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Today's guest is a business futurist. He's Co creator of the adapt manifesto and author of a book titled Never Normal. It's all about adaptability. How do we adapt to the ever changing and rapidly increasing innovation that's all around us? He's fantastic, grounded, but also forward leaning. Please welcome Greg Vordino. You're listening to sea sweet blueprint, the show for sea sweet leaders. Here we discussed nobody has approaches to organizational readiness and digital transformation. Let's start the show a great thanks for joining me. Hey, thanks for having me, George. I love your book, never normal. Am I to believe that the duck and cover strategy is not a good one? I would say it's probably not. So, you know, in on one side, I really love the title of your book in the whole premise, because it's true right we we need to adapt and and we're on this this ever increasing hockey stick of a curve of innovation. But on the other side, also dud. It extresses me out a little bit like as someone who's like always trying to be ahead of the curve a tiny bit, and as someone who's worked on mindfulness and like being content and you know, now that I'm later in my life, it's like, can I just relax a little bit? Can I? Can I settle into a groove just a tiny bit? I mean, maybe you can. You could talk a little bit about how fast the change is and why it's important to adapt. Sure. So I think it's important, at least from my perspective and the way I think about change, in the way the world is changing and what it means for us as individuals and what it means for our organizations, to kind of break apart the concepts of transformation and adaptability. Obviously they are closely related. They're both responses to this perpetual state of change. But one of the things that I've seen in my work as it relates to digital transformation in particular, and I'm sure you've seen the same kind of things, is that both the individuals in the organization and... |
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...the organization at large, from a strategic standpoint, of business model standpoint, a technology standpoint, of cultural standpoint, feel this pressure to change. It's almost like you feel like you have to change everything all at once and that you will never catch up. And of course, transformation, I mean it sounds pad and it's trite, I guess, to an extent at this point. Is A journey, right, and it's a journey without an end, which is probably the only journey without an end right. But you know, I think this whole notion of digital transformation, as it's become popularized in business over the past handful of years, has created this intense pressure to make change truly transformative, to be big, to be profound at all times, and I think that's what giving you a lot of that feeling of can't I just take a breath? CAN'T I be mindful? Can't I, you know, kind of stop chasing the Shiny object? And one of the things, and you're really where my workaround adaptability came from and the ideas that a colleague, Ian Patterson, and I put into the adapt manifesto, which is available at adapt manifesto dot org. It's a creative Commons thing. Anybody can use it, nothing to sell. You know where those where the the principles and that manifesto came from are as. We looked at the pressure that transformation put on organizations and we recognize the ways of which that could even potentially be damaging to an organization or the people in the organization we try to identify sort of like the counter principles. I mean, certainly everybody at all times needs to be conscious of the change that's happening around us, acting on the things that are important and the you know, kind of responding smartly and strategically to change. |
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But not all change needs to be profound, not all transformation needs to be digital, for that matter, you know. So we do need to be, I think, on our toes and constantly in a position to respond to change, ready to respond to change, but we need to also be measured and smart and strategic about the way we change, where we change, how we change, when we change and how much we change, and that many ways recognize. Although I don't believe adaptability means go slow, it does mean that small things, small steps we take sequentially over time add up to big change and that we can, as individuals and as organizations, be more you know, kind of be more measured in the kinds of things we do and, you know, embrace, you know, what shouldn't change at the same time as what should, and I think that's important. That, yeah, that makes a lot of sense and it sounds a heck of a lot better than the three year transformation initiative, where you have a warehouse full of consultantcy implementing some three letter software vendors solution. Right. You know, I definitely have come across more CEOS in the past few years that have kind of admitted, Hey, this was a whips it daisy. I tried to do too much all at once in but yet I'm also seeing, because we help clients every year with their strategy. There, you know, one year, two year, three year and on. And this year I've seen more of them come to me and say, our strategy is flexibility, and it where's before it was always let's hit let's hit a bigger number with less, with less money, as like our our whole strategies flexibility and like with what they're like everything. I'm like, you know, that's very expensive, right, and so, like how do you find that balance and adaptability as far as just being flexible in anything imaginal, versus like finding that right adaptability? Yeah, though, I mean I could say a few things. I mean you've hit on something that I think is key and important, which is this idea of these organizations trying to do too much all at once, right, and which,... |
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...again relates, you know, to this idea that we had of revolution through evolution. Right, of you know, don't try to do it all at once. Pick your poison, basically. You know, I think in the near term for organizations to maintain a stance of flexibility or change readiness, or agility or adaptability, whatever word you want to use for it, is critically important. Right, we're in a phase of intense ambiguity, right, you know, none of us you know the you know there's the only thing that's certain about the future is it's uncertain, and organizations do need to be able to hold multiple models in their mind at once, right, which is a principle of even, you know, traditional futures thinking. Right, this idea of the multiple futures, because you don't know exactly how something will play out and you do need to have a stance that allows you to pivot quickly when, when the environment changes around you. At the same time, I also think there's sort of a meaningful distinction in being reactive versus being responsive, right, you know, I, and you know, maybe it's semantics, but I think about reactive or reaction as sort of you know, anytime the wind shifts, you're blowing with that wind and that that's the kind of thing that could cause a lot of chaos and an organization because you're really kind of you're not pivoting, you're just kind of whiffle waffling all over the place, versus responsiveness, where you are being smart and strategic about the voices you make when you change direction. So I think that that is, you know, flexibility, as your clients are calling it, is a viable near term strategy. Of the other thing is sort of somebody who is a strategist by nature, though, is that ultimately, fundamentally, strategy is about choice. So at some point the organization does need to place bets and make some decisions about the direction they will take and more or less hold to over a course of time. So it might be a matter with your clients of you kind of... |
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...flexibility in the near term and a change reading underlying change reading as for the long term, but the willingness to act on a conviction about what the future could and should be and how the company can create that future. Yeah, and the problem I find, though, is even if they want to, you know, either react or respond, there's just so much debt that they deal with as an organization right, not just technical debt, but processed debt, people debt, and and it just I mean I've even seen, you know, in budgeting cycles come up and there's just very large swaths of the budget that are just set aside for tech that and I was actually joking with an executive recently. He was like, because he's in charge of innovation, he's like, I'm just going to start labeling all of my budget requests as debt. I'm just going to add debt to the end of it so they'll get approved, because that seems to get a prooved. I often think that you can take the unread inbox a method to it right. So if my inbox ever its own weeldy, I'll just do a select all market is on read or market as read, put it in a folder if I ever need to get to it. And now I'm just focusing on the future. You know, I'm curious if you've seen kind of frameworks or things that work for these organizations to stop thinking about the debt. I mean some of it they have to deal with, but how do you push push? For me, the debt is one of the largest challenges. I wish I had a great answer to that, that it is obviously one of the hard is right. You know, I mean if we're looking at technical debt specifically, and you've seen this, like you're describing it, to an extent I've seen it as well, that you know, organizations it. Organizations are implementing this year things they committed to sometimes three years ago, right, and they're not fully implemented, fully rolled down and by the end and they know it's like they know. It's not even like they don't know that by the time they put a tool of technology whatever into the hands of the workforce, it's already outdated. Right. You know, it's very I think it would take a very progressive... |
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...and in many ways brave organization to say, let's write that off the you know, the market as outpage our ability to implement yesterday's technology. But that would be a very rare organization. You know, I talk sometimes about this idea of funding the future and you know, and and we see the same thing in anything. I'd be technology, could be marketing, could be whatever. The innovation budgets always the budget that gets cut, right, and you take ten percent of your budget, you put it against innovation and you know when budget cut, you know, budget cuts come around, it's not the things that aren't working that get cut, it's the things you haven't done yet that kick. You know, I think organizations do need to be rigor. It's about doing kind of by whether you think of it as a start, stop, continue kind of process or start, stop, improve kind of process and be, you know, kind of rigorous and relentless hatchetmen thing for the things that aren't working or aren't serving the organization anymore, and then be very territorial about wrapping their arms around those funds as innovation funds and ensuring that they don't get cut. I think, even bigger, and you touched on this a little bit, then the technical debt a lot of times is the cultural debt, all of the assumptions that are held to be true, even if they no longer suit the organization, all of the people stuff, the human stuff that needs to be rethought, all of the UN learning that has to happen. I think, a lot of times this has been one of my challenges with digital transformation as a term and as a practice and in a lot of ways is that lend itself towards this sort of process where leaders mistake technology for transformation when fundamentally, first and foremost, it is cultural transformation. And if you can't evolve the culture the organization to be more customer centric, to be more modern, to be more are digital, you know, for lack of a better term, no amount of technology investment is going to improve the... |
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...state of the organization as far as I'm concerned. Yeah, and and really does come down to that human aspect, right. That the same reason these transformations fails, the same reason, you know, people trying to get in shape fail, or that your garage stays cluttered or whatever human thing it is, right. Yeah, you should see mine, and and and similar. How I joke. You know, there are some people that you know, maybe they don't want to be in a culture of constant change and constant adaptation and and all of that. And in so as you shift as an organization, you know, maybe you know this is you always hear this. The people who got you to where you are now they might not be the people they're going to be there to get you to the next phase. But you need to balance that with creating a culture that that can embrace the people that you have right and give them room. Yeah, so the one thing I people probably get sick of me talking about it, but, Gardner, it's actually behind my shoulder. Your Gartner has their past layering, you know, framework, and it's meant for systems. They at the bottom of your systems of record, then you're sym change innovation. I like to think about that, though, as far as help people fit into it right, because if you have someone who sits in that level, in that system of record, they probably don't want things to change. Ever, for are very rarely right, whereas you have someone that's in this system of innovation, they they would shoot themselves out of boredom if they were down at the the system of record tier. And you know, it's about finding that like right home and the right place for people in an organization to go through that cultural change. Otherwise I feel like you can lose a lot of good people if you don't do it right. Yeah, I mean, I think, I think there's a lot. I think there's a lot of a lot in what you're describing there. Right. You know, we can probably have a for our conversation about whether people suck a change or a great a change and how much of it is environmental and how much of it is personal, on psychological and social lot, sosiological and all of that. But fundamentally, whether it's people, processes or anything else, in most incumbent organizations you can't throw the baby out with... |
| 00:14:01 - 00:16:00 |
...the bath water. Right you've got a you've got a, to one extent or another, successful business with a working business model, a customer base, a bunch of people in your workforce, right and now's you know, those are your systems of record people. There might be plenty of room for incremental change, but transformation becomes a very scary prospect unless, over time, you find ways to bring those people along with you. I think one of the biggest challenges with any change initiative in any organization is always communication. You know, whether it's, you know, a bunch of sort of grassroots, skunkworky types of initiatives that are pushing innovation left and right through the organization, or whether it's a leadership team that says this is the new way it shall be and not actually explaining why is change important right now? Why is this good for the organization? How is it good for you? How will this you know? What role will you play in the world as it changed and in changes end in the new world. Why is this good for you? You know, how will it make your life better? Right, you know, if you told somebody, even in a system of record, that you will be able to do more creative work, more strategic work, more rewarding work, a different kind of work, have a different kind of work life balance, instead of living your life in spreadsheets, let's say, because the spreadsheet stuff can be automated, even in a system of record, I might go, actually, that sounds interesting. Tell me more. If you simply say your job is being automated or you know, or hey, this thing that you've spent your career building is no longer real or relevant because the consumer is moved on, that's like a shock to the system. Right. So there's, I think, a lot of stuff that comes down to communication and bringing people along, creating an environment where people feel bought into the kinds of change that may be happening around them. But also, you know, on the... |
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...flip side of that to what you were saying, recognizing that in a legacy organization or a legacy industry, many of which, frankly, have not been disrupted to the extent those of us who wear digital transformation heads or whatever pretend they have been or preach they have been, that there is a lot of value in the traditional bread and butter stuff that a lot of these organizations do. Yeah, and it's so, I would imagine. I'm curious your observations, but I would imagine the investment into that people change is probably the correct amount of investments. Not put into it. Right, I know absolutely. You know it. We send people to some leadership training or training on whatever software you're going to be using, or even like agile training or whatever it might be. But just straight up like hey, we're going to invest in you on what it means to be constantly adapting and constantly changing. Probably a lot of underinvestment out there, right. Yeah, I mean I think it's I mean under investment would be an understatement. I think that I just don't think that most organizations have that even within their sort of you know, within their line of site at this point. And the thing you know, you know, a leadership development program even you know, it's a relatively small investment at most organizations compared to you know, big technology refresh or whatever, and I don't know many organizations today that are doing things like, you know, a q assessments for individuals or teams, or even talking about a qure doing adaptability programs or providing coaching to help people with change, you know, not with performance, but with change, or even, for that matter, developing, you know, robust and I would say always on the soft skills training, because you mean we know. I mean the more and more the rote routine and sort of repeatable tasks can be automated, the more important the human... |
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...stuff. I mean, we've been talking about humanity and transformation to begin with, but the more important the human stuff about, kind of like what we bring to work and how we engage in work and what skills are not easily automatable, the more important those things become. But I feel like in a lot of ways work has stripped those things out of us right we you know, we've kind of over the cord. For those of us were old enough, we've been you know, it's like we've been taught to work like machines, not to work alongside machines, and working alongside machines requires us to bring human skills to the table, soft skills, of the table, in a way that probably many people don't today. Yeah, and you'd think some great leaders out there. They'd be looking at this hockey stick curve and they'd say hey to their employees. Whether you're here with us or somewhere else, you're going to be encountering this as a human and so we need to invest in you to give you the skills to deal with this, this rate of change, regardless, quite honestly, if you're here somewhere else, just investment to the value. Yeah, it's scary, you know. I'd love you to elaborate a little bit on those Aq assessments. You know, what are they? What do you get out of them? So I mean, obviously people are familiar with Iq and I think increasingly people are becoming familiar, or at least you know, aware, of your emotional intelligence, you know, and Eq, the role that plays and decisionmaking in leadership and in things like that. So there's sort of like a third lane adaptive intelligence or adaptability intelligence, which actually can be measured. So there are some organizations, including one called a Qai, for example, that offers an a q assessment that looks at fifteen different dimensions across sort of three general areas, ranging from sort of your attitudes and aptitudes to your competencies to the environment you're in and, just like any other assessment tools scores you, you know your level of adaptability. In... |
| 00:20:00 - 00:22:02 |
...this case specifically, and when you look at the kind of things that make up adaptability, things like your personal level of Grit or resilience or the degree to which, let's say, your environment is risk it verse or risk open, for lack of a better term, or the degree to which they give you sort of like you know, the things like even like mindfulness and and and so forth, are acceptable in an organization. Many of these things are changeable. In the case of the personal things like grit and resilience and sort of change readiness or an ability to on learn and relearn, those are skills that can be developed. They become like muscles, just like any other skill. That the more adept you become at spotting change or the more adept you become at UN learning old skills that no longer serve you and learning new skills, obviously, the easier it becomes to turn that into a habit. Other things like environment might be out of an individual workers, an individual workers per view, but certainly is within the purview of the leader in an organization. Right. So, if you, as a leader, run a q assessments across a sample or even everybody in your workforce and find that the same points of friction that are holding people back from feeling that they can lean into change are coming up as they you know, kind of as they point to the different factors of their environment. Obviously, as a leader, you now have a sense as to whether there is something innate to your environment that is causing people to be more stagnant, Morse, change resistant and so forth. And obviously, as a person, as an individual, if you find that your environment digit wholly unworkable. I can't grow, I can't change, I can't even be adaptable in an environment that is so rigid structured. So change a verse, then of course that gives you a clue that maybe it's time to look someplace else. I love that it's got a path to improve and I... |
| 00:22:02 - 00:24:00 |
...guess I shouldn't be surprised, since it's all about adapting. But you know, some other frameworks are out there. They sometimes just kind of lock you in a box and people use it as an excuse like Oh, you know I, you know me, I'm just a libra, and it's like no, you're being a jerk. Right, right, is ex actually as yeah, I mean to me what makes a good a q assessment powerful is that it gives you a sense of where you have opportunities for growth. And so few like really none of the fifteen attributes and no, in the Aqai assessment, none of them are fixed. Every single one of them has a path to growth and an opportunity to improve, you know. And then it comes down to what's the framework you use? So, again going back to the adapt manifesto, it could be the ten principles in that manifesto where you say, okay, well, I want to, you know I want to, I'm going to, I'm going to do x, Y and Z, because those will help me, you know, to improve my adaptability. or it could be, you know, virtually anything. I mean obviously came both any framework and say, okay, here are the ten things I will do to increase my adaptability, or I will you'll find a coach who specializes in change or whatever. Interesting something I love to do is to kind of poke around two areas that we think are like shrouded in bs that are out there. I think you and I both kind of have a disdain for the digital transformation phrase I'm curious, like, where else are you see in the BS that's out there right now? Too many buzz words or nonsense? I mean I think that it's virtually everywhere. You know, and and I mean I think you would probably, I'm guessing you would agree that, you know kind of there's always some amount of sort of truth hidden within the BS or alongside the BS. I tend to see B as any time anything becomes too absolute black and white, you know. So when you look at the red or rick,... |
| 00:24:00 - 00:26:02 |
...for example, around automation and artificial intelligence and sort of widespread technological unemployment, is that a possibility? Sure, is it a practicality? Not really right. You know, when you look at what ai really can do versus what we pretend a I can do, the use cases are relatively narrow and limited. You know, at least for the foreseeable future. It is not nearly as powerful as you know, as you know, we pretend it might be today. Obviously, the things that are I see, the other are like just like bullshit machines. You know, is web three. I believe that there is potential. There's plenty of promise. There are a lot of applications for web three. Technologies like blockchain and Crypto. There is a lot of potential and promise for Web three sort of mental models like decentralization, distribution, democratization. But a lot of the you know, kind of the rhetoric, for example, around the extent to which web three will replace, your obliterate every model that came before it, I think, is you know, it is kind of B se right. You know, the same way web one exists alongside web to today, Amazon and in Google on the Web one side facebook and you know, twitter and web two or whatever. You know, these models will exist in parallel. The decentralized organization, the hour or whatever it is it becomes, will it's Conte, will exist alongside traditional corporate, you know, structors. Not Everybody. It's not even feasible that everybody will become a creator, like with their own coin and build their own individual economy within their own community of followers. Like who's The's? WHO's The community? If everyone to creator, where do the doctors, the lawyers, the accountants, the engineers come from? Right, like Gire's, you know, does everything need to be on the block chain? How do we do that? You know, we don't have the energy to even support that right. |
| 00:26:02 - 00:28:00 |
You can't be both interested in sustainability and sort of environmental impact and, you know, thinking the entire world is going to go onto the blockchain, right, like to just you know, you can't be both of those things at once. Right. The world needs see, you know, everything needs to be in balance, right, you know. So I think, you know, you see a lot of bs around stuff like that and you know, typically when you see a lot of bs like that, what do you see? You see big brands feeling like they have to be first movers into something and they do these things that amount to a little more than ill advised pr stunts that, over the long haul, probably hurts the business or the brand, right, you know. So I think that, you know, is kind of like the BS and the dangers of falling prey to the BS and not being more measured and strategic and the way you think about how these things fit into the sort of environment at large. So there's web with metaverse, right, all this stuff. I do believe there's something there. I do believe these things will become increasingly important. I do believe they will introduce everything from new ways to connect with employees and customers to entirely new business models. But I don't think it's going to be. You know, probably will not arrive as quickly as some people profess it will. You know, despite a lot of the rhetoric, even with digital transformation, you know, disruption is not an overnight event, right. You know, like the companies who are scrambling with digital transformation today could have started twenty years ago, right, but they didn't. That's why it's this game of catch up right now. But it didn't happen overnight. And you know, the shift any of these new whether it's you know, the next generation of the Internet, isn't going to happen overnight and is it isn't going to be absolute, I don't believe. But we do need to be thinking about where are we going, what might it look like and what steps can we take to prepare ourselves and to experiment... |
| 00:28:00 - 00:30:00 |
...and to learn what this will mean for our organization? Yeah, we're not going to take the web to Oh box, put it to the curb and just, you know, come come in from the store with our web three box and the height cycles real right, and this is importantly. What do you think? Like, you know, Amazon's going to go all right, we had a good run here, but our time is up. You know, take it, do you know? Take it. You know, good luck to you, whoever comes next. It's like, that's not we're going to happen right. I guess everything is decentralized. Now we're all going to go home. Thank you. That ground WUS servers. Everyone'll get a terrible basement. Now. The hype cycles real. We've seen it before and but the funny thing is, yeah, a lot of real money gets spent during that hype cycle, but then they're as it does settles, they'll be some cool, meaningful changes on the absolutely yeah, yeah, I'm not, by no means am I saying, Oh, let's be loodites, let's, you know, stick firmly to our existing infrastructure and business models. But you know, we also we've got to get through that hype cycle, get into that trough of disillusionment or whatever far aser gardener calls it, and then, you know, we will find the practical applications that make sense and that work and that are relevant for consumers. Like right, what are their preferences? And, you know, and and how do we provide something that serves them right? At the end of the day, that's what it's about. You know, we've got to serve customers. So if our customers are changing, we need to change with them, but at the same time we don't need to, you know, be shiny object chasers. Yeah, I've been wondering if with web three, we need like Leodite three. Oh, will redefine what a letter is in this new mine are so greg I've enjoyed this. I always like to finish on I'd love it if you would share with us the best advice you've ever received in worker life. Wow, you know you're going to have a stumper question. You know, it's an interesting I guess maybe this kind of plays into where we were kind of going on, you know, in the later part of the conversation about web three. Point now,... |
| 00:30:02 - 00:32:02 |
...there was a time in the last Internet bubble I was working inside a traditional organization but in an innovation role, working with a lot of companies that were building brand new digital things, and that created and an opportunity where my boss and I actually both would get invited into a lot of friends and family for a lot of IPOs. And you know, when we that, and that was a relatively new experience to me, I was relatively young, certainly compared to where I am now, was not investing in a lot of companies, for sure, and we would get into these like these like crazy IPOs, and we'd see people get into these like pre you know, pre IPO, you know, friends and family rounds and like right it and make a sillion dollars. Right. And he said to me and we I was like, and there was one instance. I won't say the company, but it was a company that minted more than a few billionaires. You know, we got a little friends and family stock. And he said, you know, and I was like, I don't know what to do, like do I, you know, ride this and hope it doesn't crash? Do I do an he goes, he goes. He basically is advice. I can remember exactly what is wording was, but it was basically don't be greedy. It was like, look, have a number in your head. When it hits that number, feel comfortable getting out, even if it continues to go up beyond that, you've made more than you would have made otherwise. So it was this kind of concept of when the world is going crazy around you, be happy with the Games you get. You know, and I think you know, especially now, as you're watching people become, you know, board a PA millionaires and wondering why you're, you know, farting ferret is sitting at half and eat then isn't going up. You know, kind of be happy with the Games you get because you've you're still doing better than you were before. That makes a ton of sense. I love it. Well, Greg, thanks so much for being here. Thank you for having me. Just good talking to you. Technology should serve vision. That set it at intivity, and we design clear blueprints for organization readiness and digital transformation that allow companies to chart new paths. Then we drive the implementation of those plans with our... |
| 00:32:02 - 00:32:27 |
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