YouSaid · the spoken record

Naomi Stanford

lines on the record: 26
first: 2022-01-31
most recent: 2022-01-31
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Them, but are they real? Be skeptical. Do we all need to go for business process re-engineering? Do we all need to go for lean or whatever the latest agile thing is? They're founded in not always tested ideas and leaping on a bandwagon. We don't all need to have the Spotify model, the challenging of assumptions, essentially.”
2022-01-31 · Intelligence Squared · Business Weekly: How to design a company, with Dr Naomi Stanford · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's the third thing. The fourth thing which I think is challenge assumptions. Keep on challenging your assumptions and the pandemic was brilliant at that. It challenged a lot of organizational assumptions and we need to keep on doing that and be curious. Why are we doing it this way? What are we assuming about that? And those questions, which I have to say are absolutely infuriating to leaders. They can't bear that sort of question of why are we doing it this way or what if this or what if that. But that ability to encourage people to challenge assumptions to be curious is critical. And the fifth thing is really be sceptical about mantras like agile or one that I'm curious about now is the great resignation. You know, those things influence companies because they're out there, people are talking.”
2022-01-31 · Intelligence Squared · Business Weekly: How to design a company, with Dr Naomi Stanford · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Potential to tip organization supply chains, recruitment methods, blah, blah, blah. The third thing is understanding the organisational cultures. And when your earlier question about designing a culture, an organisation isn't one culture. And that is another mistake, I guess. To think that it is one culture, because if you work for, like I worked for Pricewaterhouse, it's in 150 countries. Each Pricewaterhouse office is culturally different from each other. You can recognize aspects of it, but the cultures are different, and those have to be factored in. And then you have the professional cultures. Marketing teams are different from journalist teams. They're different, and they use different language. And those cultures are very nuanced. And thinking that you can get an organizational culture is very difficult. So start to notice the different cultures.”
2022-01-31 · Intelligence Squared · Business Weekly: How to design a company, with Dr Naomi Stanford · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That might be of interest. And again, when I work for the American Red Cross at the beginning, I don't know if you remember that thing called Second Life, we use Second Life in the American Red Cross piece of work, which was 2008 or something, and Second Life was a precursor of what we now know like today, is Facebook's metaverse type thing. It's a precursor. And people were very curious that I was suggesting let's use Second Life. But that was a weak signal then that is going to emerge much more strongly. What are we looking at and where do we learn about weak signals? That's the second thing. And the global trends, the global trend, the geopolitics right now are very, very hard. And I think that we need to pay massive attention to those because they're going to really upset organizations, in my view, in the next couple of years. You can see all sorts of global trends which have the potential.”
2022-01-31 · Intelligence Squared · Business Weekly: How to design a company, with Dr Naomi Stanford · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And all you're doing is trying to get a dinner decision. And all organisations are massively more complex than that complexity. And so learning how you can, it's back to the Abilene paradox essentially. Learning how you can navigate complexity in a way that is easy for people is a very key skill that I think a lot of people would benefit from. So that's the first thing. The second thing that I find is also lacking a lot is what some people call the weak signals, the things that you can see might have an impact. And several years ago I was reading about the scarcity of rare metals and I was thinking that's interesting because semiconductors are dependent on those. And now we've got the semiconductor issue. And you can start to see what are the weak signals in all the patterns that we're exposed to every day.”
2022-01-31 · Intelligence Squared · Business Weekly: How to design a company, with Dr Naomi Stanford · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One thing I think that would be really hopeful is to learn about complexity, and there are masses of writings and talk and what have you on complex environments. And there's a very interesting book by Sharon Varney that came out recently called Leadership in Complexity and Change, which explains it. Organizations are very complex and they're constantly shifting. And thinking that they're simple doesn't work. And you may think, I don't want to learn about complexity because it's all academic and immaterial, but it isn't and is useful. And just to think this is more complex than we thought is helpful. And you can see it just in family dynamics. If you're in a household and you're trying to decide where to go for dinner, for example, you've got five different points of view and 20 restaurant choices and three ways of traveling to it. That builds complexity.”
2022-01-31 · Intelligence Squared · Business Weekly: How to design a company, with Dr Naomi Stanford · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To the leadership team, but that doesn't mean they don't know stuff, and so valuing contributions from different areas of the organisation would be helpful, but that is a mistake. People don't do that. So they mistake the leader's knowledge as being knowledgeable, which isn't unfortunately always the case. Obviously, they're knowledgeable about some things, but not about other things. They're not all knowing, as it were. So that's the second mistake. The third mistake is thinking that it's going to A, be quick and non-disruptive, and B that it's actually going to work. It's not known because you're working very, very complex circumstances. It's very rarely a quick fix. And you can see that in mergers.”
2022-01-31 · Intelligence Squared · Business Weekly: How to design a company, with Dr Naomi Stanford · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, looking at the organisation chart and thinking fiddling around with that makes a difference is the most common. Fix the structure last night. That's the most common. The other common mistake, again, I have to be a little bit careful here, is the leaders thinking they know what goes on in the organization. Because often the leaders mandata change or say we want to change. And they actually don't have enough detail of the day-to-day working of the organization to know what ramifications and effects that's going to have. That is a very common mistake and that is so easily solved by getting this multidisciplinary team reflecting different, I'll call them grades at all levels of people in the organisation. as anybody else they may be junior”
2022-01-31 · Intelligence Squared · Business Weekly: How to design a company, with Dr Naomi Stanford · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And for them to keep going on their current trajectory, I think will be hard going, but I don't know. And that's one of the wonderful things about organization design. They may find the adjacent possibility or have a new idea. But I think it's mainly this month you can see their share prices starting to dip and there are some questions being asked about are they going to maintain their competitive edge and will their customer base be maintained, particularly in the US. And I think in the geopolitics of it all, again, that starts to come into play of where they're operating and what their markets are starting to look like. I don't know how they're going to sort of start to think differently about what they offer. Or if they need to, they're at this point of, I'm just curious at this point of will they succeed into the next phase because you do see organisations go through phases and some manage to leap to the next phase and some sort of”
2022-01-31 · Intelligence Squared · Business Weekly: How to design a company, with Dr Naomi Stanford · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They don't always, and they don't see things coming, but some of them do. Netflix is an interesting example, although it seems to be wobbling a little bit now. It's moved very swiftly. I don't know if you remember Netflix in the early years where they sent us a CD through the post or whatever the hard thing was that you then inserted into your TV. And they've moved very, very quickly and well over the years since they started, keeping pace with consumer interest. And in fact, shaping consumer interest. Why I think they're starting to wobble a bit now is because they're losing ground to some of the competitors. And that's where the interesting thing about keep an eye on your challenges starts to come into play. And a lot of people have entered similar fields to Netflix. You've got Disney+ and other streaming services. So there's a lot, lot, more competition and a lot more room to be ousted, essentially.”
2022-01-31 · Intelligence Squared · Business Weekly: How to design a company, with Dr Naomi Stanford · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And a new government is like a startup organisation. It has the potential to set itself up very, very differently. If you're working with an established organisation, there is only a certain amount of kind of leeway essentially to make it different. Now I'm very suspicious of the word transformation. You can change it, but you're not going to make Marx and Spencer into Amazon because Mark Spencer has 150 years or whatever it is of being a bricks and mortar organization on the high street. It wasn't established as an online retailer. And that's where I think the questions around public sector and private sector are different because many private sector organisations are much swifter to move. They have much more capacity to change more rapidly. They're much more in charge of their own destiny if they choose to be.”
2022-01-31 · Intelligence Squared · Business Weekly: How to design a company, with Dr Naomi Stanford · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, my government work has involved working for the federal government. I was just over two years with the General Services Administration, GSA, in a very large two-year piece of work, actually, moving from one head office building across the state.”
2022-01-31 · Intelligence Squared · Business Weekly: How to design a company, with Dr Naomi Stanford · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I love that as an organisation designer. No, I didn't love her being blown up. I love the interactions which could have been, I was mentally redesigning all the interactions and the systems and processes all the way through because there you could see power coming into play, performance issues coming into play, governance structures coming into play, the geopolitical situation coming into play. It's a wonderful case study for organization design because you've got so many different players in it. You've also got the actual technicalities, which is actually happening of mining on asteroids and the sort of idea of who is of value and what is a value in our working lives. I thought it was a very, very interesting film.”
2022-01-31 · Intelligence Squared · Business Weekly: How to design a company, with Dr Naomi Stanford · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“By ourselves? What if we did them with another organization? And the Abilene paradox could be solved potentially by asking those what-if questions.”
2022-01-31 · Intelligence Squared · Business Weekly: How to design a company, with Dr Naomi Stanford · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Seen a lot of organisations have collapsed in the pandemic. The ones that haven't collapsed are the ones that were much more aware of what their external context is and much more able to adjust very rapidly. And there's some really lovely examples of that that go into what I think in the book I call the adjacent possibilities, what is close to what we're doing that we can capitalize on. And you saw those lovely partnerships between manufacturers of cars and another organization doing ventilated design and distribution and what have you. And that is in a response to an emergency, but we could be designing those sorts of things in, that sort of let's stop and think what if? What if we didn't do ventilators?”
2022-01-31 · Intelligence Squared · Business Weekly: How to design a company, with Dr Naomi Stanford · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“About that, and they could open up that conversation. And you don't need to be challenging about it. It's a sort of question of probing. What if someone decided that it was too far to drive? How would we feel about going somewhere closer? So before you all plunge ahead, ask them exploratory questions. And those what-ifs aren't very rarely properly explored in the organization design work that I do. What if there is a pandemic? What if that film don't look up that was around at Christmas about the comet? You know, what if that happened? And people can laugh at that idea, but actually it happens more often than you think. What if there was no, if the supply chain suddenly collapsed? What if a ship got stuck in the Suez Canal? They happen all the time. And the organization designs are not resilient enough to deal with them, which we...”
2022-01-31 · Intelligence Squared · Business Weekly: How to design a company, with Dr Naomi Stanford · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Rather against hierarchies. It stops people speaking up because they fear sometimes rightly that they will be dismissed or their views aren't of value or whatever it is. And that again is a designable thing because interestingly if you meet someone in the hierarchy in a non-work situation say it was a running club and you meet the CEO of Starling Bank at the running club doing the 5K or something and you don't know that that person is a CEO of the Starling Bank. You're just going to see that person is a runner, not as a person to be kind of in a power position unless she's incredibly good at running and clumsin first, you know, and then you might think, wow, that's a powerful runner. Going back to the Abilene paradox, someone could have said, we've all decided we want to go to this restaurant. Supposing one of us didn't want to go, how would we speak to each other?”
2022-01-31 · Intelligence Squared · Business Weekly: How to design a company, with Dr Naomi Stanford · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, and I've had this discussion quite recently actually with some leaders in a government department because the Abilene paradox works on an implied agreement which people are unwilling to say they disagreed with. So the Abilene paradox is a sort of example of the power of group pressure stops people speaking out or the power of a hierarchy stops people saying to a leader that they're wrong and there's some very interesting research and I was involved when I went at British Airways on pilot and first officer interactions in the cockpit of an aeroplane. A lot of aircraft accusants at that stage were caused because the officer wouldn't tell the pilot he was about to make an error and you can see that in operating theatres as well in any situation where you think someone is superior to you by hierarchy usually which is why I'm”
2022-01-31 · Intelligence Squared · Business Weekly: How to design a company, with Dr Naomi Stanford · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Starling Bank is very interesting, I think, because it is a digital online bank, you can't have a separate department. It has to be integrated. I'm sure there is a separate department doing the sort of technicalities of it, but as a mindset, the technology is the way we do our business, essentially. And I think that's how organizations need to go. And in terms of the people who do organization design, the more you can get multidisciplinary teams on it, the better it is. So a lot of my work in the last few years has been with people who would normally or are badged as digital technologists, service designers, business enterprise architects, customer user experience people. They have very different skill sets because they're looking at technologies, but they're not looking at”
2022-01-31 · Intelligence Squared · Business Weekly: How to design a company, with Dr Naomi Stanford · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think they'll take a bit of time to seep into organizational change, as it were, around technology use and how you think of technology as not being IT, but about a work process and how we're using it to do work is rather a different mindset.”
2022-01-31 · Intelligence Squared · Business Weekly: How to design a company, with Dr Naomi Stanford · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A wonderful froze I came across the other week. Technology moves ahead of culture. So the pandemic has introduced a much more technology-based set of interactions and organizational policies have not kept up with that because the way that people are using the technology is very, very different from the way they have used it in the past essentially. And you can see the spillover in things like WhatsApp, for example. And there have been some very interesting legal cases on bullying and harassment around WhatsApp groups and people being excluded and what have you from groups. And the ways of thinking about those technologies and how we're tracking people, and there's the whole huge other issue of tracking and surveillance and privacy and security and what have you, are being investigated.”
2022-01-31 · Intelligence Squared · Business Weekly: How to design a company, with Dr Naomi Stanford · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Need to think very, very carefully about how we make our policies, our reward mechanisms, our performance incentives really work for everybody and not for clumps of people who we sort of stereotype in a sense.”
2022-01-31 · Intelligence Squared · Business Weekly: How to design a company, with Dr Naomi Stanford · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I think physical offices will begin to look very different. Kind of prior pandemic, one of the huge issues was if you were working from home and there was a face-to-face meeting going on, no one took any notice whatsoever of the people who were working from home dialing in on a phone or a video conference. You know, they were just kind of invisible. But now I think that that's something about the behavior, the technologies has really highlighted different behaviours around that. And this is where the policies start to come into play, designing policies which are equitable for people because some people find it a lot more difficult to work from home because they don't have the workspace, they don't have the equipment, you know, they've got conditions which are not conducive to working from home. And other people have. So some people feel very isolated working from home if they're in that lonely situation and would like the office. And I think we...”
2022-01-31 · Intelligence Squared · Business Weekly: How to design a company, with Dr Naomi Stanford · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Focus currently is on hybrid working for office workers. So now you've got a design kind of assumption potentially that could, and I don't know if it will because I'm still watching it, result in a sort of two-tier system. We may value one more than the other, which would be very unfortunate because in fact it's the others who actually contribute at least as much, if not more. And those are all designable considerations.”
2022-01-31 · Intelligence Squared · Business Weekly: How to design a company, with Dr Naomi Stanford · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The other thing that I think made an immediate difference, and I haven't unfortunately seen so much talk about this now, is a recognition that the people in the workforce who are of most value are the people we least value. So people like Dustbin Collectors, bus drivers, delivery drivers, retail people, warehouse workers, those nurses, obviously doctors, those are the people who kept us going. And they're on very much lower pay scales typically, and their working conditions are not half as good as office workers for the most part. And I notice now that what do we place value on, that debate, that we could design very differently is not moving very highly up the agenda, if at all.”
2022-01-31 · Intelligence Squared · Business Weekly: How to design a company, with Dr Naomi Stanford · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The pandemic, first of all, the shock of it in the UK at least, and I think in many other countries, immediately required organisational leaders to think, what do we need to do right now differently to manage our workforce and keep the workflow? And the immediate response was this sort of great shock, I think, to a lot of people, was do we actually need to do half the things we're doing? What is the kind of minimum that we can do to keep going in the most flexible way, recognizing that people are frightened, they've got very many demands on them that are now within the work environment and so on. I would like to see continue because you can see some slippage back to how it was. I mean, we do have team.”
2022-01-31 · Intelligence Squared · Business Weekly: How to design a company, with Dr Naomi Stanford · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT