Traditionally, constraints are seen as stumbling blocks or negative forces that prevent us from fulfilling our goals and desires. Can constraints be considered an ally and a powerful resource that can be effectively harnessed to achieve success?

Contributor

• • Mark Barden, Partner, eatbigfish and Author , “A Beautiful Constraint”

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 Transcript

Sanjog Aul [00:00:26]:

Hello, and welcome to CIO Talk Radio. To learn more about the show, please visit www.ciotalkradio.com. And as always, we invite you to join the discussion on Twitter, hashtag CTR live, and look for this show as hashtag leadership. Today’s topic is Making Constraints Your Ally  . And our guest for today’s show is Mark Barden, who’s a partner at Eat Big Fish and is also the Author of A Beautiful Constraint. How are you, Mark?

Mark Barden [00:00:53]:

I’m doing great. How are you?

Sanjog Aul [00:00:55]:

Very good. Thank you so much. Now we all want utopia, but reality is we always, almost always have challenges in realizing our dreams and, of course, as we go about doing our business projects. So sometimes, they are self inflicted, and in other areas, they are just constraints that make our journey somewhat interesting. So instead of bowing down in front of these constraints and conceding to them, is it at all possible to embrace them and make them your ally? On this show, we’d like to explore it, and if it is possible, how to make that happen? So, Mark, you actually wrote a book on this subject. It’s very interesting and fascinating in terms of what you came across as part of your research. So the first question for you is that is it the constraint, just the very fact that you have constraints? We all have constraints. And some of us, we are able to make the best use of them. The other is, other people just buckle. What is happening here? Is it, like, people’s mindset that is causing it, or you would say that some constraints are simply more debilitating than others?

Mark Barden [00:02:04]:

Yes, great question. So I think largely it’s a matter of mindset and that sounds really easy to say, but it’s a conclusion that we’ve reached over the course of the last three or four years researching this topic, which is that constraints have a bad rap. So most of us, when faced with a limitation of some sort, whether somebody slashes our budget or gives us half the time to do a project or cuts our team and I’m sure many of the listeners can identify with that reality at the moment. Many of us respond to that as if we’re being threatened. It’s just human nature to kind of flinch from it and say these limitations, these constraints are going to thwart me. They’re going to require me to reduce my ambition. I’m not going to be able to fulfill my potential. And yet what’s interesting about this and I’ll share some stories with you in a moment is when you pull the camera back and you look across whether it’s art, literature, science, technology, engineering, there are many instances where the constraint and limitation not only didn’t thwart the ambition but actually led to better solutions. And most of us don’t start from that place. Most of us start in what in the book we call the victim mindset where we kind of shrink from, oh, this has happened again. I’ve got less money, less resource. But in actual fact, there are many instances where the opposite is true and the constraint leads to something better. So let me give you a few examples to illustrate what we’re talking about here from across a whole different range of industries. So imagine you are starting a shoe business, an online shoe business. It’s the .com boom not so long ago and you’re trying to raise money. And of course, the VCs are going to say to you, you can’t sell shoes online because everybody knows that people have to try them on first, right? You have to walk around the room in them for a little while. There’s a constraint at the heart of that story that prevented the founder of Zappos, this is a Zappos story obviously, from borrowing money. No one would lend him money because the constraint was considered to be just too debilitating in that category. So his response to that constraint was to create what Zappos has now become legendary for its Wow service. So we will ship shoes to you free both ways. So you can try it on as many as you like and return if you don’t like them. The return policy will not just be $10.15, 24 a month, it’ll be 365 days and there’ll be somebody manning the phones 24/7. And that has created what has made Zappos famous all those signature moments of Wow service driven by in response to the constraint. So they were able to see in that situation the opportunity in constraint. Well another story from the airline business. So another classic story about Southwest Airlines from the 70s. They’re just getting started. They have four airplanes in service, but they have to sell one. They’ve got some issues and they have to sell one. So now they’re faced with we have four routes which we worked really hard to get and only three airplanes to service them. So the question that they’re facing is how do we service a four route system with just three airplanes. So massive constraint there of resource. We’re lacking one critical thing an airplane. That constraint forced them to examine all of their practices and figure out that there was a way to service four routes with three planes if they could get the turnaround time down to ten minutes. And so they looked at every single thing they could possibly do including innovating the classic innovation of Southwest which is sit wherever you want to, just get on the plane and find a seat and let’s get going. And they were able to reduce the turnaround time to ten minutes when the airline industry average at that time was an hour. So again, creating a very signature differentiating moment for Southwest Airlines in its history, again driven by that constraint. And I could go on, Sanjog Aul, but I’ll let you interrupt me now. So that’s the kind of situation here.

Sanjog Aul [00:06:04]:

So those are very inspiring for sure. Now if you were to look at our regular real lives when the regular John Smith goes to the workplace or goes about running their businesses. Whatever they are doing, they do come across constraints, and not every time you are able to create what Southwest did or what Zappos does. Those are great holy grails, if you will, to touch or try to touch. So if you were to get real in our regular day to day life, there are so many constraints which are holding us back from meeting our true potential or even getting our things done so that we can pay our bills. So when we touch that real life, how are these individuals supposed to think?

Mark Barden [00:06:53]:

Well, I think it’s interesting you’re responding in the way that many people respond when we first start talking to them about this which is, yeah, that’s fine for Southwest, that’s fine for Zappos, but what about me? That’s the victim mentality coming through because actually, I could go on and on and on telling you stories from all kinds of different industries about where this has happened. And most people, and I hope you know this is the process maybe we can go through on this call, is most people when they start to think about it can find a situation that’s very real. It might be in their own personal life. It might be something that’s happened in their company last year where a team really responded very positively to a constraint and was able to make something better happen as a consequence of having embraced the constraint as opposed to flinch from it and try to navigate around it. So the reason why I’m starting with these inspiring stories and asking your listeners and yourself maybe to think about an instance in your own life where this has happened is because without that sense that it is possible not just for Zappos, not just for Southwest, but for me in my life and my business to work in this way without that belief at the very beginning, you’re defeated before you start. So one of the places we ask our clients and people that we work with to think about is to get in touch with a story about something that’s happened in their own world where they’ve been able to do this and to shine a spotlight on those moments and say what happened then? Was there just a brilliant individual at the heart of that? And sometimes that is the case. So we can learn from what made that individual brilliant and can we are there things that that individual was doing that are replicable that we can copy? And the book is largely about that. It’s about looking at a number of cases across a number of categories and saying well what were the steps being taken here? Is there a formula, a replicable method here that we can not just make this a series of brilliant one offs, but actually start to repeat? So I’d ask you to think about what is your own, in our world we call these the beautiful constraints. What is your own beautiful constraint story? What happened there? Was it something that’s just a brilliant one off or were there things that can be repeated? And I think you’ll find that there are a series of quite simple steps that when you are faced with a constraint and your temptation might be to become somewhat paralyzed by it, to stop, think about the fact that it’s happened many times before out there in the world and in your own world, in your own life, in your own business and to start taking small steps towards a solution that gets you away from this victim mindset and towards a situation where you can transform that constraint and can find the opportunities in it. I think you’ll find it’s far more common than we actually think. Again, it’s just, constraints have a bad PR campaign and they need to get better and that’s the intention behind this book.

Sanjog Aul [00:09:54]:

So you gave an example of or maybe asked us to take an example of wherever we had turned those constraints around and use that as a basis or kinda analyze it to see what can you do more frequently. Now every situation is different, and I’m not gonna be talking like a victim here because I’m representing my listeners. Most of us look at each constraint having its own flavor or its own set of parameters which govern it. And we try to, of course, do our best. Nobody comes, wakes up and says, okay, I’m going to be depressed and I’m going to feel like a victim. They always want to make the most of the day that is coming. When they are approaching it at that time, that moment when they accept it, do they accept it as a debilitating or a stumbling block or they see that as an opportunity, that requires them to frame that constraint in a way that it has a positive spin. What’s that secret sauce?

Mark Barden [00:10:56]:

Well, I think the secret sauce is to couple the constraints closely to your ambitions of the business. So many leaders in business will be able to stand up and tell their teams what it is that they’re trying to achieve. What’s our big ambition here? What are our goals? And rarely incorporate into that conversation the constraints themselves. So there’s a very simple tool we use with our clients called a Propelling Question, which asks a team to couple that constraint. First of all become very aware of the constraints. What exactly is it and how does it work? And couple it specifically and deliberately to the constraints. So let me give you an example to illustrate that. This is an example from the world of automobiles. So Audi wants to become the most prestigious auto brand in the world and to do that it recognizes that it needs to win on the racetracks, specifically it needs to win Le Mans. But what he realizes and what the Chief Engineer at Audi realizes is that the history of that, of racing is about building faster, bigger, more powerful engines. And he knows that they aren’t going to necessarily be able to compete in that way. In other words, his propelling question is, I’d like to win Le Mans without an engine that’s any more powerful than anybody else’s because he recognizes that Audi’s engines don’t work in that way. Is there a way for us to view that constraint, the fact that we don’t have engines that are any more powerful and couple it to that ambition of winning the race with Le Mans? And of course after some trial and error and a lot of consternation, the team comes back and says no one has yet used turbo diesel technology on the racetrack. Turbo diesel is not necessarily faster, but it is more fuel efficient and therefore we will come off the track less. And if you know anything about the 24-hour racetrack, it’s really hard to make up the pit stop time by building an engine that’s just that much more powerful. So the solution was to embrace the constraint, to see this propelling question. How do we win at Le Mans when we have an engine no more power than anybody else’s? And use that propelling question to propel the team to think about solutions that no one has yet tried on the track. And Audi was able to win Le Mans three years in a row first, second and third on the podium as a consequence of embracing the constraint and coupling it to the ambition. So that’s just a very simple pragmatic tool. It sounds quite straightforward to do and it is. But the focusing that that allows a team to bring to a problem, a very simple definition of what is it we’re trying to solve for here. We know what our ambitions are, but coupling the constraint directly to it means that the solutions that emerge from answering that question not only contain the ambition of the business, but also use the constraints themselves as part of that solution. And that’s the way that you get real world tangible concrete ways of improving your fortunes around constraints.

Sanjog Aul [00:13:59]:

Now since this particular show that we do is targeted towards senior business technology leaders and they are supposed to be married to this word constraint because they always are asked to do more with less or sometimes more with nothing. They do not get that, Zappos or Southwest or those type of, I would say, investments. So they have to figure out how they keep meeting the business demands, how do they keep handling the new things that are coming their way, and at the same time, not being offered the additional dollars or resources as human resources or other type of, constraints are imposed, and they’re still supposed to deliver. So it’s not that there are not people who are delivering, but there are many who struggle. So what should be the mindset? How can they frame it where there is in a way, in some cases, less about innovation because the way you have you’ve answered some of the questions here is that literally the answer to almost all constraint related problem is to innovate. Sometimes it is plain constraint that in order to innovate, you need money to get money. So in those cases, how do you frame it?

Mark Barden [00:15:18]:

Yeah. I think we in our work have started to use this word inventiveness because innovation carries a lot of baggage these days. Everybody’s talking about innovation is a big buzzword. But what we’re trying to do here is a little bit more of a sort of everyday inventiveness. So let me give you for instance a story that maybe your listeners can identify with that doesn’t require per se any major invention, but was nevertheless a major breakthrough. So I’d like to talk about Unilever. Unilever, Paul Polman, who is the CEO of Unilever at the moment, four years ago made a statement after consultation with his senior leaders that Unilever would double the business by 2020 whilst halving the footprint of the business, the environmental footprint. So there’s the big ambition to double the size of the business, decoupling the constraint directly to it whilst halving our footprint. Now that would kick off a whole series of innovations. But one of the things that was most interesting about a specific solution which I think can play out in the world of technology too is what he asked his teams to do, Pierluigi Sigismondi, the Head of Supply Chain there in particular asked his teams to do was to go back and examine every assumption in the way that they currently thought about their business. So in your world it might be the solution, the technology platforms that our business is built around, the way that we think about the things that are absolutely fundamental and necessary to delivering the technology infrastructure that our businesses need. He got his teams to go back and question every single assumption about what was in their systems. Because part of an ability to make constraints beautiful is recognizing that there are what technologies call path dependencies. There are ways that we believe the system needs to work, has always worked and will ever work that have become over time ingrained habits and oftentimes need to be challenged. And it’s very difficult for an organization to routinely challenge and question all the assumptions about how it goes about its business. So in the case of Unilever for instance just to make this really clear. One of the things they started to look for was waste. And all businesses can go through this kind of exercise. So somebody identified the fact that in Unilever’s tomato source protocols, it required use of 5% green tomatoes. So somebody asked the question, well why 5%? Why not 10%? Because if they were throwing an awful lot of green tomatoes away because the automatic picking machines will pick red ones and green ones and then they get sorted and the protocol said we can only accept 5% tomatoes. Somebody questioned that, why five? Why not 10? They reformulated the source using 10% green tomatoes. No one could taste the difference. The effect on Unilever’s cost structure was massive. The effect on their systems with the relationships with the farmers was massive because suddenly the farmers were getting a far better return. So there’s no per se innovation involved in that process. But the constraint has forced the teams at Unilever to examine assumptions, biases that have been in their systems, baked into their systems for years now that it’s time to question. So sometimes the impetus that a constraint gives us is not necessarily let’s create something that’s magical that’s never been seen in the world before. It forces us to examine our constraints. And so one of the things that we could ask of your listeners is to think about the opportunity that and believe me, I understand how frustrating it is to be constantly told to do more with less. That is the modern mantra of business not just in the world of technology, but more broadly than that. And it’s difficult to deal with that on a daily basis. But ask yourself, in that moment of being asked to do more with less, is there an opportunity for us to go back and re examine some of the things that we have just taken as givens? Do we really need them? Are there things that we can take out of our system and do without now? Sometimes it’s a matter of doing just a little bit at exactly the right time as opposed to re engineering an entire system. So small changes in the assumptions we make about how we need to operate in our business inspired by, prompted by these constraints can be just as valuable questioning those assumptions, challenging them, coming up with better working models than necessarily having to invent something new.

Sanjog Aul [00:20:11]:

Now let’s take a quick break, listeners. We’ll be right back. And look at the mindset of a leader who himself or herself is dealing with these constraints. And, of course, they are the one whose neck is on the line. But at the same time, they want to make sure that the troops that they are leading, they are able to convert that from being a simple negative pressure, which is going to pull them down into, them becoming creative with the way they look at things, as you mentioned, reexamine the assumptions and the habits, and see if there is a turnaround possible. So how do they go about sharing what is going on and how are we going to change our situation by just thinking differently? How do they go about saying that in a way doesn’t look like that it is just mincing words, but it, in fact, has some positive reenergizing impact. Please stay tuned, listeners. We’ll be right back.

Speaker 0 [00:21:07]:

HP is proud to sponsor this program. Find out how the HP as a service solution for SAP HANA can help you gain instant impactful business results without capital investment by logging on to hp.com. Transform information into intelligence and a competitive advantage with a full spectrum of SAP HANA products and services from HP, a global SAP hosting partner.

Mark Barden [00:21:37]:

Bosch Software Innovations is proud to sponsor this program. Visit www.bosch-si.com/connectedmanufacturing to find out how Bosch can help you improve your operational performance and become a manufacturing industry leader in a connected world. Change the way you predict, manage, and produce outcomes. Bosch connected manufacturing.

Speaker 0 [00:22:09]:

HP is proud to sponsor this program. Tap into our expertise, innovation, and services to bring your most important workloads to the cloud. You are listening to CIO Talk Radio with Sanjog Aul. To learn more about the show, please visit www.ciotalkradio.com. If you have a question or comment, call toll free at +1 (866) 472-5790. That number again is +1 (866) 472-5790. Now back to the show. Here’s Sanjog Aul.

Sanjog Aul [00:22:54]:

Welcome back. So, Mark, as I was saying, leaders are basically made of or their success is dependent on the troops that they lead, and those troops should be feeling good and hunky dory about anything that comes their way. That’s a mindset, and that’s a as a positive reenergizing impact that you want to be created by a leader by reframing the constraints so that it doesn’t look like a negative pressure. How do you go about doing that?

Mark Barden [00:23:19]:

Well, so we’ve talked about the first simple tool, which is developing these propelling questions, right? Putting our ambitions right alongside coupling them to our constraints. And that can be a very healthy thing to do as a team anyway. Even take four or five people, engineers in your group, go away and sit and down and say look what are the propelling questions guys that are going to drive our behaviors internally in the next two, three years. We all know what the constraints are. They’re very real. They’re coming to us on a daily basis. Let’s just get clear about stating what those propelling questions are. I think the next step is then to go into trying to find the solutions to those questions, the answers to those questions using what we call can if thinking. And this is a concept that we got from the guy who runs operations at the largest bakery in Europe Warburton’s. He said that when he’s facing these so called impossible briefs, these challenges that just seem like they just don’t have a ready solution to them, he needs to it’s really important how he has conversations with his team about it. So he’s banned the word can’t because at the beginning of any conversation. He just said look, we don’t I’m not interested in having a conversation about whether it’s possible to find a solution to this propelling question. We need to figure out how. So we’re going to start the conversation with can if. Now at the one hand, it seems like a really simple piece of language and it is. But what it does is injects optimism into the conversation and to the point that you’re making earlier Sanjog about it’s difficult this and we sometimes feel thwarted easily by it. To maintain optimism during the solution finding process is really important. So beginning the conversations of well we can if, what is it that we would need to believe and make happen in order to solve this problem is a really straightforward and simple solution. So again let me illustrate that perhaps with an example of let’s go to the factories of Southeast Asia where Nike’s sneakers are being manufactured. And Nike is struggling with compliance issues in those factories, labor standards and in particular the toxicity of some of the chemicals that they used to make their shoes. So the propelling question there is how do we reduce toxicity in the factories without having to put thousands of people in the factories to maintain standards on an ongoing basis 24/7? Because we just don’t have enough people to make that happen. The ChemE solution that Nike came up with is a very obvious one in retrospect looking at it, but was to remove the need for policing of toxic chemicals in the first place by getting the chemical toxicity out of their products. So they invented a new glue, a non toxic glue. So the can if solution was we can if we remove toxins from the process altogether. So sitting down with your teams, developing the propelling questions together, getting clear on what our ambitions are, what on what the constraints are that are standing in their way, coupling them together and then having can if conversations. And this is something that can happen quite formally over the period of months with a number of, conversations organized around that or it could be informally in the lunch room at Friday lunch times. Let’s have some CAN IF conversations around how we can address the propelling questions of our business. And just those two tools, propelling questions, CAN IF thinking, brings clarity and energy to the process and just keep doing it and solutions may pop up as a consequence of paying attention to what those constraints are and trying to find the answers.

Sanjog Aul [00:27:14]:

Talk about being resourceful. So we are talking here all along about thinking differently and trying to change and fundamentally innovate something. Another is to say, okay. So maybe there is a potential for innovation or perhaps not. But at least what we could do is to have the individuals who form a team to each of them leveraging their own, ways to find resources to build that collective pool so that it fundamentally offsets the very constraint that we are dealing with, whether it is time, whether it is space, whether it is money, or it is intellect. Yes. Yes. So how do you go about doing that?

Mark Barden [00:27:57]:

Well, you know, just an observation about, what we saw time and again in all of the cases that we looked at was a refusal to accept that the resources that we had to hand that we were given as part of our the higher ups gave us this budget, this group, this technology to work with. A refusal to accept that those were the only resources available to us. So yes, they are we’re looking at that as real. But in that team thinking about what other kinds of resources can we go and access. They don’t necessarily belong to us today, but we can easily access them by thinking about who where’s the adjacent abundance for example. So you might have a member of your team who goes well I don’t know the answer to this question, but my colleague who I worked with last year who’s in Team X over there does have insight about this particular kind of software. Let’s see if I can go and borrow some of his insight or maybe we asked him to be seconded onto our team. So there’s a new definition of resourcefulness that’s required in the modern world where we are going to be routinely faced with these constraints. To not accept the resources that we’re given, but to embrace that part of our responsibility if we’re working in constraint driven times is to figure out where the abundant resources are that we need and figure out how to go and get them. So let me illustrate that with a story from the fashion world, but in the end turns out to be a technology solution. So renttherunway.com is a startup about three or four years old now. Their big insight was that many young women don’t have the money to spend $1,000 on a fancy gown to go to a ball that they’ll wear once a year. And actually what those women would much prefer to do is to rent that gown over the weekend. Very good insight. Driven a lot of business for them. But all the designers they approached and said would you like to share your stock of fine dresses with us on our website and we will rent them. Why would I do that? I’m cannibalizing my own sales. So at that point we could have said okay well this is a bad business model. The fashion community doesn’t want to go there with us. But what the Rent the Runway people did is to say what is it that they do want that we can give them access to that we currently not thinking about? And the solution turned out to be what those independent fashion designers need is insight. They’re struggling away. They’ve got maybe a couple of stores, one store in some in Manhattan. They have no insight about who’s buying their dresses, what colors are in fashion this year, what styles are in fashion this year, who’s buying them, when they’re buying them. So if we can aggregate all the data and provide great insight to all of these independent fashion designers about what’s working in the marketplace today. We can make them smart and we can help them to grow their businesses. So it required Rent the Runway to say, how do we create an abundance of insight that these people need and go frame what it is that we are offering to them not as, hey we’d like to borrow all the stock you’ve got and rent it out at the weekend, but hey we’d like to bring you an abundance of insight into how this marketplace works that you can’t access any other way. And so reframing of what it was that they had so that the audience they were trying to reach would really see the value in it, allowed them to unlock that category and allowed them to find, provide abundance of information for these fashion designers that would get around that constraint that they were facing. So you know all of us will have a situation where we’re sitting there going what is it that we actually have? We don’t have there’s a lot of stuff we don’t have and we can spend some time moaning about the constraints about how little we have, but we actually have quite a lot here. Constraints about how little we have, but we actually have quite a lot here. Are there ways to reframe what it is that we do have and go and make offers out there to the world? It might be inside our own business. It might be to vendors. It might be to partners. It may be to customers and say, we need X. We don’t have X. You have X. What we have is Y. Is there a way that we can make you see the value in Y so that you are ready to trade and ready to deal with it? So it’s a creative exploration around what it is that we do have and how to reframe that back to the world so that they can see huge value in it. And it creates a mutually beneficial ecosystem of trading. What it is that we do have for what it is that we need. And it’s a much more entrepreneurial instinct. We see this happening all the time for example in Silicon Valley. But bringing that attitude that approach to the trading of value in really creative ways in order to allow us to get what it is that we need that we don’t currently have that we think is necessary outside of entrepreneurial Silicon Valley type settings in large companies, in school systems, in health care system. What is it that we have that other people need that they would be prepared to trade for us? And that’s the way that we can create abundance of resource in the face of what might appear to be limited resource. That makes sense.

Sanjog Aul [00:33:11]:

Oh, definitely. And please, let’s just we’ll take a quick break. We’ll be right back, and let’s talk about the morale. So, of course, dealing with constraints even though you’re trying to turn it on its head and make it a creative endeavor, but it is definitely draining. How do you keep the morals high, and how do you keep them at the top of their spirit as they go about going through this grueling journey? Please stay tuned, listeners. We’ll be right back.

Sanjog Aul [00:35:36]:

Welcome back. So, Mark, give us few pointers on how to keep the morale high of our team because dealing with constraints is gonna be draining. And what we could be doing throughout the journey as leaders to make the most out of the situations and keeping helping our teams keep their head held high.

Mark Barden [00:35:54]:

Yeah. Great. So let’s just re recap where we’ve got to so far. So we’ve talked about mindset, method and we’re about to talk about motivation. Those are the three critical aspects of dealing productively with constraints. Mindset, I believe it is possible to actually do more with less. I believe it is possible to take this constraint, this limitation and make it into something that’s even better than we thought it was possible to do. And that involves understanding these stories from across all kinds of categories and your own life to get that mindset and positivity at the beginning. We talked about the method. We’ve talked about creating propelling questions, using CAN IF thinking and creating abundance. The three very specific concrete tangible strategies to pursue in the face of a do more with less kind of reality. But the third piece which is what you’re getting at now is motivation. This is difficult work. Let’s not gloss over the fact that despite all these great stories I can tell you, it’s difficult, it’s challenging. The constraints don’t yield their secrets to you in the first go round and we need to persist. We need to keep going back again and again looking for solutions. And that requires a very motivated and very engaged workforce. I think this is one of those things that I feel like is personally under represented in the business world. Most of us spend our time being very professional, staring coldly and rationally at the facts and trying to analyze and come to conclusions driven by the data. And that’s great and of course we need to operate in that way. But in the face of constraints we need to recognize that we’re flesh and bones and we are human beings and we need to care about what it is that we’re trying to solve. So the responsibility of leadership in these constraint driven times is to make sure that the people who work for us know why it’s important that we have to solve this problem. So some of that will come from connecting our work. The reason we need to solve for this constraint is it’s an important driver of the company purpose, the company mission. So connecting this project to the larger purpose of the organization, allowing people to see why it is that their work is important, why a solution is necessary as part of the larger whole is absolutely critical. So that’s kind of at a macro level. But then even within the team members, understanding what it is that makes some of these people on our team tick. So getting to know these people. We’ve had in this body of work, we’ve had CEOs say to us, Mark, you know what it comes down to? It comes down to fear and greed. So I need to scare the shit out of people. They’re gonna lose their jobs if they don’t work. That works for some of them. For others, I need to put in place incentive programs. If we do this, I’m gonna bonus you up the yin yang because I know that money turns you on and motivates you. For some people it might just be personal pride. I know that you’re a winner and you want to figure this thing out and we will make you a star and a hero inside our business if you do this. It’s interesting, IKEA is very, very good they have a culture of innovation which maybe we’ll talk about more before the interview ends. But one of the things they’re really good at is using their in house magazine to make celebrities if you like, internal celebrities out of people who’ve been able to do more with less. Out of people who’ve been able to solve seemingly impossible briefs in this way and raise them up. Put them on a platform. It says to the organization, this is what we value. These are the kinds of people that we want working here. And that motivates certain sorts of people. So I think the responsibility of a leader working with a team, big or small, on these difficult problems is to understand what makes each of those people on his or her team tick emotionally as a human being and figure out how to connect what their motivations are to the project in such a way that they can ask, they can go back and ask for the team to go again. You know so much of what works in this kind of situation is persistence. It’s the psychologists that we talk to will talk about you know you batter your head against the brick wall for a while. If it doesn’t yield, you’ve got to step away, take a break, go walk around the block metaphorically, might take a week, might take a month and come back to that with a new set of stimulus and a new set of prompts and a new set of ideas about how to tackle it. But in order to get people to come willingly to that, to come optimistically, to come enthusiastically to trying to solve that problem again in a different way, is going to require us to understand who they are as human beings and be prepared to talk to them about is it about money? Is it about bonus? Is it about connecting it to the whole? Is it about promotion? Is it about a desire to make your marketing? What is it that makes you tick as a human being? How can we all talk about that openly and make sure that we are giving you the opportunity to, if you solve this problem, be rewarded by whatever it is that makes it work for you?

Sanjog Aul [00:41:03]:

Now what you just mentioned, would you agree that lot of leaders and the human resource organization, they try to at all times work understanding what their influence, how do what do what do they do when they come every day? Yet you have lot of negative environments that persist in organizations where, of course, every organization has constraints. Some have got more of that crumbling down attitude versus the others. So what is the difference? Because both parties must be trying to do the same. Maybe the devil is in the details and the way it’s executed.

Mark Barden [00:41:42]:

Yeah. I think it’s tricky, isn’t it? Because I know from my own experience that in a world where we’re all being asked to do more with less constantly and that’s just a refrain from the top, it’s very easy to become despondent to feel a little bit dejected by that. And I think the companies and the cultures that have a very positive relationship with constraint who’ve been able to tell themselves stories that they are the kind of people, they are the kind of organization that responds positively to constraint, that finds better solutions in constraints as opposed to feeling thwarted. Those organizations are the ones that are prospering. So I think it’s incumbent upon all of us to change the dialogue. You know there’s a one of the psychologists that we quoted in our book talks about this idea that we are the stories we tell ourselves. And too many modern businesses are telling themselves a story that these are sucky times where markets aren’t growing that fast, markets are incredibly competitive, my budgets are being cut. There’s an air of negativity around that which is completely understandable. I don’t wish to be Pollyanna ish about dismissing that as not the real situation. But it requires of us and it requires of leaders and it requires of us as HR organizations to step into that conversation, acknowledge what’s happening, acknowledge the truth of it and try to re engineer the mindset, the methodologies of the organization towards a more positive relationship with what’s happening around constraints, around budget cuts, around the competitive situation. Try to re engineer around that to make it a much more positive relationship so that we can move forward. Which is why talking about what is the mindset? How do we need to think about this? What are some simple steps? I’m not going to leave you on your own to go figure it out. I’m going to give you some methodologies here. Some very simple strategies. Propelling questions. CAN IF training people to think and use those tools and use the language embedded in these tools to change the way we think so that we can have a positive relationship to these constraints and the belief that it is doable rather than just thinking to this negative place. But I think it requires new kinds of behaviors of leaders to navigate their teams towards constraints not away from them. That’s a natural tendency and inclination to what we’re seeing with the best organizations at the moment, the best leaders is that they’ll move their groups towards and say let’s look at this, let’s find the opportunity in this. And there’s a positivity that comes from that. Some simple quick wins, really helpful obviously always, but to build momentum around our ability to turn these constraints into opportunities is just a crucial capability for the 21st century organization.

Sanjog Aul [00:44:54]:

When you talk about, you know, handling an individual’s needs, wants, and desires, and the motivations, and that would allow each of those people to do the right thing, which will collectively help the organization get to where it wants to with respect to dealing with constraints.

Mark Barden [00:45:09]:

Mhmm.

Sanjog Aul [00:45:09]:

There’s a concept of swarm, which is which happens in the wild where, you know, a bunch of birds or a bunch of animals, they would actually be able to thwart the threats from a predator by being together and acting in unison. If that swarm mentality was to be created within an organization, within a team where the team actually thinks exactly like at the same time totally synced, and that mindset is prevailing with respect to how to handle constraints, how to make that happen as compared to try to go to each individual and trying to find their needs, motivations, and desires? Because that will provide you much better support knowing that you’ve got 300 of your colleagues who are exactly fighting with it, but I am one of them and we’ll beat this to the punch.

Mark Barden [00:46:06]:

Yeah. So there’s issues of macro motivation. How do you get a swarm mentality in a large organization? And there’s issues of micro motivation, which is how do I, you know, create the right environment that this particular individual is going to respond in the right way to. And I think they’re both important. What you’re talking about with the swarm mentality is the macro motivation. And I’ll go back to that Unilever story again because you know when Paul Polman and his senior leadership stood up and made this statement that they were going to double the size of the business while halving their footprint. Nobody knew at that time how they were actually going to do that. That was why it was such a courageous statement to make publicly to Wall Street and others that they were going to do this without knowing exactly what the solutions were. And it creates that sort of highly intense expectation in the organization. Who’s going to do it? How are we going to do it? And it focused the organization very clearly on that singular propelling question. And what they spoke about internally at Unilever was look, the environmental impact and issues of our business are significant. If we don’t get out ahead of them and start to address things like water usage, to address things like sustainably harvested palm oil for example, there will be no markets healthy enough to buy our products. So this is an existential question that we’re asking and it’s a very powerful one and everybody in that organization responded to that as parents, as citizens of the planet, as I’m so proud that our organization is finally stepping up to this challenge and embracing it. And the engagement scores within Unilever have improved significantly. So not only do they have now solutions emerging for how they’re going to have their impact while growing their business, but they have an organization, a set of employees who are really motivated to continue on this difficult journey together because they’ve identified with the cause. They have that singular purpose as you described in the swarm mentality. They all know what it is their organization is trying to do and why they’re trying to do it and they’re all aligned with it and they’re heading in the right direction. That’s probably an overstatement if anybody from Unilever is listening. I suspect that you can’t always take a 100% of people with you on any given journey like this, but the vast majority of people there are energized and motivated by it and it’s working for them. And having said that, Pierluigi Sigismondi who is the Head of Supply Chain there who I mentioned earlier has hired a member of the military to come into his organization and talk to them about how to find their own personal connection above and beyond the largest story here of Unilever. To try to find their personal motivation connection to that story. And it’s fascinating to me that he’s brought in someone from the military because again we tend to think of the military as cold blooded professionals doing a job according to the rules, very disciplined. All of which is true and yet what they also recognize and this came from the fabulous book I really strongly recommend by Admiral William McRaven who wrote about Special Operations. The book’s called Spec Ops which we looked at because it’s small teams trying to do massive things. So it’s very much aligned with our constraint driven approach here. But William McRaven talks about the importance of emotional engagement even amongst professional soldiers. The difference maker in the end is about a personal conviction that the mission is good, the mission is right and they identify with it. So you know I do think that in the modern business world in a situation where we are constantly being asked to do more with less that we need to get much smarter, much more capable about talking to people about how we get them to raise their game and commit to doing this difficult work. And it goes above and beyond just simply asking them to do a job. It goes to the point of how do you motivate yourself to do this work again and again and again in difficult situations. And that’s about the identity of the organization and its mission and the understanding how the individuals work on an individual by individual basis.

Sanjog Aul [00:50:42]:

Now when a child is born and you take them through their journey of adolescence to a teenager to someone who joins the workforce to the middle management, all along, we create utopia. We create a place where everything is cool. They are sheltered from any other issue, and we take pride in being great parents or being great, you know, newbie, the mentors, if you will, mentors to the newbies into the workforce. Till that time, everything is hunky dory and constraint is not a word that they have to deal with. And suddenly, we throw them into the pool without floaters. Do you think there is something to do with that as a shock that they get and they are not prepared? Do you think this is more of a nature thing or the way we are nurturing our whole community or our whole workforce from the very beginning, from the very childhood and the way the society works? That has got something to do with it.

Mark Barden [00:51:46]:

That is a great question. I’m glad you brought that up and allow me to go there because this, you know, this is about parenting. I’m a parent and, I’ve had this conversation with my wife about parenting and I’ve had a conversation with a fascinating woman called Madeline Levine about this issue. So Madeline wrote a book called The Price of Privilege. And it’s particularly about raising affluent children. So you know recognizing us clearly not everybody in The States but one of the things she talks about in the modern world for smart kids coming from affluent backgrounds is that there just isn’t enough challenge in their lives. They’re given every opportunity. They’re given all the toys and gadgets they need. They’re given access to fabulous teaching opportunity and by the time they become, get into adulthood, they’ve really not been able to have a productive relationship with constraints and their prescription for children is more struggle. And this is also connected to the work around the growth mindset which is about a belief that we aren’t fixed. That our ability to deal with the world is not fixed and given. That we are constantly able to grow our abilities. This is Carol Dweck’s work from Stanford. We are constantly able to grow as individuals if we accept that there’s always something new to learn and that there’s always a new solution out there to a problem if we have the right orientation towards it. So I think there’s a very lot that we could say about how we raise our children and how we prepare them to come into a world which is going to be arguably more constraint driven. And that is to set them these kinds of difficult problems to have them embrace a more complex relationship to the world which is full of challenge, which is full of difficulty, which is full of hardship and develop a productive relationship to those constraints as they grow, as they become human beings so that when they go out into the world, they’re much more capable of dealing with the kind of realities that we all deal with in the modern world which is this do more with less idea.

Sanjog Aul [00:54:05]:

Okay. I got a couple of minutes left. So two questions. Need your quick answers, but, you may wanna take your time to explain them properly. In terms of the new variety of constraints, since that you’ve done research on this, What is that you envision in terms of the flavors of constraints which we are about to see which may we may or may not be prepared for?

Mark Barden [00:54:30]:

Yeah. So, in the book we identified four different kinds of constraints. Constraints of foundation, constraints of resource, constraints of time, constraints of method. I think the one I might highlight on this call would be the constraint of time. Who amongst us doesn’t feel like there’s just too much to get done on any given day. And as much as we live in a world of phenomenal amount of abundance of options of ways to connect and get our work done, that even adds more pressure to us. So I think one of the things that I’m fascinated by and this came out of understanding how drip irrigation works. So drip irrigation very simply put is just enough water at just the right time leads to better growth for fruits and vegetables than if we flooded the environment. I think one of the things that we all need to think about in the modern world given how busy everybody is, is how to give them just enough of what they need at just the right time. And I was reading a great article about how to prepare kids from underprivileged backgrounds who’ve made, who’ve got the grades to go to college and typically drop out over the summer and there’s a program that two Harvard experts have been using where they’re just using text messaging. Very simple texts throughout the summer period, just the right content, at just the right time that prevents those students from dropping out and going through what they call the summer melt. So I’m interested in that as an idea to apply in organizations too. In your teams that are dealing with these constrained environments, how can we give them just enough of what they need at just the right time so we’re not adding to that sense of being overwhelmed with complex methodologies and so on. It’s just enough at the right time. That’s what I’m really interested in because I think the critical constraint that we’re all dealing with and not really capable of responding healthily to at the moment is this constraint of time.

Sanjog Aul [00:56:30]:

Now one last question for you is what is it that you would like to say in two words or three words that you would like to share for people who are dealing with constraints how to do it effectively?

Mark Barden [00:56:43]:

Well, I think the three word headline will be constraints are opportunities. It’s very simple thing to say. But I think what I hope to accomplish on this call is just to say to people that when you’re confronted with the constraint, it’s human nature to go to that place of this is going to be very difficult and maybe think about how that’s going to prevent you from realizing your potential. But change your relationship to constraints and try to find in them the opportunities and the opportunities for you and your business to live up to your full potential. Constraints equals opportunity.

Sanjog Aul [00:57:18]:

On behalf of our show and our listeners, thank you so much, Mark, for your taking the time to share with us about how organizations and individuals can make the most of constraints and make them our ally.

Mark Barden [00:57:31]:

Thank you for having me. I really appreciate the time and the opportunity to talk to you.

Sanjog Aul [00:57:35]:

Thank you so much again. And listeners, hope you enjoyed it. Got some nuggets out of it. Please like us on Facebook, search for CIO Talk Radio, and be sure to follow us on Twitter. And don’t forget to sign up for our newsletter, the monthly newsletter we send out with, all the information that we collect and all the conversations we have throughout the month. Thank you again for listening to CIO Talk Radio. This is Sanjog Aul, your talk show host till next week. Take care, and God bless.