Speaker 1: 0:09

Welcome to another episode of Transformative Change. Today we're going to speak about something I've been observing for a very long time and also experiencing myself throughout my career. This topic is going to be about our tendency of having a reactive behaviour versus having a proactive behaviour in our professional life. All too many times I've seen and I've talked to people that are way too busy. They sit in meetings from early mornings to late evenings, not even allow themselves time for a proper lunch to wind down a little bit between all the meetings. I wish that I could say that I was perfect when it comes to these things myself, but it hasn't really been since the last few years that I have, proactively, have started to reflect over my own behaviour.

Speaker 1: 1:08

We are running way too fast sometimes to put out fires. I remember a couple of years ago even, when I had a discussion with some people from one of the large established banks here in Nordics. I can't say any particular name, but they said internally that they had something they referred to as heroes. A hero was something that constantly went in. He saw the situation or she saw the situation, and they were tremendously valued internally. When I asked a few follow-up questions like okay, so what did this person do? Well, it could be often enough operational issues. Well, I would lie if I said it wasn't always operational issues. Something went down and they fixed it. It seemed like every day or business as usual for this organisation was to constantly put out fires.

Speaker 1: 2:10

Initially, when you're in an organisation, you think that that's a good thing. There are these people and they're constantly fighting fires and they tend to put them out because they've expert, they know the processes, they know who to contact. They become invaluable assets for the organisation because, hey, who wants the bank to go down Taking the time to reflect on this topic? Is that really a good thing? Is it something or a behaviour that we would like? I was watching this interview I think it was Bill Gates and another billionaire and they were like show me your calendar to each other. Do you have any meetings in it? No, no meetings. Oh wait, I have 15 minutes here reserved for a catch-up, and that made me reflect. What kind of behaviour do we want to have in large organisations? Is it the people that constantly go in and fight the fires, or do we want people that have the time to think? And what do I mean with thinking this? Well, if something doesn't work and you constantly need to put out fires, in my opinion you're doing something wrong. Why, you ask. Glad you asked.

Speaker 1: 3:42

The main purpose of an organization isn't really to put out fires all the time. It is to maintain a stable business over time, and one of the biggest costs in organizations are employees. So if the organization isn't really working because you need to put out fires, how do you ever have the time to fix those fires, to change the processes or to think about how can we do more with less? Who has that role in an organization if the entire organization is constantly celebrating the people that put out the fires? Yes, it feels good in a moment Ooh, we survived this as well. But then you create a culture of putting out fire is what you celebrate in the organization. I don't think that's the best way. Take an example with the billionaires reflecting over having empty calendars. Yeah, that makes them have the time to think how can I solve another problem in a better way? And in their case, it made them billionaires because they sold something and they were able to make a lot of money out of that. For me personally, I think this is invaluable. So welcome to transformative change the podcast where we are trying to equip you with the tools to drive long lasting transformations in your organizations and in the world, and even in your personal life. We're a cross cutting podcast focusing on the latest research, anecdotal insights and just analytical conversations so you can continue driving transformations in the world and making the world into a better society. Because, hey, who doesn't want a better society? Back to the topic at hand Time to think.

Speaker 1: 5:46

I remember when I was really at the top of my game in implementing large scale AI solutions into different organizations. I think the first time I reflected over hey, I am really not working on new solutions was when I started feeling that I was in these meetings, as I referred to in the beginning, early morning. This might have been my, my H&M days, or think big days, or even the Vodafone days constantly meeting, constantly thinking, and I was so much looking for inspiration. Why can't I learn something new? I've been doing this for a while now. The Wilkes keep on turning. You want inspiration. You want to implement new things, because there should be better ways of doing this. I don't need to be constantly on the board trying to solve all of these situations, and I was invited to be the chairman of the Nori Data Science and Machine Learning Summit and In conjunction with that, I was going to give the opening speech, about 15-20 minutes, on something thought leadership, and at that point I was like, oh well, I can talk about everything I'm doing. And then I reflected for what wait? What? That's not really forward looking. There's more describing the situation that's interesting for people to listen to, maybe, but that's not the value I want to contribute to, because there's so many people just describing what they're doing.

Speaker 1: 7:20

We built this data lake or we implemented this technical solution. I wanted to think about what's coming next. What situation hadn't I anticipated yet and how could I already now think about the problem? So, when it would occur, I had a solution in mind. How could I evaluate? How could I do a benefit analysis? I think this was really what I wanted to get to.

Speaker 1: 7:48

So I took three days, I think and this was unheard of for me because I didn't even like to take vacation at that time but I really wanted a time and I took those three days. I spent the first day researching and reading, trying to catch up on all the articles you don't have time to read because you're constantly in meetings, I tried to talk to a few new people, reach out and ask them do you know what's coming? And then I started formulating ideas. On the second day and the third day I started writing them down and I think what I did at that time was I created a presentation called how do you design machine learning systems. So I basically took all of the consolidated knowledge that I have gained throughout my experience in putting out fires, building technical solutions, and I put them together in an end-to-end solution, sort of how do I create a holistic concept that people can look at, interpret and have a process end-to-end, before they're going to do a deployment. And it might not sound as extremely forward-looking for those that have worked in DevOps and state-of-the-art technology and are really good software engineers, but for AI solutions we didn't have much at that time and this is about 2017, 2018. So I created how do you design a machine learning system and I presented it and I got some really good feedback. So I created this routine.

Speaker 1: 9:30

Every year before this conference, I started to take time in my calendar to think about what I wanted to present and I even started not three days in advance, but I took a few hours here and there, blocked my calendar and thought about where is the future taking us, so that I, every year, could come with a new perspective. It was the time of the year where I felt I had the time to digest, process, conceptualize and then deploy. And deploy in this sense is presenting your ideas for criticism so that people could be inspired. I could be wrong, but at least I was out there making my solution available, because that's what I want to get to, and that really started changing my conception of what do I bring to the table.

Speaker 1: 10:24

I started going from this reactive mode, which I'm pretty sure many of you can refer to, the thing that you get a phone call from your manager. Why hasn't this been done? Or there's an incident at your office, a system goes down or a lot of people get sick and you don't have a plan in place. I think one of the most usual things I see there is not even a succession order in many teams, like what happens if my top engineer, my top product manager or a lot of other crucial roles become sick all at once or they retire. There needs to be plans in place so we can work proactively, and I think it's so important, not just when you're out on team building exercises, but you take the time to reflect, maybe not every week or month, but at least put a time calendar time together to talk about the big topics like how do we prevent incidents, how do we create a strategy? Becoming more proactive also saves time, because if we can stop certain things from happening, we are all of a sudden saving time in the calendar because we work proactively. This is not easy to sell in organizations.

Speaker 1: 11:51

That's running at 200 kilometers per hour, because that means that you're sometimes blind of the speed, because slowing down actually takes away a bit of the adrenaline that you're feeling. I'm not sure if all of you listening now have had that experience, been at work and things are constantly happening. It's like driving a car really fast in busy traffic on the highway. There's constant something happening. There's a car coming up oh, you need to break. Oh, there is somebody in front of you having the brake lights on. Oh, there is somebody coming from the left with no blinkers getting in front of you. Something's happening constantly. The same thing happens when you're at work. There's something happening. Somebody's calling you, asking you to do something. There's an email popping in. There is a colleague coming over to your desk.

Speaker 1: 12:44

If you're at the office, your pulse is up, up, up, up up. You're searching for validation. Does your manager acknowledge what you're doing? Yeah, this feels good, I'm in the right direction. Oh, I've been fighting, fighting, fighting, constantly. Your pulse when you get home after the day sometimes feel like I need a break.

Speaker 1: 13:03

This is high-paced, especially in some occupations. This is a constant pressure on people. So how can I then come from the side say, hey, you need to break? Oh, but I can't break is what I usually get. There's too much going on. Continue running, continue having high-path, continue being reactive, because a good driver can anticipate traffic. A poor driver is constantly trying to fight what's in their way. This might be a bad analogy.

Speaker 1: 13:36

What I want to get to is we all want to be good drivers right, but in order for us to be a really good driver, we need to plan ahead. You need to look on the map. If you're going, for instance, to drive through Europe, you need to look at where you're going. You need to plan ahead. Where am I going to refill fuel? If you're an electric car, it's going to be even more cumbersome because you need to find a place where you can stay for a while, probably have something to eat. This is true for organizations as well. You need to plan ahead, not just reactively, constantly trying to mitigate what's happening. You need to be ahead constantly. I wish I had a real loop, perfect answer for all of you now wondering okay, so how do we do this?

Speaker 1: 14:28

But it is a hard topic. I think what I reflected on the most in my career, when it has been the best, is I took the decision my last year, year and a half when I was working for H&M, when I was managing large amount of teams, to start working more strategically as a leader. And that's very hard, especially for us that wants to be in control, that wants to see the progress and things are not happening. But that meant I needed to spend a lot of time with both external consultant to get their point of views and their hands to creating the strategy I needed to lay out. This is the direction we're going in. Needed to anchor it with the team. I did spend so much time. I would estimate 50 to 60% probably of my time went into more strategical topics. So if you're in a team that's constantly running, it is up for your management to actually help you with this topic, to set a clear direction, to be anticipating the future.

Speaker 1: 15:36

No person, if it's a leader, can do everything by themselves. It's very hard to be alone when you're creating a strategy and mitigation actions and trying to anticipate the future and no one can anticipate the future fully but establishing a good direction is really what you can do, so you need to work with the team. You need to work as a leader, in particular, with the experts, because leaders shouldn't be experts in the topics always. They should be leaders in leadership, and being an expert leader or expert in leadership basically means that you need to work with the experts to get their input and not just one person's input, but multiple, internal and external. You need to create a roadmap that's not a fixed roadmap, but something that sets direction. You need to help and work with the team to create increments of deliverables and hypothesis. This is also key because a good strategy is not something that covers three to five years. It is something that sets a vision of where you should be in three to five years, and then it's up to the teams to work in iterations and hypothesis in order to be able to deliver this, and hypothesis might be.

Speaker 1: 16:54

These are the type of features that we're going to develop the next three months, for instance not any longer and then you see the results from that and start switching from activity based to result based follow up, because what we see in organizations is, many organizations work with activity based, and that means, are we going to build a platform, or we're going to create a feature, or we're going to shut these applications down. That doesn't say anything. What you need to work with instead, as a team, is result based results, and that depends, of course, on what type of results you're trying to achieve. If you're a back office, results in this case might be reduced in manual labor, because that translates directly into the cost of an organization, instead of activity based, which would be more focusing on the amount of FDs, for instance.

Speaker 1: 17:55

So it's important to have this mindset as well, and when we talk about strategies, it's really about taking this time to reflect. Too many times I've seen teams go away, for instance, on off-sides management meetings, and again for these management meetings can many times be how do we handle the current operational issues? While there should be time for those things because they're important, but I don't think primarily that's what management should be focusing on, not leadership, at least. They should be focusing more on how do we turn the current situation into something else and pivoting into future setting, strategizing on what we need to do. And it is hard I've said it a couple of times now, but I still think it's super hard both having this result based but also have this strategizing and forward looking.

Speaker 1: 18:52

And it's hard, but that doesn't mean hard is bad. Hard just means that you are cognitively challenging yourself when things are hard and you have a hard time grasping them. That basically means that you are growing your intellect. That something I think is worth considering, because when you're growing your cognitive intellect, that means that you're focusing on the right things. That means that you're solving hard topics. When the experts go in and they solve the operational issues which experts can do, that's what they're there for they are just maybe not always, but most of the time focusing on things they already know. They know how to solve these issues, while the harder question should be to them after something like this has happened how do we avoid this from ever happening again?

Speaker 1: 19:44

How do we create a plan? And it is hard because what it requires usually when you create this plan is to come together. It's to invest money and time. And how do you do that when the world around you is burning, because these operational issues constantly happen. You just need to allow yourself to take this time and you need to convince the rest of the organization that sometimes you need to stop hit the breaks to be able to accelerate. I'm going to let that sink in. Sometimes you need to stop, let the world burn for a while Not throw gasoline at it, of course, but you need to hit the breaks in order to accelerate. You don't accelerate into a curve, you accelerate out of it. That means first you hit the breaks and then you get going, and when you hit the breaks, you need time to grab a coffee, you need to get out of your comfort zone or the office and start to think about what's next.

Speaker 1: 20:55

This is a topic that definitely not going to be sold by listening to one podcast episode of hitting the breaks. I suggest you take some time, you reflect over what might happen if you do so, and how did you get the opportunity to sit down with your peers and discuss these topics? That was all I had for this episode. This is an interesting topic, so hopefully in a future episode we can go through some details on how to actually do this. Thank you so much for listening in. If you enjoyed this episode, make sure to hit subscribe, make sure to share it with your friends and colleagues and tune into the next episode that's coming out in a week. Until then, take care.