Sara Hanks opens up an extremely important aspect of Project Management.

And so that's that's not unusual either. It happens more than we care to admit. The the stakeholder that that's a really good example of how we missed a stakeholder, didn't we?

And it's really difficult when, like, the algorithm was new. Nobody had ever done this before. And so it's understandable that you might miss a stakeholder because we really don't know who we're going to impact with this thing because it is so down-thracking new. And in project management, that's happened to me many times. And it's frustrating. because you spend a hell of a lot of work. You've done a lot of thinking by a lot of people, which is a lot of money. And it just comes up against the wall by somebody who really shouldn't have a veto power on the project. But they do because we didn't treat it right.

That's the other side of this that most people don't recognize. You almost become the project.

I do. I do too. And it's, I think it's a penalty because we're so passionate about what we're trying to get done. Right. Yeah. But it is so like I did a lot of distribution center design using computers, which is way the hell ahead of its time. And it confused the hell out of people. So a little side story, I was charging a dollar a part.

So we would. develop a bill of materials for the distribution center, racks, shelving, lift trucks, docks, all this stuff on the computer. Then we give them move instructions from old to new because we sized every part, had inventory levels that determined cubic footage and blah, blah, blah, and all that stuff. And this was the railways in Canada, which is government-owned. They canceled over $2 million worth of product because they'd screwed up. Because they've never had this kind of algorithm in the past. So that's a different twist on the same story. Not everybody was fully up to speed as to the impact, including me, up to speed of the impact that this was going to have and how many more people it touched. So how do you break your stakeholders down now? How do you try and get over that?

A little more subtle.

So interest and influence.

Okay, so freeze frame there for a second. So you're also, you're categorizing the people, influence and interest. Yep. But you're also. changing the structure of the project because you're bringing the people with high interest and high influence in very early. Yes. Okay. I just wanted to make sure I understood that. So those folks are with you the whole way.

It's interesting. Charles Handy, who the guy that started the London School of Economics, talks about business organizations in the shape of a shamrock.

That you got just exactly what you described. You've got. A core of the company, a number of employees that know how everything goes, and they operate the whole damn thing. You have a smaller core of the company that's strategic and is driving tomorrow. And then you bring in specialists from outside, consultants, systems people, subcontractors, whatever it is, who have areas of expertise because this is no longer your core business. This is an adjunct. It's improving your core business, but you're going to need, and that's that stakeholder thing. Subcontractors become part of the stakeholders, don't they? Yeah. Okay. Sorry. I didn't mean to take you off track. That's high influence, high interest. They're with us the whole way. Yes.

Your example, that's the IT people.

One of the interesting things, Sarah, I think, obviously you're in a lot of meetings.

And if I told you that conflict is to me an indicator of the success of the meeting, would you agree, disagree, or want to discuss it?

Yeah. The, the, you know, it's, it's part of, it's part of the style I like to follow is everybody has to understand what we're trying to do. Same thing on the project, same thing, leading a team, whatever, everybody has to understand it. But the thing that most people forget is that. They have to accept that that's the right thing to do. And we do not allow people enough time or pay enough attention to their opinions to have the healthy debate, the healthy conflict, to come to the right conclusion that even if they don't support it, it's not their idea, they will be committed to helping you succeed.

Nowhere to hide.

So let's back up a little bit further. Before the project is approved. Are you being brought in to manage a project of change? Or are you being asked to help companies identify what changes need to be made? Where do you fit before the project starts?

So you're an external company. You're an expert. You're a consulting group coming in, being asked by a company to come in and look at a specific thing. True?

Okay. So in the company, who are the people that recognize that you need to be asked? Somebody like you needs to come in and help them. Who are those folks?

So would you say they're all high interest, high influence?

It's amazing, isn't it?

You know, the thing by nature of everything I've done in my life. Quality has not been something that I've been particularly good at because I'm on the edge of almost everything. And there is no quality measure. You know, going, example, a fax machine.

There was an iteration of the fax machine that did the printing on the platen by going around and around and it went the whole way. So it was just an ink mess.

And somebody thought that was a wonderful idea as opposed to printing the whole piece of paper. Like we got to move from a teletype, which is the old, to the fax, which is the new. And we got to change how this thing looks. So they did this. It might have been a good idea. It was a brutal failure, just a horribly expensive thing, messy thing. And a lot of people, for that reason, delayed implementing the fax machine as a tool. to improve. Or another example, we're going to have computer to computer communication. Today it's APIs. It's very simple. Everybody does it and it's controllable. My boss told me I will never allow my computer to be accessed by anybody outside this company. Even if it means I have somebody sitting on a chair that takes a piece of paper from one computer, puts it in the other and vice versa. I never was able to convince him to change his mind. Ever. Ever. And he was the boss. He owned the place. So talk about high influence. He didn't really give a hoot. This is the only thing that's important. So to that direction, you come forward, you're asked to go look at something. You're asked to find a solution to a particular area. You bring it back to them. How often do they accept and how often do they turn it down and why?

I'm not expecting.

In other words, you're devious.

sure. You're convinced of the benefit that comes. And, you know, somebody said, well, you don't like that approach. So you change your approach and you end up in the same place. Might take longer, but it takes longer. Yeah. So I guess where I was going, Sarah, is when you look at problem determination, there are not a lot of people inside a business. Your previous job with GE was an exception where continuous improvement is a way of life. Or the Japanese Kaizen approach is a way of life in American culture that doesn't seem to fit. But when you come forward, I don't imagine you get turned down often. But I find it interesting that companies do not have that expertise internally. That goes back to Charles Handy and his shamrock approach. You're

Yeah. Yeah. I call that fresh eyes. Yeah. Somebody coming in, you know, it's remarkable. And you can probably do the same thing. You walk into a plant and it takes you five, ten minutes and you've figured it out already. Yeah. Because you've been through so many. And a lot of people wonder, you know, what kind of mystical thing is that? It's scars. It's experience.

You know, and you get that experience by making mistakes.

And that's, you know, we teasingly call the company Learning Without Scars, but I got a lot of scars on my back end. for trying things that didn't work.

it's remarkable. And it seems to be getting more complicated, though, Sarah. The next iteration of people coming out of school don't have the same analytical and critical thinking skills, I'm told. by schools. It's taking at least a year and a half for mediation out of high school to get them to the place they should have been when they walked into the university campus. So when you get the young employee in the company, good credentials, great intellect, but very little application. That's difficult.

Fantastic.

So taking, and I agree with that a hundred percent. So taking that, we covered the high influence, high interest. We covered the low interest, high influence. The other two, I think, are the more working people on the team. Is that true or false?

That's where I was going. What you're identifying are people that can be useful in future events. Yes. Because they think differently than the traditional crowd. Yes. They're interested in things that don't necessarily apply to them. They're interested in it because of the intellectual aspect of it, the curiosity of it. And that's a different category of people. Yeah. Okay. So we see

Yeah. Yeah. I call them apostles. Same thing. It's becoming very clear in recent times that the companies need to be engaged with their employees much more than they have been.

Well, exactly. And it's the biggest cause for separation from companies. And companies have not, I don't believe they've responded very well to this. They're still, my generation was more a command and control than a, what's your opinion? Like we didn't, we don't have time for that. This is what I want you to do. Do you understand what I'm talking about? Do you want me to show you? Next. That doesn't work today.

And I'm going to put an H block on it. Anybody 40 and down are going to really seriously resist the command and control. And if they don't believe that the company is offering them a chance to improve, done.

This crowd that has high interest but low influence. To me, that's an important group of people I want to pay attention to because I want to get them engaged. I want them to feel really excited about what they're doing. And at the moment, I'm not sure they are.

Sure. Voluntarily. Yes. Perhaps even on their own time.

They're a special crowd of people. Okay. So we got high interest, low influence. High interest, high influence. High influence, low interest. We got one group left, which is what?

So why are they even there?

Yeah. So taking my snarky comment that, well, what do we got left? They're not really that important. In effect, what you're trying to do is make them have interest. And you're kind of creating a farm team for the high interest, low influence people that are going to spend their own time to help you. Yeah. And we want more of them. Yeah. So the low interest, low influence crowd, they're here. I can fertilize that. I can help develop it. I can instigate, motivate, whatever the heck term you want to get going. So how big is the team on a project, the stakeholder team? 20,40,10?

And 10 max, excuse me,10 max on a working team. They're the doers. They've got project steps. They're part of the schedule. There's various tools and training and systems, et cetera, that they need to have access to. That's the example where we failed with the IT crowd. Yeah. Then five, let me call it, on a control group.

So in my way of looking at it, I have an executive group, and that's five. Yeah. And then we have a working group, and that's 10. And we have a broader audience that we have to communicate with, with the high interest, low interest crowd with low influence. Am I saying that well?

It's not a creation of a new thing. It's an improvement of a current improvement.

Okay. So in a dealership I worked at, we had two crowds. One was the executive and I think they were called the steering committee.

And there was about five of them. Lowest job title was vice president. And then there were 10 of us, I think. They were departmental heads. We were called the working committee. So our mission was to identify areas in our groups that needed improvement. And because we were all there, we could fight about the prioritization, the investments. And then we would give that to the steering committee for their ultimate yay or nay. Yeah. So we did all of this inside. And interestingly, of the 10 guys, nine left and had their own businesses. The only guy that didn't was in his 60s to start with. So it was too late for him.

We all teased the hell out of him. And this, I don't know if this is an aberration or what, but I was probably the least talented and experienced of that crowd. The rest of the people were just superstars, all of them. And how often, so you're pulled in from outside because the companies can no longer afford to have that skill set inside. Totally understandable. How do people find you? How many of you as an organization, how many organizations are there like you that are doing this?

In your area.

That's my point. This is really at the beginning of this activity, isn't it?

And there's not a lot of businesses yet that... come to the conclusion that this is a valuable tool for them to have access to. It's kind of like at the moment, that's discretion. We're okay as we are. So getting people to accept that there's a needed change, that process improvement is required, that TQM works. Yeah. That's still, after 40 years of Deming and Duran, it's still an issue, isn't it?

How silly are we? You know, we can't be all things for all people. It's like our classes. Schools are recognizing the content that we have is ready-made that can go into work right now. Yeah. It would take them six months to 12 months to create the same thing that they could drop into the school. And at what cost?

And you're doing the same thing in a different direction.

So I think we're both proving Handy's point. Peter Drucker, the American side of things, looked at business in a similar way. You've got to have a product, you've got to have a market, you've got to have a distribution channel. So all sins went into the distribution cell. And then his comment was the area of those three that we pay the least amount of attention to is, surprise, surprise, the distribution channel. Getting, you know, satisfying customers, delivery systems, all of that stuff, which is exactly what you're doing. I find it really interesting, the four categories, because that seems to be the Breyers-Briggs and personalysis and caliper and all these other things. It's always four.

And I really like your four categorizations tied to influence and interest. Because it really explains it very clearly as to who you have to make sure of, who you got to watch out from, who you're going to work with, and who you're going to grow to help you work with. Yes. It's kind of a neat progression, Sarah. I'm very impressed with that.

which is also why when you get some time. All the free time you've got, we should get a lecture series going with you, like we've spoken about it. But that's a lot of work to put together. So don't let it take away from your day job, right?

Isn't it interesting?

Well, that's that's there's a bridge. Yes. You know, it's and it's one of those things where. A leader is someone who takes you to a place that you wouldn't go by yourself. So that bridge, that's probably why there's nobody that we can go to as an illustration or as a model like there is for continuous improvement, like there is for Six Sigma, like there is for AI. Yeah. And all of these things, and I hadn't thought of it that way, but I've experienced that, that technology typically is the last piece that people can, put their arms around and understand.

Well, I would jump. I never like, you know, in my consulting business, when I was early on, the bigger the problem that the dealer had, it was almost like you wanted to drop a bomb and start over. Because it's easier to do that than it is to modify inside. Yeah. And it's, which is also why it's very difficult to change people. We get very comfortable with how we operate. This is, this works for me. I'm going to keep doing it. But the world around you today is changing so rapidly and technology is interfering. It's invading all manner of space that we inhabit. And if you don't keep up with it, like chat GPT, just look at the pace with which that thing rolled out.

No, I just got the upgraded version of Bing. I was on the wait list for about a week before they finally gave it to me. And that sucker is, it's again going to change how things work. It's kind of like Google Maps acquiring Waze so that now we have people as they're driving inputting to Google Maps. And it's almost like we've got a...

And if there's traffic over here, here's the side street you want to take. And, you know, I mean, it's phenomenal. And AI is going to do that to us in so many ways. Absolutely. It's like my daughter who's teaching. She says it's getting harder for her to recognize. She teaches English. Recognize if the kid has written this paper or whether he did it or she did it through ChatGPT. ChatGPT. So she's doing a lot more dialogue teaching than more Socratic teaching than directed teaching. And it's very different. So project management, the same thing. I applaud you. I like the way that you break things down and are so clear in the analysis of it. It's very refreshing. It also is an indication of how successful you are at what you do. So thank you.

Sarah, the thing in life comes down to the interaction between two people. Everything we do in life comes down to two people. And everything about that interaction is about expectations. And expectations are really interesting things. They're tricky. Everybody has a... different version. So what your expectation is of what mine is of the same element could be very different. And unless we get into a dialogue, unless we get into a discussion, dialogue is a Greek word meaning flow of meaning. If you don't have a dialogue, you're never going to find out those expectations. If you don't find out those expectations, you cannot have a constructive face-to-face relationship. It's just that simple. If you have a relationship, it's awful hard to say no to a friend. So if I'm trying to sell something, it's awfully hard for a friend of mine to say no to me because they're going to feel guilty. It's not the right reason to buy something, but they're going to feel guilty. So it puts more burden on me. Like you're saying, I have to be really confident that what I'm giving them. is going to be so far and above the expectations that they have, they will be absolutely blown away. And that's my mission always. How can I help? And what do you want? I'll say yes. Doesn't matter. Just tell me what you want. The answer is yes. And they say, how can you do that? I think, you know, it's that quadrant of four. There's a different answer for each of those quadrants, each of those areas, because of the makeup of the people. because of their influence or because of their interests or it might just be because of who they are right i think it's wonderful anything you want to i'm mindful of the time so anything you want to say as a wrap

Yeah, exactly.

Actually, I think you just raised a really wonderful point. Along the way through a project, we will have people that lose interest. Yeah. And those people are not keepers. It's an interesting expose, actually. The longer a project is, the more significant, the more pressure, the more it's a heat treating operation, isn't it? Yeah. You find out who the real deal is. Yeah. And you're one of them, kiddo. So thank you very much. And yeah, enjoy the rest of the weekend. It's a Friday and I know you have a birthday tomorrow. So this is kind of cool. So thank you very much, Sarah. I think this has been wonderful. And I hope that everybody who's been listening heard something there that appeals to them. Project management is going to be extremely important as we go forward. And companies do not have the ability, the money. or necessarily the interest to develop those skills. So you're going to have to buy them, which is why people like Sarah and her business and the others in the country are so important. So thank you very much, everybody. We look forward to having you with another Candid Conversation with Sarah also very soon. Mahalo. Thank you for listening to our podcast. We appreciate your support. Should you have any thoughts or comments, please don't hesitate to contact us at www. learningwithoutscars. com The time is now. Mahalo!