[ANNOUNCER]: Breaking down everyday workplace issues and diagnosing the hidden sickness, not just the obvious symptom. Our hosts, James and Coby.

[COBY]: Did we lose a patient?

[JAMES]: No, that’s just my lunch.

[COBY]: Hey, thanks for joining us. I’m Coby, he’s James. And let’s get started with a question. What lessons can we learn from 2024?

[JAMES]: Well, first of all, happy New Year. And if you’re listening to this, on New Year’s Day, when this episode actually drops, then congratulations on starting your new year. Right. looking back over the last year, I think on the Roman 3 front, at least a lot has happened this year. we’ve developed some really cool, exciting new partnerships that we’ll see. new products and new projects launched in 2025. And coming off kind of a slow summer, we had a very busy fall, which has been fantastic. we launched our podcast newsletter. We’ve onboarded new clients and we’ve had a lot of fun just ranting about a whole wide range of topics on the podcast. And what’s kind of cool is, two and a half or three years into running, this podcast now have over 60 episodes. We’ve got listeners in 124 countries and we’ve hit six or seven different, you know, top recommended podcast charts. And people are reaching out to us all the time, which has led to some really interesting conversations, new relationships, new projects, and some really cool opportunities. So I really want to thank you for listening. Not you, because you don’t matter. you, the listener. it’s been a really cool journey and I appreciate the fact that people are willing to take this journey with us.

[COBY]: Yeah. And, we haven’t really kind of plugged it in a while, but we really should get better at it. It’s like, you know, there’s a link in the show notes to our podcast, newsletter sign up if that’s something that you’re interested in and you. We kind of, send it out out quarterly and drop information.

[JAMES]: And if you’re listening to this on New Year’s Day and you obviously can’t get enough of us, so sign up for the newsletter and you can hear our voice and text and we can.

[COBY]: Be in your inbox, not just in your ear. but yeah, no, this has been ye. So, 2024 has been kind of a cool year for Roman 3, and I’m really excited for 2025. And honestly, we never get tired of folks who enjoy the podcast reaching out to us and kind of connecting with us again like some Cool projects have come from that. Some great partnerships. We’ve met such cool people. So this is one of our favorite kind of tools that we use to kind of help with kind of getting some of our business ideas out there and kind of help sharing and creating a dialogue with cool people. So if you’ve kind of always wanted to kind of chat with us, you just kind of feel like I’m sure they don’t want to hear from me. We do. So don’t be afraid to reach out. And some contact information how to get a hold of us is right in the show notes. But that being said, let’s actually get into with the question of the podcast, which is what lessons can we learn from 2024? And there’s a couple things that there’s a few things that we kind of want to talk about. I mean this year there wasn’t in a lot of ways as many big like news, you know, shaking the kind of the business world kind of stuff that kind of happened in past years, like with strikes and this and that and this sort of thing. This year the stuff that kind of came in was a bit more subtle, was a bit more kind of continuation of stuff that happened in the past years. But it’s all really worth talking about and it is worth reflecting on as we move forward into 2025. So I’just gonna give you a quick summary and then we’ll dig into the first one. But the things we want to talk about are these kind of steady rollback of DEI strategies and positions in many, many companies kind of kind of across North America. we want talk about kind of there’s still layoffs going on in the IT sector and not necessarily for the same reasons that they were kind of happening kind of in 2023. companies are getting really tired of trying to solve complex problems and that’s go going toa be the interest one that we’re going toa talk about. Yeah, and then we’re seeing more and more businesses falling into the action is reaction, fallacy. So I think that a lot of these are going to end up kind of overlapping a bit but I think we can get started to jump into talking about the rollback of dei.

[JAMES]: Yeah, I mean we’ve seen a lot of large companies very publicly talking about rolling back their efforts. I mean even Sherm has renamed its DEI function and really dropping equity from it. Microsoft was very public around the laying off DEI employees. Walmart has made some really big announcements about their rollback of DEI initiatives. This is only going to keep, this is going to be a trend through 2025, I suspect. In many ways it’s unfortunate and I don’t want to get into necessarily. Well, I think there’s a lot of contributing factors to it. and I think part of that, part of the contributing factors are people been. We haven’t done DEI very well in many companies. It’s been largely performative or it’s been tick boxes. It’s been perfunctory lack of strategy. It’s an annexed off the side department in and of itself that really isn’t integrated into regular business operations. there’s a lot happening in this space that is noteworthy.

[COBY]: Yeah, there has been this, you know, like, like the kind of, there was a need for us, like kind of a sweeping interjection of, you know, support around kind of you improving, you know, representation and kind of inclusion and kind of like firm commitments around things like pay equity and equal treatment and that kind of stuff that, you know, again, as a kind of fundamental elements that really kind of will benefit a business and really should be in place. And it’s embarrassing that in our modern world these things aren’t in place. Absolutely. It was the good thing about kind of the ramp up or the immediate kind of need or desire to kind of jump into improving dei. even the formation of the term DEI came from you know, something where people were starting to finally recognize this stuff is important. And I think though, and we’ve been saying this kind of from the very beginning that we appreciate the fact that a lot of people kind of like go, oh, they can of came to realize that this stuff does matter. But then everything that kind of happened after that were things that we always kind of saw as being unsustainable. And we’ve done podcast episodes where we’ve talked about, you know, like, things around like doing inclusion wrong and what does DEI really mean and all this other kind of stuff like that. And we’ve been kind of critical of the DEI infrastructure that’s been out there. And I think a lot of it kind of comes from just this immediate almost like, okay, we need this. So let’s just take the first idea that kind of comes to mind and then that first idea kind of spread. And whether it was a good idea was never validated. It was just, almost just like, we need to have some something, so let’s have something now. And I think that’s where a Lot of the perform stuff comes from because whatever we do, we has to look like we’re doing something right. Whether it had any impact or all was almost like something we’ll figure out after the fact.

[JAMES]: Yeah. And we’ve talked about this, many times before. The idea that the approach that most companies have been taking historically around DEI is that diversity plus equity will create inclusion. D plus E equals I. That’s not a true statement, but I understand how we can get there and I understand the thought process behind it. Need representation is very important. We need more people, in our workplaces who represent the communities that we serve, the clients that we serve. It is an important element and diversity of perspective is an incredibly valuable, resource for businesses to capitalize on. But we’ve talked about the difference between inclusion and integration, when just bringing people into an organization and having them coexist does not automatically create an inclusive environment, it creates integration, which is not a bad thing. We want people to be able to coexist who have divergent backgrounds, experiences, opinions, what have you. But this has led to a very unsustainable model of DEI because it’s not creating an environment where people actually feel like they belong and the movement. I don’t necessarily see the rollback of DEI in many ways as necessarily a purely negative. I’m not thrilled with the trend as it’s happening. I would rather we get to the solution by enhancing our DEI efforts. But I think long term it’s going to give us an opportunity to look at. Well, the concepts are still vitally important and there’s real valuable business outcomes that come from creating an environment where people belong and leveraging diversity of perspective in our organizations. I think we will have an opportunity to reframe what that looks like and not take the solely performative idea of how do we make ourselves look good on the company newsletter.

[COBY]: Yeah, I’m kind of on the same page with you as far as there’s potentially some positive things that can come out of the rollback in as long as certain conditions are met. But I think it’s also important for us to consider what is the kind of fundamental difference between the DEI concept, the focal point, theire the intended outcome, Versus the dei, implementation efforts and strategies that were commonplace in our workplaces. Because you and I firmly agree that the intended outcome is excellent and that is something that we should have and it’s embarrassing in the fact that we don’t in most of our workplaces. But you and I have been very be consistently critical about the way that the EI gets implemented and the common kind of narrative around it about what it looks like. Because you’re right, there’s a lot of performative solutions. There’s a lot of like tacked on, you know, like people hired with no to do DEI roles with zero authority. You, they’re an appendix to kind of every other department and they’re supposed to kind of lead from like you, the janitor’s closet down the hall on something that’s supposed to be transformative to an organization. Right. The thing that you and I have always said, and this is something that we talk about in a number of different fashions, is the concept of chaos solutions. dei, the implementation of it, the performative approach of it. Again, the reactive implementation of some type of DEI concept of tacked on training and tacked on positions is a chaos solution. And this to refresh people. Chaos solution is when you implement a strategy or a plan that you expect will have a transformative effect but you’ve not done the prerequisite work to ensure you have a foundation to build from. This creates unsupported and unsustainable endeavor that will ultimately cause more harm and turmoil than create a positive effect.

[JAMES]: Is that not exact? Yeah, that’s exactly what has been happening with many DEI efforts. The complete lack of strategy, the lack of focus on any type of organizational change, meaningful organizational environmental change and structural change to support it. Plunking in these programs that have wonderful and important intentions and outcomes around them that are being cut off at the knees before they can ever get started.

[COBY]: Yeah, well, I mean if you take people out of there every day and sit them down into like anti bias training, cultural sensitivity training, which is what a lot of DEI stuff was after right of the gate in kind of 2020 and 2021. And then you plun them back in their everyday work and say cool, DEI achieved. That’s like an absolute chaos solution. No prerequisite work done, no larger strategy. Just insert this one thing and problem solved. And we can check the box or we’ve done something, we’ve performed an action that has created dei. and again. Or they hire people into these positions that sound really good that people were very excited for. Come to find out they maybe have a director level job title, but their authority is that of a payroll clerk, like, you know, very much just unsupported and very performative and people with great skills who could probably done amazing things in a lot of these major corporations to create Very effective transformative change relegated to just a fringe role that was doomed to fail because it was not designed with any kind of strategy. And the speed the, a lot of the stuff was implemented really speaks to how chaotic these solutions were in many companies. So then the fact they’re like, well, clearly DEI is not important, otherwise it would have made a difference by now.

[JAMES]: And obviously it doesn’t work. So why are we going to continue going and doing it?

[COBY]: Yeah. And that’s the piece that I’m upset about is, and we talked about this kind of in past episodes, why cultural transformations don’t often take off the way they should is because it’s not necessarily the apathy that we think, to change that most people think is the biggest barrier. It’d the existence of perform solutions that failed that people can now say, well, we tried it and it didn’t work, so we’re just going to give up on it. Yeah, but you tried a chaos solution and that you set yourself up to fail and then you failed. No surprise. So it’s. So you really can’t claim that chaos solution that you tried was a sincere effort because it was just again was. There was no prerequisite work done to build the foundation off of. And it was. And it was unsupported and unsustainable.

[JAMES]: Yeah, it is disappointing. Like hearing, seeing the news headline, seeing major corporations, publicly coming out, not necessarily against, but certainly, rolling back what they’re doing or deprioritizing it. It is discouraging and it’s got to be discouraging for the, DEI professionals who are working in this field. but I mean, it’s also got to be discouraging to be in a position where you have the potential for such meaningful change and outcomes and to be constantly cut off at the knees. So I’m hoping that good can come from this. I’m choosing to remain positive, that we can actually learn something from this. And as we begin to look at not what are the performative, pieces that, because DEI is no longer a buzzword. Right. If companies are, moving away from it, then maybe we can actually take the time for those companies that truly value it to look at. Okay. It’s not about what everybody else is doing and it’s not about what is going to be really visual and really, stand out on your company letterhead or corporate newsletter or whatever other crap we previously focused on. How can we actually create an environment where people feel like they belong, where we can attract top talent, where we can bring in diverse perspectives and where we can make people feel valued for who they are. Like that’s what we need to get to and we can get there if we just look at take a strategic approach to what we’re doing operate with intent. It should not be this, I shouldn’t have.

[COBY]: To say it your right. For companies that actually wanted to achieve it and whether they are rolling it back or not, or maybe at least if nothing there could be benefit from this kind of consistent rollback, it could be a good thing if we use it as a reflection point. Right. And here’s I think the key. As long as companies see the failure of the dei, implementation as a failure of strategy and not a failure of concept, then I think there is something very beneficial that can come from us using this as a reflection point, trying again with intent, as you aggressively said, and then actually be able to not create more chaos solutions, but actually create sustainable supported projects that will actually make a real transformative difference and not just something that looks good on social media and sounds good when being interviewed but actually does make a real difference.

[JAMES]: Yeah, that’s what we need to focus on.

[COBY]: Yeah, absolutely. All right, so let’s move on to the second thing we wanted to talk about looking back at 2024. so we still saw some layoffs in the IT sector that continued throughout 2024 and it was something that a lot of the general layoffs in a lot of different sectors kind of did slow down but the layups and it did seem to kind of continue. And this is something there’s been lots of different like why they did it. It wasn’t so much concern about recessionary stuff or the economy or this. Some of it was like talks about there being some still some economic uncertainty or some people kind of feel like they had overhiired in the past. and then others kind of talk about there being kind of this rapidly changing transformation and approaches to business strategy. Some like disrupting elements, things like, like AI is a good example, but by no means is it the only example. they found a lot of companies kind of restructuring the way that they think about the kind of employee skills that they need. And so again I think that there’s this kind of concern of this fast paced kind of like changes and disruptors are coming into the IT sector that most companies are in the sector are kind of just like, well if we’re going to be able to kind of weather this new stuff, we can weather it better if we’re lean than if we’re overstaffed. So let’s continue the layoffs. That way we can pivot easier with a smaller ship. I think that’s probably what some of the mentality behind it is.

[JAMES]: Yeah, and the whole lean mentality is what drives a lot of layoff proceedings. That and we need to run lean or we need to get our numbers up for this quarter, what have you. Yah, the tech sector is an interesting case because while I don’t want to put too much focus on AI as the boogeyman, I do think that it’s had a real impact and I think it’s probably had an impact at specific levels or authority levels or within the tech sector because the requirements to get started have been lowered with AI. And I think companies are taking advantage of that, which I mean we can’t really fault them on taking advantage of these new tools. I mean it happens across all sectors. but it leaves the tech industry in an interesting place. If you have the generative AI doing a lot of the more manual operations in generating first passes of code, then you need fewer people. but it’s also done an interesting piece around data analytics which is. And the way that AI system is going to actually understand and generate and visualize data now is coming a significant ways.

[COBY]: Well and for me again I don’t want to underscore the impact the AIs had on it too. But to me the continued layoffs about kind of concerned about overhiiring and again just trying to prepare for economic uncertainty, and fear of the rapid transformation and changes in strategy is to me more of a sign of a gut reaction to having bad change management practices. Right. To me that’s more. What is that again the idea of we can pivot better, we’re more agile if we’re leaner, there’s some validity to that concept. But the idea of being leaner, having less employees, having of people carrying more work individually than teams do come of collectively, isn’t a replacement for being able to handle change. Lean doesn’t replace being agile. I guess it may be kind of the summary of that statement. Right. If you are concerned about the size of your boat and it’s easier to turn a smaller boat than a bigger boat. But if you’re really bad at turning any kind of boat, then the size.

[JAMES]: Of it, if you’re a terrible captain, then too bad.

[COBY]: And that’s kind of where I’m going. Right. Because I mean if we are afraid of Our ability, to handle the change. If we’re not confident in our change management practices, in our ability to kind of evolve and adapt and have some agility in our strategy, then I can see this idea of like again, reducing our, our numbers so we’ve got, it’s easier to kind of control a smaller group. But to me that’s a reaction of fear rather than a reaction of conditions. And that’s something that I’m not saying every company that is doing this is acting out of fear and is unconfident inility to change. But I do think that’s something that is probably a much bigger part of this story than what most people are thinking about when they’re pointing to disruptors like AI as being the cause or the economic uncertainties being in the cause. I really do think that those are probably symptoms. But I think the core piece is that this is a reaction to being unprepared or unconfident in managing change.

[JAMES]: Yeah, that’s an interesting take because for those companies that are focusing on we need to be lean, we need to be agile, we need to be able to pivot, layoffs is what is the strategy that they’ve employed for years to be able to accomplish that. But what happens once you do pivot and you don’t have the staffing required to actually get back up to speed quickly in a new market with a new product or what have you?

[COBY]: Yeah, to me I kind of see it as this idea of going lean to improve agility is. Or as a replacement or as kind of your main strategy for being agile is like a boxer saying, well, I need to make weight for tomorrow’s match so I’CUT off my arm and I’ll drop five pounds. Right. Like to me it says faulty of a logic as that is, rather than put the effort in to be really, you be prepared. It’s a reactionary short term thinking that ends up being kind of the default.

[JAMES]: Yeah, no, I think it’s an interesting perspective.

[COBY]: All right, so let’s talk about the third one. This is one I’ve actually been really excited to talk about with you. Definitely a common trend this past year that companies are tired of trying to solve complex problems. And that fatigue, that being tired of this constantly solving problems is becoming a major strain on any kind of progress or progression and is going to be a continual problem in 2025.

[JAMES]: Yeah, this has been really frustrating. I mean it’s funny because in the opening I talked about things have been great, this fall for us personally. but I can’t count the number of times out of sheer frustration talking with you, talking about, you know, conversations that we’re having, either prospective clients, past clients. People don’t want to change. They just don’t want their problems to exist.

[COBY]: Yeah.

[JAMES]: And they’re just really tired of.

[COBY]: Feeling.

[JAMES]: like they’ve, they’re spinning their wheels or doing the wrong thing. I think a lot of it comes down to things that we’ve already touched on. the performative solutions do not get you the results that you think that you should be getting. You won’t see a true ROI on implementing new strategies if you’re focused on productivity theater. It has been frustrating in many ways. kind of going through and seeing this perspective of a bit of a fatigue around addressing crucial issues.

[COBY]: Yeah, I mean like this is something that is so again, like our, like we were saying, our year has been quite good, but we have tons of colleagues in different elements or different parts of consulting and fractional work and interim leaders and all this other kind of stuff that do kind of like lots of people are in our network. And what’s really kind of what we saw a surprising trend this fall was so many people had contracts end or get dropped or clients that they were onboard and kind of pull out. A lot of that worked for a lot of people dried up, you know, at very quickly in the last two quarters of 2024. And so first we were like, oh, well that’s a shame about that isolated incident. But then we kept hearing about it and I think it is this fatigue and I do think that it is what you’ve said that people are tired of trying to address these issues. They’re now at the point where they just don’t want the issues to exist and they’re just kind of like covering their ears and closing their eyes and la la la la la. Ah, this isn’t a problem I have anymore. Is kind of the official business strategy that we’ve seen companies turn down perspective work and proposals in favor of. So instead of us hiring you to help us solve this problem, we’re tired of this problem existing, so we’re just going to cover our ears and close our eyes and pretend that it’s not happening. Tends to be what the normal thing has been, especially in the last two quarters for many, many, many people in kind of the consulting and kind of you organizational solutions and transformation and all the kind of in the sectors and been. It’s been sad, especially when you consider how persistent the problems are. The problems are not going away. Employee retention, employee motivation, workforce longevity, all these things are still, they’re actually getting worse. But businesses seem to be slowing down in their focus and commitment to organizational transformation, choosing to ignore the problem in hopes that it goes away. And this is where we see this. And this is just, I think it all boils down to fatigue. They’re just tired of this stuff, so they’re looking for shortcuts or they’re looking to just again, use denial that this problem will resolve itself. Everybody wants stuff to go back to normal and they’re not willing to accept that normal is no longer a thing.

[JAMES]: This is normal.

[COBY]: Yeah.

[JAMES]: Until you actually address these issues, it’s going to continue to be your normal. It’s funny, we’re now into, officially into 2025. we’re almost five. I’m going to go back to Covid because I still hear people talking about wanting to get back to the way things were pre Covid. We have to accept some of the new realities, the new expectations, the changing priorities. I’ve said it before with clients, I’ve said it before on this podcast that if you had customers who suddenly stopped buying from you, you would spend an awful lot of time, energy and resources into investigating why they stopped buying from you. And then you would take strategic. You’d create a plan, you’d create a strategy, you’d develop some tool implementation to change to make sure that your value proposition is aligned with your customers, needs that what you are offering them actually now still meets the outcomes, the needs that they, that you think that they need. You would put a lot of time, energy and effort into understanding the problem. Yet when workforce expectations changed, when had, when we saw significant trends in kind of push back against the normal from years ago, Companies didn’t investigate why. They didn’t take the time to understand the new motivations. They didn’t invest in understanding the problem. They criticized people for the changing expectations. If you had done that in the consumer market, if your customers stop purchasing from you and you criticize them and call them lazy for not buying your product anymore, it’s not really going to help your case now is it? But that’s the approach that many businesses took to labor problems. Rather than taking a strategic effort in understanding what needs to change, how do I need to adapt to the new realities of the situation?

[COBY]: Yeah, it’s one of those things where the like. We’ve worked with a number of businesses that have been largely for decades, kind of been immune to kind of the ebbs and flows of the workforce. And they’re now facing these same major issues with employee attraction and retention, employee motivation, workforce longevity, like I said before, and they’re not really willing to put the work in to actually resolving them because the mentality is kind of almost best summarized as well, these were problems we didn’t have before and we don’t want these to be problems anymore. So there, like that’s, that’s kind of we don’t want this to be a problem is almost like the you when you summarize everything down to kind of to. To brass text, that’s really what they’re saying. We don’t want this to be a problem.

[JAMES]: Well, they pass the. It’s about passing the buck. Right? It can’t possibly be anything that I’m doing or not doing. It has to be a problem with the workforce. It has to be that people don’t want to work anymore. It has to be that employees are lazy. It has to be, you know, they’re entitled and they don’t want to work. And they, you know, everybody’s focused on, outside priorities rather than prioritizing work. Well, okay, even if all of thats true, okay, what are you going to do about it?

[COBY]: Right. Yeah. And yeah it’s one of those things where like, we do get that this stuff is complex. We do get that this stuff is expensive, that this stuff does not have a fast turnaround. And we do get that many companies have tried things that looked nice and flashy and looked like they were going to be, the silver bullet to solve the problem in a really short turnaround and it didn’t. And they think now the problem can’t be solved. But the problem is you can’t just not want this to be your problem. That can’t be your official position. This stuff you need to, one, you need to make sure that you understand the problem. And two, you have to say, you know, solving this problem is going to be our normal for the next two, three years, possibly, maybe more, depending on how deeply rooted it is. Right. Like if you have no infrastructure, for example, one thing that, you know, we’re seeing with businesses that haven’t, you know, haven’t had to or t haven’t had a lot of turmoil again, any kind of the ebs and flows of the workforce, a lot of them don not have great communication infrastructure with their employees. Like the people that are on the front lines or people that are kind like, you know, Odin Fields or whatever like that they don’t have a way to communicate with them. So these infrastructural pieces are absolutely void. They’re not there. And if those big pieces aren’t put into place, then any effort you make isn’t gonna work. So the solutions are gonna take longer. Cause you like, you got toa build that foundation so before you can actually address the actual problems. And to be honest, what I want to say to people is buckle up. This stuff isn’t, you’re on a long journey and covering your ears and closing your eyes and wishing this wasn’t a problem is only gonna make the problem get worse. And it’s something that we get, that you’re tired, that there is s this kind of transformation fatigue that you’re feeling. But if you don’t try and transform your normal to be this is what it is, then you’re just going to end up putting yourself a greater and greater risk. And when you do decide to wake up, you’re going to see that you’ve wasted a lot of time, effort and money and the problems are only getting bigger.

[JAMES]: And I mean, this is obviously, this is a piece that I find frustrating. but there’s a reason why we start our engagements with collecting, some data with an investigation. Because you cannot create targeted strategic initiatives if you don’t actually understand the realities that your workforce is facing, the realities of the environment that they work in. Not merely what you say your culture is, but the experience that your employees have day to day. those investigations, that data is essential to crafting any type of intervention. transformation, change in a positive way.

[COBY]: Yeah, absolutely. All right, so let’s move on to the last one. And again, so the first three we talked about the rollback of dei, the layoffs and the IT sector and kind of this, companies being tired of solving problems. Those are things that are kind of like out there that is just kind of like happening everywhere. This last one is kind of one that I think we’re seeing. And we don’t want to be, say that this is happening everywhere because we’re not 100% sure about that. But what we are seeing is there is more and more organizations that are falling into one of the things that we call the five threatening truths. And the threatening truth that we’re seeing probably was just rampant in 2024, was what we call the action is reaction fallacy. And this is when organizations think that the actions their organization should be taking are about reacting to things, always kind of, putting things into place after the fact and never Actually being proactive, only just responding to things as they come. And that is what normal businesses are. And they do. And that fallacy of thinking that your actions should only really be reactions, kind of one actually kind of is a root cause of some of the other one, the rollback of dei, the layoffs, the, and the complex problems. But it is a mindset that is so hard for organizations to ever get. Sorry. It’s difficult for the organizations to start to actually fix things if that’s the mindset that they’re in while these problems are happening.

[JAMES]: Yeah. And this goes very like. We see this happening in kind of within every department within a business that we touch. But where we see it a lot is in hr. We’ve referenced it many times. We’ve talked about the four faces of hr. but it’s really that, that firefighter mentality where all you really have the capacity for because the business doesn’t necessarily support progressive HR practices. You’re just responding to problems, to fires as they come up. And you spend your day putting out three fires and by the end of the day there’s five more that have been created. And it’s exhausting and it creates a significant amount of burnout and it causes many of the other issues that we’ve talked about to become worse.

[COBY]: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, you’re right. Going back to when we talked about what we call the highly reactive department, which is what HR stands for. That is a, so funy. When we did that episode, we talked about what is HR stand for. so many HR professionals reached out to us and be like, yeah, you nailed what my past job was like, or this sort of thing. I’m fortunate now that I’ve kind of gone through and I’m now at the humans required department. I love my job, but I had to work through a number of highly reactive this. But it is pervasive out there that probably you. Many, many, many, many HR professionals work in a highly reactive department. And it’s again often in the work that we do that tends to be the first department that we really get a full view of. And then it’s always the case that when there’s a highly reactive HR department, everything else, finance, operations, everything else tends to also be highly reactive. Just because it’s rare that it’s ever just like one department. But this is why the fallacy is so damaging is to most organizations and to the leadership of most organizations, this isn’t this what business is supposed to be Isn’t this normal?

[JAMES]: Isn’t this just how HR operates? Aren’t they supposed to just respond to stuff?

[COBY]: You’re like, no it’s not.

[JAMES]: That’s not the only function they serve. Yeah.

[COBY]: And you know, and again it’s like the whole idea of the action is reaction fallacy is really kind of characterized by that people see reacting to problems as a replacement for having a strategy.

[JAMES]: Yeah.

[COBY]: And that’s the thing that we’re just like okay, so there is no real plan or the plan that you have is so it is so generic and unspecific and unmeasurable that it might as well. It’s not worth the paper that’s written on. But really kind of comes down to we’ll just figure stuff out as we go. We’ll just put out fires as we go. We’re investing in fire hoses rather than fire prevention. And just like man, that is such an expensive thing to constantly do. And. And I think so that’s kind of like the summary is that it’s a replacement for strategy. But what it looks like tends to be the chasing those flavor of the month ideas.

[JAMES]: Yeah. Yeah. And we see a lot of this in I don’t know that I could narrow it down to any one particular department field industry size of. We all do it right. Oh, shiny. let’s play with the newest AI toy. Ooh, shiny. We’ve got something else to look at that catches our attention. bouncing around from project to project, from product to product, from idea to idea, idea to idea. The problem is people aren’t in many when we are in that mentality of the action is reaction or chasing the flavor of the M month. We never let projects have enough longevity to m actually measure the improvements. Right, right. If you we these problems did not crop up overnight. Whether we’re talking about employee attraction, retention, productivity, performance, performance management, doesn’t really matter. We didn’t get into the problem overnight. We can’t expect that we can drop a boxed product program survey what have you in and suddenly all of our problems are going to be fixed in a month.

[COBY]: Yeah. And I mean I think part of the flavor of the month chasing piece is there’s a bit of fear off missing out. Right. I mean like oh well, we don’t want to be left behind. So if we commit to something for longer term and something better comes along, then are we just working with antiquated technology or antiquated tools? Well, I mean Critical thinking while you’re implementing a strategy is always good. It’s always good to re-evaluate, always good to reflect, always good to kind of like you assess fit. There’s all kinds of methods that you can do. You don’t have to drop stuff and jump on the new thing or turn on your blinders and ignore what’s happening in the world while you are laser focused on this one plan that, you know, maybe, maybe needs to be re-evaluated. It’s not all or nothing. It’s a matter of, you know, like, of going forward with intent. And I think that’s really kind of all it comes down to if you’re implementing strategy with intent. Part of intent is to keep your finger on the pulse of the environment that you’re working in and all the tools available to you. Just putting your head down and focusing on one plan and seeing it through regardless of what happens around you is no better than just reacting to all the flavor of the month and chasing all the new shiny. And having the fear of missing out is if you don’t have intent, then you really don’t have a plan.

[JAMES]: Yeah. Looking at everything that we’ve talked about today in this episode, it all comes down to a lot of these problems are caused because we didn’t fully understand the problem and we didn’t create a plan for how to address it based on the data, the understanding that we’ve generated. You can’t expect to have transformative change by accident.

[COBY]: It’s the. And whether that’s the idea of we spend more money on those machines that electrocute our abs to, to get us all built so we don’t have to actually put the work into it. If it’s that kind of mentality we want to pill to solve our problems rather than proper diet. Again, there’s the quick. We’re addicted to quick fixes. Yes.

[JAMES]: In every aspect of our lives, not just business. The problem is it has huge financial implications. In our organizations.

[COBY]: Yeah, exactly. Because when you’re in a business, it’s not just you, it’s the people that you employ, it’s the businesses that rely on the ecosystem that you’re work in is weakened by. By not taking the right steps to sustain success. And it’s one of those things where I really hope as we move into 2025, that we can learn from this and not be chasing the new and shiny, not be doing action with intent, not letting the fatigue we have with solving problems be kind of what holds us back from having any kind of success being building good change management strategy so we don’t have to continue just laying people off and hope that being small is the same as being good at change and stop chasing this performative solution to start actually having intent, and truly understanding the prerequisite work that’s required. So we have. We’re building off good plans from a good foundation, not just buying snake oil and then surprised that it’s not curing our illness.

[JAMES]: Yeah, no, I think that’s a good summary.

[COBY]: Yeah, I think so too. All right, so that about does it for us. For a full archive of the podcast and access the video versions hosted on our YouTube channel, visit Roman3.ca/podcast. Thanks for joining us.

[ANNOUNCER]: For more information on topics like these, don’t forget to Visit us at Roman3ca. Side effects of this podcast may include improved retention, high product activity, increased market share, employees breaking out in spontaneous dance, dry mouth, a version of the sound of James’ voice, desire to find a better podcast.