Chicago Booth Review Podcast How to Argue for Change Within an Organization

James Janega: But when you compare where we are to where our competitors are and their rate of growth year over year, or when you compare it to the size of an adjacent market segment that's growing faster that we are not serving, well, suddenly you have a story that you can tell, right? And that's a story of either fear or greed that you can frame a story around. It is a strategic story, and then the intrapreneurial story is here is how we will address getting to that target market and improving that growth.

Hal Weitzman: Most of us have found ourselves at some point arguing that the organizations we work in need to change. Change is hard, which is why there's a multi-billion dollar change management industry, but what can you do to make the case for change from within? Welcome to the Chicago Booth Review Podcast, where we bring you groundbreaking academic research in a clear and straightforward way. I'm Hal Weitzman, and today I'm talking with Chicago Booth's, James Janega, a former journalist who now works as a managing partner at Growth Innovation Strategy Group and teaches storytelling to MBA students and executives at Booth. Janega argues that stories can help us make the case for change regardless of the organization we're trying to improve. So how do you pick the right stories to help make your case? And what are the common communication mistakes that make people's recommended changes less likely to be adopted? James Janega, welcome back to the Chicago Booth Review Podcast.

James Janega: Good to be with you again, Hal.

Hal Weitzman: We had such a good time last time talking about storytelling in the context of entrepreneurship and startup pitches, trying to get investment that you and I talked about where else is storytelling important? And of course, most of us are not entrepreneurs. We work within organizations, but we still want to make change. So you have this term or there's a term, intrapreneurship. What is intrapreneurship?

James Janega: Intrapreneurship is when you are a corporate innovator who's trying to launch a product or a new program or some strategic platform and drive change within an established organization. You always live in fear of low-end or new market disruption in an era that is turbulent, uncertain, novel and ambiguous as they teach at Oxford, and we all live in that era. It's full of entrepreneurs. They're not really the kids in a garage in Palo Alto anymore. Many of them are very well-funded and they're single-mindedly focused on finding a solution in an area where your company may have existed for a hundred years. Many of our graduates at Booth, my students in the full time and part-time MBA program are looking at jobs in this or attending this class because of that. Many of the participants that we work with as an extension of Booth School in the executive education program are seeking precisely this kind of insight into how to be more effective at creating change and competitive advantage inside of their organizations.

And there is this element of borrowing from the startup method or borrowing from entrepreneurship that in some cases is very well suited to this environment of intrapreneurship inside of a company and in many other cases doesn't begin to capture the complexity and difficulty that being a change agent or trying to do something new in a company that is optimized to do something else can be.

Hal Weitzman: Right. Absolutely. Just to clarify, when you talk about intrapreneurs, you are not really talking, are you about CEOs or the C-suite? You're talking about the people who are lower down or actually doing the actual work. Not to be rude to the C-suite.

James Janega: Let's be generous to the C-suite, too. Everybody, this is a team sport and everybody needs to play. And so that's one of the first things to realize in this is that one of the things that makes this more complex is that it happens. It's three dimensional chess. It happens on several levels. At an executive level, you have a strategic responsibility to say we can grow in these segments, but this needs to grow more. We need new product launches. This is declining. We need to understand our customer more. That market is changing. We need to engage with them, right? At an executive level, that strategic foresight is really important and providing that top down support. Most of the time when you hear it talked about, you have professional innovators in starved resource starved organizations in the middle of the organization complaining that they don't get enough support from senior leadership. I think that that may be true, but it also may be misguided.

The strategic direction for where we go, what the military calls commander's intent needs to come from the top down and then it becomes very easy to provide and justify support resources of people, time and money.

Hal Weitzman: You say that, but put the military aside. I know nothing about that, but at least in corporate America, it seems to me at least that lots of people talk about innovation. Management loves to talk about innovation, but they don't really give people the space and the budgets and the time to do it and to fail and all the stuff that needs to happen that entrepreneurs are well used to doing. Serial entrepreneurs could fail 10 times before they succeed the 11th time. I'm not sure you get that leeway in the same way in corporate America, do you?

James Janega: No. No, you don't. No. There has to be that strategic alignment with the company and a reason to innovate. There needs to be this portfolio management in the middle level of an organization that is keeping track of the resources, time, money and energy that are spent towards it so that we are optimizing for a result that our executive team wants, that our corporate team needs. And then there are the people that are doing the work that may be earlier in their career or early mid-career that are very, very smart and very, very creative, but are working within this constrained environment, which can be productive, which can be very productive at really productive organizations, but which needs to be tied to those other three levels of the organization.

Hal Weitzman: So let's talk about storytelling because I think we're all sort of familiar with storytelling and entrepreneurship. We talked last time about my obsession with sharks, Ankh and dragons, then the British version, which are very cheesy and unrealistic type entertainment.

James Janega: Right.

Hal Weitzman: But it's clear that nobody would argue that if you want to start up a company, you've got to have some kind of story behind it and a story that's compelling. But if you and I were sort of saying we need to cut costs in our supply chain, there's no TV show for that, right, where people come and do storytelling. So why is storytelling just as important for that kind of change within organizations as intrapreneurship?

James Janega: Intrapreneurship is looking at some opportunity for a company to grow. Also, you may need to change someone's mind to get a piece of investment to de-risk an idea. So being able to tell a story that convinces someone that this is a real opportunity, much as you would an investor, as an entrepreneur, that you have a solution that you can test and de-risk to preserve the company's resources while you are validating that this is a real opportunity and that you have a team that you can credibly do this without neglecting any of the other things that you need to do, well, that takes a really strong story and it takes the kind of story that we were talking about on our last episode about the three elements that you need to have. You need to be able to have an actor who has a problem, a customer. You need to have experts that say that they need to be served this way or there's a changing market environment, and you need to have data that you can build internally. And this is how I will get that data that shows that this is credible.

Our customers will buy this, and we can prove that without spending a lot of money even on a pilot project that has no ROI. So it becomes a very important piece of storytelling internally and more complicated.

Hal Weitzman: Okay. And the kinds of stories that you would tell, we talked last episode about the kinds of stories that you should tell as an entrepreneur, are the kinds of stories the same? You talk about a customer. I mean, it seems pretty clear that telling a story about a customer that we care about that we want to retain and work with in the future would be very compelling. Is it basically the same or are there different kinds of things when you're inside the institution that you want to talk about in stories?

James Janega: I had an uncle who was a partner at a large consulting firm, management consulting firm, and he said to me one time, "James, there are really only two things that a client, and they are fear and greed." So when you are telling... Let's pretend that that's correct. When you are telling the story inside of an organization, there are two classic call them archetypes for this story. One archetype is a burning platform. Unless we change, we will lose the right to serve these customers that we've had for a long time. So that's the fear element. The greed element is there is a growing opportunity and just like an entrepreneur, this is a sizable market that is growing, and we have a right to play there because of our inborn expertise and the assets that we can control, but we need to validate how we're going to do that, de-risk that path to market so that we do that efficiently and don't stumble on our way out of the gate because we also have to deal with as an established organization, credibility and reputation.

Hal Weitzman: Okay. Yeah. So then you have a track record to defend basically.

James Janega: Absolutely, right. And what you've see in an intrapreneurial storytelling environment is this protection of downside as you're going after upside. You have to play defense as you're going on the offense.

Hal Weitzman: And actually, we are talking about I guess what I would call that like a gain frame and a loss frame. The fear and greed is the classic way of putting that. So it reminds me of there was a time when I had a student in one of my classes who came to me and I said, "You've got to have a problem that you're trying to solve." And the student said, "My firm doesn't have a problem." And I said, "Well, that's great. So there's nothing to change."

James Janega: Perfect.

Hal Weitzman: But then it turned out that the problem was they were doing well, but they could be doing so much better. And so discovering that gain frame seems like an important... You wouldn't want to rest on what you're doing or just depend on the loss frame, the burning platform. There's so much more you could be doing, and you could be so much bigger and more successful. But it's hard sometimes to see that if you're already pretty successful.

James Janega: That is such a good point to make. Very often we'll be satisfied inside of a company. And I have seen this with my clients. I have worked as an entrepreneur inside of companies. Very often we will be satisfied with our performance because it may be getting higher relative to our performance year over year. But when you compare where we are to where our competitors are and their rate of growth year over year, or when you compare it to the size of an adjacent market segment that's growing faster that we are not serving, well, suddenly you have a story that you can tell, right? And that's a story of either fear or greed that you can frame a story around. It is a strategic story. And then the intrapreneurial story is here is how we will address getting to that target market and improving that growth.

Hal Weitzman: If you're enjoying this podcast, there's another University of Chicago Podcast network show that you should check out. It's called Entitled, and it's about human rights. Co-hosted by lawyers and law professors, Claudia Flores and Tom Ginsburg, Entitled explores the stories around why rights matter and what's the matter with rights. James, you talked about intrapreneurship and stories and how they're important. I guess everybody who tries to make change within an organization comes up against someone who doesn't want to make that change. Right? There's best practice, there's tradition. We just don't do that. We don't have the budget. We don't have the resource. We don't have the expertise, blah, blah, blah. We could go on and on. There's so many objections within organizations. How would you respond to that? And the hardest one of all is just inertia. Just people who say yes and then don't do anything. How do you tell people, intrapreneurs, to respond to that in terms of what you teach? Communication, storytelling?

James Janega: There's a certain kind of story framework that you have to keep in mind in that situation, and I want to come to that in a moment and lay this internal cliffhanger right there. Let's assume that it is the storytelling that's going to change the mind and that all of the things being equal, we have the strategy in place, the sort of structural support that we need in terms of direction, governance, portfolio management, and a system that can discover, incubate and accelerate things to market, which is what it is.

Hal Weitzman: I love a whole bunch of assumptions. Now you're talking like a real economist.

James Janega: Yeah, I'm a product of the University of Chicago. Proudly. If one assumes that all of those things are in place, now you have a storytelling challenge. Why should I make this investment over another investment or why should we make this investment at all given the opportunity cost? People do things because they feel a certain way, and I think we talked on our last episode about behavioral economics and the difference between satisficers and optimizers. Most people are satisficers. They do things because they feel a certain way. It's not just about feelings. They feel a certain way because they believe something based on the facts that they've seen put together through a combination of actors, experts, and statistics, which gets to this. They know something about something. There is a set of facts that they have examined and explored. They have identified what is behind those facts and have a belief about it.

They feel a certain way about it that you should act in a certain way. And so they do. If you want to change that cycle, you have to understand what it is you want people to do instead, and therefore how you want them to feel about that subject and therefore what they need to believe about that subject. And therefore, what those facts are that you need to present them with that may either challenge or complement the facts that they already hold true. But once you get to that assumption base at the base of their action chain, if you will, that do feel, believe, act, chain, then you can begin to get to that solution. So you need to change the facts that they understand, add to them so that they believe another thing so that they'll feel another way so that they'll do another thing.

Hal Weitzman: Okay. But I'm just wondering, and you sort of hinted there, that storytelling can only do so much, right? There needs to be a whole lot of infrastructure and processes in place that actually enable change.

James Janega: Corporate hallways are littered with the bodies of people who told stories that were not welcome. Right? And anyone who does this does it at their peril if it's outside of a structure. Many professional innovators, people who talk to my class, any professional innovator in public tells the story of their successes. And when we gather behind closed doors, share the stories of near-death experiences or reshufflings and how to tell these stories better, to maintain those better relationships inside of an organization. Being an intrapreneur is a much more complicated job in terms of all the different stakeholders that you have to keep satisfied constantly. And each of those stakeholders is a different audience to whom you have to tell a story with a consistent basis of facts, but that benefits all of them. It's really a challenge.

Hal Weitzman: Yeah, it suggests that, again, you can't really have... Just like an entrepreneur, you can't have a simple narrative. It has to be something that's adaptable based on presumably what you know about your audience and the feedback that you get in real time, right?

James Janega: Yeah, absolutely. That's absolutely right.

Hal Weitzman: Okay, so the other thing I wanted to ask you about is you do get business cultures that are skeptical of storytelling, and sometimes I feel like TED talks have just an undue influence in our society, but TED talks, everybody wants to have a TED talk and they sort of think that that's good communication, right? But in real life, when somebody starts telling you a TED talk style thing, your brain starts saying, what are you trying to sell me? And there are corporate cultures and institutional cultures that just don't like that they have stories and just give me the information, present an argument, but don't tell me a story. How do you tell people to address that situation?

James Janega: My advice to somebody that is in an organization where storytelling is unwelcome is to look and see whether evidence might be, and then let the data tell your story and lead the story in situations where a big narrative approach may set up red flag warnings. You were a journalist. I was a journalist. We've both dealt with. Anytime you begin to hear a story, these flags begin waving and you start thinking of like, oh, this [inaudible 00:17:54].

Hal Weitzman: Let me me tell you a little in North Carolina.

James Janega: A fact check string, right? But when you're telling a story in an organization, you'll encounter skepticism and there may be a corporate culture that's very proud of their strategic decision-making framework or their capabilities. I've worked with a couple of them telling that story within the framework that they are used to hearing. That's the story structure you need to tell. Having those actor and expert external elements that put a little bit of color on the story, you can have those, but have those in your pockets. When they're already buying the story, you can tell in those additional stories, those additional story elements to try to create a fuller picture of the story. But chances are, when somebody's skeptical that what they're looking for is something that shows that you've identified the opportunity properly and scaled it, that you've identified options properly and de-risked them and that you're exploring them in a responsible way.

Hal Weitzman: So it sounds like you adapt the idea. Maybe I have to set an idea of what a story is, but we adapt the idea of story or narrative to the cultural context.

James Janega: Yeah, it is. And when you think about story as a framework for conveying information that is memorable, then I think that gives you a lot more intellectual freedom for how you will structure and tell that story. That's more useful in a variety of different kinds of circumstances. There are reasons why you might want to tell, include different kind of story elements and research shows all of those things. But there's no substitute for having the emotional intelligence to understand where you are, who your audience is, and what kind of information you need to convey to them so that they come with you.

Hal Weitzman: Last time when we had you on the pod last time, we spoke about the common mistakes that entrepreneurs make when they're doing storytelling that you've seen. And one of them you talked about was technical people who are sort of overly technical and get into the weeds. Now, if you are inside an organization, you might think, well, people love the weeds because we're all living there. Is that right? Or do people make the same kind of mistakes within organizations?

James Janega: The version of that mistake inside of an organization is that very often you'll have somebody who's a senior manager, possibly a director who is an expert in a functional area, and Ron Burt has all of this social network analysis research on-

Hal Weitzman: That's one of our professors. Of course, yeah.

James Janega: Yeah. What ends up happening is that you assume everybody knows what you know, and you tell a story from your point of view using your terminology and jargon and other people in the company, people that you may even be friends with in real life don't really know what you're talking about. And people who do that, Ron's research showed were not promoted at the same rate as other people who had that sort of perforated deep friendships around where they went a mile wide and then at intervals went deep on uncertain subjects. You tend to have a broader vocabulary for talking to other people, which I just did not demonstrate there at all.

Hal Weitzman: So just spell that out. That means that means the people who don't use jargon and acronyms are more likely to get promoted to bigger jobs where they take a general view and are talking to different kinds of people I guess.

James Janega: You have a better chance at a better career if you have a broader vocabulary and can talk to a broader circle of people. The mistake that people make inside of organizations is they tend to get too technical with their jargon and get themselves trapped in a conversation with people that don't understand what's going on and who need to move on to some other thing. So that sort of technical problem is one of the chief problems that people who are intrapreneurs have in convincing somebody up.

Hal Weitzman: How do you advise them to get around that? Because we would tend to think that I'm in an organization. Yeah, I don't know the person in another unit, but I assume that they know some of the basic terminology, but as you say, that assumption is just not accurate always. How do you advise them?

James Janega: I used to work in IT as an example. I worked for the chief information officer and very often, and I know I can tell you I cannot program my phone. I cannot get everything to work correctly on my phone. I was brought in as a problem solver of a different level as an innovator within the technology side of that organization, but I was reused a lot because I could talk to the people in the business facing parts of our company to find out basically what their problems are so that we could solve them for them. Right? And what happened with my colleagues was that they would be very, very knowledgeable about technological systems, about Microsoft teams, about the benefits of various kinds of platforms, and the brokers in the organization just didn't care. They just wanted to sell deals to customers, and they wanted to know why their phone didn't work. They just wanted their phone to work. Right? And so understanding that they don't care about how much you know about the system.

That's the technical trap that you fall in inside of a company knowing that the broker wants their phone to work so that they can call their customers, their customers can call them, and they can do a deal and sell real estate. That's what you need to know.

Hal Weitzman: All right, James, this has been absolutely fascinating and super fun. So thank you very much for coming again on the Chicago Review Podcast, talk about intrapreneurial storytelling, something that I'm sure we can all benefit from. We all want to make change, so it's important. Thanks very much.

James Janega: Thanks, Hal.

Hal Weitzman: That's it for this episode of the Chicago Booth Review Podcast, part of the University of Chicago Podcast Network. For more research, analysis, and insights, visit our website at chicagobooth.edu/review. When you're there, sign up for our weekly newsletter so you never miss the latest in business-focused academic research. This episode was produced by Josh Stunkel. If you enjoyed it, please subscribe, and please do leave us a five-star review. Until next time, I'm Hal Weitzman. Thanks for listening.