Dirty Chai with Chio - Ep 3 - Lessons on being a Corporate Change Agency from the CIA

Being a changemaker comes at a heavy cost. Passion and belief alone are not enough. It's important to approach change in a thoughtful and strategic way. Adam Grant's book "Originals" provides valuable insights on how to achieve change. Carmen Medina's story is a prime example of the challenges faced by change agents. It's essential to understand the context of the change and consider different perspectives. Building power and respect in an organization is crucial to effectively advocate for change. Without respect, attempts to influence others can be met with resistance. Resentment and disrespectful behavior can result from a lack of respect. It's important to approach change with patience and a win-win mindset. Labels and stereotypes can hinder the change process. Change agents must navigate these challenges and work towards productive conversations and outcomes. Hello, hi, welcome to this week's installment of the Dirty Chai Podcast with me, your host Chio. And this week we are talking about being a changemaker and the cost at which it comes. Now there is a very heavy price to be paid for being a changemaker if you go in blindly full of passion and believing in what you want to change and those are the only tools in your toolbox. I know this because I learned it from experience and I would like for you and whoever gets an opportunity to listen to this to not have to learn from experience that that is not enough. It took me a couple of years post my own experience to actually see clearly what I had done wrong and how I had done it wrong and to learn that there are better ways to approach and achieve change in an organization because I think change is necessary for evolution as much as following the status quo is also necessary for stability. The two must balance each other so that we continue to grow as organizations and as people. And I really saw clearly what I could have done different when I read Adam Grant's originals. Now I love Adam Grant and I love the fact that his books are so well researched. The information that he gives is so well researched. Of course he doesn't put a full research paper in his books but if you go and do your own additional research or if you go and seek out additional information on the subject, you will realize that he has put an enormous amount of work into putting this information together for us. He is an industrial psychologist at Wharton University and he has a number of books under his belt. And in Chapter 3 of the originals, he says, at some point we've all considered voicing a minority opinion, protesting a policy that doesn't make sense, championing a novel way of doing things or standing up for a disadvantaged group of people. For me, that was fighting a policy that did not make sense to me. That policy at the time was not paying women who went on maternity leave. In other words, maternity leave was entirely unpaid. That did not make sense to me at all considering that childbirth is an existential imperative and that even the men who are in the workplace and able to continue working were born of a woman who had to take maternity leave. This simply did not make sense to me. It was unjust and it was particularly unjust in the context of the labor laws of South Africa. They don't make provision for people to be paid but they make provision for people to go and leave. And how do those two things work together? How do you have a baby, no other source of income, an additional massive expense and that's the very time at which your employer, your government, the people that were born of women like you turn around and say this is the time that you don't get paid. Just telling it to you brings back the passion that I had at the time and I went running at this thing with my passion, with my indignation, with the law, with the rational and I thought that that was enough. And I learned that it wasn't. I learned that sometimes you do these things from the very best of places and you cause an immense amount of damage to your career and to your reputation. This is why I identified so strongly with Carmen Medina's story in Adam Grant's originals. One of the things I like about this book is that Adam speaks to or uses examples of people that we haven't heard much of before. I'm sure they are well known in their circles but these are people that we don't know. They're not in the mainstream media in the way people like who? Let's say Steve Jobs is, for example. You find he speaks about Steve Wozniak who is a little less known. You find he speaks about people like Carmen Medina and I find that this continues to have relevance because I had a branch with two friends who are both C-suite executives and one of those friends says she's so frustrated because people don't listen. You are trying to give them ideas, she says, ideas that will improve their organization. This is for their own good and she's an expert at what she does. She's brilliant and she's expressing her frustration at trying to tell people that she has this idea and it's going to make things better and they're just not willing to listen. As soon as she finished speaking, I said, you need to research Carmen Medina. I just need to pause at this point and apologize for my voice. It's quite rough but that's because I've got a really bad chest thing and a sinus thing and I've had to drink water and nebulize myself so that my voice is audible. So please bear with me. I do think that getting the message across is far more important than lying in bed. I can affirm this for a little bit. So who's Carmen Medina? In the early 90s, Carmen Medina was a high-flying analyst in the CIA and she went away to Europe for three years. She learned some things while she was over there. She came back, as people do, having traveled and broadened their horizons and she realized there was a fundamental problem with the manner in which intelligence was communicated within the intelligence community. At that time, information was shared via what were called finished intelligence reports. They were like intelligence newspapers, if you will, released once a day. They were difficult to share and information was not being analyzed in real time. Analysts weren't sharing and analyzing information fast enough. And so to her, this was an immediate problem. She could see how at that time the fax machine had revolutionized the way information could be shared and as she likes to put it, there was this great new thing called the internet and she felt that it was going to change the world, right? And one of the ways it could change their world was enabling them to share information more speedily and more readily between agencies and be able to respond. It's a brilliant idea, right? Right, from where we are standing now. She wanted something akin to Wikipedia but for intelligence agencies so it would be limited to intelligence agencies and suitably protected and they would be able to access information as and when it was needed and you'd be able to put up information as soon as it became available so that people could check it and analyze it and work out if there was a threat in time to do something about it. Now she brought this idea and no one was willing to listen and the less people listened to her, the more frustrated she got and so she got louder and more abrasive and this, listen to me, listen to me, listen to me. You know, she stood on her soapbox. She refused to back down. She was strong. All those things that are supposed to be right, right? Right. The problem is it didn't seem to work. In fact, some of the people who gently supported her idea started warning her. Be careful, they said. If you're too honest, you're going to ruin your career. Ruin my career? She got frustrated with the people who said they supported her but weren't willing to be as loud and to make as much noise as she wanted to make about this change that needed to happen. We need to adopt the internet and her frustration led to her blowing up. She burnt out. She was off for three days after she had that blowout and she tried to look for another job because what was the point of it all, right? She couldn't get another job. She had to stay in the CIA and she became a pariah of sorts. No one wanted to be associated with her and her crazy ideas and she ended up parked in some administrative type of job far, far away from the action, as she puts it, unable to make an impact at all. In fact, she had effectively been binged for her efforts. Three years later, she gently started advocating again. She had regathered herself and within a decade, Intellipedia was born, which is the baby she had always wanted to create. So what changed? And this is where Adam Grant really breaks down what changed. He speaks of the things that changed in the outside world, obviously. So it's that the internet gained widespread acceptance. It's that September 11 sounded the alarm on terrorist attacks and how better coordination between intelligence agencies could have made a significant difference. But more importantly is what Carmen Medina did between the time she got binged and the time she started advocating again. Now I'm going to leave Adam Grant's book for a little while and I'm going to reference Carmen Medina herself. Carmen speaks now of this experience and she shares what she learned from it and how she thinks people should now become change makers. And listening to her, the things that she says make a lot of sense to me. So here she says, she tells a story, for example, of how she was raised. She was raised in a violent home. Her father was an alcoholic and there was a lot of fighting between her mom and her dad. And as she progressed in school and the idea of college, the cost of college tuition, etc., started looming higher and higher on the horizon. Her parents' fights intensified and often would become intensely physical. So one night there was a huge fight, as usual, and they were fighting about whether or not Carmen should go to college again. Her father called her a chicken shit intellectual. And fighting, the urge took off so badly. So her father called her a two-bit intellectual. And her brother, who was younger, was also at the house, fearing that it was about to become violent again. She called the police. The police officer comes, they break up the fight, and the police officer asks, what is going on here? What is the issue? And Carmen says her brother then steps forward and says, I can tell you, sir, what the issue is. The issue is that my sister is an intellectual. And she talks about how she shares the story later on with colleagues once she started interning. And one of them, who was senior to her, said, we have a very similar background. And he said, the power of being the intellectual in the room, if that's what you consider yourself, the power of being the change agent, the power of being that intellectual that her brother called her out as, is the ability not just to be intelligent and do nothing with it, but to be intelligent and apply that intelligence to directing the conversation productively. If you are a change agent, she says, it's incumbent on you to make sure that the conversation is productive, that the conversation is headed in the direction that will produce suitable outcomes, that the conversation is not escalating. It's de-escalating but leading towards the desired outcome. Number two, it's incumbent on you to think of the change in context. So when I struggled with the maternity policy thing, and this is very important, when I struggled with the maternity policy thing, I was, and I have always been in male-dominated industries, I was in a male-dominated industry where the people who were decision makers were very well-earning men with wives who either worked by choice but didn't need the money or didn't work at all. They were quite capable of supporting their spouses through unpaid maternity leave. These are people who are not able to place themselves in the shoes of people who have gone hungry, people who are raised by single mothers, people who are desperately trying to make ends meet, people who are minimum wagers, right? And losing one month's salary could throw their lives into havoc for a very long time and into severe debt. These are people who are not that they wouldn't empathize, they just have never been there and they don't understand what that means, right? And I did not approach it that way. You see, I come from that background. These things are obvious to me. It is obvious to me that you cannot say to a person who is maybe just become a single mom who doesn't have a wealthy spouse, and even if you're not a single mom, if you are just ordinary people earning just enough to get by, to suddenly lose a salary because you've chosen to make your family bigger is such a cruel punishment. But that's not something of which they could conceive. It wasn't their problem. But I approached it from a point of view of, you should know this. This is obvious. You are obviously privileged and therefore you cannot process what I am telling you. I didn't say it quite like that, but I have no doubt looking back that that is how I came across. Instead, I should have tried to understand how they think, how they are perceiving it, what their pain points were. It turns out that their pain points were it would be a massive cost. There would be so many people going on maternity leave because they were now going to get paid while they were on maternity leave. Let's leave the obviously flawed rational behind the idea that a person will get pregnant because they're going to get paid a portion of their salary while they're pregnant. Let's leave that behind. This is what they knew or this is how the conversation around maternity leave has always been for them. Instead of me approaching it from that point of view where you say, actually, research shows this. If you look at this, this is what happens. Let's look at the number of people who have fallen pregnant and see whether there has been, if those people had all been paid, would there have been a significant loss to the company? What if you put measures in place for when people go on maternity leave, they get paid, maybe you say they have to stay with the company for 12 months after that. If they don't, then they have to pay the money back. There are many ways to skin the cat, but I feel that by the time I got to that point where I was applying win-win principles instead of I'm right and you're wrong, I had done a lot of damage. The damage wasn't irreversible, but it was damaged nonetheless. Similarly, Carmen Medina destroyed relationships, many relationships. When she speaks of that point where she had that blowout of frustration, that failure to understand why people were not understanding that the internet was going to change the world, why were people not grasping that this was a life-changing event, that it could make intelligence sharing different, that it could revolutionize it, and the truth was that it could, but the truth is not enough and passion is not enough. She lost sight of the fact that she was telling an agency built on secrecy that they should be more open with the information that they had. She then now in hindsight comments that had she known or had she understood that theological change, that a change of theological principles is an uphill battle, that it is difficult, that it's not a matter of attacking it with intellect, then she would have approached it better, more tactfully, more informed, and more patiently. I thought to myself, on my tinier, tinier scale, much, much smaller scale, that is what I failed to understand. I just kept my hands there because when I read this, I read this a couple of years ago and I really understood that it's not so much about whether you are right, it's not so much about whether this thing, it incites some sort of passion in you. It's about how you come to the table and how you invite others to the table and how you create a win-win situation. Then she says, the other thing that happens when you're trying to be a change maker is that labels start to make themselves apparent. This is how you know that you are starting to ruffle some feathers. She became labeled as a heretic. She is at pains to emphasize in her TED Talk that heretics are always uncomfortable. I was labeled as a feminist. You would think that that's a good thing, but that label surfaced only in the context of a difficult situation. It would be some, let's say I gave an opinion on something and it's a really good opinion, then the person who would want to undermine that opinion or would like to move it to the other side would very quickly say, but you know, Chiyo is a feminist, right? You know, Chiyo is a feminist, right? I've lost count of the number of times I had to say, do you know what feminism is? Because you should be a feminist too. You see, anybody who desires equality of the sexes, anyone who requires equity between the sexes is a feminist. That means it's not a woman thing or a man thing. It's a human thing. But that label on its own was a warning sign for me that I had stepped into a territory that was theological, that I was affecting this type of thinking. And when you affect that type of thinking, you face a particular type of difficulty and you need to go in with a realistic understanding that you're not going to get a standing ovation for that change. You are not in a movie. So the other thing, the other significant takeaway from her TED talk, which is now going to link in with what Adam Grant took away from her story. So Adam Grant tried to understand how the change between her first attempt and the second attempt was significantly different. And he concluded that the difference between the two were power and status, right? And he distinguishes between power and status. Power, he says, involves exercising control or authority over others. Status is being respected and admired. And you see, what happens when you take the time in an organization to earn power, to earn respect, you can't buy it and you can't charge your way at it. You have to earn it by delivering, by being excellent at things, by working to earn credit. You then earn what Adam Grant calls idiosyncrasy credits. Idiosyncrasy credits simply means that people who are respected and powerful in their area are able to say things that would be considered outrageous and people receive them differently. A very interesting study found that when people who have no power and no authority, as Carmen had no power and no authority when she came back, she had been out of the country for three years. Her experience meant nothing to the people that she was talking to at that time, was trying to push this idea from the bottom up. What she didn't realize was all it triggered in the people who were hearing it was resistance. So this is what the research study found. When people sought to exert influence but lacked respect, others perceived them as difficult, coercive and self-serving. This is actually at an immediate flashback to someone saying to me, are you pushing this maternity policy thing because you want to have babies? It is just so fascinating. But it's fascinating that you think you're having a unique experience. I think this is the power of sharing information and sharing stories. You think you're having a unique experience and that you're dealing with a person who's particularly unique in the way that they're responding to you. Then you go out and you read a book or you read some research or you listen to people who are smart about these things and you learn that this is a human response, a human response to change, that it is normal for people to resist. It is part of the reason that the human race has survived so long, that people band together around a common way of doing things. But anyway, an interesting thing happens to the people who consider you as having no power or respect when you tell them something or you try to change. But also an interesting thing happens to you when you try to influence others and you discover that they don't respect you. It fuels a vicious cycle of resentment. And in an effort to assert your authority, you often respond by resorting to increasingly disrespectful behavior. And I'll be honest and say, when I look back at that experience that I was telling you about, I went through a similar period of immense frustration and becoming steadily more firmly vocal in a way that I otherwise wouldn't have been in dealing with other executives or in dealing with directors, in trying to make my point. And when I read this, I realized, oh my goodness, again, it wasn't particularly unique. And any changemaker or a person who wants to be a changemaker could very easily fall into this trap. In Carmen's story, this is where she now has this blowout and she insults all these people and tells them that they're not supporting her enough and da, da, da, da, da, and she has this burnout, right? And she's open, she's candid in saying that she lost all those friends. They have not spoken to her since. That's a very important takeaway to understand that power and status must precede your changemaking. So when you come into an organization, you don't come and slash everything to the ground without triggering resistance. You don't come and burn everything to the ground without triggering resistance. It's natural. That is what will happen. So you need to come in and earn the respect of the people that you're working with. You have to come in and show that you are capable and that you are excellent. And as you do that, you earn what are called idiosyncrasy credits. And that allows you the freedom and latitude to then try new ideas. So this will take me back now to the points that Carmen Medina makes in her own TED Talk. And she says, while she was sitting in that back office, serving her dog box time, she saw an advert for a new role that no one wanted. It was a boring role, administrative in nature, but a very important thing was on that list. Somewhere near the bottom of the description of the job spec was the expectation that the person would explore ways in which the organization, the CIA, could somehow benefit from digital evolution or revolution. And she thought, this is my opportunity. And she says in her TED Talk that sometimes when you're seeking to make change, the best thing that you can do is seek an adjacent opportunity that fits into the culture of the organization, but leads to the outcome that you want. So in this instance, using this idea of seeking to evolve as the organization was seeking to do through this role, she then proceeded to make the organization better in smaller ways using the digital revolution and gained idiosyncrasy credits. By the time two younger analysts came through and said that they thought they could put together Intellipedia, she had gained the credibility and the power to put her weight behind it and support it to fruition. In addition, her preparation and the work that she put in while creating a healthy balance in her idiosyncrasy account, the world around shifted. Because sometimes all this preparation meets opportunity, September 11 was conclusive proof that the agencies needed to find a way to share information faster because all of them had a little bit of information that would have made a big difference to the September 11 attack or to the response to the September 11 attack. Then she makes two more points that Adam Grant doesn't make, which I thought was important. Number one, she said, make your idea a community idea. Because you've had the idea and you're passionate about it and you understand it, it's very easy for you to get impatient with your community. They must catch up. They must understand what we're trying to do. They must push this in the same way that I want to push this, but don't leave them behind. At the beginning, she actually says, the number of supporters is far more important than the purity of the idea. Over time with the maternity pay idea, over time, I gained the support of other people, but I had already run ahead by myself and done some damage. Then later on, went at it again with the support of stronger, firmer people who understood this thing. That support made all the difference because it's not a change I could have made on my own in any event. But sometimes the hubris of youth and the passion and the idealism is what gets in the way. You need to understand that the number of supporters for your idea is more important than the purity of the idea. Spend time engaging with people who would be invested. Spend time bringing them on board and they will speak for this idea even when you're not in the room. My voice is telling me I should get ready to stop talking, so I'm going to hurry it up. The final one was knowing to quit or take a break. She says when people start commenting on your personality and saying things that are very out of character, towards the time that she had her flame out and burnout, people had started calling her cynical and difficult and a heretic. When she looks back, none of that fits her character. What she didn't have the ability to recognize was she was burning out with this energy of trying to get this idea across the line. She says if she had known better and been wiser, she would have paused, taken a step back, reassessed her strategy. Sometimes you just need to take a break. Assess whether maybe you don't have enough idiosyncrasy credits in your account. Assess whether maybe you don't have the right supporters. What is it that's not working? Is it not the right time? Has opportunity not intersected with your preparation just yet? Don't keep banging your head against the wall until you knock yourself out like she did. Rather be strategic, be smart, stay self-aware and stay aware of the responses to the situation and navigate. It's a marathon and not a sprint. Finally she told a story that I thought was particularly special. She said that even though she wasn't succeeding in getting this idea across the line, she kept talking where she could, where she was invited to speak, she spoke about it. She described it to people. She described what she believed, what she imagined, how she thought it was important for creativity to have a part in the intelligence community. Years later she was approached by a colleague, someone she did not know, and they said they had heard her speak on the subject and they had been so moved by it that they had left what they were, the traditional role that they were in and they were now, they had established classes and were now teaching creativity within the agency and she had changed their life. She took from that that you must always speak your truth, someone will hear you and maybe you'll change your life without even realizing it. Just don't burn yourself out on the way to the outcome. Change making is hard work, strategic work, clever work and you need to approach it as such. I hope that you found this very useful and that you will take time to research Carmen Medina but on top of that I hope you take time to read Adam Grant's originals. There are so many spectacular stories in there, including the concept, spectacular ideas including the concept of how fear is not to be feared, that fear has fueled some of the greatest leaders to the most extraordinary actions. As always I hope you've enjoyed this episode of the pod and I hope that this makes a difference in at least one person's life. If it does, then my purpose is fulfilled. Let's grow together, let's figure this thing out and grow together. Have a great week.