Doing Less with More

Robert Winter Management has a long habit of inventing instruments to convert intention into action, and an equally long habit of watching each one harden into paperwork within a quarter or two of its arrival. Management by objectives, the balanced scorecard, and now Objectives and Key Results, each arrived as a corrective to the ritual that preceded it, and each was in turn accused of becoming mere ritual. The instrument is rarely blamed. We say instead that the organisation implemented it badly, which leaves the more uncomfortable question unasked, whether there is any such thing as implementing it well, or whether this decay is simply what these devices do once they meet an organisation. My guest has spent a decade inside that question. He came up through delivery, where the measures are velocity and burndown, and the governing anxiety is whether a team is moving quickly enough before turning to the prior question of whether the speed was pointed anywhere worth going. He is the founder of OKR Quickstart, where he coaches organisations to adopt the method and, by his own account, has made every mistake in the book while doing it. He also hosts Strategy Candy, where he argues that most of what we do at work does not matter, and that the discipline of saying so out loud is where strategy actually begins. He has watched more of these rollouts than most people will see in a career, which makes him either the method's most useful advocate or its most credible witness for the prosecution. I'm not certain which. I do not think he is obliged to be only one. What I want to find out is what a decade of watching the OKR instrument meet real organisations has taught him about the instrument and about the organisations. Tim Newbold, welcome to On the Subject of Leadership.

Tim Newbold Robert, thank you so much for having me. I'm very excited to be here.

Robert Winter Marvellous. And look, let's I think dive straight into it. I think so many listeners are interested in the practitioner lens, all of the war stories that have accumulated over the years. Both I think the good and the bad. I mean, I think there is that slight vicariousness, perhaps, in seeing that other organisations struggle as much as we do. There's that sense of gosh, it's not just us that are doing it tough. But I think also so much of the learning comes in. I, my special topic is always leadership, and people say, where have you learnt most about it? Did you study Napoleon? Did you study Steve Jobs? Actually, no, most of my leadership lessons tend to come from leaders who have been, shall we say, on the cusp of doing it badly, would be the best one. So that's where I think some of those engagements become quite interesting. Therefore, I'm quite curious. A couple of engagements maybe, one where it worked well, one where it didn't. And what was materially different? Was it the temperament of people, the facts of the organisation, or just broader macro-industry elements?

Tim Newbold Very good question. To answer the question well, I want to set a little bit of context around why I got into this and why I'm so passionate about outcome thinking, right? Objectives and key results. It's a goal-setting framework. I'm sure your listeners have heard of it. But why did I actually get so interested in this? And then maybe we can talk about how does that play out with different types of organisations where this does work, where it might not work. So very early in my career, I was working in technology. I was working in a business, I can call it out, I think it's probably safe space now, it was a long time ago, called Australia Post. Government-owned organisation, very traditional. I was working on projects where we would write these endless long specifications, quite technical specifications on how the systems should work. And I was asking all these sort of questions around okay, what are we trying to achieve here? How does this help the customer? How do we know that we've been successful? And after asking probably way too many questions and challenging why we were doing certain things because I didn't understand the context, it started to land with me that maybe I'm in the wrong job. And eventually one of the senior people in that space sat me down and said, Tim, listen, I've been at this job for 18 years and I've written so many of these documents, hundreds of these documents, not one of them have resulted in a production system, something that customers end up using. Now what I heard was I've spent 18 years of my life and wasted my time here. And you're about to do the same. Get ready for it. And it was honestly a sense of terror like I'd never felt before. I was still completing my degree at the time, so I was basically doing an internship. And I'm thinking, this is the end of my career right here. I've not even started. I've totally gone for the whole wrong thing. I've studied the wrong thing, and this is a disaster. And I think to really get rid of me, 'cause they'd had enough of me asking all these silly questions, they put me in a team that was actually working much more in this particular way. And that's where I started to see, okay, actually no, I do fit here and it was focused on customer outcomes and business impacts and metrics. And really the rest is history at that point. I sort of found my niche, got into the groove, and that really helped me. Now, I think you look at a lot of organisations, the mindset that they have, they either are very focused on here's where we're headed and why we're headed there, and here's the things that we're trying to do to get there. Other organisations, it is much more organic and there's going to be some flavor of the month. We've got some bit critical piece of work, something that we're doing. But there's no there's some hope that it's going to deliver a result, but there's no critical thinking around that. And so if I give you two examples of some of the customers that we've worked with, I'm very picky about who we work with. I we sort of go through a lot of conversations before we start working with them. So a lot of these stories are a little bit more historical where it's gone wrong. But typically it's been the organisations where they have a culture of just trying to get something in to band-aid it. It's like what's that latest framework that's going to save the day? And this is something where about objectives and key results. Technically, it is a framework, but also what's really key is actually the mindset and the principles that come with it, which is around that customer impact, the focus on what are we doing and why are we here and how do we know we've made the impact we expected. So when an organisation has either they're trying to go in with the flavor of the month, they are really focused on more about compliance. How do they try and set up a structure so they get more accountability as a lot of them called? We need more. Accountability in our people. Often that doesn't come with any level of authority, mind you. So we want to have that accountability. And often it's really just about control. Those sort of organisations in the past I thought I could get them to shift their thinking and shift their mindset. Sadly, because I'm usually brought in by a CEO or at the CEO's request, it's going to be that mindset from the top. And so those are the sort of environments where we're very unlikely to be successful. I think one that's a little bit harder to tell and distinguish from the beginning is an organisation that is obsessed with busyness. And we've all been there, we've all been in the it's you know pretty much every workplace. If someone tells me they're in a quiet workplace, well, in fact, I haven't heard that I don't think anyone's ever said that to me. It's always busy, but it's around that level of busyness and context switching. If an organisation is absolutely obsessed with having everything maxed out and everyone is doing lots of things, and there is no room for strategic execution, they're busy doing they're just keeping the lights on, right? Responding to customer inquiries, they're processing whatever they need to be processing for customers. It depends on the business, obviously. But whatever they're doing, it's just servicing the customer to drive the return the organisation needs to make versus trying to come up with something new, trying to change how things are done. If there is very little value put in that improvement focus, then those sort of organisations are the one where OKR will typically not work. It sounds great on paper that it is about being very clear on here's what we're focusing on, here's how we're going to measure that success, but the act of actually doing that and having the headspace and time to do that is typically where it falls apart. Now, there's also this sort of middle ground. Where does it not quite go so well? Sorry, and how do we get to that world where it is going really well? I will say we've had a lot of success with American companies, and I think this is a bit of a you're gonna have a bit of a vibe here, and I don't want to sort of be too negative for your audience, but I have a very negative view on leadership capability in general. I think we don't teach our leaders how to be incredible leaders. It's not taught at school, university, it is rarely taught, and most organisations don't really train what I'd call management to be effective leaders and effective coaches. So this is rarer to see. I think in the United States you see a Little bit more of that focus around how do we really create great leaders. It's still they have a lot of problems. I don't think it's where I'd want it to be, but we have that consistent leadership and that sort of leadership culture that I see a lot more value put on. So I think about a lot of our customers that we work with in the States, we're actually yet to lose a customer that we've worked with for more than a sort of six month period. There's a few customers where they might start out and we've realised no, this is not the right fit, because coming back to those earlier stories. But I look back, it's one of our first customers. That we landed in the States was five years ago, in six years ago, actually, just think it's 2026. This was in Teleos. So that's a long history and a long thread there. So that consistency of leadership is a really important one. The importance of how we have great leaders and develop those great leaders is a really good environment for OKRs to start to come about. Because it means that we do have that empowered sort of environment. Because again, a great leader will empower their people. Finally, the leadership team that is trying to drive results. I think it's a little bit more of that culture, that accountability in the States at each layer in a positive way where you see organisations being more successful now. I don't think it's only in the Americas, I think, or the United States specifically. I think you do see it a lot of other places, but it's probably general observation Australia. We don't have that same sort of structure. And even leadership tenure, I see a lot more turnover in Australia versus, the customer I was working with six first for the past six years. I think I've had one executive change in that time period with them. Versus Australia it sort of happens quite frequently.

Robert Winter So many threads to pull on there. I think one of the first ones I want to attend to is, shall I call it the problem of size? I'm imagining a startup, you're a very small organisation, the CEO is putting back in the day stamps on an envelope and mailing stuff out because there is no mailroom, there's no mailroom functionality. And so one of the wonderings I do have is. Tools such as OKRs, are they to an extent, much as I think once I think I once heard a person say that culture or art is a product of civilization, because we have to get to a certain point whereby a society has enough diversification of work to say, I don't actually have to be out hunter-gathering. I can instead be painting a fresco, which doesn't sustain anything in terms of food, water, all the basics of the good old hierarchy. But I'm freed from doing those things because somebody else is doing that part of the ecosystem. And so looking obviously at Australia Post, where they were able to, I think, move you to an area of the business, you could have that space and spend that time on that thought. Is there something to be said that perhaps not larger organisations, shall I say, more diverse organisations, where they go, there is that value in that role? Is that in a sense part one, which begs the question? Does it then all come back to leadership? If you've got an organisation with a strong leadership culture that believes that management isn't a side hustle, it's a thing that people need to do and take seriously, they will therefore be the ones who will create the time for their team to not always be running, who will then have the time to engage with a framework such as OKRs. How does that thesis stand up for you?

Tim Newbold I think that sounds absolutely right. I quite like it 'cause I think it's I believe it's called the Edo period in Japan. And that's sort of where there was sort of the country again, I'm not saying this is a good or a bad thing, but the country closed itself off. It was a time of a lot of peace internally, and that's sort of when you see a lot of the things like sumo wrestling, sushi, these kind of you know, some of the things that Japan's very well known for came out. So that time to focus culturally is where they are really did come up with something special. And I think you're right for organisations as well. It's the point of making that time and space. You know, we all know. So where there's a manager, and again I suffered a lot from early management in my career. I think this is why I'm a bit of a crusade to be honest. Where you know you have your one-on-ones changed and they're kind of cancelled, or maybe a one-on-one once a month and they're cancelled, so it's every other month or every three months, a pointless activity. So I you know, I think where the organisation as a has a culture of finding the right leadership. So obviously, you've got to hire the right people, the people who share some sort of mindset or potential to be developed into that sort of way of working. If you have prioritised that as an organisation and the leaders make time to work with the teams, create that space for both individual development, but then also for them to have that freedom to go and create improvements, which I will argue this a little bit later on, I think, but around strategic execution, that's a big part of creating improvement, is a strategic ad advantage for a lot of organisations. If they have that space, then all of a sudden incredible things can happen. If you're in back-to-back calls between eight and five pm, it's all of a sudden it's a or you're not getting anything done, you're not able to make any improvement. And to be honest, the amount of people I see, just literally the organisation is paying them to be in meetings and they might get one or two things done outside of that is mind boggling. You think about the p how could anyone be possibly productive in that kind of environment?

Robert Winter Or worse or worse, I'd probably throw into that mix the well the hop-on meeting, the quick let's all jump on a call right now. I certainly see in particular environments, I mean obviously we've got some of the recent telco outages. If your emergency triple O line goes down, absolutely drop everything and hop on. And it is about that speed to triage. But one would certainly, I think, make the case that if the whole of the organisation is constantly in this hop-on mindset. Constantly in that firefighting mindset, yeah, you're never, never creating the space, which does, I think, come back both to ethos and begging the question, why is an organisation wanting to bring in a framework or a tool? Is it, I think as you've you observed earlier, so many organisations are obsessed with control. And they're seeing an OKR as a, I can't see what's happening in that area of the business, therefore I can't control it. If I can't control it, I'm not managing it, therefore I'm not doing my job, which would you argue that's a bit of a problematic way to implement? Because in a sense it's a closed mindset versus the more open mindset of strategically how does it open our people up to see more of the organisation, to see more of what we're doing? So is that perhaps a lens issue? Are people bringing in something like an OKR to open their team's field of vision, or are they bringing in it to close it and keep them focused on just a small handful of things that that manager considers consequential?

Tim Newbold I think that's a really good question. I can I jump back just one point 'cause I think you made a really good point and this is about the telco outages and people literally died from that, right? Like this is not just I can't get on Facebook. This is a there's a fundamental, emergency services, everything shuts down. I look at so many organisations and they design themselves to be fragile. And that means that if while everything's working well, everything is good, but it takes one small thing to fall over. And again, if you're a systems thinker, anyone who's read Peter Senge's books will know what I'm talking about. If they if you haven't heard of Peter Seng, Go Google it. It's an amazing book series around systems thinking. But it takes one small thing for all of a sudden the whole thing to collapse. And this is where, if you look at organisations that are incredibly successful, they design and build themselves to be anti-fragile, right? They don't have those sort of issues where, again, these fragile organisations, one thing goes wrong, the whole thing shutters. It's like an imperfection and a piece of glass, and then the whole thing goes. So we look at Netflix is a great example of this. And this is an old example. They created something called Chaos Monkey. And basically, when they first moved to cloud-based service. They had an agent that would wander around and it'd just flick off different services. And they had this happen running in their sort of test environments and their development environments, and they could build around that. They'd build services that would be ready for any part of it to go down. So maybe we'd have a fallback, maybe they'd have some sort of local storage that'd give them a bit of time for it to recover. But they had this structure where anything could go wrong. Then someone had the grand idea because they were still having the odd issue in production. What if we put this thing in production? We're going to have production instances, critical infrastructure, and then this thing's going to come along, point a gun at it, shoot it, and then all of a sudden, does the application keep running? Now that's where you have real customer outages. If these telcos had the same kind of thing, all of a sudden that network infrastructure would be incredibly bulletproof. Now, would you want something like that running on in production on critical services like that? Maybe not, but certainly in your test environments, you'd want to know that if any part of this goes down, there's multiple layers of redundancy. So I think organisation design, thinking about being anti fragile is critical. And how do you do that? I think it comes back to the question you just asked, which is if we're setting up an organisation for alignment and control. The reality is leaders have a very limited perception of what's actually going out in the business, in the on the floor. It's also a limited perception of what's happening with customers. They can get data which closes that gap a significant amount, but the reality, the difference between data and insight, there is a big separation between the two. Data is going to give you a signal. You need to go and pull that thread to find what is the actual insight behind that data. And so this is where we talk a lot about as part of the OKR process is bubbling up information from teams. Now I this is probably one of the biggest failings I see. A lot of organisations, they don't start with that bubble up. They just start with what does the executive think. And often that is a relatively good way to go from a strategic perspective because they've got a fair bit of insight. They know where the business needs to go, but they are so often missing critical information. It could be capacity in teams, it could be why a particular data point. You might have a lot of complaints about a particular thing, but unless you go and source that information from that team, you're not going to get the actual reasoning behind this. And so often I See executives not understanding what problem they're trying to solve, coming up with ideas of things they want to do, hoping that that will solve it, but they're getting not getting down to the root cause. So in an organisation where you have compliance and control, OKR is not going to help you at all. It is just going to give you a way to probably really beat the teams a little bit more because they're not achieving the outcomes. You typically see in those sort of cultures as well, people set very low bars because they know that they're going to be getting in strife for this, or they ha realise that the executive team doesn't understand what they do and why they do it and where they need to be focusing. And they're actually more aligned to the mission of the business, these individual contributors. So they're going to set their goals so that it distracts the executive team, it gets the exec team off their back, but really they're going to go and do what is really important. And so that gap there is critical. And this is where we talk a lot about empowerment. That is the only way that this works well. If it's used for control, it is highly ineffective. If you want to be a CEO and have a tight grip and tight control on your people, that's your call. I'm not going to try and tell you otherwise. I think it'd be a waste of time. But if you don't use OKRs for that, it's not going to help you get there.

Robert Winter I'm very interested in that. I'll term it the gamification process, because I think in all organisations there is, particularly if they're they have a fairly strong culture of fear, shall I say, where employees worry about their job. I see this particularly in organisations that have a relentless drive to be leaner. How can we right size the organisation? Why have five people in a particular function when we could do it with four and a half or four point two? And there is that. Eventual point at which you're stretching the elastic band beyond its tolerance. And I think in organisations though it's so difficult because you can't just turn the tap back on again. I've particularly seen that in project work where an executive will authorise a million dollars to build something and then be very confused why a week later people haven't started work on it. And it's well, we don't have the people on the team to do this. Yes, but I've approved the budget. Yeah, well we can't you know, we can't turn people on at the speed we can turn yeah, AI systems on or a light switch on. And therefore it is that what is that ramp up time? And so I'm wondering, again, coming back to this notion of lean organisations and the need for in some functions to make them far more bulletproof or I think probably a better term would be anti fragile, that redundancy. We're obviously very keen on system redundancies, but I think that there's a degree of that that needs to happen. In teams more broadly. So could it be argued that the pursuit of an ever leaner organisation is an ethos that if it exists, it by its nature is militating against strategic and actually outcomes-based thinking? Because it's far more focused on how do we do more with less rather than actually how do we exponentially grow more? Because if I can bring in another $10 million in business, what of it if I've got to hire another five people to do that? It easily pays for itself, but that's not necessarily the mindset. It's I want the profit without the cost of doing business.

Tim Newbold I think it's a very good question. I think the risk here would be falling into the trap of thinking that that a focus on growth and having capacity for growth is mutually exclusive with a lean organisation. I better preface with I am actually all about lean organisations. I think most organisations are way too fat. Like they are aggressively overweight. Now the reason I have that sensation is well that that sense is the complexity of as an organisation grows. They tend to throw more people at a problem rather than trying to solve the problem. And if you look at organisations, a great example for me, they don't exist anymore. They were acquired by Firefox or the Firefox Foundation, Mozilla. They were called Pocket, and it was 25 people, and I think they had something like it was millions, it could have been 23 or 50 million users, and it was a team of 25 people that ran this product. Now, customers love their product and it was a great experience. Funnily enough, you didn't need a lot of support with it. It was these types of ways of thinking where you create these small teams that can deliver great outcomes. And they were perfect executing perfectly on their strategy. So we then go, okay, well, why do some of these organisations fail when it comes to that? Do more with less. We've all heard that statement, it makes us all shudder. My take is if an organisation focuses on continuous improvement and doing things in a lean way, they're going to be able to simplify their processes. They're going to have a much smaller team. They're going to remove the complexity and complex dependencies that come with large organisations and having a variety of stakeholders and often different stakeholders with different levels of approval or different requirements of approval. I think a project is a great example. We've got to talk to all these different people. Often who approves what is ill-defined or not defined at all. So I'm seeking approval. No one's willing to approve it because they don't know if they have the authority. And also they don't want to have it fall back on them if they do make the decision to go ahead with it. So the organisation optimises for non-decision. While we're optimising for non-decision, you basically get entropy because the teams are busy doing stuff, trying to get the thing done, but there's these blockers in place that stop them from doing that. Hence a huge amount of waste of time. Now, if on the other hand we think about utilisation. All right. So not so much about lean organisation but efficiency. If we think about utilisation, I want you to imagine a freeway. Now a freeway at ten capac ten percent capacity. There's a few cars. I used to I would say normally a Sunday, but I don't know in Melbourne it seems like Sunday's peak hour as well. If you imagine a few cards, maybe it's two AM at night. Things are moving pretty fast, right? Everyone's effectively doing the speed limit. Is that fair to say?

Robert Winter Certainly is. Yeah.

Tim Newbold And so even if we get up to about eighty percent capacity, you get the odd slowdown. But a car the cars are still effectively doing about full speed. We're still going at about 100 kilometers an hour. If you're US listeners, they can do the conversion. Yeah, I think 60, 65 there. 60 miles. Yeah, 60 miles, that's the one. So they're all going at 100 kilometers an hour. And it's still pretty well fine. The odd braking, but we're still going pretty well. That's probably the optimal state. And you start to see this pattern repeat through nature where we've got something operating at about 80% capacity, it is quite a optimal way and efficient way of things to run. We can go do some Googling around that is a strange pattern that occurs, but that is typically the thing that we see. As we push up to a hundred percent, can you imagine what is a freeway with a hundred percent capacity? It's fully utilised. What do you think's happening to the cars?

Robert Winter I mean I'd imagine a few things. One is if anything does go wrong, someone suddenly changing lanes without indicating there's no reaction time because all of the traffic is so compressed.

Tim Newbold And we're talking about Melbourne here, so that's guaranteed. There's no blinkers [unclear]. Everyone's run out of blinker fluid in Melbourne. I don't know where we get it from. It's gone.

Robert Winter Just merging. It's fluid, fluid, fluid transitions. There's also the issue of you start to lose the necessary space in, shall we say, the serial chain between two cars. So they're hard on top of each other. And that's going to inevitably create some friction depending on how people are perceiving the road and the drivers around them. The space that they need in their reaction times. Yep.

Tim Newbold And very quickly everything you're talking about there is what drives down to the you know the small space to be able to see, the unplanned lane changes, a good portion of the drivers on their phones, breaking too late, all these sort of things happening. All of a sudden we have one or two failures and we hit a gridlock. And now the freeway, very quickly at 100%, whilst it might be moving for a moment, at 100% utilisation, it basically becomes to a complete gridlock. Now. If we think about what does that mean for work, we so often want to see in so many leaders, especially in that sort of command and control sort of culture, I want to see my people always busy. I want them to be at a hundred percent utilisation. That it puts them straight into that grid like lock state that we're talking about earlier. And this is where we see some of the biggest failures of these organisations. So again, they're while we're trying to do more with less, we're actually doing less with more. And it is a pattern that the more you throw at it, the harder it gets. That's where if we invest in improvement, creating that capacity to improve, things get a lot better. So I've I've gone a very long-winded what sort of circular conversation here, but to come back to the point, if we create time and space to be able to optimise and improve how we work, and it doesn't take a lot, it just takes a little bit, then all of a sudden we can be much more effective in improving the organisation and executing on our strategy. If we are just absolutely chokers with work, there is nothing that's going to get done. And again, this is the state that I see most organisations feel fret fall back into. 80% capacity is a good one. It might not be feel quite as efficient, but it will, and the numbers behind it will show it. If you've got a team that is processing customer inquiries at that lower capacity, you're gonna see them get through those inquiries a lot faster. You're gonna see a lot more lot less value demand, so less customers calling up trying to get their problem solved again. All of those numbers start to flow. But it's something that organisations struggle with, because as soon as they see that capacity, they go, Especially the bookkeepers here. I work with a lot of CFOs and I love them all. And many of them aren't like this, but there's a few where they're like, that's a line item in a spreadsheet. Let's delete that and save that money. And yeah, it's not worth it.

Robert Winter In that case on the saving, is it more about what task is being performed in this sense job design or I guess strategic organizational people design? What are the roles that we have in the organisation and what do people do in those roles? I don't mean what's their job description, because I think as any employee has ever found, there's your on-paper job description, then there's what you actually do in your day. And generally the only time your job description ever gets surfaced is if your boss gets a bit cranky, wants you to do something they quote unquote reckon you should be doing. And then they'll point at your job description and go, well it is in your job description, you're supposed to be answering the phones or insert name of things that you're you don't see as consequential. And does that then come back to the most people's work doesn't matter statement? The notion that, yes, I'm actively employed, yes, I'm in a lot of meetings, yes, I've been very busy, that that whole busy work thing, but it doesn't actually achieve very many outcomes. And if instead of me being in the all of those meetings being seen to be seen, I was instead off doing something meaningfully consequential for the organisation, you could actually get that true leanness of business. Because instead of my seven point six, eight hours, whatever it is a day, most of it actually going towards non consequential work. Instead, it's actually all going towards consequential work, which isn't the same, I should hasten to argue, as being one hundred percent utilised. It just means when I do something, it is actually creating value versus merely keeping a boss happy or, stopping a team from feeling I'm social loafing just 'cause they can't see what I'm doing.

Tim Newbold It's something that I think Steve Jobs puts it really well. I'm gonna paraphrase, I'll go, I'll get it close enough. But he basically says focus isn't saying yes to the right things. It's saying no to the thousands of great ideas and choosing to focus on the one thing that really matters. And this is where most people and certainly in most organisations, the culture of saying no is such a taboo. People do not want to say no. And no, I'm not going to come to that meeting, or no, I don't want to do that thing, or no, that's not a priority. And you see it, particularly with teams where like the bane of my existence, necessary of course, but the bane of my existence, ticketing systems. When people have a request coming for a ticket, and I've literally had a conversation two days ago, Tuesday, with a CIO about this problem that we're facing, where they've just got all these tickets that they're dealing with. And most of those tickets are not problems that they need to well, these tickets are requests, right? Quest for this access to this software or to do this thing, they're actually not important right now and they shouldn't be doing these things. So you've just got this complex noise that comes in. And so I think saying no is one of the most wonderful gifts that you can give someone in an organisation. And as a leader empowering your people no, in fact encouraging them to say no is a wonderful thing that all of a sudden starts to build out that capacity and allow people to focus on what really matters. There is an unrelenting amount of work that I see where people are feeling obliged, they're compelled to go, but there is no point to it, there is no benefit from it. And so voting with your feet, letting people choose where they want to go. And again, the missing piece here is the strategic context. If people are clear on what they need to do and why, and they agree with it, you've told them the story that helps them understand why they need to do it, all of a sudden people will be working on the right things. You get clever employees, they're gonna go make it happen. In the right way. It's just giving people that capacity.

Robert Winter I'm very interested in this and want to push into it a little bit, the notion of empowering people to say no. Because I think we've all seen the manager who's very quick to say, no no no, don't do that. Definitely push it off, say no to that person. But ultimately they do that in situations where they fundamentally don't care about the ask. They just don't see it as relevant. So they are very keen to empower you to, absolutely go say no to Tim. What he's asking, it's ridiculous anyway, we shouldn't be doing that. So say no to it. But it's really, again, the command and control piece, because they now get to, in a sense, exert authority over somebody else that's perhaps not even in their team. But by instructing their team member to say no. It's this indirect control versus what I would say is the true right to say no, which is actually I care about this very much. I really want this thing doing, but I'm going to trust you enough for you to say no to my request, for you to say no to the thing that I want to prioritise, because coming to sort of Peter Drucker's management by objectives and self-control, you're at that point of inflection. You can see the work in a much more three-dimensional way than I can. I'm very much top-down. I can only sort of see the buildings from the top and they everything looks flat to me. But down at ground level, you can recognise the invalidity, shall I say, of the ask. That then comes back, I guess, to trust in organisations. Is it the case that again, if organisations are pursuing that control piece? Then not necessarily open to the trust of their employees. I've hired somebody good and I'm simply going to let them get on with it, versus I've hired somebody good, but I want to again keep that macro control. Do you do you see that emerging quite a bit as well in terms of the different types of no's that get enabled in organisations?

Tim Newbold Absolutely. I think this is an important part where the issue is I think a lot of people out there, passionate individuals, they will come up with their own ideas on things they want to do. And that is going to be absolutely super critical for them. And this is it happens at every layer of the business as well, by the way. This is the thing I'm talking about. The CEO's got the latest hair brain idea. We're going to go do this thing. It the issue here is that where teams are able to say no, but they don't have the strategic context, all of a sudden you have really important things not getting worked on. You have what I call when working for software teams, it's escalation driven Development, EDD, where everything gets continuously escalated. And again, it's that lack of strategic context. And so this is where all of these pieces in a well-run organisation and a positive culture organisation with empowered teams, we need all of those ingredients to work together. Because it's one thing to say no, but I need to be able to know that if we have a someone come in and have an ask, and that's going to conflict with what I'm working on, I need to understand. Is their ask more important than what I'm working on right now for the greater good? And if it is, I absolutely should stop what I'm doing right now. In vast majority of cases, right? There's obviously you specifics and instances, but generally I probably should stop what I and my team are doing to go help with that. You're absolutely right that the leader coming in saying, no, no, don't do that. We don't need to do that. Sometimes that's helpful. Sometimes that is just another exertion of command and control. And again, the same thing. They've got limited context and so they're applying their thinking around a range of limited context. So this is probably the hardest things. And as you see organisations grow, the organisations that do this really well is they set that context so that not only are people able to say no, they're empowered to solve problems the way that they want to see them solved, but they also have that awareness of, well, this is where the organisation is working, this is how we're working. Simple things as well, which honestly this is gee, but we're going back to early stage management theory here, roles and responsibilities. Like things like that, so often, again, you were making the point. We've all got here's the job description. But for a given piece of work, what is my role and responsibility around this? And having that as a an adaptable item, something that can change over time. And this is where, like looking at p position descriptions, they're fine as bit of a terms of referencing, you the core things that are probably your responsibilities, but that all changes. I think that's quite a legacy. As well. So we want to get to a point where we can have that context where clear on who's doing what within the organisation, both in terms of what you perform as a function, the structure of the organisation, the priorities that we're chasing right now, and empowered to do the work, but also to say no where it counts. And having easy means to go and actually escalate things in a way that makes sense because sometimes you will have a genuine conflict. And you want a simple way that's not, well, I'm going to go report this to that person. Because I mean, anytime, I certainly in my early career, hearing escalation was always a threat. You know, or it was after the fact that that was escalated and now I'm in trouble. So it was never a positive thing. I actually think escalation's fine. It's basically taking it up to the ref and going, hey, look, these are the two options. Ultimately, this is your decision. What do you want to do? And if she or he decides, well, yeah, we're gonna go down this path, cool, we'll go for it. And that's part of what we need to do sometimes, right? But it's having that. Ability to be clear on who's doing what and making a decision or making a call when we need to make a call.

Robert Winter On that escalation piece, I'm I think I'm quite fascinated by that one because I find escalation, if I would term it in a good way, should be about decision making. Organisations are fundamentally about delegated authority. Authority resides with a board, and then a board says, well, look, Robert, I'm going to appoint you as CFO. I will delegate to you the day-to-day ability to sign off on. But it does require that delegation. And in a sense, that would be using escalation in a good way. I don't have signing authority on the contract. Tim does. The decision or the request is effectively escalated to Tim to perform that. But I think again, coming back to this whole control process in organisations, escalation seems to be more of a control piece. I see that often with executives who like to come into a call because for them, I'm going to assert my authority. People will be nervous about me, worried that I might take it to the next level, therefore they're going to get on and do that thing. But I would argue if I'm in a meeting, I have no positional authority, so I can't give a person a directive to do it, and they're just choosing to ignore me, we then in a sense have a broken team structure because I shouldn't have to keep going to my boss Tim to constantly step into these meetings, to constantly escalate simply to get the basics of business done. Which I guess comes back to this greater good question. And the requirement of, if not deep business knowledge, I think certainly the ability to doubt and therefore to take the time to ask the relevant question. And I think we've all seen that. I mean, I management, particularly at an executive level and in Australia, has become an increasing revolving door, and particularly of people shifting between industries. I think you would anyone who's been in an industry and wanted to shift at a more junior level. You'll always be told, well, you're pivoting. You need to start back at the bottom. Yet an executive, for some reason, their skill sets are completely transferable and they can move from HR into IT. Doesn't matter. I'm an executive, that's absolutely fine. But then, yeah, you get that challenge of, but what is their understanding of the greater good within that context? So does that again come keep coming back to this trust, this well, I'll term it self-esteem. Does a person have enough self-esteem? To lead more from the back, not to be constantly dictating to teams, but to actually be asking them and bringing up those subject matter experts and be willing them to listen to them, rather than again working and deciding in a silo and then using that positional authority to just push through the organisation what they want.

Tim Newbold Yes.

Robert Winter Excellent. I love agreement.

Tim Newbold So this is this I think this is the thing, right? So we're talking both at the senior level here and then the role of the individual. And what you said there struck me it's something that I've I've been talking to one of my customers about recently. And so they're an they're an executive and they shared with me with frustration, great frustration, our individual team members don't understand the business. And I was shocked because I wondered, hang on. Whose fault is that? Like, is that really everyone else's fault that they don't understand this bloody business? Or is it the fact that you've not trained and taught them? And again, I'm going to keep saying this. Your listeners are going to be like, my gosh, this is the context guy. They don't have the context, right? So I we've got to get down to here's what we do, here's how we run as a business, and giving that strategic context. Now, the one thing I don't want to say is because this is the thing that I did from the start of my career. You don't fall into an organizational system and then go, Well, it is the way it is. I'm just gonna deal with this. Right. And I think a good portion of people do that. I'm not gonna say a large, the majority of the minority, but there are so many people where I see they just fall into an organisation and that is the story I started with, right? The guy who'd been there for eighteen years, he was just on the treadmill getting his time for money, and that was it. That's all he was really worried about. Now, that to me is a very depressing state to be in. If you are not there to challenge, and like I don't wanna I know there's a lot of people out there who are totally disempowered or, there's people in the world where they've just got a job and that's just to feed the family and they need to bloody well keep that job. I don't think this applies to them. But for the vast majority of people who are probably listening to this podcast, the if they don't understand the business, they need to go out get up and go and start to learn. Right? They've got to go and understand what are the systems at place, how does this work, how do we generate value, how do things happen around the business. 'Cause that's where you start to get those transferable skills. That's taking personal responsibility for it. Now again, the leaders should be doing that, but don't wait for them. That's a pointless activity. And at the same time, absolutely, you've then got the executives where they are still and to be honest, like I think you know, turn the ship around, right? Wonderful book. The na the author's name has just totally escaped me then. It is terrible. I'm gonna come back to it. Anyway, turn the ship around. It's a wonderful book about a captain who took over a submarine. And he was basically training for it, really getting ready to be able to run it. Now, every nuclear submarine, there might be a given class, but they all functionally are very different, right? They're built at different times, often by different organisations. So he learnt for a particular class of submarine, and on the day before he was going to be taking over that submarine as a captain, he had to shift across and they put him onto a different submarine. Now this other submarine had a good history, it was a relatively high performing. This other sub that he took over was absolutely disaster. So they had some of the high so some of the highest rates of accidents, incidents, biggest staff issues internally, all these sort of things. And all of a sudden he thought, well, gee, how am I gonna do this? David Marquet, that's the word. David Marquet is the author. He's like how David's like, how the hell am I gonna do this? I can't tell them what to do. I don't know what levers to pull and where all this sort of stuff is. It's a like a three or four hundred page manual that he has to study for twelve months before he can do this. And so he goes, Well, I'm basically screwed. I'm just gonna have to tell people here's where we're going and hope that they can figure it out. And he created that whole motion of basically certify, don't brief, I think is what he talked about, which is set the direction, get people clear on where they're going. But really at the end of that you then check in how did they go, right? It's not give them all the detail and then step them through the whole process. It is let them understand the strategic context. And so what he did over a sort of six or twelve month period was he would train the staff and they'd like, what do we want to do? What do we do now? And he would say, Well, what do you think we should do? And they'd be like, jeez. Well I guess, we're chasing this target and therefore we probably should, maybe we should shut down the air prop filters and all these sort of things, just goes a bit quieter and he's Yeah, it's a good decision, go for it. And all of a sudden he found, there'd be a mechanic and they would announce over the radio, hey, we're in enemy territory now, we've got to go quiet. And so the ma mechanic would normally a command of chain would Right, tools down to the mechanics. All the mechanics you know, okay, right, we're doing this now. Time for tools down. We've got to be quiet while we're in this territory. So this is where all of a sudden you start to build autonomy through direction. And I think, that is a wonderful book. Because it is and is like any listener who hasn't read it really should be listening, having a read. Cause it gives you a wonderful structure to follow to set that strategic context and empower your people. And you don't need to know what you're doing. Where I see it go wrong, I've seen so many, as you said, it'll be someone who was a CFO that becomes a CIO. Apparently those skills are transferable. Now, I think if they took that mindset of David Marquet and just sort of set people up to be successful that and trusted in their direct reports. I would suspect that actually be an incredibly successful CIO. Instead, they often come in with a certain mindset and a certain agenda. They pull in that command and control and it ends up in an absolute disaster. You and again, we see it time and time again. And this is why I think there's so many brittle technical systems out there. You look at the banks, most of their products are terrible. Some are actually really investing heavily into this. I look at the Commonwealth Bank, they've been doing a lot to look at the customer experience and how they can optimise things. So I'm inspired to see where this goes. But I think a lot of organisations traditionally have done a terrible job around this. So that's where we start to see that strategic context setting. And again, a leader who empowers their people, trusts in their skills and experience, all of a sudden things start to fall into place. So yeah, it's definitely you as an individual need to take initiative and be aware of how the business works and be aware of what we're trying to achieve. But also your role as a leader, set that strategic context, give people the permission and the freedom. The one thing that David would say is like the decision to fire a weapon, so you know, something where people are people's lives are gonna end. He maintained that control. Now, thankfully he was only ever in non conflict times when he was on that sub, but if he was in a conflict, he said, That's the one thing I'll take responsibility on. And I think probably most organisations there's certain things where you as a leader you've got to wear certain decisions. And as much as you don't want to, that's your responsibility. And so again, it might look different for different organisations, but sometimes there's things that you as a leader need to maintain that authority on a certain thing because it's not fair to push that onto others. But yeah, for the most part, things can be pushed down.

Robert Winter For the takeaway then for leaders listening, I feel the need to resurface that freeway operating at 100% example, because we did talk about that notion of space. And so just as Why as leader, yes, I can try and memorize the 400 page book, or yes, I can leverage my team's capabilities, but a key part of that would be them having the space to think, them having the space to decide, them having the space to learn. Just in the example I think of one of your clients who whose lament was my team just don't understand the business. Are you creating that space for them? Or are you keeping them so nose to the grindstone, so under the pump? It's fine to say, look, it's been three months, you should have learnt all this now, but hang on. Did every single day you keep them in endless rounds of meetings, endless new work coming down the pipeline that they've never had the opportunity to pause, open the book themselves and learn? So would that be one of the I suppose the hot tips for leaders about how do you create space in an organisation?

Tim Newbold Absolutely. Look, I think there's a few things that I'd want to want people to take away from because I think I know a lot of what we've spoken to today is, it's great words like con strategic context. Cool, yeah, look what the hell do you actually mean? If we if we put some practical steps around it, it is about creating space and working out what are the really key things that we need to work on. So, we've not really talked about the structure of OKRs at all today. And I don't think we need to. I think, really the message there is you're choosing one thing to focus on and you're measuring has that been solved. What we haven't talked too much about is what the common language that a whole organisation can share is problems that we're solving. Problems for customers, the customer experience isn't great in these particular areas for some particular reason. Internal problems, this process takes too long, this is too hard, this is making employees disengaged. Think about it in frames of problems. And some people go, it's so negative. I like to think about opportunities. I'm like, if you're into that sort of space, go get into the self-help books and all that sort of stuff. That's going to be your happy space. But if we're in business, we're here to solve problems. And in fact, that's you know, if you think about any business, mo the vast majority businesses, they get paid. Because they solve a problem for someone. So we want to be there solving problems internally as well. So if we're talking about here's the problems we're solving, and getting very clear, those are the focus, that's to me is one of the first steps. Get clear on what problem you're solving. The solution is secondary in my mind. We're thinking about here what problem are we solving? Where and again, projects are there to solve a problem. So think about what problem is that project solving. If you're part of a call center. What part of this is really inefficient that we want to make faster because this takes too long or takes too much time for us to be spending on this particular activity. That's another problem. So think about that problem that we're solving. Then creating the capacity. And this is where for any leader, the first problem I would solve if I've got a busy team is trying to reduce how busy they are. So whatever is creating that capacity suck, making them busy, find that. Some of those might be a very quick decision. We might be able to just go, hey, you know what? Let's stop doing that. That's one thing that we're not going to do. Build that capacity. But as soon as you've got a bit capacity, then you can find the next problem to solve. And it becomes a virtuous cycle. It's basically anyone who's done continuous improvement, it continuously you just reinvest a bit of that capacity that you've made back into improving it and becomes a very virtuous cycle. Now We've got the problem. We've ordered our time and started to free up ourselves. I think that's the other part. We're trying to improve processes, but also look at the time people are spending on things. And sometimes people hear this and they think this sounds really you know, draconian and very command and control. But get people to write down every minute of your day. What are spending doing? And do that for a few days. It's a pain in the ass for a few days. But what you all of a sudden is get is a really good insight around here's where things are at. Now there has to be a certain level of psychological safety because if someone needs a break, which they will, I think people we need to be realistic how productive people are every day. They're not doing eight hours of solid work a day, there's unless there's like there's the odd crazy person out there like that. You know, but like most people, they don't have that same space. So get the team to audit their time where they're spending their time and understand how much of that is business as usual, that sort of work that's never going to go away, where we can try and do optimisation and efficiency gains to build some of that capacity. Look at how much of their time is doing strategic work. And that might be projects, improvements change. And I'd tie this kind of sounds like it's a bit part of the BAU, but I like split out. What the other stuff is it just busy work? Stuff that just sort of pops up, that last minute meeting, that thing that I've just got to go and do, and I'm not quite sure what's come out of that, but I had to go and do that thing. Capture that. You do that for a few days, you get a very clear picture of what's going on. So you're clear on what problems you're solving, you're building in that capacity now to actually solve those problems, and you've got a bit of an audit there. You understand across the team, here's how busy we are. If your listeners take that way as a take that away as an action and actually go and do that with their teams, I think they're gonna get some very telling insights. But of course you gotta share the story with the team. Don't just go in and be I'm gonna I need to know what you're doing every second of the day. The context is key here. There it is again. I've got I a bingo card for context.

Robert Winter We definitely should have one. We can maybe put some graphics up on screen context what we mentioned. While I agree I don't particularly want to get into the mechanisms of OKRs, I am nonetheless very interested in the mechanism of measurement in an organisation. Yeah. I think a lot of people have, endlessly said, you Peter Drucker's adage, Drucker didn't say it, but the adage has survived anyway. What gets measured gets managed, or what doesn't get measured doesn't get managed. And certainly there is a

Tim Newbold Yeah, it's a good question.

Robert Winter A degree of truth to that, in the sense that if I have no oversight of my team whatsoever, I don't know what they're working on at any point in the day, how can I meaningfully manage them? But there's also conversely, I think it was Goodhart who observed that when a measure is adopted as a target, it ceases to be a good measure because the focus comes, how do I satisfy the target, versus are we measuring something meaningful? So I'm interested in your views on measurement in general. I mean, whether it's OKRs or any other framework in an organisation, the challenges of what happens when we set a goal, which in another word for it is just a target that we're aiming for. How do we prevent that from eroding the work and the value of the measures? And how do we stop them from becoming that self-fulfilling prophecy? I mean, I think earlier when you spoke about some managers who they'll set an OKR that's very easy to achieve, then they can just get green on everything and look at how successful we are. But they're not really stretching the organizational capability via their process.

Tim Newbold I think for me it's a it's a very very good question to ask. 'Cause I think when we look at the quote in its entirety, and we're going off the back of my memory here, there is a slight tweak to it. I think when we say it straight as is, when you know, when's when something becomes a measure as set as a target, it all of a sudden becomes a cease to be a good measure. I think we have target set and where someone's job is dependent on it, I think this is also what dru maybe drucker said or it could be part of Goodhart's law. But where we make people's jobs depend on it, all of a sudden that's where it goes wrong, right? And really what they're saying there is what does that mean? Like am I gonna get fired for this? It doesn't even really mean that. It means either I've got some sort of incentive structure behind that measure, or I am going to have some sort of political risk anywhere where it's gonna be a perceived failure across the organisation. Anything where it's gonna have a negative consequence on me, again, whether it's income, whether it's going to get fired or anything like that. Where we have a psychological safe organisation where I can stretch, I can challenge myself, I can give things a bit of a go, and if I fail and learn, that's okay. All of a sudden that's where the magic of having a measure comes out. And it's actually no longer turning it into a bad measure because I'm not going to game it really. What's with the issue we're talking about here? And Goodhart's law is actually talking about is where things go wrong because people will gain the system. They're going to try and make that number successful unfairly and not really be thinking about the outcome. Now, this is where with OKRs we talk about having a 70% stretch. You should be achieving about 70% of your goals. And literally that the customer I was talking about earlier in Teleos, we've been with them since for about six years now. They have got it down to an art where literally they actually have a regular check-in and they score. That's probably one of the other key things when it comes to tracking goals, having those regular check-ins. But having that visibility and as they see, they report to board and the board comes back with feedback and questions when they're hitting a hundred percent of OKRs. So as those targets go up too high, and so this is where we're encouraging, and they're not gonna be like, you hit 85 rather than 80, that's not good. But if the organisation, the overall stats, they're starting to hit, ninety, ninety five, nearly a hundred percent of their goals, the board go, hmm, are you trying hard enough or you're going a bit easy here? And all of a sudden that creates a magic sort of conversation that comes off the back of it. So psychological safety is what's key for this to work. Absolutely, if you make someone's job depend on hitting a target, no matter what, that number will be hit in some shape or form. It could be through gaming the system, it could be through flat out fraud, but they will hit it. So my advice is don't make people's jobs or incentive structures and don't make it unsafe to be measuring and achieving metrics or missing those targets that you're setting.

Robert Winter If we can turn to strategy for a moment, because I think that two words if I were to be interviewed and say, Robert, what two words are overused in organisations? Number one is leadership and number two is strategy. Everybody seems to be want to be a leader developing a strategy. Whereas in reality, at best, most people are actually managers articulating a vision, or if they're more data-minded, managers articulating a metric that they want their team to arrive at. But it's obviously not in the realm of strategic thinking, which again I would certainly say is very much a skill to be developed. It's not something that just magically happens when you get a role.

Tim Newbold It's mostly designed, right? You build the house, you've got the strategic roof, the pillars, you've got to have three or four pillars and the flight foundations. That's your strategy, isn't it?

Robert Winter Exactly. Exactly. That's it. I've got the house. I have the graphic. I put some words on the graphic. That's is that not the strategy? Or conversely, someone prepares a very, very long document, but its sheer length and weight means over five hundred pages. Here's our organisation strategy. I was talking to someone who's a CEO of a rail operator and he No, no, our corporate strategy and there are obviously a multi-billion dollar business sits on about a couple of pages effectively because we need to keep it tight enough that any manager within the organisation can give me a golden sentence or can in a handful of their own words articulate what we're about as an organisation and where we're going. Do you find going into a lot of organisations, that's one of the first challenges? They'll bring you in to do something. Obviously in this case it might be hey, we need OKRs to deliver our strategy more effectively. But you look at it and go, there's no strategy here. How do you how do you approach that with leaders?

Tim Newbold Yeah, look, it's an interesting conversation. If we I let's rewind back to the strategic house and what a strategy is and what a strategy isn't. You know, I think my what I like to talk about is it's a diagnosis of an opportunity, some sort of big opportunity that the business is going to take advantage of. And j typically that diagnosis comes with a assessment of here's the opportunity. It's gonna come with some principles or coherent sort of I guess you'd say guiding sort of yeah, guiding principles or policies, if you want to call it that. And also a high-level set of actions. Now, not a detailed plan, but a high-level set of steps that we're gonna take to take advantage of that opportunity. Now, if that's what a good strategy looks like, you can usually tell pretty quickly when you come into an organisation. Even without having zero knowledge of the industry, whether they've got something that is a good chance of being a good strategy. So again, you see the strategic chaos, which always has customer as one of the pillars, you know that you're absolutely I don't know what right what language rating you've got on here, Robert, so I'm not gonna say it, but you're you're in strife, right? We'll say you're in strife. So right, that's where I know there's a lot of work. Often with that as well, there's because there's such a fundamental gap around the understanding of strategy with executive teams that produce those type of documents, that is one of our filters that we use in terms of you ask the question, who do we not work with? That's a big red flag for us. If they acknowledge and go, yeah, we just put something together just so we could communicate something, but we know we need to totally redo it, I that I might be a bit more open. But if that was like, yeah, that's our strategy and they're happy with it, see you later. I'm gone. I know I've got absolutely no hope in that organisation. Now, for other organisations, yeah, I'm actually quite okay with the in-depth long strategy packs, the ones that really have explored in a lot of depth. That is probably me personally, and that's a bit more my style. But as a communication tool, that's absolutely terrible. And so I agree. I think having a very clear couple of pages explanation that recaps on the vision, why are we here, the diagnosis around here's some of the things that we're focusing on. Model what it looks like, those high level actions. And that is enough for direction for teams to go and work out, okay, here's how we're going to get there. And really that's where OKR comes into its own. It should be taking a valuable slice out of your strategy every single quarter. If we get that structure right, all of a sudden things become much simpler. Now, where I often see that gap exists is and often where I need to do a lot of work is where the strategy is really just a long plan of initiatives, like a heap of different activities, things to be done. And again, there might be projects, but all that kind of view of just the stuff we're going to do, I get a little bit nervous if that is the starting point of a strategy. Where we talk about here's the outcomes, here's the strategic problems we're solving, here's the diagnosis that we've got, all of a sudden that builds that confidence. You might have some ideas. But I find honestly, every single time, and maybe I just haven't been in an environment where this happens, but every single time I've come along to a strategy that is a long list of initiatives and projects and things like that, it usually doesn't work out. And I think the reason is that often we're not looking at starting from where does t do teams have capacity? And we're also not focusing on those key leverage points. We're falling into that trap earlier that the executive team has a view that is correct around what needs to be done when and how versus the teams bubbling that sort of thing up. So absolutely strategy and that that sort of ability for the teams to be able to get clear on it and have it in a nice succinct form is absolutely critical. And this is where again, we're about we're about to see if you're looking at your retention metrics, we're gonna see it drop right now. I'm gonna say change management, right? Okay, now we're probably down to about a quarter of the audience. People find it so boring. And I remember I had a with in our custom with our customer cohort, we have people come along and they will get to attend different speakers. So typically over the summer, every month we have a speaker and you come along and you know we have someone come in and talk. And normally I come up with really cool titles for the session to get as many of our customers to come along. And this one I was like, we've got change management. I'm like, this is gonna be a we're gonna crush it. Like I don't even need to put anything on this. I'll just say change management. Everyone's gonna love this. And we had, I think, about five people turn up. [Name withheld] was the person who ran the session who has her own podcast and she is like she is amazing. And this was no fault of her own. This was all me, just thinking that people would enjoy that. And again, it's such a shame. People don't value change management. So that is what you know, it's one thing to create a good strategy, but the change management of getting people around it and interested in it and communicating it with stories so that they engage, that's usually where it goes wrong. And yeah, anyway, so that's I don't know what we're down to now, maybe ten percent of the audience, but we'll better change subjects before we lose them all.

Robert Winter Well no, I was about to say for those ten percent who've remained, I mean, here is that little bit of gold. I mean, whatever you're trying to implement in your organisation. Obviously AI is very much the hot topic at the moment, but frankly it doesn't matter. If you're not doing engagement, have I got are staff engaged? Have I got our customers engaged? And if you're not doing the change process, and no, change is not, have we drafted a press release? Change is not, did we put a couple of things on socials? Change is really looking at who are the stakeholders involved and are we moving the needle? Are we actually getting that two-way feedback? We've communicated X, we've observed Y. Therefore, we're now at Z point. Or are we just simply sending out this communication into the world? Or even worse, not wanting to communicate. There's that fear that if I communicate, I've now actually put a target on something. And by target here, I'm more meaning a target on me as an object to be either flayed or praised, depending on the success of the initiative. And that's where I think that that disconnect comes because people almost fear that level of engagement because. Once I start working with broader stakeholders in the business outside of my team, I don't have that control. When I start working with customers, I have even less control because I can't dictate to them. And that I think becomes the fear point which I think see so many people run away from change management because there's that notion of accountability without control. And that is actually very, very hard to hold and very hard to discharge in an effective way.

Tim Newbold Hmm, absolutely, absolutely. And that's where I think, it's yeah, if people just double down on the concept of change management and actually really again think about meeting people where they are today and taking them on that journey, organisations just be such a better, happier place.

Robert Winter They would. They would and it really does solve so many business problems. It gives you a better strategy because people are engaged. And again, coming back, I think, to the one of the things we spoke about earlier, this notion in project land, we've got this idea of the RACI, who's responsible, accountable, consulted, or informed. And while in day to day team management that, a formal RACI might not, be necessary, there's still that value to the informal one. What is it that people are doing? Who really needs to be let known what's going on. And also I think as a manager, how do you get yourself in that position where you don't need to be on all emails, you don't need to be in every Slack Teams Zoom conversation that's going. How is it though that I can maintain that engagement? And I think one of the other threads that came through was the notion of what do one-on-ones look like? What do team stand-up meetings look like? Are they effectively scaffolded or are they more chat sessions that everybody feels a bit uncomfortable about and therefore it becomes fortnightly, monthly, annually, or just stops happening, stops happening at all and then we don't have change, we don't have engagement fundamentally.

Tim Newbold It's funny, it's when you know, you kind of know in the start of a one on one meeting where the person, if you know their the your manager and they're kind of like quickly trying to figure out what are we talking about here, you they're kind of looking up their notes. There's been no pre work, no preconception they're trying to hope. Or probably even worse is they're not even trying to look at their old notes, they're just coming like, how's it going? Yeah, that's not gonna be true.

Robert Winter Let's just roll in. No, I think not so much a hot tip, more a plea. Do your pre-work before coming into a meeting. I think turning up unorg disorganised is just in fact, it not even disorganised, I would say unorganised. I know for those with a dictionary, they'll go, Unorganised isn't a word, it's disorganised. No, disorganised just means you're not organised. Unorganised means you're actually anti-organisation. It's a it's a word I'd like to coin. People who actively militate against the notion of having a note, recalling something, and they just want to go from memory.

Tim Newbold Yeah, that's like you it's always concerning where I like I think about many people in my career where you that their style is I'm just gonna remember this, I don't need my notes, and you no, no, you don't. You're not capable of that. I've seen this many times over. You can't be so crass to say, just write it down.

Robert Winter Let's close out if we may. Bit of a lightning round, some rapid fire questions, maybe a rapid fire response. I find some guests love a longer response. I'm open to both. One we'll stick maybe with OKRs just for a little bit, or you can even just do a leadership. One of either OKR or a leadership cliche you'd love to retire permanently.

Tim Newbold Look, there is so many. I'm gonna stick with an OKR one because I think it is the fundamental mistake. We talked a lot today about choosing a problem to solve and then focusing on that, that focus on that problem to solve. One focus, one objective, two to three key results. If your people go and do some research, your listeners go and do some research and they start looking at like how do I write OKRs? If they come across our stuff, they're gonna be fine. Plug for OKR, quick start there. But if they're just Googling and heck, if they're even if they're asking Claude for my gosh, again, here's another plug. We've got an AI agent that can help you write OKRs. Don't just ask Claude or ChatGPT to do it for you. It's gonna butcher it. The reason is the training and the theory out there is so bad on it. It says five objectives with four to five key results. We're talking about 25 data points. And in fact, I've got a quick story to share with you. When we first started working with Domino's, they had seven objectives and I don't know how many key results, but way too many. And they were at the point of throwing out OKRs. We didn't start it with them, but they'll bring in us bringing us in but with about to finish it. And we finally got them to a point of down to one OKR for the company. This is a forty thousand person business. One OKR and in that quarter they got a thirty percent increase in sales. Now, again, I would heavily argue that that was cause by the focus because they looked and came up with a very clear plan across multiple dimensions on how they're going to achieve that outcome. And when you see something like that, that is absolutely magic. So yes, the key the sort of lesson that people would have read from some of the earlier books, five objectives, five key results, kill that. Get down to one. One objective, two to three key results.

Robert Winter Simplicity. Andy Grove or Peter Drucker?

Tim Newbold I think Andy Grove is amazing and he's done amazing things and in fact a lot of computing today what we have is because of him. But Drucker is just such a fantastic inspiration from management theory perspective. You know, especially with the work that he did, a lot of it around factory workers and these kind of things, a world where pretty traditionally we'd would have, you very structured ways of working, very enforced with it within type limits. And he brought in that sort of mode of empowerment, a big part of helping propagate the lean movement across manufacturing and then bringing that into the office world. Yeah, by a mile, Drucker. Again, Andy Grove, love him, but you know, he created the framework and how it gave us computing that we a lot of computing that we have today. But I think, Drucker has that across all organisations input and impact.

Robert Winter And also a phenomenal philosopher with a deeply classically grounded education. There's a lot to be said for the type of systems and the type of institutions that produce the druckas of this world.

Tim Newbold Yeah, absolutely. I think a and a student in systems thinking as well and therefore also eventually a leader in that space, I think that is something that is massively underrated to this day.

Robert Winter Yeah. The most overrated metric in business.

Tim Newbold So I think there's a there's a few. If I so I came from a product and tech background, I mentioned this to you. I think there's old school metrics that we learnt were a bad idea and we seem to make the same mistake. So I'm gonna come up with an internal sort of team metric and gonna give another version of it in a moment. And then let's talk about external metric. I know there's a lightning round, so I'll keep it pretty punchy. So originally when looking at how productive a developer was, they would measure how many lines of code they had. Now all of a sudden what are you incentivising there? More code. Make inefficient, long, lengthy code. Rather than ideally for code to work well, it's going to be short, succinct, very quick to execute. So eventually they realise, no, this is creating a huge amount of waste and you know we're just encouraging the wrong things here. So there was a variety of different measures that people would try and come up with. Very popular for a while there and a good like 20 years and still use a lot of velocity. So, how many stories are a team getting, or user stories or features are a team getting through? Or even if you're estimating size, sometimes it'd be based on you know how big a store a feature was. You'd have a numbered system for that, and you'd sort of multiply it by how many of those you got through. That metric is so easily gamed. It is based on information that doesn't really tell you anything, right? So, how long does it take to build a feature? Why is that useful? Now there's measures out there that might be useful, like the time it takes for you to get an average feature done so that we can try and reduce the average. We want to be more efficient, we're trying to be more effective. That can be great. But velocity, which is usually a just a cumulative number, it is not helpful at all. So I look at those kind of metrics and go, it's crazy. We're now seeing again with AI, where we're incentivising teams, the teams with the highest use of credits or tokens as part of so especially engineering teams. They're getting the rewards and recognition. So what are people doing? They are absolutely slamming these agents with them as much rubbish as they can. They're not trying to be efficient with their token usage. Rather than throwing an MD file at it, which is pretty efficient, they're going to throw a PDF at it and the thing has to burn through that complex document. And that's going to get them to win. And now these organisations are wondering why the hell it costs so much or their AI efforts are so expensive. So we are, I just know. We're doomed to make this mistake time and time again. But these types of output based measures, I don't know, they kill me. The other one is honestly when it comes to external customer sa customer satisfaction, I think customer satisfaction is a great score when you really don't understand what makes your customer happy. And so, Ergo, understand what the hell your customer likes and therefore you can actually measure what delights them and makes them happy. So yeah. I still use it every now and again with our customers because that's all they've got and I'll work with it, but I hate it so much.

Robert Winter I do love that. I really do. And finally, the fastest way to spot OKR washing.

Tim Newbold I would say you've got the what I call OKR theatre. So we go through the quarterly thing, we get together, we come up with our plans, we go, okay, here it is, here's our OKRs. They're probably not metrics, they're probably just a to do list. And we then go, right, off we go. And that's the last we speak of it. And then we come back a quarter later and then talk about all the stuff that we think we did to make that goal happen. But it's always like a bit of a last minute made up story. It is OKR theatre, it is such a waste of time. If you're doing that, just stop. You're not gonna lose anything. You know, for people that are championing OKRs and that's what your people are doing, if you don't have a way to get into the teams and get them actually checking in on their goals, honestly, if this is the most important thing they're working on, it should be weekly. That should feel barely enough. Again, like this is the most critical thing, really is weekly checking on it too much. So if you're not having that luck and you don't know how to get into the teams and get them using it, just wrap it up, save yourself the pain.

Robert Winter Tim Newbold on the subject of leadership. Good night and good luck.

Tim Newbold Thank you so much, Robert. Have a wonderful evening.

Transcript machine generated, lightly corrected.