A conversation with Tim Creasey, Chief Innovation Officer at Prosci.

“Science jokes, math jokes, grammar jokes are some of my favorites, but in the same way that atom makes up everything, individual human beings make up everything in the organization. They make up the teams, they make up the departments, they make up the functions, they make up the momentum, they make up the culture. And so if we want to understand change and bring about more successful change, then at the individual level is where we need to make sure we get started.” – Tim Creasey

In this podcast episode, Douglas welcomes Tim Creasy, the Chief Innovation Officer at Prosci, to discuss the field of change management. Tim shares his origin story and how he became interested in understanding human systems and implementing change at scale. They discuss the intersection of economics and political science, the concept of systems thinking, and the potential impact of generative AI on creativity. They also highlight the importance of understanding both macroeconomics and microeconomics in driving change within organizations. They touch on complexity theory, the shift to a more humanistic approach in business, and the role of connections in combating ambiguity and uncertainty. They discuss the challenges of synthesizing information, the importance of addressing the human side of change, and the role of leaders in creating an environment of psychological safety. They also explore the individual-level implications of change and the concept of skill-oriented organizations. Tim shares his perspective on the future of humanizing change and the importance of balancing productivity and human-centricity in organizations.

Show Highlights

[00:01:23] The origin story of Tim 

[00:05:02] The intersection of economics and political science

[00:07:21] Generative AI and its impact on conversation

[00:12:25] The role of human beings in change 

[00:36:38] The Future of Change

[00:37:19] Threading the Needle

[00:40:37] Change Success through People

Tim on LinkedIn

Articles by Tim

About the Guest

Tim Creasey, Prosci’s Chief Innovation Officer, is a dynamic presenter, researcher and thought leader on managing the people side of projects and initiatives to deliver organizational results and outcomes. His work forms the foundation of the largest body of knowledge in the world on change management. Through conference keynotes, presentation, webinars, articles and tools, he has advanced the discipline of change management by moving it out of the “soft and fuzzy” realm toward a structured, rigorous approach for driving benefit realization and value creation. Tim coauthored the book “Change Management: The People Side of Change”

About Voltage Control

Voltage Control is a facilitation academy that develops leaders through certifications, workshops, and organizational coaching focused on facilitation mastery, innovation, and play. Today’s leaders are confronted with unprecedented uncertainty and complex change. Navigating this uncertainty requires a systemic facilitative approach to gain clarity and chart pathways forward. We prepare today’s leaders for now and what’s next.

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Full Transcript

Douglas Ferguson:

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Today I’m with Tim Creasey, Chief Innovation Officer at Prosci. Tim is a dynamic presenter, researcher, and thought leader on managing the people side of change. His work forms the foundation of the largest body of knowledge and the world on change management and is passionate about helping people unlock the challenges of change. Welcome to the show, Tim.

Tim Creasey:

Thank you, Douglas. Glad to be here.

Douglas Ferguson:

It’s great to have you. This is a topic that’s near and dear to me, and I often call myself a change junkie because if I’m anywhere that’s staying the same for too long, I get really antsy. So I like to talk about change and I like to think about what makes change more comfortable for folks. And so I’m excited to talk here with you today. What brought you into the field of change? What inspires you to do this work? What’s the origin story of Tim?

Tim Creasey:

Yeah, I love the origin story. We’re big Marvel fans at our house. I’ve actually been at Prosci almost 22 years now. Joined right out of undergrad, so I’ll go all the way back to undergrad. Started as a mechanical engineering student, but realized very early on I liked human systems way better than mechanical systems. And I also loved what makes people decide to do what it is they do. So coming out of engineering, I was in business for a little bit and psychology for a little bit, ultimately landed with a double major in economics and political science. Because I felt like both economics and political science give you interesting perspectives on what make people decide to do what they do.

I got out of undergrad in three and a half years and my a girlfriend at the time, now partner in life, she was doing a teaching degree, so she had to do something for an extra year. So I was just looking for a job near Northern Colorado. Because I was going to go get a PhD in comparative economics and teach economics. That was the plan. It was just dialed in. That’s what I wanted to bring to life. So I ended up looking for jobs around northern Colorado and found a three-month gig at a company called Prosci. At the time, we were nine employees, we’re up over 350 now, and we did a lot of different business at the time. In the business process re-engineering and call center operations spaces. We had a change management component, but that was just a little piece of the puzzle.

So I started in that three-month gig at Prosci and the rest is history. Prosci began to really put a focus on the change management component, do more research, more development there. And what I found is that change management, I don’t know, people either love or hate economics. I’m not sure which camp you fell into, but there was macroeconomics, how the whole economy works, microeconomics, how a firm makes decisions. Change management as a discipline, I think gets at micro microeconomics. How do we as human beings navigate these contexts and situations and environments we’re in? What makes us be more effective and more successful, more productive? Where do things get challenging and tricky? And when you’re implementing change over and over and at scale in organizations, are there repeatable things we can learn by doing the research to equip other change practitioners as they go forward? My journey at Prosci has really been part of that Prosci journey as well over those 20 years.

Douglas Ferguson:

It’s interesting. I also come from a technical background. I wrote software for a number of years and I agree with you. I found the human systems to be much more fascinating, much more complex, puzzling at times. And so I’m curious to hear about your journey about the realization around the human systems and what were some of the things that you were noticing, or maybe were there any pivotal stories or examples that come to mind?

Tim Creasey:

I think a good bit of it was watching the intersection of economics and political science actually come to life during undergrad. Because in economics you assume logical man with perfect information, you have to put all these assumptions in to get the economics models to work right. But I always stepped back and said, “There’s a lot more moving parts that are causing what’s happening to happen. There’s influences that we’re not taking in consideration or we’re assuming out of the equation.”

I got into the notion of systems thinking even younger in high school. We had a humanities teacher that showed us a movie called, oh my gosh, I’m going to forget the name of the movie, Mindwalk, I think. It’s three folks walking around Mont Saint-Michel, this castle off the coast of France. One of them has just failed to win the presidential election. The other is his old friend and speech writer who has now escaped to France, and then the other is a physicist. And they began walking around Mont Saint-Michel and just talk about systems theory. And so that was what initially sparked my interest in the notion that everything is multivariant equations and it’s all about figuring out whether the different variables that are having an impact on the thing you’re trying to make sense of.

Douglas Ferguson:

It’s really fascinating too, if you fast-forward to now with these large language models that are essentially transforming everything into language and able to create models that are really… We just have no ability to understand how they work at their fundamental level. That’s fascinating to me to think how those things evolve and do they start to model things that expose us to higher levels of thinking.

Tim Creasey:

Absolutely. And I think my other interesting takeaway right now on generative AI is if we think about it, conversation is the very first form of passing information. Way back, from the very beginning it was through conversation that we passed information. And then we started to have massive amounts of information available in different ways, whether it was in books or all of a sudden in zeros and ones. And so the interface to information changed from conversation. You learned the Dewey decimal system to find the right book. You learned how to interface with a computer first with just a keyboard, but then with a mouse and you could click and you could engage information in a different way now that there was all this digital information available, but it hadn’t got back to conversation yet. And I think what’s interesting is a lot of what’s happening in generative AI is bringing access to massive amounts of digital information back to conversation, which was ultimately our first form of passing information back and forth.

Douglas Ferguson:

I think the beauty is that they’ve simplified it to the point where, and they’re treating everything like language, whether it’s an image or a movie or there’s some form of expression, information that’s being exchanged. To use your point, if you go all the way back, there were cave paintings before there even language, and they were communicating through these symbols and these images. And if we treat things as language, then the models can get really, really good at that. And we don’t have these various different fields of study like, “Oh, there’s computer vision or this or that.” All the efforts start to coalesce into one stream of effort, which is really profound. We get more done.

Tim Creasey:

Yeah, absolutely. My other favorite take on generative AI comes from… I think your background’s in music, right?

Douglas Ferguson:

Mm-hmm.

Tim Creasey:

So Rick Rubin getting interviewed by Tim Ferriss, who also has a background in creatives, and he says, “What’s your take on what this might do to creativity?” And Rubin uses the analogy of being crate diving as a hip hop producer. Back in the day, you pull tape after tape after tape after tape, you’re just sitting there and he said, “You’re not listening for the new artist or the next new song. You’re listening for a moment, a moment to inspire.” And in the same way, the phrase he used is, “As an ends generative AI isn’t interesting to me, but as a means it’s fascinating because it very much like that crate diving gives us huge sample sizes of potential moments that we can pick up.”

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah, I think of it as how do we augment our teams? Teaming with AI is such a fascinating concept to me. It’s not like, “Oh, let’s just have it go do all the work for us.” It’s like, I don’t know, just imagine we were able to hire another person and they’re with us saying things in ways that we don’t say things and it makes us realize like, “Oh wow, look at this tape I just found out of this crate.” It’s like just jogs the thoughts in ways that are unanticipated.

Tim Creasey:

For sure. When you get to start to riff with it, like you get 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 rounds into riffing back and forth. Yeah, absolutely.

Douglas Ferguson:

In fact, here’s a fun facilitation trick with AI is to ask it what questions I should be asking myself. All the advice out there is how to prompt it to give you the answers. What if you just had it help you come up with the right questions?

Tim Creasey:

You want to know one of my favorite quotes from the last couple years? And I attribute it to Lisa Kempton on my product team, and she said she picked it up somewhere, but I’m a really good googler and I have not found it anywhere else. But the quote is, answers have an expiration date, questions last a lifetime.

Douglas Ferguson:

I love that.

Tim Creasey:

Right? And especially over the course of the pandemic response, if you ran around with answers, those things were expired well before they ever landed. But if you can equip yourself with great questions to be asked and answered and re-asked, and re-answered, that’s the way we… Interesting, that’s the way we bring about change. I also think that’s the way we effectively facilitate. And you just added that’s a really interesting way to use generative AI to give us those questions that will help us continue to expand.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah, and I want to come back to another point you made about the… There’s the macroeconomics, there’s the microeconomics and then this change piece being the micro micro. Let’s talk about that for a little bit.

Tim Creasey:

Okay, yeah. Part of, we have this tenant at Prosci that organizations don’t change, individuals do. And we do this, it’s a three-day program, it’s kind of our cornerstone program. But one of the neat things about it is people have to build a presentation while they learn it. And I used to fly down and watch people give these presentations at the end of the second day on the project they brought, the people side challenges, how they’re going to tackle it. And I distinctly remember one time I flew down and the first woman that got up was presenting about a global diversity strategy. They were rolling out across 65,000 person multinational. She talked about the awareness of the need for change, the importance of sponsorship, the anticipated resistance, and really laid out her strategy.

The next person got up and she worked at an architectural engineering firm and she managed a team of seven, what they called visual communicators, people that would take really complex ideas and explain them to somebody like me, not making assumptions about your understanding, but I don’t understand that stuff at all. So how do they help me understand these complex engineering principles? Seven creative people trying to bring a little bit of process so that they could have a bigger impact in their organization. And she talked about the anticipated resistance, the importance of sponsorships, how critical it was to answer why, why now, what if we don’t?

And so it was really neat in the juxtaposition of seven creatives bringing a little bit of process to how they work and 65,000 person multinational but the common denominator across all is human beings showing up and then needing to show up in a different way. You want to hear a joke along these lines?

Douglas Ferguson:

Sure, yeah.

Tim Creasey:

Pan, it crashes every time I tell it. I told it on stage in front of 750 people at a big Gartner business process re-engineering conference one time back in 2014. Do you know why you never trust an atom, like an A-T-O-M, an atom? Because they make up everything.

Douglas Ferguson:

Of course they do.

Tim Creasey:

Science jokes, math jokes, grammar jokes are some of my favorites, but in the same way that atom makes up everything, individual human beings make up everything in the organization. They make up the teams, they make up the departments, they make up the functions, they make up the momentum, they make up the culture. And so if we want to understand change and bring about more successful change, then at the individual level is where we need to make sure we get started.

Douglas Ferguson:

It reminds me of complexity theory and this idea that local solutions to global problems is the approach we need to take when we’re inside of a complex adaptive system.

Tim Creasey:

Yeah, absolutely. Because local is where things actually end up happening.

Douglas Ferguson:

I think a lot of our learned behaviors and our conditioning in the business world is rooted in the industrial era and coming from Taylorism. And so it’s really interesting to watch all these organizations and people struggle with this shift to acknowledge the fact that things aren’t so reductive and aren’t so simple. And we are dealing with more of a complex environment and people can say VUCA all they want, but they still default to their old ways of working.

Tim Creasey:

Yeah, I think there’s an interesting, certainly there’s the complexity piece behind. I also think in about 2016, I tried to start up a podcast with a buddy called the Humanization of the Workplace, and it wasn’t like one of these rah-rah cheerleader, it was more observational like, “Look at all these trends we’re seeing across the business world that the common thread across them all is a revaluing of the human beings, whether it’s appreciative inquiry, change management, a lot of the DEI work.” There was a common thread even back then, 2015, ’16 of revaluing the human being that makes up the organization.

Now, I’ve got a little bit of an economics background as to why that is, because the Taylorism perspective really comes if we go to how does an organization create value. In an agricultural economy, we create value by growing stuff. In an industrial economy we create value by making stuff. Service economy by doing stuff. Knowledge economy by knowing stuff. And now we’re actually getting into this next phase that I’ve sometimes called the interaction economy where we actually create value by connecting. You think about Airbnb, Uber, all of these big organizations with no assets and it’s kind of interesting they have no assets. But what’s more interesting is how do they actually create value? And they create value by connecting somebody with a house and someone who needs a house, somebody with a car and someone who needs a ride.

Now you think about as we evolve from creating value through growing something, making something, doing something, knowing something, connecting people, the human being plays a different role in each of those equations, the unique value that the human being brings. So my grandpa had a farm in central Illinois. He didn’t want people getting creative necessarily on the planting there. He had decades, generations of established knowledge in what they were doing there. That’s very different than bringing somebody into a service organization and having them solve a challenge that’s sitting in front of them. Yeah, complexity, the level of connectedness we all have, and then this evolution in economy I think all plays a role in a wild time that we’re in.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah, absolutely. I like the way you described that because complexity gets nerdy and sciencey where it’s really easy to understand the shift to connection. Anytime you’re thinking about connection, you’re moving away from something that’s mechanistic and something that’s more humanistic. And also the more connections you have, the more complexity there is. So I think they’re very interwoven and pretty much the same thing. It’s just what’s the cause versus what’s the effect, or what’s the theory versus the practical, what’s happening on the ground?

Tim Creasey:

Absolutely. And sometimes those connections can actually be the antidote to ambiguity and uncertainty. I remembered I was flying down to Colorado to visit headquarters one time. Northern Colorado, it’s in December. So there’s a chance that there’s going to be a snowstorm. The wild thing there is might be snow and there might not. You never have any idea when they predict a snowstorm. So I wake up in the early morning, early getting ready to go catch my flight here in Idaho, and I jump on Facebook and say, “Hey, friends in Northern Colorado, did the snowstorm pan out?” Jump in the shower, jump out of the shower, and eight minutes later I had five, six accounts from the entire Front Range about how much snow fell or didn’t fall. That’s not an uncertain world when we talk about VUCA.

The wild thing is right when I was making that trip, I was also reading Unbroken, the book about what’s his name? [inaudible 00:19:00]. He’s the runner, four minute mile, was captured POW in Japan during World War. The part of the book that struck me is his parents didn’t know he had survived until he showed up and knocked on the door. There was no access to information that flowed all the way to them that they knew he was alive. So access to information that comes through connection actually helps us combat uncertainty, combat the ambiguity that we have in front of us right now.

Douglas Ferguson:

Sources of information are great. I think that also the sheer quantity can sometimes be overwhelming because the weather is concrete, knowable. If someone’s there on the ground, they can say, “Yes, I can test this. It is snowing.” When you get into more nuanced things where feelings and belief systems are at play, then… When we were talking about getting into the real humanistic stuff, now we have to honor everyone’s lived experiences and beliefs and interpretations of what’s happening. And then we have to synthesize and collate those things. And the more we have, the more difficult that challenge is.

So it’s interesting because the connectivity, the network is a powerful tool if we leverage it, but we also have to think about how we leverage it and how the communication structure is in place and how we’re delineating data that’s knowable versus maybe squishier.

Tim Creasey:

Yeah, for sure.

Douglas Ferguson:

So I want to come back to a quote that we had talked about in the pre-show chat, and this is a quote from the creator of ADKAR. I had never seen this quote before. I was familiar with Prosci and ADKAR, but you pointed this quote out to me. I love it so much because it really does embrace a lot of the principles and qualities of facilitation and why we do what we do. So I love the synergy there. I’m just going to read this out and then maybe we can unpack this a little more together, but “The secret of successful change lies beyond the visible and busy activities that surround change. Successful change at its core is rooted in something much simpler, how to facilitate change with one person.” When you think about that quote, you’ve been at Prosci for 22 years, so I’m sure you’ve thought about this quite a bit. But when you return to that quote that’s so familiar, what really is centering for you there?

Tim Creasey:

Yeah, there’s really two sides of that quote that come out to me. One is Prosci and ADKAR, as you mentioned, ADKAR’s that individual change model, awareness, desire, knowledgeability, reinforcement. And that really describes the individual outcomes, a successful change journey when we’re trying to bring to life whatever change might be going on at work. And so I think there’s that one aspect of the quote that it gives us guidance and some structure into which we can start to engage. And we can experiment and iterate and all that, but we’re doing it with some directional intent. And so I think that’s one half.

The other half of the importance of that quote to me is the acknowledgement. And it gets along the lines of appreciating and understanding each person’s individual life journey and what they’re bringing to the table. Even when we’re rolling out teams, it’s an individual change, it’s an individual journey for each person who has to begin using that new online collaborative platform. Each person has potential barriers that might inhibit them. Each person has individual motivators that’s going to help move them through desire. They’ll have a different relationship with how things are done today. And so there’s a really interesting bringing the human beings to the table that I think change management does. And I think that quote exemplifies or at least gives us that backdrop that then acknowledgement of how individual the change journey is.

Douglas Ferguson:

Super-fascinated about a couple things as well. And the first sentence really intriguing to me because I often see people really get focused on the Gantt charts and the technology and the implementation plan, and “This is how we’re going to approach the change.” And I love how it’s summarized there, is the busy activities that surround change. It’s the visible tangible things. I think it’s so easy for us to, as descendants of monkeys that are so good at pattern matching, we just glom into those things that are blinking in our face. Whereas the stuff lying a couple layers deeper, the more provocative, more powerful.

Tim Creasey:

Those visible and busy activities tend to be way more in our control. I can check a box as to whether or not I did those visible busy activities. So there’s more control there, they’re less ambiguous, they’re just much easier to get behind and execute. And I think you’re right, that’s why we tend to see this draw to the technical side of change. It always got me riled up when people call change management the soft side of change, that the human side is the soft side of change. And I’m like, “Come on.” The technical side may be incredibly complex. You take a merger or an acquisition, it might be really complex merging those financial systems, but getting people to work together in a new way, that’s the harder side of the change.

And so those visible busy activities, the founder of ADKAR was a mechanical engineer by training. So he knew about the visible busy activities that come about optimizing a set of processes that should save the organization a tremendous amount of money. But if you can’t get people around it and behind it and in front of it, then it doesn’t really matter.

Douglas Ferguson:

That’s making me think of this whole concept of resistance to change. While it’s important to acknowledge that it’s there and that we’re supporting people, I think that’s also a trap. Just like the visible busy stuff is a trap. If you’re thinking in the terms of resistance, it’s already reductive. We’re already demonizing those people.

Tim Creasey:

I’m a both [inaudible 00:25:11] on this one because I do think… I don’t think we treat people as resistors, but I do think we have… I can acknowledge that if people aren’t provided the answers they inherently have as human beings when they’re exposed to a change, the likelihood of resistance will go up, which means… And so we call this proactive resistance management, which is just good change management, it’s good facilitation, answer why, why now, what if you don’t when you walk through the door, it sets the foundation for change. And if we don’t do those things, we can expect resistance to manifest. So I think there’s this, it’s not quite egg and chicken, it’s chicken and egg.

We also identify resistance that comes from not supporting people through the change and constructive resistance, which is informed objections to the decision direction we’re taking as an organization. I have to be able to discern the two. So I have to have my head… Playing heads-up enough to know which one’s which.And if I’m doing a good enough job supporting people. But yeah, constructive resistance, that’s where we get meaningful progress.

Douglas Ferguson:

So important.

Tim Creasey:

Yeah, absolutely.

Douglas Ferguson:

No, I think about Sloan’s quote where he assembled his executive team and postponed the meeting. He said, “Let’s adjourn until we can all come up with matters of disagreement.” It’s one of my favorite quotes ever. And to your point, you had to have that constructive resistance or constructive conflict. And also you have to be willing to move into it. I see so many people shy away from that stuff because they want to be soft, they want to be empathetic, they want to keep it peaceful. And it’s actually long term more peaceful if we lean into that conflict or willing to have those discussions.

Tim Creasey:

And then if I take off my change management thought leader hat and put on my Prosci business leader hat, Michelle Haggerty is our chief operating officer, just a fantastic leader and has really brought forward the concept of being kind not nice. Because that niceness can become what I think you just described as skirting away from taking on and figuring out what it is we need to be tackling in front of us. And so yeah, niceness can often get in the way of having those important conversations, those disagreements. One of her other… She’s just an amazing leader. She might be worth having on your show here. One of her other concepts she brings forward, and I think it goes right alongside kind, not nice, is high expectations, high support.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yes.

Tim Creasey:

And she brings both of them in spades. She tees up her teams to overdeliver all the time. And with high expectations and high support, you have the environment into which kind, not nice can really come to life.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah, I love that just… And so often leaders get stuck in the having the answers that comes back to your quote earlier around answers having an expiry. And it’s so much more powerful when leaders, like you’re describing she is, that find gaps or find obstacles and work to remove those or work to help people with the resources they need to remove them.

Tim Creasey:

Yep, absolutely. And to help them them feel empowered, to help spot and elevate those barriers so you can step in and help support them through it.

Douglas Ferguson:

That even gets into one of the topics du jour, which is psychological safety. Because people, even if they spot them or they feel comfortable raising that because have we made it okay to point those things out? Because it’s kind of funny to me, oftentimes the things as simple as how do we respond when those things are brought up? Are we inviting that information or are we annoyed when we hear about it? Because it can be frustrating to hear about these things that are not working, but if we have a frustrating response or posture, then people are likely to just, “Maybe don’t bring that up.”

Tim Creasey:

And I think that’s really the job of the leader is context setting, creating the context into which nobody hesitates to bring that forward. We’ve extended the invitation. And one of the big lessons I’ve learned over the years the hard way was me caring about what you think is different than you knowing that I care about what you think.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yes.

Tim Creasey:

And that’s a bridge that’s got to be crossed to create that condition of feeling invited to bring that opinion.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah. There was an interesting study the Futures Forum did, and they were asking about autonomy in the workplace, the post-pandemic everyone’s working from home and this idea of distributed remote work and how much flexibility there is in a schedule. Because everyone’s talking about, “Oh, we have this improved flexibility.” 80% of leaders said there was high flexibility. And they also said that employees had high flexibility, they were able to set their schedules, et cetera. Less than 40% of the employees said they felt high flexibility. So it comes to your point, there’s this perception from the leaders that it’s there, but no one feels it. It doesn’t matter what the leader thinks, it matters how everyone feels.

Tim Creasey:

Yeah. It’s absolutely what the… And this goes back to one of our very core principles of change management around communication. That communication is what gets heard, not what gets said. And in the same way, those perceptions are what the people feel, not necessarily what you’re seeing from leaders. Along the vein of that I love questions. I managed to get two big groups of… I had a couple hundred leaders and then a couple hundred change practitioners from the same big organization, different days. And I asked both of the groups these three questions, what new capabilities emerged over the last three years that must be part of the future of your organization, we have to incorporate them? Because you can’t pretend we didn’t grow all these capabilities that we now have.

The second question, what new expectations emerged that now need to be part of how you design the future of work, the future of the organization? And then the third one was a real fun one. What’s it for? What’s shared space for when we do come together? And really riffing off of Seth Godin design thinking article using the what’s it for as the foundation. If you’re a caterer and you’re catering lunch, what’s that luncheon for? That’s going to impact how you decide to cater it. Is it a kindergarten reunion, a celebration of life, a bachelorette party? Those are very different. What’s it fors?

So we pull that thinking into the office, what is shared space for if we’re going to bring people into shared space? And so I ended up with some really fascinating side by side lists. Interestingly, leaders and change agents had the exact same top three lists, top three of the list, collaboration, connection and teamwork. Getting back to our discussion and connection. After that, you started to see some interesting variation where change agents really elevated socializing, chance encounters, brainstorming, a bit more of those humanistic components. The leaders tended to lift up good use of physical space, compliance, safety, some of those more structural components that shared space give us.

As long as we’re being heads up and deciding and making the most of shared space when we use it, I think… Or when we bring together, that’s going to be the kicker going forward.

Douglas Ferguson:

As you were rattling off those questions, it brought me back to a thought that I was having earlier and this idea that identity is something that is often at odds with change. The going back to cloud migrations, a lot of companies still undergoing cloud migrations, but there were definitely very, very popular five, 10 years ago. A lot of people making those shifts to cloud native. And your CIS admins are staring down that pathway thinking, “Who am I at the end of this? There’s no more EMC servers to administrate.” And so acknowledging the fact that folks may be in an identity crisis when we’re having these conversations, [inaudible 00:34:00] in the future, they might be arms wide open as far as the plan, but there’s some conflict.

It’s like getting that present for your birthday is not really quite what you wanted and you got the smile on your face. And so how getting to some of those layers with some of these prompts and questions around, “Hey, how do you see yourself at the end of this journey?” It’s not just like, “What do we need to do as an organization,” but “How is this really impacting you and your vision of your career and your standing?”

Tim Creasey:

Yeah, absolutely. I got a friend here in Boise named Brian Fretwell that wrote a really nice book around, he was a runner and then all of a sudden knee blew out. And that notion of losing the thing that you define yourself with and around and how there’s some challenges there.

One of the things we’ve brought, and I’ll give you a really, really concrete example to get into this notion. We have a framework in the Prosci methodology called the 10 aspects of job impact. So 10 aspects of somebody just job that this change may or may not impact. Processes, systems, job role, tool, critical behavior, mindset, attitude, belief, performance review, location, compensation and there’s one more that I don’t remember. We’ll often sit down with employees who are going through change and do sort of a… Fill it out together. That’s sort of a side by side. How does this change potentially impact these things?

So we’re really trying to elicit and elevate that conversation about what the change actually means at that individual level. And the CIS admins, yeah, there’s particular tasks that may not need to be executed anymore. But I think this gets to some of the need developments in the HR space around being skill-oriented organizations because it creates the environment into which we can move people more effectively around when certain tasks. I wrote an article about AI and the disruption it’s going to have. And I was like, “Task disruption is where we start and then we can start to build up.” “Oh my gosh, is my job gone,” that’s not the starting point. The starting point is what aspects of my job, what tasks that I do are highly language-intensive that I can either do better, faster, or might not need to be done anymore because of these new capabilities? And so starting at that task level let’s us… In the same way we start at that individual change impact level and start to build up from there.

Douglas Ferguson:

So as we’re nearing the end here, I want to shift and start to talk about the future a little bit. I’m always curious when talking with any guest, what is your perspective on how the future will unfold if we’re boldly successful at the work we’re trying to do? So in your case, thinking about change at the individual level, humanizing things more, how does the world look if we’re able to be more successful, if more people start behaving in these ways?

Tim Creasey:

Yeah, I’ll bring forward in terms of how we’ll look in the future, I’ll bring forward a challenge that I think I picked up during… It was again, Tim Ferriss’ podcast with Jim Collins who doesn’t make the rounds all that often. This is the 2019 one. And he’s talking about Peter Drucker, one of his mentors, and he said, “Drucker’s big question. The big question that drove all of Drucker’s work was how do we become both more productive and more human-centric at the same time?” And so that was the burning ember that kept Drucker’s work going.

I think if we are successful at this, what we’re talking about going forward, I think we start to thread that needle that Drucker laid out for us as the challenge. Because we can ima… We know it’s easy to get more productive and less human-centric, very easy to do that. We know it’s easy to get more human-centric and less productive. We know that a lot of times we end up getting less productive and less human-centric. The complete misses. Can we get our leaders, our teams, our people focused on threading that needle? And I think that becomes an interesting hill worth climbing for sure.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah, I love that. It makes a ton of sense. If you over-optimize on one variable the other sufferers. So when you think about these that sometimes seem at odds with each other, there’s paradox there. And I think there’s always richness when we explore these paradoxes that when they exist together, beautiful things emerge. So I’m full-heartedly behind that mission and likewise will be keeping an eye on how humane we can be while also remaining productive.

Tim Creasey:

What’s interesting, Douglas, is the more I played it out, I ended up coming to the conclusion that getting more humane is the path to getting more productive and more successful as organizations, that ultimately just given the evolutions in organizations and how we’re operating today, the path to delivering outcomes, to landing change, to building the organization people aspire to work to is elevating that human component.

Douglas Ferguson:

Absolutely.

Tim Creasey:

And I tell people, if you think they’re rose colored glasses, let me keep them on because I’m watching organizations make meaningful progress and making meaningful decisions in this direction.

Douglas Ferguson:

Absolutely, yeah. It is effort worth making. And so I want to take a moment here to allow you to leave our listeners with a final thought.

Tim Creasey:

First of all, I’d really appreciate the time, Douglas, a really fun podcast to be on, so I appreciate the time today. Yeah, I’m most active on LinkedIn. And I think the thing that I’m trying to bring forward, I decided it was my bass beat. Again, back to music. You know the drum beat in Whole Lotta Love?

Douglas Ferguson:

Oh yeah. Very well.

Tim Creasey:

And if you know Led Zeppelin, you know the drum beat in Whole Lotta Love. And if Beyonce’s Lemonade, you’ve heard the drum beat from Whole Lotta Love because he did something there, Bonham did that was sampled a couple hundred times. That’s the neat thing about a base beat is that once you find it it can show up in a lot of different places in a lot of different ways. So the base beat that I’ve arrived at is change is hard, change is continuous, but change success is accessible with and through our people. So we all have a lot of change in front of us. A lot of things we’re trying to make happen. It is with and through our people that we’re going to succeed at whatever journey we’re setting out upon. So that’s my final thought is it’s through your people.

Douglas Ferguson:

I’ll just echo that by saying we need to change together.

Tim Creasey:

Absolutely.

Douglas Ferguson:

Awesome. It’s been a pleasure. It sounds like folks can find you on LinkedIn, so definitely follow Tim on LinkedIn, check him out and his posts. I know there’s some really amazing research we didn’t have time to get to today, but another posts there are on LinkedIn, you can go check them out, read it. We’ll have things like that in the show notes as well. And Tim, it’s been a pleasure chatting with you today. I really enjoyed it and looking forward to next time.

Tim Creasey:

Yeah, thank you. Thank you. Have a great one.

Douglas Ferguson:

Thanks for joining me for another episode of Control the Room. Don’t forget to subscribe to receive updates when new episodes are released. If you want to know more, head over to our blog where I post weekly articles and resources about facilitation, team dynamics and collaboration, voltagecontrol.com.