Adam Larson: 00:21

Welcome back to Count Me In. I'm your host, Adam Larsen, and today I'm talking with Lisa Levy, founder of Lcubed Consulting and author of Future Proofing Cubed. We're diving into the concept of adaptive transformation, how organizations of any size can use proven strategies from project management and process improvement to boost efficiency and break down silos. Lisa shares practical advice on documenting processes, encouraging continuous improvement, and building a culture where innovation thrives. Plus, she'll introduce her innovation engine, a simple yet powerful approach that any team can use to generate ideas and drive meaningful change.

Adam Larson: 00:56

So if you want actual ways to help your team adapt and future proof your business, you're in the right place. Let's dive right in. Lisa, thanks so much for coming on. Count me in. Today, we're going to be talking about a number of things like adaptive transformation.

Adam Larson: 01:14

And I figure the first place we could start is could you explain the concept of adaptive transformation and how does it benefit businesses?

Lisa Levy: 01:22

Absolutely. So adaptive transformation is the framework that we've developed with L Cubed Consulting over the last sixteen years. The framework itself relies on best practices that large corporations build teams of people around, but smaller and mid sized businesses don't have the ability necessarily to invest the millions of dollars it takes to stand up a practice in project management, in process performance management, internal controls or organizational change management. So with our adaptive transformation frameworks, we've taken the key pieces of those best practices and built them into a cross functional tool set that any business can use. The main point behind the framework, right, is to allow businesses to become effective and efficient in the work that they do.

Lisa Levy: 02:11

Let's talk about the payroll department. Every employee should understand the work that they do and the value and benefit that it has to other teams around them. But important in that is what I do and what it means to the next person in the process flow, and what it means through that and understanding all of those touch points, process management. And when we're looking at processes and wanting to know if they're performing right, want to understand points of risk inside of a process. And that's where we can put and track our controls.

Lisa Levy: 02:44

Some of them may be manual controls where it's a checklist or something that a human being is observing to make sure that it's working. And sometimes they're automated controls. In a procurement process, right, a really simple example of an automated control is a three way match. So, person needs to buy something, they create a requisition in a system. That requisition goes to the purchasing department who sources whatever it is that they're going to procure.

Lisa Levy: 03:08

They create a purchase order that they send to a vendor who then ships the widgets back. When that comes in, there's a receiving document on the box that says X number of items were ordered, the price was this, and if all of that matches the requisition amount, the PO amount, and the receivable, right, we now have a three way match that means the system can pay that invoice and no human intervention is required. So those are system or automatic controls that we can put in place. And in our businesses today, we use lots of them. In the IT space, there are tons of controls for access that are just everywhere, and we don't even know about them.

Lisa Levy: 03:45

They're just there, and they just work. But with the adaptive transformation framework, as we're going through and we're understanding what the process is and how it works, what happens when it needs to change? And how do we explain to people the importance of the change? And that's where the organizational change management component comes in. Because human beings are inherently and naturally resistant to change.

Lisa Levy: 04:10

We like to do the things we know how to do, and we like to do them over and over again. It's comfortable. And we get into that routine of work. So change is an ever present reality in business today, and some of it is planned and some of it takes us by surprise. I won't belabor the pandemic as the something that took us by surprise and everybody had to respond to that change.

Lisa Levy: 04:33

But we do, we have this every day. And I built this framework after years and years and years of having really good projects fail because we didn't take the people through the journey so that they would understand what the change is, why it's beneficial, what it means to them in their job, and even more importantly, right, what it meant to the customer of that business. And so, corporations use these four best practices all day, every day, and they work as silos, and they reinforce silos in large enterprise companies. I genuinely believe that breaking the silos is critical, and using these four very specific skills and disciplines collectively across functions empowers businesses to grow and scale, become more efficient, more effective, and be encouraged that they want to change because they understand the why behind it. And it changes the entire culture.

Lisa Levy: 05:34

It's a totally different kind of business operating model.

Adam Larson: 05:38

That's really interesting because you're right, the bigger the organization, the more the taller the silo becomes. I feel like that's what it kind of goes through and being able to break down those siloed walls. But even in small and medium sized businesses, sometimes you have one person doing 20 things and that's that in itself is a silo. So how do you kind of break down those silos, especially when the smaller the business, the more more things people are in charge of? How can you break down some of those silos?

Adam Larson: 06:04

Because maybe one component is affected by this other person or another one was only affected by that one person. Like I'm doing 5090% of the work and the one person doing 10%. You know, how do you kind of break down those silos to make sure it flows smoothly? And also just avoid some of the risks that can happen when one person's doing 20 jobs.

Lisa Levy: 06:22

So that's a great scenario because every growing business experiences this in some way, shape or form, somewhere along the line. And I'll give a little key secret, and as that business grows, one of the roles that is most likely to be in this situation of having that kind of risk is the administrative support staff, the executive assistants, the admin assistants. They work magic every day, and we don't always understand everything that they do. And if one of them leaves unexpectedly, wheels fall off of businesses very quickly. So, let's talk about the actual question, right?

Lisa Levy: 06:58

You start to break that down? The first thing I work from is an equation, and it really is people plus process, times technology, equals growth and scale, or it equals effectiveness and efficiency. But that equation is really important because it has to work in order. You need good people who are doing the right work. That right work needs to be documented and understood as a process so that it's actually repeatable.

Lisa Levy: 07:28

You do not have a process if it is not documented and it is not repeatable by somebody who is not you. That's the number one thing that starts to take apart the scenario that you posed for me, Adam, right? We have to put these things on paper so that when I win the lottery, and I run out the door, and move to Mexico, and never to be seen or heard from again, people can come behind me and pick up the process documentation and understand that Lisa was doing quite a lot of stuff, but we can continue to do it because we know what it is and how it was done. People plus process. We can talk about technology, but the people in the process is critical.

Lisa Levy: 08:05

Understanding what is being done, how it's being done. And for me, I like the representation of cross functional flowcharts. So what am I doing? What are the other teams or individuals that support me in the process? What are those handoffs and touchpoints?

Lisa Levy: 08:22

So we have those swim lanes. And so it's not all about me, right? It's all, or my role, it's all about the process. And if I'm that person who's doing 20 different things and with my superhuman, my superperson cape on, once I start putting those down on paper, I am now mitigating risk to the organization holistically. Because any capable person who's been hired into this organization should be able to read those steps and work their way through it.

Lisa Levy: 08:54

May not be perfect the first time, but they can get through it.

Adam Larson: 08:57

Yeah, they can. And it's interesting because when it comes to process documents, you know, people can get really up in arms like, I don't have time to create this thing. I don't want to do this thing. But like you said, no one's going to stay at a job forever. At some point, you're going to move on or somebody's going to move on and you have to help look because if you're running down your steps, you can find better ways to do things, too.

Lisa Levy: 09:22

Well, a great point. So, right, first step. It isn't a process until it's on paper and can be repeated by other people, right? It has to be on paper, has to be something that other people can reproduce. And then that third piece of that process is continuous improvement.

Lisa Levy: 09:40

I was having a conversation with a gentleman the other day who is on the board of the TQM association, and the statistics that they're working with today say that a really good, well tuned process should be modified and updated four times every month. That is how fast things are changing in business today.

Adam Larson: 10:01

Yeah.

Lisa Levy: 10:01

My face looked a lot like yours just did when he said that, and I stopped, and I really thought through that, and I was like, you know what? It's probably true. Not every process is going to fit into that mindset, but when most companies may touch their processes, may touch them once a year, maybe four times a month, once a year, somewhere in between. There is a sweet spot where you're actually improving with purpose and on purpose and actually making things better.

Adam Larson: 10:33

When you when I was thinking about that, sometimes we do update our process on the go, but we don't update our process documentation because you're like, Oh, I did that process document six months ago, but actually I've changed this step, this step, this step and this step. You are constantly improving because if you find a better way to do something, you can slightly tweak it. But it's remembering that you have documentation that needs to be updated, that needs to be reviewed. And so that's an interesting, you know, thought process.

Lisa Levy: 11:00

And it is, right? And it goes back to and I know, I'm sure that there are people in the audience are thinking, Oh my God, updating that documentation is just a pain.

Adam Larson: 11:08

Yeah,

Lisa Levy: 11:09

and okay, it kind of is, but if you actually do it in real time when you're making decisions and making changes happen, that pain you're talking about is five or ten minutes, Right? It's when you touch it once a year or once every other year or something like that and you go back through how much has changed. Yeah, it hurts. It's a chunk of time. But if you really are thinking about process in the mindset of being in this continuous improvement mode and that we should always be improving and that change is good, and that somebody takes five minutes to go and say, Hey, we realize that step three is stupid and it's wasting time and energy, and if we get rid of it, oh, we also can shortcut how we get to step seven, eight, and nine.

Lisa Levy: 11:56

We've just created efficiency, and what did that take me? Thirty seconds to talk about it, but five minutes to delete some things from a flowchart, it's not actually that big of a deal.

Adam Larson: 12:08

Yeah. No, that's a great point. Yeah. So when you and I first spoke, mentioned a book that you had written, Future Proofing Cubed. And I looked at it and I was like, this is really interesting, especially the idea of future proofing within an organization.

Adam Larson: 12:23

And I was thinking, wondering if you could share a little bit of some insights from it and just tell us a little bit more about it.

Lisa Levy: 12:28

Absolutely. So Future Proofing Cubed is explores the adaptive transformation framework. It takes you through all of the best practices that I've talked about project management, process management, organizational change, internal controls. And it takes us through those experiences through the voice of people who have done these things. Some of the stories are leaders who are very naturally think this way, and it was something that was very organic for them to do, and there are definitely leaders out there who just are capable of being adaptive and understand the value of process and controls and really most importantly people.

Lisa Levy: 13:04

But right then there's some stories in there about, you know, things that didn't go the way anybody was expecting and right, because that's where we learn things. Yeah. And so the book is kind of that quick start guide to understanding what the adaptive transformation framework is, and the book is something that's been out for a couple of years, but it is still very much the cornerstone of what we do in our consulting practice and everything ties back to that framework. But one of the things that we hinted at in the book was the need to innovate and the power that innovation has for a business. And it was hinted at it in the book, but over time I've realized that that really is sort of a foundational mindset that we need to explore and build into the model.

Lisa Levy: 13:53

There's research that's been done over the last twenty years and there's been touch points on it, and that when CEOs of Fortune 500 companies are asked if innovation is important to their business, 94% of them say that innovation is key for their businesses to be able to survive into the future. Not actually a surprising statistic, innovation important. When the follow-up question, how confident are you that you have teams of people who can lead innovation and lead your business into the future? 6% were confident. Wow.

Lisa Levy: 14:31

When I saw those numbers, I went, Okay, yes, that is huge and that is terrifying. But then I also thought about the fact that the Fortune 500 companies are really big, and change is hard, and it's slow to do it in that environment. And I, you know, I was like, Okay, how do we leverage this in small businesses in the mid market in places where the businesses are naturally a tad bit more agile? And we created the idea of something that I call the innovation engine. And it's something that anybody can do and it doesn't require education, right?

Lisa Levy: 15:05

This is a thought exercise that teams can do inside of any business. And it's a three step process, and it's really simple. One, we have to generate new ideas. We have to brainstorm. We have to get people together, groups of people together to play with the ideas of what could the future look like.

Lisa Levy: 15:25

What could we do differently? What new products? What new services? What things do we do today that we should figure out how to sunset and retire because they're past their prime? What are the things operationally that we do that we've always done them this way, but we've never asked why?

Lisa Levy: 15:42

We need to ideate on a regular and ongoing basis inside of every business. We need to have, in the simplest definition of how to run this process, a dedicated whiteboard in a conference room. And it is where people walk by and say, I think we should, and they write down an idea, right? And then we have a running log of ideas that are coming to play on a day to day basis. And once a month, once a quarter, once a whatever time interval makes sense in your business, bring a group of people to stand in front of that whiteboard and play with those ideas.

Lisa Levy: 16:16

And when I mean play, I mean play. This is not trying to sit there and go, that's stupid, that'll never work. No, the play is how do we make this idea real? And as a group, do the thought exercise, bounce it around from different perspectives inside of the business, from a customer perspective, from sales, from operations, from manufacturing, whatever it is, lots of different perspectives on how could we actually make it work. When you go through this thought exercise, a few of those ideas, one, two, maybe, are going to sound really interesting and people are going to go, Hey, this could actually work.

Lisa Levy: 16:54

So now we've done a conference room prototype and we have an idea or two that we might want to spend a little bit more time with. So now it's time to experiment and figure out if it's going to work or not. So this is that stage where somebody is going to say, Yes, invest some actual time into this. Again, I'm not talking about R and D, I'm not talking about building physical prototypes. This is still a thought exercise, but it's taking it out of the room, and it's taking it to a larger audience.

Lisa Levy: 17:22

It's taking it to customers, and actually starting to map out what would it take to make the idea real, and if it's real, what is the value in terms of revenue to the business? What is the value in terms of operational effectiveness? What are the things, right, what does it do for the business? What value does it provide your customers? Do you want to take this forward?

Lisa Levy: 17:47

So, you get a little thirty day window of time to experiment in a larger space and see if it's viable. Then it can go on to the, is this a project that the company wants to invest real time, real money, and create this process, this product, this service, this efficiency internally. What we get when we do this on a regular and ongoing basis is continuous growth cycles. Every product, every service that exists has a natural life expectancy. And when we go to market, we have rapid growth and we're selling things and it's really good and we're experiencing great things, but at some point in time we're going to hit a plateau.

Lisa Levy: 18:29

And that line of business is going to level out. And sometimes we can level out there and we can be there for a long time, but from that leveling out, the natural next step is decline. And if we don't have another product or service or efficiency right in the hopper, that decline is a decline in business and that's a bad thing. And being able to continuously innovate and have different ideas in different stages of experimentation, we have the ability as one product, service, process offering, whatever it is, plateaus, we can switch focus into something else that is in its growth cycle and we can manage the plateau. We can mitigate the decline.

Lisa Levy: 19:13

Right? We actually then make the decision to retire before decline happens. We can make different choices along the way because we always have something else happening. When we have disruption that's external, an economic downturn, a pandemic, or anything that we weren't expecting, we're future proofed for that because we have different things in the hopper that we can play with and offset some of those negative impacts that we weren't planning for. Innovation as part of the culture feeding into a business that runs in an adaptive transformation mindset, these businesses can grow and scale.

Lisa Levy: 19:56

They can respond to market conditions far more nimbly than those that don't. And part of it has to do with that connection at the beginning, right? The people doing the right work, they understand why they're doing it. And when we've gotten really good at accepting and embracing change, when change presents itself, people face it head on with enthusiasm rather than sticking their heads in the sand and playing la la la la la la, please, you know, I want it to go away. We've changed everything.

Adam Larson: 20:24

How long does that change take? Because going from la la la la la to yay change, that's not a just a one, two, three step process.

Lisa Levy: 20:36

No. And it does take time, right? And so the obnoxious answer to your question, Adam, it depends.

Adam Larson: 20:43

Of course.

Lisa Levy: 20:43

It depends on the company, it depends on how many people, it depends on how quickly you get to some successes, right? So we learn from the things that we do that don't turn out the way that we wanted to. We build enthusiasm and buy in on success. And so, I am not going to pretend that this is an easy journey, and I'm not going to pretend that every experiment is a raging success. They aren't.

Lisa Levy: 21:10

And when the experiments fail, acknowledge the failure, document what you learned from it so that you don't make the same choice again in the future and move on to the next thing. But this starts at the top of the organization. The tone at the top, the leadership team, the leader, depending on the size of the organization, has to understand that through this whole experience, we're going to do some things that don't work out well, and that's okay, because we're doing them as thought experiments, and so it's a small, it's time, right? And it's thinking work that may have been invested, but it is about building momentum over time. And so it's one next win to this experiment isn't going to go anywhere, but what we learned from us let us jump three steps ahead in something else.

Lisa Levy: 21:57

And so it is about building momentum. It is about leaders creating the safety for the thought experiments to fail, so that people can learn, and that it is okay to admit we've given it all we can, any more time, effort or money in this endeavor is sunk and there's no good reason to continue, we stop and we move on to the next thing. It is a mindset change for a lot of people, and it is not a command and control environment. This is decentralized decision making. This is believing that you have hired people who have the skills and the capabilities to perform in the role that they're in, and hopefully grow into new roles, right, as their experience expands.

Lisa Levy: 22:47

But it is acknowledging that they are capable. And if as a leader, you look around at your employees and you go, I don't feel that we can do what Lisa's describing, that's a different problem and it's big. But that is a cultural weakness and that is a capability gap. And that is something that, you know, that is a totally different scenario than we're talking about here.

Adam Larson: 23:13

So, when you're describing that decentralized management style, it's kind of like you're creating a leader who's kind of more self reliant, is able to make actions and do things more on the fly as opposed to jump through red tape. How do you how do you go from like your more traditional where like, oh, better ask my boss for everything to that style? Because like you said, it requires the amount of certain amount of trust. You have to kind of build it. It's not something that you turn on over a day, but it seems like that's a better way of actually trusting your people as opposed to having to micromanage everything.

Lisa Levy: 23:45

Well, who wants to be responsible for every decision? It's exhausting. Yeah. And as a business grows, I mean, you can sustain that for a while and you could create a team around you who can sustain that for a slightly longer while. And but it is not actually sustainable.

Lisa Levy: 24:05

And when you look at large corporations where they pretend that they still have the total control at the top, I challenge that. I just I don't believe it, right? Because there's just too much that happens. But those leaders don't trust their people. And the innovation engine practice builds that trust and it builds the autonomy and it builds the confidence in individuals because anybody can have an idea and anybody can want to champion experiment and figure out what's possible and what's not.

Lisa Levy: 24:36

And so, it really sort of flips things around to a perspective of, we're going to ask our employees to perform at their best and highest level and their best capabilities and demonstrate what they want to accomplish. When they find things that are going to add value, we're going to reward that behavior and we're going to raise people up because of the contributions that they're making, rather than telling them what to do and how to do it and diminishing their sense of purpose and value to the organization. This mindset puts all of the power for the future in everybody's hands.

Adam Larson: 25:14

Yeah.

Lisa Levy: 25:15

So what does that get you as a leader? That gets you freedom from day to day operations. That gets you freedom to be strategic. If you are a founder business owner, that gets you the ability to take a thirty day vacation and sit on a beach and not check your email because your business can operate without you. This is powerful, and it changes the focus so that I talk about companies at kind of three levels, right?

Lisa Levy: 25:40

Strategically, operationally, tactically. You are empowering operations and the individual contributors to think big and to dream what the future of this business can look like and giving them the opportunity to help drive that. So as a leadership team, as a CEO, right, you can be looking at the next things and empowering and investing time, money, and effort into those things that are working and know that operations is happening, all of those other pieces are running because you have people performing at their highest level because they want to.

Adam Larson: 26:20

Yeah, that sounds amazing. I wonder, how do you create that innovative space? You know, because you said there needs to be a safe place, safe space to fail. And in many organizations, they've been having to tighten their belt. There's a lot of differing things.

Adam Larson: 26:35

Industries are feeling the weight of different things like tariffs and other decisions that are happening. And so there's a lot of pressure on organizations. So obviously you need to innovate so you can create new products, you can get things out there. But what about the day to day jobs and trying to like, you know, how do you how do you find that balance? Because you need to control some aspects and you need to be actual and make sure people are doing their jobs to the bottom line continues forward.

Adam Larson: 26:58

But you also need to have that create that space that you're talking about. There's got to be a middle ground that you can meet somewhere.

Lisa Levy: 27:05

Sure. And so let's not over exaggerate the investment into innovation engine. This can be it needs to be to function and do what it needs to be, right? Part of the rhythm of the business on an It's annual there. Is it taking a person away from their job for, you know, a month at a time?

Lisa Levy: 27:25

No. Right? This is a couple of hours here and a couple of hours there, and some thinking time and a couple of conversations with other people, right? Investing in exploring an idea, we might be talking about forty hours over two months. Right?

Lisa Levy: 27:42

So it's not like we're taking them away from their actual job. We're giving them something to explore and to play with and to develop and to design. And, you know, in moments when they're frustrated with the other things that they're doing and they need to step away. And, you know, we could talk about, you know, it's water cooler conversation kind of time. But instead of, you know, sitting somewhere and, you know, talking about what's going on, it's actually now thinking time and playing with something that is intriguing to them, that is creative, that is something that they can feed off of and grow off of.

Lisa Levy: 28:19

It's it's kind of right. It's a little bit of that professional development time, but it's not saying, Adam, I am taking you off of your job as the line manager for the next two months, and you're going to go do this innovation engine thing. That's not the idea, right? But it's, Adam, you had this idea, and why don't you talk with your peers, and why don't you talk with your teams and why don't you talk, right, what does it look like to put a draft outline of the business case? What does the business case look like for this?

Lisa Levy: 28:47

And that's what we're trying to get to. But it's not just Adam sitting and writing a business case because we can all do that. It's getting multiple perspectives to make it a little bit more fully baked, thinking about from a sales perspective and operations perspective, manufacturing if it's a product, distribution, customer, getting a group of customers on a Zoom call and saying, Hey, we have this idea. What do you think if? We can call that a customer, we can call that a focus group, we can just call that an ad hoc conversation, because we all have customers that we have good relationships with and we just want to query them.

Lisa Levy: 29:20

I personally like to suggest that you find customers that were very dissatisfied with something that they did with you. They didn't like a product, they didn't like the service, and you're now asking them for their input and feedback because you're going to try and do something different. Way to win some customer loyalty, right? Even if they dislike the idea, you sought out their opinion and that will resonate with them and that you will have earned some loyalty points in their mind just by inviting them to the conversation.

Adam Larson: 29:47

Yeah.

Lisa Levy: 29:48

So again, we're not taking people away from their day to day responsibilities, but this is sort of an addition to. But it's the in addition to that they're opting in to participate because they want to. If they don't want to work on an idea, they don't have to work on an idea. Those who do are going to make a bigger impact to the company. I would wager a nickel if I had one in my hand that they're all going to have better career progression if they're actively participating in designing the future.

Lisa Levy: 30:17

But, you know, that's something that time will tell inside of each individual company.

Adam Larson: 30:22

Yeah, I think that's helpful to kind of put it in the perspective of, hey, you're not taking like a bunch of people say, Okay, we're going on to an off-site retreat and we're going to spend three days doing like and and sometimes when you think because it, you know, just just probably like what, ten years or eight, ten years ago, innovation was like the the hot topic word in businesses, You know, it had all those books that were in innovation and, you know, and everybody was like, I'm going start an innovation group. And people spend a lot of time doing things that probably didn't go anywhere because it was impractical. It was that I'm going to go into a bubble and then when we come out of the bubble, none of the stuff we said makes any sense. And so I like what you're saying is is a much more practical way of kind of, hey, this is how you can it's the little innovations that we do every day that really create the big things that happen in an organization.

Lisa Levy: 31:09

And in this practice, and I'll use the phrase practice, right? Because we're practicing through all of this. This as organizations get better at it, the innovation ideas get bigger, and the impact can get bigger. And the crazy idea that, you know, in year one was sitting on that whiteboard, and everybody just kind of shied away from it because that's big and it's crazy, and we're never going to be able to do something like that. Five years into this kind of an experience, a company might be able to tackle that big thing, right?

Lisa Levy: 31:43

Because they are a more efficient and effective organization overall. There is less wasted time and effort because processes are better controlled. There are things that lead to that thing that seems so impossible becomes absolutely achievable as the business itself is tuning. We're using an engine analogy. Let's tune this engine, this business operating engine, and it's more effective and more efficient and can then do more.

Adam Larson: 32:10

Yeah, for sure. Lisa, this has been a great conversation. I feel like it's been really great talking through this with you, and I really encourage everybody to check out Lisa's website in the show notes if you want to learn more and understand more about what she's been talking about. And just thank you so much for coming on again.

Lisa Levy: 32:28

Absolutely. It's been my pleasure. And Adam, I would love to make an offer to the audience, if I may.

Adam Larson: 32:33

Of course.

Lisa Levy: 32:35

Find me on LinkedIn, Lisa L. Levy. The middle initial is important. Levy, L E V Y. And if this conversation resonated for you, if you're a leader who feels like you are making every decision and you are just sort of stuck in this place, your team around you isn't quite delivering yet, and you know that they want to, drop the word innovation in a message to me, and I will give you the innovation engine blueprint, which sort of explains all of the things we've been talking about in a nice sort of article format.

Lisa Levy: 33:03

And if that resonates for you, I am happy to spend an hour doing what I call an innovation clarity call, and we can talk specifically about your business, your team, and what those problems are, and come up with some actionable things that you can take away from that call that will make a difference in your business.

Announcer: 33:20

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