Rob Roe returns to FuturePod to discuss his latest venture in the world of managing change. A bookcast that distils the best of the books on change that Rob has found through his extensive reading.
Interviewed by: Peter Hayward
Rob’s Links
Transcript
Peter Hayward: Supporting successful change. It's really hard to do, but it has been a great book writing market. Maybe it's been too good because now we have an almost overwhelming choice of theories to follow. For the changes we're trying to manage. Or do we?
Rob Roe: I actually really went in full bore on what's in the videos and all that sort of stuff, right? And time again, new people coming into our group, and we grew quite quickly, kept saying, I have never worked in an environment where there's such collaboration, such teamwork, such people coming in to help than what I have found here.
And yeah, I remember one person saying, I've even got sales people helping with technical advice because I made everyone's role broader than just sales and broader than just professional services and support and stuff like that. And I really structured it away from functional silos.
And I've heard like everyone's lamenting how no one reads books anymore. What books are for is decorations. They're on the shelf behind you when you're on the zoom call. So no one reads the books. No one has time. The people who should be reading the books they're all spending their time going around in circles, they don't have time to read it, so what I've tried to do with the book cast is make it easy, easier to digest.
Peter Hayward: That is my guest today on FuturePod, Rob Roe coming back for this third chat and this time to discuss his latest change venture - Unlocking Change The Bookcast.
Peter Hayward: Welcome to FuturePod, Rob.
Rob Roe: Pleasure to have me back, Peter.
Peter Hayward: Yeah, I should have said, welcome back to FuturePod. This is your third time on the on the podcast.
Rob Roe: I thought you would have been sick of me by now, but here we go.
Peter Hayward: It's been a little while, as we like to go back a little time before we go forward. Five years, your first interview that you did with Mindy back that we told battling against entrenched thinking.
And if I just people should listen to it, but just to remind you, it was that thing of, you'd learned leading people in the middle of an organization that change is successful, doable, is good for people and good for organizations because people understand what change is when it's about their jobs and them.
But as you moved up the hierarchy, it was harder.
Yes. Yes. People didn't necessarily believe in that way of doing change. It's,
Rob Roe: It's interesting, they go, yeah, that's great, I'm in. I remember a boss from the US calling me up saying, Rob, we love what you're doing down there.
Keep doing what you're doing down there. We just don't know what you're doing down there. So can we have four hours this Saturday where we can go through everything from top to bottom? Luckily it never happened. Otherwise they'd stop what I was doing down there,
Peter Hayward: And then we had you. In the coronavirus lockdown a year later, round about April 20 and you said in that podcast that you were hoping that we would take this opportunity, this unforeseen opportunity to reflect and think and, prepare and plan for unimagined futures and you yourself were gonna just be on the listen and the look for signs of change, signs of leadership in that space.
So that's last we heard of Rob. You want to just bring us up to speed quickly through those last four years.
Rob Roe: I was working then for a startup scale up again. I think I was being successful in leading the team cause we were an ocean away and actually the other side of the continent from headquarters. And we were left to our own devices. I can really remember when I made the decision to tell people to go, don't come into the office. It was a week before the government stepped in and it was based on advice of one of my people said that they had heard. And I remember having thinking, I'm going to have to do a Shackleton here, right?
I'm going to have to keep them all together, but it'll probably only last six weeks. I had in my head six weeks and then then it went on when we went back to the office, we went back hybrid. And what I said to the team is who's lived through a pandemic before? And of course no one had. And I said, so we're all making this up.
So I'll need your help doing that. Now, I organized two days in the office with everyone there and they were Monday and Friday. Which my wife said was cruel why'd you pick those days? And I said, cause I'm old and I want them to start the week and end the week. And it actually worked and it worked, I think, because of what I'll go through in unlocking change.
What I observe is, I was reading the comic in the Fin Review, I think it was yesterday, where the big bosses are trying to get everyone in, back into the office, and they're making up all these flimsy arguments. Oh, coaching, and they can see how the others work, the experienced people work, and the, in the comic it finished up with saying we've got the juniors in here, but where are the seniors?
Oh, they don't want to come in. They're all working from home. So, and I say a lot of that. I saw a former colleague post on LinkedIn about how, unless they're in the office, I can't say them and how can I appraise them properly and how can I give them promotion and blah, blah, blah. And I just put the comment and said, I just think our leadership needs to change.
But so I'm seeing, this debate going on between the old way and the new way, and people are voting with their feet, they're just staying at home. Since leaving that startup, by the way, they still come into the office two days a week, but it's now Wednesday and Thursday. Whether my, coming across too strongly, making them do Monday and Friday, they didn't put up their hand to say we don't like these days or not.
But they did sort it out and they've agreed to those two days coming forward. So I think we've got, it's not as much change as I would like, but I don't think it's over yet.
Peter Hayward: No. Where we are on the trajectory of, or capacity for change, whether it's a process that we're getting better at and more able, or whether in fact we're getting less able and less prepared to put ourselves through change processes?
Rob Roe: I think we keep repeating the same change processes and we keep missing an important point, which I'll share later. Okay.
Peter Hayward: You have now produced, not a podcast, it's called a book cast. You want to just talk to the listeners about the bookcast and what a bookcast is and what your bookcast is about.
Rob Roe: Okay. So I finished up full time work. I'm dabbling in some things which I can talk to, but my wife said, so what are you gonna do now? So, in, as because you came to the launch, in 19, I did a book, which it was your fault 'cause you introduced my coauthor to me. Called Giving Hope, the journey of the for-purpose organisation and its quest for success.
So here we did case studies on Oxfam plan international and Mater foundation. And so Lyndee said to me, are you going to write another book? And I said, that was so hard. That was so hard. I don't think so. And she said actually you're a better presenter than you are a writer. Now if anyone goes and looks at my videos, they must think, geez, he's a bad writer.
But but what I decided, what that prompted me to do was instead of putting all my thoughts down and stuff like that in a book what if I do an online book where the chapters are video presentations? And if anyone goes to that, which I hope you do, what you'll see is I'm actually on screen with slides next to me doing a presentation, right?
And that's where the idea came from. Now, there's still a dispute in our house over the word BookCast. But I didn't want to call it a podcast. I didn't want to call it a vlog. I didn't know what to call it. And it is a book, right? I've put up the first three chapters. So it's a book cast.
So you've heard it here first.
Peter Hayward: I love that you're embracing digital because digital as a phenomenon, and our ability to take phenomena and reality, and turn it into something that doesn't exist. I'm very, seduced by how digital is so malleable. It's also terrifying at the same time, because what can we actually believe in? But I love the fact that you are taking a conversation, the book, which are old technologies, and still useful and meshing them to create another way for people to engage with ideas.
Rob Roe: So the other reason for this was, and I've been on different webinars and podcasts and stuff like that, not speaking, but listening.
And I've heard like everyone's lamenting how no one reads books anymore. What books are for is decorations. They're on the shelf behind you when you're on the zoom call. And heaven forbid the person's actually written a book ‘cause their book sitting there prominently in about six times. And if you look at my video, there is a book case.
It's actually my book case and my book is there prominent, but that's okay. So no one reads the books. No one has time. The people who should be reading the books, they're all spending their time going around in circles, they don't have time to read it. So what I've tried to do with the book cast is make it easy, easier to digest.
Now, the first thing I discovered was my first chapter was an hour long and people said that's far too long. I'm not going to watch it. So I've cut the first two chapters into two and I've cut the third chapter into three videos. And the first video overall is 12 minutes, because I figure I can, people will listen to 12 minutes and you can put it on two times speed.
I do talk slowly, so one and a half's fine. Two might be a bit quick. But the idea is for people looking to find why are things the way they are, gives them a medium to come in and quickly get a sense of all of that. So, that was also what I was trying to drive using this new digital age. Lo and behold, we have unlocking change a BookCast.
Peter Hayward: It strikes me, Rob, I have to accept the fact that people say they haven't got time to read books and they're all too busy doing whatever it is they have to do that books. And here you are, distilling, synthesizing, really wisdom of people through generations. And yet you have to distill and concentrate and then further shorten. I love the BookCast idea. And there's a but coming, because the way we're having to package the information to make people at least initially engage with it. Helping or if you like it, continuing to make it hard for people to understand the situation they're in.
Rob Roe: I think it's a very good point because the. So a couple of things, I remember you coming into class in the Masters of Strategic Foresight, Peter, and you took us through the stages of vertical development and I can't remember which stage it was, but suddenly we got a thirst to read. We wanna consume knowledge, we wanna hang on the world's, not like what I thought it was, what's going on, et cetera, et cetera.
And I, when you went through that, I could just, I could tell you where I was when that hit me, right? I was working upstate New York. And I've been introduced to some books by a coach on this executive program I was on and it just blew my mind and the away I went. And I, in my roles, I've done a lot of travel.
I was always on planes, right. When I was in the US I was flying around the world. And so there's a lot of dead time, which I filled with books. How many people have had that luxury? . And it's those of you on the listening to this who do a lot of travel for work, it's not as glamorous as everyone thinks it is.
So I read a lot and what I'm trying to do, as you said, is distill this down into things that you know, slightly longer than a TikTok video, but, not as long as reading a book. And the challenge with that is, is to try and stay true to the book. Cause the other thing I find with a lot of these books, they're hard to read. I struggled through Stafford Beers, Brain of the Firm, Heart of the Enterprise. It probably took me a year, pick it up and put it down. Elliott Shark's Requisite Organization. These are tough books to read. Whereas you come along with Simon Sinek, Start with Why, Jim Collins Good to Great, they're writers and so away you go. But so what I'm trying to do is make it digestible.
But at the same time, try and keep true to the books. And what I worry about the most is, some people are going to come across who are academics or right into the detail and, have a go at me because you didn't say this, you didn't say that. But the objective is. If people do watch it and they go, oh, I think I'll go read Spiral Dynamics, I think I'll go read Action Inquiry, I think I'll go read that. And that's a start.
Peter Hayward: You're working it out at the same time. It's the audience and how the audience engage with it. And that's of course, the other difference that has become obvious to me in this digital world. We've always had content producers, whether we call them writers or speakers or presenters or game developers or whatever else. But the big difference I've seen Rob, which was starting pre COVID, is that the community want to be involved. So if you've got a game or a book or whatever there, there is a desire for people to be not just audience, but, and not necessarily on the stage. But people want involvement. It's tied up with this notion of parasocial psychology that I'm sure you understand, that people want to be in a community with someone that they're in relationship with, even though the person that they're in relationship with doesn't actually know they exist.
Rob Roe: And for my values, some of that's good and some of that's not so good. Sure. I haven't signed up to QAnon yet, so you know, we'll wait and see, we'll wait and see, But on, on this journey, Peter, the so I've read all these books and I'm trying to digest it all.
And I just found they were like pieces in a jigsaw puzzle, but I had no way of pulling it all together, and I found my Jim Collins in good to great gets asked, how do you become a level five leader, which by the way is his levels, not based on anything behind it, I don't think. But so how do you become a level five leader?
And he said, I don't know. It's a black box, I don't know what's inside it. And I'm thinking, go read Action Inquiry. Go read Requisite Organization. Go read, Theo Dawson. Susan, Suzanne Cooke Greuter, et cetera, et cetera, right? I could see all these overlaps happening. And then when I did the Strategic Foresight Masters, I got introduced to this guy called Ken Wilber and his Integral Theory.
And that was a real lightbulb moment for me. And I've actually used this then to map all these books into it, into the different quadrants, how it works, I explain, if people haven't come across integral theory, I do that in the videos, and then I map out where the books sit and how they all interconnect and relate and work through that.
The idea is I found a way to put my jigsaw piece puzzles together. In a way to understand all of this so that was, I always had that in the back of my mind ever since doing the masters and then this has given me the opportunity to try and pull it together.
Peter Hayward: You did a Wilber because that of course is how Wilber created the four quadrants that Wilbur had all of his books, all of his theories, all of his things that he thought were important and he said there has to be a way to arrange these.
And he finished up with a bucket to do with the social, a bucket to do with the individual, a bucket to do with the inside, and a bucket to do with the outside. I love that Wilber has really given you the framework for putting your parts of knowledge, parts of reality, parts of wisdom and beauty to create your own sort of integral map.
Rob Roe: So let me come back to the question, but to your point around using Wilber. So I've quoted in the first chapter, first video Professor Edgar Schoen and he got asked to do a retrospective from 1965 to 2015, right?
And it's, which is 50 years, but he said after 60 years in this arena, I am convinced That we're still at a Darwinian stage of searching for constructs and variables worth studying and are still waiting for some Mendelian genius to organize the field for us. So what I say in the BookCast is Wilber could be that Mendelian genius.
And I say, it's like I'm standing on the shoulders of giants here, right? So using Wilber to help pull this together for the journey of leaders. They, I think it's, I think they all get stuck. So what was interesting working with the not for profits, and I remember having this conversation with the CEO of Plan International.
I said, what happens is, these people they're working in funds management or something like that. And they're making all their money and then they pop out into retirement and they go, what was that all about? I actually want to help the world. And that's where they'll either be philanthropic or they'll join the boards or they'll do something.
And he said, Rob, I had that conversation this morning. These guys came in, that's exactly where they're up to. So it depends on, we talk about, Otto Sharmer talks about that break. We talk about the shift into, yellow and stuff in Spiral Dynamics. I think a lot of people get stuck in, Achiever mode maybe a little bit of transforming mode, but they get stuck in that.
And so what I'm trying to do, and I'll share later why I think they get stuck, but what I'm trying to do is, open their eyes to thinking about this broader. I was on a webinar with the Global Leadership Association, I think GLA out of the UK and they've come up with a way to measure lots and lots of people for their vertical development inside an organization.
By the way. I don't like the phrase vertical development. I think it should be breadth development. We're getting broader, right? But I'm not going to fight that battle. And what they found was people were presenting one way at a lower level to what they were testing at. And I use Bill Joiner and Steven Joseph's work in the space out of the US.
And I actually sent the video and said, I'm quoting you at 10 minutes in or something. And Bill came back to me and said, stop, where are you finding this with people are testing at a higher level to how they're operating? Because I'm finding that, but I thought we were the only ones. And I said, no.
They're finding it, by the way, Nick Petrie, a few of you will know Nick, he's finding it as well. And I was on a call with one of his customers here and the people who the customer people saying, people were testing higher, but are being pushed down by the organization. So I think there's a lot of people and this creates the frustration within organizations.
One thing on that first webinar I was on, there was a lot of coaches, executive coaches and that on it. And one guy said, what I find is I take the person I'm coaching through this and I show them what's going on. And when I come back 12 months later, I discover they've all left. So I'm not sure that was the right purpose, but, uh, but it's a common thing.
Peter Hayward: It was the same with the Foresight Masters. The Foresight Masters only lasted for probably 15 years, but I got people Joe and I, Richard, Rowena, we got people at a point where the crack had started in their life, where they actually were, obviously achiever, because otherwise they wouldn't be sitting in a master's course, but they were using the famous phrase to me they didn't want to do an MBA. And I then found through Susan Cooke Greuter to be code for them starting to speak in post conventional ways. To see the, constructed self as prior and the emerging self as the thing that moved them forwards. And you then talk about, of course, the experience of people testing much higher, but reality simply saying, I don't need you to be that. I need you to be this prior person. So your loop and my loop is similar. So start telling us what the where and why of what's going on.
Rob Roe: So I absolutely said to a lot of people, I don't want to do an MBA and time in my life, I knew we weren't moving anywhere. Kids in upper high school, et cetera. I've got, I'm staying here I'll do a Masters. I've read all these books, I'll do a Masters.
And the reading list corresponded with some of the books I read, so I thought that's great. I remember going to the 10th anniversary dinner, where Richard Slaughter was, right? And Richard and I met, had met, I didn't know who he was then a few years earlier, but I said to Richard, I actually, on my first day of the course, I rang him up and I said, I didn't know you're part of this.
So I'm on the course. And he thought that was good, but I went up to him at the dinner and I said, Richard, this is nothing like I thought it would be. And it's everything that I needed. And he said, I get that a lot, Rob. I really was moving to that post conventional, I was really, I was questioning everything. What my whole Unlocking Change BookCast is about is first of all, mapping all of this wisdom and knowledge of all these people into Wilber's quadrants, and I'm calling it the integral map for organizations, right? And then I take people on a journey of I start in the lower left, which is around culture, and I say, the last thing we need to do is a cultural change program because culture is where everything ends up.
It's not where it starts. And so then I take them through upper left, individual growth, upper right behavior, what they say, and then lower right, which is structures process systems, right? And I get into the difference between a rowing team and being in a raft on rapid waters. And the world of course is more like rapid waters than it is like a clear pond, like a lake, right?
So I go through that, And I introduced the concept that the part we don't look at closely enough is this lower right, which is around organizational structures. And I use the growth of a startup where the founder suddenly finds herself with 64 direct reports. And I have diagrams for this and I use my movement of people and stuff like that.
Anyway I said, so how would you, can, Put structure in, right? And I give the audience time to think. And of course we always end up with functional silos, right? And yeah, my, my reasoning for this is no one ever talks about a different way.
Yeah.
And so when you go read all the business books, you read not all, some academic books, they say, here's the problem.
We've got prisoners dilemma, we got turf wars, we got this, we got that. But no one actually says could the problem be functional silos, and could we actually change that? Now, you get Patrick Hoverstadt's fractal organization with recursive structures. Eden Medina, who wrote about Safford Beer and Chile in the 70s, and she's got some diagrams in her book around how it was structured in recursive, in a recursive structure but they don't really get to that.
So what I then try to do is. So we need to find a better way. I've come across some people called Team Topologies out of the UK, and they are doing this in the development operations space of an IT department, DevOps. So again, it's got fantastic stuff in it, and they've actually built out different sort of types of teams and how they interact and they have a platform team, which I've interpreted as a recursive layer.
But it's written for DevOps people. Now, luckily I've worked in IT, but there's not a business person on the planet that's gonna struggle through that book, right? And I'll change, I try not to change names, but one of their teams is Complicated Subsystem Team. I changed that to Specialist Team, because that's what they are. And so then I start building that out, but then I introduce all the challenges. So the challenges are, the mission statement, no matter what Simon Senex says, stops being why, it stops being, we need to be the best sales team, the best marketing team, the best development team, etc. And we're going to focus on that and we are going to have KPIs on that.
And in, in their world, there's a thing called Conway's law, which is the process and systems get built to the functional silos, gets built to the communication pathways, individuals are rewarded, et cetera. And so now I have people that are being promoted by being the best salesperson, the best marketing person, et cetera, et cetera.
And there's some research out of Yale that, that confirms this. That's what happens, and the research shows they're not the best person. They have been, fallen to the Peter principle, et cetera, et cetera. And as I mentioned before, the re the high level people in vertical development, they leave because they start reporting to an expert and that dumbs them down.
They leave. Test hire, they operate different. And I give, I said how do we change this? I look to Dan and Chip Heath's three changes of behaviour, rider, elephant path. I give examples of that, including one of my own when I worked for Telstra and we had outsourced National Australia Bank. I had 250 people reporting working for me, but only 25 reporting, so created a structure like Team Topologies before I even knew of Team Topologies.
And my proof point, apart from we exceeded all our results each year, was the Employee Engagement Survey. I get a phone call from the people who ran the employee engagement survey and said, Rob, sorry, we've got a problem with your response rate because everyone's trying to get high 90s, et cetera, et cetera.
And I said, what, is it too low? And they said, no, it's too high. I asked people, so what do you think it is? And they go 97 and I go, no, high 98 no, a hundred, no. Why are you stopping at a hundred? It was 200 percent because we'd created such a collaborative team environment, they identified with that. And then I introduced things like requisite organization, viable systems model, beyond budgeting, which I, and they agree is misnamed. It should be trust governance is what I think.
And then build out here's how a whole organization could look if you did this. And so what I'm trying to fill that gap in is what's missing in all the books, which is here's an alternative to functional silos. So that's, that's the journey I've been on, and a warning, I stop the video at certain sections and say, go get a cup of coffee, your brain's going to be fried.
There's a heap in this cause I'm bringing in all the books and all the ideas and I'm trying to explain it as easy as I can, but it's tough.
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Peter Hayward: Yeah, I don't want us to rerun the videos if people want to engage in detail with the book casting for goodness sake, sit down and start watching and listening to the book cast.
I just want to take it in a couple of cul de sac, so to speak, what a couple of things that occur to me Rob, this is just me looking at my life going back. When I was working in change, I worked in highly industrialized workplaces. They were very white collar, but they were highly industrialized. And the language of those organizations with a euphemistic term called industrial democracy. I'm sure you know it well. If you did change and didn't consult with people, they simply walked out. End of story. And now I look to my nieces and nephews and their kids, and what I see is the precariat, what I see of them is getting contracts from employers that really are defining the work bargain in a very one sided way. And I wonder are concepts of participation, fairness, sharing, are they the way of the dinosaur given that we've got a world that seems to be atomizing the team into just individuals with very little in the way of rights and leverage? And how does change work in that world?
Rob Roe: So, you're singing my tune, Peter.
The I did my thesis using, that was the genesis of some of this thought et cetera, and a guy had found my thesis online. And he bought, he realized I was in Melbourne, so it was he and it was Michael Griffiths and he said, can I buy you a coffee? Yep. And we had a big discussion about integral and all that, and he said, so are you using any of this?
And I was at a startup and we were growing to the point where I needed to use it, but I hadn't even thought about it. And I didn't tell Michael until a couple of years later, but I went, duh, and I went back in and started putting this in place. The second startup I was then involved with, AirWatch got acquired by a big software company.
The second one I could, I had a chance to start again, and this is a luxury that hardly any of us are afforded. But I was working for a startup called OneTrust, and we, I actually really went in full bore on what's in the videos and all that sort of stuff, right? And and time again, new people coming into our group, and we grew quite quickly, kept saying, I have never worked In an environment where there's such collaboration, such teamwork, such people coming in to help than what I have found here.
And yeah, I remember one person saying, I've even got sales people helping with technical advice because I made everyone's role broader than just sales and broader than just, professional services and support and stuff like that. And I really structured it away from functional silos. My head of professional services, when he interviewed for the job, I said I was like that startup is, it wasn't 64, but all these direct reports, what do we do?
And he said, Oh, we break them up into functions. And I said, I don't think so. And he went and talked to his wife and said I blew that interview, but he had the right attitude and aptitude. So we hired him. And now when I catch up with him, he said, it just works, Rob, it just works, right? Um, unfortunately it's getting broken up again into functional silos, but I'm out of it now.
So what you said is a factor of what you're saying about this in individuals, this lack of collaboration, team, all that sort of stuff is is what's happening with, This top, top down command and control, it's as strong as ever, and when people do have freedom, because now when you have the internet, LinkedIn, Seek, et cetera, to say, hey, I don't like this and I want to go somewhere else, they now have more power to, say thanks, but no thanks and leave, right? How does management respond to that? Let's control them all, which is exactly the wrong thing, and again, going back to the pandemic, we're all working from home, we're relying on collaboration tools like Teams and WhatsApp and stuff like that. And I'm sitting there and I've got three people working till midnight Friday night because the customer wanted to go live over the weekend.
And I'm going, guys, I'm old. I should be at home. What are you guys working Friday night? And they just, the sense of ownership, the sense of belonging kicks in. And I never had to worry about. whether they were working or not. And what's interesting, if someone wasn't working, the team would self correct.
They would say, hang on, you're, you're rowing in the raft and you're not pulling your weight. You're not changing as we need to change. We're not, it just works. But the world's going the other way. The world is going the other way and going back to Edgar Schein, he said, the problem is our consulting academic work, et cetera, in this realm has become, in another quote from him, but the field is more differentiated, fragmented and individualized more than ever. So we need to get the complexity, the interdependencies, et cetera, coming back. And that's what I'm trying to show in the videos.
Peter Hayward: Yeah, another one that again, I just ruminate on is the notion of age and how our thinking changes as we get older. And one of my developmental heroes was Eric Erickson, who of course had his stages of adult development and couched through how we got older and how we developed through paradoxes and pivot points. And as your life, as you are less able to do physical things, you often become a different philosophical thinker. And I wonder whether. All of our books and all of our models of what leaders do, are still tied up in an adolescent idea of what a leader does. And if we had books written by people at the, getting towards the end of their life, we would actually see more softening of hard categories. It's not about my control. It's about how I steward something for the people coming after me. Because I took over what was something else's, and then I'll pass it to another person after me.
Rob Roe: I think you're absolutely right. And you see this in the young entrepreneur who is, idolized.
And I'm going, but, and I was going to say, I show my age here but I show my wisdom maybe, which is, guys, they don't still know what they're doing. And there's so many personal examples of working with people and stuff like that, that haven't gone through those journeys. Haven't gone through those pivot points, those philosophical changes.
And, so we'll go read the book Bill, not Bill, (Tony) Hsieh, who set started Zappos, pursuit of happiness or something (Delivering Happiness). We'll go read all these sorts of things and there'll be some good things in there, but they are those adolescents, more tactical, more, those sorts of stuff without having that broader picture going forward. I don't know who said it, but someone said, a book that's survived time is something that we should cherish because their ideas have survived time.
So Stafford beer and these sorts of folks, right? But boards, people now want them on their boards, younger people, they want to act like a startup. All that sort of stuff. And I'm thinking guys you might be heading the wrong way. Just on the kind of combining a couple of things through that.
So, I'm a, a golf tragic and I spent a lot, I spent a lot of time in a golf simulator at Drummond Golf in Kew. And I was talking to the general manager there and I was telling her about this is what I'm doing now, and there's some videos. So she goes and watches them and she comes back to me and said, Rob, I was always thought there'd be a great team building type exercise we could do with these golf simulators.
Would you be interested? And I said, absolutely. So we've put something together which we've now launched. But the point of this is we've played two rounds, two 30 minute rounds, and we changed the team structure. And without doing anything else, the level of energy, the level of engagement, the level of cooperation goes through the roof in the second round.
So I think, that experiential learning, all that sort of stuff, I think is, that's where I'm finding I can get breakthrough. The problem is, those upper management that we talked about, they don't have time for that. We're stuck in the same loop.
Peter Hayward: So Rob, we need to bring this to, not a conclusion, because there is no conclusion, but we need to bring this to a kind of pause point. So for people that have been listening to us go round and round the mulberry bush, what is it you want, them to do or engage. And as an audience, what do you want them to get from engaging with the BookCast?
Rob Roe: So Peter, what I'm hoping is that people listening to this, and I gave a bit of an overview of what's in it to try and, maybe that's something that would interest them, but people to actually, hopefully find some time to go and watch some of the videos, whether that's on one and a half speed or whatever.
And I'd love them, yeah, to, I'd love to hear their feedback, their questions. I'm also, it's my worldview that I'm using here. And I'd like to hear what others are thinking. I am not locking this up as my IP or anything else like that. So if they want to use it in all of their endeavors and feel free if they want to have a conversation about it, feel free.
If they want a copy of slides, feel free. It's about, I'm trying to get people. I'm trying to get leaders and the future leaders who are finding themselves at that break point. This isn't right. What, where do I need to go? I'm trying to help them, share some of the stuff that's out there and give them a framework to go forward.
A labor of love and I'm just, anything, any response, any feedback, any questions, I just, I'd love to hear.
Peter Hayward: Great Rob. It's been great to catch up again, been far too long since we've since we've had a chance to bounce off things like we used to bounce off in the classroom. Congratulations for the BookCast. All the best for you and the BookCast. And thanks for taking some time to chat to the FuturePod community.
Rob Roe: Thank you very much for the opportunity, Peter. Really appreciate it.
Peter Hayward: You really should do yourself a favor and follow the Bookcast. Rob has done the heavy lifting for you and presents powerful ideas in a very straightforward way. Future pod is a not-for-profit venture. We exist through the generosity of our supporters. If we would like to support the pod then follow the patreon link on our website. This has been Peter Hayward. Thanks for joining me and I'll see you next time.