Leading Through Change

So for anybody who has not met me, my name's Kevin Finch, I'm the Chief Growth Officer here at The Pacific Institute and I'm extremely excited to be leading this Beyond Limitss Executive briefing series. This is a series we started a couple of months ago and our goal with these is to be able to bring individuals like yourself together in a group setting. And we're going to be doing this every month. This is not something we plan on doing just once or twice. Our goal is to get leaders, executives, uh, owners, and we want to share insights from Pacific Institute's core concepts.

And then we want to tie those to current events. Yes, I'm going to talk about the Olympics a couple times today, but I'm going to talk about things that have gone on in the past as well. Look around the room. We've got a very, very eclectic group of individuals, a lot of C-suites, so we want you to see this as an opportunity to network. We're going to take our opportunity to promote our awareness about The Pacific Institute and strengthen some of the relationships that we have.

The reason we call this a Beyond Limitss series is that's exactly what we want leaders to do. We want leaders to live in a limitless world. We believe that if you can be limitless, you can accomplish a lot more. And with leaders, one of the biggest gifts we believe that a leader can give to those, that that work for them is the gift of belief and the gift of being able to lead forward and having a limitless environment. So lemme tell you a little bit about The Pacific Institute.

If you've not heard of The Pacific Institute before, I'm surprised that you're here. But if you've not heard The Pacific Institute before, let me explain a little bit of our core concepts. We are a performance and leadership development company. We focus on coaching and consulting with a core curriculum based on positive psychology. Our core belief starts at the base, all meaningful and lasting.

Change starts on the inside and it works its way out. That's a quote over 50 years ago from our founder Lou Ty. And what that means is we believe that all change happens between two places. It happens between the beats of your heart and it happens between these two ears. And when you can make change happen inside of those locations, you're able to make that change, move its way out.

And what I mean by move its way out is you can start impacting those that are around you. So when you transform yourselves and you make that outward change, you can start changing others around you. Now that might be your team, that might be your family, that might be your small organization. But when you're able to start making that internal change external and those folks have internal change that gets external, then we get one step bigger and that's where the magic happens. That's where we move to the top tier of that Pacific Institute flame, which is us.

Once our team transforms, then collaboratively we can pursue our goals within the collective group. And that's what it feels like when everybody's leaning in the same direction. Or if you look at the image that's behind Ana right now, that's everybody rowing in the same direction and that's what we're striving for. So what I'm going to start with today is just a little bit of a warmup activity, just a quick little warmup activity. Everybody who is here, hopefully you've got something to write with, maybe a pen and paper, take out a post-it note sheet of paper, just something to jot this down.

It's only going to take us about 30 seconds. Once you've got that sheet of paper, I'm going to give you some simple instructions. Now there's a few things that are going to help some of you do better at this activity. If you happen to be really good at math, this is going to be something that's a little easier for you. If you happen to know your American Super Bowls and the Olympics real well, this could be benefit.

And maybe if you have a child in elementary school that you've helped with some homework recently, this'll be helpful. I'm going to give you some simple instructions. Take out a pen. And on that paper using two straight lines, I want you to draw the Roman numeral 10. So using two straight lines, draw the Roman numeral 10.

I'm going to put this one up pretty quickly because I feel like we've got a smart group and I expect most people to get this. So most of you probably did this. Nod your head if it looks like this on your screen. So far we're doing pretty good. Excellent.

I got a lot of bobbleheads today. Second piece of instruction. This is going to separate the uh, the herd just a little bit. So on the second piece of instruction, just one more line. Now I want you to make that into a nine, but one more line, make that into a nine.

I just got dirty looks from some of you. I told you math people have it better than others. So with one more line, 50 50, we usually split the group in about half on this one. Sometimes people make the wrong way, but if you got this, you are correct. Nod your head, wave your hand.

Did you do this? Mark Anthony seems to be proud of himself.

Final piece of instructions. Actually the same as the second one. Just one more line. One more line. I want you to make that into six.

You get one more line. I want you to make that say six. I'm getting more and more dirty looks on this one. A couple people are laughing. Does anybody have the answer?

Can anybody wave at their camera screen If you happen to have the answer, can you hold it up and show the group five? All right, if you can or cannot see it, I'll put it up on my screen. Here is the answer for how to create You. He said lying. Yes, cheater.

I did cheat or did I or did I? I love that. I get called a cheater on this. This is a listening exercise. You are all conditioned by somebody you don't even know.

I told you the rules up front. I put you in a little box. They said this is going to be hard. So you immediately said, all right, well I'm smart. I'm going to put on my I do hard things hat and start thinking about that.

Then I gave you some parameters, things that had made other people successful. Like maybe if you're good at math. So only the CFOs perked up and the rest of us were like, crap, this is going to be hard. And then I said, maybe if you know your Olympics or your American Super Bowls, all right, maybe that would help. But those things didn't necessarily help you with anything other than the first piece of instructions when I said straight lines and Roman numerals.

Because the second time I didn't say it had to be a roman numeral. Didn't say it had to be a straight line but your brain was successful in those first set of parameters and your brain made a mental note. 'cause your brain's a genius and when it's successful it makes a note. And I gave you another piece of instruction in your brain said, ah, I'm going to check that note real quick. And I was successful with Roman numerals in straight lines just one second ago.

I'm going to do it again. So even though those weren't the rules anymore, you were able to be successful and now your brain did that Second thing it does, it's information it likes twice. It forms a habit. Ah, habits, low energy. I don't need to think that hard.

So when I got to that third piece of instruction, your brain was so locked into how you'd always done things and been successful up to this point. It didn't register that it had to be a straight line or that it could be a curved line or that it didn't have to be a Roman numeral. So imagine you'd walked into the room a little bit late, you'd join our presentation a little bit late, you got other stuff going on and you didn't hear anything I said before. You were a late comer and you walked in and all you saw was me have this on the screen and say, just put one line and make that say six. Exercise got a whole lot easier, didn't it?

So what we want to talk about is how do we get out of those limitations? How do we get out of those boxes of straight lines and Roman numerals and start thinking in a more limitless way? But that's our goal for today, is to think about that in the chat. I'd love to see the answer for the brave people. Who do you always believe?

Write down who you always believe in the chat. You might write down your spouse if you're smart, you might write down your parents, you might write down your dog walker. You might write down your dog. Mom, sister. Definitely my dad.

That's a strong answer. These are good. So we all have different individuals that we go to for beliefs. But I think there's one person that you always believe all the time. Always.

And this is a quote from Seth Gooden. People don't believe what you tell them. They rarely believe what you show them. They usually believe what their friends tell them. You have teenagers, you know what I'm talking about.

But they always believe themselves, right? We always believe what we tell ourselves. It's like that Henry Ford quote, whether you think you can or you can't, you're right. We always believe ourselves. And that's a principle that we champion at The Pacific Institute.

We have 70,000 thoughts a day that are running through our head. And to us every single one of those thoughts is right and correct and accurate. And sometimes there's a lot of chaos that goes on. And our goal is to be able to make sense of that because we move towards the thoughts that are in our brain. Another quote from our founder, we move towards and become like what we think about our present thoughts determine our future.

We're going to move towards the things that we move towards, right? If you've ever uh, seen somebody driving their car and they're looking off to the side of the road and there's an accident and they start veering towards it, I assure you it's not because they're interested in joining in in the accident. It's just that people are drawn towards their attention. We move towards what we think about. So when we think about the future and we know as leaders we have to handle change, let's talk about what we're actually thinking about and that dirty word, how do you feel about change?

You don't have to put it in the chat, but you can if you're brave. But definitely write it down on a piece of paper like a journal entry. How do you feel about change?

Some people love it and embrace it. I love my mother dearly, but she is afraid of change. She says, I hate change. That's a direct quote. A lot of people said it's inevitable, it's optimistic.

It depends on the change is such a good answer. But when it comes to changes, there's all these different types of changes that we have to face as time goes by and we handle those as individuals. Second question. Does your organization feel about change? You may feel that you handle change differently than your organization.

If you are a sole proprietor, you can skip the question. And a lot of folks will look at this one and they'll take a step back and they go, wow, maybe I have a different view of change than my organization does. Well let's, let's get some clarity. First things first, let's define change. Let's define what I mean by change and let's talk about change versus transition.

So first and foremost, let's throw in the chat. You can nod your head yes or no or put it in the chat. Are change in transition the same? Yes. If you think they're the same, no.

If you think they're different, are change in transition the same? Look at those no answers coming in. If this was family feud, I'd say number one answer is definitely no, they are not the same. Let's pull these a hundred people on the feud. Again, is one easier than the other?

If you think change is easier, write change in the chat. If you think transition is easier, write transition in the chat. If you think those are too many letters to write, don't worry. I'll move to the next one. What about time?

Does one take longer than the other? Is one fast and one slow? Does one take a while and one happens instantly? So here's my belief and this is what we think of The Pacific Institute. Change is abrupt, it happens quickly on and off.

It's like a light switch, not like the dimmer switch in your kitchen or your bathroom, but the light switch, one minute it's dark, one minute it's light, vice versa. Transition on the other hand is something that happens a little more like that dimmer switch and it's something that we can look forward to. Think of it more like a sunrise or a sunset. Now people are terrified of change. I'm blessed.

I live on the beach in San Diego, California every single day I go out and I watch a beautiful transition known as a sunset. And I join in in that with a bunch of other locals and a bunch of others who are there on vacation. And those folks that are on vacation are watching the end of a day of vacation and beautiful San Diego go away. And I assure you they're not terrified of the change. They're in awe of the beauty of the transition that is taking place.

And they're going to do it again tomorrow and again in the morning if they're not too hung over. So we don't want to be afraid of transitions, we want to look forward to transitions because as organizations and human beings, we're going through them all the time. And if we resist them like a light switch versus embrace them like a dimmer switch or a sunset, it's really hard to grow. Now imagine a world where I'm sitting here in San Diego and it's noon and all of a sudden the lights went out instantly. Not like a sunrise or a sunset but it just went away.

Imagine the chaos that would ensue you. Don't believe me, go to any middle school in Americand turn off the lights and tell me if that decibel level goes up or down, right? There's chaos when people don't see where they're going. I have seen a couple cameras pop up along the way and I highly doubt it's because you wanted a shot of me. So if anybody wants a copy of these slides, you can hold up your camera here, you can scan this.

This will give you a copy of the presentation slides. Anna is also going to be putting in the chat right now the link that takes you to get a copy of these presentation slides. Sure everybody has their hi def iPhone 20 sevens and all. But we'll get you the actual copy of the slides. Now we got off topic.

What am I going to do? I'm off topic. Well I have to get back on topic 'cause this is a presentation on change. So here's how we talk about getting back on track and recovering and handling change at The Pacific Institute. Now I know what you're thinking.

You're looking at a middle aged white American in a race car and you think there's about to be some story. I've got excellent news for you. I know absolutely nothing. But I did have the very fortune. At one point in time in my life I was able to share a stage, gave a keynote at a presentation, uh at a for an organization.

And there was a Formula one race car driver that was speaking right before me. Ooh, did I pick his brain? And one of the things that he taught me was something that I think is just a wonderful metaphor that has to do with racing that we can apply towards life and business. And he said in racing, there's always a goal to win the race. It's to make it to the finish line first and to win that race.

But no matter what in every single race you have to accept the inevitable that there's going to be some chaos. You're going to spin out, you're going to lose control. And for a little bit of time you're going to have to take your eyes off of that primary goal and stop being a race car driver and change your focus so that you can get back on track.

Now what they teach them is don't look at the other cars, don't look at the oil slick that might have caused the problem. Do not look at that wall 'cause they have a saying that says, see wall hit wall. And at a hundred plus miles an hour, that is not something you want to have happen. So what they teach them to do is to change their focus to the recovery point, to find the way out. And then they can rely on their training and their instincts and all that self preservation to find the way out.

'cause remember we move towards and become like what we think about. And if we're thinking about those other cars, we're going to drive right into 'em. Same thing with the wall, same with the oil slick. But if we see the way out and we trust our instincts, it'll guide us out. And that's where talent comes into play.

Now, talent, let's talk about performance. Everybody here is probably in a leadership position and that means that most of you have understood that we gotta go out and hire the right type of people. And when you do that, you don't just hire anybody that'll fog a mirror, I hope. I hope that you're going out and trying to find the best and most talented individuals and figuring out what do they like to do? What are they good at, right?

And how do we leverage that? And then once you bring the right people into your organization, what's left? Whatcha going to do? Teach 'em stuff. Let's make 'em more competent.

We're going to teach 'em the skills. We're going to give them the knowledge. These are things they can acquire over time and that should be a formula for success. And if for some reason we don't reach or attain the goals that we want to, when we've done these, we oftentimes go back to the drawing board. Ah, we didn't hire the right people, let's go spend a few dollars more.

Let's hire the right people. Or you make a decision that says, now we've got the right people. I really do, but they don't know enough. So let's bring them in and let's train them right now, if somebody who's a Sandler trainer knows very much about training these types of things, I will tell you there is something far more important than the strategy and the talent and it goes right on top. And that's the belief.

That's the belief in putting that talent and that competency to work and having it actually do something for you. If you have children, you know what I'm talking about. You see them have all the skills and the talent and the ability. But if they have a mindset that says, I can't do better than a C on this math test, it'll drive you crazy because that's as well as they'll do. Now with humans, we're goal driven towards pictures.

We've got this mechanism that goes on inside of our brain that makes us goal oriented towards those photos and we think in three dimensions. So what I mean by that is we think in the form of words like you're hearing me say out loud, those generate pictures in our mind and based on those pictures we have an emotion and we move towards those emotions, right? So you've probably heard that expression. You don't remember what people say. You remember how you feel about what people say.

Emotions have a lot to do with that. So I'm going to give you an example. I'm going to tell you a couple of words. You're going to generate some pictures and watch as the emotions change. So imagine I said a word like apple.

Megan is a genius. Chances are you probably pictured something looked a little bit like this and you're going to have some sort of a feeling and emotion that would go with that. If you just read snow white to your children, it's going to have one feeling. If you had a third grade teacher that was really, really mean and had an apple on her desk every day, it's something different. But what about the things that change and how rapidly it changes?

If I was to say maybe green apple or apple computers or apple pie or the big apple, each and every one of these is going to give you a different mental picture. And based on that picture, there's an emotion that goes with it. Looking at the apple one, if you happen to be from fill your jersey, you might not feel the same as others do about the big apple, apple Eagles fan. Sorry, couldn't resist. So we have these pictures that are generated in our minds and we get to choose what those are to help us orient and we can pick that safety recovery point and whatever picture that we have in our mind that we repeat the most frequently, the strongest image is the one that we move towards.

And if we want to make that image strong, we need to get accustomed to reorienting towards it. So let's do a visual exercise. Put it in the chat using your eyeballs, looking on the screen here, tell me what you see. Everybody has the right answer in their mind. Your brain told you something.

Where do you see that green dot or that green circle? Where does that show up to you visually? See If you answers pop in the chat here. Eric says, center of the cube inside the cube in the box. Congratulations.

Number one answer. I've shown this to over a thousand people. Number one answer is this is a three dimensional object. We are looking at a glass cube and there's a ball floating in the center of it. Raise your hand, wave at the screen.

Let me know if you think that's what you saw floating in the center. Congratulations. You saw the most common answer. I have bad news for you. I created the slide that is not where it's located.

How about those of you that said I,

I'm not looking through this box. I see the front of things. I see it as located right here. I'm going to color in this panel. It is right up front on the top left.

How many other people saw it in that one? A lot of hands went up there. Congratulations. You were able to see it in a different way. Unfortunately you are also wrong.

That's not where it's located. How many of you said I get the exercise, I know what Kevin's up to. I'm going to look through this box past the problem all the way to the back. It is on this back panel. What's colored in here?

Ah, very good. Congratulations. You also came up with the wrong answer. It is not located in any of those. I'm the one who made this slide.

I'm going to tell you this is not a three dimensional object. So now you have to make your brain do something different. It's not a 3D box. These are just lines on a slide made in Google. And if I color it in, this is where it's located.

It's just in this center square. Now when I did that, did it suddenly stop being a three-dimensional object for you? Did it change from 2D to 3D when we changed the goal, when we put something else in there and when I took it away, it's going to go back to looking like that 3D object if that's what you saw originally. But what I want you to do is recognize you can put that recovery point in place with a new goal and it'll completely change how you view a situation. Anything you see in a certain way, anything that you saw that led you to success, that's what your brain wants to go back to.

That's that status quo. And that's okay. That's your brain going straight lines and Roman numerals worked once. I'm going to do it again. But if we take a step back and we recognize this is the new recovery point and you look at it like this, give it enough time, it's going to stop being a three-dimensional object and you won't need that recovery point anymore and that's when you move forward.

So let's talk about what we've done as leaders. Raise your hand here. If you were in a leadership position in 2020 and still are today, I expect to have a whole bunch of people waving at me. 'cause it's most of you. Congratulations.

If were in a group setting right now, I would tell you to stand give yourself a round of applause because leading over the last four to five years has been, gosh, I wish I could use language really hard, right? It's been a bear. And if you've done so, you've had to lead through a really tumultuous time that a person who was maybe in that same type of a position 30 years ago went through a big change about once every decade. We were told we had to stay six feet away from each other, including our employees. We weren't allowed in the same building for a long time years depending on your state or location.

And when that started to sort itself out, the economy gave us a big not so what's the opposite of a thank you? And said it's not going to do so well and interest rates didn't do so hot. And if you have anything to do with interest rates, you know exactly what I'm talking about. Or if you tried to buy a home or a business, I mean those types of things. And then we had to figure out what the world was going to look like with this hybrid slash remote.

You know, how do we do this? How do we go back and forth? How do we decide how it's going to be? And then I didn't even put it up on the screen because it changes by the time I get to the end of the sentence. It's handling ai, the updates and changes that go on with that.

So what's happened is it's created a disengaged workforce. They were behind a screen, they were watching Tiger King on the television. They were doing everything on their phone through TikTok and whatnot. We were naturally designed to be disengaged on purpose. And what that did has made it hard to lead.

It made it hard to build a culture, but you all managed to do it. You all had recovery points, whether you called them that or not, whether you recognized it or not. If you led through any of these things, you've handled that recovery point. So what we're going to do here is something that I promised at the beginning is we're going to give you guys a chance to network, to learn a little bit from one another, to share a few different ideas. Anna's going to open up a couple of breakout rooms for us.

Uh, Anna, I'm taking a quick loop here. How many rooms do you think Anna? Should we open up? About seven of them? Mm, I had eight with 10 beautiful rounds.

So perfect. We're going to open up these groups now when we get into these breakout groups, I'm going to give you a prompt to talk about. It's not going to be this one because that's written too small and you're on laptops. I'll share this screen in that group. And what I'm going to ask you to do is have one person in your group take some notes.

If you can't decide who that is, just do it alphabetically by first name. I apologize to the Adams and Allens in the group. But take down a couple of notes on these topics. What was your recovery point? If you were with an organization that didn't do well, what should that recovery point?

You can also discuss, did everyone have the same recovery point in the organizations? Think about different levels. Did your executive leadership team have the same recovery point as your sales team or customer support or finance teams? And then finally, is the recovery point that you may have Now, is it clear to everybody? Is it clear?

Are we all aiming at the same way out of the turmoil? You probably won't have time to discuss all three.

So you can pick any one of those if you, if you'd like. Are there questions about what we're going to be discussing in these breakout groups? We're just going to have an open forum discussion about these items. We'd love to hear some ideas, share stories as you have them. When we come back we'll try to get a little bit of feedback.

But I am going to ask that you put the notes from your discussion in the chat when we come back in. And on that note, Ana, you can go ahead and open up our breakout groups. We are going to do a eight minute break. We Have a, we have a question in the chat if you could absolutely redefine recovery point again. Absolutely.

So what I mean by that recovery point, so uh, what we're talking about is with those race car drivers, when they spin out of control, what they're looking for is the recovery point the way out of the problem. An example of that might be, uh, during Covid I lived right next door to a restaurant and that restaurant at first was spinning out of control. 'cause how do you stay open? And then they ran a stronger business than it ever did before because they started doing mobile margarita deliveries. They got outside the box, they did real well and ran a very successful business.

Their recovery point was figuring out how to get deliveries done. Did that answer the recovery question? Outstanding honest. It's going to go ahead and open up those rooms. I am going to remain in the main room so if anybody has any trouble or leaves or can't get access to it, you're stuck hanging out with me.

But Anna's going to go ahead and open those up. So welcome back. Welcome back all. If you are the person who is taking notes in your group, please paste those notes in the chat. It's okay if they have typos, it's okay if they don't make sense.

We just want to see what you talked about real quickly from any of the groups, perhaps Richard or any others here from TPI. Did anybody have any discussions in their group they'd like to bring up? Um, I'll, I'll jump in just quickly At uh, I'm what was terrible at taking notes, I was paying attention. Um, but we had a sort of brief conversation. It felt like we could have used another hour in there.

Um, in both cases, the two people that described the situations that they faced, they, their recovery points and they both focus on the covid situation. Recovery points was really thematically identical, which was how do we maintain our culture and how do we stay connected? So it's connectedness in spite of the world, saying you've gotta split yourself apart. And in both cases what I heard was really the same. They did a good job of like the company all had the same recovery point.

Covid perhaps this is me. Uh, editorializing it created a unique moment for us. All painful as it was where it was easy to get buy-in on a recovery point. Like let's stay connected, right? And so as painful as that whole experience was, that was a, that was a good example of a moment in history where it en, it enabled cultures to strengthen Excellent points and it really was an easier one to rally around.

The better question is how much tougher was it to move to those other recovery points, like the economy taking a dive or perhaps navigating what it was like when it was time to come back to work. Thanks for sharing. Did anybody else have anything pressing that came up from their meetings? We don't have time for all of the groups, but I don't want to trim anybody if they had a good comment or good discussion. We are going to organize these notes from these discussions into a document that we'll share with everybody later today so that if you were not in the group, you can at least see what some of those were.

Because inevitably a discussion like this, there'll be some suggestions that come up and sometimes those suggestions are really good, right? Maybe just maybe you'd look at this and you go, wait, we haven't done a virtual happy hour since covid. And who knows? Maybe it's just another thing to rally around to keep people connected, right? Any last minute comments from the groups?

Excellent stuff. I see coming through the notes. Thank you so much for your participation. So moving back over. So what we really want to think about is how do you have the control to handle these things that are going on that maybe are outside of your control?

So we talk about self-efficacy. When you hear the word efficacy, you're probably thinking about whether or not a drug works or how efficacious it is when referring to yourself. It's just how much you believe you're going to cause change in the things in the world around you. How much control do you have? So a better way of stating that is where is the control of the things that are happening?

And if we look at the three big topics were looking at covid, that certainly came in from the outside the economy, which I don't think was your fault. And navigating the work from home, hybrid work environment, which is kind of something society did for us. You can look at that a couple different ways. You can say this happened to me. I'm at the effect of I was impacted by these things.

They came in and they happened to me. Or you can look at it from an internal standpoint.

If they happened then I got to cho choose what I was going to do Coming out of that. Another way of looking at that is if you're a person that has an external, we call this a locus of control where you feel that efficacy is on the outside of you, chances are when you looked at Covid or the economy or the hybrid work environment, it might've been some excuses that came to mind. 'cause it's really easy to make excuses about external things that happen if you have an internal locus of control, if you have a lot of self-efficacy, when you see these things happening, you looked at the opportunities that arise from each one of those. What can we do? Like Richard was saying, what are our options?

Not what we can't do. We're not allowed within six feet of each other, but focusing on we're not allowed from six feet of each other is like focusing on the wall for the race car driver. You're going to smack right into it. What are the opportunities? What are the recovery points to find the way out?

So it's simply you just go do it. No problem. Now I've told you to do it. Mission accomplished. Go be better at leaders.

Just kidding, we have a process. Okay, over the past 53 years we've been building a process at The Pacific Institute that we've broken down into a four step process. And that four step process starts with an assessment. Like anything else in life, you have to know where you start. If the goal was to lose weight, first thing you'd want to do is get on the scale and find out how much you weigh today.

So that's what we do. We start with a discovery, an assessment, a diagnostic, something to evaluate your leadership, your alignment, your culture to give you an in-depth analysis. And we gottalign, get people rowing in the same direction. So we're going to tailor that approach based on our research findings to meet specific objectives identified by you. Craft a roadmap to make sure that we can get that organizational alignment.

From there, we're going to engage. Sometimes that looks like a workshop. Sometimes it's ongoing coaching and consulting, sometimes it's a little bit of both. But we're going to translate the cognitive science into practical tools. Things that you can actually use in your workplace that involve the individuals that elevate the organizational performance.

And then once you get there, imagine this is like going to the gym and working out really hard for years and you get the body you've always dreamed of. What do you do when that happens? Cancel the gym membership and go home. Of course not. You're going to want to sustain that.

And that's exactly what we do. So when we get you and your team and your organization to where you want to be, then we pivot into providing more customizable solutions. It's no longer a weight loss plan, it's more of a maintenance plan, right? The goal is to be able to keep you there. All that is is a process of developing a mindset.

All that is is developing a mindset that doesn't look at the obstacles. It looks at the way past the obstacles, like downhill skiers, the ones that are crazy, the hella skiers, they go up to the top of the mountain, they go zipping through the trees. Simon Sinek says this, and I love this. He says they don't teach them to look at the trees, they look at the spaces between the trees. You put me at the top of a ski slope, I look down one of those, I see nothing but trees.

There's nothing but problems 'cause I'm not a great skier. The ones that know what they're doing, they have the mindset that says I'm going to look for the space in between and they're going to find their way out. And when you have a positive mindset that can be shared with the team around you and the organization at large, you're developing a culture because the culture is exactly that. It's just the collective mindset of all the individuals. And there are two types of cultures.

There's adaptive and there's adaptive. And I'm going to give everybody here a little quiz. It's a simple five question quiz. You should do this on your own. This is private information.

And all you have to do is when I list off one of these symptoms, you check a box on the left or check a box on the right of which might sound like you or your organization. So when we're looking at those cultures and there's a failure, things go wrong. We were supposed to turn in our quarterly results and we missed 'em. Is the focus on whose fault it was? Was it the sales team's fault?

'cause they didn't get it done? Was it marketing? 'cause they didn't get us leads? Was it leadership for not providing us direction? Or do you have a more adaptive culture where that focus is on?

Well, we missed our quarterly number, but what are we going to do next time to make sure that we achieve our goals? What about transparency? When things are going on, our numbers hide and manipulated. I've worked for many a startup companies in the past, particularly those that are in their early funding range. Sometimes they tend to manipulate those numbers because they really don't want those investors.

So that's not a transparent culture. Being open and honest and saying we missed our numbers and this is why is a transparent and adaptive leadership culture decision making style? Is it centralized? Is it isolated? Is it left to just a couple few people that can make the biggest decisions?

Or is it decentralized? Is it open and available? You know the decision from Netflix to start doing delivery through the mail, which was the big decision that pivoted them past blockbuster that came from an unpaid intern. If only decisions come from the top brass, you continue

to make those same types of decisions you've always made. But if you're adaptive and it's decentralized, you're open to those ideas. Would you rather be Blockbuster today or Netflix? When it comes to change our topic of today, is there a resistance? Do you hear expressions like that's not how we do things.

We tried that before and it didn't work. That's not how we do it around here. Or do you embrace that? Do you encourage the innovation and find workarounds and find new ways of doing things intentionally? Having people question the status quo.

And finally, your approach to learning. Is it limited? Is it guarded? Do only the top individuals get all of the real information? The rest of you are just supposed to do your job.

Do you as you're told, or is it available to all? Can there? Is there development and learning opportunities across the board? Based on your answers to these questions, if you put most of your answers on that right hand side, congratulations. You have an adaptive culture, that's something you should try to maintain.

Any of those areas that are missing, that gives you goals. If you're on the left hand side, congratulations, you have a ton of room for opportunity for growth to make your adaptive culture more so because every unap culture can and will turn into an adaptive culture in time if you work on it. Now, does being adaptable matter? Here's the data. Ter Heskett did an 11 year study over 208 companies.

These are not small organizations, these are Fortune 1000 industries. They wanted to study these companies. So they did a quiz, much longer version of the one that I just did. So it wasn't five questions, very robust and in depth. And they wanted to find out these companies that were adaptive versus adaptive and how they'd perform over an 11 year period of time, but decades, a pretty long time.

And you can see those adaptive cultures, they did, let's say, okay, they did okay, 166% increase in revenue, 74% stock price workforce grew by about a third net income barely changed. So how did those adaptive cultures do those ones that had more of the answers on the right hand side, on the revenue side of things, about 682%. I went to a state college, but even I know that's about four times more, right? Stock price, 901. If you have investors, that matters.

If you have people that make money when your company makes money having something 12 times higher, that's a big deal. Workforce. If your company's trying to grow, if you're trying to expand your organization, you're trying to make a bigger footprint, perhaps even merge. Workforce needs to get bigger, have to be able to adapt to that. Those adaptive cultures, they only grew by 36%, but the workforce on the adaptive cultures 282 nearly three times larger.

When you have that much more revenue, have that much more stock price, you have that many more people working for you, all rowing in the same direction. This is the portion where we put some guesses in the chat. It's a percentage. What percentage do you think that net income is? Guess a big number.

Don't guess a small numbers. What do you think that was compared to those un cultures? Let's take a look at the chat and see what those numbers are. I'd love Grace's answer 1500%. I bet you that's closer than most of the rest of you.

The number comes in at 756% higher. That's what an adaptable culture means. That's what having a positive culture that rose in the right direction means. That's what having a culture that doesn't fear change like it's a light switch. Like, oh no, I hate change.

They're always changing things around here. But instead embraces the fact that we are always changing around here. We are always growing around here and we're going to grow again tomorrow and the day after and the day after because we move towards and become like what we think about and our present thoughts. They determine our future. So we have just a few minutes left in our time today.

We're going to leave a little bit of time at the end for questions, but this part where I'm curious what your present thoughts are going to be moving forward. So we're going to give you some options for ways that you can take action on the things that we talked about during the past 48 minutes here this morning. First and foremost, this is a different QR code than last time. We're asking everybody here to please complete a short survey. When I say short, I mean this is going to take you about 90 seconds unless you really want to write a whole bunch of information.

Now, if you don't want to scan this and have it on your phone, that's fine because Anna's going to put the link to this survey in the chat right now as well. And if you are like, Kevin, this is too many things to do all at once, you're asking for too much on a Friday, stop taxing me. You have an email waiting for you that has this survey in it as well that Anna has sent. So there's three different ways we can get to this survey and we would really appreciate your feedback. This helps us get better at what we do moving forward.

This helps us craft our future messages. Speaking of which, hopefully we'll see everybody back in September on the sixth, we'll be sending out an invitation

for next month's Beyond Limitss. The next thing in there, at the bottom of that survey, we have a couple of free offers for you. There's an opportunity to schedule meetings with some of us at Pacific Institute if you'd like to learn a little bit more. There's a free diagnostic that we're offering. And if you check that box, we'll send you the information.

We'll schedule a call, we'll set you up on how you can do a free diagnostic test for yourself, your team, your organization to get a snapshot of what your culture looks like. And we can get started having a conversation from there. And then finally, we would hope that you'd be able to connect with us one of the boxes you can check to join these oncoming webinars in the future as we move forward. Another one is to join what we call our winner circle email. Winner circle email takes a topic like this, it shortens it to just a couple of paragraphs.

Really helpful if you have team meetings and you need some salient topics to bring up during those. But that concludes our time for today. I'm going to remain on here as well as the other folks from Pacific Institutes. So if there's any questions, comments, anything at all that's needed, if we end up with a bunch of extra on and I can always open an additional breakout room. But I wanted to very sincerely thank everybody for spending their time here with us on a Friday morning.

I know that there are a lot of folks in here that have a lot of people reporting to them. I don't take it lightly that you gave up. 40 minutes here are sorry, 50 minutes here on a Friday morning at the beginning of a month. So we will stick around if there's questions or concerns or anything that way. But we sincerely look forward to seeing you at future sessions and have a great rest of the day and a wonderful weekend.