Calculus of IT - Season 2 Episode 8 - Building Resilience Through Independence and Effective Change Management

In this episode of The Calculus of IT, Nate McBride and Mike Crispin focus on the critical but often overlooked topic of building resilience in IT through independence and effective change management.  It's a bigger deal than you may think.

From avoiding vendor lock-in to creating modular architectures, we explore how IT leaders can maintain autonomy in a world where every vendor promises to be your "partner" but secretly tightens the chains. We discuss:

• The Three "Independence" Components of Resilience:
  • Technical independence: architecting systems for adaptability.
  • Knowledge independence: documenting institutional knowledge and breaking silos.
  • Vendor independence: maintaining leverage and planning exits from day one.
• Effective Change Management:
  • How to assess change capacity and avoid change fatigue.
  • Creating a change memory for continuous improvement.
  • The critical role of decision rights during transitions.

We also share war stories, practical frameworks, and actionable steps to build an IT organization that thrives on disruption and adapts on its own terms. Plus, hear about the tools and strategies we swear by, including a shoutout to Obsidian as a game-changing knowledge management platform.  Also, the plot thickens on the Phil Collins/Beatles conspiracy...

Transcript

Season 2 - Episode 8 - Final - Audio Only
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Nate McBride: [00:00:00] Hey, Mike. The beat. Don't stop. I said 

Mike Crispin: MAS. What up? Yo? 

Nate McBride: Uh, you know, hold on. Lemme change my, 

Mike Crispin: you're looking good. 

Nate McBride: Am I? 

Mike Crispin: Yeah. You look, uh, very, very cartoony. I love it. I'm a fan. 

Nate McBride: Yeah. Looking 

Mike Crispin: good. Looking [00:01:00] good. 

Nate McBride: How? Don't get back to me. Let's see. Boom. Done. Oh, look there. I'm, wow. Looking good. Yes. Good, good, good, good times.

I heard that song on the way home on um, XM Radio and I just fucking love that song. We used to do that every single year. Oops. Oh, that's a good one. That was your 

Mike Crispin: karaoke song. I remember. 

Nate McBride: Christopher Warren live in Moscow. 2000 gate crash.

Digital Nexus: Yeah. Gotta get it down

Nate McBride: dude. He was fucking badass. I dunno what happened to him. He was a great dj. 

Mike Crispin: Who's that? 

Nate McBride: Christopher Lawrence. I bet he's still around. 

Mike Crispin: Oh, I'm sure he is. Sure he is Christopher Lawrence. Yeah. [00:02:00] 

Digital Nexus: Word up. 

Mike Crispin: Word up. How you doing? 

Digital Nexus: You know me? I'm always good. You? 

Mike Crispin: I'm good man. I can't complain. Same old shit. You know, 

Digital Nexus: I could go for a nice, uh, rope burger from like we had last week.

Mike Crispin: Yeah. I ate that in like three bites. That burger, I ate it quickly. It was very good. 

Digital Nexus: Yeah. How do I sound by the way? 

Mike Crispin: Sound nice. 

Digital Nexus: Okay, good. 

Mike Crispin: Yeah, 

Nate McBride: that's what I try to do. I try to sound nice. 

Mike Crispin: You do. You sound very nice 

Nate McBride: tonight. Very nice. I guess we're just gonna leave it then as it is. So we wanna play some music later.

Here's what we should do, Mike. Yeah, sure. I, I just thought I just had a thought. F this whole IT leadership podcast thing. Yeah. We should start a radio station podcast where we just play great music Yeah. And tell stories about it. [00:03:00] Sure. And that's it. 

Mike Crispin: Sure. That sounds great. Okay. Bring back the old school.

Yeah. DJ Sweet apples.

Listen, this is the days 

Nate McBride: I wanted to give you a little bit of trivia. Fun fact, by the way. Sure. Um, you may not have known this, but in the original Beatles Hard Days Night movie, which was a movie, yeah. 

Mike Crispin: Oh yeah. 

Nate McBride: Um, there's a young Phil Collins, 

Mike Crispin: very young, Phil Collins 

Nate McBride: one, one of the opening scenes. Yeah.

Chasing around one of the Beatles or several of the Beatles. Yeah. He's very young. Do you find that attached? Suspicious? I mean, I'm just, 

Mike Crispin: I think you've had this planned all along. 

Nate McBride: What part? 

Mike Crispin: Just this full circle. The Beatles, Phil Collins. I'm just trying. I'm 

Nate McBride: just trying to live a normal life as a normal guy.

Like if I ask questions, people just immediately shut doors on me. I dunno what I'm [00:04:00] supposed to do. You're just an ordinary guy. You're just an ordinary guy. You're just the caveman. I was frozen in the the ice. You're scientist dug me out. Your world frightens me. 

Mike Crispin: Don't be frightened. I'm not sure what to do.

It's a happy world. Everything's gonna be justified.

Digital Nexus: Compute our

Adam, make us the.[00:05:00] 

Nate McBride: Guess who's doing an obsidian pilot next week? I know. For his, for his, for his OneNote users. 

Mike Crispin: Oh my gosh. I hope it's not you. This guy. This guy. Oh 

Nate McBride: man. Yeah. 

Mike Crispin: Wow. 

Nate McBride: Yep. So we're gonna do a pilot with, um, everyone that's using OneNote and, um, try to get them outta the uncomfortable place of not having OneDrive working for them.

And to a OneNote Universe, one note list free universe, 

Mike Crispin: you gotta get them, um, plugged in with the canvas. Mm-hmm. And with the, um, what's the other thing that we use? It's kind, kind of get, [00:06:00] so a lot of people like OneNote because they can have blocks of texts all over the screen. Yeah. And there's, there's a plugin for obsidian that will let you do that.

Yeah, canvas. I've seen it. It it's, it's not, it's not the canvas. It's, um, hold on a second. 

Nate McBride: Canvas. Well, OB sitting, obs sitting, this developer community is pretty stout. I was looking for, oh my gosh, yes. Best of breed. Um, handwriting recognition module plugins. And there's quite a few I'll 

Mike Crispin: get, so, oh, there, there's, there's a ton.

If you go into the community plugins, there's a ton of, uh, it's a little scary that I would, I would think about like, not showing some of those, I mean, you can get yourself into trouble, but 

Nate McBride: we have, we have like nine note ticking apps in our company and none of them are approved, but all of them are allowed, I guess you might might say, like, we don't and support them.

We don't, you know, use what you're gonna use. Um, yeah. 'cause it's just never been an agenda. [00:07:00] I want to get on top of, uh, it's kind of like a, a one and a zero decision at the same time. Uh, zero, which is, we're not gonna standardize or, or we're gonna. We're gonna not do anything about it. And one, go ahead and do whatever the hell you want about it.

Um, anywho, 

Mike Crispin: here's your rod. We also, 

Nate McBride: we were talking last week about, by the way, the, uh, the whole vendor spam thing. Oh yeah. And I got, you know, I'm obviously been getting just absolutely slammed, uh, for the last week or two. Why does your camera keep doing that? 

Mike Crispin: Um, I've got, I got you in the 

Nate McBride: background here.

I'll bring you in front again. There we go. Oh, that's okay. Um,

and, uh, so I, you know, I told you at, at, when we spoke at Bio YT World, that I have been in the process now for building an email routing table for Airtable. Um, so all my email now goes to Airtable and this has been happening for quite a bit. [00:08:00] And then it goes over to Box's EML files. Uh, yeah, it's a very cool process, but I have found a new way I.

To automatically reply to these people. So it auto replies with a, if you, if you wanted to email me, you should have found me email, uh, and talk to me directly. Yep. And then sends a note to me and creates a list of all the emails at the end of every day that I can add to Proofpoint in one shot. So it gives me all the domains.

So instead of like doing one-offs and to Proofpoint to block everybody, I can now just do a Mass Digest block. It's pretty nice. 

Mike Crispin: So you've got, you've got everything sinking into, you said Airtable or Box Airtable. 

Nate McBride: Well, every email comes into Airtable and gets parsed using mail parser, and then it gets entered into columns.

Then the actual EML file from, which also gets attached as a, as an entry into the attachments field, gets put into box along with any attachments that they put into the email [00:09:00] payload. Wow. So it all goes into a box folder. Holy moly. What would you think of next? I'm trying to think. Oh, I'd love for Proofpoint to have an API that I could just send this digest to for the block list, but, um, yep.

Not there yet. Any who? Yep. Good times. Good times. Very cool. Yep. Um, keep on rocking man. Last week. Oh, last week by the way, was awesome. Yes. Uh, welcome. Welcome back everybody to the Calculus of it and welcome podcast. And welcome to episode eight of season two. This is the home of the IT leadership wisdom paradox, paradoxal thinking, and occasionally coherent advice with me, as always, the infamous El Guapo, El Chapo, El Hefe, the one, one and only original lost lonely boy send you on Mike Crispin.

Hello. Hello. Happy to be here. 

Mike Crispin: The low lonely boy. 

Nate McBride: I'm Nate McBride, [00:10:00] you're Chaotic Law Elf Wizard. And each week we serve a ver ver veritable pope of it Leadership Insights with just a pinch of existential dread. Wow. I think we, I think we do a good job at balancing, you know, here's all the good things you can do, and also here's how you're far and like we, we find like a nice middle ground between those two.

I think every week there is a fine line. Yeah, there's a fine line. It's like a, it's like a 12 point aerial font line, but it's, it's a pretty good line. If you miss last week's episode, once again, what the hell's wrong with you? Jesus Christ. What's wrong with you people? Okay. These, these things happen in order, we, we record them in order so you listen to them in order.

If you, if you missed it. I mean, you gotta get on that. We, we wrapped up our two part exploration of establishing clear boundaries and principles and it decision making. And did so in literally perfect [00:11:00] Mike and Nate fashion at the Esteemed Sports Club bar at the Omni Hotel in the Seaport. 

Mike Crispin: Esteemed. It was very esteemed.

Esteemed. It was esteemed, esteemed, 

Nate McBride: esteemed. It had been recently esteemed When we got in there. 

Mike Crispin: Then, then we get, we ex steamed it or rete it, we ex steamed it. 

Nate McBride: Um, 

Mike Crispin: it was a good time. It was good, very good time. 

Nate McBride: Then we went over to F1 in the Seaport and we did, we, we, we raced cars. Uh, very big, big shout out to PTP for, for hosting that party.

And then we had a wonderful dinner with the good folks from Box and, um, talked about Orna. How's your Orna character development coming along, by the way? 

Mike Crispin: It's, it's going great. I think I'm in, uh, I think I level, level 28. I just gives her the first round, the first like section. 

Nate McBride: Yeah, that's 

Mike Crispin: good. And then I realized there's, there's, uh, if you [00:12:00] can't, if you can't leave the house, there's another version of the exact same game.

Ethere, did you know this? Yeah. Eri. Yeah, it's, um, no, I thought it was something else. Something of, um, 

Nate McBride: oh, well here's the Ethere is the, uh, they have basically two games that run parallel. They use the same kind of universe. 

Mike Crispin: Yeah. Is that what it's heroes of 

Nate McBride: e Etri or something like that? Yes, yes. So I've gotten Mike, uh, and this is potentially regrettable my part, hooked on a game called Orna.

I've been playing for a little, like about 13 months. Mike's just started. If you're an Orna player, uh, let us know. We can have you join our kingdom. If you're not yet an or a player, don't start, but also start immediately, um, because Great. It is. One of the most fantastic world building games I've ever seen.

Uh, and, and it's free. I mean, everything about, it's free. There's no hidden like agenda, uh, pay for this little module, shit. It's all free. And you get to go around the world beating up on your friends, [00:13:00] uh, and you're people you don't even know and stealing their shit and then building these awesome characters.

So it is awesome. I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm level 2 41, almost about to be 2 42. Uh, I'm about a week away from 2 42. I get a ways to go. I have to, I got a ways to go. As of today. I need to get, um,

Mike Crispin: hold on. 

Nate McBride: 46.5 billion experience to get to level 42. 

Mike Crispin: So could I spend like a couple grand and get, get up to speed? 

Nate McBride: No, there's, just 

Mike Crispin: so I can catch up. 

Nate McBride: There's no way to buy ahead. It's a, oh, dammit. You have to. Grind, play all the in game games. And, um, I'm 

Mike Crispin: only level 25. 

Nate McBride: Okay. That's, that's respectable. I'm getting, I'm getting my shit handed to me by a draconian warrior right now.

You've had it for one week. But anyway, if you're an or a [00:14:00] player, ORNA, uh, good for you. And let me know my, my name and Orna is Pouncey Silver Kitten. And Michael's name is Indigo Disco. Indigo Disco. And they have a wonderful discord board for the game. It's fun community. Uh, join up and check us out. So anyway, um, we also covered last week how to break your own rules when you absolutely must.

And breaking rules is fun, but sometimes. Not always needed, but when it's needed, you should be able to do it. Creating decision frameworks that actually work in practice. And then we introduced the concept of the boundary paradox. We love our paradoxes, and here's another one where clear boundaries actually create more freedom, not less.

Yes, go back and listened to about that. We also took a kind of a preview look at the MacGyver principle, which will be ver principle revisiting in the coming weeks as a full episode. The MacGyver [00:15:00] principle is worth an entire episode, in my opinion. We'll be coming to that. Uh, I've got an outline drafted, uh, not from chat GPT, just from what Mike and I talked about.

So anyway, listen to last week, uh, your future self will. Thank you. This week we're, we're kind of gonna get into something, uh, just as equally critical. I mean, every episode this season is critical, but also overlooked, which is, um, building resilience through independence and effective change management.

Change management is a wonderful thing. We've covered it extensively on the podcast, but never in the scope of autonomy. Um, risk innovation and productivity. So now we're gonna kind of put it in framework. In a world where every vendor promises to be your partner, which is always bullshit a hundred percent of the time, how do you maintain the independence that creates resilience?

Uh, and when change is constant, how do you manage it effectively without sacrificing autonomy? Before we get into that, I [00:16:00] had a couple other little things. Um, sure. Was it the Life Science Cares Breakfast on Monday morning? So, life Science Cares is a, um, national organization that focuses on the life science cares, the life science community to, um, donate money.

And time and resources to help the, um, communities around us that are perhaps not so privileged. Sure. So it was pretty awesome event and every single time that I get involved with Life Science cares either for, um, charitable events or, or related things. And, and this was kind of the same, it always reminds you of just how, like right outside of our periphery, uh, everything is so bad.

Yeah. And there were, there was a, there was a story, I mean, I'm not allowed to, to talk about too much of what happened there. 'cause it was, we were asked to sort of keep it in the building, but there was a lot of discussion around, um, ice pickups [00:17:00] and people walking into sort of, uh, healthcare clinics for low income workers where ICE was secretly waiting and pulling people out into vans, disappearing them.

Wow. Uh, just some crazy shit. But, um, I. Donations do work. So this week, in addition to buying us beers, uh, and or buying from our merchandise shop and or donating to Wiki Wikimedia or the ACL U, you can also donate to Life Science Cares. And I saw, I think you probably saw the 4 0 4 email that came out, uh, about the careless people book by about, about Facebook's, uh, rise.

Yeah. Yeah. So I bought that on Kindle and I went through it in about three hours. It's a fast read. Um, freaking, what'd you think? Amazing. 

Mike Crispin: Yeah. 

Nate McBride: Amazing book. Uh, if you are interested in how Facebook has become the absolute, uh, flaming dumpster fire pile of poo that it is today, [00:18:00] you have to read this book.

It's by Sarah Wynn Williams. It's called Careless People. I don't make a dollar off of that recommendation, I'm just telling you, uh, I bought it on Kindle. I read it, uh, I couldn't put it down. Blown away. And of course these are things that you kind of know already, but now you get to really understand just how fucked up, uh, that leadership team was and how, how little regard they had for anyone's privacy.

Seventh caller on the Coit US hotline, that's a free copy by the way. Seventh Call. We're monitoring the phone lines now. Yes, we are. And then, um, I dunno if you ever get, do you get the, um, Zach Whitaker weekly update? I do not. No, I don't. All right. I gotta subscribe you to this, this news list. But anyway, so every Sunday morning I get my, um, significant dose of reality from Zach Whitaker.

And it's basically just a consolidation of all the most fucked up security news that happened during the week. And um, I think I [00:19:00] do have 

Mike Crispin: that on my Feedly. 

Nate McBride: Yeah. So, and the NSA director, it was ousted, my God. Um, so there's a new Ivanti Zero day yet another. Second this year so far, uh, Oracle is continuing to deny the first breach, and now they've had a second breach, uh, which they're also denying.

And then those are just some of the highlights. But really the one that really attracted my attention here was, um, you know, we all know that a bunch of, a bunch of dick wads over at the White House were using Signal for having a conversation and they screwed it up. But, and this is no surprise that people in the White House are using Gmail for like Yeah.

Individual stuff that now they're also using Gmail for sensitive data too, which is a little bit That's wild. Absolute wild. A little bit, a little bit wild for me. Exactly. Like I, yeah, I shocked. I'm trying to, I'm trying to rationalize it, like maybe you just, you know, sometimes didn't know what Gmail account you were in or [00:20:00] whatever, but then I can't rationalize what's happening.

Um, fucking crazy. And then this is, this was kinda like a, just a thought I had. So I got invited to the Google AI mode. Beta. Have you been invited to that beta yet? No, I haven't. So Google has released AI mode. AI mode is Oh, oh, you mean like in the search engine? Yeah. 

Mike Crispin: Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. I have that. 

Nate McBride: Yep. So AI mode beta is essentially a separate from Google search, but it's what's Google, what Google search is going to become, I think in the next three weeks is when AI mode comes out.

Yeah. Um, and so all those companies that have been blocking, you know, generative AI platforms, I got a big surprise for you. Google is about to shit on your plans, and unless you're gonna block google.com, which you can do, that's really intelligent, um, Google's gonna shit all over your plans. Yeah. Just 

Mike Crispin: the only way to, I think, block AI is with [00:21:00] policy, not even block it just to warn people, to educate 

Nate McBride: people.

It's, it's purely paper, paper policy. Technologically speaking, you've just lost. 

Mike Crispin: Again, you can, you can, if you're blocking everything, you're gonna lose, 

Nate McBride: well send everyone over to Bing or Duck do go. Sure. And then, you know, just go ahead and do that. And then just wait until Bing is only using Copilot for search and wait until Duck Do Go is using its AI engine for search.

And then you're just gonna lose and then lose two more times. So it's time to like get up with the plans. Google AI mode has just disrupted all of your blockage planning. Gen AI is here for you. It's finally arrived. No, no. Avoiding it. Um, so this week, uh, a lot of those jobs that we read last week are actually off the market.

So last looks like our promotion capabilities are working. People are getting hired, uh, thanks to this podcast. That's great. I know, but we have some new ones this week. We have a couple old ones. I mean the VP IT at aia. Aia, [00:22:00] I don't know Mike. It's a tough one. Maybe they're looking for a unicorn. Um, I don't know.

But the Brian, is that still open? It is still 

Mike Crispin: open. Wow. Okay. I didn't know that. 

Nate McBride: Uh, so the Brian Group is looking for A-C-I-O-B-R-I-N-E. Uh, blueprint Medicines is looking for an associate architect of infrastructure and operations. New England College of Optometry was looking for a CIO. I did not know the New England College of Optometry was big enough to need a CIO, but they do.

So if you are a big fan of vision and you have a vision, you see what I did there? Yeah. I like that. Do you like that? Okay. Because you really weren't laughing. Now you're laughing. Okay. I have love if you, if you like vision and you have a vision that, by the way, if you go in and interview for there for the CIO, tell them that I love vision and I have a vision.

Boom. Drop the mic walk out. That's all it takes. Uh, Wentworth Institute of [00:23:00] Technology is looking for a sole professor. That means tenure professor of cybersecurity. 

Digital Nexus: Oh, 

Nate McBride: but if you like cybersecurity and you want to be a full tenured professor at Wentworth, boom, uh, overture Partners is looking for it.

Program director. Uh, if you have a pet like I do and you buy pet things and pet food, you probably buy them from Chewy. And Chewy is looking for an associate director of infrastructure. That'd be a fun one. Mm-hmm. Um, children's Hospital is looking for a senior director of IT ops, so that'd be cool. Um, UMass Medical is looking for an ED of it.

The Mass Gaming Commission, like, like to gamble. You like to roll the dice again? I'm gonna give you another, this is when you walk in, you say, listen, I like to roll the dice, but not when it comes to security. Boom. They're looking for a senior IT leader von nautical. No idea what [00:24:00] that is. It Ops lead Harvard looking for a CIO.

Do you wanna be a CIO at Harvard? Do you wanna say, you got into Harvard, people will be like, really? You did? And you'd be like, yeah, I went to Harvard. Yeah. Well, here. Jesus. I'm a CIO. I'm, I'm, no, just say I'm at a, I went to Harvard, uh, CIO for El Ira Therapeutics, LYRA. They're looking for CIO. They're, they're, they're, they're going places.

Lara is, vertex is looking for four roles. They're all new. Here we go. First, a director of AI Governance and Policy. And if you are a fan of the show, you know that these directors of AI governance and policy have the best jobs in the world, regulatory rated policy policy. And then they get coffee and they, they wait for someone to violate their policy.

Uh, vertex is also looking for an executive director of medical information and technology and [00:25:00] innovation. I. They covered all the things in that title. They're also looking for a senior director of solution architecture and technology strategy. I had no idea what that means, be the jd And lastly, looking for a director of learning and literature technology.

Wow. Imagine being a company. What? Working at company large enough that you can hire a digital librarian. I would like, I I like that job. That'd be fun. I, I, these are great. And then if you want to be the person who controls all the little signs on the highway, or you got good news for you. 'cause the MBTA is looking for an IT manager of systems.

Mike Crispin: There are a lot of systems to manage 

Nate McBride: all the systems. So you wanna be the person that puts the, the funny jokes up on the, on the highway signs. This is your job. You can come up with the jokes. Wow. Don't drink and drive. It might save a frog. [00:26:00] Happy Frog's Day. 

Mike Crispin: You could automate that whole process if you want.

You won't have to type it in. It'll just go up by itself. You better 

Nate McBride: apply soon because some companies, like the worst company on the internet ever made called Shopify, are now doing, you can only hire the role of AI cannot do it mandate. So Shopify staying on brand with their, uh, their, their goal of being the shittiest company in the world is, is has a new AI mandate in their company.

And you can read about it. Shopify has said, if AI cannot do it, you can hire, otherwise you cannot hire it. You must figure out a way for AI to do it for you. Now it's kind of ingenious. It's, it's kind of, um, overblowing what AI can do a little bit. Yeah, like a lot of it, but also they're terrible companies.

You don't work for 'em anyway. I dunno why I give him any airtime. I'll probably cut that [00:27:00] one out too late. Too late. Um, we have a slack board as you all know, as you hear every week, join the fricking slack board. Okay? It's free. It's a lot of chatting and conversations going on. Chatting conversation. It's a lot to talk about and things.

I just posted four free Red Sox tickets today in the lobby. I mean, there's things going on. Okay? Come hang in our little it me cute space and share your innermost it existential crises. We're, we're here to listen. We are. Okay, we'll, we'll hug you virtually anyway. Um, if you like our show, give us all the stars.

Stop dicking around with four stars. Who does that? Why would you ever give anything four stars either Don't rate it or rate it. Five stars. In our case, just give us five stars. If you wanna buy us a beer, do that. It's easy. Click on the link that says Buy us a beer. It's $3, let's go. And then. There's that.

All right, so a quick recap of the season before we get into [00:28:00] episode eight. In episode one, we meet the Ratliff family who have come to Thailand for a mix of vacation and academic purposes. Oh, wait, hold on. That's my white Lotus. That's where my White Lotus podcast. Sorry. 

Mike Crispin: Yeah, we gotta, we gotta, we gotta finish that.

Nate McBride: I never started it. Well, I saw like episode one of season one, and then I was like, this is just dumb. You didn't watch any of this? No. Oh. I wanna watch the, uh, gangland. Is that what it's called? The Mafia Land? Oh, no, I wa 

Mike Crispin: I just finished White Lotus. I thought you had watched it. 

Nate McBride: No. Do you want to provide any spoilers for our audience?

Mike Crispin: No. Thank you. It's, I it's very 

Nate McBride: anxious. It'll make you very anxious. What would happen if right now, if I brought up a tab and I just read the ending on the podcast? Do you think anybody would, would notice? Probably not. Okay. I am bringing up right now. All right. So here it is. Billy Ratliff did it. 

Mike Crispin: Billy Ratliff.

Yeah. Yeah. That, that, [00:29:00] so you can go with that? Yeah. 

Nate McBride: Billy Ratliff did it. Uh, Tim 

Mike Crispin: Timmy Ratliff did not do it this time. So did not do 

Nate McBride: it. Yeah. So three women that were in the, in the car with the guy, they didn't do it. That was just a red herring. None of them did it. It was Billy Ratliff who did it, and 

Mike Crispin: someone knocked over the observation tower and broke their neck falling into the bathtub.

Nate McBride: And then they ended up on a tropical island after a plane crash with seven other survivors, and they found a White Ghost monster. Oh. 

Mike Crispin: Oh, wait. Yeah. That made strange noises. 

Nate McBride: That's different 

Mike Crispin: show. And they may or may not have been alive. How many times did you watch Lost Through 

Nate McBride: Twice? No, I thought it was more than that.

Only we, we have to go back to the episodes. Yeah. Yeah. I thought it was like five. I 

Mike Crispin: don't think it was five. It may have felt like five times, but it was only two. I'm pretty sure 

Nate McBride: That's a lot. It's a lot of episodes. [00:30:00] 

Mike Crispin: Yeah. 

Nate McBride: Um, I'm watching MythBusters through again for, I don't know, the n and Umpteenth time MythBusters.

So here's a recap by the way. 'cause we've gone through now a whole bunch of episodes and we've had some jorts in the middle. I just wanna kind of bring everyone up to speed. So the whole point of this season, if you're, if you've been paying attention, is that we're exploring how IT leaders can preserve autonomy.

Well, how anyone can preserve autonomy, basically. But IT leaders, because that's the general genre of this podcast and today's increasingly complex tech landscape, we established four key pillars, risk, innovation, productivity, and autonomy. Uh, and now risk pro, innovation and productivity all are governed by basically your decisions and autonomy.

Are you a zero person who simply accepts the status quo? Or are you a one person who challenges the status quo to preserve autonomy and make the best decisions? In the first three episodes, we explored the modern IT paradox, [00:31:00] uh, where we talked more in detail about the zero versus one decision, uh, about sort of the moments when you go with the flow or you actively shape your destiny.

Uh, we defined three models of it control, complete control, which is the old school approach, complete chaos, the wild west, and what we advocated for guided autonomy. Episode four, we tackled identity, which we're gonna come back to actually in the future episode. Not just ATH authentication, but the deeper question of what makes something valuable in it, how we identify that value, and then ultimately how we protect it.

Um, episode five, we dug into the meat of autonomy preservation, which was not just reactively protecting it when someone tries to take it away, but actively building systems and processes that intentionally preserve it. We discussed the daily battle, developing good habits and building a strategic approach, and then creating a long-term vision, which brought us into episode six, where we explored how to create technical diversity without chaos.

This was a great episode, one of my favorites. We talked about establishing clear boundaries between systems, well-defined integration [00:32:00] patterns, strong governance that enables rather than restricts. We introduced concepts like capability, clusters and T-shaped teams that help maintain technological adaptability.

Then last two weeks, or, well, the last two episodes, part one and part two of episode seven. We shifted gears to discuss establishing clear boundaries and principles for decision making. As an IT leader, we explored what makes good boundaries, the four pillars framework, how to create actionable boundaries, and the three options rule to prevent falling into zero choice thinking.

Then throughout all the episodes, we've, uh, from time to time profile, different IT leader archetypes from the great homogenization leader to the stack collector to the identity identity crisis. And tonight, um, we are basically talking about building resilience through independence and effective change management.

And before we even do that, I just want to kind of pause and have, get your thoughts [00:33:00] on what you would describe as effective change management from the autonomy perspective. 

Mike Crispin: So effective change management, I think first is clarity and transparency and planning. Being able to able sell and influence why change needs to occur.

Yes. And then to put together a simple, simple plan and expectation setting around that. And when it comes to autonomy and change management, it is off awfully difficult to always go sort of in that innovative approach to change management, just trying to find, reinvent the wheel in terms of how you promote change.

There are many mediums in which to communicate and to train people, but I find that if you're able to present a, a value proposition in which people get to what they want [00:34:00] and the company remains safe and productive, you're in a good place. You're able to do that with, if you're able to use different approaches to communicating with people or different project planning methodologies or just have a really simple approach that, that you, you have your choice how you want to go about that.

And it's part of the reading, the culture of your organization and how they work. And also being able to communicate and build up credits. So I use that as the, the, the more difficult, the change and the maybe the more confusing the change. There's a huge element to trust that needs to be established if you're making a drastic change, which lines up with the autonomy piece.

So if you want total autonomy and you want to be able to go and, and perhaps it, um, you know, autonomy could be doing the absolutely right thing, but maybe the unconventional thing, you've gotta have build up the, the [00:35:00] trust to go in that dis that, that, uh, direction. Build up a few successes. And through change management, you'll be able to influence and bring people kind of to water and to drink your change procedure and your change methodology.

Right now, I think, you know, there's a lot of opportunity for change when it comes to AI being implemented in organizations. Yep. When it comes to new approaches with security, uh, new approaches to hiring people, working in remote locations isn't so new, but connecting those people, there's no great way to do it yet, no one has figured that out.

Yeah. And sometimes that comes with change, adopting platforms that you use at home, at work Yeah. Is something that might merge again, where, you know, things, there's a seesaw between consumerization and enterprise leadership and it [00:36:00] keeps going back and forth. So change management can often be driven by more.

Access and connection to people who aren't sitting near each other and figuring out ways to, to drive that change on an asynchronous basis. Not everyone has to be in the same room. Yeah. Uh, and just decide in some, some aspects people can be, uh, remote and be able to connect on a periodic basis and get things done.

Nate McBride: I think that's absolutely perfect. I mean, ultimately not just, I mean, I have anecdotes about previous companies I've worked at, but I also do a lot of work with other companies, uh, on the consulting side. And I can tell you that time and time again without fail, when I walk into a situation and determine that things are not good.

It's generally coming from a lack of change management and a lack of general buy-in. And that [00:37:00] itself is happening because the person who was responsible for instituting those changes simply rolled over and took the changes. There was no, um, let's be thoughtful about this. Let's see how we can practically do this thing.

I was, yeah, I mean, basically this idea that I, I, I worked at companies again where, you know, they, they, they go all in on a platform and they think it's the best idea and the IT leader really has no choice. 'cause they have an established proper change management. Then of course, that all in, uh, option fails dramatically for, for one reason or another.

The company gets bought or goes under or changes their entire paradigm and then you're screwed. Yep. So we're gonna cover that today, which is like, how do you lay the framework for change management to begin with? And you mentioned building trust and building these factors. I mean, these are, I would call table stakes for getting towards a point where you can do effective change management.

But even more important than that is [00:38:00] wanting to do change management. Yeah. Is wanting to go and alert people to the fact that you have a change, here's why. Here's how you arrive to this moment and bringing them along for the journey. Yep. Um, so, uh, I, I see this, uh, coming down through essentially three points, right?

The three components of resilience. One, uh, technical independence. And so we've talked about this before. Uh, we were actually talked about this last week at the, at the, um, bio IT world. We talked, we were talking that wonderful, um, CEO from Zero Bio, and mentioning that there were four layers of the IT stack and that, and they should be all, um, built in such a way that they're interchangeable.

So, uh, access and authentication, um, storage, collaboration, and communication. Those, those four layers. Right. Well, there's actually a fifth, which we keep forgetting to mention, which is the AI layer, um, which I think is in, its in and of itself its own layer, [00:39:00] but that having, having technical independence means that if you are able to build a company that has, uh, technical independence between those four layers, you have the ability to, to adapt any one of the layers without massive disruption.

That's technical independence. Your ability to move freely. Between, between the layers of your stack without disruption? No. Or without enough of a disruption that anyone might, might really notice. And two, knowledge and independence. So I'm working with a client right now that has zero knowledge independence on the scale of knowledge independence.

They are at zero. They have no internal institutional knowledge about what they own or are you? A hundred percent of their information is only known by external vendors and contractors. It is a dire [00:40:00] situation, which we have to dig ourselves out of. Okay, so knowledge, independence. And then lastly is vendor independence, which is kind of a buildup of the other two.

If you have your stack divided in such a way that it's super flexible and you are not relying on vendors for your information and knowledge, in fact you have it all in house, then you can switch in vendors. Very, I, no, you're not very easily, you can switch vendors with less disruption in that kind of, in that kind of situation.

So you have technical independence, knowledge, independence, and vendor independence. Yep. Um, all having sub requirements, like I mentioned, the free flowing stack, the, um, the capabilities to keep all information in-house. And then lastly, your ability to swap vendors out interchangeably. And you know what?

Honestly, on that last one, there are definitely price point advantages when you sign with a vendor for [00:41:00] say, a three year term. And this fucking kills me. Vendors punish you for signing for one year? Yep. Oh, you're only signing for one year. Well, here's 25% on top of your, your fee. But if you sign for three, we'll knock that off.

Plus another 25%. Exactly. Because they want to be able to do the revenue recognition on their books and say that they have a three-year client and they're gonna punish you. And this is most vendors. Mm-hmm. So you should talk to 'em about that. I'd 

Mike Crispin: say it's almost all vendors. 

Nate McBride: Yeah. Why are you punishing 

Mike Crispin: me?

I'm not buying. 

Nate McBride: Yeah. Right. Why are you punishing me for being, um, pragmatic? What the fuck? So that happens. That happens quite a bit. So I wanna lock you in. Yeah. Technical independence. There's some patterns around this. Um, I. First you have modular, modular architecture with clear [00:42:00] boundaries. So rather than building monoliths, I'm gonna go all in with vendor X, Y, Z.

You're building systems that have very, very clear, well-defined interfaces. And by the way, documented interfaces. Yep. Diagrammed interfaces between components. That way you can look at your diagram at any point in time and say, this one little piece right here, this needs to change. We can't, oh, well we can't because the whole thing's a monolith.

No, no, no. You gotta have the whole thing diagrammed. Every single component. And I'm not talking just like oblique arrows between boxes. I'm talking about defining every single step. Mm-hmm. This is a lost art to me. Yep. People are not doing this. I'm not seeing this anymore. I love doing it. 'cause I just love being in Lucidchart.

I love making diagrams. I'll fucking diagram anything but. It's not happening anymore. Um, that data [00:43:00] independence. Your data, your data should be portable and, and in formats you can control. Now, I'll be honest, back to that Lucidchart point, Lucidchart exports are an LCF format, which is not port, which is portable, but um, is only in Lucidchart.

So I can't do like a backup of Lucidchart and then use that anywhere but Lucidchart, it's, yeah, it's portable to the degree that I can move it, but it is not extensible to the point that I can bring it somewhere else. 

Mike Crispin: Yeah, that's a big problem with a lot of the SaaS applications for sure. 

Nate McBride: Yeah. I mean, Asana will export to JSON, which is a little bit more extensible.

Uh, Smartsheets will export to, to CSV, but without any of your formatting. So like all the vendors will give you your data in a portable format, but to the [00:44:00] degree that you have independence after that moment, it's hard to say, and I only picked three, but you know, the lessons learned are across the board.

Mike Crispin: I, I think that's why you're seeing, you're seeing markdown in all of the AI products. 

Nate McBride: Yeah. Was 

Mike Crispin: every AI is exporting its text and any sort of formatted documents in, in, in markdown, which I think is a sign that more, there'll be a, a better graphical standard as well coming soon. Hopefully that makes some of these things more portable.

Nate McBride: Yeah, I totally agree. Um, Claude uses Mermaid for all of its, um, graphical output down. You can download them and mermaid's free. You can use it. Yep. Mer Mermaid is an open source image format. Very straightforward, very simple to use. I love that. I like, I like that fact that it's both portable. I can go ahead and take it and do whatever I want with it.

That's not always the case. That's awesome. Mermaid is great. And that brings us [00:45:00] into the third sort of point of that technical independence, which is the standard protocols over proprietary protocols. Yep. So if you're only able to transact over a proprietary protocol or format, you're giving up your independence to a degree.

That's correct. Um, I mean, I always tickled a little bit when I look at the import list for an application like a, like an Airtable or a Zapier or one of these guys, and I see this big laundry list of import formats. I love that. Just import anything you got, whatever you got, we'll figure it out. Just don't worry about it.

Versus, you know, you go to, uh, some of these other platforms import, it's like one option CSV. Mm-hmm. And then good luck. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. So then you have knowledge independence, which was the second big tier, and knowledge independence, uh, basically. This one drives me bananas. So I'll ask you this question and then I'll answer the same question myself.

Sure. Um, [00:46:00] how you're, you're a young company, you have a department of three, um, to the degree that you've already started documenting your institutional knowledge and, and ensuring that your vendors don't hold all the informational secrets. Uh, on a stage of one on, on like a stage of one to four, with one being like just starting four being like, nothing happens without being institutionalized.

Where are you guys at? 

Mike Crispin: You, you mean from an IT perspective? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. What's, uh, what's good and what's bad? One to five. Well, a one one means 

Nate McBride: a one A zero is bad. A one means that you are starting the process of institutionalizing knowledge about the way things are done and how things work. Yeah.

Even if it's just, uh, wikis or box notes or something like you're getting things down about how to do a thing. I'd say a three. A three. 

Mike Crispin: Yeah. And I think this is something that I [00:47:00] press on with the team 'cause nobody likes to do it. Um, yeah, right. Is especially with some great AI tools to consume all this stuff, it's often, yeah.

Please write it down. Please use this tool to save it so we can read it, please. So I think the amount of work that's been done has been a three. I think we can get to a four if we just make it more of an automatic part of our process. You know, if you're. You're building a workflow or you're deploying a tool, you're creating a new Airtable.

You don't do that without writing it down. And I think that's, that's true. That's, that's where, you know, certainly being a technologist myself, it's easy to get, to get carried away and not do that. So, and that's why, you know, you talked about obsidian earlier. Uh, yeah. And so we like, and we leverage box notes primarily for all this stuff.

Yeah. But it's all [00:48:00] marked down. So the, it's beautiful that we can just transfer things where we need to transfer them and document them and make sure we manage and throw away stuff that's no longer usable. Primarily that's me right now. Yeah. So I'm primarily doing that myself. Um, but it's something that the whole team needs to do more of.

And that's, you know, something we, we talk about a lot. So I think it'll be a, a test over the summer and we'll, um, we'll, we'll get a lot of that. Squared away. But in terms of all the, it, you know, we, we no longer have a managed service partner. Yeah. Everything is internalized. Uh, the organization and different functions in the company come to us constantly to learn different tools and connect with different third parties and whatnot.

And we internalize all of that within the group. So I'd say we're doing pretty good. 

Nate McBride: I, I, I've touched three a few times, like seen it put my foot into three and then we'll immediately put myself back into sort of two land. [00:49:00] Yeah. Because things just sometimes move too fast. I'll give you an example. Uh, I'm working with an our, we have an, we have an ERP system.

We have a vendor that sort of supports it for the finance team. And I know this system, like I can do 99% of changes in it without a problem, but every now and then I run into snags because it's just hard to find things in here in the system. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Change the code. Anyway, the point is that. Um, when I'm doing these changes, nobody knows how I do this except for the vendor.

So I'm not writing down like, okay, you want me to amend this sort of like AP approval workflow. Okay. Let me just do, you know, go ahead and amend it. Boom. There you go. You're done. Close the change control, but there's no documentation of what I just did. There is, let me rephrase that. There is, you could go on, uh, this ERP websites page.

You could probably, uh, ai, it, you could probably even go to the vendor. But institutionally there's nothing. Um, [00:50:00] every time I do one of these, it's always ad hoc. And the same thing with like, all the things I'm building and Zapier and make an Airtable. Uh, it's only at the very end when I feel like it's a finished product.

And, and to, for, for me to call something finished is extraordinarily rare that I'll go back and document what it is I did. So I do teach people. I teach Miranda when I can, how I did a thing, how I built it. I still not document, I'm still not documenting it though. I'm teaching her how I did it, and she's sitting there going probably in her mind like, holy shit.

Like who does this? Right? But I'm showing her how I did it in the hopes that someday she'd be able to unfuck it if it really got screwed up and I wasn't there. But yeah, like I, so many things are documented, but so many things aren't. That should be. So from a knowledge, I'm not gonna say 

Mike Crispin: things are always documented.

Well, I would say that the best, a lot a [00:51:00] almost, sometimes I do the opposite of what you just mentioned. I will, I will fix things and I will create a box note and not tell anyone. Yeah. So I'll, I'll, well, I think I'll create, I, I'll just keep it there and then when the time comes, it'll be all right. Go into box AI and ask the question.

Sure. And, and we'll see what comes up. Because a lot of times it's like. I certainly want to give people the opportunity to fix things themselves. Yeah. So I don't wanna be in the, in the position. Yeah. I fixed it. Here's the directions and be like, I'm just gonna write it down, put it in the background. Yeah.

And create this little knowledge base. And it's not, it's never, uh, hugely, uh, put together in a way that looks good or it's even thorough. It's just enough that it can get, it's enough. The start, the starting, uh, kind of the starting point where, where if a question does come about it, some things have already been tried or, or, or worked through, um, without a kind of constant repeat.

The, the, uh, 

Nate McBride: I think, I think it's a very gr graduated scale. Like to go from zero to one on this [00:52:00] scale is a couple days of work to go from one to two, all just a couple weeks of work to go from two to three. It's a lot of work. And to go from three to four, it's a year of work minimum. Huge amount of 

Mike Crispin: work.

So, and the upkeep, the ongoing upkeep and upkeep is when you get to four. I think that's what makes the four a year, is that you are always having to refine everything you are doing and constantly changing everything. I know every single time I get this, as you go 

Nate McBride: on 

Mike Crispin: and 

Nate McBride: on, that Slack admin update with all the changes and I'm like, oh shit.

You know, how many things do I have to go back through and update in my library? So, I mean, here's like, I think I'll acknowledge independence. If you break it down, it, it, it basically covers a couple areas. One documentation that your team actually maintains and uses, like we just talked about, which is why I wanna say this now, which is, okay, here's this documentation and in three weeks it will be obsolete.

Because the vendor will change the ui. [00:53:00] And then while we're like, we'll do, we'll make some small changes that don't rise to the, the qualification of change management, and then when we get back to this, it won't be the same anymore, but, right. That, that's what independence looks like. Independence. That level four means that you have documentation that your team maintains regularly and uses.

That's probably what Vertex is hiring that digital librarian, someone who's a maintainer, um, knowledge and independence has cross training to avoid single points of failure. You do this, I do this. This is a very valuable skill, especially in small, especially s especially in small IT departments, uh, where you have ends of 2, 3, 4, um, you have to cross train and.

Again, it's like I'll use my, my experience in the consulting world for a bit. I walk into companies that have, you know, departments of 8, 9, 10, whatever. Mm-hmm. And everyone's in their little silos. No one's, no one's sharing [00:54:00] anything with anybody else. You know, you have eight ends of one, all of whom are like, well, I'm security person, I shouldn't do anything else.

And nobody else knows how to do security. Like, just share your job's safe. Um, the next one is skills development that prioritizes principles over products. Again, skills development. How do you take the knowledge that you have and improve it? And that's key. Like you can't just put in version one of a platform and then sit back and say, we're done.

And then lastly is knowledge Independence is when you allocate time for knowledge transfer and learning. We have to get over this hump. And I think it's hard for a lot of people that if I tell, if I tell Mike how to do this thing now Mike knows and I could get fired. No, no, you're not gonna get fired.

I'm not gonna get fired. Like now Mike knows in case I have to go on vacation. That's right. Or I get an expended, send an expended [00:55:00] afternoon in a bathroom. 'cause I had too many tacos. Like Mike knows how to solve this problem. I'm unavailable. Um, that's knowledge transfer and warning share people. Yes.

Share your departments. 

Mike Crispin: We can share. We're all buddies. 

Nate McBride: So one thing I have found Inval invaluable in the past is architectural storytelling, which is, and we see this all the time in Amag, which is explain to everybody, not just how your systems work. You know, take a special lunch and learn, explain how things work, but also why they were designed that way.

Tell everybody your story and it, people will find this fricking cool, like, oh my God, he used make Zapier d script mail parser and Airtable to make this stupid email thing. But you're, you're answering questions like, what problems are we trying to solve? What constraints shaped our decisions [00:56:00] and what alternatives did we consider?

And I think this goes, this is like that extra level of institutional knowledge that isn't like, okay Mike, whenever this error message comes up, press these buttons in order. No, you have a better understanding of why you're pressing them in that order. Yep. That, that's the point. Um, and I'm consciously cognizant of this fact when I'm teaching Miranda or when Kate was working there, I'm teaching them a thing.

I'm not just saying, okay, you click here, click there. I'm saying, why, why do you have to click here? And the really best people will ask you when you forget to say it, like, why are you cooking that? And you're like, oh, so sorry, I forgot to mention that. Um, here's what I'm cooking. And then you can also, and you know, I'm a big fan of war gaming.

Um, we used to do war gaming all the time, uh, at Amag and at Ohana you would do future proofing exercises. [00:57:00] So you would just simply ask if, um, Microsoft doubled their prices tomorrow, what would we do? Or if NetSuite becomes unavailable, how do we maintain operations? And these are just basically, you know, risk factor analysis.

Take all your platforms, assign them a risk scale, you know, one to four, one to five, one to 10, whatever, anything that falls say above three in a one to 10 scale. Then you have to figure out, okay, what will we do? And that's the future proofing, that's, that's knowledge independence. When you know what you would do in a business continuity or disaster recovery situation for your high risk systems, that's knowledge independence.

When you don't know, that is a, you are attached to your vendor, your vendors. Got you. Yes, they do. Yeah. So I think a lot of times, and I said this, but there's the job security thing that always baffles me. I want every, I want everyone that. In my department to know what I'm doing and [00:58:00] how to do it, and I want them to tell each other, and I want them to also know, and I'm gonna tell them, your job's secure.

Don't worry about it. Share it. You're still the security person, you're still the middleware person. Don't worry. But doesn't it feel better to know that somebody else can help you in a pinch? You don't have to like go on vacation and shit yourself every time a an alert email comes to you. 

Mike Crispin: You know, I, a general rule is that one, everybody learns, everyone does better.

If, if only one person knows something, you're, it, it can, that one person leaves or one person no longer is able to perform or doesn't want to perform, or there's some sort of tension. It can destroy everything. You want to have balance. You want people to feel empowered and people to know how to do things and to learn to be able to grow their careers.

I mean, kind of stating the obvious, but these are things that. It is just about being a, [00:59:00] I don't know, not, not trying to think of, I dunno, maybe it's gonna sound a little cliche, but having more of a team driven approach. I mean, there's just too many people maybe in the past lives on just different acquaintances and stuff.

It's like, it's all about kinda one person, you know? And it's not about the team. And that goes for sports, it goes for work, and it's more, teamwork is good. Small groups cross-functional discussion. Everyone's learning. People are outside of their comfort zone. Sometimes it, it helps everything. 

Nate McBride: Look at every single Disney movie ever made.

Literally every single Disney movie is only one person knows how to do a thing. And then everyone's like, no, no, let's all work together as a team. And then all of a sudden everyone realizes they can rescue the princess together ultimately. Um, everyone has their role, right? That was a terrible analogy.

Right? But ultimately, you're a hundred [01:00:00] percent right, in my opinion, in that, God, we used to do this all the time and it was fantastic. Like, what are you doing and how can everybody else help you? Uh, so again, gooing my Amag, uh, uh, example. So at Amag, um, everyone, every other person in the company and every other department got their annual bone risk percentage based on, um, you know, their individual achievement.

Sure. So in it, I made it so that everyone in the IT department got their bonus percentage based on how the department did. And so I imagine the incentivization that comes with that. Now, part of that was the sharing part. You have to share, you have to bring people in on what you're doing. Um, and if the department itself gets a 70, everyone gets 70%, doesn't matter.

You [01:01:00] get screwed if you do not lift up the department with what you have and your skills. Everyone hurts from that, right? Yep, yep. It's a great incentive. But after a while, I turned it off and I just let it kind of run on its own. They learned the trick, they learned how well it worked, and then for a bunch of years, up until I left, that didn't exist anymore.

Sure. I didn't need to do it. They, they had learned the beauty of that model. And so the third leg of this stool is the, the vendor independence. Yep. So going back to that idea, I'm not saying that you shouldn't use vendors or that you should build everything yourself. 

Mike Crispin: Everything's a 

Nate McBride: balance. But, but I'll, I'm gonna clarify.

I. The big asterisk that I'm a big fan of both ideas. So that's just innate paradox. But not using vendors or, or building everything yourself is the opposite extreme and creates its own problems. You can't be such a one, like, so [01:02:00] one, like, so opposed to zero decisions. We've talked about this, go back to the last episode.

Flexibility, uh, boundaries. You have to, you have to maintain a balance, but what I am saying is that you should never, um, give up enough independence that any, any one vendor's got you over a barrel. Yeah. That's not good. You don't want to take it from a vendor. So, so, so the practices for vendor independence and kind of like knowledge independence, these are pretty obvious, but they're, they're ignored.

So you have a multi-vendor strategy. I presented to a company this morning. Um, a strategic output. They're, they're a small biotech company that's got an MSP. 

Mike Crispin: Sure. 

Nate McBride: And I talked to 'em about a multi-vendor strategy 'cause they're locked into one vendor right now and asked them what would happen if that [01:03:00] vendor somehow went down or screwed them.

They did not have a plan. So multi-vendor strategies for critical capabilities. Now you can have a single vendor for like the things that are low risk. Sure. Whatever. But for the critical capabilities of your company, why wouldn't you have as many vendors as possible spreading the load? And not only that, but not for, for every vendor you pick, knowing who your next vendor would be if you had to get rid of vendor A.

Yeah. Um, contract terms that protect you. We have lost, and again, this is based on. A collection of anecdotal and real world evidence, people have lost their willingness or capability to negotiate. Mm-hmm. Just because a vendor says you'll pay me $89,000 a year for a hundred seats, does not mean you need to pay that.

Mike Crispin: Correct. 

Nate McBride: Wait till their quarter end. Wait till they're [01:04:00] year end, just push back and say, no, I'd love to, but we can't and here's why. Or I'll tell you what, gimme a three year contract, but we're gonna renew every single year, but I want three year discount pricing. Like there's different taxes you can use, not going through the whole list, but every single time that you're like, oh, well I guess it's what they said, I'm gonna sign that you're giving up your vendor independence.

Mike Crispin: That's right. 

Nate McBride: And the vendors didn't know this. Um, you should have an exit plan from every vendor from day one. So, hey, CLMS vendor. We're gonna go ahead and sign with you, but I'm also going to immediately come up with a plan to get rid of you and to, to, uh, to come up with a plan for if you are no longer here to these days, to, to just assume your vendor will be around is a little absurd.

And I, that's right. I just, literally, as I'm saying [01:05:00] this, over the last few days, I found out that Siemens bought all three platforms that we use in my company to mold into their Siemens AI experience or whatever the fuck they call it. And I've got no plan. 'cause who would buy three general use research analysis platforms in one shot?

Yep. Well, Siemens did. Who saw that coming? Nobody. Well, probably a couple people did, but I didn't. So now I'm screwed. I. I have to figure out how it is. I'm gonna handle this transition over the next nine months. I have time, but I did not have an exit plan because it's just one of those things where you're like, nobody would ever, ever get rid of Microsoft Paint.

Then one day they came out with Microsoft Paint two. 

Mike Crispin: It's difficult [01:06:00] because, you know, a lot of, there's always a lot of pressure on IT organizations to consolidate and to standardize and, you know, having, 

Nate McBride: well, so unpack that though. Multiple systems. Unpack that. Unpack 

Mike Crispin: why that is, Mike. 

Nate McBride: Well, I think that's important.

It's important. It's important to say that. 

Mike Crispin: Sure. Uh, I, I think it's to have a simpler experience to have fewer vendors from a cost perspective. Um, but who's driving 

Nate McBride: that 

Mike Crispin: actually and why? It's usually a, a cost, a cost component and a, an overlapping, you know, a lot of tools do the same thing and you, it, I think that's the key point is, you know, you may need to have one tool to do something and something to fail over to if something happens.

But to have two or three tools to do the same thing can often create a lot of confusion. So it's how do you, how do you standardize [01:07:00] and still have the, the sort of composable environment that you want to have, sort of breast breed environment? 

Nate McBride: Yes. 

Mike Crispin: Whether, because there's gonna be, there's gonna be overlaps, but you need to sound harsh, but you need to sort of dictate some standards and you need to say, absolutely.

Nate McBride: That is not harsh. 

Mike Crispin: Well, I mean, I think to some extent you, you've got. You've got tools that sometimes do the same things and to say, you, you will use this thing well. Well, that's change management though. 

Nate McBride: Yeah. I mean, that's taking you back to a look at 

Mike Crispin: Yeah. It's governance as well. Right. I mean, it's having your principles and your standards and making sure you, that everyone understands what they are and why it's important and how it will help them, and how it will help the whole company.

But it is difficult at times. Like, let's say you've put in a, you put in sort of a [01:08:00] core document management system. 

Nate McBride: Yeah. 

Mike Crispin: And that's a lot of important stuff there. 

Nate McBride: Sure. 

Mike Crispin: You know, maybe it's, uh, a QA quality management system or something like, are you supposed to have a second one? You know? No, but don't 

Nate McBride: you think that you should have an exit plan for that vendor?

Vendor? Oh 

Mike Crispin: yeah. Yeah. Continuity plan and a, an exit. Absolutely. Absolutely. 

Nate McBride: Yeah. 

Mike Crispin: From a technology independence perspective, you, you know, there's no. There's not really a, sometimes a driving need to have something ready on the back burner. You need a plan and a objective as to how you're gonna, how long it's gonna take you to get there.

But I think, um, if you got too many, too many tools that can create, create some problems. Oh, 

Nate McBride: I totally agree. I mean, if you wanna do, again, this is, these are, these are time elements and resource elements. Not everyone's got it. Leaders look around and they're like, I don't know who would do this, but these are important things if you can do them.

And even if you can't, can you stretch yourself [01:09:00] to do them for an exit plan? Yeah. It's the time isn't when you're, when you're like super pissed off about the vendor, time to do an exit plan is the day you sign with the vendor. That's right. Or even be even before that. That's right. And your, your exit plan should have.

Uh, how will we get our data out? I mean, escrow, uh, some big export file that they're gonna begrudgingly give you and make it painful for like, what's the plan to get data out? Yes. Where are all the dependencies for this system? Yep. You should know this. And believe me when I tell you dependencies will accrue.

Oh my goodness. 

Mike Crispin: Absolutely. Just links. Take links. Yeah. 

Nate McBride: Just links. Oh my God. Fucking relative links. What a nightmare. Shoot me now. What, what skills would we need to maintain and replace for the functionality? And lastly, what would a transition timeline timeline look like? Yep. Yep. How long would it take?

So [01:10:00] we wanna get out of this new CLMS system we bought. How long will it take to get out? There's 3000 contracts in it. There's x number of. Exports allowed per day, whatever. How, like what's the timeline for actually getting out? Yep. Because, because the vendor's gonna say you have to give us 90 days notice before you want to cancel this contract.

And that at that point it's too late. You are renewing my friend. Yeah. Um, it's not about being paranoid, it's about being prepared. Nobody enters a marriage planning for divorce, but smart couples don't always get prenups, but they at least discuss these things. Yes. And then the last one was vendor reassessment.

And honestly, I love doing this every year. I love doing bakeoffs every single year. For me, it lets me, it gives me a chance to reassess the market. Most of my incumbent vendors win. I mean, [01:11:00] Okta is probably always going to win box, maybe. Yep. Uh, 'cause Google is always sitting out there waiting to replace box.

But vendor reassessments every year, you should reevaluate your, every year. I think you should reevaluate your key vendor relationships against the market. What has the market done in the last year? Not to switch so much, but to understand your options and then leverage that for renegotiation. Let's suppose that, you know, you're in your last year of a contract with your CLMS vendor and you're sitting down with your rep and they're like, how was the year?

And you're like, it's great. They're like, you have one more year left. What are you thinking about? And you're like, I don't know. I'm actually thinking about, uh, this other vendor, this competitor of yours. What can you do for me? Because, you know, uh, it's a little expensive, a little pricey. And then you begin the, the conversation.

[01:12:00] Um, you get, you get complacent with vendor relationships, and then you have price increases and support changes, and then whatever. And then you realize, you know, it's, it's too late. You have to renew for at least another year, and then you're screwed. And this is the best part, right? Like, you get in a three year contract with a vendor, you turns out you, it turns out you don't like them, you actually hate them.

And so you start thinking about how to get rid of them. Meanwhile, the clock's ticking down to the last date. You haven't done shit. You have three months to go and by then it's too late. You have to renew. And then the vendor says, oh, you wanna renew for just one year? Okay, boom, here, here's a renewable tax for you for just being too slow.

Yep. And sometimes, and, and here's a controversial take on this, um, which is, I mean, I do this all the time. It's called the shot across the v switch. Your vendors, just switch your vendors. Even when you're happy, eh, you, you're doing a pretty good job. I like what you're doing, but you know. If there's just this other vendor that's better, [01:13:00] just tell them this and, and number one, it allows you and, and do it.

Number one, it allows you to exercise your switching muscles to test whether or not you can actually do this. Number two, it can work to your advantage. Either way, you're gonna get a better option. You're gonna get a new vendor who's better, or you're gonna get your current vendor to pony up some bucks or some resources or something else.

Sure. I I don't get it. People seem meek around vendors these days. People, not you, but people that I talk to and a lot of vacations are like, eh, we just took it. 

Mike Crispin: Like, why I, well, I think that it may, it may happen in some of the circles we're in where we're at smaller companies now, just because they don't know, like I, you stated earlier, they don't know.

They have some room to negotiate. In the software space, you know, you're [01:14:00] under a hundred users or you're under 200 users, and sure, there's usually not a lot of wiggle room. Sometimes you're buying more users than you need just to get the product. So I mean, there's, there's sort of that component of the world too that we have to live in being the size companies we are.

Yeah. Once you get to a certain size, though, I think as a company as well, you have people that work in procurement that are also going to push, you know, strategic sourcing and that type of stuff that are also gonna push for you to negotiate whether they're involved or not. Like part of your job should be to negotiate these, these deals.

And I, I've seen a couple in strategic sourcing people in my career, and you, you, it teaches you a lot to work with them because they're on the call, they don't give a fuck. 

Nate McBride: Right. I know. 

Mike Crispin: I'm like, whoa, whoa, whoa. We're gonna lose this. They're like, no, we're not. To your point, Nate, right? [01:15:00] Yeah. No, we're not.

These, these are salespeople. Give 'em a week. Yep. Month end, give 'em a week, they'll be back. You know, stuff like that. And you're like, oh, I don't want this. You know, this is the, we've done all this work to get this vendor where it needs to be and we're gonna bring them in and Yeah. And then you get the strategic sourcing people and, and that would be the IT leader and the smaller companies that, yeah.

You can reg really add some value to sourcing this stuff in a way where you can negotiate. Sometimes it's a negotiation just to get a one year deal, like you were talking about earlier. Sure, sure. Just getting the level of support or getting an account rep or getting whatever, but I think it's getting more and more common as a software, as a service applications and the out of the box systems call where you're just swiping a credit card and you're, this is what you're getting.

That's 

Nate McBride: right. Those, those credit card terms of service, a apps, I mean, you're kind of just getting what you're getting. Yeah. Um, DocuSign emailed me the other day and they're like, Hey, we wanna talk [01:16:00] about your renewal. And I wrote them back and I said, actually, we're canceling you at the end of this term.

Uh, and they're like, why? I said, 'cause I have box sign. I don't need you. And I said, also by also by the way, you insist on creating a SKU in every single contract for Premier Support. I don't need premier support. That's right. Cancel, cancel that fricking line outta the sku. Well, we can't. It's critical. If you need support, I'm not, I'm never calling you for support.

I promise I'll put it in writing. I'll never call you support. Strike that line and maybe I'll come back. Well, we can't do that. I said, this is why you're losing business. That's right. This is why you're losing business to every other mom and pop e-sign vendor that's out there now. Panda Doc is crushing you.

Because they'll just be like, whatever, cancel anytime. We don't give a shit and pay, pay rock bottom. It's just e-sign. DocuSign is learning some hard lessons because they are not willing to negotiate basic. I have basic demands. I mean, it also happened recently. We have a, a big tower slash machine in our mass spectrum [01:17:00] and the tower, the tower's been there for five years.

It's, it's going bad. So I emailed this vendor and I said, what are your specs for a new PC tower? Uh, like what your recommended specs are? And they're like, oh, you know this much ram, this big hard drive. You know, windows 10, ITSC, uh, blah, blah, blah. I'm like, okay, cool. I'll build it. I'll, I went and bought a gaming PC off Lenovo, like 2,400 bucks 'cause their quote was 11,000.

I bought a gaming pc, made the specs exactly the same, called up and said, okay, it's here, it's ready to go. They said, okay, well we're gonna charge you $4,400. For the onsite install, and I'm like, well, fuck you. You're not, then we're not gonna do that. Like, we will go find somebody else and went back and forth over email a couple times.

They'll finally, they're like, let's have a Zoom call. We get on the zoom call. I'm like, you have, you're, you're basically doing this out of a petty excuse because we won't buy your $11,000 Penn in three tower. Like, okay, here's what we'll do. We'll give you the, our tower for free and then [01:18:00] charge you 4,400 for installing our tower.

I said, no, because I've already still bought a tower. So they ended up, they ended up giving us the tower for free and charging you a thousand dollars for the onsite visit. Now my, my head of nonclinical is freaking out. He's like, holy shit. Like, dude, you're, they're, we need these people. I'm like, just wait.

Just wait. Yep. Because, because the parts that they specked out, they're not expensive. Anyone could bill it in a garage for peanuts. I happen to buy this gaming machine, which is kick ass, which is exceeds their specs by a by a mile. But I was like, I showed him like, here's how much the parts really cost for their thing.

Anyway, long story short, you gotta push back. You gotta some, you gotta be ready to take your alums, but you gotta have a back out plan. It doesn't matter what PC is in the company. Um, now comes the change management part. So we talked about the sort of, uh, fluency, [01:19:00] but now independence and change management are just basically two sides of the same coin.

The more independent you are, the more effectively you can manage change on your own terms. And the more, the better you are at managing the change, the more independence you preserve through transitions. It's a very logical format. So change management in it. In my experience, and this can happen very easily if you're not careful, it gets reduced to communication plans and training schedules only.

Okay, everybody, good point. Three, three months from now we are going to do a change. Okay, everybody, two months from now, we're gonna do a change. Like that's all you're doing. Communications and training, that's wrong. Yep. These are important, no question. But for resilience, you gotta go deeper. You have to build change management capabilities into the organization's literal DNA.

You need change capacity [01:20:00] assessment, and this one is not fun. But you have to understand how much change your organization can absorb at one time. We have talked about this on the podcast. Yep. How much change can your company absorb? Can it handle one change every three months? Every six months, can they handle three small changes every six months?

What is the company's adaptability to change? You have to know this. There's lots of ways to do these assessments, but if you don't know this, you could be just driving change and your company's like, we're still fucking two changes ago. We have like no idea what these new things are and great IT leaders, they don't necessarily have to do assessments 'cause they can feel the pulse.

They know. But if you're just, you know, if you're an aspiring IT leader, you're getting started. You have to know what the company can withstand [01:21:00] in a given year. Is it four major changes per year? That's a pretty good benchmark, wouldn't you say? Yeah, major, major changes, 

Mike Crispin: absolutely. 

Nate McBride: Yeah, major 

Mike Crispin: changes. Four year.

That's pretty great. That's pretty, I think that's great. 

Nate McBride: Yeah, that's, that's, maybe that's too much. Maybe two, maybe two. 

Mike Crispin: That's insane. And, and I might, yeah. Yeah. I would agree too, if four four is four is great, if you, if you're successful, it's great. Yeah, 

Nate McBride: sure. But 

Mike Crispin: it could be a backbreaker. 

Nate McBride: Well, there's, and because when you're evaluating the company, you have to also evaluate, we talked about the CTO role, um, and essentially like how A CTO understands what's happening across the entire company, or a COO understands what's happening across the entire company.

Like these roles, they're not just good at doing their jobs. They're able to, to get a hand on the pulse of everything, you also need to have a hand on the pulse of everything so that you know, if I'm gonna go ahead and make this change, [01:22:00] and I think it only impacts hr, you're wrong. You're a, you're so wrong.

You don't even know it. Because by impacting hr, because HR supports every other function, you're impacting every function. Do not just send HR an update on change management. Let the whole company know this change is coming. 'cause everyone gets impacted when HR gets impacted. Or finance. Yep. Um, and graduated change.

So you start small with changes and then you kind of like scale based on feedback. Like, what can I do for my changes and, and how do I adjust based on the feedback people? You can get, people get people to give you feedback midstream. Okay, we're three months away, we're two months away, we're one month away.

Now I'm gonna do a quick survey of 10 random people. Like how, how are you perceiving this change management? Is it good, too much, too little? [01:23:00] How's it coming to you? You have to understand that you have to coordinate changes across teams. Again, that myopic view. Well this only impacts hr. Always wrong.

Coordinate across everybody. The EAs need to know, 'cause calendars get screwed up. Like other people alerts might not go off for a few days. Everyone needs to know this. Like these things are all downstream impacts. And then lastly, the postmortem. God. Every single postmortems are not reserved just for big projects.

That's right. 

Mike Crispin: How do we do, what can we do 

Nate McBride: better 10,000 times? Do your basic postmortem. What did we do well? What did we not do well? How do we improve, blah, blah, blah. Put it in a formal document and then you're gonna have for future changes, oh, we're gonna do another change. Let's reflect on our past changes and let's not do those mistakes again.[01:24:00] 

Yep. So the, let's go back through those real quick. So that change, um, capacity assessment. You've heard the term change fatigue. Yep. Yeah. How would you explain change fatigue?

I 

Mike Crispin: would say

just people are overwhelmed by the amount of changes that are happening and they can't be productive anymore. Or they're, they're not gonna trust that the next change will be successful. So they're completely fatigued from all of the change that's happening in the organization. And frankly, they're, it's gonna just defunct any possibility of change happening in, in the short term.

So just exhaustion of things that they, they're hitting dead ends. They're hitting brick walls. 'cause things have changed in front of 'em. So many changes at once that they're, they're literally fatigued. [01:25:00] 

Nate McBride: Right. And that, and that last one you mentioned, change memory, um, that postmortem effect, I mean, every single time that you do this.

One of the questions you should be asking yourself is, you know, in addition to like, what went well, what didn't go well, you should be asking yourself how did the company react? Yeah. Did they begrudgingly take it? Were they stoked about it? Were they, like, were, were trainings poorly attended? You have to like, put all this into context to, to see the signs and symptoms of change fatigue.

Mike Crispin: Yeah. 

Nate McBride: Um, and then I think of all that whole list is the, is maintaining decision rights through the change. I mean, ultimately you are gonna do a big change and you hand over the keys to vendors or consultants. You're basically like handling, you're, you're handing over the entire change process to somebody else.

Yep. [01:26:00] You have to be very clear about what decisions you're keeping in house, what you're delegating, what required joint approval, and this needs to be constant. Because the functional lines will say, well, shit, last time you put this in for me, you just handed it off to Joe Schmo and it sucked. So why would I use you again?

Yep. Um, that's something that you, it's hard to, hard hold, dig, gto. So there's one more point I wanted to make and that was effectively creating like, um, resilience action plan. And so I think like, um, for the people that are listening, like, okay, everything they said, yeah, I totally get it. Sounds great, but where do I start?

So you should have a technical independence audit. Um, so basic audit, basic chart, like map your technical dependencies, identify all your critical path components, [01:27:00] um, evaluate the portability of data. So if I, if my company. For some reason, if Lucidchart for some reason or another went bankrupt, all of our LC, all of our LCF files would be meaningless.

So do they exist in PDF format as well? They do. So. Okay, cool. We check that box, but how many others are like that? And then assess your standardization versus proprietary elements. How much of your stuff is standardized? How much of your stuff is actually proprietary that you could not port? You should do a knowledge independence inventory.

So who knows what across your team? Smaller teams, these are gonna be bigger buckets. Yeah. Um, identify single points of failure. And again, smaller teams, you're gonna have them. It's okay. Just try not to have them across critical areas. You wanna evaluate documentation, completeness, and usability. The last one being [01:28:00] key.

Like when Nate writes a document, it's not always usable. Because it's written in Nate Ease. So you should assess its usability, and then you should assess how you share knowledge. Do you have a Slack channel? Do you have a wiki? Do you have a folder that keeps all this stuff together? How often is it done?

How often is it checked? This is all by the way. You know, if you're sitting there and you're saying, holy shit, that's so much it. Administrative overhead. It is. But you're an IT leader. Yep. You love, you love this stuff. This is, this is what you get every morning. 

Mike Crispin: It's once it, it once it pays off a couple times.

Nate McBride: Oh my God. Yeah. It's 

Mike Crispin: automatic. 

Nate McBride: The dividends on this are insane. Uh, for the vendor of independence, map your vendor dependencies and their criticality. Use any kind of criticality rubric. I don't care what you use. Download one. Ask Claude to make you one. Just map a vendor dependencies [01:29:00] using a criticality matrix.

Yep. If you think that you've reviewed all your contract terms, you have not, you should have a document which states literally three columns, vendor length of contract, and contract provisions for lock-in. Fill out those three fields and you'll find every single vendor has lock-in provisions. The 90 day, 60 day, 30 day, one year.

Some kind of notice for lock-in. Yep. Know these math them out. Put 'em in your Outlook calendars or your Google calendars if you're really, really savvy. IT leader. Um, just kidding. I love you all. Assess the existence and viability of alternatives and then evaluate your exit costs and your timeframes.

Exiting can be more expensive, but you should know this upfront. It should not be sprung on your CFO that to get out of. CLMS [01:30:00] platform, A, B, C, it's gonna cost an extra a hundred thousand dollars. They will not like that. Tell 'em upfront. Here's our back out plan, just so you know. And then for change management capability assessment, just review your recent changes and outcomes.

Sit down with your people. Hey, how did that change go? Uh, how do people feel like, what was your feedback? Anecdotal or otherwise? Evaluate your change coordination mechanisms. Yes. Send out the emails. Yes. Schedule the trainings. Yes. Put the posters in the bathroom. Yes. Do whatever you have to do to get the word out, but evaluate the effectiveness of these things.

Assess your change capacity and current utilization. And then lastly, review decision. Right. Frameworks when I make a change, do the right people know it is a very, and we don't have to get like full racy, but racy iss good. Of course, if you want. But you can just make a chart of like, people that should know when I make a change.

That's right. [01:31:00] Um, identify your biggest resilience gaps. We went through that. And then like the, like when you define these, these are your areas for of course, highest power areas for improvement. And then create initiatives to address the gaps. Like what don't we have and what's most important to us out of those gaps to fill.

And you know what? I hate metrics. I hate KPIs. I hate anything having to do with measurement. 'cause it's literally, almost always subjective, but establish some kind of metric. Yeah. And there are some basic ones that you can do that are actually kind of handy. Like vendor concentration, index percent of spending with top three vendors.

How much of my IT budget goes to my, goes to the top three vendors? Um, knowledge, redundancy score. Completely parametric, but you can say, okay. Uh, we have 10 vendors that we call consider critical, and we have a few people in it. How many people in IT know how to support these vendors? [01:32:00] You have a system modularity score effectively the ease of component replacement.

And then you, lastly, you have a change success rate. How many changes have you done without major issues and why?

So that's a lot of stuff. That's a lot of stuff. Yep. That's 10 pounds of shit in a five pound bag. But ultimately the key for change management is you can't just send out emails and trainings. There's a whole other world and layer of things you have to do to maintain this resilience through this independence.

And if you're able to do this well, it's a competitive advantage, in my opinion. Yep. It orgs with high resilience can adapt very fast to market changes. In fact, adapting isn't even a problem. You're so far ahead and able to understand the market. You're preparing for the [01:33:00] next change months before it happens.

Yep. You're always negotiating better terms with the vendors. Every vendor that gets on the call with you is like, oh shit, it's Nate. This is gonna suck. And they bring their whole army of people on that call and you're just, Nope. It just, just basically on the screen, you're, instead of having your face in Zoom, just put a big thing that says nope.

Um, implementing new technologies with less disruption. So, I mean, I love POCI just mentioned to you at the start of this podcast, I'm doing an obsidian, POC POCs, in my opinion, are the way to go. Yep. Give them a cool team name. Give them cool technology, let them play with it for a bunch of weeks. Give 'em a t-shirt or some other swag that's not disruptive.

They want to do this. Um, implement new technologies, less disruption. Uh, organizations with high resilience can retain institutional knowledge. So, [01:34:00] oh, Mike won the lottery and he's leaving. That's cool. We have everything that Mike ever thought documented. That's right. Thought set or did is documented. And by the way, in terms of like the world of unicorn wishes, I ranked this only second to having a slide library for PowerPoint.

That is the number one holy grail, holy grail thing ever is to have every single slide in your company in a database. Yep. Second only to that is to have a hundred percent of your institutional knowledge documented. Make, 

Mike Crispin: not to make a big plug and come full circle, but Oh, let's do it. One of the best tools I've ever come across to do this is obsidian.

I mean, honestly, as a knowledge mapping, knowledge management tool that's extensible, that's based on standards that can easily be exited if need [01:35:00] be, that can be absorbed by AI engines easily, that can incorporate diagrams and documents, doesn't cost very much. It's a little bit of a Play-Doh, a little bit of Play-Doh, but I, I endorse it more so for personal knowledge management.

Gonna love it. Okay. But it's a big, it's a game changer. 

Nate McBride: Upid. You heard it. Hear people. If you are not POC up, sitting right now, what the fuck is wrong with you? Get obsidian. It's free. POC. The shit out of it. Game changer. This whole episode can be resolved with p, with org, with obsidian in a POC 

Mike Crispin: Structured metadata.

Nate McBride: Oh, I love it. I love those words, 

Mike Crispin: right? Knowledge management, check. Oh, I love it. Diagrams, check AI of your choice. Check. Done. It's Dover Mobile [01:36:00] device Synchronization check. No synchronization to the cloud. Private data, hold on, check, hold on, hold 

Nate McBride: on. Does it have colored tabs? 

Mike Crispin: You can customize it however you want.

Nate McBride: Done. Sold. I think if there's one 

Mike Crispin: downside to it, honestly, the one downside, okay, is that you can customize it and mess around with it so much that it will make you unproductive. So you've gotta have some, you've gotta set some guardrails for yourself because you'll end up tinkering with it and, and you'll never take another note again.

So you've gotta set it up the way that you want and figure out what pla uh, plugins work for best for you if you even need them. And treat it like any other application where you kind of thinking about how you're gonna plan this out and actually use it. That's why we haven't used it at Cardian yet, is 'cause I'm trying to figure out what's the right way for us as an IT term, uh, IT team to sort of start [01:37:00] to grind into it.

'cause you can get into trouble. You can get in trouble with it quickly. 

Nate McBride: You know what, you know what you should do, Mike? 

Mike Crispin: What's that? 

Nate McBride: A POC 

Mike Crispin: boom. I know. Yeah, but we, we'll circle that. POC would be great, but I want to have a little bit of, uh, uh, um, understanding. You wanna have a pre P-O-C-P-O-C? Yes, exactly.

A pre P-O-C-P-O-C. And then we'll then we'll get into it. 'cause this is like a, uh. It's an all, it's on, it's a steroid, it's on steroids. It does too many things. And that scares me. So there's, there's a 

Nate McBride: sixth item on this list then. So organizations with high resilience can number six, use obsidian. So boom.

Disciplined obsidian. Disciplined obsidian. Ooh. Ooh, I like that. Yeah. 

Mike Crispin: Well 

Nate McBride: I think it, that's a, I think it's a's right there. It's 

Mike Crispin: a mess. It's a mess. If you just go hog wild on it, you'll never get anything done. So you've gotta have, so for a technology person, I think, you know, you've got a lot of different knobs to turn and it's [01:38:00] very exciting.

But you've gotta reel that in and go, okay, what am I trying to achieve with this? 

Nate McBride: Yeah. 

Mike Crispin: And what do I want the outcome for the team to be? And then go into the POC with that objective. Because you can do anything with it. You can build a whole file system with it. You can use it to anything 

Nate McBride: with it. You heard it here, folks.

Mike Crispin: For information management, I would argue you can do. And 

Nate McBride: so almost anything with it. So if you have, or obsidian, Airtable and Zapier, you can literally do anything. Anything you want. There's nothing you can't do because all three of them can do anything you want, but together, fucking over 

Mike Crispin: it. You could, you could do anything and get nothing done.

Let's put it that way. We put 'em all together. 

Nate McBride: Listen, we're not trying to get anything done here, Mike. I'm just kidding. We're trying to get something done. We would, we would have an an eighties Yacht rock podcast. 

Mike Crispin: You got, you got. That's right. Hey, that's not a bad idea. I liked your original idea there.

Just, I know. I'm telling 

Nate McBride: you, we should run a, we should run a, a parallel podcast, which is the, uh, yacht Crock or something. I don't know. Well, we'll think, [01:39:00] we'll work on the title Working, working in Progress, the state of Yacht Rock. That would be this week in the state of yacht rock Michael McDonald, uh, reuniting with Doobie Brothers, 

Mike Crispin: and it could be live video of us just standing there pushing the play button on Spotify.

Nate McBride: Like it'd be the biggest podcast ever next to this one. Like in the standings of podcasts. For viewership it would be number two to this podcast. 

Mike Crispin: We would need some knobs and headphones though. Like to turn to just change the, and by the way, 

Nate McBride: buzz Sprout and Substack don't give a shit about us using music.

Yeah. YouTube, you know, you can't do that. Like immediate, all the stuff. They don't care. In Substack and Buzzsprout, they don't care. We can violate all the terms of service. We don't make any money off the show, so who's gonna sue us? Who anyway? [01:40:00] Uh oh boy. That was awesome. Let me wrap up here. So basically

when, like when Cloud Computing first came out, I. Who knows what year it was, but I'm gonna just like round it out to 2007, 2008, soap kind of like went down. Cloud became a word. Uh, most organizations were paralyzed by the change. I remember speaking 2010 about cloud and how we transformed Amag into the cloud and people throwing tomatoes at me in the audience like, you are gonna fucking die, and how can you do this?

It's impossible. Your company's screwed. You're dumb ass. 

Mike Crispin: And getting me into fights at bars and stuff, that was fun. We're getting 

Nate McBride: back into fights at bars about the cloud. Uh, others though. So because they were just paralyzed, they were unable to adapt. And it was like, it would be like 15 years later they'd be like, yeah, we're, we're going to the cloud.

Um, others who had [01:41:00] maintained independence and built strong capabilities, and I wanna toot my own horn, but I'm going to at Amag with my kick ass team, were able to leverage cloud strategically. While avoiding pitfalls. We did. And we did, and we did the same pattern. Played out with mobile, uh, fucking ai. If you didn't plan for AI and you're still coming up with a plan, you are too late.

Yep. And with every other major technology shift, the organizations that thrived weren't the ones with the biggest budgets were the most advanced tech. I've never had advanced tech. They were the ones with the resilience to adapt effectively. That's the promise of the approach we discussed today. Not just avoiding vendor lock-in or managing change better, but building an organization in it that turns disruption into [01:42:00] opportunity.

And I will say this again, I've said it 10,000 times. Chaos breeds opportunity. Turn that disruption and that chaos right around make it a golden opportunity for yourselves. And there you have it. Hey, um, I did do a archetype for this week. I don't know if you want to go through that or you wanna just, uh, close it out?

I 

Mike Crispin: think we, I mean, I, we can keep going if you'd like. What, what do we have for time? Oh, we're at one an hour and 40 minutes. Hmm. Yeah. Maybe we should, we should hold it. 

Nate McBride: All right. Well, I'll, I'll post it on, on the substack.com. Yeah, the substack. The substack. I'll post on the Substack. I think 

Mike Crispin: Just, just substack.

It's cleaner. 

Nate McBride: No, the substack, it works for me. I'll 

Mike Crispin: post on the Substack. What's the Facebook reference? Come on. 

Nate McBride: I know. I got [01:43:00] it. I got you, Mike. I tried too hard, but I 

can, 

Nate McBride: I can drop an exchange, a gram reference. Will you get that? I might Oh, exchange it. Graham. Yeah. I love 

Mike Crispin: that. 

Nate McBride: Yeah. Yes. I wonder if we can, I wonder if we'll get in trouble for this, but Hold on a second.

'cause this is funny as shit.

Digital Nexus: Okay, come on guys. Let's brainstorm this puppy. We're gonna put the coffee in the pot and we're gonna let it percolate. Can you hear that? It'll be helpful to explore what apps have been most popular. The go backwards to go forwards. Oh, and we could bin it, you know, fall out, uh, categorize needle movers by type of user.

You gonna what? There you go. Nea hit it both by function and by user. The old two-pronged. You're on the force moon of Andor taking out the shield generator and you're launching an offensive with abnormal Act bar. It's not, 

Nate McBride: oh, an unexpected error occurred. 

Digital Nexus: No way. What was that? Well, 

Nate McBride: lemme try about other one.

Hold on. 

Digital Nexus: Okay, come on guys. You, we [01:44:00] brainstorm this puppy. We're gonna put the coffee in the pot and we're gonna let it percolate. Let's go. I think it'll be helpful to explore what apps have been most popular. Inhouse Go, go backwards to go forwards. Oh, and we could bin it, you know, fall out. Uh, categorize needle movers by type of user.

You gonna what? There you go. Nea. Hit it both by function and by user. The old two prong. You're on the force moon of Endor taking out the shield generator and you're launching an offensive with abnormal act bar. It's not a trap. Alright guys, I don't want to kill the momentum or the mojo that you have cooking, but to be fair with you, needles and categories, they don't use apps.

People use apps. So I have an idea. Nowadays people are taking pictures, right? They have their phones, now they're out. Something catches their eye, they want to take it, but then the photo's just sitting there. What if they take that photo and instantaneously put it out there on the line and they share it with their friends?

That's Instagram. It already exists. It's one of the most popular apps in the world. Facebook bought 'em for like a billion dollars. That's billion with a B. Oh, no, no, no. Mine is very different than that. How is your, something very different than that because, am I, you're taking the photo instantaneously.

You're putting the photo out there on the line. Is it online? Yeah. I'm putting my photos out on the line and I'm creating an exchange. Yeah, that's Instagram, but mine's more of a social sharing [01:45:00] on the line that's happening online. Quick interjection. When you keep saying on the line, you do mean online.

Stuart. Don't do that. You don't do that to a man. He's got a million dollar idea right here. Billion dollar idea. Even better let him flow. Nick, I appreciate it. I'm not gonna, you can't bring me down. I'm too positive. Come here. Let me share something with you. No, please come. I'm gonna explain this to you in the way that's visual.

He's bigger than you. Be careful. So now you're out there. Take a photo. Just pretend one. Go ahead. Now you take that photo, you put it on the line online, you put it on Twitter, you put it on whenever you want. That is Instagram. That's Instagram a hundred percent. I get it. I am here. Not dummies. Point taken.

Now let's go with my concept. Now you've taken a photo instantaneously or not instantaneously, and then you take those and you send those out on the line online. You don't have to say shit. You don't. You just say, I like that photo. And you share that photo instantaneously on the line online with your friends.

Now everyone's exchanging ideas, everyone's exchanging photos, and [01:46:00] that's why the photos that are being shared on the line online will be known as Exchange Agram.

Nate McBride: Okay. Sorry. Sorry, listeners. That was a little diversion, 

Mike Crispin: but that's it. That's the intern, right? The internship or in 

Nate McBride: internship? The The interns. 

Mike Crispin: The interns, yeah. Yeah. Love 

Nate McBride: it. So next week, okay, so we've kind of like closed the chapter on autonomy and independence now, and like how to build it, how to construct it, how to put it into your world, how to fight against the evil forces, et cetera, et cetera.

Now, next week, this is gonna be awesome. We're talking about the next three to five years and, and how do we build autonomy into the future. This is gonna be a great discussion if we can get D on. Um, yeah, that'd be great because we're gonna talk about things that we don't know about [01:47:00] and we're gonna be kind of like pulling some stuff outta thin air.

But, um, I have a pretty good idea. I've got a good outline for next week. I'm gonna write some stuff in, and I think ultimately, like when I think about continuing to keep autonomy, resilience that I've already built, I feel like there's some big headwinds coming. So, um, we'll talk about those. This, uh, on the line.

Yeah. This, this, uh, Shopify thing I said at the top of the episode, um, as much as I hate them, I feel like to, to a degree, some of what they're doing with that, you know, idea could be. One of the changes that comes, but, but not only from a personnel perspective, from a, from a software technology perspective, if, why would we buy this if AI can do it?

So we should only be buying this platform if AI can't do it. That that could literally be a [01:48:00] conversation moment. We'll be having a year from now, so Correct. Next week. We're gonna fricking dissect the shit outta that. That would be 

Mike Crispin: awesome. I, we can spend the whole time on that, I think. 

Nate McBride: Yeah. I mean, yeah, I have, I have some ideas that I think we need to tackle because that episode then leads us into, um, developing for the next generation of resilience and autonomy.

And, and this, you know, we only have, uh, by my reckoning, five more episodes in this season. I mean, it could end up being, being a couple more than that, but, um. We're getting there, and I think we've built a pretty kick ass foundation in these first eight episodes. So getting there. Agreed, agreed. Um, all right, well, this was another awesome one, Mike.

Thanks for coming on. Yeah, thank you as always. Uh, next week. Thanks for having me. Oh, I love it. Next week, emerging technologies, uh, and their impact on autonomy for the next three to five years. [01:49:00] I wanna remind everyone that if you liked our show, loved our show, hated our show, it doesn't matter. Just give us all the stars.

Buy us a beer, uh, buy our merch, donate to Wikimedia, donate to the ACL U. Donate to life science cares. Also, don't be a dick. Uh, especially don't be, don't be a dick to the hardworking IT folks in your company. Um, be nice. You'll get paid back in spades. Be nice to animals. Have your pet spade or neutered. Uh, be nice to old people.

Uh, they're not as fast as we are. They don't understand this world of technology. So give them an extra second to explain, uh, how not to get phished. You know, just do good, do good things. It's crazy fucked up world right now. So the more good you can do, perhaps the better it will be. 

Mike Crispin: I agree. I agree.

Nate McBride: Anything you wanna add? Should we place some more, um, Sugarhill gang or should we just sign out? 

Mike Crispin: Nothing to add, I think, um, [01:50:00] no, I think we're good. 

Nate McBride: All right, dude. Well, awesome. And uh, I will see you on the flip flop. See you on the flip flop baby 

Mike Crispin: binary

Digital Nexus: whispers. That glow so bright in. We take flight

side,

we

the

through the cyber paths, we glide in the circuits, we confide. [01:51:00] No restraints, no need to hide in the system. We.[01:52:00] 

Skate zero. One second. Today we control that it's today. Binary whispers in the night Flashing screams the bright in the matrix we take.