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Harnessing IO Psychology for Business Success
This episode peels back the curtain on the real-world application of IO Psychology, revealing how it serves as a crucial cog to ensure the smooth running of internal operations and the alignment of complex human dynamics with overarching business goals. Britni and I delve into her approach to solving organizational issues, demonstrating that it's not just about what's visible on the surface but about digging into the deep-rooted problems that often evade detection.
Welcome to MICE, the podcast where we empower HR excellence, one conversation at a time.
Speaker 2:On this episode of MICE, we are unraveling the mysteries behind the science of optimizing workplace environments and enhancing individual performance with IO Psychology, and on today's episode, I am interviewing Brittany Eisenman. She is a founding principal of Stoke Fire and she is really, in my opinion, like all things IO Psychology. If I have questions, I go to her. So, Brittany, tell us a little bit about yourself.
Speaker 1:I'm in the Fort Wayne area. I'm running Stoke Fire, which operates nationwide. We help organizations that are either dealing with a problem that's been there for decades or currently we have a project that spun off into its own company called Railtowns United, that we're solving a problem that's been around for 150 years. We also get pulled in when some visionary at the top of the organization has a massive goal that someone says that is absolutely impossible. You can't do that. So, for example, Stoke Fire's team was able to take an entire industry, the concrete industry of North America. They had about 6% of the market. We got them to 30% year-over-year growth until they were at 50% of the market. So massive goals or entrenched challenges, that's kind of what we go after.
Speaker 2:Awesome. So can you kind of start delving into what IO Psychology is and really how you use it in the real world today?
Speaker 1:Absolutely. I think one of the easiest ways to do this is to compare and contrast it with an MBA, because everyone knows what an MBA is. So if you get an MBA, you should graduate with skills to lead teams and projects efficiently. You should be able to solve complex problems and communicate well, and most graduates with an MBA have a good understanding of business, financials and the ability to build strategy from data that's been gathered. Higher education institutes have literally spent billions of dollars creating demand for an MBA, and in some industries it's like a rite of passage, like now it's time for you to get your MBA and our company's going to cover it. And that's just what you do.
Speaker 1:Folks with industrial organizational psychology or IO Psychology come out of school with the internally focused aspects of an MBA. So we ask an answer how do you get your organization to run effectively? You match the human elements of that psychology piece to your logistics, data and business goals. So I have a master's in IO Psychology, so I have an MBA and a degree on how to run internal operations effectively. I just have different letters. I have a psych, so I know how to solve problems that organizations have in functioning. Let the fail-by in marketing folks that have MBAs. Focus on that side. I've got you covered at the core of your business.
Speaker 2:Yeah, someone a few years ago had to correct me because I thought IO Psychology was like the psychology that everybody knows. And they're like no, no, no. And then they explain it to me and I was like, oh, I've never even heard of this. And so is it not really like a popular thing that colleges offer.
Speaker 1:I think it's increasing in popularity, but I have an undergraduate in psychology and I had never heard of IO Psychology until I was job searching I think it was 2017. I was burnt out in the social services sector and I decided to look for a job, found a job that all of the bullet points is what I was already naturally doing as I was being pushed up into leadership and social services, and they wanted an IO psych degree and I didn't know what that was. So I Googled it and realized I'm doing all of this naturally. I just need to go to school and learn all of the frameworks and all of the data analysis so that I can do it officially under that title. But yeah, I actually do not even talk about IO Psychology with new clients because it's just acting, because nobody knows what it is, and I get sidelined on this conversation about oh so you're a psychologist, you help people in our company that have problems with X, y or Z psychologically, and I'm like absolutely not, you do not want me counseling anyone.
Speaker 1:That's what I thought it was. Yeah, because that's what it sounds like. We kind of internally in the field, we joke about how badly it's branded. Our title doesn't really explain what we do. The fact that it has psychology and psychology is known for counseling, clinical psychology, is just a challenge. So until that changes, it doesn't help me to talk about it. But I can do all the things and that's what the clients care about, but I can get them results. So we just talked about that.
Speaker 2:So how do you explain what you do without talking about the IO Psychology part?
Speaker 1:Give examples of how we've done it before. I tend to end up talking about how, when we come with solutions and actually I will give you an example of this but only come with solutions, instead of solving the question that was asked of us when we were brought in, we dig underneath and we can identify what's going on so that we can solve the core issue, so that this problem doesn't come up again. Let me come up with an example. So retention Retention is a problem so many organizations have and, honestly, at this stage in capitalism, we will continue to have retention problems. So let's say a company was struggling to keep employees after they restructured a few months ago and they had a large layoff. And now employees won't stop leaving and so they're at risk of the work getting done with no sign of resignation slowing.
Speaker 1:So if you had an MBA, come in. They would look for efficiencies and inefficiencies. So where to cut, where to invest and where to pivot. So they might tell leadership cut programs that don't directly help get product out the door. They might say invest in employee engagement and employee appreciation. And they might tell you to pivot to use temp agencies to fill in the gap in the meantime. There's nothing wrong with that advice. It's logical and it answers the question I asked, which would have been how do I keep more employees and how do we deal with our issues while we don't have enough employees?
Speaker 2:But it doesn't really prevent it from happening again.
Speaker 1:Yes, absolutely so. If an IO psychologist came in, we know that retention itself is a symptom. 100% of the times retention is a symptom, not the problem. If you treat it as a problem, you actually can't solve it and make it go away long term. So if we don't find out how the organization got to where it is today, we cannot solve the root cause.
Speaker 1:And the answer isn't that there's some external factors, that the government's paying people not to work, that this generation doesn't want to work, that people are lazy, those external things where we say it's not our problem, it's their problem. That doesn't allow you to dig down and figure out what you do have in your control underneath the symptom that we're seeing. So instead of taking each issue at face value that your data says you have, the data says we're not retaining people and people are leaving too quickly, an IO will dig underneath, trace back the retention symptom to its cause and only then can that problem be solved for the long term. Because instead of applying these logical band-aids, we apply a solution that not only solves the cause of the symptom but also helps the organization stay more aligned long term so that it can hit its goals. You're not wasting so much energy, time and resources resolving this retention problem that keeps coming back, up and up and up, because you solved the thing that leads to the retention problem bubbling up. That's the difference there.
Speaker 2:Because retention gets brought up all the time, no matter where you work. And you said start with retention and work your way back to the problem. How exactly do you recommend doing that?
Speaker 1:So in iOpsychology, most of our training is learning different frameworks, so very smart people at doctorate levels often have done all this research, identified ways of organizing or solving or researching that makes sense. And then we have practitioners I'm a practitioner iOpsych, I'm actually doing it in the real world, I'm not just researching it that then apply these frameworks and help validate that they work. So an iO comes into your workplace with hundreds of frameworks and tools at their disposal. Some of us have favorites, some of us use certain sets of them, but once we start identifying what's going on, we can pull from those frameworks. A joke we say internally, though, is that every framework is broken.
Speaker 1:Some are useful, so none of them are absolutely perfect but, often we can use them to either identify exactly what's going on or to help build a solution once we know what the issue is. So at Stokefire and now in real towns united, which came from Stokefire, we have a framework that has now been used on hundreds of organizations. It was developed internally to Stokefire by Tate Linden he was the original founder of Stokefire Starting in early 2000s, developing, developing, developing. Until now. We have all of this validation.
Speaker 1:Not only is there thick research below this framework we use, but we've seen it work in all sorts of challenges In an organization that is working in green zones, so in the middle of a war zone, the peace area right in the middle, solving problems for them all the way to like meals on wheels, america, so just all kinds of different challenges. Our framework is all about peeling back those layers to get to the absolute core and then you apply it and you see how many paths forward makes sense once you know your actual issue, and it helps leadership decide which path forward do we want, based on where we actually want to go.
Speaker 2:So it sounds like there's more than one different kind of framework. Is that correct?
Speaker 1:Yeah, there's all kinds of frameworks that IOs use. The one that we use in Stokefire is called Linden's Lens, because it was invented by Tate Linden. Yeah, and it's a simple framework, you know. We look at a few core elements. So one is you have to have a higher calling. So what's his name?
Speaker 1:Simon Sinek talks about this. He has a book about this, how you can't just be after fame or money. You're going to crumble. You have to be solely like your values in your mission have to be the higher calling. And then we overlap that with all of your communications. You have to be able to communicate what it is you're after and what it is you're doing, not just in your words but all of the nonverbals too. And then the third element is your actions. You have to be good at the thing you do, Otherwise why the heck are you doing it? You're never going to get off of square one. So when you take those three things together so the what you think and value, you know your values in your mission, your communications, in your actions there's social science below each of the overlaps which had not been discovered before.
Speaker 1:And then Tate realized when all three are in perfect alignment, you get what's called structural integrity.
Speaker 1:So we have lots of frameworks that are in the business world that, like, mbas will use, like EOS or scaling up, which is all about like getting traction going off in a certain direction, kind of sprinting to get to the end line. And then you have frameworks that talk about resilience and then you have frameworks that help you get to sustainability. If you have structural integrity, you don't just have traction, you don't just have sustainability, you don't just have resilience. You have all of that. You're able to overcome whatever comes your way because of who you are, the environment you're functioning in. Even if there's a storm that hits you that is flipping over all of your competitors, when you have structural integrity, you can overcome all of it. You can withstand any storm, and it's been thrilling to watch it over and over and over again. Organizations take it Like there's usually a visionary at the top that absolutely understands the model. We help them implement it and they are unstoppable, no matter what comes after them.
Speaker 2:Can you give me or our listeners an example of a client you've worked with and how you implemented your framework into that and then how it ended?
Speaker 1:I'm assuming good, but you know the thing is, working with Stokefire is tough work because we shine a light in all the places that haven't had a light showed on them.
Speaker 1:And leaders have so much pressure on them and many of them, especially if you've been the organization for a long time you're pretty entrenched and you tend to be a little blind to some of the stuff that's going on and how you yourself impact it. Even the best leaders have this challenge, so working with us can be painful. We've been kicked out of rooms before, out of projects before, because we ticked off the CEO by not gently enough saying the truth. And we've had to drop clients too that just once they saw what was going on, they just weren't interested in doing the right thing or going the right direction for whatever was going on or whatever damage was happening, so you stuck to your principles in those cases.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and we aren't saints. Part of the reason that we have to do that too is because if we apply the lens to an executive team that isn't ready for it or isn't, that either don't have the willingness or the ability to apply it, it will break the executive team irreparably, and so, even if you're not functioning well, we don't want to do damage. So if we're not right for you and we didn't identify that soon enough, we're going to back out and leave you as good as we can. But yeah, that's another one of the reasons that we don't push. We need to be brought in and there needs to be. The person at the top needs to absolutely understand what's going on.
Speaker 2:In those cases, how far have you got along before you realized you needed to step?
Speaker 1:out. It usually comes at the toughest emotional conjecture, which is after our findings phase. At the very beginning, we present to the executives or the key leadership group that brought us in everything that we discovered and our recommendations. We learned the hard way that you cannot bring everyone into that room and then strip them naked with the truth and dump an ice bucket over them. It doesn't work, it is not fair, it is unkind. He'll be back, yeah.
Speaker 1:So what we do now is all the way through the findings phase, whether it's five weeks or three months, whatever it is, every single step of the way, our key connection to the organization, the handler, essentially gets all of the information about what we're finding and we validate it. So we'll say we found this, we think you should be seeing this. Is that true? Is there anything we didn't see yet? That's also happening because of this. So every step of the way, they know not only what we found, but they're with us as we discover. How big of an issue is this? Did it just start two weeks ago or has it been around for six years and we had no idea? So by the time we get to that room and that one or two day workshop however long it is, depending on the project. There are zero surprises. It's still hard, but nothing is shocking that helps. So before we did that, we ran into a lot more resistance, got kicked out of rooms or realized this absolutely isn't the right place for us.
Speaker 2:I just got us off track about the example that you were going to tell us. I just remembered that's what we were talking about. Okay, so continue.
Speaker 1:Yes, so you wanted an example of how we've applied the lens. Yeah, okay, I will give an example of actually one that's fairly local. We're both in Fort Wayne right now, so a client is a while back. But they brought us in for a challenge. They had a retention issue 600% turnover in one of their sectors. So every couple of months they essentially had a whole new department there in that area.
Speaker 1:We were either the sixth or the seventh consultant group that had been brought in to solve this challenge and as soon as we realized that, I actually told my team. We hit the brakes because I said there's no way that we're just going to continue going on. We can't just take their money and be one in a long line of consultants. We have to understand first why the heck either could those other consultants not find it or, if the consultants did find it, why this organization isn't implementing their recommendations. So we were able to get some of that information and use that as part of our findings as well.
Speaker 1:So we were brought in for a retention issue. We use a survey to take the entire organization through our model to get the right information. Then we validate all of the findings from the survey. So we surveyed, let's see, I think, four different groups, so the two main departments, one of which was salary, one was hourly and then X employees, and then sometimes we'll survey stakeholder groups like clients or ex-clients or community members. Through that we discovered that the retention challenge was essentially a sibling of six other very significant challenges, so safety and morale being two examples of issues that were happening at the same level. And then we identified one core issue underneath those seven issues that they directly grew out of, and if this core issue was solved, those seven would each start to solve themselves.
Speaker 1:So the core issue underneath all of those was something it's mind-blowingly simple, but it was administrative follow-through. So the organization at the top had sprinters. So these are like idea people that were awesome at sourcing really cool things from conferences or the new books that came out. They had lots of connections, they were seeing what other companies were doing and they'd bring back these sparkling, awesome new initiatives that sounded really good and appeared on the internet and appeared on the surface to be really good fit for some of the challenges that they were having. And also a function of the top leadership team was that they were really good at erasing bureaucracy. If I was brand new at the organization, I could, like day one, walk up to the CEO and say, hey, my kid is on the volleyball team at the local high school. They're fundraising, will the company donate? And get a yes. So there was really no bureaucracy. You could get answers right away. But the challenge with the organization was they'd pull in awesome ideas. Everybody could talk to everybody. We would implement a solution as soon as the problem was identified. We would not evaluate if this is the right solution, how to roll it out? Who needs to know how to roll it out and how to keep it going? So the solution itself would start.
Speaker 1:Fires cause problems and the next day we come in and, because we consider this solution already solved, we're moving on to the next thing. We're implementing new, sparkly solutions to other problems that we found. So what was going on is there were fires everywhere all the time and everyone from, like, the supervisors of the front level staff all the way up to the CEO, all they got done was putting out fire after fire after fire and implementing these really good solutions. So you know, some of the fallout from that was people didn't believe that solutions were going to stick around because they didn't. People maybe had access to the CEO, but weren't sure if the CEO knew what they were doing. All they saw was all these fires happening and there was a lot of pride of working there. So they had higher turnover than a lot of their peers, even though a lot of the employees wanted to stay.
Speaker 1:So it sounds like kind of like a lack of accountability after implementation of something that was one key part of you know, the lack of administrative follow through, absolutely the executive team keeping themselves accountable, and part of the issue I'm glad you brought that up, because part of the issue with that and I spent a while talking with the team about this in our findings discussion but was they kept hiring people that were like them in that personality and that drive, and so they were all like really, really, really good sprinters.
Speaker 1:So I talked about how, like this is a strength, most companies really struggle with bureaucracy. Most companies really struggle with like figuring out solutions and implementing them, but like you're lacking the balance strength which would keep you accountable, and so we really talked with them a lot about how, when you hire this person, you can't develop them internally because you already hired everybody that's like yourself. When you hire this person or this group of people that will keep you accountable, that are these careful people that need to think before they implement things that have lots of questions that will push back. It will be painful for absolutely everyone and that person needs to know, when you hire them, that they are up against when T people that do not have their strength, that have been used to having no leash, just sprinting whenever they want on anything that they want. Yeah, so absolutely accountability and all the like details of their specific situation. That meant what does accountability mean?
Speaker 2:So do they end up going that direction and hiring somebody that wasn't like them?
Speaker 1:Yes. So this company didn't hire us to do the full implementation. We built a couple things and gave them some resources and programmatic supports Long term. They have hired in a couple people that trend this way, but it is still a challenge for them. I will say, at the top the CEO it was really hard to digest what we had delivered and so there wasn't a full buy-in of the solution or ability to see how the solution will help things get better. So there have been steps taking toward that of building in more accountability naturally into the employee workspace, but they're not there yet.
Speaker 2:They're working on it. Yes, so you mentioned buy-in. That made me think of something. Another question when you go into these organizations and it's like, hey, this is what's going on, here you go, and so do you not necessarily get all the buy-in you need from, like, the supervisors or the employees to participate and get the information that you need.
Speaker 1:Step one for us is the person at the very top of the organization has to be 100% in. We spend a lot of time before we sign a contract talking about what it is we do, what it's going to feel like, types of results that we've gotten. So, by the time we are signing an agreement and starting a project, the very top one to five people are fully in. But, yes, below that and it's highly dependent on what the relationship is between the executive team and the supervisors. But there can absolutely be resistance and it's part of my job to pick up on that right away so I can understand how to implement how it is that we're gathering information. Sometimes our survey is online, sometimes by phone, sometimes I'm there in person, and that's often dictated by how trusting that person is of someone that this executive team would bring in.
Speaker 1:Our survey is objective. It's not how do you feel about, it's your observations. How many times have you observed X, y or Z? It's their measuring, their actual experience. So there isn't a lot of room to lie and we try to be careful that there's not a lot of motivation to lie either. So I'll give you an example Foundations, like family foundations or like community foundations, that are philanthropic, so giving out money either from a bunch of tiny grants or they have one that they're aiming toward a certain thing.
Speaker 1:When we see what was it? 2021, 2022,? We started turning the model that we use into more concrete tools and I started talking to foundations and they were very interested because we could measure the structural integrity of those that they were giving grants, to see how likely is it that this organization is going to absolutely benefit from the grant that you give them and be able to use it to serve the people that they want to serve. We won't let any foundation use our survey or apply our model before the grant is given, because there is so much pressure to just appear the best you can to get money and so anything that could be slanted a certain direction or something is going to be, because they need the money. They're applying to the grant for a reason. So that's an example where, after they get the grant, we're more than happy to work with them, either with the grantees as a group or individually, but because there's so much pressure to lie before. Not that they're bad people, but like any of us would Just overselling. Yeah, yeah, 100%.
Speaker 2:So, ultimately, how does I have psychology help businesses?
Speaker 1:When you're serious about getting to the core of an issue and you're okay with taking an ego hit, it's a good time to bring in. I have psychology Organizations use. I have psychology in a few different ways One you can bring us in and aim us at a very specific issue, so that's generally what I do. I'm a consultant. I'm brought in when you have a really deep challenge or you have a massive goal that everyone says is crazy. You can hire an IO onto your executive team, so a lot of them will end up in like COO type positions. Or you can hire them as individual contributors, so a lot of healthcare systems or big orgs like John Deere, amazon, rei. They have groups of IO's that are either parallel to HR or within the HR function or leading HR but that are doing things like building surveys that only gather exactly what you want to gather and employees want to take them and they can help you get to your mission more quickly.
Speaker 1:Retention work, recruitment work some IO's go into that very specifically. It's very broad. You know, for me I'm an entrepreneur and a consultant I didn't think that's what I was going to do with the degree, but that's what I'm doing with the degree. I thought I was going to end up inside of a big health network just sitting in a cushy job doing surveys or something. But I kind of get to do all of it because I'm a consultant. So that's depending on what your need is, you can pull in an IO. I had one client that was so excited about the work that we did with them that they actually went out and hired an IO and plugged them into. I think it was the safety position in the organization. It was a manufacturing company, so they knew they wanted an IO and that was the position that was open. And so they were like we know we want an IO in our company and we need a safety person. We know that they can do that, so they plugged them in so that they could access all the IO skills and abilities.
Speaker 2:Because you say it's so broad, it's not really a human resource department necessarily. So, like when you think of HR, you think of like diversity and inclusion, employee engagement, motivation, leadership development. So how is that similar or different to IO psychology?
Speaker 1:Some IOs do go ahead and get certified as HR and some become CHROs. I agree with you, though I view us more as a support to HR. That's how I started. My consultancy originally was to support HR's work and what they're doing. I purposefully didn't learn all of the HR stuff because I didn't want to be a competitor. I just wanted to be a support.
Speaker 1:Let's take, for example, diversity and inclusion. If you want to make sure that you're including people that have different abilities, have different backgrounds, different socioeconomic status, you can go out and you can grab fantastic programs. You can apply them to your organization. The executive team is going to be pretty happy with that. This was what we wanted to do. We wanted to have more inclusion. We applied a program that in 70 other companies that's been proven to improve inclusion.
Speaker 1:What an IO is going to do is going to measure what that program does and how it does it against your very specific needs. If it fits well, great. We're going to implement it so that we are absolutely matching our needs and our goals with what this program can do. Then IO will also be able to see if this program even though it's a very sexy program and has worked for so many of our competitors or companies that we want to be like. We can measure if it's not a good fit for us and why. So that we can either go find a program that will work or build only exactly what we need to hit our goals?
Speaker 2:Ultimately, if someone from the company goes and finds a one-size-fits-all system, but then the IO would really be like, yes, this works, but we need to change it this way or no, this doesn't work for us.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and they'd be able to tell you why Employee engagement is an area. For a while I stayed really far away from that area Employee appreciation, employee engagement not from lack of interest, but because there's so much out there that just sounds good but seemed like it wasn't really working in an organization. I'll share a story I was talking with a young HR professional really sharp, had been in a large company and then was brought in as an HR manager kind of leap frog from a lower position to a higher position in a new company, which is fantastic, well-deserved, doing a good job. The company that they had landed in was very much like a family-like environment and did that environment pretty well.
Speaker 1:The employees were sticking around for a long time. They were very rarely openings. When they were, it was usually because someone had retired or shifted into a higher position. The company was doing really well. This HR manager wanted to do a really good job and they were the first HR manager that the organization had had, so they didn't have a lot of guidance as to what needs to be done. The exhausted COO was just like here, take this part of my job, do what you do. They went to this conference and heard this cool story about it was you take bricks paper bricks or whatever and you write something good that the employee did or something, and you put it up on the wall.
Speaker 2:I've heard about this.
Speaker 1:Yes, sounds good on the surface. Right Could very well be perfect, exactly what your organization needed. But this HR manager implemented this with a group of people that already had belonging. They already knew that they were valued. They already knew that they were doing a good job. It was a little bit like a 17-year-old, like a four-year-old. She started implementing this because it wasn't meeting a need and they were already beyond that in their relationships with each other and with the organization. It almost had the opposite effect. That's an example of an employee engagement idea that sounds really cool, has worked really good in other organizations, could absolutely work good in your organization, except her organization didn't need it. She didn't actually end up helping things A because they didn't really need to be helped to that much, but also she was treating people like multiple levels below where they were as an organization. Stuff like that being careful, being able to tease out where is the program going to match where we are. That's an employee engagement story around that concept.
Speaker 2:What about leadership development? Because, again, I feel like there's so many webinars, seminars, people you can hire to come in and talk to your company. You really want your leaders to work on communication, but maybe what's being presented to them doesn't really fit what your actual problem is. How do you work around that?
Speaker 1:Yeah, the model that I explained earlier looking at your values in your mission, your communications and what you do can actually be applied to the micro not just one team, but one individual and even decision by decision. You can use it to guide you through this. If you have someone that wants to be a leader or you know that you want to implement some leadership pipeline or system in your organization. Step one is identifying how does this person's core values support the organization's core values? They're never going to be the exact same set of values, but how do they support our organization's values? If there's good linkage there, what this person really cares about absolutely helps support what our company really cares about. Then you know, okay, we're starting in the right place.
Speaker 1:Then you can work on things like how does this person communicate I'm not just talking directives and how they email but how does their body language and how they behave communicate to other leaders around them and to their direct reports? I value you. You belong here. I belong here as well. Then do they have the skills that they need? A lot of leadership development programs just focus on the skills you have the skills, communication being something that we call a skill.
Speaker 1:Yeah, absolutely. We tend to negate. Do you belong here? Is this the right place for you? Are your values a match for us today as it is? If not, how can we get you to the point where you're in a place where you match? Or maybe we need to help you move into a different organization where you absolutely match?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I was just going to say what do you do when you get that leader who their core values doesn't match your core values?
Speaker 1:This is tricky. I'm going to have to be careful how I answer this. So, me as a consultant, that's not my problem, but it's your problem. You can't change someone's values. What you can do is if you have a leader, for whatever reason they're not going to be leaving anytime soon but their values don't match your values or they can't help you get to your team goal or the organization's goal, what you can do is identify exactly what their values are, why they believe that, and then see if you can find a way that, if they behave X way, which is not what they're doing now it helps them match one of their values or get to the thing that they want to do.
Speaker 1:Do we have time for a story around this? Yep, I want to hear it. Yes, so this was before I was with Stokefire, but we worked with the state of Iowa. They had a conservative government for decades upon decades. It had been 25 years since they had raised the gas tax and many of their politicians had gotten voted in.
Speaker 1:Most of their platform was we're not going to raise taxes, period. A small government did it, did it. Their roads and their bridges were crumbling and one state over there had actually been a death because someone was driving over a bridge in that state that had crumbled while their vehicle was on it. So the Transportation Department knew that this was an issue. So every year or every two years, the governor of the state of Iowa would create what's called a blue ribbon committee to look at the state of our roads and our bridges. So they would do a study of the state of our roads and our bridges and they would bring back the report and there would be an awards ceremony where, like banquet and like here are the results handshake photo, the end. That's it, because we're not raising taxes, period.
Speaker 2:So, like, what was the purpose of that?
Speaker 1:That's a real good question. So we were brought in. You know it was a small job. I think it was just $80,000 is all that.
Speaker 1:Stokefire was paid to solve this problem that had been around for 25 years. That was going to get people killed if we couldn't fix it. Screaming about it had not worked. These committees, of course, hadn't worked.
Speaker 1:So as Tateland and the original founder of Stokefire did research on politicians in general, he realized if you are a politician and you solve a problem before it's a crisis, it's up to like five points lower your odds of getting voted in again. If you wait until the problem does create a crisis, like people die, then you have up to three points higher that you will get voted back in because you came in and you were the hero and you solved this. Now, if I'm a politician, it's a little bit of a thankless job. I'm there because I believe I am the right person to solve the problems of this constituency. I view my job as getting voted back in. That's my number one prerogative. So am I motivated to solve problems before they become crises and I'm not seen as the hero? I do things that people don't know that they need. There's almost negative motivation there.
Speaker 2:It's like an ethical dilemma, yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So what we needed to do was create a crisis before there was an actual crisis. So we put up billboards and actually we took this to the state senate ahead of time and many of them signed on and said I don't want those billboards in my area, absolutely don't do this. I will sign on. Billboards would point at deficient bridges and they would say you're about to cross a structurally deficient bridge. Here's a website. And then the website would give them all this information and how to contact their representative, their state senator, to ask for taxes to be raised so that we can fix this and I don't have to drive my kids over this deficient bridge twice a day. So we created a crisis. We got this conservative constituency begging to have their taxes raised, so the governor was able to raise taxes and be the hero when for 25 years he hadn't been able to do that. In three months we got $3 billion raised. Wow, for 25 years of $0 raised.
Speaker 2:Wow. What was the mayor's initial reaction when you told him what you were going to do?
Speaker 1:We didn't have much view of that, because the group we were working with wasn't his team. Okay, yeah, yeah. So we're not sure what he thought that he was going to do for now, but we got it done.
Speaker 2:What was their reactions? Or just like do it.
Speaker 1:Relief. Yeah, yeah, yeah, the team that brought us in was astounded and relieved, which is, yeah, optimal outcomes. That's what we want, that's interesting.
Speaker 2:So, with IO Psychology, how do you feel or could you elaborate on how this helps the future of businesses or how you see the future of IO being in the business world?
Speaker 1:Yeah, io is really geared toward long term. You would be hard pressed to find an IO that will give you a sexy solution that you can implement today and is only going to last for three months. If you have a mission that the people you serve can't afford for you to go under it's too important then you need to be bringing in an IO. We measure everywhere that your systems and your people interact and optimize all of that. We also make sure you are fully aligned with your mission and your values and your communications and your actions so that, no matter what hits you, because you're aligned, you can lean on the strength of those three. Together, you're going to last through it. That's what an IO can bring you. Thank you for listening. Stay tuned for our next episode.