- Carl B. Watson, Ph.D.: [00:00:00] Part of the problem in organizations is experiments are set up to only succeed, which means you limit dramatically the possible information that you can get out of an experiment. It's not a true experiment. It's a validation exercise. And so those problems become really, really small and really, really, uninteresting. You squeeze all the usefulness and the value out of the project so that you can ensure its success, and that is actually, that's tragic if the problem is really important.

- Megan Alexa Watson: This is a podcast for leaders who want to drive change in their organization without losing sight of the people behind it, the purpose that fuels it, or the principles guiding it. I'm Megan Watson, joined by Carl Watson, and this is The Watson Standard.

- Carl B. Watson, Ph.D.: An important challenge that organizations face [00:01:00] is as the pace of disruption and change increases, how do they, adapt their structures and their ways of working to these emergent problems? 

 In my research, I really looked at how to do that at the initiative and the individual level. And some ideas around, how sociotechnical inertia, organizational inertia limits people.

- Megan Alexa Watson: I think it's a good challenge. What works? What are we learning from the places where it's not working? And as we dig into this conversation, I'd love to also have us dig into what does it take for an individual, a manager, or a leader to show up successfully as these shifts happen. 

- Carl B. Watson, Ph.D.: Having a culture that supports individuals to make judgments, their own judgments, about when they adapt their work to new circumstances, [00:02:00] whether that be a minor change or even a major change to how they work or align, maintain continuity of how that work gets done. You can have micro adjustments if you have a culture that supports that in a way that an organization can realign and adjust to changing circumstances well.

There are limits, right? 'Cause as a individual, I have a certain authority in a system. I can control certain elements, and I am coordinating with other elements, other teams, other individuals in the system. Other people rely on my work, and if I change too radically, that breaks a chain somewhere.

People don't get things that they might expect. They get it differently than they can absorb. Other things can happen. But the ability to go to those people and say, "Here is the problem I see. This is why what we're [00:03:00] doing is not working. I would like to do something differently. Here's some starter ideas," or, "Here's how I wanna approach this problem." It's very useful if that is culturally supported or if that is something where people lean in and go, "Yes, let me help. I see that. Let's work through..." Even it could be a, "Yes, I don't see that problem, but I'm excited that you are thinking about, something that's innovative, something that's different, something that's new. First, let me understand what you see, and then we'll see if I can help."

As opposed to you come to someone and they go, "That's not how we do things here." And every organization I've ever lived in, I've been told that at some point in time. Whether it's 'that's not how we do things here', whether 'that's not us' or some version of that which is a cultural sanction against doing something different.

There are better ways to [00:04:00] say it that are more supportive in saying, "We don't have that experience." "Here's how we've tried that. Help me explore how we might do it differently so that it might work this time." Or "that challenges something... It challenges an important value about how we go about doing our work, how we value to our customers. Can you reframe it in a way where that value doesn't feel disrupted?" It's basically an opening versus a closing down, and that's hard for people to do in the moment. But again, that's culture, and how managers and leaders respond to new ideas matter.

- Megan Alexa Watson: As you talk about sort of managers and leaders responding to new ideas, the levers that managers and leaders can pull within their own teams or the folks that they're working with to try to make that culture more real... the obvious ones that we often go to are reward and [00:05:00] recognition, and we go to them 'cause they're powerful. They are useful.

- Carl B. Watson, Ph.D.: They are.

- Megan Alexa Watson: I think enough organizations, even in the tech space which is known for trying new things and experimenting and all of that, have gotten very comfortable with recognizing and rewarding individuals for deliverables, for the win, for the launch, for the big moment. That is sort of what is seen and promoted, and what the stories get told about, and the awards are given for, and all of the case studies are written about. And not as much on something that you and I have talked about before around what experiment, what is tried, what has been chased down that maybe didn't turn into a win or a launch or a product, but it did provide more information to the system about what works and what doesn't work. It closes off a path so you can go explore the next one.

- Carl B. Watson, Ph.D.: Yes.

- Megan Alexa Watson: And at least in my experience working with senior leaders, there is a real [00:06:00] tension around an ask and an expectation that people in a team or a system embrace this sort of joint problem-solving or going after something with the squad or experimenting something new without the recognition of what it takes for that leader to create the conditions for folks to know that they will still get recognized, they will still get rewarded, and in some cases, as we continue to see cuts at a lot of organizations... their job is still safe...

- Carl B. Watson, Ph.D.: yes, yes

- Megan Alexa Watson: Many of us have been in the organizations where it's like, "Ooh, so-and-so got put on a 'special project'. We know what that means. T-minus Tick-tock." Right?

- Carl B. Watson, Ph.D.: Right. Right, right.

- Megan Alexa Watson: And we haven't really done the work to reframe that in a lot of organizations where these sort of side quests -- as a gamer, I love a good side quest -- where these side quests are rewarded... regardless of the outcome.

And so I think about what are the ways in which leaders and managers hold an extra weighted accountability [00:07:00] to be able to define, articulate, and measure success with the help of those that are involved in unpacking this emerging opportunity, 'cause you called that out. The recognition that as you get into it, there is an accountability that the individuals who are working on the problem or the challenge have to surface, what they're seeing, and the additional data or insight that might shift how they think about what the work is.

We talk in human-centered design about don't set it and forget it. Like you have to go back to the thing that you designed to check on it and to gauge it and to measure it. I think a similar thing happens in some of these flexible work deployment approaches where the leader can't just ship somebody out to a squad and say "Yep, let me know in eight months if it worked," because you're gonna have to course correct all along. You're gonna have to reset and learn along the way.

- Carl B. Watson, Ph.D.: 100%. I'll go a step back and, borrow from [00:08:00] design language here, and that is these leaders are important problem finders. What that means in design is that they decide what problems are important to solve, and that is a generative task. Meaning there's no right answer to that. There are many answers to that, as opposed to one right answer. Leaders have to define, have to be comfortable with defining, clarifying what problems are important enough to solve, and what problems aren't important enough to solve. And what happens in the special project arena is that the leaders have not done that, and people are attached to problems that are not important enough to solve. And whether you succeed or fail-

- Megan Alexa Watson: doesn't matter

- Carl B. Watson, Ph.D.: ... it doesn't actually matter. Interesting, not important. And so that's a failure of leadership again, not a failure of the team, or the squad, or the individual in that, on that special project. And so with clarity of the important problem to [00:09:00] solve, then you can get to the point you just made about whether the project was successful or failed in terms of what you thought it would produce.

If you know more about the problem, if you're clearer about the nature of that problem than you were when you started, it is a successful project. And it's a successful experiment because a failed experiment is data, is knowledge, is information. And in fact, part of the problem in organizations is experiments are set up to only succeed, which means you limit dramatically the possible information that you can get out of an experiment. It's not a true experiment. It's a validation exercise. And so those problems become really, really small and really, really, uninteresting. You squeeze all the usefulness and the value out of the project so that you can ensure its success, and that is actually, that's tragic if the problem is really important.

- Megan Alexa Watson: We talk about that as a launch masquerading as a [00:10:00] pilot...

- Carl B. Watson, Ph.D.: Yes.

- Megan Alexa Watson: ... where it's like everything is perfect, it's fully tested, you have your comms plan ready. You would've just rolled it out, but somebody was like, "I don't know." And so you "pilot it", but you're really "launching it". You're just slow rolling your launch and pretending and losing, like you said, the value that can come from potentially bringing something unfinished to the surface more quickly... to be able to actually get signal and feedback on whether or not it's solving for the right things.

 I really wanna go back to the conversation on importance. 'Cause I think it's a pretty critical one, and you and I both talk about the power of prioritization. We say that, but then I don't know that a lot of people actually know how to prioritize or identify importance or gauge importance. And so I have some thoughts, but I would also love your thoughts on how does a system or an organization really get a sense of importance of the things to go after? I hear you on yes, if the leader doesn't [00:11:00] sort of gauge that, or weigh that, or prioritize based on that, that is a failure of leadership. And I think many of us in organizations experience this every day.

So I wanna share some hope for the individual ... out there... of what can you do... There are some really basic questions and prompts that we can use to check that with the leader. It seems really basic, but like, "What happens if this doesn't get solved?"

- Carl B. Watson, Ph.D.: Yes, that's right.

- Megan Alexa Watson: What happens if this doesn't get solved? One of my favorite questions to ask a leader, I'm like, "Put it in a cage match with something else. What wins?" Actually forcing them to choose to say, "If you had to choose between this thing you just told me to chase and this other thing that you've been talking about for the last six months, which one would win if they had to fight it out? Forcing those decisions, especially in organizations that are in a financial state where they can afford to invest in a number of different things at once, you lose [00:12:00] that muscle of being able to identify importance. Often we look at individuals and team members who ask, "How important is this?" as a sense of ego, because they only wanna be working on the most important things, when really it's become a survival tactic.

- Carl B. Watson, Ph.D.: Sure. Sure.

- Megan Alexa Watson: How do you protect yourself from being randomized on things that aren't of high value?

- Carl B. Watson, Ph.D.: Yes, yes. I think it is not always easy to tell the difference of importance between a pair of work, pieces of work. And what I tend to do is try to put them in buckets of importance. We talk about this in engineering, right? These are priority zero. This is work that we're doing, we're gonna do. If the wheels fall off the car, we're gonna still try to do it. It's just, this is work, right? If I can put what is must-do work, be clear about that, [00:13:00] those go in that bucket.

It's priority ones. There's work that's highly important, it's strategic, it has value. So in the context of OD work, it tends to have a certain breadth. It impacts a larger part of the organization. It has a certain value in terms of the revenue or the cost savings associated with that piece of work. How strategically relevant is it in the context of the centrality of the work? I'm trying to always do strategic work, but how central is that piece of work to the strategy. The work could be part of an important strategy, but the work itself is not very central to that particular strategic thrust in the work. And so that's very different.

I'm gonna value things where my work is more central to the strategic element of the work, and value less work that is peripheral to the strategy, even if the strategy is important. And so there, there are ways to think about it and put them in buckets versus just in a pair.

- Megan Alexa Watson: Yeah, yeah.

- Carl B. Watson, Ph.D.: But then [00:14:00] that is a process. Again, this is a collaborative process as well. You produce a first draft; you talk about it If you're a leader with a leadership team, you talk about it with your leadership team. And importantly, you talk about it with your peers and the executive who manages your function.

It is a collaborative document as opposed to a statement of fact. Because there's... genuinely... it's a choice. It's a set of decisions you're making, and there are answers that are better than others, but it's also fuzzy, right? And just living in that fuzziness while being concrete by making choice is the important part.

And so, this example, I had a leader of a super important business, a growing business. It was, in terms of value to the company, it was the most profitable part of the company. And I'm talking to the executive who leads this brand and I said, "Look, I can't do this work [00:15:00] right now. I think the work is important, my team is currently stacked against a bunch of other work. Let me show you my prioritization, and if you think that anything that's above your work is less important than your work, then let's have that conversation. And so I invited him in instead of just giving him the hand and saying, "No, I can't do it." And we got to a point where he says, "Yes, all these things are at least as important as my piece of work", and I said, committed to him and said, "Give me six months. Six months, I'm gonna come back to you. Most of these things should have a different shift of priorities in the next six months."

And I came back in six months and were able to do the work. But part of what I was trying to do, because in this culture there was a refusal to prioritize, I was trying to support my team in the overwhelm of taking on every project that every [00:16:00] senior executive in the top leadership team said was important to do.

And I said, "In the absence of them prioritizing, I will prioritize 'cause I have a limited budget. I have a limited number of people on my team who have a limited number of hours in the day to get important work done." But make that process explicit versus implicit, and collaborative versus declarative.

I won't say I was universally successful in doing that, no, 100% not. But in that case, it felt like it was a successful negotiation because that leader was open to hearing and open to the full discussion, and was also not dismissive of his peers' work. And that's super important.

- Megan Alexa Watson: Yeah. You ended where I would begin, which is what does it mean to be the sort of leader who can have the top team lens, the left to right understanding that at a [00:17:00] senior level, all problems are shared problems, all opportunities are shared opportunities.

 Especially in cultures where organizations have been built and reinforced to operate in silos and sometimes even in competition with each other... that can create an orientation to enterprise-wide challenges that can be a bit cutthroat. You know? Because in many cases there could have been a leader in that example that you shared that came back to you, and even if they did actually think those other things were as important, were to say, "Nope, my thing is it," so that they could get their thing accomplished and get their gold star and achieve their objective. And so the recognition of what it takes to rewire leaders into a mindset that focuses on joint problem-solving, that focuses on working across. Because you see the enterprise value even if it's not the thing that most urgently will solve for your particular business, your [00:18:00] particular vertical, your particular team.

- Carl B. Watson, Ph.D.: Yes.

- Megan Alexa Watson: And how to bring that to the surface. I reflect a lot on the level of intentionality that is required to sort of snap a leader out of that bad habit... if they don't see it. 'Cause in many cases, it's been successful up to this point. It has gotten them so far, and they have stakeholders that are expecting them to deliver. It connects to the conversations where you hear about leadership teams disagreeing on things, being able to make a decision and then lining up behind it. It requires leaders to be able to be advocates of and ambassadors for work that may not sit and start with them-

- Carl B. Watson, Ph.D.: 100%

- Megan Alexa Watson: ... to be able to tell that story, to be able to articulate that.

 That's something I see very often is leaders who are trying to deliver something, trying to remove barriers so their team can achieve something as a system then prioritizes. When your team's stuff doesn't [00:19:00] make it on the priority list, you kind of go back hat in hand to your team to say, "Listen, I couldn't make it happen." Or you go back to your team and say, "This is really critical work. It's the next thing on the stack. Let's figure out how we can help this broader enterprise-wide initiative that made it above us in the stack and get that to solution even faster so that when it's time, the resources can be deployed on the things that we're trying to drive."

- Carl B. Watson, Ph.D.: Absolutely. And so to bring this back to this core idea around, around dealing with emergent problems-

- Megan Alexa Watson: Yes

- Carl B. Watson, Ph.D.: ... it becomes exponentially more difficult. The prioritization problem is more difficult because there's a lot more uncertainty and ambiguity around these emergent problems. Yeah. And so it's harder to prioritize the work. There's a couple of different ways to approach this challenge. One is being willing to establish exploratory teams, teams that are explicitly doing exploratory work to shape the [00:20:00] problem, for a decision. Then it becomes important not only to have a culture of being able to come to a conclusion to sunset the work, but also again a discipline in the leadership to say, "Thank you. We understand the shape of that problem better than we did before. It's not something we're gonna go after. We're gonna fully reward you for helping us forestall an option that we might have continued to spin our wheel on. That it was not important for us to do. Thank you very much. You get full rewards for that." That's an important element of solving.

I think the other idea you have to shift towards being able to having enough stages of evaluation of decisions where you can change course effectively. We tend to think about these as no-go gates. Where either something continues or it gets sunsetted. [00:21:00] And I tend to think of them as reconsideration. These are times in which you decide that you can radically change the direction of something based on the clarity that you're gaining in an emergent problem. And if it's just either 'I continue' or 'I stop', then people are gonna shape that conversation in a way for you to continue along the same path, and that can reinforce failure. Going along a path that's not as productive.

Helping us shut down something that is no longer productive for us should again be fully rewarded. We can continue on the path, or we can radically adjust the path based on the new information we found. If we have more support for that radical adjustment element, people are willing to hear it and understand that, that is not only a productive outcome, but a critical element of solving emergent problems, then I think we can make more progress [00:22:00] on it. The flexibility then is built in, in a way that matters and in a way that's reinforced and rewarded, and the decision-making system has experience essentially with these kinds of judgments as opposed to it feeling... What you hear, I think, in many companies is they feel like they can't stick to a choice because they're moving these things around, and really you're actually fine-tuning. You're probing and adjusting and adapting, and you're moving in order to extract more value, more productivity, a better outcome out of the work you're doing. As opposed to you're moving around because you can't stick to a choice.

There are many leadership teams that can't actually make a decision and can't stick to a choice, but that's different than adapting based on what you know now that you didn't know when you started the program, the project.

- Megan Alexa Watson: What I heard you call out in that, that really resonates with me is being able to identify, understand, [00:23:00] and classify what work is surfaced because it's an emergent problem versus what work is surfaced because it's a known problem, we understand it, and we need to go after it, and we know what we need to do.

Because the thing that feels really clear is in this moment, people are struggling to be able to have the understanding of which is which, and therefore to know what type of response is gonna be valuable for the system or for the organization.

So, going back to our core conversation around when should a system deploy a squad in this exploration of emergent problems, and when should a system say, "This doesn't need a squad. We got three subject matter experts that have done this 100 times. Please let them go do their jobs and leave them alone."

- Carl B. Watson, Ph.D.: Yes. And it's not a substitute, 'cause I think it was what you're getting at, it's not a substitute for your unwillingness to prioritize.

- Megan Alexa Watson: Yes.

- Carl B. Watson, Ph.D.: I'm gonna borrow your talent from somewhere else because-

I can't choose-

... what work I'm going to-

- Megan Alexa Watson: So we're gonna do [00:24:00] both

- Carl B. Watson, Ph.D.: ... focus on. We're gonna do both, but I'm gonna make it harder for you to do your work done. To do your job.

- Megan Alexa Watson: Yep.

- Carl B. Watson, Ph.D.: And it's also not a substitute for under-resourcing your teams. So that's another... where sometimes, ongoing important work gets under-resourced, and that work gets starved. And so in order to get that work done, you end up borrowing talent from other place in the system.

And instead of saying, "You know what? Here are the areas where we need less because it's important work, but relative the value of that work is less important than the relative value of work in this other team. And so I'm going to build more capability resources in this team, less in this other team, which means I'm gonna reduce the goal, scope, work output, I expect from this other team."

That has to happen, too. Otherwise, again, you overwork people. And then the expectations of this other team can appropriately increase based on [00:25:00] the resource investment. It's a prioritization decision at the resourcing level. I always think that the repeatable business challenges that a team has to solve for should be resourced in that team, emergent problems then can be squaded across teams.

And then there's this other category that is frequently emergent and sometimes not, is work that sits between teams ... In which either you stand up a cross-functional team that is permanent, to deal with the cross-functional nature of that work, which completely reasonable. Lots of companies do this, and it's sort of super important in terms of how organizations work. Then the teams that are staffing that cross-functional work have to appropriately staff their organizations to account for both, this work that sits in between their teams and the work that sits solely in their remit. [00:26:00] That has to be part of the resourcing argument. Resourcing choices are hard. They're hard to predict, blah, blah, blah. It's super important to recognize that there's uncertainty there. However, I find that the lack of willingness to be clear and to make choices, and in particular to make differential value choices across teams, is not always happening at the... what's the right word...? ...with enough rationality and enough clarity and clear decision-making so that the right things happen in the organization. 'Cause you wanna please people, and you want to not upset others in the system, and then you end up laying off a bunch of people across multiple teams and everybody takes a five percent haircut, and the stupidest thing in the world because there's no way that every function is equally valuable in any system.

Not every team is equally valuable [00:27:00] in any system. That's just the nature of the work. You have to make those strategic decisions, strategic investment decisions, strategic divestment decisions, and strategic deployment decisions, particularly when you're dealing with emergent work such that you don't have this proliferation of work that happens that nobody has the time to do, and you actually don't get the results you're looking for.

It all goes back to prioritization. This is strategy. This is the work of leaders and if leaders aren't doing strategic work, they're failing in a fundamental aspect of the job. Prioritization is a critical strategic piece of work, and this idea of problem finding it's defining what problems are important enough to solve, it is an important leadership task. I just don't think we talk about it enough in organizations. The design community talks about it a lot because they're dealing with highly unstructured situations when they're trying to design something, and so problem finding is a natural language to [00:28:00] them. It needs to be a natural language for every leader.

Here are four takeaways. One, as a leader, you must decide which problems are important enough to solve and which problems the organization must cope with. Two, design experiments to produce learning, not predetermined success. Three, make prioritization explicit, comparative, and collaborative. Four, reward learning, not just launches and visible wins. These four takeaways can help us as leaders prioritize emergent problems.

 - Megan Alexa Watson: And that's it for this episode of The Watson Standard. We've shared some things to think about, talk about, and put into practice. Follow the series and join us next time as we continue redefining leadership and redefining organizations.