Lessons - Decoding Skills That Create Unicorns | Atiq Rafiq, F500 Exec (C-Suite at McDonald’s, Volvo, and MGM)

Welcome to Lessons episodes of Success Story, part of the HubSpot podcast network. These lessons episodes will be shorter conversations with past guests, valued members of the success story community, and myself. They'll be focused on teaching you actionable, insightful takeaways that you can use to upscale your personal and professional life. I want to understand how those two concepts play. So when somebody thinks, say somebody looks at this and we're going to talk about some of these superpowers. We're going to talk about this framework in a second. But when somebody thinks about superpowers, what does that mean for them? Is that these are like the attributes or the skill sets or the soft skills, hard skills, what are superpowers? But then also that framework, I want to go deeper into that framework as well. Great. So high level concepts are basically, first is the idea of upstream work, first downstream. Downstream everybody understands. That's where we have the decision point, we have the decisions and it's like let's go. Let's make a project plan and let's execute. But I think we can all relate to the fact that we spend weeks and months trying to get to the decision point and getting our organization to say yes. And so this upstream part is broken down into three phases, exploration, alignment and decision making. So let's take them one by one. So exploration is a concerted effort to surface the really important considerations, especially the unknowns and get to the bottom of them. And you do this by starting with questions. Questions are very democratic, they're very inclusive. You can give four people from a company, they have different roles, different jobs and you put an idea in the center of the table. And the first thing that comes up will be all kinds of really interesting questions. To me that's gold, that's not skepticism and that is actually high quality input to say, what are the unknowns around this, what seems to be a promising idea. You want to do a good job of creating space for that. And you want to collect those questions before you raise ahead to anything else like having a judgment or an opinion or yeah, trying to align on what to actually do. So exploration creates space for getting all the right questions on the table and trying to get to the bottom of them. That's phase one. The second phase is using the exploration to draw conclusions. If you're standing on high quality information and you said, okay, there was a bunch of things. So we had questions around, you know, here's the discovery that we did and now we're in a position and say, well, what conclusions would we draw from this, you know, what makes sense? Then you look at those conclusions and you do try to bring people together to say, do we have alignment and generally you'll find that people say, well, based on this fact base, we, you know, this is, these are some conclusions that we draw. And usually that's pretty layered. It's not just, oh, this is a good idea or a bad idea. It's many things. It's, yeah, we should do this idea, but we should also keep in mind X and Y. And so people, you know, it's really important to spend time, say, okay, what do you see in your eyes and do we see the same thing? Once you're complete with that, that's when you're ready to drive action. And you say, well, based on these conclusions, what, what actions do we need to commit to? And that's where you usually are parting with dollars and resources. You know, you're walking through one way doors sometimes by you're saying no to, to other ideas. And yes, to this one, that is the time for action. So in the book, I break this down further into 13 workflows, where you, you know, sort of set these up in your teamwork and basically create a path from, you know, idea, promising idea to the decision point. And hopefully that improves the company's ability to say yes to the right things and know to the things that deserve a note. So ultimately, at its core, not to oversimplify the complexity baddest core for people that are, are just wrapping their mind around this concept, it's, it's a decision making process with a built in feedback loop. And that can be executed. So my actual, my question, is that, is that correct? Is that like a good summary of it? Is that oversimplifying significantly if it is, I apologize, because nobody, some people, some people have not gone into this level of depth when it comes to decision making yet. And I mean, you're talking to a range of individuals. And some people are just starting to make these big decisions for their business or trying to figure out, okay, at what point do I start incorporating this? Is this something that I, I work with a, a, a small vendor? This is a, is this something that should incorporate? I should put, you know, put an exploration phase out to the business to my co-founders to talk to them. Or is this very specific, useful for very certain larger decisions that move the business forward? It definitely applies to companies of all kinds, although, you know, you know, if, if you're on the smaller end, you know, five people or ten people, probably some of this, it can be done, you know, very informally through your conversation. But once you start to get, if you will, functions in a company, you know, that's, or any sense that there are any silos, then you, then you need something. Otherwise, you're leaving it to chance of personality. The, the, the, the, a good way to summarize this is basically it's a method which promotes exploration and promotes starting with questions and suspend judgment on what to do. Because the human mind, as you know, there've been some neuroscientists who've written about, I talked about this in my early chapter, around the way the brain works, their system one and system two and system one is for a very quick decision making. You're in the forest and the tigers there, do you defend yourself for a run kind of thing? And there's system two, which is much more about thinking twice about something, and which allows you to see a little bit more of the picture. And the kinds of work we do in companies, especially around innovation, is much more system two oriented part of the brain, where you need to think twice about it and question it in order to see more of the inputs. Now human nature, and especially in companies, you know, depending upon the personalities and the culture of the company, you could be using system one, but you need to be using system, you have a system two problem, that's a work common occurrence in companies, right? Because people might think, oh my job is to know exactly what the right thing to do is at all times. But that's actually in that case, the better way to look at leadership is to know how to ask the right questions or get the right questions on the table. Do you have any tips for stopping silos from forming as much as possible? Is this a process that actually improves not only the decision making, but by constantly deploying this process, you almost improve the structure of the organization, because it breaks down silos before they would even start if done properly. That's one of my passion here is to be honest with you Scott, because I think it's one of the most baffling things in companies is not initiating with another part of the organization that has some relevant inputs. So the way I solve for that, and this is actually part of the first workflow in the decision sprint, is grouping people around a common challenge. So to look at, you know, probably a transplant company or a new idea and saying, what competencies do we need to gather around this specific problem that we're trying to solve? When you start with that, from the get go, you automatically melt away the silos. The opposite is, I think, more common, which is, okay, who's point on this in the company? And it could be a person or some function, and there's no problem with that. If they then say, well, we're going to do a much better job of promising if we get the right inputs around, you know, what the picture is, and what competencies do we have in this organization that we can group around this common challenge. So to me, that's the mindset that we need to take. And then you stop thinking about, you know, structures and layers and other things like that. And you just start thinking about, you know, what is, for example, what Amazon will call a two pizza team, you know, not huge, but enough to feed the team with two pizza pies, right? Five or six or seven or, and that's it, however you are, yeah, but that's what you get, you know, and that's really wise, because, you know, it's not one or two parts of corners of a company, especially on a large company that can really solve a problem, you know, holistically, right? So thinking about, like, being hungry for input, why don't we get the right inputs to really solve this problem? That will melt away silos.