896: Integrating Emotions and Systems Thinking for Peak Productivity w/ Lori Fisher

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Hey, what is up?

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Welcome to this episode of the Wantrepreneur to Entrepreneur podcast.

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As always, I'm your host, brian Lofermento, and I'll tell you what.

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When I think about all the different conversations that we have within the world of entrepreneurship and business and here on this show, I can't help but think of all the twists and turns that we're always talking about, and today's guest is incredible at helping so many businesses and people People is gonna be at the core of our conversation today navigate those twists and turns, because she brings with her a wealth of operational experience in so many different transitions in life, in people, in businesses.

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I'm excited about this one.

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Let me tell you all about today's guest.

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Her name is Lori Fisher.

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After a successful career in technical operations, lori launched PLS Management Consulting in January of 2023.

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In her previous operations leadership roles in industries from biotech to aerospace I told you she was impressive.

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Lori led teams with high levels of diversity through crucial business growth during significant junctures of industry-wide importance.

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These crucial moments helped her find her thinking and, through the PLS framework, lori shares her efficient and powerful employee engagement, collaboration and management approach.

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Her learning, research and knowledge-sharing lifestyle continues to amplify outcomes.

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If you're a small to medium-sized business.

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Reach out to Lori.

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You're going to hear so much of her expertise today.

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We're going to learn so many ways to expedite the exchange of ideas within our teams and amplify individual and group access to options and opportunities and, most importantly, achieve step ahead outcomes while simultaneously increasing employee jobs satisfaction and retention.

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I'm personally super excited to learn from Lori here today, so I'm not going to say anything else.

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Let's dive straight into my interview with Lori Fisher.

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All right, lori, I am so excited to have you on the show.

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First things first.

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Welcome to the show.

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Thanks, Brian.

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Thanks for having me.

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I'm very excited to be here today.

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Heck.

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Yes, you have quite the impressive background, lori, and it's so cool to see that you've packaged all of that up into the way that you serve your own clients now to make even more of an impact.

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So, before we get into your brilliance, take us beyond the bio.

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Who's Lori?

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How'd you start doing all these incredible things?

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So I launched PLS Management Consulting just last year, but I have been an advisor and mentor to individuals and organizations for decades, as people would come to me directly or would be advised to do so by higher ups with.

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Have you talked to Fisher about this yet?

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Because I was an expert at complex problem resolution and had a reputation for finding a path forward that would leverage the problem to.

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You know, enhance thinking, improve was those moments, those fulcrum moments would propel me to critical and strategic interfaces that would further influence my be hard-pressed to find anyone that had the ability to impact the business, both internally and externally, and bring success than I could.

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But my biggest challenge, which I didn't always realize or understand, was bringing Lori Fisher's perspective to management and engagement and have it not be perceived as solely feminine.

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Manufacturing is still very much a man's world, from the shop floor to the C-suite on the operation side, and so it was very common for me to be the only woman in the room, and the perception wasn't that I was bringing smart, postmodern, inclusive, pluralistic methodologies, but that it was gender based and therefore not reproducible by them.

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And so you know they, you know I, I had to overcome that and they would tend to have the belief that I was bringing some kind of voodoo or mother figure mind control to different situations, which I heard very often, and so you know.

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But my intention and my approach to business and to interactions was on the granular and micro level, not at a high level, and that included reviewing documentation and records and data, but also in my engagement with the belief, systems and thoughts and thinking of people.

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So when something goes wrong, when people come together on that issue, they bring their knowledge, which is great because I need to be able to, you know, to engage that, to be able to know what happened and to find a path forward.

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But they also bring baggage, and that baggage can be a lot of things.

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It can be ego, it could be that they were somehow part of the problem and they're nervous about that, they can have hurt and anger that not only is from this situation but has been building in them, and they can have a lot of secrets associated with the business.

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So I would unpack all that with just a problem and because we engaged at that scope, we did that because you know problems have webs of causality.

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It's not just.

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You know what happened yesterday is not isolated to yesterday's events.

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You know everything impacts everything else and there's a lot of connections and work.

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So you know we would engage on this broad scope and a lot of times it could get pretty animated.

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So you know that is something that a lot of businesses find as uncomfortable ground.

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But if you're not engaging with employees to the point at which they have emotion and they express that, you're probably not learning everything that you need to know about the business.

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So you know Teddy Roosevelt said that people don't care how much you know until they know how much you care.

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And that's how I went about engaging with people and because it was bi-directional, I was rewarded for engagement and they were rewarded for engagement.

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It took away the restrictions on sharing information.

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And then, in the year 2000, I came in contact with and encountered the teachings of Dr Derek and Laura Cabrera of Cornell University, and they teach a systems thinking methodology called DSRP and I was immediately turned out.

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I mean it changed my life and the way that I approach interactions and thinking about things.

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And you know systems thinking is sometimes, you know, data heavy and if you're an engineer, great, but the rest of us have a hard time.

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You know utilizing it as a tool, but dsrp is natural, it is a it really is, and it is easy to learn and but yet invaluable to learning and problem solving.

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And so so, real quick, dsrp, which has since evolved into thinking up at Crabarra Lab U.

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It is something that tells us that thinking is not something we do, but something we get from applying four simple rules, that's the distinctions systems.

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Applying four simple rules, that's the distinctions systems, relationships and perspective rule.

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And DSRP also tells us that if we are aware of these rules and we practice them and do cognitive moves that help us learn more about how we see things and see more than what we would have before, we can actually get better at thinking, we can increase our thinking quotient, you know.

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So it's just like going to the gym and doing reps to get your body to be able.

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You know, starting with low weights and working to higher ones, you can get your body into shape and, you know, you can be better able to execute.

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The same thing is true of our body thinking.

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And so with this, you know, practical, easily teachable methodology, I applied it right away and I was extremely successful at it.

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And then you know, I'm.

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You know, I realized that I now had a way to be able to convey my powerful engagement and collaborative approach to management and could easily train others on how to do it.

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So, you know, things worked out in my life to where I could take my hand to entrepreneurship and focus on those things that I enjoy doing.

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You get tied up into a lot of task work with operations, so I could, you know, be more creative and really get to the meat at which businesses need to start focusing their efforts these days, and that is on engaging employees, because it's so important.

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And so I learned a lot about web design and that kind of stuff.

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And here I am.

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That's what brought me to today.

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Yes, I love that overview, Laurie, because one I think it really shows how logical your brain thinks.

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You have such a really acute skill at looking at a situation and dissecting it and really making it digestible to whether it's employees, whether it's teams, whether it's business owners or whether it's right here in today's episode.

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I so appreciate that skill of yours and it's so cool to me to see how quickly you bring up some of these key words that I want to go deeper into.

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You already mentioned problems.

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Obviously, those are the starting point for solutions to come to fruit.

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But the other thing that you said and I want to go deeper here is you mentioned webs of causality, and when I think about that, I worked in healthcare for about 10 months before I went full-time as an entrepreneur.

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This was right after I graduated from college and in health care they always talk about don't treat the symptom, treat the cause.

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And, Lori, it's a heck of a lot easier to talk about this in theory, because so many of us we do just treat the symptoms.

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When we get a cold, what do we buy?

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We buy medicine that will stop us from coughing, but that doesn't actually help the underlying cause of all of this.

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So, Lori, how do we go about finding these webs, how do we go about finding these root causes?

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Because it's something that you're incredibly adept at, having done it so many times, but we get blinded by the craziness of what we're facing.

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Yeah, so the biggest thing to understand is that we make a lot of assumptions at work.

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Understand is that we make a lot of assumptions at work.

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We do a lot of.

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So there's buzzwords everywhere, culture, values, you know, and we as human beings we have our own definition of what those things are, and so in every situation we have to understand what exactly is going on, and to do that we have to dissect it and we have to create a shared mental model.

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I have to have an understanding of what you see is what the problems are, and I have to convey them also and what we tend to do.

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You know, there's a couple of things in thinking that happens, and that is first of all, that mental model that I explained.

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We do not look at the world directly.

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We have a mental model that filters what we're looking at, and then with that comes a lot of bias.

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There's different kinds of bias.

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Cognitive and confirmation bias are the big ones, and that's where we don't see things that go against how we're thinking and we don't even.

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We dismiss them.

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And then we also confirm the thinking and the ideas and the facts that confirm how we'reried thing is really the prime example of that these days where even BlackRock, these big companies that just wrote off his quirkiness as creative genius Well, guess what?

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Creative geniuses aren't necessarily good managers.

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So everybody is victim of cognitive bias and confirmation bias and the mental models that we create that will help us to do the wrong thing.

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And then the other part is that you know we are wired to make decisions.

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It turns out that research indicates that we break down the world into these infinite number of this or that choices.

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They're binary choices.

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And when we do this, as we get closer to the point at which we think we have to make the decision, we focus on the differences and that further drives the urgency to make a decision and we make a choice.

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Well, when we're choosing between this or that, chances are it's not the best option, because very rarely is anything based upon two options.

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So we have to take the time you know Einstein talked about this we have to take the time to think about the situation more, understand it more, prevent this, what is probably, you know, left over from survival instinct of you know which way to run when something's chasing you.

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But stop the decision-making process and focus more on framing the situation, looking at it from different perspectives.

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Business, everybody tends to just not do this.

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We'll just go ahead and just dive in, satisfied with the first choice.

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Whoever can accelerate to the thing that everybody else agrees on is what we pick, and it's unfortunately not the best choice.

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And that's why, when you get people together I think Churchill said something about you know the sum of all thinking, the sum of all fears.

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Well, in business it's the sum of all thinking.

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You know all the bad thinking that we do, we just kind of add to together and we just.

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There's so many times when we don't see accurately what's going on and people don't feel free to.

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You know, businesses tend to say, oh, gen Z, you know they're hard to work with and this and that you know, but yet business managers and don't know how to interact with people.

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So you know, and it's kind of showing up by the fact that it can't interact with Gen Z, so anyways, so that's what you have to do.

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You have to take the time to look at the problem and frame it in different ways and get different perspective in order to be able to see it accurately.

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Yeah, lori, it's funny as you were talking about, I love that you pulled in that Einstein quote an example of yeah, we are oriented to make decisions, we like making decisions, and I would argue that, entrepreneurs, we are forced to make more decisions than the average person because we're managing so many different things.

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And so hearing you talk about the alternative to that while you were sharing it in my head I was like what is the alternative but you shared it there which is pause, reflect, actually assess and take inventory of the situation.

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It leads me to believe, lori, that probably one of your superpowers despite what everyone wants to say in those conference rooms in an all-male society that they just want to chalk it up to you being a very wise and brilliant woman it probably comes from you likely ask better questions and more informative questions than the average person.

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So walk us through some of those questions, because we are irrational beings, with those, you know, confirmation biases that you talked about and other psychological biases.

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What sort of questions do you ask to get people to use their rational minds and start assessing a situation for the reality of it, rather than all those other thoughts we inject?

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So DSRP provides a lot of questions that we can ask.

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You know, for instance, the D is distinction.

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So what is this and what is it not?

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You know, and it's important to go to that level of thinking, because when we start listing the things that it is not, to that level of thinking, because when we start listing the things that it is not, we're creating a boundary between what we're going to include and what we're not going to include.

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So, you know, when we go through that scenario, sometimes we find out that our definition is not broad enough and we need to include other aspects of the idea or concept in order to include these things that we say are not part of it but should be.

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And so the S, the R, the P, they all have questions to them.

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But, you know, the big thing that I find is important is to ask of people so, and it's so simple is what do you think about this?

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And you know so, how do you think about it?

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And then, how does it make you feel?

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You know, and a lot of times when we're talking, we want to stay away from feelings, and it's just a big mistake.

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Humans are full of emotion and you know, like I said before, if you're not getting to the emotion at work, you're not going to be able to know everything that you need to know, and each situation is going to come up with different questions that we have to ask.

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But it's in framing the situation differently and then getting people to engage with the problem.

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And the other thing that is very helpful is to map and then that is puts it up on the wall or on the screen, depending upon how you do it and it.

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You know, when you start creating this, this picture of what the problem is, people tend to focus on that and they want to make it as accurate as possible.

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You know it's kind of like a puzzle that they want to put together, and so then you know, as you go through the distinctions and the relationships and the systems and the perspectives.

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So perspectives will tell you do we have everybody in the room that needs to make this choice?

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Have we, you know, are there sources of authority from?

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You know, doing research with online or books?

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You know those are perspectives too.

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So you know it's just making sure that the discussion continues until we have it framed in a fashion to where we really feel like we've identified what the issues are.

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So getting to people's thinking and feelings of what they believe, getting them to talk about it, is really the key when it comes to even complex problem solving in a business environment like manufacturing.

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So that's the approach that I would take.

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Yeah, lori, I'm a big fan of frameworks.

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The fact that you, even to formulate your questions, you lean on that DSRP framework I think that's so powerful.

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Which I think is a perfect segue into what I'm so excited to hear from your perspective about is your framework, the PLS framework.

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I obviously know what those stand for already, having done my research ahead of today's episodes, but this will be all new for listeners here today.

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So walk us through that framework, lori.

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I want to hear it from your perspective.

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Okay.

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So PLS stands for Purpose, leap and Surge, and so the picture in my mind that I had when I initially set this up was actually in the matrix, you know when they would jump from building to building and they would know exactly when they landed where they were going to go next.

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It was like accelerated thinking.

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That was the picture that I had in my mind.

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For business and purpose is so big for managing, we often, as managers and as leaders, we don't have a.

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So what is the purpose?

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Why am I doing this and what is my purpose?

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What do I want my team to understand, as is the direction that we're going and what we want to accomplish.

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If you don't set those boundaries in place and that vision something that's going to, you know, engage them it just could be leading them even in the wrong direction.

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So the PLS framework sets up an engagement environment that will foster collaboration and have people have an action mindset.

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So not only are they going to collaborate on what needs to be done, they're also going to have the action about.

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Okay, I want to be part of this, let's do it.

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What are we going to do?

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And so what it involves is, first of all, what we do is we want to take advantage of, we want to recapture some time in business that's slow, and those are times when we're in ideation or strategizing, when we are in meetings.

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50% of our time sometimes is spent in meetings, and they're often nonproductive and have huge decision makers at them.

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We have managers and other employees that are highly connected within the organization and are constantly interacting with people.

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They're highly connected within the organization and they're constantly interacting with people, and that is a time when, if those people knew what to do, they could, you know, catalyze other action, make their job easier, make the people that they're coming in contact job easier.

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And then we have transition points, those times in which we are changing direction.

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Whether you know, it could be a crisis.

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It could be that we need to go into a different market or we're going from plans to execution.

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So these are all points at which the framework the PLS framework can facilitate productivity and reclaim hours that we just lose all the time.

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And that comes from setting up an environment that allows for the generation of options.

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It gives people access to options not only from individually, but on a group basis, and that comes from having a zoom in, zoom out approach, the micro investigation that I talked about, where DSRP allows us to be able to, you know, look at things as in what are their parts and also the context in which they are.

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So we're going to look at all of that and then we establish, you know, thought constructs that speed up the access and sharing of information, and this becomes familiar ground to us.

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One of the things that I always correlate it with is, you know, fabricating buildings.

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When you have prefab structures, you can increase the speed at which a building goes up by 40%, and the same thing is true if we have things that we can fall back on, that provide us a structure and a template to, you know, investigate and it's familiar ground for us and we can use it in any context.

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And that's the last part of it is pluralism and universality.

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So we want to have a situation where we're inclusive in everything, in thoughts, people.

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You know we want to have a situation where we're inclusive in everything, in thoughts, people.

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We want to not be a purist but a pluralist.

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So a blended approach is the best way, while we keep the uniqueness of the business, and then the last part of that is a universality.

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Think of it as direction, not detail.

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We don't want to give people exact instructions as to how they're going to act.

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We want them to be able to, you know, be able to think on their own, get opportunities either individually or as a group or couple or whatever, and take action on it.

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So those things all combine in the PLS framework to allow businesses to define their purpose and then also to leap, to move on and then surge from the next point, already thinking about where they're going to land and how they're going to surge the business from there.

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All from people thinking more and thinking deeply about the work that they do.

00:24:12.107 --> 00:24:14.673
Yes, I love that overview, lori.

00:24:14.673 --> 00:24:19.271
I so appreciate you sharing that with us, and it's something that you're preaching to the choir here.

00:24:19.271 --> 00:24:32.828
I think that so many of us really we harp so much on this show about being strategic, being intentional, and so much of that comes from orienting your sales in the right direction, not just letting the wind choose whichever way it's going to blow you.

00:24:32.828 --> 00:24:47.050
But I'm going to call this out because I'm so excited to see the way that you handle and navigate us through this question, because, hearing you say so much of this, I would argue that a lot of Fortune 500 CEOs would deceptively say well, laurie, we do all this.

00:24:47.050 --> 00:24:51.266
This is something we are exceptional at because they think their leadership is better than it is.

00:24:51.306 --> 00:24:53.869
And all of us I'm not throwing anyone under the bus bus is that?

00:24:53.869 --> 00:24:55.952
Coming back to us being irrational?

00:24:55.952 --> 00:25:05.375
For example, you directly called out meetings are mostly non-productive time, and so a lot of us we still have meetings because we think that they're productive.

00:25:05.375 --> 00:25:15.605
So, knowing that we are irrational beings, knowing that we mess this stuff up, not in theory, but in the way that we execute it, why is it so hard to get this stuff right, Lori?

00:25:15.605 --> 00:25:18.474
Where is it that us finicky humans get this stuff wrong.

00:25:19.727 --> 00:25:24.713
And that comes from our definitions and those buzzwords and things that go in our mind.

00:25:24.713 --> 00:25:26.531
We just say, oh yeah, we do that.

00:25:26.531 --> 00:25:35.492
You know, engagement, we engage our employees when in fact, we'll conflate you know, for instance, people often conflate feedback and engagement.

00:25:35.492 --> 00:25:49.673
Engagement is a participatory process and so we have to, and I see this all the time when CEOs think that they're like, oh yeah, we engage our employees, and then you ask, well, how do you engage them?

00:25:49.673 --> 00:25:52.531
What do your meetings look like?

00:25:52.531 --> 00:25:54.488
And you find out that they don't do that.

00:25:54.989 --> 00:26:17.748
So we have, we have to realize that cognitive bias that we have keeps us from looking at things objectively, and so we have to step back and, you know, make, make the map, the system map I was talking about, and lay out what's really going on, what are the parts of engagement that we have.

00:26:17.748 --> 00:26:24.869
You know what does that look like, and not just from the CEO's perspective, but the frontline supervisor.

00:26:24.869 --> 00:26:28.317
You know the guy that has to run the restaurant at night.

00:26:28.317 --> 00:26:34.076
Or you know, through on Friday nights, how the heck are they doing any of this stuff?

00:26:34.076 --> 00:26:39.249
You know, on Friday nights, how the heck are they doing any of this stuff, you know.

00:26:39.249 --> 00:26:51.327
So we have to look at things from different perspectives, challenge what we see are the parts of something and that will allow us to be able to see and justify whether we have, you know, the thinking that's correct or not and the other part of it is.

00:26:51.327 --> 00:26:53.816
So you know what are the results of this engagement that you have going on, you know in your collaboration.

00:26:53.816 --> 00:26:57.509
You know what are the results of this engagement that you have going on, you know in your collaboration.

00:26:57.509 --> 00:26:59.076
You know where is that evident.

00:26:59.657 --> 00:27:04.051
And a lot of times, you know you get a lot of silence and stuff.

00:27:04.051 --> 00:27:19.970
It's really, it's amazing how often we make assumptions about definitions and distinctions in our heads and we just assume you know and we go from in our heads and we just assume you know and we go from, and it's just from.

00:27:19.970 --> 00:27:21.634
Sometimes I don't even think we're engaging appropriately.

00:27:21.634 --> 00:27:23.618
We just say that we do that thing.

00:27:23.618 --> 00:27:27.008
So, like I said, look at you know.

00:27:27.008 --> 00:27:41.767
So how do we engage, how you know what are the aspects of engagement, what are the parts of engagement in our business and collaboration, and then you know what are the results of that.

00:27:41.767 --> 00:27:42.650
What is engagement in our business part of?

00:27:42.650 --> 00:27:42.829
You know?

00:27:42.829 --> 00:27:43.872
How is it contextualized in the business?

00:27:43.872 --> 00:27:46.786
If it's only one way, then chances are everybody's not doing it.

00:27:46.786 --> 00:27:52.498
And then, of course, asking people, you can get feedback on whether engagement happens.

00:27:52.498 --> 00:28:00.849
Whether engagement happens and it's so important.

00:28:00.849 --> 00:28:02.758
It's crazy how, you know, gallup constantly reports numbers and they're going down again.

00:28:02.778 --> 00:28:04.103
Engagement is continuing to decline.

00:28:04.103 --> 00:28:09.394
It's like into the low 30s now, where people are engaged actively engaged at work.

00:28:09.394 --> 00:28:16.057
And think of all that resource that's just sitting there not being utilized by the company.

00:28:16.057 --> 00:28:30.700
And one last thing I want to say about that is you know people are so unhappy and you know you hear all the reports of people not, you know, having friends and engaging.

00:28:30.700 --> 00:28:36.035
And in reality, this is an opportunity for business, even with young people.

00:28:36.236 --> 00:28:40.596
People you know you think that they're, they're, you know, don't have commitment and this kind of thing.

00:28:40.596 --> 00:28:45.936
Well, this is the opportunity for you, for your business to be able to be that.

00:28:45.936 --> 00:28:51.557
You know you can be the baseline and the stable part of people's lives as a business.

00:28:51.557 --> 00:29:00.175
You know they can be like I want to go to work because you know that's where I'm not so frustrated, and you know I learned different things about how to think.

00:29:00.175 --> 00:29:03.211
You know that's the opportunity that we have right now.

00:29:03.211 --> 00:29:09.228
Ai is going to come on board and we'll see how that will improve things.

00:29:09.228 --> 00:29:16.880
That's still yet to be told, but until that time, you know we need people and we need them to engage.

00:29:16.880 --> 00:29:20.951
So you know businesses have a great opportunity.

00:29:20.951 --> 00:29:23.298
That's how you turn challenges into opportunities.

00:29:23.298 --> 00:29:44.137
You be the strength and the stable part of employees' lives and, you know, give them tools for handling not just work but work, but personal issues and things too, and they'll feel the care and commitment that you have for them, and it's very important.

00:29:44.719 --> 00:29:46.147
Yeah, lori, I'll tell you what.

00:29:46.147 --> 00:29:55.255
There's so much good stuff that you're bringing up, and as we're coming towards the end, I still want to squeeze in one more element of this conversation with you, because I want to ask you about the when.

00:29:55.255 --> 00:29:57.851
Because I'm a big fan of decision points.

00:29:57.851 --> 00:30:02.329
I love that psychological study where it's really summed up as decide or slide.

00:30:02.329 --> 00:30:15.938
And so researchers found that if you give a human a massive bag of chips, well, we're just going to keep sliding right into that bag of chips and keep eating more, whereas if we have individually packaged bags of chips, well then there are built-in decision points.

00:30:16.105 --> 00:30:22.048
When I finish that first small bag of chips, I have to then more intentionally, decide do I want to open another one?

00:30:22.048 --> 00:30:27.185
It's much more intentional if I have those decision points baked in.

00:30:27.185 --> 00:30:35.174
So, lori, with that in mind, all this stuff you're talking about within the scope of what you do and how you serve other businesses, we all need it.

00:30:35.174 --> 00:30:36.806
So the question is when?

00:30:36.806 --> 00:30:38.991
What are those decision points?

00:30:38.991 --> 00:30:53.527
What are those triggers for us to say, hey, I need to reorient my sales, I need to reassess my engagement of my team, I need to make sure that I'm intentionally and strategically going in the direction of the roadmap that you've mentioned a few times here in today's episode.

00:30:53.527 --> 00:30:56.770
So what are those decision points or triggers look like.

00:30:58.093 --> 00:31:01.457
So that's feedback from reality.

00:31:01.457 --> 00:31:08.857
And when you know, when it's telling us that things aren't going right, or you know we continually.

00:31:08.857 --> 00:31:22.219
So you can have situations where you have to continually tell people what to do and they won't do things on their own, where you have to continually tell people what to do and they won't do things on their own, or you are one that you can't find a solution.

00:31:22.219 --> 00:31:24.834
You're constantly putting out fires.

00:31:24.834 --> 00:31:31.855
You know, all these things where something gives us negative feedback is how Dr Cabrera talks about this.

00:31:31.855 --> 00:31:33.171
It's reality loving us.

00:31:33.171 --> 00:31:35.230
It's reality loves us.

00:31:35.230 --> 00:31:37.749
It's giving us all this feedback so that we know what to do.

00:31:38.289 --> 00:31:43.746
So whenever there's negativity, you want to be able to respond to that.

00:31:43.746 --> 00:31:46.893
That's the first thing and you need to respond to it.

00:31:46.893 --> 00:31:48.817
So that's the decision point there.

00:31:48.817 --> 00:32:05.377
And then what we need to do is constantly be thinking out, and when we do that, that allows us to be able to, you know, unhinge ourselves from what's going on and think more towards the future.

00:32:05.377 --> 00:32:29.337
And so then, when we think of the future, we start thinking about so what are the conditions that need to be in place for that future to happen, and then we can build back the gap that currently exists to there and those processes, those two things there responding to negativity and thinking out and projecting to a desired outcome you know a very colorful picture of what you want to accomplish.

00:32:29.785 --> 00:32:33.972
Those two things can create the decision points that you need to have.

00:32:33.972 --> 00:32:36.117
You know KPIs are good too.

00:32:36.117 --> 00:32:42.583
I don't want to give the impression that it's all fun and you know what is it rainbows or whatever.

00:32:42.583 --> 00:32:45.915
You know you need KPIs to give you feedback to what you're doing.

00:32:45.915 --> 00:32:56.009
So if you've set that by a certain timeframe that you would have, you know, this many clients or this much revenue and you don't, that's again reality, giving you feedback.

00:32:56.009 --> 00:32:58.624
So those were the three things that I would suggest.

00:33:03.035 --> 00:33:20.218
Yeah, I love that, especially because I feel like we have a tendency in business to talk about feedback, to talk about metrics, to talk about all these things, but we don't always fill in that afterwards gap of using that as an active exercise for us to take inventory, for us to go a little bit deeper into the meaningful work that we need to do to actually facilitate growth, to facilitate engagement.

00:33:20.218 --> 00:33:22.986
So I love that perspective you've given us, Lori.

00:33:22.986 --> 00:33:27.935
At the end of all these episodes, I always ask this broad question and I never know which way guests are going to take it.

00:33:27.935 --> 00:33:31.384
And that is what's your one takeaway For listeners tuning in?

00:33:31.384 --> 00:33:41.689
I feel like they got so much homework from you because you think about business, you think about operations, you think about team and engagement so much differently, and it's a way that we all should aspire towards.

00:33:41.689 --> 00:33:47.786
So, with all of that in mind and all the homework listeners will have to do, what's that one takeaway that you hope they walk away from?

00:33:47.786 --> 00:33:48.778
Today's episode with.

00:33:50.163 --> 00:33:56.939
I, you know, and I knew this question was coming, but as we went through the discussion, I think it's that you know.

00:33:56.979 --> 00:34:07.851
You just have to remember that drive to make a decision and that we need to take time to review what's going on and analyze it.

00:34:07.851 --> 00:34:11.284
Find some structure that works for you.

00:34:11.284 --> 00:34:27.572
You know the DSRP is great and I would highly recommend it it but find a structure that allows you to be able to get an idea of what's going on and make sure you're getting perspective, not just your own perspective, but ask other people.

00:34:27.572 --> 00:34:31.603
They're more than willing to help and give you ideas.

00:34:31.603 --> 00:34:40.177
They don't necessarily have to be, you know, a client or anybody that's associated with it, be your spouse or a friend, and just say, hey, here's what I got going on.

00:34:40.177 --> 00:34:45.728
You know, get that perspective from somebody else, and so that's what I would say.

00:34:45.728 --> 00:34:50.793
Remember those mental models that we all have and that we don't look at reality directly.

00:34:50.793 --> 00:34:55.405
We're looking at it through a filter that's going to keep us from understanding what's going on.

00:34:55.405 --> 00:34:58.900
So that would be the thing that I would suggest that everybody do what's going?

00:34:58.920 --> 00:34:59.000
on.

00:34:59.000 --> 00:35:01.003
So that would be the thing that I would suggest that everybody do.

00:35:01.003 --> 00:35:12.043
Yes, structures and external perspectives two very valuable pieces of advice, and for me you make my life easy, laurie, because I want to sing your praises on your website.

00:35:12.043 --> 00:35:13.652
I love how much content you're putting out there and we talk about structure.

00:35:13.652 --> 00:35:14.094
You've got blog posts.

00:35:14.094 --> 00:35:19.615
You've got a specific page about engagement and collaboration, a specific page about collaborative leadership.

00:35:19.615 --> 00:35:26.585
There's so many resources, not just information on your website, but real resources for people to leverage even more of your perspective.

00:35:26.585 --> 00:35:32.025
Then, obviously, we had some time with you here today, but they can go deeper down all the great stuff that you're putting into the world.

00:35:32.025 --> 00:35:33.418
So drop those links on us.

00:35:33.418 --> 00:35:35.244
Where should listeners go from here?

00:35:36.235 --> 00:35:44.965
Okay, my website is just PurposeLeapSurge, no spaces com, and if you're interested in DSRP, go to CabreraLaborg.

00:35:44.965 --> 00:35:49.820
They're an adjunct of Cornell University, so they have a lot of research available.

00:35:49.820 --> 00:35:52.425
But PurposeLeapSurgecom.

00:35:52.425 --> 00:35:54.976
Take a look and reach out to me if I can help you.

00:35:55.677 --> 00:35:57.481
Yes, listeners, you already know the drill.

00:35:57.481 --> 00:36:02.849
We are making it as easy as possible for you to find all of the links that Lori just mentioned, as well as a link to her personal LinkedIn.

00:36:02.849 --> 00:36:05.161
If you want to reach out to her and continue the conversation.

00:36:05.161 --> 00:36:08.500
Her business website is at PurposeLeapSurgecom.

00:36:08.500 --> 00:36:10.545
You'll find that link down below in the show notes.

00:36:10.545 --> 00:36:11.875
You can click right on through.

00:36:11.875 --> 00:36:13.297
You don't need to memorize it.

00:36:13.297 --> 00:36:18.485
So, lori, on behalf of myself and all the listeners worldwide, thanks so much for coming on the show today.

00:36:19.485 --> 00:36:20.728
Thanks everyone, Thanks so much.

00:36:21.528 --> 00:36:26.954
Hey, it's Brian here, and thanks for tuning in to yet another episode of the Wantrepreneur to Entrepreneur podcast.

00:36:26.954 --> 00:36:31.043
If you haven't checked us out online, there's so much good stuff there.

00:36:31.043 --> 00:36:40.288
Check out the show's website and all the show notes that we talked about in today's episode at thewantrepreneurshowcom, and I just want to give a shout out to our amazing guests.

00:36:40.288 --> 00:36:49.092
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00:36:49.132 --> 00:36:51.117
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00:36:51.117 --> 00:36:52.722
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00:36:52.722 --> 00:36:56.215
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00:36:56.215 --> 00:37:07.177
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00:37:07.177 --> 00:37:15.664
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00:37:15.664 --> 00:37:16.996
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00:37:16.996 --> 00:37:21.626
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00:37:21.626 --> 00:37:23.048
Initiate a live chat.

00:37:23.048 --> 00:37:32.447
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