You guys, we have a bit of fun news for you today.
While we're waiting for folks to come in and to
join us and to get connected to audio,
while we get started, something very fun.
Today, Dion wrote an article for
Entrepreneur Magazine that was published today.
The title of that article was,
Three Ways to Unlock
Your Team's True Potential by Creating a Team of Leaders.
Here's the cool thing about that.
Entrepreneur Magazine has 2.6 million readers
and 1.5 million followers on social media.
You guys, you're getting the inside scoop on
the training before millions of other people.
How cool is that?
You're ahead of the masses.
I'm going to pop a link here for you so you guys can check out
that article and give Dion a whoop-whoop in the chat.
He loves the attention,
so you guys just have to lavish it on him.
You got to give it to him because he bathes in
attention as he's getting red.
How many of you last week,
how many of you scheduled a time for
your first six-hat team session?
Yeah, Robin, I see you.
Let us know in the chat,
tell us how did it go for you?
What was maybe a standout moment during that time?
Even if it was just the learning.
While you guys are doing that, Dion,
did you want to say, before I move on,
did you want to say anything about
the six-hat sessions with the teams?
Not that you have to, but just to know if you wanted to.
Yeah, certainly. Thanks for the feedback.
Got different people sending me notes.
Got yours, Robin, as well.
Hey, Robin, if you've got a minute,
tell us quickly what happened on your deal.
I liked your story.
Yeah.
Well, we did a whiteboard and we put all the hats across the top,
and so we could put the post-it notes underneath the colors.
All of our team got together for a one-hour cut-off date,
and we basically went over the six hats,
what they are, once again, for a review,
and then the idea,
we wanted to come up,
brainstorm ideas for marketing, marketing for leads.
Everybody was coming up with these crazy ideas and putting them up there.
One of them was put red tags,
which is a stop work order,
put red tags on the tiny houses at the shows.
We were just coming up,
put a banner at the beach that an airplane flies around for talking about NOAA.
We had all these crazy ideas,
and we ended up doing the blue hat at the end,
and we ended up with three, top three,
that we decided to do HDTV ads or YouTube ads,
pop up for a NOAA nerd on our website or affiliate articles.
Those are the one, two, and three that we're going to pursue in that order
to see if that works.
That's how we ended.
That's awesome.
That's an impressive outcome for a first shot at six hats.
Yeah.
Well, thank you.
And it wasn't me, it was the whole,
and we started out slow,
like, oh man, how do you do this?
This is crazy.
I don't know what this is.
And then all of a sudden,
we started putting up these ideas and laughing,
and we just had a great time of camaraderie
and coming up with brainstorming ideas for the subject.
And it was just a good exercise.
Yeah, man.
I love what your team are doing, Rowan.
Well done.
That's really cool.
You know, six hats starts to change the way,
you start to be a little more suspicious of your very strong points of view.
You go, hang on, is that just a black hat?
So you start to realize there are six ways of thinking.
What's very cool is in season three,
we'll actually talk about two more,
and they are really exciting hats.
We'll talk about those.
But once you've got the six hats functional,
you'll find yourself questioning your own thinking,
broadening your own approach to anything,
by thinking about a vacation or any plans,
anything you're doing,
just run through them quickly in your mind.
They become second nature.
And you realize you can function in all six.
Totally, totally, totally cool.
I mean, did you say, Jenny,
we did two six hat sessions in the last,
or three six hat sessions in the last week?
We did two, yes, in one week.
Yeah.
And Robin, I liked that you pointed out
that it started out slow,
but you guys stuck with it and you gave space,
and then it just opened up.
And that's what the comments are,
is that there was laughter during the session, Robin,
is what you said.
And Nancy says, a standout moment
was when we realized we were having fun.
I think that's the best outcome, isn't it, Dion?
When people are having fun, yeah.
Love that.
We'll go ahead as you guys, as we're going along,
if you wanna drop some questions in the chat.
Oh, bless you.
Or if you wanna drop questions in the chat
or let us know how your six hat session went,
we'd love to hear.
All right.
Okay, so we're gonna go ahead and get on with the call.
Today, we're gonna be talking about
how to be a change enabler and not a change inhibitor.
And so we're gonna discuss
the three levels of response to change,
the critic, the bystander, and the advocate.
And then we're gonna discuss how to leverage change
to mine the undiscovered gold
that already exists in your organization.
So for today's pro tip,
maybe go back over the content
and re-watch one of the videos
and see how much you've grown
since the first time you watched that
and see maybe if you gleaned something new
that you didn't get the first time that you watched it
and let us know what comes up for you with that.
All right, are you guys ready to dive in?
As again, as we're going through the material,
add questions to the chat,
I'll go ahead and keep an eye on that.
And then if there's time at the end,
we'll answer some questions.
All right, Dionne with that,
we're gonna give it over to you.
Yeah, that's great.
This is such a natural follow on
from what we talked about last week.
Cause you know, once we realized
that there are other ways of thinking,
we start to become aware of our own thinking
in the sense of, you know, if you look at the six hats,
they were divided into three categories.
There's critical thinking,
you know, where we have logic and reason,
and that's a very obviously solid way to think.
Then there's creative thinking,
which isn't necessarily got logic and reason
as its foundation,
but more inspiration and intuition and experience.
And then there's metacognition
or thinking about thinking.
And what we're doing here is making ourselves,
becoming self-aware about our own thinking.
And this is what drives growth
because we suddenly realize, hang on a second,
we get a little more suspicious.
As we told you last week,
if you want to have a good giggle,
get on the team, six hat team with Brilliant
and say, I have a strong red hat feeling
and everybody will start laughing
because we've got about a 90 something percent failure rate
on red hat thinking at Brilliant.
We know for almost for sure
that if we are so sure this is gonna work,
cause that's our gut feel, it's probably not.
So we've, you know,
and what it does is it helps you
not be quite so serious about this.
And so, you know,
Ben Zander tells a wonderful story
about the British English prime minister
is sitting in 10 Downing Street
and he has another prime minister visiting.
And while they're there, there's a knock on the door,
a lady walks in and she's just frazzled.
She's really concerned.
She's upset.
She's going crazy.
Her is going everywhere.
And she's, and so the prime minister says,
my dear lady, remember rule number six.
And she stopped for a minute.
She's totally calm and she's restored to total calm
and she leaves the room.
And a few minutes later, the situation is, you know,
as it always is, happens three times, right?
Different people come in, frazzle, get all worked up.
And then the prime minister says,
please remember rule number six.
And there's this immediate calm and they step out.
So the visiting prime minister was just so intrigued by this.
So he says, my dear colleague,
could you tell me rule number six?
He said, sure.
It just means don't take yourself so damn seriously.
Sorry if that word offended you,
but don't take yourself so seriously, you know?
And he says, could you tell me the other five rules?
If that's rule number six,
could you tell me the other five rules?
He says, there are no other five rules.
That's it.
It's just rule number six.
So rule number six is don't take yourself so seriously.
And I think what Six Hats does is make you realize
that just because you have a strong preference
for a primary and a secondary way of thinking
doesn't constitute all the ways
of thinking about that problem.
And that's a very healthy self-awareness.
We've talked a lot about self-awareness,
because I would say,
if I considered all the challenges
there are in leadership and management,
I would say maybe 60, 70,
maybe even 80% of problems are solved
by just making people self-aware.
If you make them self-aware,
they immediately, for most people,
that's all you need to do.
You don't have to get on their case.
You just need to make them aware this is the situation.
So again, today is another one of those self-aware,
metacognition, thinking about our thinking.
So in this time, it's about the subject of change.
So this is, how do we...
we become a change enabler and not a change inhibitor.
And so there really are three levels to this growth,
three stages, if you like.
The first is the critic stage.
This is where we resist change.
We kind of frame it in our own thinking as,
I don't like change.
I like things to be stable.
I like things to be the way I know them.
I don't want change.
And to some degree,
we all have a little of this in us, the critic.
Level two is the bystander
or sort of the passive agreer, if you like.
And our response, we frame it in our mind is,
you know, I don't like it, but change is probably good.
You know, change is growth.
I can get with that.
And then the third level or third stage of this
is where you become the advocate.
We become the lead.
We lead change.
And this is where we frame it as change is essential.
In season three,
we're going to talk a lot about existential flexibility
and how you need to kill your own products
before the market does
and how to respond ahead of the curve
and not just, you know,
get behind with the way the market's responding to you,
your products, your services.
And so we'll talk a lot about that.
And so leading change.
So we are laying foundations now for season two and three,
which we hope to take up, you know, the next level.
So let me talk about three ways
in which you go from stage one, critic,
through stage two, the bystander,
to stage three, the advocate, to leading change.
So from resisting change
to just sort of responding to change
to actually leading change, how do you get yourself?
And by the way, you can get there very quickly.
It doesn't take 10 years.
If you think about it, it can take 10 minutes.
So let's get through that
and talk about how would you do that practically.
So thinking about change,
first thing I'm going to go through
what drives those levels,
what drives that progression are three things.
So I'm going to talk about how to reframe.
We're going to start that first.
How do we reframe the concept
or thinking about change, our metacognition?
How do we think about change?
So, you know, when we frame things correctly,
it's easy for this to become part of our culture,
part of our language.
When change becomes a natural part of our business culture,
our team culture,
what happens is growth feels not only more normal,
it starts to feel essential.
Because really, if you think about this,
today's success,
today's success is really the threat of tomorrow's success
or put differently,
the threat of tomorrow's success is today's success.
Nothing makes us settle down faster than success.
We have a saying in leadership,
nothing is more dangerous than unbroken success.
Have you ever met someone
who's just gone from success to success to success?
Man, when you ask them any question,
they're on top of their game.
They think everything they say is pure gold, right?
Oh, this is gold, this is gold, this is gold.
Because they're at the top, they've just got success.
But somebody who's had some failures in between
is a lot more cautious.
You know, it's like, okay, well, this might be one way,
this might be another way.
My father-in-law tells a wonderful story
about a young man who wanted to write a book
about parenting.
And he's one of those deep researchers, analytical types.
Anybody here, you know, say, that's me right there?
Okay, so you'll like this story.
So they're engaged,
he researches every single parenting book
and he summarizes down to 10 main things
and he writes a book
and it's called the 10 Commandments of Raising Children.
And so they get married and things are going great
and they have the birth of their first child
and he rewrites the book
and he calls it the Five Guidelines for Raising Children.
And after the birth of their fourth child,
he rewrites it and he calls it
One Possible Hint for Raising Children.
So we went from the 10 Commandments to one possible,
what happened there?
Self-awareness, right?
You found out the 10 Commandments
weren't quite so solid as you thought they were.
But you know, in business,
sometimes when we hit a successful product,
obviously we wanna build on that
and we don't wanna change what's working,
but we need to be aware that that often is the very thing
that's shutting us down to possibilities in the future.
So we need to continually ask ourselves,
what needs to change?
What processes need to change?
What products need to change?
Do we need to address new markets?
So this, what can we change?
We never say, as leaders,
we never say, you know, our people won't do that.
Our customers won't do that.
Our community won't do that.
All that we can say is we haven't led them there yet.
You know, you see this in a nonprofit situation,
educational situation, oh, well, you know, our parents wouldn't
do that, our students wouldn't do that, our team wouldn't do
that. Well, it's not that they wouldn't do it, you just haven't
led them there yet, or you hadn't led them there well, yet.
So we can lead people wherever they need to go, for the most
part. Because we know that the first question of a leader, what
am I being as a leader, that this change produced this
response? It's not why are these people not listening? Why don't
they get it? What's so they just being done? What's the problem
with my team? Why aren't they on the game? No, that's not our
leader thing. So he says, what am I being as a leader, that
when I introduced this change, it produced this sort of odd
result. And or even in the positive, what did I do there
that made it work? You know, one of the hardest things is to get
people to teach on leadership. Do you know why? There are a lot
of people who are great leaders. There are a lot of people who
even have written about leadership, studied leadership,
but it's actually quite difficult to find someone to
teach on leadership itself. And here's why. Because to teach on
leadership, you have to answer that question, what did I do as
a leader that produced this positive result? How can I first
analyze it, figure out, give it a framework, give it language,
package it up so that others can use it? Do you know how few
people go through that metacognition process they've
thought about their thinking? What did I think? What failed?
What worked? What framework can I then create so that others can
use, you know, what I've done? So that is why finding people
who can teach on leadership, a lot of great leaders, but when
you ask them, they did it intuitively, they didn't do it
in a conscious way, it was sort of just part of their gift. But
you can develop that by asking yourself the so reframing about
change is one of the key ways to learn to think about your
leadership to think about how you're influencing others. If
you think about what is it, what is a leader, a leader is someone
who manages their own influence, positively, a good leader
manages their own influence positively in an intentional
way. So we're trying through the course of these seasons, and
each of these trainings to make you intentional, give you the
tools and make you aware of your own thinking. So people will
change if we teach them how to change, right, they don't just
change automatically, just because they understand the
concept of what you're saying, does not mean that they know how
to get there. It's amazing how many times we say to the team,
you know, we tell them three times, I want you to go from A
to B, but we never told them how to get to A to B, we never told
them how to navigate A to B, we just said, we got to be at B.
And they go, conceptually, we understand, practically, we
clueless, we have no idea what you just said. Sounds wonderful.
I'm for it. What is it? So that's the point where we have
to really help people because here's the bottom line, we have
to realize this. And this might help some of you reframe your
thinking about change, because change is inevitable, but
progress is optional. Right? Change is inevitable, but
progress is optional. If you want to make progress, we have
to continually ask what needs to change, we have to create a
culture in our team that says, so if you lead some people, or
you're leading customers, and you're changing something in
your product offering, and you're explaining that to a
customer, you have to lead them to the new place, not just tell
them, you have to lead them there. So we never say, our
customers wouldn't accept that we just lead them to where they
have to go. Okay, so that was point number one, reframing how
we think about change. Let's talk next about responding. How
do we actually deal with change when it happens? One of the
things I've noticed over the years in different contexts, you
know, nonprofits, education, different types of businesses,
finance, technology, all the different environments that I
found myself in, I've realized that there are some people, or
every person rather has what I call the change capacity limit.
Some people have a limit, but how much change they can handle
in a certain period of time. You know, and some people have huge
capacity limit, their change capacity is so huge that you can
change things every hour, and they find it exhilarating, and
they're in and they go. And other people like, hey, man, I
can't change more than one thing a month, slow down, slow the
ship down, I can't move this fast, you're killing me. And so
recognizing that your change capacity can grow. But if we
Constantly pushing someone on their limit as a company, this might be the beginning which start
with, this might just really be the beginning of their exit from the organization because who wants
to live constantly pressed, constantly stressed all the time, I'm never keeping up, this is going
too fast, there's too much change for me. So as a leader, we have to discern between somebody who's
just processing the change and somebody who's actually hitting their limit. And to me, it's
like if there's a general trend of them always pushing back, you might want to rethink about
whether this is a comfortable environment, sometimes the kindest thing you can do is let
those folks find an environment that doesn't push their change capacity limit, let them go to a place
a little more stable, especially for those of you that are running smaller businesses, things move
lightning as fast as greased lightning and so as you're going at that pace, it can be too
much for some people. So we want to make sure that the rate of change that we're
introducing as leaders, as an organization, isn't stressing everyone in the team. If you're doing
that as a leader, you're driving too hard, too fast and all that you're going to do is you're just
going to hemorrhage people because they're going to run that change capacity limit for a while
and then they're going to hit timeout, they're going to say I can't live this way, this is too much.
So just back it down a bit. So as you're thinking about this, the way we deal with change,
if you find yourself constantly annoyed by every change that comes, that might be the red flag for
you just to say timeout, this change level in this organization is too much for me and that's good
self-awareness to know that, it's not that anything's wrong with you, it's just where you
function best. But some people thrive on the bleeding edge of change and I love that stuff.
One of the things I know that really helps with change is when you're introducing change
is to ask the question, can we do less? Many, many times simplification as we talked right in the
early episodes, we talked about simplification drives speed and so oftentimes we're introducing
change because we want to improve the speed of the organization and when we're doing that,
many times that's a matter of doing less. So often we can respond to change positively by asking,
can we do less? Can we achieve this change by doing less? Because often the answer will
surprise you and again we've got six hats to think it all through and think through that change and
process it properly. And what you find is the six hats is a power tool to helping everyone in the
organization go through a very healthy processing of the proposed change. As a leader, I want to
suggest that what you do rather than saying, hey we're doing this, I went on vacation, I thought
about the company, I came back, ta-da, here's the new thing. I would rather put it out as a proposal.
When you put it as a proposal with an open hand, you allow your team to go through the six hats,
to go through the process of dealing with the change and where you make change positive.
Because the worst thing we can do is create change and then just as the team's starting
to digest that change, put another one in. And just as they start, hit them again and again. And so what
happens is the change we introduce never gets its full momentum because we never gave a
chance to get any speed. Think of a flywheel or a merry-go-round, is it what you call them?
A merry-go-round in the kids park where all the kids sit on, somebody pushes it in the circle.
Now remember when you were the kid who had to do the pushing, all the kids jumped on and how
hard was that first cycle? That was unbelievable energy, right? I mean you really had to push hard
because all the kids were sitting waiting for you, go faster, go faster. And you're pushing with all
your might, you sort of get it going but then what happens? Picks up momentum and the faster you go,
the more it spins. Eventually you're just standing on the side tapping it, right? And it's spinning,
it's going. So that is how a good way to think about change, think of a flywheel. A lot of times
we do the first cycle, it's too hard, let's stop this. We just need to push through and so as a
leader you need to give time for your change to gain momentum till the point it feels almost
effortless, right? So if you're considering a change right now for your team or for yourself
by the way and you go into a new job, a new situation, you need to give that moment time
for the thing to pick up momentum. Excellent, very good.
The element I want to talk about is how now to lead change,
how to be an actual agent of change
where you are leading it.
And you'll notice sometimes we use similar questions
because they're the same metacognition
just applied in a different way.
And here's a question that we've asked that's similar.
If somebody new was hired to do my job,
even if you're the leader, even if you're the founder,
if someone new is hired to do my job,
what is the first thing they would change?
Now, this question is wonderfully misleading
because what it's doing is that things get a life.
The best way I can describe this is maybe when you just,
when you moved from one house to another
and then these boxes that you never got quite to unpack
and they got stuck in the dining room
or somewhere in the kitchen,
and then they quote, get a life.
And after a while, you don't even notice them, right?
You don't even see them anymore.
They're just like part of the furniture now.
They become part of your environment.
If a new person walked in who wasn't programmed
to see them as part of the environment,
they go, why do we have these ugly boxes
still sitting in the corner?
That's what I'm talking about.
I'm talking about your replacement walking in
and looking at your job and saying,
why do we still have the ugly boxes in the corner?
Your replacement coming in and saying,
why do we do this?
Why do we confuse our customers?
Why do we have so many levels of membership?
Why do we, you know, whatever it is.
So think about what would, you know,
and to do this, the best way to think about it
is to try to imagine that this is your first day
in this job and imagine that you don't know anything
about the business and you're discovering everything
for the first time.
This is actually harder to do than one thinks
because I spent a number of years doing CEO consulting,
which is a job I learned to hate.
Because what I found out is I kept creating solutions
that I could implement, but the CEO I was working for
could not.
The main thing I learned is I came in
and I was really useful for about 90 days.
And then my usefulness plummeted.
Why?
Because I didn't see the ugly box in the corner anymore.
I got just, I became sensitive to all their issues.
Hey, why didn't you fire that CFO?
He's useless, he doesn't know what he's doing.
Look at all these mistakes.
Look how he's misled you.
Well, he's my brother-in-law.
Oh, okay, you know.
So what happens is I start to become all,
and the more we get into the detail,
the more I start to understand all the subtleties
and the interrelationship of all their decision-making
and I become sensitive and empathetic
to the way they made the decisions,
why things are the way they are,
instead of asking all the dumb questions.
So when you're answering this question,
if someone new was hired to do my job,
what is the first thing they would change?
The question is, what's the dumb question they would ask?
What's the dumb question they would ask?
And it may sound like when you're getting paid big money
to come in and consult with a CEO,
the pressure could be to ask sophisticated questions
and look like you know what you're doing,
as opposed to asking the dumb questions.
And it's actually the simple dumb questions
are the ones that move the needle the most.
Another way to think of it, this is fixate on the why.
You know, when my kids were little and they were growing up,
we played a game and I said to the kids,
I'm gonna tell the answer to all questions.
There's one answer to all questions.
And I was trying to capture their imagination.
And so I got them to start with any sentence
and then I just kept asking why.
I don't know if you've ever played that game as a kid
or if you've played that, if you have kids,
if you've played that game, it's quite fun.
So you can start off with why is the sky blue?
The sky is blue, why?
Well, because of the way the light, whatever.
Why?
Well, because the sun, why?
Well, because eventually where do you end up with?
Well, that's because God made it.
Why?
Because God is God.
And that's the ultimate answer to all questions
because God is God.
It doesn't matter where you start, what you talk about,
keep asking why you end up with the same answer
because God is God.
Because that's where you end up, right?
The final thing.
And as that simple example,
you need to ask enough why questions in a row
to get to the heart of the matter.
Many times, many of us will set up a culture in our company
where we only accept the first why,
but we won't accept the second and the third
because it gets annoying, right?
It is annoying when someone keeps saying why, why?
And if they asking why for a genuine desire.
to get to the heart, the underlying structure of a matter,
that is really good.
So another way to think of that is,
what would a great leader do
and how would they initiate this change?
Or a simplified version,
how would a great leader initiate this change?
So you're thinking of this change,
think about how a great leader would bring change about.
I said in a leaders meeting once,
a senior executive meeting of a,
it was a big franchise group, a food franchise group,
and it was the senior board members
and they were all sitting together.
And I watched this leader do something pretty amazing.
He wanted to bring in a change, which is pretty radical,
for which he thought the board would pretty much not agree.
And that's part of why he brought me in,
was to help with the process.
And he presented an idea, he asked it as a question,
and then he made sure he never said a word
until every single person had said something.
Smart leader, that's a great way to introduce change.
And even when people asked him a direct question like why,
he didn't feel the need to answer,
he'd like leave it in there
and see somebody else picked it up
because other people would jump in.
And he just got the conversation going
and he got the team to process,
he got his board to process the change.
And I thought, this person is really skilled.
So we've talked about the three groups,
the critic, the bystander, and the advocate,
but let me tell you,
it's the most fun when you lead the change,
when you're an advocate.
Even if you're not the leader,
you can be an incredible asset
to the person who's leading you,
by jumping in and being in.
One of the things I love about working with Team Brilliant
is that you propose a change
and everybody jumps in to help lead the change,
which is fantastic.
Because the resistance and all that doesn't,
because they know they can say anything.
And I think it's in season two,
we talk about how to make things less dumb from SpaceX.
And I've had people tell me that idea is dumb.
Why?
Because again, permission to say that
in a way that's healthy.
So when we're leading change,
it is the most invigorating, self,
it's hugely fulfilling.
And to, as we've said many times,
we have to empower people to think.
We have to empower people to have a mind,
to have an opinion, to be able to ask why,
to call something that's dumb, dumb.
And here's the shocking news.
Almost everything we all do is dumb in some way or another.
So our job is to try to make people think.
And we have to empower people to think.
And we have to empower people to have a mind,
to have an opinion, to be able to ask why,
so our job is to try to make it less dumb.
There was a quote from Elon Musk.
So, regardless of what you might think of Elon,
he has built some pretty awesome organizations.
And so, but I'm a great fan of Theodore Roosevelt,
and I've made this quote again.
I want to drop this quote again for us.
What I'll do is I'll just drop it here in the chat.
So you got it.
If you don't know the quote, I love this quote,
and we use it a lot.
And so I'll read it.
It is not the critic who counts.
Amen to that.
Not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles.
No talent to do that.
Or where the doer of deeds could have done them better.
Again, that takes no talent.
The credit belongs to the man or woman
who is actually in the arena,
whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood,
who strives valiantly,
who errs, who comes up short again and again,
because there is no effort without error and shortcoming.
But who does actually strive to do the deeds,
who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions,
who spends himself in a worthy course,
who knows the best in the end
and the triumph of high achievement,
and who at worst, if he fails,
at least fails while daring greatly,
so that his place shall never be
with those cold and timid souls
who neither knew victory nor defeat.
What caution buys you is mediocrity.
The end.
So what we would like to do
is give you some time to break out in your teams
and talk about your leaders
and work through the worksheets.