Building Escalators
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Bo Motlagh:Alright, Josh. Go ahead. You were saying something.
Josh Smith:If you could choose between the bear and the man in the woods, which one would it be?
Alan Soucier:Bear.
Josh Smith:Me too. Good choice.
Bo Motlagh:On that note, here we are. Another episode of the hidden chasm. How are you doing, Josh?
Josh Smith:Hey. It's Friday.
Bo Motlagh:It is Friday.
Josh Smith:Getting down on Friday.
Bo Motlagh:Well, we have a a treat this Friday. A good friend of ours, mister Alan Souciere. Alan is a seasoned sorry. Yeah. Seasoned senior technology leader and coach.
Bo Motlagh:He's the founder and CEO of Offline Coaching LLC and has worked with some of the biggest enterprises in the US. With over 25 years of experience, Alan has been a driving force in global engineering and professional development. Alan's servant leadership style has helped many professionals reach their full potential including me. And I'm super excited to have Alan here. He's been a friend for 20 years and a mentor.
Bo Motlagh:Welcome, Alan. How are you, man?
Alan Soucier:Thank you. This should be fun. Glad to be here.
Bo Motlagh:Yeah. And so I I met Alan way back, I guess, when right out of school about 20 years ago when he hired me, at a small company called QA Associates. And you guys met in 2014, I wanna say, Josh? Yes. Frontline Education.
Bo Motlagh:So Alan, I mean, love to hear a little bit. I mean, obviously know a lot about you. But for the audience here, tell us about your background. You know, what led you to technology and then coaching? Just tell us a little bit about
Josh Smith:Your biggest regrets.
Alan Soucier:Yeah.
Bo Motlagh:Yeah. I mean, you could just start with, like, the background.
Alan Soucier:Yeah. Yeah. So yeah. I mean, I I started off at a whole different field. I was doing clinical work in Boston, social services, that kind of stuff.
Alan Soucier:So moved to Philadelphia doing that. And then within a year or 2, I found myself having a different opportunity to kinda switch gears, so I got into technology. I had an aptitude for it. So got into some, like, I don't wanna date myself, but y two k testing. Nice.
Alan Soucier:So, you know, early Internet. And so this whole thing makes me feel very old. But, so that evolved and but it didn't take long for my inclination to work with people to kinda come back to converge with that. So I've kinda lived at this intersection of technologists and people development, and a lot of it's really just advocating for for success for people. So it just happens I landed in the technology field and met guys like you and a bunch of others.
Alan Soucier:So it's been fun. Not a planned ride, but it's been actually, it's been a great thing. So, still continuing to explore and and things continue to evolve, but that's kinda where I got my start.
Bo Motlagh:Very cool. One thing I didn't mention at the beginning here and one of the reasons we're so excited to chat with Alan is, you know, we as we've been exploring the the concept of the hidden chasm from different perspectives like technology, product, investment banking, and, and m and a, We've sort of been talking around what I think is probably the most important element because it's not always an easy conversation, and and that's the human element and the culture element and the specific nuances of that. And Al has really been, you know, a a people guru, I think, throughout his career. Certainly, it has helped me a lot in that regard. I'm gonna put you on the spot a little bit here because there's this this term, relative to that concept that you you and I have been sort of thrown around now for, what, 15 years.
Bo Motlagh:Yeah. And it's people architect. And I'm kinda curious all these years later, what what do you what do you think that means?
Josh Smith:Are you the are you the Frank Lloyd Wright of People Architecture?
Alan Soucier:Maybe. I don't know. I am still I think it's a work in progress, but it does seem to be a thing. It's interesting when you do something kind of by instinct or innately then try to externalize it. So I actually spent through a lot of feedback through through friends like you and and others that have helped me discover what I'm actually kinda doing.
Alan Soucier:So I've been in this process. So, you know, I think that people architecture conceptually is really a combination of things. It's it's part, organizational development, part social architecture. And I think for me, it's a it's a mix of working at an individual level, but also looking inside organizational systems and what can make the people piece of that work well. Organizations in typical corporate America are very focused on treating companies kinda like machinery.
Alan Soucier:That's what the problem is. It's full of people and people are kinda messy. So, you know, leadership struggles to basically know how to deal with, like, what they call people problems, and they do all kinds of crazy stuff to try to fix it. But people are pretty unpredictable, and there there's a lot of behaviors around that that kind of, at every level, leaders down through. That can make it challenging.
Alan Soucier:And so I found somehow a place where I'm in the middle of organizations often usually growing or fast growth. How do they kinda travel through that gauntlet of of challenges? Oftentimes, not even sure what what it is they're tripping over.
Bo Motlagh:I think when we first met, you introduced me to a team of, I guess, including myself, big personalities is maybe the way to put that.
Alan Soucier:It's been fine for me, but yeah. But it was a beautiful group of misfits.
Bo Motlagh:It was I like that. A beautiful group of misfits. That's good. And, you know, so we we were sort of high end consultants, and we were being led by you. And, I mean, amazing fun years.
Bo Motlagh:I think it was probably very I'm assuming it was formative to some of these ideas. I'm kind of curious, you know, what about that work, maybe without any details about me, Oh. What's formative, to your approach, during the time?
Alan Soucier:You know, one of the points of feedback I got during that period was, a manager I was working with who was like, you know, you're doing a really good thing here. And I was like, what do you mean? I believed. And and but he'd come and he'd look at the team, and everybody was some diversity, different levels of experience. Yeah.
Alan Soucier:There was kind of a layer of folks right out of school that hardly knew what it meant to show up to work every day at 9 AM, but it was kind of fun to, like, figure out, dial in all these different no. It wasn't just you, but how to dial in all these different pieces. So, you know, it was it was some kind of rebalancing I was doing. I wasn't insisting that everybody be cookie cutter in terms of how they did the work or how they behaved, really look to see what people's individual strengths were and amplify them. And if people had, you know, flat sides, things that weren't all that positive to just help them avoid that.
Alan Soucier:It wasn't a lot of correcting bad behaviors or negative things, deficits in people, it was really accentuating what they brought to the table. And when you have a different team, a mix of folks, you've got a rich buffet of things to bring to bear. And I think a lot of people architecture is really an orchestration exercise of of a lot of varying things. Just like an orchestra would have different instruments that do different things at different times with different intensities. I think that's kinda I try to people architecture to me is creating an environment to do kinda what we did back in those days.
Josh Smith:Gotcha. So focusing on identifying different strengths that can work well together. Harmonize or syncopate, I guess, in in the using an orchestra term.
Alan Soucier:Depending what dance party you're throwing.
Josh Smith:And and help them identify the I'm assuming the connection between where their strengths are and where they thrive.
Alan Soucier:And often people don't know what that is for themselves.
Josh Smith:Gotcha. And you believe that one key responsibility of, a manager or leader is to be able to identify those things in people or help them identify those things in people that are meaningful to them, that help them thrive, and that and that they're particularly good at that can also help the business in that moment.
Alan Soucier:Yes. And and there's a lot of onus on managers and leaders working with teams of people, but oftentimes, especially in the technology space, those aren't the strongest skill sets. So sometimes it's working at a T Mobile, but sometimes it's working at folks that are trying to that own those those kind of people environments, the teams that you have, the larger sets of teams that may be operating together. So it's it's there's different layers, I think. And the organization sometimes isn't clear on how to work in that space at all.
Alan Soucier:They just things come top down. Need certain things done. So they're looking at outcomes, but not necessarily the impact of a team or what they're providing. Anybody can have a project deliver x, y, and z, but the reality is those things were supposed to be meaningful in some way. And sometimes I find in teams, the teams don't know why they're doing what they're doing.
Alan Soucier:They're just kinda following marching orders. But it's a different energy and a different performance level I think you get with teams when you can connect them to that larger context. And that's where it kinda I think you get more of a harmonic homegoing organizationally and within Teams if you can do that. So So
Bo Motlagh:is that more, like, aligning them to a vision or a mission?
Alan Soucier:Yeah. It can be. And sometimes there's a lot of vision, mission speaking organizations that does that's kinda soulless sometimes. The 40. You know, I I think the more I've gone through these experiences over the years, I'm really more and more convinced that what we do in professional settings, especially in technology, isn't about just kind of getting to the case study.
Alan Soucier:It's about creating a story. And technologists often aren't really attuned to knowing how to do that. I don't truly consider myself a good storyteller, but it's something I aspire to do and I'm finding myself doing a lot of coaching even in in recent years around helping organizations or teams particularly communicate, especially in in consulting businesses when you're being paid to do something for a customer. They often don't really know why you're there exactly other than someone said you should show up and do this thing. So that's true.
Alan Soucier:Storytelling school would be good. Maybe someday we'll build that.
Josh Smith:That's in my lane. Definitely. Because, you know, I went to school for I paid a lot of money at Drexel University to learn how to tell stories. Film production. So when when when I met you in Frontline, I think we had a lot of conversations, wonderful conversations.
Josh Smith:Around that time, Gallup released it released their whole global study on the future of work. And they they made this claim that I I believe in, which is, like, the single biggest factor in an organization's long term success is the quality of managers. And you were my manager for a time there as well. How does that ring true from your experience in in relation to people architecture?
Alan Soucier:I think it's been absolutely true. I think the challenge with middle management, as I say, is that you're in a larger system that is got pressure business economic wise or other that is pushing to get some things done. Orders come down. As a middle manager, your job is to take that information and get a bunch of people to do some stuff to that end. So you're in the middle.
Alan Soucier:The mandates or the the objectives or goals are coming down without a lot of granular view of the challenges might be on the field to get certain things done. And then you've got a whole assortment of personalities and skill levels and whatever. And then on top of that, in organizations that are growing, there's a lot of change going on, and people have to figure out how to navigate that. In in organizations that and some of which we've worked together in, one of the biggest things was really just helping people navigate that adjustment in the middle of all this normal stuff. So managers in the middle of that are really deserve so much more support and credit than they that typically get, And they need to be equipped.
Alan Soucier:Sometimes you'll see someone who struggles as a manager, and the reaction organization will be that guy, maybe we need to replace him. Maybe he needs to go. Maybe this isn't where he can be successful. We often treat individuals as the problem, not recognizing they're on a whole system that has a big part to play in how they're performing well or poorly. And it's just a more of a systemic view that oftentimes isn't always kind of in view.
Bo Motlagh:It's interesting because I think as I'm I'm hearing, you know, your your perspective on this, there especially in techno and you've definitely heard this. I think you've probably heard me ask this over the years once or twice. Like, in in technology with dev team and, like, the whole principle of, like, agile software development, things like that, There's this notion that a a team that's that has the right processes and good technical skill sets knows exactly what they're building, doesn't need a manager. And you see there there's a lot of organizations that sort of struggle with that because they, they buy into it. And I've, you know, we've all been at companies where they, you see this sort of up and down, like all of a sudden managers are being called out And then all of a sudden they're like, oh, we need some management.
Bo Motlagh:Let's bring them back. Right. And it's this weird up and down. And part of what I think is the issue with that, I'm very curious about your perspective on this, but is that what is a manager? You know?
Bo Motlagh:Or a director for them at leader. Right? Like
Alan Soucier:Right.
Bo Motlagh:What what are what are we saying these things are? Because what you're describing so far, I would I would go as far as to say you haven't really spoken to what I think the corporate essence of of management is yet, which probably needs to be balanced into that somewhere.
Josh Smith:Performance reviews. The answer to performance reviews.
Bo Motlagh:Performance reviews, but also, like, project management effectively. Right? And then and knowing when to hire or fire somebody. And then coupling that with this very real, like, get the most out of somebody perspective out of a team, out of an organization. And you've managed teams, small teams all the way up to large organizational groups.
Bo Motlagh:And, you know, the the distinction, the difference, that balance between what you're talking about and sort of the, you know, disconnect of of of leadership in terms of what it is that managers and directors really are doing. Curious what your thoughts are there.
Alan Soucier:Yeah. I think, you know, the the management models that we have largely in our culture now, especially western culture, are from industrial revolution. We've seen more and more literature come out and research around how this is changing, probably needs to change. But these things are really systemically rooted, and they take a long time to kinda churn out. So if I go into any organization looking to, like, significantly overhaul that, I'm gonna have a lot of frustration and a lot of resistance.
Alan Soucier:So a lot of it is looking for opportunities to push the envelope a little bit to to mature and evolve. But I have some advantage maybe in that. I didn't start my career in typical corporate America. It was in a very people centric space where I was trying to figure out assessing where things were at, what was impacting negative and positively, how to move to a positive place. Mhmm.
Alan Soucier:And so I wasn't really preoccupied in my early career with being in charge or in control. I was usually, what's the environment? What's the landscape? What's in play? And so I would have a broader view, and I would think more systemically.
Alan Soucier:There's not a large not a large leap in my mind from, family systems theory that I might have had when I was in grad school to organizational development and and looking at how organizations function because there's a lot of similarities. But, again, it's pea it's people no matter in either context. So I think there are folks that subscribe to the management model of being in control, and some organizations are really firm about that's the job. I think I'm a fan of seeing how far we can get a team of people to being kind of self managing, so to speak. Meaning, they can be clear on what they need to get done.
Alan Soucier:They can be effective in getting those things done. They can work well together and actually help each other improve and grow and and back each other up. So the performance actually goes up and often can exceed the initial task or job at hand and and go beyond that. Oftentimes, if you have really, I think, high control environments with managers, it's if it's a little more factory floor oriented, like, your job is to put 20 widgets on a pallet every day, and you do that. And then maybe you optimize and you get 21 on a pallet the next day.
Alan Soucier:But that's stationary. It's not very adaptive. It's just kind of mechanical. Some people love those jobs. Some people are built for those jobs and it comes from the manufacturing models that heavily influenced our our world in organizations.
Alan Soucier:But as companies become more into knowledge working spaces, and people aren't literally packing pallets, they're doing stuff in their heads. So it's hard to track that, which creates some ambiguity. So I think when there's change in organization and people are are doing knowledge work, there's higher level of anxiety with leadership about what's going on, what's effective, and I think that triggers a whole bunch of other behaviors that translate sometimes into really not effective management expectations. And one of the things that I've felt most strongly about is I've watched organizations struggle in their growth and struggle with figuring how to, especially in the technology side, get technologists into management roles they may or may not even want. Yeah.
Alan Soucier:Part of me is like, who do they look to for the right model? Because the old models are starting to kinda decay and fail and new models need to replace them, and that will take time. But what are those new models? That's a space that's always kind of fascinated me. And I think I've had and it has its pros and cons, but I've had the opportunity to live in a less somewhat of a open, not super structured experience base with some of the consulting we've done in the organizations we've been in where certain leaders would look at my approach and really value it.
Alan Soucier:Others will look at it and be totally confused because I wasn't following the typical hard nose manager 101 rule book. And sometimes there was kind of a autoimmune response to that when I when I wasn't doing those things. But I think that's it's kind of the, I don't know, the price you pay for being on the on the edge of of advancing and evolving people and organizations. Long answer.
Bo Motlagh:It's a good answer. I I I also think so something I heard you say in there that I think is really important is there's probably an inherent logical fallacy in a lot of organizations as a result of what you're describing where because a manager may be perceived as not being in control or in charge that they're redundant and not necessary. And what was interesting about what you were describing is that you're basically saying, well, no. I mean, a good manager's goal is that they aren't necessary, that they're basically giving the team the ability to run without them having to, like, manage every element of that. And that's a sign of success.
Bo Motlagh:And it's all of these other things that then the manager should also be doing, you know, that's guiding the team, making sure that they stay in that mode, keeping them moving forward. And I think the fallacy is that if somebody doesn't understand the full picture, the full spectrum of what you're describing, that little piece of control is is all they really have a handle on. The loss of that controller or the the perception that that control is no longer dependent on that person may make that person feel like that they're not necessary to the organization. And that's the furthest thing from the truth. And that's, that's a really fascinating way to think about it.
Bo Motlagh:And I saw you grab a book, Josh, and I I suspect you're thinking because I I had a book in mind as well. I'm curious if you were if you were thinking about something as well.
Josh Smith:No. I was, I was just thinking about the research done by Frederic Laloux on around reinventing organizations and his study of the industrial era and the processes and principles that led to beliefs that are now causing a lot of problems and challenges within organizations today, whether or not they realize it. And we think about, like, the hidden chasm. Like, what what are the things that are hidden that are contributing to that to to suddenly hitting the wall? But on the people side, some of those beliefs, and I think you spoke to a couple of them, Alan, were things like, you know, people are inherently lazy, and they need reward or punishment in order to ensure performance.
Josh Smith:And these are, like, beliefs about humanity, like, that are, like, still deep seated in many people. Like, that people only care about money, and they'll do whatever to make as much of it as possible. And they're inherently selfish. They'll always put their interests ahead of the organization, or they always need to be told what to do and how to do it. And that the leaders are there because they're the ones who are most capable of making good decisions that affect the company.
Josh Smith:And some the some people don't even realize, like, they haven't even processed that they have these beliefs, but they're operating under them. And they haven't even processed that they are they have potentially evolved into them from the industrial era. And I'm certain you've, like, run into these in your journey.
Alan Soucier:Yeah. What's funny in organizations too, those ideas are actually incentivized. So Yeah. You take your performance review process. I mean, we've all seen this where you're actually told, like, basically dumb down someone's performance score because it doesn't fit the bell curve.
Alan Soucier:Like, that is so counterintuitive and also gets so far away from what actually I think is the secret sauce for getting the best out of people, which is connecting their abilities to how they can best contribute. Money aside, but when people contribute something that is feels is really deeply connected internally to them, what they do well, what they enjoy, what validates their sense of mission in life. When you can let that loosen an organization to something that it benefits the external world, then you you tend to see a whole different thing take place. But a lot of systems are oriented towards stay in your box. You have to be this way.
Alan Soucier:You do these 5 things every day. And and sometimes that's appropriate, but sometimes that's very limiting. And in organizations, especially, they're growing and trying to trying to be innovative, although a lot of their behaviors are not anti innovation. But they, you know, they really limit themselves. So people want they said companies want they say they want growth.
Alan Soucier:They want x, y, and z. They want innovation. But oftentimes, moment those things start to peak above the waterline, there's reactions and there's a lot of anxiety around it because it's maybe not so controllable. It's not well defined. And I think in terms of, like, management development and people climbing professionally in an organization, If you're in the mindset or the model where you're trying to enable an ecosystem where talent can be more self maintaining and have a high agency and autonomy, then you're not gonna look at the kind of manager that's in control of a bunch of stuff, and you may not even get promoted because there's a perception about what that role should look like.
Alan Soucier:And I think there's just there's challenges around the the incentives with with those pieces. So most people aren't willing to give up, like, kind of work themselves out of an opportunity. But I think I think organizations are full of certain pathologies, and that's one of them, that are just bred by a lot of pressures. And I think when especially when companies are growing and they're kinda maybe heading to the chasm, they're getting pressure tested by expectations and demands, and then things start to leak and often that happens around the people structures. And and quite honestly, HR and people and culture groups are important, but oftentimes, they're not equipped to deal with some of these types of things.
Alan Soucier:They're focused on executing other smaller pieces, and I think organizations do one of the other patterns is that there's there's just a bias towards activity, not always the most meaningful or beneficial. So a lot of people, managers, teams are consumed to do a bunch of things because doing and checking things off feels good and it feels like it's certain. A lot of organizations would actually be served by doing less in certain fronts, but that sounds really counterintuitive. The most CEOs are like, dude, last. What?
Alan Soucier:That's what they're doing the right thing and being way more strategic. And true long term thinking strategically, most organizations are still very much about near term activity.
Bo Motlagh:I mean, that's a great segue to the chasm itself. You've been, I mean, we've chatted with you about it. So you're familiar with the concept of the hidden chasm. Mhmm. Do you wanna take a swing in your own words or from your perspective how you Yeah.
Alan Soucier:So my view on this distinction is I immediately think about the people component and, like, an organization might be thinking about technical debt or architectural debt when they're kind of racing towards the chasm. I'm thinking about people debt, which, you know and in things like somewhere I've got a long list of corollaries here, but for an example, organizationally from a technical perspective, you might be taking shortcuts. You're not working the code through in a more mature way, and you're gonna come back and fix that later. Sometimes we do the same thing with people where we need to upscale, but we're running too fast. Like, we just gotta get a different person in here.
Alan Soucier:So you just start short circuiting for near term expectations and demands. So I think for a lot of pieces that are are part of what we would see as technical architectural deck conversations, I think there's a very human counterpart. And then how you solve that, I think, is a is a mix of things. But there's definitely a piece, and I think at the end of the day, I think people forget that organizations are they're just run by people. Like, I think people are the active agents in organizations.
Alan Soucier:There's this there's a scene in this corny movie. I like the, the Nicholas Cage movie with the the in the, what do you call it?
Josh Smith:The the wicker man? The
Alan Soucier:no. The, what is it? Independence stuff. It it the declaration of independence where he steals Oh, yeah.
Bo Motlagh:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Josh Smith:Yeah. National treasure.
Alan Soucier:National treasure. Yeah. So, Greg, they steal the they steal the document, and they're looking for a secret message. So they put some lemon juice and a blow dryer on it to heat it up to bring the secret message forward. And I think people are like that.
Alan Soucier:They're an active agent that brings, can bring out the success of what you're trying to do. A lot of organizations just see people as a commodity resource. Like, they're gonna, you know they've got electricity and plumbing. People just are in there to do stuff. And I think that's a real miss for organizations.
Alan Soucier:I think small organizations, especially start ups, they thrive and, actually, the success are more successful off a very high people quotient. But as they get bigger and they scale out, you mechanize and you operationalize, which makes sense. I mean, scaling requires some process and different structures. But what you need structurally and even from your people is different when you're a $1,000,000 company versus a $5,000,000 company versus a $15,000,000 company. So those need to change.
Alan Soucier:And I think one of the things that organizations need to do, especially leadership, is you gotta be in a learning posture all the time and you gotta be focused on realizing the the people are what make your business work. One small anecdote related to this comes to mind. I've been taking my cars to a particular automotive shop for really over 20 years. The guy it was great for all kinds of reasons I won't get into here, but he sold it to another local business guy who had he had, like, a 2 bay garage. When he purchased, he had, like, 23 bays and all kinds of people.
Alan Soucier:He had, like, 25 mechanics. And what I noticed over 12 month period of time is prices went up, quality went down, service went down, wait times went longer, and you could hear and see even the look on the employees' faces when I would talk to them periodically or just the customer base. But out of, like, those 20 something guys he had working there for them, he now has one. They all left. They couldn't handle the transition, and part of it was because the guy did not realize he wasn't buying bays with equipment and parts.
Alan Soucier:He was buying people. Right. It was a relationship service driven business. Yes. They fix your tires and your brakes and all of that.
Alan Soucier:But he and what's what's heartbreaking is that he's a really good guy and deserves to be successful. But I honestly not to bash on consultants too much, but he hired an automotive business consultant. They installed new software, and they pretty much programmed him right into a corner. And I, actually, I saw him locally eating lunch with his wife a couple weeks ago, and the guy looked like he'd been run by run over by a truck. Like, he was he's not having success because I think there was an undervaluing of the fact that the people were really the core of what he's doing in his work.
Alan Soucier:And and you just use different examples, but that's just one that has kind of struck me in recent months.
Bo Motlagh:I really like the notion of people debt because I think I think we speak about that from different perspectives a lot. And you're right. I mean, even even we as we've sort of been exploring this concept, we approach we've been approaching that element of the conversation as skills gaps and, you know, strategic misalignments and and organizational issues, which, I mean, to your point, sort of obfuscates the core of that, which is you're talking about people. It's not some ethereal organizational thing. It's people.
Bo Motlagh:And I like that you're pulling it back. I think that makes a lot of sense because it's it's it's more than just a skills gap. It's it could be that they have the right skill, but they're still not the right person for any number of reasons. It's not necessarily a bad thing about that person. So anyway, I think that makes a lot of sense.
Alan Soucier:Yeah. I think we get caught up in our language a lot, and there's certainly business jargon. I heard a term last week. A guy named Bob Sutton, I think, out of Stanford is writing a new book called The Friction Project that's kinda fascinating, but I was watching him be interviewed, and I think they what was the term they were using on language? It was the idea of jargon monoxide.
Alan Soucier:Like, you just kinda pollute the air you're breathing with how we're talking about things. But I I think a lot of what some of this speaks to is something I feel like I've kinda at my core, I do a lot, but it probably has never been in the job description or contract, which is I'm helping to make connections between an external environment of the business and what they need to get done with people's internal stuff. So whether I'm working with a new manager or a mid level or senior technologist, there's sometimes it's just difficult connecting their performance. Maybe you're very much affected because, you know, they're lost in a bunch of chaos. They can't make sense of what their roles are, why they're there.
Josh Smith:Something you said too about people debt. Something that makes me incredibly angry in organizations when I see it is ignoring the something you said about ignoring the upskilling or not allocating and focusing on the necessity of that throughout the year, allocating some sort of capacity of their utilization over the over the week or over the months to say, let's talk about what's going on in the space that we're in, in the industry. Let's talk about how it's evolving and where it's going. Even though we're here, even though even though we're not moving, we may not be moving with it. We need to know where it is, and we need to understand how to adapt.
Josh Smith:Because I see it over and over again where I get to organizations, and they hit they hit the hidden chasm. And they go, we'll just have our people solve it, and their people are not equipped. And the conversation is no longer about how do we get our people to solve it. It's about how do we how do we fire 30%, 40% of our staff because they are not skilled. They don't know how to merge newly acquired products.
Josh Smith:They don't know the new technologies that are required to fix their technical debt issues, they have no clue. And the saddest part is to say, oh, well, the solution is to get rid of them is like saying, we screwed up. These people are now the victims of that. Of course, we say, well, they're also responsible for it. But come on.
Josh Smith:Don't they have they don't have the time nor were they incentivized. Right. They've suffered. And now what do they do? Even if they leave, how many years behind are they?
Josh Smith:They gotta catch up. And some people will meant, like, oh, why are why is these younger generations leaving their business leaving businesses every couple years? It's because they know that if they don't, they're not gonna keep up with the ever changing technologies. Because if they go to a place where they recognize that they're not growing as they need to, they'll find a place where they can because, otherwise, they will go stale, and they can't afford to. So anyway, how's There's
Alan Soucier:a lot of dysfunction around that because not only are they gonna find themselves out of opportunity with no chance to better themselves. The kind of the the scar tissue left behind from those experiences are not confidence building. They create less clarity on their own skill set and where they could be successful. Not if they're doing, but the company environment is just kinda creating all kinds of damage around that. And to make it worse, I've seen situations where in organizations that are kind of in that mode, you've got leadership involved where actually even the upskilling where people have had opportunity to do it.
Alan Soucier:I've seen things where there are managers actually undermining it more because of their own incompetence, not because they were doing it to be malicious, but they were actually taking people further away from that success direction, and they're becoming less enabled to, like, become more technically, you know, sharp in a particular area. And then they would turn around and critique them at a performance time or want them put on a performance plan because they weren't x, y, and z. But I'm like, this this manager was person who actually kept blocking that 3 or 4 times in the row for over a couple of years in one case. So you've got it's just all working the wrong direction and putting the root cause at the wrong place. And I think, you know, it seems to be difficult for organizations to think holistically sometimes.
Alan Soucier:And I think in technology organizations, even though someone becomes a VP of something, they started out coding, and they're proud of it. They were great at it, but they've never figured out how to really is a very different skill set inside a real leadership place space where it's not about the technology most of the time. And most organizations and their challenges, it's not a technology problem. It's almost always a people problem, Leadership or wherever else.
Bo Motlagh:I think it's an important point because if an organization is people and structures are people and even the uplift opportunities that we're talking about, The leadership, the founders, and the board are also people. And all of these things have incentives. And I think, you know, my thought on this is that a company has certain realities, which is it's going to have goals. It's gonna have it's going to need to make, least in this country, in a capitalist society, it's going to need to make money. And there's going to be hires and there's going to be churn.
Bo Motlagh:And those are the realities of the company. Now I think one of the things I've learned from you, Alan, over the years is that there are ways to do that and to deal with those realities in a way that doesn't dehumanize and doesn't take away from the opportunities of the people involved beyond this opportunity. And I think that's valid and important, but it is a reality. And kind of bringing this back to the chasm itself, I mean, the notion of the chasm and why the chasm becomes important is that we, you know, we see this happen with companies where the desires and the path that at the top, you know, the founders or the or the seal suite or the board have sort of established for the company Mhmm. Includes now some milestone.
Bo Motlagh:They're now heading toward m and a or, you know, growth strategies. They've brought on investment or they're looking for an IPO or some sort of exit, and then they get slammed with this. And it's a surprise, you know, and that's the hidden part. And I'm curious, how do you perceive so, you know, have you thought about their sort of mindset about this relative to people architecture? And because it's interesting to us because I think what we've learned through these conversations is that there are indicators Business indicators that can lead to this.
Bo Motlagh:But it feels like they have blinders on. I'm curious what you think of that because it can go on for years, a decade.
Alan Soucier:The leadership in organizations, especially as they grow and they kinda get more vertical and there's more layers of org charts, there are more and more blind spots, and that's kinda natural. I mean, you know, in scaling organizations, some companies don't do this well. We need to be very intentional about the communication architecture. And that isn't about moving code. That's about moving communications between people because you're really trying to maintain keep and maintain and actually continue to develop connectivity with people so that you know, when I think I've recently read an article that basically was like the the more senior you are an organization, the less you know.
Alan Soucier:And it wasn't being pejorative about it, but it was just saying they're just so far removed Yeah. From understanding what this technical problem is and what needs to be deployed and at what timetable. And not that they should be spending a lot of time understanding all those nuances. The last thing most organizations want is, like, some senior guy in the middle of your project work. But there becomes some pretty big disconnects, creates blind spots, and the awareness disappears.
Alan Soucier:And the leader will just assume someone's taking care of that. And in some ways, they need good people around them so they kinda can take that posture. So as organizations kinda get more hierarchical, it can be challenging to kind of to to keep and maintain the right balance around communication, visibility. Because nothing is worse than an organization when senior leadership is confused and anxious. Then all kinds of weird behaviors start to happen.
Alan Soucier:Sure. And then people underneath, like, it it's just kind of a crazy dynamic. But it's a a word that I I've been finding myself wanting to use, but I use it sparingly in business environments is the term community. Because a lot of what I end up doing, now I wasn't always using the word, was building community. There's a thing you were coalesce around.
Alan Soucier:You have a a vision or purpose or there's a reason you're a community, a group of people. And there's certain things that happen inside that space, and different people are doing playing different parts of that. And sometimes businesses become more transactional, and they are business operations is very transactional. You've got customers. You've got product or services.
Alan Soucier:But even in the business side, I'm finding that the customers who have a positive customer experience and trust is going up, not down, and transparency is high, that those things become more important in a lot of business environments where there's just a a trust in a collaboration that you you need to kinda transcend the transactional layer. So, of course, if I go put a new battery in my car, I want one that works, and I want the mechanic to put it in correctly. But when I interact with the guy at the service counter who I connect with and I know I could go with him with any issue, elevates how I might interact with them. I'm gonna come back. I find in IT consulting space, any customer that I've even proactively tried to address issues with, like, if I see there's a performance issue on a team and I don't wait for them to complain about it, I make the change.
Alan Soucier:I've had them thank me. And then next thing you know, they're calling me when they want another team built because they're like, this guy understands what I need, and I can trust him. And he's not just here to, like, kinda get out of this whatever he wants to get out of it. He's here to help me be successful. When you can communicate that message and I think that's where it's valuable.
Alan Soucier:And I think sometimes leadership in organizations, it's tough to maintain the connectivity between there's a lot of varying demands and appetites for these things. But, anyway, that's just some plots on that.
Bo Motlagh:From your perspective, are there bottom up signs from that that an executive should be looking at? You know, so we've identified from, like, a technical perspective that, you know, things that leaders should probably be listening for and looking at technical and financial. So things like, you know, if retention is not going well despite, you know, growth or if your dev teams keep saying the word tech debt and freaking out at you. Those are some things to pay attention to. From a people and culture perspective, are there bottom up signs that a company could be paying attention to to let them know that you might be approaching an issue?
Alan Soucier:I think that if you're paying attention to to various pieces of just team health, and it's a little more interesting now because people are mostly remote. But when we're physically in the space, are people smiling? Are they talking to each other? Are they laughing occasionally? Are they are they being human?
Alan Soucier:And it's funny. Wow. They're sharing a lot of personal stories, but, man, this team's really produced this week. Like, there's a correlation there that that gives you a sign of. You've got that and it starts to go away.
Alan Soucier:It should be asking questions. Are our managers facilitating those types of environments? And if you're finding teams in defensive postures, not communicating, deflecting, pointing to other issues, I I hate the word accountability sometimes, but they you know, healthy teams will take responsibility without saying they need to be accountable. They're just gonna take care of business. And when I start in some cultures, when I start people harping, especially the managers on accountability accountability, I know it's an environment where now it's basically, it's operating out of leverage, force, fear, or some kind of thing like that versus it being driven where teams that are it's important to them internally to be successful because they're proud of what they do.
Alan Soucier:They're gonna be a more performant team that's a healthier model. They just need to be clear on what needs to happen next for the organization. And so that's where the next layer up. If communication isn't cascading correctly, it'll actually start to uncover a lot of crazy behaviors. I I remember I was working with 1 team.
Alan Soucier:There was a capacity with 1 person that had the skill set to help another team, and we just, for the time being, didn't formally move anybody, but we just said just go help them be successful. There was such a reaction from senior leadership. Why do we move that guy? Who said we could do that? And I'm like, if we have a problem internally taking skill sets from one place to help another team be successful, then we have to have a different conversation.
Alan Soucier:And then that quieted everyone down. And these things take hold and people don't realize. They become actually just this is how we do things. But it often isn't really in good service to the organizational mission, their goals, or the customers in the end. And we waste a lot of energy in some of these cycles.
Alan Soucier:And and I think the larger the organization, the trickier it gets. And I think one of the things that contributes to this is when a company has been successful doing a thing a certain way for 20, 30, 40 years, and the environment changes into the point of the chasm, it's time to be in a different place here, but you're caught short. It is tough for them to see their way to that. To me, a lot of people movement, organizational movement is like, know where you are, you're at point a. You need to get to point b, that's your vision.
Alan Soucier:That's where you wanna be tomorrow. Here are the things that need to happen in between. And technology wise, there's a bunch of stuff that's usually easier to articulate. Executing it can be challenging. People often don't ask, what do I need from a people perspective to make
Josh Smith:that happen?
Alan Soucier:And then it's reactive behavior So after that.
Josh Smith:I'm a peacetime person. I'm very diplomatic, but I was raised by a emergency room trauma nurse who was also a coroner. So my father, his mode, default mode is emergency response. It's where he's in war. So even though my default is peacetime, I grew up knowing that you had to shift.
Josh Smith:You had to, like, shift abruptly when you are in a time of crisis because every second counts. And you're the model of how you operate with a team, the the buildup of safety and competency over long periods of time pays off when effective team needs to go from everything is fine to the house is on fire.
Bo Motlagh:Right.
Josh Smith:And the idea of emergency response preparation and how do you prepare teams for when they have to shift. Because in my own personal experiences, and you've had them too, when companies have hit the chasm, have hit the wall, and they've realized it, would you say that the and I'm trying to, like, just say in another way what you've been saying and see if it's accurate. That that shift from everything is peacetime to we need to shift to crisis mode, and big changes needs to happen. And some of them are gonna be painful. That that's a very difficult shift to make.
Alan Soucier:Yeah. It's hard. In some ways, I think it's a it's because you started later than you could have or should have. And leadership needs to have part of, I think, looking forward is anticipating a lot of things in in IT particularly, but a lot of things in other spaces too. But a lot of the job is anticipating.
Alan Soucier:And if people in a mode where they're, like, just taking their orders and executing week by week, they're not they're not thinking and they're not looking at the long range radar. Leadership managers and leaders particularly, they really need to because especially organizationally, if you're kind of in a business or market space and the thing's working and sometimes there's this, yeah, we know we need to make these adjustments, but they undervalue the effort required. And one of the reasons changes how an organization start making those changes earlier is because it means people gotta give up as to some level what they built their success on, especially if someone's better than an organization for a long period of time. And that's fair. That can be hard.
Alan Soucier:But leadership is gonna start recognizing that's a dynamic in play, and you've gotta start figuring out how to help them shift. And that's kind of where you're really talking about internal work with people, leaders, individuals, or big, like, stakeholders and pieces of organizations and functional areas because you got to prepare them for a different future. But you need to be able to say, here's how you can be successful. This is gonna be good for you because new opportunity, new abilities, different type or new type of success for you. And sometimes people aren't that interested if they're really late in their career.
Alan Soucier:But most people are really you know, if they have a curiosity and any sense of adventure, if they feel like it's safe to do so and doesn't put them in jeopardy, they will do that. So I think a leader's job and part of what I think community building is for leaders is creating safety for change. And not just the vision and not just forcing it to happen, but, ideally, you wanna put a vision out there. You are actually creating the the runway where the people you need to make that change happen start moving somewhat on their own with some direction from you. Where when people are late in this and the chasm's coming and they just gotta make a hard left, it's just bodies start flying out of the car, and there's just consequences.
Alan Soucier:And leaders would get sometimes people do this, especially senior leaders. They will get their next promotion because they got the job done, but nobody's taken a body count. Right. I think about those people would have been so great to have in your future, but now they're just collateral damage. And that's where sometimes business can take a very, I don't know, transactional mindset around people.
Alan Soucier:They're just it's it's expense. It's a cost center. It's whatever, and we're gonna make this look better. I mean, different type of people. So I don't wanna take 3 years to train some guy.
Alan Soucier:Let's just go hire a guy. But there's problems with just taking people off the street even if they're smart, especially if you get a designed and healthy culture. It takes time to assimilate because they're humans, and nobody joins a new tribe and becomes chief the next day. There's pieces to it that don't often get attended to in a lot of business practice.
Josh Smith:You've talked about hero culture, Beau, before. So
Bo Motlagh:People bubble up as a result of that. I like that term, by the way. Nobody joins, a new tribe and becomes cheap the next day. I like that a lot. Euro culture is, I think, an important point, actually.
Bo Motlagh:Curious because I think it's an inevitable sort of reality in an environment where things aren't happening. A few personalities will bubble up. Yep. Curious what your thoughts are there.
Alan Soucier:Well, I think the chaos environment when they're in crisis and half on fire, those heroes show up because you need one of those. You need a problem for a hero. So it's not always and they will get elevated, and they'll become the example. And not that there are great things that can happen with heroes that show up to fix things, but oftentimes heroes aren't looking to deescalate and now share the glory and get other people enabled. They're often, like, looking for the next the next fire.
Alan Soucier:And I was in a situation once where someone was looking for promotion, and I was asked my opinion. And I kinda gave it, and I was like, great guy, great skills, but they kinda wanna be the guy all the time. And it might have been great for solving a problem, and not that he shouldn't have been part of the thing, but the team play was not high. And, of course, they get promoted, problems ensued, and I was kinda like, told you. I didn't literally say it, but I was thinking it.
Alan Soucier:And, you know, part of it is being sensitive to not stop thinking just about a person and what they can do around a specific thing because you're in a system. Everybody in that system is being influenced by everything around them. And so when you put people in play like that, you you gotta kinda decide what you what you want a result to be. I mean, in some situations, you just want that guy. You need you need to pull somebody out of a fire, and and that's what you do.
Alan Soucier:But you need to not just just to think, oh, that's success and move on. Let's do that again. That's not the right pattern for long term sustainability. And I think sustainability is another thing I've been latching onto lately because a lot of what we do in organizations isn't really very sustainable, whether it be team operations or or whatever. But it's we often we are very outcome focused, not sustainability focused.
Alan Soucier:And sometimes that's an okay decision and a trade off. That's okay. But if that becomes your operating rhythm where sustainability is never considered, I think you end up with problems. Yeah. So
Bo Motlagh:what would you recommend to you know, what are the key leadership strategies that you would recommend to leaders in who are potentially in the chasm in dealing with these issues and or at least becoming aware of them?
Alan Soucier:I think things that help. One is I think leaders need to continually be learning. And I think that's a challenge sometimes for leaders because they're in a spot where they feel like I'm supposed to already know everything I need to know. So maintaining a learning posture to help you continue to create awareness and limit your blind spots is important. I also think there's an issue in most leadership positions.
Alan Soucier:There's just a lot of isolation, And I think finding other people to connect to that can relate to your particular set of issues and challenges, emotionally and otherwise, is important. But often and and some people are of the mindset, you know, that's just kind of the school of hard knocks you get through and if you survive it. I I was actually listening to a podcast this week where there was a movement by some leaders, like, once they've achieved success, they pull the this is what the guy described as they pull the ladder up behind them. They were not gonna share what they've learned, the success they had versus building escalators, which was the other side of the the metaphor. And I thought that was kind of interesting.
Alan Soucier:So I think leadership's having the ability to think about taking what they're learning and going through and making it beneficial to a larger group is an interesting concept. But that's not usually the first word of business when you get a board breathing down your neck or shareholders. But I think people that can have the capacity to widen their interpretation of that role a little bit will actually find those skills will benefit them in the day to day demands, but also I think in being better prepared so they're not caught off guard. Once you're over the chasm, you're, you know, you're just gonna have to deal with it. But I think preventative medicine is good in this this topic.
Bo Motlagh:So inherent in in some of what you're saying, and tell me if you disagree, but I think a piece of what I'm hearing is coming back to that notion of control and how much of that, especially if you're, you know, an executive, can it feels good to talk about and try to maintain control, but a lot of it feels almost like an illusion.
Alan Soucier:Yeah. I mean, the reality is we we all live every day with some form of illusion. Like, I'm gonna trust. I'm gonna get my car, drive home, and then I'll make it. Mhmm.
Alan Soucier:No benefit to me assuming I won't. But there's and I think in organizations, it can be kind of just I don't know. Sometimes it's just myopic issue, but or a kind of believing your own marketing sometimes. And and it's not that it's bad. You need to have a vision.
Alan Soucier:You need to believe in what you're doing. You need to communicate that to your organization. So but I think sometimes it gets to the point where people don't leave this as open to the idea that I'm gonna learn some new things too. I'm not gonna have all this figured out. And actually, you know, when you especially I think when leaders put out a plan, they wanna execute it.
Alan Soucier:There's the the ability to kind of fail and learn and adapt is they're not given a lot of permission to do that and even inside organizations. When we do planning for an an annual operating plan or if you're in a safe or agile environment and you're you're making commitments for program increments or or whatever and teams the expectation is you just hit all your marks. Mhmm. But the reality is there's emergent stuff that comes up. Technology wise, there's emergent work that pops up.
Alan Soucier:We've all seen it. I think people wise, there's emergent work. But we often don't we don't allow for that. I've never been in a management meeting where someone said, hey. I had some changes come up this week, some emergent emotional needs with my team.
Alan Soucier:Nobody says that. Like, it's just not in yet now. So and I wouldn't probably put that on the agenda that way. But as a leader, I'd wanna be sensitive to there's something up with that person. I need to have a follow-up conversation.
Alan Soucier:Make sure that they're good to stick with what their role is and their responsibilities are to the team and and see if they need something. And and that's just taking care of people so that they can perform well in the job you're needing them to do. It's just a two sided equation. There was a Mark Cuban quote I came across recently that was he basically was like leadership for him was 2 parts. 1 is you've gotta have the vision.
Alan Soucier:The second part is you gotta get to know your people and what's important to them so that you can integrate it. And I thought that was a great Yeah. Definition of of that. And sometimes we're weak on the second. And Mark Cuban is not a soft teddy bear.
Alan Soucier:He's you know? So for the fact that, you know, he recognized it. I was like, okay. He gets that. That's probably partly why it works for him.
Alan Soucier:You've had
Bo Motlagh:what you described as an interesting career that has sort of instilled these lessons for you so that you can see these patterns and help organizations. How short of first becoming, you know, getting a master's in counseling and doing what you did, how can leaders, new and experienced and executives, what are steps they can take to sort of learn more about this way of thinking in order to be more effective?
Alan Soucier:That's why I gotta write this book that I don't know how to write. Okay. Yeah. How can they? I don't know.
Bo Motlagh:It's You're listening. Alan's interested in a ghostwriter.
Alan Soucier:You know, where do they go? I don't think there is a great place that's focused on this. Some materials coming out, I think, that that's speaking to some more of the human side of of leadership, but business books are kind of business books. I think there is a a bit of a void in some of this. And, actually, in in some authors who write content that pick at some of these issues in organizations where from a people perspective is not really working.
Alan Soucier:They can write some pretty quippy books, but they don't they're not accepted. You know, you're probably not gonna have that in reading most MBA programs. I think that people don't know where to consume it. I think it's somewhat list of different concepts that just don't don't know where it fits in the models. I do think some of this is changing.
Alan Soucier:I think generationally with millennials and Gen z, they're kind of in a very different place, and they take a lot of flack for different reasons, and and we're very fascinated now with categorizing everybody. But they're really just an younger version of humans, and they've had certain experiences. But they're kinda demanding a different approach, which is kind of interesting to watch. So organizations are gonna continue to kinda thrash against that that friction, but here's also about friction. Sometimes I talk about lubrication, like, let's reduce the friction.
Alan Soucier:Then sometimes I realize friction is part of how you get around the track. So you think about I recently heard this analogy about a race car. You want your tires to have a high friction point so you can go 200 miles an hour and make that corner. But you also want your brakes to work, which is intentional friction to a good benefit. And I think in this business of change and organizations trying to figure out how to to migrate the changes in culture and the nature of business, there's a lot of opportunity in work that that could be done around enabling folks.
Alan Soucier:I think one layer is senior leadership in organizations. A lot of them, if they're experienced, they've been rewarded and are kind of steeped in a certain model that and the new thing is not that familiar to them, and it can actually it's kind of a scary business. Nobody trades in what's been printing money for them or printing success for them for 20, 30 years for something that they don't understand. Nobody's gonna do it. So there's some changes gonna happen as people age out and new talent comes in, new leaders are developed.
Alan Soucier:My concern is developing those new leaders. That's, I think, a a high value and, kinda inflection point or zone to work on. Now if there's people already in maybe someone still got 15, 20 years left to their professional career, they're a senior leader. I think those folks need a different kind of community where they can explore these things safely. Because some of them work in environments where bringing these things up is not gonna go well.
Alan Soucier:It's not gonna fly. When you're and, you know, if you're founding a company or if you're CEO, confidence is a big piece of the equation. If you walk into a meeting and say, you know, I'm not so sure about this thing. I'm kind of feeling unsure about whatever. That is not gonna play well.
Alan Soucier:So there needs to be a different place where people can kinda be vulnerable, be safe, and and sometimes that is with peers. Sometimes it might be a therapist. I don't know. But it's, you know, different kinds of things. So I I think there's opportunity there.
Alan Soucier:And then I'm not sure which all should look like, but I think some of the stuff we've talked about would be would be some good fodder for it.
Bo Motlagh:Makes sense. We have been talking for over an hour, and I think we could probably talk for a whole other hour here, but I think this has been awesome. Thank you so much, Alan.
Alan Soucier:There's so
Bo Motlagh:much here. I mean, there are so many threads we could have pulled between the notions of, like, what one thing that came up, which we're not gonna dig into but I kept thinking about, was, like, what even is a role? You know, like, when we talk about these widgets and people and things like that. But lots of opportunity to chat more. Allan, I wanna get kinda give you an opportunity here.
Bo Motlagh:If you'd like to plug anything you'd like to plug, the stage is yours.
Alan Soucier:I appreciate the chance to to talk this out. It's cool to have a space for this. Even just prepping some thoughts for this, I was like, this might be part of the book I need to write. So for some organization of some of my thoughts, I'm kind of in deep deep research mode on how do I write a book about some of this stuff. I kinda don't really want to, but I think that's why it might be a good thing to do it.
Alan Soucier:Some people just wanna write a book to be the guy who wrote a book. I'm like, I really don't care about that. But I do care about helping people. And to your point, if I could find a way to put some answers, so to speak, or some helpful information into something people can consume, I think that's worth doing. I'm not sure how to do that exactly, but we'll see.
Alan Soucier:But, you know, other than that, I think, you know, I'm I don't know if I wanna date myself, but I know. I'm 56, and I still have some career left. And what's cool is I have more things I wanna do around this stuff. And I'm trying to find ways to get less and less limited by typical models and and do some new things. So I'm totally open.
Alan Soucier:People that love this space, I wanna hear from them. If there's leaders or managers or anybody that's some of the stuff resonated with, you know, let's let's chat. It'd be cool to to help you out. So, anyway, it's been fun with you guys too. You know, we've had a lot of history, so we can talk about these things, and we have a lot of stories to share.
Alan Soucier:And we can always do part 2.
Josh Smith:Yeah. And you're, offlinecoaching.io?
Alan Soucier:Yes. offlinecoaching.io.
Bo Motlagh:If you've loved this conversation like we have, definitely reach out to Alan at offlinecoaching.io. And you're on LinkedIn as well? Yes. We can find you there. Awesome conversation.
Bo Motlagh:I think the people element of the hidden chasm is something we're just starting to scratch the surface of. And it's just as important as the financials and technical debt and all of these other elements that I think we've been chatting about. So thank you, Alan. You're good. Tune in again for another episode soon.
Bo Motlagh:Thanks so much.
Alan Soucier:Great. Thank you.
Josh Smith:Thanks for listening to the Hidden Chasm podcast with your hosts, Bo Motlagh and Josh Smith. It's sponsored by United Effects. We hope you enjoyed our deep dive exploring the impact of legacy technology on enterprise agility. Follow along as we explore this further by subscribing to the podcast at thehiddenchasm.com.
