An Anthropological Lens On Leadership In Life Sciences With Bunka's Monika Sumra, Ph.D.

On this week's episode of the Business of Biotech we speak with Monika Sumra, Ph.D., about how leadership, culture, and performance emerge from the environment and conditions inside an organization. Dr. Sumra, Founder and Managing Partner at Bunka, Inc., a management consulting firm and advisor to manufacturing-based organizations globally, explains how anthropology, CPIs, and rapid ethnography make culture measurable and operations faster, safer, and more reliable. Deploying a unique lens built on biosocial anthropology, she offers guidance on creating environments for sustainable performance in the complex life sciences industry. 

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Transcript

Meet Monika Sumra, Ph.D. And Bunka

Ben Comer 0:06

Welcome back to the Business of Biotech. I'm your host, Ben Comer, Chief Editor at Life Science Leader, and today I'm speaking with Dr. Monika Sumra, founder and managing partner at Bunka Incorporated, a management consulting firm and advisor to manufacturing-based organizations globally. Monika is a published author and speaker with a unique lens built on a PhD in biosocial anthropology. Her work with life sciences organizations sits at the intersection of leadership, performance, and environment. By focusing on environment, Bunka helps organizations develop and set the conditions for sustainable leadership, responsibility, and results. I'm pleased to speak with Monika today about how life sciences companies can build better work environments to set themselves up for success, how to bring quantitative analysis to corporate culture, and how the tools of anthropology can be used to drive efficiencies in key functional areas like manufacturing. Monika, thank you so much for being here.

Monika Sumra, Ph.D. 1:09

It is my pleasure. Thank you so much for having me on. I really appreciate it.

Ben Comer 1:14

Yeah, well, I'm excited to speak with you. Uh, I think you bring an interesting perspective that uh we haven't heard on the business of biotech. And I I want to maybe just start there with your background. I mentioned you received a PhD uh biosocial anthropology from the University of Toronto. How did you become initially interested in in this field?

Monika Sumra, Ph.D. 1:36

So very good question. And for me, it's always really been I've already always been interested about how people learning how people actually behave when the stakes are real, not how we sing we behave or how we design systems really assuming how people will behave. So these are these are things that I was always interested in. And so anthropology really gave me a way to really study humans and context, right? That's what anthropologists do. Um, and the the great thing about anthropology is that it doesn't separate people from environments. And what we look at as anthropologists in any sort of social context is, you know, how does power, hierarchy, uncertainty, and really meaning, you know, shape behavior over time. And that's really what made me very, very interested in it. And once you start seeing behavior that way, a lot of what we call failure really starts to look more like adaptation over time. And for me, that's the whole idea of being interested in that was just interesting, actually about human beings, just more generally, because I happen to be one. So it's it's it's just really going deeper and really understanding my own ways of thinking, challenging myself, and really becoming that individual who really takes all these different perspectives into consideration, you know, before coming to a conclusion. So that's really what got me interested in it as I progressed.

Ben Comer 3:04

Have you always been a kind of student of human behavior? Uh, or do you, you know, was that something like even as you know, as a child or a young adult that you were kind of like thinking about and then, you know, ultimately crystallized in this, you know, field that you could follow? Or was it something that kind of struck you later on as just a a really important and and super interesting area to, you know, to learn more about?

Monika Sumra, Ph.D. 3:31

You know, we if we had all our time, I'd tell the whole story, but I've always been interested in it. I I think like many people, I did lose my way, right? Going through when you're younger, you're so inquisitive. You really want to learn about all the differences out there, differences of different thoughts and different ways of understanding. And that as we grow older, I think, into adults, we start to become more sedimented in our ways and we we kind of, you know, veer towards things that are make us feel more comfortable in that comfort, I think, in a way. Now, if I look at it, but since you asked me that question, it seems more like an adaptation to that particular situation. So there did come a point in my time where I thought, you know, I I I was pretty good at understanding perspectives. I I I've got this down path. But then when I went back to university, so I actually went back to university when I was much older in my life and got my PhD, my master's and my PhD most recently in 2019. So I'm a very new doctor, if you will. And it was during that time I realized, wow, I there's a lot I really don't know about the world, and I really need to open my eyes in a in a more profound way in order to really understand what's truly earthing individuals and what's truly shaping their lives. And so, yeah, I did have it as a child, short answer. I kind of got used to life the way it was, and then it became revitalized, and I've never looked back since. It's always still about that for me.

Ben Comer 5:06

Can you describe maybe um some of your research that you did during the doctorate uh program? I'm curious kind of uh about what you know, what you were studying.

Rethinking Leadership Through Anthropology

Monika Sumra, Ph.D. 5:17

Yeah, yeah, that's a great question. So my doctoral research really focused on how leadership really, leadership identities really get constructed. So how you know unstable many of our assumptions really are about leadership. That's and leadership traits. That's what I was really looking at. Uh the human alpha female was was my focus, and that work really came out of that thinking. When I really dug deep, you know, I found that the term really got borrowed from animal research, right? And it's used very loosely in human context. We hear it a lot, like person's an alpha, this is an alpha behavior. So I really wanted to understand, you know, what does that actually mean in real social life, if it meant anything consistent at all? Because, like I said earlier, people had different perceptions and perspectives of things. So, what really became clear for me very quickly was that the behaviors that people were, you know, really labeling as alpha, they aren't fixed traits. So they shift actually depending on context, on expectations, you know, what's rewarded and what's sanction. So you can be alpha in one environment and not in another. It's not like a one size fits all sort of thing. So the idea of leadership and influence and status really turned out to be very situational when I when I did the research. It's not inherent, which is sometimes a mistake we make as human beings and we label things and we say that's just the way it is. So that insight really that leadership is shaped by environment. I mean, that's where this whole journey for me is kind of started. That carries directly into my work today. Um, so in a nutshell, that's really um what my research here was about.

Ben Comer 7:02

What were the circumstances that led to the founding of Bunker? You know, at what point did you decide, you know, this is this is something that I can make an impact in, or you know, that I can help help companies be better at? What were those circumstances?

Monika Sumra, Ph.D. 7:17

So really, once once I started working with organizations, you know, in the consulting um field with my business partner, the the connection for me was really immediate, right? Organizations, believe it or not, are human systems. And that's what they got. They're human systems. So that was a big epiphany for me. So when I started, you know, really thinking about this, you know, I'm sure everybody would agree that you know a lot of operational and performance problems get framed as execution or capability issues, right? But when you really look closely, they're often really a predictable outcome of the conditions that people are operating in. We just take the time to look at those conditions.

Ben Comer 8:05

So those are less less visible though, right? Than than like this.

Monika Sumra, Ph.D. 8:18

They don't really they don't really factor into the situation. I like to call those things weak signals, if you will. So and what anthropology does is it gives us the tools and the thinking and the mindset and the um discipline really to go deeper, much deeper to into assumptions, into motivations, interpretations, and the patterns really beneath what people do. So it also allows us to see how those layers, right, really shape the outcome that we later measure as performance. So those numbers tell us a story. And uh what ethicality allows us to do in this way is to find a story and tell them what that story is behind those numbers.

Ben Comer 9:06

Yeah. Can you um just for uh for the audience, give an example or two of life sciences clients, or or if not specific clients, is the kind of companies uh that that Banka can help?

Monika Sumra, Ph.D. 9:20

Yeah, absolutely. Like we right now, we actually primarily work with biotech, pharma, medical device organizations, and even food manufacturing, you know, the ones that are heavily um invested in compliance and you know, revenue regulations, right? But especially we work with companies that are really in growth or transition and sometimes both, right? Um those types of environments really um the these environments really are with uncertainty. They have long timelines that to think about, and of course, regulatory pressures. There's a lot of that. So these types of organizations usually have a lot to coordinate across disciplines and often under ambiguity. So there's not it's not really clear all the time. So this that's where this is actually where the understanding of the system, not just the org chart, really becomes fritical. And that's kind of that's kind of the type of companies that we work with and and use our for. Really, you can use Bunco with any company to be anything, but this is kind of our niche.

Ben Comer 10:25

Got it, got it. Well, um, I want to get into kind of uh strategies uh for improving various functional areas, manufacturing efficiency, uh, et cetera. But before we do that, I I want to just kind of zoom out a little and think about leadership broadly and how you think about leadership using this anthropolog uh anthropological lens. We we've talked some about environment. We'll get back into that. But maybe my first question is um, you know, what what trends are you noticing with respect to leadership positions um and the people that want to be leaders? And if you want to say something kind of broadly just about anthropology and leadership and and how you think about it starting off.

From Research To Consulting: Founding Bunka

Monika Sumra, Ph.D. 11:10

Yeah, absolutely. I I I'll share some tribes with you to a couple of things that I am seeing. Uh, firstly, you know, anthropology really is a science of humanity, it's a science of human beings. So what a better way to look at a human system than through that lens, right? So for me, I really want to privilege that and and I'm very honored that I can I can do that. But anthropologically, I don't start with the leader. You ask me, you know, what do I think about leadership more generally? So I don't start with the leader, I start with really what shapes the conditions around them, right? So leadership isn't really just um a role, you know, or a set of traits. It really is a function that only becomes possible uh when the system supports judgment, accountability, and influence. So the system has to support that. And the reason I say this because I hear often, you know, when we work with individuals in the past or people have gone through, you know, they're they're very good leaders, they're very good players, they're they're really great at what they do. And most people are, but they struggle and they they struggle or they give up or they leave. It's because the environment doesn't take them in that direction. And those that do get fortified in the environment do different things. So my first thing is always really to understand um what's beneath what people do, not just what they they say they intend. So, what is this this requires then? This anthropological analysis really requires us to get in beneath that visible behavior, right, into the deeper currents, you know, that are shaping culture. So associations, motivations, trust, and like you said earlier, like kind of the unspoken rules about what's safe, you know, what's risky to do and what's risky not to do. So to do that, I look at how decisions really are actually actually, how do they actually get made? How does information flow where people feel, where do people feel safe speaking out, you know, and where do they feel that they've got to like protect themselves? So anthropology um lets me see these deeper patterns rather than just measuring, you know, specific specific surface behaviors, right? So I get to go really, really deep. And so for me, once once you see leadership in that way, you know, your focus shifts from fixing individuals and laying blame to really shaping the conditions so that people's judgment actually matters, right? And that's what we want at the end of the day. I hear this a lot. Um and when we we we're in that space where people's judgment actually matters, that's where sustainable performance follows. And I get asked that question all the time you know, how do you create sustainability? Well, you have to create the environment that allows for the leaders to create that sustainability. That's that's the way you do it. So the the trends I'm I'm seeing, you know, I see that a lot of people are shying away. I see a lot of people shying away from becoming leaders or going into a leadership role. People are individually in leaders, and a lot of the answers, you know, you hear is you know, hey, it's it's it's too much pressure. It's um very demanding of me. I have to be accountable for so much. I'm not good at the people stuff. How do I get people to do things, you know, out of their comfort zone? I want people to be innovative and creative. There's a lot that is expected of a leader, right, today. And that's been shaped a lot about what's happened over over the past years, you know, including COVID and now it'll be coming at the eye. So I I'm seeing that. I'm seeing people not being as um, not challenging themselves as much to go into that, not because they can't do it, but many are just afraid of wow, my neck is gonna be on the line if I if I do this. Can I keep going that fast? Can I balance my family life with all this pressure? So the prestige and or the the servant put, I guess, of leadership is becoming less and less you know attractive for for lack of the better word. And I'm seeing that. I'm I'm seeing good leaders. Every leader is good, I will say this, right? They're they're all doing what they need to do. But I've also seen trends where no matter how talented a person is, the environment doesn't allow that individual to exercise their talents in the way they need to. And that puts strain on them. And so what what do a lot of people do in those situations? They they leave or they check out, and so that's another trend. A lot of talent loss, right? Uh, a lot of knowledge loss. And a lot of these things to me are they go back to leadership, but but leadership has to be sustained in an environment. So those are a couple of things that that I'm seeing over over the past few years. And I'm seeing it more and more now than ever before.

Ben Comer 16:14

That's really interesting. And I I think it it takes us back to this underlying system and an environment that a leader is working in. And you talk about, you know, going deep on these, you know, what are the motivations? What are these kind of ingrained almost mores that exist you know, within a within a company? How do you uncover those things? How do you find out, you know, what those motivations are? Is it, you know, just like long, extensive conversations with various employees? Like what do you how do you get at those kind of underlying elements that that you know seem so important to whether or not a a leader and a company, you know, is able to succeed?

Measuring Culture With CPIs

Monika Sumra, Ph.D. 17:00

Um, the good that's a really, really good question. There's it's a lot of work. So when we go deep, first of all, we have to have a very skilled team that's going to look at very different areas of the organization. But a lot of it is we use the anthropological approach, right, to to collecting data. We need we need to look at all the hard data. We want to look at all the KPIs, we look at all that information, we have conversations with people, we do observations. We're we're trained in understanding the nuances of behavior. So when it's basically a collection of all this qualitative and quantitative data, and then obviously we do a deep, deep analysis of that to connect the behaviors and assumptions with the performance at the end of the day. But it does involve time, right? So but we do something called rapid ethnography, if you will. So that there's ways to do it very quickly. You know, when you have the right team, you're you're looking at the right issues, you we're able to go in and and and do that as well. Now we we don't just go in and uncover things where things are going wrong. Like I said earlier, sometimes companies want to grow and they're doing they're doing great, they have sustainable results, but it's okay. What could be lurking in the background that could prevent us from when we acquire this organization, you know, what could what could happen to us? Could could you know is there an obstacle that we're seeing? So that that's what we would go in and go deeper. But basically, we go in using the methodologies, and we have a very specific methodology we use to go in and cover all these things, but we partner with the people in the organization. So we're not coming in on the top and and just doing that. We were living and breathing and feeling what everybody else is trying to feel in their daily lives and what how they're making meaning of it. And so a lot of it involves all these different aspects. And that our team goes out and you know, we we divide and conquer and then come back and then we paint that picture. I often use the analogy um, the picture on the puzzle box. That's kind of what I use quite often. So if you think about it, most companies probably have a good idea of what that picture looks like. Maybe it was a great, it was perfectly, you know, in color and everything was perfect when it was formed, but over time it may have faded. Or there's some sort of some crap. So we want to go and see well, what was that picture, or is there even a picture? And what is what does that picture actually look like now? So we may come up with something that's a little more fractured, or something that's you know, just a little faded, but it's still there, and there's opportunities there. So that's what we kind of do at the end of the day. We we paint the picture that you already painted before, but show you what it looks like now. And based on what you're looking for, work with solutions with the company itself. Our goal is not to come in and do the work for you. We we we can do that. The goal is to help you sustain those results. So it's using all these human, human ways of doing it. We have very specific um measures we use, very specific ways of collecting data, analyzing the data. We use very robust analytical systems so that you can actually measure and see really what the story is, right? Behind those KPIs. So I hope I introduce something there.

Ben Comer 20:24

No, that's uh that's really interesting. And I I I want to ask a follow-up on that, you know, bringing uh quantitative uh analysis to an area like you know, culture environment, for example, you know, these are areas that are considered soft sciences uh often and are sort of governed by feel. And, you know, people say, yeah, we have a great corporate culture. But um, what what more could you say, Monika, about you know, bringing hard data to you know, a soft science like like corporate culture? Can you give me an example of you know maybe one or two things that that you're collecting data around?

Monika Sumra, Ph.D. 21:01

Absolutely, I can. The this is where where kind of the field of anthropology really comes in. So as an anthropologist, we're doing a lot of statistical analysis. We take qualitative data and we quantify the qualitative data. So it was that sort of thinking and that sort of research methodology, you know, that has influenced, you know, some of the things that we do now here at Bunka. So we use something called that we developed called CPIs. So everybody knows that a KPI is a key performance indicator, right? I never make an assumption because sometimes people mean something else. But CPIs, we call them cultural performance indicators, and they work kind of hand in hand with the KPIs. If you think of a KPI, KPIs tell you what already happened, right? It's already happened, so it's it's a light, it's a laping indicator, if you will, right? But CPIs that we've designed and we customize them depending on the situation we're looking. At and what our clients are looking to achieve, they tell me what's forming now. So they tell you the human conditions that are going to are shaping future results. So it's your eye into the future, right? It's that window into the future. So together, when when CPIs are paired with KPIs, they really reveal that full system. So you're now looking at the system with both eyes wide open. So there's no softness there. There, there it's very, very measurable. And it's actually hard to deal with soft stuff. Yeah, it's kind of a leather than an oxymoron. But but it is, it's very difficult because even though it's innate to us as human beings, how do you quantify that? How do you look at it and make it invisible? So our goal is to make the invisible visible, measure it. And then a couple examples I can give you. You know, again, I just repeat KPIs tell you what already happened, CPIs tell are going to tell you what's forming now, the human conditions that are shaping those future results. So what we could be measuring for somebody would be things like trustful. What does the trust flow look like? What does the decision latency look like? You know, how long does it take uh on average for a decision to stay stuck somewhere? Right. And belief alignment. I I get this question asked often, you know, we have all these beliefs and values, but how do we know if people are aligned? Um, the other thing is I sometimes ask leaders, you know, you you have a vision, you have a strategy that you've got in your head. How do you know if people are aligned with that? To what degree is that aligned? So that's it, that's another example. Things like follow-through, you know, measuring that, that's a that's a good CPI. Right. And these are these are things that are kind of all upstream of speed, quality, reliability, and execution. So hand in hand together, it's it's pretty magical because you get this really full picture of, okay, now when I make a decision, I I can see the whole thing. Now that picture on the puzzle box is really, really clear. And I can see the fine lines in it, uh, not just some sort of faded hue, right? So that's that's an example of of how you take that what is people think is soft and show you that it's it's actually powerful. Maybe soft, but it's a very pun.

What Culture Is And How It Emerges

Ben Comer 24:28

Um most, if if not all of the leaders I've spoken with on the business of biotech agree that that company culture you know directly correlates or even causes good or bad company performance. But then often they don't have much more to say about corporate culture and kind of what what makes it or breaks it beyond a kind of statement of values, uh, many of which are are quite similar across uh different companies, you know, patients first, uh, of course, uh as kind of a an example. You know, what what does anthropology have to say about corporate culture? And and I guess how do you think about, and you know, you're you're bringing you just gave some, I think it really interesting examples of of data that you can bring to some of this, but um, how do you think about improving a company's culture?

Monika Sumra, Ph.D. 25:21

True. So there's there's a couple of things. Firstly, culture isn't just you know the value statements that you were just talking about or visible behaviors. It's really built, like I said earlier, from deeper layers. It's built from assumptions, beliefs, interpretation, behaviors, actions, all those things. And all of those layers are really shaped by conditions that people are operating in, right? So I always say, people ask me this question often, Monika, how do you change culture? Um, I wrote an article on this too. And I always say you don't fix the best way to change culture is don't fix it because you can't change culture directly. Culture is an emergence, it emerges, right? So what you have to do is you've got to work on the conditions shaping beliefs and behavior, right? When we work on those conditions and those conditions start to ship, and then then culture shifts, right? So when culture shifts, now not per then not performance becomes more predictable and sustainable. And that that's what every company is looking for. I walk in the door, I know how my days are gonna go, I know what it can deliver to the marketplace, I know what my people are capable of. It's that assurety everybody's looking for. But when you're trying to change culture, because culture doesn't actually exist as a thing, it is a product of everything else. So you really can't change that. I I often the analogy I often use about culture is when you're trying to create the right culture and inputs, your culture has to be kind of like jello, right? And if you think you think about jello, like you make you make a mold on jello, it it has a form, right? It's got this form, you can see it, but it it wobbles, right? It has flex doped into it. So culture must have flex doped into it. And a lot of the times I think people are looking to define culture as something fixed and permanent. And by its very nature, culture is dynamic, it changes all the time. So obviously, it can't be a thing that you change, it's the things you bring into it that have to change. I give you a very clean example. Think about it. If um a new leader comes on board with a different thought process, different experience, they're gonna bring a different lens into the next, right? And that's gonna change things. And and people will say, Well, that's not our culture, that's not the way we do it. We do it like this. The culture is all about change, it's all about moving and grooving. So once you create, it goes back to what I said right at the beginning. It's the environment that has to be created. The culture will emerge from that. And so when we're hiring people, when we're changing processes, when we're doing all these things for the organization, we've got to ask ourselves is are all these things gonna be in service to the environment that we want? Because it is that our environment that's gonna create the culture that's gonna give us the performance we're looking for. So that's how you, you know, I guess the discipline to think about, but how I, as an anthropologist, think about it. And not just as an anthropologist, just as a business leader myself, as someone who's operates my own business. Um this is the way I think and this is the way it is for me, right? And uh that's what lens we look. And so yeah, I wonder what you had to say about that.

Ben Comer 28:50

Yeah, well, I mean, I I wanted to uh actually ask you about you mentioned ethnography uh earlier. And um I I remember, you know, being in a kind of sociology 101 class uh in in college, and I was always really taken by ethnography. I thought it was super interesting, but I I feel like culturally we've kind of moved away from anthropology with more of a focus, I think, on large quantitative data sets. Um, and I and the reason I bring this up is I I I would love to have you, Monika, explain what ethnography is for folks that that maybe aren't um don't don't know what what that particular field is and kind of how that plugs into the work that you do uh with life sciences companies.

Monika Sumra, Ph.D. 29:40

Yeah, absolutely. And I do want to say though that the quantitative data is extremely important.

Ben Comer 29:45

So it's not a one or the other, right?

Ethnography For Operations And Quality

Monika Sumra, Ph.D. 29:49

Yes, exactly. And I uh traditional anthropologists, if you look at sociocultural anthropologists, they're always looking at um, you know, the social, the behavior, all that stuff that I talked about. But we we do ethnography a little bit differently. We do well because we're business people, we understand that the numbers, you know, at the end of the day, it's about the dollars and cents, it's about the profit, it's about getting that quarter, it's about getting stuff out to the client, it's about potential recalls and deviations. Those things are very important. But we look at those through the through the lens of saying, okay, this is telling us a lot more about the behaviors and shape. So we we take them together. So ethnology really, in very simple terms, it's really the systematic observation of how work actually happens. That's how we look at it, right? So for us, it's actually what happens means it means the numbers, it means the data collection, it means how we look at the data, how do we interpret the data, it means qualitative, quantitative, it means all of it, right? The whole shebang. So we're not just looking at things ethnographically, more we're talking about ethnography, we're not looking just at how things are designed on paper. So I could think of a process flow. We're not just looking at, you know, what is the ideal process, and we're looking at what happens in each step in the process, what was the environment of each of the steps of the process, what happens in between, behaviorally, scientifically, socially, um, you know, and even from a process for regulatory compliance. Because our team looks up all that, right? So we're not just looking at design of paper from point to point and not have people say it happens, but what actually happens. Okay. Especially and at those points, you know, where interpretation really creeps in, um, or people compensate for ambiguity, right? So if something's unclear, what is it that they do? Do they escalate it? Do they work around it? You know, do they do they do they put their hand up? Do they ask somebody who's more experienced that what are they doing to get past that ambiguity? Right. So you can see that even though what I'm telling you is behavioral in itself has a very big impact, right? It's powerful, so it's not really stop. It's actually probably very critical, right? So for us, that's where we we we surface this invisible kind of friction in the system and also the invisible areas of you know greatness in the system, right? It's not just friction that we we find too. We find, wow, this could this be that best practice? Like, is this repeated somewhere else? This is really incredible the way things are done here. So we're not just looking at it from one ledge, it's the whole thing. So this is why the way we do ethnography, I will say, is I would say the non-traditional way. Uh, if we were to think about it in terms of how it would be done just behaviorally, we to look at it all. It's it's all of it has to be taken into consideration. That's what the outcome we gave is very unique at the end of the day, right? Because we're actually showing this particular behavior is connected to this result, and that most people, because you tell them the story of how it got there, right? Right. That's not soft. That's that's a clear path.

Ben Comer 33:07

And you have to go deep to understand that. I mean, I when I was thinking about ethnography, you know, I'm thinking about the anthropologist who goes and lives, you know, with a small tribe for months at a time and and really catalogs every tiny little behavior that's happening in that dynamic to try to understand what's happening in that specific, you know, example. And so, you know, when you talk about understanding environment, understanding leadership, and combining kind of a you know, a larger quantitative analysis with a a really deep uh ethnographic study of the you know the variables, you know, the individual actors with within a company, uh, that strikes me as powerful. Um, I want to move on to uh some of the examples that that you might be able to offer Monika on functional areas within a company, you know, where you can apply this kind of framework and then measure uh measure results. Uh, and maybe we can talk about manufacturing, but I'll I'll leave it up to you if there's a different example you want to use. But um, you know, we've talked a little bit about leadership and environment um broadly, but I wonder if we could kind of um narrow in a little bit and look at a functional area at a biopharma company and you know how you how you think about using that framework to improve you know efficiencies in manufacturing, for example.

Monika Sumra, Ph.D. 34:34

Right. I I mean as far as functional areas goes, it it's a we work with every single area.

Speaker 2 34:39

Okay.

Aligning Functions In Manufacturing

Monika Sumra, Ph.D. 34:40

The area where we would focus on would be based on really the need, but you really need that broad brush to understand because focusing on one area only will never be enough because even the area that functional area is is performing within a system. So if you've got one area working really, really well, but it doesn't connect to the other parts of that system, it's it's gonna be challenging, right? But typically when when we we come in, usually the the areas we're really focusing on, we get asked in right at the beginning is aligned quality and operations, right? That's typically maintenance, operations, quality, like getting that triad, that trusted triad to really speak each other's language is is very is very important. And one of the things that we really uh are to really, really kind of focus on is that quality itself isn't a functional area. Quality shouldn't be, must be the way you do the work, right? So, so and especially in biotech, this is very important. So a lot of the times, you know, how do you how do you define that? What does that look like? Helping helping the organizations create that. But typically, you know, when we're going into manufacturing, there's all these different aspects. You know, there's maintenance, there's there's quality, um, there, there's engineering, then you got operations itself. So there's all these different functional areas, supply chain, warehouse, all these things that have to kind of work in a system to get the work done. But we also look at sales too, right? So if I think of functional functional area, customer complaints are telling me a lot, right? What's that customer complaint telling me? We'll bring it back and say, okay, well, how does that relate to what we're doing here on the shop floor? So that's really, I would say, you know, where the system live and breathe. And really, it's in any industry. If you think about it, if I we go back to what we're talking about, the quantitative data, who developed that quantitative data or those data? Human beings did. Right. Humans did. Humans develop that. So we have to understand it. Um, because it was developed by people for a specific reason. So with that, that tells us what it what it what it you know, what it's supposed to tell us at the end of the day, right? So that's that's really, I think, everything that I can think of in terms of you know what functional areas. Really, there's no limit. And you said earlier, you know, people have gotten away from thinking about this, the the you know, ethnography and the behavioral piece. I I will say that I see actually tin bits of that every day. People are thinking about it. They are doing these things, and they are doing, they are thinking about behaviors, they are thinking about all these things. But what's challenging is they don't have something to hang it on or a framework to to to give it space and to make it invisible. And that's what we do by the time you know we're done or even in process, you can see it. You can see that framework. But everybody does have bits and pieces of it. Because human beings are human beings, after all, they they they really know what they're doing at the end of the day. So when you when you look at it, you you end up seeing when you show them what they can see, but you show it in a form that's understandable, it makes it a lot easier. And biotech, it's different from it's different from company to company too, depending on the industry you're in, depending on what class, the form of product you're making, or class and medical device you're manufacturing, it's gonna that that that framework is gonna change, but it'll become visible and and it'll make sense to you within that environment. So I hope I hope that makes sense.

Ben Comer 38:34

No, that's that's excellent. I I want to just um maybe follow up on that, you know, you talked about alignment, you know, across business functions at times, certainly between individuals. Um, what what can you what more could you say, Monika, about aligning mindset or aligning beliefs between individual team members and kind of you know how you do that? You know, you also mentioned the example of, you know, for example, uh, you know, a new leader coming into a company that maybe has a different perspective than the former leader, has a kind of different way of doing things, maybe a different set of beliefs. Um, what can you say about that mindset connection between individual team members and and um how do you work on that?

Monika Sumra, Ph.D. 39:21

Very, very good question. And it's a very deep answer. Leaders are leaders must be responsible for you know aligning those beliefs and behaviors across the entire operation, right? That's really it really it's really up to them at the end of the day, their effort.

Ben Comer 39:40

They have to actively do it.

Monika Sumra, Ph.D. 39:42

Actively do it, right? Because the idea of different perspectives, or what I like to call perspectivism, right? Which is you know, appreciating the perspectives of others, even if you don't agree with it, you're appreciating it, you're understanding it, you're you're you're bringing it in. That difference, we but that's what I would call difference, right? The difference is only an asset if an environment can integrate it. So the lead leaders first and foremost must be able must be able to do that, right? So their role should be in not creating sameness, right? But creating shared me. Because sameness needs it's just gonna be done this way, we all have to agree on this and we'll and we'll get going. And that's when others, people's thought must ages and start to creep in. That's when the work brows come in. That's when not following a procedure comes in or finding a different solution comes in because we're not appreciating the perspectives, right? We have to obviously in biotech, there are certain things you must do in a certain way. You cannot deviate from that, right? So if we know that, we have to build the fact that it's possible that somebody could deviate. So, how do we how do we build that into the process? Because we can't deviate from that, because we know human beings work like that. So it and that's what I mean by thinking about honestly, build it in, but understand that that's a possibility. So a leader's role, like I said, is to share, you know, create that shared meaning across groups so that the differences of opinion and differences of thought improve decisions rather than create friction, right? And that is that is really the the delicate uh role that a leader plays. And I always say when a new leader comes into an organization, the first thing they need to do is wander. You have great ideas, you were brought in, you are amazing at what you do. Maybe the board of directors thought, hey, you're gonna come and bring that stuff you did in Company X and help us become like that or get there. Yes, we can do that. But you can only do that if you know where you're gonna get pushed out, where it might be okay to do it, where it might not be okay to do it. Maybe it's already happening somewhere and you can leverage that. So you've got to wonder, spend the time wandering, spend the time understanding the business, even if you know the business, because you don't know that business. So really understand what the environment is. What is the environment? And how am I going to be responsible for shaping it or changing it so that I get the results that I need at the end of the day, right? And that's hard to do when they just come in, they're put under pressure right away, right? Get this done and get this done. So, you know, that's when we come in and we can help you, but but but even you can find your own help and say, look, I gotta I gotta slow down here for a minute. I gotta really understand the lay of the land, right?

Speaker 2 42:43

Yeah.

Monika Sumra, Ph.D. 42:44

So you gotta go in and and let people take you, don't push your way in. Right? You learn so much.

Ben Comer 42:54

What about uh it's it's 2026? We're hearing, I'm getting emails about it. We're hearing more and more about uh different types of AI implementations in the life sciences sector uh every day. And I I want to, you know, thinking about environment culture leadership, um, what are some of the things that that uh life sciences companies should should think about in terms of leadership and organizational culture before you know implementing AI tools? Uh how do you advise companies on that?

Building Belief Alignment And Shared Meaning

Monika Sumra, Ph.D. 43:31

I always think, you know, we need to think about AI not as a plug-and-play fix, right? Often that's what we we think of any tool, any tool that you want to introduce into uh your organization, it's like it's gonna fix this, right? We just put it in here and it's gonna fix. I always say it's important to think of AI as a magnifier, right? Of whatever environment already exists. So what do I mean? Before you adopt, you know, AI broadly, it's very important to understand what's actually shaping how people work, how they interpret information, and how do they make decisions? Not just what you say you value, but what people actually experience, right? So if leaders elevate, you know, attentions without, you know, examining the lived conditions that people are in, that any strategic tool, you know, including AI, can actually cause them to drift away uh from the outcomes that they were trying to support in the first place and achieve in the first place. So what does that mean? You know, I would say it's important to kind of ask some questions, right? Right off the bat if you're if you're thinking of the AI in there, you know, do people feel safe, right, to share truth, risk, and uncertainty? That's really important because you want to know. Is um judgment supported? When when people actually said judgment, is it supported with authority and accountability? Do are the incentive structures, you know, for example, do they align with what you say and with what you want, right? We have to understand that the what AI will do is it'll amplify patterns, okay, good and bad, right? Faster than anything else because it is AI, right? What you feed it, it's gonna feed on what you feed it, right? And and give give you give you that. So if the conditions aren't solid to begin with, then AI is gonna just simply steal the confusion even more, right? There's gonna be more bias and more misalignment. So really, it's not about choosing tools first, per se. It's really about understanding the environment, the culture very, very deeply and ensuring, you know, making sure that leadership, environment, and human experience are really intentionally aligned before you start layering any technology on top of it. Otherwise, it's gonna amplify. And you'll wonder why, hey, we got this and it's not really helping us. Well, because we didn't we didn't go back to see, you know, how people are actually creating meaning of this. I hear this a lot. People are afraid of AI. People think many people think their jobs are gonna be become obsolete. There's lots of stuff out there. So companies to un need to understand that even though somebody might say yes, you know, leaders will say yes, hey yeah, use AI. Even they uh have some form of fear, even they have some sort of it's uncertainty, but it's the unknown. And what any human being is space within the unknown, what do we do? We Google things. Google things, we try to find fix, we we try to implement things, and all of that is coming from a place of not experience. But your true Google or your true information is the people going down and finding out what's going on. That's really where you're gonna get everything you need to know. So AI is very powerful. It's gonna be a great partner, but we want to make sure that it's a partner that's going to be lifelong, um, and not a temporary relationship, right?

Ben Comer 47:03

Yeah.

Monika Sumra, Ph.D. 47:04

That's what I would say.

Ben Comer 47:05

Yeah, and I mean, I think the other uncertain piece about AI, and it's improving every day. Uh, it's getting better and better, but it does make mistakes, does uh hallucinate on occasion. Um I want to ask, though, about human error and how companies you know can think about designing processes, whether you know it's manufacturing, clinical research, finance, uh elsewhere that that account for actual human errors.

Monika Sumra, Ph.D. 47:36

So the best way to account for a human making errors is you can make one assumption. I I don't like to make assumptions, but the one assumption that I think we should make is that humans are human.

Ben Comer 47:50

Yeah, they'll make errors, right? I know I will.

Monika Sumra, Ph.D. 47:53

Yeah, that's what we learn, right? We will make mistakes, even when we're we're trained on something. We do it every day. Has anybody ever said I'm sorry or yeah, oh, I didn't mean it that way? Of course. Constantly we we we do that in our lives every day. So we've we've got to remember that error isn't random, you know, it's it's it's patterns. So if we think about it that way, we we want to really look at the patterns, we want to understand the patterns and then design systems that reduce error instead of reacting to it. And I think that that's that's what we're seeing. We're doing it later in the game and saying, okay, human error, but what were the conditions that shaped that human hair? We should expect human error. Okay, what were the conditions that shape? All right, we need to change those conditions. Because what happens if we say humans made a mistake? What happens?

Ben Comer 48:45

Uh it's the human's fault, right?

Monika Sumra, Ph.D. 48:47

It's the human's fault. We blame them. And when we blame ourselves or someone else, then what ends up happening is our focus now becomes on the individual, fixing the individual or not fixing the individual and not the problem. Because there's no guarantee, there's no guarantee that if you remove that individual, then another person that goes in the same spot will make the same mistake, you know? And in science, you know, we do double blind experiments, we do it. So as scientists, we know that it is human, we have to we have to do it twice. You gotta repeat the error, you know. Is it is it a physical bias? Is it a personal bias? Is it is it is it the equivalent? What is it? You know, and we don't know until we the conditions, we understand the conditions that you know cause that error to occur in the first place. Humans are gonna make mistakes, like it or not. And so that's what we have to remember right off the bat. And I think if that's the only thing that you remember and you expect that, life becomes much easier because you're gonna say, yeah, of course this person made a mistake. Let's let's figure out when that happened. And it makes it so much easier because you actually end up putting permanent fixes in there that fixed the inheritance, human behavior, not individual behavior, right? And then the new behavior becomes easier than the old. And that's the other thing I will say that it is very important when we're trying to do these fixes for human error not to occur, that the new behavior must be easier than the old. It's got to. If it's not, we're creatures of habit, we're gonna go back to our happy place. It was easier to do it this way before. So that's the way we're gonna do it. So the new, it's gonna require work to figure it out. The new one has to be easier. So when we layer, for example, if somebody makes a mistake and we say, all right, we got to add this to the process now that's going to stop this person from doing this, and you add it again. What we're doing is we're complicating it. So we're actually making it more difficult. And that's what we see the error again, because we made the new behavior more difficult than the old behavior. So of course people are going to walk in away. We're human beings, after all. We want the path of least resistance. Uh and that's and that's that's what I think we need to think about.

Ben Comer 51:04

That makes a lot of sense to me. Um, in our our final minute or two here, Monika, uh I want to ask you about kind of um prospective company creation, thinking about the environment and conditions uh that that companies could perhaps start out with, you know, and uh, you know, set themselves on a kind of um trajectory, you know, that they're gonna be happy with. Uh and maybe just thinking about your past experiences uh at Bunker and the ever-growing number of startup biotechs, you know, that are working to develop uh innovative therapies uh for tomorrow, um, what what can you say to them? You know, what advice would you give to someone, you know, a leader perhaps who is thinking about forming a company around a really exciting technology, but they need to get those kind of that get the environment right, set themselves up for success. You know, what are what are a couple of things that they could do or or think about in that kind of company formation stage?

Preparing The Organization For AI

Monika Sumra, Ph.D. 52:09

I think that first of all, and I'm I'm gonna say that the most important thing is to design the environment for purpose and design it for humans. That may sound easy, but it isn't when you're thinking about producing a very uh product that requires so many different processes, so much science, so much technology to make. So often we're designing it, we're fitting it for purpose for the technology that has to create it, right? Or the process that has to create it. Yes, we have to do that too. But we've got to be able to design it for purpose and we've got to design it for humans because humans are going to use that environment, humans are going to use the processes. So if we think about it, why do biotech companies exist? They they exist really to solve real human problems, right? That's why they exist. Uh, the internal system people operate inside has to be built with that same level of intentionality. If we're designing products to solve these real human problems, and the system's got to be designed with the same thought process, right? Human beings are going to be creating this tribe for other humans to solve real human problems, right? And the trick is humans, the advice I that the thing I would say is that, you know, humans don't operate well inside systems that are built purely for control and speed. They just don't. They operate well inside, you know, systems where you know, judgment, authority, and accountability, and they need align. Like there's there's an alignment to that, right? So before anybody would scale, I would say, or start out, there are two questions I think we need to start asking. The first two questions. And the first thing I would say is, you know, ask yourself, you know, say, you know, what kind of environment are we building? First one. And what behaviors are we making possible? That is key. If there's behavior, and the way to do that, it's behaviors you don't want to happen, then what are the behaviors you do want to happen? What are you doing to make those behaviors possible? Not just that, this is what we want, because otherwise we're expecting people to just do it, then it's inherent. You're creating, you know, you're remember we just talked earlier about perspectives. Everybody has different perspectives. So you've got to create the system that everybody has to align to that perspective. You can appreciate everything else. Give them a framework, right? Give them something to connect to, right? And if you if you design a system, you know, so that people's judgment matters really in service of a clear purpose, then the leadership can function really, really well, right? And then performance becomes sustainable. That's really what everybody is striving to do. So even if you're opening a bio to a company, whatever you're doing, you want sustainable performance at the end of this. You want to be able to deliver the product to the people when they need it, how they need it, right? That's that's what we want at the end of the day. So it starts way back in the environment. And that's what I that's the advice that I would give.

Ben Comer 55:22

Excellent. Before I let you go, Monika, uh, really quick, if you can, you're working on a book. Uh I wonder if you could give us a preview of the topic.

Monika Sumra, Ph.D. 55:33

Take a wild guess. Um the book is gonna be really focusing on this this idea about environment and how to steward that environment so that it's a deliver those results. So, yes, I am working on it, and um I'm very excited about it. It's I finally decided to write this book after being asked many, many times, when are you gonna write your book? When are you gonna write your book? But it was always a different topic, and and nothing really mattered to me as much as it does today, and I'll tell you why. I think I had to experience like the rest of the world, COVID, now experiencing AI. You know, there's all these little these things that have happened that have really impacted society and what we what we how we make meaning just as human beings today of our world, that now's the time for me to write this book. And it's more important than anything. And also given the the fact that I'm seeing less and less leaders want people wanting to become leaders, it's a little bit of a scary thought because we need leaders. We need leaders who want to be in those leadership roles to to take human beings and society on a journey and and in companies we need this. And so for me, this that's a big that that that's been my push to really think about it. I mean, I I'm a mother, but I'm also a grandmother. So I I I think about okay, my granddaughter, you know, who's going to lead her tomorrow when she gets a job somewhere. You know, what type of leader should that be? And I want to I want to do something that's going to say something and hopefully inspire people to think about it more deeply. And now we all need to be more responsible for that. So that's the kind of where my head's at with the book. It's still taking shape. So I'm not sure when that'll be done, but I am working very hard on it.

Ben Comer 57:32

Well, I look forward to reading it. And thank you again for coming on the show, Monika. I really enjoyed it.

Monika Sumra, Ph.D. 57:38

I enjoyed it too, Ben. It was absolutely a pleasure.

Ben Comer 57:41

We've been speaking with Monika Sumra, PhD founder and managing partner at Bunka Incorporated. I'm Ben Comer, and you've just listened to the Business of Biotech. Find us and subscribe anywhere you listen to podcasts, and be sure to check out our new weekly video cast of these conversations every Monday under the Business of Biotech tab at lifescienceleader.com. We'll see you next week, and thanks as always for listening.