The New Imperative: Embracing a Continuous Cycle of Discovery to Optimize Your Organization

0:00 The topics and opinions express in the following show are solely those of the hosts and their guests and not those of W FOURCY Radio. It's employees are affiliates. We make no recommendations or endorsements for radio show programs, services, or products mentioned on air or on our web. No liability explicit or implies shall be extended to W FOURCY Radio or its employees are affiliates. Any questions or comments should be directed to those show hosts. Thank you for choosing W FOURCY Radio. What's working on Purpose? Anyway? Each week we ponder the answer to this question. People ache for meaning and purpose at work, to contribute their talents passionately and know their lives really matter. They crave being part of an organization that inspires them and helps them grow into realizing their highest potential. Business can be such a force for good in the world, elevating humanity. In our program, we provide guidance and inspiration to help usher in this world we all want Working on Purpose. Now, here's your host, doctor Elise Cortez.

1:04 Welcome back to the Working on Purpose program, which has been brought to you with passionate price since February of twenty fifteen. Thanks for tuning again this week. Great to have you. I'm your host, doctor Elise Cortes. If we've not met before and you don't know me, I'm an organizational psychologist and logo therapist, speaker and author, and my team and I at gusto Now help companies to enlive, and fortify their operations by building a high performance, invigorated culture and leadership activated by meaning and purpose our missions to help our clients create a destination workplace where people flock to join, are intrinsically motivated to perform with their best, can grow into the floor potential, and are committed to stay in dynamic to deliver on the company's mission, which translates to higher profits for you. You can learn more about us. On how we can work together at gustodeshnow dot com and my personal site Eliscortes dot com. Getting into today's program we have with us today. Karen Goldenbiddle an organizational ethnographer, educator, and sought after voice on discovery, transformation and navigating change.

1:57 She's the author of The Untapped Power of Discovery, How to Create Change. It inspires a better future, which we'll be talking about today. She jos you today from Atlanta, Georgia. Karen, A hearty welcome to Working on Purpose. Thank you, thank you for your invitation. Look forward to this absolutely. As you know from my notes, my very very thorough notes, I quite enjoyed. Your book and got a lot out of it. You know, reading my guest's books cover to cover, Karen, is really part of my research process that I use to continue researching my own books, and of course it goes into my speaking as I'm out and about, so your word continues to travel through me as well. And I was amazed, Karen, you have literally just stumbled or discovered an area vastly underappreciated before, which seems really from the outsets quite simple, and that's discovery. How did you find yourself into this?

2:50 Well, I have long studied change, and I do it as an ethnographer, organizational ethnographer, so I go into organizations to learn about them. So my dissertation, for example, was a year long study of a fortune two hundred corporation. So and I've done a series of those over time, and I kept all the statistics about change. Seventy percent failed, eighty five percent. You know, various numbers over the years of cultural change failed and I saw that as well, and in fact, numerous things were offered for kind of explanations to it, you know, lack of leadership, support, resource constraints, no employee gauge in. And I was seeing in my studies well intentioned not problematic change initiatives, but well intentioned initiatives go awry, that they too would fail or fail to deliver the expect with the expectation that was set in advance. And I really got puzzled. I was it was why. I mean, these were managers who cared about implementing change in a way that would bring employees and so forth. So for a couple of years it was a puzzle for me, and I struggled with it, frankly, trying to teach about it. You know, how could I do this when I knew that many of the well intentioned were not there? So what I did was start looking around. I thought, well, I'll flip the question. You know, most people talk about statistics of failure. I'm going to

4:22 look at the statistics of success try to find those, if you might call it sampling on the deependent variable. I was purposely doing that, so I wanted to get a cadre of organizations where the change was working, and so I sent the word out and one came. I heard about one medium sized healthcare organization. It's in the book, Delta Care, and I decided to reach out got involved with them, and what I was seeing was amazing. They didn't necessarily use the word discovery. They were trying to create a model of care that had future relevance for their patients. So they were thinking ten fifteen years out, and they really had a good reputation for delivering care well, and they wanted to continue and sustain that over in the future given the future relevance of this, and so they did. I will go into that with questions for you, but the key here is really that they it was a collective effort, and as I watched them work and engage difficulties, engage the unexpected, deal with surprise in different ways than I had seen before, they helped me discover the power of discovery. Frankly, that's really how it happened.

5:43 And then I wrote it up for an academic journal. I really wanted to tighten my analyses, wrote it up, and then started searching. In twenty nineteen for any cases I could find, and there are dozens in the book, and COVID also was part of that whole time of trying, and so there are dozens of the book and that's really how it started. Maybe it helped me, and it's brilliant. So two things to that, Karen. One is the way you're describing going after you know, the non failure cases and what's good and right in organizations is really also what positive psychology is about. And that's one of the things that I was built in, right, you know, let's look at what's good and working well in people and not what's wrong with people.

6:26 And so that's so I'm linked with positive organizational scholarship. Okay, simply it had just started prior to me finding. This, okay. And then the other thing is how delightful to just really go in there and just put your finger on the pulse of this organization. And as you know, I do want to talk with you later in the program about Delta Care because I think it's really fascinating what they did and I'm really really intrigued that you are an organizational ethnographer. I think that says so much and really lends something to what you have created and brought forth that frankly is I found so refreshing and effective and powerful. Karen. So I'm really glad that you're on the program and I get to have you on my on my on my program with my listeners and viewers.

7:11 Very welcome the stories we're compelling, they are and we're going to We're going to hit several of them, as you know. So so first I want to situate and it's just really powerful and really adds an opening for us. Is you talk about how many people have a constrained view of discovery. They think of it as not necessarily for them. So it's I think probably the other thing that I as I worked the case and around discovery, I saw that the bulk of the discussion about discovery was as an object, the what and end result, and that really by thinking of it that way, it does a number of negative things. Number one is it totally doesn't tap the creative power that does discovery as a process has so as as it unfold over time, and by focusing on the what, not the how, it's just limiting. As I mentioned, we really believe that we don't have the talent of discovery it's relegated to the talented few, maybe scientists, artists, So it doesn't it doesn't tap into the notion of discovery that anyone can and we can develop this later.

8:26 Anyone can cultivate the practice of discovery with this. So uh, that can do discovery. People, the designers, the scientists, the researchers, the new product developers, you know, those that are designated in organizations by role or function as being creative is only a sliver of the creativity in organizations, and that's totally lost when discovery is thought of as an object, not as a process that unfolds over time in our even in our everyday actions. Yes, and therefore we miss all of the potentials for human growth and positive changes you write out. I just thought that was such an important point. So it's for all of us, this discovery process, which really really delights me.

9:14 So many people say things like I'm not creative, I can't possibly do this kind of workly, right, And we're not talking about that, And so you go on to say, the solution here is to embrace the process of discovery. Yeah, I really think of it as an inventive process. It helps us generate a hause insight, new perspectives, and new understanding that are essential and fueling change, and we really derail that too often. For sure. I want to say that as a discovery process, what I've come to see really even since writing the book, is that discovery is an inventive process, and organizations are also filled with evaluative processes, production, planning, performance, appraisal, those things that keep the organization running. Kind of thing systematic and organizations need both the inventive and evaluative processes. But because of pressures for stability or returns or a number of things, the whole notion of inventive processes has been hidden on the discoveries lost, and it's relegated to, as I mentioned, to these certain roles. Even the teaching of change in as an MBA. I've taught many MBA classes, and it really most of our teaching doesn't talk about the inventive part of change at all. It's more about control and moving through the steps of change and not weaving through. I'm really not talking another model of change.

10:46 I'm talking about a process that weaves through any kind of change model that you might have, that opens it up to be able to discover new ideas. And we're going to dig more into that towards the end into the program, because I just think it's so important to contrast what people think of as the traditional change management process. And I've been part of those two organizations and they include a lot of things like communication, timelines, power points, we're documents explaining the change it doesn't and your approach is so much more fresh, and I just we'll get to that a little bit later to really ferret that out, but I wanted to at least surface that the process of discovery is something to be embraced by everyone and that we all grow and learn and improve because of that process. And then the next thing I wanted to get to Karen, this is really really really critical here in your book that I really thought was important to call out is you talk about how people can work together using three motors. I love that three motors to address necessary belief change to bring out entirely new results. So let's talk about each of the three motors, Okay.

11:51 And what I want to say is, so that's the idea that they helped me discover. These three motors together really help cultivate the practice of the discovery you're doing discovery as you engage these motors, and what they help do is drive belief change. So the willingness to challenge and change potentially change one's beliefs that are found ill fitting or maybe found in error as you engage things during change is the single most important thing for developing discovery. So I'll take a look at the first one. When we embrace surprise, So it's surprise, it's kind of that's curious, or uh, something's not right. That's how we tell that there's a surprise. It's something unexpected. And if you think about all the directives these days for leaders to leverage the unexpected, this is it, right, the unexpected event. We did not expect it to happen, and expectations really as a habit are there are everyday beliefs like what we expect to have happen, the kinds of beliefs that I'm talking about. So those are really critical because if we dismiss surprise, and we do, we we put it over here, we derail it. We say, oh no, surprise management.

13:12 We rationalize it, all that kind of stuff. Right right, then we derail discovery. But surprise is important because it ignites discovery. So that's its role as a motor. Yes. The second one is when you did you have questions or you want to. No, no, keep going, keep going. Yeah, it's great. When you walk into this realm of doubt of not knowing, a genuine doubt, and we that's it can be uncomfortable and occasionally and it can be scary in ways because we're taught as professionals to know, we're not taught how to not know, how to be comfortable without with with not knowing and moving through that. And so it's it's letting go of what is known for us. And we're going to see some examples in every single story in the book, there's a letting go. So every single story has these three motors in them and also some various iterations with them. But that's one. So the letting go.

14:13 And you know, when you think about that, for leaders, what you're engaging a process when you're opening up to discovery that has somewhat of an unknown outcome for it, Right, you're letting go of the control that we would have during change. And to be able to do that in a way trusting that it is not a random process. It's a way to engage, but it's certainly different than what traditionally we have done. And then launching to new ways really says really expansively explore new possibilities. As we go through surprise and doubt, we will start to question, oh, I thought this, but maybe it's this, and now I'm seeing in this experience that it's not at all like we had imagined. So we're going to adjust our beliefs, and those beliefs and new perspectives open up new ways of seeing, new possibilities for ways to deliver change elf the change itself as well.

15:17 I think the surprise in launching new ways is pretty pretty obvious for people. Let's talk a bit more about how we recognize that. What do you mean by Genuine'll give us some examples of what would be How would we show up in genuine doubt? Yeah, and so doubt is that, you know, a key marker of doubt is questioning. So with surprise, we're kind of taken aback, and then do we say it's gone or do we lean in and try to explore it with questions? And so the whole notion is to question what we don't know, rather than to affirm what. We see very good addition. Okay, that's so helpful. Very good addition. Okay, wonderful.

15:59 Okay. On that note, let's grab our first break. Karen goes by so fast. I'm your host, doctor Early. I'm your host, Doctor Elise Cortez. We were on the air with Karen Goldenbiddle, an organizational ethnographer, educator, and a sout after voice on discovery, transformation and navigating change. We've been getting into. The process of where her fascination with discovery came from and some of the promise of what can happen when we actually embrace it in organizations. Stay with us, We'll be right back.

16:40 Doctor Elise Cortez is a management consultant specializing in meaning and purpose. An inspirational speaker and author. She helps companies visioneer for a greater purpose among stakeholders and develop purpose inspired leadership and meaning infused cultures that elevate fulfillment, performance, and commitment within the workforce. To learn more, or to invite at least to speak to your organization, please visit her at Elisecortes dot com. Let's talk about how to get your employees working on purpose. This is working on purpose with doctor Elise Cortes. To reach our program today or to open a conversation with Elise, send an email to a lease Alisee at Elisecortes dot com. Now back to Working on Purpose.

17:32 Thanks for staying with us, and welcome back to Working on Purpose. I'm your host, doctor Release Cortes. As I also am dedicated to help them create a world where people realize their potential at work, are led by inspirational leaders that help them find and contribute their greatness, and we do business at Better's the World. I continue to research and write my own books. So my last book came out in March of twenty twenty three. It's called The Great Revitalization, How activating meaning and purpose can radically and liven your business. And what I did for you is I really helped you lay out what is today's scarning workforce want from their employers, and then I offered twenty two best projects to help you fold that into your culture, to help to supply that for them. So, if you're now just joining us, my guest is Karen Golden Biddle of the Untapped power of discovery, How to create change It inspires a better future, which we're talking about today. So now we want to get into some of those stories that we queued up and kind of teased our listeners and viewers with, and the first one I want to start with. I was just so intrigued with all the stories, Karen. They're just so well written that describe the power of when we embrace discovery and what happens when we don't. So let's start with the play Pump example.

18:39 If you could just situate. What they were trying, the problem they were trying to address, what they did to address it, and then where things kind of went awry. Right, So it's an example of where it did go awry, discovery was not embraced. There is a wake up call toward the end of it where they do embrace discovery, where the foundation to embraces it, but it really the product and the project itself failed. So we have Ronnie Steiver and Trevor Field. I'll just say Ronnie is the inventor of something called play Pump and Trevor Field is a marketer. They both experienced and this is key for this. They both experienced or witnessed African villagers that the difficulties they faced in getting clean water. So this is all about creating a technology that would help villagers in very remote areas in Africa gain be able to get clean water without walking miles a number of hardships that they both witnessed in this so Steiver created it. It's a merry go round. You can see this online, a Merry Garne pumping device, so literally a merry ground that's connected to a well head that so it's a storage tank it goes in so that on demand, once that's filled, the villagers can get gravity fed clean water. And so as the children play on the merry around, it pumps the water. So that's the notion of play pump. That's that's where the play pumpkin.

20:08 And it's just delightful. It's delightfully brilliant. Accept it stopped there, so but it's just I really want to celebrate what they did from the out from the outgo. Yes, the technology itself was very interesting, very intriguing. Yes, they they honed it a little bit, but that it was like they it really they thought it was the best solution uh to accessing clean water that had ever happened, and so did the funders. The number of funders US government was involved in it. The number started to donate once they saw the early success for water deprived villages in particular, so lots of positive press and there was a partnership that was found with the Foundation and the government to provide to say to this play pump, so it's roundabout Outdoors was the company that was created to implement install these play pumps to provide clean water for ten million people in Sub Sahara, Africa by twenty ten. This was two thousand and eight when they did this, so by twenty ten they had a clear mandate by the funders to get clean water for ten million people. But difficulties emerged late two thousand and seven two thousand and eight, all of a sudden, the pump stopped working in villages and where they never thought to look at the villages where there were few children,

21:42 so the play pumps were installed anyway and without thinking to look at that, and there were no children to pump the water with a merry ground, so it went unused. The pump stopped. There were reports out there that the the technology itself was very innovative and very robust, but they were calling out the technology driven very single minded installation of these pumps without regard for community inputs, so communities were not asked in advance, no sense of the user experience from in advance to problem solved to fine tune what was going on, even to check the geographic land to make sure that the amount of water could be tapped out. So there were serious issues about this.

22:37 Still Field believed that they had everything to achieve the target, and again the target was twenty ten, so he continued installation. Slowly the project started unraveling. The funders, the collaborative group got back involved, and with such hope and promise that the play Pump offered, it ended. The project was stopped five years after it began. And there are a lot of explanations for why this happened. As I dugged into it closer. It's this notion. It's a wonderful case for us to illustrate when we see how often do we implement the best practice or the software is big, like we just pop it into the organization as the best solution for our time. This fits that problem without regard for any kind of understanding about the context of im implementation or what the continuous notion of finding out about that software or new practice or whatever as we go along so this whole notion of continuous discovering even during implementation and beyond change was totally lost. They thought it was perfect, it would implement and it would work. So that's that's what happened.

24:02 Thank you for explaining that. It's just on the one hand, it was such a beautiful, creative solution, but then you know this sticking, the rigidity of sticking with the plan without really understanding how it was being accepted. What were the obstacles, et cetera. That's what I really wanted to illustrate. And you did that view right, and how often we stay the course. Right right, right right? And they had and they had funders to satisfy all these things. That totally understand. And yet when we get into one of the other, uh, the MRI I, that was a really interesting We'll get to that later, but so many great stories. So let's go on to the Microsoft story. Here, right. This is such a critical thing that I really really admire about the CEO, Sacha Nadella.

24:47 You know, you talk about how you know. He when he when he got when he when he got in, he really understood that he that we were operating as if the formula had been figured out, we know what we're doing. We're baked. It's all good, and he really understood that it was necessary to discover a new formula. So would you just say a little bit about just kind of what was he up against? How did he go about help starting to make the cultural shift that he did. I know, we could spend a whole hour. We could. I love this, I mean, and he's been there ten years now, so that was twenty fourteen when he made that comment about what we need to do is discover a new formula, not just optimize the old formula with this, and so that began a cultural shift, a cultural change, I think again, it's one where there was a really important vision purpose around what they were trying to do, and it allowed they use the word growth mindset, which is a very discovery oriented term focus as well. But this discovery helped Microsoft let go of beliefs that drove the formula optimization, and some of those beliefs were in hierarchy in a way that was segmented the silo's notion that very much silos competition internally, not just externally, really trying to get ahead at the expense of others. There was a number of things, even teams

26:19 later SATA found we're not sharing code with each other, right, So that's what it was like the old formula around this, and then the take on they moved from a know it all culture what they called it and still do, to a learn it all culture. So no longer are they know it alls, but they are learning along the way and so that to me is a fundamental shift and earthshaking shift, and you can see it in their business obviously. So that's really what There's a lot to talk about there. I mean, HR came in a number of things are all aligned with this. But what I really wanted to illustrate, which you just did so well, is just literally how do you turn the Titanic? And they did and they did, and it's just really it's many of the books that I've written over the years that I've been hosting the show. The case ends up showing up, but the way that you described it was just great for discovery.

27:18 Well, and then strain everyone around. If you take a look at Nadella, I mean you see someone who engage relationally, engages others, is okay with new ideas. When he made errors and he did around gender pay early on he went on and admitted the error, you know, as there's a lot that he modeled as this notion of discovering and moving this shift to this new way of operating as well as supported it, and so did his senior staff and so did it. It really was a all hands on deck kind of thing. It's really to be celebrated and revered and emulated. Right, That's what's why we're talking about it. Okay, Now I want to go on and talk about that delta case, Delta care case, and what I want to situate that really stood out for me as I was reading it and as you go on to describe what happened, is I want to situate how really as they were looking at understanding, you know, what was going on, and looking at their patient mapping care flows that they had in the beginning, they started to accept their high patient death rate.

28:24 Oh we get the really so well, there wasn't. Really a death rate. I did see that in your in your oh okay, but definitely handoffs were being missed. And okay, okay, not what they wanted to say, Okay, okay. And so the other thing that I that I really got to is, you know, when they really got into together as a team and they enrolled various kinds of representative stakeholders to do this work, which I thought was brilliant. And they really walked through the process of what does a patient go through to get care here? You know, they really discovered that it was really chaotic and then it really took heroics to pull off between the caregivers as well as the patients. So if you could just situate this case for us and kind of what happened.

29:04 Okay, so I think this if I can just go back a little bit with the mapping of the care flows that was on whiteboards in a meeting, and they were chagrined. They really one of their beliefs was we can get We've got this. You know, we may have little glitches here and there, but we've got We've had great reputation, We've got this. And they didn't. They could not map the flows. You would think that this broad stakeholder group, which actually also is typical of many of these discovery efforts, at least you broaden it to include those who can help move it forward, but also then who are impacted by it. So in this case, they included patients. They included board members say and brilliant, you know those kinds of things. So they but this mapping thing totally upended their sense that they could map the flows.

29:57 And you would think clinicians should be able to do this, but they never really saw outside their area. It was very specialty based, and in fact, the whole novel solution was to move through a process for patients from getting into out of the system, regardless of specialty. That they were able to track that process and then every clinician was helpful to do that. But they had I want to point out one piece with the mapping and also when they walked the flows, which was dramatic. Both of those raised difficulties for them, as you noted. And when we face these difficulties, the surprise kind of thing and unexpected, we again have choices. I mean, they could have explained away the mapping exercise as an artifact of that exercise, or they could have delegated it to others, or they could have gone to the literature review of best practices.

30:57 They had many options, but they that they would walk the care flows. They chose that they would engage more and over across all the studies. You see this amplifying engagement with the situation, so that getting to know the situation that's so relevant for them. It was the patient flows and the units that was so relevant for the change that they were trying to make it. So they did discover, as you mentioned, that it was fragmented, it wasn't an artifact of the exercise, and that's where they went. I mean, I have a chief nursing officer said hey, this I think it helped us to say, wait a minute, this is really chaotic or the physician physicians were on board, became on board. I have to say, there's more to it, but it was a big AHA that helped make visible to us that we were not doing patient care as well as we would like. So that AHA is a discovery termal right. They were owning it. That's the piece they talked about it, and it led them to the next cycle that they did where they took not these high level patient care flows, but then they focused in on inpatient care and they found other kinds of problems there as well. In fact, the CEO, the president of the hospital said, you know, during one of these mapping sessions that they did at the lower level, jeez, we know how our patients get in, but we don't know how they get out right, And so in any rate,

32:31 it kept going from multiple cycles, and I think the thing that it shows in the book they had five cycles. I'm trying to see if that's what it takes or if that's just their cycles. So I'm doing separate research right now trying to look at that what does a change project large writ look like in terms of cycles that they go through inside. But so they then developed a very model, very novel MoDT of patient care delivery that was frankly certainly nationally renowned in the US, and they kept the visitors. There's some articles written about it. I need to use the pseudonym at this point except for the President's name, mainly patients sensitivity and things like that.

33:20 Right, totally understand, Thank you, Karen. I mean, that is such a powerful case study to really situate when you know, when an organization commits to really understanding how do we radically understand and improve our service and our standard of care. I really was very, very profoundly impressed with that, and listeners and viewers that study alone is worth you picking up the book for. So I'll leave it at that. And with that, let's grab our last break. I'm your host, doctor Eli's qrtees. We were on the air with Karen Goldenbiddle. She's an organizational ethnographer, educator, and a sought after voice on discovery, transformation and navigating change. We're talking about a few of the care studies that she has in her fantastic book that really illustrate the power of embracing discovery and what happens when we don't see with us. After the break, we're going to get into her approach to really elevating the acceptance and the success rate of change management.

34:17 We'll be right back. Doctor Elise Cortez is a management consultant specializing in meaning and purpose. An inspirational speaker and author. She helps companies visioneer for greater purpose among stakeholders and develop purpose inspired leadership and meaning infused cultures that elevate fulfillment, performance, and commitment within the workforce. To learn more or to invite a lease to speak to your organization, please visit her at Eliscortes dot com. Let's talk about how to get your employees working on purpose.

35:00 This is. Working on Purpose with doctor Elise Cortes to reach our program today, or to open a conversation with Elise, send an email to Alise A Lisee at Elisecortes dot com. Now back to working on Purpose. Thanks for sting with us, and welcome back to working on this. I'm your host, doctor Elise Cortes. As I mentioned in the last break, my last book came out in Marshall twenty twenty three. It's called The Great Revitalization. How activating meaning a purpose can radically in liven your business. What I did for you is I created a three.

35:40 Page organizational assessment for you to determine the extent to which your organization is running in a way that needs the discerning needs of today's workforce. You can find it at gustodeshnow dot com if you are just now joining us. My guest is Karen Goldenbiddle. She's the author of The Untapped Power of Discovery, How to Create Change and Inspires a future, a better future. Sure, So, before we get into the change management focus that you really exemplify here, I do want to talk about a couple of more of your case studies. Yeah, one of them is this notion of the opportunity to really capitalize on surprise, which is illustrated through the Doug Dietz MRI case. Will you situate that for us?

36:21 It's such a powerful case, and I really really applaud his approach to what he discovered. Definitely. Doug Dietz was a lead designer at GE Healthcare when was this case developed. He led teams a team of designers to develop a new MRI I for children and and it was an award winning machine that he was very proud of. So an hospital invited him to come visit to take a look at the machine in VMRI in implementation and he was allowed to go. And during that visit he encountered a young girl who was having an MRI taken with her family, and he observed the He was asked to go in the hallway and saw them walking down the hall even and he could see as the family got closer, the young girl was weeping and the father was telling her that things would be all right. Diets also said she was frozen. I mean, it was just he could just see this and he you know, when you think about this, he was proud of this award winning machine, and he saw this young girl who was terrified of going in to have the MR That was not at all what he had ever imagined nor any of the designers for this. They had made it easier for technologists and a little bit smaller, but never really thought further than that. He then started noticing other things. He realized it was a crazy, terrifying

37:55 environment as well. The walls were based, very institutional and so forth. There was just them was big, she was tiny. He got to see a different perspective. I mean, that was that different vantage point that he just had not seen before. He also then she needed to be sedated, and he was horrified to learn that eighty percent of the children who will undergo MRIs needed to be sedated. That has dramatically changed since he adjusted some things as a result. The key here is he really had multiple surprises. I mean the sedation, the young girl being terrified, and he could have again I'm stressing this choice. He could have just let that go and say, well, we weren't paid to do that. We didn't nobody said anything, you know, the hospitals would just kind of go there. But there was no way he was going to do that. He said.

38:47 It really was a huge awakening for him, and he went back to the team. He talked with his wife. He was really I had troubled I guess would be the words about this, about what he saw that day in the in the hospital. So he went on to redesign and they now they weren't able to redesign the machine, but they were able to change the way the machine would be received by creating spaceships and other kinds of things that children like. They he went actually his own search, and when you think about the launching new ways, he went wide and far to see. He watched children play, He watched he watched some crawl under blankets and to create forts, and he you know all this, and he said, we can do that here. We can make it more vibrant in the room. We can have people enter, you know, help them come in if they have a character that they're playing. And you know the amount of sedation I mean, so all of that went through and it still is it still is that way, and that whole notion of embracing surprise, I mean, sedation is minimal at this point, which itself is a huge outcome for that. And then there is way more attunement to the needs of the users to access user experience in the design, So you really see that with design thinking, accessing user experience and augdits is in part responsible for that.

40:16 It's a brilliant, delightful story, and then even go on to say that he then got to witness at least one of the children going through that newly designed situation asking him can I do it again? Yes? Yes, yes, thank you for having that. What a difference between you know, being frozen and needing to be sedated to let's do that again. So just just a delightful example. In his human response, he has a ted talk that I reference the site to it in the book. That's just so worth watching as well as well as he's a nice. I've got it on my list to watch. I definitely will. I know that there's room for me to give that as an example for sure. So while there's two we have, we're getting at the end of time, but there's two things I want to do next. I want to definitely talk about the guinea worm disease case. And the reason that I think that is so important, Karen is it's a huge problem and it really illustrates the power of how to enroll people in change management in a way that you most.

41:16 People would never have ever thought of. So if you could situate us for us the case that you have about the guinea worm disease. Okay, so it's a big case. It knows around the ring a lot. I'll be short. It's about the power of growing connections for change, and so a collaboration made all the difference in being closed to eradicate a disease that in nineteen eighty six had three point one million cases per year in Africa and India. Then people, there was no vaccine that would would be and still isn't. There was no medication to prevent it or treated infections someone. It don't didn't if someone had guinea worm disease, it didn't confer immunity onto them to not have it again.

42:08 For example. The only cure for this, which totally intrigued me, the only and I looked at a lot of this during COVID actually, so there was a parallel. The only cure was behavior change. Now there's also some belief change that we can get into, but right now the focus is on behavior change. They needed to filter the water. So basically guinea worm is really the US It's known as dracunculiasis for the public health people in the audience. It's contracted when people drink water contaminated by these tiny fleas that carry warm larva. And so when you would bucket the water from the from the spring, from the water the ponds in the villages, they would have the larva with it. The infection incubates and ends when the worm that has grown inside the body has to come out in some spot and it erupts from the skin. It's often three feet long, taking months to a very debilitating disease of creating painful sores, painful sores. So the only cure was this The Carter Foundation, the Carter Center, led by President Jimmy Carter, as well as Donald Hopkins, who was on the team with smallpox. The whole small eradication of smallpox launched a global collaboration and they went wide and far for this. And so Jimmy Carter obviously had

43:40 worked with the tribal chiefs. He was able to bring public health officials in the various places. That's key for this. And from Carter and Hopkins on out, there was a respectful engagement for everyone in the process. So when they brought village workers in to be edgu caters and to learn how to educate. In fact, the village health educators are notably key to the uptake of this behavior change. Definitely, we're part of that. All through that, I think what that's what I want to emphasize is the relational connections with this. Today they plug the guinea room disease has plunged by ninety nine percent last year. The most recent reporting case had only thirteen cases. Wow, it is and some of them are a war striven area in rural areas.

44:37 And then they're really working. It has jumped a little bit to animals, to dogs, and so they're working diligently too. But everyone, including the scientists, I want to say, bring like a humility and they know science, but they also respect that there are beliefs that the villagers hold and they work with those, unlike others that may go in and tell people what they should believe in, what they should do, right dramatically different, Yeah. Yes, yes, And I just thought that was and in fact, what I remember you tell me if I've got this right, Karen, that they to the point where the educators were able to help the villagers actually start to notice themselves that there's something in the water, they could see it themselves.

45:20 And when they could see it themselves, they would oh, this is not safe to drink, but yes, leaning into their space so they could actually enroll them so they could see. That was I think a big part of the behavioral change. Yeah, thank you, I like to thank you for adding that. I mean, because that was the belief that was a discovered discover one of the discovery cycles that happened there where you could see their beliefs where it was sacred water and that these worms they thought were a normal part of the body. And so they really came to know through this seeing the worms in the water, they were stunned, how that hell could that happen? Or the larvae, how could that happen in sacred water like that? And so they went through and the education that the global collaboration had done really created a discovery possibility for them to go through that.

46:11 So powerful. And we're we're getting very close to the end here. But I really want to situate for our listeners and viewers, you know a different perspective. On change management. You talk about it, you know, eighty five percent failure rate, and let's just if we can care and situate. You know, you talk about bringing you know, three factors to life and the discovery process that can challenge traditional change management. Can you just sort of situate those for us? Sure? And I'm not saying John's a particular model I mean, but I think the discovery offers ways to enhance and change many different change models. Yes, yes, that's the piece. It's the process that we've through it. And so one is you start from a different place with discovery. You start with a problematic situation and you do not presume to know the answer with that, and so and if it's a software implementation project or whatever, you don't start with trying to get buyer employee buy in. In fact, employee buy in, you don't go for So it's that discovery.

47:11 You want to question and explore the problem itself and not assume that you know what it is. Yes, that's what it means. And more and more you take time there, you are greatly enriched later with that. That's one you want to access the user experience. I just talked about that a bit. Traditional change management is all about getting everyone on the bus and getting buy in. There is a place for that, but it's not before you know what before you know what. That is the user experience. I mean I had projects with MPa students who looked at our own software implementation issue at Boston University with Peoplesofts, and they, I mean they saw a number of ways that they needed to access user experience more the deep understanding of the situation and the users. And then finally, a big one is treat discovery as continuous. That we saw that with play Pump it continues in and beyond implementation, even scaling up. You want to be able if you scale up something, you want to be able to incorporate discovery into that process and not assume you're going to just take what you've done and put it in another unit or another location. So that's a quick way to talk about these three, but they are fundamentally different. I'm actually writing up a piece right now that talks about these and fleshes that out well.

48:39 I think that is an amazing contribution, Karen, And because so many organizational change efforts are complete failures, and that alone, so listeners and viewers getting the book for a few of these case studies as well as that methodology is totally worth picking up. For that, Karen, I want to say thank you for coming into my world. Thank you for coming on and working on purpose, sharing your research. You're clearly passionate about it. Very happy to know you. Thank you for coming on. Likewise, Elise, thank you. You're welcome. Listeners and viewers, you were going to want to learn more about this remarkable woman, Karen Goldenbiddle, the work she does helping organizations navigate discovery, transformation and change, and her book. So go to her website. It's I'm going to say it and then spell it for you. It's Karen Golden dash Biddle dot com. So her first name k A R E N Golden g O L d E N Dash Biddle b I D D l e dot com Karen gooldendash Biddle dot com. Last week, if you missed the live show, you can always catch it via recorded podcast.

49:41 We were on the air with Jeff Wetsler talking about his new book Ask Tap into the Hidden Wisdom of People around You for unexpected breakthroughs in leadership and life. Really amazing what you can learn by asking people around you about their perspective of you, your performance, et cetera game changer which you got to learn how to do it and learn how to do well. Next week will be on the air with Garren Store talking about his work linking athletes mental game to their physical game, as well as his own incredible journey he's been on navigating leukemia. See you there, Remember work as one of the best adventures and means of realizing our potential and making the impact we crave. So let's work on Purpose. We hope you've enjoyed this week's program. Be sure to tune into Working on Purpose featuring your host, doctor Elise Cortes, each week on W four C. Why Together, We'll create a world where business operates conscientiously. Leadership inspires and passion performance and employees are fulfilled in work that provides the meaning and purpose they crave. See you there, Let's work on Purpose.