Heath Gascoigne  00:02

Hello, welcome. My name is Heath Gascoigne, and I am the host of the business transformation podcast. And this is the show for business transmitters who are part business strategists, part business designers, part collaborators and part negotiators, business transmitters have moved on. Move past just design and include oversight of implementation of those business designs and business transformation, and include stakeholder management, coordination and negotiation. If you work in strategy, development and implementation and work to ensure that the strategy is aligned to the business design and technology, then you’re probably a business transmitter. This is a show where we speak to industry experts and professionals to share their stories, strategies and insights to help you start, grow and run your business transformations. Welcome to the business transformation podcast, and in this episode, we are talking to one of those industry experts all the way from the USA. We are talking to the one other than new author. Now, although I’m going to drop a few insights here and sneaky releases before they generally made public, we’ve got Mister James. Wendover, James or Jim, let’s go Jim today. Jim Landgraf, okay, thank you, Jim. Jim is, and I’ve just learned this. I knew of the term, but I didn’t find the understand the context. Is a business cartographer, as opposed to a geographic cartographer, but the cartographer being that maps the geography, the landscape. With Jim is a specialist in mapping the business, very similar to a business architect, actually. He comes from over a decade experience in working in the business, as opposed to on the business, as leading and key decision maker, and now is in the position of supporting and helping customers and clients with their transformations on the business. Jim, welcome to the business podcast. How are you?

Jim Landgraf  02:01

I’m good. Thank you for having me.

Heath Gascoigne  02:04

Fantastic, fantastic. Okay, there’s a recent announcement that you’ve got you’re going to share with us as we go through this for the for audience, Jim, like myself, has a method, and he’s published his book, and we’re going to get into that. But as we on the we talk about what the three points we will cover, from your perspective as a cartographer, as one of the the bows in your your toolkit, what do you see the industry is doing right? What is the Do you have particular approach? Maybe this might be an opportunity to plug the book that you follow when you go in to help clients. And the third one is, what is, if you could do it all again, or you could do it differently, or do it differently, if it made sense to what would you do differently? And this is really the takeaway for the audience. So they go, okay, yeah, these are the content, the top three things that I’ll do. Okay, so kick us off. So what is the industry and your perspective doing right or doing wrong? We’ve had a lot of conversation on LinkedIn, actually, and you’ve commented to post and comment to yours, and so kick us off. You

Jim Landgraf  03:10

know, I think that it’s interesting. It’s an interesting question because, you know, so often, especially on like social media, you hear about the stuff that’s going wrong right, you hear about the big wins, and then the all the stuff underneath that’s kind of falling apart. I think that the reality is, is that businesses, and I’ve been in, you know, Fortune 200 and also, you know, $59 a year businesses, so everything in between, and they all kind of have a common school, is that there’s people there that really want to do the right thing. There’s people in there that really feel passionate about what they do. They really feel passionate about wanting to move the needle, for lack of a better word, right? So I think what businesses do well is they really kind of try to harness that, right? They really kind of get into that whole thing and get people excited about wanting to be better, right, wanting to improve, wanting to get out there. So I think that they do that. I think more and more businesses are starting to invest in more of that transformation and beyond just, you know, the big dollar consultants coming in there and implementing stuff, or the SI or whatnot, I think they’re starting to really realize that, you know, we have to invest in things like change management. We have to invest in things like business architecture. I still think there’s a little bit of unclarity about what those actually mean to the business, but I think that they become more than just buzz buzz words. So I think that’s a good thing. I think that we’re seeing kind of a trend towards, you know, grasping that those concepts and putting those in place, okay. And I think that, you know, businesses are understanding what success looks like and again, like it’s funny. I think if most businesses you did a SWOT analysis, strength and witnesses are oftentimes the same thing, right? We’re we’re a big company that does this thing. That’s our strength, we’re our weaknesses. We’re a big company that does this thing right, and we can’t. You know, kind of get out of our own ways, or we can’t be as nimble or as agile as we want to be. So it’s just always been interesting to me, when you do those kind of things, that those strengths are oftentimes and weaknesses are oftentimes similar.

Heath Gascoigne  05:14

Yes, the whole opposite, like Muti law, the equal opposite?

Jim Landgraf  05:21

Yeah, physics,

Heath Gascoigne  05:25

yeah, I would play back a couple of points. You said they’re quite good. Is that what the industry is good at? They said, Change Management, Business architecture and understanding what good looks like, which is, I think, very key the so this on their business architecture one it’s like the what I see in here myself is that clients know of this term business architecture, but they don’t know what it means, right? And they hear the name, and then they’ll go call a business architect, and next thing you know, the business architect isn’t doing architecture. They’re doing big business analysis, or they’re doing some vendor valuation, and it’s like, yeah, so I think that that’s it’s good now they’re coming. They’re consciously aware of the discipline or techniques that are out there. Now it’s the application they and also the change management is really good to see that i A few years ago now there wasn’t as a core project team, there wouldn’t be a change manager on the as part of that core team. But now they’re almost mandatory on chance are fantastic. And are these transformation projects are mostly technology, either driven or enabled, but people any change managers to help manage that? Yeah, I think what

Jim Landgraf  06:40

they’re saying, they’re seeing that there’s, they’re investing millions of dollars in a CRM, for example, right? I’m going to go and buy Salesforce and put it in, and I’m going to spend, you know, as a medium sized business, eight to $12 million on that, and then they get to the other side of it, and no one’s using it. They’re like, wait a second, we spent all this money, and we’re still doing the things that we did before, right? We’re still doing this thing the same way. And it comes down to that change management, and change management isn’t just about the training, and I think that’s what the thing that gets lost, right? People think about change management similar to business architecture, and it gets lumped into the piece of it they understand, right? Is it about capabilities? Is it about training? Well, it’s a lot more, right? Those are just building blocks to the whole thing. And ironically, like we talk about business architecture and change management, and too often, they’re too separate, because they’re the two sides of the same coin when it comes to transformation, right? I don’t know what I’m changing if I don’t have my business architecture, I don’t know how to change it if I don’t have my change management, right? So being able to connect those dots is really important as the next evolution of this, this, this work happens, right? Is really being able to go there and say, Hey, how do I protect my investment? The first thing is, up front, you do it with good architecture and make sure that you’re not building the wrong things. And on the back end, you make sure that when you’re done with it, people are actually using

Heath Gascoigne  07:59

1. Yes, okay, I’m gonna go on a couple things. You just said, there is about the the change management and business architecture, the opposite to the same coin. And so, yeah, I’m fully agree with you there. And the other, the other point you just said, I like it, is that people’s perception and understanding is, I’m going to quote you on this one that you said that’s lumped into the things they understand. So like the technology guys, see business architecture straight away. It’s solution architecture and business analyst. See business architecture. It’s next thing, you know? It’s, it’s business analysis, yeah, yeah, there’s nice one.

Jim Landgraf  08:37

And we’ve kind of done that to ourselves, right as business architect, because we’ve come in there like it’s a methodology and not a practice, right? It’s not supposed to be supposed to be a practice, right? So you can’t hit people over their head with with with theory and with frameworks and stuff like that all the time, because they’re going to be resistant. Or, you know, we’ve raised business architects from business analyst or or from solution architects. And we’ve said, Hey, we’re going to call it this thing, and we’re going to, we’re going to, you know, market it as business architecture, but really just going to be, you know, business analysis on steroids, or solution architecture, because we’re assigning business architects to a specific tool, which is kind of the antithesis of business architecture, right? Is that we couldn’t we shouldn’t be tool connected. We should be too agnostic. We should be process agnostic. We should be it’s an enterprise function, not a tool function, and not a departmental function. So we start

Heath Gascoigne  09:36

with, I think you’re getting into, is product management. And so the business architects, business architects, the product managers.

Jim Landgraf  09:47

It’s and again, I’m going to go a little wax philosophical here for a second, if that’s alright. But you know, it’s

Heath Gascoigne  09:52

so context. Sorry, just for you to context, ladies and gentlemen, that Jim is actually a major and. English. So, so the content, Jim’s understanding of the application, the English language is at the next level. So, so when you say philosophical this, we’re getting a we’re getting a master class here. Go ahead. Sorry, go

Jim Landgraf  10:17

No. So you know it’s I um, I guess maybe this skips a little bit towards, you know, what I’ve learned over the years is that for business architecture specifically, like we’ve created this, this, this image of a bridge between strategy and execution, right? Yes, and a bridge kind of tastes, there’s something that it’s spanning, there’s something that’s going over. And the reality is, is there’s like this abyss between the two, right? And most organizations and their thought process, there’s this abyss between the two. And so now there’s, they’re standing on one side of the other of this abyss, right? Strict, you know, strategic people are on one side, the execution people on the other side. And business architecture is supposed to be the bridge that gets them. And I think that it’s the wrong image, because if you think about it, the reality is, is most organizations the bridge they’re going to build might be like a rickety suspension bridge, right? And you’re sitting there, and you’re looking across this abyss that sometimes you can’t see the bottom of, right? And you’re expecting someone to walk across your bridge. And it’s like, Wait a second. Are you expecting the executioners to go to the strategy side or the strategy people to go to the execution side? Where do you want them to stand in the middle? Stand in middle and rickety bridge over this giant abyss and have a conversation? And I’m like, who’s going to do that? Right? I mean, you know, they’re not going to invest big enough to build a suspension bridge. I’m not building the golden, great bridge across this, you know, abyss and maybe no, do I need to? Right? So we need to change that, that dialog and that, change that perception of it, and not take people on this rickety suspension bridge across this abyss, or looking down in the water, there’s 1000 crocodiles waiting to eat you fall into right? So that’s the unfortunate reality of the gap, and the image that we’ve created as architects and business architects is being a bridge, and I think that we need to change that a little bit and think of it more as a different destination. And the best analogy I can use is we’re going to create a vacation house, right? We’re going to create a getaway for the business that nobody owns. It’s not a strategic owned getaway. It’s not a finance owned getaway. It’s a business loan getaway that we help create so they can go there. Because when you’re at your house, and I come to your house, right, I’m going to have a conversation with you, and I’m going to be conscientious that I’m sitting in your house, so I’m not going to be really contentious, because I don’t want to, you know, be rude. And as a host, you also don’t want to be rude, so you’re kind of, you kind of find this, this temporary ground of, you know, diplomacy, right? And is that really helpful? I don’t think so, right. So, if we go to this, this guest house together, if you and I go and we can go meet in a, you know, villa on the Mediterranean, over a, you know, a bottle of beer or a glass of whiskey or whatever, we can start all of a sudden be opened up, because no one owns that place, right? No one owns that anyway. I can keep going like analogy, but I

Heath Gascoigne  13:09

like it, yeah. So the the dynamic is would have changed from that and that vacant, temporary house, but, and that may even become permanent at some point. Or, you know, you build on it, but I like how you’re saying that the analogy of We are the bridge between the two strategy and execution. Then neither one of them is going to other side. And so there’s always going to be the abyss, whether you know, whatever that looks like, in between, no one wants like, Oh, what the hell deep sense. Oh, he’s risky, and I will stay here. We’ll stay here too. And so there’s like, they never come together. So define, I think what you’re saying is provide a safe space to where they in those words you just said, Open. Nice one. Okay, so this should change the language, constructive

Jim Landgraf  13:58

contention, right? That’s the thing that businesses need the most. Is construction. Constructive contention, to be able to voice their opinions and voice their concerns without fear of reprisal or without hurting someone’s feeling like there’s no ownerships in that bill, right? If you and I go to this house, you know, the house of business architecture, anyway,

Heath Gascoigne  14:22

before just

Jim Landgraf  14:25

came to me anyway, so we go in there, and it’s really a place, but the on the flip side of it, right? And this is where that investment comes in. You have to, you have to build a house, right? You have to invest in that, in that property, and not the rickety bridge. And the other beautiful thing is, nobody lives there, right? No one’s expected to live there. And then I think that’s the other problem with business architecture, is people have a tough time understanding where it lives right, and where they live with it, and how they live site with it. And the reality is, is that, again, using that same analogy, the business architecture, and I would say other architecture to data. Architecture, you know, change management, architecture, so on and so forth. They’re the ones that are keeping the house up, right? So when you go there, you don’t have to worry about mowing the lawn, you don’t have to worry about fixing the toilet, you don’t have to worry about stocking the fridge, right? That’s all done before you get there, and that’s the purpose of architecture, right? And the other nice thing is, like, you know, the sales people go there to have a conversation, and they look at the house, and they think about all the stuff that we built, and they’re like, You know what? We cool if we had a barbecue here. So hey, can you guys give us a barbecue pit, right? And that’s the intake process that goes into the continuous improvement of the connection between architecture and the businesses that there go there. But they can’t do that from their house, right? Because at their house, they have everything the way they want it, right? Yeah, they don’t want you to come in there and redo their backyard, or redo their barbecue, whatever, like, I have my stuff. So when you go to the guest house, people can be open minded. And again, that’s kind of the concept that I have. And I like it. I think,

Heath Gascoigne  15:57

I think I’m gonna leave it to update, and they’re going to find some way to put this lovely house of architecture in this sort of vocation camp,

Jim Landgraf  16:09

just, you know? And it kind of goes into a more tactical presentation, right? Is that, that there’s this liminal layer that exists, or that needs to exist? Yes, and it’s a temporary place, and I talk about a lot my book is this liminal layer. Is that this is where architecture, because architecture, by nature, is abstract, right? It’s not intended to be super specific or super strategic, right? It’s supposed to be the abstract of the two, of being able to look at your business by one view and then change the lens, right? I can look at a process map and I can change the lens. What does it look like from a compliance perspective? What does it look like from a go to market perspective? What does it look like from a people perspective and a training perspective and a you know, professional and now with AI? What does it look like? Where can I put AI in there, right? But if you’ve already created the view. You can change the lens anytime you want without changing the view. And that’s the beauty of architecture, right? Is that we provide the view and you you bring the lens, right? Yes,

Heath Gascoigne  17:10

I like it. It’s like, I like your analogy you said earlier, and about the constructive criticism or tension rather, is the in construction, the as like we are, we’re building a building, a building, a business, and you have your Carpenter, your plumber, your electrician, and they’ve got their own plans looking at the same building, the same structural outline. And then so you give for the particular perspectives, the different view the electrician gets the wiring, the carpenter gets the structure. Steelman gets where he’s going to lay the steel pipes for the carpenter to come in after. So everyone has particular view, but if you lay them over the top of each other, and this was I find, is that probably the not so the confusion, but we’re not helping ourselves, or else. Of our colleagues, as they put all the views all together in the one view, and they go, and it’s like, it’s confusing. And that’s when the business go. I don’t understand the word the same, but they’re very convincing. We should just sign off on it, because we’re going to look silly if it doesn’t go ahead and fall well, it goes ahead and it falls over on our face. So that’s just to prove it. They don’t know what to prove it, because they can’t understand

Jim Landgraf  18:19

1. Yeah, and it’s a great analogy, because if you think about that in the way, in the context of how businesses are currently working, the plumbers are creating their own map, the electricians are creating their own, their own plans, and there’s nothing tying it to the house, right? So all of a sudden, you know, I’ve got, you know, open exposed wires next to my tub. And I’m like, that’s not safe or a good idea, yeah. Or I’ve got, you know, the Winchester house in Sacramento here, which is just, you know, built me on and on and on and on without any, you know, content or context. It’s cool to look at, right? Because you got rooms that go nowhere and you got different shapes and sizes, but at the end of the end of the day, it’s not very functional, right? And I think that’s what the and again, we need to take people to that liminal layer, let them visit there, and then they go back home, right? They don’t have to stay there. They don’t want to stay there. They want to go back to their own house, but they want to be able to take what they’ve learned and take those conversations back with them, right? We can take our memories from our vacation back with us. We don’t take the vacation back home, right?

Heath Gascoigne  19:26

Yep. Okay, so, ladies and gentlemen, if you’re missing it, Jim is saying liminal land, and this is, this is you can trademark that then, so, so this is your this is the abstract view, and this is probably the the, let’s say, not them, the hurried the Mirage on the horizon where they’re all chasing or going to, well, they eventually get there and sit down together in this open, collaborative space where it’s free from the current ways of working. They have open. Opportunity to discuss about fear of failure or criticism for what the maybe the future state is, but it’s, it’s like you said the other part about plumbers and creating the plumbers like I’ve seen it helping client right now, and they’ve got these all departments all involved in transformation, and everyone’s got their own little map, and it’s all different to each other, since, like, the alignment is like, not like this. It’s like, all over the show the nice one.

Jim Landgraf  20:30

And then they go and they say, well, it’s not right. And so they go back and fix those independently, and then come back and it’s still not right, right? There’s nothing connecting them together. So and a little it’s not just academic, right? It’s the reality. So if you think about what lives there, right? Is that those pieces of architecture, you got a process map, you got capability maps, you’ve got some of your strategic things, you got business model canvases. You’ve got, you know, SWOT analysis, you’ve got five forces analysis. You’ve got all these kind of things that you can use as tools. And I’m not suggesting that everyone uses all of them. But there’s, there’s a progression to it. And as far as you know, how I take it, you know, it’s, it’s, let’s think about it from the strategic level, like, let’s do a business model canvas, right? Let’s figure out how all these things interact with our value proposition. It’s always starting at the what we do, and people like to jump into how well we do things right off the bat, right? Let’s go and fix pain. And I’m like, well, pain isn’t relevant if you don’t understand where you’re going, right? I mean, if I don’t have a destination, pain is just a bump in the road. And, you know, it doesn’t, doesn’t help you. And people want to go and fix pain, and, you know, fix the root cause, right? Fix the thing and set yourself up for success, because businesses are made by human but they’re not human, right? So they feel pain in different ways, and pain is relevant for different people, right? If at the end of the day, there’s somebody that’s, that’s, that’s having to push extra buttons every day to do their job and get their stuff across, but the value of changing that isn’t worth I’m sorry, you got to deal with the pain, right? I mean, it’s just the reality of some of the

Heath Gascoigne  22:06

pain is going to stay okay. So

Jim Landgraf  22:09

when you use those strategic pieces, right? When I go in there, and I’ll set up with a business model canvas, and sometimes it’s just departmental, right? And I’ll sit down and say, What is your value proposition for marketing? What are you trying to provide to the business, and what are you trying to provide to your customer? Right? I think about the Uber model, right? When they think about how they do it, they have two different groups that they’re trying to attract, right, riders and drivers, right? And you have to kind of think about how your business can do both and the same thing inside your business. Most businesses, you know, if your sales, how do I work within the business, and how do I work with my clients or my customers, right? And think about it from that perspective. But those value propositions have to be that centerpiece the other part of it, and one of the only things I like to do is think about it from the forces, right? What are the business forces? What are the market forces? What are the economic forces that are forcing me to have to make changes, forcing me to have to adapt. I mean, when smart money came in, right credit card companies all of a sudden, how do I do this right or buy now, pay later stuff, and think about how that changes the credit card industry. And if you don’t think about that, if you don’t think about consciously why, how that impacts your value proposition, how that impacts your partners and your channels and all the other pieces of the puzzle, then you’re just going to go and chase your tail. And so if you start scenario planning, yeah, it really is.

Heath Gascoigne  23:36

Which you know, what’s that? Okay? So I think you’re starting to get into the second part, but I just want to cap on what you do when you go on, or your process that you follow. So I just want to so for the audience, want to recap from real good points you’ve talked about there is that you said about these different tools, techniques, templates, blueprints. You mentioned capability map, process mapping, the business, Canvas model. But you also said, but the couple good track good things, there is about people, how people want to understand what they do and then go and address the problems. And what your, I think you’re getting to was solution mode. And so there’s a time and place for everything. And but also you said is you’re not going to try. You’re not recommending or suggesting you do all the things. Just, you know, some of the things are appropriately I call that on, on with my workout work. I say, you know, like, I get guys that are like, you’ll get it. Now, I’m absolutely sure with the release of the book, people call you up and say he thought, Jim, I’m reading the book and trying to apply it by the letter, and then you say, hey, look on the front of the book, there’s a word that says framework. And framework means you do two things apply appropriately and proportionately for the context. It doesn’t tell your words as you don’t apply all of them, right? What I see is. The is, when I go into these projects, and they have to with the wall room, and aptly named war room, of all the possible blueprints that you could possibly think of have been started or done, and it’s consumed a lot of the businesses time. And the business is just this might the change and fatigue like Jesus, you’ve got a lot of work, but we’ve got nowhere. They’re not cool, that market texture interesting, but useless.

Jim Landgraf  25:25

Yeah, and it’s funny, I’m gonna plug my book here just for a second, because I, when I talk about, I want the main core of it, what’s that? Yep, plug. It’s just careful. It’s that whole, you know, doing things because we can, and not doing things because we should. And to your point, the beauty of technology is that it allows us to do things faster. Now, with AI, we can do things a lot faster than we used to, right? We can come up with beautiful decks in seconds because we could just use copilot. We can come up with all these ideas in seconds because we use chat, GPT or something else. But the reality is, you know, everyone talks about efficiency and having automating reports. Let’s use that as an example, right? Let’s call automate all these reports. Well, you’ve already got 1000 reports that you’re not looking at anyway, so now you’re gonna have 10,000 and what good does that? But it’s the same concept. I can have 30 frameworks, I can have 30 pieces of information, but at some point it dilutes the value, right? Yeah. So, yeah, I always preach this, this, this, this one concept is the best tool, and the best framework to use is the one you’re using. Just stick with it and use it effectively, right? It’s the changing in the mind, like Agile is a great example, right? If Agile is working for you in the way you decided to adapt it, it worked. If it’s not working, don’t, don’t hang on to a sinking ship, right? You can come in and fix it or move on to something that does work for you, right? But that’s part of the that that continuous improvement process is, sometimes it’s okay to let things die, right? Sometimes okay to start again. Sometimes, okay. But what’s not okay is not picking a direction, right? What’s not okay is saying, let’s have 30 things in the room at the same time and try to get them all done well, because it doesn’t work right? Let’s pick four of those and just stick with them. Yeah? Three of them work. You only have to replace one.

Heath Gascoigne  27:18

Yeah? Yeah. There’s a great, there’s a great, there’s a great, great tips there, ladies and gentlemen, is it what’s okay? It’s okay and what’s not okay, then change it. But also, you know, I love it. The the I see people getting excited about AI, and they go, Oh, we can do it. Like, I’m currently helping a client right now, and they’re already talking about, we’re in discovery, and there was already talking about design and all about automation. And AI and I said, Okay, guys, you know, let’s, let’s take it this. Take a step back for a second. You know, the process to process improvement is first. There’s four stages. First is elimination, cut out the waste, and then there is standardization and improve your what you’ve got. And then the optimization, so you get the better quality, better throughput, to then automation. What you’re talking about, really at the start of this whole project, is the last step. So this is where a lot of clients and companies start. And they work backwards, they automate it, to optimize it, standardize it, and then they eliminate the waste. Is like this, you’ve just wasted a whole truck. So what you just said about, if you got 100 reports, having 200 reports that you don’t use is not going to help you any faster.

Jim Landgraf  28:27

No, it’s the illusion of efficiency, right? Is that we talk about efficiency like it’s this, this, this tangible thing that we can gain, right? The reality is like, I’ve worked in business where efficiency does matter, right? I’ve worked with, you know, field technicians and four technicians that I’m billing at $100 an hour or whatever. And so I can live in six minute chunks, right? I can live that 10th of an hour every six minutes cost them $10 right? I have to, you know, earn $10 for that. But beyond that, if you don’t have an hour billing kind of thing, the concept of efficiency is, is this buzzword that people throughout there. But what are you going to do with it? Right? If Heath, if I save you, you know, eight hours a week of your time, because I automate some of your process, what do I do with eight hours? Right? It’s Parkinson’s Law. Work expands to the time allotted to do it, right? I mean, you know, we’re going to find, or now, all of a sudden, right, now that I can, you can do more reports. I’m going to expect more reports from you. So I haven’t gotten more efficient. You’re the same busy. You’re just doing more of the same thing. And you know, it’s, you know, it’s, it’s, it’s, and sometimes it’s a simple thing, right? Sometimes it’s a simple, you know, you’re in a procurement environment, and man, my AP, people are running around and spending hundreds hour a month chasing POS. I must need some automation. I must need something that does some AI bought in there. Well, maybe what you really need is a policy of when to create a PO. Because what the reality is, the problem is that you have 12 different countries that have 12 different. Uh, you know, sets of rules and criteria about when a PO is needed, and so, you know, fix that problem. And you don’t need any technology, right? Yeah, then you just need some governance and some management. And it’s done, and I’ve seen that this is an actual, true example of something that I came across, right, is that, you know, you want to spend a million dollars to bring in some eye procurement tool that automates this stuff, when the reality is all you really need is a policy and to enforce the policy, yes. And so we look to technology, right? We rely so much. We’ve become so reliant on technology. And again, this is something I talk about my book. Is that there has to be that balance, the analog balance versus the digital balance, right? And I think architecture is the vessel to help bring that balance back, right? That liminal layer is where that balance can live the best. Alright, we

Heath Gascoigne  30:51

just done the full circle. There. Leslie gentlemen, fantastic. Okay, so, yeah, I’m going to quote you on a couple of things you just said. There that. Okay, the the illusion of efficiencies. I like that quote you when I post that one up. And also the Parkinson’s Law about the task or the time expands so much you allow time for it’s like you can clean your bedroom. I’ll give you three months where you can clean it in three minutes. It’s like,

Jim Landgraf  31:17

if you have an hour meeting, it’s going to take an hour to get the stuff done. Whether you need an hour or not, right? You schedule an hour, it’s going to take

Heath Gascoigne  31:25

an hour. Okay, yes, oh yeah, yeah, exactly. I tried giving it half an hour, but so on that, on that. So I think we’re getting out of the what the industry is good doing. There’s lots of things that they’re good doing, and then there’s opportunities of where they could probably stop doing the stuff. Like you said, with agile, if it’s working away you want it to work. It to work, the way that’s working for you. Keep doing it. If it’s not, then hey, that’s probably the chance to change it. So the now getting out into so that’s, that’s part one. Step two is, is there a particular approach? And I think we’re starting to get into that, and you’re starting to say, well, I’ll do this. And so what’s a particular Is there a particular approach that you follow. Maybe it’s written in the book that you every time you go into a client, what is it you look for where you’ll see the freed flag straight away and go, Well, this is why I got caught in here, because this, this is the thing that everyone gets caught up on, and these guys are doing it. What is that process you follow through? Can you step us through

Jim Landgraf  32:18

it? Yeah. So I think that, you know, it’s interesting, because what I like to start with is the value stream, right? What do you want to work? Right? Because we’re not going to fix your whole business, right? It’s one thing at a time. It’s procure to pay, it’s lead to cash, it’s order to cash, it’s, you know, record, report, whatever happens to be that, that value stream that we’re talking about. And the first thing I’ll ask is, you know, what is your process? Right? What is your process, not how you do it, but what you do, right? And most organizations don’t have that, right. And so I’ve done a lot of this stuff, and what will happen is, you walk in there, and you walk through here is, you know, we use procure to pay as an example, because it’s a relatively simple one, right? I have a request, and I end up paying for that bill, right? So, AP, so, you know, walk, walk me through that process. And first of all, that all need to bring in six, seven different people because of the layers of the process, right? There’s different things. There’s, you know, the procurement side, there’s the vendor management side, there’s the risk vendor side, there’s the AP side, so on and so forth. So nobody really knows everything. And then they’ll send me their process maps. And it’s really hands on keyboards, right? I can do this. I can, you know, push this button, and this happens, or it’s, it’s system instructions. And so I always bring them up a level, right? Let’s go up to, you know, just, let’s walk through what you do, end to end. And what, what happens, inevitably, is that everybody comes together and they realize that, hey, they don’t really understand the process as well as they thought they did. Yeah, and I’ve had the same comment in one way or another, brought to me almost every time, is that, man, when we look at it this way, it’s surprised we get anything done, right? Because it is connected to the apparent at that point, right? Because we’re getting away, we’re pulling our heads out of the other computers and looking up a little bit. And when we do that, so that’s kind of the

Heath Gascoigne  34:06

step working on the business in the business, right,

Jim Landgraf  34:10

right? Let’s, let’s look at the picture of the business and people everyone goes into like, how well we do something, right? When I, when I put a box on there, since we do this. We create a PO, right? We create an invoice. We, you know, match an invoice to appeal, whatever happens to be that process step everyone wants to jump into the pain about that, right? Like, here’s what’s problem with this. I’m like, hold on a second, right? So really, kind of keeping people at that level and walking through that. And then we talk about what, what should it look like? Right? If you can start your business today, how would you do this? Right? Let’s, let’s take that pain and turn it into opportunity instead, right? And flip that conversation. Because it’s a lot healthier to talk about opportunity than is talk about pain. Yes, first of all, and some of that’s a lot more practical, right, because it gives us direction instead of just gives us fresh. Situation. And so we do that. And then, you know, I like to do a simple, kind of interactive, you know, maturity model, right? So what’s your process mature? Looks like? It’s process management, right? We think about process maturity in, you know, is this process step mature? Not? Is the technology mature? Not? I’m like, Well, hold on, how about the management of that, right? Do people know what the process is? Is it written down somewhere people have access to is it, you know, Incorporated? Can you measure it, whether it’s successful or not, right? I mean, it’s those little pieces of the puzzle that people kind of overlook. And I wanted to, and everywhere I’ve done this, I’ve had, you know, VPS looking and say, Wait a second, if we’re supposed to be a 3.1 and we’re at 2.1 why are we doing anything else, right? There’s a lot of aha moments that happen on that when people realize the other part of is people realize aspiration doesn’t have to be a five, right? Yeah, I can be a four and be okay with that. That’s just my inspiration is, is getting that point right? Everyone thinks from a maturity like you want to be the top level? Well, that’s not reality, right? If I’m a procurement department in a SaaS company, right? It’s a supporting function. I don’t need to be a five, but if I’m a procurement company at Costco or Walmart, I have to be a five, right? Because that’s what I do. That’s what I you know, that’s where my margins come from, is my ability to purchase correctly. So you know, you know you have to take things into perspective and understand your business well enough to know how to control your aspirations.

Heath Gascoigne  36:28

Yeah, I like how you said about the the measure partner, step back and but they they work. And how do you measure success? And, but I think the starting point of that is, you know, if you your your processes work as well as you documented them. And an undocumented process is no standardization for sure. It’s more likely done ad hoc and inconsistently, so the inconsistent process and consistent output. But then part of that, what you just said about how do you measure it? If you you cannot improve what you cannot or do not measure. And so key point there, ladies and gentlemen, and Jim has caught it out early. Okay? And then I like how you’re saying about the maturity is you’ve, you’ve given it a rating or ranking of a one to five and assessing it and asking the business the question, which is great, because that’s the ones that are doing it and for their own self, self assessment, now that they’ve got opportunity to look on the business as opposed to being in it. Yeah, nice one. Okay, so we’re at the process maturity, Process Management, yep.

Jim Landgraf  37:30

And it’s funny, because I think the other piece of it is that it’s really important to have the consumer and the producer in the room. And what I do is like, I will send everybody a survey right on a scale of one five, and I will give them very specific definitions, right? This is what a one looks like. This is what a five looks like, so on and so forth. So there’s not a whole lot of room for interpretation. And so I’ll have everyone do it independently, and I’ll have not just the people that are doing it. So for example, like lead management, like I’ll have the marketing or the SDRs or BDRs, whatever, you know, hey, how do you think you’re doing in this and they’ll have the salespeople cut right? Because the reality is, is, then we get up in the room and marketing is like, I’m giving you, you know, level four leads, and the salespeople like, I’m getting level two, right. And so that disconnect does happen. But here’s a nice thing, is that nobody owns maturity, right? So we can have that contentious conversation. That’s one of those pieces of the liminal layer. Now I can sit there and say, okay, marketing, you say you’re given a four sales. You’re saying it’s a two. Let’s figure out what it really is, and let’s use this criteria and be objective about it. And then we can get to an agreement of like, what is, where are we really at? And so having that conversation when you’re doing maturity, you have to look at it from all the perspectives, right? People that aren’t in the process need to have a chance to weigh in on what they think it is and well, here

Heath Gascoigne  38:48

you see, so yeah, like we see there’s two parts, right? You’re saying for the audiences, you’ve got your right producers and consumers. So those are the ones that are in the process. Is the operators, if you like. So this in terms of side pocket, say, the supplier, and then that C being the customer, the consumer at the end. So you’re involving, and I think for the if we step back a sec, but the issues of transformation, or business transformation, and one of the problems being lack of business user involvement, of stakeholder involvement, and you’re, you’re calling it out here now, is that you’ve got your both your producer and you’ve got the consumer, so you’ve got them involved, and you’re also saying contention. And there is contention there, and I like it, because this is the challenge right, where the only way you want to come together is addressing the contention So, and the part that I think is bringing it together is that objectivity, the the objective criteria, what good looks like. It’s very you see that from the beginning that you’ve given them the clear definition of what one is and what five is. So then they go, Okay, if I think it’s two, and you think it’s a four, and it’s very clear, there’s, there’s no ambiguity. Said, Well, it’s definitely like, we’ve got to, have to be smack in the middle. And

Jim Landgraf  39:59

that’s. Where you come to the agreement there’s not, it’s not an exact science. It doesn’t need to be right, because it doesn’t need to be an exact science. The reality is, is that I know that I’m here and I want to be here, and here’s the steps I need to take. Just all of a sudden, you’re building a roadmap to and to tie it back to the, you know, part of the conversation at the beginning, right? If I do that exercise, if I do the process, if I do the process of maturity, if I do some of the stuff from a change management perspective, I have identified my producers and consumers, so I know who needs to be in the room, I know who I need to talk to, and I know at the maturity level of that what the issues they’re coming up against, right? When I hear the resistance in the organization, it’s not giving me pushback, it’s giving me feedback, right? And that’s what resistance is supposed to do. And if you have those things document, if you figure this stuff out about where we’re at and what we do, then that resistance becomes a signal instead of just noise, right? And it shows me where I need to work on. It shows me how I need to incorporate people in development, change management perspective, and I’m using that business architecture as that backtra, right? So now I put the two pieces together, like I said, the different size of the coin, and now we’ve kind of tied it all together by by using them in the same context and creating one view that both people can leverage for their purpose.

Heath Gascoigne  41:17

Okay, I like how you’re saying here the sorry Heath down. I’m right. I’m taking notes here because you’re dropping a goal, the the the change, the pushback. And I think that this is, this comes from, I think, experience. So, ladies and gentlemen, you’re getting the mask glass here, the people, the newbies into the industry, you know, the the will apply it by the book. And I think that what you said is, or the frameworks, methodology, they’ll get all those what you see from the beginning process, mapping, capability, mapping, the SWAT, the five wires, all of those things, Canvas that they want to apply everything. But you’re saying, you know, appropriately and proportionately, my words and your way is, it’s the key part. And you said it quick, so ladies didn’t want to miss it. And you said, it’s not an exact science. And I think what the newbies try and do is they try to fit it into a box, and smash it into the box, although it doesn’t fit, and apply it 100% of the time. And that’s where you lose the business. It’s like when you apply it to the degree that you need to Okay? And now talk about change management, and I think this is the part where either the newbies or those that have got certain hats on, they mistaken feedback as pushback. And it’s not pushback, it’s feedback, it’s opportunity for you to take on. And how can we use that to the point you were just saying about the identifying the issues? Okay, nice one beauty. It

Jim Landgraf  42:39

really is. I mean, again, and this is kind of the opening my book, so I’ll talk about, like it talks about the storm, right? And we’re sitting there in the ocean, and

Heath Gascoigne  42:50

have you got it? Was the name of the book there, so ladies and gentlemen, can find it.

Jim Landgraf  42:54

I’ll pull it up here real quick. It’s called Slow as fast analog wisdom in a digital storm. So it’s available

Heath Gascoigne  43:04

analog wisdom in a digital storm. Okay, nice one just

Jim Landgraf  43:08

came out yesterday, so I’m still holding the proof copy. So that’s why it looks a little funny. But well anyway, right now on Amazon, yes, you can get it right now as Amazon, it’s available on a hardback as well as electronic copy.

Heath Gascoigne  43:21

So oh, well, okay, I’m going to put the show. I’m going to put that link to that in the show notes, and also the how the people get a hold of you to for anything they need to. Okay, beautiful. So

Jim Landgraf  43:31

it talks about the the noise of the storm, right? It being noise, right? And we listen to a lot of noise in our organizations. We listen a lot of of communication and conversation, but, you know, we’re often missing the signal. So the analogy is, right, we’re on this boat and the seas rocking, and the wind’s blowing and the rain’s coming down, and, you know, sails are creaking, and we’re listening to all this stuff, and we’re not paying attention to the lighthouse. The lighthouse in the distance is the signal, right? That’s what’s trying to tell us where to go and what direction. But we’re so focused on the noise that we don’t and again, you know, it’s the whole one of my favorite ones is, you know, we want to be customer centric, like everyone’s the voice of the customer, right? The reality is, is that the voice the customer is so drowned out by the voice of internal competition, right? Is that we’re competing so hard between marketing and sales and finance and bi and it and all this stuff to try to do what’s right for the customer, but we never stop to listen, right? And again, as an English major like you know, it reminds me of Dostoevsky demons, right, where Rivera’s coach was dwindling down in a hurry to get somewhere and hit this peasantly Right? And of course, the whole big scene is like, is she okay? Is the is Rivera Okay? And you know, she barely even notices that this person is lying in the mud, right, and and possibly dead, and it just kind of drives off, and it’s. Of that whole thing is, like, that’s kind of the customer today, right? Is that customer is that peasant that’s lying in the mud because we’re so focused on having our grand carriage and getting to our fancy balls and and doing all these things, and that’s the technology piece, right? So we want to do all this fancy stuff, and we’re leaving our customers lying, you know, hurt in the ditches. And I know it’s a pretty dark analogy, but it’s a reality.

Heath Gascoigne  45:22

And if you really feel this reality, yes, yeah, it’s,

Jim Landgraf  45:25

it’s not customer based, because if you’re competing internally, and all it’s going to take, right, in your industry is to be the one that looks up, is to be the one that rises above the nose and starts listening to the signals, right? We talk about hyper personalization, right? We talk about omnichannel and marketing, right? And it’s like, you know, I had a VP of Marketing come to me, Jim, how do I get to omnichannel? He goes, I’m doing all this technology stuff. I’m doing all this stuff. I said, Hey, how are your budgets? He’s like, they’re channel based. I’m like, until you fix that, you’ll never get on the channel. He’s like, what? I’m like, you’re incentivizing people like you go to a marketing meeting, right? And where they talk about, you know, the channels get together, you never want to be the second to last person or last one, right? Because by the time it gets to you, when you’re talking about attribution, you’ve already hit 100% so now you’re telling the business that I’m giving you more than 100% because they’ve added all, because everyone’s taking their piece of attribution. But it’s not the same, right? And it’s that same kind of concept. If you want to stay in channels, if your operating model is channel based, if your budget is channel based, all the technology in the world isn’t going to fix that, right? So you have to look at it holistically. You have to look at the analog piece of it, which is your budget, which is your operating model, which is all those pieces of the puzzle that go beyond that before you just start throwing technology at it, because you’re just going to throw money, millions of dollars, away every year to try to get to a destination that you don’t quite understand.

Heath Gascoigne  46:52

The I like how you’re saying there is basically you’re understanding your current state and not yes, you might have some forecast value stream vision in mind, but understanding what you’ve got first, getting better at it maturity before you start saying about the faces of business improvement, process improvement, automation, AI is at the end, and the digital so the digital, analog at the start, The budget, your forecasts, your current channels, your operating model. You just said to going omni channel, with different technologies, etc, is that’s the future.

Jim Landgraf  47:32

It’s a slow, as fast like, take a step back, right? Take and you know, we’re human beings, right? Human beings made made computers. Human beings made systems. Human beings made that, and we can’t take the human piece out of it, right? And even AI, right? I can sit there and I can do stuff in AI, but if I don’t have the viewpoint of that analog side of the human side of it, AI, can’t be empathetic, right? AI is sycophantic by nature, right? As most systems are, they’ll tell you what you tell them to tell you, right? So if you can’t discern between noise and reality, right? If you can’t understand that having 1000 reports when it could have two or five or 10, and I can do more with 10 than I can with 1000 right? That’s the piece of the puzzle. Like we do things because we should can, not, because we should. And that’s the problem with just jumping into the technology solution. Is that, you know, especially if it’s it based, right? It’s the whole concept of technology for technology’s sake, right? And it’s cool to be, it’s cool to be, you know, bleeding edge in certain areas, but man, if that’s your business model, it’s going to fall apart. And

Heath Gascoigne  48:43

yeah, so just a couple of great things you’re just saying here. So I’m going to this, this, the concept of slow is fast is, is doing things, let’s say thoroughly, but in order, from the foundations, basics first, to get that understanding. And you’ve talked about your producers, consumers, your business lead. You’ve got the business’s voice and considerations in there. The part about systems and technology, it will tell you what you tell it to tell you. So that is the quote of quotes, ladies and gentlemen. It is the second part where you just said, you know, you can do more of 10 reports than 100 like I’ve there’s in this space like I tried to simplify, and I think we were talking about, we know, we’re getting it down to the fundamentals, the first principles that, um, there’s only some the core questions that you want to be asking and then getting the answers for not 1000 You know, you could answer 1000 questions, if it’s helpful. And you talked about the Parkinson’s Law, you know the time will expand the task experience the time you allow it. Well, you ask 1000 questions, you get 1000 answers. Well, if you ask the six suspicious specific specific questions, then you get the specific answers. So you reach

Jim Landgraf  49:58

for that. It right? If you don’t get those answers, that’s when you can that’s when you set your sale towards getting those answers right at the end of the day, right? We have to set our and again, I’m going to be a little academic here and talk about it being about the journey, right? We all think about destination, right? We all want to be at this future state, right? And which is ironic, I think, you know, ideal state is a better way of thinking it than future state, because future state is just tomorrow, right? It’s tomorrow is a different state than it is today, right? Whether it’s good or bad, is, is, is irrelevant in that context, right? So we think ideal state, we have a North Star. We have that lighthouse in the future, in the distance. Now, as a business, we probably will never get to that lighthouse. And that’s okay. It’s about the journey, right? It’s about getting the journey and understanding the journey and learning from the journey. Right? Again, I’m going to throw out a literary references, candy, bolts, candy, right? He goes through there searching for quinine, like, hey, you know what? I gotta get her. She’s the most beautiful thing. I love her so much. She’s a destination, right? And along the way, like they go through a help to try to find her, but they realize, when they get there, right, that it’s not what they thought it was going to be, and they realize that the journey is the important thing. And you know what he says at the end of the book is, let us cultivate our garden, right? And that’s, to me, one of the most powerful senses at the end of a book is let us cultivate our garden, because that’s what we’re trying to do here, is cultivate our garden, right? It’s our garden. Yes, it’s our soil. We need to get our hands dirty. We need to get it done, and we need to have a purpose. A garden has a purpose, right? We’re not just turning soil. We’re making something. We’re growing something, we’re building something. And so if we realize the journey is where it’s about. We give ourselves the ability to fail. We give ourselves some leeway, right? We give ourselves a safety net to say, Hey, it’s okay if we fail a little bit, because we have things in place. We have this liminal layer that we can go back to refer to, to help us get better the next time, so we don’t fail the same way twice. And I think that’s the difference. We can fail 10 times, but if we feel the same way 10 times, we failed ourselves, right? And I think that’s kind of what this architecture, piece of it, this, this, you know, this liminal layer, this piece of the puzzle that that’s missing a lot of places, and it’s not, I don’t want to pretend it’s more important, right? If I think about a race car going around track, all four wheels are super important. There’s not one wheel that’s more important than the other four three, but if you take one of them off, and if you try to run with three wheels, you’re not going to do very well, you’re not going to go very fast, and it’s not going to be very safe. And so I’m not suggesting that we make one of the wheels more important than the other. I’m just suggesting that we use all four wheels on our car, right? Okay, architecture is one of those wheels, right? Architecture is definitely one of those. And it’s the wheel that sometimes it’s the spare tire, which is better than nothing, and sometimes it’s just missing. And the beauty of architecture too, and in every organization, right? It’s the necessity. It’s a need, but you don’t need to hire it all the time, right? And, you know, you and I can talk about this is that, you know, fractional architecture is a thing. It’s a real thing, and it’s an it’s a powerful thing, right? Because most organizations, especially mid sized ones, that are trying to find their rhythm and find their way like they’re not going to go and hire a bunch of architects, right? A business architects, right? But they still need it. So the availability of fractional architecture, the availability because, again, we are the caretakers for that, that vacation home, right? And we can scale, and we can take care of multiple I can take care of multiple vacation homes simultaneously, because I don’t have to live there either, right? I can go mow the lawn at five of them during the course of the week, right? I run my landscaping business. I’m not just doing my own lawn, right? I can do others. And so there’s, there’s options out there for people to be able to go, and there’s frameworks out there, like yours and stuff that people can look at it. And again, you need a guided tour. This isn’t something that most organizations could just jump into, right? They have to have a tour guide a little bit, or a photographer, right? Let’s map your organizations, figure out what it looks like, and then you just need a tour guide, right? And there’s different levels of that. But again, put all four wheels on the car and you’ll be much more successful, and you’ll be much smoother, and you’ll have a better chance of winning.

Heath Gascoigne  54:21

Yep. Okay. And then I like you saying it’s not one will. It’s more important than the other. You need all of them. And then they play a different role. And said it will spare tie there, the make sure on the caption, playback case the audience missed it is the the the ideal state versus the future state. I think that was they could have been missed there. That’s fantastic. So, yeah, it might not achieve the future state. That’s when you start to see it’s in the journey, the journey to get there. And that journey is given that liminal layer you said of about creating the safe space. And so I think this is the part where organizations. Probably haven’t got that part, right? Is it? They don’t create that, say, space. And it is about, don’t fail. And it’s like, you know, if you fail, failure is bad. No, that you just said, I quote you. You said it’s okay to fail, as long as you don’t fail twice on the same thing. And so, so, yep, and so fantastic, that one. And the the fractional architecture is like, you bang on, that’s exactly right. You don’t need architects there for all the time. You know they, they will. Might start the tour, and let’s go. This is what you need to do. And then do the, what was the term you used? There is a caretaker. The caretaker, you don’t own the home, you don’t live there, but you’re, you’re coming in for the maintenance to see you’re still on track. That is great. Then it sort of comes back to the first thing in the introduction where you said the cartographer. And so that’s a you have well described the role of the cartographer. Fantastic. Okay, so now the the last part of, I think I’ve got that right. The last part is the third part of the of the of the episode is having now done this in an honors in English, if I got there at the mark, the honors in English, the the practitioner of a decade in in leadership roles as business owner and now into your cartographer, also now published author. If you could do it all again, what would you do different

Jim Landgraf  56:18

man? That is, you know, it’s interesting because I am a firm believer in the journey, and so I’m always kind of being introspective and saying, hey, you know, what can be better? What can be different? How can I improve? And I think if I was going to, you know, put it down in just a few bullet points, I think when I first started off, I tried too hard to get people to believe in business architecture instead of belief in the intent, right? So I pushed process, I pushed theory, I pushed framework, instead of pushing value right. So really kind of understanding the value of it, and it took me a little while to realize the value of it. I knew intrinsically, like, hey, there’s important stuff to do here, but being able to to communicate the value of it, the value story is like, you know, being able to sit there and say, Hey, if you want to spend 8 million on a Salesforce implementation, I can save you a million and a half if you have business architecture up front, because the discovery time, time to value, time to decision, is a lot shorter, and it’s going to cost a lot less money, and the ROI is going to be faster, right? Your time of value is going to be ongoing and better. But being able to articulate that wasn’t available. I think the other part of it is looking at it just from the, you know, the kind of, the the nostalgic version, right? Of like, hey, you know what? Let’s, you know, Kumbaya, let’s, let’s get all together and do this. And I think really kind of understanding that, that, you know, it has to be, you have to meet people where they’re at, right? You can’t drag everybody three steps. It’s like the maturity thing. If you’re a two, I’m not going to take you to a five tomorrow. We’re going to do a two and a half, then a three, then a three and a half, so on and so forth. And so you have to think about it in steps, and you can’t be too far ahead of the thing. So I think the other piece of it is really just kind of, you know, being, I call it, listening to the business, right? Really, kind of taking a step back and taking your own predispositions and your own thoughts and subjectivity out of it, and saying, you know, what really does the business need? What does the customer need? And the voices, right? There’s three voices in a business. The only three that should matter is the customer, the company and compliance. And if you’re listening to other voices than that, are you really hearing what’s going on? Are you just getting resistance and just getting noise instead of actually getting a signal, right? And so, you know, that’s one of the things that took me a little while to get to. And again, also, you know, letting things die naturally, right? I tried to resuscitate whether it be a framework, whether it be a process, whether it be this or that. Too often, I think, in my career, and I’m like, oh, let’s do CPR on this. This, this ocean cannery matrix, right? Because I’m sure it’s going to work for you. You know, sometimes they don’t work. Sometimes they’re just not the right tool. And, you know, it’s okay to let it die. And, yeah, you know, I don’t say abandon too quickly, but I think sometimes you have to understand when it’s time to just, you know, put it in the corner and let it die. Yep, all right, okay, there’s

Heath Gascoigne  59:31

a great system going to play back to you so no one’s missed that one. So the first one is about intent. So you maybe like the old, not saying the old school, but the more those that want to apply the framework to the letter, which are probably going to get a lot of calls about, is it not about like I, we yesterday, I wrote a book and about business architecture, but it’s not actually about business architecture. It’s about the application to achieve an outcome of business. Information. So I don’t really talk about business transformation. I talk about, as you’re saying, the journey to get you to the outcome they want. So so there’s a great learning. Therefore, not only juniors, but seniors in the practice there about the value, there to communicate the value. And so the things you’re talking about, if you did business architecture, early, early in the piece. You know your system, you want to permit that you’ll get the time to value quicker, your ROI faster. Okay, so the first one is about the value. Second is the classic, which is great and glad you’re saying it, and great to hear it is the meet people where they are, and it’s then understand there’s a process and maybe, and what you’re saying is that you are taking people through the process. Tell them there is a process, so not jumping to the end, like taking through the process, thinking steps, I think you said. And then the third one is, listen to the business and your ladies and gentlemen, if you miss it, the three C’s you said, is the customer, the company, and compliance, those are the main three voices. And if you’re not, there might be and to the title of the book, you might be talking or listening too much to the noise, but not the signal. And the last one is that letting things die naturally. And then so if it’s like slinging a dead horse and like, the thing is dead, it’s dead, you know, trying to revive it. It’s like it might be better off just to let it die naturally. All right, did I get that right?

Jim Landgraf  1:01:29

I think so. I mean, yeah, of course. You know, I can, I can sit there and we can wax philosophical for hours more, but yes, at the end of the day, right? I mean, we learn from our mistakes. We learn from what we do, and, you know, I guess I can leave it with, you know, when I wrote my book and when you read my book, if you read my book, right, it’s not about finding answers there. It’s about finding questions. It’s about finding questions for yourself, about, like, how can I do this? How can I apply this? How can I get this going? And does this really make sense to me? And not from a, like, you know, practical sense, but from a from a more, you know, theoretical sense, like, you know, where am I? I don’t want to get into an existential thing, but the end of the day, like we should be looking for questions in our approach and not answers, because the answers will become self evident with those questions, and with our ability to question ourselves and think about things in ways that we haven’t thought about before, right? And kind of remember, most importantly, to maintain our humanity, right, and that that, you know, we are the bosses of the business, not the other way around, right? And we are not the boss. The tools don’t boss us, right? The tools do a lot of our work for us, but they always have to be pointed in the right direction, and it’s our job and our duty to make sure that happens.

Heath Gascoigne  1:02:44

It’s a great one. That’s a great quote there to finish off. There Jim about tools aren’t the boss of us. And I see that is where, if it’s a particular framework or methodology, or someone has come in and said, we’re going to do it a particular way, and they sober now bewitted to that approach, that it’s like, well, appropriately and proportionally, that’s the way you’re supposed to apply, right? But they’ve forgotten that, and they’re caught up, and probably what you said the beginning the noise, they caught up in the noise, as opposed to listen to the signal. Alrighty. Ladies Gentlemen, thank you much, Jim, all the way from the USA. We’ll wrap it up there. Great job. Now to people, get hold of you. I’ll put your LinkedIn contact details in the in the show notes, as well as to get the book hot off the press, just released yesterday, so you’re getting this is there’s new as new. So when this will come out, hopefully not too long, in a week or two, we’ll post it up there. I’ll tag you. Do what you want, share, team, network um and but they’ll the show notes in the on the actual episode itself, so they can get a hold you, either it’s going to be from on the website, on YouTube, or any one of the podcast channels that it’s listed on.

Jim Landgraf  1:03:54

Well, thank you for having me. It’s been a blast.

Heath Gascoigne  1:03:56

Let’s do it again. My pleasure, my friend, my pleasure. We will do it again. We’ll do it again. Well, maybe when the book number two is coming out, you’re going to go a little bit of a exclusive that there is. It’s on the way. It’s in, it’s in, in draft. We’re working on it in the background.

Jim Landgraf  1:04:12

There we go. Yeah, I’ll type it in while we’re talking.

Heath Gascoigne  1:04:16

Hey, alrighty, Jim. Thank you very much. Enjoy the rest of your weekend. Thank you. You too. Okay, see you. Bye, bye.