PAPod 517 - From Kansas to the World: Todd Conklin’s Journey and the Evolution of Human Performance

Show Transcript

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Music.

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Welcome back to the Pre-Accident Podcast. I am your temporary host,

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Jeff Lith, and I am sorry.

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I am sorry because I'm Canadian, so I'm predisposed.

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But I'm also sorry because everybody's expecting to tune in to their favorite,

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favorite podcaster out there.

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We get to do something very special today, I think.

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And I get to interview a very special guest.

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Guest as a friend of the pod i get to

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interview the probably the most special guest of the pod

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and that is todd conklin am i saying that

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right conklin that is that is a that's a european pronunciation but yes that's

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correct awesome man no i'm excited to talk to you about this what a great beginning

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i didn't even know that was going to happen that was amazing well we never know

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what's going to happen on your cast well that's true turnabout is fair play

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that's true that is It's true.

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So listen, I want to talk to you like I now I get to feel with these tables

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turned as a as a as a listener, right,

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as a champion of the listener out there,

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not somebody who has a lot to say intelligently on your podcast. So.

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Let us begin, Todd, you, you know, in this podcast, you've you've created such

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a body of work and we feel like we get to know you through your work and through your discussions.

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But i'm curious and wondering if you're willing do you think i talk too much about the weather,

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i always worry that i talk too much about the weather well weather and food

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are two things that are food i don't worry about i don't i don't worry about

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food you can't talk enough about food.

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Though lobster rolls so i'm just saying that for halifax's benefit and not dallas's

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benefit And not Dallas. Okay, there you go.

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Listen, what stood out to me in no particular order was that you do mention

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Kansas a couple of times in this book.

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And I think that's really fascinating. And I wondered...

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Have you ever given everybody just a very brief summary of how a guy,

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now we know from a small town in Kansas,

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whose dad gave you that great footnote, how does a guy from rural small town

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Kansas make his way to being interviewed on this amazing podcast?

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The amazing pre-accident podcast?

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Yeah. Well, Jeff, that is the sweetest question. So I grew up in the middle

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of the United States, and I grew up in both Kansas and Colorado,

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but not very far apart from the two cities I grew up in.

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I grew up in eastern Colorado and western Kansas.

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And some would say there is no difference between eastern Colorado and western Kansas.

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It's the Great Plains, the High Plains, the very same ones that go up to Alberta

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and Calgary and to a great extent Saskatoon and that area.

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That's where I grew up. And it was a really fun place to grow up.

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And I had, you know, sort of a normal upbringing.

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I worked in a Alice Chalmers implement dealer, my first job, my little kid job.

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And then I transferred from there I went there to the veterinary clinic,

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which was actually quite an education because my veterinarian was – that I worked

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for, there were actually two of them.

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They specialized in large animal because it's a large animal kind of place, so cattle and horses.

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But then they also did small animal because that's how you made your money.

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So if you wanted to eat and buy a new car you had to take care of mrs.

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Johnson's poodles more or you know mrs.

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Jones's cats that kind of thing and then I graduated from there to the grocery

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store and I don't know Jeff would you where did you grow up North Vancouver

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okay so growing up in rural North.

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Every little town, and my town had about almost 3,000 people in it,

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so it was tiny, although there are smaller for sure.

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The cool place to work when you were in high school was the grocery store.

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That's where all the cool kids worked, like the quarterback of the football team worked there.

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Not like the fast food joint. We didn't really have a fast food joint.

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Like we didn't have a McDonald's.

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We had a burger place called The Jet, but that was run by one family.

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So to work at the jet, you had to be the child of the person who owned the jet.

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I mean, they didn't bring outsiders into that community.

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And so I then worked for the grocery store. And in the midst of that,

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I got a job at a place called Philmont, which is a big Boy Scout camp in New Mexico.

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And that kind of opened my eyes because at the time I worked there,

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there were about 700 college-age kids that worked there. It's the largest outdoor camp in the world.

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And I just met all these people that grew up in, you know, like New York City

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or went to school at Stanford. I mean, they did all those big things.

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And that sort of enriched me.

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Enriched me seems wrong, but that definitely showed me there's more to the world

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than my little part of the high plains.

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And so that's how I got to where I got to.

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The reason I talked about it, I think, in this book is this book feels like

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I feel like I owed this book to people.

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And it really became really clear to me

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when we did that meeting in Australia and had

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these big discussions that the one part of this conversation that people haven't

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talked about was how to manage and facilitate change in the process of getting

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an organization to move from seeing safety as a noun to seeing safety as a verb.

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If we can kind of coin Eric's idea, moving from safety to safely,

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I think is how Eric says that.

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And so I thought I should probably just write down some things that I've always

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thought were really important and see where that sort of lands.

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And some of those things definitely came from growing up in western Kansas.

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So Kansas to meeting all those folks.

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And I hear what you're saying there. That's kind of like the effect travel has going anywhere.

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Right. Yeah, totally. And, and I happen to know that some lifelong friendships

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were cemented there. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

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I'll have great friends, but we skipped a couple of steps from that camp to Wollongong. Yeah.

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How can you fill in a bit between that camp experience and Los Alamos, maybe?

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Well, yeah. So I was teaching school in Denver, teaching university in Denver.

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So because I worked at this Philmont place, I wanted to have my summers open.

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And so the one way you can guarantee your summers are open is never stop going to university.

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And quite honestly, Jeff, between you and I, I think I would have stayed in

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university. university, I'd probably still be in university.

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They kind of kick you out after a while. They make you take a degree and leave

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because they get tired of you.

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But because I wanted to stay in university, I just kept working on my degree.

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And so when I finished my bachelor's degree, I went right into a master's program.

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And partially, I think, because I didn't want to get a job. I mean,

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the idea of owning something that wouldn't fit in my car was really unappealing.

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I mean, really unappealing. Because I think my vision for myself,

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and I'm not sure this has changed much, is that I would probably just always

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kind of be mobile. I would always be moving.

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And that every place is interesting. And no one place is interesting enough to hold you there.

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I've changed my thinking on that a little bit now.

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So I was teaching in Denver because that was a really good job.

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And it was very fun to work there.

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And I was having a great time. And Los Alamos National Laboratory had a big

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labor strike with actually with their protective force, with the security people.

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And so I made a phone call to the labor person.

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And I really to this day don't know why I did this.

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But I asked them what their plan was for restoration.

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Because I remember on the phone with this guy telling him, you know,

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every strike eventually gets over.

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It doesn't feel like they're going to get over, but they always end.

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And when they end, what's your transition plan? And he said,

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we don't really have one.

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And I said, that's something that you should be thinking about.

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And probably that sort of fit into what I was teaching at the time because I

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was working a lot with that kind of business communication around significant

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events like labor unions and stuff.

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And the guy said, well, come up and see me and talk to me.

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But then he just said, but this isn't a job interview. And I said,

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well, that's okay, because I'm not really looking for a job.

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And so I went back to New Mexico, which I'd spent every summer for 13 years in New Mexico.

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I went up to Los Alamos and I talked to the guy and we were supposed to talk for an hour.

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And we ended up talking for like the whole afternoon, so like five hours.

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And by the time I left, he had offered me a job and I had accepted the job.

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So then that brought me into Los Alamos. And I really did.

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I came in on the labor side, the labor relations side.

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And actually worked to help provide transition from the very,

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very toxic environment that a strike creates to an environment where you could

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actually perform mission.

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Because Los Alamos is a real mission essential place.

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I mean, and security is a really important part of that. So that went really

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well. And out of that, I ended up doing a lot of work with leadership training.

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And then very early in my career, this guy, John Sung was his name.

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He came up to me and he was an important name in the Department of Energy.

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And he had been in Washington, D.C. a long time.

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So he was quite influential. influential he came up

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to me and he said what do you think about this human performance

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discussion that's happening within the

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doe and i'd not heard anything about it so what i did was act like i heard about

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it because that's how i mean it's work so i mean you know exactly so i said

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well you know i i've i've been listening to it and i'm super interested in it

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but i don't know you know i I don't have a lot of details on it at this point in time right now.

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And he said, I think it's something we should be looking into.

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And that sort of started the journey on the human performance part.

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And we met with a couple people at the time.

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The names that sort of – there's a bunch of names that I should list here because

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I hate to leave anybody out.

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But like Shane Bush had already started –.

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He was a little ahead of Los Alamos at his laboratory, and they had started

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the journey probably a year before us.

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And so they had a little better understanding of what was happening,

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and we almost immediately took a trip to INPO and sat with Tony Moshara because

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that's when he was at INPO, and we started talking about these ideas.

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Is and it became it became

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well it obviously became what happened is

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that it sort of caught some traction but it

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was a very interesting journey because we knew so little

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back then and we were learning and we were definitely getting information from

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some scholars the names are almost the same you know back then jim reason was

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kind of the the granddaddy of everything and And so a lot of stuff came from Reason's work.

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And we started looking, you know, really across the disciplines for things we

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could pick up on. And it was a pretty interesting journey.

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Wow, that's fascinating. So many of us have gone back and sort of learned all

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that stuff because ultimately you did, you know.

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And then you took that forward and, for me at least, created that curiosity

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back and looking at that.

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That so going through that

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work at some point i mean the five principles were published in

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what 2019 right probably something

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like that yeah i don't have it in front of me but maybe and so

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but this this notion of you know this thing they call hot sort of evolved out

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of that space and i think that's an important call out the most i think a lot

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of people out there might think that it that notion kind of began with the publication

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of that book but in fact you were spending all all this time back in the roots of this HP piece.

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And at some point in that.

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You brought yourself to it and wanted to evolve it, it sounds.

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And that evolution process probably began sometime before it manifested into

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the Principles book, yeah?

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Yeah, oh, for sure. Like the Five Principles book, that's wild.

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I never thought about people thinking that was an origin document.

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The Five Principles book is really, first of all, it's the summation of the

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journey we had been on that far.

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I don't think it's the final summation by any stretch, but it was sort of –

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it became really clear that over the last 20 or 25 years that the principles

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that we began with had morphed.

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No. Yeah, no, morphed. I guess I don't really know what morphed means,

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but that's what smart people say.

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They had changed not because the principles were wrong, but because we had become so much smarter.

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Smarter and so many people had learned so

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many things i mean the one thing that i think it's

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worth repeating a million times over and over again is nobody

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has individual ownership to an idea in the space like human performance because

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it's a multi-disciplinary kind of holistic view there are no single owners to

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ideas it's really a result of the community And the larger community,

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the bigger and bigger and bigger community, that these ideas have sort of taken root and matured.

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And so the book in 2019 – and the funny thing is I wrote that book because I

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was kind of angry, not at anyone.

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But I was really angry that we were drifting away from the first principles.

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And so I ask, why am I upset that lots of places aren't doing the fundamentals training?

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They're just jumping right into tools. Because we know, after 25 years,

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ask anybody who's been on this

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journey a long time, that if you just start with tools, you will fail.

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You have to shift the thinking. It's really moving safety to a practice.

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We used to say it was a philosophical change. And it is a philosophical change,

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but what it really is, is moving safety from a program to a practice to something that you, you do right.

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And, and that's so obvious now, but at the time that was not that obvious.

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I mean, that was, people were, that was a big deal and it gave people little heart attacks.

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What is it? They say that the path is always obvious when you look back at it.

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Yeah. Yeah. I'm a genius.

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I'm a genius in retrospect. Your whole journey started by that one business

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principle there when that fella directed you to the HP stuff.

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And that is what interests the boss fascinates the shit out of me. It's totally true, too.

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And the funny thing is, is that I wasn't I genuinely was not interested in in what I thought it was.

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And I was genuinely not interested in the moving full time into safety.

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Safety and i realized in retrospect that that

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was the leadership saw something

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there that they wanted to tap into and so they and i remember saying well you

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know when they asked me to go over full time and do it i said well you know

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i thank you for that offer but right now i'm and they're like oh you must be

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confused we didn't mean to say this was optional this is your assignment, bingo.

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And that was a pretty good move. And what's funny is that the Five Principles

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book is really a maturation of the principles based upon all the.

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Incredible work, both practical and academic, that was being done around these ideas.

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And some things, well, for instance, the one I would use as an example,

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Jeff, is that humans are fallible. People make mistakes.

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The original understanding of that 30 years ago was that if we could identify

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every error-likely condition and remove or replace it, the outcome would be reducing error.

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And what's funny is that back then that was really compelling.

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But now everybody realizes that error is really normal and it's not a choice

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and you could have the best system in the world and still have mistakes.

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And so now instead of reducing or replacing error, we're really much more prone

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to talk about error tolerance, recovery, resilience, a lot of David Wood stuff,

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which is brilliant stuff.

00:18:05.468 --> 00:18:12.828
And we needed to retool our principles so that it was more reflective of those ideas. Yeah.

00:18:13.488 --> 00:18:17.088
It's amazing. You're right. You know, the lineage of all this conversation and

00:18:17.088 --> 00:18:21.848
then, you know, folks come along and add context or bring themselves to it or

00:18:21.848 --> 00:18:25.128
tie in other facets and the space evolves, right?

00:18:25.248 --> 00:18:29.288
Yeah, totally. So where in this journey did your PhD happen then?

00:18:29.628 --> 00:18:34.248
Oh, so pretty quickly after I got to Los Alamos.

00:18:34.508 --> 00:18:40.808
So I never thought I'd won it. I mean, the idea of getting a PhD was super unattractive,

00:18:40.828 --> 00:18:45.008
but it became a smarter thing to do.

00:18:45.268 --> 00:18:50.448
And part of the thing at a place like Los Alamos is that everybody had a PhD.

00:18:51.648 --> 00:18:56.588
Now, that didn't mean I felt peer pressure to get one, but what it did mean

00:18:56.588 --> 00:19:00.248
is that the community I was working with, my peers and coworkers,

00:19:00.548 --> 00:19:07.148
were incredibly supportive of it and knew what it meant and what it would do

00:19:07.148 --> 00:19:12.668
and how the journey would be really significant and fun for me.

00:19:12.748 --> 00:19:13.628
And they were exactly right.

00:19:13.768 --> 00:19:18.808
I mean, I had a great time. And so I got the Ph.D., but I totally lucked out on that Ph.D.

00:19:19.428 --> 00:19:25.608
Because I'd actually aligned with a program at the University of Texas and was

00:19:25.608 --> 00:19:27.648
going to commute to Austin.

00:19:28.408 --> 00:19:31.808
Actually, this was all kind of set up to commute to Austin.

00:19:31.908 --> 00:19:34.528
And I went in for a final interview with the department chair,

00:19:34.708 --> 00:19:38.928
and the department chair said, why aren't you studying with Everett Rogers?

00:19:38.928 --> 00:19:46.808
And I said, well, because he's at Annenberg at UCLA and the chair said,

00:19:46.928 --> 00:19:50.028
no, he's in Albuquerque at the University of New Mexico.

00:19:50.976 --> 00:19:54.696
And I said, I did not know that because that is not my community.

00:19:55.156 --> 00:20:00.016
And he said, you ought to talk to him. And so I immediately flew back from Austin,

00:20:00.256 --> 00:20:04.156
made an appointment, and went to Albuquerque and met with Everett Rogers.

00:20:04.836 --> 00:20:11.856
And he was incredibly supportive, and he encouraged me to apply.

00:20:12.076 --> 00:20:15.516
And you should know that the first year I applied, I didn't get in.

00:20:17.116 --> 00:20:20.476
Actually, yeah, just the first year. I think I got in the next year.

00:20:20.976 --> 00:20:25.616
But he was very encouraging, and I think he did that kind of to humble me a little.

00:20:25.976 --> 00:20:33.176
So then I got in, and that was really lucky because Rogers is – he was amazing.

00:20:33.596 --> 00:20:39.956
So you know where I'm going with this is that you do show the curve.

00:20:40.196 --> 00:20:44.216
Yeah, the diffusion current. And what's fascinating – and I wanted to just –

00:20:44.216 --> 00:20:48.516
thanks for doing that. I wanted to do a bit of the backstory because this is

00:20:48.516 --> 00:20:53.116
a hop-adjacent organizational change book.

00:20:53.816 --> 00:20:58.216
Yeah, and I think that's – so that's true. And that was kind of the goal.

00:20:58.556 --> 00:21:05.116
That's the thing. I really felt like I owed this to the gang.

00:21:05.656 --> 00:21:10.496
It's timely. Just because everybody was saying, well, you know,

00:21:10.536 --> 00:21:12.636
how do I make this change happen?

00:21:12.736 --> 00:21:15.396
How do I make it stick? And I would always say, well, you know,

00:21:15.396 --> 00:21:19.276
there's a whole body of knowledge around this. I mean, you don't have to reinvent this.

00:21:19.376 --> 00:21:23.296
There are people who, you know, Peter Senge and Everett Rogers,

00:21:23.476 --> 00:21:27.216
there are people who really understand how organizations function and they understand

00:21:27.216 --> 00:21:29.996
a lot about change. Yeah, buddy.

00:21:30.736 --> 00:21:35.236
So putting the curve in the book and speaking to that.

00:21:35.356 --> 00:21:39.796
And so can you talk a bit about, and that's so on point, right?

00:21:39.896 --> 00:21:42.416
With everything kind of comes full circle, right?

00:21:42.576 --> 00:21:45.656
Right. from that experience. So talk a bit about that.

00:21:45.676 --> 00:21:49.416
Talk a bit about that curve of diffusion and what that's done to your thinking

00:21:49.416 --> 00:21:52.336
here in helping folks successfully integrate.

00:21:52.536 --> 00:21:55.796
So Everett Rogers grew up in Iowa and he's a scholar.

00:21:55.936 --> 00:22:00.556
And if you want to look him up, you should. Everett Rogers, his most famous

00:22:00.556 --> 00:22:04.596
book, and he has many books, but his most famous book is called The Diffusion of Innovation.

00:22:05.036 --> 00:22:10.196
And it's a really important book. It's hugely popular among academics.

00:22:10.536 --> 00:22:14.496
It's incredibly well written, which is one of the reasons it's such an important book.

00:22:14.676 --> 00:22:21.736
And he basically spent his lifetime researching how hybrid seed corn,

00:22:22.616 --> 00:22:29.776
was diffused among farmers in the middle of North America, both Canada and the United States.

00:22:29.936 --> 00:22:35.496
So any place that grew corn, he was able then, because the data set was really

00:22:35.496 --> 00:22:41.876
easy to get hold of, he was able to sort of study how new hybrid technologies.

00:22:42.757 --> 00:22:49.217
Types. I almost said models, but I don't think it's models. Hybrid types of corn were diffused.

00:22:49.417 --> 00:22:54.597
And so corn is really interesting and it's always been hybridized.

00:22:54.637 --> 00:22:59.597
I mean, since prehistoric times, I mean, it's a really interesting plant.

00:22:59.977 --> 00:23:05.637
And he was able to do that. And in doing that, he was able to study this idea

00:23:05.637 --> 00:23:09.777
of how new ideas move amongst groups of people.

00:23:10.117 --> 00:23:13.857
And if you're not I'm not familiar with the diffusion curve.

00:23:13.977 --> 00:23:18.597
It's kind of an S curve, sort of. And it starts with innovators,

00:23:18.717 --> 00:23:23.637
and then it has early adopters, and then it has the middle people.

00:23:23.737 --> 00:23:25.997
I don't remember what the middle people are called, like normal,

00:23:26.277 --> 00:23:31.417
early normal, late normals. Is that it? I'm making that up kind of. Oh, no, majority.

00:23:31.877 --> 00:23:37.697
Early majority, late majority. And then the last people to accept a change he calls laggards.

00:23:37.937 --> 00:23:40.837
Right. And folks that still have a rotary dial phone. Right, exactly.

00:23:41.137 --> 00:23:44.557
And none of those places are necessarily bad or good.

00:23:45.137 --> 00:23:49.617
They're just predictable. And what's so interesting is you can see that very

00:23:49.617 --> 00:23:55.357
same thing happening within organizations, certainly happening within industries.

00:23:55.637 --> 00:23:59.337
I mean, if you look at oil and gas or you look at steel construction,

00:23:59.797 --> 00:24:05.877
you can tell who the early adopter companies are, who the innovator companies

00:24:05.877 --> 00:24:08.757
are, because they're out there in the front trying new stuff.

00:24:08.757 --> 00:24:11.837
And then they bring with them the rest of the community.

00:24:12.037 --> 00:24:16.397
Well, that same thing holds true in your organization is that you have those

00:24:16.397 --> 00:24:18.877
very same people and they're kind of predictable.

00:24:19.017 --> 00:24:22.737
And his data shows that you can count on those.

00:24:22.837 --> 00:24:29.657
What Rogers then did with that is say we have to have different strategies to

00:24:29.657 --> 00:24:32.817
facilitate change for those populations.

00:24:33.617 --> 00:24:40.017
So innovators need very little convincing because they're always willing to try the newest thing.

00:24:40.137 --> 00:24:43.597
And everybody listening knows somebody who's an innovator. They have the newest

00:24:43.597 --> 00:24:45.197
phone. They have the newest watch.

00:24:45.457 --> 00:24:47.977
They have the newest camera. I mean, everything's new.

00:24:48.842 --> 00:24:54.702
But their strategy is different than it would be for the late majority or the early majority, right?

00:24:54.802 --> 00:24:59.482
And so you're able to sort of strategize and manage change through the organization

00:24:59.482 --> 00:25:01.342
by sort of understanding where people are.

00:25:01.502 --> 00:25:06.442
And it was really, really helpful. He then took that on to the whole idea of

00:25:06.442 --> 00:25:11.982
social networks and then eventually went to the whole kind of six degrees of separation,

00:25:12.242 --> 00:25:17.822
that there are only six people between you and a fruit seller in New Delhi,

00:25:18.022 --> 00:25:21.722
which is the original thesis for the six degrees of separation.

00:25:22.162 --> 00:25:28.242
And then they're able to do that network study and understand how that connection works.

00:25:28.562 --> 00:25:30.742
And that connection is really fundamental for change.

00:25:31.102 --> 00:25:35.262
That's amazing. I had no idea Kevin Bacon was from New Delhi.

00:25:35.362 --> 00:25:37.962
Yeah, Kevin Bacon is