A sixth sense for project management | Tres Roeder | TEDxCWRU

[Music] okay I want to thank first everyone who put this together this has been a very well organised event so another round of applause please for the organizers and thanks to all of you for being here today and investing in your future as you may be aware this world has opportunities to do better and you are part of that as you study here at this famous institution and develop yourself you're preparing to go out there and make a difference in this world to change things change is what I have done professionally for the last thirty

years or so and I decided to focus on this because I wanted to in my own way find an opportunity to make this world a little bit better and in order to take us from where we are today to where we need to be that meant becoming a student of change and there's no better place to talk about change than right here at Case Western Reserve University because in the 1800's you graduated the first african-american student in the United States you also graduated six of the eight first female physicians in the United States right here

at this institution and if you're watching this online and you're not part of this institution you need look no further than your local community and you will find important positive change that has occurred in your area as well so that's what we're going to talk about today we're going to talk about as you go out there into the world how can you be a part of positive change what is it that you can do to make a difference and I'd like to go back 17 years I'm a consultant with one of the big strategy consulting

firms and we're working on a project for a fortune 500 organization and we have about 30 or 40 consultants packed into a very small room with no windows this is what you have to look forward to and we went through looking at the data and the facts and we created charts and we analyzed and we wanted this to be done in secret there was a problem though because this room had a glass window where people would come by and they'd look in the window and they'd want to see what we were doing so we came

up with a solution that involved paper and some duct tape and took care of that so this was symbolic of our process there we said in private coming up with our solution when the day came to present to the executives our senior leadership met with the executive senior leadership and they said here's what we've come up with we have these amazing facts and charts and PowerPoint slides and this is the answer this is the fact-based answer for your organization now some of these recommendations that we had were diametrically opposed with how these executives had viewed

the world for the last 10 20 or 30 years so how do you suppose this worked for us here you have a group of executives who have a mindset and we come in and say no that's all wrong here's a different way of thinking about the world do you think they said oh well based on your facts and your slides I'm going to change my thinking just right here anything else you need for me no that's not what happened at all instead they they push back on us they challenged us so I'll share with you

the framework that I've learned along the way that has changed how I think about everything and as you as a rising star get ready to take on your piece of change in the world this framework will guide you on how you can make the world a better place it all starts with awareness if you are to be a leader of change you need to be aware of yourself of other people of the situation and the environment now if you're involved in a change initiative you are naturally going to have some sorts of documents and plans

with your facts and your information and that's important because if we are to make this world better we need to know that the change we're trying to make is actually going to be a positive change that's where the facts come in but when it comes to actually changing people it's going to be a very different conversation so for your awareness focus not only on those facts but save part of your attention to focus on the people and their nonverbal behavior how are they moving their face in their hands and their arms and if it's online

and you can only hear them or if you're listening to them on the phone what's their word choice what's their tone of voice what's their speed of voice all of these are going to be important clues for you now as you become more aware there's going to be a lot of information that will be coming in and you'll need a tool to sort through all of that information and that tool is what we call whole body decisions whole body decisions is using your brain and your heart and your gut together to make the best decisions

the US military has done research on this and they've found that if you use your brain specifically your frontal cortex exclusively to make decisions you're likely to get it right about 70% of the time now if you're a soldier in the field 70% when there's bullets flying doesn't feel like a very good number they've found that in order to increase your probability of success you also need to listen to your heart now your heart is the strongest electromagnetic force in your body your heart communicates with your brain electromagnetically in fact now with sensitive scientific equipment

we can pick up the signals from your heart six to eight feet away so look who's sitting within six to eight feet of you right now and ask yourself if you're communicating electromagnetically with each other your gut has cells has thinking cells that are no different than the cells in your frontal cortex there actually have been medical doctors and others who have studied the biochemistry of your gut and it turns out that there's important information coming from your gut so here's what a whole body decision might look like let's say you come to the fork

in the road and you can go to the left or you can go to the right so you clear your mind take a deep breath and you visualize yourself going to the left perhaps you feel anxiety have thoughts and questions in your mind your heart rate picks up your guy your gut tightens now clear your mind again and visualize going down the path to the left or to the right now you let's say your your mind clears up your heart rate slows down you don't feel the tightness in your gut anymore for whatever reasons this

is your body telling you that the path to the right is a better path for you so you're leading change you've become very aware you've made whole body decisions but now if you're to lead you need followers and in order to create fouler followers you need to be clear in your communication and by clear communication I mean the idea that's in my mind is the same as the idea that's in your mind when I communicate it to you and vice versa all right now I'm going to ask you a question here and I need a

volunteer what's what's your name ma'am Michelle all right Michelle has agreed to bring everyone over to her house for a party later tonight after the TEDx is done so round of applause for Michelle yes let's say Michelle lives about 20 minutes away from here and I need to communicate to you directions to her house now forget for a moment that you just want the address to type in your phone and that'll tell you how to get there let's assume that's not an option I can give you directions in one of three ways I can give

you printed directions turn left here go mile turn right there I can give you a map you are here Michelle is there here's the path to get there or I can talk you through it so the question is which of those three do you prefer printed directions the map or I talked you through it so by a show of hands who wants printed directions okay that's perhaps a third of the room who would like a map so are visual people excellent and who wants me to talk you through it always always the smallest group but

there are always people who feel that way which one of those three groups is right which one is right it's not a rhetorical yes this gentleman says number three because I'm assuming you are number three right are you're saying number one you're saying number three is it possible that all of you are right so what does this mean if I'm leading change now I need to send things in writing I need to communicate it graphically I need to talk to you individually or as a group that sounds like a lot of time but of course

that's what we need to do if you are to successfully lead people through change we all process information differently and you need to do all of those things if there's one thing I've learned if there's one thing that I can leave with you today about leading change it's a change is not a straight line things don't go according to plan we need to be able to adapt four years ago when I started my term on the city council in Shaker Heights I had committed to bring a teen Center to the community and the first thing

I did is I pulled together a group of stakeholders to help me develop this this teen Center and it became clear that some of these people were very skilled at telling me all the reasons why it wasn't going to work now if you're going to lead change you need to surround yourself with a group of people who can believe it's going to happen now they need to be optimistic and they need to be realistic but we need to believe it's going to happen so I needed to change that group and it also turned out the

first location we looked at didn't work or the second or the third or the fourth we needed to adapt on our location I also learned at least in our community if you want to get anything done you see I'm the legislative branch I needed support from the executive branch so I needed to recruit one of our directors who ended up midway through the project taking leadership over this and being the face of it so if you were to lead change you need to constantly adapt and as you can see here we have a chameleon and

I kind of a chameleon who adapts to the environment around you but you also see at the center of the chameleon a circle that's the core you must stay true to your core vision of what you're trying to do and your ethics and your morals that is non-negotiable and this is the art of change is knowing when to adapt and when not to and if you're ever unclear unclear and when to do those two the way you can resolve that is quite simply by making a whole-body decision the fifth discipline is diplomacy as a leader

of change you should not be evaluated on whether or not there is conflict conflict is going to come along for the ride because you are doing something different than what's been there before was there conflict when Martin Luther King was involved with civil rights of course there was does that mean he was doing something wrong it means he was pushing the envelope it means he was pushing us forward so you should be evaluated not on whether or not you create some conflict now you don't want too much of it but it's going to happen you

should be evaluated as a leader unchanged on what you do when the inevitable conflict happens do you freeze do you run the other direction do you throw your hands up and say this is really hard or do you figure it out and I'll give you one hint here people tend to process change across one of three ways of thinking rational emotional political so your rational person is going to be interested in the facts in the data and so on your emotional person is going to have an emotional reaction to what you're doing it's not about

the facts it's about how they feel about your change and political has to do with what they think this change means to their proximity to people they care about to their influence to their prestige and so on rational emotional and political the final discipline is persistence now this is a final discipline for a reason we all know people who are persistently wrong so persistence in and of itself is not a virtue but if you've been aware if you've made whole body decisions if you've clearly communicated those decisions adapted when you need to and been diplomatic

and how you've managed it now it's time to be persistent and to stick to what you're trying to do now share with you one piece of research that was done on this which I find somewhat amusing this was research done on married couples and they found out these are newly married couples and the researchers found out what made them angry with the each other and then they brought them into the lab and watched him and videotaped them arguing with each other now who signs up for this research key imagine getting his phone call yeah yeah

hey how do you there's some guy in the phone or what's a videotape us arguing what do you think yeah we're free Sunday let's go for it why not so these people come in and here you have partner a say - partner B you know what based on these facts you're wrong in fact you're an idiot and if I tell you all of this information a b c and d this is why you're wrong now is partner B likely to say ah well you know I'm kind of emotionally upset because you called me an idiot

but your facts are correct so I think I'm going to change my mind is that what's likely to happen or its partner begin to say no yeah I'm gonna come back at you and of course this is what the research shows when we challenge people's opinions even if we have the facts on our side they are much more likely to dig in their heels than they are to change so when I talk about persistence this means knowing when to push knowing when to sprint and knowing when to back off each change effort is going to

have its own rhythm to it and you'll need to know how to play that otherwise you actually might be making things worse if you're pushing too hard in closing as you look to the way you can make this world a better place as your star is rising if you can take these six disciplines that we've talked about today and improve upon them within yourself and take this as your own personal mission not only will you help this institution achieve what it's capable of but you will you will help your future employer reach new heights your

community your state your country the world will be better and we need this from you because there are things that we need to do better as a world and we're counting on you to help us with that I thank you for being here today I thank you for your time good luck to you all thank you you