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Embracing Digital Transformation
Embracing Change: How to Stay Relevant and Avoid Obsolescence
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Or something like that. And that seems so far away from filling out forms and doing tax declarations or whatever you end up doing in your job. But that's the reality. And when you reconnect with that, that miracle, you suddenly realize, wow, I'm going to go and create the best podcast episode ever because I want people to hear this message.
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Welcome to Embracing Digital Transformation, where we explore how people process policy and technology. Dr. Effective change. This is Dr. Darin, Chief Enterprise architect, educator, author, and most importantly, your host on this episode. Embracing how to stay relevant and avoid obsolescence with change expert Alistair Frost, a motivational speaker and author of Ready Already. Alistair, welcome to the show.
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A
Well, thank you for having me. I'm looking forward to talking about change and obsolescence and all those things.
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B
Oh, it's going to be a killer show. I can already tell. But before we get started, everyone that listens to my show knows that I only have superheroes on my show. And every superhero has a background story, an origin story. So, Alistair, what's your origin story?
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A
Oh, my word, my origin story. Well, it's quite. I started off I wanted to be a marketing guy. I wanted to make adverts. That's what I always dreamt of doing. And I learned that at university. And I joined a company called Kimberly Clark and they make bathroom tissue, as you may call it, or toilet tissue over here in the uk and Kleenex and Huggies and, you know, lots of products like that. And that was, that was a wonderful time. And, and then I, I did the. Armed with all this deep, intense knowledge of, of manufacturing and grocery distribution, so on, I did the most logical thing I could think of and I joined Microsoft in the technology sector. And to this day, I think I'm probably the only person who's ever attempted to go from soft toilet tissue to software. It was one hell of a learning curve. It made me who I am. I think it gave me the resiliency that. Because I really had to dig in to make sense of the tech sector and go through that transformation.
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B
Well, that's quite a big change because you went from highly commoditized manufacturing, right? I mean, you actually manufacture something real to Microsoft, where you produce one product and it's distributed everywhere easily. So that's a very different model. And even the marketing, the marketing's gotta be completely different.
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A
Well, it was interesting. I was brought in at the time when Microsoft really was shifting from frankly, just taking orders, people were throwing money at it, to there being real competition. And they were starting to have to make orders. And so it needed to learn about this thing called marketing. What is that? How do you do it? I know many would argue Microsoft to this day has not quite got its head around it, but Microsoft at the time brought in a number of people like me from industry to bring a different perspective and just show it how to build brands, how to run campaigns, how to manage things in a different way. So it's really interesting time to join the organization, but boy, yeah, it's very different. But the fundamentals of understanding your audience and doing what's right for them are the same. They're universal.
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B
Well, that's really. Do you think that that kind of shaped who you are today as kind of a change evangelist? Because you had to do that in a very large company with a lot of money and a lot of culture. That kind of.
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A
It must have been difficult, but it was the most. Yeah, I do think I didn't realize it at the time because I was just head down trying to survive, frankly. But looking back, it probably was the most transformative and character building experience of my life because I went from, as you say, commodity manufacturing of products where very much the philosophy was if it ain't broke, don't fix it. Right? Keep running the machines, make the money, you know, it's a good product, tweaks here and there, but fundamentally manage this big ship and keep it going in a straight line. And then I got to Microsoft and that's where Bill Gates at the time was pushing the message, trying to get the world to realize that things are speeding up. And he said at the time it was a Marshall McLuhan line that I quote in my book. He said, today if something works, it's obsolete. And that shook me to the core because suddenly I thought, what? No, everything's fine, just keep going. And then I realized, no, everything is obsolete. Everything we do, everything we know, every process, it can all be improved in some way now because someone's figured out a better way. We just haven't got there yet. So I, that was, that's what was really shaped me as a, as a thought. Well, as a thinker around change is that how do we do change? How do we keep up and not become obsolete?
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B
I like that, I like that kind of mentality because yeah, if we just stand still, we become obsolete, we become irrelevant.
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A
Well, you know, some people find it really threatening, that concept because they've got a lot invested in their careers. What they know is, you know, knowledge is power and all that stuff. And to sort of accept that Actually, it's no longer fit for purpose. It can all be done better by somebody else is really tough. But you know what? When I realized the permission it gave me to question everything and to try to look for improvements everywhere, it brought me back to life. Because suddenly, actually, yeah, if it's all up, if, if. Nothing here is perfect. Crikey, I've got so many opportunities. Where do I start? And I found that really empowering.
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B
But isn't that kind of, from an individual point of view, isn't that risky as well? There's a lot of risk involved in that. Right? I mean, when you're, when you're, you know, disrupting the apple cart.
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A
This is the fundamental thing, and this is why I believe that people don't actually resist change. We're really good at change. We're human beings. Look at us, we're running the planet. There's no other creature doing it. Yeah, that's true. We're really good at change. But we only change when we want to change. And we only put in the extra effort that's needed to create something brilliant when we have a reason to do so. The risk, Actually, all the studies confirm this. When we look at change and we think, oh, this is another change. And some people seem to be resisting it or fighting back. Actually, it's the fear of loss that's the greatest driver in all of that. It's the fear of losing your status, losing your experience, losing, you know, the safety net of your current existence, your comfort zone. And that's what we worry about. And it's a natural human instinct to sort of think, oh, no, I don't want to learn something new. When you're young and thrusting, everything's possible and you don't care about learning new stuff. But we all grow older and there are, I believe, millions of brilliantly talented middle age or older people, and actually some younger people too, in the workforce today who, if they don't recognize this new skill that I talk about called a future ready mindset. If they don't embrace this way of thinking, they will be utterly obsolete in the workforce at a far younger age than our parents or our grandparents were. Because the world is moving so quickly.
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B
Yeah, it's moving much faster now than it did when, when we were younger and when I was, I was in Silicon Valley in the dot com boom, you didn't stand, you didn't stay at the same company for more than, you know, a year maybe. And they, they talked about, oh, how long have you been here? Months. No one ever Talked years back then. But I noticed the older I've gotten, the more established that I've. I use the word established, I think the word is chicken. The more chicken I become. Right. I'm afraid. Right, right. Hey, I've, I've got things figured out. I don't want to disrupt things because I've, you know, I'm doing well in my career, where I'm at. Why take that? Uncomfortable, uncomfortableness. And how do I get over that? How do I get over that? So that I can feel comfortable making bold moves and things like that.
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A
There's also a biological thing at play. And the plasticity of our brain shifts over time. Our ability to learn, our desire to learn, our capacity to retain new information, it diminishes with time. So please don't. I don't really want to get into like an age related debate. It's not that. But it is. But it does affect all of us that as, as we, as we gain experience in the past, previous generations, once they got their experience, once they're a certain level of seniority, they pretty much could cruise at that level and you know, make more and more money or more and more status, whatever they wanted, within reason. These days that doesn't happen because unless you're keeping yourself on the edge, you know, keeping yourself at the forefront of thinking, your everything outside of your comfort zone is changing all the time. So the minute you rest in your comfort zone, you are the problem. You are stuck where you've chosen to be. And that's great.
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B
Now I'm the blocker. I'm the blocker to change. That's what you just told me.
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A
I'm saying to make change more of us, that many of us wait for change, or we moan about change when it arrives, it's like, oh, there's another new AI thing I've got to learn about. Oh my goodness, off we go again. And actually, while some change can come from the leadership, from your bosses, from your colleagues, whatever, the best change is one that you spot that you believe in, that matters to you and that you pursue because you genuinely believe it might help you achieve your mission in life or what, you know, some higher level thing than just getting the job done because you can cruise through life, let's be honest, probably not doing very much on the whole change agenda, ticking boxes and getting away with it. And then you can retire and then you can look back on it and say, what a waste did I, could I have done more? And you could. And that's. But we had that choice in the past, I don't think we have that choice because you're going to get found out if you're not thinking about what's next.
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B
Okay, so I, I love this message and, and I think it's a great message to get out to individuals. And I kind of joke, because I am a change agent, I cause a lot of discussion at work. Everyone knows that about me. But there is that feeling like, let's just, you know, hey, let's take it easy and coast, right? Because like you said, I've built up enough experience. I know how to get my job done much more effectively and efficiently than I did it early in my career. All these things. How do I then as a manager, let's talk about managers and executives. How do I foster this culture of change in my organization?
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A
Because the first thing, the first thing that comes immediately to mind is to accept if you're a manager or leader or whatever level you are, or even just somebody that people look up to, is to have the humility to say, I don't have the answers. Stop looking to me to lead you with the certainty I will create a culture and an environment where we can grow together. But I am just as confused about what's going on as everybody else. There is a lot that's a really hard humility lesson for a lot of people who are people, managers at some level, because they got to that status and they kind of carry this thing that says they know more than their team. They don't. I didn't get better at predicting the future. I don't know about you. I didn't get better at predicting the future or knowing what was right for the next move. As I went up the ranks, if anything, I got worse because I became less attached to reality, more caught up in my cocoon of leadership, and I got worse. So the first thing is to accept that the ideas that will work are very unlikely to come from the top management down. What may work better is if everybody in the team feels empowered to look at their area of responsibility and pick off those things that they, that they wish to influence, that they believe can be better. And they may be quite small things that your team members individually might do. But if everyone in the team makes a small change today, tomorrow, next week, and on we go, before long, lots of small changes equates to a huge amount of big change, far bigger, arguably, than that grand project that the leader might have invented.
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B
So this brings up. I've seen organizations do this, some effective and some ineffective, where maybe too much lead Way was given to individual contributors. And then there was this concept called let a thousand flowers bloom. And then we'll take the best of that. But in corporations, in large corporations like 3M is a great example. Intel's another great example. Who I work for, we have that philosophy. But now we're. We're suffering because too many different directions.
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A
So.
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As a manager, how do you manage? You've got to figure out some way to manage that. How, what's some approaches I can use because I like the idea everyone has their domain of change and all that, but when push comes to shove in reality, it could be scary. And what, you know, what if you don't have enough controls in place so all of a sudden your company's going in all different directions and there's no focus.
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A
So look, most organizations are far away from Silicon Valley and the crazy startup culture where anything goes. I mean, there are some, but most people are working in a slightly more established world where things do move slower. Now here's the thing. I believe that the best change does come from individuals who are pursuing something that's meaningful. In the book I've just released, I call this a personal mission. If your people are driven by something that truly matters to them but relates to their work, that's more than just getting a promotion or a pay rise or a salary or whatever, you know, some meaningful thing, then they will pursue ideas that are relevant to the organization. There is a final part in my process where you bring those ideas back to colleagues to sort of have some checks and balances so you're not all going off doing crazy stuff. So let me just take personal mission first, if I may. I think it's really vital if you want to keep creating the future, keep creating change, and you want to be around for a long time, it is really important that you recognize the miracle of your work beyond the tasks or the job title or whatever it is you have think about. The personal mission, for me is the heartfelt reason why you do the job that you do in the service of others. So it's recognizing that if I do my job well, I will earn my success by serving others in some way. And who is that person or those people? And many of us, we lose sight of the bigger picture of what we do. So when I arrived at Microsoft, they put me in charge of email. There's a sexy product if ever there was one. And I wanted to work on Xbox and stuff like that. That's what I thought would be cool. And I was a bit depressed. But then I realized email runs the world, right? You can't run a company to this day, or a government or anywhere. No one can function without email, you just can't. And good luck to all of the startups that are trying to create alternatives. But email is incredibly sticky. And I realized that my job, whilst it was to sell more licenses for Outlook and Exchange, of course, and get the new version out there and all the rest of the. I realized that my job was to make the world better at email. Because everybody has email, everybody hates email, everybody's rubbish at doing email. And I thought, you know what, if I can actually reframe the job as something more meaningful in the service of others, I make the world better at email. And then I started blogging, making videos, talking about it at conferences. And actually email's really an outlook in particular is really interesting what you can do with it if you want to become a power user. Now that gave me the energy then to say, okay, if I make the world better at email, how can I do this? And I started having more ideas and I started realizing, oh, there are far more interesting ways of talking about software than here's an update, here's the new features, yada yada. So I think you've got to be. If your people are driven by a personal mission that matters to them in their heart. There was another time, Microsoft, when I was my, when my son was very little and he was just getting into computers at school and I was really concerned about child safety online. And that became my personal mission at that time. And that drove me related to my work. But it was absolutely a passion of mine now because I had that, I still had the day job to do, there was something else, a fire inside me. And when you rediscover that fire and you empower your team members to have that fire and to talk about what really matters to them. It doesn't matter so much what ideas they come up with because they will be, they will be great ideas and you're much more likely to benefit as an organization from them.
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I like that passion drives because you took something that was boring like email. Email was boring, right? Like you said, you took the passion that you had. You found a greater purpose. So I, I, I like that, I, I really like that concept because if I as a manager or an executive can empower my people so that they can bring their own personalities, their own passions and desires into my company to help the company do better overall. But what an incredible. But that, take that, that's hard, that's it's really hard to train you exactly.
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A
For people to find their personal mission, particularly in large corporations like intel, because we kind of get inducted into the organization, told, here are your values and here's your mission. And this is how you.
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Yeah, and you.
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Everything sort of beats the you out of you. So what I try to do is get to get leaders to give that back to their team members. And in any team, you might have a young mother, you might have a. You might have somebody who's close to retirement, you might have an intern. You know, there's incredible variety there. And to imagine that they all look at the job task in exactly the same way is utter folly. Most importantly, though, when you've got a personal mission, when you care about something beyond the immediate task list or the KPIs you've been given, you have a vested interest in wanting to do it better. You want to leap out of bed on a Monday morning on a rainy day thinking, great, I get to do this, pursue my mission again. And that's where you're going to have the energy, I call it the fuel to keep creating the next thing. To have a new idea, to have a. To look for what could be improved, what could be changed, what's obsolete, what am I improving today? That's what you need from people. If we are to keep up.
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B
I'm glad we're talking because this is kind of reinvigorating the things that I do. Because being a change agent like you and I, you can get kind of down sometimes when you know, because you feel like you're pushing up against all this resistance all the time.
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Time.
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But with that personal mission, nothing gets in my way.
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A
No, but it's a really hard thing to find. And there's lots of advice in the, in the book, because this is a, this is a difficult bit for a lot of people, I'll be honest. But it's to think about what do you do in the service of others? And I, in the book, I've got an example of if you're a manager or something, you could, you know what? You might think you sell houses. But no, if you sell the right house to the right people, maybe a young couple could move in there. They might decide to get married, they might adopt you children, those kids might go to a school, the parents will get good jobs. And if you keep thinking of the downstream consequences of selling the right property to the right people, you suddenly realize, wow, if I do my job well, maybe a little boy and girl can play bat and ball on the beach on holiday with their parents or something like that. And that seems so far away from filling out forms and doing tax declarations or whatever you end up doing in your job. But that's the reality. And when you reconnect with that, that miracle, you suddenly realize, wow, I'm going to go and create the best podcast episode ever because, you know, I want people to hear this message.
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B
Yeah. And I like how you've couched it in serving others because that is where you have connection. Right. Right. And that gives you real, real purpose instead of I'm just doing this to make money.
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A
Yeah. It's my definition of happiness is earned success in the service of others. No, I love that a lot, earning your success. But you're doing it to better other people, not just yourself. The minute you, minute you see that, you realize, ah, I've have, I have a reason for being here. I have, I have something that I'm going to be so proud to tell my neighbor, friends, maybe grandchildren, whatever later life that I used to do. I'm. This is a story I'm going to tell.
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B
I. Boy that I like that a lot. That, that helps kind of center you when, when you're trying to figure, figure things out. Okay, Alistair, how do I move forward with this? I love, I love the advice, I love what you've given me, but how do I, how do I now take this? All right, you've got me all choked up. I'm ready to go because I knew because I'm, I, I'm taking this real. I mean, I do this podcast because I love talking to people and I love, and I want to share digital transformation to the world, but you can even further purpose, which is great. What do I do now?
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A
What do you do now? All right, look, there's a lot of things you can do, but obviously I'm going to say get my book and read that because.
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Okay, there's process, but there is a.
- [23:34]
A
Process in the book. And I'm so proud of this because it took me years to figure this out. Personal mission, that thing we've been talking about is right in the middle of the process. And then there are five steps around it. I've created this thing so it's pretty much bulletproof. It's proven and tested with organizations like Cisco, 3M, BBC, lots of companies that I've worked with. And it really allows you to sit down and say, okay, what is important to my future? To work out the one thing, it's always one thing that you should focus on and then to apply Three. I call them human superpowers, but they genuinely are. They're things that technology and AI will never take away from you. Apply these superpowers to your thing that you need to focus on, and by doing that, you'll have freshness of perspective, you'll have new ideas, but you'll also get your colleagues on board to make your ideas better. And so there's a process there. And I'll give you one of the superpowers because I know it sounds kind of weird. The first superpower on the model is sometimes referred to as the Frost model, because it actually spells my surname Frost. F, R, O, S, T. They're the five steps. So there's follow, react, and then the first superpower is open. And open is this ability to use naive human, almost childlike curiosity to look at the status quo, to look at your world afresh, to open your mind, and in doing so, to create space for the potential for something to be different. So, so many of us just get used to, this is how things are, this is how it works, and this is how we work around here. But when you start asking why, like, like an annoying child, you know, why? Why? You suddenly realize that not much makes sense. And there's a story in the book that I. Which is one of my favorite questions I ever asked at Microsoft. I just said in a team meeting, why is the Monday meeting always on a Monday? And everybody looks at me like I'd gone crazy because I'd literally given the answer as well as the question. But then I said, well, no, but why. Why is it on a Monday? And someone says, well, it's probably at the start of the week, isn't it? It's good to have a meeting on a Monday, but why at the start of the week? Well, and it's such a silly example, but it makes me smile because it turned out that the reason he was on a Monday was because the guy two generations before me did it on a Monday and we'd never changed. And there are so many things that when you stop and look at them, you don't see them because you go into work or you think about work, knowing this is how it is. You know that space where you're sitting right now, you know your desk, you know the layout, you know, but if you start walking there like you've never seen it before. And you said. You said, why. Why is there. Why are there pictures on frames on the wall? Why is there a piano? Why is. Why is there my. Why do we have a carpet suddenly? You Know, the fact that you've always got a carpet is actually open to interpretation. And actually you start, you can, in the next step, which is surprise, you start thinking, well, maybe we could have some tiles, maybe we could have. Maybe we could have a glass floor. Maybe we. Suddenly there's. And then you can have creativity and fun with that. Now these are obviously, I'm giving examples. When you apply this to your work and you say, well, why does the customer get an invoice in triplica? Why do we do these things? Suddenly you realize some of them don't make any. Some of the status quo. The way things are makes no sense at all. No one actually thinks it's the right thing to do and no one's ever had the courage or the time to challenge it. But because you're focused on something that matters to you through your personal mission, suddenly you can see new possibilities. And it's a superpower. Because AI cannot do that.
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B
No, it can't.
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Large language models work in a linear fat and work based on existing data sets. We all know this stuff, right? They're brilliant, they're amazing. You can use them to help you be curious to ask. Curious. But they won't do it biologically like your brain can. And so that's one of three skills that I talk about that if you master these things, you will have a job for as long as you want. You'll be utterly indispensable because the computers cannot take that away. They don't know how to do it.
- [27:55]
B
I, you know, this is great. And that right there is probably the most important thing that we can take from this. The humanity of us, I think, is actually going to be unleashed even more because of generative AI, because it's going to do the mundane, the repetitive. We get to use the Frost method, we get to empower ourselves with these superpowers that you talk about. If people want to find out more about your book and all that, where do they go? Where do they go to find all this stuff?
- [28:29]
A
Yeah, well, you can find the book on that well known online bookseller resale site as well as bookshops and things like that. So it's called Ready Already is the book. You can also find me online, Alistair Frost, but you probably won't be able to spell that any better than I can. So just search, just go into browser and put in readyardy me. And that will take you straight to a page that's about the book and the process and you can find out a bit more about it and get in touch.
- [28:59]
B
Alistair, this has been wonderful. You got me all energized and excited and I want to take this to my team, especially organizations, like a lot of organizations right now are going through downsizing and executives are running around scared. You know, AI, I've got to do something right? This encourages, I think, a lot of people so you your book is hitting the market at the right time and I appreciate you energizing me more about doing things. So I appreciate it.
- [29:32]
A
Hi. It's my absolute pleasure. My day job is, if I can call it a day job. It's speaking at conferences and helping big teams or organizations to think differently. The book is something that people have been asking me for years. I'm so glad it's out there and I'm so glad that you feel like it might help you and I hope many of your viewers and listeners will also feel the same.
- [29:59]
B
Thanks for listening to Embracing Digital Transformation. If you enjoyed today's conversation, give us five stars on your favorite podcasting app or on YouTube. It really helps others discover the show. If you want to go deeper, join our exclusive community@patreon.com embracingdigital where we share bonus content and you can always connect with other change makers like yourself. You can always find more resources@embracingdigital.org until next time, keep Embracing the Digital Transformation.