Why Skipping Activation Breaks Your Strategy

“Alex Cullimore: That reminded me of the places I've worked, where sometimes communication was only found because somebody happened to book a meeting room near somebody else, the walls were so thin they heard through the walls what was going to happen. That was the only way they knew.”

[INTRODUCTION]

Alex Cullimore: Welcome to Uncover the Human, where every conversation revolves around enhancing all the connections in our lives.

Cristina Amigoni: Whether that’s with our families, co-workers, or even ourselves.

Alex Cullimore: When we can be our authentic selves, magic happens.

Cristina Amigoni: This is Cristina Amigoni.

Alex Cullimore: And this is Alex Cullimore.

 HOSTS: Let's dive in.

Authenticity means freedom.

Authenticity means going with your gut.

Authenticity is bringing 100% of yourself. Not just the parts you think people want to see, but all of you.

Being authentic means that you have integrity to yourself.

It's the way our intuition is whispering something deep-rooted and true.

Authenticity is when you truly know yourself. You remember and connect to who you were before others told you who you should be.

It's transparency, relatability, no frills, no makeup, just being.

[EPISODE]

Alex Cullimore: Welcome back to this episode of Uncover the Human. Today is a just hosts episode. It's Cristina and I. Hello, Cristina.

Cristina Amigoni: Hi. I think we're recording episode 199?

Alex Cullimore: Yes, this should be episode 199. We're about to hit the big 200 celebration, which it makes you feel old as a podcaster.

Cristina Amigoni: Kind of does. Yes. Kind of does.

Alex Cullimore: Getting that double century and really just nails it.

Cristina Amigoni: Back when we started this.

Alex Cullimore: We were oh, so young and uninformed. Where you go with that?

Cristina Amigoni: I don’t know. Back in my time.

Alex Cullimore: Back in our time.

Cristina Amigoni: At the beginning of the podcast.

Alex Cullimore: We used to have to edit things ourselves, and it was a pain. Now we're very thankful for all the services that do that.

Cristina Amigoni: Now we have other people edit and we don't know what goes out there. I am not quite sure we have improved anything.

Alex Cullimore: That's funny that we're mentioning all these process issues, because the topic we wanted to discuss today is one that is so often missed, and we're describing our own misses here. Yeah, we're living it and breathing it, guys. This is things that really happen to people that even should know better.

Cristina Amigoni: Yeah, we try it first and then we're like, maybe we should try to find a way so others don't have to go through this pain.

Alex Cullimore: Yeah. That's the goal. In the spirit of do as we say, not as we do, let's talk about activation. Activation is the point. This is a concept that was introduced to us by The Table Group. The Table Group is Pat Lencioni’s company. They have a lot of great models and great thought leadership out there on how to work better as a company. This comes from their model, The Working Genius, which is one that we've talked about a few times, I think, even on this podcast. It's definitely a popular way to work as a team and to get people knowing what parts of work they enjoy, what parts of work their teammates enjoy and how to even that out, so everybody works a little bit more in the state of flow. That's a fun model. You think I've wandered off the path.

Cristina Amigoni: I'm so glad you took a breath in between.

Alex Cullimore: It's important that people get all this before I get a breath, so that they don't feel like they can take a mental breath. I want people to feel out of breath having not spoken.

Cristina Amigoni: It was almost like watching you swim underwater and wondering like, when is he going to come up for a breath? Or is it going to be at the end of the pool, or maybe halfway?

Alex Cullimore: I hadn’t thought of that. Now we're just going to go off topic. This is a tangent now. That is actually something I do almost every time I swim. I take the entire first lap underwater, which now explains a lot in retrospect, that does relate to the general breath capacity and maybe some of the speaking patterns.

Cristina Amigoni: Yes. Yeah. It felt like I was holding my breath the whole time underwater, and like, can we breathe? Can we breathe? Okay. Oh, now. Yes. We're back down.

Alex Cullimore: Yeah. I want to give everybody all the info right upfront and that, I also want to make sure that if you are listening to this at 2 to 4X speed, you’ll regret it briefly.

Cristina Amigoni: I was going to say, Chuck doesn't actually have to go to 4X on this one. At least not in that intro. He will when I speak, but when you speak, he'll have to go back down to maybe 1.5X.

Alex Cullimore: It's going to be very frustrating for him to just change his pace every swap of speaker.

Cristina Amigoni: Indeed. Okay. back to activation.

Alex Cullimore: It comes from The Working Genius model. The Working Genius separates things into six geniuses, but those can be subdivided into three sections of work. It's about the places that you find yourself in work. The first phase is ideation and the last phase is implementation. The middle phase is the one we're going to talk about today, and that's activation. I mentioned that in that order, because most of the time, both in our own lives and as companies, we tend to go from ideation to implementation. It makes sense. We say, “I'm going to come up with ideas. We got to come up with a strategy.” Then you think, “Let's go execute the strategy.” That's what ideation, coming up with ideas and implementation are doing the ideas.

The thing that is often missed and is incredibly important the second you get outside of one person's head, so any group, any organization, any pair of people is that activation piece. That's where you really understand what is the right idea of all the ones you've come up with, what's going to be workable about what you've come up with and whether that is a good thing to pursue. Finally, getting everybody really aligned and bought in on that and making sure everybody is excited to actually take this journey.

Hopefully, at this point, a lot of people are ringing bells and realizing, “Oh, yes. That is often missed.” We do jump into doing things and then people are like, “Wait. What are we doing? How is this happening? What have you thought about this thing? What about this edge case that's not going to work?” Those are where organizational changes and personal changes can fall off the rails, and that activation piece is really where all that lives.

Cristina Amigoni: Yeah. It is interesting, because we don't skip it in some things in real life. We just skip it in some other things. But in some things, we don't skip it. What makes me think of activation is let's say, you plan travels and you say like, “Hey, the idea is we want to go to Scotland in July.” Then you can't really skip to, “Oh, and now we're in Scotland to get on the plane, or get on the plane so we can go to Scotland.” There's a whole middle ground of figuring out when can we go? Is it feasible? Where do we want to stay? Who's coming with us? Do they want to go to Scotland? Are they actually joining? Does everybody have their passports? All of those pieces, you don't just go from, I want to go to Scotland in July to now we're at the airport and we're taking off. That's a lot of what it feels like when activation is skipped within the workplace.

It’s that somebody in a room had ideas, probably spent a lot of time thinking through that strategy and idea for many, many months. Then the communication goes out that says like, “Hey, now we're doing this.” The expectation is that everybody's running and doing it. First of all, the people doing it haven't been in the room for the last six months coming up with the ideas. Also, do they have the plane tickets? Do they know which airport to go to?

Alex Cullimore: Do they want to go to Scotland?

Cristina Amigoni: Exactly. Do they want to go to Scotland? Do they have to find pet sitters for their pets they're leaving behind? There's all these things that have to happen before you say, “Now just get on the plane. We're going to Scotland.”

Alex Cullimore: Yeah. Yeah. It doesn't mean that the idea is wrong, but the delivery is usually where everything starts to fall apart. You can have the best strategy in the world, but if you don't think about these things, if you don't think about what's connected, if you don't think about how this is going to impact other people, and if you don't give people the time to get onboard with this, it's very easy just to have the whole thing start to fall apart on you, or feel like you have to make another change, at which point, you're just reintroducing ideas of change fatigues to people of, “Oh. Well, I could just wait this one out.” You're going to choose another one. You're just going to have another idea.

That's where people tend to fall into problems. Something that we see over and over and over again in the corporate world is the idea that people will be bought in, or that they should just be bought in because they're being told, “This is what we're going to do.” That's not the same as them, A, knowing what to do, knowing how this is going to work.

Cristina Amigoni: Yeah. Exactly.

Alex Cullimore: Or being onboard with it. Even if they're like, “Fine, I have to do this,” what ways are they going to resist? What ways are they going to be on board with this? There's a lot of times people resist, because they have a good thought on why they should resist. Either they think it's not going to stick around. There is something about the previous world that they want to keep up that is not being included in the new plan, whatever it is. There's a reason that they're like, “This is not something I'm going to do.”

Often, leaders can feel frustrated by that, but it's on them to slow themselves down enough to realize, “Oh, we came up with this idea. It took us months to polish this. It's going to take other people some time to even understand what we're doing,” much less how it impacts them.

Cristina Amigoni: Yeah. Then part of the activation is that transition period, is that journey to understand like, okay, if this is the idea and this is what you expect me to do, how do I get there? You don't just teleport to the top of the mountain, just because you said, be on top of the mountain. What's everything in between and in, especially in the workplace, there's a lot of how does this impact me? Not what's my role in the new in the future state? What is the expectation of my role in the future state? How will I learn? Part of the activation is like, how will I learn what I'm supposed to be doing and then going through the learning? Then, what happens to my current place? Because most people don't go to work and have nothing to do, until a new idea comes up and now they have something to do. What happens to my current tasks? What happens to all the things that I do today? Do I still do them? Do I do them with somebody else? Do I transition to somebody else?

All of those pieces are part of really looking at the idea in the activation piece and figuring out like, how possible is this? When is it possible to be in the implementation? When is it possible to make sure that people are doing in the execution of doing what the new thing is? Then, making sure that everybody understands that. It's not just the people in the closed-door room. They say, “Well, it's their job. They're just going to do it.” I'm like, how often has that actually worked out? Because I probably can guarantee that it's 100% of the time, it doesn't work out that way.

Alex Cullimore: Yes.

Cristina Amigoni: Then there's a lot of frustration on all sides. I'm like, “Why aren’t they doing it? We just told them that's their new job. That should be enough.”

Alex Cullimore: Yes. It reminds me of the quote that we love to use on this one, which is that change is a process, not an event. You don't just announce a change and it's over. I mean, if you think about one very common example in the corporate world would be, “Okay, we're going to restructure. These two teams are now merging. We've decided that these functions are similar enough. We want to actually have them all under one place. Okay.” Then they go announce that and they've made the changes in their HR system. Now their org chart is updated and they're like, “Great, the change is done. The event is done. We have changed.”

The thing is it's never, ever, ever, ever, ever true. Even when you are all the way to the implementation point, even if you make the change and then you've done the parts of making sure people understand what that means for them and what they're going to do and what they need to do differently, and they are onboard with it and they've started to do it, they're still even more refining once you get to the implementation. 

Now they're doing it. now you're learning all those lessons that you didn't think about, all the edge cases you didn't find and all the things that are – It's not a bad thing. It's impossible to capture all of that nuance. But it would be bad, as we see way too often, to blame the people who are trying to raise that nuance to you for being change resistors, or not doing it right, or not being in this. You can't think of everything and that's okay. It's okay to continue to make changes. It's not the fault of the people who are trying to be like, hey, by the way, this doesn't work.

Cristina Amigoni: Yeah. Exactly. Yes. In activation piece, that's the other thing. Just as change is a process, not an event, activation is a process, not an event. Because that's the other piece.

Alex Cullimore: We activated them. We’re done.

Cristina Amigoni: Exactly. There could be the misconception that activating is communicating. First of all, it's not. Activating is not even training. Also, not. It's much bigger than that. You don't just tell somebody to activate. You don't tell a toddler, walk, and they walk. Then you say, I've activated, because I told them to walk, or I've taken my hand off and they fall off their face, but it's not their fault. It's not my fault. I've activated.

Alex Cullimore: I told you to walk, and I've been walking around you this whole time. I feel like you got a pretty good idea of what walking was like.

Cristina Amigoni: Exactly. I've been telling you, it's time to walk for the last year and a half. Not my problem. I've activated you. Again, it's not an event. Activation is not an event. You know that activation has actually happened when people start behaving in the future state. When the mindset and the behavior have changed and activation for that thing, that works and that behavior has actually finished. Activation doesn't finish when you say as a sender, it's finished. Activation is finished when the behavior has changed.

Alex Cullimore: Yes. This is the same as communication. Communication is not done when you sent the email out. Communication is done when people understand what that email needed to convey. That might mean whole other conversations and meeting up with people and making sure this is under staff meetings and making sure this is this, because even if they reread it, or they have to go back and carefully read it, there's going to be things that they just still need to understand, or need to understand in the same way and get aligned on, that communication and change are very similar that way, that it's not over until there's actually understanding, until there's actually changed behavior.

Just for the people who are only listening on audio, I was nodding my head vigorously throughout that entire thing, because that is all incredibly true and that is all everything that Cristina said, because that is all exactly what we've seen so many times, that it's very easy to forget. It's very easy to miss that activation step and it is a process. I want to highlight that one you said about training and communication, because that's often when we think, “Oh, we have to do change management,” and people will say, “Oh, that's training and communication.” It's not that that isn't part of it. But again, both of those for the reasons we're talking about now are not a one-time event. You can say, this is the process. You can say, we've developed a training on the process. You can say, we got all of our managers to take the training on the process. You're not done, until they are actually acting in that process and you've worked out whatever else needs to happen and it's all fairly aligned.

That's when you've actually changed. Up to that point. It's just a way that you took a couple of hours of people's time and gave them, hopefully, some information that helped them maybe understand some piece of this. But if you're not measuring that, if you're not following up, if you don't have that – just put yourself in their place. You've been to trainings before. You go through, you get a lot of ideas, you might even be really excited about them. It doesn't mean that you walk out of that and you're like, “Oh, I do everything differently and I do it perfectly and I'm great.”

Cristina Amigoni: And I know everything I need to know.

Alex Cullimore: Yup. Done and done, and no context will ever change.

Cristina Amigoni: And I have all the tools and everybody else around me acts accordingly, because that's the other piece that's missed that activation is a huge part of, is anything that changes for one person, changes for everybody else, too. Because now, they have to act differently and they have to coordinate and collaborate differently with that one person. Once again, activation is not done when you have communicated the new org structure.

Now, people have different names next to them. That doesn't mean anything at all. Besides, you've communicated. Actually, you didn't even communicate. Let's take the communication word out. You have sent information about the new org structure. You don't know that it's been received. They don't know that it's been understood. You have no idea whether people know what they're supposed to be doing and again, are they onboard? Are they going to pretend it doesn't exist? Are they going to say yes and nod and then do what they used to do? Are they not going to do anything? What manifestation is going to come up? Because there hasn't actually been any activation.

Alex Cullimore: This reminds me of every time you walk past a construction zone and it's got one of those giant billboards that says, “Zoning, zoning.” It's got a thousand tiny little pieces of fine print about exactly what's going to go up and what you can do if you need to, if you want to object to this, or what zoning codes this is going to apply under. How many of us have ever been on a walk? Walking our dog around the park, we see this, do we stop and we read every piece of that and we make sure we understand that and then we lodge a formal complaint and we do that? No. We wait until it starts to build. Then there's suddenly this hulking building there, you're like, “I'm sorry. Was that okay to build in the middle of our neighborhood? Who let this happen?”

Cristina Amigoni: Yes.

Alex Cullimore: Then the city says, “Well, I mean, it was out there. We communicated it. There was a billboard.”

Cristina Amigoni: Yeah. We communicated it.

Alex Cullimore: It was right where this is going to be. I get that this is not an easy thing to do, but that's the thing that is easy to do in corporate America, where there's really no excuse, because you have the ability to talk to people, you have the ability to make communication. That isn't just a billboard posted on a wiki and a link posted on a team's chat that wasn't tagged to anybody.

Cristina Amigoni: Oh, yeah. Those are the best ones.

Alex Cullimore: Or ones that are way over explanatory and you get a 70-page PDF document. You're like, “I'm sorry. I have a job to do. I'm not going to read this.”

Cristina Amigoni: What am I supposed to get out of this? Yes. Or, you read it and you're like, “I still don't understand how this impacts me. What is my behavior supposed to be?” You haven’t answered the question. Answering the questions with like, well, that's effective today. Also, useless. What's effective today? Not talking to my manager? Doing the new things, but dropping all my other tasks? What's effective today and what is feasible to be effective today? Because, unless, again, somebody has a job where they don't really do anything, which is possible, not likely, but possible, what happens to this stuff they no longer are responsible for? What happens to the stuff that the people that used to do them are no longer around to do? They just magically get rid of [inaudible 0:18:01]. Somebody magically knows, “Oh, that's on me. Let me pick that up, because it's just laying there.”

Alex Cullimore: Yeah. In the example of the merging of two departments, you've got two people that now they all maybe have a similar title. Who talks to who? Who does the responsibilities within it? You had a project. You're not even on either of those teams, but you have to communicate with one section of it. Do you communicate to that same person? How many times have you seen people just drop communications in time like, “Oh. Well, I mean, I worked with business analysts, but now that's not the title, so I don't actually know who I talked to.” Then they just don't. Then that becomes just a dropped portion of a project. These are the things that are the gaps of activation that make change very difficult, make it painful for everybody, leaders and the people on the ground.

This is not some master plan to take down a change. It's just confusing, and people can't get through it and they have too many other things, and they're hoping that somebody can provide some clarity, but it's hard to know how to ask, where to ask, if it's going to be answered, etc.

Cristina Amigoni: Yeah. You don't know even where to go to ask for clarity. I have questions, but I don't know where to go for questions. When I go to the people that I used to, they tell me that they don't have the answers either. It's no longer them. It's just chaos. Yeah, it's not a master – It's not a Despicable Me 5. I lost count of how many there are. Mostly, there's four. That it's not about taking down a change in an organization. That's not what it is.

Most people know that they have – unless they're the business owners and even then, there's some things you can’t control, they have a very limited purview of control over what their job is going to be. If we want them to actually do it well, which I imagine that's the ultimate goal, then –

Alex Cullimore: That big assumption, but sure, let's go with that.

Cristina Amigoni: Then that's where the journey and process of activation is very much needed.

Alex Cullimore: Yes. Yes. This has been a very cathartic and good soapbox, but let's quickly help people understand what good activation looks like and what might be good activities for activation.

Cristina Amigoni: Am I supposed to go up with this?

Alex Cullimore: I'm happy to go either one, and I wanted to take a breath.

Cristina Amigoni: Let's see if we can get there, because I have another angle and I'm going to see how it goes. Clearly, I skipped the activation on figuring out whether that would work for you. We'll see if we crash and burn on this execution, and you have all witnessed the missing of activation.

What I was thinking is like, what are the signs that activation has been skipped? How do you know that it's been skipped? Because you can, again, it can be one of those things as like, we activated. It wasn't us. What are the signs that has been skipped? Some signs are people are not behaving in the future state, so they're not acting the new role, the new job, the new responsibility, the new way that you expect them to. Also, they are constantly asking for information about what it means for them. Like, how do I fit in this? If they're constantly asking for that, that's not just that you communicate it. You sent information, they didn't read it.

Look at the frequency. How much is this going on? What's the volume of those requests? Is it most people, or is it just a couple of people? Because then, you can also narrow that down. Are people, if they're resisting, as in they keep bringing up issues and like, “This is not working. It was better in the past.” There is some change curve in there that everybody goes through and there is a change. When that's still happening 18 months later, not a change curve problem. Then something really is not working well.

Again, in the discernment of the activation, that's what was missed. It was missed that like, well, how will this work and will actually work to reach our goals? That was missed. There are signs all around about what's happening. If you're hearing that people don't know what's going on and you think, “Well, why everybody should go and should know what's going on. “I know that communication is happening, but when they're hearing things through the screenshots of the somebody's monitors cousins who happen to be in a meeting where they were given a PowerPoint, no, you totally missed the point, actually, communicating well. How do you guarantee then that everybody knows and has what they have?

Alex Cullimore: That's a really good and comprehensive list of things. I was just going to check. That reminded me of the places I've worked, where sometimes communication was only found basically, because somebody happened to book a meeting room near somebody else, and the walls were so thin, they heard through the walls what was going to happen. That was the only way they knew. That was when they actually figured it out. Anyway, that was a crazy time.

Cristina Amigoni: We have lived that, too. We are not just creating scenarios. These are lived scenarios.

Alex Cullimore: I imagine by the passion with which we're putting into this, people are saying, most of these are real. We're not just really getting angry at hypotheticals.

Cristina Amigoni: Yes. We've seen it, we've lived it, and we have the t-shirts.

Alex Cullimore: The other ones that are good to know, and you've already covered a lot of these, but one that I've seen a couple of times is people not really knowing why things are changing. That is super important, because people are going to be making little decisions in their micro ecosystems, or larger sub-ecosystems of the whole organization, that are attempting to align with a strategy. If they don't understand the main why, and this is where it's easy as a leader to fall into like, “I've told everybody, this is why, this is why.” There's a good possibility it's not landing, or it's not coming across as clearly as it is in your head.

Or, it's changing more than you realize. You're changing your understanding of it and it's continually clear to you, but you're not realizing that that is a little different for everyone else. That not knowing that why is another sign of misactivation, because the why isn't clear. When it finally is clear, it still needs to be galvanized. It needs to be put out there and everybody needs to get onboard and aligned with it. Times when people are just missing that, or they were continually referencing, like you said, a change that was over a year ago and were like, “Oh, I wish it was still the previous world.” There's going to be some grief of change every time. But if that's lasting long enough, the change isn’t helping and people aren't really accepting and adopting the next new world.

Cristina Amigoni: Yeah. How do you do activation right?

Alex Cullimore: Let's talk about that. It's a great idea to – this is the same thing as a plan is not a strategy. Both planning and strategies are necessary. Communication and training are not activation, but they are both necessary. You do have to think about communication. The really important parts about these are figuring out exactly what people need to know for themselves. There's a ton of empathy that goes into this, and that's in the generation of materials. That's actually skipping why you would know who needs to be impacted, and that's you going out and actually listening to people and figuring out, what do you do right now? What does that look like? What would it look like, we think we need to make this change, how might that impact you? How might this? You don't even have to ask it that explicitly, if there's things you don't want to over explain about the strategy, or you're still developing it, that's fine.

Gathering that understanding is a really important part of being able to empathetically deliver communication. The same for training. Here's the gaps we're seeing. We think people should be able to do that. What can we do to fill that? Then, what can we do to make sure that training is taking hold? Training and communication are really important parts of activation. Empathy is the huge piece that you need to really activate any change. Empathy helps build trust, trust builds change agility, change agility allows you to make those turns as an organization.

Cristina Amigoni: Yes, empathy. Yes. Skipping empathy, you might as well not do the change. It's not going to work out. If you do not take the time and make the effort to understand what people are experiencing today, you cannot expect them to be in the future. It just won't happen. You can kick and scream, you can lay people off, you can say it's not necessary, you can say you can don't have time, you will be forced to make time. When it doesn't work, you'll be forced to make time. Because if you cannot explain to somebody, if this is today your job and tomorrow is you're expected to do this, and this is what happens to today, to get you to tomorrow, then you're never going to have the changing behavior. If you don't have changing behavior, why make a change? That's not a change. That's a change on paper.

I could create a change on paper in two seconds. Actually, I wouldn't even create it. ChatGPT will create it for me. That doesn't make me an expert. It doesn't make me a leader. It doesn't make me successful. A successful change is when behavior mindsets change.

Alex Cullimore: That's one point I do want to offer a point of empathy for all leaders out there doing this. These are not easy things to remember to do. We constantly trip ourselves up on these. It is all necessary, because it will come back. At some point, you'll have to do all of the work of activation. I empathize with how stressful everything generally seems, how we always feel there's a deadline. We start to come up with a change and we really want to see that, like now be the reality. We don't want to have to slow down to get to this future. We want that to be. We see that there's an advantage here. We see this is something we need to do. We want to see it happen fast.

It's really understandable to hear what we're talking about with activation and say, “Sure, that all sounds nice, but that will slow things down.” It is a purposeful slowdown, because you're going to get slowed down on the other side and it's going to be much more frustrating. You don't get to avoid. It will take the speed that it takes at some level. Like, whatever level, it will take some amount of time. It can either be a very painful time after the fact, after you tried to rush it, or you can try and slow it down enough to make sure you employ enough empathy to bring everybody along, at which point, you're going to have a lot better results both for this change and for the next one, when people are ready for that empathetic response.

I get it. I'm really sorry to have to deliver that news that it just has to be slower. It's going to slow you down one way or another and it sucks to think that. I live in the ideation space a lot of the time. I love having ideas and I want to see them delivered as quickly as possible. It doesn't mean it happens overnight. I continually stub my toe and trip over the stairs trying to make that leap. I get it. I understand the push. I just implore people to think about taking some of that pause, because it's very easy to skip. It's very easy to get excited and it's very easy to not want to take that time and then to have to take the time later in a much more painful way.

Cristina Amigoni: Indeed. Yeah. I live in the activation space. My working geniuses are actually mostly in the activation space. I'm even impatient, because once I discerned something and I know it needs to be done, I'm like, “Okay, why is it not done? Why is it not done? Why is it still not done?” We get the impatience of it and we have lived through many, many, many, many change projects and change initiatives that have had to slow down, either before or after, because we're skipping.

I mean, and we've gotten very used to actually having those conversations. When we hear somebody saying, “I want to make this change.” And we ask them if they have a timeline, I would say 99% of the time, our answer is like, yeah, double that. That's not happening in two months. We're going to need six months to actually get you there.

Alex Cullimore: It sounds flippant, like we're just saying double it. That sounds like it's exaggerated. That's almost always the actual amount that we tend to underestimate by. I find myself doing this all the time, my estimates. I'm always like, “Oh, I can do that in two days.” No, that's going to be two weeks. They slow yourself down. It's going to be okay.

Again, just empathy wise, I feel the pressure. I feel the excitement. I want to do it, too. It still comes back to bite you when you don't do it. Then it comes back to bite you, unfortunately, that time and in the long term. If you can do it the other way, you do the empathy, then you've got – When you get slowed down the painful way, that's when emotions start to pop up. People get angry. People are frustrated. People aren't doing it doing the thing. Some people are farther on the change than others. Now they're angry at the other ones, or vice versa. Those are the times where emotions start to flare up, at which point relationships can get a little more frayed, and that's what slows you down both for this change and for the next one, because now people have all of that logged information about that relationship in their head and they're more suspicious, they're slower. They're going to be a little bit more cautious the next time.

You can do it that way and you'll continually just pour molasses around your feet, or you can try and do it the other way. Even though it feels like you're moving slowly, you are moving and you move better and easier and you're not pulling muscles to try and get through a tight corner.

Cristina Amigoni: Indeed. Yeah, listen to your people, understand where they're coming from. The goal is when they're saying where they’re coming from. Because it'll actually make the change possible. You'll be able to actually understand, is this feasible? Was the idea feasible to begin with if you can understand where the people are coming from?

Alex Cullimore: That, I hope, is also everybody's goal too, because you want that change to be feasible, because you want to see it happen. You want it to be doable. There's nothing as stressful and tiring as you're reaching the end of an attempted change and being like, “Oh, damn. That was never possible the whole time. We really missed that one thing.” It's okay. There's going to be misses. There's going to be adjustments, but it can be especially painful to have something that you really want to move as a full strategy and then look back and be like, “Oh, we couldn't have made that happen the whole time.”

Cristina Amigoni: Yeah. We've lived that, too. Been on a project. It was supposed to be a six months project. Then once it was implemented, because of the missing of some of the activation and understanding, had to redo it all over, and there was another nine months after that. More than double the time.

Alex Cullimore: Yes, there are real costs to this. It's understandable to try to push. Unfortunately, reality does not bend that way.

Cristina Amigoni: No. Yes, the humans in the middle of the reality. Yes. Hope this helps with some activation, understanding. It's not an event. It's a process and it's a journey and it doesn't end until you're fully in the future state of new behaviors and mindsets.

Alex Cullimore: Yeah. Go forth and activate. Feel free to reach out if you have questions on activation, because this is something we clearly have some energy binds.

Cristina Amigoni: Yes. Just a little energy on it. Yes. Thanks for listening.

Alex Cullimore: Thanks for listening.

[END OF INTERVIEW]

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. 

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