Jason Bloomfield
Appearances
Chief Change Officer
#216 Jason Bloomfield: Change Consultant by Day, Resilience Expert by Life
And amplifying that conversation to a global community where there's a feedback loop is how we're powering change now. And thinking about making sure that feedback loop is not just focused on those who are the most vocal, but it needs to be inclusive. We're a global company. We are in 180 countries. And that is fantastic because what it does is it provides you with that diversity of thought.
Chief Change Officer
#216 Jason Bloomfield: Change Consultant by Day, Resilience Expert by Life
Now, the challenge then is how can you be empathetic across 100,000 people in 180 countries? The answer is still the same. It doesn't matter if you're in one country and 18 people or 100 countries and 100,000 employees. It's still the same thing. It's humanity, ultimately. By hearing a person out, you can find that common ground and you can then action it.
Chief Change Officer
#216 Jason Bloomfield: Change Consultant by Day, Resilience Expert by Life
And one of the things that we've been working really hard on is pivoting ways of working from a focus on functionality over to usability. These are 180 degree opposites. From leading with a solution, we're a technology company, some, not all, but some people believe we can just throw a bunch of hardware software at something and that'll solve the day.
Chief Change Officer
#216 Jason Bloomfield: Change Consultant by Day, Resilience Expert by Life
Rather than leading with the problem, this approach around combining empathy, divergent thinking, and loving a problem as opposed to leading with a solution. These are some of the ethos or guiding principles of design thinking. Design thinking is a concept that I first got exposed to in 2018. I took a mini MBA to Google in London. All light bulbs just clicked.
Chief Change Officer
#216 Jason Bloomfield: Change Consultant by Day, Resilience Expert by Life
I've since become a huge advocate, an evangelist, you might say. around applying design thinking to everything. And what's beautiful is it's industry agnostic. It's geography agnostic. It is plug and play. It works in every single context or none, even in a not for profit space. In fact, some of the not for profits that I've supported being on their board, I would take them through
Chief Change Officer
#216 Jason Bloomfield: Change Consultant by Day, Resilience Expert by Life
a design sprint, which is a type of structured activity that design thinking has to help them unpack a problem. And for them, it was cultural change. And after a day and a half, we did a compressed exercise. We had actionable ideas that they've since adopted, improving cultural appreciation and satisfaction across all measures.
Chief Change Officer
#216 Jason Bloomfield: Change Consultant by Day, Resilience Expert by Life
And diversity events is something I believe you already know is really a superpower. And I don't want to use a phrase lightly. I'll give you some facts, right? Because some of us are left brain, right brain. So McKinsey did a very famous study out in 2015. It was called Why Diversity Matters. And what it did was it compared diversity.
Chief Change Officer
#216 Jason Bloomfield: Change Consultant by Day, Resilience Expert by Life
most diverse companies with least diverse companies and explained what they found when they compared business performance. And let me give you some quick bits of information there. So what they found was the most diverse companies tend to outperform their peers by 15%. They are 15% more likely to outperform their less diverse peers.
Chief Change Officer
#216 Jason Bloomfield: Change Consultant by Day, Resilience Expert by Life
But that gap becomes quite stark when you compare top quartile companies in terms of diversity with bottom quartile companies. The gap then widens to 45%, four or five. Now, talk with any business leader, technology leader, operational leader. Would you happily love a 45% increase in your likelihood of being successful and being performance and outperforming your peers in the marketplace?
Chief Change Officer
#216 Jason Bloomfield: Change Consultant by Day, Resilience Expert by Life
Absolutely. And what's so great about that study and the follow on studies since in 2018 and again, I believe in 2021, is that it was found this was not a one time slash in the pan. This wasn't a fluke. This was actually fact. And it helped to settle the debate. And so when we think about this global community of feedback loops that we have, we built diversity by design.
Chief Change Officer
#216 Jason Bloomfield: Change Consultant by Day, Resilience Expert by Life
What that means is we looked across functions, we looked across regions and geographies, we looked across seniority levels, we looked across tenure, and we built by design a very diverse, representative, unbiased community. And that is what's been shaping The things that we work on. So now the voice of the community is what's informing the technology priorities.
Chief Change Officer
#216 Jason Bloomfield: Change Consultant by Day, Resilience Expert by Life
And so there's still more work to be done. I don't want to sound as though we're at the finish line, but we have made substantial strides in now doing things that people recognize and care about. and rewarding that with increased satisfaction scores. One quick example, there's a tool, I won't mention the name for obvious reasons.
Chief Change Officer
#216 Jason Bloomfield: Change Consultant by Day, Resilience Expert by Life
When I first joined, it was far and away the single greatest concern and complaint among employees. I said, OK, great. If we can't measure something, we can't manage it. So let's start measuring so we can manage. And that meant creating a global survey and some other things. And what we found was I wanted to use something that's globally recognized and not proprietary.
Chief Change Officer
#216 Jason Bloomfield: Change Consultant by Day, Resilience Expert by Life
So we went with Net Promoter Score, NPS. And it basically says, how satisfied are you with a bidding product to the extent that you would or would not recommend it to friend or family? The range, for anyone unfamiliar with NPS, scores can go from a minus 100, being the worst, to a positive 100, being the best. I had never seen, ever, NPS scores this eye-wateringly negative.
Chief Change Officer
#216 Jason Bloomfield: Change Consultant by Day, Resilience Expert by Life
The first was a minus 83. And we are almost a year and a half, two years on from that point. We are now at a minus 4. We're still minus, but that is a significant gain. And before we, and one of the things that we do is we transparently and candidly communicate all information, all results back out to employees, whether it's good or bad, no spin, we just are direct and candid and transparent.
Chief Change Officer
#216 Jason Bloomfield: Change Consultant by Day, Resilience Expert by Life
They've started to appreciate that. But what I do is before we publish those numbers, I'll get some of the other tool owners, because we do it across tools now, and I'll preview for them, hey, here are the latest results. And one thing that really sticks with me, one of my colleagues said something really generous and said, you know what? These numbers are moving in such magnitude.
Chief Change Officer
#216 Jason Bloomfield: Change Consultant by Day, Resilience Expert by Life
We haven't really done big changes in the systems. You know what I think this is? I think this is people feeling and knowing that they are heard. And I thought, wow, that's really powerful. And it would have been more, it would have been powerful if it was said to me one on one in a private conversation. But this person said this in front of their peers and then their peers chimed in as well.
Chief Change Officer
#216 Jason Bloomfield: Change Consultant by Day, Resilience Expert by Life
And so I don't have a quantitative crunchy business case for the power of change, but I can share with you this, that their belief certainly is having people feel and trust that they're being heard in of itself can help to elevate perception. And we see that now tangibly with scores continuing to increase.
Chief Change Officer
#216 Jason Bloomfield: Change Consultant by Day, Resilience Expert by Life
It is quite a thing to come into a company that has 140, 150 years behind it. To your point, they've got ingrained norms. They've got ingrained ways of working. And then in a company that's large, you'll find subcultures. You couldn't paint with one paintbrush and say, ah, company X has this mindset or mentality and company Y has this mindset or mentality.
Chief Change Officer
#216 Jason Bloomfield: Change Consultant by Day, Resilience Expert by Life
Actually, what you'll find is within different businesses or different functional areas, entirely different cultures. But the consistent thing that I have found with companies that have a great heritage to them is that pride can at times obscure a line of sight on the way forward. And some examples, when we think about one of the big plays has been going from paper to paperless.
Chief Change Officer
#216 Jason Bloomfield: Change Consultant by Day, Resilience Expert by Life
And there's an economic element to that for a company. If you think financial services and if you have any investments, When you first become a client, you get a huge stack of paper. When you do a transaction, you get some additional paper. At the end of the year, you get another huge stack of paper.
Chief Change Officer
#216 Jason Bloomfield: Change Consultant by Day, Resilience Expert by Life
Now, as a business, you've got some economic incentive with rising cost of post, rising cost of material. to digitize that. But what's the value proposition? What's the value exchange for the client, for the human on the other side of this handshake?
Chief Change Officer
#216 Jason Bloomfield: Change Consultant by Day, Resilience Expert by Life
And interestingly enough, at one company I was with, most recent one, in fact, we were really struggling with adoption of this, not going above a certain percent. So I suggested to do something different. How about we ask? And it sounds almost too simple to be true, but this simple act of asking unlocked insights that surprised everyone.
Chief Change Officer
#216 Jason Bloomfield: Change Consultant by Day, Resilience Expert by Life
So the thinking going in was these are retirees and therefore they're less digitally comfortable navigating the technology. And that's the reason. And so we just need to increase training and the call center talking about it. That wasn't it at all. And what we discovered was actually people in retirement age are much more digitally comfortable than by perception you might think that they are.
Chief Change Officer
#216 Jason Bloomfield: Change Consultant by Day, Resilience Expert by Life
Their challenge was distrust of institutions. They had this distrust that unless they had something physical and tangible that they can put in a filing cabinet and always refer back to and see the value, they thought the company might just update the values behind the scenes and not then authentically represent what happened. So there was a trust issue.
Chief Change Officer
#216 Jason Bloomfield: Change Consultant by Day, Resilience Expert by Life
And so the way to overcome that would be, what if you can simply save your digital statement, just like you would, except now you don't have a bulky file cabinet. Instead, you could just save it on your laptop. Ah, light bulb goes off. Second light bulb goes off. The incentive for them, one thing that they had concern with paper were people rummaging through their mail.
Chief Change Officer
#216 Jason Bloomfield: Change Consultant by Day, Resilience Expert by Life
So if people are watching the mail, they might say, let me try to grab an envelope and that's my gateway to identity theft. So what they found appealing was that no one could rummage through their mail, take paper and turn that into an identity theft risk. And so that was another value proposition for them. Let me give another example.
Chief Change Officer
#216 Jason Bloomfield: Change Consultant by Day, Resilience Expert by Life
We were looking into more environmentally and social governance or ESG, more sustainable investment products and making those available. And we thought for sure the compelling value proposition was that You can now vote with your wallet.
Chief Change Officer
#216 Jason Bloomfield: Change Consultant by Day, Resilience Expert by Life
You can invest ethically if you're against munitions companies, if you're against tobacco, if you're against companies or indeed markets which don't have values aligned with your own. Now you've got alternatives. And we thought that was a strong case. I asked, can we please test this? So we did a focus group. We were dead wrong.
Chief Change Officer
#216 Jason Bloomfield: Change Consultant by Day, Resilience Expert by Life
The investors who were randomly sampled came in and we asked for their thoughts and opinions. What they wanted were returns. Returns. Good old-fashioned economic incentive returns. It was really disappointing, I have to say, to hear people say they didn't really care about the environment. It was not their priority. Instead, their priority was getting returns.
Chief Change Officer
#216 Jason Bloomfield: Change Consultant by Day, Resilience Expert by Life
And so ultimately, we had to just reposition this to say, you can invest in the economy that was, or you can invest in the economy that will be. And that was the incentive to help move things along. So in this culture where people feel like they know everything, The most powerful thing you can do is to challenge that, not in a confrontational way, but more like a what is, and get them to listen.
Chief Change Officer
#216 Jason Bloomfield: Change Consultant by Day, Resilience Expert by Life
And those insights, I'm going to say eight out of 10 times will surprise you and unlock and unblock outcomes that otherwise simply are impossible.
Chief Change Officer
#216 Jason Bloomfield: Change Consultant by Day, Resilience Expert by Life
I joined Ericsson two years ago as the head of people change and experience design. In the company, we call the HR function people. And so in most other companies, you'll hear it simply called HR. Really what that focuses across, we have digital tools which facilitate HR, people, transactions.
Chief Change Officer
#216 Jason Bloomfield: Change Consultant by Day, Resilience Expert by Life
And the thing that created my role, gave rise to my role to begin with, was a very disastrous rollout of a tool, again, I won't mention the name, that took place a year before I joined. The company became self-aware as to how poor the tool was received and was performing and said, OK, we need to bring in some change management to help here.
Chief Change Officer
#216 Jason Bloomfield: Change Consultant by Day, Resilience Expert by Life
When I joined, to my manager's credit, when we were interviewing, they were very upfront. This is not going to be a walk in the park. This is not going to be easy. You are stepping into a minefield. Are you okay with that? So I have to give immense credit to my manager and the transparency and authenticity through the interview process. But since then, the ask was, how do we make things better?
Chief Change Officer
#216 Jason Bloomfield: Change Consultant by Day, Resilience Expert by Life
And I'll zoom all the way out, Vince. To first understand how things might get better, we need to understand why they are the way that they are. And so tying back to active listening, I reached out to a number of stakeholders across a number of different areas and said, how did we get here?
Chief Change Officer
#216 Jason Bloomfield: Change Consultant by Day, Resilience Expert by Life
And that long pause was exactly the invitation to the other side to share what they were thinking, what they were feeling. And from that, I took away five key lessons from a retrospective, putting together these key views. And I've been actioning those ever since. One of those key lessons has been that really the tool was designed by and for the subject matter experts.
Chief Change Officer
#216 Jason Bloomfield: Change Consultant by Day, Resilience Expert by Life
It was not designed for or with, co-created with, the actual human, the person between the chair and the laptop who day in and day out would be having to work with the tool. And so that's as an example, now we have a definition of usability. It's no longer some nebulous, subjective thing, we have built a definition of usability and it is now threaded into our design process.
Chief Change Officer
#216 Jason Bloomfield: Change Consultant by Day, Resilience Expert by Life
Thank you, Vince. It's great to be here with you and your listeners. You can tell by the accent, I'm not born and raised in the UK, actually born and raised in the suburbs of New York, Long Island, in fact. And about seven years ago now, my wife and family and I, we moved to the UK, specifically in England. And what we're finding here is it's very helpful to have a common language, asterisk.
Chief Change Officer
#216 Jason Bloomfield: Change Consultant by Day, Resilience Expert by Life
And so that challenges everything from day one. And now I talked about the community that we have. We're co-creating with them rather than just turning up with a finished product and going, this is going live on date X. There you go. Rather than doing that, and immediately you get an us-them type of dynamic. We are co-creating with them.
Chief Change Officer
#216 Jason Bloomfield: Change Consultant by Day, Resilience Expert by Life
So we're commenting them with, I'll call it in pencil sketches, so to speak, right? Some ideas. What do you think about this? Tell us, what do you like? What do you hate? And then we'll come back. We'll close the loop. We'll come back and we'll go, you know what? Great idea, but just not possible. Or great idea, we're going to do it. Or something in between.
Chief Change Officer
#216 Jason Bloomfield: Change Consultant by Day, Resilience Expert by Life
Maybe it comes later because it's just not feasible in the moment. But that co-creation process is something that really taps into the diversity of thought, taps into empathy, taps into... design thinking, and that co-creation process helps. The other thing, though, was having to back to trust.
Chief Change Officer
#216 Jason Bloomfield: Change Consultant by Day, Resilience Expert by Life
When you've got a tool that's hated and has a minus 83 score, NPS score, and your humans who are using it feel distrustful and resentful of anyone having anything to do with it. What you need to do is you also need to be really careful about how you position things. So when we started the global feedback community, I really wanted to be intentional around how we framed it.
Chief Change Officer
#216 Jason Bloomfield: Change Consultant by Day, Resilience Expert by Life
No, we don't have the answers. We wanted to make it about you, the person who we're going to be asking for feedback. And so positioned it as an experiment on how we can make things better. What's important there is it does let people know and understand these people don't think they have all the answers. They are actively listening. And with experiments, sometimes you get things right.
Chief Change Officer
#216 Jason Bloomfield: Change Consultant by Day, Resilience Expert by Life
Sometimes you get things wrong. And it is always iterative. There is no such thing as a single time experiment, right? It's an iterative process. And simply by couching and positioning things in that way, it's more of a shared journey, a journey together. And the brand that I've given this process, I say it's your voice, our action. And that is the red thread between everything.
Chief Change Officer
#216 Jason Bloomfield: Change Consultant by Day, Resilience Expert by Life
So every single new thing we're doing in a system, I thread it back directly to you. You said that you wanted this or you said this needs to be better. Therefore, here is the improvement or here is the new capability. And that's the journey that we're on right now.
Chief Change Officer
#216 Jason Bloomfield: Change Consultant by Day, Resilience Expert by Life
I'll share a little bit of my personal perspective and then give some examples around how I'm applying generative AI today in a space that's really about hearts and minds. So when I think back, does anyone remember the metaverse? Do you remember Vince hearing nonstop? All day long, every day, the metaverse is going to change the planet. When was the last time you heard any mention of that?
Chief Change Officer
#216 Jason Bloomfield: Change Consultant by Day, Resilience Expert by Life
And for me, it never clicked because I always asked myself, why would I want to use, in essence, a video game with really poor graphics? It didn't click. In contrast, with generative AI, I was helping someone update their resume, and I heard about ChatGDP, and I go, okay, let's give this a go. And updating resumes is excruciating, but I said, let me help this person.
Chief Change Officer
#216 Jason Bloomfield: Change Consultant by Day, Resilience Expert by Life
I used ChatGPT and it was like magic and it was useful, purposeful magic. What otherwise took hours now took a few seconds and produced a very high quality product. Now, when we think more broadly, what does it allow a hearts and mind function to do that couldn't do before? It's about scale and pace.
Chief Change Officer
#216 Jason Bloomfield: Change Consultant by Day, Resilience Expert by Life
Things are spelled differently. Some words are used in different ways. Football, for example, meaning a very different thing in America than what it does mean here today in the UK.
Chief Change Officer
#216 Jason Bloomfield: Change Consultant by Day, Resilience Expert by Life
So as an example, one of the things that we launched was a global survey where we asked for feedback on our global digital tools and ways to improve it. High quality problem is we get thousands of verbatims, qualitative feedback. That took me a week to go through painstakingly and cluster them or bundle them according to theme.
Chief Change Officer
#216 Jason Bloomfield: Change Consultant by Day, Resilience Expert by Life
I am now able to do that same activity in a week that used to take a week. I'm able to do that in a few hours. Now, my personal journey is the one that I would suggest and recommend for others is to experiment and find a purposeful value or user case for yourself to experiment with it. There's risk and reward. There's something called hallucinations, which in simple speak means AI gets it wrong.
Chief Change Officer
#216 Jason Bloomfield: Change Consultant by Day, Resilience Expert by Life
I'll give an example. I used a number of tools. I asked it the same question, gave each tool the same data set. three of the four got it right, one got it wrong. Had I just used that one and not checked the outcome, we would be looking pretty silly because actually the one that got it wrong said scores were going down when in fact scores were going up.
Chief Change Officer
#216 Jason Bloomfield: Change Consultant by Day, Resilience Expert by Life
Now, the other thing that it lets you do is you can, with prompting, and this will become, I think, for those who might be old enough to remember DOS, you had to type commands in order to get the computer to do what you want. And then we moved to Windows and you can simply move your mouse and click.
Chief Change Officer
#216 Jason Bloomfield: Change Consultant by Day, Resilience Expert by Life
But prompting is, in essence, think of it as whether you want to call it HTML, whether you want to call it command language, whatever you want to call it. But the good news is there's no jargon associated with it. So you use natural language.
Chief Change Officer
#216 Jason Bloomfield: Change Consultant by Day, Resilience Expert by Life
The easiest way I would suggest a person experiments with generative AI and interfaces with it, type as though you're in a chat message with a colleague or a chat message with a friend, and you can do things like Help create a survey. Provide for me the top five insights from this data. Help me carry out a change plan or devise a plan to roll out a new system.
Chief Change Officer
#216 Jason Bloomfield: Change Consultant by Day, Resilience Expert by Life
Yes, indeed.
Chief Change Officer
#216 Jason Bloomfield: Change Consultant by Day, Resilience Expert by Life
And you can use various prompts so that you can say, do this in a humorous way. Interrogate this outcome from a skeptics point of view. As a data analyst, do this. As a strategist, do this. As a change manager, do this. And each of those different ways of conversing with the technology helps to produce an outcome. I'd suggest people think of this as a first draft.
Chief Change Officer
#216 Jason Bloomfield: Change Consultant by Day, Resilience Expert by Life
One of the most daunting things to do is to try writing and you're staring at a blank page, or if you're in a meeting and you've got a giant blank whiteboard, getting that first thing on can sometimes be a little difficult. Take that difficulty away. Allow generative AI to give you that first draft and then you humanize it.
Chief Change Officer
#216 Jason Bloomfield: Change Consultant by Day, Resilience Expert by Life
I don't believe now, in this day and age, in our conversations of happening events, I don't think AI is going to replace humans. There is that very common phrase, which I think is really important. It's not going to replace humans. It will replace humans who do not use generative AI. What the future holds, I will not pretend to know. I could not have foreseen how rapidly
Chief Change Officer
#216 Jason Bloomfield: Change Consultant by Day, Resilience Expert by Life
and how powerful generate ai has come to be i could not have foreseen that despite my love of technology and business and following things closely it was a pleasant surprise though i dare not predict or forecast where it will be three or five years from now but i do know this that it is helping people now in a hearts and mind space such as change management
Chief Change Officer
#216 Jason Bloomfield: Change Consultant by Day, Resilience Expert by Life
To do more and to do it in less time because it's an extra pair of hands. It's an assistant. It's a great way to provide a first draft and you can use it to anticipate objectives and that can help you prepare and refine your value proposition. The why, not the what, not the how, but the why for doing something so that it lands well with the community.
Chief Change Officer
#216 Jason Bloomfield: Change Consultant by Day, Resilience Expert by Life
Thank you.
Chief Change Officer
#216 Jason Bloomfield: Change Consultant by Day, Resilience Expert by Life
Certainly. So growing up in the suburbs of New York out in Long Island, I really enjoyed the neighborhood we were in and the friends that we made. And we were, I'd say, upper middle class, if you will. And things were going along quite nicely until, and rather inconveniently, my teenage years, where focus on study really needs to ramp up.
Chief Change Officer
#216 Jason Bloomfield: Change Consultant by Day, Resilience Expert by Life
And instead, what was happening was the relationship between my parents had really violently and rapidly deteriorated to the point where they were looking to try to have my sibling and I take a side. And really, they were so unable to actually care for themselves, much less my sibling and I. And so in a very rapid way,
Chief Change Officer
#216 Jason Bloomfield: Change Consultant by Day, Resilience Expert by Life
fashion, my entire lifestyle changed where I then had to find a place for myself and my sibling, have my sibling live with me. And I was the one with an active income. It was a crash course for sure in life and home economics. really necessity as the mother of invention. And those dire challenging circumstances, socially, economically, really created resilience and has enabled me to
Chief Change Officer
#216 Jason Bloomfield: Change Consultant by Day, Resilience Expert by Life
then take on some of other life's challenges in the years since in a way where I feel like had I not had that previous experience, not that I recommend or suggest it to others, by the way, but had I not had that experience, I think it would have been more difficult to get through.
Chief Change Officer
#216 Jason Bloomfield: Change Consultant by Day, Resilience Expert by Life
And I think one thing for sure, if anyone listening is going through a similar situation where you're having a high level of conflict and distraction amongst others, Do know that it will take time, but at the end, you will find things to smile about again.
Chief Change Officer
#216 Jason Bloomfield: Change Consultant by Day, Resilience Expert by Life
It was a very non-linear journey is the simplest way to describe it. But really my first work experience was a paid internship through school. It was what's a regional family owned business. It brought together Two passions of mine, which was business and the other is being technology. And it really helped to awaken those two passions.
Chief Change Officer
#216 Jason Bloomfield: Change Consultant by Day, Resilience Expert by Life
And having done some really work, some great work that I'm proud of, building out offices. The first acquisition I ever did was actually with this family regional business, helping them take on another business. But quickly, what I wanted to then do was to get just some more broadened horizons, some differentiated experiences.
Chief Change Officer
#216 Jason Bloomfield: Change Consultant by Day, Resilience Expert by Life
And so there was a multinational company that was advertising an open role. And I thought, you know what, I want to make that move. I want to try to get a nationally recognized Turns out years later, a globally recognized brand on the resume or the CV, as we call it here.
Chief Change Officer
#216 Jason Bloomfield: Change Consultant by Day, Resilience Expert by Life
And that leap and I started as an hourly wage person connecting in cables from the person's laptop to the wall and setting up their voicemail on their phones and loading software by floppy disks. I'm aging myself now. to then getting the attention in a positive way of the corporate office that was based in New York. And so then they asked, would I welcome joining the home office?
Chief Change Officer
#216 Jason Bloomfield: Change Consultant by Day, Resilience Expert by Life
And it was at 1 Madison Avenue. It doesn't get any more New York than that. And from there, hard work translated into additional roles and responsibilities. And so after a few years, this kid from the suburbs, who never left the US at all, actually found myself being nominated to work on a global acquisition and an integration of a multi-billion dollar business
Chief Change Officer
#216 Jason Bloomfield: Change Consultant by Day, Resilience Expert by Life
located in 13 different countries and i was in country on the ground working across 17 different work streams and so all of a sudden i'm learning things that i'd never imagined i'd learn tax product marketing email And when you have a street date or date where the transaction needs to close and everything needs to be ready, that's an immovable object.
Chief Change Officer
#216 Jason Bloomfield: Change Consultant by Day, Resilience Expert by Life
And that's where you discover the power of constraint. It's a counterintuitive phrase, but really, when you've got constraints, it forces things to happen and move. And thinking back on that experience... By far and away, and to this very day, the hardest work, most stressful, and yet the most gratifying experience.
Chief Change Officer
#216 Jason Bloomfield: Change Consultant by Day, Resilience Expert by Life
We did things like a reverse acquisition, which is a phrase I'd never even heard of up until that point in time. And to this day, one of the big lessons from that, which carry forwards to change and change management, is really building resilient relationships. And even though you can imagine if you're being acquired, you're going to have some natural fears and anxieties. Is my job safe?
Chief Change Officer
#216 Jason Bloomfield: Change Consultant by Day, Resilience Expert by Life
What's going to be happening to my position in the company, etc. And so it's easy to be at arm's length and to be distrustful. But through transparency and finding common ground and emphasizing the common ground, talking more about what's in common than what's different, we built resilient relationships. And we had some very opposed views on things like branding, for example.
Chief Change Officer
#216 Jason Bloomfield: Change Consultant by Day, Resilience Expert by Life
The local businesses were very proud of what they built, especially in places like Poland. And yet, exchanging candid ideas, actually, to this day, I'm still in connection with many of the people who we worked with on the side of the company being acquired, and I was the acquirer. We're still having contact today, and I think that just speaks volumes to the power of relationships.
Chief Change Officer
#216 Jason Bloomfield: Change Consultant by Day, Resilience Expert by Life
But thinking about the school and the like, for me, I was the first in our family to go to college. And it was not because, actually, that's what my parents were nudging. They were actually nudging quite the opposite. They were really suggesting a quick-sassed locational track, which has some merits, to be sure, has some pros. It didn't align, though, with...
Chief Change Officer
#216 Jason Bloomfield: Change Consultant by Day, Resilience Expert by Life
my passions around both business and technology. So I wanted to go to college. And I remember growing up listening to my parents or uncles and aunts when they would come over, everyone hating their job, just hating their job, talking about night shifts and not liking their manager. There needs to be a different way.
Chief Change Officer
#216 Jason Bloomfield: Change Consultant by Day, Resilience Expert by Life
So either definition of insanity, do the same thing, but somehow expecting a different outcome. I was not going to do the same thing as them and expect a different outcome. I was going to try something different. And what that outcome might be, who knew? But I definitely wanted to give it a go. And so after that, I did have to pause college studies, though, for some time.
Chief Change Officer
#216 Jason Bloomfield: Change Consultant by Day, Resilience Expert by Life
So that I could care for the family. And then once they got to a point of self-sufficiency, I was able to resume. And it was really difficult balancing the needs of the family with what at the time was, I was very, I would say, work obsessed. And either because it was just a level of achievement that I was missing.
Chief Change Officer
#216 Jason Bloomfield: Change Consultant by Day, Resilience Expert by Life
inspired to reach for or maybe it was an escape from the personal circumstances and challenges that were going on which of the two maybe both maybe neither i really can't say but i can say this that it really forced me to rethink about things
Chief Change Officer
#216 Jason Bloomfield: Change Consultant by Day, Resilience Expert by Life
where there were times I would happily be working until 2 a.m., not because anyone asked me to, just I was consumed and passionate and driven to get things done, to move at pace. But I've since had to learn through a number of changes over life to recalibrate that in a much healthier way and recognizing that's not a luxury, that's a necessity. You have to invest in yourself.
Chief Change Officer
#216 Jason Bloomfield: Change Consultant by Day, Resilience Expert by Life
Think of the analogy around when you travel on an airplane during the flight safety briefing. What do they say about cabin pressure and putting the mask on? Put it on yourself first before helping others.
Chief Change Officer
#216 Jason Bloomfield: Change Consultant by Day, Resilience Expert by Life
And that concept is really important because if you're not there, if you burn yourself out, if you're not living and acting in a sustainable way, the people who count on you and the people who you care about, they won't be able to be helped by you. You need to put your mask on first. There are times where you do need to be, I'll use the word, selfish.
Chief Change Officer
#216 Jason Bloomfield: Change Consultant by Day, Resilience Expert by Life
You need to focus on yourself so that you can be able to support and care for those who depend on you and for those who you love.
Chief Change Officer
#216 Jason Bloomfield: Change Consultant by Day, Resilience Expert by Life
The big thing, Vince, with transformation, I would say it's part instinctive and also through learning. It's something I've come to understand as a really powerful instrument, and that's empathy. And empathy comes from a number of ways, but particularly one mechanism that I employ is active listening. Not listening, active listening.
Chief Change Officer
#216 Jason Bloomfield: Change Consultant by Day, Resilience Expert by Life
What it does is it helps you feel the shoes of the person or people across the desk, across the counter, across a video call to understand what he or she is thinking, to understand what he or she is feeling. What are their hopes? What are their aspirations? What are their fears? What are their concerns? What are their anxieties? And when you build that empathy,
Chief Change Officer
#216 Jason Bloomfield: Change Consultant by Day, Resilience Expert by Life
What you're able to then do is to build a resilient relationship. And it starts because active listening not only allows you to hear and understand the other person, it sends a signal. It sends a signal to the other person or people just by listening that you care.
Chief Change Officer
#216 Jason Bloomfield: Change Consultant by Day, Resilience Expert by Life
Because in today's world, it's just so easy to click end call, for example, or if we were faced to go, oh, look at the time, I've got another meeting, I need to go. To just end that conversation and walk away, to disengage, simply by actively listening, there's a signal there to the other person on the side of the conversation that you do care, that you're interested, that what they say matters.