In COVID times: the value of keeping journals and leadership for organisational reinvention

I was delighted to be a guest on Zanele Njapha‘s Future-fit Fridays podcast, with her dynamic style helping bring out some of my strongest-held beliefs.

You can listen to the interview on Apple or Spotify, or the full transcript is below.

Zanele opened by asking me about my practice of keeping a journal, following up by asking me if this was particularly relevant today. I agreed.

These are very challenging times for almost all of us and so this is a time when we can get value in reflecting, by writing and capturing our own thoughts

With the primary theme of the podcast the future of work, Zanele asked how organizations should respond.

We always need to be renewing ourselves. The world is changing. If we, as individuals or organizations are staying the same, we will of course be left behind. So we need to continually renew ourselves, renew our products, renew our offerings, renew the way we’re working, renew our culture.

I went on to discuss more specific perspectives on leadership in the current environment.

For more, listen to the podcast or read below!

TRANSCRIPT
Zanele:
Hey there everyone. Thank you so much for joining us on another episode of Future Fit Fridays, season two. I am Zanele Njapha, your host, the Unlearning Lady, and I’m so excited to bring you today’s episode, which is with a guest that I’m so honored and excited to have. And I don’t want to say I’ve been stalking this individual, but I have really been looking and following his career and I think we are going to talk about some very exciting insights in today’s episode. So I’m going to just introduce him quickly and then we’ll get right into our discussion.

So my guest on today’s episode goes by the name of Ross Dawson. So Ross Dawson is a sought after keynote speaker and strategist. He’s sought after worldwide for his inspiring and insightful keynote speeches at conferences, off-site strategy meetings, and marketing events. Strong demand for Ross Dawson’s expertise has seen him presenting as a keynote speaker in 30 countries for clients that include ABC, Air New Zealand, American Express, Canon, Cisco, Citibank, Commonwealth Bank, Ernst and Young, Google, HP, IBM KPMG. Wow. PWC, Procter and Gamble, Toyota, and the list goes on. Many other leading industry organizations that set the trend. And I think that that says so much about you. Ross, it’s such an honor to have you on Future Fit Fridays. Welcome.

Ross:
Thank you so much for having me. It’s a great pleasure to talk to you today.

Zanele:
Awesome. So the very first thing that we do at Future Fit Fridays is we want to make sure you are a real human being on the other side of this conversation. So the first thing I want to ask you is something that’s a little bit more personal. When I did a little bit of looking into you and just in following your career, I found out that, and I envy you a little for this, because this is a habit that I’ve tried and then every now and again, I’ll drop off the wagon and then try it again. I found that you actually have been keeping a journal since you were very young. Tell me a little bit about this practice and what it does for you.

Ross:
So, it is a foundation of who I am. There’s a wonderful quote, Aristotle, or was it Plato? I can’t remember. Said, “The unexamined life is not worth living.” And the more we examine our lives, we think about it, we reflect on that, the more we get from it, the more we’re able to grow, the more we get from life. So when I was young, I was getting lots of ideas and I just wanted to write them down. And so now it is just something where, I think there’s many, many levels to it. Part of it is simply the emotions. We all have ups and downs. And part of it is when we write that down, that is a reflection. I think there’s never been a time when I’ve just felt not as good as I could and where I’ve written down about it and I haven’t felt better, because it gives me perspective.

It says, “Well, actually, what is…” I get some perspective on my issues. And I’m able to capture them and learn from them. And one of I think the most important things, which I actually need to do more is actually reread my journal. I think that even if you just write and you never reread it, that has value in itself, because you are formulating your own thoughts. You’re thinking through issues for yourself, but even more is when you learn and you go back and you just realize how much you have thought, how the richness of your thinking, which I think so many people have incredibly rich ideas and thinking, but they lose it. They don’t write it down. They don’t capture it. And so much of who they are is not there for them to come back to.

Zanele:
So would you advise more people to do that, especially at this time?

Ross:
I think now it doesn’t… Now, as any other time, there is just so much value in writing and capturing. And it’s not for everyone. When I wrote about this recently, somebody says, “Oh, I’ve tried to do it. I just don’t know what to write.” And I say, “Well, don’t force it.” But I think just some kind of irregularity, it doesn’t have to be daily, maybe it’s weekly. It’s just when you feel to it saying, “Yes, I think I want to write some things down to capture some ideas, to capture ideas I might want to look back, try to think through some for myself.” I think that almost all of us would have value in that. And I suppose to your point, yes, these are very challenging times for almost all of us and so this is a time when we can get value in reflecting, by writing and capturing our own thoughts.

Zanele:
Wow, you make such an excellent point. You remind me of something. I was listening to a podcast yesterday that was saying, when you write and you record your thoughts, it allows you to track the data, especially at a time when so many of us are changing habits and transitioning. When you look back on that, like you said, you want to start to do a little more, it allows you to track where those changes started to take effect. And that’s, I think is a such a beautiful insight.

Zanele:
So now, working our way into our real conversation, you nudged a little bit around the time that we’re living in and what I’ve noticed and I’d love to hear if you’ve noticed the same thing is that a lot of organizations had simply transformational strategies, especially around their digital upbringings or their digital work that was planned to be around 10 or so years’ time, but they’ve now found that they needed to accelerate it to about three months. And it reminds me of the quotes by William Gibson, it says that the future is already here, but it’s unequally distributed. I want to hear what some of your thoughts are and what you’ve noticed about how your clients and people you’ve worked with, organizations you’re tracking, are responding during this time.

Ross:
So, one, I suppose a key point for me is that every individual is different and every organization is different. And so observing how, yes, we’re being forced to move into more and more virtual work, remote work, changing the nature of how organizations function. Some organizations have already been there for a long time. There are quite a few organizations that have been completely virtual from the start, never had an office, so they don’t miss a beat. For them, they just continue as they were. There’s many organizations that have already been on that journey, have been able to have this more flexible ad hoc location independent work. And that’s many organizations have already been on that path and simply had to accelerate and expand that.

Of course, there are many organizations that have never encountered having people working outside of the office for mainly cultural reasons, rather than technological necessarily and have had to suddenly transform, digitize, shift to new ways of working and learn on the fly. And from that pool, I suppose of organizations that have been forced into rapid change, some have actually done quite well and they’ve gone, “Oh, we have to do this. All right, let’s do it.” And they’ve done a decent job, whereas others are struggling still with the shift.

And again, this being not so much about the technology, there’s plenty of tools off the shelf that you can start to be able to work, but around that culture, around this idea that people can work, be productive, to collaborate, contribute to the organization, without anybody looking over their shoulder, checking they’re working day by day. And in many cases, that culture is shifted into this one of remote surveillance. And there are tools for tracking what all of your people in your organizations are doing on their screens and what their activities are, which is even more invasive than managers keeping on looking around and seeing who’s taking their bathroom breaks. So this is again where that culture of those organizations is pushing against their ability to move to a more contemporary, more flexible, more responsive organization that we need in these challenging times.

Zanele:
That’s quite a paradox, isn’t it? That on one side, you really do want that engagement, but at what cost? And some organizations really, like you’re saying are finding that they have to do an almost cultural level kind of shift. But I think many of the organizations that are out there at the moment are asking the question, how do we use crisis as a springboard for strategy, innovation, and changing the game altogether? And what would you say to this?

Ross:
So from the very beginning, I said that strategy these days is about two things, survival and reinvention. And there are still many things, initially certainly survival has to be the number one thing which you consider. And that is still many leaders and organizations are in that frame. But at the same time, every organization need to reinvent themselves. And this is around several dimensions and many organizations need to consider that what it is they offer, their products or their services or the distribution, need to fundamentally change, they need to have different business models, they need to function in different ways, use their capabilities and transform themselves.

But in other ways, that reinvention is around, how is the organization structured? How do our people and our processes, now technologies together create value? So that is… Some of this, the word innovation has lost much of its power through overuse and over the years, but this is one of the words I’ve done a lot of work with boards of directors and organizations around innovation. And my favored frame for that is renewal. We always need to be renewing ourselves. The world is changing. If we, as individuals or organizations are staying the same, we will of course be left behind. So we need to continually renew ourselves, renew our products, renew our offerings, renew the way we’re working, renew our culture.

And so, I suppose the stronger frame is now saying, “Well, the world has dramatically changed. It’s not incremental. We need to reinvent ourselves, become a new organization, become the organization that can be successful.” So again, so much of it comes down to the leadership. People are confused, people are worried, people are concerned and very justifiably. So now, this is about being able to have the leaders that can acknowledge they don’t necessarily have the answers, but are driving this need, necessity to reinvent ourselves, and how we are collectively as an organization.

Zanele:
And what are some of the ways that leaders can do that? Is it a mindset thing? Is it a strat session? A framework that we need? Or what is it really that leaders can start to put into practice or put into the frameworks that they use within organizations that they can actually start to open teams up to this idea of being okay with being wrong and consistently? And I always say that it’s literally like Weet-Bix, you put your milk in, you turn around, you get back and the milk is gone. So it’s just this continuous change of environment.

Ross:
Yes. Well, again every organization is different. So what is most appropriate for a particular organization will vary. But this has to be, the first thing is that there has to be an acknowledgement of creation, continual creation, and that experimentation that is required to do that and that this is something where everyone needs to participate. And I think that, again, there’s some existing organization cultures where it’s easier or harder to do, to go beyond saying, “This is the way it is. This is the direction we’re going. You’re along for the ride,” to get people’s participation in that. And there’s many… One of the hardest things is to shift a culture to one where making mistakes, or I suppose, taking wrong forks, wrong turns down the path in order to get success are acknowledged to be the way in which you get to the right path to success.

And that we have to… Nobody knows the answers. The world is different than it’s ever been before. And the only way to find out what works in this world is to try things, some of which will work and some of which don’t. So this is where it comes from the bottom, it comes from the top. It’s certainly from the board of directors, from the CEO, from the top executives, they need to demonstrate that willingness themselves to do things which don’t work, to acknowledge that, to learn from that, and to move forward. So I feel that it has always been true, but now more than ever, every organization needs to be focused on learning by doing. The only way to learn is not from others or reading books or watching videos or whatever it may be, it is by doing, by trying and seeing what works and learn from that. And that is the culture and the practice and the way that organizations need to shift to is learning by doing, individually, collectively, and as an organization.

Zanele:
Wow. It’s actually awesome that you say that because I was about to ask the question of how individuals, whether within the organization, or even outside of the organization, because what we want to do especially now is build our own adaptive capacity muscles in ourselves as individuals. I was actually going to ask whether it is important for individuals to maybe be trend alert and be tracking trends, or it really is just about us really exercising our capacity to learn by doing?

Ross:
So, it’s all of the above. And so part of it, yes, learning by doing. That’s the only way we can learn is by trying things [inaudible 00:16:32]. There’s lots of wonderful courses, one of the wonderful things with lots of free online courses, we can learn from that. But in any of those good courses, the ones which make us do things, and we can learn from that as a result. This goes to a far broader point around this outlook of, crudely, how closed or open our minds are. And I think it’s interesting that people, psychologists have pointed there are five fundamental dimensions of personality, and one of them is openness. And different personalities have different degrees of openness.

Now, in the past, some decades ago say for example, you could have a quite closed mentality and be successful. “So this is our industry, this is where we work, this is the way we’re going to do it. Boom, boom, boom.” And everyone follows and you can actually be successful. Today, when things are changing so fast and what has happened in the past may not necessarily work today, that openness to possibilities, that openness to exploration is in fact, a fundamental factor driving success. And yes, you could say it’s an accident or it’s a function of our personality that we are more open or more closed, but I think we can recognize that is a key success factor, there are things that we can do to make ourselves more open to signals.

So looking for things which are outside our domain, to look, to explore and consider ideas which might be different from our own. And so in a way this is encouraging in the sense that these are the things I believe in. Yes, of course we should all be open to all perspectives and ideas and this is what brings us success. I think we’ve got lots of data to show us that diverse people and thinking and ideas creates more success. But now that it is more critical, then in fact we all need to do what we can to shift our own perspectives in thinking and there are tools and mechanisms that we can use to do that as individuals.

Zanele:
Well, that’s a complete shift in thinking where you don’t just consider them, but you seek them out. Would you say that that’s how some of the leading organizations, especially those that you’ve worked with, are actually approaching, and I don’t want to say innovation because I remember you saying you’re a bit… around that word, but is that how they actually approach this process of continuous learning and coming up with original and novel ideas?

Ross:
Absolutely. And so, you may be familiar with the term open innovation, which is essentially saying, “We don’t have all of the ideas and the knowledge and the perspective and thinking within our organization, so we need to go beyond.” So one of the organizations I’ve worked with, Procter and Gamble, is famous for it’s shifting from R&D, so Research and Development, and so they have 8,000 people or whatever it is working with social development, new products and how they do that. And then they had a shift where A.G. Lafley, who became the CEO for the first time in 2000, said, “This isn’t going to work, we have to shift to a new paradigm where innovation comes from outside of the organization.” So they made it not Research and Development, but Connect and Develop.

And amongst other things, they might’ve been idea brokers, I can’t remember the term they used, but they actually hired people whose job was simply to go out and explore the world and to find new ideas and to connect the research and the thinking and the perspective outside the organization and bring that into the organization, which is in fact how I ended up working with them, because one of them discovered me and brought in some of my thinking into what they were doing. So this has been a foundation for many successful organizations, this idea of open innovation. And this is something you can actually build as a practice and set of principles and structures that expose as much as possible the organization to outside ideas and thinking to bring them inside.

Zanele:
Yeah. And you’ve outlined so well some of the principles and key little things that you and I, and even on an organizational scale can start to apply. Oh, okay. Sadly, we are now at the end of our interview and this segment needs me to give you the beginning of a sentence and then you will kindly complete it for me. Okay. You ready?

Ross:
Sure.

Zanele:
All right. The first one. Change is…

Ross:
Wonderful.

Zanele:
Entrepreneurship begins when…

Ross:
Begins when you have the desire to make a difference. It comes from not accepting how things are, but wanting to make something different and better.

Zanele:
Wow. Leadership is not…

Ross:
Telling people what to do.

Zanele:
Yeah. Innovation happens when…

Ross:
Different ideas are accepted and encouraged and acted on.

Zanele:
Oh, I love how when you thought of that, you looked to the side. It’s this concept of disengaging. Oh my goodness. Wow. Okay. Last one. The future…

Ross:
Is what we make it.

Zanele:
Classic. Classic way to end it. So how do people get ahold of you, Ross, and follow some of the work you do and actually engage with some of your books, including Living Networks?

Ross:
So the easiest place is rossdawson.com and they’ve got from all of my books there and some of them are actually complete downloadable. There’s a newsletter on there and on a number of social channels. Twitter, significantly, @RossDawson. But rossdawson has a wealth of resources to continue to try to keep that as a place which is going to be valuable for people to visit.

Zanele:
Awesome. And I’m sure it is. I definitely encourage everyone who’s listening in on this episode to definitely go over to rossdawson.com. A lot of really great resources on there as Ross has just mentioned. Thank you so much, Ross for spending your time with us and sharing those invaluable insights that you’ve shared with us today.

Ross:
It’s been a great pleasure and I wish you all success with the rest of your podcast. I’ll be tuning in.

Zanele:
Thank you so much. Thanks very much everyone. Stay awesome. Stay future fit. And we’ll chat to you in the next two weeks. Bye for now.