Wrestling With Chaos

In this episode Urko Wood, with Reveal Growth Consultants, discusses how business-to-business (B2B) companies can grow in a predictable manner using a method — Jobs-To-Be-Done — which also sustains value and profitability. The process is described in the seminal book, Jobs to be Done: From Theory to Practice, by Anthony W. Ulwick. Urko also has a free white paper, 3 Steps to Consistently Fill Your New Product Pipeline with Only Good Ideas, you may find quite beneficial for developing new products. The discussion opens with the reality one can't just prepare to do Jobs-To-Be-Done (JTBD) via a major in college. His initial contact with the method was with improving existing products and services. At the time it was not necessarily good at discovering new products and services that could be offered in new markets because the method was limited to existing products and services. Eventually he read an article in the Harvard Business Review and connected with Ulwick, the CEO and founder of Strategyn and became a part of his team from 2005 to 2012. From there Urko founded Reveal Growth Consultants, working mostly with small to midsize B2B companies. The conversation switched to VOC (the Voice of the Customer). The problem with that approach is it tends to focus on products that are already in place. With JTBD the opportunities lie with unmet needs. And in line with that it is important to separate the need from the solution, per Theodore Levitt, because “customers don't want to buy a drill, they want to buy a hole.” A laser may do a better job than a drill. The customer wants to get the job done! The key is shifting from what we know how to do to what it takes to get the customer's job done. The #1 reason for product failure is not understanding the customer's needs. With JTBD the first goal is to discover the customer's unmet needs. In line with this Urko approaches the customer defining 7 key terms: 1. Innovation 2. Customer need 3. Customer unmet needs 4. Opportunity 5. A Market 6. A Market segment 7. Creativity All terms need to be defined with the customer for innovation to occur. The client team must have a consistent definition of these terms. Innovation is first discovering the customers unaddressed needs and then integrating ideas to address them. THE SEQUENCE IS CRITICAL! The need must be defined separate from any possible solutions. This increases the odds of achieving a breakthrough. Failure to put solutions first can create real problems. The example was given of the cell phone industry switching from analog to digital and being disrupted due to analog leaders focusing on solutions first. This also occurred in the image industry with the switch from film to digital. The flow then is to first discover the customer's unmet needs then evaluate those needs with the client's team using concepts such as strategic fit, time to market, relative advantage, etc., in order to win in the market place. Innovation always comes before products in order to avoid being tied to existing products/services, e.g., an accounting consulting firm purchasing a digital security firm since most of their clients had that need. Most growth comes from discovering unmet needs, eliminate phantom needs, and then matching solutions with the important unsatisfied needs. The challenges of product management and innovation are often reflected in the company's internal politics, diluting the focus on relevancy for the customer. In such situations it's key to have an objective metric against which one can make good decisions. In other words, use the JTBD approach. JTBD uses market statistics to determine a prioritized list of needs, increasing the odds of success in terms of product development. The discussion may take some time and massaging the metrics give a good starting point rather than, say, the CEO's pet idea. To get this information the conversation turned to methodology. A simple place to begin is asking customers what they are trying to accomplish with your product or service. It's important to be qualified in terms o knowing what questions to ask. If it turns out the customer's needs are best met with new technologies your company lacks then it's best for the CEO to set up a new group separate from existing ones in order to avoid to avoid being “contaminated” with existing methods that may not meet the customer's needs. The need to adapt and be disruptive is shown by the fact that most companies are bought out within 12 years and during that time they will have to reinvent themselves several times. Disruption is becoming the norm. Failure to do that can lead to disaster, e.g., Palm going under in the PDA/cell phone market. Funds were diverted to dividends that would have been better spent in JTBD. To keep clients “on the same page” Urko work on alignment in terms of uncovering customer's needs, determining how the customer measures success, and then determining how much of a solution can be put into a solution. The focus is on asking not only what customers want but what they want to avoid, e.g., safety issues with hand tools. It's important to avoid confusing needs with requirements. There should be a clear mapping between the two. Urko refers to himself as an innovation guide, totally focused on serving his client who usually are dealing with a threat and need to grow by creating new value through differentiation. What is key is having everyone who will be involved at the kickoff meeting — getting everyone on board in terms of innovation. Because of potential change management issues it is best to create a culture of innovation so people aren't attached to one particular solution. Modeling innovation throughout the company is critical, i.e., get a clear definition of the problem or solution needed before doing any design efforts. So when submitting and idea the presenter needs to identify: 1. Who is the target customer? 2. What's the job they are trying to get done? 3. Where are they struggling on that job? 4. What'a the opportunity for value creation? 5. What's your idea going to do to mitigate or increase/create new value? 6. What's your evidence that shows it's a problem? 7. How broad is this issue in the market? Gary referenced the similarity of this approach to the one presented with regards to implementing solutions in the 12 Steps to Flow, which has a supporting series of podcasts (WWC podcasts 0037, 0042, 0043, 0045, 0046, 0047, 0049, 0050, 0051, 0053, 0054, 0055). Flow emphasizes the need for openness throughout the organization both vertically and horizontally when solving problems relating to innovation -always having a focus on the client's problem that needs to be solved. The value of JTBD and finding hidden markets was the next topic. It's important to know what inputs to get and how to get them from target customers. Must know how to create the needs statements so that they are accurate and unambiguous, and validated in order to go into a survey of the representative sample of the target population to rate for how important it is and how satisfied are you with your ability to implement. With a sufficiently large population segmentation can be used to see if the same valuation is placed by a sufficiently large segment that it is worth one's while to develop solutions for that segment because they are underserved. This is superior to demographics in terms of assessing shared values. It's all about being in the realm of causality rather than correlation. Urko explains the criteria and mechanics of putting an accurate and valid survey together — it's a specialty. Surveys aren't the first step - qualitative interviews are. It helps establish: 1. the target customer 2. what they want to accomplish 3. what steps they have to go through 4. what criteria for success 5. and where do they struggle and why Surveys don't penetrate to this level of information. Surveys tend to focus on sales methods. For more information contact Urko on • LinkedIn or • e-mail to uw@revealgrowth.com, • on Facebook see Reveal Growth Urko also has a white paper, 3 Steps to Consistently Fill Your New Product Pipeline with Only Good Ideas that is quite beneficial to learn more about Jobs To Be Done CHANGE MANAGEMENT WHITE PAPER LINK. Need help dealing with complex situations? You can download CMC's free e-book MINDSET – 5 SIMPLE WAYS TO LOOK AT COMPLEX PROBLEMS and learn how to find a simple vantage point from which you can resolve challenges. Your feedback is important. Choose from the following options: • place a review in iTunes, • send any comments along with your name and the show number to support@ctrchg.com Listen to future episodes for our reply.

In this episode Kent Johnson, CEO of Highlights for Children, a family-owned business with a majority of independent Board members, discusses a series of topics ranging from his sudden take-over of the CEO position at age 36 due to the death of the incumbent to how the company started to the different avenues of childhood development Highlights pursues. To compound the situation he actually did not want the position since he was working successfully in biotech. Kent refers to the great mentorship he received from the Board of Directors which helped insure assuming the CEO position would be successful. A real plus was governance in terms of having sat with the Board for 2 years prior. The challenge of juggling a wide range of stakeholder populations was achieved by first focusing on the employee population since they were the main determinants of whether or not Kent would succeed, a key determinant of any leader's success. As to general traits of being a good CEO Kent felt working hard and a willingness to listen are two key character traits. Kent's father's work as a scientist and his mother's work as a politician working in the community contributed immensely to the foundation needed to succeed as CEO. It provided key lessons in diversity and its value in succeeding in meeting everyone's needs. Humility is key. Fortunately, people are focused on the mission and avoid major, internal political struggles. To support this Kent will tell people, especially when asking a detailed questions, he just needs to know. His scientific training can creep in because he was trained to question everything…details, details. His training does help growth since promoting experiments is key to finding opportunities. Risk Management! In terms of income, Highlights for Children, is not their major source of income. Zaner-Bloser, professional development for teachers, etc. help create an environment where the organization can succeed especially by marketing to government agencies in order to gain sponsorship for their children. Chaos- and complexity theory come into play because there is a constant balancing act required to keep the company balanced, fresh, and appropriate for the markets they serve. Financially, grounding work in risk management is essential because a sunk-cost frame of mind is needed to determine whether or not continued investment in diversification strategies is essential. In turn, these efforts are grounded in a belief of what they can do for kids that will help them flourish. Consequently, a balance is struck in deciding when it is best to stop a highly-desirable project that is failing to show the necessary return potential. This is especially true as the world moves faster and faster. In line with this speed of business the criticality of maintaining balance in a constantly-changing environment is critical. In other words, Kent has to focus on, “How do we need to change in order to stay relevant?” As a middle-market company managers are expected to help in terms of looking at the outside world and how it is changing along with keeping existing workflows moving forward. This includes managing conflict through rules of engagement, e.g., assume a positive intent when there is conflict, work to provide solutions, examine assumptions, examine clarity of rules, examine possible consequences. This leads to clarity and alignment of goals from the Board to the employee. Managers must “translate” from one level of the organization to another. This alignment is critical especially when working with outside partners. Motivation can be a major task encouraging employees to work on change, stay focused on the problem-at-hand, and maintain respect for each other, i.e., an egoless team — hammer the idea, respect the people. Trust is critical. Debate in a trustworthy manner rather than attack resulting in interpersonal conflict. Conflict and fear crush innovation. Trust and discipline lead to thriving. Inclusion is vital since different personalities come at a situation, problem, or opportunity differently. A straightforward example is Extroverts want to jump in immediately and get “out there” right away vs Introverts who need time to go back to their space and think about things in order to explore and then come out with their ideas/proposed solutions/etc. A solutions-oriented frame-of-mind rather than attack/defend - that's the key. Some of the challenges facing Highlights for Children is, as mentioned, is keeping up with the changing environment and staying relevant in developing the whole child. Another includes the business models used, e.g., the “magazine” part of the business is challenging but it is essential to go beyond just being a magazine for children. High Five is a good example — it focuses on being a part of a child's development (preschoolers and kindergarteners). This leads to “Highlights Habits,” a range of products within which the child can explore. So “Highlights for Children” becomes the spine from which products flow develop that achieve the goals within the mission strategy of the 4 C's - Creative, Caring, Confident, and Curious - and how the child goes through their day. This includes curriculum development for the influencers in the child's life. An example of this is “Hidden Pictures,” which helps with critical thinking for children by doing puzzles. It helps children learn to use different tools and processes. I commented on how this helps with developing the child's Axis Mundi — creating a space where the child's “insides” meet the world's “outsides.” The child is offered an experience. At “Highlights” this is expressed in their slogan, “Fun With a Purpose.” Childhood is a short, sweet season where they learn to love engaging with the world. The children can engage with the characters in the tools. Instead of tools alone, children are taught to have a sense of right and wrong and the tools to apply that sense in their life and change as they see appropriate. The hope is teaching children how to immerse themselves in the 4 C's can help them solve major problems as they grow older and go out into the world. This is all grounded in ideas that started with the founders of the company, Kent's great-grandparents who founded the company in 1946 when they were 61 & 59 - starting on their own new careers at that time! Being flexible and change while being faithful to core principles is the constant challenge while also trying to move faster is the challenge Kent faces — surfing the edge of chaos. This all leads to a fascinating work stream frame-of-mind challenge which imagines there is no magazine and no existing business, “What activities should we pursue to achieve our mission?” I pointed out that whether conscious or unconscious this gets to practical applications of Complexity Theory and Chaos Theory, necessary for moving through a changing world by promoting healthy child development. This means the company works at a meta level with a focus on child development through the creation of an ecosystem around “Highlights for Children” that supports achievement of their mission statement. The content may change, e.g., the magazine may have changing relevance and will just shift to its proper place in the ecosystem where certain needs for relevance are constant, e.g., touch being important with activities such as sitting on a parent's or grandparent's lap and reading “Highlights” together. Kent's profile can be found on LinkedIn. Need help dealing with complex situations? You can download CMC's free e-book MINDSET – 5 SIMPLE WAYS TO LOOK AT COMPLEX PROBLEMS and learn how to find a simple vantage point from which you can resolve challenges. Your feedback is important. Choose from the following options: • place a review in iTunes, • send any comments along with your name and the show number to support@ctrchg.com Listen to future episodes for our reply.

In this episode I talk with Jim Bruner who works in child development and who draws on his long history of mentorship to develop diversity, specifically combining the arts with technology. We started with Jim introducing the importance of diversity - turning STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) into STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Art, and Math). He and his husband bought a farm and with is half Jim dedicated it to gardening and technology. He realized without diversity technology is a destructive component causing isolation and destruction. With diversity technology can be unifying. He works with anthropologists, sociologists, and ethnographers to apply diversity to “gardens” of people! This helps with his search for diversity of skill and talent among his students, working to elevate the individual while promoting team spirit and behavior. A big breakthrough occurred when he realized there was benefit to be gained when the mentoring went outside a focused purpose - the children are unique “gardens,” themselves! Children need to be in an environment where they can thrive and grow, realizing for themselves what they can and can't accomplish. Ask about their dreams, look at their art, etc., and let them talk about it. This helps children understand they don't need permission to be who they are. The conversation moved into STEM vs STEAM. The arts are critical to every stage of technology because without a sense of wonder and beauty there is no technology. Art is needed to move technology forward. THERE ARE NO SOFT SKILLS - technology moving forward is about people interacting based on mutual respect. It is grounded in creativity. With STEAM children are challenged to push their own limits to solve problems. This turns creativity on, which is art. Learning to do this within a group and build mutual respect is key. With the “A” for Art, STEAM turns STEM into creativity. It's teaching children to lean through empathy and understanding. One problem mentioned was the movement from “natural philosophy” to “science.” “Natural philosophy” is a frame of mind about connection across all areas of human endeavor which encourages art to be connected to technology - STEAM. On the other hand, removal of art in order to have STEM (as was done in the industrial revolution) risks dehumanizing and fragmenting the individual thus creating problems for and within children. Jim, himself, lives a diverse life, from his farm, Mezzacello (https://mezzacello.org/) where children study food, technology, and learning, to the PAST foundation (https://www.pastfoundation.org/ ) which partners anthropology with science and technology. “We don't need more kids to work in factories. We need factories that can work with passion and creativity to reach new horizons.” Maurice Sendak in his book, “I don't care, Pierre,” discusses how a STEM frame of mind leads to demotivation - absence of love. Technology flows from creativity which is forged in art, history, poetry, literature, love, laughter, and tears. People are the beautiful strange attractors that create chaos leading to invention and technology. But what about kids who don't care? Kids who are outliers? They need mentorship both from adults but also peer-to-peer. They need to be empowered by learning to trust themselves and others. It has to do with vulnerability and dealing with the associated challenges. We discussed how Apollo 13 reflects what is being spoken. (https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/apollo/missions/apollo13.html, 13 Factors that Saved Apollo 13) To reflect all this Jim teaches algorithms to children via Tai Chi - 11 movements tied together by a story. He can teach the algorithm to children in 3 weeks! The problem with algorithms arise when they are dedicated to a single purpose, e.g., profits. People then become devises meant only to achieve the goal - their humanity is subtracted. People are multi-dimensional and for children to thrive they need to learn how to explore and express all their dimensions both individually and on the team. In other words, have children who are successful sooner teach those needed more time and input. In business, then, what is best is focusing on human capital and a culture based on wanting each other to succeed. Jim goes on to talk about ignorance, stupidity, and fear along with how a CEO is best suited to deal with them and gain respect of employees. • Ignore stupidity • Eradicate ignorance • Use knowledge to replace ignorance • Care about what people feel about each other • Then, care about what they think about you He summed it up with a quote from Maya Angelou, “People don't remember what you did, they remember how you made them feel.” Telling people, “I appreciate you make my bottom line stronger and I am stronger because of you,” is much more powerful than, “You have to make my bottom line stronger.” The topic switched to Invention Convention and the Invention League. At one point the judging panel comprised 2 adults from a given industry. The children couldn't take the criticism! Eventually, all critique was changed to 2 adults + all the kids in that particular group with the kids opinions ranking as important as the adults. Success ratios went through the roof! Rather than critique the students saw their peers' judgments as being a “plus.” It built empathy. It promoted honesty, openness, and vulnerability. It supports the understanding that people are power and that vulnerability is a key component for a successful team. It teaches children to blossom. “Innovation is rented, not owned and the rent is due today,” is a poster on Jim's office wall. You surf the edge of chaos, go back and implement, and then get back out to the edge of chaos to gain new information and insight as well as helping keep one sharp. Reinvent the journey! The conversation switched to the importance of just being yourself rather than trying to have a face for each situation. This includes “not just sitting there,” which lead to discussing the difference between homeostasis and stability. Homeostasis is an “alive” situation which takes energy and commitment to maintain, e.g., holding a body temperature of 98.6° F. Stability is a dead state - everything goes towards maximum entropy. When children start to cry Jim reminds them they are an emotional supercomputer. The brain functions on emotions - what one feels can appear more real than what is. Consequently, teaching children to respect but step away from letting the emotions rule is important. While emotions can be genuine they can mask a reality that is key for the child to learn to be successful. How Buddhism works into generating this frame-of-mind was discussed. Briefly, the need for social media to be “more human” was discussed. Humility is a character trait that is profoundly missing in today's business leadership. Rather than throwing people a rope, Jim teaches them how to make their own rope. A potential next podcast is the intersection between technology and people discovering themselves. If you think this is a good idea, send us a comment at support@ctrchg.com. Jim's profile can be found at LinkedIn His two websites are the Past Foundation and Jim Bruner. His e-mail address is jbruner@pastfoundation.org Need help dealing with complex situations? You can download CMC's free e-book MINDSET – 5 SIMPLE WAYS TO LOOK AT COMPLEX PROBLEMS and learn how to find a simple vantage point from which you can resolve challenges. Your feedback is important. Choose from the following options: • place a review in iTunes, • send any comments along with your name and the show number to support@ctrchg.com Listen to future episodes for our reply.

This episode is the first in a series on preparing for the next recession, “Recession Preparation - Processes and Employees.” The entire teamCMC contributes their expertise: • Gary Monti: change management, business analysis/planning, people & politics, project management • John Riley, Agility expert • Jeffrey Cochran, Human Resource expert The conversation was based on a point-counterpoint approach, i.e., which is more significant during a recession, a bad process or a bad employee? For this argument the definition of “recession” provided was, “A shrinkage of sales.” John started the conversation by saying organizations frequently want to cut employees were cut products in preparation for recession. He stressed what is important is to look at the efficiency of your processes and the value to the customer of your products. Consequently, the best place to start in terms of recession is to look at the value stream of your product. Jeffrey responded by starting with the observation that separate from a recession the bad employee is affecting your bottom line. A better employee typically has a compounding effect on the organization by influencing a drop in morale, productivity, and added stress for fellow employees. In line with this, Gary referenced an excellent book, “The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn’t,” By Robert Sutton. Jeffrey went on to point out one of the biggest problems with difficult employees is failing to show up for work. The discussion proceeded to talk about the impact absenteeism has on the workplace. The big point regarding this is how organizations will adapt the dysfunction in an effort to keep products or processes moving forward to sustain cash flow. An example was given of how Detroit's Big Three, back in the ’70s when production quality was terrible, argued that Toyota would never catch on in terms of significant sales numbers. The rule at the time was, "you never want to buy a car was manufactured on a Friday or a Monday." The reason being absenteeism was so high. John picked up on that and turn the conversation back towards its impact on processes. He emphasized that with process execution one of most important aspect is retrospectives throughout the product delivery process. During those retrospectives the quality of performance by the team is one of the key elements to be addressed. And one of the key elements in addressing quality is individual team member performance with this issue being addressed directly by fellow team members rather than senior management. The function of senior management is to set the goals and to support the team during execution. The team should be empowered to address whatever it takes to deliver the value to the customer. In other words, the team being very direct with regards to retrospectives conducted on a routine basis is critical for survival during a recession. Vulnerability, then, becomes a key issue because senior management needs to risk turning power over to the team in addition to shouldering responsibility for determining what direction the organization should take. Jeffrey asked an excellent question with regards to owner stepping in and modifying the process in an attempt to adapt to the dysfunction in its present. There is general agreement that this is the case now the company is put it greater risk of failure because senior management is now pulling back ownership of the process by dictating how the team should adapt to the dysfunction. Gary proceeded to point out how power then shifts from senior management to the dysfunctional employee who becomes the tail that's wagging the dog. Once this inappropriate shift of power occurs the company is destabilized to some extent in the risk of failure during the recession goes up accordingly. An example is given of an employee who was guaranteed employment as a condition of her former company being bought out. Feeling bulletproof, the employee took advantage of the situation much to the detriment of her teammates. Jeffrey proceeded to note how quality employees suffer because workloads are shifted in their direction. This compounds the damage associated with the absenteeism. John jumped back into the conversation pointing out that in line with being able to discipline fellow team members the team needs to be given the power to modify processes in order to increase value. A good, iterative process with pre-defined goals that remain constant gets people on board as to what the product is. The other thing is it solves “not knowing what the problem(s) is(are).” By knowing what the goals are the team can morph around the job and gauge each others performance accordingly. In other words, if someone needs time for a doctor’s appointment the team can adapt. The team can also call out someone who isn’t staying on task to achieve the goal(s). This helps surface risks in a very clear manner. Jeffrey backed up this approach from a Human Resource perspective, e.g., excessive overtime for those picking up the pieces associated with others not performing properly. There was some back-and-forth regarding team size estimates, etc., and whether or not that information and associated processes were adequate. The key point, though, is senior management is where the responsibility lies in determining what is appropriate and insuring the team has the resources needed. Arguing whether it is the people or the process can miss that key point. The bigger point in all this is making needed changes in preparation for a recession can be a huge challenge if there are a lot of dysfunctional habits spread throughout the company and employee base. The reward system morphs around those dysfunctions making change difficult. It’s not just about the processes and tools. John emphasized the individuals and interactions are critical, especially when practicing Business Agility. The metaphor of a race car pit crew was used for emphasis. Jeffrey expanded the conversation to the quality of managers. The conversation then rolled to knowing the principles involved. This is key for success. Everyone needs to know these principles and they need to permeate the workplace. Failure is used as an opportunity to sharpen the team’s application of principles to achieve the goals. This approach is critical since the life expectancy of the average company is

In this episode I review “Influence People: Powerful Everyday Opportunities to Persuade That Are Lasting and Ethical,” written by Brian Ahearn. In addition to influencing people in general, information is provided for those who need to improve their sales cycle. His approach is very practical, laying out key principles and associated acronyms that can be used to practice sharpening you ability to influence people. His overall tone is about helping the read as an entire person, not just one aspect. The work is based on solid research. He boils the information down to 7 key shortcuts which basically are sound principles. They include: 1. Reciprocity - behave in a way that encourages others to relate to you 2. Liking - people want to do business with their friends or people they like 3. Authority - experienced or knowledgable - use it 4. Consensus - when no authority use how groups are moving in a given direction 5. Consistency - channel a person’s consistent behavior in a desirable direction. Be consistent yourself to develop trust. 6. Scarcity - people respond more to what they might lose than they do to what they might gain 7. Unity - people like to relate with people with whom they have a sense of belonging and with whom they may have common experiences Additional tools are presented: ▪ Compare and contrast - set the stage to make it easy for the other person to go in the direction you want, e.g., “This normally is $799 but since you are here I can give it to you at $599.” Another example is given with wine lists. When the wines are listed in decreasing price people buy more because they feel they are being practical by buying a good bottle but one not so expensive. When listed from lowest price to highest people buy substantially lower priced products because they are only seeing an increase in price rather than an opportunity to “save” ▪ Consistency vs authority. Consistency is driven by client history in terms of thoughts, feelings, and actions traditionally going in a specific direction. Authority is used when your expertise legitimately points the person being persuaded in the desired direction. This especially helps when the client is uncertain. ▪ Conformational bias. Present information that is ethical and honest but plays in the direction the other person wants to go. ▪ “Because I said so.” The word “because” allows people to be gracious and help. This works especially well when put in the form of a question, e.g., “Would you please get your report to me by Monday because I have to roll it into a larger report?” If they say “no” you can have a backup position of Wednesday. “How about Wednesday?” Usually people don’t want to say “no” twice in a row so with this approach you increase the odds of getting their report when you actually need it. They have a sense of reciprocity. Decision making and rationality are the next topics he presents. Most decision-making is essentially irrational, with some researchers believing >90% of our decision-making is driving by the unconscious. What you are exposed to and the order in which you are exposed sets the stage for how the decisions will flow. This gets back to the reality people respond more to concern about what they might lose compared to what they might gain. Several examples are given. Brian goes on to give about 15 tips for improving your bottom line. Case studies are then provided, some of which are fascinating and make it worth purchasing the book. This includes: - How Kodak went from having almost 100% of the image market to almost nothing - JCPenny losing 40% of it’s stock value by making changes that failed to take the customer’s wishes into consideration - How Bernie Madoff used the principles in this book unethically to swindle $65 billion - Why Starbucks is so pervasive even though they don’t advertise. What’s their secret? The etiquette for using social media is discussed. Use it to network and connect…don’t start selling right away! The book closes out with examples of how people behave in ways that show they are worth working with. The examples are quite good. Brian is is on LinkedIn and can also be contacted at brian.ahearn@influencepeople.biz. Need help dealing with complex situations? You can download CMC’s free e-book MINDSET – 5 SIMPLE WAYS TO LOOK AT COMPLEX PROBLEMS and learn how to find a simple vantage point from which you can resolve challenges. Your feedback is important. Choose from the following options: • place a review in iTunes, • click on “leave a comment” below, • send any comments along with your name and the show number to support@ctrchg.com, • go to Contact at Center for Managing Change and leave a message Listen to future episodes for our reply.

This episode is an interview with Dr. Katherine Barteck, PsyD, about the differences between counseling and coaching. She starts with definitions of therapy and coaching. Counseling, or therapy, is about taking an in-depth look at what is creating the current problems. The person can benefit from psychotherapy without necessarily having a diagnosis. Simply having the desire to explore one's past is efficient to gain benefits from psychotherapy. Also, the person who lacks a specific diagnosis may be going through a stressful period and needs help in sorting things out. The therapeutic process can be used to directly impact behaviors and business. This can be, at times, an essential component of change management. Gary describes, in line with that, the client he worked with who'd been chronically abused as a child. It's critical when doing this work for the coach to understand when it's time to bring a therapist in. On the flipside, work may be required to perform the basic act, e.g., negotiating with others, which a therapist can help with but where there really is no underlying pathology. Dr. Bartek points out coaching is not a protected medical privilege. If subpoenaed, a coach can be required to reveal details of the relationship in court. The coach can benefit by having discussions within the therapist's office, where privilege does apply. The coach can maintain privilege by generating a list of action items, to do lists, or behaviors that need changed in taking those lists with the client out into the business world where they can be discussed and worked on without referencing the therapeutic process. In the end, what needs to be considered is whether or not the client needs a therapist, a coach, or both along with where the boundaries lie between the client and these professionals. The conversation switch to the differences between how therapy and coaching are framed. In therapy the client is in a protected space where they can open up fully and flesh out their entire frame of mind and associated feelings in order to work on improving. In other words, it is a safe space. The client can safely choose what they want to take to the outside world which is where they would work with the coach. The client can then explore in the outside world and bring the results back to the safety of the therapist office. Coaching, on the other hand, can be more open and more diverse and application because the working assumption is the coaches working with the healthy components of the client. Consequently, a psychotherapist has to be careful when they are coaching to avoid going back into a therapeutic session during the actual coaching engagement. It is important to maintain the distinction between the two. The issue of shame and seeking counseling was brought up. An article, "The Very Real Dangers of Executive Coaching," by Steven Berglas was discussed. He talks about how important it is to avoid downplaying psychological issues when coaching powerful people. Specifically, there can be prestige associated with an executive having a coach which can enhance his or her sense of grandiosity. Berglas goes on to distinguish between a "problem executive" versus and "executive with a problem." The former is able to be trained to function effectively while the latter is best helped by psychotherapy. Coaching may also be viewed as a way to get simple answers with quick results while therapy typically is more involved and takes a longer period of time to show results. It is important to set expectations accordingly. Gary provided an example where inability to follow through thoroughly with therapy led to hampering of the client's company's performance leading to the eventual sale of the organization. Dr. Bartek went on to talk about two cautions critical for coaches to pay attention to. The first one being the overplaying of behavioral techniques in order to gain quick responses when therapy is more appropriate, and the second being the avoidance of becoming "the Guru" who becomes the crotch upon whom the client leans leading to a codependent relationship which definitely is unhealthy for the client and the coach. Another caution that was discussed is the avoidance of viewing coaching as a status symbol within an organization which basically indicates who's of value and who isn't based on whether or not resources are spent on an individual. Going in the other direction there may be a fear that the stigmas attached to either having a coach and/or seeking therapy through an employee assistance program (EAP). Consequently, it may be best for the client to gain support from resources outside of the company. Coaches are also worn to avoid being a tool for weeding people out. The various modalities present to provide support for individuals includes peer support coaching where the coaches gone through similar experiences as the client. Having gone through therapy for specific problem does not mean the coaches capable of bringing the client along in that area. Likewise, having recovered from particular issue does not mean an individual is prepared to coach in that arena. In both those situations training is available to ensure professional behavior. For example, there is training available to be a peer support specialist. Coaches also need to be careful to avoid coaching protocols that are essentially therapeutic models repackaged in different jargon. The conversation then turned to peer support specialists where revealing oneself to the client helps them move forward in addressing their own challenges. The caution that is given, though, is to avoid using the coaching situation is a way to simply talk about oneself for personal aggrandizement the expense of the client. This admonition applies to therapists as well. Gary goes on to describe the three types of change situations: - the principles are constant and the rules never change - the principles are constant but the rules are rearranged - both the principles and rules are shifting and changing constantly In the first scenario coaching typically is sufficient to move people along to a more productive situation while in the last scenario therapy may be required because so much changes occurring. The middle scenario is a bit foggy and some balance needs to be found between coaching and therapy. In all three scenarios there are people who are able to navigate the changes without the need for coach or therapist. For many, though, people can be caught off guard and need support in reestablishing balance as they work through the changes. It is also critical to pay attention to what the therapist or coach knows about the situation. This is especially important for coaches so that they don't overstep their boundaries, e.g., not knowing whether or not there is a home -related issue that's influencing the performance at work and that that actually is the issue which needs to be addressed. Having a sense of the breath of the possibilities may lead to conducting various assessments to get a clear sense of what, exactly, is the problem. This also is true for the therapist and that what the client thinks is the problem may, in fact, not be the case. Thus, moving in a steady methodical manner is critical for the client to be served properly. For example, client may insist they no longer suffer from PTSD that they only need to work with the coach but yet they list all the symptoms of PTSD when talking about whatever suffering or discomfort they are experiencing. Likewise, someone may be a high functioning individual who may in fact have some therapeutic issues but under the circumstances may respond well to coaching. The session closes out with stating how critical it is for the therapist and the coach to be in touch with themselves and know their own strengths and weaknesses in order to provide the best service for the client. Dr. Bartek is on LinkedIn and can be contacted at kbarteck@gmail.com. Need help dealing with complex situations? You can download CMC’s free e-book MINDSET – 5 SIMPLE WAYS TO LOOK AT COMPLEX PROBLEMS and learn how to find a simple vantage point from which you can resolve challenges. Your feedback is important. Choose from the following options: • place a review in iTunes, • click on “leave a comment” below, • send any comments along with your name and the show number to support@ctrchg.com, • go to Contact at Center for Managing Change and leave a message Listen to future episodes for our reply.

This episode is an interview with Brittany Dixon of Process for Profit. and continues our look at the relationship between fear and bad habits (see the previous article, Fear and Bad Habits - Give Yourself A Break and/or listen to the previous podcast of the same title) . Specifically, we dive into addressing obstacles fear creates which leads to wasting time, lowered efficiency, and an aimlessness in terms of moving one’s business forward. Brittany is an Operations/Efficiency expert. Brittany went from event organizer to home organizer to business organizer. She found she loved organizing everything "behind the curtain." When she went out on her own she started with a side hustle organizing cluttered homes. Over time, this evolved into helping people organize their businesses. She found that clients strayed from their "zone of genius" and were getting distracted by all the aspects of their business about which they lack familiarity. Brittany emphasizes that simply relying on hustle is insufficient to grow business. Organization is critical. The conversation switched to dealing with resistance and its relationship to Fear and Bad Habits by walking through the 5 basic fears and addressing how Brittany deals with them: 1. Fear of uncertainty in one's world could fall apart leading to rigidity. Brittany addresses this by providing case studies to show the benefits of moving away from the old behaviors. Goals, goals, goals; 2. Fear of being consumed leading to people-pleasing to cover vulnerability. Saying “no” is critical if one is to grow their business. It’s important to be one’s own gate-keeper; 3. Fear of being isolating leading to wanting to do everything and be everything for everyone. Without narrowing down to a specific niche growth is almost impossible. Boundaries are critical; 4. Being riddled with self-doubt leading to way too much busy work and over-explaining instead of believing in themselves and making simple decisions. Working through the fear of success and moving forward is critical; 5. Fear of being clueless leading to just falling apart and being unable to see the big picture. Here is where Brittany works with the client on developing strategic goals…thinking a year out and then choosing tactics that will get to those goals. These individuals need to take a more proactive position rather than reacting to everything. This behavior may be influenced by the jobs they had before going out on their own, i.e., being a hero at work by picking up and reacting to every problem. Working with Brittany will require changing one’s sense of significance and how that is derived. Hustle is not sustainable. Also, being organized helps in determining how best to form relationships that are in your best interest instead of just trying to get relief and engaging in dysfunctional relationships. Organization helps with generating a clear plan along with associated strategies and tactics. We closed out the conversation by Brittany talking about how she has to apply to herself the principles she uses with her clients. To find out more about Brittany and her work helping clients increase pr ofitability through process improvement listen to her podcast, The Process for Profit Show, or go to her website, Process For Profit. You can also connect with her on Facebook and Instagram. She also has a membership site, Hustle To Flow. Need help dealing with complex situations? You can download CMC’s free e-book MINDSET – 5 SIMPLE WAYS TO LOOK AT COMPLEX PROBLEMS and learn how to find a simple vantage point from which you can resolve challenges. Your feedback is important. Choose from the following options: • place a review in iTunes, • click on “leave a comment” below, • send any comments along with your name and the show number to support@ctrchg.com Listen to future episodes for our reply.

In this episode the relationship between fear and bad habits and the importance of going easy on yourself are covered. You may notice that when trying to break a bad habit resolution fades and suddenly you're back to the bad habit maybe even more so than before the resolution. There's a good reason for that in this podcast is going to cover that issue. We will look at the chain of events that goes into the creation of a bad habit with a special focus on how bad habits interlock and are mutually reinforcing, making it difficult to shift to healthier, more constructive behaviors. Bad habits originate in one of five fears which, specifically, are: - fear of instability - fear of vulnerability and being consumed - fear of isolation - fear of not being good enough and getting destroyed - fear of being nothing With the fear of instability the belief that everything in one's world is going to fall apart. This leads to rigid behaviors which in turn leads to a sense of being trapped by the very things one’s trying to save. With the fear of vulnerability and being consume leads to trying to get along with everyone which, when taken to extreme leads to just freezing in place. With the fear of isolation one tries to do everything for everyone in order to dominate the situation to ensure sense of significance and not being left in isolation. One is left feeling burned out from trying to do everything in order to ensure constant recognition. With the fear of not being good enough rather than simply standing up for oneself the urge sets in to give endless explanations, create white papers, and slide into workaholic behavior rather than simply standing up for oneself due to fear of getting destroyed if a stance is taken. With this fear one is ultimately torn apart by trying to do more and more busywork. With the fear of being nothing a blankness can set in which leads to a fragmentation of one's worldview and not being able to see the overall picture. In other words, a sense of cluelessness is present. Ultimately, with this fear a sense of dissolving into nothingness develops. So these fears the result from reacting to situations lead to the creation of projective emotions, more commonly called projections. These comprise: - rage - greed - instinct - desire - jealousy - pride With rage there is the urge to tear people and situations apart, to destroy. With greed there is the urge to consume everything, never getting satisfied, and only wanting more after something has been gained. With instinct a reptilian type of behavior sets in it is a moral and simply focuses on having urges satisfied. Desire is a little more subtle and can be reflected in concerns about societal position, e.g., wanting to live in the right neighborhood, have the right job, have the children go to the right schools, worrying about one's image, seeing one's children as simply as an extension of themselves, etc. Jealousy is a projection of feelings of inadequacy. The individual is always wanting what others have and can harbor a deep resentment when the issue is actually all about not taking care of oneself in a healthy way. Pride comprises the projection of a sense of superiority over all others, treating them like objects to be manipulated on a chessboard. A tremendous insensitivity is present which, when combined with greed, becomes hugely destructive. So far, everything that is been described from the initial fears to the reactive emotions is inwardly focused. This negative energy, though, ends up being thrown into the outside world through the creation of negative, or karmic, behaviors. Karma, is commonly misunderstood as "what goes around comes around." This is not necessarily true. Many evil people die without experiencing the repercussions of their behaviors. The better way to view karma is as a negative behavior put out into the world the takes on a life of its own in an unpredictable manner. Karma comprises four elements: - actualization - execution - objectification - completion Actualization is the conscious thought around the performance of a negative act. Execution is putting that thought into action. Objectification is choosing another person or oneself is the target of the negative behavior. Completion is about being successful in creating the desired destruction. Now, when we execute these karmic behaviors if we do it often enough it starts becoming a pattern (more commonly called a habit). The pattern comprises four elements: - mechanization - resource consumption - crystallization - habituation Mechanization is the conversion of the act from a conscious one to a "spinal" one where the activity is performed in a reflexive manner. Think about figure skater focuses on where her hand is and how her fingers are during the figure skating routine they practice the behavior over and over and over again until it becomes, well, spinal. This means they no longer have to think about it, which frees their brain to move on to other considerations. Resource consumption is about channeling energy into the negative behavior. Over time this becomes very nasty because the resource consumption increases both in terms of the amount of energy consumed and the speed of onset. This is one of the elements that makes breaking that habits difficult. Crystallization is when the negative effects of karmic behavior is compounded. By this I mean one bad habit interlocks with another bad habit at the spinal level. These bad habits become self protective so that when you try to break one the other bad habits will kick in to cause you to behave in a self sabotaging manner in order to preserve the bad habits. For example, you may be successful in losing a few pounds and suddenly, before you know it, your reading multiple pieces of cake. Finally, this crystallization becomes even more intense through habituation. In other words, the karmic behaviors are the ones with which one leads with when going out into the world. And, because these behaviors are habituated and "spinal" there can be no sense of actually engaging in unhealthy behaviors. The individual doing karmic activities can feel just fine about themselves and have a sense of confusion when confronted by friends, relatives, coworkers, strangers. From reading all this you can hopefully see the changing bad habits and replacing them with healthy ones is not necessarily a straightforward process. It requires a coordinated effort across all areas of life in order to effect the change in a lasting manner. In future podcasts I will talk about how to bring about those changes. Your feedback is important. Choose from the following options: • place a review in iTunes, • click on “leave a comment” below, • send any comments along with your name and the show number to support@ctrchg.com Listen to future episodes for our reply.

This podcast covers Chapter 12, “Small Steps To An Agile Strategy” of “12 Steps to Flow: The New Framework for Business Agility,” by Haydn Shaughnessy and Fin Goulding, developers of the internationally acclaimed workshop, Flow Academy. The authors start the chapter by stating a good Flow workplace is one that challenges the idea of big strategy and grand plans. The new method is to build strategy from small steps. How to achieve that will be covered in this chapter. The first problem pointed out is that the core elements that people focus on in strategy and planning are necessary but nowhere near sufficient for success. This necessary-but-not-sufficient problem is typical of the digital world. Many intangible factors, often intangible, have a significant influence but are difficult for traditional strategist to grasp. An old style of marketing is used, e.g., "Build the platform and market the hell out of it." The key problem is the platform is seen as a technology stack rather than a relationship nexus. So why are the issues associated with platforms so interesting to the Flow frame-of-mind? First, platforms invented modern agility, providing the ability to roam into any space choosen with a lot of activity taking place on the network along with having the ability to update with high-frequency and low-cost. Also, products are digital, which means there is no conventional supply chain to manage. Second platforms are almost impossible to plan and this is really critical because execution needs a huge amount of iteration and a commitment to real-time executive direction. For example nobody can say what it will cost to be successful at developing the ecosystem of third-party actors. Consequently, platforms force designers to take small steps. These hundreds of incremental steps requires Flow. Business often gives the impression that there is one big solution, e.g., a new platform, or a single answer to complex problems. This is just wrong. Success in High-Performance Teams In delivery terms, the economy is shifting towards small. Good leaders recognize this and see the critical gains lie in the margins, in the detail. That's why in Flow, work units are only ever a maximum of two days long. These are the micro-units where you can get 1% gains to scale up into something significant. Interestingly enough, incremental changes that scale can apply to strategy as well as to delivery. The short cycle times of two days or less force people to interact more which is good for both productivity and quality. The authors feel this is superior to long planning cycles which can drift away from providing the value required to meet the customer's needs. Small Steps to a Big Platform One problem with setting digital strategy is that many people get the core ideas of agility and scale wrong. With the digital transformation the dominates the agile world companies seek network effects where there is little disruption caused by the platform. The stability or lack of disruption by the platforms is supposedly created through: - open APIs - two-sided or multisided markets - network effects - cloud infrastructure The authors view this is flawed because: 1. Great platforms exist without having an open API 2. The idea of two-sided and multisided markets feel superfluous 3. Network effects are powerful but rare, e.g., Facebook 4. There's nothing special about Cloud services, all companies have access to Cloud infrastructure The real power of platforms lies in the ecosystems that grow around the successful ones. This is a real nightmare for traditional strategists because success lies at the other end of intangible investments in relationships, promotion, content, and likability. Services with no allegiance to the platform can exist on that platform thrive and do well and benefit the platform service at the same time, for example book arbitrage on Amazon services. Customers may pay more after successful in finding what they need. The successful companies are an essential part of the Amazon ecosystem yet Amazon does not prompt, support, or invest in any of them. In fact, they exist because of Amazon's shortcomings. The Very Basic Model for Highly Skilled Business The platform model is deceptively simple having only a few basic components but it would be a big mistake to assume that the basic structure is sufficient. For example there is the App Store for the iPhone. Essentially it is an ordering platform. As a catalog with the transaction engine and fulfillment service. The simplicity, however, is misleading. What's needed are the critical nonessentials in order to be successful in other words, there is all the work required to develop highly skilled relationships, many giveaway tools, wonderful content, and huge advocacy. Without that ecosystem the platform can't survive. It's all about having real relationships. Many companies create platforms without realizing the content and advocacy are key aspects of the project. This means human factors are quite important, a truth that platform designers overlook. To compound things, the human factors are difficult to represent in an ROI plan. Also, with the traditional approach there is a risk of viewing everything in terms of cost savings rather than value. This can easily lead to cutting those critical human factor components. Again, relationships are important. To compound the situation the activities that actually go with building relationships recruiting and nurturing, etc., are not easily planned. They require warmth, trust, care, excitement, and adaptability. Their cost/return is always going to be uncertain. Because businesses have been taught to expect network effects, they underinvest in advocacy, the very thing they need that could bring the benefits of being on a network. Being on a network is only powerful if you know how to acquire great content and generate superb advocacy. People must love what you are doing madly enough to create content around it, build new services to exploiter, recommend features of your service that they will attach their reputations to, and spend their own cash on being part of your ecosystem. The Importance of the Ecosystem because of the challenges associated with attracting and orchestrating multiple parties for your passionate endeavor a Flow approach strategy aims at creating the dozens of small steps that allow entrepreneurs or executives to figure out where value might lie in to accelerate business activity in precisely those directions. Simply put, to do Flow strategy, you have to accept that you cannot know. Instead, you can hypothesize frequently across many actions and be ready to capitalize on the basics truths you discover and can build upon along the way. This is far from the MVP (minimum viable product) frame of mind. Instead, what is needed is a minimum sustainable delivery matrix (discussed in previous chapter) the comprises: - a broad set of features and hypotheses to push through to the customer - structured feedback loops to capture knowledge - capturing and formatting that knowledge in a way that easily translates into discussions that lead to new feature in hypotheses matrices which is where the asset discovery process described in chapter 2 comes into play. This comprises: - customer segmentation - asset discovery - targeted ideation - the ecosystem - stating goals Customer segmentation. In the book they use an example comprising based on a segment that the platform advocate knows to be underserved or in need of reorganization. Asset discovery. Their assets intrinsic to the platform, however, it is important to consider other third-party assets that are critical to success, e.g., content, data, and other assets that can brought it onto the platform by negotiating with partners in the ecosystem or non-partner third parties. It is essential to take into consideration critical nonessentials such as content which are essential for success. Also, it is important to inventory any missing assets which need to be developed somewhere along the line. Targeted ideation. With targeted ideation new services are created by repurposing assets in addressing previously-underserved customer segments. The key is building trust with customers you have and determine how the assets can be repurposed. The approach is freeform, will Wall-based, in iterative with how you see your potential ecosystem along with your goals. The ecosystem. Essentially this is about finding missing assets which are needed to satisfy unmet customer needs. The key is providing sufficient tools for those third-party providers that encourages them to work on your platform. Stating goals. Use an analysis of assets to provide a few goals that comprise the first small steps to a big strategy. This includes: - identifying new customer segments to discover hidden opportunity - identify internal assets that are relevant to those new segments - call out the missing assets and the dark pool - identify an ecosystem that can deliver assets that are missing from your skill set - the eight new tools and content to support an even broader ecosystem, beyond a simple supplier base - learn how to combine these assets in a way that is really appropriate for modern markets, using a Go to Market strategy that builds share-ability and advocacy into the product or service - explore content and advocacy issues, e.g., social strategy, designed to share, effects of the network. Proceed to break the work down based on the stated goals. Once done this is the beginning of an ecosystem strategy for your agile business. Does not have to be written as a strategy. Rather it gets built from the discovery of assets, the iteration of goals, areas of work in units of work, and experience and feedback. Strategy Building from Incremental Steps Keep in mind these key points when building a strategy: - the critical non-essentials necessary for high performance - efficiencies gained by optimizing across hundreds of small steps - optimizing many marginal gains if you apply these thoughts to digital projects than you have the ultimate modern paradox, i.e., highly skilled businesses built out of many small units of activity. To achieve the success work by: - customer segmentation - asset discovery - a Customer Innovation Wall that fleshes out the segmentation. Have an inventory of assets (known, hidden, unknown-but-needed next to that wall). Also, have a chart comprising targeted ideation suggesting tools and tricks needed to engage customers third parties in the ecosystem. This approach is meant to be conversational an interactive without any big planning periods. It is an exercise in value-seeking behavior. Conversations around these walls leads to the emergence of baseline activities. These are referred to as the best next actions for achieving the stated goals. Consequently, the strategy actually emerges from the generation of these best-next activities. This is a classic characteristic the complex situation where the solutions emerge based on the actions of self-organizing teams. CONCLUSION One of the main takeaways from this book should be the awareness that work at all levels of an organization is becoming less about excellence in execution more about adaptability in the face of changing circumstances. When you can accept that order is best created by allowing people to codesign multiple strands of work, and that the big plan needs to be hundreds of small units of work, then you have the capacity to adapt infinitely. You need a passion for change to follow everything that's been stated in this book. You need to believe in a movement built on small steps. Here are the link for previous chapter reviews: episode 0037 of Wrestling with Chaos. the Introduction, The Value Seeking Enterprise, and Chapter 1, Talking About Business Agility: episode 0042 of Wrestling With Chaos. For Chapter 2, The Customer In The Agile Business. episode 0043 of Wrestling With Chaos. For Chapter 3, Disrupting The Cadence of Work episode 0045 of Wrestling With Chaos. For Chapter 4, Taking Advantage of Visible Work episode 0046 of Wrestling With Chaos, For Chapter 5, Anti-Project Thinking and Business Agility episode 0047 of Wrestling With Chaos, For Chapter 6, Creating Value-Seeking Behavior episode 0049 of Wrestling With Chaos, For Chapter 7, The Agile C-Suite episode 0050 of Wrestling With Chaos, For Chapter 8 216, Value, The Anti-Plan and Testing episode 0051 of Wrestling With Chaos, For Chapter 9, Reinventing Roles episode 0053 of Wrestling With Chaos, For Chapter 10, The Customer Wall episode 0054 of Wrestling With Chaos, For Chapter 11, Broadening Your Personal Development Goals For more on the various “Walls” using Post-Its refer to their excellent book, “Flow.” In line with Business Agility and dealing with complex situations, you can download CMC’s free e-book MINDSET – 5 SIMPLE WAYS TO LOOK AT COMPLEX PROBLEMS and learn how to find a simple vantage point from which you can resolve challenges. Your feedback is important. Choose from the following options: • place a review in iTunes, • click on “leave a comment” below, • send any comments along with your name and the show number to support@ctrchg.com Listen to future episodes for our reply.

This podcast covers Chapter 11, “Broadening Your Personal Development Goals” of “12 Steps to Flow: The New Framework for Business Agility,” by Haydn Shaughnessy and Fin Goulding, developers of the internationally acclaimed workshop, Flow Academy. I would have to say if I had a favorite chapter so far this might be it! To quote from the authors, "Flow stands for empowerment. Real empowerment puts responsibilities onto your shoulders. It gives you more liberty, more uncertainty and more need to challenge yourself to grow. You are in charge of more than you realized." The authors feel that Flow is in stark contrast to collaborative platforms that they feel distort people's views of assets and values, e.g., Atlassian's Jira and Confluence. They tend to respectively be perfect fits for obsessive project managers who want to keep order or want to bury information so nobody has to look at it again. Essentially they are document silos. A better approach is the use of Walls with Post-Its so Flow can flourish with Kanban. They promote personal development and real growth for three reasons: 1. The development of strong, personal boundaries in emergent situations because while it's important to be open one must know their limits; 2. The developments of emotional resilience in uncertain environments, a trait critical for shaping boundaries; 3. Mastering the ability to be a quick study, learning new rules fast along with people's strengths and weaknesses in doing all this while maintaining a compassionate frame of mind. This is far more important than learning how to do brain dumps of documents. In order to improve value you need to focus on the personal development goals of the people whose role is to create it. As Fin and Hayden discussed the importance of personal goals they are talking essentially about how to thrive in a complex environment that's bordering on chaos. This essentially means learning how to seek and implement value when in the state of some level of uncertainty and incomplete information. Doubt becomes important because it promotes inquiry. Simply put, Flow is caught not taught. It's all about capturing what you can from social interaction in a good workplace. With everyone having personal growth goals in behaving this way collective intelligence grows and becomes more powerful. The remainder of the chapter the authors relate the above-mentioned principles to five issues: 1. How your organization, wrongly, expects you to learn; 2. How to develop your personal learning objectives: 3. Thinking about your learning style; 4. How roles are changing in work; 5. Developing a personal learning journal. Let's flesh these out in a little more detail. 1. Against Traditional Organizational Learning The authors talk about an organizational contradiction that is best captured in a statement made by one of their colleagues, Dan Pontefract, "All your school-life you are taught the value of thinking freely. Then you go to work!" Some conformity is essential but over regulating behavior is counterproductive. The key to learning is always having a focus on increasing value in order to increase Flow. Organizations hurt themselves by focusing on placing people within functions having process-driven frameworks. This fits with a Agile approach where there is a focus on process objectives and their metrics. 2. Developing Your Personal Learning Objectives The goal here is the development of emotional resilience so that healthy, flexible boundaries can be established when in the state of uncertainty. This is critical if one is to keep the focus on adding customer-centric value. In complex environments there is a constant learning -related pressure because one never knows everything, and never will. Consequently, it's important to develop learning objectives centered around putting the uncertainty to work in terms of growth, inventiveness, and being smarter. This is where doubts can really help by provoking thinking in terms of seeking out patterns that can help direct work flow. Disruption is ever-present. The authors go on to talk about their personal learning objectives which, I believe, is a good read. 3. Thinking about Your Learning Style While everyone can be dedicated to learning goals that help promote value the techniques used may differ from person to person. The authors share their techniques. Fin has a more social style mixing it up with various groups and individuals. Hayden tends to take a bit more of a contemplative approach, not that he's a wallflower, and works to sketch out problems and solutions every day, literally, every day he always has a stack of blank A4 paper on his desk. Both provide very good examples of their learning styles on pages 237 through 242. In reading this I'm reminded of the book "Back of the Napkin,” By Dan Roam. 4. 10 Evolving Roles in Work This part I found rather intriguing. 10 roles are listed: 1. The Initiator. These people get projects underway; 2. The Wrangler. These are people and never let go of a problem and work to get it under control; 3. The Connector. This individual has political skills and is capable of managing other people's objectives; 4. The Coach. These coaches know that work needs the change and they are hungry for new ideas, breaking down rigid processes and replacing them with invention and interaction. 5. The Product or Project Guy. The individual capable of laying out ideas and loosely connecting them in a plan sufficient for others to take off with an flesh out. 6. The Mediator. This person does just that, i.e., works to confront behaviors to get in the way of delivering value and helps the team get back on track. 7. The Tester. This person cannot only test to see if metrics are met engaging whether or not what's been delivered is what the customer needs. 8. The Detective. These are individuals with forensic capability who can look through the morass of complex systems and see where simple changes can be effective. 9. The Tech Guru. This is the individual who is expert in a particular area. 10. The Emotional Leader. This person is willing to learn while also taking care of people's emotional needs. "Humility" is the watchword. 5. A Personal Learning Wall Developing a personal learning wall is a great way to establish a focus in progress in growing on a day by day basis. The key point here is that your personal development will propel your professional development. It also works to divide goals into "long-term and "short-term." The key element is to have your plan span the breath of your life rather than focusing only on one area. Also, it is important to track your progress, that is why the Personal Learning Wall is important in order to ensure your moving forward and objectively seeing how you are progressing in terms of increasing strengths and addressing weaknesses. You Are the Value It is important to be inventive during this process because you are the value. Also, one of your responsibilities is to bring the growth that you've created to the team to help with the collective thinking and to encourage other team members to work on their personal growth. Here are the link for previous chapter reviews: episode 0037 of Wrestling with Chaos. the Introduction, The Value Seeking Enterprise, and Chapter 1, Talking About Business Agility: episode 0042 of Wrestling With Chaos. For Chapter 2, The Customer In The Agile Business. episode 0043 of Wrestling With Chaos. For Chapter 3, Disrupting The Cadence of Work episode 0045 of Wrestling With Chaos. For Chapter 4, Taking Advantage of Visible Work episode 0046 of Wrestling With Chaos, For Chapter 5, Anti-Project Thinking and Business Agility episode 0047 of Wrestling With Chaos, For Chapter 6, Creating Value-Seeking Behavior episode 0049 of Wrestling With Chaos, For Chapter 7, The Agile C-Suite episode 0050 of Wrestling With Chaos, For Chapter 8 216, Value, The Anti-Plan and Testing episode 0051 of Wrestling With Chaos, For Chapter 9, Reinventing Roles episode 0053 of Wrestling With Chaos, For Chapter 10, The Customer Wall For more on the various “Walls” using Post-Its refer to their excellent book, “Flow.” In line with Business Agility and dealing with complex situations, you can download CMC’s free e-book MINDSET – 5 SIMPLE WAYS TO LOOK AT COMPLEX PROBLEMS and learn how to find a simple vantage point from which you can resolve challenges. Your feedback is important. Choose from the following options: • place a review in iTunes, • click on “leave a comment” below, • send any comments along with your name and the show number to support@ctrchg.com Listen to future episodes for our reply.

This podcast covers Chapter 10, “The Customer Feedback Wall” of “12 Steps to Flow: The New Framework for Business Agility,” by Haydn Shaughnessy and Fin Goulding, developers of the internationally acclaimed workshop, Flow Academy. The Flow Customer Feedback Wall is an additional powerful tool for bringing different parts of the business together in search of customer success. It is a venue for everybody to observe customer opinions and to participate in discussions about what has value for them. That helps focus on the personalized approach of "market-of-one." THREE ADDITIONAL ELEMENTS OF CUSTOMER-CENTRICITY authenticity is critical inappropriately representing the customer voice. This can be achieved through the use of: - Customer labs; - The Hack Box (for internal entrepreneurs); - Awareness of SaaS (Software as a Service) developments, especially their metrics. Customer labs literary comprise an area where customers can work and experiment with the design team to generate new products, features, and product ideas. The Hack Box is all about inviting individuals and teams to experiment on how best to bring a new product idea forward and test in iterate demonstrably value-adding features for customers. The SaaS metrics are founded on the basic proposition that any customer-centric platform will improve the potential of the customer to succeed in some way. It turns pain points into strengths. One area in which there is a heavy focus is "churn.Turnover metrics are monitored to look for red flags. An example is measuring the growth of inbound inquiries. THE CUSTOMER FEEDBACK WALL the big advantage of the customer feedback wall is it brings customers closer to the business. It can be used to direct customer feelings to any department or team and/or to unite teams around life customer concerns. An example is given on page 222. There are nine columns comprising the following: 1. Identifying the pain points; 2. Prioritizing the backlog of work; 3. Sizing, evaluation and valuation; 4. No change required; 5. Assigned to digital team; 6. Assigned to core team; 7. Assigned to process change; 8. Back to the portfolio wall; 9. Informing customers. The way this works is the team would first identify customer pain points and then prioritize the backlog of work based on the intensity of that pain and the frequency with which it occurs. The sizing, evaluation and valuation wall serves two purposes. The first is evaluating the impact of the customer pain point while the second is, if possible assign a valuation for that pain point. The no change required column addresses pain points about which the team cannot handled in it needs to be sent to senior management for evaluation. The assigned to digital team refers to pain points that can be fixed by the team managing the company's online presence and sales channels. When there needs to be a change to the platform in order to address a particular pain point this is where it is assigned to the core team. When the pain point highlights the fundamental flaw in the work processes then that pain point is the sign to whomever is responsible for process changes. The back to the portfolio wall addresses issues that erroneously have been made in strategic thinking and that particular pain point needs to go back to executives. The informing customers column addresses just that, i.e., keeping the customer informed of any and all progress being made and doing that on a frequent, routine basis. Here are the link for previous chapter reviews: episode 0037 of Wrestling with Chaos. the Introduction, The Value Seeking Enterprise, and Chapter 1, Talking About Business Agility: episode 0042 of Wrestling With Chaos. For Chapter 2, The Customer In The Agile Business. episode 0043 of Wrestling With Chaos. For Chapter 3, Disrupting The Cadence of Work episode 0045 of Wrestling With Chaos. For Chapter 4, Taking Advantage of Visible Work episode 0046 of Wrestling With Chaos, For Chapter 5, Anti-Project Thinking and Business Agility episode 0047 of Wrestling With Chaos, For Chapter 6, Creating Value-Seeking Behavior episode 0049 of Wrestling With Chaos, For Chapter 7, The Agile C-Suite episode 0050 of Wrestling With Chaos, For Chapter, Value, The Anti-Plan and Testing episode 0051 of Wrestling With Chaos, For Chapter 9, Reinventing Roles For more on the various “Walls” using Post-Its refer to their excellent book, “Flow.” In line with Business Agility and dealing with complex situations, you can download CMC’s free e-book MINDSET – 5 SIMPLE WAYS TO LOOK AT COMPLEX PROBLEMS and learn how to find a simple vantage point from which you can resolve challenges. Your feedback is important. Choose from the following options: • place a review in iTunes, • click on “leave a comment” below, • send any comments along with your name and the show number to support@ctrchg.com Listen to future episodes for our reply.

In this podcast I give my reflections on attending my first Women in Agile Meetup - one of two men to attend. The podcast is divided into two broad categories: - what I will call the human condition, and; - gender differences First off, it was a very valuable experience. The presentation was good and the experience, overall, was positive. I am glad I attended. The presentation was on emotional intelligence and team safety which the speaker felt was not complete unless vulnerability was included. It got my attention because vulnerability is one of the number one topic that I have to address in change management. In line with that, one of the elements that struck me was talking about Brene Brown and her work on shame. What was interesting about this was how the topic was treated as if it was relatively new in terms of developing an understanding of how shame influences our lives and creates problems as well as what we need to do in order to be healthier. The energy was definitely positive around this part of the presentation. I found this quite refreshing. For me, though, the concern that I have is that while people are willing to talk about vulnerability when it comes down to risking being in that state when at work and when doing Agility it can get challenging. Frankly, my experience is most people actually do not want to be vulnerable. Consequently, the leader has to risk being the first to display vulnerability in order to set an example to encourage others to do the same. While being able to talk about vulnerability in public at work, in my experience, it's so tempting to just want to hide and pretend everything is okay. The positive expressions when the speaker encouraged being frank about vulnerability and shared some of her own experiences led to an increase in the energy level in the room. What I thought when seeing this is that these women could put together a really good team! So why is this so important? Agility is the child of chaos and complexity theory. In those situations rules have fallen apart and the only thing that allows for moving forward is the team making commitments, locking arms, and risking formulating the best way to move forward to solve the customers problems. Willingness to be vulnerable is that the core of success when it comes to agility. From my perspective, though, the Agile community is a bit naïve in terms of understanding the need to work with people in developing an understanding that working from a position of vulnerability does not mean weakness or submission. Rather, it simply means being fully available to work with your teammates. It takes time to shift the culture so the people feel safe being vulnerable. I now want to move my attention to what I view as differences based on gender. Again, these are simply observations and are not meant to be judgmental of either males or females. The first thing that stood out was a difference between meetings where in terms of numbers males dominated versus this meeting were females dominated. I found I sat back and listened, which was appropriate for this being my first attendance at this meet up. However, there was something deeper which was simply being outnumbered in terms of gender. I found myself feeling comfortable being quiet and I reflected on it. What I saw was simply being out numbered gender -wise created some discomfort and encourage me to just stay quiet. The thought that came to mind, then, was "Is this what women experience when in meetings where they are outnumbered by the number of men present?" But then I had another thought with regards to why women would be quiet in male-dominated meetings - gender inequality. It is probably best represented by the fact that for every dollar a man makes a woman only makes $0.87. When that difference is viewed as normal from my perspective that's when a prejudice sets in that intrinsically puts women down. For myself, if I were in that situation for a prolonged period of time I would be at risk for becoming reticent simply because my paycheck would say one hour of my work is not as valuable as one hour of someone else's work. It also led me to think that I may hold back some in the workplace. Some of the other behaviors I observed included more caution compared to a male-dominated meeting. A counterpoint to this was a level of excitement for some attendees in terms of being able to speak out in a place that was considered safe. Another behavior was inclusion. There was less a sense of competition and more of a sense of, "How can we capitalize on this as a group as well as individuals?" From my perspective this is powerful in terms of developing self-organizing teams that risk throwing themselves into solving the customer's problem. This caused me to realize that there was a mythology present in the room, i.e., people coming together and sharing their individual experiences and looking for common threads that can be used to weave a team where the team members are trusting of each other. Going back to what I would catalog under "human condition" is what I like to call, "Speaking from the Matrix." Let me explain. People desire to be unique, be on a team, and work together constructively with their security on the team. Part of what I heard, though, was limitation set by working within the organization. This can at times be quite intimidating. The reason is organizations can have a persona just like an individual can have one. Now, within that persona can be some dysfunction which threatens individuals and essentially dampens the ability to practice emotional intelligence based on being vulnerable. What would be better is for self-organizing teams to have the goal of participate based on one’s diversity rather than conformity. So, as said before, overall it was a positive experience and I'm looking forward to going to future meetings where I can learn more both about myself and Women in Agile. In line with Business Agility and dealing with complex situations, you can download CMC’s free e-book MINDSET – 5 SIMPLE WAYS TO LOOK AT COMPLEX PROBLEMS and learn how to find a simple vantage point from which you can resolve challenges. Your feedback is important. Choose from the following options: • place a review in iTunes, • click on “leave a comment” below, • send any comments along with your name and the show number to support@ctrchg.com Listen to future episodes for our reply.

This podcast covers Chapter 9, “Reinventing Roles” of “12 Steps to Flow: The New Framework for Business Agility,” by Haydn Shaughnessy and Fin Goulding, developers of the internationally acclaimed workshop, Flow Academy. Flow is based on a belief in multidisciplinary people, not just multidisciplinary teams. This is critical when practicing business agility in order to avoid the confusion associated with the approach of one person-one discipline. By having multidisciplinary people the boundaries (maybe the walls) that exist within an organization can be dissolved to some degree. Critical to the process of developing multidisciplinary people is removal of the gap between product managers (market-oriented) and product owners (IT-based). This is critical because if a digital transformation is to be effective people need to transform how they see themselves at work and how they performed. A good example of what I am trying to say comprises people that work in social media. Those individuals need to be effective across many disciplines. Limiting them to only social media effectively is under using their capabilities. Simply put, role rigidity and refusing to let people develop fungibility decreases value-seeking behavior. The authors walk through the traditional waterfall approach for the creation of a product, starting with requirements being generated under the product manager, movement through business analysis, and then the creation of an IT project. This leads to poor integration because each group tends to have its own frame of mind which is not coordinated with the other frames of mind. Also, there's the issue of rigidity in terms of how each department sees its function. What is really needed in an enterprise is for business goals to be adaptive and iterative so that IT can deliver products consistent with the previous chapters we've seen in this book. The key to accomplishing this is working in small units as mentioned in chapter 8. Essentially there is constant iterative experimentation with development-testing, development-testing, rolling out many deliverables on an almost continual basis. An example is provided of creating a customer survey to understand customer needs and specific segments to help shape feature design. Gamification with the social media tools such as Twitter can speed up the process of developing the survey in a rapid, iterative manner that stimulates insights and innovation. Working this way and releasing updates frequently shifts the goal from "understanding customer needs and specific segments" to "a snapshot of customer commentary to key product design fresh." This behavior requires a balancing act weighing the benefits of speed against comprehensiveness and depth. So, the question is would you prefer to secure value after a few days or week and build on that through multiple iterations or would you rather wait a long period of time before releasing the finished survey. The allowance for the development of adaptive business goals the flex throughout the creation process is superior to holding off the release of value for weeks if not months. The key to all this is having a product owner who champions flexibility which is substantially different than traditional product management roles. The traditional approach may be difficult for the product owners to have a clear idea as to exactly what value is needed. This is true in Scrum as well as in Waterfall approaches. Traditionally the product owner sits at the IT-Business divide and focuses on the generation of personas while having very little insight into marketing in the customer. So, while the use of Scrum may unblock some of the old Waterfall methods problems are still present. In going to the other extreme and using MVPs (minimum viable product) can create more suspicion because it can encourage minimal commitment to deliver a minimum viable product. The goal is to have developers who understand the business and can work with the changing matrix of future priorities as well as having an understanding of the user and value creation. There is a need to understand eco-system and associated activities that can be nurtured as well as micro trends that offer immediate opportunities. In other words, this new product owner should be a value-discovery agent. Another world it needs redefined is product owner. Typically, this role is so tightly bound to the IT culture that it fails to perform well across the entire business. What would be better is to morph that role into one of a value manager. This individual would move just as comfortably with the business unit as they would with the IT department. They can move well from assessing customer needs to creating the work breakdown elements while ensuring these are consistent with the business goals. The value manager would then be in a good position for determining when business goals need to change. The individual filling this new product owner position which would be better addressed as the Flow Value Manager would be able to find a balance between the following eight aspects that need to be addressed in order to successfully deliver value: 1. Relationship management 2. Market insight 3. Customer segmentation 4. Developer process insight 5. Requirements setting and goals management 6. Workload management 7. Customer feedback management 8. Acceptance testing This activity would be supported by the following real-time management of feedback loops comprising: 1. Real-time analytics 2. Real-time web analytics 3. Real-time usage analytics 4. Real-time social media analytics 5. Sharing behavior of products and key information between the team members and stakeholders involved This is all grounded in a frame of mind comprising the following seven components: 1. No projects - moving away from the project frame of mind with defined beginning middle and end and subsequent deliverable 2. No estimates and no budget- -using the Flow approach with consistent cycle times one just counts the key Post-Its on a project or Kanban Wall to arrive at estimates and forecasts 3. Very small units of work - 1-2 day units of work encouraging people to come back to the Wall and interacting socially to move the project forward 4. Co-creating processes - wisdom of the crowd is used to define priorities and determine how objective should be reached including processes and tools to be used 5. Informality - frequent informal acceptance agreement so that work can be kept moving 6. Value-seeking behavior - multiple strategies and constant questioning are used to ensure the value is increasing 7. Experimentation - using a range of hypotheses, a matrix of features is created and pushed through to the customer for feedback before committing to full development of any one of those features So with the Flow approach instead of having a Scrum Master it's everyone's job to ensure that value is delivered. It's the new Flow Value Manager (Product Owner) who leads the charge. Here are the link for previous chapter reviews: episode 0037 of Wrestling with Chaos. the Introduction, The Value Seeking Enterprise, and Chapter 1, Talking About Business Agility: episode 0042 of Wrestling With Chaos. For Chapter 2, The Customer In The Agile Business. episode 0043 of Wrestling With Chaos. For Chapter 3, Disrupting The Cadence of Work episode 0045 of Wrestling With Chaos. For Chapter 4, Taking Advantage of Visible Work episode 0046 of Wrestling With Chaos, For Chapter 5, Anti-Project Thinking and Business Agility episode 0047 of Wrestling With Chaos, For Chapter 6, Creating Value-Seeking Behavior episode 0049 of Wrestling With Chaos, For Chapter 7, The Agile C-Suite episode 0050 of Wrestling With Chaos, For Chapter 8, Value, The Anti-Plan and Testing For more on the various “Walls” using Post-Its refer to their excellent book, “Flow.” In line with Business Agility and dealing with complex situations, you can download CMC’s free e-book MINDSET – 5 SIMPLE WAYS TO LOOK AT COMPLEX PROBLEMS and learn how to find a simple vantage point from which you can resolve challenges. Your feedback is important. Choose from the following options: • place a review in iTunes, • click on “leave a comment” below, • send any comments along with your name and the show number to support@ctrchg.com Listen to future episodes for our reply.

This podcast covers Chapter 8, “Value, The Anti-Plan and Testing” of “12 Steps to Flow: The New Framework for Business Agility,” by Haydn Shaughnessy and Fin Goulding, developers of the internationally acclaimed workshop, Flow Academy. The chapter opens with obstacles to the creation of value: 1. Searching to save costs rather than creating value; 2. Failing to truly understand value until we fully understand what customers will buy, enjoy, and share; 3. Planning too much and not testing enough. The authors turned their focus to the issues associated with planning, where planning is inappropriately used as a quality control tool. In the end this can create too much rigidity and planning can be viewed as taking too much time. Testing is then used to take up the slack which, consequently, puts testing in a poor light is a compensation for value-based activities. What works better is the socialization of the whole process where a iteration and testing culture can keep the work flowing in a very public way. This is a basic underpinning of business agility. Something is needed beyond the waste reduction associated with Lean and Agile. Those approaches focus on efficiency rather than value. With Lean it's the straight out reduction of cost and waste while with Agile situation is vague because there are no clear directions as to how to actually increase value. The important point here is that efficiency should not be confused with value creation. Said differently, throughput is not the same as value. Value-seeking behaviors based solely on the creation of features and functions that create a better customer experience. Visualization of processes fosters social interaction which increases the probability of success. In order to be flexible, and move quickly unit testing is a key component of Flow. This pushes the approach of constantly testing at as low-level as possible in order to increase the frequency with which features are delivered. This is in contrast to having a big plan with big tests at the end of development. What is critical is for the entire organization to understand their state in the creation of quality product rather than viewing it as some activity left for the IT department. The shorter the timeframe between testing events the better, e.g., being able to test product every 12 hours in response to micro trends. The authors propose taking this frame of mind to other areas of the company such as marketing and distribution. A good example of this is same-day delivery for products ordered online. Some costs associated with this are incurred because of the speed with which changes being implemented, e.g., friction between team members and stakeholders as they redefine their roles and personal boundaries as well as the IT department working with other areas of the organization. This could be applied marketing by furthering the process of segmentation which would, for example, allow for faster, more specific A/B testing. Also, there is the need for interdisciplinary training for the team members. One aspect of workflow that can inhibit this process is the use of traditional waterfall project management where projects are planned for and approved many months or years prior to implementation. This frustrates the approach of using small unit testing to quickly adjust the teams approach in order to meet the customer's needs. The authors provide a 12 point summary of their conversation with Alan Murphy regarding quality, testing, and value: 1. Traditional testing suites bite off more than they can chew; 2. Code often gets put into production too early; 3. Difficulties associated with the word "done;” 4. Small unit testing brings IT closer to other areas of the business to the benefit of the customer; 5. Unit testing can be coupled to just-in-time acceptance tests; 6. Unit testing is really what makes DevOps work; 7. Units of work should always be the smallest breakdown possible; 8. Good practice involves a broad coverage of unit testing; 9. Unit testing is applicable across all work in all departments; 10. Developers should always challenge product owners about the value of any increment of work; 11. Everyone should be focused on value; 12. There should always be a continuous reevaluation of key roles like product owner, product manager, and project manager. With the trending towards being small the authors see testing and its relationship with Flow as something that can be applied across the entire organization in order to quickly shift with market demands and provide customers the value they need. This gets past the problem of the big projects which push value too far into the future. This is probably best exemplified in the management of drone fleets, a behavior based on real-time interactive activity rather than long-range planning. Trial and error or test-and-see are very common approaches drone fleet management. This rolls back to the need for team members and stakeholders to have a multi-disciplined approach individually as well as within teams as well as across the organization. Here are the link for: episode 0037 of Wrestling with Chaos. the Introduction, The Value Seeking Enterprise, and Chapter 1, Talking About Business Agility: episode 0042 of Wrestling With Chaos. For Chapter 2, The Customer In The Agile Business. episode 0043 of Wrestling With Chaos. For Chapter 3, Disrupting The Cadence of Work episode 0045 of Wrestling With Chaos. For Chapter 4, Taking Advantage of Visible Work episode 0046 of Wrestling With Chaos, For Chapter 5, Anti-Project Thinking and Business Agility episode 0047 of Wrestling With Chaos, For Chapter 6, Creating Value-Seeking Behavior episode 0049 of Wrestling With Chaos, For Chapter 7, The Agile C-Suite For more on the various “Walls” using Post-Its refer to their excellent book, “Flow.” In line with Business Agility and dealing with complex situations, you can download CMC’s free e-book MINDSET – 5 SIMPLE WAYS TO LOOK AT COMPLEX PROBLEMS and learn how to find a simple vantage point from which you can resolve challenges. Your feedback is important. Choose from the following options: • place a review in iTunes, • click on “leave a comment” below, • send any comments along with your name and the show number to support@ctrchg.com Listen to future episodes for our reply.

This podcast covers Chapter 7, “The Agile C-Suite” of “12 Steps to Flow: The New Framework for Business Agility,” by Haydn Shaughnessy and Fin Goulding, developers of the internationally acclaimed workshop, Flow Academy. If you follow my podcast you'll know this is one of my favorite chapters because I'm all about whether or not senior management aligns with what it takes for the team to get the work done by practicing servant-leadership with the team, turning power and resources over to the team so they can get the job done. This is critical because in complex situations, which essentially is what Flow is about, the typical organizational pyramid gets turned on its head because it's the people in the trenches that are actually executing. They are the ones closest to the customer and closest to the work. So in terms of solving problems as effectively and efficiently as possible power needs to be turned over to the team so that they can make on the spot decisions and keep on moving forward with the solution. The authors referenced a recent study showing that lack of executive accountability was one of the big corporate risk factors. Specifically they list four awful consequences of bad executive decisions: 1. Wasted resources; 2. More pressure on people to perform under constraint because resources are being wasted; 3. People disengaging because they know their work has no value, and; 4. Trouble innovating because there are too few resources and the feeling that, “Well, we tried new things in the past and they never went anywhere.” A way to remedy these problems is to have an Executive Portfolio Wall. It’s a wall where the executives use Post-It notes to show their frame of mind, what they are thinking, how they want to move forward, etc. This has three benefits associated with it: 1. The team can compare what executives are putting up on the Executive Portfolio Wall with the other walls associated with Flow. They can see how many resources are getting wasted and they can change course. They can put things right and specifically this leads into; 2. Seeing the imbalance of resource allocation. They can course correct the organization ensuring that work flows into the right goals, and; 3. As they get close to the teams they get to see emerging areas of activity that are covered by their goals. They can see areas where mavericks have introduced innovation in an attempt to create change. This is referred to as gold dust. I would tend to agree although I would say you have to be careful because you can get cowboys and cowgirls who just want to do things only because they're different, which could end up being a distraction. Frankly, there has to be a commitment to some experimentation if innovation is going to occur. The next section in Chapter 7 is titled Unfreezing Middle-Management, which is a really good term. In my change management, and program and project management experience middle-management has one of the most difficult positions because they can just get frozen in a position where those above are not releasing sufficient resources and power as well as not listening while those below can take advantage of the disorientation their middle managers are experiencing. By having the Executive Portfolio Wall middle managers get a chance to comment on the relative importance of the executive goals as well as the adequacy of what they're willing to allocate in order to achieve those goals. In other words, it allows for a shift in dialogue that makes the conversation between executives and middle managers more robust. Senior managers also get to see how what they put on the Executive Portfolio Wall is the fountainhead for the beginning of Flow. The entire hierarchy can see the connectivity between what the executive portfolios comprise and how that rolls down to the specific goals that they are addressing. By having the Executive Portfolio Wall there are five benefits: 1. Listing the executives’ main enterprise goals; 2. Listing currently funded projects; 3. Indication of the the size of the projects; 4. By showing the backlog they can indicate work that's waiting to get started. What's really good about that is by indicating that a project or piece of project is in backlog senior management is implicitly saying, “Okay, we don't not have resources yet.” 5. With a “Bury” listing they indicate work that has to be canceled. If you've worked in organizations long enough you know that you get what I like to call the zombie projects they just keep on going when they should be canceled. They're not and they just kind of take on a life of their own. So with the Executive Portfolio Wall situations like this are looked at very squarely and decisions are made. Again, this high level of visibility and not writing extensive papers with 30 people on a massive email distribution. Just having this information up on the wall has a massive benefit. Anybody can walk by it on break or when they're doing their work and see how their senior management has shifted its frame of mind as we work to move forward. It promotes healthy interaction across the entire hierarchy. And the better those interactions and the more frequent good decisions are made the better for the organization. Now the big problem with this (and this is actually one of the things that led me to found center for managing change) is whether or not executives are willing to expose their flaws and let go of the gamesmanship around trying to hide flaws and not really being honest about the situation and mistakes that are made, etc. That's what really screws with the team and also in the end screws with the customer. Buying in is needed with regards to senior managers being vulnerable and willing to admit to the consequences of changing their mind, the consequences of making mistakes, etc. in order to move forward. Okay, so why is this important? Well, if an executive is willing to be honest about their flaws then they are giving up their ability to shake their finger be punitive or bossy. Now they're committing to collaborate with the team which means are going to make connections with the team. Sometimes people protect themselves by trying to put as much distance as they can between themselves and other people especially subordinates. By risking being vulnerable there's a chance for better, faster, higher quality communications since there is a willingness to own the consequences associated with taking on the risk. This is why I have an executive coaching course because this can be very difficult to do. It’s this willingness to be vulnerable that's really the linchpin that makes Flow possible. To the extent senior managers are willing to do it and are disciplined and take on the responsibilities then that's the extent to which Flow can be successful. Now another benefit associated with senior managers willing to be vulnerable is they can confront, and I want to use that word neutrally. In other words they can talk directly to the good, the bad, and the ugly that is occurring on the project because if they are honest about their own behaviors then they can be straight up with subordinates regarding the subordinates behaviors. There can be a sustained focus on what it takes to solve the customer's problem. Now in the book on page 184 they give a sample Executive Portfolio Wall to start with. It addresses issues associated with IT and how that compares to C-Suite projects. It's driven by technical debt, work on regulatory and mandatory projects, and projects and propositions that have a direct impact on customer satisfaction.I think it's worth the time it takes to review since it is a good starting point. Remember the goal here is to get a Flow started and that means we have to have an open discussion. By hitting the high points and how they're going to be addressed at the executive level will stimulate conversation where team members can roll in with more detail as is needed. It's a very natural way to work. Finn and Hayden point out this typically is the missing link with Agility. the authors believe the reason why is the vulnerability and exposure associated with owning the consequences. But when vulnerabilities and responsibilities are owned things get better because three simple things occur: 1. Insight can develop across the organization. Remember we have different walls for different themes, beliefs, and components of the project. We get insight by seeing all the information being displayed in different ways. 2. Conversation. Risking having an Executive Portfolio Wall promotes a conversation. 3. Common Language. Conversation leads to a common language across the organization with regards to the customers, the customer's problems, and how those problems are being solved, this is pretty cool! That's it for chapter 7. In chapter 8 the authors talk about value, the anti-plan and testing. Here are the link for: episode 0037 of Wrestling with Chaos. the Introduction, The Value Seeking Enterprise, and Chapter 1, Talking About Business Agility: episode 0042 of Wrestling With Chaos. For Chapter 2, The Customer In The Agile Business. episode 0043 of Wrestling With Chaos. For Chapter 3, Disrupting The Cadence of Work episode 0045 of Wrestling With Chaos. For Chapter 4, Taking Advantage of Visible Work episode 0046 of Wrestling With Chaos, For Chapter 5, Anti-Project Thinking and Business Agility episode 0047 of Wrestling With Chaos, For Chapter 6, Creating Value-Seeking Behavior For more on the various “Walls” using Post-Its refer to their excellent book, “Flow.” In line with Business Agility and dealing with complex situations, you can download CMC’s free e-book MINDSET – 5 SIMPLE WAYS TO LOOK AT COMPLEX PROBLEMS and learn how to find a simple vantage point from which you can resolve challenges. Your feedback is important. Choose from the following options: • place a review in iTunes, • click on “leave a comment” below, • send any comments along with your name and the show number to support@ctrchg.com Listen to future episodes for our reply.

In today's podcast we have a wide-ranging discussion about Women in Agile and Agility itself with Carina Silfverduk, an Agile Practice Lead at CAS. The basis being creating abundance in business through compassion, empathy, and discipline. Carina leads the local chapter of Women in Agile, working at the national level with the Executive Sponsors Natalie Warnert and Deema Dajani. Carina opened our discussion stating that men are welcome since this is a group focused on maximizing diversity in the creation of better solutions. The group is also meant to provide a safe space for women to seek support and grow with others. Women in Agile provides that support through three programs: 1. Launching New Voices: Providing mentors in learning how to speak publicly 2. Conference Allyship: Women in Agile connect with other groups sponsoring conferences 3. Seed Local Communities: this provides support in the creation of local chapters and meet ups The main concern of the group right now is promoting women in STEM careers especially since numbers have been dropping off the last four or five years. The conversation switched to diversity with regards to implied white, male privilege versus being a woman. An example was provided of a woman researcher with a PhD leading a meeting where she was the only woman present and it was assumed she would take care of the notes as well as making sure appropriate refreshments were present. There is also the issue of women appearing "ladylike" when it comes to emotional expression, e.g., when a man is forceful he is considered to be a "leader," while if a woman shows the same emotional expression she is at risk for being considered "bitchy." These implied biases can be quite damaging to an organization since they blind those doing the hiring to a pool of talent that can add to the organizations diversity which, again, can lead to better more effective problem-solving. From a risk perspective there is also the issue when failing to hire for diversity of creating a blind spot where major problems develop on projects and the team as well as senior management are caught unaware, much to the disappointment of the customer. Gender bias is one of many cognitive biases that knowingly or unknowingly contribute to failure or inability to achieve the maximum amount of success possible under the circumstances. Carina referenced Ash Coleman, Head of Diversity and Inclusion at Credit Karma, when speaking with a group of interns. In a previously attended conference, Ms. Coleman spoke regarding the decrease in product performance when diversity is not taken into consideration. Examples were given of products that failed miserably, products that were created by all-white, male teams, e.g., facial recognition. Multiple, diverse frames of mind are needed when working on product creation based on market segmentation. This includes career, cultural, and life experience diversity in addition to gender diversity. Jazz was used in the conversation as a metaphor for the power of diversity when working in an agile environment when addressing problems that have not been solved before. Jazz musicians bring their various frames of mind as well as the discipline they learned working with various chordal systems. The artist's experiment with different frames of mind while they're actually performing, challenging each other to "keep up" and work in an integrated way so that the customer (audience) has a pleasant experience. Doug McCullough, the CIO for the city of Dublin, Ohio, was also mentioned because he believes if everyone in the room is in agreement then some of those individuals are probably redundant and, there's potential for missing key components associated with solving the problem. Also, there’s the need to be comfortable with discomfort when maximizing the diverse talent present on a team. Also, the need for self-doubt in order to leave room for team member’s thinking is critical when doing product development. This leads to the need to be vulnerable to be an effective leader, a trait not reinforced in our culture. Rotating individuals between different teams in different areas of an organization is one way to promote diversity as well as integrate individuals more deeply into the organization. As an Agile Practice Lead Carina looks for diversity at the team level. She looks to see who's Introverted and who's Extroverted as well as timing and style differences; always looking to see how the diversity can be used as a constructive force. In the end, this means that we all benefit from each other and there is no need to have boundaries, e.g., women versus men. Unfortunately, cultural stereotypes as to men versus women still have a strong influence on a day-to-day basis both at the tactical and strategic level, e.g., who gets to speak and how during meetings. Various techniques for conducting meetings and gaining information when working with a diverse group were discussed, e.g., using "parking lot" flipcharts as well as techniques from books such as "Back of the Napkin." Ideally there would come a time where people treated others equally and there be no need for groups with names such as Women in Agile. The conversation then shifted to the pluses and minuses associated with teams either being together for extended periods or members being swapped out at a frequent rate. This led to a lively discussion around the words habit, expectations, principles, complexity, chaos, and simplicity. The results fell into several categories: 1. Working together for extended periods allows team members to quickly pick up on body language and subtle cues which is a plus. On the downside, habits that tend to cause people to go blind could set in; 2. An agile approach is ideal in situations where the rules have either fallen apart or it is an exploratory situation where there frankly aren't any rules. This is the nature of complex and chaotic situations; 3. Conversely, in simple situations where the rules function well there is no reason to confuse and overcomplicate by acting as if the situation is actually more an R&D endeavor; 4. The word "principal" was contrasted with the word "habit." It was agreed that those who are principal-based should and do have habits which reflect their awareness of the situation and the appropriate application of principles. This is in contrast to a more negative use of the word "habit" where individuals are mindlessly going about doing their work without bothering to see if what they are doing is actually appropriate for the situation. Also, habits can shift over time based on the continual, flexible application of principles; 5. Essentially, it's critical to avoid going on autopilot without reflecting when making decisions as to the best way to proceed; 6. The importance of being on guard with respect to expectations and working to avoid letting them cloud one’s vision; 7. The importance of focusing on commitments and areas of agreement to help avoid the team falling apart due to internal differences. The conversation then shifted to misconceptions regarding agility, e.g., agile approaches are undirected, agile approaches are just another form of anarchy, agility has no safety net, agile approaches are dangerous because products are released without adequate testing, etc. While there is some documentation, one of the key aspects of agility is the project living within the relationship between the team members. Consequently, having and appreciating diversity is critical if the customer is to be served appropriately. This lack of documentation can be taken to the extreme is expressed in Haydn Shaughnessy and Finn Goulding's book, "12 Steps to Flow," where the documentation is limited as much as possible to post it's on the wall, Twitter, text messages, and phone calls. The conversation returns to a discussion of simplicity and, specifically, the use of waterfall methodologies and when they are appropriate. Essentially, when a proven methodology has been established, e.g., say, laying a foundation for house, then there is no reason to use an agile approach. Stick to the methods that work. Agility in this case would cause confusion and over-complicate the situation. What this gets down to is the need to use the right tool at the right time that’s appropriate for the situation. Waterfall is good for some projects while agile approaches are good for others. The important point here is to avoid viewing any particular methodology as the "religion" of the "true believer." It's that sense of religiosity which makes what was initially a very healthy approach into something that is counterproductive. There is also the need, as Carina says, to pay attention to the fact that we live in the "real world." This means that regulatory, financial, and risk-oriented stakeholders may demand compliance with a particular methodology that may run counter to using an agile approach. The key point that Carina wants to reinforce is reflected in the book "The Four Agreements," by Don Miguel Ruiz. Her point being there's actually a Fifth Agreement, be skeptical. This allows for considering various ways to view a situation in order to get the best solution, which brings us back to the value of diversity, which brings us back to Women in Agile. Have questions, wonder what the story is behind a situation, etc. This leads to practicing cognitive dissonance which is the ability to carry multiple models of the situation simultaneously in one's head and go back and forth between and/or choose combinations of the various models. Again, a diverse conversation is quite beneficial. It gets beyond cultural biases as reflected in sexist approaches. The conversation then shifted to agility versus lean and the relationship between the two. Essentially, they can work well together where, say, in a manufacturing situation lean is appropriate but when an unanticipated problem surfaces a switch to agility could be the best way to resolve the issue and get back into steady production. At the extremes, agility relies on a Bayesian statistical approach, i.e., as new information is gathered the model or frame of mind one is using to solve the problem shifts accordingly. This is in contrast to a lien approach where one may be looking at "six Sigma" statistical certainty. How this relates to Women and Agile is this: if you want to have a disciplined, flexible, fluid team that can get to the heart of a matter and solve problems and create solutions then diversity is needed along with a correspondingly safe environment where the team members can be spontaneous and proactive…free of worry or retribution for being put down or being sidelined. The Toyota-GM joint venture, NUMMI, is offered as an example of culture, discipline, teamwork and the need for safety and what happens if those factors are missing. TPS, Toyota Production System is referenced as a method that combines management philosophy, production methods, and societal influences to increase the level of quality and sustained success. This is grounded in allowing people working on the line to stop production when observing a safety or quality issue that is best resolved now. This is contrasted with the punishing aspect GM held at the time towards workers who would stop the line. The point of all this is it is critical to allow the workers to perform in an agile manner even when it cuts against the expectations associated with formal processes. Again, we come back to the importance of diversity. Finally, we all flip to an agile frame of mind routinely even when working with standardized methods, we may just not call it such. So just stop, look, and think about what the best tool for the situation is. Whether or not that proposed solution comes from a woman is essentially irrelevant. The important thing is deciding whether or not senior management, the team, and associated stakeholders will unite and embrace the discomfort they need to walk through in order to identify root causes and succeed. Dealing with this challenge is something Gary runs into in his consulting and coaching practice. You can contact Carina Silfverduk on: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/silfverduk/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/AgileCarina You can reach Gary Monti on: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/garywmonti/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/garymonti Center for Managing Change: https://www.ctrchg.com/contact/ If you are working in Agility and dealing with complex situations, you can download CMC’s free e-book MINDSET – 5 SIMPLE WAYS TO LOOK AT COMPLEX PROBLEMS and learn how to find a simple vantage point from which you can resolve challenges. Your feedback is important. Choose from the following options: • place a review in iTunes, • click on “leave a comment” below, • send any comments along with your name and the show number to support@ctrchg.com Listen to future episodes for our reply.

This podcast covers Chapter 6, “Creating Value-Seeking Behaviour” of “12 Steps to Flow: The New Framework for Business Agility,” by Haydn Shaughnessy and Fin Goulding, developers of the internationally acclaimed workshop, Flow Academy. This chapter answers the question, "How do we seek value is continuous activity without a spreadsheet, value proposition or a conventional ROI?" This is done by going deeper into the Flow Value Stack introduced in the Introduction. The key is weaving value into everyday activities rather than being a separate event.   The importance of how a customer is viewed along with the corresponding segmentation is critical for success. Innovation alone is insufficient. The authors provide as an example the TV industry in the United States and its disappearance, losing dominance to the Japanese, who eventually lost dominance to the Koreans. This loss of dominance occurred for two reasons: 1. The Japanese were better at focusing on continuous learning in semiconductor manufacturing while the Americans focused on innovation; 2. The Americans drove for excellence in image quality which led to a high degree of breakdown while the Japanese focused on optimizing the technology they had, leaving fewer breakdowns. The lesson here is to look for optimization across a matrix of all the activities rather than driving one component to perfection. In Flow one looks to see how the matrix of all the activity involved in bringing the product to market and servicing customers can be best optimized.   The approach of Value Optimization Analysis is introduced. This is a level above traditional value stream analysis. In value stream analysis the reduction of waste in a given process is assumed to increase value while in value optimization analysis one questions, “Why are we doing this process? Is this the best way to create value in a balanced way?"   The authors go on to refer to tools that we introduced in Chapter 10, e.g., The Customer Feedback Wall, but for now they give a list of 16 questions that can be used over a three month period to conduct a value review by the team to see whether or not the right processes are being used in order to add value for the customer. Questions range from, "How many customer feedback issues have been dealt with and how can we classify them?" To, "Are enough of our products and features contributing to customer success?" The results from discussing questions such as these and others are placed on a Flow Value Wall where trends can be observed as to whether or not value is increasing, staying the same, or decreasing. While observing these trends can chose the value of performance in the long run what is key is to learn how to use this information to optimize value on a day-to-day basis. Remember, the goal is to maintain a continuous flow of innovation that can be tested with the customer.   The authors take to task the traditional use of the phrase "value proposition." Rather than something that can be stated in one sentence or a single statement they see it as something that is much more complex and encompassing the ranges across the entire customer experience. It is open-ended and continuous. This leads asking two key questions: 1. How can I be sure that my work-in-progress and project investment are adding value to customers in a balanced or optimized way? 2. What initiatives can we develop to expand our markets as new technologies arise in new needs become evident? This chapter focuses on the first question.   SEEKING VALUE WITHOUT WRITING VALUE PROPOSITIONS As mentioned in previous chapters, is not only inventing new products but also adapting to system changes necessary to innovate in a timely manner. Consequently it is quite important that collective intelligence is used to stay on target for achieving goals through a continuous flow of activities in the work units. All work is interrelated which is essential for Flow to be effective in that one is taking business objectives and working them into value for the customer.   Two examples are provided, one is with regards to changing the business cycle in insurance and the other addresses creating value in the automobile industry.   The second example addresses aftermarket issues associated with car sales with one of the focal points of being how women are addressed with regards to After-Sales customers. The break the situation down into five phases: phase 1. The statement of proposed value phase 2. Articulating flexible business goals phase 3. Understanding customer success factors phase 4. Creating new units of work phase 5. Delivery, test and iteration   They summarize the overall problem as comprising: - many enterprises do not have problems that can be solved with a startup approach such as MVP - they struggle to balance complex psychological and financial pressures - After-Sales is where the profit lies - carmakers have little idea how this market segments other than data on the types of cars that get serviced most - carmakers think they can solve this problem with the big data solution, or "market of one."   A key component that stands out is in Phase 4, creating new units of work. It discusses the need for integration across research, marketing, and production in order to be successful. In other words, the Post-Its associated with work breakdown appear on the same wall representing marketing, business delivery, and IT. This integration is critical for success. The forces work out into the open where team members can see if everyone truly understands what everyone else is doing along with whether or not the work is being truly integrated. This rolls into phase 5, delivery, testing, and iteration. The units of work all need to come together through minimum sustainable delivery matrices (MSD) that can be pushed to the customers in a manner that satisfies their needs as well as generate sufficient profit.   The chapter concludes with statements regarding Flow and how it focuses on value seeking rather than value propositions. That value can be sought in a number of ways: 1. In a Statement of Proposed Value 2. By creating flexible business goals to which people can adapt via spot decisions 3. Breaking work down into tasks where the value can be more easily identified especially through short cycles of work which helps get rid of anything that lacks value 4. Engineering continuous feedback loops that creates information for both the strategist and the kanban teams 5. Conduct Flow Value Optimization Analysis to check whether systems, routines, or services are creating continual added value 6. Constantly engaged in helping people broaden theres skill sets so that they can put value ahead of roles 7. Use the Executive Portfolio Wall to make sure that only work of value passes down to the executive teams   Here are the link for:    episode 0037 of Wrestling with Chaos. the Introduction, The Value Seeking Enterprise, and Chapter 1, Talking About Business Agility: episode 0042 of Wrestling With Chaos. For Chapter 2, The Customer In The Agile Business. episode 0043 of Wrestling With Chaos. For Chapter 3, Disrupting The Cadence of Work episode 0045 of Wrestling With Chaos. For Chapter 4, Taking Advantage of Visible Work episode 0046 pf Wrestling With Chaos, for Chapter 5, Creating Value-Seeking Behavior   For more on the various “Walls” using Post-Its refer to their excellent book, “Flow.”   In line with Business Agility and dealing with complex situations, you can download CMC’s free e-book MINDSET – 5 SIMPLE WAYS TO LOOK AT COMPLEX PROBLEMS and learn how to find a simple vantage point from which you can resolve challenges.   Your feedback is important. Choose from the following options: place a review in iTunes, click on “leave a comment” below, send any comments along with your name and the show number to support@ctrchg.com   Listen to future episodes for our reply.

This podcast covers Chapter 5, “Anti-Project Thinking and Business Agility” of “12 Steps to Flow: The New Framework for Business Agility,” by Haydn Shaughnessy and Fin Goulding, developers of the internationally acclaimed workshop, Flow Academy. This chapter argues that Agile techniques could be improved by moving away from Epics and User stories to Flexible Business Goals, Areas of Work, and Units of Work.   The reason for this is workplaces change with regards to technology and market dynamics. The situation is highly complex with multiple intangible assets such as relationships with customers. There also is the vast array of digital assets that come into play along with multiple interfaces presenting different messages or incentives. This means a vast amounts of data come from various sources.   To compound the situation companies are faced with the prospect of doing multiple new things all the time which the authors refer to as "atomization", which fragments old value chains into hundreds of interrelated units of work that make up matrix innovation. Traditional and agile ways of work cannot cope with this level of novelty because they are built on replicability, i.e., doing the same task multiple times.   This is where Flow comes into play. An example is provided using Patty Power Betfair, a gambling institution in Dublin, Ireland. The deals with more than 3.5 billion API requests every day and handles up to 30 million transactions daily. This is a circumstance where the flow philosophy is superior to project management. For success, it is critical to prioritize goals over Epics and User Stories. Goals are defined as flexible statements of what a good outcome of work should look like. These goals are broken down into areas of work and then units of work each of which have their own specific goals. Working in this manner and monitoring performance allows for quick adjustments early in order to continue producing value.   This approach epitomizes the Business Agile mindset. By atomizing the work the mystery is removed from dealing with such monolithic endeavors as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat. The atomization of work into small work packages allows for maximum flexibility in terms of necessary changes based on immediate performance feedback.   Working in this manner is the antithesis of traditional project management with its work breakdown structure (WBS). This essentially is the Waterfall method. The Agile approach provided some improvement with the Epics and Stories, but these Epics and Stories are delivered in Sprints that come together in periodic Scrums which are supervised by Scrum Master.   Sprints have their own problems because work progresses for a period of time before determining whether or not it integrates with the work that other individuals are doing. Reworked and delays occur which encourages people to go off and work on other tasks causing a subsequent collapse of the culture which leads to more problems. Epics and Stories have their own problem, i.e., the product owner becomes a stand-in for the customers. Flow goes beyond this by having a different cultural perspective centered on interaction and collective intelligence. The authors do note the formal project management techniques are appropriate when physical materials and multiple parties are involved, e.g., construction. With intangible products the situation is different because a consistent flow of innovations may be required to provide services and products that are unique to various customers. Because the work is not constrained is in a physical situation, e.g., construction, codesign of work is possible. Value seeking behavior is prioritized in an environment where goals and work codesign rule.   A key aspect of Flow is keeping work fluid so that battles do not break out, the kind of battles that occur when a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) is being defined in a large organization. With Flow there is a focus on fluidity rather than rules, processes, and boundaries. Value is the goal. Innovation is continuous.   The key is: - focus on business goals with real value - training people to adapt to shifting goals is more knowledge of customer needs his acquired - perform units of work in short bursts in order to check in frequently with customers and colleagues - be ready for multiple, micro-pivots as you create a matrix of features to put in front of the customer   An appropriate work breakdown it is visualized on a wall is required for successful Flow. Because of the newness of the work and the lack of repetition team members will be asked to invent new methods of working along with features and products or services that have value for the customer. This is why the social interaction is so important because the work may change as new information is gathered. This is why visual techniques are so important in order to provide maximum value in the shortest period of time. Constructing the work breakdown and laying out significant independent deliverables to achieve the business outcome is critical. It should be done in an area where all stakeholders can observe and comment. The closer the work is to today more detail is required. Is the workflows out into the future it can be left to be more free-form and become more detailed as the team approaches it. It's all about connecting the work breakdown to identified value. It's also about shorter cycle times.   The work breakdown process comprises 11 steps: 1. There is a pressing business objective 2.  A series of goals (business outcomes) are defined 3.  Which goals will deliver value first is the first significant social interaction 4.  Goals are broken down in terms of a user journey or workflow steps 5.  Is workers describe the stories in terms of the value users can acquire from the features of the product or service 6.  Later goals are left on the wall to be assessed and commented on his people think about them and domain experts share their knowledge 7.  The work breakdowns become story cards for developers and testers 8.  Story cards are intended to be completed within 1 to 2 days the output bundled into a Minimum Sustainable Delivery Matrix (MSD) the customer will engage with 9.  Minimum viable features can be created to test value and overall fit with the project 10. The aforementioned features may lead to more enhanced features or they may lead to features being dropped based on feedback 11. Along the Walls many dependencies become apparent to people over time. This is where the used of Post-It's is superior to a planning document   An example of high-level goals is provided. The example shows the importance of bringing in all areas across the business which are affected by or can contribute to the project in addition to the IT shop. This is one of the key benefits of Flow.   The authors then describe the benefit of Flow over Agile. Flow is based on direct user experience and feedback rather than the development of User stories and Avatars and the associated "Agile prison" that can be created the removes the developers from contact with client. The very short cycle times of Flow give immediate user/customer feedback which the team can use directly.   One of the keys and Flow is to have work codesigned by IT and business unit. Which critical when doing work this way is to think beyond one's own selfish culture and the focus on the customer and how they feel when we are successful in addressing their needs. Working this way is referred to as a holistic team.   The chapter closes out with a good example of how this multidisciplinary work is performed with regards to a car dealership.   Here are the link for:    episode 0037 of Wrestling with Chaos. the Introduction, The Value Seeking Enterprise, and Chapter 1, Talking About Business Agility: episode 0042 of Wrestling With Chaos. For Chapter 2, The Customer In The Agile Business. episode 0043 of Wrestling With Chaos. For Chapter 3, Disrupting The Cadence of Work episode 0045 of Wrestling With Chaos. For Chapter 4, Taking Advantage of Visible Work   For more on the various “Walls” using Post-Its refer to their excellent book, “Flow.”   In line with Business Agility and dealing with complex situations, you can download CMC’s free e-book MINDSET – 5 SIMPLE WAYS TO LOOK AT COMPLEX PROBLEMS and learn how to find a simple vantage point from which you can resolve challenges.   Your feedback is important. Choose from the following options: place a review in iTunes, click on “leave a comment” below, send any comments along with your name and the show number to support@ctrchg.com   Listen to future episodes for our reply.

This podcast covers Chapter 4, “Taking Advantage of Visible Work” of “12 Steps to Flow: The New Framework for Business Agility,” by Haydn Shaughnessy and Fin Goulding, developers of the internationally acclaimed workshop, Flow Academy. This chapter deals with introducing visible, observable, work. This is the cornerstone for new organizational culture. It provides a framework for collective intelligence and matrix innovation which requires many granular decisions which everyone can see. By having a wall with Post-Its everyone can see the decision points and play a key role based on their know-how.   A key component of Flow is social interactions shape knowledge and support decisions. Doing the work visually supports these interactions and addresses the complexity of projects in a threefold manner: - first off, likes complex anyway and there is no way of getting around - complexity is more easily managed when an approach is used that allows for collective intelligence rather than hierarchies and plans - this can be accomplished using walls and Post-It’s.   An example is provided as to how Samsung one about creating the Active Matrix Organic Light Emitting Diode (AMOLED) screen. Two major goals of no backlight and better color saturation were broken down into 50 major problem areas. In turn, these problem areas were broken down into hundreds of problem statements which ended up producing thousands of smaller problems which were essentially viewed as goals which needed to be achieved.   This example was used as an analogy for how Flow works, i.e., instead of problem statements goal statements are used to direct the construction of areas of work and units of work. Addressing these problems visually is superior to creating a grand plan. Visualization and social interaction helps keep everyone on board. Visualization and smaller units of work are effective tools for mastering complexity. The team is free to develop its own culture and interactions that are appropriate for solving the problems.   An interesting point that is made is that many people have emotional intelligence but they lack emotional resilience. Emotional resilience is the ability to stand up for ideas one believes in. Visualization helps people develop emotional resilience. The reason is people can actually see how the work is progressing, or not, which helps them look at the situation in a straightforward manner and develop a collective intelligence. The Walls with the Post-It's create venues where discussions can occur that promote the resilience.   With this approach risk and issues receive greater exposure.   These walls essentially become a visual documentation of the organizations learning.   The authors point out that by having visual manifestation of work it's easy for everyone to observe the work-in-progress to get an idea of how well the project is moving forward. This is especially important when a lot of the work is being performed is brand-new.   It is important to have a wall for the various frames-of-mind appropriate for the project, e.g., the customer innovation wall, and appreciation wall, an executive portfolio, the customer feedback wall, etc. This is referred to as extreme visualization.   The chapter concludes with the steps required to implement extreme visualization are: 1. Sufficient wall space. The corridor that everyone uses is a great space. 2. Anticipate resistance. Coaxing executives to participate can be one of the most difficult aspects of the work. Regardless, it is good start with a customer wall and an executive portfolio wall. 3. Adaptation. See if you can find a pressing project that can serve as a focal point to begin practicing extreme visualization. This will encourage maximum involvement. 4. Research. Customer walls, for example, may require social media research or examination of existing files in order to populate the wall. Likewise, for an executive portfolio wall data from all projects needs to be gathered and displayed. 5. The first draft. It may be difficult and/or uncomfortable to get a particular wall started. This is where a facilitator for the first day or two can be beneficial. Sometimes there may be a team member who happens to be good at facilitation. Use that person but don't let them become too prominent. This is meant to be a team effort. 6. Reporting. Resist the urge to create write ups from the walls. Use photos, not reports. 7. Tools to have on hand: - a learning wall where people can document the learning process - the go to market plan. This provides a valid and disciplined way to think about the market when you're creating products or services. - plenty of Post-It's and markers - a camera. Smartphone may be sufficient. The goal is to routinely take pictures on a daily basis to avoid the temptation of writing things up.   Here are the link for:    episode 0037 of Wrestling with Chaos. the Introduction, The Value Seeking Enterprise, and Chapter 1, Talking About Business Agility: episode 0042 of Wrestling With Chaos. For Chapter 2, The Customer In The Agile Business. episode 0043 of Wrestling With Chaos. For Chapter 3, Disrupting The Cadence of Work   For more on the various “Walls” using Post-Its refer to their excellent book, “Flow.”   In line with Business Agility and dealing with complex situations, you can download CMC’s free e-book MINDSET – 5 SIMPLE WAYS TO LOOK AT COMPLEX PROBLEMS and learn how to find a simple vantage point from which you can resolve challenges.   Your feedback is important. Choose from the following options: place a review in iTunes, click on “leave a comment” below, send any comments along with your name and the show number to support@ctrchg.com   Listen to future episodes for our reply.

In this podcast I interviewed James Rores, founder of the Floriss Group and who is a consultant who specializes as a growth multiplier by practicing and teaching sales as a leadership competency - essentially sales transformation. We discuss Sales, business growth, and dealing with recessions. He started his career working with venture-backed groups, learning how to sell items people didn't know existed for problems they did not know they had. What became transformational was his realization is inside life had to match his outside life. He set out on a path of personal transformation.   Learning to live with vulnerability while pushing forward to be successful was a key lesson learned if he was to achieve his goal of creating change.   The conversation shifted to a very key question, “When do people buy?" Answer, "When they are willing to change." So, instead of focusing on the transaction good salesperson focuses on determining where the prospect "is" with regards to willingness to make the change. Is their willingness to change large enough and does it align with the product or service the salesperson is bringing to the table. This context James believes everyone has something to sell, e.g., apparent convincing a child to wear a bike helmet when it isn't cool. It is similar to an IT unit selling their ideas/products internally.   The challenge is creating a conversation which supports exploring whether or not the product or service is valuable for the prospective client. If the opportunity is not present then the salesperson needs to have the courage to move on.   In order to be fully present to see if that conversation can be created is critical to move away from thinking about what one can do (this is especially important for organizations overall) to thinking about the "why" that is driving the buyer to consider a purchase. Selling the "what" (the specific product) is a misdirection. It’s determining what the "want" is that is motivating the buyer which needs to be determined and connected with. The challenge can be present when objections get in the way of making the connection, e.g., having the child see for themselves it's best to wear the bike helmet when they initially don't feel it's very cool, e.g., showing them that if they have a concussion they won't be able to engage in all the other activities they enjoy. It all revolves around the question, "Why change?"   Essentially, this means an authoritative approach will fail. In other words, it's better for a manager to work with the employee to show how it's in their best interest to make the needed change rather than use the weight of their authority to force it on the employee.   James presses home the important point that leadership is earned if effective change is to be brought out through the sales process.   The conversation shifted to the next recession and how to maintain a growth frame of mind. A delicate balancing act is required between the growth and preserving what's already in place. James responded by saying it's important to always maintain a curiosity even during difficult times. This is the path to change. He goes on to say that there are two ways we can change: - have it forced upon us due to complacency and have decisions forced upon us while in crisis, or; - walk the path of curiosity so the decisions can be made with clarity. This is the path to growth.   Making decisions based on curiosity even when times are difficult is the key to growth. Market leaders have cultures built around innovation which is based on curiosity.   This led to a discussion focusing on culture and its relationship to recessions. This included the mission statement (the customer and their problem that needs solved) and the vision statement (our internal goals and how we plan to reach them). Leaders must have the ability to see what's on the horizon and plan accordingly. This means finding a balance between having an abundance-oriented frame of mind while being realistic as to business realities associated with the recession. From this balance point employees need to be scored according to their level of performance. This means that regardless of the external economic realities leaders are curious and always looking for ways to innovate even when there is a temptation to fall into the fear associated with the recession. Healthy leaders score their employees based on innovation rather than conformance with the past.   So the abundance-oriented leader when going into a recession must: - allow employees to innovate and make mistakes that come at some cost - conserve resources sufficient to make it through the recession   James refer to one of the mantras on his website, "We solve sales problems and we build growth cultures."   The conversation then turned to a cautionary tale regarding strengths. One of the ways a leader can hide is by focusing only on strengths and failing to address weaknesses. This, essentially, this can be the kiss of death during a recession. In order to innovate one must address your vulnerabilities in order to grow.   Gary presents the model used by Center for Managing Change to delineate the three types of change environments and the conversation shifted to how important it is to be honest about vulnerabilities and weaknesses in order to maneuver through the changes and establish a new state of stability via innovation. In line with this, adrenaline and testosterone mask fears and can actually accelerate failure.   In order to achieve growth through innovation James teaches sales as a leadership competency. In line with this the conversation shifted again to an aspect of Gary's coaching course for dissolving fears and achieving abundance, i.e., in addition to identifying the fear one must also identify the habits that protect that fear and choose a new way of being so that the fear can be dissolved and innovation introduced and supported. An example is provided revolving around fear of public speaking. The leader can work on addressing their fears by risking performing a "360."   In line with this James brought up the famous quote, "What brought you here won't get you where you want to go." Which needed to stop plateauing or even shrinking is having the courage to look and see what the leader doesn't know and generate the insight needed to move forward. This requires leaning into the fears and vulnerabilities. James then moves on to say that in doing this work is critical to pay attention to the classic S shaped growth curve and work on innovation before the growth plateaus. This is where the use of third-party consultants, outsiders who can be objective, is beneficial.   Working in this manner then requires performing risk management in an objective way in order to move away from the emotionality associated with fear and complacency.   Gary provides a cautionary tale from the past regarding the now-defunct automobile manufacturer Studebaker which originally made wagons for moving westward in the late 19th century. They woke up to the transition to the internal combustion engine too late and were able to only grab a small segment of the market and, even though they were great innovators in the automotive market, they went out of business because they were too slow to move when the time was right.   James astutely pointed out the mistake Studebaker made was being product-centric rather than customer-centric. This leads to the reality that the leader needs to pay attention to whether they are being truly customer-centric or if they are fooling themselves by doing more of what they are already good at doing. Innovation is always customer-centric. This mistake in the leader’s belief system can be reflected in continual use of various consultants without making genuine progress.   The conversation concludes with the awareness that consultants must first determine the belief system present within the leader and the organization to see if it aligns with and innovative frame of mind that is customer-centric, then work on skillset, then work on toolsets.   In line with dealing with complex situations, you can download CMC’s free e-book MINDSET – 5 SIMPLE WAYS TO LOOK AT COMPLEX PROBLEMS and learn how to find a simple vantage point from which you can resolve challenges.   Your feedback is important. Choose from the following options: place a review in iTunes, click on “leave a comment” below, send any comments along with your name and the show number to support@ctrchg.com   Listen to future episodes for our reply.

This podcast covers Chapter 3, “Disrupting The Cadence of Work” of “12 Steps to Flow: The New Framework for Business Agility,” by Haydn Shaughnessy and Fin Goulding, developers of the internationally acclaimed workshop, Flow Academy. Chapter 3 deviates markedly from the traditional Waterfall approach. A visual approach is used with Post-Its on the wall and no extensive, traditional documentation. All functionalities, including Finance, etc., are included. Communication is brief via Tweets, use of the phone, etc., to create energy in the team and avoid the stodginess of traditional approaches. Work is divided into 2 day chunks by apply CATE from Chapter 2:   C = (dynamic) Customer segmentation A = Asset discovery T = Targeted ideation E = Ecosystem   It’s all about reducing the cycle time to get product out. Move forward with successes and make changes as needed based on feedback.   To make this all happen a big part of senior management’s job is making sure the team feels safe and able to work iterations and apply lessons-learned.   By working interactively in short cycles work can be transferred to a Kanban board which supports continuous innovation because trust is present. This is superior to continuous improvements.   The “soft” skills senior management must practice can be quite hard. Working with human nature is not necessarily a straightforward task. It requires senior management to work as servant-leaders both supporting the team and watching that the team is going in the right direction.   Methodologies now come into play for continuous innovation. What is critical is methodologies are used in a flexible manner, picking the tool that works best in a situation.   The Minimal Sustainable  Delivery Matrix (MSD) is introduced, which solves the problem incrementally with constant feedback from the customer. This is a method superior to MVP (minimal viable product). MSD requires critical non-essentials and marginal gains (see Chapter 1).   Kanban is preferred over Scrum because the team only takes on the work they can do. Those in Business Analysis can work on improving the backlog.   Also, by having the short intervals decreases the occurrence of context switching where team members are constantly switching back and forth between tasks.   The chapter concludes with a 12 step approach to reduce cycle time: smaller work units increased team interaction multidisciplines environment allowance for new tools, techniques, and workarounds shorter cycle times improves accuracy of budgeting visible work ( Post-Its on wall) shows dependencies visible work allows for better resource allocation collaborative thinking work breakdowns performed groups the value of work is visible cycle time for feedback is shortened faster pivots on short notice     Here are the link for:    episode 0037 of Wrestling with Chaos. the Introduction, The Value Seeking Enterprise, and Chapter 1, Talking About Business Agility: episode 0042 of Wrestling With Chaos. For Chapter 2, The Customer In The Agile Business. For more on the various “Walls” using Post-Its refer to their excellent book, “Flow.” In line with Business Agility and dealing with complex situations, you can download CMC’s free e-book MINDSET – 5 SIMPLE WAYS TO LOOK AT COMPLEX PROBLEMS and learn how to find a simple vantage point from which you can resolve challenges.   Your feedback is important. Choose from the following options: place a review in iTunes, click on “leave a comment” below, send any comments along with your name and the show number to support@ctrchg.com   Listen to future episodes for our reply.

Today’s podcast covers Chapter 2, “The Customer in the Agile Business” of “12 Steps to Flow: The New Framework for Business Agility,” by Haydn Shaughnessy and Fin Goulding, developers of the internationally acclaimed workshop, Flow Academy. From my perspective, this chapter is all about the need for complex adaptive systems pulling in information and responding in a real-time manner to customer needs. See what you think.   Key points from chapter 1 are brought forward: matrix innovation critical non-essentials and marginal gains value-seeking culture Flow Value Stack For more on the Introduction and Chapter 1 go to episode 0037 of Wrestling with Chaos. The concept CATE is introduced here, in Chapter 2 C = (dynamic) Customer segmentation A = Asset discovery T = Targeted ideation E = Ecosystem   Customer segmentation reveals potential new markets, especially out at the long-tail where new trends are emerging. This requires the ability to innovate and adapt to the new trends on the fly — matrix innovation. Things can keep on changing out on that long tail. A fascinating example given is creating financial markets for the poor (people outside established banking norms) in Africa via working with NGOs. Asset discovery addresses what all is needed to satisfy demands in those newly-discovered markets. Do you use existing internal assets? Develop new assets? Utilize customers existing assets? Bring in partners? This is a very rich phase which requires a very direct discovery conversation within the team as well as bringing in the customers (more on that later) and/or potential partners. A conversation flow is established and maintained. Targeted ideation essential flows from the asset discovery in terms of defining the products generated during customer segmentation. Ecosystem comprises the context, the “geography,” so to speak of how and where the product(s) fit in the stakeholder landscape.   Economies of scope are discussed which is all about understanding directly customers needs. Rather than abstractions via big data or avatars it is better to gather information directly from, say, social media analysis. This allows for simultaneous differentiation of multiple products/services customer segments may need. The recommend using social media tools such as StatSocial, Sprinklr, and Crimson Hexagon. An example is given of a car dealership finding out a high percentage of purchasers were interested in biking. Consequently, they aligned the dealership with adjacent biking products.   An example of the Asset discovery, Targeted ideation, and Ecosystem coming together via the NGOs is a large, global retailer providing the transportation chain needed for land-rich, cash-poor, transportation-deprived farmers in Africa to get their product to richer markets.   Essentially, this is about developing complex adaptive systems that morph with discovers in and changes to the business environment.   In terms of methodologies the authors focus on visual processes…building “walls with post-its.” In other words, no lengthy documents. The team is vital and works as a unit real-time, face-to-face, generating the minimal amount of documentation needed, i.e., organized post-its. The process is very immediate. No lag time. evolving and innovating as they work to stay connected to customers and create solutions for customer needs. For more on the various “Walls” refer to their excellent book, “Flow.”   In line with Business Agility and dealing with complex situations, you can download CMC’s free e-book MINDSET – 5 SIMPLE WAYS TO LOOK AT COMPLEX PROBLEMS and learn how to find a simple vantage point from which you can resolve challenges.   Your feedback is important. Choose from the following options: place a review in iTunes, click on “leave a comment” below, send any comments along with your name and the show number to support@ctrchg.com   Listen to future episodes for our reply.

Rich Thiel, Business Agility consultant and CEO of The Noble Foundry, discusses the importance of emotions, relationships, trust, and vulnerability in order to successfully provide solutions to customers problems when leading an Agile transformation. We met at the Flow Academy workshop conducted by Fin Goulding and Haydn Shaughnessy at the Business Agility Conference Midwest that past Nov 4-7, 2019. The workshop is based on their book 12 Steps To Flow. The discussion is quite rich since Business Agility is based on key concepts from complex adaptive systems and complexity science and describes a frame of mind used when the rules fall apart or there simply are no rules. The discussion points are as follows: Agile is a culture and a mindset rather than a specific methodology. Agility is about team empowerment in contrast to leaders dropping end dates on teams and leaving them with no support or sense of how to proceed. With an Agile Transformation teams can behave as owners of the project and be fully engaged. Senior managers work with the team. Achieving the above is what led Rich to Business Agility. Rich discusses the erroneous belief that somehow managers have the answers which always come from above. He references “Innovation Happens Elsewhere,” based on the belief the best ideas emerge from the team, collectively managing the brainpower of the group. A really good manager focuses on the team being successful. With a good Agile leader the team is in an environment where they can risk being vulnerable, increasing the collective capability which increases the odds of the team self-organizing. Gary references the challenge with a quote, “We raise children to be dolphins but in business we reward sharks.” Also, Six Sigma situations occur very rarely. Rules either fall apart or are absent. Business Agility is a much. Rich talks about the importance of relationships as reflected in the “I promise” approach a leader used to show both his commitment and the expected commitment of team members. The above leads to the importance of emotional honesty between team members…a challenging but rewarding activity. What makes this a challenging activity is team members need to stop self-protecting and be honest about strengths and weaknesses. Technique is important but it is not the core. The core is changing the way people choose to relate. People over process - a foundation principle in Business Agility. This was reflected in Fin Goulding referring to constructive work as being fun! It gets down to an old function from Project Management…being an egoless team. Rather than a collection of individuals the team works as a unit. A dramatic change Business Agility creates is: work is brought to the team, which remains constant as a unit, rather than matrixing people across multiple projects. Rich and Gary joke about the word “vision” and how it can be distorted to encourage greed vs staying on track with the principles and being honest about what can be done with the resources available to solve the client’s problem. Agility helps create a more realistic use of the word “vision.”   You can reach Rich at The Noble Foundry or contact him on LinkedIn. Gary is available on LInkedIn as well as at Center for Managing Change.   If you need help in gaining clarity when dealing with complex situations similar to our podcast discussion, download CMC’s free e-book MINDSET – 5 SIMPLE WAYS TO LOOK AT COMPLEX PROBLEMS and learn how to find a simple vantage point from which you can resolve challenges.   Your feedback is important. Choose from the following options: place a review in iTunes, click on “leave a comment” below, or send any comments along with your name and the show number to contact at Center for Managing Change.   Listen to future episodes for our reply.

Flow in Business Agility is discussed with Fin Goulding and Haydn Shaughnessy of  Flow Academy. The discussion is quite rich since Business Agility is based on key concepts from complex adaptive systems and complexity science and describes a frame of mind used when the rules fall apart or there simply are no rules. The discussion points are as follows: Haydn started by stating his work with new technologies and their business applications. This includes disruption. Fin is a technologist having worked with financial institutions and then switched to the dot com world. Together they’ve created a unique perspective on Business Agility. This uniqueness is reflected in how they avoid distinguishing between the Business Unit and Information and Technology. They have a strong record in uniting the two into a seamless entity. The conversation turned to the need for a high level of trust in order to be effective and get “Action and Traction.” This trust allows for criticism which helps get to the heart of the matter and solve the client’s problem. Business Agility allows for providing many small releases maybe on a daily basis faster than waiting for quarterly releases based on a waterfall method. It’s important, though, to have sufficient up-front analysis to make sure what is delivered has value. Flow discovers value up front and makes sure it’s delivered through the entire organization and the traditional blockers are removed. Leadership qualities and behaviors are critical — help the team do the work! Be part of the team! Stay focused on the principles involved. This is grounded in putting emotions, mutual respect, and relationships first. This is based on the principle of collective intelligence which says there is too much information and we need to put our heads together to figure out just what is essential. A real challenge with Flow is the absence of rules. It’s about harnessing the power fo the team rather than promoting a specific methodology. This harnessing is done by use of visual methods typically using post-its and walls in order to work outside the box. People will engage more with visual approaches over extensive white papers. This includes having emotion walls where “thank you” post-its can be placed. Because emergence is such a key part of Flow and Business Agility there is much more flexibility with Post-its and Walls vs constant editing of long papers. This helps avoid information overload caused by excessive e-mails, etc. It also keeps people working face-to-face around the Post-Its which supports honest communications and moving the project forward at an optimal speed. Social interaction improves. Emotional honesty drives the work forward. Flow Value Optimization Analysis was discussed which simultaneously looks at the flow of a specific process while simultaneously questioning the value of the process and determining if it can be improved or even eliminated. Flow helps respond to new market dynamics quickly along with long-tail product dynamics. Additionally it helps with scaling, lowering prices and doing this with micro-developoment. Flow fits well with a start-up frame of mind…even in a large organization where micro development occurs. This is critical because of the ecosystem of markets and the frequent, small shifts. Flow becomes a guideline for gauging how best to shift behaviors to be effective.   Again, their website is with Flow Academy and they can be reached on LinkedIn at Fin Goulding and Haydn Shaughnessy.   If you need help in gaining clarity when dealing with complex situations, you can download CMC’s free e-book  MINDSET – 5 SIMPLE WAYS TO LOOK AT COMPLEX PROBLEMS and learn how to find a simple vantage point from which you can resolve challenges.   Your feedback is important. Choose from the following options: place a review in iTunes, click on “leave a comment” below, or send any comments along with your name and the show number to support@ctrchg.com   Listen to future episodes for our reply.

In this podcast Interview Lee Rowley (http://leerowley.com/), copywriter, discusses how you can get clarity on growing your business by focusing on what it takes to generate good sales copy. Lee makes some excellent points as to do’s and don’t’s when it comes to copywriting: If stressed, a good copywriter can help you find a path back to simplicity. The writing is only 10% of what copywriting is about. It’s mastery of the 90% below the waterline that is critical. It is much more than “deja moo,” where one has seen this bull (use of standard templates) before. Humans are complex and good copywriters help business owners need to find the thread running through their business prospective clients can identify with. It’s the intersection of why you are ready to help with the client’s readiness to change. Being genuine and client-focused rather than seeing prospects as sources of income is critical for good copywriting. You have 2-3 seconds to grab the readers attention and the message needs to be relatively short since people don’t spend as much time reading as in the past. Marketing for the sale is vastly different than marketing for the ego of the seller (“Look at me! This is how I got my Rolex!”). It’s all about solving the customer’s problem. When it comes to copywriting, the shorter the better. One trick Lee has learned is to sit down and read the copy out loud. This will help find the ideal length. Lee works to empower his tribe rather than trying to be everything to everyone. When selecting a copywriter have a face-to-face conversation to see if the person is engaged and excited about your product and views you as unique if you want the copy to be an effective sales tool. Clients do best when they unlearn what they know about marketing since a lot of it can be formula-based. To get it right, the copywriter needs to spend time at the beginning (that 90% below the waterline). It gets to the core, the “why,” the copywriter’s client is working from. In the listening process Lee also does Avatar Emersion where he observes the client working with their client’s to get as rich a sense as possible of what the client really needs in terms of copy. He can do this by going to Facebook groups his client’s client attends to get insights into what people want. Also, he read Amazon reviews of books his client’s prospects are interested in. Lee finds that the more one listens to the client the easier the writing part becomes. In the initial conversation with prospective clients he asks them to talk about the crossroads where they have arrived. He then moves into the “immersion part” which is where the work is done, behind the curtain, so to speak. He looks at where they are compared to where they want to be. This gets into determining the ideal audience which leads to checking out various forums and groups. From that the appropriate avatar is created. For example, having arthritis and not being able to play with grandchildren. Listening in the various groups Lee picks up life-style issues that need addressed but aren’t necessarily talked about directly. This information leads to great copy. The interview closes out with Lee talking about the importance of treating well those who support you and can provide good information that gets to the heart of the client’s problem. Also, remember the good copy is a tool, a tool that exists in a marketing environment the components of which, e.g., social media need to be addressed as well. It all gets down to working both smart and hard and knowing when to stay and when to walk away.   You can get ahold of Lee at (http://leerowley.com/),   If you need help in gaining clarity when dealing with complex situations, you can download CMC’s free e-book  MINDSET – 5 SIMPLE WAYS TO LOOK AT COMPLEX PROBLEMS and learn how to find a simple vantage point from which you can resolve challenges.   Your feedback is important. Choose from the following options: place a review in iTunes, click on “leave a comment” below, or send any comments along with your name and the show number to support@ctrchg.com   Listen to future episodes for our reply.

In this podcast Gary Monti, Jeffrey Cochran, and John Riley with Center for Managing Change discuss how your business is a reflection of you and how you view and interact with the world. They also provide tips for what to do so that you can get focused, get on track, and get profitable growth.   Points covered include: Jeffrey started the conversation with the need for a consultant to think about where they are with their OWN business. There’s a need to walk the walk. John talks about needing to level-set before even doing a small piece of work. It’s all about adding value. The challenge is success brings us to our next challenge, e.g., trying to expand or grow one’s company. Strengths have been exhausted. It’s time to lean into the more challenging part of oneself so in order to improve their organization right along with themselves. Personal lives are a reflection of what is going on in the business. There’s an urge to go out and “buy a piece of software” to cover all the difficulties that really are being caused by personally internal issues. So what does the journey look like? It’s about leaning into the chaos and complexity and admitting the rules are falling apart and a change in perspective is needed. The urge is to amplify what has worked in the past instead of making genuine changes. In a word, denial is the issue. Jeffrey gives a great example where unique code with no documentation was written and the owners were challenged in trying to figure out how to move forward. The move for the unique code was painful. A method for deconstructing denial is presented which gets into the huge challenge of dealing with fear. John talks about how dealing with fear when working software in the trenches there’s a potential for fear of having one’s hand shot off it it raised to state there’s a problem. Gary shifts the conversation to the work load associated with pulling one’s difficulties out of the company. People have adapted in order to survive and cry “unfair” when the company is re-structured in a healthy way. John brings up the denial mechanism associated with CEOs who say their door is always open…they fail to mention that employees don’t trust them. Jeffrey points out it will be reflected in excessive turnover and that it will take diligence and a lot of humility to turn the organization around. The conversation shifted to a stable, growing organization where everyone had a clear understanding of each other’s position. Sales personnel working throughout the company for up to 2 years in order to have a clear understanding of how genuine growth could be achieved. This means being honest about the reality of the situation. The challenges of self-organization or being proactive in dealing with problems are discussed with respect to the degree of trust present. When self-organization occurs the team can dive into The Why, The How, and The What. This gets to asking, “Why would someone want to work with me?” A critical form of denial that can be very destructive is purchasing the Silver Bullet product, e.g., software, or hiring/retaining the White Knight that will solve EVERYTHING! It can also show up in overestimating one’s strength in a situation and having tunnel vision which can lead to destructive decision-making. Hiring “Yes” men and -woman is another form of preserving denial. By owning your shortcomings and bringing everything to the surface leads to the best decision-making. It is a reflection of your culture. Allow for a culture of experimentation! Also, allow for the direct challenges you’ll experience where your shortcomings are brought to the surface. Be humble, own them, deal with them direction and take a leadership position by changing behaviors. There will be a payoff in terms of growth and abundance. Pay attention and maintain a healthy level of stress during the change process — not too lax and not to fast.   If you need help in gaining clarity when dealing with complex situations, you can download CMC’s free e-book  MINDSET – 5 SIMPLE WAYS TO LOOK AT COMPLEX PROBLEMS and learn how to find a simple vantage point from which you can resolve challenges.   You can contact Jeffrey, John, or Gary at support@ctrchg.com or call us at:   Jeffrey Cochran 614-565-8073 John Riley 614-778-1514 Gary Monti 614-226-1333   Your feedback is important. Choose from the following options: place a review in iTunes, click on “leave a comment” below, or send any comments along with your name and the show number to support@ctrchg.com   Listen to future episodes for our reply.

In this second interview with Dan Roman (https://www.linkedin.com/in/dansroman/) and I (https://www.linkedin.com/in/garywmonti/) cover potential religious wars between various methodologies…Waterfall, Agility, Product Management, (and a new methodology not mentioned in this podcast, Business Agility, as exemplified in Flow),  as well as whether or not there is value in gaining certification in the various methods. The podcast is sponsored by the Business Agility Conference Midwest being held November 6-7, 2019 in Columbus, OH. A form-follows-function approach is used in determining the value the various methods can provide in given situations. This includes use of hybrids. Collaboration is the key. The conversation opens with the reality many aspects of these various methods have been used throughout the ages, e.g., Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations. Also, the consequences are discussed of excessive belief in a one-and-only-one method and how it can lead to problems. The reality is when moving through the 5 stages of Complexity the frame-of-mind and associated problem-solving method needs to shift accordingly, e.g., a lean approach may not be the best way to proceed before methods have yet to be established. Dan goes through a brief history of the various methods and how they started as heuristics and were converted to dogma, dogma which can bias how historic events are viewed. The need to combine a humanistic approach, e.g., Carl Jung, along with a disciplined frame of mind in approaching innovation, e.g., TRIZ, can go a long way in deciding what approach will work best. In the end, it’s best to use the method that brings the most value to the customer. This must be done, though, with a clear focus on risk management. Collaboration is the key when looking at the people involved, degree of complexity, and the challenge associated with the client’s problem that needs to be solved. The conversation moves into the importance of the psychological approach when forming teams.  Vulnerability and team safety are key components that need to be addressed for efficiency and effectiveness. The next topics covered include: What makes for a good Agile coach? What influence does psychological Type have on the team’s ability to perform? What is each team members definition of “reward?” The importance of diversity in creating a team. Combining team dynamics with methodology. The impact of team size. Why egoless teams work best. Delegation of power and budget control to the team and associated power struggles. The need for a clear vision to guide the team and having that vision reflected in something measurable. This is in contrast to just starting with work packages and/or backlogs. A simple technique for tying work back to the vision statement and solving the customer’s problem. Having a strong team spirit vs following a “guru.” Certification is more a start to build a path to success rather than an end-point in itself. Methodologies should support, not shackle, the team in solving the customer’s problem. Focusing on appropriate principles and their application rather than searching for a gimmick. In the end, having a focus on the customer and what their problem is that needs solved is critical. This can be best done with Product Management which guides selecting the best method for moving forward.   Again, you can also connect with Dan on LinkedIn. Access the conference web site directly for any comments or questions, https://businessagilitymidwest.com/, or you can contact me at https://www.ctrchg.com/contact/   In line with Business Agility and dealing with complex situations, you can download my free e-book MINDSET – 5 SIMPLE WAYS TO LOOK AT COMPLEX PROBLEMS and learn how to find a simple vantage point from which you can resolve challenges.   Your feedback is important. Choose from the following options: place a review in iTunes, click on “leave a comment” below, send any comments along with your name and the show number to support@ctrchg.com or call us at 614-388-8917 and leave a message including your name, the podcast number and podcast title.   Listen to future episodes for our reply.

In Product Management - Part 2 my interview with Brett Buchanan, Product Management Consultant continues. Essentially, the Product Manager and the team have work with complexity to solve a jig-saw puzzle where the pieces aren’t initially designed, their shape may change over time, and stakeholders are pushing on the development with their own agendas. First, though, Brett explained the foundations of Product Management starting with the movement from Business Analysis (BA) to Agility with Product Management using Scrum. Agile allows for uncertainty, learning, and shifting your plan. This is more realistic than having a Product Requirements Document (PRD) which would never change. The Switch to Agility allows to more collaboration more frequently with the customer rather than building more, higher quality deliverables that don’t necessarily relate to the customers’ need and the problem that needs solved. Staying in touch with the customer increases the odds of success by shipping features on a routine basis for the customer to validate the deliverables which are then moved into the product pipeline. This approach also helps dramatically with risk management and time-to-market. For this to work the Product Manager has to be skilled in saying “No” in a respectful manner by filtering based on 4 criteria: What’s the problem? How Big is this problem? What part of the customer’s need does this address? Do we need more research? Getting prototypes in front of the customer can help save time and resources as well as the organization having a firm understanding of the customer’s problem and the customer stays comfortable with the progress. It also increases efficiencies by validating work on a daily basis. Brett includes an example of how McDonalds developed their processes and flows by graphically laying out on a tennis court how the restaurant work would flow. The conversation moved to organizational politics. Clear-headedness is critical. The Product Manager needs to always have a clear sense of measurable goals and what the product needs to do in order to deal with all the inputs and constraints stakeholders can provide. By staying on track via Product Management with Agility the team avoids simply becoming a feature factory caught up in Project Management that may drift from solving the customer’s problem. The flow based on Product Management is shown at Apple from initially starting with the iPad but then moving to the iPod then iPhone and then, after an eco-system has been created, the iPad. All of this works best when an egoless team frame-of-mind is used solely focused on the customer’s problem. Working this way allows the team to shift culturally from focusing on failure to “what did we learn.” This helps the team account for their behaviors in a proactive manner and maintain their autonomy. To do this effectively empathy for the pressures stakeholders have will help communicate in a straight-forward, constructive manner. This will allow for experimentation and acceptance of a non-linear path leading towards successfully solving the client’s problem. Simply put, everyone having top-of-mind the question, “How does my behavior solve the customer’s problem?” leads to success.   To learn more about Brett’s expertise as a Product Management consultant attend his presentation at Business Agility Conference Midwest Nov 6-7, 2019, in Columbus Ohio. You can also connect with him on LinkedIn. Access the conference web site directly for any comments or questions, https://businessagilitymidwest.com/, or you can contact me at https://www.ctrchg.com/contact/   In line with Business Agility and dealing with complex situations, you can download my free e-book MINDSET – 5 SIMPLE WAYS TO LOOK AT COMPLEX PROBLEMS and learn how to find a simple vantage point from which you can resolve challenges.   Your feedback is important. Choose from the following options: place a review in iTunes, click on “leave a comment” below, send any comments along with your name and the show number to support@ctrchg.com or call us at 614-388-8917 and leave a message including your name, the podcast number and podcast title.   Listen to future episodes for our reply.

Today’s episode in a panel discussion on Value, Success, and Joy with John Riley, An Agile coach and consultant (https://www.readysetagile.com/), and Jeffrey Cochran, Human Resource consultant (https://www.hrperspectives.org/) in terms of self, family, business, and your customer. At the core the customer focus answers the question “Who’s the customer and what problem do they have that needs solved?” The importance of collaboration and negotiation are discussed along with the damaging effects unresolved personal biases can have. This rolls into a shared vision within the team and with the customer so that a balance can be found between scope, time, and budget. Product development is an important component making Agile methodologies ideal  for providing incremental deliverables the customer can examine and determine the appropriate path for solving the problem. This leads to the creation of an agreed-upon mission statement which increases the odds of success for Human Resource efforts especially with regards to talent acquisitions. The conversation moved to the foundational relationship between product management (the Iron Triangle) and project management (the Triple Constraint) which together provide a basis for weaving all the intangibles together leading to the creation of a realistic plan, effective execution, and maximum value for the customer. An important consideration here is products are ever-evolving while projects have specific end-dates. This means collaboration with the customer and between product and project management is essential to avoid confusion. Agile methods are ideal in such situations. The importance of the 3 Pillars of Agility, transparency, inspection, and adaptation, were discussed. This is important in product development because some of the pieces of the puzzle are firmly designed, e.g., labor law, limits of the technology used, etc., and others are more fluid requiring constant experimentation and, again, close collaboration with the customer. Examples of the latter being screen design, product feature layout and ergonomics, and the ultimate feature set the product contains. This increase in complexity makes vulnerability among all the stakeholders involved a key consideration. Honesty, transparency, and authenticity are critical if the collaboration is to be successful. The conversation moved to the importance of vulnerability and collaboration to increase the probability of experiencing joy and thriving. This especially is required so that the team can fail forward fast in determining exactly what the customer needs to solve their problem. It also pushes on the client to do their part in creating a User’s Acceptance Test (UAT) that becomes the hub around which all work is performed and gauged for adequacy. The situation can get dicey if the UAT evolves over time. Stress can go up putting pressure on each individual’s ability to trust. An example was presented when hubris, arrogance, and a lack of honesty, humility, and team work are used to solve problems...France’s attempt to build the Panama Canal. A minimum of 30,000 workers died and France was brought to the edge of bankruptcy. This is on contrast to America’s approach where, among other things,  Dr. Walter Reed went in and determined solutions needed for the public health issues present. To encourage the listener the podcast closes with Jeffrey, John, and Gary each giving their individual sense of Value, Success, and Joy.   For Human Resource concerns contact Jeffrey Cochran at: https://www.hrperspectives.org/ 565-8073 jcochran@hrperspectives.org   For Agility needs including coaching contact John Riley at: https://www.readysetagile.com/ 664-9606 john@readysetagile.com   You can contact me, Gary Monti, at: https://www.ctrchg.com/ 614-388-8917 gary.monti@ctrchg.com   This episode  is sponsored by the Business Agility Midwest Conference, November 6-7, 2019, Columbus, OH. You can access the conference web site directly for any comments or questions, https://businessagilitymidwest.com/, or you can contact me at https://www.ctrchg.com/contact/   In line with Business Agility and dealing with complex situations, you can download my free e-book MINDSET – 5 SIMPLE WAYS TO LOOK AT COMPLEX PROBLEMS and learn how to find a simple vantage point from which you can resolve challenges.   Your feedback is important. Choose from the following options: place a review in iTunes, click on “leave a comment” below, send any comments along with your name and the show number to support@ctrchg.com or call us at 614-388-8917 and leave a message including your name, the podcast number and podcast title.   Listen to future episodes for our reply.

Dan Roman, PMP, PMI-ACP, shares his thoughts on deciding how best to move an IT project forward. Rather than being wed to one methodology he uses a form-follows-function approach because of the realities that must be addressed with a project of any complexity. Topics covered include: Agility vs Waterfall vs Hybrid The Triple Constraint Projects vs Product Development: releases vs incremental sprints When agility does and doesn’t work Agile Enterprise vs Enterprise Agility Risk Management: politics, superheroes, failing forward, and managing an agile team   Dan closes out with a reference to the seminal article by Takeuchi & Nonaka (https://hbr.org/1986/01/the-new-new-product-development-game) on product development with emphasis on the “limitations of agility” portion of the article.   This episode  is sponsored by the Business Agility Midwest Conference, November 6-7, 2019, Columbus, OH. You can access the conference web site directly for any comments or questions, https://businessagilitymidwest.com/, or you can contact me at https://www.ctrchg.com/contact/   In line with Business Agility and dealing with complex situations, you can download my free e-book MINDSET – 5 SIMPLE WAYS TO LOOK AT COMPLEX PROBLEMS and learn how to find a simple vantage point from which you can resolve challenges.   Your feedback is important. Choose from the following options: place a review in iTunes, click on “leave a comment” below, send any comments along with your name and the show number to support@ctrchg.com or call us at 614-388-8917 and leave a message including your name, the podcast number and podcast title.   Listen to future episodes for our reply.

In today’s episode I interview Bart Weaver, Charlie Kennedy, and Brian Link - founders of the Business Agility Midwest conference to be held in Columbus, Ohio, Nov 5 & 6, 2019. Below are the timestamps for the subjects covered as well as links to the conference web site and to the monthly Meetup in Columbus, OH. Access the conference web site directly for any comments or questions, https://businessagilitymidwest.com/, or you can contact me at https://www.ctrchg.com/contact/   timestamp (start) notes 00:00 Conference promo 01:18 intros: Gary, Charlie, Bart, Brian 03:51 Experience in delivering product and reaching goals has led them to Business Agility being the best method. 04:28 Definition: What’s Agility? What’s Business Agility? 05:38 Many definitions for Business Agility. 06:27 Team prioritizes customer’s problems and delivers against those problems. Team = Technology + EVERYONE necessary to build the solution. 07:28 Build a product team focused on solving the business problem first... “Design Thinking” 08:54 Cooperation at 3 levels: Portfolio/Middle Management/Product Teams. Traditional silos need to be drawn in to the team. 11:03 Uniqueness of this conference & The Business Agility Institute - function and format. 16:11 Brett Buchanan - Product Management workshop day 2 16:34 Keynote Speakers/how Executives benefit/practical workshops 18:45 Pre-conference Flow Academy:  Fin Goulding/Hadyn Shaughnessy November 4 & 5 21:15 Cultural Issues, Organizational Development, Team Safety, Senior Stakeholder Buy-in 24:32 Agile Practitioners, Human Resources, Marketing 25:31 Product Owner & Product Management 26:18 Non-IT Practitioners, Manufacturing, and Business Agility 28:26 Conference website, signing up, schedule, speakers, etc. 29:35 Women In Agile, 1/2 day session Nov 5 31:20 sign up, comments, questions - go to https://businessagilitymidwest.com/ 33:40 Join the Meetup! https://www.meetup.com/Columbus-Business-Agility/     In line with Business Agility and dealing with complex situations, you can download my free e-book MINDSET – 5 SIMPLE WAYS TO LOOK AT COMPLEX PROBLEMS and learn how to find a simple vantage point from which you can resolve challenges.   Your feedback is important. Choose from the following options: place a review in iTunes, click on “leave a comment” below, send any comments along with your name and the show number to support@ctrchg.com or call us at 614-388-8917 and leave a message including your name, the podcast number and podcast title.   Listen to future episodes for our reply.

Business has a personal side, especially if it is privately held or family-owned. In line with that we have today’s topic - Estate Transition. We have a panel of experts who represent 3 important professions and who work as a team to help insure your life’s transitions lead to your desired goals. They work with clients to get through the personal challenges along with those associated with possessions, real estate, and financial planning.   Our experts comprise: Dawn Lehman of DM Home Transitions LLC Keith Sharick of HER Realtors Parker Salata of Foresters Financial   There is a lot of good information in this podcast so a time stamp chart of the various topics is provided below.   TIME STAMP     TIME STAMP TOPIC 1m 0s Introduction 3m 56s How we came together & created Lunch N Learns 5m 20s Adding value to our lunch and learns 7m 17s Addressing client’s struggles with anxiety and “not knowing” 8m 48s Being proactive with your transition to eliminate the fear 13m 8s Services vary with the client’s stage in life 13m 59s Listening to people and guiding them to the right person 16m 15s Downsizing in order to transition 17m 0s Excitement and relief from clearing out your space 22m 12s The importance of direct, detailed questions 24m 10s Identify fears and address them 31m 11s The personal approach over the transactional approach 33m 13s It’s their life and memories - client’s need for time 36m 22s Senior approach vs Millennial approach 38m 37s We put ourselves in the client’s shoes to understand better 40m 37s Contact information       You can reach today’s panelists at:   Dawn Lehman 614-800-8156   dmhometransitions@gmail.com    www.dmhometransitions.com Keith Sharick 614-390-9317    Keith.Sharick@HERRealtors.com https://www.herrealtors.com/keithsharick Parker Salata 330-224-5147   parker.salata@foresters.com www.forestersfinancial.com   This show was brought to you by our two sponsors:   My free e-book MINDSET – 5 SIMPLE WAYS TO LOOK AT COMPLEX PROBLEMS and learn how to find a simple vantage point from which you can resolve challenges. “8 Steps From Chaos To Clarity and Calm: CEO Advanced Training” a course for business owners dealing with unforeseen problems that have surfaced as a result of success. For more information go to https://www.ctrchg.com/ceo-advanced-training/   Your feedback is important. Choose from the following options: place a review in iTunes, click on “leave a comment” below, send any comments along with your name and the show number to support@ctrchg.com or call us at 614-388-8917 and leave a message including your name, the podcast number and podcast title.   Listen to future episodes for our reply.

Our guest is Urko Wood, president and founder of Reveal Growth Consultants. He helps companies find and capitalize on the best opportunities for innovation and growth using the “jobs-to-be-done” (JTBD) innovation approach. His promises to increase new product success rates 2 – 5 times over industry averages to over 80%. As you will see, a key aspect of his success is redefining common terms for innovation.   Urko states that if leadership teams want to drive innovation and growth as a repeatable business process, then they must establish a common language and process for innovation. This means getting clear about: What steps innovation entails and why executing them in the right sequence matters The difference between a customer need and a product/service solution The difference between innovation and creativity How to redefine your markets from the customers’ point of view, and more.   Time Stamps:   time stamp notes 0h 4m 16s Why innovation does not start with a good idea 0h 5m 25s “People don’t want to buy a ¼” drill; they want a ¼” hole!” 0h 7m 8s Important unsatisfied needs are opportunities for innovation and growth 0h 13m 29s What is a “customer need?” 0h 22m 10s Change management and innovation 0h 25m 9s How to redefine markets for innovation 0h 29m 29s How to size a market for something that doesn’t exist yet 0h 37m 53s How to know where value is migrating in a market 0h 41m 58s “Stump the Prof:” Urko addresses two challenges 0h 46m 20s A key reason why Steve Jobs was so successful. (Note: Urko pointed out that he misspoke when he said Steve Jobs was talking about the iPhone in a famous exchange with a confrontational stakeholder. The year was 1997 and Jobs was referring to another Apple product). 0h 53m 2s Innovation defined 0h 54m 41s Debunking the misbelief that “customers cannot tell us what they want” 0h 59m 19s 3 “workhorse” growth strategies JTBD makes possible 1h 4m 44s How to establish a valued and unique position in the market 1h 9m 53s A simple way that any business can use to drive innovation and growth 1h 11m 17s Impediments to innovation: conflating two experiments 1h 14m 45s What Thomas Edison really was doing during his 10,000 failed experiments 1h 18m 50s 2 key questions that elicit customer needs in any conversation 1h 20m 42s Another misconception: innovation is inherently risky     For more information you can contact Urko at: uw@revealgrowth.com https://revealgrowth.com/ 614-895-7680   This show was brought to you by two sponsors:   My free e-book MINDSET – 5 SIMPLE WAYS TO LOOK AT COMPLEX PROBLEMS and learn how to find a simple vantage point from which you can resolve challenges. “8 Steps From Chaos To Clarity and Calm: CEO Advanced Training” a course for business owners dealing with unforeseen problems that have surfaced as a result of success. For more information go to https://www.ctrchg.com/ceo-advanced-training/   Your feedback is important. Choose from the following options: place a review in iTunes, click on “leave a comment” below, send any comments along with your name and the show number to support@ctrchg.com or call us at 614-388-8917 and leave a message including your name, the podcast number and podcast title.   Listen to future episodes for our reply.

In this episode I want to talk about the five types of business challenges we all experience. A key component to running your business, a clear head, can be challenging to maintain. This is especially true when experiencing success. This may sound odd but it is the reality of the situation. Growth and profitability take us to the next set of challenges that must be addressed in order to sustain. Being able to focus is essential if problems are going to be solved and success achieved. This blog covers what the appropriate focus is for five different situations. Now, I am a big believer everything is simple when the right vantage point is found. The trick is having the right frame of mind which is a lens through which the situation is viewed. Here are five frames of mind from Complexity Theory that are quite useful for both viewing situations and determining what the general course of action should be: Simple Complicated Complex Chaotic Random Let’s go through them. See which of them apply to your situation. Simple.  With simple the rules work. The problem is out-of-bounds behavior occurring. You simply reference the policies/procedures and rules you have in place and get back to doing things right and achieve the deliverables. This is where money is made unless your company is being paid to explore the other areas listed below. Consequently, driving to simple as much as possible is essential. Complicated. With complicated the rules work but the problem is there are several sets from which to choose.  For example, you may have a core product, such as sheet metal manufacturing, wedding photography, consulting services, home repair, course offerings, etc., that you are willing to modify based on specific client needs. The challenge is deciding how, exactly, those specific needs are to be met. Complex. With complex the problem is new thinking is required if you are going to get back to simple. Here the rules, to some extent, aren’t working and something new is needed. Based on client needs you and your team look at the existing rules and keep what works, drop what doesn’t, and add new rules specific to the situation. Chaotic. With chaotic there are general thoughts but the problem is there are no specific, implementable rules. Once you go one level down below the strategic level organization disappears. One is left only with intention. These intentions may be quite strong and there may be a great deal of belief in future success but, again, the situation “has no legs.” There is reliance on the team and all stakeholders believing that as a team you can make this happen. Random. With random there is just a bunch of ideas with no particular structure. This is what I call the “coffee shop” stage where ideas are being kicked around and there is a lot of brainstorming and searching for options and possibilities. This is a sunk cost. In the next podcast I’ll talk about how to structure a solution for each of these 5 types of challenges. Download my free e-book MINDSET – 5 SIMPLE WAYS TO LOOK AT COMPLEX PROBLEMS and learn how to find a simple vantage point from which you can resolve challenges.   For more information on the “8 Steps From Chaos To Clarity and Calm: CEO Advanced Training” go to https://www.ctrchg.com/ceo-advanced-training/   Your feedback is important. Choose from the following options: place a review in iTunes, click on “leave a comment” below, send any comments along with your name and the show number to support@ctrchg.com or call us at 614-388-8917 and leave a message including your name, the podcast number and podcast title.   Listen to future episodes for our reply.

Today we talk about victimhood with our returning expert David Wetmore, a life coach with years of experience. David has been a previous guest sharing his knowledge and experience with regards to Life Coaching and Stress Management. David starts by explaining the difference between being victimized and victimhood. One can be victimized once (the act, e.g., breaking a leg) while one can practice victimhood as many times as they like and stay in that state. The key is for the individual to decide if they are in charge of their life or the circumstances and events they experience are. David’s comments from the second podcast on stress management are reviewed - does one have an inside-out or outside-in approach to life. Even detrimental experiences can be opportunities to grow. An example was given of a surgery patient proactively exploring what they could do before/after surgery in order to “own” the surgery and move forward with their life. The discussion turns to the consequences of someone taking on the victimhood role: 1. a sense of neediness sets in and there is a demanding the outside world take responsibility for improving the spirits of the victim. “Needy is creepy!”, in both senses of the word - expanding and irritating. 2. the victim has to make the decision to take the inside-out approach and take responsibility for themselves. No one can do that for them, no matter how smart the helping person is. 3. a blindness sets in where the victim doesn’t see the consequences of their holding on to victimhood. 4. If the feelings persist the sense of victimhood and lowering of self-esteem go hand-in-hand and intensify. 5. the victim can become aggressive feeling that no one is understanding and taking care of them. Viktor Frankl and his concept of catharsis was discussed, how people try to exorcise themselves by projecting out into the world their inward, destructive feelings. David talked about how comfort figures into the situation. There can be a settling into the feeling of victimhood and the belief there is nothing one can do, which provides a form of comfort. By surrendering to the feeling a sense of not being responsible for one’s actions can set in. As an example the Jonestown incident is discussed. The conversation shifted to magical thinking and its negative impact that makes a victimhood frame-of-mind even worse. David goes on to talk about how this can lead to a withdrawal, a minimalistic approach to life which makes situations even worse. Appreciation for what one has drops to zero. He has found this cuts across all classes of people and incomes in terms of believing the world owes you something. The wealthy person convinced of victimhood can be just as demanding as a poor person. When experiencing it with a client David addresses it in an open and loving fashion. Rather than calling out someone as a victim David uses his approach of encouraging the person to get “outside the box.” (this is an application of his inside-out approach.) No matter how enlightened we all live in a box and we can’t see outside it. It’s the coach’s function to show the person what the coach sees outside the box and encourage the person to look for themselves. If they can’t see they probably aren’t going to be a client much longer since they believe they can pay a coach and/or the outside world to once again come and bail them out. The key to success is the client being more forward-thinking. There’s a willingness to address the pain and discomfort associated with dropping the attitude they’ve had for so long and look to see all the opportunity available to them. The acknowledgement is key! Gary asked David in what state his clients come to him. Most are self-motivated. He’s only had a couple clients whose boss suggested they see somebody and paid for it. David has had some clients who came to him to get motivated but that doesn’t work well since the motivation is an “inside job.” That is work better done in a therapist’s office where the reason-why for not being motivated can be explored. The discussion turned to how life coaching meshes with change management. A common misbelief that brings clients to David is the belief that if the accomplish that one “something,” if they get to some point in life everything will be fine, as if life is a destination. He does get clients who have been victimized but don’t know how to deal with how it’s effecting them. The difference between humility and humiliation and how that plays into a sense of health or victimhood is discussed, including a reference to the Dalai Lama’s book The Art of Finding Happiness at Work, where he talks about the reality we can only be on a small place anyway (humility) so let go of someone pushing you there (humiliation). In terms of David’s inside-out model humility is “inside” and humiliation is “outside.” David reminds the listener of a quote from Einstein, “We can’t solve problems at the same level we created them.” David closes with the reminder that good coaching is just a good conversation where people sit and genuinely listen. The best coaching conversations have been ones that are in the flow of life. For more information you can contact David at: www.davidwetmore.com (c) 513 543 6596 dave@davidwetmore.com For more information on the “8 Steps From Chaos To Clarity and Calm: CEO Advanced Training” go to https://www.ctrchg.com/ceo-advanced-training/ Your feedback is important. Choose from the following options: • place a review in iTunes, • click on “leave a comment” below, • send any comments along with your name and the show number to support@ctrchg.com or • call us at 614-388-8917 and leave a message including your name, the podcast number and podcast title. Listen to future episodes for our reply.

In today's episode, Jeff Elder, an expert in inbound marketing, returns to talk about authenticity and the use of storytelling and brand development. He will also talk about considerations one must make when looking at the website itself. The first point Jeff makes is the importance of just being oneself, including both the positive and the negative. In other words, stop pretending to be perfect. For example, he inadvertently had deleted his website, and he ended up using that as a learning experience to identify issues that were getting in the way which he needed to address in order to get back on track. There were various technical considerations that went along with the problem, but the important point was, Jeff decided to own the responsibility for the mistake that had occurred. Why is this important? People connect with honesty. Honesty promotes trust, and trust is extremely important in developing one's business. This is critical, because there's a constant battle to develop one's business in a highly competitive environment. Since consumers are careful and do more research now, trust is critical to get them to consider your product. One of the best ways to develop trust is through storytelling. People don't care about how great you are. They need authenticity. Tell a story, but underneath it all, have the story be their story. Doing this causes the prospective client to go, "Wow. You really understand me." The story paints a picture of where your audience is. The goal is, tell your story in a way that's actually telling the client's story. You want the client to say, "This content was really written just for me." In addition to the website, being honest with regards to storytelling spills over into social media, where you just want to be yourself. When it comes to your story, there's two options. You can outsource it and have someone manage your account for you, or you can do it yourself. If you generally want to be authentic, it's better to do it yourself, because your passion will infuse the social media posts, something that cannot be outsourced. Jeff tells his story as to the medical battles he fought from birth, in which he overcame to get to where he is today as an inbound marketer. He's learned to focus on being authentic. In terms of practical application, the vulnerability component means you want to let the client inside your business, rather than trying to sell them. Jeff uses the metaphor of imagining someone on a very first date, asking the date to marry them. That would be extremely off-putting. That's what happens when we try to sell people from the very beginning. What's better is to just show them who you are and see if you have anything of interest to them. This is what inbound marketing is all about. The discussion turned to brand. When it comes to your brand and managing your brand, you need to decide what impact you want to have. For example, the impact Jeff wants to have is, "I want business owners to succeed." In combining the concept of brand with storytelling, there are three components. In the story, you want to frame it so that the client is the hero, the problem is the villain, and your company and what your company offers is the catalyst that will help the hero succeed. Success, then, becomes a breakthrough. For example, one may be stuck, but they can be determined to break through and make things happen, telling themselves "I can do this." It's this drive for authentic behavior that motivates people. Jeff tells a story about when he revealed the trauma he experienced from birth, where he was expected to die, let alone be able to speak, and how he worked forward today to where he's a marketing expert. He relates how after telling the story someone who was very sales oriented came up to him and asked, "So how much do you think your sales are going to increase because you told your story?" The stark insensitivity of this question shows how wrongheaded the selling approach is. It's all about authenticity and taking action and bringing it into business. Now, it is important to be prepared that when you choose to be vulnerable, there will be people that will tend to attack, much like the salesperson asking Jeff, "Well, how much business do you think you're going to get by having told your story?" What supersedes that is the reality that by being authentic and being vulnerable and knowing your business and being disciplined, that will lead you to become a thought leader. People follow thought leaders. You attract your clients. You don't tell them what to do. If you're having a hard time trying to figure out what your story is, simply get a sheet of paper and start writing about yourself. Write your biography from as early as you can remember, and notice where your strengths are and that about which you are quite good. Once you've written the story, look for the components that overlap with your business, and now you're prepared to start writing your story in a way that your prospective clients will resonate with. All this leads to the importance of avoiding compartmentalizing your life. Just be who you are wherever you go. Bring that frame of mind into your storytelling. Once you've done the above-mentioned writing, pick someone to read your "About Page," someone who would be an ideal client, and look for their feedback. In fact, see if you can find several people to read your story if it relates to business, and get their feedback and see how you can incorporate it to improve your ability to display your authenticity, your willingness to be vulnerable, and the discipline that you bring to your business that will help your prospective clients. You can reach Jeff at: jeff@syncthree.com https://www.syncthree.com/ or in Instagram at jeldera For more information on the “8 Steps From Chaos To Clarity and Calm: CEO Advanced Training” go to https://www.ctrchg.com/ceo-advanced-training/ Your feedback is important. Choose from the following options: • place a review in iTunes, • click on “leave a comment” below, • send any comments along with your name and the show number to support@ctrchg.com or • call us at 614-388-8917 and leave a message including your name, the podcast number and podcast title. Listen to future episodes for our reply.

Today our guest expert is Jeff Elder who works in inbound marketing. Jeff will cover two topics today: • a general understanding of inbound marketing, as well as • his journey from programming to becoming a marketer via web design. Jeff describes his journey to his work as an inbound marketer from way back when. He formed a web design company with a close friend in 2008. Their goal? Commitment to being the best. Eventually during his web design journey, he realized that other factors were entering into the internet, especially with regards to the generation of revenue. This included social media. Jeff began an in-depth study of buying behaviors and how that would work on the internet. He focused on HubSpot's content. Eventually, HubSpot reached out to him and asked if he wanted to become a partner, and he did. Jeff contrasted this approach with traditional outbound marketing where mass mailings are performed or ads are broadcast on TV, radio, et cetera. Jeff goes on to describe how with inbound marketing you position yourself to be found on a search engine, as users try to find solutions to problems that they experience. He talks about how this approach, inbound marketing, is also referred to as permission-based marketing, because the prospect has complete control of the conversation, and you as a provider only deepen your relationship based on gaining that permission. The way to do this is by being the authority and teaching rather than selling. Jeff described the three step approach that he uses with his inbound marketing approach. The three steps comprise: • awareness, • consideration, and • decision The perspective customer first becomes AWARE that they have a problem, which they may or may not be able to define. So they proceed to go to the second stage, consideration. Then they do research to see what's available to both define their problem and find a solution. Consequently, when this research is completed, the perspective customer is 75% through the decision-making process. This leads to the third and final step, decision-making. As an inbound marketer, there are three steps in your sales process: • listen • diagnose • prescribe. Jeff goes on to describe how HubSpot has changed the function of the sales person to now be more of a guide. The best way to be this guide is to create content, content that helps the perspective client define their problem as well as define a solution. This approach works well with Google's current frame of mind, where Google is working to be more human. Google wants to provide content created by providers to help Google's clients get the best results and the best solutions. The question is why would Google do this? The answer is this is how they're able to show credibility with Google's advertisers. Jeff goes on to describe the relationship between the pillar page and the content page. In the old days, searches were driven by keywords and really were context-independent and consequently could make a search difficult. Now Google reviews content based on intent as well as specifics in a piece of content. This allows Google to tailor searches for an individual user's needs. The pillar page is basically a long document on your website that defines your intent, context within which you work, and the specific content that you provide. Links are made to specific content, creating a web of solutions that shows the site visitor both your authenticity and authenticity. You can reach Jeff at: jeff@syncthree.com https://www.syncthree.com/ or in Instagram at jeldera For more information on the “8 Steps From Chaos To Clarity and Calm: CEO Advanced Training” go to https://www.ctrchg.com/ceo-advanced-training/ Your feedback is important. Choose from the following options: • place a review in iTunes, • click on “leave a comment” below, • send any comments along with your name and the show number to support@ctrchg.com or • call us at 614-388-8917 and leave a message including your name, the podcast number and podcast title. Listen to future episodes for our reply.

In this, our second interview with David Wetmore, Life Coach, David talks about stress management. In the first podcast, 0009 WWC Life Coaching – David Wetmore Interview, David works to connect what is going on inside the person with what is going on outside the person. David starts by stating stress is a feeling. He uses a metaphor of walking on a board. However, as we raise the board and make it progressively narrower the feeling one gets is what David is calling stress. To support that stress is only a feeling he refers to two people having the same job and one loving it and the other being totally miserable, saying it’s the job that is making him feel bad. When there’s acceptance the stress is self-induced then freedom to act and do something about it sets in. Otherwise, one is trapped in an relentless effort to control the world around them. This can lead to hurting oneself or those around you. The question surfaced, “Why should an employer worry about whether or not employees are stressed if the employer is getting the money they want from the situation?” Answer: The better his people feel the better his business will be. It will increase efficiency and productivity. Also, when employees are appreciated in this manner trust increases which is an important asset to have when difficulties surface. Asked about how to reduce stress when faced with the unfairness of life David stated that success in this regard is more of a state of being rather than something to do. He rolls back to his initial statement that stress is more about how we allow ourselves to think, which is something about which we can do something. The more we realize stress is something we have on the inside the greater the odds we’ll have much less of it. The conversation switched to meditation and yoga, which are quite popular right now. David talks about how they are being used to treat symptoms rather than used to dissolve the stress completely. Yoga and meditation are for accelerating your well being. So, it’s not the stressful situations themselves but the thinking about them that creates sustained stress within. This is not to say there are not external stressful events. Rather, it’s the continued thinking about would could or could not happen in a reactive manner that creates sustained stress. The goal is to get away from focusing on something external. With success there is the realization there is nothing that one needs stress release from. It’s all about letting go of the stressful thinking and just being. This led to looking at the definition of “Yoga” and how it refers to unity within rather than unity without. It started as a meditative technique. David discusses how Viktor Frankl (Man’s Search for Meaning) influenced him. Frankl emphasized that it’s our thinking that is the source of stress. Even though his family was killed, he was starved and tortured, the Nazis could not take away his mind. He was always free inside his own mind. Frankl noted that some of the prisoners were worse to other prisoners than were the guards. David shared his basketball metaphor which serves as a great example of our thinking being the source of our feelings. Imagine the winning point is scored at the closing buzzer. Half the people are elated and the other half are sorrowful. It’s the exact same event. All that differs is the chosen response, whether or not an expectation is met. The expectation is all about one’s thinking. In closing, David stresses that we never get rid of stress completely but it is something we can aspire to do. What we can do through daily practice is reduce the intensity of the stress response and return to a state of equilibrium much faster. There are real, stressful situations that are just a fact of life and we need to deal with them. The key is finding what one is hung up on and dissolve that connection. This is true even in painful situations. The pain is real, the stressful suffering is optional. For more information you can contact David at: www.davidwetmore.com (c) 513 543 6596 dave@davidwetmore.com For more information on the “8 Steps From Chaos To Clarity and Calm: CEO Advanced Training” go to https://www.ctrchg.com/ceo-advanced-training/ Your feedback is important. Choose from the following options: • place a review in iTunes, • click on “leave a comment” below, • send any comments along with your name and the show number to support@ctrchg.com or • call us at 614-388-8917 and leave a message including your name, the podcast number and podcast title. Listen to future episodes for our reply.

In this, our third interview with Jeffrey Cochran, Human Resource Consultant (https://www.hrperspectives.org/).The initial interview covered legal classifications for work performed, https://www.ctrchg.com/0002-wwc-are-you-a-solopreneur-or-an-employee/, and assessing if one is a solopreneur or actually an employee. In his second interview, https://www.ctrchg.com/0011-wwc-human-resource-law-jeffrey-cochran-interview/, Jeffrey told us about the importance of complying with Human Resource Laws and some of what to watch for. Today’s podcast was recorded at the gym Jeffrey owns where he takes work-life balance seriously…encouraging his clients to take complete care of themselves, not just their business. This can be tough when, according to Elon Musk, “You have to put in 80-100 work-weeks.” With that approach, though, the solopreneur/entrepreneur is going to burn out. That is why Jeffrey recommends stepping back and structuring a work-life balance. Jeffrey referred to an Inc Magazine article referencing an study stating that employees who felt they had a good work-life balance were 21% more productive. That 21% boost not only supports getting more work done it also creates a space for working out and taking care of oneself. He also referenced another study by SHRM (https://www.shrm.org/), the Society for Human Resource Management, stating that 25% of people who feel they have no work-life balance plan to leave that company - a number that becomes increasingly significant as the size of the company gets smaller and smaller. On the flip side, the same study saw an increase in employee retention of 89% when there were flex hours and a greater sense of work-life balance. The conversation moved on from the “Why?” of establishing work-life balance to the “What?” and the “How?” Methods include: • flex-time, with core hours around some set time, e.g., 9 AM to 3 PM • a 4-day work-week of 4 10-hour days Applying for loans from the Small Business Administration (https://www.ctrchg.com/0003-wwc-small-business-financing/ and https://www.sba.gov/) life-style is one of the areas addressed. They don’t want to loan money to someone on the edge based on over-extension. More and more small businesses are rolling larger businesses’ approaches to work-life balance into their operations: • mandatory sabbaticals. Cell phone off, locked out of the system for that period of time. This also helps prevent fraud by being able to see if there are behavioral changes in the organization when someone is on sabbatical. So how do you do this with a smaller business: • at the individual level, let go of responding immediately to everything. Use a “24 hour” rule stating you’ll get back to the person within 24 hours. • gauge the value of each activity. Was it worth missing your anniversary dinner with your spouse? When was the last time you actually hung out with friends? • when you’re not fresh can you actually do damage when trying to stay on top of everything? The fact is mentioned that when one pushes to hard and over-stresses the brain gets rest by shutting down portions at a time, rotating what part is “down” at any given time. Pushing to work at this time is a formula for disaster. • discipline in terms of calendar management is critical. Jeffrey references Ben Franklin a lot because his methods for managing one’s life are still applicable today. Franklin addressed his attitude along with the actual events on the calendar. Remember to include some flexibility so that there is contingency time available for the inevitable unforeseen events that occur. Jeffrey includes what he calls “study hall time” so there is space for him to invest in himself and his business. He uses it to read articles he’s bookmarked on the internet and other such activities that, when allowed to interrupt flow through the day, can be detrimental. Make sure to include personal events as well so they don’t become forgotten after-thoughts. Comparisons are made to the European approach to work schedules. Jeffrey offered a great term! PDT…Productivity Dense Period. Gary referred to Twyla Tharp’s (https://www.amazon.com/Creative-Habit-Learn-Use-Life/dp/1480589837) advice to save 10% each day for the next. By consuming all of one’s energy on one day, or even over-extending, the odds are high that the next 1-3 days will have low productivity. Jeffrey referred to a habit DaVinci had...simply taking naps throughout the day when swamped with work that had to get done. Separating home and work can help with work-life balance. If working out of the house use a separate space that is detached from all the home-life activities, such as laundry, that can be tempting to perform but which take away from the PDT. Be able to shut the door and just focus on your work. Turn off e-mail notification and anything else that can generate asynchronous interrupts which can break your train of thought. Schedule when to deal with them. Remember, every focal point in your life is present in the house, potentially making it difficult to work. Get up and get dressed for work. Even if working out of the house sometimes a shirt-and-tie approach will help one focus. Co-working spaces are another option where, for a reasonable fee, a drop-in desk can be used providing a work destination. It can also be used as a mailing address plus give one access to high-speed internet. If no space is available consider contacting your Chamber of Commerce and see if they will support starting a co-working space. Isolation is discussed. It is important to keep in mind how the degree of isolation can affect one’s ability to work. The loss of social fabric by being working alone can not be over-stated. It’s one of the main reasons people leave working on their own. Jeffrey talks about his experience as co-owner of Reform Total Fitness and how people will say, “I don’t have time to work out!” …but they had time to watch “Game of Thrones” for 3 hours! Jeffrey refers to Tim Ferriss (https://tim.blog/) and how in his interviews with business leaders over 80% meditate. Also, As the level of distraction goes up and the belief there just isn’t enough time then, while seeming counterintuitive, it is better to meditate more in order to maximize focus and productivity. Jeffrey references an article in the Harvard Business Review entitled, “Why Some Men Pretend to Work 80 Hour Weeks.” It addressed the fact that managers couldn’t tell the difference between people that worked 80hours/week and those who pretended to work 80 hours/week. For more information you can contact Jeffrey at: https://www.hrperspectives.org/ (c) 614-565-8073 jcochran@hrperspectives.org For more information on the “8 Steps From Chaos To Clarity and Calm: CEO Advanced Training” go to https://www.ctrchg.com/ceo-advanced-training/ Your feedback is important. Choose from the following options: • place a review in iTunes, • click on “leave a comment” below, • send any comments along with your name and the show number to support@ctrchg.com or • call us at 614-388-8917 and leave a message including your name, the podcast number and podcast title. Listen to future episodes for our reply.

Today’s interview is with Jeffrey Cochran, Human Resource Consultant (https://www.hrperspectives.org/), and will cover Human Resource Law compliance. Jeffrey specializes in working with small companies. The initial interview covered legal classifications for work performed, https://www.ctrchg.com/0002-wwc-are-you-a-solopreneur-or-an-employee/, and assessing if one is a solopreneur or actually an employee. Jeffrey will talk about the alphabet soup of government regulations. He starts with a caution to all employers when it comes to Human Resource law, if it isn’t documented it doesn’t exist and never occurred. It is important to keep good records. Today’s conversation will go back and forth between strategic and tactical considerations. Future podcasts will drive to deeper detail. One point of confusion is that not only can there be differences between federal, state, and local laws a given law may have contradictory terms within it. Laws frequently don’t get vetted properly before being passed. Having an expert familiar with the regulations and their variances can give one peace of mind. Common regulatory cutoffs are based on the number of employees a company has. But going against even this approach is the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) which requires compliance if any of the following criteria are met: • If a Federal, State, or Local organization • If a medical service organization • educational institutions from pre-school to university • revenues for an annual report. If over $500,000 in revenue These criteria can change over time so it is important to keep track of FLSA and other HR laws. FLSA has an exempt/non-exempt test which looks primarily at whether or not hourly employees are being paid properly, e.g., overtime. Keep in mind the break point between hourly and salary can change over time. This means an employee may have been categorized as exempt, “salary,” but an increase in the point that separates hourly from salary may throw that employee into the non-exempt, “hourly,” category. This means overtime may need to be paid where it wasn’t before. A ripple effect may be re-organizing the company to save money. Jeffrey recommends following the guidelines for larger organizations even if you currently are exempt. This way, when you do grow past that tipping point your organization is already in compliance and an HR upheaval is avoided. Employee count is important as well. One to fourteen being the size of “small business.” The Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) requires filing an I-9 for every employee hired. It declares they are legal to work in the United States. It is easy to fill it out incorrectly. Fines can range from $178 to $3563. The Employment Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA) requires giving any retirement plan or benefits program information to all employees. This helps protect employees. The Federal Insurance Contribution Act (FICA) is another area. Using a qualified payroll company should take care of this. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) insure employees aren’t discriminated against. This includes the Equal Pay Act (EPA) saying that male and female employees must be paid the same amount for the same job. To explain the current pay discrepancy between men and women requires a separate podcast where we can dive deeper. Experience and/or tenure can be one explanation, i.e., a male employee may have 10 years with a company and the female employee with similar position may have only 1 year. Keep in mind that once your company exceeds 100 employees the EEOC collects information on position/salary/gender looking for discrimination. They do not look at tenure. Make sure to have your documentation in order. Having a defined payroll structure prior to hiring helps avoid a lot of issues associated with EEOC. Fast-moving companies may want to consider retaining a fractional HR consultant who can take care of these issues and you can stay focused on your core competencies. Family-owned businesses need to make sure that relatives and non-relatives are treated equally in terms of employment and compensation. Other acts include: • The Fair and Accurate Credit Transaction Act - dispose carefully of consumer credit information • The Employee Polygraph Protection Act - can’t use a lie-detector on employees except in certain extreme circumstances. • The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) - protects medical information of individuals. If information is gained through another legal entity, e.g., workman’s compensation, then you can’t talk about it. ⁃ It’s best to keep medical information in separate files from, say, employee reviews, to insure medical information is kept confidential. • Workmen’s Compensation - even with 1 employee Workmen’s Comp must be paid. All states, except for Ohio, allow companies to provide Workmen’s Compensation Insurance through private insurance. Ohio’s plan is state funded. With 11 employees OSHA requires posting your OSHA 300 Log. It shows the accidents you’ve had over that last 12 months. All fo the above gets added to as the number of employees increases. With 15 or more employees ADA, GINA, and Title 7 are added: • Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA) - can get a job if they can do the job with or without reasonable accommodations. Having a good job description is important. Pregnant women can be included in ADA. It’s primarily designed, though, for a chronic situation. If a substantial material cost would be incurred for the disabled person to work then there is no requirement to employ them. General access to a facility does require being ADA-compliant. • Genetic Information Non-Disclosure Act (GINA) - an employer cannot discriminate against an employee based on genetic information, e.g., a family history of cancer. • Title 7 - Prohibits sexual harassment and other forms of sex discrimination in the work place. It also covers race, religion, color, and national origin. This works in conjunction with the Equal Pay Act (EPA) mentioned above. With 20 or more employees: • Age Discrimination and Employment Act (ADEA) - Employees or applicants 40 or older cannot be discriminated against. • Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act (COBRA) - Continuation of benefits. If company-funded health plan can continue for 18 months with plan by paying full premium. Irony is there’s no requirement to have insurance until 50 employees but if you have 40 or more and are providing insurance then you must have COBRA. Must give notification you provide COBRA when an employee joins and when they leave. It’s important to inform the employee as dictated by COBRA guidelines. Jeffrey has a schedule document he updates with changes to any of the laws and makes sure his clients are aware of the information. Jeffrey works as a fractional HR consultant and gives them full-service at a much lower cost than having a full-time HR person. With 50 or more employees • The Affordable Care Act (ACA) - have to apply affordable insurance to all employees. The insurance is considered affordable if its cost is less than 9.9% of their total monthly income for the lowest plan. If too good of a plan is provided your company will be assessed a Cadillac tax. • Family Medical Leave Act (FMLA) - Family member or significant other may require an employee to take leave. This act protects their position. This has been covered to include military assignments. There is an Intermittent FMLA. It all can be quite time consuming. If you have multiple locations there has to be 50 or more at a given location for FMLA to apply. If multiple locations within 75 miles of each other and a total of 50 or more employees across those locations then FMLA applies. • Affirmative Action Program (AAP) - are specific to government contracts and subcontractors as well as some other employers. Working with an HR consultant can minimize the time you need to spend on HR legal concerns while keeping your costs down. Jeffrey mentioned in passing concerns when you have 100 or more employees. That will be addressed in a future podcast. He wrapped up the interview by reviewing all the points covered.’ For more information you can contact Jeffrey at: https://www.hrperspectives.org/ (c) 614-565-8073 jcochran@hrperspectives.org For more information on the “8 Steps From Chaos To Clarity and Calm: CEO Advanced Training” go to https://www.ctrchg.com/ceo-advanced-training/ Your feedback is important. Choose from the following options: • place a review in iTunes, • click on “leave a comment” below, • send any comments along with your name and the show number to support@ctrchg.com or • call us at 614-388-8917 and leave a message including your name, the podcast number and podcast title. Listen to future episodes for our reply.

Today’s interview is with Demetrius Robinson, attorney, about tax-, business-, and family law as well as work-life balance. In line with that he defines himself as father-husband-attorney-soldier and admits there can be challenges in maintaining a balance. The conversation is far-ranging providing both broad contextual considerations as well as specific advice when it comes to taxes and business law, especially for startups and companies that are expanding. This is reflected in his background. Demetrius has a Masters of Law in Tax. While he does family law, his area of specialty is tax law in business, all of which can help with family-owned businesses. Before law school he worked for JP Morgan Chase in the their Treasury Division when Congress was developing the Dodd-Frank Act to stop another Great Recession. His job was to determine the impact the law would have on operations of large corporations and government agencies Chase represented. He also worked on projects helping low income individuals with their unemployment, making sure their interactions with financial institutions didn’t adversely effect them. This ultimately led to him leaving Chase and going to law school, working to help “both sides of the coin.” The conversation turns to risk management and the need to calculate downsides in addition to upsides when making decisions and the purpose or regulations. The conversation switched to legal and tax issues the entrepreneur can encounter. While the driving force behind the company may be the same there are differences encountered based on the size of the organization, from solopreneur to CEO of a multimillion dollar company. Demetrius’s advice to solo- and entrepreneurs is, “You can’t do everything by yourself.” Being pulled away from what you do well to take care of other tasks in your company ends up hurting your firm. At the beginning, when starting up, it is especially valuable to get an hour or so of an experts time to help sort things out. Demetrius provides fractional services where he works as you in-house counsel on a retainer basis. If you have a problem, just call. Additional advice to solo- and entrepreneurs includes: • create processes in the beginning. This allows for smoother transitions when having to make changes. • don’t be afraid to step out of your comfort zone • try new things • don’t be afraid to fail when trying those new things • don’t be afraid to go in different directions. It’s not necessarily the first product introduced that is the successful one. Also, new products may come to mind that are worth pursuing. The listener is referred to our sister podcast, Thrive and Connect, and check the category “fear” to get more information on addressing some of the difficulties associated with these suggestions. The fear can be a great motivator as well as a tool for avoiding hubris or foolhardy behavior. When balanced out with a sense of opportunity you stay on your toes and avoid missing opportunity. The next phase of the conversation moves to what to do when you DO become established and are experiencing success. Remember that the model that was used to startup and got you where you are today may not be the model that will get you to the next level. Transitioning from 10 employees to 100 will obviously require a change in the model that is used. It is important to escrow money from the successful periods to help manage the change that will inevitably be needed as you grow. Reorganizing and restructuring will have associated sunk cost. Demetrius draws on his understanding of how the military organizes, reorganizes, delegates and gets work done as the technology, goals, and makeup of the armed forces changes. The point is, it is important to delegate power to those closest to the decision and you hold the strategic position that coordinates these efforts. A rule for determining how to delegate is to look at the revenue/hr a position can influence. For example, if making $100,000 in revenue and 2000 hrs in a work year, as an owner all decisions made should be worth $50/hr. If the value is less than that hourly rate then the job is better delegated so someone lower in the hierarchy. On top of this there is the skill level required which may not be one of your strong points. The question is, “Which is more important, your time or your money?” In terms of amplifying value, it’s your time. Connection versus compliance are also discussed. Value goes up with connection vs a “check-the-box” attitude associated with compliance. Compliance IS important, e.g., paying taxes properly but value is added with connection. The conversation shifted to addressing tax implications for a given financial decision such as whether or not to purchase or lease a forklift or a piece of computer hardware. But determining whether or not that item is best for your business requires expertise other than Demetrius’s. He avoids situations where the client is paying him to educate himself. It is better to bring in someone well versed in that area and work as a team. Keep in mind when using fractional consultants and vendors whether or not they are team players and will work with the other consultants/vendors. Ask them, “What other disciplines have they worked with and how did it go?” If the individual says, “I can do it all.”….RUN!! Avoid paying to educate your consultants. Good consultants know their limits and understand the benefit of being a team player. The conversation switched to tax considerations startup companies should think about. The tax code is designed to encourage people to start up companies and take risks and create economic growth. Demetrius lists the types of costs that can be deducted (these amounts can change with time, circumstances, and changes in the tax codes), For example: • $5,000 - startup costs • $5,000 - organizational costs • If a research-based company payroll taxes can be written off as a business deduction Using contract employees vs hiring employees is discussed. (See podcast 0002, “Are you a solopreneur or an employee?,” for more information.) There are certain tax implications that can be quite serious, e.g., failing to withhold payroll taxes if the individual is classified as an employee by the IRS. The conversation turned to community activities. The Legal Aid Society of Columbus was then talked about with regards to their providing support to low income families. Demetrius provides tax legal support to the group. It’s a way for him to give back to community. Getting back to business, Demetrius helps startups and small businesses by providing services with regards to: • entity selection • understanding contracts they’ll be involved in • legal and tax implications associated with employees • executive compensation plans • stock options for employees • exit strategies and associated tax implications • general tax advice Next, Demetrius talks about the ideal relationship with a client. In screening for an attorney items to consider are: • openness in that the client feels sufficiently comfortable that they can keep the attorney informed with regards to key information, some of which may be personal but which is protected by attorney-client privilege • what experience does the attorney have in your areas of concern • is the attorney adaptable in being able to apply expertise learned in other areas to your situation • understand the scope and cost of the work you are asking them to do • spell all of the above out as clearly as possible in your agreement with them • use flat-fee arrangements if costs are difficult to determine on an hourly basis The conversation then turns to considerations with regards to entity selection, e.g., LLC, sole proprietor, partnership, etc. Having a clear sense of where you want the business to go in the future is important to save a lot of headaches in the future. The interview closes out with Demetrius describing his ideal client. It’s someone who has a glimmer in their eye, who can see their success and needs someone to help them achieve it. For more information you can contact Demetrius at: https://www.robinsonltd.org/ (o) 614 706 4317 drobinson@robinsonlimited.org For more information on the “8 Steps From Chaos To Clarity and Calm: CEO Advanced Training” go to https://www.ctrchg.com/ceo-advanced-training/ Your feedback is important. Choose from the following options: • place a review in iTunes, • click on “leave a comment” below, • send any comments along with your name and the show number to support@ctrchg.com or • call us at 614-388-8917 and leave a message including your name, the podcast number and podcast title. Listen to future episodes for our reply.

Today’s expert is David Wetmore, a life coach with years of experience. David takes an “inside out” approach to coaching. With inside-out we are guided by our internal feelings rather than outside events. One of David’s biggest rewards is seeing a client have that “Aha” moment where they gain clarity and see something that previously was way beyond their reach. David starts by talking about how change and coaching go hand-in-hand. People get stuck when it comes to change and need help. This is especially true when wanting to start their own business. The fear of leaving stability can be too much. It can take some work to figure out what people really want to do. Doing a deeper dive can be stressful. Sometimes David will ask the client do a faux resignation and just write the resignation letter and see how it feels. Then imagine how it feels walking through the resignation process. Don’t have to take action on it, just start stepping into those feelings. Once they do that he walks them through the feelings of moving forward from the resignation. The coaching process, itself, is just a conversation. If David listens long enough the client starts saying things of which they weren’t consciously aware but are quite important to them. It takes time for the insights to come up. Stories and examples are often used as well as asking clients to relate situations to where they are in life. He then asks them to re-tell the story if something different would have happened in their life. One of the first things David talks about with clients is slow down their thinking to become more aware which leads to greater productivity. He goes on to talk about how the words “need” and “should” are very disempowering and need to be rooted out of one’s vocabulary. Substitute “want.” The conversation turned to having to stop working with clients because the trauma/concern they are addressing is just too deep to be brought to the surface at the time. This led to discussing expectations and how they are set initially in the relationship. In addition to getting rid of the “needs” and “should,” slowing down is discussed, and the third element is dropping expectations. Now, it is good to have goals and intentions, which work best when they provide direction rather than being the destination (an expectation). There can be a time during the coaching process where the client has to dig deep in order to progress. Working to generate enthusiasm in terms of the desired end-goal can be required. It’s the achievement of results that counts when it comes to keeping energy up. For some clients keeping a daily journal of progress helps them change their thinking. Dave offers a personal insight how it became true for him. Progress is not about “the calendar” nor is it about comparison to others. Sometimes the discoveries that surface can be disorienting for the client and time is needed to re-equilibrate. For some clients they see that where they are in life and the goals that have been set really aren’t for them. Relieve can eventually set in since they discover they were going down a dead-end road. David talks about trust and what one should look for in a life coach along with self-checks a life coach must perform to work ethically and responsibly. The conversation then moves to cost vs value - which can be a challenge. The best way to find a balance is for the client to ask themselves, “What is this final state I want to get to worth to me?” The relationship continues only when the client can see the value. David then discusses the contractual nature of the relationship - usually 3-6 months, initially. Once into the relationship the duration can be revisited based on progress, challenges, difficulties, etc. Some clients progress so quickly that the time needed shortens. From there period calls are made to touch base to see if additional coaching is needed. This is all based on desired goals the client has. I ask David to go a little deeper into his literature, specifically, “I’m successful but not fulfilled and want to find out why.” It could be staying on the job for the money or security. They are just trudging along. “Successful but stressed out.” David has a program for addressing that. Events and circumstances in life don’t cause our feelings about a situation, in this case stress. It’s our thinking about the events and circumstances that causes our feelings. This can be one of the most challenging aspects. We talked about the repercussions on-the-job when unable to deal with that stress, which brings the conversation back around to the damaging aspect of expectations. The solution David works with clients on is building agreements with those around the client. Leaving space for others can have a very positive effect leading to having a sense of joy rather than duress. Being stuck is another topic. Simply starting to take action can resolve the issue — work in smaller chunks. With the final topic David addresses the difference between a therapist and a life coach. Simply put, a therapist will tell you how you got to where you are and a life coach focuses on where you want to go. There are times when the client needs to be in therapy in order to get to the point they can be coached. For more information you can contact David at: www.davidwetmore.com (c) 513 543 6596 dave@davidwetmore.com For more information on the “8 Steps From Chaos To Clarity and Calm: CEO Advanced Training” go to https://www.ctrchg.com/ceo-advanced-training/ Your feedback is important. Choose from the following options: • place a review in iTunes, • click on “leave a comment” below, • send any comments along with your name and the show number to support@ctrchg.com or • call us at 614-388-8917 and leave a message including your name, the podcast number and podcast title. Listen to future episodes for our reply.

In today’s episode we continue our discussion with Craig Clawson, IT expert, and the topic is cloud computing (CC). Craig starts off by defining CC as essentially renting IT solutions from other corporations via hosting on the internet for just about any process you can think of. Many startups are using CC because it eliminates a part of the initial capital outlay needed for hardware and software to start their business. This includes a smaller outlay for physical plant needed to house all the hardware. In fact, some company’s entire office is virtual! Cloud services also help with budgeting since you know what your costs are going to be month-to-month. CC also helps with risk management since security, redundancy, etc., are built in. The conversation continues into risk management including: • denial of service attacks on social media services via the Internet of Things (IoT) in 2016 • Amazon’s and others software as a service servers going down in 2017 These are situations that have to be factored in when considering CC. In other words determine how long you can go without those services and still meet your customer’s needs. Workarounds are discussed. This gets to possibly using paper and pencil! The important point is to think ahead and have plans in place. Another important point to consider is “vendor lock-in.” With vendor lock-in the service makes it very easy to put data in and next to impossible to remove it and move to a different vendor. There are reputable services that avoid that behavior. Customized business processes need to be considered. CC may not lend themselves to that customization. When choosing a CC provider, Craig advises putting your credit card and checkbook away until you’ve done your homework. Match the proposed solution with your business cases. Maybe you have to change processes some in order to use CC. It an pay to bring in a 3rd party (consulting CIO) to help you through this process. Keep in mind if moving an existing, well-established process to the cloud it will probably change. So consider any necessary training and how/who’s going to conduct it. Also factor in the time it will take away from production to get through the training and testing as well as lost productivity during the transition. Then there’s the culture shift issues not to mention changes in software! The drain on your time can be dramatic. Mapping out the old as well as the new processes is critical so there is a “road map” of the changes. Hiring a factional CIO at this point is money well spent. You may also need a Business Analysis consultant to insure the flow sheets are accurate as well as have a project manager who can stay on top of the entire process of transitioning. This all can quickly become a substantial project with associated costs. The changes observable on the computer screen are just the tip of a very large iceberg. During all this, having good legal representation from the beginning is important. Use trial periods to actually test your processes on the service rather than as a time to just “kick the tires” and leave deeper analysis for later. Craig can be reached at: craig.b.clawson@gmail.com (c) 614-859-6328 https://www.linkedin.com/in/craigbclawson/ For more information on the “8 Steps From Chaos To Clarity and Calm: CEO Advanced Training” go to https://www.ctrchg.com/ceo-advanced-training/ Your feedback is important. Choose from the following options: • place a review in iTunes, • click on “leave a comment” below, • send any comments along with your name and the show number to support@ctrchg.com or • call us at 614-388-8917 and leave a message including your name, the podcast number and podcast title. Listen to future episodes for our reply.

Today’s expert, Craig Clawson, talks with us about strategic planning in IT. Strategic planning is for any size organization and looks 3-5 years down the road as to technology and other needs. Scale, for example, is a critical issue of your company is going to take off. Even if you are dealing with a database of 100 customers are you comfortable you can manage the data? What about data corruption where an employee incorrectly closes a database? Consider a fractional CIO from the beginning. IT Strategic Planning: • synchronizes the planning of technology with the organizations mission • defines the methods of security and stability allowing the organization to move into the future • it provides a framework for planning what to do when problems arise • depending upon one’s industry certification requirements may require having an IT strategic plan, e.g., finance, health care, or the non-profit space The 5 levels of the Department of Defenses Capability Maturity Model (CMM) was discussed • chaotic • repeatable processes - someone knows how to solve the problem • defined - standard written procedures (most organizations can get to this level) • managed - metrics and KPIs are defined around particular applications or processes • optimizing - anticipating problems before they occur and planning/acting accordingly via root cause analysis or other methods Craig discussed the hype cycle revolving around the latest, new technology that’s going to solve all our problems. He uses the Internet of Things (IoT) and cloud computing as examples. They fail to deliver even 1/2 of what was promised and the performance drops on the CMM. Because of this taking some time to see what the fallout is discovered by early adopters is important. Even if you’re just a 1 or 2 person shop consider IT strategic planning as part of your overall strategic plan. Do it from a CIO position not from a tech-guy position. Without an IT strategic plan there is the risk your staff will do what they fell is best from a tactical level. If choosing to use a fractional CIO remember they need time to get up to speed with your organization. The conversation then turned to the politics of employees vs outside managed service providers (MSP) vs a fractional CIO. It’s important to keep in mind that the CIO’s outsider’s perspective can help the company avoid tunnel vision and hurting itself. Also, with executive support, the CIO can direct the MSP’s activities in a manner appropriate for your company. And the employee’s voice is important but it needs to stay within the bounds of the mission statement the company has set for itself. Problems may be due simply to a fear of change. Craig can be reached at: craig.b.clawson@gmail.com (c) 614-859-6328 https://www.linkedin.com/in/craigbclawson/ For more information on the “8 Steps From Chaos To Clarity and Calm: CEO Advanced Training” go to https://www.ctrchg.com/ceo-advanced-training/ Your feedback is important. Choose from the following options: • place a review in iTunes, • click on “leave a comment” below, • send any comments along with your name and the show number to support@ctrchg.com or • call us at 614-388-8917 and leave a message including your name, the podcast number and podcast title. Listen to future episodes for our reply.

Today’s expert, Craig Clawson, talks with us about the plusses and minuses of IT outsourcing under a range of situations: 1. owning your own IT function is expensive: ⁃ Manager $100K/yr ⁃ Engineers $60-80K/yr ⁃ Desktop technicians $40-60K/yr ⁃ benefits ⁃ Support tools, monitoring tools, 2. A managed service provider (MSP) can help keep performance up and costs down Craig talks about the differences between and mutual support provided by the C-suite IT CIO, VP, or Director and the operations manager. There are 2 different approaches: 1. Hand off the entire operations to an MSP. 2. The other is maintaining your technology leadership in-house Craig prefers option two with an MSP providing the actual operational service and walks through an example. He walks through what could happen if an IT consulting firm is used who has a partner relationship with a major technical company. The key is having someone in-house who can direct IT activities based of business requirements and business decisions not vendor benefits. Another option is hiring a fractional CIO to keep IT from becoming a regrettable, low-priority, ad hoc, after-the-fact activity. That factional CIO can shepherd the technology part of the business plan as well as manage the MSP. The above is true even if you have as few as 10 employees. The goal is to keep IT “ahead of the curve” in terms of your business not missing a heartbeat. Avoid putting this responsibility on the shoulders of the CIO. Craig discusses how to select an MSP: • A fractional CIO is very helpful, to start with, • Are you a 24/7 operation? ⁃ Is the MSP? ⁃ Help desk? ⁃ Service monitoring? • What are your show-stoppers? • Talk to MPS’s extensive client list, not just the ones they want you to talk with. • Specific concerns such as asynchronous courses housed across several services need to be addressed in a detailed, clear manner, e.g., if Amazon servers are a Sev1 for your company then make sure the MSP views it as a Sev1 and respond accordingly. • Be prepared to provide specific, process details so the MSP can perform, e.g., if social media is a key component in your product/process flow them have that mapped out clearly. Pitfalls with fractional CFOs and/or MSP: • No Service Level Agreement (SLA) and/or KPIs. Both recommended • Problem-solving without maintenance or documentation • Poor password strategy • No or inadequate security remediation plans • No Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA), Non-competes, or data ownership contracts. • Lack of redundancy • MSP’s backup/redundancy plan poor or missing Craig concludes with the benefits of having of a fractional CIO and an MSP so you can focus on the product you want to create. Craig can be reached at: craig.b.clawson@gmail.com (c) 614-859-6328 For more information on the “8 Steps From Chaos To Clarity and Calm: CEO Advanced Training” go to https://www.ctrchg.com/ceo-advanced-training/ Your feedback is important. Choose from the following options: • place a review in iTunes, • click on “leave a comment” below, • send any comments along with your name and the show number to support@ctrchg.com or • call us at 614-388-8917 and leave a message including your name, the podcast number and podcast title. Listen to future episodes for our reply.