What's the Constraint You Don't Know You Have?

What if the thing holding you and your organisation back isn't a market problem, a resource problem, or even a people problem — but a thinking problem you can't yet see?

This week's guest, Angela Montgomery, has spent three decades helping leaders discover exactly that. As author of The Human Constraint and co-founder of Intelligent Management, she brings together the work of W. Edwards Deming and Eliyahu Goldratt into a practical framework for leading in complexity.

In this conversation, Angela and Gerry explore what it means to run an organisation as a living system, why the assumptions we don't question become the constraints we can't escape — and what it actually takes to think differently as a leader.

And, you could be one of 10 lucky listeners who will receive a special offer from Angela. Details in the conversation.

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Transcript

Welcome And Core Leadership Premise

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to Leading People with me, Jerry Murray. This is the podcast for HR leaders, LD professionals, and senior leaders who want to bring out the best in themselves and the people around them. Every other week I sit down with leading authors, researchers, and practitioners for deep, honest conversations about what great leadership actually looks like in practice. And how your own mindset, behavior, and presence shape everything around you. If you want thinking that challenges you, tools you can use, and conversations worth returning to, you're in the right place.

SPEAKER_01 0:49

Always start with your own thinking. Always start with what are the assumptions that I am making? What is it that's keeping me stuck? What is it I'm not seeing? And that cannot be an abstract question. You need a method. So I would really uh love people to understand that there is a method that they can learn, and they root we really all need to learn to upgrade our human interaction and our human thinking skills to be able to go forward and flourish uh in this current climate.

SPEAKER_00 1:22

That's this week's guest, Angela Montgomery, author of The Human Constraint, systems thinker, and someone who has spent three decades helping leaders discover that one of the biggest constraints in any organization isn't the structure, the strategy, or the technology. It's us. In today's conversation, we explore why so many organizations are still stuck in ways of thinking that no longer serve them, what it really means to lead in a world of complexity, and why that assumption keeping you stuck might be your greatest opportunity. So let's dive right in.

Angela’s Journey From Arts To Systems

SPEAKER_00 1:59

Angela Montgomery, welcome to Leading People.

SPEAKER_01 2:02

Hi, Jerry, it's great to be here. Very happy to share about our work at Intelligent Management. Fantastic. And you're coming in from which part of the world today? Yes, I'm in Ottawa, the capital of Canada, and where spring has finally arrived.

SPEAKER_00 2:19

Great, great. And uh I do detect that you're you're you're not a Canadian. Uh and maybe that gives us an opportunity before we get into the substance of your work, and of course the book that you wrote uh a while back. Uh maybe please give my listeners an insight into your own journey from I believe literature and theatre and then research and into the work you do today around system thinking and management. That's a pretty pretty long journey. And were there any epiphany moments along the way? Aha moments which were oh yeah.

SPEAKER_01 2:54

Well, it has indeed been a long journey, Jerry. Um, I am in Ottawa, Canada, and I am in fact Canadian now. I am a British Canadian. Um I and my partners became citizens uh in 2018 of Canada. Uh the uh king is uh currently visiting our continent, and uh we are in fact all subjects of uh of his majesty here in Canada. Um but I was born and grew up in London, and um I was educated all the way through from my um high school to bachelor's to PhD in London. Um and uh from there I uh began uh to develop my interest in overcoming artificial barriers, which in my case was between art and science. You know, in the UK we grow up and we're educated in silos, and you have to make the choice am I going to do arts or am I gonna do science at a certain point? And um, that is quite limiting. Um, and I discovered by visiting and then living in Italy, for example, that there are countries where kids are educated all the way through in different subjects. So this kind of silo thinking it permeates so much of our lives and our institutions. Um, but I began to be interested in why do we see certain things as separate when they're really not?

SPEAKER_00 4:27

Yeah, yeah, that's a very I I kind of like the framing around the um the educational background. I think certain late Sir current Ken Robinson would have been uh happy to hear that you were exploring the artist's. I I had the I've had the privilege, my two youngest girls uh went to a Rudolf Steiner school, which sometimes has like Waldorf school. Uh they sometimes people have perceptions of this, but I have to say, the last one is finishing now, they got the most rounded education. They they did everything from making clothes to chemistry experiments to physics and you you name it architecture, they even learned about architecture and stuff. So um, and all the kids have gone out of that school I know over the last couple of years and they've gone on to do some remarkable things from bioengineering to you name it. So it's uh interesting when you get this more um rounded education at a young age because it's not easy to make choices, you know. Even at this stage, a lot of 17, 18-year-olds don't know what to study next. And and you're being they're being asked to to figure out what what they should study so they can create a career, and they're thinking, I don't know. So it's an interesting one. But that's not what we're here to talk about. So

Why A Business Novel Works

SPEAKER_00 5:41

uh remind us about the full title of your book, um, because we're going to be unpacking this uh as we go along. Can you remember?

SPEAKER_01 5:49

Yes, well, the title of the book is The Human Constraint. And I think you can read it out because it has a long subtitle, Jerry, that the publisher wanted to add.

SPEAKER_00 6:01

How business leaders can embed continuous innovation, conflict resolution, and problem solving into daily practice. And that basically solves everything. It does indeed.

SPEAKER_01 6:14

Yes. The original title of the book, I wrote it as a web project initially, and it was downloaded in 43 countries. Um, and then as we had already published other books on our management approach with uh Routledge, um, they were interested and decided to publish my book uh as a management book in their series. But they added this subtitle, which it was completely appropriate because that is effectively what this approach is about, even though my book is a business novel, it is told as a story, but it's a story based on um case histories of ours. So instead of uh writing a business textbook, which we've already done several times, I wanted to tell a human story as we had lived through these now three decades of bringing a systemic approach to management, and I wanted people to understand and feel the action, the excitement and the emotion and the frustration of uh what it's like to bring a new perspective to business and management, um the experiences that we've had, and also the real um joy when people make breakthroughs and can adopt a new perspective in the way they work and in the way they do business and interact. So it was a wonderful opportunity to do that. And the reason why I chose the novel form is because our approach, which is a systemic approach to management and operations, uh, is based on two giants of management thinking of the 20th century. One is uh Dr. W. Edwards Deming, uh, American physicist, engineer, statistician, uh, the man who was sent to Japan after World War II and who had an incredible impact on all the Japanese industrialists there. Um, and on the work of Dr. Elia Howe Goldrat, who's an Israeli physicist who developed something called uh the theory of constraints. So we have put these two uh bodies of knowledge into one uh unified methodology, and that's what we bring to companies. Um, and Dr. Goldratt, instead of writing textbooks, uh, introduced his theory of constraints through business novels. The first one was called The Goal, and it was published in the 1980s. I don't know if you came across it in your business studies, but um, it was a huge bestseller translated into many, many languages. Um I took the baton from Dr. Goldrat uh uh with his example. Coming from a literary background, I wanted to uh use that form to communicate this way of working.

SPEAKER_00 9:12

Yeah, and um apart from himself, uh a few other noteworthy, it's interesting, a few other very well-known, noteworthy books in their day were written as novels, like The One Minute Manager was written in a little sort of story format, then Who Moved My Cheese in these kind of books, which somehow seem to do quite well because I guess this there's there's something about a story as well, and I guess it makes it easier. I'm just thinking out loud a little bit, but the systemic aspect of a story, you know, you bring so many things, you connect so many relationships when you tell a story, but not in a necessarily linear, nodal way. You're you're bringing plots in and bringing things in and out and stuff like that. Okay, so you've been helping organizations, you've been referring to it now a few times, that you've been helping organizations uh adopt a systemic approach since the mid-90s.

Complexity Makes Silos Fail

SPEAKER_00 10:00

But when you look at the challenge of leading people today, what do you think leaders still most often misunderstand when they treat organizations as separate parts rather than an interconnected whole?

SPEAKER_01 10:14

Well, the fact is, uh Jerry, that today we live in a world of complexity. What does that mean? Not just that things are complicated. Um scientifically, it means that we live within a level of interdependencies that has never existed before. And we experience that in our everyday life. So we are all interconnected, and we live it through the internet, we live it through international trade, we live it through, sadly, international conflict. Um, all these things uh demonstrate to us on a daily basis how interconnected we now are. Um, that was not the case a hundred years ago, and yet so many organizations are still organized and they're still managing themselves as if they were a hundred years ago. So we still have so often the top-down hierarchy, the company divided up into business functions, which inevitably leads to silos. But the intrinsic nature of work in any organization is a flow. So if you introduce business functions, if you have silos, that flow just keeps getting interrupted. And the performance of the whole organization is sub-optimized. So for leadership, the implications are huge because we need to understand that to lead today, we must see and understand the organization the way Dr. Deming taught us back in the 1950s, as a network of interdependent components that work together to achieve a goal. Now, when we have that understanding, then it doesn't make sense anymore to think of top-down hierarchies or leadership as anything to do with control. Uh, leadership is to do with guiding the interactions of the company in the best possible way to achieve a common goal. So in fact, Dr. Deming said that a leader is somebody who has a theory and uh a vision, and their job is to communicate that theory and vision and so that people can execute on it. And when we say theory, that is something that in the uh Anglo-Saxon world has a very people think of that as a negative thing. Um Einstein said there is nothing as practical as a good theory. If we don't have a theory behind what we're doing, we don't know what we're doing, basically. Right. Right?

unknown 12:48

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 12:48

So the leader's job is to have that very clearly in mind. But I would say also today, they we really need to understand what an organization inherently is. It's not about superimposing some trendy idea or some fluffy idea, oh, we're all connected. It's about understanding that um any organization is a system, is a network. Um that's what it is. That's just fact. But we're still lagging behind in, and business schools are not helping in this particularly, uh, in the way that we tend to organize and operate companies.

SPEAKER_00 13:29

We'll be right back after this short break. If

Subscribe And Join The Community

SPEAKER_00 13:36

you're finding value in this conversation, please subscribe wherever you listen to your podcasts, and perhaps share this episode with a colleague who'd find it useful. Word of mouth is how good podcasts grow. And if you'd like to be part of the conversation beyond the podcast, I'd love to have you in the leading people community, a growing group of HR leaders, LD professionals, and experienced leaders who gather regularly for live sessions, discussions, and the kind of thinking you've been hearing today. You'll find the details in the show notes.

Flow First Not Organisational Shapes

SPEAKER_00 14:14

Okay, Angela, and uh as you were talking there and you were talking about this hierarchical silo type organization, I'm curious. There's quite a lot starting to emerge around this notion of a diamond organization, um, which uh seems to suggest its own implications where you're going to have even less managers, you're just going to have a lot of people, the diamond part in the middle. And this is affecting the seems to be affecting the even idea that you bring young people in as interns. And this is the term that has been being floated around this last few months with the whole impact of AI and stuff like that. Have you any immediate thoughts on the how that might affect the systemic nature of an organization?

SPEAKER_01 15:04

What needs to be present, Jerry, is a real understanding of the idea of flow. Uh and so any kind of artificial shape, with whether it's a diamond or a rhomboid or a rectangle, is going to be missing the point. Because we need to see, first of all, what is the goal of the organization and what are the internal processes and interdependencies that need to be there and the competencies that need to be present in order to transform the inputs that come into the organization from customers, from the market, uh, from um competition that come into the organization need to be processed and that need to go out into the organization and then out into the market, and there needs to be feedback from the market back into the organization again. That is what matters. So any attempt to put any other kind of shape on it is kind of missing the point. And then I have to add to this that thanks to Dr. Goldrat's intuition, um, this is another element of system science which helps us uh to manage organizations, every system has a constraint. So we need to be conscious of that because a constraint is something which is limiting the performance of the organization. And we can actually use that. It sounds negative, but we can actually use that if we strategically choose the constraint, and uh we use that as a leverage point to uh create the interdependencies in a way that they subordinate to the constraint, um, which again sounds negative, it's not, uh, that they allow the constraint to work to its fullest, because this is what um gives the whole system the possibility to perform uh and to maximize the output. So um with these two fundamental understandings, one an organization is a system, uh, second, every system has a constraint, that's really what we need to know as leaders uh of how we can really help the work of the organization to reach its goal. And if I may add, if you don't do that, um then adding any kind of technology, if you haven't figured out what your flow is, what the processes are, what the interdependencies are, what the competencies are that you need, then any kind of um technology that you add is not going to help you. Uh you don't want to automate things which are not working, right?

SPEAKER_00 17:46

No. Um and uh if I'm not mistaken, uh a lot of the early work on the constraints, theory of constraints fed into the Macy conferences, um, where there were some very prominent thinkers who came together and realized that this was something that many disciplines held in common. And there was this whole idea of feedback loops that came out of that. And could you maybe because I think with flow, you're also getting feedback uh throughout the flow process. Maybe explain a little bit how that works in an organizational context and uh what what leaders and what people can do to pay attention to these feedback loops.

SPEAKER_01 18:26

Yes. We want to be continuously listening to uh what is happening. So if we think of the organization as a network of conversations, which it is, we want those conversations to flow. And one of the ways that we can do that is by using something which uh Dr. Goldratt developed called the conflict cloud. This is a systemic thinking process where any time we bump into uh a blockage, um it could be a disagreement, it could simply be a problem that we don't know how to solve. Um, whatever it is that's getting in the way of our processes flowing smoothly, um we can use this thinking process to uh overcome it. So this is one way of listening internally, but we also need to be listening to the customer all the time. So that means having a continuous conversation, understanding what their, as Goldrak calls them, undesirable effects are, and how we as the supplier uh can help overcome that. Um, because we always want to be continuously improving the way that we satisfy the customer.

SPEAKER_00 19:41

I had

Theatre Lessons On Presence And Assumptions

SPEAKER_00 19:42

a question here about um your early background in, I believe you had some background in professional acting. Is that correct? Yes. Yes. No, no, the reason why I'm asking this is because I'm quite a big fan of improv. And um one one of the interesting things that uh I'm not an expert in it, but I I've done a little bit of workshops in it, and I is is that you you have to respect the the feedback loops and the flow in in that context. And I was just wondering um how that has shaped the way you think about people and organizations, that early experiences you had in theatre and literature.

SPEAKER_01 20:19

Well, it's that's a good a good point. I hadn't never thought of it in those terms. Um when I left university, I I went to Queen Mary College at London University, and I was in a year where we did so much theatre, and I had wonderful um co-students who were um who several of us decided to go into professional theatre, so I went to drama school and began on that career. Um, and certainly when you are live on stage, um I never did improv, but uh, when you are even use using lines that you've learned, the presence of the audience um changes everything. And it's like we always say in rehearsals when you get to dress rehearsal and things don't feel right, we need the audience, right? Um, because there is that communication that happens no matter what uh between who's on stage and the audience. Um so that is something certainly to be aware of. However, um, my personal experience of um theatre was uh was something that took me into a bit of an epiphany moment uh where I was standing outside the American Embassy in London with a friend after coming out of an audition for a TV ad. And I think they'd asked me to do something like, I don't know, stand on a table and sing a song as if I were a toothbrush or something like that. And at that point I was in tears saying, I can't do this. And my friend said, But you're good at literature, why don't you go back to university? And I said, I can't do that, because uh how can I do theatre and um uh and uh uh do something academic. Um That was an assumption that I had. It was a mental model that was keeping me stuck. I then went on a national tour where the leading lady's partner was doing a master's while being an actor. And so real life showed me that my mental model was inaccurate. And I at that point decided to go back and do a master's and then carry on from there. With a special interest in Samuel Beckett, the Irish playwright who won a Nobel Prize. And looking into the shapes of scientific ideas in the work of Samuel Beckett. And while I was doing that research, Samuel Beckett donated a notebook from the 1930s where he had taken a whole bunch of notes on Poincaré, on maths, on physics, so it wasn't such a crazy idea. But just to say that we all get into situations where we get stuck and blocked. And it's because we make assumptions, it's because we have mental models about things. So when we can have a method, and this is what Dr. Goldratt has developed with the thinking processes, a method to examine those mental models and those assumptions, it takes us beyond that point of blockage and allows us to take the thinking to a whole new level in a systemic way.

SPEAKER_00 23:28

I have a question that comes off, probably comes off the back of that very nicely. But as just want to mention that as many of my listeners know, I I've been a professional musician all my life. And uh when you do the sound check and there's no audience, you always know that when you walk out on stage, the sound is going to be completely different. Um and I remember us used to have these conversations, and one member of the band would say, I'm fed up playing the same show that for the last three weeks. I say, Yeah, but you're not you're not playing the same audience every night. There's different people, and some of the lines work and some of the lines fall flat and stuff like this. So it was, yeah, I always think of that as you know, working in the situation rather than you know, working with what the situation was bringing, even though some of the presets were standard enough with how you did your sound checks and that.

The Cognitive Constraint And Breakthrough Method

SPEAKER_00 24:19

But the question I came to because you're talking about these mental models, and it's actually quite nice, I think, because um you talked about the complexity and interdependence of our world and and this idea that um many leaders are using outdated ways of thinking. And um why do you believe that learning to think differently has become such an urgent leadership issue now? And what does that involve? You're listening to leading people with me, Jerry Murray. My guest this week is Angela Montgomery, author of The Human Constraint and co-founder of Intelligent Management. Angela has spent three decades helping leaders see their organizations as living systems and find the method that turns their biggest constraints into breakthroughs. Coming up while learning to think differently has become one of the most urgent leadership challenges of our time. And the surprisingly practical first step anyone can take. Stay with us.

SPEAKER_01 25:28

Well, it first of all involves some humility and some patience, because we're not taught to think. It's not something that we get when we go to school, right? We are taught a whole bunch of things. Um, but the ability to take a step back and see a situation in a different way is uh is a skill that we really, really need to learn these days, um, more than ever. With artificial intelligence coming onto the scene, the ability for our human intelligence to develop and expand has never been so urgent. And fortunately, um we have ways to do that. There are methods for that. So uh I think that it's um in terms of uh leaders in organizations, um, for them themselves to uh embark on this path is very important uh because we don't want to be limited by um assumptions that we're making, and we all have them, we need to have them. Assumptions are uh what keep us functioning. We need to, if I open the front door, I need to know that there is uh you know ground outside when I put my when I step out. Um but there are so many assumptions that are simply there because we have never taken the time to examine them, but they're not serving us anymore. So we need to be continuously involving, evolving the way we think, and so our actions then can become much more effective.

SPEAKER_00 26:59

And of course, assumptions and biases and things like that are it's our brain's way of being efficient in many ways, it's the shortcuts. And at the same time, I suppose something that you're probably probably not trying to create here is that I mean, not all I would advocate that all not all all thinking is useful in some context. And so we're not advocating that people have to be totally changed. We're probably talking about enhancing and expanding your range of how you think about situations. Is that where we're headed with this?

SPEAKER_01 27:33

Exactly. It's um it's a way of opening the mind to possibilities that we would not have seen if we didn't go through uh this passage. So the beauty of what Dr. Goldret has developed is that there are precise steps that we can take, starting from a situation where we feel stuck. We we know we can do more, we know we can achieve more, we know the market is bigger, or whatever that situation is. Um, but for some reason we can't see the way through. And so that is what uh intelligent management, our company, we have come to call the cognitive constraint. Um that's why I call my book the human constraint. Um, that is what is keeping us stuck. But like every constraint, um, as it were, the theory of constraints, it's an opportunity. We can leverage that to um do something more. So by um unveiling uh what are the connecting thoughts that take us from I'm stuck in this position, you think this, I think this, um unveiling what are the actual needs that are driving us into that, adopting that position. The needs are never in conflict, they are legitimate. And the needs have a common goal if we are part of the same uh, if we're not enemies, then we always have a common goal. Um, but in between that common goal, the needs, and our conflicting positions, there is a series of linking thoughts or assumptions or mental models that we have never verbalized unless we go through the process of doing that. So by following this method, you can uh reveal what it is, what is all the connecting tissue, if you like, behind this situation of blockage. Then, when it's out in the open, we can see that there's going to be a series of assumptions that are weak and that we can invalidate. And the process of invalidating those assumptions is what takes us to a breakthrough. So we've seen this time and again with people that we work with. So the breakthroughs can go from just solving a problem with you know, deciding whether with your spouse you want to uh renovate the kitchen or not renovate the kitchen, through to how are we going to take our company from a disastrous situation to uh to turn around. Um, that is the beauty of this uh approach. It's extremely powerful, um, it's learnable. And even beyond that, it is the a template for innovation. Because today, Jerry, it's not enough to continuously improve, you need to continuously innovate. And the beautiful thing about this is we will find, right? The more you um adopt this way of thinking, um, that as Dr. Goldrat said, and before him, uh the uh Lubovich Arebe said this, that he's a spiritual leader, the sky is not the limit. So there is uh we tend to box ourselves in with our thinking, but when we practice this idea of looking at the assumptions and finding ways to invalidate them, we will keep opening up new possibilities, new realities.

Conflict As A Path To Win Win

SPEAKER_00 30:53

So uh you I think you you nicely dealt with this possible uh um thought that m listeners might be having around well, constraints tend to be things, uh whereas as you said yourself, even your book you called it um a human constraint, didn't you? Yes. And you know, we probably first have to start thinking about what constraints we create within ourselves which are colouring or filtering our ability to process what's going on around us. Yes, uh indeed. And then you the other thing that comes out in your work is that conflict is not often what it first appears to be. And then I suppose from a systemic point of view, what uh can help leaders move from blame or polarization towards better problem solving and maybe more win-win thinking. And the world we live in today might need a little bit of this sprinkled on it, given that we I think every news story is about blame or polarization and so many things. And and we see the we see even at the time we record this, and hopefully in years to come it won't be the same, we see so much uh conflict coming off the back of that. So tell us about what conflict is not always what it appears to be. So, what how does the systemic approach or thinking approach uh help us look at these situations in a different way?

SPEAKER_01 32:27

Yeah, well, that's a great question, Jerry. And what the systemic approach helps us with is to see that we are part of a much bigger picture. We need to be able to see that our role inside a company, our company, uh what's outside our company, all these things are part of an interconnected universe. So there are no individual companies, there are supply chains. Um, and uh we need to always be looking at the bigger picture. That is what allows us to get over ourselves, as it were, and uh and to be able to take the thinking to a whole new level. Ultimately, the worldview of behind the systemic approach is a worldview of win-win, and it's a worldview, um, thanks to um what we learn in the theory of constraints, of unity. So, what we're all striving for is a level of unity that we're not experiencing today. Not as some kind of um, you know, just uh feel-good, kind of, oh, that would be nice, but even scientifically, collaboration is shown to be much more effective than competition. So we need to have that back in the back of our minds always this idea that we can achieve more unity. We can actually unveil the unity that is intrinsically there, but it gets covered up by unnecessary conflict and competition. So the zero-sum game of business that is so present is due to the inability to see that we are all in fact interconnected. Because if you knew, if you realize that, you would not be making the kind of short-term decisions that lead to polarization, that uh that don't see that we need everybody to prosper uh in order to really achieve sustainable prosperity.

SPEAKER_00 34:27

So the uh the longer-term consequences of zero sum, apart from creating polarization, what other um consequences do we need to we end up dealing with? And even from the world of geopolitics, I mean we we see uh a world that is so polarized today. Um what what is the unifying principle that is being missed here?

SPEAKER_01 34:53

That we are all part of the human race. And that nobody does things on their own. The term self-made man is totally ridiculous because nobody is self-made. We all got help from uh the society, we all uh enjoy the benefits of having roads that are paved, uh, of having lighting, of having all the things that we that we share. So we need to understand that it's by investing in our potential, it's investing in the education of children, investing in allowing people to uh do things which um which lead to more and more development, that that is where there is no limitation. We don't need to lead the leave the planet in order to progress as a human race. We need to make this planet uh somewhere that we can live together in a sustainable way. So the the zero-sum gain is not sustainable. It takes us in the direction where there is no sustainability. If we want to flourish, we have to overcome that.

SPEAKER_00 35:58

I have this image of a young teenage boy going into a room. You say, Where are you where are you going? I'm going to make myself because I want to be a self-made man. So I'm going in here. I've heard that if I go in there for a few hours, I'll come out self-made, you know. Go in a boy, I come out a man. I mean, it is a bit ridiculous, isn't it? That we we have and and we're so so many parts of society, whether it's media or whatever, they use these terms and they just bandy them around uh without really probably thinking through what they mean. I mean, one of the first things you hear when something goes wrong, first in thing a journalist will ask is who's to blame for this? Whereas that doesn't help anything because, as you know, and as you've eloquently explained, um, most of these things are flows, they're processes, there's many actors involved in many outcomes. It's never, you can very rarely attribute it to one per person doing one thing uh when you get a result, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 36:54

Yes, and that's important inside companies too, because it's never about um blaming, looking to blame somebody, it's understanding where is the system um failing us. Um, Dr. Deming famously said uh a bad system will be a good person every time. But if we're able to design and manage systems um in the ones that work well, then we can actually elevate everybody who is in that system.

Real Examples From Etiquette To Turnarounds

SPEAKER_00 37:20

Yeah, so I teach some courses, and and one of the uh one of the questions we try to minimize that people use a lot is the why question. I always say a how question might be more useful uh in some in many contexts. You know, how did this happen? Because it helps you, you know, you need an actor, something an action and something being acted upon directly or indirectly, will help you understand a problem or what has happened much better than saying who did this or why did you do this? Uh because you know it doesn't help, it just creates more problems because a person will come up with 25 excuses about, well, if I'd have known this now, if I didn't do that and this. Yeah, and so um what sort of practical examples could you share with me? Obviously, without going in breaching any confidentiality, but what sorts of practical examples can you share with my listeners where you know you went into a situation where uh the lack of a systemic uh thinking approach was holding uh a group of people or an organization back, and it took a little bit of time, but some whatever it was, an intervention or two, to help the people unlock it for themselves.

SPEAKER_01 38:30

Well, as I mentioned before, Jerry, you can apply this at any scale. Um, so whether it's um in a company where um there were problems in the office because some people's behavior in the common space was annoying other people, um, we were able to sit down and build that as a conflict cloud. Um, so it was on office etiquette. So it was a question of um what people are doing and how people are behaving now and how we would like them to behave. We built it up from there uh and found um a breakthrough for that. Um that's on a minor scale. On a major scale, um we have gone into a company where um they were literally uh about to fail. Um, and by taking them through, taking the leadership through what is called the core conflict from theory of constraints, looking at what were the undesirable effects in the reality of the company and understanding uh what the actual needs were, uh, what the real goal was, what were all the mental models and assumptions that were keeping them stuck where they were, we were able to uh find a breakthrough for them and put that into implementation. So in other examples where a company knows they want to scale, um, and uh we were able to work with the company to help them verbalize a breakthrough solution for their sector. Uh so something that nobody else had thought of, but by looking at the problems of the sector and seeing it as a systemic problem, they were able to develop that breakthrough solution and start offering a new level of service that nobody else in that sector was able to do because they everybody else was thinking of themselves as a small cog in a much bigger wheel. So, um, and that was a competency-based uh solution. So it's really um something which uh can be applied, and we have worked with all kinds of sectors from software to healthcare to um to steel to um to automation, or it really doesn't matter what the sector is uh because this is a method of thinking. My partner's a physicist, so um, they are the ones that uh that really have the handle on the hard science elements. Um for me, I never imagined that I would end up working uh in management and business at all. Um but anybody who thinks that management and business is all about numbers and spreadsheets, and they've got another thing coming because uh the it is the human um element which is always in the picture. No matter, I don't care what the situation is, I don't care how successful the company is or how famous or how wealthy, um, they are all dealing every single day with what is limiting them in the way they think um and in the way they address issues.

SPEAKER_00 41:40

Okay, uh those are great. Thanks for sharing those practical examples.

Where Leaders Should Start

SPEAKER_00 41:45

So, for a leader listening today who who maybe likes these ideas but then feels, well, look, I'm dealing with real-world pressure, competing priorities, and lots of imperfect people. Where would you suggest they begin if they want to think and lead more systemically? Actually, probably probably with the the notion of imperfect people. But anyway, where would you suggest they begin if they want to think and lead more systemically?

SPEAKER_01 42:10

Well, first of all, imperfect people, that's just people, right? So it's not it's not their fault. Um always start with your own thinking. Always start with what are the assumptions that I am making? What is it that's keeping me stuck? What is it I'm not seeing? And that cannot be an abstract question. You need a method. So I would really uh love people um to understand that there is a method um that they can learn, and they we really all need to learn to upgrade our human interaction and our human thinking skills um to be able to go forward and flourish uh in the in this current climate.

SPEAKER_00 42:53

Okay, so Angela, is there anything I should have asked you that I haven't or forgotten, or if I've forgotten to ask you that you would like to share?

SPEAKER_01 43:03

Well, um I just want to reiterate what I think are um really important and urgent things that leaders and managers need to take into consideration. Um firstly, leadership and management, um, I think these two terms are often confused, and leadership sounds more glamorous and interesting, and in fact, what we really need to be talking about is management, is how do you manage? So let's look at how you are managing the company, and then you can lead it. Um but first of all, understand that your organization is a system, is a network. You need to know how systems and networks behave and what the fundamental laws applying that apply to that are, so that you can manage and understand much better what you're doing on a day to day basis. Um, you need to understand the notion of constraint because it is affecting. Your system, whether you're aware of it or not. You need to understand the concept of variation, which is what Dr. Deming taught us about in a very important way, which is all human activities are affected by variation. We need to understand it, measure it, manage it in order to improve what we're doing. And we need to upgrade our thinking because the sky really is not the limit if we're able to see that, to understand it, and have a way of achieving it.

SPEAKER_00 44:34

So those loads of takeaways there. Is there a consolidated takeaway that you would say to people?

SPEAKER_01 44:43

The understanding that our human constraint, our cognitive constraint, what keeps us stuck, is in fact our greatest opportunity and our greatest advantage because we can always be looking at that, questioning it, and coming through it into bigger and greater things.

Resources Plus Listener Offers

SPEAKER_00 45:02

Okay, Angela. So coming to the end, um where can listeners, my listeners, learn a lot more about your work? Um also get in contact with you, because I'll put some things in the show notes, but I'd like you to tell them about how to a bit more about how they can learn about your work, how they can get in contact with you, and I believe you might have something special to offer some lucky listeners.

SPEAKER_01 45:27

Yes, indeed. Well, uh please come and visit our website, which is www.intelligentmanagement.ws, uh, to read more about our work. And um you can um visit uh that and you can find all of our books. Uh my new book, The Human Constraint, is available on Amazon and all the major channels. And for um the people from this uh podcast that contact me on LinkedIn, I would be delighted to give them uh a guide to the thinking processes from the theory of constraints so they can start learning about that and applying it. And um, I'm also offering for the listeners who contact me, the first 10, um, a 20% discount on a new program that I've developed. I'm calling it the Sekhel program, um, which is uh to uh learn one-on-one an introduction to these systemic thinking processes. Um, because I really think this is something that individuals, not just groups and companies, need to be able to learn.

SPEAKER_00 46:35

So, Angela, thanks for sharing your insights, tips, and wisdom with me and my listeners here today.

SPEAKER_01 46:42

It's been a pleasure, Jerry. Thank you very much.

Final Takeaways And Closing

SPEAKER_00 46:47

And that's it for this episode of Leading People. If you're new here and enjoyed today's conversation, I'd love it if you subscribed. It's the best way to make sure you never miss an episode. And if you are a regular listener, the best recommendation is always a personal one. So, if this episode made an impact on you, please share it with a friend or colleague. It might just be the best thing they listen to this week. Until next time.