[00:00:00] spk_0: This is Andy and this is Matt and you're listening to
[00:00:03] spk_1: the Hop podcast with no name.
[00:00:06] spk_0: What a dumb name. So stupid.
[00:00:23] spk_1: Then we're off. Let's do it. Episode 19. Uh Let's get started.
[00:00:28] spk_0: All right. What are we starting with the homework? Homework? Homework. Come on.
[00:00:33] spk_1: I remember with a marine.
[00:00:36] spk_0: I got it. Like the structure is always the same homework. Did you do it?
[00:00:41] spk_1: I did. I'm so excited. I love it.
[00:00:45] spk_0: Um So our homework was to try to invent a mitigation defense that does not exist yet with the caveat that it doesn't have to really make sense, meaning it doesn't have to be entirely feasible in real life. Physics of it doesn't have to work out. Yours is OK. All right. I'm ready.
[00:01:06] spk_1: OK. So I saw a video, I don't know, a year or two ago they had some technology where someone could wear a vest and if they were falling the vest of technology that it would realize and it would sort of puff up and make like a little bubble around the person so that if they were falling, they wouldn't hurt themselves and targeted for elderly people. So that they wouldn't break any bones if they fell. Which I was like, this is a great idea. Where do people fall most often that are not elderly? And I just guessed the stairs. And I said, so what if your stairs had the technology that if you were falling, it would turn into like a giant inflatable staircase. And it would have a little like crash landing area in the bottom and it'd kind of be fun, but like it would almost be like the airbags. So you'd have to spend some time and energy to put it back in. So you wouldn't do it just for fun, but
[00:02:01] spk_0: you wouldn't do it just for fun. My Children on the other hand,
[00:02:05] spk_1: well, not, not Fiona Penelope would, as we saw it yesterday when I showed up at your house and Fiona was like, Uncle Matt, why me jump off the couch and then couldn't
[00:02:15] spk_0: and then, and then didn't help me down,
[00:02:18] spk_1: whereas Penelope's doing backflips off of it. So, yeah. Um That's my idea and I think it's fantastic and if anyone wants to take a picture, hold on just in case someone wants to patent it. Go ahead. You're welcome. Enjoy it.
[00:02:35] spk_0: So the stairs themselves like erupt into an inflatable slide, like I'm picturing something like off of a plane, like a like emergency landing plane fly.
[00:02:47] spk_1: But hopefully.
[00:02:50] spk_0: So if you're falling, do the stairs know, are you wearing something? Are you wearing something that triggers the stairs. I think
[00:02:55] spk_1: there's like sensors, you know, you could very easily put sensors on the side of your stairs. That would say, oh, someone's too fast in
[00:03:05] spk_0: a pen. Penelope runs down it. Now,
[00:03:09] spk_1: also, if you combine that with the fact that you said erupts, I don't think it's a good combination
[00:03:14] spk_0: being deploys cautiously. I love it. I love, I love your and
[00:03:21] spk_1: anyone can take it and I'm just feeling generous and I wanted to put that out there for everyone. So perfect. If you get rich, just send me a Christmas card. Thank you. I appreciate it.
[00:03:32] spk_0: Awesome. All right. Are we ready? We're ready. We're gonna do something a little bit different. Changing gears. You're
[00:03:41] spk_1: saying it like I don't know, do you know I'm gonna act like I don't know who, what are we doing,
[00:03:45] spk_0: Andy. So what we wanted to do is we wanted to help folks um be able to craft some language in order to um in order to, to meet with some of the resistance that often exists in this h space. Like you learn about it, you learn about the concepts you're passionate about it and then you're trying to explain it to someone else and there's pretty strong resistance depending upon who you're talking to and what part of the organization you're in. Um So ultimately, that's where we wanted to get to was help people with some of that language, but to get there we thought we probably needed to set the scene a little bit in terms of how organizations even start to adopt these concepts. Because at least in our world, we frequently get calls from folks who have heard what hop is they are within the structure of the organization, right? So they have some level of, of decision rights and some amount of resourcing. They are sometimes in the C suite, sometimes not in the C suite. And their ultimate question when they call us for the first time is like, how, how does an organization do this? Like, how do you get from not using hop principles to using them? And what does that look like? And
[00:05:12] spk_1: they say it in the best ways, it's how do we become hoppy? It's always something like
[00:05:17] spk_0: that and how do we adopt the hop program?
[00:05:20] spk_1: It's perfect. And for me, every, I'm just thinking about this every time we adopted anything and I'll, I'll use program just because I think people tend to grasp onto that strongly. It did come from the C suite every time. And so when I joined, I was like, oh, I'm imagining we're talking to a lot of C suite because they, they want to go in this direction and you're like, hm,
[00:05:44] spk_0: sometimes in a way
[00:05:47] spk_1: the conversation. Uh and so I had to learn a lot about how it was on boarded or adopted and it was somewhat surprising.
[00:05:56] spk_0: So we wanna talk through that a little bit because realistically, you know what we know to be true and what organizations doing this knows to be true is that the change agents for the organization aren't external people, they are within the organization. And so we wanna help sort of make a mental picture of what that looks like. And then if there are folks that are internal to the organization and are needing language in order to help be an advocate for this thought process, we wanted to, to help provide some of that.
[00:06:27] spk_1: And we're also gonna play around with another counterpoint to a lot of this stuff which is we have uh thrown, I gotta get it right the first time. Uh the idea of devil's advocate
[00:06:40] spk_0: crushed it. Got it.
[00:06:42] spk_1: No one knows how hard it is. I want to say abdicate all every time, every time devil's advocate training. So, in doing this and however many episodes it takes, we're also gonna put out some of the often the things that are pushed back on the sort of the case against hop or at the very least case gets to change in, in this direction. And so we'll, we'll kind of use that as part of the conversation as we go as well. And uh we'll take turns picking the argument or pushing against things and just, I hope it helps.
[00:07:18] spk_0: Yeah. All right. So what do we start with Matt? We start with that?
[00:07:25] spk_1: How does someone get started. Right. They, not individually,
[00:07:30] spk_0: I mean, individually,
[00:07:31] spk_1: they've listened to podcasts different than this one. Better, better, better than they've read some books. They've, uh, maybe found some articles and they've talked to people like they're individually, we're assuming this first change agent has some education on hop. Yes.
[00:07:52] spk_0: And usually that's the phone call we get is from someone who has done that who's heard from or came from another company that used these concepts and then has moved somewhere else. And they're like, OK, I would like to now bring these hop concepts into my new company. What do I do?
[00:08:07] spk_1: And I, and I can't stress this enough. It truly ranges from someone who has, we would say less influence up the highest. So it is all over. The could be
[00:08:19] spk_0: like one person from one site location that is sort of like middle management at a site all the way to the environmental health and safety leader or quality leader for an entire organization that sits on the C suite all the way to a CEO, like it's like, and, and everything in between. Um So for this, let's just picture someone kind of in the middle of an organization. That's
[00:08:45] spk_1: I think about it if we're going to do the most common.
[00:08:50] spk_0: Um And then the thought is OK, how do I introduce this? So oftentimes, the idea is, um I, I need to like, they'll call us and they'll be like, I need to be able to convince my CEO to do this right? Or I need to be able to convince some sort of senior leader to make this change.
[00:09:08] spk_1: And sometimes we get like, well, my boss is on board but, but there's people above him that are not or heard that are not. Um And so I just don't know what to do next or I need to influence this person. How do I do that?
[00:09:20] spk_0: And so our advice always is that you try to look for a place where you can influence some group where it's not like the barrier to entry isn't very large, right? So if, let's imagine, we've got somebody who's um just trying to introduce these concepts at a site level, we encourage it at a site level as opposed to just trying to like get to the top of the organization and start there. Let's actually use the site as a way to find advocates for this thought process and actually use some of the concepts and then show it maybe as like a, a pilot for the rest of the organization. So you can get by. And so we always encourage people to start where they can start and to introduce the concepts uh in like a, a meeting or a setting that isn't hard to get to. Maybe
[00:10:10] spk_1: let's maybe let's define that because I think the term start could have a lot of me. Sure. So what is starting even look like when it's, when you're telling someone, then I think it's, I agree with you, start wherever you have the most, it's the site, start at the site, but start, how do I start?
[00:10:29] spk_0: So start oftentimes means introducing what the foundational principles of hop are and what the business case is for, why we would want to do something differently and you can do that internally. So some organizations, they've already done that and sometimes people call us and they're like, hey, can you help us do that? Um Which basically just means having a, a fairly short discussion, right? Like an hour, sometimes we're lucky and get two hour discussion with literally any group of people who is willing to have that conversation. Um And, and you're, you're talking about the, the foundational concepts of what hop is. Um And why organizations are adopting it.
[00:11:20] spk_1: And that's the start the start in this case is, I don't even want to say spreading knowledge. It's more just spreading awareness as to there is an alternative or slightly alternative view of what we're doing that maybe we could try and what do, what do you want to get out of that session? What's the, what's the goal there?
[00:11:39] spk_0: Well, we try to get out of that session. Um And oftentimes in order to do it, we actually tell us tell a story in order to allow people to sort of see what the difference between using what we'll call like a traditional mindset versus a hot mindset. So like a comparison story of like this is historically, how an organization would respond to this type of, you know, event or this information. And this is what it looks like when you put a hop lens on it.
[00:12:01] spk_1: I wanna just for the audience. Thank you for saying that because I'm sure they had no idea that we use stories to convey a message. They haven't heard that in any other episode.
[00:12:13] spk_0: OK. Fair enough. OK. So we tell a story and our hope out of that session is to just find people who are interested in the ideas enough that they're willing to spend some more time learning because really, that's all you're trying to get to at the beginning is having a group of people within the organization that are like, huh I think there's something here and there's enough of it here that it's worth my time to really understand what this is. That's all you're looking for. Yeah.
[00:12:46] spk_1: And there's in that group of people that either we or you know, these change agents are speaking with. There is a scale of people who this is just wow, this just put language to what I've thought my whole career. And now I can use common language with everyone else and there are people who are, I'll just put it politely. Um This isn't for
[00:13:09] spk_0: me. I don't, I will never, I will never ascribe to this thought process
[00:13:14] spk_1: in my life. I like Matt and Andy a ton. They're great humans. This is not for me and sometimes it's not always that, but this is not for me. So you're not, the goal is not that we get absolute buy in that everyone leaves train. They're like, yep. Wow. Um, this is everyone, this is what we're doing forever. That's not what the sort of goal or the outcome is.
[00:13:38] spk_0: You're just looking for a group of people that this makes enough sense to, that they would want to spend some time to really understand what it is because it does require time. And that's the, like, that's the biggest barrier at the beginning because this isn't just a program that you have like tools that you can just buy and adopt. In order to adopt it, you have to pass knowledge to each other, knowledge of what these concepts are and to learn requires energy and effort and time. And so you're just, you're looking for people who are willing to do that.
[00:14:08] spk_1: I'm going to throw out the first curveball. Yes, I'm ready because this happens often enough that it needs to be brought up. Yes, we or hear stories or we are a part of the story where the two hour session, hour session goes. Well, there's general consensus. They like the ideas and you go great. Let's go run a learning team right away. I run a book. Uh And I want to go do a learning team. What, what would you say in those situations? I would
[00:14:41] spk_0: say great. But first, huh. But first, uh we would have to understand the implications of what it means to run a learning team because although it's fantastic to go run and operationally learn and I don't want to discourage it at all the difficulty with running a learning team before we have an understanding of what one is, There's a lot of difficulties, but the, the biggest issue can be the fact that you end up learning pretty significant information from folks that are close to the work. That could be um things that historically, we would have written people up for or they would lose their jobs for or it just like scares the crud out of us. And if we don't respond to that information, well, like if we're not, if we're not in a headspace to be ready to know that that information will come. Like if, if we hold a really good conversation, um and we don't know what to do with that information, meaning like we, we don't know what to say, we don't know how to receive it. We don't know how to not have a knee jerk reaction to it. Then that might be the only learning team that we ever get to run. And that would be sad. Right. So, and
[00:15:47] spk_1: there are definitely stories of organizations who tried it and it worked well, but I would say more often than not when they just jump in and they're not prepared to learn. It actually is like more of like a one step forward, 2345 steps back, steps back. So that, ok, so now we've, we've gotten that, we've had that first initial meeting at a site level. Some people are bought in at this being a good idea to learn more about. Um, they decided they're not going to do a learning thing right away. Uh Now, what?
[00:16:24] spk_0: So ultimately, what you're looking for in order to start doing this anywhere in an organization is a leadership team that has some amount of autonomy that wants to spend the time to learn enough to go try this, right? So in whoever that group is, that was having that initial discussion, your hope is that somewhere in that mix, you have like a service leader or you have a plant manager, somebody who is um in charge of something and feels as though they have enough authority to try something different even if their entire organization isn't on this path yet. And it's that team of people that either someone external or someone internal would be working with to give them more about what the hop thought process is and then teach them how to operationally learn or how to run a learning team so that you have a fairly autonomous group that has the mindset and the beginning of a skill set to go learn differently so they can design differently. And that's the group that starts to change everything in an organization
[00:17:37] spk_1: and what we, what we hear most often. And actually the first time I ever was in person with you in front of a group, uh I think the only thing I said that was valuable, which was, um
[00:17:50] spk_0: which was, can I get you more coffee?
[00:17:53] spk_1: Who needs some water? Um Which was that your stories are fantastic Andy. But they're nothing in comparison to the stories that in this situation, this this imaginary site would have. It. It is such a different environment when we are talking to a team of people and they have their own stories that are going up in the organization and all of a sudden it is, it is such an accelerant into what's what's happening.
[00:18:20] spk_0: Yeah, because so, so someone external, what their stories do is they, they, they help start to craft a narrative of what could be like. This is, you know, how other people are experiencing this. But then when you have a location or you have a group of people that understand the thought process enough and then have a skill set enough to go operationally learn. That's when that group starts to gather their own stories. And their own stories is not an example of what it could be. It's an example of what it is like. This is what it looks like for us. And this is why it's different. Um And then telling those stories within the organization becomes really powerful. Actually, historically, I've called um learning teams, the Trojan Horse of culture change. And it's just because it's the stories of the learning teams themselves that start to like, do you remember giving me a face? You don't like it?
[00:19:14] spk_1: No, I like it. He hates it. I like it. I just don't know why the reference Trojan horses come up so often in my life for the last couple days and you said it and I was like, something's going on. I gotta look into
[00:19:26] spk_0: this a little more in this game. Um It's because the, the learning team itself, like you, not only with a learning team are you solving like um or at least making improvements to local problems. It also is showing an example of a problem solving mechanism, methodology, thought process that in and of itself in doing it is actually starting to help change a culture to align it with these hop concepts because the way that you're holding conversation and the way that you're trying to address something is oftentimes very different than you have historically done it. And in actually taking those actions, you are taking steps to change how we choose to interact with each other.
[00:20:04] spk_1: And I think it's, it's important that you just said it's different than how we have historically done it because we will talk to leaders and they are very accomplished and they've done a lot of great things in their career, doing what they've historically done. And that can be a hard shift to make. And, and sometimes we have leaders who love change and they love trying something new and it speaks volumes to them and some people are just really set in what they're doing and it's really hard to push them off that, that
[00:20:36] spk_0: block. So that's kind of why we wanna spend time in this space, right? Because high level summary of what we just talked about, if an organization is trying to do this from scratch, right? You're finding any group of people that you can introduce some of these ideas to in order to find the people who are like, oh, this makes enough sense to allow them to spend more time to actually understand the concepts and that group of passionate folks, you're hoping that you can find within that some sort of semi-autonomous team that not only is willing to spend, you know, eight ish to 10 ish hours understanding the concepts themselves, but then maybe another eight hours understanding how to facilitate operational learning so that they can just then go do it and in doing it, they see why this whole thought process is worthwhile doing. And it's those people internal to the organization that start to then spread the concepts outside of whatever their team is. And so that act of spreading that information can be very difficult to do, but it is much more valuable coming from inside of an organization than it is outside of an organization. And that's why we wanna spend the time trying to help give language and words to some of the most common pushbacks that we hear when you're trying to help influence other people in your organization. Like why you would want to give it a go, give the hot stuff a go,
[00:22:03] spk_1: I think, and that's what we'll pick up next episode. I think we'll just spend a lot of time talking about. I mean, even the first thing comes to mind is that's a lot of time. You just had a lot. I mean, a lot of time to
[00:22:13] spk_0: even, to even get to a place to try
[00:22:15] spk_1: something that may or may not work. I mean, we hear that often, right. We're, we know this whenever we meet with someone, they are coming from a meeting, they are with us and then they are going to a meeting
[00:22:26] spk_0: and actually they had four meetings booked at the same time at the same time as our discussion. I think what
[00:22:31] spk_1: we'll do is we'll, we'll play around this idea of like, well, what are the objections that we hear? Where do they come from, the organization and what our response could be correct? And, and we'll take the time to also field questions. If anyone has them, please let us know podcast.com. You can, you can they, the questions come directly to us. We will, we will field them, we will anonymize them. So no one's called out on air. But if you have questions, please, we will answer them for sure. Over the next couple of episodes. What else am I missing?
[00:23:04] spk_0: Well, that was the homework.
[00:23:05] spk_1: Yeah, the homework. Let us know if you
[00:23:07] spk_0: have questions. Well, I mean, what we're gonna do is we're gonna think of the most common types of pushback we hear. And then the homework for folks that are willing to is the, the pushback that they hear today or are afraid of hearing or feel themselves. And if they're willing to share it with us, we'd be more than willing to, to talk to it
[00:23:30] spk_1: and we're committed to going a step farther. We are not going to just take the baseline question and say like, well, it's too much time. We are going to dig into each answer and really try to act as if we are pushing against something. So we're gonna try to not be fluffy, not just give lay up answers or responses. We're gonna try to really push back. So that's our commitment for anything that's sent to us or anything we talk about coming up.
[00:24:00] spk_0: Cool. Sounds good.
[00:24:02] spk_1: Another one in the books. Thank you all for listening. We'll talk soon.
[00:24:14] spk_0: Well, that's it. Yep.
[00:24:17] spk_1: Another one in the books. We did it.
[00:24:20] spk_0: If you, uh, wanna send us any of your thoughts. Actually, fling us any of your thoughts you can do so at the website www dot hop podcast.com.
[00:24:32] spk_1: That's Hoppo DC A st.com. It's still
[00:24:39] spk_0: such a stupid name. A
[00:24:40] spk_1: stupid name. We look forward to hearing from you. Thanks for listening.