IAM2231 – CEO Discusses the Importance of A Culture-Driven Approach to Organizational Design

Title: Transcript - Mon, 09 Sep 2024 14:52:38 GMT

Date: Mon, 09 Sep 2024 14:52:38 GMT, Duration: [00:16:57.48]

[00:00:00.28] - Nigel Thurlow

And then we started to realize that actually they weren't getting the benefits from these huge investments they'd made with some of the large consulting groups in these methodologies and approaches. And they were still suffering and struggling. And then one or two of the customers started to reach out and say, hey Nigel, we have a culture problem, we don't have a methodology problem. And then I started to look at that and work with them quite deeply to understand. And true enough, it was about how people are interacting, behaving and connecting with each other towards the product, the service.

[00:00:33.00] - Intro

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[00:01:03.78] - Gresham Harkless

Hello hello hello. This is Gretch from the Imceo podcast and I have a very special guest on the show today. I have Nigel Thurlow. Nigel, excited to have you on the show.

[00:01:12.98] - Nigel Thurlow

Hey, I'm really excited to be here. Thanks for having me along, Rush.

[00:01:16.06] - Gresham Harkless

Yeah, super excited to have you here and you're doing so many awesome things so can't wait to dive right in. But of course before we do that, I want to read a little bit more about Nigel so you can hear about some of those awesome things that he's working on. And Nigel is an expert in organizational design, author and renowned speaker who serves as a consultant to industry and business agility and as an expert in the application of cross disciplinary methods and approaches to accelerate business change. He is the current CEO of the Flow Consortium, an interdependent group of companies working together in organizational design, organizational development and organizational change management. He is the former chief of Agile at Toyota and also serves as a member of the Forbes Coaches Council, writing and advising on business and leadership topics and was listed by Forbes as the top ten author. He will be listed in Marquis's who's who in 2024. He is the creator of Scrum, the Toyota Way and the co creator of the Flow System. He has co authored two books on the flow System and is the co author of an upcoming book on decision making and complexity. His work is heavily cited in peer reviewed papers and by his industry. And as we were preparing for this, I read that he has trained over 8500 people in worldwide in scrum agile, lean flow complexity and organizational design. And we had a phenomenal conversation. We talked around so many different things when we first connected around the human part of business and also the interconnectedness of business, as we sometimes can look at it in silos. So I'm super excited to jump in. Nigel, are you ready to speak to the ImCo community?

[00:02:51.81] - Nigel Thurlow

Yeah. You said a lot of good things about me. You've really built me up. Now I've got to try and deliver for you.

[00:02:56.90] - Gresham Harkless

Hey, hey. It's easy to read the things, harder to do the things. So that's why we make sure we have you here. So let's kick everything off. Hour one on the clock. Hear a little bit more on how you got started, what I call your seal story.

[00:03:08.30] - Nigel Thurlow

Wow. So I was a project manager back in the day, but I'd trained in electronics, and I'd always had a passion in electronics. My dad had got me into that when I was a very young boy, and so I'd sort of done a lot. I trained as an electrician training electronics, then got into project management as sort of the corporate side of my life. And then these things called computers came along. So, yes, for the listeners, I'm a little bit older than probably some of the people listening, but computing came along. I learned to program, and I was programming when they still had this bit of tape with holes in it. So I was doing it in those days. But then I got into databases and became a DBA as well as a developer or program analyst program, as we called them back in the day, and that sort of, but kept me busy for some time. I gradually went through the different management ranks, and then I got an opportunity to work with this strange company that had some really strange, weird ways of doing things, and that company was Toyota, and they trained me. I went there as an enterprise architect for the it folks out there, and I was trained in some of the best training I'd ever had in my professional career. And, of course, that led onto a lot of things I was able to do with Toyota, a lot of the things around bringing together the sort of scrum and software development techniques into the sort of manufacturing Toyota production system, lean thinking techniques. And then that led to sort of scrum the Toyota way, which was a great amalgamation of showing how these things were symbiotic. And that led me on to work with some great colleagues to develop the flow system, which is my key and primary focus now. So that's sort of 25 years, 30 years condensed into about a minute.

[00:04:47.93] - Gresham Harkless

There you go. He didn't even take any breaths in terms of doing that. I'm sure there were some breaths in between doing the 25 years for sure.

[00:04:53.80] - Nigel Thurlow

Yeah, there sure was. And I did other things like learn to drive a bus so I can drive a double decker bus, but you know, that's not really right.

[00:05:01.30] - Gresham Harkless

But those are fun facts for trivia time whenever we have the trivia nights and everything is like, who knows how to drive that double decker bus? And so I know you touched on a little bit on like how you work with and serve clients. Could you take us through a little bit more on what that looks like, how you're making their impact in working with these organizations?

[00:05:18.45] - Nigel Thurlow

Yeah, a lot of organizations used to reach out and say, hey, Nigel, we're interested in this agile thing or were interested in some way of improving our digital development and working. So we spent a lot of time with organizations in the early years doing that. And then we started to realize that actually they weren't getting the benefits from these huge investments they'd made with some of the large consulting groups in these methodologies and approaches and they were still suffering and struggling. And then one or two of the customers started to reach out and say, hey, Nigel, we have a culture problem, we don't have a methodology problem. And then I started to look at that and work with them quite deeply to understand. And true enough, it was about how people were interacting, behaving and connecting with each other towards the product, the service. And so we started to look at that a little bit more and we learned about sense making, again from my colleague and friend Dave Snowden. But we'd learned a lot about this technique, which we could go in and sense the environment in an organization in a very safe way, a very anonymous way. And unlike an office 360 or a typical like it style survey, we're able to use different techniques, mainly narrative based capture where we ask people to talk about an experience or something within their context. And we use some special techniques that enable us to be able to collect extremely powerful feedback without biasing the outcome or without threatening or creating an environment of fear. And then through expert analysis, we can see the elements we're looking for, the patterns that sometimes we call things weak signals, the things we should be seeing, but we don't see maybe dark constraints where we see the impact of this thing, but we don't actually know what's causing it. So we use these techniques to discover that. And then we start to find what really we need to focus on. From coaching, from intervention, from small nudges and from mentorship, from training and these types of things to enable us to help an organization understand what the real problem is, the real challenge is, and then we'll do a lot of work with leadership at SLT, senior leadership level, C suite, and various levels in between them and the people doing the work, so the leaders understand how to create the right environment so their people thrive, because if their people aren't thriving, their organization isn't thriving. Typically.

[00:07:43.50] - Gresham Harkless

Yeah, that makes so much sense, and I almost wonder if that's part of what I would like to call your secret sauce. Could be for yourself, the organization, or a combination of both. Is it that ability to see the forest for the tree, so to speak, and be able to say, hey, this is not what the actual problem is. And as soon as you can do the quote unquote deep work and actually go deeper, ask the questions, have those conversations, then you can start to really take a step forward in the right direction.

[00:08:08.87] - Nigel Thurlow

You know, somebody says, I was talking to a client the other day, and they said to me, we're totally talking to you, because nobody else is doing what you're doing. The only people doing it. And there was a book written a few years ago, and it's an okay book. The Red Ocean or the Blue Ocean strategy. When she talks about red Ocean's blue ocean and things, I'm sure people are familiar with it, but the basic concept is find a space where nobody else is and exploit that space. It's like Elon did with, you know, what's known as disruptive innovation. Found a space nobody was exploiting. Everybody thought he was a madman. Now they're sort of eating the words, you know, despite the challenges in the EV world, for different reasons. And I didn't set out to do that. I truly didn't. I set out with my colleagues to find a way to solve a problem we could see was there, which is that we kept trying to solve organizational challenges by throwing more tools at them, but we weren't really understanding what the real problem was. And then when we did, we didn't have the tool set, because we were seeing things in these different silos, and bringing them together helped us to understand we've got more powerful ways to help organizations. So if that's put me in the blue ocean, and I'm happy about that for now, I'm sure people will catch up.

[00:09:18.87] - Gresham Harkless

Yeah. Yeah, you hope so. But I think there's. What is they say. The saying is, it's never crowded along the extra mile. So sometimes people don't want to go that extra mile to do those deep work, have those conversations and make those things happen. So I wanted to switch gears a little bit, and I want to ask you for what I call a co hack. You might have already touched on this, but this could be like an Apple book or even a habit that you have, but what's something that makes you more effective and efficient?

[00:09:41.53] - Nigel Thurlow

So I have to credit Toyota with this over the years. So they taught me the art of visualization, visual control. So if anybody reads the new book we wrote called the Flow System Playbook, or comes across a copy of it here or there, you'll find there's over 400 visual diagrams. And I'm not talking about just little stick men diagrams. There's 400 visuals, which we put a lot of effort into. And all my material is known for this because we wanted people to be able to have those visual metaphors, those reminders, and so extending that into everything we do, visual control is very important. So when you're in, and if you ever go into a factory, you'll see these giant boards up in the air with lots of numbers on them, and that's visual control. So the plant management, the plant, the line managers know what's happening on any manufacturing or production line at any moment. And we know we do PowerPoint decks for managers on Friday mornings or Monday mornings, whatever the day is. But imagine when we talk about dashboards, we have all the information we require. When we require it, at the point we require it. So visualization, the Japanese call it Miyaruka, make it big and visible. It should show the right information and it should be available whenever we want it. The challenge with that is a lot of tool manufacturers have now built tools that give you so much visualization, it's now just eye candy. And my boss used to say to me at Toyota, we want utilization, Nigel, not just visualization. So what we're seeing should be telling us what we need to know, not just showing us a load of bling because it was useful. So that's while visualization and visual control is fundamentally the one of the key things I focus on, it needs to be useful and only showing us what we need to know.

[00:11:25.96] - Gresham Harkless

I love that. And I almost wonder if that's your seal nugget, which is kind of like that word of wisdom or piece of advice or something you might tell your younger business self. But I almost wonder, like for organization, for leaders within organizations, when you say that they should allow it, is that how do you allow it? Is it just as a situation where you're just saying, you just creating that space, you're creating that I think Google had the 20% of time that you would have to innovation. Is it starting to kind of standardize and put those things in place in order to allow that?

[00:11:55.34] - Nigel Thurlow

Yeah, I mean, I talked to a client the other day who have a 60 2020 view, 60% of time for new work, 20% of time for maintenance and operational stuff, and they're in the software development business, and 20% for remediation of technical debt. Those things that have gathered and built up that haven't been attended to three m are famous for their 15% of innovation time. That's another. But allowing it isn't just a matter of saying you can have this much time. You actually have to empower and give permission, or. No, the wrong phrase is not give permission. You give ownership of that decision making. That's the agency and voice you're giving to those people who do the work because you want them to make the decision themselves, not to have to ask permission to do this. And also because otherwise there's, you know, there's a book by Dave Marquet turned the ship around, and he talks about if he was giving all the orders, he never had time to go have, go home and have dinner, because he wants you people, you know, the people, to make their own decisions themselves. But then you have this thing called enabling constraints. And an enabling constraint is guardrails. It's basically saying you're free to operate between these guardrails without asking permission, provided you don't go past those guardrails. And that's an enabling constraint type of way of doing things. But even as Dave Marquez says, move the authority to the information. The information is where the work is done. So transfer as much authority to that as you feel safe and comfortable in doing. Remember the enabling constraints. So leaders create the environment for this to happen, and then they can focus on things that are more important, like strategy and mentorship and coaching and guiding the organization, rather than just telling people what to do.

[00:13:40.96] - Gresham Harkless

Yeah. And that ends up being such a really powerful place to be. Now, I want to ask you my absolute favorite question, which is the definition of what it means to, to be a CEO. And our goal is to have different, quote unquote, CEO's on this show. So, Nigel, what does being a CEO mean to you?

[00:13:53.25] - Nigel Thurlow

Well, I thought about this, and no, vacations is one of them. There'd be a lot of people out there resonate with that. And I do try and take vacation, but it is tough. I always make myself available, and maybe that's the important thing. I mean, everybody I talk to has my WhatsApp number or my cell number, my imessage number or whatever. But the ability to enable others to shine, I think is one of the things that being a CEO means, because I'm not the person who's important. What I've had a fully experienced career. What I'm trying to do is use that knowledge and that passion and that enablement to help others and, you know, to fulfill that passion to help companies and others and to help individuals to thrive. Because I mentioned earlier, if they thrive, we all thrive. So that's really what it means to me, to be in a position to help others.

[00:14:42.25] - Gresham Harkless

Yeah, I absolutely love that. What I wanted to do now was pass you the mic, so to speak, just to see if there's anything additional that you can let our readers and listeners know and of course, how best they can get hold of you. Get a copy of your books, find out about all the awesome things that you all are working on.

[00:14:54.69] - Nigel Thurlow

If you're an executive or somebody in a senior level of leadership or management, be available all the time and find out what that means in your context. I don't mean people are calling you at home on a Sunday afternoon when you're relaxing with the family. I use the phrase, descend from the ivory tower, the towers of power, these islands of disconnected effort, and go to Gemba. That's a japanese word meaning the real place where the work is actually done. Make the time to go and understand how your organization does what it does. And I don't just mean at a high meta level of understanding. We also don't know what our companies do, but actually how you get the nuts and bolts of it done. Because then you'll start to understand some of the challenges and you may be able to better help if you just go to nigelturlo.com, that will give you a link to all the other websites and the places where I make information available and that will get you. Or then go to the just to flowconsortium.com if they want to look more about the organization. But Google's your friend. I'm pretty well plastered on Google. If you type my name and you'll find ways to find me, there it is.

[00:16:02.61] - Gresham Harkless

Well, we appreciate Google's all our friends, I think at least. And of course they make it even friendlier as well too. We're going to have the links and information in the show notes that everybody can click through and find about all the awesome things. I appreciate you and I hope you have phenomenal to do.

[00:16:14.78] - Nigel Thurlow

Appreciate you. Thank you. Very much. Thank you.

[00:16:17.22] - Intro

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