Complexity is killing the ability of many companies to innovate and adapt. So, simplicity can be a competitive advantage. Imagine what it’d be like where everyone only engages in essential and meaningful work. How can leaders rebuild their organizations with Simplicity in its DNA?
Contributors

• • Lisa Bodell, Author, Why Simple Wins.
  • Ed Toner, Chief Information Officer, State of Nebraska.

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Top 5 Learning Points

1. You can’t operate with speed; you can’t compete. By just writing it off, I think that’s an absolute nonstarter, that cannot be the way that we operate
2. How do you kill complexity and sustain simple?
3. What do employees want- to be inspired to work in a simplified environment?
4. How do you add more, change processes, and as a result, change reporting relationships, and still maintain simplicity?
5. Should we take simplicity as a step, always when we’re trying to grow?

Show Notes

• By being more intentional about making everything as simple as possible, we can start to clear away the clutter while a lot of the bigger simplification initiatives get put in place.
• The best companies that are truly both innovative, the simplified, are the ones that get comfortable with constantly killing complexities to make space for the innovation to happen so it can become a habit.
• How we can measure simplicity or the ability to get things done in a company are things like, employee retention levels, consistent growth-not just a business as usual stuff but new bottom line growth.
• Innovating with simplicity- not replicating the past, but actually creating new more innovative and more efficient processes for the future.
• Defining it, tackling just a couple things and then saying the metrics that you want out of it are really a great way to get people comfortable with simplifying and seeing the value in it.
• How does Agile increase on processes, innovation and streamlining the products?
• It’s really walking the walk and talking to talk and making sure that they know that when you say something, you’re going to have their back and yes, they can make change, even at the lowest level that you’re going to support that change.
• Don’t start unless you’ve done all of the homework, you’ve put all of the thoughts, and you talked thoroughly to all of the people involved.

Summary

To drive simplicity, on needs a compelling vision for the future and a structured, systematic communication. They need to build trust or else the teams won’t follow. Getting the influencers on board with a vision of simplicity that drives efficiency, reduces costs and increases agility, gets everybody’s buy-in and drives the project better.

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• The Future of IT Leadership
• Private/Hybrid Cloud, Security, & Taking that First Step into the Cloud

Transcript 

Sanjog Aul [00:00:24]:

Hello, and welcome to this segment on CTN. To learn more, please visit ciotalknetwork.com. And the topic for today is Leading to Simple  . Our guest for today is, Lisa Bodell, who’s the Author of Why Simple Wins. Hi, Lisa. How are you?

Lisa Bodell [00:00:39]:

Hi. Thanks for having me.

Sanjog Aul [00:00:41]:

Oh, great to have you. And we have Ed Toner, who’s the Chief Information Officer with State of Nebraska. Hey, Ed. How was life?

Ed Toner [00:00:48]:

Very good.

Sanjog Aul [00:00:49]:

Very good. Very good. So, the reason we wanted to talk about this topic, which is around simplicity, is because we are trying to do a whole lot in today’s day and age. More technology, more business processes, more acquisitions, you name it. Everything is becoming intertwined, complex. And while we try to say, oh, we are gonna give a very simple experience for the customers, but internal complexity is actually pulling us down. So could this be a time when organizations, if they take a solemn vow to actually embrace simplicity, make it part of the very DNA, could it not become a competitive advantage? Yeah. The answer intuitively seems to be yes. But then how? Easier said than done. That’s what we want to explore. So starting as the first question, when we are looking at this, Lisa, this is for you. We are saying we want to do a lot of reporting. We want as the companies are trying to do more with lesser resources or maybe pumping in more resources, who’s accountable? Who’s making the decision? How are things gonna be changed? Everything is moving at a warped space, and we are trying to change wheels of a very fast moving car. It cannot be easier. When we have such a thing happening, do you think we should just say, okay, while the life will become simple after this complexity, can we live with it or there has to be something done upfront about simplicity? 

Lisa Bodell [00:02:26]:

Well, I would argue that something has to be done upfront. I mean, to me, you just hit the nail on the head when you said simplicity will be our competitive advantage. And I truly, truly believe that. And the statistics and research show that. And they just by way of background, and then I’m going to get to your question, which is, you know, not too long ago, SAP had done a future work study. And the number one issue that 70% of the CEOs that were interviewed said is that their number one concern is complexity. And the reason why it was their number one concern is because people were drowning in mundane work. They weren’t able to get the real work that mattered done. And they realized that because of, for better or worse, things involving technology, big data, etcetera, it was only going to get worse over time. So something had to be done to kill complexity because complexity is the enemy of meaningful work. And it’s not about being big anymore. It’s about being fast. So you can’t operate with speed. You can’t compete. So by just writing it off, I think that’s an absolute nonstarter. That cannot be the way that we operate. And so to answer your question, I think that the focus needs to be at every level of the organization, not just from the top, making simplification our new operating system. Because when simplification becomes top of mind, we become more intentional about it. And the problem with so much complexity, you know, that’s the evil twin of simplicity, is that so much of it that is created is self imposed and unnecessary. And we can get into that a little bit more. But that means by being more intentional about making everything as simple as possible, we can start to clear away the clutter while a lot of the bigger, you know, simplification initiatives get put in place. There’s a lot we can do on a day to day basis to simplify our work in terms of meetings and emails and policies and reporting, to get rid of those redundancies while bigger things are put in place. You can’t wait for those things to happen or kick the can down the road, in my opinion.

Sanjog Aul [00:04:19]:

So, Ed, no one comes to the office every day and say I want to screw up today or I’m gonna make things complex. That’s not the intent anyone brings as an individual, as a team, as an organization. Why is this a chronic issue? Do you think we are taking on more than we can chew or tackle? Is that’s where we lose track of what’s supposed to remain simple and unknowingly, unintentionally make it complex?

Ed Toner [00:04:49]:

Well, I think, you know, I spent 20 years of my career in private industry and just the last 2.5 years in public. And things in the public sector are much more complex than in the private sector. And it’s inherent because of the fact that in the public sector you’ve got separate agencies, you’ve got separate boards, you’ve got separate commissions and every one of them feel like they need to be autonomous. And what that means to the IT world is that we have dozens and dozens of entire infrastructure networks that are separate and don’t even talk to each other. So one of the things that I did when I came to the state 2.5 years ago was exactly what you’re talking about. I wanted to take all that complication, all of that out. And, of course, by doing that, I hit bureaucracy, but we’ve done it. And in fact, I think we did it faster than any other state. We have consolidated all of our code agencies, many of the non-code agencies, and the difference between code and non-code are the ones that report to the governor and the ones that don’t. In March of last year, I announced we were gonna consolidate all agencies that were code agencies and non-code agencies that wanted to join us, and we are done. We actually during that entire 18-month process, we did something that was unique to any state and that is instead of asking one agency at a time, I went out and took every single network engineer across the state and added them to our team, then gave them the first task and that is take everything off of your network and put it on to the one state network. Then that was 6 months. 6 months later, we went out to all of the server engineers and said, I want them all, bring them into my group. And by the way, your first job is now that we have a centralized network, take every server, every data closet out there, and there were dozens of these across the state. I want them in our two data centers. Third thing we did 6 months later, we said every desktop everybody who supports desktops, they’re coming into the state. And by the way, we’re not going to support out of one central location anymore. We’re gonna support out of eight service centers that are closer to our customers across the state. Just doing that cost us nothing and we’ve already saved $10,200,000 in efficiencies to date. That was an 18-month project start to finish. We’re completely finished. We have decreased the number of IT staff in the state by 12.5%. We’ve increased through our statistics the service levels and we have consolidated dozens of separate applications into what we call standards. So I’ve said we have one enterprise content management system. We have one email system. We have one of everything and we have picked the best of breed and then we’ve eliminated all the other contracts which have saved us millions. Reducing staff, increasing efficiency, reducing cost, increasing quality every single month. So we went in and actually simplified from the bottom up all across the state.

Sanjog Aul [00:08:42]:

Yeah. That’s a that’s a very encouraging story for other states and even for private sector because there’s complexity even private sector. So, Lisa, when you listen to Ed’s, accomplishments or his team’s accomplishments, there was subtraction, there were efficiency gains, everything else. Would you roll this up into saying he’s simplified?

Lisa Bodell [00:09:07]:

I would most definitely. I mean, I think, Ed, that’s fantastic. And your point is a great one, by the way, of public versus private in terms of, public sectors, having done some work within education and some other areas within government agencies. There’s more, handcuffs, so to speak, versus guardrails that you have to operate with. And so I love a few things that I was talking about, which is, yes, it’s a cost reduction. It was also a resource reduction. But the other side of it is, it’s not just a financial gain that you get with the provocation. You know, it’s a cultural and cultural gain, as well as, I’ll tell you, an ethical gain, which is something that people don’t realize. You know, the cultural gain is, things that you get from servicing your customers better, making them happier. Employees are happier because they’re serviced better. You don’t waste their time. There’s a better place to work because they’re being able to focus on things that matter versus, you know, not being able to get service from an IT perspective. Those things add to culture. And so that’s another benefit. The other thing is, you know, it’s an ethical thing. An ethical meaning it’s not okay to waste people’s time anymore. Time is worth more than a lot of people, than money. And what’s interesting is we let people waste our time so much, and people are starting to get upset about it. So people that are proactive, like what Ed mentioned, is being really smart, whether it’s for his employees or for the constituents he serves. Because it’s not right to waste people’s money and that alone is something that he’s ahead of the game on. Getting rid of redundancies and all those other things is the smart approach. The results that he has, I think, speak volumes. That’s absolutely what simplicity should do.

Sanjog Aul [00:10:44]:

And people say that it gets ugly before it gets better. So, Ed, while you hold the trophy right now of having accomplished what you did accomplish, what do you do when you are dealing with the structural shifts in the roles? Like you said, okay. All you guys not gonna be, like, local to that region, you’ll come here. Or then you will not be serviced by that one central location. There’ll be multiple. So that means there is a flux not only like, technology wise, you consolidated, but then you also had to look at what a person deals with on a typical day. Do you think there’s a way to simplify that transition, or should we say, okay. You know, we’ll have this ugliness, but live with it. And and from one ugliness to another, then there would be another project that you’ll work on that again will create a shift. That also creates complexity. Can you tackle that and make that transition process simple?

Ed Toner [00:11:40]:

Yeah. Absolutely. Communication is the key. You have to put out as a leader, as a transformational leader, and that’s really what we did. We changed the culture. Everything is now coming from one central location where before they were getting direction from multiple areas. Right? They had my office telling them what to do. They had then their agency telling them what to do. Then they had, you know, all these different, really, bosses across the state. They now have one. So I realized that by having that one central location that was setting policy, I had better have a good road map. And I published that 18 months out so that our teams know exactly where I’m going and what I’m doing 18 months from today, and that’s public, on our website. I also blog constantly about what we’re doing, why we’re doing what we’re doing, talking about success stories, and letting people know how this is actually working. A great example is when I went to the distributed model of desktop support, we had an instance where we shut down a state patrol center in a town very far west, 6 hours away by car. We had to move that equipment to the new location, which was another 4 hours away. And in our old model, you would send someone from our central location. They would drive 6 hours. They would then take all of the equipment at that location, disconnect it, put it in a van, drive it to the new location, and then set it back up and then come back home. Well, that’s gonna take 2 days. Well, because I had people located in those locations, it took them a matter of hours, 2 or 3 hours because they were sitting in the Scottsbluff location, which is way West Nebraska, if you know our geography. They just disconnected. They literally then just had they had a State Patrolman actually drive the equipment to the new State Patrol location. I had another group of people that connected a couple of hours there. What would have taken 2 days and had been a really a bad service happened the same day and quicker than they’ve ever had it done before. So that type of thing has to be advertised. So I blogged about it. I wrote about it. I wrote exactly what happened. And as long as you are really communicating those successes and you just keep rolling with them, people start buying into that new culture of why why in the world were we sending someone from Lincoln, Nebraska to Scottsbluff, Nebraska, then down to North Platte, Nebraska, and then they had to go back to Lincoln, Nebraska. Why didn’t we just have someone in Scottsbluff and North Platte doing this work? And that’s what we’re doing. And the really big advantage here is, guess what, I didn’t move anyone to Scottsbluff or North Platte. They were there already. They were just underutilized. They weren’t doing state work. They were doing a particular agency’s work. I’ve now asked them to do the entire region’s work and believe it or not, haven’t had to increase staffing at all. 

Sanjog Aul [00:15:07]:

Let’s take a quick break. Yeah. Go ahead. Go ahead.

Ed Toner [00:15:09]:

And the customers are writing to us saying, I’ve never been serviced so quickly. Why? Because they would call on a Tuesday. I couldn’t get out to Scottsbluff if I wanted to until Wednesday. Now they’re getting it same day service. Cheaper for the state, no travel cost.

Sanjog Aul [00:15:29]:

That’s phenomenal. Let’s take a quick break. Lister’s will be right back. And, Lisa, when we come back, let’s explore that is outer success means what examples that, Ed gave here. Multiple how he tried to do it. Is that an automatic indication of inner simplicity? Because some companies, we see they show wins. But then if you go closer, it looks like the company’s imploding. What are the signs which the outside people will see or, in fact, even more importantly, inside people will see, which will tell that whatever efforts they’re making to simplify are actually simplifying the organization. Please stay tuned listeners. We’ll be right back.

Sanjog Aul [00:18:13]:

Welcome back. So, Lisa, we heard great success story, what Ed, led. Now this is great where he also mentioned how he simplified and that led to success. But that’s not always the case when you see the rest of the world. We we hear a lot of success stories, but then you look closer and you find that it has created more complexity and it becomes like a sine wave. You go up and then down and or or the only time when you go up is you you have a some sort of a success, but internally, it is imploding. And that means some place complexity is getting, introduced as a result of this because we want to be competitive. We want to roll out new products and features.

Lisa Bodell [00:19:00]:

So, you know, it’s interesting. You were asked about the signs of simplicity. Is that what you were talking about before, I think?

Sanjog Aul [00:19:08]:

Yes.

Lisa Bodell [00:19:09]:

So there are many different signs in terms of simplicity. And I think, you know, it’s interesting. What’s on the outside isn’t always what’s happening inside of a company. All of us know that. But one of the biggest signs that I can tell you in terms of is a company really doing what they say they’re doing is you can look at performance reviews. And one of the things that they do on a lot of companies’ annual employee surveys is there’s been this big focus on innovation, which is great. Innovation, though, typically focuses on doing more because we are addicted to more. We think that more has more value. And what happens is that’s where companies, you can see a growth spurt, but you don’t know if there’s going to be a problem looming on the horizon because suddenly they’re not going to be able to take on more because they’ve created this beast that they’ve become a slave to. And I think the best companies that are truly both innovative but simplified are the ones that get comfortable with constantly killing complexities to make space for the innovation to happen so it can become a habit. So for example, when you look at these performance reviews, one of the questions they typically ask or they rate high on is, are we an innovative company? And I’ll give you an example of a pharmaceutical company here on the East Coast that said, you know, 89% of their employees said that they are innovative. But the thing that they ranked lowest on on their employee annual survey was the ability to get things done. So what that showed me was and you see this a lot within companies is the perception and the window dressing is, hey, we’re innovative. But no one’s getting anything done. And so what that signals to me is they had a culture of complexity. And they needed to change the habits and the metrics upon which they measured how people work. And the reason I say that is a lot of people spend time on building a cultural, on cultural aesthetics within their companies. Like, you know, cultural, whiteboards on the walls and colorful walls and beanbag chairs and organic food in the cafeterias. And all that stuff is great. But that’s not only why people stay at work. Because if that was true, then Google would have a 100% retention And what people want is not inspiring workspaces, they want inspiring work. And they want to be able to get things done. So how we can measure simplicity or the ability to get things done in a company are things like, employee retention levels, consistent growth, not just in business as usual stuff, but new bottom line growth. Simplified companies on average are able to charge between 6% to 10% more for their products versus other people. They have higher customer satisfaction levels. Again, they have higher retention levels. And employees say within their companies, they have systematic processes to actually getting rid of redundancies and things that don’t matter. And they also have permission to say no. So some of these things are system things. Like, they have quarterly meetings to kill stupid rules, to kill stupid meetings, to eliminate reports that don’t matter anymore. So they make those things a habit. But they also have permission from good leaders that model killing complexity behaviors that they are allowed to and encouraged and, in fact, measured in their performance reviews to say no. And some of the companies that do that are places like Novartis, P&G, GE, Vancity Credit Union. There are many people now that are putting metrics in place and simplification teams to make this a habit. So you’re going to see a lot more stuff internally getting resourced, as well as reviewed in terms of Simplicity teams and even Chief Simplicity Officers. So it’s a very exciting time, and this is becoming a real way that people wanna work.

Sanjog Aul [00:22:47]:

So the examples Lisa gave, Ed, are from companies which are progressive, and they are where they are because some of those techniques to retain simplicity as you grow were actually put in on paper and some processes were developed. But there are many, many more who are struggling. And as they have to, not just like because in your case, you consolidated. So whatever you had, you simplified it. But now comes the time when you have to add something new to it, which means you’ll have to again shift gears. How do you add more, change processes as a result, change reporting relationships as a result, and still maintain simplicity? Do you think it’ll become complex for a bit and then come back to simplify it? So you have to make it monolithic or make it complex before you simplify, only that’s the way you could grow?

Ed Toner [00:23:42]:

No. I really think, and I think I totally agree with Lisa on this. I think simplification is your first step. And that’s really what, when I joined the state, I wanted to make sure we had good core processes, good standards across the state that we could all agree on. And that simplification had to happen. And I’ve been telling my team, you know, we’re simplifying now. We’re consolidating now. We’re actually, as a culture, we’re coming together so that we can innovate. Right? And I really think you stifle innovation if you’re not simplistic. Right? Because if it’s a simple, if you can navigate the system very simply, then innovation can be fostered much easier. So, one of the things I did because my background, I spent 20 years in IT and private industry, but the other 10 years, I started out after college. I was in industrial engineering and manufacturing, so everything to me is an assembly line. And my background is every you know, I had just in time manufacturing and continuing, process improvement and zero defects and all of those things. And I went all the way and I have a Six Sigma Black Belt. So, what we did at the state is we wanted everyone to start thinking about how do you make things simple. So, every time that we redo any type of product, if we’re writing if we’re taking a process and we’re taking it from a manual to an automated state, the very first thing our teams look at is, okay, is this the right process to even start with? Do we even want to automate this process? And how we got that thinking in place is we started about a year ago training every single employee, that’s 19,000 employees in the state, have had Lean Six Sigma training. Every single employee in the state is a white belt. All the managers in the state are yellow belts. I’m personally a black belt, and I served in the manufacturing industry. So we have set a mindset of you don’t automate or you don’t innovate until you have an optimum process in the first place. And so having that mindset of everyone knowing that, oh my gosh, IT is not going to just come in and replicate what we’re doing today. They’re going to ask us to improve it and then they’ll automate it. So we’re not replicating the past. We’re actually creating new, more innovative and more efficient processes, for the future. And to me, that is innovation.

Sanjog Aul [00:26:15]:

Lisa, when we look at the the whole process, so let’s kind of jump in as someone is trying to introduce a new service or trying to shift things. That means the people who are supposed to work on it, they need instructions. People who are managing them need some reporting, some data, and the people at the top need to make sure there is an alignment to what they started out with. All of that means it’s gonna be a shift for all of them. Do you think there is a way to simplify or keep that shift simple?

Lisa Bodell [00:26:58]:

Well, yes. I think there’s a few things you can do, which is, you know, aligning on what I was saying is you have to make sure we all define the problem and what we want to do in terms of simplifying in the first place. So, taking out just a manufacturing realm or industrial realm, I would say from a human perspective, one of the things that you need to do when you’re inside an organization and you start this culture of simplicity is you need to define what you mean by simplification. And it’s much like innovation. We have this joke that if we ask people to define simplicity you’ll get 10 different answers. And we worked with a really large, well we worked with a division within P&G who was actually starting a simplification effort. It was an engineering group. And I said, hey, have you defined you know, define not just projects. That’s what they did. Here are the projects we want to simplify. And I said, now hold on. First of all, did you say what simplification is to you and where you want it to take you? And they kind of paused, like, because they just said, oh, it’s common sense, right? It’s just inherent to everybody. And believe me, it’s not. Everyone approaches it differently. And I said, let’s define what simplicity is. They did this research and they came back and they had 17 different bullet points for what simplicity was. And I said, here’s your first problem. And so we had to define what simplicity meant to them in terms of how they wanted to approach it and what the outcome was. And they wanted to look at things that they could eliminate and that they could outsource. And so that I said great. That gives us the first guardrails around what we need to do. Then they identified just a couple top projects to tackle first. And the reason I say that is the first step is defining. And the second thing is, don’t try and do everything at once. Because that’s the other thing where you get these false starts, is everyone says, let’s identify everything that needs to be simplified, and then let’s do it all at once to start to make projects. One thing that Merck did, for example, in Canada, is they said, you know, we identified all these problems. We made sure that we picked the two that we think we would have the biggest impact on. And then we tied a senior leader to each of those as a champion to make sure we would move them forward. And the two things they picked, to simplify first, were meetings. And what was interesting about that is the reason they chose those things versus everything else is those were the day to day things that were taking up people’s time the most and adding the least value. So the reason I’m saying that is you can get very discreet then with what you want to focus on and create kind of a sprint on those things. And then the last thing is tying the metrics around it. How will you define what success is in terms of getting rid of complexity? Because people, they can feel it, know, with simplicity, but they’re not very good at defining it in terms of what they want as an outcome. Is it time saved? Is it skills built? Is it layers in decision making that have been eliminated? Is it redundancies eliminated from the process? Is it policies and procedures that we were able to get rid of? A lot of things were good in the first place in terms of being put in place but they may have outlived their time and people need to have permission and outcomes identified so they can get rid of them. And I’ll tell you this process P&G in terms of streamlining one of their engineering groups, they identified over 800 different rules, meetings, and processes that they could get rid of in short order. And were able to do that within 6 months. So I think, you know, defining it, tackling just a couple things, and then seeing the metrics that you want out of it is really a great way to get people comfortable with simplifying and seeing the value in it.

Sanjog Aul [00:30:21]:

Let’s take a quick break, listeners. When we come back, build upon what Lisa just mentioned where you see something, you hack through it, make sure that we are cutting off anything which is redundant. Ed, when I come to you, let’s think about a situation or, in fact, more and more of us are dealing with this where we are doing something new. We are walking into uncharted uncharted waters or or we are looking at new territories. We have to create something from nothing, which means we have to get more in our in our hand first before we can start hacking into it. And when you try to get more, it means you want more information. You need to create new processes or more processes to kinda get something started. At that time, we will not know what we really want. So hacking away becomes an impossible task. So should we take simplicity as a step two always when we are trying to grow? That’s the main question. Please stay tuned, listeners. We’ll be right back.

Sanjog Aul [00:33:14]:

Welcome back. So, Ed, do you think simplicity can preempt or it could become the core DNA of innovation where we don’t know what we are gonna create? How could we simplify it? 

Ed Toner [00:33:25]:

Yeah. This is a great question and something that, actually Nebraska is getting a lot of national attention. Accenture Consulting wrote an article, Agile IT Delivery Imperatives for Government Success, and we were their case study. And we go in our enterprise content management system, of which there’s only one, all applications within the state must utilize that same database. All of our data is in one place. And what we did was we, 2 years ago, set out to move from waterfall to agile and what does that have to do with simplicity. That’s exactly agile development allows us to do sprints and talk to the customer and say, what do you need now? We break down a very large project into very small segments. But each of those agile developers and the customers that they work with sign statement of works that say they’re not just going to create the product, they’re going to use Lean Six Sigma processes to enhance the product, to make it much more value add, take out all of the non value add steps. So, if they’re going to work with our team and start adding applications to our enterprise content management system, then they have to first be optimized. And if it’s something that’s like just greenfield, brand new, then we will walk through that and make sure that we are not adding any type of complexity or any type of non value added steps to this new application for our customers. And so, that was a very big cultural change. We ended up doing that by hiring college interns and converting them into full time employees. That entire team is really made up of millennials. I would say the average age of our enterprise content management team is 25 at max. They’ve adopted all the new technology. They’ve adopted the agile way of developing. And in fact, none of them even know the old way of waterfall, which allows them to react very quickly to the customer’s needs. Every 2 weeks, they produce product. The customer gets to see the product, says, yes, that’s what we want, or no, let’s move in another direction. So we don’t go more than 2 weeks without getting the customer signing off on, yes, that’s exactly the product I want. And with it is inherent simplicity because the customer doesn’t want to have, you know, all this complexity and have to test that. And there’s always other people in the group looking at it going, is that really a step we need to code? And so, just having that influx of the new development methodology of agile has made us much much better on innovation and streamlining the products that we build from scratch. So, Lisa

Lisa Bodell [00:36:50]:

I have to Yeah.

Ed Toner [00:36:52]:

Go ahead.

Lisa Bodell [00:36:52]:

Just chime in. I have to say I agree with what Ed said. You know, one of the case studies in my book was with Cleveland Clinic, and they did the exact same thing in terms of moving to Agile. And they wanted to be able to do these sprints and move more quickly. And one of the ironies around simplicity was they realized that they could move more quickly if they could have quick, 10-minute huddles every day to kind of have check ins with their team on the progress of some of their software development about how they move critical patients into the emergency room. And the pushback people got was, oh, gosh, I thought you were trying to move faster and simplify things, and now you’re adding meetings to my calendar every day for 10 minutes. And they said, here’s the thing. Would you rather have these ongoing, once a week, half day meetings? Or would you rather have these quick little 10-minute meetings every day? And they realized that the quick little 10-minute meetings, while more frequency of them, the shorter times, punctuated, allowed them to move faster. So sometimes it’s defining again what the simplicity means in service of what the outcome is you wanna have happen in the end.

Sanjog Aul [00:37:54]:

And to that, Lisa, we know that, yes, we all want simplicity, but people are the cause of creating or introducing complexity. And there are some inherent stigmas or habits or culture. Like, let’s start talking about the culture because there is something which is making this happen and not let it go away. Could you show some light on on the habits and what people bring from outside the company? And then what company ends up supporting unknowingly or unintentionally where it starts supporting complexity or promoting complexity?

Lisa Bodell [00:38:34]:

Yeah. It’s you know, we always joke that we become the beast. You know, we create the beast we become a slave to. And everyone always goes to work, we believe, and there’s a few exceptions, with the best of intentions. No one is purposely trying to create complexity. In fact, many people are doing it unintentionally because they’re trying to move faster, solve a problem, fix something for a customer. So they just build on what they already know, or do the habits that they already think they have to follow. But when you really look at this is interesting when we studied complexity, there’s really four parts to it. And when people say what makes their organizations complex, and this is whether you’re, profit or nonprofit, regulated or unregulated, typically what people will say is they’ll say industry regulations, government regulations, that something regulatory creates complexity for them. And that’s very true. Those are outside influences that are in their sphere of concern, not in control. And then what we put in place to manage those things are organizational complexities. Kind of moving to the center of the bull’s eye from regulatory to organizational. That’s what we put in place are things like, you know, organizational structures or silos, new roles, new reporting structures, etcetera. But what really bogs down people are the next two types of complexities. When you ask them what really, what they spend their day doing, what holds them back from getting more done are tactical complexities and then behavioral complexities. So it’s the tactical stuff is what you put in place to manage organizational stuff. It’s what we do as day to day as leaders, as managers, we put in more reporting controls, more reports, more meetings, more decision making, more layers, etcetera. And that’s largely driven by behaviors, which are risk, fear, power, and control. And as humans, that psychologically that’s what makes us want one more report. That’s what makes us want to have everybody in a meeting to CYA, so to speak. And so what we talk to leaders about is, yes, they should identify the big systemic things that could really make impact. Of course, like what Ed was talking about. Brilliant, big stuff. But what can really make it a culture is by empowering everyone on a day to day level to tackle the individual complexities that we have control over. The sphere of control they can do. And that starts with habits and then that starts with tactics. And the habits are, for instance, one of the tools we do or techniques we do with companies is we say let’s create our simplification code of conduct. And what that is identifying the three behaviors, for example, they either want more of or less of that people can operate and know they can do every day to make simplicity a reality. So, for example, they might commit to eliminating redundancies and unnecessary work whenever they see it. And they have permission, and it’s expected they do that. It could be that they will no longer create false urgency. They’ll only do things in a 24 hour or 48 hour period and not request it to be urgent every day. They’ll use jargon free language when they communicate. So things are straightforward. They’ll empower others to make decisions without them. Decision making is a huge problem. What I’m getting at is those are habits that people want to know that they’re empowered to do. And once they do that on a day to day level, they save hours of time a week to do more meaningful things. And then those are the habits. And I think what’s interesting about that is, we think the problems are really big and systemic. But what really it is, it’s individual things that we put in place every day that we assume are the way we have to work. And by changing that of a mindset of simplicity, people can move faster and feel better about the work that they do.

Sanjog Aul [00:42:08]:

Awesome. In terms of the thoughts. Now, Ed, if we were to have Lisa’s, playbook, if you will, of simplicity and match that to what you got done, were you able to let people do their own thing, make it meaningful themselves, or did it need some leadership guidance, even more roles to get them to behave or to start acting or to start embracing the newer, simplified organization. 

Ed Toner [00:42:42]:

It definitely took a leader that they trusted and had credibility that they would be able to actually act independently, and go after those inefficiencies that we had across the state. That was a big thing. The feedback I got from my team was, you know, they were wondering, you know, you’re making all these changes, Ed. You’re bringing in consolidation. You’re bringing in standards. You’re, you know, you’re bringing in a whole new development methodology. You’re bringing in Lean Six Sigma processes. And they were saying, you know, what we were waiting for was when you got that first punch in the mouth, how are you going to react? And they said, You reacted great. You just kept going. You didn’t get diverted. You kept going on your roadmap, with your vision, and we knew then that if we got into problems, that you’re going to be there for us. And they literally said, you took a few punches, you kept going, you shook them off, and you never let anybody slow you down. And that’s a big a big thing. So, you’ve got to have a culture of trust. They’ve got to trust that you actually mean what you say, and you’ve got to prove that upfront. With our Agile team, I provided the training because there was no way they were going to learn that on their own. So, we put out a lot of money to train really young people in the start of their career. We put a lot of money into the training. 2 years later, it’s paid off tenfold. We have lowered the rates that we charge. There’s a lot of pride in that group. And as I tell a lot of agencies, my biggest thing that I did was I told them I’m going to train you. I’m going to provide the coaching. I’m going to do everything to make you successful, but you have to personalize this and do it your way. So the next thing I knew, they were on the 3rd Floor, just below my office. I go down there quite often. They rearranged the entire floor because it wasn’t the work model that they wanted. They had screens up everywhere showing their sprints. They had, you know, all of this that they personalized and they took it to heart. Okay. He said, we can do whatever we want as long as we get to work, as long as we achieve our goals. And when I came down and I saw that, I said, Okay. You guys get it. This is exactly what we want to see. And then from that group, the other groups are now going, Okay. Well, we want to do that same thing. So it’s really walking the walk and talking the talk and making sure that they know that when you say something, you’re going to have their back and, yes, they can make change even at the lowest level that you’re going to support that change.

Lisa Bodell [00:45:32]:

You know what I also love about what you just said was that, other people then wanted to start to do it. And I, you know, I’m curious about that because I think my finding with an organization is just what you said, that simplicity is it’s contagious, and it’s slightly envy provoking. Because people are like, hey. How come those guys get to do that? I want that. And that I think that’s cool, actually, because that allows, people that take on simplicity once they kind of go through those maybe there’s ups and downs or there’s this resilience they have to have, but once they get through it, other people want to copy them. And that’s another way that it spreads organically versus having to be, you know, just a formalized process. So, I like that and it’s plain for people to think about, to really highlight and communicate your efforts because people will want to replicate them.

Ed Toner [00:46:19]:

You’re absolutely right, Lisa. It was organic. People ask me, Well, how did you get other groups to pick up on the Agile methodology? Do you dictate? Do you say that they have to? I said, No, absolutely not. It’s organic. Right. If they want to, and you’re in a great little example is when, you know, this group of millennials are out there and they start putting up their monitors and sprints, they ended up all the other people on the floor were walking over there saying, what is that and we want to do that. Right. And so exactly to your point, it was envy provoking. Right. As far as wait a minute, you’re getting, you know, your own work area, you’re getting the monitoring, you’re getting all of the things that you want just the way you want. We want to get into on some of that. And, it was a little envy and a little bit of, wow, this is common sense. We’d like to join this.

Lisa Bodell [00:47:22]:

Yeah. I love that. You made what we’d like to say is you’re making common sense common practice. And the fact that you got to do it organically shows that it was a really smart, well communicated effort. So that’s excellent.

Sanjog Aul [00:47:34]:

Now given, like, this is an excellent conversation here and a great story again. So Lisa, do you think there has to be a chipping away approach to simplifying or you have to announce that we are going after simplification as one big initiative, and then people are made aware. You set their mind that, okay, this is coming, and then you go ahead and tackle it. What works?

Lisa Bodell [00:48:00]:

Well, great question. I mean, I think the efforts of where you announce it as a simplification is one of our strategic pillars. And everything is tied to that that sets a signal, and it starts to communicate that I expect those behaviors, you’ll be measured upon it. You’re supposed to be operating not just with efficiency, because it is an efficiency effort, but also as a cultural, in terms of the habits and behaviors of the type of work you want to do, and that you should get to do. So I like that. However, I will say that there are places that have announced things like that, and they weren’t prepared to support it. It was kind of like, you know, a decade ago when people started talking about innovation. We’re innovative, but then they didn’t put any resources and money or processes behind it. So I think if you are going to announce it, like many have done, by the way, companies like Altria, GE, P&G, Novartis, some of the others that I’ve mentioned, Vancity, TATA, they’ve all said simplicity is one of our core operating principles. Some are better than others in terms of how they’ve supported it. Now that said, there are other companies that to get the buy in in the first place had some, either large business units that were more, open, led by more maverick people, that started it and created the envy. And I’ll tell you there was one group within HBO, their DND group, which was their biggest, kind of membership part of the organization that drove a lot of the subscriptions. They started implementing a thing we do with them, a process called kill a stupid rule. And they did one session together as a big group. They killed over 300 rules. They were so jazzed by doing it every month that they posted it on a Google doc online just to share with everyone. And said, hey, you’re welcome to steal these rules, kill these rules in your own organization if it will help you. So many people got up in arms that their boss wasn’t doing that in their group, that it started to spread like wildfire. Why can’t we do that? Why can’t we do that? And then it became a big part of the organization to the point of where they started to take simplicity outside with their partners. And they started to actually do kill a stupid rule sessions with partners on the outside, like Verizon, to together simplify their relationships and make joint businesses better. So it can be bottoms up. It can be top down. I think top down is best, but a groundswell of envy is a good way to get it going too if you really wanna make people move off the dime.

Sanjog Aul [00:50:18]:

So, Ed, every time when we do it, it’s not exactly flipping a coin, but you have a fifty fifty probability of making something successful. Do you think there are signs when you start on this journey of simplification, but it looks like a sinking ship, Should you cut your cords or you keep going till you sink or maybe float?

Ed Toner [00:50:39]:

I think if you’ve had a good business plan from the beginning, if you’ve really mapped it out and thought it through, and I think Lisa talked about that, it’s really have you put the money in, have you put the time in, have you put the research in, is this have you bounced the ideas off of other people? And if it comes out that it’s presented as such a no-brainer, you know, that that’s just intuitive, then you’re going to be successful. If you can’t get to that point, then I don’t start it because it’s one of those things that it never gets better as you peel back that onion, so you better have a very good case going in or you will not succeed. Because even though you’ve thought it out, even though you’ve done all you can to plan that change or that simplification, there are things that you are not aware of that are going to come up. And so, you really have to it’s very much I go back again in my manufacturing days, you had to think of when you put that part down the assembly line, you better think it all the way through to the end. And even when we did that, we found there were things on the assembly line that couldn’t be done the way we thought they could be done. And so I would say don’t start unless you’ve done all of the homework, you’ve put all of the thoughts, and you’ve talked thoroughly to all the people involved.

Sanjog Aul [00:52:12]:

Lisa, when you look at a leader like Ed Tried, you know, depending on what how flat the organization is, but you need your lieutenants, your managers to be on board and actually not only just be on board, but know to replicate or even do better than what Ed would have done in terms of embracing and conveying the message and getting the culture built of simplicity. What does someone do sitting at a top level position as a leader to make that happen?

Lisa Bodell [00:52:46]:

So what do they do? There’s a few things. I mean, one of the things I always like to do again is define the behavior. I mean, one, it’s risk taking. You’re going to be, you know, you might take a few arrows in terms of how you get this stuff off the ground. The other thing, frankly, I think is being resilient because they’re going to be they’re going to have to just, be in it for the long term. They’re going to have to be very good decision makers. I think that’s one of the best things about killing complexity, which is you’re just going to have to be really good and swift in terms of exemplifying decisions. So can you cut out decision making layers? Can you make decisions faster? So people can get that need for speed going. So those are some of the characteristics that we’ve seen really help people become what I call a chief simplification officer of their group. The other thing I would tell you is focus. Because I think what happens with so many leaders is they hear about this thing, hey, let’s simplify, and they try and do too many things. So again, it’s how do you pick one thing at a time, focus on that, and get results, and then move on to the next. So if you can try and do those types of things, being decisive, being agile and resilient, having focus, that will really help you have that kind of that simplify your sensibility.

Sanjog Aul [00:53:53]:

Okay. 30 seconds for you, Ed. What’s your message to other leaders who are trying to simplify their organization or bring simplicity in their organization?

Ed Toner [00:54:06]:

Future, and you have to have structured, systematic communication. You’ve got to build trust or else they won’t follow you, and you’ve got to surround yourself with those lieutenants that you talked about, right, that guiding coalition. The people that if they’re getting on a bus, there’s a whole lot of people that want on that bus with them. They’re the respected folks that are in your organization. You’ve got to get them on board, and they’ve got to be really your advocates.

Sanjog Aul [00:54:39]:

On behalf of the show and our listeners, thanks so much, Lisa and Ed, for sharing your views on how organizations can actually build a culture of simplicity and use it as a competitive advantage. Thanks so much.