#261 - The Hidden Stories Sabotaging Your Culture Change - Ronica Roth

[00:02:03] Introduction

Henry Suryawirawan: Hello everyone. Today I have with me Ronica Roth, IT Revolution author of a book titled ‘Practice Makes Culture’. This is kind of like a new book that is coming from the IT Revolution. As the title says, we are going to talk a lot about, you know, making good culture, doing change transformation and all that. And we all know these days what is happening is AI is transforming a lot of organizations. So hopefully we can learn few practices from Ronica’s book on how we can make this AI transformation also successful for all of us. So Ronica, thank you so much for your time. Looking forward for this conversation.

Ronica Roth: Yes, me too. Thank you very much.

[00:02:43] Why Did Ronica Write a Book About IT Culture?

Henry Suryawirawan: All right, Ronica, let’s start maybe by, you know, talking about the book. I think talking about culture, there are so many books available out there, although many are probably not from the IT technology space. So tell us the background, why do you actually coming up with this book?

Ronica Roth: That is the first question we asked ourselves, in fact. They tell you? To make sure you know why you’re writing a book. And I think, I mean part of it is just a sense of purpose, right? I really do wanna change the world of work. I hate it when people are frustrated in their workplace of work by change that doesn’t lead to results or by change fatigue or by places where it just feels hard to create great results together. And honestly, not even just work. I, you know, I volunteer with a community, kind of an arts and culture community that… Essentially it puts on an event. There’s a whole bunch of people who help put on that event. But they get frustrated, you know, and sometimes there’s just a lot of friction. And it can feel like you don’t have any control over that. And the truth is, in 20 years, 20 plus years of doing this, 25, I can’t do the math, it turns out you really can include the people, address the people, and the human factors, to create much better change experiences and to create great great results.

And at the end of the day, I can only work, Christine Hudson, my cowork, my co-author. We can only work with so many companies and I really want them all to change. And I really do feel like we’ve found a way to break it down into a really accessible approach that — And it’s not a method or a methodology or a system, but it’s just some really practical advice that a leader at any level really can change their organizational culture for whatever part of the organization they can influence. And I want those leaders to have that chance to shine. And, and to your point about AI, I think the shift from the AI world are adding to the urgency. I mean it’s more critical than ever that we’re conscious in how we bring along the humans as we consider how AI is gonna remake organizations. So…

[00:05:14] What Are the Three Types of Elephants That Hold Organizations Back?

Henry Suryawirawan: Yeah, I think that’s a very great mission that you elaborated just now, right? So I think definitely also you are running a company behind this book, right? So tell us about the funny name that you have for your company.

Ronica Roth: The Welcome Elephant?

Henry Suryawirawan: Yep.

Ronica Roth: Well, you’re gonna, as we kind of dive more into the book, you’ll, one of the key approach, one of the, we have kind of a three part approach, the subtitle of the book is “How Welcoming Elephants, Creating Ownership and Facilitating Daily Practice Transform Organizations”. And that, creating an environment that welcomes the elephant. So welcomes the elephant in the room, right? And envi, like, think about places you’ve worked. Think about some of the best places you’ve worked and maybe some of the more frustrating places. How often have you had an environment where you can bring the bad news and you’re not gonna get shot down for it, and you’re not gonna get punished for it? Everyone’s gonna say, boy, thank you. Okay, let’s roll up our sleeves and solve that problem you just mentioned, right? So, we wanna, we work with leaders to create environments, to create cultures, to create organizations that not only welcome those elephants, those elephants in the room, but also that welcome emotional elephants.

So funny thing about people, humans, we are far more emotional than we like to think we are. Even you, dear listener, who’s thinking to yourself, yeah, but I am very rational. I want data and I want science. And I’m like, yep. And data and science give you feelings. And it turns out that even that CTO or CEO or board president who wants the hard data to tell me why we’re embarking on this change, whatever it is, at the end of the day, they really make decisions based on emotions. When people resist change, that’s because it’s an emotional response more than a rational one. Because we’re emotional humans, we make up stories. If we’re missing information, or say you give me a bunch of data about AI, a bunch of information and a great vision. Henry has this idea about what we’re gonna be capable of once we fully adopt AI to help us build our products. But because I have feelings about that and I’m a little bit scared and I’m nervous about the skills I might not have, right? Or I’m worried I won’t be able to do it. I will literally change what I hear about your story, because of my emotions. And I don’t know I’m doing it. It’s just a human.

So when I’ve been in organizations that really embrace, you know, our whole selves as, you know, emotional and rational, then it takes some of the power out of that emotion. I can look and say, oh, thanks for acknowledging that this is a little intimidating. Now that you said it out loud, and I can say it out loud, whew, okay, now I can listen better, right? So it’s not about… I don’t know, it’s not about like, oh, I’m gonna become super emotional at work. It’s actually about, just let me, you know, acknowledge all the different sides, and then we can engage better.

And there’s a third elephant that we’re trying to welcome, which is the systems elephant. There’s the old Indian story or parable, Southeast Asia, India, of the six blind men and the elephant, right? And they, the blind men, they each are touching a different, they’ve never seen an elephant or they’ve never encountered an elephant. They’re touching each part and they’re arguing about it. It’s like, no, an elephant’s like a wall, says the guy touching the side. And no, an elephant’s like a fan, says the guy touching the ear. And no, the elephant’s like a snake, says the guy at the trunk. An elephant’s a pillar, says the guy at the leg. And they start sort of fighting with one another, arguing until a sighted person arrives and says, well, actually you’re all right and you’re all wrong. The elephant is all these things, right?

And this is exactly, in my experience, this is what happens in every company, in every organization. And I don’t think there’s anything you do to prevent it. It’s just human nature. We can best see what we’re closest to. Our day-to-day work kind of keeps us focused in. And it, it takes, it’s a different kind of thinking to pick your head up and look at the horizon and look at the whole organization. And we often build habits around who talks to whom and how easily can I go talk to that group over there? Or, you know, how well do I understand that group over there and can I anticipate what might go wrong? And so the most effective organizations, building on the work of Deming and Lean, there are the places where we build habits, we build organizational structures and habits, that help us see that whole system and just get better. So we’re trying to welcome all those elephants. And that’s what’s in the book, and that’s what our company does.

[00:11:05] Why Do 70% of Change Efforts Fail?

Henry Suryawirawan: Right. So thanks for explaining what the meaning behind elephant. So it’s like elephant in the room, right? So I think you also mentioned these funny things about human, right, funny things about people. And in your book, you open it up by saying that, you know, 70% of change efforts actually fail because of this funny things about people, right, about human. And it’s actually very true. I believe it’s even higher than that because almost in every organization when you deal with people, there are a lot of uncertainties, ambiguities. Different people react differently because maybe emotions play a big part in what they do and what they decide. So tell us about this funny things of people that always seems to be like a gotcha for every change, you know, transformation, organizational culture.

Ronica Roth: You know, it is funny. All credit to Christine for hitting on that phrase, the funny things about humans, as we thought about, you know, answering that question, why do change efforts struggle. And once we started really thinking about it and digging into it and looking at the research, the list kept getting longer and longer. I mean, really what we’re talking, I mean, the thing is, it’s not about, these aren’t character flaws unless they’re flaws of humanity. They’re just patterns in how all humans process information, assess value, and respond to change. And really it’s the cognitive biases that we’ve learned from neuroscience, from behavioral economics. And so, we’ve already mentioned a couple, that we’re more emotional than we think we are. We tend to filter new experience, initially we’ll filter new experiences and new information through the thoughts, our old ways of thinking. So the, it’s called selective interpretation.

Belief, there’s something called belief bias that causes us to sort of cling to old beliefs. And I probably shouldn’t say this out loud, but at the very beginning of kind of the AI stuff, you know, I had an emotional reaction that was a little bit of the fear of I don’t know if I know how to do this, that made me create some beliefs about the nature of AI. Like, oh, it’s not, that doesn’t work. It’s, you know, all these false, you know, hallucinations, and blah, blah, blah. And of course, AI’s changing so fast if you’re not reading about it every day, you don’t know what’s true. And so some of the things I believed were true in the beginning, and I would read new stuff and I still was like, nah, it’s never gonna work. You know? And we cling to old beliefs. Now it turns out that to get past that, those beliefs, I had to get past the fear. I got past the fear by finding people to work with, to play with it. So… And there’s a few other that are particularly important for change. We’re very social creatures. In fact, I love Harari’s work in Sapiens about about our only superpower as people might be our ability to collaborate. And when humans have sort of made great strides, it’s because we’ve figured out ways for more people to collaborate together. I mean that’s kind of what this Agile world’s about and this, you know, process world which is great. But it’s also can kind of be our weakness, right? So a social threat activates the same neural pathways that guide, govern our responses to physical survival. So the idea that I might look bad or look dumb, or that you might think less of me for, you know. So you can tell me I’m supposed to welcome elephants, but I’m pretty sure that I’m gonna get yelled at, so I’m not gonna. And, you know, and it’s a really, it’s, it’s a really, very powerful response, It’s not a just get over it response. And related to that, social standing, that’s one of the, that’s why we avoid conflict. So some people are better at conflict than others, but most of us have some boundary where it’s like, nope, I can’t, I can’t. I can’t have that conversation. I can’t bring that up. I’m just gonna, we’ll just, we, let’s not talk about that.

[00:15:45] How Does Ronica Define the Different Layers of Culture?

Henry Suryawirawan: Yeah, I think hearing what you said, right, a few examples we can definitely acknowledge that. I think we can feel it in ourselves, we can see it with our colleagues, friends, even family members and all that, right? So I think this funny thing about people is something that we have to work on definitely, right?

Speaking about culture, I wanna ask this probably difficult questions because everyone talks about culture. Everyone wants to build a good culture. But how would you define it, right? How do you describe a culture? I think in your book you also mentioned this layers of culture, you know, like how do you differentiate? Because I think it’s like a spectrum thing, right, for culture. Like you can’t really describe it very succinctly in just like one sentence. Maybe tell us what’s your definition of culture.

Ronica Roth: Yeah. Well, again another place where we spend a lot of time thinking about what we’ve seen and experienced and also reading, you know, a lot of very smart organizational psychologists and whatnot. When most people say culture, and we think of this as little c culture, they kind of mean like how does it feel to work around here? How easy is it to get things done? Or how hard is it to get things done? How well do people get along? Are people really nice to each other? Are they so nice they can’t say, you know, give real feedback. That’s what — And most people would say like, well, I can’t define it, but I know it when I see it, right? That, you know, that culture can be, everyday culture can be, you know, how much do we defer to hierarchy or not? How much do we — it, it, it’s, it’s endless. And yet we’ve learned it’s so much more than that. It’s also your business operating system, right? So the values that are up on a poster, everything that’s in the HR handbook, the shortcuts, the processes we do because the official process doesn’t work, that’s part of our business operating system. Yeah, the kind of rules, processes and habits about how we do things, right? And, we could, if you think of, I love a good iceberg metaphor. If you think of that everyday culture, little c culture, and that business operating system are what we see, they’re very visible, right? That handbook is on your desk, that batch process runs every night. Those are, you know, we interact at the coffee station every day. That’s what we see.

But under the surface, the massive, hidden, powerful part of the iceberg are the hidden stories. So, again, as humans as story making machines, we individually and collectively have, are just full of stories that we tell ourselves about what’s possible, about why things are. And we often don’t even know that we have them, right? It’s this constant filter that you’re assessing. You know, and it could be, you know, I don’t know, a company is, wants to go on become more innovative, right? The big transformation is we’re gonna be the leading insurance company, whatever it is, and in innovation. But the hidden story that people believe is, well, we’re risk averse by nature, and so we’re never gonna do anything that feels risky. And those stories are powerful no matter how many initiatives and speeches, well, I shouldn’t say not no matter how. We have to recognize that one good speech is not gonna change a hidden story. And if I have a hidden story that, as part of that that I’m gonna get my hand slapped if, I don’t know, if I try some new way of interacting with the customer. I would have to not get my hand slapped. I would have to be praised for that behavior many, many, many times before I’m gonna change my story about it. You know?

Sometimes we know those stories. It’s like, well, in happy hour when you’re having that, well, you know how things really work around here, you know? You know that John is never gonna change the way he talks to us or whatever it is, right? So, they’re very, very powerful and they build up through time. They build up through shared experiences. So we have shared stories. We have stories, our team has some stories about that team, and again, unconscious. And then also me personally, because of the way my life has gone, I have stories and beliefs. So culture is the everyday culture of the business operating system, including the unofficial parts and the hidden stories.

[00:20:57] Why Is Declaring a New Culture Necessary But Not Sufficient?

Henry Suryawirawan: Yeah, I like your analogy of this iceberg, right? So like what you mentioned the visible one, right? The everyday culture, the values handbook or whatever that is that you have in your organization. The way you work, the workflow, the habits, right, those that it can be easily seen in the tip, at the tip of the iceberg. But the hidden stories are actually, you know, the majority, the bulk of how you define your culture, right? And I think, many, many leaders actually, I think they feel it’s hard to change a culture but they always opt for this route of, you know, maybe when new leaders come in especially, I just declare a new culture. You know, set top five cultures, this is how we are gonna change.

Ronica Roth: Right

Henry Suryawirawan: And they start from there. Is there a better way of, you know, for leaders, especially new leaders, to come in and make a change rather than doing that?

Ronica Roth: There is a better — Well, I will say, maybe a better way to say it isn’t, it’s not that there’s a better way. It’s that that way is just one piece that’s insufficient. It’s necessary, but insufficient. So if you wanna change the culture to be, I don’t know, we wanna embrace AI, we wanna become more innovative, we wanna… you know, I don’t know, move fast and break things, whatever it is we want, it is important to state that and to be really clear about it and to have a vision, compelling vision that you can tell with a story that appeals to emotion, as well as logic, you know? And it’s really powerful to acknowledge and recognize that what this thing we wanna do isn’t just a process change or a business operating system change or a technology change, it is a cultural change and we know that. So all of that is important, it’s just insufficient. And honestly, it could be paralyzing, I think for esp, you know, especially the farther down the, you know, either down or at the center of the organization, however you wanna think about it. It can feel big and amorphous and I don’t know how to change our culture. What does that even mean, you know? So, yes. So there’s a better way.

[00:23:12] What Are the Three Pillars of Your Cultural Transformation Framework?

Henry Suryawirawan: Yeah. So I think many people that I’ve seen or many organizations, how they approach change, obviously declare, you know, state clearly this is the vision, this is where we go. Eventually, sooner or later they will, you know, try to use power, hierarchy, to actually enforce those culture. So I think there’s a better way, definitely. And which comes to your, kind of like the framework, you know. You have these three pillars of how you can approach this culture transformation much better. Tell us about your three pillars in this framework.

Ronica Roth: Yeah, perfect. Well, I’ll start with, again, welcoming elephants, which I kind of talked about the three types. So we have learned, it’s funny when I tell people that I, part of what I do is, is help with culture change, culture shift in organizations. I often wanna, sort of, my caveat is, I mean, it’s not just any culture change. I’m not gonna help you become, you know, a protective, conservative, you know, disempowering hierarchy, you know. I wanna help create organizations where they do welcome the elephant in the room. And so this is a part of it. And so now that I explain the three. Let me give it a little more like example.

So like the emotional element, elephant, excuse me. So let’s imagine we’re gonna have, it’s a simple change. It’s not even big. It’s, we’re gonna have a new approval process for something, because we wanna prevent errors. So we say that. But the reaction that people have, you think it’s a little thing, it’s not even gonna matter. But people are like, don’t you trust me to make good decisions? Why? Why are you doing that? Why are you introducing this? Why are you disempowering me in the area I’m expert in? To welcome that emotional elephant would be to bring in stories that address some of that emotion. Hey, we’ve had some pretty big misses lately that might have been prevented by slowing down and like getting a second pair of eyes on things, right? So now I’m bringing emotional story that empthasizes, that that brings us a shared goal. We all wanna not make mistakes and feel like we’re on the line. It makes it really hard to make decisions. So the idea is, you know, we’re trying to create a safety net around decisions that actually let us go a little faster, right?

Okay, great. So now we have a, now what about the systems elephant? Well, the new approval process didn’t consider the fact that we just created a bottleneck because we asked the systems architects to become the deciders, the approvers, and now they’re in this uncomfortable position. Everyone’s gonna get mad at them. But if we came at it with the idea of welcoming the systems elephant from the beginning, we would have invited more groups to help us think through the problem space. What is it we’re trying to accomplish, and what are other ways we might tackle it? Maybe if we had done that, the systems architect would be like, look, it’s not really about a particular set of eyes, it’s just about a second set of eyes. What if we created more, you know, blah, blah, blah, whatever it is, right? So that’s welcoming the systems elephant. We’re bringing people in sooner.

And then in terms of the elephant in the room, so imagine, imagine we’re kicking off this little new approval process initiative. And there’s this great story that welcomes the emotional elephant about how we’re trying to make it easier to make decisions and be successful. And… silence. Nobody reacts. And you’re like, uh-oh, what’s going on? And the hidden elephant is at the VP level, the engineering and architecture leads battle all the time. And the result, as a result, there’s this trickle down, those two groups don’t even get along currently, and now you’re gonna ask us to like collaborate on decisions? What the heck? So if you welcomed that elephant, as the person announcing the change, you might say, look, I know this isn’t just a process change. This is a people change. Those two VPs own this initiative together. And their first tasks will involve getting everyone together to build a shared vision about what we’re trying to accomplish, right?

So welcoming elephants. So really paying attention in many interactions, in all our interactions to how can we not just acknowledge, but embrace our whole emotional and logical selves. How could we constantly seek ways to consider the entire system? How can we constantly find ways to improve the psychological safety that will allow us to welcome room elephants, right? And we do that, but I’m actually gonna skip to the third pillar, which is facilitating daily practice. So we don’t do it again, like you said, we’re not, it’s not a big grand gesture and an announcement. Every day, what are little things we could do that would make it real, right? So, I’ll take the systems elephant actually, ‘cause that’s a little easier to think about ‘cause it’s a little more logical, right? But, well, we don’t normally, we do our planning, and then we go talk to that other team, which is painful, and it always changes our plan. Okay, what if we invited that team to our planning? Right? That might sound like a big change. So what might be a small change? I’m a team lead and in the Slack, in our Slack channel, whenever we’re talking about, you know, this area, I’m just gonna, I’m gonna ask a kind of non-threatening, curious question. Hey, have we asked, have we, what did the widget team say about that? Not did you ask the widget team, which will make someone defensive. Yes, no, I don’t know, whatever. Or sounding impatient, right?

Like, so just daily practice, me as a leader, I’m gonna write down the open curious question on my desk or on my computer, what did the widget team say? Or what was their input? And then so that I don’t sound frustrated by writing in the moment. And then I’m gonna keep asking that. Every time this comes up in Slack, I’m gonna ask that question until the team tells me before I can ask, right? And if that happens, now I’ve turned my practice, our practice becomes a habit, right? And we can change something else.

And so that facilitating daily practice, it turns out it’s how we learn, right? We build — I mean, how many times have you gone to some kind of training or had a discussion about how we wanna do something differently? And then if you don’t immediately do it, if you don’t build some of that muscle memory, this is part of where change fatigue comes from, right? So we don’t do it often enough, but I constantly have to remember.

So every, I don’t know, every six weeks we work on that one thing where I’m supposed to talk to the widget team, but I don’t know, we don’t talk about it that much in between and I forget, you know. And so it takes, it’s very effortful. Whereas if we want to turn systems thinking, welcoming systems elephants into habit, and every day I’m looking for a way to invite us to think about other teams or every sprint planning, we’re gonna build a habit of where, you know, we have certain people in our planning or we do a planning set, you know, whatever it is. But you create this repetition. That’s where we sort of take it out of the very effortful space. I’m watching the sun change while I talk. I might have to fidget that out.

Henry Suryawirawan: Yeah, you, you are getting dark as well. Do you have another light?

Ronica Roth: See if I can fix It.

So yeah, the other piece about facilitating daily practice is, going back to hidden stories, it takes many new shared experiences to change a hidden story. So we’ll go back to welcoming room elephants. We say, the leaders say they want every crazy idea, but anytime we come up with an idea that’s a little too out there, it gets shot immediately, right? So that’s gonna reinforce the hidden story that I have, that the leaders don’t really embrace innovation. One leader reacting well once will not change that story. I’m gonna be like, great, he just didn’t notice that my idea was crazy ‘cause he doesn’t really know the tech that well, you know. Or what, you know, whatever story we have. Or bad news. A big one for me is bad news, right? Inherent in modern ways of working is the idea that we’re trying to learn faster. We wanna learn faster, that customers don’t really, we’re not solving the right problem or customers won’t react to that thing or this design won’t work. We’re trying to learn really fast.

And I can’t tell you how many companies I’ve encountered where they’re like, yeah, yeah, we wanna learn fast. Iterative, iterative, iterative. But they can’t ever hear, oh, that didn’t work. We try to think it didn’t work, we’re gonna try another. What do you mean it didn’t work? How many customers saw it? Like that was a real quote from a real client, you know, a stakeholder who was struggling with the idea of iterative. So there has to be the safety and this welcoming, of, well, that design didn’t work, but thank goodness we found out now, right? As a, you know, that design didn’t work well, now how late are we gonna be, right? It really requires the repetition of leaders who can say, you know, take a deep breath. And again, leader that, you know, a program manager who’s like, they’re like, well, the side of the schedule’s gonna slip by two weeks. And they’re like, right? If you’re gonna learn to not get that look on your face or sound frustrated, then you have to practice that kind of with intention and over and over again. So that’s the practice piece.

The third pillar. So we’re welcoming elephants, we’re making change by facilitating daily practice, and we’re creating ownership. So, you know, a lot of leaders try to create buy-in through new tools or processes, which I don’t, I’ve never quite liked that phrase, but, you know, how much do you need? How much do you need me to buy in? When we talk about creating ownership, this goes back to one of those funny things about humans, which is ownership bias. So we tend to value more the things we perceive that we own. And that doesn’t, we don’t have to literally own it, right? Like, it feels like my project, because I’ve been working on it for six months. I don’t own the project, someone else owns it, but it’s mine ‘cause I’ve invested time and effort into it. You know, we can also, through — we could talk about, I own, that’s my seat on the bus. That’s my park. That’s my park over there at the end of the street, right? It’s so we have this sense of ownership. And things that we even have a sense of ownership for, we just, we value more. And if, I will — I, once I feel ownership of something, I will assume, I will consider it to have more value than a thing I don’t own.

And that, so that ownership makes makes all the difference. And it, a lot of senior leaders hear that and they’re like, well, it’s, they don’t own the initiative. I’m the one whose bonus is on the line for these results. But what we’re really talking about is a sense of ownership, and the psychological ownership. And we create psychological ownership by giving, just giving people a chance to fully understand something. So taking a little bit more time, you know, with people to explain what it is we’re trying to do and help them understand, you know, whatever it is, whether it’s understanding the reason, or taking them through the evaluation process that we went through with these tools. It can be giving people a chance to just give feedback and poke holes in something, right? So maybe this is the group, this rock, this task force, you know, created a plan for AI adoption or whatever. Even if it was right to get this small group, we now need to include the larger group. And we don’t just include them by telling them and being inspiring and telling a great story, although we need to do those things too. We have to really give them a chance to kind of understand it and spend some time with it and interact with it.

And that can be true for a change, that could be true for a product initiative. It could be be true for all kinds of things. When that sense of ownership is created, people will give more time. They’ll, they’re more invested. And so, they’re more willing to practice, they’re more willing to, they’ll find more elephants in the room and they’ll be willing to do the extra work to engage in healthy conflict. Because, well, this change is important. So I know I feel that it’s important because I own it, right? I co-own it. And so it all actually becomes quite a great reinforcing loop, right? Because I have a sense of ownership. I’m willing to dig in to deal with the elephants in the room. I know that that requires, you know, constant attention to new ways of speaking, and reacting, and reacting. And I’ll do that. And because we do it in small little changes, they’re very doable, right? Which is another piece of the facilitating daily practice. As humans, we tend to underestimate the value of small changes, yet habit research tells us that it’s the small changes done frequently that have a significant impact.

Henry Suryawirawan: Yeah. Thanks for elaborating these pillars. So I feel definitely what you mentioned makes sense, make a lot of sense, right? So especially I love about the ownership, right? Because like what you said, coming back to the funny things about people, right? So we kind of like take pride about what we own, what we produce, right? What we can probably create together as a team, right? Rather than bolted on from the top. You know, saying for example, you have to use AI every day, right? But if we cannot find something that we own by using AI, I think definitely the change is gone, not gonna stick, I would say, right? So I think ownership definitely is very important. And I mean, for leaders out there who try to make a change, don’t forget that you need to create that kind of ownership. Maybe not the full accountability ownership thing, but it’s about psychological thing that, you know, people will need to own something.

[00:39:28] How Can You Turn Meetings Into a Daily Practice for Cultural Change?

Henry Suryawirawan: So speaking about daily practice, right, I like it. You also mentioned, you know, habit changes always be, you do it iteratively in small changes, right? One thing that I particularly kind of like intrigued in your book, when you mention about this daily practice, you come back to this meeting. Meeting is something that many people probably dread, especially if you’re doing it, you know, in a big groups, you know, talk about no agenda. So how do you actually use this meeting as a powerful way for the, you know, making changes in the daily practices?

Ronica Roth: I mean, I like to think that people hate meetings because they’ve been in a lot of bad ones. And the good news is, if you begin to think of meetings as a place to change your culture where you welcome emotional and room and systems elephant, they will suck less which will be helpful. But this also might be the moment when I give a shout out to mentor was Jean Tabaka, who passed too young, gosh, 10 years ago I think almost. But she really showed me and showed Christine power of, if you think of meetings as a, it’s the place where your culture is most visible and therefore must most able to be changed. And if you think of meetings as a place where we can practice the culture we want, then they become, they both improve the culture, but also the meetings themselves improve.

And so let me give an example, perhaps. Sorry, I had too many examples in my head. So we say we wanna welcome bad news. Or actually I’ll do it this way. We say we want to learn from mistakes or that we wanna be a learning organization. But that’s, you know, that’s not always gone well. So I’m gonna use, we have a weekly team meeting, let’s just say. And I’m gonna use, I’m gonna add an agenda item to the weekly team meeting that says, we’re gonna share, learn, we’re gonna share what we learned. And I’m gonna make a plan about how I invite that so that it’s clear that I really mean it. And maybe I’m even gonna tell a couple people in advance so they’re ready to bring. And I’m going to lead with something and I’m gonna model an example where I learned from by getting something wrong, right? And maybe I’m also going to kind of have some words written in front of me to help me like respond well, you know. You know, thank you and, you know, whatever that looks like, right? Now I’ve just turned a meeting into a place where we’re practicing a learning culture.

So I’ve talked to a million teams and team leads who say, why? I just wish that my team would talk in retrospectives. I can’t get them to talk, I can’t get them to contribute, right? So you’ve got a kind of culture, one is, I would want to, what do you know about why, right? Is it ‘cause it’s not safe? Is there a lack of safety? What creates that lack of psychological safety? Is it just ‘cause, you know, there’s people on the team who are uncomfortable with speaking in front of a group, even though it’s just our team? You know, it could be all kinds of reasons, right? Is it because that one person on your team like jumps in and like talks over everybody and you know, what is it? So you figure out what that is And then you can design the meeting specifically to be a place that doesn’t just ask people to contribute, but makes it safe and makes it easy to contribute.

So maybe in that retro, we’re going to, maybe we need a working agreement around how people react to ideas. Or maybe we have a working agreement around everyone having, everyone make sure we hear from everyone, which is both a responsibility to draw, for all of us to draw people out, and the responsibility to make space for others, and a responsibility to use your voice. But then we also can design the meeting. Like when we’re collecting ideas, or reflections on how the sprint went, we’re gonna use a pass the pen technique, right? We’re writing. So now it’s not talking, it’s not fighting for attention. You just pass the pen and everyone can, you can say no, you can pass your turn, right?

And that’s a way that helps us hear from everyone. Maybe when it’s time to generate ideas for improvements, we’re gonna give everyone a couple minutes to write on stickies quietly, no talking, so that quiet thinkers can think. And then we’ll have a speaking part so that out loud thinkers can think. That’s me. And then maybe, maybe we’re gonna adopt a decision, a decisioning mechanism that, again, it depends what the problems are, but maybe addresses safety. So maybe we create some anonymity around it. Or maybe we, maybe one thing that’s gone wrong in the past is we don’t have a bunch of options. Like, you know, we wanna make a bunch of options, and then make it clear what they are. And then give us a chance to vote. Clarity on how decisions are made.

So all of these things, if we implemented all those things in one meeting, which is not starting small. But if we did that, now we’d have a meeting where maybe there’s a little more psychological safety, it’d be a little richer conversation. We’d have better ideas. And suddenly a retrospective’s not so annoying, and it’s fun, you know? And then maybe there’s another improvement. Maybe the next improvement is we have a retro, and we choose improvements. And then we never check in to see how they went. I’ve worked on that team. I’ve worked on that team many times. And so now the next improvement is we’re gonna start the meeting by talking, checking in with our last improvements, right? Something like that. And if you need, and if you wanna start smaller, you do each of those improvements kind of one at a time, right? Or stacking them up. Yeah.

Henry Suryawirawan: Yeah. Yeah, I feel hearing what you said, definitely it’s a big opportunity if we can leverage meetings, you know, where smaller groups of people interact with each other. You can definitely see how you welcome the elephants in that meeting, right? How do you actually make small changes, right, facilitating daily practice. But I feel also? Quite important is that the leaders should also embody what they preach, right? What they declare in their values, in their, you know, vision and mission. So I find sometimes leader who declare those values, they actually also haven’t embodied that themselves. So I think meetings is also a place where they can actually showcase, you know, maybe try, you know, how to embody those values and all that. And I think in your book mm-hmm.

Ronica Roth: Go ahead.

Henry Suryawirawan: No, go ahead.

Ronica Roth: I was gonna say there’s some, there’s some funny research that we found around… people think their own meetings, it was, and I can’t quote it precisely right now, but it was, you know, thousands of managers. And basically they think their meetings are fine and good, and they think other meetings are terrible. And they see no irony in that, you know. We tend to be blind to these things. I will say the book very much, you know, we talk about starting where you are and we are talking to leaders at all levels. You start by practicing yourself. What do I, how do I want to behave differently to create the environment I want to create? And in order to address hidden stories, in order to make it safe to practice, you kind of need to narrate what you’re doing because you’re not gonna get it right every time, right? And then, oh, that’s nothing’s changed around here. It just, that’s still how that person reacts. But if you tell people, hey, I’ve realized I haven’t been listening very well, and it’s causing a lot of frustration. So I’m really working on my listening skills, and I’m doing it. I’m starting with our team meetings and this is exactly what I’m trying to do. And I invite you all to give me feedback and tell me when I’m succeeding and tell me when I’m not. And that takes a lot of courage. So I don’t mean to like make, I said it’s a, it’s a simple model for changing culture but it’s not always easy. It’s a little, there’s a lot of vulnerability required here, for sure.

[00:48:51] How Can Leaders Address the Emotional Elephant of AI Transformation?

Henry Suryawirawan: Yeah, So definitely, in your book you have a number of other hacks, right, that people can also explore in terms of making this cultural change. I wanna go to this, you know, elephant in the room, so to speak, right? Because almost every organization is embarking this AI change transformation. I don’t know whether you have, you know, some good success stories or case studies, you know, how a company can actually successfully make this change happening with their people, embedding AI, changing how they work and things like that. So maybe if you can share some of your experience out there, that will be great.

Ronica Roth: Yeah. Well, I’ll first say, I don’t know, I don’t know if I have true success stories yet because I think we’re all a little too early on the journey. But I’ve had the great privilege, through IT Revolution to interact with some amazing tech leaders who are, they’re all trying to find the right answer. And I see a lot of things that are grounded in the principles that we’ve been talking about. So it’s an elephant in the room. It’s a massive emotional elephant, right? So step one, you have to make space for people to be uncomfortable, like to express their discomfort, make that okay. And again, I, one of the most powerful things I’ve seen is when a leader can be vulnerable, I’m excited and I’m nervous too. I don’t actually, for the first time in my life, I’m leading a change and I don’t exactly know what the end state is, you know? It’s not true everywhere. I mean, some people have a pretty clear idea, but it’s all changing so fast. So that kind of making space for that emotional reaction.

Absolutely daily practice is, the question in an AI environment I’m noticing, as I talk to people, is how do we make it safe to practice? So it’s not enough to say you have 10% time to play with AI, that’s almost too unstructured in most places, right? What is it you want me to be learning? What is it you want me to be trying to do? What makes it safe and practical kind of depends on your current culture. Is this a culture with a lot of guardrails? Maybe you wanna start by providing guardrails. Here are the guardrails that will make it safe to play, you know, and here are the guardrails that’ll make sure we don’t accidentally delete our production database, right? Maybe you believe that the future culture of the company that is a little more AI ready or AI centered will be one that doesn’t need as many guardrails. And so you want to change how people feel. So now you’ve gotta have a plan. How do we start finding ways to reduce — how do we work with the teams to understand like how could we give you more freedom and remove, reduce some of those guardrails because that’s actually what we wanna be going forward, right? And so part of it too is this constant conversation.

One of the most thing that I’ve seen the most excitement around, I guess, and a lot of success, I’ve talked to a few large enterprises who basically told the executive level folks, you need to vibe code something that we can put in production. Which when I first heard it, I thought sounded insane. But it’s great because, and that goes back to that vulnerability and that it starts with the leader. So, you know, it, this isn’t something that we could have done in the past, but AI enables vibe coding. And so now, I mean I’ve talked to some really excited CTOs who haven’t written production code in for 20 years and they’re having a blast. And they also have had the humbling experiences of, you know, that was exciting. I did it in a weekend. Oh my God, that was terrifying. I could have deleted the production database, right? And so then there’s just more empathy, right? And for what it takes. And I think also creating chances for people to talk together. This goes back to the ownership piece, right? So creating some ownership. I guess it’s like a lot of other change efforts, right? You want that community of practice where people can come together to share excitement, to share learnings, where it’s safe to share failures. I think with, again, with AI, everything is goes to 11. Like it’s everything we’ve ever said times 10, you know, times 100. So…

Henry Suryawirawan: yeah.

Ronica Roth: Yeah. And I guess, going, coming back to the ownership thing too, especially with AI, things are changing so fast that you, I think you need, and maybe, and this is a systems elephant too, you need as many people helping as possible. It’s too much for one person, one team to kind of, I think keep up and keep envisioning what it’s gonna mean for our organization. I also give a, I have to give a shout out to a colleague, Melissa Reeve also has a book coming out from IT Revolution, Hyperadaptive: Rewiring the Enterprise to Become AI native. Have you interviewed her yet?

Henry Suryawirawan: Yes.

Ronica Roth: Okay, good. We were working on our books around the same time. And it was really, and she and I live in the same city, so we had a lot of fun, sharing ideas.

Henry Suryawirawan: Yeah, so if people haven’t listened to Melissa’s episode, so please do check it out. So I think she talks a lot about how do you actually become a more AI-native, AI-ready organizations, by using their, her hyperadaptive model, right?

So I think also thanks, for, you know, sharing some of the so-called maybe success tips for leaders to make this AI transformation much more smoothly, much more successful. I like the way, the way you mentioned about, you know, maybe the leaders should vibe code more that, you know, that is going to production. I think, obviously, if you want people to use AI more, you know, you, you have to show them, right? You have to be comfortable, be vulnerable. I don’t think anyone knows the actual answer, how this AI will play out, especially in the organizations, right? So definitely if everyone play along, acknowledge, because I think a lot of this is also emotion. We feeling anxious, you know, about our job security, about the identity crisis, right, for some people, because like for example, software developers now we kind of like don’t know whether what we learn before is actually gonna be still useful. So definitely a lot of these emotions, funny side of the, about people that I think we all come back again, again, and again.

[00:56:13] Can You Apply These Culture Change Principles to Personal Growth?

Henry Suryawirawan: So a bit trivia as well, right? Because I think your pillars, your way of thinking, is kind of like, implemented for organization. Can we also use your thing for personal stuff, right? Because I think, you know, making a new culture for yourself, is that something that you have also personally seen?

Ronica Roth: Yeah. I mean, and I have, we actually have some examples in the book of — you know, we’re all in a personal growth journey, right? And it doesn’t even have to be in the context of change. I would like to be a better person. I would like to be, you know, I would like to be a person who, honestly who is better at healthy conflict. I would like to be a person — anything I wanna change, this idea of sort of applying the concepts from habit research of daily practice. One of the things we mentioned in the book is the WOOP method. We talk about WOOP-ing it up, so Wish, Outcome, Obstacle, Plan. So oftentimes we wanna make a change and we believe we can do it, and we have a lot of positive intent. And it turns out that that is not enough. And in fact, sort of optimistic view toward change can almost backfire. We’re so sure we can do it. We don’t take the steps. And I’ve fallen prey to this often. And instead, WOOP, it’s really a combination of…

First is getting really clear on what is the intention, what is the wish, and what’s the outcome that you’ll get from the best possible version. If this goes as well as it possibly can, what’s the outcome? And that helps kind of ground your own optimism in a why. But then you really kind of need to be a little pessimistic and imagine the obstacles, the internal obstacles that are likely to get in the way. What’s gonna get in the way of me practicing this new behavior? Or, you know, showing up in this particular way. And, you know, spend some time really thinking about all the things that can get in the way, but then what’s the most important or what’s the most likely, or what’s the — and then have a plan for that. And you kind of set yourself up. You don’t have to rethink. When you hit the obstacle, you don’t have to start again. You’re like, nope, I made a plan for this. I know I’m gonna do, I’m gonna do Y instead, you know.

It’s funny, one of the personal things I was trying to change not too long ago, I was just really like, I was working really hard and all of my texts to friends got really matter of fact and like, no emojis. And I’d forget to say good morning before I like started texting somebody. And I don’t know what it’s like in Singapore, but I was starting to realize that my texts were kind of rude. And it was just ‘cause I was distracted, you know? So, you know, the world and my wish and outcome, the world has moved to so much communication is through text. And if this is how I’m maintaining relationships, there has to be a heart in it. And my obstacle was, I’m moving too fast. I’m too stressed about other stuff. Also, I, the pleasantries were in my head but not making it into the text. And so one was — I had two things. One was, don’t send texts in the middle of other work. So separate the two things. So if you’re sending personal texts, make personal time. And then the other one was, I started doing talk-to-text more because then I said the warm things I was thinking. Anyway, that was my WOOP. So yeah, that, it’s all — and the other one is the hidden stories. And the, This is work or personal, but coming to recognize all those hidden stories that we tell ourselves and that we make up. And actually it’s an incredible — I had, there were three of us who were co-founders at a company and we were having some challenges. And we learned to say in a, he, in a difficult conversation, we’d say, I might say, the story I’m telling myself is, you know, you’re not responding to emails because your focus is over here, you know. Which gives the other person, so A, I recognize that I am making up stories based on emails or actions or whatever. But then it also gives that other person a chance to correct that story or tell their story. But actually what I was doing was something else, and I made up a story that you were, you know. And it makes for a much easier conversation.

Henry Suryawirawan: Wow, I find it’s really a powerful hack, probably, right? So this phrase, the story I tell myself, so I think making it explicit, right? Because sometimes we don’t tell it, right? We always have it in the back of our mind, especially for personal habit, right? Because we are all only doing it with ourselves, right? If we don’t talk about it, acknowledge about it, I think those hidden stories won’t get surfaced, right?

Ronica Roth: Yeah, for sure. And all credit to Brené Brown for that phrase.

Henry Suryawirawan: Right. So, Ronica, I think we have covered a lot of things. Is there anything else that you think is kind of important about the, you know, your practice, your framework and all that, that we haven’t really discussed?

[01:02:06] What Are the Five Culture Hacks for Scaling Cultural Impact?

Ronica Roth: I will just do this as a teaser ‘cause I don’t wanna make this too long. You kind of referenced, so we have these five — so if you want — we’re talking about start where you are, making small changes in your team. I’ve worked with a lot of leaders who are like, I am trying to make fast change in my whole organization. And, for those people, part three of the book talks about our five culture hacks. And it’s also meeting centered in a way, but it’s, you do a lot of facilitating practice, creating ownership and welcoming elephants when you brought — so I’ll use the example of, if you do any kind of like quarterly program planning or like a SAFe PI planning style thing, you’re broadening participant groups. It used to be that just the program managers planned, but now you include all your team members. Except you’ve been doing this for years and now you don’t include all your participant group, all your individual contributors, and I’m gonna tell you you should, and then you co-create working agreements. So when people get upset, it’s often because they had expectations for behavior, but we never said them out loud. You can make all of your meetings better by having co-created working agreements for how people behave in those meetings or on your team. Organizational agreements.

Number three, demoing work. I know lots of groups that stopped demoing together. They just demo to themselves. That’s not really a demo. We can welcome all kinds of room elephants by showing work and then explaining why we did or didn’t do what we’d hoped. Co-creating pressure tested plans. So going back to that PI planning. Do you, have you fallen into the habit of you make plans before you walk in and then you just, and then they don’t change? No, the whole idea is that we’re gonna poke holes in each other’s plans and figure out why it won’t work. And it’s a systems elephant. All of our plans all together need to lead up to the value and results we’re trying to create. And then finally practicing together. So designing the agenda of a bigger meeting like that so that it practices many of the behaviors we’re trying to have. Like blaming less or taking responsibility or all kinds of things. All kind. Better listening. So yeah. So part three of the book is all about how to scale impact through those five hacks.

Henry Suryawirawan: Right. Definitely check out those hacks, right? Because, we know changing culture is gonna take time, right? So if there are hacks here and there, probably I think we can also give it a try.

Ronica Roth: Yeah.

[01:04:49] 3 Tech Lead Wisdom

Henry Suryawirawan: So Ronica, as we approach the end of our conversation, I really love some of the tips and hacks that you mentioned, right? And hopefully people can make the cultural change much smoother. Before I let you go, I have one last question. It’s like a tradition in my podcast. I call this the three technical leadership wisdom. Think of it just like advice you wanna give to us. So maybe if you can share your version, that would be great.

Ronica Roth: One, here’s another phrase for you. You are the kind of leader who… You can claim the identity you want even before you’ve finished practicing and attaining it. So you’re the kind of leader who invites participation. You’re the kind of leader who, whatever, whatever that change is that you want, claim it. That will help you get there.

The second one is, notice your hidden stories. So… And get curious about other people’s hidden stories. As a leader, if you can make those less hidden, then we can discover what it is we wanna, what new stories we wanna write through shared experience.

And then finally, you can create the culture you want on your team, in your group, in your program, in your organ, whatever part, practice welcoming elephants every day and invite others to practice with you.

Henry Suryawirawan: Wow, I like the last one, right? You can make the culture change. And hopefully we all are successful in this because I think this AI cultural change is gonna be massive, right, for every organizations, especially those traditional incumbents, you know, who used to do things in certain way. So I think this AI disruption is really real. And hopefully yeah using your techniques, reading from your book, everyone can make this successful transformation.

So thanks again, Ronica. If people want to follow you, find more things about you, is there a place where they can find you online?

Ronica Roth: Yes, you can. thewelcomeelephant.co is our company. Follow me on LinkedIn at Ronica Roth, on LinkedIn. And then we also have a Substack Practice Makes Culture. Right now we’ve been writing about monthly, but now that we’re actually finished writing the book, we’ll start writing Substack more frequently, with the idea of lots more practical examples and tips.

Henry Suryawirawan: Lovely. So yeah, I hope you are successful in your mission, you know, to make this cultural change more successful and people go through those changes, you know, in a happily, you know, kind of like a way rather than painful ways of changing. So thanks again, Ronica.

Ronica Roth: Yeah. Thank you, Henry. Appreciate it.

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