Empowering voices to optimise potential and satisfaction with Lisa Carlin

What if you could create a workplace where everyone's voice is heard and teams are empowered to reach their full potential? Join us as we explore the inspiring journey of Lisa Carlin, a Scale Up Mentor and Digital Transformation Specialist who grew up in South Africa during apartheid and is now dedicated to giving individuals and teams a voice in the workplace.

In this conversation, we discuss Lisa's vision for reimagining the workforce, her mentoring work with digital leaders, and the exciting launch of her TurboCharge Transformation Membership Academy. Learn how to reach the "unicorn zone" where systems, people, executives, and boards are all aligned and inspired, and discover the dangers of the "dark room" approach to developing strategy. We also touch on the need for organizations to become agile and flexible to truly thrive in today's fast-paced world.

Finally, we dive into the potential of AI in professional services and how embracing these tools can help us achieve success. Lisa shares her insights on the importance of multidisciplinary approaches, the use of chatGPT to save time and foster creativity, and the concept of prompt engineering to improve productivity and quality. Don't miss this engaging discussion on the power of authentic consultation, the double diamond approach, and the importance of motivating employees with purpose and value. Listen now and unlock the key to transforming your organization!

Lisa Carlin on LinkedIn

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The Reimagined Workforce podcast is brought to you by Workforce Transformations Australia Pty. Ltd.
All opinions expressed are the speaker's and not the organisations they represent.
If you have a story about a workforce transformation to share and would like to be a guest on this podcast, please contact us at kathhume@workforcetransformations.com.au.
Connect with Kath Hume on LinkedIn

Transcript

Lisa Carlin: 0:00

Individuals and teams need a voice. So the very first start was at workshops with people to generate ideas of what the priorities should be, and we ran those and we got amazing ideas And what was interesting and not altogether unexpected, was that there were very strong themes, consistent themes, coming out across the different groups.

Voice over: 0:24

This is the Reimagined Workforce Podcast from Workforce Transformations Australia, the podcast for people and culture professionals seeking to drive meaningful, impactful and financially sustainable workforce transformation through curiosity, creativity and data science. In this podcast, we hear from talented and innovative people making a positive difference for their people, their organisations and those their organisations serve. They share stories and learnings to help others on their path to transforming their workforce today and tomorrow. Now here's your host, Kath Hume.

Kath Hume: 1:02

So Lisa Carlin is a Scale Up Mentor and Digital Transformation Specialist. Her early career was with McKinsey and Accenture. She started her own consulting business in 1999, co-founded Future Builders Group in 2013, which is a network of organisational development specialists. She's worked with global multinationals, Australian corporates, government and NFPs, through to startups and VC funded businesses. She's designed, delivered and or mentored clients on 50 transformation programmes, with a 96% success rate versus 70% to 78% failure rate in the market on average. She also volunteers as a chair of an educational NFP and is a former adjunct faculty member of the Australian Graduate School of Management.

Kath Hume: 1:51

Lisa, welcome to the Reimagined Workforce podcast. Thanks, Kath. It's awesome to have you here today and we've had a few conversations and contacted each other over LinkedIn and I'm really inspired by the work you're doing, and I think what I like most is that you're building these connections out in our network. You're creating this tribe and you're getting real following behind you and through the groups that you're leading, so it's probably really great if you could give us a little bit of background and tell us about the work that you're progressing.

Lisa Carlin: 2:24

Fantastic. Well, it's great to be here today, Kath, and to talk to you about this. Perhaps it's useful if I start off with my early background, because I think that's actually informed a lot of who I am and the kind of work that I'm doing. So I grew up in South Africa in the apartheid era and I think seeing the inequality in the society has made me and I felt really guilty. Being a white South African growing up, I had that sort of guilt around me And I think that it's had an impact just seeing that sort of unfairness in the society and the fact that so many people didn't have a voice.

Lisa Carlin: 3:08

So I joined a multicultural group at the time which was later banned by the government And my parents complained to the principal because they were scared we'd land up our family, we'd land up on the banned list and it was really hard to do anything in such a constrained society if you felt that the system wasn't working. And as a result of that, i want to make a difference in the workplace and give people a voice, and I know I've seen over the years the power that it has when you give people in the organization at all different levels and across all different types of roles and people from different parts of the business. If you give them a voice, you can have such a powerful impact in the business because people have so much value to offer. So I think that that's sort of impacted the way that I work.

Lisa Carlin: 4:08

So what I do is I do three things in my work.

Lisa Carlin: 4:14

I mentor digital leaders who are often feeling alone and have to make those really tough decisions, and I give them that independent sounding board and the expert advice they need so that they have absolute confidence that they can achieve their goals. So I do that. The second thing I do is I run these peer mentoring groups and where small groups of folks online globally can come together to support each other to achieve their goals. So just the third thing that I do of the three things is the TurboCharge, or Transformation Membership Academy, and I'm so excited to be launching that this month, and I'd love to chat to you about that more as we talk today, because I think that's going to just make a major difference in terms of people working in the workplace to achieve transformation, change, strategy execution, innovation, implementation, whatever you want to call it. Yeah, there's no one word to describe all these changes. I think it's going to make a major difference because it has such a multidisciplinary effect and, yeah, and so I'm excited that that's going to be.

Kath Hume: 5:27

It's such a shame that this isn't audio. I'll have to see if we can create a video out of this, because to see your face, you are just beaming talking about this. So I love that. I love people who are passionate about what they do, and I also like that you've got these networks, so it's the changes that you're implementing or that you're mentoring people to make are so far and wide and broad, so it probably is a nice segue into then thinking about the changes that you're impacting on the system. What does your reimagined work force look like?

Lisa Carlin: 6:02

Well, I describe five different approaches to strategy activation in organisations. So it's a triangle model that's sitting on my website futurebuildersgroup. com. So this is our cooperative group of consultants, of organisation development consultants, and I describe in the triangle five different approaches that organisations can take. And at the top of the triangle is this unicorn zone, the unicorn approach, which the word unicorn people describe it as a private company that's achieved a billion dollars in valuation sometimes unicorns describes the perfect person. I use it to describe this magic zone that an organisation can be in where everything's just working perfectly. So the systems are working perfectly, the people are involved and the executive and board are completely aligned and inspired, all talking out of the same book or for the same page, and the staff are just the teams are just absolutely aligned and behind them. And unfortunately, there are four other types of approaches that sort of sit underneath that, that various organisations get stuck in these different other approaches and a lot of what I see is what I call that dark room. So the organisation all looks professional, the approach looks professional, but these enterprises, everything looks like that everyone's got their stuff together, but what they're doing is that they're developing strategy in the dark room, which means that they they're awake from different people and then they come out and announce the plans yeah right, it's go by and there's this grudging compliance and wonder why that

Lisa Carlin: 7:41

people aren't on board exactly and in my reimagined workforce of the future, we get into the unicorn zone, that magic zone, and we get out of the dark room and the executive are engaging with staff to develop the plans using, like, a co-design approach or design thinking or human-centered design or consultation or whatever methodology you want to call it, and they're having those real conversations so that and that's why I call it strategy activation rather than strategy development and strategy development, because the minute you actually start the strategy development or strategy formulation process, you're already consulting people, so you already actually started the implementation.

Lisa Carlin: 8:25

Yeah, that's what gives you that magnifying effect, and I think so. What happens is coming to organisations, and you've seen this in your career, with your expertise as well. You see this exhaustion of executives and leaders that are trying to achieve change, amidst all this inertia and disinterest and politicking, and they're pushing, pushing, pushing so hard. And I always say see my logo, you can't get to the unicorn zone by pushing harder. The harder you push, the more resistance you almost seem to. So it's getting to that pull effect where you can actually just to have everybody pulling together in the same direction and in that reimagined workforce of the future. This is the way we get leaders to work.

Lisa Carlin: 9:11

So that's the first big thing, and then I've got sort of two other areas that I think are also key in terms of the way things are moving in the future. With so much change and so much you know that word VUCA, volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous it's only going to get worse. So organisations that are very agile and I use a small a, not I'm not talking about an agile methodology, I'm talking about flexible that are project based, that are skills based rather than job based, I think those organisations will have that fluidity to assign people, allocate people to different projects based on their skills, not based on the job, not based on the narrow job description, so that people will have an ability to contribute in their fullest sense rather than just in the narrow sense of what is in their job description.

Kath Hume: 10:10

So in that model, as beautiful as it sounds, the organisation is still allocating people. Where's the opportunity, do you think, for self-allocation? So individuals know themselves? We do have this traditional model where the organisation effectively owns the individual and directs them and then it's up to the individual to decide if they want to play or not. So we're doing job crafting, which is great, but I'd love to see this opportunity where it's a conversation between the organisation and the individual around what actually has to happen here.

Kath Hume: 10:42

What are we doing and how do we work together? How do you play to your strengths but also your passions? How do you bring yourself in in the things that you love and capture hearts and minds? And then I think that what you talk about, with the leaders pushing all the time, then I don't think you'd have to push as much, because people are on board, you've already got them, and it's just a different way of thinking about how do we organise that, because I think the challenge you end up with then is people are so energised, people are so passionate that you've probably got too much discretionary effort, if that's even a possibility. The challenge is then how do we organise this thing?

Lisa Carlin: 11:22

Well, I think that data driven decision making is absolutely critical, and I think we are heading in that direction with better and better HR tech.

Lisa Carlin: 11:32

So I worked with one business the last year called SkillsBase. That is an excellent platform for storing information about technical skills and non-technical skills at a very granular level and people can evaluate themselves and then managers evaluate them and they can have the kind of transparent conversation that you're talking about, Kath. So I think you need that sort of base of information of skills. A company can make decisions in consultation with the people that are affected and they can have that regularly. People can put their hands up for things that they want to do because they feel like all their skills are seen and noticed and appreciated, rather than just the ones that are defined for their day job. And then you can get to allocate people and people can work on cross-functional teams. They can be part of that decision and you've got that agility and that learning happening, which is so important. And then that leads me to the third part. I said there were three parts of the reimagined workforce. So the first one being moving out of the dark room and getting that full effect, the second one being this agile, project-based, skill-based environment. And the third thing for me that is absolutely critical, which is why I'm so excited with where I'm at right now is that multidisciplinary transformation skills actually to be able to get things done on scale. So if you think of the T-shaped model of skills that you'd be familiar with, many people come from a very you know to have a deep functional background, which is the vertical part of the T-shape, and that is their expertise and that's what they're known for. But in this complex VUCA environment that's only getting worse, where you've got things like pandemics happening and you know all this geopolitical uncertainty that affects the economy so quickly and the economic cycles are so rapid compared to how they've been in the past. They're rapid changes. Then people need the top of the T, which is the horizontal axis, which is having multidisciplinary skills.

Lisa Carlin: 13:31

So I draw a Venn diagram with three circles And if you can imagine that, the top circle is a business orientation, so even if people are in a, let's say, they have a project management background or a specific technical background, they need to have some board, business, commercial, strategic skills to understand the context that they're working in. The second circle is a change management orientation, a people orientation. So because so much is happening so fast in order to execute strategy effectively, more and more people are going to need that change management orientation, management perspective. So that's the second circle And the third circle is the project management or governance or process skills. So as transformation leaders and you know, chief transformation officers and project management officers and business project managers whatever you want to call folks that are or even business leaders, anyone who's achieving strategy activation at scale they need to have these multidisciplinary transformation skills across those three areas to be truly effective And I've seen this.

Lisa Carlin: 14:44

You kindly spoke about the 4% failure rate that I have on projects compared to the, you know, 70, 78% failure rate out there. But Harvard Business Review and McKinsey and others report. I truly believe that being able to take a multidisciplinary perspective across those three areas and also consider the cultural context that you're in, to be able to do that is what will lead to effective transformation And it's the only way that we're really going to get that success rate of transformation, that success rate of growth. It's the only way we're going to get there, which is why I'm so passionate about it and why I'm sort of moved a little bit away from the consulting work, the balance of work that I'm doing, and I'm doing more work in the learning academy space, because I think that's so important.

Kath Hume: 15:35

And it's interesting because everyone really needs to innovate at the moment and that will only become more and more prevalent. And I do love that multidisciplinary approach. What I have also seen in terms of innovation, and what I try and do as well, is bring in those human elements to differentiate us from the robots and the machines and look at how we can integrate that into the roles that we have. So how do we augment and optimize all of the resources that we have available to us? So I love that transdisciplinary, where we start moving out of our lines, that approach where we can say where can I add a value elsewhere and who can I bring in, because I don't have that expertise but they do, and I think it gives us such a broader picture And that transdisciplinary approach. I see that that's where innovation is going to be driven from moving forward.

Lisa Carlin: 16:28

Yeah, and I'm glad you mentioned the sort of technology part of it and using all the tools that are available, because one of the modules in the membership is turbocharging what we're doing through AI And there are some amazing AI tools and approaches that we can take to make our work in transformation, change and workforce development so much more effective.

Lisa Carlin: 16:51

So I ran conversations on AI for OD folks right And I see it was interesting. I see a lot of folks that have come from an HR or organizational development background being quite nervous about technology And so they start hearing like any three letter acronyms in technology or anything and the highest glaze over, And many that are quite you know, don't even want to go near AI. And the same with business leaders that are, particularly ones that are a little bit older that feel you know why do they need it there? It's at such a senior level of organization. The thing is that it's another tool in our arsenal. Absolutely The more multidisciplinary we can be and the more we can grab on to all these amazing things out there. So, whether it's AI tools, whether it's design thinking methodologies, whether it's problem solving methodologies and what we can learn from the management consulting world, whether it's change management methodologies, project management techniques you know, business, iron, all of these different approaches.

Lisa Carlin: 17:59

We can learn from and get the best of everything So, and information is so much more accessible than it's ever been before. But of course, we need the time to do that.

Kath Hume: 18:09

Yeah, and I feel lazy sometimes because I embrace this the chat GP team. Just that can save me so much time. It doesn't do my job for me, but it definitely saves a lot of the thinking and things that I don't need to spend time thinking about, And so then I'm free to think of all that creative thinking that I need to do. But yeah, just someone chained me the other day actually at work. They got to write in terms of reference for them And I thought, oh, how good is that? Because who ever wants to write in terms of reference, Like I know that they're, they're important and we can dream about how we make sure that they Create that network of people who are actually really going to drive what we need to drive. But you know, if someone else or something else is going to write that for me and I can tweak it afterwards, then I'm very happy with that.

Kath Hume: 18:58

Excellent, and how easy was it to use Kath when you actually.? It's the simplest thing ever? I think I think in the Helen Finneran episode back in I recorded in January it must have been February, i think it's episode 17, anyway, I'm not sure But I remember in that episode she mentioned chat GPT and I said I'm really scared of it and I have to look into it. And I remember because it was January and you know you've got a bit more time in January So I jumped in and thought, oh my God, this tool is phenomenal, I love it And, yeah, I've been really embracing it. But I think you're absolutely on the money. You have to give it a go, you have to see what it is, because otherwise you feel the unknown.

Kath Hume: 19:36

And yeah, I was actually in a room of people earlier in the week and someone mentioned about AI and are we scared of AI? And quite a few people said yes and I thought, oh, wow, that's, that's something we need to really help people with. So how do we in organisations show that this is actually here to help you? It's not going to replace you. What it means is that your job becomes way more enjoyable because you get to do the things that are fun and someone else can something else. It's not even that you're passing it on to someone else anymore, it's something else can do it for us and we can just be human, exactly.

Lisa Carlin: 20:14

Exactly And it's just learning how to do it. Well, there's a whole new skill set, now called prompt engineering, which is like the prompt, so that you get the best answer. And you know, we've been using it in first draft of designing workshops, first draft of writing articles, first draft of all sorts of things for for text. Secondly, we've been using it for images and thirdly for for video editing really easily. So it comes away of improving the productivity but also the quality and breadth of what we're doing, because again, it's got that it has more of a multidisciplinary.

Lisa Carlin: 20:50

Obviously, we would have individually able to tap in to a whole lot of things that we wouldn't do. So, yes, so I'm very excited to include that in the Tuppercharger Transformation membership, because some of the folks that are part of this just need that little bit of a prompt push initially. And no, should I say no? And a reason to, because we don't, we don't, i'm the same, i'm not going to learn anything unless I've got a reason, a practical reason, for why I need to do it. And there's a lovely quote that's floating around that says AI is not going to replace you, but someone using AI. So that's an important technique.

Kath Hume: 21:34

Yeah, All right. so we're going to try something a little bit different in the episode today And we're actually going to tell a story and I'm going to walk you through with my questions and we'll probably go off on tangents. But when we met just for the listeners when we met, i talked about the fact that I really would like to make this real. So we'll start by saying we want to understand the problem that you faced, who was impacted, what you did to address it, the solution that you ended up coming up with and then the outcome that you achieved. So just back to the start. So can you explain to us what the problem was that you faced?

Lisa Carlin: 22:10

So this was the one there's so many I could talk to you about, and the one that I've chosen to talk to you about I thought would be interesting for the listeners is digital transformation, and because it's just on the top of all of our minds at the moment. There's so much of that. And it was a little while ago and it was a professional services firm that wanted to embrace digital technology to provide better services to their clients. So there were a range of things on new digital systems for example, client relationship management or CRM, and how they communicate with their clients and how they deliver some of their products digitally, and affected also some of the work practices that their professional service teams are needed to follow. So why this was such an interesting project is that in professional services firms you have a number of problems, and this firm particularly.

Lisa Carlin: 23:04

It's a very high performance environment, right Well, lots of very smart, highly educated people, but everyone is working in a different practice area and those practice areas are quite different. So what happens to these culture is it became became a little bit siloed, in the sense that you know that's saying it's not invented here. Everyone feels that they're slightly different. Nobody wants a solution foisted upon them across the whole firm. They all want something slightly different that suits their business, and rightly so. Right, these are smart people, they know the client's best and they don't need a solution foisted upon them.

Lisa Carlin: 23:42

But you know, we were a small project team, so I was leading the transformation project and there was only about seven of us on the team. You can't just create a solution that's going to suit every single group in the firm, because if you do, you're going to run out of resources pretty quickly. So that's one of the problems. And the other problem is that the folks that have been there for a long time, to the very most senior partners and directors, don't want to spend time learning new things and work practices. They haven't got the time. And third of all, how do you get momentum when everybody is so busy and time is literally money, because everyone's in doubt?

Kath Hume: 24:24

So, in terms of who was impacted, so we're thinking workforce. What were they seeing, feeling, hearing? What was the problem that they were facing?

Lisa Carlin: 24:34

It was a really top performing professional services firm and they knew that to stay ahead of the game and to even get better, they wanted to be known for their client service because they believed that that was the edge, and so that was the management and overall the kind of the firm deciding that. But to do that, it impacted every single person in the organization because everybody has a role in serving the clients. So obviously, the professional service folks in the business, they need to work differently and use different tools. The partners need to be using tools. And then all the large corporate services, which is probably guessing about a third from memory of most of these firms.

Lisa Carlin: 25:21

Whether you're marketing, whether you are in a training role, whether you're a secretary or executive assistant, every single person in the firm is affecting service. So what they call them in a lot of these firms they call them secretary, still, but executive assistants, personal assistants are also engaging with clients, mostly over the phone, but they are. It's not just the professionals. And then everyone in corporate services are also impacting service because even if you're a trainer, you're training someone internally to deliver the service. So you're actually affecting internal service, which affects external service, and there's amazing work in the 80s, that customer service profit chain article which just describes that whole chain and the impact on profit, and so it affects everybody in how they need to do their work.

Kath Hume: 26:17

And so, in facing that problem, can you talk us through the approach that you took, leigh?

Lisa Carlin: 26:23

So it was very much a pull approach that I was talking about earlier rather than push. So I always think about the culture first that I'm working in and the high performing culture with silos of activity in different practice areas, and so individuals and teams need a voice. So the very first start it was workshops with people to generate ideas of what the priorities should be, and we ran those and we got amazing ideas. And what was interesting and not altogether unexpected, was that there were very strong themes, consistent themes, coming out across the different groups. So when we developed the program of work and the priorities of what the changes were going to be be their systems or work practices, processes if we had a list of, say, five or six things that we were going to do, most teams had at least two or three of those things on their list.

Lisa Carlin: 27:23

We wanted to do a whole bunch of things, but we can't do everything, so we chose the top three that were the most consistent across all the different teams And we could use the language that the teams, their problems, so important And so people can see where their ideas are in the solutions that we're putting forward.

Kath Hume: 27:44

It's funny. I have a team in my company, my small company, and a few weeks ago we sort of got stuck on a problem And I said how can we have an identified this particular part of the problem? And they said to me oh, i didn't know. And I said, okay, that was a really light bulb moment for me because I thought we're relying on just our own knowledge here And that's the problem. And so I've changed their title, so I've got dreamers and creators now, rather than just you know. They asked at stock standard terms, and the dreamers are about saying well, what? it's almost that first part of the double diamond. What is our problem that we're facing? What could the world look like if we were to have no barriers and dream what that might be? And then we move to that second part of the diamond where we start creating.

Kath Hume: 28:38

But I think that that consultation that you speak about, that going and hearing from people, it's always, it's always interesting how those common themes come to the top. And I also like how you've mentioned around, make sure you use their language when people can see themselves in it, and I know I'm preaching to the converted here, but how important it is for people to say I had a voice, you gave me the opportunity, i spoke, you heard and this is the result. And I think the danger is and I've seen it And that might be where that's higher failure rate comes in is that we ask And then we change language, or we still go up and do what we think is right all with the best intentions But the employees say, well, ok, i dedicated time, especially what you're saying in a professional services firmware time is obvious. If we do that, not only do we not achieve our goals today, but next time we go and ask people to talk to us, what's their motivation? It's back to that whole leadership push again rather than that pull approach.

Kath Hume: 29:48

I think I love. I love where you've taken this. I'm really keen to hear what solutions you came up with. So can you talk us through that Before I do.

Lisa Carlin: 29:56

You are absolutely right about the fact that people are spending that time and that's obvious, since for professional services, because they're not actually billing for the time that they attend these sessions So they've actually got to see value, got to see value in what they're doing And that gives them the link to the value because it's going to help them either do their work better, serve clients better, achieve all these outcomes that they need And that is what is so exciting about and having that authenticity, which is basically what you're talking about reflecting truly what they want rather than just foisting a solution. And it's taken me a long time to get my head around reconciling two approaches. I've been taught through a, you know, a rigorous problem solving approach where you have a hypothesis first.

Lisa Carlin: 30:45

And that's how all the big strategy firms work. So they take a structured hypothesis, which is what they think is the answer, and they go and test it, which is a very scientific approach, and then you get it proven or disproven And it's a much faster way to come up with the answer. But the difficulty with that is it's directly conflicting with that double diamond approach. You actually keep a very open mind And you ask and you don't tell, and you truly listen in an authentic way to hear what was those three priorities that those groups had actually come up with. Now, most of the time, i find, is that you know in reality, if you are doing your analytical work correctly as a core team, the kind of hypothesis that you're going to come up with and the kind of approach that you would have taken if you hadn't consulted.

Lisa Carlin: 31:34

There's not a huge difference when you talk to people. There's nuances that are really important, but there are differences And it's those nuances and those you know. It's using those people's language that is so important, and so I've moved away from a pure hypothesis driven approach and can vary loosely. We're all going to hold some kind of view in our minds when we go out and ask right, that's our ingrained in our human psyche. Whether we express it or not, we're going to have a view in our minds, but it's just trying to keep that open view that's important, and being open to suggestions, because there's some fantastic nuances and suggestions that we come up with And they're so powerful and that's why you can get to the, you know, success, which can take a little bit longer sometimes, but then it really sticks.

Kath Hume: 32:26

I think it was Joanne Langdon's episode where she said I asked her about this tension So in government, and I talked to her about the fact that you know you're spending citizens money and if you take longer, what's the tension? But she said well, at least you get the right answer. So you can. you can go very quickly to the wrong answer and that's efficient if you like. But it goes back to what you mentioned about value, And I think the big thing there for me is that people will see value if they see purpose. and probably goes back to our earlier part of our conversation, where if people can navigate themselves into roles that align with their purpose, then when the organisation is delivering on that purpose, they'll see value, they'll be motivated, they'll contribute and there's this beautiful, mutually beneficial outcome because everyone can see the good from what they're doing.

Lisa Carlin: 33:25

Exactly exactly. And so back to your question about the solution that we came up with. We came up with three different priorities that we worked on in client service, which included systems and included the way the proposals or tenders or provided, which gives clients a better sense of the cost, right Yeah. And then there were some major changes and then there were some very minor changes which impacted people in interesting ways. So one of them, for example, was that simple suggestion from again the, the secretarial group that they actually never got to meet the clients. All the conversations were over the phone and what difference it makes if one executive assistant and another executive system get to know each other. Well, what access do you?

Lisa Carlin: 34:12

have to an insight into what is going on in the world. Yes, but one of the things we did is give them copy vouchers, and the copy vouchers were so that the executive assistants of this firm could take their client executive assistants or secretaries out for a coffee and meet them. And that's the one, and they loved it. And it's just one paid coffee, two coffees, but it's such a powerful thing when people can create those connections. So that was a very simple, non-digital solution And I can talk about this because it was such a long time ago, so it's easy for me to talk about this solution. Yeah, so we got a really great engagement from all different parts of the business, because every single cohort, community team were involved in the consultation process. Everyone was invited, 100%, and you don't always do that right, you often just do a sample. Yeah, you select, yeah, this purpose in every single office, in every single team. People were invited to a session.

Kath Hume: 35:13

So yeah, huge In the episode with Ed Morrison. Now I'm not sure it might actually just be in his book, i'm not sure if he spoke about it in the episode, but he talked about there was a community in America that were low socioeconomic. A lot of the bigger firms had left, so the economy was plummeting. So they did a stakeholder consultation with community members to understand what they could do, and one of the things that they decided to implement was they put planter boxes around the community. And he talks about the fact that people came to him and said are you serious? You did all of this consultation and that's what you came up with, to which he responded but that's what they wanted.

Kath Hume: 35:59

And so, whilst we might feel that this isn't coffee vouchers, we might think that's not going to make a huge amount of difference if they said they did. And in our approaches we can test and iterate on that. We don't have to wholly and solely adopt everything that comes up and is suggested, but we can try and see what happens And we'll get that Hawthorne effect for a while too. But if it's a lasting and sustainable impact, it doesn't have to be expensive, it doesn't have to be changing the world.

Lisa Carlin: 36:29

And it means so much to people, which is why I'm going to give that to you as an example, because it's just amazing when you see people And it values and respects people.

Kath Hume: 36:41

My undergraduate was economics and there's the old law of diminishing marginal utility And I do think that we're going to have a job forever because I think we'll satisfy people, but then there'll be new problems that arise and we'll continually have new problems to solve. But I love it. I actually like to call them puzzles rather than problems, because I think they're so much fun to, and when you get to do it with other people, i just I love the idea of doing it together. I think we're running out of time. This has gone so quickly for me. Lisa, if people did want to connect with you, you've got so many groups and themes going on. What's the best way for them to do that?

Lisa Carlin: 37:26

They can go to our website, wwwfuturebuildersgroupcom. In there there are a number of different parts of our academy, which is our future Builders Academy. So the OD Hive, if they're interested in masterminds, the Turbo-Chigio Transformation Membership Program, if they're interested in a multidisciplinary approach and learning that approach. And on the near the bottom of our home page is a diagnostic tool which I meant to mention to you, so I'm glad you asked me. And what it is is it's a diagnostic tool which includes the 50 different work practices to transformation success. And so it's there. It's a calculator, it'll give you a percentage score and it'll also give you a percentage breakdown of all the different components, like stakeholders, culture, the design approach, your planning approach, your leadership approach. It'll break all of that down And I'm very excited to share that with everybody because I know these other 50 work practices that count and make a difference.

Kath Hume: 38:26

So have a look bottom of our home page And I will link to it in the show notes. but that's very generous, because 50, that is so empowering. You know, if we get stuck, how good is it to have a tool and a diagnostic that you can actually go in? that's got a bit of rigor behind it as well. It's a really great idea, And I've seen that you're posting on LinkedIn about each of those in a little bit more detail too. Thank, you.

Lisa Carlin: 38:51

yes, i want to get it out there because I know it's going to make a difference.

Kath Hume: 38:55

Excellent. So we will be watching this space because I know that all of these groups are going to go out and infiltrate and make a huge difference in the world. So thank you so much for your time and for all that you do. It's really been a great pleasure talking to you later.

Lisa Carlin: 39:09

Thanks, kath. Likewise be a great chatting to you.

Voice over: 39:13

Thanks for listening to the Reimagined Workforce podcast. We hope you've found some valuable ideas that you can apply to transform your own workforce today and tomorrow. Additional information and links can be found in the show notes for this episode at workforcetransformationscomau. Please share this podcast with your community and leave us a rating to let us know what we can do better for you.