Peernovation: What's Next? (Season 2020, Episode 7)

Welcome to Peer Innovation, the podcast with Leo Battari and me, Randy Cantrell. Building on our previous shows, The Year of the Peer and What Anyone Can Do, we turn our attention to helping business leaders build high-performing teams. We'll talk with a diverse group of thought leaders who will share stories and insights that will help you and your teams achieve new heights. If you believe there is strength in numbers and that meeting the challenges of the future can only be achieved if we do it together, then join us for the conversation. Welcome back. We are up to episode 7 of the Peer Innovation Podcast, Season 2020. So 7's a, uh, 7's a good number. It's a good number. So today, uh, just Leo and I, no guests, but we're going to have a conversation. And it really is, Leo, it's a conversation that a lot of folks are having, especially with the current pandemic that we are in. As we hit the record button today is Wednesday, July 8th, 2020. And the question on a lot of people's mind is, what's next?

Yeah. Well, first of all, I hope everyone had a good Fourth. I know it was not the usual festivities for most of us, but, um, you know, uh, still, I hope a good 3-day weekend for everyone. But, um, yeah, you know, we'll be having guests most every week, but it's also time to kind of reflect a little bit and think about what's next. In fact, it was funny, that was the article that I submitted for CEO World today that was funny because it was based on— remember Dan Hoffman was on the show a few weeks ago, CEO of Circles, and Dan Hoffman just out of the blue brings up John Dewey, right? Great educational philosopher essentially, and, you know, is about as good as it gets in terms of his ideas holding up and standing the test of time, right? So anyway, he brings him up, I bring him up a little bit. It gets me thinking, you know, he's got this book called Experience and Education, which by the way should make book writers out there feel pretty good because this is a hugely important book. And it literally, by the time you get into his text, it begins on page 17 and ends on page 92. So just to show you that really great important books don't have to be really long. But the content is really awesome and it's really rich. But it was fun to reread that. And once I got done with it, of course it didn't take real long, although it takes longer than you'd think just because it's a bit dense as far as the reading. But it got me thinking, God, what other thing do I want to either reread or look at? And I realized that I had never finished General Stanley McChrystal's book, Team of Teams, which I said, I've got to do that. And And I did, and it was so phenomenal, just incredible in terms of, you know, talking about smaller teams, larger teams, the scale of all of it, but the focus on adaptability versus efficiency, right? Most teams are all set up, everything's well planned, everyone has their duties and their jobs and the things they're supposed to do. And when the world's working perfectly and we walk into the office and everything is as expected, It all works great. Um, you know, throw some wrenches in there, throw in some crises, whether that's economic, technological, health, you know, whatever it happens to be, and things can change in a hurry. And so the premium on teams being adaptable versus just efficient becomes huge. You know, you, um, and it goes back a little bit too, and this is why it was kind of fun thought to do this show too, because so many of these themes go back to recent guests that we've had. Look at Frances Shull's work on squircles, right? And the idea of being adaptable and the notion that you can't operate in a world of chaos by logic, because chaos doesn't play by your organizational rules. But anyway, and that got me to thinking about actually a high school teacher that I had who unfortunately is not with us today. But he was a math teacher of mine in 1975 when, you know, my early years in high school. And he was an amazing man. In large part, was not only teaching— first of all, teaching— he was an African-American man teaching in an all-white high school. He was a concert pianist. He had invented various games and written books, and he was more accomplished, I mean, in so many respects than anybody on that high school faculty. And, but as an instructor, he was so amazing in that up until that time, whenever I went into various classes, what did teachers do? They would, they would show you a problem. They'd show you the formula about how to solve it, expect you to memorize that formula, and then you'd go on and you'd memorize all the ways you saw this problem. Great. I know how to solve it. Well, Mr. Botner, Clifford Botner, um, was one who said, ah, that doesn't help you much. What if, you know, you're— you take the SATs and you get some problem you've never seen before? What are you going to do then? You know, you don't have the formula. Um, so you have to know where these formulas come from, how to think in mathematical terms, how to understand the language of math in a way that would allow you to have the tools to figure something out on your own if you had to, if you saw something that you'd never seen before. And it made me really think about how powerful that lesson was, and that he wasn't just teaching us math. He was teaching us to be adaptable. He was teaching us to be ready and prepared and understand what's behind what we learn, not just what we learn. To show people why, not just how. And it's incredibly powerful. And, you know, and with that, what does that happen? That circles back to Dewey. Because Dewey and what we talked about with him, with Dan Hoffman and all this collateral learning. When we get a group of people or a team of people and they're working together, they're not just learning whatever content is in front of them. Simultaneously, they're also learning and building muscles around how to collaborate, how to work together, how to be better at that. And the more they have opportunities to do that, the better they're going to be at it. And I think during these times in particular, if we are simply having online courses for employees where they sit in front of a computer and they deal with content and it's just on their own and they pass the, you know, the little test or whatever, and then they go on to the next course without having them really working and learning together, they're really robbing themselves, I think, of a huge opportunity. And I think at this time when people are trying to take this time to think about, hey, how do we develop our people? How do we become more adaptable? How do we become more collaborative and work together more effectively? You know, I think that that's kind of where it's at right now. And so it's been really fun to hear people talk about all this stuff. And I know one of the things that we'd love to get from folks is what's happening at your organization? You know, or if you've got a team that you think is performing really great under these circumstances, we'd love to hear your story. We'd love to hear what that's all about and whether that's something we can share on your behalf publicly on the show among other stories about great teams and great examples of what's going on out there. Or, you know, we talked about doing panels, you know, this year and using circles. Let's get the team on the show and talk about why Why is it that you guys work together so well? What's so effective about it? And what are you able to do? So I think it could be a lot of fun.

Yeah. And we encourage anybody in the audience, if you care to participate and help us out, just go to the website pearnnovation.co and use the contact form there. And that will immediately forward over to Leo and me. And yeah, we'd love to hear those stories. You know, As you were talking about that, the clients that I've been working with through this pandemic especially, one of the things that seems to be problematic to this whole notion of being adaptable is just our collective restlessness. You know, we've got major sports here in America, and for those of you that are listening, internationally. These major sports here in North America have obviously been dormant, and we've now got the NBA today reporting to this bubble in Florida. You've got Major League Baseball trying to figure out what they're going to do. You've got the NFL doing the same thing, and we've got huge spikes in the virus numbers, much more so than they were in March, and yet we've got this collective consciousness in North America of our antsy-ness. Yes, give us sports, give us sports now. And I heard one athlete, I believe he was a major league baseball player, and pardon me, but I don't recall the fellow's name, but it was pretty insightful. He said, you know, I don't know that we've earned the right to overcome our restlessness to go ahead and have major league sports, because we've got people that aren't even willing to put a piece of cloth over their face out in public. And as it pertains to groups and teams and performance, and we see it every day exemplified in social media outbursts and people that are misbehaving horribly over the whole mask thing, which I get has been politicized, but forget the politics. Of it all, of just teams being really antsy, people being trapped at home. They really want to interact. Other people don't want to interact. Leave me at home. And I've dealt with a— well, every client I've had through this pandemic has had to somehow wrangle their teams, whether these are small groups or whether these are much larger groups of people to just not have the restlessness that gets in their way of adapting to whatever we need to do, whether that's temporary or whether that's going to be for some extended period of time here.

Yeah, I, and, and I have to tell you, when you talked about, um, where I also thought you were going to go is talking about just the, the clients you're working with, because I know you're doing a lot of work with, um, you know, municipalities right now. And I think about just everything that's involved in that, right? When you, when you imagine, and this is where sometimes you can see where it can be difficult, especially, and I'm, of course, I don't know your clients and kind of what the setup is, but presumably, um, when you either get large organizations or organizations where they're, they're hierarchical and there's lots of approvals necessary and things like that, it doesn't make you very nimble. You know, under those circumstances, you know, and I think organizations are finding out quickly. This is not unlike a project I dealt with a long time ago, um, with, um, Disney, quite frankly, where they were relooking at their crisis communication programs, not because they weren't excellent, but because they weren't fast enough in the age of someone who can post a YouTube video within seconds of an incident happening at a park, for example, or something like that, right? I mean, it's just everything's moving way too quickly. And so the idea of how do you rethink how you do things, you know, in a way that protects, you know, everyone's interests. But, you know, I would imagine this has to be a really difficult time for, you know, you've got your town managers, city managers, mayors, people like that who are trying to figure out not just what's the best for our healthcare workers or for our small businesses or for, you know, our parks or for our local, you know, all these, all these things. But having to really be that person who sits in that chair and not unilaterally necessarily, but that's the consideration that they have to have when you consider people's health and everything. So what are you seeing out there in terms of some of the challenges they're facing and, and how they're doing that.

Well, there's just— there's— it's— to piggyback on a phrase that you threw out there, I mean, it is complete— it's chaos, you know, not their management of it, but just all of the— all the information coming in. So you've got the pandemic, and none of us knew back in March, you know, really what we were up against. I'm no— I'm no virus expert, but, you know, I don't even know what I know at this point, you know. So you've got all these, and here in Texas where I'm located in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, and city government here is, uh, in a major metropolitan area, as you can well imagine, you know, we've had— we've got multiple counties represented here in the DFW area. So you've got You've got these power structures at the county level, and then it filters down to the individual city or town level. And then of course we have our governor. And sometimes though, sometimes all the information is conflicting. Sometimes the health experts, you know, have conflicting advice and everybody's concerned about the economy. And now throw on top of it the social unrest. Due to some of the events that have happened in recent weeks. And you've got protests that sometimes are getting out of control, sometimes are perfectly as they ought to be, in my opinion, peaceful and non-destructive. And you've got this whole police issue. So they're really dealing with a multiple multiple issues that are all major, major, major issues. Uh, it's unprecedented. It's unprecedented. And, uh, they've got a lot of constituents. They've got a lot of people, you know, where a regular business person, which is my roots, my, I mean, I'm completely a fish out of water in, in this space. I stumbled on this space some years ago and kind of fell in love with it to serve these people. You know, all my work is leadership executive coaching kind of work. I'm not a consultant, but these people are, are faced with trying to keep their citizens happy and safe, trying to keep their employees happy and safe, and all of the politicians that they serve happy and safe. So they've got a lot of, you know, it's a lot, it's a lot of pressure. Adaptability has got to be their middle name because if they can't do that, they just don't last. It just eats you up. Now, efficiency, on the other hand, I think most would readily admit, yeah, we give up a whole lot. We give up a whole lot in efficiency because they do have to be adaptable, which may be a worthy idea or conversation of the balance between adaptability and efficiency. In that world, they have got to be very adaptable. They would be the first to tell you they try to be. Obviously, they're very concerned about their dollars and about their budgets. And with this economy, they're going to get hurt. The budgets going into the next fiscal year are going to look very different than they look right now because of the economy. Tax dollars, uh, hotel, hotel money, you know, that's all but dried up. So a lot of their revenue streams are really going to take a hit. So they're going to have to even be more adaptable and more strategic, but they do give up something when it comes to, to the efficiency side of stuff.

Yeah, no, it's, um, there's just obviously, um, a lot going on. One of the things that— of course, we're having a good time, actually. We're getting a lot of requests, which is great, for people who want to be guests on the show. And that's really good. But on the other hand, we want to be really selective and careful, only from the perspective— and not that the guests aren't great. A lot of the people who want to be on the show are terrific. They're subject matter experts in their own right. And they're very accomplished in their own right. The question is whether, um, you know, how well do they serve our audience in terms of the, of the theme, you know, and high-performing teams and what that looks like and the contribution they have to that kind of that specific conversation and not whether they can't contribute to it, but whether they are the best at contributing to that. Um, so, you know, again, uh, I think for, for people out there who, um, you know, are interested in Being part of this conversation about teams, particularly during this time where we're talking about things like adaptability and being innovative and future-ready, a term that Executive Growth Alliance loves to use quite a bit in terms of describing what they hope to achieve for their members who tend to be mid-level executives at larger companies, right? These are the next generation of leaders in many respects. So, or, you know, it's not dissimilar from what, you know, when we had Alexander Keenan on the show and Win Mastermind and his folks, or what Vistage Groups or Tech Canada Groups or all those folks, everybody's in it. Everybody's trying to work together to figure out how they can be better leaders in a world where we're walking into a future we can barely imagine. So how do you prepare for a test that you don't know what the questions are going to be? Or prepare for something that, you know, you haven't seen before. And in the case of what you were describing, municipalities, they're not only seeing things they haven't seen before, they're seeing multiple things they haven't seen before, and they're all happening simultaneously. And you can imagine the—

And they're having to manage these things largely, well, today, they're having to manage these things remotely. I mean, you've got town halls here in the metropolitan area that are for all intents and purposes shut down to the general public, and they've got skeleton crews. And in some cases, depending on the city, some people will work certain days of the week there in the facility, and other days other people will. And in some cities, there's just one or two people and there's nobody. I mean, the building— the buildings are empty and everybody is doing business like we're doing on this Zoom call.

Right.

So you've got these horrific challenges and they're not able to get face to face, which has been their custom. And they, by nature, it is a very meeting-intensive kind of an operation. They all are. I mean, I learned that very quickly early on. These people have got booked calendars from the time they get up until You know, some the time they go to bed. So, so they're having to do it with different methodology. Hey, let me shift gears and ask you, because it kind of fits with this conversation of what's next. And I'm going to ask it because somebody a few weeks ago asked me, and you and I haven't had this conversation, so I'll blindside you with it. You're starting your launch of peerinnovation.co. Peerinnovation. The whole— just share with the audience and share with me that the— for you, I mean, at some point, that was the what was next for you. And you've had a number of what's next. And before we're done here, we do need to kind of tease and talk about the upcoming book, Peer Innovation, the same title. But the work itself and the launch of the company and and what you hope to do. Share that with us.

So, yeah, I think it really starts back, you know, I'll go back to when The Power of Peers was finished back in 2016. And I met with a group of chairs in San Diego, Vistage chairs. And, you know, as Vistage chairs will tend to do, they'll ask you a lot of questions about, okay, now what are you going to do? What's this look like? And, you know, and they really helped me drill down to, recognize that, okay, the book isn't the completion of anything. It's the start of something. And so what happens with this work other than the hope that some people buy it, pick up the pages, read it, get something out of it, and go— how do we become much more proactive about driving the narrative about what makes great groups, um, you know, be so powerful so that at the time it was so more CEOs and business leaders would have that as part of their consideration set when it came to what am I going— what resource am I going to tap to try to get better for myself, my team, or whatever, right? So when I get into doing that and then ended up developing a workshop that I've worked with high-performing groups now, you know, as you know, in North America and, and, and the UK is The more that I've done these and the more that I've actually been able to work with some cross-functional work teams inside companies at the same time, the more applicable I saw this work. Um, so instead of— it kind of was like this, right? You, you could have stopped writing, stopped after writing the book in the hopes people would just read it. You could stop at the workshops for CEO groups in the hope they'll actually take it into their companies. Or once you realize that you've got something that's been pressure tested and really good, and you can directly bring it into their companies and so that people can feel it and touch it and see it firsthand, that's, that's where I think the rubber meets the road in terms of what has driven the journey over time. It didn't start out that way by any stretch, and it's been kind of a real iterative process as this has gone along. And, you know, for me, I needed to personally have a comfort level with the integrity of the content to know how it holds up and how it works and what that looks like for people. And also a central piece of it is the kind of self-determination part of it. You know, I don't go into groups or companies and tell them what they should be doing. I just give them the framework where they explore that for themselves and they come to their own conclusions and action items and all. And quite frankly, the better group or the better team, the better the team. They get just as much, if not more, out of the workshop because, you know, great teams and great groups have great expectations of themselves. And they are always looking to raise that level of excellence. So I think when it's something as simple as being able to facilitate teams having the kind of conversations that aren't just going to take place organically. They're just not. I mean, they're just— people, you have to have a framework and you have to set out time and you have to put people and have them feel comfortable in a situation where they can really talk and share about what everybody wants and how they can move forward together. And once you can do that, yeah, that's something to get pretty excited about. And so The more I do that, the more I continue to do that, whether that's virtually or in person. But that's really what that journey is all about. And what peer innovation isn't just, you know, kind of a turn of phrase term, you know, the idea of peer influence was that we are influenced by the people who surround us, right? We know that. We know that's a pervasive and powerful force in our lives. We also know and where the term peer advantage came from, from the first book, that if we are more selective, strategic, and structured about who we surround ourselves with and to get us to achieve whatever goal we have, whether that's a group individual goals or a team collective goal, that we give ourselves a heck of a lot better chance. I think when we're operating from a place where we have shared values, common goal and all of the differences and unique perspectives and everything you can bring to the table and you work together really, really effectively, now you're creating something larger than yourself. Now it's just— it's innovation by many and, you know, very powerful. And certainly things that I've ever been a part of, whenever I've been part of a team that created something really, really great, it was never a situation where it was one person's idea that no one ever added anything to, and it just made it from beginning to end. You know, it's just everyone had something to contribute and it made it better. And even if there you've got an idea person in the room who comes up with that initial idea, that's fantastic, but get a team of people who offer different perspectives around that idea and really can bring it to life. That's super powerful, and I think that's what peer innovation is all about whether you're a part of a group or you're part of a team. If you're part of a group, you're going to build the muscles. That's your practice field for collaboration and for peer advantage and peer innovation. And so, yeah, so that's what I'm doing and it's what we're doing and it's what is so exciting and so fun.

Well, and to be fair, our, our view of, of the word peer is, is much broader than maybe what the average bear might just first think about. Because you said it in, in, in what you just said, which, which is great, and I love it, which is why, you know, I tried to tether myself to you some years ago because I just, I was pretty, I was pretty passionate and in love with your work and, and have gotten more so through the years that we've known each other. But it's that It's everybody, you know, because in, in this podcast started out, the first iteration of this podcast was Year of the Peer, and it was Leo talking to people. The second iteration was What Anyone Can Do, which was really an outgrowth of the first one because everybody that we talked to, the people that really had made an impact in their life, yes, there were peers, meaning people that were kind of on the same same plane and had a lot in common, but there was grandparents and there were parents and there were kids, children, and there were teachers and all these people that influence us. And so we are using it in a much broader sense, which is why Leo's initiative to go inside companies that have teams— you've got a leader who's got a team, and the team could be a small team of a handful of people, it could be a team of dozens of people They aren't necessarily peers in the technical sense, but they're all tethered together. And so it's still these conversations, to your point, that I think we fool ourselves into thinking that the conversations that we need to have, we're going to have. And that's just not the case. You and I both know in the real world, in the wild, that does not happen.

It doesn't. I mean, You know, think about Bruce Tuckman's work, right, of forming, storming, norming, performing. How many teams actually come together and before they get going they say, okay, we're going to have our forming meeting. This is where we're going to develop a charter. We're going to talk about what the rules of the road are. What are the values we have? What are the— how are we going to work together? Instead, everyone comes together with assumptions about what good work habits are, what on time means, what all kinds of crazy stuff. Um, And then when people get disappointed in one another and mad at each other and this, that, and the other thing, no one ever really set the ground rules to begin with. And so we don't tend to have the conversations. We think that the— we put off the conversations we should have at the beginning. And all we do is delay it so that we end up having harder and even more difficult conversations later on. It's a heck of a lot easier when you've laid things out to a point where if there is a misunderstanding or something, you've got something to go back to. You've got something that you all looked one another in the eye and agreed upon right out of the gate. And that's a, that's a big difference, you know, but you've got to take time to do these kinds of things. And, and you also have to realize that something like that, These are all journeys. They're not destinations. You know, we talk about psychological safety in groups. This isn't something you achieve. This is something you might enjoy in a given period of time. But if you're not all over it and paying attention to it and watering that plant, if you will, you know, all the time, it's going to start dying on you. So, yeah. And so having those not only just those initial conversations, but those frequent conversations to talk about how are we doing, you know, um, and, and taking assumptions and, and taking people filling in those communication gaps that we've talked about as much out of the equation as humanly possible.

Some of the more powerful challenges that I've put forward to my clients through this pandemic, especially is if you take a leader of a department, let's say, is because they are really wanting to form— they're really struggling in some cases, my clients at least, to maintain, build, improve cohesiveness, for lack of a better word. And I've just encouraged them to have a conversation of what do we want to be. So in keeping with today's theme of what's next, I think for for your organization, those of you that are listening, for your team, for your group. I have found it helpful, clients have found it helpful to simply all have that conversation, which is not, it's not a conversation that you would just organically have. A leader has to march forward and say, who do we want to be? What do we want to be? And out of those conversations, I've had more CEOs and I've had And more leaders tell me they unearth things that they had no idea members of their team were thinking, concerns that they had, pluses and positives that they felt. It's just these conversations that aren't forced, but I would describe them— how would you describe them? I would describe them as they're just very strategic. I don't know a better way, but you probably have better words for it than that.

No, I just think to myself, if you're sitting around and you're a team and you think, okay, we're a really good team. So I want to know, how do you know that? Right? You know, you brought up sports before, you know, you don't play other people. You don't play against teams from other companies to know like, okay, here we're going to give you both a similar challenge and we're going to see how you do with it. You know, who's really, really good at it and who sucks at it. I mean, you know, that And so you don't know, at least from that perspective, right? So you've got to have some criteria. You've got to have some framework and some, you know, piece that not just speaks— and this is, we've talked about this before— because it's much more in many respects about the outputs that help you achieve the outcomes. So just because you may be achieving good numbers doesn't mean you're a great team. What you might find out is if, boy, if we really were a great team, what might we be able to really do? So it's a tricky thing. So I think just having those conversations and I think depending on who you are, what industry you're in, how you need to work together, how you can really get behind truly being excellent at what you do and having that be— that's why we always talk so much about learning and growing and You know, and all that. And I do think that the great teams aren't the ones who hold a national championship or a world championship out as the goal so much as the reward for the everyday commitment to getting better. You know, they just do it all the time and they're relentless about it. They, as individuals, you know, so that they can bring their best self to the team. And as a team so they can best work together. And that's just kind of what it's all about.

And that's what we're trying to do here at the Peer Innovation Podcast. We're just, we're trying to get better. So what's next for us? We've got a number of great guests lined up. We've got others that are kind of in the queue. As you would imagine, some of the people that we hope to bring you on the podcast, they may not necessarily be people that you just see on every other podcast. And these are busy folks, so you kind of have to get in line sometimes. But we've got a long list. Again, if you want to contact us and you've got stories, if you are on a spectacular team that you're proud of, if you've got positive or negative stories that you care to share, just go to the website peerinnovation.co, use that contact form. Tell us about it. And I can promise you, we'll reach out, we'll return the message to everybody. Tell us a little bit about the book and I'll give you the last word, Leo.

Yeah, this will be, and this will be brief because the book is going to be with an editor for another month, probably at least. And so, and I'm real excited about that. You know, I think any book worth its salt out there and any writer of a book like that has a great editor to thank for it. So the process is really important and really helpful. And it's the— so I'm really excited about it. You know, of course I'd love to have it back tomorrow so that I can kind of keep the process moving, but at the same time I understand how valuable it is to go through this line edit process I'm going through right now and have it done really, really well. So I'm really excited about working with the folks at Archway Publishing who have been, you know, amazing. I will tell you, there's been an incredibly professional group to be working with there. So really excited about that. And they're a division of Simon Schuster and just, um, just real excited about the whole thing. But, uh, anyway, um, just looking forward to, um, so our guests in the coming weeks. And, um, uh, just hope you all, you know, stay well and stay safe. And, uh, we will, uh, we'll see you soon.

Thank you for joining us. To subscribe to the podcast and Learn more about how you can engage peer innovation for your organization, contact us on the website at peerinnovation.co. Till next week, remember, the power of we begins with you.