Episode #63: Tastes Like Chicken

What’s cooking in today’s episode? A little chicken, some vegetables, and a delectable story about changing your mindset. We turn up the heat as we look at when a limitation might not really be a limitation. Winner, winner. Chicken dinner!

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PODCAST TRANSCRIPT

Yeah, welcome to the CXM Experience. And today, we’re gonna be talking about chicken. Yep, we’re talking about chicken today. We’re actually going to tell a fun story about chicken, it actually comes from my lovely fiancé, Rachel Lyn Honig. And Rachel tells this story all the time. But she doesn’t listen to this podcast. So I’m going to… I’m crediting her, but I am also ripping this story off, but she won’t ever hear it. So I don’t have to worry about her being disappointed that I told the story. And don’t anyone out there tell her.

Alright, so this is a fun story. This all goes to mindset, and how we like to do things the way we like to do them. So, let me tell you the story about grandma’s chicken. And I think maybe I’ll tell the story in first person, like it’s my story, okay? So that’ll make it feel a little bit more personal. And I’ll just start this as my grandmother had a chicken recipe, okay? I’ll start it that way, and then I’ll go from there. And you can use this story and tell it in different ways. I’ll highlight a couple of the important story elements at the end of the story. So you understand what’s going on in the story. And you yourself will start to use this story as an example when you see this kind of mindset operating. So, let’s start.

Okay, so my grandma had an amazing chicken recipe, really incredible actually. And I think she had probably learned it from someone in her family, and I really wanted to know how to make it as well. And my mom was not really super interested in duplicating her mom’s recipes for… I don’t actually know why. But for some reason, she didn’t do that. But I really wanted to learn how to do this and it was gonna be a big deal for me to do it. And the way it was done is that it was a roast chicken recipe, but it was with vegetables. And you would have a bunch of red potatoes, little small red potatoes, maybe eight of those. And five medium carrots, and a couple of sweet potatoes. And all these are peeled and cut into one inch pieces, small pieces. Then a large onion peeled and cut into eight wedges. A couple cloves of garlic that were minced, three tablespoons of olive oil. A large lemon, zested and then juiced. A couple of teaspoons of Dijon mustard, it’s got a secret ingredient. And then some kosher salt and pepper to taste.

And what you do is you take the chicken you cut the legs off, and then you would put the body of the chicken in and then you’d layer the vegetables around. Usually best to mix them around. Not have them in sections, but have the carrots and the potatoes and the red potatoes and sweet potatoes all kind of mixed together with the onion. But sometimes I might take the onion wedges and might put them around the edge in slightly different patterns instead of mixing them in, but you get the idea. And put the chicken legs on top and then put some of the olive oil, lemon, garlic and stuff and Dijon on top of all that, and then put whatever remaining vegetables you have on top of that. It’s almost a little bit layered as a roast chicken. And so that’s how the recipe worked. And it comes out delicious. The vegetables are all roasted, and they soak up the juice of the chicken. The chicken skin is like nicely brown, looks gorgeous. These are the elements of it, and the whole thing it’s like an entire meal in one spot.

So, my grandmother had been making this for years and so I wanted to do it. And I wasn’t super old. Let’s say 10ish. And I got the chicken, I cut it apart, took the legs off, put the les to the side actually. Took all the vegetables. Chopped all the vegetables which took forever when I was that age. So I was chopping all the vegetables up and I probably only cut myself a couple times. And then I put the chicken body in, put the vegetables in. I think the first time I did it, I mixed the onion up, but I didn’t like that because it broke the onions apart. They weren’t in wedges anymore. So I’ve changed that since then. Then put the chicken legs on top, and then put on the olive oil and lemon and the mustard. Put that on top of that and put that in the oven. It took a long time. It was really elaborate. It was kind of tricky cutting the legs off. Putting the body together and getting all the vegetables chopped up and putting all that in. But it was great.

Then put it in the oven. I was pretty proud of it. I thought it was, for me, probably the most complicated thing I had cooked to that point in time. And you cook it for about 45 minutes, baking it around 375 or maybe higher. I think some people would do at around 425 degrees, depending on how aggressive you want to be.

Anyway, so I sat down, made this, served it to my grandma. And she looked at it and she said, Wow, it looks amazing. Like, it looks just like the way I make it. And then then she has a bite and tastes it, and she’s like, wow, it tastes just like I make it. It’s a great job and really delicious. And I really enjoy it. And I’m really proud of myself. And then she looked at me, I only have one question. I said what, what’s the question? She says, why’d you cut the legs off? I said, well, you always cut the legs off when you make this chicken. That was part of the recipe. And she started laughing. And she said that’s just because I don’t have a pot that’s big enough.

So, what I love about this story is that this becomes enshrined, like the way we do a thing often becomes enshrined. And often the way we do a thing is driven by a limitation that we have. That may not be a limitation in the future. But we continue to do the thing that’s enshrined in the process. And Rachel is constantly saying, “Oh, looks like you had to cut the chicken legs off” when she sees something being done over and over again that may not be necessary to be done that way anymore. But that’s just the way we’ve always done it. Take a look, you’ll notice that you’re cutting the chicken legs off on a lot of things that you don’t necessarily have to anymore, because that’s the way you’ve always done it. And and then ask yourself, Well, maybe it will be tasty with the legs still attached, right? That’d be fun.

Anyway, the current core elements of the story to make it interesting is you have to have a little bit of a recipe in mind. So, in this case, I’m using a recipe called Bonnie’s roasted chicken with vegetables, because it’s slightly distracting and adds some interest. Because we all like recipes, right? So, we all like to think about, hey, you know, how’s this being made. And you have to have some element of the reality of a real recipe to it. Think through, like, that sounds like something I might like to cook. And actually, Bonnie’s roasted chicken with vegetables does sound quite delicious. The second thing is you need to repeat the fact that you cut the chicken legs off enough times that when the punch line comes, you’re aware of the fact that this chicken doesn’t have his legs attached, right? I repeated that three times. But I did it as part of a more elaborate description of how to put together this meal. So, it didn’t just sound like well, why is he so focused on the chicken legs being cut off? Right? You heard it, but it didn’t necessarily flag to you that that’s really weird, because it sounds like part of an overall recipe. That’s another part of the story. And then I think the other thing that makes it interesting is to personalize it, which takes out the… sometimes the story is told from the perspective of, but that can sometimes come across a little bit misogynist. And you just tell it from your own perspective, then it takes that element out of it entirely.

So, there you go, fun story on mindset. I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did. I think that for me, mindset is the core thing that stands in the way of transformation. We’re so used to always having to cut the legs off. We’re so used to having done it that way all the time. We’re so used to having to report it this way, or so and so likes to see it this way, or whatever other set of preconceived notions that we trap ourselves into thinking have to be done every time. It makes it really difficult to drive change. And when we talk to customers, and at Sprinklr, we’re always talking to customers who are at some stage of digital transformation, and sometimes at a significant stage of digital transformation. And we talked to those customers. Their issue is not that they need to do it. Everyone gets that and my gosh, this year if anything has proved that digital transformation is not just an important thing to do. It is probably critical to the survival of the organization. We had one customer, Piaget the watch company, they are very deeply into their digital transformation journey, long before 2020 hit. And they had been doing a lot of really exciting work with us and in their own platforms. And during the last year their business has gone up. It’s been great for them even though they’re a retailer and even though they’re a luxury watch manufacturer They’ve had a great year. And that’s been driven by the fact that they were well along on their journey. So people who had not started yet have been struggling to catch up. They will, there’s a good chance you can, so keep going. But this transformation journey is the hard part of all this.

And I think the hard thing about transformation is really the mindset. People don’t like change, people don’t like to change, even when change is important. There’s an amazing stat that Carlos Dominguez uses. I think he talked about it in our podcast of a few weeks ago, where when people are sent home from the hospital after a heart attack, they’re given some lifestyle changes to make. And these are important lifestyle changes, changes that will determine how long they live. So, change that is essentially your life depends on, right. And the compliance rate for people with these lifestyle changes, is not eight out of 10, or seven out of 10. It’s two out of 10. 80% of the people choose death over change in this particular case. So, if that’s how people are handling their lives, how they’re gonna react to your digital initiative, right? And so, we do work really hard on how to how to manage mindset. And a lot of mindset is really getting alignment around the core issues.

And the Digital Customer-First Transformation System that we have at Sprinklr, which we offer for free and do workshops on all the time, and which I’ve been going over the last week, is a great way to drive that alignment and get people on the same page. So given that, I am going to be picking up DCFTS, in our next podcast, and we’re going to be moving on to my favorite, the maturity model and talking about that. Probably dig into that for a couple of episodes. And then we’ll move into the ROI model, the use case model, and the reference architecture. So probably five more shows or so on DCFTS and we’ll wrap that up.

And for today’s mindset story, I hope you enjoyed it. And try out Bonnie’s chicken too. Sounds pretty good. Dijon mustard is good idea. All right, I’m hungry. That’s it for today. The CXM Experience. I’m Grad Conn, CXO at Sprinklr, and I’ll see you next time.