Nobody in the room knows who decides

Freezing on me like your video's freezing. Are my freezing on you? On you okay, 'cause I'm okay. Like right, yeah, it's freezing delay, right? I'm getting a freezing delay. This the audio's fine. The video's freezing, just so you know. Doesn't really matter, but that is happening. But the audio is is good.

Let's go. Thank you for having me, Mick. I'm delighted to be here.

Sure, Mick. I go back a little further than you. So I got out of business school in 1989, worked for a big pharmaceutical company, Merck. They put me in a rotational assignment, like what I was doing. They just made up a job called the Director of Change Leadership and Development, which in all honesty was a fancy title for I had no idea what I was doing. I'm like three years out of business school. New CEO comes on board, does their assessment, somehow it rolls down to me. To get people collaborating because it was siloed. And I'm like, how do I do that? I just started out of business school, so I hired an outside consultant. That's who I work for now. We're a small consulting firm, and what we've done for 33 years is support small to medium-sized organizations in cultural transformation. Now, as part of those interventions, we always were teaching people what really is a lost art of facilitation or a style of leadership that Started back when I was challenged by the CEO, we designed that program and we've run it around the world for thirty three years as part of change intervention.

Well, th this it's a that's a big question with probably a lot of root causes. But I often ask clients and have for thirty-three years two questions, Mick. how many meetings are going to take place in your organization today? And that of course is based on the size of an organization, right? A small organization with fifty people, maybe they run twenty-five meetings. Now we've worked with clients with a million people, they may have a million meetings in a single day. The second question I've asked. Is what's the average effectiveness of the meetings you attend? And almost every time people say 50% or lower. And I sit there with clients and I say, do a little math with yourself. Most senior people spend at least 50% of their time in meetings. If they're running at 50%, it is a massive productivity loss. And this is where organization dysfunction starts at the meeting level. And most leaders are not taught how to facilitate. collaborative conversations and so because there's not that skill level, a lot of leadership teams are just not that effective because they don't know how to run a collaborative conversation.

Yeah, I mean probably companies would measure it through some sort of survey. But at a very practical level, Mick, the way we would measure it is did the meeting achieve the objectives? Right? We teach a very simple model, right? And the metaphor you might use for a workshop, because I'm teaching complex collaborative meetings, right? People doing agile, scrum, kaizan events, six sigma continuous improvement, change agent, complicated meetings. Right. The metaphor we use for running a complicated meeting project is a plane flight. You're in Prague, I'm in Denver. If I'm coming to visit you, it doesn't take a lot of time from the time they hit the jets to wheels up. I time it every time. It's usually about thirty-five seconds, plus or minus five seconds. If it does not go well, we're all dead. Most of the flight is, you know, trying to get to Prague. Once the plane's in the air, if you set it up well, the plane's gonna get there. The second place you've got to pay attention is on landing. So the key thing is taking off well. And if I don't know why we're doing things and what we're doing, there's no way to measure it. So the measures we would use is did the meeting achieve the objectives? And trust me, there's plenty of meetings that shouldn't be happening. They don't have objectives, and those are a waste of time.

Well, so I think I'm I'm glad you brought that up because we did this as culture change. So the easy stuff to do with the leadership team is get rid of the bureaucracy. Unnecessary policies, unnecessary reports that are being generated, un and of course unnecessary meetings. So the easy part is let's just figure out which meetings are worth having and take them off the books. Now I say it's easy, but culturally people get attached to bad meetings. Then once you've isolated to the meetings that matter, the true decision-making meetings, you need to train leaders in how to facilitate collaborative conversations. And that's what we've been doing for 33 years. And there's a simple, I'll give your listeners a simple tip for takeoff. We teach a very simple model. It's called POPRA. It's an acronym. It stands for Purpose, Objectives, Process, Roles, Agreements. So many meetings the leader calls, they don't get clear what the purpose of the meeting. why they're having it. They don't think through what are we trying to get done? Are we trying to make a decision? Are we just getting input? Are we just presenting information? And if you haven't thought about why you're doing things, what you're doing, you shouldn't be allowed to have a meeting. You shouldn't be allowed out of the hangar on the tarmac on onto the runway, because you're guaranteed to waste people's time. The second P of the process is the flight plan. Now if I don't know I'm going to Prague, I'm going to end up up in Heathrow in London. Right, if I don't know the destination. So I can't design the flight plan with I'm not clear on the objectives. And then I've got to make sure we have the right roles. The role that often gets left unclear is who the ultimate decision maker is. And if we don't know who that person is, we're going to hit turbulence and the plane's going to just keep flying in circles because we can't figure out how to land it. And the A and the popper model are agreements. How do we need to interact? Functionally as dysfunctional human beings to make sure we achieve the objective. So that simple POPRA model, if you take time to get clear why, what, how, who, in what way, process objectives, or excuse me, purpose objectives, process roles, agreements, you're gonna have a much smoother flight. So that's my first tip to people. Don't have meetings that you're not clear why you're doing it, what you're trying to get done.

Well, leadership is it's a buzzword, right? And there's so many different ways we might think about leadership. The simplest, most powerful way is simply think about our leadership as a continuum. On one extreme, I as the leader could be the expert, where I come in as the senior person and I decide and tell the group the decision. That's what most people get wrong. So we start and especially I have you ever heard the acronym HIPO decision making. It comes from Agile Mech. You're a little young, but have you ever heard that HIPAA decision making acronym?

Right. So so here's it's an acronym. So here's what it stands for. The hippo is the highest paid person's opinion. It's the senior person. And and what happens is a group naturally defers to the boss's boss because they're like, I don't want to look stupid in front of the hippo. Right. And so when the hippo as a leader comes in on the expert side of the continuum and starts with their opinion, or telling the group this is what I think the decision should be, the group just is like, All right.

They're the boss. So the mistake leaders make is coming in on the expert side of the continuum when they should be coming on the more neutral side of the continuum where they're asking questions rather than telling. So we say neutral in the sense, if I stay purely neutral as the leader, I never tell the group what I think the decision should be. I am guiding the conversation to elicit the thinking, the expertise from the group. And the group's making the decision. Now, are hippos going to ultimately make the decision? Of course. They're the senior person. But the skilled hippos understand, let me create space so I'm hearing from all the voices. They all get to weigh in. Because it often could be the most junior person, lowest in the organization, yet closest to the work, who may be an introvert, maybe speaking English as a second or third language, maybe a person of color, who has. The expertise to help the hippo make the better decision. But if the leader doesn't understand how to engage all voices, what happens is we suboptimize decisions and we don't get buy-in so people don't implement. So the mistake leaders make is they start by telling people what they think rather than asking the group, what do you think?

First of all, culture change and transformation is extremely difficult, especially as organizations get bigger and bigger. And the culture is set by the senior leader, the ultimate HIPAA, the CEO. They are the ones who people are modeling and reacting to. So when we used to do culture change, the first people who would train in this style of leadership was the C team. Because if they don't understand the art of collaborative leadership, of facilitation. The culture is going to be a one of deference to the boss's boss, and people don't say things. There's not an environment where there's pushback. So culture change is a very difficult thing to do. It doesn't happen often. And it the person who has to lead cultural transformation is the CEO because everyone's looking to them for the cues. And if they can't change their leadership style, the culture of the organization is not going to change. Now, there's so many other levers that need to be pulled. you know, levers on how we promote people, right? How we you know, recruit people, you know, how we pay people, how we reward people, how we communicate. I mean, culture change is a massive undertaking, but from a leadership standpoint, you have to train, change the culture of the senior team and then work your way down and get this style of leadership inculcated everywhere because that's how, you know change happens. It ch it it's person to person, person to person.

Okay, that it's a great question. And let me be very clear. I'm not an AI expert. Of course I use it a lot during my workshops now, like everyone. But what I'm learning from participants, and I don't think most organizations are here yet, but we can all envision a day where we're gonna be in meetings, and some people are in there where not only do I have human beings in the meetings, I also have AI agents or bots. I could have a finance bot. or agent that can immediately do forecast for the group that would have taken days to do. I could have a legal bot that can help the group know this is not legal in this country. This is legal. Right? There's a lawyer there, a human being, but the bot's going to be able to go look up things instantly. I could have a compliance or risk bot in there. I could have an HR bot. So what's going to end up happening is my belief is we're going to have mixed meetings where we have AI agents doing the analytics. Human beings though Ultimately have to make the decisions based on the analytics. So what's going to change is I'm going to have to facilitate a group of agents, bots, and human beings. But what does not change? Is the human element. So the skills we're teaching are even more essential because they're really about decision velocity and alignment. Because once we have all the data done instantly, it's most of the what slows down organizational change is the bureaucratic. lack of decision making. So what I think's gonna change is you're gonna have to facilitate AIs and human beings, but these skills are even more essential because it's the decision making speed and velocity and alignment that is the hard part. The analytics are going to be done so quick by the AI, and that you know that that's gonna be unbelievable to watch.

Well, first of all, I'm sixty-two. You're probably around twenty. My goals are work-life balance. I'm no longer consulting. It is a l I just am too old. So for me, my goals are to find and partner with leaders of PMOs or they're leading continuous improvement groups or an IT group doing Agile and Scrum. And just finding a few partners who want to transform their organization and what we're doing. Is a vehicle for change and transformation for the leaders who have to run complicated meetings. So I don't have huge goals. I want to play a lot of pickleball, right? There's no question. And I only train people now because training I can do and block off my calendar. When I was consulting, it's a you're you're consumed by the organization you're working with. So the honest truth is I want to run a lot of programs, play a lot of pickleball, spend time with my wife and family. And of course eventually time's running out on us all. So hopefully I have twenty years of health to do that. So you and I are in a little different place in our career, given our age difference.

Yeah, the best place is probably to go to my LinkedIn page. From my LinkedIn page, my website is there. They can grab my website. From my website, they can set up a Zoom with me. That's the simplest thing. If you're watching this on video, my LinkedIn icon will be this same blue shirt, blue check shirt. there's six Evanungers, actually. So the I'm the Avanunger in Denver, Colorado. But if you get to my LinkedIn page, You will be able to get to my website and set up a meeting from

It's been my pleasure, Mick. It's great to meet you.