In this conversation, Andrew Young explains that organizational policies should be treated as part of a living system that must evolve as conditions change. He argues that systems always produce the outcomes they were designed for at a specific moment in time, but as organizations grow or shift, policies must adapt through continuous feedback and change.
However, simply having the right policy is not enough; successful adoption requires bringing people along through iterative feedback, stakeholder involvement, and trust-building. As complexity increases with more people and policies, organizations must focus not just on the policies themselves but on the relationships between them and the people affected. When policy conflicts arise, leaders should first diagnose structural duplication, measure the policy’s actual outcomes, and assess stakeholder trust before assuming the policy itself needs to change.
Video Transcript
Matthew Oatts
Thanks, Andrew for joining me again. Last time we were talking about policy and we were talking about how policy in an organization is sort of like a living thing. Maybe you could think about organizations as ecosystems. So where I want to get into now is like we talked about ecosystems, living organisms, whatever you want to call it. That’s natural world stuff. Those things change and I want to explore what happens with change tied to policy, but like we talked about last time, there’s a context that a policy exists. So can you talk to us about, fundamentally, is there a top of mind question when we think about organizational change in policy?
Andrew Young
Yeah. Before we get into how it shows up, maybe I’ll step back and talk about three core backstopping phrases, principles, references we have that help us frame why one should be comfortable with change or why change is present. So first and foremost, we think every system is currently designed to produce exactly what it’s producing. And that’s a result of, it was a snapshot of time and place. It was a snapshot of when the system was created. And you can look at the relationship of people or policy or the organization to how it’s operating. And you can tell how old that design was just purely by Conway’s Law, how things interact. It’s producing the organization. So there’s this truth of whatever you’re experiencing was right for when it was developed.
Matthew Oatts
You mentioned Conway’s Law. Explain that in a couple sentences.
Andrew Young
Conway’s Law says the interactions and the communication and the architecture could be technology, it could be people, it could be policy is designed, will be designed and it will reflect how people actually interact. The way you experience the organization is a reflection of the interactions in the organization is the way you say it. If you take this out of context for any company, I pick up the phone, I call customer supports. And if they don’t have this other information, I can clearly tell you behind the scenes, those two departments don’t work together. Law manifested. So we believe every system designed to produce exactly what it’s producing for the time and place and a healthy organization will continually update that time and place. It’s not static, it’s not deterministic. We know conditions change and those conditions could be market conditions, internal people shifts, leader shifts, vision shifts, even just how big the organization is and the number of interactions, all of those things influence.
Matthew Oatts
So, if you’re scaling really quickly, this ends up being a big thing, you’re probably spending a lot of time talking about what has shifted and changed in the organization.
Andrew Young
And hopefully you’re continually making incremental updates to reflect that shift.
Matthew Oatts
If you’re healthy, if you’re maybe not healthy, you’re sort of running with the same models that you had three years ago and you’re probably going to experience a bunch of pain.
Andrew Young
That’s right. And you’ll have a whole bunch of gaps and they’ll be very evident and gaps will show up in that version as tension, conflict, and upset people.
Matthew Oatts
Or suppression of all of those things underneath the surface and then it’s only happens.
Andrew Young
That’s exactly right. Okay. So there’s that truth or that principle. There’s a second one that having the right answer is necessary, but it’s insufficient.
So we can know what a better policy looks like. We can even write the better policy, we can create the better picture. But until you enlist people and bring them along, having the right answer won’t matter. I can know exactly what to do, but unless I enlist the people around me through co-opting or alignment or leadership, there’s a variety of ways we can talk about that. The right answer is insufficient because it’s about the application of the right answer and getting people comfortable with the right,
Matthew Oatts
Especially if there’s this under the surface thing going on where people are like, oh, well that’s how we said we were going to work, but we don’t work that way anymore. So they’re just not even going to get bought into any policy because they play the game where it’s like, oh, that policy is irrelevant. Or they joke about that 400 page policy. Did you read that today before you woke up? No.
Andrew Young
Yeah. And so then this gets into our last kind of truth. We believe, and we know it’s been proven and there’s whole consultancies just specialize in change, that once you have the right answer or a belief of the right answer, the hardest activity is not getting to the right answer. It’s actually creating the change to support the right answer. And that change takes more cycles, effort, energy than anyone’s going to predict and the people leading the change. So here’s the underlying of what we’re saying, are already exhausted because they were the creator of it. They were investing in it, they were the designer of it, so they had the right answer. They put all of the cycles in to get there and nobody else around them has any of this exposure or attention or energy of cycles with it. And so there’s a discrepancy of the people leading the change already feeling exhausted. And the receiver of the change could be a new policy implementation could be a shift in the organization, could be even just like when I get a new leader, the leaders who made that decision are already exhausted with that decision because they’ve been working on it for so long. But this is my first interaction with you is my leader and I don’t know what this means.
And we then shortcut maybe just to even abandon the energy it takes to change. And that’s where failure occurs. It’s not because we didn’t have the right answer. Again, it’s because we didn’t invest the appropriate energy into getting people along. So this is where you create skeptics. It’s not because always they disagree with it, it’s because they weren’t enlisted or brought along in the journey. So when I hear people talk about stakeholders, and we’ll talk about this, I think in a few moments, how do you manage your stakeholders? And that one’s a skeptic, therefore we have to dismiss them or we have to do something different. They might just be a skeptic because they haven’t been brought along.
So, you have to understand why are they getting mapped to where they are because it’s the change piece that’s probably the limiter, not to the actual mapping of where that person is as a skeptic. So take all that we believe those things to be true, and therefore we have to design change as the vehicle for adoption. We have to design the outcome of whatever the right answer is in a way in which can be absorbed.
Matthew Oatts
Okay. So are there different sort of levels of complexity with that? I know sometimes when we’re talking about change, if you have a direct report or if there’s a single person, you have to navigate that that’s different than if there’s a smaller group of people. That’s a different way. You have to think about change differently. If we’re talking about a large group of people,
Andrew Young
The scale of difficulty is I think what you’re referencing, like the scale of size. So if it’s just two of us, it’s one thread. If there’s three of us, there’s this thread, this thread, and this thread. So three people have three, but you had a fourth. So it’s 1, 2, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. So with every new node, you’re adding the intensity of interpretation and point to point interaction increases. So you have to have a better foundation of alignment.
Matthew Oatts
Yep. Do you find even if there’s, let’s say there’s a just dropout idea of a policy in the middle of all of that space one, and then there’s almost, you could treat the policy as another part of the triangle, how I relate to you and how we both relate to the policy. That’s essentially another node. Do you find, does it help hurt? Does it even matter? Maybe the answer is all of the above. When a policy is supposed to, we talked about in a previous conversation, having a policy sort of being a central construct of the thing, but not when we start talking about people. You can only go so far getting everybody oriented against the construct of a policy. How does a policy fit into those spaces too?
Andrew Young
Yeah, when I think about the node, if we just oversimplify a node, be it a policy, a person, a thing, again, the increasing volume of nodes creates complexity. And so if it’s just you and I and a policy, we can very quickly understand is it you and I having an issue? Is it me individually with the policy? Is it you and I both having an issue with the policy? We can triangulate against the policy node. Is it the node or is it the relationship when there’s 10 policies and 10 people, 20 nodes? The ambiguity of is it a people,
It a one person to a policy, is it a collection of people all hating that one policy? Is it the concept? We don’t like that style and node CAU a policy. We’re adding layers of complexity into the narrative. So what I heard your question was, and tie it back to your opening question, living systems, which is what an organization is, time and place. We have an answer, wants to be deterministic and develop notes. Here they are, they’re stable, and now everybody go interact and play healthily. And what the living system tends to forget is that the node answer is insufficient. It’s actually about the connection of the nodes. And we under prioritize or deprioritize our energy into the strength of the relationship of the nodes. Meaning do I have conflict with the policy? Do I have conflict with the concept of policy? Do I have conflict with the person? And we forget that. And this is now the governance piece. How the nodes interact is a policy unto its own, regardless of if the node itself is a policy. So there’s policy to manage policy and then there’s policy to manage our relationship, and then there’s policy for policies to manage each other.
Matthew Oatts
Or processes the policy might have something that is actually affecting a different sort of aspect of the organization.
Andrew Young
And when we oversimplify and what so many organizations do, I developed a note, here’s a policy, everybody gets it. We also now are forgetting about the human emotional component of it. If it’s never as clear as the person who authored it thinks it’s going to be. And this gets into the change piece and the adoption piece,
Matthew Oatts
Why you need feedback loops as you’re developing policy, you get one of the things that we talk about all the time in terms of policy creation is maybe the drag it can feel when you’re creating policy and you have to go through different review cycles. Well, there’s reason there to give people an opportunity with authority to sort of change things. But there’s also, you’re sort of prototyping the efficacy of a policy at the end of the day, I’m guessing, trying to get in front of what you’re talking about is people are going to relate to the policy in different ways. And so you need to sort of get in front of how people might relate to this thing.
Andrew Young
And a tool liminal arc brings from our background would be fast incremental, fast incremental and iterative cycles. In the technology world, we call this the tension between agile development and waterfall development. So if I apply that here, do I want to spend all this time to get what I believe is one correct policy authorship and it takes a long cycle and I do it in a vacuum and I put it into the world. Well, I have emotional energy, it’s correct, but I have no feedback loops. And there’s a series of frameworks. We use one fast, incremental, iterative feedback cycles. Take the thinnest slice of that, get some feedback, iterate, iterate, iterate. And if you have that as a core pattern, you’ve already created the platform for a living organization. It’s incrementally changing all the time based off of feedback loop. You’re never done.
Matthew Oatts
So that should be good news for people that have to create policy. And there’s different gateways like you’re doing that not because people want to jump through hoops. If it’s an effective and healthy organization, you’re doing that to increase the likelihood that when it gets into the wild, people are going to be receptive and at best advocate for it or at worst just be comfortable with it.
Andrew Young
That’s right. And there’s a lot of ways you can gain feedback. So we want to add a little bit of structure to incremental and iterative feedback. One of the ways we bring that in is we think about the stakeholders. We’re asking for feedback. Do you want feedback from everybody or do you have someone who’s on this side of the gradient of I don’t believe in any of this and why it’s needed. So here’s my feedback and I actually have someone on this side that says, this is exactly what we need and I’m an advocate for, do you get feedback from one or both and building structure that, okay, skeptics and supporters are both valuable feedback loops and someone who is so close to it, they might’ve wrote one very similar and someone who’s never done this before, gaining feedback. We build this two by two concept of stakeholder mapping to use a mapping activity to understand where the feedback needs to live. And then back to our governance conversation and back to our prioritization conversation. Out of these stakeholders, who do I actually care about? Who am I trying to influence and bring along in the change? So we map those things out for incremental and iterative feedback. And we also use, I think to what you just said, the comfort nature of this, as if you can do a little slice of it and then you gain some feedback and someone sees their voice has been incorporated, the organizational voice has been incorporated, at least heard
You build trust and the more trust, so I’m drawing this with my hand. We have a visual that’s like an infinity symbol. The more trust you can build with someone, the easier it is to bring them along and change the easier it is. We label it as influence to build influence. And the only way you can build influence is based off of credibility and we will leave. One of the easiest ways to build credibility is with small thin slice, incremental, incremental and iterative attempts to showcase. I was here, I’m now here and I can bring you along. I was here, I’m now here. I can bring you along. And all of this is underneath the guise of don’t go disappear in a silo and build this thing in a vacuum in a really grand way and do this grand reveal. We use this phrase with our clients. Our clients should never be surprised
They’ve been brought along. We bring them as partners; we really enlist them as a partner. So when I think about as applying this to policy, anybody who’s going to be put in the box of that policy, you have to play this game should never be surprised with the first time of them reading the policy. They should have had either early iterations, this is directionally where we’re going, or they had some like this is also why we’re changing. We miss that component a lot in this development cycle of here’s a new rule book, but I never told you why we’re changing the rule book and I never enlisted you in helping me grow the narrative of why that’s a tactic as well. Again, going back the right answer of the new policy is insufficient
The way we think about changing to the new policy, the tools we use to enlist people that then slicing to incremental feedback loops to build trust. All of these are the patterns underneath of policy creation or policy change.
Matthew Oatts
So, if I tie it back to a fundamental question, when there’s some sort of issue that comes up and policy gets thrown into the arena of conflict around it, maybe it’s just one person, maybe it’s smaller group of people, maybe it’s a whole organization is starting to bubble up with issues around policy. The fundamental question is going to be do we need to change the policy or is it not actually a policy issue? So when we talk about the trust influence loop, we talk about stakeholder maps. At some point you sort of have to make the decision and it’s not necessarily just either or, but at what point do and what are the types of things that you do as a leader, as someone closely tied to the policy to say, you know what? I’m going to do maybe these three things before I go down the path of, oh, I need to change a policy because when I hear you talk about policies and their role within the organization and there’s a potential change coming forward, at some point quality policies shouldn’t change that much, but people should really be investing in the relationships around the policy. So what would maybe be three good tips to, you should do these three things before you go down the path of oh, we need to change the policy.
Andrew Young
Yeah, I’m going to tie it back to our prior conversation. I think a lot of it anchors on that. So I hear attention. An individual has a problem with the policy. A group of people have an issue with a policy. A policy is in conflict with another policy. That’s a very evident one that
Matthew Oatts
Yeah, the policy is clearly the impediment of some sort of process being effective. Okay,
Andrew Young
So my first question, when I root cause, so I’m going to start with a quick root cause analysis. Am I having a structures problem? Is this just because two different things were given autonomy and they’re in conflict with creation. So we’re creating duplication of responsibility or agency or energy. So I’m going to start there and if I say, oh, it’s just actually a, we don’t know where the boundaries are. Cool, let’s start with the boundary piece. Let’s figure out who owns it and then let’s figure out in that new boundary of application, is there still conflict? If we realize we have created duplication easy to solve. If we say, oh no, there’s no duplication, we actually haven’t changed and have any structures issue, we have a relational issue. So I think that’s level two. Level two relational. She says, is it because someone feels unsafe? Is it because they don’t feel heard? I’m trying to thin slice some categories that it’s unsafe, they don’t feel heard or it is creating a negative result if the policy is actually producing bad outcomes. I’m still going to tie it back to my structures conversation.
Matthew Oatts
Something that you could actually directly observe this as a negative, not necessarily emotional result, but something logical.
Andrew Young
Logical or objective. But the only way I know how to measure that is I go back to the structure of the value piece of it. The value structure says this thing is preventing this green light from remaining green, and now I’ve taken Matthew or Andrew’s opinion out of it and I say, look, here’s why this version of the policy is struggling. And that’s actually what the person is struggling to say most likely is I
Matthew Oatts
Don’t, especially if they’re bringing a lot of emotion to the table. The emotion could just be an indicator of their sort of sense that, hey, this policy, while it might not be in conflict with someone else, it is some impediment to the organization.
Andrew Young
And so the headline there is every policy and every structure needs to have measures. Can I measure what it’s producing and its impact? Is it going up where I want it or down?
Matthew Oatts
This goes back into why measuring things are so important. When we talk about navigating policy change, a good indicator to the fact you need to actually change the policy is do the measures tell you that yeah, something’s wrong and you can change the policy.
Andrew Young
And from all of our history with all of our clients, the first thing that gets abandoned is measures. It gets put under the table because it’s hard. People don’t know how to actually measure things, especially impact of a policy on a thing. The traceability of measurement is not easy. So we just tend to not do it and hope for the best.
So, create measures against the structure though. That’s the second thing. I think the last thing, so if we realize it’s not duplication and we have measures and someone is still having tension or a group of people who have attention, I go instantly to my stakeholder map, where do I put them? And is it that they don’t have trust with the person that created it or trust with the organization or trust with the policy itself. So we figure out do they not have trust and is it because they’re skeptic or not brought along? And I then go through that mapping activity of is there noise because I really think about all this. It’s just kind of noise. There are probably some happy, healthy truths underneath all this, but is this noise that is emerging because we haven’t enlisted them?
And if all of this, no duplication, we have good measures, we’ve enlisted them, now I can finally get to the person issue. Maybe I might actually now have evidence that the wrong person’s in the wrong seat attempting the wrong thing and it could now just be skills, capability or vision, mission, values, alignment issues. But so many people start with that you don’t get it, or I did it right. How come you don’t see it? And we skip all of this root causing to get there. So I think the three things that I identified get ruled up into the statement. There’s a objective logical chain of progression for root cause analysis that starts with every bit of noise can be patterned into that. If we air quoted framework, start with duplication reduction or make sure that there’s not start with measures. Start with where does a person get enlisted and all of this is true and it still has tension. Now we have a conversation we can actually index to.
