Strategy Meets Reality Podcast

No Silver Bullet: Reconnecting Strategy, Change, and Leadership with Steve Hearsum

• Season 1 • Episode 11

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What if the real barrier to change isn’t resistance—but the stories leaders tell themselves to avoid doing the work?

In this episode of Strategy Meets Reality, Mike Jones is joined by Steve Hearsum—consultant, coach, and author of No Silver Bullet—to unpack the deep disconnect between strategy, leadership, and organisational change.

This isn’t about frameworks or toolkits. It’s about the mess, the uncertainty, and the anxiety that real change creates—and what happens when leaders fall back on control, comms theatre, and performative fixes.

Steve brings sharp insight into why so many change efforts fail to stick, the myths that keep organisations stuck, and the work needed to build capability, coherence and culture from the inside out.

🔍 In this episode:

  • Why leadership development often misses the point
  • The gap between strategy and actual change
  • How anxiety and fragility show up in executive behaviour
  • Why clarity is useful—but coherence is critical
  • The danger of “burning platform” narratives
  • What it really means to build organisational capability
  • Why communication isn’t the problem—it’s the shortcut

🎧 Keywords: organisational change, leadership, capability, strategy execution, culture, complexity, communication, change management, OD, Steve Hearsum

📘 Read No Silver Bullet: Bursting the Bubble of the Organisational Quick Fix: https://amzn.eu/d/bUXQWSn
 

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💬 Connect with host Mike Jones → https://www.linkedin.com/in/mike-h-jones/

Steve Hearsum (00:00)
I'd argue that if you're not

actually doing something to do with change in a leadership role, then what on earth are you doing? Because you don't get many leading through stability programs or heads of status quo.

most of the time in organizations, slide decks are just containers for anxiety. And the bigger and prettier it is, the bigger the amount of anxiety being contained is.

in your invariable need for speed,

How do you know you're running 120 miles an hour in the right direction?

Mike Jones (00:57)
Welcome back to Strategy Meets Reality podcast. Thank you, Steve, for joining me today. It's been a pleasure to have you on. I've been a great fan of your work and it's been a pleasure that I've now met you twice in person, which is always good. Yeah, yeah. Just for the listeners, do you mind giving a bit of intro about yourself and what you've been up to lately?

Steve Hearsum (01:10)
Twice. Yeah. You poor devil.

Sure. So in a nutshell, I'm a consultant, a coach and a supervisor of particularly consultants and change practitioners. tend to do three things really. I specialize in leadership practice work because I believe that most conventional leadership development, much of it is a waste of time and money. do skills development and capability building of change and OD practitioners and consultants. And the third thing probably goes under the big bucket of culture.

But what I've been spending a lot of my time doing recently is is really not recording an audio book. So my book that came out last year, I've now decided to turn it into an audio book, which meant I was in the basement of a studio in Brighton for the best part of two weeks talking. So.

Mike Jones (01:57)
wow.

There's a lot of movies that I think started with that, it? Yes. And I'll, I'll link Steve's great book, No Silver Bullets to the podcast. So you can all have a read of it. Totally recommend it. Which I think leads nicely onto first question, which is, in your, in your practice, we see organizations do a lot of things wrong.

Steve Hearsum (02:01)
think so, yeah.

Thanks Mike.

Hmm.

Mike Jones (02:22)
Definitely when it comes to sort of change in strategy, what are the reoccurring blind spots that you keep running into?

Steve Hearsum (02:28)
I was thinking about this before we came online and I'm thinking about this, particularly from the change perspective, which overlaps with your focus, which is strategy. so we can be interested in seeing how we unpick these. But I kind of come up with a sequence of things and I'm not suggesting it's linear, but it kind of fell out as a sequence of things. So the first thing is, is how organizations define and construe change.

Mike Jones (02:42)
Mm.

Steve Hearsum (02:56)
So what are the assumptions here around the nature of change? And what I mean by that is, is it something that they assume that can be planned? Is it something that they assume is part of everybody's work regardless of what they do? Or is it just the trained specialists? Do they have any kind of idea or acceptance that change is actually a core component of any leadership role? I mean, I'd argue that if you're not

actually doing something to do with change in a leadership role, then what on earth are you doing? Because you don't get many leading through stability programs or status quo or heads of status quo.

Mike Jones (03:28)
Yeah, yeah.

Steve Hearsum (03:31)
So that kind of says to me that it's part of everybody's work. So the assumptions bit is clear and that leads to what seems to happen in many organizations is the thingification of change. So you hear this in very simple terms of phrase. We need to land the change.

Mike Jones (03:46)
Hmm.

Steve Hearsum (03:46)
is probably the most clear example. It has the word the put in front of it. So it's been objectified and turned into an abstraction. The reason I suspect that is done is because it makes it face value simpler. It makes it less anxiety inducing because if we've turned it into a thing, then we can just shove it around. can project manage it. We can give it to a to a center of excellence. They can do it. And more importantly, we can advocate responsibility. We can shove it into somebody else.

Mike Jones (04:05)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Steve Hearsum (04:14)
And I've got other stuff, but I'll stop there. So I've got about three other things, but I I'd say I'll stop there because you may have some responses to that.

Mike Jones (04:19)
No, no, no. You're right, definitely with the change. It's the same with strategy. It's almost become, there's a charade around it, I think tries to make it easier. So what I mean that is the change doesn't become an adaption over time for a reason. And what we're trying to do, we're doing this because something has changed or something's happened in the external environment and our response is this.

we don't have the capability or we do have the capability. If we don't have the capability, then we need to do something. But for an outcome or an effect we're trying to achieve, I think they missed that for what you said, they say it's a thing and then there's a song and dance around it. It has to have a name. It can't just be we're doing these things. It has to be this massive all singing dancing thing. Yeah, yeah.

Steve Hearsum (05:07)
project. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, I mean, you use the C word in there, which I think is really important. So let's pull that out, the capability word, because I've worked on a number of capability building programs in large corporates, where what we've had is we've had cohorts of often very talented internal change agents. Now the label is kind of secondary. We're talking about a mix of all development people, design people, change people, maybe some HR people. But the common thread here is all of them were

identified as people who would be needed to develop their change skills, their internal consulting skills to do good change work. But in almost every context, what happened, there's three big examples I can think of. No soon had I finished working with them. Then the organization went into consultation for redundancies and that community was put into the pot for

for headcount reduction. And what would happen is some of them would be redeployed, some of them would take redundancies, some of them would walk, some of them would be left, you know, scratching their backsides, wondering what on earth was going on. And if you look at that with a little bit of distance, you kind of go, hang on a minute, what's just happened here? An organization has just paid six figure sum often to put in one case, dozens and dozens of people through this program. And they've now just

moved to get rid of the people who are probably the best equipped to facilitate change in the organization. And by the way, this happened to me when I worked for the Guardian as well. So I've been in the middle of this. I've lived it from first person and not just third person. And I find that intriguing. And there's a clue into this in terms of what's going on. I interviewed as part of a diagnostic phase, senior leader in a big UK corporate as in a run up to one of these programs.

Mike Jones (06:47)
Yes.

Steve Hearsum (06:57)
And this person said to me, we need these people to operate at several levels above their pay grade.

Now think about that for a moment, right? So we need these people who we want to do good change work. We need them to be as good at critical thinking, as good at communication, as good at influencing, as good at dealing with conflict, as good strategically as senior leaders. But we will not give them the same money, the same status and the same authority. And my hypothesis is it's part of an unconscious psychological spitting.

Mike Jones (07:02)
Okay. Yeah.

Steve Hearsum (07:27)
in many organisations. It's an abdication of responsibility. If we give it to these people, then we don't have to take responsibility ourselves.

Mike Jones (07:34)
Yes, we talk about in strategy this.

metaphorical wall between the people that do the thinking or the strategy or the decisions and then they throw it over the wall to the people they expect to do it. And it's a massive disconnect.

Steve Hearsum (07:48)
That is interesting. So where I've immediately gone is so what is going on here in the conversations? I'm getting quite excited about this in the conversations around both strategy and change in an organization.

Who is involved in those conversations? And to what extent are they joined up? And when are they sometimes deliberately uncoupled because it would be too anxiety inducing to couple them?

Mike Jones (08:15)
Yeah. And I will see it in a sense that there's a relationship between the external environment, the strategy, and I'm not talking about the people doing the strategy, but the strategy and all change, the ability to adapt and the organisation currently in their relationship with the external. And there's all these connections that go in there that are feedback loops. Yeah.

we know that every time we do something, especially in an environment, it's gonna changing away that we hoping to expect or not expect. And then we've got to go, well, what does this now mean to us in relative context of what we've already agreed, what changes are going on, what direction are we given? Is it still valid?

Steve Hearsum (08:57)
So here's a question for you, Mike, as I hear you talk.

When you, because you tend to be working with senior leaders and organizations around strategy and how they make meaning of strategy and how they come up with a new strategy, correct? That's your sweet spot. When you scaffold those conversations, how often do you hear clients able to, as they talk about the strategy for the organization, are they able to then look in the mirror and go,

Mike Jones (09:09)
Mm, yeah,

Steve Hearsum (09:24)
So what that means for me and for us is that we need to and specifically are they are they able to have that conversation around the stuff where it's uncomfortable for them? So for example, they may need to become less command and control. They may need to show up differently or whatever. Do you see much awareness of that?

Mike Jones (09:44)
Um, we, we do, but I think that's a lot to do and not initially when we go in, um, like I can start asking around, what, what is your strategy for a start, which normally is quite an interesting one. Cause they'll show me a PowerPoint slide that they made to look like a, a Greek villa. Um, and the load of just nonsense and then, and there's no connection with all the other ongoing stuff that's happening in the organisation, the expectations. There's no link. Um,

But I suppose the process that we go through, there always is that point where it gets uncomfortable for me when I'm doing it because we can model as much as we want, but I don't know when suddenly it's gonna hit him in the face and go, wow, that's what we need to do. That's clear to me. And then we turn it into going, okay, so now you understand the maneuvers you need to do. What does that mean?

What does that mean to you as a leader? What does that mean to the organization? What does that mean to all the other stuff that you committed to? What does that mean to your suppliers? You know, we start to really try and pull that out and it gets really uncomfortable.

Steve Hearsum (10:52)
So

what's the discomfort?

Mike Jones (10:53)
It's good question. I think discomfort is trying to translate from what we've agreed to action.

Steve Hearsum (11:00)
So my interpretation of that is, is you get to the point where they move from the theoretical to the practical. They have to go from, looks great on paper to flipping out. This is what it's actually going to mean. This is what it's going to mean for me. I am going to have to take responsibility for this or whatever, whatever it is. Is that what you're getting at? And then they're faced. And my extrapolation that is, and this is something I talk about in the book, is they're then faced with not knowing.

Mike Jones (11:12)
Yes.

Yeah, yeah.

Mmm, yes.

Steve Hearsum (11:27)
They're faced with not knowing, for example, but they don't know what to do when it comes to a particular strategy or activity, or they don't know what's going to happen. Simply the anxiety of not knowing whether or not the strategy will work.

Mike Jones (11:40)
Yeah. And that's a really good point. there's that shroud around the perfect strategy or the perfect change. Now we will do this thing and it will happen like this. It's that linear cause relationship that if we do these activities, then we will get this outcome. Where what we're trying to say to them is that you could do these activities, but you've got to observe to see if you're going to get those outcomes.

Steve Hearsum (11:50)
Yeah.

Mike Jones (12:05)
And I think, know, too often, I think it's too ingrained with people, leaders and organisations, is this sense of predictability that, you it's almost, we've reducted it to simple things that we do this, like we get together, we have a fun day, we create a vision statement, we get in a internal comms team or a, consultancy comms team, we make a big flashy show about it, we tell our people.

and it will happen.

Steve Hearsum (12:30)
You me thinking again here, which is... So one of the things I think about a lot and I write about is collusive behaviors, unconscious collusive behaviors between clients and solution providers. And one of my clients told me a story recently that still has me kind of banging my head quietly against the nearest wall. And they were describing to me in this very large global corporate how...

Mike Jones (12:41)
Mm.

Steve Hearsum (12:56)
the senior leadership team, the exec, were really insistent on working with a quite high profile search and selection business who, I don't know you've come across them, but quite a few of these organizations set up leadership and change practices alongside. And I've not come across one that I've not heard bad things about. I'm sure there are some good ones, but I've not heard of any yet. And this agency very excitedly on this call with the global team,

Mike Jones (13:10)
Yes, yeah.

Steve Hearsum (13:21)
three OD people sitting quietly just listening to this said we've got this brilliant way we've come up with to embed culture change.

Mike Jones (13:31)
Hahaha.

Steve Hearsum (13:32)
and the OD team sat there going, okay, this is going to be interesting, and then proceeded to reveal that the brilliant idea was posters.

Mike Jones (13:39)
Yeah, I would have banged my head against this as well.

Steve Hearsum (13:40)
Now,

right, and my point here is...

If that is the level of thinking in the interconnected systems of senior search consultancies and the executives who they cater to and who they snooze that goes unchallenged, is the problem maybe a wee bit more difficult for people like me and you than we realise?

Mike Jones (14:03)
Yeah. it is. Especially like, cause you're the same as me. We're, we're small, more bespoke consultancy, more of choice rather than anything like that. And we're real practitioners and we, we take pride in our craft and we want to do things correct and not correct. know we...

Steve Hearsum (14:04)
genuine question.

Mike Jones (14:22)
do it seriously. And it's hard because when we're going up against these big machines that are saying, no, this is what you're doing, it's all pretty shiny stuff. Then we're going, no, actually it's gonna be a lot harder than that. And actually we need to commit to these things. That shiny way of going, what, I just need a few posters. Yeah, that'd be great. It does make it very difficult.

Steve Hearsum (14:42)
Yeah,

it's anxiety management and it contains it. Oh, totally. It's... Yeah, where did I go? I had a quick series of lateral jumps. That's where I went to, was it got me wondering about therefore how power is exercised in relation to this. So, I was talking last week or the week before to Niels Flegging, who I think we talked about last week when I saw you.

Mike Jones (14:45)
Yeah, yeah.

Yes, yeah, yeah,

I've connected with them.

Steve Hearsum (15:06)
I was

talking to Niels about his work because he's got a very clear methodology and approach, beta codex, and he's really clear that unless the most senior person in the organization is up for it and is committed to it and will basically be in the organization for about 100 days without any holidays and is going to be available, then he won't work with them.

And his line is simply that it will stand or fall on the most powerful person in the organization. So there's no point in doing any of the change work unless they're in.

And it's quite challenging for someone like me, know, because there's this view also in OD circles that change can come bottom down, know, sort of from the bottom up. It can be kind of more viral or disruptive. But equally, if I link that to some of the research around leadership development, know, what Geoffrey Pfeffer says is that one of the problems with leadership development is that

Mike Jones (15:50)
Yeah, yeah,

Steve Hearsum (16:02)
You have a brilliant program. Everybody gets spat out, fully activated, ready to go and do good work. And they'll revert within a few months if the culture they're going back into isn't actually receptive to them, if it hasn't really changed. So I'm just chewing on what this book Power means for what we're talking about, I guess.

Mike Jones (16:13)
Yes.

Yeah. this sort of, and I agree with, both, you need to have the top aligned. even when you're looking at transfer training, know, constant things in transfer training is that, you've got peer support, know, the content relevant and actually helpful. And then the other one is, is leadership support. does the leadership buy into this and are they going to support you to transfer that in? When you think about the bottom

bottom up, that's where you start getting into decentralized decision making. And, is that, that context they're ready and available that people can, be given a clear intent about what you want and allow them to understand how to deliver it. You haven't got that and it's all just down. Then it becomes very difficult for something to bottom up to come happen.

Steve Hearsum (17:07)
Yeah, absolutely. But I was cooked by words you used there, which is...

what do you understand by aligned and what's aligned enough?

Mike Jones (17:15)
That's a question. It's not aligned as in... Well, I prefer the word coherence. you know, are we... Yeah, so... And what we mean by that is that do we have enough clear intent, you know, minimal constraints, but there will be some constraints in there that gives them the freedom of action. And that then enables them to adapt.

Steve Hearsum (17:21)
Okay, nice.

Mike Jones (17:37)
under changing circumstances. If we're too aligned and there's no freedom of action, then we've got nowhere to go. We'll just crumble as soon as things happen.

Yeah, and that sort of coherence comes from a very viable systems model, system thinking approach.

Steve Hearsum (17:52)
because you can have too much alignment, too much coherence, because that's when you get homogeneity and homeostasis. Yeah.

Mike Jones (17:54)
Yes. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. And it's always

that balance, isn't it? Because you, this is where you have the argument with these organisations about completely flat organisations and holocaust and all this stuff. ⁓ Yeah. And you know, it challenged those because it goes the other way is that you might not have enough coherence or alignment and then it can, you could rapidly go into chaos and organisations always balancing this thing between stability and chaos.

Steve Hearsum (18:09)
Or leprosy,

Well, one of the things about this is a bit of tangent, but I'm going to throw it in because it fascinates me and I don't hear anybody really talking about it. Have you come across some snakes in suits? It's book co-authored by David Heyer, the guy who came up with the psychopathy test. And in it, he talks at one point about how the move towards

Mike Jones (18:34)
No, I haven't,

Alright, yeah, yeah. Sneak suits.

Steve Hearsum (18:48)
flat structures and more autonomous working and pulling down the bureaucracy. In some respects, yeah, useful, but the problem is that creates the conditions that narcissists and sociopaths thrive in.

Mike Jones (19:01)
yeah, yeah, yeah.

Steve Hearsum (19:02)
because they work well when they don't have to worry about boundaries that will force them to be consistent in terms of how they show up in multiple.

Mike Jones (19:15)
Mm-hmm.

Steve Hearsum (19:16)
free to show up however they want in multiple contexts. They can present whatever version of themselves they wish to.

Mike Jones (19:21)
Yeah.

Steve Hearsum (19:22)
depending on what they want. And so his argument is that the move towards that kind of structure increases the likelihood of those sorts of personalities and people to actually gain more influence. So I don't have an answer. I just have a kind of, wondering around.

Mike Jones (19:34)
that's why, ⁓

Yeah, because our friend, our friend Akita, he talks about it that, in startups, you tend to find more of those type of people because there's less boundary.

Yes.

Steve Hearsum (19:46)
Yeah, yeah.

And there's a very big startup, but I know two or three people who've worked in, and I'm not going to name them, but they're quite sizable and very well known in London. And one of my clients worked there for a while and she was on one of my programs. And it was fascinating listening to her because it's total lack of boundaries. A founder who just wanted everybody to be free to say what they did when they wanted, but it meant that he could

Mike Jones (19:52)
Hahaha!

Steve Hearsum (20:14)
He could play games whenever he wanted to. It sounded really unsafe.

Mike Jones (20:16)
Mmm.

Yes. They start getting some of these, you start seeing more cultish behavior rather than, they sort of start to create the organization and the image in themselves. And that's why with this thing around, know, talk, anyone that follows me, I talk about decentralization, self-organizing teams. But what I mean is that to do that, you need to have a good coherence, some good governance principles, decision rights in there.

Steve Hearsum (20:28)
Yeah.

Mike Jones (20:45)
Otherwise, you can go into this chaos bit quite quickly. We avoid that.

Steve Hearsum (20:45)
Yeah.

Well, we got to in our question.

Mike Jones (20:52)
Uh, I don't know, but I'm having fun though. Uh, the one thing I'd pick up though with, um, the part we're talking about is the thing that always gets me is around the, the charade that organizations play. And I've sort of picked up a bit about the, talking about change and ASPI this thing, they make big smoke and mirrors about it, but, know, what do think causes this organization to revert? I call it marketing and PR.

Steve Hearsum (21:12)
Hmm.

Mike Jones (21:19)
And I think marketing PR is absorbed change, absorbed strategy and absorbed leadership programs. So we're not really, we're not really dealing with these things. We're just making things look snazzy.

Steve Hearsum (21:33)
My immediate, without having had a chance to reflect on it long, my immediate response is I suspect it's several things and in what order and what scale of importance or what importance I don't know. So one is if you orientate towards command and control, then that's gonna shove you that route. If you have a conventional as opposed to a post conventional set of assumptions around change,

will shove you that way because you can then market it. eight steps isn't it? Or what's ten steps? Just how many steps? So you you'll market the simplicity of whatever it is you're thinking. So that's that's one set of reasons. Another set would be, this is a slightly, I'm noticing my slight cynicism in this, is a very conscious what's in it for meanness. So if if if I get to build my empire

Mike Jones (22:00)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Mmm, yep.

Steve Hearsum (22:22)
or I get to ensure that others who I'm competing with are discounted or removed from the system, that might influence how I then market and simplify things. Another one though, probably the biggest would be different forms of anxiety, which is if I really accept anxiety that I have around my lack of control or not knowing.

Or if I'm in touch with the shame potentially that might be evoked if it's revealed that I don't know as much as everyone thinks I do, then that's going to drive me towards oversimplifying stuff. So one of my kind of throwaway slightly flippant phrases, which I get occasionally challenged on, but I hold to is that most of the time in organizations, slide decks are just containers for anxiety. And the bigger and prettier it is, the bigger the amount of anxiety being contained is.

Mike Jones (22:55)
Yeah, yeah.

Yes. yeah. You know what? Starting up as a consultant, that was my anxiety because I used to see, these big consultancies, slide decks and they'd be lovely. it'd so pretty. And I'll look at mine. Mine are like Johnny H5. They still like Johnny H5 now. But then I've got over that fact that, I'd rather have substance than beauty.

Steve Hearsum (23:30)
Well, it's interesting to say that's one of my favorite stories told to me by the guy who's anonymized in my book, who's a very good English consultant now based in Canada, but works in North America as well. And told me this lovely story about pitching for a piece of work with a corporate. So he turns up and the person who's kind of, what's the word, managing the pitching process says, where's your slide deck? And he goes to them, I don't know what, says, but you have to have one.

I don't need one. He goes, well, you have to have one. He says, okay, okay. So he goes away and in reception creates two slides that basically just say, this is who I am, but they're meaningless. And he goes in and bear in mind he's competing against the PWCs and BCGs of this world and a big consultancy firms and there's this one guy with this small consultancy. And he walks in and he says, I'm told I have to have a slide deck. Here it is, but actually it doesn't say anything.

and just gets into the conversation. And of course the punchline is he wins the business because he's actually got to have the conversation.

Mike Jones (24:30)
Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

I like that. I think, getting over that, but I want to slight tangent now, but the, when you talk about change in that anxiety inducing element, I see it lot happen when we've got leaders in, we've got people into the change. We've had a debate around all the strategies you'll change. And then it comes to the point where they need to then go and execute. And often we're seeing this.

projection that it's no longer, I'm not part of the change. The change is being done to me, even though I've been in that conversation and you hear him saying language like, know, Dave's told us to do this. Dave being the leader or their boss. And there's not this ownership to get the change done, which I think is quite crucial. They just project it off.

Steve Hearsum (25:20)
Yeah, it's well, lurking in there is something around. Whose is it?

You know, how often this change construed as something that is done by a sole set of people or who is determined or who is it decided who is allowed to be in that conversation? I mean, I have a real problem, for example, with the whole language of resistance to change.

Mike Jones (25:41)
Same, yeah.

Steve Hearsum (25:42)
You know, way it's used in pro-sci and pro-sci has got some good stuff in it. But reads one of reasons I critique it in my book is because I think it's part of the mythologizing of something that is deeply damaging. It pathologizes whole groups of people and organizations as being resistant and assumes that by definition they're wrong. That's the most horrifying thing. The assumption is by definition somebody who resists is wrong.

Mike Jones (25:57)
Yes.

Yeah, yeah,

Well, you only have to go into organisations. As soon as you mentioned change, everybody talks about cut as eight steps. And yeah, still. you think, well, you know, it was fine. There's elements that are, good at it. But I still have my critiques about things like, I know he changed it later on, but it was pretty much in there. anyone resists it, pretty much lock them in the room and, get rid of them. I know he tried to change that later on.

Steve Hearsum (26:13)
still.

How many?

Mike Jones (26:31)
The other thing is about this burning platform and you you were talking earlier, there's no stability programs for leaders or anything that will take, but we've always got this tension going on between change and status quo and adaption. But we know that T only there's only so much change a team can handle at any one time. And really we want to get the change with minimal disruption to the operations. We don't want to unsettle the organization beyond

Steve Hearsum (26:39)
Mm.

Hmm. Hmm.

Mike Jones (27:01)
what it can handle. So this whole thing of let's create a burning platform and urgency. I just challenge that as in, you trying to unsettle the organization more than the necessary needed?

Steve Hearsum (27:13)
There's two, okay, let's take the obvious one. For a start, it's a totalitarian metaphor. And it's you know, it's a brutalist metaphor. It assumes that the only reason people will want to change is because you threaten them with death and dying. So on that basis alone, I despise it as a metaphor. But it also assumes that

Mike Jones (27:30)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Steve Hearsum (27:38)
people are not intelligent enough to make decisions about how things might change. Which is kind of ironic when you consider something like the whole, every single episode of Undercover Boss that's been filmed in Australia, the UK and the US and every other territory it was in, where the single message of every episode.

Mike Jones (27:41)
you

Steve Hearsum (27:59)
from every CEO and lead at the end of it is. I never would have known that unless I'd have gone and talked to people in the front line who run my business. So I kind of think the whole burning platform thing is I think what's the technical term, Mike bollocks.

Mike Jones (28:06)
Hahaha, yeah.

Yes. Yeah. Yeah. just, yeah, it is. And we've just done settling. It's like we're trying to force, forcing the change again, come back to your point about, change being completely managed and forced through. We previous episode we were with Julia Houts, who one of the co-authors of open approach to strategy. And we're talking about how do you open it up? Really? It's a sense of.

Steve Hearsum (28:16)
It's dangerous bollocks at that.

Mike Jones (28:40)
How do you involve those people at edges of organization? Because I still think there is a bias thinking that I'm a strategic leader, so I must know all the answers. When really, yeah, really, yes, we've got to make decisions, but there's nothing stopping me from getting out my office, walking several layers down and just speaking to people.

Steve Hearsum (29:02)
Well, there's two things that immediately come into mind when you say that one is the assumption that every single leader really is comfortable walking the floor. And it's surprising, I can think of two leaders I've worked with in my career, who had the walking the floor thing down to a T, and they did it intentionally, beautifully, in subtly different ways.

Mike Jones (29:09)
Mmm.

Steve Hearsum (29:21)
But to walk the floor, you need to be willing to be visible. And you need to be willing to get into conversation and be willing to be open to the possibility. Someone may ask you a question you're not expecting. That's what strikes me with that. And the other bit is one of the stories in the book from the lovely Eva Applebaum, who now works

for Gate One, part of the Havis group. And she was telling me about some of her work a few years ago in the digital space, because she's got a very strong track record in digital digitalization. And she said, one of the biggest challenges working with senior leadership teams when it came to digital transformation was these were people typically who had signed off off to millions of pounds worth of investment in technology and they didn't understand what they bought.

Mike Jones (29:43)
Yes.

Steve Hearsum (30:06)
but they couldn't admit that they didn't understand what they thought.

So just think about that for a moment. So these are people who are making a strategic decision. So back in your space, they've got a strategy to invest in e-commerce or digitalization, but they don't actually understand what it is they've bought. And they can't talk about it. Not really.

Mike Jones (30:24)
Mmm scary, isn't

It reminds me of time when I went back to, I was in the military and I was back to the army, I went to a headquarters and I wasn't technical at all, but I had technical soldiers. And I remember the general's chief of staff called me up and he was like, we need you to come brief the general on the state of this equipment that had. I was like, well, I'm not the best person.

because I don't have a clue what it is. So I saw one of them, he's an Alliance Corporal. So in soldier terms, he's a private Alliance Corporal. But this guy was, yeah, this guy was clearly intelligent bloke, knew exactly what he wanted, knew everything about it. So I was like, Corporal Gurung, go speak to the general. And he wants a brief on what's going on. And then he comes back two minutes later. I said, was quick. He goes, oh no, no, the Chief of Staff sent me away.

why? said, wanted you. I was like, oh. So I took the soldier with me and I was like, right. And I made a point. I was like, general, what do you want to know? And they were like, oh, I want to know about this. And I just turned to the soldier and just repeated the question. And the soldier gave me the answer and I just repeated it back. I got a firm telling off afterwards, but.

Steve Hearsum (31:36)
I love that.

I love that.

That is I'm going to be telling that story and referring to you by name. That is lovely. I love that. That's brilliant.

Mike Jones (31:50)
And it's up to that point, isn't it? It's that I've got to make decisions and I'm making informed decisions. But I don't have to be the expert at everything because funny enough, I pay these people to be experts. I give them a role. I give them responsibility to be experts.

Steve Hearsum (32:06)
Yeah, but one of the things this is then opening up, this is one of my kind of current threads of inquiry, my practice, and I work with practitioners around. I'm trying to work out ways to bring it into the leadership space, but you'll understand why this is a bit trickier. I talk about the fragility of practitioners and leaders and what happens when the fragility of the practitioner meets that of the client or the fragility of the consultant meets that of client. And an example of this is

Mike Jones (32:24)
Mmm.

Steve Hearsum (32:33)
If I said she might, how do you know you're an expert?

Mike Jones (32:35)
yeah. Well that's a... yeah.

Steve Hearsum (32:37)
Who's told you? And what happens when your client says to you, oh, mate, you're an expert in this and you know you're not? Do you tell them?

Mike Jones (32:45)
Well, yeah, well, I do in practice. I know what I know and I like to think I know that I don't know. But I've had it loads of times where they've said, oh, we want to go do, I had this one recently actually where they're going on about it we're talking about structural change and doing that stuff. So I'm happy with it and I get the information. But then they're talking about digital stuff and AI. And that's where I had to say, I'm not your guy for this.

But I know someone, I know someone who's very capable. ⁓ Do that.

Steve Hearsum (33:19)
But this is

the interesting thing. Some of the research shows that one of the things consultants are not always prone to do is to tell their clients where they're not experts in what it is the client wants. It's part of the ethical shadow of our world because we as a breed, we need to earn money. And the subset of us who are prepared to go, I don't know that, go and talk to Mike. So if I had a client who wanted to know about strategy, mean, you're now on my list of people are saying, talk to Mike. He knows this stuff.

Mike Jones (33:30)
right, yeah, yeah.

thank you.

Steve Hearsum (33:49)
Because I can't hand on heart say that strategy is something that I know how to scaffold in a way that I could probably come up with something, but I know it wouldn't be as informed or as well thought through as what you spent a lot of your time doing. But there are plenty of us who will.

Mike Jones (33:57)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Mm.

Steve Hearsum (34:06)
we'll collude with the client because we need the work or believe we need it.

Mike Jones (34:10)
Yes. Yeah, you see that a lot. That's why there's a of bad practice. Like you said earlier, I'll bang my head against the wall when I see certain things on LinkedIn. go, oh, we've had a strategy Jay. You see it and they're like on Go Ape. You're like, that's not straight. I don't know where to start with that. That's definitely not strategy. It's a nice day. I'm not saying don't go to Go Ape or play games.

Steve Hearsum (34:31)
Have people really

done that? Seriously, they've scored extra today and gone and eight.

Mike Jones (34:34)
Yeah,

you see all the time they got like, they go, have a strategy day and it looks like they spend most of the time doing team building exercises. And then they'll, they'll, um, the last part of it, they'll scrabble over a vision statement and they think of vision statement strategy when they've not probably spent even 30 seconds remotely looking external and going, no, what's our relationship with the external environment? where do we fit in that? It's pure like, well,

it's that aspiration first. And I think this is the same in changes in strategy, that they come up with an aspiration first without understanding the context.

they know where they fit in the relationship, but they're going, oh, we want to be the best in this. They've not even understood the relationship, the external environment, it's saying we change. Oh, we want this, but really, do they need that? Is that the problem that is happening on the ground? There's one, I can't really say too much, but a client I was working with, they put a whole big change around something that was already happening.

on the ground. They put a big change in it. It just it everything. So like we're pretty much doing that. What's the problem? And it created more ranks than, you know, cynicism and, you know, people just wanting to leave the organisation. So like, why are we unsettling all this stuff when we're pretty much doing it?

Steve Hearsum (35:57)
Yeah. Well, this is this is one of who is up on it yet. One of Adam Grant's books in the original scene somewhere and he talks about how even when you

you communicate change well, you have to do it 10 times more than you actually think you do. Because people will both filter it out, but also because their immediate default responses is it's going to be bad news. You'll need to keep on saying, no, no, it's about this. This is what it's about.

Mike Jones (36:10)
Yeah, yeah.

Yes.

Yeah. And that's where the skills of coaching, you see in organizations coaching still gets just boiled down to if I'm going to have anything to do coaching, I need to have 45 minutes, in a room one-to-one where really when it comes to like change, no one's thinking, well, don't ask that question. Instead of telling, why I just say, what does this change mean to you?

And what new capabilities do you think you need to be able to enact this change?

Steve Hearsum (36:52)
Yeah. Yeah. But then it's interesting, again, we got back to kind of capabilities.

I don't have an answer to this, an easy answer. It's one of the reasons why the next book I'm doing with a person who I'm not going to name yet because we've not agreed yet when we're going to announce it. But we're co-authoring, she's an internal and a big European corporate. I'm an external and what we're chewing on is what does it take to do change work well in an organization, but writing it from the perspective of an external and an internal.

Mike Jones (37:16)
Mm-hmm.

That'll be good.

Steve Hearsum (37:23)
And we're hypothesis is that's not a kind of overlapping set of lenses that tends to be brought together. It tends to be written about either from the external or from the internal perspective or from the leadership perspective. We're kind of going, wait a minute, what if we look at this slightly differently? And the question of capability, this is where kind of how we met, what we started talking about is there's something about how change is construed.

Mike Jones (37:34)
Yes.

Steve Hearsum (37:48)
and the way in which it, the people who supposedly have to have the capability, the way they're actually organized and organizing within organizations is not thought through enough. And it's both part of the solution, but also reflective often of the dysfunction.

Mike Jones (38:03)
Yes. Yeah, it comes to your point around, I think people get so fixated in the thing they've objectified this change. They've lost then focus on, if we do this, what does that mean to our organization? What does that mean to our people? And ultimately, what outcome are we hoping to achieve by doing this?

Yeah, and I think that's really interesting, two lenses to look at from the internal and external, because I'm mainly external, but I support internal because I don't want to do the change upon an organisation. I'd rather they build that capability themselves to do change and I can support them to do it.

Steve Hearsum (38:45)
Yeah, absolutely.

Mike Jones (38:47)
Yeah.

definitely interesting world. What else do you think frustrates you the most in sort of being this as an outsider?

Steve Hearsum (38:57)
Ooh.

frustrates me.

I it's more not frustrates. suppose it sends me. ⁓

Mike Jones (39:05)
Mmm.

Steve Hearsum (39:06)
Whatever, the frustration is that we spend more time finding new ways to reframe the problems that we already know we know than actually having the conversations about how we are actually going to wrestle with those and what it's like to wrestle with them and what we might actually choose to do differently and how we might need to be differently and what that's like and how hard it is and what happens when we do that.

Mike Jones (39:14)
Yeah.

Steve Hearsum (39:28)
So long as we carry on reframing and researching more what the problem is, even though we already know what the problem is, we get to avoid the discomfort. So that both that kind of frustrates me and and sands me. The other bit is, and it's why I this thing with Martin Sjodra a few weeks ago about shame and violence in organizations.

Mike Jones (39:35)
Yes.

you

Steve Hearsum (39:47)
I think it's interesting how there is so little that is being really talked about openly in terms of how the discourse outside organizations, in terms of how it's not possible to be nuanced or ambivalent about things. We have to take fixed positions either for and against things politically and so on. The idea that that happens in a vacuum and it's not impacting how people lead organizations or how they show up is frankly absurd.

Mike Jones (40:06)
Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Steve Hearsum (40:16)
total denial of reality. But there's relatively little that's actually talked about in that space. know, the the DI thing is what which is where it might have been contained, because now that's being dumped all over and now scapegoated means that I kind of question where the spaces are to have more nuanced conversations in organizations about the stuff we find quite tricky to talk about, because we clearly can't do it that well outside.

Mike Jones (40:40)
No.

Steve Hearsum (40:40)
And

yet paradoxically, if I come back to your space Mike, you know, I would imagine that when you're working with the senior leadership team and talking about strategy, you need to be both pretty clear sighted and clear thinking, but at the same time, you need to be pretty good at working with some of the intricacies in the mess and nuance. You can't think in binary terms. Right.

Mike Jones (41:00)
No.

Yeah. And it's something I've been thinking about or looking at for a while. I call it cognitive security. how willing, in the world of strategy and that, it's all about having perspectives and open up about your perspective. What are you seeing versus what everybody else is seeing, et cetera, et cetera. But I think more that we're seeing externally, people are more close to the debates because they don't want to

open up about what they actually think. Or they're just going, or we're getting ourselves into this vacuum now externally and we're not willing to see it from different perspectives. We only see it from one perspective. And I wonder then how much our orientation with reality is getting shaped by that lack of discourse that we're seeing.

Steve Hearsum (41:48)
So I'm just going to read something to you because I was trying to dig out some of the exchanges I've had with my co-author. This is something she wrote. It's not marked from my head and it resonates for some reason what we've been talking about. This is what she said. Quote. One thought I've been keeping my mind is around what do we mean by the very word change when we define the subsequent capability. To me, it simultaneously, sequentially means change as the desired outcome and change as the process to get the change as the design.

Change as an outcome is historically and adamantly preserved as such the prerogative of senior leadership, the demigods of strategic decision making. Change as the process and implementation is graciously delegated upon the change resources. This is why the change capability development is mostly around implementation skills and enthusiastic tools wielding and hardly ever touches on strategic thinking, decision making, vision and innovation. And this is also why change only needs to be managed below senior levels.

Mike Jones (42:37)
Ha

Steve Hearsum (42:46)
Change management as it stands today has nothing in it along the lines of change thinking, change scenario framing, change vision creation, yet everything to do with making it happen smoothly, orderly, yet enthusiastically and reversibly.

Mike Jones (42:59)
That's fantastic. And you see the reason why I created this podcast around challenging those lives around stability, predictability and Lily Kors relationship. And what I took from that is quite clearly is around the disconnect between the strategy people thinking about what they want and then it just getting to still down to the people to execute how they want it.

Steve Hearsum (43:02)
Isn't it just?

Mike Jones (43:23)
rather than getting people into the thing around, let's think about what we are trying to do and what effect we are trying to have. And I always talk our effect with the external environment, that's what I think it always goes to. How we get there and how we deliver that change, that's where we need to get people in. It's not a defined set of principles, not defined object. It's an iteration, it's an adaption over time.

Steve Hearsum (43:36)
Hmm.

Mike Jones (43:51)
to get there.

Steve Hearsum (43:52)
maybe as we get close to the end of our conversation, starting to wonder whether where we're getting to as a natural question or point of.

Mike Jones (43:56)
Mm.

Steve Hearsum (44:01)
Well, ask it as a question, don't have an answer, clear answer to it. Is the...

is this kind of split between strategy and change.

arbitrary and do organizations tend to separate the two out way more than they should?

Mike Jones (44:15)
I would say yes. I say that just for experience because, know, I ask organizations often, what change have you got concurrently going on? why are you doing those things? And how is that connected to what you're trying to achieve? And I tend to get a very sort of,

unsure, I never get a definitive or we're doing that because we're trying to achieve that effect which then enables us to do this in the long term. I normally get because it came from central or it was someone's idea that we had. You're like okay and I think there really is a massive unnecessary disconnect.

Steve Hearsum (44:51)
Yeah.

Yeah, yeah. All right, we fixed it then, Mike.

Mike Jones (44:59)
There we go. Don't have a disconnect. Yeah, makes me... I've been modelling this relationship for a while and trying to figure out how best to describe it, the relationship that needs to exist between the strategy, the change in the organisation and the feedback loops to ensure that they're all there. Otherwise, you're wasting vast amount of emotional, cognitive...

and financial effort for what may not be actually effective.

Steve Hearsum (45:26)
Yeah, yeah, totally.

Mike Jones (45:32)
Yeah, sound. Yeah, I really enjoyed this conversation. I think we just keep on going. But what would you like listeners and leaders to go away and think about from this podcast, from our conversation?

Steve Hearsum (45:35)
Yeah, likewise.

you

going to try and say this without it sounding a bit kind of hackneyed or a bit too cliched. The phrase that popped into my mind

was something like what would it take you to slow down long enough to notice what it is you are uncomfortable about and to think more deeply and to inquire into that discomfort with the other people who are who haven't had a stake in your discomfort.

Mike Jones (46:02)
Hmm.

Yeah.

Steve Hearsum (46:14)
The reason

I say that, Mike, is because one of the cliches of the kind of work I do with clients is to use language like, you know, I'm going to slow you down to speed you up. This is slow burn work. And invariably I had it recently, you know, it's like I told a whole group of people the first day, this is going to feel slow. I told them and the feedback afterwards, the first morning was too slow. was too slow. They are so.

Mike Jones (46:38)
Yeah, yeah,

Steve Hearsum (46:40)
find it so difficult to maintain a level of awareness to take in even when somebody's told them what they're going to be doing, why they're doing it, what something's going to be like. They filter it out. That's how high the levels of anxiety are and the tuning out of discomfort. So I guess what I'm saying is to people listening is.

in your invariable need for speed, because I suspect most people who listen are going to be moving quite fast. Because that's the rhetoric and that's the discourse.

How do you know you're running 120 miles an hour in the right direction?

Or are you actually really going over a cliff or into a wall? How do you actually know? What data have you really slowed down to take into account? How do you even define data? Is it hard data? Have you gone and talked to people? Have you found out what people are talking about? What the stories narratives are? Have you asked people what they're feeling?

Mike Jones (47:18)
Mmm.

Steve Hearsum (47:34)
It's fascinating when you ask people in organizations to describe their feelings and they can only come up with happy, sad, frustrated, angry, disappointed, embarrassed, and that's it. And they don't, you know, I had a conversation with somebody recently and about, and opened up the space for more detailed conversation about the breadth of emotion and the word to open things up. When I was talking, when we were talking about a visual with lots of different nuances and feelings.

Mike Jones (47:40)
Ha ha ha.

Steve Hearsum (47:58)
The that opened things up and took us to a whole new level of insight was word grief.

Mike Jones (48:02)
right. That's interesting.

Steve Hearsum (48:04)
Right. And

and so my question then then stands is, you know, in this need for speed. What are we avoiding? And those of us who are listening, what would it take you to slow down and notice and engage in a deeper level of conversation and ask questions of yourself and others that might lead you to the point where you start to talk about the things you're avoiding talking about with yourself and with each other?

Mike Jones (48:15)
Mmm.

Yeah, I think that's probably, we have a saying in the military, slow is smooth, smooth is fast.

Steve Hearsum (48:32)
I like that.

Mike Jones (48:33)
yeah yeah it's all about how we do our drills

Steve Hearsum (48:35)
So let me get this right.

So that comes from a need to make sure that I've immediately gone to a of a firefight situation. If you move fast in a firefight, you will literally get your head blown off. So you slow down long enough. Yeah, slow down long enough to know, are you moving at the appropriate pace to the context? Yeah.

Mike Jones (48:47)
Yeah, it's all part of our training. Yeah. So it's all

Yeah. And it's it's

us getting used to our drills and stuff like that in the practice that if we, if we rush our practice and how we do it, we're always going to have that, that anxiety where I think, when we slow it down in practice, slow is smooth. get it right. So it becomes second nature. So when it actually happens in reality, we were nice and smooth.

Steve Hearsum (48:59)
Love that.

Have you ever

think I've ever written anything about it.

Mike Jones (49:19)
No, I haven't, no, no, I haven't. Maybe I should do.

Steve Hearsum (49:21)
Well, I'd

encourage you to, or if you want, I'll co-author something with you because I think that's really interesting.

Mike Jones (49:26)
Yeah, yeah, definitely. I think that'd be a thing to work together on.

Steve Hearsum (49:29)
You know, it's,

think it's, I think it's a really important, you know, frame. And I think it's got multiple applications, not just, it's not military, it's across any human system where there's change going on. I think it's really useful.

Mike Jones (49:42)
Yeah. Yeah. And I think there's that challenge all the time is getting leaders to slow down. was one of the previous podcasts with Adam Thompson. took, we talk about, do we, when we're asking people to do stuff like change or strategy, do we ever just stop and say, let's just get in the room and let's talk about it. Let's understand what we're actually asking people to do or asking you to do. And then, let's, let's have a chat about it, but no, we don't. We just go do this and we run off.

And yeah, I think that comes at a point where we just need to try and do something. We just run off and we wonder actually, are we, are we just running off in the wrong direction? Meaning well, but.

Steve Hearsum (50:21)
Yeah, that's exactly it. Make a note of this. That may go into the next book and I'll credit you,

Mike Jones (50:22)
Yeah, yeah, I like that. Awesome.

Thank you. I appreciate that lot of things come out his podcast is great. We solved the world's and then we co-authoring stuff I'm gonna get a credit in a book

Steve Hearsum (50:33)
Yeah, but seriously, that's

not, that's not, that's not a kind of throwaway thing. I'd really, I'd really be interested. I mean, I can, could, I thought I could write something about that. And I thought, well, why would I do it on my own? you me the fact you're the source? So if you've got energy, then that's, that's so that can write something.

Mike Jones (50:47)
Yeah, yeah, I'd love to. That'd

be awesome. Cool. Well, thank you very much, Steve, for joining me. I thoroughly enjoyed the conversation and really appreciate you taking the time to join me. So, listeners, if you really like the conversation as much as we've enjoyed it, please like, subscribe, and share to your network because someone else may find this conversation also useful. So, I'll see you next time. See you. Bye.

Steve Hearsum (50:54)
I'll go ahead.

I'll go ahead.