Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Speaker A: Hello. Thank you for joining us. Welcome to what Counts, the podcast where we dive deep into the world of information governance. Here we highlight proven solutions developed through our experience working with companies across various industries and we talk about how you can apply these solutions to your company.
Whether you're interested in information governance, have a need, or just curious to hear about information management challenges like email management, retention management or asset data management, this podcast is for you.
This is Lee and in this episode, Moore and I will talk about what it means for a business to plan for change and anticipate the future.
We've all heard the phrase if you fail to plan, you plan to fail.
But what does the smart planning really look like? How do leaders see opportunities before they come become obvious? And what's the balancing act look like today to run a business?
Mara, those are all really loaded questions. Could you think you can handle some of those seriously?
[00:01:00] Speaker B: And you started out with the bumper sticker answer, yes, fail to plan.
[00:01:06] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:01:06] Speaker B: I also think you added to our introduction there about people who are just curious about information management.
And I, I assure you listeners that if you invite your friends, there's a lot of cool stuff going on in the world of information today.
So the more you, the more information, the more you'll want to know.
At least that has been true for me from the beginning.
So the balancing act.
Yeah, this has been, I mean it's a constant struggle for a lot of people, definitely for us included, definitely for me. But I do feel in the last couple of months that we have had, you and I, a lot of discussions about balancing our future, planning for future Trailblazer and our day to day life in the world of Trailblazer day to day operations. And I think that, and I was talking to a, a former client about something unrelated and she said something that made me think it kind of crystallized it all for me. This balancing act is not unique to any one business or to just me feeling like it was my personal inability to balance it all and get it all done.
It is a sign of a healthy business, actually, I think.
But that doesn't mean it's not a challenge, even though it's a sign. And the reason that it came so clear to me is because something that this client said is something that we, that we faced in our last project with a different client and the one before and the one before.
And those two clients were very different as businesses from the one that, that this client came from.
And I started to realize that, okay, we are a little business, you and I and our Small Trailblazer Consulting. We're having this challenge and we ran into a lot of issues related to this challenge. And I'm being a little bit mysterious, but I'm going to spell it out in one second with the very large company that we worked with most of last year and now with this reminder from the client that I spoke with earlier, who that was a startup company and they were focused on different things, but they had investors and they had operating assets and they had some things that made them a startup. But they like took a giant leap forward.
All three of those companies, us, that client and the client from last year, we all face this challenge. And which is how much effort do you put into the front end of the business? Growing the business, making your products bigger, your assets stronger, growing your footprint versus the back end of the business, the infrastructure side, your information management policies, processes and systems of particular import to us. And also, I just care a lot about that.
But it could be your HR policies and personnel and how do you bring on new talent and how do you keep people engaged? It could be any one of those back office functions. How's your financial systems working? Do you depend on the heroic efforts of one incredible spreadsheet guru, which I swear we have encountered one of those in every single client organization that we have been in.
That person always knows everything.
And it's in a massive spreadsheet that.
Can anyone else interpret it? Maybe, maybe not. Does it support all of their financial reports? Absolutely. But the interpretation and explanation of it maybe not so standalone and traceable.
So.
And that's because the focus is mostly on the front end. If you are a publicly traded company, you're trying to deliver for your stock holders or shareholders. If you are a small business, you're scrambling to make sure you have enough money coming in to pay your bills and pay your people. If you're a startup, you have to make your stand and, you know, get in the mix. And you can't be spending time on this. All that admin stuff, we'll get to it later.
And it's true in every aspect of business. And that's what came home to me this morning when I was talking to this other client is, oh, this is actually a thing. This is a feature, not a bug of running a business.
And okay, now we know this is part of what we have to do. How can we do this better?
I called you and told you about my epiphany and you had some, I think, really good insight and reminded me that we're not doing a terrible job.
So do you want to talk about that?
[00:06:02] Speaker A: Well, I basically said that you have to get the right team around you to complement who you are and where you're at as a professional.
And in that team, you need to be able to communicate effectively and you need to do brainstorming sessions, like take the time, whether it's once a day for 15 minutes or it's a Friday afternoon or something.
Maybe not Friday, maybe relax Friday morning.
Yeah.
But take the time to really war game out. Where are you headed? Where is the business headed? What's going on in your environment, in your professional environment so that you can position yourself for it.
[00:06:51] Speaker B: Yes. And I think I really that resonated with me, especially the two pieces of it. This take the time to really have a deep conversation on a regular basis, because this isn't a one and done kind of topic. But the other part of it is who are the right people?
And when you're building your team, however you're building your team, you know that there are vision people, there are the details people, the completer finishers who get stuff done.
There's a lot of models out there in the writings around how to run a business. You know, minders, grinders, finders.
Um, so there's that. There's a whole thing that we did at a former company where we, everybody got divided up into what was your team role? Were you the cheerleader? Were you the completer finisher? Were you the plant who had the ideas and the vision? Um, so pick your model. But the fact is every business needs somebody with the vision. Where are you going next? Somebody who can get stuff done.
And how you deploy those resources is the balance.
So the gaming out, we were talking about change. And I think in one of our earlier podcast episodes in this arc, we talked about flexibility is important. When you own a small business. You can't just be stuck in your ways because something's going to happen and it won't work anymore. And then you're stuck, you can't move forward. So flexibility is important, but flexibility is also somewhat reactive, reactionary, as opposed to adaptive and looking forward. And how do you anticipate upcoming changes when you don't know anything? And we're kind of living through this in the world right now because some things are unknown.
So I said, you were talking about positioning and I said, how can we possibly position? We don't know what's next. We could position over here in left field and the ball goes over there across the fence or something.
That's my. That is my One attempt at a sports analogy. So it works. Silent cracking up is nice. You're on mute, but you're cracking up.
So the same thing for our business. It's about where, where are things going to change from a technology perspective because we are providing information governance services and helping our clients respond to the way information is changing. That's very technology driven, but it's also a regulatory aspect. And how do you keep the, how do you keep pace with any regulatory changes? And what do you need from information out of your information to respond to that? And then there's operational changes that change your information or change the information that you need. So how can we anticipate that?
And I suggested a surprising thing to me, now that I look back on it from an hour ago when we talked about it.
The surprising thing to me is what I suggested is that we can't, we can't anticipate the change. What we can do is watch something, watch an idea, and we wait for data.
And that part doesn't surprise me. I'm always about wait for the data and then make a decision. But it's the regularity of, let's check in on this thing every three months or every six months because we don't know where it's going, but we know something's going to happen.
The reason it surprised me is because usually I'm just like, oh, this thing happened. Here's the next step. I want to jump fast, but in this case, I think the right answer is actually no. We need to watch for it.
[00:10:44] Speaker A: So, yeah, we had talked about in a previous episode to always be learning. Right. Always taking information. And I think that's kind of a piece of this. Right. Stay informed, read network, expose yourself to diverse perspectives, ideas. Yeah, yeah. And it'll give you the, like, the lead as to where things are going. And, and you're right. You can't position yourself because you don't know what it is. Your, your example from earlier was the fiber optic. Is that the latest to greatest? Absolutely. Is there going to be something after that? Absolutely. What is it? Don't know. But you need to be able to be flexible enough to move. Right.
[00:11:25] Speaker B: And you need to start finding the sources to watch what's going to happen.
So we talked about an example where I think we're doing a decent job, which is in energy storage, because we spend a lot of time working with energy companies and we have a pretty strong understanding of fossil fuels and we've learned a lot more about renewable energy. And one of the challenges with renewable Energy is the storage of energy, the battery storage. And we started looking at the evolution and improvement of batteries a couple years ago at a small scale so that we would understand how, how that's going to impact the businesses that we support. And will there be new businesses in this space that will also need the type of information governance lessons and principles that we've learned from other energy fields, starting with fossil fuels and moving forward. Because the idea of generating or capturing energy, distributing it, transmitting it and distributing it, that's a pipe question of big or small, and then getting paid for it. How do you get paid for it, which is complex in the renewable space because you have tax credits and interim steps and a lot of different things. It's a different model for payment than you have in fossil fuel industry or traditional utilities.
And we know a lot about that, but we didn't know enough about batteries and we started looking at that.
So we can, we are on our way to being able to position around that because we've been learning and because we saw it as a thing, as an idea, I think we have in fits and starts. Maybe it's just a back and forth between you and me, the same kind of watch on what is happening with AI.
Where we see it's happening, one of us wants to leap ahead, one of us doesn't.
But we're watching it and we're learning about it and we're trying to think about, okay, how can that fit into the principles of information governance that we have, that we've never strayed from, which is you're creating information to support your business, to demonstrate, to document your transactions, your obligations, your fiscal rights and interests, fiscal and legal rights and interests, and to demonstrate compliance with regulations. Those principles are solid regardless of your business and regardless of what's happening with technology.
But the answers change drastically when you go from paper to electronic. You go from old onion skin paper that lasted forever, to recycled paper that faded away, to electronic information that you can't get rid of because you can't find it.
And what happens next with the AI creating new information?
It's a different record type.
Is it a record? I don't know the answer to that. We're going to work on that, but we are watching it and I think so. This day started out with me feeling like this balancing act is really hard.
And it's not just me, it's also everybody. All these different businesses are having similar issues of how to best spend their resources.
I have to say that having talked with you a couple of times now, this earlier today and in this conversation, I'm feeling better about the fact that we don't have to know all the answers, we just have to have an approach.
[00:15:05] Speaker A: So give us a little framework.
I recorded a couple of words from our previous conversation and that was lead, work and build.
So lead is set the vision right, rally the right people and then it's work. Do the work, take some action, test small changes and so forth and then build and is invest in the long term strategy.
[00:15:27] Speaker B: Yes. And I think the work piece is one that sometimes, maybe often gets skipped because it's shortchanged.
It was shortchanged.
It's hard. You gotta test this thing. You still have to deliver in your current state. Can I try this? Will it work? Is it going to take me five times as long? Because I don't know how to use that tool yet.
We've also been encountering that lately.
Trying to learn new things along the way, trying to take something that we really understand solidly from a theoretical perspective and make it practical.
That's a challenge.
And everyone is doing that in different ways. So that. What'd you say? Learn, work, build.
The work piece is lead, lead, work, build. The work piece cannot be shortchanged. You have to spend time on that because the vision is important. Otherwise you don't know where you're going to go.
But you can't go straight from vision to building.
It'll be just a. It'll be a picture. It won't, it won't work.
And we have to get through that. That trial and error, informed trial and error. Not just randomness, but thoughtful trial and error. Test a piece of, see how it goes, improve it slightly, see how it goes. Until all of a sudden you look back and you're like, wow, look how far we've come. Because that's one of the other things. Today was an introspective day already or retrospective, Both.
Looking back at some work we had done about 10 years ago that was solid work based on good principles that we still apply today.
But actually the practical approaches that we took 10 years ago are completely inapplicable to today's world. And we have developed a lot of new approaches. And it was really helpful to me actually to go back and kind of check like, oh, wait, we were cutting edge on this and it was good and it's gone.
I wouldn't want to go back to that. That's not what we want to recommend to our clients. That's not how we're moving forward. But this work that we've been doing for the last two years.
It seemed like just little tweaks actually represents the end of a pretty long journey from where we were 10 years ago.
And I think that can be applied in a lot of different situations.
What do you think?
[00:17:58] Speaker A: I agree, but we're going a little long so asking if we if we're wrapping up.
[00:18:05] Speaker B: Yes, I could talk more in riddles, but but I'll just. I think that lead work build is a good framework for us to to keep working with and I think that my the piece of how do you bring the right people together and make sure you've got people focused on the front end, keep your business moving forward and the back end, build the solid foundation.
They're both important. You can't do one without the other.
[00:18:32] Speaker A: I agree with that. If you have any questions, please send us an email at info trailblazer.us.com or look us up on the web at www.trailblazer.us.com. thank you for listening and please tune in to our next episode. Also, if you like this episode, please be a champion and share it with people in your social media network. As always, we appreciate you the listeners. Special thanks goes to. Jason Blake created our music.
[00:18:58] Speaker B: Thanks everyone.
Come back soon, okay?
