#460 – How Change Really Happens with Kristy Ellmer

Cherylanne Skolnicki:

I’m Cherylanne Skolnicki, and this is Brilliant Balance, the show for those of us who still dare to want it all, who have big dreams and bold ambitions. I think we deserve to have a big, full life and the freedom to enjoy it. So let’s design our next chapter together for brilliance, not burnout. Each week, I’ll bring ideas, insight, and a fresh perspective to keep you growing into a life that feels as good as it looks. Brilliant balance, your life, your way. Now let’s get started.

My guest today is Kristy Ellmer. She is a managing director and partner at Boston Consulting Group where she leads BCG Transform in North America and co-founded the firm’s behavioral science lab. Before that, she was a chief transformation officer herself leading a number of organizations in the CPG media and energy industries through large scale, complex transformation. Kristy also coaches CTOs and C-suite executives during periods of rapid performance improvement. And in full disclosure, Kristy was a client of mine for a number of years around the time that she made partner at BCG. So I had a tiny bit of a front row seat to how she thought long before she became a superstar and a published author. This year, her first book arrived, How Change Really Works, co-written with Julia Darr and Philip Jamison, laying out the science-based reasons that most corporate transformations fail, and the principles that actually make change stick.

Kristy, welcome.

Kristy Ellmer:

Thank you so much, Cherylanne. I’m so excited to be here.

CS:

This is a delight. Like, I get to do a lot of podcast interviews, as you know, with a lot of authors, but it is so fun to have somebody on the show who I know in real life and then get to hear about this exceptional piece of work. So I’m excited for today.

KE:

I am really excited. I can’t believe how much has happened since we, um, spent time and I learned so much from your program.

CS:

It has been, it, it’s been a minute. It has been a minute. I was thinking about during, like, pre – COVID was really where you and I crossed paths. COVID, you were, like, ensconced here in Cincinnati for a hot second, and just a lot has happened since 2020. A

KE:

Lot has happened. A lot of change, a lot of really good changes, but, you know, all based on building a really strong foundation of what you need to do to actually drive successful change in your personal life. And I employed all of those tactics, and here I am today.

CS:

Here you are. So let’s start before this book ever existed and long before you and I met. You’ve told the story publicly. You tell it in your TED Talk of being 24 and at an airline going through bankruptcy and a facilitator asking the room, “What if being laid off is actually a good thing?” And that became sort of a guiding belief and principle for you. There’s a long gap between that moment and writing this book. But I want you to tell me, like, some of what happened in between. What did you, when did you, like, know that that idea, that insight could become a book?

KE:

Yeah. I think, you know, early on in my career when I started in bankruptcy, it was one of those, like, just trying to survive. You know, everything was being thrown at you every day. And I just kind of kept saying, “Put your head down and just do the work and lean into it.” And through that process, I learned so much. And after I sort of finished the bankruptcy piece, there was an opportunity to work on Northwest and Delta’s merger. And so I had this opportunity to kind of, again, lean into uncertainty and change. And so between those two sorts of experiences, sort of the first five years in my career, it became very evident that whenever I leaned into uncertainty and change, and I was just open to the possibilities, I actually got stronger, both professionally and personally. And so that really became sort of the theme for my life of how do I keep leaning into uncertainty and change and therefore getting to sort of unveil different parts of myself?

You know, so following the, um, the work that I did with Northwest and Delta, I went on to AstraZeneca Pharmaceuticals because I wanted to sort of be a global leader. I really wanted to understand change in a global context. And I had the opportunity to work in many different countries and understand how to lead teams through change. And then from there, I found out in consulting, you can just kind of keep going from change to change to change. And so, um, since then, I’m about 14 years now in consulting. And I’ve really enjoyed it because it’s allowed me to keep leaning into different client challenges and keep growing with them, but also continue to sort of e- educate myself and have to sort of stay on the top of what does great look like and how do you lead great change?

CS:

It’s wild when you think about how many people spend their whole life avoiding change. Like I want to just keep everything the same and stay really comfortable. And you have made a whole career out of leaning into it sequentially from client to client, being able to follow that and of course stay in that state yourself along the way. Um, let’s cover the main premise of the book. I want you to, I want to get everybody on the same page who hasn’t had the chance to read it yet. Tell us about change distance.

KE:

Yeah. So I think one of the things having led so much transformation that was frustrating me was if you actually look at the success rates of transformation or change any large-scale change, they’re actually quite bad. And when we look at it now, we just did a study, 2,000 transformations. And, um, only 25% of transformations are continuing to be successful. And that’s over 20 years. Wow. And as someone who has been a part of it and seen so many successes, it actually frustrates me that they aren’t getting better. And particularly because we actually know what it takes now to make change successful. One of the things that we started to look at when we wrote the book was this idea of how do executives and how do employees actually experience change? And there is a real distance, that’s what we call the change distance, and how they just look at the word change – Yeah.

Or how they feel about it. So, the opening really looks at asking executives how do they feel about change? If we just ask the simple question of a change is coming, how do you feel? Positive, neutral or negative? 67% of executives feel positive. If we ask the same question of employees, it’s about 48% that feel positive. And so, when we look at that, there’s a real distance and we’ve just said a change is coming. We haven’t said bad, good,

CS:

Anything. But it is, right.

KE:

And executives are already excited. And we ask them, do you think it’s going to be successful? And it’s something like 70% of them think it’s going to be successful when we know the odds are actually sacked against them. And so that real mental gap of how you’re thinking about change, depending on whether you’re employer or an executive, can be very different. And that’s just before you even started.

CS:

Before it even gets going. Yeah. What role does their perceived sense of agency play in that gap?

KE:

I think one of the things we looked at a lot was that idea of agency. And what we found with executives is they’ve typically been successful through change. So, when you ask them what has changed given to you in your life, they’ve had incentives around it. They’ve been successful both professionally and personally. Yeah. And then there’s the third that they’re actually helping design it and deciding to do it. An employee might feel like it’s being pushed by them and they have less incentives. So there really is a difference in how they’ve maybe experienced change too, that’s actually creating more of an issue. But then also to your point, this idea of agency of, am I the one who’s actually designing it and choosing it, or has it been chosen and now I have to figure out how to sort of navigate through it?

CS:

Mm-hmm. It is, because you and I, I mean, talked about that way back in the Brilliant Balance days, that the power of feeling like you have some sense of agency or control over what’s happening to you is such a game changer around attitude and belief and positivity. And when people feel like it’s happening to them, kind of the classic victim mindset, I do think it explains maybe a bit of that gap. So it was, uh, it, it’s interesting to see how that plays out at a corporate level versus an individual level for sure. Um, that premise, the idea that there is this gap between leadership and the individuals in the organization who will arguably be executing the change leads to these seven principles that you outline in the book. We’re not going to go through all of them. I want people to read the book.

But I do want to talk about a couple. And I thought a good way to pick it, pick which ones might be if you had to pick one principle that people being exposed to this work get the most wrong or that like most surprises people when they eventually kind of explain it or read the book, which one is the most surprising? Or which one does people get wrong most often?

KE:

I think the one around rituals. So, there’s an entire thing that we talk about having rituals, not reactions. And people who are going through change sort of want to, they, they will at times kind of just go with the flow, if you will. Like I’ve said this, I’m going to do this. And then they kind of make progress. They might start disciplined, but then what they start tending to happen down the road is actually they let discipline go. So, they stop getting into these rituals. And for me, this is something that is so important because this is actually what drives successful change, particularly over the long run. So, what we mean when we talk about this is this idea of, do you have rituals? Do you have a system that is designed to make change easier for you? And I think this is something you talk a lot about in your program, right?

Like are you making change easier for yourself? Yes. And what we found is a lot of people tend to react. So, I’ve said I was going to make this change. I’m watching the metrics and then something doesn’t go the way that I like. Now I react and I throw a meeting on the calendar. I re-pivot and I look at why it’s not working versus actually I already have that built into the way that I’m going to do things and I’m going to create systematic ways that make change easier. Yeah. And I think that, particularly in a corporate context, happens all the time because it sort of happens at the whim of how somebody might be feeling that week or some new data that came in or actually something’s changed and we’re going to pivot this meeting. And all of a sudden, it throws everybody off versus just letting the machine run itself that you’ve designed around how people can engage.

CS:

Do you think that people treat it as episodic? Like they get started, right? It’s a big kind of like a lot of energy on the front end, but then that ability to sustain it, what I’m hearing you say is discipline only gets you so far to sustain it. After that, it has to be transformed into ritual. What’s the difference, Kristy?

KE:

Yeah. So, I think what we find is there’s a lot of, uh, a lot of excitement around change in the very beginning, right? We’re excited, we’re going to kick off. We have all these big things. Around

CS:

Round meetings, yeah. And

KE:

Think about it in your own life, right? Like January 1st, right? Yep. All the goals, everything’s going to happen. And then we might be very disciplined, but then when things get hard or when things get changed, it’s sort of how we were thinking the outcome would be, all of a sudden, we let go of some of that discipline. And if the system is actually built in a way that makes it easier for you, you’re less likely to lose that. Like we can’t sort of rely on willpower and discipline all the time because you will get tired. The cognitive load will wear out. Yep. But if you build a system around you that actually says, “How am I going to do things? How am I going to update? How am I going to follow this process? Or how am I going to measure this?” And they’re just sort of calendared and they’re the same way that the same, the organization operates in the same thing every single week, then it sort of just takes over even when you’ve lost sort of that willpower momentum.

Yes.

CS:

And that would be true for an individual as well as an organization. Like obviously Kristy’s whole book is written about organizational change, but I think a lot of this does, if you think about within your family system or you think about even as an individual, a lot of the principles I felt translated really well. Um, but the fact that they ladder up and work at a, an organization level really shows how tested and proven they are.

KE:

Yeah. Yeah. That’s I think the thing that’s been most fun about the book is we’ve had so many people tell us that they’re using some of the science at home. Yes. And as we’ve gone through the process, I could even see as I was writing it that I’m using some of those tactics in my own life. Yes. And the reality is, because the book is actually based on behavioral science just around how people think, feel, and behave when they’re going through a change. Yep. Now, doing that at scale means you might have different tactics in place or different things that you need to do, but science is still the same. The psychology doesn’t change.

CS:

Right. You just have that layer of needing to keep people on the same page. So rather than just having to worry about yourself, you have to worry about how am I going to not get so far ahead of the organization that they’re no longer following me? They no longer have somebody to follow. Yeah. I think that’s interesting. The second way in for me in terms of picking another principle to talk about is did anything surprise you during the research. Did you go in with a hypothesis or an assumption somewhere that got overturned? Because you all surveyed 6,000 executives and employees before writing this book. So, what did the data show you that was maybe a contradiction to one of your assumptions?

KE:

Yeah, I think we often come in thinking that people don’t like change, right? We walk in and say people don’t like change or change is hard. And one of the sets of questions that we actually asked was, you know, you, you have a first emotion after you hear change is coming. What is it? The number one response was actually curiosity. And so, for me, that actually tells us you have a moment in time where it isn’t that people immediately feel negative on change. There are people that do, but the highest percentage is actually curiosity. So, whether you’re leading something at home, whether you’re leading something in an organization or a nonprofit, you have this moment when you actually launch something big to say, if I can actually lean into that, tap into that curiosity, I have a chance at winning them over, right? Or at least suspending disbelief for a while in what’s going to change.

Misconception so much that immediately people don’t like change. And the reality is they don’t like change being done to them, but if it is going to be done, you have a moment in time where it’s curiosity first.

CS:

That’s so interesting. And how do you harness that? What are, what are some things that you’ve seen work in real life to harness that moment of curiosity? It feels like an important moment to not rush past.

KE:

It is. Yeah. I think the first is really around agency, right? And, and you talk about this all the time, but if we’re announcing a change, how do we allow people immediately to have some agency in the process? Now, whether that is, you know, helping design how we’re actually going to run the process, actually putting in ideas on what will the change actually mean? You know, even silly things. Like I’ve had crowdsourcing program names for the change, right? Because immediately someone gets to vote on something. Mm-hmm. And so how do you from day one actually, when you’re announcing it, create saying, “I’m actually going to tap into that curiosity by giving some agency and getting people involved immediately rather than sort of we’re announcing it and then we’re going to go in a room and we’re going to come back and we’re going to tell you all these things that are happening.” Making them part of the process is the number one thing.

But then also using that time to say very specifically, what do they think needs to change? And so, it’s not just how they sort of creating agency or creating ideas on what is already being announced, what other things are there? Because you might find some things that actually create more following and more excitement that weren’t on your list that are probably low lifts – Yeah. But actually, mean a lot.

CS:

Right. And you know what I can’t stop thinking about is families. Because so often, you know, I work with a lot of moms, right, who are working moms. And so often what I’ll hear is like, I need to get my kids to do this differently, or we as a family need to approach this differently. And they want to sort of hold a family meeting and deploy their new way of doing it, which of course does not work, right? Because to your point, there’s no buy-in. The children feel no agency. And I’m always talking about, like, how can you, if you’re going to have that family meeting or where, whatever that looks like for you, can you give them some input to the process? Can you get their suggestions? Even if they aren’t ultimately the ones that are adopted, can they feel like they have a voice in that process?

Cause I do think it changes the buy-in early on. Like, it’s not happening to me. We are all doing this together. We’re all a part of it. Really, I can’t stop thinking about how it translates to families. It,

KE:

It really does. And I think, you know, one of the principles we talk about there is the IKEA effect. And Michael Norton is doing some work on actually building IKEA furniture, having people build it, versus people who buy furniture and the people who bought it actually having a 63% increase in perceived value. So, we talk about this as like people don’t burn down houses that they build. And so even with kids, even with families saying, “We’re going to do this new project. We’re going to do this new process.” Even if your s – like actually skeleton out like 70% of it, give it to them to then edit off of, because then you’re going to find they might not change much, but they will have felt like they changed.

CS:

Quite a bit. Yeah, they’ve made it their own. Put a stamp on it in some way.

KE:

That’s

CS:

Right. Mm-hmm. That is, that’s fascinating. Um, I think that the idea of, you know, change is so universal to life. Then, the change that we do personally as individuals, in our families, in our communities, in our organizations, like I think it’s, when I first picked this up, I had this because it’s HBR Press as a business book. I didn’t have it in my head like, oh, this would translate. And then when I read it, I was like, oh no, this is behavioral science book. This is exactly like you said. Do you remember when we had Katie Milkman, um, on the podcast a million years ago from the University of Pennsylvania? Yes. And she was talking about really how do you get habits to change for people? And I think our audience learned so much from the very pragmatic ideas of it doesn’t just happen.

You don’t just change a habit. You have to sort of have these, I guess, rituals that allow you to change them over time. So, it had some, uh, reminiscence to that for me too.

KE:

Yeah. I think, you know, Katie’s work is, uh, was very inspiring. I actually worked with her a little bit on some of this. And, you know, because this is what’s been bothering me about corporate transformation. And there’s so much in the personal development space and improvement in behavioral science and neuroscience, but it hasn’t actually translated to how do you do that with groups of people? Yeah. And it’s, it’s been one of those things where I actually didn’t, and people will tell you, I never wanted to be an author. This was something that I just saw a need. I was so tired of people saying to me, “Well, how do I do this? Or how do I do that?” And it’s like, it’s so obvious, but it was out in, like, 30 different academic journals and all these books. And we just said, “We need to pull it together to make it easy for someone who’s trying to lead organizational change to grab all those deep insights from all that great work that’s done by Katie and Michael and Brene Brown, all these people into one place.

It’s as well how do you approach it when you’re doing with groups of people?”

CS:

Yes. And when that is your core job, which I don’t want people to lose sight of who are listening, like when your c – when you get brought in through your firm to an organization, this is an explicit role. Like leading transformation, can you just talk a little bit about what that looks like when, when BCG gets brought in to do that with a firm? Tell the listener what that looks like.

KE:

Yeah. Often, I lead our transformation practice, and what I’m often brought in to do is a company is really looking to sort of have a big change in what they do on all different levels. So not typically just one. It’s a bunch of different things that need to happen. And often what’s happened is the organization, the senior leadership team really knows what they want to do, but they don’t know how to get it done and they don’t know how to do it at scale. And so, we’re often.

Allow people to actually drive that change. But then also we’re kind of varied as experts on very specific things to act as sort of additional capacity, but additional expertise to help employees that maybe don’t know how to do some of those things yet. So, you know, anytime we think about a change, the question is like, do you have the right capability? Do you have the right skill? And do you have time? And so often when BCG comes in, we’re brought in for that expertise and our capability to actually drive change at pace and at scale.

CS:

And to have the capacity to do that, like if the leaders of the organization are already occupied sort of running the current business, running change on top of that requires incremental capacity. And I think that’s where you can fill a gap is like, we’re going to open up extra capacity here to focus on driving the change itself. It does translate to, again, all the women that I’m working with, I think, want to do both. It’s like I have to run my current life well and I want to get to the next level. And how am I going to do both at the same time? And you have to sort of crack open some level of capacity to do that. Um, and it’s not easy. That’s not an easy trick to do when you’re doing it on your own. I was – I’m curious about the writing process itself. Um, you have co-authors in this book with three co-authors, all those surveys to deal with, you know, years of consulting material.

What was the process like to write this book?

KE:

Uh, it was a long one. <laugh> It’s been a few years. Um, you know, honestly, the first part of it was super interesting because we started with almost work shopping, right? It was sort of saying, okay, what do we see? What do we learn? We actually looked at, I think at one point we were at, we had 20 principles and then it was 12. And then, you know, what we really started to look at was let’s keep going to the fundamentals. If we can just get to the core. So, we kept challenging ourselves all the way through to say, okay, is that really core? And have we seen that actually in at least 20, 25 other transformations? Mm. And so I think we’re really trying to push ourselves to say, what is core and fundamental to the human side before we would actually sort of make a commitment to that?

The other thing is we actually did a really good job. I’m very proud of us for this. We’re all still friends at the end of this. Huge. Um, of holding ourselves accountable to the principles. So, if we, in the book, we talk about getting to true agreement. And so, we created a bunch of principles and how we were going to operate as a team and sort of rules of the road. So, all the way through the process, you know, if somebody had something where they said, “I want to debate,” we’ve put a debate on the table, and we would debate it out. And even if we got to an hour, two hours into it and we didn’t agree, we left it, we came back to do something else to try and get momentum. We’d pick something else that would move us forward. Then we’d come back to it.

And so, I think by actually putting ourselves through our own process that we recommend, we actually were testing it ourselves in a way, if you will. But it actually kept us really a high performing team and really one that could agree that what we were putting out, we were very proud of. Um, I would say it took a lot of time. So, this was a few years in the making, and it was, you know, multiple eight-hour sessions every weekend. And so, it was really one of those things that we had to really be committed to. And I think one of the things that was really interesting that we did is that I don’t know that if every team does, we actually did a survey ourselves before we started of why we are writing this. What is the hoped outcome from this? To make sure that we were on the same page as to why we were doing this.

Because otherwise you could see it going in different directions. So, for us, it really became about we are on this mission to make transformation and change have better outcomes, you know? Yeah. And that’s at every level. And it wasn’t about, you know, having our names as authors or, you know, some sort of fame or anything like that. It really was about we are on this mission to change the outcomes. And because of that, when we had the debates, it was always about the material and the work.

CS:

In service to that. Yeah, yeah. And then, the humility that that brings to say we have a shared purpose and this isn’t about anybody getting famous. It’s about getting this work into the world as a, as a part of a collective. I do think it’s a unique writing approach to have co-authors. I’m also just curious fundamentally, like, did you alternate chapters? Did you, did somebody draft one and other people were revising? Like what did that look like?

KE:

Yeah. So, the first part was actually we read a bunch of other people’s books. Yeah. Because the first is understanding what, what is the voice we want this book to look like? What’s the structure? So, we actually probably spent four or five months on that part alone. And then, um, Phil actually took a pass at just writing the entire thing. Okay. Um, and it was terrible. <laugh> It’s

CS:

A mess, right? Terrible first draft. And

KE:

Interesting, a fun tip here, when he did that, um, I was on, I was on vacation and I came back and he had written a memo and said, “This is from Phyllis. Not Phil, Phyllis.”

CS:

Oh, brilliant. Because

KE:

There was no emotion tied to it, right? No. It was like this is somebody else out there. But what he did is he actually wrote it in multiple different styles, different chapters. So, we could say, “Okay, that’s a bridge too far. This one’s good. That’s not good.” Oh, that’s brilliant. And that allowed us to react to something. And then from there, you know, um, we outlined every single chapter, what was going to be the main argument points. And then Phil would often take a pass on some chapters. I would take another. Julia would take a few. And then every weekend we would get together and we’d have sort of an agenda that said, okay, I’ve submitted something for people to review and edit. Um, and then somebody, you know, other people would do the same thing. And so, it was just this constant flow of process.

I would say we started really focusing on the first part before we started part two, because if we didn’t get part one right – You.

CS:

Have the premise, right? That’s right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I don’t know if you know this. I’m working finally in earnest on my first book. And this is the part I’m in, it is like really trying to get every, all the arrows pointing in the direction at the premise. And man, when you were talking about that crappy first draft, does that ever resonate? Uh, you know, you think you have it. I’m like, “I think I have a draft.” And then you’re like, “This is terrible. Like none of this is going to work.” So, you’re giving me hope for sure. Um, for someone who is listening, who is sort of mid-transformation right now, maybe in their life, in whatever the vector is, whether it’s a work transformation or a person or at home, and they feel like it’s stalling, right? Progress is stalling, it’s going backwards. Where is someplace you would have them check first?

What’s like a good check oil light?

KE:

Yeah. I think if you feel like it’s stalling, go back to what is the system around it? So why, why might it be stalling? And this goes back to the rituals or the way that you’re thinking about your week, if it’s a personal thing. Are you actually doing those same things that you said you would do? Um, and then I would also look very specifically off like when they’re not happening, why aren’t they happening? Like what else is getting in the way? Because there are so many times that we start signing up for change and then we just keep adding, adding, adding, adding. And so, all of a sudden something that’s been added might be more important to us. Yeah. And so, it might be stalling because something else has actually changed and something is more important. Or it might be stalling because maybe you’ve lost momentum, maybe it’s not the right system anymore.

And so, I think really sitting down and I mean, you could take literally the principles and say, “Do I actually agree on what I’m still doing?” Right? And do I very specifically understand what sort of the rituals? Why am I not doing them? And just go through all of that. And I think the one piece of advice I would have here is don’t be afraid of doing something that we call the fresh start. Because too often we get into it and then we just start beating ourselves up. This isn’t working. What did I do wrong? I don’t know why this isn’t happening. And there’s real behavioral science that just says sometimes the fresh start of I’m just going to start again – Yep. Actually, gives you momentum and it actually builds your confidence rather than trying to just like keep suffering through. Yes. And I think that is something that, particularly for high performing women, I don’t think we like to say.

I don’t think they would say like, “It wasn’t working. Now I’m going to stop and fresh start it because it feels like failure.” But the reality is for your brain, right, it’s actually creating momentum.

CS:

Yeah. It’s like hitting that reset button on the computer, like a little bit of just there’s a lot clogging my cache and I have to sort of give myself the chance to clear it all away, recommit to this. Maybe change something about the approach. I think for me, if I look at places where I’ve had to reset something, often it’s the opportunity to double click and say, “Is there something about my approach that I was, uh, overshooting on? Is there something I was trying to hold myself to that just isn’t possible in this life chapter that I can sort of right size the, the commitment level, um, to fit?” And then I think momentum is so important. You know, if you, if, that’s what I heard your kind of in your answer is if you’re breaking momentum, there’s a reason, right? If you’ve fallen out of momentum and how you get back into it, this fresh start is a good way back in but learning what are my mechanisms for getting back into momentum so that you don’t just give up completely.

KE:

That’s right. That’s right. Yeah. I think it’s, and that’s, I think when you’re doing that fresh start, right, we actually say like reflect a little bit. So, it’s like you have to reflect on what like why wasn’t it working or, you know, did I just need a break? Was this, you know, the way that I’m trying to do this right now just too much to your point? So, I think actually understanding and I think really being honest with yourself. Like too often we don’t like to be that honest, right? And so, and this is true in organizations, like because it, it feels like failure. It feels like there might be a performance problem, that kind of stuff. But at the end of the day, if we’re not delivering the outcomes anyway, you might as well take some time, reflect on why it’s really not working so that when you fresh start it, you actually get to sort of better outcomes.

CS:

Yes. So, what have we not covered, if anything, that you think is important for this listener? You know this audience well. Any angle on this that we haven’t addressed?

KE:

Um, I think one of the things that I would just talk about here is, um, the, one of the principles we talk about is measuring emotions rather sort of than intuiting your own feedback. And this was something that has been a pet peeve of mine through all my transformations up until about four years ago, um, and transformation are in change. Most transformation kits or toolkits or change kits will have you look at a heat map of, are we doing too much, this idea of changing fatigue, right? Are we doing too much? And it would actually heat map to say, well, like Sheryl Ann might have 10 initiatives and Christy has five, so Cheryl Ann has too much and Christy doesn’t have enough. Um, and that’s actually just an activity base. It’s not a cognitive load piece. Yeah. And for me, this has been the most frustrating thing because maybe Cheryl Ann can actually handle 12 based on what she’s got going on in her life.

Maybe I have a sick parent at home and five is all I can handle because my cognitive load can only take on so much. And I think this idea of really understanding your cognitive load, and if you’re leading teams, like what is the team’s capacity in cognitive load is the unlock in a transformation and change. And a couple of years ago through our behavioral science lab, I worked with Julia, my co-author, to figure out how could we measure cognitive load, because that is where we really understand how much we can push an organization, how much we can move things, and in some cases, slow things down, but in other cases, actually speed things up because people are actually thriving in that change. And for me, what was really surprising is it actually came down to about 12 emotions. And if you could understand these emotions that you’re feeling, that will actually give you a score that basically says, “Do I have a capacity problem, right?

Do I have a confidence problem?” And that is what equals cognitive load. And so, for me, anytime we’re going through a change or it’s getting hard, I’m constantly checking in now. I’m like, “What are the emotions that I’m feeling?” Because that helps me understand, okay, it’s a capacity problem or it’s a competence problem. So just to make it real. So, if you’re going through a new change and you’re doing something you’ve never done before, you do not feel as confident doing it. So, you might feel anxious, you might feel fear, and it’s going to take more cognitive load. So, trying to take on multiple changes at one time becomes harder because it doesn’t mean you’re not capable. It’s just that you have to – No, you.

CS:

Haven’t done it before.

KE:

Yeah. You just don’t feel confident about it, you know? And so, your ability to do more at that time is going to be limited. And so, understanding that and saying, “There’s nothing wrong with me. I just, until I build my confidence, my cognitive load isn’t there.” And so, my biggest piece of advice here is like understanding emotions and understanding, is it a capacity problem or is it really a confidence problem? Yeah. And therefore, if you work on that, you can actually improve your cognitive load.

CS:

I love this. It dovetails a lot in my work. That is, that’s definitely like you can hear the overlap, right? And I think the idea of how overwhelming things we’ve never done before are, they’re so overwhelming. There is something on our plate that we’ve just never done before. It’s completely overwhelming. Um, and yet once we’ve done it, it’s no longer overwhelming. So therefore, lower cognitive load, because we’ve been through that process before. Yeah. Love it. Yeah. Um, I think that this was great. I want people to have an opportunity to find the book. I’m going to link it in the show notes, right? It’s called, I’m going to hold it up to How Change Really Works. I love this cover design. I’m sure there’s a great story behind this. Um, How Change Really Works, I want everyone to have an opportunity to get it. And Kristy, where is the best place for them to find you online?

I know you have an online presence as well.

KE:

Yep. Um, so Kristy Ellmer, um, on LinkedIn, and then also on Instagram as well.

CS:

Fantastic. Thank you so much for being here today, for taking your time. I know you have a thousand interviews for this book, and it really means a lot to me that you would take time to share it with our audience as well.

KE:

Well, thank you. And thank you for the wonderful foundation you and your team gave me as I continued my own journey of growth. Um, I couldn’t be more grateful for the lessons that I learned and now employ and everything that I do.

CS:

Amazing. Amazing. Well, thank you again. Have a great day.

KE:

Thank you. You too.