Transcript
Speaker: And what's happened is the world is conflated ah having a a top-down structure as having a top-down process. No, no. Like you got design your structure from the top down. You do, okay?
Speaker: but you're designing it to unlock autonomy, energy, risk-taking, perspective-seeking, execution, right? Which is the process that brings life to that system. So that's really important to make that distinction in your head of like, hey, they're not, don't conflate them.
Speaker: I need a strong structure, scalable structure, and I need a dynamic process to synthesize information, make decisions and all that stuff.
Speaker: Welcome to the Leaders Commute Podcast. I'm Jess Villegas. This podcast considers how the experiences that keep resurfacing over the commute of our lives inform our worldview for how to lead others, and more importantly, how we lead ourselves.
Speaker: Its mission is to assist you to transform those experiences from passive, compartmentalized episodes into leveraged connections for better thinking and outcomes. Today's episode is titled, Beyond the Score, Finite Energy and the Forces that Success Can Hide.
Speaker: Every so often, a conversation gives me language for something I've experienced but never fully understood. On rare occasions, it causes me to reconsider something I thought I already understood quite well.
Speaker: My conversation to today with Lex Sisney did both. I first encountered Lex through his book, Organizational Physics, The Science of Growing a Business. I was immediately drawn to the title because it joined two subjects that had helped shape much of my own work, how organizations behave and the underlying forces that caused them to behave that way.
Speaker: Lex's methodology begins with a deceptively simple premise. Every system has finite energy in time. From there, he examines how organizations acquire energy, where they lose it, how competing forces consume it, and why structures that produce yesterday's success may eventually work against what that organization needs to do next.
Speaker: What I especially appreciate about Lex's work is its discipline. Organizational physics is grounded in first principles that he believes are universal, but he is not inclined to present it as a theory of everything.
Speaker: It does not need to explain every organizational phenomenon or absorb every other useful model. It was built to help a particularly kind of client confront real problems clearly and act upon them.
Speaker: That clarity carries an honest limitation. This is not necessarily a methodology for everyone. Systems thinking requires more than learning a few terms or adopting another management tool.
Speaker: It asks leaders to look beneath visible results, question what apparent success may be concealing, and consider whether the organization itself is producing the behavior they are trying to correct.
Speaker: Lex readily acknowledges that only a relatively narrow band of leaders and businesses will have both the need and the willingness to engage that rigor. He does not seem troubled by that because he has built the work for those prepared to receive it.
Speaker: Lex's personal evolution that made the framework possible is particularly compelling. He speaks candidly about moving from a young entrepreneur drawn to achievement, status, and the visible rewards of success toward a very different identity as a coach, someone called to listen, reflect, guide, and serve.
Speaker: He noticed that his work did not merely use his abilities. Because he was good at it and genuinely enjoyed it, it added to his energy. That may sound like a career insight, but I believe it reaches considerably deeper.
Speaker: Sometimes progress does not come from improving the person we have always been. It requires releasing an old identity, even one that may have served us well, so we can become available to the work the next version of ourselves is being asked to do.
Speaker: I entered this conversation hoping to explore Lex Sisney's ideas. I left it grateful for several lessons I had not expected, ones that are already causing me to think differently about my own methodology, the clients prepared to engage it, and the way I might best put it into practice.
Speaker: Please enjoy.
Speaker: Good morning, Lex. How are you doing today? Hey, good morning. Thanks for having me. My pleasure. Off camera, you were mentioning that it's going to be a pretty hot one in the Santa Barbara area in a today. i don't know if you're specifically in Santa Barbara or you're proximate to it, but it indicates it's hot.
Speaker: Yep, it's a little warm. And I'm in wine country, equine country in the Santa Barbara area. It's quite stunning. oh Oh, very nice.
Speaker: Very nice. Have you been there a long time? We've been in the Santa Barbara area for about 25 years. we My wife and I ah recently... Completed about a two and a half year walkabout where we traveled around the U.S. and Europe and tried on living in Franklin, Tennessee.
Speaker: But ultimately kind of landed that this was a a nice ah nice spot in the world for us. Right. Are you originally from the California area? area No, I grew up on Lake Minnetonka, Minnesota.
Speaker: Okay. Which is just outside of Minneapolis. And I was originally born in New York City. And if you look at my life history, I've started in New York City and I progressively moved west, spent some time in Asia and early in my career, and now back in California.
Speaker: So I started west and moved east, but it wasn't nearly as dynamic as what you described. It was one big move for a change of jobs. And I always relate the story that the reason I moved is I had been working as a controller for mid-sized companies, a really reluctant controller. I'd been in into the accounting field for 10 years and been spending nine of it, trying to get out of it. well The executive asked me if I wanted to move to Lawrenceville, Georgia to be a controller. I said, no, I'm not going to do that. So he said, you can talk to the general manager. of If you can work out a deal, maybe you can move, and then maybe he'll let you do something else. And I said, if I can get even a handshake, I'll do it. I'll move.
Speaker: And so I did. And the agreement was, after two years in accounting, helping to restructure the department, they let me move into operations. So i was going to be able to make a lateral move without a you know pay cut and all the pain of trying to restart a career.
Speaker: And so your lateral move then turned out it happened. It wasn't just it wasn't just a No red herring offer. Okay. Yeah. Now those are the days when I could ask for a handshake and they could give me a handshake and would actually just happen and it happened exactly that way.
Speaker: And I imagine your background as a controller strongly he still influences your understanding of operations and processes and growth and things like that. Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah, it does. And it created a discipline in me that I don't know was innate to my skill set. You know, you have to be very detailed oriented. And I did find that I did enjoy that part of it. I just didn't like doing the traditional accounting stuff. But yes, someone other day called me ah a financial expert. And I said, you don't call me a financial expert. I go, that's like calling me A Spanish expert, you and just because you hear me order a Spanish in a restaurant and I came from California, those Americans speak Spanish that well anyway. So you said you went on, the what was the term you used? You went a walkabout. Did you say, was that literally, figuratively? Yeah, literally. We put our stuff into storage and traveled around, drove around the U.S. s So I know that I'm oversimplifying the question, but
Speaker: In those 25 years, did did all that travel, i know it had some part in shaping your worldview, but did did it do it so to a significant fashion to inform your work? o That's a good question. So I spent my early part of my career in Asia, and that was a time when China really was anticipated to be this up-and-coming growth market and, and, and superpower, but it hadn't yet materialized. This would be back in early nineties. Okay.
Speaker: And, uh, I don't know if it influenced my approach, but it's certainly, i think any kind of travel opens your eyes and helps build an appreciation and awareness for how different cultures and mindsets, you know, approach things and view things and interact. Um,
Speaker: And I've certainly had many, since then, many experiences with international teams where, you know, I went in thinking, oh, well, they must think like Americans, you know, and just get hammered because my underlying assumption is wrong, you know, and so you got to like,
Speaker: have the wisdom, which comes only from pain and experience of like, okay, well, what's actually real here? What's true? You know, how should I approach the situation with fresh eyes? think that might be the main thing.
Speaker: Yeah. I was working for a gentleman. He was a well from the Netherlands. And it seemed like I was the only person in the company that understood that when he spoke, he wasn't yelling at everybody. He just sounded like yeah close to Germany. One example. Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah. Thanks for sharing that, Lex. I want to just set up a listener for what I'm intending to accomplish today. And I came across your book, Organizational Physics, the Science of Growing a Business, in bouncing around from different roles, either as W-2 manager and then executive and then fractional executive and then also a business performance consultant. I've tried to be very aware of what are people doing, how are they thinking about things.
Speaker: But I did find myself what was undergirding a lot of that discovery wasn't just what's the next way an executive can be better, what are the things that people need to do to be better, and which always strikes me as very self-help, which is fine.
Speaker: But that's not really what I was after, but I didn't know how to talk about what I was after. yeah So I would get drawn to books like yours, like things like the fifth discipline, anything related to systems thinking, and started reading deeply about those those authors. And then back in college, you know, when I was, I was wayward for most of college, but for a very specific two years of being wayward, I was a philosophy major. And so I was exposed to a lot of literature. So all these things,
Speaker: I look back and I were really were searching. I thought I was just trying to get smarter to be interesting at a party, but what was happening is i was really looking for something. And honestly, the way I finally discovered what I thought I wanted to understand was just experience, you know travel, demands, living in situations that i was uncomfortable with.
Speaker: So that was part of the search. And then different classes, different books helped me just create some parameters around my thinking so I could speak about it. And even today, it's still difficult. And that's why I was drawn to your book. And I think I mentioned to you in an earlier conversation that what first drew me was just the title. like I think I said to you, Organizational Physics.
Speaker: I don't know if I'd ever seen those two words put together. I love organizational stuff and I love physics. I particularly use it to help me articulate how to think about doing things in the short term and the long term. I don't know how you intended the book to be read, but that's how I've been using it.
Speaker: Yeah, thank you. One of the ways that I kept some sanity around trying to put structure around my ideas was, I'd say, it seemed like the story is trying to teach me something.
Speaker: And i want to satisfy sort of the ego of telling the story and then also satisfy my curiosity about it. And I just kept holding on to them. over the years, I just want to share ah an experience. And then I do have some questions that I think about relative to your material that has informed the stories since I wrote it.
Speaker: If you're okay with that. Of course. In an earlier podcast, I wrote a longer version of something called The Fog of Score. It was about me coaching a YMCA basketball team. So was halftime of our YMCA basketball playoff game and the situation was not promising.
Speaker: We were down 28 to 13 against a team seated higher than us, bigger and stronger than any of my scrappy Blue Devils. I sensed a team-wide resignation to the inevitability of a loss. We were well into moral victory territory.
Speaker: After all, this was a group of overachievers that had never expected to have a winning record, much less reach the playoffs. But with 16 minutes left, I could not quite bring myself to tell a group of invested preteens that losing honorably was now the goal.
Speaker: They waited for me to reveal the grand strategy, and I searched for my inventory of pep talks and produced the wholly unoriginal and completely unsubstantiated declaration, all right, team, we have them exactly where we want them.
Speaker: One of my players, David, was not convinced. He said, coach, what do you mean? Those guys are giants. They can score any time they want. I just don't understand why they're in such a huge hurry to score.
Speaker: He was right. The other coach kept thundering, pushed the ball, pushed the ball. His son, Billy, was their somewhat oversized point guard, and the offense ran through him. They were playing their own version of the Magic Johnson-led Showtime Lakers, but they did not need Showtime.
Speaker: With their size, they could have walked the ball up the court in slow time, fed their biggest players, and scored almost at will. My team had fewer options, so by some dev divine guidance, I decided to fight speed with speed.
Speaker: I told our guards to stop trying to impede Billy's progress and instead get behind him and chase him up the floor as fast as they could, every single time. At first, the decision looked like a gift to the other team as they scored the first two baskets of the second half, but eventually Billy began to get tired and his even bigger teammates had to work harder just to keep up with him.
Speaker: Their exhaustion allowed us to chip away the lead. And with two minutes remaining, we were only a few points behind. Completely depleted, Billy had abandoned his father's insistence that he keep pushing the ball. But by then, whether they ran or crawled, the team was too exhausted to execute.
Speaker: We caught them, passed them with less than a minute remaining, and won 41 to 39. For years, I told that story as evidence of my strategic brilliance. The underdog coach makes the decisive adjustment, outmaneuvers a superior appointment, and it leads his team to an improbable victory.
Speaker: But over time, in several retellings of the story, that version began to fall apart. My so-called strategy was largely a reaction to David, not me, first noticing that the other team was spending the energy it never needed to spend.
Speaker: And honestly, if the game had ended just 60 seconds earlier, we would have lost. 60 little seconds were the accidental difference between glory and forgotten defeat. Eventually, I became less interested in the final score and more interested in the fog surrounding both coaches.
Speaker: The other coach had a formula that was working, so he kept demanding more of it, even after the conditions indicated another approach. I waited until all reasonable choices disappeared and then treated a desperate reaction to the circumstances and carefully designed plan.
Speaker: Both teams had an opportunity manage the energy resources in a way that was optimum for their respective goals, but neither one did it particularly well. One team expended too much because its success to a substantial degree seemed to validate the strategy.
Speaker: The other expended almost everything because it had waited too long to adapt to what the circumstances called for. The experience stayed with me because favorable outcomes can hide poor thinking just as usually as unfavorable outcomes can hide good thinking. The scoreboard told me we have won It did not tell me whether I had undersung the system, managed its energy, or simply benefited from the other team exhausting itself one minute too soon.
Speaker: So I wrote that a long time ago, and I polished it up for the different audiences, but that story just kind of sat with me for a long time. I didn't really think much about it and until I read your book.
Speaker: And so I don't know if I'm catching exactly all the ways you might talk about energy, because I know that a lot of the book speaks pretty heavily towards, these are my words, but external sources of energy. know, we had a finite amount of energy and how we expanded it wasn't great.
Speaker: yeah But after reading your book, I thought maybe someday I'll get a chance to ask lots of questions. I'll meet him at a bar or something. So I'm just going to leave it there for now. i mean, you're welcome to comment on that. But at some point, I want to get back to maybe a couple of thoughts about the stories. Well, I like that story a lot.
Speaker: And i especially like how you deconstructed it over time. to try to get the lessons and we all get caught in a narrative fallacy, right? Oh, I was the brilliant strategist and then you broke it down further, right? That's that's a real systems thinking commitment there.
Speaker: Like, okay, well, what did I really do? Well, I reacted to a situation and I got lucky. But you're capturing this concept that every system has a finite amount of energy and time. The players can't play forever.
Speaker: They got to get... Calories and water and oxygen and and rest. Yeah. And the business is the same, right? It has finite energy and time. It's got to get new sales and new customers and keep in new resources. Yeah.
Speaker: And keep its existing customers and employees happy. And at the same time, there's this force called entropy. It's pretty simple. Once you break it down, it's just this force of things disintegrating, falling apart. Yeah.
Speaker: So in your story, Billy, the point guard, think that was his name. you know You could feel he was just extra worn down. He's probably irritated with his dad. I imagine he got flustered and frustrated and you know demoralized. That's a form of entropy, right? Just tune into the friction eating away at his internal system.
Speaker: Well, that's true for every system in the universe, from a startup to a billion-dollar company to a courtship to a marriage. And I found there's tremendous value in just holding that as a foundational principle, like finite energy and time.
Speaker: And if I can do that, then I can tune into my client, you know, where are their energy drains, that's a symptom of entropy. Yeah. Where their energy gains, it's a symptom of integration with the environment where the energy flows in, you know, and if I'm good as a coach,
Speaker: then I'm helping that executive design their business, design their life so that on net-net, they're getting more more gains and less drains. The really interesting thing about that is that in order to have more gains, you actually have to reduce the drains.
Speaker: And that's not something that's always intuitive, but it's important to call out. like If you want to have more flow, energy, wins, victories, success in life,
Speaker: ah you you ultimately get to a point where you realize, well, then I got a cut. I got to transform or get rid of those things that are costing me. They're not a net gain.
Speaker: And if you want more success and happiness, the bottom line is cut the drains and you'll naturally experience more gains. I mean, there's part of my career where i have the time to play well with podcasts and do things like that and between the the clients that I have, but I put a restriction on myself right out after COVID that I wasn't going to do the kind of travel that I've been doing for the previous 30 years.
Speaker: yeah And then we had a situation where mother-in-law was living with us in her final days and speaking as respectfully and as lovingly as I can about my mother-in-law. is that That was a big drain, particularly for my wife, who was a caregiver. And that's a hard thing to do, to kind move away from what you've been doing. it It can be hard thing. Yeah.
Speaker: It's a real thing. I also thought things about that story was that um to a certain extent, in order to make myself seem reasonable and smart, I had to make the other coach seem reasonable and smart. And instead of understanding it in l and analyzing it, it's saying we're showtime and that's it. That's the assumption. And then you walk around it and you never, never evaluate it. And then with me is I got to say, oh, fog of score, interesting energy inertia. When all I was really doing because I had no options left.
Speaker: I thought, all right, well, let's just try and outrun I do like um the sports metaphors for business. So I've read most of the elite coaching biographies in basketball, you know, and I always get good insights out of the, those pro sports coaches, you know, Pat Riley, Phil Jackson,
Speaker: they're They're good systems thinkers, right? And how they approach building a team and winning a championship and repeating is always a systems approach. It's cool. Even if they wouldn't necessarily call it that or understand it.
Speaker: And now people very casually use the term, I'm going to trust the process knowing it's in the right direction, not necessarily knowing why it's a process or why it makes sense. Yeah, exactly. But I would like to understand a little bit about how you came to those concepts and then how you decided that you were going to construct that book and along with other books. So i was just wondering if you might talk about what preceded that and how you got to that point of wanting to develop that.
Speaker: So, um, the origin story would go back to my, my late twenties and I was leading one of the country's fastest growing technology companies. And most of it was just lucky, right place, right time. ah I had a a firm idea of what the business should do and not do.
Speaker: And as we grew, i you know, I brought in investors and had a board and it's my first time kind of going through all that. I found that a certain stage of complexity that I really started to carry a lot of stress.
Speaker: You know, I had all the normal things you would imagine, right? Like, The pace of change is really, really fast. Each of my board members has a very different, very strong opinion.
Speaker: ah my The management team all has different approaches and styles and opinions. And I... At that time, I didn't have any kind of framework to synthesize that or sift it and make sense of it, you know?
Speaker: So imagine a ah young executive just kind of trying to do their best, like fully committed to the mission and doing what sounds right, but often has a downstream negative implication.
Speaker: So just like chaos, you know, really rapid chaos. And the the gift in that experience was if it was a normal growth company, I would never know what I know. I would never have had the inspiration to go and find a better way.
Speaker: Because in a normal growth situation, like you can afford to make a suboptimal decision. You won't even get the feedback for months or years later. You'd just be sailing in a leaky boat and not have any feedback that that's there's a leak there. you with me?
Speaker: Yes. But in a hyper growth situation, like the feedback is... Like an upturn rake, smashing you in the face. Like, bam, oh, why didn't that work? Oh, bam, that sounded like a good idea. And it downstream, it this happened. So there was a real gift there.
Speaker: It also broke down my ego to where I started to look for help. And I was really fortunate because ah near where we were headquartered in Santa Barbara, there's a consulting group called the Adesis Group.
Speaker: And that was created by Ichak Adizas. And he had a right-hand man, a president called Sunil Davidi. And we were probably too small for them at that time, but they took me under their wing.
Speaker: And what Adizas is really known for and should be celebrated for is this idea of life cycle theory. You know, that every system goes through a series of predictable stages.
Speaker: just like a child, and anyone listening to them as a parent, you know just imagine what would happen if you took your three-year-old and you started parenting them like they were already 13, or vice versa, disaster.
Speaker: You gotta match the parenting style for the stage. And the same thing with entrepreneurship is you gotta actually match the management style for the stage of the business, the products, the business units.
Speaker: And if you get out of sequence, then all hell breaks loose and you're gonna suffer. And so that was my first experience of, they taught me a framework to look at my business from upper a level, you know, as a system.
Speaker: and And then it was instantly obvious, oh, That sounded like good advice, but it was out of step with the stage. Oh, I should do this right now. I shouldn't try to do that. I got to come back and do this because it's stage appropriate. Am I making sense?
Speaker: Yes. And so that was like an instant turnaround for that business. you know It was like suddenly many of the problems we were having like shifted because I suddenly was seeing things differently. Right.
Speaker: I was pacing and and approaching things differently. And I started to feel a little bit more like I was running things versus being run by them. Okay. So like when anytime in life, when you have that visceral experience, like the basketball game, you're talking about, like I'm failing and then um I'm succeeding.
Speaker: Like that's a trigger for me to go, okay, that's interesting. I want to go explore that. And so what happened is I went off and wanted to find, ah a method, a framework where I could kind of look even more robustly, like, you know, my my life, other companies I get involved with, all situations, I was looking for that framework that I could place on any situation and it would be more graceful. I'd be a more astute leader. I'd know what to do in any kind of situation and more effortlessly guide that system.
Speaker: to you know better outcomes. And ah in the back of my mind, I had some requirements. One was like, okay, I i need this to be on on first principles. Like for some reason, I have a hitch in my consciousness where I need things to be the same at all levels.
Speaker: Like it's true at the individual level, the team level, the family level, the organization level, it's the same principles. So that was a requirement. Another requirement was that it could be as simple as possible to deploy.
Speaker: Like imagine you're a leader in a fast-paced setting. It's less theory and more like ah application now. you know So simple enough to apply in a fast-paced setting. And then i ultimately landed around using metaphors of physics Because, um you know, we live in a physics-based culture. Physics is is known and respected, and it's the same in Paris. It's the same in Tokyo. It's the same in l LA. Like, it's a language that cuts across international teams and boundaries. And so that was the genesis of ah of organizational physics.
Speaker: So you said that you were with that business ah in your late 20s, and then I'm not sure how long you stayed with it. But these key items that you gathered, first principles of physics as being more universally understood idea,
Speaker: Was all of that gathered ah pretty much in that first role or did you have several roles where you were organizing that information for you? You what happened was I got ah got fired upwards to chairman in that company and ah the my the board had just gotten you know tired of this kid learning on the job and wanted a steady hand and the market had crashed then. So I got fired up to chairman and i was really dissatisfied.
Speaker: And so i i I started to plan like a next venture. you know And ah I was almost about to launch it and this you know this voice came in. you know Hey, man, what are you doing? like If you want to do another business, you got to build some more foundational things in your life, right?
Speaker: Be a better husband, be a better father, be more present. yeah Otherwise, you're just going to repeat what you did before and you're going to continue to have you know suffer and stress and anxiety and that stuff.
Speaker: And so I thought I might take like a ah summer. Like I actually had to fight to give myself permission to take a summer off and just recharge, renew, recommit and research.
Speaker: And then, uh, that, that summer ended up being about, I don't know if it was like five or six years of just like questing, searching, researching, like entrepreneurs are strange and that would like we're ah all or nothing. And so,
Speaker: my orientation went from building a business to like finding the answers. And I did all kinds of stuff, like lots of different roles, but what happened or some different roles, but but mostly always as an entrepreneur.
Speaker: And then what happened was ah other entrepreneurs started to reach out to me for coaching. And man, I really liked that. Like I got to hone in the craft I was building, the framework I was building it was I was good at it.
Speaker: you know When I did it it, it would add to my energy. ah People were asking me for it. you know ah Later, I learned those were all signals of the thing you're supposed to be doing, but at the time, I didn't know it. At the time, I was really like a house divided because my ego and my by original like orientation to the world was be a very successful entrepreneur and CEO.
Speaker: you know And I really wanted all the wealth and status and accoutrements that come with that. And then there's a very different part of my personality emerging coaching that was like the opposite, right? It was like, I'm here as a servant. I'm here to be present for you.
Speaker: Listen, guide, suggest, reflect. You feel the difference? Yeah. my It took me like five years in that searching process to like drop that old self, that that first self that was really driven and ambitious and be fully embraced this other self,
Speaker: And so that to me was the main the main shift was like learning to let go of that old identity and fully step into the new identity. I'm relating quite significantly to your journey there. The main difference is taking me 20 years longer to come to the same realization as you may have come to much more quickly. But ah one thing that I think is interesting is that part of letting go, at least for me, of the ego,
Speaker: which gives you a little bit more clarity about what are the more universal first principles instead of what are mostly theirs and so am i But I think the way it manifests for me is whatever I was developing was too big for anything I could do.
Speaker: mean, it was it made a lot of sense to me, but I knew that it was going very difficult to communicate. to other individuals because either they would see it as abstract or maybe I wouldn't do a good job of talking about it. It almost seems like giving up part of a self that's restricting the development of that material is also allowing you to constrict, if that's the right word, the methodology down to its most usable parts. And so maybe you maybe there's a process. want to get too spiritual here, but maybe you've got to let go of yourself in order to get down to more fundamental principles. I'm not sure if that's something that might resonate with
Speaker: I get the concept of what you're saying for sure. And the thing that comes up for me is the organizational physics is a very, I think it's very useful framework. Those who like embrace it and coach with me, you know, get a lot of ah ROI from it.
Speaker: um But it's not an easy access point for the world. Like if you just hear one part of it, you like, you have to have the need and the time and the commitment to understand and see how it all interconnects.
Speaker: And then you need to integrate that. You know, like you can't be a systems thinker. You can't be an effective systems thinker unless you like have embodied systems thinking, you know, which takes training, reinforcement, mentorship. Like it's a whole new approach to living and leading, right?
Speaker: So I'm in that that realm. And I know the anecdote to a lot of chaos, confusion, distraction is a good system.
Speaker: Yeah. But getting people to dive into that system It's a different challenge. And so like I don't know if I've packaged it up well. I think i think I've packaged it itd up pretty well to try to make it digestible. But that's a chasm that's not going to go away. Like this is always going to appeal to a small subset of the population you know that has the wherewithal and need to like own it, you know, to really master a system.
Speaker: Yeah, that's the tension that I work with all the time. And I guess I'm not solve it, but um but you just try and make it. More digestible, I think, is a great way to to say that. But oh because of the nature of this type of work and that it's got to be embraced, and it's almost like you're going to preach, but you need a choir already to some extent, right? and yeah Some of the language that you're prepared to to give them, they've to be able to use it.
Speaker: yeah um But I'm wondering if what forged you in terms of how you came to those concepts because of the chaos, all of the things that you described in your initial experience there, is it fair to say that the companies you coach, are they because of the deliberate somewhat deliberate nature of what you're trying to implement, does it mean that other companies like that aren't necessarily the clients that will come to you? Are they going to be more companies, not that are stable, but find themselves in a growth mode, but not necessarily in chaos mode?
Speaker: Are they the better receptors for your material? Yeah, um I speak to a very niche audience. It's a expansion stage CEO that they have product market fit, they're growing quickly, and they hit the ceiling of complexity.
Speaker: And they're like, okay, I know we need to change, but I'm not sure what or how. And i i I can't afford like a long time disruption or getting it wrong. And if this if they're in that experience and and then they come across my work, like in those principles start to speak to them, then then we can explore if it's a good fit.
Speaker: um So I work across all industries and you know many different countries, but they're typically those businesses, 100, 300 million range, you know sometimes as small as like 30 million, but they're growing quickly and they just they're feeling it, right? It's not like a theoretical future problem. It's like, ooh, you know this business unit is doing pretty well, but this new one we're unable to launch, why?
Speaker: my head of marketing was doing great. And now they're, now I think they're not it. Why, right. Is it me? Is it them? Is it a change in environment? Uh, this friction between sales operations and finance is extreme.
Speaker: what How do we solve that? you know So every business is unique and every business goes through the same patterns, the same life cycle stages. And so you know you'll you'll see these patterns emerge.
Speaker: And so a lot of times I get feedback that like the book felt like I was writing their life, you know just because the CEO is so in it at that point. like yeah It's interesting.
Speaker: I'm wondering if just if you think back to your engagements and the ones that maybe they didn't turn out exactly the way you expect, maybe they they didn't go badly, they just didn't go the way you expected or hoped or how your your client may have hoped.
Speaker: um Is it only that they had difficulty embracing the concepts or maybe they thought they had the discipline and they don't? Or is there some other dynamics that would have a company maybe fall a little short of what you were hoping to help? Yeah, so I've had a couple of um hard hard learning experiences and they all they all kind of fit a pattern.
Speaker: ah Interestingly, they were they were international tribes. So like imagine a ah ah global leadership team with like two cultures, you know ah Irish and Russian, Dutch Afrikan and English Afrikan.
Speaker: ah Okay, like I could go on, but like they're very different cultures. And i was kind of brought in to like stamp a structure that the CEO felt would be the best one to kind of mediate between these and these international groups and conflicts. And that's not a good place for me.
Speaker: One, because, I mean, it's not going to work, right? I only do my work because I want to see results. ah That's the main reason. the And what I learned from those experiences, like is like, if I'm sensing that's the situation, I just won't engage, you know?
Speaker: um But two, it really opened my eyes to that, you know, the map is not the terrain. So you might see a company on paper and assume there's a unified culture and mission there and, like, don't have that assumption. You got to go in and see it because...
Speaker: Like what I've seen is some some tribes will work for the tribe more than for the whole. i don't know if that makes, it's pretty abstract, but. and No, I think I understand you're saying there. ah Are you finding because you're comfortable working remotely that you're having to balance which between having to be on site versus working from the Santa Barbara area or does your work require that you just spend a good amount until I'm on site?
Speaker: um I've kind of hold my model in where I do like my stage one engagement remotely. And then sometimes I'll do a stage two engagement in person a, like a strategic alignment workshop.
Speaker: I got to go to Columbia on Sunday, for example, to do that. Yeah. So got to do the right tool at the right stage. Yeah. This is a,
Speaker: Again, some of these things are just coming to me and these may just be my problems. But I have also been working remotely for the last 20 years, right? So now you've got remote pre-COVID and remote after COVID.
Speaker: yeah And it seems to me that all of the challenges of working remotely, and obviously there's the benefits of getting face-to-face with people and then having that that interaction in a way that facilitates the relationships.
Speaker: yeah But it almost feels like the 20 years of working remotely up to COVID and the five years since or six years since COVID, like the problems of working remotely seem to just now be different or they popped up. Like I never thought to myself, I'm gonna be you know working with remotely and I'm gonna have to suffer through lack of communication, visual cues, I won't get all that. I never really thought much about that. I just found ways to overcome them.
Speaker: And now it seems like there's a cottage industry to either tell me I'm doing a right or wrong when you're working remotely. And now it a lot less satisfying to work remotely. I almost long for to get in front of someone, go to their location and spend time almost just because I feel like there's something i won't, maybe I won't miss the most vital item, but I might get the next level of 10 vital, ah less vital situations. And just wondering if you've found that dynamic or just maybe the way I'm working, I'm not sure.
Speaker: I don't personally have have that dynamic, um but yeah, Like there's many ways to solve the mission, you know, help the client solve the problem. And so I would just try to orient always to what's required here, how to do this the right way, efficiently as possible.
Speaker: You mentioned um one of your mentors and I'm a little familiar with the author, but ah don't pronounce it properly. you tell me again? the he ah Adesis? Adesis. Are there other books or influences that that you'll claim that have influenced you quite a bit or there things that you look for now to try and enhance how you think about your work?
Speaker: You know, ah because my orientation is to find like frameworks. I'll usually land like on a framework that I find useful and true. So yeah, There's a lot of classic classic books there, ah classic ways of thinking there.
Speaker: And i I don't really have any to call out in particular at this point. um But I found that I can usually get a ah good concept from a book, you know, to either reinforce what I've been thinking or give it in a new light.
Speaker: Yeah. As I was thinking about the word physics and the things that come with that, that connotation or the concept to people who love physics less, I think an equal and ah amount of individuals probably think about things like sort of chaos theory and I don't claim to understand it, but a lot of the ways that people talk about chaos theory and is that appropriate to say that that's a a subset or that's a ah first principle or is there some way that you relate those things?
Speaker: Well, um I think we have to be, or I wanna be careful Because my orientation is to help a CEO and their company like thrive.
Speaker: And i'm I'm trying to pull metaphors that speak to a complicated situation very cleanly, you know, like they're, we get it, we can apply it.
Speaker: Now, one area of of chaos theory or emergence theory is like phase shifts. you know Now, I'm using the term phase shift in a different like different way. like you go When your business goes from the late nail it into the early scale it stage, there are some changes that have to happen. That's actually a phase shift or an emergence happening. you know But I'm not the person to go to to like...
Speaker: reinforce and show how ah a business is in a chaotic, emergent, chaotic system. Like, me like I'm the guy to go to like, we're at, we're having these problems and we want to solve this quickly as we can. And we don't want to lose our entrepreneurial DNA, you know? And so I have a, I have a framework to help guide you through that. And then you can pick up the next framework or metaphor. Like think of me like a Swiss army knife, the base of the Swiss army knife.
Speaker: Yeah. Get that installed and then you can add any widget you want onto it. So I thought that makes sense good because I i think um people like myself can get lost reinforcing something that feels right, but maybe it's not feeling right for the end goal, right? Because ostensibly want to be as clear as possible and helpful as possible to to my clients. yeah And it's not necessary for them to understand how chaos theory links to other theories. But it's also the inertia of what a lot of leaders will do, right? I'm ah being validated almost every step of the way, but I'm not measuring the degree to which the returns are coming back to us for the effort.
Speaker: It's very, very hard not to look at the score and judge your success and leadership or and all those things based on the score. Like it's really, really hard to look past the scoreboard and look underneath very hard.
Speaker: You have to be an intentional about it. And you have to decide that you might think something or hear something that doesn't particularly coincide with your worldview on how things should work. Yeah. And I want to add, you have to anticipate.
Speaker: ah So if our business goes three times the size from now, what breaks? You know, and like that'll get you thinking, oh, well I better start shoring up this part of the business because I can intuit it's going to break. I was working with a client recently and on the face it, they seem successful.
Speaker: They seem to be doing all the right things. And then you get underneath and then you realize there's lots of things you wonder, how did they get that far? when they've only gotten this far on these three things. But maybe that's less important than understanding that no matter where people are, there's different things going in the business and you can't optimize them all. As matter of fact, you can't optimize everything because then they start working against each other almost. that's right But there's a long way from to get to that point. There's several things you should optimize to a degree, I think.
Speaker: And that's a hard thing to see. And then I just just thought, if I try and say that to ah someone, they're going to say, what are you talking about? What are you talking about? I wanted to share something with you. I had an individual tell me other day, hey, listen, I want to give you an introduction to someone you might want to speak to.
Speaker: It's kind of a self-help thing, which is not really your thing. You didn't say it improperly. He's a friend. Yeah. And when he said that, I thought, well, I don't know. I mean, it's like saying, you know, you're not into apple pie, you're not under the American flag. I just thought, well, yeah, I'm into self-help, I guess.
Speaker: And then I thought, well, he primarily knows me through whatever my methodology is he's aware of. And I started realizing it's not self-help, but it's also not organizational physics, right? I think you do a really nice job of first principles underlying structures. So then I'm thinking where I'm operating, if it's not self-help,
Speaker: and It feels like there's some standards that you can work with or some tenants you can work with at just below the structural level. I see so the way systems work. I need to change my view.
Speaker: That's kind of self-help because you can better. and It's not self-help like I got to lose 10 pounds. So maybe he was right. but i don Maybe I don't want to talk to the guest, but it's just interesting. So let's i've just begun the book to design the scale.
Speaker: I haven't gotten too far into it. but I'm just wondering, is there something about that book not having read it yet that I might want to be watching for? Let's see. That book is um well used in hyper growth companies. And the reason why is that it kind of illuminates that the structure is not the org chart.
Speaker: that ah structures get out of alignment. And if you really want your business to grow quickly and smoothly, then at certain stages, inflection points, you need to redesign the structure ah without involving the people. Like keep the people and current team and personalities out of it.
Speaker: And then you you kind of go through a process where first of all say, okay, what's this strategy? that the business is pursuing now. And then what is the structure that's required to execute on that strategy? Again, no people.
Speaker: And that's the most important rule of structure is that the structure must support the strategy, not the other way around. And you don't want to let ah short range functions overpower long range developments. We all have this experience of like the tyranny of now.
Speaker: makes it really hard to think and plan and develop for the future. So if you're working 60 hours and you can't, you know, i don't have time for my health and fitness and I'm eating poorly and I'm distracted around my family, like you can do it. Like I got to step away in order to reset.
Speaker: but Business is the same, you know, and there there are functions in the business like short range, demand gen, sales, you know, operations, right? Those things have to thrive,
Speaker: But there's also longer range development things like R&D or culture and talent or brand positioning that have to keep a long range orientation. And if your structure doesn't support it, then what's going to happen is the short range pressure is just going to overpower long range needs.
Speaker: So both are important. um The next one is ah don't let efficiency functions overpower effectiveness. So efficiency is about... Doing things the right way every time.
Speaker: High quality, high repeatability, yeah? Very, very important. But effectiveness is about breaking glass, trying things, being innovative, being disruptive. So and intuitively, your listeners would never put um the sales team under operations.
Speaker: Right? That would be putting efficiency function operations over sales, which needs to keep its effectiveness high. Like it is intuitively, our guts go, ah, no, that's not going to work. Now, that might feel good for three weeks because those rascally sales people finally are following structure and order and process. you know Okay, and three weeks later when your sales numbers are down, you'll realize your tragic error. like you let You let efficiency overpower effectiveness. So there's lots of examples of that, though.
Speaker: And you'll see when you start to break apart your business in this way, you'll start to see, oh, well, I i've thought of HR as just HR. But I unconsciously combined efficiency and effectiveness and long range and short range in the same in the same function, the same area. That's stupid.
Speaker: like Just because the world's grown up that way doesn't mean that it's wise. like I got to think more systematically and break break these parts. There's a reason your brain performs a function and your heart and your liver and your lungs perform different functions, yet they all work together.
Speaker: Your business is that is a dynamic organism and those same things have to come in place. So what I'm helping you to do in this book is bring visualization to, oh, that's a brain. That's a heart.
Speaker: Those are the lungs. I need them in their own functional areas of the business. And i'll I'll show you how to bring it all together to make a living human you know living dynamic system.
Speaker: couple other things is ah you can't let centralized control encroach and overpower autonomy. Generally, as a principle, we try to push autonomy and decision-making to where the work's happening.
Speaker: You with me? don't have to go back to centralized headquarters for for decisions that should be made at the point of impact, right? And those closest to the work typically make the best, have the most knowledge to make the best decisions. But at the same time, you can't decentralize and autonomy free for all because you're you know you'll go you'll go out of business, you'll harm your brand, you'll commit fraud. like you got So there's this tension, right?
Speaker: What I'm trying to do in the structure is is harness that tension where you keep centralized control where it should be and you push autonomy as much as possible as where it should be. another Another insight to think about is that most most of us are conditioned to think of structure and process as the same. So think of structure like a human body would be the musculoskeletal system. If my hip is out of alignment, I'm going to suffer.
Speaker: It doesn't matter how much my i improve my diet or my fitness. I'm going to be in pain. yeah That's structure. But I would be a dead skeleton unless I'm brought alive with a neural net and consciousness and in circulatory system, right? Well, that's process.
Speaker: And what's happened is the world is conflated ah having ah a top-down structure as having a top-down process. No, no. Like you got to design your structure from the top down. You do, okay?
Speaker: But you're designing it to unlock autonomy, energy, risk taking, perspective seeking, execution, right? Which is the process that brings life to that system. So that's really important to make that distinction in your head of like, hey, they're not, don't conflate them.
Speaker: I need a strong structure, scalable structure, and I need a dynamic process to synthesize information, make decisions and all that stuff. And then the last thing is, I said, keep people out of the way.
Speaker: Keep people off the page. Well, what happens is if you can follow these principles and design a scalable org, now you can add your team back into the structure with fresh eyes.
Speaker: You can see, oh, I have a glaring gap here in product management. You know, I'm asking my product innovator to do short range product management. You know, like, of course, it's not working well.
Speaker: Right. Or, oh, I'm really strong here and go to market. OK, so just take that orientation. Think systems, design for scale, take the people out of it. At the right time, you can add the people back in. But the moment you start designing around the personalities, people, the inertia of the status quo, you're going to get more of what you're getting.
Speaker: I've made some indirect references as a view to the PSIU model and scale. if you don't mind, if you could just give me a short synopsis of that so that anyone listening could immediately say, okay, I know how to think about Okay, so we are in alignment that all systems have finite energy and time, yeah?
Speaker: That means you got to get energy from the environment, yeah? And at the same time, entropy or this force causes things to break apart. And if the entropy is high in the system,
Speaker: capacity is going to be low. If I'm, if I'm feeling sick and i have a headache, I'm not going to be as effective at work, right? Being sick and having a headache is like entropy. If the sales leader and the ops leader are at each other's throats, yeah, that's entropy. It's go to be hard to have winning products and kicking butt in the market. Yeah.
Speaker: but That pattern is true everywhere. All right. If that pattern is true everywhere, then you can put a little pattern language to recognizing individual work styles, right? Which is an attempt to manage energy, team dynamics, life cycle stage dynamics.
Speaker: It's all the same dance. And so PSIU is a way to give a language to the dynamic that you're seeing. So If you see, a we can talk ah from a person level or a team level, but let's just jump right to the people. if Imagine a person you've worked with who's like screaming hard charger. Like it get up early, work your ass off, knock stuff off the list, next.
Speaker: Yeah? I value myself by how hard I work and I value people around me based on how hard they work. Grit, determination, gumption, go. That's the producing producer style, producer.
Speaker: It's focused on what to do, getting it done, short range, and being effective. Now, if you had a team of all producers, you would generate a lot of activity, but it wouldn't be it would burn out quickly, and there'd be a lot of um work that's just repeated, and there wouldn't be a lot of delegation or development,
Speaker: Because everyone's just taking the ball and running, playing their own game. Yeah? Okay. So the producer or the producing force has to be married with the stabilizing or stabilizer force.
Speaker: And that's what brings efficiency, systems, repeatability, quality, process, how the work gets done, right? It rips out inefficiencies to make things more streamlined, stable, order out of chaos,
Speaker: Now, if you had a person on your team that had a really high stabilizing force, you'd find that they're a little bit more methodical. Yeah. They're oriented towards doing the work the right way. They need more time to do it.
Speaker: So ah both things are required, right? you You need both of those forces in your business. You got to be producing results for whom you exist and you got to be able to systemize or stabilize how the work gets done.
Speaker: Now, if you only did those two things in the short run, you would be successful and profitable, right? Think about it. You're producing results. You're systematizing how it gets done. So congratulations, you win, except the environment's always constantly changing.
Speaker: And so while your system is producing and stabilizing, it also needs to be innovating for a changing future, which is about why not? Why not this? What about that? Let's do this. That would be cool. Why not?
Speaker: Long range, effective, disruptive. Yeah. No, just intuit the tension there between those three forces, right? Short range, effective, efficient, disruptive. You feel the tension?
Speaker: Well, guess what? That's life. That's leadership. That's a business. Like those tensions have to be there and they need to be harnessed for the good of the organization. But no one individual is good at all three of those things.
Speaker: Are they? Like they different individuals get more energy out of operating in a certain domain. When you ask a high innovator to step into accounting like disaster, right? We intuitively know that. I'm just giving you a language to look at it and go, oh, I've asked an innovate i've asked a fish to climb a tree.
Speaker: Dumb. There's one other force, the unifying force, which is what brings cohesion and unification, teamwork, bonding, community connection to the system.
Speaker: Unified. So P-S-I-U. P-S-I-L-V-E-U. All four forces are necessary in a healthy system, individual, marriage, business, but they're always in competition for finite energy and time.
Speaker: yeah And what happens is at different stages, a force will either be like missing or over-dominant. And you got to know how to match forces and ah give more emphasis to different areas, different forces, sometimes through different people at different stages in order to fulfill the mission.
Speaker: That's a lot to take in. But basically, ah each of us has a mix of these styles. you know Your style will evolve and adapt over time.
Speaker: Like you mentioned earlier, you were feeling the need to like get out in front of people. you know That's a unifying force wanting to express itself. You with me? Yeah. So you're going to look for solutions, environments that allow you to express more of that.
Speaker: Your team is exactly the same. like They have a force they're expressing that they want to express more of. And also, though, they got to show up and meet the needs of the environment.
Speaker: So there are these tensions there. And if you can bring language to it, awareness to it, you'll start to solve the tensions. Thank you for that. I only mean that in a disparaging way, but the way that it was easy for me to grasp what you'd said pretty quickly from the book and it felt like it's something i could use right away, but it doesn't feel underbuilt. It feels universal.
Speaker: I would say it's certainly universal. Like if we just go from the first principles, like the you could call it different things, but those patterns are definitely universal in all systems, all levels for sure.
Speaker: We're gonna start to wrap up here a little bit. I had one more question and then perhaps if you wanna talk about anything that you wanna communicate, i I'll invite you to do that. But here's one question and keep going back to the digestibility of the process. So I know that you're working CEOs and executives of these companies under certain types of circumstances and that makes sense. What I'm wondering is, do you find that part of whatever you define as success in the organizations is that those executives and or other managers have found a way to internalize the information at a lower level? Like, do they say, all right, I understand what Alexa's helping me with here, but we're here separately.
Speaker: We need our next line management to be more systems thinkers so that they know how to listen to us. Is that part of the equation of what you're trying to do? Or does it, do you leave that to the organization? I only go, um, to the CEO and the, they're what I call strategic execution team, which is typically about 12 to 18 people.
Speaker: And then I let the organization take care of the rest. It's just not my area of genius and strength. um to One good piece of good news there is, ah you know, the the framework is true at all levels.
Speaker: So it can be pretty easy for a manager to teach their team. Where it isn't optimal is that we all have finite energy and time. And so... people who can go in and really dive deep and get retraining and reinforcement and the principles will tend to be better leaders in the future because they've, they've had that indoctrination, right? They've had that knowledge base built in.
Speaker: Any your final thoughts you'd like to get out to the audience? You know, my, my final thought is that, uh, Reflect on finite energy and time in your life, your relationships, your work.
Speaker: And if you notice an energy drain in a key relationship or activity, I want you to flag it and recognize that that's like having a hole in the boat of your life.
Speaker: you know So we're conditioned and trained and society wants us to think about hey, where do you want to sail in our life? you know I want bigger, better boat. I want to go to these exotic locations and these interesting adventures and experiences. But all the while, there's a big hole in the hull.
Speaker: like You go, oh no, I'm going to patch the leak and then I'll sail. you know I'm just encouraging people to look below that water line. If you spot an energy drain, I know there's a creative solution there, but I want you to flag it. like Bring awareness to it and then the solution will emerge.
Speaker: That's the main takeaway. So that's relevant. It's really compelling. Well, i want to thank you again for your time. And if you have some projects in the future, maybe we'll have an opportunity to talk about those types of things again. But I really enjoyed the conversation, Lex. I want to thank you for your time.
Speaker: Appreciate it, Jess. Thanks for having me.
Speaker: My thanks to Lex Sidney, not only for sharing the principles of organizational physics, but for the openness with which he describes the experiences and personal changes from which those principles emerged.
Speaker: I entered the conversations thinking primarily about how organizations manage finite energy, but left thinking more carefully about how individuals do the same thing.
Speaker: what gives us energy, what quietly drains it, and whether we continue investing ourselves in an identity simply because it once produced a favorable score. There's humility in recognizing that even a framework built from first principles does not have to explain everything.
Speaker: It needs to help the right people see what matters and act with greater clarity. There's another kind of humility in recognizing that the person who created the work may also have needed to change before that work could fully emerge.
Speaker: Perhaps one of the most important transitions in a business or in life begins when we stop asking how to preserve the self that brought us here and become willing to release it for the self that may be required next.
Speaker: For the new questions, the unexpected connections, and the lessons I will continue to carry in my own work, I am genuinely grateful to Lex. The Leaders Commute podcast was produced by Acuity Business Consulting.
Speaker: Acuity demystifies the challenge of transforming talent and resources into exceptional and sustainable organizational performance by surfacing actionable clarity in the areas of strategic design, financial management, operational excellence, and leadership development.
Speaker: You can catch a new episode every couple of weeks, wherever you enjoy your favorite podcasts. Thank you for your thoughtful engagement. And until next time, I'm Jess Villegas, and you have been listening to the Leaders Commute podcast.
