306: Create a Culture of Curiosity with Bill Ryan
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Bill Ryan, Founder of Ryan Consulting, helps organizations maximize their investment in technology and people by ensuring they work together efficiently and effectively, regardless of location.
We explore Bill’s journey from technologist to consultant and his mission to connect people “over time and distance” by giving them what they need at the time of need. Bill introduces his Culture of Curiosity Framework, a leadership model designed to foster innovation, engagement, and problem-solving inside organizations. The framework emphasizes being willing to say “I don’t know”, making it safe to ask “why”, encouraging employees to figure out solutions, and provoking thoughtful conversation that sparks collaboration.
Bill also shares why curiosity is the foundation of leadership, how leaders can model vulnerability to build trust, and why he views learning and development not as an expense but as a strategic investment in long-term performance and retention.
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Create a Culture of Curiosity with Bill Ryan
Good day. Dear listeners, Steve Preda here with the Management Blueprint Podcast, and my guest today is Bill Ryan, the founder of Ryan Consulting, helping organizations maximize their investment in technology and people by ensuring they work together efficiently, effectively, regardless of location. Bill, welcome to the show.
Thanks, Steve. Glad to be here.
Well, I’m excited to have you and, to hear about your personal why and how you are manifesting it in your practice and activities.
I love that question. You told me you were gonna ask it. It made me think for a little bit and it took me back to like my very, very beginning part of my, of my career and it was all about how to use technology to send the message across time and distance. And I think that’s my fascination is my focus has really been centered on how to connect people over time and distance to the things that they need to support their performance at the time of need. And it’s kind of guided me through the various levels of technology of the various boxes we needed, the various places we stored information. But
the way I kind of manifested is that it's all about centered on the person and making sure we meet their need at the time of need so that they can be successful.
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That’s fascinating because ultimately you have to meet your clients where they are, and you can’t just put them in a box or put them on a cookie cutter framework and just hope that it’ll do the job you need to figure out what they need and how you adjust to that. Now, this is a good segue because you developed a framework called Strategy On A Page. It’s really a five step process and you call it SOAP. And other than the acronym I’m trying to still figure out what the connection of SOAP and this process is. Maybe you can enlighten me and also tell me about this process that you have come up with.
Well, and I wanna be clear, I didn’t invent this somewhere earlier in my career. I ran across this idea of a strategy on a page, and it was really, and it stuck with me, it has stuck with me through all of my years about how we as, as leaders, can convey our strategy to both our stakeholders, but also our leaders in a clear and succinct manner. So at the end of a process that I’ll talk about in just a minute, is this one pager, a strategy on a page. But to collect it, I have found kind of takes five key steps. And the first part really is about talking to the people in the organization and at all levels. And you said something just a moment ago that I think is so important because where I focus this idea of this soap results in is that it’s not a cookie cutter. So you have to really go talk to the people at all organizations, the part-timers, the hourly employees, the front office, the back office, the middle managers, supervisors, leaders, executives. But you have to really go talk to them and ask ’em a lot of questions ’cause they’re living the work. And then the second step is you listen.
You know, poll questions. I’m a big fan of the five why’s. There’s a book on that, and I just gave the entire premise away. You ask why five times and you’ll get probably the good basic root cause of a problem, but you listen to the people and you kind of start to see themes. You can start to synthesize what they’re saying, what they’re living, what they’re experiencing. And more importantly, the things that they can see that would help them do their jobs better so that they’re successful. And after that, you kind of pull all that together. You go talk to leadership, but you frame it in the language of their people. I have found more success when I quote the people by using their words. I don’t, you know, put it, you know, I don’t put Joe Smith under the tray, under the truck right away, but I use that words and, and I wanna be very specific to leaders can understand and help kind of create that bridge of the context of the worker and their work back to the leader. So that they can kind of see it and you frame it in their own words and then you kind of help connect the dots. You help them understand that strategy has to be linked back to the tactical applications.
So you bring focus into what will help make the organization move forward. You kind of help them identify the needs versus the wants.
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And you kind of help them go through the steps that says, you know, good, fast and cheap. What can you do with the resources you have, with the people you have, with the money you have, with the time you have? And then help them identify the things that they can either revise, replace, or remove.
And that I think is a key part because that’s when the plan kind of gels together. You know, we’re not adding something new to workplace because too many idea, too many times. I know in my career we had, oh, the next great idea, well, we just had one two years ago and we had another one and we’ve never taken them away.
So part of this strategy that I do is to help the leadership understand that you know, your workers only can do so many things. So let's take this now that we've kind of helped connect all these dots. And go from a plan towards how we can people…
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Identifying the things that they have to measure, the things that matter to the operations, so those metrics that really matter, being clear what can be done, and then kind of being clear about what can be done to the entire community. So communication’s really important here. You know, you might come up with 10 things that people have identified as like, these are really important, but you’ve also found out you’ve only got good, fast, cheap, you know, people, time, money, that you really can only do three or four of them to do them well.
Okay, so, let me just zoom out here because sure there’s a lot in there and I’m afraid, I mean, I find it challenging to keep up and maybe the listeners who do something else motor loans or drive their cars, they will also find it. So the first thing that I’m really trying to grasp or, grasping here, or maybe it’s, it’s talking to me, is this idea of crowdsourcing solutions from the people in the organization. So as a consultant, you know, sometimes we are guilty of coming in and we have preconceived ideas and we think we can fix things and, we just, you know, wanna be the smart, smartest person in the room or whatever it is. And then we just, you know, vomit ideas. But the level of buy-in into our ideas is gonna be a lot lower than level by in the ideas and the people inside the organizations, and then the other thing that struck me was that you talk about the language that the people are using on the front line
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