Heath Gascoigne  00:04

Welcome to the business transformation podcast, and in this episode, we’re going to be talking to one of those industry experts. We take speaking to one and only Mr. Ron Lehman, who is actually the goat. This is where we we’ve had a few guests on the on the podcast, but I have to say Ron is probably the most experienced actual practitioner. The difference between a practitioner and academic. Rod has been in the business for more than probably I’ve been on this earth, which is still a long time. So if Ron, thank you for being here. You’re coming in from all the way other side of the world right now in Thailand, right?

Ron Leeman  33:04

Yeah. Oh, lovely Thailand. I’ve been here since 2011 and thoroughly enjoyed it. Although the sort of landscape of the sort of politics in Thailand has changed quite a bit since I first came here. It’s kind of settling down again a little bit. So things are quite easy going here. It’s nice, cost of living, nice, cheap, sort of cost of living. And the weather’s nice, apart from rainy season, which it is now.

But yeah, I’ve been here for 2011 so nearly 1213, years, thoroughly enjoyed it and made a conscious decision to move here in 2011 because the jurisdiction really didn’t like, or was not, how can I put it, not, didn’t like, is the wrong word. I was not too sort of happy with the kind of way the UK was moving in terms of its politics and so forth.

And I think what’s going on nowadays, it’s kind of sort of, you know, helps that decision, help that helps that decision, or supports that decision I made then, because there’s all sorts of things going on and I but yes, I love Thailand, and it gave me the opportunity to work in different countries, here In Asia, like, you know, Singapore, Indonesia, places like that. Here in Thailand as well, obviously different sort of culture, the way they practice change and so forth. So I had to get understand, you know, the cultures of the countries I was going to work in, because here is very heavily biased by the country culture. And one of the big things about change here in Asia is building relationships.

You can’t just go in with your size 10s and say, right, this is what we’re going to do. This is the change management plan. This is how we’re going to do it. Is going to deliver it. You have to build up a relationship with your I. Sponsors, with your stakeholders, etc. So that takes time, normally, over 234, weeks, maybe. And then once you’ve built up that relationship and trust in you and what you’re doing, then things start to become sort of safe, straight sailing.

Basically, enjoyed working here, and I I can now deliver my training, which I’ve been doing since 2019 to the world. I’ve done about I’ve done training to deliver training to about 20% not of the world’s population, about 20% of people in different countries. So about 20% all of the countries in the world where I’ve delivered to either one person or few people, which is great, you know, and it’s good exposure. What I’ve got, what I’ve got is an overhead is a laptop and a Zoom account.

Heath Gascoigne  35:56

You’re very mobile. You like to be like, travel like so for that, for the audience. So,

Ron Leeman  36:07

yeah, I try and keep it simple, you know. And it’s just like my training is very simple, you know, very easy going. It’s very sort of specific, it’s pragmatic, it’s practical, and so forth. So I do like to keep things simple. I don’t like to come to complicate the thing. I’m not a overly heavily focused technology person, although I do understand technology there, but I do like aI now. I do like AI and whatever way AI is going. And, you know, put my hands up.

Yes, I do use it, but I don’t use it in a way that is like, overly Okay. I’ll take what AI says as you write and not edit. What I tend to do is I use, tend to write articles or whatever, put it into AI, get AI to sort of screen you might want to think about that and then editing. Yeah, so and you edit it to make it yours, basically. So, you know, you can say, I don’t agree with that, with Yeah, whether you’ve said Mr. Ai, Mr. Kgbt, or whoever, yeah, you agree with that. I think it’s this.

So you change it. And that’s the beauty, yeah, of AI. Not a lot of people do that. What they do is they take the answer they get from AI is thinking, Yes, yeah. And, you know, it’s been proven time and time again that some of the sort of things that AI says, whichever one, whichever sort of application you want to use, it’s been, it’s been proven time and time again, that they sometimes lie, yeah,

Heath Gascoigne  37:39

yeah. Okay, so bring us into into the agenda is so the full audiences we capture three points is the is that, what is the industry doing right or wrong? And I think you were starting to lose to it there about maybe just copy and pasting for no thinking. So we’ll get into that.

What’s the industry doing in terms of change management, whether it’s locally, Asia or globally, what’s the what are they got right? What are they continually not getting right? I think just quickly there i I’ve seen now, probably the last probably five years, that there’s always, now been a change manager, or as a change manager, on the stakeholder list, as part of the core team from the very beginning, which probably 10 years ago, wasn’t and so, so that’s a change I’m starting to see. So I like that. And number two is, is there a particular approach that you follow when you go in to do your work with clients and on change management? And I’ll give the audience a little bit of a tip here that Lee Ron is a a when I say goat, I’m not joking.

Ron is more years experience as a practitioner in as a change manager, leader, also consultant, formerly of the UK, many, many, many years ago was it the Ministry of Defense started as being a consultant, got clients around the world, Europe, Asia, Americas. He’s covered all the spectrums from oil and gas, BP, with pharmaceutical and everything in between. So this is where it’s coming from. So, so that’s the second, second question, and then the third one. Your many, many years of experience.

What is it as a you could do it all again, knowing what you know, the clients you’ve worked with, the different cultures you’ve experienced, what would you do different? And they’ll be really the takeaways that the client, that the audience, will go, okay, you know, Ron’s just now saved me 50 years plus with his years of experience. So kick us off, Ron in terms of industry, what’s the industry got right or wrong? And I think you’re just saying here, technology is coming around, but people are thinking they’re just copying,

Ron Leeman  39:44

Okay, what’s the industry got right or wrong? That’s an interesting question, actually, because one of the big issues that certainly I’ve come across before, and I think it’s still an issue industries, is they often a specific industry often says, well. We want something that we want somebody or a change manager that has experience in our industry sector.

Yeah, we do want anyone that doesn’t have experience. I think that’s completely wrong. And one of the one, just to sort of give you an idea of when I first started in this business of change, so many years ago, I sort of when I went on to the contract market, should I say? And that was about 1996 I started off because I worked for a bank, yeah, um, which was then Abbey?

Well, building society, first Abbey national, then Abbey, which then became Santander, banco, Santander, but I left Abbey to go on the contract market, and I started off in financial services, okay, industry experience, you know what you’re talking about. But then I thought, Well, wait a minute, what I’m doing for every contract I go into. I’m doing the same thing. I’m engaging with stakeholders. I’m looking at sponsors. I’m helping sponsors, etc. I’m doing communication, I’m doing training, I’m doing all these things the same.

There’s no difference. So I started branching out, and I’ve sort of ended up working in about 2025, different industry sectors. And the thing about that is that if you actually come into an industry sector that you have already got experience in, what do you what could you offer them? Yes, no innovation, because you know about the industry sector, if you go in with a clear mind without sort of, you know the industry sector experience like, that’s what I’ve done. I did pharmaceuticals without being involved in pharmaceuticals. I did heavy lift equipment without being involved in in industry sector before, etc, and you’ve come in with a completely different mindset and quite innovative practices and implementing ways of implementation and stuff like that, with that very clear, open mind, without blinkers on.

So I think that’s slowly changing nowadays. Sort of try to keep my sort of focus on what’s going on, but it you can notice still, although I don’t sort of keep an eye on sort of advertised jobs, you can still see on the on occasions where people are saying or industry organizations are saying, We want industry sector experience, yeah. Why? Yeah, and, you know, that kind of leads me on to say, and we would want also this kind of change management experience, which is another sort of, slightly different way of saying, you know, without these, we’re not going to take you on.

Yes, well, no, that’s wrong. A change manager doesn’t necessarily have to have that industry sector, experience and organization should think a little bit before they start saying, This is what we want, you know, keep it fairly sort of open and let people actually apply for a role that they know they can do, regardless of Whether they’ve been in that industry sector, good before. The other thing with organizations nowadays, and I know this has probably been said before, is change is happening all the time. Change used to be, yes, we implement one kind of solution, and that’s it, start, finish, go, live, gone. Now it’s constant, because it happens all the time, very

Heath Gascoigne  43:22

fast and then faster than you go for

Ron Leeman  43:25

Yeah, it is, it is fast moving, and you have to keep pace with that. And that’s one of the big problems with change management, is keeping pace with all the things that happen, especially looking at AI. But one of the issues that I have, personally, I think other people have as well, based on sort of the sort of statistics and research I’ve looked at, is that people are grabbing AI and they’re just saying.

Okay, we need this, you know, we need this as an organization to try and, you know, get better than our competent competitors, etc, get on with it without saying, oh, wait a minute, why? Why do we need this? What are the benefits implementing this? Yeah, okay, yeah. So that’s the other thing, and people organization need to take a step back and think about why they want it. So it’s just not a matter of throwing this thing into an organization say, Okay, people get on with it because some people embrace it.

Some people won’t. Some people will be resisting it, etc. So you’re not getting a very sort of a consensus of opinion about where the organization AI will make a big difference. So I think organizations need to sort of take a step back a little bit, and I think mainly at two levels, at leadership level, because there is an issue that still leaders do not understand change management the way it should be done properly.

Okay, so there’s an education issue. There. Like that, yeah. Also at stakeholder level, where you are actually, people are trying to change the name again, by the way, managing the process. Okay? So you’re like, you’re like, for what of a better phrase, piggy in the middle between the two. And you have to

Heath Gascoigne  45:20

most of the time. You are big in the middle. Yes,

Ron Leeman  45:24

yeah, it is. And you know, you have to sort of deliver what you said you could deliver, because the leadership or the steering group are expecting you to do this within a specific period of time, and stakeholders are expecting you to actually engage with them and tell them all, what it’s all about and so forth, so they can actually help implement, help you implement the process. And the other sort of kind of space is a little bit of an issue, is where a change management sits in the Change Manager sits in the organization.

A lot of occasions, a change manager probably sits in the project team, or in the IT department, or whatever. And you know, it’s sort of one step removed away from the business. What I believe is you are the Change Manager. Is the conduit into the business. So they should be, they should have a separate role.

They shouldn’t be proud of the project well, they should help the project team and but they should be very much business facing towards the business in terms of no engagement and so forth, because it’s the business that are going to make this whatever it is, success. Yes, it’s not, it’s not the project managers or the steering group. They’re not going to do it. It’s the change, the people that are going to accept and embrace the change that are going to make it successful,

Heath Gascoigne  46:41

yeah, yeah. So, okay, so you’re saying business transformation. They there’s this new role. I think it’s emerging role. They’re the chief transformation officer. Yeah, okay, now the transformation stakeholders have got a seat at the table now, through this, Chief transformation officer, provided, I think, to your point is that they’re not connected. For example, most times a business architect or architecture is connected to technology, and so they’re always coated with a blanket of your company technology.

And so the business go, it’s just technology. It’s going, you know what it’s it’s like, if you got the Change Manager coming from projects that they’re changing off a different brush, right? They’re not. They should. And say, you’re saying they are part of the business. They represent the business. They’re the voice of the business to the project to get the wants and needs and requirements implemented. But if they they’re setting a reporting into from Heath, from technology, that’s like, well, it’s just another technology stakeholder. And I don’t get the gravitas or the

Ron Leeman  47:54

Yeah. I mean, I’ve got a mantra people first followed by processes and then technology. Because at the end of the day, if you’re delivering a technology solution, it’s not going to happen. People are not going to adopt and use it unless they understand it and say it’s the people and it’s the people’s minds. You have to change.

The other slight issue I do have you said business transformation, some people call it digital transformation, etc. Is is transformation the same as change? I’ve written about this several times.

I think it is now, just to give you a bit of an anecdote I 25 years ago, dare I say I was working for a government department and we actually implemented digital transformation. Because what it was, was the the the way that ministers actually asked for briefings when they were going to ask a question in Parliament was very fragmented. So they had briefing authors that were sat in the business all over the place. What we actually delivered, and I was working as a an associate for a consultancy.

Can’t remember what they were called, but they know they went on to be called CMG, I think, or something like that. Anyway. That doesn’t really matter. The fact is that we built a central repository for briefing systems, structured way of creating the briefing etc, which anybody could use at any time, but obviously, with certain levels of restriction on it, because, you know, couldn’t, couldn’t act, weren’t allowed, sorry, access to certain elements of a brief. It was a restricted brief or a confidential briefing.

So we actually built a central repository and all the briefing, all the briefings that people, briefing authors, used to produce for ministers, started to be built in this repository. So it was digital, digitalization that was 20 and so that’s why. I asked the question, transfer is transformation the same as change? I believe it is. And we, we still, we still still, actually have a bit of a hang up on what we call change. I’ve got to say, I’ve always been a change manager. I don’t call myself a transformation manager or whatever, you know, and with due respect to what you do Heath.

You know, I’m not not challenging you or anything, but I identify as a change manager, because that’s what it’s all about. When people start to say, it’s time we change the name, it’s time we did this, it’s time. Oh, dear. Well, okay, if you want to change the name, and I’ve just written an article about this. I don’t know when I’m going to put it onto LinkedIn.

If you want to change the main name, you try it. You get, when you put the search string change manager into Google, you get 3.6 billion. It’s 3.6 billion hits. Okay, you got duplication, triplication, quadruplication. But even if you take a small percentage of that, yeah, the word change manager hits, number of hits on Google, you try and change that? No way. It’s that way. Would be the biggest change management project in the world. But then I believe it’s, it’s all about horses for courses.

In other words, you know, if your organization wants to call it business transformation, you’re the transformation manager, yeah, if they want to call it facilitator, fine, you’re the change facilitator. It doesn’t matter, so long as you’re doing the right thing, yes, so long as you focus on the people, on their normal processes and then on the technology. So

Heath Gascoigne  51:43

are you saying in terms of the industry being that they may be, and I think education might be part of the solution, but the issue is that then they’re getting caught up in the name, not about the activity, about all the outcome they want to achieve is with trade when we’re changing, yeah, losing focus. Focus on the right.

Ron Leeman  52:04

I think you’re right. I think you’re right. They do, they do get caught. I mean, one of the things that I kind of say on my, on my training, is, you know, once you get to the you get a title of, say, manager, yeah. How difficult would it be to if you went into an organizational change type situation, to take away that name from that individual, yeah?

And call them a facilitator, because they worked hard to become a manager and they want to keep the name, yes, yeah, regardless of what it means in the context of you know what you’re doing, so you try and change your name. Yeah. And people do get too hung up on, am I a change manager? Am I a transformation manager?

Am I a facilitator or whatever? And people get too hung up on that, call yourself what the hell you like matter, yeah, so long as you are delivering what you’re expected deliver, and you’re focusing like, I’m going to repeat myself now refocus on the people side chain right now. Call that people science, by the way. I’m just going to throw that in because it’s been known as the people side have changed for too long, and I’ve kind of now changed. I’ve reframed it into people science. Because people science,

Heath Gascoigne  53:24

I’m going to quote you from now on with the creator of people science.

Ron Leeman  53:33

Yeah, because people people it’s all about neuroscience, how their brain reacts for change. It’s all about psychology. It’s all about behavioral science. Yeah, so you’ve got these real, what I would call hard sciences, that are behind the way people react to change. So why not call it people’s science and reframe it as people science?

Because that is what, that is what drives people, yeah, it’s, it’s the way the brain acts when it sort of gets hit with change and it starts, you know, this sort of the threat, or whatever mechanism can’t remember what it’s called. It’s, yeah, yeah. It’s the way they react. So let’s get away from the people side of change.

Because I think this is one of the issues with you talk about, you know, people are sort of a bit worried about, sort of get hung up on a name, and the name people side of change in the context of when, say, a C suite manager of some sort, looks, they think it’s a bit fluffy. Yes, what they’re going to do, they’re going to try and change culture. They’re going to manage I don’t understand what this is, what this means.

Yeah, I don’t really understand that. I don’t get it. So they regard it as fluffy. And one of the problems there is, if they regard it as fluffy, they. Don’t cough up with the money. Yes, for investing, yeah, change manager, or business transformation manager, or whatever you want to call them, they say, No, we’ll do it with a project manager. Yeah, yeah, project manager. No chance, because project management, you know, and again, I’m not sort of degrading project management, but they have a different focus.

They’re actually the break. Their brain works in a different way than to change manager. They’ve got the blinkers on. They know they have to deliver to time, cost, quality, scope, etc. They have to, you know, be follow a project planning sector, whereas change managers are dealing with people and how people are act, act, and so forth.

So it’s different, different animal. Yeah, and the the C suite, or the people that sit behind providing budgets for projects are still hung up on this fluffy This is a little bit now and understand what it is. And that’s why I said it’s about education. Absolutely you need to educate the C suite, the managers that sort of, you know, kick off these projects, to say you need change management. However, having said that, sorry if I’m going on, there is a bit of a disparity. Now what I’m going to come up with. Because what you have is, you have lots of organizations, you have lots of consultancies, saying, to be successful with this implementation, you need change management. However, that in opposition to that, going back to the we mentioned, the 70% which is a fallacy, which is McKinsey sort of fairy tale.

However, most surveys now come in that people do, whether it be the mckinseys of this world or the Boston Consulting Group or whatever they’re always coming in, and they always seem to say between 60 and 80% of projects fail. Yeah. So what? What’s that disparity? People need change management for success, whereas surveys are saying, well, change management is not, projects are not very successful.

There’s a problem there. There’s a gap there somewhere. And I’ve been meaning to try and get into this gap for a long while. Now you know about how you how you determine what success is? Yeah, because everybody looks at success in a different way. And I want to get under the skin, and I’ve not been able to, because I haven’t got time, because I’m training, you know, trainings all the time. But I’d love for somebody to say, you know, hopefully somebody listening to this podcast say, hey, Ron, we’d like you to actually research that is a big you know, go ahead, what is actually, what does success mean, and what does failure mean, and how do you actually put it into context?

Yeah, how do you measure it? Yeah, yeah. I’d love, I’d love to be able to get that down into that level of granularity. But, you know, that’s the way it is. I can’t do it at the moment. I want to

Heath Gascoigne  58:02

say, Yeah, I think there’s probably two parts to that right. As one is, you know, qualitative and quantitative, but also measuring different things. Execs got their their version of the truth for the future, and then down in operations, they got their version. And if you got consultants somewhere in the middle, they’ll muddle it up, and they’ll combine the two. And so everyone’s confused, and

Ron Leeman  58:26

my current thinking about success and failure the best way to measure it, and you can do it via business benefits or time plus quality and scope, or KPIs or whatever. OKRs is build a balanced business scorecard with different measures in both quantitative and qualitative. Yeah, so you might have measures for customer customer engagement or stakeholder engagement. You might have measures for training competency. You might have measures for business readiness.

You might have measures for usage and adoption, so and again. Each of those measures has some kind of sort of achievement target, yeah. So you build a balanced scorecard and you say, Okay, we’ve got training in this, we’ve got business readiness, we’ve got usage adoption and so forth, and stakeholder engagement in this, yeah. What have we achieved in each of these sectors within business scorecard. And then you look at it, and you say.

Okay, on overall, we’ve actually achieved whatever the percentage is, 80% 70% 80% success of each of those measures, yeah. And you have, you have a level that you have to try and achieve, all the business the different elements of the business scorecard together and say, Okay, this has been successful because we’ve hit the quantity, we’ve hit the qualitative target for these components of the scorecard. Yeah, that is my favorite approach at the moment, but I don’t think anyone agrees with me.

Heath Gascoigne  59:58

Well, you’ll be the champion over. Theme you’re going to champion the the business talent. So I’m learning a couple things here. So thank you the so we got two takeaways for me already. One was your other people sites.

I’m quoting mister Ron Lehman on the people science. It is a people science. The I think it’s like you’re saying it’s an indication that, yeah, like these projects will say that it’s a business transformation or some other form of change, and they’ll focus solely on the technology, and then they wonder why, when the business users or the stakeholders in the project were speaking with the consultants or the business analysts and taking these requirements, the guy, I don’t understand a word they’re saying, but they look at their watch, and they’ll go, you know, these guys are going to be here for a month or two, and then they’re going to leave.

We’ll just, we just play nice, and we’ll disagree. We think in the room. And when they leave, we go back to how it was before, because I don’t understand the things that and then this, that’s where I see when I get called into these projects. It’s usually one or two years after tether started, or it’s one or two years after the second one started, and as I wanted to do the first time, and he goes out learning you’re doing the same,

Ron Leeman  1:01:14

you’re actually spot on. Because, I mean, I’m getting the same message from some of the trainees I’m training, I’m actually getting quite a few trainees, quite mature change managers now. So they’ve been in the business for quite a few years. They’ve been through Prosci, or they’ve been through apmg, or they’ve got CCMP or whatever.

I’m getting quite a few of these people. And the anecdotal evidence they’re giving me is that, you know, you’ve got these programs, these big programs going on. Yeah, and people are managing these programs, but they’re so fragmented because they’re so big, the people are not speaking to each other because so each one is not understanding their impacts on the different parts of the organization, and they don’t want to, because, again, it’s about, you know, defending your turf.

Yes, yeah. Wait a minute. This is going to impact my area of the business quite heavily. So what am I going to do? I’m not going to really speak about it. I’m not going to actually resist this and actually sort of just put it on the back burner, if you like, yeah, and not speak to people, yeah. And that’s one of the problems. It’s this fragmented overarching way of delivering these big programs that it’s not working because you don’t have that consensus of opinion, that understanding, and you get infighting when you’re presenting on the steering board, and your communication is always watered down and so forth. So, you know, I believe what my view is that to be successful, you just need to get people talking to each other.

For goodness sake. You need to get people to say, This is my area. This is how it’s going to impact my area, and this is what I’m doing about it. How could I help with other people? Let’s talk about it. Let’s talk about what you’re doing. Let’s talk about what you’re doing. Let’s take information, all this information, and you should be getting maybe the sponsor who’s going to be a bit more active in the process, and say, Hey, that part of the business came up with a good idea. I think we should actually implement this across the whole business, you know, in terms of this specific program, because it’s working for them, so it could work for everyone else.

And that’s the problem people are trying to deliver so much in a short period of time, yeah, and the impact on the stakeholders and other people, you know, it’s just unbelievable. And this is where we talk about, you know, constant change, etc. So it’s about getting your act together. You know, it’s like, you know, when you’re talking, no say, in a pub, you’ve got a few friends there, etc, and you’re providing each other with their ideas and so forth. And, you know, you come up with all these wonderful innovations and etc, and, you know, and that’s it.

You forget about it. Wait a minute. But if you think of a different way of doing this that’s going to be more successful, talk about it, tell people about it, bring it up at the steering group, and get get some kind of consensus from the whole of the program or the project to actually implement this, because it seemed to work. And yeah, that, I think that’s the big problem, is this sort of fragmented approach to delivering these big projects. And it’s like, AI, you know, throw it at the business. Let them sort it out. Let them understand it, and then, you know, we’ll go in later and try and sort it out.

Heath Gascoigne  1:04:36

You’ve thrown over the over the fence. You raised some incredible, great, great points there. The you talked about, get the sponsor, so so the audience, if you missed it, so the get the sponsor is this, you could say it is the hippo, the highest paid person in the room, or it is, you know, the if we talked about whether the fallacy.

Or otherwise, about the projects fail. So what’s the causes the project fail? There’s a bit of research out there, and one of them, the highest one, being lack of business user involvement, and then lack of senior leadership support. And you just said it, you just said it to get the sponsor to that. That’s a senior leadership support.

So get that. And then there’s a change requirements and incomplete requirements, but the other one that you see was great. And if what you said with the very beginning about the vision, and so if yes, it is, yep, so so maybe to help the fragmented, fragmented, minted projects, and then everyone’s defending their their spot, or the Empire is, is say, well, what’s the and this is where the I’ve seen an alpha client I’m helping, is that they’ll have an organization’s vision, and they’ve got a program of work created, and they’ll say.

Well, we’ve got a we already got the vision. I said, Well, that’s the organization’s vision. What about this? The vision within the organization? And then they try to, yes, what’s the word? Like, force the their version into the higher. It’s like, you know what? You need a specific one to solve your problems that you’ve got down here, and this division, not and then, so they’re trying to the final, very case. Let

Ron Leeman  1:06:20

me go. Okay, go on. Let me talk about, let me talk about sponsors. First, it’s a given that sponsors are the number one factor for change management or business transformation success without an active and engaged sponsor that’s willing to, sort of, you know, take it on their shoulders to actively participate and talk to the space stakeholders, etc.

Your project is likely to fail, okay, but the issue is that some sponsors are railroaded into the role and say, you know, you’ve got to be a sponsor, whether you want to be or not, and they probably don’t have time, because they’ve got all these other sort of, you know, commitments, etc. Or the sponsor says, or the person that’s nominated says, yeah, yeah, I’ll take it on. And all of a sudden, what they do is they actually say to their sort of

Heath Gascoigne  1:07:11

sidekick, delegate, yeah.

Ron Leeman  1:07:12

And delegate, and that’s not good, yeah, because the sponsor needs to be fairly, sort of high in the sort of high level of hierarchy. And the other thing is that a lot of sponsors don’t understand change. They don’t understand the sort of aspect of change because, you know, they kind of sort of think about it as, again, going back to the fluffy aspect.

Okay, so sponsors are critical to change project success. Let me talk about what was the other issue we talked about. You mentioned at the end. Can’t remember. I’ve lost track now. Oh, the vision, yeah, the vision. This is, this is kind of one thing. Remember I talked about men, models and methodologies earlier on. A lot of methodologies, models, change management, whatever they are do include a vision, like Cotters, eight steps includes a vision. Yeah, such a thing. It’s important to have an understanding or a view of where you’re going.

Otherwise, what the hell are you doing it for? Yes. Why are you doing it so you’ve got this vision of an organization say that’s using all these different AI solutions to actually make things more efficient, you know, sort of your customer interaction better and so forth. Yeah. So you have this vision, and you have to stick to that vision visit every time, just to make sure that your stakeholders involved and understanding why you’re actually doing this project.

I mean, some of the transformation projects last for months and months and months and months. Yes, sight of why you’re trying to implement this specific project or program. Yeah. So you need to remind them, remember what we said at the beginning. We have a vision now. One of the issues now is that if check the way change is now being delivered, still not susceptible, still, are you still able to create a vision? Because change is not becoming project specific or program specific anymore. It’s becoming constant.

Okay, so I suppose what I’m saying is you probably needed a an overall vision for the organization, Yes, yep, of which all these different change programs that are going on actually look at. So this is where we want to be in five years time as an organization. We want to be the biggest, the best, etc. We want to be able to say, you know, in terms of, for sort of our financial operations, we’re the most profitable in terms of our customer engagement, we’ve got the highest rates ever. You know, this is where we want to be, these specific things that we’re doing, yeah, all in line with that vision, yep. Okay, yeah. So that’s where you.

To be with a vision. But people, you know, I mean, the previous way was you had a vision for the specific implementation. Yes, that’s changed. Now it’s an organizational vision, yeah, so, you know, yes, absolutely you need it, because you need to keep reminding people Yes, about why you’re doing this.

Heath Gascoigne  1:10:20

It is the number one I call the vision, and then one requirement. But I like what you’re saying, so the audience will be missing. It is that Ron is saying reminding. And what I see is on one of the clients, one of the projects I’m having this client with at the moment, those have been the on and off over for six years, since I’ve been in UK.

And, yeah, they we’ve not only just kicked it off and we’ve got an approach approved, and we’re probably about, probably, we’ll be honest with you, the the business case was approved in 2002 and so they’ve done nothing for now three years, and now that, yeah, and so, so they’ve got, I’m across, three different projects or programs, and this is one of them.

And and I say, so I put the approach together, and they agreed it. We got to the board approved it, and we start and I said, So what are we going to do? So are you mad we’ve just had the approach that we’ve disagreed at the board, and now you say we’re going to do follow the plan and the approach that just got approved, and then the plan being the first part of this to find the vision, and they go. So where should we start?

Ron Leeman  1:11:27

You raise an interesting question there. You mentioned the business case. I’m going to get onto my high horse now, because, according to quite a few. How can I say articles and stuff that I’ve read? There’s not a lot of organizations that actually kick off projects with a proper business case. I think the PMI, the Project Management Institute, mentioned this somewhere ago.

And what worries me is, if you don’t have a business case, you don’t have justification to start the project, because the business case is justification. The other thing with a business case is that you can create a business case for a specific project, no problem.

But we know the projects never go to plan, the scope creep, scope change, you know, you’ve underestimated complexity or whatever. So the one thing that’s never done is, if that happens, people don’t revisit the business case.

Yeah, yeah. So if the business case contains a number of business benefits that you hope to achieve from actually implementing whatever it is you’re implementing, yeah, they’re no longer valid. Yes, because you’ve had scope creep, you’ve had a scope change, or you delayed by three months or whatever.

Yeah, so the business case is a living document, and if anything, absolutely anything, changes during this implementation, for goodness sake, if you’ve got a business case, please, if you’ve got a business revisit the business case and the bit business benefits within that case, business case to make sure that you’re still delivering to what you said you’re going to deliver. Okay, so business benefits might get watered down a little bit, okay, because of the scope change, etc.

But then, you know, you recreate the business benefits there in a new business case, yeah. So you’ve got the business case that kicks off the project justification, all for the funds, etc, etc, yeah. And then you’ve got revisiting the business case, yeah, whenever something changes, yeah. But I think it’s good practice to visit revisit the business case anyway, even if things don’t change, because it’s still so the business case should still provide that vision. Going back to that subject again, it should provide

Heath Gascoigne  1:13:48

change, yeah,

Ron Leeman  1:13:50

yeah. It’s always good to revisit. Remind yourself, this is why we’re doing it, yeah, the big question, the why,

Heath Gascoigne  1:13:57

yeah, yeah. What’s in it for me? Yeah? The Yeah, definitely. I think some organizations do it with the revisiting the business case, and they call them initial or outline, and then they got a final version, like these guys do, but I think there’s some missing in translation, or, like you just said, they’re watered down. It’s so watered down.

And time gets the final they’ve lost the whole thing. I was like, you might as well start a whole new project. You’ve changed the scope so so much. This is not even the same project anymore. Cute, absolutely.

Ron Leeman  1:14:32

And you know, the business change sort of, there’s never, never a final version. There’s never a final version. Even when you go live there is a version, but not it’s not a final version, because what you’re going live with might look completely different to what you said in the first place. Like you just mentioned, it’s an interesting area that I. A lot of projects that get kicked off without a business case.

And I’ve got a bit of a cartoon that I use in my training that says something like the CXO says why we seem to be doing a lot of change and what we getting out of it? And their assistant says, Well, wait a minute. Let me check for you.

Okay, well, I’ve checked for you. And all I’ve been told is that, you know, by the C suite, stop all this messing about and asking these stupid questions. Just get on with it. Don’t worry about business case. What do you do? What do you do if you get tell to get on with it without a business case? What do you do? You can’t say, No, I can’t, because as long as

Heath Gascoigne  1:15:38

you don’t end up being the scapegoat, which is most likely, of your external is the situation is that you are the scapegoat, because nothing was written down. So they can put in a lot of things. You have to watch that all right. So there’s a lot of takeaways there. I’m writing taking notes, because you drop us on gold there. I don’t know. I’ll see if I can sum it up at the end. But there’s basically, I think the summary is there education process.

And I think you I thus in change has got to educate from up. And I call it the 3l and the organization, the layers, language and levels. You got the layers, strategic operations and implementation. They all speak a different language at a different level of detail, and else, like, I think you’re saying those similar words, is about the way the conduit picky in the middle is that we’ve got to interpret, keep everyone happy.

Look in my eye, shake the hand, build the rapport and give and deliver the things that need to deliver. For one reason, the vision, and if we’re lucky, it was defined at the beginning and didn’t change.

Ron Leeman  1:16:43

Yeah, absolutely, totally agree. It’s very good summary. Alright,

Heath Gascoigne  1:16:46

okay, great, I got that one. Okay. Now, part two. Part two. Now, like, ladies and gentlemen, just a reminder, as, as Ron just said about the reminder is that Ron has the the like, I think we’ve got, I had a couple of professors on here. They might be more academic than they were practitioners in a no, no disrespect, but they were like academics, not practitioners.

And I, I must say, struggle with it, but I see the difference between academia and I got asked to put my work and into my university. Flew out here the alumni, or the public relations for the alumni, want to get my framework into the university. And I said, why? They said, because there’s a gap between industry and academia, and we try to close it. And I said, how to do that?

And I said, Well, we get people who are leaders in the industry to come back to university and teach what the teaching in industry is. Okay? I said, That’s interesting, because otherwise you get the other side is where PhD students will do their research, and it’s based off the theory they had to come up with a model or a framework, and then that gets fully implemented, like the two guys actually implement that. Or is it something you create as part of a PhD program?

As I Yeah, so when we talk of So, and I’m saying here, Ron is a practitioner. Ron is a practitioner of many, many, many years experience across the world, different genres, cultures, industry sectors, so Ron now going into your clients and also coaching and with your own training program. What is there’s a particular approach that you follow? And if you could skip us through it,

Ron Leeman  1:18:27

there is approach, I apologize, my approach, I developed what I call the practical framework. Approach has changed way back in 2005 okay, but it’s not a sort of, you know something that you need to follow in a hard and fast way. You know you have to do this, you have to do that. You have to do this. You have to do that.

One of the things that you know, after I developed it, any project I went into, I said, Okay, I’ve got a framework, but what I want to understand is what you have as an organization in terms of internal capabilities, because I can marry up your internal capabilities with what I say. So as an example, communications, most organizations have a communications requirement, one of my fun one of my foundations of change in the practical framework.

Approach to change is communication. Let me have an understand how you do things, what sort of mechanisms you use so forth. Let’s align ourselves together. I do things this way. You do things that way. Let’s read how we do it.

Okay. You’re now working together. Learning and Development is similar. HR in terms of change, the roles and regulation roles and responsibilities is similar, and all of that sort of stuff. So identify your internal capabilities and align them with your own my own model without frame. I don’t call it model, I call it framework. And what you do then is you build and not buy, so you don’t go in with a bit of paper that says I’m certified. Look, this is how I’m going to do. Do it.

You go and say, This is how I think it should be done, but I need to understand what you how you can help me as an organization, and I need to align those sort of capabilities with what I do. And so you build a specific model that takes into account their culture, their understanding of change, and what they do actually do internally, and you build a bespoke model for them, and say, Here we are. This is how we’re going to do it.

You know, this is where you’ve This is where you fit in. This is where I fit in. And I’ve done this so many times now, and it has never been an argument with a C suite to sign it off with a steering board. Never been an argument. They’ve always said, Hey, this is great. This is wonderful. Because what you’re doing is you’re actually taking into account what we have, what we do, our culture, how we do things, etcetera, with your framework and your years of experience and so forth. And the two marry together, are going to create a successful project. And to be honest, you know, and I have to be it hasn’t worked sometimes, but in a majority of cases, yes, it has Yeah. And this is, this is one of the things I teach on my my driving change management course is the second half of it is all about my practical framework approach to change. Excuse me, a minute. I’ve got a frog in my throat.

Heath Gascoigne  1:21:18

Are you speaking a lot?

Ron Leeman  1:21:21

I think that’s still practical. I think that, I mean, I’ve got a couple of trainees at the moment. Went from Southampton street University, and I went through models and methodologies, and I went through my framework, and I went through Kurt Lewin, and I went through Kotter, and I went through pro so I had sort of the pros and cons I got from chat, GPT, yep, etc.

And I said to them at the end, hey, what do you think? What do you think of my framework, when you compare it with the pro size, the Lewins or the Cotters? Yeah, I said, there’s a lot more detail in it. I said, Yes, there is Yeah, and that’s a practitioner. Because it actually helps make, helps you make decisions, because there’s more detail and and I did go that just very, very similar manner, the way I normally, when I created the framework, how I deliver it, by aligning it with internal capabilities, they said they like that because, again, that creates the buy in from organizations because they recognize that you’ve actually taken a notice of how they do things, yes. So you’re not going in and saying, I’m going to do it my way.

Yeah, sure. Let me get on with it. You know, I’m the expert. Well, you’re not the expert. The experts are internal. The experts are those people that are doing things within the organization. Yeah, and you can learn a lot from those organizations, and that is why I made a distinct decision when I first, when I stopped going into financial services organizations, to actually get that cross industry experience and that understanding and that knowledge how things happen in other organizations. Yeah,

Heath Gascoigne  1:23:01

I like that. I like that you’re saying me about you. You go in and understand what they do at the moment, like I get that when they will know that you know, like, you’ve got a piece of a body of work, right? And so I have one, and they’ll say that no one will know on the project, when I start that I might have written a book or something.

And then the guy introducing me, who I’m reporting to ask me to come in and say, Oh, by the way, he wrote a book. He’s, you know, he’s got it all covered. And I was like, what? And look, he never told me to read my book. And and then so the project start to learn that I wrote a book. And said, Yeah, look, my own whole goal here is, I’ve got this book here, and I pull it out, and I go, my whole job is to bang you over the head until you’re blue in the face of it.

And they go, you’re joking. And I said, Of course. I said, Of course. I’m joking. If anyone comes in here with any method or models or tools or templates and what’s the bang it over your head until you’re blue in the face, you got the wrong guy. And you know you’ve got, yeah,

Ron Leeman  1:24:04

that’s fine, because, you know, I’m assuming that you know you’ve written your book based on your experience about what works and what doesn’t work, etc. So, yeah, you know, get out. I don’t understand your model, in your way of doing things. You know, here it is,

Heath Gascoigne  1:24:17

bang, yeah, that never works, right? It never works. It’s so your point is, let’s understand what you do, which I tell them. I said, my job is to understand what you’re doing, see what’s missing, and we fill in the gaps. And so it’s the same thing you’re saying, is that you understand what they’re doing, and then then you can offer some suggestions, and then fill in the gaps into your work. I think you’re saying to build competence or capabilities.

Ron Leeman  1:24:40

Yeah, you’re right. One of the things I didn’t, I didn’t actually cover what you mentioned, the sort of academia and the sort of industry side of things, so the practical side of things. I’m not an academic. I never went to uni, okay? I just went out to work straight from school, because I left Malta when I was 1819, there. So I thought, and I didn’t get kind of very good grades in my sort of GCSEs and stuff like that, so I thought, I need to go out to work.

Okay? So I never went to uni. I don’t regret it. Okay? I don’t like, Okay. I have a, maybe a misunderstanding about academia, and I’ve been pulled up about this before, but I don’t care. I don’t like academia because it seems to be too structured. It seems really this kind of research I have to do, you know, make sure I quote the right people, etc, etc, so it’s not in any way practical. And I think I’ve got an article in my articles, thing on LinkedIn about can the can academia deliver change management training in a practical perspective, practical and pragmatic way, or something similar to that?

And I argue the fact that they can’t, because it’s too much based on theory. Having said that, I’ve got a couple of I’ve got a couple of, I’ve got a couple of papers on academia. Dot something rather or edu there? Yeah, which, which sort of have, has created a fair bit of interest. But again, they don’t quote anything. They just quote practical experience, all the results of surveys and stuff. Yes, yeah. Opinion,

Heath Gascoigne  1:26:19

it’s academia, they would benefit from practical application of themselves. And usually the unsteady is, I sat on a on a call, on a quite a famous, well, maybe infiniteness in our space, in change or project management, is they created a Architecture Framework.

And they were actually creating it on the call at the time by some juniors in Asia. And I was like, You guys are literally making this up as you go. It’s never actually be implemented, and now you’re saying it’s a new standard. Come on. It’s marketing here. This is, I call it market teacher. It’s interesting, but not very useful, like me, disappointing.

Ron Leeman  1:27:11

Just going back to the academia thing, and one of the things I needed to do when I came to Asia in 2011 I was I started looking, because I lost all this money that I mentioned earlier, and started looking for jobs. And one of the things that prevented me from getting jobs was lack of experience in Asia because of the different way they practice change.

So what I did was I did, I did a high level survey or research into the cultural dynamics that impact change and transformation in Asia, Oh, yeah. And I covered 1414, countries with certain dynamics, yeah. And about sort of 20 people in each country, and I came up with different perspectives of how different countries in Asia practice change because of their cultural dynamics and it covered. It covered, sort of like from India and Pakistan down to sort of Singapore and Malaysia and places like that, Japan and so forth.

The interesting thing was, is quite, quite interesting, because I live in this country now, Thailand. Is that tau Thailand was a complete outlier. It was like they were complete, completely different than any of the any of the other sort of results. Yeah, most of the other results either sort of with a kind of the same sort of, you know, dynamics. But Thailand had three completely different dynamics. So that kind of told me, Well, you know, I don’t think I can practice change the way. I think I should practice change here in Thailand.

I did try a couple of times, like I mentioned before, never. It never really worked. They couldn’t understand it. But yeah, it was that was an interesting one. I was going to follow it. I did one in 2013 and I did another follow up in 2020 I was going to do another follow up again, just to see if anything had changed. But I haven’t got time again, yeah, because I’m doing all this training. Yeah.

Heath Gascoigne  1:29:10

Okay, so in terms of your approach, so there is maybe three major parts for maybe, and it is, first of all, it is understanding what the organization does is the first step is going in there with and with your background, open mind, your skills and transferable from different sectors and industries. And then the second part, I think that audience might miss it. We said built.

So there’s three options of doing change. What you can do, buy, build a borrow, and so you’re going to buy it in there’s going to be temporary, not going to stay, build it. You’re going to beat it, and it’s going to stay and grow and hopefully becomes internal. And to borrow is you’re going to hire it, and the course that’s going to walk out the door.

So the second part there is, then you’re going to build the competency within the organ. Organization, the ways of working. So you said words to the word effect of now you’re aligned. So you’re, you’re seeing the gaps, or you see what they do. You offered your suggestions or your approach, and you’ve married in the middle. And so now you’re, you’re building your competency and leveraging, which I a big fan there of that.

So the audience, if you’re not, if you don’t miss this or should pay attention, is about which I will say when I go into clients like I’ve got an approach like you say, so I don’t have your business knowledge, your guys in the department have the actual knowledge. And I did this at Ministry of Justice on the humanities court and tribunal service did a transformation program that had already been the second reincarnation they tried before with a couple of big fours, they got nowhere. They killed the project and restarted again. They said, we want to do it differently. And they brought me in. And then so I got the approach approved by the sponsor and the director, or the program director and the program manager, project manager and the core team, and said, Now you got to go to the sponsor to get it approved. And so went to the board, I’m doing the presentation.

The sponsor said, Heath goes, Look, I like it. I like your six steps there. I want you to start at number five. Because I at the end of the process and I said, Look, I said, Look, you know you so you telling me we want, you want to start and design effectively without understanding the what you said earlier, the vision. So you know, been here for a couple of weeks, and I’ve met all your staff. I sat in the workshops, but no one’s talked about the vision. And the second part about control and governance, we haven’t even defined what that looks like.

And in the current state, you’ve already got a vendor in here doing requirements about what the solution looks like for problems, are you having me to find? I said, he goes, Heath. He goes, we’ve done this before. And I said, Yeah, I know that is why I’m here, because you want to do it differently. And he goes, Look Heath. There’s 53 sites around the country, and they do the same thing, 53 different weights. And I said, Great, we’ll just pick one, and that’s going to be like the baseline. And for some it’s going to be aspirational.

For others, it’s Bau and, yeah, we got a we got a baseline to start off. And he’s going, well, that’s kind of making sense, but he didn’t like it still. And he says, Well, I see what you’re saying, Heath, but I want you to start at number five. I said, Okay, if you, if you want me to start number five, I’m basically doing what you hit the last two guys do? He go, I said, If you give me 20 minutes, I’m going to go get that plan out of the draw and give it to you. And he goes, Oh no, no, no, no. I said, Well, that’s going to be the same plan. And I said, I’ve done the approach, but I don’t have your team’s knowledge, so I need the team. So to your point of the SMEs, the experts are in the business and so.

So he seconded them. And long story short, I presented the final plan the time in the roadmap, we’ve already recouped a lot of millions of dollars of lost fun fines that they thought had lost because an efficient process, they couldn’t see them. He signed at the board. He goes, Heath, thank you. Had a minute take it. There. He goes, won’t stop the meeting. And what the site goes especially special mention, Heath, thank you.

You did what you asked for. You’ve delivered the the time and the roadmap of where to recruit this money. But you did the unthinkable. You had documented the undocumented business for the last 20 years. It’s been undocumented. And I say, look, I said I had an approach, but I don’t know the business. And you seconded these people to the business. Was actually them who did the work. These are the guys that went around the country, and they were the ones your people talking to your people. And that’s why it wasn’t me, it was an external consultant. It was your own people talking to your own people. And that’s why they that’s why it was successful, because it was their own language. And I said, If anyone needs a thank you, it’s not me, it’s them. And so your point is, the

Ron Leeman  1:33:42

experts. It’s interesting. You talk about, sorry, it’s interesting. You talk about starting at stage five. My framework approach has three, three foundations. And what I try to, try to say, is, work on these three foundations. First, those three foundations are sponsorship, communication and stakeholders, yeah, work on those foundations.

First, make sure they’re as strong as you could possibly get them. And then you can start putting the building blocks on top like your sort of process, change your organization, change your impact analysis, your training, your business readiness, your user adoption, etc. You can build those building blocks on top of that solid foundation. But you can’t go straight to process change as an example, because you haven’t built those foundations in the first place. It kind of sort of just makes sense to me, and it does to others as well, thank goodness.

Heath Gascoigne  1:34:38

Well, that’s what you get from years of experience, right? Which you won’t get from academia, reading books. You get that from being on in the chat, on the ground, doing the work. Okay, so, so, ladies and gentlemen, so I’ll play the best in there.

Ron, you said, the foundations, sponsors, yeah, communication and stakeholds. So we get, you guys get a master class here. I hope you’re taking notes. And then you said, from there. Is it you, I’m taking notes? Is it some something you’re building on top of that, but once you’ve got the foundations Right, yeah, but you gotta make sure you get those. Okay, fantastic. Yeah, yeah,

Ron Leeman  1:35:09

absolutely. And you need to spend about three or four weeks making sure those foundations are right. So you need to make sure that you sort of talk to the sponsor. They understand their role and responsibilities, they understand after what they have to do during a project life cycle. You have to then work out community well.

You have to engage with your stakeholders and put them into some sort of structure, whatever it is we know depends on the initiative, and you need to engage with them to understand how they want to be communicated to what’s the best form, the best mechanism for communication. And then you actually build a communication plan built based on your stakeholder engagement. So that’s the key, sponsors, stakeholders, communication. They are the three foundations of project. Project matters, project management, what’s your mouth now the change management?

Heath Gascoigne  1:35:59

Okay, sponsors, communication and stakeholders, clarity on the roles, responsibilities a communication plan and where your communication plan is, understanding what’s their format. They like it. They want to email, newsletter, a face to face, a one to one, whatever, whatever. Yeah, the frequency they want it in. So you got a comms plan there. Okay, so there’s clarity, no misunderstanding. I think we’re talking about the business case earlier is that it’s a living document, and it’s going to change, and you gotta be, and this is even as a change manager, you gotta be changing, all

Ron Leeman  1:36:32

right? I think you’ve got it. I think you’ve got it. Alright,

Heath Gascoigne  1:36:37

okay, so we’ve got our three phrases, maybe, if it’s the understand the current state, your alignment is your outcome, your building the competency, capability. Now you’ve got the buy in, yeah, and then you’re, you’re solicited, the experts from the organization. You’ve got the your sponsors agreements, the sponsors your your foundations, the sponsors communication and stakeholders. And now you’re

Ron Leeman  1:37:00

off that. And then where you go? Get your get your sign off in blood, if possible. You know, from your steering group, this is the way we’re going to do it. Okay, get it signed off. So if they kind of complain or say, Hey, this is what we not signed up for. Well, actually, you can say, Yes, you did. I’ve got it here. Look, yeah, yeah, this is what you signed off,

Heath Gascoigne  1:37:22

yeah, and I think that. So, ladies and gentlemen, that’s a key part. There is the sign off, right? So you’ve got the the the evidence of the agreement. Now, when I was saying that Ministry of Justice, one of the first things we did is define the design principles, because they were arguing with each other, and in front of the the vendor when they’re doing the requirements piece, I said, the only reason why you guys are arguing because you’re not agreed on them, on the current state. And so let’s, let’s help with that. We’ve got to find the vision in the design principle to contain the scope. So these are things we’re not going to do, and these are the things we are going to do. And so I printed them off, and every meeting would go to and they started arguing. And I said, it’s Paul. It’s pulled it out. And I say, Here you go. Just remind them, this is what you agreed to. It’s the same thing here, as you’re saying, is you gotta, like, revisit and remind that

Ron Leeman  1:38:11

this is one of the which is one of the reasons, as my first building rock is process change. Because you need to understand your current state without understanding your current state. How can you actually ever think about moving to a new state? Because you don’t know if it’s going to be more efficient than your current state.

So you need to understand what your current state is. You know what your processes are other people that actually undertake your processes, and whether they’re siloed or whether they’re cross functional or whatever, and then how the implementation, whatever it might be, whatever it’s a solution, or whatever it has going to impact that those processes, yeah. So need to understand where you’re going, because we don’t know whether where you’re going is going to be more efficient where you are. So yeah,

Heath Gascoigne  1:38:55

and that was the sponsor, yeah, the Ministry of Justice. They wanted to start at the two piece state without understanding the current state and the his fear was it’s going to take forever, and it’s a never ending exercise. And I said this, and it’s only talking to the points you’re saying is it’s about, I think that in when you got book smart people who will academics, not Chris and academics, but they, you know, they’re smart for for they’re in that position for a reason, and they’re probably because they are academically, book smart, but the application is a separate thing. And a different thing is that I say in this space, a transfer meter.

I don’t like the term. I’m not a fan of the term Business Architect, because their classic business architect is someone that just creates designs. And I think you alluded before they throw it over to the business and go, there you go, like the business is going, what the hell is that? And don’t use it. So say the business transmitter is part strategist. They help with the direction, part designer. They help the structure and the setup of the organization. Part. Collaborator, because it’s not enough. This. Projects are not an ice, you know, not an island. You gotta collaborate for colleagues, and you gotta negotiate part, negotiate your prioritization and trade offs that you have in a few colleagues across organizations. So the if you don’t have that in place, you’re you’re basically throwing their designs at them and saying, Good luck to you, and that’s not going to go too well

Ron Leeman  1:40:24

anyway, agree?

Heath Gascoigne  1:40:27

Okay, so now you’ve got a section of your first part there was about the building blocks, so in the first and understanding the current state. So you’ve got the current states, you’re, I’m assuming, with change and business benefits, you’ve identified the benefits, qualitative, quantitative, and you say, Okay, what’s the changes that need to be implemented on your current state processes to turn them into the to be once they get implemented, they will allow you enable the business to realize their business benefits. And then you come up with the change plane?

Ron Leeman  1:41:03

Well, just to, just to sort of go into a little bit more detail, you start with process change that understandably could impact your organizational change, because if you’re changing from silo to cross functional processes, as an example, it’s likely to make create changes to the organizational structure. You then need to understand the impact of that change of your change of processes and structure.

Then you need to then do your training based on the new state, the current state, the future state, okay? And then once you do that, you need to measure business readiness throughout the project life cycle. So you can put in a process where you can measure certain aspects of business readiness throughout the project life cycle. And you start with right at the beginning of the project, if possible, if you’re not bought in late, like you usually are, and you can measure that. And if you’re, if you if your measurement is actually increasing all the time, that’s fine, because that gives an indicator that what you’re doing is, you know, getting through to people, and people are understanding more okay, if you suddenly get a drop in that sort of, you know, feedback, then there’s an issue there that needs to be sorted out.

So you analyze that, and you sort of, you know, create interventions to make sure that that goes up again.

Then that’s, that’s pre go live, post go live, is then you measure your usage and adoption. You expect people to actually, you know, adopt what you’ve been delivered. But there is adoption. There’s a difference between adoption and usage, because adoption is about, you know, a number of people may adopt your process, but so a lot of people, sorry, may adopt your new solution. But not only, a lot of people use it, what you need is both usage and adoption. Then after that, it’s managing, as you mentioned, managing business benefits.

And then I think one of the key elements that is always missed is the continuous improvement, because Change never stops. Even when you implement a new solution, people will find ways of around it. People will find new ways they don’t need to follow the workflow, because they can skip a screen or whatever. So you need to be able to capture that information to make sure that your your processes are completely up to date. So if you’re taking on any newcomer, etc, and you need to train them, then you have up to date processes. But that’s kind of sort of in a nutshell? Nutshell?

Heath Gascoigne  1:43:21

Yes. Alrighty, okay, so I’m going to play the Back to you, so make sure I got it. So when I engage you, you on a change measure, on my program, so I know who I’m calling. So you’ve your current state is your is your first step.

And so the parts you were talking about when an architect were coming about, are you moving from a silo to the cross functional processing, because that has the impact of the organization structure, organization map, also roles, responsibilities, your artists, doing it. You said, I think gap analysis, impact analysis, understanding the degree of change, creating the training, training schedule, rolling out the training. You are managing and monitoring the readiness for change you’re surveying more likely questionnaires may be watching over their shoulders, looking for an increasing trend of they understand their readiness or that is increasing, and so there’s no need for any intervention there. They might not know what what change means to them. And then, so you’re filling in the gaps there. And then, once we’re in implementation, the you’re looking for two parts. I think this is, I think this is one, one good lesson here for me is adoption is one thing, the usage is another thing. So that’s a nice little tip there. Ron, so ladies and gentlemen, have you got that?

One is that you’re looking for both adoption and usage, and then your ongoing business benefits, which I say, and this my approach is that, of all the artifacts that you would produce, the business benefits register is one of the, if not the biggest or the strongest, but the most prominent. That you hand over to the business that lasts longer than the project that the business themselves will now manage that well after project is finished. And, yep, okay, I’m more on the same so maybe I might apply for a change manager for one point on, alright, and then you’re looking at continuous improvement to make sure you know there’s where there is opportunities to change, or the the users are finding ways around the system or the process, then the process will probably be updated so it’s efficient and effective, in a nutshell. All right,

Ron Leeman  1:45:33

you’ve just gone through my course.

Heath Gascoigne  1:45:38

It might take some time. Alright? So, so that’s the, that’s the the the Ron Lehman approach, the practical, the practical, I’ve got this right, the practical change management approach. That’s the, that’s the

Ron Leeman  1:45:53

name of, no, it’s a practical framework approach to change. Oh, P, fact, P, F, A, C,

Heath Gascoigne  1:45:59

B, F, A, C, you okay, the practical framework for approach, approach change, approach change practically a

Ron Leeman  1:46:09

framework, because I don’t want to put it in the same category as models and methodology, because it’s not, yeah, it’s a framework where the framework isn’t so kind of overbearing, if you Know what I mean, I

Heath Gascoigne  1:46:21

do, I got this. Where is it here? So I get this a lot with people who read my book, and they call me up and say, Heath, I’ve read the book, and I’m trying to, thank you very much, but I’m trying to, and I’m trying to apply it by the word, but in a word to word. And I said, dudes, but there’s a little word there, and it says, so your word that framework,

Ron Leeman  1:46:43

yes, yeah. If it’s meaning to

Heath Gascoigne  1:46:45

do two things. Of it, you apply it appropriately and proportionately for the context what it means. Other thing is that you don’t do that. We’ll pick it up. You don’t pick it up and bang people over the head until the blue in the face. You apply it. And this is why I talk about these successive projects. It’s not about the methodology that you apply. It’s the ability of the practitioner to apply it in two ways, appropriately and proportionately. And for a practitioner like yourself versus academia, who are just, you know, book smart, let’s apply the whole thing. They don’t take into account the complexity or it’s always not vanilla. There’s so many competing demands going on, those myths that deployed straight from the book don’t take that into account. So

Ron Leeman  1:47:31

at least, at least you’ve got something heavy to hit people overhead with. I’ve been threatening to write a book for years, and I’ve never got around to it, although I always have in the back of my mind the ultimate change management approach, which is a baseball bat. If you don’t do this, for

Heath Gascoigne  1:47:49

sure, that will definitely get some form of change. I tell you, though, if you can find the time, although that was a labor of love, to get it down in paper, you’ve probably almost likely got it all there. It’s just now putting it into one, yeah, printable thing. Okay, so we’ve got the Ron Lehman practical framework approaches to change about that. Now the third part is now having many years, decades of experience as a practitioner across the world for the different flights you’ve had in a different sectors. If you could do it all again, what would you do different,

Ron Leeman  1:48:35

right? Okay, okay, one of the things I wouldn’t do is stay in a job for longer than I had to. Okay? I spent 20 years with the Ministry of Defense. I spent eight years with Abbey, national Abbey, and I kind of got the bug for change whilst I was with the Ministry friends, but that was towards the end of my tenure, if you like, and I just wish I’d have done what I did eventually, earlier, earlier. That’s one of the lessons. But obviously it’s too late now. The other thing, I suppose, is probably to have called myself a change manager earlier than I did. I think I first call myself a change manager in about 19, no 2000 or something or other.

Then you know when, when you look at the change management timeline, and that’s a lot about when change management became on, came on the radar. And you know, I but I’ve been a change manager since I took my first course in what was called work study at the Military College of Science in I remember where it was now, now now called defense Academy, because I was working for the ministry friends, and that was actually all about change. So it was about change. His management. But, you know, I could have gone back to Lewin, who first created his own freeze change refreeze model in 1948 you know, it was two years before I was born.

So, yeah, apart from those things, apart from sort of not sticking to one job for too long, I think the other one is probably not deciding to become a trainer early enough, but I needed to sort of work, so I went out as a consultant when I came here to Asia, obviously, and I was forced to get become a trainer by COVID, yeah, because everything shut down. So I couldn’t do any traveling, I couldn’t do any consultancy, and sort of, you know, off, you know, on site and off site was not an option, because you needed to stay off site. And off site really didn’t work with people.

Hybrid working was not possibility. So I had to think about what I needed to do, and I decided to become a trainer. I wish I’d have decided that earlier, because I absolutely, really love, I enjoy my training. I love it’s one to one, which is maybe, which is probably not ideal, because it’s hard to scale up. But I love talking to people on a one to one basis, because you get a lot more information from people. You can actually build up a relationship with people over the nine, two hour sessions. So I do do, actually cohort training, so I’ve done some sort of organization, big organization training, but I do prefer the one to one approach.

And I wish I just started training earlier. I think I found my sweet spot. Yeah, I mean, I get, I’ve got 95% plus positive feedback for my training. Whoa, yeah, 95% plus. So I’m delivering, like, part practical, part theory, doing some research, etc, part of what I used to do in the olden days. Of, you know, I’ve got sort of what they call case studies that were, you know, maybe 20 years old, but it’s still relevant today, based on what I’m training. And it’s going down well, I could do with more trainees, obviously, but that’s one of those things that, you know, okay, so make a decision so you’re, yeah, as I said, I found my sweet spot. I, like, should have made that decision a lot earlier.

Heath Gascoigne  1:52:27

Okay, so for the audience in in a similar situation, is that, if maybe it’s a self awareness, self affliction, part of some, some part of that, of, I mean, you move out of from the consultant to the trainer you might have that, am I like I had that with my book, because I and I go into these projects and it’s always the same thing and the same issues, and going, you know, what are the people not learning?

And I go in, the guys that are in there already that some my colleagues, business architects, were walking around with a business Canvas model, and going, okay, business campus model is nice. I’ll tell you the nine elements of a business model, but that’s not what you need for transforming an organization, particularly not for business architecture. It’s not going to tell you how you structured. It’s not going to tell you how to communicate between each other. You know, what are they passing between the different departments, divisions, the values, so the the wrong tool, and I’m going to put up with it, I’m going to buy a book on the Target Operating Model.

There was no such book. So I wrote the book. And as I, you know, and I was thinking when I was writing, I was going, Do I even have a book in me, you know? And Jesus ago. And sometimes I look at that and I go, Well, I wrote that well, so I think there’s a lesson that you’re having, and even for myself, reflection of that is the way he even have a book in me. And like, I think now, the lesson that Ron and we talked about this before off camera is, you know, I think the thing for you next is to write

Ron Leeman  1:53:58

the book. Yeah, I didn’t have a book in me, to be honest, it’s just changing the focus of what

Heath Gascoigne  1:54:06

I do. I’m telling you

Ron Leeman  1:54:10

wrong, and that’s, that’s the that’s the issue at the moment. I won’t go into detail. You’ll

Heath Gascoigne  1:54:15

find the time. You’ll find the time. Otherwise, you’ll find the excuse, right? And there’s a change manager, you know you, you should know this. And you talked about interventions, true, yeah, maybe the vision, yeah, great division. You’re going to be around for many more years.

Ron Leeman  1:54:33

I should, I should sort of focus. Should not. I should give yourself a slap and say, Get on with it. Ron,

Heath Gascoigne  1:54:39

time will fast. Look, it’s already six months into the year, already, right? How far? Right? How fast has that gone? And so, you know, six weeks, six months. Well, what could you do if I Okay? So the lesson there is, sorry, to cut you off. So listen, there is that you would have moved earlier. You would have called yourself a change manager earlier, and you would have moved out of the, maybe the the genre. Of being a change manager to the teacher of the Change Manager. So I’ve

Ron Leeman  1:55:04

got, I’ve got the content of a book, about 90% about 75 80% there. And basically I was going to call it the life and times of a change manager. And what it does, it takes me right from when I was in Malta being to the shapes of the person I was and how that changed me as an individual. Then going through my years with the Ministry defense and the different projects I’ve worked on, then going on to working for AVI and the different projects I worked on, then going on to the contract market and the different projects I worked on, then moving over to Asia and the different projects I’ve worked on. So it’s there. 80% is there. I just need to say, you need to do it. I need to get the final 20% written. And that’s, I

Heath Gascoigne  1:55:53

think you may have got two books at least in you. One is about the life of a transformation, a change manager, and another one is about, if you wanted to make it just about the the your framework itself,

Ron Leeman  1:56:08

yeah. I mean, the one I think the the framework approach would be easier to finish, to to write, than the last 20% of the, you know, The Life and Times off. And because I’ve got all the information there, I train on it. I actually train all the information there. You

Heath Gascoigne  1:56:27

should do it to the book. So, you know, when I, when I wrote my book, I was actually writing a book about the problems in the industry. Keep

Ron Leeman  1:56:33

on, keep on hassling me. Heath say, well, write that book. Run.

Heath Gascoigne  1:56:37

Well, you know, I think this. It’s evolution, right? I love I commented already. I’ve seen some changes on your LinkedIn, and I really like it. And so let’s get over evolution. So the next one is the book,

Ron Leeman  1:56:54

yeah. Okay, done. Okay,

Heath Gascoigne  1:56:57

okay, I got Ron’s commitment, ladies and gentlemen. You just got the goat of change management has just said, Ron Lehman has just said that he is putting the one of two books, and maybe the first one’s going to be because unquote is that the practical framework of a managed approach to change is going to be in a book form by the end of the year. Yep.

Ron Leeman  1:57:22

Done. Okay,

Heath Gascoigne  1:57:25

ladies and gentlemen, thank you very much. Okay, so this now, so they this will, hopefully it’s only going to be less than a week to put it up on on YouTube, and then I’ll tag you on LinkedIn, and you can share it out to your network if people want to get in touch me.

I’ll put in the show notes. How to get to get a hold of you on LinkedIn, how to contact, get a touch of you about the training, your courses that you offer with the one to ones in the cohort. I’ll put the link into the show notes. It’ll come on to our website, but also on all the places it gets shared on the podcast, on SoundCloud and apple and all those other ones. So they better know how to get a hold of you. They want to get a hold of

Ron Leeman  1:58:11

you. Sound good. Sounds good to me. I’ll send you a few things, a few links that you might be interested in, absolutely. But yeah, Yes, sounds good. Sounds really good. Okay, just keep me in the loop.

Heath Gascoigne  1:58:20

Yep. Okay, okay. Thank you very much for your time. Thank you for joining from Thailand. I hope that the the the sunny, the the rainy season, classes will felt too much drama, and for next week’s event that you’ve got going on, I will send out the positive vibes.

Ron Leeman  1:58:37

It’s it’s dark. Now it’s dark. Oh, it’s eight o’clock. It’s actually eight o’clock here, nearly my bedtime. Listen, Heath, thank you very much for having me on your show. And really, really, you know, it’s been quite a while since we started, but I really enjoyed talking about the things that I like talking about, which is change management. And I hope that your viewers also get this impression that you know, I like what I do, I enjoy what I do. It’s my sort of, I don’t know what to call it, life, good purpose, yeah, whatever you want to call it. So thank you very much for having me My

Heath Gascoigne  1:59:15

pleasure. Okay, enjoy your day and have a good sleep. Okay, cheers. All right, bye,

Ron Leeman  1:59:22

bye.