Are You Creating a System of Change?

Geoff Tuff is a principal of Deloitte Consulting LLP and holds various leadership positions across its Sustainability, Innovation, and Strategy practices. In the past, he led Doblin, the firm’s innovation practice, and was a senior partner at Monitor Group, serving as a member of its global Board of Directors before the company was acquired by Deloitte. He has been with some form of Monitor for close to 30 years.

Steve Goldbach is a principal at Deloitte as well, and serves as the firm’s chief strategy officer. 

Steve helps executives and their teams transform their organizations by making challenging and pragmatic strategy choices in the face of uncertainty. Over a 25+ year career, Steve has served clients across most industries, with an emphasis on industries in transition and consumer-driven sectors.

Steve and Geoff co authored “Detonate: Why - And How - Corporations Must Blow Up Best Practices” and “Provoke: How Leaders Shape the Future by Overcoming Fatal Human Flaws.”

They join Greg to discuss these books, their “provocative” work, questioning orthodoxies, balance, and shaking up the traditional career path.

Episode Quotes:

Steve Goldbach: How the traditional “career path” is changing

The problem is that if you believe that we're in a world that will require constant evolution, then that career path isn't worth the paper it's written on, because things are gonna change substantially over the next while. So I think the moral contract between organizations and their people needs to be rethought. Instead of saying it's about achieving a particular level the next X years, it's gotta be achieving a particular set of skills, akin to the kind of skills that are going to be relevant in the marketplace. 

Geoff Tuff: How did we get to a place where change is not common in a workplace?

We as human beings tend to place a higher prominence on data and information that is more readily available versus data and information that's more difficult to get. And because of that, we kind of assume that the information we have around us all the time is the right information that we need to be using to make decisions. And therefore opening up the information for challenge, we're opening up one's logic to challenge, it feels antithetical to making good efficient decisions. And that's just one example of both individual and organizational biases that we think work together as a system to prevent change.

Geoff Tuff: Best practices & orthodoxies

We are now living through, Steve and I believe, a time where we're shifting from a world that's governed primarily by linear change to one that's increasingly governed by exponential change. And with that comes a different set of operating rules, where the old playbooks just don't apply. The only way we can break the habits of operating by rote, using the playbooks, is to get people to recognize when they're being impacted by orthodoxy, meaning just the kind of conventional wisdom of the way the place operates.

Show Links:

Guest Profile:

• Geoff Tuff’s Professional Profile at Deloitte Consulting LLP
• Geoff Tuff on LinkedIn
• Geoff Tuff on Twitter
• Steve Goldbach’s Professional Profile at Deloitte Consulting LLP
• Steve Goldbach on LinkedIn
• Steve Goldbach on Twitter

Their Works:

• Provoke: How Leaders Shape the Future by Overcoming Fatal Human Flaws
• Detonate: Why - And How - Corporations Must Blow Up Best Practices (and bring a beginner's mind) To Survive

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