KF #3. Manages Ambiguity Archives - Page 2 of 4 - How to be Awesome at Your Job

Pete Mockaitis
Keith, welcome back to How to be Awesome at Your Job.

Keith Ferrazzi
Pete, this is an extraordinary time because your name reminds me of my father, and time together always reminds me of best practices and clear action. You’re one of those individuals that I really enjoy these conversations with.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, well, thank you, Keith. I enjoy chatting with you, and it’s fun to be speaking to you live after I’ve read your books before I had a podcast. And you got some more coming and a big research project. What’s the scoop here?

Keith Ferrazzi
Yeah, so the peak of the pandemic, I saw this not only as a horrible disruption of the world, but I saw it as an inflection point; an opportunity. And what I want anybody listening to think about is “Have you really captured this pandemic and this disruption as an opportunity for your career and for your team and for your organization?”

We benchmarked 2,000 executives and entrepreneurs, and asked the question, “How do we leverage this pandemic to leap forward to work, not go back to work? How do we change the ways we’re leading? How do we change our business models? How do we really think about workforce redesign during this incredible disruption time?” And we’ve been chosen as the number one pick of Harvard coming out of the pandemic in terms of books, and this has been a massive research project that I’m excited to share with your listeners.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool. Well, we’re excited to hear it. So, you interviewed all these folks, and you asked them specifically, “Which work innovations from the pandemic had the highest return and ought to be kept, held on to?” So, can you share what are the top one, two, three themes that folks are relatively unanimous about?

Keith Ferrazzi
I’ll give you three themes, which you’ve asked for. The first one that I’ll give you is how much collaboration transformed during the pandemic, and I’ll give you a number of very distinct practices. Because we were in crisis, org charts and positional authority, they went out the window. Anybody who could lead change was given the opportunity to lead change. If you had an idea, if you had a way of working around a crisis situation, you could step into the void and you could fix it.

Now, that was extraordinary. We saw people emerge without titled leadership into significant leaders. And I want to make sure that we keep that going. I’ve never been a particular advocate for managing org charts or thinking about your team as who reports to you. When I was a kid at Deloitte, I had a vision that Deloitte could be a great marketing organization, and I started leading toward that end, and I became the chief marketing officer at Deloitte before I was 30. Before they even made me partner, I was the chief marketing officer of the company.

So, the opportunity for all of us to step into the void and see a vision for improvement or opportunity, that was afforded to us. Now, the second piece that we saw was, because of hybrid work, we could think of our teams as an unbounded way. We didn’t have to think about geolocation. We didn’t have to think about anything. We could think of “Who do we want to collaborate with to really achieve this vision?” And that’s one of the big tips I want to leave everybody here with.

Your team is whoever you need to get your job done. Now, if you imagine that, who do you need to get your job done is your team. Then the next question is, “How do I let them know that they’re on my team if they don’t report to me? And how do I invite them in to really co-create extraordinary new advances?” And the answer is just that. You reach out to individuals that you want to collaborate with, and you say, “Here’s a vision I have for how things could be better.”

And then with that, you say to them, “But I could never get there myself,” humbly speaking, “Maybe we could work together and achieve that together. We could co-create a solution. We could take that hill together.” The next thing you know, you’re now a leader of another individual who, working together, is going to achieve something that you couldn’t have achieved on your own.

We saw that happening all over the pandemic. And in the chapter that we have in the book around collaboration, we saw that hybrid work put all of that on steroids. We could really be unbounded in our collaboration and there’s a ton of things in there also on best practices on how to start rebooting the way we think about work in a hybrid work environment, which most of us aren’t thinking of today.

So, for instance, we think of the way to collaborate is through meetings. Well, the best organizations were collaborating asynchronously. They were collaborating in Google Docs and other things so that we didn’t have all of these droning meetings one after another. So, we started using the tools in a more effective way to reboot the way we were collaborating, and that was very powerful as well.

So, all of that, I would say comes under the theme that you were asking for, one of the themes, which is, “How do we really fundamentally re-imagine the way we collaborate?”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Cool. And I’d love it if you could share a fun favorite story or two that shows that in action.

Keith Ferrazzi
Yeah, sure. It’s a big company one, it’s the first one that I think of. So, Unilever has always done business planning in very traditional ways. They cascaded business planning down from the CFO and the CEO, figure out the budgets, then they work with the executive teams, then they give everybody their budgets and they’d trickle it down.

Well, what happened was one individual, an HR person in North America, so here’s an HR person in North America had an idea, which is “Why aren’t we crowdsourcing innovations and growth opportunities for next year 2021 that I guarantee we wouldn’t have seen at the executive team, at the central headquarters in London?”

So, Mike Clementi came up with the idea that we should be crowdsourcing among the top 300 leaders in the world, not the executive team only where the growth opportunities were. And he ushered that process into being, and they literally ground-up the business-planning process instead of top-down. Another example is a learning executive inside of Federal Express was asked to host these townhalls on behalf of their chief operating officer and chairman.

Well, typically, these townhalls were one-way broadcast conversations, but this person said, humbly speaking, “Why are we, when we’ve got the technology, we’ve got breakout rooms, why aren’t we asking people questions of what risks they’re seeing in the Federal Express platform, what opportunities they’re seeing to serve customers differently?”

So, instead of a one-way townhall, they started inventing two-way dialogues, once again, breakout rooms, opening Google Docs, having people give their ideas, and they created a very two-way collaborative engagement with thousands and thousands and thousands of people. So, those are two very small examples of massive companies that fundamentally rebooted real important processes in their business because a single individual saw hybrid and collaboration and crowdsourcing and innovation as something that didn’t have to be limited to a small group of people.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool. That’s cool. Another theme in your book I want to dig into is you say that there are six decision dials that can impact the way we work. What are we achieving with this framework? And what are the dials?

Keith Ferrazzi
Yeah. So the book was divided into two sections. The first half of the book focuses on how all of us need to change the way we work and lead, and there are four components to that. One of them is agility, the other one is foresight and, really, how do we look around corners and run an agile operation. And then the one we just talked about, collaboration. And then the next one, which is really a hot issue today, which is the subject of resilience and mental wellbeing.

And then what we did is we said, “Once you begin to lead in these four fundamentally different ways, where do you apply this philosophy to?” You apply it to reinventing your business model, reinventing the way your workforce works, and to, whether or not, we, as organizations, are led by the north star purpose, which became a very important aspect of a lot of businesses.

So, what you’re referring to in terms of these dials is inside of a chapter called “Workforce Redesign.” One of the things that really happened was we started to realize that the old ways we thought about work needed to be rebooted. So, of course, we’re all now thinking about “Are we physically proximate or are we remote?” So, that’s a dial going one way or the other.

Now, when we really dug into it, we realized it was a spectrum. It wasn’t just an and or or. The hybrid spectrum of how we work together actually includes a dimension that isn’t even on that dial which is called asynchronous. How do we work asynchronously? How do we work in a way that doesn’t even require meetings? How do we work in a way that collaborates in the cloud where I don’t give a damn if you’re physical or if you’re remote? It doesn’t really matter.

The other thing is whether or not you’re domestic or global. Now, on my personal organization, and this, Pete, could be something you’d be interested in, I designed an entire marketing function at Ferrazzi Greenlight. Now, we coach executive teams. I designed an entire marketing function out of the Philippines. I used to have marketing executives in my company that were about 85,000 in their base salary and their job was what I called high-touch marketing, curating relationships with executives that could ultimately buy our services. High-touch marketing, very high touch.

But there was a lot that I wanted to do around search engine optimization, there’s a lot that I wanted to do around content marketing, email marketing, etc. that I never really put as a primary because I didn’t see the return on investment for it from the kind of money that I’d dispend in the United States on marketing executives.

I ended up hiring folks out of the Philippines, an entire marketing team at, on average, $25,000 a head, who are every bit as good as the professionals I was hiring at $85,000. They work on my time zone, they’re incredibly English literate, and driven, and ambitious, and thoughtful. And so, I really, this outsourcing conversation, many organizations are now totally rethinking the boundaries of where they’re hiring. And I’m sure you’ve read a lot about that in the marketplace, but we can live anywhere and work anywhere.

And so, why doesn’t an individual like yourself, Pete, even, anybody who’s a solopreneur, whatever, you can be thinking about building a team that you were never able to think about before, both from a global perspective, gig workers. Now, we’re dealing with a choice. Do we even want to hire a full-time employee or do we want to hire an individual who’s an expert on an hourly basis that can really change the game in our strategy?

So, all of those are workforce dials that we look at in the chapter of re-engineering the workforce. I guess the one tip I would say is if you can start thinking about hiring globally, you can get incredible value for some of the employees that you hire. Anybody listening should consider that.

Pete Mockaitis
Absolutely, yeah. I have had great results myself by pursuing that approach. Okay. And we got some extra dials here, huh?

Keith Ferrazzi
Well, look, what I really want to make sure we have time for is to get to some that which really starts in the book. There were many organizations that were fundamentally caught on their heels during the pandemic. On March 13th, I sat on a March 11th in a room with an executive team that had major presence in China, and this topic of the pandemic was only a mention at one point during the discussion, and that was just a few days before the shutdown.

Yet, the question that we looked for is, “What organizations foresaw the pandemic and were able to react to that risk whereas others did not?” We found an organization called Lockheed Space. Now, Lockheed, interestingly enough, didn’t even have operations in China, yet they had a simple process I highly recommend for all of your listeners whether, again, you’re a team leader, a company leader, or a solopreneur. They brought together, on a monthly basis, a group of individuals that would look at the marketplace from different vantage points.

“So, Pete, you’re going to handle the customer vantage point. What’s changing from the perspective of the customer? Dave, you’re going to look at competition. Jane, you’ve got technology innovations. Sue, you’ve got the focus on macroeconomic policies and finance.” And then, once a month, as a part of a natural meeting, they would spend five minutes, and everybody on the call reported if they had a major risk that they saw from their vantage point, or if they saw a major opportunity that should be pursued from their vantage point.

Now, sometimes, they would go beyond that five-minute meeting and nobody would have anything to say. Fine. Or, somebody would say, “Hey, I just read this blog about some virus in China. Maybe it’s worth us taking a look at in terms of a disruptive force.” At that point, they wouldn’t even gut-dive into it to disrupt the meeting. They would say, “Let’s have an assessment meeting to determine whether or not we move into some form of planning or watch and observe.”

Well, Lockheed Space saw this in December of 2019, they had their assessment meeting in January, and went into planning and went fully virtual in February. Fully virtual in February. And how many of us, if we had had that insight and wisdom, we would’ve shorted so many stocks, we would have invested in other stocks. As individuals, we’ve got to leave some space and time in our lives as individuals, as leaders, to assess risk and opportunity that are from different vantage points that we may not be seeing every day.

That was one of the biggest takeaways that I saw which is us realizing and, interestingly enough, it moves interestingly into the agile question. We practiced crisis agility during the pandemic. Now, I was working with Delta Airlines, coaching that executive team moving into the pandemic, and we were going to reinvent the travel industry and we’re doing a great job of it, and, all of a sudden, they lost 90% of their revenue in a day.

Now, they went into daily agile sprints. They assessed the situation from all different vantage points, “Where are the risks? Where are the opportunities?” They planned for a day. They went and did it. At the end of the day, they did a standup, and said, “Okay, what did we achieve? Where did we stumble? What are we going to do the next day?” Every single day, they went on an agile sprint willing to assess what was going on from the external marketplace.

Now, the power of that is that model of agility is well-practiced in technology companies while they’re programming and designing software. It’s well-practiced among any organization doing strong project management, but it’s not practiced in many executive teams. It’s not practiced by most of us leading our work, running our work in small agile sprints.

I believe what we saw in the pandemic was this crisis agile that is going to become the new operating system for any organization. We are living in volatility. We’ve got to lead in agile where we’re constantly assessing and re-assessing pivots and movement and readjustments, and we can’t just be planning on a quarterly basis anymore.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s so powerful that the five minutes assignment was all it took to be like, “Oh, okay.” And then to have it on the radar and then go deep. And so, I’m curious, for folks looking to implement something along those lines, do you have any favorite ways that you think about breaking up the world of stuff to be on the lookout for?

Keith Ferrazzi
Of vantage points, yeah. In the chapter called “Foresight,” we actually have a list of the vantage points. But the reality is every company is going to be a little different. The ones I gave you make the most sense, which is by functional area, you know, sales is dealing with competition, marketing is dealing with customers, your IT folks are dealing with technology advancements, your CFO, your accountants are dealing with… etc. Those are natural.

But in any given business, you’re going to have your own nuances. And I would say one of the things you should do as you start this process is ask your team, what vantage points they think we should be looking at on a constant basis. Now, I’d mentioned this to you, Pete, that we created an entire video series around the book that helps any team move through each chapter, and anybody who buys the book gets that free video series.

So, if you go to RadicallyAdapt.com, and you purchase the book wherever you want to purchase it, just let us know that you bought the book and we’ll send you the video series. It’s all on trust. But the power of that is that in the section of “Foresight” we actually walk you through all the details of how you can set that up for yourself.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, very cool. All right. Well, so we talked a bit about agility, foresight, and collaboration. How about resilience and wellbeing?

Keith Ferrazzi
So, that was one of the more exciting ones to me personally for a number of reasons. I have felt for a very long time that teams needed to build a greater relational competency inside of their teams because you know me, the guy who wrote Never Eat Alone cares a lot about relationships. And as I came along with subsequent books, we have double-clicked on how important those relationships are to functional teams and organizations.

And what I saw happened during the pandemic was what I know brings greater relationships among people and brings greater empathy among people is the willingness to be authentic and vulnerable. This got dialed up during the pandemic significantly. I saw grizzled white shoe-type old leaders being vulnerable, crying in fact, on townhalls where they were talking about the fear that they had for their parents’ health who were in a nursing home, or a spouse that was diagnosed with COVID early on in the process before we knew what that meant.

And I saw that vulnerability and that shared sense of openness, and I was proud of that, and I knew that that was something that I think we had opened a door that we’d never be able to shut again, thank goodness. Now, the question then is, “What do we do with that vulnerability? How do we resolve it? And how do we help people have greater resilience?”

Of the teams that I saw be most successful, they were the ones that had a different social contract. They owned each other’s energy. They lifted each other up. They asked how people were doing openly, and then when people were hurting, the team rallied around that person. Now, I feel like there was an old myth associated with work of the past, which is your resilience, your mental wellbeing, that’s your responsibility. And it’s not even your responsibility; it’s your private affair, and we’ll leave you to it.

Whereas, what happened in the pandemic was there was much more transparency around all of this. And some teams did a very simple practice, they called an energy check, which I love and I advocate, which is in your meetings, just every once in a while, ask, “What is everyone’s energy level?” And I’m not just talking about in the afternoon. I mean, going into a meeting, you say, “What is your energy level these days? Put in the chatroom from zero to five what your energy level is.”

Now, anytime somebody puts a two or below, then you pause, and you say, “Pete, tell me, you put a two. Are you okay?” Now, Pete might respond, “Well, my kids had a restless night, and I was just up all late last night with my kids.” “Great. Sorry to hear that and hope they’re okay.” But they might say, “Jane, why did you put a two or why did you put a one?” “Well, my spouse has just been diagnosed with needing a kidney transplant.” Now, I heard that in teams, and the person who particularly said that had been sitting on that information without sharing it with the team for two weeks.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, because nobody asked, like it doesn’t live anywhere. It’s nothing like, “Hey, anyone’s family need an organ transplant?” Like, that just doesn’t pop up.

Keith Ferrazzi
It’s not part of the vernacular. But where it used to happen organically, and this is what we found across the board, where it used to happen was in the casual walk down the hallway, or the lunchroom conversation, or the coffee-break conversation. Now, that’s where these kinds of conversations happen, but in the remote or hybrid world, they don’t happen organically. And if you make it a purposeful process, it actually happens.

What was most interesting is that we found that…we’d been coaching teams for 20 years. We had a diagnostic tool that we used in coaching teams, and what we found was that teams that made a…one of the areas is relationships. Teams that didn’t pay attention to relationships purposefully eroded their relationship score on this test.

So, one of the tests is “I am deeply committed and connected to my team.” That’s a scale of zero to five. Well, those that didn’t have purposeful processes around it went down on the score. But, interestingly enough, those that decided to have these kinds of energy check-ins, or they hosted a meeting…one of the things we recommend is a personal/professional check-in meeting where the whole meeting’s intention is “What’s going on in your life personally and professionally?” so people just share what’s going on with them.

And those teams that had these purposeful processes, actually, their scores rose above what they were when they were in physical meetings together. So, people claim that remote work eroded things like innovation and relationships. It only eroded work if you didn’t do the things you needed to do more purposefully. If you did them, it actually improved the qualities.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s powerful in terms of it’s like, “Well, yeah, if you’re just kind of going with flow, yup, that’s what’s going to happen. It’s not going to be so rosy.”

Keith Ferrazzi
Yeah, it’s lazy. It’s lazy and you’re going to suffer lazy results. Now, we spend a lot more time on this, “When is a wellbeing and resilience question?” We had major partners like Headspace and Weight Watchers all working with us to create innovations, and we found a number of things. Number one, as I sort of mentioned, just the awareness and the collectivism gained around “We own each other’s energy. We’re going to serve each other. We’re going to take care of each other,” that was the highest lift in scores and mental wellbeing.

But there was no question that we needed to make sure that people were aware that they had to take a more proactive responsibility for their own wellbeing, their own mental and physical wellbeing. There were people who just sat down in the morning and they didn’t leave all day. They didn’t get their workouts, they didn’t take a break, they didn’t take a moment for themselves. And, by the way, because they didn’t leave any time for email or anything else, that time got squeezed into their evenings and weekends. They were just one meeting after another.

So, what we learned is that there are a set of personal routines that you need to adopt, and the most important thing is, if you’re a leader, you adopt those personally. Like, block your workout time, block your walk with the kid time, make sure that small breaks that you’re taking, you actually put them on your calendar so you’re signaling to the organization that they need to have those routines for themselves as well. Very powerful.

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly. Well, so you mentioned a few personal routines, and we love that sort of thing here. Anything that came up again and again as being super powerful and restorative or good bang for the buck in terms of rejuvenation per minute?

Keith Ferrazzi
One that was really funny that nobody did until, all of a sudden, somebody cracked the code, one of them was end meetings five to ten minutes early.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yeah, that does feel great for everybody. No rushing.

Keith Ferrazzi
Right, it does, but guess what? Nobody ever does it because you’re in the flow of the conversation then we don’t end the meetings five or ten minutes early. So, what one group, I remember who this was, I think it might’ve been FedEx, they did something brilliant. They started meetings ten minutes late so it’s easier. Everyone is used to ending on the hour but if you start meetings ten minutes late, then that’s where the break is, and so I love that simple idea. And once companies started adopting that, that was kind of breakthrough. It’s so important that ten minutes to walk into the other room and give a hug to your significant other, or go check on the kids, or whatever it is, so powerful.

The other thing is blocking out time for you to think, do emails, and do asynchronous work. So, for instance, if you’re doing asynchronous collaboration where you’re working on a Google Doc with a group of people, block a half of an hour to do that as if it’s a meeting and protect it as if it’s a meeting. “That’s my half of an hour time to do that work,” and you tell the world that, “That’s my time, and, no, you can’t take that time just because it looks available. It’s not available. That’s my time to do my asynchronous work,” because, otherwise, as we said earlier, it’s just going to get squeezed into nights and weekends, but blocking that time is really precious and important.

So, that was another really important routine. Those are the things. What we found was that the stuff around meditation, etc., it was all very powerful but, at the end of the day, if we don’t change the way we work, none of that stuff can keep up with us.

Pete Mockaitis
Got you. All right. Well, Keith, tell me, any final top do’s, don’ts, implications from this stuff, particularly from the vantage point of either a frontline manager or an individual contributor?

Keith Ferrazzi
Yeah, I feel that one of the greatest things we can all start to do is start to shift our meeting time out of meetings. We need to make meetings the enemy. And if we imagine saying, “Okay, how can I not make somebody of a meeting with me on this but, actually, free up time?” So, I tell you, like one of my employees who does work for me, actually she’s the individual that helps manage my speaking business, individual contributor.

And we used to have a weekly meeting just to get an update, “How’s the speaking business doing?” and she would go over all the things she was doing and I’d banter back and forth, etc.

And now what she does is she sends me a five-minute recording that I can listen to at my leisure with a quick update. And then if I have any response or feedback, etc., I just shoot her another recording back. It is the easiest thing in the world for me and it has freed up a half of an hour block of time that my administrative assistant is so grateful that he doesn’t have to have as a weekly meeting.

So, start asking yourself, how can you take meeting time off of the people around you off of their agenda. Let’s say you’re going to throw a meeting with your team, and you’re going to talk about X, Y, and Z, give you a piece of information. What we found was that during the pandemic, if you have 12 people in a meeting, only four people feel that they’re fully heard in that meeting. The average is only about four people of 12 feel that they’re fully heard in that meeting.

If, on the other hand, you send, we call it a decision board, out to folks, and say, “Listen, we’re not going to have a meeting on this topic. I’m going to say we’ve got a problem. The problem is we’re falling behind on inventory right now. And I think the solution is X and some of the struggles or challenges I know we’re going to have is this,” and send that out to everybody, and ask everybody at your leisure, “Add to the document.”

Now, you want to do a document that’s a SharePoint document or a Google Doc where everybody can see each other’s answers, and say, “You put your point of view in there.” So, now in a meeting, which you might’ve called a meeting with six people, all six people are going to get a chance to see each other’s point of view. Everybody will be fully heard.

Then you look at it, and then you decide if you even need a meeting. Maybe the problem has already been answered. And if you do need a meeting, you’ll be able to see that, really, we’re only two people that really had an opinion that mattered, so I’m going to have the meeting with these two people and let everybody else off the hook.

Pete Mockaitis
I like that a lot.

Keith Ferrazzi
It’s powerful. Also, some of these people will say, “Well, listen, I think the better person who should be weighing in is so and so.” So, now, originally, you might’ve invited six people but maybe eight people get a chance to weigh in. These other people wouldn’t have even been invited. So, the biggest thing that I can say as a takeaway is start thinking about how you rethink some of the fundamentals of how you work personally. And one of the great evils of wasted time is meetings, so make sure that you work hard to eliminate as many of them as you can, move to asynchronous as best as you can.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. And for your speaking business manager, with your quick video recordings, I love Loom myself. Is there a tool you’re using and digging?

Keith Ferrazzi
We’re really simple here on this, and that’s the other thing I found out, Pete, which is it didn’t matter what technology people used. We could jerry-rig anything. It was more about, “How do you rethink the way work is?” The fact that she could literally just send me an audio message in Slack so that if I wanted to, they’re all housed there. Or, if we wanted to get lazy, she could send me a voice text right on her iPhone. But the point was it’s not about the technology. It’s about the mindset.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Perfect. Well, now, let’s hear about some of your favorite things. Can you give us a favorite quote?

Keith Ferrazzi
“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds,” Ralph Waldo Emerson. I’ve always been a thoughtful curious agile person. I want more information and I love changing my mind. It means I learned something.

Pete Mockaitis
That is good. That’s good. Sorry, I’m just thinking of…

Keith Ferrazzi
Hobgoblins

Pete Mockaitis
Spiderman and Green Goblin and my kids.

Keith Ferrazzi
Exactly. Exactly.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite study or experiment or bit of research?

Keith Ferrazzi
I would say that my favorite research is the Gallup organizations research on employee engagement, when they really cracked the code and realized how fundamental relationships were. One friend at work was the greatest predictor of an employee’s engagement. And it’s interesting, so many organizations just dismissed that as a critical element of what they focused on, engineering for their employees’ happiness.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite book?

Keith Ferrazzi
I would say The Great Gatsby, and that has nothing to do with business. It just has to do with the plight of a man who was deeply insecure, trying to aspire into a society that he didn’t think welcomed him. And that feels a lot like my life as a young man when I grew up in southwestern Pennsylvania, a poor Pittsburgh kid trying to do better than my family history had been.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite tool?

Keith Ferrazzi
I love this new tool called MURAL. It’s a whiteboarding tool. And I love getting on and whiteboarding things and collaborating. But I love it when it’s virtual and I love it when I can pass around between members of meetings, live asynchronously, grow. So, these days, I’ve really started to love this whiteboarding technology called MURAL.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite habit?

Keith Ferrazzi
Ten minutes every morning. So, snooze to me isn’t go back to sleep. Alarm awakes, I push snooze and I do two things. I spend just a bit of time being grateful and I think about why I’m so grateful. And I happen to be, in my household, not to get too private, in my household, I need my space when I’m sleeping, so my significant other stays on that side of the bed. But that last ten minutes is my cuddle time, just time to be warm and intimate, and excited about the day, and so gratitude and connection to me to start the day couldn’t be used for anything better.

Pete Mockaitis
And is there a key nugget you share that really seems to connect and resonate with folks; they quote it back to you often?

Keith Ferrazzi
Oh, yeah. It is that, “We can’t get there alone and, therefore, people are so important. And the currency for deeper relationships is generosity. Find the folks that matter to you and be of service.”

Pete Mockaitis
And if folks want to connect or learn more, where would you point them?

Keith Ferrazzi
Yeah, RadicallyAdapt.com is where we’re engaging with folks and will be for a while around this particular book. RadicallyAdapt.com. You will get all the information that you need to get the video series for free, which we’re really excited to put in your hands. Obviously, if you want to get the book there, you can do that as well. RadicallyAdapt.com. Thanks.

Pete Mockaitis
And do you have a final challenge or call to action for folks looking to be awesome at their jobs?

Keith Ferrazzi
Yeah, it might be broader than we want for this time, but I would say, going back to my core roots, every single one of us have to recognize that your opportunities in this world will come to you not only because of your competency but because of your relationships, so build a relationship action plan. After today, literally just pick the five people who are most important to your progress and success, and be of service to those individuals.

And I would say, measure the current relationship status you have with them. Zero means you don’t know them; they don’t know you. A five means you could call them up on the weekend and cry about something that you’re disturbed by, so it’s that end of the extreme. A three is what we normally call a friend at work, just an acquaintance. I want you to try to move those five people into being fours and fives, not twos and threes where they usually reside. So, build a relationship action plan.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Keith, this has been a treat once again. I wish you much luck in the new world of work.

Keith Ferrazzi
Thank you, Pete. And thanks so much for your generosity of this amazing audience.

Pete Mockaitis
Jake, thanks for joining us here on the How to be Awesome at Your Job podcast.

Jake Jacobs
Thanks so much, Pete. I’m glad to be here.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m glad to have you and I’ve got so many things I want to hear from you about how to leverage change but the first thing I want to hear from you is about your massive baseball card collection. What’s the story here?

Jake Jacobs
Well, first of all, we should tell your listeners it’s 45,000 cards, so for some people that’s considered massive; for others it’s just puny. But I started when I was about eight and just got the bubble gum and the packages, and then I hit about 15 and decided this was a potential way to send my kids to college at some point. And so I started ordering full sets and not opening them, which took the fun out of it but at 15 you’re kind of moving onto girls and other things. So, it sits actually in my parents’ basement, Pete, all 45,000. They’re not even with me. I moved into a house that I fell in love with a woman five doors down, so I can keep a ready eye on those cards.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s good. Now, 45,000 cards, how much space does that consume in a basement?

Jake Jacobs
It’s a healthy pile. It’s a healthy pile. I think it’d go about waist high. And if I did the splits, I’m not terribly flexible, but if I did the splits it’d probably be about that far wide.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, understood. That’s substantial. And then, in the basement, are you worried about flooding? What’s the estimated value when you think on this collection here?

Jake Jacobs
No, you haven’t met my father so there’s no flooding in that basement, brother. And I do have several Mickey Mantles and one card when the Padres were going to move to Washington. Nobody remembers this, but in ’72 they were going to move to Washington and they printed 500 cards with Washington on the card and then they decided not to go to Washington, so I’ve got one of those 500 cards. So, who knows? Neither of my kids ended up going to college.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, hotdog. There are just so much there in terms of do you view these as an economic-type investment or do you go and look at them from time to time? I’m just fascinated by people with big collections.

Jake Jacobs
Yeah. On podcasts that I’m on, generally, Pete, I refer to the economic benefits because some people think that I’m crazy having that many baseball cards and possibly even immature. But in my place in the world, I have a heart connection to them because it brings me back to mark, row, sorting baseball cards, putting rubber bands around them with the teams in little pieces of paper, and so I don’t need to open them, and I figure, yes, they’d be worth more if I don’t open them.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Fun. Well, so now we’re going to talk about leveraging change. I don’t have a great segue there. Just as sometimes teams change locations and then don’t change locations, some organizations fail to follow through with their changes.

Jake Jacobs
Absolutely.

Pete Mockaitis
And so, can you give us the rundown on when it comes to change in organizations, how often do those changes succeed versus fail and what’s behind that?

Jake Jacobs
Well, if you go by the Ready Reports, and in this is in the Harvard Business Review, this is in the Sloan journal, there’s all kinds of books that had been written on this, and the common number is 70% fall short of the objectives they set out to achieve. So, that doesn’t mean that they fell on their face, it just means that what set on to achieve, they didn’t. This is going to sound odd, but I actually, in 35 years of doing this work and had great mentors so this is not all on me, I had some of the mentors who started my field of organizational change, but I haven’t had a client disappointed.

Pete Mockaitis
There you go.

Jake Jacobs
After all that time and all that work. And I think part of it, Pete, goes back to like a “Never say no” attitude. So, if we haven’t gotten done what we need to then we’re not done with the work that we set out to achieve. And so, that notion of continuous improvement and hanging in there, and so when I work with clients, we get very clear on the outcomes at the beginning and what the deliverables are, and that’s what we work to. And I don’t have a clock going. Some consultants track things by time, I track things by outcomes. So, if we’re short of the outcomes, then there’s work to be done.

Pete Mockaitis
Got you. Okay, cool. Well, sounds like a good consultant work. Good stuff. Well, so then you’ve packaged a good bit of your learnings and insights when it comes to change in your book, Leverage Change: 8 Ways to Achieve Faster, Easier, Better Results. So, can you maybe hit us with a power punch to start. What’s a particularly surprising, fascinating, counterintuitive discovery you’ve made in your decades of work on change when it comes to change? Like, what’s something most of us don’t know but should know about this?

Jake Jacobs
Sure. So, Pete, what I would say is that you, your listeners, people who’ve written about change, studied change, practice change, both been changed and changed others, that’s what they focus on is, “What’s going to be different? What’s changed? What’s going to be different?” And at face value it makes sense. I mean, it’s what you’re trying to accomplish so why wouldn’t you focus on it?

I talk with my clients about what not to change. Now this is a different perspective. It’s what I call a paradoxical approach. So, each of the levers in this book states a common problem that organizations and people bump up against when they’re trying to bring about successful change. And then I have a lever, or a strategic action, a high-impact action, people can take to remedy that problem.

So, in organizations where there’s too much change, a lot of people talk about change fatigue, it’s like, “Oh, there’s one more coming down the pipe,” and what people hope for is, “This, too, shall pass. So, maybe we can get another leader and survive this change effort.” And I have a lever that’s called “Pay attention to continuity,” so what not to change.

And what I tell clients, very simply, is to make a list of all those changes that are going to occur in their organization. And they make a list, it’s a couple of flipcharts long, and it gets a little depressing in the room because it’s overwhelming. You’re surrounding yourself by all of these things that you’ve got to do differently. Then I tell them, “All right, we’re going to change gears. Now, what I’d like you to do is make a list of all those things that are going to stay the same, that are based on continuity. This time I want you to make the list twice as long.”

Well, people have a lot of ideas once they start thinking about what’s going to keep going the way that it’s always been, whether it’s who they work with, how they get paid, where they work, I mean, all kinds of things stay the same. But once they see this continuity lever, it shifts the energy in the room, it shifts the purpose that people have, how driven they are going to work. It changes the organization.

And I think that all of this focus on change is good and right, and it’s half the story. And it’s like trying to put a jigsaw puzzle together with half the pieces. You get a great picture of what’s on half that front of the board but you’ve missed half of reality. And so, that’s one that I think has been really powerful with people that I’ve worked with.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yeah, I mean, that sounds powerful right there in terms of just the feelings you get, when everything is changing, is kind of uncomfortable. It’s sort of like a rising sense of, I don’t know, dread, anxiety, overwhelm.

Jake Jacobs
Those are good words.

Pete Mockaitis
And when you think about all the stuff that’s going to stay the same, it almost feels like after that it’s like, “Oh, no big deal. Okay, so I still got the same boss, I still got the same colleagues, I still get paid the same amount at the same frequency, I go to the same office, I use the same computer. Oh, but a couple of the software programs we’re using to insert inventory orders, or whatever, is going to be different? Okay.” It’s like, “What are we so stressed out about? Game on.”

Jake Jacobs
Yeah. And it really is I think it’s an emotional thing. I think that change goes to the heart of empowerment. And I’ve had clients tell me, “Everybody minds being changed and that people don’t necessarily mind change.” And so, if I’ve got my hands on the steering wheel and I’m starting to make some decisions about my future and I see that some of those are repeating the past, the way I describe it is that people find much firmer footing on that continuity side of the cliff, if you will, and they get a much firmer push-off into the unknown future. And so, you can be a lot more confident about how far you’re going to get because you’ve paid attention to the continuity.

So, when I even have executives give townhalls or they do communications, I had a client once that literally, in the working sessions that we held, it was about a rapid growth strategy and they needed to change a lot of things about how they did business and their roles and relationships and all kinds of stuff. And, in the meeting itself, he made sure that every time they worked on an issue around change, they worked on the same side of the issue but dealing with continuity.

And it was a very powerful session because it gave people permission at some basic human level to reclaim what was theirs. And I think that envisioning and creating our future is the most powerful thing that we can have and making that possible by reminding people of the things that are going to stay the same makes a big difference.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s great. Well, heck, Jake, let’s just get into it. That’s one lever and that’s beautiful. You’ve got eight of them. So, you tell me, should we just maybe do a quick overview and then dig deep into perhaps two or three more that make a world of difference for a lot of folks?

Jake Jacobs
Sure. I’ll tell you what the problems are that people bump up against and then just a short bit on the lever because I think there are a few that can lead to immediate action that people can take. Levers can be used by individuals, teams, organizations. They can be used with existing methods that people already have in place, and it’s like, “No, no, don’t give that up. Build on it and turbocharge it.”

They can be used at the beginning of a change effort or in the middle. They can even be used as informal tools where you don’t have a formal change effort but you’re just looking to do business a new way because the subtitle of the book says, 8 Ways to Achieve Faster, Easier, Better Results. So, if you’re into faster, easier, better results, these are good things for you.

And let me say one quick thing, Pete, because people may wonder, “Why levers? Like, what does this mean?” And it comes from a story about Archimedes who was a 3rd century BC Greek mathematician, and he was known for describing the power of leverage by saying, “Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it and, single-handed, I shall move the world.”

And so, I believe people can move their worlds in the arena of change by taking these levers and putting them under with the right results with a fulcrum and making change, something that can be faster, easier, and better.

Pete Mockaitis
Excellent. All right. Well, let’s hear some levers. Well, problems and levers.

Jake Jacobs
So, “Change takes too long.” Now this is one that you hear a lot from leaders and there is a lever, and I think I can talk more about this, which is “Think and act as if the future were now,” right? That’s number two. We’ve got one, “People reject your approach because it’s not invented here.” So, a lot of people will say, “Have you ever done this in my industry? Have you ever done this with an organization my side? Have you ever done it…?” And the answer to that is “Design it yourself.” There’s a lever that talks about “Taking the best of what you’ve used and actually looking back at your own organization’s capabilities with change and putting that into place.” So, design it yourself.

There’s “People don’t know enough to make good decisions.” In a lot of organizations, leaders appear to be making decisions that don’t make sense to frontline employees, and frontline employees are taking actions that leaves to throw their hands up. And so, this whole notion about not knowing enough, I have a lever called “Create a common database,” and it addresses this directly. And I’ve got a great story about that one with a client, too.

Then we’ve got “All change efforts must begin from the top.” So, this is one of my favorite ones because every consultant will come in and they will say, “Start with the senior executive team, get them on board, then cascade this through the organization. One needs to be transformed before they transform others. This is the way it goes.” Well, I say start with impact, follow the energy. So, that means start where you can make a difference and then follow where people want to do the work. And that’s a very different model than the waterfall approach that’s quite common.

So many ask, “What’s in it for me?” So, anybody who’s been in an organization may recognize the “WIIFM” way of talking about this, that’s, “What’s in it for me?” laid out in letters. So, the “What’s in it for me?” a lot of people see this as a problem, asking the question, like selfish, like there’s something wrong with the person asking it. And I look and I say, “No, this is a normal human reaction. This is not unreasonable to be asking ‘What’s in it for me?’”

So, the lever that I developed to address this is called “Develop a future people will want to call their own.” And if I developed a future that I want to be part of, then the “What’s in it for me?” question comes off the table, no longer is an issue. People get to only do their routine work of their daily job. Now I’m not saying that that’s unimportant but what I’m saying is that people yearn to make a significant contribution in their lives whether it’s in their places of worship, in their families, in their communities. It’s also true at work. And so, finding ways for people to make a meaningful difference is another one of these levers.

And then the last one. So, “People’s plates are already full.” You hear this all the time at organizations, they’re like, “I don’t want to take on change. I’ve already got enough to do.” And I have a lever that reframes this to say, “Make change work part of daily work,” that it shouldn’t be another item on the agenda, it shouldn’t be the meeting on Friday afternoon. You should be looking at it every day in everything you do, and that will actually change both your paradigm of what’s going on but also your experience of it.

Pete Mockaitis
As opposed to this extra bolt-on thing, it is rather the thing.

Jake Jacobs
Yeah, and it’s part of it. I had a client that was a team and they were looking at improving their performance, and they did an assessment and I was working with them instead of somebody else, and so they were like, “Well, let’s put a sub-team together, a committee, and they’ll study this,” and all this extra work that people resisted.

And I said, “No, no, let’s make this part of your weekly meeting. Every week we’re going to do something that improves your performance, whatever it may be.” And we started out taking part of the next meeting with feedback and the boss getting feedback first, and deciding what to do differently. But rather than separating change as “Another event, another item, that I got to deal with,” make it part of daily work.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, cool. Well, so let’s hear about the common database. You said you’ve got a great story there. Let’s hear it.

Jake Jacobs
Yeah. So, this was in a merger and acquisition. And in that merger and acquisition, they needed to get a lot of people on board with the culture change. One of the organizations, I’m not going to be mentioning the organizations, but was a little slower, a little less rigorous, and worse-performing, and the other one was on the better side of that coin. So, what we needed to do was get everybody up to speed on what was going on with the merger and acquisition.

What we had were meetings. This actually took place around the world 200 people at a time but they don’t have to. You could do this with 10 people around a table. But what we did is we taught the frontline people about convertible bonds and debt and floating interest rates and all these things that the CFO and their people should be paying attention to, but what they were asking of these frontline people would not make sense unless they understood these business terms.

And so, they got a mini-MBA as part of these sessions. And that’s about people knowing enough to make good decisions. And so, that common database, it’s different for everybody. I do these LinkedIn videos, and one of them that I put up recently was “Do you know something that somebody else should know? Don’t keep it a secret.” So, this basic question of, “Do I know something, Pete, that you should know to be able to do your job better?” then it’s my responsibility to reach out and make sure that you know it rather than being too busy with my own work or having these senior leaders say, “People aren’t getting on board.”

Well, they don’t have the information you do. They don’t understand what the payoff is if we make these numbers this year instead of next year, and how much money saved, and what their bonus could be, and all those questions, I think, in that situation, needed to be information everybody knew. So, you get a mini-MBA if you need it as part of the work that I do.

Pete Mockaitis
And that’s intriguing, and I recall, boy, with my very first internships. My boss, Kevin, we were working in channel strategy for electrical components in terms of like, “How can we get distributors to sell more of our stuff,” basically is what we’re trying to figure out.

Jake Jacobs
Good internship.

Pete Mockaitis
And he mentioned, numerous times, how he did a training in finance, and that he thought of it again and again and again with regard to what shows up with like the share price and the earnings and the expectations, and how things bubble up. And I thought that was interesting in that that’s not sort of directly essential to know that, and, yet, everything you hear from the CEO just makes a bit more sense forever when you have that internalized. And I want to hear you elaborate on how the frontline workers understanding the convertible bonds improved what they were doing.

Jake Jacobs
Well, for one thing, it shifted their motivation immediately because if you understand that if you pay off that debt sooner, you save money for the company. And that money for the company, yeah, it’ll go into innovation, and it’ll go into next year’s budget, but some of it was going to go into their pocket. So, understanding the relationship between how fast they paid this debt off and what they could buy at Christmas was fundamental. They didn’t understand that.

And once they understood that the floating interest rate was there and why was it that they paid so much for this other company if it was underperforming, they understood what it meant to have those assets and what it meant to open new markets that they weren’t in previously on a global scale. And so, rather than just being US-based, they diversified their risks by going global and they diversified their customer base.

And all of these things which could’ve been on the rumor mill, which is very efficient, it’s one of the most effective communication strategies any organizations had, but around the rumor mill they were like, “We paid all this money for this company, and why did we? Look, they can’t even do their regular jobs right.” And that was the scuttlebutt on the street. And when they understood what that new business made possible for them, it made a lot more sense.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool in terms of immediate motivation for your compensation this year and what you can do as well as I think just enhancing some trust forever in terms of, “Okay, our senior leaders aren’t morons. In fact, they got a deep understanding of this thing, I’m just now learning about, that has implications for what we’re up to, okay. And I see how I fit into this.” So, even if there is not that direct connection to, “What can I buy at Christmas?” there’s a huge, I think, emotional energy lift that occurs there. So, that’s beautiful. Thank you.

Jake Jacobs
Sure. One other thing I’ll just jump in with, Pete, this is not just about people who don’t have to do with finance getting financial information. This is like even about what I do on my daily job and having information. So, years ago, there was something called open-book management that came out, and in plants and factories, they would post numbers on production numbers, and people hadn’t seen those before. They didn’t know what they were.

So, it’s not always this big leap in logic to say, “Well, we should teach somebody who’s on an oil platform enough to get an MBA.” But it’s like within your own team, do you know things that other people know? And like I said, if you’re keeping it a secret and you’re frustrated that your team is not performing well, then, I don’t know, it was Michael Jackson who said, “Take a look in the mirror and you might realize that you’ve got a lot more power in this situation than you thought you did.”

Pete Mockaitis
And just while we’re here, what are some things leaders ought not to disclose to more junior team members? Is more transparency, more openness always better? Or are there some guidelines, or limits, or times less is…?

Jake Jacobs
Yeah. So, there’s an approach that I take that really says you can have too much of a good thing, that there needs to be a balance between the sharing of information and the protection of information. And so, I worked with the Department of Defense and there was a lot of information they weren’t meant to share with other people. But if I have personal information about your performance, about the issues that you’re working on, about your family, about your development plan, there are a lot of things that I might know about you as a direct report of mine, and it’s probably not appropriate to be sharing all of that. It’s not helpful.

So, one of the things I would tell your listeners, and this answers the question simply, directly, and, I would argue, correctly, which is, “What do these people need to know to do a great job for this business and themselves?” And if you can answer yes to that 95% of the time, it’s a good thing to be talking about. And if sharing this is not going to make a profound difference for the performance of that team or that organization, like me talking about your personal issues, it doesn’t have a place in that, then they’re going to be safe sharing the information, and they’re going to be in a good place to protect what shouldn’t be shared.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Thank you. Well, could you give us another story about a lever and action that made all the difference?

Jake Jacobs
Yeah. So, this is the one, when I talk about it, Pete, think it’s most unique. And it’s the one about change taking too long, that it being too slow, and leaders happen to complain about this a lot because they see what the benefits are, what needs to be different, and they’re trying to get things to move faster and they’re not for whatever reason. And I came up with this lever called “Think and act as if the future were now.”

So, what this means, it’s a paradigm shift, you got to think differently. Rather than the future being something that’s out there that will occur later, which sounds like common sense, what we’re going to do is we’re going to get some image of that future, however clear we can be, grab hold of that image of the future, pull it back into the present, and start thinking and acting as if that were our present now.

So, here’s a story that I have. There was a group of executives who were in deep debate, they had a day-long meeting set aside to figure out how to come up with a sales strategy in this new market, and they spent the whole morning arguing passionately about it, not as an unhealthy team. I mean, they listened to each other, but they came up with two answers to the question by lunch. And then people started to pick on sides and I could start to see this was not going to be a helpful way to spend the afternoon.

Now, this organization had said they wanted to create a participative culture. So, knowing my lever, I said to them, “Well, what could you do to create a more participative culture around this sales strategy issue?” Some of them looked around the table, didn’t know what to do, but there were a few of them who said, “Well, we’d probably get more salespeople involved in this conversation.” And that seemed to make sense to everybody.

So, they got out their version of a calendar, whatever it was at that point, and they started to make a meeting for next week when they would bring these people in. So, I saw this as a big, fat fastball down the middle, to go back to my baseball cards. And I thought, “All you got to do is swing,” because it’s going to make a lot of sense. And by that, I mean, I said, “Why wait for next week? You said you wanted to make a difference. And if you think and act as if the future were now, if you became that participative organization right here and right now at lunch, what would you do? Be in that future.”

And they said, “Well, we would grab the salespeople who were walking the halls here, and we would call up the ones that are out in the field, and we’d probably might even get some customers involved in this because we said we wanted to be bridging relationships with them.” And I said, “Great. Set it up for 1:00 o’clock, finish lunch, and let’s go to work.”

And what they found in the afternoon was this common database lever came into play, and a lot more people learned about what the issues were, and people on the frontlines talking about a new region of business, they had opened new regions before, they knew what was needed, they knew what was going to be a good or a bad idea.

And so, by learning that and by thinking and acting as if that participative organization was part of one that they were members of, they came up with an entirely different solution. It was a third solution that nobody in the morning had come up with but one that everybody in the room, customers included who were in on the phone, thought, “I got a lot more confidence in this being a path to take.” And what they found was they opened that new region faster than they’ve ever opened another region before, and it got to profitability faster than any region had before.

So, they came up with a good idea but it goes back, for me, to this, “Well, do we want to wait a week?” No, you lose time, you lose money, you lose energy, you lose political capital, all of these things. Why wait to get a better answer when you can start behaving as if you already knew it?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, that’s good. And I think it’d be really fun if you are a salesperson in that afternoon who are just kind of surprised, pulled into a room full of senior executives, like, “Oh, okay. Well, I feel kind of special and important right now.”

Jake Jacobs
A little nervous too.

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly. And then that creates all sorts of good things in terms of some of the other levers with regard to they all make meaningful difference in that work and bringing it together.

Jake Jacobs
Absolutely. Absolutely. And the levers, Pete, work together that way so you can focus on one and start to make gains on two more where you don’t have to think, “Well, let me find a meaningful way for people to contribute. Let me find a way to create a common database.” They were working on thinking as if the future were now, and they got freebies in terms of what the results were on those other two.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. That’s good. Well, can you tell us, Jake, what are some key things to not do when we’re trying to get a change going?

Jake Jacobs
Yes. So, one of them, I think, is the notion that people see change as something that happens to them instead of with them. And so, if you can engage people in conversations that matter about their future and talk about the meaningful difference that they can make, avoiding those conversations, being nervous about those conversations.

I once had a client, it was a plant, and they were going to close. It was in Cleveland, it was a casting plant, I won’t tell you the company, but it was going to close. And so, they held a big meeting, there were 300 people, to talk about it. And there’s one woman who stood up and she said, “Look, if closing this plant is going to create an opportunity for my son to work at the plant the next town over, I’m willing to close it here.” The place went dead silent and it’s like, “Was she serious?” I mean, that’s something that you’re not really supposed to be talking about. It doesn’t make sense to talk about and, yet, for her, she decided that that was important.

So, a lot of people, when they deal with change, emotion is something that’s off the table. You shouldn’t be talking about how people feel. And what she did is she put on the table, her bare to her soul, and I’ve worked with clients a lot of times. I had a leader once who basically said, “We’re not dealing with feelings; we deal with facts and figures in here.” And his people were dying because of the support they needed and they couldn’t even ask for it because they saw it as a sign of weakness.

And so, if you can create a culture in your team or your organization, where people can speak the truth, and including their emotions and put it on the table, even this woman, it was a safe enough environment for her to stand up and say, “Look, I’ll put my job on the line.” But I think, too often, we look at change as a project, and it’s got deadlines, and it’s milestones, and it’s got resources, and it gets very cold and calculated, and we’re dealing with human beings, and that’s not how we’re wired.

Sure, you’ve got to pay attention to all those things but if you’re not looking at people’s experience of the change and asking them, “What’s going to make it better?” you don’t have to have the answers, but if you ask them, they know most of the time what’s going to work better for them. And so, that ask, and then you got to listen. So, if you’re asking and don’t pay attention, you’re in worse shape than if you hadn’t asked in the first place.

Pete Mockaitis
“Man, you don’t care.”

Jake Jacobs
Right. Charlie Brown, Lucy and the football, and Lucy pulls the football out and Charlie Brown ends up on his backside. It’s like asking people what they need and then ignoring it entirely – not smart.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, now could you share with us a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Jake Jacobs
Yeah. So, this one is actually one that I’ve used a lot of ways in a lot of places. So, this comes from Thomas Jefferson and it goes back to 1820, and he said, “I know of no safe depository of the ultimate powers of society but the people themselves. And if we think they’re not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is to not take it from them but to inform their discretion.”

So, I think what he was saying is if people don’t know enough to be smart about decisions they need to make, then educate them. Help them make good decisions. Don’t take those decisions away from them. So, I’m a big believer in engagement in organizations for all the right reasons. It’s not right all the time but in a lot of organizations today, we err on the side of not informing discretion. So, I think that’s less of an issue for most people to deal with, but I think Thomas Jefferson in 1820 had it pretty darn well.

Pete Mockaitis
Thank you. Well, now could you share a favorite study or experiment or bit of research?

Jake Jacobs
Yeah. My mentor’s mentor, Ron Lippitt, people don’t believe this but actually, was a significant player in the invention of flipcharts, being if you want to claim the fame. Ron was at the University of Michigan, and what he studied was the difference between what he called preferred futuring and problem-solving. So, what he did is he gave two groups the same situation. One of them was to go about it as solving a problem, “What’s wrong? What do we need to do to fix it?” The other, he came up with this thing called preferred futuring, which said, “We’re in our future and what did we do to get there?”

And what they found at the end of this study was that people who were in the problem-solving group had less energy at the end, greater blame on other people, and they had reduction of pain solutions. So, it’s like, “It won’t be as bad if we do this than it normally would.” The preferred futuring group was the exact opposite. They were more energized at the end, they took more ownership of the situation, and they found innovative solutions to their problems.

So, this preferred futuring is actually the precursor or the father of all the visioning work done in organizations today. Until that time when Ron did this experiment, problem-solving ruled the day, and this was in the ‘40s, but he had the insight to say, “Maybe there’s another way.” And now it’s so commonplace, people would look at you like they had their heads screwed on backwards if you didn’t think about what the vision for your organization was going to be.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, thank you. And how about a favorite book?

Jake Jacobs
So, for me, I think that my favorite book is a book called The Practical Theorist. It was written by a guy named Al Marrow, and it was written about the founder of my field of organization change, his name was Kurt Lewin. And The Practical Theorist was saying, Lewin said, “There’s nothing so practical as a good theory.”

So, to me, it’s very concrete because I love the story. It’s very useful for the listeners. He was in Germany before World War II, and they used to sit and have coffee at the cafes, if you can imagine, and students would sit with them, and they had this wondering about, “Would the waitress remember the bill better before or after it was paid?”

And what they decided was it was going to be before it was paid. Other people decided after. So, they asked the waitress what it was before and what it was after. She could remember to the Deutsche Mark before it was paid, she had no idea what it was afterwards. A woman named Bluma Zeigarnik took this on as her doctoral thesis and it became known as The Zeigarnik Effect.

And what it says is that people have greater recall and motivation to go back to unfinished tasks. So, don’t tie a bow around something at the end of the day or the end of a meeting. Keep it open and you will find that people would be more motivated to go back to it the next day, or the next meeting, than if you finished something at the end of the meeting. So, a lot of times there’s this mad rush to get through the last slide or to get the last agenda item covered, and I would say don’t. Leave it for next time and you’ll find a lot more energy to work on it.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s interesting. And, likewise, I think, for, I don’t know, books, movies, stories, TV shows, like if the story is not quite finished, it’s like, “Ooh, what’s going to happen?” You got to know and you keep going.

Jake Jacobs
Absolutely. I think a lot of sitcom writers probably studied Kurt Lewin before they got into sitcom-writing.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. And how about a favorite tool, something you use to be awesome at your job?

Jake Jacobs
Yeah. So, this one for me is that I find that listening is the most powerful tool that I have at my disposal and it’s readily available anytime, place, or with anyone. And when I say listening, I mean listening to see the world through their eyes. And so, I talk with my clients about four magic words that they can use whenever they’re in trouble. It’s like you get a little hot under the collar, you start breathing a little faster, you start interrupting the other person, like we all know what it looks like for our own version of that.

And I tell them, “As soon as you start to feel that happen, say, ‘Could you say more?’” And that gives an invitation to the other person that they have the floor still, and it creates a safe place for that person to go deeper into whatever it was that they were saying because you’re inviting them. So, when I give you an invitation, Pete, that says, “Could you say more?” you’re going to feel better about sharing it with me.

And the other thing it does is it interrupts that whole building of interruption and heat and breathing, all those things when we get a little ticked off. But when you say, “Could you say more?” well, one thing is they see Jake in their face saying, “Say it,” and hopefully your listeners will hear me next time they get in that situation. But it’s very practical advice. I think, like this guy who wrote the book “The Practical Theorist,” it’s like, “If you can’t put theory and put it into practice, then it’s not worth knowing in the first place.”

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And is there a particular nugget that you share that really connects and resonates with folks; they quote it back to you often?

Jake Jacobs
Yeah. So, this one goes back to that lever about “Think and act as if the future were now.” I interviewed people to put on my website, clients, and half of them came back to me and said, “You know that thing you say about living in the future and making it happen today? That’s been really helpful.” And one of the people said, “Yeah, I went back to my team the next day and there was a guy, after I said that, who was like the chief engineer, had a whole list of things that he needed to start doing differently if he was going to operate and do business in new and better ways.”

And so, that has been something that a lot of people have come back to me and said, “You know, one thing, for sure, that I’ve taken away from my time with you is that quote and putting that quote into practice.”

Pete Mockaitis
Let’s hear it one more time.

Jake Jacobs
“Think and act as if the future were now.”

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And, Jake, if folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them?

Jake Jacobs
I would point them two places. One, my website JakeJacobsConsulting.com. The other thing that I would encourage them to do, if they’re not on LinkedIn, I’d get on it, but if they’re on it, look me up there, I’m Jake Jacobs. And I’ve got a short Jake on Change, two-minute videos, that I put up there, there’s articles, there’s quotes, there’s all kinds of materials because I believe you go into the world with open arms. And the more you share the more you receive. So, it’s really important to me to make sure that I continue to push my own thinking, and I continue to give whatever gifts I have to other people so it will help them create faster, easier, better results, whatever they may be working on.

Pete Mockaitis
And do you have a final challenge or call to action for folks looking to be awesome at their jobs?

Jake Jacobs
Yeah. I think that the final challenge is for them to picture a day when the results they’re working on for their change effort are achieved, for them to picture a day when somebody who’s been resistant to their change work comes up to them and says, “I’m really glad I got involved. I’m excited about the future we’re creating,” and to picture a day wherein their organization, faster, easier, better results just become the way of doing business. It’s not something special or different. It’s just the way that we operate.

And if they could sit back and picture those days when those things are happening, I think they end up getting pulled into the future more by what Ron Lippitt would call their preferred future or vision, and less of it is about getting mired trying to solve today’s problems. It’s much better to get pulled forward than pushed from behind.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, Jake, thank you. This has been a treat. And I wish much luck in all the ways you achieve faster, easier, better results.