Shadow Systems and Technology Adoption with Preston Chandler

PIVOTING TO TECHNOLOGY ADOPTION
EP136: Shadow Systems and Technology Adoption
Guest: Preston Chandler, Global Lead of Strategic Operations, WPP
Host: Donna P. Mitchell, The Transformation Authority™
Published: Tuesday, November 10, 2026

FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Donna P. Mitchell (0:01): Welcome to Pivoting to Technology Adoption. I'm your host, Donna P. Mitchell, The Transformation Authority™. Every week I sit down with executives, strategists, and innovators to tackle the one problem no one's solving: why 70% of technology transformations fail. Let's pivot. Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, and welcome to Pivoting to Technology Adoption. And today we have Preston Chandler.

Donna P. Mitchell (0:32): He's the Global Practice Lead, Strategic Operations at WPP, where he built and now directs a new global strategic operations practice across one of the world's largest marketing and advertising holding companies. Prior to that role, Preston served as Senior Vice President of Client Transformation at WPP Health, leading a $180 million client project portfolio through agile and human-centered design transformation. That's really why I got him here, because I thought he would be one of the best people to talk to who really works in transformation and co-authored Agile Code and Breakthrough Innovation and is the co-author of Adapt on AI and the Future of Work.

Donna P. Mitchell (1:18): Preston also co-owns Centered, a transformation firm he has run since 2016, serving Fortune 100 clients across utilities, healthcare, financial services. Also, across 20 years, he has coached enterprise agile and lean transformation for Sprint, Ford, Walgreens, Pfizer, Intel, and the American Academy of Family Physicians, among others. Preston, I want to welcome you to Pivoting to Technology Adoption. I'm excited for the conversation.

Donna P. Mitchell (1:51): I'm excited for the audience and what they're going to hear today because you have been in the middle of this for more than 20 years, and you definitely got the people side and understand the people side and the shadow systems, which we're going to talk about. So say hello to your audience and ours.

Preston Chandler (2:06): Hey, hi, Donna, I'm really happy to be here. I think the introduction, you read it and it makes me feel like, wait, I don't know that guy. And then I have to take a step back and be like, no, no, that was, that was right. I did those things. You did those things. But, you know, looking back on it, it, it just feels like a lot of work.

Donna P. Mitchell (2:27): It is a lot of work. Transformation, change management, and everything on the people side is work because we are dealing with people, moods, attitudes, workarounds, and sometimes there are issues and topics that C-suite just doesn't know or understand, and I'm sure you can share some of that information with us. I think what really brought you here was the fact that I had talked about what people do in, in my book, Pivoting to Technology Adoption, and the shadow systems. But you have a great depth and breadth in shadow systems. Can you share with the audience what that is?

Donna P. Mitchell (3:01): What are we talking about that they need to know?

Preston Chandler (3:04): Yeah. Well, so particularly when you're doing a technology transformation, there's a lot of stuff that comes right to the fore. It's, you're talking about the technology itself. You're talking about maybe some processes that need to change. We need to connect to different data sources. But the shadow systems, it's the stuff behind the scenes that you don't always notice, that you don't see. It's things like decision rights. Who actually makes decisions? How have we structured our people and our teams? What have we empowered them to do? How are we talking about this new transformation within it?

Preston Chandler (3:35): That's all happening behind the scenes. It's not really the technology itself. It's all of the other things, all of the human elements there. It could even be something like compensation systems and incentives. I've certainly gone into places where their incentives were backwards from what they wanted to have happen. They wanted to have more and more collaboration, but their incentives reward individual contribution. Well, those work at odds, and I'll tell you, in every situation that I've ever seen, incentives win.

Preston Chandler (4:06): So whatever you're paying people for, whatever you're bonusing people for, that's the behavior you will get long-term, regardless of how much you try talking about something else. You're, you're just gonna get whatever you pay people for.

Donna P. Mitchell (4:18): So when you walk into organizations and you find the culture is not really becoming or appropriate for the change that they wanna bring on, be it technology or AI or an upgrade in their systems, what happens at that point? What do you say to them?

Preston Chandler (4:37): It's usually kind of a decision point. There's certainly been people and clients that I've said, you know what? I'm not the right one for you. Like, that's, you don't, you don't need somebody like me. It's usually because they're the people who don't want to change their culture. And what I'll tell you is if you won't change your culture, if you're trying to adopt something new and you won't change your culture, your adoption is gonna fail in the long run because anything significant will require you to to change something about your culture. It'll require you to change your leadership behaviors. And when I come into organizations and I'm like, ah, your culture isn't really working really well for you, I need your leaders to change how you are leading, to change what you are valuing in the organization.

Preston Chandler (5:18): And I certainly had clients and people who say, no, we're good. We're not going to change what our leaders do. We just want the people to change. And then I'll say, then you don't need me. Go find some other person to help you with the transformation, because it just won't be successful. I've seen it enough, to your point. I've spent 20 years in all sorts of sizes of companies and industries. And when leaders aren't willing to change their behaviors, your technology adoption will fail. There's no option for it. It's going to fail because it requires a lot of those shadow systems to be successful.

Donna P. Mitchell (5:51): So when we talk about the shadow systems and the failure, I think the first thing that comes to my mind is who's responsible? Let's talk about that first. Who ends up really being responsible, in your experience, for the failure or the success of the transformation?

Preston Chandler (6:06): The CEO, period. As soon as the CEO tries delegating that authority, that responsibility to someone else, it's probably going to fail in the long run. So, I've seen too many organizations where they will hire a chief innovation officer, and it's good. It's good to have a chief innovation officer, but if then you say all innovation is the responsibility of the chief innovation officer. Now that's really siloed. That's a small portion of the company. The companies that wildly succeed are the ones who say, the CEO says, this is part of our culture.

Preston Chandler (6:36): This is who we are. We do have a chief innovation officer or a chief technologies officer or something to be a point person, but this is the whole company. We are all changing. We're all in this together. When organizations say that, then they can be successful. As soon as they start trying to make it someone else's problem, or everyone else has to change, but I don't have to change. And it won't be successful in the long run. You're going to end up with leaders who make old decisions that don't support the new directions.

Preston Chandler (7:10): And they're very well-meaning leaders. They're not trying to sabotage things. They're just behaving in the old way.

Donna P. Mitchell (7:19): So for accountability and responsibility, the buck stops at the CEO at the end of the day. Whether you bring on the transformation officer or anyone else, it's still the responsibility of the CEO.

Preston Chandler (7:35): Yeah. And I would, I would take it the next step further and to say that CEO and the leadership, the executive team, they should actually look at their jobs as being 50% transformation. That, that's how they should consider their role in order to be successful. They can't consider their role as I'm responsible to run sales or I'm responsible to run product. Because then they're going to try taking too many of the decisions on themselves. They need to start thinking of themselves as, I am a transformation leader. All of us are transformation leaders. All of us are, to your point, and when we were chatting earlier, Donna, you said operators.

Preston Chandler (8:08): All of us are operators. We all have to make things happen. We cannot afford to make it someone else's responsibility to make things happen, to make the transformation occur. That has to be the most senior leaders in the organization. Again, I've seen it happen when they tried delegating that. They'll be like, oh, I'm too busy. So we're going to have Preston, who's 1 or 2 levels lower in the organization, and Preston's going to take lead on this. That generally doesn't work. It means that your transformation isn't going to have the power and authority to overcome the obstacles.

Preston Chandler (8:45): If it's a good transformation, there's going to be some obstacles. There's gonna be things you have to overcome, and they're gonna be painful. And you have to have that leadership buy-in and ownership to overcome it.

Donna P. Mitchell (8:57): So, based on your experience, when do you see the success? Who's at the table in C-suite at minimum? Because from my conversation, there's a lot of people missing sometimes. They just have the crew or their close colleagues that they do all their work with, and they make a decision and run with it. Who should be in the room? Who should be there?

Preston Chandler (9:16): That's largely dependent on that company's culture and the industry that they're in. I would say in almost every situation, it should be the CEO. Probably someone sitting in an operations type role is going to be required. You probably need a finance person in there. You probably need the technical, whether that's engineering or product or whatever that technical bit is for your organization. And you probably need someone who looks after people. Because a lot of this, when you're looking at technology transformation, a good transformation is going to change people's roles.

Preston Chandler (9:50): If it's a good transformation, if it's a meaningful transformation, people are going to be doing different things. And so, you start leaning into that people side of the organization as well.

Donna P. Mitchell (10:02): So, when you lean into the people side, you walked right into the main, the main conversation. On the people side, what are the components that you see make it successful for the people?

Preston Chandler (10:13): And the biggest one, and I know I just said that the CEO needs to have ownership for it, which is true. But the most beneficial way to make it work for the people is so that every person is empowered to participate in that transformation. People don't like it when change happens to them. They are much more accepting when change happens with them. If they're able to have some element of this change that they own so that they control a bit of their destiny.

Preston Chandler (10:45): People really don't enjoy it if you come to them and say, here is everything written out. I have all of the SOPs written out. I just have to get you to change what you're doing. That's a change happening to them. It doesn't stick very well. It's really easy for people to backslide or they're only going to do it like under protest because someone made me and they don't have a lot of passion around it. I just barely got off the phone with a colleague who was talking to me about success that he's had with his AI adoption.

Preston Chandler (11:15): And he first shared with me all of this wonderful stuff about his AI adoption and how it was powerful. And I started hearing like between the lines, he never quite came out and said it, but he was talking about all these shadow systems. And so, he finished sharing with me a deck and he was so proud of all of the impact that they've made. And I said, I would like one more slide. Could, could you have a slide to talk about all the shadow systems that you had in place? He's like, well, what do you mean? What do you mean about this? I said, well, you didn't have someone come in and build all of the agents and build all the technology for your people.

Preston Chandler (11:47): He's like, no, of course not. Why would I have, why would I do that? I need the people who are doing the work to, to build all of their solutions. And I thought it was funny because in his head that was just obvious. That was just how you did it. There was no question. You have the people doing the work who create the solution. But I would say that that is far from common sense. Most of the time we would have some, you know, technology department who's building the solution for people. And what he found to be wildly successful, and he's, he's now doing, he's doubled the size of his team, but they're doing 17 times as much work and they've retained the team.

Preston Chandler (12:23): So he said he has a negative turnover rate because he had somebody who left before who's come back. Yeah. But it's amazing that they have stayed. And I, and I had to point out to him, wait a second, this isn't because you've adopted AI. They aren't coming because you've adopted AI. You're keeping your people because all of these shadow systems work. It's because you've empowered the people to own their own solutions. They're incentivized in the right way to own those solutions and to, to come up with good outcomes.

Preston Chandler (12:54): You, you reward and recognize people who find ways to improve the work. Which is surprisingly rare. We get a lot of companies who tend to reward the people who keep everything the same, which is always surprising to me. You're punished if you try to do something different and risky. And I think he's done a really good job of rewarding the people who are trying something new, even if it didn't work. We're like, oh, great job for trying something new. We learned something. Exactly. Now we can move forward. So, a lot of it is, you know, empowering the people. And then recognizing, even if something failed, recognizing and rewarding for trying something new, for experimenting.

Preston Chandler (13:30): That is what it takes to make a really powerful transformation. And again, it still has to be owned by the CEO. The CEO has to say like, I am here, I'm with you. And I think that's difficult for a lot of leaders to understand. How do I own it and still empower people?

Donna P. Mitchell (13:48): Thank you for that. Could you paint a picture for us that this system that was operating and the shadow system together made it, in the reality of it all, a misfit? This is not working and this is why. Can you think of a couple of companies or transformations in your experience where that has happened? What does that look like for those listening?

Preston Chandler (14:15): I'll give one live one right now. The marketing industry is really struggling with AI adoption. And we tell good stories and there's certainly successes, but the marketing industry by and large is paid for by a time and materials model. So the more time that we spend, the more we charge clients. That's normal. Well, if you're trying to adopt an improved system, and in this case it's AI, if you're trying to adopt AI, one of the promises of AI is that you'll be better, more productive, higher quality, whatever it is, something better.

Preston Chandler (14:50): Well, in this situation, if we're better, then we actually charge less money. We, we lose money if we become better. And so to me, this is a clear one that says we can't be successful in that system. We are, we're going to continue to fight the uphill battle of trying to adopt more AI. When our clients don't pay us to improve anything. We lose money. We are less profitable when we have productivity improvements. And so, until we can change that system, until we can change the commercial model, this technology transformation won't go forward.

Preston Chandler (15:24): Is it the right technology? Yeah, like we should be doing it, but until we change that internal value system and policies around finances and all that kind of stuff, we just can't be successful. It's a bad fit.

Donna P. Mitchell (15:35): So does that really bring into the whole mindset piece of the organization and people not wanting to change or having their attitudes and behaviors or moods really slow progress down? Is that what's happening? Yeah. I mean, I've had, I've talked to some organizations or aware of some that they're really dysfunctional. Or there's just too many silos and they miss what's really happening, what I call from the boardroom to the break room.

Donna P. Mitchell (16:09): How, how do we change that? What would you like to see happen?

Preston Chandler (16:12): Well, let me, let me first, I guess, paint a little picture of what's really common from that perspective. You said silos, so let's talk about that for a minute. And silos are really common in large organizations. And it's also really common that we try to use technology to break down silos. We assume that if we have this technology and we bring all the data together, that we will break down the silo and we can all of a sudden work better together. I don't believe I've ever seen that work. And I've seen it a lot, that attempt a lot. And it doesn't really work because the people themselves are still organized and structured in a very siloed manner.

Preston Chandler (16:50): Now, if you flip that around, if we reorganize the people into a small cross-functional or cross-discipline team, regardless of the technology system they are going to operate in a more collaborative, integrated manner. And it doesn't really matter what technology they have. So, if you can get the people to change their mindset and behavior first, then we can bring the technology in. We can bring whatever the solution is to support them in their behaviors. But trying to do it in the reverse, trying to change a process and hope the process is going to change your culture, or trying to change the technology and hoping that the technology is going to fix a structural problem, like how you structure your organization, that's never going to happen.

Preston Chandler (17:34): It just can't happen. So I think it's starting to understand that there's an order of operations. If you want to, if you have a culture problem, you have to fix directly the culture problem. You can't try to put a bandaid on it with technology or a process or something.

Donna P. Mitchell (17:49): I agree. I really do. There's been conversations where people just don't want to change. They don't want to do the culture change. No, we got to get this going. We got to bring in AI. We have to do this, this, and this. And it's just really not going to happen. So when you look at everything in the different industries, especially health from a clinical standpoint, and the governance piece, and the policies, and the data, and the privacy, let's talk about that a little bit. What are you seeing in those industries that are regulated?

Donna P. Mitchell (18:20): Let me put it like that.

Preston Chandler (18:20): In regulated industries, honestly, regulated industries think that they are so much different than other industries. And they certainly have uniqueness, and I'm not trying to say that they're exactly the same, but they aren't all that different. And you look at a regulated industry or, or a non-regulated industry, both of them have people with ego. Both of them have, have, you know, power hierarchies. Both of them have rules, whether that's an interior comp— internal company rule, or whether that's a government regulatory rule.

Preston Chandler (18:51): They both have rules to follow. And, and in both situations, those rules can be really silly. And sometimes you might just have to follow them. That happens in all of these industries. Now, certainly in a healthcare industry or other regulated industries, you might have a few more rules. So you're, you might lean a little bit more into those rules and, and a lot of things that you can't do. But I will say that the same solutions are going to give you the most benefit.

Preston Chandler (19:21): So what I would do in any of those situations is first bring in the other parties who have to have a hand in the solution or who have a hand in the regulation. There was a team I worked with a while back on Pfizer and it was taking a long time just to get some content for marketing. And this is for the COVID-19 vaccine. Yeah. And it just took them a long time to get everything through regulatory. And one of the changes that we made was we pulled the regulatory person, the person who was reviewing all the regulatory, and we brought her into the team and we had her create with the team.

Preston Chandler (19:57): That was it. Instead of waiting for her role to be at the very end, we brought her in at the beginning. And so, this, the team started creating things that were compliant from the start. They didn't create everything and then, and then try to hope it was compliant. They created something that was compliant from the start. They went from something like a 10% first-pass yield, meaning that only 10% of the things they sent through regulatory were approved the first time, and they improved that to about a 95% first-pass yield, largely because they, they collapsed some of those silos.

Preston Chandler (20:30): They brought the regulatory person into the room. And that was a regulatory person that was internal to the company. But, but several years before that, I had a similar experience with the FDA where we brought an FDA inspector into the room to say, hey, this is the problem that we're trying to solve. And we realized that there are some really like very valid reasons and to have regulations help us figure out how we solve this best in this situation.

Preston Chandler (21:01): The situation at hand was, it was a pharmaceutical plant and they were making radioactive pharmaceuticals and their, their size, the size of their, of their supply run, they would make like 1,000 doses. That was it. Like 1,000 doses at once. And, but they would end up testing something like 500 and it was a destructive test. So in order to make 500, they had to make 1,000 and 500 of those were destructively tested to make sure that they were good. And so we brought the FDA in. We said, yeah, we understand that this is regulatory.

Preston Chandler (21:35): We understand that there's rules around this, that the FDA had rules on how many you have to test. And we showed the FDA, we said, you know what? We're, we're wasting about half of the money. This is costing us twice as much as it should. We don't want to send out bad product. We don't want to send something out that's bad quality. Help us figure out exactly how much we should do. And so by talking to the FDA, we found a way to reduce the number of destructive tests by over 80%. So we had 80% less destructive testing, which means that it costs the company much less money and they were able to provide it to end users for much less, or end patients for much lower cost.

Preston Chandler (22:13): And, but that required us to break down the silo, to bring people in. And it's the same in all the industries. So the fact that you might have to bring somebody in from a government regulatory body versus somebody in from inside your company, that's still bringing somebody in and breaking down the silos. It's the same basic solution. It's empowering teams. It's the same basic solution. I think people assume that their industry is so special. And again, it's unique, but the same basic solutions continue to work.

Donna P. Mitchell (22:44): So at the end of the day, cross-functional teams do matter. And bringing in your audit compliance and all the right people from the beginning do matter. I find that to be the most valuable way to go, no matter what you do. People want to be included, not excluded.

Preston Chandler (23:01): It's really hard to beat. I haven't seen any other structure of people, any other way to structure people that provides more performant, faster, more productive results. It just doesn't happen. And I get people, particularly in the marketing industry, who think that they can schedule exactly when people come in and they run project teams. And I'm going to bring in Donna for 5 hours this week, and then we don't need her next week because we're focused on something else. All of those efforts, very well-meaning efforts, are less valuable.

Preston Chandler (23:36): It costs more to develop something in that environment. It's so much better if we just say, hey, we have a cross-functional team. They already know each other. We're just going to give them a task to solve. And it doesn't really matter that they don't have all of the perfect skill sets. They are probably close enough and they will come up with a good solution. And over time, they'll figure out how to make great solutions.

Donna P. Mitchell (23:54): I think with cross-functional teams, if they're there together, somebody's going to say something that's going to say, this is what I think. And then someone else listening to what they think is going to say, yeah, but if you do that, that's going to impact this. And nobody's going to know unless they had that person included. And it really all works together well and off each other. When you have the shadow systems, what should those that are listening really take away from your experience? With shadow systems when they see them and as they, and how do they learn about them?

Preston Chandler (24:28): I think lots of questions there. For shadow systems, I think it's realizing that that is the system. Even calling them shadow systems and I'll use those terms because it helps people understand it, but we really should flip our perspective. We should say that the system is the people and then the technology should be the shadow. That should be the thing that supports the people. It would be wonderful if we could just flop that in our minds, because I think it's much healthier to realize that technology's gonna change faster and faster and faster.

Preston Chandler (25:02): And we really need the people to be supported in that. This isn't technology first, people second. This is really people first. People first. And even when you look at something like AI adoption, the best, most effective adoptions that I have seen are small cross-functional teams. Organizations that try to adopt AI with functional silos aren't very successful. They usually fall down flat. And the organizations that already had a team to begin with, they can adopt AI and they get a whole lot more value out of AI much quicker than the alternative.

Preston Chandler (25:40): So it's, again, starting to realize that when you're going in to adopt a new technology like AI or any other technology, your efforts are probably spent better figuring out how do we solve the behind-the-scenes problems first and then have AI support us. And I will continue to say that the best way to manage a project that I've ever seen is sticky notes on a wall. Like, in spite of all of these fancy technologies and project management systems that we have, I experienced an amazing project that was run just by sticky notes on a wall.

Preston Chandler (26:15): That was it. We didn't need any of the technology tools to do it. There are times when we really need the technology, but often if we can just do it well as humans without the technology, then the technology can help us make it even better. But, but assuming that the technology is going to fix the problem, it's, it doesn't. It just flat out doesn't fix the problems. We got to fix the problems first and then have AI support us. Or technology.

Donna P. Mitchell (26:42): So, so let me be honest with you for why I'm chuckling a little bit. So when you talked about the little Post-it notes, I thought back to the day. Okay, now this is going back to Interline Electronic Ticketing days. And, and, and that's a pretty big, pretty big number globally with the GDS systems, the global distribution systems and everything else. Your travel agencies, your internet travel agencies, you know, your cruise lines and everybody else. And it was really successful to have the cross-functional teams, as you mentioned. I can't imagine anything without them because all the projects that I led, we had cross-functional teams globally.

Donna P. Mitchell (27:20): So I guess my question to you is, since I really haven't had a project that size since then, has much really changed or has it pretty much stayed the same? I mean, I'm going to be honest. I mean, having a client at $3 billion at that time and the numbers, and it sounds like a lot of things have stayed the same, but I guess I really see a pattern. And it seems like in some ways nothing's really changed on the best way to get it done, that the customer's happy, that the internal customer's happy, the stakeholders, the company, the balancing the needs of the organization and the customers.

Donna P. Mitchell (27:53): Am I okay? I mean, has it changed?

Preston Chandler (27:56): We are not okay, Donna. We in general are not okay. And there's some interesting numbers. So, Agile is now the predominant approach to project management globally, like more than 50%. I think the last number I saw was closer to 70% of all projects are run in an Agile way. What I would say is that often that means that they are run with some Agile practices, but not really an Agile mindset. I've seen way too many groups say, oh yeah, yeah, we're Agile, but they don't have a dedicated cross-functional team.

Preston Chandler (28:30): And I don't understand how that works. I'm like, well, that's your building block. So I don't know how you can say that you're Agile and you don't have the building block there. But I would say particularly the marketing industry is about 30 years behind the times, about 30 years behind the times. And so there's, there's still a lot of teams, and this is across the industry, not one particular company, but there's a lot of teams who still try to manage projects with a spreadsheet. That's, that's their, their commonality. Yeah. And they're still managing by timelines and that's their predominant, like this is their normal.

Preston Chandler (29:02): I just, I just update the timeline. I continue to update the timeline. And that is very common. Of course, we see in, in technology industry that it's much more common to see things like a backlog and a Kanban board and things where you have more cross-functional teams are more common in a technology space. But I would say by and large, I have been amazed by how, how much people don't know about how many people are still stuck 20, 30 years in the past.

Preston Chandler (29:32): Some of that can be, can be school. You know, that's what they were taught in school and they haven't learned any more since then. We have told ourselves a lot of lies about how things should actually get done. There's a lot of very convenient lies. We tell people that if only we could define the work better upfront, that we would, we would have a better project. That is false. That doesn't work. Like, you're always going to be defining the project. If you try defining it upfront, that's when you know the least about it. So why did you try to lock in any of your definitions upfront? You gotta keep going and, you know, and keep cycling through.

Preston Chandler (30:05): So, so you're not, you're not crazy. But we do all need help and we're generally still stuck in the past. And again, I think education is a big reason why is that we just haven't educated people. People, we have a lot of very well-meaning leaders who think that they're asking for good things. They think that when they ask for a status report, that that was a good thing. They think that when they ask for a really detailed project plan, that that was a good thing. Yeah. One of my favorite articles, and I guess it was more of a presentation than an article, is a talk from Mary Poppendieck of like 30 years ago, 20 years ago, something like that.

Preston Chandler (30:42): And it's called The Tyranny of the Plan. And she does an excellent job of talking through modern-day planning, project planning, project management, and where did that come from. And one of the examples that she uses is the Empire State Building. It was, it was built, and I might get some of the numbers wrong, so go out and read her, her presentation. But it was built in about 13 months and the total project plan was a single 8 by 14 piece of paper.

Preston Chandler (31:12): That was the project plan. And it had a line for every floor of the Empire State Building and a planned date for when it got steel and a planned date for when it got marble. That, that was the project plan. Didn't have all of these plans for electrical and plumbing and all that kind of stuff. Right, right. Instead, what is the thing that we actually had to plan around? And it was steel and marble. That was the big thing that you had to plan around. And they were able to produce it, build the whole building in 13 months. We could not do the same thing today, even with all of our better technology.

Preston Chandler (31:44): We couldn't do it. So that tells me again, we are living in the past. We have all this new technology and we're not realizing that just the way that we can approach projects and how people work is antiquated. We, we, there are better ways to do this. They have advanced just like technology has advanced. We've advanced and understood better ways. The better ways haven't really changed ever. But you look, human beings always did better in small cross-functional teams.

Preston Chandler (32:14): Always. Yes. We've always done it better and we're just not remembering that. We, we think that because people have gone to, to business school, you learn how to manage your projects. And usually business school teaches you a lot of the bad ways too.

Donna P. Mitchell (32:26): Well, a lot of methodologies that I've heard, or I'm a, I'm a learner, I'm a continued learner. And I think a lot of people listening are continued learners. That's why they're early adopters or they're trying to really get an idea on what's happening. What is the gap? What is going on? Why is it stalled? Why is everybody upset or why it's unsuccessful? We've put in this many millions of dollars or billions of dollars. So why aren't we where we wanted to be? But at the end of the day, I really think everyone is doing the best they can, but a lot of people are really missing it at the same time too.

Preston Chandler (33:00): It's always very well-meaning people who maybe it's because they're just uninformed. I don't think people want to sabotage things. They're not trying to do a bad job.

Donna P. Mitchell (33:13): Let me ask you this before we finish the conversation. What have you seen that really concerns you that nobody's speaking about?

Preston Chandler (33:24): I wouldn't say nobody's speaking about it, but I don't think it gets the focus and emphasis that it needs. There is a really concerning trend that, that we can just treat people like machines, that we can replace people. I see it across industries. I see it on LinkedIn posts. I see it in the news that we can just replace individuals and that we are devaluing humans. And, and I think there are some companies who do a really good job.

Preston Chandler (33:55): I think IKEA was one that I saw in the news recently where they brought in new technology and AI to reduce the demand on their call center. And those people who no longer had a role in the call center, they trained them on different roles. I believe that humans have an infinite capacity. Like they can learn all sorts of new things. And we need more companies like IKEA who instead of just letting people go will say, great, we're glad we freed you up. Let's train you how to do something else that is also valuable.

Preston Chandler (34:26): And let's respect you as an individual. Don't treat people like, like machines and they have to come in and they have to work exactly 8 to 5 and they have to follow all the SOPs. Like, okay, make machines do all of that. Allow the human beings to be creative. Allow the human beings to have human-to-human contact. We need more of that. Yeah. In the world, not less.

Donna P. Mitchell (34:45): I agree for sure, because you can't outsource humanity. There's a certain level of human dignity. And at the end of the day, I see this like a pattern previously. You got IVR systems and VRU systems and everybody thought, oh, they're going to take our jobs. And really it just transitioned the responsibilities and the tasks, and you ended up doing a higher level job. with more revenue, income, time, and efficiency. It just changed things. And we're back to that change piece.

Donna P. Mitchell (35:18): How can people reach out to you? How can you be reached? And hopefully you come back again. I've enjoyed the conversation. I'm sure the audience has, because we've never really talked about this previously.

Preston Chandler (35:29): I'm happy to come back. It's something I'm passionate about, Donna. Always happy to talk about it. The best way to reach out to me is just go on LinkedIn. Look up Preston Chandler. There's only a couple of us. Mine, my tag is linkedin.com/prestonchandler. So it's pretty easy. You can also look up, Donna, you mentioned a couple books. We have 2 of them that are published right now, and I'm working on publishing a 3rd. You're welcome to go out and look at those.

Preston Chandler (35:59): You can find them on Amazon, The Agile Code and Breakthrough Innovation. And I like talking with people. So feel free to reach out to me. I'd love to set up a chance to, to chat and to talk about whatever your challenge is. I like solving problems. I like helping people out.

Donna P. Mitchell (36:13): This is wonderful. Well, I'd like to thank you for coming on Pivoting to Technology Adoption, and we are shaping tomorrow together. Thank you.

Preston Chandler (36:21): Thank you, Donna.

Donna P. Mitchell (36:24): Thank you for listening to Pivoting to Technology Adoption. If this episode gave you something to think about, subscribe, leave a review, and share it with a colleague who needs to hear it. My new book, Pivoting to Technology Adoption: Mind the Gap, is available now on Amazon. Visit pivotingportal.com to work with me directly. I'm Donna P. Mitchell, The Transformation Authority™. Until next time, mind the gap.

ENDNOTES AND SOURCES
[1] Figures Preston Chandler mentions in this conversation, including team results, first-pass yields, testing reductions and the share of projects run with Agile methods, are his own recollections and estimates from his work. They are not independently sourced.
[2] Preston refers listeners to Mary Poppendieck's talk "The Tyranny of the Plan" for the Empire State Building example and notes he may have some of the numbers wrong.

GUEST
Preston Chandler
Preston Chandler is a transformation leader and systems strategist with 20+ years of experience helping complex organizations operate, innovate, and deliver value. He is Global Lead of Strategic Operations at WPP and Managing Partner at Centered, advising executives on innovation-ready teams and sustainable operating models. He has partnered with 100+ teams for clients including Pfizer, Merck, J&J, Ford, and Novartis. He co-authored The Agile Code and Breakthrough Innovation and co-hosts the Breakthrough Innovation podcast.
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/prestonchandler
Books: The Agile Code and Breakthrough Innovation, on Amazon