Latest / Success Story with Scott Clary / Lessons - The 13 Superpowers Behind Every Great Decision | Atif Rafiq - Ex-Amazon, McDonald's, Volvo

Transcript

Lessons - The 13 Superpowers Behind Every Great Decision | Atif Rafiq - Ex-Amazon, McDonald's, Volvo · Success Story with Scott Clary

• 0:00
  In this lessons episode, explore a practical framework for making better decisions
• 0:03
  and driving meaningful progress inside organizations. Discover how structured exploration surfaces
• 0:09
  critical insights before action, understand how alignment replaces silos with clarity and shared
• 0:14
  ownership, and uncover how disciplined decision processes improve execution, accountability,
• 0:19
  and long-term outcomes. So this process, I think it's broken down to a few different pieces,
• 0:32
  so I want to make sure that we're all on the same page. So this process, I mean,
• 0:36
  in this book there are 13 different superpowers that I guess are the core concepts that people
• 0:44
  have to think about, but then it's even drilled down to an even more simple framework of exploration,
• 0:51
  alignment, and decision making. So I want to understand how those two concepts play. So when somebody
• 0:57
  thinks, say somebody looks at this and we're going to talk about some of these superpowers,
• 1:01
  we're going to talk about this framework in a second, but when somebody thinks about superpowers,
• 1:04
  what does that mean for them? These are the attributes or the skill sets or the soft skills,
• 1:10
  hard skills, what are superpowers? But then also that framework, I want to go deeper into that
• 1:16
  framework as well. Great. So high level concepts are basically, first is the idea of upstream work,
• 1:24
  first downstream, downstream everybody understands. That's where we have the decision point,
• 1:30
  we have the decisions, and it's like let's go, let's make a project plan and let's execute.
• 1:35
  But I think we can all relate to the fact that we spend weeks and months trying to get to the
• 1:39
  decision point and getting our organization to say yes. And so this upstream part is broken
• 1:46
  down into three phases, exploration, alignment, and decision making. So let's take them one by one.
• 1:54
  So exploration is a concerted effort to surface the really important considerations, especially the
• 2:02
  unknowns and get to the bottom of them. And you do this by starting with questions. Questions are
• 2:08
  very democratic, they're very inclusive. You can give four people from a company, they have different
• 2:15
  roles, different jobs, and you put an idea in the center of the table. And the first thing that comes
• 2:22
  up will be all kinds of really interesting questions. To me, that's gold. That's not skepticism and
• 2:29
  you know, that is actually high quality input to say, hmm, what are the unknowns around this,
• 2:34
  what seems to be a promising idea. You want to do a good job of creating space for that. And you
• 2:40
  want to collect those questions before you raise ahead to anything else, like having a judgment
• 2:46
  or an opinion or yeah, trying to align on what to actually do. So exploration creates space
• 2:54
  for getting all the right questions on the table and trying to get to the bottom of them. That's
• 3:00
  phase one. The second phase is using the exploration to draw conclusions. If you're standing on high
• 3:08
  quality information and you said, okay, there was a bunch of things that we had questions around,
• 3:14
  you know, here's the sort of the discovery that we did. And now we're in a position to say, well,
• 3:19
  what conclusions would we draw from this? You know, what makes sense? Then you look at those
• 3:25
  conclusions and you try and bring people together to say, do we have alignment? And generally,
• 3:31
  you'll find that people say, well, based on this fact base, we've, you know, this is, these are
• 3:36
  some conclusions that we draw. And usually that's pretty layered. It's not just, oh, this is a good
• 3:41
  idea or a bad idea. It's many things. It's, yeah, we should do this idea, but we should also keep
• 3:48
  in mind X and Y. And so people, you know, it's really important to spend time, say, okay, what do,
• 3:56
  what do you see in your eyes? And do we see the same thing? When, once you're complete with that,
• 4:02
  that's when you're ready to drive action. And you say, well, based on these conclusions,
• 4:08
  what, what actions do we need to commit to? And that's where you usually are parting with
• 4:14
  dollars and resources. You know, you're walking through one way doors sometimes, right? You're saying
• 4:20
  no to, to other ideas. And yes, to this one, that is the time for action. So in the book, I break
• 4:27
  this down further into 13 workflows where you could, you know, sort of set these up in your
• 4:34
  teamwork and basically create a path from, you know, idea, promising idea to the decision point.
• 4:42
  And hopefully that improves the company's ability to say yes to the right things and know to
• 4:47
  the things that deserve a note. So ultimately, at its core, not to oversimplify the complexity,
• 4:53
  but as core for people that are just wrapping their mind around this concept, it's a decision-making
• 5:00
  process with a built-in feedback loop. And that can be executed. So my question, is that correct?
• 5:06
  Is that like a good summary of it? Is that oversimplifying significantly? If it is, I apologize.
• 5:13
  Because nobody, some people, some people have knock on into this level of depth when it comes to
• 5:17
  decision-making yet. And I mean, you're talking to a range of individuals. And some people are just
• 5:22
  starting to make these big decisions for their business or trying to figure out, okay, at what point
• 5:27
  do I start incorporating this? Is this something that I work with a small vendor? This is something
• 5:33
  I should incorporate. I should put an exploration phase out to the business, to my co-founders,
• 5:40
  should talk to them. Or is this very specific, useful for very certain larger decisions that move
• 5:45
  the business forward? It definitely applies to companies of all kinds. Although, you know,
• 5:52
  you know, if you're on the smaller end, you know, five people or ten people, probably some of this
• 5:58
  can be done, you know, very informally through conversation. But once you start to get, if you will,
• 6:05
  functions in a company, you know, that's, or any sense that there are any silos, then you need
• 6:14
  something otherwise, you're leaving it to chance and personality. The good way to summarize this
• 6:21
  is basically, it's a method which promotes exploration, promotes starting with questions,
• 6:29
  and suspends judgment on what to do. Because the human mind, as you know, there've been some
• 6:35
  neuroscientists who have written about, and I talked about this in my early chapter, around the way
• 6:40
  the brain works, there's system one and system two, and system one is for a very quick decision
• 6:44
  making. You're in the forest, and the tigers there, do you defend yourself for run kind of thing?
• 6:50
  And there's system two, which is much more about thinking twice about something,
• 6:56
  and which allows you to see a little bit more of the picture. And the kinds of work we do in companies,
• 7:03
  especially around innovation, is much more system two oriented part of the brain, where you
• 7:10
  need to think twice about it and question it in order to see more of the inputs.
• 7:15
  Now, human nature, and especially in companies, you know, depending upon the personalities and
• 7:21
  the culture of the company, you can be using system one, but you need to be using system two problem.
• 7:28
  Yeah, that's a big common occurrence in companies, right? Because people might think, oh, my job
• 7:34
  is to know exactly what the right thing to do is at all times, but that's actually not the case.
• 7:39
  The better way to look at leadership is to know how to ask the right questions or get the right
• 7:46
  questions on the table. And another thing that I'm thinking people would have a big concern with,
• 7:53
  not in terms of the process, but in terms of their own organization, is you mentioned something,
• 7:57
  you mentioned this is great to solve for this type of thinking, system one, system two thinking,
• 8:03
  but also silos. So silos pop up in organizations. I know that this is not directly related to
• 8:11
  decision sprints, but it's probably something you've experienced. Do you have any tips for stopping
• 8:16
  silos from forming as much as possible? Is this a process that actually improves not only the decision
• 8:21
  making, but by constantly deploying this process, you almost improve the structure of the organization
• 8:28
  because it breaks down silos before they would even start if done properly?
• 8:35
  That's one of my passion here is to be honest with you Scott, because I think it's one of the most
• 8:40
  baffling things in companies is the, you know, not initiating with another part of the organization that
• 8:49
  has some relevant input. So the way I solve for that, and this is actually part of the first workflow
• 8:56
  in the decision spring is grouping people around a common challenge. So to look at, you know,
• 9:04
  a problem you're trying to solve in a company or a new idea and saying, what competencies do we
• 9:09
  need to gather around this specific idea, this specific problem that we're trying to solve? When you
• 9:15
  start with that, from the get go, you automatically melt away the silos because the opposite is,
• 9:23
  I think more common, which is, okay, who's point on this in the company? And it could be a person
• 9:29
  or some function and there's no problem with that. If they then say, well, we're going to do a much
• 9:38
  better job of problem solving if we get the right inputs around, you know, what this, you know,
• 9:44
  what the picture is and what competencies do we have in this organization that we can group around
• 9:50
  this common challenge. So to me, that's the mindset that we need to take. And then you stop thinking
• 9:57
  about, you know, structures and layers and other things like that. And you just start thinking about,
• 10:02
  you know, what is, for example, what it has all will call a two pizza team, you know, not huge,
• 10:09
  but enough to feed the team with two pizza pies, right? Yeah. There's five or six or seven or
• 10:16
  and that's it. How do you are? Yeah, but that's what you get, you know, and that's really wise,
• 10:22
  because, you know, it's not one or two parts of corners of a company, especially on a large company
• 10:28
  that can really solve a problem, you know, holistically, right? So thinking about like being hungry
• 10:36
  for input, how do we get the right inputs to really solve this problem? That will melt away silos.
• 10:42
  And another, another point on that, because inputs are very important, but the larger the
• 10:48
  even smaller organizations, but the larger the organization, you're going to have endless amounts of
• 10:52
  questions that can be put through this process. So how do you prioritize the, the urgent and important?
• 11:01
  It's definitely a matter of relevance. And so you're right where, I mean, interestingly,
• 11:07
  if you ask everybody, and I have a methodology in the book where I actually suggest people do this
• 11:14
  independently. So let's say you have this six-person team, and you want to get all the right questions.
• 11:18
  To me, that's getting to first base when you're trying to tackle a new idea. If you ask them to
• 11:24
  independently, you know, sit down, write up their questions, send them in to one person,
• 11:30
  you will find them a lot of common themes. So generally, you know, there's, you can group them
• 11:38
  together and do the pattern matching. And by trying to get independent input, you get to see like
• 11:45
  a little of the heat map of where is the headspace of the team? Where are really the questions that matter
• 11:52
  most? So I think what I would suggest is a little bit of that methodology where you kind of
• 12:00
  try and promote independent thinking so you can get wide enough divergent thinking. But then
• 12:05
  bring them together, you'll see, you'll see the patterns. And I think it'll be a manageable list.
• 12:10
  Interesting. So, so when you've, when you've run this exercise, even though you have so many
• 12:15
  different business units, so many different personalities, again, you start to see the common
• 12:19
  threads. And I'm assuming that would mean you'd actually start to see the common threads
• 12:24
  in the output as well. So when a question goes through this process, you start to see the common
• 12:31
  threads in the actual answers that you're getting. Is that good? Yeah. Well, it's the beauty of it,
• 12:38
  right? Is that because behind everybody's question is sort of some,
• 12:43
  consideration like a risk or fear or upside or, you know, is there a business case? And so
• 12:51
  if you, and the questions are very neutral because, you know, you're going to get people to,
• 12:58
  if you will, sort of agree that you've canvassed the problem right through the questions. And what
• 13:04
  happens is that people begin to sit, develop a lot of trust in the problem solving effort because
• 13:13
  they say, hmm, well, I'm good. If, if we do a good job, this, this set of questions, I'm pretty
• 13:18
  confident that we'll be drawing the right conclusions and therefore executing the right decision.
• 13:24
  So you do what I call upstream is you bring that all the way up there and it gets to be much less
• 13:30
  contentious where, where people, because it's neutral, right? There's no, there's no decisions yet.
• 13:36
  So I think that's a really important part of this methodology. You bring it to a neutral point,
• 13:43
  which questions to me are very much so in that realm. Thanks for tuning in. If you found this
• 13:48
  valuable, don't forget to hit that subscribe button so you never miss an episode. And if you want
• 13:52
  to dive deeper into this conversation, check out the links in the description to watch the full
• 13:57
  episode. See you in the next one.