Stories from reality - March 2024 - Martin Berg and David Symhoven

right um and um I'm Ina and I am in Oslo uh and today it looks like we going to have a nice spring and that is something we all uh waiting for but uh I think we will start uh this session so I will just start to handing over the word to Martin you um I I was not so prepared for that one so I hand over to David and start okay so hi everyone it's nice to be here and thanks for taking the time to listen to to this talk today and I want to start with asking you how would you feel if you have to drive across a bridge knowing that it's not statically safe I mean that would be strange right and and in our Western culture it's mandatory and I think absolutely useful that we have Structural Engineers making sure that we have statically safe Bridges and that's good so but you know what's strange that that's metaphorically speaking exactly what happens often in organizations and just as mathematics and physics is the tool for structal engineers there's very very profound theory for organizational Developers and for organizational development but uh sadly I think almost nobody knows about that and yeah maybe I know what you're are thinking right now that yeah it's just another guy talking about Theory and you know what I don't care about theory that doesn't help me uh I have day-to-day problems and I need solutions to my day-to-day problems so don't talk about Theory and I feel you and I know how it feels like but I think that that might be misunderstanding and what if that theory really can make the difference and what if Theory um is not what we think it is and then there is a very very cool quote I like it's from cour leine and he said that there's nothing more practical than Theory and just to give you a short disclaimer we will not bore you to death with just Theory today we have a lot of uh cool examples and a cool story for you but I just want to start to say that theory is not the opposite of practice because I think theory is a tool it's like a quality gate for your thoughts and in a more and more complex world we need a reference point and that's might be Theory where we can challenge our ideas and Theory can give us this quality gate and where we can sort out if our ideas make sense or not and if we can just leave these ideas out because they don't make sense sense right from the beginning and yeah but we in our Western culture and in generally in the in the agile scene I say that we are so used to best practices and blueprints and and um Solutions uh that we have unlearned to think on our own and that we unlearned to start with a problem and to understand the problem and that's why we have a disclaimer for you you won't get any solutions today you won't get best practices you won't get blueprints today but you will get a lot of food for thought we want to show you some basics of this profound Theory I talked about so that you can build aesthetically safe organizations metaphorically speaking of course and I hope we hope that you see things differently after this talk and therefore I brought somebody with me today yes now it's my turn to talk I think n n not you Martin I brought somebody else with you say hi to V W is our is a a manager he's working in the financial industry and we will follow him through a very regular day today and he has some trainings and we will follow him and see what we can learn but wait I think there's still something missing here so V suit up ah much better okay then let's start yes now it's my turn but maybe David would you like to introduce yourself uh yeah sure um I'm David and I am located in Munich and um I'm working as an organizational developer and agile coach for almost six years now uh for over six years and yeah I have a podcast and I'm writing my first book right now and I giving I work with Martin for I don't know several years now we gave a lot of talks together and yeah that's why I'm here today yes and me my name is Martin and I work at agile people as an organizational change manager and supporting a lot of different organizations and I like to draw so why is my creation or the pictures but I get very good help from from David in in finding new strange things and places to put him in so what I want to start first here is to tell you a story um as I as David said white is currently participating in a training a leadership training and uh we want to tell take you through some of the things that he's doing in this training um so the first thing he has encountered encountered is that the trainer tells a story for him and I want to take you with you on that story it's a very interesting story in fact um it was that I saw a man and a woman walking outside the other day okay let's pause here for a minute these brief information pieces that I gave you what information popped up in your head I would like to ask you to participate here what what how did a woman look like how did a man look like where were they share your thoughts what what pictures popped out in your head I were thinking about an old couple um of course since I'm in Gotham I was thinking about just in the urban city pretty much M do someone else have another picture I I was at the Gothenburg train station uh two people rushing by to get to the train thank you okay so let's be continuing the story then so they were actually out walking their pet okay what pictures popped up in your head now what was what pet was it did the woman man and woman change as I explained this it depends if they're walking a cat or a [Laughter] dog it you create those pictures and images in your head all the time as we give you stories so now I actually remember that the man was actually a bodybuilder what happened with your picture now the dog became so small and fluffy yes it's so funny that happens all the time I don't know why but it happens all the time stereotypes yes so the key takeaways from this is everything that you get is information you get information but that doesn't or data but that doesn't mean that you are informed pieces of data is not information that needs to be completed in some way or another so all that information that you think that you have are subjective it's based on your perception and you can't P know what others perceive important to remember that you are uh what is it called David a closed system system you can open up yourself to information but you create and maintain your information so David let's take the next exercise yes so the training continues and now the trainer um andite is invited to uh play a game but in order to play the game he needs uh six volunteers so now I'm asking you if there are six volunteers so disclaimer it's nothing bad you don't it's it's just a little fun game so it would be nice if we have six volunteers maybe you can just raise your hand if somebody wants to participate Eric unas I can join super awesome thank you now that's three sure I can Jo I can join as well but I don't find how to raise my hand in in zo okay then I think we have Martin can can you see that so we have Martin Anna Jun June and Martin another Martin and Eric and Eric okay perfect I think that's fine to start with okay so thank you very much okay so um we play a little game and first we do a a quick check-in so please say your name and your favorite four-digit number so that everybody knows something about you okay Mar bar uh 6284 thank you uh Eric one two 35 Anna 1320 Martin uh 7890 yeah Jones we don't hear you okay okay I think that we we have everybody right except for your yeah Junes WR wrote his number in the in the chat ah okay sorry but unfortunately we don't hear you that's a little bit unfortunate but let's try anyway okay so now um the the goal of the game is just to pass an imaginary ball to another person so one of the persons who raised their hands but there are some rules so you don't you aren't allowed to talk except you call somebody out and in order to call somebody out and to pass the ball you say their name and the four-digit number so whoever wants to start just starts so you say the name and the four-digit number have fun Jones uh 2525 that was the easy one tricking the system um no we can't hear you yeah we can't hear okay Martin do we have uh another can you remember another digit no I can uh jump I think we have 1 two three five um but then I got a little bit if it was Eric or Martin I think it might have been Eric he's not yes it's me perfect Perfect okay very good Eric continue but I was so focused on having a smart four digigit number so I don't remember anyone else's number so what is the lesson okay maybe we we increased the complexity here so last time we played it uh online on on the stage and it's a little bit easier can somebody else remember digit I think someone said one two three five but I don't remember who it was yeah that was me that Eric again yeah um and what was it uh 6790 or something like this someone finished with a zero with high numbers 7890 I guess 7890 was me yes yes perfect okay Martin can you you remember a number [Laughter] no and Anna made a switch it was like 238 like she went back with the third number but that's uh all I can remember so usually what what would happen now then okay um it was a little bit uh strange now but I think we can explain what should happen happen um so some of you might remember Eric's number because it was quite easy maybe 1 2 3 5 and what usually happens is that if you only have two numbers or three numbers you can remember then the ball is always passing around with these three people and everybody else doesn't get the ball because you don't remember the number and it might be a little bit abstract now and because we didn't see the the pattern here but what happens in organizations is that you have some kind of similar effect then I as a manager can go in here when you pass the ball and say hey don't be so mean include maybe Junes in his in the game or somebody else but you can't because you don't know his number yeah and I force you and I say hey why are you not including other people why don't you co cooporate but the G the the rules of the game prevent you from passing the ball to the other people and then some kind of of pattern emerges and what then happens is that we do a lot a lot of work in analysis and we try to find the pattern and why these pattern emerge emerged but these kind of patterns are random we can play the same game with different numbers and another pattern would form so in some kind in in lot of situations in organizations where we have a lot of complexity in the system patterns emerge but these patterns are random so it doesn't make sense to spend a lot of idea and analyzing these patterns and the other key takeaway here is that the rules Define the game and the people behave coherent to these kind of rotes and if you want to change the behavior of the people you need to change the rules first it doesn't help to say as a manager yeah here please include others and don't be so mean and collaborate when your roots prevent that from happening so not everything is predictable and some phenomenon are emergent and uh full transparency as we see is uh Utopia so even if you know all the numbers no one can contain and hold all the information in an organization I mean it's just a I don't know how many people were we five people it's nothing and just one information like the four-digit number and we didn't manage to even create transparency for that so yeah and as I said analysis is not very useful in this um in this case okay so we need to refine this uh part I think Martin it worked better uh on stage yes on stage yes okay wasn't the case with Jonas writing in the chat also interesting because it was the only one that that felt so uh accessible yes exactly transparency yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah he he altered the system yeah in some way okay but let's continue I hope the the the takeaway is is still y OB let's continue yes so now why is back at his office he's a manager he's in charge of a few teams uh and he thinks thinks about this learnings that he has had are things not predictable what can I do to help to solve this in my domain where I have responsibility and he thinks and he reflects and he sleeps and he thinks and then he gets an idea okay this is how I want to do it I will try this but actually at the same time in a completely different Universe another wi has done the same Journey but they have come to the complete opposite decision so as a chance now we can have the possibility to follow both of them to see what happens when they try out their different approaches we quantum mechanics now so split universe that's the good thing with with u cartoons you can do anything so my watch the orange watch that's mine the the the purple one that's David's but my wife wants to try out trust so he says to his team that he decided to put all his trust in them he continues and he feels that yep you will solve it I will make sure that you have all the power that you need to do your things whatever you feel that they are and as time continues yeah he tries his best but coordination falls apart and W himself does not feel that he has control of anything he has he feels like he's walking towards a cliff scared of falling down because he doesn't have any information of what is happening in the other [Music] Universe yeah in the other other Universe we have another wi and he says okay then let's go with control we I just want to have control over everything and yeah so he's uh in a meeting and he's um surrounded with his employees and he's saying telling um his colleagues what he needs to be done what needs to be done and he points out some responsibilities on the board and yeah he says I'm taking control of every aspect now and so then nothing can go wrong and yeah as you can see the team members look a little bit overwhelmed and yeah then you see a very cluttered office and a lot of paperwork and he's buried behind this paperwork because everyone is coming coming to him and ask him what his decisions are and what needs to be done even for the simplest tasks and yeah so there's nothing left to do instead of micromanaging and everyone is frustrated and yeah B came to the conclusion that he can't even breathe with all this kind of uh control and in the background of course all his employees are walking around like zombies at some point because they're don't thinking anymore it's just like waiting for command and control so so yeah yeah so we have an ambiguity here we have trust and control and in trust when you include trust in a in a in an organization or a system you reduce complexity and you can deal with with open Futures so you have multiple Futures that you can control but you have less control and less coordination and less overview and could potentially make you blind and and one thing with trust is that's only applicable to humans if you can't trust an organization you only trust the humans in the organization yeah and as you saw on the on the page before that trust and control for us is um are two sides of the same coin and especially in the agile scene I I see where we have this value even of trust you know know that trust is always good and yes of course it's good but control is also good and the funny thing is that control as well has the same function than trust it reduces complexity because you make things very easy if you want to control everything and also a very funny thing um one can think about is that you need to control in order to have trust because otherwise people game the system that's why we have some kind of text control that's why we have speed controls on the on the street if you would know that you don't have any kind of speed controls you would just break the rules all the time because you know that there is no control system so trust and control are two sides of the same coin on the other hand the negative side of control is that it's of course very expensive as you saw in the cartoon it takes a lot of time and of course it restricts autonomy because in the worst case you get just zombies because people stop thinking yeah so to sum up uh trust gets you more trust control gets you more control it's a vicious or a very good cycle as ever you want to see it but on the other hand trust makes you blind and control makes you weak so you are screwed both ways uh and both are neither right or wrong they need to coexist and therefore it needs to be Ms the next thing that w prize is to connect so include the team is getting bigger There are 16 members now but he says no let's not split the team we need to work closely in order to be able to continue our work we need to be have a strong bond between ourselves so he includes everyone and they should take decisions to collaboratively together but that makes people feeling that they are distant from the decisions because there's so big crowd and sometimes people start to talk and people would feel that they are left outside so decision making slows down and people feel that they are disconnected from each other even though the connect intention was to connect people and in the other Universe in the other universe W decides well to improve in efficiency we'll split into smaller teams we are too big now we will divide the teams in smaller teams and employees are working in their isolated small cubicles or in silos as we say uh with minimal interaction everybody is doing their thing very focused on their kind of work and then at some point one of the employees has please mute thank you you and at some point one employee said that well okay I had no idea that the other team is also working on that very similar project maybe we should uh talk to each other we do the same things twice here and yeah V is trying to manage and coordinate all the numerous small teams but he is very very overwhelmed again and he starts to feel like he will need to employ more managers in order to manage all these different different teams yeah so again two sides of the same coin connect you increase complexity by connecting uh you increase information density which is could be a good thing of course um but at the same time you get less efficient and resourcefulness goes down yeah and on the other hand if you separate the teams you reduce complexity in subsystem which is also very good it can be really good um function and use case but on the downside you increase complexity for the organization so you cannot decrease complexity at some point because it the complexity is as it is and you can just decide to ignore some of the complexity but then you increase at at some point at at some other point in the organization that's why W needed to employ more managers to coordinate all the different teams you may get uh parallel processes of course that's um another downside and simplifying also means ignoring so when you ignore some kind of complexity it means also that you get blind at these points so also here it needs to be a mess um the more you separate organizational processes the more you decrease complexity for subsystems but increased complexity in the organizational level and the more you connect processes the more complexity you need to handle them and group separate on the informal level again both is neither right nor wrong they need to coexist and therefore it needs to be a mess on Final ambiguity before we go into some learnings so keep so the organization has implemented a new strategy and why is presenting that to the team uh they say that our current model is not working and we need to reorganize in order to change to our new strategy but the team instantly reacts negatively because they feel that this change is unnecessary uh we need to keep what we have it has been working for a very long time we have a good process we have a good structure but why persist and says we need to adapt and make changes and but then team members goes in and says but all the methods that we have they have served us well for for for a long time and if we change now it's very risky and it's unnecessary we don't need it and eventually in the last picture that people he V is persisting we should change we need to change but the team member starts to feel yeah he will Tire soon we'll continue with what we are doing soon the manager will get tired of talking about this change and he will suffice to our approach we need to keep what we have because it's been working for a long time and in the other Universe in the other Universe V decided to implement a new strategy and V is presenting his the new strategy to the new team and everyone is super enthusiastic and yeah so they agree that our current model is not working anymore and we need to reorganize and we need to change and well the team members enthusiastically respond well we're ready for change let's Embrace we delete everything let's just go with the new and the team members immediately start implementing the new strategy erasing whiteboards and filled with very good and useful information without practices and at some point V looks at the Discover CED whiteboards and bins and realized that the team has unlearned all the old practices but forgotten to preserve them what in fact served them for a very very long time so we have two ambiguities again the keep because the keep's per P per per ah purpose is to help to stab stabilize and connect you to the past uh create an identification for you uh but it also reduces complexity because we have processes and structures that helps us progressing um the negative side of course is that it slows you down in change it's harder to change things if you are very structured and or and want to keep the old things and but you get a very stable p and in some ways in this complexity World maybe we don't want to have too stable patterns doesn't suffice and support you in the way that we want yeah the good thing when you learn new things is that it's of obviously necessary to adapt to the changing environment you need to adapt and learn new things and of course it's very time sensitive so you don't know when you need to learn new things um but of course it can be very uh powerful to be able as organization to learn when it's necessary but on the other hand it's very difficult to unlearn um old things because they served you in the past and what often gets neglected is that it threatens the identity it's a fear so usually um it's not about the arguments for the new but people fear what they become if the old paradigm the Paradigm is no longer valid anymore that's often of neglected in in in change projects yeah so the more you change the more you learn new things the more people hold on to keep on uh to keep to their old beliefs I think everybody can relate to that we are not free from that and the more you keep the more you need to change that's a paradox and both are again neither right or wrong they need to coexist and therefore it needs to be a mess okay so some time has progressed for w now and he has actually have some time to reflect okay what the heck has happened what did I learn and we will help him we will help him to actually meet the friend he will meet his parallel palth in the parallel universe so that they can reflect on the learnings that they've done together so you should always assume that the person that you're listening to might know something that you don't so let's go into that and they discuss and then they ref reflect and they come to three different insights so I will talk you through them uh briefly now because we want to have some time to for you to have questions also uh so the first one is the communication ecosystem so an organization is communication and they need to be structured in order to satisfy a need or a market need for instance that's that's the purpose of the organization and the communication is the thing that helps that organization to actually succeed with that and another Insight is that organization do not consist of people but by but but communication people are just prerequisites uh uh they are players in the game like in the ball game but the communication is the thing that actually makes it happen decisions is also an important structure so of course we need to take decisions all the time in an organization that is actually what makes the organization move forward but remember all all the decisions that take are based on our perception of how we experience things you remember the the old woman walking suddenly turning into a bodybuilder that's our perceptions of things um so U let's move on to perceptions we perceive things differently and we need to remember that and it's also important to remember that descent and conflicts is the norm and we need to embrace that that behavior in our way of being is a good thing because if we descent to things there's a clue in something there it's something that we can work with so an organization therefore needs a structure to make consent more likely it's easier for us to move forward if we all agree on what we where we want to go we can call it alignment but you can achieve alignment in many different ways of course so all of this creates some sort of uh mess that we need to organize ourselves within so we need to play with those tensions that is created by this mess and we can approach the first principle which is that you need to play with tension so it's not Theory or practice it's not profit or purpose it's not agile or waterfall it's actually both they need to coexist because all of them have potential values so we need to be better at embracing a both and approach to things um and an example here for instance is uh what can I say embracing I waterfall that's where I am control and structure connected to freedom to move we we need both of them as we have seen here principle number two thep itive self-awareness this is this is the place that I love to be I love to help an organization to talk to itself using the power of the humans within the organization so that we start to open up and reflect together and see each other I work a lot with trying to help to an organization to network in in community practices and other all all those things one one important tool that I'm using is called liberating structures uh which has the power of actually helping an organization to talk to itself so you liberate the organization uh through F facilitation and by doing that you can create an organization that has a descriptive self-awareness and if we have that we have a better sh sh perspective of how the organization should work and therefore it's easier for us to take shared decisions and agree with them right so that was two principles play with tension and descriptive self-awareness what's the third principle David yes so the third principle and that's what we want to close with is more or less a summary of all we want to uh what what we have shown you in this a talk today so basically we can say that do not ask what's right or wrong but what do you decide for the time being because you cannot do the right decision you don't know if it was the right decision because you need to see how time progresses and with all the different ambiguities we've shown you and that's just a little little little glimpse into all the different ambiguities we have in organizations you need to balance them it's not either or it's both and more as Martin stated in as you can see here very clearly and nicely in this this picture if you go too far in the extremes you will get consequences you are not you don't want to and yeah you need to find a balance and that's just possible with communication and with talking with each each other and using this descriptive self-awareness Martin was talking about if the organization can reflect about itself if you want to see it like this maybe to be even a little bit more uh clear here what we are claiming is that we don't see organizations as machines anymore but as a living ecosystem we stated that as well and if you see an organization as a living ecosystem you can think of them as having some kind of personality and you can Define and and characterize this personality with these kind of ambiguities and you need to map them and at sometimes you need more Trust and sometimes you need more control sometimes you need more alignment sometimes you need more autonomy sometimes you need to learn new things sometimes you need to keep things it's not this black and white it's more playing in the tension and and playing in the different colors uh in the different colors of of gray if you want yeah so and let's close with a a quote it's from Oscar wild and he said without order nothing can exist with without chaos nothing can evolve it's an ambiguity again and nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing thank you very much for your attention and now we are very happy to as to answer some questions if we can I I have a question inde please right so um a reflection of knowing of this like sometimes you need to learn sometimes you need to sometimes you need to sometimes you need to adapt sometimes you need to trust and all that that kind of tells me that the talent of Tomorrow Is Knowing When to adapt or when to keep when to trust and when to control and that how do you learn that skill what do you do to be able to do that no for me the best way to do this this is navigating complexity so probe sense respond so you test you need to have safe to fail experiments in some way you navigate by by testing and see okay how what how does things react when I do this what do I want to achieve so do I have a a purpose of what I want to reach um if I have that then I can start of navigate towards that but you can only navigate there you can't decide the full path all the way so you need to have some sort of so I think one of the most important thing is to have um what is it called uh scientific thinking you can call it so you have a hypothesis driven approach to what you want to achieve and on top of that maybe just to to give my thoughts to that Martin said that this is what we mean with the principal descriptive self-awareness you can also say that you should do um rros regularly but it's even more than that it's not just what went good what went wrong and what do we change in the future it's more that you really see the organization as an abstract thing and everyone in the organization looks at your own organization how do we behave is our organization healthy right now or not what some kind of characteristics is our organization evolving right now do we want to Foster this kind of behavior we see right now now or not are we aligned correctly do we balance our um our polarities our ambiguities here correctly or not so you need these kind of structures in your organization where you talk about if you organized correctly if you need to adapt do we need more trust right now do we need more control right now and I don't know I cannot say that you need to do that every four weeks or if it's enough if you do that once a year it depends on on the organization and on the market but that's what we mean with with descriptive selfawareness all right I think Eric was next yeah yeah yeah my my reflection was kind of around the same thing uh we are we been working like agile with the product development for 10 years but when we talk about working agile with the organizational development it's it's it I mean people get really uh they don't like being experimented with it's interesting we work with this method developing our products but when we talk about experimenting or hacking the organization it's a long journey just to get that accepted uh so it was just a reflection that I think you the whole I think the whole idea of talking about it as just raising these ambiguities and talking about it as not being near right or wrong but an ongoing process I think we need to align on that before we can just start adapting the same principles directly on the organization and that has been a clear wakeup call for us for me in a big organization yeah yeah and I think one one approach that you can have is to as as David also talked descriptive self-awareness that you help the team the organization to talk to itself and by that accepting change and discussion because accept or even proposing change yeah within the organization so if you want to identify different polarities that is creating problems within your organization you can use the liberating structure uh what is it called now um ah I don't remember there's a liberating I can look it up and send it in the link but there's a liberating structure that helps you to identify uh polarities and and how you can approach them um there's also a tool called polarity mapping which is very good to complement with so that you can start to think think about okay if we are focusing very much on this what are the downsides of this okay then there's proba polarity that can balance that so control and freedom both of them are so they balance each other out and you can get a much better value from that okay next question maybe course book yeah uh yeah how do we deal with the because in the beginning you said something about patterns are random so how do we do with organization learning and retrospective and so on so how do we have what kind of approach should we have that yeah I think what's what's different to this what's important to this distinguish here is that if you have a complicated or complex problem I mean usually both terms will be used simultaneously but complicated things are things where you have cause and um cause and defect relationships and then it's of course totally valid to analyze things and to find to see and and to find um patterns and every organization has these kind of of structured approaches and these kind of complicated problems but you have also Parts where you have complex problems and complex problems you don't have this linear um cause and effect relationships and there it's very difficult it can be that you have stable patterns but you need to be you need to approach them differently because you don't know if they are stable or if they just emerged randomly yeah that's why they can be perceived that stable but they are in fact complex because if you if something is changed then they don't repeat in the same way that they have done exactly so the the question would be some kind of fistic um if you can find cause and effect relationships over and over again then if you get the same results over and over again then you have a complicated system and if not so if you're not able but if if you came to Paradox conclusions given the same data so that you can have two different hypothesis over the outcome then it's complex my favorite example is football so you can analyze as much as you want you won't get the result of the football game in advance you need to wait until the game is over and then you have the result and you can create uh different hypothesis if team a or Team B will win the the game so you have contradictory hypothesis over the same situation given the same data then you have a complex problem yeah and yeah then you need to be aware that some patterns might be just random and then you approach them differently by probe sense response so you need to interact with the system and see if you can find stable cause and defect relationships does it answer your question uh yes somewhat but yeah course um let's say we have a retrospective in in the agile framework and so on so um it's more like do we actually learn something uh last time and and it tends to be that we repeat ourself yeah yeah some when when you run retrospectives in teams some things are very easy to attend to but when you have done a few retrospectives and you start to see that this pops up again and again and again and it's probably a complex problem that you need to attend to in a different way it's not just actions you need to probe sense respond in order to start to navigate away from that but if it's a simple thing to solve like starting to do something in a specific way but that could be complex because part of the system is blocking you from actually doing that it could be behaviors or habitual behaviors or other things but a good way to identify those type of complex problems or systemic problems that you can't affect by yourself but you need to attend to in a larger context it could be that they are repeating so repetitive problems that are reappearing again and again and again in in retrospective that could be a clue for you to start to approach them in a different way and then it's good to find a hypothesis and start to experiment toward wordss a goal that you want to achieve instead of just finding an action and then do it if you have a hypothesis you have a possibility to learn you form a hypothesis by saying okay this is what we want to achieve we think so you write it down and then you set the time where you when you want to have achieved it not too far away and then you go back and reflect okay what actually happened and what did we expect because in in the between of those is the learning so we are very good at our brain is very good at pulling ourselves so if we don't I my experience is that if I don't write what I expected down I will fool myself to think that I actually expected the thing that actually happened and not the things that I was thinking so if I write it down it's much easier for me to actually see the learning now thanks we have a question in the chat Martin I think that's a hard one um let's let's let's see Richard ask what do you think are the three most important skills leaders need to improve to handle this situation quote unquote so I might start yes I think yeah it's it's a tough one I don't know I think so the first things that pop in my mind are self-reflection I think that's very important um and why because I think it's very easy to get absorbed in all the different fields you need to pay attention in in organizations in these ambiguities and to have the capacity to abstract and to to have some distance to all the different things going on in the organization is I think very very helpful then the second skill something about knowledge about System Theory and how systems work what what I meant is that we get the shift from realizing that organizations are not machines but living ecosystems and if you accept this then you approach organizational change very very differently that are two things that popped in my mind I don't know Martin what would you the third I'm thinking about is people Centric so you need to be aware that you are a human yourself you're not you're fallible yourself as a leader and others are also and that you have your perception of how the world looks like and others have their and all those people are the one that is populating that organization that you're in so if you are more more self-aware as you said David and being part of yourself it's much easier for you to meet others and see their perspective so I think that is one thing that is important super important for a leader to have no more questions ah how to promote change in the organization if you're not 100% sure about outcome wow um you are never 100% sure but yes some leaders feel that they need to have a 100% uh uh understanding that this will be the outcome but if we are not able to fail as an organization then we will have very big problems I think uh so but we need to create intelligent failures as Amy admon is calling it so you create a failure that is small small enough for the organization some organizations can do a Big G this is what we want we can fail in this manner I when I go out and and invest in things I have a very limited failure balance but if you do intelligent failure that's by doing a hypothesis this is what we want to achieve this is what we think will happen and then we gamble on that but we need to do that based on Research so we need to have data that sort of IND indicates that this is a likely event that will take place but we can't for sure we can't be sure for sure uh of course because it's complex Martin I was thinking maybe to to quote Dave Snowden here again MH he's always saying that it's maybe if especially in in complex systems it's not about outcome but more about a sense of direction so maybe it's not even the right approach to Define outcomes but just to say okay we think that this might be the right direction and we go the first steps in this direction then we see what happens it giving us the chance to learn going this way but also saying okay that's not the way and we go in another direction from where we are then the the thinking about outcome is again very meist mechanistic I think because you can say I want to be there in this state in two or three years yeah but it's a very philosophical discussion I think because I'm still a fan of of outcomes because you need to so then the question would be how would you define Direction you know so that can also be an outcome but yeah anyway so that was just my I recommend an interesting article uh it's called colors of change we can put it in the in the show note later on when we put it on on YouTube um it's it's talks about five five different approaches to change and based on how you view your world you have different approaches and all of them works it's it's a matter of what type of change you want to achieve 100% things is are probably in the complicated at most or in the clear if we're using the domain uh the can model I see that times is progressing here so maybe we should stop here what do you think yeah the clock is ticking even it's really interesting to listen to both of you so um I just want to say big thank you to David and Martin uh for this session I love the title and and uh we always learn something new so thank you and uh we will have uh new meet up coming up so we hope to see you there soon again thanks for having us and for doing this experiment so first time remote session here and yeah was was fun and thanks for the very good questions was very interesting yes thank you