Lisa Bodell is the founder and CEO of FutureThink, a company that uses simple techniques to help organizations embrace change and increase their capability for innovation, and an award-winning author of Why Simple Wins and Kill the Company. Repertoire Magazine recently spoke to Bodell about the power of simplicity and how to reignite curiosity within their team members.
Repertoire Magazine: What is important to understand simplicity?
Lisa Bodell: The first thing to think about simplicity is that it isn’t just meant to drive productivity and efficiency. That will happen, but the bigger thing about simplicity is it’s a strategic advantage because people can move faster, they can focus, and they have time to think. Companies are like, “I want to innovate, but I don’t know how,” so they think they need more ideas. What they really need is to simplify, because they need poeple to have the space to not do meaningless work and focus on more meaningful work.
Repertoire: How do leaders reignite curiosity in their team members?
Bodell: First, they have to demonstrate it. They’ve got to make it so that asking questions is a safe space. We’re asking open-ended questions, not yes or no questions. Yes or no questions imply blame and open-ended questions imply solutions, so it’s important to model that behavior by asking open-ended questions. There are common question stems. How else can we? What else might we do? What are all the ways we could? That invites learning and teaches people in a safe way to come up with ideas. Modeling comes first, and then you have to train for it.
Repertoire: Why is curiosity important?
Bodell: Curiosity drives action. It hijacks your brain. If I can ask you enough questions, I can get you on my side from a sales perspective very quickly. Being curious has a lot of advantages. If we teach people how to ask better questions, we’re going to get better innovations too. I think training people how to be curious is really important.
Repertoire: What are the most common leadership challenges you see in organizations today?
Bodell: Oh boy. My guts says that it’s no longer true that you can go to somebody and say, “I just need you to lead through change,” because they have been. Their response to you is, pardon my French, “Go to hell.” They’re like, “I’ve been doing this for so long. I can’t lead through change in the same way anymore. I’m not leading through change, I’m leading through chaos.” The reason for that is because change should have a start and end point. I make a plan, I lead my teams through it, and there’s a light at the end of the tunnel. If you talk to teams now, change is so constant and there’s so much of it. That’s why people burn out.
The reason I talk about simplicity, not in terms of efficiency but in terms of removing extra noise, is that it helps people to focus on what they need to do. That’s how you lead through chaos. The best leaders, in times of war or great upheaval, simplify and focus on what’s really important.
Stay tuned for an article about Lisa Bodell in an upcoming issue of Repertoire Magazine!