Ep 24 Employees Want In! | How AI Fixes the Participation Gap - Dan Bruder

It's the Jump Leap Long Term Strategy Podcast, Episode 24. Your company is committed to engaging staff in implementing the next strategic plan. Like most, you realize that their involvement is important, but the company is big, large enough that you can't talk to everyone. Not effectively, but you'd like to give each person a chance to contribute and to be heard. How can you pull off this seemingly impossible feat? And how can you do so at scale? You know, at the hundreds and thousands kind of numbers. Tune into this episode to hear from me and my special guest, Dan Bruder, as we solve this wicked problem together. I'm Francis Wade, and welcome to the Jump Lead Long-Term Strategy Podcast. And welcome back. As you can see, I've brought Dan Bruder here on the stage to join me. And before I introduce Dan, let me say a big hello to you if you've never been to this podcast before, because you may be wondering what the heck is going on. This is not the typical podcast that folks have in the out of the podcast world or arena. Most podcasts are kind of interviews. You know, you ask— I bring someone on and I would ask them some questions based on a book they've read or some background or some knowledge that they have. This is a bit different. Here we've chosen a problem, problem that I introduced a few minutes ago. And we're going to be diagnosing this challenge in the hope that we can share some underlying thinking with you. Our intent is to have you use it going forward, and it's far better for us to share our thinking than it is to just give you the outcomes or the conclusions. Because why? If we just told you what we think, you would say, where did that come from? Here on this podcast, you get to decide for yourself because there's aspects of our thinking that you may like and parts that you may not like. So it's a diagnostic kind of show for the most part. According to Einstein, if he had an hour to solve a problem, he spent 55 minutes thinking about the problem and 5 minutes thinking about solutions. And that's kind of what we're looking for here. We're hoping that via our diagnosis, we'll bump into some serendipity and maybe even forget that this is— we're recording for an audience. We get so lost in solving the problem and spend some time trying to solve it together and Hopefully, when we come up with something that's a bit unexpected and unplanned, what I'll do is I'll ring an insight bell that says, ah, pay attention, here's something that's brand new. Okay, and by the way, if we don't have any insights at all, I'll put in a buzzer at the end to say that time ran out, just like it runs out at the end of a good basketball game, a shot clock, maybe. So let me start with a story before I introduce Dan. Indiana is a director, and she's the main internal sponsor of the upcoming strategic planning retreat in her company. She was around for the creation of the last plan, but it was hardly implemented. In other words, it wasn't— it was a bust. That was 5 years ago. This time around, she's convinced the company needs to do things differently. Although the organization is made up of some 3,500 employees, she's convinced that there must be a way to reach them all, all, all. One of the things she wants to try is an all-employee SWOT survey. It's not really interactive, but it will get the most vocal involved. Some companies' staff don't even like completing surveys. So mileage could vary. There will also be several focus groups online, and her CEO is also going to do a virtual town hall. But even if she hires an army of consultants and pays a small fortune to these outsiders, she still won't give a significant percentage of staff members a meaningful opportunity to interact via this approach. So she's racking her mind and thinking, there must be a way. So here to tackle this problem with me today is Dan Bruder. He's the CEO and co-founder of Blendification, a company driven to connect company focus and employee focus, leveraging an AI-powered software suite. His vision materializes in strategic and personal planning tools highlighted in his book, The Blendification System, and a TED Talk. Which has over almost a quarter million views. He has a background in banking, hospitality, and real estate, and he also teaches at an MBA school and executive MBA programs in Colorado. And he teaches the blendification approach to doing things. Dan, welcome to the show.

Thanks, Francis. Glad to be here. Looking forward to a good conversation.

Great. Let's jump right in. What do you think of Indiana's situation?

Well, I think it's normal, and it's just not for companies of 3,500 employees. It's really persistent at every level— companies of 100, companies of 50, companies of 5,000, 27,000, and so forth. So I think it's a real issue. And over the years, we've been able to kind of fake our way through this and just have the same people go to the off-sites and come up with the same plan we had last year and create some incremental changes. But we've never really been able to capture the true pulse of the organization the way that I think we would like to.

Yeah, you know, there used to be that strategy was something that the big people, big people went off, disappeared and worked on, you know, at some kind of fancy offsite location, hotel, preferably beach, mountains, and then came back from, you know, with something engraved on the golden tablets or the holy tablets. And then, you know, was handed down to the peons and told, thou shalt implement. But I think most people are past, you know, we've gotten over that sort of approach. I would say it's increasingly rare. And folks, if you're listening to this and your company still implements that problem, implements that approach, you need to call one of us ASAP because nowadays the idea is to engage, staff early on, get them thinking so that when the strategic plan is complete, then it actually has some fertile ground to land on. Dan, does that make sense? Does that match your experience?

Yeah. And, you know, we have to ask the question, why don't we include employees in this process? And there's a lot of different answers to that. One answer is as simple as we don't really respect our employees or their opinions. We think we know it all. And that goes to the thing you said, kind of the executive elite category. And, you know, strategy is too complex and it's too important for everybody except for the top, you know, 10, 15 people in the company. That's one reason. The other reason is, is it's, it's not impossible, but if done correctly, it's very, very expensive and time-consuming. And as we see so many things changing outside the walls of organizations, if it takes us 9 months 6 months to a year to go through a strategic planning process. Well, in all intents and purposes, when we roll this thing out, it's already old. And so we really need to be able to do things quick. So now we come to a point is like, well, we want everyone's input. If we believe that, we really want their input, but we don't have time or money to actually go incorporate this desire into our process. So we default back to what we've always done, and that's to to do what you said, go up to the mountains or the beach and hang out for 3 or 4 days and have some nice dinners and talk about strategy with a very, very small percentage of the company. And that's really where we are right now. It's up to this point, it's really been companies that have a desire to do it but really can't do it because it's just not cost effective, or right, companies that just surely don't have the desire, they don't see the benefit of including people throughout the organization.

Right, right, right, right. And that leads me to suggest that, you know, in Indiana, or listeners, if you find yourself, you know, if you found yourself in Indiana's shoes, that there could be C-suite who don't think that this kind of engagement is even needed, you know. Hope you're enjoying this free excerpt from the Jump Leap Long Term Strategy Podcast. Interested in finding out more about getting a subscription to full episodes? Visit www.longtermstrategy.info. Or, or wanted, and they just see it as a time waste, wasting activity, or just superfluous, or something that is going to occupy a lot of money for no payback. In other words, they don't see the benefit. So let's imagine that in this case One villain is those who disagree with Indiana's approach, and the other may be that, you know, she doesn't have a lot of resources to play with, so she's got to get this done without spending a whole lot of money. And it can't take a lot of time because, you know, these things are probably not too far off. Her retreat maybe is a week or two away. She can't get this army of consultants and doesn't want to spend all that money to bring them in to get them to do that job. At the same time, she's seen what happened in the past when a strategy came out and was not implemented, low engagement. She saw that people weren't interested, weren't impacted, didn't take it seriously, and didn't have any ownership, and that's what she's fighting against. So she's— let's imagine that she's impatient to some degree, She's also anxious. She feels somewhat pressured. And, you know, above it all, she's thinking, there's got to be a way to get my core staff, you know, some essential number, some, you know, some quantum, some percentage, so that the implementation and the buy-in would be there. Before the retreat even starts to some degree. So that it's not a matter of coming back and trying to sell something. It's more a matter of we've taken your input and here's what we've done with it. So there's a collaborative feeling even at the start of the retreat. How does that hit you so far, Dan?

Yeah, I think that's the goal. I think if we look at strategy and we have to define why we're even doing strategy, And, you know, I've talked to some companies and they say, well, we are— our operating agreement says that we need to have a strategy done every 3 years. So we want to do a strategic plan. And essentially what they're saying is, is they want to go offsite, do a strategic plan, check the box, and it doesn't really move the needle. It doesn't really mean anything. But their operating agreement says they need to do it. So that's not exactly a good reason to do a strategic plan. Other people feel like it's something that they should do because everybody does it. It's also a fun week, you know, for them, but it doesn't really go anywhere. So then you have to ask, why do we really do strategy? And there's an obvious answer to that. It's like, you know, well, we want to have a plan and execute a plan and we need to know where we're going. So there's all those fundamental reasons. I would actually argue or add another reason And I think that the strategic planning, the process of strategic planning is a perfect opportunity to create employee engagement. So I know whenever I've built something, you know, even going back to middle school, you know, if I ever built something, I tended to take an interest in what it became. I had some level of pride, of ownership or authorship or something like that. Yet when we go to work, we spend, you know, nearly half of our waking time at work, and we're not part of the— we're not part of the architecture or the build. And I think strategic planning gives us that opportunity to bring more people into the process so that they can take pride and ownership in, in the outcome of what this organization becomes. And if we look at strategy as a way to not only just produce a plan but a formidable way, a foundational way to build employee engagement, satisfaction, and fulfillment, we might start reshaping our thinking and looking at this differently such that it can be a much more comprehensive and effective approach.

An opportunity.

Yeah, I would agree.

Yeah. So I've tried, you know, and I'm sure our listeners have tried, and Dan, I'm sure you've been down this road before. To gain engagement using— well, you know, I, when I first started out, we didn't do anything. So this is back in the day, confession, we didn't, we didn't do jack, okay? It was just like, come out with the holy tablets and roll them out as if, you know, we're all like Moses. Uh, got a little better over the years, um, incorporated some of the things that we used to do in the transformation world So we do in our company, and we're very proud of it. Okay, although based on conversations and where we're gonna go, we're gonna go way past what I do today. So I'm just warning you listeners, there's something coming. We're building to something here, and it does involve, as you heard, AI and some technology. But we would send out a SWOT survey, still do it, and the survey is Just what you would expect. Uh, fortunately, it, it does scale, so you can send it to a gazillion people. You can send it to even customers, um, all kinds of stakeholders. You can go to town with just a simple SWOT survey on, uh, uh, you know, on some software like SurveyMonkey. We use one called ProProfs. The software isn't that special. The questions are the kind of thing you would expect. But anybody can answer. Traditionally, the response rates have varied. Uh, in the last— a recent company that we worked with, I think we got about 45 to 50% participation, which is unheard of, I have to tell you that. Um, usually it's somewhere scrabbling down into the single digits. So there's a SWOT survey. That's the one. Our practice is not to have a lot of SWOT conversation in the retreat itself or in the offsite. We focus on facts, not opinions, and the SWOT survey is really an opinion survey. You're looking for extraneous opinions and interesting stuff that people come up with. So we do that, we do focus groups, and the focus groups, all kinds of, you know, depending on the issues of the day, uh, we might do a focus group of people in one country or in a department, or we might mix them, or we might do it by level. By level is the most popular choice, the most popular design choice, uh, and then we also do interviews, um, in individual interviews of people who have an opinion, who are talkative or thoughtful in some way, Interviews tend to be at the higher levels of the organization and with a board member, but that's the state of the art as I know it. Dan, do you have anything else traditional that you would suggest to our audience?

Well, in—

Technologies that we're going to get into now.

Yeah, right now. You hit it on the head, and what we've done is we're really trying to progress this process to include more people and get more information in the planning process. So the more and better information that we have, the better decisions that we make as a team. So how do we equip the decision makers with more and better information? And, and that's the process you've laid out, and I think that's a tremendous leap over what used to happen when it was just a few people that would go off-site. And so that process, you know, surveying, focus groups, and then interviews, all three of those things are really, really good things that should be done. And quite frankly, they're not really done that often. And the reason for that, obviously, is, I mean, it's— it takes time for somebody to do that. So if you hire a consultant, I'm not going to say what your hourly rate is, but that can start adding up. You know, over time. And you're somewhat limited in terms of the number of people that you can reach and touch. And then we have, let's say you get a lot of data, what are you gonna do with it? And how do you analyze that? How do you synthesize that? That's another period of time that it takes in order to make that usable information. So, you know, one thing is the focus groups and the interviews. The other thing is how do we consolidate and synthesize synthesize this data into something that's meaningful that we can make good decisions with. So now we have these things that all essentially comes to two things. It comes to more cost and more time, which is fine if there isn't a better way, right?

So, right, right, better than nothing.

That's the thing is, and that's a positive progression or positive progress over what used to happen. And it is, you know, it's the best thing available until something better comes along.

Ah, which we're about to get into in just a couple moments. Now, someone might say, but Francis, I don't even do those things, and they sound pretty good. And if we did them, maybe they would solve the problem that Indiana is having. So I've mentioned some of the ways in which they don't really work all that well. One is that the, the reach is always limited because people sometimes don't want to fill out surveys. And even though you may get a statistically significant sample, you know, kudos to you if you do, at the same time you aren't getting everyone. And you, you, you may be getting the ones who are the least thoughtful for some reason, or the ones who are the the least or most risk-averse, either way. So you're not looking, you're not really getting a representative sample. It's a self-selected group. They nominated themselves to complete the survey. And the other thing is that it's not interactive. So people, we used to have a, sometimes have a question at the very end, how could this survey be improved? And we get all sorts of answers. You've reached the end of a complimentary clip from the Jump Leap Long Term Strategy Podcast. To hear the full episode, go over to www.longtermstrategy.info and grab a subscription or a free trial. See you there. And here's the excerpt from our next episode.

Because I really don't pay attention to it. So now we look at AI and I think we're overloaded right now with AI information. And most of the people I talk to are clearly aware of AI, but very few business leaders are aware of how to apply this with a specific use case that they can use today to help their business tomorrow.

And if you like the work we're doing, feel free to follow us at our website strategyconf.fwconsulting.com or like or leave a comment on one of the popular podcast apps such as Stitcher or iTunes. This is Francis Wade, and I'm signing out from the Jump Leap Long-Term Strategic Planning Podcast. See you later.