GA 637 | Developing Organizational Maturity with Norman Wolfe

Think of the departments as being part of an ecosystem, not as individual silos, and really learn to pay attention to the context and to take challenges you face as opportunities to learn and grow and focus on developing the capability and the maturity of the organization.

Today, I am excited to welcome Norman Wolfe to the show. Now, today's episode was a lot of fun to record. So as you'll hear, Norman's got a lot of experience, has been, been in the business world for quite a while, and he's just got a lot of wisdom, you know, and I really, really gained a lot from our conversation. So as you'll— he describes, he's written a couple books and he's got another one releasing, I think by the time this episode comes out, it'll nearly be out, and we're going to link to all of his books in the show notes. Be sure to check those out. But today we really kind of just dive into this whole idea of, you know, and within the lean world, we're often, you know, we're really focused on operational excellence, and as we should be, and all the rest of it. And it's very important, and Norman would grant that it is also, it's, you must have that. If you don't have that, then we're going to be in trouble. But in his experience, in his opinion, many times the issue isn't always the process. Instead, it can be this underlying context, or maybe the shared beliefs and assumptions that shape how people interpret and then act on these processes. So, you know, like, how are we getting along? And, and so during the episode, we really kind of, we always take on like some, we roleplay a little bit and talked about a couple of different characters who represented a kind of a collective group of people. And it's really interesting and just a very unique podcast. I really enjoyed this one. So show notes can be found over at gembapodcast.com. Again, this is episode 637. Again, gembapodcast.com. Look for episode 637. Okay, enough from me. Let's get to the show. Norman, welcome to the show.

How are you? I'm fine, Ron. Thank you for having me.

Yeah, man. Hey, where are you calling in from?

I am in Vancouver, Washington, not to be confused with Vancouver, British Columbia. We're actually just across the river from Portland, Oregon.

Okay. Gosh, I didn't realize there was a Vancouver in Wyoming. I never knew that.

I know. I often refer to us as the other Vancouver because you mentioned Vancouver and everybody knows Vancouver, British Columbia. I mean, beautiful place. It's iconic. It's—

Well, I'm sure your place is lovely as well.

Yeah. Well, it's different, but we love it here. Yeah, it's beautiful. Pacific Northwest, it's—

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, it's really gorgeous.

Yeah, good stuff, good stuff. All right, well, hey Norman, I know you know the drill. We like to begin all of our episodes with our guest sharing a quote. So what do you got?

Well, for me, one of the most powerful quotes I've been living with actually is this notion that, it's from Joel Barker that says, "What's difficult in one paradigm, even impossible, is often easy and trivial in another paradigm." And the notion of paradigms have become very relevant to my work over the years.

So what's that mean to you though? That's a pretty deep quote.

Well, you know, we live in a world we think we understand what it is, but what paradigms really show, and this was really created by Thomas Kuhn, a famous scientist who actually probably coined the concept of paradigms. It represents that how we frame the world The rules of what we see, what we believe it to be actually defines what we see. It defines the way we frame our challenges and the way we respond to life events. So sometimes the way we frame how we approach the challenges we face actually prevents us from seeing solutions that might make the resolve to the challenge much easier. Sometimes they're called our blind spots. You ever have an experience where somebody came along and said something to you about you've been struggling and struggling and struggling and they said, "Oh, but what if you saw it this way? What if you looked at it this way?" You go, "Oh my God, yeah, of course. How did I miss that?" Right?

Yeah.

That's in some regards a shift in paradigm. But there's been some really significant paradigm shifts we've gone on a society level. All the ways back to going from seeing the world where the Earth revolves around the sun versus the sun revolves around the Earth. That's a shift in paradigm. Or understanding the world is round, not flat. That's a shift in paradigm. Or understanding the nature of the universe is only partially defined by classical physics. Quantum physics opens up a whole nother field. And what you couldn't solve in— Yeah. Classical physics you can now solve and understand with quantum physics. Those are shifts in paradigm. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

Good stuff. All right. Well, hey, Norman, tell us a little bit about yourself. Tell us about your background and then what you're up to these days.

Well, my background is really, I would say, have two distinct paths that end up converging into one path. One is my business life, right? So I graduated university, went to who worked for Pratt Whitney Aircraft as a systems engineer, computer programmer, systems programmer type person. Moved on to Hewlett-Packard mostly because we were using HP equipment and I got to know people there and they got to know me and opportunity showed up. So I spent 15-year career with HP. Probably the most— Early in my career, there's been a couple of early significant events that sort of set the tone for my life. One was earlier in my career at HP. My manager said, "You know, Norman, when you come to work, you leave your personal life at the door." That was an interesting statement. What does that mean? How do I do that? What part of me do I take off and hang up at the door and put back on when I leave?

Mm-hmm.

It was just, How do you do that? What does that mean? And the same manager a few years later when we were sitting around talking about how much fun we were having at work said something to the effect of, "Work is not meant to be fun. Work is work. You come to work to do your job. If it was fun, you'd be paying us. This is not Disneyland." You know, it's like, again—

Okay, interesting.

What was the attitude to carry into business and into my life? So it kind of set the stage for why is that? Why do we have that feeling? Within HP, my career started out very positive as a regional systems engineer, helping salespeople, helping customers, applying the equipment we sold them and helping them with software design. And then I was given an opportunity to move into management, but the management career I took was in the district service manager. I didn't know anything about fixing computers. So here I am, a brand new manager, dealing with people who come from a different world than I do, see the world through a different lens than I do, solve a different set of problems than I was ever used to solving. And I'd like to say that the highlight of my career was my first performance review was unacceptable in every category.

Oh boy.

And I say highlight because it really gave me the option to choose what my life was gonna be about. And I chose to figure out this role we play called leadership. How do you get a collective of people to improve how they perform? And that's been a kind of a lifelong pattern of mine. And throughout my career at HP, I always took over challenges like that. My last challenge was to move to another organization that had no, no experience in, the administrative organization. So I went from being a computer guy to leading a service organization to now running an administrative organization where I had to learn all about day sales outstanding and order processing and service contracts and demo inventory and secretarial support and, you know, all the things, information technology, nothing of which I had any grounding in. And the organization I took over was considered the worst performing of the 4 region operations. So not only am I dealing with something that is unfamiliar to me in its details, I mean, I have familiarity with what they did, but not details of how they did what they did.

Mm-hmm.

And it was underperforming and I had to turn it around. Those gave me a certain orientation, a certain paradigm, to go back to my favorite term, a certain way of seeing an organization that I didn't become consciously aware of until late into my, about 2000. So I left HP in 1988 and started to consult. And in 2000, I, I decided to bring focus to what I did and a client of mine, I asked him why he kept hiring me and he said, "You know, Norman, you help me execute faster." And that one phrase brought a lot of clarity to what I've always been interested in. How do you help an organization, a collective of people to work together to achieve the results they want to achieve? How do they execute more effectively. And that became the focus of my life and ended up in a book I wrote called "The Living Organization." And soon to be released on September 1st, the second book of the trilogy called "Leading the Living Organization." I said there was two paths. The other path was a personal one which centered around a similar theme, again, unconscious as I was living it, made conscious after the fact, so to speak. And it was wanting to, on a personal level, create the results, more of what I wanted in life and less of what I didn't want. And so that took me down some interesting workshops and journeys and discoveries into why do I behave the way I do as a person and what makes me react to life events the way I do. And where is there guidance I can find on how to live a better life and to how to get more of what I want and less of what I don't want? Over time, I began to see the two questions, how do I get an organization to perform more effectively and how do I create the results I want in my personal life, ended up becoming one and the same and the two merged.

Hmm. Wow. Okay, well, maybe we can dig into that a little bit more, but I mean, Maybe to open up with my first question, I was wondering if we could— you've talked a little bit about all the work that you've done with different organizations. And you may mention some systems. So let's assume that an organization has a strong system in place, whatever that might mean, but they're still struggling with execution. Have you seen that? And if so, what's up with that?

This will get us smack into the notion of paradigms. So yes, I see it all the time. As a matter of fact, that's core of what I help clients through. The paradigm of most organizational thinking, most leadership thinking is centered into, centered around what I call the mechanistic or machine paradigm. Look, the way we we've all been taught to think of an organization is as a simple black box that takes inputs and converts it to outputs. The goal of the leadership team is to design that box, right? To put in place the right processes, the right systems, the right structures, to establish the right metrics along the way so we can measure its progress, to put the right components in place. Some people like to say put the right people in the right seats on the bus.

Mm-hmm.

But we think in that term where we think of it very much mechanistically, like a set of components we try to put together in the right way to make sure it works. And the biggest focus of that is to make it as if— to optimize it for efficiency and to control it for predictability. That's one way of looking at it, and it has been successful. I don't want to diminish it. There's a lot of very positive things about it. Oftentimes when I'm working with a client and they don't if you don't have a system or structures in place, like you mentioned, to define the strategy and manage the execution of it, that's the first thing we have to put in place. Because if you don't have that, you're going to struggle no matter what. But once you have it in place, the assumption is that's all you need. And that's where the paradigm trap begins to fall, begins to show up. And the limitations of the old paradigm begin to show up. The reality is an organization is a collective of people. They're not a collective of components. So now here's where my personal journey began to filter into the business world. If you think of a collective of people as a single person, and there's anecdotal evidence, most people actually intuitively know that. For example, you talk about your sales department versus your finance department versus marketing versus of operations, and they'll start to describe the department itself in terms used to describe people. My sales department is aggressive, they're pushy. My finance department, right? They're not talking about Bill who's in charge of finance or Marcus who's in charge of sales. They're talking about the collective as a whole.

Yeah.

And they talk about it in terms of the personality of the collective. And the way the collective interacts with the world around them. So I began, and the living organization work that I developed is all centered around what if we shifted the paradigm? What if we looked at an organization as a person? And inside that organization as a person, the individual departments were collective persons. If you will, right? So sales is just a person and marketing is just a person and they interact like two people interact.

Okay.

Now, here's the difference between looking at it in the traditional sense versus looking at it through the lens of the living organization. In the traditional sense, the way I try to get the two departments to work together is we do things like set clear goals. And responsibilities. And you've got your KPIs and your OKRs and you've got your huddles that you meet with and all of that. And that addresses very effectively, and it's a key point to stay, make sure we address, it addresses the structure and the goals and the processes of the organization. It doesn't address the, call it the psychological dynamics of the organization. It doesn't address the people aspect. I'm not talking about individual people, but it doesn't address the reason sales behaves the way it does collectively. It doesn't address the way operations behaves the way it does. I'll give you a perfect example. I was working with a client and the issue was the sales department and the operations department. And the sales department believed the purpose of the organization was to grow the organization through sales. And time criticality was important and getting things out there. Reliability was important and they would voice the importance of reliability, but it wasn't really a priority for them. Getting— being responsive to customers and getting the sale, whatever it took to get the sale, was what was important.

Yeah.

But to the product development and operations folks, reliability and the reputation was a higher priority, more important. So what you really had was two people Just like two humans who had very different priorities in life and they all acknowledged the importance of each other's priorities, but they couldn't align on those priorities. Working with them and saying, "Hey, look, here's Sally, the sales department, and here's Jose, the operations department, and they have different belief systems." Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Now let's get those belief systems resolved and let's get them aligned and let's get them looking how one is dependent on the other. And so it's not like sales just meeting their quotas and operations meeting their targets and that defines success. Success is defined by the two of them learning to work together as a collective to produce the results for the organization. That's what shifts when you think of it as a person rather than trying to solve it through the lens of how can I get better coordination and how can I get better processes or let's put in a new system or let's reorganize or let's replace the head of the department because that's the problem. It just gives you another way to look at what the real challenges are. Change the paradigm.

I mean, I know we don't have enough time to go into great detail here, but just generally speaking, you've got Bill and Sally and they're not aligned. They're not on the same page. They're not enemies, but they're both looking out for themselves, right?

For lack of a better word.

Very natural. So what do we do? Like what's your approach then?

Well, what we discovered, what we do is we explain that what's driving Bill and Sally, these two collective persons is their underlying context. And when you bring that underlying context, the belief systems and their priorities and their values, you bring them to the surface, now you have a discussion. It's really no different than what do you do with a husband and a wife in therapy in many ways, right? What are you both here to accomplish? Are you want to fight each other on who's right? Or do you want to make a healthy relationship, right? Mm-hmm. It's the same thing with the organization. Yes, getting sales is really important. This was the outcome of the situation. As a matter of fact, I use the same example in the book, in the new book, Leading the Living Organization. What we did was we just identified, we actually had Sally talk about what's the personality of Bill, the collective, what does the operations department look like and how do they behave? From her perspective. From her perspective, how she saw it. And why is the way they behave valuable? And then we did the same thing with Bill about Sally's, the collective organization, right? The sales organization. Why do they behave the way they do? And why is that valuable? Now, how can you both honor each other? And that's when the things began to change.

The valuable part is interesting, is the interesting twist that you put in there, I think, right?

That's right.

That's right. It's not very uncommon to have two different collectives, if you will, talk about, well, what do you think about sales? Well, I'll tell you what I think about sales.

Right.

Right. Yeah.

And then you ask the question, how can you contribute to each other's success? Now you've got a different conversation, right?

Yeah.

Now what you've done is inherently broke down the very structure that you put in place that caused the silos that's causing you your problem. Because you're not dealing with them as individual silos that you're trying to optimize each silo. You're seeing them as a collective, as two people trying to work together to achieve the goal for the organization. Very different way of looking at it.

Now, is this what you're talking about? As I know in your book, you talk about the context and how context can influence results. Is this really what you're talking about?

This is exactly what we mean. Yeah, that's exactly what we mean by context. The underlying, the way we look at context is what makes a person or a collective person respond to life's events the way they do.

Mm-hmm.

Right? And we explain in the trainings and a little bit in the book how that person's context gets established and how it works so that a leader has the understanding of how they can go about reframing the context so there's greater alignment and greater focus, not only alignment with each other, but alignment to the strategy. I will tell you in the example I used both Bill and Sally to continue that metaphor of the two collectors. Both departments absolutely aligned with the strategy. They both believed they were doing their job to fulfill the strategy and had no visibility into what was getting in their way.

Yeah, because what's interesting is many times, not always, but many times, just in my experience working with different companies, Bill and Sally both mean well. And they both want the organization to succeed. But yeah, sometimes you're, you know, what is it, self-preservation or whatever it might be, you know, like, hey, I got my review coming up in 3 months. And I got, you know, so a lot of times it's not even Bill and Sally's issue, for lack of a better word. It's Bill and Sally's leadership who might not even be aligned, right?

That's the other thing that comes out of this is sometimes the leaders, the way we look at the leader's role of a department is the leader is the voice of the collective. And that presents some interesting things because sometimes the leader's personal voice is what sets the tone and the context for the collective because everybody wants to please the leader of the department. And sometimes you'll find the department already has an established context and the leader struggles to fit into it.

Mm-hmm.

So when you begin to recognize that the organization or the department has its own collective context, therefore its own collective personality, you can actually understand how the leader's role plays in terms of shaping that collective's behaviors and personality. So again, it gives you another lens, another way to see what's really going on in the organization instead of relying on traditional ways of trying to get people to behave change management and all that stuff, which hasn't been working for a long time. So, new lens, go back to my opening line, change the paradigm and what was difficult and almost impossible in one becomes easy and simple in another.

Yeah. So what do you think, I mean, somebody's, aside from getting your books, obviously go buy the books, but do you have some advice or maybe are there some, I don't know, first steps that we can be taking to start thinking about these, what we call maybe less visible forces? Like how do we get started with this?

Well, some of the things we ask leaders to do is simply step back and start assigning, look at the collective and think about just like we did on this call, something as simple as what is its personality? How does it behave? How does sales interact with the outside world? How does sales interact with the insight world? How does operations respond? And begin to frame it, their thinking, start thinking in those terms. And when they're seeing issues of not being resolved or issues keep coming back, step back and say, "Hey, is this a person-to-person situation? Is this a context-driven problem or is this an activity-driven problem?" We look at the dynamics in an organization through 3 lenses: activity, relationship, and in context. So activity is to— everybody knows how to fix activity. That's process, structure, goals, all the plans, whatever. Relationship has a lot to do with the person-to-person interactions. So what are the styles of interacting? Does the sales department respond to finance a certain way that pisses off the finance department? Are they doing it intentional? Do they know they're interacting that way? What's the trust relationship? What's the dynamics of the relationship? And you begin to look at the issues in a different way. So start with the simplest starting point. Start thinking of your organization as collective persons and start framing the challenges through the lens as, "What would I be doing if Bill was a person, sales was a person called Bill, and operations was a person called Sally?" Or vice versa. Yeah. And I was here to work with Bill and Sally to help them achieve the goals we three, meaning CEO, sales, are here to achieve. How would I enter that conversation? So start thinking, start reframing, put on a new lens and look at your organization differently.

So I've got a weird, maybe final question for you.

Sure.

So I mean, obviously you've been in the professional world for a bit longer than me.

A year or two. Yeah.

Yeah, a year or two. Got a lot of experience. So my daughter, Brenna, she just graduated from college. So super proud of her. And her young boyfriend, soon to be fiancé, I believe, also graduated and just landed his first job. He's got a sales job. And so we're excited for that. It's not in Texas, which is a problem. So, but he's getting experience. And then when they get married, the story is he's coming to Texas.

That's a good story, young man. But anyhow. We'll see how that turns out, right?

Yeah, right. So, but I guess my question is, what advice do you— his name's Jack.

Okay.

He's just out of college, got a sales job, got good energy, really good good young man, smart, had good family, good upbringing. All the stars are aligning. But what advice do you have for Jack and really just for anybody sort of getting going in their career and getting started?

Wow, that's a broad topic. I'm going to answer it by going back to what would I tell young Norman if I was able to go back and tell him what to do based on what I've learned. I would say think of your job that you're gonna do in two levels, maybe three levels. One is be efficient at what you do, be really capable, what I would call the activity level, right?

Mm-hmm.

Be really, really good at the technical aspects of the job, but recognize that's only a small portion of it. The second is be very cognizant of relationships. At the end of the day, people buy— if he's in sales, people buy from people. They don't buy technology. They don't buy companies. They buy from people. So be very cognizant of and develop really good relationship skills, skills of listening, skills of caring, skills of compassion. Those are cornerstones. Yeah. Of really having solid relationships. And the third is learn to transcend the defensive nature of your ego.

Ooh.

To the degree you can, mistakes are not bad, they're learning opportunities. And every time something, every conflict you have is an opportunity, it's an invitation to grow beyond your own limiting beliefs and use it as that till you continue to grow and mature, just like you did with your kids, with your daughter when she was younger. Your goal was to help her get to the stage where she can deal with life's complexities pretty much on her own. Continue that process. Don't ever stop. Those would be my advice.

Beautiful advice. Thank you for that.

I appreciate it. You're welcome.

Jack, you gotta listen to it.

All right, good stuff. Now the chat, it's easy to give advice, getting them to listen to it is hard.

Right, exactly, exactly. He's a good voice, I'm sure he will. So, all right, well hey, do you have any sort of final words of wisdom or parting thoughts that you wanna leave with the listeners?

I would simply take that same advice I gave for your hopefully future son-in-law to all leaders, you know, be very, very, Conscious of making your systems and structures efficient, that they run well and smooth, but pay a lot of attention to the relationship dynamics internally and externally. Think of the departments as being part of an ecosystem, not as individual silos, and really learn to pay attention to the context and to take challenges you face as opportunities to learn and grow. Mm-hmm. And focus on developing the capability and the maturity of the organization.

And name of your books again?

The first book, The Living Organization. The second book, due out September 1st, is Leading the Living Organization.

Okay, okay, fantastic. All right, well, and if people wanted to connect with you personally, Norman, what's the best way?

Absolutely, best way is direct to my my email, nwolfe@quantumleaders.com. Got it.

All right, well, I appreciate you coming on, Norman. This has been a lot of fun.

Thank you, Ron. It's been a pleasure, uh, and a lot of fun for me as well. All right, take care. You too.

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 is 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.