New Skills to Navigate Continuous Change

0:01Sarah Green Carmichael:Legal teams face more data and more scrutiny than ever. They need AI built for both. Relativity is the AI platform for legal work, delivering defensible AI that handles the tedious tasks so judgment stays where it belongs with you. Learn more at relativity.com slash ideacast.

0:23Sarah Green Carmichael:on may 20th join me at hbr's annual leadership summit with master classes interviews with the ceos of at &t and mattel and an interactive case discussion led by harvard business school professor kareem lakani this all virtual day will give you practical frameworks to lead with purpose and strengthen culture across your organization to learn more go to hbr.org slash leadership summit see you there

1:00Sarah Green Carmichael:I'm Alison Beard. I'm Adi Ignatius, and this is the HBR IdeaCast.

1:12Sarah Green Carmichael:Adi, I'm not going to lie, I am getting pretty exhausted by all the changes we've seen in the media industry over the course of our careers, especially now with the advent of AI and a new strategy at HBR that's built around connection as much as content, I feel like I'm having to learn an entirely new business. And that's exciting, don't get me wrong, but it's also extremely hard. I feel the same thing. I think everybody in every industry is pretty much feeling the same thing right now. And this is before AI even completely lands and transforms our business even more. So that this is what we're doing.

1:46Sarah Green Carmichael:We are constantly reinventing our businesses. And for anyone struggling like we are with this period of transformation and uncertainty, our guest today has good advice on how to break out of old patterns, holding us back, and really embrace the idea of continuous change for ourselves and our organizations. So I love that because I think it's easy to say, you know, and leaders say it all the time, we have to continually experiment, continually change, everybody has to adapt. Easy to say, very hard to pull off. So if she's got a framework, I'm all ears. So the guest is Milifor Merchant, a former Apple executive, corporate consultant, and author of the book, Our Best Work, Breaking Free from the Invisible Norms That Limit Us.

2:27Sarah Green Carmichael:And I talked to her about some practical ways for both individuals and teams to thrive in ever-changing environments. That includes things like normalizing discomfort, rewarding people for building new competencies rather than just showing confidence, and modeling constant curiosity. Here's our conversation.

2:52Sarah Green Carmichael:I'd love to talk today about this idea of adapting to continuous change, which requires curiosity, rethinking that status quo, trying new things. That sounds great and logical, you know, in theory, but in practice, it's extremely hard for individuals, for teams, for organizations. So what is the biggest hurdle preventing many of us from just understanding that this is the new normal? Yeah, so here's the thing. Change management in the management discipline is you decide where it is you're going, you tell other people very clearly, you communicate it extremely well, and then you reward and acknowledge the work that's actually happening.

3:35It assumes that one group or party ends up directing the others. And my observation is that that's actually not change. That's actually control. When you have true change comes choice. What we're describing in the change management literature is actually a subjugation. It's us telling other people and directing other people to do things. And what we want instead is the ability to actually decide together. And when I say that, most people think, oh, you're describing chaos. And I'm actually not describing chaos. what I'm describing is the difference between accountability and ownership. So accountability says, Alison needs to know where we're going to go, and she's going to tell Nilofer.

4:15And Nilofer gets to participate in that or not. That's, you know, to some degree her choice, right? But if she needs employment, she's going to participate. But as soon as Alison takes her foot off the gas, Nilofer's going to go ahead and do whatever it is she wants to do, which is why no change management stuff actually sticks. It's because we only do it as long as someone's forcing us to do it the way it's been done. But if we have an ownership model, a collaborative model, then we've actually decided the horizon together. And then you've got my commitment. I'm on board. And so as long as you've got me engaged, then we're going to go do it.

4:48And even if you move on, I'm still committed to it because I decided at Wiki.

4:52Sarah Green Carmichael:So what's the first step for a leader in trying to move to that old way of doing things into the new way. Collaboration is, you know, co-laboring. You have to actually decide together what it is you want to do. But before we can even do that, we have to be okay with not knowing. We have to be okay with, I don't know the answer, you don't know the answer, but we can actually build the answer. And for any of us, I don't know you, but I was trained in, you know, MBA programs and at work that my job was to know and be confident in that. And I'm noticing actually that the role of work is really changing with AI because it's not about knowing.

5:34And in fact, it started changing when we had really good access to search because it wasn't then about, did I know more than you? It was about, could I find it out? Could I gather up that data? Could I form an insight? And now the knowing and the data part is almost irrelevant. It's the, can I formulate a new question? Can I have a new take? And those things are so inherently about discomfort because we get to sit in the unknowing for enough time to go, what is it I don't know? I tell the story of the book about orange theory. Right before they make you do like something really hard, like an all out, they'll say to you, it's 90 seconds.

6:13It's supposed to be hard. And you're supposed to get uncomfortable in order to grow. And I feel like that's the sentence we all need to say to ourselves at work. If we're coming up with a new insight or we're doing innovation or we're doing growth strategy, it's supposed to be hard. But we have to be willing to go into that discomfort and trust that at some point we will figure it out. Sitting with that is the maturity that we need every

6:37Sarah Green Carmichael:leader to have. This requires patience, though, right? You know, so in the orange theory, they can say, yes, it's going to take 90 seconds, but a leader, you know, might not know how long it's going to take. And the team members might think to themselves, but I have all these deliverables that I need to sort of get going on and still perform. So how do organizations, how do teams sort of find that right balance? So I've done this kind of change management work inside companies. So let's just kind of describe an ordinary scenario. It's when teams normally try to solve things themselves first, then they often hire a big firm, you know, one of the big three to come in and help them and get that PowerPoint slide.

7:16And then they're still stuck because they still haven't figured it out. And at that point, they are more desperate than ever. And typically, that was when I was hired, you know, my team and I were hired. And we come in and we'd say, actually, can we invite people throughout the organization to come and participate with us? Because I'm sure that if you haven't solved it yet, it's not because you're not trying hard enough. It's because somewhere in this, we don't understand the situation. And if we don't understand it, we can't solve for it. So somewhere in this organization, someone can actually help us.

7:48And I think every CEO looked over at me like, can I fire you now? Because they thought I was like not taking it seriously enough that I wanted to talk to more people. And I was actually saying, no, no, no. The reason you're broken is because I am taking it seriously enough. I believe that there's some missing piece. So we have to actually get people in a room together. And I call that process an invitation to play where I'd actually have them write an email to people and say, anyone who wants to come help us solve this problem. And in that first couple weeks of process, people would, you know, share stories of why customers were calling a lot or why sales metrics weren't being met or whatever else.

8:23And then about two weeks in, three weeks in, four weeks in, some period of time, but not indefinite, there was always this epiphany that would happen where someone was describing something and it was the equivalent of looking at an elephant in the room and somebody was saying, this is shiny and smooth. And the other person saying, it's hairy. And, you know, it's just like they were describing different things. But as soon as you put the pieces together, you're like, click. and there's this moment that would go around the room, and the CEO would always look over at me like, oh, we didn't know the answer.

8:50And I go, yeah. And what does that take? I go, you've been working on this for a couple years, and I look at my watch, and I go, that took three weeks. That took four weeks. So it's never an indefinite thing. The thing is, are we willing to go slow in order to go fast? And are we willing to understand that the comfort of believing we already know the problem is actually the reason why we're not moving forward?

9:11Sarah Green Carmichael:And that goes to the point of rethinking the status quo. It's really difficult to break people from the sort of structures that they're used to, the business models that they're used to, the ways of working that they're used to. So in your experience, how do you get people to sort of abandon their resistance to changing what feels normal and right to them? So the difference to me is the difference between competence and confidence. So most often our organizations are rewarding the fake it till you make it behavior. We're reinforcing the person who shows up with the most amount of confidence at the table.

9:50But that's not allowing for us to have the actual competence. So if we don't know the answer, why aren't we willing to say we don't know? and if we essentially lie and create a form of fraud with each other, that's not going to allow us to hook up and actually create the ideas that matter. I should back up and share this, right? So innovation, there's three things that have fueled innovation that all the management theorists feel like the last hundred years, Drucker, Mary Follett, to Amy Edmondson and Bob Sutton, like every person agrees there's three things that drive innovation. One, that we have access to new and novel ideas.

10:26Two, that those ideas are joined together in a way that allows them to become real and robust solutions. Three, that we're solving the problems of tomorrow, that we're solving meaningful problems. And confidence is to say, we already know the idea. Confidence is to fake it and not actually show where those ideas need further development. Confidence is to say, we actually believe where the market's going. When actually all those three things are about curiosity and uncertainty and change. And so we need to lean into those three C's and let go of the knowing and the data-driven and the confidence kind of models that we've been taught.

11:07And the shift will allow us to collaborate and create innovation. But more importantly, in this world, if you kind of notice that knowing and speed and confidence and data-driven are all the things that AI does really well.

11:18Sarah Green Carmichael:Sometimes wrongly. In fact, the data, Allison, is really interesting. I just read a piece of research that Kareem Lakhani did out of Harvard and a group of other people. So I'm locating it to one person, but it was actually six or seven researchers. And they said AI allowed people, especially junior people, to do things 12 % faster, 25 % more, but it got the answer wrong 19 % of the time. And I'm like, okay, so are we valuing speed and the appearance of progress? Or are we valuing insight, ingenuity, collaboration, creativity, all the things that actually lead to growth and innovation? Right. So when you're thinking about sort of how you need to change as a team, as an organization, obviously there are some things that you're going to want to keep and preserve because they have been working well.

12:11Sarah Green Carmichael:And then there are going to be things that you need to get rid of. So how do you work with leaders on determining which changes will make meaningful progress while retaining some of the status quo that has been helpful? I think it's more about thinking about where are the different things that we do every day that we could go, oh, this is a place for us to improve. So that's one. And then the second one is really being practical about we need to figure out how to do more innovation. And the places where we're not seeing the growth we would like is to actually go, how do we come together around that?

12:45How do we invite people to play? and start doing strategy and execution in a different way than we've ever done, which is to say, what is it we want to do? And that creative process. I mean, I did a bake-off with a team once where they had$2 million to spend and they were having this conversation about, oh, we should spread it peanut butter style across the organization or we should invest it in one place that's already working. And I said, well, actually, rather than assuming we know the answer, why don't we invite everyone into an idea-a-thon, like a hack-a-thon, but with an idea thing. and just see what's worth investing in.

13:18And we set up some rules for the teams and we said, you don't have to work in your discipline. So if you're a finance person, you can go over to the cafeteria and work with them, whatever you want to go do, but you have to form teams. And so we set up a way for people to do that. And you have to come with the sizing. So we assign finance people to help with that. And then you just have to show us the possibility. So I pilot it in some way so we're not just talking theory. One team came together with this idea about if they could make people go use the stairs instead of the elevators at lunch, they would improve the 10 ,000 steps thing.

13:51And they were just excited about that because they personally were trying to improve their health. Interestingly enough, the way they sized it was they actually called the insurance company and said they could get a 5 % benefit if they did this set of protocols inside the company. And so save the company money. And it turns out, by the way, that like 90 % of the ideas that were submitted in that ideathon were things that did not require or self-funded, did not require incremental dollars or self-funded. And there was all this latency in the system that was innovation at different levels, right?

14:22So wherever people caught, whether it was a systems change or a process change or a human behavior change or all the way up to a market change. I think that's the kind of thing we need to unlock. When we say let's access new and novel ideas, the data says that we eliminate between 50 % and 70 % of them, that they either self-silence or re-ignore that.

14:42Sarah Green Carmichael:It sounds like you're really talking about the democratization of change, which also sounds really difficult to manage. So sort of in practice, do you have an example of a company that you've worked with that has managed to sort of corral that kind of change management that you're talking about, you know, sort of bottom-up change? You know, I want to share this story, and I'm going to tell the CEO's name, but he's no longer in the role, so I can do it, and he won't mind. So when I was working with Adobe, one of the things that they were stuck on is they were losing a large portion of their education market to a competitor, Macromedia.

15:23And basically every kid that was coming out of design school was coming out loving Macromedia tools and not Adobe's tools, which is a big risk to their future design market. and we figured out that over 50 % of Macromeda's revenue was coming from education. So we figured if we won education, we actually defeated the vendor in a really interesting way. So we talked to customers and said, why are they picking the vendor? We talked to the product team and said, what would you build if you could build? We talked to the sales team and said, you know, what is it you need in order to win over contracts?

15:53But, you know, we're just moving all the levers, trying to figure out what the go-to-market strategy would be. And at that point, Bruce shows up with a book called Execution, which was a book that was saying basically, if the reason we're not, we're failing at work is not because we don't know the strategy, it's because we're not executing well. And he handed this book out to everybody. And the book basically said, listen, if things aren't executing well, it's because you're not telling people clearly enough, you're not rewarding them enough, et cetera. And I said, isn't that interesting that we're making the assumption that strategy and execution are two different things and that they come from two different parts of the organization and that this side can then tell this side that they're not working hard enough.

16:34When in reality, strategy and execution are, especially nowadays with the world moving so fast, is more one in the same. It used to be a thing you could plan and then you'd hold a 20-year arc. And Rita McGrath many years ago, I want to say 10 plus years ago, showed the research and said strategy was holding a five-year arc. And of course, that data was far less for any industry that was touched by information, which by the way is everyone. So it means that we're not holding on to any kind of arc. So now we have to think much more iteratively, adoptively. And so him handing out the execution book was really saying, hey, I'm doing a great job.

17:10I'm doing a great job because we in the C-suite know what's going on and you guys aren't doing well. And I just looked at the project we were working on because we had gone to him and said, hey, we figured out that 50 % of the market was coming from education. So if we fix the education solution, we actually win there. We win the whole game. He funded it because we brought him the idea. It changed the entire industry because Adobe became the player. And that was a perfect example of what happens when you stop thinking in the sort of siloed model, which is what we do within an organization too, right, but strategy and execution being two different silos.

17:47And we start thinking collaboratively and go, oh, these are one and the same.

17:50Sarah Green Carmichael:Yeah, absolutely. I think today that arc is shrinking so much that strategy just has to be dynamic. You know, Rita actually presented on this at one of our recent virtual events. And I have a colleague at HBR who I think put it really succinctly, like in this environment, you need to do strategy with us, not to us. Exactly. It was just like so succinctly phrased that I said, yes, that's exactly right, because strategy does need to be changing all the time. And so you need the people on the ground to help you conceive of it. I have a whole chapter around the idea with, right? Because the world is so complex that we can't assume that any one party knows enough.

18:34We have to assume that we're missing pieces of information. And that gives us the opportunity to go, what is it I need to ask in order for me to fill in pieces of information rather than what is it I already know? Our role also as leaders is to be co-creators in that process because if we listen well, other people can hear themselves more clearly. So listening becomes an act of co-creation.

19:01Sarah Green Carmichael:Legal teams are under more pressure than ever. More data, more complexity, more scrutiny. They need AI built for the realities of legal work. For more than a decade, Relativity has invested in AI built specifically for legal teams, designed to meet legal standards and support defensible decisions. The result is explainable AI that handles tedious tasks, so judgment and critical decisions stay where they belong, with you. Relativity is the AI platform for legal work. Learn more at relativity.com slash ideacast.

19:38Sarah Green Carmichael:You know, we have covered curiosity, listening, quite a bit on the show, but is there any particular advice that you would give to leaders about how they need to approach team members, you know, from their direct reports to the sort of people working, you know, indirectly customer-facing jobs about how they need to show curiosity and how they need to listen? It's actually a practice I've done for years. And what I do is before I go into any meeting, I prime myself by asking, what is it I don't know? And I start to write down questions that I could ask that would get to that. And I make sure I'm not just asking, you know, like factual questions, but what was the history of this and why are we So whatever it is, the set of questions that we can unfold more.

20:26And I do that as a way of teaching myself to be so much more curious. When we're in a room, any meeting, we can go, what is it that I can be asking that will help the room develop more intelligence, which is different than being smarter, right? I want, smart is like what we come into the room with. And there are multiple forms of smart, whether it's kinesthetic or intuitive or data-driven or whatever, lots of different ways of smart. And then what I want to do as a leader is to figure out how to become more of the glue. So how do I build intelligence in the room by having people hear each other and figuring out where are the possible gaps between people?

21:06Sarah Green Carmichael:In this era of continuous change, when you're trying to rethink the status quo, when you're trying to be curious, when you're trying to ask questions, when you're trying to find the gaps, the end goal, though, is to be competent at that new thing that you should be doing, right? But is it even possible when things are moving so quickly? I think the goal is to be ever better at solving the problems and needs of today. And so what I want to do is think about growth as a curve for myself. And the way I get good at change is to actually practice changing. So I don't need to know tomorrow's problem.