How to get past the "messy middle" of a big change | Mary Martin

Modupe Akinola (0:00)

This past spring was a particularly tough one. My mom had a stroke. If you've been listening to my podcast for a long time, you've probably heard me talk about my mom a lot. That's because so many of the lessons on leadership and perseverance and team building, I learned from her. And she's doing better now, but it's definitely been a journey which has included her working really hard at rehab to regain some of what she lost from the stroke.

We're at this point in the journey that I'm sure a lot of you listeners will recognize either from your own experience or a loved one's. You're not at the absolute bottom, you've made progress, but you're also not at the top. You're somewhere in the messy middle. You have to keep reminding yourself to not lose confidence, to be proud of the distance you've already traveled, and above all, you have to find the strength to keep going.

I'm Modupe Akinola, this is TED Business, a podcast from TED. Our speaker today, transformation expert, Mary Martin, is here to assure us to keep the faith during our time in the messy middle. Change is hard, it takes time, and it can feel like we're not on the right track, even when we are. But in the meantime, she's giving us three tips on how to spot glimmers of progress when we need it the most. Then, after the talk, I'll share some thoughts on being in the middle of someone else's messy middle. But first, a quick break.

And now, Mary Martin takes the TED stage.

Mary Martin (1:48)

I snapped this photo of my daughter this summer when we had the chance to hike together on our vacation in Colorado. I know you can't see her face, but I promise she's smiling. She is so glad she made it to the top of the mountain. But actually, the photo op almost didn't happen. Because after starting out with incredible optimism and excitement and joining me on this hike, she quickly began to grow tired. Her seven-year-old legs after an hour of steep terrain had had all they could take, and she was getting frustrated and teary-eyed. And I realized I needed to shift from hiking companion to cheerleader. I know you can do it. I've actually been to the top of this mountain, and we're almost there. Of course, we can turn around if you need to, but I think you're going to be glad that you made it.

She was really ready to give up, but then she scrambled up that last little ledge to the top, and all of that frustration faded as she saw the view and took in the sunshine. She was so proud of herself.

Now, even if you've never been hiking, which I do encourage if you haven't, I imagine you can relate to this story, because no matter whether you've started a business, made a big career switch, or just tried to take up tennis at the age of 40, not that I know anything about that, we all have experienced what I call the messy middle. It's that moment when the pinnacle seems completely out of reach, even though you've done everything right.

As a senior leader in BCG's digital and AI practice, I've worked with dozens of business leaders as they've transformed their companies using new technologies. Almost every one of these transformation journeys starts out in the same way. There's a lot of excitement, there's a lot of optimism, because everyone knows this is the opportunity to do something new. But inevitably, they hit the messy middle. Maybe results are slow to materialize. Maybe their teams start to lose confidence. Or maybe the market changes. It's out of their control. And no matter what the context, just like my daughter, even very seasoned executives, grow frustrated in this moment. And many of them actually want to call off the transformation.

Well, as much as we want to avoid those messy middle moments, I would argue not only are they inevitable, they're a good thing. Why? Because messiness is a sign of bold ambition. Change absolutely is hard, simply because it's hard. Transformation without a messy middle means you probably won't get the big results you were hoping for. And so instead of being afraid of this moment, you should embrace it. It means you're on the right track. Okay, obviously, that doesn't make it easy. We need tools to weather the messy middle successfully. And my advice is to look for glimmers of progress, small indicators that you're on the right track, even when the summit is completely out of sight. The first place I look for these glimmers of progress is in results for the business. So, one of my clients is a fast food chicken brand. And when we started working together, their operations were fairly slow. It took about 18 minutes to cook an order of chicken wings. And that was because they were cooking fresh chicken and not precooked frozen chicken. So I don't know if you've ever had chicken wings, but when they're freshly cooked, they are delicious. But customers were pretty unhappy because time was long. They didn't want to wait that long. We needed a way to speed things up without sacrificing quality. So we designed an AI-powered forecasting tool that would predict how many customer orders were going to be placed and then would guide the employees in the store on how much chicken to prepare so there was always fresh chicken when orders were placed. Great vision. The CEO knew this was the right approach. But it was going to take some time. We needed to design, we needed to build, and then we needed to scale it out. And in the meantime, the CEO had to go to all those franchisees and convince them that they should make some meaningful investments in this new technology. We didn't have a year to wait and hope that the results turned out like we expected. So we focused on finding glimmers of progress. We built a very rudimentary version of the tool. And then we took it on a clipboard, printed Excel sheet and a pen, we went one night into a restaurant, and we stood with the employees and we guided them on how to prepare the food. So, how about you drop 25 chicken wings into the fryer now? 15 minutes later, now drop 60 chicken wings into the fryer. That first test showed great promise. We were seeing a couple minutes shaved off their speed of service. Certainly wasn't perfect, no one wants to do this manually, but it showed the potential, and it was enough to give the entire leadership team conviction that we were on the right track. In the months that followed, we kept investing in the solution, improving it, so we were seeing a 50% improvement in speed of service. And as more restaurants were testing it, seeing better and better results, franchisees grew excited, investors grew excited, and they were ready to scale to the entire system. Without that very first test and that glimmer of progress, it would have been really hard to have conviction for what became a multi-year journey.