The show’s guest in this episode is Brandi Olson. She is a best-selling author, speaker, and organizational agility leader. She believes that the only place to do good work is in reality, and does her work from St Paul, Minnesota where she lives with her husband, two kids, four chickens and many honeybees.

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Leadership and Agility with Brandi Olson

Hello, I’m Melanie Parish, I am super excited to be here live with you today. And I have been having the most interesting conversations about accountability, both with my clients, I’ve been thinking about it myself. And I’ve realized that this is something that new leaders often struggle with. And I think they struggle with it, because things kind of get away from them. And, and I was thinking, I don’t really struggle with this so much anymore. And I was wondering why. And I was thinking that part of it is because I’ve learned how to pass buckets to people, so that I actually pass the accountability piece down the line. So, they’re actually holding me accountable to deadlines, and what we want to accomplish and those kinds of things, because I’ve passed a big enough bucket to my people. So, the people that are doing work with me, alongside me, I’m passing them the accountability. And so, so I’ve sort of learned how to twist accountability, upside down. So, if you’re a leader and you’re struggling with accountability, you may want to think about how you take the whole of the project the problem, and you start to think about how you might pass it to a team member. Now, I’m not saying that you’re going to pass that to a team member, and then give it to them and never talk to them again, and just hope they’ll get it done. Because you want to play on their team then and you want to be a resource for them.

In fact, we had a thing that I said, gosh, in September, we want to get this done. And it wasn’t getting done. And you could think wow, Melanie, I you know, I was thinking I really need to hold them accountable. And so, in October, I started doing that for my team. And I was like, hey, why isn’t this done, and I started to be sort of cranky, and but what I realized by having regular meetings about the thing was that we actually were missing some skill sets and some vision and some strategy. And, and so no amount of crankiness or force of character was going to have us be accountable to this thing. I mean, we could have done it badly. But what we were actually missing was a person we were and so we ended up hiring a consultant to help us with a marketing plan and a marketing strategy. Because we were missing something that was really key as we wanted to try doing something else. So, this is all foreshadowing, we’ll be doing some cool stuff this in in the new year. But it was the accountability piece. Sometimes I think new leaders think if they’re just tough enough, or they’re mean enough, or they hold people’s feet to the fire, we have all this language for this, then they’re going to get what they want. But it’s through sort of curiosity and conversation that you might find out, you’re actually missing expertise or strategy. And that’s why work isn’t getting done. So, it’s a much more complex topic, this accountability thing. And I actually think it’s more about the leader holding themselves accountable to their curiosity, and to watching movement of things they hold, dear and important as work and throughput happen with their team. So those are my thoughts about accountability.

And I am super excited about my guests today. Today we welcome best-selling author, speaker, and organizational agility leader, Brandi Olson. Brandi believes that the only place to do good work is in reality, and does her work from St Paul, Minnesota where she lives with her husband, two kids, four chickens and many honeybees. And she has a new book out in October called Real Flow: Break the Burnout Cycle and Unlock High Performance in the New World of Work.

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And I am so excited to have you on my show, Brandi. Welcome.

Hello, Melanie. It’s great to be here. And I’m excited to join you.

Yeah, thank you for coming and I can’t wait to dive into all that. Before they we do that before we dive into all of what you’re working on.  We are doing book clubs this year on the podcast. And I have a little passage to read from the experimental leader book where we’re doing chapter one. We’ll be doing a little bit of book club every week on the podcast, and we are on chapter one the Climate of innovation, I just want to read a paragraph or so just to put the flavor of the experimental leader book in here.

“As a leader, you know that real intentional change must have stable supportive organizational structures. Without these whether seen as upheaval, or innovation. Change is rockier, less productive and less energizing for the company and its leaders. Without stability, innovation is expensive. People fight over resources, and eventually they burn out. The experimental leader needs to consider how to establish the stability that will support innovation as we hammer on at breakneck speed.”

I picked that for you. For you branding, but yeah, it’s burnout is definitely important as we talk about tech and leadership. I mean, any business but especially now. So, I don’t know what thoughts you’ve had. I know you did a little reading and pondering how these topics intersect with your work. 

Yeah, well, that passage that you just read was one that stood out to me as I was, as I was reading the experimental leader, that idea and the relationship between stability and responsiveness to change, I think is such an interesting paradox. And really important to pay attention to, you know, I think about stability. And the word that I often apply to that is discipline. And when we choose to be stable, or have discipline in certain parts of our organizations, structure is a really good example, that enables us to have flexibility and creativity and responsiveness in other areas of our organization. And I think so often we try to control and predict the change that’s happening around us, which is a really futile task. And if instead we spend time focusing on how we create a stable environment, then we can be released from needing to know exactly what’s going to happen six months from now, and we can be much more adaptive, experimental, focused on learning. So, I think that relationship, right between stability, innovation, and then how we show up to do our work, I think is really at the core of what it means to be an effective leader.

Yeah, I think it’s so important, you know, that alchemy of doing something that’s never been done before, I talked about the book, but the concept still astounds me when, when I sort of think about it, you know, we had all these professions that were, you know, accounting, even medicine, like we have innovative medicine, but innovative medicine also follows best practices. So, it and then we have this whole body of work that opened up with tech. And, and even if you think about entertainment, or things like that, doing, like the creative world, and all of a sudden, we’re trying to, you know, reinvent the wheel every day. And, and I and the, the weight of that is sort of, we don’t have a world of best practices to go from, you know, my husband and I are first generation to deal with children who grew up having devices in their hands. Oh, what did my parents do? My parents let us do whatever we wanted with. They supplied some they, you know, it was a tool. It was, you know, there, they didn’t grapple with too much. So, I think we, we grappled with a lot of things, and I think we’re only touching on, you know, what it’s going to be like to burnout or how to how to think about burnout even is a new topic.

But Melanie, you said something there that I think is really important. And you started talking about best practices. And I think one of the things that has always been true, but sometimes we wind up thinking that it is not that there is a best practice, that we can always rely on that. You know what worked for that company over there, that family over there will work for me. And I think one of the things we start to see in our current climate and environment and markets is the eye whatever nugget that we want to still hold on to that those best practices exist that are known is blown out of the water because change is happening so rapidly. The work is changing the ways we’re working as to thinking so rapidly that we are forced to let go of that kind of comfort of a best practice. But I think one of the things that’s true Is there perhaps has never been best practices that work and are right in all circumstances in all situations. And the idea that there is a best practice is kind of keeping us locked in a level of learning and performance that’s limiting. I wrote an essay about this a few weeks ago, the idea that best practices right don’t exist. And one of the things that resonated for me in reading your book is this idea of learning to do better, right. So, I will say like, definitively there are bad practices, there are bad practices that will never work and never be good to us. And there are patterns and practices that worked well, for others that are a good starting point for our leadership or the work that we’re doing. But the idea that there’s a best the right way, well, comforting. Just gets us really far outside of reality. And I wonder if there ever really best practices have been. But really, what we have always needed and what has always worked well is finding those better ways to work well.

I think there’s some interesting things like if it’s a there are some repetitive tasks, like I’m a knitter. And I’m, and I’m really trying to up my game, and I’m upping my game, through having a mentor who knows those best practice. And I thought, and this is interesting, because I thought that was going to be that she taught me how to follow a pattern. But she’s better than that. So, she’s not teaching me how to follow a pattern, she looked at a lot of patterns. And then we figured out how to start and what our goal was. And it was still like a target condition. And there’s, so we’re doing the same exact pattern with the same yarn, but it’s two different colors. And she’s doing a different stitch that I’m doing, and they will look nothing alike when they’re done. Mm hmm. We’re both making a poncho. And you will, we could wear them together, and people go, wow, those are really interesting. No one will ever think they are the same. And from our point of view, they will be nearly identical, except the stitches are so different that people think the stitches are the thing. So that’s that sort of navel bottom with the freedom to create. That’s so interesting.

Yeah, well in like, you know, I mean, that’s something simple, right? Knitting, people have been knitting for millennia, perhaps very long time, right. But what works? Well, for one knitter, well, there may be better practices. And there’s bad ones, what works well, for one that or may not be the exact same thing that works well, for another knitter. Or like, you know, I’m left-handed. So, when I learned how to crochet, very few of the YouTube videos out there were very helpful for me. But understanding the pattern at play, allowed me to kind of work backwards from that and figure out what was going to work well, for me. And I think that same sort of dynamic exists, whether we’re talking about knitting, whether we’re talking about like team collaboration, whether we’re talking about you know, leading a large organization of you know, hundreds of 1000s of employees, right.

And I think one of the things that’s even interesting about that is just like, we have to decide what we do with mistakes. My guess is her knitting will have not one single mistake. And I actually with the yarn that we’re using is really difficult. It’s small, and it’s two threads spun together. So, it’s really easy to pick up half a stitch. And I practiced a lot, and I’ve knit a lot, but it’s just a little much. So, I’ve dropped a stitch a couple of times, now, she would probably pull it all out and fix it. I’m not going to do that. So, I will have imperfections in my knitting, which I actually don’t mind at all. Will not and so, and we also get to decide as leaders, I mean, I’m just going to throw this in there as leaders, we also have to decide how we handle mistakes, like do we live? amplify them? Do we talk about them? Are we an example for the people around us? Or do we, you know, work really hard at night to make them go away? You a whole bunch of extra work to make them go away. So, I think that you know, even in my stupid little it is a stupid little analogy to talk about knitting. But even in those things like there There’s these little decisions that get made that affect because you’re producing something, there’s not at the end. Think about who you are.

Yeah, well, and there’s this inherent tension between learning and innovation and predictability, and repetitiveness. And I think, you know, as leaders, we crave predictability, because it helps us understand deadlines and budgets and inputs, and what we’re going to need to get the outcome that we want. And if you actually got to live in a world that was super low complexity, and change didn’t happen very often, you could perhaps build a highly predictable world and company. But if in fact, you live in a company that has an environment and a market that’s rapidly shifting and changing, and people show up to do the work to collaborate, you inherently have a super highly complex organization. And that means that change can come from anywhere, it can create unpredictable outcomes. And innovation itself, right as the outcome of learning is inherently unpredictable. And so, we have to balance this tension of predictability and innovation. And yet, we can’t like to have an organization that is in total chaos, or there’s no structure or stability. And I think that’s navigating that creating that environment that finds the right balance between that innovative learning that predictability, that stability. That’s the role of a leader, how much do we need, it might look different, at different seasons, and different times, depending on what your goals are your outcomes, but balancing that and creating an environment where people can balance that together, I think that’s essential, and one of the primary responsibilities of a leader.

Well, and I’m super excited to talk to you about your book, partly because sometimes I experienced burnout. I’ve been coaching for 23 years, and I have to pay attention. So, I want to know why you decided to write this book, because I am guessing there’s a story. And yeah, I’d love to know more about it. And why is this the book that you wrote?

Real Flow: Break the Burnout Cycle and Unlock High Performance in the New World of Work

Yeah, so this is probably a book about burnout that’s unexpected and doesn’t really take a look at burnout from the exact same direction that a lot of conversations happen, because I really wanted to look at it from the perspective of how does a leader design an organization and lead a team that doesn’t cause burnout. And it started for me, actually, with work that I was doing, as I was coaching some executives and teams around their agility and how they were designing their teams. And the challenge that came up. And this is a challenge that I have seen and observed in every single organization I’ve ever worked with, from a three-person volunteer led nonprofit, to a multi global financial institution, which is there’s an abundance of important work to do. And we are struggling with the abundance of important work and how to prioritize it and how to get it all done. And it’s all important to what do you do. And that pattern just emerges over and over again. And, and one of the things that I’ve taught for a long time is to understand in an organization when there is an abundance of important work to do, what it looks like to do all of the work at the same time, versus and so in doing so planning to get started on all of the work versus planning to get done with it, and managing how much work we pursue at any given time. And so, as I was doing a lot of research in that space, I would start to draw this graph around what’s actually going on in your brain when you’re navigating competing priorities. And, you know, we talk about that as multitasking. But what’s actually happening in your brain and what’s actually happening in your brain is that your context switching, you’re switching back and forth between all of these things. And the research shows that if you are navigating one project or task, you’ll get to spend all of your time doing that task. If you have two projects or tasks, you spend about 40% of your brainpower, just managing the switch back and forth between those tasks. If you have three projects, you spend about 60% of your brain power, just managing the switch back and forth between those tasks, and you get about 40% of your capacity to actually do the work. And so, the reason I bring that up is because as I was working with organizations struggling with an abundance of important work to do, and feeling overwhelmed and flooded and burned out, I try to navigate that, but the reality is is many of us are spending the majority of our time during the day during the week during the month. Just switching back and forth, which is work that doesn’t actually help us get to done. I started teaching about that and writing about it. And a friend asked me why I cared so much about it. I call that organizational multitasking, that collective switching back and forth between things all the time. Because Brady, I don’t get why you care so much about organizational multitasking. This is where the idea for the book came. And I what I said was, I care because I think we are putting people in positions where they’re having to choose between doing good work, and their own humanity and well-being. And in most cases, I think that’s a false choice. And so, this constant like switch, and overwork, and working in effectively causes some real human suffering. And it’s keeping us from using our collective capacity for creativity and innovation and learning. It’s keeping us from using that to do the work that matters most. So that’s, that’s why I wrote real flow, I wanted to have a conversation about how does the way we choose our work? How does organizational multitasking? How does that cause and contribute to burnout? And why should we care so much about it? If you’re a leader of that organization that’s experiencing a lot of burnout or turnover? What’s underneath it? And how can we start to have a different conversation about what to do instead?

I am fascinated, you know, and I’m also like, I wonder, you know, when I noticed, because I work? You know, I work with so many leaders and executives and how they go from one meeting to another meeting to another meeting. And there, and they’re like popcorn, yeah. And, and me too, because I mean, I’m doing the same task. So, I’m not clear. And I am even asking for myself, like, wow, I wonder how that research applies to me. And if I’m talking about the same time, if I’m always coaching, well, is it a different topic? Is it like, am I Where does that? I don’t know the answer. You may or may not?

I do. My brains are incredibly great at this sort of thing. And so, we’re super malleable. And how we approach that, when, when you’re switching, what your brain is actually doing is two tasks. One is called goal shifting. So, your brain is immediately saying, what was I doing before? And what do I need to do now? And the other is rule activation. And what your brain is doing, when that’s happening is saying, what are the rules of engagement? Here, it’s different when I’m in this conversation with you, Melanie, as we’re getting to know each other and having a very public conversation, the rules of engagement, they’re very different than the rules of engagement when I am facilitating a 30-person design session, right. And so, my brain is rapidly adjusting to that. So, every time we switch, our brain goes through those two tasks, and we can’t skip them, we can’t avoid them, our brain just does it for us, often without awareness. So, our brain can simplify that right. So, coaching all day means you probably have a less active rule activation load, because I know exactly what I’m doing. task. Now the people are changing. So, your brain and your body are going to rapidly adjust to how you engage with that person. But it simplifies like the cognitive load, which means you don’t have to spend as many of your calories and oxygen in your brain. And understanding the rules of that type of engagement, you get to spend more of your time listening, understanding what’s happening, meaning making, right. And so how we manage that context, which is really varied for each person. But what is the same for every person is that our brains all do it. And we can only do it one thing at a time. So, I can’t actually do rule activation and goal shifting at the exact same time. I can only do it one at a time. And so that means that the more I’m shifting, the more things are changing, the more meetings I’m going to back-to-back, the greater my cognitive load is growing, because I can only do it one at a time. And turns out the same part of my brain that’s responsible for context switching is also the same part of my brain that’s responsible for listening for communication management for problem solving, for creativity and analysis. And our brains can only do one of those things at the exact same time.

So, what do you recommend?

So, what do you do with that? Right? So, it’s, it’s the, it’s the reality that we have to understand because it’s just true about humanity. Right? And there’s been a load of research and cognitive science, backing this up. It’s called the bottleneck phenomenon, the thing that means we can only do one of these executive function tasks at a time. It’s just true. So, my first recommendation is to embrace that reality. Because it’s a whole lot easier to embrace that reality and move forward than to try to get our brains to do it all at the same time, and somehow turn our one human self into something like a machine, it’s harder to work against our biology than with it. So, it’s first just recognizing and noticing that it happens, right? So, if you are in meetings back-to-back all day long, and you get to the end of the day, and you feel exhausted, it’s not because you’re not cut out for the work. It’s not because you’re not a high performer. It’s because your brain has been engaged in this unrelenting context switching all day long, and it physically requires more calories, more oxygen, more energy to do that. So, from an individual perspective, it starts with just finding ways to consolidate and create space, right? And being aware of it, right. So, there’s lots of strategies individually around how we can understand how our own brain engages with that kind of context switching. And I will say the answer is not just to do one thing at a time, it might be for you. But it doesn’t have to be that it’s more about understanding just how, how do I work with my brain? How do I understand better how my brain does this type of work, so I can work with it. What I’m especially interested in, though, is not how each of us individually manage our task list. I’m especially interested in what’s happening when we are part of an organization that is so flooded with competing priorities, that we feel there is no other way to work, other than to be in a meeting and be checking our email and to be in back-to-back meetings all day long. And what happens when we exist in that environment? And what’s an organizational leader to do about that? And how does that scale? How does our individual experience of how we manage our work? How does that scale, and we have entire teams or teams of teams, or entire organizations that are constantly just engaged in an unrelenting game of context switching all day long, the problems and the challenges their scale pretty significantly. And yet, it’s still it’s still a human problem. And so how we show up as individuals, we have to be able to understand that, and then look at it at scale, and then come back to we’re all made up of individuals and humans and look back and forth and connect the dots there, there’s a lot of ways that we can look at that differently. But it starts with recognizing it and seeing it and embracing the reality of it.

It’s super interesting. Thank you so much for talking about it. I’m really fascinated by this idea. And I think that I think it’s so important. I, you know, live and breathe and have people in my ear, who are struggling now, you know, more than ever. After, after the last few years, we’ve been through people, and now when I hear layoffs, you know, in the tech sector, all I can think of is Oh, no, they’re going to ask more of the people that are left behind. And this becomes even more relevant. And, and so thank you so much for the work that you’re doing in this area. I think it’s really important. I love the idea of creating teams that don’t have this, I think as leaders, we can constrain the amount of, you know, shiny objects, we run toward at least the ones and get them to market before we you know, we can have an impact there. We can’t always do that from our place on teams, but we can as leaders, so I think constraining constraint can actually be a powerful tool in the leadership. in protecting our teams from this kind of burnout, where can people find you, Brandi?

Yeah, so you can find me at realworkdone.com. That is my learning and organizational design consultancy. And we believe that the best way to design organizations is to get real work done while you’re doing it. And that the only place to do good work is in reality, so you’ll find a healthy dose of pragmatism and reality and all of my work so you can find me there. You can find me on LinkedIn, Brandi Olson. You can find my book real slow. At the website. You can also find it on Amazon or anywhere you like to buy books.

Great and we just had a comment really, you know, very interesting. So that’s great. We love when we are love when our list nors comment, can we get excited about comments and anyone’s always, you know, welcome to ask questions. Thank you, Brandi for being here today. We’ve really enjoyed having you on the show.

Thank you so much, Melanie, I’ve really enjoyed the conversation. And I’ve learned along the way too. So, thank you.

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It was great talking to Brandi. I really enjoyed our conversation. And as I was thinking about it, I was thinking about a couple of things that are part of my leadership toolkit with people. One is I often, you know, really recommend to leaders that they end meetings when they’re done. So, you know, set aside one meeting, you know, every couple of weeks with your team, where you check in and you do all of the warmth and things that need to be done. But don’t be afraid to schedule short meetings and to get off after five minutes or 15 minutes, if that’s the period of time to get the work done. So that you don’t end up being in a cycle that because you scheduled an hour, you have to stay on for an hour, be efficient in your meetings, see what needs to be done. And then don’t be afraid to say, I feel like we’re done. Can we move on now. That’s not rude. You don’t have to sit through a long meeting. It’s okay to finish and recoup your time back. The other thing is, as she was talking about, you know how many things you can work on at one time it, it really made me think of the Kanban process and Kanban sort of limits you. A Kanban board can make work visible. I talked about it in my book. But there’s, you know, it’s a Japanese efficiency tool to make work visible. And they often constrain you to having a column for work in progress that they limit you to having only three things in progress. I think you need more than one. And I think you may need more than two because, for example, if you’re reaching out to someone to get information, you’re waiting on them. So, things might be you might be in the waiting mode in a project. So, you need so you’re working on the project, but you’re not actively working on the project. But you certainly don’t need 20 Because if you’re working on 20 things, you’re not working on anything actually to move it forward, and to get throughput or completion with the project. So Trello Atlassian, this project product is a Trello is a Kanban board. There are some free other free Kanban boards out there. There’s we use Kanban flow for a long time. There’s just a variety of Kanban boards that you can use if you want to you can drop them in the chat or make a comment if there’s one that you recommend that you use. MS teams integrates with Trello as well. And it can be a really useful tool. And it has been great talking to you today. I love the idea of trying to prevent burnout before it happens by setting your team up. Well, I hope that this information has been helpful to you. Go experiment!

Important Links: 

• Real Work Done – Website
• Brandi Olson – LinkedIn

Brandi Olson

Brandi Olson believes that you shouldn’t have to choose between doing good, important work, and your own humanity. She knows that the best way to solve big problems, to innovate, and to deliver out-of-this-world value is through teams who are deeply engaged, high performing, and actually happy.

And that the quickest route for leaders to cultivate engaged teams who are doing great work is by not adding free frozen yogurt in the lobby, but by creating cultures where people are learning together faster and better.

So that when change happens, as it always will, your organization isn’t just reacting to change, you are leading change.

A sought-after speaker and best-selling author, Brandi practically addresses topics like agility, emotional intelligence and productivity, leading high-performing teams, and organizational design. She has over 20 years of experience consulting with leaders across diverse sectors who share a commitment to people, learning fast, and doing good in the world–from nonprofits like Mayo Clinics to universities and startups to Fortune 100 companies like 3M and Wells Fargo.

Brandi is the founder of multiple small businesses and is the CEO of Real Work Done, a global learning and organizational design consultancy. Brandi lives in Minnesota with her husband Sam, their two children Micah and Nora, one dog, and four chickens.

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