Welcome back to the Digital Workplace podcast. Today, our guest is Rodney Evans. She is a partner at The Ready and co-host of Brave New Work. Hey Rodney, how are you? 

Hey, Neil, I’m very well, thanks. Good to be here.

It’s good to have you. I’m going to just apologize to you in front of everybody, because this is our second time talking and I messed up the recording the first time. But this one’s going to be even better, so.

Well. And if it’s not, what we can fall back on is how amazing the first one was. And unfortunately, nobody ever got to hear but us.

Which I think makes it even more special that no one will hear it ever.

It was a moment.

Yeah, it was a moment. So, let’s do a check-in round question, a different one than the first time so you’re surprised. But this one is, what about adulting is least natural for you?

Oh my God! All of it, every single part of it. This is a really hard one for me. Because really, there are so many things about it where I’m like, I can’t believe that I have agency to make these kinds of decisions at this point in my life. Because there’s so much in my brain that still feels like being a child. Probably the thing that feels weird, maybe embarrassing, maybe I should be embarrassed to say this. I will routinely wake up in the morning and be like, I can’t believe I’m old enough to be married. And I have been married for almost 10 years, is that right? Almost 10 years. And my husband and I have been together for almost 15 years. But there is something about still like having a boy in my house that I live in every day, that I’m like, surely, I’m too young.

The police are going to come and knock on the door.

Surely my parents at some point are going to be like this is inappropriate. You’re grounded. I don’t know. There’s something about marriage that feels like that was a thing for people much older than I am.

That’s a great perspective. I like that because I think it’s hard. There’s so many of those things you think of as a kid that you just don’t stop thinking in those terms.

Yeah. It was like people who were married were 1000. They were 1000 years old you know. What about you? What’s hard or weird about adulting?

Oh, I think that’s a good one. For me, I’m more thinking about the things that like, ‘Oh, now I have to do this’. So, mine is going to be a little weird. People who know me will find it weird, because it’d be like keeping my mouth shut, that things are strange, and just kind of going on with it. It’s not that I’m unnecessarily an outspoken person. And when as a kid, always did that. Now that I’m an adult, I can’t do that anymore. But just the collective looking around and shrugging and being like, this is just life, we got to do this, we got to keep it up. That’s always hard for me, to keep going. I feel like I should have grown out of that. And we all should have done something. So, I don’t know if that answers the question, but.

I like it.

Well, today, we are going to talk about the ‘Digital Workplace’, which is the topic of the show and something we never seem to be able to define. So, I want to talk with you because you have a lot of context in this that is going to be helpful for us. So, just start off sharing a little bit about what you do at The Ready and what your work is.

Sure. So, The Ready is an organizational design and transformation firm that is focused on helping largely big, traditional organizations that are somewhat mired in bureaucracy to become more people positive and more complexity conscious. And what that looks like is having more participatory practices, more ability to adapt as the environment changes, and more of a general belief in evolutionary systems. And my role there is to do all that stuff plus host a podcast.

Yeah. And when your parents ask you what you do, what do you say?

I’m like, I’m an HR. No. My family has no idea what I do for a living. I tried to point them to the podcast because I feel like it explains pretty well. My mom understands that I do transformational work with business, which is close enough. Yeah, close.

And do check out the podcast, by the way. Whether you’re Rodney’s parents listening in, or not, everyone should at least. It is one of my favorite ones to listen to. You guys talk about a lot of really important stuff.

Thank you.

Okay, so you said organizational design, organizational transformation. Let’s take a step back. There’s a term that I think most people have heard a lot and even that’s a little confusing, which is digital transformation. Let’s start with you. When you hear that term, what do you think of immediately?

Yeah, so I think about the replacement of more analog workflows and tools with digital workflows and tools. And this is not my area of expertise. And I see a lot of different definitions in client organizations of what they mean by that. So, I don’t know if mine is accurate and I would like to know from you, if that checks out.

So, my perspective, because I feel like this is all like, well, I can’t answer because I wasn’t alive when that was going on. I mean I was alive. I picture like 1990s. For some reason, that decade, I think about digital transformation the most. Because it is, I think when, I mean obviously we had computers before then, we had networks before then, there were a lot of things that were there. But that’s when things really start to get serious in terms of like, oh, everyone can do this, if they really want to put the money into it and try. That’s when the first email addresses were rolling out and people were getting in touch with that, even on the consumer side. But to me, digital transformation means the replacement of the analog tools you were using with digital versions of those, which itself makes sense, but also a little bit hard to hold on to when we’re talking about that. I want to step back one step further and say, okay, you’re into organizational design, organizational transformation. That’s been going on much longer than digital workplace or digital transformation has been going on. So, let’s give some definition to that term. What does it mean to go into an organization and design it?

Yeah. I would say that the definition of that work has also changed a lot over the years. If you look at more traditional kinds of system transformation and system design, the prevailing thinking was a much more change-management oriented approach to this work, which is, it’s more command and control in nature. It’s more like we’re going to, and by we, I usually mean a group of leaders, are going to determine what the outcome is. We’re going to make a plan full of milestones for how we’re going to get there. We’re going to communicate, communicate, communicate, so that we “win hearts and minds” and then we are going to see this change unfold as if by magic, on the timeline that we put on a Gantt chart. And not that there were not thinkers starting in the 50s and even earlier, who were much more emergently oriented and thought about this work the way we do. Certainly, The Ready did not come up with these notions. But from a transformational perspective, that has been the prevailing wisdom. And in fact, I still run all the time into consultancies, and what they’re selling to clients is the answer to the problem that they have. So, the client is like, ‘We think our structure is wrong’. And the consultancy is like, ‘We will do the research and give you a new picture of your org chart that is right’.

And our thinking about that, which obviously conflicts both of their opinions is, you can’t know that exactly. You can have an idea about that but the way that we think about doing OS or operating system work and really doing transformation work is, ‘What are the tensions that you’re feeling in your system, as an individual, as a team, as a leader?’ Those often look like, ‘We have bottlenecks in decision making, we have diversity and inclusion issues, we have an inability to innovate, everything takes forever, we can’t launch new product, blah, blah, blah.’ It often looks like something like that. And then in terms of your OS, the question is, ‘What are you trying to design for? And what are you going to try that you think brings you closer to that thing?’ And it’s just an ongoing way of doing participatory evolution versus something that is predicted, planned and, and attempted to be controlled.

I don’t want to be biased. But I feel like when you’re looking at traditional organizational design, it was like, ‘Hey, restructure our hierarchy chart.’

Totally. 100%. That’s still happening. All the time.

But what you’re saying, you dropped some words like operating system, making it seem where these tensions are that just reorganizing people’s titles and putting them in different positions betrays the attitude that ‘if I just have the right person in that role or if I just have the right structure, it’s all going to work, and move the pieces around in the pyramid but it’s still going to. If I just find it right, it’s going to work.’ But you’re saying, at least the stuff you’re doing at The Ready is trying to move past that or see that as only one small option in the whole scheme of things, right?

Yeah, that’s right. And you hit on two really important pieces in your summary of that. One is, there is no one right way when you’re operating in complexity. There is only sensing and responding to what is now. So, the idea that we can do a holistic reorganization where we just shake up all the puzzle pieces and then put them together and that’s going to solve our problems is incorrect. Never works. But it feels good. It feels good in the moment because it feels like a problem to be solved, and human beings, by our nature, want to solve problems. So, redrawing the org chart on the whiteboard and then be like ‘Phew, we really did a thing today. It feels great.’ It just doesn’t work.

And the other thing that you hit on is, is the idea of the individual being the solution. And a lot of times in our work when I hear the very familiar drumbeat of like, ‘Oh, we just need a new leader. We just need one point of accountability for this. We just need to put a project manager on this. We just need to replace John because he’s not strong in this.’ Always my ears perk up to say, ‘What is going on in the OS?’ Because it might be a capacity issue about an individual. But we can’t know that until we know what’s up in the system. And usually, we’re overly reliant on individual heroics to overcome bad org design because we don’t do the work to go like, ‘Actually, we’re unclear on our strategy. We don’t know how to make decisions and our compensation keeps our resources in competition.’ And it’s like, okay. Well, then it doesn’t really matter how smart John is, because he’s always going to be stuck.

So, dive in deeper to this OS. What are all the things that are included in that? Give us some examples of stuff people need to think about in terms of what the OS is.

Sure. So, I would encourage people to check out an article, maybe you could link to that for them, because there are 12 fields. But I would say, the things that are probably the easiest entry points into the OS are looking at meetings, looking at decision making. So, meetings is a field, authority is a field, which is how we meet and decide. Usually, there’s something in workflow like usually there’s some cross-functional process that is really gummed up and causing a lot of pain. And usually, there’s something in purpose or strategy that pops pretty early on. And I use those as examples because they tend to be easier to futz with than getting into resources, for example, like budgeting or compensation, or structure. These things that have a lot more scar tissue around them tend to be harder to mess with. Most people will let you mess with their meetings because they’ve never given a moment of thought to how they meet. And just having a disciplined operating rhythm that has certain types of meetings that do certain types of things will usually make enough momentum and space to get at some of the gnarlier fields of the OS.

I love the fact that meetings was the first thing you mentioned, because if you just look at the meeting you’ll learn a lot about the organization. Do you have any of those experiences where you’re just working with a new client and you just ask to sit in on something like that?

All the time. All the time. And that’s actually how you and I met. You invited me to do a thing on Twitter that was about, why meetings? Why remote meetings are so screwed up? So yeah, I do it. I’m laughing in my brain as you ask that question. Because also, all clients want you to come and watch their crappy meeting. They’re like, ‘Before you make a recommendation, please come and watch this.’ And I’m like, ‘Okay, I’ll come watch.’ But also, I know what I’m going to see because I’ve seen it 9000 times. Like, what I’m going to see is a leader who has an agenda, who takes up 75 to 90% of the airtime, who saves five to 10 minutes for questions at the end, and who reinforces a dynamic of driving control, alignment, etc, that is very top down in nature. So, meetings are just a representation of what’s going on in your OS. And I think it’s an interesting point you make because you go sit in on one and you can probably get a pretty good beat on what’s happening in all the other parts of the system, because it’s all just patterns. The pattern is the same and the pattern will repeat itself in resourcing, in mastery, in workflow. In fact, it’s all the same loop that people are in. So, then it’s just a question of, where can you disrupt the loop first.

So, you’re teeing this up excellently. We’re actually going through an article that I’ve put together about what is a digital workplace and I’m trying to see if it blends in with what you experienced. And what I’m hearing from you, I don’t want to assume anything, but I’m hearing that we got a lot of systems around us that have these operating systems, and they’re all pretty old and they’re all pretty the same and we usually never change them, correct?

Yes.

Okay. So that’s kind of where I want to jump in. Because you guys have the 12 systems. You have this canvas that’s really cool that we will make sure there’s a link into the show notes to talk about these different parts of work and different parts of the system. I’ve picked five areas of work, clubbing several different things trying to make it more thematic. So, I have collaboration, productivity which, I would put meetings inside collaboration, like how do people work together. Productivity is about how do we actually define good work. What that means in terms of ‘Did we do what we were supposed to do today, or this quarter, or this year.’ Leadership, in terms of how we’re actually leading other humans and the things we’re supposed to be doing. Culture, which is always one of those funny things like, how do you describe everything else that goes on. It’s really those unwritten rules that determine how people interact with each other. And technology for what are the tools we’re going to use for different situations. What are the rules around those tools? What’s our orientation towards technology? So, I see those as five main ones. Do you feel like by selecting those five, we’ve simplified things too much or left anything out?

I don’t know if it’s a question of over-simplification. But there are a couple of things that I would probably argue with you a little bit about.

Yeah, let’s do it. No one argues with me on this show. So, please go ahead.

So, one is, when you talk about culture. One time I was giving a keynote at a thing and there were a lot of people in the audience. It was an hour-long talk. And the first question was, I noticed that you never used the word culture in this whole talk. And they were absolutely right. And though it was not intentional, the reason for that is because I fundamentally believe that culture is a byproduct of the choices you make in the OS. You can’t work on culture. Culture emerges from everything else that you do, both explicitly and implicitly. So, when people say, I’m a culture consultant, or we’re going to do a cultural transformation, I’m like, ‘What are you going to do?’ And usually, they’re like, ‘We’re going to train people to use integrity.’ And I’m like, ‘Best of luck to you.’ Because let’s say that one of the things that’s important to us in culture is “Empowerment”. I’m like, “Okay, cool. Let’s dive into the authority field and understand your decision architecture, decision rights, who can make what call in the absence of leadership, etc.” So, that’s my one small peeve with talking about culture as something that summarizes because to me, it feels like it’s a byproduct.

Yeah. And I totally agree with you. A lot of times as I’m trying to figure out what goes in there, because I’ll put things in there like, “Okay, your policies.” But policies could also be like, where else would that fit?

Great question. To me policy is, what is your policy for each part of the canvas? So, what are your policies or practices around compensation, or around meetings, or around workflow, right? Or around mastery. Like maybe in mastery, we have a policy that is, every employee on our team can spend up to $5,000 a year to do their own self development work. That’s a policy, but it’s a mastery flavored policy. And again, I think of policy as being something, some constraint, that we want to put on the system, some guardrail that we all agree we’re going to stay inside, and that could be about anything. That could be about strategy. That could be about compensation. That could be about workflow. That could be about membership. You know, we could have a policy in membership that says, “We don’t steal from each other.” Great. That’s a policy, but it’s membership flavored.

Sure. So yeah, I think that I agree with you. I don’t know how to act on that immediately in terms of reorganizing our whole website. But culture is definitely something that does seem like, ‘Okay, this is the after-effects of those things.’

Yeah. And the other one that I think is interesting to talk about is, I mean, we can talk about all of them, because they’re all interesting to me. But when we talk about leadership, I’m curious, from where you sit and what you do, what does that mean? And what are you aiming for when you talk about leadership.

So, and this is, probably gets into where we’re going with this, so let me step back for a second. We have this organizational design and we’ve shifted to talking about the systems, the operating systems around it, and how many elements are to it that are there, and they need to be worked on. But then let’s not forget the first conversation we had about digital transformation. So digital transformation comes in. And for the most part, I think we saw digital transformation as, ‘Hey, that’s an IT project that’s going to happen. They’re going to go in. They’re going to bring us all sorts of fancy new tools. We’re all going to have fun. Everything’s just going to go on the same way it was, except for now, we have some cool tools around us.’ But we didn’t prepare for what was actually going to happen, which was, the tools were going to take over and they were going to start giving the rules essentially. And they were going to start impacting all those operating systems and all the areas that are out there and start to mess with things. I always use the example of how email changed the way we looked at productivity. Like all of a sudden, you could feel good about your day if you got to your email, and you got this ‘Inbox Zero’ at the end of the day and you can leave. When did that happen? That wasn’t there before. 

All the digital tools we’re inviting in and using them, I think they were much more powerful than we realized. Or they were much more influential than we realized. And they’ve revealed a lot of these systems that hadn’t ever been updated or hadn’t been updated in a long time. So even if you talk about meetings, like everyone knew, “Yeah, meetings are drag, they’re not great. We could probably do it better.” But then when you make a digital meeting that operates on the same systems as before, it’s horrible. And it exposes all of the ridiculousness that we’ve been dealing with for a while. But suddenly when you’re sitting on a Zoom call, and all these things are going on, it just seems ridiculous. Like, what’s actually happening. And so, for me, when we talk about digital workplace, we’re talking about, okay, we’ve got all this digital transformation coming in. And we have all these old ways of working, these old operating systems. And digital workplaces, one that looks at both those and says, okay, we need to level up these things to bring it in line with the new digital tools we have. 

So, to come back to your question about leadership. Because I think leadership is often like a really vague term. It’s just out there, ‘Hey, everyone’s a leader. Do your job.’ Leadership type stuff that’s out there. But for me, leadership now becomes, ‘Oh, now we have to think about teams of humans and systems working together.’ So, what does that mean? Because the digital tools have revealed that that’s a truth that’s out there. So how do we actually lead the other humans on our team well? And what are the systems around them that they need to be there? And do we need to do it? Do we need to have more of a self-management style that’s out there? Or what are the things that people tend to rely on other humans for, when it comes to direction, when it comes to how we’re moving forward with things? 

I also kind of plug in the leadership like organizational direction. Like where are you going with all this? What’s the endgame here that you’re trying to play? That’s another system that needs upgrading. We can’t just assume that we’re all just out here just to eternally turn out more profits than we did last quarter. How can we update that and go through it? So, that’s the background where I’m coming from. And with something like leadership where I see, yeah, these digital tools are helping us to see the truth behind the systems that we need to upgrade.

Yeah, that makes sense to me. A couple things that were really interesting to me as you explained that. One is, the idea that IT can do to digital transformation, to the rest of the organization is, to me, the same thing as saying that people ops can do cultural transformation to the rest of the organization. It is a lie. It is a lie, and no one should believe it. And the only way that anything transforms is in the work. And when I say that I mean if what we want is a different orientation around the tooling that we have, the way that we do that is not by adding a layer of tooling, doing a bunch of training and death marching people through a compliance exercise. The way we do that is by looking at what our work is, and what tool enables it or replaces something that we already have, and how we experiment and learn with that thing. So, I’m glad you said that because I think that that idea is nonsense, and people should not do that.

And the other thing is, when you talked about noticing the ridiculousness of what we do when we’re on a Zoom meeting, for example, that’s just a very systems’ thinking kind of observation to make. And a lot of times when I’m working with a new client, and they say, “Where do we start? And what order does this go in? And how do you know you’re attacking the most important problems and blah, blah, blah.” The reality is that any new thing you introduce, whether that’s moving meetings to be remote, whether that’s moving to Slack from email, whether that whatever, whether it’s a new compensation policy, whatever. When you agitate the system, the system tells you things. It gives you feedback. So just like when you move your really crappy meeting to Zoom, you notice things about its crappiness that you didn’t notice when you were all in a room together. That’s good feedback. That’s good data and information. Now, it’s our job to go, ‘Okay, what does that tell us? And what could we try instead?’

Yes, absolutely. I think that’s where the leaders that I talked to right now, are in the middle of that, trying to figure out, ‘Okay, what’s next? Like, yeah, my meetings were bad.’ Because we say that the most basic level of a digital workplace is just, ‘Okay. Let me find the replacement for whatever we were doing before in a digital world.’ So, we were in meetings all day, so, let’s do Zoom meetings all day. Well, do you have to? Can you think of something different? Because you’re now digital. Now you have opportunities you didn’t have before. Because you can talk about a document asynchronously at different times and everyone’s still kind of having this different kind of meeting. But if you still try to do what you were doing in the office, in a digital space, it’s not going to work that well. So, see, I try to figure out how to upgrade those things and find new ways to take advantage of it and really reorient and rebuild these systems.

And I think the mistake that leaders, I use leader, the word leader fairly loosely because I sort of believe more in like emergent leadership and domain-oriented leadership rather than hierarchical leadership for a variety of reasons. But for the purposes of this conversation, one of the big misses that I see leaders make, and I made as recently as Friday, is, when we’re trying to make a choice about a technology or a meeting type or a policy or a new hire, or whatever, restructuring, what I don’t see people do is stop and say, “What are we trying to get the system to do?” So, it’s like, we get into these arguments about the solutions and critiquing the solutions and talking about pros and cons of the solutions, but we can do that forever. But the question is, if it were perfect, what would it do? That should be the thing that tells us what the solution is.

And I’ll give a super easy example. We have a meeting at The Ready that’s once a month that’s a governance meeting. It’s a participatory governance meeting and we’ve gotten to a size now that it’s a bit unwieldy. And what we’ve realized is we probably need to have some sort of like subgroup that does this governance meeting with representatives or change the way that we do the process to speed it up, I don’t know. We’re just not getting through as much stuff as we feel like we want to be able to get through. And so, there were interesting, competing arguments about, ‘Everyone should be included for these reasons. We should have representation for these reasons, etc.’

And I listened for a long time. And then I was finally like, “Well if governance were perfect, what would it do? And if the number one thing our governance meeting is meant to do is process changes and make proposals, then we should have a smaller representative group. If what our governance process is meant to do is teach people governance, we should have everybody, including new hires. If what our governance is meant to do is include as much variety of opinion as possible, maybe we do some asynchronous work first to get more advice and input before bringing it.” But in the absence of choosing and debating what it’s supposed to do, all of those solutions have merit, and they have equal merit, we can just argue about them forever. But the work of a leader in any scenario is to go, ‘Well, what should I do? What should the structure do? What should the tool do? What should the meeting do?’ That should tell us what we need to know about what we’re going to try.

Yeah. And I think that is the posture that, again, digital leaders today, have to have. And that maybe 30 years ago, you didn’t have to think in this way as much because you could just ride on what was there. But you have to constantly be asking that question, ‘What does perfect look like? What does great look like? What are we moving towards?’ And also, because you have so many options today. We’re not saying remote work is the be all end all, like everyone should be there. There are tons of great reasons why being in an office together, as soon as our vaccines are all through, is like the best thing that you could do and is perfect for you. But you have to constantly be asking that question and thinking about. So, I think that’s great orientation.

Yeah. And the other thing, and I’m curious about your take on this, because you’re much more in the digital world than I am. One of the things that I noticed in doing transformation work is, it often doesn’t seem interesting or possible for a team or a leader to try a new thing unless and until they personally are holding attention around it. Like a lot of times when I try to get them into some tool where they can see work transparently and I try to tell them why that’s principle, that’s important, or whatever, they’re like, ‘Shut up, leave us alone.’ And then I get them into a new meeting structure. And they’re like, ‘Well, it doesn’t make any sense for us to be sending a PowerPoint deck back and forth.’ And I’m like, ‘Yes. Okay. Now back to the thing I showed you three months ago. Are we ready now to try that?’ And it’s not because of intelligence or capacity or anything else. It’s just that human beings basically don’t learn things until they need to know them. And so, if they don’t have that feeling of ‘this tool solves my problem.’ Basically, I don’t find most people want to hear about it. Is that your experience, too?

Oh, yeah. Yeah, totally. That’s mostly just human nature. But even on my own team, I tell them from the start, we’re going to be doing experiments or I’m trying these new tools that you are not going to like, but I’m actually going to use it anyway and try to go through it. Sometimes it’s just like pulling teeth to get them to say like, ‘No, I want you to have this conversation over here, because we’re trying to solve this problem.’ Because they don’t feel that problem. Like I had to introduce a different collaboration tool because we had one external vendor who couldn’t plug into the other one that we were using. That was a problem for me. I felt that very distinctly. So, I wanted to use a different tool. But everyone else on the team was like, ‘Now I’ve got to maintain these other two things. I don’t really care. Everything else is going on.’ But yeah, totally. If the need is not there, then you don’t see it. And maybe that becomes then the job of the leader. If your job is to create these changes and to bring people there, then maybe pointing out those systems and helping people to see the problems that are there, is something. As long as you feel it’s legitimate, no reason to stir up things that don’t need to be there.

Absolutely, absolutely. No change for change sake.

Yeah. Real cool. Rodney, this has been great. You’ve eased my mind a little bit. This topic of what is a digital workplace. It’s good to have a better perspective on and especially from your perspective of knowing how companies think about this canvas that you guys work with and the 12 different things. So, this has been a fun conversation.

Awesome. Thanks so much for having me.

Yeah. So, we look forward to having these benders again soon in the future.

I’m always happy to do it. Thanks, Neil.