Louis Carter Show and Chris Worley, professor Pepperdine Graziadio Business School on Change Fluency

This is awesome. We have Chris Worley with us here today at the Louis Carter Show. Chris Worley is an awesome professor and luminary in the field of organization development at Pepperdine. He's the director of the Pepperdine School of Business. He's just phenomenal. And we get to talk today about a new research project that he's leading on change fluency. And isn't this neat? Who needs change fluency today? Everybody. We all need to be fluent in this new language of change and learn about it in companies like Google. What are they doing at Google and other companies? And welcome, Chris, to our show.

Thanks, Louis. It's good to be here. Always glad to sit around the campfire and chat with you. This time over the internet, but it's still good to chat with you.

It always is great to chat with you, Chris, and so many great things throughout the years that you've done contributed to the field. So prolific in your research. Everybody, I recommend that you check out Chris Worley's research in organization development. It is is invaluable today. And today we're going to wrap our hands around this new change fluency research that you've been doing. And I just love it because it's so important with resilience today and pivoting, not just for entrepreneurs, intrapreneurs, and practitioners and managers and leaders. Talk more about this concept. What is change fluency?

Got it. Happy to do that. The change fluency idea came out of a project, a learning process really that we were conducting at Google. A good friend and colleague, Claudie Jules, is the head of their organization design center of excellence there. And as he was looking at Google and where it was at and sort of on the heels of the Economist article that said, you know what, Google has finally grown up. It's no longer a young upstart startup company, Google's, you know, is a big mature organization now. And so what does that mean? What does that mean? And, you know, Jules and I had talked about agility and the kind of the research that I was doing on that and said, you know, let's start there. You know, let's start there and try and understand, you know, what Google looks like from an agility point of view. Because, you know, if you go around and you ask people who are the most agile companies you've ever heard of, a lot of people will list Google on their shortlist. And so we started there. It was sort of, okay, you know, given where Google is at, given the shifts that had taken place in the reorganizations to create Alphabet, the responsibilities of Google within the portfolio at Alphabet, and, you know, the increasingly broad range of products and services that Google was offering, He just wanted to say, let's figure out, you know, how agile are we and where are we agile and given how we've matured. And that was just the start of it. We did an assessment, we had a good conversation about where they were strong and weak with respect to agility, and then Jules said, okay, let's take the next step. The next step was what he called the Change and Design Forum. What I really like about this, Lou, is this is a process that anybody can go through. You know, this isn't unique to Google. It isn't something that just Google could do. If you think about the process they went through, it's a very flexible, adaptable, customizable process. And in this Change and Design Forum, it got set up. It was a bunch of people from Google, inside Google, but it was multifunctional and multi-stakeholder. He brought in business people, change management people, org design people, HR business partner. He brought in a bunch of different people representing different points of view from Google. And then I was the, you know, I was sort of the outside, you know, wonkish academic type. And we started just going through cases. What worked at Google? What didn't work at Google? What were the tools that were effective? What processes were effective? And we just kind of systematically went through the kinds of changes that Google was going through and needed to go through. And out of that process, one day Jules calls me up and he says, "What do you think of this idea?" And he's, you know, change fluency. And I said, "And you're adopting that metaphor from language fluency to talk about it? And he went, yes. And so we've been sort of trying to write about it and flesh it out a little bit to begin to, you know, talk about how it's different from agility. It's not the same thing, but how it's a concept that I think people can sort of think about and learn about and play with.

So tell me more of this in terms of the steps to fluency and how to introduce it into the organization. How do you see that happening?

Yeah, I think that's one of the cool parts about it. When you think about what we were doing with agility and the research that we did on agility, we did a, I think we did a pretty good job of sort of defining what it is, right? Timely, effective, sustained change when and where it makes a performance difference. I think we were, we did a pretty good job of that. Where I think we fell short a little bit was, okay, I understand what agility is, help me get there. And the concept itself didn't necessarily contain a means to an end. Whereas if you think about the notion of language fluency, there is a process for becoming fluent in language. Your first steps, you gotta learn the vocabulary, you gotta learn how to conjugate verbs, you have to you know, just get all the basics down and establish a really good foundation for the language. And after you get that basics down, the really hard part comes, which is sort of immersing yourself in the language, actually having to use it to interact with people, to talk with people, to read stuff, to write stuff. And, you know, At this point, you know some things, you know what you want to say, but sometimes the words don't come out. You struggle a little bit to say some things and you make some mistakes along the way, but that's part of the learning. And after you kind of go through that immersion process, you end up then on this other side of that where you're fluent. You're able to have conversations, you understand nuance, you can make jokes. You can play around, but, and I think this is an important piece to the concept, you're never a native speaker, right? A native speaker who's grown up all their life just understands some depth of the language that even being fluent you don't quite understand, and you're always trying to figure it out. You're always trying to get better in your fluency. So I think those steps parallel nicely what Jules and I started thinking about. If you want to be change fluent, then you got to get the basics down. You can't just, you don't walk before you crawl. You crawl first, then you walk, then you walk, then you run. And so getting those basics down, getting, understanding how to create flexible resource allocation processes, how to set goals more than once a year, how to include social justice and DEI issues and social responsibility and environmental sustainability goals with your economic and financial goals, sort of integrating those. You have to learn to do all these basics first, and then you have to lean into it, right? You got to lean into change. You got to try it out. You have to learn so that you go through that immersion process. And so at the other end of it, you end up being change fluent, which means that it's just sort of integrated. Jules even talked about it in terms of being almost unconscious. And so that's a vision, right? That's an aspiration to get there. And it represents a way of talking about and beginning to get on the path to fluency.

Absolutely. And as you speak about it, I kind of think of these 3 different areas, which is neurological, process, and practice. So you think of the, so the practice itself is around kind of what Curt Lewin was talking about, right? We keep practicing it. We were in it. We can become fluent in it. We experience it. Process really is that, you know, it's SHINE. It's, you know, storm, norm, perform. We form, storm, perform. We get into it. We make it happen. And we have to have conflict to do it. And the actual neurological aspects are this neural bundling of the language itself that we become more of living it so that our minds can actually practice it over time. So there's neurological practice and process and practice. All three are really important to this.

Yeah, that's right. You don't get to skip steps. It's too integrated of a process. If we're thinking about organizations, they're under a lot of stress for a lot of reasons today. But even without the COVID problem, they're under a lot of stress. Managers are under a lot of stress to get performance out. It's not like you can say, "Okay, here's the one thing you need to do in order to become change fluent." It's all three of those pieces that you laid out that have to be integrated. I remember, you know, when my wife and I were living in France and having to pick up the language, we spoke a little bit of French, but boy, there was a huge difference in actually going to the store, you know, talking to the plumber, talking to the guy who's installing the, you know, the phone system or the internet, you know, speaking with students in the classroom. That's a— there's a big difference between, you know, being able to say, "Hello, how are you? Where's the bathroom?" and having a conversation with people about, again, these nuances and the tenses and being able to adjust. So again, when Jules came up with this idea of fluency, it was sort of like I got it in my core. I understood what he was talking about because there is this middle place where you've got to work through it and you've got to integrate, you know, the neurological, the process, and the practice. You got to integrate those so that, again, back to Jules' comment, it's almost unconscious.

And that unconscious part of it is so important because we make the conscious practice unconscious so that we can easily practice it. And that's fluency, really. And fluency, and it's so global in orientation, isn't it? Because, you know, we have have those experiences of conflict, right, of misunderstanding or a depth of sharing in order to really truly get the essence of change fluency.

Yeah, I always like that diagram. You can find it out on the internet. You know, it's got two circles, right? One circle is your comfort zone, and then over here is a little smaller circle is the area of learning. And you got to get out of that comfort zone. In order to learn, in order to grok the thing and make it part of you. That doesn't excuse you from setting up the systems, right? You've got to have a good system for scanning the environment. You have to have a good system for refreshing your strategy. One of the things that came out of the fluency idea is change and design are the same thing. Google and many other organizations just operate at too fast a speed to say, okay, we're going to— here's the structure, let's set and forget. It's fine, it's ready to go. The designing process is now ongoing and the change process is ongoing. This integration that you're talking about extends to a lot of different dimensions and areas. And we just started talking about change and design are the same thing. Every time an internal org design, org change person works with a leader on a redesign, that's a leadership development opportunity. So all these things ended up being very integrated. And I think that's one of the really cool parts of the metaphor that he came up with.

I love it too. And for those people who are not in OD, design, what we're talking about is the work. We're actually talking about how are we going to implement the change? How are we going to have new meetings even? How are we going to hold the meetings?

Who should be there?

Yeah. We have to be there, show up. And people, they wonder, well, what do you mean by design? Well, the noun design and also the verb design, right? They're both. And to design is to co-create together, to develop what the new is. So you have the sort of the old and the present and the future. And that's what you're really talking is becoming fluent in the doing as a developmental opportunity and as a redoing opportunity as well.

I think that's one of the, you know, I can be outspoken at times and a bit opinionated. And one of the things that I've tried to be outspoken about is for those people who are in change management and organization development, I think this organization design concept is an incredibly powerful notion. When we started doing the agility work, it was definitely an org design problem. We're talking about, as you mentioned, we're talking about the structures, the systems, the processes, the way work happens, who meets, how often do they meet, what do they talk about, what kind of decision rights do they have. Those, all those different features of an organization's design, I think, have to be complemented by a change process. So you can't separate them, right? Design and change are just the same thing now in today's world. I think that's just an opportunity for the org development communities to learn the concepts of org design and to recognize that any good change process, any good organization development process is probably tinkering in some way with the organization's design to pull people and systems and processes into place in service of some objective that we're trying to achieve.

And what you're saying, I think, is so important for people to hear, which is there are real structures and practices that need to be in place. Some things that we take for granted, like decision rights. We don't— so is that the person who's making the decision? Am I the person? Make it obvious. Make it real. Sometimes we just often We just say it's real, or we don't know it's real, right? And this is making what is unconscious conscious again, right?

Yeah. Well, that's the thing with change, right? If you think about change as a, again, as a process of moving from one sort of design to another, or one under the way things are right now, today's world, right? You sort of have a sense, okay. That group makes this decision or I get to make that decision. But when you change things, those decision rights might also be changing. And if you don't address them, if you don't, like you say, raise them from my assumption was that you always made that decision, but we've changed things in such a way that maybe you don't, but your team does. And we have to go through that process consciously to say, okay, Just so everybody knows, Chris doesn't get to make the decision anymore, but his team is going to. So you have to start thinking about how Chris's team thinks about this instead of just Chris. So that process of change means that a lot of stuff that was assumed needs to be explored or re-explored. And you say, OK, it stays the same, or this too has to change. All those pieces have to be— alignment still represents a good idea, it's still a good concept, it's still a good metaphor for thinking about how to keep systems moving forward and again trying to achieve these multifaceted objectives. Jules was really clear that fluency was different than agility because it was trying to achieve ESG objectives, not just financial, but environmental, social, and governance kinds of issues.

And to be exact about that, we're doing ESG and we're doing financial, and that is our purpose because it may come from the top or may come from the decision right people. At that point, it doesn't matter, does it?

Yeah. No, we were really clear. You can't And, you know, the CEO directive, the Business Roundtable directive about moving from shareholder capitalism to stakeholder capitalism, you know, was sort of the symbolic expression of all this. But if you are out maximizing profitability, right, if you're maximizing profitability, that pushes out attention, resource allocation, investment in things that don't appear to be contributing to the profit, the maximizing of profitability. So that requires a thought process to think about how am I going to optimize, jointly optimize financial issues and social issues and governance issues and environmental issues. We're going to think about how those things all go together and to your point, it's got to be conscious. It can't be, "Oh, well, you know, somebody else will take care of that. We've got a DEI group. They'll worry about that." Well, actually, if you set up a DEI group separate from your environmental group, separate from your finance, they're actually competing with each other internally for resources and management attention. So that has to be a conscious thought.

It was just saying that the DE, DA, and other groups competing, right? And they have competing thoughts, yet they all can work together toward the same. And this process change fluency helps them work together toward the same. Are there ways of integrating various factions and groups that you've seen that are bringing them to the table, first of all? Because often they compete, right? Are there some tips or tactics for OD or people inside HR, business partners, anyone really, how to bring together?

You know, maybe not surprisingly, I think it's a structural solution. If we separate all those different groups and they all have separate budgets and we only have, you know, a fixed budget amount, then everybody's competing. Structurally, what I've— and I don't know if I'd call it a trend. I would say it's probably some noise that could turn into a trend, and that is sort of reorganizing these different groups into one unit. For example, at the Chemours chemical company, Susan Kelleher, the CHRO there, under the HR organization, she also has the corporate responsibility commitments. The HR person is also responsible for the organization's commitment to the environment. We've seen some different organizations, WL Gore, Google's doing this, Nike's thinking about it. There's some different organizations that are thinking about putting different parts of HR with different parts of the organization. So we see, for example, HR and strategy coming together, or organization development, OE groups coming together with the strategy group. Because what a beautiful combination. Where is the organization going from a strategic direction? At the same time as they're thinking about that, they've got the organization design and change folks joined at the hip talking about, "Okay, if we decide to go that way, how are we going to resource it, put the workers in place, put the processes and systems and rewards in place so that we move in that direction?" Why don't we have strategy and sustainability connected to each other? So part of my solution, or part of my, what I see happening, and like I said, I'm not sure it's a trend. I think it's noise, but it's a really good piece of noise that I've been paying attention to, is organizations are trying to think about what's the right combination of these things that would push an integrated agenda forward.

Excellent. You know, and the only way to push that agenda forward is through change fluency, because if we cannot really bring people together, if we can't have that fluency language, design language, implementation language, we will be lost. We will say, "Well, how do we do this? Why are we doing this? Who has decision rights? Is it okay to do this? Who has permission to be here? Can we take time to do this?" And we think, "Oh, get back to our day job. Get back to our day job." It's not about— right? It's about that is the day job itself.

That's one of the pieces of brilliance that I think, you know, in Juul's design of this learning and why I think other people, other organizations can do this. It's not just the Google thing. What Jules brought together, people with different language sets, line managers, business leaders, HR folks, OD folks, change folks, he brought them together. And, you know, the first few meetings were a lot of it, although we were debriefing cases and dissecting what worked and didn't work, we were also building a shared language. So that, you know, as the OD change folks went into work with a particular business and leader, they started developing a shared language about what they were talking about. And that language then led to an idea that you have to work at the cadence of the business. Being fluent means you work at the cadence of the of the culture that you're in. So, you know, a lot of times organization development, change management people come in and they have their, okay, here's the steps we're going to go through, 2 weeks on this, 6 weeks of their 4 meetings. And they're pushing their agenda, their cadence on the business instead of saying, okay, what's the rhythm of the business here? What's the language that we should be using that will allow us to work within their way of thinking? And adjust and move it in a positive direction. I think that's part of the fluency idea.

It definitely is. And you can imagine saying that you want your meeting and you want this certain way before a board meeting, or the board asks for certain things and, "Time out!" You can't do that. You have to work and kind of surf with the system. And I remember back in the '90s, remember the organizational learning kind of phase where everyone was kind of going in. They had taxonomy lexicon specialists, knowledge management specialists. Is that kind of thing unearthing now as you see it at Google with Jules and what your work is too, is that specialization in this, in language and lexicon knowledge management. So it's a little bit more precise and conscious.

Yeah, I think the issue is, if you think about it, there's two sides of this conversation. There's the people who are trying to help, and you mentioned Ed Sheeran earlier, He's done a lot of thinking about what help means. But on our side, you know, on the helping side, I do think we have to have some shared language so that we can move our ideas forward and develop them, build on them, whether it's, you know, theory or frameworks or whatever. I do think we have to have some shared language so that if we're talking about organizational learning, We all understand that we're talking about the same thing. The same that was happening, it is happening with agility. A lot of times when I go into organization, the first thing I ask is, what do you mean? I think it's one of those words that when people say the word agility, they're like, oh, we all know what that means. And that's just not true. There's a lot of myths and misconceptions about what it is. So on our side, I do think we have to have some language. Shared language that allows us to move our ideas forward and accumulate our learning. When we're helping systems, I think it's important that we leave our jargon behind and be good enough and know our craft well enough to go into a system and say, "What's your language? When you say strategy—" I remember this is a Good one. When I was first working with Microsoft, I was trying to, we were doing strategy work in some of the different businesses. And I was trying to help them talk about strategy. And I would use the word strategy and they would nod their heads. And then pretty soon I just started noticing they kept using the word bet, B-E-T. I need to make a bet. And that was their word for strategy. I had to take a chance. When you roll the dice, it doesn't always come up the number that you want, but I have to make a bet. If I don't make a bet, if I don't commit resources, if I don't say I'm going in this direction, I get no traction. So for me, it was, I got to learn their language. And I think we need to know our craft well enough and then go into the system and say, what's your language? How can I understand it and begin to use your words so that I can work with your system and help you change your system. You own it. And so I think there's got to be that flexibility on our side.

We've heard it all from Professor Chris Worley today. He's done his job today, no doubt, and taught a great class here today about his work with Jules at Google and so many other companies on change fluency. Thank you for educating us, letting us understand about this new research and really broadening it in a way that we can understand it for our companies. Professor Worley, thank you so much for joining us today.

Uh, Louis, always good to chat with you. Be well. Best of the holidays to you and, and your family. Happy holidays to you too. Okay, take care.