OKR with a Mission: Radically grow your Association or Non profit with Juan Sanchez

G' day and welcome to Strategy Candy, the podcast that's all about doing better work with a great strategy, setting and achieving audacious goals, using objectives and key results and building incredible products with incredible product teams. I'm super pumped about this episode today. This is with long term customer and I'd say a dear friend, Juan Sanchez. He is the CIO at an incredible medical association based in the USA Today. In this episode we unpack what it is to have 50 years of history and dare I say a lot of organizations out there, baggage that comes with that. How have they managed to let go a lot of those traditional constraints They've had to really empower their people to focus on solving meaningful problems and doing so in a way that helps them achieve their mission. We unpack what it is to be a nonprofit and working in this space. So if you are a NonProfit or a four mission business, this is the exact podcast you need to be listening to to understand how do you set up okrs for success? Intellis did it in an incredibly special way. Where teams own their OKRs, there's much less top down. Although the leadership still coaches the team on what problems to solve, it helps them identify the right OKRs as a team, get behind those OKRs and really drive incredible outcomes. If you want to see how OKRs can drive real impact for your business and your organization, this is it for you. Let's get straight into it. Juan, I am super excited to have you on the podcast today. It's been way too long and a long time coming. How are you doing today? Good. Tim, how's it going? Amazing to hear. And we're at opposite ends of the world. It's about 6:20 right now in the morning. What time is it for you? It's the best time. It's 4:20 here. So we've timed that pretty well. Perfectly. That's right. So on. I think you're going to be much better positioned to do the introduction than I am. I feel like I'm going to mess it up because you've got a bit of a non traditional role. So give us the rundown. Who are you and what do you do? All right. So yes, Juan Sanchez, the CIO at a company called Intellios that is located just out of outside of Washington D.C. in the States. A nonprofit. I like to say that we're small but mighty because we're only about. I say only but 120 or so people spread out around the world. Pretty good actually with people in several just in our team around six Countries and I'm the cio, so I'm information officer. Technology obviously is my game. And I've been with the company in August it will be six years, which is amazing because it's gone by really fast. So it's been an incredible journey so far. We've been working together for five years and you've made some incredible impact there. A little bit shy of when you first started, we didn't get to see that happen, but certainly have seen the amazing impact that you've had. Can you unpack a little bit about what does Intellios do as a medical association? What does that actually mean and what sort of impact are you trying to make? Yeah, sure. Maybe a little bit US specific. So a little background. So here in the US obviously and abroad, right. We have nonprofit organizations. Some of those are NGOs, non governmental offices, Some of them are charities that rely on the donation of in philanthropy from people with money or grants. And then there are organizations like ours, which are either associations here in the US which represent an entire profession or a trade, or what we actually do, which is certification specifically. So what does that mean? That means that at least as the traditional model of what our business is, and I know this is what we're going to talk about is how our okrs are making us be a different kind of company. But for today, it's simple. We develop the exams that doctors and here in the U.S. sonographers take in order to be awarded a certification. And at least here in the US in most cases that certification is what we call de facto licensure. So essentially it means that with having that certification, their employers are looking for that so that they can have a job doing what they do. So it's a pretty important role in the world. And it's really here in the US we have certified in the US around 120, 130,000 sonographers. And then on top of that we have cardiologists and other domains in medical imaging. So ultrasound, MRI, CT, nuclear, cardiology. That's our domain. So what you do as a medical association is absolutely critical and makes a huge impact on the daily lives of people and the patients or your, the people that you're certifying, working with. I'm curious what else is really unique about Inteleos that's different from most other organizations? I think the fact that we are called Intellios at all is different. And the reason is because this company actually is 50 years old. But Intellios is a brand and really the company was formed in 2016. And it came from a much more traditional and much more focused nonprofit, which was ardms, which we still use as a brand, because in the U.S. like I mentioned, sonography is a specific kind of discipline. And so this ARDMS was the original intent to certify just those people. But over time, we realized that there was a whole world to serve and that essentially creating this company, Intelios, which didn't really sound like such a thing, gave us a lot of latitude on what we could do and where we could do it. And so that alone is, I think, a unique aspect of it, on top of the fact that since the pandemic, we went fully remote, like everybody did, but the uniqueness is that we are still that. And I think we've seen some really great dividends from that idea. It certainly sounds like you're bucking bit of a trend there. I think from what I've seen, there's a lot of organizations that are starting to push that back in office mandate, and I'm a big believer of. In fact, I was listening to a podcast this morning. I think it was the. The Prof. G Markets with Esther Perel. Probably butchered that name. But anyway, it was really interesting to hear her take that. She sees this bit of a challenge of having this remote work and what it means, particularly for junior staff. And however, the key takeaway for me was, number one, you need to focus on that as an important point. But also when you get together with intent, we can all work from home. Most people are very effective operating in that mode, and if they want to have an office to go to, they can do. But to me, it's when you get together with intent and purpose and make those experiences really incredible, but then also give people the flexibility to work from home. So being a fully distributed organization does come with its own challenges, but it also gives you access to incredible opportunity as well and also is really great for a lot of people who want to work in that way. Yeah, yeah, it's been great. I would have a hard time going back. Obviously, it poses its own challenges, of course, and especially when you begin to distribute your workforce around the world, the fact that you and I are speaking right is in some way an offshoot of the fact that we have this ability to connect now with technology and different things. But how many times have you. And I said, hey, it'd be great to actually meet in person. So to anybody listening or watching, we've actually never met in person. That's. That. That makes it a challenge. But I Like what you said in terms of when you meet with intent. And that's exactly what we do. We have events during the year, broadly speaking, and then more narrowly speaking, that where we do come together and say, hey, we're going to focus on this now. I know that's something that we've been mean to fix. I think we both like the outdoors. You do it, we go bush, you do it out to the woods. Right? That's one thing. So it'd be cool to go out to the woods or out to the bush and just do some exploring. The other one for me is I think we're both fans of whiskey, so I've got to bring some of that Australian whiskey, the Sullivan's Cove from Tasmania and crack some of that. But yeah, definitely the opens of all these incredible opportunities and then also allows you to connect. And it's just remembering, yeah, having that let's get together with purpose and reason and have that human connection. So absolutely love it. I want to shift gears a little bit now and bring us on to objectives and key results or okrs. And this is something where you and I started working together. I think we first got introduced just having a chat on LinkedIn. I was chatting to Tammy, the chief people officer there at Intelios. And for me, you had some really good reasons on why you're starting okrs and what you hoped it would bring to the business as an executive team. Can you unpack that for me a little bit and just tell me why did you start with okrs and what were you hoping to get out of it? So this is. The story is probably intertwined with my own personal story about OKRs. But so I'll begin where, where that first happened for me and for the company in some way. So I arrived at Intellios in, I said, the summer, so it would've been August of 2019. And I've told this story before, it bears repeating that when I walked into my office, because obviously we were still there in a physical office, our CEO Dale had left me three books to read in a nice little note saying, welcome to Intellios, which I still have, by the way, and I still have the books. But one of the books was the famous Measure what Matters. And so I looked through the books and the other one was the End of Competitive Advantage. And then good strategy, bad strategy. So I looked through the books and this Measure what Matters book was like, what is this? I had never really heard of this and it was interesting. So I started reading it and basically what we were already on the way, which had started just before I had started at the organization, was that Dale had identified and found OKRS himself, because he's very much a learner, and said, you know what? I think this is what we need to catalyze the sort of the broad goal that even back then we had started forming about what we wanted to become and what we wanted to do in the world. And for any of the people or listeners that have read that book, there was a chapter where Bono was interviewed, and it was specifically focused on nonprofits, on nonprofit work, NGO work, that kind of thing. And it had a resonation resonance with us. And so that was where really our cumulative journey as a company and personal for me began. By the time I got to that job, I had already spent 20 years in technology and in nonprofit technology was. Which is very. The important qualifier here, because for whatever reason in the nonprofit world, OKRs, at least in the space in the sphere that I work in or I did work in, were never used. And so I was like. It was like a renaissance for me, right? I was like, what is this outcome that everybody talks about? So I'm curious to know a little bit about what that journey looked like, because you're going from quite a bit, what I would say would be quite a traditional organization where. And again, intelligence is not unique like this. I would say the default in most businesses is tell me what you're going to build. That's tends to be the common currency that we use, is just give me the idea, how do we build it? We seem to hold a lot of weight to ideas. We don't tend to talk much about the problem that we're trying to solve. And so what this means is typically you get trapped in that conversation about the old iron triangle. Is that on time, on budget, to scope, and really most projects or the strategy execution, they're not trying to really focus on the outcome or even necessarily explicitly measure that they achieve that outcome. Typically, you're looking at those three dimensions again, on time, to scope, on budget. Did you hit all those items? Tick those boxes. Great, we're done. And often from a project perspective, it's just getting the things done right. Is the schedule running okay now? The problem here is that there's a very low correlation to, okay, all this activity we're doing, does that actually achieve the outcome that we intended? And in fact, I think this is why it's a stat that something like 30% of projects, maybe more traditionally, it might be different now, but certainly back in the day, only 30% of them would actually achieve the outcome that they were originally intending to achieve. Which is wild when you think about it. You throw a lot of money at these things. So was that a similar journey that you had to go through? What did that look like? Having to go from a traditional way of working and here's the projects, go do this thing to here's the problem, here's the outcome we're trying to make. So it was interesting. I remember early, I read the book, I read. I remember actually going through the book really fast. And as sometimes I'll speak for myself, as sometimes I tend to do, if I read or acquire new knowledge, I delude myself into believing now I know all the things about the thing, right? So I said, this is easy, John Doar, he's got it down. I can just write these on the back of a napkin and they'll be easy, right? So I went into the office with a new team and I said, guys, we're gonna do all this, we're gonna do OKRs. And I started writing on a whiteboard, OKRs what I thought were OKRs. And obviously the punchline, there's a spoiler alert, right? Which it was nowhere near that easy. And basically what I was doing is manifesting my thinking around how I had done everything in my life essentially for work which was output based and pretended like I was gonna measure something about the output, right? And there's the difficulty, right, which is, okay, you now you have to really think and deconstruct. The way my brain thinks about this is I look at the thing we're talking about doing and then I deconstruct and try to figure out what is going to change about anything in the business. Because we're exerting this effort, right? There's effort being put into the system. And so what is going to change by doing that then? That's where I am now. And more evolution. But even back then, in those early days, in 2019, 2020, we also were, I was trying to explore agile mindset and agile ways of working. And we definitely had some missteps in that space early on, but it was all related. In hindsight, you see it now. Agility that sort of has a relationship to outcome thinking, systems thinking, all these other things that we've done, product thinking, all this other stuff that we're now into, all start to fit into a puzzle pretty well that that was what the effort was. And it was across the company. It was. We had workshops and it was hard to get people to really understand outcomes because they kept trying to get to things of certainty. But you're going to. And we can talk about this later, but there's going to be a performance evaluation, right? There's going to be a grade. And so therefore, I have to make sure that it looks good and it's the right thing and all. Yeah, so we got into that conversation. So I think that's a really good call out. Let's jump into that now. So it's one thing that I find is probably the hardest thing to shift is that mindset around what is the purpose of my work. I think a lot of people, number one, don't philosophize much about that, which probably isn't such a bad thing. But if we really come down to what is the intent of my work and what am I trying to achieve here, that's a whole shift into that mode of outcome thinking. Right. We're optimizing in everything that we do to make an impact. And what I see a lot of organizations typically struggle with is that shift away from, okay, here's. And particularly, I think one thing that I would imagine is very hard for Intellios is you've got this pretty structured way of working with customers. You're a certification body. And so traditionally it was, did you do the test? Did you pass? Did you complete all the right sort of information in there from your organization's perspective? Do we put all the right questions in there to make sure people are answering things in the right way? Are people learning from our content? So there's all these different dimensions to be thinking about. And it is often much easier just to simplify it and just go, here's a list of questions that works. Here's a set of learning material. Stick with that. And just pushing that out into the customers. Right? Really, Rather than questioning, well, does that process make the impact that we want to have, which is better Patient outcomes? So let's unpack that mindset and journey that the team had to go on to really focus on the outcomes and the impact that they're making. I don't think it was necessarily for this one reason, but part of the journey was understanding that some of that team was not going to be with us for the whole journey for different reasons. People opt out. They're like, you know what? I don't want to work in a situation like this. And that's totally fair as well. I think obviously we're. You and I are talking about this because we believe in this stuff. I think you shortchange yourself if you try not to lean into it, but fair enough. So part of it was people departed the team. Okay, so now you have a renewal, right? I see that as a renewal because you get in new people from different backgrounds. So. So the mind is maybe a little bit more open there because they don't have all that legacy already of baggage with them. So that was part of it. I think the other part of it was for me really trying to explain and manifest the difference between why we together said okrs. And so I think that's an operative word there, that's important. Right. We aren't talking about individual people or KRs, like because we people make that mistake. Right. And you have the benefit again of hindsight and all the things and all the learnings that we've done over the years. But don't do that, don't put OKRs on individual people because that will become their proxy to performance. Right. So first thing is like we're not going to do these things as individual assignments. Right? Number one. But then the second part is, but we have to work within the constraints of what performance systems are traditionally. Fine. So that is where things like goals and more output based things are, let's say, useful. Right? Because the outcome, let's face it, it's probably a little cynical, but for me the outcome of a performance system evaluation is can I please get the money at the end of all of that? That's the reward. So great. So then what we've done here is we've actually split goals so that you get one goal, only one. You can have more than one if you want, if there's something more there that's interesting to you. But one goal per quarter per person, generally speaking, whether or not we decide that goal has something to do with the OKRs, the division or the team or the organizations on at that time, fine. But it's not mandatory. It does. Sometimes it creates a nice glue to have those two things together. So fine. And so that was that. That big step was let's think about goals as one thing for us as personal humans. And let's think about OKRs as change methodologies for the organization, a structure for the organization at large. And then you can, like for me you can move up and down. I see it in my mind as a stick, right? Or a, I don't know how, like a ruler or whatever. The good, a good visual for that is there are places further down on the stick that are, let's say closer to the heart of the matter or whatever your team is involved in. So As a tech person, the lowest part of that stick are things like, oh, our servers are crashing, so let's fix that, and let's use okrs to track the fix. And it's not the work to fix it, but it's how do we prove that we fixed it. Yeah. And then as you move through that hierarchy of needs on that stick, now we can start. Once we got that out of the way, now we can start thinking about, great, our servers are no longer a problem, and they're running super fast and super performant and it's elastic and all the orchestration is in place and blah, blah, blah, now what kind of value can we unlock? And so now let's think about OKRs at that level. And that's how we've tried to progress the team down the journey that way. All right, let me pick up what you're putting down there, because we covered quite a lot of ground. What I think you really called out there early on was team OKR should be there about solving a problem that is measuring real change and impact. And if we can frame that in the right way, teams can measure their progress towards solving that problem. I liked as well that you talked about it is about moving up and down multiple layers. I think quite often, and this is a skill that I've always appreciated that I've had, is I'm able to navigate different layers of an organization quite effectively. The whole hierarchy thing's never really concerned me, but I look to a path of how do I navigate through this to drive the right outcome. And okrs give you really nice means to transcend that and work up and down that model at the same time. I think it is that actually too from team members, so individual contributors, they can go and have these sort of conversations. They can get context around, around what they're working on and why, and same for executives. So it works both ways, which is really powerful. That strategy link, again, is super critical. So really being clear on why does the work I'm doing now matter and why does it matter right now? Where things go work really well is it is about that driving and improvement and change that's strategically significant. And to your point, I think, like people talk about servers, often we hear okrs where it's about, don't have any outages or these kind of things. I think when things are broken, you can use okrs to fix them. And it's quite, quite a nice way of going, okay, how do we improve and operationalize this in the most effective way? Often that is additive. We're trying to improve things or do new things, but also might be. It also might be reductionist where we're taking certain things away or decommissioning certain things. But ultimately we need to be measuring what's the impact and the benefit that we're trying to drive there. When it comes to individual okrs or goals, I think we need to be really careful. I don't typically like OKRs for individuals. I think the team performance comes down to the team performance. It's very hard to tie back who did what to drive that outcome. What seems to work really well for me, though, is if there's developmental goals that we're trying to achieve to help the organization strategy, and it's an area of development that I'm interested in. It could be about acquiring new skills. Maybe we want to get better at public speaking. But all those things come together and so you've got your okrs, which really link you into strategy, help you drive strategy, help you have conversations across the business about strategy. And then there's your personal goals that are about how do I get better and improve. But having those two things as separate is quite important. There is a way to link okrs, but it's a whole different conversation. I don't know if I just put down more than what you're putting down, but does that make sense? Absolutely. And I think even that you touched on like the AWS example where we may have. Okay, so I'll just make up the example. Right. We have an okr because we have a server that's in bad shape, or we have legacy technology. Right. We know that we have this technology debt in our organization and okay, there's a point of view there. We're going to reduce that tech debt. Great. As an incumbent in the organization, I already have. Hopefully you already have the technical skills that are required to improve what you have. Right. Maybe you haven't had time. There's some other reasons that hasn't been given the right attention so we can unblock some of that. But you already have the skills. There's no point in a goal that quarter saying go learn more about the thing you already know how to do. Instead, the goal is go learn about the thing that's going to get us out of this for good, the next move that we're going to make. And so it's trying to anticipate where we're going and learn about that or. Yeah, exactly. That's it. You've covered a lot of ground there. So let's go. We've really just fast forward through six years. I wonder if we can condense this down into what's your number one takeaway? If someone is kicking off on their OKR journey, what's the number one most impactful learning that you've picked up on along the way? So from a personal point of view, I think any organization, yes, maybe I will be at Intellios the rest of my career, but maybe not. Let's pretend like maybe not. And so one day if I go to another organization, I am definitely bringing OKR thinking with me. Right. It is the thing that I think is so indispensable. Yes. For technology. Just did it come from the technology world? Of course there's a connection there for sure. But it obviously it doesn't have to be. We can use it anywhere. So this is coming with B and I think I'd abstract it one level more which is it's not so much that we have to use okrs, right? It's if you arrive in a new location and you, you can see that everybody's focused on outputs, then it don't even mention okrs, right. It's just let's talk about the outcome thing. Right? Let's think, let's define what an outcome is and let's explore that. And then we say, oh, now we understand it together. Here's a way we can track that. Great, now you can implement it. So that's on a personal take, I think on an organizational take. Six years in. Yeah, I know you and I and our team here internally we've talked about a capability model around OKRs over time and how good you get at it and whatever good means and all this kind of thing here. The punchline is we're small, we're six years in and you're going to have uneven capability. Right. Where in your mind as an executive you might dilute yourself into believing that, oh, everybody understands it exactly the way I do. False. And so that check in is really critical. You got to keep asking. You're going to have different mindsets, you're going to have different points of view on it. You're going to have people who they say I'm only interested in the output work, so leave me alone. Okay. I think you can lean into that. So I like what you've said there. You've really called out that if we're going to go on this sort of journey that people need to lean into these sort of challenges and acknowledge that we're intentionally shifting from an output model to an outcome thinking organization. And that, hey, we've all got to get on this journey together, because otherwise it doesn't quite work if we're all speaking different languages. I think the other thing that trips up a lot of people is okrs is a tool. Right. It's not the actual outcome that we want. We don't want to have okrs driving okrs and all the. I think where a lot of people get this wrong is we want to have okrs to drive an outcome in themselves. Right. Okrs is the tool or the means to get there. It is about shifting to outcome thinking and having people focused on making the maximum impact they can. And too often, I think teams get distracted and go, okay, I need to embed okrs. I need to be doing okrs really well versus going, okay, here's the outcome I'm trying to make, and here's the impact we're trying to achieve as a team. I think that's really critical. Right. It's like a common language, right. So that we can. With the common language comes the common platforms, which then let you mutually, you know, collaborate. Especially going back to what we said earlier as a remote company, Right. The ability for us to get on Zoom and share a platform that helps us track that. Right. So that. That's the manifestation of the language. But, yeah, you needed to come up with the philosophy and the culture first, and then the language makes sense. That's. We're going deep on the journey tonight, and that's pretty wild. From what we've seen, where you started, how you got to where you are today, we haven't talked too much about, where are you today? What does okrs currently look like in the business? Is it just in technology? Is it across the business, what's currently happening? Yeah, and I'll say, I don't know how unique it is, but I can say that definitely in the feedback that I've gotten with peers, it's different. And not a lot of people in, like I said, in my space seem to be adopting what we've done. So maybe we're totally wrong. I don't think so. Maybe we're totally wrong and we're just off the mark completely. But, no, I don't think so. All right, so at Intelligence right now, what we have is what we call organizational okrs internally. O. Okrs. That's a funny way of saying it. I like using the word impact okrs, and I do that specifically to differentiate from the okrs we use on an annual and quarterly basis. I'll speak about that in a minute. But I think the reason why impact okrs for nonprofits is specifically important is because hopefully you have a noble mission in the world. Right? This is why you're a nonprofit. Because you have something, you're trying to fill a gap in society or in the world that capitalism or for profit motives don't, doesn't fill. Great. Now if you believe in your mission and hopefully your mission is really aimed at changing something about the world, then wow, we just said that OKRs are a way to measure change. Maybe we could think about how our mission is changing the world right now. The trick here is you have to I think realize that you are not going to have direct control over those key results, those impact okrs. Because why? Because you're going to have effort internally that you can by way of the people and the efforts and the con and the strategies and things that you're doing. You can see that happening. You are hoping that they have a knock on secondary effect of impact in the world. But it, but I think it really brings to life the mission for the organization. I know it has for us in our world. They span. They originally started with five year timeframes and they expanded to seven because we were again we learning, we misjudged how long it would take the inertia to kick in. So really for the first couple of years of those impact okrs we weren't seeing a lot of progress. And so everybody was like. And we've debated that, right? We've debated whether we should have changed the horizons or not. So it's all good. It's part of the conversation. Good news is that the points don't matter and the rule, there are no rules and the points don't matter here. So impact okrs important. And then over time we've grown from just quarterly OKRs, which is the traditional out into the annual OKR because the organization, feedback from the organization, from the teams indicated to us on the executive team that they would like some more help with direction. So we said great, so what are the things that we could focus on in a one year timeframe that teams broadly could lean into? And so that's where we are now. Amazing. So there's one thing that really stands out to me from what I've seen at Intellios, and that's the cross team alignment and collaboration that occurs. And I think a lot of organizations get this wrong. They talk about cascading, in fact measure what matters. John Dollar talks about each team's got their goal and it goes from the objective to the Key results, the company level and that's usually for the CEO. And then the CEO delegates that to the next layer down and one of those key results becomes an objective and they set their own key results and then so on and so forth. And it seems to me like it's such a slow and inhibiting process. I'm wondering how do you set your okrs? Do you cascade them? How does you get that whole team alignment going on? Can you run me through that a little bit? Impact okrs, a five, seven or a seven year horizon, which we are coming up to the end of them now so soon. And annual krs, we're I think in our second year of annual okrs, if I remember right. And then, and then quarterly cadence for the rest of the teams. So we have definitely not gone with that approach. Like there's. It's okay to have say alignment, right. So alignment is like this supports or is supported by. And the platform we happen to use allows for that designation when we're writing the OKRs on the platform. And so what does that do? Right, that gives you a breadcrumb or gives the teams breadcrumbs to understand where is the effort going towards again going back to why am I doing this work? Right, so it's the point. So we use alignment. The cascading part has more to do with how you measure progress. Right. And what that means is you set one okr that's dependent entirely on its key results changing based on whatever key results you cascade down from there. Right. And we just have found that it's simply not useful. Right. It just because it's not giving us any more data, it's not giving us any more insights into something happening or not happening. So we've just chosen to decouple from that concept altogether and just lean on alignment. And like I said, using the support supported by tags within the system, that's it. That's super cool. So I guess when you're getting into that collaboration using a tool and you can see where everyone fits together, who's supporting, where people are working together, how OKRs linked together, it gives you a really powerful view. But to me it's what really counts as the conversations that lead into that. Right. So you can see okrs in itself as a framework is really powerful for this. What really comes out to me though is that you're breaking between teams, you're going between these silos which would traditionally be teams or divisions, you're pulling that apart and working together to drive the same impact and outcome. And so Often I talk to a lot of product teams about this very matter where they focus on the delivery. Got to get this feature built and released and put it into production. But there's next to zero thought of what actually happens. Then sometimes they think about how do we technically support it, but the go to market piece, how do we launch it successfully? All those pieces are just totally forgotten about. So for me it's how do you get everyone optimizing at least one small part of that customer experience and working together across different areas to make that impact? Yeah. And you can solve it, I think, at large over time, which is because as a team, we've seen where we've been and what choices we made early on. The problem at large, like you're saying if it's a big problem, but we can always deconstruct and decompose that big problem into smaller ones. So as a team, together, I'll say this a little bit on your earlier question is another surprise is really is how hard sometimes it is to coordinate just people together. And because time moves unbelievably fast. Right. And so it's like we've obviously, you and I know all the different things that we have tried at Intellios in terms of stimulating more collaboration, but we still see that it's hard for people to find time on their calendar where four or five or six people might be able to just get together on Zoom and have a conversation. Because I think the other surprise is it's not easy and it takes time to have that conversation. Right. Because there's a lot to unpack usually. And so it's just, it's anybody that's interested in getting involved in this stuff, you have to make room and give space to people and nudge them to say, hey, don't you got to get together? Because there's a lot of conversation to be had before you get to the numbers. Coming back to thinking about how you work with okrs, I think the broader concepts, you've shown me a slide in the past which sort of talks about OKR strategy. It's almost like a wheel with different things. What's that? What's in the Intellios ecosystem that you use to really connect people with the mission, but then also drive the strategy, execute the strategy and make sure that you're running the business. What's that look like? Yeah, I love that question. Which I think really is what makes up the secret sort of recipe of the company? Not so secret, because I'm about to tell you all what it is. So I think the biggest umbrella is a learning culture. This has been really a top of mind thing for, for me personally recently. But remember what I said early on about my first day at the job, right? I was given three books to read, right. I remember even in my interview our CEO asked me he's do you read? You like, right? So I was already like, oh, this is different. All right, so learn a learn as a learning organization. Massive. It's a massive leg up on anybody else that's not learning or expecting people to learn at another time of their life. I don't know where ness you're going to learn if it's not when you're trying to do your job O now inside of that learning context every, roughly every year basically I think is true. Our CEO at least so I'll start at the executive level because that's where sort of my world is. But we all share a book. He does a great job of curating learning in this way where he's look, I've got the book of the year or whatever, we're going to read it together and it's going to, it's been hit or miss. We've had actually some books where we've read and we're like yeah, you know what, we get it. But there's still a little residue that's left behind. Even if we may not like totally do whatever the book is saying that we have to do, it leaves a residue. One of the biggest, in my mind that has one of the biggest ones that have had an impact for us for the longest amount of time is a book called the Interaction Field. And look, the simple premise of the Interaction Field is that surprise, you don't live in a vacuum as a company that you succeed by collaborating with many different players in a, in an ecosystem and that what your goal is not to get all of the pie with a limited size pie, but is together to try to grow the pie right together and we all then get to have a bigger piece of it anyway. So that has informed a lot of our choices in the way we approach other companies and the way we approach partnerships and the way we think about it. Perfect. That's one I think from there we've, I mentioned the, the agile mindset concept, right? So we have an agile coach that works with us consistently. We have we and we've tried to distribute that agile mindset across the organization, right? Not just for it guys and gals to do, but it's for everybody because it's just a way of thinking, right? It's a way of approaching a thing. So agile, I think is as big, and I know these days, unfortunately that's fallen into a little bit of, I don't know, lack of favor, I guess for, from some, in some corners of the world. But I still deeply believe in that, in that philosophy. So we use that. Okay, ours are there. And then more recently we've really started asking the question around product and the product operating model. And Tim, you and I both know Marty Kagan, right. And all things product. So that's been super for me personally. It's been a really incredible learning experience to understand product. And then think about how does a nonprofit that typically wouldn't really think of product in that way. Because again, mission is you're. We write tests and we give certifications and as long as doctors know what they're doing, what product is there. Right. It turns out there are plenty of products. Right? Yeah. So that's been another big thing. There are others, but I think that sort of triangle of learning, that interaction field methodology or philosophy, agile mindset and then product operating. Look, we were a unique company. We have a CX brand new within the year. We've got a CXO at the top of the executive team, driving customer experience from an entire team. So you can just think of where the investments are going. That's a big one. Yeah, yeah. And that's a big move, having someone like that join the business. To me, it's also a fundamental shift because I'm guessing this focus and obsession with the customer journey, the product focus, those things have not always been there. You've had to go on the journey to get to this point where you're ready for this. Is that true? Absolutely. Yeah. No, absolutely. And the journey is there, right? We're in it, we're in the middle of it. 100%. It's been work in progress because look, just the act of knowledge. Translation, fine. I might be able to read three books in a month, right? I don't, but let's say I could, but I did. So I read some books and so now I have this knowledge in my head. Go back to exhibit one, which is I now I know everything about it, right? Of course I don't. But you start explaining it to people in the organization and try to like, hey, this is a cool thing. Well, that's going to take a lot of time for people to understand it, to frame it, to understand what that means for them. And then eventually you start seeing it manifest maybe in the organizational chart, maybe in the way the titles are written and that's what we've seen. Right. So now we have, as of the beginning of 2025, we have a Director of Product. Right. We've never had that position here before. So that's how it starts to show up. And this is the product conversation started probably two years ago. So it takes a while. It does. This is I think a sign of encouragement for a lot of other organizations because I think you and I have always spoken about the long game. Right. It's about playing the long game. And sometimes it feels like there's so much to be done, there's so many different priorities and coming back to that sort of ecosystem of mindsets and practices and tools that you use, there is so much in there to try and get to that point in a short period. It's just not going to happen. It's accumulatively building upon that. For me, this is really hard because I could go on for this for hours. I love these conversations. I think there's so much to unpack here. I'm curious to know. We're going to give you two questions and take us through this journey. Particularly thinking about associations. I'm curious what you're working on right now and why that matters for you as an association and then any advice that you've got for other associations or non for profits that are looking at picking up like something like okrs and how they might want to approach it. Yes. Let's start off. What are you trying to improve right now? I'll try to break it out into a few horizons just quickly. So on a more sort of, let's call it tactical slash strategy adjacent horizon. We're in the midst of core system modernization. Right. Basically the entire platforms that interface with our customer every day and then the data systems that inform us as a customer relationship side of things with a CRM style thing. Organizations been running on the same platforms for more than a decade. The moment was now the funny thing is I'll just a little side story is that when I was hired five, six years ago, the premise was I was coming in to do this work in the first year that I was here. So six years later, you, anybody, time will be the judge of this. But whether I failed or succeeded, but I still haven't done. We haven't done it, but now we're here so we're doing it now. Right. This is the moment. But there was a lot of other things that we focused on beforehand and it was. ORKR has helped us illuminate that Stuff. So that's on that horizon, on the next horizon is this concept of reinventing ourselves as a business. Right. Which is okay. We can continue to think of ourselves as a 50 year old legacy company that makes exams and give certifications or. And we were doing that. Fine. Income is steady, relatively very predictable actually. In fact. Right. 98, 99% predictability year over year. It's sustainable in the near term. You've got that sort of machine that's running. People are engaged, People would, for the most part, I would say, liked the product. Why change? Why change? And so I think that's that next piece which is you have to change both your philosophy and how you identify, identify as an organization and what you see yourself in the world and what your mission is about in the world. And then these other things that then we talk about transformation and digital transformation. And I think, I think this might actually be Marty's quote. The definition of transformation is super easy. It's just being able to do something tomorrow you can't do today. Right. So what is that thing? And then what are the things that I laugh with our team because I'm like, we need to be a pretty butterfly. We're just a caterpillar right now. We need. But we want to fly, so we got to grow some wings. So those are the moves. The growing wings part is a CX division, a director of product thinking about that in those ways, OKRs, integrating teams, trying to decide why is it organizational charts are designed the way they are. Maybe they should be designed or named a different thing or just all of that is in play. Right. We won't take all of it, but having the open mindedness and the growth mindset to consider it in service of this idea that we have about how are we going to reinvent ourselves. Because doctors have certain needs, sonographers have certain needs, have certain problems and their problems aren't all the same around the world. And so we need to be able to handle that. And that's the journey. I love it. I think there's so much good stuff to move on from there. Okay, so I guess condensing that down to the advice. If you're a non for profit looking to embark on something, you're listening to this podcast going, this all sounds really amazing. What's your advice for them? Probably the unpopular opinion I talk about a lot is that first be honest about whether or not you want to and feel like you're members. We're talking about associations. We don't have members, but let's pretend like our certificates are that way for us in some way. But there is a distinction. I want to get to that. So first is be honest about whether or not you believe your members have different problems that you aren't servicing. Right. And therefore that if you aren't and you would like to, what's that going to mean for how you have to change? Right? So that's a piece of advice. Maybe the answer is, oh, everything's fine, we can be, we can do this on cruise control for the rest of eternity. And fine. And if your mission's being fulfilled, there is no real reason to change also, right? Change for the sake of change is not the answer. Second part is in the unpopular quote. One of my favorite quotes around that. I'm going to jump in there. One of my favorite quotes around that is, sorry, there's no requirement to change, but there's also no requirement to survive. So it's that question of if you think you can get through, if you can do what the crocodile, right? The crocodile's done, the Australian crocodile, very main based. It is not changed in a long time. Very much living dinosaur. Most other things had to change and evolve to be successful. That's exactly right. So it's funny that you said the crocodile. So the animal that I use is, and I call it my phrase is the cockroach conundrum. The cockroach conundrum is exactly the same idea. The cockroach has survived in its form relatively from whatever, hundreds of thousands of years, if not millions of years, right. I don't know the number, but it has no environmental pressure or requirement to really make major modifications to itself right now. And I use that word obviously because it's, it has a connotation of who wants to be a cockroach, but hey, they're doing okay. So maybe it's okay to be a cockroach, but again, if you want to be something else, that option is there. But the environment has to be drawing that from you. So I think that's a thing. Look, and then I think the unpopular opinion part that I talk about, and this is related to our thinking around production, is that I think associations, and there's a history here and whatever you can get into that if you, if anybody's interested in researching it. But why membership? Why have we chosen associations? Why have they chosen membership as their business model? Where did it come from? Why is it still valid? And if you were to think about it in terms of product, is membership in fact a product? And I might, I contend that it is not. And that the organizations have been making a mistake and calling it that for years, decades and in some cases centuries. Because some of these organizations are indeed that old. Right. So I think a question around how could you think about membership in a unbundled way that would allow you to think about product in a more meaningful way for the customer and the problems they're facing instead of just bundling it all together? Because for sure, and the death of the association has been long foretold and it still hasn't happened. But there's always a promise that technology and tech players in different spaces are going to come along and they're going to disintermediate you and they're going to unbundle your offerings on their own and then you're going to still be talking about why are. Why is our membership number declining? That's why. Yes. It's always being aware about what's that next sort of problem to solve and what is that next evolution and being ready for that. And if your organization isn't geared towards that, for sure that end in a pretty bad state. I know. I was just trying to look behind the scenes and think who's the charity that does this? I know there's a few charities out there that pretty sure it's based in the States. What they do is they build water wells for and one thing they realized is that the old way of donating to charities, you throw a bunch of money in, there's none of that traceability and it just gets used very largely effectively. But you have no idea how is it actually being used. What they would do is they would actually give you a link that would tie your dollar back to it goes and helps this particular project. And here's the kids drinking from the well and that's me is a shift in social expectations. There's probably always been a desire for something like that and that's how it's held people back from donating. And if I give you this money with that it's that connection back to okay, this is the impact that it's making. I think this is an example of where for associations, yes, understanding what does that future look like. But also opposed to any sort of organization, charities here, they need to be thinking about these kind of things as well. What sort of impact are they trying to make? How can they do that better? Because although the system works today, I like the cockroach analogy. It works today, it's going well. But surely there's something more, something better we can do and something we can Focus on to increase the impact of our work. Yeah, yeah. One last thing to touch on that though is it's, it's a good thing to talk about. So we've all heard the story. Maybe this is a very US cent thing. I don't think it is. But the story of Kodak Camera and Fuji, right, the two filmmakers and why Kodak doesn't exist and Fuji exists. So the long standing sort of myth is that Kodak just failed to innovate. In fact, and they failed to innovate, meaning they never thought that digital cameras were going to be a thing and they therefore they paid no attention to that space. And the truth is, in fact they did it. There were engineers at Kodak that had designs for digital cameras. What happened? The organization never saw itself. It liked being the cockroach and so therefore it shed or it pushed away anybody that was trying to flash the warning sign and say, hey, but this though, right? So I don't want us to confuse that these organizations that are, let's say in the cockroach conundrum, it's because there's a lack of people inside of them with ideas and innovation and just waiting to get unleashed. It's just to give it a chance. You got to give it a chance. Absolutely. And it's the decisions that come from the top. In a lot of these cases that they were prototyping some incredible digital cameras and top of the business, they decided no, that's something we're not going to pursue. And that would have been very hard for the team members who would have seen the opportunity that came with this and gone, okay, we got to shelve that. And yeah, you can imagine that this is where too, when we empower teams through outcome based thinking, it encourages this sort of thing where we're actually starting to challenge our model and working a little bit differently. It's almost back to the. Maybe we're doing the analogy here, back to the cockroach analogy. We're basically building a spider now. We're evolving into a spider. Sure, it's probably going to kill the cockroach at some point, but that's why it's going to do pretty well. You have to be okay with that. And it's funny you say that because we talk about that, I've said it before, that if we're successful, we'll effectively drive our old business model out of business. Like it doesn't mean that we won't continue to ensure patient safety and ensure the performance of doctors who are touching patients is at the top of the game. It's not going to change. But the way we thought we were doing that will be gone. We'll be doing it in just such a different, radically different way with the. With better. Go back to the impact. With better impact. That's it. That's the mission. That's it. And this is where, again, we are not going to have time for this. We're going to have to call this shortly. So I know it's end of the day for you and I've got to. I've got a breakfast with hopefully a future podcast interviewee that's going to be joining us. Just using AI, we can't get into. We can't get into this topic. I'd love to go deep with you on that one. But literally just using AI, I quickly dumped in what's a water charity that traces to projects and it's come back with charity Water. That's the name. So that's a good name. We should have remembered that name. Look, this has been amazing. Let's land this plane. I would love to have gotten to a bit more about your career and journey, but we probably don't have time for that. I do one question though, which is just on a personal level, how do you think you do things differently that probably most other people don't tend to do or even just one thing that you do differently differently that most other people tend not to do that gives you results? Man, that is such a difficult question. What do I do differently? Look, I would like to believe that I have a good sense with our team and it's not always. It's not always on target because the good news is that we have such a good relationship in some ways that when I misfire the way I am because I'm very vocal about things, people in our team, people have told me, they're like, hey, that's not helping. So I appreciate that. Okay. So that set aside as one of my flaws, right? Yeah. I think the power for me or the different thing about me with the teams is that it's the human first thing. We are the. We are a person first. We're not cogs. That philosophy generally, I like to think it's a very humanist philosophy measured with moments, using CX term moments that matter. I also strongly believe that there are times when a team needs you to lead them. And confusing empowerment for abdicating responsibility in those moments is the mistake. Right. That's not empowerment. So having a good feel and it's the best way I can describe it it's just a feel. Thing is this is the moment where I have to say the thing and this is the thing we're going to do. And now we're good here, right? And then now we can go back to being friends and humanity and all the things. But there are those moments where you have to be a little more sharp and more. More precise. Look, last thing I guess is just learning. I do have a curiosity. I love learning about stuff almost to a flaw. A friend of mine told me the other day is you over overshot. You hate output so much that you went to too many inputs. It's like you're just obsessed and addicted to input. And I'm like, yeah, you're probably not wrong. Yeah, yeah. It's not a bad place to be living though. That deep curiosity about our work and the way the world works I think is. It's always served me pretty well. Any sort of level of curiosity is what useful. So learning, reading all those good things. On that note, what are you reading at the moment or what are you learning about as would not surprise anybody. You just heard what I said. As I have a stack of books that most of them are not read or partially read. I did manage to succeed successfully read Thinking in Systems, which is a nice. A very nice short book. Classic book from the. I think it was originally written in the early 90s, but a beautiful book. So I definitely recommend that to anybody. And it doesn't matter if you're in tech or not. The system thinking is a really nice thing. That's one, isn't it? It's a different one. It's just called Thinking in Systems. You can find it. The COVID of it is a multicolored slinky look. I love that book so much. I actually gave a copy to everybody on leadership positions in the tech division just last month, I think. So that one I finished. Great book. I'm currently into another one called Mind Masters, which is a newer book. This is about psychology and how algorithms manipulate human psychology. That one I just got started with. But it's fascinating. Written by a woman from Columbia University who was one of the people who cracked the Cambridge Analytica scandal back in, I think, 2016. That one's a cool. That one seems to be pretty cool. And last but not least, anybody that's on video, I've got Better, Simpler Strategy, which is a nice book from Felix Obohozer guy who's one of the professors over at hbs. And then I've got Driving Digital Strategy downstairs from Sunil Gupta who's another professor at hbs. So I'll stop there with those four. Those are on the current rotation right now. Yep. Yeah. Thinking in systems like that, to me, you started with that one. I feel like that's a really good place to start. That was one that I remember reading. So. Yeah, it was Donella Meadows. But yeah. Yeah, that's right. That is a ripper book. So definitely worth checking out. They all are amazing. I haven't read all of them though, so that's. That. That sounds like a bit of a reading list for myself here. That's amazing. That's right. So there's always so much to. That's the problem. That's the problem is I can't. The speed at which content is coming at us. Right. This is the addiction to in. That's. Yeah, it is. But if you apply it then it's useful. Right. That's the main thing. One look. This has been absolutely fabulous. I am so frustrated. I could go on like this for hours. But we got a call it there. Thank you so much for joining me today. Last thing, is there anything else that you'd want to share before we wrap up? Feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn. I like engaging with people. I love helping other nonprofits. I know, Tim, you and I have helped mutually other people that are starting on their journeys. Right. If anybody has questions or doubts or fears or uncertainty. The FUD. Yeah, I'm on LinkedIn. Probably the easiest way to find me is through Tim's website because Juan Sanchez is the probably one of the most common names on the planet. But I do think I did lock in a good URL for my profile. I think it's slash Juan's profile, so that might work. I think that's right. I like it. I like it. But anyway. Or find me through Tim. Well, we'll pop it in the show notes but people can jump in there. Look, honestly, you've put this offer out a few times and I was like, Juan has no idea what he's in for. He's going to be book solid for six weeks and you got a few people, but not a lot. It's blows my mind if someone is going on this journey again. We're happy to talk to non for profits and NGOs free of charge. Of course you are as well. And you've lived the journey, led an organization through this experience and really seen all the challenges. You got all the battle scars for it. It's crazy to me that people reach out to you. So yeah, I think that's a little shout out. If anyone does want any tips and advice and help, reach out to Juan. He's more than happy to help. Absolutely awesome, Juan. Thank you so much for your time. Keep making impact. I can't wait to catch up with you soon. Have an amazing rest of your day. Cool. Thank you, Tim. See ya. That was Juan Sanchez from Intellios. What an epic conversation that was. I had such a good time chatting to him. Here's my top three takeaways. I was writing them down as I was going. So number one is impact okrs over outputs. I think this is something where we talk about traditional organizations. If you're going to take away one thing that's a really big consideration you need to make is how do we make sure where driving outcomes, not just the projects and doing the stuff. A long laundry list of things. Cross team collaboration. You've got to get that happening to break through your silos. Otherwise it's very hard to make a meaningful impact. Creating a learning culture where you're willing to explore, test things out, fail and learn. All those pieces are so important. That was incredible. For me, if you're a four purpose organization, Wine is always keen to have a chat, so I encourage you to reach out to him. You'll find him on Twitter, LinkedIn. Absolutely incredible person to know. If you want to learn a bit more about okrs or get some of the templates and practices that Intellios has been using to get their practices really nailed, head over to okrquickstart.com podcast and you'll have everything there. We'll drop a link in the show notes as well. Until next time, keep ultra focused on the impact you're trying to make and bringing your team on the journey to maximize everything that you do. Have an amazing rest of your day and I'll catch you on the next podcast.