Strategy Meets Reality Podcast

Diagnosing the Real Problem: Michael Negendahl on Risk, Control, and Leading in Complexity

• Mike Jones • Season 1 • Episode 15

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Control is comforting, but in complexity, it’s often a trap.

In this episode of Strategy Meets Reality, Mike Jones is joined by Michael Negendahl, founder of Exaptive Labs and a former emergency nurse, to explore why many leadership responses are performative rather than practical. They unpack the psychological need for certainty, the danger of chasing tidy plans in messy environments, and the difference between solving a problem and solving the wrong one.

This is a candid conversation about power, ego, and the courage to admit we don’t know. For leaders navigating real-world uncertainty, this one goes deep.

🔍 In this episode:

Why control is often just a performance

How strategy becomes theatre when leaders avoid discomfort

The gap between perception and reality in problem-solving

The difference between control and the illusion of control

What distributed intelligence looks like in practice

Why proximity to the customer changes everything

🎧 Keywords: Leadership, complexity, risk, control, decision-making, distributed intelligence, strategy, systems thinking, safety, problem-solving

📘 Learn more about Michael’s work: https://www.exaptivelabs.com/aboutus

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

Michael (00:00)
Uncertainty to our brains is like a threat and we'll do anything to move away from it.

distributed intelligence and decision making. think a lot of leaders see that as a very scary prospect because they think that they'll lose control. But if you genuinely empower people, then most people will step up to that challenge and kind of let adults be.

Mike Jones (00:12)
Yeah, yeah.

Michael (00:19)
adults

humans are still going to be very much part of organisations going forward and it's the real competitive advantage will come from understanding how to navigate complex problems as opposed to how to apply the management theories of the 20th century

Mike Jones (00:30)
Yeah, yeah.

Welcome back to strategy meets reality podcast. I'm your host Mike Jones and today I'm glad to be joined by Michael Negendahl Great to have you on the show Mike Michael

Michael (01:17)
Great

to be here, looking forward to the chat.

Mike Jones (01:19)
Yeah cool. Michael, do mind giving a bit of background about yourself and bit of context about what you've been up to lately?

Michael (01:25)
Yeah.

So career wise, my career has been a bit of a different one for people in the consulting world. I started off as a registered nurse actually, in intensive care and emergency nursing. But after a little while of work and 50 % night shifts, I kind of figured out that I wanted to do something else and do that all the time with 12 hour shifts. So whilst I was in the hospital system, I studied a master's of science majoring in occupational health and safety and then moved into OHS in the university sector here.

Mike Jones (01:40)
Ha ha.

Michael (01:52)
here in New South Wales in Australia. And that was really good, gave me lot of exposure to a lot of different types of sort of hazards and risks within that environment, microcosm of the economy, right, in university sector. So I think that kind of paved the way for me in terms of really understanding stuff and kind of was really good for me later on in my consulting career. And then moved over to the UK actually, over your way, back in 2008, did that for a couple of years.

Mike Jones (02:15)
cool.

Michael (02:18)
worked in risk and emergency planning over there, which was again really helpful, kind of gave me exposure to those kind of really high consequence, low frequency type events, planning for terrorist attacks and kind of natural disasters and stuff like that, which was really good for my professional development as well. And then back to Australia around 2010, I think it was, back into the university sector, was working there for a few years. And I think by that time in my career, I was kind of like, how do organisations work? know, why do decisions get

made because I was obviously looking at it from a risk management point of view and I was kind of like wanted to get a little bit more understanding so did a did an MBA with the idea that that would tell me more kind of a few years under my belt I've probably learned that that might not have been true but it was good to learn a lot of things which was good and it kind of ushered in my consulting career so I moved into health and safety consulting at EY here in Sydney that was around 2015

and I've just left EY actually, so after 10 years, lots of good memories there and lots of good experience, and started my own consulting firm, which is Specialised in Risk Management and Complexity Consulting, Executive Labs. So, yes, it's been a long, winding career.

Mike Jones (03:22)
I was going to say it's like an interesting transition going from sort nurse into risk management into health and safety into consulting around complexity. Yeah, that's the obvious, but I think that that's really useful in that different perspective and there's different experiences. It must be great to understand, as you said, how decisions get made and how organizations operate.

Michael (03:31)
Definitely.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, and kind of on reflection, I was only thinking about this, you know, in the last few months, actually, I think.

I think my time in nursing taught me a lot about people and then transitioned into health and safety taught me a lot about systems, moved into consulting that taught me a lot about organisations, how those two things come together almost, how people come into systems and how they integrate and interact. So was like this real serendipitous mix of experience I found on reflection looking back over the years.

said

very diverse but you know equally complementary as well which is really I found really beneficial and kind of helps frame kind of my next kind of venture into complexity consulting which you know personally I think is is a really interesting area and definitely I think we need more of to be honest.

Mike Jones (04:19)
Mmm.

Yeah,

I agree. that's lot of my focus as well. And the focus is, podcast is to help leaders understand complexity and what does that mean to strategy? That's an interesting one when you said about people and systems and stuff. So why do you think so many leaders still reach for certainty, whether it's the five-year plan, the strategy day or the new culture, as they put it, even when deep down?

they must know that the world does not work that way.

Michael (05:01)
Yeah, I mean, it's a pretty simple question, right? And I think a lot of people ask it. And I'd probably caveat kind of most of the things we talk about today with, I guess, you know, there's a lot of strong sort of cultural and structural.

drivers to these types of things. So even going back to Taylorism and scientific management and stuff like that, kind of gave us this, it kind of built these assumptions into how we do work. And I think a lot of organisations these days are just utilising modern day versions of Taylorism, right? Like they're still quite reductionist in the way that they approach things, even from a strategy perspective.

Mike Jones (05:14)
Mm.

Yeah, yeah.

Michael (05:37)
parts can be kind of stripped down and kind of optimized and put back together and the whole can be optimized and we can kind of understand it all. So I think there's a lot of strong history there. But to be honest, I think there's also just the basics of how humans work. We know from a neuroscience perspective, our brains crave certainty. Uncertainty to our brains is like a threat and we'll do anything to move away from it.

Mike Jones (05:46)
Yeah.

Michael (06:01)
So we've got

got

that working against us kind of on a constant basis. And there's a lot of good evolutionary reason for that. But when it comes to working with complex problems, then yeah, that can be a challenge, right? Is where we oversimplify and we strive to get certainty over problems that really you can't get certainty over and you have to navigate and make sense of them and take it intuitively rather than with one big solution, right?

Mike Jones (06:13)
Yeah, yeah.

Michael (06:26)
See, I think there's a multitude of reasons. The question I ask myself though is...

Mike Jones (06:26)
Yeah, yeah.

Michael (06:30)
with all the evidence stacking up from a neuroscience perspective, all the research that's going on in terms of how our brains function and why they function that way. The question for me is why more of that science isn't making its way into management literature and practice. I think that's the big one for me. ⁓ In snippets of it over the years in my work, particularly around health and safety stuff, there's a lot of psychology in health and safety these days with obviously auxaics such as yourself working in

Mike Jones (06:46)
Yeah.

Michael (06:56)
in kind of risk and stuff like that, but more broadly in terms of how decisions are made, how strategies are formulated, that sort of thing. You just don't see a lot of that scientific evidence finding its way into the mainstream literature, ⁓ is kind of a question for me.

Mike Jones (07:11)
No.

Yeah,

and I see this. It's the same. I often fight against your orthodoxy of strategy and, and a lot of it's still predicated on sort of 1980s, typologies, ⁓ that, as we talked about complexity, it's really quite fit anymore. ⁓ but, and that's why I probably laughed a little bit when you said about the NBA, it wasn't obviously laughing at you. I was laughing at the NBA and, know,

Michael (07:22)
Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah.

Mike Jones (07:35)
And I've said the same way. It's like, I remember me thinking, especially when I left the army, I was like, right, maybe I just need to learn some more, just to go on. Because thinking that if I keep going on these courses, I'll find the answer. Yeah, I can't find the answer and I still don't find the answer, but it's interesting. Where do think this need for control comes from?

Michael (07:43)
Yeah.

Funny answer.

Well, again, think it's, well, control and certainty, I don't know, they're probably two sides of the same coin, I think. ⁓ I think there's that sort of, you know, that psychological need for certainty within each of us. But then the control element to me, again, is just a way that people...

Mike Jones (08:03)
Mm.

Michael (08:14)
seem to feel safe, right? And I think leaders, you know, I think the other thing that I'd probably mention at this point is I think leaders, in my view these days, are in a very difficult position, right? A lot of leaders.

Mike Jones (08:15)
Yeah, yeah.

Michael (08:25)
And I think some recent data out of Gallup, think, was sort of highlighting the pressure that a lot of leadership are under at the moment, the fact that there's a lot of uncertainty in the world, there is a lot of complexity. haven't really been...

taught how to navigate this sort of stuff. So I think all of those are really systemic problems that are bearing out on individuals at the top who, and again, bringing the cultural side of things is, you know, kind of this cultural archetype of the leader, right, that has answers and makes decisions and kind of gets it right and gets paid a lot of money to make big decisions. I think there's a lot of those cultural kind of that cultural pressure on these people. And so they're kind of navigating these situations.

Mike Jones (08:52)
Hmm.

Michael (09:04)
knowing kind of to your point earlier that perhaps there isn't an easy answer but they're kind of forced into providing an easy answer and I think maybe politics is a really easy example of that right where politicians forever selling simple solutions to very very complex problems and you kind of have to question is that because of us as the electorate that we don't want to listen to nuance and we don't want to deal with the complexity of social problems or is it because politicians just like to get elected and they just want to give us whatever we're going to cheer for.

Mike Jones (09:13)
Yeah, yeah, I was thinking that.

Michael (09:30)
I think it's probably a bit of both. But yeah, I think the control element just comes from people being people, wanting to feel safe in their position, whatever that might be. Doesn't matter how highly paid they are, they probably still got that instinct and they're just trying to, I guess, do their best within what they know as well.

Mike Jones (09:45)
Yeah.

It's interesting when you said about politics and I see this, especially in the UK, where a politician or someone will make a decision and, inevitably not be as good as they expected or maybe didn't work out as well. And straight away, everyone's like, they must stand down. They must be fired. You can see that happens in that sphere.

Michael (10:03)
Yeah.

Mike Jones (10:06)
You can imagine what the pressure is like for executive leaders in organizations that they're fearing to make decisions because if it's the wrong one, then people then call them to be sacked and removed. And you see this the same in sports, the manager there, if they have a couple of bad games, they're gone. And you think all this around leaders, they must be thinking, wow, trying to make a decision must be a scary thing. And...

Michael (10:22)
That's it.

Yeah.

Mike Jones (10:31)
The question got asked to me the other day, was working with some clients and we were looking at strategy and one of the leaders turned around to me and went, how do we know this is going to work?

Michael (10:40)
Fair question.

Mike Jones (10:40)
Yeah,

yeah, was a question. And I was like, well, we don't. I said, we've done all the right stuff. We've looked at futures, we've looked at the relationship with the external environment. We've done all those and we've made a plausible decision that this is the way to go. And we're going to make those decisions and we're to act. But then that's where I suppose we need to be observant to how that starts to land and learn from it. But how would you...

Michael (10:56)
Yeah.

Mike Jones (11:06)
from your very diverse experience, what advice would you give to leaders navigating uncertainty?

Michael (11:12)
I mean even that navigating uncertainty I think leads into the complexity part right is I genuinely don't in my experience in all my work experience

Mike Jones (11:16)
Mm.

Michael (11:21)
I could probably count on one hand how many people I think genuinely understand complexity and complex adaptive systems and kind of how they work. And I think because it's a common word, then a lot of people just assume that they know what it means. It's like, yeah, yeah, it's all complicated. Like it's all kind of, there's a lot of stuff. And they then, you know, use the old methods of again, maybe, you know, harking back to Taylorism and scientific management of like,

Mike Jones (11:33)
Yeah, yeah.

Michael (11:44)
know, process map it out or like if we just maybe to your point, if I just learn a bit more, if I just study a bit harder, if I just put a few more smart people on it, then they'll figure it out. And I think that's a big one for me is challenging those assumptions that that is even the right approach to these things. But as well diagnosing the nature of the problem in the first place is like, if this is a complex problem,

Mike Jones (11:51)
Yeah.

Michael (12:07)
then we know there's certain methods that we can use to navigate it and there's certain methods that we shouldn't use to navigate it and we shouldn't be going down the path where we're asking questions like how do we know it will work? Well we don't know it will work.

Mike Jones (12:18)
Yeah,

yeah.

Michael (12:19)
but we'll have

to do lots of experiments to probe the system and see what comes up, right, and what we can amplify and what we can dampen and stuff like that. And I think it kind of goes back to my point before about how I can't see how a lot of this stuff is making, why it's not making its way into more mainstream management literature. I mean, you look at a lot of the big mainstream management literature producers like HPRs and others.

you don't see a lot of this stuff coming through there, but that's what a lot of people in management roles would read, right? ⁓ I think it's really getting people familiar with the concept of complexity. What is a complex problem or a complex adaptive system?

Mike Jones (12:42)
Okay, I'll do it.

Yeah, yeah.

Michael (12:57)
can you expect from it so you don't have unrealistic expectations like I can solve this problem if I'm smart enough or if I work hard enough or if I throw enough money at it or whatever and it's something that we have to iteratively work through and see what works and what doesn't work and then we talk about distributed sense making and all these other things to make sense of it right. So think it's that to be honest is just starting with that.

Mike Jones (13:04)
Mm.

Michael (13:19)
with the correct assumptions of what a problem is and then nature of the tools or the methods that we can use to actually navigate it.

Mike Jones (13:27)
Yeah, Highlighting some good points there, especially around, people's really understanding complexity and how many people are out there that understand this stuff. And it's definitely growing, but it's grown against a massive wall of things, know, archetypal things like, you HBR. I remember when,

used to HBR thinking it was like, wow, it's amazing. Then I sort of start to realize, it's nice. Yeah, it's what I call nice fuzzy stuff. doesn't really, I look at it now and think it doesn't really do much.

Michael (13:52)
Open.

Well, and it reinforces

a lot of the challenging assumptions around leadership and like the majority of the leadership stuff is about individual stuff, right? So individuals developing, know, do more exercise, get up at 5am and do an ice bath and stuff like that. And you'll be a better executive as opposed to, you know, seed control, empower teams, reframe your role from decision maker to someone who creates conditions for decisions to be made.

Mike Jones (14:00)
Hmm.

hahahaha

Michael (14:20)
know, distributed sense making and that sort of stuff. It reinforces a lot of those North American leadership archetypes. And I think that's another thing that I think most people don't really critically think about is where is this information coming from? What's the cultural?

Mike Jones (14:29)
Yeah.

Michael (14:36)
background to the people who are producing it and what kind of cultural norms do they grow up in and around because again, we know that different parts of the world have very different cultural norms, particularly when it comes to leadership and working and teams and all that sort of stuff. And it's kind of like unless you're throwing that critical lens across that stuff, it's very easy to get taken in by the dominant

you know, the dominant producers of this sort of literature like a HBR, right? ⁓ But yeah, there's not a lot of nuance I found in those types of things and...

Mike Jones (15:05)
Yeah, yeah.

Michael (15:09)
And even when they do kind of venture into that area, it's done in the way that I've seen it done in the safety world, which is almost performative in nature. So a lot of it becomes quite, well, you have to consult with people. So you kind of do this random consultation process, but you've really already kind of figured out what you want to do. you know, the nature of the consultation is very closed. It's, it's kind of like asking people very simple binary questions or stuff like that. So it's not really getting to the heart of the problem. And it's almost like, well, I can see.

Mike Jones (15:32)
Yeah, yeah.

Michael (15:35)
what the assumption is baked into how the approach has been designed and I think if we can get away from some of that stuff then I think leaders will be a lot better positioned to actually navigate the problems that they're facing now but also they're going to face into the future.

Mike Jones (15:48)
Yeah, and

I think that you're right with the predominant view of what a leader is about. And I think it's a bit earlier when we talk about politicians and their decision making that we've got a leader and they have to do the sense making and they have to then produce the answers where, individuals are finite, human beings are finite, we've only got so much cognitive capacity, we can only see so much of the world at any one.

time, we have our predominant biases and perspectives that are interlocked into our orientation. And, moving from that to realizing that me as a leader, I don't need to have all the answers. And exactly what you said, I love what you said about setting the conditions. You how do I set the conditions so that people around me can support with decision making? I can listen to their perspectives. I can...

Michael (16:21)
Yeah.

Hmm. Yeah.

Mike Jones (16:41)
move away from the Taylorism view of, you we have management do the thinkers and we have people do doers and actually embrace that everyone has a perspective, everyone has information and that, get into the wider depth of our organization just to listen to understand what's going on. It could be a great source of information, great source of decision making.

Michael (16:59)
Mm.

It kind of, like I was, until I met a friend of mine, he works in sort of the agile community, so he's kind of around this type of sort of...

I guess, applied complexity stuff with software development and stuff like that. And some of the stuff they talk about is zero distance to customer, right? And that's, I think it's a really fascinating concept. And I think it really underutilized concept in organizations where it's like, well, the people closest to the customer knows what's happening with the organization, right? Like they're there, they're living and breathing it. And in a lot of organizations, the people who make decisions are so far removed from the customer that they don't know. And it's not because they're not intelligent people

Mike Jones (17:26)
Yeah, yeah.

Michael (17:34)
and then they don't work hard and they're not well intended. It's just that when you are so far removed from somebody, unless you proactively seek out that individual or that cohort in your customer and don't rely on third party assessments of the customer like that, think that's a critical one. otherwise, how do you ever know where your business is headed? What are the weak signals that are gonna

eventually become strong signals that are going to upend your business. And I think one of your previous guests was talking about Blockbuster, right? Where with their failure, know, catastrophic and they were mentioning how they were number one in every metric in their category. And then they went bust because Netflix was kind of doing a completely different thing and kind of charting the new course. And that's the issue that I see with a lot of organizations is

Mike Jones (18:17)
Yeah, yeah.

Michael (18:27)
They're trying to run, like leaders are trying to run an organisation at arm's length to the very people that create the reason for the business, right, in the customer. And I just think...

And again, then I start questioning what is that because of the concept of a leader and the status of being a chief executive or a board member and it goes, you know, more into that ego part of us rather than the curiosity part of like, how do I figure out this problem? How do I create a good product for someone or provide a great service? And it becomes more about, or how do I maintain a position? And it becomes more of a political thing rather than an organization or a

Mike Jones (18:48)
Mm-hmm.

Yes, yeah.

Michael (19:09)
competitive

or market-facing type thing.

Mike Jones (19:11)
Yes, I think it was great. Yeah. I think it was Mark McGrath's episode. Yeah. Yeah. But you bring up a really good point, especially about ego and preserving the structures that got them to that position. And you see this a lot with the way they do strategy and stuff. It's all performative. It's less about the customer. I had a recent interaction with clients and they wanted to develop a strategy and they were

Michael (19:15)
Yeah, I think it was my kid actually.

Mike Jones (19:34)
They were saying, we must have these things in there. And I'm like, well, that's all performative stuff. It's not what you do. it's, you see this with purpose statements and vision statements and stuff like that. They're not really, they seem to be more of a performative appeasement to the board rather than the thing that's going to give them direction, help decision-making at the different levels of the organization to increase the value or fit with the external environment.

Michael (19:38)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I think strategy, I mean, is a fascinating topic. I think you're right. I think a lot of it is performative. think a lot of it's on business as usual, kind of just rinse and repeat, to be honest. don't think strategy, I don't think a lot of leaders are really well equipped to...

Mike Jones (20:12)
Yeah, yeah.

Michael (20:16)
understand strategy, to design strategy, to oversee the implementation of strategy. I think, to your point, I think it's become...

kind of like a brochure, like let's just knock up a brochure that kind of looks like everyone else's and it's kind of like, it doesn't annoy anybody or it doesn't, but it's sufficiently aspirational enough that, you know, we'll get the ticks and the nods of approval from kind of the conservative types who don't want to rock the boat and want to kind of guarantee ROI and see 10 % year on year growth and all this. But the thing that I kind of get confused about is,

Mike Jones (20:26)
Yeah, yeah.

Michael (20:51)
where most organisations just kind of forget where they are right now, what they do.

what is their value to a customer and how does a strategy actually build upon that existing value base rather than kind of looking at other people, other organizations, competitors, at what they're doing and trying to keep pace with absolutely zero context about how that organization's doing things or running things or what their objectives are or what they're investing in. And it's kind of like,

pointless pursuit for me in a lot of ways. And it's kind of like, well, you just be best off just letting everybody else get on with their day. That being said, think, you know, I think strategies are very underappreciated and underutilized skill. And it seems, I don't know, it seems to be getting worse. And I don't know if that's a case of...

Mike Jones (21:20)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Michael (21:39)
we're starting to see the fracture between the problems that organisations are facing and the methods that they're using to approach them, which I think it would be from my research. It seems that...

they are most organizations are relying upon you know reductionist kind of linear kind of thinking to navigate complex problems and they're doubling down on that sort of stuff when really they should be doubling down on sense making and kind of you know distributed decision making and sense making across their organization to kind of really pick up on the weak signals what's happening in our business what's happening in our sector where can we move what are customers

Mike Jones (21:54)
Mm-hmm.

Michael (22:13)
wanting, how can we provide a better product, that sort of stuff. yeah, just, the companies that do do that seem to be working quite well and the others kind of don't from what I can see.

Mike Jones (22:17)
Yeah.

Yeah, it's going to annoy me because I can't remember who I was having a chat with about it, but they were talking about Siemens in the around the 2008 crash, how they done really well. And when they were asked about it, it's because they knew things were happening because they were speaking to their customers and the customers were telling them what their fears were, what was happening, which gave them great insights. So they had the ability to adapt with the customers.

Michael (22:43)
Crazy.

Mike Jones (22:53)
needs because they were so interconnected. And I think this is where all the stuff that we talk about at the start around that need for control, the ego element, our inability to or want to deal with uncertainty, we seem to centralise all this stuff. The more we get worried about we centralise it, we now got, we proliferate job titles now. So I frick, it's mental. Suddenly you've got like a

Michael (23:18)
everyone.

Mike Jones (23:19)
head of strategy, they're a little strategy team that are like disconnected. We've now got, yeah, yeah, we've got like head of employee experience, head of culture, head of all these things. And I'm like, why, why are you, it's like almost think if we just put a head on it and we can control it and all these things that can't be controlled, they're trying to control it, which yeah, seems really counterintuitive to me.

Michael (23:21)
Everyone's on VP.

Well,

no, is. But again, I kind of put that in the reductionist approach, right? It's like, well, if I create a department to fix something, then it'll be fixed, right? When an actual fact, you're dealing with a complex problem which is probably distributed throughout your business in terms of touch points and people who might have...

Mike Jones (23:44)
Mmm.

Yeah.

Michael (23:58)
know, control or input to it, which is where distribution of that sort of sense making and decision making is supposed to come in. It's not just for fun. It's not just a thought experiment. It's to create a sensor network throughout your organisation to make sense of what's happening and then work out what the best course of action is and to do that in real time. But instead, yeah, exactly to your point is they kind of go, we're having a lot of problems in customer satisfaction.

will create a head of customer satisfaction and they'll do, and they'll, you know, annoy the hell out of our customers by sending them emails with NPS scores on it and all the, even though the, you know, the science behind NPS is completely debunked and it's kind of pointless and it means nothing, but we'll still put it on a dashboard and we'll put metrics around it and we'll do all this stuff. And I think that's the big thing for me and kind of, as you were talking there in terms of like the proliferation of just stuff and activity.

I think that's where I've got to in my research and why I complexity science as such a refreshing approach is because if you start from the right position, you go, well, all of that stuff doesn't make sense. So I'm not going to bother. So immediately, I can get rid of so much energy wasted, so much resources, so much time, and I can focus on the things that are within my control, which is

Mike Jones (24:56)
Mmm... Yeah.

Michael (25:08)
creating sensor networks, working out what's going on, coming up with portfolios of small experiments to see what works and what doesn't to kind of test and probe the system.

and kind of go from there and scale things at work. And I think that's probably an important point as well at this point is not everything is a complex problem. Like some things are quite simple and checklist and linear sequence of activities for people to follow is really good. Like that's fine. Like there's a lot of clear evidence. And again, safety is a really good domain for this where we've seen a lot of that stuff, like even in challenging environments, in surgical teams and in aviation and stuff like that.

They still rely on checklists quite heavily. So there is value in linear sequencing to assist a human when they're making decisions under pressure or under time constraints, right? So it's not to say that everything has to be, we've got to ask everybody everything and we've got to take into account all these opinions and whatever, which I think some people who don't quite understand complexity fully get is not everything's a complex problem.

Mike Jones (25:46)
Yeah, yeah.

Michael (26:08)
The key is diagnosing those complex problems and making sure that you approach them in a way that matches the nature of the problem, ⁓ rather than applying the approaches that you would for an ordered system where you have linearity, strong cause and effect relationships, where you have predictability and you know what's going to happen. You've got a level of stability within those systems. Don't try and apply that thinking to complex problems because the resultant effect will

Mike Jones (26:15)
Yeah.

Michael (26:34)
be number one failure, but a whole bunch of wasted energy and all that other stuff in the process as well.

Mike Jones (26:39)
Yeah, I think that's great advice. really diagnose actually what you're looking at and in those ordered systems, no one's saying, don't move away from guidelines or processes. That's where processes are really good. have it, where it's it's repeatable, have a process. Great. And that really helps the cognitive load of the people there. It's when they try and put that process on a complex problem, there's not repeatable.

Michael (26:49)
yeah.

Mike Jones (27:04)
And I like your point as well around the experimentation and scale what works because I think people have got this sort of idea about this whole, well, I say they have around this whole, know, fail fast type mentality they're talking about. But what I find is that when they're doing experimentations, they're not, they make it over complicated. They make this big thing which slows it all down.

Michael (27:10)
Thank

Yeah.

Mike Jones (27:27)
and a lot of investment in time where actually they can find a really quick dirty way of just trying to do some experimentations to probe to understand what's going on. And once they understand what works, then start putting the investment and scale it and bring it into the business. think they have it almost the other way around. They put all the time up front to try and get it perfect and then don't really have the resources to do it. Yeah. God. Yeah. lot of planning.

Michael (27:35)
Yeah. Yeah.

planning. Lots of Kind of

antithesis, right. Well, mean, planning is another one for me. I'm like the amount of effort that goes into planning and maintaining a plan as opposed to, you know, sitting with the problem and actually working the problem.

with whoever the relevant people are is kind of crazy to me in most organisations, right? But again, I assume it comes back to a lot of what we've been talking about in terms of certainty and, you know, a perception of control. But I think that's a big one for me that I've learned over my career is there's a big difference between the perception of control and actual control.

and finding the difference is really, really critical, particularly in the domain that I work at in terms of safety and risk management and stuff like that. It can be very critical. can be catastrophic if those types of things get wronged, like in terms of critical controls of critical systems and stuff like that in different organisations, particularly high risk ones. So, know, being honest about and being clear about what

what

is a control that we can rely upon versus one that we're doing to give us a sense of control and whether it really is effective or not is a critical question for organizations. And I mean, that's where it boils down to from a risk management control perspective is what's the effectiveness of this control as opposed to the mere existence of it or the undertaking of activities, right? And activity is constantly conflated as a control in organizations when really

Mike Jones (29:00)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Michael (29:07)
it's just an activity that somebody does, but I wouldn't really say that it's a reliable control measure in terms of controlling whatever hazard you're trying to control. ⁓

Mike Jones (29:17)
Hmm.

Michael (29:18)
But yeah, it's, I think perception versus reality is a big one that we have to overcome as well. But again, for me, that kind of comes back to understanding what a complex problem is. The fact that you can never know everything and that's okay. That's the nature of the problem that you're dealing with. But again, don't be applying this kind of thinking to every single thing that you've got in your organization because it's not necessary. In fact, it's quite ineffective and quite inefficient to do so.

Mike Jones (29:39)
Yeah, we are saying the plan is nothing, planning is everything. And I think that hearts up all the point you're saying around like, yeah, we have a plan, you have a plan and reasonable, but it's just a plan. It's not some dogma to be beaten with.

Michael (29:44)
Yeah. Yes.

It probably goes into some

of your military stuff around commanders intent and like the Udalupe in terms of constantly shifting the orientation and stuff like that. And I think it's the cadence of that that is probably where a lot of organizations get it wrong. I think there's a lot of set and forget. We've kind of worked that problem, haven't we? Six months ago, didn't we do that? And it's like, yeah, but six months is long time for this particular problem. And that's one,

Mike Jones (30:17)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Michael (30:22)
We've got a live example here in Australia right where with psychosocial risk legislation that's been in in place for a couple of years here a lot of organizations are really struggling with it You know fairly unsurprisingly in in my from my perspective because it's a complex problem and most organizations are applying linear logic to a complex problem and It's a relational issue. So it's between interactions with people. This is not something that you can apply

you know, the rigid kind of control approaches that you do for a physical hazard. But again, that comes down to treating each individual problem based on its own nature. And if you're dealing with a complex problem versus a complicated one, then you have to treat them differently. And subsequently, the control environment that you develop for those will look different. And the cadence of things like orientation, if we're looking at it from an Oodaloo perspective, is somewhat

be fast and some might be slow and that's okay but you have to build that level of nuance and variation within the system because otherwise you know you're just using the same tools to address different types of problems which is only going to end up in risk of some sort whether it's safety whether it's competitiveness in terms of market and stuff like that product quality whatever it's all going to come out somewhere.

Mike Jones (31:35)
Yeah,

I've seen a lot in some of the clients I work with that are in safety. I don't deal with safety, they are in safety critical areas of work. And one thing I've noticed is that in the safety now to try and control things, they're centralizing everything into packs telling people exactly what to do. But when they think that...

Michael (31:54)
Yeah.

Mike Jones (31:56)
by trying to control it and control the actions of people. They're going to make it more safe, but actually they're making it more unsafe because we're not disputing the thinking and the decision making. And so they're not now going to those situations, not thinking, right, what have I been told to do? And how can I navigate this as safely as possible to achieve the aim, but also make sure that we are safe? They're going, well, the list doesn't say this.

Michael (32:07)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Should I follow the list or should I, yeah. And I mean, that's a good example because I mean, safety as a profession is pretty bad at this in terms of applying policy and procedure.

Mike Jones (32:21)
So do anything. Yeah.

Michael (32:32)
as a control for everything because it just, you know, you have an incident, you develop another procedure, you do a bit more training on someone again, like you've just got to try harder and you'll be better, as opposed to creating an environment where, you know, people are constantly making sense of what's happening and we're empowering them with the capabilities to actually navigate those things. The one point I'd make on that is, again, it's like what we mentioned before, it's appropriate for the particular

hazard or situation that you're in, right, where you may have, like I said, safety critical stuff is a very good example, particularly in the physical hazard world. So you're talking like gas plants and those types of things where process safety is a really good approach to managing high risk incidents. A lot of linear sequencing and processes is important in those environments. I don't think anybody's debating that, but I think it's the

the application of that thinking, that very engineering thinking to complex problems that doesn't quite fit. And that's where we're seeing the tension bubble. And often as a practitioner, as a consultant, where I go and talk with operational teams, they'll tell you what they're doing to actually deal with something. And it's not by the process or the book or whatever. ⁓ And you kind of like, well, then within the system, it's like, how do we capture their operational knowledge, redesign so that they're actually in

Mike Jones (33:42)
Yeah, yeah.

Michael (33:49)
alignment

with whatever they're telling them to do. And at that point you can challenge any unhelpful behaviors, know, potentially that the guys might be doing stuff that are unsafe and all that, then you kind of work on what is a safe way to do this, but a way that's also aligned with how you actually undertake the task as people who are, you know, the specialists at undertaking that task, as opposed to a process, you know, health and safety process designer ⁓ who was removed from the work.

Mike Jones (34:11)
Yeah, but,

and I think that's a great point, especially when we think about the execution. So execution strategy is known to be god awful. And I think it comes to this point where you said exactly there, you engage with the people that undertake the task to communicate what you're trying to do and how then you, how then,

using their information, their knowledge to say, well, how can we do this more safe manner? I think that's the same in execution. It's people then define the how too high up and they restrict the freedom of action for the people that are doing it. Yeah.

Michael (34:35)
Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah.

Oh yeah, undoubtedly. Like, and

I mean, any top down strategy is almost destined to fail, right? And I mean, it hap- and particularly if you're talking about in complex environments, which I mean, let's be real, with digitization and globalization and stuff like that, you'd be hard pressed finding an environment, a work environment that's not, you know, a complex adaptive system that doesn't, you know, have the hallmarks of it. And, or at least in some-

capacity run, like it might not entirely be, but most organisations are just by virtue of having a bunch of human beings in them and the level of interpersonal interaction. But I mean, most organisations again kind of take that.

you know, that very traditional approach of the people at the top design the strategy, then they tell all the people charged with execution what they're gonna do, what vision they've got, and what direction they're gonna go in, and how we're gonna be the best at something in five years. And then the people are sitting there going, what on earth is this? This is never gonna happen because of a whole bunch of reasons. Or just completely disagree with the direction and all that stuff. ⁓

Mike Jones (35:42)
Yeah.

Michael (35:43)
But if you take it bottom up, and I mean, this is again, why I kind of like leveraging kind of some of the complexity approaches, is you take bottom up, start with where you are, know, starting with where you are, not where you want to be, because aspirational states are great, but at the end of the day, they're just kind of like a wish list. It's like, well, sure, how are you going to get there? Here's what's more important as to where you want to go. But setting that sort of direction as opposed to those explicit goals, you know, starting from where you are and working on, you know, from that complexity point of view, that

Mike Jones (35:53)
Mm-mm.

Michael (36:08)
kind of adjacent possible, like what are the things that we can actually reach to that are quite easy for us to get to, as opposed to trying to go all the way to sort of some arbitrary goal at the end of, you know, a five year, three year, five year cycle with no actual path to get there. That's what I find fascinating about strategies is they're literally just aspirations, right, of people sitting in executive roles that kind of, and I mean, they sound great. They sound fantastic. And again, it sounds like we're sort of

Mike Jones (36:24)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Michael (36:35)
taking out people in senior positions, but I think it's this ritualistic behaviour that we've got into in terms of leadership is that that's what a leader does. And I think more and more if leaders just actually went and engaged with people in operational roles on a real frequent basis, you know, with curiosity and sort of that inquiring mind, I think you'd be a lot better in terms of creating a strategy just from that alone.

Mike Jones (36:40)
Yes.

Michael (37:00)
let alone sitting in a boardroom with consultants and stuff like that. And again, I kind of...

kind of mystifies me. I don't think any of this is revolutionary or all that difficult to do. It's just being willing to just do something a bit different and see how it goes. But maybe it goes back to one of your points before, how do we know this is gonna work? Or how do you know that the other approach is gonna work, right? Like that's, because all evidence suggests, as you said, just read any McKinsey report or Bain report or any of that. All the evidence suggests that most strategies that are developed don't get implemented.

Mike Jones (37:12)
No.

Michael (37:33)
what's the harm in trying something different?

Mike Jones (37:35)
Yeah,

exactly. Shocking statistics, about 98 % of strategies had never implemented. That's sort of, that was Kaplan and Norton's estimate. And you sort of get this and like I said, we're not bagging on senior leaders. And I do think senior leaders have an understanding of the direction, but I think it's, we're just so coupled with this rituals.

Michael (37:43)
Yeah, it's crazy.

Mike Jones (38:00)
formative nature of what strategy is that you we must have an off-site, we must do this and we must do the financial report to the board and I really like your point and I wrote about this recently around aspiration first approaches that we need to move away from aspiration, you know this whole sort of what's our winning aspiration first and actually there's nothing wrong with having an aspiration.

Michael (38:20)
Yeah. Yeah.

Mike Jones (38:24)
but you need to have a view of where we are now. Like what's emerging now, what we're doing, understand what we're capable of, what's our nature relationship with the clients, and then we can then start to understand what is it that we need to do, what's our intention now.

Michael (38:39)
Yeah, yeah, totally. And I'm with you 100%. I'm not a fan of aspirational and particularly really explicit aspirations as well, I think is.

is a real error that a lot of organizations make where they make really specific future goals. honestly cast your mind five years ahead. What on earth is going to happen in five years? You've got no idea, right? So this idea that people can cast forward and I mean, don't get me wrong. Like I understand future, like, you know, designing sort of scenario futures and stuff like that going all of that I think is really important work. Like, so I'm kind of not rubbishing any sort of kind of planning.

Mike Jones (38:58)
Yeah.

Mm.

Michael (39:14)
and stuff like that. But it is about kind of to your point about trying to get to a point of saying, well, we think this is a more likely scenario or a less likely scenario. It's not we can't design any of them to within sort of perfection or within sort of tolerance limits like that. Because it's not an engineering problem. Again, there's too many, there's too many things that are outside of our control. And it's interesting actually, now that we're talking about it is, you know, the amount of things that

Mike Jones (39:31)
No, no, no.

Michael (39:39)
organizations completely seem to ignore that are outside of their locus of control, Like, you know, from a regulatory perspective, from geopolitical perspective, and all these things, and it's like, but then they kind of develop their strategy as if somehow none of that stuff.

is kind of relevant or has any bearing. It's kind of this real inside view of the business and it's all because, I'd like to be there. And it's like, well, that's fantastic. We'd all like to be something. That would be great if we were number one at something, whatever your desire might be. But there's probably a whole host of things in there that could potentially happen that would not allow us to do that, that would act as fairly strong constraints on our ability to achieve that objective. And to your point,

Mike Jones (39:54)
Yeah, ⁓

Michael (40:18)
like why don't we start with where we are, what is reasonably within our reach in terms of you know time and energy cost and then how do we move you know much more intelligently and strategically towards a direction we'd like to head as opposed to the goal we're trying to hit. But again I think this is where those subtle kind of conditioning that we get in terms of

you know, through things like management literature, through things like this high performance executive type thing of like, well, if you work really hard, then you'll figure it out and you'll make the business go there. Just through sheer willpower and all this stuff, which isn't helped with the likes of, you know, like a Musk and all these guys getting kind of, you know, held up as some sort of gods. When really it's the reality is it's just a whole bunch of people that are working really hard towards a common objective. It's, you know, the leadership.

Mike Jones (40:49)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Michael (41:03)
I'm not sure there's a huge amount of impact on those types of things.

Mike Jones (41:05)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But yeah, you're right. The proliferation is this literature all around, know, it's all about, it's not thinking about, know, Jason, possible is a great thing. was writing it up, hopefully I'll release it this week, hopefully. But I mentioned about that. But it's also thinking everything is around, if we just

if we just put our heads down and we just work really hard, we'll get there. instead of thinking, what we need to do is this for us to do this. That means that we have give direction or we actually need to change something structurally. And I suppose this comes into where experimentation comes in small. Let's try this, see if this works and if then we can scale that team to do what it needs to do. And that's where it's more thoughtful.

Michael (41:30)
Yep. Yep.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Mike Jones (41:54)
intentional maneuvers rather than, right, we've just got this aspiration that we're going to be number one, freaking manufacturer of this in five years. Let's just go. Yeah.

Michael (42:02)
Yeah. Yeah.

Well, and there's a couple of things there. mean, I like the quote, you know, it doesn't matter how well you solve the wrong problem sort of thing, right? And, it doesn't matter how well you optimize it to solve the wrong problem. And I think that's what I often see is kind of to your point.

organizations spend so much time focusing on efficiency and all these internal things that are about their own machine, they lose sight of what's actually happening in the markets that they operate in or in the environments they operate in. And I'm going to go to that orientation point on Boizutalip, right? And it's kind of like, but they kind of do those cursory things in terms of benchmarking and stuff like that. Like what's everyone else doing?

Mike Jones (42:48)
Yeah, yeah.

Michael (42:48)
as opposed

to it. But it's again, what's everyone else doing as opposed to what's the customer, what signals am I picking up from the customer, which I find quite interesting, where you spend a lot of time navel gazing about your competitors as if somehow your competitors are on the right track anyway, which is always kind of a massive assumption that I am kind of confused about where it's like, well, if you're benchmarking against someone, you're giving them a lot of credit, right?

Mike Jones (42:55)
Yeah.

Michael (43:12)
either you think that they're on the right track, which they might be, or you're just scared to be different to the rest of the people in your pack, which again could be a social thing in terms of how humans operate, right? We don't want to be isolated. We don't want to be sort of different from the bunch. We want to kind of have that kind of, we want to conform and fit in and kind of whatever. And it's interesting because you kind of see, well, anybody who's really defined, and if we're just talking within an organisational context now, anybody who's sort of defined categories or really

Mike Jones (43:17)
Yay.

Yeah.

Michael (43:39)
defined, you know, had big innovative breakthroughs and stuff like that. They're the people that aren't bound by those conventions, right? They're the people that are driven by curiosity and by the idea of producing something special for a customer. They're not obsessed with optimising their own workflows internally and all this other crap that kind of might be important at some point, but ⁓ in a lot of instances I think

Mike Jones (44:02)
Mm-hmm.

Michael (44:03)
waste a lot of time and energy from stuff that's more important in terms of what's happening in our environment, where are we heading, how do we strip away stuff so people can get on with their job and make sense of what they need to do and what as a leader, what's my role in doing that, in clearing the decks for them as opposed to maintaining a status and kind of like you said, this performative role of like being busy and doing lots of things to justify my salary or something. And again, it just kind

Mike Jones (44:19)
Mm-hmm.

Michael (44:29)
to reiterate, think leadership's a really tough job these days. It's only getting harder. think leaders of...

years gone by, probably had a much easier task than leaders of today. And I think, for me, I have a lot of empathy for people in those positions because it is very hard, it is very isolated. And I think they do need that support. And I mean, that's where I've kind of focused my energy right, is like, well, how do you help people in those positions make sense of what they're facing? And to me, a lot of that starts with like, get back to fundamentals, watch your role.

Mike Jones (44:40)
Mm-hmm.

Michael (44:58)
don't be burdened by this kind of cultural archetype of like you have to make every decision. It's okay to say you don't know what you're doing. It's okay to say, hey, you know what, there's probably someone in my team who's much better placed than that, but they're a graduate who cares, right? Like if they've got the answer, they got the answer. But again, there's a lot of stuff in that in terms of vulnerability, humility, all that sort of stuff that often doesn't come easy to people who've found their

Mike Jones (45:12)
Yeah, is that it?

Michael (45:21)
their

way into those positions where other qualities have served them well in terms of strength or confidence or decisiveness and all these other qualities. So think it's a really tricky one. But I think the more people can help them focus on what's important, then hopefully the better the outcomes.

Mike Jones (45:37)
Yeah.

And I agree with that with the organizations that herd mentality is like our supermarkets over here are the same. They didn't really do anything bold or different. They just do pretty much the same as what everybody else does. And they just all, but that extends into your point around leaders. it's tough because it's, a, with herd mentality comes comfort because you, get to see what they're doing and you just do a little, iterate it slightly better than what they're doing. And,

Michael (45:43)
Yeah.

Thank

Yeah. Yeah.

Mike Jones (46:01)
You don't do anything bold to step out of that herd. ⁓ and I think that's the trap they come in. They just think, well, if I just have the comfort of doing pretty much what everybody else is doing, I won't stand out as a problem. And I'm probably not going to fail because I've just sort of seen what they're doing and I can just iterate a little bit better on them. So I'm, I'm just the same as them, but I'm just slightly bit better than them. Yeah. that's all. Yeah. Yeah. Just slightly better.

Michael (46:05)
Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, as long as I'm slightly good.

Yeah. I've heard a quote before as a consultant, as long as you're five minutes in front of your client, then you're an expert sort of thing. Yeah, but I think it's true. But mean, again, I think there's some deep seated sort of.

Mike Jones (46:34)
Hahaha.

Michael (46:39)
evolutionary purpose to this, right? It's like you don't survive as a species by going out on your own, right? So ⁓ it is counterintuitive to us when we are feeling threatened as well as individuals. And I don't think...

Mike Jones (46:45)
Mmm.

Michael (46:53)
you know, being granted a status, know, a prestigious status in an organisation makes anybody, you know, immune to those types of things, even, you know, obviously subconsciously. But yeah, I think the challenge for me is trying to articulate why that kind of approach or why that kind of strategy.

is actually contributing to the challenges that they're experiencing.

Because from all the literature I look at, leaders and people in leadership positions, things are getting harder, they're suffering more from it in terms of stress and mental health and stuff like that. And you've got succession issues in terms of people not wanting to be leaders in a lot of organisations because they're seeing what a toll it takes on people. And again, from my perspective, and particularly someone who works in risk management and psychosocial

Mike Jones (47:35)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Michael (47:40)
risk, you know, I kind of think, well, if we could strip away a lot of this activity that kind of doesn't really perform any function or doesn't contribute to the shared objective of the business.

then what kind of a work environment could we have? What kind of a work life could you have as a leader if you were to just give it a go? Now I say that, you know, a, it sounds like a degree of naivety, but you know, in my time, I'm seeing lots and lots of large complex organisations and how they function. I'm kind of like, well, you can't tell me that the way it's working is going all that well. So why wouldn't you just try something different? And to your point,

Mike Jones (47:53)
Yeah.

Michael (48:16)
the experiment stuff is like start small and just see how it goes and get rid of some of the things, the long held assumptions that you think are constraining you and actually work from, know, where are we, what can we do right now in terms of lowest energy cost and sort of time and see what we can do and just get the networks, the sensor networks out there to see what works and what doesn't work and try and pull that whole zero distance to customer thing.

get close to who you're selling to because at the end of the day that's all a business exists for, Is to serve its customers in whatever way. If you can kind of flatten that out a bit, then I think a lot of this pressure that's on leaders of organizations would sort of resolve because they wouldn't have to uphold a lot of this performative kind of activity and structure and all that stuff that, you know, in a lot of instances I don't think serve much of a purpose.

Mike Jones (49:03)
No. Yeah. And I really liked that idea of, they, it gets me to reflect on a recent conversation I had with an organization that we're, we're trying to make things efficient. Like, and I totally agree. There's probably a lot of stuff that people do that just aren't really worth it. just, we just sort of ingrained into doing it, but they, it takes so much, focus away from people to the customer or people they serve.

Michael (49:24)
Yeah.

Mike Jones (49:25)
and then it's more internal entropy of stuff. And you definitely see that in health sector, know, there's shocking around the amount of time a doctor spends doing internal reporting versus seeing patients. But it was a question and they were trying to make the organization more efficient. And I said, what question did you ask? Because...

Michael (49:28)
Yep.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Mike Jones (49:46)
it, how do we make efficiencies or how do we make it more efficient? There two different questions and two very different outcomes. And I think this is where we need to think. And unfortunately we find where, I think the questions get confused and we think efficiency comes from stripping out people and cutting costs rather than what you're saying is like, how do you maximize what we've got? How do we remove the, internal entropy and so that people are more closer?

Michael (49:50)
Yeah. Yeah, yeah, that's right.

Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah.

Mike Jones (50:13)
And

that might mean more people. doesn't necessarily mean that we need to make efficiencies rather than being efficient.

Michael (50:16)
It could.

It's funny you mention that because there was just one of the universities here is doing an efficiency drive.

Interestingly being reported to the health and safety regulator over it. So I'm seeing how that whole thing will play out. But I think they're getting rid of, 400 staff or something like that. Universities are under pressure here in Australia, a lot of headwinds post COVID and stuff like that. So it's not that there's not a problem, but equally, I would argue that this is just your, you know, management restructure 101. Like it's pretty kind of boring at this point, 2025, that we still think that

Mike Jones (50:38)
⁓ Same in UK,

Michael (50:55)
The only way to help an organisation survive is to just sack everyone.

when there's such, again, when there's such clear evidence about what damage that does to the organisation reputationally, but from, and this is the core thing for me that I always come back to, is from producing the actual good or service that it's there to produce. If you only focus on the dollars and cents to kind of keep people around and you ignore the fact that those people usually would have provided some value, and I'm not saying that the

that redundancies aren't a legitimate kind of way to go in terms of modern kind of corporations and stuff like that. But I think it's a blunt instrument a lot of the time and it's just this really easy way to demonstrate action and outcomes and it's, clearly it'll look good on a P &L and it kind of, save lots of money. But we've seen it as well. If you've been around organizations long enough, you'll know that they'll hire people two years later and you'll be back to kind of the FTE base that they were.

Mike Jones (51:40)
Yeah.

Michael (51:49)
before they did all the sacking and it's wise because all those people actually performed a function in the business and they realized after they've sat them that that function wasn't getting done and they need to bring someone back in and they probably paid a whole heap of costs on like sort of short term people in to get, know, either consultants or whatever. So it's all this credit. I mean, we see that in our health system, right? It's like you, you kind of don't hire the right people, but then you fly them in from New Zealand for weekend shifts and pay them 300 % loading and all this sort of stuff. it's,

Mike Jones (51:54)
Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Michael (52:17)
this craziness of, I think a lot of it, a lot of these things are driven by again, not understanding the problem that you're facing, ⁓ not, and I mean really understanding it, right? Not at a cursory level, like I think a lot of management teams and to be fair consulting advisors and stuff like that do as well, where they apply a lot of patterned advice, where it's like, I've seen this before and this is the answer.

Mike Jones (52:24)
Yeah, yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Michael (52:39)
and I'm like, well, I don't think that's true. I think we need to of make a bit more sense of the situation. And you're just getting this carbon copy of know, increased revenue, reduced costs and kind of here's a bill. And you kind of will, I just think...

Mike Jones (52:41)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Michael (52:54)
Yeah, I think the impacts of that are severely underestimated in terms of the long-term viability of the organisation. And it comes down to, you know, how important are your people? And I think, and particularly in the age of AI and this sort of thing where everybody thinks that AI is now going to kind of take over everybody's role and it's kind of going to be all agents talking to each other. I think some of the evidence coming out, some of the research is kind of demonstrating that's not going to be the case.

humans are still going to be very much part of organisations going forward and it's the real competitive advantage will come from understanding how to navigate complex problems as opposed to how to apply the management theories of the 20th century

Mike Jones (53:29)
Yeah, yeah.

Michael (53:33)
to situations that no longer fit. mean, for goodness sake, you've got, is it Porter, the change guy?

popular change theorist. mean, he came out a few years ago. Cotter, yeah. He was the Swat or something else. Yeah, he came out sort of basically saying, don't follow my change method because the pace of change these days, by the time you get to the end of it, things have changed again. You have to start again, ⁓ which makes things like Boyd's Oodaloo much more relevant. But, you know, go kick around most organizations, you won't see Boyd's Oodaloo getting implemented, you?

Mike Jones (53:40)
⁓ err, cut her. Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

No, see freaking,

yeah, you see cutter and all those things like the change curve and all this stuff that's, I recently was with clients, I said about cutter, don't bother. And they were like looking at me like I I just sacrificed a sacrificial animal in front of them. Yeah.

Michael (54:17)
Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah,

this is, I think this is what's, and maybe even going back to the MBA thing, is you've got so many people embedded in organisations that have been taught those principles and they think, you know, and go through them like SWAT, PESTEL, you know, all these, like you said, the CORA, all these other things like Portis 5 Forces, all this stuff. And you've got so many people out there still leveraging those tools as if somehow they're going to solve the

that they're facing and it's quite troubling. You're kind of like, well, there's no chance. These tools were not made. It's not that there's anything wrong with the tools. It's that they were made for a different time. And I know that a lot of them aren't that old. You're talking maybe 10, 20 years maybe, but in organisational terms, that's a lot of change in terms of digitisation alone. So why would you use the same methods?

Mike Jones (55:01)
Yeah.

Michael (55:07)
But this is where I kind of see as people who...

have done a degree or a course or something like that at a point in time and then they just apply the learnings from that into perpetuity as if somehow your role doesn't necessitate you learning more as you go. And I think that's the difference that I've seen in leaders that I've worked with is those that are curious, kind of keep an open mind and maybe again to the Boyd's thing, destroy and recreate their kind of mental models are the ones

that have greater success or a lot more adaptability and agility to new circumstances because that's really what it is, But I think this maybe it kind of goes full circle back to the certainty and the control is that underlying comfort that that brings and just that human desire to just be like, hey man, I just want to know that things are all good. Like, can I just do my job and go home and it's all good? Like, I don't want all this flux and all this change and whatever.

Mike Jones (55:40)
Yeah, yeah.

Michael (55:57)
But again, to me, that's just kind of like denying gravity. So it's like, it's going to happen regardless. And if you align your systems, then navigating that is actually not as stressful as what I think you think it might be. And I would posit that maintaining the systems of rigidity and stuff like that is a lot more stressful when meeting complex problems. So it's kind of like, well, I think we've got it backwards a bit.

Mike Jones (56:14)
Yes, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, I agree. This has been really fascinating. And I think there's going to be a lot for people to take away from this conversation. But what would you what would you like to leave listeners with to to think about from this podcast?

Michael (56:32)
Yeah, it's probably just that simple fact of not all problems are the same, right? So don't ⁓ approach them with the same problem-solving methods or however you sort of navigate problems in your organisation. Really seek to understand the nature of the problem.

Mike Jones (56:36)
Mm.

Michael (56:46)
And even if you've got experience with it, because I see this a lot in the safety space, where you have highly competent people working in a particular area. Again, our brains are pattern detecting machines. So we like to detect patterns and kind of assign meaning to it straight away as quickly as possible to conserve energy. So if you know that that's the way that your brain works, then you've got to actively overcome that innate sense, right? That innate behavior.

Mike Jones (57:10)
Nah.

Michael (57:10)
So even if you've seen the problem before, make sure you're going through a process of sense making with it to determine if contextually it's in line with what you've previously experienced or not. I think the more context we can provide to situations and analysis of problems, the better. I think we're in a context starved world at the moment, I think, and that's driven by a of things.

Mike Jones (57:38)
Yeah, yeah.

Michael (57:39)
So I think understand the nature of the problem and then don't underestimate the power of distributed intelligence and decision making. think a lot of particularly leaders see that as a very scary prospect because they kind of think that things will go a bit wild and they'll lose control. But I think if you genuinely empower people, then most people will step up to that challenge and kind of let adults be.

Mike Jones (57:52)
Yeah, yeah.

Michael (57:59)
adults

and yeah I think that can be a very powerful tool to any organisation is leveraging that distributed intelligence of the workforce to navigate problems that are complex in nature and there's no one person that's going to know everything about it so kind of leverage it.

Mike Jones (58:14)
Yeah,

I agree. That's awesome. Yeah, I think that really, really bringing back to that sense making that empowerment and context is key. I think especially in change, just because it worked in one place doesn't mean it's going to work in, in a different context. That's great.

Michael (58:22)
Yeah.

Well, and the speed

of context change, right? Like I think is critical in these, like, mean, again, chat GPT came out a year or two ago and now we're talking about all these other AI things and how they're gonna work. I mean, what's that doing to people's workflows and processes and stuff like that? Like it's completely upended it. And that kind of thing is happening all the time. So it's kind of like constantly reorient, I think.

Mike Jones (58:48)
Yeah,

I think that's key with that. It's been awesome. I'll put Michael's details in the show notes. So if you want to carry on the conversation with Michael, feel free to. I've really enjoyed the conversation today. Thank you so much. And if you enjoyed the conversation, please like, share and support the strategy meets reality podcast. And I look forward to seeing you in the next one.

Michael (59:01)
Me too.

Mike Jones (59:11)
Thank you very much Michael. Cheers.

Michael (59:12)
Thanks a