Episode 01: Change Changes But Not Everything Changes

Hello and welcome to Process Transformers, the podcast that talks about business transformation and the intersection of processes and AI. Thanks for tuning in, my name is Lucas Egger and I'm the head of innovation at SAP Zimabio. I'll be your host for today's episode. I don't change changes, but not everything changes. And we have picked this topic today because change feels like such a force that you have to abide by. You have to change. But I think it's really important to also talk about what doesn't change in order to know where to invest your focus and how to deal with it. Also because I think it's a question that normally is not really talked about. We are so focused on the new that we kind of forget what we can safely put aside and feel good that it has changed before. And to help me with this conversation, I have Stefan Meier today, which is a big honor to have on the show. Stefan is the managing director of Custom Lightning. He's an innovation consultant with focus on leadership. And he has covered more than a dozen industries in ten years, multiple companies and tons of successes. And so with that said, I want to segue into the first question, namely change changes, but not everything changes and Stefan, what is your perspective on the things that you feel like haven't changed as much or you wouldn't want to change as much. So I will be very curious to hear your take on it. For sure, thank you for having me, Lucas. Really excited to be here with everybody else and with you. It's always really fun. So thank you. What changes, what doesn't change, the funniest thing you just stepped all the way right up to it in my experience has been that change people want change. They especially want change from all the things around them. But then when the change shows up, it makes us uncomfortable. More uncomfortable if we ourselves have to change. And more uncomfortable if it actually is a lot of change, if it's a lot of progress potentially, that also ends up scaring us. And of course, you know, the neuropsychologists and will tell us all of the psychology behind it, the neuroscience behind it, the history, but it's just funny when, you know, I'm an innovation consultant. My whole job, my whole career is all innovation, innovation change. And then people hire me for it. And then it's stressful for people. And then I turn right around and say, you know what? I'm no better. I'm no different. I have the same thing happened to me when AI first showed up a general AI that is in my sort of awareness. It boggled my mind. I thought I was living in the future. And some of it was fun. Some of it seemed kind of scary. And some of it I could hardly believe. So I know better, either it just seems to be a human thing that we want change. And we wanted from everything around us just not too much and just not to us. That's super fascinating. It reminds me when you ask people about what they wish for. It feels like everyone knows that they might want the bigger car, or the bigger apartment, or the promotion. But we all know that there is hedonistic adaption, right? That we always resist to the mean and a couple of months later we want the next bigger job, the next bigger car, whatever it might be. So it feels like people have a hard time wanting something abstract like growth or like positive progression. So I'm like, that's a little bit of a curveball. What do you think is behind the wish for innovation? Because it feels great, but the implementation is painful. So what is to wish behind the wish that makes us long for it? Yeah, I find that too. Somebody mentioned that same principle as calling it the hedonic treadmill. It's we are running so fast and yet we stand still. But what's behind it? To me, it comes down often to the purpose. Why are you changing? And I would actually argue that not everything should change, right? So I work with startups. I'm CEO of startup myself. And so everything there is about change. Well, once you do a startup or once you do anything in life and you achieve it, you worked so hard and so long to try to make it happen. Wouldn't you want to have it? Yes, you want to have that thing make it better. You see ideas, you know, whether that's in personal life, your home could be better. Your family is evolving. What you're learning, you can learn more and the same thing at work, you know, we have a process. It's established finally. Now we want to optimize it. Doesn't want to change. So the question becomes, and I use this principle quite a bit in my work, actually. Do you have a must do purpose for your change? And it seems almost inevitably in the real world, whenever there isn't a must do purpose that everybody understands and everybody sort of agrees, at least kind of the change will fail. And so what's behind it then why is that it's not a must do change to people. And I'll give you an example of how that like plays out. Is it unavoidable, right? So I look when I sit in a meeting, when I hear people talk, do they even squirm? Oh, they don't want this to change. But I guess we have to. You see, there's media articles. They were forced to. It's unavoidable. The second thing ends up being, is it urgent? There's another conversation that happens to a lot where it's like, yeah, we should definitely change. Once we've done all this other stuff, that's actually urgent. And so then that becomes not urgent. At some point, we should change maybe, right? That's not unavoidable. That's not a must do. And third, the last thing would be that there's one that the intellectual people, the rigorous logical people sometimes don't acknowledge, is, is it set up for success? For example, if your change is going to cut your bosses, bosses, bonus and half, it's just not set up for success, no matter how logical and how proper it is. So it seems like the why is, is there a must do purpose? I'm very drawn to a question that maybe is a bit odd, because innovation to me and the imperative of change, feels like it comes out of quite logical kind of reasoning, you know, the destructive power of change. You have to be set up. It's like, always has to evolve. It's like very enlightened, very rational kind of reasoning, at least it feels that way to me. But you now said, when we go with the rational stuff, in your experience, it seems to be prone to failure. Whereas when you go with the, it feels like the right thing to change, like a very aesthetic, very personal kind of feeling, right? That those are the boundary conditions for a successful, like, change process. And I'm, I think that's a very unintuitive, but fascinating thing you said. So would you say, like, change is an only rational at some point, or like, how, how do you feel about this difference? Hmm, feeling. Here we go, all intellectual and logic, I'll talk you about feelings. I would agree it's that the boundary conditions are the feeling. It's probably supposed to be both rational and a feeling you want to make sure that it is not just rational. It's not that it's not rational, but not just rational, just like psychologists have taught us over the decades now how we think we make sense, but we really don't. Recently, there were some research really fascinating stuff that the more rational we think we are, the less rationally we will actually act, because we're actually the same as other people. We just have made it part of our self to need to be rational as part of our self identity. And so we push away anything that's different. And all that means is we have more blind spots. And so people who insist on being ultra rational sometimes are actually less so. And I'll get in trouble with this of course, but it was fascinating, but so it's not that you shouldn't make sense. It's that you shouldn't trust just your own rationality. Make sure, you know, in human-centered design, we say get out of the building, get an outside in perspective because your rationality isn't everything. And then even when something is rational, it's not enough. There's a lot of rational priorities that you could rationally pursue. It also has to be unavoidable. It has to be a must do. And even if you're uncomfortable, if you have an uncomfortable human feeling, it just has to happen. In terms of when you say it has to happen, when we think about risks, we often try to put the risk categories into different buckets, right? And we think about disability, feasibility, viability, agreeability. So, will our customers like it, can we make money, can we technologically, like complete the project, and can we, does it align with our values? And how can we translate that to what you just said? I'm curious because the question about the imperative of change and all that, where does the unavoidability come from? Does it come from any one of those categories or something else? I think it can absolutely come from any of those categories. And it differs a little bit by discipline that you work in. So in my world, I'd been an operational consultant, strategy, innovation, and the focus differs a little bit. But the bottom line is it can come from anything where I am now in innovation. There's a love, almost a obsession with the product or the service, the solution, right? And yet that is absolutely not where the innovation is scope to where it's limited. It can really go across DVFA, just like you said, and I'll give you an example. Back when I was still at Target, there was a few, this feels like long go, but it's still current. Hurricane Katrina, barestown on the US, right? And Louisiana is going to be in trouble. And Hurricane Katrina washes over the city of New Orleans, powers out no money, no roads, flooding, and people are still there and they need to get back into life. Well, at Target, up here in Minneapolis, there was a small team that got cobbled together, and there was a must do problem. We got to get our part of New Orleans working again. We got to help those people. And you've got to figure out how you have no power, no cash, no roads, you know, go. And within a couple of days, those people managed to bring refrigerated cold water and functioning safe stores up and running again. In a city that barely even was just getting off its feet, right, onto its feet. And that is absolutely innovative. Well, was there any one designer involved or an engineer who could write amazing code, maybe, maybe not. It was human innovation nonetheless, right? And so it's a matter of going with where the problems are or your vision is frankly, and going after those issues. And it can absolutely be in finance, it could be in supply chain, it could be an operations that team doesn't matter. Actually, I'll go one level further, even if it gets me in trouble, who'd say the problems that actually matter. Yeah, they are usually cross functional because they don't care that some professional sitting in some tower, working for some company, have some certain or structure or preference on their software or scope of edges, no, the problems don't care. And so they can absolutely come from any state where and second, they cut across the functions. If it's a clean, functionally, orderly problem, maybe either you haven't fully understood it or maybe it's not as pressing as you think it is. That's fascinating because I think you're tapping into something really interesting there in terms of we focus so much on technological innovation seems to be the most beguiling, the most like fascinating. We can harness the power of fire whenever right here, like yet another technological advanced we master, but I think it's reoccurring motif that people say the hardest problems are the ones where people and processes get involved and not just the technology and just coming back one more time to those categories. And if you talk about the cross, the nature of problems that are cross in from your perspective or in your experience, which one or the hardest problem, the ones that are more on the human side, they're more on the, I don't know, you broke it down into various categories, right? Yeah, which problem would you be most intimidated, let's say, is it those cross functional problems or what kind of intuition have you build up in your career? In my experience and debate me on this if if you've experienced it differently because I'm only one is there's almost an illusion of them being separate. Oh man, that sounds existential. It's really going to be very practical. We say, you know, what should be automated, what should stay human and which are the human problems, which are the practical, the automatic or technological problems, they end up being the same. And I'll give you an example to two principles that really show up one is for example an AI and then before other technologies computer technology, there's this idea of human in the loop. And it's not one or the other it's both you have the technology and then you have the human in the loop and I love that you just had fire as your technological advance, which one pointed was right. And the idea there is that we as humans, we only remember two levels of automation, remember the level of automation that we just had. And you're either happy about that or you're annoyed at that or we or and we know the technology and the automation that's coming ahead, right, and either we're afraid of it or we're looking for it and yearning for it. But all the things that came before all the way back to fire, if you want, that's just normal. That's not automation, even though if you put yourself back a couple hundred years and would have been massively automated, right. So we have all this automation and yet they've been more humans and yet we're not all unemployed or sitting at the beach drinking, you know, drinks with the umbrellas in them. So there's always going to be a human in the loop and anybody who sells you a new technological solution and promises you full automation hands off either they're selling you a story or they haven't understood themselves. So human in the loop, I think is one case where it's not one or the other it's an illusion. And then I have this other thing that I got really passionate about over time, I wish I knew who I learned it from, but there's this idea of humanize what's human and automate the rest humanize what's human automate the rest. And it sounds really esoteric, but it comes really practical because what it tells you is that what really matters and those differences is do you care automation or human is not about the technology is about whether you care on the one hand there's, you know, the light switch in this route. Have I thought about this and then just making up this goofy example. No, I don't think about light switch and yet there's all this technology industrial production standard parts electricity internal wiring homes, all these technologies. On the other hand us talking right couple hundred years ago I would have taken a horse I would have ridden to you we would have sat in the room if we wanted to recording they would have been another person madly writing away with Quill and parchment and if we want that replicated other people to copy it. It's not human or technology it's it's both and what matters is okay here we care we are hopefully having a human conversation and all this technology is just a backdrop it's a background thing. And so what you can do practically then is worry think about where do I care what steps so you map a process map you map a user journey don't just map where the waste is don't just map where humans in a design would say where the pain points. When you say where do I care do you mean where do I care as a company where where does care happen with with my customers like who cares about what would you say there it's the purview of the CEO or the innovation office or the consultant like who's care are we talking about. That is probably the heart of the matter and I would argue when you don't answer that question well is when you get into what people would describe soulless processes or feeling not appreciate not valued all those things so you have to get that right so there's probably three levels you have the person who is doing the work. Maybe think of it as three circles rather than levels three circles that overlap the person who's doing the work so there's a project team or a person in charge doesn't matter but there's people working on it and they have really functional worries. Then there are the stakeholders so that could be the CEO and your example and that person is not directly involved and also is not zoomed into that one topic there zoomed out and care about many topics and this thing is just one piece of a puzzle that's a different and bigger puzzle that they focus on. And then they're the people affected by it right so the users the employees who have to execute a process once it's created it really doesn't matter but so the people doing it the people who are commissioned it and the people who are affected by it if you want to have those three circles and so if you keep only focusing on one it just won't work I think you can probably get by with only worrying about two of the three but you will pay for it later like I said. If you only care about the doers and the deciders the stakeholders and ignore the users it will feel so less if you don't care about the stakeholders you might just get rejected and not get approval and your various things and if the bosses want something and they hear from their customer you know a very customer focused or you know user centric and they don't care about what can happen in the real world and they just make promises that will never happen so you end up having to do all three if you want. Things actually to work and the best teams I find managed to strike that balance even if it seems hard makes perfect sense even if it raises the state I love that we gravitated towards the humanity and talking about that. That thing said I know that you have a background in six sigma right which to me always struck me as a very methodologically straightforward process which tries to not bring in the humanity too much right we think about statistics about all these kind of things when we talk about like total quality so I'm curious could you make the case for that approach as well or. What do you think we're the parts of that that inspired your position today is it something you did and just like a ladder you stepped it up and then didn't need it anymore is it something that. That gave you the tools to then focus on let's say the other parts that you so eloquently pointed out just now oh man i'm going to get in trouble for this but i'll step right into it I appreciate it and I think you're right there is definitely attention there so it deserves attacking directly so my take is actually that six sigma and operational improvement lean all of those things and innovation actually are not all that different. You should be equally rigorous in both and good innovation work is just as rigorous in fact I would say there's there's one so if the godfather of modern innovation theory and processes as somebody named Steve blank and he is the person who initially was at least credited with a lot of the current ways that startups work in corporate innovation works. In 2015 and blog post he coined this term that had people really kind of worked up and I think it was because it was a little bit too close to for comfort and he talked about innovation theater innovation theater and what that meant was that there's sticky nodes and shiny modern rooms and enthusiastic people coming up with ideas and somehow nothing ever came of it. And it kind of was a little bit of an awkward thing on the other hand you argued you can be absolutely rigorous on innovation work. And so on the one side there is rigor there so I would argue on the other hand I would actually say when I learned my six sigma work humanity was just part of that there were sort of three levels of care for it that don't get talked about a lot and they matter a lot to me one is you have to care for humans and we learned formally. There's a tool that six sigma people use but other people have since used it and adopted it so it might be familiar to many people it's called the five wise and it says basically to get to root causes you can just ask people about why something is wrong you have to ask them several times. And we would ask our coaches so how do you know when you're done is at five is at six times well how do you know and our coaches would tell us look what you want to get to is the point where you get away from process problems and you get to the human problems that are under them all. You know you've hit the root cause when you figured out what the human causes below the process so I would actually then disagree even with the statement of you know six sigma is all about statistics and so forth it is also about that. But if you want to solve issues you have to understand why and that's going to be a human thing so care for problems and that's actually very similar in innovation work where you say look we need to empathy for our users and understand the deep wise it's the same idea. And that is just one of the places where you really need them in both. I find it fascinating and I really want to specifically talk about one thing you just mentioned when you talked about Steve Blanken is innovation theater right we all know those dog and pony shows like the things words about performance and less about the content let's say. If you're a consultant and we're talking about these topics because we really want to get closer to how can we help everybody have a conversation about how to do change right so I will ask for some secrets of the trade when you come in as a consultant. How would you gauge whether it's a performance or whether a team is on the right path so speak what are the tell tale signs our listeners and people should you know watch out for where you go like we might have left the actual change field and we have endured not the circus I don't want to be me but you know we have veered off the idea that we were going for. Oh yes there are two themes right the one is I think this humanity side humanizing this right and we've already talked about that a little bit the other one is about. It feeling like work feeling like rigor ceiling tight so in and sometimes people will say innovation work is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration meaning there's the stuff that's cool that sexy the stuff that you know you're all worked up about and then there's the work that you say no I'm at work i'm getting paid i'm proud for it for my you know doing a good days work but it definitely work and i'm glad they pay me for it. And so those are really the two things that I look for are people clear on the human dimensions of this because it's not just the rink or not just the process but also the human things. Secondly are they treating this just like work in a good way being sort of being proud of your craft i'm a professional in a space i'm doing work that is solid and then I can stand behind and sign my name to but not in a way that is. Mostly glamorous the glamorous the part that we get to do when when things go well once in a while and in between we're proud of doing good work right and then of course the last part is are we clear on the problem solving problems were solving so maybe it's three things rather than than to the rigor the humanity and problems were solving. I not only do I agree I find it really an important point the question that I definitely want to ask because of your background I know that you have lived in multiple places right you currently in the US he'll just live in India. What is your experience with the let's say cultural backdrop or how those perceptions change the place right because there is like i'm not sure we should call it a myth but there is a perception that here in the US innovation is the best in a certain sense right so what are your experiences about different places and how they go about with. Change management innovation that applying the principles that you just talk about right and it definitely is a myth people in China in India in African countries in Europe all around the world would massively disagree with that idea and they would all have a really good case for it and look i mean this would deserve its whole conversation of its own probably and to some degree would really we are even out of my competence but. So maybe a couple things one really quick just for anybody who hasn't experienced those specific things sometimes there is sort of an on average difference in that you experience in different cultures and you will have you have the ones that you've immersed yourself in I have mine others have different ones in the US on average there tends to be more of a focus on the upside of change and how can we bring that about. In Europe sometimes it can be a little bit more about how do we avoid the downside of change make sure that it doesn't cause the unintended consequences India is a fascinating multifaceted country I don't even know that I could put it into one box I think you have to talk about it in different ways so they're definitely differences and you know whenever we learn about living in other countries we learn about sort of those averages but look even that is not all the same so it's a myth even here so. You know I work in a startup and here in Minneapolis our little silicon prairie startups feel very different than in Boston or Boulder or silicon Valley different people different attitudes right it's not the same. And then when I've done my consulting work across different companies that people have been kind enough to invite me into the cultures are massively different even when they're in the same city you can feel each team each group of humans has their own group and so it's actually to me much less about my experience or your experience. So your experience or those specific places it comes down more to are you willing to put yourself out there and react to it there's let's see I think three main points the one part is you will definitely have places where you fit right fit is a thing and you will find where it is and the important thing there seems to be less about hey I want to become somebody who fits in here who belongs here and more finding the places where you already accepted for who you are today. But the second thing even bigger is people talk about valuing differences but the people who are doing it are finding it's actually really hard on the ground because all those differences mean people who value different things do things in a different order. Act differently while they're doing it express it differently that's hard work and under pressure from timelines and deadlines and things that have never been done that's hard so being willing to do the hard work. Of valuing differences that stands out to me and that's something that I've learned. Luckily I have an expert in my own family my wife is quite expert at navigating big transitions but even then it's still hard when I can rely on an expert and ask her how do we deal with that so the last thing actually it's the biggest part that you have to stop caring about your own perspective as the one that matters. There's 8 billion people they all think that their perspective is important and if we stick to that nothing much happens we just but heads you know so there after you value the differences there's still the part of saying you know what I have a way of doing this and I have a way that could be right. But other people do too what if I was okay with assuming that the others also have good willing competence and I went with their way. I think it's a beautiful way of putting it I think another idea that's currently very pervasive is that everything once again will change because of generative AI and so we're all looking at the processes and how generative I might affect the those what is your take on how AI will. You level the playing field for making it in companies game or currently when you work with other companies and people have questions about whoa there's another big change coming ahead. All around generative AI or AI in general like what's your take on it do you think it will be like a radical challenge to the change processes of that or do you think. With the same tools we can solve the problems of tomorrow right look look is that's where you and signal you might be more experts than I am but I'll take an outside perspective for what's worse based on my experience right and they'll be sort of. Two aspects the second one will be quite the thing in this so starting with the simpler first one I think AI will infuse everything but not always obviously. It might be in the backdrop right and obviously it's hard to really understand it and map it and describe it neatly while we're in the sort of the beginning fury of it and everything is exploding like plants after Minnesota winter. But I'll take an analog right so if you look at even something fairly similar like desktop computers and see where they've taken us since. I don't know windows 3.1 early 1990s whatever something in that range right there's been a ton of change just there having a computer on every desk laptops mobile everything that has come since. And yet do we say everything we do is about computers no it's just infused into everything sometimes very obvious but sometimes it's it's just sitting in the background and that'll be the same thing for AI I think over our time in general. Of course it's a little bit different I tend to think of AI as all human intellectual work in your pocket so anything that's intellectual work you can now have so the topics will be different but it'll infuse everything sometimes in the background that's cute but there's a big second sort of but that comes with it and that is implementation or adoption. I'll tell you a story about it maybe again from a technological wave before there used to be digital transformations even before AI and companies would have them and I was involved with a company that said ha ha we have a very analog process it involves some desktop computers and then a bunch of printed pieces of paper and handwritten stuff we will digitize it. And it involved a whole floor of people in one of the big office buildings and one of our big cities and so they brought in the software that they chose and they implemented it and they trained it and they installed it and configured it and all those things. And yet it failed and the company ended up pulling out the software was not as a peak and they went back to this quasi analog process and how come what they had missed was the human side that we already talked about the humans that the floor professionals working there had to do the entire job differently before they would make their thinking work a little bit at a time think a little do a little think a deal do a little adjust and throughout their whole work process they would do that in this new world they had to do all their thinking upfront declare all the rules all the ways that things should do tell it to the computer and the computer would do it. And they had to change everything about how they did their entire thinking and that was squishy and human and you know shouldn't it be obvious and isn't there so much value and it got undervalued and yeah, they was training and change management but so if acknowledging that dozens of people had to do things completely differently that was overlooked. And so the same thing I would say applies here with AI right yeah, there's going to be transformation and automation and all these things what we need to consider is what are the human aspects, what do we care about and how do we help the humans come along with it and again it's not going to be where everything's going to be automated the humans still matter the humans will still matter just like we don't have 90% unemployment right now. There's a quantitative futurist Amy Webb professors super super amazing she just had an article out not that long ago about how interacting in an AI world will look. And she talks about working with CEOs and executives who say now we will just have all these cost savings everything simple everything automated and she like no you will have floors of people working with the AI. We talked a lot about future change and change itself I want to put you on this ball right now here today if you had the power to instantly transform one single process what would you change and why. Well I'm going to still get in trouble here all right OK I got one. Yeah I actually believe this one it's not just when I come up with so this one I actually believe in I would love to transform any process that boils down to this any process that boils down to let's get people to agree. And that's like what do you mean by that we give it fancy names right process governance milestone meeting stage gates cross functional alignment project kick us all these fancy names right and what we've really done I think is we've created these elaborate rituals they're almost religious right they've ceremonies and they have symbols and. Structure and all the things but they kind of don't always work and the people are not in the midst of it see it and cringe and roll their eyes sometimes. And so it seems to me what would be really awesome is a process for healthily agreeing because what's missing in the current way is we sort of got the humanity totally out right there is power there is conflict there's the neuropsychology groups psychology. Incentives what we know about efficient meetings and good meetings and all of those things kind of get ignored a lot of the time not always put a lot of the time no wonder it doesn't work and then you have. Between these decision points you have very logical varies or factual processes whether it's sigma whether it's lean startup human center designs strategy based problem solving doesn't matter what. But then all these teams that do the work are stuck very efficiently doing work for purpose that doesn't mean anything because either people didn't agree in the first place or they couldn't agree on what success looks like so they agreed in the front but they won't agree the next time that you bring them the work. Or they never defined what they're focused on anyway in the work will sort of distribute a not really focus no wonder so you very efficiently sort of do the wrong thing and sometimes people will offer silver bullet solutions so you know if you just do this one thing your process will we find clickbait for companies right and there are some solutions that I've seen that actually work but are sort of specialized the design spring process by Google ventures comes to mind. Check now john Zorowski third author works very well considers the true human factors it's just meant for a special purpose I would love a general purpose automated process for healthy agreement. And this agreement and this agreement in fact so that's an old thing even it's we should know better who is it slow in the CEO of general motors in the 50s he says I won't get the quote exactly right but he said something to the effect to his executive team. Have we figured out what disagreement this meeting is all about. If not let's adjourn until we know what the disagreement is that this meeting is all about so we should be able to figure it out and yet we haven't there's a fragility a worry about all the things that really that feed into it but I would love if we could come up with a healthy way of reaching the agreement. That's beautiful and thank you so much for sharing so many insights and a wealth of experience about change about the things that don't change and how we can take better advantage of it. And with that thanks for listening to another episode of process transformers if you have questions or comments email us at process transformers at SAP dot com until next time for another transformative of a section.