Stop Managing People Like Machines - Insights from Norman Wolfe - video Dailymotion

Workforce Alchemy

What if the very management model that built your company is now the biggest barrier to scaling it?  In this powerful episode of The Mason Duchatschek Show, Mason sits down with Norman Wolfe, Founder and CEO of Quantum Leaders and author of The Living Organization, to challenge one of the most deeply rooted assumptions in business leadership.  Most companies are still run like machines. But today’s markets are complex, fast-moving, and deeply human. Treating organizations like mechanical systems may be the exact reason innovation stalls, silos persist, and engagement declines.  Norman introduces a different lens: organizations as living systems. For CEOs, business owners, HR executives, and senior leaders navigating growth, complexity, and culture challenges, this conversation provides a practical and transformative roadmap.  If you are responsible for performance, culture, scalability, or leadership development, this episode is essential.  ▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬  🔎 WHAT YOU WILL DISCOVER IN THIS EPISODE:  • Why traditional management models fail in complex environments • The core difference between mechanical leadership and living systems leadership • How leadership behavior shapes culture more than strategy ever will • Why collaboration is a performance multiplier, not a soft skill • How hidden narratives silently undermine engagement and results • The importance of organizational maturity assessments • Why context drives performance more effectively than control • How heart-centered leadership produces measurable business outcomes  This conversation is especially relevant for:  ✔ Business owners scaling beyond founder-led leadership ✔ CEOs navigating rapid growth or stagnation ✔ HR and People Leaders focused on engagement and culture ✔ Executive teams breaking down silos ✔ Organizations pursuing sustainable performance and innovation  If you sense your current leadership model is no longer delivering sustainable results, this episode will give you a new framework for building a resilient, adaptive, high-performing organization.  ▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬  ⏱ CHAPTERS  00:00 The Shift from Traditional to Living Organizations 03:25 Understanding Leadership Through a Living Systems Lens 07:31 The Contrast Between Traditional and Living Organizations 10:39 Breaking Down Silos for Collaborative Success 15:10 Assessing Organizational Maturity 18:08 Unlearning Leadership Assumptions 21:42 The Role of Context in Organizational Culture 27:30 Small Shifts, Big Impacts in Leadership 31:05 Future Capabilities for Thriving Organizations  ▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬  🎧 LISTEN ON YOUR FAVORITE PLATFORM  Apple Podcasts Spotify Amazon Music YouTube  Full Podcast Playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLaGSQcRH4ChwjjPLD9FN6r2IvuBp5PPbg  Subscribe to the channel for weekly insights on leadership, organizational culture, workforce strategy, and executive performance: https://www.youtube.com/@workforcealchemy  ▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬  🌐 CONNECT WITH WORKFORCE ALCHEMY  Website: https://workforcealchemy.com/

Transcript

00:05Welcome to the Mason Dukacek Show. This episode is brought to you by Workforce Alchemy,

00:11helping leaders improve hiring, engagement, and retention while uncovering people-related

00:16profit leaks hidden in everyday operations. Today's guest is Norman Wolfe, founder and CEO

00:22of Quantum Leaders and author of The Living Organization. Norman has spent decades working

00:28with CEOs and senior leadership teams who, since that, traditional management models were no longer

00:34keeping up with the complexity, speed, and human dynamics of modern organizations. His work challenges

00:40the idea that companies function best like machines and instead reframes them as living systems that

00:48require a very different kind of leadership. That perspective did not come from theory alone. It

00:53came from watching capable leaders do everything right and still hit invisible ceilings. Welcome

01:00to the show. Thank you, Mason. It's really a pleasure to be here. So what was the first moment in

01:05your

01:05career when you realized that traditional leadership logic was producing the opposite of what leaders

01:12intended? I think that's, I think the really earliest moment I can remember was two events that happened

01:20very close to each other in, uh, I was working for an aerospace company, engineer, engineering group.

01:27And we came in one day and I heard my supervisor say to one of the other engineers, you know,

01:33when you

01:34come to work here, you leave your personal life at the door. I said, how do you do that? What

01:39part of me

01:39do I disconnect and leave at the door? In the second one, very similar message. Group of us was talking

01:46about how much we love the job we were doing, how much fun we were having. Same supervisor came in,

01:52work is not meant to be fun. Work is work. If it was meant to be fun, you'd be paying

01:57us. This isn't

01:58Disneyland and walked out. You all looked at him saying, what? That set the tone for me to realize

02:04there was something very fundamentally wrong when we're not allowed as humans to enjoy what we're doing.

02:11We're not allowed as humans to come into the workplace as human beings. Um, didn't have the

02:17framework back then. I just knew something was off. And over the years, as I, as I worked my way

02:22through my career at HP and then working as a consultant, helping other leaders, uh, through

02:27their challenges, I began to see a pattern and it was really in, I guess in 2004, I had many

02:35changes in

02:37my consulting focus. And I began to focus on, uh, executing strategy. And I realized that strategy

02:43execution is poorly executed. The statistics say 70% of companies fail and only 30% of employees

02:52are engaged. It's no wonder given what my own experience was. And yet I had a lot of success

02:57and a friend of mine was asking me what I did and what makes me different. And I said,

03:01I think of organizations fundamentally differently. I think of them as a living being, a person with

03:06a soul. And that began a whole journey that's over two decades long now.

03:13Well, you know, I know some leaders here, organizations are living systems and then they

03:17nod politely and they move on. What's a real world moment that made that idea undeniable to you?

03:23I think it came to me when I was working with some of the founder owned companies that, that I

03:28would

03:28work with. I kept seeing a pattern and the pattern was they didn't think of it as a machine.

03:34They thought of it as their child, their baby, somebody that they gave birth to. And that began

03:40to say, wait a minute, something else is going on there. Now, raising a child has all sorts of

03:46interesting parental dynamics we have to deal with. But it began to give me a new framework to think

03:52about. And in my own experiences, I always knew that the people in the organizations were the actual

03:59producers of results. And so if the people of the organization are the, are the producers of the

04:05results, my focus as a leader has to be not on getting them to do the results, but helping them

04:11become more capable in producing the results. It's a, it's a subtle shift, but a very significant

04:17one. Where's my focus as a leader? Just focusing on results, results, results, whatever we need to do,

04:23get the results, reorganize, change our strategy, move parts around the machine, or do I look at it

04:29as something as sort of developmental in nature? How can I help these people become better at what

04:35they want to do? Changes everything. And that became the sort of the foundational thinking behind

04:41the framework. So what's the most common leadership behavior that looks productive on the surface,

04:46but quietly drains energy underneath? Well, that's a great question. I would say, uh,

04:53the focus on process and metrics. I'm not, don't get me wrong. I'm not saying we shouldn't have

05:00them. We should, but it's the focus on them that puts the energy in the wrong place. What I mean

05:04by

05:04that is people begin to recognize that what they have to do is just produce the numbers and they want

05:11to, they want to make sure they're successful. So they learn how to behave in ways that are successful.

05:17And some of those learned behaviors become risk avoidance. Don't take risks. If you don't take

05:23risks, you don't learn anything. So there's a, you can see how if I'm setting it up so that

05:28your job is to please me and the numbers I set for you as your goals, then you're going to

05:36do

05:36everything possible not to upset that apple cart. And that's never going to be an environment where

05:41you're going to learn and grow. You're going to just be protective, defensive, all the things that

05:47we don't want. Um, and so it's a, it's what I call the negative unintentional by-product of a system

05:54that's focused on optimizing the machine. People, and you, what you have is typically people performing

06:00for authority instead of maximizing their potential. Yeah. And I want to be careful to,

06:06to not make this a, uh, completely what we care about is our people. That's not the, that's not

06:14the framework. We very much care about producing results. I mean, at the end of the day, the number

06:19one responsibility of a leader is to ensure to do the organization produces the results necessary

06:25for sustainable growth. So our model, our framework is all about helping leaders create results.

06:31The problem is the way they're going about it is actually undermining their ability to get the

06:35results they want. So do me a favor, help me and help the people watching and listening today.

06:41Can you kind of compare and contrast, like this is what traditional is, and this is how living

06:47organization is. This is how traditional is. This is how living organization is to give people a better

06:51feel for the shift in thinking that you're talking about. I guess what I'm asking you to do is,

06:56is bring that comparison to life if you can. Sure. We go about in the traditional machine paradigm,

07:02the leaders figure out the strategy. They set the goals that we want to achieve. Those goals are

07:08cascaded down through the organization, right? And they're given ultimately to the people to achieve

07:16certain goals, knowing that if person A and person B and person C and department A and department X and

07:22department Y achieve those goals, the whole will work. I, as an individual with it, or as part of a

07:28department or the department as a whole, our goal is to optimize our ability to achieve our goals.

07:33We don't really care about other people's goals. We care about our goals. Sure.

07:40So byproduct of that is silos, which we know are detrimental to the success of the whole. In the

07:45living organization framework, we do it a little different. We go to the, say, the department and

07:50say, the sales department. Our goals are company objectives are X, Y, Z. We want to grow by 50%,

07:5815%, 10%, whatever the number is. How are you going to contribute to this? I'm not going to tell

08:03you how to do it. I want to know how you're going to contribute. In the old system, the traditional

08:07system, after they get their goals every year, we're going to sit down and review them. So there's

08:12nothing in the old system that stimulates ownership. In our framework, we want to stimulate

08:18ownership. We want them to want to do the job that needs to be done, not have to do what

08:23we tell

08:24them. Very different energies behind those two things. In our system, when we sit down with them

08:30and they start giving us how they want to contribute, it's not anything they want to do. It's within

08:35boundaries that we set, what we call setting the context of the organization. There are rules of the

08:39game. It's like any game, right? You can't go to a football team and play it like baseball.

08:45Right. Sure. Right. So the leaders, I mean, every company has their own rules of the game. This is

08:51what you're like. So within that container, how are you going to contribute? And you recognize in our

08:56system, we believe everything's an ecosystem. The definition of an ecosystem is I am equally

09:01dependent on you for my success and you're dependent on me for my success. So I'm no longer in a

09:06silo

09:07situation. Now I'm in a collaborative situation because I know I can't make as a salesperson 15% growth in

09:14my sales if I can't get operations to give me the product and time to make those sales.

09:19And so I got to work with, collaborate with those people for me to be successful. So we reframe the

09:25role of, hey, you're going to contribute, right? How are you going to work with your teams? What's

09:30in your contribution agreement that talks about working with your teams? And then at the end,

09:35instead of evaluating them, we ask them to reflect, how did you do? What did you learn?

09:39How did you grow? What got in your way? What are you going to do different next time?

09:42It's a very different conversation than here's what I think you did and here's how you should

09:46improve and here's what you got to do to do better. And we treat them like people rather

09:50than comp on the parts of the machine. That's interesting you say that because

09:54you're making me think back to one particular company that I worked with years ago where the

10:00sales manager is a printing company and the sales manager couldn't stand the manager in charge of

10:07production. And it was like, stay out of my hair. Let me do my thing. We'll get you the

10:12orders. You produce them. And it was separate silos. And what transpired was one day in the

10:18lunchroom, one of the top producing printers was sitting there talking to someone in production,

10:23just regular workers sitting there visiting, having lunch. And one says to the other,

10:26gee, I wish we could do this X style of printing. I'd be making a fortune in commissions. I'm

10:32tired of giving out referrals to my customers who need this and send them to XYZ printing company

10:38down the road to get this work done. I wish we could do that here because I would make a

10:42fortune

10:42and I'm tired of helping our competitors, but I have to take care of the customer.

10:46Guess what the guy in the printing production said?

10:49Sure, I can do that to you.

10:51Absolutely. He goes, we can do that. No problem. And not only was the company losing a fortune that

10:58could have gone to in their bank account, they were also enriching their competitors. So it was not

11:04only them losing money, but strengthening their competition in a very competitive

11:08metropolitan market. Why? Because it was a machine and people were in their silos.

11:14That's right.

11:14And that was a first class example of what you're talking about.

11:19And I'll tell you, it's not easy to be in an ecosystem. Humans, people have been grown up in

11:26our society all their life to think about optimizing for themselves and to optimize for the collective.

11:34Sometimes it actually means I have to give up something for myself. Because in the long run,

11:40when the collective wins, I win. It's easier for me to say, look, I'll take care of myself,

11:46you take care of yourself, and somebody else will mediate. Well, that's the pressure we put on CEOs.

11:51They're the ones that have to mediate. They're the ones that have to make the tough calls.

11:55Wouldn't it be better if everybody shared in those tough calls? If the salesperson and the head

12:01of production would get together and say, hey, I've got some opportunities. Oh, yeah, we can help

12:05you with that. I'm sorry, but in production, they go, well, if I did that, that would make me less

12:11efficient is one of the reasons they stopped.

12:13I can give you a perfect example that happened to me recently. It's amazing that we're having

12:18this conversation, and I'm actually living through some of this right now. So this is the

12:22first year I've ever moved to Florida during the winter, and it's been wonderful. But we had a pod

12:28shipped down here with all of the stuff. And the person who, when it arrived, placed the pod into

12:35the driveway. He was very, very careful. He said he went and he took extra time to go and look

12:41where

12:41the trees were, where the sidewalk was, to make it sure it was a good walkway. He took extra time.

12:46And one of his biggest considerations was he wanted to make it easy for the person coming up

12:51after him once we unloaded the pod to come get it, even though he didn't know who that person would

12:55be. That's right. He literally had the presence of mind to say, I want to do my job in a

13:01way. I

13:01will take a little bit of time now to do a little extra, to do it right, to make sure

13:05that my customer's

13:06happy. And so that my coworker, whoever he or she is, when they come to pick it up, that I

13:12have made

13:12it possible for them to do an exceptional job easy and efficiently.

13:17Now imagine if that driver knew he was being measured by how many pods he delivered in a day

13:24and time and efficiency was the dominant requirement.

13:27He would have dumped it off in a second and he would have bolted and said, not my problem.

13:33See you later. And his metrics would have said he is fantastic.

13:36That's right. He would have got a bonus because he had the most deliveries in a day.

13:41And the company's reputation would have been hurt. And that's a perfect example of what we do in

13:47the traditional paradigm and what we have to, what we've set out to change.

13:52So in your experience, what signals tell you that an organization is maturing

13:56even before performance metrics catch up?

14:00We actually have developed a maturity assessment to help us with this.

14:04Tell me about that.

14:05There's three major dimensions within the maturity assessment.

14:09One is the ability for a collective. When I talk about people, I'm also referring to collectives.

14:16In our framework, what we discovered is a group of people who come together for a common purpose.

14:21I'm a salesman. I come to join a sales group. That group actually has its own personality,

14:27its own persona, and it behaves collectively like an individual does.

14:31So our approach to optimizing organizations is to ask the question, how do we optimize a human being?

14:38So when I look at, say, a sales department, I want to understand what its level of maturity.

14:43I look at things like, how well does it see the big picture?

14:47Can it see, like the driver, he saw a bigger picture.

14:51He saw not just his delivery, he saw the whole system working.

14:55So how much can they be systems thinkers? How much can they adapt to change? How easily do

15:01they accept change? How easily do they deal with uncertainty? So that's one whole dimension we

15:06call a complexity dimension. Then there's the relationship dimension. I have my belief systems.

15:11Well, you have yours. I have my way of looking and solving problems through my experiences.

15:16Well, you have yours. Am I going to hold to my way of thinking? Or am I open to listening

15:22to

15:22your perspective? That's another level of maturity. Do I think in black and white? Or do I accept

15:27gray? That's another level we look at. In the third dimension we call self-reflection. Can I

15:34take ownership for my decisions? Am I responsible for my actions? Do I try to blame people? Do I make

15:41excuses? And can I make mistakes and learn from it? If I don't, if I'm not open to making mistakes,

15:47I'll never learn anything new. So those are the level components of our maturity assessment.

15:52And those are what I look for. I actually developed it because I was talking to a bunch

15:57of CEOs and we were talking about promoting some people up to the next level. And I was

16:05asking them, what criteria do you use to do that? And they talked about all the, what you

16:09might call typical job description expectations. And I said, well, when you were working with

16:15this person, you were frustrated with them. What were you frustrated about? I couldn't see the

16:20big picture. And you were working with this person over here. What were you, what were you

16:24struggling with? Every time I gave him feedback, he'd defend against it. He never, he never was

16:29open to hearing feedback. That's the real world. We think we're looking for what I would call

16:34technical specs, but what we're really looking for is maturity specs. That's how I developed it.

16:39Very, very insightful observation. Thank you for sharing that.

16:43Yeah, you're very welcome.

16:44What's one leadership assumption that you once believed strongly, but had to unlearn after watching

16:50it fail in practice?

16:51All problems could be solved through thinking.

16:55It's funny you say that because I, Mike, I've had these conversations with my son who just

17:00graduated college a few years ago, and we can still come up to us, come up with a solution to

17:05a problem. Whereas my nature is to try to figure out a solution, think it through. His is to find

17:12an

17:12answer. I mean, he has been conditioned to go on his phone and go on the internet, go to YouTube,

17:16find an answer where I'm tend to think it through. And we've had discussions on whose is the

17:21best way. And I think each of us made our points, but if he can get a solution in a

17:27minute by going

17:28on the internet and it takes me five, who's right. But if he can't get access to the internet and

17:33he

17:33hasn't developed the skills of being able to think critically and he finds himself somewhere where he

17:39can't get internet access, he might want to have the skill of problem solving and critical thinking.

17:44So we go back and forth on that.

17:46It's interesting you say that the internet is presenting a number of challenges.

17:50in terms of what we may call lazy thinking. But there's another way of solving problems.

17:56You know, when I was at HP, we used to have the thing called the HP way. One of the

18:00key components

18:01was management by wandering around. That's really mostly been poorly misunderstood. What the

18:08principle about management by wandering around really is all about is if you go out into the shop

18:16room and you just observe, listen, you're not doing anything to solve a problem, picking up data

18:24intuitively, you're feeling your way around, you're getting the sense of things. And that has more

18:30knowledge and more insight and more information than any statistics, dashboards, KPIs, or anything else

18:38we'll ever have. I remember at HP, we saw a video and the video went something like this. He had

18:44a

18:44manager sitting in the room going over his monthly reports and trying to figure out what was the right

18:50course of action to do. And, you know, typical way we, you know, instead of printouts, now we've got

18:57dashboards, but we manage by numbers. We manage by dashboards and KPIs. And that's important. Don't get

19:04me wrong. They're important indicators. But in this video, it showed that his boss, because he was

19:11struggling as a young manager, his boss came in and said, come with me. Let's walk the floor. What do

19:16you see? What are you feeling? At the end of the video, the message was he knew what the numbers

19:22were

19:22going to say before he got the reports, because he had a feel of the organization. In the military,

19:28a friend of mine who was in the special ops, he said, oh, we call that situational awareness. We

19:32train all special forces. There's a part of us that thinks logically, rationally, and the mind is the

19:40ultimate solution to our problems. And if we were managing a machine, that would make a lot of sense.

19:46But if you're managing people, you've got to be able to, we call it heart-centered wisdom. You've got to

19:51be able to intuit, be inspired, find that area of wisdom that guides you through all the uncertainty,

19:58that guides you through all the changes that we're going to have. You've got to combine the head and

20:03the heart to be effective. You spend way too much time on that. When leaders say our culture just

20:09isn't where it needs to be, what's usually the real issue beneath that statement, in your opinion?

20:13Culture is defined as the, how we do things around here. Simple definition, right? Which is really

20:20saying how do we behave in response to events? What they're saying when they say that is our natural

20:26response, our natural behavioral response is not getting us the outcomes. Here's the secret that they're

20:32missing. Our natural response to behaviors in humans, I mean, you can think of every living thing, even

20:39machines. We all respond based on a internal set of guidelines. In the machine, it's the way it's designed.

20:49It's designed to behave. You take an input, it goes from these gates and this thing, and it produces

20:55this output. In living systems, that response mechanism, that encoded mechanism or set of rules

21:03is the genetic DNA of the living system. Trees know how to do what trees do. They produce acorns.

21:10Fish know how to swim in the waters. Birds know how to fly or all of that. Humans are part

21:15of the

21:16living systems genre, but we're different. Our internal encoded way of responding is driven by

21:24the stories we tell, the narratives we have created. I call it our psychic DNA because it responds to life

21:31events like our genetic DNA causes our body to respond to certain ways, right? And the psychic

21:38DNA is really quite simple. We have an experience. We don't know what that means. We work to create a

21:43meaning for it and go, oh, that's what it means. Therefore, I should behave this way. So we have

21:47sort of story behavior patterns. We have thousands of them. Just like our genetic genome has millions

21:55of protein peers, we have similar psychic peers. And so when that event happens, we respond without

22:01even thinking. As long as that response gets us the results we want, we're highly efficient actors in

22:07the stage of life. It's when it doesn't. And when leaders say our culture isn't getting us what we

22:13want, what they're really saying is we have a contextual narrative for the whole organization

22:20that causes us to behave a circle. In our model, in our framework, we teach people how to reframe

22:26context, how to understand and unpack the stories that are driving the behaviors because it's simple.

22:33We're doing A and we want to produce B. We know, everybody knows, doing the same behaviors,

22:40expecting the different results is insanity. So we know we have to change behaviors. And we think

22:45simply telling people, here's the new behaviors you should do, they will behave that way. But they

22:50can't because their internal narrative says, when the customer calls, I got to ignore them because I'm

22:58paid by efficiency of processing. No, we want to pay it. That's true. I have been on calls where I'm

23:05a

23:05consumer and I can tell someone on the other end is trying to rush me through and the problem's not

23:10getting resolved. And I've just had them hang up. They would rather just hang up, know it's going to

23:16get put in some queue, then waste another minute not being able to solve a problem because they knew

23:20it was going to kill their statistics. They hang up there, you know, there's no way that I'm going to

23:23know who that was or what their name was. They're not held accountable. They're just so worried about

23:28getting off the phone quickly because of their metrics that what's my impression of the company.

23:33And that's the context. When I was at HP, I took over the administrative organization and I

23:38did my management by wandering around. I went out and listened and I observed and I discovered that

23:43very thing. All the processing people were complaining about being interrupted by customers. That was their

23:50narrative. My goal is to be efficient in my processing and every phone call they got, they

23:55felt was an interruption. That's their context, right? So I set out to create a new context.

24:02I began to create a new narrative. Your goal as an order processing person is to really take care of

24:09the customer's needs. That's how you're going to be measured. That's what's important. That's what we

24:14stand for.

24:14Because if I would have stayed on the phone for a few more minutes and they could have solved my

24:19problem,

24:19I would have been happy with that company. I would have said good things about them. I would

24:23have given them good reviews, but now I would give them a zero star review. I would never want to

24:29do

24:29business with again. And I would tell any friends, family, or anyone on the internet who will listen

24:33that these people don't care about their customer. And it's not these people. It's that one person I

24:38had an interaction with. But to me, that one person is that company.

24:42Absolutely. And it's the context by which the organization is unconsciously, I want to emphasize

24:48that. This is not conscious, malicious intent. This is the story we live in causes us to behave

24:55the way we behave. And that's true for an individual. It's true for a collective. It's

25:00true for a whole company. So the problem with saying, you know, we have to change our culture

25:04is they know that instinctively, intuitively, they don't know what to do about it. And that's

25:09why we've included the work on explaining what context is. Context is what creates the culture.

25:15And if you want to have a different culture, if you want to have different behaviors, you

25:20got to learn how to reframe context. And that's one of the skills.

25:23So I'm looking for an example here. Can you maybe tell me a story where a small shift in

25:28how leaders showed up created perhaps a disproportionate impact across an organization?

25:33Oh, and there's thousands of stories, not only in my experience, but some really powerful

25:38people. Bob Chapman comes to mind, Jolie, who's the former CEO of Best Buys. You wrote

25:46a book called, I think it's called The Heart of the Company. Those leaders found an important

25:52secret. When you care about people, when you as a leader fundamentally have the position from

26:00it, and they interact from a truly caring place, those little acts of caring has a tremendous

26:06ripple effect throughout the whole company. In my experience, I've been working with one

26:11of my clients who recently said to me, we were talking about something, and he said,

26:17you know, Norman, it's the skill of heart-centered that you taught me that has changed fundamentally

26:23everything about our company. And it's not anything I do. It's more like how I am engaging

26:28in the interactions. I would say that's the biggest shift that I see happen over and over again.

26:33And to give you some concrete examples, he says, he said recently that his organization has been

26:40more collaborative. They're much more engaged. They're taking ownership. He said, I have never

26:47enjoyed leadership more than since I've made these small changes. My life's easier because they're

26:53doing it. I don't have to make them. If you were sitting with a CEO who feels their organization is

26:58busy, but not alive, what would you help them look at first and why?

27:03Well, that's really different for every organization. I would begin to look at,

27:09I always start with results. So I would look at what are the results you're getting? And what about

27:15that makes you unhappy? What do you think is, what are you striving for? And then I would begin to

27:21look at the organization. I have a matrix. I call it the framework. The first thing,

27:26the easiest thing we can change and make a difference is, what are we doing from a process

27:30point of view, the activity of the organization that would, if we made a change to that, it would

27:36change the outcomes. If that isn't where the problem lies, if the activity is fine, or if the

27:42inability to make changes is because of the relationship dynamics, then we begin to look at

27:48what in that domain do we have to change? Collaboration, well, if it's not collaboration,

27:52and the last piece would be, we go to the context layer. We look at what is the narrative here.

27:59But

28:00I always work with clients from the point of view of, we want to make the most impact we can

28:07in the

28:07shortest period of time. And so activity is easy to change. Relationship is a little bit more

28:12difficult, but everything is driven by context. So if nothing else is working, we have to look at

28:19the context. And honestly, leaders have to learn, if they really want to look at the organization as

28:27if it's a person, a living being, a living entity, and operates like a person operates, then they have

28:34to learn some new skills. They can't continue to treat people like the compounded parts of the machine

28:39and expect them to behave like the creative, innovative sources of positive outcomes that

28:48they can be if we let them be. So looking ahead, what capability do you believe will separate

28:53organizations that thrive from those who merely survive over the next decade? I would say that

28:58those leaders who adopt the notion that their responsibility is to develop the capability and

29:05maturity of the organization, meaning the collective as a whole and the people within it, those who

29:11commit to what I would call a developmental focus versus a results evaluative focus that we have now,

29:18those are the ones that will thrive in the future. I say it this way. In the machine paradigm,

29:24we use people to get results. In the living organization framework, we use the challenge of the results

29:30we've set to serve as the catalyst to develop the people. When I develop the people, I increase the

29:35capacity to produce even more. So if my goal is to keep growing, I want to increase my capacity to

29:43grow

29:43and to do that, I have to develop the capability and maturity of the people. And the goals we set

29:49is actually necessary to serve, to create that challenge that serves as that catalyst.

29:54So it's a, we call it the virtuous cycle of growth because it builds on each other.

30:00So I really appreciate all of your time and your insights, and I hope everyone listening has

30:05learned as much and has been inspired as much as I have. I've got one more question, actually two,

30:10but the first one is if there was only one piece of advice, I know you've got a lot of

30:15experience and

30:15a lot of wisdom, but if you could boil it down into your opportunity to only give one piece of

30:20advice

30:20to business owner executives, what would that be and why?

30:24Well, I think I've already said, and I'll just repeat it, learn to think of your organization

30:28as a person that you want to, that you truly, deeply care about and you care about their well-being,

30:37knowing that their well-being, their development will increase the capacity of that living being

30:44to produce greater results.

30:46Excellent. So for people who want to know more about you, the work you do, what are the best

30:51ways for them to connect?

30:52Easiest way to go to my website, there's a contact form, quantumleaders.com. You can email

30:58me directly, which I'd love to have, nwolf at quantumleaders.com.

31:02Excellent. It's been a pleasure having you on, and thank you so much.

31:06Mason, thank you so much for having me. I enjoyed it very much.

Stop Managing People Like Machines - Insights from Norman Wolfe

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