Hey everyone, Kumar Dattatreyan here with Agile Meridian and the Meridian Point. Today we're going to do something a little different. Even though I'm introducing the topic, my partner, my friend, colleague, Glenn Marshall is going to be interviewing me about the Disruptor Method. This show is all about disruption, innovation, and myself and my colleagues at Agile Meridian have created a framework that we call the Disruptor Method that helps individuals and companies disrupt themselves. We're going to dig into that in this episode - what the Disruptor Method is and how it helps companies become more disruptive, more competitive, more resilient, and all of those things. So without any further delay, let me bring Glenn to the screen.
"Hey Glenn."
"Hi Kumar. I've seen the testimony. You've got a powerful testimonial, a very exciting, very powerful statement from the CEO. So I'd like to hear more about the disruption."
"Well, the Disruptor Method was born about two and a half years ago officially, but it's something that we've been doing for a long time, probably more like five or six years. We just didn't call it that. You can think of it as a collection of patterns and practices that we bring to the fore in service of our clients. You could think of it as really about building a cohesive leadership team as the primary driver of the creation of this method. It was formed to help a leadership team become more of a team.
In most medium to large firms, leadership teams may meet quarterly or maybe even less frequently. They meet for a yearly strategy session and the leaders go off and try to implement the strategy, and it doesn't work all that well. Maybe they meet more often, but the thing is that the strategy is so big and so unwieldy, it's hard for them to sometimes put those things into practice. The genesis of the Disruptor Method was to teach these leaders and imbue in them some skills and capabilities to help them become more collaborative, to visualize the things that they wanted to do from a strategic standpoint, and give them some tools to help take that strategy and turn them into tactical things that they and the people that they lead could start doing. Not that they weren't doing these things, they just weren't doing them well. That's kind of the genesis of the Disruptor Method. I can get into more detail with more questions, of course, but I wanted to stop and see what questions you had at this point."
"So it always starts with the leadership team? You're talking top-down?"
"It always starts with a team that is leading something. It's evolved since the initial genesis. It was always the leadership team, the C-suite, or a combination of leaders that made up a cross-functional, cross-departmental, if you will, cross-divisional set of leaders. The reason we did that is because most of the challenges that we saw is that these people weren't collaborating with each other. Leaders are often rewarded for goals and outcomes that aren't aligned with other leaders' goals and outcomes. And so they end up being in conflict with each other.
What we set out to do was bring the leaders together and create goals that were aligned across the different divisions, departments, if you will, of the company. And of course, if we got into the C-suite, then they were already meant to be aligned with the C-suite as the CEO and the CIO and the CFO and the CMO and so on. These people all had different sorts of responsibilities. However, oftentimes their personalities were too alike. They sometimes didn't get along. Very smart people. But when you put a group of smart people together in a room, sometimes the collective intelligence of the group goes down. Maybe individually they had an IQ of 120, but you put these five, six, seven people together and collectively they behave as if they have an IQ of 80. They make poor decisions, they are in conflict.
The Disruptor Method is really meant to help them understand themselves, their personalities, how they work, how they could work with each other, and then work with that. Once they have that awareness and understanding, it leads to, 'Okay, well, I need to adopt a different persona' because on the DISC spectrum, I'm a sort of command, take-charge person and all my colleagues are the same. We need more people that are analytical and more people that are collaborative. And so people start to realize that they need to develop some skills and capabilities in these other areas, even though it may not be their natural strong suit. They need to develop those skills or bring people in that balance them out."
"You said something interesting about the rewards not being necessarily aligned. You don't change the reward model? You just find common ground?"
"Well, sometimes it does lead to that. In our engagements, one of our clients - or still a client, I believe - they did change their reward model. This was for what we call a catalyst team - leaders from different divisions in a company, along with part of the C-suite, maybe all of the C-suite, I don't recall. But with this group, what we do is we first do an assessment. We use Predictive Index, which is similar in many ways to the DISC assessment. We do that not only for our benefit so we can get to know them, but really more as much for their benefit so they can get to know each other better.
After this assessment, we also interview each person individually, find out what their goals and values are. What are they and how can we help them achieve their goals? Then we put them through a workshop, a strategy session. It was interesting - in one of the testimonials, they said that this wasn't like the normal strategy session where you come up with a bunch of goals and they get put on a shelf until you meet again in a year's time. This was different. They felt it was different because it was much more collaborative. They were creating these goals together because of the way the workshop is set up.
Even before we get into the workshop, we say, 'Okay, your team is unbalanced. What do you want to do about it?' And in the case of one of the clients, they actually brought someone else into their team to balance them out because they didn't have that skill. They didn't have that personality trait on their team. They needed someone more analytical and more of a bridge-type person that will pull different viewpoints and experiences from the others so that they can be a more cohesive team."
"You mentioned catalyst. Are there different flavors of this method?"
"Yes. One is the focus just on the C-suite. They're naturally a catalyst team because they are catalyzing change and ideally change innovation and the delivery of value in their respective discipline - whether it's marketing or sales or legal or whatever it might be, engineering, technology. Each of them has a certain unique perspective and skill that they bring to that table, that C-suite. And so they're catalysts. We consider them that.
In some cases, we combine some of the C-suite with the next layer down, if you will, the next rung down, more of the doers. They're still leaders, but they are translators between strategy and execution. We call that a catalyst team because it may include - it may not include any of the C-suite. We may actually start at the VP or the AVP level. Those are the catalyst team members that represent the different departments because the C-suite is too busy. We still get in relatively high.
We give them pretty much the same charter and the same type of workshop and the same sort of experience, but we also help them coach up, coach the C-suite in that case. And then there's another flavor of this where it's a product team. So it's product and engineering and architecture, if it's a digital product, or if it's a physical product, then it's maybe - it still could be architecture because it may be a cyber-physical product, but it also could include mechanical engineering sort of skillset.
A product team would be a new product that is being launched or a product suite that's being launched, and so we want to get them to be almost like cutting a steel thread, if I'm going to use the X-scale term. So cutting a steel thread through the organization to put the catalysts, if you will, for that product together as a team. They are the catalysts, but they're focused on the product.
Again, we implement a DRI model, a leadership as a service model in any of our flavors to teach them how to lead by serving the next layer in the hierarchy, if you will. A lot of these organizations we go into are very hierarchical. But what we want to do is ensure that they have a mechanism to implement or to sort of manifest servant leadership in an effective way. Because a lot of people talk about servant leadership, and if you're in a traditional environment and you're being rewarded for being the type of leader that got you to that position, it's hard to know how to be a servant leader. The Disruptor Method gives them the tools to be a servant leader because what they're doing is deferring decision-making to where that decision needs to be made through the leadership service model and through the DRI structure that we help them set up."
"That's an important point - have the decision where the data is, where the knowledge is. Can you drill down a bit on this? I get it with the personality - that's an interesting angle on them. Sometimes it should be the more great way to understand about each other, great way to start team building. Can you drill down a little bit on the strategy, or am I going to be stealing all your thunder here?"
"No, I can give you a high level without divulging too much of what goes into the sauce. The strategy comes out of the workshop. After we do the workshop around the personality types and we do a teaming exercise, my partner, Mike Jebber, he has a really good saying that he calls 'emptying the glass.' A lot of times leaders come in, people come in, and their glass is full. They have no capacity to take in anything because they've got all of these issues that they're grappling with, they're thinking about. They come into these strategy sessions thinking, 'Oh my God, I'm going to spend three days here. I'm not going to get anything done. I've got work to do. I've got people to serve' and so on.
We do this exercise that we call emptying the glass - there's actually a video about emptying the glass. If you search our YouTube channel, you'll be able to see that. All that means is we're giving voice to these people to lay it out there, revealing their biases, revealing their issues, their struggles, whatever. We just get it all out. Let's get all the issues out on the table. We affinity map those things. We categorize those things. And then we say, 'All right, so these are some of the challenges that you have. Let's go a little deeper.'
So we do something similar to the SWOT analysis. We call it SORI - another video in our YouTube channel that describes what SORI is. It stands for Strengths, Opportunities, Risks, and Impediments. A lot of the emptying the glass is going to come out in this SORI exercise, especially in the risks and impediments section. The strengths and opportunities are really more about what makes your company successful, what are your strengths. And given the risks and impediments that you have mentioned, where are the opportunities to improve?
This SORI exercise becomes the backbone, if you will, for their change effort. Because ultimately that's what this is - Disruptor Method is about disrupting the way they work and using SORI as a catalyst for that change. After that, we do something very similar to value stream mapping. We do a value stream mapping exercise to discover where all of these impediments and issues show up. When I say value stream, I'm talking about the company, the high-level operational stream or streams for the different product lines that they may have.
Where are the bottlenecks? Where are the issues? Where are the constraints? We typically serve midsize firms, so we can - they're not so complicated that we can't do this in a half a day to understand their value stream and have them start looking for the areas that could be improved in how they deliver value to their customers and deliver an impact to them, to their company. We think of these as two connected but separate things: customer value and business impact. We're always asking those questions during the workshop: Where's the impact here? Where's the outcome for the customers? How does that get served? What's getting in the way?
Again, plumbing the information from the SORI workshop, we are priming them to start thinking about their process at a high level. We're not getting that deep. We're just getting at a high level with these leaders, what they know, and sometimes they don't know. They have to go find the people that are actually on the shop floor, if it's a manufacturing plant, to bring them into the workshop and explain a part of the process, a part of the value stream. That takes a little time, but it's well worth it."
"So yeah, this is all pretty straightforward and very good stuff. Once you have identified the impediments, then what do you do?"
"The three-day workshop really ends with a plan. How are we going to tackle all of these things that came out of the workshop? So we build a set of - similar to OKRs - we call them COBIs: Customer Outcome Business Impact, with measures that we attach to it, very similar to OKRs. We just have our own acronym; we call it COBIs. These COBIs form the backbone of what they're going to do with us over the next at least six months.
We set a cadence for - you talk about OKRs or 4DX, the four disciplines of execution - any of these models where you have goals and outcomes that you're trying to track over time, they all work great as long as you have a cadence of accountability set up. Too with our model, COBI depends on, and the Disruptor Method depends on, an accountability model. Within the team, whether it's a C-suite team, a catalyst team, a product team, it doesn't matter - it's who is the DRI for the process, the process that we're trying to institute in that team, and how will they make decisions?
We set a decision protocol for the types of decisions that they will make, and we ensure that they are DRIs for the different types of work that's happening in that team, the people that are responsible for the different types of work so that the leader can do their job, whoever is appointed the leader. In some cases, they rotate that role, the leader role. Their job is really very simple: if the group cannot reach a decision on whatever it is that they need to decide, the leader picks the deciding vote based on what they know of that decision, the expertise that's needed to take that decision to a conclusion. If they can't reach consensus, then the leader picks a decider, the DRI, and the DRI goes and says, 'Okay, this is how we should proceed.' The decision protocol has already been agreed to as part of the workshop because we teach them that, and we get their commitment in the workshop that we're going to follow this decision model."
"By decision model, you mean the leadership as a service?"
"Correct."
"Okay. You mentioned the cadence and the accountability. That sounds like where the magic is. Can you elaborate on that a bit?"
"Yeah, so we leave the workshop and we establish that cadence. We start out weekly and then we adjust based on how they're doing. We are there just to coach. We don't facilitate it - we ask one of them to facilitate it. There's a facilitator that gets picked, but they pick them. Again, they don't have to be the same person; that can rotate as well. And a leader.
They facilitate it. We are there to coach them, to mentor them. Actually, in that reverse order - we're there to teach them, mentor them, and then coach them as they get better at facilitating themselves and making decisions themselves and following up with those decisions that they make. Again, what we want them to do is not just work the leadership as a service model in their team but disseminate it to teams that are actually doing the work.
There's a bit of coaching that we do. We want to turn that team into a set of disruptors. We are the disruptors going in - we want to make them the disruptors that stay. That's our aim. We don't want to be there forever. We want to go in, we want to disrupt how they work, we want to disrupt how they collaborate, we want to make sure that they set up systems, visual systems that can track their work. Under the covers, it's agile, it's lean, it's all of those things. But we don't use any of the jargon. We are focused on the results and the results only."
"So these weekly meetings, is that like a retro, a demo, and how can we improve?"
"It's basically a Kanban. It's a weekly Kanban. They track their board. They track the work on the board. They track the accountabilities on the work. And they track the board as any Kanban team would. They look at it from right to left and they move things. And it permeates through their organization because this team, while they may be the C-suite, they can't do this work. They have to run the company. But what we're teaching them are the skills and the capabilities for them to employ a more modern style of leadership so they can empower the people that they lead to make these decisions in a way that can permeate through the various streams of work that they help manage."
"Now, there's one thing that always intrigued me about this. I don't know if you want to talk about it or if that's just something you keep in your back pocket, but it was the guarantee."
"Yes, we do offer a guarantee. The guarantee is just that if they don't see value in the process, if they're not able to implement their strategy in the stated time - and we say we don't put a time limit on it, we say it usually takes four to six months. Our fee is a flat fee and we will stay as long as it works. But we guarantee that it'll work, as long as they do the work. I mean, we're not doing the work. We are teaching them to do the work. So our guarantee is pretty ironclad. We will refund the fee if they do their part and it still doesn't work. But we've never had to do that because it's always worked."
"And one of the things about that that I was intrigued by is they have to do the work. They have to show up for these meetings. And if they don't, the guarantee is off. So there's a bit of an incentive for them to show up."
"Yeah. We do track the meetings, the effectiveness of the meetings - it's a very simple thing, anyone can do it. When you're in a meeting, what we do is we just do a fist of five at the end of the meeting. Five fingers up: I got immense value from the meeting. Four: I got pretty good value. Three: I was OK, it was good. Two: I'm not sure why I'm here. One: this was an utter waste of my time. We want to know, we want them to make sure that these meetings, these Kanban events and other meetings that they may have, are valuable.
There's so much waste in corporate culture where, especially after the pandemic, everything has to be decided in a meeting. So we want to make sure that these meetings are valuable, they result in an outcome that is expected by every member, every attendee in the meeting."
"So then as part of the Kanban meeting, you would ask hard questions, you know, what's going on with this? And people would state that and they would set an expectation for where there would be the next go round."
"Exactly. Yeah. The work moves just like in any Kanban team, the work is going to move. And when it doesn't move, then that's when we step in and we offer mentoring, coaching, and guidance on how to get things to move. Because these things don't happen overnight. It takes two or three months for things to click with a client or organization. And it's not just the people that are in the Disruptor Method, part of the Disruptor Method experience. They have to learn some things, learn how to work together, learn how to work as a team. It takes a little while for that team to form and gel and all that stuff.
Then they have to - that process has to repeat in the people that they are empowering to make these decisions and actually the doers that do the work. Our role is to help them coach those people. And if needed, we can help. But typically our engagement is peripheral. We're there as coaches and advisors, not as implementers. We're not embedded in the client organization doing the work. And so this really, for this to work, the onus is on the people that have hired us to help them. It's on them to do the hard work so that they can disrupt themselves the way it should be."
"I also like what you said a moment ago. And in fact, this is, I think, coaching integrity. The job of a coach is to work themselves out of the job."
"Yes. The thing is that we, since we've been doing this for a while and really this is my partners, Mike Jebbers - we all had contributed of course, but he's been doing some version of this for a long time, five or six years. So all credit to him. As we put this thing together and we added pieces and parts, we borrowed stuff from X-scale. We borrowed stuff from our experience. We were trying to decide what assessments to use. So we're using Predictive Index and we have used other ones too. We've used DISC. We've used AQI, which measures adaptability - the adaptability and resilience of the team.
We use various instrumentation to help the team, the leadership team, the client organization really get a better understanding of themselves. And that sets the stage for everything else, in my opinion."
"And leadership is a service. I think that's very powerful as well."
"Yeah."
"But it's fascinating. This doesn't sound that complicated. It sounds fascinating to me that such a simple approach has produced such strong results as the testimonial tests. And you can even offer a guarantee. That's amazing."
"Yeah, I mean, usually it's like that. Simple rules yield complex behaviors. Just look at traffic around the world - cars for the most part don't hit each other. People stop at red lights and go on green lights and go really fast on orange lights. And people cross when the little sign goes off and so on. There's simple rules, right? Complex behaviors that usually people don't get hurt.
What we are doing is rather than come in with a big, fancy, complicated framework, we are coming with something simple. Kanban is a very simple framework. We're not saying do Kanban. What we're saying is keep it simple, measure what you're trying to achieve, understand yourself first, get all the - can I say this? Well, I can say it, it's my show - get all the shit out on the table, and then figure out a way to deal with it.
I think that's what sets this apart. I'm sure it's not unique. I think the combination of patterns is maybe unique, but it's not unique per se. I've met people on this show that do things that are similar, just not to the extent that we do it. And so that's what makes our technique, this method unique."
"I think the thing that's always fascinating me about this, and we've talked about this several times, is the guarantee. The fact that you can offer a guarantee gets people's attention, yet it also has another side to it in that, well, in order to get the guarantee, you have to show up. So it's kind of self-reinforcing. And maybe if you didn't have the guarantee, it wouldn't work. But because you have the guarantee and everybody wants that, that encourages them to show up."
"I think so. I think the guarantee does add a certain element of authenticity, maybe. I don't know. It's like, OK, we're going to stand behind our promise as long as you do. And so if you don't stand behind your promise, then it's a reminder that they're paying money, good money to a company to help them, but if they don't do their part then that money is going to be wasted.
How many times have you gone into an organization to help coach them through some change effort and there's just no or very little participation from the people that are part of the change? You can't get them to play the game. It's like you're going to go play a game of tennis and there's no one on the other side of the court. You're just hitting a ball. It doesn't come back to you. Or you're trying to applaud, but there's only one hand. There's no other hand to meet you. Don't you get that feeling sometimes in change efforts? And that's what we're trying to eliminate."
"How many levels do you - I just thought of another question. You mentioned that you come in at a fairly senior level and you are training folks at that level and you encourage and you then guide them to be disruptive at the next level down. Is it always just one level or does it sometimes go to two or three levels?"
"It can. Ideally what we do is we start somewhere either a steel thread product team or maybe we start at the product level and the results are so good, we sort of propagate that through their organization for however many product lines that they have. And then we go up - we maybe start in the middle and head up. And in some cases, we start up and head across, build a catalyst team and maybe go into the product lines.
In some cases, they achieve proficiency so fast that they don't need us to do that - they just need advisory. Especially in a smaller firm where it's a hundred employees, hundred fifty employees, they're not gonna need us for that long. We do the catalyst or the C-suite team and that may be all they need because as long as they have the right people in place, they have the right talent.
That's one of the things that we stress in our Disruptor Method is talent - how do you hire and retain good talent? It's not just enough for the C-suite or whoever we're advising to become really good collaborators and visualize their issues and delegate responsibility if they don't have the right people to delegate to - that's not going to work. That delegation requires, again, two people: the person that is empowering the other person to do something, and that other person to actually do it. Because if they don't do it, then what that does is breeds a lack of trust. And so now this person that gave, that sort of empowered this other person to do something, they're not going to trust them anymore. And they just, the behaviors are going to go back right where they were before.
We advise on many more things. We coach on many more things. How do you build a resilient workforce? How do you ensure that your employees stay engaged? And it's not by working the same job for ten years. You've got to give people room to innovate, to grow. And it's not just titles. It's not just promotions. It's grow in areas that they are more intrinsically motivated to grow in. And so finding those types of opportunities for companies - smaller companies are easier because generally it's more family oriented. They think of themselves as a family. When you get into larger firms, it's a little harder."
"And in terms of going down, I think you said sometimes you will coach at a certain level and then maybe down one more. If somebody gets stuck, they may invite you to go and help one-on-one coach with a particular team."
"Right. I mean, the Disruptor Method in its current form is probably two years old. We've gotten some really fantastic feedback on it, great testimonials. We need more. We need more case studies that we can add. So as we grow it out and start helping the larger firms, because I think that's the real challenge is how do we scale this Disruptor Method to a larger firm? My thought there is that it can apply to any size company, any size firm. It's just where do we start?
One of the things that always has intrigued me is the X-scale approach of the steel thread. And that's something that we have adopted. I don't think intentionally, but just intentionally. It was almost like conversion to evolution. He calls it that. We have been doing it. And I'm like, 'Oh, OK. That's very similar to the X-scale approach of the steel thread.'
We've employed that with product catalysts. The idea is that you start in a product line and then you start to take those learnings. It may be a thick steel thread where in X-scales version is maybe a thinner - you start with one team and you propagate that out and you go out that way. This is maybe a little thicker. You're talking about product leadership and you're imbuing them with the capabilities and skills to lead product development in a way that is nimble - I'll use the word agile - and resilient and adaptable. That permeates through the entire product organization for that product line, but that takes time. And then you replicate it across."
"You replicate it, right. The challenge in a large organization will be cross-functionality. They tend to have a fairly rigid - finance is, I'll pick on finance today - finance tends to control things and they're kind of off on the side so they're not on the team. So one challenge I would see that you get into large organizations is getting all the expertise on the team."
"Yeah, I mean we may never go to the large large companies because our sweet spot is really helping the mid-sized firms. They have less of those types of bureaucratic nonsense to deal with, in terms of financing things and stuff like that. And so they have more flexibility. They can be more responsive to changes in the market. They have to be right because they're still fairly small. So we'll see. We'll see how it evolves."
"I would encourage you to try larger companies. Just keep growing until you find a problem, and then of course you'll adapt. You'll be agile about being agile. You said this is fixed price. There's one price for any implementation?"
"We have a model we call DEEP. It stands for Discover, Engage, Enable, Produce. The DEEP model is sort of, if you want to call it, our full engagement. So we discover the issues, we engage with the team at whatever level they are, and we enable them to do something. And then we're there in an advisory role to ensure that they're producing the result that they set out to do.
We have sort of our DE engagement, where it's the four to six month plan, if you will. That is the sort of the inexpensive plan - if not inexpensive, but it's not that expensive, really, when you think about the value that people get from it. And that incorporates the discovery and the engagement model. We leave it up to the client organization to enable, self-enable and to produce. We're going to be there in an advisory role, and we can stay there longer if needed. But generally, we see results in the third and fourth month.
So by the time the six months rolls around, we have essentially covered DEEP. That part of the organization is functioning way better than it was before. Now, if we did a full DEEP engagement, that generally takes a year and a half. And that's where we are sort of propagating this model and we are doing this for several teams and we are much more involved, much more engaged, much more enabling because we're providing training, not just coaching - formal training for their people and so on. That's a longer engagement.
We're still not embedded. It's still sort of a weekly or there's more time, of course, allocated to the client organization, but it's not as much as an embedded model. So it's still cheaper than what an organization would pay for an army of coaches to come in and help them transform."
"Okay. All right. Sounds good. Did we cover off everything? Was there anything else that you wanted to add?"
"I think so. I think it was pretty comprehensive. Thank you for probing and asking. For anyone out there that wants to learn more about the Disruptor Method, there'll be some links, of course, in the show notes. Just visit disruptormethod.com. There's a quiz that you can take. It's a very simple four-question quiz to help you determine if you are a disruptor or if you will be disrupted. And it doesn't matter what your answer is - I mean, if you are going to be disrupted or if you are a disruptor, you still may need help. And so if you take the quiz, give us a call and we can discuss your results."
"Sounds good. Thanks for the questions. They were all really spot on. So I appreciate it."
"And thanks for watching. See you all next time."
