The Remarkable Leadership Podcast

00:00:08:08 - 00:00:35:01
Kevin Eikenberry
Change is all around us. We hear that we experience more change now than ever before, and change is almost an ethos at work. Like, if something isn't working, let's shake it up. Let's try something new. Let's move towards that shiny object that we see. But if there are problems, are there problems with that approach? What if everything being in constant flux causes more problems than the promise of the change itself?

00:00:35:02 - 00:00:59:13
Kevin Eikenberry
If that idea intrigues you in any way, even if that idea may be makes you a little bit uneasy, I promise you're in the right place. Welcome to another episode of the Remarkable Leadership Podcast, where we are helping leaders grow personally and professionally to lead more effectively and make a bigger difference for their teams, organizations and the world.

00:00:59:15 - 00:01:19:15
Kevin Eikenberry
If you're listening to this podcast, you could join us in the future for live episodes because they all happen live, simulcast across multiple social media channels long before they make it to the podcast. And so by doing that, you could get this information sooner, which could be of great value to you if you want to learn more about when that's happening and what and how that's happening.

00:01:19:21 - 00:01:48:15
Kevin Eikenberry
You can join our Facebook or LinkedIn groups to find out how to join us live. And you can do that by going to remarkable podcast.com/facebook or remarkable podcast.com/linked in. Today's episode is brought to you by our Remarkable masterclasses. Pick from one of 13 important life or leadership skills to help you become more effective, productive and confident while overcoming some of a leader leader's toughest challenges.

00:01:48:16 - 00:02:10:23
Kevin Eikenberry
You can learn more and sign up at Remarkable masterclass.com. Our guest today is Ashley Goodall. He's joining us again. He's been here before. More about that in a minute. Let me introduce him and then we'll dive in. Ashley Goodall is a leadership expert and author. He has spent his career exploring large organizations from the inside and most recently as an executive at Cisco.

00:02:11:01 - 00:02:34:12
Kevin Eikenberry
He is the coauthor, with Marcus Buckingham, of Nine Lies About Work A Free Thinkers Guide to the Real World, which is what brought him to be on this podcast before in 2019. He's also the coauthor of two cover stories for the Harvard Business Review, Reinventing Performance Management and The Feedback Fallacy, which was Harvard Business Review's favorite article in 2019.

00:02:34:14 - 00:02:56:03
Kevin Eikenberry
He's written a great new book that is coming soon. If you're with us, live, it's going to be a little while. If you're on the podcast and you're jumping on the podcast the day this comes out, it's the day before the book comes out. It's called The Problem with change. and the Essential Nature of Human Performance. that will be our conversation focus today.

00:02:56:06 - 00:03:06:09
Kevin Eikenberry
So, Ashley, man, I'm so glad to have you back. We had the chance to chat for a couple minutes and kind of catch up before, we, I hit the go live button, so. Man, I'm glad to have you here. Thanks for being here.

00:03:06:14 - 00:03:08:19
Ashley Goodall
It's great to be back, Kevin. Looking forward to.

00:03:08:19 - 00:03:29:14
Kevin Eikenberry
This. So, tell us a little bit about the journey, specifically as it relates to why write a book about the problems with change. We'll talk about what those problems are and a little bit. But, like, what leads you to write and be thinking about this particular stuff?

00:03:29:16 - 00:03:37:12
Ashley Goodall
It's interesting listening to you, name all the things I've written, and there is a little bit of a thread through them, isn't there.

00:03:37:14 - 00:03:38:15
Kevin Eikenberry
Where we talk.

00:03:38:17 - 00:03:57:16
Ashley Goodall
Lies that work? The fallacy of feedback. And now I'm on the problem with change. And so you might sort of, especially if people are, reading, I don't know, the hardcopy version of our podcast, which doesn't exist. They could read it and go, well, this guy is a he's a bit of a crank, isn't he? He's always got there's always something wrong.

00:03:57:20 - 00:04:01:16
Ashley Goodall
There's always something he's he's poking at, but actually.

00:04:01:16 - 00:04:03:17
Kevin Eikenberry
Not cranky at all. Everybody. He's just I.

00:04:03:17 - 00:04:29:11
Ashley Goodall
Don't fit I don't feel cranky today. I feel cheery, boisterous, not boisterous, cheery. but you look at all that stuff and, and then you ask about, okay, what is the problem with change come from? I suppose my thing is that I wonder around the work world and go. That doesn't make sense. What's what's up with. Hang on a second.

00:04:29:13 - 00:04:50:21
Ashley Goodall
Whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa. No no no no no not that, not that, not that. And so with this one, I was spending time in organizations and talking to colleagues and organizations around the world. And the thing I heard over and over and over again was, oh my God, we got another bloody change. This thing's coming down. We've got one of these.

00:04:50:21 - 00:05:10:11
Ashley Goodall
There's a real there's a change in leader. I'm on another team. Oh, that. They've changed the technology. the one that everyone loves to hate. We've redone the office floor plan, and now I can't actually find my colleagues without looking them up somewhere. And I'm surrounded by all these people. I don't know if I'm meant to be collaborating with in some way.

00:05:10:13 - 00:05:13:06
Kevin Eikenberry
Or. I worked at home for four years now I have to come back to.

00:05:13:06 - 00:05:45:09
Ashley Goodall
That and I'll have to go to the office. And and by the way, I worked at home and I was on this piece of technology, but then overnight, someone tweaked something so I can't find anything anymore. so I was I was hearing all these stories from the working world about too much change. And then at the same time, you listen to what leaders say and indeed what we train leaders to do, and leaders say change is fabulous, disrupt everything, move fast and break things.

00:05:45:09 - 00:06:08:00
Ashley Goodall
The more change, the better. We must change. And leaders are taught part of the job of a leader is to make change. So I looked at all of this and said, these two things can't both co-exist. It can't be that the too much change in a way harms people, makes life very, very hard at work. And yet more change makes business better.

00:06:08:02 - 00:06:13:21
Ashley Goodall
That that doesn't that isn't square. So I got curious and and that's what led to the book.

00:06:13:23 - 00:06:36:19
Kevin Eikenberry
And there's and there's certainly research that says that as an individual there's not. We can only handle so much change at a time. that's and that's a real thing. And that's not even one of things you talk about a whole lot in the book, but it's certainly true. so, you know, as I was reading the book and preparing for this conversation, I thought I could have a really good podcast just by reading the introduction.

00:06:36:21 - 00:07:00:10
Kevin Eikenberry
Because you make this story, you tell this story that would like everyone would, would, would understand, recognize, both smile and shake their head and at the same time, like you're doing, and and yet that wouldn't be a very compelling podcast that wouldn't require you. So we're not going to do that. I'm just gonna tell y'all when you get your copy of The Problem with Change, you're going to love the beginning, and then you're going to say, okay, like, he gets me and you're going to want to keep reading.

00:07:00:10 - 00:07:09:15
Kevin Eikenberry
So one of the things you say early in the book is that life, that life we're experiencing life in the blender. What do you mean by that?

00:07:09:17 - 00:07:31:22
Ashley Goodall
Well, I was I was just trying to describe this feeling of one thing after another and not feeling particularly in control of any of the things that was happening, any of the changes. And, I don't know, I was listening to people talk, talk, talk with their stories about, oh, now we're doing this. I thought we were doing this.

00:07:31:22 - 00:07:45:07
Ashley Goodall
We got halfway into this project and then it got canceled, and now we're doing this. And I was on this team last week, but now I've been told I'm going to be on this team, but I don't really know what that team is. And it has a different leader. And then that team's actually going to go off into that organization over there.

00:07:45:08 - 00:08:10:07
Ashley Goodall
And this little, little and this is a big, long chain of chain of things. All of which is like I don't know, it's it's like being everything's mixed up the whole time. And it's like, well what's a kitchen appliance that mixes things up? It's a blender isn't it? So we'll we'll call it life in the blender. and then of course it gets a little bit fun because then you ask yourself, well, who's operating the blender and what are the names of the buttons that they're pressing?

00:08:10:09 - 00:08:26:22
Ashley Goodall
And in a way, the leaders of the organization, I'm sure, you know, not necessarily out of ill will, but the leaders of organizations are pure saying things and chopping things and threading things, and the rest of it stuck in the middle, being blended the whole time. So it's a little.

00:08:27:00 - 00:08:31:09
Kevin Eikenberry
Different than the blender in your kitchen. All of the buttons might be being pushed at the same time.

00:08:31:09 - 00:08:33:23
Ashley Goodall
Yeah, so we just mashed the whole lot.

00:08:34:22 - 00:09:01:09
Kevin Eikenberry
you said something in passing that's really important. I think. And and that is that they're not intentional. Leaders aren't intentionally trying to do this. They're not mean. They're not villains. And oh, by the way, here's the other paradox that you said it earlier. We teach leaders to, put a good spin on change. and when they're talking senior leaders, especially when they're talking about it, they're talking about it always in glowing terms.

00:09:01:11 - 00:09:06:08
Kevin Eikenberry
But when they close their office door, they're feeling all exactly the same things.

00:09:06:09 - 00:09:35:06
Ashley Goodall
I think it's a very important point. there's some there's some interesting stuff that I get into and sort of halfway through the book about what insulates leaders from a real understanding of what goes on and what happens to somebody when you make them, powerful in some way. And stuff happens. And, we can research all of that, and we can we can see that, but that doesn't, challenge the point that, you know, leaders are trying to do a good job.

00:09:35:11 - 00:09:47:22
Ashley Goodall
They are responding to a set of, pressures and economics signals in the world and investor signals and all these other things, that aren't quite as visible. I don't think so. People on the front lines.

00:09:48:12 - 00:09:50:20
Kevin Eikenberry
but I think that's I think a really important point.

00:09:51:02 - 00:10:21:03
Ashley Goodall
You could call this the problem with change. You could call it the paradox of change. You could call it the tragedy of change. Interestingly enough, because, you know, the one definition of a tragedy, I suppose, is bad things happen when everyone's trying to do good things. And that's sort of what's what's going on here. So what what I'm trying to do is to shine a light on this so that when a leader, say, comes into, a new job or a new organization, and every time in their career before in that circumstance, they've gone.

00:10:21:03 - 00:10:43:01
Ashley Goodall
All right, well, let's let's pull up the org chart. All right. Let's start shifting that around. And let's, let's bring me the strategy and we'll have a new one of those. And I'm going to change out half the people on the leadership team. And then we're going to, we're going to do that all the way through the organization that somewhere in the back of their head, I'll have a we'll have a little thought that goes, hang on a second, hang on a second.

00:10:43:03 - 00:10:54:15
Ashley Goodall
If I solve for change, I might not solve for performance. And actually, I was sent here to solve for performance. So how does that occur?

00:10:54:17 - 00:11:16:16
Kevin Eikenberry
Yeah. You know what? It's been interesting. I didn't even know I was going to share this, but it I think it's exactly what I should share right now. in our work with new and front line leaders from our book from Davos. So we do lots of work with new and frontline leaders. In fact, I had this conversation with a group virtually this morning, and the question that we ask is, what are the common mistakes that new leaders make?

00:11:16:16 - 00:11:33:16
Kevin Eikenberry
And we always frame it, new could be brand new. I've never done this before, but also I'm a new leader. I'm new to this group, which is what you just described, right? I've been leader, but I'm new to this group. And you know what? One of the single biggest, most common mistakes we hear is too much change too fast.

00:11:33:18 - 00:11:58:02
Kevin Eikenberry
Not necessary. They're not necessarily saying changes bad. They're just saying they're changing it before they even know what the heck's going on right now. And you just described what happens is we feel like we're supposed to we feel like we're we're we're tasked with it and we're doing it before we even know the ground we're walking on. I want to comment on that.

00:11:58:04 - 00:12:11:08
Ashley Goodall
Well, and yeah, I mean, it's, I think people feel that they were hired to put their imprint on something. I've certainly had that feeling in my career. They brought me in to make my mark on this thing.

00:12:11:10 - 00:12:13:08
Kevin Eikenberry
I better prove that I was worthy of this.

00:12:13:08 - 00:12:35:11
Ashley Goodall
You know what? If I don't take up a chisel and a mallet and hit a rock, I'm not going to leave my mark, am I? So I'd better get whacking away at it. because otherwise my mark won't be. Won't be left. and so one of the, you know, one of the most important messages that I think we've got to get across to people is change and improvement are not the same thing.

00:12:35:13 - 00:12:51:12
Ashley Goodall
And and so we've actually got to start by thinking about where does improvement come from. and more improvement comes from not the leader. The we leaders are probably comfortable admitting to

00:12:51:14 - 00:12:53:02
Kevin Eikenberry
In doing the work.

00:12:53:02 - 00:13:21:03
Ashley Goodall
It comes from the people who do the work, people on the ground, people on the front lines. And so you you actually have to like, rewire your thinking about organizational performance and improvement to go. Where does it come from? Front lines mainly. What conditions do we need to create on the front lines to enable improvement to emerge? And very high on the list of conditions is stability, not stasis, stability, but certainly not life in the blender.

00:13:21:04 - 00:13:25:09
Ashley Goodall
Life in the blender doesn't help anybody do very much of anything.

00:13:25:11 - 00:13:50:05
Kevin Eikenberry
Except wait and wonder and be anxious. so so here's another exercise that I do with leaders all the time. I'll ask them, I'll short circuit this, but basically I ask people right now what what your thoughts are about change. And by the way, about half of the things we get aren't thoughts. Their feelings and the and the if we're playing Family Feud, the number one answers are all feelings.

00:13:50:07 - 00:14:08:11
Kevin Eikenberry
Some of them are positive, some of them aren't. But here's the interesting thing. it comes down many cases to, I and I say, are they positive or negative? Are they neutral? And all of the neutral ones, somehow form around this idea of uncertainty. And I want us to get to uncertainty in a minute because I just don't know.

00:14:08:11 - 00:14:29:10
Kevin Eikenberry
And if they say, well, if I said, what if I use the word progress? Well, then all my words will be positive, because you can look up change in the the source and progress will be one of the synonyms. But progress implies change for the better, better, but change itself. We don't know. We don't know, right? We don't know.

00:14:29:11 - 00:14:49:15
Kevin Eikenberry
I want to get to I want to get to uncertainty. But I got we got to unpack something else first. And that is like how did we end up here? Like how did we end up with this idea that somehow disruption is good and is maybe even necessary or essential? Like, how did we get. Because it hasn't always been that way.

00:14:49:17 - 00:15:22:13
Ashley Goodall
No, I mean, I think, you know, that that we can debate the history of this. I think a, a pretty good starting point if you're looking for a beginning of all of this stuff, you're going to be fairly close to the mark. If you say Clay Christensen, the Innovator's Dilemma, which which was published in the 90s, I think up towards the end of the 90s and, Clay Christensen, Harvard professor, very, very smart guy, said, I've studied some industries.

00:15:22:15 - 00:15:44:06
Ashley Goodall
And here's what happens. the leaders in those industries, in the, in the established industries face a certain set of economic incentives. And they have they've got customers and the customers like the products. There's a certain price point. So they've got a certain profit margin that they have to consider and they've got stakeholders. And one of so it's they don't have many degrees of freedom.

00:15:44:08 - 00:16:06:00
Ashley Goodall
And so what happens is a little startup will come along and basically eat their lunch because the little startups got a different sourcing capital. Its customers aren't necessarily expecting something to be cheap at the very beginning. Think Tesla for goodness sake. When Tesla was tiny, Tesla was selling well modified Lotus cars for hundreds of thousands of dollars, like five people.

00:16:06:02 - 00:16:26:11
Ashley Goodall
And they didn't have to deal with GM's profit margins or Tesla today profit margins. They could just they could be an upstart. So Clay Christensen observes or observes all of this and says, look, by doing the right thing, by your customers, leaders of large organizations are going to lose their businesses. This would be a problem, at least completely right.

00:16:27:02 - 00:16:39:18
Ashley Goodall
but then you get to the well, what's the solution? And of course, his prescription is, take some people out of your workforce, put them in, put them in a room up off on one side, like the skunkworks.

00:16:39:20 - 00:16:44:20
Kevin Eikenberry
I'm going say. So that idea comes from the mid 80s with time. Right? I'm Peter Waterman.

00:16:44:22 - 00:17:08:05
Ashley Goodall
And, and they will invent the disruptive here we go product. And you can then bring it back into your business and now they've created a new market and a new product and a new economic structure for that product. And so hallelujah, you're you've done it. And a lot of people listen to everything I've explained now and said disrupt everything then.

00:17:08:07 - 00:17:10:10
Ashley Goodall
Oh, off we go. Which was that's.

00:17:10:10 - 00:17:14:09
Kevin Eikenberry
Not what he says. And then but that's what's the biggest understanding.

00:17:14:09 - 00:17:37:21
Ashley Goodall
And it's like stuff goes bad in human affairs when we turn complicated ideas into taglines. And this got turned into a tagline. And then all of a sudden disruption is like the only idea, not one of the three ideas about how to run a business. The only idea we must run businesses by creating constant churn across the board.

00:17:38:02 - 00:17:43:23
Ashley Goodall
And if we don't do so with failing, and that's that's sort of where it comes from. 20 years we've been.

00:17:43:23 - 00:17:51:19
Kevin Eikenberry
Like, so for 20 years we've been teaching MBA students that. Yes, and we've been writing about it and all this other stuff. So I think that that's, I think, junior.

00:17:51:21 - 00:18:27:15
Ashley Goodall
The irony in the story, his prescription, Clay Christensen's original prescription, take people away and wall them off from corporate everything. Yeah, he's creating stability. That's not what he's doing for the people who are going to be making the the brand new products. The thing he's recommending is remove them from life in the blender. They get life in the whatever anti blender thing is, life in the cozy, warm space where things are predictable and you're in control, you have great degree of certainty about what's going to happen next.

00:18:27:20 - 00:18:49:22
Ashley Goodall
You are together in a community of people. You have a good sense of belonging, you're in a particular place and your work is massively meaningful. That's like the absolute epitome of innovation. Produce stability, but it gets branded disruption and foisted on everybody as something very different from the thing that Clay started with.

00:18:50:00 - 00:19:13:01
Kevin Eikenberry
So, the front half of the book is about the problem, and, and you identify several things, and we're not going to get to all of them. we're only gonna talk about one of them. And I already brought it up. And that's uncertainty. bunch of reasons why I'm picking that one. Doesn't really matter. but let's talk about the problem of uncertainty.

00:19:13:03 - 00:19:23:04
Kevin Eikenberry
We've already hinted at it, but what are the problems? And why is why is this a huge culprit to the overall problem that we're talking about?

00:19:24:18 - 00:19:52:22
Ashley Goodall
so, the problem with uncertainty is it frames people's brains, roughly speaking. and more so than, inflicting pain on people. So the science on this is, the science on this is all a little bit weird when you sit and read it, because it almost all involves giving people electric shocks. and when I started, I'm like, has anyone ever had another thought in uncertainty research, then wiring people up and shocking them?

00:19:53:02 - 00:20:24:05
Ashley Goodall
And the answer is apparently not. but anyway, you what's nice about an electric shock is you can use it to measure pain, but also the gaps in between the electric shocks you can use to create uncertainty. And so there are these. There's this one experiment where they, where they give one group of people a bunch of really strong electric shocks, and then a different group of people, a mixture of strong electric shocks and moderate electric shocks, and they measure the stress levels.

00:20:24:07 - 00:20:51:15
Ashley Goodall
And it's less stressful to be given consistent high shocks than it is for it to go up and down the the group that got three strong electric shocks and 17 medium ones was much more stressed than the people who just got high level electric shocks. All of them. then somebody else much more recently did a very clever experiment involving a computer game involving a snake and some electric shocks.

00:20:51:15 - 00:21:14:10
Ashley Goodall
I believe that probably a little bit of both, and what they were measuring is, the moments of highest stress and the moments of highest stress for people who were uncovering, I think, snakes in a simulated environment or being shocked or both. The moment of highest stress was when the uncertainty was at its highest, not when their pain was at its highest.

00:21:14:12 - 00:21:29:19
Ashley Goodall
So uncertainty trumps pain. This is a very, very important thing to understand if you're in a workplace, because workplaces, actually most of them don't create much pain. They create a hell of a lot of uncertainty.

00:21:29:21 - 00:21:49:11
Kevin Eikenberry
So you can say that if I want to, I don't I'm want to move on a little bit because you make a point that I think I really I'm glad you shared that with us. And that point of and if and if all you all take from this is uncertainty trumps pain, then this was worth the 30 minutes that you spend with us.

00:21:49:12 - 00:21:56:13
Kevin Eikenberry
But you you talk about something else that's really important. The difference between uncertainty and fear.

00:21:56:15 - 00:22:19:04
Ashley Goodall
Well, the way to think about this is the it's actually the example is from Monty Seligman, who writes about this in his book helplessness, which is another, by the way, if you like reading about electric shocks, then go read about helplessness. And it's about helplessness and depression and a lot of other very, very cheerful topics. But it is a masterpiece and it is a classic of the psychological literature.

00:22:19:10 - 00:22:42:15
Ashley Goodall
So if you want to understand human beings, Monty Seligman, helplessness, you should read that. and he gives the example of a of a rabid dog and he says, what? You might be afraid of a rabid dog because you know that if it bites you, bad things are going to follow. Well, the thing is, when it leaves, the threat is gone.

00:22:42:17 - 00:22:50:23
Ashley Goodall
And you can deal with that. People can deal with that. The problem is that uncertainty doesn't have an end.

00:22:51:01 - 00:22:54:01
Kevin Eikenberry
It's you don't know if the dog is still here or not.

00:22:54:01 - 00:23:12:20
Ashley Goodall
Well, because there wasn't a dog, there was just a there's a reorg coming and the real coming exists for a long time before there's an end. And by the way, the way we do reorg at work by the way, is when we finish one we start the next one. So the really is no end to all of this stuff in the, in the world work.

00:23:13:10 - 00:23:39:01
Ashley Goodall
and so he's the Seligman says, look, there's a difference between fear and chronic anxiety. And chronic anxiety is the flavor of uncertainty that we've that these other experiments look at. and what, what you need in a world of rabid dogs and chronic anxiety is a thing called a safety signal. And the safety signal is the psychological equivalent of the dog left.

00:23:39:03 - 00:24:03:09
Ashley Goodall
And it's to say, we're done now. We're done now. It's okay. You can breathe out. It's the the thing has passed. what you see when you look at particularly executive communications or leadership communications in organizations is a whole bunch of people trying to come up with a safety signal when there isn't a believable one. This won't be too bad.

00:24:03:09 - 00:24:29:14
Ashley Goodall
We'll be through it soon. this is for all the right interests. We're sad that thousands of people have got to leave us. but none of this. But, but, but, but, but. And it's all like reaching for safety signals. But there aren't safety signals for a lot of things at work. And so when you start down the path of uncertainty, you are creating an environment that is very psychologically toxic for people.

00:24:29:16 - 00:24:40:18
Ashley Goodall
And once you started, you can't actually do very much about it. It's very hard to come up with a credible and persuasive and believable way of letting people know that, that we're through it.

00:24:40:20 - 00:25:12:15
Kevin Eikenberry
And hear this clearly. Everybody, even if you really are. If you really can show them that we're done, they may not believe you because and their perception is what matters here. So, even it's it's super hard as actually saying and it almost doesn't matter because we don't believe it, because we've lived 67 times when it wasn't true.

00:25:12:16 - 00:25:16:21
Kevin Eikenberry
They don't think you're lying necessarily, but they don't really believe you.

00:25:16:23 - 00:25:41:23
Ashley Goodall
Or they don't. Or people are smart. I mean, the other thing about organizational life is people are very smart and very astute readers of organizational signaling. And so people can look at a leader and go, you're telling me it's all going to be safe, but you actually don't control whether it's going to be okay or not? You can't unilaterally make it all okay, because I know what got us into this in the first place.

00:25:42:01 - 00:26:13:21
Ashley Goodall
And it was partly you're doing and partly not you're doing, and you don't control everything. So and then, by the way, and this is it gets even more strained and strange, because then the disassociation between what the leader is saying and what the people understand to be the reality on the ground makes the uncertainty worse. So now you're in this sort of spiral, and, you know, it makes it hard to show up in the morning and get on with your job, which ultimately is what we're we're talking about in all of these things.

00:26:14:01 - 00:26:20:07
Ashley Goodall
What are the conditions for somebody to do a good job? Uncertainty is not one of them.

00:26:20:09 - 00:26:42:19
Kevin Eikenberry
So you wrote something in the book and it literally made me laugh out loud when I read it. because you, we you don't just talk about uncertainty. We talk about for other reasons why the way we're doing it, based on the way we see the world is causing us problems. And then you say in the book, but blockbuster, it makes me laugh.

00:26:42:19 - 00:27:05:17
Kevin Eikenberry
But my, my point is, we all know when we say that, like, if you're old enough to know what blockbuster was like, sometimes we really do have to change. So my question is, in the few minutes we have left, like, what do we do? Like we can rethink all this. And yet sometime how do you what do we do?

00:27:05:19 - 00:27:26:09
Kevin Eikenberry
Yes, I think there are some things we can do to to reduce and change and all those things we've talked about. But what are a couple of tangible things that leaders can do, especially if you're a leader somewhere inside the organization? Yeah, you're a frontline leader. You're a leader of leaders. You're in the middle. Like, what can you do now that we've you've preached the gloom and doom actually.

00:27:26:11 - 00:27:27:20
Ashley Goodall
You want me to cheer you up now?

00:27:27:22 - 00:27:29:21
Kevin Eikenberry
Yeah. Let's try.

00:27:29:23 - 00:28:00:06
Ashley Goodall
Teams. The beautiful things. Teams are beautiful things. Teams. If you want a simple way of thinking about this as a leader, imagine yourself primarily as a leader of a team. And that team in the relationship between the people on the team, provides for itself a great sense of certainty. Social glue. we talk a lot about meaningful work.

00:28:00:08 - 00:28:20:09
Ashley Goodall
Meaningful work at an organizational level is much more slide wear and slogan than it is actually tangible meaning for humans. But work on a team is massively meaningful because I know what my work is, and if my team understands that, then I can begin to amplify that meaning out and up in an organization.

00:28:20:13 - 00:28:25:05
Kevin Eikenberry
And I know that when I do this, it helps it know.

00:28:25:07 - 00:28:55:08
Ashley Goodall
And they can tell me. So if you want the place where stability needs to live in organizations is teams, which means we've got to help team leaders learn that this is part of their job to create stability for people. We've got to help team leaders lead in a way that creates stability. So the quick thought on this is if you're micromanaging somebody, that's not it.

00:28:55:09 - 00:29:17:15
Ashley Goodall
If you are making space for them to establish their own agency, then that is it. You're much closer to the mark there. If you are talking in strange corporate lingo that nobody really understands, and they don't sort of really figure out what what it's a being sold something here. Is this a fake safety signal? Where's the rabid dog?

00:29:17:15 - 00:29:40:13
Ashley Goodall
Blah blah blah blah blah. If you're doing all of that, you're not helping. If you're speaking real words that actual humans use to communicate with one another when they're not at work, we all know what those words are. We'll call them real words then. You're doing pretty well. And if you are thinking about at work, what are the rituals that teams can participate in?

00:29:40:18 - 00:30:00:22
Ashley Goodall
What is the weekly this? What is the daily this? What is the set of. Whenever this happens, we do this. What are the response of rituals? What are the things that give predictability to time and predictability to a group of people working together? If you do those things, you're off to a pretty good start.

00:30:01:00 - 00:30:28:15
Kevin Eikenberry
Creating a rhythm. You're, you're you're building that stuff into culture. You're doing all that stuff. So be predictable. Speak real words, honor ritual, most of all, focus on your team. so. So actually, is there anything else? I mean, this wasn't meant to be a book report. You and I talked about that before we started as well. in fact, I'm hoping that everybody wants to get their own copy of The Problem with change and the Essential Nature of Human Performance.

00:30:29:07 - 00:30:38:12
Kevin Eikenberry
but is there anything we didn't talk about, that you really think we should have highlighted, or you wish. You wish I would have asked.

00:30:38:14 - 00:31:09:19
Ashley Goodall
I think the, I think where I arrived at the end of all of this, all of this research analysts writing is the idea that actually we sort of think of organizations in an upside down way. We think of them. We think of the point of organizations as being economic profit or economic activity. Your customer base or customer that, but actually the right way to think of an organization is to think of it as a platform for human contribution.

00:31:09:21 - 00:31:34:19
Ashley Goodall
And that if you can understand that we all have choices of where to work. we all have things to offer to the world, and yet there are many things that we can't do by ourselves that are deeply, intrinsically rewarding for us to do. And to do those things, we need to team up with other people. And then the sky's the limit.

00:31:34:22 - 00:31:58:09
Ashley Goodall
At least it has been so far in human history. so the our organizations are large companies or other organizations are there to allow us to amplify what each of us brings to the world. And we need to think of them in that way, because then we need to them will help us put the humans back in the middle.

00:31:58:11 - 00:32:15:04
Ashley Goodall
You do you get that right? A lot of other goodies come along. You got a lot of happy customers. You got a lot of economic upside. but if you aren't thinking of human organizations around the humans, then you're missing out.

00:32:15:06 - 00:32:43:23
Kevin Eikenberry
Organization is an organism, not a mechanical thing. I'm just. I'm just saying what you said in a less elegant way. I love that. And that's a pretty good place for us to shift gears to the final part of our conversation, actually. so tell me. Tell us what you do for fun.

00:32:44:01 - 00:33:01:12
Ashley Goodall
I like to play golf in the summer. Can't do it here in the northeast in the winter, because it's a little white ball and you lose it in the snow. but I like to play golf for fun, and that's that's my that's my thing. I still play the piano a little bit, but not so much. These days.

00:33:01:14 - 00:33:21:11
Ashley Goodall
But golf is interesting because it's an exercise in frustration, as anyone who plays golf knows. And it's also an exercise in learning in a very different way. And it's it is fascinating to me how hard it is to learn something by feel rather than by sort of intellectual learning, which is the sort of learning I've done for me for most of my life.

00:33:21:16 - 00:33:40:04
Ashley Goodall
Somebody says, hit a golf ball and you say, show me. And they show you, and then go do that. You can't do that because you don't know what it feels like on the inside. And there is, I think, in that, a profound truth about how to help other people learn, which is they have to help themselves feel what it's like to do the thing that we're trying to we're trying to help them be better.

00:33:40:06 - 00:33:50:05
Kevin Eikenberry
Because learning isn't knowledge. Learning there is. There is intellectual. Now knowledge is learning, but learning is about doing it. Which means I have to pick up.

00:33:50:06 - 00:33:51:20
Ashley Goodall
You got to know your way to do it.

00:33:51:20 - 00:34:11:05
Kevin Eikenberry
And I got to pick up the club and I got to hit the keys. So here's my observation for you. Take this for what it's worth, actually, if I remember right from our first conversation that you have a degree in music, remember that correctly. So you play the piano. So you started out learning things by, and now you're back to learning things by feel.

00:34:11:05 - 00:34:12:22
Kevin Eikenberry
How about that for an observation.

00:34:13:00 - 00:34:34:04
Ashley Goodall
Yeah. And how great is that. And how back to the theme of uncertainty and stress. How distressing is that? Because it puts your brain in a sort of tank, changes the channel on your brain a little bit, and there's something lovely and rejuvenating about that, even when you when you can't do it for a while, which is my golf game.

00:34:34:06 - 00:34:51:01
Kevin Eikenberry
There you go. So you did something this weekend that I need to do badly. And if any one of my the people on my team that watch or listen to this are going to spit out their coffee when they hear this, you have you have just reorganized your bookshelves. And my team would say, Kevin. Well, first of all, you need more of them.

00:34:51:01 - 00:35:02:19
Kevin Eikenberry
But yeah, that's a problem that you've got. Kevin. I have not doing that. I haven't done it. You've done it. And as a result of that, you've got new things on your reading list. So tell us what you're reading right now.

00:35:03:03 - 00:35:31:06
Ashley Goodall
the one I just started like yesterday before, is a book named Smart Swarms. And it is, it's been around a little while. but it's about emergence and and having just described an organization in terms of a, an organism and b a thing where performance emerges from a group of people helping one another, supporting one another, providing a sense of belonging for one another.

00:35:31:15 - 00:35:59:00
Ashley Goodall
it's it's not massively difficult to see what I might find reading about ants. interesting, but so far I've read the beginning of the book and it's all about ants. And my God, they're fascinating ants. I mean, I always knew they were interesting. There was some clever stuff going on there. but, you know, there's a big description of how they know whether there's a threat or how do they know whether there's food based on how quickly the the morning foragers come back.

00:35:59:02 - 00:36:19:10
Ashley Goodall
If they come back in a big rush, that's a bad signal. If they come back very slowly. Also bad. No food. If they come back in a sort of moderate way, presumably smiling in a sort of anti way, then that's lovely news. And how that means there's food and let's go. That's how a decision is made with no person making or no and making making the decision.

00:36:19:10 - 00:36:35:14
Ashley Goodall
The decision is emergent. And I think this, you know, it's it's it's it's an idea that's been around for a while, but I think it has profound implications for how we think about work and, again, how we think about teams and how we think about organizations, smart swarms.

00:36:35:14 - 00:36:47:05
Kevin Eikenberry
But the other book that you would like them all to read is your new book, The Problem with Change. Ashley, where do you want to point people? where can they learn more about you, learn about the work, etc., etc.?

00:36:47:07 - 00:37:03:22
Ashley Goodall
So, learn about me on my website, Ashley goodall.com, which is exactly as it sounds. And you can get the book, wherever books are sold, Amazon, Barnes Noble and all of the other outlets, where people go book shopping.

00:37:04:14 - 00:37:21:13
Kevin Eikenberry
Ashley, thank you for joining us today. I've been looking forward to it because I know how much I enjoyed our first conversation. And by the way, everybody, I'll put that a link to the first conversation in the show notes, as we always do. But a couple of other episodes that you might might find interesting, but we'll sure put Ashley's there.

00:37:21:23 - 00:37:36:15
Kevin Eikenberry
the nine Lies about work. And we'll you'll have that there. and but I have a question for all of you that I ask you every week before we wrap up. And the question is simply this. Now what? What action will you take because of this? And I'm not just talking about buying a book, although I hope you do that.

00:37:37:01 - 00:37:55:16
Kevin Eikenberry
and I'm not just talking about you encouraging someone else to listen to this. Although I hope you do that. I'm really asking you to think about what action will you take based on what you just listened to? What action will you take? Maybe you need to think about how you can be more predictable with your team. Maybe you need to think about how to focus on your team more.

00:37:55:19 - 00:38:23:09
Kevin Eikenberry
Maybe you're going to rethink uncertainty. Maybe you're going to work harder to find, a credible and believable safety signal. I don't know what that is for you, but I do know that if you take action on what you got here, you'll have a far more value from it than just having listened. I do hope that you, found it useful, but it will only be ultimately useful if you take action.

00:38:23:11 - 00:38:43:10
Kevin Eikenberry
Ashley, thanks again for being here. Such a pleasure to have you back. we might have to do another one before there's another book. We just might have to do that. and so, everybody, I hope that you will come back next week, because I'll be back next week with another episode of the Remarkable Leadership Podcast. Make sure wherever you're listening that you go say that you like it, share it with somebody else.

00:38:43:10 - 00:38:49:12
Kevin Eikenberry
You know how to do all that stuff. but I just hope you come back and join us for another episode, because we'll be back next week. We'll see you then.