November 29, 2023 • 73 mins
Since 2017, Philippe has operated as an independent coach under Henko, with a focus on building high-performing leadership, teams and organizations in digital business. Philippe has worked with organizations such as Lloyds Banking Group, Deutsche Bank, Carnival UK, KFC and a number of start-ups, facilitating complex digital / Flow transformation initiatives as the main Change coach. In this episode, Philippe talks about how you can bring Flow Agility to the frontlines of any organization through value stream alignment, flow-based operating models and a renewed focus on excellence.
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Episode Transcript
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James (00:06):
Hi again, and welcome to the Strategy Hero Podcast,
the podcast that's all about divinginto the world of business strategy,
transformation, and operational excellence.
Since 2017, Philippe Guenet,who is our guest today,
has operated as anindependent coach under Henko,
who is focused on buildinghigh-performing leadership teams.
Philippe has also worked with organizationssuch as Lloyd's Banking Group,
(00:29):
Deutsche Bank, Carnival in the UK, KFC,
and a number of startups, facilitatingcomplex digital transformation initiatives.
He's also an associate boardmember of the Thought Leadership
with the International Coaching Federationand runs London's Digital Leadership Meetup.
But today, he's our strategy hero.
I'm very excited to talk to youtoday, Philippe. How are you?
Philippe (00:52):
I'm all right. Thank you.
It's a little bit dauntingto be a hero, but we'll see.
James (00:58):
Well, I'm glad that you accepted the title.
Philippe (01:03):
I'll do my best.
James (01:05):
Just to get started with kind of an overview of who you are.
I'm sure a lot of people on, youknow, who are listening today
have heard of you. Butfor those who have not,
could you just tell everyone alittle bit about your background
and how you found a wayinto starting Henko?
Philippe (01:21):
Thank you. Thank you.
One thing I cannot add is
I'm actually originally French,
and I moved to the UKa long time ago, in 96.
Therefore, my accent is notcompletely the one of a local,
but I'm UK-based, south of London.
(01:43):
I did my initial career very much in,
I graduated in businessand saw the internet
and the potential of theinternet early on in 93, 94,
and ever since, I've workedin the world of digital.
That has got me essentiallyin consulting organizations.
(02:06):
And for my scenes, I probably have about20, 25 years in the consulting world.
And from 2017,
effectively, I had a client that wasreally thinking about in-sourcing.
And strategically, they havea view about in-sourcing,
(02:28):
which is quite an existentialproblem for a consultancy.
And that made me thinkactually they're right,
and actually, there is abusiness model supporting them.
But that business model is notabout coming up with a solution.
It's coming up with something different,
(02:49):
something new that helps themdevelop the competencies,
reorganize, rearrange basically their,
rewire some of their companyto something we call flow.
And reconsider many thingsaround leadership and, of course,
(03:10):
around strategy, with agilitybeing also a guiding principle.
And when you get to that, you realize thatthe organization needs really profound change.
And that profound change is notabout doing things differently.
It's also about being different asorganizations, being different as leaders,
(03:32):
being different as teams.
That is more of a coaching concernthan really a consulting concern.
It's about creating the framework,
creating the facilitation, creating theengagement of people, and getting people
(03:53):
in collaboration together overcertain things like excellence,
like the future of theorganization, strategy,
like the relationship between theteams, and, of course, like delivery.
But very often organizations, are only organizingthemselves around delivery, which is the problem.
And doing those more profound changes isa change that has to come from the inside.
(04:18):
And it is not about imposingsome recipes from the outside.
It's actually helping peoplemaking those changes on the inside
and riding that journey.
And that's why, in 2017,
I just thought it was not aboutbeing a consultant anymore.
The new game is being acoach but facilitating change
(04:38):
as a coach, as genuine coaching.
And that's why I went on to a new careeras a coach and a professional coaching.
A qualified and certifiedas a coach with the ICF,
and now I'm also a boardmember in the ICF UK
to this purpose of embracing a differentstance and different type of support.
(05:02):
Allowing the client to have theintelligence as a team, as individuals,
bringing the intelligence of change,
bringing a contextualized viewworking through their difficulties,
working through their relationships,realigning organization,
realigning their relationships,
and doing this purposefullyaround creating excellence
(05:25):
and creating the performanceand the future of the business,
which involves, you know,
improvements, which involves strategy,which involves all those things.
So that's my journey.
Sorry being a bit long over it,
but I think it's important to explainthe nuance that this is bringing.
James (05:44):
No, please don't apologize, Philippe.
I think a lot of what you say there
will resonate with our listeners because
they are in, you know,they are either consultants
or they're working in a plant or
they're within the corporate office.
And they're tackling the issues thatyou've tackled your entire career.
(06:07):
I think it's always inspiring to hearpeople that have been in your shoes
and they've thought outside the box.
They've thought differently.
One of the things that I've really loved,
I've loved about gettingto know you personally.
For our listeners, I headup marketing at i-nexus,
(06:28):
and Philippe found his way to i-nexus,
and we built our relationshipthrough our content.
So, for me, it's alwayspersonally rewarding
to see people come into i-nexusand engage with our content,
but to get someone like yourself,Philippe, was an extra added bonus,
(06:49):
I would say, to me.
Philippe (06:51):
And maybe we should give a warning sign as well to people that
I'm not too afraid being controversial
because my job is to think outside the box,
is to challenge the thinking,challenge the perspective.
And Henko, as well, it'sa name that has a meaning.
The company I created has a meaningin the sense that it's helping people,
(07:16):
you know, seeing things in a new light.
And that's what the name Henko carries.
And
it's not about telling people whatdifferent things they should do.
It's helping them seeing in a newlight so they can make better choices,
better decisions.
And it's very, very validin the field of strategy
(07:37):
because very often,
in the field of strategy, we bringthat strategy house to do it for us
and know if the people have, and the leadershipof organization has to take their own care
of their own strategy.
That's the important thing.And that's what I am to do.
James (07:56):
I wouldn't, again, I wouldn't apologize about being controversial. I think
some of the guests we've had so faron the podcast have been anyone,
you know, anything but traditionalin terms of their point of view.
And I think that it's very importantthat we get people like yourself
exposed to more audiences
(08:18):
because through thinking differentlyis how you can actually make a change.
And that leads me nicelyonto our topic today.
And before we hit record, we weretalking a lot about flow and change.
And, like you say, you'rethinking differently.
And that's why when wecame up with today's topic,
(08:41):
bringing flow to the frontline,
it seemed perfect based on your experiencesand what you're doing over at Henko.
So, just to get started,
diving into what is areally exciting topic for me
to listen to,
in your career, you've workedwith some real big clients.
(09:04):
You've worked with some smaller clients.
From your engagements,
what would you list as the reasonsthat drive change in leadership,
organizations, and strategy as a whole?
Philippe (09:19):
Yeah, very good question.
And I think what we fail to recognize is
how much digital is changing the wayorganizations work or should work.
If we go a long way back aroundthe digital industrial revolution,
(09:43):
there was a lot ofchange around leadership.
And the change in landscape, thechange in possibilities also change.
We led organizations and so on.
In more recent times as well, therewas the sort of mass production
(10:04):
where we have had basicallyyears where, or many decades,
through the 20th century, where itwas about producing new, you know,
producing things, andthey would be customers.
So really, everything wasoriented towards the production.
(10:24):
And there is one notableinteresting exception in Toyota.
Through scarcity,
Japan was really ruined after the war,
they had to come up withsomething different.
They had to build what they sold.
(10:45):
Meaning that they would onlybuild the things they sold
because they couldn'thave the luxury of stocks,
which actually introducedthe idea of viability
or the possibility of viability.
Because as they were goingtowards more than one piece flow,
they would build the thing only they sold,
(11:09):
then they could actually pivotand build things different,
different variations ofthings, different colours,
different options.
And bring that into an industrial cycle
where they're churning cars and production.
(11:31):
And to me, that's really amassive change that they brought
a bit by necessity, by the context,
and this has opened up to all the leanthinking about reducing inventories,
smaller production batches,or no batch at all.
(11:54):
And then sort of getting thepossibilities of viability,
the possibility of configuringa car to your liking
whilst the car is being mass-produced.
And that, to me, is really animportant point in history.
And fast forward to the digital times,
(12:15):
with software,
it's 100% viable.
It's 100% tailored, pretty much.
And we're trying to have anindustrial production of software
with a lot of the work in theservices of most companies
that use a website, thatuse an app, and so on.
And we see as well a lot of the thingswe consume are more software-based.
(12:41):
And interestingly, you wouldbuy a camera in the past,
you would buy an iPodor Walkman in the past.
Now it solves software on yourmobile phone, for instance.
And the world is going togo more and more software.
And with software,
there is a possibilityto change a lot more,
a lot more often,
(13:02):
which means that the speed ofthe industry is much faster,
and there is an infinitepossibility of tailoring
and personalization down to the individual.
So this is changing again, massively,
and it is really opposite tobasically the mass production time
(13:26):
to the speed we're getting now.
Another also element and again, Toyota,
is that,
in the mass production sense,you would design something,
and then you will havepeople putting it together,
and their skills will be limited toputting some things together well.
(13:51):
Comes Toyota days.
Kaizen is really central to it,
meaning that the people that are puttingthings together are also thinking.
They start being knowledge workers
in the sense that they start thinking,
is there a better way to put it together?
Is there a better waythat the product could be?
(14:11):
Fast forward to digital again.
The engineers on theproduction chain are really...
it's not a productionchain anymore, actually.
It's a value creation chain, pretty much.
The engineers therereally have the knowledge,
and actually, the leadership doesn't haveso much knowledge of the constraints.
(14:34):
If you were putting them in front ofan IDE to start creating some software,
they wouldn't be able to.
The languages have evolved. Even some ofthem that have engineering, in their past,
a lot of things have evolved so much that theywouldn't know how to put it together anymore.
And therefore, we have to leanand rely a lot more on the people
(14:58):
that are closest to doing the work,
that are closest to the customers
to get involved, to have a say,to actually switch on their brain.
And that means bringing thosepeople into the strategy.
That means getting those people tocontribute to where we could go.
(15:20):
And it's a fundamental difference wherenow we're talking about potentially
and had talk in the past about that,
a strategy to the people.
So, getting everybody as asensor network and an ID network
to contribute to the strategy.
Now this completelychanges how we see strategy
(15:41):
because if you want to havethat genuinely distributed,
you are doing it bottom up
instead of having a select fewdoing strategies at the top,
and then all the rest of theorganization delivering to that,
which would work in amass production type sense
(16:05):
in the early 1900 or mid-1900 maybe.
Now, it's completelydifferent, where the people
need to be able to make daily decisions,
and there isn't time to go up anddown the hierarchies to make those.
And so, therefore, they need to havethe context in which they're working in.
(16:28):
And if they're contributingto the strategy,
they have that context in built in them.
And the second thing is they're all seeingthings that are important in the strategy.
There are ideas that few may beoutliers ideas may be the ones
that will be the futurebreakthrough of the business.
(16:48):
How are we tapping into that,
and how does that make its way
to actually impact and decideand help better decisions
and better opportunities for the business?
And that's strategy bottomup, which, unfortunately,
is strategy upside down,but it's not a bad thing.
It's rethinking how we get to that.
(17:11):
And in doing that,
you realize organizations areabsolutely not designed for that.
They're designed todeliver most of the time.
The coherence and the glue oforganization is the delivery, the plans.
It's not so much the strategy.
And to change that is amassive, massive, massive task.
(17:33):
And people, as well,need to see the benefits,
but also grow their skills and compute andunderstand how we are going to change all this,
because you don't switch it on.
It's a big journey, a very big journey.
And once you do that,you have a better flow.
James (17:53):
Thank you.
There are a couple of thingsthere that stood out to me,
but I think above all else,
what would you say are the main blockers to
flipping strategy on its head
and having the shop floor or
(18:14):
the doers or however youwant to call those people,
what's stopping companiesfrom being able to do that?
Philippe (18:24):
I don't like the term mindset, and everybody will flag mindset.
Well, it's a way too generic thing.
But I think we are at the tippingpoint of a transition where
digital has been seen
and digital transformations have beenseen as a technology affair type thing.
(18:47):
Where you need to deliver the next big data,and then now you need to be on the cloud,
and now you need to haveAI and all those things.
And a lot of companiesare made feel inadequate,
so therefore, and laggards,
and therefore they're goingto call some consultants
that have something semi-intelligentto say about it, to rescue them.
(19:09):
And fundamentally, and maybe that's right.
They need to catch up.
If they are that far behind, ifthey're really in a laggard category,
there is an experience out there that someconsultant is able to maybe bring them
to the right sort oflevel quickly to catch up.
(19:30):
It doesn't mean they're going to perform.
And the things we are seeingmore and more are the reasons
and essentially the leadershipand the wider leadership element
that have got them to become laggards
and not wake up to the speedof transition of the market.
Having a consultant helping them catchup is not resolving that problem.
(19:57):
It's not actually, it'sjust playing catch up.
It's not actually solving thefact that they're not aligned
to perform in the new digital world, in afaster-changing world with software, and so on.
And the gap is very bigfor some organizations
(20:18):
because technology,
as in digital transformation inso far as just technology thing,
it has been a technology delivery element
where people have beendelivering those new things,
but they have not necessarilychallenged their perspective.
(20:38):
How do we move?
How do we make better decisions faster?
For instance, simple thing.
How do we make decisions on the periphery,
and really, how do we all contribute tothe well running of the organization?
Meaning that how do we adapt ourselves?
(20:59):
How do we all pay attention atour relevant level to excellence
so that we don't have a hurdle?
And so many companies willtell you about tech debt,
and are we all aligned on the strategy?
And a new way of being alignedon the strategy is really
distributing the strategyand holding its coherence.
(21:21):
So it's a bottom-up strategy,an emergent strategy
from the generation and theidentification of ideas.
And then it's actuallycoherently choosing the focus
so that it doesn't go all the ways,
but sometimes the focus can be also, well,
we're going to have some teamsthat are going to diverge because
(21:42):
there may be new ideas,serendipity coming out of that
and dealing with riding that change,
we're talking about[inaudible], for instance,
and this uncertainty, ambiguity.
And this is often presented as a problem,
and it is a problem if you'retrying to control it, of course,
(22:05):
but it's also the massive opportunities tofind new business model, new ideas, new avenues
because the world is gettingdisrupted all the time.
So, how can you ride that change?
How can you lead in a waythat, of course, needs agility
so you can ride the opportunities that
(22:27):
are emerging from thefast-changing pace of the industry?
And that is, I think, a fundamental change.
And we still longing from,
and, you know, personally, I wrote ablog, actually not so long ago around.
We are still celebrating
(22:50):
traditional readership.
If you look at somethinglike The Apprentice,
if you look at what are theleaders that come to mind,
and people will mention ElonMusk, will mention Steve Jobs,
and they're all seen as thosegeniuses that make all the decisions.
And I think it's really a dangerousperspective on leadership.
(23:15):
I think the better leadershiptoday and maybe, you know,
maybe there are some peoplethat are such geniuses
and working 24/7 and soon that can hold that,
but up to what scale and howmany people have that gift.
Now, I think the betterleadership is to think about
how you distribute thatin your organization.
(23:38):
How everybody has an elementof engagement and involvement.
And it is an, you know,
around creating excellence, aroundworking well with their colleagues,
around harnessing, basically,the collective intelligence
and the collective perspectiveand sensor network and so on
(24:01):
to spot weak signals of possibilities.
And if you want to harnesseverybody on the direction,
strategy is involving a lot of people,
many more that are typically involvedinto the strategy are important.
And all those things,when we talk about flow,
(24:22):
it is all those thingscoming together really,
and that achieve flow.
But it's important toappreciate that flow in...
a lot of people talk about flow nowadays,
but they talk about flow inthe sense of flow of work.
Which is the sort of olderLean concept of flow of work.
(24:44):
But that is very much basedon reducing the viability.
Now, we keep on talking about the flowof work in the context of complexity
where the viability is inherent,
and actually, you have to work with it,
and you have to explore and exploit it.
And that means that the ideaof flow is a constant dynamic
(25:08):
where you will need to recompose, youwill need to explore possibilities
when those possibilities happen,
then how do you direct capacity to that?
And maybe what do you do,
what do you stop,
what you shrink,
and the flow, therefore, becomessomething extremely dynamic.
(25:29):
That is a very, very fragile thing.
You may hit the perfect flow, but it'sgoing to be for a very, very short time
because something will changethat you have to adapt for.
And it changes the dynamicsof everything again.
So it's taking that perspectiveand writing it, really.
James (25:48):
Yeah. I couldn't agree more, I think.
When I think back to sort ofhow I've developed in my career,
I have had what you talkedabout there, Philippe,
where leaders have distributed responsibility,accountability, and participation
in strategy setting.
(26:09):
And that then flows,
that's flowed throughout my entire career.
Every team that I'veever built and managed,
I've always empowered themto think strategically
and to carve out timeto be able to do that.
And it's so important.
I think it's just going back to what yousaid at the very beginning about Toyota.
Obviously, they innovated out of necessity,
(26:32):
out of the post-World War II.
Economic environment and physicalenvironment that they found themselves in.
What I'm sensing listening toyou, and I think for listeners,
if you go back to theepisodes with James Davis
and probably Pascal Dennis,
what you're hearing in those episodes, andPhilippe is absolutely echoing this, is that
(26:55):
change has to happen.
And the trigger for that change isthat there are multiple reasons,
but the thing that standsout more than anything is
if you don't keep innovating,then you are dying.
So, just to slightly pivot away fromsort of this scene setting, Philippe,
(27:20):
how would you describe the world ofstrategy right now in terms of its change?
What's going on with strategyand how is it evolving
from what you are seeing in yourengagements and generally, you know,
what you are thinking about the space?
Philippe (27:38):
I mean, it's still a place of great potential, to put it politically correct.
I think I'm still seeing a lotof the old school strategy,
and to be honest,
and by that, I mean strategy andleadership that aims to create
certainty out of something that is ignorant
(27:59):
and ignorantly uncertain.
And the net effect of that is people kindof put their neck on the line to saying,
oh, I'm going to make that happen.
But
they have,
to make it happen, you'regoing to need some effort.
You're going to need heroes thatwe're going to clap at the end.
(28:23):
You're going to need all thosethings that are not sustainable.
And actually, you're going to need to have
a fairly assertive,aggressive sort of leaders
that all the ones that are going tomake things happen in an organization.
And that is basically people
(28:44):
that are going to build those throughthe dysfunction of organization.
And you're not solvingthe dysfunction that way.
You are burning people out.
And I think that is stillsomething that we praise.
That is still the kindof people we promote.
(29:04):
And the danger is that organizationsare not setting themselves up
for being highly functional,adaptive, and so on.
It's still relying verymuch on some individuals
to make things happen.
(29:27):
And as part of this,
sometimes what you got is also thefact that we go from a strategy
and we believe in a strategy,
and we engineer a lot thethinking about it, the modelling.
We bring some external people tomodel industry data and so on.
(29:50):
And we believe it's perfect,
but we should be more humble to realize,
no, we just have somedirection effectively.
And those are imperfect.
And we're going to learn along the way.
If you commit that strategyto a roadmap and a plan,
(30:13):
now the delivery becomes the focus.
The strategy is no longer the focus.
We need to deliver that based on theassumption that made in the business case.
And many organizations will tell you,
actually, we never look back on whetherthe business case has been realized.
(30:34):
You can imagine the problem with that,
but are they actually solving that?
Not so much.
So I think we are still in the earlydays of completely shaking this up
and working with some clients andchallenging some clients on shaking this up.
(30:54):
It is still quite dissonant.
You still have
the leadership that, for20, 30 years of career,
those people have been used about,
we set an objective,
we paint that future, thatidealistic future very well.
(31:15):
And in leadership, we spenda lot of time doing that.
And then we make a solid plan,
and we are going to be successfulas long as we execute well.
Now, there're a couple ofproblems with that, of course,
this plan isn't perfect,
and that picture we have in, you know,
for the three to five-yearhorizon isn't perfect,
(31:38):
and a lot of things aregoing to change in between.
And actually, the time then is spent sellingthis to the rest of the organization,
whereas you could have allowed moretime for the rest of the organization
to participate,
and you wouldn't have to sell it.
(31:59):
And if you organize around that participation,you can actually iterate on that.
So you can adapt along the way.
And I also found that we spenda considerable amount of time
to paint that perfectpicture of the future,
but we have a very, veryimperfect picture of the present.
(32:24):
If you look at,
I know very often when yougo into, especially software,
because software is not something we see
how far the leadership that does the strategyknows about the constraint of software,
knows about,
oh, we have a problemwith fraud around here.
This API is really so flaky.
(32:47):
It's not working where it's supposed to go.
The infrastructure is actually not right.
And that's why the ordersare not going through.
And it requires investment,and none of that is visible.
People are swarming tohave things sort of held up
by bubble gum and sticky tape, sometimes.
(33:09):
And it doesn't make iton the strategy radar.
So the strategy becomes wishful,
and the foundations are made of sand,
and a strategy that doesn'tconsider the constraints
is not a worthwhile strategy.
So I do see a lot of that.
(33:30):
And if people recognize those problems,
it is quite a fundamentalthing to go and change them.
And it's a hard thing to go and change it.
Because that is whatpeople have as a concept,
and the way they see strategy is like that.
(33:52):
Now, to change the view and to turn itupside down about how you do strategy
and how strategy is effectively a factorof alignment for the organization,
it is a big step, a very, very big step.
And it's all the more of a big step that
(34:12):
it starts where who do you involve.
What are they here to represent?
And if you have people that arealigned by project and by competence,
which most organizations are,
then who is representing thecustomer and the product here.
(34:35):
What is the persistence of alignmentof those people to the organization?
And if it's projects,there isn't persistence.
So, therefore, they don't really havean identity to represent in strategy.
And it's difficult.
So, they are some prerequisitesto be able to have a strategy
(35:00):
that is done more continuously.
And therefore more agilefor the organization.
And God, I could go ontothe agile world as well.
I might in a sec, but it's...
You have some elementsof prerequisite where
you need to have some elementsof flow in place where
(35:22):
the organization should align andrepresent some products or services.
Services, also products.
And understanding your value chains,supporting the value to the customers.
Because the strategy has tobe oriented to the customers.
(35:44):
They're the ones thatkeep the company alive.
To do that, there are some elementsthat, if you don't have that in place,
it's very difficult to start distributingstrategy and doing it effectively.
I said as well, the foundations of sand,
if there isn't an element ofsafety and an element of measuring
(36:08):
how bad things are,
it's very difficult tohave solid foundations.
You don't have excellence.
If you don't have excellence,
you're going to be firefightingprobably at least 30% of your time.
If you are firefighting, this isthe space you would've for strategy.
(36:30):
Having excellence as a foundationthat you can really lean on is key.
Otherwise, you end upfirefighting, and you have no time.
And you mentioned time earlier.
You have no time for everything.
Again, if, as a leader,
you find yourself with no time tryingto coordinate the activity all the time,
(36:51):
you are effectively firefighting.
And it's the time to take a stepback and focus on what's important,
limiting the work in progress and so on.
Since I mentioned agile,
I think we have associated acausation between agile and agility,
(37:14):
and organizations have recognizedthat there is a changing,
fast-changing landscape,and they need to adapt,
and they associated doingan agile transformation
will make that possible.
And what has happened is they haveadopted some agile techniques,
maybe some scaled agiletechniques and methods,
(37:37):
but they haven't gonemore agile as a result.
And very often, the challenge is,
it's not the process that was the problem.
Operating in an agile way mightbe something around process,
but building agility or
(37:59):
if you operate in anagile way towards agility,
it's about alignment a lot.
And it's about strategy.
And on that agile, has been quite empty.
So an agile that doesn't provide agilityfor me is as useful as a chocolate teapot.
(38:19):
So it's really about, you know,
I think some organizations have done massiveamounts of agile transformation for some time
to know agility benefit.
They have to pick themself up anddust themself up and just rethink:
how do we bring agility to ourbusiness, and where do we start?
(38:43):
And if you want agility, ifyou want autonomy of teams,
then that means the teamparticipates in the strategy.
That means your strategyis going to be iterative.
That's agility.
If you have a rigid strategy,rigid plan, and roadmap,
you're not going to have agility.
So our strategy becomes in the mix,
(39:04):
and agile has latched onaround OKRs for agility.
Because
academically or theoretically,
it's actually a nice ideathat you have objectives.
People have intent and key results.
And, as we work out, are we getting there?
Which is fair enough.
(39:24):
The challenge is if your objectivebecomes a sort of delivery objective,
then it starts breaking down
because your key results become delivery.
And very often, you see things like that.
And unfortunately, OKRsare a little bit of,
(39:46):
you know, we have introducedthat as the panacea solution.
But they are more of an art toget right than really a science.
And I don't see them beingimplemented very effectively.
And that's where I think the Xmatrix is actually helping massively.
And I'd like this concept, this idea from
(40:08):
Mike Borrows, the creator of Agenda Shift.
And he has this thing
it says, do meaning beforemeasure and measure before method.
And the method is sort ofyour solution, your action.
And that's navigating an X matrix.
So you understand your meaning,your aspirations, your strategies.
(40:33):
You understand your measures.
So, how you going to measurethe progress of your strategy?
And then, you're going to take the action
and determine the actions you're taking.
And you don't need tohave a massive backlog.
It's actually counter-intuitive.
We need to have a smallishbacklog that is just in time.
(40:54):
And once you start hitting the measures,
do you need to continue?
Is there more potential in those measures?
Or, actually, do you need topivot to more important things?
And if you want agility,
people that have one year of backlogs
they can't have agility.
They are delivering to a backlog.That's what they're doing.
(41:14):
You need to bring themore just-in-time element.
And that means connecting the strategy and itsdeployment a lot closer and a lot more often.
And the X matrix is a great tool for that.
James (41:28):
You talked a lot, Philippe, about,
I'm hearing about valuechains, value stream mapping,
the X matrix just in time,
business centres of excellence, agile.
There's a lot of what you could say,
buzzwords here or tools thatpeople probably are aware of.
(41:51):
I think you've done a brilliant job,
and I could keep talkingfor a very, very long time.
I wish we could.
You've done a brilliant job of kind ofsetting the scene and really explaining
the theoretical side of whatyou're talking about here
in terms of bringingflow to the front line.
(42:15):
We love theory.
This space loves theory, but what reallyhelps people stand out as leaders,
and that could be people in theC-suite or people on the shop floor.
What really helps people to standout is practical, actionable advice
and putting into practice whatyou're talking about here.
So, with in mind,
(42:36):
I know our listeners are probably itchingto hear the execution part of this strategy.
So, how can you put all that you'vetalked about here today into practice?
Philippe (42:51):
Good, very good question. Very good question.
Each situation is specific.
So there isn't really a rule ofthumb or a recipe to go about it.
But I have isolated, somehow,
(43:11):
some pillars, and generally, thosepillars need to happen in sequence.
So when,
and let's say you get intoa traditional landscape
or, you know, sometimes it's more evolved,
but essentially we all,
all initiatives, very often,organized as projects.
(43:36):
And the projects typicallyhave a conflicting demand.
So, there are people that startgetting shared across teams
to accommodate those things.
And sometimes,
the teams are not stable, and so on.
So, that is very often a starting point.
(43:57):
It's nice if we already have some ideas of
teams that are set, and persistedand they're aligned to something.
The first key part is trying to putsome stability in the organization.
And how can we align to something?
Generally, we look to align to value,
(44:20):
but it's also understandingwhat is that chain of value
because you can't have all theknowledge concentrated on one team.
So you need to keep ateam size around 5 to 10,
and then the teams get connected.
So, understanding that connection,
(44:41):
what is the landscape ofthe system in serving value?
And in this,
you tend to map your system andthe relationship between teams,
and it's also very useful.
That's something I'm quite a specialist of,
and I train it on O'Reilly and so on.
Worldly maps.
(45:01):
I'm a big fan of worldly mapsbecause they start from the user,
and you map all the usersyou got in your business,
their needs,
and how your businessaligns to their needs.
And that gives you really a senseof granularity of your business,
and at the same time, alignment ofthe different parts of the business
(45:26):
to the needs of the customer.
So, getting that view of the landscape
and trying to establish teams in everything
is important to start with.
Teams will bring you resilience.
And once you have that,
you can look at focusingas well on excellence.
(45:47):
So now that those teams are stuckwith the software they're building,
or whatever it is they're building,
how can they start ironingout the process issues,
the performance issues, the quality issues,
and now how can they start doingKaizen effectively, really?
(46:08):
So, continuing improvement.
And that's the first step where they starttaking responsibility for themselves.
Because another challenge is thehuman challenge of they have been used
to being told what to do for so long.
Now, we are telling themto think for themselves,
(46:29):
and we need to start training those muscles
and training those muscles.
Kaizen is very effective becauseit deals with their context,
with things that are near to themthat they can change and influence.
So it's about training that.
So, number one, alignment.
Number two, igniting somecontinued improvement and Kaizen.
(46:52):
And by that, theresponsibility of the teams.
Number three,
it's also the teamwork relationshipswithin teams and across teams.
So understanding, at ateam level, the roles,
but not in a segregatedway, in a relationship way.
(47:12):
I absolutely hate withpassion the racing metrics.
So responsibility, accountability,consulted and informed,
which are the typical consultanttoolkit that people bring.
This isolate responsibility, itdoesn't create collaboration.
(47:36):
So if we are to create collaboration,
first, the team has theaccountability, not the individual.
The team has the accountabilityand the responsibility together.
Number two is about recognizing therelationship people have in the team
and the outcomes of those relationships
and making sure they're lived.
(47:56):
And making sure very often, as well, that
it creates cross-functionalleadership in teams.
Because you realize youmay have a product owner,
you may have a scrum master.
You may have an engineer,you may have an architect.
They become the leadership together.
It's not some leader that takes the leadershipand all the accountability on behalf of.
(48:19):
So, if you want to have distributedaccountability without dilution
of accountability.
Very important point that.
You need to actuallyinvest into creating teams
and continually coachingthose teams to be accountable.
Accountable to the outside, accountableto each other on the inside.
(48:41):
So there's an important elementof teamwork relationships
because it's intangible. Peopledon't know how to work with that.
And all you see out there is
we need psychological safety,we need, we need, we need...
but how do you work with it? Andteam coaching brings that element,
and team coaching outside of the system
(49:03):
it's about recognizing the relationshipteams have with other teams
to get things realized.
And that leads to ideas of topology.
It's a very good book called
Team Topologies
that looks at the typology of teams
and how they work into a topologyand the relationships of teams.
(49:25):
I'm also currently writingsomething around the relationships
between teams and theidea of the three Cs of
coordination, cooperation, collaboration.
Most organizations, based on projectmanagement, budget management,
and single accountability,are effectively coordinated.
(49:49):
Meaning that somebody takesresponsibility on behalf of others
and is going to coordinatethe relationship,
and often micromanages the relationshipof people to get it realized.
This is the project management territory.
You can evolve to cooperation.
And cooperation is basicallyhaving more of an idea of teams.
(50:13):
Each team has its ownobjectives, and they all made,
you know, they're all gettingtogether every so often.
And as where the scaling agile techniqueswith big room planning and so on is useful.
They're all getting together, and theycontribute to each other projects.
And you organize something like that.
(50:35):
And then you have collaboration.
And very often, it's anempty word in organization.
HR department wants collaboration,
but collaboration doesn't happen
because it's not designed for it.
Collaboration is bringing peopletogether very frequently to co-create,
meaning you don't distribute the work.
You don't divide the work.
(50:56):
You actually get the bigger objectives,
the more distal goal of the work,
and you swarm the peopleon the work as a team.
And sometimes it's a teamof teams that do that.
So, understanding howyou deploy across teams,
a coordinated approach,a cooperated approach,
(51:17):
or a collaborativeapproach is very important.
And it depends with thecomplexity of your problems
because you can't afford collaboratingon everything all the time.
So you need to recognize whereyou are only going to coordinate,
where you're only going to cooperate,
and where you can afford collaboration.
So a key element, number three,is the team relationships.
(51:39):
And once you have allthose things in place,
you can actually startaffording your strategy.
And, generally, strategy inmost of the change programs I do
is the last piece.
And it is, unfortunately,the hardest to get to
and also the keystone tomake it hold together.
(52:01):
And strategy,
the way I look at strategy,is continuous strategy.
So basically, how do we get teamsto continually think about strategy?
So every couple of weeks,
you know, getting togetherto talk about strategy,
very often supported byworldly mapping and so on.
(52:23):
And then strategy refreshes.
So looking to organizethings around once a quarter.
And instead of organizinga regroup around delivery,
we organize a regroup around strategy.
And the delivery itself is organized throughlean portfolio management, which is continuous.
(52:43):
So the regroup aroundstrategy is about refreshing
and everything that has emerged throughthe quarter, through the strategy,
continuous strategyactivity people are doing,
then goes into an input to the refresh,
which is looked at thesystem, more systemic level.
(53:04):
And,
basically, all the teams have a day ora couple of days of facilitated progress
where they look at what's the impact.
What do we need to change,
how do we need to align on certain things,
how are we aligning on those,
what do we need to expedite,what do we need to stop?
(53:25):
Maybe how do we need to carvethe organization differently
to make space for collaborativeteams that start a new initiative?
So, looking at this,
very often periodically at least
once a quarter as a strategy refresh.
And for that, we use...
you'll be pleased to knowthe X matrix and I axis
(53:47):
to create that alignment
where we create the alignment across thespace and, effectively, we are looking to
the input is future suggested changes,
and the output is normalized
on the coherent sort ofprogress for the next quarter.
(54:10):
So, effectively, the ideais we are here to disturb
what we think of the delivery,
what we think about theinitiatives we are taking,
how do we need to disturb that?
And we regroup every quarter for that.
And that allows us to havethat emergence coming in
and that coherence working through.
(54:33):
So, actually, we are all put in thesame direction at the end of it.
And continually, we challengethat again and over again.
So, one alignment.
And flow around the alignment.
Two,
getting the excellence.
Three, wiring the network of relationshipsin the teams and across the teams.
(54:57):
And four, organizing thecollaboration around strategy,
which is a part of continuousstrategy and strategy refreshes.
Does that make sense?
James (55:11):
Absolutely. I feel like we could probably
do an episode per those topicsin fairness, Philippe, but
I think that's very clear in terms of a,
I guess, a plan, a roadmap forpeople who are listening in terms of,
you know, a lot of thepeople that I talk to,
(55:31):
they do have a businesssystem or an operating system,
and that does incorporate Lean, Kaizen,project management tools, et cetera.
But what Philippe, what you aretalking about is, okay, that's good,
but actually, now you need to build these otherelements into this overarching methodology.
Philippe (55:54):
If you are doing good at Lean, and I mean
the Lean of Toyota style,
you already have an embedded culture,an embedded alignment, and so on,
that should get you into a reallygood place already. So yes.
James (56:13):
For those people who don't have that, though,
what would your one piece of advice be tosomeone on getting started with all of this?
Outside of, naturally, I'm going to askyou how they can work with yourselves,
but if you are looking atthis with a fresh pair of eyes
and you're thinking,
(56:34):
wow, Philippe, there is somuch great content here.
I haven't thought about theimportance of flow and agility,
but where can I get started above all that?
Like, what's that one piece of advice forsomeone to get started with this process?
Philippe (56:54):
I'm tempted to say I don't know
because it is so contextual.
And the answer is that youneed to read your context,
and you are going to try things.
And I'd like,
that's actually a very important questionand something that I continually feel
(57:20):
people are not getting and notgetting enough attention to.
The idea that, you know,
a bit like there's warm holes in space
or this idea of warm holes.
I think there are warm holes in change.
And there's this idea of dispositionally.
(57:43):
Influence or modulators.
If you hit,
if you create,
I mean, you need to recognizesome constraints of your system,
and sometimes, unplugging certainconstraints is going to enable a lot.
And here we're talkingabout limiting constraints,
(58:05):
but there's also this idea of,
potentially, enablingconstraints or constructors.
We could also try and call them.
And sometimes it's actuallyvery interesting to think
if you do a small thing, somewhere,
maybe it changes completely
(58:29):
how people will perceive a situation.
So, an example is,
if you want excellence,
I often ask engineering teams to reporton the tech that they are leaking,
and, at first, they don't have thepsychological safety to do that
(58:52):
because it's like puttingbad marks on their job.
But then I tell them, well,
if you are able to mark and puta bad mark on your job you do,
you actually know,
and it's not your skillsthat are your problem.
(59:12):
You're not given thetime to do the job right.
So it is somebody else's problem,
the person that doesn't give youthe time to do your job right
has the problem.
Now, you are only creatingvisibility of that problem,
and without that visibility,
nobody can make the decisionsto give you the time.
(59:37):
So few things like this,
and you can only change so manythings because people, you know,
want maybe a dozen things tochange in an organization,
small changes.
But are there some key changes
that will allow you to createleverage in your change
(01:00:02):
to accelerate certain things and addressmany of the other changes as a by-product.
And leadership needs to understandwhat are those modulators,
those dials, that if Itweak them a little bit,
it's going to create an imbalance,
and actually, the dispositionallyof the system will
(01:00:23):
go towards more of the things we would like
and less of the things we don't like.
Sometimes, there's inertiaand belief, as well.
I've been in an organization where,
that was a fantastic story like this.
And if you think, you know,
we discussed about the Porscheas an organization as well.
Change often happens in an organizationwhen they're in the dire strait.
(01:00:47):
And some don't make the change.
Some make this change, andit's quite spectacular.
But because of the context of thatsituation being in dire strait,
they're ready to takemore radical solutions.
And I've been in...
and you can exploit
if some change is happeningin your organization,
people have a dispositionally to reorient.
(01:01:10):
Now, can you use thisto go in the right way?
Like Covid, for instance.
It was one of those things.
You didn't have a choice,but as it was happening,
what can you make of it?
How can you use a good crisis,
like Churchill was saying?
And
sometimes you have to engineer it.
(01:01:31):
If you see inertia in your organization,
then you can think, how are wegoing to basically poke something,
create a disruption that willallow us to overcome that inertia?
And I've had a situation oncewhere people were hearing,
(01:01:51):
being told, yeah, weneed to focus on quality,
but for them, they werefocusing on delivery.
For them, it was about delivering features.
And if they had tocompromise quality, so be it.
So the message was not landing,
and one day, the release got actually...
(01:02:13):
it wasn't going to happen.
There were so many problems.
It wasn't going to happen.
And so what we said is, you down tools,
at the end of the day,
if we're not releasing software,
there is no value that we're providing,
no value that we're creating.
So you down tools and 200 people,
(01:02:34):
when you say to 200 people,
you stop what you're doing,
you're down tools,
it creates an impact.
And then we told them
there is one thing that isabsolutely critical in that release.
One team is going to re-engineer that
into the past workingversion of the system.
(01:02:55):
So it's going to take thechange we did just for that
and retrofit them into the pastversion that we know is working.
All the rest,
you swarm into teams
to figure improvements on thingsthat have made this release fail,
this work fail.
(01:03:15):
And it was really disturbingand upsetting for some people.
But from that point on,
they knew that quality mattered.
From that point on, themessage about quality landed.
So sometimes, it's aboutcreating those things
(01:03:36):
that will change some belief systems.
And there are big tickets likethis that you can work with.
And the reason I'm saying I don't know
is because those are so contextual.
And even when you are facing them,
you don't know how they're going to work.
You can only try them,and you'll know afterward.
James (01:04:00):
I think that's absolutely fair.
I can imagine it.
It really is dependenton not just the vertical
but the company itself andthe size of the company.
Philippe (01:04:15):
You can have a lot of linear approaches to do that.
But, you know, for leadership,that is interested is
how can we look at warm holes of change,
that can accelerate things byusing the dispositionally of people
to reorient around constraintsthat are being created
(01:04:36):
or that exist in the system.
And it requires quite some thinkingand a lot of probing, a lot of trying.
And then you see what reacts, and thenyou orient, and you navigate your change
as a dynamic thing.
You don't follow a setplan, a settling plan.
You navigate based on allthe things you're trying,
(01:04:57):
and 20% of those will succeed, probably.
And then you try some moreand some more and some more,
and your change morphs moretowards the good thing,
less towards the bad things.
James (01:05:12):
Yeah. I can imagine.
Just to finish this up for today'sepisode, Philippe, and again, thank you.
It's been really, really interesting.
Can you just tell us a little bit aboutthe support that you can offer over at
(01:05:35):
community.henko.co.uk
and, I guess,
the sort of work that you can offerpeople to take today's learnings
and put them into action?
So, we run a communityof digital leadership.
It's a meetup.
So we have frequentmeetups, and I'm rallying
(01:06:00):
some team around it to support it.
The idea is sharing something back
but also probing as an industry.
Understand what's resonating.
I eat my own dog food as people say.
So it's a permanent sort of experimentation
(01:06:23):
and sharing so that we recognize,
it's not basically talking froma top of a soft box type thing.
It is actually participating andthe community is more involved.
The idea is being moreon the experimental side
(01:06:46):
and the high-end side of what's next.
And for me,
a lot of the things I've been workingon for the past six, seven years,
and actually in my previous job,
I was already really doingquite a lot of that too,
has been about always what's next.
(01:07:06):
Very early on is what's nextto that agile transformation.
I won't bring agility.
What's next to the digital transformation
that one brings basically businessand technology working together.
And that's what weexplore because, I think,
there's still a lot more in it.
(01:07:28):
But we start also looking at themes beyondthat around leadership in complexity.
Where is the next complexitygoing to come from as well.
There is a lot aroundsustainability, responsibility,
and we don't think about diversity.
We are connected as wellwith our tech legacy,
for instance, that looks at how can welook at tech, in terms of sustainability.
(01:07:54):
And when you think, you know,
some large bank, for instance,probably has the data centre
electricity consumption of a small city
and all that with a serverutilization in 3 to 5% maybe.
So, the cloud offers a lot of possibilitiesaround that, around optimizing tech.
(01:08:19):
But there's going to be emerging things.
And the more we are goingtowards a more complex world,
and I was in research with SimonWard as well around retail,
and we are seeing probably
the supply chains in retail,
it's not that different thanthe financial crisis where
(01:08:40):
people knew their counterpartywho they were selling to,
and the counterparty wherethey were buying from.
And in the financial crisis was around,
where they were ensuring their risk really
and what they were selling to.
That has been a recipe for disaster.
(01:09:00):
We know
the poor knowledge of thewider counterparty network
has been a recipe for disasterin the 2008 financial crisis.
And more recently,
it's been also a disasterin the supply chains
of the car industry and many industries.
And how the product andso on are going to change
(01:09:25):
the supply chain dynamics.
Also very much changing.
And how do you carbon test
as well as supply chain.
How do you become moreresponsible in your supply chains
and your carbon footprint?
All those things. You know,
if you think the complexity ofdigital about working with technology,
(01:09:46):
working with sustainability,working with responsibility,
working with resilience into avery, very fast-changing world
and changing dynamics andgeopolitics and so on,
it is going to increase multifold
the complexity that we arestruggling to today to deal with.
(01:10:10):
And I see that being thedirection of what we look into.
And the direction forme as a business as well
is still very much about howorganizations learn to lead
in a changing environment rather thantrying to create certainty around that.
(01:10:30):
And how do they adapt very fast to thechanging circumstances and conditions
for resilience, formanaging the risk as well as
for exploring theopportunities that it brings.
I think that's, yeah.
(01:10:50):
I think given the uncertain conditions
economically and geo-politically thatwe find ourselves in as we record today,
I think yeah, what you'resaying there, Philippe, is very,
it's very timely, and it's somethingthat listeners should definitely
go out of their way.
(01:11:10):
If it does resonate,
they should go out to visitcommunity.henko.co.uk.
On behalf of myself,and the production team,
and everyone else thatsupports this podcast,
I just want to say thank you, Philippe.
(01:11:31):
I think this has been anotherone of those episodes that
I've really learned a lot and changedquite a few opinions that I had.
Thank you so much, Philippe, for joiningtoday and being our strategy hero.
Philippe (01:11:48):
You're very welcome. And thank you for having me.
I hope I lived up to the Avenger type.
I think I'm more here to help.
I think there's something aswell in the engagement process
that for me, the heroes arereally the leaders and so on
(01:12:11):
that have to make those difficult changes.
And we are just here to support them.
Let's be humble and let'swork with them as a team
because it's not an easy change.
We like to say,
oh, people, and they're not doing this,and not doing that and not getting it.
It's not easy changes.
(01:12:31):
It's difficult.
And maintaining the running business
and all the problems, as well
as driving fundamentalchange on it, is difficult.
Very difficult.
So sometimes, I also act as a coach and
as a one-to-one coach,and the stories you get,
you realize that there'spressure on people.
(01:12:53):
There's pressure on people, andit's difficult to leave them.
That's the other side of thecurtain that is confidential.
And I'm not able to expose theconversations I'm having, but
we need to appreciateit's not easy for people.
And to me, they're all the heroesand we have to make them the heroes.
(01:13:16):
We just send a little help here.
James (01:13:21):
Well, I'm sure that...
I'm sure that you've helped a lot of ourlisteners to realize that they are the heroes.
Thank you, Philippe.
I look forward to hopefully havingyou back on the podcast in the future.
Philippe (01:13:36):
We'll be glad to. We'll be glad to. Thank you.
James (01:13:39):
Thank you, Philippe. Take care.
Philippe (01:13:41):
Cheers.
Hi again, and welcome to the Strategy Hero Podcast,
the podcast that's all about divinginto the world of business strategy,
transformation, and operational excellence.
Since 2017, Philippe Guenet,who is our guest today,
has operated as anindependent coach under Henko,
who is focused on buildinghigh-performing leadership teams.
Philippe has also worked with organizationssuch as Lloyd's Banking Group,
(00:29):
Deutsche Bank, Carnival in the UK, KFC,
and a number of startups, facilitatingcomplex digital transformation initiatives.
He's also an associate boardmember of the Thought Leadership
with the International Coaching Federationand runs London's Digital Leadership Meetup.
But today, he's our strategy hero.
I'm very excited to talk to youtoday, Philippe. How are you?
Philippe (00:52):
I'm all right. Thank you.
It's a little bit dauntingto be a hero, but we'll see.
James (00:58):
Well, I'm glad that you accepted the title.
Philippe (01:03):
I'll do my best.
James (01:05):
Just to get started with kind of an overview of who you are.
I'm sure a lot of people on, youknow, who are listening today
have heard of you. Butfor those who have not,
could you just tell everyone alittle bit about your background
and how you found a wayinto starting Henko?
Philippe (01:21):
Thank you. Thank you.
One thing I cannot add is
I'm actually originally French,
and I moved to the UKa long time ago, in 96.
Therefore, my accent is notcompletely the one of a local,
but I'm UK-based, south of London.
(01:43):
I did my initial career very much in,
I graduated in businessand saw the internet
and the potential of theinternet early on in 93, 94,
and ever since, I've workedin the world of digital.
That has got me essentiallyin consulting organizations.
(02:06):
And for my scenes, I probably have about20, 25 years in the consulting world.
And from 2017,
effectively, I had a client that wasreally thinking about in-sourcing.
And strategically, they havea view about in-sourcing,
(02:28):
which is quite an existentialproblem for a consultancy.
And that made me thinkactually they're right,
and actually, there is abusiness model supporting them.
But that business model is notabout coming up with a solution.
It's coming up with something different,
(02:49):
something new that helps themdevelop the competencies,
reorganize, rearrange basically their,
rewire some of their companyto something we call flow.
And reconsider many thingsaround leadership and, of course,
(03:10):
around strategy, with agilitybeing also a guiding principle.
And when you get to that, you realize thatthe organization needs really profound change.
And that profound change is notabout doing things differently.
It's also about being different asorganizations, being different as leaders,
(03:32):
being different as teams.
That is more of a coaching concernthan really a consulting concern.
It's about creating the framework,
creating the facilitation, creating theengagement of people, and getting people
(03:53):
in collaboration together overcertain things like excellence,
like the future of theorganization, strategy,
like the relationship between theteams, and, of course, like delivery.
But very often organizations, are only organizingthemselves around delivery, which is the problem.
And doing those more profound changes isa change that has to come from the inside.
(04:18):
And it is not about imposingsome recipes from the outside.
It's actually helping peoplemaking those changes on the inside
and riding that journey.
And that's why, in 2017,
I just thought it was not aboutbeing a consultant anymore.
The new game is being acoach but facilitating change
(04:38):
as a coach, as genuine coaching.
And that's why I went on to a new careeras a coach and a professional coaching.
A qualified and certifiedas a coach with the ICF,
and now I'm also a boardmember in the ICF UK
to this purpose of embracing a differentstance and different type of support.
(05:02):
Allowing the client to have theintelligence as a team, as individuals,
bringing the intelligence of change,
bringing a contextualized viewworking through their difficulties,
working through their relationships,realigning organization,
realigning their relationships,
and doing this purposefullyaround creating excellence
(05:25):
and creating the performanceand the future of the business,
which involves, you know,
improvements, which involves strategy,which involves all those things.
So that's my journey.
Sorry being a bit long over it,
but I think it's important to explainthe nuance that this is bringing.
James (05:44):
No, please don't apologize, Philippe.
I think a lot of what you say there
will resonate with our listeners because
they are in, you know,they are either consultants
or they're working in a plant or
they're within the corporate office.
And they're tackling the issues thatyou've tackled your entire career.
(06:07):
I think it's always inspiring to hearpeople that have been in your shoes
and they've thought outside the box.
They've thought differently.
One of the things that I've really loved,
I've loved about gettingto know you personally.
For our listeners, I headup marketing at i-nexus,
(06:28):
and Philippe found his way to i-nexus,
and we built our relationshipthrough our content.
So, for me, it's alwayspersonally rewarding
to see people come into i-nexusand engage with our content,
but to get someone like yourself,Philippe, was an extra added bonus,
(06:49):
I would say, to me.
Philippe (06:51):
And maybe we should give a warning sign as well to people that
I'm not too afraid being controversial
because my job is to think outside the box,
is to challenge the thinking,challenge the perspective.
And Henko, as well, it'sa name that has a meaning.
The company I created has a meaningin the sense that it's helping people,
(07:16):
you know, seeing things in a new light.
And that's what the name Henko carries.
And
it's not about telling people whatdifferent things they should do.
It's helping them seeing in a newlight so they can make better choices,
better decisions.
And it's very, very validin the field of strategy
(07:37):
because very often,
in the field of strategy, we bringthat strategy house to do it for us
and know if the people have, and the leadershipof organization has to take their own care
of their own strategy.
That's the important thing.And that's what I am to do.
James (07:56):
I wouldn't, again, I wouldn't apologize about being controversial. I think
some of the guests we've had so faron the podcast have been anyone,
you know, anything but traditionalin terms of their point of view.
And I think that it's very importantthat we get people like yourself
exposed to more audiences
(08:18):
because through thinking differentlyis how you can actually make a change.
And that leads me nicelyonto our topic today.
And before we hit record, we weretalking a lot about flow and change.
And, like you say, you'rethinking differently.
And that's why when wecame up with today's topic,
(08:41):
bringing flow to the frontline,
it seemed perfect based on your experiencesand what you're doing over at Henko.
So, just to get started,
diving into what is areally exciting topic for me
to listen to,
in your career, you've workedwith some real big clients.
(09:04):
You've worked with some smaller clients.
From your engagements,
what would you list as the reasonsthat drive change in leadership,
organizations, and strategy as a whole?
Philippe (09:19):
Yeah, very good question.
And I think what we fail to recognize is
how much digital is changing the wayorganizations work or should work.
If we go a long way back aroundthe digital industrial revolution,
(09:43):
there was a lot ofchange around leadership.
And the change in landscape, thechange in possibilities also change.
We led organizations and so on.
In more recent times as well, therewas the sort of mass production
(10:04):
where we have had basicallyyears where, or many decades,
through the 20th century, where itwas about producing new, you know,
producing things, andthey would be customers.
So really, everything wasoriented towards the production.
(10:24):
And there is one notableinteresting exception in Toyota.
Through scarcity,
Japan was really ruined after the war,
they had to come up withsomething different.
They had to build what they sold.
(10:45):
Meaning that they would onlybuild the things they sold
because they couldn'thave the luxury of stocks,
which actually introducedthe idea of viability
or the possibility of viability.
Because as they were goingtowards more than one piece flow,
they would build the thing only they sold,
(11:09):
then they could actually pivotand build things different,
different variations ofthings, different colours,
different options.
And bring that into an industrial cycle
where they're churning cars and production.
(11:31):
And to me, that's really amassive change that they brought
a bit by necessity, by the context,
and this has opened up to all the leanthinking about reducing inventories,
smaller production batches,or no batch at all.
(11:54):
And then sort of getting thepossibilities of viability,
the possibility of configuringa car to your liking
whilst the car is being mass-produced.
And that, to me, is really animportant point in history.
And fast forward to the digital times,
(12:15):
with software,
it's 100% viable.
It's 100% tailored, pretty much.
And we're trying to have anindustrial production of software
with a lot of the work in theservices of most companies
that use a website, thatuse an app, and so on.
And we see as well a lot of the thingswe consume are more software-based.
(12:41):
And interestingly, you wouldbuy a camera in the past,
you would buy an iPodor Walkman in the past.
Now it solves software on yourmobile phone, for instance.
And the world is going togo more and more software.
And with software,
there is a possibilityto change a lot more,
a lot more often,
(13:02):
which means that the speed ofthe industry is much faster,
and there is an infinitepossibility of tailoring
and personalization down to the individual.
So this is changing again, massively,
and it is really opposite tobasically the mass production time
(13:26):
to the speed we're getting now.
Another also element and again, Toyota,
is that,
in the mass production sense,you would design something,
and then you will havepeople putting it together,
and their skills will be limited toputting some things together well.
(13:51):
Comes Toyota days.
Kaizen is really central to it,
meaning that the people that are puttingthings together are also thinking.
They start being knowledge workers
in the sense that they start thinking,
is there a better way to put it together?
Is there a better waythat the product could be?
(14:11):
Fast forward to digital again.
The engineers on theproduction chain are really...
it's not a productionchain anymore, actually.
It's a value creation chain, pretty much.
The engineers therereally have the knowledge,
and actually, the leadership doesn't haveso much knowledge of the constraints.
(14:34):
If you were putting them in front ofan IDE to start creating some software,
they wouldn't be able to.
The languages have evolved. Even some ofthem that have engineering, in their past,
a lot of things have evolved so much that theywouldn't know how to put it together anymore.
And therefore, we have to leanand rely a lot more on the people
(14:58):
that are closest to doing the work,
that are closest to the customers
to get involved, to have a say,to actually switch on their brain.
And that means bringing thosepeople into the strategy.
That means getting those people tocontribute to where we could go.
(15:20):
And it's a fundamental difference wherenow we're talking about potentially
and had talk in the past about that,
a strategy to the people.
So, getting everybody as asensor network and an ID network
to contribute to the strategy.
Now this completelychanges how we see strategy
(15:41):
because if you want to havethat genuinely distributed,
you are doing it bottom up
instead of having a select fewdoing strategies at the top,
and then all the rest of theorganization delivering to that,
which would work in amass production type sense
(16:05):
in the early 1900 or mid-1900 maybe.
Now, it's completelydifferent, where the people
need to be able to make daily decisions,
and there isn't time to go up anddown the hierarchies to make those.
And so, therefore, they need to havethe context in which they're working in.
(16:28):
And if they're contributingto the strategy,
they have that context in built in them.
And the second thing is they're all seeingthings that are important in the strategy.
There are ideas that few may beoutliers ideas may be the ones
that will be the futurebreakthrough of the business.
(16:48):
How are we tapping into that,
and how does that make its way
to actually impact and decideand help better decisions
and better opportunities for the business?
And that's strategy bottomup, which, unfortunately,
is strategy upside down,but it's not a bad thing.
It's rethinking how we get to that.
(17:11):
And in doing that,
you realize organizations areabsolutely not designed for that.
They're designed todeliver most of the time.
The coherence and the glue oforganization is the delivery, the plans.
It's not so much the strategy.
And to change that is amassive, massive, massive task.
(17:33):
And people, as well,need to see the benefits,
but also grow their skills and compute andunderstand how we are going to change all this,
because you don't switch it on.
It's a big journey, a very big journey.
And once you do that,you have a better flow.
James (17:53):
Thank you.
There are a couple of thingsthere that stood out to me,
but I think above all else,
what would you say are the main blockers to
flipping strategy on its head
and having the shop floor or
(18:14):
the doers or however youwant to call those people,
what's stopping companiesfrom being able to do that?
Philippe (18:24):
I don't like the term mindset, and everybody will flag mindset.
Well, it's a way too generic thing.
But I think we are at the tippingpoint of a transition where
digital has been seen
and digital transformations have beenseen as a technology affair type thing.
(18:47):
Where you need to deliver the next big data,and then now you need to be on the cloud,
and now you need to haveAI and all those things.
And a lot of companiesare made feel inadequate,
so therefore, and laggards,
and therefore they're goingto call some consultants
that have something semi-intelligentto say about it, to rescue them.
(19:09):
And fundamentally, and maybe that's right.
They need to catch up.
If they are that far behind, ifthey're really in a laggard category,
there is an experience out there that someconsultant is able to maybe bring them
to the right sort oflevel quickly to catch up.
(19:30):
It doesn't mean they're going to perform.
And the things we are seeingmore and more are the reasons
and essentially the leadershipand the wider leadership element
that have got them to become laggards
and not wake up to the speedof transition of the market.
Having a consultant helping them catchup is not resolving that problem.
(19:57):
It's not actually, it'sjust playing catch up.
It's not actually solving thefact that they're not aligned
to perform in the new digital world, in afaster-changing world with software, and so on.
And the gap is very bigfor some organizations
(20:18):
because technology,
as in digital transformation inso far as just technology thing,
it has been a technology delivery element
where people have beendelivering those new things,
but they have not necessarilychallenged their perspective.
(20:38):
How do we move?
How do we make better decisions faster?
For instance, simple thing.
How do we make decisions on the periphery,
and really, how do we all contribute tothe well running of the organization?
Meaning that how do we adapt ourselves?
(20:59):
How do we all pay attention atour relevant level to excellence
so that we don't have a hurdle?
And so many companies willtell you about tech debt,
and are we all aligned on the strategy?
And a new way of being alignedon the strategy is really
distributing the strategyand holding its coherence.
(21:21):
So it's a bottom-up strategy,an emergent strategy
from the generation and theidentification of ideas.
And then it's actuallycoherently choosing the focus
so that it doesn't go all the ways,
but sometimes the focus can be also, well,
we're going to have some teamsthat are going to diverge because
(21:42):
there may be new ideas,serendipity coming out of that
and dealing with riding that change,
we're talking about[inaudible], for instance,
and this uncertainty, ambiguity.
And this is often presented as a problem,
and it is a problem if you'retrying to control it, of course,
(22:05):
but it's also the massive opportunities tofind new business model, new ideas, new avenues
because the world is gettingdisrupted all the time.
So, how can you ride that change?
How can you lead in a waythat, of course, needs agility
so you can ride the opportunities that
(22:27):
are emerging from thefast-changing pace of the industry?
And that is, I think, a fundamental change.
And we still longing from,
and, you know, personally, I wrote ablog, actually not so long ago around.
We are still celebrating
(22:50):
traditional readership.
If you look at somethinglike The Apprentice,
if you look at what are theleaders that come to mind,
and people will mention ElonMusk, will mention Steve Jobs,
and they're all seen as thosegeniuses that make all the decisions.
And I think it's really a dangerousperspective on leadership.
(23:15):
I think the better leadershiptoday and maybe, you know,
maybe there are some peoplethat are such geniuses
and working 24/7 and soon that can hold that,
but up to what scale and howmany people have that gift.
Now, I think the betterleadership is to think about
how you distribute thatin your organization.
(23:38):
How everybody has an elementof engagement and involvement.
And it is an, you know,
around creating excellence, aroundworking well with their colleagues,
around harnessing, basically,the collective intelligence
and the collective perspectiveand sensor network and so on
(24:01):
to spot weak signals of possibilities.
And if you want to harnesseverybody on the direction,
strategy is involving a lot of people,
many more that are typically involvedinto the strategy are important.
And all those things,when we talk about flow,
(24:22):
it is all those thingscoming together really,
and that achieve flow.
But it's important toappreciate that flow in...
a lot of people talk about flow nowadays,
but they talk about flow inthe sense of flow of work.
Which is the sort of olderLean concept of flow of work.
(24:44):
But that is very much basedon reducing the viability.
Now, we keep on talking about the flowof work in the context of complexity
where the viability is inherent,
and actually, you have to work with it,
and you have to explore and exploit it.
And that means that the ideaof flow is a constant dynamic
(25:08):
where you will need to recompose, youwill need to explore possibilities
when those possibilities happen,
then how do you direct capacity to that?
And maybe what do you do,
what do you stop,
what you shrink,
and the flow, therefore, becomessomething extremely dynamic.
(25:29):
That is a very, very fragile thing.
You may hit the perfect flow, but it'sgoing to be for a very, very short time
because something will changethat you have to adapt for.
And it changes the dynamicsof everything again.
So it's taking that perspectiveand writing it, really.
James (25:48):
Yeah. I couldn't agree more, I think.
When I think back to sort ofhow I've developed in my career,
I have had what you talkedabout there, Philippe,
where leaders have distributed responsibility,accountability, and participation
in strategy setting.
(26:09):
And that then flows,
that's flowed throughout my entire career.
Every team that I'veever built and managed,
I've always empowered themto think strategically
and to carve out timeto be able to do that.
And it's so important.
I think it's just going back to what yousaid at the very beginning about Toyota.
Obviously, they innovated out of necessity,
(26:32):
out of the post-World War II.
Economic environment and physicalenvironment that they found themselves in.
What I'm sensing listening toyou, and I think for listeners,
if you go back to theepisodes with James Davis
and probably Pascal Dennis,
what you're hearing in those episodes, andPhilippe is absolutely echoing this, is that
(26:55):
change has to happen.
And the trigger for that change isthat there are multiple reasons,
but the thing that standsout more than anything is
if you don't keep innovating,then you are dying.
So, just to slightly pivot away fromsort of this scene setting, Philippe,
(27:20):
how would you describe the world ofstrategy right now in terms of its change?
What's going on with strategyand how is it evolving
from what you are seeing in yourengagements and generally, you know,
what you are thinking about the space?
Philippe (27:38):
I mean, it's still a place of great potential, to put it politically correct.
I think I'm still seeing a lotof the old school strategy,
and to be honest,
and by that, I mean strategy andleadership that aims to create
certainty out of something that is ignorant
(27:59):
and ignorantly uncertain.
And the net effect of that is people kindof put their neck on the line to saying,
oh, I'm going to make that happen.
But
they have,
to make it happen, you'regoing to need some effort.
You're going to need heroes thatwe're going to clap at the end.
(28:23):
You're going to need all thosethings that are not sustainable.
And actually, you're going to need to have
a fairly assertive,aggressive sort of leaders
that all the ones that are going tomake things happen in an organization.
And that is basically people
(28:44):
that are going to build those throughthe dysfunction of organization.
And you're not solvingthe dysfunction that way.
You are burning people out.
And I think that is stillsomething that we praise.
That is still the kindof people we promote.
(29:04):
And the danger is that organizationsare not setting themselves up
for being highly functional,adaptive, and so on.
It's still relying verymuch on some individuals
to make things happen.
(29:27):
And as part of this,
sometimes what you got is also thefact that we go from a strategy
and we believe in a strategy,
and we engineer a lot thethinking about it, the modelling.
We bring some external people tomodel industry data and so on.
(29:50):
And we believe it's perfect,
but we should be more humble to realize,
no, we just have somedirection effectively.
And those are imperfect.
And we're going to learn along the way.
If you commit that strategyto a roadmap and a plan,
(30:13):
now the delivery becomes the focus.
The strategy is no longer the focus.
We need to deliver that based on theassumption that made in the business case.
And many organizations will tell you,
actually, we never look back on whetherthe business case has been realized.
(30:34):
You can imagine the problem with that,
but are they actually solving that?
Not so much.
So I think we are still in the earlydays of completely shaking this up
and working with some clients andchallenging some clients on shaking this up.
(30:54):
It is still quite dissonant.
You still have
the leadership that, for20, 30 years of career,
those people have been used about,
we set an objective,
we paint that future, thatidealistic future very well.
(31:15):
And in leadership, we spenda lot of time doing that.
And then we make a solid plan,
and we are going to be successfulas long as we execute well.
Now, there're a couple ofproblems with that, of course,
this plan isn't perfect,
and that picture we have in, you know,
for the three to five-yearhorizon isn't perfect,
(31:38):
and a lot of things aregoing to change in between.
And actually, the time then is spent sellingthis to the rest of the organization,
whereas you could have allowed moretime for the rest of the organization
to participate,
and you wouldn't have to sell it.
(31:59):
And if you organize around that participation,you can actually iterate on that.
So you can adapt along the way.
And I also found that we spenda considerable amount of time
to paint that perfectpicture of the future,
but we have a very, veryimperfect picture of the present.
(32:24):
If you look at,
I know very often when yougo into, especially software,
because software is not something we see
how far the leadership that does the strategyknows about the constraint of software,
knows about,
oh, we have a problemwith fraud around here.
This API is really so flaky.
(32:47):
It's not working where it's supposed to go.
The infrastructure is actually not right.
And that's why the ordersare not going through.
And it requires investment,and none of that is visible.
People are swarming tohave things sort of held up
by bubble gum and sticky tape, sometimes.
(33:09):
And it doesn't make iton the strategy radar.
So the strategy becomes wishful,
and the foundations are made of sand,
and a strategy that doesn'tconsider the constraints
is not a worthwhile strategy.
So I do see a lot of that.
(33:30):
And if people recognize those problems,
it is quite a fundamentalthing to go and change them.
And it's a hard thing to go and change it.
Because that is whatpeople have as a concept,
and the way they see strategy is like that.
(33:52):
Now, to change the view and to turn itupside down about how you do strategy
and how strategy is effectively a factorof alignment for the organization,
it is a big step, a very, very big step.
And it's all the more of a big step that
(34:12):
it starts where who do you involve.
What are they here to represent?
And if you have people that arealigned by project and by competence,
which most organizations are,
then who is representing thecustomer and the product here.
(34:35):
What is the persistence of alignmentof those people to the organization?
And if it's projects,there isn't persistence.
So, therefore, they don't really havean identity to represent in strategy.
And it's difficult.
So, they are some prerequisitesto be able to have a strategy
(35:00):
that is done more continuously.
And therefore more agilefor the organization.
And God, I could go ontothe agile world as well.
I might in a sec, but it's...
You have some elementsof prerequisite where
you need to have some elementsof flow in place where
(35:22):
the organization should align andrepresent some products or services.
Services, also products.
And understanding your value chains,supporting the value to the customers.
Because the strategy has tobe oriented to the customers.
(35:44):
They're the ones thatkeep the company alive.
To do that, there are some elementsthat, if you don't have that in place,
it's very difficult to start distributingstrategy and doing it effectively.
I said as well, the foundations of sand,
if there isn't an element ofsafety and an element of measuring
(36:08):
how bad things are,
it's very difficult tohave solid foundations.
You don't have excellence.
If you don't have excellence,
you're going to be firefightingprobably at least 30% of your time.
If you are firefighting, this isthe space you would've for strategy.
(36:30):
Having excellence as a foundationthat you can really lean on is key.
Otherwise, you end upfirefighting, and you have no time.
And you mentioned time earlier.
You have no time for everything.
Again, if, as a leader,
you find yourself with no time tryingto coordinate the activity all the time,
(36:51):
you are effectively firefighting.
And it's the time to take a stepback and focus on what's important,
limiting the work in progress and so on.
Since I mentioned agile,
I think we have associated acausation between agile and agility,
(37:14):
and organizations have recognizedthat there is a changing,
fast-changing landscape,and they need to adapt,
and they associated doingan agile transformation
will make that possible.
And what has happened is they haveadopted some agile techniques,
maybe some scaled agiletechniques and methods,
(37:37):
but they haven't gonemore agile as a result.
And very often, the challenge is,
it's not the process that was the problem.
Operating in an agile way mightbe something around process,
but building agility or
(37:59):
if you operate in anagile way towards agility,
it's about alignment a lot.
And it's about strategy.
And on that agile, has been quite empty.
So an agile that doesn't provide agilityfor me is as useful as a chocolate teapot.
(38:19):
So it's really about, you know,
I think some organizations have done massiveamounts of agile transformation for some time
to know agility benefit.
They have to pick themself up anddust themself up and just rethink:
how do we bring agility to ourbusiness, and where do we start?
(38:43):
And if you want agility, ifyou want autonomy of teams,
then that means the teamparticipates in the strategy.
That means your strategyis going to be iterative.
That's agility.
If you have a rigid strategy,rigid plan, and roadmap,
you're not going to have agility.
So our strategy becomes in the mix,
(39:04):
and agile has latched onaround OKRs for agility.
Because
academically or theoretically,
it's actually a nice ideathat you have objectives.
People have intent and key results.
And, as we work out, are we getting there?
Which is fair enough.
(39:24):
The challenge is if your objectivebecomes a sort of delivery objective,
then it starts breaking down
because your key results become delivery.
And very often, you see things like that.
And unfortunately, OKRsare a little bit of,
(39:46):
you know, we have introducedthat as the panacea solution.
But they are more of an art toget right than really a science.
And I don't see them beingimplemented very effectively.
And that's where I think the Xmatrix is actually helping massively.
And I'd like this concept, this idea from
(40:08):
Mike Borrows, the creator of Agenda Shift.
And he has this thing
it says, do meaning beforemeasure and measure before method.
And the method is sort ofyour solution, your action.
And that's navigating an X matrix.
So you understand your meaning,your aspirations, your strategies.
(40:33):
You understand your measures.
So, how you going to measurethe progress of your strategy?
And then, you're going to take the action
and determine the actions you're taking.
And you don't need tohave a massive backlog.
It's actually counter-intuitive.
We need to have a smallishbacklog that is just in time.
(40:54):
And once you start hitting the measures,
do you need to continue?
Is there more potential in those measures?
Or, actually, do you need topivot to more important things?
And if you want agility,
people that have one year of backlogs
they can't have agility.
They are delivering to a backlog.That's what they're doing.
(41:14):
You need to bring themore just-in-time element.
And that means connecting the strategy and itsdeployment a lot closer and a lot more often.
And the X matrix is a great tool for that.
James (41:28):
You talked a lot, Philippe, about,
I'm hearing about valuechains, value stream mapping,
the X matrix just in time,
business centres of excellence, agile.
There's a lot of what you could say,
buzzwords here or tools thatpeople probably are aware of.
(41:51):
I think you've done a brilliant job,
and I could keep talkingfor a very, very long time.
I wish we could.
You've done a brilliant job of kind ofsetting the scene and really explaining
the theoretical side of whatyou're talking about here
in terms of bringingflow to the front line.
(42:15):
We love theory.
This space loves theory, but what reallyhelps people stand out as leaders,
and that could be people in theC-suite or people on the shop floor.
What really helps people to standout is practical, actionable advice
and putting into practice whatyou're talking about here.
So, with in mind,
(42:36):
I know our listeners are probably itchingto hear the execution part of this strategy.
So, how can you put all that you'vetalked about here today into practice?
Philippe (42:51):
Good, very good question. Very good question.
Each situation is specific.
So there isn't really a rule ofthumb or a recipe to go about it.
But I have isolated, somehow,
(43:11):
some pillars, and generally, thosepillars need to happen in sequence.
So when,
and let's say you get intoa traditional landscape
or, you know, sometimes it's more evolved,
but essentially we all,
all initiatives, very often,organized as projects.
(43:36):
And the projects typicallyhave a conflicting demand.
So, there are people that startgetting shared across teams
to accommodate those things.
And sometimes,
the teams are not stable, and so on.
So, that is very often a starting point.
(43:57):
It's nice if we already have some ideas of
teams that are set, and persistedand they're aligned to something.
The first key part is trying to putsome stability in the organization.
And how can we align to something?
Generally, we look to align to value,
(44:20):
but it's also understandingwhat is that chain of value
because you can't have all theknowledge concentrated on one team.
So you need to keep ateam size around 5 to 10,
and then the teams get connected.
So, understanding that connection,
(44:41):
what is the landscape ofthe system in serving value?
And in this,
you tend to map your system andthe relationship between teams,
and it's also very useful.
That's something I'm quite a specialist of,
and I train it on O'Reilly and so on.
Worldly maps.
(45:01):
I'm a big fan of worldly mapsbecause they start from the user,
and you map all the usersyou got in your business,
their needs,
and how your businessaligns to their needs.
And that gives you really a senseof granularity of your business,
and at the same time, alignment ofthe different parts of the business
(45:26):
to the needs of the customer.
So, getting that view of the landscape
and trying to establish teams in everything
is important to start with.
Teams will bring you resilience.
And once you have that,
you can look at focusingas well on excellence.
(45:47):
So now that those teams are stuckwith the software they're building,
or whatever it is they're building,
how can they start ironingout the process issues,
the performance issues, the quality issues,
and now how can they start doingKaizen effectively, really?
(46:08):
So, continuing improvement.
And that's the first step where they starttaking responsibility for themselves.
Because another challenge is thehuman challenge of they have been used
to being told what to do for so long.
Now, we are telling themto think for themselves,
(46:29):
and we need to start training those muscles
and training those muscles.
Kaizen is very effective becauseit deals with their context,
with things that are near to themthat they can change and influence.
So it's about training that.
So, number one, alignment.
Number two, igniting somecontinued improvement and Kaizen.
(46:52):
And by that, theresponsibility of the teams.
Number three,
it's also the teamwork relationshipswithin teams and across teams.
So understanding, at ateam level, the roles,
but not in a segregatedway, in a relationship way.
(47:12):
I absolutely hate withpassion the racing metrics.
So responsibility, accountability,consulted and informed,
which are the typical consultanttoolkit that people bring.
This isolate responsibility, itdoesn't create collaboration.
(47:36):
So if we are to create collaboration,
first, the team has theaccountability, not the individual.
The team has the accountabilityand the responsibility together.
Number two is about recognizing therelationship people have in the team
and the outcomes of those relationships
and making sure they're lived.
(47:56):
And making sure very often, as well, that
it creates cross-functionalleadership in teams.
Because you realize youmay have a product owner,
you may have a scrum master.
You may have an engineer,you may have an architect.
They become the leadership together.
It's not some leader that takes the leadershipand all the accountability on behalf of.
(48:19):
So, if you want to have distributedaccountability without dilution
of accountability.
Very important point that.
You need to actuallyinvest into creating teams
and continually coachingthose teams to be accountable.
Accountable to the outside, accountableto each other on the inside.
(48:41):
So there's an important elementof teamwork relationships
because it's intangible. Peopledon't know how to work with that.
And all you see out there is
we need psychological safety,we need, we need, we need...
but how do you work with it? Andteam coaching brings that element,
and team coaching outside of the system
(49:03):
it's about recognizing the relationshipteams have with other teams
to get things realized.
And that leads to ideas of topology.
It's a very good book called
Team Topologies
that looks at the typology of teams
and how they work into a topologyand the relationships of teams.
(49:25):
I'm also currently writingsomething around the relationships
between teams and theidea of the three Cs of
coordination, cooperation, collaboration.
Most organizations, based on projectmanagement, budget management,
and single accountability,are effectively coordinated.
(49:49):
Meaning that somebody takesresponsibility on behalf of others
and is going to coordinatethe relationship,
and often micromanages the relationshipof people to get it realized.
This is the project management territory.
You can evolve to cooperation.
And cooperation is basicallyhaving more of an idea of teams.
(50:13):
Each team has its ownobjectives, and they all made,
you know, they're all gettingtogether every so often.
And as where the scaling agile techniqueswith big room planning and so on is useful.
They're all getting together, and theycontribute to each other projects.
And you organize something like that.
(50:35):
And then you have collaboration.
And very often, it's anempty word in organization.
HR department wants collaboration,
but collaboration doesn't happen
because it's not designed for it.
Collaboration is bringing peopletogether very frequently to co-create,
meaning you don't distribute the work.
You don't divide the work.
(50:56):
You actually get the bigger objectives,
the more distal goal of the work,
and you swarm the peopleon the work as a team.
And sometimes it's a teamof teams that do that.
So, understanding howyou deploy across teams,
a coordinated approach,a cooperated approach,
(51:17):
or a collaborativeapproach is very important.
And it depends with thecomplexity of your problems
because you can't afford collaboratingon everything all the time.
So you need to recognize whereyou are only going to coordinate,
where you're only going to cooperate,
and where you can afford collaboration.
So a key element, number three,is the team relationships.
(51:39):
And once you have allthose things in place,
you can actually startaffording your strategy.
And, generally, strategy inmost of the change programs I do
is the last piece.
And it is, unfortunately,the hardest to get to
and also the keystone tomake it hold together.
(52:01):
And strategy,
the way I look at strategy,is continuous strategy.
So basically, how do we get teamsto continually think about strategy?
So every couple of weeks,
you know, getting togetherto talk about strategy,
very often supported byworldly mapping and so on.
(52:23):
And then strategy refreshes.
So looking to organizethings around once a quarter.
And instead of organizinga regroup around delivery,
we organize a regroup around strategy.
And the delivery itself is organized throughlean portfolio management, which is continuous.
(52:43):
So the regroup aroundstrategy is about refreshing
and everything that has emerged throughthe quarter, through the strategy,
continuous strategyactivity people are doing,
then goes into an input to the refresh,
which is looked at thesystem, more systemic level.
(53:04):
And,
basically, all the teams have a day ora couple of days of facilitated progress
where they look at what's the impact.
What do we need to change,
how do we need to align on certain things,
how are we aligning on those,
what do we need to expedite,what do we need to stop?
(53:25):
Maybe how do we need to carvethe organization differently
to make space for collaborativeteams that start a new initiative?
So, looking at this,
very often periodically at least
once a quarter as a strategy refresh.
And for that, we use...
you'll be pleased to knowthe X matrix and I axis
(53:47):
to create that alignment
where we create the alignment across thespace and, effectively, we are looking to
the input is future suggested changes,
and the output is normalized
on the coherent sort ofprogress for the next quarter.
(54:10):
So, effectively, the ideais we are here to disturb
what we think of the delivery,
what we think about theinitiatives we are taking,
how do we need to disturb that?
And we regroup every quarter for that.
And that allows us to havethat emergence coming in
and that coherence working through.
(54:33):
So, actually, we are all put in thesame direction at the end of it.
And continually, we challengethat again and over again.
So, one alignment.
And flow around the alignment.
Two,
getting the excellence.
Three, wiring the network of relationshipsin the teams and across the teams.
(54:57):
And four, organizing thecollaboration around strategy,
which is a part of continuousstrategy and strategy refreshes.
Does that make sense?
James (55:11):
Absolutely. I feel like we could probably
do an episode per those topicsin fairness, Philippe, but
I think that's very clear in terms of a,
I guess, a plan, a roadmap forpeople who are listening in terms of,
you know, a lot of thepeople that I talk to,
(55:31):
they do have a businesssystem or an operating system,
and that does incorporate Lean, Kaizen,project management tools, et cetera.
But what Philippe, what you aretalking about is, okay, that's good,
but actually, now you need to build these otherelements into this overarching methodology.
Philippe (55:54):
If you are doing good at Lean, and I mean
the Lean of Toyota style,
you already have an embedded culture,an embedded alignment, and so on,
that should get you into a reallygood place already. So yes.
James (56:13):
For those people who don't have that, though,
what would your one piece of advice be tosomeone on getting started with all of this?
Outside of, naturally, I'm going to askyou how they can work with yourselves,
but if you are looking atthis with a fresh pair of eyes
and you're thinking,
(56:34):
wow, Philippe, there is somuch great content here.
I haven't thought about theimportance of flow and agility,
but where can I get started above all that?
Like, what's that one piece of advice forsomeone to get started with this process?
Philippe (56:54):
I'm tempted to say I don't know
because it is so contextual.
And the answer is that youneed to read your context,
and you are going to try things.
And I'd like,
that's actually a very important questionand something that I continually feel
(57:20):
people are not getting and notgetting enough attention to.
The idea that, you know,
a bit like there's warm holes in space
or this idea of warm holes.
I think there are warm holes in change.
And there's this idea of dispositionally.
(57:43):
Influence or modulators.
If you hit,
if you create,
I mean, you need to recognizesome constraints of your system,
and sometimes, unplugging certainconstraints is going to enable a lot.
And here we're talkingabout limiting constraints,
(58:05):
but there's also this idea of,
potentially, enablingconstraints or constructors.
We could also try and call them.
And sometimes it's actuallyvery interesting to think
if you do a small thing, somewhere,
maybe it changes completely
(58:29):
how people will perceive a situation.
So, an example is,
if you want excellence,
I often ask engineering teams to reporton the tech that they are leaking,
and, at first, they don't have thepsychological safety to do that
(58:52):
because it's like puttingbad marks on their job.
But then I tell them, well,
if you are able to mark and puta bad mark on your job you do,
you actually know,
and it's not your skillsthat are your problem.
(59:12):
You're not given thetime to do the job right.
So it is somebody else's problem,
the person that doesn't give youthe time to do your job right
has the problem.
Now, you are only creatingvisibility of that problem,
and without that visibility,
nobody can make the decisionsto give you the time.
(59:37):
So few things like this,
and you can only change so manythings because people, you know,
want maybe a dozen things tochange in an organization,
small changes.
But are there some key changes
that will allow you to createleverage in your change
(01:00:02):
to accelerate certain things and addressmany of the other changes as a by-product.
And leadership needs to understandwhat are those modulators,
those dials, that if Itweak them a little bit,
it's going to create an imbalance,
and actually, the dispositionallyof the system will
(01:00:23):
go towards more of the things we would like
and less of the things we don't like.
Sometimes, there's inertiaand belief, as well.
I've been in an organization where,
that was a fantastic story like this.
And if you think, you know,
we discussed about the Porscheas an organization as well.
Change often happens in an organizationwhen they're in the dire strait.
(01:00:47):
And some don't make the change.
Some make this change, andit's quite spectacular.
But because of the context of thatsituation being in dire strait,
they're ready to takemore radical solutions.
And I've been in...
and you can exploit
if some change is happeningin your organization,
people have a dispositionally to reorient.
(01:01:10):
Now, can you use thisto go in the right way?
Like Covid, for instance.
It was one of those things.
You didn't have a choice,but as it was happening,
what can you make of it?
How can you use a good crisis,
like Churchill was saying?
And
sometimes you have to engineer it.
(01:01:31):
If you see inertia in your organization,
then you can think, how are wegoing to basically poke something,
create a disruption that willallow us to overcome that inertia?
And I've had a situation oncewhere people were hearing,
(01:01:51):
being told, yeah, weneed to focus on quality,
but for them, they werefocusing on delivery.
For them, it was about delivering features.
And if they had tocompromise quality, so be it.
So the message was not landing,
and one day, the release got actually...
(01:02:13):
it wasn't going to happen.
There were so many problems.
It wasn't going to happen.
And so what we said is, you down tools,
at the end of the day,
if we're not releasing software,
there is no value that we're providing,
no value that we're creating.
So you down tools and 200 people,
(01:02:34):
when you say to 200 people,
you stop what you're doing,
you're down tools,
it creates an impact.
And then we told them
there is one thing that isabsolutely critical in that release.
One team is going to re-engineer that
into the past workingversion of the system.
(01:02:55):
So it's going to take thechange we did just for that
and retrofit them into the pastversion that we know is working.
All the rest,
you swarm into teams
to figure improvements on thingsthat have made this release fail,
this work fail.
(01:03:15):
And it was really disturbingand upsetting for some people.
But from that point on,
they knew that quality mattered.
From that point on, themessage about quality landed.
So sometimes, it's aboutcreating those things
(01:03:36):
that will change some belief systems.
And there are big tickets likethis that you can work with.
And the reason I'm saying I don't know
is because those are so contextual.
And even when you are facing them,
you don't know how they're going to work.
You can only try them,and you'll know afterward.
James (01:04:00):
I think that's absolutely fair.
I can imagine it.
It really is dependenton not just the vertical
but the company itself andthe size of the company.
Philippe (01:04:15):
You can have a lot of linear approaches to do that.
But, you know, for leadership,that is interested is
how can we look at warm holes of change,
that can accelerate things byusing the dispositionally of people
to reorient around constraintsthat are being created
(01:04:36):
or that exist in the system.
And it requires quite some thinkingand a lot of probing, a lot of trying.
And then you see what reacts, and thenyou orient, and you navigate your change
as a dynamic thing.
You don't follow a setplan, a settling plan.
You navigate based on allthe things you're trying,
(01:04:57):
and 20% of those will succeed, probably.
And then you try some moreand some more and some more,
and your change morphs moretowards the good thing,
less towards the bad things.
James (01:05:12):
Yeah. I can imagine.
Just to finish this up for today'sepisode, Philippe, and again, thank you.
It's been really, really interesting.
Can you just tell us a little bit aboutthe support that you can offer over at
(01:05:35):
community.henko.co.uk
and, I guess,
the sort of work that you can offerpeople to take today's learnings
and put them into action?
So, we run a communityof digital leadership.
It's a meetup.
So we have frequentmeetups, and I'm rallying
(01:06:00):
some team around it to support it.
The idea is sharing something back
but also probing as an industry.
Understand what's resonating.
I eat my own dog food as people say.
So it's a permanent sort of experimentation
(01:06:23):
and sharing so that we recognize,
it's not basically talking froma top of a soft box type thing.
It is actually participating andthe community is more involved.
The idea is being moreon the experimental side
(01:06:46):
and the high-end side of what's next.
And for me,
a lot of the things I've been workingon for the past six, seven years,
and actually in my previous job,
I was already really doingquite a lot of that too,
has been about always what's next.
(01:07:06):
Very early on is what's nextto that agile transformation.
I won't bring agility.
What's next to the digital transformation
that one brings basically businessand technology working together.
And that's what weexplore because, I think,
there's still a lot more in it.
(01:07:28):
But we start also looking at themes beyondthat around leadership in complexity.
Where is the next complexitygoing to come from as well.
There is a lot aroundsustainability, responsibility,
and we don't think about diversity.
We are connected as wellwith our tech legacy,
for instance, that looks at how can welook at tech, in terms of sustainability.
(01:07:54):
And when you think, you know,
some large bank, for instance,probably has the data centre
electricity consumption of a small city
and all that with a serverutilization in 3 to 5% maybe.
So, the cloud offers a lot of possibilitiesaround that, around optimizing tech.
(01:08:19):
But there's going to be emerging things.
And the more we are goingtowards a more complex world,
and I was in research with SimonWard as well around retail,
and we are seeing probably
the supply chains in retail,
it's not that different thanthe financial crisis where
(01:08:40):
people knew their counterpartywho they were selling to,
and the counterparty wherethey were buying from.
And in the financial crisis was around,
where they were ensuring their risk really
and what they were selling to.
That has been a recipe for disaster.
(01:09:00):
We know
the poor knowledge of thewider counterparty network
has been a recipe for disasterin the 2008 financial crisis.
And more recently,
it's been also a disasterin the supply chains
of the car industry and many industries.
And how the product andso on are going to change
(01:09:25):
the supply chain dynamics.
Also very much changing.
And how do you carbon test
as well as supply chain.
How do you become moreresponsible in your supply chains
and your carbon footprint?
All those things. You know,
if you think the complexity ofdigital about working with technology,
(01:09:46):
working with sustainability,working with responsibility,
working with resilience into avery, very fast-changing world
and changing dynamics andgeopolitics and so on,
it is going to increase multifold
the complexity that we arestruggling to today to deal with.
(01:10:10):
And I see that being thedirection of what we look into.
And the direction forme as a business as well
is still very much about howorganizations learn to lead
in a changing environment rather thantrying to create certainty around that.
(01:10:30):
And how do they adapt very fast to thechanging circumstances and conditions
for resilience, formanaging the risk as well as
for exploring theopportunities that it brings.
I think that's, yeah.
(01:10:50):
I think given the uncertain conditions
economically and geo-politically thatwe find ourselves in as we record today,
I think yeah, what you'resaying there, Philippe, is very,
it's very timely, and it's somethingthat listeners should definitely
go out of their way.
(01:11:10):
If it does resonate,
they should go out to visitcommunity.henko.co.uk.
On behalf of myself,and the production team,
and everyone else thatsupports this podcast,
I just want to say thank you, Philippe.
(01:11:31):
I think this has been anotherone of those episodes that
I've really learned a lot and changedquite a few opinions that I had.
Thank you so much, Philippe, for joiningtoday and being our strategy hero.
Philippe (01:11:48):
You're very welcome. And thank you for having me.
I hope I lived up to the Avenger type.
I think I'm more here to help.
I think there's something aswell in the engagement process
that for me, the heroes arereally the leaders and so on
(01:12:11):
that have to make those difficult changes.
And we are just here to support them.
Let's be humble and let'swork with them as a team
because it's not an easy change.
We like to say,
oh, people, and they're not doing this,and not doing that and not getting it.
It's not easy changes.
(01:12:31):
It's difficult.
And maintaining the running business
and all the problems, as well
as driving fundamentalchange on it, is difficult.
Very difficult.
So sometimes, I also act as a coach and
as a one-to-one coach,and the stories you get,
you realize that there'spressure on people.
(01:12:53):
There's pressure on people, andit's difficult to leave them.
That's the other side of thecurtain that is confidential.
And I'm not able to expose theconversations I'm having, but
we need to appreciateit's not easy for people.
And to me, they're all the heroesand we have to make them the heroes.
(01:13:16):
We just send a little help here.
James (01:13:21):
Well, I'm sure that...
I'm sure that you've helped a lot of ourlisteners to realize that they are the heroes.
Thank you, Philippe.
I look forward to hopefully havingyou back on the podcast in the future.
Philippe (01:13:36):
We'll be glad to. We'll be glad to. Thank you.
James (01:13:39):
Thank you, Philippe. Take care.
Philippe (01:13:41):
Cheers.
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