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- [00:00]
A
Today we're bringing you our most timeless advice from our last conversation with Ashley Goodall. We're covering his most pressing thoughts on the problem of change, a problem that has only accelerated since his last episode. You're listening to Joel Beasley, modern cto. I go back and forth between life is really long and life is really short. Constantly.
- [00:28]
B
Isn't that funny? And I think the answer is yes. It is yes.
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A
The answer is yes to both. Life is long and life is short.
- [00:36]
B
If you think about the received wisdom of change, it's sort of like the more the better. I mean, change is a good thing. Changes how the world improves, changes, the state of evolution, changes. We should all be very keen on change. We should all be enthusiastic supporters of changes. And that certainly is the sort of the management received wisdom. When I was at business school, one of the definitions of a leader or the job of a leader was to create change. Leaders are to make change. That's what we sent you there to do. But if you look at the experience of being on the receiving end of change, it's a very, very different set of experiences and circumstances and psychological reality. Because as it turns out, when you, when you find it, well, when you ask people about it, when you say, tell me your stories, they're not happy stories for the most part. And then when you look at the psychology going on, what happens to the human animal under change, you find out that too much change harms people. So the book is an investigation of this sort of dichotomy or tension between probably one of the most prevalent management truisms, your job, you were sent here to make change. And the reality of that on the ground, which is that too much change makes it really hard for people to actually do their jobs. It's not, it's not just, you know, people don't like it, it's. This makes it hard to do my job. So we need to sort ourselves out on this topic, I think, because if you have, if you have a. A management philosophy or a management idea that is actually harmful to people, it's not going to end so well.
- [02:29]
A
How do you know when to use it? Like, let's pretend it's music, right? It's like a note. If you're just always C C sharp. If you're just always hitting that same note, if you're always hitting the change note, it's not going to be a very pretty song. Is it a tool that you use at a specific time? Like, when would you use this tool of change?
- [02:47]
B
Well, I think the first Thing to get clear on is that change is slightly the wrong term for what we're after. What we really want is a thing called improvement. And so you have to go, well, not all change leads to improvement. All improvement comes from change. Gotcha. But it doesn't always work the other way around. So, you know, when I was researching the book, I reached out to people about the. Their change stories, and I said, just, you know, I want to speak to people. Tell me your. Tell me your stories of change. And dozens of people reached out to me, and I spoke to as many of them as I could, and their stories were of being on the receiving end of a reorg or a new strategy, or a new leader who was changing all the positions in the organization, or a new technology or a new policy, or a new office floor plan or a new, I mean, everything. And you took a couple of things away from these conversations. Firstly, this is absolutely continuous. The nature of work today is to be, as I call it, in the blender. To be living life in the blender. And it's really hard on people. The second thing was that I also said to people, I would say to somebody at the end of a long recitation of, and then this happened, and then this happened, and then this happened. And people were telling me that they were burned out, that they were exhausted, that their souls were crushed. Someone said, this is soul crushing. And so I go, oh, so is. So I'm guessing you think change is not a very good thing then. And they were going to. Well, no, I believe in change. I believe I'm a fan of change. Because change is possibility and change is potential, and change is all that the future offers to us. If it doesn't offer change, then what's it all about? And that's the dichotomy, right? So no one wants to play C sharp for 15 minutes in a row. No one wants a monotone song. But at the same time, the song that's a fusillade of random notes and you can never, ever shut it off and you can never make sense of it, and you can't hear a melody in any of that wears people down. So what people are looking for is the song, I suppose, to just torture the metaphor a little bit. The song that they want to sing. The song where they know what the harmonies are going to be and they're going to do the jazz improv on top of it. So there's some sort of. I mean, you know how jazz works. You've got a jazz standard and there's A chord sequence, and it's a 12 bar or a 16 bar or whatever. And then there's beyond that. There's no score for the musicians. Most of the time people are making it up in real time. So they're creating change on a basis of stability. And it's that, that people want. They want to be able to riff in a way that for them feels like possibility and hope and improvement. But if the world is just firing notes at you at random, does there.
- [06:05]
A
Ain't no chewing that when you're discussing and talking about change here. I could see how if people keep changing the aim and you don't have control, yeah, for you, someone changes it for you and you have no control to set that aim, you have to go with whoever and they're constantly changing it. You will never be able to align everything you're trying to do. And then you'll get, you'll get. What, what, what is the right word? Demoralized. I don't know if that's the right word. But you will lose motivation and interest and you'll just, you'll feel like there's no winning. And when you get to the point where you feel like there's no winning, you are doing the worst possible work you could do.
- [06:47]
B
So that the psychology name for I feel like there's no winning is called learned helplessness. And there are studies on this going back to the 70s, and they've studied it in dogs, in rats, in people, in birds, in, I mean, every, every sort of mammalian creature. And what they found is that if you teach a creature that nothing it does can make any difference, it quits trying. So you can teach somebody to essentially phone it in if you like. It's related to what you're saying, because what you're saying is that if, if the, if I can't adjust my aim, if I have no control over my aim, then what happens to me? Sooner or later the answer is you learn that nothing you do makes any difference at all to anything. At which point you phone it in. And just to translate back to the world of work for a second, there are some recent synonyms for phone it in. One would be quiet quitting. One would be lazy girl jobs. One would be coffee badging. Another would be the great resignation. I mean, these are all things where people have gone. You know what? I've tried, I have tried, but this environment is so hard to navigate. I don't know where my aim is. I knew where it was last week. I don't know where it is. This Week, week. I don't know where my potency is. I don't know if you keep changing the context, the things I'm good at doing, are they valuable here or not? They used to be in the old, are they valuable in the new world? And I'm not sure what it all adds up to. I'm not sure that this is a coherent world that I'm living in. So that's. And that leads to people essentially going, listen, I'm helpless here and all I can do is wait for this to pass. And if you go and talk to people in large companies who are going through the nth reorganization or reshuffle or transition or merger or spin off or whatever, the ones who've been around the track for a few, few times will go, you know what? I'm just waiting for this to go. I'm just waiting for this to pass.
- [09:13]
A
So I pre ordered your book on audible because that's my preferred method of consumption. Did you narrate it by the way, or did you hire it? Oh, you did it.
- [09:21]
B
Oh, yeah, yeah.
- [09:23]
A
Nice. I love it. But the book to me looked like it was laid out where you listed the problems of change and you went through them by orders and chapter of the book. Can you just touch on a couple of the problems of change?
- [09:37]
B
Yeah, I grouped them into five headings. That's not like the official grouping. That's me doing a bunch of research and reading footnotes a lot and saying, listen, what are the shapes here? So the problems with change from a, again from a psychological perspective, we can start off with uncertainty. So when you get the memo that says, hello everybody, there's about to be a reorg in an instant, you are visited by uncertainty because you, you know, the communication, the email or whatever will tell you some things, but it won't tell you all of the things. And very often, by the way, it's preceded by the rumor of the thing, which tells you there's a thing coming, but you don't know what it is. So uncertainty is very hard on, on humans. It causes us stress, it causes us all sorts of physiological trauma like beyond high blood pressure. It causes increased mortality. So uncertainty is a, we don't want uncertainty. Uncertainty bad. So that's the first one, second one we touched on it learned helplessness or the lack of control when, when somebody announces the change. The second thing that strikes you is that you didn't announce the change, somebody else did and you're not in control of what's going to happen. That again is very hard on us. From a psychological perspective. The third problem is, or the third challenge with change, is that so much of our structures are social and so much of our source of stability is social. And so when you shuffle all the teams, you reshuffle all of our other human support structures in a work environment. And so you, you ruin our sense of belongingness, which is a super important part of how we actually get done what we do. The fourth one, if people are tracking along four out of five, the fourth problem is what I call displacement. We, we interact with our environment in a series of fairly specific and to me, quite beautiful ways. Place is something that we become attached to. And so our workplace is one category of things that we become attached to in the world. And the way that we become attached to place is in our habits and our rituals that, that link us to a place. So in your house, you'll have a morning ritual. That's, that's the thing that connects you to a house in a way. And people have rituals at work as well. And so rituals embed us in a certain place, in a certain context, in a certain social group. And again, if you blow up all the rituals, if you, you know, a lot of the rituals exist on teams, so if you block the teams, you, you're blowing up a lot of rituals. That makes it very hard for people to find their bearings. And then the last one we've touched on as well, the loss of meaning. It's hard to figure out what your aim is. It's hard to figure out where you're heading towards if the context keeps changing. But even before that, the first thing I discovered in researching all of this is that actually we tend to think of meaning as, as you said before, aim or mission or purpose or sort of daylight things, aspirational things up into the right things. But the first meaning of meaning is actually whether stuff makes sense or not. And it can't be aspirational if none of the parts make any sense at all. They can't. Things can't cohere into a beautiful picture until they cohere into a picture. And one of the most pernicious things about change is that the world stops making sense. I spoke to somebody who had gone from one leader to another and could not figure out what the next leader, the new leader, was trying to do. She said none of it makes sense. I don't. I understood where we were and before, what we were trying to do, how I fitted into that. I understood what the projects were, I understood what the team was, I understood the Language was all that's gone away. None of it makes sense anymore. And so she lacked meaning in her work, but not because the work pointed in a way she didn't find inspirational, but because the work didn't point anywhere at all. So those are the, those are the five, if you like, the top five that I would sort of use to frame the challenge of constant change for human beings. It's uncertainty, it's lack of control, it's unbelonging, displacement and loss of meaning, which is, you know, a fairly depressing list.
- [14:20]
A
But once we, once we name them and can discuss them, we can overcome them and provide the antidote and move forward.
- [14:28]
B
And we can honor the value to humans of their opposites, right? We can honor certainty, we can honor control, we can honor belonging, we can honor the value of place for us. And we can honor people's need to derive meaning from what they do every day.
- [14:48]
A
One of the things I have learned in the past 10 years is that by default I see people like me. And that's a problem because they're not like me, they're themselves. And so I have my work ethic, my drive, my motivation, my outcome oriented focus, my desire to grow and improve. And I, when I meet people, I just assume that they're like that. And I consciously remind myself, let's judge, let's judge person on who they are and what they present, not what. I'm looking through my lens, but there's a.
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B
Do you know, have you heard of a thing called the extrinsic incentives bias?
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A
No, what's this?
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B
Oh, this is a lovely, lovely piece of research that was done by a guy named Chip Heath, again I think late 90s. And so there are, roughly speaking, two groups of incentives for a human. There are the intrinsic incentives, which is to do stuff that feels important to me, to do stuff that makes me feel good about the world. And then there are the extrinsic incentives, which are sort of pay and title and promotion and private jets and those things. So the extrinsic, you could see by looking at somebody from the outside, as it were. The intrinsic you can't figure out until you know what it likes, you know what it's like to be that person, to feel from the inside. Well, so those are the two things. And Chip Heath did a series of experiments, or certainly writes about a series of experiments. Some he did, some others did, where he says, if you ask us about our own, if you ask us to rank our own incentives, we will put all the intrinsic ones at the Top of the list. You go, okay, once I'm paid enough to make, you know, put food on the table and pay the mortgage, then actually what I care about is work. That lifts me up, that makes me feel good, that makes me feel like I'm making a useful contribution to society and growing my ability to do those things. That's what matters most. But if you then say, great, what do you think motivates those people over there? And then what do you think motivates those people even further away from you? So people you know a little bit and people you know not at all. And the greater the distance of familiarity with somebody, the more extrinsic we assume their incentives are. So we look at ourselves and we go, listen, I'm lifted up by a whole bunch of stuff that's fundamentally noble and good, but if you ask me about Joel, well, we've been talking for a little while and we met a few years ago. I don't know Joel quite as well, so he's probably got some goodness, but there's probably a little bit of base. He's really, he's, he's interested in prestige and funny type fun titles and stuff like that. And if you ask about Joel's dad, who I never met in my life, Joel's dad is only in it for the money, isn't he? He's got to be, because I don't know him at all. And so that's the, that's a measurable bias. Now put that inside a company and go, what do you think of your employees who you never met? And the answer is they must be motivated by money. They must be coin operated. And coin operated was an actual phrase that an executive used with me once. He said, we all know that people are coin operated, don't we?
- [18:08]
A
Until their need is like they, There's a bit, the problem with that is there's a bit of truth to it. Like you have to get paid. But you're right. After you get that Maslow's hierarchy of needs, after you're able to get that, then it becomes about purpose, meaning in those intrinsic.
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B
And you know, just to be clear, this executive was talking to me in a company where people, most people made six figures. So we were hardly dealing with the low end of the, you know, pay to put food on the table, continuing.
- [18:37]
A
Well, you actually, I have, that's a, an, a realization that I have made as an entrepreneur is you cannot, there's a level in which you cannot throw any money, more money at it. That's going, you can't make the person. If you, if you take somebody from a hun, let's just use bigger numbers. You take somebody from 150k and they're doing some type of job and they're in that position and you think that you can pay them 300k and that they will work harder. You are correct for a short period of time. Because what will happen is they will have this amp up in excitement in work. They will increase their salary and be excited about the different level of life they can live, but also just work harder because they're pumped up about the raise. But give it three months and their productivity is going to be about what it was before.
- [19:26]
B
Because the assumption behind that, you know, I'll double somebody's pay and they'll work harder, is that they weren't working hard when I was paying them 150. Well, what happens if a person, who your $150,000 person is actually trying to do a good job? There's not much, there's not much headroom left. So it's not like we all show up again, it's not like we all show up at work and go, all right, my theoretical maximum salary is a million dollars and I'm paid 100,000, so I will put in 10% effort. We don't, that's not how. We don't do that. This is, this is silliness. The science on compensation and effort is that for piece work. So when I pay you per podcast or per book or per whatever the units of your and my work are, that you can see an increase in productivity up until the point where the person's burned out and exhausted. But that if actually what you want from somebody is creative work or innovative work or to make new things, which is a lot of work, that there's. The relationship vanishes again once you've paid somebody enough to not have to worry about where the next meal is coming from. So, you know, it's a long digression on compensation, but how much discussion of management is actually the discussion of how to incentivize people. There's a huge amount of discussion of if you get the incentives right, then the robotic ant, like human people, will go and do the thing that we designed for them in the incentive structure. And it just doesn't work like that. So it's another thing that if you imagine people are automatons or coin operated or any of the other things that we're throwing around here, then you can just visit change on them. You can just say, we're shuffling everything, but we'll give you some incentives to be in the new model. And then it's sort of a bit of a surprise when it doesn't quite go that smoothly.
- [21:24]
A
Well, I love what you're doing. I love the message that you push brilliant thoughts and every time your name comes up, I'm like, I like talking to Ashley.
- [21:31]
B
Well, it's lovely to chat to you again. It's been too long. We should do this more.
- [21:35]
A
Thank you so much for listening. And if you found this episode useful, please share it with a friend, friend or a colleague who you think would get value from it. And if you have topics that you would like to hear discussed on the podcast, either add me on LinkedIn or send me an email. Joeloderncto IO Every time I get an email or LinkedIn message, it absolutely makes my day and inspires me to keep going.