The Communicative Leader
On The Communicative Leader, we're making your work life what you want it to be. Do you need years of training or special equipment? Not at all my friends. Simple, yet thoughtful changes in your communication can make great strides in displaying your leadership ability. And why the heck should you care about leadership communication? Well, communication is the yardstick others use to determine whether or not they see you as a leader. Ahhh don't be scared, I got you. We will walk through common organizational obstacles and chat about small, but meaningful communication-rooted changes you can integrate immediately. No more waiting for the workplace to become what you hope it will. Nope. You, my friends, will be empowered and equipped to make those changes. Let's have some fun! Can't get enough?
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The Communicative Leader
Harnessing Agile and AI for Transformational Leadership: A Conversation with Dennis Stevens
Ever wondered how to turn your organization into a powerhouse of adaptability and innovation? Discover the secrets as we bring you a captivating conversation with Dennis Stevens, the visionary founder of OrgRite. Dennis takes us through his remarkable journey from technology consulting to pioneering organizational change, sharing his groundbreaking work with IBM and the importance of integrating AI and Agile methodologies. Learn how his expertise in organizational psychology and change management has been a game-changer in leading teams through rapid technological transformations.
Explore the powerful synergy between Agile methodologies and AI, which can revolutionize decision-making and foster a culture of continuous learning. Dennis sheds light on how getting data and insights deeper into the organization enhances adaptability and efficiency. His real-world case study of a successful Agile transformation at a midsize bank serves as a testament to the impact of strong leadership and strategic alignment. Understand how these methodologies, when combined, can empower teams to respond swiftly to market and technology shifts.
Ethical considerations of AI integration are not left untouched. Dennis emphasizes the pivotal role of middle management in ensuring transparency and improved decision-making through AI. Uncover practical tools for understanding team dynamics and the significance of emotional intelligence in leadership. Whether you're a leader aiming to design adaptable organizational systems or an employee looking to build better relationships with management, this episode is packed with insights to help you navigate the complexities of modern organizational life. Tune in for an enriching discussion that promises to equip you with actionable strategies for success.
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Dennis Stevens, executive leader, entrepreneur and founder of OrgRite, joins us today on the Communicative Leader. Dennis shares his wealth of experience regarding organizational adaptability and innovation, especially via agile transformation and AI. Let's dive in and have some fun.
Dr. Leah Omilion-Hodges:Hello and welcome to the Communicative Leader hosted Dr me, -Hodges. My friends call me Dr Oak. I'm a professor of communication and a leadership communication expert. On the Communicative Leader, we're working to make your work life what you want it to be.
Dr. Leah Omilion-Hodges:Dennis, thank you for joining me today on the Communicative Leader. I'm really excited to learn more about what you do and your perspective and it's so cutting edge. And, before we get into that, what led you to be this expert in organizational adaptability, ai integration and agile transformation?
Dennis Stevens:Yeah, good afternoon, Leah. It's very good to talk to you as well. I know I said afternoon, but good morning. So I started out with technology consulting like 30 years ago. My first job was designing probabilistic systems for marketing platforms for IBM, which even then was like a form of AI, and we were developing these large scale innovative solutions using emerging technologies to roll out there. I went into two or three different companies from there where I did predictive maintenance systems for handhelds, I did remote sensing systems for precision agriculture, so sort of always doing new technologies as they're emerging and learning how to deploy them in a way that was safe.
Dennis Stevens:So there's a lot of risk market's uncertain, product's uncertain, technology's uncertain. You have to develop in smaller batches and then validate them with the customer all the time. There's also a really interesting part that came out of my early work was I was also ended up being responsible for people actually using the technologies that we built. So the organizational change management piece became really important. How do you get people, how do you understand jobs, design the jobs with the new technology and get people to start to adapt them and leverage them?
Dennis Stevens:So I went back to college and got my degree in organizational psychology and development and was really focused on the change management part of it and it was useful not just from a technology standpoint but it was useful from leading teams and leading customers right. So you learn how people to build teams and build organizations. In 2005, I started a company called Synaptus and that was doing large scale organizational design and technology design using business capability modeling to design a customer alignment, wrapping technology and organizations. So they were aligned and I've got an HBR article the Next Revolution in Productivity that talks a lot about leveraging that to build adaptable and composable organizations. But again, the implication or the application of that required a tremendous amount of effort to get leaders to understand how to change and adapt. We can make it technically possible.
Dr. Leah Omilion-Hodges:We can design it and make it possible.
Dennis Stevens:But getting people to actually play was really interesting. Yeah, those pesky people exactly yeah, yeah so so in in 2012, I co-founded a company called leading agile, and leading agile does large-scale agile transformations and I got to lead about 150 agile transformations, actually figuring out how to get leaders to understand how to participate in that over the last 12 years, and so the change management model that I started at Synaptics to start to solve that problem became a critical part of what we did then at Leading Agile.
Dennis Stevens:What I found out as we were wrapping up at Leading Agile was leadership is still a challenge. Leaders don't know how to lead their organizations and how to participate in change. Don't know how to lead their organizations and how to participate in change and so I founded Orgrite because I think the coaching consulting led change is going to fail as change becomes faster and faster and I think we have to teach our leaders how to design organizations and lead organizations that can adapt to change.
Dr. Leah Omilion-Hodges:So that's kind of what Orgrite is is targeted at, you know, empowering organizations to change rapidly know the way, to show the way and embracing change, and that uncertainty kind of throws that old idea to the wind and it's really a scary place to be, I think, for many of those who have come up under a different model.
Dennis Stevens:That's right. I think that the way that we treat I talk about the messy middle in organizations a lot of times and the way that we create that in organizations is by punishing people with undisciplined change and then holding them accountable for delivering organizations a lot of times. And the way that we create that in organizations is by punishing people with undisciplined change and then holding them accountable for delivering results in misaligned, not well-designed organizations, and then these middle managers become very defensive, very resistant change because they're trying to keep their jobs, take care of their families, you know be successful and we've put them in really challenging situations.
Dr. Leah Omilion-Hodges:Yeah yeah, I love that messy middle. So apt, unfortunately. So, dennis, you kind of touched on this a little bit in your background, but I'm wondering if you can give us your perspective on what organizational adaptability means today, when technology markets I mean just about everything we can imagine is shifting at such a rapid pace.
Dennis Stevens:Yeah, so organizational adaptability is the ability of a company to respond swiftly and effectively to changes in the market, technology and customer preferences. So can I design my organization to be able to respond to changes that are coming? And I think there's some key elements that we can observe as we look at companies, and one of them is just the org design itself. Is it structured in a way that decision-making is clear and rapid and that the team dynamics are fluid so we can redirect the organization? I think the malleability of the technology is incredibly important and I think this concept of informed decision-making, so one of the challenges that we have in organizations is the only people that have all the information and understand all the consequences are at the top of the stack. Yeah, so meaningful decisions have to go to the top of the stack. One of the things we have to figure out if we're going to be adaptable is how to get data and insights deeper into the organization, closer to the work surface, so people can make decisions that are aligned with the market, customer needs and strategic intent and do it in a relatively safe way.
Dennis Stevens:There's a cadence of purposeful interactions as well, which is one of the things you know. At Agile. We talk about standups and retrospectives and reviews and all these events. But those events are meaningful routines. They're on a cadence of interactions to radiate information and express intent. It doesn't get implemented that well in most organizations but the intent of those interactions is built in there. So organizational adaptability is just ready to pivot quickly in response to changes. So the whole company can change as changes come up.
Dr. Leah Omilion-Hodges:Yeah, yeah, I was thinking of, like the old ship analogy that we use a lot, and, too, the importance of data-driven decisions at every level and when we implement that, how the norm of an organization would completely change and I would imagine, much more empowerment at other levels, below, you know, our senior leaders, which would be really powerful.
Dennis Stevens:Yeah, I think what's interesting is many sense that many leaders are afraid to delegate decisions and give information down the stack as it won't be, interpreted correctly or they don't have all the consequences that are responsible for us. I think what's important to get senior leaders to understand is when you can guide and steer in this new organization, you're actually more influential and can create more success for everybody. Rather than clinging to it, delegating it increases your power.
Dr. Leah Omilion-Hodges:Exactly, I know I know I hear you on that one. So we're going to keep moving and we're going to look at adaptability via Agile and AI. But before we can dive into the details there, can you introduce us to Agile and I know AI is pretty well known now, but anything else that we kind of need as a foundation? So, going forward, we're on the same page.
Dennis Stevens:Sure, agile has a couple of different aspects to it. There's a sort of hard aspect to it. It's teams designed around business problems or customer needs that are able to have everything needed to deliver an increment of value. Operating in a very disciplined cadence of developing and finishing things in smaller batches, it creates a lot of ability to respond to change and drive risk down early. And there's some soft aspects to agile which in the industry, in some regard have overtaken the systemic aspects of agile. But like a culture of collaboration and continuous learning, these interactions and rituals, transparency and safety. So those are kind of in the space, but somehow we don't always get the practical actions and get our leaders to understand how they can carefully form teams and guide, how they interact, how adaptive planning, creating space or safety for learning, how the things that the leaders have to do to make it work. They're not getting educated on, how it makes them more capable. So Agile is small teams able to adapt rapidly and learn.
Dennis Stevens:So AI is interesting too, because a lot of people look at AI and they think it's chat, gpt or they think it's some of this new generative AI. But AI has been around for a long time. It's using algorithms and machine learning to enable machines to perform tasks that would normally be done by a human being. So things like data analysis and decision-making predictive analytics, those are all AI as well. When you watch a car driving down the road and your car is avoiding the sides, that's AI, artificial intelligence. It's not all this generative, and I think what becomes interesting about AI is how does it apply to the human continuum of interaction? So some things are humans might reference AI for information. Some AI might assist with insights, like your car suggesting you don't pull into that lane and hit that car, but you're actually still in control Yep Right.
Dennis Stevens:Or there's collaborative interactions, where AI handles all the tasks and humans might oversee it. We're starting to see that in some of the new self-driving cars, where the cars are generally being driven by AI, but when an instance comes up that AI can't resolve, the human being takes over and drives the car, and then there's the full automation where AI operates independently. So there's a whole spectrum of items there.
Dr. Leah Omilion-Hodges:Yeah, and that's really helpful because I think a lot of people say AI and equals chat, gpt, and they're one and the same and thank you for expanding that for us.
Dennis Stevens:There's one important thing there.
Dennis Stevens:It's just the difference between AI and what some people think AI is, which is this artificial general intelligence. Most of the AIs that we're using today are trained to do a specific task from a specific perspective, and they're only allowed to operate within that narrow bound. So the large language models like ChatGPT are just trained with much bigger data sets, but it's still just predictive. It's not really learning on its own, and so this idea of AIs that are going to take over the world and control everything, that's a whole nother wave of things that doesn't exist yet. Agi is what people might rightfully have some concerns about, but it's several years in the future.
Dr. Leah Omilion-Hodges:Okay, Okay good, so we can sleep well for a little bit longer. So, Dennis, you've kind of hinted at these things and so now I'm wondering you know you've talked about how you've been working with these, these learning models, and you've been on cutting edge technology for your whole career and then I love that you went and brought in the people side with the org psychology degree. So I'm wondering if you can talk to us a little bit about these kind of experiences that have led you now to say you know, I really appreciate this agile approach and I really appreciate AI learning in this way and these two together, when we marry them, they're really helpful at looking at adaptability.
Dennis Stevens:Yeah, so, when you start to look at the ability to delegate decisions into teams, they can operate more autonomously, but do it in a very purposeful and disciplined way, so still aligned with the strategy, still aligned with intent, the agile practices are really effective at that. What we've lacked in some regard is the ability to have a third brain at the table, have all the other intent involved in all the decisions, because it's been very difficult to gather that information. I think at Synaptics, we built small teams that were focused around specific problem domains. At Leading Agile, we started making those practices be really, really applied, but the gap was still the ability for people to understand the consequences and the considerations they should take for all the decisions being made. So decisions still stay too high in the organization, one of the things that AI has been able to give us is the ability to bring more information down and provide more meaningful sentiment and performance information up.
Dennis Stevens:So we're bridging a gap that was very difficult to bridge in the past.
Dr. Leah Omilion-Hodges:Yeah, that makes so much sense, and I was even thinking too in terms of what that does for keeping knowledge in organizations. When people at middle manager levels are feeling empowered and they're part of those conversations, even if it's in a tangential way, we have them training in very real ways for when there is other attrition or vacancies opening.
Dennis Stevens:Yeah, that's actually a really important aspect. There's a part of that on the agile side which is one of the things we do to make technology very malleable is we write a lot of tests around it. The tests can survive developer transition or a vendor coming in and building something and leaving. If the tests are there, then a lot of the knowledge about how things work and the surety that it's going to continue to work are built into the technology. This concept of maybe with AI we can start to build those sorts of digital twin understanding of our organization and maintain the information. But also, are things operating the way they're supposed to?
Dr. Leah Omilion-Hodges:Yeah, yeah, that's really interesting, very insightful. So we've talked about Agile quite a bit and you've talked to us about some of these core principles. I'm wondering if you can let us know how you've seen some challenges that will pop up when we use Agile methodologies and how organizations can kind of pivot and adjust to continue, you know, steering that ship the way in which they want it to go.
Dennis Stevens:Yeah, I think that when I look at the resistance we often run into sometimes it's from the teams, but sometimes it's from leadership support it's just resistance to change across the board because people don't understand how they're going to be safe in the new model that agile gets implemented in a lot of places. First off, it's treating agile as practices or training. We don't actually change the way that we interact or how decisions are made or how people are empowered, but we're doing these new things that the book says to do, but we're not really an agile company. The second big failure mode that I see is when we treat change as an event. So people come in, they restructure, do a course and leave.
Dennis Stevens:But we haven't changed how we relate to each other, and understand the problem and I do think outsourcing change to experts has huge consequences because our leaders don't know how to run the new system we just installed and it will go back to what they understand if we don't do it through the leaders.
Dr. Leah Omilion-Hodges:Yeah, yeah, yeah. That is really really helpful. And so now, thinking again about Agile, I'm wondering if you can share a successful case study with us when you have seen and certainly you don't have to name names if you don't want to or aren't comfortable with, but when have you seen this really improve adaptability in an organization?
Dennis Stevens:So we've got a hundred measurable successes of doing this, but I'm going to pull out like a specific example. Great, it's a mid, it's a midsize bank in in in the Midwest and they had acquired some other banks. They were growing pretty rapidly.
Dennis Stevens:They were adding new products to their product suite and their IT department was really long timelines, system outages, inefficiency in delivering value to customers, and so they were trying to grow. They were positioned from a brand to grow but they couldn't deliver on the brand promise because it was taking too long and their technology was stopping them. What they didn't understand was that the way they designed their organization, funded and led their projects was leading to that poor technology. So they invited us in to do a natural transformation. We restructured the teams around the business problems. We helped align the technology that was being leveraged to develop that to align with those teams. We put in a lot of adaptive planning and risk mitigation processes on the top and then we put in some tools for doing analysis of the performance of the team versus their future expectations. It was a bit of predictive analytics If the team could do this in a short period of time.
Dennis Stevens:What can they do in the next period of time? How big is this problem? What should we actually expect to deliver? Because one of the problems you run into is you overload these teams with 10 times more things they can deliver and then nothing gets delivered. So we want to be able to align them.
Dennis Stevens:And so we went in there. What was really cool about this is we did it. Super, super strong CIO, super strong leadership team. He hired a lot of them as we were doing the transition. Everybody reapplied for their jobs in the new teaming structure, so it was very involved in it. They quadrupled the amount of work that he could get done in a period of time. They actually, in the first year, delivered twice as much as they were forecasted to, and they're already behind on their forecast, but they actually delivered everything they were going to four times. They went further down the roadmap than they ever imagined. Now they didn't deliver everything on their roadmap because not everything was actually going to provide strategic value to them, so they were able to pick those most important things and move the important things forward. And what's really cool about that is, eight or nine years later, that CIO still has a great leadership team. They have a great culture.
Dennis Stevens:They've expanded and grown as new ideas come in or new technologies come in. They're able to absorb them and just roll with them and they're the leading bank in that Midwest region that they're in and the markets that they're in. So they've been very successful.
Dr. Leah Omilion-Hodges:Yeah, that is so incredible. I love so much of that. I love the reapplying for a job, because we want people who buy in right, because if this is not for you, then it's probably better if you self-select out, because it's going to be a different ride than the one you originally signed up for. And I like, too, that you acknowledge some of those initial strategic goals. Once they started performing, we recognize that this is not actually. This needs to be adapted or we have already blown this out of the water. What's next?
Dennis Stevens:That's right.
Dr. Leah Omilion-Hodges:And the pigs have quadrupled their output. Oh, my goodness. Yeah, my brain just short circuits trying to think about if I could do four times the amount of work that I currently am.
Dennis Stevens:Yeah, when you think about the amount of defects and errors that are created when teams are not well-formed and the technology is not well-designed and we don't know how to delegate intent.
Dr. Leah Omilion-Hodges:So we make bad decisions.
Dennis Stevens:There's so much waste and churn in the organization. You just smooth it out. Almost everybody doubles throughput Almost everybody gets significant improvements right out of the box. If you do it, if you just leave everything in place the way that it was and don't fix your technology or your interactions and just call things by new names, you get the same results you've always gotten.
Dr. Leah Omilion-Hodges:Yep, yep, yep, that makes sense, and so my next question. So I kind of want to shift more into AI and I think you've kind of already touched on this in the success example you just gave us, when you were talking about tools for analyses, like throughout. But I'm wondering if you know, maybe you expand on that. But I want to think about how AI works in conjunction with these agile methods to enhance that adaptability.
Dennis Stevens:So I'm going to give you three different sort of places where AI is really significant yeah. The first place is we are seeing really significant improvements in quality and throughput for developers that are using ai effectively to help them develop their code. Now effectively actually means it requires more thinking about architecture and systems engineering and writing test cases but, once you do the hard thinking and designing of the software.
Dennis Stevens:Ai is really good at writing the code, typing the code to fulfill those things. When, when it's used poorly, people are asking to do the design, not creating the constraints, not architecting well, you end up with a mess. So you have to use the code well, but when used well, tremendous improvement, right? The second one that I think is really interesting, and it goes to this place around how do we get middle management to have the information they need to do a better job of delegating and empowering teams, as I did? Strategic empowerment and AI can go, look at so much information and find patterns and bring it back.
Dennis Stevens:I can use the abilities that we're seeing in some of the new AI tools to provide much better interaction models for middle managers. So enabling and elevating the burden on middle managers is really important. The transparency that can come from that actually can bump into this conflict between defensive behaviors and trust. So things are messed up. I can't tell people things are messed up because I'll get in trouble, but if I can keep it covered up and hide it long enough, maybe somebody else will mess up before I get caught. So there's a lot. There's some risk in creating transparency in the data, but getting it out there is really really useful because, then we can make better decisions.
Dennis Stevens:Very few executives actually want their organizations to be completely out of control, right, and they don't understand how awful it is. And then just the concept of prioritizing and delegating tasks and improving decision-making by having the right.
Dennis Stevens:How am I performing? What is my capacity? Like all that's very interesting. We do a lot to really help middle managers and I think there's an interesting aspect of a tool that I had started building before was reading project communications and trying to sense the sentiment on the project. If I had 10 or 15 projects going on, I couldn't tell which one was in trouble, and status reports were all there to obfuscate any risk or problem to keep me out of business, and so there was no real value.
Dr. Leah Omilion-Hodges:We're doing great boss risk or problem to keep me out of people's business, and so there was. There was no real value. We're doing great boss.
Dennis Stevens:Yeah, but what if? What if I? What if I could read the Slack messages and the emails and the communications and analyze the data and have AI do some of that pattern matching? I think there's some really, really powerful use of tools to help us decide what to pay attention to. Then the secret is we have to get our executives to then go. The problem is not the individuals. The problem is the design of the system I put in place. What do I fix to improve the situation? But they actually are solving the real problem because they have insight into it. There's a balance there to get past that defensiveness and trust to create that.
Dr. Leah Omilion-Hodges:Transparency? Yes, exactly, and, like you said, then, helping like that, prioritizing and putting in those systems to continue to grow. Middle managers that we cut down on yeah, that's phenomenal. I'm working on a paper right now called Stuck in the Middle and it's all about middle managers and they, you know, they have some extra autonomy, but not very much, and they they're encouraged to be transparent, but they can't share too much. So it's just that that is a tricky position to be in in organizations. So I love when people like you are doing really cool things to help reward them and continue to train them and empower them.
Dennis Stevens:Yeah, they should be the leverage point that we're using to grow our organization and instead they're the messy middle, they're the frozen middle. They're the problem, but they're the problem because we put them in an impossible job.
Dr. Leah Omilion-Hodges:Yes, yep Agreed, so this is a nice segue to ethical consideration. So what are some things that organizations, that their senior leaders, some questions that people should be asking and thinking about when they're integrating AI into operations, especially when we're thinking about team dynamics and decision making?
Dennis Stevens:Right. So there's a whole big topic around bias and fairness in the data. Like I talked about earlier, all these AIs you're using today, they've all been trained by somebody and they've all been trained with data and a perspective that absolutely brings bias and this is now bias itself is not bad, because if it keeps you from making a bad choice, that's, that's good, like it keeps you from driving into the car next to you.
Dr. Leah Omilion-Hodges:That's a bias, it's interpreting.
Dennis Stevens:It's interpreting that data that that's not desirable over this other condition, but there's the balance of sort of fairness in it and how it impacts the brand of the company becomes very interesting. So you really have to stop and think about the decisions and the interactions you're having AI do and analyze it, to think about ways that it could possibly be going wrong and have governance in place to be auditing and paying attention to mitigate those biases.
Dennis Stevens:You can't just go buy it off the shelf, throw it into your customer center and have people start using it. You have to really have disciplined governance in place, paying attention to it.
Dennis Stevens:There's a bunch of stuff around privacy and data security which is also really critical for executives to be thinking about. If you don't have your data under control, if you don't have the right PII rules and customer rules, if you don't have the right containers around access to data, ai can introduce some real risk and so, ethically, can introduce some real risk. And so, ethically, you're not supposed to be paying 4,000 people's mortgages by accident because you accessed data through a virtual. It's a real story, right. You're not supposed to be saying horrible things or letting people's social security numbers out in the wild, right, or filing up.
Dennis Stevens:Yeah, all those things happen, and I think, generally, our data is so fragile in the world today that this is a chance for us to really investigate and tie down the data that we want to use and then actually, using AI, give responsible access to those tools, to that data, to that information, rather than giving give responsible access to those tools, to that data and that information, rather than giving people just raw access to it. So I think there's a balancing there, but you have to really understand it. Then the other one that I think is really interesting and I don't have a good answer on is the impact on employment.
Dennis Stevens:Ai is going to replace some jobs. Ai does that mean it's going to displace some workers? Probably, is it each individual's company ethical responsibility to create new jobs that get displaced, or is it their responsibility to have programs to develop people so they can find new jobs? Or is it government's responsibility? Or is it each individual's personal responsibility? That's a a really interesting, rich sort of category to go into yeah um is the employment one.
Dennis Stevens:I personally think um in the market today, you should be understanding how to make yourself ai ready, because I don't know if you can count on your company or the government yep to make decisions in your best interest. But it reminds me of when, when uh farming uh became automated and we went from having all these people on farms to people moving to the cities and taking manufacturing jobs and getting new education. They started requiring you go to high school until the 10th grade, so everybody had to have like a an employable level of skills. They'll move into the new market and there was a disruption for a moment, but we actually landed in a pretty good place overall. The quality of life went up, the economy went up, people's lives were generally better, but I think that's a really, really great area that that doesn't get enough attention, but it's not a reason.
Dennis Stevens:It's not a reason to stop it. Um, because because here's the other thing if we don't do it here in the us, there are other countries that are probably going to do it and we'll take a less ethical approach to it and we'll actually hinder us. So it's complicated, complicated space.
Dr. Leah Omilion-Hodges:Yeah, yeah, yep, and one that I think changes every day. It is so many different, like you said, so many different perspectives and levels, and imagine one we're going to be talking about for a long time, which is probably good, like you said, if we're thinking, then, bringing in governance in a way as well, that's right. So, dennis, this question's really for me. As a leadership scholar, I am really interested in the work that you do and I'm wondering, across all of these different organizations that you've worked with, all of these leaders, what are the traits that you're seeing that are being really crucial to foster that culture of adaptability and innovation in, you know, the ever-changing organization of today?
Dennis Stevens:Yeah, leadership becomes less and less, at a certain level, about being the best person in that particular job. Jobs are more complicated, require a lot more interaction. Jobs are changing frequently, so you can't stay ahead. So I have a list of things that I try to build curriculum around and teach to leaders.
Dennis Stevens:The first one is just this concept of systems thinking. So looking at the problem instead of looking at it as a small local problem, what are some tools and techniques for looking at it as a bigger, more holistic problem and what are some frameworks for that? I think that there was stuff, you know, when I was young Peter Senge was out, Arjur was out there. There were all these people having deeply thoughtful discussions around organizational design as a system, and I don't think we see it as frequently in leadership.
Dennis Stevens:Today it becomes about P&L and plans and accountability, and so I think there's a challenge there and I wonder why. That's not critical, but the people that I see that are naturally systems thinkers, or that you can get them to start to think differently become much more effective leaders, and I think it becomes a more important skill as we move forward. I think strategic thinking, which is different than systems thinking, strategic thinking is given limited capacity, limited dollars and a strategic intent. What tradeoff decision am I going to make? I think that leaders that can't make strategic decisions end up working on everything at the same time and delivering nothing, end up telling everybody it's all going to be fine.
Dennis Stevens:But, is it really fine, right? I think that ability to thoughtfully consider. You know that decision you made to give that person a $5,000 bonus for finishing that job was not a $5,000 decision, it was a $100,000 decision because you have 20 other people that will do the same thing in the next year. We have to get people to think strategically. The other people that will do the same thing in the next year. We have to get people to think strategically.
Dennis Stevens:I think EQ and EQI becomes really, really important. It's interesting to me, the one thing that people can uniquely do that computers can't do as well as people is be human and so getting really good at being human. How do I feel about this? How do they feel about it? How can I respond to that? How can I help them respond to it? These ideas around EQ are critically important, and then I think there's some things around imagining the future instead of nailing things down. So some tools and time in the day to imagine what might be possible.
Dennis Stevens:So sort of the concept of visionary thinking to imagine what might be possible, so sort of the concept of visionary thinking. And the last one I'm going to put in there is just team dynamics and social dynamics in organizations. I don't think enough emphasis goes into managing team dynamics and how important it is. If I design the team right, get the right expectations on that team, develop the right competencies within them and then start to delegate with intent, I get those teams to do dramatically better contribution than they're probably doing today and they're probably happier in their jobs and it's more fun to lead a team that's set up right than is one you're fighting with every day. So just that how you create the conditions for healthy teams is really really important, and I think all these skills can be taught right.
Dr. Leah Omilion-Hodges:Yeah, yeah, yeah, I agree, I completely agree with you and I'm just thinking about what a powerful force that would be if someone can bring this in and thinking you know that systems thinking but integrate it with the strategic and the EQ and the visionary and team dynamics. I mean I would put my CV in the ring for that organization any day. To work with someone who's doing that. Yeah, that's really incredible. I was thinking of some research I did with team dynamics and essentially what we walked away was the relationship you have with. You know, in quote marks, because we need to recognize that people are really savvy discerners of these interactions and they make different assumptions and the more that we can connect with individual employees, but also as the team, the better we're going to be.
Dennis Stevens:There's a, there's a tool that I teach leaders called inference hacking, and and it requires you to thoughtfully have empathy for the other people in the room. But in empathy, in empathy hacking, I take, I take Arjus's or Shon's ladder of inference and I go here's the option I'm seeing, here's the beliefs, and I walk down to why would they, why would that make sense to them, like, why would that, why would that behavior be what they think is right? And if you can't understand that, you can't lead them. So I want to walk down the ladder of inference, I want to find it with them. Then I want to explore how to reframe the problem for them or me, or both of us.
Dennis Stevens:So, we can reach a better conclusion. That's a very practical applied mental model that you can use to go have those conversations.
Dr. Leah Omilion-Hodges:Yeah, and think about enhancing your EQ and that strategic thinking. Then, when we're able to think like others, the system works better. Yeah, I love how you tie those all together in such a beautiful way. So my two final questions for you, dennis. These kind of are intertwined. So the way we end all of our episodes of the Communicative Leader is with advice. First for our formal leaders out there managers, directors, ceos you know those folks, you know who are truly tasked with that decision making, the accountability of it. So it can be advice, it can be a tip, it can be a challenge. And then the second part is that you know those tips are challenges for employees of all ranks across industries. So what do you have for them?
Dennis Stevens:So for the title leaders, I'm going to say it's crucial to understand that organizational systems produce precisely what they are designed to produce, and your job as a leader is to design that system. If you're not getting out of the organization what you want out of the organization, you need to understand why you're creating the conditions for that to be how people are operating. There's, again, hard aspects to it and there's soft aspects to it, and there's ways to think about it. That ladder of inference is a soft tool that you can use to evaluate that, but you are getting the result that you and your leadership team have created because of the system that you've produced, the one that I think is really interesting, and so your job is to create an environment where people are aligned, they understand their role and people feel safe to act decisively. So you have to be able to trust them. That means you have to understand what it would mean to have a trustworthy team and how you can establish that, and those go into those other topics.
Dennis Stevens:For general employees, I think there's two parts to this. I had two different answers. I kind of went back and forth on Generally employees. I think there's two parts to this and I had two different answers. I kind of went back and forth on. But your leaders don't trust you and treat you micromanage. You hold you in space that you don't want to be in because you don't operate in a trustworthy fashion.
Dennis Stevens:What would it look like to become able to build a trusted relationship with your leadership, to understand their needs and what they're trying to accomplish and how you can help them be successful? You can help your organization be successful and elevate your leader. I don't think we sit and think about that very often when we're just trying to get through our day. So employees want to be trusted. They have to figure out how to be trustworthy. The other one I was going to go was a little less dramatic than that. It was just. If you're an employee of any organization able you are to do basic AI things, the more likely you are going to be still employed in six months or nine months. But there's some mobility you have to be looking for. So start to envision that and figure out how to get that training and how you want to participate in the next phase of these companies as they change.
Dr. Leah Omilion-Hodges:Yeah, oh, that's really, really helpful, dennis. And with that, do you have, are there places you kind of refer people to if they're saying, hey, I want to think about that. Is there you know some trustworthy, even if it's just dipping a toe sites or resources that would be helpful?
Dennis Stevens:Yeah, what I can probably do, of course I would say go to go to org rightcom. Yes, you know, and these are the things that I'm talking about there, because it's not as well developed, but there's some content out there. There's a. There's an organization called the agile network that I can also point you to. If to somebody's interested, reach out to me and I'll send you a code for that. But the agile network is a developing network of experts. There's they pick 50 experts from worldwide to help develop the next evolution of agile on the agile network I'm one.
Dennis Stevens:I'm one of those experts and we're talking about these and you can go subscribe and participate in that community. It's very interesting.
Dr. Leah Omilion-Hodges:Very cool, oh, I imagine, I imagine that is a huge responsibility, but also, for someone with your training and experience, a whole lot of fun to be a part of that shaping that conversation. Yeah, it's nice to do meaningful work, right? Yeah, exactly's nice to do meaningful work right, yeah, exactly, excellent. Well, dennis, I have had such a blast with you today. I've learned a lot. I know this conversation is going to be really helpful for our listeners, so thank you again for sharing your expertise with us.
Dennis Stevens:Yeah, thank you for the opportunity to come on and share my thoughts. This was this was very enjoyable to come on and share my thoughts.
Dennis Stevens:This was very enjoyable. All right, my friends. That wraps up our conversation today. Until next time, communicate with intention and lead with purpose. I'm looking forward to chatting with you again soon on the Communicative Leader.
