[11:36:00:17 – 11:36:08:15]
Lochner Eksteen
the normal. Some people and watch previous episodes, you’ll have to introduce yourself again just quickly a background. We are the guide on the table.
[11:36:08:15 – 11:36:22:01]
Carien Human
So my name is Karine. I’m a psychologist here in Johannesburg. And I don’t know that much about AI and tech, but a little bit more about psychology, I guess.
[11:36:23:09 – 11:36:23:15]
Lochner Eksteen
Walter?
[11:36:23:15 – 11:36:29:02]
Wilfred Greyling
Wilfred Kralen. I’m a software architect, systems architect.
[11:36:30:19 – 11:36:40:05]
Wilfred Greyling
I am currently framed as that very founder that I might be talking about. So it’s an interesting journey. I’ve been through the loop a few times.
[11:36:41:05 – 11:36:46:16]
Wilfred Greyling
And let’s see what happens this round. So this is an interesting conversation to have. I’m looking forward to it.
[11:36:46:16 – 11:36:47:17]
Lochner Eksteen
Awesome. Thank you.
[11:36:48:17 – 11:37:03:04]
Lurinda Maree
And the end up? Do you end up? I’m Maria. I’m an industrial psychologist, a blood-theatric specialist. And I work with systems psychodynamics. So in this system, I’m figuring out what’s actually going on under the surface.
[11:37:03:04 – 11:37:03:17]
Lochner Eksteen
Amazing.
[11:37:05:19 – 11:37:12:17]
Lochner Eksteen
And it’s the conversation, right? That is the idea of the first post-podcast, is to speak to executives,
[11:37:13:23 – 11:37:23:02]
Lochner Eksteen
but not just in corporate, but so as customers, as well as businesses in South Africa, about that play off between systems and people.
[11:37:24:13 – 11:37:29:00]
Lochner Eksteen
And so you guys are a great balance for us today.
[11:37:31:02 – 11:37:31:09]
Lochner Eksteen
Wilfred,
[11:37:32:22 – 11:37:51:09]
Lochner Eksteen
the reason I asked you to come, on very short notice, and thanks for that, is you’ve been watching businesses from the outside mostly as a systems architect, looking into businesses, smaller medium corporates, banks, for a while now.
[11:37:51:09 – 11:37:54:10]
Wilfred Greyling
Do we have to disclose that? Yes, please.
[11:37:56:15 – 11:38:01:05]
Wilfred Greyling
I would say, okay, well, I think we need to reframe it maybe a little bit, because
[11:38:02:11 – 11:38:04:15]
Wilfred Greyling
I always had my own businesses.
[11:38:06:12 – 11:38:12:20]
Wilfred Greyling
And in there, you sort of learn interesting things of what to do and what not to do, but the hardest possible way.
[11:38:14:00 – 11:38:14:09]
Wilfred Greyling
Because we,
[11:38:15:23 – 11:38:40:08]
Wilfred Greyling
as business owners, you can’t hear or see anything that anybody else tells you, because you must know, you are clever and you understand and you’ve got your plan and don’t come and tell me what to do. So I’ve been that guy and I am that guy and I’m trying to not be that guy. So I’ve always been inside the business, trying to make it work as best as I can.
[11:38:41:13 – 11:38:50:14]
Wilfred Greyling
And I’ve spent some time, thanks to you actually, to look at businesses from the outside as an architect and see how they operate.
[11:38:51:16 – 11:39:23:05]
Wilfred Greyling
And that was six years or so that that made sense. But the majority of time, I was on the other side of the fence. So I’m enjoying the dynamic of seeing both sides of the story in a way and trying to see how I can learn and how I can help other people to also cross that divide, because it feels like that. As a founder where you can’t see where you must go, even though you think you know where you must go. So I don’t even, did that answer your question?
[11:39:23:05 – 11:39:44:04]
Lochner Eksteen
There’s a follow up question on that is, at which point does the founder become the risk? Because you know when you are, let’s take your position as a systems architect helping a business implement systems. Number one, why do they want to implement systems?
[11:39:45:04 – 11:39:48:14]
Lochner Eksteen
And is it because of this risk, this founder’s risk? Just talk to us a little bit.
[11:39:48:14 – 11:39:57:16]
Wilfred Greyling
I would say it’s got, again, it’s got multiple angles. When you have a business,
[11:39:58:16 – 11:40:59:11]
Wilfred Greyling
and this is for me, I’m talking from my angle, and I’m going to get to the architect side in a minute. I just want to frame it from the side that I’m feeling at the moment. So I’m sitting in a new business now where we’re building up a thing. And I can feel it. I can feel that I’m resisting those processes and you become part of the workflow essentially. And that is such a huge risk. But in the start, you have to do that because if you are not in the workflow, then nothing happens and nothing moves. So is that fine balance of knowing when you switch out to the next layer of things? So when you look at it from an architect perspective, is to try and identify what phase the business is in. Like where are they? How far have they gone? Which things have they established? And there’s a very other interesting conversation that I’m dying to hear where you see the things that you can’t see.
[11:41:00:17 – 11:41:10:17]
Wilfred Greyling
But where are they? And what has been tied down? And what just flows as I think is a natural flow, which starts establishing those
[11:41:11:21 – 11:42:02:04]
Wilfred Greyling
issues where you become part of the workflow as a founder. And I think that’s the risk that develops over time and the mechanism of how you break out of that without feeling like you’re losing control, without feeling like you’re letting go of your business so that you’re always here that you have to let go as a founder. But it’s not true that you have to let go. You can only let go if there’s something else that carries the thing. So I can let you do a thing if you were working with me. I could let you do a thing on your own without having to approve it only if there is a foundational layer underneath that that supports these things. And that’s where the systems come into the process is to make sure that when you let go as the founder,
[11:42:03:08 – 11:42:27:10]
Wilfred Greyling
that thing lands nicely and solidly and it can carry on. And they are not just you as the founder looking at it saying, I have to see that this thing goes the right way. But other people can also visibly see that the thing is following the right path. That’s where the systems get it through. But it’s also the place where the founder struggles to let that go because those things are often not in place.
[11:42:27:10 – 11:42:48:17]
Lochner Eksteen
I mentioned earlier just before we got this solid is the idea of the concept when I was reading through the notes again this morning, my thing that I like to do is freedom is love. Because, you know, you’re learning a personal life that if you you’re in your home, or in a relationship, if you try and control it, that’s not love.
[11:42:48:17 – 11:42:49:09]
Wilfred Greyling
Yeah.
[11:42:49:09 – 11:42:54:05]
Lochner Eksteen
Love is freedom. And that freedom could be that you choose against me.
[11:42:55:07 – 11:43:07:10]
Lochner Eksteen
I should give you that freedom. So because in the home we are, we are, but we are the same people in this business. I’m just wondering, on your side, the invisible architecture.
[11:43:08:18 – 11:43:14:00]
Lochner Eksteen
Because that’s really what drives most of these businesses or organizations.
[11:43:15:18 – 11:43:17:14]
Lochner Eksteen
You mentioned emotional contracts.
[11:43:19:05 – 11:43:35:14]
Lochner Eksteen
Talk to us a little bit about that. Because I mean, we, your focus, I know, and that’s all I want you to play in on the system side. I want you to balance that with this emotional contracts and invisible architecture. I listen to lane to that. Founders risk.
[11:43:35:14 – 11:45:38:09]
Lurinda Maree
Yeah, as I was listening to speak, I was thinking about the fact that these, the system psychodynamic lens incorporates boundaries authority role in task. And thinking through how you talking a lot about how do I redefine redefine my boundary all the time. And play my role all the time. And how do we make that visible and conscious so that people can know what’s the ask. And I think that’s the biggest thing is nobody, people assume they know what the ask is. But they’re not really talking about what the ask is, because it’s sometimes painful, or there’s the risk in or three ends. So they, they just work on this. So let’s say the situation you just described, you’re at that point where you know, you need to get out more out of the operations into the strategic and allow the workflow to go on their own. You know that and it exists in your mind. So we call it organization in the mind, it’s the, they have another organization in their minds, where you are now part of this. So separating with mean loss, so they don’t want to talk about it. Although they might be a known unknown, they might know that, you know, in the unconscious, you actually already know that you’re going to separate at some time, but they don’t want to deal with it. You know, you need to go away, but you you might also be very scared that they’re not going to be okay without you. So these three on both sides, these, but nobody’s talking about it, you’re trying to strategically figure out when do I move? What’s the best time? Because the moment that we bring this to the surface, and we’re talking about it, it’s going to be painful. And to your point, then there’s the freedom of saying, but I don’t want you to go, I still need you. And there might be conflict. So that’s the other part of the bi or T’s CNI is conflict and identity. So we’ve not we have an identity now, and you’re going to disrupt that. And I don’t want that. So that’s actually what’s going on. But how do you put that in words, if there’s no words? There’s no language for that. So we need to create the language.
[11:45:38:09 – 11:46:01:18]
Lochner Eksteen
So what I’m getting is, you know, this is a lot of customers who’s, you know, when you talk about a founder in a business, some founders lost longer in the flow. And other some are maybe a second round in business, I need to exit early. And then it’s less painful. But some guys stay the CEO, all these thousands of people work in there. And he’s in the phone, all of a sudden, some business coach tells him, hey,
[11:46:03:08 – 11:46:06:02]
Lochner Eksteen
and always, always relationships are going to waste.
[11:46:07:09 – 11:46:23:11]
Lochner Eksteen
You need to exit, then he’s thinking, okay, well, for me to exit, I need to implement my flow thoughts into systems, so that some alter ego of my we can still exist via these systems. Is that what you think happened?
[11:46:23:11 – 11:46:24:06]
Wilfred Greyling
Yeah.
[11:46:25:19 – 11:46:46:15]
Wilfred Greyling
So on the second and third rounds, I think you start doing it earlier on, where you now know that moment is coming. Yeah, there’s also, I mean, I enjoy Daniel Priestly, he’s an allergy of where you know, you’re in the wilderness where you’re trying to work out what your business is. And then you live inside a,
[11:46:47:22 – 11:46:50:02]
Wilfred Greyling
what is the thing called?
[11:46:51:04 – 11:46:56:19]
Wilfred Greyling
I can’t remember now, can you believe it? Anyway, so this is your comfort zone, where you’ve got a
[11:46:57:23 – 11:47:53:06]
Wilfred Greyling
business that makes a lot of money. And the people can all talk to each other and information flows freely. And it is comfortable to work inside that space. Then when you say I’m leaving this business, and I’m moving to a high performance business, you cross a desert. And I think you’ve spoken about a desert as well, that that journey where you leave your, your comfort business, and you move to high performance business, and you’re traveling through the desert, that is your that’s where you die. I’ve died there. I think one and a half times. I have seen other businesses die in the desert. And it’s so sad, because you’ve got everything going on. And it’s all working. But because you’re not changing the way you’re thinking about how you’re supposed to put those systems in place, which sort of captures not who you are, but what the business is actually about.
[11:47:54:06 – 11:48:04:16]
Wilfred Greyling
You shouldn’t be so pivotal that it can’t be put into a system. And anyway, so the point is that that going through the desert is the hardest part.
[11:48:05:17 – 11:49:17:12]
Wilfred Greyling
And this is the piece that you want to get right. So, so there are lots of phases to this. Obviously, it’s not just you just arrive at the end, you have to go through a journey. Now, the business exists in it offers a special thing, we make these cups and they are black, and they are special because of this. And that’s the thing that you focus on as a founder. So how do we make these cups better? But behind that or underneath that lives the entirety of business that is supposed to exist. In addition to the cup that lives on top of that, that is the piece that you do. Now as a founder or as a business, if you’re looking only at how you deal with the cup, you forget about all the other bits. But they’re like the things that must be there. And we hate them because they are boring and it’s accounting and it’s knowledge management, it’s HR, it’s all those things that we don’t want to do. But if you don’t do them or at least acknowledge that you are not doing them, and that is part of the process, once you’ve got that solid foundation, then go climb your mountain when at least you’ve seen these bits. And you know that if I ask something of someone, if I’m the leader,
[11:49:18:12 – 11:49:41:16]
Wilfred Greyling
I should trust that they can do their job. Or if they need to do their thing that they need to do, they shouldn’t have to come to me or to you or anybody else to say, “How do I do my work?” The work must be visible. You must be able to see that. And in recent times that’s been one of the hardest problems is to see where the work is. And that makes people feel like,
[11:49:42:22 – 11:49:56:22]
Wilfred Greyling
“I’m not doing my job because I can’t find the work.” But to find the work, you need to understand what goes on in the shadows. And you don’t know that game and you don’t want to play that game, but it affects your surroundings. So anyway,
[11:49:58:20 – 11:50:13:20]
Wilfred Greyling
you want to make sure that when you build a business, you care about those boring things. And if you can systemize it, then you don’t have to worry about it. It is handled. And you can focus on the cup that you want to make better.
[11:50:13:20 – 11:50:22:02]
Lochner Eksteen
I think that’s an interesting question. Is it a fallacy to think that you can systematize many of those things?
[11:50:23:19 – 11:50:43:01]
Lochner Eksteen
I think there’s some exchanges. What I see is you get a business requirement document, you read through it and you’re like, “Hmm, that looks like somebody’s job once.” And now they want to put that into a system where somebody needs to capture something or have a multi-select…
[11:50:44:19 – 11:50:57:13]
Lochner Eksteen
Does it work? Because 90% of system implementations fail. There’s no adoption. Is it because we are trying to put stuff flows into systems that should really be done by people?
[11:50:59:07 – 11:51:17:18]
Wilfred Greyling
Correct. And I know this is not an AI discussion, but this is part of the AI problem also because it all falls that way. And somehow we want to take the human out of it. And that’s not the correct approach. We need to amplify the people so that they are stronger and they’re not sidelined in the whole process.
[11:51:17:18 – 11:51:20:00]
Lochner Eksteen
That’s tricky. What are you hearing?
[11:51:20:00 – 11:51:23:17]
Carien Human
I’m slow. I’m still coming.
[11:51:25:01 – 11:51:40:06]
Carien Human
Can I just go one step back? Because the first thing I want to ask you is, I like this. You go into the desert, you’re talking about smaller businesses and then you call it high performance businesses.
[11:51:41:14 – 11:51:45:01]
Carien Human
How do you know that you’re there? It’s time now.
[11:51:45:01 – 11:52:07:08]
Wilfred Greyling
You have to consciously understand it. So you have to know… I had a client just the other day and I asked him, do you want to be a lifestyle business where it’s a smaller team and you guys are tightly knit or do you want to be a high performance business where it’s… Of course, I want to be a high performance business. But that is just…
[11:52:08:16 – 11:52:41:05]
Wilfred Greyling
I think he said that because that’s an expectation of what business should be. It’s that you should always be working to be this big operation with these millions of people and high turnover. But the reward is not always there. You can have a lifestyle business where you are way more happy and you can go home to your family and your kids and not be dead and not have to think about work every five seconds of what threat is coming in and whatever. And that’s a lifestyle business and there’s value in that.
[11:52:42:06 – 11:53:25:12]
Wilfred Greyling
And to move to the next layer, you have to say, guys, we are going into the desert and this is going to be the journey and this is what I think it is. Can I have your input? How do we get through this thing? And you work together with your people to get to the other side and everybody must know that you’re leaving this space where we spoke to each other around the lunch meeting spot and everybody had context to a place where we need to distribute the context in a different way because we are leaving this happy space. But we are leaving this happy space because we understand that this other thing we’re going to is a thing we want. So don’t go to the other thing if that’s not what you want either. So that’s why I say it’s a conscious decision.
[11:53:25:12 – 11:53:32:02]
Carien Human
But what I’m hearing is the overlap between the two of you saying if as the founder leader I realize,
[11:53:33:10 – 11:53:48:19]
Carien Human
I don’t know if it’s always voluntary, but you are growing to the point of changing from a lifestyle business to something bigger, that you actually sit the people down and you say to everyone that’s what you said, bringing it to consciousness.
[11:53:48:19 – 11:54:01:08]
Lochner Eksteen
So my experience is that happens most often when a leader or a executive burns out. Normally in a state of burnout, it triggers that.
[11:54:01:08 – 11:54:01:21]
Speaker 8
Sure.
[11:54:01:21 – 11:54:04:06]
Carien Human
Walking into the desert. Yeah,
[11:54:04:06 – 11:54:14:00]
Lochner Eksteen
like listen, I’m burned out. I can’t deal with this amount of people. There’s a lifestyle business now. It comes to be if a person is just actually in burnout
[11:54:15:04 – 11:54:22:18]
Lochner Eksteen
or trying to process it and most people don’t process properly, are they in a good state or a state to actually make that decision?
[11:54:22:18 – 11:54:30:10]
Carien Human
I think it would be really unfortunate. What you’re trying to say is let’s avoid that. That’s not why it’s all burnout. And when we make this decision.
[11:54:30:10 – 11:55:41:05]
Wilfred Greyling
You can’t have children to save your marriage. It’s like that kind of a thing. And so you can’t go through the desert to a high performance business because you burnt out. You need to deal with the issue first and you need to stabilize that. And I think that is where systems are important. If you have to say, how can I fix this? Is to say what goes on in your head? Why is it heavy for you? Why is it that you are tired? It is because every decision comes to you and because you carry all this weight. For example, if you want to speak to your leader and that person is so busy that they can say that they can physically say to you, you’ve got 30 seconds to deliver your whatever it is you want to say to me. Then you must know the game is lost because for your leader to have no time for you and an issue that you want to bring to the table indicates that that person is doing the wrong stuff. They are doing the work. They are the workflow. So they are so busy doing that that they cannot care about the people that that is in the business. You can’t go into the desert with that. You will just die. And so you do.
[11:55:41:05 – 11:56:07:07]
Lochner Eksteen
Interesting. Lillana, you mentioned that in every human interaction there’s two worlds. That’s serious and the playful. I’m just wondering if that happens where you’ve got these guys. Your business coach tells you, listen, you need to separate yourself from business. You need to now go into this desert. You need to give people 30 seconds or 15 minutes to interact with you. Do you lose some of that?
[11:56:07:07 – 11:56:08:09]
Lurinda Maree
The playful.
[11:56:08:09 – 11:56:18:08]
Lochner Eksteen
Yeah. And well, the question is really, is that playfulness really there? Because in South Africa my experience is when you sit in wardrooms or in meetings with very, very little of that.
[11:56:18:08 – 11:56:26:06]
Lurinda Maree
Very little. Yes. And I think that’s, you know, it is an effort to bring it to bring it to the party in any circumstance.
[11:56:26:06 – 11:56:44:10]
Lochner Eksteen
Why? Why would you want to? I mean, there is you know, South African. So yeah, we’ve got a healthy dry, you know, sort of gas and you’ve got a dry, you know, when the people don’t like the joke. Yeah. It’s actually a critical part of.
[11:56:44:10 – 11:57:51:07]
Lurinda Maree
I think it’s critical. I think it’s critical because you cannot be curious and judge mental in this on this at the same time you need to choose. And I think if you and it’s about the limbic system and then your cortex as well, the prefrontal cortex, you can’t live in your head all the time. The moment you go into your body and you really just enjoy what’s going on and you connect to your limbic system that holds all your emotional memories, the reason why you’re doing what you’re doing and you get everybody in the company to do the same thing. Then it’s like an awakening. It’s like a refreshment. And it can’t be that all the time as well, you know, but I think that some way that’s why everybody’s talking about the vision is so important. Everybody must know where we’re going. But actually the vision is the playful part of it. It’s like, why are we doing this? You know, it’s like being home with your family around the dinner table and really just engaging with these people that are forming and shaping every day. And it’s similar to a business. When do you do that? Where’s the time for that? Or are we being intentional about it? Because that playful part is what gets us through the difficult parts.
[11:57:51:07 – 11:57:55:17]
Wilfred Greyling
You have to weave it in all the time. It must be constant.
[11:57:55:17 – 11:58:01:09]
Carien Human
So my question is, if you said going through the desert has a lot of loss, right?
[11:58:02:15 – 11:58:16:15]
Carien Human
And it feels like part of that loss is when you leave the lifestyle business, that’s actually what you lose. The only reason you would want to keep it is because you have that playfulness, right? But if you’re intentional about keeping your playfulness,
[11:58:17:15 – 11:58:26:22]
Carien Human
then the loss isn’t that hectic or not really. Does it keep, does it contain a little bit of that lifestyle business culture?
[11:58:26:22 – 11:59:32:23]
Lurinda Maree
I think that’s probably in my experience, the biggest fear that people have in that that they will do three company maturity model transition is losing the family feel. I’m handing you the paper so we can have a quick conversation about your child. Even when I did change management, that’s the stuff people are really scared of. But the streets are 10% truth wrapped in 90% lie. And that’s the problem is that’s what they think that’s the thing we could lose this. But you’re all going to lose a lot of it, but you’re not going to lose all of it. But we need to know, okay, that’s your fear. Let’s speak to that fear and say, okay, we all going to lose a lot of it. But what are we going to keep? And the William Bridges transition management says, celebrate the endings. If you don’t celebrate the endings, then you enter the desert and you still wishing you were in Egypt. That’s not what you want to do. You want them to be like, Oh, yeah, I am. This is a creative space. We can become more. Yeah. But it’s making that intentional and conscious to everybody. The fear is true, but it’s not 100% true.
[11:59:32:23 – 11:59:46:07]
Lochner Eksteen
It’s funny, because last night, the kind of Bible for my kids in the evening before they go to bed. And it’s funny, because last night I was reading to them, specifically those first three months in the desert.
[11:59:48:04 – 11:59:52:07]
Lochner Eksteen
And, you know, they run into a point where there’s, oh, there’s no water.
[11:59:53:11 – 12:00:05:13]
Lochner Eksteen
So it was actually better. We were working, please take us back there, which comes into this change management. Yeah, it was actually a lot better in the previous state. Even though it was
[12:00:06:22 – 12:00:21:04]
Lochner Eksteen
all burned out, I had to do everything. I see it as slaves. It’s a safer space. Why do people, why do we do that? Because I mean, it makes sense to rather go back to what we know what pushes you through the desert.
[12:00:22:17 – 12:00:25:23]
Lurinda Maree
Well, according to the William Beaches, he was just
[12:00:25:23 – 12:00:27:13]
Lochner Eksteen
one William Beaches quickly before you can
[12:00:27:13 – 12:01:46:00]
Lurinda Maree
he uses the Exodus story as Moses being the first first transition management manager in the history. And he says he had to take them out of the space where they didn’t want to be the burning platform as we know it. But he never, they never celebrated the endings and they were never the expectations were never aligned with what’s happening. They were thinking, oh, yes, you know, to do a trip and we’re in the beloved country. Now, nobody expected 40 years in the desert. So it’s that expectation and celebrating endings. He calls it endings, neutral zone, new beginnings. And the neutral zone is the desert. And he said that Moses didn’t anticipate all the hardships, but he was, he was also burning out at one point as you can recall. And then he just he decided to have the tribes. And that is called the transition monitoring teams. So that’s why he’s saying get a change agent need to get people to feed back that kind of stuff, but make it creative. It can either be your deed space or your creative space. And it’s depends on how you deal with it. And then you get to the new beginnings. And again, you have to celebrate what’s going to start and what’s going to stop. And I think in my mind, if you dumb it down all the way, it’s really about expectation management. What are we expecting of this space? And as a leader, I get it treated because as a leader, you give unconscious permission to everybody else about how they should deal with stuff.
[12:01:46:00 – 12:01:52:05]
Carien Human
So if you’re the one going to be called by the saying the difficult part of letting go is that you have to give the unconscious permission.
[12:01:52:05 – 12:01:55:02]
Lurinda Maree
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, scary.
[12:01:55:02 – 12:02:13:16]
Lochner Eksteen
I mean, if you if you had the opportunity to speak to a business owner, call it this founder, and you and you’re kind of helping him saying, okay, well, your personal life has changed. You know, you know, you’re married, the kids are getting all the units are giving more attention to your children because they screaming at you. You’re creating more childhood trauma.
[12:02:14:17 – 12:02:24:04]
Lochner Eksteen
So let’s run. I think you should talk to your your partners and start getting into that business space. What would you tell him to do personally?
[12:02:25:21 – 12:02:42:17]
Carien Human
I think that’s actually what’s been playing in my mind this whole time, because you touched on it briefly. And it’s this idea that when you when I don’t know if that’s true for everybody, but I think maybe especially for women, right, if you decide to start your own business,
[12:02:43:19 – 12:03:03:08]
Carien Human
you’re doing it with this ideal in mind that this is going to create some kind of work-life balance for you, or you are going to build something that’s gonna that you’re going to be proud of or something you want to do, or this is your vision, right? And so it’s like your little baby, and you don’t want to let go of it.
[12:03:04:09 – 12:03:19:21]
Carien Human
Because like you said earlier, you don’t know what’s going to happen with like, you don’t know if I release you into this adult world, what will happen to you. And I wonder if that’s not linked to our identity. So I think as a founder,
[12:03:21:00 – 12:03:25:22]
Carien Human
what you create and what you start is such a big part of who you are.
[12:03:27:02 – 12:03:44:15]
Carien Human
And then if suddenly you have to give that over to somebody else, you have to trust other people to run with that vision, and they don’t see it exactly the way you do, then you lose that thing that kind of spoke into your identity. So you have to also redefine who you are now.
[12:03:44:15 – 12:03:50:07]
Lochner Eksteen
Your identity is in the eyes of others, right? You’re managing that?
[12:03:50:07 – 12:03:54:22]
Carien Human
Yes, or in the eyes of yourself? I mean, how do I see myself?
[12:03:54:22 – 12:03:58:20]
Lochner Eksteen
Mostly my experiences as business people are performance orientated, they want to be on the
[12:04:01:11 – 12:04:42:03]
Lochner Eksteen
pedestal to some degree to show that I’ve been successful, other showing it through lifestyle cause, you know, some form of it is that identity. So let’s say I was there, my identity was started as business, good to a point that’s me. So when I often somebody asks me, who are you, that’s the story I tell. I create my identity by telling them the story of what I did. All of a sudden, that’s I’m voluntary, involuntary, I have to let go of that identity. What do I do to retell that story and do you have one new identity to myself and to others?
[12:04:43:07 – 12:05:12:12]
Carien Human
I think it’s most probably one of the most difficult things for any one of us to ground identity in something more internal and not external, maybe in our worth in who we, and maybe like you’re saying, I don’t know, it’s just a guess, but in celebrating what it was and it’s going to change and that doesn’t take anything away from what it was, it was good and it’s changing and it’s just that.
[12:05:13:21 – 12:05:17:03]
Carien Human
I don’t know, I can see you have an idea in your mind.
[12:05:20:06 – 12:06:06:21]
Wilfred Greyling
I think it’s like, why do you start a business? Like you and is it to have the car and the assets and the achievement? I mean, I think all these things are part of it and they all form some aspect and some will be bigger and some will be smaller. Sometimes if you make the cup, it’s not about the cup at all, it’s about the car. If you sell enough cups, that could be one angle that you’re running your business on and you just want the outcome. So that’s a different kind of approach to business. It can’t make the people lesser, but people must understand that, like people that work with you should understand that we’re only making these cups so that I can have a big car. That will be a difficult sell, I think, to get everyone to be in on the game.
[12:06:07:21 – 12:06:11:09]
Wilfred Greyling
But that happens a lot and where the driver is
[12:06:12:10 – 12:06:31:13]
Wilfred Greyling
unspoken, like you don’t understand why are we doing this thing as an employee because it somehow doesn’t make sense. But you can’t talk about it because like what are you going to say? Like why the heck are we making these cups? It’s like just terrible. We’re destroying the environment, blah, blah, blah, all that stuff. Obviously you shouldn’t be working there, but that’s a different story.
[12:06:32:17 – 12:06:35:14]
Wilfred Greyling
But why do you have the business?
[12:06:38:04 – 12:06:57:19]
Wilfred Greyling
I’ve got a business and I like to think that I’m thinking about it as helping other people see this process through. But at the end of the day when you think about it, you still have to live and all the other things also. So there are parts of all these things. You can’t just make it, I’m doing it for other people because that’s just nonsense.
[12:06:58:23 – 12:07:38:16]
Wilfred Greyling
There’s this blend of stuff going on. And I think if you can highlight the dark corners and somehow get your folks to be on the same page as you, this is a difficult thing and this is not system talking at all because systems are crystallizing how you do a thing. That’s all that that does. And once you crystallize a process, then that’s how you do the thing. So that’s systems and they need to mature over time. And you can’t just crystallize the stuff and say, I’ve got systems so my problem ends. You have to work with your people while we have people in business, which is also a different conversation.
[12:07:40:06 – 12:08:58:16]
Wilfred Greyling
And get it right and understand why you’re doing the business just to come back as to why we’re doing this thing. And that drives your decisions. You decide your next, like for example, why would you want to cross the desert? So I’m sitting in a lifestyle business. We’re all happy. We sit at the bride every Friday, the 10 of us. We have a ball. We drink some beers or whatever it is that we do and we talk to each other and we’re a family and we make the money and our customers are happy and all of these things are cool. Then at some point you have to say, I want something else now because that is the decision that you make. But you do it subconsciously because maybe you’re just chasing more customers. Maybe you’re just bringing in more product that you want to develop. And those things are the things that push you into the desert without you knowing it. And that puts you over the line. And suddenly you’ve got too much going on. And that’s when the decline starts. If you have not planned for it, if you have not put the things in place that even if you just crystallized your old processes substantially, at least you’ve got something solid to work on top of. I think that we do. I don’t know if this is the place for that, but when we want to work with a customer, we try and say to them, let’s first look at all these foundational things.
[12:08:59:20 – 12:09:35:03]
Wilfred Greyling
I’ll give you a look at a business from the ground up. We’ve identified 41 domains like billing, like HR, blah, blah. 41 of these things that you have to do. And inside of these 41 domains, they are, I think, for an advanced business. You’re looking at about 1,500 things that you must do. So it’s like a lot of stuff. And this is for a generic business. This is just a business out the box. This is not making cups specifically. This is just the business part that lies underneath this. These are a lot of stuff that you need to do.
[12:09:36:10 – 12:10:16:03]
Wilfred Greyling
So the idea is to try and find a way where we can look at a business. And before you build on top of the thing is to just identify what is the thing that is there and what is missing. And then you can say, like when you sit at the meeting, you have your general meeting and nobody ever talks about marketing because you’re not doing it. That’s a bad place to be. If you consider the meeting and you can talk about marketing, even though you do it very crappy, at least you’ve got something that you can say, this is a gap that we need to fill. But if you just pretend that that thing doesn’t exist, that is not a good place to be. And then if you take that shape and you go into the desert,
[12:10:18:04 – 12:10:18:18]
Wilfred Greyling
prepare to die.
[12:10:18:18 – 12:10:25:02]
Carien Human
But what if you kind of, it’s too late, like you accidentally didn’t build that thing.
[12:10:25:02 – 12:10:28:03]
Wilfred Greyling
Yes, which happens all the time.
[12:10:28:03 – 12:10:33:02]
Carien Human
And now you find yourself in the desert. Can you backtrack?
[12:10:33:02 – 12:10:45:10]
Wilfred Greyling
I think you can, but that is harder because now you have to think about, okay, are we going to push through because we won’t make it or are we going to backtrack? And that is like there’s now ego and all kinds of things.
[12:10:45:10 – 12:10:53:21]
Lochner Eksteen
I think identity is strong. So can you have a vulnerable conversation with your team and say, listen, I’m sorry.
[12:10:55:21 – 12:11:00:07]
Lochner Eksteen
Can we do this, please, without upsetting customers and
[12:11:00:07 – 12:11:26:11]
Wilfred Greyling
let’s talk about it. And you can’t do that while you’ve got the shadows hanging all about the place. Then that is harder. So when we spoke earlier, I thought about it. It’s not systems versus people versus these things are all one big thing and they fit together. And if any one of the parts are not well attended, that’s,
[12:11:27:13 – 12:11:36:09]
Wilfred Greyling
you are just going to trip and fall. So they work in unison. It’s a single solution for all of it. They all need to be there. Yeah.
[12:11:36:09 – 12:11:48:13]
Lochner Eksteen
Listen, I was theater Michael, if that’s possible. That’s interesting thing. I haven’t crossed it in any business I’ve done, except most businesses theater.
[12:11:51:13 – 12:11:55:14]
Lochner Eksteen
But with your theater background, how did you bring these two together?
[12:11:57:22 – 12:11:58:03]
Lochner Eksteen
Yeah.
[12:11:58:03 – 12:12:07:19]
Lurinda Maree
So I did the national theater for the first five years of my career, which helped me to learn to discern the story of an organization. I think that’s the training I got in retrospect.
[12:12:07:19 – 12:12:09:11]
Wilfred Greyling
What is industrial?
[12:12:09:11 – 12:12:13:10]
Lurinda Maree
In natural sense is when you do a play for a company.
[12:12:13:10 – 12:12:14:03]
Wilfred Greyling
Okay.
[12:12:14:03 – 12:12:26:18]
Lurinda Maree
But you have a very specific outcome with wonderful values. If you change values to expand while changing the values, what does it mean? That kind of stuff. You draw chose to all the different places. You use real actors, not role play.
[12:12:27:18 – 12:13:07:18]
Lurinda Maree
And yeah, and you try to make it as identifiable and as recognizable as possible. So people must think it’s people from our company on stage. They need to walk like being talked like they, we need to know the lingo. We need to know the stories. And then you see, you see yourself in there. So it’s once removed, you can really see what’s playing out, why it’s playing out. You see another world. For me, theater is unothering the other. It is really unothering the other. So you have this, you have this idea of what money you mentioned is doing and going through. But when you see it in play in a story, you see, but wait a minute, they are actually battling with this as much as we are.
[12:13:07:18 – 12:13:09:15]
Wilfred Greyling
You see
[12:13:09:15 – 12:13:34:04]
Lurinda Maree
the other world and the other. So that’s one way of playing it out. And then you can do it with facilitation. We actually talk with the audience and ask, what did you see? What was interesting? What do you think about this? And you can actually debrief a lot of assumptions. So it’s clarifying those assumptions. But the thing I’m doing at the moment a lot is working with improv theater and through a system psychodynamic lens. Because then you,
[12:13:35:08 – 12:14:06:13]
Lurinda Maree
improv theater has the same principles as any good team or any good system needs. It’s like you need to be spontaneous. You need to think on your feet. You need to let go. You need to not, not worry about making mistakes. You can’t make mistakes with improv. Don’t if you know that, but you just use whatever they give you and you got it. So if you, if you put people in an environment like that where they can just play, suddenly you see where you see who’s taking what roles, you see where there’s boundary issues, you see where there’s communication issues.
[12:14:06:13 – 12:14:09:09]
Lochner Eksteen
And that’s actually the actual team that you facilitate.
[12:14:09:09 – 12:15:16:00]
Lurinda Maree
It just, it dips into their unconscious dynamics immediately. And you have an immediate real time conversation about it. It’s talking through the dynamic play that you just had. So then it’s again, once you move, there’s a safety in the fact that you can talk about this and see yourself in relation to other. And you can see, oh, this guy actually, you know, I saw a side of him. I’ve heard that so many times. I saw a side of this. Never existed. Here’s because we don’t show those sides to each other every day, but suddenly you have a different idea of the other and you have it. You have your confronted with yourself seeing one picture, you know, that they talk the danger of a single story. It’s like that. Suddenly there’s not just one story and I can start to relate to other people in a different way. And I think that’s for me, the magic of it is, and it shows immediately we, we’re the issues, all that’s under the surface, but not in a confronting, threatening way in a very, oh, wow, we should do this. We should do that.
[12:15:16:00 – 12:15:23:09]
Lochner Eksteen
You use the magic recipe you use to get people into that state to be willing to do it. You do that. They give them.
[12:15:24:10 – 12:15:37:07]
Lurinda Maree
Everybody is always worried about that. And I’ve never had an issue. Everybody’s always concerned. No, but these people, you know, they’re not going to want to, they all see us on CA’s orchries, engineers.
[12:15:37:07 – 12:15:38:06]
Wilfred Greyling
They all play.
[12:15:38:06 – 12:16:02:05]
Lurinda Maree
They’re not going to want to do this. Love it. Because we are wired to play. So they come and it’s, I think minute to win it. I don’t think theater, I don’t think cruise line is it anyway, because that’s what people think, but it’s minute to win it games. It’s two to three minute games in pairs and groups. And we do about 15 in a two hours span and you debrief everything from there. And it’s just fun. So much fun.
[12:16:03:11 – 12:16:31:12]
Lurinda Maree
But then I also use Augusta Ball stuff, which is actually designed to bring voice to things. So that’s that is, we’re slowly image there. So we build an image of your presence and then of your future state. And you do the transition. And when you do that, that works very well if a team lead and its team doesn’t have the same idea. So suddenly you see the image the way he builds it and you’re like, but what am I doing? Why did you put me there? And that opens up really good, very frank conversations.
[12:16:32:17 – 12:16:51:17]
Lurinda Maree
That needs to be facilitated much better in terms of like much contained because you want you want them to have the frank conversations with art and residue without emotional, you know, emotive sparks. So they are think you need to really be skilled in how you approach that. But but it works.
[12:16:51:17 – 12:16:58:12]
Lochner Eksteen
Yeah, it’s incredible. Because in the last one we did with Sonia, she talked about that liminal space.
[12:17:01:02 – 12:17:54:00]
Lochner Eksteen
And she talks systems business, we are in this liminal space, because the old world, the cloud computing, flow management, all of that’s kind of still there. But it’s not dead. And there’s new AI agent, a genetic world is in the future. It’s there, but it’s not really there’s yet we’re in this space. And I’m just wondering, is it a good time now for people who are listening to us to just calm down? So this is a great time to review all of this. Because we’re still making backups, we’re still doing those basis we can, but we can’t really do it in a new way. And we’re not really doing it in an old way. And while we’re somewhere in between, and most people I speak to in business, it’s manifesting in anxiousness. It’s not manifesting in in a calm,
[12:17:55:04 – 12:17:58:22]
Lochner Eksteen
centered, this is not what we’re going to do. Do you experience that as well?
[12:17:58:22 – 12:18:43:15]
Carien Human
So what I’m what what’s going through my mind is that when we have when I as a person have anxiety, then one of the ways that I can better regulate anxiety and overwhelm maybe even more is to have good language. So to know how to express exactly what I’m feeling. And I know that when you speak about the system, the unconscious system, it’s almost saying that similar to me as a person who has an unconscious and conscious spot, the company also has that maybe you can just explain that a little bit more. But I’m also hearing you say the same thing. The thing that will regulate the anxiety is language.
[12:18:45:03 – 12:18:55:11]
Carien Human
And that’s what you’re essentially facilitating. And that’s the thing that carries us maybe through the liminal space is to have the actual words to say what is happening right here.
[12:18:55:11 – 12:19:16:01]
Lurinda Maree
Exactly. Because you want to clarify the assumptions. But how do you do it if you don’t have don’t know how to articulate it don’t exist, and don’t know how to create a common language, we both are talking the same language. So I think theater bridges those things to get to the language.
[12:19:16:01 – 12:19:30:11]
Carien Human
So do you when you speak about this company subconscious, do you teach people the language? Or how would you how would you explain that that thing even exists, that a company has a shadow or a
[12:19:30:11 – 12:19:38:04]
Lurinda Maree
I don’t really play the games with them and then I show it to them. I think it’s to explain it.
[12:19:38:04 – 12:19:39:08]
Lochner Eksteen
Yeah, in concept.
[12:19:39:08 – 12:21:02:19]
Lurinda Maree
Yeah, if I do the contracts, I will explain it. Yes. And then I would explain it as the iceberg model, which is the easiest way to explain that you see the top of the iceberg. That’s the behaviors you see. That’s the conflict we experience. But underneath, we have values, we have the beliefs, we have everything that drives an individual and this group to do things. But at the end of the day, the things you see there’s more to it, you need to stand back and say what is actually going on? That is the big question was actually going on when we feel our leaders not really leading us. Okay, why? No, because he doesn’t pitch for meetings and he doesn’t give me enough structure. And that’s things you hear. Then I go why? Where’s the boundary with authorities not stepping into it? Or you as a team actually in an anxious response, we are trying to just be helpless and putting him in a messiah role. And we all know the messiah will get crucified. So is that what you’re doing? So you have to analyze that with him. But if I explain it to them, you can’t use that language, be very freaky for them. So you should just say there’s a lot that we don’t see. So let’s play and explore and see what comes up. And then we’ll figure out why we aren’t communicating. So I won’t go into the detail in contracting at all, I would rather just get them to experience it and from there move on. And sometimes you don’t even need those explanations because in on some people, everybody knows.
[12:21:02:19 – 12:21:03:08]
Speaker 5
Yeah.
[12:21:03:08 – 12:21:04:11]
Lurinda Maree
It’s a no, no, no.
[12:21:04:11 – 12:21:17:18]
Lochner Eksteen
I do one thing. If you if you had the opportunity to redo some implementations in some customers, technical implementations, do you think it would be of will be worth doing this parallel?
[12:21:19:03 – 12:21:27:23]
Lochner Eksteen
Because my experience is you get to a customer, they’ve either already written user experience, or user, whatever you call it, user stories, functional requirements,
[12:21:28:23 – 12:21:29:22]
Lochner Eksteen
process flows.
[12:21:30:23 – 12:21:32:17]
Lochner Eksteen
I’m not narrating any of this.
[12:21:32:17 – 12:21:46:17]
Wilfred Greyling
Yeah. The customer arrives with, “Help me break my car window, please.” And then that’s what you have to do. Yeah. Meantime, the question was, “My keys are locked in my car. How do I get my keys out?”
[12:21:48:00 – 12:22:12:13]
Wilfred Greyling
So they’ve already solved the problem based on what they know. And they’ve arrived at this is the next best thing to do. But that is like arriving at the doctor saying, “Please cut off my big toe.” And he cuts it off. But meantime, you just need a Rennie because you’ve got heartburn. It’s like the right people must do the right work for your business.
[12:22:14:01 – 12:22:41:21]
Wilfred Greyling
And that’s the hardest thing for me as a founder. I resist that because I’m most clever. So I mean, I know all the things. So don’t come and tell me what. But this is the thing that we need to try and understand how we let it go and say, “Okay, there’s someone that knows better and let me listen and assess.” And I don’t have to just accept it, but I can process these things. And maybe some variant of it comes out and we just cut off maybe another toe. I don’t know.
[12:22:43:09 – 12:22:53:12]
Wilfred Greyling
But essentially, don’t pre-diagnose because you think you know. Talk to others and understand the problem fully. And then you solve it.
[12:22:53:12 – 12:23:01:21]
Lochner Eksteen
I want to balance that with reality like a friend of mine used to call it the not-invented fallacy.
[12:23:03:05 – 12:23:12:11]
Lochner Eksteen
Now you do come in as the system implementation consulting people and you say, “Well, this is how we’re going to break the window.”
[12:23:13:23 – 12:23:27:02]
Lochner Eksteen
And when you start asking them to do the repetition in the business using the system, you get pushback because they weren’t part of the invention of their process of breaking.
[12:23:27:02 – 12:23:33:02]
Wilfred Greyling
And they were breaking it differently in a nicer way or so in a way that they preferred.
[12:23:33:02 – 12:23:43:15]
Lochner Eksteen
Yeah. So you were talking about earlier and I want to skip back. Just go back a little bit as you were talking about that heavyness feeling. In the beginning, this is pretty light.
[12:23:45:05 – 12:23:47:10]
Lochner Eksteen
When does it get heavy? When does it feel? Does it burn?
[12:23:48:12 – 12:23:52:17]
Lochner Eksteen
And that’s also also one of the parts that triggered this journey.
[12:23:54:23 – 12:23:56:17]
Wilfred Greyling
I think it happens when,
[12:23:58:14 – 12:24:22:16]
Wilfred Greyling
and I think we’ve discussed a little, but when you add another customer and you add another customer and you add another thing into the mix and you add more people and then you make more money but then there’s more risk. And then it’s just, it’s not a, maybe there’s a straw that breaks the camel’s back for sure, but you keep on piling these things on.
[12:24:24:00 – 12:24:25:11]
Wilfred Greyling
And some of the things that happen,
[12:24:26:23 – 12:26:25:21]
Wilfred Greyling
so you bring more customers on. We did the process manually. I approved the process. Now these things keep coming faster and faster. So my quality of work starts going down because I’m a bottleneck in this process and that can go for founder or any individual person, doesn’t matter. But as founders, you would tend to want to keep control of this thing because that’s the human nature, I guess, because it’s your baby and you can’t let your baby get hurt, but then you hurt your baby. The very thing you’re trying to do is the thing that is causing the damage at the same time. So it builds up over time and there comes a point where you feel this weight and you don’t go home happy anymore. You go home worrying about how am I going to deal with this? How I’m going to solve this problem, blah, blah, blah. And then you start putting in systems yourself. You reach for all these things that you just put in place. Then you end up with a bunch of systems that don’t talk to each other and then it’s like the next mess. So the things sort of grow on top of each other. I think it’s a difficult game to play, building a business in a structured way, understanding and seeing the things, being aware of you yourself are creating these shadow spaces. You say one thing, we are open business, just come talk to me. That’s another problem. It’s just like just ask me. Like that should not exist. People should know what they have to do without having to ask and they should understand the context of the problem from the system, not from having to go find for people to talk to to see what is the next thing I need to do. Look, I mean, I say that it’s not easy to do, but that is the objective and that’s what you work towards all the time. So it’s a continuous process. It’s not like we put in the system and now we’re done. It’s never like that. It’s not like we spoke about this stuff and now we never talk about it again. Then you’ve achieved nothing. It has to be, it’s like going to gym.
[12:26:26:23 – 12:26:29:02]
Wilfred Greyling
I don’t know why I brought that up. That was a bad example.
[12:26:30:07 – 12:26:34:16]
Wilfred Greyling
But it’s like going to gym. You have to go all the time. You don’t get the gain from going once.
[12:26:34:16 – 12:26:35:23]
Speaker 5
I’m pushing your teeth.
[12:26:35:23 – 12:26:38:17]
Wilfred Greyling
Correct. That’s a better example. Thank you.
[12:26:40:03 – 12:27:13:10]
Wilfred Greyling
So that’s what happens. So it builds up over time and it’s adding all the little bits and the little bits. So you think your business is growing. You think you’re being a leader because you are giving advice to every person that asks you, but that is not leadership. Leadership is when people know what they must do and they know and they’re allowed to make decisions and they’re allowed to make mistakes. If you can’t make mistakes, your business will not grow. People will not bring anything to the table if there’s a penalty for every adventure you want to go on.
[12:27:13:10 – 12:27:21:12]
Lochner Eksteen
Listen, I’ve got a customer, quite a large customer. They’ve got millions of customers in South Africa.
[12:27:22:18 – 12:27:39:20]
Lochner Eksteen
In their business they’ve got about 3000 employees and many of those employees and management people have got an AI too. JGPT or something. They actually asked these informal questions. I don’t deal with my manager now.
[12:27:41:08 – 12:27:45:05]
Lochner Eksteen
This is not becoming this extra person or active.
[12:27:46:16 – 12:27:59:01]
Lochner Eksteen
So everybody’s saying we need to implement AI but my experience is already implemented within those informal networks and it’s driving behaviour because people are actually acting on what JGPT is telling them to say. Well,
[12:28:00:15 – 12:28:06:16]
Lochner Eksteen
my manager’s upset with me. I didn’t give an increase. What do I do? What do I say? It gives you a nice point for point.
[12:28:06:16 – 12:28:08:10]
Wilfred Greyling
And it’s always on your side.
[12:28:08:10 – 12:28:14:09]
Lochner Eksteen
It’s always on your side. It starts with a compliment. So everybody’s already, to a degree, implemented AI.
[12:28:16:08 – 12:28:20:06]
Lochner Eksteen
Are we going to deal with that actor who you can’t bring onto the stage?
[12:28:21:18 – 12:28:24:00]
Lochner Eksteen
Because they are deciding to form part of this informal…
[12:28:26:02 – 12:28:27:07]
Lurinda Maree
That’s a very good question.
[12:28:27:07 – 12:29:05:11]
Wilfred Greyling
I’ve had a thought on that for business discussions is to have that as a person at the table when you have a meeting. You have that as a pseudo person contributing to the conversation. And if you’ve got someone that can prompt it to give the right pushback and all of that, maybe it can contribute and make the conversation more constructive and more direction without taking control, without being the one that says, “Well, the AI said so it goes.” It’s not how it must be. But it puts input into the thing and maybe it can… I don’t know.
[12:29:05:11 – 12:29:28:00]
Lochner Eksteen
It’s a second round of Excel. Because a bunch of years ago, when you asked a person, “Do you have a system for this?” No, we do it on Excel. Where’s Excel? I’ve got access to this Microsoft license. We just want only Excel where I input my stuff and I get a result and I act on that. But it’s not integrated into a larger flow.
[12:29:28:00 – 12:29:36:15]
Lurinda Maree
But I was just thinking it can make it work for you in such an awesome way. You can get that daughter and you can use it as a culture server.
[12:29:36:15 – 12:29:43:04]
Lochner Eksteen
Isn’t that exactly what just happened with the small guys in the AI to write good queries on Excel?
[12:29:44:11 – 12:29:48:17]
Lochner Eksteen
Got good results, got the ears of the boss, grew in the business.
[12:29:48:17 – 12:29:52:02]
Wilfred Greyling
But the boss can never know that you asked, “How do I deal with my boss?”
[12:29:52:02 – 12:30:13:05]
Lurinda Maree
If you can get that daughter and you know what people are asking in the company, it’s telling you something about what it is and what it is and what it is experiencing. If you can have that daughter and you can speak to that and say, “I see everybody’s asking this, there’s obviously a problem in this area. How do I make that conscious and talk about it?” That’ll be awesome. Because then it’s just another data point that you can use.
[12:30:14:05 – 12:30:17:15]
Lurinda Maree
You just then want to get rid of it. That’ll be awesome.
[12:30:17:15 – 12:30:34:19]
Carien Human
But I think the question you said, “What’s behind it? So why do I want to use AI to analyze the business and how I should treat my boss?” and things like that. It made me think about what you said earlier when it becomes heavy.
[12:30:36:18 – 12:30:52:01]
Carien Human
At some point, I recall you saying, I don’t know if it was here or in something you wrote, that it’s very difficult for a leader when it becomes heavy to shift their internalized vision.
[12:30:54:06 – 12:31:15:16]
Carien Human
I feel like when people are involving AI and trying to analyze their leader and asking questions about management, it’s because they don’t actually see what the leader sees. That doesn’t make the leader necessarily the right one or the one carrying the perfect vision, but it speaks to the gap.
[12:31:16:23 – 12:31:17:10]
Wilfred Greyling
The language.
[12:31:17:10 – 12:31:24:13]
Carien Human
The language too, but also the gap in you said, what did you call it earlier, when there’s only one story?
[12:31:24:13 – 12:31:26:09]
Lurinda Maree
The one single story.
[12:31:26:09 – 12:31:48:16]
Carien Human
So I’m curious when you help people through this desert and in this implementation phase, how do you get a leader to shift a little bit of their vision so that the people don’t actually need to go ask AI, “How do I get my leader to see this?”
[12:31:48:16 – 12:31:57:22]
Wilfred Greyling
I’m going to do politics quickly, but I think it’s easier to open the Strait of Hormuz than to get that right.
[12:31:59:12 – 12:32:39:22]
Wilfred Greyling
It’s a very difficult process because every environment is different, every business is different, every person is different, every process is essentially different. So there’s no, like just we stamp it down. So some things you can do, like to make an invoice as you make an invoice until you try and make an invoice, then that’s not how we make invoices. There’s this all complicated story that actually happens. And that is what unfolds when you talk to a business is it’s all the layers that live inside of it. And that thing that you thought you could just quickly do, you can’t do because we actually need to query this and we need to do this and blah, blah, blah. So it is complicated.
[12:32:41:05 – 12:33:20:00]
Wilfred Greyling
And you say to get leaders to do it, it’s difficult because it’s like me trying to tell Lohne to do something, what the heck, that’s not going to happen. We can only have a conversation and we can only through long discourse arrive at a point where we agree on a topic because we’ve went this way and we went that way and then we’ve landed on this thing. So it’s time. It’s time in conversation. And if the leader is willing to have the conversation and not be blinkered, then you’ve got a chance. If that particular person does not want to see anything else,
[12:33:21:03 – 12:33:22:19]
Wilfred Greyling
maybe you must move on. I don’t know.
[12:33:22:19 – 12:33:35:20]
Lochner Eksteen
My experience is that before I go into a last point is that as blinkers are on because most of these people when you, as executives, when you chat to them really, it’s because nine out of 10 times in their personal life, it’s overwhelming.
[12:33:37:01 – 12:33:43:08]
Lochner Eksteen
There’s children complications or health issues or their parents or it has been, it’s just a survival mechanism.
[12:33:44:12 – 12:33:55:07]
Lochner Eksteen
Like I can’t look beyond this at the moment because I’ll just go around and have some form of panic attack. That’s my experience.
[12:33:55:07 – 12:33:57:23]
Carien Human
Which is the precursor for that burnout.
[12:33:57:23 – 12:33:58:11]
Lochner Eksteen
Yeah.
[12:34:00:01 – 12:34:03:04]
Lochner Eksteen
Because the cost of building a business is high.
[12:34:05:02 – 12:34:18:13]
Wilfred Greyling
That’s why the decision to go into the desert must be a conscious one. Because the cost is so extremely high, you can’t just willy nilly of a day start walking and not have planned the journey.
[12:34:20:01 – 12:34:28:21]
Wilfred Greyling
And if you can somehow see that and understand that we are about to take this journey because we want a baby to save the marriage.
[12:34:29:21 – 12:34:57:03]
Wilfred Greyling
Just don’t do that. Let’s do something else and bring you back and stabilize the space. And then you can take the journey, but don’t take the journey for the sake of the journey. That’s just a risky approach to taking the next steps. And this is specifically obviously not the one once you’ve taken the journey on the other side. That’s a different story. But if you are this lifestyle business and you’re having a good time or you feel that you’re not,
[12:34:58:03 – 12:35:22:16]
Wilfred Greyling
going and growing is not the way I’ve done that very successfully. I have grown from, I remember clearly the day we were in a 4,000 square meter factory and the landlord changed the rules. He just said, no, we had to do this, that or the next thing. So we could then fight that thing or we could find a new place to go stay. So then we start looking around. And now it’s the question,
[12:35:24:15 – 12:36:26:08]
Wilfred Greyling
do we, and I was a youngster, so what do you know? We went into a factory that’s 8,000 square meters. So with that now you’ve got all the space, but also the rent goes up. And now because you have space, we must have people. We have more, you know, it’s not, it was not the right idea. I keep thinking about that and thinking, if we had taken the road the other way, which was says, let’s go down to a 2,000 square meter factory and I’m using the square meter as a guide to the size of the business and the number of people and the complexity. If we had scaled back at that time, what would have been the outcome? Would I still be making kitchen cabinet doors to this day, happy content, have a smaller team and not have done, look obviously I don’t regret my journey because every journey is fantastic, but it’s that decision. And sometimes it comes clear like that, like we are now choosing to go big and then I ended up going home. So yeah, it doesn’t always work out.
[12:36:26:08 – 12:36:28:01]
Lochner Eksteen
That’s a total end of plan.
[12:36:29:09 – 12:36:39:02]
Lochner Eksteen
I read it out, I think for all of us. If this conversation could surface one unspeakable truth, something they, our little is listening,
[12:36:40:05 – 12:36:44:06]
Lochner Eksteen
know, but was not willing to admit. What could that be? What do you think that is?
[12:36:44:06 – 12:36:52:05]
Lurinda Maree
I was actually thinking about it now. I was thinking about what Karine said earlier in your question, what you said about identity.
[12:36:53:14 – 12:36:57:09]
Lurinda Maree
And I think the one thing, if you, well two parts, if you are the leader,
[12:36:58:15 – 12:37:03:14]
Lurinda Maree
you know, when we do group relations conferences, we always say, are you willing to look at yourself towards an all?
[12:37:05:02 – 12:37:42:17]
Lurinda Maree
I think that’s something where you’ll never lose. If you’re a leader and you’re willing to look into that mirror and say, what am I missing about myself? What am I not wanting to look at? That’s self-awareness and understanding what the loss is for you, what the threats are for you. I think that is the one thing to know, that you can’t do any of these. You can’t be in the lifestyle or move to the other one. If you can’t do that first and foremost and have peace with it, like be on it. Own who you are, what you’re scared of, all that jazz. And then with the people, I was thinking about this, when you said about them asking this manager,
[12:37:43:20 – 12:38:14:19]
Lurinda Maree
and how can we use it in all that jazz? But what is the actual problem? The problem is people don’t trust their own guts anymore. People don’t connect with themselves anymore. So it’s like a traumatized society you’re working with. You kind of have to also, as a leader, maybe install that in them. If I can connect to myself, trust myself in what I say to you, there’s the example, but can I also enable you to trust yourself and really be okay with bringing whatever you’re bringing? So for me, that’s something I don’t think we always think about. Thanks.
[12:38:14:19 – 12:38:17:23]
Wilfred Greyling
I’m just going to add on to what you said.
[12:38:19:04 – 12:38:39:18]
Wilfred Greyling
I’ve experienced it on projects where you see people grow inside the project when you give them that permission to do a thing. And it is the most satisfying thing you can experience, is when somebody that you know were previously not,
[12:38:41:07 – 12:39:09:12]
Wilfred Greyling
they’ve got all the capability and they’ve got all the things, but somehow they’re blocked by something. And through the process, you can break those barriers down and that person comes alive and they deliver something amazing. And eventually, they are running the project. Oh man, then you’ve won. And that is so cool if you can get that right, where you can let people out. And I think it’s that thing, it’s like allowing them to talk and allowing them to be themselves.
[12:39:09:12 – 12:39:15:16]
Lochner Eksteen
If I can give you some words, I think that the original topic was, if you really love them, you’ll give them the freedom.
[12:39:15:16 – 12:39:16:05]
Wilfred Greyling
Yeah, correct.
[12:39:16:05 – 12:39:18:08]
Lochner Eksteen
It is a form of love.
[12:39:18:08 – 12:40:08:04]
Wilfred Greyling
Yeah. Now it’s amazing. And it’s almost like a parent seeing their children achieving. And it’s so fulfilling and amazing. And that goes to, if you think about the founder, just for a moment, if the founder could have that feeling of letting the people be themselves and the stuff that they can bring to the table, you can’t as an individual have all of those things in your mind. It’s physically not possible. So you can’t always be the pivotal point. And letting go, you don’t let go because you letting go of control. You letting go because it needs to fall into a system that catches these things. And there’s a way to see how it flows just to put my little architect thing in. Sorry. Thank you.
[12:40:09:13 – 12:41:02:01]
Carien Human
I think my biggest takeaway, personally as well today, is that we all know the, oh, you can’t reach the promised land without going through the desert port. Right. But I think we often feel like we have to, like we fall into the desert and we just have to endure it long enough, then we’ll reach the promised land. So I think my takeaway here was that don’t fall into the desert, acknowledge that you’re at the edge and prepare it. There are things you can’t prepare for. You can’t take water. You can have systems. You can face the wars and the difficulties. You can acknowledge it’s going to be a tough journey. You can talk about how it’s going to feel and what we’re going to do. You don’t have to just fall and survive because you might die.
[12:41:02:01 – 12:41:02:21]
Wilfred Greyling
You can choose.
[12:41:02:21 – 12:41:03:19]
Carien Human
Yeah.
[12:41:03:19 – 12:41:14:13]
Lochner Eksteen
My takeaway is, I like the way you brought in the Moses. The other story is that if you think you’re going to go into this transition, building systems, training people with your own
[12:41:15:15 – 12:41:16:22]
Lochner Eksteen
energy and your own strength,
[12:41:18:17 – 12:41:21:20]
Lochner Eksteen
it has to be that collective community, that collective
[12:41:22:22 – 12:41:39:16]
Lochner Eksteen
conscience. You can debate where it comes from or whatever the case might be, but that seems to be the only thing that does if you do have to set it through for 40 years, which at scale some businesses do. If you like that, you’ve got that lucky, you’ve got that underlying presence.
[12:41:41:00 – 12:41:41:16]
Lizelle Pike (Producer)
Guys, thank you.
[12:41:41:16 – 12:41:47:03]
Lochner Eksteen
I really appreciate it. Thank you. Thanks for just being here. Thanks for adding the value to
[12:42:06:14 – 12:42:06:14]
Lochner Eksteen
the conversation and we’ll see you guys again. This is fun. Thank you.