The Third Way

Matt Perez (00:09):

Hi, I'm Matt Perez, and you are in the Radical World Podcast if you're, if this is not what you're supposed to be, should leave and and we have with with us Rodney. And she's going to tell us about what she does and all that stuff. And and then we'll see. We'll continue the conversation afterwards. So, Rodney, is your show

Rodney Evans (00:36):

Hi everyone. I'm Rodney Evans. I steward a company called the Ready, which is a future of work consultancy. We work with organizations around the world to help them modernize the way that they work. We've been in business for about eight years and we currently are about 40 folks doing great work in lots of client organizations of lots of shapes and sizes all over the world.

Matt Perez (01:06):

Great. So you've been at it for eight years?

Rodney Evans (01:10):

With this organization I've been doing very similar work for about 12.

Matt Perez (01:15):

Wow. Wait a minute. 12 years. That's like 2012 When you started and what got you to do this? I'm, I'm curious

Rodney Evans (01:31):

What, I'm sorry. Repeat the question. What

Matt Perez (01:33):

Got you to this? What, how did you start and why and.

Rodney Evans (01:38):

Yeah. So I the first 10 years of my career was working in very traditional organizations. I worked for a large traditional consultancy, and then I worked for an investment bank for years. And I left those places. I left the bank in 2010, and my husband was also working in a very traditional company. He worked for a big ad firm, and we both were just ready for something different and ready to leave New York City. And so we traveled around the world for a year and wow. I think the thing that happened during that year it wasn't like any eat, pray, love situation, it was just that I sort of realized that people who are not born and raised in a very particular culture in the US have very different relationships to work, and that things can work really, really well in a way that doesn't look a lot like traditional capitalism. And I got really curious about alternate structures and alternative ways of working and organizing. And and when I came back from traveling a friend of mine had started had co-founded a company called the McChrystal Group, and asked me to start doing some work with them. And so for a few years, I led a team that was really just like researching and understanding what the underpinnings of adaptable humans and organizations actually is doing very, like interdisciplinary reading and writing and sense making and collaboration with experts to understand what are the skills that it takes to be an adaptable person in a complex system, and what are the markers of adaptive organizations. And so that really led me into this whole like, future of work realm. And and when I left there in 2015, fifteenish then I started working with the Ready. So I've been doing versions of future of work consulting stuff for I guess, yeah, like 13 years.

Matt Perez (03:48):

That's progressive. Yeah, that's very progressive. We I started a company, I co-founded a company and called Nearsoft. And it was, it was software, you know, nearshoring kind of thing. And we never had any management for one. And a lot of people tell me, that's crazy. You should get some managers and work less. I go, I'm not working much, I'm just doing some sales and some strategy and that's it. But but I was, you know, the crazy guy just showed up give, give him something to eat. And so 2015 is still progressive. The, the, the whole self-management, that kind of thing. It started with started big with a book called Reinventing Organizations written by.

Rodney Evans (04:56):

Fred Liu. Yeah, he's one on my podcast. I'm very familiar.

Matt Perez (04:59):

And you know, that's when it got big and I talked to somebody, she said, I read the book that night. I read him one sitting and the next day I came to work and it was, it looked so different. I go, okay. We just started with another book called Maverick by Ricardo, similar in, in 2007. And he had written it in the late, in the early eighties, so he was way ahead of the crowd. But 12 20 15 is still remarkable. And so what, what does the already do?

Rodney Evans (05:49):

Yeah. So it, it's interesting. You know, it's funny when people say, so I started at McChrystal Group in 2012, and like on the one hand I agree that that's early in terms of the popular idea around things like self-management. And I think Reinventing Works is a great book, and I'm a big fan of Fred the Lou's. And also there are a lot of examples of organizations doing work in different ways, like Simco, like Morningstar, like, like for decades, decades and decades. So even though they're potentially more fringe, I would say, like the adoption has come later, but a lot of these ideas were published in popular in like the 1950s. Like a lot of what we espouse in large organizations people like Wheatley and McGregor were talking about, you know, 70 years ago. There's a lot about this that just I don't think has, I don't think there's been enough application, but I don't know that we have that many actually new ideas. I think they're just becoming more palatable as large companies are seeing the limitations of command and control bureaucracy in terms of getting what they want. And I think the reality is no certainly no publicly traded company, but, but in general, most like large comp for-profit companies aren't going to make these kinds of changes just to be good. Cool. They're not going to do it just to be, you know, humane or people first or purpose led if it doesn't also strongly impact their results. And I think it's only now that the foundations of, of, of extractive capitalism have started to fail these large organizations, and they're not able to actually extract any more value out of the system that they have, that they're willing to consider these alternatives that are quite old, that have been around for quite a long time. So so it's been sort of interesting as a person who's been swimming this in this for a long time, to see to see the disposition of clients in out there. Their disposition has changed in terms of their open-mindedness and their flexibility and their willingness to experiment. I think much more than a lot of our thinking has changed. Mm-Hmm. <Affirmative> in terms of what's possible, which is just funny. Sometimes it just takes a while for for these things to line up with each other. But but to answer your question, yeah, I mean, the ready does organizational design work, so we have a very strong focus on systems thinking. The kind of work that we do helps organizations to really learn new moves to become more adaptable. And what I mean by that is we are unlikely to come in and give you a strategy, but we have a way of creating and steering strategy on a cadence, on a rhythm with inclusion of cross-functional voices with inclusion of external data scenarios, trends, etcetera, that we believe helps companies to not be stuck in the old, like, here's our PowerPoint deck, failure to execute lots of pain and planning in between. So like that's one example. We, you know, we, we teach a lot of meeting practices. We teach decision making practices. A lot of the work that we do is about just getting teams to, to clearly articulate things about roles and about decision rights and about ways of working that are, that tend to be kind of implicit and kind of murky and kind of confusing and kind of tend to slow things down and create a lot of friction. Cause people don't know who can spend what, who can decide what, who can say what to whom. And so a lot of our work isn't telling our clients what that should be, it's just getting them to say it out loud and write it down and tell each other, and we are just like, we are just kind of facilitating that and holding them accountable to that so that they're really making their ways of working explicit and they're evolving them over time.

Matt Perez (10:05):

Okay. Yeah, no, that would be to see it, you know, the large picture, that would be a, a good thing in general because companies, if you look at now, I, I laugh. There's all these, you have to come back to work, you have to come back to the office. Why? Because we, we bought the rental for 10 years and, and it seems ridiculous to me. But anyways so so do, so do you actually work in the company or, or do you work as a consultant? Or how do how how's it work?

Rodney Evans (10:48):

You mean in terms of my role at the ready? Yeah. Or how the ready works.

Matt Perez (10:52):

How the ready works.

Rodney Evans (10:54):

Yeah. So the ready, you know, we consider ourselves embedded coaches. So when we are working with a client partner, we are actually in a lot of their meetings, we are in their tool stack. We are in the conversation with them. We are not sort of preparing reports or analysis or assets on the side and then presenting them and then leaving. We are actually much more likely to come in. This happens a lot when clients have bought that asset. They've bought that strategy deck from a management consulting firm. They've bought that shiny new purpose and value statement from a culture consultancy. They've bought that target operating model from another consultant. A lot of times they have sort of the picture, the asset, the end state, and then they don't know what to do with it. They don't have a way of actually evolving their own organization to make use of that work. And there was a time that I would say at the ready, there were a lot of people who sort of objected to that, which I, which I understand philosophically because like, I believe that the best strategies, for example, the best sort of principles or purpose come from within. I think that like, I, I believe in the wisdom inside of organizations that can be tapped. And so I don't love when these answers are just purchased particularly because the thing that's purchased is often just a repackaging of things that people inside the organization site. But that's a conversation for another time. Anyway, the point being, there was a time that I think a lot of consultants at the ready sort of objected to that as a starting point. Like, we bought this strategy. Now what, I never really minded it. 'cause I think any client, any organization who's wrestled with, we have an end state and we don't have a way to get there, is really primed. They're ready to try something new. They've maybe tried to do it themselves and scraped their knees a bit. Now there's a little bit less resistance, there's a little more humility, there's a little more openness to trying some new moves on than if you're starting just from scratch. So I don't mind being the one who closes the strategy execution gap, actually.

Matt Perez (13:19):

Okay. Yeah. There's the thing about a good crisis is, it's going to be wasted or something like that. And I thought, I've always liked that that phrasing. We don't, so at, at Radical, by the way, is referring to root, not that I'm going to kill you where I'm going to, you know, Patty Harris, I'm going to take you a hostage or anything like that. But it refers to Roots. So going back to the roots of the problem, and we happen to think that the roots of the problem is, is is people. And now we're, we're, our thinking has gone a little bit further than that. But that's a good way to start. The, the, the, the first thing is the system that we live in now which is, you know, is a system, first of all it is we call it radical. So all the companies lcs and all that, it's all radical. I'm sorry, it's called Fiat I'm missing my words there. It's called fiat and fiat because it means do as I say or else, the or else part is that I'm going to take your livelihood away from you. And so that's the fiat system. And the other, the other thing is ownership. Right now we have fiat ownership in everything. You know, this house belongs to me and that house belongs to you and blah, blah, blah. And for some things like toothbrush and toothbrush in the houses and stuff, it is good to have ownership, but for most things that we have ownership now it is not necessarily so it comes to us from historical reasons and stuff like that. But so those two, the FIAs system combined with ownership it starts willing to conquer in England. And it came over from France and, and owner of all of England, England, not, not Scottish or anything else. And he came up with a system to keep it to himself. And if anyone, anybody wanted to use part of England, they had to pay him. So he, he created a recurring revenue stream. And so we, we, it's two 2024 and I think it's time to change now. We're not going to go from, like you said, you, for the goodness of our heart, or because we're kind, we're in like. Excuse my French. We're going to go step by step by step by step. And some, some companies we're stuck in the middle and go back and, and things like that. But that's, that's what radical is all about and radical world, because we're doing, we're doing several things and we, it is all umbrella under the radical world. Name I guess. So what do you think of, well, let's start with fiat. What, what do you think with of that, of, of lumping all that we have today and everything that's fiat based? As under the name Fiat, because I, I couldn't find that. I couldn't find the name.

Rodney Evans (17:25):

Yeah. I mean, I think, I think all names are as good as they are useful. So if you, what you find is that when you talk to people, they interpret that word the way that you intend it, then I think there's nothing wrong with it.

Matt Perez (17:41):

Yeah. They, they, they don't know what to do with it. They go fiat, is that a word?

Rodney Evans (17:46):

Yeah. I think of it as a car.

Matt Perez (17:48):

In English and Spanish and probably French too. And but people don't take to it. So in a sense, fiat and radical are too meaningless words for, for that kind of thing. So it is hard to sell in the present. But I just wanted to see what your reaction was. But yeah, that's a good way to put it is, is if if they get curious about it, if they get, if they know something about it and they curious about it, that's a good word.

Rodney Evans (18:28):

Yeah, I mean, we rely and like, look, I do think that when we're trying to shift people's, when we're trying to open the aperture so that people are considering non-traditional ways of doing anything, non-traditional ways of ownership, of organizing, of selling, whatever the thing is I do rely very heavily on from twos because just describing an end state often isn't enough for people to know what I'm talking about, especially if they haven't had an experience. Like I'm talking about like right. I now have the experience of a lot of, a lot of time of being in self-managing systems, so I know what I mean, but people out there don't know what I mean. And so I think, you know, like we rely on in the, in the sort of from column, we rely on industrial age, command and control, bureaucratic, top down, et cetera. And I would put fiat into that category of like the power. It's, it's shaped like a triangle and the power and the authority is held at the top.

Matt Perez (19:37):

Yeah. Yeah. That's the thing. You have to go from the present to the future. You can just jump to the future and put in your suit and all that stuff. Let me I reorganize this thing and so written two books that I'm supposed to advertise them of radical companies and radical detail, which I like better. And where he tries to explain things like that and people have read it. The, the general reaction is, oh, that was weird. They don't, they don't get it. So, so you're probably going about it, the, the better way the.

Rodney Evans (20:30):

I think what we've learned over the years of, of doing this is that selling people an idea that feels quite appealing to them and is quite like inspiring. Is, is fine, but often in my experience, actually delivering on an organization that is radical, that is self-managed, that is participatory in nature, takes actually more discipline and more structure than a command and control organization. Because if you pull the, it's not just mindsets. Yeah. If you pull the bosses out, you need to replace the hierarchy that we've all been socialized to with ways of working that we've all agreed to. 'cause Otherwise you have inspiration and chaos. And that is a very exhausting culture to work in. And so I say this only because I, I would say at various points in my career, I've leaned very heavily on the end state being quite exciting and then had clients have the experience of like, no, this is about like making things clear and having routines and lowering the cognitive load of working in this place so that people actually can use their authority. And they're kind of like, but we like the thing when you were on the stage and you were talking about how the future was going to be great, and like using words like self-management, and it's like, what is missed sometimes in that is, is actually how much work it takes when we want to have, when we want to have the kind of resilient system where people can exercise their authority, where they can co-own, where they can make their own decisions, where they can participate effectively. What I know from stewarding a self-managing organization is it takes a lot of it takes a lot of scaffolding for human beings to play that way. It takes a lot of co-creation of the rules and editing of the rules and clarifying of the rules for people to play the game. And, and that's really exciting if, if, if the people who are in it want to do that work. And it's really frustrating if people think that that will happen naturally.

Matt Perez (22:54):

Yeah. The, my experience with the Nearsoft, the company that we could find, he said, it's let's, let's work. You don't have to be telling people things. Even hiring and firing, we didn't have anything to, I didn't have anything, well, I had so to with the hiring because of the Spanish English. And but that was about it. A lot of times we got a request for more people. We, and they would say it, it would've to be somebody like Jose or whatever they would identify somebody in the group as the ideal guy that they would want. And that was less work than, than my previous work. And, and in regular US organizations, stuff like that. So and the, and the rules were fluid. In other words, I'm trying to think of a, a case where the script started with, no, we're going to come on Wednesdays and, and blah, blah, blah. And over time they changed it, but they changed it to me. It was very painless. I don't know if they, they went through the pain, but I imagine they did. And to me it was pretty painless. So it freed up my time to do what I was, what I liked to do and what I, what I'm good at. So no, it's, it is not, to me, it's not so much reducing the cognitive load as it is to a, applying the cognitive the flow that doesn't get applied. And maybe it's a little bit different because we're talking about writing code. And, you know, programs are very opinionated people. I can say that I was, I was a program and we got to 400 plus, I don't know what the plus was when we sold the company. But we could have gone poor. In fact, right now it's 900 people and there's still no managers in the company and we're part of a bigger company that, oh, bring your five managers or, or limit, let's, let's have a, a limited talk to your five managers or we don't have answers, remember. And, and yeah, it's it hasn't been a requirement or an imposition or an obstacle to that. So we have different experiences that way.

Rodney Evans (25:58):

Well, I think that what I'm talking about is the cognitive load of navigating the organization. I'm not talking about a boss or manager and how their job is. I'm talking about the fact that for us, for example, we have extraordinary talent at the ready. And it's really important that we have extraordinary talent. 'cause We're a service-based business, and we are very, and we have a very high touch kind of engagement model with our clients. So extrapolating back from that hiring is super important. And we want the resilience of a really great hiring process so that no one or handful of people ends up becoming the blocker or the arbiter of what a good hire looks like.

Matt Perez (26:39):

Oh, that sense.

Rodney Evans (26:41):

So what I'm saying is when the, when, and it's not a, it's not a bot. When, when some group of people puts the effort into creating a great hiring process, it lowers the cognitive load of every project steward that goes, how do I get a stunning colleague on my team to deliver this project? 'cause They're not starting from scratch every time. And that's what I mean in terms of like doing the organizational design work to limit the chaos that people experience.

Matt Perez (27:10):

Okay. You said it twice now, I'm going to correct you. It is not, we live in the ideal world, world or, or organized world and or chaos

Rodney Evans (27:24):

Literally what I'm describing is the third way, which is the name of this podcast episode.

Matt Perez (27:29):

Yeah. And, and there's a long process to go from one to the other, so.

Rodney Evans (27:36):

Agreed.

Matt Perez (27:38):

So yeah. But what happens is you say chaos, and that's what people remember, chaos. Oh, if we don't do this, we, we do chaos. And so anyways, the forgetting things, so let me start from scratch. The, the oh, I know what I was going to ask you do. So do you have long-term clients or are they a certain length, or, or how, how does that work?

Rodney Evans (28:15):

Yeah, I mean, we do have, we have shorter term engagements. You know, a typical engagement for us is about six months. And we do have lots of longer term clients because after a period of six months or so, they decide that they are ready and interested in the next body of work. So sometimes the first six months is a lot of foundational work around meetings or decision makings, or role clarity or adaptive strategy or whatever. And then when they have some of those foundational moves down and they're doing that work themselves, which is really important to us, we don't try to create dependency on us. Then often they're interested in a next set of moves. And often that looks like they want to go after a really challenging cross-functional issue, or they want to develop a method for prioritization. Or they, a lot of times they, they see what the next sort of horizon in their organizational design is, and they want help. And so sometimes we have clients for six months and they go away and they come back. And sometimes we have clients that last for years.

Matt Perez (29:19):

Okay. That, that's good recurring variety. Oops, what happened? What, I don't know what, oh, here we go. He went back to his little windows and, and all that stuff. So yeah, anything you'd like to tell us in closing? Any closing words?

Rodney Evans (29:52):

I mean, I, the thing that we talk about a lot on our show is just how to really start from where you are. So, you know, we are all, we're all in, we're all situated differently. Some of us are consultants, some of us are solopreneurs, some of us are working in giant, really calcified organizations. And I think that, like, to me, the important thing about changing work and redefining work is starting from where you have the agency to do it. And so I just encourage people who are listening to find a place, even if it is only, you know, within your own schedule or your own team meeting or your own way of organizing your work to do something that feels different, that feels better, that feels like it's not not traditional just to buck tradition. 'cause That's not the point that I'm making, but that, that feels like a modern, helpful, supportive way of working. And to just see your own work as a place to experiment. Because we can't wait for large systems to reform themselves and hope that it trickles down to impact everyone inside of them. We, we know that that's a failed experiment from, you know, governments to healthcare, to education, to large corporations. And so I just encourage people to even though I understand how like daunting and overwhelming it can be out there to also seize the agency that they do have to try something new.

Matt Perez (31:29):

Yeah. That, that's, that's the, that's the problem. Try to do something outside of third domain. We're going to leave this alone and we're going to add this thing and this thing. And it's a, it is a problem because then they fail and they blame it on, on their goal. They say, we're trying to do this and we fail. So that's how the door, so well, thank you very much. We're going to sign off now and and, and that's that. And then you get posted this recording will get posted in several venues and stuff like that. And, and that's that. And I apologize. I'm, I'm kind of losing my mind here because of the treatment I'm going through. So thank you very much.

Rodney Evans (32:30):

I appreciate it. Thank you. Absolutely,