B (2:51)

I love it. That's a great one for me. And this is a weird one, but I feel like in winter when it's very cold and you dress appropriately for that cold and you don't feel cold, it feels like, yes, I nailed this. Like, I. I nailed dressing myself in such a way that this frigid situation is not affecting me at all. Comparing that to summer, where I feel like at some point there's nothing you can do. Like you can't remove more clothing and little worlds he could wear. In winter, though, I feel like there's skill involved to dressing appropriately for the weather. And I, I enjoy that.

A (3:30)

This is the most Sam Sperlin answer to a check in question, which is like, I enjoy being correctly prepared for something.

B (3:39)

Yeah. I enjoy strategizing about it and then executing it and then retrospecting on how it went and getting it better next time.

A (3:47)

I love it. I love it. It's amazing. All right, what are we going to do, Sam?

B (3:53)

Yeah. So as I mentioned at the top, we are kicking off our multi part miniseries on the idea of depth. Finding a new framework from the ready for thinking about and working with the complexity of organizations.

A (4:07)

Yeah. This is something that we've been working on for almost a year and now I have so much to say that I can barely keep it inside my face. So here we are.

B (4:17)

That's a sign that you're ready to podcast about something.

A (4:20)

I'm ready to podcast.

B (4:21)

Keep it in your face. Then you put that face in front of a microphone and you capture the little letter rip.

A (4:27)

Yeah, exactly. That's what today is. And also know that there is a lot here. There's a lot of ground that we're gonna cover. And so today is meant to be the lightest, easiest, most accessible teaser. And it's Sam and my job to then let this thing unfold and really like fill in the lines of this over several episodes. Today is just to get us started and get you read in to. To our brains on this particular body of work.

B (4:56)

Beautiful.

A (4:56)

So we're going to start right with the action, right?

B (4:58)

Yeah, let's do it. Let's. I know. I think we have two kind of vignette stories, cases that we want to use as the anchor of this episode. So let's just jump right in and why don't we start with the One that you are going to talk us through.

A (5:12)

Yeah. So we've talked about strategy on this show before. We've talked about the problems with how strategy is done, that it is done as a season, that it is done as an asset, that it is done in an ivory tower, that it is not used day to day to make choices, et cetera, et cetera. And so if we start to think about this through a depth finding lens, we stop saying maybe what's in the PowerPoint deck isn't perfect or we didn't make the right exact asset and we start to think about what is really going on. So in my example, the cross functional challenge that we will articulate is strategy is not effective in steering an organization. And the reason I think this is important is because generally setting strategy is the leadership team's most important work. And a lot of leaders we talk to feel like their strategy is very clear and they don't understand why it isn't executed. They. They don't understand why it isn't crystal clear to everybody in the organization and they feel a level of frustration that's like all I do is talk about this. All we do is push comms about this. Why doesn't anybody do anything? And so now I have to tell you a little bit about the depths. We've been sort of like sideways at this for a while. So some of you probably have already put this puzzle together.

B (6:37)

But if we've been dropping clues the past few episodes, we'll reference Twilight Zone or Midnight stuff. Now it's gonn all come together for.

A (6:46)

All the org design detectives. So here's how the framework looks and there will be a link in the show notes so that you can see this because this is a visual framework. Let's start at the top. We have the sky. That's the top. What happens in the sky is the external why for what's happening in your organization. This is the weather. This is the threats and the opportunities that you're meant to be responding to. The surface layer of our depths is the sunshine Zone. This is where we have clarified assets like your strategy deck, like your org chart, like your job description. Anything that I could see from the outside or from inside the organization that is clear and written down sits in the sunshine zone. By the way, these are real oceanographic terms. Sam and I did not make these up. The next depth of the ocean is the Twilight Zone. Twilight Zone is a very murky and very deep zone of the ocean. This is your how. This is where teams are actually hands on keyboards Executing. This is where we have routines, experimentation, ways of working, et cetera, et cetera. The bottom of the ocean is the Midnight Zone. This zone is invisible. And this is the internal why. This is the individual's lived experience of what is going on above. When we think about strategy, what I usually see is a bunch of Sunshine Zone work. A bunch of let's make the bullet points, let's make the assets. And then we usually see a lot of stuff in the Midnight Zone. There's then a lot of unspoken feelings and reactions that people have which range from we don't know how to do this. I don't have the capability to do this. I don't have the resources to do this. Everything in this strategy deck is net new. I already have a full time job. I don't see myself in this strategy. I don't see my team in this strategy. Does that mean that I'm getting fired or I'm getting sidelined or whatever? And we're missing in this scenario the other two zones. So we're missing the sky. What is this strategy really? Clearly in response to what is the strategic challenge that we are answering and most importantly, we're missing the whole Twilight Zone of how it is actually going to get done. And we're going to talk a lot about what those routines can be. We've talked about them in the past. The reason that we start here is because I've never shown this before and after of the depth finding framework around strategy to a leader who hasn't said that's us, not yet one time, including Sam and I showing it in front of about 300 people, none of whom goes, it doesn't seem familiar. So we start with this one because it's very easily accessible and because our argument is the problem with your strategy isn't the strategy. The problem with your strategy is that it lives at one depth and it gets reacted to at another depth. And we need to be working across all four.

B (9:35)

Yeah, I love that. And just to push a little bit on it, I think what you're not saying is that the Sunshine Zone doesn't matter. Of course, more so that probably over invested in the Sunshine Zone or at the very least underinvested in figuring out what's going on in the Twilight Zone and maybe being deliberate about the stuff that shows up in the Twilight Zone to support Sunshine Zone and Midnight Zone below it.

A (10:03)

That's exactly right. And that often what we find is if people feel like they have an issue with something clear and explicit like a strategy, they think that the way to respond to that issue is more Sunshine Zone stuff.

B (10:20)

So they're like, get clearer on the artifacts, clearer on the stuff that we can already see, clearer on the comms.

A (10:26)

That's it. Nobody did the strategy, so now we need a plan. Nobody did the metrics, so now we need a roadmap. Nobody understands the words, so now we need a comms plan. And it's like, actually, you cannot solve a problem created at that depth in the same depth. You gotta look somewhere else. So that's the easiest primer and we're going to get further into what all of this looks like. Most of our work is in the Twilight Zone, figuring out the habits and routines that deal with the other three zones.

B (10:59)

Yeah. That's part of what I really like about this framework is that it's not very clearly not throwing out the nine years of bathwater and baby that the Ready has created over nearly a decade. And it is, I think, quite complementary and builds on stuff that we've already been doing, like the OS canvas. The operating system is deep Twilight Zone stuff predominantly. There are aspects of midnight and sunshine and sky in that as well. But I think we are kind of pushing the Twilight Zone forward in a more understandable way with the depth finding stuff.

A (11:39)

I hope so. The idea here to me is like, give people the easiest, most accessible way to understand complexity and solve complex problems without ever having to explain really what complexity is.

B (11:55)

Yeah. And all the org design practitioners like us who are listening to this podcast that probably maybe they just gasped a little bit because we love talking about.

A (12:03)

We love it so much. I know.

B (12:05)

But in many cases it doesn't translate or turn into useful information that somebody who doesn't give a shit about complexity science can actually do something with which.

A (12:19)

We'Ve learned as most leaders.

B (12:20)

Yes.

A (12:21)

Yeah. Turns out most of them don't care about systems thinking, but we need them to be systems thinkers. So this is the way that we make it really, really easy to do that.

B (12:34)

Yeah.

A (12:34)

So, Sam, why don't you tell us about your example, which I'm actually not really familiar with. But what's fun about this framework is that people have just taken it and started using it without any priming or teaching or coaching, both at the ready and in our clients, which to me is generally the mark of something that is pretty diy that people are just like, got it. Bye. So Sam is one of those people, which is exciting. So I want to hear what you did.

B (13:01)

Yeah. And this is like a story that is like just starting. And I don't know where it's going to end. Like, what I don't have here is like, here's what I did. And we had this beginning part and this middle part and this really satisfying end. Basically I have the beginning and the sense that it's going to turn into an interesting ongoing piece of work. So the example that I have been working with, and this is in the context of a one on one coaching relationship with a senior leader in an organization and the people in her team, she's bringing them together kind of for the first time as a leadership team. And the question that they have been needing to wrestle with is like, what are we actually here to do? Basically they need to kind of raise their gaze around what is happening in the organization. They should not be coming together and just being hyper tactical on the work of the team that may be part of it. But there's likely to be conversations that are worth having that are at a different level. So I brought out the depth finding visual and we started talking about, well, perhaps we can use this to start to put some guardrails or some guidance around what is this team actually here to do? And in the parlance of the framework, I think the new direct reports were very much in the sunshine zone. Like what are the visible pieces of work that are going on? And basically all three of the other depths were just not on their radar at all. So we're starting to have a conversation now. All right. If you're bringing this team together on a weekly basis for an hour, maybe there's a rhythm of giving each depth its own specific time to like really understand. Like today we're going to like really go into the sky and figure out like what aspects of the sky are really affecting us. And since it's an internal facing team, in many ways, the sky, the way we've been talking about it is, yes, stuff external to the organization, but also just external to the team. The sky of other things happening in the organization.

A (15:08)

Everybody's sky is different. For a lot of internal functions, their sky is still internal. Yeah, yeah, that's exactly it.

B (15:15)

I'm glad to hear that I didn't break the framework by you're doing great, you're doing great. I appreciate it. And then Twilight Zone stuff, which definitely feels like the ready sweet spot as we already talked about. But this leadership team has the responsibility to help build a operating system, a framework, a way of working that amplifies the whole organization, the whole team. So what's, you know, all the classic Twilight Zone things that we can be talking about as a leadership team. And then the midnight zone is really interesting for them to be thinking about in terms of what is their own midnight zone stuff going on as new leaders and also what are the midnight zone things going on for the rest of the people in the team that they are leading and being aware of those things and having perhaps some tools in your tool belt to support people in those things while not kind of falling into the team's therapist role.

A (16:14)

Yes.

B (16:14)

Yeah. So really this is the very early stages of a new leadership team using depth finding to articulate their own purpose and their own shared work as a team.

A (16:28)

I love that. And you know, there's actually, I think, a lot of parallels to the strategy example that I gave because, you know, one leadership team in particular that I'm thinking of, when we realized that their strategy work was all sunshine at midnight, we had a discussion about whether to do sky work first. To be like, let's really nail the strategic challenge and let's do more scenario planning and landscape analysis and red teaming, whatever, or whether to get at some more routines. And they chose routines. They were like, you know what, we are so new to actually doing strategy in this way that's more adaptive and more written in pencil and more in a feedback loop with the environment. Let's just like learn the routines. So like, let's learn about all the things we talk about in our strategy pancakes. Like let's learn about what a rhythm of strategy is that includes outcomes and even overs and essential intents and whatever. Let's do that first. And once we sort of have that, let's see if the midnight zone stuff starts to get better. They were basically like, we're so sort of frozen in the midnight zone because we're so worried about whether the declaration in the sunshine zone is wrong or is risky or is executable or whatever. Let's see if we can get enough routines in place that some of that starts to chill out a little bit. Because we're gonna be able to do the sky work better if we can show up to it with some psych safety, with some flexibility, with some creativity. If we're all sort of like hand wringing and pearl clutching in the midnight zone, we probably aren't going to be able to do that work well. Anyway, I say this not as a prescription, but because I think to your point, the purpose of the framework is not you need to fill in all of these levels perfectly. The purpose is to understand where you're over invested and underinvested and what you're going to do about it, basically, and not just be like, we have one move. We're going to keep making that move and hope that it works differently. And instead understand that if it's not working in one place, the cause is somewhere else.

B (18:40)

Yeah. The other thing that I'm excited to do with the framework is probably, I would imagine, starting with like a Sunshine Zone thing and then taking the vertical slice of that Sunshine Zone thing. So here's a thing that you think is or is not working super great. Well. Okay. Is it connected in any logical way to the sky? Maybe, maybe not. But if that link is broken, we're probably experiencing some symptoms. Cool. Let's go down now. So into the Twilight Zone. Is there any supporting structure for this thing or what supporting structure do we have? Maybe we accidentally made some. Maybe we have some that we actually deliberately made. But let's understand what Twilight Zone stuff is directly connected to this Sunshine Zone thing that we think is important and get clear about what's working and not working there. And then going one level deeper. Well, what are the Midnight Zone things that we hypothesize or know for a fact are going on for people that that is radiating up throughout. And is there any connection between what is actually happening in the Midnight Zone to how we are addressing that in Twilight? I think there's a lot of interesting stuff to be done in the future. Really being explicit about how these things are connected and seeing where they have broken and where there are broken connections. I think there's work to be done.

A (19:59)

I think it's exactly right. And I think that to your point about the Sunshine Zone, if you take something like compensation as a really easy example, as a really easy thin slice that you can run all the way down, usually there's something in the Sunshine Zone that's like, this is our compensation philosophy and these are our pay bands. And it's usually in response to the market to stay competitive with talent. That's your sky. Usually there's very little in the Twilight Zone. Like, it's just like you get told what you're getting paid and then you get paid it. But there's usually not a place for, like, sense making and understanding, both with the people who are compensated and with the people who are making decisions. And then it's like rife with Midnight Zone stuff.

B (20:40)

Right.

A (20:40)

And people show up in the Twilight Zone at meetings, at their performance reviews, at salary negotiations, at internal positions that they are interviewing for with, like their comp acts to grind unspoken. And so it's like, okay, well, what are the routines that we could start to use in the Twilight Zone to alleviate some of that specifically? So that to your point, we're not trying to triage every single person's beef with their comp and instead we are creating clarity and forums and formats for why we made these choices for what the trade offs were so that people can do their own Midnight Zone work. To be like, well, this is not for me. Or to be like, oh, that actually makes a lot of sense or whatever. It's like.

B (21:25)

Or even like, I disagree together, but okay, like, I don't think.

A (21:29)

But it's clearly not going to change.

B (21:30)

Yeah. And like, and I either can or can't live with that if I can't.

A (21:33)

Exactly.

B (21:34)

Good for me to know. Let's find something else to do. I can live with it. Okay, then like, let's carry on. I mean, the goal is not that the Midnight Zone completely disappears and Everybody is stoked 100% of the time.

A (21:46)

Of course.

B (21:47)

Talk about unrealistic expectations.

A (21:50)

Of course. I think that's exactly it. So this was a super quick primer. We're going to get into so many more examples and how we hope you can use this. But hopefully this gave you an initial sense of the framework. Jack can post a strategy before and after that basically shows the case that I described. And we'll also post just a blank template so that you can start to use and understand this. I think where I wanted to just like go from here, Sam, is a little bit of just what we've learned so far. So from having these kinds of conversations both internally and with your clients, what are some things that you've noticed?

B (22:30)

Yeah, I mean, I feel like I kind of want to sit at your feet here because I know you've had so many conversations with folks about this and I'm kind of still new to the journey. But the main thing that I've noticed is that when you put this visual in front of people and give a just a small modicum of explanation as to what people are looking at, people like, oh, okay, yeah, I can see this. I can see what is helpful here. And that contrasts to my experience of putting a blank OS canvas in front of people. Where I'm like, here are 12 fields that encapsulate everything about your organization. You'll notice that it's empty because it can be. You know, this is value. There's. We're not putting any sort of value on what these fields. Like, there's a lot of explanation that I find myself having to do around the OS canvas. Once you've done that, there's a great conversation to have about how fields influence each other and like what's going on within them. And making a heat map, like, that's all very cool, but it feels like a bigger lift to initially get into having useful conversation as compared to depth finding where it's like here, you know, four layers that have very distinct kind of definitions. Let's talk about it.

A (23:39)

Yeah. My primary insight that's been really surprising is I think because of the kind of work we do and because a lot of folks that already have training in coaching or psychology or family systems therapy or whatever, I don't see the Midnight Zone as being something unconsidered. So like, I know that it's invisible. I know I'll never understand your lived experiences and why you react to the way that you do to things and what exactly is going on for you emotionally. But my assumption is that it's stuff. My assumption is that you are having it's stuff there a lived experience you.

B (24:18)

Are not devoid of a personal experience.

A (24:21)

Exactly. That I cannot understand. So my assumption when we made this framework was like helping people see what's missing in the Twilight Zone and that that is where you close the gap between strategy and execution. Is the killer app. And what I found through dozens, or maybe now a hundred conversations is Midnight Zone is the killer app. Because giving people even just that label for what the fuck is going on. Just even when I have done this as a talk in places, how quickly a team goes to, you know, I think there's more Midnight Zone stuff here than we realize. Or like I'm realizing that my own Midnight Zone stuff is showing up. They don't have to say what it is. That's not really the point. The point is that they're able to name this invisible, opaque swath of really important data without actually excavating it in a way that they're unwilling to do. And it is really often the thing that is preventing everything above from doing a fucking check in round to having a clarified strategy, to adapting to an external disruption. Often the problem is Midnight Zone stuff and we just tend to not talk about it except in a therapeutic way, which is not always super useful in a systems context.

B (25:44)

That is so true that being able to just use the phrase Midnight Zone stuff to name a whole body of feelings and emotions that in certain contexts are probably useful, maybe a therapy context to name those specific things. But in a lot of work contexts, just naming the fact that there are these things Going on for us without getting specific is, I think, is really powerful because once we've named it, we can honor it. We know we are honoring the fact that there are things here. And also, this is not the time or space. I do not have the skills or the experience to really dig into it. But it's still there. We're not pretending like it doesn't exist, which I think is the default when you don't have something like the phrase Midnight Zone to use.

A (26:34)

Yeah. And we're not trying to manage people out of it. We're not just saying, write more sticky notes in the retro, or speak up more in meetings or be more. Not like who you are. Because we're like, okay, there's stuff going on for you. It's informing how you show up in the Twilight Zone. Got it. And from there, I think that my other really big takeaway from doing these conversations and showing people the way that I've been doing this out in the world is like, I've been talking to, like, board members, CEOs, chiefs of staff, VPs of large organizations. And I just start with the prompt, what's the hardest problem that you're trying to solve right now? And they explain it to me, and I fill in the framework without showing it to them, and I show it to them. And then I go, what do you notice here? And really quickly, just the awareness of what is going on shifts something about it. And I think that, like a lot of consulting in the world, not just trad consulting, we definitely fall into this too, because this is what clients want. Everybody just wants to know what we're going to do about it. What is the action or the activity that is going to fix this. And it's like, you can't solve a problem. You can't see. And what we usually find. What I'm finding in these conversations is just people understanding what the fuck is going on. They are walking away from that conversation, going, here's what I'm going to do. And it's not what I thought I was going to do. And that to me was really surprising and was really interesting. And, you know, we'll talk about this case some other time. But in one instance, we realized that, like, this person was really dealing with her own. A lot of very profound Midnight Zone stuff, was really trying to solve it in a very Twilight Zone way. And there was nothing that had been articulated in the Sunshine Zone, period. And that actually, that was the problem. And she kind of walked away being like, I'm just gonna go. And like, Write this down and get consent and share it publicly. That might actually be the thing. And I was like, go get it. Let's find out. You know what I mean? So it's like the inversion here that we're trying to create is moving from a very surface level understanding of what's wrong and hopping immediately to action or experimentation to a more nuanced understanding so that you can make less effortful change.

B (29:04)

Right? Yeah, I love that because I feel like our experience of organizational change over the last, you know, nine plus years is that it's kind of been a, a move of like, if you just experiment enough, eventually the right thing will emerge. And in some cases you get great outcomes from that. Like just starting to change the things that very obviously suck creates interesting momentum and things have a tendency to get better. And sometimes you never really get to that tipping point. And it's just kind of the uncharitable feeling of it is thrash. Like you just, you're just kind of thrashing in various directions trying to do useful experiments. And I think depth finding could bring a little bit more cohesiveness, a little bit more coherence to what experimentation within an organization could, could look like.

A (30:00)

Yeah, I think so too. I think the one other thing that I've noticed because a lot of you out there have said to us over the years, like, I just can't get my leadership team to see that working on the organization is important. And like a lot of our listeners are org designers, a lot of you do work that is like what we do. And there is a little bit of like a seeing the Matrix thing in our work and for a lot of very valid reasons. I think a lot of people who ascend to very senior leadership positions have been very in their content. Like they're the best salesperson, they're the best finance person, they're the best market, they're the best technically at what they do. And their job hasn't been to understand the organization around them in a nuanced way. And just going back to the beginning of this conversation, nobody wants to do graduate level complexity science work in order to do so. But what I'm finding, and I had a really interesting conversation with a CEO where I showed her this and she immediately said to me, well, what goes in the Twilight Zone? And I was like, well, based on your issue, I think it is this different way of making decisions. I think it's this different way of communicating with board members. I think it's X, Y and Z. And she was just like, well, can you send me stuff because I don't have that. I don't have anything there. And so it's like it's a different world way of engaging people. That's not like your habits are wrong, your ways of working are inherited. You're borked. It's like, look, here's how to see what's missing in a way that doesn't feel squishy or doesn't feel like extracurricular. It's like it's all one thing. There's just depths to the one thing. And you can't just do anything that is complex in nature at one depth and expect it to work. You can't just do coaching on individuals and expect it to change. You can't just buy analysis from a strategy company and expect something to change. You can't just do one thing and expect anything to happen. And that's, to me, what will help leaders start to get themselves moving the way that they want to.

B (32:15)

Yeah, that's really cool. I think it's one last thought since we're kind of at the end of the year and I've been doing kind of my own personal reflections. You know, don't call them resolutions, but kind of resolutions, but just like being deliberate about. All right, like, what do I want to do differently next year? I think this depth finding works even on an individual level too. Like, I've literally scheduled into my calendar over the past couple of weeks sky time. And that's just like where I'm going to get smarter about what's going on in the world. And what are the. The sunshine zone things that I really care about making happen for myself in 2025. And then what do I. What support structures do I need to be able to do that? And then, you know, what's my midnight zone? Stuff that's either motivating me or making me afraid or making me avoidant of these various things that I want. So, you know, I think a sign that this is touching on something true to complexity is that it seems to work across like every size of unit that could potentially do something with it. From the individual to doing depth finding as an entire organization to as a team. That fractal nature of it I find very satisfying as a complexity nerd.

A (33:26)

Sweet. I love it. So, Sam, that felt like a lot of information. A deep dive, if you will, in a relatively short episode. Hey, she's here.

B (33:39)

That's three, though. We too many.

A (33:42)

It's my show and I'll do what I want, so stick with us for the journey. We are going to give you guys so many practical tools to use. This is the place for leaders to understand their orgs, for you to to help your leaders see through the matrix. And we are going to steer too as we hear from you. So you know, tell us what you want more and less of. And nothing is carved in a stone tablet just yet. So we're also going to be flexing along the way to make this maximally useful for everybody out there.

B (34:12)

Hell yeah. All right, let's wrap this episode here, the first in our miniseries about this new framework. Future episodes we're going to get even deeper into what depth finding is and how you can use it. So here's our ask of you though, and this is a little bit different than how we normally close an episode. Take a look at the Depth Finding visual linked in the show notes and email us the answer to this question. What zone is your team over investing in? Send it to depth finding theready.com if.

A (34:47)

We get more than 10 responses, Sam and I will share how it breaks down on the show. Yes, the music for this miniseries is Yaga Dang by BG and Coyote Radio. Our show is produced by Jack Van Amberg who truly it wouldn't be possible without you Jack and engineered by Taylor Marvin. Our team at the ready makes it all happen by helping companies solve their biggest problems out there so that we can share stories right here. Thanks so much for listening.