Kris Safarova  00:46

welcome to the strategy skills podcast. I’m your host, Kris Safarova, and our podcast sponsor today is strategytraining.com and we have some gifts for you. You can get five reasons why people would ignore somebody in a meeting. You can download it at firms consulting.com forward slash on the role. You can also access episode one of how to build a consulting practice at firms consulting.com forward slash build. You can get a copy of one of our books at firms consulting.com forward slash gift, and it’s actually a book that was co authored with some of the listeners of our podcast, and today we have with us Julie da who is a Harvard trained behavioral scientist and managing director at Boston Consulting Group where she founded and leads BCGs behavioral science lab, and she’s A co author of the book how change really works, something every leader needs to know more about. Julia, welcome

Julia Dhar  01:47

Kris, thank you. I’m so happy to be here and to talk about the link between strategy and humans.

Kris Safarova  01:53

And you have such an incredible background and such an interesting area of specialization. I would love to start a little bit with your career and then go into your very important work.

Julia Dhar  02:06

Well, I originally started out expecting that I might work for the government in my home country of Australia, and actually my very first role was in the government of New Zealand, as they started to think about how to really make good use of data to ensure that the services that citizens were getting actually met their needs, helped someone get a job or stay in stable housing or finish their education. And those are very difficult and complicated problems. It’s the work of a lifetime to solve some of them, but one of the things that they all have in common is that they have humans at the heart of them. And I had then spent some time working on very similar challenges at BCG in Australia, before I started my graduate studies in the US, and that was the first time that I started thinking about what are all of the ways in which the really powerful insights from extremely gifted researchers in universities all over the world can get a wider audience, but even more so than just being heard, could be used by the people who are trying to make change happen in the real world, in their companies, in their communities, in their own lives and families. And that’s the sort of long story of how the behavioral science lab at BCG came to be, which was a collection of us passionate about the same problem and seeing the idea that behavioral science could be part of the solution, said, Let’s earnestly work to bridge the gap between insight and theory from research and practice in the real world. And the end of the story for me is a very blessed one. I get every day to work with people in airports and factories and shops and offices who are trying to do a really big thing well in their companies to better serve their customers or their clients or their communities, and perhaps apply a little bit or a large bit of behavioral Science that makes their chance of success more likely

Kris Safarova  04:22

incredible when you joined BCG, which is an incredible organization as so many people dream to be part of, but choose another path forward, going to industry and so on, going to government, but they always kind of wonder. Anyone who went through MBA kind of wonders what it is like to work for BCG. What was your experience like, especially when you just joined? What was surprising about the organization for you

Julia Dhar  04:48

when I was thinking about whether to join? BCG, a mentor of mine, who I really appreciate, said generally, when you’re thinking about what you should do in your life, you should go. Where you are needed and where the people are kind. There are plenty of places where you are needed but the people are not kind. There are places sometimes where the people are very kind, but you are not needed. You’re not uniquely helpful to the problem that team or organization is trying to change in the world. And over 17 years at BCG, the thing that has been consistently true for me is that there has always been a way to be needed, a way to be useful, and that the people, our colleagues, but also our clients, the customers of those clients, the communities we work in, are consistently kind, are consistently trying to do good in the world. Of course, the heart of BCG is strategy. That’s the foundation of us as a firm and one of the ways in which I think we all experience that day to day is we have an almost unlimited appetite for new ideas. The magnetic attraction, I think that people all over the 10s of 1000s of us at BCG have towards a better way of doing something, a new way of doing something, a chance to take part of your approach and my approach and combine those together and see if that really works, if it’s really an improvement on what we have been doing so far. Is incredibly energizing. It is the DNA of the company that Bruce Henderson when he started it, and can actually allow all of us to continue practicing and to live that legacy today.

Kris Safarova  06:40

And for somebody who is, let’s say they are very senior, but somebody outside of consulting, what kind of skills you think they could learn that your colleagues within BCG would have, or people generally in major consulting firms would have, that our listeners could incorporate and be even more successful.

Julia Dhar  06:59

One of the things that I think we can all continue to do, no matter where we find ourselves, senior junior consultant client is to continue to ask two questions. The first is, what is true about this situation? So sometimes that can be doing a really good job describing the problem, and that is one of the places where BCG consultants, in my experience, are often really gifted a beautiful diagnosis of an industry that people, of course, know very well from a lifetime of experience or challenging An assumption about a specific opportunity or strategy, so that first continuing to ask ourselves over and over again, what is true about this situation, versus what have I assumed about this situation? The second one is, what do I believe is true, or what do I hope is true because of my vantage point in the situation. What do I wish was true that would make my life easier? If it were true? I like wish it were true that everybody loved this strategy, for example. I wish it were true that we, for example, might not have to do a lot of effort with a different stakeholder group in order to convince them of the wisdom of a plan. Because as soon as we start confusing the facts, what is true with our feelings, what we hope to be true is when all of us get very tangled up, and sometimes the power and often, like some of my favorite relationships with clients, is the two of us constantly saying, in this situation, what is a fact and what is a feeling.

Kris Safarova  08:52

This is so valuable. Thank you so much for sharing this. I know that you don’t specialize in AI, but I want to use it as an example, just from top of your mind, because it is such a pricing issue right now. I work with a lot of clients who are at executive level, and they have so much pressure now to incorporate it very quickly. And I know many of our listeners are in exactly the same situation. They need to integrate it, but they also under so much pressure because people are afraid to lose their jobs. People are afraid if they’re going to incorporate, not even the leaders themselves, but their teams are afraid if they incorporate it, they’re going to lose their jobs. And so leaders are in the difficult position of acquiring a new skill set, figuring out how to help their team not to lose motivation and not to start looking for another job and actually be invested and deliver what we need to deliver as a team. So going back to your two questions for our listeners right now who are in that position that they have a lot of pressure to integrate AI very quickly, AI automation very quickly into workflows when they asked us two questions, what is true? About the situation, for example, versus what they have assumed, but they think they need to realize that they may not be realizing.

Julia Dhar  10:07

I think you described two incredibly important categories that are at the heart of all efforts to make positive change in the world, and it’s one of the basic problems that we try to solve in our book how change really works. The first is the challenge of emotions. You’re exactly right to say people are afraid and afraid of any number of things, and very often, when we survey people in about how they feel about change generally, indeed, some people say I feel afraid, a very large number, often about a third of people say I feel anxious. And we know that it is very hard to positively move someone from a state of fear or anxiety productively and sustainably over the long term. That’s number one, emotions. Number two, incentives. It is very difficult to get people to do things that are against their own incentives. One of the most beautiful and important insights of behavioral science is that human beings are much more generous, much more altruistic, much kinder, more patient, more community minded than rational economics would have us expect. But equally, they’re not martyrs to the cause of any given change, and where people know that they’re being asked to do something that is really in violation of their own incentives, where there is very little for them to be able to gain, it shouldn’t surprise us that the smart people that we hired into our company are resistant to that type of change. And so of course, you look at those two categories and you say, Okay, well, we have a challenge of emotions and we have a challenge of incentives. What do I do if I’m a leader in that situation? Because clearly, in many cases, the AI transformation is a perfect example. Not changing is not an option. But equally, it seems very clear that I can’t use the strategy that my co author, Phil Jamieson talks about as shut up and change. I know that that’s unlikely to reach people well, we do know a lot about how people can actually change under those types of conditions, and the first is they need to feel some form of optimism, not a totally imaginary version of the future, but a belief that there are ways in which their lives can positively Improve because of what they are being asked to do, or the quality of their job, or the frustration or friction that they experience in daily work. They need some optimism about that. The second is they need some agency. And agency is another really important concept that we talk about that I wish more people did, and I would love for more executives to think about what’s the quantity of agency that we have inside the organization? Because agency isn’t about power or decision rights. It is about people feeling as though they have some freedom to shape the agenda. So in the case of an AI transformation, that might be a team being allowed to choose the order in which they work on certain problems. It might be selecting the most appropriate technology for a particular task or change that someone is asking them to make. It may even be being able to choose between more training or more resources of another kind when they’re making decisions like that. So we need some optimism. We need some agency. But one of the other things that executives can sometimes not always but sometimes give people is clarity, clarity of expectations and where they have some certainty around the outcome. So do any of us really know what the future of the workforce of any given company is five years from now? Never mind the prospect for an individual job? Of course, we we do not. None of us do. People who say with great confidence that they do like mostly kidding the rest of us, and certainly kidding themselves. And so executives can sometimes feel like they’re in a little bit of a trap for people who may feel afraid and want reassurance, and executives know they can’t give it to them, but even being able to say, I’m uncertain about what the future holds, we often are. But what I do have clarity in, what I do have conviction in, is that if we take this set of actions, we are much more likely to be successful than if we remain where we are and and that it is clear that we base. Based on the set of evidence that I had seen that we cannot remain where we are, executives who I think can bring those three forces together. How much optimism do we have? How much agency Am I unleashing into the organization? And if I’m able to offer people the gift of clarity of my own expectations or some certainty about the future. Have I done so? I’m much, much more likely to be successful in persuading people to change, inviting people to change, than those who say I am in a rush. Let me try ordering people to change.

Kris Safarova  15:37

Julie, and what would be your advice on how to answer, what do I believe is true in this particular situation, for a leader who is asking himself those two questions you gave us, I have the

Julia Dhar  15:49

great good fortune to work with a number of companies that have unbelievable legacies. Many of them are more than 100 years old. In some cases, like some of the companies that I work with, are older than the countries in which they operate. And very often inside those same companies who are grappling with Kris, exactly the challenges that you describe, someone will say to me, oh, you know what? Like? The thing you have to understand about us, about this company, is we are not very good at changing that’s the story that we are telling ourselves, and that’s a perfect example of a feeling we like. Have all agreed to feel that way about this company, but the chance for an executive to say, let’s just pause for a second and contemplate that possibility. This is a company that has survived the invention of the bank, internal combustion steam engine, big the motor car like in the United States, the creation of the nationwide highway network, and then, if we fast forward several decades, the internet, globalization, the massive economic and geopolitical complexity in which we now find ourselves. And this company has moved through each of those stages powered by human beings who were not more talented or more knowledgeable or more passionate or more committed than you. And we have survived because this company is capable of great and profound change, and because the people inside the company made choices to change when it became clear that we needed to change. And one of the ways that you can know that for sure is that the companies that did not change over that period of time did not survive, that we have survived only because we are capable of change. That is a really good example of where an executive has the opportunity to say, we have a collective feeling, is a shared emotion about the company, that we are bad at change even just a chance to pause for a moment and say, Is it true? Is that true in all cases? Is it likely to be true in this case, and invite people into in social psychology, we talk about it as a shared reality, you and I have agreed on a certain set of facts, then allows you to say, okay, assuming that we agree on the facts that we have changed, that that has, that change has allowed us to be successful, and that choosing to change now may multiply our opportunities to be successful. What is it that we should do next? Which is where the invitation to strategy comes in incredible

Kris Safarova  18:53

before we move into specifically discussing your current work, which we already started doing anyway, because it’s such an important topic that it just anyway comes up organically. I wanted to ask you if you could give advice to people who are currently worrying about being relevant, given what’s happening with AI and technology, and specifically, most of our listeners are relatively senior or very senior within major organizations, but they also worry about that.

Julia Dhar  19:24

I start by reminding myself, and I hope that it might be of service to some of your listeners. Then there are so many important jobs to be done in an organization that we just don’t get around to, that in leadership roles, the more senior people get. Sometimes the chance that we get around to those really important tasks becomes less and less. Let me give you a really good example, about 4% of a. Senior Executives time today is spent with frontline employees of their own company, and about 60% of their time is spent in meetings. If you said to almost any senior executive like, would you wish to be spending more time with the frontline both to encourage but also to understand the reality of their work is that something you would want to do, nearly all of them would say yes, but somehow, for very powerful people, that doesn’t end up happening in the course of the day, for all of the reasons that we know about, like the very urgent present intrudes. There are many other stakeholders competing for their attention, there are other obligations pressing on them. So it’s not a critique. It’s merely saying that there is actually an enormous amount of leadership that could be done if some of the things that we were doing now became less relevant, or we became irrelevant to the task. So I try to reframe the challenge, the concern, the fear that people have in that way to say there was a real promise of part of your job, there are deep talents that you have that are not yet unleashed, or not fully unleashed because of the amount of work, the very long tail of what Cass Sunstein would call sludge in the organization that you have to work through and and if you can consider the ways in which this allows you to do the really deep work of leadership, that might provide some reassurance. The second thing I try to encourage and offer is you could be concerned about your own relevance, your potential usefulness to the organization, but the only reason that would really be true is if you believed that human beings had run out of new ideas, that we were somehow done, that all the ideas that we Were going to have as a species, as a collective humanity, as a company, as a team, had been completed. Now that, also to me, seems quite unlikely that we have fully accumulated the quantity of good and new ideas that we are going to have. And so perhaps, if you started by saying, what are the new ideas? What else are we not yet thinking about? You might be less anxious about needing to feel relevant, and instead say, I can perhaps more clearly see the ways in which I can be useful, the ways in which I can be of service.

Kris Safarova  22:39

Thank you. So let’s talk about your new book you wrote. The issue is not what to do, but how to do it. In your experience, what is the most consistent pattern, or one of the most consistent patterns you are observing in executive teams who believe they’re executing well, because in your work, you pointed out that execution is the reason why 70% of change efforts fail. So what are some of the patterns that make executive teams believe they actually execute in well, but they are not.

Julia Dhar  23:12

Let’s maybe start with the a problem that we collectively are experiencing, which is the need to change in organizations, is incredibly clear. In fact, Kris, exactly as you have described it, is getting even more intense for leaders, so you might say we’re hopefully getting better at doing that really well and making sure that our organization has the capability and the capacity to change, you would hope so. The evidence suggests that that’s not true at all, that over the last several decades, the odds of success, as judged by external researchers, as judged by really large scale analyzes by BCG and by others, the odds of success have barely improved that roughly 70% might say somewhere in the 60s, of change efforts fail. And what we mean by fail is they don’t achieve the stated objectives, the goals that the executive set out for themselves at the beginning are not achieved. And that should be really disappointing to us all, because a change effort is a huge commitment of often money, always time, the attention and energy and the potential of human beings inside an organization. And so anything we could do to increase the probability of success would be highly worthwhile, both for shareholders, but also for the people who give their careers to the company. You might focus a lot on the 65 70% I actually choose to focus on the 30 to 35% because it is not that all. All change efforts fail, in which case you’d say just very difficult to change, like it’s very hard to adopt a new habit. But that’s clearly not the case. A good number of them do succeed, and that success isn’t random. Those executive teams, generally speaking, did not get lucky. There are a set of factors that allow you to describe the reasons that they have been successful, and in some cases, why some teams are able to succeed over and over again. What’s the punchline of why those are teams and organizations that are disproportionately focused on the how. It is extremely seductive. It’s very attractive for all of us, strategy consultants included, to focus on the what, say, what is the blue sky thinking? What are the next frontiers of strategy and idea to put together a roadmap and say and call it a transformation, and say, We’re done, other people will now implement this change and and that can feel really satisfying. Of course, that feels like a big job well done, but that actually is a big job barely started, because at that point, you hand it over to a set of other people who will do the change or implement the change, and then you’re surprised months down the line when they have not been successful at doing what you expected. But if we paused for a moment and said, Do we think it’s likely, for example, that people are going to be able to change in the way that we expect? Have we been specific about the behaviors that need to shift? Have we told a really compelling story about what the future looks like, and have we given people visible symbols and reminders of that, have we as leaders done all of the things that we would do for our most treasured customer, for our employees, when we’re inviting them to have a different type of relationship with us? And I think if many executives, many leaders, if we looked at ourselves honestly, we would say, in many cases, that is something that we have not done. One of the things that we did as part of the preparation for this book was an enormous global study of several 1000 executives and employees about the ways in which executives and employees are different, and we can talk about that for sure. I would love to, but the most important insight there is that executives need to take accountability for actually bridging that distance between themselves and the organization in order to make change successful. It’s not always as glamorous to talk about the how, but the difference between success and failure is paying attention to the how for longer than you think is necessary, with more intensity than you expected would be required.

Kris Safarova  28:15

Why do you think executives don’t realize that they need to really disproportionately focus on the how,

Julia Dhar  28:24

I think many do. Many also may expect that that is the job of other individuals deeper in the organization to take forward the how. And of course, that’s often true when we think about operational responsibilities. They should not all be done by the executive team. But let’s start way, way back for a second and say, What are executives like, and what are employees in the organization like, to make a really broad generalization. And so Kris, if you would, if you wouldn’t mind, perhaps we do a small version of our experiment here, where, if I could ask you a question, there is a change coming to your organization, and you don’t yet know the magnitude of the change, the precise impact, or What it would mean for you or people around you, but nonetheless, there is a change coming. How do you feel about that? Positive, neutral, negative.

Kris Safarova  29:32

I from childhood. For some reason, I really like change.

Julia Dhar  29:36

So you’re precisely like my co author, Kris Elmer. You’re precisely like most executives who say, I feel positive about that. And I say, Well, hang on a second, Kris, if you don’t know anything about the change, change could be really bad. Change could be really bad specifically for you. But the default of executives is to say, I feel positive about that. Open minded. Curious, energized to see what you’re talking about. Julia, when you say change, when we go deeper in the organization and we ask employees, it’s not that employees are mostly negative about change, although a meaningful percentage of them are most employees are neutral about change, and a much smaller percentage are positive about change. Now there are all kinds of explanations about why that gap, what we call change, distance, would exist. Obviously, executives get promoted by being leading successful change. They’ve mostly been the beneficiaries of successful change. So it makes good logical sense that they would be different, but nonetheless, those two groups are different, and so the responsibility for executives to say, Let us not fall into the trap of assuming that our excitement is shared by the rest of the organization is step number one, have the humility to say we need to assume that most people are more negative than we are, just as a like matter of orientation towards the change chunk number one. Chunk number two, remember that when you’re contemplating any like major change in effort in an organization. And anyone who’s ever been part of one will know this experience. And anyone who’s ever been on the outside of one will also know this experience, where for a small group of people, there’s a flurry of activities and different meetings and workshops and executives are sometimes much less available to people, sometimes on short notice. We know that there is something going on, but we don’t know what, but we know that some people are working really intensely on it, and then there comes an end to that period. You could call that maybe planning to change phase, and then some other people have to do things. But you could imagine that for executives, at the end of that phase, you say, Oh, I’m exhausted. I’m done with this project. Someone else is going to do it now, and I am ready to move on to the next thing. At exactly the same moment, almost every other person in your organization is saying, I have absolutely no idea what is going on. You talk about this change effort, and I don’t even know what you are talking about, because I have had the benefit of months of talking to my executive colleagues, a small group of people about it over and over again. You can, as a leader, very quickly fall into the trap of saying, I can’t believe you don’t get it to someone who hasn’t had the benefit of any of that explanation, persuasion, consideration of all of the options. So there are two things that executives can do to bridge that gap, to actually bring a much more human centered approach to change, one is to continue to be empathetic, to remember that it is extremely unlikely that they are representative of the attitude of the organization as a whole, and be sincerely interested in measuring and Getting feedback and understanding from the rest of the organization, and then the second is to continue to tell stories well, including with data about the change that you are seeking to undertake probably many more times than we expect to do so in order to invite people into that change.

Kris Safarova  33:41

Julia, let’s talk about, what does it really mean to build an environment that naturally leads to the desired behaviors? You talk about it in the book, but maybe you could give our listeners some of the pointers now before they read the book.

Julia Dhar  33:56

The first is, what is the exact behavior that we are expecting. And sometimes we hear things like, Well, I just think people should be more accountable or committed or higher performing, maybe. But none of those things are behaviors. None of them like clearly explain to me what you would expect me to do in order to be worthy of you saying you have been highly accountable in this situation, and so therefore, saying to people, when we talk about being customer centric, for example, what we mean is having a deep personal relationship. With a customer, being curious about them as a person, specifically behaviorally. That means that we consistently practice asking questions about the customer’s needs, clarifying our own understanding and. Is explicitly acknowledging when we have changed our mind and approach, for example, which is much more precise than Julia, would be good if you were a bit more customer centric, there’s number one, have we been articulate about the behavior that we wish to see? Number two, have we helped people create a set of habits and routines, can also say rituals and practices that allow them to consistently have the chance not just to do the new behavior, but to get the satisfaction of completing the behavior, so to have gone all the way through a conversation with a customer, where I have the chance to learn about their needs and the way I’ve been trained to clarify my understanding, to explain how I’ve adapted my approach, and get some feedback from someone about how well or not, well I did in that situation, have good quality rituals and routines. The more that we can help people in organizations make those really easy and natural or predictable. For example, you think about teams in revenue management or financial planning, we rerun the forecast every Monday at 10am at 1030 we meet to review the forecast. At 11, the sales team meets to adapt their plans. That’s a really good example of a successful and predictable ritual in an organization, and then the final one. And if you wanted the like easiest, cheapest, it’s literally free behavioral intervention for an executive but by the way, this works in your like personal life as well. To increase the chances that you will see the behavior that you want to it is to praise the behavior that you want to see more of. Praise the behavior that you want to see more of so you might say, for example, Julia, I really appreciated the way that you asked one more follow up question than you usually would today. Like that shows me that you can do it, and I would expect to see more of that in the future. So you’re not just giving more praise and saying, Julia, thank you so much for coming to work and doing your job, but specifically identifying instances where people have succeeded, and emphasizing that you expect to see more of that.

Kris Safarova  37:30

Julie and let me ask you about an exception that may be taking place here. At least. I think it is based on my observations. It seems to be there is a subset of people who, in case of praise, the performance actually deteriorates. I’m so

Julia Dhar  37:45

glad you asked about this. And praise is a confusing, complicated often, by the way, for some people, awkward situation or encounter that we have in companies, let me say a couple of things about praise. Number one, generally speaking, there is not enough praise at work when we survey people and ask, what other resources would you like to do your job? Well, including more money, more training, more technology. The number one thing that people say they want, whether they’re experienced or inexperienced, high performers. Low performance is I want more praise and appreciation for my managers. So let’s think about that for a second and say, Okay, if we could all just praise in the right way, could we shift the level of performance in this organization? Probably yes. But then Kris, to your question, is there a set of people for whom that is counter productive, that the praise will not actually land well, that will not achieve the desired result? Yes, there appears to be, like, a couple of situations, so one that we now know really well from the all of the work that has happened around social norms is it is clear that when people know that they are a negative outlier, you are in the bottom 10% of people who are completing their training, time sheets, expense reports, in a timely Fashion, they tend to positively adjust their behavior, but we know that at the other end of the spectrum, that sometimes, when people find out that they are high performers, that can degrade their performance, if we don’t also appropriately correct for it and ensure that we continue to stretch those individuals, that we make sure that their own baseline for performance is what we measure them against. You really want to make sure that in the way in which we use praise, you don’t cause regression to the mean, or you don’t set needlessly low expectations for people. There’s one other element and Kris. Kris here that I think you might also be thinking of, which is praise, can also be very culturally specific, organizationally specific, individually specific. There are some organizations where sending someone, for example, an email with the CEO copied congratulating them on what they did, would be one of the best possible things you could do. There are other organizations where that would be very awkward for almost everybody on that email chain. That’s some of the role of managers to say, what is the way in which I praise and recognize someone publicly or privately, collectively or individually, and how do I make sure that it will be welcome from the for the person who is getting the getting the praise? However, it is important not to use any of that as an excuse or a reason not to praise. We do know that one of the reasons why managers don’t appreciate and recognize people is because they have a psychological hang up. Let’s say that the person receiving the praise will find it awkward. That’s quite rare, actually, for the recipients of praise, no matter how it is done, the evidence seems to suggest that people appreciate it much more than the giver expects, and they remember it for much longer than we than we might think. We shouldn’t assume that just because we don’t have the perfect way to praise that we shouldn’t do it.

Kris Safarova  41:33

Thank you. You mentioned earlier, consistently asking questions about customer needs, which is so critical for a change effort, and it can be internal customers. It can be external customers based on the particular situation. Do you have any advice on how to do it better?

Julia Dhar  41:50

Step number one is just to do it more. The resistance that you sometimes run into and Kris, perhaps you’ve heard this in organizations. People say, Well, we can’t survey people because, well, because, then we might have to do something with the results. But also, we survey people a lot. Our people are over surveyed, quite unlikely. Generally, people like actually say, I find filling in surveys or being asked for my opinion. In other ways, quite pleasurable, quite satisfying. The problem in your organization is probably that people are under listened to that you actually didn’t do anything with the investment of time, expertise, opinion that they gave you. So make sure first that you are gathering feedback. If you gather feedback, you should, of course, be sincere about being about doing something with it, about playing it, playing it back, one of my favorite efforts over the last several years, we did exactly this as part of a large change effort. We surveyed people, or gave people the option to be surveyed by us. At every possible opportunity. Came to a town hall, you got a survey. You received the newsletter. There’s a survey at the end. You participated in a training. You got our survey. And at the end of a pretty short survey that you know, which started with, would you recommend this transformation to a colleague? The last question was, would you like someone from the team to follow up with you? And if that had happened, if anyone had said, Yes, I’d like someone from the team to follow up with them. Our commitment was that a vice president would call that person within within the next 48 hours, it was actually very rare that people said, yeah, like, I would like to talk to a Vice President about my issues and concerns, but one of my favorite things was when people had checked that box, and indeed, a vice president called them the next day and said, like, hello, I’m calling because I think you have some more feedback, and we’re here to listen. Two thirds of those people said, oh, like, I was kind of testing if the machine worked. I didn’t really think that anyone would ever contact me. I’m just testing whether or not someone really cared about what we were doing. That, to me, says any opportunity that you have to get feedback from the organization to enrich what you are doing with the voices of the people who you are in the service of when you are trying to make change is valuable, and the more that you can make that a closed feedback loop and say to people, here is what we have done in response to your feedback, but that we are also not just asking, how do you think the transformation is going? But how are you experiencing that on an emotional level, so that we can manage not just the resources of the organization, but the actual energy for change inside a company or inside a team? Because that’s the ultimate gift, is to be able to say, I can now figure out where I have momentum in the organization and where I don’t, and then you can do the magical thing and allocate your efforts accordingly.

Kris Safarova  45:14

Julie, and how do you know when change has become natural, rather than imposed? You talk about natural change in the book,

Julia Dhar  45:23

in some ways, that feeling of natural change is the result of a very careful, well considered highly responsive, planned for efforts. So the idea that some of us are naturally good at change, or good at making change, and some of us are naturally not good at making change, might not be a very helpful mindset, but the idea that people feel as though a new way of working or a new model of collaboration, or a new way of doing a process in a company like getting a project from start to finish is a fit with the way in which they want to be working is an extremely reasonable goal. One good test of whether or not a change is likely to become natural over time, would be Cass unseen, I think would say it needs to be meaningful and instrumental. Another really easy way to think about that is, is this change going to be something that people feel like is fun and useful? Can I make it fun and useful for people? And you can’t really go wrong if that’s the criteria that you’re holding out for your efforts, because as soon as you’re asking that question, you’re being really empathetic to the needs of the person. Do they have space for this in their day? Will anything about this be enjoyable for them? When is it actually going to be overwhelming. When do they say, Aha, that is a better way of doing things. Because people who have a fun and useful experience of change are the people who tell other people, they’re the people who train others in the organization. They’re the people who pretty quickly get you to this is how we should always have done this.

Kris Safarova  47:26

Thank you so much, Julie. I want to wrap up, given that we’re coming to the end of our time together, today, I want to wrap up with my two favorite questions, one or two, depending on how it will go. The first one is, over your amazing career so far, and your life overall, so far, what were two, three aha moments, realizations that you feel comfortable sharing that changed the way you look at life or the way you look at business.

Julia Dhar  47:54

I try many times a day to remind myself in any given situation, no matter how busy or stressful, one of the things that we can do, and the more senior you are, the more you can do this is we can bring joy to people and we can inspire hope. Bring joy and inspire hope. It doesn’t matter how Junior you are, by the way, you can also bring joy and inspire hope. And the idea that all of us have the ability to positively shift the energy of a team or a group or an agenda should be a responsibility that we take really seriously. Bring joy, inspire hope.

Kris Safarova  48:41

That’s amazing. Thank you. And the final question for today is, imagine, if you could instill one belief in every listener’s heart, what would it be

Julia Dhar  48:51

I would want people to know about themselves, that we are all at every moment, capable of profound transformation, like we are all works in progress. None of us are completed. And the opportunity to change, and like to change successfully, to believe that we are capable of changing, is one of the things that makes us truly alive.

Kris Safarova  49:24

Julie, thank you so much. Really. Discussion time went so fast. Where can our listeners learn more about you? Buy your book. Anything you want to share

Julia Dhar  49:33

our book, how change really works, is out from the 19th of May from Harvard Business Review Press, but is available now for pre order on Amazon. We hope that you continue to follow our work through bcg.com but also on LinkedIn and Twitter, where we hope to not only be able to share change in practice, but unpack the science of what makes successful change.

Kris Safarova  50:00

Julia again, thank you so much for being here. Our amazing guest today was Julia da check out her book. It’s called how change really works. It was co authored with two other amazing colleagues, and they are coming as guests as well very soon on our podcast. And our podcast sponsor today is strategytraining.com you can get some gifts from us. You can get five reasons why people would ignore somebody in the meeting, and those are some of the reasons, not all of them. And you can get it at firms consulting.com forward slash on the room. You can also access episode one of how to build a consulting practice at firms consulting.com forward slash build. And you can get a copy of one of our books co authored with some of the listeners and clients, and you can get it at Friends consulting.com. Forward slash gift. Thank you so much for tuning in, and I’m looking forward to connect with you all next time.