Joe Miller: 0:00

Hey, welcome back, everybody. I'm back in the studio here with Bob Tipton. I should say the virtual studio talking about navigating times of radical change. Bob, we want to talk about communications today to start off, don't we?

Bob Tipton: 0:14

Yeah, that's the primary topic for today is finding ways to be able to communicate effectively during times of radical change. What I find is that we talked about this in the first episode also is that When things are challenging, we tend to find ourselves adrenalized, and our physiology, our brain chemistry only gives us a limited number of choices at that point.

Joe Miller: 0:39

Let's pause just a second and welcome Mike Peterson into the conversation. Hello. Hey, Mike. I'm glad you could make it today. Mike is a former VP of HR and IT. And he and I have been in a common network together for a number of years. And also a published author and has recently published a book on leadership. Maybe we'll touch on that later if it ties in. But welcome in, Mike. Go ahead, Bob. Sorry to interrupt the flow. Teeing up the whole topic for today of starting with communications and how to communicate in this challenging environment.

Bob Tipton: 1:17

Thanks, Joe. And hello, Mike. Nice to meet you.

Mike Peterson: 1:19

Nice to meet you, too.

Bob Tipton: 1:22

So I'm coming to you from the Denver area. I don't know where you are, Mike. I know where Joe is. He's like in Florida, right? I'm

Mike Peterson: 1:28

in Northwest Arkansas.

Bob Tipton: 1:31

Northwest Arkansas. A lot of time in Fort Smith. Just down the road. Northwest Arkansas is beautiful. It sure is. Really special part of the country. Anyway. Yeah, we were talking about this idea that when things are hard, when things are challenging and difficult, And we find ourselves with a whole bunch of adrenaline that's been pumped into our body. We don't have a lot of executive function available. We basically have fight, flight, or freeze, and that doesn't help when it comes to communicating effectively, usually. So, yeah, that's the topic for today, is to how do we bring better tools and approaches when it comes to communicating? So, I guess the first thing I want to put out there is leaders... often find themselves navigating challenging situations just like the people that they're leading. But we have a special relationship, obligations, kind of a big word, obligation, to be able to quell some of our own concerns and our own nervousness and uncertainty and be able to help those around us. So one of the first things that I like to think about before we start communicating is are we in the right mindset to do so? And that right mindset is requires sometimes just taking a deep breath and relaxing a little bit, giving yourself a moment. In fact, I've got three kind of rules about answering emails or communicating. So if it's something that's really important, I mean, it's like life-changing potentially. I have a 48-hour rule. I'm not going to say anything until I sleep on it twice. Then I have an hour rule. If it's something that looks like it's something that's significant, really have to deal with it. I'll still wait an hour to make sure that I've actually metabolized my adrenaline. And then if it's something that's on fire actually has to happen immediately, I still have 90 seconds. So this knee-jerk reaction to communicate immediately when somebody says something, I'll always wait at least a minute and a half. And I get a mental timer going. The good news about that is after 90 seconds, the adrenaline actually starts to be converted. So that's first. Are we in the right mindset to communicate? Have you ever received a flaming email from somebody that are just full of concern, full of all kinds of things? Never. Never gotten one of those, have you? Oh, my God. Our natural reaction is to communicate immediately. That's where road rage comes from, too. It's an immediate triggered response based on... a lack of 90 seconds of waiting. So that's first. Are we in the right mindset to communicate? That's necessary. And then from that, when we're looking at things of radical change, the first things we talked about, is it even real? Is it something that belongs to me? And I think one of the things we didn't talk about a lot in the first episode is this idea of what if I'm wrong about this? You know, we find ourselves in echo chambers. We've talked about that a fair amount. We find ourselves victims, quote unquote, of algorithms and social media and all the different things that come across our newsfeed. We're not really victims. We're choosing that. It's just we kind of get reinforced. We find ourselves in some cases addicted, I guess, to that sort of a thing. But what if we're wrong about it? So one of my favorite things to bring forward, well, two things, I guess. One, a marvelous TED Talk from 2011. Catherine Scholes had a TED Talk on something called On Being Wrong. She's actually a researcher that looked into the subject. And she started her TED Talk with this story. See if I get it right. I'm not sure if I get it completely right, but you get the gist of it. She and a traveling companion were driving across the United States and they kept seeing this weird symbol. They thought, why do we keep seeing this Chinese or Korean or Japanese symbol on the signs? And after a while, one of them finally decided to look it up to see what it actually was. And it wasn't this Chinese kanji symbol. It was a picnic table. It was a symbol for campground. So just the context was completely wrong in what they thought they were seeing. Totally different. And then she asked the question of the audience. She said, how does it feel when you're wrong? So, Mike, Joe, how does it feel when you're wrong?

Joe Miller: 6:11

It's a little bit embarrassing, I think, because it reveals back to that knee-jerk response and maybe from I've built context based upon maybe the echo chamber that I've been in or the paradigms I was holding.

Bob Tipton: 6:26

Right. Except you didn't ask her the question that I asked. This is what she said. The question that you asked is how does it feel when you realize you're wrong? How does it feel when you're wrong? It feels like nothing or it feels like you're right. You don't know. So that's a little bit to add to the mix of what we talked about in the first installment is this idea of my source is even accurate. Who paid for that research? What, Are they looking for the statistics? What things are they comparing? You want to do something fun with Copilot or ChatGBT? Give it this prompt. Say, find me a ridiculous correlation. So I'll butcher this. This isn't exactly right, but it sounds right or similar. The number of people that die from poisonous spider bites every year correlates to the number of movies that Nick Cage is in every year. The graph looks exactly the same, but it's ridiculous. So it's back to this idea, first of all, am I right about what I'm about to communicate? How much time do we actually spend checking sources?

Mike Peterson: 7:38

Capita cheese consumption in the U.S. is strongly correlated with the number of people who died by being tangled in their bedsheets.

Bob Tipton: 7:46

There you go. It makes no sense, but it correlates. Yeah. And a lot of the stuff that we see, Mike, when it comes to messaging has that kind of nonsensical feel to it, unfortunately. But we're either not aware enough or we don't care enough to be able to check it out. So, Joe, that's first, I think, when it comes to are we in the right mindset and do we have the right information to be communicating? So from that, if we can say yes to that, I'm in the right mindset or I think I am. And I think I'm right because I've checked the sources. Then it gets down to what do people actually need when we're communicating with them? And the third installment, when we get to that, I'm going to get in more specific behaviors from a leadership perspective. So I'm not going to get into so much of that right now. This is going to feel a little bit more like training. Sorry, not sorry. But a couple of tools that are really important. when it comes to communicating effectively. And the first one I want to talk about is relevance theory. Have either of you heard of relevance theory before? Not

Mike Peterson: 8:59

ringing any bells.

Joe Miller: 9:00

No.

Bob Tipton: 9:01

So what I find is many of those that are in technical professions, and I started that way. I was an IT person for many, many years. Didn't spend much time in the humanities section of the university before we got our degree and started working. I find that with doctors and lawyers and engineers. There's not a lot of time spent. Maybe one mandatory communications class you had when you were a freshman, but that was it. And what we tend to believe, there's a myth about communication, and that is everybody should find everything that I say to be relevant. It's a very personal, individual way of looking at things. And in reality, it's not true. A, not everybody cares about what we have to say, and B, B, it's the listener that gets to decide whether this is relevant or not. So as we're sitting here pontificating about stuff, dealing with times of radical change, those that are listening to this get to decide whether it's relevant or not and whether they want to pay attention to it or not. It's not what we want to say as we sit here. So imagine a Venn diagram. The Venn diagram on one circle, it's what you want to say. The other circle is what they want to hear. And the overlap is where relevance exists. Now, driving up relevance, there's actually some things to help. And this is what this idea of relevance theory shows up. So two pieces, and I'm warning you, you have to imagine a little bit of a math problem in your mind here. So I don't know how good you are at that, but I'm going to ask you to imagine a bit of a math problem. So relevance theory is a simple computation that It's contextual effects divided by processing effort. And what I mean by contextual effects is how quickly am I able to connect this to something that I already know. So a couple of weeks ago now, I was in a workshop with some real live engineers, water engineers, and they're looking to build a sophisticated water treatment plant to get rid of forever chemicals. And one of the things I know having worked in the water industry treatment industry, although I'm not an engineer, but I work in that industry a lot. There's a term called flocculation. Joe, Mike, have you ever heard the term flocculation before?

Joe Miller: 11:23

No, but I'm holding my tongue trying not to use my chemistry background to extrapolate a potential meaning. So I'm holding it.

Bob Tipton: 11:31

Fair enough. No, maybe you've got background here that you can understand a bit about what that means because of your training and your background. Most people have no flip an idea of what flocculation means. So there was a very senior water engineer in the room and I was sharing a slide that had this math formula processing or contextual effects divided by processing effort. And I said, can you help me with the term flocculation so I can get it quickly? He said, all right. It's like making ice cream. I thought, okay, cool. No pun intended. Making ice cream. What does that mean? Well, you start with this liquid with all sorts of stuff in it. And what you want to do through this paddle that is stirring in the ice cream is you want to create some glob. You want to make something kind of come together. I thought, okay, I get that. That's what flocculation is. Yeah, it's about taking particulates. It's about taking things that are floating in the water. And you want to attract them to each other through agitation. And there's some chemicals to make that possible. So what you do is basically create globs of stuff. I thought, great. Now I have a really clear understanding of what flocculation is because I know how ice cream is made. So the contextual effects for me were off the chart. It's like I get it right away. And by the way, if you ever watch drinking water being made, the last step is flocculation. And what they do is they take all the particulates and so on in the water and create these nasty looking globs of stuff that are heavier than the water. They float to the bottom, they're scraped off, and the finished water is ready to be sent into the distribution system. So this is an example of relevance theory.

Joe Miller: 13:19

In that case, Bob, was the way he explained it. My first response was he impacted the denominator. So he made it easy. But then in his example, he also, seemed to make it more relevant to something you could relate to. So he kind of did both at the same time?

Bob Tipton: 13:41

Yes. So if you imagine the numerator and the denominator, what you want is it to be 10 over 1. You don't want it to be 1 over 10. When it's 1 over 10, it's like you're speaking in a foreign language. People have no idea what you're saying. It's not relating to them at all. They don't get it. So this idea of relevance theory really is pretty straightforward, except that not enough leaders use it. They don't care about it. It's not something important to them. It's like, I held the town hall. I sent the email. What the heck? And they wonder why people are still running around going, I don't know what to do now. I don't know how this affects me. I don't know what to make out of this. So does it take a little longer? Does it require some empathy? Does it take some effort to be able to see what other people might need? Absolutely it does. So I haven't been a practicing IT professional for a long time. I still am involved in the strategy associated with organizations that often includes technology. But I haven't been doing it for quite some time. Do I still have a basic understanding of how to communicate things to people? I think so. Can I help? In fact, I don't know who I was talking to. Maybe it was you, Joe. I don't know who I was talking to, but I'm a former CTO and former CIO, and I discovered that people still have trouble communicating the strategic value of IT with their organizations. It was us. We had

Joe Miller: 15:14

a sidebar, I think, before the first session on this topic, yeah.

Bob Tipton: 15:22

It was us. I was hoping that you all had it figured out. I really did.

Joe Miller: 15:29

It's one of the most common, and Mike, you'll relate because we touch on this in our communities. It's one of the most common things that comes up, especially in people a little bit more junior than CIO, but still there too. And that is, how do I get a seat at the table? So it's related to that. In other words- Why aren't people listening to what I'm saying? Why am I not having influence?

Bob Tipton: 15:57

Maybe you're not making it relevant for them. Exactly. Maybe you're making it very difficult for them to understand because they don't get the nuances of cybersecurity. They don't get the nuances of risk when it comes to artificial intelligence. They don't get that. What they get instead is the meme that somebody posted on Facebook or Instagram the day before. They're getting something out of their echo chamber. They're not getting the actual facts in such a way that they can understand it. So anyway, I go back, gosh, this has got to be 25 years ago or more, developing websites. And the tool we used back then, where I think they're probably still using something like this, is called Personas and Journey Maps. I don't know if you're using any of those. Information architecture and who are we talking to? Well, I've translated that into team dynamics using that same tool now for decades, but in a non-IT kind of capacity because it's the same issue. We don't spend enough time understanding who we're communicating with and what they need, what their pain points are, how they view the world, what their actions and behaviors are. So there's a really specific thing that we can use, especially for a technology-related audience, It's not anything new. It's been around for decades, but we don't use it enough. How come do you think, why don't we use things like personas and journey maps enough?

Mike Peterson: 17:24

Uh, I think I just answered a, a question like that. So thank you for reminding me. And I, you know, one of the answers that I came across is, is just, um, time, you know, so, so many people are, um, They feel overburdened with work. They're playing catch up and doing things the right way takes a lot of time. And so a lot of people, from my perspective, at least know what the right way is. They just don't necessarily want to take the time to do it the right way. And I think... In many ways, those journey maps are a great example because they've been around for so long as kind of a best practice that it started to become like, well, I know what needs to be done. I know how to do it. So I'm just going to skip the process and go right to some assumptions about what I think I know because it's going to save me a lot of time. Until it doesn't, right? Exactly.

Bob Tipton: 18:28

Yeah. Again, going back to my days in IT, it was, why do you keep giving me the things I ask for as opposed to the things I need? I don't know how many times I heard that question from users. It's like, I know I asked for this, but it's not what I really need. So taking the time to understand how you actually interact with them. I mean, I go back now 30 years ago, there's a book written called Moments of Truth by Jan Karlsson. He was the former CEO of SAS Airlines. And SAS, the Scandinavian airline, they were horrible. I mean, they had some of the worst customer service imaginable, maybe worse than imaginable. And he came in and he decided he was going to turn that airline around. And what he came up with was every interaction that we have with a customer, no matter what it was, from a business card to a face-to-face meeting, whatever it might be, is a moment of truth. And what does the customer come away with as it relates to an experience? So what it forced his leadership team and ultimately the whole organization to focus on is who's in front of me? What do they need? What are they looking for? What do they actually want? And it fundamentally transformed the airline. I don't know if it's any good anymore, but at the time it was a fundamental transformation. So this whole idea of empathy. Oh, my gosh. There are some in the world that talk about empathy as a waste of time. Or. a marker of weakness. I am not one of them. I think empathy is a superpower in the year 2025 and beyond, not taken to an extreme, right? So that's part of what we talked about in the first installment, Joe, is I'm not going to pick up your burden just because it's sitting there telling me I should pick it up. I can be empathetic and I can be compassionately detached and know that you need to do your own growth and you need to go through your own suffering, quote unquote. The hard thing with being a parent is you have to let your kids grow. If you don't, you're going to wind up taking care of them for their whole life. So empathy, in my mind, is a superpower. And I have a very simple definition of empathy that goes beyond walking a mile in someone else's shoes, which is the way most people think about it. Let's try this one on for size. I hear your lived experience and I believe it. Not my job to judge it, criticize it. put it in the category of right or wrong, I believe that you believe that. And that's a great platform to build communication using another tool if you're ready to move on to something that still feels a bit like training.

Joe Miller: 21:03

If I could, I wanted to just swing back a little bit. It seems to me, I'm correlating here, that when Mike was saying that people know what the right thing is to do, but it feels like too much of a heavy lift based upon time. And I would also insert the pressure that they're under at the moment to deliver. Then they don't take that path. Likewise, and I think you sort of did a hat tip to this, Bob, when you said they think it's right until it's wrong. It really gets into this point of, do you have the space to look at the long view? Or do you feel... Like you are reacting constantly, which to me correlates and ties back to this adrenalized state that so many of us are in. And I think about a technology leader, you know, most technology leaders have a service part of what they do. They have hopefully people who are helping them take care of the services that support the organization. You know, is the email always running, et cetera. If there's a problem, I mean, They're responding constantly to issues, their organization is. So there's a sense or a belief in this adrenalized state, I don't have time to deal with the right thing to do because I have to respond. I'm not saying it's true. I'm just saying that longer view seems expensive, going back to your formula. It seems costly to me as the person delivering the message. So I just want to bypass it. So the question that I would lay on the table, and we can get to this later, is how do you help people put the practices in the place to de-adrenalize themselves so they can do the right thing? First, you've got to have the tools, and that's part of what you're delivering here. But I think it's also important to talk about Assuming I have the tools, how do I enable the right practices and habits and awareness to utilize those

Bob Tipton: 23:24

tools? Again, back to what we talked about in the first installment, there are three levels of awareness. And the levels of awareness come with experience. They come with time. And one of the first things about getting out of being adrenalized is realizing that it's possible to be so. But that is a choice. It's not an inevitability. We are completely in control of how we react to everything. Some things, they're the fight, flight, or freeze because nature puts it in. If you see a bear, you probably decide it's time to do something, although we tend to do the wrong thing. We run away from the bear. The bear is faster than you are. And it also primes its instinct to chase prey. So one of the better things to do is to become large and loud. You have a better chance of surviving an encounter with a bear if you do those as opposed to running away from it. So that comes with some training. But first of all, Joe, how many times do we actually find ourselves encountering a bear in our lives? Once, I remember as a kid, we were camping at Yellowstone. We had a bear encounter. What did my father do? He decided to throw rocks at the bears. We actually hit one on the nose and the bear decided that that was better to run away than to come back. But I could have been fatherless when I was about eight. My father was throwing rocks at the bears. Anyway, enough about my personal life. It's a matter of being aware that the choice is possible. And that comes with experience. So I believe the more gray hair we earn, the more trips around the sun we have, Joe, the more we realize that sometimes the expense up front is worth it. And It's also a choice through awareness that I don't have to respond to everything. As I said a little while ago, I've got these three timers that go off about things. I will not respond immediately to anything unless I'm in a plane crash and a flight attendant tells me to get off the plane. I've got 90 seconds to do that or I'll die. Okay, I won't wait 90 seconds to see how I feel about what he or she is saying. So to me, it's a cop-out to say, I constantly have to respond to things. That's not true. That's a choice. Each thing that comes along, you have the ability to say, I'm going to take a deep breath at least. So these three levels of awareness we talked about, the first level of awareness is, crap, I just did what I always do. I responded. But you realize it sometime after the fact. There's a teachable moment for you at that point to say, do I want to do that next time? But it's an awareness to say, I've just done what I've always done. So I'll give you an example. Imagine you're on a buffet on a cruise and the food is available 24-7 and it's amazing food. And what you're trying to do in your life is to get your A1C down. You're trying to get away from being pre-diabetic and you're trying to eat healthier. What do we do when we see a buffet? We load up the plate because somewhere inside of our alligator brain, it's like we're never going to eat again. Every time we load up the plate, it's a choice. So the second level of awareness is in the middle of loading your plate. You look at it and say, I'm not going to eat this in three meals. I don't need this number of carbs for three days. And you can decide to quit loading your plate. So you have a choice in the middle of it. And the third is I'm about to get a plate and go through the line. I'm going to pick things that fit my priorities. So the tool that I'm talking about here, Joe, is it's an intentional disruption to the automatic pilot that we find ourselves on. It's the echo chamber stuff that we've talked about so much. Oh, okay. Maybe I'm the only one that feels this way. I don't know. We'll find out. Maybe some listeners are giving up at this point. But we are in control. We can put our hands on the wheel and decide what our actions will be. And if we choose to respond constantly to things, we play whack-a-mole all day long, that's a choice.

Joe Miller: 27:43

Even if you don't think it is. Correct. Because you're conditioned. You're conditioned. And it's funny because that relates to some of the other things we discussed in the first episode about all the messaging we get externally. I find that a lot of times in this particular example, leaders tend to keep reinforcing their own messages back to themselves and take away their agency to make a choice in the moment, which gets back to something else. I had someone close to me interact with me based upon the first episode, asked me some questions about how do I evaluate the messaging that's out there. And I said, well, One thing I do is kind of use this Columbo technique where I basically ask the person delivering the message to me, or if I'm getting it somewhere, I just basically say, what exactly are you saying? And then the second question that fits in here is, how did you get to that? How did you decide that? How did you decide that that is true? which also relates to what you've been saying about challenging these things, but also is the belief that I have, are the tapes that I'm running through my own brain actually true?

Bob Tipton: 29:08

Correct. Yeah, one of my favorite examples of that, Joe, is who said the line, Luke, I am your father? The answer is nobody. The line does not exist in the movie. But we've heard it repeated over and over and over again, so much that we believe it's true, but it isn't. The actual line is, no, I am your father. Not Luke, I am your father. So it's one of those simple examples that we look at and say, well, what's the foundation for my belief? Or what do I think about this? Is it true? Back to the first thing we talked about in this installment is, are you in the right frame of mind to communicate? So again, cop out, what a 80s word or a 70s word, but it's this idea that I just simply give up my responsibility in the matter and I am reacting like whack-a-mole. Well, maybe get your chainsaw out and cut the mole off so you never see it come off or come up and down through the hole. Maybe it's nothing. So people get good, in fact, really good at knowing where your buttons are. especially children and a lot of our employees, they know exactly how to make us react. What if we had, you know, the react button that we have on our chest here where people walk up and push the react button. What if we had no wiring behind the button? Well, it's not going to be used for a long. Would it frustrate the person that's pushing the button? Yeah. The first couple of times. Yeah. But no response. None. I tried that with my younger daughter. Oh, she got mad. It's

Mike Peterson: 30:51

a very powerful tool for sure. It

Bob Tipton: 30:53

really worked. So those are a couple of ideas, Joe. So the nice segue here is into another type of awareness. And this is based in how we process our satisfaction when we ask a question why and we get an answer back. So we're constantly processing why, especially in times of radical change. It's just, what's going on? Why is this happening? So The answers that we get back are different, or we need different answers based on who we are. So there's a level of awareness when it comes to who are you, and then there's a level of awareness about who you're communicating with. And if you're communicating with an individual, it's easier. If you're communicating with a large group, it's important to communicate in all four ways. There's four elements in the quadrant. dream in two by twos. My staff laughs at me, but it's true. I actually dream in two by twos. So, imagine this quadrant. There's four pieces to it. There are two ways that we are satisfied with the answer to the question why that are emotional. There are two that are logical. So, top and bottom. Left and right now, we have two that are intrinsic and two that are extrinsic. So, And about 25% of the population is spread into each of the four quadrants. And yes, there's nothing that is absolute about it. It's a model, not a mandate, but it's a model to say kind of where's home, when we're adrenalized, what do we prefer? So it's a way to be able to kind of get to what we're going to default to in terms of communication. And if we only communicate from our quadrant, 75% of the population is unsatisfied. So it's a realization that my preferred way of communicating may not be effective. And it probably isn't if we're only using our own preferred way, unless the other person we're talking to has the same preferred way. So let me go give you a quick tour of the four different quadrants, and then we can see how it might be useful. So if you're an intrinsic logical decision maker, you look at facts. Data, numbers, amounts, quantities. And you think the facts should speak for themselves. I've done the numbers. I've run the numbers. I've put it through my spreadsheet. Out pops the formulatic response to say this is the answer. That's all we need to do. That's useful. But it only speaks implicitly to 25% of the population. There are a lot of technical professionals that believe that that is the capital T way, capital W, the way to communicate. It's not enough. Unless the person you're talking to on the other side has exactly the same way of looking at it, then it's great. So now if you're an emotional logical decision maker, what you look for are external sources. It's not you running the spreadsheet. It's what study have you read? Which PhD? What research? What example is available to prove that this actually works? Data is incredibly important, but I want to see this actually in action somewhere. So I look on the outside for validation. There are a whole lot of people in technical professions that do that also. They want to look at case studies or research. I don't know if Gartner is still around. They were a big source of research when I was doing it 20, 25 years ago. In fact, I managed the Gartner relationship for the consulting company that I was the CTO for. It's incredibly valuable stuff. Where are you in the magic quadrant?

Joe Miller: 34:32

Magic

Bob Tipton: 34:33

quadrant, the

Joe Miller: 34:34

hype cycle,

Bob Tipton: 34:35

et cetera. Yeah. And that's supposed to justify everything. Well, that's only half the population now that we've talked about. Only half. And by the way, that's where most communication and organizational life comes from, is from those two dimensions. The other two are emotional. And one of the things that happens when we're in the middle of a radical change is we can become emotional decision makers, all of us. So if you're about to lose your job or you have lost your job, you become an emotional decision maker yourself. And that's one of the most important things during times of radical change. If you're a leader, people will quit listening to your data. They don't care about COBRA. They don't care about co-pays. They don't care about anything until they get satisfied with what this means to me. And that's the emotional, intrinsic decision maker. How does this make me appear like a politician or a policymaker? I want to know what this looks like to me. And until I have that satisfied, I don't care about your data or your studies. They're useless to me. So how does this make me appear? How does this change my life? Where am I going to work? Who do I sit next to? What's my drive look like? So technical professionals who love data and love studies, they look at this need to tell somebody how they feel about something as being useless. Well, guess what? When people aren't satisfied with the answer to the Question why that they get over and over again. Do they get more quiet? They do not. They get louder. They find different ways to drive you crazy. So this is another one of these examples, Joe, where some time up front is very well spent to be able to answer the questions from the different viewpoints. All right, so there's a fourth one. That's where I self-identify. I'm an emotional, extrinsic decision maker. And here's how I get satisfied. I get satisfied that you're presenting me enough right answers that the best right answer is included. One study, one set of data, one set of information about how this affects me isn't enough. I need to be able to know that you've done your homework. I need to feel that you've taken it seriously by looking at more than one potential answer. So back to what I said at the beginning with this particular tool, if you're talking to somebody that's just like you, it's easy. If you're talking to someone who isn't like you, like someone who's at the table, and you as an IT professional want a seat at the table, and the person that's at the table wants to know how this appears to them, Right. Right. Yeah. Yeah. And what I find by using this tool, especially when things are uncertain, when things are challenging, when things are a mess, the more you spend time preparing your communication from all four elements in this quadrant, you'll look like a communications hero. You'll be so out of phase with everybody else, they'll look at you for the source of the truth. Confidence that what you're saying is believable. It's authentic. It's true. So... When might this tool be useful? It's like, how about all the time? By the way, the type that's most challenging for us is the one that's diagonally opposite. So for me, being an emotional, extrinsic decision maker, it's the internal logical decision maker. Guess who I was married to for 45 years before she passed away. I miss her logic. I miss her intrinsic decision-making because I can get lost in possibilities. She used to tell me, can we just fricking decide where we're going to go to dinner? No, I want to look at all these different options. I just want to look at different possibilities and choices. Can we make a decision, Bob? So finding ways to be able to glue them together, get the best of both for the diagonally opposite, Trying to get all four wrapped up into your announcement memo or your staff meeting or your town hall.

Joe Miller: 39:00

So that there's connection points in the overall messaging. That's right. Rather than exclusion zones because you haven't made the effort to form the communication to touch those different types.

Bob Tipton: 39:16

That's right. And back to the, I don't have time. Yeah. Yeah.

Joe Miller: 39:23

Yeah. It reminds me of the old total quality examples, right? You don't have time to do it right the first time, so you pay for it in spades just forever on the back end. I

Bob Tipton: 39:38

love that one. Yeah. Yeah, that's a great example, Joe. You know, one of the– you just brought up a whole other subject in my mind. I don't know if this is a weird non sequitur, but I'm going to go there. Have you ever known a company that won the Malcolm Baldrige Award?

Joe Miller: 39:54

Well, I know we were chasing after it when I was at Syntex years ago. You know Syntex. You were one of our providers there. So I know we talked about a lot of companies that won it. But no, I haven't ever been close to them, if that was the question.

Bob Tipton: 40:11

Well, it's like winning the lottery. Yeah. How many people, after winning the lottery, say it's the worst thing that ever happened to them? Most. It ruined their life. Well, the same thing with chasing after the Malcolm Brawlers Award. The companies that won it, many of them said it was horrible afterwards. Why? Because there was such pressure to be perfect that they never brought forward the issues that needed to be brought forward. So that's a whole other subject for another day, Joe. But this idea of psychological safety... Psychological safety is another communications cultural sort of a marker that says what needs to be said is said at the time it needs to be said, to whom it needs to be said, and the way it needs to be said. Using all these tools, relevance theory, using the four different ways, but we say what needs to be said in a plain way. That's another thing that we find really challenging in the world of, or in the times of radical change, is people don't feel safe to communicate that way.

Joe Miller: 41:11

You know, Bob, I can't resist the temptation to speak to both of you and Mike about the leadership books you've written. I remember your book, Jump. And Mike, it followed a similar format to your book you just released. Why don't you just throw the title out there? I'll let you do it.

Mike Peterson: 41:30

Leading in the Age of Digital Disruption.

Joe Miller: 41:33

Right. And you used sort of the same format where you had a story on the front end. And then you had the teaching. I think, Bob, you did this too on the back end. And I'm just kind of curious how what we're talking about today connected to some of the scenarios. Mike, if you don't mind, you're thinking about your new freshly minted CEO, which I thought it was kind of humorous. It came out of being leading HR. Nice one there. But Some of the dynamics of building the team and dealing with the challenges that the company went through, I think, touch on some of these same themes, do they not?

Mike Peterson: 42:17

100%. And

Joe Miller: 42:18

then maybe after you're done speaking to that, maybe, Bob, you could talk about how it ties into– Jump was a number of years ago, but it's still on my bookshelf and used.

Mike Peterson: 42:29

Yeah, I mean, I think everything, it's almost like Bob could have written my book. I mean, we're definitely saying very similar things with the order of operations, just slightly different. You know, I think in leading in the age of digital disruption, the three ingredients to success is trust, transparent communication, and accountability. And you know, starting out talking about empathy. Empathy is a huge factor of building trust and psychological safety is absolutely necessary to have transparent communication. And just like Bob said earlier, I think that it's about saying, having the tough direct conversations when they need to be had in the best interest of the organization, right? Not necessarily in the best interest of Joe or Bob, but doing what's right for the company. And so you have to build a really thick layer of trust in an organization to have employees feel comfortable saying what they really feel. And in those times of radical change, which we're certainly in right now, people tend to operate in fear rather than in trust. And so it takes even more intentional effort to build that psychological safety than it does in other times. Definitely.

Bob Tipton: 44:16

Amen. I'll give you a high five if you're sitting next to me. So here's a virtual high five. There you go. Yeah, there's just some profound truths in the world. And it sounds like I need to read your book. I would love to learn your viewpoint on it. You know, one of the things I heard Stephen Covey say a long time ago, he was being interviewed by some gotcha journalist at an event and they were trying to catch him. Well, isn't what you're saying pretty much the same as everybody else is saying in their books? And he looked him straight in the face and said, yes. However, the audience that I relate to and the way that I say things is different. And we're all in the business or have the mission to be able to help people realize things. Not everybody relates to me.

Mike Peterson: 45:08

Yeah. Well said. I was talking to publicists in my publishing journey, and they would always say, what makes your book different? And I'm like, well, it's not really. I believe a good leader 100 years ago would still be a good leader today. It's just evolved slightly to work in this environment of hyper-technology that we're now living in. But was Abraham Lincoln a good leader then? Would he be a good leader now? I'm not saying he's wrong. Correct.

Bob Tipton: 45:42

Yeah, there are some basic principles, deep truths that have been true forever. That underpins how I think about things. I've learned a lot of hard lessons from people. I've got some great teachers. I wish I could say that I came up with much of anything on my own. It was more how it connects, how it relates. The primary focus in Jump, Joe, is this idea that things don't have to take a long time. Things can happen quickly if you let them. In fact, I believe that the universe is conspiring to help us all the time, and we're the ones that get in the way. We gum up the works. We put the monkey wrench in the gears. The natural path to things is to move and move quickly. So Mike, as you were talking about being stuck in fear, any message in my mind that is designed to keep us small and afraid, it's not a leadership message. It's a different type of communication. So we'll get into that, Joe, in a big way in the third installment here, some of the behaviors and actions that leaders can take. I've got seven things that we want from our leaders and five things that we don't. And one of the things we absolutely do not need from our leaders is to be more confused or to feel like they're withholding something, like they know the answer. They're just not sharing it with us. You want to erode trust immediately in a time of radical change? It's like somebody knows what's going on, but nobody's talking to us about it. So. productivity goes in the dumper at that point because everybody's talking about what they think the withheld information actually is. So another point about this too, Joe, is that there's a really practical side to communicating effectively. The organization not only feels better to be part of, but it's more productive. So back to this group of water engineers that I was working with and talking with them about psychological safety. You know, the joke about introverted versus an extroverted engineer. Have you ever heard that joke? Is there an

Joe Miller: 47:49

extroverted engineer?

Bob Tipton: 47:50

Yeah, so an introverted engineer stares at their shoes. An extroverted engineer stares at somebody

Joe Miller: 47:57

else's.

Bob Tipton: 48:00

That's funny. It's funny that, yeah, an engineer just hit their head at this idea, but There's a real practical side to being able to make effective decisions faster if people feel like they are in a safe environment. Things cost less and they move faster. So yeah, jump is about making things happen quickly. And there's almost like a quantum leap. That's where the title sort of comes from. It's like an electron moving from one orbit to another around a nucleus without going any, never experiencing the things in the middle. So at the right time, framework and the right preparation, the right time spent. I see it over and over and over and over again with leadership teams and organizations. All of a sudden, the realization is incredibly powerful, profound, and they think it came out of nowhere. No, it didn't. It came from your preparation. So the need to be able to trust the sources of information and A little bit more on Jump, too, is this synergy. Synergy is waiting to happen constantly. One of my favorite examples of synergy is a gift bag. Can you imagine not having a gift bag in the world? I'm old enough to know, maybe you're too, Joe, when we didn't have gift bags. There was wrapping paper and there were sacks. And somebody somewhere said, hey, what if we put the two together and have synergy to come up with something that hadn't been invented yet? What a change that would be for four-year-old birthday parties. It's a brilliant idea, but you needed to allow those circumstances to be present for that to be true. So if your fear gets in the way, if you're constantly playing whack-a-mole, you're responding to everything, sometimes you have to do that. I don't want to make it sound like it's just leave a magic wand and all that goes away. But bit by bit, step by step, day by day, week by week, you can start to erode the number of things that you respond to. You start using the timer to say, how long am I going to wait before I react? You take a deep breath between things and your world changes.

Joe Miller: 50:06

Yeah, going back a little ways when you were giving your three rules, you know, your timers, I see those as intentional, upfront actions and practices to help you maintain your awareness and your awareness long arc of your intention of how you want to live. The problem is without these tools that we're talking about today and in the last episode and hopefully a third one, people tend to operate like they're in the matrix. Until Neo realized he was in the matrix, he couldn't see the real world.

Bob Tipton: 50:49

Is it real? Is it

Joe Miller: 50:53

real? Right.

Bob Tipton: 50:54

Back to the first episode or the first installment, I actually had a picture that looked like the matrix, but it wasn't. You do

Joe Miller: 51:01

have the one trader who decides to go back in the matrix. That's an interesting thing to talk about. I wonder how that applies. But to your point, your last point, it's fine to take those quick actions in a calculated, measured way. not betraying the intention of how you want to live.

Bob Tipton: 51:27

Correct. And that comes with time. It comes with establishing boundaries and values. Discipline. You know, maturity and leadership. Mature leaders are value-based. And until you're able to establish boundaries around your values, I don't think you really reach the level of maturity to call yourself a leader. You can be a manager, right? It's a little bit like I worry about 25-year-old vice presidents. They haven't had much life experience to be able to apply it to the theory that they're using. I remember when I was 25, I was insufferable. So, yeah, exactly. It's not complicated. Back to what Mike and I were talking about a little bit ago. This is stuff that we know, but do we practice it, yes or no?

Mike Peterson: 52:17

Not complicated, but I will say difficult. Because it's often emotional.

Bob Tipton: 52:23

Yeah, especially when, oh, here's another tool. Maybe it's one of the last things we'll talk about today. But another tool is I stopped using the word busy about 15 years ago. Somebody asks me, how are you? Busy? It's like, no, I don't use that word. And I haven't used it for 15 years. Why did I take busy out of my vocabulary? Because I discovered people use it for two reasons, neither one of which is empowering. People use it either as a shield, I'm busy, stay away. Or they use it as a metal, as something to reward themselves. Look at me, I'm busy. In reality, both are disempowering. And they also tend to keep us in the echo chamber where busy is somehow a goal or some way to keep people away. So what I say instead of saying busy, it's like I've had a really full day. I've had a lot going on today, but I'm never busy. Is that weird? Am I the only one that feels this way? Could be.

Mike Peterson: 53:29

I love that. I feel like when I would walk the halls and ask people how they're doing, nine times out of ten, I'd get busy as an answer. And it doesn't really mean anything to They might be busy, but is the work they're doing valuable? Are they doing the right work? Are they doing the wrong work? Are they busy making coffee all day? What does that really even mean? Absolutely. I think it's a practice that should be normalized. Try it today. Just

Bob Tipton: 54:05

try it for an hour. Every time the word busy starts to come into your awareness, just replace it with something else. It's that kind of a practice, Joe. Yeah, that's good. I think that's a simple one.

Joe Miller: 54:21

It is a simple one. And I also think when you say it, you're putting yourself in the place of being a victim and you're disempowering yourself. And a word popped up into my mind just a few minutes ago when you were talking about this, and that is overwhelm. Often I coach people and say, The term that comes to mind is, you know, you're in a state of overwhelm. And so you can't live in a state of overwhelm too long without serious consequences.

Bob Tipton: 54:54

It's one of those weird words. We get underwhelm and overwhelm. But when is the perfect amount of overwhelm? It is a word, but we just never use it. We always use under or over. Well,

Joe Miller: 55:07

that's a good point. Maybe that's a good place to kind of round this out, this conversation. Thanks again, Bob. And Mike, great input. I appreciate you jumping on. Give us a little bit of a preview, Bob, for next time. What are you thinking about? I think you touched on it earlier, but remind us, including me.

Bob Tipton: 55:23

Yeah, the primary things are, well, first, getting to some leadership behaviors and some actions. I've got, like I said, seven things that we really need from our leaders during times of crisis. of radical change and five things we don't. And often we reward the wrong things, or we believe that people that are doing these things that are not helpful, they have ice water in their veins or they're able to make, be decisive. It's like, yeah, but they're ruining things. They're creating this vortex of destruction that somebody else has to come and fix later on. Yeah. They're making hard decisions, but are they good decisions? So that's, part of what we'll talk about. And then summarizing, kind of pulling it all together and saying, here's how you might put this into action. Thanks,

Joe Miller: 56:12

Bob. And maybe you could also remind listeners who may have just tuned in this episode about your webinar and where to find registration for that. That really goes into much more depth, I think.

Bob Tipton: 56:26

Yeah, definitely. I think as you edit this, Joe, you can pop up something. I don't know. It's kind of hard to have you remember a URL on it. put it out there, but teamtipton.com and then slash nav-radical-change. And a couple times a month, I offer a webinar that gets into some detail associated with all of this. I'd love to have you be part of that if you'd like to. And to the listeners, it's something I do a couple times a month.

Joe Miller: 56:55

Great. Any final comments from you, Mike?

Mike Peterson: 56:59

Thank you so much for having me, Bob and Joe. Really appreciate it. And sorry I was out sick last session, and I'll look forward to joining the next one as well. Well, at least

Joe Miller: 57:10

you didn't say

Mike Peterson: 57:10

you were busy.

Joe Miller: 57:12

Yes. Oh, gosh. Listen, thank you so much, guys. Really appreciate it. Bob, in particular, thanks a lot. Look forward to our next session together.

Bob Tipton: 57:21

Thank you, Joe.

Joe Miller: 57:22

All right. Bye. Thanks, Mike. Hey, thanks for joining me today on Titans of Transition. Hope you enjoyed the episode. Please check the show notes for additional information.