016 - The Courage to Say: I Don’t Understand with Jussi Hermunen

What happens if we dare to tear off the mask of professionalism and actually risk showing up for real? I'm your host, Myriam Hadnes, and this is Unprofessionalism.

I enjoy being the Rebel slash corporate therapist on the outside, and that's why we're hired, because from the inside it's very difficult to instigate a change because we can always be the silly ones. Why is this process so stupid? I get to ask this to top management and they allow me that because I'm an external.

Hello, Jussi.

Hello, Myriam.

Welcome to the show.

Thank you.

Jussi, Please share with me, with us, an anecdote of a time when you've been unprofessional and it turned out to be actually a pretty cool move.

I work a lot in my life with big organizations, like established organizations, and in my mixed pool of skill sets and professions, I tend to work in a way that's typically not maybe anticipated by the customers or their customers or the other vendors. And a big customer of ours in the company that I run, they had a magnanimously big ERP renewal going on. And whenever you tell people ERP renewal, people tend to shrink a bit and go a bit gray, like, oh, it's one of those. The mental image is like at least 7 years of admin hell and gazillions of Excel files reaching people that they shouldn't reach and Word documents and whatnot and Visio diagrams.

So ERP, just for those who don't know.

Yeah, good call. I'm all for acronyms and then I drop them off casually like any consultant and then everyone nods and no one knows what I'm speaking of. Like enterprise resource planning systems. or research platforms, if you may, vast systems that control how an entire big entity works, like workflows, user interfaces for sales and customer service and warehouse, from warehouse management to how is this thing delivered where, and so on and so on. So the blood and the veins, the nervous system of how a big organization ticks. It's really difficult to manage anything complex without some element of an ERP. And these are expensive, long projects, if you may. And as such, these multimillion euro endeavors begin with a vendor, a company, a consultant party seasoned in these coming in, helping them first with the platform selection and how should that be done. And then typically either the same consultant or another comes in and starts to map like, this is how it will be built for you. They employed 2 consultants from us, myself and one other initially, and we started working in an organization where the workers themselves number thousands. And if we take a look at the consultants, people who was building, like the planning the ERP globally in that company, tens of thousands people work, but of course there was just a handful of them. But they were kind of in charge of the technical planning and as they felt planning. And we were then 2 people in the middle trying to figure out like, okay, this is how these people want to work and this is how these technical people are saying they should work. And then the technical people who were in charge, the consultants kind of in their nice suits told us designers that, hey, So what are you guys exactly here to do? And we told them, and then they were really a bit annoyed. And then they said that, okay, well, go ahead then. But how are you exactly going to go about this? And we said that, well, we're going to sit down with people, we're going to have workshops, we're going to interview them, we're going to draw visual maps out of it, like service blueprints. And we're going to map the service blueprints from one market to the other on top of each other so we can see gaps. And they got really nervous, consultants. There was this like, it doesn't really mix and match with our way of working. And we're asking why not? And then they asked like, well, what's the program that you will use to create these diagrams? And we were just like, well, Miro is the easiest one. And they were really relieved. That's in the list of prohibited Items.

Oh, they were relieved that this was on the list.

Yes. And we told them, oh, that's a shame. And then we did it in Miro anyhow, because I needed to make a call at that point. Like someone has made a silly call somewhere and it's going, my decision made someone look silly, probably me alongside many others, but I just bluntly told Several people higher up in both organizations that their decisions are silly because this is faster, this is easier. And why is it faster and easier? This method is better understood by others. It's understood the same way by the top floor of the customer and the factory floor. They see a diagram in the same way, whereas your Word files require 15 years of consultant English consultant language courses.

Yeah.

Yeah. And this is one of the many examples that could probably arise from being unprofessional, but for me, being unprofessional is kind of challenging the norm a bit and also allowing yourself to be a little bit stupid at times or Or bullheaded or whatnot. Maybe stupid is a bit weird.

Stubborn. Very stubborn.

Stubborn, maybe.

Yeah. How did they react?

They were super annoyed. The consultants, I mean. The other consultants, they were annoyed, but once they started to see the reason why we're, the reason, the real reason why we're talking about Miro is not Miro per se. Or the visual form per se. Like I said, the visual form has a benefit of being understood similarly by everyone else. But the real reason to do this is that when there is a large change that touches on people's lives, when you want to push that change through in an organization, it reduces friction when you pull people in. into the design of their own future. And this is why they were annoyed. They were annoyed by the fact that their magnanimous plans were being altered by the people in the organization. And that's very human.

Yeah. What I hear is, so someone is organizing a change, is orchestrating the change, so has the change plan and the change management, And then suddenly you are making them part of the change, the uncertainty, the uncontrollable.

Yeah. Yes.

And that's actually a role that they're not used to because usually they're on the other side of the change. Because I think everyone loves change that we, that we are in control of, that we decide for ourselves. Nobody likes change that is put upon us.

Yes. Exactly. And when you're, like I said, when you're part of designing that change yourself, the change that might or will impact your life, daily routines, the way you work, then you're more likely to welcome it with open arms and kind of help drive it through. Like I said, reduce friction. And when you do something as important for a large entity as As an ERP renewal, the one thing you want to get right are the, what's called outside business processes and what's called inside in the coffee room, the new interface or the way we work. Yeah.

And how did the, so you said the other consultants were annoyed. How did actually the business, your client, because you clearly went against IT rules, so if they were on the list of prohibited tools, then it's a very clear breaking of the rules, or how did they react?

It's true, but no one had forbidden to use imagery in the end results, so of our interactive service blueprints, we just created static images in the end and does not—

Nobody cares how you created these images with what tool.

Yeah, so it's a little bit like far-fetched example, but I've noticed that oftentimes in working world, we tend to, or the modern working world, we tend to, the more complex an item is, we tend to think in really complex ways on how to, there are mysterious rules that we need to follow. And for instance, in meetings, particularly in this project, what I saw, participated in several of the steering group meetings where much of the senior leadership from the customer company was present, and then us consultants from both parties or from all parties at some point, because there were several, were present. And then there's a consultant going through a Word document about 60, 70 pages long, And filled with acronyms, just like the ERP thing that we began with.

You can keep it with that.

Yeah, and everyone's nodding. And then I realized that actually, honestly, honestly right now, people, the meeting begins that, yeah, we've shared the documentation beforehand and we trust that you've all received it and read it. And people nod in this corporate way.

Because nobody dares to actually admit that they didn't have any time to read that between dinner and nighttime, because that takes a ton of time.

Yeah, actually there's always at least some person who says that, well, I haven't had the time, but I was hoping that you would recap it for me. And everyone is silently relieved.

I would love to double-click on that. Who is that person who dares to say that?

Who dares to say that I didn't have time to read it? the person closest to the decision-making or who has a vested interest in the actual thing.

Yeah, and has the status to say, oh, I didn't do the homework without fearing repercussions or whatsoever.

Yeah, yeah, but also more and more people nowadays, to my mind.

Okay.

Yeah, it's changing in a way because much of the consultant language nowadays is It can be super, super, super daunting. Like when we go through this document in question, contained so many acronyms, so many difficult to understand items that it was in no way human understandable unless you were really deep in the technology and terminology. But hidden inside those documents were really dangerous things.

Oh.

Like, like, like, uh, key decisions being buried in technical jargon that would later become items like, well, you did accept the definition document on this date and at that point, and that's why we made the call of employing these 50 people to implement that technical system to you for half a year.

And then basically you have to sign with this company and spend all these fees on that. And I, What this brings up for me is the professional language that protects the in-group.

Yeah, exactly so, it does. And there's a quote for that. I think it's attributed to Einstein, I think. And if I remember correctly, it goes, if you can't explain it simply enough, you don't understand it well enough.

Yeah.

And it's so true.

Yeah, it'd be, um, there was another quote similar. Was it Hemingway? If I had, if I've had more time, I would have written a shorter letter.

Yes, exactly. Well said. Both capture the same sentiment here.

Yeah. And I think nowadays with AI, it's, um, even worse because it has never been so cheap to, to create so much. paper and so much text.

Yeah. And it's never been so easy to create such a professional thing in your name that you have absolutely no recollection of what it contains.

Yeah. And I wonder, coming back to the acronyms and the difficulty to actually read and understand such a document, it's, it takes some courage to say, okay, wait a moment, I don't understand that. And I remember back in uni, it was usually always the most prestigious professors who would ask the simplest question, would just boldly say, I don't understand that, explain.

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

And I wonder whether we have often unlearned that it's actually possible to ask that. And that's why these AI document, AI-generated documents, very often there are sentences that sound fantastic, but they don't make any sense. And nobody asks actually, What does it mean?

Exactly. Yeah, yeah, because the minute one person just kind of nods sagely, yeah, I get it, I get it, I get it, then other people have the same tendencies of, oh, I need to probably get it too. And people are very, very, very much afraid of being human. In the larger corporate entity it is, the more human it gets, the lower you go in the organization, but the higher you go, the less human you get to be. Because of rules and regulations and understanding and definitions of done and acronyms abound, which kind of occasionally block people from saying really cool human things. Like, what's that? I don't get it. This is stupid. Okay.

And what it brings up for me, isn't it the consultant who comes in? So back to your example, you said, I will ignore the rules and I will still use this tool to make it visual because visual, the visual works better than the written text. So wouldn't it mean that consultants come in to make it easy to understand instead of to complicate it?

Yes, but oftentimes in certain aspects, Consultants come in to make consultants really important and irreplaceable. And the minute they do, they become the only people who get the change because of the technical nature of the project. And then suddenly you realize that you're totally dependent on the consultant. And secretly, it's the secret sauce of many big consultants is that this is how we want it to run. We don't necessarily want people to understand because we're— super scared of what happens if they start understanding on their own and they don't need us anymore. It can be human. I don't know. I'm not here to criticize any of those, but there's a reason why we do things differently in different aspects. Yeah.

And then, so you have a, you're a designer. That's your background, right?

Yeah. Yeah.

And as a designer, you—

Nice segue to the beginning. Yes. The reason I work differently is that I'm a service designer by background. Yeah, yeah. I'm— I don't come from an engineering background or a heavy business background, but I have both as a result of my career. But the thing is that I'm a service designer, and that's what I've always been despite running businesses and so on and so on. It's my mental model. It's who I am, how I approach things. And with that comes like, let's make this understandable. Let's make this human. Let's make this so that everyone gets what they said.

And you mentioned that the other consultants are annoyed by this approach.

Yeah.

How about the business? Have you noticed?

Yeah.

Are they thankful, afraid, scared, annoyed that you're breaking all the rules? Apparently you're successful with it, so it must.

Yeah.

At some point works.

Everyone, service design was all the rage in about closer to 10 years ago when we go back and everyone was like, ooh, service design must be, sounds intimidating and expensive and so on and so on. Let's try that. Nowadays everyone gets the value of service design, but also the value of good customer experience, flawless items and so on and so on, frictionless digital and physical surfaces. So that's not news to anyone, but what is news and why business owners tend to love it is that when you apply service design principles to process design, because that's what we did. So when you understand what is it that needs reshaping, and it's no longer the self-evident beautiful websites, apps, internal systems, physical spaces that need that design so much in the Western world anymore, but it's actually the Your own machinery, your own business processes. And when you do these things, the service design way. Yes, to that aspect, business owners have been first surprised, like, you want to do this? Why? Secondly, again, like, sounds interesting. Is it expensive? And later saying that we only now realize how expensive it would have been if we didn't do it. No. So yeah, and the, it's actually a segue for me. The life of a designer or the professional life of a designer is very often breaking outside your box and doing something that you're maybe not allowed to do. Hmm. And, and to get to the end result. And that might be also, therefore, I think I have a lot of moments when I haven't been Very professional in delivery or the execution of something just to get to the end result.

And this makes me wonder whether it's, is this a trained behavior or mindset? So because you were the revolutionary, you started to study service design, or it's because of the service design training that you dared to go against the rules?

I think maybe a bit of both, but maybe more of the former actually. And for that, I need to go a little bit further back in my own career. Like I said, 10 years ago, 15 years ago, we were still doing briefs that the customer told us that this is, this is what we want you to do. Please come and execute us, design this beautiful thing for us, whether it's a complete service or a chain of events or, or do this study for us and whatnot. And alongside those projects, I realized that no matter how hard we designed and how beautiful our end results were, they did not cause the change very often that we wanted it to cause. And that is the end result for many designers is that you do something really awesome and beautiful, and then you might win a prize in a competition for that. But at the end of the day, did it change the world? Very seldom it did. And that led me, as it does many, to first question the brief, but then years later, starting not to question the brief, but to question the organization that resulted in the brief.

Hmm.

Like, why did they think that this would be a way to solve that problem? And that led me to investigating organizations more and more. And the more I went through different organizations and investigated how they run, I started to find constantly like similar blockers, similar items over there. And at some point I felt that, okay, so That is actually the heart of my career. This is my professional stake. This is my thesis, is that organizations are ruining everything. It's not humans. Humans are most of the time super awesome, but organizations can be like really daunting.

Yes, and organizations are run by humans. So is it Is it that it's a path dependency? So people just continue following a process that was implemented at one time and nobody ever questioned it because they don't dare or they don't have time or they don't care.

Actually, they do question it a lot. Imagine yourself, let's go together to work on this right now. We'll go work together for this multinational consultancy or company, whatever. It doesn't matter what it does, but the minute we land there as fresh employees today, We are going to be told this is how we do things. And it's like, okay, cool. And then we dig in. And I bet that on the 3rd day in the coffee room, once we meet again from our respective onboarding courses, one of us is going to say that I found this and this thing to be really stupid because it's an established norm. But still, when we leave the coffee room, We are expected to do that exact same thing because that's how the machinery over there works, whatever it is that they do. So people just silently accept it as a way of embedding into the larger organization. And if we really stay there, then secretly we think that someday I will change this. And it can be a small thing. It can be a big thing. It can be, I want that button on my interface to be not orange, but Blue. Oh, or it can be a big thing. I want, or a medium thing or slightly larger. I want our Monday staff meetings to be biweekly and have breakfast, or they can be big. I want this entire process to run differently. And depending on the way we dream in that organization, we might impact some of it.

Mm-hmm.

But then at some point, we'll feel this is meaningful and just kind of meaningless and accept that can't change it here and then we'll go elsewhere, reflect on our past experiences and hope that it will be better.

Yeah. And I guess it's also, we get used to it. So the first time we find it odd, the second time we find it annoying, and the third time we cope with it.

Yes. And hence, even though my profession or vocation, if you may, is service design, Oftentimes then when there are customers who get it with whom I have good relations with and they've kind of learned to be with me and me with them, I often tell them that I'm really not a service designer, that consider me as a corporate therapist.

Mm-hmm.

And then it's easier for them to get like, oh, okay, so you're here to help us understand us. You got it. Now we can work.

I love that. And then, because then the process is basically representation how they do things, but you first need to understand them, how they do things to then map the process.

Yes. This is the case. That is my life. And this is why I think being a corporate therapist is so awesome. First of all, I would love to have that on a business card, just like as a title. A corporate therapist, just give me your problems and we'll work through them. But working like that, it connected with what I've done in the past, with what I think that really chafes, which is typically organizational processes, hiccups, shapes of organizations that want to do something big, but then absolutely block it from ever happening due to their own shape. I've seen this happen in so many big ways, like one majorly big consultancy where I worked, where they employed me to make a change, and then I really wanted to try to make that change, but the shape of the organization itself was blocking it.

What do you mean by shape?

I mean that An individual coming to work at a branch of this multinational company comes in with a designer's mindset and skillset to work on items. And then there is 50 years of legacy buried in deep in, in business processes and everything. So you can't change that.

Mm-hmm.

Or you, you really can't because it generates so much money that they run processes the way that they do. That's one way. And then the other is that if I had had not a euro, but let's say €100 for each time a customer commented in one way or the other that A, we want to create a disruption, or B, we want to be the next Apple or Uber or Netflix in our area, I would have stopped working a long time ago. Because this is how, that's how you brief a designer. But nowadays when I hear that, it makes me immediately go into the corporate therapist mode. Tell me more. Why do you feel that that's possible or needed?

I love this distinction, and I, so what makes the corporate therapist mode effective? Where are you getting with that?

It makes it effective because, God, I love this rabbit hole where we're going with this. It is effective because of the service designer skill set. Anyone can say that we have now worked extensively with your problem and uncovered the following. Compare that to the sentence, we have now worked extensively with your people on this problem and found the following. So service designers don't work in isolation. We're kind of solutions looking for problems, and we're kind of the minute we're handed something, real to work with, we tend to find, try and find the people who make that surroundings. If we change this, whose lives are affecting, are we affecting and how? And when that happens, you work with the machinery and the process of getting something done. But if you work like that on a business process instead of an evident touchpoint, this is, and you start to answer the question, This is the way your sales works, and this is the way your sales wants to work. And then you can ask a simple question. Do you want your salespeople to not leave the company every now and then? Do you want to affect the attrition? And typically, almost always, the answers are the same. Well, some attrition is okay.

Yes.

And, and so because people take some things for granted in a big organization, then when you tell them that, when you show that these things can actually on the grassroots level change in the customer organizations, they tend to be like, oh, hell yes, let's do it like that.

And I am curious because when I, when I think of the silos, so There's often this sort of finger-pointing.

Oh, yes.

We would love to work like that, but marketing is in the way, or the IT people are in the way, or we have to fill in so many formulas or whatsoever. So it's, I hear a lot of blame of either individuals as bottlenecks or as entire departments. And when I listen to you, I hear It is solvable when we look at the process and we talk to the people. So how do you deal with that? How do you shift the people issue to become process issues that are solvable? Or maybe you stay the therapist and—

Sometimes, yes, but it's a benefit of being really established in one's own domain. Or career to have the serenity and maybe seniority to state out loud that I, after working with you for a bit, you've, yes, I know that initially you've constrained us to work purely with customer care for, in this fictional example now, that you constrained us to work purely on customer care and that was our focus. But as you can see, when we map this out, customer care has no way of working effectively unless we know what sales is doing and why, because then we're just fixing symptoms, not the root causes. And if you know, as heads of sales and customer care, thank you for having me today, both accept the fact that we'll expand this a bit. on to cover also sales. Both of you benefit, and we have a chance of creating something unified and also getting the people on board on both sides so that there's not the singular change in a company, but maybe a bigger one. And one of these choices will have a definite impact, the other one less so.

Mm-hmm.

So it's a question of being blunt, but it's also a question of, of Actually displaying to people what can be done when you work in a specific mode. And therefore, I also typically very much insist when we have new customers coming in who have a very clear definition of a problem, I tend to tell them that we have no way of knowing whether that's the problem yet. Let us begin the work, let us investigate, and then we'll come back to you and we'll tell you. what is the problem indeed in the end.

Thank you. So what I hear is indeed the therapist way. Let's get the people around the table and look at the problem without making it personal.

Yes, yes, because we can't, particularly because like I've said repeatedly, my forte is the large organizations, but when are these started to be exhibited? these kinds of symptoms that organizations tend to show. It's funny, but it's when you're over 100 people in your organization, you start to exhibit slowness and established processes and silly things to do. And the larger you go from that, because we both know that there are organizations who employ hundreds of thousands of people and everyone over there is like cogs in the machinery. I don't mean that everyone needs to be rebel. But I enjoy being the rebel/corporate therapist on the outside, and that's why we're hired, because from the inside, it's very difficult to instigate a change because we can always be the silly ones. Why is this process so stupid? I get to ask this or have these comments to top management, and they allow me that because I'm an external. I mean, it's your internal. Let's go back to you and me were hired. Why is this so stupid? I'll give you that because it's your 3rd day on the job. But if we say it in 3 months, none of us, neither of us will be working there again in some organizations.

And then we're again, the privilege of being unprofessional because you're not on their permanent payroll and they basically hired you to ask the uncomfortable questions.

Yes, exactly so.

To doubt the brief and to Question the problem.

It doesn't mean that every single question is silly. And now with AI, things are changing a lot also in my profession, and it's actually in any professional consultancy at this point. There's a huge disruption going on with everyone figuring out how does AI solutions, how do they accelerate me, Replace me, augment me, support me. And then the customers are thinking, now with this AI solution, do we need those consultants anymore? So everyone's trying to figure that out, but I have not yet in any way recognized a diminishing need for the expertise that is needed to pinpoint this model from that with a Done my work. Next year becomes 30 years. Yeah. So, and I've not yet, I do work a lot with AI. It's almost my only needed work tool anymore nowadays. And still it doesn't replace my judgment when it comes to making calls on or design decisions or educated decisions based on data on the directions of customer journeys, customer interactions, touchpoints, these kinds of things. It can guide them or the data can guide them to that point, but the calls need to be made by me still today. Let's see about tomorrow.

Yeah. I also have the impression that AI is very good in synthesizing the data or making sense of the data, of the facts. That's something that it can do faster than we do. But then the interpretation and the meaning of that for now still needs the expertise and the human eye, the judgment.

Yes.

I think because very often it's a judgment call that is, hmm, this would be my assumption that there are a lot of the decisions that you would still take are judgment calls that are not only based on the data and the hard facts, but maybe also on the gut feel, maybe on The cultural component of your clients that maybe doesn't show in the data?

Yes, you are exactly right. And therefore, AI is an awesome tool to kind of guide and support in parts of this work. But the personality items, these kinds of things are still very human traits. And that's where luckily we humans are still needed. And as long as humans are needed, there's typically a need for a corporate therapist.

What is an unprofessional advice that you would still recommend others to follow?

Of all the things that we've touched on, the most evident is twofold. Think hard. Think carefully before you open your mouth. When you don't understand something, but recognize that you need to do it. So the only thing that you need to think carefully is how you phrase what's coming out, because people are too scared in meetings to say that, I don't know that acronym. What do you mean? What does this imply if we decide like this? I didn't get this. Did any one of you others get it? Who got this? I don't understand. This or that. And that is actually the most core critical advice that I think is needed because people have this funny tendency of thinking that working life is about going to meetings and that work happens in meetings. No, it's not. In meetings, we discuss work that was done prior and after, and we decide on key items. But if you don't understand what's being said and decided, just nod and think that you can just do the work later, you're letting the so-called professional side of you get in your way. So be unprofessional, ask things, ask to clarify, ask to make it simpler, ask to explain it so many times that even my younger daughter gets it. And that is core because the minute you understand why something is being presented or discussed or something in the way that it does, Then it's like, okay, cool. And then you know how you can contribute. And I know it sounds cheesy, like, be yourself, open up, but you can't follow up on either. You can't follow up on being yourself and opening up, but you can follow up in think and talk. Yeah.

Thank you. And I don't think that it sounds silly at all. And for me, when you say it, I'm like, duh, of course. But hearing it, yes, the sitting in meeting is not the work, but understanding what is discussed.

Yes.

So, and not having the possibility or not seeing the permission to ask for clarification then leads everyone to just shut down and answer emails instead of asking and following and engaging.

Yes. And then in that meeting, in that particular meeting or some meeting someplace, even right now when we're talking, a decision is being made with many of the participants in the room not understanding what's being talked about, but they just silently hope that the decision, whatever it is, won't touch them. But it might touch the entire organization and it might impact, in the end, their working lives. Like, if I had known in that meeting room that my life would be governed by an ERP that was doomed to fail for 4 years. But if everyone has spoken up, did you talk to people? Do we really know that this is going to work? What is this based on? Why are we doing this again? And when we're doing it, how can we make sure that it's done in a way that it actually is good for customer care and sales and the warehouse people? Can we loop them in? Can we call them?

One professional, awesome one.

Yeah, I have them here outside the door. I called them the minute you started. So we let them in because I want to tell them how their working life is changing. Yeah, again, slightly rebel, yeah, but going back, I'm a consultant. I get to be slightly rebel. Yes.

And what I hear is, it's also, what I hear is that you take the people seriously. You invite them on the table. You want them to contribute. You give them a voice. And that's worth so much.

Everyone is nowadays, due to AI, asking for an organization that can produce more with less people. And that puts a tremendous emphasis on the people who are there to know what they're doing and why and be at their best. This is what companies seldom get. And that in turn is only achieved by Having people who have a broad enough mindset. And the best way to make sure that these people are on board whatever changes you're instigating is to co-design their own future with them. Like you said.

Thank you, Jussi.

Thank you. A thorough pleasure. All mine.

Always a delight to be in conversation and learning from you.

Same here. Same here. Much appreciated. And thank you for having me.

This was a conversation without the script. Now it's your turn. I'm Myriam Hadnes, and this has been Unprofessionalism.