Business futurist and AI keynote speaker Jonathan brill speaks with Julia Hautz, Professor of Strategic Management at the University of Innsbruck in Austria, about the dynamics of change management and the importance of fostering open communication within organizations. Their discussion explores the shift from traditional top-down management to a more inclusive bottom-up approach, advocating for the need to listen to employees at all levels, and how small gestures of acknowledgment can significantly impact employee engagement and motivation.
Here’s their conversation:
Episode Transcript
Introduction
Jonathan Brill: The future belongs to organizations that think like an octopus: distributed, intelligent, and endlessly adaptive. I’m business futurist and AI keynote speaker, Jonathan Brill. In this series, I talk with global leaders about how technology is rewriting the rules of business.
In today’s conversation, I speak with Julia Hautz, Professor of Strategic Management at the University of Innsbruck, about the dynamics of change management and the importance of fostering open communication within organizations.
Julia’s Background
Julia Hautz: I’m currently a professor of strategic management at the University of Innsbruck. But actually I didn’t plan to become a researcher very early on, so I started very differently — having a technical background in construction engineering. I ended up at business school and got caught up in projects and ended up doing my dissertation and building a career as a researcher there, being abroad at different universities in the US and in the UK.
I started studying strategy with a very traditional approach — diversification strategy — but was always also involved in companies that were doing crowdsourcing projects and open innovation projects. And over time, these two worlds of open innovation and traditional strategy work just merged, and I ended up studying open strategy. So — new ways of approaching strategy processes. And that’s what I have been doing over the last years: exchanging ideas, talking about this, and getting feedback on open strategy.
Why Open Strategy Matters
Jonathan Brill: Why is open strategy your passion?
Julia Hautz: Firstly, it breaks with traditional ways of doing things. And that’s what I like. We have this very established model and a way of thinking about who is responsible for strategy and who is doing strategy. And typically those are small, homogeneous teams of very often men behind closed doors — old men. I really believe it has been this way for such a long time. It might have worked earlier, but the world has changed so much.
We are questioning so many things at the moment. We should also question this way of doing things. We should question if there is a better way of doing it. And I believe there is a better way of doing it.
What really caught me was: okay, how could we do this differently? Are there people out there that are doing it differently? Are there organizations out there? What are their experiences? How could it work? How could we make it accessible for more people? How could we make, like you said before, a model out of it to help more organizations do it if it’s working? So really questioning things that have been done the same way over many years. I think that was something that really was driving me in this work.
The Challenge of Bottom-Up Change
Jonathan Brill: So when we think about these changes, what’s interesting about what you’re saying is there are so many people who think about top-down management of change, where the reality is actually change has to happen from the bottom up, right?
Julia Hautz: Exactly.
Jonathan Brill: And so in these moments of change, often the people at the base understand the problem long before the people at the top do. How can we better surface that? Because often in these top-down organizations, it’s very dangerous to say the emperor has no clothes.
Creating Channels for Communication
Jonathan Brill: What are some better ways to open up that conversation as a more junior person?
Julia Hautz: I think there are many ways organizations have to establish those ways, and they have to listen. And I think that not only refers to people within the organization and management — I think everybody should do this. If you are in a situation where you’re not sure or if you’re facing a problem, talk to others and talk to people who are out of your comfort zone and outside of your traditional team that you consult with. Try to get as many perspectives as possible from people who are not necessarily close to your problem. And I think that helps in a personal situation, in an individual situation.
And I think this helps within organizations, and that’s what people at the top should do. They should talk and listen to people outside of their traditional circle. It could be within the company, could be outside the company. And today we have so many ways how this communication could happen. It could happen in a workshop, it could happen via any kind of digital technology, social media. We have so many ways to interact and to communicate today.
But you have to realize that you need to get this perspective and you have to listen to those ideas, even if the people are not necessarily the ones that have the expertise in your specific domain or are from an area that could directly relate to the problem. I think this helps a lot because it might reframe your problem. It might make your problem a little smaller, or it gives you solutions to the problem, which helps drive change.
Asking the Right Questions
Jonathan Brill: So what are some questions that we can ask to encourage our people or our leaders to do that? Are there some specific ways to encourage that behavior?
Julia Hautz: From the people at the top?
Jonathan Brill: I think there are two perspectives. From the people at the bottom, they often have this broader perspective than the people at the top. The people at the top have a more strategic view, maybe, but both need to do this. At the bottom, no one’s talking outside the organization. At the top, maybe they’re talking outside, but maybe not down.
Julia Hautz: I think very often it’s not the problem that people from the bottom don’t have insights — they just need a way to be listened to. So what the people at the top should ask them is: What is your view? What is your reality? What do you see in the context of our organization?
I think it doesn’t depend necessarily on the specific question. If you just give them the opportunity to talk, they will share a lot. And I think just opening up this channel could start with a very basic question. We have seen organizations where they have asked very simple questions: If you would be responsible for the organization for one day, what would you do? What would be your first step? What is our biggest problem? What’s the first problem you would mention?
Very simple questions. I think those simple questions should just open up the conversation. So maybe it’s not necessarily about the type of question that you are asking, but about whom are you asking and that you are asking a question. So I think that might be just as important as the question itself.
The Art of Listening
Jonathan Brill: And then the flip side is how to listen.
Julia Hautz: That’s true. That’s very true.
Jonathan Brill: Tell me a little bit about what to listen for when I ask these open questions.
Julia Hautz: There are many ways. It depends. Of course, if you ask a lot of different people, you get a lot of different insights and a lot of different ideas. So reflecting on them, what we have seen is that very often it’s not so important that you act on all of the ideas — you can’t take them all seriously in the sense that you realize all of them. That’s not possible. But just show that you’re listening, appreciating, reacting.
Show that you have understood what’s going on through a quick conversation, acknowledging that you have heard what they are saying. That matters more than actually being the one whose idea is chosen in the end. So showing appreciation and that you care — I think that’s also something that is very important.
Jonathan Brill: One of the things I have experienced is I had the CTO of my former Fortune 50 organization — he’d send me a thank you note when I’d say something, or the CEO would send me an email. Just 5 words.
Julia Hautz: Small things. We have seen it in a big telecommunication company that uses internal social networks where people are sharing ideas. And if they got just a small comment from the CEO — “Great idea, we will consider it” — just a small comment on this social network, that meant so much to them. It was a way of appreciating their work, their effort, and it was really motivating for them. It meant a lot that they saw that their ideas were seen. So I think small gestures help here to show people that you are listening.
Closing
Jonathan Brill: Thank you very much, Julia.
Julia Hautz: Thank you. I really enjoyed this.
Jonathan Brill: Thank you for listening to the Octopus Organization. I’m Jonathan Brill. Subscribe now and remember, in the age of AI, the line between survival and extinction is drawn by how boldly you adapt.
The Octopus Organization™ with Jonathan Brill is a series of conversations with global leaders, executives, and innovators about how AI and new models of leadership are rewriting the rules of business. Click here to see more episodes.
