Change Activism: When to Ditch the Process for the Freedom that Unfolds

“So a lot of what I think about when I’m doing this in an organisation is that we’re not just working in an organisation, we’re working with a group of people that are members of a society that are members of a species on this planet that’s in trouble. And we need to make space to talk to each other about what we want this society to be, because we’ve gotta make decisions”
Jaimes Nel

In this episode you’ll hear about

• Front-Loading the Problem-Solving: Starting strong; intense early-stage problem-solving simplifies complex transformations.
• Cross-Cutting Strategies: Merging strategies across aspects; uncovers capabilities that drive transformative goals.
• Long-Term Visioning: Beyond short-term; envision change’s ripple effects and broad context impact.
• Decisive Balancing of Actions: Blend top-down and ground-up, as well as narrow to wide focus for effective change management.
• Catalytic Conversations: Scaling via collective decisions; accelerates a shared understanding and builds more adaptable organisations.

Key links
The 4 Modes of Strategic Change
De Bono’s thinking hats 
Design Thinking 
Dave Graeber & David Wengrow 
MCU – Marvel Cinematic Universe 
Sunrise Movement 
Occupy Wall Street 
Jobs to be done framework 
Path Ventures 

About our guest
Jaimes Nel founded Path in 2021 to help organisations play the long game through design-led strategy. He began his career designing for the early web, and gone on to develop a practice applying thinking from the social sciences to strategic change.

Jaimes was Head of Insight for pioneering service design agency Livework in the early years of service design practice.

He’s worked on service transformation for brands such as the NHS, BBC, Aviva, Johnson&Johnson, Ebay, GOV.UK / HMRC and led a transformation design team at Westpac in Australia, delivering their digital mortgage service.

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.

Chris considers himself incredibly fortunate to have worked with some of the world’s most ambitious and successful companies, including Google, Mercedes-Benz, Accenture (Fjord) and Dulux, to name a small few. He continues to teach with Academy Xi in CX, Product Management, Design Thinking and Service Design and mentors many business leaders internationally.

Transcript
0:07
Hey, everybody hope you’re having a great week. All right, we’ve got another cracking episode lined up for you here on the company road podcast. And since starting to work with Jaimes Nel, a few years back, I knew I had to get this guy onto the show. I can attest that he simply thinks and works differently to so many of us. So prepare to break, open your preconceptions around transformation and how you can play a role in shaping it. Jaimes began his career designing for the early web and has gone on to develop a practice of applying, thinking from the social sciences to strategic change. He was a pioneer of service design in the early days. And he’s worked on service transformation for brands such as the NHS. BBC Aviva Johnson and Johnson, eBay and HMRC. More recently, he led a transformation design team here at Westpac in Australia delivering their digital mortgage service. Jaimes then founded Path in 2021 to help organisations play the long game through design led strategy. Here at Company Road we talk a lot about manoeuvrability in business, and I’ve got to say this robust conversation with Jaimes really blew the topic wide open. So bring your whole hearts and minds to this one and see what you think.

Chris Hudson: 1:07
Okay. Hello. Hey James, and welcome to the Company Road Podcast. So bit of an intro. We’ve worked together in product and in digital transformation at enterprise level and personally just in seeing you in action, I’ve got a huge amount of respect for you as a strategic designer, as a thinker. You’re a real force for innovation from what I’ve seen, and you know, how to create that kind of spark of change and then create and sustain momentum as well. So, It’s all around how to lead and how to influence. And usually that’s in the middle of total chaos that is transformation across multiple teams and stakeholders. You make it look easy but tell us about your past, if you can. Was it always that easy for you?

Jaimes Nel: 1:44
Chris, that’s very, lovely of you just say no, and it’s not easy still. I think yeah, nothing’s ever easy. I think what I usually try to do is just to be really focused on the problem at hand. That kind of gives a little bit of maybe an obsessive focus that maybe makes it easier than it is. That’s really that’s really it. You asked a little bit about my past and I was thinking with the questions that you sent me, like where was it that I first started thinking about change as a thing that I was interested in working with. I have a checkered past. But I always use this story from when I was a teenager. I grew up in South Africa in the last years of apartheid. And one of the things that always really stood out to me was the newspaper used to, we had a state of emergency with censorship. You couldn’t say things. They were critical of the government or they were reporting what was actually happening. And the newspapers used to Print the full story and then leave a blank paragraph. And I was always just struck by that ability to talk about what wasn’t there and that being actually what was telling the real story. So, that was, I think probably, that was this form, formative experience that I had of quite radical change at a very large scale. And I think I’ve spent the rest of my career chasing that and trying to recreate that a little bit. And I think that also gave me a large sense of, I guess how difficult it is. I mean, you look at that change in South Africa that happened 30 plus years ago. And I would say that change is at the beginning of the end the beginning of the end of the first kind of stage of that change. It’s only really beginning now because really what is happening now. It’s like the end of the transition period and the start of a new period where it’s the change itself is taking roots. Now, I wanted to share that story with you because I think it’s really indicative of what I think change actually is. It’s this kind of constant that is always moving, always changing, and we’re almost just trying to ride that or steer it or steward it for a period of time before we pass it on to the next person.

Chris Hudson: 4:01
So that’s a little while ago. I mean, what, when did you first see that or observe that, or when did you have the self-awareness to, really put your finger on the point that you just mentioned?

Jaimes Nel: 4:10
Well, well, it was really, I mean, I think the advantage of going through that kind of experience is that everybody around you is talking about it constantly. And so it’s yeah, it’s something that’s really alive. It doesn’t have that kind of hidden elements that that’s something that’s changing a lot more slowly has it’s something that kind of bumps up into the consciousness.

Chris Hudson: 4:29
Yeah. I mean, it’s obviously still happening and, equating it to the business world. Are there other parallels that you see? I mean, we’re obviously seeing history in a way unfold itself but within a corporate setting, within enterprise setting, within innovation, within change, are there other parallels that you see?

Jaimes Nel: 4:47
I mean, I think the parallel that is interesting is the difficulty, right? So we’re in this really strange moment. And the other part of that story that is probably worth mentioning is that this was at the same time that the internet was starting to emerge as as a mainstream. My, my first jobs were in internet companies in the late nineties. And seeing that change at the time, like everybody else was extremely excited about it. And I think we all, and we all have a little bit more kind of weariness about it now, and a bit more awareness that change can be a positive and a negative. And, we don’t have this kind of naivety about progress that I think the world got caught up in a little bit with digital. And so I, the reason I wanted to bring that thread in is ’cause I think it raises a little bit more of a question of like, what kind of change. So, thinking a little bit about. What was interesting to talk about is this idea that change is like a thing that you do, and we’ve then made a change and then it’s over until the next time you wanna make a change. Feels like something we don’t really have the privilege of having that naivety any anymore. Like the changes are constant, everything is always changing. So what kind of change are you trying to make? Or should you even make a change? These are things that I think are worth talking about.

Chris Hudson: 6:04
Yeah, I mean that whole point around change as a force it’s obviously a catalyst. It feels like it can be used for many different things. And since you as, and as you’ve described since the internet and since the fragmentation of, you know, influence effectively many, many inputs that people are exposed to every day through their work. And outside of that, It feels like the possibility for change has never been greater, but at the same time it’s it’s unavoidable, right? It feels like it, it can be used well, it can not be used well. It depends on who’s, who’s having at that level of influence. So do you, what are some of the dynamics that you are seeing there within the business context?

Jaimes Nel: 6:43
So, so for businesses, I mean, there’s obviously there’s obviously some, the kind of bigger trend things that, that that things are, climate change, et cetera, are happening to everybody, but perhaps in slightly different ways. So I there’s perhaps this kind of sense that change has to happen and should happen and we’re on this kind of pathway towards it. And. Then a little bit of uncertainty about, what that actually means. So, a lot of the time when we’re talking about change in organisations, we’re talking about a change that’s maybe started in one place and and then has an impact on other things. So you might see it starting in technology. We want to change the system and that’s gonna have an impact on everything else. And a lot of, I think where you’re actually trying to get to when you try to make a success or something like that, is to try to connect that, that kind of catalyst change to everything else, to, to other parts of the business. And then do that in an explicit way, because these things have a knock on effect, right? You change the technology and then you change the operating system to the operating model to go with that. And there’s a knock on effect to the way people work, the way people deliver a service the way people are organised. And quite often that happens in this like chain reaction. And I think what you’re trying to do a lot of the time when you’re trying to plan for this is to think about, well, actually, if we do this in a way where we’re trying to steward a longer term change, what are all the connected bits that this connects to? And so, you might be thinking about, I mean, a technology system, is it very common that happens? Like you, you will have seen that as well. There’s a change which is intended to be a limited, like driven by a bottom line some reason. And then I guess you’re trying to think about, well, how does that then have a long run change to unlock something new, some kind of new capability? I don’t mean a technology capability. It might be a capability to be able to interact with your customers better. Or new way of engaging with the markets. So I think a lot of the work that I do is to hold that a little bit because it’s, doesn’t sit easily into a p and l, right? Like the budget will come from something that’s much more constrained. But strategically you’re trying to actually think about what you can do once you’ve got that. And so I think a lot of the kind of work of change in an organisation is to almost be a steward of something slightly longer run. And that’s, yeah, I mean, that’s difficult because a lot of time you don’t, it doesn’t fit into a p and l. Or you may not have a department that’s supposed to do that, or the department that’s supposed to do that doesn’t have the real ability to do that. And so it’s this kind of tenuous thing there. There was a lot of, it was framed a little while back as a, like a two speed organisation or like a multi. Multi-layered change, which I think is, that’s an interesting idea, right? Part of that idea was like, you’ve got a commodity control structure and then you’ve got like a network structure that sits over it that people self-organise. But what I’m quite interested in is not so much the kind of structural side maybe, but like the idea side. How does an organisation talk and think about itself in a different way and start to unlock, unlock a change in the way that it thinks about itself and what it can do. And then that flows through into lots of different parts of the organisation, like a network idea of change, which I think to some extent comes from like a, there’s a power dynamic there of like not, trying to affect change when you’re not necessarily like leading the organisation but you’re trying to kinda work within it to, to unlock something new.

Chris Hudson: 10:21
Yeah, it makes sense. I mean, there’s a lot in that point, and I’m just thinking almost to the origins, to the ontology of change and where it all comes from and what the locus for change can be or would be if you weren’t expecting it and you were just, somebody in an office one day in your day job. How would you, how do you know what to spot and what to do with it? How do you see the signals?

Jaimes Nel: 10:45
Like, the part of it is that, is this, this with this idea that the change is a constant, right? So it’s almost like, well, there isn’t a single, an organisation needs to necessarily create a change unless there’s something fundamentally wrong there. But maybe there’s something, there’s some signals there about like whether an organisation’s good at that constant change. So I think there’s a, there’s like a reflexivity that is interesting, like an organisation that knows how to talk to itself about change is in a much healthier position with it. It doesn’t feel like this crazy thing that you have to do. It feels like something that you’re continuously doing, and there’s an evolution to it. And you’re good at understanding how it’s going, and it feels like a, almost like a healthier place to be because you’re able to take some of the difficulties a little bit more easily. As things fail. Things are hard. You’re trying to do hard things. Ultimately you are trying to do hard things. You should be prepared to have a little bit of challenge in it. And we get this idea that, all big change changes fail, and technology programs fail. Things don’t. Well, that’s because these things are hard and the ideas that you have at the beginning inevitably change, right? So I think if you can remove some of the pressure of that, you’re in a much easier position to make smaller changes, more probing changes, more adaptive, and think about putting in like capabilities that unlock emergent possibilities rather than necessarily like, here’s the blueprints, here’s the thing. It was delivered well. Okay. It was the thing that was needed. So, I mean, I think a lot of the time yes, about trying to understand really where an organisation is with thinking about its own needs and then rightsize it in an organisation that is really good at that. Maybe it’s just more in the flow of that process. Whereas if you are seeing signs that they don’t have that capability to think, then there’s some stuff there where it’s almost, it’s not necessarily the change, it’s the capacity for change that needs improvement. So there’s a couple of things there. I always think like a very extreme action bias is something to watch out for. It’s quite difficult when you’re running at things all the time to to also be thinking about it. So, and I, there’s a tension there. Like if you ask me about what my practice is, it’s always about resolving their tension. Like the tension between action and thinking if you get off balance and either one, so my practice is very much about like course correction. And result and negotiating their tension. So an organisation that feels outta balance in one way or the other, I think that’s a sign that there’s some capability there. I’ve been thinking a lot about imagination and the organisation’s ability to talk to itself and think about alternative states of being. And that’s good and bad. I’m I’m very into the idea of pre-mortems and thinking through thinking through what can go wrong. Understanding constraints and working at the constraints first. And bringing all that to the surface, like making things explicit making the things that could go wrong or that you need to understand that are, possibly gonna sink the ship. Things that you actually add to your work list, right? Like how can we mitigate that risk or work towards that or, a lot of those time, a lot of the time, those are things that are really long run things that just get skated over or they get solved and then baked into the product. The work product, like whatever it is that you’re working on. And that’s a problem because you end up down the line where that’s in a black box and somebody solved that problem by going around it, but then later on you can’t get around that that, that kind of iceberg. So, I think a lot of the time, at least initially, you’re trying to figure out where these big things sit and if there’s a reluctance to talk about that or, this is all positive and we’ve gotta have action, we’ve gotta put, well actually you’re probably gonna run into some challenges down the line with that kind of action. But it’s a balance. And so, I think that kind again, that healthy reflexivity, but being able to talk about your ability to do it, really be honest about where your maturity is. Like these are healthy signs that you’ve got that you’ve got the ability to navigate some of these challenges.

Chris Hudson: 15:19
Yeah. That’s really interesting. I wonder whether, just for the benefit of this conversation and to explain a little bit to the listeners how that would work. So from the point of view of understanding parameters looking longer term, working back from that to obviously plan for things within your product development, your lifecycle, what would be some of the things, either from an example that you’ve worked on or just generally what are some of the points there that you think would either be parameters or workarounds or anything like that?

Jaimes Nel: 15:47
Yeah, I mean, look the big long run things, right? So, so it’ll be teams and deep stack technology that are the constraints that you work in, right? So, if you think about the like, time horizons and I try to think quite structured in quite a structured way about time horizons because structuring things in time horizons clearly is such a useful tool for helping cope with the kind of organisational anxiety around change. We live in a quarterly driven world for better or worse. And and that means that you have to manage that. So it doesn’t help to be pushing for something right now when it’s something that can’t be affected for a long run period. But you need to have that conversation because if you don’t address it, when the backlog clears the, the smoke clears its time now for that thing, you’re not gonna be able to do it. So, that might be like a big technology piece. Usually I find that the architecture is the bit where that comes up. It’s like, we’ve designed it this way, but that means that you can’t do that. And so, yeah, like when you’re looking at those kind of decisions, you’re trying to influence, you’re trying to influence your constraints that you’re gonna be dealing with in five years, and so you’re trying to shape that and a lot of that is, helping to paint a picture of what it might like be like in five years, what the requirements might be, how they might change in five years. And so you’re trying to build patterns or organising ideas that move through different teams and help them to understand in their space how those changes might affect the decisions that they’re making. So I’m not talking about like making architecture decisions but I’m talking about being able to talk to architecture or talk to teaming constraints or kind of think through what some of those things might be, right? Like if you try to find a practical example, you might know that you’re gonna need to make a transition in some way or form, and you’re gonna have to you’re gonna have to soak up a bit of capacity. Or do you have the ability like soak up capacity in the short term? And over manage and like, have an inefficient team for a period of time. Well, you want to be able to do that because you can use it to manage a transition state from one state to another. And so you then need to be able to, manage a team in a call centre who maybe are highly skilled but are a bit more flexible. And so, things like that capability needs to be in place and up and running as a stream long before you need it.

Chris Hudson: 18:24
I feel like, just To add to that, I think that, particularly in corporates and within enterprise level organisations, there’s a lot of comfort in process and procedure and governance, and that there feels to be almost constraint. But it’s comfortable because people love that rhythm, understand the daily and weekly routines and their, they’re obviously working within a known format, and what you are talking about and describing is really much more longer term potentially disruptive to that. It potentially wouldn’t need to be as openly reported if your team is working on something else because they had the capacity or because you needed to get through, a peak in activity to really get the organisation to the next stage. How do you manage some of that? Because on face value, it might seem like it’s it’s running in completely the opposite direction to what the normal course of business would usually involve.

Jaimes Nel: 19:16
I mean, this is why I talk about states, right? States are one of the strongest tools for and again, the, like, the underlying thing is I like to make everything quite explicit because there’s a kind of a paradoxical freedom in doing that, right? If you lock down into different kind of states of thinking about something and then you leave the one that’s running alone, right? Like it’s, I, if you think about production and dev servers in a techno, in a technology sense, you’re doing something quite similar. Production is production. You don’t touch it.’cause you’re gonna, you’re gonna break things. So you’ve got a death state, right? You’ve got a place where you are intentionally a little bit freer. And by not. Mixing them together. Actually, people leave you alone in the dev state. Like it’s fine that, that’s the dev state. So, so you’re freer to experiment there and to play with it. And then there’s something like a middle ground where, you’re moving between them. And so you’ve gotta think about it being in flux. And it’s not at a steady state. It, it might be moving, you might be moving volume from one system or one way of working to another. And so that’s a, that is inherently a transition state. And so that’s, it’s that transition state that I’m talking about there. It’s like, well, okay, that’s traditionally difficult to talk to because it’s temporary. And I really like working with people for that kind of temporary thing because people have been really good at managing complexity, right? Like we’re quick to think through things, novel situations, right? So you don’t necessarily need to industrialise everything in a tradition so you can keep it a little bit more flexible and loose and, use, use people’s brains to help you manage it and then industrialise slowly and kind of bed things down. And so I guess all of that is trying to build a bit of like an experimental space where you can try and kind of work out what, what’s working or because I’m not a big process person uh, kind of flag up front. I think that was one of my other markers, right? Too much process thinking. Is probably a sign that there needs to be some looseness in inability, like process is fantastic for predictable industrial, industrialised things like you want certain things to get to that state. Absolutely. But like the interface between two human beings doesn’t need it. It needs more flexibility.’cause that’s actually what, it’s what human interactions are really good for. Transitions tend to be in this kind of like more fluid, adaptable space where you don’t want industrialise what you don’t know, right? Like if you don’t know the right answer, don’t industrialise it.

Chris Hudson: 21:52
So just thinking if you are putting together a team or you’re trying to bring the right team together within one of these organisations, what are you looking at for there that will result in the team that’s comfortable but also quite I guess aspiring in their ability to navigate this change that you’re laying out in front of them. What’s the best formula from your experience?

Jaimes Nel: 22:14
I’m gonna, I’m gonna leapfrog from the point about process. I I think the opposite to process is the ability to judge, to have judgment about what’s going on in front of you. And so to understand the context and then decide what’s needed you can still have tools and methods and, there’s still, you can still do things that, you know, but you’ve gotta be able to look at it and go, is that what’s needed right now? And I think it’s that ability to judge and try to figure out what’s needed. That’s the critical skill set. So it’s almost a little bit, I mean, you would expect something similar in startup, like where everybody’s doing multiple jobs. And being a bit loose with job title. Like, I guess it’s that skill of being a bit flexible with what’s needed and having just a focus on the job at hand and a sense of how do we progress this? How do we move this forward? How do we shift it into another space? Almost like how do we hunt for a value or quality that we’re looking for in the eventual kind of transformation? And just keep trying to get closer to that. Now, you can’t get that from a process because what you’re doing is you’re judging a future state and you’re judging how close you are to it. So, if you were doing this from a startup perspective, you’d be going. Okay, what are the signals that we are getting product market fits or something like that. You’d be, those are the kind of conversation you’d be having, and you’d just be continuously trying to get at that. And that’s really I guess what I look for for a team is the ability to have these broader conversations flip between states without, like, having lots of friction every time without getting bogged down. Like the ability to hold multiple states is a bit of a cliche. But that’s really what it is. It’s like, well, it could be like this and we can debate it, and then we can figure out where we are now, and then we can figure out where the gap is, and then we figure out where the next step is. To me, that’s how you balance this like long run view with action is that you’re not necessarily expecting to get there all immediately. You’re just, it’s, you’ve got a high bar, you try your best to. Get there. It’s okay if you don’t,’cause you never really do, if your bar is high enough, you never get there. So, there’s a freedom in that. But you’re continuously judging how, how close you got or what your kind of attempt was like. And then trying to, trying to get better, trying to get closer to it.

Chris Hudson: 24:30
Where does the buy-in happen in that set of steps that you’ve just outlined? Who are you involving in your team? Is it C-suite? Which type of team members or level of people you’re involving in that and how do you get the momentum going in the first instance?

Jaimes Nel: 24:45
Yeah always hard. And again, it’s pretty varied. And in that kind of like startup momentum kind of space, really, like, it’s varied for a reason, because you’ve gotta be moving constantly between. Levels. Because if you’re constantly trying to judge what’s needed here what’s needed here might be incredibly granular. Or it might be really high level and then everybody needs a kind of organising centre of gravity. And so you’re just constantly trying to figure out like, what is the next piece? I mean, the more that I talk about it the more that I think that, there is an analogy to start up here because you effectively don’t have enough time to do it all. Like you never have enough people, you never have enough resources, you never have enough time. So you make progress on what’s in front of you, which needs to be the most pressing, pressing thing. And that could be anywhere in the problem space. So I think it’s always about trying to figure out like, how do you make progress? How do you fill in more of the. Uncertain picture. Where’s the point that’s got the most leverage next to make progress? And that could be literally like, we need to understand some granular detail. And it’s right into the detail of like, well, if we get this decision wrong, we’re gonna be stuck in two years. Or it could be at the level of everybody needs an organising idea to hang to build an alignment and a momentum around. And you’re just bouncing back and forth between those all the time. But I’ve been working with a model that I built that’s got four, four dimensions and trying to use it as a tool to go, what do we need right now? And just trying to speed up the cycle around the judgment around what’s needed. So that’s got four quadrants. Which, which goes you either need to build something which is usually make it tangible. And that doesn’t mean like, build a product that, you could be building a job description or something, right. But it’s like, make it tangible, make it something that people can clearly see and gather around. And quite often that’s the way that you unlock something that’s in somebody’s head or in one person’s head and it becomes something that can be shared, shared entity. You might need more direction and thinking. So you might just need to be unpacking what it is so that you know that the ideas that you’re feeding into this kind of working body, which is, it’s an assemblage of everybody’s brains before it becomes anything real. So everything is operating at the level of people’s kind of ideas and shared ideas. So you might need to amplify that a little bit. It might need to be a bigger idea. Operating with two small an idea, so you need to expand that. It might just be that people are all in different places, right? So one of the things that can slow you down the most is actually everybody’s really good. Like, it’s it sounds counterintuitive, but if you put a lot of really smart people in a room, they’re gonna go slower because everybody’s got the same idea, but not exactly. And they’ve got different naming for things, slightly different perspectives, and they’re all valid, right? So it’s one thing when one is like smaller or less powerful than the other, it’s an easy decision. But when there’re two equivalent ideas, there’s no right or wrong answer to it. So the only way to. Get to the answers to talk through it. And so it slows down. So, so sometimes that’s what you need, like you need to just work out because actually you all need to be in somewhat of harmony around the direction that you’re going. And then the last one is build momentum alignment facilitation. You, You might just actually need to be like talking to everybody and like actually making a decision, right? So you might just need a kind of a catalyst decision making kind of criteria. So I think all of those, they’re like roles and again, my theory is always you try to make things explicit. You try to make it clear. So what I’m trying to get to is a space where you can almost pick a card and you go, what do we need right now? And it doesn’t matter who. Does it like, you’re trying to get away from this, someone in charge necessarily. And to shift some of this into into the background of we know the intent. We know we’ve got an organising idea that everybody understands, that we can use as a judgment to know whether we’re going far enough or not. And then you flip between these modes to understand like, what’s next? So you, you can do that as a team really and say, well, what do we need? And then you get a bit of a kind of a cycle of shifting between between things.

Chris Hudson: 29:16
Yes. It’s very useful, I think in distancing yourself from the problem, the idea, the direction, the strategy, the to-do list, the process, whatever it is that you’re trying to move yourself away from. And it’s often used in design thinking, in product design management, where we’re almost playing the role of a facilitator a lot of the time. And you’re looking to not only gather information, but hopefully, use that information to create a sense of, what if we got here to play with and where can we take this and what is the possibility? What feels right, what feels wrong? And some of the questions that, that can be maybe more objectively tackled than other ones that, that perhaps are just led by, technology directive or, something from above where, it’s been specified that things have to be actioned a certain way. Interesting that you had that point earlier around action strategy, because action can be where that, that whole process gets shortcut. It feels like you can obviously quite easily fall into a spiral of action with without, real. Thought around the long term effect of repeating those actions over and again. So yeah, I just feel like it’s an interesting one. I think a mechanic like you, a tool set like you’ve described is really useful in that respect. Obviously you see it in creativity with De Bono and his thinking hats, and you can apply similar analogies. It feels like people need that level of I guess structure and framework to to feel comfortable in that situation as well.

Jaimes Nel: 30:46
Yeah, I mean, the reason that I like things being a little bit explicit is it’s a bit like the rules of the game, right? Like the field is laid out like this. You can always change it. So it encourages a sense of kind of playfulness, but it lets you agree temporarily to adopt a certain set of rules. And then you can move faster. So a lot of the thinking there is like, well actually trying to establish some of the rules of the road so that you can move a little bit quicker. And then you add reflexivity on top of that. So rather than it being like, we debate every single point we, okay, we’ll accept these, let’s accept these constraints. And then we operate within those until we need to change them. And if we need to change them, we change them. I think that, that, that allows you to I guess, get on with the work a lot of the time. But at the same time, still keep some autonomy, keep a little bit less kind of command and control. Yeah build a kind of a thinking engine that isn’t totally constrained. So you can hear the thread here of like, negotiating this tension between action and thinking, because I wouldn’t want to give the impression that I don’t think action is powerful. Like build is one of those kind of modes, right? Like sometimes you just need to get on and build. But it’s not getting caught in the trap that you know what the thing that you’re building is or, so, so you need to be able to flip outta that mode as well. So I’m really interested in this idea of this kind of flexibility and my, I wrote something about this a little while back, prompted by the book the dawn of everything the David Grabber Win Grow book. I dunno if you’ve come across it. There’s a lot in there about this kind of like. I guess the emergence of like, structured thinking about roles in society. And I just I like that that idea of intentionally keeping things very flexible and getting a little bit away from kind of command and structure.

Chris Hudson: 32:30
So you feel it can be applied more broadly in life as well?

Jaimes Nel: 32:35
Yeah. Well, I mean that the point of that book, it should be applied at a kind of a a society level and even, that we’ve gone wrong in the weird societies that we’ve built this like highly structured, hierarchical, inflexible, I mean, I, part of the point in that book is that sometimes hierarchies are good but they should just be temporary, right? So it’s not like you don’t get born into a role and then you stay in it. You assume a role and then you know, you assume a completely different role in the next stage. So I just think, I dunno, psychologically I like that idea that we try to build these kind of flexibilities into into our structures. I think it’s healthy.

Chris Hudson: 33:13
And does that, coming back to what you’re saying at the start of the chat where we were discussing change and the fact that it’s always there, does it make it easier in that sense where your mode of operation is always transient in that, people are coming in to join the project. Some might leave, you might get new input, you might have a different diverse perspective in another day. Does that make it easier to manage because your framework is a lot looser?

Jaimes Nel: 33:34
Well, well I’m trying to negotiate the tension between looseness and so, so, so I’m trying to choose solidity for periods of time, right? Like, I think that’s where that kind of comes in.’cause I think that there’s definitely a benefit to having some. Some forms of stability but you want to be able to understand it as a kind of a factor that you can play with. So, so it should always be a bit of a lever. And the way that I’ve been thinking about this a little bit at the moment is the M C U I’m trying to I’m trying to, I’m pulling a bit of an idea together around like, like what are the things you’re trying to do in this? I mean, I guess my role is using design thinking and doing to do strategic change. So long run change. And and one of the things you try to do all the time is to create these continuities between things which exist in different universes. Right? So just to like completely push the metaphor too far, right? Like, like you’ve got something that’s happening in one part of the organisation and you’re trying to build a continuity with another part of the organisation so that you can start to have a picture, like a bigger picture of how this all hangs together. And and, in an ideal world, you can zoom out past the organisation as well. I mean, a lot of the big challenges that we have around our societies, our natural ecosystem, it’s because we’ve got these kind of solid pieces where we, the rules of whatever universe only apply to it. Well, that’s not how it works. So, we need to start to think about how it all fits into a larger picture and then how to connect those things together. So I guess what you what you’re doing in that, in this overly stretched metaphor is that you have a particular universe and it’s got a particular set of rules and it’s got continuity with other parts of the universe. And they know how to talk to each other. But they also know how to operate on their own. And I think yeah that you’re trying to build some structures or thinking that allows you to navigate those tensions, which maybe brings us a little bit back to the two speed organisation I’m operating in this like world of the cinematic universe. And that’s a kind of a privileged position to, to be in, which is, I think, the a there’s a bit of a respect that’s needed there because not everybody else gets to escape the bounds of of that. And I think a lot of the time we talk about like resistance to change or people don’t want to change and sometimes that, yeah, I feel like they can be quite disrespectful a lot of the time. Like design sometimes has the sense of trying to be a true religion and everybody should should be on the same. Change trajectory. And a lot of times completely naive, right? Like you’re talking about changing something, that’s a, you’re not gonna be able to change all of that in the timeframe that you’re talking about. And b, you’re gonna drive a resistance because other people don’t necessarily have the ability to, make that leap that you’re making at that point in time. Like the, role at the time is constrained to delivering something or, providing a service which is in the production side of the business. Like, you can’t expect that person to to necessarily be able to jump to the narrative that you’re creating. So you’ve gotta be able to create different states to manage that, different storylines, different kind of means for people to be able to navigate those if you want to be successful. So, yeah, I think a lot of the time you gain a lot of credibility by having that respect for other people and the challenge that they have within these kind of timeframes. And thinking about like what it is that you’re trying to do in a way that’s respectful to the pace that the organisation itself is working in while still being challenging. And I, I found in my career that actually developing the judgment to be able to have that respect is actually one of the most powerful things that, that, that’s enabled me to have the longer term conversations, right? Like if the long term conversation isn’t getting in the way of the short term needs, it’s much easier to have that conversation and then you can influence the short term. So I, yeah, I think that’s a really, that respect point is really important to me because without it, you are in this almost kind of naive change agent space that I don’t think is that I don’t think is that credible? And I don’t think it’s actually that successful all the time. Like that’s, to me is part of where you move away from the action thing and you end up in the, strategist as PowerPoint. Much as I, I love a presentation yeah, we’re ultimately trying to actually like, make the change, not just envision a potential change

Chris Hudson: 38:12
And what are some of the most powerful ways to influence in that sense. Obviously you’re spending, from what I’m hearing anyway, you’re spending a lot of time understanding those fixed needs and things that are perhaps more constrained. How are you working around that? And almost playing back some of the change that you’re looking to see in the most, in the most compelling way?

Jaimes Nel: 38:36
I came across this idea of front loading from Sunrise. There’re like an organising network that’s that is involved in, activist social change in the States. And they took a lot of lessons out of Occupy Wall Street and those movements where a lot of the kind of organised the collaborative understanding, the direction setting. Was missing in kind of radical democracy, right? So like, so, so front loading is trying to pick apart some of those sources of friction that are gonna slow things down when you need momentum. And so that’s really what I think of, there’s a role in strategy in an early change to be trying to front load stuff as much as possible. And this is not building plans, this is pattern building and building ideas that have got enough stretch in them understanding kind of first principles and trying to get first principles embedded because you don’t, nobody else has got necessarily the privilege to operate at that or in this role perspective. Like nobody’s got the privilege to operate in this kind of meta, kind of architecture change space for long, right? In any change. There’s a few people that are operating in that conversation at, in at one time, right? And then it, and it flips and moves around and everybody else taps into it. But some of us have the privilege for us of spending a lot of time there. So, so you need to translate that into things which can then influence, like, decisions for everybody else. And so that’s what like the work is. And if I try to give an example, you, so that there might be some kind of challenge that you’re gonna need to resolve down the line. You need to make sure that decisions are made now that don’t curtail you when you’re actually trying to deliver it, right? So, so yeah, you’re trying to front load ideas that enable people to think through the problems in their domain with an understanding around like where you’re eventually gonna try to get to, so a new kind of way. And you’re trying to do that in a way that kind of cross cuts across things. So, so a lot of the time you’re thinking about capabilities what are the kind of underlying thing that you’re trying to accomplish or you want to be able to accomplish. And that can be driven by a need, but really I need I don’t necessarily mean need as like, as granular as like a job to be done. Where you’re trying to design something, into an interface or like, I’m talking more about like the kind of building blocks of how you’re going to pull a activity together in a particular way. So you might know that. Well, one of the problems that always occurs with this thing is that you need to, marry two completely different sets of people together. Like your staff and consumers have got a completely different mental model. So you know that there needs to be a translation layer. Okay? So that’s the pattern around the translation layer, but that’s way too abstract. So then you’ve gotta go take that and build it out and understand the kind of. What that actually means in the context that you’re talking about. You’ve gotta then go and turn that into technology and then you’ve gotta do all the hard work to make that real and tangible for everybody in the decisions that they need to make. But you do that work and you front load those ideas and then everybody else operating with that same kind of fundamental idea about this thing all the way through the program. So I guess you’re trying to scale ideas. And, the way that I think about doing that is to make them as stretched as possible. Make them as, big and capable as possible. You can always subset down from there. So you can always make decisions about scope. We will do this or we won’t do that. Like, those are relatively easy decisions to make a lot of something get made for you by budget and resources and priorities. So, so that’s relatively easy. But the things that you miss are the things that you, like, you don’t talk about. Right. So it’s, so you’ve gotta front load those kind of patterns up front. I hope that’s not too abstract.

Chris Hudson: 42:42
No, I’m just trying to draw pictures in my head while you describe it. But it feels like there are different forces at play from both the top down and the ground up. And from a ground up perspective, you can obviously look at points of points of dissonance or, points of friction or anything that comes almost almost flies in the face of, if something doesn’t connect then it won’t work. So to introducing that layer that you mentioned will bring one part closer to the other because you’ve created a layer, some sort of interface that can bring those things together. In terms of building momentum, would the ground up area be the place to start in trying to build traction towards a transformation? Or would you always come from the top down first to look at what the bigger idea and the unifying idea would be? What informs the other?

Jaimes Nel: 43:27
The interplay as much as possible, but my practice it’s very, I probably tend to be a little bit I dunno, I’m hesitant to say top down because it’s not necessarily, but you need to be in that space to be able to be effective. So, so, so yeah it’s a traversal, it’s a like a liminal thing, rather than necessarily like a bottom up or top down. It’s the ability to traverse. It’s actually interesting. You need to be able to understand the detail. But you’ve gotta be able to explain the importance of that detail at scale to the people who are gonna make decisions about whether to fund it or not, right? So you don’t really have a choice but to operate at both of those scales. So, yeah, I mean it’s challenging and I think you do quite often come into maybe it’s like narrow or wider is maybe more interesting than top or down, it’s like you come into like a small space and you’ve got a small window into the problem, and then you try to broaden that window as much as possible and understand as many components. But there’s a trade off to that because you can think you’re gonna broaden it, but it’s a lot of work to really truly broaden something, right? So, so are you doing a very narrow slice of it and what’s affecting that slice and is it the right slice? So yeah, I think you’ve got to be a little bit careful and again, reflexive with like, what are you actually doing? Sometimes you just need to make sure that there’s enough of a big idea there that has enough power to reach the decision makers. Sometimes you actually, you really need it to be something that is moving with people, but I think it depends where you’re playing as well, right? Like, so, so, early on in, in a big change, again, it’s that kind of narrow view. And what you’re trying to do is you’re almost designing the project, not designing. The actual outcome of it. And so you’re laying groundwork for there later to be broader engagement and more kind of involvement. But it completely depends what you’re trying to shape. And I think there’s a little bit of this, which is like a lot of my work tends to be there’s a catalyst that’s driven the change in the shape of a proposition or a piece of technology or something. And it’s quite rare for it to be, we’re just gonna change the culture of this organisation. That’s quite a rare thing to be funded. I mean, even building cross-cutting things is quite hard to have as an objective. Like there’s usually an objective and then you’re trying to bring change through that objective. And so yeah, I think that makes the, like the change slowly thing harder and I. I mean, there’s a reason that I’ve worked like that mostly in my career. I like having that lever because I think actually again, it’s almost like it gives you a capacity to operate in the environment with some autonomy that you don’t have necessarily. If the point is earned, let’s change the culture of this organisation, like point by point. That, that can run outta steam, right? Like there there’s something about having like a lever in the in the system with something that then gives you like a point to jump off of we’re introducing a new product or we’re changing a system or we are trying to build a new capability in a department or, something like, like that’s got the tangibility that you then can like actually get on with the work and find out what’s actually going on like through the work. Again, if you think about, if you use states cleverly, then you can also then think about like, okay, well that’s the starting point, and then what do we do in terms of scaling it? And that then becomes a different question, which might involve, well, we need to have outreach or, something like that. But yeah. Just a lot of my work is in that kind of like, how do you find a lever and work on a lever rather than necessarily changing people’s minds point by point or,

Chris Hudson: 47:19
Yeah, you’re right. You’re never gonna get a, let’s change the culture directive or a brief. That, that just comes in one day. But it can be hooked into, to a particular area. Like you say, if it’s building around a capability for products or if it’s a new tech platform or infrastructure or anything like that can obviously necessitate and result in the, in some of this change. And then as you describe it, it can lead to more and more things. But you have to have the foresight really and the breadth of thinking to really know that actually this is the beginning of a broader opportunity. So is there anything that would remind you to do that in that position? If you were just listening to a conversation or if you were given a brief one day, what would you be thinking? What questions would you be asking yourself to really unpack whether there was longer term or broader opportunity than what you were just hearing on face value?

Jaimes Nel: 48:08
Look, I think I’d still be looking for something to, like a vehicle to affect the change through, right? Like, so I think you still need that, like, again, and I would come back to, do you need momentum? Well actually maybe you still starting point, is that like, let’s build something. We can use that as a demonstrator. So, I’m saying use something that you’re building as a kind of a momentum device or device to traverse the organisation. I’m not sure I’d do it completely differently that it might just be, that’s where my kind of practices come from. But I think that the really important thing when you’re trying to think about the broader picture is to, to me it’s like, where’s that sense of continuity and where’s that kind of imagination about what this could be and how do you stretch it? So it’s never like we’ve, some strategist has had an idea and now that’s the future of that’s it sounds like a bad idea. But the organisation needs to figure out and play with the, with that long run. And so it needs to be, have the ability to have the discussion. So I think that space where I’m interested in is like, how do you have those conversations and how do you enable different kind of conversations and open up spaces where organisations can have conversations about where do you start from and do you start with something or do you start with a kind of a bigger idea? And I think you, you need both and they need to work in parallel and then maybe if you’re trying to affect bigger change, you can just have more of these kind of experiments happening. More I guess kind of probes or trying to figure out where you can get. Resonance, and then you build on that. So, so, so yeah, a lot of the thinking there is like, how do you get away from big, like, planned things that are extremely large and more about trying to build opportunities to figure out where you can exercise as judgments and go what’s working? And then that implies having conversations. Right? So, so how do you have conversations about where as an organisation you want to go and enable those around a longer term idea of what you’re trying to, are trying to accomplish? I think the need for those conversations and the need to build the ability to have them is something that we need to build, right? So a lot of what I think about when I’m doing this in an organisation is that we’re not just working in an organisation, we’re working with a group of people that are members of a society that are members of a species on this planet that’s in trouble. And we need to make space to talk to each other about what we want this society to be, because we’ve gotta make decisions. We’re gonna make a lot of decisions and we’re gonna make sacrifices. So, so, and that’s how I think about it from a kind of a purpose perspective for myself is building kind of a muscle memory for how to be able to work better together at scale.’cause we need that ability. And so I, I think I’d extrapolate that to think about it from an organisation is how do you build that ability to, to have conversations and make decisions and speed up our muscle memory for doing that at a much faster pace and increase the velocity. The velocity with which we’re able to make change and have conversations about where, what the purpose of that change is. Like those two things go hand in hand to try to give us some of this ability, and in the meantime work to affect that change in projects for organisations.

Chris Hudson: 51:31
Yeah. Brilliant. And one of the things that just occurred to me as you’re saying that is around prioritisation. And often people want to have principles or guardrails or whatever you wanna call it. It’s something that helps you as a team decide what’s right and what’s wrong in a certain context. If you come across anything like that, that, that works better than just simple prioritisation principles. From what you’re describing, it’s quite empowered. Obviously the team is working. In the end as one that understands not only the longer term objective, but you know, what they need to do today to make that possible. And so instinct might kick in but are there any other piece of advice around prioritisation that you’d give?

Jaimes Nel: 52:13
And again, like not process. So, so I think you need to have judgment calls and you’ve gotta have the space to have conversations about what’s needed. And that, that needs to have some, it needs to have some flexibility. It’s gonna change almost every single time, right? So, I think if you try to build a kind of a cookie cutter out of it, you probably are not putting enough attention on the context of that particular decision. And you’re maybe trying to build a factory line a manufacturing line. I’m not convinced that you get the best decisions out of those, you tend to get into the space of how do we assign points and how do we measure yeah, that all makes sense and it’s helpful, but it, but I think if you are stuck in that world of trying to prioritise a list of thousands and thousands of things, you’re probably operating at the wrong set of granularity. Because you probably need to make some decisions at a higher level of resolution and then let the individual decisions filter down to the team that actually have to go and execute it. Yeah. Systems like that are quite a lot of the time have come out of a world where people are either trying to implement process where the process will tell you you need a quality button. I’m, that’s, like, The process is gonna deliver the same thing. It’s almost by definition like the wrong thing. Because if you’re in the world of trying to create difference you actually need to be judging whether it’s actually different, right? Like, it’s part of I think a broader critique there maybe of where a lot of the kind of products thinking has gone in the last couple of years as it’s been very much about we can build a system to do this, and then you end up with feature factories. So, so, I think we need to be again, conversations, judgment context and trying to think about what’s the most important thing that all gets you towards like focus and like clarity, do less my thinking about you probably end up at the same place in terms of quantity. But you do each piece one bit at a time and you do it well, and then you move on. Right? So that’s where more, where my thinking goes when I’ve seen people try to scale things up and do a lot all at once. You usually I think the quality suffers a lot of the time.

Chris Hudson: 54:30
Oh, well, yeah. I think you’re reinforcing the points that I was making at the start around how you do this so well, because I don’t think many people can do what you describe in this podcast. But but yeah, you obviously, as a leader, as a facilitator of this process, you can bring people into this into this process. And, if you are comfortable in that space there, obviously you can see a lot of these outcomes realised in one way or another through what you’ve described. How would you describe some of the impact that you’ve had through using these techniques?

Jaimes Nel: 55:01
So, so I mean, I’ve spoken a bit about like front loading, right? And the thing I dunno if you came, there was a, I dunno if it was a meme or I dunno how developed it was. I came across it as like a little thing on LinkedIn about strategists and being invisible and just accepting it really early in your career that you’re not gonna have your name on things necessarily. And so yeah, I think there’s definitely something in that and it means that you have your impact on what I’ve been trying to describe is like the stretchiness and the fit for purpose of the ideas that are animating a team that are working. So, where I’ve seen or, get good feedback about where I can see the value is where after I’ve moved on, or, the projects have moved on, or people are still saying, oh, we’ve encountered something that you’ve done. Or, this idea that you put in place is still animating a team. So, the actual change that again, in this kind of change is constant, can be quite ephemeral. Like, things move on. You’re keeping things moving rather than achieving a new steady state. But if it keeps on, in the way that people think and the way that people are able to work together then, yeah. And I think you’ve had an, you’ve had an impact that’s of value. I mean, and if I connect that back to where I see my purposes of the building muscle memory, like, that’s great. That means that people have learned something from me and are able to think in a different way about a problem. I get a lot of gratitude from that.

Chris Hudson: 56:25
Fantastic. And where do you think this will all take you? I mean, you’ve obviously done a lot of work in, in the banks and insurance at various organisations, but but yeah, where do you think your path will take you next?

Jaimes Nel: 56:37
I still have clients in financial services. I think that’s probably like the the bread and butter of most most agencies. Yeah, my kind of long run is in two spaces. I enjoy working on big, challenging things and so I like it when people come to me with a big thing that they that they need a bit of help when they’re working on. But I also like this space. I. That I’ve been describing around, what do we do with these changes and how do we take a bit of a broader view and think a little bit about the connections between some of the things in our society. So, yeah I would definitely like to get into that space more and have a few little kind of experiments and and things in, in, in that realm. And then I’m more and more experimenting with trying to, build things myself that trying to either scratch an itch or build a build a sustainable thing around. So, I have. I guess what I’m calling labs which is my like little kind of experimental build experiments play which could be running the gamut from a little model or a framework all the way through to a piece of software or a kind of a, like a publishing kind of thing. Which, which brings me kind of all the way full circle back to H T M L, which is like really where I started. So I still have a bit of a love for the ability to get in and build things and just, do stuff and so yeah, trying to build more. So I think if the agency could eventually be building a little bit more autonomy having a bit more of a balanced revenue stream so that I’m consulting on challenging, interesting things building my kind of. Approach to things, into tools that other people can use. And then having a little bit of a kind of, I guess, space to think and space to engage with what some of the kind of really kind of difficult problems that we that we’re facing. That, that sounds like a good practice to me. So a lot of what I do is like try to build the engine to keep going on all of those fronts. And all of those things happen happening now to some extent. And I’m relatively happy. Just keep building each of those kind of streams.

Chris Hudson: 58:44
Excellent. Well, thank you so much. It’s just one more thing, which is really for people that are listening to the show. If they would like to connect with you, tell us a bit about your consultancy, if you like, and where they might be able to find you.

Jaimes Nel: 58:57
Yeah. Fantastic. Thanks. So, you can find me at pathventures.io. It’s pathventures.io. I, I have quite a lot going on there largely because yeah, I’ve been experimenting with the web before a very long time, so I enjoy doing that. So you can find out a lot about the agency there and how we how we work LinkedIn. That’s probably the two big spaces I would really try and push everybody to, to my website, sign up to my newsletter. That’s probably the main space. But I’m around and I’m in Sydney in Australia for folks that are located here. Always happy to have a chat.

Chris Hudson: 59:33
Perfect. Alright, well thank you so much James. Really appreciate your time this evening and yeah, it’s another really interesting episode. You’ve given some very provocative answers and yeah, it’s gonna make me think a lot tonight before I go to sleep, so thank you very much.

Jaimes Nel: 59:49
Well thanks. Thank you for the chance to, chat about it and the chance to think about things a little bit. Yeah, I’ve connected a couple of things together and also been. Yeah prompted by the conversation starters that you said and and the conversation. So yeah, that’s been really good. Thank you.

Chris Hudson: 1:00:04
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 share this episode with your friends, team members, leaders if you think it’ll make a difference. After all, we’re trying to help you, the intrapreneurs kick more goals within your organisations. If you have any questions about the things we covered in the show, please email me directly at chris@companyroad.co. I answer all messages, so please don’t hesitate to reach out. And to hear about the latest episodes and updates, please head to www.companyroad.co to subscribe. Tune in next Wednesday for another new episode.