Leading Audacious Change

Moving through resistance - at the level of Organisations - with Otti Vogt

June 03, 2021 Marcus Druen Season 3 Episode 3
Leading Audacious Change
Moving through resistance - at the level of Organisations - with Otti Vogt
Show Notes Chapter Markers

In this episode I am speaking with Otti Vogt. According to his LinkedIN handle he is passionate about Igniting the Human Spark to Build Better Businesses & Sustainable Futures.

Until March 2021, Otti was the COO and Chief Transformation Officer for ING’s Challenger & Growth business line. ING is a Top 6 Eurozone Bank by market cap and the C&G line serves 27m retail and wholesale customers in 12 countries. ING is a fairly well-known case study of agile transformation, some of my clients even did a real-life excursion to the Netherlands learn from their both successful and failed experiments.

Prior to that he was the MD for Global Vertical Industries at British Telecom, BT, where he spent over a decade of his international career. Otti speaks five languages!

What really makes Otti special is the combination of his deep intellectual understanding and hands-on experience with what many people call New Work: agile working methods, Teal Organisations, Holacracy, Sociocacy and other forms of self-organisation.

The content is very dense and we cover a lot of ground with many references and name dropping, which underpins Otti’s architecture of thinking and practicing. You’ll find these in the show notes. 

We talk about: 
- the innovator’s dilemma 
- the corporate immune system
- the role of leadership in change
- why and how resistance often starts at the top
- why in this decade a sense and response approach is much needed

Otti gives some practical advice to our podcast personas, Michael and Michaela, on how to move through resistance within the organisations they are leading.

You will hopefully also feel inspired to follow my Call to Action (CTA) – or homework if you like – which comes right after the conversation with Charlotte at the end of this episode (you can check the chapter notes in your app for precise time - if you need a re-listen to take notes).

Links

Simon Weston on eco-leadership

https://www.socialsciencespace.com/2020/03/a-brief-guide-to-eco-leadership/ 

Joseph Campbell: The hero’s journey

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Heros-Journey-Joseph-Campbell-Collected/dp/1608681890

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d1Zxt28ff-E 

Ryan Holiday: The obstacle is the way
http://theobstacleistheway.com/

Dave Snowden: Cynefin Framework and Culture = derivative of a business that you can’t change directly

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N7oz366X0-8

https://www.ropesgray.com/en/newsroom/podcasts/2020/June/Podcast-Culture-Compliance-Chronicles-Measuring-Culture

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cynefin_framework 

John King: Tribal Leadership

https://www.triballeadership.net/ 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=smaLc4NLPQY 

Amy Edmondson on psychological safety in self-organisation

https://fearlessorganization.com/

John Kotter: Don’t declare victory too early

https://hbr.org/1995/05/leading-change-why-transformation-efforts-fail-2 

 Alex Osterwalder on Ambidextrous Organisations

Otti's opening nugget plus my podcast, season and episode intros
Warm up questions on leadership, audacity, bold choices in his life and letting go of your ego and external approval
Exploring the season topic: moving through resistance, what it means from a psycho-dynamic perspective, common patterns in organisations
What business executives resist, why you can't change culture directly, change = existential threat to status, power, sense of belonging and direction
Importance of fairness, the problem with leader's 'empowering' employees, three lives (career phases)
Sense & respond vs. predict & control approaches to change, Dave Snowden's Cynefin Matrix, power's resistance to decentralisation
leadership, psychological safety and agency in self-organisation, plus the innovator's dilemma and the corporate immune system
Ambidextruous organisations, Kodak's death, outgrowing your problems, creating new incentives, why Otti thinks Milton Friedmann was wrong
Agile at enterprise level: Otti's tips for our podcast personas Michael and Michaela
Otti's billboard and his wish for my next conversation with Margaret Heffernan on moving through resistance at the level of the economy
My call-to-action for you: investigate your corporate immune system incl. 10 typical phenomena to observe
Outlook next episode and Outro with contact details