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Speaker A That's early for this morning. All right, again, welcome to really, day one, which is really where we're going to kind of get at this stuff over the next couple of days. But if I just like to start with everybody's. Okay, everybody settled into the room? Everybody got some nice rest? Hopefully to be ready to do some stuff with anybody today. I've seen you settled in your various places, and some of them are the same places as last night. We're going to shape things up during the next couple of days and encourage you to mix up as much as you can. So from time to time, it'll be pick up your binder, pick up your name tag, and move to another place. But that'll give you an opportunity to engage with other people and learn from other people and hopefully leave here having met with or worked with just about everybody in the room over the next couple of days. Let's just take a quick look like last night. And I'd just like to reflect. I mean, sometimes it's the old question of we get kind of 5 miles down the road and gosh, I wish I said, or I'd have a little reflection or something like that, but I didn't have anybody to say it to. So I'm just wondering if it just checking in on last night. How are people feeling about last night, how we got started? Were there any kind of insights or thoughts or reflections that came out of last night that we want to just share for a few minutes before we start off?
Speaker B Anybody?
Speaker C This was the kind of confirmation that I was wondering which kind of conference even if I was non legal.
Speaker A Hopefully you're making me the right way, but you got something to do with that too.
Speaker D Anybody else? I just thought it's useful when you get into the time frame to think about the impact of new technologies and the shorter time frames in product and time frames and the impact that has on accountability, for example, of a CEO on a technology company. We've both got to ensure that there's long term, shall we say, sustainability, and where's going in the long term. But also we've got to make sure that we're competing with product lifespan, but are going quick shorting.
Speaker A Exactly. And maybe some of that conversation can fit into the case study where you.
Speaker D I think it fits into the case study. Yeah, I think that in discussion of time spans would be used.
Speaker A Absolutely. Okay, then let's just move on to what we're planning on doing today.
Speaker B Hello?
Speaker A Hang on. Yeah, I am strong. Hang on a bit this year. That should do it. Yes. I think Herb reviewed a little bit briefly yesterday, but let's just take today what we're going to do. We're going to be doing a lot of work on the case study in terms of getting started. What we plan with this is we use the case study as a way to kind of get us into as close to a real situation as we can around an organization design. Obviously, if the case is relatively short, it doesn't give you anywhere near enough information. So somewhere doing this thing, there'll be an opportunity for you to kind of as you're working in this group, to make some assumptions about some of these things. And that's going to be okay because you're going to have to do that to do the work. But we're going to go through that. We're going to start really with the whole notion of looking at the surface chart, as we call it sometimes, or the manifest chart, what the organization gave you, as I think you said last night, Herb, and we're going to do a little work with that. We're going to go then into kind of the sequence of building on the case of you've been hired as this consultant. So just think of it through the next two days is that we're all a consulting group that's been hired by this CEO to help her and her management team to take a look at.
Speaker D The issues that have been presented.
Speaker A So we go in in terms of the sequence of what would happen in a normal consulting assignment. You're going to do some kind of an organizational diagnosis. You're going to dive in and find out what the heck's going on and collect some information. Part of that is the whole notion of in this particular field of organ design is leveling the work, making sure we have an understanding of what kind of levels of complexity are we dealing with in this organization. And so how do we get at that? We'll spend a little bit of time with Herb on the whole time spent interviewing, in other words, demonstrating what that really looks like. It is a core piece of this work. And for any of us, of course, who lived and worked and had the joy of having Elliot as a mentor for us around this know, we couldn't get enough of that sort of stuff from him in terms of just how important that was and how tricky it is sometimes to really get at it. And so we'll talk about some of the issues around that. We also then want to make sure that we spend a little bit of time making sure we're all grounded in this notion of work levels. What are these levels and how do we understand them and what are the various ways in which we could understand these levels and recognize them and be able to talk cogently with our clients about these levels. The other one too, is grouping, I've always felt at a very simplistic or simple level. I mean, it's not simplistic but simple level that an organization designed in some ways an accountability hierarchy is really just the way in which the organization is choosing to distribute accountability and authority for getting the business plan executed by creating roles that are organized in groups and layers. So in a very simple way, the organization design exercise is what is the right grouping of work for accountability and what are the right layers of work relative to the complexity of organization? Easy to say, not easy to do. Absolutely. Elliot would often say that, Jeffrey. He would say that the grouping is more aligned to the strategy. There's less science in the grouping of work than there is in the layering of work. All right? But it really has an alignment to the strategy. And what I certainly found, and I think my colleagues would say too, the whole leveling and grouping issue is an iterative process, it's constantly iterative. In other words, if I discover a role, whatever it is, in level three, it's not a question of who the role reports to, it's the question of which role in the next value adding layer of management would be best held accountable for that role in line with strategy, which then becomes a layering and a grouping issue simultaneously.
Speaker C Could you repeat exactly the same word?
Speaker B No.
Speaker A I'll tell you what, young fell in the back of the room, you got that on cake. I think what I said was layering and grouping is an iterative exercise. If you discover a role at a particular level, in this case, I say level three, then the question is not who it reports to, but which role at level four in the next value adding level to management would be best held accountable for that work, given the alignment to strategy. Then there's a whole bunch of other stuff you get into around grouping kind of issues and stuff. So all I'm going to say is we want to talk a little bit about the leveling and grouping stuff to make sure we're as grounded as around that stuff leaving here tomorrow. And then what we'll end up doing then is we'll assume that what's happened is that after this diagnosis we've got some information. So we've created kind of the real but fake extent chart, in a sense, or what kind of my company we call depth charts, and we produce those. So then we'll do an exercise at the end of the day where we can take a look at what's that telling us. After that, we've got that analysis and we've got that excellent chart of the structure. What's that telling us and what do we want to tell our clients on the basis of that chart? I know for some of you in the room who've done a lot of this work, those kind of charts can be very powerful. Have clients walk in the room. You'll see these in our company, we tend to do them in color. And so we kind of start the conversation with a client that color is not good. So when the chart goes up with all this color on it, it kind of dulls. But very often, just the chart alone can have amazing impact on a client. In terms of understand why some of the stuff that I see happening has happened, that's really important. So you'll get a little chance to analyze that. And I think we end the day talking a little bit about some of the three tier management stuff. I've told this story many times. Maybe some of you have heard it. Maybe you've heard it from Elliot. But one time Elliot said, paul, have I told you my theory of weekend change? And I said, no, Elliot, but I think you're just about to. And he said, yeah. I said, you know, that whole construct of the manager, the management, that whole, you know, that is so seminal to this work. He said, I kind of believe that if a CEO would go home on a Friday night and come back on a Monday morning and just simply declare henceforth and evermore those fundamental accountabilities and authorities of managers, managers must remove the employees will be the way we run this company, full stop, period. He said, I think change would occur, like, overnight. And my own experience with my own clients is that probably, I would say somewhere in the range of 70% to 8% of them have said that three tier concept is probably one of the most powerful things that you brought to Our. And so we want to spend a little time talking about the issues and opportunities plus stuff that goes. So that's our day. Does that feel like a decent beta to get it going? Okay. Paul would like if I could just add to the don't expect change to be an overnight thing, but I think what he was really intending was that if you can really get that implemented, the change in the organization would occur. All right, you had a chance, or we hope you had a chance both prior to coming here, or maybe you kind of did it last night because you didn't have a chance to do it beforehand, was to take a look at the case. And as you recall, we gave you the case. We gave you the surface charts or the manifest charts for that organization. We've actually put big posters around the room of that manifest chart, and we asked you to kind of look, pose, or link through a bunch of questions in the preassignment. What we'd like you to do in your groups right now is take about 20 minutes, all right? You'll lead us driving a spokesperson again and to share your pre session thoughts on the case. All right, from what kind of noodling you did, the little notes you might have made to yourself on the case on that NASCAR chart and then reach some consensus in your group on some of the things that you kind of come up with. And you think there's a key point you'd want to make. The idea as Herb said yesterday is that in this work, it is about organization design. So if you forget or don't get the charts that the organization thinks that they're using to run the business right off the top, you're missing the boat. So that's why we start with that kind of that's the first step. We would always encourage anybody to use in a diagnostic process to take a.
Speaker B Look at what they say they have.
Speaker A Now to look at it through these set of lenses. So we're asking you to come to some consensus, and consensus, by the way, for us doesn't mean you're something you're willing to die for. So we only have so much time here. So consider how the observations will inform or affect what you want to investigate. Because it's the notion that, again, is that there's something in these charts, is what we're trying to say, that are starting to tell you something, both in terms of might be going on, what might not be going on. So what's kind of going in your head around kind of formulating a little bit of hypotheses that are going to lead you into your diagnosis? What are you going to be going to look for? So that's kind of what we're asking for here. And then we'll ask you there's flip charts around the room. So you're going to need to grab a chart for your group, record them on the flip chart, and then we'll just do a little full group take up in terms of what we found and see the similarities and differences in terms of what people were thinking about.
Speaker D Is that clear? It okay.
Speaker A So the charts are there in your books. You have the individual pages you've got for the charts. And also I think we put the wall chart in your books as well. If you feel like standing up and working on breakfast and going up to the wall and working against the wall or something like that, feel free to do that. The charts are here, the wall charts are there.
Speaker D Just stay in the group that you're in for now. It.