WEBVTT
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Hello, I'm James.
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Hi, I'm Jimmy, and welcome to A Job Done Well.
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The podcast that helps you improve your performance and enjoyment at work
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afternoon.
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How are you?
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I'm good, James.
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How are you?
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And
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now today we are gonna talk about organisational inertia.
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You know that sensation when you're in a meeting and you think,"We've talked about this so many fucking times, and nobody has done anything yet." So that's what we're gonna talk about.
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It's gonna be exciting.
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I like a bit of inertia But before we get into that, we are not going to be recording over the summer.
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The sun is high, and people go on holiday, and so they don't listen to us.
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So shortly, come summer holidays, we're gonna back away from the podcast for a couple of months.
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But before we do that oh, I suppose we've got a request
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Yeah.
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we're gonna start thinking about season four what would you like to hear us cover?
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What subjects, what challenges?
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What questions do you have for us?
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A reasonable percentage of our episodes do come from our audience, so it's just a, a little nudge to say if there's anything that you like or don't like, wanna hear more of, less
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Please.
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let us
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'Cause otherwise we just make shit up
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Which we did
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Yeah, so yeah, we're quite good at that as well.
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So inertia then.
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Have you ever, there you go, have you ever sat in a meeting where everybody bitches and moans and says everything's broken, and everybody nods, and everybody says,"We need to fix that." And you come back six months later and not a damn thing has changed?
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Does that sound familiar?
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God, if I had, if I had a pound for every time I've had that experience,
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You'd have
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I
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£7.43, yeah.
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So what we're gonna talk about is what drives that in organisations and what you can do to change it
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Yeah, absolutely.,
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So some of the frustrations, some examples of the type of things I I'm thinking about..
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Several years ago, I will leave it at that so it won't protect the innocent, I worked for an organisation, and it was deciding where it was gonna put a new office block.
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Yeah.
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And should we put it in that city?
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Should we put it in this city?
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Should we expand over here?
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Should we expand over there?
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The conversation went on for it must have been two or three years, and people just wouldn't come to a conclusion.
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They wanted more analysis and more data.
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And it just went round and round and round.
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And to be honest with you, it almost didn't matter where we put the flipping office block.
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It was just a question of deciding and getting on with it.
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Yeah.
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Something.
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Yeah, absolutely.
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So for me, I think that is a good example of two of the issues we face.
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One is this just sort of, well, it's not very, it's not very sophisticated, but let's call it analytical masturbation.
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So this endless search for numbers and more numbers and more numbers but never being happy with what you've got.
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So there's one of the things that I was seeing
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well, I think one of my examples, James, relates to that as well, I was in one organisation, and we were changing the way we had set up our suppliers.
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We were going from multiple suppliers down to one.
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Yeah
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So it was quite a big move for the organisation.
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But the people in the organisation wanted so much information about what we were gonna do, how we were gonna do it.
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Not just the right questions,'cause there are-- it's appropriate to ask the right questions, but it was into the minutiae of what could ever go wrong.
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And we found ourselves having to work through scenarios that were beyond fantastic in terms of they could never happen.
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Asked me for a solution to one potential issue, and I sarcastically called it Plan Z.
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Because you have plan A, plan B.
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They wanted everything through
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Right
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Z.
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And, and actually that name stuck, and they called it
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did they?
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afterwards Plan Z.
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But sarcasm aside, they just wanted such a level of certainty, and it's back to your analysis paralysis point.
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You just get into that,"I want more, more, more data," and what you're trying to show is more and more certainty.
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And so many decisions in life, you can't have a hundred percent certainty.
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You just have to make a decision
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Another example would be we had, worked for an organisation, every year they had what they called Quarter Four.
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And Quarter Four was at the year-end, everybody was running around like headless chickens to try and hit their end year targets.
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I was responsible for capacity management at the time.
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Can you imagine what that was like?
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Was everyone's forcing volume into the business, and we ain't got any people, and it happened every year.
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But the problem was, come the beginning of January the next year, everybody si- had a sigh of relief and forgot about it.
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But then nine months later, we went round the same path again.
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I swear it happened five or six years on the trot.
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So there's another thing.
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It's almost like,"Well, we've got through that.
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We can just put it behind us and go and focus on something more pleasant." So yeah, there's another example.
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The examples we've talked about, fairly senior level examples, but I've seen it in small teams shop floor stuff.
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So there's this spreadsheet that doesn't work or there's this work instruction that's rubbish.
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Well, someone fixed the spreadsheet, somebody's fixed the work instructions, but you can go round that as well
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The number of times, James, and you don't look at how people do things and, you know, they talk about workarounds this workaround, how long has it been in place?
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And I...
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there's been workarounds that have been in place for years.
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Well, they're not workarounds, are they?
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They're just how you do things.
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But you've almost become accepting of the initial issue, the initial problem,
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Yeah
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you're never gonna fix it you've just got used to the workaround
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so I suppose the question for me is, right, why do organisations tolerate these problems for so long?
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And actually, I mean, you know, I'm a lucky man.
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I've worked for some fairly intelligent organisations, or worked for a couple of not too fucking intelligent organisations as well, but some fairly intelligent ones.
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And then why do they just repeat the obvious mistakes?
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There's another one I think I've heard you bleat on about this before, but over-collaboration.
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Go on, tell me about over-collaboration
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You see it in a lot of organisations.
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Stuff doesn't change because everyone's got to have a say, and everyone's got to agree.
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It's not just collaboration, it's unani- it's got to be unanimous.
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and I was working on one organisation recently, and they had a good idea about how they were gonna rationalise part of what they were doing, and it was a great idea.
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It really was a great idea.
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they'd been talking about this great idea for, for over two years, and it's just because everyone had to have a say.
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That reminds me of something I read, actually, this morning.
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It's this point that in most organisations you have to persuade everybody that something's a good idea, right?
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You go, and if one person thinks it's not a good idea, it stops.
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Yeah?
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Yeah.
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But if you spin that on its head, right, and actually you have to persuade people that it's not a bad idea, then all of a sudden it just changes the mentality altogether.
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Yeah.
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It's about,"Well, it's not a bad idea.
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Let's have a go." So it's just how do you spin that mindset around?
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But the reality is, James,, if you work that way, that you can only do things unanimously everyone thinks is a good idea, you won't be doing very much, will you?
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Because it's very difficult, particularly on big or important or complex or controversial things, to get absolutely everyone agreeing all the time If you step back, you can get irate about it's that quarter or it's that board paper or it's that process that's broken.
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problem with inertia, I think, is it's not just the point of inertia that, that is the problem.
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Inertia spreads, so you become accepting of one thing, and the next thing you know, you're accepting of another thing and another thing and another thing, it does infect things.
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It's almost like a disease that
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Okay, so it's that nothing ever changes around here conversation.
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And actually, once you start to believe that nothing ever changes around here, nothing ever changes becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy
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Exactly.
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But it starts off with some single points of inertia in your organisation.
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Then it builds and builds, and it becomes exactly as you said, nothing ever changes here
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So let's just summarise that then.
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So three of the things which we talked about.
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So we talked about analysis paralysis, we talked about over-collaboration, we talked for, about a desire for certainty.
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But what, what do you think causes that and what are the underlying reasons, would you say?
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So I think there's, a few things.
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The first one's probably worth discussing is just how you set things up, how you incentivise behavior within your organisation.
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And that's not just paid incentives, it's what's important, what's rewarded here.
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So one of my friends, Rob Wilson, who's actually been a guest on the show, but he said to me once,"One man's waste is another man's career." Which, you, you know, it depends on what you're set up to do, Have you set your organization up in a way that, you know, you've just got conflicting incentives, and people never come to a conclusion, and'cause they never come to a conclusion, nothing ever flipping happens.
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So I think that's one of the key things, actually, the incentives within the organization and what they do for people's behavior
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Another reason is that people act out of fear, and it makes them about the risks that they are taking.
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The fear can be of something going wrong, but also people find that change is threatening.
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They get comfortable with the way things
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Yeah, but there's here you go, I'm gonna be intellectual.
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You'll like this.
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Two types of errors, mate.
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The error of commission and the error of omission., So error of commission is when you do something that you shouldn't have done.
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An error of omission is when you don't do something that you should have done.
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But actually, you're more likely to get a good kicking for what you did do than what you didn't do.
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So actually, in a lot of organisations, the safest safest thing to do is nothing.
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Yeah.
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Sit down, you know, sit on your hands, wait and see what happens.
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Yeah,'cause it- you're much more likely to get bollocked for doing something than not doing something
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Yeah.
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So underlying fear drives inertia in organisations.
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Well,
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What else
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is that that's an interesting line, isn't it?
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This whole thing.
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People aren't scared of change.
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You know, everybody's got an iPhone.
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We've moved to that change very quickly.
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People are scared of being changed, which actually links back to the underlying incentive points.
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Yeah?
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But if you're changing things, which will change the way people's, well, status, the pay people are paid, all of a sudden you get a whole host of brick walls coming up and reasons why people don't want to change.
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So yeah, fear, I think that's quite a big one
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I do remember going into one organisation and talking to one of the very senior managers about, about what the organisation needed to do, and he was like,"Adam, we, we
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Yeah
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stuff.
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You know, there's so much here that needs to change.
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team over there needs to change.
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That team over there...
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except
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to change except me." He absolutely was adamant everyone in the organisation needs to
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a problem but him.
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Yeah, yeah, yeah.
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Yeah, which, yeah, it doesn't help the situation.
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All right, and so go on.
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Next one I think is this whole not my problem, right?
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So or to give it another more technical term, diffused ownership, right?
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When it's, you know, really not clear who owns a problem, and'cause it's not clear who owns a problem nobody picks it up and runs with it
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This is what you experience in a lot of organizations is your systems, your processes, like as a middle manager, they don't quite work, but you don't own them.
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So therefore, sometimes it can be hard to then work out,"Well, how do I, how do I change this?" And yeah, there's been a few organizations I've worked in where we've gone with the the old cliché of don't walk past bad service.
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If you see something that is broken, that is causing you to serve your customers badly, you need to do something about
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Yeah
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Whatever it is.
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Doesn't mean you have to fix it yourself, but you have to do
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There's that old sort of little fable..
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This is a story about four people named Everybody, Somebody, Anybody, and Nobody.
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There was an important job to be done, and Everybody was sure that Somebody would do it.
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Anybody could have done it, but Nobody did it.
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Somebody got angry about that because it was Everybody's job.
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Everybody thought Anybody could do it, but Nobody realised that Everybody wouldn't do it.
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It ended up that Everybody blamed Somebody when Nobody did what Anybody could have done.
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I know, all right, it's a bit flipping cutesy, but that is how it feels in organisations, yeah?
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It's things where there is nobody accountable for it or people feeling that they shouldn't touch things that nobody's accountable for
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Another thing that I think sits behind a lot of this is the, desire that people have to defend the status quo.
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And, whi-which can be quite surprising'cause you can be working in a very difficult situation or, have some real problems around you, but still people will defend what is, difficult and broken.
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And I think there's a few reasons why people do that.
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One is,
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Yeah.
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ego.
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You know, I
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Yeah.
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up,
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Yeah, yeah, yeah
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up.
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This is my operations, my business.
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I don't wanna...
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nobody wants to be told their baby's ugly at the end of the day.
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As well as ego, I think there are a couple other things at play.
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I think people do fear change.
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You know, no matter how bad things are, you are certain about what you've got, people fear the unknown.
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Even though it almost certainly will be better, they still fear the unknown.
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It's back to that old saying,
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Well,
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you
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yeah
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And I think there's a bit of the cyclical nature of organizations, you know, and you can get swept up in the latest kind of things that are happening.
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But then it goes back to how it was.
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You get a new leader in, and they start saying,"We're going to ch- I'm gonna change what..." I remember somebody said to me once when I joined an organization, after about a month, I'd been talking about things that we would be doing, and I had a one-to-one with this person.
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She said to me,"Love what you're telling us, but, I'll be interested to see how many people are just sitting there waiting for you to move on,
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No,'cause they've heard it before.
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here." And that
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yeah, yeah
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the inertia.
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Yeah, that was the inertia.
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It was easier to keep your head down and wait for the next, the person to move on and the next person to come on.
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So I think that all part-- plays part of, you know, defending the status
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there's another one actually, which is, Can I be bothered?
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And I think in a lot of organizations you get that.
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Have I told you my story of the dog and the nail?
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So anyway, a big old country house in Virginia.
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You've got this big veranda, two good old boys sitting on the veranda, and there's this hound dog, and this hound dog's sitting on the veranda, and it's howling to itself.
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Do you like that?
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That's my howling talk.
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I think that's pretty good.
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Anyway, yeah,
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You can tell you're not a dog
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So anyway, it's howling to itself, and one of the good old boys says to the other good old boy,"So why is that dog lying there howling?" And he says,"It's'cause he's sitting on a nail." So he looks at him and says,"Well, why doesn't he get up and walk and move away from it then?" He says,"Well,'cause it's not hurting him that much." But there is just this, you know, can I be bothered?
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Is it really that bad, or should I just put up with it?
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And I think there is, yeah, there's an element of that.
00:15:41.977 --> 00:15:44.078
Can that be us, or is it organisational exhaustion?
00:15:44.138 --> 00:15:45.798
Maybe that's a better way of putting it.
00:15:46.317 --> 00:15:48.717
But, you know, people stop believing change is real.
00:15:48.758 --> 00:15:58.977
They've seen so many failed transa-transformations and so m- They've seen so many restructures and leadership churn, and after a while you just think,"Well, been there, seen it, done it.
00:15:59.018 --> 00:16:01.398
I'll just keep me head down and see what happens next."
00:16:02.054 --> 00:16:08.924
So if you are, a senior manager running an organisation, you need to pay attention to some of those themes, right?
00:16:09.164 --> 00:16:14.225
So, to avoid inertia in your organisation, they're some of the things you can change.
00:16:14.346 --> 00:16:16.767
But what about if you're a middle manager?
00:16:16.966 --> 00:16:20.905
How do you think about this inertia where you're caught in it, you know, you're
00:16:21.210 --> 00:16:31.669
Well, the trap for a middle manager, s- quite often I think, is they can see the problems really obviously, but they lack the authority to solve them.
00:16:32.250 --> 00:16:32.451
Yeah?
00:16:32.789 --> 00:16:40.528
And they sit there absorbing the pressure from both directions and they almost become the translators between reality and ambition, right?
00:16:40.629 --> 00:16:40.908
Do you know?
00:16:41.049 --> 00:16:47.530
So I think that drives a whole load of bad behaviors maybe in that population
00:16:47.996 --> 00:16:59.202
Interesting point here, James,- I've worked in a number of organisations and worked with senior teams, thing that they would point to in terms of inertia is
00:16:59.269 --> 00:17:01.010
Yeah, they talk about the frozen middle.
00:17:01.230 --> 00:17:01.789
Yeah, yeah, yeah
00:17:02.022 --> 00:17:05.362
Exactly, the marzipan layer, the permafrost layer.
00:17:05.643 --> 00:17:19.842
There's all sorts of derogatory terms I've, I've heard used about that group i-in an organisation, but not really understanding the themes that we talk around that are driving inertia throughout the organisation.
00:17:19.883 --> 00:17:23.721
It isn't the fault and the behaviours of those middle managers.
00:17:23.761 --> 00:17:25.762
Those middle managers are responding to
00:17:25.817 --> 00:17:27.179
Yeah, and I totally get that.
00:17:27.298 --> 00:17:28.397
It's, totally agree, right?
00:17:28.478 --> 00:17:32.998
So if you've got this problem, it is a senior manager problem, right?
00:17:33.498 --> 00:17:41.958
If your organisation is disengaged, yeah, running an engagement survey and beating people if they don't give you a five is not the solution.
00:17:42.038 --> 00:17:43.038
Don't be surprised.
00:17:43.337 --> 00:17:43.518
Yeah.
00:17:43.898 --> 00:17:49.077
However, I suppose how does that materialise within your middle layers of your organisation, right?
00:17:49.138 --> 00:17:51.827
So you just get this sort of well, cynicism.
00:17:52.528 --> 00:17:52.768
Yeah.
00:17:52.988 --> 00:17:53.788
Endemic, right?
00:17:54.028 --> 00:17:55.367
Or learned helplessness.
00:17:55.468 --> 00:17:59.186
We believe we can't do anything about it, so we just don't do anything about it, right?
00:17:59.603 --> 00:17:59.762
Yeah.
00:18:00.247 --> 00:18:08.047
the other two things you get, which I think are worse still, are you get this sort of survival behavior, which is, for God's sake, bend down, here comes another one.
00:18:08.136 --> 00:18:09.516
And we'll just wait and see.
00:18:09.976 --> 00:18:18.685
Or worse still, you just get quiet disengagement where people, you know, watching the clock until five o'clock ticks up, and then they, they get out and walk away, and they're just in it for the money.
00:18:18.965 --> 00:18:25.446
So those are the sort of issues I think which happen within that, that part of the organisation.
00:18:25.746 --> 00:18:27.086
But it is, you're absolutely right.
00:18:27.105 --> 00:18:33.902
It is a senior management problem, and they should be addressing it However, right, this is all terribly, terribly negative.
00:18:34.842 --> 00:18:36.442
What can you do, right?
00:18:36.501 --> 00:18:42.201
So let's just say, well, as we have been, you're sitting in the middle of some organisation, What can you do about it?
00:18:42.222 --> 00:18:44.162
What sort of, what hints and tips would you give?
00:18:44.727 --> 00:18:50.007
We are guilty at times of thinking that there's nothing that you can do about things.
00:18:51.326 --> 00:19:04.707
it may be true about certain aspects of the way the organisation runs, but if you think about what you can control, you can control a lot of the environment that your team work in.
00:19:05.326 --> 00:19:19.917
A good example of this is, in one organisation I, I worked in, we had a big contact centre with, 30 different teams in, and there was a massive variation in the performance of those teams.
00:19:19.978 --> 00:19:24.127
They were all doing the same job the same pay, same conditions, all the rest of it.
00:19:24.489 --> 00:19:35.948
The difference was the manager that they had in the organisation, and that difference was how that manager treated them, the environment they created around them, how they coached and helped them to do their job.
00:19:36.268 --> 00:19:46.667
That is one of the areas, the day-to-day contact that you have with your team and how you're managing them, communicating them, motivating them, rewarding them, praising.
00:19:46.729 --> 00:19:47.508
You can do a whole load
00:19:47.556 --> 00:19:50.996
Yeah, but that comes down to enthusiasm, right?
00:19:52.215 --> 00:19:59.236
Yeah,'cause actually what, what you just told me is there were some managers which were more enthusiastic than others, and that enthusiasm rubs off largely.
00:19:59.256 --> 00:20:03.616
And it, for me, it's this whole circle of influence and circle of control, right?
00:20:03.698 --> 00:20:07.517
So the point again, don't worry about what you worry about, worry about what you can control.
00:20:07.896 --> 00:20:09.457
And I think that is really powerful.
00:20:09.498 --> 00:20:15.157
You know, go and focus on the things you can do something about, and don't worry about the things you can't
00:20:15.759 --> 00:20:23.117
In the things that you can, the point that I was making about how different managers manage their teams, that stops inertia
00:20:23.473 --> 00:20:23.943
Yeah, yeah,
00:20:23.998 --> 00:20:25.019
into your teams.
00:20:25.326 --> 00:20:28.645
I think small changes trump grand transformation plans.
00:20:29.226 --> 00:20:37.006
You know,'cause it's very easy to pull together some whizz-bang deck, you know, 150 slides, and go and ask for, oh, half a billion quid.
00:20:37.425 --> 00:20:44.757
But really small stuff that gets changed, and people seeing it changed and moving on it, that's what really starts to unlock that inertia.
00:20:46.116 --> 00:20:46.317
Yeah
00:20:46.809 --> 00:20:56.469
One of the great things you do in one organisation we worked together was help teams understand what those small changes were and how they could impact those small changes.
00:20:56.769 --> 00:20:58.589
And the majority of them, they loved
00:20:59.076 --> 00:20:59.576
Yeah, yeah, yeah
00:20:59.868 --> 00:21:00.909
those small changes.
00:21:01.209 --> 00:21:03.509
They had loads they could tell you about.
00:21:03.849 --> 00:21:12.709
And then when you actually analysed with them how they solve those small changes with ways that were in their control, quite often they could change a lot of them.
00:21:13.068 --> 00:21:21.888
So back to the point, something big over here may not be changing, within your team's life you can change a whole lot, and that
00:21:21.989 --> 00:21:23.308
Well, and I think two things.
00:21:23.348 --> 00:21:28.469
So, you know, people say it's not strategic, but if you make small changes, it's a bit like...
00:21:28.509 --> 00:21:30.509
So my analogy would be bridges to islands.
00:21:30.528 --> 00:21:40.859
You make a small change, you create a bridge to a different island, you can then walk onto that island and have a look round, and you realise,"Oh, we could do this, we could do this, we could do this instead." So it, it sort of expands your your geography.
00:21:40.881 --> 00:21:43.000
It makes you think about your problems differently.
00:21:43.040 --> 00:21:43.799
So that's the first thing.
00:21:44.099 --> 00:21:47.140
Second thing is lots of small changes make a really big difference.
00:21:47.660 --> 00:21:49.951
But thirdly, it just people just get enthused.
00:21:49.990 --> 00:21:52.089
They see things changing, they want it to happen.
00:21:52.150 --> 00:21:53.990
Nobody wants to come to work and be bored.
00:21:54.289 --> 00:21:58.829
So yeah, sorry, I'm bang on, but small stuff I just think is fundamentally important.
00:21:59.170 --> 00:22:07.490
The other thing that links to that really well is this whole thing about, everybody talks about it, quick wins, but visible wins create momentum, yeah?
00:22:07.851 --> 00:22:08.951
Nothing ever changes here.
00:22:08.971 --> 00:22:10.191
Well, what about that spreadsheet?
00:22:10.271 --> 00:22:10.951
Yeah, okay.
00:22:11.152 --> 00:22:11.332
Right.
00:22:11.373 --> 00:22:12.270
So it's, Yeah.
00:22:12.931 --> 00:22:16.451
Don't worry about what you can't do, worry about what you can and get some momentum going.
00:22:17.606 --> 00:22:17.787
Yeah.
00:22:18.727 --> 00:22:27.887
And, and at the end of the day, back to your point about big change, big transformation is the crack cocaine of corporate life, everyone's addicted to it.
00:22:27.946 --> 00:22:33.547
They all want it, but actually the reality is where the gold dust is, is in the small stuff.
00:22:34.007 --> 00:22:50.175
And so as a middle manager who's stuck in this, environment, you can focus on how you lead your team, and you can focus on the small change that you can implement, and that'll be far more meaningful the fact that, you aren't changing the big stuff every year
00:22:50.505 --> 00:22:52.963
And I think there are two more things that link to that, I think.
00:22:53.463 --> 00:22:56.884
First of all is, right, you just gotta stick at it.
00:22:57.163 --> 00:22:59.163
It just cr- persistence,
00:22:59.451 --> 00:22:59.632
Yeah
00:22:59.804 --> 00:23:00.003
right?
00:23:00.523 --> 00:23:01.163
We can't do that.
00:23:01.265 --> 00:23:02.044
Well, we will do that.
00:23:02.144 --> 00:23:02.884
Well, we will do that.
00:23:03.124 --> 00:23:04.564
'Cause, you know, you've got two options.
00:23:04.663 --> 00:23:07.804
You can either suck it up as it is, or you can change stuff, right?
00:23:08.285 --> 00:23:11.324
So if you're gonna change stuff, you have to be persistent, right?
00:23:12.344 --> 00:23:19.784
But if you are persistent, then that will generate trust in the people around you,'cause they will see that you're trying to make things happen.
00:23:19.963 --> 00:23:24.324
And wouldn't you know, people need some belief, and that is driven by trust.
00:23:24.364 --> 00:23:29.294
So if you can get people trusting you and engaged with it, you know, really powerful.
00:23:29.713 --> 00:23:34.794
And then the other thing is, I think you've got a lot more influence than you think you have, right?
00:23:34.953 --> 00:23:42.994
'Cause easy to say"Oh, I can't do this, this, and this," but you know, you can restructure your meetings.
00:23:43.275 --> 00:23:45.355
You can do something about your local culture.
00:23:45.654 --> 00:23:47.934
You can do something about that small process.
00:23:47.954 --> 00:23:50.214
You can do something about team norms, yeah?
00:23:50.516 --> 00:23:52.596
You can do something about honesty and clarity.
00:23:52.654 --> 00:23:54.096
All of these things matter.
00:23:54.795 --> 00:23:56.095
In fact, matter an awful lot.
00:23:56.134 --> 00:23:58.195
But d- yeah, what can you do?
00:23:58.275 --> 00:23:59.894
That's my real point.
00:24:00.326 --> 00:24:03.547
Overall, it's back to your point, control the controllables.
00:24:03.965 --> 00:24:12.227
Don't underestimate what's controllable, at the end of the day, that stops inertia hitting your team and
00:24:12.314 --> 00:24:19.094
Yeah, and it, you know, might be a bit of a throwaway line, but most successful change is much quieter than an organisation expects.
00:24:19.314 --> 00:24:22.154
You know, it's not big bang stuff, it's just getting on with it.
00:24:22.213 --> 00:24:23.835
So yeah, those are the things I think you can do
00:24:24.218 --> 00:24:35.327
Yeah So in summary, James, we're saying that organisational inertia some way or another is almost always inevitable in organisation.
00:24:35.367 --> 00:24:45.198
I think we've seen it wherever we've worked, and the danger, the risk that it brings is that it spreads And next thing you know, ever changes here becomes
00:24:45.340 --> 00:24:45.582
Yeah.
00:24:45.758 --> 00:24:46.076
company
00:24:46.280 --> 00:24:56.060
A- and if you are, if you are in the senior position, right, you have to do something about it, but you have to play at the, you know, the, the risk, the fear, the incentives, the reward level.
00:24:56.122 --> 00:24:58.861
That's, that's what you're paid to do, so you address that.
00:25:00.461 --> 00:25:02.582
But for the people who can't address those issues
00:25:03.019 --> 00:25:14.199
There is plenty that, that is within their control in terms of the environment, the work, and the small changes that they can make to avoid inertia creeping in on
00:25:14.346 --> 00:25:15.707
So we can't do anything.
00:25:15.926 --> 00:25:19.098
Well, I hope you've enjoyed this week's episode, and,
00:25:19.227 --> 00:25:22.746
Yeah, and we look forward to our barrage of thoughts about what we could talk about next season
00:25:23.201 --> 00:25:23.662
Absolutely.
00:25:23.938 --> 00:25:26.317
recognition
00:25:26.519 --> 00:25:28.701
We cover a whole host of topics on this podcast,
00:25:29.140 --> 00:25:31.079
from purpose to corporate jargon,
00:25:31.441 --> 00:25:34.619
but always focused on one thing, getting the job done well.
00:25:35.119 --> 00:25:35.980
Easier said than done.
00:25:36.760 --> 00:25:43.660
So if you've got unhappy customers or employees, bosses or regulators breathing down your neck,
00:25:44.440 --> 00:25:52.759
if your backlogs are out of control and your costs are spiraling, and that big IT transformation project that you've been promised just keeps failing to deliver,
00:25:53.599 --> 00:25:54.279
we can help.
00:25:54.680 --> 00:26:06.119
If you need to improve your performance, your team's performance, or your organization's, get in touch at jimmy@ajobdonewell.com or james@ajobdonewell.com.
00:00:03.305 --> 00:00:04.565
Hello, I'm James.
00:00:05.044 --> 00:00:07.804
Hi, I'm Jimmy, and welcome to A Job Done Well.
00:00:08.025 --> 00:00:11.586
The podcast that helps you improve your performance and enjoyment at work
00:00:15.416 --> 00:00:15.916
afternoon.
00:00:15.996 --> 00:00:16.416
How are you?
00:00:16.760 --> 00:00:17.301
I'm good, James.
00:00:17.361 --> 00:00:18.221
How are you?
00:00:18.280 --> 00:00:18.501
And
00:00:18.605 --> 00:00:22.524
now today we are gonna talk about organisational inertia.
00:00:22.925 --> 00:00:33.665
You know that sensation when you're in a meeting and you think,"We've talked about this so many fucking times, and nobody has done anything yet." So that's what we're gonna talk about.
00:00:33.765 --> 00:00:34.506
It's gonna be exciting.
00:00:34.604 --> 00:00:41.140
I like a bit of inertia But before we get into that, we are not going to be recording over the summer.
00:00:41.200 --> 00:00:45.679
The sun is high, and people go on holiday, and so they don't listen to us.
00:00:45.719 --> 00:00:50.399
So shortly, come summer holidays, we're gonna back away from the podcast for a couple of months.
00:00:51.179 --> 00:00:53.579
But before we do that oh, I suppose we've got a request
00:00:53.838 --> 00:00:53.959
Yeah.
00:00:54.899 --> 00:00:59.238
we're gonna start thinking about season four what would you like to hear us cover?
00:00:59.399 --> 00:01:01.819
What subjects, what challenges?
00:01:02.628 --> 00:01:04.188
What questions do you have for us?
00:01:04.429 --> 00:01:12.248
A reasonable percentage of our episodes do come from our audience, so it's just a, a little nudge to say if there's anything that you like or don't like, wanna hear more of, less
00:01:12.391 --> 00:01:12.731
Please.
00:01:12.908 --> 00:01:13.128
let us
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'Cause otherwise we just make shit up
00:01:15.456 --> 00:01:15.876
Which we did
00:01:16.099 --> 00:01:17.920
Yeah, so yeah, we're quite good at that as well.
00:01:18.006 --> 00:01:18.805
So inertia then.
00:01:18.905 --> 00:01:35.625
Have you ever, there you go, have you ever sat in a meeting where everybody bitches and moans and says everything's broken, and everybody nods, and everybody says,"We need to fix that." And you come back six months later and not a damn thing has changed?
00:01:36.584 --> 00:01:37.245
Does that sound familiar?
00:01:38.421 --> 00:01:42.742
God, if I had, if I had a pound for every time I've had that experience,
00:01:42.816 --> 00:01:43.296
You'd have
00:01:43.742 --> 00:01:43.802
I
00:01:44.277 --> 00:01:45.846
£7.43, yeah.
00:01:46.186 --> 00:01:50.677
So what we're gonna talk about is what drives that in organisations and what you can do to change it
00:01:51.343 --> 00:01:52.144
Yeah, absolutely.,
00:01:52.575 --> 00:01:57.103
So some of the frustrations, some examples of the type of things I I'm thinking about..
00:01:57.194 --> 00:02:06.683
Several years ago, I will leave it at that so it won't protect the innocent, I worked for an organisation, and it was deciding where it was gonna put a new office block.
00:02:07.319 --> 00:02:07.599
Yeah.
00:02:07.718 --> 00:02:09.019
And should we put it in that city?
00:02:09.079 --> 00:02:10.399
Should we put it in this city?
00:02:10.438 --> 00:02:11.878
Should we expand over here?
00:02:11.998 --> 00:02:13.338
Should we expand over there?
00:02:13.799 --> 00:02:22.218
The conversation went on for it must have been two or three years, and people just wouldn't come to a conclusion.
00:02:22.299 --> 00:02:25.218
They wanted more analysis and more data.
00:02:25.759 --> 00:02:28.330
And it just went round and round and round.
00:02:28.370 --> 00:02:32.091
And to be honest with you, it almost didn't matter where we put the flipping office block.
00:02:32.110 --> 00:02:34.590
It was just a question of deciding and getting on with it.
00:02:35.229 --> 00:02:35.789
Yeah.
00:02:36.389 --> 00:02:36.729
Something.
00:02:36.850 --> 00:02:37.590
Yeah, absolutely.
00:02:37.870 --> 00:02:41.580
So for me, I think that is a good example of two of the issues we face.
00:02:42.080 --> 00:02:47.860
One is this just sort of, well, it's not very, it's not very sophisticated, but let's call it analytical masturbation.
00:02:47.900 --> 00:02:54.012
So this endless search for numbers and more numbers and more numbers but never being happy with what you've got.
00:02:54.102 --> 00:02:55.442
So there's one of the things that I was seeing
00:02:55.837 --> 00:03:05.997
well, I think one of my examples, James, relates to that as well, I was in one organisation, and we were changing the way we had set up our suppliers.
00:03:06.137 --> 00:03:08.456
We were going from multiple suppliers down to one.
00:03:08.832 --> 00:03:09.212
Yeah
00:03:09.258 --> 00:03:11.356
So it was quite a big move for the organisation.
00:03:12.258 --> 00:03:20.956
But the people in the organisation wanted so much information about what we were gonna do, how we were gonna do it.
00:03:21.016 --> 00:03:30.336
Not just the right questions,'cause there are-- it's appropriate to ask the right questions, but it was into the minutiae of what could ever go wrong.
00:03:30.657 --> 00:03:38.656
And we found ourselves having to work through scenarios that were beyond fantastic in terms of they could never happen.
00:03:39.475 --> 00:03:46.776
Asked me for a solution to one potential issue, and I sarcastically called it Plan Z.
00:03:46.816 --> 00:03:49.015
Because you have plan A, plan B.
00:03:49.037 --> 00:03:50.475
They wanted everything through
00:03:50.599 --> 00:03:50.840
Right
00:03:51.336 --> 00:03:51.475
Z.
00:03:52.156 --> 00:03:54.915
And, and actually that name stuck, and they called it
00:03:54.948 --> 00:03:55.528
did they?
00:03:55.697 --> 00:03:57.116
afterwards Plan Z.
00:03:57.135 --> 00:04:04.945
But sarcasm aside, they just wanted such a level of certainty, and it's back to your analysis paralysis point.
00:04:05.286 --> 00:04:11.306
You just get into that,"I want more, more, more data," and what you're trying to show is more and more certainty.
00:04:11.705 --> 00:04:15.686
And so many decisions in life, you can't have a hundred percent certainty.
00:04:15.746 --> 00:04:17.466
You just have to make a decision
00:04:17.567 --> 00:04:23.826
Another example would be we had, worked for an organisation, every year they had what they called Quarter Four.
00:04:24.565 --> 00:04:31.536
And Quarter Four was at the year-end, everybody was running around like headless chickens to try and hit their end year targets.
00:04:31.896 --> 00:04:34.074
I was responsible for capacity management at the time.
00:04:34.334 --> 00:04:35.415
Can you imagine what that was like?
00:04:35.475 --> 00:04:40.654
Was everyone's forcing volume into the business, and we ain't got any people, and it happened every year.
00:04:41.615 --> 00:04:47.764
But the problem was, come the beginning of January the next year, everybody si- had a sigh of relief and forgot about it.
00:04:48.565 --> 00:04:52.105
But then nine months later, we went round the same path again.
00:04:52.185 --> 00:04:54.824
I swear it happened five or six years on the trot.
00:04:54.886 --> 00:04:55.564
So there's another thing.
00:04:55.584 --> 00:04:57.564
It's almost like,"Well, we've got through that.
00:04:57.625 --> 00:05:03.300
We can just put it behind us and go and focus on something more pleasant." So yeah, there's another example.
00:05:03.408 --> 00:05:09.497
The examples we've talked about, fairly senior level examples, but I've seen it in small teams shop floor stuff.
00:05:09.536 --> 00:05:14.776
So there's this spreadsheet that doesn't work or there's this work instruction that's rubbish.
00:05:14.797 --> 00:05:20.377
Well, someone fixed the spreadsheet, somebody's fixed the work instructions, but you can go round that as well
00:05:20.750 --> 00:05:29.228
The number of times, James, and you don't look at how people do things and, you know, they talk about workarounds this workaround, how long has it been in place?
00:05:29.309 --> 00:05:29.629
And I...
00:05:29.718 --> 00:05:31.680
there's been workarounds that have been in place for years.
00:05:31.838 --> 00:05:33.459
Well, they're not workarounds, are they?
00:05:33.538 --> 00:05:34.899
They're just how you do things.
00:05:35.279 --> 00:05:39.300
But you've almost become accepting of the initial issue, the initial problem,
00:05:39.882 --> 00:05:40.083
Yeah
00:05:40.139 --> 00:05:43.867
you're never gonna fix it you've just got used to the workaround
00:05:43.867 --> 00:05:48.947
so I suppose the question for me is, right, why do organisations tolerate these problems for so long?
00:05:49.129 --> 00:05:51.187
And actually, I mean, you know, I'm a lucky man.
00:05:51.208 --> 00:05:58.447
I've worked for some fairly intelligent organisations, or worked for a couple of not too fucking intelligent organisations as well, but some fairly intelligent ones.
00:05:58.788 --> 00:06:01.769
And then why do they just repeat the obvious mistakes?
00:06:02.605 --> 00:06:06.923
There's another one I think I've heard you bleat on about this before, but over-collaboration.
00:06:07.004 --> 00:06:08.423
Go on, tell me about over-collaboration
00:06:10.036 --> 00:06:11.514
You see it in a lot of organisations.
00:06:12.014 --> 00:06:19.336
Stuff doesn't change because everyone's got to have a say, and everyone's got to agree.
00:06:19.894 --> 00:06:23.045
It's not just collaboration, it's unani- it's got to be unanimous.
00:06:24.404 --> 00:06:33.185
and I was working on one organisation recently, and they had a good idea about how they were gonna rationalise part of what they were doing, and it was a great idea.
00:06:33.204 --> 00:06:34.425
It really was a great idea.
00:06:35.245 --> 00:06:41.485
they'd been talking about this great idea for, for over two years, and it's just because everyone had to have a say.
00:06:42.365 --> 00:06:44.245
That reminds me of something I read, actually, this morning.
00:06:44.584 --> 00:06:53.495
It's this point that in most organisations you have to persuade everybody that something's a good idea, right?
00:06:53.574 --> 00:06:58.314
You go, and if one person thinks it's not a good idea, it stops.
00:06:58.875 --> 00:06:59.074
Yeah?
00:06:59.142 --> 00:06:59.363
Yeah.
00:06:59.555 --> 00:07:09.574
But if you spin that on its head, right, and actually you have to persuade people that it's not a bad idea, then all of a sudden it just changes the mentality altogether.
00:07:09.615 --> 00:07:09.754
Yeah.
00:07:09.814 --> 00:07:11.475
It's about,"Well, it's not a bad idea.
00:07:11.555 --> 00:07:15.584
Let's have a go." So it's just how do you spin that mindset around?
00:07:16.404 --> 00:07:26.293
But the reality is, James,, if you work that way, that you can only do things unanimously everyone thinks is a good idea, you won't be doing very much, will you?
00:07:26.394 --> 00:07:47.494
Because it's very difficult, particularly on big or important or complex or controversial things, to get absolutely everyone agreeing all the time If you step back, you can get irate about it's that quarter or it's that board paper or it's that process that's broken.
00:07:48.473 --> 00:07:55.855
problem with inertia, I think, is it's not just the point of inertia that, that is the problem.
00:07:56.194 --> 00:08:07.202
Inertia spreads, so you become accepting of one thing, and the next thing you know, you're accepting of another thing and another thing and another thing, it does infect things.
00:08:07.242 --> 00:08:08.971
It's almost like a disease that
00:08:09.259 --> 00:08:12.959
Okay, so it's that nothing ever changes around here conversation.
00:08:13.440 --> 00:08:19.699
And actually, once you start to believe that nothing ever changes around here, nothing ever changes becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy
00:08:20.384 --> 00:08:20.764
Exactly.
00:08:20.845 --> 00:08:26.824
But it starts off with some single points of inertia in your organisation.
00:08:27.204 --> 00:08:31.725
Then it builds and builds, and it becomes exactly as you said, nothing ever changes here
00:08:32.890 --> 00:08:33.971
So let's just summarise that then.
00:08:34.010 --> 00:08:35.910
So three of the things which we talked about.
00:08:36.010 --> 00:08:42.552
So we talked about analysis paralysis, we talked about over-collaboration, we talked for, about a desire for certainty.
00:08:43.311 --> 00:08:48.032
But what, what do you think causes that and what are the underlying reasons, would you say?
00:08:48.822 --> 00:08:50.533
So I think there's, a few things.
00:08:50.572 --> 00:08:58.712
The first one's probably worth discussing is just how you set things up, how you incentivise behavior within your organisation.
00:08:59.113 --> 00:09:04.712
And that's not just paid incentives, it's what's important, what's rewarded here.
00:09:05.383 --> 00:09:24.850
So one of my friends, Rob Wilson, who's actually been a guest on the show, but he said to me once,"One man's waste is another man's career." Which, you, you know, it depends on what you're set up to do, Have you set your organization up in a way that, you know, you've just got conflicting incentives, and people never come to a conclusion, and'cause they never come to a conclusion, nothing ever flipping happens.
00:09:25.351 --> 00:09:31.172
So I think that's one of the key things, actually, the incentives within the organization and what they do for people's behavior
00:09:31.677 --> 00:09:40.038
Another reason is that people act out of fear, and it makes them about the risks that they are taking.
00:09:40.217 --> 00:09:46.538
The fear can be of something going wrong, but also people find that change is threatening.
00:09:46.687 --> 00:09:48.008
They get comfortable with the way things
00:09:48.041 --> 00:09:50.169
Yeah, but there's here you go, I'm gonna be intellectual.
00:09:50.230 --> 00:09:50.870
You'll like this.
00:09:51.490 --> 00:09:52.809
Two types of errors, mate.
00:09:53.429 --> 00:10:01.048
The error of commission and the error of omission., So error of commission is when you do something that you shouldn't have done.
00:10:02.028 --> 00:10:05.389
An error of omission is when you don't do something that you should have done.
00:10:06.928 --> 00:10:12.509
But actually, you're more likely to get a good kicking for what you did do than what you didn't do.
00:10:13.309 --> 00:10:18.750
So actually, in a lot of organisations, the safest safest thing to do is nothing.
00:10:19.570 --> 00:10:19.729
Yeah.
00:10:20.208 --> 00:10:24.149
Sit down, you know, sit on your hands, wait and see what happens.
00:10:24.570 --> 00:10:27.870
Yeah,'cause it- you're much more likely to get bollocked for doing something than not doing something
00:10:28.349 --> 00:10:28.448
Yeah.
00:10:28.629 --> 00:10:32.288
So underlying fear drives inertia in organisations.
00:10:32.596 --> 00:10:32.836
Well,
00:10:32.869 --> 00:10:33.168
What else
00:10:33.238 --> 00:10:35.996
is that that's an interesting line, isn't it?
00:10:36.037 --> 00:10:36.517
This whole thing.
00:10:36.817 --> 00:10:38.397
People aren't scared of change.
00:10:39.298 --> 00:10:40.837
You know, everybody's got an iPhone.
00:10:40.897 --> 00:10:42.856
We've moved to that change very quickly.
00:10:43.277 --> 00:10:48.926
People are scared of being changed, which actually links back to the underlying incentive points.
00:10:49.186 --> 00:10:49.426
Yeah?
00:10:49.765 --> 00:11:01.706
But if you're changing things, which will change the way people's, well, status, the pay people are paid, all of a sudden you get a whole host of brick walls coming up and reasons why people don't want to change.
00:11:01.907 --> 00:11:04.187
So yeah, fear, I think that's quite a big one
00:11:04.384 --> 00:11:14.346
I do remember going into one organisation and talking to one of the very senior managers about, about what the organisation needed to do, and he was like,"Adam, we, we
00:11:14.576 --> 00:11:14.798
Yeah
00:11:15.184 --> 00:11:15.544
stuff.
00:11:16.105 --> 00:11:18.304
You know, there's so much here that needs to change.
00:11:19.125 --> 00:11:20.164
team over there needs to change.
00:11:20.225 --> 00:11:20.846
That team over there...
00:11:21.197 --> 00:11:21.758
except
00:11:21.904 --> 00:11:28.424
to change except me." He absolutely was adamant everyone in the organisation needs to
00:11:28.432 --> 00:11:29.232
a problem but him.
00:11:29.833 --> 00:11:30.513
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
00:11:30.673 --> 00:11:32.332
Yeah, which, yeah, it doesn't help the situation.
00:11:32.692 --> 00:11:33.572
All right, and so go on.
00:11:33.653 --> 00:11:38.011
Next one I think is this whole not my problem, right?
00:11:38.113 --> 00:11:43.039
So or to give it another more technical term, diffused ownership, right?
00:11:43.299 --> 00:11:50.441
When it's, you know, really not clear who owns a problem, and'cause it's not clear who owns a problem nobody picks it up and runs with it
00:11:50.895 --> 00:12:02.081
This is what you experience in a lot of organizations is your systems, your processes, like as a middle manager, they don't quite work, but you don't own them.
00:12:02.481 --> 00:12:14.572
So therefore, sometimes it can be hard to then work out,"Well, how do I, how do I change this?" And yeah, there's been a few organizations I've worked in where we've gone with the the old cliché of don't walk past bad service.
00:12:14.871 --> 00:12:20.792
If you see something that is broken, that is causing you to serve your customers badly, you need to do something about
00:12:20.821 --> 00:12:21.120
Yeah
00:12:21.351 --> 00:12:22.111
Whatever it is.
00:12:22.173 --> 00:12:24.052
Doesn't mean you have to fix it yourself, but you have to do
00:12:24.340 --> 00:12:26.399
There's that old sort of little fable..
00:12:26.490 --> 00:12:32.030
This is a story about four people named Everybody, Somebody, Anybody, and Nobody.
00:12:33.149 --> 00:12:37.730
There was an important job to be done, and Everybody was sure that Somebody would do it.
00:12:38.269 --> 00:12:40.669
Anybody could have done it, but Nobody did it.
00:12:41.150 --> 00:12:44.230
Somebody got angry about that because it was Everybody's job.
00:12:44.690 --> 00:12:49.570
Everybody thought Anybody could do it, but Nobody realised that Everybody wouldn't do it.
00:12:49.870 --> 00:12:54.690
It ended up that Everybody blamed Somebody when Nobody did what Anybody could have done.
00:12:55.690 --> 00:13:01.830
I know, all right, it's a bit flipping cutesy, but that is how it feels in organisations, yeah?
00:13:02.090 --> 00:13:08.211
It's things where there is nobody accountable for it or people feeling that they shouldn't touch things that nobody's accountable for
00:13:08.673 --> 00:13:15.852
Another thing that I think sits behind a lot of this is the, desire that people have to defend the status quo.
00:13:16.832 --> 00:13:28.432
And, whi-which can be quite surprising'cause you can be working in a very difficult situation or, have some real problems around you, but still people will defend what is, difficult and broken.
00:13:29.251 --> 00:13:31.772
And I think there's a few reasons why people do that.
00:13:31.852 --> 00:13:32.371
One is,
00:13:32.587 --> 00:13:32.807
Yeah.
00:13:33.231 --> 00:13:33.652
ego.
00:13:34.111 --> 00:13:34.532
You know, I
00:13:34.587 --> 00:13:34.827
Yeah.
00:13:34.991 --> 00:13:35.111
up,
00:13:35.128 --> 00:13:35.567
Yeah, yeah, yeah
00:13:35.692 --> 00:13:35.851
up.
00:13:35.871 --> 00:13:37.991
This is my operations, my business.
00:13:38.052 --> 00:13:38.513
I don't wanna...
00:13:38.772 --> 00:13:42.339
nobody wants to be told their baby's ugly at the end of the day.
00:13:42.389 --> 00:13:45.389
As well as ego, I think there are a couple other things at play.
00:13:45.429 --> 00:13:46.928
I think people do fear change.
00:13:47.269 --> 00:13:53.869
You know, no matter how bad things are, you are certain about what you've got, people fear the unknown.
00:13:54.369 --> 00:13:58.568
Even though it almost certainly will be better, they still fear the unknown.
00:13:58.669 --> 00:14:00.130
It's back to that old saying,
00:14:00.337 --> 00:14:00.677
Well,
00:14:00.850 --> 00:14:00.950
you
00:14:00.977 --> 00:14:01.197
yeah
00:14:02.211 --> 00:14:11.761
And I think there's a bit of the cyclical nature of organizations, you know, and you can get swept up in the latest kind of things that are happening.
00:14:12.761 --> 00:14:14.620
But then it goes back to how it was.
00:14:14.711 --> 00:14:27.490
You get a new leader in, and they start saying,"We're going to ch- I'm gonna change what..." I remember somebody said to me once when I joined an organization, after about a month, I'd been talking about things that we would be doing, and I had a one-to-one with this person.
00:14:27.890 --> 00:14:35.820
She said to me,"Love what you're telling us, but, I'll be interested to see how many people are just sitting there waiting for you to move on,
00:14:35.936 --> 00:14:37.196
No,'cause they've heard it before.
00:14:37.360 --> 00:14:37.801
here." And that
00:14:37.856 --> 00:14:37.995
yeah, yeah
00:14:38.061 --> 00:14:38.899
the inertia.
00:14:39.360 --> 00:14:40.399
Yeah, that was the inertia.
00:14:40.470 --> 00:14:45.379
It was easier to keep your head down and wait for the next, the person to move on and the next person to come on.
00:14:45.720 --> 00:14:49.639
So I think that all part-- plays part of, you know, defending the status
00:14:49.778 --> 00:14:52.519
there's another one actually, which is, Can I be bothered?
00:14:53.379 --> 00:14:55.379
And I think in a lot of organizations you get that.
00:14:55.578 --> 00:14:57.379
Have I told you my story of the dog and the nail?
00:14:58.339 --> 00:15:00.299
So anyway, a big old country house in Virginia.
00:15:00.320 --> 00:15:08.389
You've got this big veranda, two good old boys sitting on the veranda, and there's this hound dog, and this hound dog's sitting on the veranda, and it's howling to itself.
00:15:10.049 --> 00:15:10.308
Do you like that?
00:15:10.308 --> 00:15:11.349
That's my howling talk.
00:15:11.370 --> 00:15:12.369
I think that's pretty good.
00:15:12.409 --> 00:15:14.370
Anyway, yeah,
00:15:14.548 --> 00:15:15.528
You can tell you're not a dog
00:15:15.769 --> 00:15:35.498
So anyway, it's howling to itself, and one of the good old boys says to the other good old boy,"So why is that dog lying there howling?" And he says,"It's'cause he's sitting on a nail." So he looks at him and says,"Well, why doesn't he get up and walk and move away from it then?" He says,"Well,'cause it's not hurting him that much." But there is just this, you know, can I be bothered?
00:15:35.577 --> 00:15:37.817
Is it really that bad, or should I just put up with it?
00:15:37.837 --> 00:15:41.518
And I think there is, yeah, there's an element of that.
00:15:41.977 --> 00:15:44.078
Can that be us, or is it organisational exhaustion?
00:15:44.138 --> 00:15:45.798
Maybe that's a better way of putting it.
00:15:46.317 --> 00:15:48.717
But, you know, people stop believing change is real.
00:15:48.758 --> 00:15:58.977
They've seen so many failed transa-transformations and so m- They've seen so many restructures and leadership churn, and after a while you just think,"Well, been there, seen it, done it.
00:15:59.018 --> 00:16:01.398
I'll just keep me head down and see what happens next."
00:16:02.054 --> 00:16:08.924
So if you are, a senior manager running an organisation, you need to pay attention to some of those themes, right?
00:16:09.164 --> 00:16:14.225
So, to avoid inertia in your organisation, they're some of the things you can change.
00:16:14.346 --> 00:16:16.767
But what about if you're a middle manager?
00:16:16.966 --> 00:16:20.905
How do you think about this inertia where you're caught in it, you know, you're
00:16:21.210 --> 00:16:31.669
Well, the trap for a middle manager, s- quite often I think, is they can see the problems really obviously, but they lack the authority to solve them.
00:16:32.250 --> 00:16:32.451
Yeah?
00:16:32.789 --> 00:16:40.528
And they sit there absorbing the pressure from both directions and they almost become the translators between reality and ambition, right?
00:16:40.629 --> 00:16:40.908
Do you know?
00:16:41.049 --> 00:16:47.530
So I think that drives a whole load of bad behaviors maybe in that population
00:16:47.996 --> 00:16:59.202
Interesting point here, James,- I've worked in a number of organisations and worked with senior teams, thing that they would point to in terms of inertia is
00:16:59.269 --> 00:17:01.010
Yeah, they talk about the frozen middle.
00:17:01.230 --> 00:17:01.789
Yeah, yeah, yeah
00:17:02.022 --> 00:17:05.362
Exactly, the marzipan layer, the permafrost layer.
00:17:05.643 --> 00:17:19.842
There's all sorts of derogatory terms I've, I've heard used about that group i-in an organisation, but not really understanding the themes that we talk around that are driving inertia throughout the organisation.
00:17:19.883 --> 00:17:23.721
It isn't the fault and the behaviours of those middle managers.
00:17:23.761 --> 00:17:25.762
Those middle managers are responding to
00:17:25.817 --> 00:17:27.179
Yeah, and I totally get that.
00:17:27.298 --> 00:17:28.397
It's, totally agree, right?
00:17:28.478 --> 00:17:32.998
So if you've got this problem, it is a senior manager problem, right?
00:17:33.498 --> 00:17:41.958
If your organisation is disengaged, yeah, running an engagement survey and beating people if they don't give you a five is not the solution.
00:17:42.038 --> 00:17:43.038
Don't be surprised.
00:17:43.337 --> 00:17:43.518
Yeah.
00:17:43.898 --> 00:17:49.077
However, I suppose how does that materialise within your middle layers of your organisation, right?
00:17:49.138 --> 00:17:51.827
So you just get this sort of well, cynicism.
00:17:52.528 --> 00:17:52.768
Yeah.
00:17:52.988 --> 00:17:53.788
Endemic, right?
00:17:54.028 --> 00:17:55.367
Or learned helplessness.
00:17:55.468 --> 00:17:59.186
We believe we can't do anything about it, so we just don't do anything about it, right?
00:17:59.603 --> 00:17:59.762
Yeah.
00:18:00.247 --> 00:18:08.047
the other two things you get, which I think are worse still, are you get this sort of survival behavior, which is, for God's sake, bend down, here comes another one.
00:18:08.136 --> 00:18:09.516
And we'll just wait and see.
00:18:09.976 --> 00:18:18.685
Or worse still, you just get quiet disengagement where people, you know, watching the clock until five o'clock ticks up, and then they, they get out and walk away, and they're just in it for the money.
00:18:18.965 --> 00:18:25.446
So those are the sort of issues I think which happen within that, that part of the organisation.
00:18:25.746 --> 00:18:27.086
But it is, you're absolutely right.
00:18:27.105 --> 00:18:33.902
It is a senior management problem, and they should be addressing it However, right, this is all terribly, terribly negative.
00:18:34.842 --> 00:18:36.442
What can you do, right?
00:18:36.501 --> 00:18:42.201
So let's just say, well, as we have been, you're sitting in the middle of some organisation, What can you do about it?
00:18:42.222 --> 00:18:44.162
What sort of, what hints and tips would you give?
00:18:44.727 --> 00:18:50.007
We are guilty at times of thinking that there's nothing that you can do about things.
00:18:51.326 --> 00:19:04.707
it may be true about certain aspects of the way the organisation runs, but if you think about what you can control, you can control a lot of the environment that your team work in.
00:19:05.326 --> 00:19:19.917
A good example of this is, in one organisation I, I worked in, we had a big contact centre with, 30 different teams in, and there was a massive variation in the performance of those teams.
00:19:19.978 --> 00:19:24.127
They were all doing the same job the same pay, same conditions, all the rest of it.
00:19:24.489 --> 00:19:35.948
The difference was the manager that they had in the organisation, and that difference was how that manager treated them, the environment they created around them, how they coached and helped them to do their job.
00:19:36.268 --> 00:19:46.667
That is one of the areas, the day-to-day contact that you have with your team and how you're managing them, communicating them, motivating them, rewarding them, praising.
00:19:46.729 --> 00:19:47.508
You can do a whole load
00:19:47.556 --> 00:19:50.996
Yeah, but that comes down to enthusiasm, right?
00:19:52.215 --> 00:19:59.236
Yeah,'cause actually what, what you just told me is there were some managers which were more enthusiastic than others, and that enthusiasm rubs off largely.
00:19:59.256 --> 00:20:03.616
And it, for me, it's this whole circle of influence and circle of control, right?
00:20:03.698 --> 00:20:07.517
So the point again, don't worry about what you worry about, worry about what you can control.
00:20:07.896 --> 00:20:09.457
And I think that is really powerful.
00:20:09.498 --> 00:20:15.157
You know, go and focus on the things you can do something about, and don't worry about the things you can't
00:20:15.759 --> 00:20:23.117
In the things that you can, the point that I was making about how different managers manage their teams, that stops inertia
00:20:23.473 --> 00:20:23.943
Yeah, yeah,
00:20:23.998 --> 00:20:25.019
into your teams.
00:20:25.326 --> 00:20:28.645
I think small changes trump grand transformation plans.
00:20:29.226 --> 00:20:37.006
You know,'cause it's very easy to pull together some whizz-bang deck, you know, 150 slides, and go and ask for, oh, half a billion quid.
00:20:37.425 --> 00:20:44.757
But really small stuff that gets changed, and people seeing it changed and moving on it, that's what really starts to unlock that inertia.
00:20:46.116 --> 00:20:46.317
Yeah
00:20:46.809 --> 00:20:56.469
One of the great things you do in one organisation we worked together was help teams understand what those small changes were and how they could impact those small changes.
00:20:56.769 --> 00:20:58.589
And the majority of them, they loved
00:20:59.076 --> 00:20:59.576
Yeah, yeah, yeah
00:20:59.868 --> 00:21:00.909
those small changes.
00:21:01.209 --> 00:21:03.509
They had loads they could tell you about.
00:21:03.849 --> 00:21:12.709
And then when you actually analysed with them how they solve those small changes with ways that were in their control, quite often they could change a lot of them.
00:21:13.068 --> 00:21:21.888
So back to the point, something big over here may not be changing, within your team's life you can change a whole lot, and that
00:21:21.989 --> 00:21:23.308
Well, and I think two things.
00:21:23.348 --> 00:21:28.469
So, you know, people say it's not strategic, but if you make small changes, it's a bit like...
00:21:28.509 --> 00:21:30.509
So my analogy would be bridges to islands.
00:21:30.528 --> 00:21:40.859
You make a small change, you create a bridge to a different island, you can then walk onto that island and have a look round, and you realise,"Oh, we could do this, we could do this, we could do this instead." So it, it sort of expands your your geography.
00:21:40.881 --> 00:21:43.000
It makes you think about your problems differently.
00:21:43.040 --> 00:21:43.799
So that's the first thing.
00:21:44.099 --> 00:21:47.140
Second thing is lots of small changes make a really big difference.
00:21:47.660 --> 00:21:49.951
But thirdly, it just people just get enthused.
00:21:49.990 --> 00:21:52.089
They see things changing, they want it to happen.
00:21:52.150 --> 00:21:53.990
Nobody wants to come to work and be bored.
00:21:54.289 --> 00:21:58.829
So yeah, sorry, I'm bang on, but small stuff I just think is fundamentally important.
00:21:59.170 --> 00:22:07.490
The other thing that links to that really well is this whole thing about, everybody talks about it, quick wins, but visible wins create momentum, yeah?
00:22:07.851 --> 00:22:08.951
Nothing ever changes here.
00:22:08.971 --> 00:22:10.191
Well, what about that spreadsheet?
00:22:10.271 --> 00:22:10.951
Yeah, okay.
00:22:11.152 --> 00:22:11.332
Right.
00:22:11.373 --> 00:22:12.270
So it's, Yeah.
00:22:12.931 --> 00:22:16.451
Don't worry about what you can't do, worry about what you can and get some momentum going.
00:22:17.606 --> 00:22:17.787
Yeah.
00:22:18.727 --> 00:22:27.887
And, and at the end of the day, back to your point about big change, big transformation is the crack cocaine of corporate life, everyone's addicted to it.
00:22:27.946 --> 00:22:33.547
They all want it, but actually the reality is where the gold dust is, is in the small stuff.
00:22:34.007 --> 00:22:50.175
And so as a middle manager who's stuck in this, environment, you can focus on how you lead your team, and you can focus on the small change that you can implement, and that'll be far more meaningful the fact that, you aren't changing the big stuff every year
00:22:50.505 --> 00:22:52.963
And I think there are two more things that link to that, I think.
00:22:53.463 --> 00:22:56.884
First of all is, right, you just gotta stick at it.
00:22:57.163 --> 00:22:59.163
It just cr- persistence,
00:22:59.451 --> 00:22:59.632
Yeah
00:22:59.804 --> 00:23:00.003
right?
00:23:00.523 --> 00:23:01.163
We can't do that.
00:23:01.265 --> 00:23:02.044
Well, we will do that.
00:23:02.144 --> 00:23:02.884
Well, we will do that.
00:23:03.124 --> 00:23:04.564
'Cause, you know, you've got two options.
00:23:04.663 --> 00:23:07.804
You can either suck it up as it is, or you can change stuff, right?
00:23:08.285 --> 00:23:11.324
So if you're gonna change stuff, you have to be persistent, right?
00:23:12.344 --> 00:23:19.784
But if you are persistent, then that will generate trust in the people around you,'cause they will see that you're trying to make things happen.
00:23:19.963 --> 00:23:24.324
And wouldn't you know, people need some belief, and that is driven by trust.
00:23:24.364 --> 00:23:29.294
So if you can get people trusting you and engaged with it, you know, really powerful.
00:23:29.713 --> 00:23:34.794
And then the other thing is, I think you've got a lot more influence than you think you have, right?
00:23:34.953 --> 00:23:42.994
'Cause easy to say"Oh, I can't do this, this, and this," but you know, you can restructure your meetings.
00:23:43.275 --> 00:23:45.355
You can do something about your local culture.
00:23:45.654 --> 00:23:47.934
You can do something about that small process.
00:23:47.954 --> 00:23:50.214
You can do something about team norms, yeah?
00:23:50.516 --> 00:23:52.596
You can do something about honesty and clarity.
00:23:52.654 --> 00:23:54.096
All of these things matter.
00:23:54.795 --> 00:23:56.095
In fact, matter an awful lot.
00:23:56.134 --> 00:23:58.195
But d- yeah, what can you do?
00:23:58.275 --> 00:23:59.894
That's my real point.
00:24:00.326 --> 00:24:03.547
Overall, it's back to your point, control the controllables.
00:24:03.965 --> 00:24:12.227
Don't underestimate what's controllable, at the end of the day, that stops inertia hitting your team and
00:24:12.314 --> 00:24:19.094
Yeah, and it, you know, might be a bit of a throwaway line, but most successful change is much quieter than an organisation expects.
00:24:19.314 --> 00:24:22.154
You know, it's not big bang stuff, it's just getting on with it.
00:24:22.213 --> 00:24:23.835
So yeah, those are the things I think you can do
00:24:24.218 --> 00:24:35.327
Yeah So in summary, James, we're saying that organisational inertia some way or another is almost always inevitable in organisation.
00:24:35.367 --> 00:24:45.198
I think we've seen it wherever we've worked, and the danger, the risk that it brings is that it spreads And next thing you know, ever changes here becomes
00:24:45.340 --> 00:24:45.582
Yeah.
00:24:45.758 --> 00:24:46.076
company
00:24:46.280 --> 00:24:56.060
A- and if you are, if you are in the senior position, right, you have to do something about it, but you have to play at the, you know, the, the risk, the fear, the incentives, the reward level.
00:24:56.122 --> 00:24:58.861
That's, that's what you're paid to do, so you address that.
00:25:00.461 --> 00:25:02.582
But for the people who can't address those issues
00:25:03.019 --> 00:25:14.199
There is plenty that, that is within their control in terms of the environment, the work, and the small changes that they can make to avoid inertia creeping in on
00:25:14.346 --> 00:25:15.707
So we can't do anything.
00:25:15.926 --> 00:25:19.098
Well, I hope you've enjoyed this week's episode, and,
00:25:19.227 --> 00:25:22.746
Yeah, and we look forward to our barrage of thoughts about what we could talk about next season
00:25:23.201 --> 00:25:23.662
Absolutely.
00:25:23.938 --> 00:25:26.317
recognition
00:25:26.519 --> 00:25:28.701
We cover a whole host of topics on this podcast,
00:25:29.140 --> 00:25:31.079
from purpose to corporate jargon,
00:25:31.441 --> 00:25:34.619
but always focused on one thing, getting the job done well.
00:25:35.119 --> 00:25:35.980
Easier said than done.
00:25:36.760 --> 00:25:43.660
So if you've got unhappy customers or employees, bosses or regulators breathing down your neck,
00:25:44.440 --> 00:25:52.759
if your backlogs are out of control and your costs are spiraling, and that big IT transformation project that you've been promised just keeps failing to deliver,
00:25:53.599 --> 00:25:54.279
we can help.
00:25:54.680 --> 00:26:06.119
If you need to improve your performance, your team's performance, or your organization's, get in touch at jimmy@ajobdonewell.com or james@ajobdonewell.com.
