Designing GMB for Continuous Change and Growth | David Bolt, CEO & Rob Den Besten, COO, GMB

Welcome everyone. We're just gonna give a few minutes for people to trickle in and then we're gonna get started. Okay, hello and welcome to this deep dive. On Designing for Continuous Change and Growth, featuring David Bolt and Rob Dunbeston of GMB. I'm Christopher Parsons, founder and CEO of Knowledge Architecture. And many of you on this call have been to a K Connect conference before. And for those of you that haven't, it's a conference that we've run for the last 10 years that's focused on helping the AEC industry manage knowledge more effectively. And obviously with coronavirus and the pandemic, we've been moved virtually. And so the mission that we've been pursuing with these virtual events is the same as that we pursued with our live events over the years, which is finding ideas that are useful and helping you connect with your peers and build your network. And so with this deep dive series, what we've been doing— and we started this 2 weeks ago, and so this is our third, uh, 3 weeks in a row, which we are going to slow the pace of this down. That is good for us and for you, I think. Um, but our goal is to do those 2 things, right? It's to interview some really interesting people on a topic that matters, and then provide an optional Hangout afterwards to allow you to connect in small groups and talk about your experiences and talk about your challenges. So today we're going to have about 35 minutes of discussion, and then we're going to have some dedicated Q&A time at the end. So if you're new to Zoom, there is a Q&A button down at the bottom of your screen, and that Q&A button allows you to ask questions, and you can see all the other questions that everyone else is asking. There's also a like button in the Q&A panel, and so you can click that like button to upvote. And so I'm going to ask you to kind of like log questions as they come up during the session, and then when you have— sorry, hey, Greg, would you mind putting your video on? Yeah, cool. And then when you have questions, log them in the panel as you go, and then vote for other people's topics. Then we'll have a dedicated focused point near the end for you to be able to vote up topics and then for us to ask questions. Okay, so for those of you that signed up for the 60-minute Hangout afterwards, we'll be leaving this webinar and we'll be switching into a Zoom meeting, and so that we can use the breakout feature there. So I'll be pasting a link, you'll click on that link, and it'll take you over to the new meeting. If you didn't sign up for the Hangout but you'd like to join us, don't worry, you're invited. There's plenty of room, just click on the link that I share at the end of the webinar. Okay, so this deep dive portion is being recorded and will be available on our, shortly. And Susan Strom, our Director of Client Success, who many of you know, will be taking notes in this session in a Google Doc. So please feel free to jump in and take notes alongside her. We're looking to capture quotes, links, resources, books, et cetera, things that come up, and we'll share the final document later on this week. So I'm going to put the link in the chat so that you all have access to that. Okay, that's it, that's it for logistics. Let's get started. So our two guests today, uh, David and Rob of GMB, were scheduled to speak at K Connect 2020, and I asked them to speak because I've had the privilege of watching this team of teams initiative evolve over the years, their kind of approach to management and change. And I thought that the way that it has helped them navigate the coronavirus pandemic to manage knowledge, prepare for uncertainty, would be really useful and inspiring for this audience. So I'm very happy to welcome David and Rob to K Connect. And David and Rob, will you please turn on your cameras and unmute yourselves? All right. Welcome.

Hi.

So let's, let's just start with a little bit of an introduction. I'd like to hear a little bit more about GMB and then yourselves and your role within the company.

Sure. So GMB is a— we are a 50-year-old architecture and engineering firm, but our values have always been centered around learning and knowledge that we believe is the primary catalyst for creating positive changes in both our business and in the communities that we serve. So the work that we do in our own company which focuses a lot on building knowledge and building community, is also mirrored in the professional work that we end up doing, which is helping educational institutions to create a better future for their own communities. Right now we have 4 different offices that are operating out of the Midwest and roughly 130 people on our team, although we just hired 10 interns this week, so that's probably 140 people now.

There you go. Yeah.

Uh, personally myself, um, so I've been with the company for 21 years. I started as an intern myself 21 years ago, and I'm an architect by training but have been in every aspect of the company throughout those 21 years, which has given me sort of a nice broad base of understanding of the culture and who we are and the things that we need to, um, to really make our company work. And 5 years ago, because I think my passion really is around building a company that serves its employees well, I was able to be appointed to the role of president and have been really trying to lead the company through a lot of change and growth ever since.

Awesome. And Rob, how about you? How— what was your journey to becoming COO?

Yeah, yeah, so David and I have a pretty similar story. Um, I always love it when he goes first because I can say, yeah, I started 24 hours ago today. I just learned through our intranet. And very similar background, architect by training, moved up through a lot of roles, primarily more of a design bent role. I got a lot of the complex projects that maybe no one's ever done before because I have sort of a bent to— I like to And yeah, so, and I guess wise for me, as we, as we run and figure out this company, it's now designing that company and figuring out what's next and pushing ourselves towards growth.

So yeah, well, I like the way that you put that, designing the company. That was kind of our theme here, to talk about organizational design a little bit. And I know from previously discussing with you guys that this kind of revisiting of your core values was one of the jumping-off points for this Team of Teams initiative to kind of rethink the organization. So maybe take us through the backstory on that and how this, how this journey got started.

Yeah, I'll jump in on that. So the, the history of it was we were going through a lot of growth and change, um, about, well, 5, 10 years ago really is when it kind of started. The company had always been a small family culture where we valued people, uh, and we said that we really valued people, we valued what they did, but we also valued the product that we created and we really wanted to create a great product for our clients. And as we were able to kind of start growing and getting bigger, you— we got to the point where we're about 60, 70, 80 people and, uh, the sense of family started to erode because of the size. It got harder to know the people who you're with. It got harder to be really close to those people. And so we started to find that we're having some, some issues with our projects, how we were delivering them, some of the things that were going on with how we did that. So we started to try to really change our processes to deliver better products. The problem that we had is that it really wasn't working because I think fundamentally, culturally, it wasn't who we were. Um, and so we kind of did this examination of what, what was working and where were the successes in the company. And we realized a lot of that was centered around where people were tight-knit, where they cared for each other, where they were, uh, creating that small, that small team of people that really loved each other. That's where the successes of our product came out. Uh, and so then we really started thinking, well, I think the idea is we need to start really building that people connection side of life rather than the product side and let the product just take care of itself because we trust our people to do good work.

And how did you— I mean, I'm guessing you were taking care of your people already. So like, so it sounds like it was like just a more intentional like prioritization of kind of where we do it and how that looks.

Yeah, I think, and I think I'll say probably post everything in these last, even last year, we've sort of started to figure out what it was that maybe that we've actually did, that we did prioritize our people. I think we talked about, as David said, that, you know, we were all one big family and we had all those things. And I think David and I, because we've been working together for so long, have sort of always struggled with this How do we organize ourselves? How does that reflect what it is that we're doing? The one thing that really pushed us towards Team of Teams, and this is literally— we find we read a lot of books and then we grab parts and pieces from it. There's a book, Team of Teams, and we were at a conference together and they started talking about it and it was this aha moment for us of, hey, this helps describe how it is that we work, that we're a network of people, work of teams, um, interact with each other, that there isn't hierarchy within that, that there isn't a boss within that. Um, and, and it started to really sort of coalesce and describe how it was that we work. Um, and I think it was that— now we fast forward, I think now we realize it. And David says you can't have two priorities You can't have your client and the people. At some point, one of them is going to conflict with each other and something has to win. And I think we've just started to decide we want the people to be the thing that wins.

Right.

So yeah, I just— to maybe piggyback on that, you can have— you can say you value your employees, and we did, and we absolutely did. It was one of the things that we had most. There's a We have sort of the story of, uh, we had an employee that started working for us and after maybe 3 or 4 months, he, he resigned, he quit. And, you know, we were sort of confused and we said, well, what was going on? You seem like you're doing a good job and all that. And he said, yeah, you know, I come in every day, I go to my desk, um, I do my work and I leave and I don't talk to anybody. I don't connect with anybody. I'm just kind of lonely and I don't need to work here. And that was like a gut check right in the heart for us who say we value people and we've got this employee who says I've never connected with people and I don't, I've never done that. So that was kind of a moment for us to say we're not really doing the job that we think that we're doing. We sort of took it for granted when we were 30, 40 people, but now at 80, you can't take it for granted. You have to work hard at it. And that was—

So it's not gonna happen organically. You have to be intentional.

Yeah, very good.

Yeah. And so one of the things that, um, well, I'm assuming this is one of the things Team of Teams was designed to help, uh, to help solve, right, is the kind of the no employee left behind, uh, kind of situation. And so maybe for those— oh, go ahead, Rob.

No, go ahead.

I was gonna say, for people that don't know what Teams of Teams is, I think it'd be good to kind of like start there and introduce this and then walk into why GMV adopted the model, right?

Yeah, so Team of Teams, and again, we built it on some respects off the book Team of Teams. It's a General McChrystal book, at least that was in concept. I can't say we're following that to the T probably at this point, but I think big picture concepts. So sort of 4 primary areas that we focus on is building trust. You'll probably hear us talk about building trust a ton as we As we walk through this, the foundational thing of that, another good book, Five Dysfunctions of Teams. Those things were things that we said, in order for us to make sure we don't lose people and that everyone has a friend and that they're linked, we need to have trust as the basis of everything. Exchange of ideas, which is this kind of stuff, exchange of knowledge, common goal and purpose, which I think we finally in the last year feel like We've honed it and honed it and honed it, done it probably for 3 to 4 years of really nailing that down. And then this empowerment of individuals, which is historically what we've all always been, a very empowered group of employees to go do things, but maybe we were always pulling in different directions. And so part of what we want to do with the common goal and purpose is putting the guardrails around that and saying, hey, we're all going in this, this direction together. You can do what you need to do as long as it's pulling in this, in this direction.

What direction are you headed in?

Yeah, um, so lately, uh, and then, and David, and David said this, um, we, we are really putting students at the center of the things that we do. We think that by creating lifelong learners, whether that's internally or externally with our clients But that's the key to basically transforming all of our communities. So that might not be architecture and engineering is how we look at it.

Yeah. Yeah. It is right now.

But it is when we're talking big future.

So there's a big future that you're looking at. There's kind of ideas of trust and like exchange of ideas, etc. How does that then break into an organizational design? Like what does the structure look like?

Right, so the, the exchange of ideas happens through the rhythm of a lot of our, a lot of our things that we, that we have in place. So, and just, it's, we have things we call pods, we have a GM University that happens, and every 90 days we have 90-day topics. So we've put in together a lot of rhythms of things that sort of happen on a regular basis in order to create those links and those forced connections amongst all the variety.

So the, the big, uh, the biggest maybe surprise that people might have is it's a very non-hierarchical structure. So we really have that— the, the concept starts with the traditional pyramidal structure of president at top and sub-reporting down. Uh, this breaks that all apart and says the, the entire organization is made up of teams that have a specific purpose and scope to what they're supposed to do. They have total empowerment, they have total control, they have total responsibility for that particular purpose and scope. And all of those teams are linked and connected to other teams that they might influence. If they make a decision where that ripple might connect, there's a person, or sometimes multiple people, that connect those two teams together to create the transfer of communication. So when somebody makes a decision, you have to understand the impact and the ripple that it makes to the other teams around you, but you're essentially empowered to make that decision as long as it's within your complexity and scope, and other teams then will react to that, push back, pull back. It's a— it's a very organic structure, but it's not top-down hierarchical, and it's— it's so all the decisions don't run up, uh, up the chain to Rob, who runs it up to me, who runs it back down again. Sure.

So what's an example of a— sorry, go ahead, David.

No, no, go ahead. It's, yeah, it's a network of teams is another name for it.

Network of teams. Yep. So what's an example of a team and what's one of their scopes and what decision would they make and maybe walk us through that, like impacting other people and how that gets managed.

Yeah, so pods is probably the, I'll say the one that gets the most traction when we talk to people, at least they're like, wow, that's something unique. And PODs started a little bit out of our history too. We had an employee who called the area she sat in a POD, and she nominated herself the POD captain. And so we sort of globbed on to the thing that already existed, at least stole some of the nomenclature, and created— and this goes back to trying not to lose people within the organization, so you don't sit at your computer for 8 hours a day and go home and don't have any contact. We also historically have always sat multidisciplined, so architect next to engineer next to interior designer next to chemical engineer, which has been a strength of ours. We built on those strengths and said, hey, pods, for 90 days, we have this thing we want you to work on. Right now, we were talking earlier, it's about what's our flexible future, so we're all 100% remote right now. How does that start to impact us? How do we work differently? And so that's what they're working on right now as an example. And it's, I think we have 12 different pods. We try to keep them to 6 to 8 people. They have a pod captain. The pod captain facilitates that discussion and they meet for 15 minutes every single day. We started that, the other duality of the thing we asked them to talk about is basically anything they want. It's what did they, what did they do this weekend? What's coming up? A lot of it is again building that trust, building that common language, building empathy for each other. And I think the probably the one thing that we did, David, and is that is our Lifeline exercise when we launched Team of Teams, which was something that David did in one of his, uh, forums.

So they have a— if I can back up a little bit— so they have— you guys have divided the company into 12 pods, 6 to 8 people each. They do at least a 15-minute connection, just even socially, every day, but they also work on long-term kind of company improvement projects as a group.

Yep, that's right. So the, the primary purpose and function is simply to make sure everybody is connected to a group of 6 to 8 people every day. And that started with that story I told you of the guy who said, I, you know, I never knew anybody. So that, that's their number one thing is get to know people at a deep, very personal level, start creating trust and empathy with a group of, uh, that you're around. We also found— and so they can show up every day and share what's on their mind, what they did last night, uh, things they're worried about that can be personally related, project related. It can be a variety of different things, but the purpose is just to connect them to each other every day for 15 minutes. So sometimes they don't have anything to talk about, so we also give them this assignment of saying, hey, there's a big strategic part of the company that we all developed as a, as a whole company, by the way. The whole company did a strategic plan together and we all agreed on these goals. So here's our next 90-day sprint goal. To think through and work on, start talking about what that might mean to you. So, it gives them kind of that duality side of it. Some groups will only do a social thing one day and then they'll kind of work on the company the next day and sort of alternate it, that kind of variety of things. We also rotate that system, so that pod, that core group stays together for about a year, year and a half is what we found. About a year and a half is what we found is about the right amount of time. When they start to say, okay, I'm ready to, you know, get to know other people in the company. I love these people. Shorter than that and they said, no, I don't want to leave these people. Uh, longer than that, you're like, it's time, it's time to move on.

Yeah, fair.

So the very— but back to what Rob was saying there, the very first thing that we did with them, uh, when we launched this initially, we had everybody— well, it started with, I got up in front of the whole company and I shared my, my personal lifeline with them, which is Essentially, you walk through from birth to today and you talk about the high points and the low points of your life— personal things, professional things, things that were painful, things that were exciting. Um, and it really is an empathy-building exercise where I, as the leader, became very vulnerable in front of the organization by sharing some private things with them. Um, and, and then we asked them to do that with their pods. Uh, and the results of that were incredible. We created instant connections across the company because it's at a very human level that, that you start to create those connections and you start to trust those people. And when you trust people, you're much more willing to embrace change.

Yeah, this— that was the title of your postponed K-Connect talk, right? Changing at the Speed of Trust. Right. So maybe talk about that a little bit, about change and trust and like how that goes together and what you've experienced over the last 5 years.

Yeah, so when, when we look at it, the future is all about change.

You, you're—

if you're going to be a company that's going to remain vibrant and continuing to move forward, you have to be able to move to the future, and you have to be able to embrace change. People naturally are scared of change because it's unknown, and so they're, they're going to be afraid of it. What they're going to feel feels that is safe is sort of the current situation where they are right now, because it's safe. Even if it's bad, it's still safe because it's known. So the only way you convince people to walk into the unknown or walk into the fear of the future is by creating trust. They have to trust that the future is going to be better than the present. They have to trust that you're going to safely lead them there and you care for them. They have to trust that if they're going to experiment with something and it fails, that you're— they're not going to get penalized for that or reprimanded for it. So all of those are cases of building trust that help us create change and move to the future. And we found the best way to create trust is to— it's the rhythm, it's the repetition, daily interaction, and being extremely vulnerable with each other. That's, that's how we felt we build trust in the organization.

And one of the things you guys have shared with me is, and I'll try and put this gently, like you have been a multi-office company for a long time, but that didn't necessarily go so well right away. And so I'm curious how like trust, but then how the pods, like our pods cross office, like take me through kind of knitting together the company this way.

Yeah, so yeah, our pods are cross office, which again was sort of this aha moment of, Well, wait a minute, if how to build culture that you want to build in all the off— that's at least some sort of commonality. Every office has its unique flavor just because of where it is geography-wise and who's in that office. But how to do that was for us, well, if we cross-pollinate these teams from all the different offices and have them meet for 15 minutes every day and get to know each other and talk about what's going on in their lives, sort of an instant culture similarity thing that could happen, plus all the other teams and meetings that we have along with everything else that's going on. We tend to focus on PODs because it's the one that's unique. So yeah, I think the thing that we found within our— within all our offices was they didn't become vibrant until we started to do that, until we started to actually have that inclusion. And we just heard today, um, this— the fact that we are all remote and now, you know, we're all the same size, uh, we do our Zoom meetings, um, that our other offices feel even more connected than they've ever felt, um, because it's— everyone's on the exact same playing field. Um, so again, from people who maybe were in an office in a bit larger office, now there's this equality and empathy building for the other side of people who are in some of our smaller offices.

Are they optional? Like, do you have to be in a pod if you're at the company?

Yeah.

Yep.

Yep.

Yeah, and we haven't had a problem with that so far, at least not that I know of. I don't think anyone said, "I refuse to do this." Okay. Even the, even the people who I would say thought would have been either late adopters or hard adopters, are some of the biggest proponents and biggest pushers of, yeah, this is, this is cool.

What were the objections like early on? Like, why would people say it wouldn't work or this isn't for me?

Probably time.

I mean, yep. So, you know, one of the excuses we heard right away was like, you're going to take 15 minutes of my workday every day to, to do this silly thing. I don't understand why would we waste our time doing that. I got work to do. We heard people say that, oh, I've got kids just coming in all over the place, so thanks, Bruce. Thanks for putting up with that. So the other thing that we heard was that people said, like, I don't understand why we're doing this. It doesn't make any sense. What are we trying to do here? And so those were kind of the early reasons for it. But I think again, as that, it's the daily repetition and the constant needing to build those relationships. And once people have built relationships, then you start caring and then you start wanting to be part of that. And so by just sort of making it mandatory, partly you're just forcing people to do it every day and they did it. And then they started to love it because they started to get to know the people. And it's a very human thing.

Yeah. Tell me about the 90-day things, because I find that very interesting about the way that you guys have done this, and you've done this for a while. And what's the kind of— how do the 90 days split out? How does it work? Because I think people will be interested in that.

Yeah, it's evolved and it probably continues to evolve. So we started it with the, well, we better give them something to talk about, you know, this What if they get sick and tired of talking to each other about what they did over the weekend? So there's a little bit of that, and we have some personalities that also need that structure. Well, you need to give us something, you know, we need to be working on something. So it started with that, I would say, and David and I would come up with topics of things that frankly we needed some innovation on. And, you know, we're just two people, and if we can harness the resource of 30 people to be innovative about something, why, why wouldn't we? And these are the people that are sort of feet on the ground doing the thing every single day.

Rob, what's an example, like what are some of the past ones, like problems that you've given them to work on as a group?

One was multi-office communication, so it was how do we connect better with all our offices, and we had one, one of our pod groups work through all the different versions of things like Zoom, GoToMeeting, Webex, and say, hey, We're going to test all of them and we're going to pick one and we're going to say that's the best thing. Um, yeah, the thing we're doing right now is the flexible future. I'm trying to think what else, David, that we've—

well, I mean, it's been big things like how do we do project management better, how do we, uh, connect with clients better, um, you know, how do we— we talked about finances in the, in the company, which is sort of a big, uh a transparent move for us that had been sort of a protected thing for a long time. And we started talking about, okay, we're gonna start sharing some information about finances, and you guys start talking about how, how do you think that we impact finances the most? Uh, great story out of that one. One of the groups, they said, I'm get— I, I'm, I'm convinced that all the paper that we print out in this office is a huge financial burden to the company. And so that was their premise. And they did an experiment for 30 days and they counted up all the paper and they—

every piece of paper.

Yep.

How much got wasted versus what was not wasted. And their conclusion at the end of a sort of a mid-cycle of it was this cost us very little, like fractional amount of money. But the thing that came out of it was they said one of their tests was they did PDF online virtual page turns instead of printing out big sets of drawings. They said, well, that actually saved a ton of time for all of our employees because we weren't in doing all these page turns. We could do it all virtually, mark it up, and it was really quick. So they realized that the saving the time of our employees was a lot more financially viable than the lack of just printing out a set of drawings. So it was an un— like, Rob and I could never have come up with that, right? There's not a chance we would have come up with that.

You would never have started from that premise. Never. Yeah. So let's play that out. So like, let's say it's that one where it's about finances. They go off into their pods, they start talking about noodling on ideas on how we could impact the finances. Then what happens? Like you got 12 teams running in parallel.

Yeah, so we have 30, 60, 90-day check-ins. So we typically start out, We introduced the topic at GMBU, GMB University, which is basically a 1 to 2 day offsite that we do every quarter as part of our rhythm. We introduced that topic. We also reviewed the last 90-day topic to talk about things we learned and what things we're going to implement. Then we have 30-day check-ins, which we literally just did today with our topic where the pod captains represent their pods and say, hey, this is the stuff that we're researching and talking about. And then usually those pods start to combine with each other and either say, hey, we're working on the same thing, let's team up and let's tackle and basically experiment with those things for the next 30 days.

So let's get some more resources, some more brains.

Exactly, exactly. And then at the 60 days, we start to coalesce on, hey, these things are viable, this worked, this didn't work. Which one of these things should we start to carry forward, and do we talk about them again at the next 90-day GMDU? We messed around with for a while the A3 format, which comes out of the Agile world. I'll say we've taken the big premise of that, basically the 30, 60, 90.

That's like a standardized thing for defining the problem and countermeasures and all that.

I'll say our engineers really liked probably the A3s, the architects maybe not so much, just to put generalization on it. Sure. But it definitely, it definitely gave us a framework for how to, how to move these things forward.

And when we started, that's— we started day one with those, and partially it was just we did a whole training session on how to use the A3 form, uh, because we'd never done this before, right? No, nobody had ever tried to tackle problems in this way or think through them, so it was at least a formula for people to follow to say, all right, here's— I can put, you know, these things in these columns and slots and understand how to get a result. Once they kind of get the gist of it, we drop the formality of the A3 and we just kind of let them run with it.

Right. Yeah, right on. You guys mentioned, um, and I'm going to go to questions, um, after this. And so if you guys have started putting questions in the questions panel, go ahead and add them if you haven't added them yet, both for the ones that you want me— that you want us to call on. You mentioned GMBU and kind of like how this culminates in that. So talk just like kind of briefly about GMB University in general and then how it intersects with the pods and the 90-day sprints.

Yeah, so GMBU started for us probably, what, 6, 7 years ago now, Rob, where we just started thinking about how do we create better knowledge transfer in our organization. Again, this was at that growth point. And we're realizing that knowledge wasn't organic anymore, that it really— whereas it used to just be kind of this mentor-mentee relationship, we'd have 2 or 3 new people a year coming in. Well, suddenly you're getting more and more people coming in and knowledge transfer is not organic. So it was really a way to try to have us formalize a system for sharing knowledge broadly across the organization. But we based it on a couple interesting things. One is— it was a 2-day offsite for everybody in the company, from receptionist all the way to president, right? Everybody comes, everybody hears the same thing. So even we have sessions on the hydronics of snowmelt systems, our receptionist is hearing this. And that started to actually become some of the basis for our Team of Teams model as well, because the idea was knowledge is ubiquitous. We should all understand everything that's going on, even at a small scale. That all helps us perform our jobs better. And so that was really kind of the, the start of it. And we've been doing it quarterly ever since then, and the topics range in huge variety. We sort of, we plan them on a 90-day basis on sort of what's present in the company, what are the things that, that people might value learning about. And then we also kind of have these other sessions, so we sort of started to split it into two. Kind of strategic things or in-the-moment things, and then also just more broad-based knowledge-based things that people might want to learn about.

And did you— where do you think GMB University and getting all the people together and coronavirus, like, how does all that come together?

Yeah, so we just have one in— yeah, we had one in April.

Yeah.

And I think the thing about team— I guess maybe as we pandemic that I was most excited about was there was a little bit of, hey, if there was always, well, if 2008-2009 happens again, you guys are going to get rid of team of teams and you'll go back to hierarchy, you know, because you'll have to, you'll have to manage people. There was, and I think if anything, we doubled down on team of teams and found out how quickly and how flexible and how fast we could change, even being unprepared. For all of this. I don't know how, I don't think anyone was. And so GMBU was, we need to do this, we need to figure out how to do it. So we did it virtually. Instead of a 2 days worth of offsites, we spread it over the week because we didn't think people would want to sit in front of their Zoom meeting screens for 2 days straight.

Yeah.

And probably couldn't because they had small kids running around in the background. So, but so we, we did something every single morning of the week. We typically have a theme and then we broke things out in the afternoons. We had a couple things kind of each day and then we had more of the, the collective hangout social at lunch and then we had some happy hour, you know, virtual happy hours happening in the evening. And I think that For us too, it's a little bit of what is our future as we get more people in other offices and maybe, you know, how are we flying all these people into Michigan? There's— it honestly was a good thing to push us out there to see what, what could the future be, how could these things be different for us, and what's the value of the stuff that's happening in person versus the things that maybe we can do virtually, you know.

So it's— I mean, I think I'm hearing it's likely to be at least a hybrid model kind of going forward.

I think so.

Yeah, we did this, we did a survey of our— we always do a survey after each GMBU for all our employees to say, you know, what, what can we get better, what, what did we do, um, what suggestions you have for the future. And there was pretty much across the board people said some component of a, of a virtual piece of this makes a lot of sense. They also missed the everybody getting together for a day or two from all over the Midwest, you know, into one location, which there's a lot of value in that. So I would anticipate we keep that going too, but I think it expands some of our capabilities for sure, and it was a very, very successful event for us this year virtually.

Great, glad to hear it. Let's take some questions. So Libby, you've got a question. I'm going to unmute you. Hi, yeah, I put the question in the Q&A box, but there was a couple other questions like it, but What do you do if there are people in the firm who are not quite, you know, extroverts? Maybe they're kind of tentative about this whole thing, want to keep personal and work life separate, that kind of thing.

How do you deal with those, and is it something maybe that you screen for when you're hiring? It's— so I'll say this, it's not something we screen for when hiring. We have people who are very diverse across the board, right? Like the world is. So we have extroverts who love this stuff, they're social, they get it. We have introverts who just want to crawl into their shell and, uh, you know, not come out. Um, we fundamentally believe, number one, that every human craves some sort of interaction with other humans at some level. Um, so you, you participate at your own level, right? You don't have to share deep dark secrets about yourself. That's your choice. Nobody forces you. Nobody says, "Okay, now tell me about whatever, whatever," right? So, that's— it's not forced situation. So, you share what you're comfortable with. And even our massively introverted people have ways to contribute and be part of the discussion and do enjoy, even if it's just kind of sitting in the background listening to other people, what's going on. So, It works, and I don't think we'd ever screen for that and say we're only hiring people who want to, you know, share this level.

Yeah.

Great. Kristen Fulmar. Oh, great. You know, I think that was my— Libby kind of parlayed a little bit off of my question, just, you know, the ones who took longer to connect and embrace it, and you answered that since I had put that into the the question box. Great. So, Kristen, you're gonna yield your minutes to Drew. All right, Drew, there you go. You should be all right. Okay.

Yeah, so my question is— excuse me—

what is diversity like at your firm?

Is the all-inclusive sharing problematic for women or people of color, and has anybody ever asked that question?

Yeah, I think it's similar to, in some respects, to the introvert-extrovert. It hasn't, it hasn't been that you, again, we're not forcing people to, to share, um, maybe what they're not comfortable with. Um, and, and I think that's a little bit why the leader went first, why we had David go first, because there was sort of a, hey, I, I'm going to do this. This isn't a mandatory thing, but just so you can feel that it's okay. We haven't had anything either from any diversity problem that said, "I'm not comfortable sharing this," because it isn't a forced thing.

Yeah, I'll echo that. I haven't heard anything from a negative standpoint. If there's a couple things I would share is, number one, our diversity has increased over the last 5 years. We've been intentional trying to increase that, but It has increased, and those, you know, those people don't leave because of this. And I would also argue that this is more just maybe my personal belief system, but this type of a system helps us seek to understand each other in a more meaningful way. And so it actually allows, I think, a greater ability for people to share who they are and actually realize we are all different, right? Like, that's a beautiful and wonderful thing, and so I think it gives actually a platform for people to have a voice that they might not otherwise have.

Yeah, great. Julie Weston, I'll unmute you. Julie, you should be able to Sorry about that. Oh, there you go.

How are—

when a new employee starts, how are they brought into already established pod systems? Is there a whole trust exercise redone all over again, or how does that happen?

Yeah, so the answer is yes, sort of. We do light versions probably of it. Part of that is because we found the first time we were expecting this to take an hour and it was 3.5 hours later and people were still in there talking about who they were. And, and so there was a little bit of that for us. So we do different versions of that. We have small shares where each person goes around, shares just something about themselves, person shares something about themselves. We found it actually, it's a really great way to onboard people because it sort of gives them instant friends, 15 minutes every single day. And we're really intentional about the onboarding process. So we have coaches for people that, you know, they send them personal notes before they get there. They get a whole set of welcome packs, tell them what to expect. They know their coaches, they have a pod team, they get put on other teams. So they sort of have this sort of built-in instantaneous network of friends. And teams so they don't get lost. I think we get onboarded faster. And then we have the normal resource labs and things that let's teach people how it is that G&B does work. And so, no, we don't make them go through the full lifeline exercise every time someone new comes in. If anything, we probably haven't found out the best solution for that part yet.

They would go through it When they rotate and you kind of reassemble a new pod?

When they hit new pods, yep. Again, it's different versions, but yes, different versions of lifelines, yep.

Marjan Pearson. Might be muted. Hi, Chris.

Hi.

All of a sudden got a spam call at the same time. I think that my question has actually been answered, which was are the people within a pod also working on projects together, but it became clear that there was this initiative and then there are project teams as well, right?

Right, right. Yeah. Yes, that was intentional to begin with. But what we're doing right now is we're going with our team theme. We just started something we're calling super teams. So we are trying to align, kind of learn the things that we learned from these pods and how those work. How can we start to apply that to our project teams is something that we're trying to do. So again, it's similar philosophy to Team of Teams. We're empowering the teams to make their own decisions. We actually empower them to even decide what projects they want to sort of pull down from our, what we call a board. Hey, so we are trying to take the things we learned from pods and plug them into project teams, but our pods were intentionally set up to be anyone, so they weren't project-based.

And it was driven right out of our own company. Again, it wasn't Rob and I coming up with this. It was our employees saying, oh, we love our pods, like, we love those people so much. Wouldn't it be great if we could work on projects with our pod because we know them so well, we understand them so well? And so This is— and it's very recent. I mean, it's just within the last month that we started this. It was our last GMB University, we kind of launched this new phase. So look forward to the future of what happens with all of this. But trying to align projects into pod-like formats as well has become a strategy for us. But we are not getting rid of our existing pod structure because that's about relationship connection across the company.— and now having sort of our super team pods that focus on projects as well, we're hoping creates some efficiencies within the organization.

We'll have to check back with you and find out how it goes.

Yeah. Great.

Good question, Martin. Steven Olsen, you have a question about pod rotation details.

Yeah. Can you hear me okay?

Yep.

Yeah.

All right.

So, I think to some extent you answered the initial question. Question, which was, do you move people from pod to pod over time? But I guess, what, what does that process, you know, look like? You know, how do you, how do you handle that? It's like the draft.

Yeah, it's like the draft. So there, there is kind of a, a team, like we have a, uh, a culture and connection team in our company, and members of the, that group look at when it's time to realign pods, when the pods start to feel that way. We— they talk to the pod captains, they talk to the pod. So we try to get a blend and a mix of people and personalities. Um, for example, the extrovert-introvert question, right? You, you want a few people that are going to carry the conversations, who are going to sort of be energetic, be excited, move things forward, and not just have an entire pod of people who don't want to talk. So we try to look for those, those trends and those blends and, and get connections of people. We look at geography, we look at who needs to be connected to which office, we look at a whole variety of different things, and, uh, and that kind of ends up putting our blends together every 18 months. But a team sort of looks at that together and decides where we're going to realign the pods. And again, it's sort of temporary, right? It's 18 months and then you move on. So it's—

so And our, and our pod captains too, are, um, they aren't senior people in our organization. Um, we use it as a little bit of a leadership training ground in some respects. Um, there's a pod captain, there's a deputy pod captain. So when the captain's gone, um, it kind of takes on a life of its own. But, but it's also a little bit of a training ground of like, all right, well, if you can facilitate and lead a conversation amongst these 9 people, How— and, and you sort of get used to that and, and start to kind of flex that muscle. Um, what else, what else can you, you know, can you start to lead within our office? So it's, um, because people also after 18 months get burned out of being the pod captain. So, right, we pull people in and out of that role too. So it's multigenerational, it's cross-discipline pod captain leadership, it's, it's kind of everything. But roughly 18 months, it we find it needs to change.

Great. Uh, Jeanette Parker.

Hello.

Um, so my question was, uh, what are your mechanisms for the pods to share what they're learning and accomplishing with the wider firm? I think you may have mostly answered that already, but if there is any others.

Yeah, there's a lot of different ways that happens. So in addition to sort of the 30, 60, 90 check-in points, we do a variety of different things. One is we do cross-pod connections. So we'll set up where some pods will meet with other pods on a regular basis, and we kind of mix that up so they can talk with each other. But then we also use our intranet to post what pods are talking about., and they can just give summaries every once in a while so other people can comment, they can see what's going on. So we do have a variety of sharing mechanisms within the company to hear what topics and what things are bubbling up. So any pod that's got an issue or a topic or a question, we've had pods say, hey, we're going to do an experiment on this particular thing, so calling all pods, come help us out. "Hey, I'm doing this experiment," and then everybody's— all the other pods will step up or volunteer to help them with whatever that experiment might be. So yeah, there's lots of communication that occurs during that night, lots of communication during the 90 days.

How do you guys measure success? Like, how do you know that this is working?

So I think a few of those things are just literally our turnover rate. It's incredibly low now, I'll say, comparative to maybe what, where we were. Not that that was horrible, but people don't want to leave anymore. Again, it's a little bit of that they have a friend, and a lot of times it's the, if you have a friend at work, you're less likely to want to leave. I think our culture transfer amongst all our offices has been a big success that we worked hard at. I mean, worked really hard to make those 4 offices feel like one office.

Rob, can I stop? What is it— how do you know that culture transfer has happened between offices? Like, what does it look like when it hasn't transferred and when it has?

I guess for me, I don't know, David, you can chime in too, it's when we hear people using sort of the same language and thoughts and, hey, because we're going in this direction and we know that this is the thing that's important to us, to GMB, I think that's when I know. And then how people get treated within the organization. I think at least for me, those are my sort of two metrics with that.

Yeah, I totally agree with that, Rob. It's that we talk about alignment so much, about how when we're all aligned and focused on the same goal, we're just going to get there much faster. And then the other side of it is just the sort of the lesson learned or the failure story of when we had an office that it just wasn't connecting well, wasn't working. There was a sense of there's like a have and a have-not, right? If you're in this office, you're, you're part of the culture, you're part of— and the other people, it's like, oh, who are they? We forget about them, whatever that is. There's, there's not that feeling anymore. Every person is connected across the organization. Nobody thinks that the people in people in Indianapolis are strangers from the people in Grand Rapids or Detroit, right? They all know each other, even though they've maybe only met each other in person once or never, right? So I think that's success, definitely.

Awesome. Andrew Trickett.

Hi, good evening, or good afternoon in your case.

Having done this for some time, if you had your time over again, What would you do different that you'd share with someone starting on the journey?

It's a good question. I feel like because we flex stuff so quickly, we're the fail fast kind of company. We're sort of willing to try anything and let anyone try anything at some level. Nothing's coming to mind of like, what would I ask to do differently? I for sure would do the lifeline exercise again. I wish, and I guess, and some of you have pulled it out, I wish we had a better way to do Lifeline Lite when we have new pods or when we have new people coming in. That is something where we're going to play around with probably our next GMBU is it would get all the new people to at least share what's going on in their world with each other. I don't know.

Yeah, it's a, it's a great question, uh, and, and I don't, I don't know that I have a great answer for it either. Um, the, you know, getting as many people involved as possible early, as early as possible, I think is a, is a great, um, lesson. I mean, I think the other lesson is it's, it's all, it starts with the leadership. You have to Yeah, you have to be vulnerable in order to lead this. If, um, and then, and then let it— just let it go. Like, then stop. Like, lead it and then stop leading it.

It's almost—

yeah, maybe a good advice.

Light the match and then— yeah, yeah, great.

There's, there's maybe things, Rob, that you and I try to control too much at times, that maybe that's a lesson is, uh, you know, trust the people. Trust them, trust them, and let them go. And we do that, but like I wish we would do it even more.

Right on. Camille Potter.

Great.

So, you sort of already answered my specific question about strategically building pods to incorporate a variety of roles, but could you talk a little bit more about the thought process behind building the pods?

Yeah, so maybe I'll start kind of with the story at the beginning of how it formed. So we're kind of a weird office in that it's— we've never, uh, the way we sat in our original first office, uh, you know, got to 60, 70 people before we ever branched out. Um, everybody sort of sat mismatched. You weren't— oh, you didn't— the people you sat around weren't your project team. People you sat around weren't in your discipline. It really just kind of ended up being a haphazard thing, and for whatever reason, but people loved that. Like, it became endearing that you sort of were around a variety of people for that, that were just haphazard. So our first pods, the first ones we ever made, were just simply the 6 people who sat right around you. They became your first pod. And so we've, we've really just kept that spirit alive, which is just try to get kind of random people matched up with each other because that creates some of the strongest networks across the organization. Your project teams, you're with them all the time. Your discipline, you're with them all the time. Like the people you're— your friends, right? You're with them all the time. So you really want to get a good blend of people who aren't necessarily in the same discipline, in the same projects, or that are kind of your friends and buddies. That's where we think we have found the most success because that creates all of those great relationships in a much broader spectrum across the organization.

Yeah, and we started them out geographically based within kind of where they sat. The next iteration was they were like, yeah, we'd be comfortable with pulling from different people in the office and then they met and now we're in this frankly virtual iteration where—

Virtual pods, yeah.

Yeah. We're clearly at home.

Todd Henderson, you get the last question.

Oh my gosh, what luck.

Thanks, you guys.

This is, this is so cool. My question, I started to hear a lot of things that sounded Agile and Scrum-like, and I was curious.

You guys never used the S-word itself.

You said sprint, you have daily stand-ups, you have stable teams. Is there, is there influence there?

Are you doing other Scrum-y behaviors behind the scenes? No, for sure, there's for sure influence there. It was one of the books we read, How to Do half the work and— wait, no, all the work and half the time. I'm getting the title wrong, but it's Scrum. Um, and yeah, that's sort of the premise behind our super teams too. I will say, um, it's where the daily huddle idea came from. We're just not huddling about projects, uh, but our super teams are going to start in a more Scrum manner. Again, we're at day one, we're just trying to align people and projects. And I'll say it seems to be adopting faster than we thought it would, but it's, it's going to be a messy few months here. But it's already a messy few months, so why not add it all? But we're definitely looking at Scrum, especially the idea of this context shifting, this working on one thing with everyone all at the exact same time. We think there's a lot of efficiency in that.

The, uh, the interesting thing though, to maybe just bring it right back to the very beginning of the conversation, is Whereas Scrum, I think, is very project-focused and about creating agility and efficiency within a project process. We— all of the sort of the tools of Scrum that you're talking about, we did them to connect people, not to improve the processes. And I think that's a fundamental difference between why it's not really Scrum, because it's about people and how do we connect them in all of these ways. So the tools are there. But it's people over process.

And the other thing I think that makes us a little bit unique to be able to adopt it maybe a little easier is we don't track people's hours. So we don't—

I like how you guys drop, we don't track hours at 11:59.

So we don't plan our projects out by hours. We don't do any of that kind of stuff. We work off of deadlines and tasks. So ideally in our Scrum model, we're hoping we can get to, here's a full set of tasks. If you have the credentials to be able to pull them down and do that task, go ahead and do that task. We think there's, again, part of this whole flexible work and being anywhere in the world, we think there's some possibility there in the future for us.

Well, Rob, thank you. And you know what, that couldn't have been a better advertisement for the Hangout. So no, no, no, if you guys want to get into how GMB doesn't track hours and still makes money, um, stick around and join us in the Hangout and we can get into that. So, um, thank you, David and Rob, for your time and, and being so open and transparent and sharing with us. It's always fun kind of geeking out with the two of you. And thank you to our audience. We got through 10 of your questions today, so thank you for good questions and keeping them coming. Um, the recording of this session will be out soon. Um, you'll also see a link to the Google Doc and a short survey on this session from us tomorrow morning. So, um, here's a link. I'm going to put it in the chat to the Hangout space. You should also, if you registered for the Hangout, should have this in your email. So once you click on this link, you'll see a prompt that says, do you want to leave this webinar and join the Hangout call? Say yes, and you'll be there for about 60-90 seconds before the meeting starts. So if you have any trouble getting in, please email us at connect@knowledge-architecture.com. All right, go ahead, click on the link, head over to the meeting, and we'll see you there at the Hangout. Thanks, everyone.

Thank you.

Hey, Chris, just let me know before you go so I can, um, grab a screen capture if he's still here. Sounds good. Down to 15, 13, 11. All right, if you're still here, this is kind of a last call that we're about to close the, close the webinar and head on over to the Hangouts. All right, Susan, I'm going to do it in 5 seconds. Great.

Okay.