It Never Sticks

Jeff Burstein: Now what you find is, yeah, you can let it go, but it could be five minutes later, 13 seconds later, two years later. You don't even know how it happened, but now that pen is right back in your hand, and you're holding it again, and you got to practice letting it go again, and you have to practice all the time letting it go. So it's that. It I don't know that it sticks. It doesn't get any better. Devon Morris: This is the Lagging Team. Falling behind is a position, not a verdict. Today's episode, It Never Sticks. Welcome, welcome, welcome, everybody to the next pod. I have a really special guest here who I respect and someone who knows what they're doing. Jeff Bursting is an inventor, a founder, a consultant, and an enterprise transformation coach with 20 years of helping companies and government agencies find better ways of working. He's the founder of Advanced Enterprise Agility and L-EAF.org. That is L-E-A-F.org, and the co-founder of L-EAF Lab, he spent his career on the sequence most organizations truly get backwards: people, then process, then tools. And I ask Jeff here because his entire practice is about the transformations that actually stick, which means he's watched a lot of them that truly did not stick. Here's what I keep coming back to, Jeff: a transformation doesn't fail in a strategy deck per se. The deck can be fine. It fails in the team. It fails in the organization. You see those signs with the team first, and months before anybody upstairs and management even writes anything down. Can you kick us off by telling us about a transformation that looked done and was kind of gone six months later, Jeff Burstein: yeah. I mean, I have several examples in my career, and first of all, thank you so much for you know inviting me onto you know The Lagging Team and an opportunity to speak to your audience. I really do appreciate it. I, you know, I've been fortunate in that over you know 20 plus years of doing this work, I've never spent too long in any one organization, right? So over 20 years, I've probably done transformations in around 30 to close to 40 organizations, right? So to say, oh, have you been in a place where you've seen after six, eight months the the the things that were showing progress, where teams were actually leaning into the practices, and then things started to either go off the rail or revert back to the old practices. I have been fortunate in that I've joined transformations that have been underway, had started years before, right? And so you get to hear some of the, you know, some of the horror stories. You know, I would say overall there there are a lot of examples that I could point to where teams started off in one direction, and if you're familiar with the Jay Kerber, the Tuckman model of team formation, and it talks about forming, storming, or overforming, you know. So where teams have moved beyond that, hey, we know how to commit to work together, stage forming stage. We know how to be predictable. Like we could say, yeah, we're gonna get you these if they're leveraging Scrum. You know, we're gonna get you these 12 story points by the end of our sprint, or we're gonna you know flow this work if they're more Kanban or flow you know through our thing, and we're you know our throughput, our cycle time is about this, so you can expect it around then, and then they, by their organization, can be trusted to deliver within that time frame. Yeah, you know what? They are dependable. They're predictable, right? They are a normalized team, and they start to move that towards the performing. Where now they're saying, "Oh yeah, it'll take us. It'll take us three spins. There, but they're delivering it in two because they're they're moving faster than they can, and what it is that will typically go ahead and cause any team that's making that, you know, continuing that, you know, and and staying committed to that relentless improvement that every team, every organization has to have from a mindset perspective in order to have a transformation. That sticks, right, is something in the environment has changed. Something around them that no longer rewards or supports that behavior, right? That now is forcing them, and it could be any number of things. It could be new rules around how the organization puts together its, you know, its PIPs. You know, everybody's got a an improvement plan for the year. What are your What are your things that you're going to go ahead and deliver on? If those aren't related to the initiatives of the company, and if teams and the individuals on teams can't track the work they're doing on a team to helping them get their bonus, guess what? The team's going to go off the rails, right? So there are a lot of cases that I could actually point to, but I would say it's more of a pattern, and what an organization really needs to watch out for is when anywhere in the organization, after a transformation has started, and any of the teams have started to realize the benefits of working in new ways, visualizing, communicating, collaborating-how all that stuff is done-but then something in the environment has changed, and in me notice the slowdowns. I would really challenge the organization to go. Okay, so what new rule? What new policy? What happened that all of a sudden you were able to notice and feel as a leader? Maybe you sensed that there was a slowdown in the flow of value from teams, or oh, you know, teams that were very predictable and actually were moving faster. All of a sudden, they're moving slower. What's going on, right? The question is rarely what is the team doing differently because they don't. They're they're no longer wanting to be self organizing, right? Like what team doesn't want to self organize around the problem, right? So it's got to be that something has been put in place that makes the transformation work and the working in that way counterproductive and not beneficial to the team. And those are the things that I would really, really watch for. Devon Morris: Okay. So then, then that's a that's I like that. So, how when you have that conversation with a leader about that impact, something in the environment has changed. Tell me, how do how has leaders classically received that? Jeff Burstein: You know, so I I would say that there's a spectrum. As in all things you're dealing with human beings, this is what mindset coaches will tell you: is you can have the exact same conversation with the exact same person at two different times of day and have the exact opposite outcomes. Why? Because people bring emotion, and emotions are unpredictable, and you cannot account for how someone's going to interpret anything you share with them, right? Because you don't know what happened to them on the way to work last night, whatever they're dealing with, right? So if you consider that, right, you understand that okay, leaders fall on that spectrum, and they're going to react. And so you're going to have the leaders who, hey, look, I believe that working in this way is beneficial not only for me but for my teams, for my organization, because I know this is a better way of delivering value. Because we can stop doing all the things that don't deliver value, and what a great way to reduce waste in our company! And if I'm a leader that sits on that side of the conversation, I'm open to hearing. Oh, I created a policy, or a policy was created and put into place that impacted that. They're going to be way open. But if your leader on the other end of the spectrum is like, look, I've seen transformations fail. This is never going to work. They might have intentionally or subconsciously put a policy in place just because they were hired as an expert to lead a company. Yeah, and if they don't have all the answers, they'll just be replaced by a board, you know. And so they have the things that they care about too, and if it's not in alignment with the transformation and what got them there, right? You know, so you know, I've been in organizations where it's come time to talk to the leader, and I know which leader I'm talking to based on the hey, we've observed something, and their reaction is going to. Either be oh my god what'd you see I'd love to hear about it or it could be oh how many X Y Z kind of companies have you been the CEO of before and my answer is usually zero. However, I have coached X number of CEOs through these exact kind of problems before, having never run a company in their industry before. So, right, it just depends on who you're talking to, and a mindset coach is going to have a sense of that because they are used to dealing with human beings. A process coach is going to point to the process. A tools coach is going to bring you to the Tools, Devon Morris: yeah, I would have to agree with you. So then, here here's the question, right? Because I always I always look at things a certain way, and we we talked about in the introduction, people process tools, right? So to just straight up, why that order, and what happens when somebody hands the team the tool first? Jeff Burstein: So that that's a great question. Whether it's the tool or the process, Devon Morris: yes, okay, Jeff Burstein: right. So here's what there is that not a lot of people think about. We live in a world of interconnected systems. We have we're human systems. This is a system. This is we are developing a system. We have a relationship, you and I. That's a friendship. That is a human relationship system. It's based on how we communicate, right? We're we each have families. That's a human system. Our families exist in communities. Human systems. We have governance systems. You have local laws. I have local laws. The United States has federal laws. There's state laws. Those are governance systems. Every company has a governance system. There are mechanical systems. A manufacturing plant has machines that you put something in, something comes out. The other mechanical system, digital systems, websites, all these things. There's all these kinds of systems, process systems. How do we work systems? All these different kind of systems. Of all the different type of systems, once they are designed a particular way, when you put in the the resources needed to kick off the process, the output is predictable unless something is wrong with the system, and that is true of every type of system except the human ones. Humans are the only ones that have emotions. I can talk to two different teams who are having the exact same problem and give them two completely different solutions. Why? Because they're human beings. They have needs. They have emotions. They are where they are in their journey. And if you can't account for that, then you're going to rub up against them. Right. So. if we realize that of all the different systems and every organization is just a mixture of all these interconnected, they're a hybrid system of systems. So if we don't deal with the ones that are unpredictable first people, and we don't get them a mindset that allows them to for themselves control their how they're reacting to things. Devon Morris: Yeah, yeah, Jeff Burstein: right. Because in life, there's what happens. Hey, I asked you for a report. You didn't get it to me on time. What happened? I asked you for a report. You didn't get it to me on time. Then there's everything that human beings make that mean. Oh my God, I'm going to lose my job. Oh my God, I'm going to fire you. Whatever it is, but it's just what happened. Like, would you yell at your car because you put diesel gasoline in an unleaded car and you kill the engine? Why did you stop working. Why? Why can't you just be happy with the gas? Like no, that's insanity. So that's why you have to start with people first, because people need an adaptive mindset to deal with the complexity and chaos that is work today. There is so much unknown and unknowable, Devon Morris: yeah, Jeff Burstein: that all we are going to do as human beings is react to them. And so, if we don't have some sort of framework, some sort of common language, a system that we can all agree, yeah, as human beings, we know we all are going to have reactions, but we're just going to agree that if we're going to be committed to getting to a particular place as a group of human beings who have a shared common goal to deliver this particular value to this customer, then let's just do that. And you know the fact that somebody. Cut me off at work, or that my spouse didn't appreciate what I did, or they did, or my kids got you know got the dream job, or they got fired, whatever. I can just show up and go, yeah, that all happened, and I'm going to have to deal with that, and I have emotions about that, but I am here to do this work with these people and engage with the systems, and to just give myself just a little bit of way to do that, and that's why starting with people is so important. And if you look at any of the frameworks, the processes-Scrum, Kanban, SAFe, LeSS, Nexus-any of them-they'll all tell you, "Hey, make sure you have a not a fixed mindset, but a growth-oriented mindset. And what they don't tell you is how to go ahead and develop one of those. So even they tell you it starts with people. We're assuming you did that work because now you're at process, and now we're in a world where for 20 years we see what happened to the world of agile, and we're at the tail end of Devon Morris: it. Yeah, in some Jeff Burstein: communities, capital A is agile or agility is a bad word, right? And and that's because people relied on the process, thought the process would help the people. Process doesn't help the people. People have to help themselves. Then they can use a process, and then they can find the tools that help them make that process simpler for themselves. And that's why, in that order. Devon Morris: Then, then here's the question, right? And and I'm just saying we, just to be general, okay. Sure. So why did we get it wrong and start with process or tools first? Jeff Burstein: So it's not that way. So I'm as a mindset coach, it's not wrong or right. It's better or worse, right? Because if it's about relentless improvement, did we improve or did we make it worse? So the reason, well, so this is a pure law hypothesis. It's because of where the solution originated from. It came out of a group of software developers who were frustrated with the way they were being asked to develop software, and so for themselves, they came up with a better way that they wanted to work, right? And then that became you know that became Scrum Common, right? All that that was the Agile Manifesto, right? In the hot tub, right? That was great. They all read the work of you know Tom Gilb, great guy, right? You know he wrote how to build software better, focused on value. I've had the pleasure of speaking with him, and even he told me he's like, yeah, you need to have a mindset. That set they had the mindset. They just assumed maybe everybody else does, and what happens as humans is we turn to processes and tools so that we don't have to think because change is hard. And I'd rather just do what somebody else tells me to get the result that I need to, so I can go on doing the things and dealing with the things that you know I think about all the time. Devon Morris: Yeah, if it's, I mean, if you're, you know, you mentioned earlier that you know these executives get replaced, you know, often enough, right? And so, if you're a leader and and somebody says to you mindset, right? You know, the measurability of it. How do you measure that? Because it's you know when it comes to a process or to a tool, you know they can measure that to say. Oh yeah. Right. So how do you measure that? So you can know that you went from point well one particular starting point to some other point in the future, right? So, sure. Talk to me about that. Jeff Burstein: So, you know, unlike unlike a process or a tool, which do have very objective measures that anybody can look at, right? When you're dealing with human beings, you now cross the threshold into subjective measures, right? So, I've worked for a lot of financial institutions, and there is a measure that they use all the time with their customers. They call it a customer satisfaction rating, right? And really, all it is is it's just a subjective measure where you come up with a fixed set of questions, the dimensions, the things that you want to know about, and you ask people their opinion. But you you read them with the understanding that yeah, the answers may be completely flipped. If I'd ask the questions in the afternoon versus the morning, because people's you know where they are emotionally can change, and the way they're going to answer a question can change. So you know that's it. So it is those kinds of subjective measures, engagement measures, satisfaction ratings. I always encourage leaders to, and most companies do this kind of work with their employees, anyhow. Yeah, they do. Right? They do. They do take a measure of that, and so it's just about asking the questions and focusing on the areas that are also in alignment with the mission of the transformation. You know, so do you feel that in your team you're more empowered to make decisions to provide feedback to product? You know, to those kinds of things. Do you feel that solutions are being handed to you versus problems. It's those kinds of questions that yeah, you could ask those. You just have to be aware that you could ask the same person that question three different times in a day in a day and get three completely different answers. Devon Morris: Yeah, it's one of those things where you know you know read studies and all this other kind of stuff, and you know, doctors and folks like that make better decisions in the morning time versus in the afternoon. You know, sure, these things happen. You know, Jeff Burstein: exactly. Devon Morris: Will have happiness metrics, right? So then, then as a leader that's dealing with several teams, Jeff. How do I compare across teams? Jeff Burstein: So that's the that's the risk. You don't, right? How do you compare an apple to an orange? Two teams are two different teams. They have different people. It's a completely different unit of value delivery. I would never. Like, how do you compare? I have two kids. How do I compare them? I don't. They think I do, and it's okay that they do, right? But the danger of comparing teams is you end up with, you know, managers and leaders who come in and tell teams, "Hey, you have to double your velocity. What? Why do we have to double our velocity? Velocity is a measure that we a team use, so that when we're going into planning, we have a rough idea of how many sprint points we can deliver, how many story points we can deliver in a sprint. That's what velocity is. It's not a, you know everybody Devon Morris: what velocity is so they're all clear just in case somebody don't know what it is Jeff Burstein: sure so velocity is a process measure the process is Scrum how do teams organize around the work Scrum is a a methodology it's a framework you know the it's a great one it's used in a lot of organizations and velocity is simply a measure of story points on average that a team gets completed in a sprint over the last three sprints. And now I'm going to have to define all those words. So a sprint is simply a time box that's used to get work done in, you know, typically one to two weeks. A story is how the work is captured, right? Like as I want so that, and it's ideally a relative complexity measure. Hey, have we done this kind of work before? Are we familiar with it? Is new. How complicated do we think it's going to be, or is it going to be more chaotic? Like, like if we've done it before, have we never done this before, right? And then the more complex the story points, they are just a number that are assigned to the complexity of a story, so that if a team goes into sprint planning and they plan to do a body of work, a number of stories. They'll calculate, you know, and add up the story points, and then it's a rolling velocity is the rolling average of the last three sprints. How many story points actually got completed? And it's just a planning mechanism. That's all it is. It's just something to help the team do a better job when they plan. Hey, how many story points? Should we plan 50 story points next sprint? I don't know. We've been getting on average 20 done. 50 may be a little bit much, and that's all it is intended to be. But now managers, leaders use it to measure the success of a team. I was on a call where a leader said, "I need all teams in this department to deliver to double their velocity points. When I asked them exactly what they expected that to produce, their response to me is, "Well, I don't want my the team." Under my department, looking worse compared to other teams, and so I said, "Great, we'll have it doubled by the end of this sprint. And he was like, "Great, you're an awesome coach. I am an awesome coach because I went back to the teams and I said, 'Great, in order to satisfy a ridiculous request from leadership, please multiply all of your story estimates by two. And they're like, "Why? I'm like, "Because they want you to double your story points, and I'm not willing to let you work 80 hours a week. So it becomes a math problem. Devon Morris: Yeah, we we Jeff Burstein: done, and we were by the end of the week multiplied. He was like, "Oh my God, mine was blown. I'm like, "Yeah, these teams you had to whip them into shape. But that's a mindset problem, and they started with a framework, with a process. And when you start with a process, you have to force teams into it. That's why you start with a mindset. Going back to the previous question. Devon Morris: Now you you talked about you know that's interesting because I there was a client I worked with recently that they started dictating story points to the individual, and I I just kept hearing you say we, we, we, and I just want to make sure people understand that Jeff really was saying we. He really was saying a team here. He wasn't saying the individual person there. Can you just speak on that for just a second? Jeff Burstein: Sure. When you're when you're looking at any of these adaptive or agile or lean methodologies frameworks, they will look at the smallest value delivery unit within an organization as a team. They don't look at individual contributors because they already assume that a better quality output is going to come from a group of people all providing their own insights and their own thoughts to how to solve a problem that will make a better solution rather than relying on a single expert. You know, so if you're familiar with complexity theory, specifically the Cynefin model, which which I love. Dave Snowden, great guy, really sharp. But he explains it as the work of the systems that people do exist in one of four quadrants. It's clear we know everything, and if we know, since we know everything and we're familiar with everything, we know what we need to do to produce particular outcomes. Then there's complicated. This is the domain where experts are awesome. You bring in consultants into the complicated because you know what there is to know. You're just really unfamiliar with it, and what you need are extensive documents so that your teams can follow the process, and experts help you to document those processes. Very few organizations work actually exist in those two domains. Most organizations operate in the bottom two quadrants: complexity, where there is a degree of known unknowns. Oh, we know we need to figure this out. We just know we haven't figured this out yet. And the way you approach that is experts won't help. You need to run experiments. You need to test theories. See if hey, well, we think it might be this. Is it this? Let's see what happens. That's complexity. The other domain again. Most of our work exists in this, especially today, as things change every day. New technology, competition changing, customer demands changing every day. That's more of chaos. We don't even know the dimensions, the boundaries of the, you know, the environment that we're working in. And so, what we have to do is anything. We have to get teams doing anything. Observe what happens. See if we are able to identify some unknown unknown, something that we weren't even aware that existed, that we now can start coming up with experiments to contain it and move it into the complex domain. Because once we've solved it with experiments in the complex domain, it moves into the complicated domain, right? And it's about shifting things and relentless improvement is once you get things clear, pushing them over the edge and making it more chaotic. That's what brings improvement. That's what relentless improvement feels like: is running that model over and over again. Devon Morris: Relentless improvement. Jeff Burstein: So, yeah, relentless Devon Morris: improvement. So then, here's the question, right? You brought up you you you literally said you know the team as being like the smallest unit of value, and and and these agile frameworks moving in that direction. Can you tell us a little? A little bit more about that conceptually. Jeff Burstein: You know, so if you look at the Agile Manifesto, you know, it'll tell you that collaboration is definitely a better way of getting to to outcomes, right? Versus sticking to a plan. Let's negotiate. Let's do things. So negotiation only happens be between people. If you look at the traditional or you know the way product project management was done, and it's still done in a lot of places in the waterfall methodology, where it takes a project manager to write down the plan. One person writes down the plan. This is the plan. Everybody who's you know they're going to talk to somebody in the program, get a bunch of resources. Don't please don't refer to people as resources. They're going to get people assigned to their project. They're going to do allocations. Okay, you're working 80 hours over the next three months, whatever it is, right? And then it must go. There's toll gates, right? You got it. Oh yeah, we're gonna get it monthly. We're gonna get here, and we're gonna have sign off and approval, and all these things happen, and we're gonna develop all these documents. And there's a business development document, and there's a functional requirements document. All these documents get done, and that information finally flows down to a group of people who have to do that work. There's no team in doing that work. It's everybody's reading the instructions. They're picking their piece and they're working alone. Somebody has done all the thinking for them. That is very rote work. That is not the work that most of us do today, right? Most of us do not rote work. We do knowledge work. Rote work is we experience the same thing every day. It's clear, and if we just do it faster, we'll get more of it done. Knowledge work is our work changes every day. There's a new problem. There's a new technology. The competition has tried something new. A customer has a new demand. Oh, we have to introduce an efficient, a more efficient way of doing this because the way we've been doing it is no longer efficient or effective. So something has to change. That knowledge work, right? And it takes different types of workers to do those things. And in the work of knowledge, work collaboration gets you a better outcome because what you start with is a problem given to a group of people who bounce ideas off of each other and try different things, mix their ideas together. Everybody gives a different perspective of the problem, thus resulting in a better solution. I, as a single human being, I cannot wrap my head around how am I going to solve this exact same problem for for 100 different people who all have different needs. It might be easier for 20 people to think how they might solve it for five different people, and so when you look at organizations that are are working in these more adaptive or agile ways of working, they look at teams. They have what I call the value delivery teams. These are the people who do the work, right? But they might have management teams and leadership teams also. I believe those people should be working in teams also. A CEO is a part of several teams in a large enterprise. They work with the board, but they also work with their other C-level executives. They're part of multiple teams. Their work moves at a very slow pace. They're setting strategy multiple years, right? But in when we talk about scaling, we scale down, right? We narrow the scope, we narrow the work. It moves down in the organization, and so the cycle picks up faster and things move quarterly till it gets down to the team where the work gets done. Now it's moving every week or two and it gets done, and that value flows back up through that exact same system. So if you stop thinking about an individual as the one person who can solve every problem. That is for rote workers. We don't exist in that world. We work in the world of knowledge workers. You will just get a better solution from a team. And so, when I talk about teams being the smallest unit of value delivery for any organization, that's what I mean. Is once you're down and you get to the lowest level team, what they're actually delivering is customer value. So that's why I call them as a team. They deliver customer value. They're a value delivery team. That's the smallest unit that delivers customer value. A team of people. Devon Morris: That's that that that right there is amazing. Now you you mentioned two things in that that I want to make sure that people are really clear on, and I'd like for you to distinguish some different types of things that are knowledge work, you know, in general versus what you said rote work, Jeff Burstein: rote work, sure. You know, so this this is we're now going to cross into the realm of L-EAF.org, right? Why is why L-EAF.org as a framework? So there has been a lot of work. This is not like the research has been done on this. There are two different types of workers in the world. There are people who do repetitive work. It doesn't require any thinking. You know who you are, right? You may work on a factory assembly line, and you just right, or you could work in a big organization and look. You just know at the end of every month the reports are due. I go to a system, I press a button. I don't know what the heck happens. I just know when I press that button, reports happen. That is rote work. If you don't understand what's going on behind why you do what you do and it produces value, you are a rote worker. If that breaks and you can't fix it, or the way that value is delivered is now no longer meeting the needs because something in the environment has changed. It's taking too long. It's it no longer meets quality standards. Government regulations have changed. We have to file our taxes differently. Whatever doesn't really matter, but something has changed, necessitating a change in what happens after the button is pushed. If you can't get behind the scenes, improve it. So the way you improve what happens behind the button is all knowledge work, and that's really the distinction. Is if I push the button and I don't understand what happens, I'm a rote worker. If I push the button faster, right, then what happens happens faster. And the way you reward those people, it's very simple. It's stick and carrot. Press the button faster, and we'll give you a bonus. Don't press it fast enough, and we'll find somebody who can press it fast enough. No thinking involved. Knowledge workers-they don't work like that, so they require the way you motivate them. Is it? It's it's two steps. Step one is you first have to remove their concerns about money, right? And this is again not my research. This research has been done by psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists, finance people, right? Like all over the spectrum, people from the liberal to liberal to conservative have looked at this not only in the United States but globally, and they just see the same pattern when it comes to human beings. If I don't think about my work, and I don't have to think about what happens for me to do my work, then reward and punishment makes me do it faster or gets someone else to do it. But if I have to think about my work, something's changing. I have to be creative. I have to come up with new solutions. And now I'm a knowledge worker. You first have to remove my concern of money, right? So I'm not thinking about money when I'm doing my job. Then you have to provide me with three things. Devon Morris: One is Jeff Burstein: purpose. Why are we doing this? Who are we doing this for, and why does solving this problem matter in the world? So, purpose. Second thing is you have to show them where they can have all the access to the tools and the resources, all those constraints. These are the boundaries: what you can and can't use, what's good and not in, what's in and out, all those things. Make the boundaries clear, make the resources available, and then leaders. The third thing they have to do is they have to learn how to get out of the way. Give the team autonomy to solve the problem because you hired them because you realize there are no experts, and we've never done it this way before, so we can't bring in a consultant. What we need are people who work really, really close to where the problem is, and have actually seen the shift in the environment, and now can shift the process to me. It's evolutionary in nature, right? And so then we talk about knowledge workers and rote workers. Those are the two buckets we're talking about. You can be the CEO of a company and be a rote. Worker, I don't know what happens when I say get me these reports, but all I know is these reports matter. No idea. If the process broke and the board asked you to fix it, they would be replacing you in 90 days. Because if you can't tell, and what's worse is a lot of senior executives actually have a belief that their systems, the way their organizations run, that they actually exist in the clear or the complicated domains, when in truth they exist in the complex or chaotic domains, and they are just oblivious to it because there's a middle management that protects them. Devon Morris: So, so then that is beautiful and interesting. So, one thing I'll say, so then people know. I think Dan Pink summed it up in a book called *The Drive* in terms of some of the things that you're talking about, and what I'll add for people: if you remove autonomy, you're going to impact motivation and psychological safety. That's what the research, right? Jeff Burstein: Well, so those those those things, right? It's the it's the how do you unlock motivation in knowledge workers? It's remove their concerns about money, then purpose, resources, and autonomy. And now you have just unlocked their motivation, and you just stay out of their way. That's it. Devon Morris: So then, then you started talking about. So how do you, you know, we almost we you mentioned goals. You meant you mentioned alignment. Yeah, you mentioned a lot of things, right? So then I'm curious, and I want to go back to the mindset, and I want to give people some things that are definitely useful. You know, how do you get, you know, in in this world? Can you get those mindsets to actually stick? Jeff Burstein: Um. So that's a great question. I don't know. I've been working on mine since I'm like 22, 23, and every day it can be a battle. So does it stick? Like you don't have to keep working on it? No, I don't think it ever. You're never done. It is relentless improvement, right? It's you know, it's the when I'm coaching, I'll tell anybody. I say it's not a question of right, wrong, good, bad. It's like going to the eye doctor, better, worse, and just orient and keep orienting towards better. It's never done, right? When I deal with leaders and I talk to them about how do you cast vision for your organization, so that there's always something that at one on one end of the sector it seems like oh yeah yeah we can get there, but it's also just out of reach. So they'll never get there because they have to, as an organization, constantly be pulling towards something. Why would you ever stop? The companies that stop, they begin to atrophy. Like as soon as you stop trying to get better, you start to get worse. Not because there's anything wrong with the systems or the organization that you've built. It's just you don't exist in a vacuum. Everything around you is changing. Your competition's not stopping. Your customers are going to want more. Technology changes every 13 seconds. Yeah. Well, how can you stop? You know who gets to stop? Organizations that don't have to worry about sustainability. I look at some government entities. Yes. They don't have to worry about where does the money come from. We tax more. Okay, but you know there there is a threshold. You know, so, but for an organization or anybody to go, yep, no, it's stuck. It never sticks. I don't think you know. So we have this. There's this one interesting exercise we do. We call it letting go. Right? Like when you realize that, oh my God, I've just brought my emotions into the work. I got to let that go. Right? Like I brought I brought something personal to my team that is not in not aligned with what we all said we were committed to delivering value wise for our customers who we're here to do the work for. How do I let that go so I can get back in with my team? And so we we often will will tell people you know. Imagine you've got a pen in your hand and you're just holding it. I mean, I mean, really hold on to it tight. You know, think about how much energy you're putting into holding it on. Now, is it easier to hold on to it than it is to just let it go? Devon Morris: Right. Yeah. Jeff Burstein: And imagine if you could take all that energy that you were putting into holding it and just divert that into delivering value, just because you let it go, so you weren't focused on that. Now, what you find is, yeah, you can let it go, but it could be five minutes later, 13 seconds later, two years later. You don't even know how it happened, but now that pen is right back in your hand, and you're holding it again, and you got to practice letting it go again, and you have to practice all the time letting it go. So it's that it. I don't know that it sticks. It doesn't get any better. Devon Morris: Here's here's a question, right? So, so I, you know, I obviously we are mind melding here, right? And so I'm curious, man. So, for me, when you say this, the Devon Morris: way to get it to stick is to understand it's never gonna stick. Jeff Burstein: Right. Well, so we get back to relentless improvement. Why? Why in all the frameworks? Why in all the methodologies do they tell you you got to have a commitment to relentless improvement? Because they know things are going to change, and if you just rest on your laurels, you stop getting the value from what you've done. Devon Morris: So then, how do you help a team that did get stuck in a mindset? Jeff Burstein: Sure. So it is a great question. So the first thing I would tell you is that in in mindset training, everybody gets stuck. There is no not getting stuck, right? In order to have what we call a breakthrough in mindset, you actually have to hit what we call breakdown. And breakdown is I'm not talking a mental breakdown where you go away, although it can sometimes get something. What we're actually talking about is that if you think of your brain as a system, all right, it's just a system. It generates ideas for you. That's all it is. It is, however, a system that is influenced by emotion, which is weird because no other system is influenced by emotion. That's a weird thing. We talked about that earlier, but when you can identify, you individuals can identify that they are in some sort of cognitive breakdown or the mindset breakdown when they're looking at a problem and they're like, "I don't, I don't know what to do. I can't think of anything to do. I'm not doing anything, and they just sit there and look at the problem, and then I have this saying that I I do and I say, and people really don't appreciate it, but I people will often say, "Oh God, we hope that works. I'm like, "Well, hope is not a plan. Come up with a plan, you know. Or I'll say things like, "Well, hope is what you what you have to rely on when you run out of your ability to plan. So if you are just in hope, if all you have left is hope, you're in cognitive breakdown. That's the signal. It's like God. I I I hope my finances work out. I hope this problem for the customer solves itself. I hope this report automatically fixes itself. I hope we can somehow magically be in compliance. I hope I've got nothing left. So how do you get out of breakdown? It's actually really simple. Do something. Do anything. It doesn't matter. All you're trying to do, and all that, and I describe it like this: is think about it this way. The gears in your brain that come up with ideas are seized up. There's something jamming them, and you're in breakdown. You are relying on hope. You cannot come up with any ideas. At that point, don't try to do the right thing. Don't try to do the good thing. Don't try to do the thing everybody expects you to do. That's going to make you think about a thing to do. We already have agreed you can't think of anything to do. So stop trying. Just do, do anything. Do something. Do something small. See what happens. Just keep doing things because what happens is, is you will just unjam it, and then you go. Okay. Well, wait a minute. Before I do that stupid thing that I know doesn't. What if I tried this, and that is an indication you are now popping out of breakdown. And what you'll generally get to 80% of the time is breakdown leads to breakthrough. You have to get to one to get to the other, because what you've done, if for those who have seen the the video, getting smarter every day, the backwards bicycle video, it's a great video and it explains this what's happening. Right, is you're essentially taking what is a cognitive pattern that has been set in your brain because you've always done it that way for so many years, and it's always worked. But then it stopped working, and then you've started to fill in that cognitive pathway and start to develop new trails. Devon Morris: Yeah, and that Devon Morris: is really, really hard Devon Morris: to do. So then, then here's the question, right? Because you've seen people go from breakdown to break to break Devon Morris: through, yeah, Devon Morris: and you've seen both, right? You've seen both how it looks in a person that you've seen in that place where they had breakdown versus when they've broken through. Jeff Burstein: Sure, right, and so breakdown really does look like it has a signal. It's people are relying on hope and they can't think of what to do, and they're just stopped. They're literally unable to think of what to do next, and they're unwilling to do anything. They're resigned, right? Like, yeah, this is this is just it. This is it. I gotta hope that someone's gonna come in and save me or something. I've got nothing. I'm broken down. In that way, I cannot create anything new. And when we ask them to start, well, just do it. Do anything. Doesn't matter what you do at that point. Do something you know is not gonna work. Do it 10 times. Watch it not work. See if you can understand why it's not working. Right? It's just the starting to get them realizing that they gotta get the gears that have seized up in motion because once they start going again, right, the ideas do flow, and then you will see the signal, like the signal show up because a they'll they'll fix the problem, like they'll get a solution. It may take a little time, but then what they'll start to be able to do is produce solutions at a higher rate than they, and they will be like, I can't believe that I figured this out. Yeah, like I thought it was going to take this, but I got it in in much less than that. Yeah, yeah. And that's that's what it looks like. Is they have now moved beyond their own cognitively set imaginary boundary of capability for themselves. Devon Morris: You know, I say to you, Jeff, when when it when it happens to me, it may be I reset by going to bed, playing a video game, going to cook something, taking myself away for a moment. You know, going someplace on the computer that's a little bit different, just so I can disconnect a little bit and then try to get back at it because I don't have any more ideas, any more things to move forward with. Because I just, you know, and then I do try to move forward. I'm just messing things up, just making and worse and worse for myself. So I'm just like this is this is this is wild and crazy. And again, I may connect with family in some kind of way, and that's you know classically, I'm I'm I'm going to my other human systems to help me out in some kind of way, and we all, you know, I don't know a single person that does not go through it. We all go. Jeff Burstein: Everybody does, but that's why we have these connections. Devon Morris: So then, what? So then, we we definitely was talking about an individual here. Do you get the same advice for a team? Jeff Burstein: Same advice for teams. Yeah, you you can see it in their backlog, right? When they stop putting things into their backlog. They're running out of ideas. Devon Morris: Yeah, Jeff Burstein: put anything in your backlog. Devon Morris: Yeah, Jeff Burstein: pull anything into your workflow. Do something. Right now, the coaching may be right. Like do something intentional. Like you know, okay, maybe I'll do the same thing again, but instead of doing the same thing, trying to move, you know, have it be the solution. Let me do the same thing and understand why it's not the solution. Okay, so what we've really done is, you know, mentally we simply step to the left. Right a little bit, and we looked at the problem from a different perspective, and that's all we're trying to do. Just change where we're standing and looking at the problem. That's an advantage a team gives you: is everybody's already standing in a different position. They're already looking at the problem different way. Great, everybody, shift 10 feet to the left. Now we're getting that exponential value of having a whole team. Now all look at it through a new lens. Now what do we got? Devon Morris: That's that's that's interesting. So here's here's the question, right? Because you know when I when I think about a leader, a leader could be somebody on the team on the team, right? A leader could be somebody outside of the team. when you have leaders that don't notice that a team is seized up, how do you teach them or coach them through process of being able to coach their team in the right direction? Because again, you said, Jeff, I'm not going to be at an organization forever, so how do you leave that knowledge with that leader so they can actually help these teams be better? Jeff Burstein: Sure. So that is a great question. And so, when working in an enterprise, doing enterprise level transformation, there is transformation work that gets done at the team level, at management level, at leadership level, at executive level, and in any kind of scaled framework, everybody's seeing an amount of the same kind of process. They might be seeing it as it relates to their work, or if you're a leader, like oh, when you're seeing teams, these are some of those things that you might be on the lookout for, right? But it really is the best way for leaders to track progress of teams and just make sure that everybody's moving in the same direction as an organization. We don't have two teams working in opposite directions or working opposed each other, right? All of a sudden, we're not making any progress, but we're spending a lot of capacity and energy, right? There are regular check-ins. Like a leader who has gone through the training with me will not be surprised because they are participating at regular schedules and in team demonstrations, maybe at the you know maybe one layer up at the product level where they're seeing with product you know managers working within the portfolio. If it's a really big organization, you know, so they have and they're engaged, and they're participating. They're providing feedback. Yes, I see that the teams are moving us closer to our initiative. What we'd like to see next is these solutions. How would they answer these questions? So they're engaged, and they're not surprised. And yeah, I mean, they will notice that you know why is it that the flow of value has has slowed down? Yeah, you know, is there is there something from that triad that as a leader I am now failing at? Is it that they don't completely cannot connect to purpose. Maybe we don't have the right resources and tools and boundaries set. Yeah, or maybe the teams don't have feel they have the right amount of autonomy, and we haven't moved that authority closer to where the solution is going to get developed. Devon Morris: You know, you you, I and I and again, you see it a ton. Probably if you you you remove that extrinsic motivator money and those kind of things, remove that, and you mentioned purpose, you mentioned autonomy, and then you mentioned boundaries. I'll just call it mastery, all that kind of stuff back there, Right, which of those three things, you know, purpose, autonomy, mastery, because you touched on every single one of those in this conversation. Which of those do you see missing the most with teams that you engage with? Jeff Burstein: You know, honestly, it is a combination, and it's not just a combination of those three. It's also a combination of that predecessor, right? Like the conversation of money has not been taken off the table for them, right? And so you're already behind the game because you then don't get to rely on the the triad, you know, that formula that every leader has to experiment is it is it a little more purpose is it a little pinch of you know autonomy or mastery whichever it is you know what's the ratio where do we need to lean into now that the conditions have changed and it's not a it's not like Ron Popeil where you set it and forget it. Devon Morris: Yeah, yeah, Jeff Burstein: right. It is, you know. It's you have to be engaged. It is a living, you know. I tell people, you know, organizations. The word is so much like organism, and it is a living, breathing organism that evolves and changes, and either it adapts to its environment or it shrivels up and dies. I didn't write the rules of biology. I was taught them as a child. So evolve or don't, right? You know. But there's a formula to evolutionary organizations, and it's not bringing in experts and consultants to tell everybody what to do, and it's not set your processes once and be done with it, and it's not this is the way we've always done it, and we're always going to do it, and no one can tell you why. It's just not. Devon Morris: I, I, you know, I couldn't, I couldn't agree with you more. Organisms, organization, Jeff Burstein: organisms. Devon Morris: I love that, right? Evolve or die, right? Absolutely, like nothing new under the sun here, right? So we we are in agreement. So here's the deal, right? I'm gonna ask you one final thing, and then let let us tell everybody where you can be found at. We talked about mindset first, so I like to kind of make sure that we tent that with that mindset. But here's my question: What would you tell a leader whose team is behind right now, and they know it. Jeff Burstein: Sure, I would tell every leader the same thing: is as a leader, that title comes with a certain set of responsibilities and accountability to the team. So, what is it that, as a leader, you need to do to ensure that your teams have everything they need to be successful? Because either you have inherited an organization that is configured in such a way that teams cannot be successful, or you have inadvertently created rules and guidelines and governances that have forced your teams to behave a certain way, or maybe with the best of intentions, you brought in a tool or a process. So, what I would tell every leader is the same thing: just remember, you lead people, and you are accountable and responsible for people. And on any given day, your people are dealing with-is there cursing on this podcast? I don't know. They're dealing with stuff, but they're dealing with stuff. And as a leader, what you need to ensure is that they're okay, that They can, for themselves, attach to the purpose you have laid out, develop the mastery that you have defined you think is needed, and that they get that they have the autonomy to solve your problems with their teammates, and that you've done what you can to make sure they are not thinking about money all the time, most of the time, right? Because at the end of the day, if you if your teams if your teams are suffering, right? And there's a difference between a team that's working on a solution and just not making progress. Could be there's a lot of unknown unknowns. It's just going to take time, right? You know, giving people artificial make-believe deadlines doesn't help. That that is a that is a touch on the autonomy corner. That's not autonomy. We'll solve it when we solve it. Not we'll solve it by the 23rd of the month, right? That's that's not autonomy. We don't know what it's going to take. We've never solved this problem before. So I would always tell a leader, great! You have a basic set of tools that you, as a leader, can use to help the people that you lead. Right? You have purpose. You have mission. You have vision. You have your ability to cast those things. The ability to set an off. North Star, and then you have control as the leader of the organization, right? Over as things get identified that are standing in their way, they don't need to be there. Let them know they can be removed. They don't have to be there, right? Keep in mind every rule that exists in this company, and every rule that this company follows, even by the government that made up a bunch of rules that we all have to follow. These are all rules that were just made up by people, just made up. They don't exist anywhere but out, but they only exist inside of a human system, society, nationality, how corporations are structured, tax systems. Those are all human made. It's all made up. None of it's real. Yeah. And so, if not, why treat it like anything it's not? And let's just understand that as long as we're going to adhere to the boundaries that other people set, we get to get there any way we want to. Devon Morris: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Jeff Burstein: So that's what I tell leaders: is lead, and you lead with purpose, vision, and mission. Go lead, Devon Morris: go lead. I like that. And I'm there, but here's here's the statement. I I have to I have to say it because I I love that you said it. Um, and that's suffering, right? It's really hard to be really productive on anything if all you can think about is you or the people that you love and care about suffering, right? Especially knowledge work. So I think that that is a great thing that you pushed in there. But again, mindset is extremely important. So I'll ask you here: Where should people find you, and tell us what's coming up for you? Jeff Burstein: Sure. So the easiest place to find me is probably on LinkedIn. I do a lot of just meeting people on LinkedIn, talking to people on LinkedIn, I will generally respond to every direct message sent to me at some point. You know, I get back, and that's even the ones that I know where it's just people trying to spam me and try to sell me something that I'm never, never going to buy. I take the time to talk to them. People took the time, even though I know that they set up an automatic. I hey, look, you took the time. Let me acknowledge you as a human being. We're all human beings, all right. So LinkedIn is the best place to find me, and you know I am on LinkedIn. It's Jeff Burstein. You'll you'll see me. I'm standing in front of it's the the the picture of computing and theoretical science building on Argonne National Laboratories out in Illinois. When I was working for the Department of Energy, one of the even though there's no pictures, one of the guards let me take a picture outside the building because there was nothing to see outside the building. But it's a it's a great picture. It's got the old punch cards in front of it, and and so you'll find me there. It's you know LinkedIn. I'm just Jeff Burstein, one straight thing, you know, without an underscore in between them. You can also connect with me at any of the websites. My email is generally Jeff at or JB at, and then it's either @advancedenterpriseagility. com, L-EAF.org, or L-EAFLab.org, L-EAF Lab. So those are all ways that anybody can can get a hold of me. We're always willing to talk to people and see how we can help. Devon Morris: I must say this to you, Jeff, because I'm I'm I keep getting kicked in the teeth by you guys who come and I interview. I always think about a title, a possibility, beats that we go and have conversations about, and then you guys just all of a sudden change the conversation, and it's the right conversation to have. So I appreciate you, man. Thank you so much. Jeff Burstein: And you know, it just it comes back to you know we have plans, and that's great. It's good to have a plan. Everybody needs a plan, and if you get nothing out of an adaptive way of thinking, it's your ability to plan, but just realize that your plan's gonna just go off the rails as soon as you start implementation, and that's okay because all that's happening is you're learning about. Oh, I thought it was this. Turns out it's that, and you're just adapting as you go. Devon Morris: Well, you know, I'm. Try my best to be as adaptive as I can be, but I'm going to say to you, Jeff, I really appreciate you. Thank you so much, and audience, go find Jeff. You heard the conversation. Get that mindset right, and we will be talking to you again sometime soon. Jeff Burstein: Absolutely. Thank you. All right. Thank you so much. Have a great rest of the whatever. Listening Devon Morris: to Jeff Burstein: enjoy the rest of it, and we'll we'll see everybody next time. Devon Morris: I appreciate you, Jeff. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you for joining us. Where every Tuesday and Thursday we work toward bridging the gap for teams that are behind.