Staying True to Long-Term Change: Becoming Future Fit

“Change is by nature, inherently disruptive, and it often stresses people out. How can we move it from a source of distress to a source of eustress?”
Friska Wirya

In this episode you’ll hear about

• Change management in organisations: The need for organisations to embrace change as a permanent function and strategies to nurture employees through disruption.
• Transitioning from invisibility to influence: How individuals can move from feeling invisible within their organisations to becoming influential.
• Playfulness and innovation: The role of playfulness in inspiring innovation and approaching corporate challenges with creativity.
• The role of personal branding: Why defining one’s personal values and projecting them authentically through a clear personal brand is important.
• Sustained motivation and resilience: Personal strategies for maintaining motivation in the face of ongoing change and long-term goals.

Key links

Fresh by Friska
Friska’s new book: The Future Fit Organisation
Friska’s TedX Talk
MBB
Yammer
Big Four 
Rocky

About our guest
Friska Wirya is a Top 50 Change Management Thought Leader, most known for her work with large corporates – a US$170m cost saving for the biggest gold miner in the Southern Hemisphere, executing the digital response to COVID for Australia’s number 1 university, and partnering with the largest engineering company on earth to win the race to net zero.

She is now the powerhouse behind Fresh by Friska, a change management consulting, coaching, facilitation and training service, and was selected by Meta as part of the Top 100 Consultants and Thought Leaders of the world.

About our host
Our host, Chris Hudson, is a Teacher, Experience Designer and Founder of business transformation coaching and consultancy Company Road.

Company Road was founded by Chris Hudson, who saw over-niching and specialisation within corporates as a significant barrier to change.

Every team approaches transformation in their own way, also bringing in their own partners to help. And while they’re working towards the same organisational goal, it’s this over-fragmentation that stunts rapid progress at a company-wide level.

Having worked as a marketer, transformation leader, teacher and practitioner of design thinking for over 20 years, both here in Australia and internationally, Chris brings a unique, deep and ‘blended’ skillset that will cohere and enable your teams to deliver ambitious and complex change programs.

Transcript
[00:00:07] Chris Hudson: Hello, lovely people. It gives me great pleasure to introduce my next guest, Friska Wirya. Friska is the powerhouse behind award winning Fresh by Friska, a change management consulting, coaching, facilitation, and training service for executives, teams, and businesses. She’s a top 50 change management global thought leader, a TEDx speaker, a highly sought after facilitator and she’s an author as well.

She’s about to launch her book, The Future Fit Organisation, which is out next month. So she’s known for her work with large corporates, a US 170 million cost saving for the biggest gold miner in the Southern Hemisphere. She’s executed the digital response to COVID for Australia’s number one university, and she’s partnered with the largest engineering company on earth to win the race to net zero.

And these are just a few examples of the amazing work that she’s done. She epitomises courage. dynamism and leadership in change management. And I know you’ll learn a ton of stuff from this episode. She’s exactly the type of guest that we love to have on The Company Road Podcast. And she’s not only been an intrapreneur in large organisations, but she’s been able to use that foundational experience and that drive to really launch and then turbocharge her own business ventures and become a thought leader as well.

So really hope that you enjoyed the episode today. Let’s tune in and see what she had to say.

Okay, hello Friska and a huge welcome to The Company Road Podcast. We met fairly recently, actually, and you were kind enough to squeeze in that coffee with me in Melbourne in between a jam packed few days of events and meetings and knowing that we both worked in the business of change and thought leadership and not really knowing where this conversation would go.

I really, welcome the opportunity to exchange stories, ideas, and hear from you today. At the time when we met, I rather cheekily asked whether you’d be a guest on The Company Road Podcast and here we are. So thank you very much. I’m just really happy that our listeners will get the chance to know you a little bit better. For those that aren’t aware of the amazing work that you’re already doing and that you have planned and from background to business change to book launch, we could start our conversation anywhere today. But why don’t we begin with something about you? And I’d love to just hear about how you go about things and when you first started out.

So maybe we just start with a question around how you started out in business. When did you realise that change and transformation would be your pathway?

[00:02:25] Friska: Okay. I’ll do the change and transformation one first. So I’ve been in change for a decade now. And during that time, I’ve led changes in six of the seven continents for the biggest names in mining, engineering, and the higher ed, and I. Took a massive 40 percent pay cut to start as a lowly change analyst.

Before that I was in management consulting. So I was at a boutique firm. I first started working when I lived in Los Angeles, actually, cause I won a scholarship to study there. And I just didn’t feel challenged. I felt that every project was roughly the same, do some analysis, do some data crunching, present it back to the client.

And when I returned to Australia, it was only then change management started to be recognised as a discipline. And it played to all my strengths; communication, the developing rapport and trust, the analytical ability and the creativity. And I thought, oh this is really interesting. And it piqued my interest because it was different. Every single day is different. There’s no cookie cutter approaches here because every leader, every change, every organisation, every culture, they’re all different. So what you use for organisation A is going to be very different for organisation B. Never mind organisation. What you use in different teams, all these levers are different.

And so, yeah, I took a massive pay cut to start from nothing and did. all the shitty projects had all the really difficult clients, changes of all shapes and sizes, restructures, operating models large scale technology implementations, culture, and then fast forward, seven years later, I was the youngest Head of Change at the biggest gold mining company in the Southern Hemisphere so it was a lot of hard yakka to get there.

[00:04:00] Chris Hudson: Just simply amazing. And that obviously characterises what you do today. How would you describe what you do today a bit more broadly to those who don’t know you.

[00:04:09] Friska: I’d say I’m a change multi hyphenate, so I’ll answer both questions ’cause you asked me how did I get started in business, so how did I get started in business and what I do today. It can be answered in one go. So I started, November 2019. I was really burnt out. I had just left corporate and I had no idea what I was gonna do next.

I didn’t know whether to jump back in or not. And then I said to myself, if I don’t, I’d always had a, you know, a little voice inside of me always had a yearning for more control, more control over where, when, and how much I worked. And I thought, look, I don’t want to look back, when I’m 60 and always wonder, what if I took the path less traveled?

And because I was speaking at a conference in about two weeks time, and I still hadn’t made up my mind. I was like well, you can’t rock up to a conference that you’re speaking at and rock up empty handed. So it was literally as basic as that. It’s register an ABN. Think of a business name, buy a template from Squarespace, put your photo on it.

And it’s just evolved since then. Little did I know two months later COVID would hit and when all the borders shut, it took with it my entire pipeline. Organisations were not used to hiring consultants on the other end of a Zoom, especially if they didn’t come from big four. Or the MBB cohort. And I thought this was like a change management exercise for myself.

And I literally applied proven change management frameworks and techniques that I use still to this day or when I’m consulting to these client organisations to myself. First is the awareness. How do I get people knowing who I am? Desire: how do I get people to support me? Want to engage with me? Knowledge: what’s the information that they need the ability? How do I make it easy for them? How do I reduce the friction to buy? And lastly is the reinforcement. How did that? How do I keep them happy? How do I keep them always coming back to me? Because consulting had fallen off a cliff, I had to diversify. So I started speaking, I pushed myself and like developed workshops by request from Women Leaders Institute. I did a lot of stuff for free in the beginning to get that exposure and to get those blue chip logos on my website. I don’t do that anymore. Hell no. But the point is what I do today. I’d say I’m a multi hyphenate. I do a combination of things.

I partner with a select number of companies and they are really my foundational clients that come to me for change advisory to up skill their change capability, perhaps build a CMO. And then the rest of the time I’m either speaking at events, running workshops. So I just wrapped one up last week for Women Leaders Institute.

That was for about 180 people in the room and they are not topics on about change management, but many change management principles are applied. They’re usually about communicating without authority, levelling up your personal brand, resistance management mastery. So deviations from change. And then as you said in the intro, I’m also publishing a book.

So that’s off the back of my TED talk last year, which went pretty damn well. I must say I was very chuffed with that. And so I’ve turned that into a book. It’s going to be out on the 12th of September and it’s called the Future Fit Organisation. So I’ve added consultant, speaker, facilitator. And I’ve added author to the mix as of next month.

[00:07:16] Chris Hudson: Wow. I mean, that’s just incredible that last one or two minutes of you describing what you’ve been able to achieve. And I’d love to just maybe take a step back from that and think about your superpower more broadly. How would you describe that? And does it relate back to the things that you learned earlier in your career?

[00:07:31] Friska: Without a doubt, it’s my work ethic. And all my friends, colleagues, previous bosses, clients they admire my discipline and quote unquote, brutal efficiency. I don’t know where it came from, to be frank. I’ve always been like that. I’ve always been very bright at school and always applied myself.

And I think those habits, those study habits and the application of knowledge have then transferred quite seamlessly into the world of work.

[00:08:00] Chris Hudson: There’s often that situation where you know that you can, as a person who can affect change, somebody that can go into an organisation and see what’s wrong and actually fix it. But there’s almost that consideration for how you will be received into an organisation that you’re either working within or that you’re consulting for.

Do you think about that at all? Do you think about how, how to make yourself well received within an organisation?

[00:08:22] Friska: All the time. I mean, perception is reality and that’s why first impressions are so important to get right because they’re made in about three seconds and don’t get me wrong, you can undo first impressions, but it takes a lot of effort and heavy lifting to get to that point. So there are things that, you have control of that will set you up for success, and that’s about, making sure you know how to develop trust and rapport, making sure your online and your offline presence is something that you can be proud of. Like you can hang your hat on that, so all these things will help you be received more positively as soon as you step in the room.

And there’s nothing like also taking control of the introduction itself. So whenever I’ve been engaged by a client, I write my own introduction. I take control of the narrative. I was like, this is how I want to be introduced to your senior leadership team. This is how we’ll be introduced to ABC.

So these are things that, that you should be thinking of before you get to that point.

[00:09:17] Chris Hudson: I like the thinking behind that because it, it almost breaks down a bit of a comms strategy for how things should play out. And if you, like you say, if you’re not taking charge of that yourself, then somebody else will do it for you, but maybe not in the way that you’d welcome because, even just a short intro at the start of a meeting and that happens all the time.

It can be what guides the rest of the meeting and in terms of how people perceive you within the room. And I know that you do a lot of work from the point of view of influence and around personal brand, are these some of the things that are also part of your offering?

[00:09:45] Friska: Yes, exactly. So I’ve got anywhere from 90 minutes to two day intensive courses. And it really, I mean, change management is really reputation management because you know, you often have to reprogram a person’s beliefs and perceptions about a particular change that’s happening in the business.

So, you know, these are, these are not just business skills. These are life skills and I teach other people how to apply it to their own individual situations. So I’ll give you, an example. Women especially are very uncomfortable articulating their value proposition or crafting a pitch, right?

It feels slimy. It feels dirty. It feels a bit They don’t want to be pulled down, et cetera, et cetera. But it’s only salesy if you have nothing of value to offer. So I walked them through a process to unpack that, unpack what makes them unique. And what comes out is really warm. So for example, I was working with an electrical engineer, last year and crafting his pitch.

And I got him to work through an exercise where he literally wrote down. All his experience, work experience, life experience, degrees, obviously. And, but then other skills that are not attached to a piece of paper. And he wrote down this first thing and it was great because it quantified some dollar savings that he achieved.

There was a personal hook into it. Like for example, his father and his grandfather before him were engineers and worked in construction. So he felt like it was his calling, but what really set him apart is his experience in retail. And initially he wasn’t going to put that in. He’d spent seven years at JB Hi-Fi, so working throughout uni. And he said, look, no one’s going to care I worked at JB Hi-Fi and I think like it actually doesn’t add anything to me. And I said, look it’s not JB Hi-Fi, like it’s not the job. It’s the lessons that you took from that job. And the lesson in that situation was the five star customer experience.

The after sales service and follow up. And these are all reasons that he didn’t realise he did that because of that experience that he had in retail. And that’s why he has such a good rating from clients. So, everybody has so many different life experiences. But what people really do is unpack what those experiences meant, what it taught them and draw reasons into why that person is the way they are today.

[00:12:06] Chris Hudson: Yeah. And I think that the relevance of that experience for how it can be linked to what is happening in a company at this moment in time is also important because not everyone realises what that experience is or was and how that can be translated into something that is incredibly powerful for the team and what the team wants to achieve as a goal, as a vision, as a strategy, it feels like that can somehow get lost and that people often get pigeonholed really by what the project team says they need to be in that moment.

Do you see that happening as well?

[00:12:36] Friska: Yeah, I think a lot of people are just so busy in the doing and they’ve always got a million different thoughts in their mind. It’s a bit like monkey mind. They can’t see the forest for the trees. So yeah, I think a lot of people should have more alone time, more reflection time to really understand what that makes them tick, what drives them.

Instead of being so easily swayed by what the majority thinks.

[00:12:59] Chris Hudson: Coming back to that point, really uh, we’re thinking about when you first walk into an organisation and you’re starting to do some work with them and this can be in relation to your experience from working within mining or within another company.

But sometimes you just get a feeling, right? You walk in, you’re in the four walls, you could see that things have been done a certain way. What are some of the signs of an organisation needing to change? How do you pick up on that? And then what do you need to do?

[00:13:24] Friska: A regular answer would be declining or stagnant financial performance, but often the symptoms of an organisation needing to change is not just about the dollars and cents. And mining is a perfect example. So, in that situation, it was high turnover, very high turnover above industry average and low morale.

People seemed constantly stressed, like there was, I can’t explain it, there was like this frenzied feeling and people were constantly hurrying to somewhere and they constantly felt overworked and burnt out. There’s an inability to keep up with any change, not even technological change, but regulatory change, health and safety change, whatever the change is and it’s because people are so overloaded with information and work. They’re just like, oh my God, I can’t take another change. So change fatigue is very common. Also decreasing customer satisfaction and loyalty, less relevant to. mining, but very relevant in fast moving consumer goods, even higher ed there’s often a dissonance between the organisation, the institution versus the students that enrol there.

So yeah, those are about, four or five symptoms of an organisation that needs to change.

[00:14:33] Chris Hudson: Change fatigue is an interesting one, isn’t it? I just want to pick on that one because it feels like you, you can introduce change, but then the velocity of change can obviously result in either apathy towards that change or certain side effects coming in, which can be, in a way going against the change, they go against the grain of the change that you’re trying to implement.

So what are some of the things that you do to get around that?

[00:14:54] Friska: To get around change fatigue, I break things down in really small steps I simplify and consolidate as much as possible because people getting an email that’s more than three paragraphs long, that often creates a knee jerk reaction. It stresses them out. Too long. Didn’t read. So thinking about people’s mental load and being creative on how can you can reduce that load.

So it’s not just the frequency, but it’s also the conciseness and a picture says a thousand words. So I try to story tell, change narratives as much as possible using either images, metaphors, or analogies. So these things less taxing on people’s brains to make sense of, and it does help with adoption, awareness, and engagement.

[00:15:37] Chris Hudson: So how do those narratives play out in a practical sense?

[00:15:39] Friska: You gain support for your change a lot easier, a lot faster. You get budget and resourcing. People understand it. There’s complete alignment at the leadership level, and that’s what you need before you start trickling down to the entire organisation.

[00:15:51] Chris Hudson: Yeah, super important. I think the, the strength in that is, is really evidenced by people’s adoption to it obviously. They understand it. They see the artefacts that you’re creating and they can actually not only talk about those but share that with other people, get other people on board with some of those lessons and, some of those pieces of information as well.

So the culture of change is then accepted and then it feels like it’s more readily taken on. From an individual’s point of view within the context of that imagining that you’re just receiving that information for the first time. Do people always know what to do with it?

Or do they feel like if change is happening, that they’re almost a little bit of a passenger? How do you get around some of those things?

[00:16:29] Friska: That definitely does not happen the first time. Like most good things, it takes time and the way I like to explain adoption and awareness. It’s really like making a layer cake. You need to work in layers and slowly, but surely increase. And this repetition and reinforcement helps increase understanding.

And you can’t expect people to know what to do with it. The first time you tell them because they’ve got a million different things going on inside their head. They’re thinking about what to make for dinner, what time to pick up the kids at school, et cetera. And so I’ve often been in these town hall meetings where.

A big change is announced, for example, a merger, and then always at the end, they’re like, anybody have any questions? And no one puts their hand up cause they’re still a little bit gobsmacked. Often the C suite are like, that was brilliant. No one had any questions. It’s all steam ahead, but people take time to make sense of things.

So expecting them to understand what to do with a change immediately, like that’s just completely unrealistic and how good your communication and engagement strategy is depends on how fast they understand and feel empowered to respond to the change that you’re talking about.

[00:17:34] Chris Hudson: taking that example, how would it work and how would the sequence of events work in a way that would be better? So you’re making a big announcement and you’re either planning for that or you’re then thinking about how to involve the teams a little bit more through those subsequent stages.

How would it work out best do you think?

[00:17:50] Friska: Give people a heads up on what you’re going to be talking about on that day. Don’t surprise people. Like I said, bite size information, regular information, before you even get to that day, like you need to have some sort of. FAQ, prepared and not prepared by just you, a team of people because the more diverse perspectives and opinions, the better, because they will definitely think of things that you could not have thought about. Take into account also people’s different ethnic backgrounds, cultures, learning styles.

So these are all things that should be considered before it’s announcement day. And last but not least, consider people’s personalities too. So the introverted people will never put their hand up and ask a question. Be creative, like use Mentimeter or, you know, Slido or whatnot so people can ask their questions anonymously and also leave the question capability functionality open before and after the event.

Because people receive information and process it at different times. So if you only have it live on the day, you’re limiting yourself to a minor fraction of the population.

[00:18:53] Chris Hudson: So it’s almost around increasing the exposure of that message either before, during or after, so that people get more of an opportunity to, to feed in,

[00:19:01] Friska: You want people to feel included. It’s not about exposure, it’s the fact that people need to be included in different ways, whether that’s technologically, whether that’s language wise, and you need to be considerate. of the differences in the population.

[00:19:16] Chris Hudson: So if you’re organising that yourself how do you make it simple? Because I can imagine that a lot of organisations or leaders would find that a little bit daunting when what was previously done was just a town hall or a PowerPoint presentation to make the announcement. How would they go about it?

[00:19:30] Friska: Like I said, I’d break it up and each engagement has a different objective. What are you trying to get? Really pare it down to the basics. The first should always be, let people know about it. The second is, you know, make sure people are comfortable. Third you want people to ask questions.

So, break it down into chunks. Be very clear on what the objective is. If you’re clear on what the objective is, then it’s a lot easier to figure out the content.

[00:19:54] Chris Hudson: Yeah, I’m also thinking about who takes on the change first. So if you’re adopting the change, are there people within your crowd or within the organisation that you’re almost trying to take on the journey as champions and as advocates that can help support you in making that change? Does that seem to play out as well?

[00:20:11] Friska: Before you even get there, you map out your stakeholders. So, stakeholder analysis 101 who’s got the power, who’s got the influence, who’s not senior, but we should listen to them. Who holds the keys to the gate? So that all those things need to be taken into consideration and they should form part of, feed into your comms plan.

[00:20:32] Chris Hudson: And what are some of the signs of it working really well, either in the early stages of that announcement being made or longer term how do you know that it’s worked?

[00:20:40] Friska: People spend less time gossiping about it in the corners, so they’re pretty clear on what it means. Yeah, there’s less noise in the airwaves the quality of the questions and the number of questions that come in. Obviously, you ask for feedback, so structured feedback, and you also. undertake your own observational feedback.

[00:20:57] Chris Hudson: think, a lot of the change these days is to do with digital transformation in one way or another. You’ve done a lot of work in this space, I know as well but thinking about that what are some of the things that came up? What are some of the themes that you encountered as you were trying to strengthen, a digital culture and really bring organisations forward into a new way of working?

[00:21:15] Friska: The tool is only as powerful as the people who are using it. So what I mean by that is You can’t spend, 10 million on the best technological tools to advance your transformation and spend five bucks on your people to get them ready for the transformation. So your own, your performance will be limited by your investment in change management.

So that’s a common theme. And you, and if you’re, implementing a really innovative system, but your culture is command and control and conservative, then there’s a big gap that needs to be filled in there and it will take a lot of effort to fill that in.

[00:21:47] Chris Hudson: Yeah, I think that plays out all the time. It just feels like, digital culture is set by some, but not followed by all or followed by many. And you can obviously see evidence of it working in places, but then there’s almost that exclusion effect. You see it with early adoption of any technology, whether it’s, a new piece of software, some AI, some people are doing it, some people are not.

So automatically it feels like there’s a divide that’s created within an organisation because you’re rolling it out in a way. And it’s only natural for certain people to pick it up before others. So how do you bring some of that adoption together and actually make it more of a universal universally accepted piece of technology?

[00:22:25] Friska: I’d say inject the F word and the F word is fun, so get people excited about it. Like it’s all about creating a buzz. Like a lot of the strategies that I employ in creating a buzz for some sort of change that, my client organisation has entrusted me to drive forward. I learn a lot from the marketing and advertising industry.

So I’d say read up on that interpret it in your own way and apply that to your own individual situation.

[00:22:53] Chris Hudson: Let’s talk about that. The marketing and the advertising industry, what are some of the things that, that you get inspired by in that space?

[00:22:58] Friska: They’re very good at enlisting ambassadors, so User Generated Content (UGC) is a huge thing. So one of the most viral Yammer videos from way back when, when I was, doing a large enterprise wide implementation was. their own users literally recording himself on his mobile phone saying, hey did you know I could do this in the new system?

And it started like, a little bit of a rivalry, like people like, oh my God, what’s a trick that I can share with the world, et cetera, et cetera. So, influencers on social media are doing this all the time about products or whether it’s beauty products, whether it’s fashion products, it could be five ways to style a scarf or whatever the hell it is.

So you can do the same thing for your change. It just takes a bit of effort and creativity.

[00:23:44] Chris Hudson: Yeah I mean, I think you’re right. You can draw influence from a number of different places to obviously drive your own change forward and actually bringing that the process of bringing things into an organisation from the outside world is often interesting. You can obviously be quite selective and quite particular about where you want to focus the stimulus for a conversation, whether it’s in a workshop.

And that can obviously, promote a certain behaviour and it can promote a sense of openness, a sense of, shared experience around something that nobody’s, nobody in the room has seen before as well. Which is really good to hear about. Yeah I’m thinking. Probably along the lines of gamification, the fact that business in a way can be enjoyable if it’s done right, you know, playfulness, F word, as you say, fun, do you think about that as well?

So how to make something appear to be more of a sport or a game?

[00:24:28] Friska: Totally. User Acceptance Testing is a great example. It’s so batshit boring. It’s like poking yourself in the eye with a blunt object, but I get creative. There’s always a theme song. There’s some funny memes flying around. There’s GIFs, there’s emojis. So especially if you’re doing it online, like you need to get create, like you can’t just rock up with cupcakes, right?

If it’s online. So you need to think of other ways to create that atmosphere, that buzz.

[00:24:55] Chris Hudson: I mean, testing, you’re right. It’s one of those examples where, and actually a lot of research runs that very, very formulaic, always done the same way you get the same types of people. You get the same types of outcomes and you’ve got to light that up in some way.

You’re got to bring some spark in some sort of way. I’m interested about the theme. So what was the theme song? Where have you used that?

[00:25:13] Friska: Rocky

[00:25:16] Chris Hudson: So you’re, you’re about to go in and do some testing for, I don’t know, a new medical service or something or

[00:25:25] Friska: Yeah. Fighting the bugs,

[00:25:26] Chris Hudson: and you get the rocky soundtrack and then off you go.

[00:25:29] Friska: Yeah.

[00:25:30] Chris Hudson: that how it works? How brilliant. yeah. I mean, I think the playfulness is really key.

There’s a lot of rich territory around play and how you can bring that in. And obviously that inspires people, when you come in with a different approach as well. So, that’s already helpful.

I just wanted to tie that to your points earlier around you talk a little bit on your speaker circuit about being invisible and moving from invisibility to being more influential. What are some of the directions that people can take in that area?

Because a lot of people, I think. feel like that they’re just one of many within a crowd, within a corporate and how can they stand out?

[00:26:01] Friska: They need to know, people are not going to care about what you do until they know why you even do it. So, think about your why. Think about the top three, I’d say three, the top three values that you want to be known for. Because when you look at the values, you’re like, oh yeah, people easily pick 10 or 12, but really it’s like you keep on stripping back until you get to your true essence.

Once you know what those top three are, you then think about how do I exude these values? For example if it’s performance, what are the things that someone with performance at a value would do? What would they say? How would they look?

How did they interact? So you need to take the time to flesh these things out. Like a strong personal brand doesn’t happen by accident. It’s not just a random thing that happens. It’s through commitment, consistency and dedication to cultivating those values. It’s just like adoption, right? It doesn’t happen overnight.

It’s cause you’ve got a solid change plan. You’ve got your sponsors on board. The leaders are walking the talk, blah, blah, blah. That doesn’t happen overnight or in a week. The same thing with a personal brand.

[00:27:03] Chris Hudson: Yeah, I’m just hearing you talk. It feels like you’re considering three things in a way, you’re considering yourself and what you can do, what you can bring, you’re looking at the process and what needs to be done. And that is often tying that’s locus for change and that’s tying things together.

And then you’ve got the broader organisation and how, what you’re trying to commit or envisage or bring to that organisation, how that fits within their lives and what they need to do. Personal brand can obviously be incredibly powerful in creating a link, if you’ve got those values that you were describing and how does that link to the values of the people that you’re talking to, how do you then build the processes and the steps in and around that?

So that people are connecting with you in relation to the values that you’re representing and that you’re feeling strongly about as well.

[00:27:46] Friska: And externally

[00:27:47] Chris Hudson: I mean, there’s, there’s,

[00:27:48] Friska: there’s no point limiting yourself to just who’s in your organisation. Like it’s a, it’s a big wide world out there,

[00:27:53] Chris Hudson: Yeah. So external to the organisation because that then becomes marketing in and around what the organisation is doing or how do you mean

[00:28:01] Friska: People follow people and often individual brands are stronger than company brands, right? I talked about this last week in my workshop that I ran, how many followers do you think Richard Branson has?

[00:28:11] Chris Hudson: million, I don’t know.

[00:28:13] Friska: 20 mil, 20 mil. And how many followers do you think his company has? Virgin Group.

[00:28:18] Chris Hudson: 100,000

[00:28:19] Friska: 200 odd thousand, but the point is there’s a huge disparity. And when you look at the top 100 followed accounts on LinkedIn. Over 90 percent of them are individuals, and this was very different 20 years ago, where the top 100 was dominated by companies. Now’s a great time to think about how you want to be perceived in the world, what you want to project.

And look beyond your organisation. You are so much more than the organisation that you work for.

[00:28:43] Chris Hudson: What’s been your own experience of that? I know that you’ve done a lot of work in this area. I’d love to hear the story if you’re able to

tell it. Or how you, how you thought about, I suppose presenting yourself as, in your personal brand to the rest of the world and what you’ve been able to achieve through that.

[00:28:57] Friska: The content that I put out online and what you see, and, uh, it’s exactly as, as I am in real life, There’s complete congruence there. So I just decided to amplify more of what I already had. And I leaned into what people usually just like people’s descriptors of me my characteristics that people think are my strengths.

I just leaned into that and the effects of that are compounding. Like I would never have gotten a speaking gig at TEDx. I would have never spoken at Salesforce or Microsoft. I wouldn’t be flown out to Singapore next month to launch my book. So all these things are cumulative and they’re a result of decisions that I made three years ago.

[00:29:39] Chris Hudson: Can you tell us about what, I know we talked a bit about COVID and setting everything up there but what were some of the steps that you took to keep that momentum up, to keep that sense of progress going?

[00:29:48] Friska: I had a structure, so Monday to Friday, every day, I knew what I was going to say and how I was going to say it. I knew it wasn’t a numbers game. I surrounded myself with people who have been there and done it before. But I’m naturally a very driven as and self motivated individual. And I think a lot of what allows me to have this seemingly endless energy and drive is because I take a lot of time for self care, whether that’s being mindful of the foods that I put in my body being mindful of what I read. So shock horror, I actually don’t need read the news. I think it’s really depressing. I think if it’s that important, someone will tell me about it. It’s a complete waste of energy for me. I exercise every day, I surround myself in nature.

I know what my goals are and I take the time to plan the week ahead and what I want to achieve. So all these things, like it’s quite a motivational tool when you’re checking things off your list constantly. And, you know, it’s, it’s a long term game. Like I step back, I don’t step back after a day and judge whether today was a success or not.

Like you judge that, a year.

[00:30:56] Chris Hudson: So you take a conscious moment at the end of the year to think back. How do you go about doing that?

[00:31:01] Friska: Yeah, usually so traditionally I’ve gone somewhere new every year for as long as I remember and I take a fair chunk of time off. So I usually take about six weeks off end of the year. So Christmas and January, sometimes it bleeds into February, depends when Chinese New Year is. And I just do that naturally, actually, there’s no kind of rigid process that I follow. I’m a big believer in visual diaries. So I look at what I’ve done a year ago versus now, and just think about how far I’ve come.

[00:31:32] Chris Hudson: that? Visual diaries, so you’re drawing every day?

[00:31:34] Friska: Drawings and photographs.

[00:31:36] Chris Hudson: Just in a handwritten one? Are you on your mobile or how are you doing it?

[00:31:39] Friska: On my mobile. My mobile is like constantly attached to me. I tried keeping hand written journals, but it just got too heavy and too unwieldy.

[00:31:50] Chris Hudson: Yeah. Great. Oh, that’s really good. And yeah, just tell us about the new place that you visit every year. Was that something that you started doing a little while back?

[00:31:57] Friska: Oh, um.

it’s been at least 10 years. I’ve always traveled since I was a young age. So it’s just something that I think is completely normal. So this year I went to Malta for the first time ever, which was amazing. I then went to Norway, Sweden, Pretty much all of Scandinavia.

So that was all new. I went paragliding for the first time ever. So I jumped off Mont Blanc in Chamonix in France. Yeah, so yeah, I

[00:32:23] Chris Hudson: was that?

[00:32:23] Friska: helps me, it inspires me. So it’s, recharge and it also boosts my creativity and the people I meet are amazing. Like I’ve met people first connecting on LinkedIn, literally all around the world.

You know, They’ve turned into friends, they’ve turned into collaborators, they’ve turned into clients. So yeah, it’s an annual thing for me.

[00:32:43] Chris Hudson: And do you plan that to the letter? Do you, do you look at LinkedIn and connect with people before you go and make plans-

[00:32:49] Friska: No, I decide on the country I want to go to first, and then I see who’s there, and then I slot them in.

[00:32:56] Chris Hudson: That’s really good. That’s an exercise in changing itself, isn’t it?

Because if you’re not changing yourself, then obviously you’re stagnating, maybe, or you’re staying still, or you’re letting your current state, in a way influence

[00:33:08] Friska: Yep.

Yep

[00:33:08] Chris Hudson: everything about your day to day and what’s being planned as well. And I think a lot of people feel like that, don’t they? Within their roles, within their work, that everything is all a bit samey every day. So yeah, that feels like a really good way to break out of that and think about broader horizons and broader possibilities and the influences that it brings as well.

What else would you say to people, in and around self motivation and I guess keeping going, it feels like that’s a really big theme for you in terms of resilience, persistence, tenacity. What’s behind that?

[00:33:40] Friska: I think because for me there’s no, there’s no failure, there’s only feedback. And so use every rejection as an opportunity to stress test your ideas, to finesse what’s resonating with people and what’s not, and, you know, get people involved, like crowdsource feedback, include, forward thinking colleagues, mentors, open minded people who recognise the potential value of disruption or whatever it is, whatever idea that you’re trying to lead also, there’s nothing like the power of collaboration, so, find out who maybe isn’t trying to do what you do, but is trying to achieve the same objective and find out those like minded people and see if you can collaborate with them.

And then, I’ve always been open to feedback so, I remind myself, cliché, but Rome wasn’t built in a day. And whatever dream you’ve got in your head is not going to come into reality in a day either. So, yeah, it’s a long term game.

[00:34:35] Chris Hudson: And long term, you said a year before, but is it longer than that? Or is it, how are you framing long term?

[00:34:40] Friska: Multi year. Over 80 percent of businesses fold after the first year. So it, it really, it’s not battle of the fittest, it’s battle of the most resilient. So, you know, make sure you’ve got that staying power, find out what’s going to give you that staying power.

[00:34:53] Chris Hudson: Are you applying that to business as well? I’m sure you are, but just in terms of future readiness and a lot of business can obviously be very short termist in its approach. How are you going about some of those things?

[00:35:03] Friska: So it comes back to governance, frameworks, core values, uh, leadership team. You can’t get ready for the future. You can’t get future fit if your leaders are living in the past, so it’s all about alignment for, and forward thinking and starting from the ground up and making sure those foundational blocks that you’ve got in place are relevant to where you want to go, are relevant to your future, and what your past and this applies, yeah, to business life client organisations.

It applies to everything.

[00:35:34] Chris Hudson: Do you believe that the change that you’ve described is possible within every organisation, or do you feel like there are certain organisations that cannot change? Hmm.

[00:35:49] Friska: It depends on the leadership team, you know, it depends on resourcing because just because you say you want to do something doesn’t mean you’re going to do it. Because guess what? Real change takes grit.

Real change takes sponsorship. Real change takes action. So a lot of organisations just pay lip service to real change. I think they don’t understand exactly what it takes to change, to win at the hearts and mind stuff. So no, it’s not for the fainthearted. If it was possible for every organisation, the failure rate wouldn’t still be at 80 something percent.

It’s definitely not possible for every organisation.

[00:36:21] Chris Hudson: And do you think that change has to become something that organisations do more easily and more readily on that basis? Because my observation in and around change and, you know, is that organisations and their manoeuvrability needs to improve a lot. Because you can’t, you can’t expect your business and your current business model to be around forever.

Unless you’re able to change with the times a little bit, to some extent anyway, it doesn’t have to be changed for changes sake but I feel like you need to be ready to move. Do you feel that as well?

[00:36:52] Friska: Yeah, change needs to be a permanent function in organisations, not just a nice to have or a bolt on whenever there’s enough budget or there’s a discreet project to lead to fruition.

[00:37:03] Chris Hudson: How does that work practically? Is it running programs through teams or departments? If there’s an innovation that’s sometimes put in, into a lab somewhere and that it’s running

[00:37:11] Friska: Oh, I think you need a change management office, just like you have a PMO you need a CMO to partner with it.

[00:37:17] Chris Hudson: Yeah but it’s like a, like a mysterious, maybe it’s a dark art. I’m not sure, but people get into change management. I never really know how they’ve come into that line of work and what. really drives them to do more and involve their practice. And it feels like it’s getting a little bit more codified in terms of people know and what people are expecting from change management, but it doesn’t feel as structured as some disciplines.

If you look at marketing, if you look at design thinking, look at You know, finance and tech and products and all of the areas that usually form a business like change management seems to be the one that is very much facilitating all of those areas, but it’s less fixed in a way.

[00:37:54] Friska: Yeah, there’s different specialty areas I guess. There’s the human centred design part. There’s the operating model part. Yeah. Lots of different disciplines.

[00:38:04] Chris Hudson: So, maybe thinking back to some of your highlights through your career, what’s something that you wish you’d known earlier in your career and let’s hear about that if we can

[00:38:14] Friska: Multiple roads lead to the same castle and what I mean by that is just because you see everybody, random example, like how you develop relationships, like everybody goes to after work drinks or they do things this way, but if A you don’t drink. B, you don’t like crowds. It doesn’t mean you have to do that.

So it means that you have to find a different path, but it will still lead you to where you want to go. And for me, I’m not a huge crowd sort of person. I prefer more intimate conversations, either one on one or small groups. So that means to develop the relationships that you want to develop, you need to be proactive and go on coffee dates or, you know, so that’s what I mean.

There’s more than one path to get to the same castle. So find your own path.

[00:38:58] Chris Hudson: And what kind of transformation would you like to see take place in business today? What would make the biggest difference to change becoming more possible within business?

[00:39:05] Friska: So I wrote about this in the AICD Company Director magazine, and it’s the recognition that we need a new person around the leadership table. And that’s the Chief Change Officer. So someone that’s always got their eyes on the prize, that’s focused on nurturing how quickly and how well people go through the resistance cycle, the change commitment curve.

And making sure that change, change is by nature, inherently disruptive, and it often stresses people out. So how can we move it from a source of distress to a source of eustress, which is a good stress, right? We spend a lot of time at work. Change is only going to happen more frequently. More complex and more far reaching than never.

How can we make it an experience that actually nurtures our people?

[00:39:50] Chris Hudson: That’s such good advice. Thank you very much. Let’s just finish with one final thing. How can people connect with you? Tell us a bit about what’s happening next for you in the wide world. I know you’ve got the book launch coming up, but what’s coming up for you and how, how can people connect with

[00:40:02] Friska: So the best way to reach me is on LinkedIn. So it’s linkedin.com/in/friska/. Uh, You can also drop an inquiry through my website, freshbyfriska.com. And what’s next for me are six book launches in three countries. So I’m going to be very busy for the next few months. My next in person masterclass I’m doing is partnering with UN Women in November in Sydney, however, very open to, facilitating these workshops that I run for organisations.

And I’ve done quite a few over the years. So just reach me in one of those platforms and I’ll get back to you.

[00:40:38] Chris Hudson: You’re going to keep busy. I know you are and yeah, you’ll be traveling to another place as well at some point as well. I’m sure I’m taking a break. So thank you so much for today Friska. I really appreciate you giving your time and also such valuable advice and points of view in and around change in particular, in and around personal brands and really about how to make things possible.

if there’s one thing I take away it’s around a feeling of possibility having heard from you and what you’ve been able to say and share with the group today. So thank you very much.

[00:41:05] Friska: Thanks for having me.

[00:41:05] Chris Hudson: Okay, so that’s it for this episode. If you’re hearing this message, you’ve listened all the way to the end. So thank you very much. We hope you enjoyed the show. We’d love to hear your feedback. So please leave us a review and

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