Why Role Clarity Requests Signal Deeper Cultural Problems

“Cristina Amigoni: When you start hearing, “We need more role clarity,” that's a red flag. That's a system issue. In the system, it's like, this means there's no psychological safety. That means people are actually more worried about stepping on other people's toes than actually doing what needs to be done.”

[EPISODE]

Alex Cullimore: Welcome back to another episode of Uncover the Human. It's a host episode, and we are here to talk about, well, here's one of my favorite quotes, and this is how we're going to introduce this.

Cristina Amigoni: We love quotes.

Alex Cullimore: A well-executed plan coming together.

Cristina Amigoni: Which actually aligns very well with a quote you're about to say.

Alex Cullimore: This is from Stafford Beer, and he was a systems engineer. His quote is, “The purpose of a system is what it does.” The point of this is to say that the outcomes you're seeing are a result of the system that you have. You can have whatever intention you want with a system, but the actual point and the actual purpose of a system is what it does. What does it deliver? Why is this important to talk about?

Cristina Amigoni: Well, just to connect it back to how we started a podcast is, in a system where we don't write down how we're going to start a podcast, well, then we start a podcast however it starts, and then it does. The system does what it's supposed to do, which is we randomly throw quotes in, or randomly start with chatter.

Alex Cullimore: Yeah. And we wanted to be able to record and share our conversations, and this is what our conversations are like.

Cristina Amigoni: Yes. All the time, microphone or not.

Alex Cullimore: Yeah. Yeah. We just sometimes put a microphone in front of them. We thought about this particularly, because in leadership, there's a lot of times where you can identify problems, and there's things like, you send out engagement surveys, and you'll be like, why is engagement low? The real question is, what is the system doing to drive engagement down? Because engagement is low as a result. It's not something that's happening independently of the system, it's something that's happening because of the system. That means that however the system is currently working, the point of a system is what it does, the system is creating lower engagement. If you want to change it, if you think about it systemically, what will change that?

The whole point of this is to help reframe the questions, which tends to end up, it's easy enough to come and lay out a bunch of why questions, or lay out a bunch of questions that assume some type of blame. They're like, why aren't people doing this? Why aren't these two departments working better? Why isn't this more efficient? Why don't we have, I don't know, better relationships? Why aren't people engaged? Those are understandable starting points, but it's easier to reframe these things so that you can actually approach the real problem, and so that you don't have everybody who's trying to answer that question, just trying to avoid the blame. Stick around and make sure they're not the one who's pinned with, “Oh, I'm the reason that engagement is low.”

Cristina Amigoni: Yes. Along those lines, one of the things that we say, and we believe it is, every problem is a human problem, but not in the sense that humans are the problem. Every problem is a human problem, as in the humans are not in a system where they can thrive, but it's not that the humans are always the problem.

Alex Cullimore: Yes.

Cristina Amigoni: In a lot of cases is you've got great people. For the most part, people hire great people and know that they're great people, and the system is broken, and so the results are the same. You may be changing the people, you may be promoting the people, you may be moving them around like music chairs, but the results are the same, and it's because it wasn't the people that needed to be moved around. It wasn't because they had the wrong title. It wasn't because of all these other things that you thought were people related problems. It's a system problem that's not allowing the people to thrive, collaborate, work together, and actually be great.

Alex Cullimore: Yeah. Yeah. These are the things we see over and over again. It's so tempting to think, this is so much what we were talking about on the previous episode, about what's easy to measure. It's easy to think like, oh, I have to change the processor. Oh, we just needed a new tool. This one looks new and shiny, and their salesperson was real nice. This is a new shiny tool –

Cristina Amigoni: They bought me pizza.

Alex Cullimore: - and it will solve all my problems. But implementing that tool is going to be a human problem. The fact that there was an issue in the first place is already a human problem. They’re like, why was the tool not working? And understanding what was failing about it. What are you going to get out of this, and how are you going to communicate to that to the people? All of these are human problems. All of these are things that you will have to do with, with the humans, and fixing tools all the time may not be the underlying cause.

The reason we bring this up is that we often skip over the underlying cause, because we're going for, oh, god, I'm going to have to use buzzwords here. We're going for the low-hanging fruit.

Cristina Amigoni: Where's our bingo chart? Also, oh, we should have a swear jar, but it's a corporate word chart jar, and then I don't know, go out and party when it's full.

Alex Cullimore: Yeah, let's circle back on that.

Cristina Amigoni: After we pivot.

Alex Cullimore: We'll double click on that. Let's put that in the parking lot for now.

Cristina Amigoni: Actually, I think I saw a clip. It's not an original idea. I'm pretty sure I saw a clip of a company that tried to do that. It's like, okay, we use way too many buzzwords. And so, here's the jar of corporate buzzwords. It was taking the opposite effect. Now everybody talked in buzzwords all day long, so that they could fill the jars and they could go out and get beers.

Alex Cullimore: Which actually proves our original thesis. The point of the system is what it does.

Cristina Amigoni: That's exactly it. I know.

Alex Cullimore: That brought awareness to buzzwords and it created a system which everybody could go get beers.

Cristina Amigoni: Yes. Yes.

Alex Cullimore: And it worked.

Cristina Amigoni: It worked.

Alex Cullimore: Now the intention of this system was to reduce buzzwords. This is why there's a disconnect and why it's important to remember that whatever the outcome is, that's what the system is enabling.

Cristina Amigoni: Exactly.

Alex Cullimore: See, it all comes together. We really circled back on that one.

Cristina Amigoni: Oh, we can find all sorts of different ways to explain that. Since we're talking about dishes and washing dishes in the last episode, stay with the dishes theme. I don't know why I have this dishes obsession today.

Alex Cullimore: You've got it. You had a dish obsession today.

Cristina Amigoni: I actually don't have dishes to wash in my – I think I have a dishwasher to run, but I don't have dishes to wash in my kitchen.

Alex Cullimore: Maybe that's why it's on your mind. There's just nothing – no dish area of the brain to focus on right now.

Cristina Amigoni: Yes. I tried to change. The system in my house was not working. Meaning every day, or every other day, the kids would have to ask me, are the dishes in the dishwashers clean or dirty? So that they could add whatever they just used. I got sick of being the police on dirty, or clean in the dishwasher. I'm like, “Just look at them. First of all, if it's empty, they're not clean, because there's nothing in there.” Then I changed the system. I was like, we're going to have to change the system. I got one of those nice little slides things –

Alex Cullimore: Magnet slider thing? Yeah.

Cristina Amigoni: Magnets, exactly, where I can push clean and dirty. Again, the system, change the system, so that we could get different results. Now I got half different results, because the other half of the time, I forgot to change the magnets. Again, the system is really what it does. The human is the problem in this case.

Alex Cullimore: Then I had to hang a different magnet in my fridge. It says, did you change the magnet?

Cristina Amigoni: No. Now, here's an innovation for anybody out there looking to innovate dishwashers. Put something on the outside that's not some tiny little red dot on the floor that nobody looks at that actually switches clean. It's on the outside, not on the inside. It's too late –

Alex Cullimore: A tiny red dot.

Cristina Amigoni: - what's in the inside.

Alex Cullimore: Yeah. Mine has a tiny red dot that's on the top side. It's only visible when it's open and it is also ridiculously on a time delay. You click it and it doesn't change, if it was already clean and now it's empty. Then two seconds later, it'll flick on and off and off like, okay, well, how long have we had working circuitry? This doesn't seem like this should be an issue.

Cristina Amigoni: We circled the moon and come back. But the clean/dirty part of the dish –

Alex Cullimore: From what I understand, white was pretty fast.

Cristina Amigoni: - is just in the dishwasher. Apparently, still an issue.

Alex Cullimore: There's the old joke that NASA invested thousands and thousands of dollars into creating a ballpoint pen that could write in space and Russians used a pencil.

Cristina Amigoni: There you go. That's what it's supposed to do.

Alex Cullimore: What are some ways that you've seen where people tend to focus on the wrong portion of it? They might be missing it and there might be a better way to approach it.

Cristina Amigoni: Oh, is that a question?

Alex Cullimore: Yes.

Cristina Amigoni: What's the question again?

Alex Cullimore: Yes. You. Yeah. No, the other people in the room. Like ghosts in the room.

Cristina Amigoni: Sorry, I got stuck with the pencil and the Russians in space. My head was still in space with a pencil and I’m like, “Huh, that is actually really good point.”

Alex Cullimore: No, I was talking to the third person in this room.

Cristina Amigoni: Where are the cats? My cat is outside, so you weren't talking to my cat.

Alex Cullimore: I meant the virtual room.

Cristina Amigoni: All right, what was the question again?

Alex Cullimore: What are some common ways you've seen people maybe misdirect this, or blame something incorrectly when it's really a system problem?

Cristina Amigoni: All right, so one of the most frequent times is organizational changes. We're going to go with organizational changes, not tool changes, because that's too easy. As I said, a low-hanging fruit. In organizational changes, and that's not to say that some changes are not needed. As long as they are an evolutionary change, they are needed. The approach usually misses the point, because the approach usually tries to fix something that's on the surface without actually exposing the root cause. Or it tries to, which is definitely the worst times of doing organizational changes. It's trying to meet some sort of expectation to boost whatever leader, or group leaders were hired to come in and fix things and change things and as fast as possible.

There's usually like, “Oh, yes. Let's eliminate people. Let's move these apartments. Let's reorganize. Let's do all these things.” But the time to actually understand what was needed wasn't taken. Then this happens again after, I don't know, two years, three years, 18 months, a year, whatever it is, because again, you're not fixing the system. The system itself is what needs to be looked at, not the people in the system not doing what you think they should be doing according to what the system is like in your head, but it's not in reality.

Anything from lack of collaborations, projects taking longer, lack of innovations, all those things that matter in a company. Yes, it's a human problem, but you have to understand why the humans are not able to do what you expect them. The problems are not the humans.

Alex Cullimore: Yes.

Cristina Amigoni: Understanding that takes a lot of time. It takes a lot of investment in understanding where people are, what's the extra experience, where the history comes from, why are they behaving, why are the actions in a certain way, why are there assumptions, why are there expectations, are those the right expectations? That's when then you can look at processes, you can look at org charts, you can look at all these other things and decide what needs to be changed. Also, do it with the people, because they will tell you what the problems are, and they will come up with the solutions if you let them co-create with you.

Alex Cullimore: Yes. If they aren't, that's a different safety issue.

Cristina Amigoni: Yes. That's also the system. The system is not safe and it's working exactly as it's supposed to.

Alex Cullimore: Yes. I'm going to bring up an example that we heard many, many times from different companies. It's role clarity. People will be like, “Well, I'm just not sure what's my responsibility and what's somebody else's responsibility.” I was confused when I started to hear this for the first time, because I have been in many jobs, where technically, I guess, I had a job description, but I have no idea what it was, and it certainly did not have any bearing on really what I did did today, because it just get done, it has to get done, and this is vaguely a responsibility, and you figure out where the edges are, and what you need to plug into.

If somebody's asking what role clarity is, the problem probably isn't role clarity. The problem is there's dropped process gaps. There's something that people don't feel like they can take something, or they're being chastised for taking too much, or too little responsibility, and now they want this to find so that they can basically – That means that the system is out there to establish blame, more than it is to find solutions. What are you going to do to help change a system where people aren't begging for role clarity, they're just figuring out what needs to be done, and it's not that they actually aren't clear on it, it's that whatever the system has encouraged is now just people fighting with one another, or now there's just territoriality about who owns what, or who should own what, or there's just two departments that don't want to have a responsibility, so nobody's doing it, and whatever it is, that's where you dig in.

It's not that they need well-defined job descriptions, because nobody wakes up every day, at least as far as I'm aware. Nobody gets up every day, reads their job description, and it's like, right, that's what I'm doing today.

Cristina Amigoni: Hopefully, not. But it's true. I mean, and I agree. If I actually did what was supposed to be on my job description as a job in pretty much 30 some years of careers, I would have maybe done 1% of work every single day, because I guarantee you, 99 was not on the job description. And that's not how it works. That's not how it works. But like you said, when you start hearing, “We need more role clarity,” that's a right flag. That's a system issue. In the system, it's like, this means there's no psychological safety. That means people are actually more worried about stepping around other people's toes, than actually doing what needs to be done, or talking to each other. That means that there's a blame game going around. Those are system issues. What in the system are the incentives for those to be fertile ground for growth of people not stepping on, avoiding stepping on each other's toes, really covering their asses, really wanting to only do things if it's on a written piece of paper, that is a huge problem, that somebody's only going to do something if it's written on a piece of paper. That's a lack of accountability. That's a lack of collaboration. That's a lack of responsibility. What's the system doing to create that?

Alex Cullimore: Yes. That gives you, once you start to understand what that is, then you have a foothold in trying to fix that. Now you're like, “Oh, the system's not safe enough for people to talk,” so what are our leadership practices that might be shutting people down? What are leadership practices we can adopt that might open things up? Now you've got something that can actually address the problem, instead of spending many, many cycles, refining and perfecting job descriptions that nobody's going to read.

Cristina Amigoni: Or if they read, they still don't know what they're supposed to be doing.

Alex Cullimore: This is interesting as this ties to a different block that we've written about, white strikes, the Bianco Scorpio. This is the idea that –

Cristina Amigoni: Sciopero.

Alex Cullimore: Yes, there we are.

Cristina Amigoni: Sciopero Bianco.

Alex Cullimore: Sciopero Bianco. Yeah, okay, so I don't speak Italian, it turns out.

Cristina Amigoni: No, we’re going to have to work on your pronunciation.

Alex Cullimore: Yeah, seriously. Every time a C comes up, I'm like, I'm just not – I'm going to skip that word. It was a type of strike where there would be laws and labor laws where you're like, “Wow, you guys don't have the right to strike.” Which is an odd thing to do, because a strike is generally why is this done by rules, or not rules? It's a form of protest. But also, this is a form where, okay, we're not going to do an active strike, we're going to do a worked rule, or white strike, which is we're going to do exactly what the rule book says. This inevitably slows things down, because the rules aren't comprehensive. What actually gets things done is people naturally covering the gap and making sure they're helping one another out, or understanding the process enough and knowing that this all has to be done.

The second you start to follow just the rules, everything slows down. The point of what a system is to open people up enough so that they cover all those gaps, not to define everything so that everybody executes like an automaton.

Cristina Amigoni: Yeah, exactly. I remember when I left the job before we started Siamo, and how in my transition, I wrote down every single thing I was doing and how to do it, and my suggestions and who should take it over. I guarantee, and part of the – when I was presenting that and explaining all of that to our CEO and the executive team, I could tell that they turned white, or green, or the blood just sucked out of, because what was very evident was that 99% of what was on that list was not in my job description, or in my role, or they had any idea that I was doing it. So, why did I do all this stuff all the time?

Because I looked around and when something that needed to be happening was not happening and nobody was picking it up, I picked it up, and then that list kept growing and growing and growing and growing. There were things in there that were marketing related, sales related, tax related, implementation related, payroll related, I-9 and E-Verify related, HR related, applicant tracking system related. I mean, I did stuff that was in every single department in some way. Security related, learning and development related, IT related. It was because it needed to be done.

If I stuck to my job description, which I don’t even know if I even had one, but if I had it, all of these things would not have gotten done. They would have slowed things down. Somebody needed to do them. It was a problem. That's how I found out that they needed to do them. It was a problem, because either the person that used to do them got laid off, left, or it was a new process that needed to – or it was a change process, or something happened. Rather than wait and figuring out, who's toes am I stepping on and who's supposed to be doing this? Yes, I'll let somebody else do it, as soon as we establish who's supposed to be doing it. In the meantime, I'll take it. Because isn't the goal for us to have customers that actually can use our platform? Because if that's the goal, that's how we're going to get to the goal. If I sit here and worry about what's mine and what's not mine, because I may get punished both ways, probably I'm going to get punished both ways, then we're not getting to the goal.

Alex Cullimore: Yes. But we're going to waste a lot of time debating it.

Cristina Amigoni: Yes, yes.

Alex Cullimore: By the way, when executives have that moment where they realize that it's known as executivo bianco, that's where they go pale.

Cristina Amigoni: Yes. There's definitely a lot of whiteness happening.

Alex Cullimore: Executive white. You can actually paint your walls this color, but it's not great. It makes you feel uneasy. It makes the whole situation – the vibes go off. But I don’t super recommend it that you can find it at Sherwin Williams.

Cristina Amigoni: That's when you realize, yes. That's when you realize you burnt out a high performer, but you didn't know how high of a performer they were, and there's a lot of things are going to be falling into the cracks.

Alex Cullimore: Yes. That's another great example of the point of the system being what it does. You're relying on one person and it becomes a bottleneck. Not in that it's slowing things down so much. I guess, it's not a bottleneck. What is it? All your interest is in one basket. It's just that you really are just investing too much in one that if that basket's gone, then what are you going to do? If the point of the system is to reduce down to the point where you only have one person, well, that's great, but now your system doesn't have a fallback. Your system isn't going to – sure, it's functioning for now, but your system – systems don't run forever.

Matt Poepsel talks about entropy in systems. Everything starts to pull apart just naturally. There's just natural drift in things. If you're not conscious about that, if you're not conscious about where this is going, you just let the system run as it is, well, it's like letting your dentistry not be taken care of for years. Eventually, there's going to be some repairs needed.

Cristina Amigoni: Yes. Exactly. Yes, yes. Well, I know another example is actually for you, for your example where the system was designed for you to be the only person that did a certain part of the implementation and then you went on vacation for three weeks and four projects had to be on pause. I remember looking around and being like, go live in 45 days. Why are these projects on pause for three weeks? We don't have the three weeks. Everyone was like, “Well, because Alex is the only person doing this and without Alex, nobody else can do it.” I'm like, well, that was a good design system, wasn't it?

Yes. Yeah. I reckon I did try to hand it off and I did mention –

Cristina Amigoni: This was assigned for.

Alex Cullimore: Yeah. Yeah. I played by the rules on that one. I tried to give people the other one. Then I was like, well, I'm taking my PTO, because I've been doing 17 projects and I need some time off. I remember seeing the first day, I was like – it was a trip to Europe. The first day I'm in Europe, I saw some Slack come through and I was like, “And I'm turning off Slack.” This is going to be a trial by fire for everybody on this one. There's no way to explain it more than from a Slack message than there was in person, which I'd already tried to do.

Cristina Amigoni: Yes. It's like, maybe in the system design, instead of saving, again, the bottom line, which was our last podcast, by only having one person responsible for something that literally stalls all projects and that person is no longer around for a day, a week, three weeks, whatever reason it is, maybe the system should have been designed to have other people know how to do this. Yes, spend all those billions of dollars that you're getting paid from your VC, or from your shareholders, or from your customers on actually investing in the humans, so that somebody can go on PTO and have five projects stalling for three weeks.

Alex Cullimore: Yes. I can hear people screaming, like entering my head. It’s like, well, that sounds redundant. That sounds – No, you have to have people – It's not even about multiple people doing the same job. It's about multiple people understanding what has to be done in general. So that when there's a gap, everybody knows what to cover, when to step up, what they expect from where, they're able to communicate that. That's where it's helpful to have things like process diagrams. It's not about following the exact process. It's about knowing what other things are going to be impacted. That's the real value of the process is knowing what gaps are going to need to be filled.

When something inevitably happens, somebody has a life event and they can't be around this week and somebody has whatever. Great, all those things are going to happen. You don't get to choose those not to happen and you definitely shouldn't try and force people to be working on times they shouldn't be working. Between those, how are you going to have a system that allows for that? That means spending time making sure people understand everything that goes on, so they don't become pale executives.

Cristina Amigoni: Yes, exactly. I mean, one of the things that we designed the system specifically for this reason. I designed it in change management, for our change management team and our previous job and then we designed Siamo the same way when we work on projects and especially with clients related projects, we never go alone. We very rarely go alone to meetings and we never go to any projects alone. Yes, somebody that's looking at the bottom line and efficiency and blah, blah, blah, all those nice, shiny little things that will get you whatever you want on your tombstone will look like that's redundant. Why have three people in a meeting, or two people in a meeting if it could be one person? Why have three people in a project when it can be one and a half people in that project?

I can't tell you the number of times that that saved us from actually stalling in projects and not being able to deliver, because life happens. If you have somebody else who is fully knowledgeable, has already the relationships with the customers and knows what's going on and what's supposed to happen in every single meeting, then you can have the, I woke up with a stomach flu and I was supposed to run this meeting, Alex can run it without me, and it does no disruption for anybody, or anything, any other – or there's a fire in another client project. Okay, we can split up, because we both have the knowledge to take that over. That saves relationships. It saves projects. It saves the bottom line, because it saves time that's wasted. It saves having to cancel a meeting. It saves having to lose trust on the customer side, because now it's like, oh, well, okay. I guess, that's how it is. There's so many ripple effects. Is it redundant? I don't think it is redundant. I think it actually makes it very efficient.

Alex Cullimore: Well, it's not only it's great for backfill, which is for all the unforeseen things, but it also works for just the fact that we're humans. Our memory isn't perfectly accurate. It helps to have another person there who has a different perspective, who then is like, here's something we can do. Here's something we can do. Here's what I heard from that person. If we happen to have other one-on-one meetings, we're now bringing both of those pieces of points of view into the next meetings, into the status updates, into the whatever. This is where it actually ends up being really important just to have multiple perspectives and multiple people who have a record of the same types of meetings, because you're getting different things out of it.

Everybody has a different interpretation of what's happening, not in a bad way. It's just that's how we all process things differently. We'll have our own lens. That helps on the day-to-day and then it absolutely helps when there's the backfill needed and something unexpected happens and you need to just – preserves so much and it saves so much more time and effort later. You can get a lot more efficient with finding solutions, or answering questions, or making sure you've delegated those. The money savings is so much larger than somebody had a meeting and then they spent – you can have two people in a one-hour meeting, or you can have one person in a one-hour meeting and then they have a second one-hour meeting to fill somebody else in on the one-hour that they just had.

Cristina Amigoni: Exactly.

Alex Cullimore: At which point, you're playing a game of telephone and it's starting to stretch the – that's where you start to find other gaps that will pop out. Yes, that's a great example of the system is there to have that a little bit of what, on the surface almost looks like redundancy, but is actually much greater efficiency on the overall project.

Cristina Amigoni: Yeah. Even on deliverables on the work that needs to be done after outside of meetings, when you have multiple brains that are keeping up with the knowledge and contributing, then we're reducing. Instead of taking three hours to produce something, we're now taking one hour, because there's two people that can contribute to it. Overall, it's a savings and overall, you can deliver faster, so it's a saving on the other side. There’s savings all over the place, if you can get past the surface piece of things.

Alex Cullimore: Yeah. Yeah, that's a great way of putting it. It's a lot easier.

Cristina Amigoni: Way easier.

Alex Cullimore: Other examples are things like, employee engagement, or in changes. There's often at some point where people are like, “God, people just need to get used to the fact that there's some change.” Yes, but there's a reason they're not able to accept this change. Let's dig into what that is. People don't want to resist things. People do have a natural resistance to like, “Oh, no. This is going to be disruptive.” I don't know. Until you give them a reason to change and tell you understand what the reason is to try and not change, or what they're really feeling in the meantime, how are you going to address that? How are you going to get through that? The point of a system is not to just ignore and try and bulldoze through a change and be like, just please stop talking about this. We're going to make this change. Figure out why, why there isn't.

This is, of course, very popular in things like, return to office. This feels like being bulldozed into change. Or if it's something like – just any organization change. We're going to change departments and you now have different responsibilities. Maybe you really liked what you did before and now it feels like a loss. Maybe you are totally unsure what you're being asked to do. Then you go back to things like, “Now I'm going to demand role clarity.” If there was no psychological safety, if there was no general understanding of what should happen, there can be no coverage. Then you're going to lose out at a totally different way.

Cristina Amigoni: So many losses in different ways, and it manifests. The cracks in the system manifest. That's one of the things that's coming out, especially with AI implementations, it's actually the stuff that's accelerated and way more obvious now is lack of gap in leadership skills and gap in system problems that have been covered up. Because now you don't have the humans doing the covering up.

Alex Cullimore: Yes. Yeah. It's great. It points out the issue, although the most brutal way to find a way to point out that issue.

Cristina Amigoni: Yes, yes. Which, unfortunately, that's too often the case. It's like, let's feel some pain, so that we can look at what's causing the pain, as opposed to that maybe a problem and it has been brought up and we see it, but let's ignore it and expect it to just disappear by itself.

Alex Cullimore: Yes. Well, those people shouldn't be doing that. Okay, those people should be doing this. Do they know that? Have you talked? Are you going to re-talk to them now? Maybe they don't know. Maybe it's a totally different interpretation. There's a thousand ways to fix that, rather than just be like, “Ah, it must be the people.” Or, “Ah, we'll just have to change the entire system.” Figure out what in the system is creating the results that you're seeing and what outcomes do you want to see and how are you going to change the system to get there.

Cristina Amigoni: Yeah. It's not about making yourself look better.

Alex Cullimore: Wishing would make it so.

Cristina Amigoni: Yes. That's a whole other podcast.

Alex Cullimore: Yeah. Our next one will be, it's not about you.

Cristina Amigoni: It's not about you. Sometimes it really is about you.

Alex Cullimore: Yes, but not in the way you're thinking.

Cristina Amigoni: Yes.

Alex Cullimore: Sometimes you are the problem.

Cristina Amigoni: If it's positive, it's not about you. If it's negative, it is about you.

Alex Cullimore: It might be about you.

Cristina Amigoni: It could be about you. Yes. If the system brings in the same type of person, then it's not just a system problem, it's the person problem too. It's about them. But the system is usually in play there.

Alex Cullimore: Then it's the person who's even higher up, that's about making that decision. Now it's a you-you problem. 

Cristina Amigoni: Yes. Yes. If you're not getting the results that you want, look at what system is in place that needs changing.

Alex Cullimore: Yeah. Leave the question for beyond the basic why. Why don't we have this? It's fine to use that as I thought exercise for yourself. Why is this not happening? Which is, what is the impact of not having us? What is the impact of not having that? What is the impact of that? What am I really saying? What is impacting these things? Getting to root causes, getting to real understandings is where you can change a system, instead of just blaming symptoms and being like, “God, this runny nose. Let's just cork it. Just cork the nose and it'll be fine.” Yeah. Look, but there's allergies, right? Now it's bleeding out my eyes and this is not helping. This very provocative image brought to you by allergy season in Colorado.

Cristina Amigoni: We're really into the bottom of the analogies.

Alex Cullimore: I think that's what people will tune in for. I think that anybody would comment on that in our audienceship.

Cristina Amigoni: Yes.

Alex Cullimore: Can you come up with another gross metaphor?

Cristina Amigoni: I go back to the dishes, but you guys think to the bottom. I love the transition from plugging your nose means blood is coming out of your eyes. I’m like, wow. That's quite the system you’ve got going in yourself.

Alex Cullimore: See, the point of a system is what it does. It did stop the nose thing, but there are consequences.

Cristina Amigoni: It can be tears, or could be blood.

Alex Cullimore: No. I don't know why I went through blood. It just seemed much more – This never happened on allergies. It could have been a nose itch. It could have been full ears, but here we were. That's where we went.

Cristina Amigoni: We take some clarity.

Alex Cullimore: I apologize to everybody.

Cristina Amigoni: On that note.

Alex Cullimore: On that note, check out your systems.

Cristina Amigoni: Yes, go look at your systems and get some pills for allergy season.

Alex Cullimore: Look at the human problems and get Claritin.

Cristina Amigoni: Yes. Claritin, clarity. There we go. We're looking back to clarity. It is about clarity then.

Alex Cullimore: Yes. Looking at systems, organizational Claritin.

Cristina Amigoni: Yes. Thank you for listening.

Alex Cullimore: Thanks.

[END OF EPISODE]

Alex Cullimore: Thanks so much for listening to Uncover the Human. We Are Siamo, that is the company that sponsors and created this podcast. If you’d like to reach out to us further, reach out with any questions or to be on the podcast, please reach out to podcast@wearesiamo.com. Or you can find us on Instagram. Our handle is @wearesiamo, S-I-A-M-O. Or you can go to wearesiamo.com and check us out there. Or, I suppose, Cristina, you and I have LinkedIn as well. People could find us anywhere else.

Cristina Amigoni: Yes, we do have LinkedIn. Yes. Yeah. We’d like to thank Abbay Robinson for producing our podcast and making sure that they actually reach all of you. And Rachel Sherwood for the wonderful score.

Alex Cullimore: Thank you guys so much for listening. Tune in next time.

Cristina Amigoni: Thank you. 

[END]