Not Another Discussion! → A 12-Minute Conversation

In our second 12-minute conversation, Paul Marston and I focused on his experience of implementing a method for solving issues in a team. Paul is the Owner, Visionary and Integrator of a mid-sized transportation company. I've had the privilege to serve as their EOS? Implementer. 

Watch the video here, or read the transcript below.

SERGIU: Hi, welcome to our 12-minute Conversation on Operationally Speaking. I'm Sergiu Simmel, Principal EOS Implementer at Get Business Momentum.

PAUL: And I'm Paul Marston, the Owner and CEO of Abenaqui Carriers. More precisely. I'm the integrator and the visionary at my transportation company which I've been running on EOS for several years now.

SERGIU: And I've had the pleasure and honor to be Abenaqui's EOS Implementer for a while now. Today our conversation will be about... "Not another discussion!" Ready to get going. Paul?

PAUL: I'm ready when you are. That's going to be awesome.

SERGIU: Thank you so much. So Paul, if you recall the times in the leadership team at Abenaqui before we started implementing EOS, when you were getting together with your chieftains, what would the trying to address some issue or some topic look like in those days?

PAUL: It was a lot of conversations, because everyone's got something to say. It was clearly dominated by the loudest voice. That's without a doubt. And we were always, I would say, going after the symptom and not really digging into the root cause. We wouldn't always be disciplined to come up with concrete action items. They were more vague. As the leader, I'd leave the meeting feeling that this is exactly what we need to do.

PAUL: Then a day or two later, I'd be wondering how am I gonna measure this. How are we going to ensure that what was done was done? And then two weeks later the same issue arises and I'd say "Wait a minute. I thought we agreed on X, Y, and Z," but it wasn't documented, and it wasn't followed up on. And then I as the leader I was left shaking my head. That was very common.

PAUL: We're in transportation. Pick a topic, say, compliance. A truck would be operating and get ticketed for not having the proper permit. This happened over and over. We spent bazillion dollars on permits. And lo and behold, the truck would show up in a jurisdiction without a permit. And then we would say: "All right, we're going to have a full audit of all of this." And then they'd audit only part of it. Then we would have the program go through, but it wouldn't get followed through. And since we didn't have regular meetings back then, I would follow up with emails. It's very unsystematic method. And so that was really frustrating for me as a leader of the group.

SERGIU: What you provided us with, Paul, is just one example of the kinds of issues that we are talking about here that we are trying to solve as a team. And I want to get a little bit more specific. First of all, it's the obvious stuff: difficulties, challenges like your own permitting challenge or obstacles: How am I going to get from here to there? We also need to solve things like broken promises. Somebody actually said that going to get something done by such and such date and nothing got done. And I don't mean necessarily a single person, maybe a whole department didn't deliver. Or they are focusing on some project, some goal and all of a sudden, the whole thing derails for whatever reasons. So the question is: How can we get it back onto the rail?

SERGIU: And also not just the negative stuff but also the positive side. For example: I have a new idea and I need to discuss it with the team and see whether this idea has merit. What am I gonna do about it? Or there is an opportunity that I just came across: H ow are we going to tackle it or not?

PAUL: You made me think of something: the difference between managing action promises proactively versus managing them reactively. We were stuck with reactively managing promises. In other words, you promise me you're going to do that. So since I didn't really have a great mechanism for following up other than email and hounding you, then if the thing broke again in the future and I found out you didn't do it, then I'd say to you that you broke the promise.

PAUL: But when you have a proactive follow up, meaning like right now we have a system where every week we check in. You'd promised the group last week that by this date you'd have this in place and you either did or didn't and maybe you need another couple of days. But we follow it up. Now you're being accountable to the group to get the stuff done before it breaks again. We're not waiting till it breaks again to say that we're going to hit you with a stick. Now it's all about: "Hey, get your to-do's done, get your action items done. You promised the team, so let's keep moving. We've got other things to work on."

SERGIU: And also digging deeper into what is it that actually is preventing you from keeping things on track or fulfilling on your promises, right?

SERGIU: Give us a little bit of a description or an image of what it looks like to try to solve an issue like this, will you?

PAUL: What you taught us to do was first to identify the real issue. This is so important to the group. You want to solve the right problem. You don't want to climb the wrong ladder. So asking the right question is key. We just had this happen the other day. The question was: I need to get compliance with the software, so we can do this particular operation 25% of the time, and that's going to be the first step to achieving what we want to achieve.

PAUL: And then as we delved deeper, we realized that we don't actually have the best practices for that process established. So, I don't care if the request is 25%, 12% or 92%. We didn't have the best practice. Before we do it, let's define the best practice for that piece of software. And I don't want to delve into what we do, not to bore you all, but the getting to the root question is so important because then you're not wasting people's time. You don't want to focus on hanging the picture to the left or the right when the whole wall is rotting. So that's really, really critical.

PAUL: And then in the discussion, we are prone to hear only the loudest people. And when you have a leadership team, it's your job as the leader to get input from everybody.

PAUL: The system you've taught us can be considered a little methodical, but you know what everybody knows they're going to get heard from. I can't tell you the number of times we would have an operational issue and there’ll be somebody from IT that would chime in "I can do to make a report for that." And we go: "You can make a report for that?" Or you might even have a solution has nothing to do with technology. One might say: "Look, I don't think that's congruent with our core values." The group think is so important to a leader!

SERGIU: It's the power of the lateral thinking. People thinking outside the box because they are not inside the box to begin with.

PAUL: Yeah. And sometimes as you're verbalizing it, as you're sharing that to people, as it's coming out of your own mouth, the solutions become more apparent.

PAUL: And then when the question's clear and everybody's had a chance to have some discussion on it, then the solutions really tend to be more collaborative. This is the best choice of action. Always end up with an action item. Who's responsible for what. So that's the only way an issue comes off of our list. And we have quite a long list by the way. Once we're having a discussion about one item, other items come up. And you say: " Well, okay, get that on the list and we'll have a separate discussion on that. Let's keep this going, but we don't want to forget that." And that will stay on our list until it gets solved. A solution is always an action item.

SERGIU: You mentioned the method called, in EOS parlance, IDS. And "IDS" is an acronym for three things: Identifying the issue, Discussing it and Solving it. You mentioned that this methodology is a little bit "methodical," to use your term. I bet that whenever you try to implement something like this, people would put up a little bit of resistance because it's kind of unusual. It's counter intuitive. What did you experience in your team?

PAUL: Definitely! I've seen this with my own team, and I've watched it maybe four or five times now with various teams. At first, there is a lot of resistance. Week one doesn't look really good. It's really kind of ugly in the first week. And then the second week people are okay. They kind of know what to expect by the third or fourth week. Now they know they're going to be heard. Now they know that everyone's sharing something. We're all contributing our metrics. We're all contributing our viewpoints. We're all contributing. The questions aren't disappearing. There's no more "well, nothing ever gets done about that." You hear that less and less. It takes a while to get away from that.

PAUL: Eventually, during the week people are saying: "let's get that on the IDS List." That needs a team decision, so let's get that there. It's a momentum thing. You've got to get by the first three or four weeks. Now we have generally around 51 meetings a year. We look forward to it. It's how we resolve our issues and how we get stuff on the board for conversation.

SERGIU: To summarize, the three most important benefits of using this kind of methodology of solving issues as a team are: Number ONE, everybody gets a chance to speak, so it's not just the loudest voice. Number TWO, try to solve root causes, don't try to solve just symptoms. And number THREE, make sure that every time you end up with at least one action item, one to- do out of it.

SERGIU: So, Paul, any last thoughts?

PAUL: Issue resolution is such a big part of business. Having a formula in place to really solve them: I just can't thank you enough for helping us create something that really solves this problem.

SERGIU: Are you suggesting people should just be going off and implementing this based on the great books about EOS?

PAUL: Oh Man! Do I have a lot of thoughts on this! know Your time is money and I'm sure you can try to do this on your own, but if you do, you'll waste time and you'll waste money. I cannot discourage not hiring a coach strongly enough. Get your leadership team together to start basically on third base instead of a at home plate. It is a great asset to hire a coach.

SERGIU: Thank you so much, Paul, for your endorsement. And for anybody who's watching this, the way to reach me is to just give me a call at 617.731.3132 or email me at [email protected].

PAUL: And thank you, Sergiu. I'm looking forward to our next 12- minute conversation at Operationally Speaking. Until then, lead with wisdom, enthusiasm, and clarity!

SERGIU: Well said, Paul, and goodbye, everybody!