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It seems that every organization right now is going through a transformation of some sort, if nothing else, to try to figure out how to fit in with this new opportunity of AI in the fourth industrial revolution.
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But new data is showing that even fewer companies are likely to get across the chasm and make that change successfully.
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In this episode of We Not Me in a new evolved format, Pierre and I are looking specifically at the art of transformation, the science of transformation, looking at a wonderful tool that should be part of any leader's toolkit that helps to really understand where you need to change the organization, but also where you yourself will need to change.
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Hello and welcome back to We Not Me, the podcast where we explore how humans connect
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to get stuff done together.
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I'm Dan Hammond.
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And I am PLE in 3D.
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Are you in 3D?
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I think we're in 2D really.
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But anyway, sounded good.
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Sounded good, yeah.
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But we are on video.
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Maybe people are listening on audio thinking, what are they talking about?
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But we are evolving We Not Me.
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We've listened to our listeners.
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Can you do that?
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Yeah.
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It's really exciting because this is five years this month since we started We Not Me.
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Do we look younger?
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We are so young.
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It's incredible.
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I think anyone
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watching this channel might be able to make their own decisions on that.
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But yeah, we are 150 episodes in.
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This is actually the 149th episode, but we've basically got to our century and a half.
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Yeah, nearly there.
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And we're evolving.
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Having listened to our listeners, as I said, the first thing is, yes, we are adding video to the mix.
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Video is up and coming in the podcast world, but we also importantly want to make a shift from being guest driven to being topic driven.
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We're aware that the world is challenging at the moment and so we really
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hitting the things that are most important to people and not leaving that to chance.
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Yeah, and having the right conversations.
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And I think that you and I are spending our entire working lives right in the depths of corporations and organizations.
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We're seeing it every day and we're seeing the trends.
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And so
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I think the working world needs a forum for us to raise some of these topics and kind of get to the meaty detail of it.
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Everyone goes to work, but a lot of things aren't talked about.
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So let's talk about them.
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Indeed, indeed.
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That motto we started out with, how humans connect to get stuff done together, that purpose in a way for the podcast remains, doesn't it?
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Does.
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There's a lot of getting stuff done out there at the moment and we strongly believe that it's going to be about humans doing that work.
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And so these episodes will take a slightly different
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They're going to be a bit simpler in format, but we'll be alternating shows like this where you and I will just talk about a topic, bring in research, talk about our experience.
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Lather on.
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Lather on, yes.
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Not for too long, I'm hoping, but they should be pretty concise.
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Let's see how we go with that.
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But then every other one, we hope, will have a panel.
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So we'll be bringing in, we've got to have a we not me panel.
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We'll bring in one or two experts to join the conversation and we'll be contributing to that.
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We'll be chatting a lot more as a group rather than interviewing those guests as we've done
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So we hope our listeners like it.
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Please give us some feedback.
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Feedback is a gift.
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Please wrap it up nicely.
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You can e-mail us at wenotmepod.gmail.com if you do have any feedback, particularly nice things, because we're particularly open to those.
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So that's the evolution.
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And evolution is actually what we're talking about today, isn't it, Pierre?
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It is.
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I read an article very recently in June that I thought was pretty staggering and I thought was a good reason for us to raise this as our topic today.
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Transformations, trillions
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are spent on them inside organisations.
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And there is an astonishing 88% failure rate of transformations in organisations.
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The author quipped, it was in Forbes, written by Roger Dean Duncan.
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Duncan, that is the name of my dash hand, so I particularly like that name.
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Said, you know, well, actually, probably a lot of end of a lot of transformations is approving a next off-site, which is pretty tragic.
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And they talked about seeing transformation as a destination,
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something you're trying to get to and something to fix an organization rather than a more flexible, adaptable.
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So you've got a goal and you're heading towards it, but that you're more able to be more adaptable and you're able to take, I think, a little bit more of the rough with the smooth.
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And we thought that that would lead quite nicely into talking about a concept that we actually talk a lot to clients about the sigmoid curve.
00:04:39 Dan:
Yes, I think we should definitely look at that.
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The thing that struck me when you
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you shared that paper as well was that number of 88% used to be 70%?
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Yes.
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So this is not getting any better.
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And actually, if you look at organizations now, you think, yeah, it makes sense that the success of transformation is dropping.
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And looking at why that is and getting under the cover of it is really helpful.
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I like that thing about this being as a destination.
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You know, there's one of the old change theories is about sort of these freeze thaw cycles.
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So you take the organization, you thaw it out, you melt it,
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change it and then you freeze it again.
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So it comes back to some nice solid-state for a little while, these sort of periods of great stability and then changes.
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I can't see that happening again.
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There might be some big changes like an organizational change, but seeing it as a continuum of growth and change and evolution through a multiple curves is probably a wiser way to see it.
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You're going to have multiple transformations continuously.
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And I mean, even the word transformation can get everyone confused because it's misused.
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In its places, restructure
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or realignment or downsize, and that's somehow called a transformation.
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Which are all received by the employees as you're fired, aren't they?
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Yeah, you're not transformed, you're fired.
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Which gives transformation a bit of a bad rap.
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No wonder 88% fail.
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Yeah, exactly.
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With AI and Agentic AI knocking on the door here, I'm sure a lot of people are really thinking the same thing.
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So let's look at this.
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When we take a look at this little visual that we have, because this has been an absolute winner for us, hasn't it?
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Over the, you're doing our transformation consulting.
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It has.
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We're seeing infinity now.
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That's very good.
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There we go.
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Perfect.
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That's all you need.
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So talk us through, Dan.
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So this is from Charles Handy.
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This is such a
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useful concept to understand why transformation and why change is needed in the 1st place.
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So it's not talking about the psychology of what goes on, how we feel, but actually why and when change should happen.
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So talk us through it, Dan.
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I've got a quote from Charles Handy here.
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He put this in a book called the, I think it might have been another book, but he actually wrote a specific book about this called The Second Curve.
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And he says, it is the line of all things human, of our own lives, of organisations and businesses, of governments, empires and alliances, of democracy itself and its many and varied institutions.
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So very Charles Handy there.
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He had always had a massive view of things.
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This is where if you look at the current curve, I'm going to try to help our audio only listener
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non-viewer.
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If you've got two axes of performance vertically and then over time, how that looks, any curve, anything you start out starts to go down.
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So your performance is dropping over time.
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If you have a startup, Pierre, you and I have experienced this, never had, you're investing in it, you're trying things out that don't work, you're maybe recruiting people and it's not working, but you're investing.
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But at some point you figure out how things are going and the curve starts a beautiful ascent, sort of diagonally upwards.
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And that's when you really start to
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to make your money back, things are great.
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But if you stay on that curve, it's going to start to drop off.
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Why?
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Because competitors come in, particularly if that's a lovely, lovely curve, you get complacent.
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You start to believe the future is the same as the present.
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In the case of Kodak, you might buy billions of dollars worth of manufacturing plant for film, just as digital photography has taken.
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But you try to cling onto that and milk the asset, which are just going to kill you.
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So that's going to drop off.
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and the second curve, as Charles Handy says, is you have to start a new curve.
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Now that curve is exactly the same shape.
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So when you step off the current curve, it's going to drop down.
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So anything new you start.
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goes badly at first.
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You're investing in it and you're not getting the return.
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And that's why one of the reasons why change is so hard.
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But you have to start that curve, just as the visual says, you have to start it before the hill of the previous curve.
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Otherwise, you're going to start dropping off the other side.
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You're not going to have the resources to fund the change.
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So you have to start that curve, that new curve, sufficiently early.
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But the challenges in that, and I'm really, that'd be great to dive into the practicalities of where we've seen this.
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The problem is, of course, that on that lovely
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the sunlit uplands as it goes up.
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You don't know it's about to drop off.
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It's very easy to look at that in reverse.
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But you are saying to the company, hey, we need to do something different when actually everyone's saying, no, it was brilliant.
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But if you don't, you are destined for a fall.
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That's my potted description of the sigmoid.
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I think that's great.
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When you're talking with teams about this, a key question is where do we think we are on the current curve?
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Yes.
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You mark this up with A, B or C and A is going up the hill, B is on the plateau and C is you've fallen off the earth.
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cliff.
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And when organizations are too slow and they're on the downward curve, then it is restructure time.
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That's when major surgery has to happen.
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Whereas actually when you're on the ascent, you can bring the organization with you because they're going to have to proactively
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create that second curve.
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And that little shaded area in there, that's an interesting place.
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I mean, you might have heard the term VUCA, volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous.
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It's a difficult place.
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Things are unclear.
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There's a degree of turbulence.
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People are unsure.
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My God, leadership counts in that shaded area.
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Totally.
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You can't expect people to just jump from one curve to the other.
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Today's Monday, tomorrow's Tuesday, different game.
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It doesn't work like that.
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That's where you've got to paint a really clear picture, support your people through the psychology of it, give them a good reason why, help them to adapt and change, and then support them.
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Not everyone makes that transition.
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It's not everyone's cup of tea, but most people do.
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But the leadership is the bit that accelerates.
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Otherwise, it doesn't look as shallow as that black next curve.
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Some of those ones can go really deep.
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They dive, yes.
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Oh my God.
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And people are.
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stuck in the valley of despair forever.
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Absolutely.
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To your point about starting change on the other side of the dip in point C where you're heading down, it's in a way quite pleasing because everyone wants to change at that point, but you're too late.
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Do you know what I mean?
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It's sort of, yes, now everyone sees it, but if it's too obvious you have left it too late, you need to be thinking about this transformation.
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And I think, yeah, you're right, that transition zone is really interesting.
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I was working with a tech company and they were making a move from hardware to
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software.
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And of course, in that zone where you've got the two curves operating, you do get real issues, you say, that requires these.
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So you've got the old curve that's actually funding the change, but they become the sort of ugly sister, if you like.
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No one wants to be part of the old business, but the new people are just spending money without bringing in sales, for example.
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And you've got these two cultures emerge.
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You've got to try to bring the whole thing together.
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So yeah, it's really complex.
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Let's talk about that second curve, Peter.
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How do you set that?
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We
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a lot about clarity on this show.
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And it's really essential, is it that people have a view of what that second curve looks like?
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What are the components of that?
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A simple way to view this is in the absence of clarity, people just make stuff up.
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That's normal.
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Like we're meaning making machines, so we're going to make it up.
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And the noise of conversation and what's going on drowns out the clarity.
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So sometimes the internal noise inside the organisation is so loud.
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and distracting.
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So a key part of that is actually redefine what does that next curve look like?
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Where are we heading to?
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What is that goal?
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And get the people that are involved in the change in your team to help construct that.
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Because if it's done to people, they feel disenfranchised and disengaged and they're two disses that are not good to have.
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So you really want to have that people can actually start to track that next part of the journey and make that clarity.
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So
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That's definitely going to help accelerate people.
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So that's an accelerant.
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And then that's sort of like the slowing down is actually making people aware that they go through a psychological process of change.
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There's a great guy, William Bridges, who said, you know, organizations change and people transition and they have to go through the stages of almost like grief.
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Grief wasn't documented.
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It's a lot of departures.
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Oh, and it wasn't written about until the 60s.
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Yeah, right.
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There was a lady called Elizabeth Klubler Ross who wrote a fantastic book with a very catchy title called Death and Dying.
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Both of those things.
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It's not just all about death, it's also about dying.
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And dying.
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Because no one had actually looked at what the journey was for people who knew that they were going to die and what was that journey.
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It was actually a sellout book.
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And then of course, corporations started rapidly changing and going, oh, there's quite a bit here that relates.
00:13:34 Dan:
Yeah, because we do form attachments to all kinds of things, don't we?
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Yeah.
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Our colleagues, we can form attachments to our clients, we can form attachments to, I know it sounds weird, but processes, meetings, the way we do things, buildings.
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Our roles, our status.
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Exactly.
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Where we sit and have our meetings, the buildings we're in, you know, it's all of it.
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It forms an identity.
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I think that next curve can be defined for the organization level.
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And I think the three Cs are brilliant for helping to define that.
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What's the clarity?
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Where are we going?
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What are we going to try and achieve?
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But also define the climate that you're going to need on the other side.
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This is the stuff, you know, if we're going to do that, which is totally different, you know, we're going to move from being a hardware manufacturer to a software provider.
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All your climate has to change.
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How you bill is going to go to from multi-million pound big deals to monthly subscriptions.
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I mean, this is huge.
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Everything has to change, for example, and your culture will have to change as well.
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And then finally, the interesting one as well is at an organizational level competence.
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What skills will you need on that new curve?
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And I do think this is where sometimes people come unstuck as well, because skills and behaviors, they're not that clear on what's really required and therefore what's required of the people.
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So that's great at an organization level, but teams have to transform as well.
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They all go through the signal curve.
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And as you say, as individuals, you have to transform.
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easy for a leader to think, oh, the organization will be different, but I'll be the same.
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That's really unlikely.
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No, you're not.
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It's a fallacy, that one.
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It's a myth.
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So if you're leading change and you haven't changed, well, you're probably going to fit into the 88%.
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It's not going to work.
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The hardest bit is actually going, okay, I have to lead this and I have to let go of some things.
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And it could be your old role, it could be your old team, it could be all the things that you like.
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Sometimes
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you have to look at the trust relationship you have with the organization and then has to either be renewed or changed in the way that you do that.
00:15:37 Pia:
But if you don't evolve yourself, so on that plateau, sadly, we're all in that.
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and we can all plateau.
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We can become boring old farts without ourself realizing.
00:15:47 Dan:
Speak for yourself.
00:15:50 Pia:
Yeah, I wasn't being pointed.
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But you can.
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get stuck in your ways.
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You can be adverse to change because that second curve is
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a little uncomfortable, some home truths, lack of comfort about feeling it's the same, it's different, all of those things.
00:16:07 Dan:
I think this is vital.
00:16:09 Dan:
And I know you have a lovely phrase that you use with our clients, which is the U-bend, which actually is the same shape as a sigmoid part of a toilet.
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You have to sort of go down, but that means there is going to be some pain there.
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If I think about the transitions I've made over time, I joined the workforce as an incredible
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incredibly good looking young engineer.
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Part of that sentence wasn't true.
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Was that short, that career, or was it?
00:16:37 Dan:
That sigmoid curve is microscopic.
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But to become more human focused, to understand disorder and how to lead in a more sort of empathetic way, you've got to face into your, not just your strengths, you've got to face into the things that aren't helping you anymore.
00:16:51 Dan:
And that can be just taking on board.
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I need to change that.
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That's something that's not working for me now.
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I know it sounds, when you read this on the page,
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sounds really sort of very easy.
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I just change that.
00:17:01 Pia:
No, it's not as easy.
00:17:03 Dan:
It's your identity that is sometimes being challenged.
00:17:06 Dan:
You have to change.
00:17:06 Dan:
So that's I think any listener out there get excited about.
00:17:10 Dan:
Yeah.
00:17:10 Pia:
Oh yeah, it's we've all been there.
00:17:13 Pia:
And that's because the first phase of any change in that psychology, so you've got to transition, is denial, which is my standard joke here is the longest river, the longest river in Africa.
00:17:24 Pia:
No, this is the process where you're just like, no, it's not happening.
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The change isn't happening.
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I don't need to change.
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You can stay in that place for quite a long time bargaining, looping your thinking, telling yourself you don't need to do it.
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And then you go into anger.
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Then you get angry.
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And that combination between denial and.
00:17:43 Dan:
Fantastic.
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Everyone else's full.
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And then you go to the bottom of the U-bend.
00:17:47 Pia:
That is the bit where you've gone through those stages.
00:17:50 Dan:
This piece of resistance, yeah, the resistance.
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You have to let go.
00:17:54 Dan:
That's where you really pile on your logic to say why the thing is wrong and it can become hardened.
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But as you say, stepping over that chasm into experimentation and openness is the thing that's going to make people move through.
00:18:08 Pia:
That's it.
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You start gracefully moving into a little bit of an acceptance and often
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You swing back and you go, that didn't work.
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That was a pile of rubbish.
00:18:16 Dan:
Yeah, it's sort of like a ball bearing at the bottom of the curve, yeah.
00:18:20 Pia:
Then you actually then do, then you sort of get into that acceptance or exploration.
00:18:25 Pia:
You're ready to go to take that new step.
00:18:28 Pia:
But no one knows how long it takes and no two people are the same.
00:18:32 Dan:
Absolutely.
00:18:33 Dan:
When I joined, I think I'm allowed to say this now, but when I joined Novartis, this was in year 2000, so I was very, very young, but people would still in Novartis, this is 10 years after the SIBA and Sandoz merger, people would still say, oh, he's a Sandoz guy.
00:18:51 Dan:
I kid you not, because these two cultures came together.
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And that was not a merger.
00:18:56 Dan:
That was not something that failed.
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But overall, I mean, Novartis is fantastic to this day.
00:19:01 Dan:
But you can see how those little cracks are still there and things you have to leave behind.
00:19:06 Dan:
Fascinating.
00:19:07 Dan:
And by the way, and I was thinking also, when you ask a team, and this is a great thing you do with your own teams, you're going through change, if you say to people, say to leaders, where is your team on this curve?
00:19:17 Dan:
And where are you on this curve?
00:19:18 Dan:
It's very obvious that your team
00:19:20 Dan:
is generally trailing.
00:19:21 Dan:
You've been privy to more.
00:19:23 Pia:
That's true.
00:19:24 Dan:
You've had longer to think about it.
00:19:25 Dan:
It's probably a wrong estimate, but you do have to go back and bring people through and recognise that they are transitioning.
00:19:32 Dan:
It's not a sort of, hey, could you guys get on board?
00:19:35 Dan:
It's an individual leadership thing.
00:19:37 Dan:
You're going to have to talk to each person on your team to bring them through, hold them by the hand and bring them through and also learn from them what the challenges are, because this is not a sort of how do we force this change on an organisation.
00:19:48 Dan:
There has to be at every level
00:19:51 Dan:
there's a dialogue and ideally that is rattling up and down the organisation as it cascades.
00:19:56 Dan:
The change, feedback should come back up because the top team needs to be hearing all of that and tuning things for what they're seeing because the people at the front line know exactly what's going on.
00:20:07 Pia:
I think you can get change fatigue and that can happen when those, it's a bit like being dumped by waves on a beach.
00:20:14 Pia:
But those sigmoid curves, if they happen too close, you're just kind of getting out of 1 and then you hit another one.
00:20:19 Pia:
I'm seeing a lot of
00:20:21 Pia:
That happened to a team recently, came through a big organisational change.
00:20:25 Pia:
Now they're coming to go through an externally driven impact on their product and that's created another change.
00:20:31 Pia:
And I just so full of respect watching that, how they're rallying together, looking for what they can influence, what they can control.
00:20:39 Pia:
Huge maturity in being able to do that.
00:20:42 Pia:
But they've learned also that this is a process and that they won't all go through it at exactly the same stage, but they can support one another.
00:20:51 Pia:
If you know where you're at, where you've got to get to.
00:20:54 Dan:
Yes, yeah, and it's a bit of we not me, isn't it, coming together.
00:20:57 Dan:
The change fatigue is really interesting, isn't it, that people can be sort of battered by it.
00:21:02 Dan:
And obviously in this case, this is an externally driven thing, but I do think that some organizations...
00:21:08 Dan:
sometimes what I call the dark side of agile.
00:21:10 Dan:
They'll initiate a change.
00:21:12 Dan:
Don't give it enough time to actually take root and have the plus and say, oh, we need to do something else.
00:21:17 Dan:
Jim Collins talks about this, doesn't he?
00:21:19 Dan:
The flywheel.
00:21:20 Dan:
You can become change fatigued just because actually that last change wasn't given the chance to really, you know, it's like this back to the sigmoid curve again.
00:21:28 Dan:
We only gave it the sort of downward curve.
00:21:30 Dan:
Oh, this isn't working.
00:21:31 Dan:
Let's go back.
00:21:32 Dan:
So there is a piece where you can change too quickly, but on the whole, people are changing still.
00:21:37 Dan:
still too late.
00:21:38 Dan:
Even in product development, Steve Jobs was the champion of this.
00:21:42 Dan:
You remember those days when you bought an iPod?
00:21:44 Dan:
The way you bought a new iPod, you'd see an advert for the next one and stop, gee.
00:21:48 Dan:
Yeah, I know.
00:21:49 Dan:
But he was relentless about creative destruction, ju
It seems that every organization right now is going through a transformation of some sort, if nothing else, to try to figure out how to fit in with this new opportunity of AI in the fourth industrial revolution.
00:00:17 Dan:
But new data is showing that even fewer companies are likely to get across the chasm and make that change successfully.
00:00:24 Dan:
In this episode of We Not Me in a new evolved format, Pierre and I are looking specifically at the art of transformation, the science of transformation, looking at a wonderful tool that should be part of any leader's toolkit that helps to really understand where you need to change the organization, but also where you yourself will need to change.
00:00:49 Dan:
Hello and welcome back to We Not Me, the podcast where we explore how humans connect
00:00:54 Dan:
to get stuff done together.
00:00:55 Dan:
I'm Dan Hammond.
00:00:56 Pia:
And I am PLE in 3D.
00:00:59 Dan:
Are you in 3D?
00:01:00 Dan:
I think we're in 2D really.
00:01:01 Pia:
But anyway, sounded good.
00:01:03 Dan:
Sounded good, yeah.
00:01:03 Dan:
But we are on video.
00:01:05 Dan:
Maybe people are listening on audio thinking, what are they talking about?
00:01:08 Dan:
But we are evolving We Not Me.
00:01:10 Dan:
We've listened to our listeners.
00:01:12 Dan:
Can you do that?
00:01:13 Pia:
Yeah.
00:01:13 Dan:
It's really exciting because this is five years this month since we started We Not Me.
00:01:18 Pia:
Do we look younger?
00:01:19 Dan:
We are so young.
00:01:21 Dan:
It's incredible.
00:01:22 Dan:
I think anyone
00:01:23 Dan:
watching this channel might be able to make their own decisions on that.
00:01:26 Dan:
But yeah, we are 150 episodes in.
00:01:29 Dan:
This is actually the 149th episode, but we've basically got to our century and a half.
00:01:33 Pia:
Yeah, nearly there.
00:01:34 Dan:
And we're evolving.
00:01:35 Dan:
Having listened to our listeners, as I said, the first thing is, yes, we are adding video to the mix.
00:01:40 Dan:
Video is up and coming in the podcast world, but we also importantly want to make a shift from being guest driven to being topic driven.
00:01:49 Dan:
We're aware that the world is challenging at the moment and so we really
00:01:53 Dan:
hitting the things that are most important to people and not leaving that to chance.
00:01:57 Pia:
Yeah, and having the right conversations.
00:01:59 Pia:
And I think that you and I are spending our entire working lives right in the depths of corporations and organizations.
00:02:07 Pia:
We're seeing it every day and we're seeing the trends.
00:02:11 Pia:
And so
00:02:12 Pia:
I think the working world needs a forum for us to raise some of these topics and kind of get to the meaty detail of it.
00:02:20 Pia:
Everyone goes to work, but a lot of things aren't talked about.
00:02:23 Pia:
So let's talk about them.
00:02:24 Dan:
Indeed, indeed.
00:02:25 Dan:
That motto we started out with, how humans connect to get stuff done together, that purpose in a way for the podcast remains, doesn't it?
00:02:33 Pia:
Does.
00:02:33 Dan:
There's a lot of getting stuff done out there at the moment and we strongly believe that it's going to be about humans doing that work.
00:02:40 Dan:
And so these episodes will take a slightly different
00:02:42 Dan:
They're going to be a bit simpler in format, but we'll be alternating shows like this where you and I will just talk about a topic, bring in research, talk about our experience.
00:02:51 Pia:
Lather on.
00:02:52 Dan:
Lather on, yes.
00:02:53 Dan:
Not for too long, I'm hoping, but they should be pretty concise.
00:02:55 Dan:
Let's see how we go with that.
00:02:57 Dan:
But then every other one, we hope, will have a panel.
00:03:00 Dan:
So we'll be bringing in, we've got to have a we not me panel.
00:03:03 Dan:
We'll bring in one or two experts to join the conversation and we'll be contributing to that.
00:03:08 Dan:
We'll be chatting a lot more as a group rather than interviewing those guests as we've done
00:03:12 Dan:
So we hope our listeners like it.
00:03:14 Dan:
Please give us some feedback.
00:03:15 Dan:
Feedback is a gift.
00:03:16 Dan:
Please wrap it up nicely.
00:03:18 Dan:
You can e-mail us at wenotmepod.gmail.com if you do have any feedback, particularly nice things, because we're particularly open to those.
00:03:25 Dan:
So that's the evolution.
00:03:27 Dan:
And evolution is actually what we're talking about today, isn't it, Pierre?
00:03:30 Pia:
It is.
00:03:31 Pia:
I read an article very recently in June that I thought was pretty staggering and I thought was a good reason for us to raise this as our topic today.
00:03:39 Pia:
Transformations, trillions
00:03:42 Pia:
are spent on them inside organisations.
00:03:45 Pia:
And there is an astonishing 88% failure rate of transformations in organisations.
00:03:53 Pia:
The author quipped, it was in Forbes, written by Roger Dean Duncan.
00:03:57 Pia:
Duncan, that is the name of my dash hand, so I particularly like that name.
00:04:01 Pia:
Said, you know, well, actually, probably a lot of end of a lot of transformations is approving a next off-site, which is pretty tragic.
00:04:08 Pia:
And they talked about seeing transformation as a destination,
00:04:12 Pia:
something you're trying to get to and something to fix an organization rather than a more flexible, adaptable.
00:04:20 Pia:
So you've got a goal and you're heading towards it, but that you're more able to be more adaptable and you're able to take, I think, a little bit more of the rough with the smooth.
00:04:31 Pia:
And we thought that that would lead quite nicely into talking about a concept that we actually talk a lot to clients about the sigmoid curve.
00:04:39 Dan:
Yes, I think we should definitely look at that.
00:04:41 Dan:
The thing that struck me when you
00:04:42 Dan:
you shared that paper as well was that number of 88% used to be 70%?
00:04:47 Pia:
Yes.
00:04:48 Dan:
So this is not getting any better.
00:04:50 Dan:
And actually, if you look at organizations now, you think, yeah, it makes sense that the success of transformation is dropping.
00:04:57 Dan:
And looking at why that is and getting under the cover of it is really helpful.
00:05:02 Dan:
I like that thing about this being as a destination.
00:05:04 Dan:
You know, there's one of the old change theories is about sort of these freeze thaw cycles.
00:05:09 Dan:
So you take the organization, you thaw it out, you melt it,
00:05:12 Dan:
change it and then you freeze it again.
00:05:14 Dan:
So it comes back to some nice solid-state for a little while, these sort of periods of great stability and then changes.
00:05:21 Dan:
I can't see that happening again.
00:05:22 Dan:
There might be some big changes like an organizational change, but seeing it as a continuum of growth and change and evolution through a multiple curves is probably a wiser way to see it.
00:05:33 Dan:
You're going to have multiple transformations continuously.
00:05:36 Pia:
And I mean, even the word transformation can get everyone confused because it's misused.
00:05:40 Pia:
In its places, restructure
00:05:43 Pia:
or realignment or downsize, and that's somehow called a transformation.
00:05:48 Dan:
Which are all received by the employees as you're fired, aren't they?
00:05:54 Pia:
Yeah, you're not transformed, you're fired.
00:05:57 Pia:
Which gives transformation a bit of a bad rap.
00:06:00 Pia:
No wonder 88% fail.
00:06:01 Dan:
Yeah, exactly.
00:06:02 Dan:
With AI and Agentic AI knocking on the door here, I'm sure a lot of people are really thinking the same thing.
00:06:08 Dan:
So let's look at this.
00:06:10 Dan:
When we take a look at this little visual that we have, because this has been an absolute winner for us, hasn't it?
00:06:15 Dan:
Over the, you're doing our transformation consulting.
00:06:18 Pia:
It has.
00:06:19 Dan:
We're seeing infinity now.
00:06:20 Dan:
That's very good.
00:06:21 Pia:
There we go.
00:06:21 Dan:
Perfect.
00:06:22 Dan:
That's all you need.
00:06:23 Pia:
So talk us through, Dan.
00:06:24 Pia:
So this is from Charles Handy.
00:06:26 Pia:
This is such a
00:06:27 Pia:
useful concept to understand why transformation and why change is needed in the 1st place.
00:06:33 Pia:
So it's not talking about the psychology of what goes on, how we feel, but actually why and when change should happen.
00:06:42 Pia:
So talk us through it, Dan.
00:06:43 Dan:
I've got a quote from Charles Handy here.
00:06:45 Dan:
He put this in a book called the, I think it might have been another book, but he actually wrote a specific book about this called The Second Curve.
00:06:52 Dan:
And he says, it is the line of all things human, of our own lives, of organisations and businesses, of governments, empires and alliances, of democracy itself and its many and varied institutions.
00:07:04 Dan:
So very Charles Handy there.
00:07:05 Dan:
He had always had a massive view of things.
00:07:07 Dan:
This is where if you look at the current curve, I'm going to try to help our audio only listener
00:07:12 Dan:
non-viewer.
00:07:13 Dan:
If you've got two axes of performance vertically and then over time, how that looks, any curve, anything you start out starts to go down.
00:07:21 Dan:
So your performance is dropping over time.
00:07:24 Dan:
If you have a startup, Pierre, you and I have experienced this, never had, you're investing in it, you're trying things out that don't work, you're maybe recruiting people and it's not working, but you're investing.
00:07:34 Dan:
But at some point you figure out how things are going and the curve starts a beautiful ascent, sort of diagonally upwards.
00:07:40 Dan:
And that's when you really start to
00:07:42 Dan:
to make your money back, things are great.
00:07:45 Dan:
But if you stay on that curve, it's going to start to drop off.
00:07:48 Dan:
Why?
00:07:49 Dan:
Because competitors come in, particularly if that's a lovely, lovely curve, you get complacent.
00:07:54 Dan:
You start to believe the future is the same as the present.
00:07:58 Dan:
In the case of Kodak, you might buy billions of dollars worth of manufacturing plant for film, just as digital photography has taken.
00:08:06 Dan:
But you try to cling onto that and milk the asset, which are just going to kill you.
00:08:11 Dan:
So that's going to drop off.
00:08:12 Dan:
and the second curve, as Charles Handy says, is you have to start a new curve.
00:08:17 Dan:
Now that curve is exactly the same shape.
00:08:19 Dan:
So when you step off the current curve, it's going to drop down.
00:08:23 Dan:
So anything new you start.
00:08:26 Dan:
goes badly at first.
00:08:28 Dan:
You're investing in it and you're not getting the return.
00:08:30 Dan:
And that's why one of the reasons why change is so hard.
00:08:33 Dan:
But you have to start that curve, just as the visual says, you have to start it before the hill of the previous curve.
00:08:39 Dan:
Otherwise, you're going to start dropping off the other side.
00:08:42 Dan:
You're not going to have the resources to fund the change.
00:08:44 Dan:
So you have to start that curve, that new curve, sufficiently early.
00:08:49 Dan:
But the challenges in that, and I'm really, that'd be great to dive into the practicalities of where we've seen this.
00:08:54 Dan:
The problem is, of course, that on that lovely
00:08:56 Dan:
the sunlit uplands as it goes up.
00:08:58 Dan:
You don't know it's about to drop off.
00:08:59 Dan:
It's very easy to look at that in reverse.
00:09:01 Dan:
But you are saying to the company, hey, we need to do something different when actually everyone's saying, no, it was brilliant.
00:09:07 Dan:
But if you don't, you are destined for a fall.
00:09:09 Dan:
That's my potted description of the sigmoid.
00:09:12 Pia:
I think that's great.
00:09:13 Pia:
When you're talking with teams about this, a key question is where do we think we are on the current curve?
00:09:19 Dan:
Yes.
00:09:19 Pia:
You mark this up with A, B or C and A is going up the hill, B is on the plateau and C is you've fallen off the earth.
00:09:26 Pia:
cliff.
00:09:27 Pia:
And when organizations are too slow and they're on the downward curve, then it is restructure time.
00:09:33 Pia:
That's when major surgery has to happen.
00:09:36 Pia:
Whereas actually when you're on the ascent, you can bring the organization with you because they're going to have to proactively
00:09:45 Pia:
create that second curve.
00:09:46 Pia:
And that little shaded area in there, that's an interesting place.
00:09:49 Pia:
I mean, you might have heard the term VUCA, volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous.
00:09:55 Pia:
It's a difficult place.
00:09:56 Pia:
Things are unclear.
00:09:57 Pia:
There's a degree of turbulence.
00:09:59 Pia:
People are unsure.
00:10:00 Pia:
My God, leadership counts in that shaded area.
00:10:04 Dan:
Totally.
00:10:05 Pia:
You can't expect people to just jump from one curve to the other.
00:10:09 Pia:
Today's Monday, tomorrow's Tuesday, different game.
00:10:12 Pia:
It doesn't work like that.
00:10:13 Pia:
That's where you've got to paint a really clear picture, support your people through the psychology of it, give them a good reason why, help them to adapt and change, and then support them.
00:10:24 Pia:
Not everyone makes that transition.
00:10:26 Pia:
It's not everyone's cup of tea, but most people do.
00:10:29 Pia:
But the leadership is the bit that accelerates.
00:10:32 Pia:
Otherwise, it doesn't look as shallow as that black next curve.
00:10:37 Pia:
Some of those ones can go really deep.
00:10:39 Dan:
They dive, yes.
00:10:40 Pia:
Oh my God.
00:10:41 Pia:
And people are.
00:10:42 Pia:
stuck in the valley of despair forever.
00:10:45 Dan:
Absolutely.
00:10:46 Dan:
To your point about starting change on the other side of the dip in point C where you're heading down, it's in a way quite pleasing because everyone wants to change at that point, but you're too late.
00:10:57 Dan:
Do you know what I mean?
00:10:57 Dan:
It's sort of, yes, now everyone sees it, but if it's too obvious you have left it too late, you need to be thinking about this transformation.
00:11:05 Dan:
And I think, yeah, you're right, that transition zone is really interesting.
00:11:08 Dan:
I was working with a tech company and they were making a move from hardware to
00:11:12 Dan:
software.
00:11:12 Dan:
And of course, in that zone where you've got the two curves operating, you do get real issues, you say, that requires these.
00:11:18 Dan:
So you've got the old curve that's actually funding the change, but they become the sort of ugly sister, if you like.
00:11:25 Dan:
No one wants to be part of the old business, but the new people are just spending money without bringing in sales, for example.
00:11:32 Dan:
And you've got these two cultures emerge.
00:11:34 Dan:
You've got to try to bring the whole thing together.
00:11:36 Dan:
So yeah, it's really complex.
00:11:38 Dan:
Let's talk about that second curve, Peter.
00:11:40 Dan:
How do you set that?
00:11:41 Dan:
We
00:11:42 Dan:
a lot about clarity on this show.
00:11:43 Dan:
And it's really essential, is it that people have a view of what that second curve looks like?
00:11:47 Dan:
What are the components of that?
00:11:49 Pia:
A simple way to view this is in the absence of clarity, people just make stuff up.
00:11:54 Pia:
That's normal.
00:11:54 Pia:
Like we're meaning making machines, so we're going to make it up.
00:11:57 Pia:
And the noise of conversation and what's going on drowns out the clarity.
00:12:03 Pia:
So sometimes the internal noise inside the organisation is so loud.
00:12:07 Pia:
and distracting.
00:12:08 Pia:
So a key part of that is actually redefine what does that next curve look like?
00:12:13 Pia:
Where are we heading to?
00:12:14 Pia:
What is that goal?
00:12:16 Pia:
And get the people that are involved in the change in your team to help construct that.
00:12:20 Pia:
Because if it's done to people, they feel disenfranchised and disengaged and they're two disses that are not good to have.
00:12:29 Pia:
So you really want to have that people can actually start to track that next part of the journey and make that clarity.
00:12:37 Pia:
So
00:12:37 Pia:
That's definitely going to help accelerate people.
00:12:40 Pia:
So that's an accelerant.
00:12:41 Pia:
And then that's sort of like the slowing down is actually making people aware that they go through a psychological process of change.
00:12:49 Pia:
There's a great guy, William Bridges, who said, you know, organizations change and people transition and they have to go through the stages of almost like grief.
00:12:58 Pia:
Grief wasn't documented.
00:13:00 Dan:
It's a lot of departures.
00:13:02 Pia:
Oh, and it wasn't written about until the 60s.
00:13:05 Dan:
Yeah, right.
00:13:06 Pia:
There was a lady called Elizabeth Klubler Ross who wrote a fantastic book with a very catchy title called Death and Dying.
00:13:15 Dan:
Both of those things.
00:13:15 Dan:
It's not just all about death, it's also about dying.
00:13:18 Pia:
And dying.
00:13:19 Pia:
Because no one had actually looked at what the journey was for people who knew that they were going to die and what was that journey.
00:13:26 Pia:
It was actually a sellout book.
00:13:28 Pia:
And then of course, corporations started rapidly changing and going, oh, there's quite a bit here that relates.
00:13:34 Dan:
Yeah, because we do form attachments to all kinds of things, don't we?
00:13:38 Pia:
Yeah.
00:13:38 Dan:
Our colleagues, we can form attachments to our clients, we can form attachments to, I know it sounds weird, but processes, meetings, the way we do things, buildings.
00:13:48 Pia:
Our roles, our status.
00:13:50 Dan:
Exactly.
00:13:51 Pia:
Where we sit and have our meetings, the buildings we're in, you know, it's all of it.
00:13:55 Pia:
It forms an identity.
00:13:58 Dan:
I think that next curve can be defined for the organization level.
00:14:02 Dan:
And I think the three Cs are brilliant for helping to define that.
00:14:05 Dan:
What's the clarity?
00:14:05 Dan:
Where are we going?
00:14:06 Dan:
What are we going to try and achieve?
00:14:08 Dan:
But also define the climate that you're going to need on the other side.
00:14:12 Dan:
This is the stuff, you know, if we're going to do that, which is totally different, you know, we're going to move from being a hardware manufacturer to a software provider.
00:14:20 Dan:
All your climate has to change.
00:14:21 Dan:
How you bill is going to go to from multi-million pound big deals to monthly subscriptions.
00:14:28 Dan:
I mean, this is huge.
00:14:29 Dan:
Everything has to change, for example, and your culture will have to change as well.
00:14:33 Dan:
And then finally, the interesting one as well is at an organizational level competence.
00:14:38 Dan:
What skills will you need on that new curve?
00:14:40 Dan:
And I do think this is where sometimes people come unstuck as well, because skills and behaviors, they're not that clear on what's really required and therefore what's required of the people.
00:14:48 Dan:
So that's great at an organization level, but teams have to transform as well.
00:14:53 Dan:
They all go through the signal curve.
00:14:55 Dan:
And as you say, as individuals, you have to transform.
00:14:58 Dan:
easy for a leader to think, oh, the organization will be different, but I'll be the same.
00:15:02 Dan:
That's really unlikely.
00:15:04 Dan:
No, you're not.
00:15:05 Pia:
It's a fallacy, that one.
00:15:06 Pia:
It's a myth.
00:15:07 Pia:
So if you're leading change and you haven't changed, well, you're probably going to fit into the 88%.
00:15:12 Pia:
It's not going to work.
00:15:14 Pia:
The hardest bit is actually going, okay, I have to lead this and I have to let go of some things.
00:15:21 Pia:
And it could be your old role, it could be your old team, it could be all the things that you like.
00:15:27 Pia:
Sometimes
00:15:28 Pia:
you have to look at the trust relationship you have with the organization and then has to either be renewed or changed in the way that you do that.
00:15:37 Pia:
But if you don't evolve yourself, so on that plateau, sadly, we're all in that.
00:15:43 Pia:
and we can all plateau.
00:15:44 Pia:
We can become boring old farts without ourself realizing.
00:15:47 Dan:
Speak for yourself.
00:15:50 Pia:
Yeah, I wasn't being pointed.
00:15:51 Pia:
But you can.
00:15:53 Pia:
get stuck in your ways.
00:15:54 Pia:
You can be adverse to change because that second curve is
00:15:59 Pia:
a little uncomfortable, some home truths, lack of comfort about feeling it's the same, it's different, all of those things.
00:16:07 Dan:
I think this is vital.
00:16:09 Dan:
And I know you have a lovely phrase that you use with our clients, which is the U-bend, which actually is the same shape as a sigmoid part of a toilet.
00:16:19 Dan:
You have to sort of go down, but that means there is going to be some pain there.
00:16:23 Dan:
If I think about the transitions I've made over time, I joined the workforce as an incredible
00:16:29 Dan:
incredibly good looking young engineer.
00:16:32 Dan:
Part of that sentence wasn't true.
00:16:34 Pia:
Was that short, that career, or was it?
00:16:37 Dan:
That sigmoid curve is microscopic.
00:16:39 Dan:
But to become more human focused, to understand disorder and how to lead in a more sort of empathetic way, you've got to face into your, not just your strengths, you've got to face into the things that aren't helping you anymore.
00:16:51 Dan:
And that can be just taking on board.
00:16:53 Dan:
I need to change that.
00:16:54 Dan:
That's something that's not working for me now.
00:16:57 Dan:
I know it sounds, when you read this on the page,
00:16:59 Dan:
sounds really sort of very easy.
00:17:00 Dan:
I just change that.
00:17:01 Pia:
No, it's not as easy.
00:17:03 Dan:
It's your identity that is sometimes being challenged.
00:17:06 Dan:
You have to change.
00:17:06 Dan:
So that's I think any listener out there get excited about.
00:17:10 Dan:
Yeah.
00:17:10 Pia:
Oh yeah, it's we've all been there.
00:17:13 Pia:
And that's because the first phase of any change in that psychology, so you've got to transition, is denial, which is my standard joke here is the longest river, the longest river in Africa.
00:17:24 Pia:
No, this is the process where you're just like, no, it's not happening.
00:17:28 Pia:
The change isn't happening.
00:17:29 Pia:
I don't need to change.
00:17:31 Pia:
You can stay in that place for quite a long time bargaining, looping your thinking, telling yourself you don't need to do it.
00:17:37 Pia:
And then you go into anger.
00:17:38 Pia:
Then you get angry.
00:17:40 Pia:
And that combination between denial and.
00:17:43 Dan:
Fantastic.
00:17:44 Pia:
Everyone else's full.
00:17:46 Pia:
And then you go to the bottom of the U-bend.
00:17:47 Pia:
That is the bit where you've gone through those stages.
00:17:50 Dan:
This piece of resistance, yeah, the resistance.
00:17:53 Pia:
You have to let go.
00:17:54 Dan:
That's where you really pile on your logic to say why the thing is wrong and it can become hardened.
00:18:00 Dan:
But as you say, stepping over that chasm into experimentation and openness is the thing that's going to make people move through.
00:18:08 Pia:
That's it.
00:18:09 Pia:
You start gracefully moving into a little bit of an acceptance and often
00:18:13 Pia:
You swing back and you go, that didn't work.
00:18:15 Pia:
That was a pile of rubbish.
00:18:16 Dan:
Yeah, it's sort of like a ball bearing at the bottom of the curve, yeah.
00:18:20 Pia:
Then you actually then do, then you sort of get into that acceptance or exploration.
00:18:25 Pia:
You're ready to go to take that new step.
00:18:28 Pia:
But no one knows how long it takes and no two people are the same.
00:18:32 Dan:
Absolutely.
00:18:33 Dan:
When I joined, I think I'm allowed to say this now, but when I joined Novartis, this was in year 2000, so I was very, very young, but people would still in Novartis, this is 10 years after the SIBA and Sandoz merger, people would still say, oh, he's a Sandoz guy.
00:18:51 Dan:
I kid you not, because these two cultures came together.
00:18:54 Dan:
And that was not a merger.
00:18:56 Dan:
That was not something that failed.
00:18:57 Dan:
But overall, I mean, Novartis is fantastic to this day.
00:19:01 Dan:
But you can see how those little cracks are still there and things you have to leave behind.
00:19:06 Dan:
Fascinating.
00:19:07 Dan:
And by the way, and I was thinking also, when you ask a team, and this is a great thing you do with your own teams, you're going through change, if you say to people, say to leaders, where is your team on this curve?
00:19:17 Dan:
And where are you on this curve?
00:19:18 Dan:
It's very obvious that your team
00:19:20 Dan:
is generally trailing.
00:19:21 Dan:
You've been privy to more.
00:19:23 Pia:
That's true.
00:19:24 Dan:
You've had longer to think about it.
00:19:25 Dan:
It's probably a wrong estimate, but you do have to go back and bring people through and recognise that they are transitioning.
00:19:32 Dan:
It's not a sort of, hey, could you guys get on board?
00:19:35 Dan:
It's an individual leadership thing.
00:19:37 Dan:
You're going to have to talk to each person on your team to bring them through, hold them by the hand and bring them through and also learn from them what the challenges are, because this is not a sort of how do we force this change on an organisation.
00:19:48 Dan:
There has to be at every level
00:19:51 Dan:
there's a dialogue and ideally that is rattling up and down the organisation as it cascades.
00:19:56 Dan:
The change, feedback should come back up because the top team needs to be hearing all of that and tuning things for what they're seeing because the people at the front line know exactly what's going on.
00:20:07 Pia:
I think you can get change fatigue and that can happen when those, it's a bit like being dumped by waves on a beach.
00:20:14 Pia:
But those sigmoid curves, if they happen too close, you're just kind of getting out of 1 and then you hit another one.
00:20:19 Pia:
I'm seeing a lot of
00:20:21 Pia:
That happened to a team recently, came through a big organisational change.
00:20:25 Pia:
Now they're coming to go through an externally driven impact on their product and that's created another change.
00:20:31 Pia:
And I just so full of respect watching that, how they're rallying together, looking for what they can influence, what they can control.
00:20:39 Pia:
Huge maturity in being able to do that.
00:20:42 Pia:
But they've learned also that this is a process and that they won't all go through it at exactly the same stage, but they can support one another.
00:20:51 Pia:
If you know where you're at, where you've got to get to.
00:20:54 Dan:
Yes, yeah, and it's a bit of we not me, isn't it, coming together.
00:20:57 Dan:
The change fatigue is really interesting, isn't it, that people can be sort of battered by it.
00:21:02 Dan:
And obviously in this case, this is an externally driven thing, but I do think that some organizations...
00:21:08 Dan:
sometimes what I call the dark side of agile.
00:21:10 Dan:
They'll initiate a change.
00:21:12 Dan:
Don't give it enough time to actually take root and have the plus and say, oh, we need to do something else.
00:21:17 Dan:
Jim Collins talks about this, doesn't he?
00:21:19 Dan:
The flywheel.
00:21:20 Dan:
You can become change fatigued just because actually that last change wasn't given the chance to really, you know, it's like this back to the sigmoid curve again.
00:21:28 Dan:
We only gave it the sort of downward curve.
00:21:30 Dan:
Oh, this isn't working.
00:21:31 Dan:
Let's go back.
00:21:32 Dan:
So there is a piece where you can change too quickly, but on the whole, people are changing still.
00:21:37 Dan:
still too late.
00:21:38 Dan:
Even in product development, Steve Jobs was the champion of this.
00:21:42 Dan:
You remember those days when you bought an iPod?
00:21:44 Dan:
The way you bought a new iPod, you'd see an advert for the next one and stop, gee.
00:21:48 Dan:
Yeah, I know.
00:21:49 Dan:
But he was relentless about creative destruction, ju
