#012 - 2021 is 15% Over Already

Robert Greiner 0:05

Yeah, so we spent the better part of the week without power, snowed Sunday night, Monday morning, you know, power went off early in the morning, two or three o'clock off and on and off and on kind of thing. And then it was just off most of the day, on Monday. And throughout the week, we had periods where it was eight or nine hours off two or three hours on, and then everything normalized a little bit on Thursday, but no internet, like through Friday, there was some kind of problem with our service provider. So it's a pretty rough week. All in all,

Tiffany Lenz 0:38

no kidding. How did the kids manage? Did they enjoy the extra family time? Or was it really unsettling?

Robert Greiner 0:45

They were fine. We were a little bit more cautious about playing outside. Because we didn't know if we had our hot water was the pipes were frozen for a while. And so we didn't really have a reliable way to warm them up. You know if they were out and the power went off or whatever. Yeah, but we made the most of it. They had that fun lots of snow more than we've ever had, like in this area of decades living here. Yeah. And so made a little snow forts and did some makeshift sledding and stuff like that,

Unknown Speaker 1:13

huh? Cool.

Tiffany Lenz 1:15

I'm glad you didn't have any damage to your house then or

Robert Greiner 1:18

no, we

lucked out. But we have some pipes that when it gets cold, they freeze but no water damage pretty unscathed as far as that goes, which is nice, because I have some friends who had a ton of water damage in their house. And so that's always good to a little bit of power being outs fine. No, no lasting damage.

Tiffany Lenz 1:37

Yeah, good. Good. Thinking about you guys. craziest thing, and I'll bet it's warm there now. Right?

Robert Greiner 1:43

So it was like 80 yesterday.

Tiffany Lenz 1:45

It's almost like a bad dream. That really was it just snowing and storming and craziness.

Robert Greiner 1:53

Yeah, just just for a few days. Guys are wearing shorts today. Like it's nuts. Yeah, really. Nuts is the right word. I have to just a normal day for you right to the storm.

Tiffany Lenz 2:04

Oh kind of came down the center another storm but just a normal day. Like I have two feet of snow outside my window. And Monday we we like they were calling for a winter storm warning. And I'm looking out the window and there's like nothing happening. And then an hour later I look out it's a complete whiteout. Like you couldn't see anything at all. For the next like four hours.

Robert Greiner 2:26

It's pretty great power stayed on, huh?

Tiffany Lenz 2:28

Yep. Yeah,

I had some had some like, little spotty internet here and there, but nothing to even really speak of, oh, I'll go off video for a little while to let the to not put so much pressure on my Wi Fi or whatever. But like nothing at all. Nope. I never lost power once. So. Yeah, good. And then it's still not 70 or 80 degrees. It's still cold. It is still. Yeah. It is now.

Yeah. All as well.

Robert Greiner 2:54

Yes. So today, we're recording this on February 24. And the year is 15%. Over, which is bonkers.

Tiffany Lenz 3:02

bonkers.

Robert Greiner 3:04

Yeah. And we had originally planned on recording this last week. So it could go live today. But I didn't have power or internet. So that have been tough.

Tiffany Lenz 3:12

hing I wanted to roll out for: 2021

Robert Greiner 3:52

d we saw people talking about: 2020

Tiffany Lenz 4:01

kind of feels like we are in: 2020

or it was just yesterday.

Robert Greiner 4:06

And we've been in situations before where maybe you do you're on like a quarterly planning cycle, or whatever. And you and we see this with some of the people we work with. I don't have my numbers yet. And it's halfway through the quarter. So I think there's a few things that happen. One is we have a hangover. At the beginning of the year, you're coming back from the holidays, everyone just trying to get their email caught up, get set back settled back in. And before you know it, you're through January, and really nothing has happened. And then you compound that problem by goals being set and delivered and agreed on and rolled down cascaded too late. And you put those two things together and yet the years 15% over and you might not have even started yet you're still thinking about last year or something like that.

Tiffany Lenz 4:50

little early and set goals in: 2020

Robert Greiner 5:33

It's been in a typical period of time yet,

Tiffany Lenz 5:36

but I am starting to expect to need to have a level of fluidity in my planning, my execution, give myself some space, especially when it comes to any sort of initiative that relates to multiple stakeholders or communicating to large groups of people, the more complex the the initiative, or the objective, the more I expect there to be cycles of churn before something can be delivered. Do you experience any of the same?

Robert Greiner 6:12

Yeah, there is something about this period of time, which compounds the problem. And so I do think that level of fluidity is helpful, but are helpful to not be so hung up on day one out of the gate, like the rigidness of the plan, we all know that stuff comes up, and we need to adapt. But I do wonder like this has only from my experience this year, and maybe I'm just more cognizant of it has had been negative impact on our teams, our people, me personally, like I'm not 15% through my goals, you know, for the year, and I did the right thing, like I I carved out some time in December to plan for this year, actually feel like I started pretty well had a couple of things early in January, go my way. So that gave me some forward momentum in my goal setting that maybe I normally wouldn't have gotten and I still feel behind. And so I'm not sure if that's a sign of the times, or maybe it's just always been like that. And we just haven't been so keen to notice it. Because times are good. Everything's going well, you have some flexibility, some margin in your life and your organization and your team to not have to worry about it. Or maybe that's it,

Tiffany Lenz 7:22

I think you hit on something really briefly, that's worth pulling apart a little bit,

it really is almost death by: 1000

Robert Greiner 8:14

It is the macro force that's affecting everybody. We have like maybe a collective headwind. And that impacts us each incrementally and to different degrees. But then when you start having to pull effort for your team or your organization, that's when you really start to feel that cumulative effect that you mentioned,

Tiffany Lenz 8:35

I think that might be the case, but I hadn't really thought of it that way until you mentioned you just alluded to it in passing and I feel like you aren't you're hitting on something. Now if we if that is true, what we're what we're supposing and then you layer on all of the the chaos and say Signal to Noise misbalance of politics, election, ongoing, ongoing political and civil unrest. There is even more of a kind of a, like an erosion of mental capacity, almost. So where I might have felt like I was, whatever, whatever this is, we're firing on all cylinders, working against all of my objectives. Now I'm firing on all cylinders working against a fractured set of objectives because of the compounding effect. But in reality, I'm not firing on all cylinders, because part of my brain is distracted by a lot of unrest.

Robert Greiner 9:37

Yeah, there's this low grade tension. Let me ask you this, because I'm curious. Are things worse right now than they've been? So certainly, global pandemic is a weird thing. And we had a few firsts, not in a good way last year. And but we've had war before. Like our kids aren't hiding under desks at the school. Doing nuclear bomb drills. We've had natural disasters before, worse than we've experienced, although that I did read the storm here in Texas, and our baffling reliance on our own power grid, which I don't fully understand, is probably going to be the most expensive. natural disaster. That's hit the state now, which is interesting. We've had other, more impactful, worse natural disasters in the US, let alone worldwide, politics have always been a thing. I don't, I've never had a problem in my lifetime going in getting gas, like filling my car with gas. How much worse is it now then? Our parents and their parents had before like that, I don't know, I'm having a hard time understanding. Should these things be as invasive in our personal professional lives as they are? Like, it's certainly the worst period? I can't find. I can't think of a different term other than worse, but most challenging period of my life, but I don't know I'm having a hard time understanding like how much worse or better it was before us.

Tiffany Lenz: 11:00

It's a very interesting question. And you're right, we almost needed a different, more verbose, more varied word than worse, because that feels very linear. Certainly, there were worse circumstances. I wasn't alive for World War Two, and neither were you. But that was a worse circumstance than than what we've experienced. But at least my perception, which could be way off is that during a crisis that affected so many, there was a slowdown of other things, maybe a slowdown of economic demands that were the same. A rallying, like, I

Robert Greiner: 11:40

like the cause and effect. okay

Tiffany Lenz: 11:41

I think about why I started, as soon as you say something like World War Two, I start to visualize something that looks like rubber drives and metal drives and lots of like collective thinking, versus some what we've experienced during the pandemic has been, but the show must go on stock market must continue to grow, there must not be a decrease in in shareholder primacy there must not be, it's like we want this and we want to experience this catastrophic event as a globe. But nobody wants to lose any money. And we want to experience this, these kind of unprecedented for our generation anyway, situations, but have my cake and eat it too. If that if there's a way of saying it like that, as opposed to dialing back, maybe some of our expectations, to collectively regroup and move forward. That's a thought. The only other thought I have is, you cited some other examples of major crises in different parts of the planet, natural disasters, that would tend to strike one place at a time, while at the same time our world continues to get more and more flat, we're more and more dependent on one another. So if let's say there was a massive earthquake, say in in Bangladesh, and I have a lot of business partners or call centers in India, probably didn't affect the whole country, probably part of my business will continue to run, even if part of it won't, where with the pandemic, almost everyone was impacted in some way or another that just slowed down a an economy that continues to get become more and more global.

Robert Greiner: 13:27

That's a good point too. And, and I think we're also seems like we're less efficient, like there, there are some benefits to, you know, not having a commute. For instance, I haven't been in office for about a year, and now, I was driving probably two hours a day. And then sometimes when you're bouncing between clients and offices, like it just that's a lot of driving. I'm not sure how much of that time I was effective at recapturing with phone calls and, and things like that. And there was like, I remember reporting on it very early. So this was would be April May of last year, all of our team's velocity went up. Everybody got more productive. And we thought at the time that like, this probably isn't right, we're probably getting a little bit of a bump from everyone just being happy to not have to drive a bunch every day. And then to I think there's this like adrenaline factor, like everyone was worried about the economy, about keeping their job, the uncertainty of what's going to happen, there was so much unknown then, like it was right now we have a low grade tension, or stress, then we had just all out pretty much panic was more of a panic setting. And that adrenaline has worn off. I know, I just think that over time, you know, 100% of something is really hard to accommodate, even if you're a 50% remote or 80% remote, but you had the opportunity to get in person to collaborate when that was needed. That's much more effective than the 100% mode. And so I do think we're less efficient right now as a working force, globally than we have been in the past. And I think that's, that's also maybe what's contributing to the fact that we're 15% of the way through the year and not 15% or more through our goals,

Tiffany Lenz: 15:04

I think you're that there's also something there too, around settling in. And I don't want to keep overusing the overused expression of the new normal. But last week, I was reading an article in The Economist about the changes in business travel, being here to stay that business travel of the many things that are affected permanently, and many that will bounce back 100% business travel will not. That's their assertion. And I think they're right, both from a cost standpoint, as well as a human tolerance standpoint. So to your point of, it's a year, it's a year, since you've been driving two hours, I'm thinking where I was a year ago, I my commute was a flight from New York to North Carolina, every week. So I am, I'm over the honeymoon phase of enjoying that and in the crisis mode. And also thinking I don't, I wouldn't go back to that sort of scenario for myself. Even though I am craving the human interaction, I wouldn't go back to flying every week, and my client, my former client, they're not going to pay for it again. So there there is kind of like, we're experiencing a settling in and use the example before of your team's velocity. I don't think we know what our new velocity is. So technically, we're 15% behind. But this may be another data point set of normalcy that we need to see, before we know what our actual speed is.

Robert Greiner: 16:37

Yeah. And then what's going to be that reckoning when we come to that realization, and expectations have not met reality, like that's going to be really interesting.

Tiffany Lenz: 16:46

It'll

be interesting. It'll be different for lots of different people. I think it depends who your stakeholders are, if you're looking at again something related to shareholders, or market demand versus an environment that allows for flexible problem solving, or innovation, to reach a goal, I think there will be that there'll be a feeling of more success, that way of leapfrogging through through something as opposed to following the tradition, the plan that was laid out versus hard and fast numbers that may or may not change the valuation of one's company that will probably have more negative impacts.

Robert Greiner: 17:27

So one thing I wanted to ask you too, could it be? Would it be advisable? Do you think to maybe shorten the timeframe with which you do planning? So we say quarterly planning, we have yearly goals, we're on these like, chronologically based boundaries, if you think of, and we've tied some of our previous discussions into like how things work for an individual and maybe extrapolate that for an organization. When you're in a personal crisis. The first thing you do is you collapse your timeline of what you're planning for the future. If everything's going great careers firing on all cylinders, you're happy and healthy. You may be thinking about your five year plan. What am I going to do for retirement? What am I doing for my 20 year work anniversary? Something macro happens or individually at your organization or something personal and you might collapse down? Oh, my gosh, I have to go take care of this in a week. Like it just gets way smaller? Would that be a you think an advisable practice, if you're running an organization, you're feeling this sort of hangover or drag? Are you noticing the years 15%? Over you're not 15% of the way through your goals? Would it be helpful to think about things on a much smaller timeframe, either 10% or 50%? of whatever period you normally plan on? What do you think about that?

Tiffany Lenz: 18:42

I think that's a very good idea. The the recalibration, I think every shorter term plan needs to be in alignment with the longer term strategy. But does it have to be measured in strict chronological increments? I don't think so. Depending on how one is communicating commitments to external parties, that would that would limit how and when you can shift your thinking or inside what parameter you can shift your thinking. But is there value? You're asking two questions, one inside the other i think is there value in constantly having a fallback, or having a kind of unemotional willingness and ability to prioritize again and skinny down what one is looking to do? I think 100% there has to always be a plan that allows for a Best and Worst case scenario or a a fatter and leaner scenario. Because you'll inevitably end up in one of those situations you probably won't hit the nail on the head with any plan and more than likely will need to skinny down. So being caught unawares with that happening is probably something that one should be guarding against.

Robert Greiner: 20:08

Yeah, because the solution is to not get rid of planning. That would be a terrible idea.

Tiffany Lenz: 20:13

And not even possible.

where we are too tight or too tightly coupled as as an economy that we just simply couldn't any one unit that said they were going to just forego planning would just be rejected from the broader body, like a bad organ transplant, and someone would ever would surpass them.

Robert Greiner: 20:33

And so you can't get rid of planning. But I do you think there we talked earlier, this episode about bringing in a dose of reality, and then maybe collapsing the timeframe like you were talking about? That's gonna be two good things. I remember the idea came from a book called the 12 Week year, have you heard of it?

Tiffany Lenz: 20:48

I haven't.

Robert Greiner: 20:49

Brian Morin. The tagline says, get more done in 12 weeks, and others do in 12 months. If you split the year up into 12 week chunks, it's not quite the quarter, right? Because you have 48, for 12 week chunks, which is 48 weeks, that gives you four more weeks. So you can you basically get time to do a week of planning. And then you have your your 12 week period. And they're saying that the whole assertion is basically you get they focus on the backend, like we're focusing on losing that first 15%, or a majority of the first 15% of the year, what they would say is, you have these yearly goals, that's way too long to think about. So much changes, you need to be flexible. And then you find yourself in October, November, December, just rushing to get to meet your goals and objectives. Like you've seen that people will try to burn their budget, all sorts of flurry of activity happen up until sort of the Christmas time break, and then everything falls off to zero. And then you have your hangover. And then you rinse and repeat right? You get your goals late. There's 10 15% over you don't realize it like maybe this does happen more often than we think this is a yearly thing. It's just we're more cognizant of it this year. And so the idea in the 12 week year is Hey, you focus your energy, you distill down into a shorter a shorter time period. And then at the 9, 10, 11, 12 week of your 12 week period, you're applying that same end of year fervor and energy to meet your objectives. And now you're doing that four times a year. And then over time, you get a lot more done. And I don't know, I think that's maybe an interesting way to think about how to approach things in a crisis, especially collapsing your timeline being more realistic about your objectives. And then maybe you still have to drive towards the strategy, like you said, it seems like though, there's a definite adjustment that needs to be made. And we have not collectively made that.

Tiffany Lenz: 22:38

I especially like this as a thought experiment in a crisis in an unpredictable time. Because it would give you more opportunity to pivot,

which often pivot is the saving moment. So it's interesting in that I personally like lots of opportunities to just readjust not take my thinking to seriously and readjust as many parameters as I can. So I like thinking about that in terms of quarterly with the longer term strategy in mind, obviously, but seems like it would be a great experiment for something in very unpredictable times.

Robert Greiner: 23:16

And this is hot off the press for us. I haven't really given it a ton of thought before we recorded it. But I'm definitely thinking now, how I've been behaving at work has been more normalized, almost assuming away some of this complexity that we find ourselves in as a collective. And I think we, you me, our organization did a pretty good job taking care of individual humans during a crisis that has a physical component to it, but you could get sick and your family could get sick. And I feel like we responded well to the humans. I don't think that I've responded in kind to the backlog. You know what I mean? What we're committing to having conversations with the people around us when we're creating solutions to incorporate some of the realities that we find ourselves in? Yeah, when things were on fire, I feel like we started to address them. But now I don't hear anyone talking about that kind of stuff to you now.

Tiffany Lenz: 24:09

No. I do wonder how that conversation around like a different schedule of recalibration would work if we tried it with a client as an experiment, because they would have a number of interlocutors that would be dependent. But is there any place where there's room for that sort of experiment? Sure. I think it's, I think it would be well worth considering.

Robert Greiner: 24:34

Yeah. So I do want to if there's no other major thing you want to discuss? I do and yeah, a bit of a positive note. Okay. Have you ever watched Hell's Kitchen Gordon Ramsay as though right? Gordon Ramsay is one of my favorite personalities. I guess you could say I don't even really have a deep appreciation for food, which is so silly. But I like his maybe he and he's a little over the top but I like his sort of standards. And in Hell's Kitchen, he would always say it's not How you how you finish. And you'd have these people that got lucky or cooked to the right dish right at the beginning. And they would be both these, they're going to get their black jacket, they're going to make it to the end. And then over time they peter out. And then you have the ones that came in, maybe they shouldn't have been there one guy with like, I think he had like a broken wrist or something. And he was going through dinner service, because he wanted to win. And he didn't necessarily start off so well. And Gordon Ramsay would always say, it's not how you start, it's how you finish. And I think that's some really good advice for us individually, organizationally, whatever. Right now in 2021, there still 85% of the year left, that's a long time. 2021 is going to be a long year too. And we have a bunch of time left, I think it's a good opportunity to take a step back, adjust, shorten your timeline a little bit. And maybe if you didn't get a good jumpstart on planning for this year, block some time on December right now, your calendar is probably pretty open in December 2021 blocks in time out for 2022 planning, spend some time thinking about what you want to accomplish, what your organization's objectives are. And then you can set yourself up to hit the ground running on January 3 2022. And then when we're 10 15% for the year, next year and having the same discussion, you can say Nope, yeah, I was ready this year. Yeah, go ahead.

Tiffany Lenz: 26:18

Be nice if we could think of written you and I was generally positive people anyway. But it'd be nice if we could think about 2021 as being an opportunity for some experimentation and exploration. How do we look for creativity at every point, or a way of getting around a problem in a less standard way, just to see what we might learn.

Robert Greiner: 26:41

I love that we talked about 2020 being very survival oriented, we're down on to the Maslow's hierarchy of needs, we're in our basic needs, like we're trying to see what that means and get through that and survive. 2021 might be a last year productivity wise or might be lagging, productivity wise, but this is a good opportunity. Since we're still in this sort of crisis mode to do those experiments. We talked about Kenv framework last time, we're in the state of complexity. When you're in a state of complexity, you have to run experiments, right? That's the whole probe sense, respond. You have to try things, see if they work, take the inputs from your experiments make a decision about what's

Tiffany Lenz: 27:17

emerging.

Robert Greiner: 27:18

Yeah, I do. I really like that. And a great way. I'll just add one more thing. Decision journaling, if you're doing stuff like this is, I think really important. Take these experiments, think about what you want to do, write it down, revisit it, and a couple weeks or months, depending on what kind of experiment it is and see, hey, here's

the state of mind I was in, here's the decision I made. Here's the outcome. Don't want to kill that or double down on it.

Tiffany Lenz: 27:43

There's three different steps there. There's something around this repeated experimentation and documentation, looking for emergent patterns. And then revisiting how that fits into your bigger picture your enterprise almost of your even if it's your own mental model. What did you learn that emerged that would fit back in that you could then do another set of experiments? Maybe 2021 is that year.

Robert Greiner: 28:07

Yeah,

yeah, cuz if we are living in a different world, but we have not experienced it or sensed it yet, then we're playing the wrong game. And then that could be really dangerous. So this is a good time to go and remove some of that time.

Tiffany Lenz: 28:20

I've gotten some ideas from this discussion. I'm building a brand new business unit, short term, short term goals and long term. So I've gotten some good information from this. Thank you.

Excellent.

Robert Greiner: 28:31

It was great talking to you today. I'm glad your power is on and

water is running and

Tiffany Lenz: 28:36

I'm happy for you to have 80 degree weather even though I don't

Robert Greiner: 28:40

Yeah, from one degree to 80 degrees in just a few days. There you go. There's plenty of room for you in Texas if you want to join us.

Alright, have a good one.

Tiffany Lenz: 28:47

Take care.