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- [00:01]
A
Hello, Dave here from Coaching for Leaders. I am taking a very brief pause until January 5th on airing new episodes here on the podcast, but I am not leaving you hanging in the meantime because there is so much inside our library that I keep coming back to daily. Many of our members are continually surfacing back to me, and many of you are telling me regularly that the episodes I recommend at the end of every new episode are helpful to you in new ways. And I'm bringing back a conversation to you today and also another one next week that will help you start 2026. Well, the first one you're about to hear is with Frances Fry. Frances is the author, along with her partner Anne Morris, of Move Fast and Fix Things. They were both recently recognized by Thinkers50 as two of the top management thinkers in the world. The reason I'm re airing this episode is because I'm hearing from lots of leaders in our community on the increasing challenge and and disruption of adapting to change and culture shifts. And because this conversation challenges one of those assumptions we often make that going fast is reckless and going slow is righteous. Not necessarily, as you'll hear in this conversation, for leaders who need to make change happen faster, this one's for you. This is a rebroadcast of Coaching for Leaders, episode 650 58, produced by Innovate.
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B
Learning, Maximizing Human Potential.
- [01:35]
A
Greetings to you from Orange County, California. This is Coaching for Leaders, and I'm your host, Dave Stahoviak. Leaders aren't born, they're made, and this weekly show helps you discover leadership wisdom through insightful conversations. Of course, one of the things that leaders are charged with is thinking about change, the importance of change. And we've all heard really good advice on organizational change. And one of those pieces of advice is to slow down, take your time, be deliberate. There's a time and a place for that, right? But there's also a time and a place for urgency and how quickly we move. And those aren't either ors, but they're often both and and thinking about change in a different context. I'm so glad today to have a guest with us who's going to challenge us on some of our conventional thinking about how we think about change and where we can accelerate things actually is more helpful for not only the team, but also the organization and doing the great work that we're all trying to do. I'm so pleased to introduce to you Frances Fry. She is a professor at Harvard Business School. Her research investigates how leaders create the context for organizations and individuals to thrive and by designing for excellence in strategy, operations and culture. She regularly works with companies embarking on large scale change and organizational transformation, including embracing diversity and inclusion as a lever for improved performance. In 2017, Frances served as Uber's first senior vice president of Leadership and Strategy to help the company navigate its very public crisis in leadership and culture. Her partner, Anne Morrison Hur are the authors of Uncommon Service and the Unapologetic Guide to Empowering Everyone around you. They are also the hosts of Fixable, a leadership advice podcast from the TED Audio Collective, and They're recognized by Thinkers50 as among the world's most influential business thinkers. Their newest book is Move Fast and Fix the Trusted Leader's Guide to Solving Hard Problems. Frances, what a pleasure to talk with you.
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B
Oh, it's so wonderful to be here. Thank you so much.
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A
I'm thinking about the title of the book and I was practicing before I got talking with you of like make sure you say fix things and not break things. Because of course the title's a play on this sort of now famous or infamous sign that went up in Facebook's headquarters that said move fast and break things. And I think maybe to start off making a distinction here that you really point out in your work is there is a distinction between this sort of like hustle culture that we've all seen play out in recent years and urgency. When you think about hustle culture and urgency, what does that distinction look like to you?
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B
I really like the framing and the language. So the hustle culture, the break things part, it presented a false narrative. It essentially said because you're going fast, it's okay to break things. That's just the price to pay for going fast. And that's what the hustling sort of that there'd be collateral damage. And we wish there wasn't. But that's, that's simply a byproduct of speed on the urgency side of it, which is the move fast and fix things. Collateral damage is not a byproduct. And indeed we want to be able to take care and go at the pace that the urgency of the problems that we're confronting demand. And so the hustle culture, I like to say, gave speed a bad name because it made us think we could either go fast or, or take care, one or the other. And what we show in this book is that that is a false trade off and that you can meet the urgent demands of your most pressing problems and do it very fast, but you must build trust along the way.
- [05:34]
A
And it speaks to One of the beliefs that you highlight in the book, this belief that going fast is reckless, going slow is righteous, meaningful change happens slowly. And I've probably internalized some of that belief myself and just thinking about change and how it has to work, but it isn't an either or on these things. Right? I mean, there's more complexity to this.
- [05:59]
B
There's definitely more complexity. Although I would say that far too many of us think slow is righteous, and change should take a long time, and far too many of us think fast is reckless. And so we're presenting, I guess, a third way, which is you can go just as fast as the hustlers and go righteously fast. You needn't go recklessly fast.
- [06:24]
A
We're going to talk about some of the ways to do that. But I'm curious about mindset. The mindset of a leader who is maybe going fast and thinking about, like, well, like you said, okay, I don't want there to be collateral damage, but it's going to happen versus someone who's going quickly but is much more mindful of that. What's different about their mindset?
- [06:45]
B
Well, I find the person who's going fast, recklessly is often simply uneducated. They think the only way to go fast is to have collateral damage, and they really. And the challenges they have require them to go fast. So I don't think that it's. They're bad people or have bad intentions. They simply didn't know that there was another way, and they knew going righteously slow was not an option. So I find most people are. It's a last resort, and they just. It's just the price of doing business. And so what we show is it's. It isn't the price of doing business. In fact, we show that you can go even faster when you move fast and fix things than when you move fast and break things.
- [07:35]
A
One of the things you write is the fastest way to speed up your company is to empower more people to make more decisions. Tell me more about that. What does that look like in practice?
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B
Yeah, so at first, from the mindset, it really stems from the famous quote from Toni Morrison, which I will paraphrase, once you get that power you so richly deserve, your job is to turn around and empower someone else. And so using our power, we can either make ourselves the sole decision maker that all decisions have to run through, or using our power, we can empower others to make decisions. In terms of speed, there's no comparison. It's either I am the bottleneck Or I am not the bottleneck. If decisions are being made in a distributed way, we will go 10, 100 times faster than if all decisions have to flow through me. But some people get confused about what to do with the power, and they don't use it to empower. They use it to become a command and control hub.
- [08:39]
A
There's a bunch of organizations that have really done this well and systematized some of this to really help this do better, to go better. And one of the examples you cite is Ritz Carlton. They have a really interesting practice on empowering people to make more decisions. I'm wondering if you could share, like, what they do.
- [08:58]
B
Yeah, and their mindset is ladies and gentlemen, serving ladies and gentlemen. And they, from day one of training, they're showing that and they have it's a privilege to serve mentality. And so what they say to everyone who works there is that if you stumble upon a customer issue, we want you to feel like you have license to solve it. To convince people that they meant it. They said, you may spend up to $2,000 to solve it. Now, that is an enormous amount of money. And in practice, nobody spends that much. But it is the way to get people to realize, oh my gosh, you're serious. I should solve the problem in front of me. In fact, you're giving a line item with which to do it. And it's a culture of service that's relatively unparalleled in the world. And it's because everyone has this can do spirit of come across a problem, I will solve it for you. I'm not going to call someone. I'm going to get approval and have you wait here with me while I get approval and try to explain it and then explain it to someone else. None of that happens. I am empowered to solve it. And then the stories that people have used for empowerment, they're spread around the organization as folklore, which further encourages people to really go the extra mile for guests in the act of being of service.
- [10:23]
A
And of course, like an incredibly successful organization with such a powerful brand that even if you haven't stayed there, like the Ritz Carlton brand. Right. And am I remembering that? I can't remember if this was in the book or just I thinking of this from somewhere else, but that there was some pushback from leaders in the business when this was first decided on as a policy that, well, we couldn't possibly like, give people that kind of budget. And I'm, I'm curious for someone who's thinking about giving people more authority More decision making ability, how they worked through that and what helps to nudge that along a little bit to get going in a better direction?
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B
Well, I think the $2,000 was one, reflective of the lifetime value and two, reflective of like if you had to comp a nights stay, you could. But also they trained people how to use discretion and to have service. So if you went into an organization and did nothing else but put this line item in place, you actually the concerns that, that are raised are real. People don't know how to use judgment. But if you do it as part of the training, it actually is a beautiful extension of it. But I would say don't start with $2,000. That's the price point of Ritz Carlton. Do it at $200, do it at $20, do it at $5. You will be surprised at what giving people license and then marvel at the creativity they use to solve problems real time and then the authenticity and contagion with which they talk about it. So I think that if you do it without training for it, maybe bad things can happen, although probably not that bad. But I would train for it for sure. And that's what the Ritz Carlton does.
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A
Yeah, such, such a, such good advice. There's a heading in the book that says dare to be bad at something else. And it's in the spirit of creating urgency on, moving on. What's important. Tell me what you mean about dare to be bad at something else.
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B
Yeah, it kind of sounds like a bad romance novel. So. Yeah, right. So what, what we mean is that if you want to be much better tomorrow at something than you are today, like you want to get much better at it. The resources, time, attention, money have to come from somewhere else. Physics applies. So where are you going to take the resources in order to distribute even more resources? So that's the fundamental idea, that to give more here, it doesn't come from magic, it comes from somewhere else. So what are you going to get better at? Needs to have the second half of the sentence and thus what are you going to get worse at? Now it's not worse because I'm lazy. It's worse in the service of being better. I think of the if you've ever had your house worked on with a contractor, they will have shown you some form of the impossible triangle, which is cost, quality, speed, and what they will notoriously say is pick two. That is we can't possibly be best in class relative to everyone else at cost and quality and speed. And if we try to, we're going to end up with mediocrity, what we call exhausted mediocrity. So tell us the ones you want us to emphasize and which ones you're willing to give up in order to get there. And we have countless examples of that working well. And yet, at any moment in time, listen to what managers are saying to employees. And they're essentially saying, go get better at cost, quality, and speed, as if there is nobility in the effort of trying. And what we find is there is mediocrity on the other side of that effort. And so if you want the nobility of excellence, you have to articulate what are we going to be great at? And then reverse engineer. And what does that necessarily mean? We have to give up in order to do it.
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A
Yeah. And it all makes sense, and yet it's so hard to do it.
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B
Oh, in the moment, I can say it, you know, clearly. I understand it deeply. I can describe it simply. I have a lot of humility for in the moment, we want to be better at everything. And it comes from a great place. But what also comes from a great place is people are working harder and harder, and they're becoming more and more similar to their competitors. And this is why one of the.
- [14:52]
A
Best examples of this, and you cite it in the book, is Southwest Airlines, that they're just really. In fact, there's a famous interaction Herb Kelleher, like, has with someone who gives them feedback on this. And perhaps you could share that, because I think it, like, illustrates the. The real intention behind this.
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B
Yeah, it's. So it was when someone wrote a heartfelt letter to Herb and said, listen, my elderly grandmother is switching from Southwest to another airline because you don't fly there, and will you please transfer the bags? And they don't have what's called interline transfer. And just will you make an exception for this? And instead of giving into the exception, Herb described the business model and why they couldn't do that. And the description was essentially, if we do interline transfer, we will have to slow down the turnaround time of our airplanes. And if we slow down the turnaround time, we'll have to have, he calculated, 100 more planes in our fleet. That's what the number was at the time. And if we have 100 more planes in our fleet, it will cost US, like, $400 million a year in profit. And thus we will no longer be able to be the low cost carrier. So like he explained, in order to be best in class at turnaround, we had to be worst in class at these other Service amenities. Now, the competition did it because they weren't best in class at turnaround. They had all kinds of buffer in place. They weren't competing the same way South Southwest was. But what was important, the reason you read about it, is because he then shared that letter with everyone in the organization as a educational moment, because he's like, look, you're going to be asked in very compelling ways and be tempted to say yes. And I want you to understand the cost to our system of your saying yes.
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A
Such. And of course, we now hold up Southwest as an example of doing something really, really well, which is being efficient, low cost, doing it with a wonderful culture, and there's a whole bunch of things they don't do, but they're really intentional about that. And that's a very intentional decision. And also the culture behind sharing stories like that of how that impacts timing. And speaking of timing, you highlight John Little's research on start to finish time in systems and organizations. And there's two elements of that. Work in progress and psych, or work in process rather, and cycle time. And I'm wondering if you could describe just what that is, because I think there's a larger message here on how we think about approaching that in organizations.
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B
Yeah. So the amount of time something takes is equal to the number of things that are in front of us in line and how long it takes to process each one of those things. So I often think about it. I go to the coffee store. It takes a minute to for each person to get served their coffee. I'm the 10th person in the store. So if I was the only person in the store, I would be in there for one minute. But because I'm the 10th person, I'm going to be in there for 10 minutes because each of the nine people in front of me have to get served by a minute. So my start to finish time equals the number of people work in process times, cycle times, times how long it takes to process each one. And the reason that this, that John Little's observation became a law, Little's law, inadvertently, we almost always focus on cycle time. That is, we ask people to work harder, to work faster. Implicit in that is, oh, improving cycle time must have a better effect on start to finish time than working on the work in process. But it turns out that's wrong. That if you remove work in process, you can have an orders of magnitude improvement. And getting the barista to go from 1 minute to 55 seconds or ghastly to 50 seconds, working at a breakneck speed is going to scarcely affect my scar finish time. But if I could find a way to remove work and process it by half or by three quarters, that will dramatically do it. So what we think is that work in process is working smarter and cycle time is working harder. And we instinctually try to work harder. And what we should be doing is trying to work smarter.
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A
And almost all of us do that. I'm thinking of three examples in the last 24 hours where a problem has come up and I'm thinking like, ooh, how do I get better at the cycle time, more efficient?
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B
It's our instinct. It's our instinct. So I wouldn't fight human nature, but now we want to adopt the learned behavior. Every time I think work harder, let's just pause and say, could I work smarter? I run across this when I talk to people who are coming up for promotion at the Harvard Business School. And I'll ask them, how are things going? And they're like, it's all good. Really happy with the quality of papers, but I'm not sure I'm going to have enough papers published by the time I come up for tenure. And I'm like, oh, okay, so that's a start to finish time problem in my mind. And so then I just ask them, well, why don't you just tell me about the projects you're working on? And they start listing them out and it's 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. It's comical how many projects they're working on. And so they have much too much WIP in order to get the papers done. And then I ask them, I bet when you got here, you worked nine to five, and then you started working nights and then you started working weekends. And now you've pressed all of the cycle time advantages. You can even gone too far and you're still not making any progress. So what I've taught them is what's the minimum number of projects you can do? And for the others, because academics have a very hard time saying no. I just taught them to say not now, delay it until after tenure. But if you, you have a choice, you can work on all of those interesting projects and not get tenure at the Harvard Business School, or you can work on a subset of the projects and have a very high likelihood of getting tenure. But you need to learn how to say, not now. It's working smarter, not harder.
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Yeah. How do you know that you're too fixated on cycle time? What's the indicators that are the kind of the warning signs as a leader.
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Of like, okay, quality of life is suffering. Like literally you're sacrificing lunch and then breaks and then exercise and then sleep and then relationship time and then family time. Like you're just sacrificing, sacrificing, sacrificing. And it doesn't feel like things are getting all that much better. You are pressing on cycle time. I mean, cycle time is what leads to pressing on, that is what leads to burnout in many cases. So you keep sacrificing and to getting no better. Step back and think, how can I work smarter?
- [21:22]
A
Such a great invitation. And related to this, I mean, I think about the work in progress and just the amount of things that are in queue, right. And like part of this is like, okay, how do I think about those differently? Reduce them to the minimum viable amount, as you said. And there's also an invitation in thinking about creating urgency and moving things faster of fast tracking projects and organizations that have disciplined themselves to do this better often really can move on things fast. What is, what is fast tracking projects look like culturally when an organization gets better at doing that?
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Yeah. And they have different names in organizations. The one that's a little grim but most poignant to me is when they say that they're going to ambulance the project and that is, you know, all the other cars move to the side of the road and they just to get to go through, so they get to cut in line in front of everything else. And so that's a way, way one, to fast track the things that have the most urgency. But two, to show you how fast things could be done if there wasn't all the rest of the WIP in the system. And then when you compare that to how long it usually takes, that's what you get to reflect on about the work in process. And if we go back to the impossible triangle, the number of work of projects that are in work in process, that are for things that we have we should not be getting better at is startlingly high. So there are things we're working on that are on our list and work in process that are slowing down. Other things that we have no business getting better at. In fact, we need the discipline to stay bad at them so that we can be great at other things.
- [23:02]
A
Yeah. And it's interesting that organizations that have learned to move really quickly and do it responsibly have like developed systems language for this. I mean, you cite Stripe as an example, an incredibly successful organization that's grown so quickly and they have a term for this called Code Yellow. When there's something that really is an important project that should go to the front of the line, they culturally have like name that they. Everyone knows what that means. It, it helps because you know you're going to run into that as an.
- [23:31]
B
Organization and, and it is so much better to be prepared. You just don't know when it's going to happen or on which context, but you know it's going to happen. It's important to have language for that, have culture for that, have processes for that. And Stripe is a multiple amongst the best managed organizations and they have thought of so many of these things and they use code yellow. Another organization uses ambulance. You get the ER room and the hospital sort of thoughts of this. When we need to go very fast, what is our process for doing? And other organizations, they get surprised every time there's an emergency and then they can't get their legs under them to go fast. And then very bad things happen as a result. And that's an unforced error, I would say.
- [24:18]
A
Yeah, well, speaking of unforced errors, we've all heard the good and wise advice of having healthy conflict in our organizations and we've had that conversation on the podcast many times. And I was thinking about that and I was really struck by two lines in the book you both write. We once heard a senior leader, a woman thriving at the apex of the sharp elbowed private equity industry, describe skilled conflict management as comfort with tournament play. The medieval metaphor works for us in part because of the word play. I think there's a really key message there and I'm wondering what captured your attention about that word play and how she thought. Thinks about conflict.
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Yeah, you know, if you go back to Tuesday in the book, we do call that our vernacular for that is sandbox day, where you should get in there and play. You should get in there and experiment. And so we do actually think that there is a lot of need for play at work. In this case, it's people who have played sports, particularly team sports, tend to do very well in organizations. And one of the reasons is that we're comfortable with tournament play. We've won, we've lost, we know that none are fatal. Whereas people that haven't, they think each one is life or death and they get their emotions last for decades in some cases, versus that. It's just the way in which we do things. Because competition makes ideas better, competition makes people better, competition makes companies better. Well, competition is tournament play. But when it comes to conflict, many of us don't want to have that competitive, let's go after it and make our ideas better. We would actually prefer to hit pause and isolate from it and separate from it. And our ideas don't improve in isolation, they improve in the jousting of the competitive match. And so I think that's what. And it's not life or death, nobody is dying, but we are all going to get better as a result of it. So it is play. And it does have implicit in it that competition makes us better. But you have to participate. And many of us individually and organizationally are conflict averse. And what that means is we're denying ourselves the chance to improve. And that can have pretty tragic outcomes.
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A
I'm thinking of the person listening to this who is maybe having the same thought I am of like, wow, I wish I could go back as a kid and do more team sports. And having had more of those experiences where I really developed comfort with this because I found that I've really needed to work on and strengthen that muscle over the years. And for someone who has had that experience that you describe of like, oh, I do find that I shy away from this a bit. Like when healthy conflict happens, even when I know it's good, I find myself hanging onto those emotions. I find that really difficult. When you're working with leaders who are running into those headwinds, what do you find that's helpful to just start to reframe the thinking around that a bit? Yeah.
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So I'll give you what I encourage them to do at work and what I encourage them to do outside of work. It's to realize that that conflict is something for us to be curious about so that we can learn from it. But our instinctual response to conflict is to be judgmental about it. To think we're right, they're wrong as an example, or we're moral and they're not. And so what I say is try to leave behind the judgment and replace it with curiosity. Now fortunately, if you invite in curiosity, it repels judgment. So the only thing you have to do is become curious about the conflict. Why would an otherwise good person have that opposing point of view? Treat it like a puzzle. With curiosity, you will be more than 50% of the way there. So the secret ingredient at work is curiosity. One, it helps on its own. Two, it repels judgment and that makes everything better. That's what I asked them to do at home. If you didn't play a lot of sports growing up. But you want to get like a, a quick example of, oh my gosh, competition and tournament and getting better. Take a pickleball. Pickleball should be taken up by anyone of any circumstance. You'll learn how to play it in 10 minutes everyone wants to play, and start playing it in competitive ways. You will experience being good and bad and winning and losing, and you'll start to develop these muscles that you'll realize if you practice on your own, you will not get better. And if you practice compete with others, your learning curve will skyrocket. And then marvel at it and bring it back into work.
- [29:14]
A
And the beauty of doing something like that is like once you build up that muscle in your brain a bit in one venue, then you start to naturally bring it other places too, don't you? I mean, it's just.
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B
Yeah, you can't help it, I think.
- [29:29]
A
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So cool. There's so much in this book. I mean, we're literally scratching the surface. And the book is arranged in a way that's really beautifully done. You articulate as a week. There's Monday, there's Tuesday, there's Wednesday. Going through the different stages. I mean, we're just zeroing in mostly on the conversation about Friday, like the actual execution of it. But there's so much, of course, in being mindful and thoughtful, as you've articulated in this, of going through the process. So I invite folks to, if this is of interest to you, or maybe by necessity, right now you're leading a team, you're leading an organization, and things do need to move faster. But maybe like me, you hear that word and you're like, oh, gosh, but I can't be breaking things all along the way. There is a better way to do this. What a wonderful guide this is. And Francis, I have one other question for you. You have been hosting a podcast over the last year, and I often ask people what they've changed their minds on in relation to their work. And I'm kind of curious in the context of you having started this podcast Fixable and taking questions from people all the time. As you've started doing that over the last year, what's one thing you've changed your mind on?
- [30:42]
B
Well, it's a call in show. So somebody presents their problem and we solve their problem in 30 minutes or less. And it can be a frontline employee, it can be a CEO, any size organization. I have always said meaningful change happens quickly. And when we wrote it in the book, and we wrote it for a week, people thought we were crazy. In all candor, until they started doing it. I didn't know that we were going to be able to do it in 30 minutes. So we we tried to get it down to its essence and then I thought we would only be able to solve simple problems in 30 minutes. But complicated problems would require longer. And it turns out they don't that we can get through the complexity. Complex problems don't take longer. You simply have to understand the problem as step one. And if you take the time to understand the difference between the symptom and the cause, even complicated problems you can solve very, very quickly. So I used to delineate oh, simple problems get to go on the fast track. Complicated problems have to go on the slower track. Not true.
- [31:46]
A
Francis Fry is the co author of Move Fast and Fix Things, the Trusted Leader's Guide to Solving Hard Problems. Francis, thank you so much for sharing your work with us.
- [31:55]
B
Oh, thank you for this conversation. It brought up beautiful ideas.
- [32:05]
A
Two questions I've been getting here at the end of the year. One of them is in relation to Coaching for Leaders Plus. One of our members reached out recently and said, can I give it as a gift? Turns out she has a few members of her team that already follow the podcast. If that's you, thank you so much for doing so and wanted to know if Coaching for Leaders plus can be gifted. And the answer is absolutely. If you go over to coaching for leaders.com/ and you'd like to give the gift of my weekly journal entries and our expert chats monthly and all the other benefits inside of Coaching for Leaders plus, just go over there and when you check out, there's a little button that says is this a gift? If you check it, it'll take you through that whole process. Thank you so much if you decide to do that and thanks for passing along our work as well. The second question that I've been getting is about the Academy. A number of people have reached out and asked, when does the next Academy application period open? That is going to be in 2026. And if the new year is bringing a inflection point for you, perhaps you are going into a new organization or taking on a new role or received a promotion recently. Congrats if that's you. Or maybe taking on a new team or any other inflection point you're navigating right now. The Academy is designed to help leaders thrive at key inflection points. It's an opportunity to work with me personally and a small group of peer leaders supporting each other to really thrive through those inflection points. For details, go over to coaching4leaders.com academy and there is a place there on the page where you can join our early invitation list. If you would like to know first when our applications open up in March, just go over to coaching4leaders.com academy. We will make sure that you get an invitation when they are available. Thank you so much as always for listening to the podcast. What a joy it has been to support you this year and going into next year. And I will be back with the next episode on January 5th.