Leading Change And Understanding Opportunities In Crisis With Dr. Gregory Shea

How do you make change successful? Dr. Diane Hamilton converses with Dr. Gregory Shea to give a plausible answer to that question. Dr. Shea is the President of Shea & Associates and author of Leading Successful Change. Today, he shares some details from his book and imparts some aspects about change, understanding opportunities in crisis, and curiosity. Dr. Shea notes that there are opportunities presented during crises and explains why some change efforts in an organization fail. He also points out some aspects that play significant parts to change, such as perception. Learn more about how to lead and bring about change successfully for your team in this encouraging episode.

 

I’m glad you joined us because we have Dr. Gregory Shea here. He is the President of Shea & Associates. He’s also an Adjunct Professor of Management at Wharton School as a Senior Fellow at its Center for Leadership and Change Management. He is a change expert and we are going to have a fascinating conversation.

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Leading Change And Understanding Opportunities In Crisis With Dr. Gregory Shea

I am here with Dr. Gregory Shea, who consults, teaches, researches and writes in the areas of organizational and individual change, leadership, group effectiveness, and conflict resolution. He has worked extensively in multiple industries with senior leadership, including boards of directors, as well as deep within organizations. He’s a Senior Fellow at Wharton School Center for Leadership and Change. He’s co-authored the revised edition of Leading Successful Change: 8 Keys to Making Change Work as well as quite a few other books. If I listed everything that you’ve done, Dr. Shea, we’d be here all day. It’s nice to have you here.

It’s my pleasure.

I was interested in your work. Change is such a hot topic and it continues to be a problem for a lot of organizations. I’m curious what led to your interest in focusing much in that area and healthcare? Since I worked for AstraZeneca, I’m interested in that as well. A little background on you would be great.

In terms of the interest in change, I do what I do because our lives and organizations are major factors in how we feel at the end of the day and how we show up in our private lives, including our families and our communities. That has led me in this decades ago and keeps me interested because it matters how we handle organizations and people at work. It’s both specific to the organization, but then more generally for people’s lives. That said, change is one of the most important pieces of work. If one’s trying to have an impact as I am on how well organizations do what they do, as well as what that means for the individual leaders and members of the organization, change is often defining for both in the short-term and longer-term.

That’s been particularly true since the ‘80s where the environment shifted to something Peter Vaill called a Permanent White Water. The model that had existed before was one that you have a steady state, you go through a period of change, a temporary perturbation in the environment, and then things settled back down. That’s not the environment that got created during the ’70s and played out in the United States in the ’80s and has been with us since, which is an ongoing turbulence. You can talk about how white the water is to use the kayaking image on a given day, week or month but that’s a different world. Organizations have to get better at it. Individuals have to get better at it because it’s become more central if we believe, as I do, that how we handle these things has a lot to do with both our professional and personal lives.

That’s how I came to be interested and focused on change in many ways. One comment about healthcare is that if you track my career, I’ve worked in many different industries. The industries that I was in at any given time were the industries that were somewhere between getting ripped apart. As the singer Tom Waits might say, “They had vice grips on their head” because of what was happening in the world around them. Manufacturing in the late ’70s and ’80s, financial services the late ’80s and early ’90s, the power industry, ITIS as we went through Y2K and the introduction of the internet and then a lot of time on healthcare. I’ve been in industries that were pressed into this white water environment and that’s where I fit in my time and on a couple of decades, that has particularly been healthcare.

Healthcare is interesting to me from my background as well. I work with pharmaceutical companies to develop curiosity in their employees as well because of my focus on curiosity, perception, emotional intelligence and the things I consult with. I’m curious about how you think this crisis is going to impact, the Coronavirus and all that. When we’re talking about change, are we talking about crisis management as well?

It can include crisis management, although a lot of leading change can run across the gambit from being purposeful and proactive because you believe that there’s something better. You’re pulled toward hope or a dream that used to characterize a lot more of how we talked about change if you go mid-20th century or so. In the ’80s, the expression was you need a burning platform, which I got to say is a fairly hostile approach to change. Let’s build a wooden platform, put a Homosapien on it and torched the platform. That’s the image. That can work and that can be necessary. The more that you do that, you’re forgoing the benefits of working toward a dream, a hope, etc.

Working our way into crisis, it is an example of change. Often in the crisis mode, which is much working on the end of the continuum that has to do with building a burning platform. We’ve seen that the ill effect in the Coronavirus in multiple settings, including the United States, is that we take a crisis and what we do is we try to seal it up. If one were thinking more about change more generally, one of the big challenges in any change effort, no doubt you’re well familiar with this, both from your education as well as your experience. Creating felt need is creating the emotion to change where it’s driven by fear or driven by hope or some combination.

 

There’s tremendous opportunity in crisis because felt needs created. You can say, “Let’s put the band-aid on this thing,” or “As long as we’re in here, there are a few things we could fix. I got the engine block open here and I’m looking at all this other stuff. Do you want to seal it up or should we fix this while we’re in here because we certainly are feeling a need here to address the problem or how do we define that problem?” Yes, is the short answer to your question. A crisis is a form of a leading change piece and yet, we often missed it. We don’t need a crisis, but if we have a crisis, we often miss the opportunities that are present in crisis to go after more because people feel the need to fix it.

You’re talking about opportunities presented in crisis and we talk about why organizational change. Sometimes it’s successful, but it does fail often. What is the biggest reason why we see many change efforts fail?

I will give you the classic academic and consulting response, which is it depends. This was certainly behind the book. There are multiple reasons why change efforts fail. We fail often at it that its worst. We’ve got studies run, it’s a majority and depending on how which study. It can go up to three quarters and if you’re trying to change the culture, that’s one of the worst change success rates. We’re not good at it in terms of being successful. If we’re that bad at something repeatedly, we can look at individual methods and I’m not arguing against walking the talk and modeling the behavior. You want the rest of it. I’d suggest there’s something more systemic than that. That’s certainly behind my career and this book I wrote with Cassie Solomon. We spend too much time giving advice to people and how to push change. Let me tell you how to model the behaviors, which are micro-behaviors, as opposed to saying, “How do you pull change? What’s the species strength here?”

We’re working with human beings and human beings are more loosely adaptive creatures. It’s a species skill, whether it’s in a social setting or whether it’s physical. We’re the only mammal that lives on all seven continents. We live at high altitudes, low altitudes. We migrated across the planet. You move somebody from Iowa City to Manhattan, they adjust. The point there would be, if that’s true, which it’s hard to argue that it’s true. Why don’t we spend more time trying to design the environments around people? That would drive the particular behaviors or adaptations that we’re looking for rather than neglecting or underplaying those and trying to push people to do something different when they look at the environment? “Why would I do that? What I’m doing is working fine, thank you.”

A lot of people are happy with status quo thinking, but that leads to a lack of innovation and many other problems. When you’re talking about designing the environment, what does that look like? What are you talking about designing?

The subtitle of the book is The 8 Keys to Making Change Work. Work with the speech and the work socio-technical theory coming out of the middle and later part of the 20th century. Systems thinking, particularly from the later part of the 20th and the end of the 21st century, which is a couple of pieces. One is that there are multiple parts of any system. If you want to change a system, you want to change the different parts that are in that system. It sounds simple but when one thinks about people at work, we do what we do because we’re adaptive. If you get messages from the information system, from the measurement system, from the reward system, from the way you were trained, from the organization, from the way your workplace is set up, we’ve got eight aspects like that.

You are going to behave in a particular fashion. If you want, head over to George Day. We had 127 organizations study on innovation and the Sloan Management Review. One of the major findings of that was the difference in the narrative that people tell about how innovation occurs inside their organization. Surprisingly, that narrative sits on top of or inside of, depending on the image that you use, the kind of influences that I got done listening to. Drive the narrative about how it works around here if you’re trying to be innovative.

If you want to change the narrative, which is the behavior, you want to change those influences to drive particular behaviors and not others. If I want it to not be an innovative organization and to be largely confined to efficiency and working on the next 2% that we can squeeze out of the process, you got to set up a system that makes that behavior that makes sense to people. If you want people to be regularly being innovative like 3M, which is relentlessly in the top ten if not the top five innovative organizations on the planet, they’ve consciously gone out to set up multiple aspects of the world inside of 3M to encourage people to act at innovative fashion.

That’s interesting because I worked with pharmaceutical companies, I’ve talked to Verizon, I have done a lot of different work with these top companies who were trying to develop curiosity within their organizations to become more innovative. I’m curious how much you hear about companies doing any change inspired by improving curiosity. Do you have any good stories of companies you’ve worked with?

[bctt tweet=”Opportunities presented in a crisis are often missed out because we are too focused on fixing it. ” username=””]

I’d ask you a question back about how you’re defining curiosity?

The desire to explore, to ask questions, to not go along with status quo thinking. A lot of people are held back by the fear, that voice in your head and the assumptions we make. The technology, we can over or underutilize it. Our environment, by everybody we come into contact with in our lives. These are the four things I found in my research that hold people back from exploring, learning new things and becoming much more inquisitive in the organization so that they’re not in the status quo ways of doing things.

If I were going after curiosity, we certainly seem like it’s at least a cousin of innovation. I can see the connection in your work between working in innovation and curiosity. In the method that Cassie and I would advocate in this book, and I’ve used it for several decades. Let’s take a couple of different players. I’m thinking more in terms of types of roles. Let’s write the scene that you want to see. What might they be thinking about? What would curiosity look like? Who did they go and talk to? What’s the tool that they use? How are you measuring it? Tell it like a story. Usually, it’s anywhere from a page to four pages, and come up with a portfolio of those. Maybe it’s several. I’ve done it where it’s as many as six to try to capture the sense of what does curiosity looks like.

In a behavioral sense, Ed Schein, who’s arguably the patron of organizational culture work. He came out with the fifth edition of his book, Organizational Culture and Leadership. He has this great quote. I’m going to paraphrase, which is in the domain of what we’re talking about. He said, “When people come to talk to him about culture, it’s behavior.” He tells the executives, “Can you please come up with your question again and not use the word culture?” My compliment to that would be if we take a word of directional intent, I want people to be more curious and more innovative. I got a case in the book about Whirlpool, about trying to increase its innovation.

How would you know what you sought? Let’s build that out. That becomes the thing you’re trying to get. The reason you’re not seeing that is not because you hired all the people on the planet who are opposed to giving you that scene. There’s something structural, and I don’t mean lines and boxes on an org chart, that you’ve done that has made that set of scenes not make sense for people to engage in. Let’s go back in and think about the way you’ve set up your organization. This is designed writ large, back to that list of eight things that would make those scenes make sense to people. Change those and you’re in a different place in terms of the likelihood that you’re going to be getting the behaviors that you want. When you see patterns of behaviors in systems, that’s because the system was designed to give you those patterns of behavior.

You’re saying we have to look at these behaviors and for somebody who’s thinking, “We know we have culture equals behavior, we want to change the way we look at these things.” Are we looking at these eight levers that you talk about and change to do that?

The place that I encourage people to start is in the spirit of what you and I were talking about, it’s curiosity. Let’s tell a story about curiosity as you want it to work. Is that a middle-management curiosity? Is it a frontline? Is it both? Is it interaction? Is it the way that the key interface that you want to see in between your people in the field and customers? Let’s come up with some stories that you’d like to be able to tell about how things work around here. Exercise your inner fiction writer, your scriptwriter or whatever it is. You’re enhancing something here.

The point is not for them to walk out and say, “Everybody’s got to learn this script.” That’s not the point. The point of those narratives, scenes or stories is then to say, “Those aren’t happening. Let’s take a look at these eight influences that we’ve listed. How might we arrange those to make these stories likely to happen?” Let’s assume that the biggest variable we’re looking at here about why we’re not seeing these things happen is the way we’ve set up the world and our organizations. The eight ways in or the eight aspects to which they can turn into levers of change.

Can you list those eight for those who aren’t aware of it? 

 

One is organization, which is structure. It includes organization charts. It’s also things like regular committees or meetings. What’s the formal skeleton of the organization, which is lines and boxes plus things like meeting system? What’s the workplace design? It is the layout of the physical and virtual space. What are the work tools that are available to you? That also includes who’s located near one another. Propinquity matters in human relationships. If I’m located in a space near you, I don’t have to have a deep personal connection with you. I am going to interact with you during the day at the copy machine or wherever it is that I might end up looking at the screen with you, sharing a space or trying to work out the coffee, whatever it might be. That’s workplace design and that’s important. That’s a valuable resource that American firms especially undervalue, which is who ends up co-located and why? Task, which is work processes, protocols, pathways, and interventions around lean sigma and things like total process engineering. People, which is who do you pick as well as skills and what do you develop in them. What values they might bring in as well as what you teach them about what it means to be a member here.

One of my favorite quotes that emphasize that it’s important who you pick and yet you better make sure you’re paying attention to these other variables we’re going through. Google has in effect a mantra that goes, “We hire people who don’t need support and then we support them.” Rewards and punishment, which include money. It can be other rewards, simply knowing you’re going to do well or you’re going to succeed, social recognition. Rewards broadly defined measurement. What are the metrics, the scorecard to performance, information distribution? Who knows what, when and how? Is it pushed to you or pulled to you? Is it digital? Is it real-time? Decision allocation, which is who participates when in what way in which decision, which is responsibility charging or RACI charting for those who are familiar with that. It’s trying to line people up in a way that’s based on the task to be performed in terms of do they sign off on it? Do they do it? Do they get informed? Do they consult to it? Those are the eight levers.

We know what they are and we know your approach, but is there a time when they shouldn’t use it?

I wouldn’t use it to figure out where the water cooler goes.

I was looking at the notes you sent me. There is a time that you said when we shouldn’t.

If it’s a minor change, don’t worry about this. This takes us back to where you started, Diane. You talked about crises, but we can talk about the size of the opportunity. How much are we trying to change here? If it’s truly small, then I wouldn’t worry a lot about this. Although with this advisory, this is somewhat in the spirit of how we were talking about crises. We pick a change that we want to do and we underestimate what changes. For example, my work in healthcare is much more to do with large academic-based healthcare systems. Tremendous effort about digitizing health records for all good reasons. That’s been an extremely costly in many ways painful task for providers. That said, as big as that change is to get electronic medical records in place, it’s also the opportunity to say, “Is the only thing we’re doing here putting in a faster train on old tracks?”

Before we say and limit this, which is already a massive inexpensive thing, does it provide us the opportunity for changing how we think about, population health, outpatient care, telemedicine, collaboration at the bedside, the role of pharmacy? Yes, it does provide that opportunity. You can decide whether you want to take it or not, but if you want to write out scripture stories that are possible, once you’ve got electronic medical records, write them out. Is this the time that as long as we’re in here, we might as well do the whole thing because it’s going to be worth it to do that? If it’s a small change, don’t do it but don’t kid yourself that automatically because it looks like it may be one thing that it doesn’t provide the opportunity for something larger. This method would allow you to at least think about, “Do I want to make this bigger than it already is or not?” Sometimes it’s about the parking lot and parking spaces. Don’t worry about it.

When you say, “Don’t kid yourself,” it brings up some research I’m doing on perception and how our perception of what’s important? What isn’t important? What’s important to me may be different than what’s important to somebody else? How much does perception play a part in our desire to change our need to change and what we do?

It’s a huge part. The question becomes how do I influence perception? Much of the conventional wisdom is you spend a lot of time trying to restructure frames, provide information and create meaning. I’m not arguing against that. I would say that in a hypothetical world, if somebody spent a lot of time talking to me about how he looked at the world versus I show up at my office and I see that I’ve been reassigned to a new unit, have new meetings, schedules with different players. They’ve changed my reward structure and decision structures, which make me much more interdependent with one set of people versus another. The metrics have changed to be less individual and far more collaborative than lined up with those.

[bctt tweet=”If we don’t make changes within the next 20 years, we won’t be able to make any changes after that. ” username=””]

I’ve got access to information that used to be siloed. That scheduled for a training class to try to help me get the tools that I need to make use of this, I see that the processes I’m supposed to follow in the three major pieces of my job have changed. I’m getting collocated with these people. How much time do you have to spend convincing me that this is important for me? I got it. Can I get to my training class? That would be as opposed if you could spend a lot of time talking to me about frameworks. I’m not saying that can’t be helpful to help people understand why these changes are occurring. In the end, if my environment changes significantly, you got my intention. I’m a human being. I adjust to my environment and my environment changed.

A lot of environments are changing and you’d write about these things. You have some interesting case studies examples. I know Ikea and Whirlpool. I would like to know a couple of them that you think is important for people to know about.

There is a number that is not in the book. Is there a particular topic or challenge that you think might be interesting to the readers?

For me, it would be how people were able to implement change based on exploring new ideas, being creative, innovative, that type of thing. 

One of my favorites about creating a more innovative world is an oldie but goodie, which is the culture of innovation at Whirlpool. This may be the oldest case we’ve got in there but it’s good. David Whitman was the Chairman, CEO of Whirlpool as we’re moving into the 21st century. He had taken several runs at cultural change, mainly trying to make induce innovation in the organization. Whirlpool is successful and certainly at that time, in particular, it’s in white boxes. What’s the innovation here? Keep engineering. Whitman didn’t think that was the way the future was going to play out. He did not explicitly use the model, but if you take the case apart, I’d say he certainly implicitly use the model. Everything from requiring that divisions had to deploy 10% of their capital investment dollars to innovation, to set up unlike 3M, they create a latticework of ways for ideas to surface that people are recognized and rewarded for ideas as they show up. They were creating decision allocation that allowed people to make choices at a lower level so that budgeting was freed up.

If they weren’t happy with decisions, they had roots into the executives, including to him if they want to check the work of the people who were allocated in this more bottom-loaded decision making. If people were not happy with that, they created a suite of online resources. I believe they were called Innovation E-Space. They’re trying to work the workplace design aspect by changing the tools available for people even as changing the metrics or resource allocation pieces. They created ways of mentors who they trained so people could have the resources available to them to understand and what innovation might look like. They guide them through the process. As you well know, innovation is not, “I have an idea.” That’s a place where you start, but it’s got to be shaped, molded.

That’s even before you get to the political reality, you’re trying to make the business case for doing this. Whitman set up his separate seed fund. He told his employees, “If any innovator goes to their original innovation head with an idea that the SBU head will not fund, then they can come to see me.” He’s not promising but he wants to boost signal and that’s important symbolically. This is all part of altering the decision allocation process, established boards throughout the company, which had responsibility for nurturing and funding innovative ideas. That would be changing the organization and the decision allocation. Whirlpool’s 2018 report announced the launch of 100 new products. They were recognized in early 2019 by sixteen International Forum Design Awards and five Consumer Electronic Show Awards.

That’s a great case study and I know you said it’s an oldie but a goodie. It continues to be successful.

We got twenty years on this. People talk about sustainability. He starts it at the turn of the century and they’re still winning awards many years later.

 

I’m glad you shared it. A lot of people look to more companies that have started. I want to hit on a modern company as well. I know you talk about Twitter and it turned itself around with Jack Dorsey returning and all that. What do you think of what Twitter’s done in terms of relationship?

I should note it’s a case in the book. When Dorsey returned, part of this is determining which is what we would argue as the work of creating the narratives. Where do you want to be? Dorsey wanted to rewire the organization to take it back into a focused core, what one might call fundamentals. Twitter’s is what’s happening was the buzz. Cassie worked with a piece of the organization which explicitly used the model. Twitter as a whole did not. Much of the case we present is inside of that group, which was the customer’s organization.

One of the big things they change is they decided that they wanted to integrate a lot more cross-silo work. To do that, you have to change meetings structures and reward structures. You’ve got to change who knows what about whose product and what they’re thinking about. You’re changing information and distributions. We’ve touched on rewards and information and organizational structure. They created different tools available so people could look into and share both what other points of view were being done in the marketplace, but also, ways of enrolling those up or combining them.

I’m quoting here, “Traditionally, we put together one global narrative and shared it at our annual sales meeting. We started to roll out a much broader set of tools, case studies, videos, training that are tailored to different markets.” This isn’t an either-or, you got to have a strategy. I’m not arguing that. In terms of the implementation, they’re doing coordinated way into workplace, information, rewards. What do you measure? How do you organize in terms of established meetings and establish cross-stitching of the various pieces of the organization?

The Twitter case study, is this part of the revised edition? 

Yes, it is.

What else did you do in this revised edition? Is it more updated case studies like this?

It certainly has several case studies. For example, in this one the original book, what we put in here is the Twitter case. We’ve got a Viacom and an AI case. Those are all new.

How about the Conference of State Bank Supervisors, is that new?

[bctt tweet=”You need to be able to think, take time and have the energy to implement your system. ” username=””]

Yes, that’s new. Somewhere between 4 and 6 new mini-cases. These are not long as you know from the book. They’re the cases run 2 to 4 pages. We’re trying to mind them for a particular material. One of the hardest things for people to do in the method that we use is what you and I have talked about a couple of times, which is the construction of the narratives. People aren’t used to doing that work. They want to get right into the levers, not fast. My Japanese friends’ clients would say, “What’s the difference between an American gardener and a Japanese gardener?” When they asked me, I said, “I have no idea, but I’m sure you’re about to tell me.” They said, “Yes, Greg-san.” The difference is that if you ask an American gardener to move a bush, they move straight to the bush and begin to dig.

If you ask a Japanese gardener to move a bush, they circle it until they believe it is time to approach. We can have a long conversation about the limits of either approach in the context of this question. Don’t go straight to the levers, what are you trying to do? What are you trying to create? What are the focal behaviors? Strategy implementation comes down to what are the changes behaviors are looking to it? Come up with what you’re trying to create in terms of social reality for people, and then go to the eight aspects or levers. All this is back to your question about what had changed? We spent a little longer based on our experience talking about how you construct the scenes.

I’m curious if you think luck and timing have any effect? Let’s go to the Twitter example. Did Trump have any impact on that?

The Twitter reorganization, that’s 2015, that Jack Dorsey returns. I have no idea about the Trump influence on that. I would argue that if they hadn’t gone through some of these changes, they would have been not as well-positioned to whatever that bounce was to take advantage of that. The old quote about, “Better to be lucky than good.” The other quote is, “Luck favors the prepared.” Most quotes, you have to find the whole portfolio of quotes, put them together to find out what the truth. It’s probably both of those. They were clearly out of track to prepare themselves for being focused on that theme, which is Twitter is what’s happening. That’s where they were headed. If they weren’t doing that, I would suspect whatever else was going on in their environment, they would have been less prepared to take advantage of it.

All of this is fascinating to me. It’s right up my alley of what things I like to study and research. Your work has been unbelievable. The amount of writing you’ve done and many years of research. Do you have more books that you plan for the future? What can we expect?

First, let’s get to the future, Diane.

You’ve don’t have a burning desire to fix some mystery other than healthcare?

If you’ll tolerate this but I’d kick it to a mental level to try to answer that question because there’s an awful lot of conversation about, “It’s AI or it’s machine-based learning, we pick the industry.” All of that’s probably true, 4th or 5th industrial revolution. I don’t know that’s the thing that’s going to be the change that’s going to churn up the waters. I do believe that we’re at some type of a tipping point regarding what is our relationship with this planet. There are many of us pushing a billion. We are consumptive, trying to sort that out throughout the next handful of decades while we still can make a choice. We’re either going to end up in a more of a partnering relationship or we’re not. If we’re not, it’s going to drive a whole bunch of fairly predictable climate changes from six meters rising of water and continued more violent weather and disruption.

From a business standpoint, therefore supply chains and all that. That change has a good chance of dwarfing everything else that we talk about. If I’m right about that, then that’s the thing that’s going to create a whole new context to use your word about perception. A whole new perception of what are we doing here? We still got to get stuff to market and we still got to sell stuff and all of that. I’m not arguing that, but if we’re doing it inside of the context that I noted, that’s different. AI is powerful potentially as it is. I’ve written about AI. There’s an AI case here. The bigger one is, what is our relationship with this planet? Whatever we decide is going to be, and then how that backwashes through almost everything else that we’re doing. I believe we’re probably at that point.

I’ve had some experts on the show who said, “If we don’t make changes, we won’t be able to make changes.” There are some scary predictions of what we’re going to see with some of the stuff that we’re doing. We’ve got a lot of focus on important things. Younger generations are behind a lot of that focus. It’ll be interesting to see how companies react. I’m wondering if this crisis will open up our eyes to other things that we need to be preparing for. Probably see a lot more crisis management discussions I would imagine.

I hope that we see less crisis management discussion and more that we spend more time back to one thing you’d talked about trying to understand and then deal with the systems that we’ve created. You didn’t say this, but we’re in danger in our fear, anxiety, and anger of ending up playing a continuous game of whack-a-mole where you squeeze the system and it costs up as the scapegoat. You go after that scapegoat and then you squeeze again and come up with another one as opposed to going back to trying to figure out what’s the system that exists?

In this one, what’s the system that we’ve got that can detect worldwide and then help guide us in terms of our reactions to various diseases known and unknown as an example? What’s the system we’ve created of the gig economy and what’s the vulnerability inside that we don’t have people with healthcare benefits and don’t have people who can take paid time off? We could go after a single issue, but I suspect if we got inside that, it could be a different conversation. One of the things that I wish that had happened that Obama had said he was going to do multiple times was to do a congressional investigation of the healthcare system on C-SPAN.

That didn’t happen. It ended up back behind closed doors. I’m not trying to go after Obama. That’s an example of somebody, why did he want to do that? What he wanted to do was we need to look at the whole blessed thing. We need to all look at it and we need to archive it. Anytime you want to go in, you can look at it. What’s happening with the pharmaceutical? How are physicians paid? What happens with the way we’ve limited the government’s negotiation capabilities? How we fund acute versus non-acute care?

All that stuff is hard to keep your head around but laying it out and presenting a place that you could look at it and trying to take the whole system into perspective, likely would lead us as a collective in a different place. That’s the thing that we’ve got in multiple places. Back to the orientation in the book is think systems. That takes dedicated hard work to do that. You can’t be reactive. You need to be able to think, take time and have the energy, the training, and enough sleep to be able to say, “Let’s see if we can layout the whole thing and decide how much of this do we want to go after, but let’s understand the whole thing.”

That’s a great place to end because you’ve laid out many great ideas for people. I hope everybody has all the information that they need to make important changes in their workplace. Your revised edition is something that is a must-read. A lot of people are going to want to know how they can get it and maybe reach you. Are there any links or anything you’d like to share?

You can get it at Barnes & Noble and Amazon. You can go to LeadingSuccessfulChange.com, which is out there. I’ve got a website, Gregory Shea. You can get it through that as well. If that doesn’t work for some reason, send me a note on LinkedIn. I have a picture of me looking like I’m leaning over Ben Franklin’s shoulder, the statute pen, reading a paper with him. That would be how you know you’re on my page. Any of those will lead you to the book. I hope it serves people well in hard times.

Thank you much for being my guest, Dr. Shea. This was wonderful.

Thank you. I wish you well in your work too. You’re working hard both on what’s in the public domain here in terms of your show and blogs, but also in your consulting and your speaking work.

I appreciate that.

—

I’d like to thank Dr. Shea for being my guest. We get so many great guests on this show and if you’ve missed any episodes, you can find them on my website at DrDianeHamilton.com. We’re on all the radio stations where we’re syndicated as well as on all the areas like iTunes, iHeart, Roku. If you’re looking to contact me, you can do so on my site or through social media at Dr. Diane Hamilton. For more information on Cracking The Curiosity Code or The Curiosity Code Index, you can go to CuriosityCode.com or again at DrDianeHamilton.com. I hope you enjoyed the show and I look forward to the next show of Take The Lead Radio.

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About Dr. Gregory Shea

Gregory P. Shea, Ph.D., consults, teaches, researches, and writes in the areas of organizational and individual change, leadership, group effectiveness, and conflict resolution. He has worked extensively in multiple industries and with senior leadership including boards of directors as well as deep within organizations. He is a Senior Fellow at the Wharton School’s Center for Leadership and Change, Adjunct Professor of Management at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and of its Aresty Institute of Executive Education, Adjunct Senior Fellow at the Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics at the Wharton School, President of Shea & Associates, Inc, and a Senior Consultant at the Center for Applied Research. He served as Academic Director for the Johnson and Johnson/Wharton Program for Health System CEO’s and for fourteen years as Academic Director for the Johnson and Johnson/Wharton Fellows Program for Nurse Executives. His awards include an Excellence in Teaching Award from Wharton. He is a member of the Academy of Management and the American Psychological Association.

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