Apr 01 2024 54 mins
Bio
Brant Cooper is The New York Times bestselling author of The Lean Entrepreneur and his new popular book Disruption Proof. He is the CEO and founder of Moves the Needle. He is a trusted adviser to startups and large enterprises around the world. With more than 25 years of expertise in changing industrial age mindset into digital age opportunity, he blends agile, human-centered design, and lean methodologies to ignite entrepreneurial action from the front lines to the C-suite.
As a sought-after keynote speaker, startup mentor, and executive advisor, he travels the globe sharing his vision for reimagining 21st century organizations. Bringing agility, digital transformation, and a focus on creating value for customers, he helps leaders navigate the uncertainty brought on by increased complexity and endless disruption.
Interview Highlights
01:30 Background
03:40 First startup
05:30 Learning from failure
06:50 The Lean Entrepreneur
07:30 Empowering employees
15:40 Learning through observation
19:00 Disruptions
22:00 Output vs Outcome
30:45 Working in teams
35:30 Aligning priorities
41:00 Disruption Proof
52:00 Take risks
Social Media
· LinkedIn: Brant Cooper
· X/Twitter: @brantcooper
· Email: [email protected]
· Website: www.brantcooper.com
· Website: www.movestheneedle.com
· YouTube: Brant Cooper
Books & Resources
· Disruption Proof: Empower People, Create Value, Drive Change, Brant Cooper
· Dare to Lead: Brave Work. Tough Conversations. Whole Hearts, Brené Brown, Brené Brown
· Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World, General Stanley McChrystal
Episode Transcript
Intro: Hello and welcome to the Agile Innovation Leaders podcast. I’m Ula Ojiaku. On this podcast I speak with world-class leaders and doers about themselves and a variety of topics spanning Agile, Lean Innovation, Business, Leadership and much more – with actionable takeaways for you the listener.
Ula Ojiaku
So I have with me Brant Cooper, who is the author of the books Lean Entrepreneur and his latest one, Disruption Proof: Empower People, Create Value, Drive Change. He also is the CEO and Founder of Moves the Needle. Brant, it is a pleasure and an honour to have you as my guest on the Agile Innovation Leaders Podcast.
Brant Cooper
Thank you so much for having me. I'm glad to be here.
Ula Ojiaku
Now Brant, as I start with all my guests, we want to know a bit more about you. So could you tell us about yourself growing up, your background, are there any experiences that have made a great impact on you that have led to you becoming the Brant we see today?
Brant Cooper
Yeah, so born and mostly raised in California, which seems to be somewhat unique these days, but also did travel around a bit. My dad was a Navy man. I don't know, I guess I was always a little bit different. I think a lot of us describe ourselves that way, but when I went away to school for college, most people were focusing on one major or maybe two majors because that was sort of the state of the world. It's kind of, this is a little while ago, but supposedly what you needed to do is go and get narrow expertise and then that was what was going to launch your career. But to me, that was boring. And so I wanted to take a little bit of everything. So chemistry and calculus and sociology and psychology and history and creative writing and literature. So I was sort of all over the map and I guess it's kind of funny, you can look back on your life and find these little threads that weave through everything. When I left college and got my first job, I remember specifically, I was in Washington, D. C. and I was sitting on the stoop of the house that I was living in and I was all like, really, is this it? Is this the rest of my life, is it working 9 to 5 doing, you know, what people are telling me to do. Wow. That doesn't seem like the bargain I thought it was. So I actually dropped out and wrote a novel, which was very sophomoric, because unless you're a genius, most 20-something year olds really don't know that much about the world. But anyway, it was sort of a, this empowering moment when I just sort of had faith in myself that I would always be able to take care of myself and figure things out. And so it's really one of these moments where the moment you feel like you can just leave a job, you get a tremendous amount of power from that. Most people go through their lives feeling like they have to do what their boss says and they have to live that life and it becomes, your choices obviously become quite limited. So I ended up crossing the country back to California, moved up to the Bay Area, worked in a few jobs there, tried unsuccessfully to sell my book, and then I joined my first startup. So this is the, you know, dot com era, the nineties, and it was really there at this startup that I caught wind of the fact that there were actually these jobs where you weren't supposed to just do what you're told, that your responsibility was to figure things out, to exercise your own creativity and your own intelligence, and nobody was going to sit there over your shoulder, that you were going to be held accountable to what you were doing or what you weren't doing. But you are literally sort of on your own and that was, again, sort of the second moment of feeling the sense of empowerment. And it's funny, because up to that point, I really, maybe I wasn't an A player as the startup likes to talk about the startup myths, you know, you have to go hire all those A players. Maybe I just wasn't an A player, but I used to be passed around like a hot potato between all of these managers because nobody really wanted to manage me because I really didn't do what they said. I did what I thought was best. But anyway, so the startup sort of launched this new type of, so then even in the startups, I worked at a bunch of different jobs. So instead of again, specialising, I was in IT, and then I ran the professional services group and then I went into product management and then I took over marketing, you know, sort of helping out salespeople. So I, again, I sort of traverse the whole, all of the different functions inside the company. And I guess I think that that was also a big learning moment for me, and so I lived through that, you know, tried a couple of my own companies that failed and others that succeeded crazily and others that, you know, ramped up their sales, but then they tailed off and I was on the management team trying to figure things out. And it's funny, because I used to, you always learn more from failures, and I think that the last one, the way I talk about it is that the sort of the company strategy was dictated every week by whoever was the best arguer. Like, so it was just like a management team free for all. And whoever won, that would set the strategy. And so I sort of won for, you know, a year and a year and a half, and we grew like crazy and I had, you know, allies on the team and then they kind of changed their mind and got rid of me and got rid of my allies. And then they went back and did whatever they wanted to do, the founders. So it was all again, it's sort of this learning moment where maybe that's not the best way to make decisions, but so the dot com bust happened and I was actually writing and blogging about, well, what makes successful startups better, what makes them successful compared to all of the ones that fail and what is it about, you know, sort of this idea of learning and empowering people to learn rather than just execute. And so I was blogging about that stuff and got turned on to Steve Blank and to Eric Ries and I ended up writing the first book that talked about lean startup and product market fit. And then that kind of launched this whole other career where at first we're focused on startups, but eventually, I wrote The Lean Entrepreneur and formed Moves the Needle to start taking some of these principles to large enterprises over the world. So around the last 10 years we’ve been helping some of the biggest brands in the world try to adopt some of these principles of exploration, so learning mode and, yeah, that sort of takes us to where we are today. I am still doing that work in addition to some other things, but primarily it's focused on empowering employees to exercise their creativity and their inspiration and to drive impact. And then, you know, helping the leadership understand that they get more out of their people if they enable that, and take a step back, and then they get to be more proactive and more strategic in their own world, and it's sort of empowering to them as well. And I think really, post pandemic, we've sort of seen this shift where that's happening more once people are remote workers, you know, workers being burned out and frustrated with work is when they don't get to do that sort of work. So yeah, it's sort of an interesting time and really the rise of, you know, sort of Agile reaching the next level and Design Thinking reaching the next level and Product Management and all of these things happening because the world is turning digital, makes this a pretty exciting time to apply a lot of these principles.
Ula Ojiaku
You have a fascinating background, Brant, and there are some things that you said about your background that had me nodding, because I identify with it and maybe in terms of, I love variety. And yes, I studied Engineering, but I also kind of liked to know a bit more about economics, psychology, you know, the other subjects outside my normal domain and someone I was having a conversation with someone I can't remember his name again, I think it was Dr. Steve Morlidge at a conference and he was saying life is all integral really, it's just us as human beings trying to make sense of the different aspects. We've created the disciplines, but in the truest sense, there aren't any distinctive lines, and it's all integral, and it helps, I've noticed, you know, at least for me personally, just knowing a bit about other subjects outside my core area just helps me to be more well-rounded and more strategic, if I, for lack of a better word, in how I approach issues.
Brant Cooper
I agree with that. It provides a larger context, right? I mean, so if you can understand what the colleagues are doing in the other function, you can also see the bigger picture, which makes a lot of sense.
Ula Ojiaku
Yeah, yeah. And you mentioned something about not liking to be told what to do. Is that the definition of an entrepreneur or could there be something else?
Brant Cooper
Well, I mean, I think it is, yes, I think it probably is similar to most early stage entrepreneurs, but, you know, you won't succeed as an entrepreneur if that's the only way you are. And so, you know, we all kind of grew up a little bit and we, you know, we have to mature in a way that we can still hold on to our creativity and all of these, our instinct or whatever it is, but we also have to be able to listen to others and to recognise when ideas are better than ours and change our minds based upon new indications. And so there's a flexibility that has to be built into there as well. It can't just be that you're going to stick to your guns. And as a matter of fact, I get a lot of entrepreneurs saying like, oh, well, it's all about the conviction of your idea. And I go, sure, if you want to fail, that's great. But you know, if you really want to change the world, as opposed to focus on a particular idea, then you have to be flexible. And I think that it's a, you know, people always point to Steve Jobs and his genius and I'm all like, yep, it took him a long time to get out, you know, the product that really was putting a computer in everybody's pocket, which is kind of what his dream was in the beginning. It took him a long time to get to the iPhone, and that what was revolutionary about the iPhone actually was opening up the app store to third party developers because that turned the phone into a platform and yet he opposed it even with all of his advisors telling him he had to do that, he didn't allow it the first year and so it wasn't until the second year when he changed his mind that things really took off and so I think it ends up being Steve Jobs is a great example, but not for the reason you think.
Ula Ojiaku
We could go into that but I think we would be going off tangent a bit. So what makes a lean entrepreneur? Because one of your books is titled, The Lean Entrepreneur, how visionaries create products, innovate new ventures and disrupt markets.
Brant Cooper
So I think fundamentally, it's somebody that can admit when they're wrong or when they don't know. I mean, so the lean part of lean entrepreneur is about reducing waste. It's not about being small or not spending money. It's about not wasting money and not wasting time and resources and even your own passion and your own inspiration. And so how can we work to understand our customers more deeply? How can we work to understand the market better? How can we run experiments that bust through our assumptions? How do we even identify assumptions? And then how do we cut through our own biases and all of these things that are very human but could be holding back the success of what we want to build or what we want to bring to the world. And so to me, that's the lean entrepreneur, is you have to be able to admit when you're wrong, admit when you don't know, and go out there and learn and hustle and explore and figure things out before you spend the time and money and resources executing on a particular idea.
Ula Ojiaku
So what I've heard you says is being willing to change your mind when you are faced with, you know, some evidence that your original assumptions are wrong, and also being mindful about how you use your resources. You're not wasteful, you're using it to learn and discover and learn what your customers want so that you're better able to provide that to them.
Brant Cooper
That's correct. Yep. And so if you're, you know, if you sit down and you build a product for six months, and then the product's wrong, or even, you know, just a lot wrong, you know, then there's a lot of waste that went into that. And when you're understanding customers, that doesn't mean ask your customers what they want and do what they say. It means understanding why are they saying what they're saying and what is their environment and what are their aspirations and what are their real needs. It's up to you as the, you know, sort of as the product person or the solution provider, to come up with what is the best way for me to address those needs, but the only way you can really truly understand those needs is to dive as deeply as possible in understanding the customer and their environment.
Ula Ojiaku
Are there any, like, specific examples of how as a lean entrepreneur, I can dive more into knowing what the customer does or needs?
Brant Cooper
Sure, I mean, I think that, you know, Steve Blank's customer development stuff was always really about understanding customers more. I think it was like, in my opinion, a little bit shallow compared to some of the techniques that are used in human centred design or design thinking, where you're getting down to emotional levels and you're getting down to, you know, empathy and really understanding, and you’re kind of zooming in and zooming out. You can zoom in and interview, that's fine, but you can also zoom out in trying to figure out, well, what does it, what would this mean to them if they were successfully doing what they wanted to do? Would they be able to take their family to Italy in the summertime? Is that what they aspire to? Do they want to be a better mother? Do they, like, what is actually driving individuals to make the decisions that they're making? You know, observation is a great way to learn about that. That's, you know, often used in human centred design when you're even in, you know, business to business, business type of solutions, is you go watch people do the work that they're doing in their environment and you can start picking up on all sorts of issues that they're constantly having to overcome or, you know, conflicts or, you know, things don't work in a particular environment or IT does not allow this, you know, I mean, there's all sorts of things that can educate you about what you're trying to, the needs that you're trying to address.
Ula Ojiaku
Yeah, I completely agree. And for you, would you say that, you know, being a lean entrepreneur, is it just for individuals who set up their own startups or early growth companies? Can it also apply within a large established organisation with, say, thousands of employees already?
Brant Cooper
Yeah, no, I think that it's a good question. I think that the example that I give is if you look back to Henry Ford's Model T, right? You build a factory and then you build a whole company around this highly optimised, efficient assembly line that can produce the same vehicle, you know, he sort of famously say, you can have a Model T in any colour you want, as long as it's black, right? That's the only thing that he's going to produce. And so he optimises the flow of resources through the manufacturing, and then he builds the rest of the company based upon functions, this whole linear fashion, everybody do what we've already proven needs to be done. Then you can produce a car that the middle class could buy, which was a new thing and opened up this crazy new market. So that's very well understood. Everything is really, there's not a lot of uncertainty, but if you look, fast forward to the digital age, there's tons of uncertainty, right? All of the products and services that are produced have multiple models and multiple options on each model and hundreds of colours. And there's a lot of choices for consumers to choose one over the other. So consumers don't have the same brand loyalty that they used to. They can change their minds overnight. And again, this is true in the business world, not just consumers. But so there's so much uncertainty there, that you actually have to then understand the niche desires of all of these different market segments out there. Well, the only way to do that, so if you imagine that organisation that is only allowed to do what you're told to do based upon how it used to work, then you're the one that's going to miss out on all those opportunities based upon creating exactly the model or the options that the customer wants. How do you know what it is that those customers want. Well, you have to be out and interact with them. So even the biggest companies in the world have to figure out how they're going to start learning from the environment that they're in. So that's number one. Big companies have to do it and they are doing it more and more. Design and product management and all of these things are, these practices are emerging in these companies to do that exactly. And I think that the other point is, is that the world is so interconnected now, and this, again, has been brought upon by the digital revolution, and so what that causes is that all of these disruptions that we've just, you know, experienced here in the last four or five years, things like the pandemic, inflation, supply chain shocks, reverberations from the war, you know, just on and on. All of these things sort of ripple across our economies. They used to be, they could be isolated in different pockets of the world without affecting the rest of the world. Now everything affects everything. It's like the, you know, the butterfly flapping its wings in the Amazon or something like this. You know, it creates this chaos. And so what that means is, is that things, disruptions, not as bad as the pandemic, but disruptions like ransomware attacks that cause disruptions, or again, supply chain issues, all of these things ripple across the economy and they actually change the market. So if you worked on your marketing plan and your selling plan the day after the pandemic hit, you're not in execution, you're just flailing. You have to actually be able to readdress, what is our situation currently based upon the current environment? How do we change our work in order to adapt to this new environment? And that is just a skill that everybody needs and everybody has to develop. And those are, startups do it naturally, big companies need to try to figure out how they're going to build that in and this is sort of the, the rise of Agile, right? I mean, so I think that the way I describe Agile, or the way I picture it for people without getting into all of the jargon is like a meerkat. So, a tribe of meerkats, every once in a while, come out of their hole and they pick their heads up and they look around and they take in new information and they're going to decide what to do based upon that new information. So, if you're a big corporation, you need to pause your work, which would be like a Agile sprint. You look up from the work. What has changed? Are we making the right progress? Right? Check within our customers. We check with our stakeholders. How do we improve our work as a team so that our output is better? So you take that moment to pause regularly, you can make your Sprint lengths anything that you want, I really don't care, it depends on the type of business that you're in, but you're pausing the work, you're re-evaluating, you're taking in new information, and maybe the answer is you don't have to change your work at all, you can just go back, but there's likely, sometimes, changes that have to be made so that you're getting to the desired outcome more efficiently, so we can't be like the assembly line, you know, Ford’s assembly line, where output was a proxy for outcome, i.e we're going to be successful if we can produce the car at this cost. Now, it's like, we have to focus on efficiency of outcome and not efficiency of output and that means that it's actually more efficient to pause and make changes during the course rather than only after failing at the very end.
Ula Ojiaku
There's a question, you know, lots of things you've said that I resonate with, and one of my favourite questions to previous guests and you would be the next one I'm asking this, is what would you define as outputs versus outcome? So, what's an output to you versus what's an outcome?
Brant Cooper
Yeah, so like the Henry Ford example is the easiest. Output is the car is being done, is being produced. So the car has been manufactured. That's output, and for decades, even still today, businesses and economists using old antiquated models like Larry Summers does, are focused on the efficiency of output and what those are serving to do is being proxies for outcome. So if you, outcome would be, we've successfully sold those cars to happy customers, so they're going to buy again from us, and maybe they're going to get service from us, and maybe they're going to get financing from us, right? So, we want to keep them satisfied, and also we get to generate income and we pay our workers and we actually pay our shareholders. So, everybody gets sort of these outcomes or these desired results from successfully selling the car, which is dependent upon the sufficient production of output. But now, again, today, if you buy all of what else I've said, you can't, output is not a proxy of outcome. So output is, still could be the number of cars that are produced, but if they're not sold and the customers aren't happy, then you're not going to be able to pay your shareholders and you're not going to keep loyal customers, and you're not going to pay your workers, and so we have to now look at the efficiency of outcomes because the world is so complex. So that applies to, I think, any product. Obviously, when you go into the nuances of a corporate hierarchy, not everybody is focused on the final outcome, and so they actually have to have their own outcomes. But even in that regard, you know, outcome is increased user satisfaction. Output is, you've built X by a certain date. Outcome is, you know, a thousand people have opened your newsletter, you know, 75 percent of people opened your newsletter, output is we sent the out the newsletter to 10,000 people. So, the output is very focused on ourselves and the tasks that we're doing, usually over time period. outcome is, what are we getting out of those tasks? And it's best to measure that actually from who the beneficiary’s experience. So if I'm producing a, you know, just a super simple example, if I'm producing this newsletter and people are opening it and spending time reading it, then that is a desired outcome. If nobody opens it, then that's sort of a, you know, there's a variety of issues that might be involved there, but you haven't achieved the outcome despite your output.
Ula Ojiaku
Thanks for that explanation. And somebody else said something that stuck with me as well, which is that, you know, outcome would signify some sort of change in behaviour, or in noticeable behaviour from the perspective of whoever the customer is, or who's consuming the results of your work.
Brant Cooper
Totally agree with that, and way more succinct than what I said. And the focus really is, it's on, that's what I sort of refer to as the beneficiary, because sort of inside of an organisation, your beneficiary of the work that you're doing are maybe internal people, not directly to the customer. So customer, sort of in scare quotes. But I love the fact that they, that person mentioned behaviour, because that's what actually allows us to measure it. And so even in The Lean Entrepreneur book, there's a section called the value stream discovery, which is focused on, what is the behaviour that I'm trying to get from my customer for everything that I'm doing as a business, and how do I measure that that behaviour is happening? And one of the benefits, of course, of the digital world is that you can measure a lot of that stuff. And so if you're trying to measure whether people are satisfied with your product, one proxy for that might be not just running surveys, but how often are they using the product? What are they actually doing with the product? It's not that they downloaded the app, it's that they downloaded the app, they installed it, they create an account, and they come in and they look at, you know, these different screens and interact with them four times every week. Okay, that's what a satisfied customer looks like. How many do we have? What's the growth of satisfied customers year over year or month over month? So it gives us all of this way of starting to measure what the behaviour side is, that becomes very powerful whenever we're doing our work.
Ula Ojiaku
And it's all about evidence based, it helps with evidence-based decisions, so that helps you because back to your explanation or, well, I say your talk about Agile and how it should help with, you know, organisations and leaders with just periodically you do a bit of work in a Sprint, but you look up and look around and know, okay, what we're doing, is it really moving us? Is it moving the needle? No pun intended. Is it moving the needle or is it pushing us closer to where we want? Are we likely to achieve those outcomes instead of focusing on how many widgets or gadgets we've produced within a Sprint? So based on that, what are the things, can you give examples of, you know, challenges you've observed, maybe in organisations or startups with being able to apply this sort of iterative development mindset, and still managing it with the needs to plan in, you know, longer time, across longer time horizons, because some organisations, especially if you're, for example, publicly traded, you still have to have a long term, you know, mid-term and short term view. So how can you, what are the challenges you've experienced with them, balancing all these?
Brant Cooper
I think that, yeah, I think it's, you're planning outcomes and so I think that the difficulty is that when people look at the outcomes, like, well, we need to grow 5%, you know, quarter over quarter, or something like that, the difficulty ends up being when they have to translate those outcomes into what is the work that people need to do. And so we, at some point in that progression from the top leadership down to the to the ground floor, those outcomes get translated into output. And so we lose this connection between, is what we're working on actually going to achieve the desired outcomes? And this is what causes all the reorganisations that happen every couple of years, because they don't, they don't match up, and then the Board or the C-Suite needs to do a reorganisation because it's sort of their admission, their tacit admission that they failed in organising the output to match the outcome. And so they get to have a reset. And so they fire a bunch of people and they reorganise and then they go do it again. So, I think the biggest challenge is that it's really a ground up type of change that has to happen. And so a lot of the, I'm sure you're very familiar with a lot of the, you know, the corporate implementations of Agile tend to be very process-heavy and very, you must do it this way, and you've lost all of the Agile principles and the ethos that got you to want to do it in the first place. And instead it has to be very ground up and it's really around, in my opinion, putting people on teams, so I don't think there's any individual inside of a company that should not be on a team. The team sort of will hold people socially accountable to their work. And if not, then there's still HR that can deal with it, but rather than have managers kind of leaning over and trying to get everybody to figure it out, you know, sort of the, the classic Agile self-organised team, where those teams have to be held accountable to the outcomes, but are empowered to figure out the work in order to achieve those outcomes. And then you practice that behaviour. That behaviour has to be practiced. It's not about, like, giving an order that now you have to work self organised, you actually have to practice that behaviour and you build in some of these other empathy techniques as well as running experimentation and you create an environment where, like, as a leader, you admit when you don't know, and when you've made a mistake, so you're kind of demonstrating vulnerability and that we're actually living in this complex, uncertain world so that you are empowering individuals to also behave the same way. And so you're starting to create this learning exploration balanced with execution type of organisation, and I think inevitably you start seeing impact of that type of work, and that's really, I think, how you can start driving the longer term change that has to happen. It's really by taking pockets of the organisation, teaching the behaviour and practicing it. And then it's teaching and practicing leaders how to manage people that are working that way, which is different as well. I sort of view it as perhaps a little bit idealistically or even utopian is, it's sort of cascading missions. And so the very top mission statements are around those things that you're promising Wall Street. Here's what our growth is going to be, here's what we're going to achieve next quarter and two quarters from that. And then in order to achieve that, here's the different things that our business unit must achieve, the outcomes. And that drips all the way down in terms of outcomes, to the point that you're assigning teams, here is your outcome and you know how to do the work or we'll help you figure out to do the work or you could figure it out yourself. I mean, depends on kind of the quality and the nature of those teams, but it's a way of organising work where I think, in the end, the company doesn't necessarily look that differently than it does now, but it's just not built sort of arbitrarily on function like it is now. And so, by building sort of this mission-oriented way, whenever there's uncertainty, you can put people on that mission that can help overcome the uncertainty. And so you get sort of the cross functional and interdisciplinary nature, when it's required. If it's not required, that's fine. You know, all manufacturers, they're working on that team. That's great. They know what their outcome is and they're going to produce that outcome. But if it's uncertainty, how are we going to go into this new market? Okay, well, there's a lot of things that we know, but we should test those things that we don't know. It's a different, it's a different makeup of that team. Whereas now, if you're trying to do exploration work, when the teams are organised by function, you have to sort of force that cross functionality, and it's very difficult and it doesn't last long. If you don't keep the pressure on, everything kind of falls back into whatever their functional role is, as opposed to continuing to adopt and apply missions to these teams, then they get the resources that they need in order to accomplish a particular mission and then that should rise up to the level of whatever the company objectives are.
Ula Ojiaku
It's really interesting, and it seems like you're a mind reader because you did say initially, you know, it has to start from the ground up. And I was going to ask you if there was any place at all for, you know, the bigger North Star vision mission to trickle down and influence what they, the people on the shop floor are doing in the coalface, as some people would use the term. And you've kind of answered it. So it's more of trickling down the mission such that it gets, once it gets down to the teams actually doing the work, they understand what they're doing and how it's helping in their own way, how they're helping to achieve the bigger objective of the organisation.
Brant Cooper
Yeah, exactly. And I think that that's what, again, going back to sort of the big quit and workers being burned out, I think that a lot of them, like whatever survey I've seen, even those produced by the big consultant firms, pretty much say that workers don't feel aligned. They don't feel aligned with what the priorities are, like they don't even know what they are, and they don't feel like they're driving an impact, and then that makes human beings feel like they're not making an impact in their own life, and it starts this downward spiral, whereas we can create a fortuitous spiral if we actually allow these people to see the impact that they are making.
Ula Ojiaku
And the benefit of working in an Agile manner. Now, I do have my reservations about some people who have peddled Agile as you know, like an elixir, you have a headache, Agile will cure it, or you have a tummy ache, Agile will cure it. Actually, it has its purpose, it has its remit and it has, just like you'd have multiple tools in a toolbox, Agile is really about, you know, you sense, you respond, you know, you build, you put it out there, you get feedback, quick feedback, and then you make adjustments as required, and then move, you know, take the next step. So, from that perspective, taking an Agile approach to, will I say developing or building on, or implementing strategy. How can, do you have any thoughts on how organisations can be more effective at it? I know you've talked about the ideal of cascading missions and then building up. But what else do you think organisations or leaders and organisations can take into account?
Brant Cooper
Yeah, I think that the, I agree with you, it's not, it's just, you know, one view into it. And so I think that there's, I'm sure there's other ways of tackling it. I think that, I guess I think that it's this idea of teams, like, I think that there's everybody could start forming a team now, and it doesn't have to be permanent. Like, if there's a bunch of things that need to be done, find one part of uncertainty and form a team and give them the responsibility of solving that uncertainty. And so I think that it's, it ends up then being well, they don't need to necessarily learn Agile or Design Thinking. I really think that if we measured the right things, human beings sort of know how to optimise what they're being measured for. And so I think that if you were to sit down with a group of your people, and you were to say, listen, this is some, here's a business challenge that we have, I would really like you four or five people to go figure it out, I'm here to give you whatever help you need along the way, I'm here to mentor you, give you my own advice, do whatever. But I need you all to try to figure this out. And here's what the outcome is that we want to get from that, what do you think? And, you know, maybe there's a little bit back and forth, but I think that that's actually more important than any of the frameworks that, you know, even I talk about a lot, and so I think Agile was originally developed sort of around that concept, just very specifically for software development teams. And so I think that it's thinking about the principles that can apply pretty much anywhere as opposed to the actual practices. I just also happen to think that there's a bunch of practices that can be beneficial. Things like the idea of what is the length of time you're going to put your head down versus, you know, when you look up or how you're going to share your work or all of those type of things. But I think that it's essentially if we just gave a group of people a business, a challenge, and said, I'd really like you to help me figure this out, that you would see them rally around that idea. And I think that that's kind of the nugget of what we're trying to create here, and then hopefully spread because it makes those people happier, and when they solve something, that's impact that can be shared with other people. And I think that you see in companies that really have been successfully innovative are those that actually have inspired that to the point that the core business is then, you know, want some of that energy, like, we want that here, because we know that we have to be faster and move quicker and adapt and all of those type of things. We know we have to be truly customer centric and not just, you know, sitting around a conference room table, imagining we’re the customer, so it's really kind of really more about finding that and it also may vary, you know, based upon company culture, even positive company cultures. And it's like, what is that little nugget that actually empowers people to, as a team, let's work together and figure something out.
Ula Ojiaku
Thanks for that very, very insightful response, and there's something you said about uncertainty. You know, it's really about trying to make sense of the unknown, and this brings me to your book, your latest book, Disruption Proof, full title Disruption Proof: Empower People, Create Value, Drive Change. What led you to writing that book and what is it all about?
Brant Cooper
Yeah, so I think it really is, it's really all about what we've just been talking about the last few minutes, where it really is sort of looking at how the organisation can structure people and work, such that the natural output of it is more, it's actually the way I put it is more efficient execution based upon exploration work, and so how do you build that into the organisation, so it doesn't feel like it's a cannibalisation, you know, sort of the whole old school Clayton Christensen stuff. I know everybody's going to be like, what do you mean old school, but it's like, it's not about disrupting yourself, it's not about this other organisation is going to come in and disrupt you. It's not that you actually have to eat your own tail as a snake. It's about finding this emerging behaviour that then will sort of flower from within and takes over the organisation because that's what the circumstances require. And so I think that the, I don’t know, I guess I think that the book was trying to show examples of businesses that have done that, either large scale, or pockets within these organisations that have brought people together, cross-functional where necessary, interdisciplinary. Hey, this is a new opportunity, how do we actually engage the business units as opposed to, to me what that old school way of doing it is like, here's your little innovations, you know, silo over here, you guys go figure out what's going to happen in 10 years. I think that's like, largely failed. And I think that what we need to do, is figure out how there's, from the beginning there's buy-in from these other parts of the organisation. So that's really what the last book is about, really all of these things that we've been talking about.
Ula Ojiaku
And I believe it's available on Amazon and other major book sellers.
Brant Cooper
Anywhere you can buy a book.
Ula Ojiaku
Awesome. Well, I haven't read it yet, but I have made a note, it’s on my reading list, definitely.
Brant Cooper
Well, thank you for that.
Ula Ojiaku
Definitely. No, my pleasure, I look forward to digging into it to learn a bit more about the concepts you've just shared and the insights as well as the examples with organisations that might have failed or succeeded in some aspects of the concepts.
Brant Cooper
Yeah, that kind of describes everybody to a certain level.
Ula Ojiaku
Do you have anyone you could share at this point? You know, maybe an example from your book? You don't have to name names. Is there anyone that comes to mind?
Brant Cooper
Well, I think in terms of, I guess what I would call lean innovation transformation, I think ING is a really good example, the bank in Europe, they did a full on Agile transformation as well, like organising the whole company based upon really more like based upon missions than functions, and I think that that always has its challenges, but I think that what, in the end, they kind of brought these two different endeavours together. One being this Agile transformation and this other being what we call lean innovation. And so they really started practicing the empathy and the exploration work and the experiments. And those things ended up sort of combining. And I think it's always interesting when, you can theorise about this stuff, but when do you actually get to see the results? And so a lot of this, most of this work was all done pre-pandemic. And then some of the stories that came out of different pockets of the organisation during the pandemic were really quite extraordinary in ways that they were able to adapt to, you know, finding yourself suddenly in this world, that they could point back to these lean innovation practices, being the, you know, being the impetus for being able to change like that. So I love those stories where you’re actually able to see that, okay, we applied all of this. Here's like this major, you know, environmental change brought on by the pandemic, how did the company respond. And so that's a, I wrote a couple of stories about that stuff in the book Disruption Proof. And so there's a couple of other examples in there, but that's the one that really comes to mind because they just committed to it at a larger level than I've seen other organisations do.
Ula Ojiaku
Sounds awesome. So in addition to your books, The Lean Entrepreneur, The Entrepreneur's Guide to Customer Development, Disruption Proof, what other books have you found yourself recommending to people who want to know more about, you know, Lean Innovation, Agile, or maybe it doesn't have to be on the subject of Lean Innovation or Agile, but just generally because you felt they were impactful to your life. What other books have you recommended to people and why?
Brant Cooper
Yeah. So I think that, you know, people have recognised change in the world quite a bit over the last, you know, 10 years or so, or five or six years, pandemic is making me lose all track of time. But, so the ones that I keep coming back to are not specifically Agile or lean innovation. So I would say Brené Brown's Dare to Lead, and I think that this is a just an example of what we mean by empathy, you know, you don't really have to go hug your customers, you don't have to hug your employees. It's not, you know, but it's understanding how you apply those principles in a business environment and the ability, like I mentioned earlier, for leaders to demonstrate vulnerability by admitting when they don’t know and when they're wrong, that this is really important in changing. The other thing I'll throw out there that I love that Brené Brown talks about is this idea of rumbling. Again, we're not talking about some, you know, kind of kumbaya moment here. It's really around bringing evidence to the table and having forceful discussions about what is actually happening and what you need to do next, but it's based upon this evidence and I kind of call it respectful rumbling, because rather than like my startup example I gave in the beginning of just arguing, it’s really around, you know, as a team of leaders even, it's great to respect each other, but we also have to be direct and honest and have real conversations and not just sort of let everything go hunky dory and then go back to your office and whine about stuff. So it's, I think that there's this, I don't know, I sort of enjoy this ability to sit around with people and, you know, kind of debate ideas and really try to get to the crux of things. And I think that we need that, and Brené Brown writes about that in Dare to Lead. I think that the other one, it's General McChrystal Team of Teams. And I think that, I'm not sure he ever realised it, but I think he was writing about Agile. But what he describes, of course, is the US military in Iraq, and the difference between facing a traditional force versus a, you know, sort of this ad hoc network, new, modern military force and Al Qaeda, and the changes that he then needed to do to the military to be able to respond to that. And I think that it's really quite extraordinary in the sense that, you know, unfortunately, in my opinion, the military is often the first thing for an organisation to learn about all of these things happening in the world. But it is a result of the digital revolution that now what you have are this interconnectedness that never existed before that allow little ad hoc network entities to pop up everywhere. And this is the same thing that's happening in business, and it's the same thing that happens in the market and Agile actually is a response to that, and so then we have to go back to how do we implement Agile so that that's actually part of the organisation. It's this interconnectedness and this ad hoc nature of forming teams and missions to accomplish goals, whether they're long term or short term. And so it's really super, an interesting analogy to, I think, what business requires.
Ula Ojiaku
So you've mentioned two books, Dare to Lead by Brené Brown and Team of Teams by General McChrystal. Okay, well, thank you.
Brant Cooper
They almost seem like polar opposites, but it's sort of interesting.
Ula Ojiaku
Well, they are interesting. I haven't read Brené Brown's Dare to Lead, but I have listened to the audio version of Team of Teams, and I do agree there are some interesting insights, which one can, basically, something that you said about principles, again, that principles, you know, you can draw from General McChrystal's narration of their experience in Iraq and how they had to adapt and all that, which you can apply to the commercial world or, yeah, so I completely agree was a very interesting book for me. So can the audience engage with you, and if so, how?
Brant Cooper
Yeah, so I'm Brant Cooper on all social media, really, but, you know, maybe primarily LinkedIn and I encourage people to reach out. I'm [email protected] is my email and I respond to, you know, I respond to everybody. My company's website is movestheneedle.com and we're launching some online courses that hopefully make learning some of these new behaviours a little bit more scalable. So I invite people to check that out, but yeah, you know, happy to engage with any of your listeners.
Ula Ojiaku
Sounds great. Well, thank you for sharing those, and this would also be in the show notes. And would you have any final words for the audience, any ask?
Brant Cooper
I don't really have, I don't think any ask. I think that, I don't know, I guess one other little story that that summarises part of my life was this idea that I forget every once in a while that change happens because you as an individual decides to make a change. And I think that, like, some people, I think that just comes naturally to it and they live their whole life that way. I'm not that way, I'll sit back for a while and kind of look around and go like, well, who's going to fix this? And then I realise, oh, well, you have to do it. And so I encourage other people to maybe actually look at themselves in that way, and sort of that own self awareness goes like, oh, well, guess it's me. And, you know, I think that it's easy to be scared of the risks supposedly, but I also think that generally the risk is in doing nothing. And so you might as well go for it.
Ula Ojiaku
Go for it, take risks. Thank you for those words.
Brant Cooper
Based upon evidence.
Ula Ojiaku
Okay, go for it, take evidence-based, calculated risks. How does that sound? Kind of made it very clinical. I think I've rephrased it in a way that takes off the oomph, but thank you so much, Brant. It's been a pleasure meeting you and recording this episode with you. So thank you again for your time.
Brant Cooper
Thanks for having me. Fun, fun discussion. Thank you.
Ula Ojiaku
That’s all we have for now. Thanks for listening. If you liked this show, do subscribe at www.agileinnovationleaders.com or your favourite podcast provider. Also share with friends and do leave a review on iTunes. This would help others find this show. I’d also love to hear from you, so please drop me an email at [email protected] Take care and God bless!