you can get that article. What he's saying is we lean on concepts to make sense of the world and we lean and that's really at this level and we lean on our ability to build relationships. Anything that threatens our basis for making sense of the world and anything that threatens our ability to have relationships, we're going to resist. So comments were made yesterday by some of the CEOs about requisite organization is very threatening to people who are in power. It's very difficult to take the authority away from people. And the issue for a manager, I think, at that level is I thought I could just boss around anyone I want to in the organization. That's how I make sense of the organization. That's how I think through the issue of how I'm going to get work done. You are telling me I can't just order people around the way I want to. Suddenly I'm lost. I don't know how to make sense of this organization. You're not just giving me a new idea, you're taking away the way home. May I make sense of things? And people are going to resist that. And so that's one thing that we need to show them how to replace the concept that they used to have. Requisite organization I think, is very threatening in terms of relationships. So the issue of saying to a manager, it's your judgment that drives things and you're going to have to say to your subordinate, I am, or I am not pleased with your performance. Someone who is used to saying, well, you did the 360 feedback, and people aren't happy with the service you got, so we're going to have to make some changes. It's a whole lot easier than to say, in my opinion, you're not doing a good job.
Speaker B People aren't very happy saying that.
Speaker A Most people aren't happy saying that. For me to be critical of you and nakedly, it's on my judgment, because you say, Well, I'm outperforming her. And I say, well, yeah, that's because I've made circumstances very easy for you, and it made them very difficult for her, and that's why you're outperforming her. How do you know they're more difficult? It's going to always come back to my judgment, and I'm afraid when word gets out that I've disciplined you just on my judgment, I'm going to be sitting alone at the office Christmas party. And that's the adequate threat that Requisite organization presents. The irony. I mean, Jerry talks about any of you have heard Jerry Harvey speak about the Abilene Paradox. Very charming. The whole the OB community loves him. We talked about the Abilene paradox and amyquitic depression. People say, how do we prevent this from happening in our organization? He says, well, requisite organization. So the reason I like it is because it has the least anaclitic threat as a system, of any system he's aware of, because once you're inside of it, it's very comfortable looking at it from the outside, from the point of view of the organization I now have. Each individual point you're presenting to me is anaclitically threatening. It's only when I can get that whole system and I realize, oh, wait a minute. When I discipline him and I say to him, you're not carrying your weight, I start realizing, wait, everyone around here has been waiting for me to have that conversation. I'm not going to sit alone at the office Christmas party, people. I'm going to get an atta boy for that. But it's only when you get into the system as a whole. Friends of mine have accused me of having only two concepts stratum and anaclesis. They work for Merb, and I have.
Speaker B A lot of fun working together, and we make a great team, I think the rest of my team, and we need to look at some familiar faces. We've got a long history together, and you can see why. And we call her Professor Herb because he often brings us back to really getting grounded and staying pure in some of what the essence and principles are of what we're talking. And I usually am the one who's in the place of saying, my God, I'm sitting in the vortex of this organization. I'm seeing all that stuff going on. How do I make sense of that? How do I make movement? How do we make change within that? So I wanted to connect to some of these things and talk from the perspective. And really, these are my ramblings. So there's no science behind this whatsoever. It is strictly based on my observations, the reason why I'm at the bank of Montreal make that declaration. I'm not a banker. And it's so funny. People go, there's an intake of breath when I say that within the banking environment, but I'm there because it's just a fabulous learning lab. And for me, it's this huge playing field to learn from and contribute back to. And that's what fascinates me about the whole thing. So I want to talk about some of the things I see, and I find them in these situations, as most of you must be, too, where people tell me their fears all the time, actually. So in preparation for what I wanted to say, I started writing down all these fears and just sat back and looked at them and tried to make sense and some meaning out of what I was hearing. So that's what it's all about. And I think I want to also link into my mind's been just racing, as I'm sure you already had, over the things we've been talking about in the last couple of days. And I've been struck with this sort of mantra around if all this stuff makes so much sense, because that's been a theme, I think. And it's been wonderful for a number of us to not be so alone and realize there's people doing sensible things in all kinds of other places and for a good amount of time. So there's this wonderful sense of some community and some critical mass around this. So it all makes great sense and it's got some good common sense around it. But boy, the health is so hard, I think, about that list of stuff we had for those of you who weren't here on our opening night, we did an exercise around what questions have we got? We had the academics questions, we had the business folks questions, and we had the consultant questions. And then the consultant is, why is it so hard to sell this stuff and to keep a client once I have one academic? Or Why is it so hard to write about this stuff and get published about this stuff and have a language to talk about this stuff? And you have the business folks saying, why let's just get at her. Like, why is it so hard to implement this stuff? And Why can't we do it faster? We need accelerated ways of getting at this stuff. So I want to talk about three things in response to that question that I'm mudding through myself. One of them is Clutter. I want to talk about clutter. The second thing is chaos. I want to relate back. I think you might have recalled rob Pierce talked about the Chaos Meter, and I'd like to go back to visit that concept. And the other one is courage. And I've just got some observations and some sort of hypotheses about all these herb. The clutter, I'm coming out. I would like to admit I'm moving so I don't keep cluttering at home. And there's nothing like getting in touch with your stuff, right? I've had to clean up the garage and the basement and cupboards and things. So I have to kind of focus on this. But it strikes me that that's not very different than the work environment. And I think one of our biggest challenges, because we always talk about adding things in, I think there's an enormous amount of clutter in most organizational systems, and until we actually deal with the clutter, I don't think we're going to get too far with some of the things that we've been talking about. So the clutter, for me, some of it you've talked about her. I think some of the clutter comes from various management fads and things that we've had over the past that folks are very attached to, and they're still in the system. So they're sitting there in the system. We've got attachments to them. The other thing I see is that we seem to have this propensity to we can't just do one thing. We have five or six things, but they're actually all the same thing. But on Facebook it looks like different things, but in fact it's just one thing. I see this everywhere I go. We put different names on them, but essentially they're all the same thing. I don't know why we can't clean up a cutter. I was sitting with a group of managers recently that I worked with on an ongoing basis, and it was like a level five, kind of like I think it was four reports, and then there are three reports. You could feel it in the room where these managers back up at the bank. We have this whole thing around high performance culture, and so we're talking about getting focused, being more collaborative, moving faster, these sorts of things. And people sit there and get the message. People understand what we're talking about. But these poor managers, we clutter them up so much that I can almost hear this little boy screaming in the room of people saying, just tell us what we should be doing. Just tell us, tell us. We understand what we're trying to do. But you got so much clutter sitting in front of me as a manager, I've lost sight of what I should even be focusing on and doing. And I think actually I would challenge all the HR people in the room. I think we add to the clutter. I think HR people payments for this, and I am amongst them, so I can stand up and say this and point a finger at myself as well as everybody else. I think the biggest contribution HR people could do would be clean tabs. I was sitting in a room. This was learning lab experiences I had. We have a task as part of this high performance culture thing we're on where how many people have competency dictionaries these things that have art has a list of 100 things, right? It's a beautiful thing. And somebody got paid $100,000 to write it a number of years ago. So our task was to realign and kind of refurbish or re whatever our competencies because we want them to fit in with sort of our strategic focus. So like with practitioners, we thought, okay, well, perhaps we got to look at the thing first. So we actually took this competency and we cut it all up and we put it on the wall, all the statements all around the room, and we took every other thing that we had that was related to competency type states, devotion. And we cut them all up and put them around the wall. And we went through this exercise of actually trying to group them. And what happened was fascinating to me because we had the best minds we have in the room, people who are supposed to be experts in this work, and guess what happened? We had such a model there that we couldn't make sense of what we had. And yet this thing is a cornerstone of our HR programs and platform, and we don't know what it is and we don't know what to do with it. I find that fascinating. Like, how are we going to get somewhere if this is our reality of what we're dealing with? We have people in the room where we couldn't actually get a definition of what competency even is. And I'm talking there's experts in the room, guys. There's experts in the room that do nothing but this kind of stuff. We couldn't tell the difference between its capability and competency. The same thing is skills actually competency. What are values? We don't know what values are. What are the behaviors? We just got completely muddled up in all of this stuff. Here we are trying to rewrite the dictionary. So that's where I come back to conceptual frameworks. I think part of the problem is we enter into all these exercises as if they're an activity. It's actually we need a framework, but nobody in the room. That's when I think then the whole notion of capability comes into play. Because I think you don't get that unless you're operating at level four and five capability, even though that you need a conceptual framework. So the other sort of thing I think that creates a lot of clutter too, is I was thinking about the whole thing that I picked up on yesterday between long term and short term. It's a struggle that Mark was talking about at the board level and at the senior executive and CEO level. At least focus on monthly and quarterly reporting and annual reporting and what we don't seem to be able to hook onto and focus as much on the long term. Well, I think we've got a mania we've created these monsters in organizations who are activity junkies. They have tons of activity junkies running around organizations who want to get a ticky box for completing the activity. And unfortunately, we've got these activities which in and of themselves probably all look fine, but when you start to add them together, they're not necessarily adding up to a conceptual framework that pulls things together and makes sense of things for people. I think that's a huge amount of so one of the things that struck me yesterday too was I think we're lacking in organizations. I see it in ours. Julian mentioned it in his session. I was in the first morning. I think we have huge gaps. I mean, we worry a lot about compression. I'm starting to worry more about gaps. I see huge gaps in identifying the actual work to be done at level four and level five and huge gaps around the capability matched against that work. So it all brings me back to I think that's what makes it so hard for us to do and bring in the requisites that we're talking about a because people are so attached to a cluttered up of stuff that's already there, if we don't remove that stuff, there's no space for what we're talking about. But secondly, I think we kind of as a community, have expectations around capability that aren't actually there. I struggled too with and we noticed that in the branch network redesign work because that was about pulling work up. I think it's hard to tell what real capability is there because I don't think we're clear enough about the work. So if we're not asking people to do that kind of work, it's actually hard to know whether they have the capability or not. The first contribution, I think, around this work we do is the definition of that work and what kinds of assignments and thinking would you be doing should you actually in reality be operating at that level? So that's kind of all connected around the clutter theme for me. Chaos. I've learned a lot about chaos. Now, Rob mentioned Chaos Meter, which came about when we started the branch network redesign and used to begin in the national head office redesign we were doing. And the chaos factor to me is I think it's a fear and an obsession on most attendable executives minds. And I think what most of them worry about is I'm worried about making changes into my organization or my unit or my system because I'm worried about people taking their eye off the ball. I can't afford to not get my numbers. I can't afford to have us not focused on selling the servant or whatever the best of our business is. So it makes me very concerned about them working on these strategic change things that are about changing the business. And it's really hard for me to figure out how I can run a parallel of changing the business with not taking the eye off the ball of actually running the business. I think that's a paralyzing fear. And I hear a lot of executives, they actually come right in and say that to me, people say in, it would be great to do the stuff you're talking about doing. Love to do it conceptually with you. But I can get over my fear of the chaos and when that chaos will destroy the essence of my business and the best of my business. And it's a really hard choice for me to make, and it's very hard for me to have the faith to make that leap. And I think Rob is interesting, right as he said himself the first time he made the choice to go down this whole requisite route, he didn't know what he was getting into, didn't have a clue. But for some reason or other, he made that leap of faith because I think it's not even something he can articulate. He just decided to go for it and to take that risk that it would be worth it to go through that exercise to get what he wanted to do. And one of the things that fascinated me around this whole chaos thing is we always worry about chaos in terms of what we're going to add into or do to the system. I think we risk way more chaos by not doing anything. So I observed that when we were in the beginning of the branch network redesign, we didn't get to mention it yesterday, but actually turning point on that whole thing was, if you got to remember, this is we're going right across Canada. We've got all these thousand plus branches spread out all over the place. We have very different regions. It's very different in Quebec than it is out west. We've got all these differences you're working with. And when we were running the initial test, we just chose one part of the organization to do that. And what had happened is we communicated what we were going to do and people all sort of keen and wired up and interested in doing this, but there was going to be such a huge lag time because if you start sort of on one side of the country and work to the other. It was a two year you're into a huge, long implementation. So guess what started happening? People started doing stuff, right, because the whole thing was, we're trying to make a more consistent organization around a common spine, but we've got people who are used to doing their own thing. They've been doing their own thing for 100 years, and so they just continue doing their own thing, which is completely opposite to what we were trying to change. So actually, the chaos, even though we worried about all Rob's description of the chaos being around, not getting the numbers and taking our eye off the ball, the chaos was that when we didn't touch. All parts of the system early. They started creating stuff that was problematic. So we switched our whole focus and did an exercise of configuration and moved right across the country, worked with every single executive that was there and their senior teams to have them get their hands around what we were doing. And it settled them down because they got to touch it, they got to feel it, they got to do something that was chaos too. So I think there's this interesting sort of polarity and management of chaos. It's a bit related to the clutter point. It's not always about what we're going to do or what we're going to add in. It's also the price of not doing things and not, I think, equally as important. So that leads me to courage, and I find that an interesting one and that what gives Rob Pierce is an example of courage to jump in and do these things. And Rob's been fascinating too, because different from some of the other executives I work with, rob doesn't process much about proving the outcomes and proving the hard numbers. Now, he spoke very clearly to that because he sees the fact that his financial results improve his customer satisfaction and his employee satisfaction. And he knows that there's that positive correlation there. But he has never been fixated on having to have huge metrics approved or validated heavy stuff around that before he entered into the exercise. That's very different from the place that I've been with a lot of other executives at the bank. Because, again, I think it's a great defense mechanism, right? I need to know exactly the outcome and I need to have all these hard numbers and hard facts and hard metrics. It's another great rationale for not actually doing it. But again, if you just have the faith and are willing to take the leap, all of that part of it becomes more in the back stage as opposed to in the front stage. Certainly not saying that I don't want you to hear me say that I don't think outcomes are important and that output or anything like that. But again, all of that, I think, needs to be put in some perspective and in some kind of balance. So I think there's some correlation between the capability to understand system and to think in terms of an organizational system directly related to having courage to do this kind of work that we're talking about doing.
Speaker A I think there's an irony here that it takes great courage to bring requisite organization into your department during operation. Ideally, at least once you're requisite, it doesn't take courage for anyone to be inside of you. One of the goals in requisite organization is to have it on the workplace without fear. Because as long as I'm doing my level best, I'm okay. There should be nothing to be afraid of. But bringing it in makes great contribution.
Speaker B Again, I come back to I observe with the folks that I work with, and that's usually council executives at level five, primarily low level four as well. I think a huge thing that's not developed is this notion of thinking of the organization as a system, seeing it as a system, seeing the interdependent parts and being willing to tackle it as a system. That's the huge differentiator with Rob Pierce. He has used organization design as a strategic change leader, very choicefully, and he has been very methodical about tackling this whole system because he knew he needed that system to be able to have workflow through it and to make change through it. I think it's just not again, I don't know whether we have enough practice doing that. And I think that's a huge contribution we can make in this field is helping people to get more comfortable and more fearful around thinking in terms of that. But I think that's where future menacing education needs to be and a lot of the conversation needs to be. So it's an interesting dichotomy because the other thing I heard was time and process and all the stories we heard. This stuff takes time. And part of the reason why it takes time is the educational element of it. But also you have to talk your way through. And again, that sort of comes back to my thing about unless we unbundle some things and unclutter some things and throw some stuff out, why we can't throw stuff out, we attain on everything. It comes back to this hugely cluttered thing, which I think is one of the big blocks to get into where we need to go. I had another interesting story that I'll end with, which I was sitting with one where I had finance guy who Brighton, wonderful guy. This is kind of fascinating. You guys will laugh at this. I think this is a universal story, probably, so I'll make fun of us and probably everybody else while I'm doing it. But we have had this system in the organization of having stretch goals. Don't you love it when we start to go through our business planning cycle every year and we make these stretch goals? Well, the thing is, we made them so stretch, we have no hope in hell of actually achieving them. And everybody knows it. We play this game for a whole bunch of years. So we go through this whole exercise. We set these things. You can't make them and everybody knows you can't make them, but we pretend you can and we go through this. So this year we're doing something different and we're imagining this thing called aggressive achievable goals. And I said, well.
Speaker A Wonderful.
Speaker B And how would you define that? Something about this poor little man here we go, right? The poor little manager that I was talking about before here we get another thing that's going to come on down. How would I, the manager, know what that means? So he got this big smile on his face and said, well, we haven't defined it very well yet, so that's work we need to do. But he said, but here's what my fear is. And he said, So, granted, you got me on that one. So once we get a good definition of it but here's my fear. He said, I'm really worried that people aren't going to get it, that these targets are real. But think about that for a minute. This is the epic cultural change, right? So what he's saying is, I'll say it. We had a bullshit system in the past. Now we don't want bullshit anymore. And we have to tell everybody that because we're still playing the old game, but we're changing the rules of the game only. We need your people to realize. But how I connect into that is I'm accountable for an enterprise framework and approach to doing performance management, which starts with setting some realistic goals connected in with your business plan goal. So actually, this is me, because I can help with this and I can see my way to add some value and help with this whole exercise. But I just thought it was so neat that while this fellow losing sleep at night worrying about this and I think he's worried about the right thing, at the same time, I'm not sure he understands what he's worried about. It again, comes back to that sort of notion of the system and understanding. Those are my thoughts. I'm sure we'll be struggling with all of these things the next couple of days, but there you got it.