Harry 0:00

I'm seeing it in every corporate environment that I'm in: leaders and boards that just don't know how to say, "Stop." They don't know how to say, "Put the brakes on this." And they just keep piling on and what's happening is not what they want.

Narrator 0:24

You're listening to Traction Heroes. Digging In to Get Results with Harry Max and Jorge Arango.

Harry 0:35

Jorge, it is a pleasure to see you again, my friend.

Jorge 0:38

Hey Harry, always good to see you.

Harry 0:40

I just feel so grateful to know you're in my life and that we have these conversations set up. It is super fun.

Jorge 0:48

For sure. I always think it's a little bit selfish of me. We're releasing them and I hope that people are getting value out of them as well, but even if they don't, I'm getting so much value out of our periodic conversations.

Harry 1:04

Yeah, I agree. I don't know that I could put my finger on any specific change, but I know that my overall approach to moving through my days has shifted a little bit. I'm a little bit more thoughtful because I feel like I've got new tools and lenses to try on and reflect on as I move through my life. I brought something I wanted today. It's really short and I stumbled on it, but it just, it hit right at the center of the kinds of things that I think we appreciate talking about might be useful for folks. Can I just dive in or...?

Jorge 1:51

Let's do it.

Harry 1:53

All right, here you go. "When you feel a path you've chosen has reached its conclusion, whether that's a job, a relationship or a hobby that no longer excites or challenges you, it can be tempting to put off ending what you've stuck with for so long. But in doing so, we miss the chance to reinvent ourselves to live fully as we cycle through life's seasons."

Jorge 2:23

Oh, that is short. Wow. That is touching all sorts of nerves on me. You and I had a conversation last year, I think, right before I wrapped up my previous podcast and we decided to spin up this one, right? And it hinged on this subject, this idea that there comes a time when you have to recognize that something has run its course and there is such a thing as inertia. And I am someone who suffers from sticking with things for too long after they've clearly run their course. And I feel like it's cost me opportunities in my life. So maybe we can unpack that. What book is this?

Harry 3:10

All right. The title of this book is What Would Harry Do? Lessons For Living Like A Hero from the Wizarding World of Harry Potter by Juliana Sharaf. And I got this book while I was out and about. It just made me laugh when I picked it up. And then, I was reading through it and caught that and it reminded me, I think, of my either 2017 or 2018 book of the year, which was Necessary Endings by Dr. Henry Cloud. And I may have recommended that to you at some point. But that's a book about thinking about if, whether, and how to end things. And it is so critical, especially when it comes to innovating, when it comes to project management, when it comes to prioritization. Because I think most of us really struggle with the sunk cost of the time we've put into something or the money that we've put into something, or the emotional investment we've put into something. It's really hard to stop.

Jorge 4:30

The identity, right? Because we build identities around our careers.

Harry 4:34

Yeah.

Jorge 4:36

It's, "Oh, if I stop doing this and I start doing that, does that mean I am no longer a fill in the blank, job description or whatever." Yeah, totally, I hear you. I'm, super, super curious about what, first of all, when you said what would Harry do, my first thought was like, wait a second, did Harry write a new book and I not know about this? I thought you were the Harry alluded to in the title. So I'm very curious about what context this comes in the wizarding world.

Harry 5:14

Oh, interesting. It's Don't Be a Phoenix was the chapter, and this was, "When it comes to reinventing ourselves, muggles can learn a lot from the mythical birds that are no strangers to living, dying, and living again."

Jorge 5:30

But it said, Don't Be a Phoenix?

Harry 5:33

Oh, I completely misread that. It's Be a Phoenix.

Jorge 5:39

Okay. Yeah, that makes more sense. Interesting. I have fond memories of the first three Harry Potter books because I read them to my kids. But, we didn't read past the third one for reasons that we could go into if you want. But I think that the Phoenix, if I'm not mistaken, might be one of the ones I didn't read. So I don't remember what context that comes in. But that's really interesting, this mythological image of the phoenix, it obviously precedes Harry Potter and it's a powerful one, right? Like this idea that a way of being ends and it ends spectacularly, in ashes and then from the ashes, new life arises, right? That's the basic image. And it's a glorious arising of a new life. It's not just new life, it's this spectacular bird that comes out of the ashes. And that's a great image to have in mind for this.

Harry 6:48

And it's so funny that when I misread the chapter title, I think that's the inertia problem, right? The Don't Be a Phoenix is I think the fear of what it would mean to effectively disintegrate into ashes. And when I read Be a Phoenix, I think, I don't know why I misread it, but I can't help from, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. I may be reading into it further than that, but the idea that we have to embrace the destruction before the creation and this goes right back to Boyd and his destruction and creation discussions as we've talked about before. But the reason I think this caught my attention and the reason Dr. Henry Cloud's book on necessary endings was so potent, has really come into very sharp relief with the work that I'm doing with one particular leader. This is a Chief Product Officer who's about to retire. And so, I've been brought in to help create the conditions for this leader's departure and their ability to hire somebody new and have them come in and be successful. But the most interesting thing in the process has been learning about the incredibly... I don't even know what to call it. The founder of this company is so creative and so mercurial and so optimistic, that the company itself just doesn't have it in their DNA to stop things. They just keep adding things. One would think that's abnormal, but in fact, as I reflect on it, in every organization that I've been in, and I talk about this in my book as well, just a little bit, but the idea that we would figure out how to stop investing in something, whether it's a direction that we're in in our careers or whether it's a podcast as in the case of your Informed Life that led to our work together here. And hopefully this will continue on for a long time. But the idea that people don't think about the approach to pruning and really being intentional about where to clip and how to increase the likelihood that things will grow in a more fruitful, more positive, direction, is leading to a lot of aberrant behavior in the system. It's constant piling on and not enough piling off. And I like to think it's about prioritization, but that's not it. There's something going on here that is, we don't yet have the tools to face the commitments that we've made that need to be deprecated and need to be reevaluated in the face of new ongoing opportunities, either solving problems or pursuing new challenges. Those are all great and and good, but unless you add more resources to go with them, unless you figure out how you're gonna apply those resources, all you're really doing is adding noise to the system. And so many people, especially right now and especially in the face of what's going on with AI, need to be thinking very carefully about where they're being put to their highest and best use, and need to do a lot less of the things that are not really the most valuable, most useful applications of their talents and intellect and spirits, time and energy. And it is so deeply fundamental. And maybe it's that we don't know how to say "No." I'm not quite sure, but I think there's something here, and I think we need to talk about it. And I guess I would love to hear from you, how do you stop doing things or how do you reevaluate where you're placing your energy and your time and your... I mean, how do you stop so that you can make room for the new?

Jorge 11:41

The first answer that comes to mind is "poorly." And I think that's because I've long had an image of myself as a tenacious person.

Harry 11:53

Huh.

Jorge 11:54

I remember very vividly, when I was much, much younger, an incident, where, my dad had observed me doing something, a behavior over and over again until I actually got what I was aiming for, and he told me that he had been watching me and he had been sitting with a colleague of his while I was doing this, and he had told this colleague, "Look at how tenacious he is." And that bit of feedback stayed with me and said, "Yeah, I am tenacious and I stick with things." And that's become part of my identity. And that... first of all, I'll say, I think that it's positive to be tenacious and to be persistent and to stick with things. But I also think that's a really risky position to be in because you can stick with things past their expiration date. At which point, like you were saying, you're no longer adding value, right? The risk is that you find yourself trapped going through the motions just because it's become comfortable to go through the motions. When I discontinued The Informed Life, I had set up a workflow that allowed me to produce episodes of the show in a predictable manner. I had a schedule, I had a whole pipeline of guests. I had the whole machine set up right. And, the easiest thing to do for me was to just keep going with it. And what led me to make that shift was a growing realization that it had played its course. The thing that I was working on had played its course. I set out to do something, had achieved that, and it was no longer a) producing the... not producing results, because it wasn't about producing results so much as it was about fulfilling what it was set out to do. Like, it had already done what it set out to do, and now it was just like going through the motions. So it was that realization, coupled with what you brought up earlier, like this idea that we are clearly in a transitional period where AI is changing everything and this requires focusing attention in different directions. And this is, I think, the most important piece of this. I think you and I are of the age where we might be more consciously aware of constraints and limitations. I'll speak for myself. I'm more consciously aware of constraints and limitations than I was when I was much younger. When you're a young person, the world feels like your oyster, right? And it's like you can do anything and you can do all of it. And as one grows older, in my case I'll say, as a dad, a husband, you acquire certain responsibilities that impinge on your time. And you have to be more selective about what you're doing. And all those things, I think you pick up as you age and as you gain more responsibilities. I would imagine that your client, when you're in that stage of life, if you are retiring from a role, you've had some success. And you've also accrued certain responsibilities. And you have to focus your time and energy. You have to be more conscious about how many plates you set up spinning because you only have certain amount of time and capability to keep the plates going.

Harry 16:02

Yeah, it's funny. I just reflected on a conversation I was having yesterday with a friend who said, "I figured out how to avoid doing certain things. There are some things that," he said, "I have to finish. I just have it in my, I think, that tenacious gene, right? I have it as part of who I think of myself, as somebody who has to finish things. They start and so things that are too complicated or I can't see how I'm gonna finish 'em, I just don't start 'em."

Jorge 16:39

The flip side of that is that some things can't prove themselves out until they've been tried for a while. A podcast is not something that you do a couple of episodes of and then achieve immediate success. You have to keep doing it for a while before you know whether the thing is producing results. This brings up an idea that I think is highly related to this, and it's almost become a cliche in the business world, the innovator's dilemma, right?

Harry 17:10

Mm-hmm.

Jorge 17:10

The idea that if the thing that you are talking about doing is successful, it becomes really hard for you to discontinue it in favor of something else. And I think that the prototypical example there is Kodak and the fact that they invented digital photography yet went under because they were addicted to the profits generated by the chemical photography stuff. And, there's so much of that in the world, right? And it happens not just to companies, it happens to people. Like, you keep doing the same thing over and over again, and if you achieve any level of success, it's really hard to chuck that and start something different. But I think that if you don't burn your identity down every once in a while and take a fresh crack at it, you run the risk of losing relevance and falling out of step with what the world needs from you at the moment.

Harry 18:10

I'm sure that's right. I've spent my whole career always wanting to call myself the thing that I used to do. I started out as a tech writer, but I was doing information architecture and I wanted to call myself a tech writer 'cause we didn't have a name for information architecture at the time. And then I was an information architect, but I was doing out of box experience work, but I wanted to call myself an information architect, 'cause there was, nobody was an OOBE architect at the time, right? Out-of-box experience architect. And that's been going on for years. I don't even know what to call myself anymore. I'm not really a product leader. I'm, I do a certain amount of that. I'm not really a straight up executive coach. I call myself a player coach, but even that doesn't make any sense given the kind of work that I do, because it's this blended coaching and consulting kind of work. And it's in the dynamics of the work that my contribution lives, and putting a label on it and calling it something fancy just so I can feel better about myself isn't the thing to do. But this idea of figuring out how to let go of things that are not serving anymore, I wish I had done a lot of deep thinking and came with a bunch of really smart thoughts on a good theory, and said, "Here's how do it." But that's not what happened. What happened is I read this thing in What Would Harry Do? I was like, this once again is such an important topic, because I'm seeing it in every corporate environment that I'm in: leaders and boards that just don't know how to say, "Stop." They don't know how to say, "Put the brakes on this." And they just keep piling on and what's happening is not what they want.

Jorge 20:00

Something that came to mind while you were talking about it is that it might be easier to do when you're confronting a situation of trauma or urgency. Like we were saying, if you're successful, you have less of an incentive to change lanes. Whereas, if something radical happens like you lose your job... To me, the prototypical example of this, and one of my favorite business stories is when Steve Jobs returned to Apple at the end of the 1990s. And as I recall, the company was like ninety days from going bankrupt. Like, they literally were running outta cash, right? And one of his first moves was to pare down their product portfolio, radically. And there's a whole story around the four by four matrix, which we're not going to go into. But basically, he made this four by four matrix and he said, "Any products that don't fit into this very simple construct are going to be excised." And it was a really painful move. There's a YouTube video of Jobs at a developer conference at the time defending his decision to cut one of the core technologies of the Mac at the time. Very hostile audience, right? These developers have built products based on these frameworks and Jobs is saying this has no future. But his point was, if we don't make a change now, there simply will not be a company anymore. And he was right about that. But I think it was easier to do because they were facing such extreme circumstances. It was not Kodak with this nice revenue stream coming from selling film and chemicals.

Harry 21:58

Yeah, I think we need better mechanisms for evaluating what is at the bottom of our list and being not only true to ourselves, but true to what we're trying to accomplish such that we're not deceiving ourselves into thinking that we can have everything.

Jorge 22:25

If only someone had written a book about priorities.

Harry 22:31

I'm glad you brought that up. But the thing that's making me crazy right now in my work is that they're reading the book and they're still doing the thing, right? They're still not drawing the cut line at the bottom, and that's what's vexing me right now. They're getting the part where this is what's most important, but what they're not getting is what is at risk of if they don't stop with the crazy, with with the chaos. So, the book's not enough. And interestingly, the book didn't ship with its final chapter. I've been working on it slowly, and that chapter was really on... I call it From Thought to Action. It's really on from prioritization to execution, because that transition right there is the place that this is happening. Understanding what's most important is only half of the equation, but then figuring out how to... whether it's resource allocation, whether it is driven by some other set of criteria, figuring out where that cut line is gonna go and figuring out what's gonna have to stop in order for the world that you want to have to materialize in a much more predictable, much more consistent way. We need some better tools and I'm certainly thinking about it, but I wanted bring it up.

Jorge 24:06

In our previous conversation, we talked about framing and mental models, and I'm wondering if that might not be the missing ingredient. The idea that, "Oh, you have to dig a bit deeper to what are the mental models that are informing my worldview at the moment?" Because if I think of myself as an information you brought up the label, right? information architect I've been attached to that label to describe what I do for coming on three decades now and...

Harry 24:38

You look pretty good still.

Jorge 24:39

Thank you for that. But there's this question about why you're doing that. are you doing it as a favor for others to make it easier to interact with you or are you sold internally on the idea that is who you are. I think that those are very different scenarios and they all rest on a particular mental model. Like, I'm always going to be an information architect in the sense that I'm always thinking about, first of all, the role of information in our lives, and second of all, the understanding that you can be intentional about how you structure information, and that has an impact on outcomes. That's always going to be true about me, no matter what I call myself or my work.

Harry 25:22

Yeah.

Jorge 25:24

But I don't want to become attached to labels, particularly as I describe myself to the external world, because I don't want to fall into the trap of... imagine if Jobs had come back to Apple and been attached to that particular API and the myriad other things that they were doing. That's not what Apple was about. They needed to whittle it down to, what is the essence of this thing and how can we move forward in a new way, in a new kind of reconfigured way? And you're the expert here, obviously, but I suspect that if you haven't sorted out these deeper mental model issues, it's really hard to prioritize effectively.

Harry 26:09

I think you're onto something here. I think that's exactly right. And you mentioned the word figuring out what this thing is about. That was almost verbatim. And really understanding something's aboutness is, I think, a result of looking through a frame. And that, to me, is a very rich territory that we should explore at some point as a future conversation.

Jorge 26:36

It feels like we should put a pin on that and return to it at some point.

Harry 26:40

Oh man, this has been a good set of conversations: this conversation, the one before it, I so appreciate. It's left me definitely thinking about stuff in a new, in a fresh way.

Jorge 26:54

And I'd love to read the unpublished chapter of the book.

Harry 26:58

It's getting there. I'm going to send something out first on collapsing sliding windows. It's a new planning construct. And I'll send that out to my email list first and then I'll, you're on that list.

Jorge 27:15

Can we talk about that for just a second? And I realize that we're running a bit long here, but you do have a new mailing list. Is that true?

Harry 27:23

I have one, but I haven't been using it. I'm a terrible person. But people have been writing me and saying, "Hey, do you have an email list or do you have a newsletter?" And I'm like, "Yeah, I'll put you on the list." And I finally have enough stuff to start talking to people. So I wanna let people know about our podcast. I wanna let people know about like this planning construct I've been working on with Luke Holman.

Jorge 27:44

Where can folks sign up for your mailing list?

Harry 27:47

Ah, that's at harrymax.com or they can go to LinkedIn and send me a note. But harrymax.com, there's a link right there. And love to hear from folks. Thank you.

Jorge 28:00

Fabulous, Harry. As always, brilliant talking with you.

Harry 28:05

Great. Great talking to you, Jorge.

Narrator 28:09

Thank you for listening to Traction Heroes with Harry Max and Jorge Arango. Check out the show notes at tractionheroes.com and if you enjoyed the show, please leave us a rating in Apple's podcasts app. Thanks.