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Chief Change Officer
#406 Richard Carson: Diagnosing Dysfunction, One Broken System at a Time — Part Two
00:25:06
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- [00:13]
Vince Chen
Hi everyone. Welcome to our show. Chief Change Officer, I'm Vince Chen, your ambitious human host. Our show is a modernist community for change. Progressives in organizational and human transformation from around the world. Today's guest is Richard Carson, consultant, strategist and a guide who once walked away from a government job to join the consultants he just hired. In this two part series we talk about what happens when organizations try to change but forget about people. Ratchet shares what most consultants get wrong, why empathy isn't optional.
- [01:24]
Richard Carson
Empathy.
- [01:24]
Vince Chen
And how a terrible time tracking system Inspired his now 39 step change model. It's practical, honest and filled with stories you won't forget. Let's get started. So back to your model is people sustained. So while it includes the classic three stages, you've also built in several other steps and actions. What are they? Can you walk us through those? How do they come together in your model?
- [02:14]
Richard Carson
I'll go through the 10 steps, basically first steps. Number one is first steps, problem identification, scoping out the problem. Second is there's a kickoff that explains the program, the process, everybody in the organization. So you don't just send out an email, you sit down with each of the organizations, work in groups and answer their take them through the process and get their buy in. Get them to understand that change can be difficult but they will be part of the process and will have input all through the process. Then there's data collection and assessment. This is probably the most boring part because you end up reading a lot of annual reports, a lot of statistical analysis, media press information, anything that's written or data driven. Then you go out to the stakeholders and meet with the individual stakeholders, whether they're vendors, consumers, whatever, however they touch the organization, you get get that feedback. Then you go next into the actual organizational change. And I won't go through that in detail, but that's the diagnostic portioning of the model. And what I ended up doing was I ended up using diagnostic model by the National Institute of Health which was a medical diagnosis process. And what I found was that organizations and people are remarkably the same in terms of their ailments and symptoms and how you can diagnose them because organizations are made up of people. And so that I've used that diagnostic model. Then you implement the change, there's process mapping, re engineering, then you lock in change. There's a number of ways to lock the change in, from executive leadership coaching to staff training, tqm, things like that. And then finally is to you maintain the model. And that's like I said, you can do that through multi year strategic plans and budgeting primarily. But you also need a feedback loop that constantly goes back on an annual basis and kind of looks at the benchmarks that you set to see if you are achieving those and why not.
- [04:59]
Vince Chen
So when did you publish your book? The reason I asked about the timing is since the book came out have you had a chance to apply your new model? Perhaps have you received some of the recommendations from your clients? I'd love to hear how your new model played out in real life. Any results or experiences you can share.
- [05:28]
Richard Carson
Published it in spring of 23.
- [05:32]
Vince Chen
Okay.
- [05:33]
Richard Carson
Oh, it's a little over a year old. I have used it in one example I gave that I gave you was the Southern California county government in which I applied all those steps in the process. And it was really interesting in terms of you know what Basically the board of county commissioners told me in terms of that people weren't the performance levels went where they wanted them to be and that they thought that staff had a bad attitude and it was numbered things. The interesting thing I found out was from talking to the staff was the manager who ran the entire organization group was a micromanager and he had. He was using a time sharing, not time sharing time management software and he was actually having people report their activities in 15 minute increments. So they were spending more time reporting what they were doing than doing would know it was. That's how bad it was. And I once I found that out it was really hard to believe but that was. And he was really enforcing that. So everybody was like every 15 minutes they were basically stopping saying I just did this in this way. And then basically they just cheered up half the time that they needed to do the actual task. It given that it's the Christmas season, it's kind of like in the movie Miracle on 34th Street. The guy who was a time management expert who was driving everybody crazy. That's exactly what happened Coming out of the years of kind of Henry Ford was I guess it was the Hawthorne experiment. That was it. They did a study and they found that people changed their behavior by you watching them do their behavior. But yeah, there was a great deal of time and money and stock put into the idea that you could manage if you could only manage people's time better then you would make more profit. Unfortunately you got taken to an extreme where there was no it isn't like a lot of today's philosophy were there's a lot more stock put in creativity where you don't basic time management said look I don't want you to think. I just want you to do what I tell you to do over and over and over and over again. And business has evolved a great deal since then where people are given a lot more latitude to do things on their own that might actually be efficient.
- [08:28]
Vince Chen
Have you received any feedback so far from your clients on the model? I'm curious. Not just about what they say, but also your own reflections. After publishing the book and spending so much time developing everything, did anything surprise you once you started applying it? Any part of the model that worked differently than expected or something you've seen refined as you go?
- [09:05]
Richard Carson
I think that the one thing that I am most focused on right now is artificial intelligence. That is a. It's such a huge game changer. When I was a boy, I used to read High Line, Bradbury, asmov who talked about such things, but it was back then it was science fiction. It is such a sea change that it's almost unfathomable to determine what the changes will be in the workplace. There are some predictions by, say, the United nations that unemployment could shoot to 80%. And certainly for a lot of service sector jobs, that's already starting to happen. And you go to McDonald's or Taco Bell or whatever you're already having to order from a kiosk or online. That's the one that I've been spending a lot of time thinking about, reading, researching, because I think that's going to be the most significant change since COVID Covid. If you think about what you know, besides the fact that we 7 million people died in Covid, it basically made Amazon and now Amazon has one of the world's largest fleet services in terms of delivery. It totally changed how people think. Instead of going to the store and buying something. If you look at stores like Macy's were struggling because no one goes to their stores anymore. The malls are struggling because people don't go there. So what Covid did to the retail industry, I think AI is something that I'm still trying to get my head around in terms of what it's going to do to organizations and how organizations will cope with that change.
- [11:06]
Vince Chen
I'm not talking about macro trends like AI or climate change, but more specifically such as feedback from others and your own takeaways from using the model in practice. So after you published your book and started applying your own model, I'm curious, have your clients or the people you work with given you any feedback on it? That's one part. The other part is about your own Reflection. When you actually applied the model in real cases, did anything shift for you? Maybe you gained new insights or maybe it confirmed what you originally believed.
- [12:00]
Richard Carson
I haven't got a lot of, I haven't really got a lot of feedback from folks about the book that wouldn't have me change much of it. Basically, before I wrote the book, I sat down and talked to a number of people who were consultants and academics, people who had written their own books and developed their own models and spent a lot of time trying to work through the process, you know, with them. It's like I even talked to the author of the Black Swan. So I, for that part, I was very comfortable with kind of the model the way it is in terms of working with it. I really haven't found anything that I would really change at this point. I think the model is, was designed so it is one comprehensive, but you can use it in pieces, parts, stages. You don't have to take all 39 steps to go through what you need in terms of change management. Your particular issue or situation may only deal with a kind of a more narrow focus in terms of say, human might be a human resource issue, might be a production issue. So it allows you to take that, those kind of bites and apply those to your situation. I don't really expect that everybody's going to start with step one through 39 and take everything I have there as gospel and try to synthesize it and implement it Like I'm about a year and a half into the book's publication. I haven't really come up with any major changes. I'm really thinking about what, what's going to happen next. And I just briefly touched on the Trump Musk situation. That'll be very interesting. That'll be a grand exercise in change management. But there's a lot of external factors like Covid was in the past, like I said, you know, in the future. Those are the things I'm looking towards in terms of how to deal with those issues.
- [14:26]
Vince Chen
So Covid as a disease might be behind us, but how we handle health crisis, that's not in the past. We never know what might happen in the future. And the way we prepared or respond still really matters.
- [14:49]
Richard Carson
Yeah, I totally agree. Covid was a wake up call. We could face something much, much worse. I remember the early days of COVID before they had that vaccine. And it was truly scary how individual governments reacted to it differently. For my part, I thought it was frightening and it could. It certainly will probably happen again, especially given that the world is Transportation wise is so global now that you look at what happened originally with hiv, with AIDS was fairly limited because of the transportation was not what it is under Covid. And if, if it happens, something's going to happen again and hopefully we learn our lesson.
- [15:46]
Vince Chen
You've studied so many change models and you are an expert in this space, but outside of your professional work, how have you applied those ideas in your own life or maybe help someone close to you, such as a friend, a family member, a colleague, navigate change using what you know from organizational models? I think that would be a great way to conclude this interview to show that you don't just study change, you live it.
- [16:32]
Richard Carson
Like I said at the very beginning, in terms of my own philosophy, in terms of cartridge was always to go with change and not have a plan fixed in my mind. And when a change occurred that I considered to be an opportunity, then I went with that. And I didn't really follow some kind of long term plan that I wanted. This is what I want to be when I grow up. So I think that's part of it. I think the other thing is it's very important is to learn from your mistakes. I think John F. Kennedy basically said that after the Bay of Pigs was the important thing is to learn from your mistakes and to take that to heart. We all make mistakes. And especially when it comes to working experiences, whether it's something that happens to you or somebody else, is to really learn from that and not have the attitude that we've always done it this way because things. I think you become a better person when you really look at your own life, your own experiences and make decisions, changes for the good. And I've done that. I think part of it is when I moved from working in the, in a business, business or public sector and a working environment as a manager and deciding to go into Consulting after 30 years and to go back to college and do doctorate work. I know when I went to work the organization I was in, I went to them and said, look, I'm going to, I'm really interested in this. I'm going to go back to go to college and get a work work to get my doctorate studies in this. And basically he said no, you're not going to do that. So I said okay, I quit and I went into consulting with this company and learned from them through performance on it, a form of organizational change management. So that's my personal evolution in terms of making changes, embracing changes.
- [18:51]
Vince Chen
Honestly, I've met a lot of people, for instance in the education, technology, Space where I was very active before COVID I've spoken to many entrepreneurs who created new ventures and solutions, especially those focused on helping companies train and upskill their staff. So I asked them, okay, you are building these tools, you are the champion of learning and development, but what about your own team? How do you invest in your own people? Most of the time they either didn't expect the question or they said something like this. Oh, good point. We haven't really done much internally yet. We've been focused on the product and on serving clients. That's where I start to see the gap. You talk the talk selling solutions for upskilling, but you are not walking the walk inside your own organization. That kind of discrepancy always tells me something important about the founder or the culture.
- [20:19]
Richard Carson
I think one thing that's really important in a manager in a change management process is to have empathy. A lot of managers don't have empathy. They're very clinical about the business approach. Since organizations consist of people. I've always found that it really is important to listen to what people are telling you on a day to day basis. As a consultant, as a manager, or even as a colleague is to actually listen to what people are saying. A lot of times people don't listen. They talk over you, they talk at you, but they're not listening and they're not processing what you're saying. So I think that is a really important attribute in any manager or any process is to have empathy for the people involved in.
- [21:16]
Vince Chen
Empathy isn't just for managers, is a basic human skill. But honestly we are wired to be self centered. So even if a leader has a good degree of empathy, showing it in decisions is tough. Why? Because incentives drive behavior. I studied accounting and economics, I believe that and right now leaders and CEOs are paid based on numbers such as revenue growth rate, stock price, not how people feel. If empathy culture or staff well being were tied to the bonus, you will see a big shift. But until then, there's a gap between what we say matters and what actually drives action.
- [22:22]
Richard Carson
Granted, people don't get paid by some measurement of their empathy. But if you really want to be successful as a manager, you need to listen to other people's opinions besides your own. And a lot of people, let's just say some managers basically come from a position of I'm the manager, I'm the boss, I know everything you don't. But if you want to surround yourself with a bunch of yes men and women, yeah, that's fine, but you're not going to learn anything and you're going to believe that you know everything. And so a level of empathy is really the ability to listen because you might learn something that will save your job. My most difficult times have been dealing with engineers or economists in terms of how they think. They're not exactly outside of the box people for the most part. And I had a job once where I was had put together a report and I hired five economists. They almost drove me crazy because there was no empathy at all. Certain jobs come with certain skill sets, let's put it that way. Empathy is a must. Make a habit of actually listening to what people tell you. Advice I ever got was from my wife who at one point said, look, I don't want your advice, I want you to listen to me.
- [24:04]
Vince Chen
And that's the end for our two part series. If you thought change was about tools and templates, Richard, just flip that. It's about trust, timing and knowing when to stop talking. If you are in the business of moving people, not just systems, his advice is worth returning to. Thank you so much for joining us today. If you like what you heard, don't forget, subscribe to our show. Leave us top rated reviews, check out our website and follow me on social media. I'm this Chan, your ambitious human host. Until next time, take care.