Transcript
Caroline:
[00:00:05 – 00:02:31]
The pharma industry is a world where innovation drives success and our passion is to perform for patients. So what the pharma explains why so many of us feel a bit, well, frustrated. We all know the world’s changed in the last few decades, and we also know we’ve responded to these changes, or tried to. In some cases, we’ve been successful. But if we’re honest, there are some areas where, when we look back 20 years, things haven’t really changed that much at all, despite huge, huge investment and effort. So here at Rubico, we regularly wonder, what if it’s some of the less explored depths of our culture, the norms, assumptions and unwritten rules that are slowing our progress and keeping us, in some cases, unhelpfully stuck. Welcome to the What the Pharma? podcast, where we take inspiration from what’s working across our own and other industries and go deep into human behaviour. In each episode, we’ll be talking to a variety of guests both inside and outside the life sciences industry to uncover new angles and ideas for action to tackle the industry challenges that seem most resistant to change. Together, we’ll share experiences, hunt for aha moments and spot clues that will help us unlock different ways to approach some of our stickiest problems. I’m your host Caroline Gosling here at Rubica and joining me is my co host and colleague Harry Malcolm. Without further ado, let’s get into the show. Hello and welcome back to this episode of What the Pharma? with me, Caroline Gosling and my co host Harry Malcolm, who you’ll be hearing from a bit later. This is part two of our episode focused on digital transformation and customer centricity. Be sure to go back and listen to our part one where I spoke with Davidak Herron, Global head of Digital at Roche Pharmaceuticals, for some context and further insight into the themes and discussion in this second part of the episode. Right now, I am delighted to welcome Clement Gavrila, who is the head of digital transformation at Virgin Media 02, who we all know as the British media and telecommunications giant that has been helping us all stay connected. Clement brings a wealth of experience from his career so far and he’s here to offer his insights and expertise on what’s helped and hindered digital transformation in commercial organizations. Will be interesting to see how his views compare and contrast with what we heard from Davidek from Rosh. So let’s get on with the show. Hi Clement, it is lovely to have you on the podcast. Let’s start by just getting some introductions out the way. Let’s hear a little Bit about you and your story and your current role.
Clement:
[00:02:31 – 00:04:39]
Sure. Hi Caroline, thanks for having me. When you look at my profile, it’s a very nonlinear one, but one thing that it’s kind of constant from my background for the past 10 years or so has been change in one shape or another. Whether it was change of my appetite for trying new things or just change in the sense of getting into answering more transformational questions in the areas that I worked in. So today I’m part of Virgin Media 2, very much having played a number of roles within digital transformation for VMO2, and that’s been happening for the past three years. And a little bit before that I used to work in consulting where I’ve worked on transformation projects, turnaround, restructuring. So a little bit rougher topics, but still very much domain agnostic, which allowed me to see how different industries react to change. React to change that is triggered by them as a need to grow, but also triggered by the environment and the circumstances they found themselves in. The need of restructuring, which is a bit more painful for shareholders, employees and senior leadership as well. And before that I used to work also for Discovery Networks and Eurosport and it was more of an internal transformational focus there. And that is answering a simple question of how do we evolve in being closer to our viewers at the time. So moving away, moving slowly further away from the B2, B2C model, closer to the B2C aspect, simply from a value perspective where shareholders see, you know, multiples get higher the closer you are to the end consumer. Right. And before that, a bit of sell side mergers and acquisitions for small and medium UK businesses. So that was very much, you know, a entrepreneur led entity. They’ve built something for the past 10, 15 years. Now they’re looking for the next step, which is a massive change in the way they’re doing business and managing their boards at the time.
Caroline:
[00:04:39 – 00:05:15]
So experienced with change. And a lot of us are sort of quite used now to being buffeted by change and transformation, whether we’re in the world generally or inside big corporations. You’ve landed in telco, which has radically changed over the last decades, both in terms of the product, but also in terms of how it interacts with consumers and customers. What are you noticing about where telco is right now? So what are the big topics? What are the sort of big moments that people are focused on or the challenges that that industry is grappling with?
Clement:
[00:05:16 – 00:06:33]
Well, telco has been changing quite a lot, you’re right. But the important thing is to understand is that the telco products and technology have been changing so all the way from the launch of first iPhone or when we were that era of I have these many free minutes left to call you. I’m going to be charged by the networks if we don’t stop talking to now a world of unlimited Data and now 4G and investments in 5G as well. But it was very much a product led and I think telco has been riding a wave of growth on the back of that for a long time. With that has allowed a slightly degree of comfort because we’re so dependent on telco infrastructure whether it’s mobile or even broadband. And that doubled down during COVID as well. Now what’s happening because it becomes such a critical way of life. It’s almost like it’s a utility provider. Right? We are a utility provider like gas, electricity, water. So there is an element of commoditization, if that’s a word for it.
Caroline:
[00:06:33 – 00:06:34]
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Clement:
[00:06:34 – 00:07:46]
And with that it becomes a bit of, a little bit limiting on how much more can you charge for it, how much more products can you build with it. Anything else that actually will start driving value is what services can you attach to it. So I think the evolution of Telco right now is moving away from that mindset of you know, the 18 months, 36 months contracts for servicing and the occasional price rises that are very much debated and highly regulated into what services do we provide to the end consumer. How do we answer the digital needs of that household, the 24 hour digital needs or the 7 day digital needs? And that is a tough question because you have a lot of players in that ecosystem already. So then it becomes more of a strategic positioning. The players in that ecosystem are global players. You have the hyperscalers and then you start to see how can you actually fit as a highly scaled national player in partnering with global hyperscalers, addressing a local market. That’s where it becomes quite interesting.
Caroline:
[00:07:46 – 00:09:01]
So many streams that I could follow us down from that. Really intrigued by that kind of product led innovation. So and that kind of, you know, a business that has been very, an industry that’s been very successful and almost has not needed to change. There’s been no to date burning platform. You know, things are collapsing around your ears. So you have to change a lot of similarities I think with the pharmaceutical industry there because you know, another very successful industry very much driven by huge innovation in terms of product, medicines, but also noticing some of that commoditization, some of that price pressure that comes from that and having to look differently for how to create value. Super interesting around therefore how those different industries are responding differently. And what you’re saying around, you know, having to go into services but actually in a hugely competitive space and actually looking to find ways to partner as a result. And I think those collaborative partnerships are something that the farm industry has potentially explored a bit. So what are you noticing about where innovation is happening in there? Where are people taking strides forward? Where are the kind of people who are pushing the envelope a little bit?
Clement:
[00:09:01 – 00:12:02]
I think to continue on that parallel with pharma, right, the product LED and the product evolution and the R and D there, if you want to put it that way, whether it’s, you know, releasing a new drug or you know, doubling down on, on the ones that actually are for regular use, you have those multiple brands. So up until now you’ve never had, I don’t know, it’s probably in the last 10, 15 years, probably a little bit more. You know, you only had one or two brands of ibuprofen. Now you have the white label supermarket ones. And you’re comparing branding. Are you brand agnostic? Does it do the job? There’s that perception. Similarly, with broadband or connectivity, you’re having players coming in in a market and really winning specific pockets of consumers. Whether they’re consumers that are very price agnostic but they’re very quality conscious or your consumer that are very price sensitive. You start having these players that don’t even need to own the infrastructure. Right? Well that’s what we call them, mobile virtual network operators. They don’t need to own it. And that translated into a bit of a competition, obviously on a competition on service, on pricing. But also it meant that the consumer becomes much more aware and has the choice, which is a good thing, is always a good thing, and creates a pressure on the model. And the pressures start to translate both on, you know, that limited further uplift. How much more headroom do you have to charge more for services? Sure, you’re always adding more to it and you’re making them better, you’re providing better quality, you’re building upgrades. So arguably you can ask for more from the consumers, but there’s a limit. But your cost base is also growing to some extent. We’ve seen the energy crisis. All these are high consumption infrastructure points. The realization on what drives innovation is actually flipping that product, thinking on its head and moving away from we’re going to build better products, we’re going to actually continue to innovate products. I’m not saying you stop innovation, but you go consumer first rather than product first. And that flip is something that you start realizing that maybe the upgrade is not necessary in this use case. Maybe we need to provide something else because that’s what the consumer wants. And this is, I’m not saying anything new. Other business areas, business models, do that on a daily basis. That’s how they start. It’s in their core, it’s in their DNA. When you’re operating in a business where as its DNA it has always been, we’re going to develop, we’re going to actually dig up this street here, put in fiber and we’re going to provide the best service and the best speed. People will come changing. That is. It takes effort.
Caroline:
[00:12:02 – 00:12:37]
That is a brilliant segue into the next question I had, which is about the implications of some of those that refocusing on the internal workings of the company that you’re with or other organizations and how you’re noticing organizations successfully or perhaps not successfully help people make that transition. Because it’s easy when you explain it rationally, it’s kind of like, oh, yeah, that makes total sense. But we know that humans are not rational, sadly. So what have you observed about ways of working about what’s going on for the human beings Inside Virgin Media?
Clement:
[00:12:37 – 00:15:50]
O2 I mean, like with everything, right, you have sponsors, you have pioneers and you have people that resist change. And it’s not, you know, ill intent or malevolence, it’s simply, you know, the unknown and a bit of risk aversion. It’s also not knowing what best in class or that change looks like. So that’s where you bring in external expertise and not necessarily in the form of, yeah, sure, you have a combination of consulting support where they’ve had that exposure and they know what best in class is, what has worked in other areas. But what you’re also trying to do is bring leadership and leadership thinking. And I don’t mean necessarily only on the executive level or minus one. Right. But you bring leadership thinking and you inject that talent that are probably coming outside of the industry. It actually could be quite an exciting challenge for those individuals because they see it. This is one industry where this type of change hasn’t been done before. We can probably do it here. If we do it here, it’s a massive win professionally in their track record. So that gets them excited. And as well as being a business that probably has the ability to invest versus others that have reached that point in time already. So what has worked is that injection of talent first, then you have to take it in chunks Right. So it’s always, I think there’s an analogy of carving the elephant, right? It’s a well known analogy of you can’t eat an elephant, you just have to carve it in pieces. So transformation, it’s probably overused, it’s probably misunderstood to some point as cutting people’s jobs. It’s not, it’s developing capabilities. Right. To improve your operations or to generate more value, whether it’s to the shareholders, to your customers, to the rest of your stakeholder groups. So as a result, what you have to do is you have to find pockets where you can win that relatively quicker than in other areas and prove the model. You come in with a framework, you come in with a plan, you show it works in one area because the plan will never match the application 100%. You show it works and from that you start building the blueprint and you start reapplying it somewhere else. And that gives you the proof first of all, then the lessons they’ve learned and the blueprint to reapply it so it enables you to scale. And the third one, which is probably the most important one, you win the sponsors, right? So you win people over on saying, I didn’t know, I bought into the concept like you mentioned it, somebody sold me the idea. But hey, it works, look, it’s working in my area and I’ll help you bridge the gap where you’ve got more resistance to that change. So I think that’s. Those are the three things that probably will come out of, you know, carving that elephant into small, achievable targets.
Caroline:
[00:15:51 – 00:16:54]
Yes. Bite size elephant, basically. I just want to go back to you talked about injection of talent and I really want to ask a few more questions about that because that whole concept of kind of inserting a capability in one or more individuals potentially, I think you said, from other industries where they have had that learning and they have understood what works. I think we’ve seen a little bit of that in the pharma industry and it’s kind of potentially starting to grow a little bit, I think. I know, I do know of organizations that are choosing to recruit differently, are changing the criteria, but it’s not perhaps as prevalent as you might imagine. What are the pros and cons of it, I suppose, because for the person coming in, I totally, you know, can be exciting and all of those things, but also there has to be quite a lot of adaptability and sort of a high level of risk, I suppose, on the sort of receiving end of that, especially when organizations are very used to doing things in a, in a specific way and it can be quite hard to imagine it differently. So what are the sort of ingredients that make that a successful strategy?
Clement:
[00:16:54 – 00:18:46]
I suppose first of all, it’s not easy and you’ll have. Not every injection of talent is going to be a success, not every way of upskilling people, it’s going to be a success, but it is a way. At the same time, I think one things that it doesn’t, it’s not an end to. All right, you still need the existing expertise because the current business is working, is still generating value. There’s lovely analogies or sayings that I’ve learned throughout my time here in the UK was, you know, not throwing the baby with the bathwater sort of thing. Right. But effectively that’s kind of it. Right. You’re not trying to replace everyone, you’re trying to retain obviously the expertise because that’s valuable. It’s ip, it’s been growing over years. They’ve seen the evolution of the industry. They know, you know, everything and anything around the topic, around the domain. I guess it’s finding those individuals that are willing to embrace change even with that deep domain knowledge and are welcoming the new talent coming in and are open to a new approach and they can see how that can be transferred into this new or in their domain. There’s also allows an openness to develop new skills, new expertise and it’s not enough just to put a new leader from somewhere else or build a team that has a mix of existing domain and outside domain knowledge, but it’s trying to create an environment and provide them with the tools to actually exchange those ideas, exchange the expertise and see where you can cross pollinate the frameworks, the processes, the tooling, the ip, the own personal ip. They bring with them that idea of.
Caroline:
[00:18:46 – 00:20:00]
Cross pollination and that kind of exchange of expertise is really, really interesting I think. And there’s some things you’re saying that are around kind of mindset and beliefs and those sorts of things that I do want to get into. But on that exchange of expertise, one of the things that we definitely seem to be talking about a lot at the moment is how do you create capacity for learning in organizations? So there’s kind of this having a go, that kind of willingness to try something different, but there’s also the space to practice it until you get good at it. And what we see a lot of the time is, you know, it’s quite easy for organizations to create space for having a try at things. Relatively easy. None of this is easy, of course, but that first go seems to be relatively easy. But the having the conviction to stay with it, to allow people to test and learn, to allow people the space to go from being a beginner essentially in whatever it is, to being, having mastery to being good at it, that seems harder to create the space for. And I don’t know if that’s been similar in your experience or whether you’ve seen organizations who really have, you know, said, you know, it’s going to take us X amount of time to get good at this stuff and we’re going to give you the space to do that.
Clement:
[00:20:01 – 00:23:55]
It depends on what are their pain points and how urgent they are and where are they on that transformation journey. And if they’re forced to be on that transformation journey. Right. And you can think of very macro level or a higher level in the sense of is the leadership and the shareholders in alignment of. We’re having a plan in place and this is how long it’s going to take for us to get on that transformation journey. This is what it entails, and we’re going to start proving that as we go. But there is a buy in of an overarching roadmap, which obviously has to have a degree of flexibility to allow an element of learning and failure. But at the same time, it should provide sufficient commitment to give early proofs that it works, that builds that trust between shareholders and your executive committee and the next level of leadership, because then it allows them that space to say, we trust you to do what you promised to do. Go ahead and do it. What that translates further down into your point of learning and getting the space of it. There is also an element of acceptance between leaders, between peers, and it can translate down to almost individual employees of this new concept coming in, somebody coming in with a different point of view and openness to explore it, openness to accept it, openness to give people the space to do the job they’re asked to do. When you have a new leader in data, for example, if that leader has been hired to democratize data, for example, that has. They’re coming in with an idea of what needs to happen in the next 100 days and they have a roadmap for a few years, they’re aligned with the overall strategy of the business as a leader of that person, you let them to do their job and you trust that they will deliver to what they’ve said because you’re depending on each other for success in a smaller scale. It’s when you start playing around and Implementing more ways of working processes, frameworks like an Agile framework. And I’m not an agile purist by any means, but it’s a way of letting people understand of we’re going to deliver small bits in discrete pieces of work and time, well defined time frame, we’ve got acceptance criteria, it’s fully transparent. Anyone can see what we’re doing. Anybody can join our Sprint reviews, what we delivered, can see our outputs. Our outputs are linked to very transparent outcomes for the business and those outcomes have a link to value and everything translates back. Now, I’m talking about almost a utopia here, but you’re trying to implement that in pockets. So it can work very much on a senior level of that alignment and trust and showing proofs of concepts, working to build upon those. But also at team level, when you start implementing new ways of working, of agile learning, test and learn, you’re exploring things, you know, you allocate time or you build projects or programs that have that allocation of experimentation. Like even now, we’re looking at launching a new initiative, a consumer piece for the consumer, which is something hasn’t been done really before. We don’t know what that would look like. We have a set of hypotheses, we go in and test them in the market in a controlled way, come back, continue to define it. So there is an appetite for that, but it requires kind of transparency, clarity and communication of why are we doing what are we doing? And then a degree of trust from the leadership and an empowerment to actually go ahead and do it.
Caroline:
[00:23:55 – 00:25:06]
And in the way you just described that last example, there’s a real sense of being okay with not knowing so that it didn’t sound like, and you might want to correct me, but it didn’t sound like. This was one of those examples where you had to have every T crossed, every I dotted the Most robust solid 12 months in development business case. Everything is known almost before you even go and see if it works, which is a little bit of kind of our historical baggage. Certainly in the pharma industry it might be the same in the industries that you’ve worked in of like this kind of historical sense that even if we were doing a pilot, we sort of had to know it would work before we tried. Whereas what I’m hearing you describe is being okay with not knowing if it’ll work. And that is, you know, back to the mindset thing. That is a mindset change that isn’t, you know, it’s easy for us to rationalize it, but actually when we’ve grown up in a world of kind of shooting for certainty all the time. That’s how we did business. We got as certain as we could to one where uncertainty is just dialed up to the max. That is quite a big shift. So I don’t know, do you have any experiences or comment on that whole, like the humanness of it all?
Clement:
[00:25:06 – 00:27:13]
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. There’s always a balance, right? Because at some point you’re trying to avoid analysis paralysis like you described it, where you’re trying to avoid engineering, developing for a long period of time and then releasing something that may or may not still be relevant. At the same time, you’re trying to get answer relatively quickly, but make sure you’re forming the right questions because you can end up doing thousands and thousands of trials and tests and trying to answer this and the other thing, and you’re still trying to find hypotheses that work, but take in very carefully the ones that don’t to see how you course correct. And the way I’ve seen it done, as simply as where has it worked before? Is it in a different market, in a different industry? Let’s go and speak with those people. Let’s see if is there a partnership there? What can we take on? What can be reapplied in this market for or for this product? It’s the same. It’s the same approach with the talent injection, right? You’re bringing in expertise from the outside. Then you’re also looking for that partnership, that ecosystem of partners and relying on, on their learnings. And see, because everybody brings something different to the table. You can provide access to a market or you have, you know, access to a specific piece of technology or ip, they’ll have the other component that will complement that. So it’s probably testing hypothesis that may have some evidence of working in different circumstances, in different environments. And that’s what you’re trying to test. This is how I’ve seen it work to some extent of striking that balance between testing something that you know it will work, having that confirmation bias versus, you know, testing everything under the world, or simply continuing to develop to make sure everything is going to be perfect the moment you release it.
Caroline:
[00:27:13 – 00:27:45]
Earlier you talked about this kind of idea of the eating the elephant thing. So going into pockets and then scaling, once you kind of seen that you’ve got some proof of concept and things are starting to work. What drives that scaling? In your experience, do you see more pull? So you see success happening in the these pockets and then you start to see people pulling on that within the Organization or is it more of a, a sort of structured scale that’s a bit more top down? Like where do you see that really working well and getting some momentum behind it most rapidly?
Clement:
[00:27:45 – 00:32:25]
Yeah, absolutely. You have to find the right combination of almost all of the above. Right. The only thing it’s probably less beneficial is tactical work. You’ll be tempted to do tactical implementation of things or tactical solutioning because that will get the problem done and resolved. It’s a combination of things. For example, we’re working on data democratization for VMO2, which is in very simple terms is actually empowering Almost every single VMO2 employee in utilizing data in their decision making process in the right way and in an effective way. And as part of that, on one hand, we found our champions and pockets where that could be done. And we’ve done it in one area and it works and it proves it works. And you know, you see it working and you win people over and that becomes a bit more contagious because you start moving from push to pull. Like you mentioned, at the same time there’s also that senior buy in, right. Where there’s a strategic alignment of this is what needs to be done. And we understand the way that this will be done. We’re buying into this, therefore go ahead and implement it and we’ll make sure our teams will, will do the best they can to help you help themselves. Right. So if I can say that. So it’s a combination of. Now to drive scale, you need to make sure you’re building. Whatever you’re building, you’re building not for the purpose of that particular use case. Sure the use case is important, but you have to think if that use case becomes applicable across the board or across the business. And in doing so you’re already building for scale. That means the downside of it, it might take longer because you’re trying to build it right from the beginning. You’re trying to build it the right way. So it could take longer than a tactical solution. Whereas the simple mic setup that I could give as an example right now, I’ve just, you know, I put a bunch of books to bring my mic closer to myself. It’s a tactical solution. A strategic solution would probably be longer legs for the mic and adjustable. Therefore you don’t have to repeat the same adjustments or the same quick around fixes every single time we need to do this. So it will take longer to implement these longer legs, but you do it once and that’s the whole point. This is something that in certain Environments where pace, pressure, lack of transparency can make this trade off between tactical and strategic extremely painful, almost unacceptable. Because our P and L, our revenue is at risk if we don’t do this now. And the only option is to do this tactical solution. And therefore you have to kind of think pragmatically in saying, okay, let’s do this contract, then we do this tactical fix now. But we commit nothing beyond until we implement the strategic solution. There’s ways around it. Right, but my point being is you have to play it depending on the circumstances and have to implement the combination of. And it’s very much linked to. And maybe we talk later a little bit, but it’s a framework of transformation that I’ve learned more recently. And it spans across four key areas. Right. Very much on the cultural and the mindsets side of things. Then we’re talking about abilities and skill set of the individual, running and building and even the leadership. The next one was actually the processes in place and the frameworks you put in to drive this transformation and to ensure the scale. And then finally, it’s just the technology that underpins everything, right? We need to run a race. Well, we need a fast car. We can have the best skill, we have the best mindset, we can have the right process to run a racing team. But if you don’t have actually a car at all, good luck with that. So they all work in tandem. So whenever you think about this and running in tactical versus strategic scale, you have to run all of them kind of almost on the same time, but at least you have to take all of them. Maybe mindset will be most difficult to change and culture will be the most challenging one. But definitely the systems, the technology as part of that, the structure, the processes within it, and the ability to even upskill the people around it will be critical.
Caroline:
[00:32:25 – 00:33:42]
One of the things I think is really interesting about that capabilities and skills piece is that again, very human thing of. We find it hard to imagine what we need when we haven’t experienced it. And you touched earlier on, you know, we used to be. We had change that was like, here we are at A and we want to get to B and B is very clear. And now B is not very clear a lot of the time. So we’re trying to imagine the capabilities we might need for something we have no experience of yet. And I think that’s really hard for organizations at a macro scale and also very hard for individuals who might be sensing that their role is going to be very different in the future or that they might be asked of things that are outside of their capability but at the same time are not being. You know, there’s no description of what that’s going to look like. And, and you can almost hear it in people’s voices. They’re like, I just need you to tell me exactly what I’m going to be doing in five years time. And it’s impossible to describe. So that kind of, I mean, we touched on it very briefly on change resistance, but it’s almost more than that. It’s a real sort of fear of an insecurity. It’s a real insecurity about your job, about your value as a human, about your identity. That’s really alive. I think for a lot of us it is.
Clement:
[00:33:42 – 00:34:04]
And it’s highly relevant. Right. And it’s an interesting one. It made me chuckle a little bit because it’s very difficult to have a clear, clear path. Right. It’s even more so now. But ask anybody in what, 2015 in the past, where do you think you’re going to be in five years time? I bet you nobody thought about a world pandemic, right?
Caroline:
[00:34:04 – 00:34:04]
So true.
Clement:
[00:34:04 – 00:36:50]
So, yeah, I guess the best thing, and actually there’s another small thing, is a lot of people think that there is an answer out there or there’s someone in leadership that will have an answer. Sure, they will have the experience of having gone through similar things and they’ll provide guidance, but nobody’s going to be able to create clear answer of what that could look like. But one thing that we discussed even before this and we discussed about the book of seven Habits, right? And it’s actually trying to define the end. And I know it’s very difficult, but just starting with that end in mind, it’s the concept of future back. So what is the end state or what is the outcome we’re trying to achieve? What that end looks like, or target, let’s not call it end state, sounds a little bit catastrophic, but what is that target state that we’re trying to achieve? And it’s going to be a little bit blur around the edges, but there are going to be some very clear known components of it. You start there and then you work your way backwards to where you are now. And you can do that on almost every kind of change or situation or project or program, right. If you start defining that first and then walk your way backwards future back, then you understand where the gaps are and how long would it take or how fast you need to accelerate and how much money you will need to do to make that happen and to explain it to your leadership and saying, if you want this done in three quarters or in six months, this is the target state. We’re all in agreement. Yes. Or this is 60% of the target state of what we know now. We’re all in agreement. Yes. This is where we are today. We’re all in agreement. Yes. You can see the gap. Understood. How fast do we want to get there? Six months time. Okay. These are the activities we need to do and this is how much it’s going to cost us. And there’s going to be a bucket load of uncertainty and risks that we’ll have to mitigate along the way. But we will find out as we go and we evolve. You can almost apply that on personal, professional level. Right. Micro level of. Okay, what skill sets, what profiles do I want to build in the next five years? What are the skills that I want to show or master? Not the title I want to have, not the company I want to work for. What do I want to master? And then work your backwards there. And then you start figuring out what are the best circumstances that you need to put yourself in. The best opportunities you need to explore to achieve that. Then it removes. It creates some level of clarity, some level of control, but it will remove the idea of, oh, I need to know every step of the way, or we need to do these activities because I know for sure it will lead me there. Keeping that end in mind. Right.
Caroline:
[00:36:50 – 00:38:04]
I love that because it is such a beautiful way. So, so often in change, people feel done to. You know, the reality is for most of us, the change happens. It’s decided somewhere else a lot of the time. And it can feel like we’re just sort of pulled along or we have to exit. You know, we either go with it or we exit. And that’s the choice we’re presented with. And in that situation, it’s not surprising we kind of go into stasis or resistance or whatever it is. But just in the way you’ve described it around making it a choice to master certain skills, you immediately take some control and power back. You’re not saying I have to learn something different in order to keep my job. You’re saying, actually I’m choosing to get better at some stuff that I think is going to benefit me and the wider organization. And I think that reframe, you know, we touched on mindset a fair amount of time. But that kind of ownership of how you, you feel yourself about change is really important. That kind of. Actually I do get to decide How I feel about this opportunity, or whatever it might be is really important. Empowerment is banded around, isn’t it? But it is a meaningless word. But when you take that example, you can immediately see how people can take power for themselves.
Clement:
[00:38:04 – 00:40:37]
And I’ve seen it when back to your point, because you mentioned something quite important which reminded me of something of actually when it works, when it doesn’t work, there are multiple instances where change is done upon. Whereas on an organization or on a group of, or an area of the business, it’s done to, let’s call it them, it’s done to those areas, not necessarily people, because rarely change is targeted at people per se. It’s more targeted at capabilities that the business needs to evolve or change. Obviously where there’s the biggest risk of failure is exactly as you describe it. When somebody sits in a room sometimes it could be, I used to be one, a group of consultants devise something and then try to implement it across the business. Where it works or where we’ve seen it work better is when actually you provide the framework, but then you give the leadership teams underneath and you can go a few levels down because you have leaders across the business, depending on the size of the business, obviously. And you give them that framework and ask them to be part of designing that change. That’s where you have expertise around the table. They know their areas, they understand there’s a new direction of travel that’s being proposed. How do we make that happen? And they probably might need some guidance or a structured way of building or designing that change. And they’ll go ahead and they’ll design it and they’ll also think of working together different areas. And we’ve seen it, I’ve seen it in my past. And you have commercial areas of the business working with operational areas of the business, knowing that change will have to happen in both areas. And they will sit together and define it and define their interfaces, define their ways of working and really realize they might not realize the targets that probably very, very senior leadership might have wanted. But they co design, they’re part of that change because they bought in into why they’re doing it. And I think that’s a key area where we sometimes miss because we want to do change faster, because we want to implement it, we want to make sure it’s consistent and coherent. And it spams from one place. It’s not a bad thing, but it’s a way of how do you bring people, not necessarily just on the journey because they don’t have to be passengers, but Actually be part of the driving cohort.
Caroline:
[00:40:38 – 00:42:16]
Yeah. And that is a really important difference, I think, because if they’re being brought on the journey, it’s just another way of saying we’re going to carry you along in the river that we’ve created versus giving people some choice, not just because it’s a nice thing to do, but because actually, to your point, they have expertise and experience and a viewpoint of the organization that is unique to where they are sitting. That someone in a project team or someone on the executive team does not have that same perspective because of the roles that they’re playing and that kind of drawing on real life experience. I think we sort of know it so well rationally, and yet it’s quite rare still that it happens, really happens in practice. And one of the reasons I hear people saying, and it’d be interesting if you’ve also heard this, is that, oh, well, we don’t want to, you know, we don’t want to cause distraction in the organization because of what you said earlier. There’s this business as usual performance train that we’re on, and we can’t divert that. So let’s just take a small subset of people to go and worry about that big transformation thing over there. Everybody else, if you could just carry on with business as usual and not rock the boat. But I wonder how effective that ever is, to your point, and also whether it’s another example of us, you know, people are going to be distracted by change. It’s whether it’s how you manage that distraction so that people can get back into the flow. And not knowing is the biggest distraction of all. Like, our people are not stupid. They know something’s going on in that closed room. And so their half of their brain is constantly wondering what’s coming next. Whereas if you’re open about it, it’s less of a distraction, arguably.
Clement:
[00:42:17 – 00:44:28]
Absolutely. You’re spot on, Caroline, because you will still have to start with a small cohort of SMEs and make sure they represent correctly different areas of the business. Because, yes, you still try to minimize the distraction in the business as usual, making sure that still runs and you’re not impacting performance there. But at the same time, you’re right in any way. You’re going to have a rumor mill. And anyway, people will hear things, will understand things, will see things happening. Right. So it’s all around how do you communicate that? How do you build transparency? And that’s something that I’m yet to see it being mastered in a perfect way, almost perfect. Way that still has gaps. And yeah, I think the people that will master that very, very well will earn quite a bit of money in doing so. Because it still is disruptive. I mean, it’s change. Its transformation will always be disruptive to some extent. And it’s very much. You still have that separation of some groups preparing, designing that transformation. But guess what? Most of the doing will still be done by the same people running, operating in a business today. So it’s, it’s an. It’s an element of timing, it’s an element of communication. Actually, it’s change management, if you think at the core of it. Right. So how is that being implemented? Now, that being said, you will still have people that just don’t want to be on the journey. They’ll do anything possible to maintain the status quo because they believe or they believe that’s the right thing, or they don’t want to believe there’s an alternative there. And it’s unfortunate. It’s the nature of the business. And those will be the ones or the areas that will probably be left a little bit behind and they’ll have to evolve into something else or transition out. It’s with anything. Right. But yeah, I agree with you. I don’t think there will be a world where everybody will get involved, but there will be a world where everybody get better informed and more clear of what that means. And they might have a way, or they will most likely have a way to go back to that original point of building that empowerment of changing with the wave. Right?
Caroline:
[00:44:29 – 00:45:15]
Yeah. So just thinking about not just your most recent experience, but all of that career in change and transformation and seeing it from different angles and across different industries and thinking about the sort of less obvious things that help or hinder change to happen, especially in maybe in the digital space. What are the one or two things that you would absolutely hang your hat on that you would say? These are the two things that I absolutely think are critical ingredients. They might not be, they might not be tangibles even, but they are two things that we’ve got to get right, or one thing that we’ve got to get right that might be sort of less obvious to people who’ve not been involved in transformation as you have.
Clement:
[00:45:15 – 00:49:44]
I’m going to give two things that I believe are and I’m sure people will fight against or will suggest otherwise or will come up with better ones. And I’m open to change my opinion. The one, I’m going to start with the boring one and it’s the obvious one. It’s actually coming back to value. And this might sound very crude, but it actually removes a little bit the emotional discussions and brings a little bit more clarity in the why and in the prioritization on the how and so on. Is what value are we trying to create by doing this? Whether it’s value to our shareholders in many businesses, they’re for profit businesses, let’s not kid ourselves. Or value to our customers in the products and the services we’re providing, or if it’s a. A different type of organization, value to our trustees, to our direct stakeholders that are impacted by our initiatives, but really coming back almost to as much as possible to actually the value that you’re trying to drive, the value you’re trying to change and put a dollar or a pound sign to it as much as you can. Because then it becomes very clear of where that sits and it becomes very transparent and we remove the conversation around my area is more important than your area or my I believe this strongly than you do. That’s absolutely fine. We can still have those debates. But the numbers won’t lie. I’m sure there’ll be a little bit of backlash on treating people as numbers. I’m not saying that. I’m saying when there’s a discussion on value, whether you put employee retention or employee satisfaction, you can link it to productivity and value as well. That becomes a very clear, tangible, understandable at all levels, whether it’s from shareholder all the one down to your end, consumer of the why, a way to measure the why and measure the realization of the why. The second one is actually people. And by people, I mean you have in your team people that have probably never done this before, never done change properly before, and they’re embracing it and they’re actually becoming your stars in your team. And what I’ve seen it actually work very well is you almost forget that individual’s role. You need to look at them as your agent of change, your transformation champion, and look at where the team would benefit from that individual, where the organization will benefit from having that individual play different roles irrespective of their job title. And sure, if you can have that discussion of one to one of. Is this part of your development plan? Do you want it to be? Your role is this. And your job description is this. It’s not throwing more on their plate, but just having that flexibility of saying, I have this individual here, they’re my head accountant in the organization. But they actually are best of understanding how to change a process and how to win stakeholders over. Like how do I empower that individual to do more of that while bringing support for him to enable him to be less invested in the day to day training a team to do what his or her job was and that becomes more of an agent of change. And then you start have these little rock stars that can kind of storm and form around specific topics that you do. And we’ve seen that working. But that means you need those individuals are very not easy to find. But also you’ll find them in the most surprising places and give them the comfort that the flexible, dynamic environment that you’re creating around them doesn’t put them at a risk of dissipating from their career path or not gaining what they’re looking to gain. Just making sure that they’re not doing this temporarily and once transformation is done, they’re gone. Given that framework, that environments, the confidence, the empowerment, and actually placing those people as often as you can and move them as often as you can into different areas to show what good looks like. I think those are the two things. One is a more conventional, straightforward, boring way on value. The second one is probably a little bit more unconventional. It requires to be a bit more tactical in approach, but not tactical in solutioning. Right.
Caroline:
[00:49:44 – 00:50:53]
I love that. You know, I hear what you’re saying about the first example being more conventional arguably. But I also think it’s really rare that it’s done well. So it’s again one of those things, we rationally know it. We know about, you know, defining the benefits you’re trying to realize up front and then making sure you’re tracking that benefits realization over time and aligning everyone up. And also to your point about it’s not about being inhuman because clarity is kindness. I think it was Brene Brown who gave us that juicy chestnut. Sometimes the dancing around the edges of what we’re shooting for actually really has a negative impact on people. And then the second I really got an image of kind of these rock stars, I think you called them, being unleashed. So it’s less about having to add stuff into their capability. It’s more about removing the constraint around them that’s, you know, based on pigeonholing them in a certain way or, you know, only giving them a certain territory to operate within. And I think that idea of removing constraint, getting out of people’s way and taking away the breaks and the barriers is something that’s definitely worth us all exploring. So much of change, we try and add stuff in. Sometimes it’s about taking stuff away, taking.
Clement:
[00:50:53 – 00:51:11]
Stuff away or just clearing the path for someone. Right. Sometimes I just have to play the role of protecting that individual and continuing to what they’re planning on doing and break, you know, just filter out the noise. Just not let the noise hit that person. So yeah, it’s, it’s a combination of absolutely.
Caroline:
[00:51:11 – 00:51:23]
Clement, thanks again for joining us and sharing your incredible insights and perspectives. New industry for me. So really loved hearing your experience and some different stories. It was great to have some time with you today.
Clement:
[00:51:23 – 00:51:26]
Likewise, Noah, thank you very much for taking the time.
Caroline:
[00:51:26 – 00:51:53]
Okay, so two incredible conversations with two very experienced leaders in digital transformation across different industries. So much to take from both of those chats. Luckily I do not have to distill all of that alone. I am happy to introduce you all now to my co host and colleague Harry Malcolm to help break down all of that information and wisdom from Davidec and Clement into some so what’s and what ifs. Hello Harry.
Harry:
[00:51:53 – 00:52:06]
Oh, so very lucky. Hello Caroline. Hello listeners. All right, Caroline, you recently spoke with Davidec, Getrosh and Clement at Virgin Media O2 about customer experience. What did you notice? What did you learn from the conversations?
Caroline:
[00:52:06 – 00:54:51]
I think the first thing that struck me was actually how much commonality there was between the two different worlds. So pharma and telco and there’s some obvious stuff around they’re both, you know, a lot of big corporates and we get a lot of similarity in those big setups anyway. But I think the sort of big commonality that struck me is they’ve both been hugely successful industries historically and almost had this kind of victim of their own success sense of there hasn’t just been an impetus to change so that there isn’t that burning platform that some other industries have faced, but that both industries, or certainly from this conversation are now or have been for a while, really having to force themselves to rethink everything from their business model to how they add value to who they recruit. And I think that’s really interesting when organizations choose to transform because of things they can see coming rather than things that have forced them to change because they have seen performance decline, for example. So I thought that was quite interesting. The three themes that really stood out though in the conversation and we were focused on kind of customer experience and digital transformation in a broader sense. But the real three things that they both talked about were really dialing up the outcomes and value focus. So really getting specific and clear on what you are shooting for and what that looks like. So that was one, there was also one around scaling but linked to this kind of tension between having an aspirational vision. We can talk about vision statements a bit, maybe, so this aspirational future state, but actually making it doable for people and breaking it down into something people can actually get a sense of and know what it looks like instead. And then using that as a springboard for scaling so things not getting stuck in experiment phase and how you actually get to it, becoming business as usual, which we used to call a lot embed. But I think scaling is probably more accurate based on the conversation. And then the third chunk was around this kind of organizational capability and individual capability and how those two things sit next to each other, whether it’s leadership capability or specific new skills or new things that we need to bring into organisations. So this sense that you get a good idea of what capabilities you want to have at an organisational level, but then there’s some sort of disconnect sometimes between then getting people, I hate this phrase, but on the bus in terms of their own development and the individual capability and it feeling done on to them, which I thought was interesting.
Harry:
[00:54:52 – 00:55:52]
Nice. The thing you said there about the pilots, I had a conversation with, with Alex Giorgio Miller at AstraZeneca A couple of weeks back and he was like, we’ve got more pilots than EasyJet. We don’t need anymore. Stuck with me. I also totally recognise a thing about the going being a bit too good. You know, I worked in energy for a long time and that was definitely a fat and happy situation. And it wasn’t until there was some change in the rules of the game, be that from policy or just other shifts in the market which started to force their hand. And I’m sure it’s the same in telco. They talked about. Clement, talked about new entrants coming in. They don’t actually have to own physical infrastructure. I’m sure that wasn’t a choice by the incumbents. Again, that’s kind of a change of the rules. And how much of that is happening in pharma is less clear? Definitely in the wearables and maybe on the more med tech side of life sciences, but I’m sure it’s happening in pharmaceuticals as well.
Caroline:
[00:55:52 – 00:56:15]
Yeah, yeah. That whole kind of barriers to entry thing was very alive historically in both of those industries and still is arguably in pharma. Really hard to set up a new business in that space, but it does feel like that’s being eroded. And we definitely heard that about the telco industry. That that was just, you know, you were no longer digging up the street to put infrastructure in and you had to totally rethink who you’re competing against.
Harry:
[00:56:15 – 00:56:22]
But people that are in the organizations, that are used to digging up the infrastructure, still want to do that. You know, that was their core job.
Caroline:
[00:56:23 – 00:56:37]
Yeah. You know, that whole thing about my value is I’m really good at digging up the road. And the huge amount of investment people have put into doing that sort of work and then being told almost overnight, well, we don’t need that anymore, is painful.
Harry:
[00:56:37 – 00:56:55]
I mean, I’ve got the image of somebody in their high vis jacket out in the street and a manager coming and going and. Well, now actually, we need you to go and interview your customers about their needs and their wants and talk about digitalization of the service. It’s just a different kettle of fish.
Caroline:
[00:56:55 – 00:57:34]
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And that’s sort of what I was pushing on with that. It’s a great example of the difference between a decision to create different organizational capability and then the reality of how that impacts on the individuals. And I think historically we’ve kind of tried to train our way out of that as a problem. So it was just about more training. We could just train people with different skills and then they’ll see the benefit and then they’ll join. And that maybe hasn’t always been to our benefit, hasn’t addressed that fundamental challenge of the disconnect between what we want aspirationally as an organisation and what individual humans within the organisation might want or need.
Harry:
[00:57:34 – 00:57:49]
Yeah, I mean, it’s massive and the timescales involved, but at the individual level, it’s taken, as you’ve said yourself, you know, give a training course or two and then an expectation that you can do a totally different job. That’s not going to happen at the same way that a big organizational capability is not going to shift quickly.
Caroline:
[00:57:50 – 00:58:31]
No, exactly, exactly. And we talked a bit with Davideck on Space to be rubbish for a while. So how do we think about really contracting and overtly contracting with individuals with teams, that it’s okay if you’re learning something that’s quite a different type of skill, it’s okay to not be brilliant at it on day two? Yeah, and I think we sort of know that. Of course we know that intuitively, but it’s not very overt in the way we set people up for success. And so I do wonder if that leads people to be, you know, the assumption is, if someone hasn’t told me, I can be rubbish, I have to be brilliant. And that’s quite stressful if you don’t know what you’re doing.
Harry:
[00:58:31 – 00:58:53]
And particularly now if you’re. I’m thinking if you’re identified as a high performer, you might be one of the first ones that’s kind of asked or put in a position where you need to have that stretch, try something new. And they’re the people that are really used to being good at their job. Yeah, they’re really good at it. And now you say nah, well, can you be rubbish for a bit? Yeah, that’s tough, that’s hard. Yeah, yeah.
Caroline:
[00:58:53 – 01:00:00]
That’s about identity and everything. And actually again, victim of own success. But I don’t know about you, most of the people I meet in pharma are pretty darn good at what they do. And I don’t know if you would officially call them hack performers, as you say, whatever that means, but most people are at that end, I would say, of the spectrum. And so it’s quite common probably for people who, again, macro level, we’ve been successful for a long time, what’s the impetus for change, but also individually been successful doing things in a certain way. What’s the impetus for change? Especially when we can’t really describe well yet because we don’t know, we genuinely don’t know what they’re heading towards. This is the job instead. It’s not like you’re a bus driver and now you’re going to be a train driver and we can imagine what that looks like. We don’t have the tangible frame of reference yet as an industry of what that future state is, so why would you almost want to pull towards that? And then it becomes reliant on individual motivation and intrinsic motivation and a desire to learn and all great things, but we don’t always encourage them, maybe as well as we could now.
Harry:
[01:00:00 – 01:00:20]
And you talked with Davidek about carrying the bag and often times gone by the manager had done the job themselves, they’d carried the bag and now they are in a position of leading into a unknown and asking other people to kind of walk into the unknown, maybe more than they’re doing themselves even.
Caroline:
[01:00:20 – 01:01:31]
Yeah, and that does fascinate me, that whole thing of. And I don’t know if it’s true of other industries, people might want to tell us, but that whole thing of where it’s such a pace of technological change and we know we talk about this all the time, the pace of change like never before, but the implication of that is, is a bit like with our children, we’re having to lead people through stuff that we have no experience of ourself, so we have to Be really in touch with empathy and really humble about knowing we don’t know what it’s like actually to do that in that way. And so the space for jfdi, you know, I’ve been there, done that, earned my stripes, and now I think that space is quite narrow in terms of how we lead through this. And I think there’s much more opportunity in a sense of saying, yeah, let’s work it out. We’re going to have to all bring different aspects and perceptions to this. I’ve got strategic viewpoint as the leader and you’ve got a different one because you’re closest to the customer. And we’re going to have to work this out together. But there isn’t a weird power dynamic where one person’s wise and has been through it all and the other person isn’t. Nobody knows the answer. And I think that is really intriguing.
Harry:
[01:01:32 – 01:01:46]
One of your other themes was about visions, which I’m not going to ask you to comment on visions. I know how long we could be here. But the breaking down visions into dooble chunks and the scaling bit of it say more about what you noticed about that.
Caroline:
[01:01:46 – 01:03:13]
So I think Davidet brought it up, but Clement touched on it as well. This idea of, you know, we want to take people on a journey and our sort of learning in change is to kind of give this kind of compelling narrative of a future state and then people will sort of lean towards it and then there’s a burning platform that they’re running away from. But what in this situation where that vision is, you know, even if you’ve written an amazing vision, even if you have, it’s still quite far out by its nature. So I think what I really notice in organizations, and we touched on this in the conversations, is what people are really looking for is a sort of viable instead. So just help me understand how you want me to be different tomorrow or next week. And that tangibility is really hard because back to the thing, we don’t know what it looks like. So the example in pharma would be like the future role of the rep. And there’s some great language around orchestration and. But it’s very rare that you find someone going, yeah, so that job next year we’ll be doing these things with enough tangibility for people to go, oh, okay, yeah, I get that. And it’s okay to not know the answer. But I think we get in our own way if we don’t help fill that gap. And it can be part of the conversation. You know, hey, salesperson, let’s design that together would be a way of doing it. But without that tangibility of what the near term change is.
Harry:
[01:03:13 – 01:03:14]
Yes.
Caroline:
[01:03:14 – 01:03:20]
It’s almost impossible for people to get on board because they don’t know what they’re getting on board with. Yeah, it’s too wispy.
Harry:
[01:03:20 – 01:03:59]
Come across this plenty of times as well. An organization where there’s got this, this vision that’s out there, that is, is so far away and there’s an expectation that you’re going to do loads and loads of work and then at some point you will have arrived like you will have achieved. You’ve come to this visionary place as opposed to right now. What do we need to start turning up and turning down? Yes, you’re not going to probably bin a load of job roles straight away, but those jobs need to evolve and the experimentation about some of the things that you might want to. To turn up a bit more and turn down a bit and so on. And that’s less scary. Right. You just go, what is the most important thing for us to be developing right now?
Caroline:
[01:03:59 – 01:05:05]
I think so. And I think what you’ve really opened up there, Harry, is that asking a different question gives you potentially a different answer. And that whole thing about scalable, I think Clement talked about like building the anticipation that you’re going to scale into the use case or the pilot or the experiment or whatever language we’re using. Because I think sometimes we try and carve out this little. So I may say make it tangible, but it also has to look at the whole system. It has to be a microcosm of the reality that people are exposed to. Otherwise what happens is it just becomes a project. So you do a project, then you’re like, well, that worked, that’s brilliant. But it was in this rarefied environment that wasn’t real. So then when you try and scale it, you start bumping into all of these constraints that exist in the system outside of that experiment. So if you really want to do an experiment that’s going to give you learning, and that’s the different question I think is how can we learn quickly rather than how can we answer whether this works or not. We just end up with these experiments that then when we try to scale them, they just don’t work because they’re taken out of real business.
Harry:
[01:05:05 – 01:05:06]
The context. Yeah, totally.
Caroline:
[01:05:06 – 01:05:16]
Yes. Yeah. We’ve literally done them in the lab and then we try and put them in vivo and we’re like, that turns out humans don’t work in that way or whatever it is.
Harry:
[01:05:16 – 01:05:34]
Yeah. It’s the same thing as, you know, the bee in the bonnet we have about training courses and training. Take people out of their working environment, you know, get them all hyped up on new possibilities and skills and so then put them back in the system, which is totally different. And then it’s organ rejection.
Caroline:
[01:05:34 – 01:05:35]
Yeah, yeah.
Harry:
[01:05:35 – 01:05:39]
Or they’ll just snap back to what they were doing beforehand because it doesn’t work then.
Clement:
[01:05:40 – 01:05:40]
All right.
Harry:
[01:05:40 – 01:07:24]
We’ve covered quite a bit of ground in this conversation and we started out looking at the challenges and opportunities of customer experience and digitalization. But I think this is about something else. It’s something we’ve touched on but not yet nailed down. I think it’s about a lack of precision. Bear with me a minute. Organizations are constantly setting off on like great quests to transform, an agile transformation, a patient centricity transformation, a, a digital first transformation, all of these fantastic sounding things. I think all transformations are basically the development of new capabilities. Right. So in a customer first transformation in the future, a company may want to have the capability to understand customers better and to be able to develop and then deliver products, services, whatever, to meet those needs in the best way they can. And because they believe that will bring them commercial success. That all sounds like really logical. And the problem is that it’s all too poorly defined. So the future state is some like woolly vision of our account teams work in partnership with our customers. We’ll have all heard that and they go, okay, so even if we get a little bit more precise and we add something like, and they’ll do that throughout the product lifecycle, like what the hell does that actually mean? Yes, like a customer’s going to be sitting in your office, are they going to have decision rights? You know what happens when they go, well, we want this feature. And you go, well, that’s too expensive. Who is actually getting to decide that kind of thing? Are they genuinely involved in it or not? So that’s problem number one. Number one is like they don’t have that same picture of where they’re trying to get to. And then the second is that the capabilities to even get to that future state, woolly or not, haven’t been defined either. And it can’t if you don’t have.
Caroline:
[01:07:24 – 01:07:37]
A clear vision or they have been defined, but at the same woolly level. So they’re like the capability we want is, is like that sort of circular chicken and egg thing of like, we want to be more customer centric. So the capabilities we need are customer centric capabilities.
Harry:
[01:07:37 – 01:07:38]
Customer Centricity.
Clement:
[01:07:38 – 01:07:39]
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Caroline:
[01:07:39 – 01:07:43]
Or the mindset. We need a customer centric mindset. Okay, well, how do we get one of them then?
Harry:
[01:07:43 – 01:08:11]
Yeah. And everyone’s going, yeah, yeah, yes, absolutely. That. It’s that thing. Great, let’s go for that. And brilliant. And so because they haven’t really, like, probed it and tested what they mean by that around the organization, individual capabilities they want, they actually might need to rearrange processes, or you might need people excellent in design thinking, but because they haven’t had those discussions and got to that degree of precision, it ends up being that people just get sent on a training course for customer centricity or something. And that doesn’t change anything.
Caroline:
[01:08:11 – 01:09:04]
Yeah, I’m totally with you. I have seen this. Well, we’ve all seen it. Everyone listening will have seen it. Of you have this really exciting vision that people can all agree to, like, it’s impossible not to be excited about it or a compelling narrative. And we know how I feel about this. We can talk about those another day. Compelling vision of the future. La la la la. Super aspirational. We all get super ambitious. We’re so excited. This is where we’re heading. And then when it comes down to brass tacks, everyone goes, ooh, oh, we didn’t realize it involved that. Oh, do we have to stop doing that now? Oh, hang on a minute. And everybody rails back, rail back, rail back, rail back. And you see it all the time. And I don’t think it’s because people can’t imagine more specificity or precision in the future. Like. Like we work with people who are way cleverer than us, who have way better knowledge about what the organization needs all of the time, and they are super able to define that.
Harry:
[01:09:04 – 01:09:06]
So why don’t they do it then?
Caroline:
[01:09:06 – 01:09:17]
Well, I think because. So my theory is. Is because it’s really scary. It’s super exposing. It is our deepest core of vulnerability. If we pin our colors to a flag.
Harry:
[01:09:17 – 01:09:18]
Yes.
Caroline:
[01:09:18 – 01:09:45]
If we say, that is what I’m shooting for. So it’s not that it. You can’t picture it. Although it does take sweat. And some of it is effort, because it’s really effortful to really imagine the future with precision. It’s much easier to have a sentence, frankly, than a detailed vision of the future. But mainly I think it’s because it’s really scary and fear is behind it. Theory is underneath everything we do as humans, isn’t it? We’re either, you know, motivated towards something or we’re frightened of it, basically.
Harry:
[01:09:45 – 01:09:45]
Yeah.
Caroline:
[01:09:45 – 01:10:10]
And I Think it’s fear, but if you imagine. So we’ve just come out of the Olympics, Paralympics. We talked with Davidek about sport and he was obviously an elite sports person himself. Can you imagine, though, an athlete going, oh, you know, someone’s interviewing them, so, you know, what’s your hope for your future career? Oh, well, I’m just going to be. I want to be really medal centric. I’m going to be medal centric. No, that would never happen.
Harry:
[01:10:10 – 01:10:12]
Performance centric. Love it. Yes.
Caroline:
[01:10:12 – 01:10:58]
Yeah, it would never happen because what they do brilliantly is they have a very specific and very detailed. And we all know about athletes using visualization, but they have a very precise vision of what it is they’re going after. So they are going to win a gold medal in the Olympics in Paris at the 800 meters in a time of whatever it might be. And that’s the commitment. But that is so brave to put that out into the world or even to say it to yourself. That is super brave. And I think it’s really hard for all of us working in big organizations where we’re trying to develop our career and we’re trying to please shareholders and we’re trying to please our employees to dig deep and go, yeah, this is it. That’s what I’m going after.
Harry:
[01:10:58 – 01:11:00]
Yeah, it’s really clear then if you, if you’ve made it or not.
Caroline:
[01:11:00 – 01:11:01]
Yeah.
Harry:
[01:11:01 – 01:11:07]
Like, you can’t say, I’m going to jump 8 meters. And if you jump 7.6, kind of fudge it. Like, it’s, it’s all there for everybody to see.
Caroline:
[01:11:07 – 01:11:09]
You’ve either done it or you’ve not.
Harry:
[01:11:09 – 01:11:34]
Yeah. And if we keep on that kind of sports line and the athlete and their team get, like, really ruthless about choosing the things that will help them to achieve that, they don’t say, oh, well, let’s just keep doing the rehab exercise that we did last year, even though your foot is healed. Or like, let’s do a few more focus groups to ensure we have the right wording for that goal. Like, they really put their effort behind the things that are going to make a difference and cut the things that definitely aren’t.
Caroline:
[01:11:34 – 01:12:22]
Yes, yes, yes. And they don’t hang on to them just in case. So they don’t say, well, I’m going after 800 meters, but I’m just gonna keep doing some sprint stuff. Like, clearly, I’m at the edges of my knowledge about running now, but I’m keep going to do the sprint stuff just in case I’m not very good it turns out 800 meters, they’ve got that kind of single minded. And when you see that happen, when you do see organizations do that, single minded, super precise. They are super successful. Patagonia, brilliant example. I mean they’re lauded for lots of reasons but one of the things they are really good at I think is being, being super clear and letting go and disconnecting and shedding the stuff that is not in line with that. Really shedding it when. Even when it’s painful, even when it hurts them to do it.
Harry:
[01:12:22 – 01:12:34]
Yeah. If you don’t let go then you just, you know, you’re spreading your resources too thinly. You don’t have that focus, you don’t have that alignment. All of that stuff, all of that detracts from your ability to achieve the goals.
Caroline:
[01:12:34 – 01:12:49]
Burnout is a problem in organizations for a reason. And part of the reason I absolutely believe is because we’re not letting people let go of stuff stuff. But we’re still adding more in. Yeah, it’s like a big pot air balloon. Sorry, another analogy there. Like you’ve got this, all these sandbags still attached. So you’re not blooming.
Harry:
[01:12:49 – 01:12:56]
No. Get back to the sport 1. What about practice then? Right, because that’s something we talk about sometimes. What about this like this practice thing?
Caroline:
[01:12:56 – 01:14:23]
So you know, I’ve got an absolute bee in my bonnet about this. That we do training in organizations training and that’s capability build. But training is not capable. Like you would never. Sport analogy and we touched on this with Davideck is you don’t learn something and then never practice it to get good at stuff. If you want to get good, you have to practice and you have to acknowledge that at the beginning you’re going to be a bit rubbish. So one of the things about organizations thinking about shifting capability is how are we consciously planning to practice? How are we actually working out how we are going to make time and, and make it safe for people to be a bit rubbish and all of that stuff. How are we going to do that? Like practically, how are we going to do that? How are we going to hold each other to account that we’re actually trying this stuff versus the. Oh, let’s roll out a series of workshops. Amazing workshops. Probably amazing. And then everybody goes, well, that was lovely. Now I’ve learned how to do a customer journey. Brilliant. Okay, I’ll just go back to what I was doing before and nobody’s going to notice if I’m not not practicing getting better at customer journeys because there’s no plan for that. Bit. And we call it embedding. I would much prefer that we all think about it as practice, because that is intentional. We’re practicing to get good. It’s not embedding it and then it’s static. We’ve embedded that and now it’s done. We need to keep practicing to keep getting better and stay good.
Harry:
[01:14:23 – 01:14:29]
Yeah. And it doesn’t stop when you get good. Right. So in sports, again, like, the higher up you get, the more practice you do.
Caroline:
[01:14:30 – 01:14:30]
Yes.
Harry:
[01:14:30 – 01:14:36]
I don’t think Serena Williams, when she won her first Grand Slam, said, oh, yeah, I’m there now, got it nailed. No point practicing anymore.
Caroline:
[01:14:36 – 01:14:37]
Boom.
Harry:
[01:14:37 – 01:14:47]
Yeah. Like, the amount of practice, the kind of discipline around that practice, the quality of the coaching just increases. All goes up rather than down.
Caroline:
[01:14:47 – 01:15:13]
Yeah. And it isn’t seen as instead of the real work. It isn’t like, oh, here’s where we’re taking people out of work to do practice. That is part of the gig. It’s part of getting better. So if organizations don’t want to get better, I think that’s fine. Like, choose that, don’t choose that. You want to be better at something, but not pick how you’re going to do that, which is divert some time and effort to practicing.
Harry:
[01:15:14 – 01:15:16]
The majority of the athletes time is practice.
Caroline:
[01:15:16 – 01:15:17]
Yeah.
Harry:
[01:15:17 – 01:15:22]
You know, the competition is this tiny amount of the calendar year compared to all the rest of the hours that were getting put in. Into things.
Caroline:
[01:15:22 – 01:15:23]
Yeah.
Harry:
[01:15:23 – 01:15:24]
All right. We’ve.
Caroline:
[01:15:24 – 01:15:25]
We’ve exhausted our sporting analogies.
Harry:
[01:15:25 – 01:15:30]
Probably exhausted this morning. Yeah. Give us some Rubica remedies. Caroline. What could people try instead?
Caroline:
[01:15:30 – 01:15:42]
Okay, well, if you have lots of power in your organization, if you’re top of the tree and you’re the CEO or someone with an SVP title or a VP title, or you’ve got power and you know who you are.
Clement:
[01:15:42 – 01:15:43]
Yep.
Harry:
[01:15:43 – 01:15:44]
Then got some letters.
Caroline:
[01:15:44 – 01:16:10]
Honestly, like, be brave, be precise. Next time you are setting goals, steer yourself away from the safe zone of the woolly ones that nobody will quite know whether you’ve achieved it or not. And put some specifics, put some precision into what you are shooting for so that everybody around you can understand what it is you want from them and why. That would be number one. That would be number one.
Harry:
[01:16:10 – 01:16:14]
Zero room for misinterpretation. Nowhere to hide. All right, 100.
Caroline:
[01:16:15 – 01:16:17]
Not easy. I’m not saying that’s easy, by the way.
Harry:
[01:16:18 – 01:16:22]
No, no, but this is. You know, they’re getting paid the big bucks, so they gotta do the tough.
Caroline:
[01:16:22 – 01:16:22]
Stuff, do the hard things.
Harry:
[01:16:23 – 01:16:30]
What about other people with kind of responsibility for other people. So the general managers, the team managers, that kind of role.
Caroline:
[01:16:30 – 01:17:41]
So I think for that group, it would be easy to say, and I’ve done this myself, those people haven’t defined a clear enough vision of the future. We don’t have a clear enough goal. They, whoever they are, therefore nothing I can do about it. I just need to carry on doing the day job or whatever. But I actually think you could choose to sit with your team, however big or small that is, and say, okay, well, we’ve got a general idea of where we’re heading for us. What does that look like in terms of the capabilities we want to build as a team? How specific, how precise can we get with that, and how are we going to practice to get better and support each other to do that? So within the parameters of your sphere of control, have that conversation. Agree it together. Don’t agree it in a darkened room on your own talking to yourself in a mirror, and then impose it on other people, people. Discuss it together, come up with a plan and have a go and see what impact that has on whatever matters to you. Organizational performance, impact on patients, customer feedback, whatever it is, have a go with you as your team at practicing, precisely defining what you want to get better at. Ring fencing some way of practicing that and then measuring whether it’s working or not.
Harry:
[01:17:41 – 01:17:52]
I like that. Yeah, well, it’s the being brave thing. But take into, you know, the demarcation of whatever you have responsibility for going, okay, for our bit, for our piece, what are we going to do? Nice.
Caroline:
[01:17:52 – 01:18:02]
And by the way, I’m sitting here thinking, we need to do all of this as Rubica. Like, there is no part of me here who’s sitting going, oh, of course we’re doing this perfectly in our organization.
Harry:
[01:18:02 – 01:18:06]
No, no, no. I’m thinking, oh, we’re just dishing out the good advice here.
Caroline:
[01:18:07 – 01:18:07]
Okay.
Harry:
[01:18:07 – 01:18:27]
All right, last group, the individual performance. So pharma world, this is the reps, These are the MSLs, you know, but also roles. The accountants, the lawyers, the other people that have got roles in those organizations. I’m thinking that they need to be doing some demanding of that clarity. God, that sounds strong, but requesting the clarity. Questioning about the clarity, right?
Caroline:
[01:18:27 – 01:19:54]
Yeah. And I think that asking questions is the most basic way. So I love that. Accountability is bandied around all the time in all of the organizations everywhere. And quite often it means, like, we want again, them to take more accountability. But the flip side of that is holding people to account, of course. And that’s not just holding More junior people in inverted commas to account or your peers. It can also be about holding leadership to account. And that can be hard and scary, of course, and because some organizations career derailing. But actually a way to do that beautifully is to ask questions that are curious and try and extract precision where there isn’t any. So questions like, oh, can you give me in your mind what will we be doing differently when that’s happening? Or if you imagine my role next year, how will it be different? Could you describe what that looks like in your mind? So even if they don’t know, at least that you’re showing that you have the desire for that or the need for that, and that might help support them to prioritize some time to think that through with you potentially. So that can be as much true if you’re working in legal or compliance as it is for other parts of the organization. It isn’t just about like, you know, the people at the pointy end. It’s every role can be asking those questions about how do I need to operate differently in order to be in tune with this future direction. And if you’re not clear, then you are accountable for getting that clarity or at least asking for it.
Harry:
[01:19:54 – 01:20:05]
I love that. Different positions on the accountability. You know, you’ve got a role in it as an individual when you don’t have that clarity, ability to do something about it rather than just demand it. That was too restrictive for me. Absolutely.
Caroline:
[01:20:06 – 01:20:21]
Yeah. And that happens. It’s very easy to be passive in those situations where you feel like you have less control, less power. It’s very easy to just go, okay, well, you know, I can’t do anything then. But the invitation is to choose not to and choose to be active in whatever form that takes.
Harry:
[01:20:23 – 01:20:30]
Let’s wrap it up there, Caroline. Thank you very much. Thank you. See you on the next episode of What the Pharma?.
Caroline:
[01:20:30 – 01:20:58]
Thanks for tuning in. We hope you took something from this episode of What the Pharma?. If you’re interested in talking more about these topics, or if you think we need to talk about different topics or want to know more about the work Rubica does in this space, head to rubica.co.uk and find us on LinkedIn. We need as many brains as possible on these tricky issues, so we’d love to hear your views and of course, subscribe to the podcast for future episodes and give us a review on the platform you’re listening on. We would love some feedback.
