GA 629 | Why Leadership Is Like Cooking with Pete Behrens

Leadership is not a title, it's not a position. We often look at it that way. Leadership is an act of service, and it's available by everyone in any position, no matter where you are.

Today I'm excited to welcome Pete Behrens to the show. Now, um, as you'll hear, Pete has written a book called Into the Fog: Leadership Stories from the Edge of Uncertainty. And so today on the podcast, we sort of just dive into this whole idea of, of fog. It's a really interesting analogy, um, and really kind of dig into, um, and what it is and how as leaders this so-called fog can really get in our way and can really cloud our judgment and make it difficult to sort of navigate our, our way through. Uh, you know, here Pete's got a really strong sort of corporate career, worked at GE, Salesforce, some big companies, and, and, uh, now is, um, doing some consulting work. And, uh, yeah, it was a really fun conversation. There were some parts in the conversation to where I was almost kind of digging in and really trying to understand what was going on. And so I sort of kept pushing him on a few different topics and it was a really good, fun conversation. I really enjoyed it. So show notes can be found over at gembapodcast.com. This is episode 629. Again, gembapodcast.com and look for episode 629. Okay, enough for me. Let's get to the show. Pete, welcome to the show. How's it going?

Thank you very much, Ron, for allowing me to be here and spend some time with you. I'm doing I'm great today.

All right, where are you calling in from?

Boulder, Colorado.

Okay, Colorado, beautiful part of the country.

All right, we— it's a life choice to be here. Back in the '90s, it was actually a remote island, or at least it felt that way.

Yeah.

And for me, it was a choice of business or life, and, and I chose life. But come to find out, this has been a tech boom space to be, and it's been Been a great journey ever since.

Fantastic. All right. Well, hey, Pete, you know, we like to begin all of our episodes with our guests sharing a quote. So what do you got?

Well, I'm always one to think about the path less taken. And so one of my favorite quotes is, "Not all who wander are lost." For me, that just represents this discovery process leading through the fog, understanding uncertainty, and sometimes Getting lost is really the only way to find your way.

Oh, I like that. Getting lost could be the only way to find your way.

Yeah.

Yeah. Well, and if you aren't lost, it means you're probably just staying where you know where you are, right?

There's something about leadership that takes us into the unknown. And so it's, yeah, that edge of your comfort zone, that edge of certainty that creates a lot of the interest, at least in my world, I enjoy. That's an adrenaline rush for me. And I would expect for most leaders, that's something you get comfortable with or need to.

Yeah, I love it. I love it. All right. Well, hey, Pete, tell us a little bit about yourself. Tell us about your background, what you're up to these days, and how you got involved in all this continuous improvement stuff.

Yeah, I started my career in engineering. I was, you know, I fell in love in school with Math turned to science, scientists turned to engineering. For me, what was interesting, it was the problems that had answers. A lot of other subjects in school were opinions and exceptions to the rules. And it was frustrating for me until I found that part of the learning journey that felt clear. And what's interesting is my early career, I started as an engineer and some people ask, well, how do you go from that to leadership coach? That seems like a pretty pretty big leap. It's not the leap most people think it is. I look at engineering as optimizing a system, taking whatever it is— a parking lot, an elevator bank, a computer database system— make it work more effectively. Leaders do the same with human systems. So I look at what I do today as engineering in a human organizational system, one of the most complex systems we work with. And so that journey was not easy. It was not slow or fast. It was not fast. It took quite a decade and a half to go through that shift. But I find the space to be some of the most impactful and motivating when you can improve that system, not just for a leader, but for everybody involved.

Mm-hmm. And so, I understand that you've worked at some pretty, some small, some of the smaller companies out there, you know, like Salesforce, GE, you know, just little guys, you know. Talk a little bit about your career.

It's ironic. Most of my career that I've worked in as a leader, I did start out at EDS back in the day that was eventually bought by the HP consulting wing. That was a large company and working with large companies as a consultant there. But from that point, I joined startups and I've been a startup and entrepreneurial junkie. Ironically, as a consultant, I've been working with, as you say, some of the largest organizations in the world, whether it's a Salesforce, a GE, a Danske Bank, a Swiss Re Insurance. Non-simple trivial companies. And as you know, these companies not only have complexity in terms of products, they have complexity in terms of organizational design, silos, departments, roles, and then location, geography, and everything else. And it's hard to say exactly what brought that on, like why I ended up focusing quite a bit on the large scale. I believe when I look back at my career and that shift from a lean to an agile shift that was happening in the early 2000s, nobody understood this. And sure, we had practiced in a mechanical way with industrial automation, But with software, it was greenfield. So nobody had answers at that point. And so there was a vacuum that allowed me to enter.

So I know that, you know, with engineers, we're all about processes and, you know, facts and data and that sort of thing. But I believe that you have a hypothesis that people might be one of, if not the biggest source of variability out there. What do you think about that?

Yes, that was one of those things that hit me over the head, probably 10 years' worth of frustration. You know, shifting from that engineering mindset, solving problems, enjoying that world, getting into leadership positions myself as a manager, as a director, as a VP of engineering, I started to realize that technical problems can be solved. Human problems are simply opinions. They're conflict, they're differences, and there's no right. Yeah, and there's no right or wrong. It's simply who has the loudest voice, who has the most data, who's carrying the most weight. And so I started to realize in leadership, it's less about solving problems, more about managing tension of multiple paths. And the most impactful improvements come through this construct of choosing when there is no right. I was teaching a class early. I, I was just past the lean movement into the agile, and I taught Scrum for about 10 years and into the agile framework world. So we're focused on software and we're focused on product development in a technical sense, not as much manufacturing, more design and implementation of software solutions. And I was teaching a class of product owners and somebody asked, "Pete, does everything in leadership depend?" And I just said to like, own, I probably said the word, well, it depends, one too many times. And that was an awareness journey for me to think, you know, it does. But giving somebody an answer, it depends, is not good leadership advice. And sticking to the plan, we know in a lean agile construct, isn't good advice either. So it put me on this journey, what's between an it depends, which is a wild card, and stick to the plan? And that's where I find the most interesting leadership to live.

It's like the age-old question, what is truth? Right? It's a big question, right? Yeah. So something that I know that you've written about is an interesting concept. I think you call it fog. And I'm wondering if we could just maybe dig into that a little bit. Like, what do you mean by by fog? I mean, we all know what fog is as far as in the air and that sort of thing. But as it relates to leadership and people and all the messiness that we bring as human beings, what are you talking about?

Yeah, fog is the metaphor that I use to describe the feeling we all get in uncertainty or change. Think of it as the intersection between these two. And leadership, we often think, mistakenly, it's going to take us out of the fog. In fact, leadership is more likely to take us into it. The definition of leadership is taking us someplace we've never been before. That's inherently uncertain. I'm not talking managing things and processes. I'm talking about leading products, people, organizations towards something new. And that's the description I use is fog, because you think about what does that fog feel like? You can't wipe it away with windshield wipers. You can't, you know, unclear the window because it's in the environment around us. You have to navigate it. There is no other choice. You can't flash your lights or it makes it worse. So it's a metaphor for the construct The only way to get through is to navigate it. And the thing you need most is clarity. But that's the thing is that's the scarcest when we're dealing with the unknown. So how do you start to create clarity? How do you make decisions? You might have an idea of where you wanna go, but even knowing, am I in the right direction? Do I need to turn or not turn? Without the GPS, which we've solved, you know, with our cell phones and physical locations, But the metaphorical locations we're trying to get to in organizations, there is no GPS. And so, it's a bit, I guess, counterintuitive in the way we think about creating clarity. The plan doesn't create the clarity. It's the movement that creates the clarity. But then what's most important is you need to be aware and you need to sense more and get more information to know whether that movement was correct or not. And that's where pivoting comes in. That's where a lot of the lean and agile constructs make sense in the fog. Small steps, inspect and adapt, pivot, continuous improvement constructs. But yet it's still humanly challenging to our brains to deal in that environment.

Yeah, I keep thinking of, as you've been talking, I just keep thinking of the framework our friend Mike Rother created with the whole Toyota Kata movement and scientific thinking and the way Toyota operates is thinking about just sort of like, experimenting your way forward, right? Like having an idea of a direction that you want to go, and we're not quite sure, but we can identify some obstacles that are in our way, and we can start experimenting against those obstacles and see what we learn. Is that similar to what kind of what you're thinking?

Yeah, but even deeper than that, it starts in here. It starts in our head. We think about agility as movement, as the ability, like a dog in this obstacle course, well, Agility as a movement by itself doesn't actually do anything. It just creates noise, like a dog chasing squirrels. It's not necessarily effective. And so, what the journey that it put me on is, what does it mean to create more clarity in the fog? What is leadership from a mindset perspective? That's where we really start to get the clues to better leadership. Is I've got to be more clear in what I'm trying to accomplish. What is it that we're trying to do and have mental agility in order for that movement agility to make more sense?

So, what do you do? So, let's say you're navigating your way through the day and you've come up against some situation, some problem, whatever it might be, and you don't know what to do. Like, what's your approach to that?

Well, first of all, it's recognizing that uncertainty is not a problem. It's the landscape, it's the terrain. And I think a lot of us approach this as a problem to solve. And that's the wrong mindset. And we often illustrate this in terms of these little dolls. And I've got this little doll here I call the expert. And this expert says, oh, I see this problem, I see this uncertainty and I wanna solve it. Well, yeah, but perhaps it's not something that can be solved. Perhaps it's something that's inherent in what we're doing. So what I've gotta start to think about is how do I upscale this mindset? And we do something in this nesting doll framework where it says, okay, that's one mindset. Let's think about this in a different mindset. How might I approach this? Give you an example. You know, we often talk— Gemba is itself an approach to address problems, right? Go to where the work is, go to the value, go to the people, step into the situation that's occurring. And that's a real effective technique. But when you start to think about it, it's also a trap. Every time I step in, I have the potential as a leader to overstep. Do they need me to step in? Would they solve this better if I didn't step in? Am I going to micromanage when I step in? So there is problem number one: is, is that leadership effective or less effective? That's a question. And certainly I can do it, and you've seen it, in both ways. The second is, when I step in, what am I not doing? I'm stepping away from the big picture, the strategy and what's going on. If I step in too much, I get myopic. So all of a sudden, something as simple as, "Hey, we have a problem. Let's step into it." Yeah, and look at in a different mindset what that also is creating. This is one of those, when I say problem to solve versus tension to manage, This is one of those tensions to manage. I'll use another prop here. I love props.

Yeah, people are probably audio only, so describe your prop.

Oh, this is audio only. Okay. Well, I'm showing little nesting dolls and I'm showing a tension rubber band.

Okay.

And, you know, I dressed up for this podcast.

Come on.

Yeah, yeah, you look good. I want to show off.

I took a picture and put it on there.

That's okay. That's okay. The tension band. Stepping in is one side of a tension. Stepping back is the other. I call this an elusive peak, and there's many elusive peaks in leadership that follow this train. Our mistake as leaders is thinking we can solve this. This is something that's never going to go away. This tension between stepping in, stepping back will always be part of leadership. It's always going to fight. You're always going to be fighting it. So, what's balance? Balance isn't a state. It's not a destination. It's an activity. You're constantly like a bike, going left and right. So, that's an example where we start to think about my mindset creates the behavior that's going to create the outcomes. And there isn't an answer. There's more of a strategy and behavioral process I need to be going through.

So, again, we got a problem. I'm going to keep pushing you on this because I'm curious to hear your thinking. Because I know how I would approach it, but I'm not sure you would approach it the same way. So I just want to explore it together. Like, like, imagine that you're, you're navigating your way through the day and something's in front of you and you, you have to— I, I think of my, my grandma and my grandpa when I was a little boy. We were in the car, my grandpa was driving and he wasn't the best driver and He would throw his door open to spit his chewing tobacco out every so often, flying down the road. So it's a little scary, you know. But I will never forget the rest of my life. I was probably, I don't know, 7 or 8 years old. And we were at this intersection and my grandpa, for whatever reason, God bless him, pulled out and then he sort of stopped and he froze. And he's just sitting there. Cars are like about to smash into us. And my grandma said, well, do something, you know. You know, like you can't just sit there. You're going to get smashed, right? So in that situation, to where, like, metaphorically speaking, we're in business, we're in life, or whatever it might be, and we're in the intersection. And if we just sit there, we're going to get smashed, right? Like, we got to do something. We've got to, we got to take a step in one direction or the other. And we may not know, um, and my grandpa, he could have gone forward or backwards, you know, like, either one probably would have been better than just sitting still, right? But what do you think about that? That's, I guess that's what the gist of my question Sure.

What you're describing is the common fear or behavior we see in uncertainty is I, to some degree, freeze. And so that we know in the fog, if you're driving in a car in the fog and you stop, that's dangerous, as you, as you just described. If he was, if your grandpa was in a situation where there wasn't clarity, he's going to get hit. Okay, so stopping's not the answer, but that's the natural reaction. Freeze, get the data, and repivot. Well, we also know the answer is not going faster. And that's another default we see in business today. Just go faster, just do more. That's one I'm seeing more and more of. Just push AI, whatever it is today. It's about speed. But that's also in the fog and uncertainty. Also the answer that's going to get you into trouble. You're going to crash more likely, crash bigger. There's going to be— you're causing— you're creating more problems. The US military solves this through a very simple saying: slow is smooth, smooth is fast. They're obviously working many times in very uncertain, dynamic, hostile environments, especially the Special Forces. Where, yes, we have a plan, but as soon as our feet hit the ground, that plan is modified through reality. And so running down the plan is going to get them into trouble. Staying where they are is going to get them in trouble. It's that small step, inspect and adapt, small step, inspect and adapt. So this is the hardest thing to do in uncertainty is these smaller step see what's actually happening, get the real data. And the biggest problem is typically our ego, not the process or the tool or anything else. And this again, where it becomes a human problem because our ego wants to be right. Our ego wants to say that I can fix this, I can solve this, I can. And the better answer is, as a leader of this group, how do I get the best data? The best data comes through all the people on the ground. They're all getting data. How do I capture that? How do I collect that? How do I disseminate that? How do I make a decision where that collective knowledge is processed and better decisions can be made through that process? So that's why the Gemba is so powerful, is you go to where the work is, you get that multiple perspective, and you make what seems to be the best decision in that moment. That's great when the leader's mindset is in the right space.

Yeah.

And it's a problem when it's not.

Love it. So I understand that you've got some stories that sort of compare and contrast leadership with cooking. And so I'm wondering if we could maybe explore that a little bit.

Yeah. Everybody loves a good meal, right? Leadership is like cooking because many leaders want to be the 5-star chef, or they want their organization to be the Michelin star restaurant. And yet what they're doing is following other people's recipes. That is not what 5-star chefs and Michelin star restaurants do. They create their own recipes. So how are we seeing this in business? Most leaders are looking for the shortcuts. And go back, even back to Toyota. You mentioned Toyota. Go back to Toyota. They developed through TPS Lean a beautiful recipe. Beautiful, right? That, that was incredibly impactful to that organization for decades following that development with Deming and Toyota and, and all the work that they had done. Look at what the companies that followed tried. Copy-paste TPS Lean into our environment, and what do we get? Failure. I mean, you've probably studied NUMMI as one of the classic examples of this, where we've got GM having a plant in California that's one of the worst performing plants in the world. They're trying to use Lean and it's not working. They want to have this plant. They want to work with Toyota. Toyota wants to develop in the US. And so, Toyota comes over and says, "Hey, we'll take over one of your plants." And they say, "Great. We'll just let everybody off and you come in." And they say, "No, no, no. Keep all the workers. We'll just put in new leadership." That's an example where, as a leader, we want the recipe. And yet, it's creating the recipe that's the effective solution. When we transition this into Agile, in the Agile world, from the early 2000s to today, last 2, 2 and a half decades, what have we seen? We see some of the top companies in the world— Microsoft, Salesforce, Amazon, Google— none of them use an Agile recipe, Scrum, SAFe, a framework that we've developed over time. None of them. They've all created their own recipe, yet everybody else is trying to copy those recipes and be that top company, and it doesn't work that way.

It's interesting. I mean, because I do know, I mean, I, I, well, we've worked with some of those larger companies, so I know that there is aspects of what we just call traditional continuous improvement going on in these companies. I mean, they're, they're customers of ours, so I know that. But I think maybe to your point, everyone's got to find ways to— it's not cookie cutter, perhaps. I don't know, maybe that's what you're trying to say, right? Like, the principles of Lean apply to anyone, anywhere, at any time, right? Or just continuous improvement, PDCA, whatever it might be, right? You're not different, right? When people are like, we're different, so we've got to create our own system. No, you're not different. You have people, you have processes, you have problems, right? And there's a system that will not fail. The only way it fails is when people stop doing the system or they quit, they give up or whatever it might be. But I think maybe to your point, there is uniqueness, if you will, in any company, right? Whether it's a smaller company like Gemba Academy or Microsoft, right? So, is that kind of where you're going with this or I just want to make sure I understand?

No, exactly. So, take for example, Google. They leverage OKRs. That's a recipe, small recipe. Now, they didn't develop the OKR. That came out of Intel in the 1950s. But they took it and they made it their own in a very creative way. Now, what's creative? When others ask, well, how does Google measure the effectiveness of their OKRs? I'll say, well, they have what's called the 70% rule. If they get 70% of the OKRs completed in that quarter, that's success. And leaders from other companies will look at that and say, 70%, that's really low. That's a low bar. Like, you're only going to get 70% in a quarter of what you say you want to get done? And I'll say, Google's goal is not predictability. Google's goal is speed and creativity. So, so here we have a recipe, OKRs, that a lot of companies are copying. And yet they're not taking the mindset that Google's taking to approach this that drives a particular culture Google's trying to create. Google wants a creative-driven culture no matter what size they are. And this is one of the powers that Google has created in simple little policies like that, that everybody does. It's part of their recipe. Another one would be code reviews. They don't have all these, you know, how many lines of code are test-covered and automated and, you know, all that stuff. But they have one rule: every line of code is code-reviewed by somebody that is capable of doing that. These are the types of things that I see the top companies like Salesforce and Microsoft and Google doing that other companies aren't. Other companies will take the OKR, they'll take the lean approach, they'll take SAFe or Scrum, and they apply the framework like a recipe. And it's like, It's mashed potatoes. It's blah. And people, the creativity, the discipline, the speed all goes away because the fact that they're not focused on the principles that you're talking about, they're focused on the practices.

Got it. Got it. Yeah. So maybe to wrap things up, I'm wondering if we could explore your thoughts on on constraints as it relates to leadership? Are there some major constraints that you're seeing out there that are holding us back as leaders?

Yes.

What are they?

Let me identify 3. Maybe I'll bring out here. The first one is in our head. I call it the inner fog, our ego. Our expectation of knowing the answers. I struggled with this as a leader. I thought, "I'm smart. I'm an engineer. I should know this." I saw asking for help as a weakness. It's not. It's a strength. And the best leaders know this. This is one of those counterintuitive aspects of leadership that we've got to get through or nothing else matters. So, that getting past the ego is number one. The other two, I believe, are created by our culture in our organizations. One is time and the other is location. Time, or the lack of time, is a perception we're all feeling today that anything we do to try to get better gets in the way of getting stuff done. It's the metaphorical caveman with the square-wheeled wheelbarrow, not wanting to put the round wheel on. And so, it's thinking continuous improvement, process, retrospectives, evaluating our alignment as a leadership team, focusing on how we work together in collaboration, breaking down silos, working on our culture are all seen today as a luxury. We don't have time. And that's speeding up every year that I've been consulting for 25 years and in this business for almost 35 now. And so, that's something we've got to get past. We've got to create a breath in order to work more effectively. We've got to take a step back to go two steps forward. The last one there is location. If I look back at my consulting career, starting in 2005 to '25, I look at, uh, first 15 years of slow shift from dedicated in-person locations to global multi-location companies. And this is Salesforce back in 2005. They were all in San Francisco in one building. The stuff we could do because of that was incredible. You look at Salesforce today, it's 100 locations across the world, virtual teams, and all sorts of environments. How do you create alignment, synergy, focus in that locational setting? That slow shift from 2005 to '20 was manageable, and we were dealing with it. And then all of a sudden COVID threw that out the window. And a different expectation of distributed came into being and it's not going away. The concept of creating a corporate culture alignment is so much more difficult in a virtual, everybody working at home world, especially in our tech side, not necessarily manufacturing. Cause we have to, they have to get together, but on the, on the tech side of software development applications and most of the banking insurance and the other industries that are working with virtual goods, it's incredibly difficult as a leader to create what we used to create in that environment.

Yeah, yeah, I agree totally. Wow, this has been a fun conversation, Pete. I really appreciate you coming on. I don't know, do you have any sort of like final words of wisdom? And then I want you for sure tell people if they wanted to connect with you, what's the best way?

Yeah, maybe the words of wisdom I'll share, something I tend to lead with is leadership is not a title. It's not a position. We often look at it that way. Leadership is an act of service. And it's available by everyone in any position, no matter where you are. In the book you're referring to, Into the Fog: Leadership Stories from the Edge of Uncertainty, the book that I wrote last year examines leadership, not in the macro, not in our bro tech, just meme culture of what leadership looks like at the top, but in these small moments in a room that doesn't want to hear what you have to say, in the indecision of a product manager trying to decide between all these different stakeholders fighting. Those micro moments in a meeting when people are confused or frustrated. That's where leadership shows up most of the time, and that's something anybody in any position at work, at home, in society can change how they show up. And that's really what I want people to start to see, is that leadership is a choice.

Hmm, 100%.

They can learn more more at— the simplest thing to do is go to intothefogbook.com, and that's a landing page that has information about myself, about the book, about our company Agile Leadership Journey, who works like Gemba Academy with organizations across the world trying to navigate uncertainty and change.

Got it. Yeah, we'll link everything up in the show notes, so everybody scroll down and make sure you go connect with Pete. So, hey man, thanks for coming on. This has been a lot of fun.

Well, thank you for having me.

All right, take care. Thanks for joining us today. We know the path to continuous improvement can be challenging to walk alone. That's why Gemba Academy exists, not just to provide training but to be your partner in problem solving. Whether you're just taking your first steps or leading a global transformation, our goal to help you bridge the gap between knowing and doing. Beyond our library of Lean and Six Sigma resources, we're here to coach and guide you through your journey, whether that's through personalized support or joining us for a live training to get that immersive hands-on experience. To learn more, go to gembaacademy.com.