BLOG

Josh Schachter:

Hi, everybody, and welcome to this episode of Unchurned. I’m Josh Schachter, your host and founder and CEO of blog.update.ai. I’m really excited to be here today with Dr. Wendy Smith. Wendy is the author, her and Marian Lewis are the authors of both and thinking, embracing creative tensions to solve your toughest problems. Wendy’s a professor at the University of Delaware. She holds a PhD in organizational behavior from Harvard Business School. And she and Marianne Lewis are considered the foremost thinkers really in leadership and decision-making and how to navigate when you’ve got competing demands which we all do in the business world and at the leadership level. I thought this would be a great conversation because we have so many customer success folks out there and listeners who are really aspiring to Keep growing through the ranks and as you do that decision-making is tough Wendy, thank you so much for being on the program. Josh. Thank you for having me So in your book you kind of quickly go into some really cool case studies about decision-making, difficult decision-making at Lego and other really well-reputed brands. And you talk about how all this stuff really boils down to paradoxes.

Wendy Smith:

Explain that. What is a paradox for starters? Josh, I love that you jumped right into the heart of the matter and if any of your listeners are listening to this conversation and drift off at the end here’s the big idea. The big idea is exactly where you started with the intro which I love which is that we all face challenges, tensions, competing demands, tug of wars, conflicts, that it’s not if we do so, it is how, how we do so. And in order to get there, we have to turn our understanding of our challenges on their head. So what we argue, what we find, what we’ve been doing this research for a number of years is that if we start with the word tensions, tensions are something we all experience. We experience them often as detrimental. We would argue that tensions just exist, competing demands between what I want, what someone else wants, competing demands between what I want now or what I want in the future. Tug of wars about my career and my life or about how I navigate customers and my relationships with them. Those are neither good nor bad. It’s how we deal with them. They show up for us as these dilemmas that sort of pull us into wanting to make an either or choice. Either I get something or you get something, either I do what’s right now or I do what’s right for the long-term. They sort of demand of us in either our choice. And we can talk about, if we want, the psychology behind why we get pulled into that either our choice. But, and Importantly, what we argue is that in order for us to get to a better choice, we have to look underneath those dilemmas, and underneath those dilemmas are these paradoxes. And paradoxes are these competing ideas, these dualities, these opposing forces that are not just opposing, they’re also interdependent with 1 another. So if we think, for example, about tensions that we feel in navigating challenges with our customers, and I know that we’ll get into a couple of these in more specific details, underlying some of those tensions might be this enduring interdependent relationship between what I need for myself and what I need for outside myself, the customer, the other. And those kinds of self-other tensions pop up all the time, or what I need for right now and what I need for the future, which create sometimes is in conflict or intention or what I need for myself and what my company needs for me in terms of the metrics and expectations that they have of me. Those underlying paradoxes, if we can look at them, invite us into a different way to think about the issues or tensions.

Josh Schachter:

There’s so many paradoxes and tensions in the world of customer success, customer experience teams. 1 that comes to mind, and we’ll go through a few of these, 1 that comes to mind is, it’s funny, I actually had this in our pitch deck for blog.update.ai that exposed just the macro issue that we’re, 1 of the issues that we’re trying to help solve. Customer success teams are generally speaking, I’m a little bit shy of making this generalization, but generally speaking, they are under-resourced and under-budgeted. And at the same time, especially now in this current economic climate, which, you know, hopefully we’re climbing out of, but they’re being pushed to do more, you know, so companies are all hands on deck to retain customers. We have to hold on to our existing customers, customer success managers, you are the superheroes of revenues for B2B SaaS companies. Oh, but by the way, like we’re cutting your headcount, or do you really need that tool that enablement tool? Because you know, budgets are really tight. There’s this constant tension is what I see in the industry. And we can talk about that. 1 thing that strikes me is like in that particular example, it’s not necessarily under your control, right? You’re being pushed and pulled by an outsider. So How would you deal with that type of a paradox?

Wendy Smith:

Yes, I wanna say 2 things about this, and by the way, they might be in conflict with each other. The first thing that I wanna say is that part of both-and thinking, well, so let me just take a step back. If we see paradoxes underlying our tensions, then how do we shift? And the invitation and the reason that we name the book Both-And Thinking is because we invite people to shift from an either-or approach to a both-and approach. And so part of this both-and thinking is indeed Noticing that 1 of the reasons that we live into this either or is because of resource constraints, because we have limited time, financial resources, and those feel like a 0 sum game. So the invitation, you know, for example, In the example that you used, we have fewer resources and more expectation. Well, how could we revamp, revise, rethink our experience of resources so that they don’t feel scarce, they feel abundant, so that we can lean into this both and. So that might look like, okay, we have fewer people, but we have larger expectations of what we need to get done. How can we rethink how we resource people and their time and their experiences to be more efficient or to be more engaging or to be more effective in the kind of work that they’re doing? How can we work on the higher, not priority work, but the higher output work and let go of and maybe find other ways to get done some of the, you know, easier work that other people can do. How can we just be more creative in our application of resources so that there is this abundant approach? We expand the value of our time and our people and our money before we say, okay, we’ve only got X number of hours in a day to a lot. So, so there is part of this both and thinking is indeed being more creative in our resourcing. And here I’ll, I’ll go back to a great book that I love by my colleague, our colleague, Scott Sonenshine, where his book, Stretch, invites us into how do we stretch the value of our resources so that we’re not in a 0 something. I want to go into the double click there. But like, what I heard from what you just said was,

Josh Schachter:

step 1 is take a deep breath and like you know like and just think level-headedly about um don’t don’t don’t don’t panic just clear your head and and because you need that to be creative like you you referenced to to think about workarounds Is that a big part of this also? Is the psychology of dealing with paradoxes? Yeah,

Wendy Smith:

indeed. Yes, you’re speaking to sort of 1 of the big pieces for us and what I think is a big component of the book that often gets overlooked. When we talk about navigating paradoxes and we in the book we put together the system these 4 sort of sets of tools. 1 of them is how we think about things and 1 of them is exactly what you’re talking about how do we feel in our emotional experience of things. So what we argue, what we find in the research is that our emotions, our anxieties, our underlying panic will often drive us to act in ways that, again, will trigger this kind of either or frustrated, defensive, responsive, you know, feeling that says all these tensions are problematic and they’re detrimental and they’re, as opposed to wait, there’s possibility here. And exactly what you said, we go straight to that. We call it finding comfort in the discomfort, which what we mean is recognizing that we feel this discomfort, we feel this panic, we feel this fear, and how do we just pause and honor that, acknowledge that, but not let it define and drive how we’re going to act and how we’re going to think about this problem. So take a deep breath is like number 1 process to do that. Number 1 practice of like, it’s gonna be okay and I’m just gonna pause for a minute, build in a pause so that I don’t act, so that I acknowledge that fear but don’t act on it. I want to build in a pause right now for yourself and I, Wendy,

Josh Schachter:

and all of our listeners. I want to take a big deep breath because paradoxes are not, we’re all feeling tensions all the time. So we’re going to take a deep breath right now And then we’re going to move on. Ready? All right. So, now that we’re all in a relaxed state, I’ve actually noticed myself that when I’m facing tensions and paradoxes, a lot of times my team has helped me get out of that. We’ve been able to brainstorm the workarounds together in ways where I may have panicked more just thinking about the different scenarios on my own. Is there any literature and research about teamwork in that sense?

Wendy Smith:

Teams, I think, could go either way. We could easily be swayed by our teams to go into more of a panic and we are surrounded by some of those people or we could find that our teams create the… And or what we can what will happen is we can find that our teams end up in conflict and therefore create even more of this kind of competing tensions. We talk about that as the vicious cycle of trench warfare, meaning that there’s groups on either side of a position and they intensify their opposition and get into opposing ideas because they’re on either side of an opposition and they get defensive. This sort of polarized experience, this conflict experience or, you know, I love that you have a team that you’re surrounded by that can help you pause and think the bigger picture. What we find though, is that for leaders to help their teams get there, it is about using language, metaphors, ideas on an ongoing basis to pull people out of their sort of narrowed either or thinking and into the bigger picture. And that requires leaders constantly saying to their teams, hey, you know, we’re in this either or of should we spend resources on this or resources or that, or should we launch now or launch later into, okay, what’s the both and here? So it’s asking, it’s asking the questions, it’s repetitively asking the questions, it’s reminding people that there’s value in anding. We have 1 leader who uses this example. This is from W.L. Gorin Associates, and this is Terry Kelly, who is the CEO there. And she would tell her senior leaders, you know, we’ve got to both think about today and tomorrow. We’ve got to be both sort of down in the weeds in small teams and enterprise-wide. And the reason we have to do both is it’s like breathing. We’re back to take a breath. It’s like breathing, you have to, in order to live, you have to breathe in and breathe out. It’s not 1 or the other. So I think that’s right. I think leaders and teams can reinforce this kind of thinking, but we have to be, and we have to be intentional

Josh Schachter:

about it on an ongoing basis. We had Kelly Leonard on on the show recently, and he connected us, actually. And he, of course, wrote the book Yes, And, which is relates to improvisational thinking. And that’s kind of picked up over the past years, this yes and thinking. It feels like also what you’re saying is 1 of the tactical ways for leaders to create this environment is just to make that the mantra, just literally like post that up in the scrum room, in the conference room, if people are still going into physical space but both and thinking I mean that’s the title of your book but just to literally make that a principle an operating principle of your team both and thinking. Yeah it’s you know I even I even find myself doing I caught myself in a couple times in our conversation so far your listeners can go back and listen. And sometimes when we go to the but, you know, I will, I find myself going, even in my own mind, wait, not but, and, and, and,

Wendy Smith:

you know, the mantra for us is change the question. So yeah, it’s both and thinking. It starts with change the question. So I recognize even notice how often do we frame our questions as a or B. Okay. Should I spend time on this or that? Should I be focused on what my customers need for the moment or what they’re gonna need for the future and how to develop and advance into the future. Should I think about what my customers need or what my company needs? And as soon as we frame it as an either or it just gets pitted against 1 another and expects this very quick, not easy, but this expects of us an either or decision, expects us to make a choice. And if we can change the question, okay, how can I achieve what my customers need for today and be starting to explore for tomorrow? How can I build a relationship in which I advance my company and build trust and connection to my customers? As soon as we reframe into that and what we know from our research, what we know from psychology, what we know is that it invites us into a whole different mindset. It expands our thinking and invites us into much more creative possibilities.

Josh Schachter:

I love that. You know, as you were talking, I was thinking I was almost going to cut you off, which I just kind of did, but and say, you know, but, you know, how do you do that? How do you how do you balance the future and the present and don’t those, you know, but but but like isn’t are you going to be overwhelmed trying to do both? And then you said it right there. You just changed the question. It’s not, you know, it’s not are you going to be overwhelmed with trying to do both? And then you said it right there. You just changed the question. It’s not, you know, it’s not, are you going to be overwhelmed with both? How are you able, how much you be able to deal with both? So yeah,

Wendy Smith:

it leaves space and acceptance. It does. I think this goes back to where we had started earlier on less time, less money, less resources, doing more. And the caveat I wanted to put on that 1 is both and, and I’ve had this conversation several times. In fact, I just posted on social media about this because both and doesn’t mean and and. It doesn’t mean you keep adding and adding and adding until your plate is overflowing and about to break. Because sometimes both and people in the name of both and are just adding. Both and requires boundaries and creative thinking about how these competing ideas can work in a better, more creative way, in an integrative way, in a more succinct way or in a more efficient way so that you can really value more. But it doesn’t mean that you just add and add and add. And I say that in part because I think I have, you know, I certainly have some empathy for, it doesn’t mean that employees should be told do more and more and more in the exact same way you’ve always been doing things with fewer and fewer resources. That just feels almost abusive in the extreme or demanding and in a less extreme way. So I wanna be clear that it’s not and, and we should just add, it’s a process by which we start with the, how can we question and then move on and we can talk about what would come next into a more creative possibility for how you approach these tensions? Yeah, I mean, how do we move on and at the same time keep those boundaries? Yeah, so the first step is change the question. The second and third step, the second step is what we call separate and connect. The third step is choice and choosing, or moving to choosing or rethinking the outcomes. So if the first step is framing a question, how can we both address what we need as a company or address what we need as an employee and somebody who’s working on customer success and build a trusting relationship with our client and customers. And then the next step is, OK, separate, meaning let’s pull apart what we each need and why they are in conflict. And really acknowledging that. Sometimes people in both anding will go straight to, what’s the integrative synergy? What’s the ways in which we can find a win-win? Well, we can’t really find a win-win until we first understand and recognize what each side needs. If anybody listening has studied negotiations, this is a classic turn of negotiations. You first have to understand the interests of each side, the interest of the different demands, either in your attention or your relationship with other people before you can find the synergy. So that’s the separate part. And sometimes that involves the basic practice of just listening, right? I mean, I’m sure, and I’m not in your world, but I can only imagine that in the customer success world, listening to your customers is big. Giving them the space to share, you know, Sometimes it’s just listening and articulating and understanding what is valued on each side in service of looking for points of connection, finding ways in which there is an integrative possibility along the way. So that’s step 2, and I’ll just lay out step 3 and then we can do a deep dive in any of these pieces. The third piece is rethinking what the outcomes look like. And we talk about 2 different types of outcomes. So if in a typical approach, which we’re contrasting against an either-or, you frame it as an either-or question, you pull it apart, you analyze, you make a pro-con list in service of making a choice between the alternative options. Instead, we talk about moving from a choice to choosing. And here’s what we mean by that. We mean 2 different things. We either mean that you found some solution where there is a win-win and both things can be accommodated in a way that they are both valued at the same time. And so we talk about that win-win, we talk about it as a creative integration or with the metaphor of a mule, because the mule is the oldest living hybrid that we have biologically been bringing together. It’s, you know, smarter than a donkey, faster than a horse. We’ve been bringing together horses and donkeys to create mules for like 3000 years. So it’s better than both. And it’s this win-win option that happens sometimes. And what we find, and this goes back to the very first research project that I did on senior teens at IBM trying to innovate for my dissertation when I was at Harvard, it doesn’t happen all that often that we look for these win-wins. They’re great when we find them, but more often we do what we talk about as tightrope walking or being consistently inconsistent. And what that means is that we are often making choices, these choices between these alternative options, but we’re making choices, not that we are over choosing 1 side or over choosing the other, we’re making them in these kind of micro shifting between these options over time so that we can stay with both over the context of multiple decisions. And so it’s like the tightrope walker because a tightrope walker in order to get to the end has to focus on a longer term horizon, some point off in the distance in order to stay on the tightrope. They’re never fully balanced. They are balancing in that they’re shifting left and right, but they are not overemphasizing 1 side or overemphasizing the other. The same is true, for example, if you are in a conversation with a customer and you’re trying to figure out what you need out of it, what they need out of it. You wanna build a trusting relationship. Maybe there is this ideal point where you get exactly what you both need, but sometimes we’re shifting to my needs in this moment and I want to sell you and give you the example of what I sometimes you’re shifting to focusing on what their needs are in this moment and really doing a deep dive into their needs and it’s making these micro shifts of choosing along the way And we talk about that as being consistently inconsistent, because over time,

Josh Schachter:

you’re really accommodating both. But in the moment, you’re making these micro shifts back and forth. Yeah, I almost visualize that. It’s not linear. It’s just like kind of footprints going all over the place right here, But with intentionality. Let’s talk about another scenario with this context and this framework that you’ve given us here. 1 that there’s a lot of just constant conversation about in the customer success post-sales industry, which is the primary intention of the primary business outcome of customer success teams is to renew and to sell to retain their customers. But they’re also at the front lines with the customer for the good reason of building a harmonic, supportive, genuine relationship. And that can be at odds with selling to the person. And so there’s this kind of, there’s these different camps and schools of thought around, should a customer success manager own the renewal and selling process, or should they actually be divorced from that so that they can be pristine in their relationship building with the customer and then the salesperson can swoop in for the kill, so to speak? What are your thoughts? Like, how would you apply what we just discussed, this framework, to that, you know, perennial debate within CS?

Wendy Smith:

The question that I would ask is 1 about time frame and time horizon, as I think about that. And what I mean by that is in the work that we did, we interviewed Paul Pullman. Paul Pullman was the CEO of Unilever, introducing a massive turnaround for Unilever by introducing a sustainable living plan and essentially seeking to achieve and in fact doubling profits, not despite, not alongside, but through a commitment to a sustainability agenda around environmental impact and social impact. And has really, it’s very provocative And 1 of the things that he noted early on in that experience was how much short-term metrics, quarterly reporting was creating behaviors in which people were very much thinking about short-term relationships. And that creates this kind of either or experience because in the short term, in the very moment, there is this, you know, who’s, is the customer gonna buy or are they not? How do I get them quicker to buying or to renewing or to engaging in that way. But if we think about what does it mean to establish a relationship for the customer over the long run, it gives us a lot more flexibility of what’s possible in that relationship. Now, this might sound heretical because, and to be fair, what Paul Pullman did, and this was, you know, really dramatic, if you will, in the context of business, he basically told the market, I’m not giving you quarterly reports. I’m just not, I’m not gonna be getting on quarterly calls. I’m not gonna be giving quarterly reports because that’s just driving too much detrimental behavior in the company. It’s not allowing people to think more broadly, creatively, generatively, in terms of the relationships that they’re building and how we are implementing this kind of strategy. So it might sound like heresy and to the extent that people have, you know very short term metrics that they’re being measured on that creates some problems in terms of the possibility of how we build this relationship with our customer because They might, you know, what we really need from them is this long-term relationship that we’re trying to achieve where they might end up buying a whole lot over a longer period of time. But what we’re so pressed to do is to get them to purchase right now, right here, that we might actually lose them along the way. So 1 of the invitations is whether can either as individuals that are listening to this as company leaders that are listening to this or from an industry wide perspective, think about what it would look like to push time horizons out in terms of our metrics to enable us to get to more creative ways of engaging. And it sounds like from what you said a moment ago that

Josh Schachter:

you, tell me if I’m right on this or not, you would be supportive of customer success teams owning renewal as well because you can be nurturing the relationship in 1 moment, but then you can be agile and in a different moment be, you know, so supporting your customer 1 moment, but then also supporting your company’s needs in another moment and be more in that sales position. Like you were saying, like it doesn’t have to be consistently inconsistent, like you had mentioned. Yeah, so I would say maybe the academic in me would say, well, I would want a little bit more empirical

Wendy Smith:

experience with this, you know, your industry and your experiences in order to understand that. There are different schools of thought in terms of the value of having very different roles and responsibilities versus bringing them together. And there’s this language around being ambidextrous, which is around structurally pulling apart these responsibilities so people can have real different focus, but then figuring out who needs to pull that together. I think that what we find in our research is the important, and there’s also schools of thought around the value of giving people the ability to kind of manage, and by the, sorry, the reason to pull it apart is partially that it’s really complicated for individuals to be able to manage both. And there’s a school of thought that says actually we can train and enable individuals to live into that more complicated approach and There’s value in bringing it together For us the key idea is is that over the system where there might be different individuals that somebody is really focused on these 2 different kinds of expectations and somebody is pulling it together and thinking about, again, separating and connecting, but that that happens. And whether it’s the same person or whether it’s different people, I think depends on the context of the system and the experience you have with your people and how to navigate and train them to be able to think more in a more complex way. And that would scaffold up to your chief revenue officer and or your chief customer officer, which would be kind of looking at it from both perspectives. So if you were in those shoes,

Josh Schachter:

how exactly might you make that decision for your team? What kind of, I know you don’t have quite so much empirical

Wendy Smith:

evidence on this right now, but like, how would you break that down? Well, I think importantly, if I asked my my if I was the chief revenue officer, the chief strategy officer, whoever this was rolling up to that you were talking about, what I would want to know is if I am going to invite the people on my team to be able to embrace both this renewal and engagement relationship as well as the sale. How can I help them learn the skills? And in my world, it’s the skills of both anding long-term thinking, building in a pause, changing the question, thinking about how the relationship is not just instrumental and like, you know, about the cell, but also about this long-term relationship and how do I think about that and listening skills and how do I teach those skills to the people that I’m asking to do that. So it’s partially who does it, and it’s partially am I empowering them with the skills that they need? And 1 of those skills is living into paradox, living into the both and in order to be able to do that. Sounds like you would be a very supportive

Josh Schachter:

executive for these companies. Wendy, we’re going to leave it at that. I really enjoyed the conversation. I think that our listeners are going to get a lot of value from it. And Where can they find your book, Both Anne Thinking? Yes,

Wendy Smith:

well, you know, any place that they buy books. And we have a website that is called bothannethinking.net, bothannethinking.net. And we welcome any feedback or reactions. There’s a page there to be in touch with us. We welcome any reactions, thoughts. They can find how they can connect with both myself and Mary Ann Lewis, my co-author on social media. We’re active out there and love hearing reactions, feedbacks, thoughts, applications

Josh Schachter:

along the way. I read it myself, thought it was a great, great read, and I highly recommend it to listeners out there. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks, Josh.