Camille Rapacz: What happens when the old guard clashes with the new? Should we dismiss the old legacy ways of working in search of innovation? Or are these new ways of working just mucking up the works? Today, we're exploring the compelling dynamic that every leader faces in navigating the delicate balance between the old ways of working and the new.
Camille: Welcome to The Belief Shift. The show that explores. What you really need to know about building a successful business.
I'm your host, Camille Rapacz: business coach and consultant who spent too much of her career working in corporate business performance.
George: And I'm George Drapeau: your co-host and her brother. I'm a leader in the tech world bringing my corporate perspective, but mostly my curiosity.
Camille: Together, we're exploring beliefs about success and how to achieve it. But mostly we're bringing practical solutions so you and your business can thrive.
Camille Rapacz: Hey George!
George Drapeau: Hi Camille. By the way, sometimes not so delicate, that balance. I would say, woof!
Camille Rapacz: Yeah. Yeah, that's true. So true. Let's get into this. This is gonna be good. So I do have a question for you, but before I get to my question, I wanted to find this old guard versus new concept and then I got stuff for you.
George Drapeau: All right.
Camille Rapacz: What do I mean when I talk about the old guard versus the new in the organization? The old guard is made up of those people who they believe that the older or just the current ways are the best ways. to do things. So they represent the established practices, the deep rooted traditions, and the wisdom of experience in the organization.
And the result is that they can be resistant to change because they believe the old ways are the best ways. And this can happen for many different reasons. Of which we, we will talk about some, but the outcome is the same, which is they sort of think change bad, current state good.
Now the new guard are the people that have new ideas.
They have different perspectives and they want to do things in a new way. So they're bringing in fresh perspectives, innovative approaches, and there's sort of this promise of growth and adaptation coming through all of this. Now sometimes this happens, we think traditionally of age, right? The younger people come in with the new ideas and the older people don't want to change.
So, sure, that happens. But it's not always that. Sometimes it's just somebody who's been with the organization for a long time and And it doesn't have to be a younger or a person who starts in the organization, it could be somebody older who just has a lot of experience, but they're coming in with different ideas about how things should go.
So it really is this clash of, this is how we've always done it versus, you know, But what about this other way?
So I'm curious, George, if you've ever worked at a company that did not have this problem, because I run into it a lot. And I imagine you've run into it a lot too, but I don't know which is more fun to talk about the organization that has not had this happen or the ones that do.
Have you ever worked anywhere where this wasn't a problem?
George Drapeau: Yes. Yes, I have.
And it was completely dysfunctional. So I worked at a small company. It was about 40 people that was started by this brilliant hardware engineer who was also fairly disorganized. I mean, he didn't keep track of plans or designs . There was a bad outcome at the company one time because Lost the designs there to build stuff from scratch again.
It's crazy. But there was no old way of doing things. We weren't big enough to do that. Really. We're organized enough to get to the point where we had an old way and there wasn't really like a new way of doing things. It was just more like a startup where everybody has to figure things out as we go along.
There was really no clash between old and new, but things were broken. because we, I guess we had really neither. We didn't really have the company saying, let's. Hang out together and figure out what's the way we should do this. Let's innovate. There was individual innovation, like writing software, building hardware, and there was also no established culture. There was no guard.
Camille Rapacz: No old, no new, just no, none, no guard. That's really interesting. Any company that is more established, like out of startup, they're going to have this dynamic happening. This old and new is always going to sort of be present.
The challenge is, how do you strike the right balance so that you're benefiting from both of those perspectives?
George Drapeau: That's right.
Camille Rapacz: So what's happening here, let's just focus on the, what's happening when we have this clash of ideas and approaches, because I think it's important to dig into, How do we really understand what's happening?
What are the dynamics of these two perspectives?
George Drapeau: Yeah.
Camille Rapacz: So when I think about the old guard, the number one thing in this conversation has got to be some empathy,. What does the old guard, why do they feel the way they do? A new guard would be like, why are they stuck in their ways?
So you always hear the, like, well, this is the way we've always done it. That's one of those reasons that I think most leaders kind of roll their eyes like, oh, no, we're just because it's the way we've always, we've always done it doesn't mean it's the right way, but there's something valuable in it.
George Drapeau: And so how do we not
Camille Rapacz: like throw the baby out with the bathwater, I guess, is the saying, right. That feeling stuck in there, this is the way we've always done it. Part of might be going on with them is that, you know, it's hard to learn new things. If they're going to have to stop doing it the way they've always done it and learn something new, that's going to require them to at some point feel incompetent.
You will always feel incompetent before you gain competence in something, much less gain excellence in it. And the old guard folks, they're excellent at what they do. So, asking them to feel incompetent and learn a new thing, they're not gonna use those words, of course. I'm using these words as a way to describe what's happening.
They're probably not even aware, consciously, that this is what part of their resistance is coming from. But every human being experiences this at some point. Do you remember when you were a kid and you had to learn something new and You didn't want to look incompetent in front of somebody doing something, so you just didn't want to try.
Yeah. That never happened to you.
George Drapeau: I see that with her son all the time and he's a bright kid. I see the getting over the incompetence curve. Yeah, absolutely. I'm just joking. It's a real thing.
Camille Rapacz: Yeah. It's a real thing. We still have that as adults. We don't ever grow out of that.
We can become more self aware of it, but we're still going to go through that process. Absolutely. Absolutely.
I think another reason that people can be stuck in this old way of working is that they don't trust the new ways. Maybe they've been burned in the past by a change process that went bad.
So they're thinking I don't want to do that again. Last time we tried to change this, it didn't go well. I've definitely heard that before. And I think, you know what, they have a bit of a case there.
George Drapeau: Especially when there's this pattern where maybe a new leader comes in and they're the ones, they're a change agent and they come in and put the change on you.
And you know, you know more about them than they do. You're not trusting that they understand enough context to make change responsibly, like, but they're going to do it. Happens all the time.
Camille Rapacz: All the time. And I watch leaders do this all the time too. And they're struggling with, you know, why isn't this working?
Why isn't my team picking it up? And I'm like, well, you just dumped an idea on them. There's no change management in the process, basically.
George Drapeau: If you
Camille Rapacz: don't infuse that with some change management work, then yeah, people are going to be resistant.
Another reason that people can struggle with this is they might actually have some fear of losing status or even their job.
Like, what if I'm not good at this new way of working? What if I can't actually figure this out? Or what if this new way means they don't need me anymore? mean, these are valid fears to have, reasons to resist.
George Drapeau: Absolutely valid. I've worked with old guard people my whole career. I can visualize people from, Most companies I've worked with, and there's some really great people.
And I will tell you, you talk to a confident old guard person. And they will tell you a story you ask them nicely and if you're patient and you hear the story, they will tell you about the experience they went through from when their thing was new and not figured out and all these painful lessons that they learned as a team together went through trauma and finally figured out structures and protocols and processes for doing things the way they're done now that are well reasoned and were a result of, I think, probably when they were the new guard.
They've gone through that. They've learned their lessons. And who's to tell them, Hey, you don't know how to learn. They do know how to learn. They did learn. They're done learning.
I've seen people like this and old guard all the time and they're great people and they're not just stuck in the mud.
It's not exactly it. They've got good reasons for being bound to their way of doing things.
Camille Rapacz: And that's why I'm talking through this is there's a lot of different reasons to why people will be where they're at, stuck in what they're trying to do.
Stuck is not a great word to use, I think maybe.
Wedded to the current way of working. They might genuinely think that things just work fine the way they are. Like, why do we need to change this? They don't see that this new way is actually going to be better. And they're, they're oftentimes they're right. That's not because we shouldn't be improving and innovating and changing things, but one of the things, I'm kind of leaping to this topic that we'll hit at the end, so I'm just gonna touch on this and then I wanna come back to it later.
Most of the time when we're trying to create change, of significance in an organization, when we first create it. It does not work well. So right out of the gate, we've done this new thing, but we're not good at it yet.
Camille Rapacz: As an organization, all of the training and change management you want to do, it's going to be clunky when you first roll out a new process, a new system, whatever it is, because it's new. That's what we don't want to experience and what can cause us to want to stick with what we're doing now, because we, spent all this time getting good at it.
To your point. Right. I've spent all this time. I finally honed in on this. I'm really good at this. We as an organization are good at this. Why would we want to change it? We'll come back to that at the end a little bit, but that's definitely part of this dynamic, Part of what is holding people into the current way of doing things.
George Drapeau: Absolutely.
Camille Rapacz: So one more thing that I see show up in this is that sometimes the resistance comes from people who just aren't good at systems thinking. They can see how this is working in their own silo of work, but they can't see the bigger picture. And so they're resisting change that would actually improve overall the system because they can't really see it.
Some people don't really process information from a systems perspective. so they're not thinking about more broadly the whole team or the whole organization in this. So that can be another reason people get, stuck in this way of thinking. Yeah.
All that is to say, there are a lot of valid reasons because sometimes I think we can be too dismissive of the old guard.
And I want to just, Emphasize that there are so many different and valid reasons why people can feel that way and that if we don't acknowledge them, we are just inviting this clash of ideas. We're just going to create more tension and chaos in the organization than we need to by not addressing it.
George Drapeau: Absolutely.
Camille Rapacz: So what are the new people thinking? Well, people, the new ideas, their perspective is they might come in and when people are resisting them, they're like, well, why, why can't my new ideas be heard? So they feel undervalued and unheard when they get this resistance from the people who know everything about the organization, right?
Like I have some new ideas and we're like, yeah, you don't know everything though. Well, I might know something. I might have some idea. So they can be frustrated by not feeling heard. And then they also can make mistakes in bringing change in. This is what you were alluding to earlier, I think, right? You can make a mistake by bringing in change and just not paying attention to these dynamics.
And so they're just like, jam this change in or like, here's how we're going to do it. New boss comes in. Here's the new way we're going to do it. Everybody go. And then everybody's upset about it because there's no context. There's no change management process. It's just happening. You're just creating way more chaos in the organization than you need to.
George Drapeau: Yeah.
Camille Rapacz: Not healthy.
George Drapeau: No.
Camille Rapacz: So ultimately, these two perspectives, when they don't listen to each other and navigate these dynamics out in the open, and instead they let them exist like inside conversations and silence, the tensions arise and it leads to this resistance and miscommunication and the whole organization can stagnate because of it.
You've definitely felt this before, right? When you're like, Oh my gosh, everybody's just talking off to the side. Yeah. About this process that isn't going well, but we're not actually openly talking about it and fixing it.
George Drapeau: That's right.
Camille Rapacz: Happens more often than we think.
George Drapeau: I see it happening all the time.
Camille Rapacz: So when this has happened to you in the past, I'm curious if any examples come to mind for you, or you've seen this clash happening, like maybe it was in a big project. What kinds of negative things happened?
George Drapeau: I'll think back to my first job out of school and I worked at the university and there was a new technology that was coming out.
We were working with Steve Jobs's new company, Next Computer, in secret before the computer was out. And we were starting to get ready for rolling out the first shipment, buying the first shipment of their computers. And the people in our academic computing department, there was definitely an old guard and a newer guard.
The old guard, they would say, I need one of these things on my desk because I need to examine it before the students get access to it. And the new guard was saying, none of us deserve that stuff. Let's just put it out in the public computing center for the students to try and break it themselves.
the ones you're giving it to. They'll figure it out. Basic clash that way. And the entrenched old guard people who had more management control would dig in stubbornly. They wouldn't hear the argument about the students. They started becoming patronizing and paternalistic. And really didn't really put trying to put the kibosh on this new way of thinking in the new guard.
People were just frustrated and they're. Tempers started to rise because they didn't have the power to really make this change. They just had a really passionate transformative idea and that wasn't getting traction, the old guard. Did not get resolved well, actually, the old guard in that case had the control for a while later on.
The students revolted and they made it known. They didn't get access to enough of them. So there was no choice, but for the boss of the whole organization to cause some of those to be reallocated, that was not managed well.
Camille Rapacz: Yeah. That sounds like the opposite. so we're talking about who's in the position of power. Previously we were talking about if you're the person in power and you have the new idea, how you can swoop in and do it wrong.
This story that you're telling is the people in power, the old guard.
George Drapeau: Yeah.
Camille Rapacz: Whether you are the new or the old, if you're in the position of power in this, you need to tread carefully.
George Drapeau: Yes.
Camille Rapacz: Either way.
George Drapeau: Either way. It's true.
Camille Rapacz: So just having the power does not guarantee you a win.
George Drapeau: Or stability.
Camille Rapacz: Exactly.
George Drapeau: Yeah.
Camille Rapacz: That's why we're talking about this, We can get into positions of power and assume like, okay, now that, and I hear some people say this, where they're like, I just wish I could just be the boss for a day so I could just make this thing happen.
And I just chuckle to myself, like, you know, the higher up in the food chain, you go, the less control you actually have. Because the forces are bigger. Change is going to happen, and that force, you cannot stop that, no matter what you try to do. Eventually, you might win the battles, but you're not going to win the war.
That's a perfect way to describe it, is the long term of this is you are not going to win at the end of the day if you don't actually address this head on.
And in a thoughtful way. Addressing it head on, isn't just, here's my way, everybody go do this. That is the wrong thing to do. No command and control here.
Let's talk about how we navigate these challenges. This is what I want people to do, how we do
it.
So now we kind of understand all these dynamics. What do leaders do about this?
The number one thing is going to be around active listening and humble inquiry.
Because what you need to do is be able to honor the history and the contributions of the old guard. Like it's really important that you do that. This can be tricky if you're dealing with a company that's not in a great place financially. This can be hard to navigate, if, morale is tanking or revenue is tanking.
It can be really easy to sort of place blame on the old way of doing things and not recognize the good in how things are going. So this can be a little bit tricky, but you do need to recognize that people have doing the best job they can with what they've been given. And what they've been given in terms of process and expectations and all of that.
You do have to address that. You need to make sure you're honoring, the work that has been done to this point.
George Drapeau: Yeah.
Camille Rapacz: But, you also have to ensure the organization can adapt and innovate. Because, to your point, change is coming, and if you're not prepared for it, all your competitors are gonna be doing this.
They're going to be out changing and innovating, doing the stuff. So if you just decide, I'm going to stick with this old way, you eventually are going to lose. This means that as a leader, it's not enough for you to just embrace the idea of change and innovation. You have to champion it. Like your job is to infuse it into the culture of your organization.
George Drapeau: Absolutely. This
Camille Rapacz: will take some time, but it is what your job is. And so what we're doing is we're talking about how do you strike a balance between acknowledging the old ways. And the value of them while also pulling your whole team, your whole organization towards innovation. So how do we innovate without devaluing the past?
George Drapeau: Love the way you say that. Totally get it. So the,
Camille Rapacz: you know, the reason we want to strike this balance is that we, you don't want to suddenly lose all of your institutional knowledge. They have all of that knowledge in the organization, that old guard. if you make them no longer feel valued, they may choose to exit the organization.
And if you lose all of it, and some people think, like, oh, that'll be great, then I'll put new people in and I'll be fabulous. No, to your point earlier, there's a reason that they got good at what they're doing. We need to keep that knowledge in the organization and use it as we innovate. You're gonna pay the price in losing knowledge.
So you don't get to access all those lessons learned and all that experience. But also if you create high attrition in the organization, because you're sort of telling the old guard Look, now it's our way or the highway and they choose the highway. Now it's just expensive. Like now attrition is very expensive for an organization.
So whether it's knowledge or money, both of those things they're going to cost you dearly. If you just ignore that old guard and you dismiss them.
George Drapeau: Yeah, absolutely. There's something inside me that's thinking about the taking advantage of institutional knowledge. I think those words themselves can be problematic. Some people are going to interpret that as like, well, as you're just saying, a nice way of saying old guard.
That's not true. People here need to listen to what you just said to explain what's the value of institutional knowledge. Because I, I agree with you. there was a reason they got to this point. They probably did this journey of learning themselves at one point, which is great.
Camille Rapacz: Exactly. And, or maybe somebody has, tried this before.
I hear this one a lot. We've tried this before. It didn't go well. That is the, we're throwing the baby out with the bathwater because it didn't go well last time. So we're never doing it again. What we really want to do is dig in and go, well, what didn't go well?
Where did we fail? And how could we do this better? How could we make it successful?
And you can't do that. If you don't listen to the people who actually experienced the bad version of this change the first time around, that's who you can learn from. They might have the attitude of like, Oh, it just didn't go well.
But if you go in and ask the right questions, again, we're going to come back to active listening and humble inquiry. You can pull these things out.
This brought up another curiosity of mine though. Cause I was like, , I wonder how common this is in tech. And you just brought up the startup version example of, you know, when there's neither guard happening.
But I think, you know, when, when people think of tech, you think, Oh, that's where there's all this innovation happening all the time. Move fast and break things I know that's a horrible way to, but that's kind of the perception, right? So I'm curious, is this just as common in tech?
George Drapeau: Yes. And here's why. For one reason, even in tech, you're trying to invent new things, but you're trying to systemize and routinize invention as much as possible. You're trying to make it as cheap and as efficient to invent new things. And so you've got ways of doing things like the way software developers build their code, work in teams together.
You're reducing the connection costs of them working together. So you're establishing practices and you want all the developers to follow roughly those same practices. So you get, you get a way of doing things.
I'll give you a specific example of a tech that some people will know and other people won't, but they could look it up.
When I grew up 8 million years ago, when we were still mostly doing smoke signals to write code, there was a fully developed methodology for writing software called the waterfall method, which meant You didn't write code at first. You spent a lot of time talking about what are the requirements of getting clear about that, creating prototypes and a series of steps to get ever, clearer.
And it worked great for the defense industry, which had thousands of people trying to build software to control a plane or a spaceship where nothing could go wrong. Worked great. And then things like the, um. Agile development, pair programming, things that started leaning toward lean they're hugely disruptive where you're focused on small iterative development, breaking things into smaller problems.
And I had a whole different way of thinking about things in a different design purpose. And these companies trying to stop building guided missiles and start building websites had a hard time transitioning from waterfall to agile. And it's perfectly legitimate tech companies. The other thing is, I mean, big successful tech companies are made up of many, many, many people.
And it's hard to innovate with that, many, many, many people. It's just hard.
Camille Rapacz: Yeah.
George Drapeau: There you go.
Camille Rapacz: This is good to hear, by the way, that we're all human and still have these same challenges. Because I do think a lot of it just comes down to our human nature, Which is just we get we get comfortable with things and we kind of sometimes we just kind of want to hang out there for a while.
And maybe I'm not ready for this change that you're bringing in because I just got comfortable with this process. I just got comfortable with this work. And now you want me to do something new again. So, I get that.
George Drapeau: I also think the larger the organization, the harder changes to really make happen no matter what kind of organization.
It's just absolutely
Camille Rapacz: yes. Because a bigger organization, it's more complicated. The system has more moving parts. All those moving parts have to be addressed in the change. So that's harder to do.
George Drapeau: And more whiny babies too. You have to,
Camille Rapacz: yes, there's always more whiny babies. Yes.
What do leaders do about this? Let's talk about how do you handle this problem of this clash of the old ways and the new and still not lose that institutional knowledge? Like how do we make sure that we are taking advantage of that? We see it as an opportunity and not as a hindrance.
George Drapeau: Yeah. Let's hear that.
Camille Rapacz: That's actually the first step. You see it as an opportunity, not a hindrance, like you've got to go into it with that as a leader. Like that's my first thing. Back to our, tried and true go to method is active listening and humble inquiry. This is where you're going to genuinely listen and understand the perspectives of both sides.
So as a leader, if you're the one bringing the change or you're the one who's in the old guard, you might think you're neutral, but you probably do lean to one side or the other more. You need to hear both sides of this for yourself and for all of the people involved. So that's number one.
George Drapeau: Yeah,
Camille Rapacz: part of this is creating that space that is safe and collaborative for people. So you're encouraging each side to listen and understand each other. This is that learning organization. We talked about this a while ago, but just Can we just learn from each other in this process? We want to learn, from what's happened in the past, and we want to learn the new ideas coming in, and we want to put all of these together.
Some other things you can do to make this happen is you can just create these opportunities for some cross generational or even cross, functional mentorship that will allow for this transfer of knowledge. I find this is really helpful when if you have like a couple of departments that have to work together, but they're constantly bumping up against each other.
Like that department ticks me off because they always do this thing that bothers me. And then they're also complaining about the same thing, but in the other direction, get them to do some cross mentorship or even a job shadowing so that they can understand, have this mutual understanding of their jobs.
I don't think organizations do this enough and they absolutely should. If you want to break down silos, this is a great way to do it. And you don't actually have to invest that much time like, Hey, go spend a couple hours with so and so and see what that work looks like.
George Drapeau: Yeah.
Camille Rapacz: You also want to make sure that there are feedback loops in the organization so that you ensure that the leaders are really able to address concerns and suggestions as they're coming up.
I heard you, but then I also need to come back to you with, here's what we've decided.
George Drapeau: Suggestion box. That's good enough. Right. Have a suggestion box.
Camille Rapacz: Yeah.
George Drapeau: That's feedback. That's good.
Camille Rapacz: That's a feedback dot, not loop.
Yeah, it's one directional feedback in a box. It's
George Drapeau: really feedback. Is it?
Camille Rapacz: No, I mean, you got to have the loop, right? So sure. Maybe a suggestion box, but then how am I looping back with people about? Thank you for your suggestions. Here's what we've decided to do. You don't have to do all the suggestions.
That's not what you're doing, but it's also not good enough to just hear them and be like, thanks, everybody. Appreciate all your input. Have a nice day. We do that a lot.
What else? Oh, encouraging experience. This is my favorite one. We want people to experiment and we want them to take risks, thoughtful risks, managed risk, but we want them to take a little bit of risk.
When I say thoughtful, I want them to do this in a way that also is respecting the established protocols in the organization. So you have to strike this balance between the protocols, the traditions of how we do work and how Taking some risk and innovating and experimenting with things.
This is the tricky thing to do is everybody thinks it's got to be one or the other, and it does not. You can acknowledge what's currently in place while also creating space for taking some risk and doing some experiments so you can innovate, In the end, though, I think that what leaders really need to do is make sure that they're very clear in the business with the organization with everybody there that you will constantly improve and you will innovate.
I don't think any organization can survive not having that be infused into the culture of the organization. It does not mean you dismiss the old ways of working, but if you aren't looking for how do we do this better tomorrow, next week, next year, you're going to fall behind everybody else.
George Drapeau: Yeah.
Camille Rapacz: I like to think of this as the organization that can identify and solve problems most effectively and efficiency wins.
the identify is the key. If I can identify the next problem to solve for my clients before everybody else. And I can find a better way to do it than anybody else can. I'm going to beat out my competition. I will win. So you've got to constantly be looking for that new and better way to do the work.
And not just customer delivery, but, you know, back office stuff too. Like, how do we just do this better so that we can be much more effective in how we're running this business? Because if you don't do that, entropy takes over, just turns into mush again.
And so even if you want to keep things status quo, you've got to stay on top of it. Like my health, I can't just get healthy and then be like, I'm good now. I have to keep working at staying healthy,
George Drapeau: Yes. I want to throw in another thought here that I think where some people's discomfort will be.
Absolutely. You have to have a culture where, reexamination and innovation improving is part of it. But I think the difficulty here is it's not just what we're getting better, but the, the paradigm has shifted on you. This is where the tension between old guard and new guard is that it's worse is when the old guard have really optimized.
for the paradigm they've been working at, but the paradigm itself has changed and they're not really equipped . It's not just a matter of getting better at that. They have to change what they're doing.
Camille Rapacz: This makes me think of, one of our favorite books, The Innovators Dilemma.
George Drapeau: Oh yes. Yes. Okay. I'll be quiet now. Yes. Well, why did we love that? No, no, no. I want, I want to hear what you have to say about it. Yeah. We'd love this part of us.
Camille Rapacz: There's a level of, disruption that will come with innovation.
if you're being really innovative, you're going to be disruptive either internally in the organization, in the industry, whatever you want to talk about. And there's layers of change that I'm talking about here. So this isn't always about that level of change. Sometimes there's just internal process improvement that is just, we need to, maybe you want to call it a micro innovation, but it's not big industry disruptors, which is a lot of what Christensen talks about in the innovators dilemma.
I'm also talking about just the small, simple improvements we need to make to processes, like how we're processing invoices and all the basic everyday stuff. If there's a better way, we should do that. And you want your organization to have all your employees to have a mindset of, if there's a better way to do this, I should do that.
I should implement a better way and not just do it this way because we've always done it this way. That's where I see organizations get really stuck is they're stuck in the, well, how do I balance if I'm constantly changing? How do I ever get good at anything? So, yes, you do have to balance the.
improvement with the giving yourself a chance to let that improvement work well for you. But what I really want organizations to get good at is change and problem solving. I want improvement to be the thing they're good at, not just the process itself, but the process of improving process is what I want people to be really good at.
And that's kind of the thing that I think is, important in this discussion in addition to that bigger breakthrough, like how do I do really big, innovative, disruptive change in my organization? If you can't do it at the most basic problem solving, improving a process level, I don't know how you're going to survive bigger disruptive change that will really catapult your organization forward.
George Drapeau: That's a really good book.
Camille Rapacz: What do you like about that book?
George Drapeau: He's a very good storyteller. He explains sophisticated concepts, clearly. He's even better to listen to. Like I've watched some of his videos and heard him narrate shorter version of his book, and he's just so pleasant to listen to.
So fun to be taught by. And the examples he, Brings up, have huge stakes, like the change in the way department stores went about their business. Completely wiped out a whole generation of old department stores into the generation that you and I grew up with, which are in turn have been disrupted by Walmart in turn, disrupted by Amazon.
I read his one example and I can easily map it to a current version of that. Really compelling.
George Drapeau: There's a lot of the empathy for the old guard in this. He just really says, look, let's not blame these guys.
These companies have become hugely successful for optimizing for what they were trying to do. They're in trouble because they're serving their customers really well, their existing customers. I love the empathy that's in that explanation. It takes a lot of the tension out of like, you just need to sort of slide old thinking and innovate and forget about those old people.
That's not what he's saying at all.
Camille Rapacz: Yeah.
George Drapeau: I love that. I guess that's what I like about the book now that I think about it.
Camille Rapacz: I think that's what I like about him generally. So this is *Clayton Christensen*. I'll make sure I put this into the show notes for people. If you aren't familiar with him and his, books and his work is fabulous stuff.
he has another book called, *how will you measure your life*? Is that what it's
George Drapeau: called?
Camille Rapacz: Also a lovely book. I highly recommend, I'll put that in the show notes, but yes, I do love his approach. He does come at this from a very empathetic. Perspective thinking about the human factor in all of this. But one of the other things I love about this is I remember reading how, so many other great leaders of big companies, I don't remember the name specifically, but it's like, I don't know, head of GE or, might've been Steve jobs, people like that who read the book and were just It kind of terrified them because they realize my organization is not prepared to do what he's talking about, but they instantly, as they read it, they could see, oh, this could be our downfall if I don't figure out how to be good at this.
If I cannot figure out how do I optimize for this clash between the old and the new ideas? How do I make that work to my advantage so that I can actually get to be a disruptor in my industry, then I'm probably not going to make it.
Eventually, this thing is going to fizzle itself out. I have to figure that out at some point,
George Drapeau: Yeah.
Camille Rapacz: And I love that. I love that he had this idea that made brilliant people go, Oh, I really need to pay attention to this and figure it out. And that's why I love this topic because it gets oversimplified into it's just an interpersonal thing.
And it's not. It's not just about an interpersonal, I'm the new person. You're the person who's been here forever. And we don't see eye to eye. It's not that simple. And I think we try to simplify it. People like, can you just fix my team? Because, you know, they get old ways, we get new ways and we just don't agree.
And there's so much more going on in there. And I think if organizations can really look at that and how to optimize that tension is important. You can capitalize like not all tension is bad. It'll be bad if you just let it fester, but it could be good if you like harness it and do something with it.
George Drapeau: That's cool.
Camille Rapacz: All right. Any last thoughts on this, George?
George Drapeau: I like a lot that we acknowledge the validity of both old guard and new, and that there's got to be a way to deal with both and you start with, empathy, inquiry, listening, that's where you start. You're going to find those validity in both camps, helping in your job as a leader.
I love how you say this too, is to help manage that change, infuse the process of change in this culture, them both working together. I like that a lot.
Camille Rapacz: Yeah. You don't have to pick sides.
George Drapeau: You don't have to pick sides. Also, don't work for a company that has no guard. Don't do that.
Camille Rapacz: Don't do that.
George Drapeau: Hot tip.
Camille Rapacz: Yeah. Oh my gosh. That would be so frustrating.
All right. Well, that's all I have on this topic for today.
George Drapeau: Great topic.
Camille Rapacz: If you have any thoughts on this, you know how to leave us a voicemail, I hope by now, or if you're a new listener, you can go to the belief shift. com and there's a little widget where you can click and leave us a voicemail. We would love to hear your thoughts, maybe your stories, maybe your questions about this problem that might be existing potentially in your organization.
I'm sure it is somewhere. We would love to hear from you.
And also, if you would like to talk about how I can help you with this, you can book a free consultation with me, CamilleRapaz. com slash book a call all the links will be in the show notes.
Thank you everybody for listening. We will be back in your ears next week.
George Drapeau: See you soon, everybody.
