In today’s episode we explore the issue of managing change through challenging times, and how business leaders can ensure they bring their people with them and don’t lose them along the way.
Hosted by Dave Harries, with Dr Curt Friedel & Jessica Prater.
Dr Curt Friedel
Jessica Prater
Dave Harries
Dr Curt Friedel is Associate Professor and Director of the Centre for Co-operative Problem Solving at Virginia Tech in the USA where he is also the Director of the KAI Certification Course.
Jessica Prater Principal Consultant at J.Prater Consulting and HR professional with strong communication and strategic thinking skills. Subject matter expert on standardized training processes and Train the Trainer.
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DH: Dave Harries
CF: Dr Curt Friedel
JP: Jessica Prater
DH: [0:00:00.0] Welcome to the KAI Podcast Series. Building better teams and great leaders. KAI or the Kirton Adaption Innovation Inventory is the world’s foremost measure for problem solving style. It’s used widely to create cohesive and productive teams and effective leaders. It’s been in use for over 40 years and is supported by a large body of academic research from around the world. In these podcasts we aim to shine a light on the issues and problems facing all teams as they strive to be the best version of themselves. In today’s episode we’re going to explore the issue of managing change through challenging times, and how business leaders can ensure they bring their people with them and don’t lose them along the way.
My name is Dave Harries and joining me to discuss these issues is Dr Curt Friedel and Jessica Prater. Curt is Associate Professor and Director of the Centre for Co-operative Problem Solving at Virginia Tech in the USA and is also a co-instructor of the KAI Certification Course. Jessica is Principal Consultant at J Prater Consulting and a Human Resources professional. Amongst other things Jessica helps small to mid-sized businesses build fantastic teams to realise their organisation’s vision. Jessica is also a certified practitioner for KAI. Curt, I wonder if I could turn to you first, and maybe we could get started by getting you to tell us a little bit more about KAI. I obviously referred to it in the introduction there, but tell me a bit about it for listeners who perhaps don’t know much about it or have never heard of it.
CF: [0:01:32.5] KAI is a measure for measuring problem solving style and we all each have a problem solving style. We believe it is innate, it’s stable and it measures how one perceives problems and prefers to solve problems. What’s really great about the KAI and how it measures problem solving style is that it assumes that all people are creative. You’re creative and I’m creative and we do that all in our own style. So there’s a difference between one’s capacity for solving problems and being creative as well as one’s ability or one’s level and one’s style.
So because we’re all solving problems, we’re all agents of change. You’re an agent of change. I’m an agent of change just because by nature we’re all solving problems. If we were to connect change and a measurement of change to problem solving, problem solving requires moving from a current in status of things onto a desired status of things – and because of that problem solving can access to a measurement of change.
KAI measures the problem solving style. Because we all have perceptions of the problem that are different, we need each other to manage change together. If there is a 20 point gap, as measured by the KAI between the more adaptive and the more innovative, or it could also be between innovative people and adaptive people, we start seeing stress in that relationship and lack of ability to work with each other, lack of trust of each other, and inhibitions in communicating with each other. That really speaks to the science of teams that KAI has to offer in managing teams in moving forward, especially in this era of COVID-19.
DH: [0:03:16.6] Jessica, I wonder if I could turn to you now. Tell me about how you actually apply the stuff that Curt’s been talking about, out in the field.
JP: [0:03:23.7] So, Dave, I’ve been a practitioner of KAI for the past five years and typically when I’m brought into an organisation as a consultant to use the KAI, it’s because teams are either having some sort of dysfunction or they are tackling a large change.
What I think is very interesting about the current climate is that most teams are experiencing both. We’re all experiencing significant amounts of change – whether it be the function of how you’re working, working from home, working from a different space, or if you’re an essential worker you’re facing problems that you never would imagine four months ago. And so because of that, I would imagine that most teams are experiencing heightened amounts of dysfunction. So now more than ever the KAI is extremely relevant and really needed for teams.
DH: [0:04:17.8] So Curt, tell me about the way it’s measured and the scale and what the numbers mean in terms of your problem solving styles.
CF: [0:04:28.8] So the KAI measures your problem solving style on a continuum between 32 and 160. It is a normal distribution with the mean or average at 95 points and so if someone tends to be more innovative as a preference of problem solving style, they would fall between 95 and 160 points. If someone’s more adaptive, they would fall between 95 and 32 points.
Now, there’s no better style. It’s a non-prejorative measure. Sometimes in the United States I like to think of it like the sleep number of bed. You have a score, I have a score. Your score is your preference for sleep. You might be a 72. I might be an 87. That has no measure of quality of sleep or capacity to sleep or how well someone sleeps. KAI is the same way. You have a number I have a number and it’s a preference for solving problems. The more adaptive tend to be people who like to make things better. So if you have a system that is broken, the more adaptive prefer to tweak that system with efficiency and detail to make the system work again. If the system is broken for the innovative, they prefer to swap out the system and replace it with something else that they perceive could be better.
DH: [0:05:48.7] That’s really interesting. So how in the challenges that people are facing right now, might you be able to use that knowledge?
CF: [0:05:59.3] The biggest challenge a lot of people are facing right now with COVID-19 is the guide book or the play book, if you will, of standard operating procedures have been thrown out the window. The more innovative may have been too quick to throw it out the window realising that there’s some structure of systems needed to improve things. Some things are still needed for moving forward with business, and the adaptive may have been too late to throw it the window, holding on to say, “Well, that can’t work anymore but if we just tweak it just enough for a longer period of time, it will certainly work because it’s worked in the past.” It’s a combination of the two. We know that things have changed, so we need a change along with it.
JP: [0:06:39.7] I think what’s really interesting and illustrative of this is I had a client a few years ago and she and I were doing some coaching together. She got her assessment results back and she didn’t like them. She was really upset. She was like, “Man, I’m in the wrong career. I’m in the wrong field. I’m going down the wrong path.” She was ready to just completely change her career as a result of her assessment results.
What I had to work with her on was take what you have and go from there. There are probably people that are frustrated with current situation, they’re frustrated with the systems or the processes, or they’re frustrated with having to change things. Where this tool can really be transformative for people is that self-awareness piece. So not saying as a result of getting these assessments that you would change anything necessarily, but simply having that self-awareness is absolutely critical to weathering this difficult time.
I was sharing with Dave before we got started that knowing my personal results has really helped shape how I weather difficult situations. It almost gives me a sense of control within a situation. Even though I have no control of what’s going on, I know exactly what’s going to push my buttons and as a result of that I can redirect my approach looking at it as changes come down the pipe.
CF: [0:08:07.1 Yeah, I would agree. It’s having a name for it. Some people naturally get it without knowing anything about KAI. You might have an innovator who is a CEO who knows they need someone who’s more adaptive to keep things orderly and organised. You might have an adaptive CEO who recognises the need for going outside the box and having a bit of fresh air in the company for every once in a while.
DH: [0:08:33.1] Okay. So as you’ve mentioned CEOs, let me talk a little bit about leadership and ask you about that. If a team – and the team leader – are aware of their styles, how can they use that to make the team better and to make themselves better leaders? Curt, maybe you could start with that one.
CF: [0:08:51.3] Yeah, that’s a great question. It’s helpful to know the scores of your team. As a matter of ethic we do not share KAI scores as a KAI practitioner. We view your KAI score as something that is personal, but we do encourage people to share KAI scores with each other. It’s helpful to have a team to know where everyone is in problem solving style. We know that one’s KAI score is independent of motivation, independent of intelligence, independent of culture and ethnicity and so it’s a pure measure of problem solving style.
So if you’re having a disagreement and you’re not sure why, it’s possible that it could be a disagreement over problem solving style, how best to solve a problem, and that’s where that 20 points comes in. if someone’s trying to adapt and someone else is trying to innovate, it’s probably not personal, it may not even be political. Someone who is very motivated, even more motivated than you, has more values in the company more than you, is very intelligent, just thinks very differently in how best to solve the problem. And that’s okay. Hopefully we build a culture of safety in sharing ideas so that those ideas can stand on their own merit without being tied to the person and what might be their personal gain.
DH: [0:10:13.9] Jessica, I wonder if you could talk to me a little bit about this issue as well. I’m thinking particularly – Curt mentioned there about the 20 point gap that might exist between team members or between a team leader and some of his members or her members. How in reality out in the field – again, with practical experience – does that work? In other words, if there is this big gap, how do you bridge it?
JP: [0:10:40.3] It’s what Dr Kirton talks about, Problem A versus Problem B. Problem A itself is the problem at hand, what we’re trying to solve. What we find a lot of times within groups is that conflict is actually coming from Problem B. We’re all trying to solve the same problem, but what’s happening is the way that we get to that looks a little bit different.
Early on in my consultant business I worked with a small team. They were experiencing significant amounts of dysfunction. Their customers were noticing it, they were to the point of almost falling apart. We did the KAI assessment with them and found some very interesting results. This small team, all but one person had what we called essentially the same score. This one person had a drastically different score than the rest of the team. What was very interesting though is they serve several internal customers, so their organisation and most of their customers identified more closely with the outlier than with the core group of the team – and that outlier was actually serving as the communicator for the entire team.
What was very interesting is the leader fell within the larger group that all had a similar score and so working with that leader, that leader suddenly had that understanding of “Hey, we’re having a lot of infighting and it’s not because we want different things. It’s not because we even see things differently. It’s because we approach the problem differently.” Having that knowledge within itself helped that leader understand how to really use that one person who could be the main communicator for their internal customers and really leverage that. I’m happy to say after several months of positively working together they saw a big difference, simply understanding that they were not actually fighting about the solution itself. It was just about how they approached the problem.
DH: [0:12:39.4] And Curt, presumably if the leader of a team can deal with those differences and understand those differences, that’s going to increase the performance and productivity of the team.
CF: [0:12:49.7] Yes, absolutely. When Dr Kirton first evolved the KAI and he was going to different CEOs and asking how they apply it to leadership, what they told him was they asked for the most coping during a crisis of all team members and when the crisis was over or resolved, they were able to go back and operate normally. And so asking for minimum coping during normal times and maximum coping during crisis times, and obviously with COVID-19 we’re going through a crisis.
DH: [0:13:24.4] And presumably, depending on your score on the inventory, you’re going to change the way you react to a crisis. I mean you’ve already talked about how the innovators might be too quick to throw away the rule book, whereas the adaptors might want to try and hang on to it for too long. Specifically what the reactions to a lockdown situation like this where we’re suddenly having to work at home much more and perhaps not seeing our colleagues so much? Can you talk to me about people on the scale will react differently to that, Curt?
CF: [0:13:59.0] Yeah, of course we haven’t researched it, but I’ve talked to a lot of people. We have anecdotal evidence that when people – or I should say, when companies went into lockdown and people were working from home, the most adaptive individuals had a bit of anxiety because the routine was broken up and they felt more comfortable once they had established a routine – making sure they were doing certain things during certain days, checking on certain people at certain times. They’re even scheduling a workout or a time to sit out and relax, but they had to build a routine to calm their anxieties.
The most innovative people are happy to go from work to home. They enjoyed the different environment. They liked the opportunity that it presented but now that we’ve been doing it for a while, the most innovative individuals are wanting to get out. It’s become too routine, they feel a bit trapped inside the house and they need to get out and do something else.
DH: [0:14:55.2] And Jessica, presumably as well, when the leader of the team – assuming they’re equipped with this knowledge that the KAI system gives them – can build the routine to suit the adaptors and can offer enough difference so that the innovators are happy too. I mean, that presumably is what the good team leader is doing at the moment.
JP: [0:15:17.0] Yeah, and Dave, I could go further on that and say it’s not even necessarily about changing the process itself. It’s simply about framing how do we communicate these changes? How do we communicate how we’re moving forward? That changes with how someone approaches the problem and the leader can really make sure that they’re emphasising the parts that really resonate with that person. This is just one more aspect of how we’re making sure that leaders are properly tailoring communication to the folks that they’re working with.
DH: [0:15:55.4] And tell me a little bit about stress in all of this. I know stress is a big deal when it comes particularly to change, for everybody, and of course at times like this where there is so much change, stress must be a really important thing to acknowledge and deal with. How can you help with that using the knowledge of the KAI system?
CF: [0:16:19.2] That’s a great question. In answering that question, I need to talk a little bit more about coping as we’ve been defining it here. As we’re defining coping behaviour, coping is the ability to operate outside of your preferred style. And so KAI measures your preferred style on the continuum, a number between 32 and 160, but we’re all able to operate outside of that style, either more adaptively or more innovatively. That requires three things –
The first thing is awareness of the need to cope. The problem requires some adaption or some innovation and so you’re able to turn it on.
It requires some motivation and that’s where the stress part comes in because you have to be more motivated than the stress that you have to be able to cope, and because we’re all under a lot of stress right now, it’s much more difficult to cope because it’s taxing to the brain and motivation is difficult.
The third part I want to talk about is something that came up in a recent conversation with a leader of a non-profit. The third reason someone may not cope is they’ve never learned how. It’s a lot of skill. This was an instance where there was a 25 year old employee and the individual wasn’t coping well. They had to be more innovative as the Director of the Programme was talking about the individual, and it became evident that even innovators need a little bit of structure. They’ll appreciate it when they see it. They may go over it on occasion, not out of spite of the structure, they just don’t see it. But a little bit of structure is needed, and so even though this person is a little bit more innovative, she never learned how to work from home and how to establish a routine that was productive for her and in her role in her company.
DH: [0:18:11.9] So again, that’s presumably where leadership is so important because you need to recognise that some of your team members might be having problems with the particular challenges that you’re facing and act to deal with those. Jessica, do you see that in the field?
JP: [0:18:26.5] I do. Many times when I’m trying to explain coping, I talk about the rubber band. I’ll stretch a rubber band and I’ll talk about how if you go significantly outside of your comfort zone in problem solving you’re going to be like a rubber band. It’s going to stretch and as you continue to stretch – think about a rubber band. If you pull it over and over again, it’s eventually going to get bigger. It’s like thinking about working outside of your typical problem solving style. If you continue practicing it over and over again, you’re going to get a little bit better at coping, but here’s the monkey wrench that’s been thrown in to things is that with COVID-19 there is a significant amount of more stress that are on folks. Childcare is different, people are worried about their safety, people are worried about when the economy is going to get back to normal.
I would say that probably most people’s rubber band cannot take any more coping right now at work, and so what Curt mentioned earlier is that we’re asking people to do all this coping and people’s rubber bands are stretched really thin. I think in a practical sense we need to have really two main understandings from this.
The first one is there are probably going to be higher team tensions than ever before. It’s not because people don’t like their team. It’s not because their team is not working well together. It’s simply because this coping may cause people to snap a little bit more often. And so thinking about holding space for that, thinking about really having an open and honest conversation with folks.
The other piece is that we do need to understand that teams are functioning very differently right now, and so as a result we are having to change how we cope. Curt mentioned earlier learning to cope is really important, but what we don’t understand really fully right now in a global sense how is everyone changing how they cope? Folks that are more orientated – and I’ll share personally as well – real group conformity is really important. I know we’re not getting into sub scores today, but that’s a piece of this. How much do you play nice in the sand box to others? How important are your relationships with others? For me, that’s really high and so living in this world of not actually seeing people, not actually getting into a room and working with folks, it’s been really challenging for me to really think about “Okay, how do I get that peace in my working relationships? How do I get that peace with the groups that I’m with because coping looks very different right now?
DH: [0:21:07.1] Okay. So I think it’s clear that in a time of potential stress, like this, if I understood what Curt was saying correctly, people tend to cope less well so they go back to their normal problem solving style, or they go back towards their normal problem solving style because they’re under stress. So from a leader’s point of view – and we are after all, talking about leaders today – what do they have to do? How do they adapt their leadership to deal with those situations, to try and keep the team together, bring the team with them as I said in the introduction?
CF: [0:21:45.6] Yeah, that’s a great question. I think CEOs need to recognise where people are at on the KAI continuum and recognise the need for reward. As Jessica was saying, there’s lots of stress out there and there just needs to be a lot of understanding but also as we increase motivation, some more reward. I’m not talking about monetary reward. There needs to be more conversation about acceptance of “Hey, we value you. We want you on the team.” Show signs of appreciation. Those are all very helpful.
And I want to add one thing. Building off more what Jessica was saying about group conformity, KAI can inform us about group conformity and adaptors and innovators look at group conformity a little bit different. One of the biggest fears I think a leader should have right now is losing good people. A lot of people think, “Well, the innovators are going to be the first to leave because they enjoy bouncing around from job to job anyway, so why not? But actually if a person, I should say an adaptive person, is lacking that organisational fit or lacking that group conformity that they feel, they’ll be the first to leave because the more adaptive feel sense that hey times are changing and may not feel relevant here anymore. They’ll feel it the quickest.
The next people to leave are the more innovative who don’t feel the fit, so it’s very important to have ability to communicate well as a leader and show appreciation and keep your team motivated.
DH: [0:23:15.4] And presumably, Jessica, that communication needs to be on an individual level wherever possible so that as a leader you’re adapting your communication style to the person you’re talking to.
JP: [0:23:27.1] Yes, absolutely. Having that awareness is really important. I’m going to say something that might be a little bit controversial because I’ve heard folks all over the board on this. This is the time to look at your organisational charts. This is the time to look at your reporting structure.
I’ve heard some HR folks that have really said, “Don’t make any big changes right now. Don’t make any big moves.” This is the time to really assess that structure because there might need to be some temporary moves and as much as we want to think that COVID-19 is temporary, this could impact us for the next year to two years or beyond. There could be some long term implications to businesses, and so I want to encourage leaders not just to communicate on an individual level, but also truly look at your organisational structure. How is it serving?
We don’t want to put people in a box. We don’t want to say, “Oh, just because you’re an innovator you need to be in this department, or just because you’re an adaptor you need to be in this department.” But you do need to think about how you are structuring your organisation to make sure you have the right people in the right places, especially in this time of great change.
DH: [0:24:41.8] That’s a great point Jessica just made, isn’t it? Going forward, the future is really important and presumably companies can’t ignore what’s going on. They’ve got to adapt and make sure they move with the times, I suppose.
CF: [0:24:55.2] Yeah, I agree. COVID-19 has given us an opportunity to re-examine everything from organisational structures to how we prefer to do things, what is essential, what is not essential, how we interact, how often shall we interact? I have actually seen more opportunity and that might be a controversial statement because I know it’s hard and we’re all living through this. I think it’s a great point. Some of us working from home have greater challenges working from home than others and such, but I do think it’s a tremendous opportunity to re-examine what we do and why we do it.
DH: [0:25:30.9] And finally, I wonder whether you could both just sum up for me what are the advantages of understanding the adaption versus innovation problem solving techniques? What are the overriding advantages that people are going to gain if they take the trouble to understand this stuff?
CF: [0:25:52.1] I would say KAI is unique because it is the one inventory that associates with a different type of theory, and that is adaption and innovation theory, which is a theory based on the idea of how we work together to manage change. It is the original theory, the science of teams and managing change. KAI is a pure measure that’s used around the world and so the value becomes I know where people are at on my team, I know how they prefer to solve problems and I can appreciate that diversity of thought they bring to the team knowing that any idea that they may bring to the table may be contrary to what I want to do or think we should do – but because we have an open space to have that conversation and be respectful of each other, be able to disagree without being disagreeable, move forward as a team and solve problems.
As COVID-19 has shown us, the world is very complex and complex problems require teams to solve those problems together.
JP: [0:26:57.9] We’re at a critical time as Curt mentioned. There is a lot of change that’s happening and KAI is uniquely positioned to help individuals and teams understand how they work best. I know there are a lot of businesses that are in a ‘wait and see’ mode right now, a lot of businesses that are putting off development, a lot of businesses that are just maintaining the status quo. The problem with that is you’re not taking this unique opportunity to really rise to the occasion and really make your business better during this crisis. We don’t know how long it’s going to last. We don’t know how long we’re going to live in this new normal and so I always encourage people ‘knowledge is power,’ having an understanding of yourself of how you work, how your team works can actually help you overcome many of the challenges and conflicts that you might be stuck in. And at the end of the day we are shooting for connectivity and excellence, and this is just one more tool to help teams really get ahead even in a difficult time.
DH: [0:28:08.3] Thank you very much Jessica, and thank you very much Curt. You’ve been listening to the KAI podcast with our special guests, Dr Curt Friedel and Jessica Prater.
If you found the discussion interesting, you can find out more about the KAI system and its first class team development potential at kai.foundation. In the meantime, please subscribe and share this podcast.
Thanks for listening.
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