Episode 928 ·
Tech Titans: A Masterclass in Change Management with Ashley Goodall
Things are changing faster than ever, but don’t let it affect your team.
Today, we're talking to Ashley Goodall, leadership expert and bestselling author. We discuss why the management obsession with change is harming the people it's meant to help, how constant reorganization leads to learned helplessness and quiet quitting, and why the real goal should never be just change.
All of this right here, right now, on the Modern CTO Podcast!
To learn more about Ashley's work, check out his website here.
About Ashley Goodall
I am an advisor, author, and executive. I've spent two decades working in the areas of leadership and human resources as a consultant, Fortune 50 executive, speaker, researcher, and writer. In my advisory work, I help companies and leaders navigate the swirl, and discover the path to sustained improvement in their people practices. In my writing, I explore the lessons from the real world that help people and teams thrive, and that make work a more human place for all of the humans in it. In my executive roles, I have created and instituted new approaches to leadership development, feedback, team performance, coaching, employee engagement, performance management, people analytics, and more. My first experiences of teams and leadership were as a student musician and conductor. I was fascinated by the unspoken understanding between people playing together and carried this fascination into the corporate world. Before starting my advisory practice, I spent six years as a Senior Vice President at Cisco, where I led organizations focused on leadership, on teams, and on research, and which took on some of the most challenging questions about work. What is special about the best teams? Why do we follow one leader and not another? How can we measure our experience at work reliably? And how can we take what matters most to people and embed in into our people practices and systems? Prior to Cisco, I spent fourteen years at Deloitte as a consultant and as the Chief Learning Officer for Leader Development. My most recent book, The Problem with Change: And the Essential Nature of Human Performance, looks at why change is hard on people, and what we can do to draw its sting. It has been named the Porchlight Books Best Management and Culture Book of 2024, a Financial Times Best Business Book of the year, and a Globe and Mail Best Business Book of the year.
Transcript
(Intro Narrator at 00:00:00) Today, we're bringing you our most timeless advice from our last conversation with Ashley Goodall. We're covering his most pressing thoughts on the problem of change, a problem that has only accelerated since his last episode. You're listening to Joel Beasley, Modern CTO.
(Joel Beasley at 00:00:23) I go back and forth between life is really long and life is really short constantly.
(Ashley Goodall at 00:00:28) Isn't that funny? Yeah. And I think the answer is yes, it is.
(Joel Beasley at 00:00:31) Yes, the answer is yes to both. Yeah, life is long and life is short.
(Ashley Goodall at 00:00:34) Yeah. If you think about the received wisdom of change, it's sort of like the more the better. I mean, change is a good thing. Change is how the world improves. Change is the state of evolution. Change is we should all be very keen on change. We should all be enthusiastic supporters of change. And that certainly is the sort of the management received wisdom. You know, when I was at business school, one of the definitions of a leader, or the job of a leader, was to create change. Leaders are to make change. That's what we sent you there to do.
(Ashley Goodall at 00:01:10) But if you look at the experience of being on the receiving end of change, it's a very, very different set of experiences and circumstances and psychological reality. Because as it turns out, when you find it, well, when you ask people about it, when you say tell me your stories, they're not happy stories for the most part. And then when you look at the psychology going on, or what happens to the human animal under change, you find out that too much change harms people.
(Ashley Goodall at 00:01:42) So the book is an investigation of this sort of dichotomy or tension between probably one of the most prevalent management truisms, your job, you were sent here to make change, and the reality of that on the ground, which is that too much change makes it really hard for people to actually do their jobs. It's not just, you know, people don't like it. It's this makes it hard to do my job. So we need to sort ourselves out on this topic, I think, because if you have a management philosophy or management idea that is actually harmful to people, it's not gonna end so well.
(Joel Beasley at 00:02:29) How do you know when to use it? Like, let's pretend it's music, right? It's like a note. If you're just always C sharp, if you're just always hitting that same note, if you're always hitting the change note, it's not gonna be a very pretty song. Is it a tool that you use at a specific time? Like, when would you use this tool of change?
(Ashley Goodall at 00:02:47) Well, I think the first thing to get clear on is that change is slightly the wrong term for what we're after. What we really want is a thing called improvement. And so you have to go, well, not all change leads to improvement. All improvement comes from change. Gotcha. But it doesn't always work the other way around.
(Ashley Goodall at 00:03:08) So, you know, when I was researching the book, I reached out to people about their change stories. And I said, just, you know, I wanna speak to people. Tell me your stories of change. And dozens of people reached out to me, and I spoke to as many of them as I could. And their stories were of being on the receiving end of a reorg or a new strategy or a new leader who was changing all the positions in the organization or a new technology or a new policy or a new office floor plan or a new, I mean, everything.
(Ashley Goodall at 00:03:28) And you took a couple of things away from these conversations. Firstly, this is absolutely continuous. The nature of work today is to be, as I call it, in the blender, to be living life in the blender. And it's really hard on people. The second thing was that I also said to people, I would say to somebody at the end of a long recitation of and then this happened, and then this happened, and then this happened, and people were telling me that they were burned out, that they were exhausted, that their souls were crushed. Someone said, this is soul crushing.
(Ashley Goodall at 00:04:04) And so I go, oh, so I'm guessing you think change is not a very good thing then. And they were gonna go, well, no. I believe in change. I'm a fan of change, because change is possibility and change is potential and change is all that the future offers to us. If it doesn't offer change, then what's it all about? And that's the dichotomy, right? So no one wants to play C sharp for fifteen minutes in a row. No one wants a monotone song.
(Ashley Goodall at 00:04:50) But at the same time, the song that's a fusillade of random notes, and you can never ever shut it off, and you can never make sense of it, and you can't hear a melody in any of that, wears people down. So what people are looking for is the song, I suppose, to just torture the metaphor a little bit, the song that they want to sing, the song where they know what the harmonies are gonna be and they're gonna do the jazz improv on top of it.
(Ashley Goodall at 00:05:27) So there's some sort of, I mean, you know how jazz works. You've got a jazz standard, and there's a chord sequence, and it's a 12-bar or a 16-bar or whatever. And then beyond that, there's no score for the musicians. Most of the time, people are making it up in real time. So they're creating change on a basis of stability. And it's that that people want. They want to be able to riff in a way that for them feels like possibility and hope and improvement. But if the world is just firing notes at you at random, there ain't no tune there.
(Joel Beasley at 00:06:07) When you're discussing and talking about change here, I could see how if people keep changing the aim and you don't have control of your aim. Is it for you?
(Joel Beasley at 00:06:19) Someone changes it for you and you have no control to set that aim. You have to go with whoever and they're constantly changing it. You will never be able to align everything you're trying to do. And then you'll get what, what is the right word? Demoralized? I don't know if that's the right word, but you will lose motivation and interest, and you'll just you'll feel like there's no winning. And when you get to the point where you feel like there's no winning, you are doing the worst possible work you could do.
(Ashley Goodall at 00:06:47) So the psychology name for I feel like there's no winning is called learned helplessness. And there are studies on this going back to the seventies. And they've studied it in dogs, in rats, in people, in birds, in every sort of mammalian creature. And what they found is that if you teach a creature that nothing it does can make any difference, it quits trying. So you can teach somebody to essentially phone it in, if you like.
(Ashley Goodall at 00:07:31) It's related to what you're saying because what you're saying is that if I can't adjust my aim, if I have no control over my aim, then what happens to me? Sooner or later, the answer is you learn that nothing you do makes any difference at all to anything, at which point you phone it in. And just to translate back to the world of work for a second, there are some recent synonyms for phone it in. One would be quiet quitting. One would be lazy girl jobs. One would be coffee badging. Another would be the great resignation. I mean, these are all things where people have gone, you know what? I've tried. I have tried.
(Ashley Goodall at 00:08:15) But this environment is so hard to navigate. I don't know where my aim is. I knew where it was last week. I don't know where it is this week. I don't know where my potency is. I don't know if you keep changing context. The things I'm good at doing, are they valuable here or not? They used to be in the old, are they valuable in the new world? And I'm not sure what it all adds up to. I'm not sure that this is a coherent world that I'm living in.
(Ashley Goodall at 00:08:45) So that leads to people essentially going, listen, I'm helpless here, and all I can do is wait for this to pass. And if you go and talk to people in large companies who are going through the nth reorganization or reshuffle or transition or merger or spin-off or whatever, the ones who've been around the track for a few times will go, you know what? I'm just waiting for this to go. I'm just waiting for this to pass.
(Joel Beasley at 00:09:13) So I preordered your book on Audible because that's my preferred method of consumption. Did you narrate it, by the way?
(Ashley Goodall at 00:09:21) Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.
(Joel Beasley at 00:09:23) Nice. I love it. But the book to me looked like it was laid out where you listed the problems of change, and you went through them by orders and chapter of the book. Can you just touch on a couple of the problems of change?
(Ashley Goodall at 00:09:37) Yeah. I grouped them into five headings. That's not like the official grouping. That's me doing a bunch of research and reading footnotes a lot and saying, listen, what are the shapes here? So the problems with change from a, again, from a psychological perspective, we can start off with uncertainty.
(Ashley Goodall at 00:09:59) So when you get the memo that says, hello, everybody, there's about to be a reorg, in an instant, you are visited by uncertainty. Because you know, the communication, the email, or whatever will tell you some things, but it won't tell you all of the things. And very often, by the way, it's preceded by the rumor of the thing, which tells you there's a thing coming, but you don't know what it is. So uncertainty is very hard on humans. It causes us stress. It causes us all sorts of physiological trauma, like beyond high blood pressure. It causes increased mortality. So uncertainty, we don't want uncertainty. Uncertainty bad. So that's the first one.
(Ashley Goodall at 00:10:39) Second one, we touched on it, learned helplessness or the lack of control. When somebody announces the change, the second thing that strikes you is that you didn't announce the change, somebody else did. And you're not in control of what's gonna happen. That again is very hard on us from a psychological perspective.
(Ashley Goodall at 00:10:59) The third problem is, or the third challenge with change is that so much of our structures are social, and so much of our source of stability is social. And so when you shuffle all the teams, you reshuffle all of our other human support structures in a work environment. And so you ruin our sense of belongingness, which is a super important part of how we actually get done what we do.
(Ashley Goodall at 00:11:35) The fourth one, if people are tracking along, four out of five. The fourth problem is what I call displacement. We interact with our environment in a series of fairly specific and to me quite beautiful ways. Place is something that we become attached to, and so our workplace is one category of things that we become attached to in the world. And the way that we become attached to place is in our habits and our rituals that link us to a place.
(Ashley Goodall at 00:12:08) So in your house, you'll have a morning ritual. That's the thing that connects you to a house in a way. And people have rituals at work as well. And so rituals embed us in a certain place, in a certain context, in a certain social group. And again, if you blow up all the rituals, if you, you know, a lot of the rituals exist on teams. So if you blow up the teams, you're blowing up a lot of rituals. That makes it very hard for people to find their bearings.
(Ashley Goodall at 00:12:27) And then the last one we've touched on as well, the loss of meaning. It's hard to figure out what your aim is. It's hard to figure out where you're heading towards if the context keeps changing. But even before that, the first thing I discovered in researching all of this is that actually, we, you know, we tend to think of meaning as, as you said before, aim or mission or purpose or sort of daylight things, aspirational things, up into the right things. But the first meaning of meaning is actually where the stuff makes sense or not.
(Ashley Goodall at 00:13:06) And it can't be aspirational if none of the parts make any sense at all. Things can't cohere to a beautiful picture until they cohere to a picture. And one of the most pernicious things about change is that the world stops making sense. I spoke to somebody who had gone from one leader to another and could not figure out what the next leader, the new leader was trying to do. She said, none of it makes sense. I don't, there was, I understood where we were before, what we were trying to do, how I fitted into that. I understood what the projects were. I understood what the team was. I understood what the language was. All that's gone away.
(Ashley Goodall at 00:13:48) None of it makes sense anymore. And so she lacked meaning in her work, but not because the work pointed in a way she didn't find inspirational, but because the work didn't point anywhere at all. So those are the five, if you like, the top five that I would sort of use to frame the challenge of constant change for human beings. It's uncertainty, it's lack of control, it's unbelonging, displacement, and loss of meaning, which is, you know, a fairly depressing list.
(Joel Beasley at 00:14:20) But once we name them and can discuss them, we can overcome them and provide the antidote and move forward.
(Ashley Goodall at 00:14:28) And we can honor the value to humans of their opposites, right? We can honor certainty. We can honor control. We can honor belonging. We can honor the value of place for us, and we can honor people's need to derive meaning from what they do every day.
(Joel Beasley at 00:14:48) One of the things I have learned in the past ten years is that by default, I see people like me, and that's a problem because they're not like me. They're themselves. And so I have my work ethic, my drive, my motivation, my outcome-oriented focus, my desire to grow and improve. And I when I meet people, I just assume that they're like that. And I consciously remind myself, let's judge a person on who they are and what they present, not what I'm looking through my lens.
(Ashley Goodall at 00:15:18) But there's a, do you know, have you heard of a thing called the extrinsic incentives bias?
(Joel Beasley at 00:15:24) No. What's this?
(Ashley Goodall at 00:15:25) Oh, this is a lovely, lovely piece of research that was done by a guy named Chip Heath. Again, I think late nineties. And so there are roughly speaking two groups of incentives for a human. There are the intrinsic incentives, which is to do stuff that feels important to me, to do stuff that makes me feel good about the world. And then there are the extrinsic incentives, which are sort of pay, and title, and promotion, and private jets and those things. So the extrinsic, you could see by looking at somebody from the outside as it were. The intrinsic, you can't figure out until you know what it's like to be that person, to feel from the inside.
(Ashley Goodall at 00:15:56) Well, so those are the two things. And Chip Heath did a series of experiments, or certainly writes about a series of experiments. Some he did, some others did, where he says, if you ask us about our own, if you ask us to rank our own incentives, we will put all the intrinsic ones at the top of the list. You go, okay, once I'm paid enough to make, you know, put food on the table and pay the mortgage, then actually what I care about is work that lifts me up, that makes me feel good, that makes me feel like I'm making a useful contribution to society, and growing my ability to do those things. That's what matters most.
(Ashley Goodall at 00:16:48) But if you then say, great, what do you think motivates those people over there? And then what do you think motivates those people even further away from you? So people you know a little bit and people you know not at all. And the greater the distance of familiarity with somebody, the more extrinsic we assume their incentives are. So we look at ourselves and we go, listen, I'm lifted up by a whole bunch of stuff that's fundamentally noble and good.
(Ashley Goodall at 00:17:15) But if you ask me about Joel, well, we've been talking for a little while and we met a few years ago. I don't know Joel quite as well, so he's probably got some goodness, but there's probably a little bit of base. He's really, he's interested in prestige and funny titles and stuff like that. And if you ask about Joel's dad who I never met in my life, Joel's dad is only in it for the money, isn't he? He's got to be because I don't know him at all. And so that's a measurable bias.
(Ashley Goodall at 00:17:43) Now, put that inside a company and go, what do you think of your employees who you never met? And the answer is they must be motivated by money. They must be coin operated.
(Ashley Goodall at 00:18:00) And "coin-operated" was an actual phrase that an executive used with me once. He said, "We all know that people are coin-operated, don't we?"
(Joel Beasley at 00:18:08) Until their need is—there's a bit, the problem with that is there's a bit of truth to it. You have to get paid, but you're right. After you get that Maslow's hierarchy of needs, after you're able to get that, then it becomes about, you know, purpose, meaning, and those intrinsic.
(Ashley Goodall at 00:18:24) And, you know, just to be clear, this executive was talking to me in a company where most people made six figures. So we were hardly dealing with the low end of the, you know, "pay to put food on the table" continuum.
(Joel Beasley at 00:18:37) Well, actually, that's a realization that I have made as an entrepreneur is you cannot—there's a level in which you cannot throw any more money at it. You can't make the person—if you take somebody from, let's just use bigger numbers, you take somebody from $150K and they're doing some type of job and they're in that position, and you think that you can pay them $300K and that they will work harder, you are correct for a short period of time. Because what will happen is they will have this amp-up and excitement in work. They will increase their salary and then be excited about the different level of life they can live, but also just work harder because they're pumped up about the raise.
(Joel Beasley at 00:19:21) But give it three months, and their productivity is going to be about what it was before.
(Ashley Goodall at 00:19:26) Because the assumption behind that, you know, "I'll double somebody's pay and they'll work harder," is that they weren't working hard when I was paying them $150,000. But what happens if a person who you're paying $150,000 is actually trying to do a good job? There's not much headroom left. So it's not like we all show up—again, it's not like we all show up at work and go, "Alright."
(Joel Beasley at 00:19:50) "My theoretical maximum salary is a million dollars and I'm paid $100,000, so I will put in 10% effort."
(Ashley Goodall at 00:19:50) We don't—that's not how—
(Joel Beasley at 00:19:59) We don't do that.
(Ashley Goodall at 00:20:00) We don't do that.
(Joel Beasley at 00:20:00) This is—
(Ashley Goodall at 00:20:00) This is silliness. The science on compensation and effort is that for piecework, so when I pay you per podcast or per book or per whatever the units of your and my work are, you can see an increase in productivity up until the point where the person's burned out and exhausted. But if actually what you want from somebody is creative work or innovative work or to make new things, which is a lot of work, the relationship vanishes. Again, once you've paid somebody enough to not have to worry about where the next meal is coming from. So, you know, it's a long digression on compensation.
(Ashley Goodall at 00:20:43) But how much discussion of management is actually the discussion of how to incentivize people? There's a huge amount of discussion of, "If you get the incentives right, then the robotic and machine-like human people will go and do the thing that we designed for them in the incentive structure," and it just doesn't work like that. So it's another thing that if you imagine people are automatons or coin-operated or any of the other things that we're throwing around here, then you can just visit change on them. You can just say, "We're shuffling everything, but we'll give you some incentives to be in the new model." And then it's sort of a bit of a surprise when it doesn't quite go that smoothly.
(Joel Beasley at 00:21:24) Well, I love what you're doing. I love the message that you push. Brilliant thoughts. And every time your name comes up, I'm like, "I like talking to Ashley."
(Ashley Goodall at 00:21:31) Well, it's lovely to chat to you again. It's been too long. We should do this more often.
(Joel Beasley at 00:21:35) Thank you so much for listening. And if you found this episode useful, please share it with a friend or colleague who you think would get value from it. And if you have topics that you'd like to hear discussed on the podcast, either add me on LinkedIn or send me an email: [email protected]. Every time I get an email or LinkedIn message, it absolutely makes my day and inspires me to keep going.