Master Change or Perish, w/ Ron Crabtree: Ep61

Summary

In this No Limits Leadership podcast episode, Sean Patton interviews Ron Crabtree, who shares insights on digital transformation, its components, and the challenges organizations face in implementing change. Ron emphasizes the importance of understanding the interplay between people, processes, and technology and discusses the ongoing labor shortage in various industries. He highlights the critical role of effective change management and communication in ensuring successful digital transformation initiatives while also addressing the need for organizations to adapt quickly to the ever-evolving business landscape.

Ron Crabtree, is the founder and CEO of MetaOps™ and MetaExperts™Inc. He is an internationally recognized expert in leading-edge business process improvement methodologies. He is a Master Lean Six Sigma Black Belt, a Certified Supply Chain Transformation Architect and also an expert in effective change management, facilitation and communications.

Takeaways

Digital transformation is a complex and evolving process.

A significant percentage of digital transformation efforts fail to deliver expected results.

Organizations face a labor shortage that impacts their ability to implement change.

Effective change management is crucial for successful digital transformation.

Communication and transparency are key to overcoming resistance to change.

Middle managers play a vital role in driving change within organizations.

Apathy can hinder progress in successful companies.

Iterative approaches to change management can lead to better outcomes.

Understanding the components of digital transformation is essential for leaders.

Organizations must adapt quickly to survive in a rapidly changing environment.

Chapters

00:00 Introduction to Digital Transformation

06:32 Understanding Digital Transformation Components

13:59 The Role of People in Digital Transformation

19:23 Navigating the Labor Shortage

26:34 Change Management Challenges

32:07 The Need for Agile Change Management

37:40 Implementing Tangible Change

43:26 MetaOps: A Solution for Rapid Change

Transcript

Sean Patton (00:02)
Welcome to the No Limits Leaders podcast. I am Sean Patton. I'm so excited to be here today with Ron Crabtree, the founder and CEO of MetaOps. Ron and I had an amazing conversation before deciding to record this podcast and he was just full of information, decades and decades of amazing knowledge and wisdom and we can all learn a ton from him. So Ron, it's my pleasure to have you on today. Thanks for being here.

Ron Crabtree (00:32)
Yeah, thanks for inviting me.

Sean Patton (00:35)
And right, you know, we, we talked first and we got deep. started talking about the history of the U S automotive industry and digital transformation and the future and everything that cool is to go on with your company. So we can go so many ways with this, but what really struck me looking at your content and talking with you. And when I think our audience would love to hear is we're all talking about struggling with this digital transformation, which really started years ago, but we're in this new phase of it. And.

As you work with companies, how do you even define digital transformation in the modern world?

Ron Crabtree (01:13)
Well, that's a great question. And the answer is it's changing very, very rapidly. And I've got kind of a strong opinion around it because I had a career in the automotive supply chain and materials management operations implementing ERP systems. had a stint with Grant Thornton back in the late 90s as the Oracle practice leader. We were beating the Y2K bug and putting in automation and supply chain execution like electronic combons and pulse systems.

And then got very much involved with lean manufacturing as a practice. And I actually worked for at the time, the world's largest lean manufacturing company, lean manufacturing consulting company, or should I say at the time, is a technical director mapping digital enablers to lean manufacturing practices and figuring out how could we accelerate lean success. This is back in 2000, 2001 timeframe before I started our company in 2002.

If we fast forward a little bit, you know, I've got this massive network of experts we've built over the years. We'll talk more about that later. But one of our customers is a large international e-learning company. They specialize in training and online programs for the corporate customers, right? A lot of our audience is probably familiar with them, but I won't name them because I shouldn't. But they came to me back in 2020 at the onset of the COVID pandemic and said, look, we're looking for kind of a fresh look.

a real hard look at digital transformation, awareness training that we can sell to our customers around the world. So I pulled together a team of our meta experts, know, people that have different kinds of expertise in digital transformation. And we kind of came up with this master list of what are all the components that make up digital transformation. So here's the thing, everybody's talking about AI, artificial intelligence, it's end all, see all, if we aren't doing it, we're going to get left in the dust.

There's elements of that that are true, but it goes well beyond that. So at the time we mapped out like 30 different elements that make up at the time digital transformation, which by the way has changed and morphed quite a bit since then. And we map these against the various functions in organizations, just to get a little flavor for this, I'm not going to name them all, but if think about sales and marketing, engineering, new product development, you know, there's stuff like, you know,

new product service development automation technologies to accelerate the speed at which we can bring new products and services to market. And then nowadays, cybersecurity is a massive problem. Not only do we have people attacking our companies, but also as we design and bring products to market, that comes into play with respect to how do we make bulletproof equipment, software, and services that we can sell to our customers and then manage the cybersecurity associated with that. So that comes into play as well.

You know, artificial intelligence certainly comes into play. if you think about supply chain, supply chain operations, you AI, we have what's called additive manufacturing, advanced materials, think about 3D printing and some of those technologies. The internet of things is out there. We have another thing called edge sensor technologies, which is data way out in the field. There's stuff being consumed to send, you know, consumption signals back upstream supply chain. And then there's edge sensors are way out where we're digging it out of the ground and harvesting it from the fields.

way out there, data and information that can feed into execution of supply chain and certainly automation of that blockchain cloud computing effects all functions, enterprise information management. You get into finance, IT operations in most companies. They can all what's called EIF or enterprise information management. This is where you're really thinking about all the data you're using, all the data you're creating, who needs to use what and why and how are you going to connect all that and automate it.

and make it easier for people to use as time goes on. Robotics, robotic process automation. We think about the physical robots, for assembling cars and stuff like that. think about digital robotic process automation. And that's what the big thing is, is how do you actually digitize work, repetitive tasks, people, you know, people spend time on it that it's kind of wasteful or it's prone to human error. Great opportunity there. Machine learning, intelligence.

self-correcting, tuning cognitive programs that figure things out. Intelligent process automation kind of kicks into that. Then you have unified collaboration tools that kick in as you get into, you know, people management, HR, operations, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So here's the thing about digital transformations, unlike back in the good old day with an ERP system. It's going to solve our problems. We can go out and pick one provider, you know, have all the bells and whistles, and we do this, and it's like this, you know, silver bullet cure.

for our technology problems. those days are long gone. I call digital transformations kind of like death by a thousand cuts. There's hundreds of things to think about and trying to just say, I'm gonna do AI and all my problems are solved, it just doesn't work that way. And the other thing that's really scary about digital transformation, you can ask any expert you want out there, a lot of data published that between 78 and...

88 % of efforts to digitize or move into digital transformation initiatives fail to deliver the results we expected or fail outright. You know, just don't get the results we expect. So it's hideously difficult and complex.

Sean Patton (06:42)
There's so many components there and it's so interesting. think what I'm taking away from you is the, when we talk about the transformation, everyone's trying to get ahead of this, the rapidly changing technology. We are hearing all about it. It's AI. you're not talking about, mean, every conference I go to, right, there's at least, I feel like there's a session, you know, every morning on AI, right? Everyone's talking about how they can integrate, how they can do it, but it's really this larger picture. So as leaders, when we,

think about how digital transformation is this ongoing process that's only getting more complex. And we look at our own companies, like where do we start? Like how do we even assess where we are and where we should be going?

Ron Crabtree (07:26)
Yeah, it ties back a little bit to what I described as enterprise information management. And, you know, if you're a smaller company, that's just like way beyond your reach. But it's the concept of we have a corporate strategy. We've thought long-term about what our basis for competition is going to be in the future. We thought about, you know, what we're going to do about those three common challenges, right? So digital transformation is certainly a huge one. The other massive challenge everybody faces is what I call the forever labor shortage. I didn't make that up. That came out last year.

there was a pretty cool series of information around trends for, know, it's collapsing growth of the workforce in North America. In fact, most Western countries where the number of people entering the workforce as a percentage of total population is going down every year. And as we're creating more jobs every year. So we have a huge issue of war on talent, you know, competing for talent. And then, you know, just like how to do more with less, you know, less logistics, less material, less risk.

right, less waste in our processes. So, assuming you've got a picture of that, then after that, you have to become pretty specific about what you're trying to fix and why you're trying to fix it. Now there's a lot of methods out there, but generally speaking, you know, you think about D. Edwards Downing, right, one of the great fathers of modern quality, you know, that helped shape Japan after World War II, taking things that we had developed as part of the war effort and actually helping the Japanese perfect.

that he said, basically, if you can't describe what you're doing as a process, you don't know what you're doing. So digital transformation is people, process, and technology, these three components, right? So it's the technology side of it, but it's the process and the people are the components you have to really understand. And there's a method out there called value stream mapping. For those who are familiar with the Lean Six Sigma Lexicon, it's a very powerful tool. And over the years,

worked with many different methods. And the method I'm using nowadays with customers and share with our meta experts, use with our other customers is mapping the people to process and technology and really understanding, okay, there's a hundred steps in this process. Let's just call it an order entry process, right? And there might be a hundred steps in there, but then where do we have those areas of opportunity for automation and digitization? And that's where the devil becomes in the details.

Who's doing what through these process steps? How long is it taking? What's the first time quality issues we're encountering in the process? Then which, in the current state, which IT systems and sources of information can come into play? So as an example story, I was working with company that designs and builds those metal storage buildings. And the charter was, let's take a look at how long it takes from customer says, hey, I'm going to want one of your buildings, actually having production ready drawings and...

specifications so that we could kick off buying materials, get a manufacturer and build some materials, stood up and all that other good stuff. And I said, well, great, you know, let's just figure out from the sales and marketing side how many different systems we're using, CRM, spreadsheets, different kinds of tools. And then on the back end for the engineering shop, what are all the different IT systems that come into play? And I didn't print that out for this discussion, but there were 27 different systems in play.

in the current state.

Sean Patton (10:55)
I guess it's good thing you didn't print it out. We usually try to keep it about 45 minutes. I feel like we'd be here three hours looking at that document. That's so much to look at, right?

Ron Crabtree (11:00)
Exactly. So basically for each of the tasks we meant what were the primary touches. Every time I do this work I have to touch these systems and what were the secondary touches meaning if something's missing, it's conditional information, I have go back and look. What were the secondary touches? And it was amazing what we uncovered there. That A, you know, we had people touching multiple systems when maybe they should be using one. In fact that was one of the huge outcomes.

So if they determined after really understanding it, we could do a Pareto analysis called the 80-20 rule. And we were able to isolate what 20 % of these steps are consuming 80 % of the sales team's time, that's elapsed time, and then the human work time. So we can get after the speed of the process by looking at elapsed time, get at the cost of the process by looking at the human interface time. And we were able to isolate and begin to pull out where were the hot spots, right? Where were the places where it wasn't right the first time?

And so that was what we first time quality capability inside the process. And we were able to begin to boil that out. And one of the huge ah-hahs for this organization is there was a mindset in the sales and marketing side of the shop that, well, you know, I want to hurry this thing through, you know, so that we can get the quote done and get manufacturing underway. So they would just hurry up and do stuff and push it into the value stream downstream with incomplete or inaccurate information, thinking they were doing a great job. Well, it was creating chaos downstream.

because somebody down the street with them to have to go back, go back to the customer, go back to the field, go back for permitting, blah, blah, blah. It was just this huge rework, like what we call the hidden factory in the mean lexicon. And that led them to the realization that, you know what, we've got to go way up from this process at the CRM level and look at the integrations we're doing to CRM so that these folks weren't going to four or five places to get information to get something stood up for a new order.

that could have all that ported in very quickly to help them make an accurate decision right the first time. And then we created conditional requirements that if certain kinds of information were not correct, it couldn't pass into the process. So that's where the huge get for them was is very specifically, what are we automating and what's the business outcome in terms of return on investment for that speed, reduced cost and first time quality capability are really the common things that always come up in any process.

And that was just like very revealing and really set them on the path of, okay, we have limited time, money, and resources. What are those short sprint projects we can do to close specific functionality gaps? And then we're going to map current state, future state, right? So we have our current state, which is the big mess, and future state that's much cleaner, fewer steps, fewer, you know, I'll call it break fix or something, didn't go right and you have to now go, you know, get information. Here's the thing about information, that it has a shelf life.

Most information and business processes have a shelf life. So today, when I look at this, the information's correct. a month later, because our process got delayed, I have to go back and revalidate all that information's still correct. Things change, right? In other words, I'm giving you a permit, but it's only good for two weeks, right? Or an approval, but if you don't do something within a certain period of time, you've got to go back and redo it. So it goes on and on. So I'll take a breath here and let you.

Sean Patton (14:28)
Well, I think as leaders, you you mentioned the people process technology and in that example, you brought out how all three of those things really have to be synchronized. And I think it was really interesting. You mentioned the mindset, right? Like it started with mindset. It started with mindset of sales and marketing. And to me, it really sounds like it started with

a different mindsets in different parts of the company and a lack of communication between them of, you know, the sales and marketing were in that, you know, sort of a early stage tech, you know, move fast and break things mentality, right? Like, let's iterate, iterate, iterate and go. And, and when you have that large organization, especially in things like manufacturing and right where there's, there are big moving pieces. If there's permits, if there's all these other things going on, you know,

You can't, you can't move fast and break things if you're building a jet engine, right? It's gotta be a little more, a little more synchronized. And so, as leaders, think making sure that we're, we're honoring equally the people and the process and the technology and not saying, you know, technol we'll just get this tech and that's going to be the solution. Cause clearly that, that leads to mistakes. really pulled that out. And before we go future on that, I actually want to ask you, I want to come back to you mentioned the foray.

forever labor shortage. And I think that's a really interesting concept as we think strategically and about the American economy because you know, one narrative that gets pushed is well with AI, with technology, that's going to take away everybody's jobs, right? There's going to be no jobs, right? Because of technology and everyone's going to be out there just like on the street with twiddling their fingers with nothing happening. But what I'm hearing from you and

from the other narrative is we actually have a labor shortage. And I'll tell you that I hear that from a lot of my clients, especially in manufacturing and other places where they can't find it to go off good people. why, what is with these competing messages? Are they true in certain sectors? Is one true and the other not like, what do you make of these two competing narratives about the labor shortage?

Ron Crabtree (16:45)
Well, it definitely depends on your organization and the basis of which you compete. Right. So, you know, there are certain industries that are doing a pretty good job getting out in front of the problem. You know, think about medical devices. had an executive with Medtronic, one of the world's largest medical device manufacturer in my podcast called Medapod. And Michael was talking about all the things that they're doing to try to get out in front of that. And they recognized years ago that, you know, they were going to be shorthanded.

So they're doing all kinds of internal programs to bring people up through the ranks and equip them for those future jobs. They're getting involved with public-private partnerships, begin going into K-12 education, getting people thinking about jobs in manufacturing and making stuff as a real option. So they're doing things proactively to get out in front of that because there's really no choice, right? We've got to develop that workshop workforce of the future.

Now, if you're in a, I'll call it inferior goods industry or something less, less fancy, like, you know, operating garbage truck service, you know, there's a pretty low barrier to entry and, you know, it's easier because, know, immigration, you know, people that are not highly educated can step into those sorts of jobs. So there is a gradient in terms of the industry you're in, the sorts of talent you need to be competitive and how available is that talent.

So there's definitely, depends, okay? But generically, we're all suffering from the same problem. And shows up as, I've described the three things you should do if you're facing a forever labor shortage, and we're not gonna get into this, but basically, what are you doing to become an employer of choice? Well then you get into things like compensation within my geography, how safe is it, how attractive is my company brand?

attracting people to it. I know I'm getting off topic with respect to digital transformation, but it does have an impact on that with respect to how we share information, dispense information, get that out there in social media. There are ties to being an employer of choice and your success in digitization. There are ties to that that you can't ignore. So anyway, I'll pause there and let you get back in here.

Sean Patton (19:02)
Yeah, well, I think it is really interesting to think about what industry you're in.

where new technology is having an impact and how that impacts your labor force and how you train up people, recruit. And I think that this becoming an employer of choice branding, not just in terms of to your customers, but to become a place that people want to work at. this is an area that is really around my passion is

Leaders. I believe that it's, we judge great leaders on the leaders they create, right? We have to be developing people into becoming better, not just good at their job, but better and more capable human beings. Because that's who we need to step in to solve these complex challenges inside digital transformation. And I think it does tie really well. And I love how you brought that up for, you know, how

At the end of the day, it's going to be people solving these problems and technology is still going to be the tool, not the brain at the top, right?

Ron Crabtree (20:19)
Exactly. And I wanted to point out something, I heard something pretty interesting just the other day. And talk about artificial intelligence, right? And there's lots of opinions out there in terms of whether AI is really going to really replace people. And for the beginning, the land is, know, AI doesn't necessarily replace people straight up. Elements of what they do, possibly. But something that came up the other day, and I thought this is very profound, is AI...

plus people are always going to be people without AI. Let me repeat that. People leveraging AI as part of what they do are always going to be people with no AI. So think about that.

Sean Patton (21:02)
It is such a huge component. And as we talk about digital transformation and, and I want to talk about implementation of this, this digital transformation, right? So as we get into managing, we've, we've set across our future state, you know, our, our desired state, if you will, our current state, and then we're trying to implement this plan to make that happen. You you've done this for.

throughout your entire career and now you help companies find people to help them do this. But in our earlier conversation, we talked about the failure rate. I think you had mentioned it for digital transformation, but the failure rate of change management of actually trying to make, we have the whole plan together, but now implementation fails more often than not. Why is that?

Ron Crabtree (21:54)
Well, I was making a presentation at the Michigan Lean Consortium Conference and I had a group of lean practitioners in the room. We spent a lot of time talking about lean enabling technologies, right? Digitization and all that has come into play to do more with less. And one of the exercises at the end was, are the reasons we would fail to be successful? And surprise, surprise, 80 % of the respondents put lack of acceptance of change on the part of people.

being significant contributor to that. So there's some pieces to that we need to be aware of. First of all, our top management folks don't necessarily understand how these technologies work. And as you move down through the work chart, right, you've got the top level, they're typically going to be sponsoring and driving it because they can see the long-term benefits. Then as you move into middle management, there starts to be a big layer of challenges there. You know, I think back to that organization I mentioned that makes the metal buildings, right, storage buildings.

The guy that ran engineering, the middle management guy, he came into that really skeptical and like, okay, I don't even know if I'm like, what I'm going to get out of even looking at all these processes, let alone how we can collapse the time it takes to do this by many, by 50 % and do it 50 % faster because they couldn't hire enough engineers to keep up with the growth. And he came out of it in the back and he was, now I get it. Now I understand.

Right? So middle managers are really important in organizations to bring them in and make them part of that process. They need to be involved with, I'll call it use value stream mapping as a technique. They need to be understand, you need to be able to gather for them and engage them in the conversation around, this is how we operate today. We can't keep doing that. Right? Develop that burning platform. You know, why are we going to do this? And then engage them in envisioning what that future state could be and what's going to be better or different in the future.

and allow them to begin to understand what that impacts them, right? So it's taking away some of their power in some respects, but it's giving them back power to help develop the skills and abilities of the organization for the future. So we need to empower them to be part of driving that change. Because if we fail to get the middle managers involved, you're going to get all kinds of passive, hidden resistance to change, and it's just not going to go well. And then you move down toward the people who actually do the work.

This is where fear comes in. Like, wait a minute, I'm gonna lose my job. That's where losing my job becomes a much more powerful impact on how people behave. again, you gotta start developing, help them understand that the work is going to change. So if you wanna be part of that, you either need to get involved with it or be prepared to move into a different role, right? Be re-skilled into a different role. But we've gotta kinda get out in front of that, because if you need, to the extent you need people to agree to,

and change their behavior to be successful in that digital transformation initiative, the more that is important, the more engaging them in making part of the process comes. And unfortunately, change management isn't sexy. People don't, let's spend some money on change management. That's not how we think. We're thinking about, want the business result, quicker turnaround, lower cost, better quality, better customer satisfaction.

I look at technology as kind of a tool, it's a widget, it's something I can kind of wrap my head around and buy it. But change management is pretty squishy and very few people want to spend money on it. So the trick is I need to spend money on the change management part where it actually matters. So I'm kind of back to that 80-20 rule. Probably 20 % of the workforce is going to give you 80 % of your problems. Can we zero in on where that resistance is going to come from and then what's the root cause for that? If it's fear,

You've got to communicate, you've got to be transparent. You have to come up with a plan. If you're going to have to move people out of jobs and into other kinds of jobs, you've got to help them move down that journey to that future state. For example, I was looking at a defined benefits plan with one of the world's largest retirement services companies. They have had these processes outsourced.

and they acquired another company, they couldn't share work very well between business unit A and business unit B, doing the same sorts of work around defined benefit plans. So we got them all together and we had to map this process out. And then we got to the end, I asked them to do a little task. I said, I want you to go through this process and I want you to add up all the time that's spent in the end-to-end process, verifying quality, right? It's signing off.

inspecting, verification, forms of quality, making sure we're getting it right the first time before we begin writing checks. And they ended all that up, and the shocking thing was, this is where lot of mouths popped open, the 65 % of all the human effort in that end-to-end process was some form of quality. Verification, double checking, know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So that led to a lot of mouths popping open, and from there we had to go upstream and say, okay, what happened early in the process?

that generated the need for those fixes later, and let's go fix it up there, A, and then B, what can be automated workflows, conditional approvals, digital approvals, et cetera, and get it from seven signatures to one. I mean, if you're mandated by law to have, you you can have been signed off on it, then sure, we can keep doing that, but let's go from seven approvals to one and move down through the process. But that wasn't going to be possible, because this is two different teams, two different states.

And they're all worried about losing their jobs, And reduction to workforce. When in fact, it was a growth opportunity, they were going up to win more of this business, they had to do more. And so again, I could go on forever, I'll take a breath here.

Sean Patton (27:53)
Well, you know, it's funny how Mitch, this comes down to clearly communicating, intent and outcome. And I also think there's a huge component here on planning about as much as possible, bringing in your team to be a part of that process. Right. Like for one, generally the, the, the strategic leaders might

might see out ahead and they might know kind of where they need to go and be. But generally the person closest to the tactical problem best understands the tactical problem. And that's one part. There's also the buy-in that that happens. And, know, I, it's funny coming from my military background. I still view things in terms of what we call the three levels of warfare, right? That's how I look at businesses, which maybe is a little extreme, but then we have strategic.

operational and tactical. And, and you have your strategic leaders who are always up and out, right? Looking at the world and where, how is it going to change and what role do we play in the world and how do we engage with that? Right? Whether that's the same, whether it's a theater level war or whether that's, you know, how are we going to better build our, our metal buildings and, and do our retired benefits practices. Right? So they're always up and out and that we need them to be out, someone looking up and out.

And then we need to skip down to our tactical level leaders. As you pointed the people actually doing the work. We need those experts on the ground who are, who are making it happen. And then you mentioned the importance of bringing that middle management up and those operational, I see those as operational level leaders who are able to take that strategic vision and that up and out view and communicate and turn it into, I'm going to use your term, people, process and technologies. So to enable.

the tacticians to make it happen. And it sounds like that whole process is a lens that talking with you now, I'm sort of seeing this change management process that each one of those levels have to be involved. Or it's good. If you only have the strategic people talking, they're going to miss it. If it's just the operations, they're going to miss it, right?

Ron Crabtree (30:16)
Exactly, it's got to be a balanced perspective and you have to have enough connections between them so you can self correct as you go. We talked about this before as know, being military background like you have, it's Sun Tzu, the art of war, the book, the art of war that no plan survives contact with the enemy. know, trying to plan too much, get too far in front of it isn't going to serve you well when comes to digital transformation. We'll bring it back to what we were talking about.

You know, it's the waterfall technique versus, I'll call it a scrum sprint kind of technique, Agile, if you will. Waterfall is, you know, I want to plan out every single function and feature of this whole program end to end and then go program it and launch it versus, you know, the agile method of, know, we're going to define the chunk. We're going to iterate that very quickly and get it launched. Well, we're definitely...

in the latter situation, in most cases when it comes to change management, you've got to move pretty quickly. People's memories are pretty short. And the other thing is, the only constant we have, we face, everybody faces, no matter what, is change. And change is accelerating. I heard something recently that made me really think about it, the number of fortune companies that went out of business in the first 50 years of the 19th century, 20th century.

The percentage of fortune companies went out of business at the last 50 years of the 20th century. And then how many have gone out of business so far in this decade? Scary. right, survival businesses is going, know, survivability is going, it's getting worse, a lot worse. And the rate of failure and change is increasing. So we've got to be able to iterate things pretty quickly and then, you know, giving people a chance to get those bite-sized chunks that can wrap their head around it, iterate through, get to success.

Sean Patton (31:52)
Yeah.

Ron Crabtree (32:10)
success, brute success. And so I call it death by a thousand cuts. There's no big bang here. We've got to chip away at it very methodically and moving toward success with a very clear vision of what good looks like that people can actually understand. People would rather fight you than accept a change they don't understand. That's just human nature.

Sean Patton (32:32)
I love that. I know one of my sayings when I talk to clients is people don't fear change. They fear ambiguity.

Ron Crabtree (32:43)
That's a really good one. That's a real good one.

Sean Patton (32:45)
Right. And so can we, and, and when I'm also in, let me know if I'm, if I'm drawing the right conclusion from what you're saying, or if I'm off base here, I'm hearing that as the world changes faster and faster and therefore, you know, if you don't adapt faster and faster, not able to change faster and faster that your survivability goes down.

And so where maybe a hundred years ago, you could run one set of processes and then when it was time to change, bring in a team, do this big idea, like how are we going to make this giant pivot because this change is coming and make, you know, almost this change, this change management via a moment in time pivot. And what sounds like an order to be successful now, and especially in the future that

this ability, this, if you want to, we want to call it change management, but really I feel like I'm seeing change management and just successful management merge, right? Like it's almost a constant state of change. And so it is that what you're seeing is like these two things are starting to become almost a necessary, the regular state of business is almost change management. sounds like.

Ron Crabtree (34:05)
I agree with that and you're spot on with that Sean. It's integrating good change management practices, the thinking associated with how we're going to execute change and making it part of the fabric of, you think about the Deming Wheel of plan, do, check, act, right? Well, I would expand that maybe a plan, do, change, management, you know, the act, but the plan needs to include change management, right?

before you even start the plan. As you do the plan, you need to be thinking about how we're going to manage the change. As you implement the change, you have to think, as you implement, you're making through change management. And we talked about sustaining and making the process really robust. You have to weave in change management there, because remember, the only constant is change. So what's the mechanism you're going to put in place to cause you to pause, enough to revisit what's different now that invalidates some of our assumptions?

going on out there with people in particular since they tend to be the roadblock that we need to get in front of again. We have new people entering the workforce, don't understand the background of why we did all this to start with and now they're going to fight it. We've got to make sure that doesn't happen. You can't allow atrophy or entropy to be our enemy either.

Sean Patton (35:21)
Yeah, or apathy. Throw another A in there. That's one of my favorite phrases. know, apathy ends all. we don't attack apathy at the beginning, because especially companies that are having success, right? almost the higher you're performing, the better your results that you're having, that is when apathy starts to become enemy number one.

Ron Crabtree (35:23)
there it goes.

Sean Patton (35:51)
And, and apathy in this case toward future change, right? Because if it ain't broke, don't fix it. Well, you know, maybe, right? Maybe, but if you wait till it's completely broke, then you could be kind of behind the times. And, you know, I was thinking about, talk about managing the people and the messaging, you know, up and down. And I really, I really think that there has to be a continual mechanism for.

communication downward of what's coming up and what's happening. And then, yeah, you're stealing words from mouth. And then there's asked that, and then what's the mechanism for feedback, backup. And that is more often than not, I would say the problem that I'm talking with my clients or with other business owners and leaders about it's, when I, when I started having a conversation about a problem, I would say that they're having in the business more often than not.

I'm looking at what's your feedback mechanism, like your regular feedback mechanism, and that seems to be a common piece that's broken the cycle. Do you see that as well?

Ron Crabtree (37:00)
I do. You we think about, you know, becoming an employer of choice. So one of the things you think about is what's our strategy as an organization to be the organization people want to work for? Do we have an officer for that? people officer. I'm not talking under IT or all of the operation, but actually reporting at the board level. You know, do we actually have a strategy? And we really thought that through carefully, the basis for us to compete longer term. And then if yes, that's a good thing.

then how are we connecting those various dots? So what you measure, know, care for what you measure because you might get it, right? So you need to measure the right sorts of things. When we think about, you know, being an employer of choice, you what's your glass door score? What are the average days to hire? What's your turnover rate? You know, what is the general sentiment feedback if we're doing, you know, repeated, I'll call it employee survey activities? What we're asking them to give us feedback in terms of how we're performing as leaders, how we're performing and sharing, you know, vision.

Do you have a chance to say anything? Do you have a say in your work? Little things like that. Are those indicators improving or are they tanking? So you need decent trailing indicators of things like turnover rates, average days to hire. That's well after everything is done. But then you need leading indicators to help you cut off at the pass. Your glass door score is just starting to go south. You can find that out pretty fast. Social media support for automation can be really helpful.

social media sentiment with respect to what we're hearing back from the marketplace, from customers, our employees, our partners. What's that sentiment indicating about how we're behaving as an organization? There are things that can kind of give us red flags. Be our little canary in the coal mine to let us know if things are starting to go south so that we can react to it appropriately.

Sean Patton (38:50)
Yeah, no, that's, that's so true. And I love the, you know, when we think about change management and how this needs to become, it's just become more more important, but yet the sentiment around a lot of maybe people in traditional business definitely have seen it. And I'm sure you have in like the mergers and acquisition world. that's the thing is people, nobody wants to spend money on it. Right. Like, so it's like,

Everyone after the, after the process, you know, happens is looking back and doing an after action review or lessons learned or, and you know, it's almost always like, well, we, could have done better. We should have done more on the people side, the more in the planning side, but upfront, it's like, it's the first thing on the chopping block. And, and you know, we had talked before you had mentioned, I had mentioned that that's something I'm looking at more. And, and you mentioned a tangible.

come up with a tangible business benefit, I think for, for that. So, you know, if you're, if you're the change actor inside your company, or if you're looking at a potential merger and acquisition or your, whatever your role is, but you see this issue, like how do you communicate the need in a way that gets action to put and, leaders to put resources toward this.

Ron Crabtree (40:14)
Well, if the audience is leaders, that's always the critical question. Who is it exactly we're talking about? So if we're talking about leaders that need to be successful at leading digital transformation efforts in organizations, am I understanding the question correctly?

Sean Patton (40:29)
Yes.

Ron Crabtree (40:32)
So, you know, a little bit of what's in it for me question, right? So we have to understand for those leaders, what's their burning platform? Why do they even care? You know, if they own the company, that's pretty easy, right? If their job is to do that, right, and their success in the company, that's pretty easy. if it's not clear to them what good looks like and why I should even care, it's a non-starter, okay? So the first thing is, can we get agreement around future state?

what it would look like at the end of this and are the agendas on mind on that? Or do we actually have competing agendas that can result from that? And then it's just a case of working down through the bite-sized chunks of what does change look like and get it down to something more executable. People don't deal real well, you said it earlier, ambiguity is a real problem. So the more specific and tangible we can make that, for example, order entry instead of taking three weeks is gonna take three days.

Instead of having 30 man hours of effort in that, we're going to have three. And the benefit to that is we're going to be able to grow faster. We're going to have to do it right the first time, so our quality is going to go up, and we're going to get one market share, which means jobs will be expanded, if anything. So if the leaders are nodding their heads and they're truly in their hearts with you on that one, you're off to the races. But if you can't get that depth of clarity, you're going to have problems.

Sean Patton (42:04)
Yeah, the short sprints, the tangible outcomes, the simplicity in the plan that you're talking about, I think is so critical. You mentioned Sun Tzu, the art of war and how the enemy, what we used to say too is the enemy gets a vote kind of said less eloquently than Sun Tzu. What I found along the way too in military and this transition to the business world for me as well,

Is that the simple plan usually wins the right, because the complex plan, there's just so many variables and things are going to change. And so making things simple, tangible, knowing your audience. I think those are just so, so important and you may have, right? I mean, it's so important to have that grander vision of where we're trying to head in general, but that's what you say. That's more of kind of a North star, right? That's more of a direction to head as opposed to a very tangible.

Ron Crabtree (42:59)
Correct. Correct.

Sean Patton (43:03)
you know, sort of sprinting. When you look at that, when you tell someone they need to have a tangible business outcome and a sprint to focus on, what is, how do you measure, how do you measure that? Is that a time? Is that a complexity? Is that a number of tasks? What would you recommend people look at?

Ron Crabtree (43:21)
Well, there's a lot of pieces to the answer to that. But generally speaking, you've got to break it down into a workable, achievable chunk that can actually complete it in 90 days. And I have this opinion that if you can't complete a cycle, 60 to 90 days, you have to start questioning why you're even doing it, because the constants change, right? It's hard to keep people focused. know, there's things going on in the world, in people's lives, et cetera. So if we can't iterate, move through pretty quickly to get to a nice

meaningful piece that we actually accomplished all at a pilot that we can then scale, right? In other words, I can't fix this entire process in 90 days, but can I isolate one particular product or type of water or type of process? Can I get that to demonstrate the result we're looking for? And then we can scale it. That could be that success. Yes, we proved in our actual test that we could accomplish that. And now we can share that information and scale it out.

That way, you're not trying to do fix everything around that process in one fell swoop. You've got to delve into something that can actually execute. And that's typically the advice I give is, we're going to take a look at order entry. We're not talking about the entire order entry process. We're going to break this down to a very specific type of customer, a very specific type of product or service that has the attributes that mimic many things that we do. So everything we can learn from that, we can apply.

to many other products and services. We can move through that very quick iteration to success. I'll call it in a lab, To demonstrate it actually works. then everybody got to see that, they got to experience that. And then when you step into, now we're going to scale that out. It's a whole lot easier and your chances of success go up dramatically.

Sean Patton (45:14)
You mentioned there about, when you look at the whole process and picking the right one that sort of mimics the greater effort so that you get the most bang from your buck on that immediate change. think that, man, I just want to highlight that. I think that's a super important and powerful tool as a leader in any business or whatever organization you're part of. As you start to look at what

what do we do first? Cause I think that's, that's hard sometimes you're like, okay, we've got this big problem. Like what, what's step one, right? What's our first test? What's our first 90 days? And that right there is a great way to look at it. And I, I, that's where I, I, I think when I looked at, and did some research before we had our first conversation and before we did this about meta ops and, and how the people that you bring in,

and the problems you solve for these companies that are looking at this.

You look at the complexity and the speed of change of business and, and it's almost that change in that speed and the need for it and the need for expertise in that area seems to be a unique value prop for MetaOps in terms of what it brings and the solution it brings to companies. Is that, is that true? Is that how you would sort of, is that how you would frame it?

Ron Crabtree (46:40)
Yeah, that's pretty accurate. know, so, you know, I started the company 20 something years ago as a management consulting company in the Six Sigma supply chain, got very active in thought leadership.

developing online learning programs, teaching for various universities, and working with a lot of cruel companies, multi-billion dollar companies, helping them to solve some of these problems. back in 2012, we hit on this thing. You know what? lot of customers will say, I'm not looking for a consultant to come in and tell me what to do. I need someone to come in and just do it for me. Integrate, be part of my team. So we gave birth to the MetaExperts brand back in 2012.

and been building that out. And we're this vetting process people go through to be inside our firewall to go out and solve these sorts of problems. have more than 1,100, approaching 1,200 certified vet experts now mostly in North America. And these are folks that have 25 or more years of experience. They've been there, they've done that. So coupled with that, when a customer says, you know what, I need help. Part-time or a full-time resource, come in and help me get through this, right, solve my problem.

We have what we call our 47 point customer alignment worksheet process. A lot of customers don't really like it when we get started. Wait a minute, we've got a lot of questions. The first and foremost question is what's your situation? What's going on? What are the manifestations that you can articulate around the sorts of problems you have? And then what does good look like? And just force a quality conversation. Here's what I'm dealing with and this is what a good outcome needs to be.

And then that leads us down this rabbit trail of, okay, so for the resource to come in and be successful, what's the pedigree you're looking for? What kind of background you're thinking is important? Which industry do you care about, et cetera? That's pretty easy to figure out. But then we ask a lot more detailed questions. So help me understand, they need to train others. Or do you primarily need a techie to come in and just help you through the technical aspect? Or do you need somebody to actually help you with the change part too?

And by the way, do you need to have somebody that's got expertise and I'll call it process improvement, know, lean Six Sigma type orientation to help you really think critically about the process. Do you need that? So we force these rounds of questions. And then at the backside of that is if we can get quality answers, then our jobs go out and pick which one, two or three meta experts are probably the best specific fit for your situation. And at that point, we can pretty much guarantee that technically,

They're going to handle it. You're down to, do I like the person? Do I feel like they would fit in? Would I enjoy working with this person? Would my team interface well with this person? Because at end of the day, people got to come together. And typically, these experts coming in, they need to be very involved with people. And it needs to work from a culture perspective. so we've had a lot of success, very high success rate, in fitting the results that customers expect.

They'll stick with us to get through really defining what good really is and accurately defining the criterion for the right resource to step into. Now, in some cases, even though you're trying to do all that, we don't know what we don't know. So I've had situations where we've put an expert A in just to help them figure out what they're up against and follow up expert B, C, and D to actually fix the problem. In other words, I really need somebody to help me diagnose. And an aim...

and then somebody to help me through actually implement that. So that happens quite often too. And in some cases we can put together a team. You know, it's a massive supply chain problem. We need all of our supply chain folks to actually be involved with developing this and getting this deployed, all at automation. But the regular day jobs got to be handled. Well, okay, we can provide buyers, purchasing agents, people that can do planning and scheduling, stepping or do those jobs for three months. We should get through a couple of sprints.

and move to your future state and then we'll pull them back out again. That's the power of an interim workforce.

Sean Patton (50:41)
Yeah. And just coming, think you guys do it so well and just it becoming such an important, I think tool in the toolbox for businesses as you know, sort of tie a bow on it as this rate of change, it's just continuing to go faster and faster. And so the ability to have that agile workforce and bring in experts and solve problems quickly and, versus, you know,

bringing in and saying, we're to have to vet for a full time hire a whole new person to bring in on board, get them going. Like by the time that happens to your point, right? The pro the whole problem could have changed. Everything changed. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. So when so, so important, man, Ron, this was awesome. I really appreciate your time today. I learned a ton, you know, from you, from our, our conversations and I hope we get to, we hope we get to do this again.

Ron Crabtree (51:20)
Everything's changed, everything changed. All your assumptions have changed again.

Yeah, I was looking forward to that and it was an honor to join you today. Thank you so much.

Sean Patton (51:44)
Absolutely. All right. You have a great day. We'll talk soon.