Following his webinar and blog post, Senior Consultant Frederick Hall joins Access Answers to expand on the Creature of Habit (aka The Blocker). He emphasizes its important role in change management, describes his experience as one, and shares his journey to becoming Prosci®️-certified.

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Episode 11: The Creature of Habit with Frederick Hall

Julia:

Welcome to another Access Answers episode. I’m your host, Julia Vergara along with Angela O’Pry, and we have Frederick Hall here with us today.

Angela:

Frederick is a senior consultant with Access Sciences for just about eight years, I believe. In addition to that, he’s a handyman, a storyteller, and a Creature of Habit, so we have lots to talk about today and I’m sure we’ll get some great stories. I think you just went on vacation not that long ago.

Frederick:

Yeah. We had a road trip. I love road trips, so we went out West. We ended up on Route 66 a little bit, but not the entire time. But we went out to New Mexico and a little bit into Arizona and then back. And so, considering we had about seven days, it was we were fitting in about, oh boy, 200 to 300 miles a day.

Angela:

Wow. And how many flat tires?

Frederick:

That was very interesting. Boy, we were out in the middle of nowhere in the desert in New Mexico and Arizona. And I mean, when I say in the middle of nowhere, it was like two hours before you’d see another town.

Angela:

That’s terrifying.

Frederick:

Well, it was fine. And I remember thinking, “Well, as long as we don’t get a flat tire or something we’re okay.” And some somehow or another, by some miracle, we were driving through the center of El Paso and all of a sudden got the warning light that the tire was deflating fast and really fast. And I remember thinking, “Well, if we had to get a flat tire…” I wasn’t thrilled about it, but if we had to get one, this was the place, because if it had happened two days earlier or three days earlier when we were out driving through South Western New Mexico, it would have been a really bad situation, really bad situation. And come to find out our car does not have a spare. It has this a silly-

Angela:

What?

Frederick:

Yes. That was the worst of it. We found that out. So the car is two years old. It’s an Acura. Don’t mean to bad mouth Acura, but they decided not to put spares in their cars. They just give you this little electronic pump and like a Fix-A-Flat kit, and it did not work. And we would have been in trouble, for sure.

Julia:

Well, I actually bought a new car recently, and I found out while I was going around and looking that I don’t think it’s required anymore to put the spare tire in the back.

Frederick:

Apparently not. It’s news to me, but I think you’re right. Personally, I totally disagree with it because if you have serious damage to the tire, and that can happen easily, if not, a very small puncture, very small like a nail or smaller, it’s not going to work and it’ll leave you stranded every time. Whereas a spare, anything can happen. You could crack the wheel on a curve and still have a way of getting to safety. So anyway, even those little, what do they call them? Those temporary spares is better than no spare. I mean, anyway, that was an interesting situation. It was the only mishap, really. The rest of the trip was great. I’m good for about four to six hours of driving a day. And when it starts getting anything beyond six, I get pretty worn out. So we planned it out so that we try and keep it between four and six hours a day, but we keep moving. Maybe stay two nights in one place, but generally one night in each place. So it’s fun. It’s a lot of fun.

Julia:

Did you hit some good restaurants while y’all were out?

Frederick:

Oh yeah. Yeah. And that’s not good for the waistline, for sure. And when you say good restaurants, I would use that term loosely. And we actually hit one or two very nice restaurants in the Santa Fe area, but also some dives that ended up being very good too in some of the smaller towns. And then also some dives that weren’t so great. There was trucker food. And yeah, I don’t know, you sit there and you eat that horrible food sometimes on the road and then you get right back in the car and you sit there for another four hours and so it’s very little activity. Luckily at the times where we stopped, like in Santa Fe, we were doing a lot of walking and then we were camping part of the time. There was plenty of walking, but when you realize how long you’re just sitting there in the car, you understand how some of those truckers can get a pretty big belly.

Angela:

So, I have to ask this, did the Creature of Habit go to a new place or where are the places that y’all went places that you were familiar with?

Frederick:

Now, so that’s a great question because the answer is yes and no. We went to a couple of places that I went to years ago, probably mid ’80s, late ’80s that I recalled being really amazing and out in the middle of nowhere. I tend to really like to get away from the crowds and off the beaten path. I don’t like to do what everyone else does. I want to go to the unusual places. And we went to a place called El Morro, which is also called Inscription Rock. And it was everything I remembered it was but it had been… Wow, I don’t even want to think about how long had it been, 35 years or more since I’d been there. It seems like it was yesterday to me. Nothing had changed. It’s a place where for centuries people have stopped on the way into the West of the United States, including their conquistadors, their Spanish inscriptions from the 1600s all the way through the 1800s.

I think Theodore Roosevelt was there and inscribed his name on it. So, it’s basically just a huge… or mountainside that is scribed with thousands of signatures, and really nicely done. I mean, some of them look like they were stonemasons that put their names in there, and some of them were very rough, but it’s amazing. And then also we went to new places too. I mean, believe it or not, Angela, there were some routes that I said, “I’ve never done this road, let’s do this road, let’s see what’s down this road.” And so I was mixing it up. I mean, I am a Creature of Habit no doubt, but believe it or not, I do like to mix it up sometimes.

And I think it really depends on what the thing is, especially food and meals, I like to go with what I know. If I know I’m going to enjoy it, let’s do it again, I’d love to try it. But something like a road trip, I love to go down the road I’ve never seen before. So I guess in that aspect, maybe I’m not so much a creature of habit. I’m also very adventurous in some ways, but not so much with food, I guess.

Angela:

So, we should probably take a step back and even start from the beginning where the Creature of Habit came from. And of course, we use that term or that expression nicely.

Julia:

Lovingly.

Angela:

Yes.

Frederick:

I hope so.

Angela:

So, tell us a little bit about where that came from and how that got started. A year ago you gave a webinar presentation about that and so it’s just stuck. And I think I told Julia that we need to create a Gossip Girl style blog. It’s like, “XOXO Creature of Habit.”

Julia:

Yeah, I want to create a Creature of Habit Twitter account.

Frederick:

There you go. There you go. Yeah, it’s funny because I remember, Angela, when we talked about that webinar, when you told me I’d be doing it, I started thinking about it and thinking about the irony of the fact that I’m in change management and that I am so averse to change, especially, I mean, there’s some things that I do. I like routine, I like predictability in a lot of areas and it’s just ironic that I ended up in the field of change management. But at the same time, I think it also, it helps me because I understand the challenges of what it takes to get someone to want to change it. And I’m also a huge fan of old horror movies, any kind of old horror movies, even the bad ones. I liked the good ones, I like the bad ones all the way back to the ’50s, and got me to thinking about Creature from the Black Lagoon.

And then whenever I had heard the term Creature of Habit, and I’ve been told that’s me, it always made me think of those old movies. And so I thought it’d be fun to do, I think the podcast was titled, I’m sorry, the webinar was titled Change Management Versus the Creature of Habit. That’s what it was. And it’s very relevant to what we do in terms of helping people. In almost every case where I’ve been working on any kind of a project where there was changed involved, I guarantee you I’ve run into people like me. They are like, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” That whole mantra. I totally understand that, and there’s ways of working with that. There’s ways of working with people like that. And I think it’s an empathy, a piece of empathy that works. So that’s where that came from. So, I do not mind being called a Creature of Habit.

Angela:

What’s so fascinating to me is that whenever we planned that presentation, that was way before COVID and way before the pandemic was even a thought. I remember sitting at Yia Yia Mary’s, which is now closed, having hummus chatting about our ideas for the presentation just like nothing had ever… We had no idea what was coming, not wearing masks and not being concerned about being out at a restaurant. So I think the relevancy of that is just so on target right now and everything that we’ve been through over the past year. Julia and I have talked about the pandemic and everyone is ready to move past the pandemic, so I don’t want to belabor that. But I think the change management component that we’ve all been through of our lives is worth addressing in this podcast in this episode.

So, from someone who maybe is a Creature of Habit for certain things, certain situations, what was your journey like? I mean, we’ve had nothing but change, work from home, starting out and then not knowing how long that was going to take. Now people are doing a hybrid situation. I don’t know, what’s your take?

Frederick:

Well, that’s a good question. It’s funny, maybe it’s the optimist in me or just looking at the glass half full, when I heard, I’m sure everyone thought about this when it first came out in March or whenever of last year, that we may be confined to the house and that we may not be able to travel and go and do things, there was a part of me that was like, “Oh, wow, this is not good.” And yes, that is a change. But at the same time, I get to stay in my same house all the time and I don’t have to go anywhere. I don’t have to take any risks. I don’t have to get on the road and drive. I might get into an accident. All of these things. So, it’s fed into almost the Creature of Habit and in a funny sort of way. And I developed these routines around the house.

I was able to find a different way of doing things. Every morning I’d go down and get my coffee at about 7:30 and I could be ready for my meetings at 8:00. I’d sit in the same room, wearing the same headset, doing the same thing every day. So you can find a bright side to it. Right? And I’m also an introvert, and people laugh when I say that, but I truly am an introvert. And so that helps too. If there’s something, and I’m sure every introvert out there in the audience could relate to that, that when you’re told that you’re going to be confined to your house, it’s a funny relief too.

But that said, about three months into it, I started noticing, even the introvert that I am, I started missing human contact. And I think we all did that. And the project I was on, luckily we had a great team together and they were all over the world and so I was able to speak with these people. The project actually took place with, I want to say clients or people that I was speaking with every day, they might’ve been in Amsterdam. They might’ve been in Singapore. They might’ve been in Spain. They may have been in London. I mean, all over the place. And my teammates were also all over the place, but it felt like almost a support group. It was a really great place to be at that particular moment in time.

And I think that project was perfect for our COVID thing to come along. And it was odd, we started the project in… I started on the project in January and six weeks or eight weeks into it we started hearing about this COVID situation. And by March 15th we were in our houses. And I was able to speak with all of these people about, “How are things on your end? What’s it like? Are your restaurants closed? Are people outside?” And I got to hear a couple of things. One is that things were being handled very differently because in Italy, if you’ll recall, they were the first to get the bad press about all the awful things happening in Italy, and then of course expanded over the whole world. But speaking to people in Spain they were saying they’re not even letting people out on the street at all. And I’m like, “That’s kind of odd.” I mean, literally you couldn’t go jogging.

And I remember thinking, “Well, we’re in America, land of the freedom, so they’re not going to restrict you from walking outside.” And to me, that was the one thing you could do, that you could actually get outside and you’d see people on the streets speaking across the street. The distancing was more like 20 feet at that point, but you wanted to talk to people. And anyway, speaking with people all around the world, it made me realize that we were all in the same boat, but at the same time, not. And I don’t know, it was certainly interesting, but I found a bright side to, even being a Creature of Habit, I found a bright side to it and adapted to the change.

I mean, I think even someone like me that loves to do the same thing all the time and loves routine, it’s not all black and white. I make it sound that way sometimes, but there are places that I do like adventure and change and to see, to do different things. But most people would not see that side of me unless you’re hanging out with me for a long time.

Angela:

Yeah, I think the initial excitement of getting to stay home wore off pretty quickly. And I’ve seen a lot too about the price of lumber and the supply of lumber is extremely difficult. I think everyone was sitting at home, “What can I do to just expel this anxious energy and provide a better surrounding or redo the bathroom, repaint the walls, build a deck, install a pool?” Does that sound familiar?

Frederick:

Yeah. We had a, I call it my COVID project, and it began before COVID. I recall I was talking about the team I was working with, so I had this project, we were actually having a pool installed and we paused it. Of course in February or end of February I remember they were about to start digging and we started hearing about COVID and all the whole situation coming. And I started thinking about all these worst case scenarios. What if they get the hole dug and then the whole world comes to an end? Or we stop working and no more paychecks? I didn’t know. I mean, there was so… The unknown was intense. I mean, we had no idea, was the economy going or what was going to happen? And so we paused it, and of course the pool guy was not happy about that but he said everyone was doing it, because we just didn’t know what was going to happen. And I didn’t want a big hole in the backyard and then find that we’re in this post-apocalyptic kind of world with a big hole in our backyard.

And so anyway, we went ahead with it after about eight weeks, I’d say in April. I had a pretty big task ahead of me because I had decided to do a deck on the entire backyard. Our backyard was never that spectacular. We live in an old house in an old part of Houston and the backyard was just mediocre at best. It was nothing to look at. Grass wouldn’t really grow there, mosquitoes. It was just not much to be able to hang out in. It wasn’t fun. And so we decided to do a deck above ground, about 18 inches above ground and I used synthetic decking. I forget how the square footage, but it was a lot. I mean, it covered the entire backyard. I want to say it was 1200 square feet, something like that.

And so, I have these two guys I work with that I bring in and we call them the Rodriguez brothers because they are brothers. And they work with me, they’re framers. And I started working with them about six years ago when I did this home restoration on our house. We did a major restoration, stripped down the walls. I call it skeletonized. We literally had stripped it down to the studs. You could see through the walls in some areas. And we re-piped, rewired, put insulation in. The house was built in 1922 so it didn’t have installation. And these guys helped me. I say, help me, I couldn’t have done it without them. I was going to try and do most of that myself and they laughed when I told them I thought I’d get it done in three to six months. They said, “Okay, whatever you say.”

And they only speak Spanish, so we were speaking Spanish the whole time and they… It’s funny, I could tell they had this great respect for me as the boss. I was the one paying them. But they also, there were some things they would smirk at. I would say, “Well, we’re going to do this,” and they would say, “No, you don’t really want to do that.” And I was like, “What do you mean?” And I started realizing these guys are super smart. They’re like engineers that just didn’t go to school. But as framers, they were incredible. So I digress a little bit there, but so the long story short is I called them here four or three years later and I said, “Hey, you guys want to help me with another project, a framing project with the deck?”

And so, they came in and helped me put up a perimeter beam and then they got called into another project. And so, we did social distancing. We stayed away from each other, but they’re always fun to work with. And I thought they were going to help me with the whole thing. Well, once we got the perimeter beam up, they called me and said, “So we got a good framing job.” And I know that they’re going to go and take the solid job where they’re going to be working for a while. And they’d been with me for about two weeks and they needed the money and they needed a long-term gig. So they were going to be able to frame up a bunch of townhouses. And I said, “You guys go.” I said, “I think I got this now.” And so I did the rest of the joists. But you talk about lumber, it started getting to the point where I didn’t even know if I was going to be able to get the lumber for it. I’d go to the supply store and the shelves would be empty. And I started thinking, “Oh wow.”

And so, I bought what I could, and I ultimately got it done. It was quite a task. It was during the summer. So working outside during the summer like that in Houston, it’s not a good idea. It’s a better fall project, but by July and August I was out there working on it. But it came together. It’s amazing. I finally finished it, I want to say officially, probably in November or October. But it gave me something to do. And my team that I was working with on my client project for actually my day job, I was showing them videos and taking them out to show them the deck. I’d say, “This is what I did this weekend.” So every Monday they’d want to know, “How far did you get? What’d you get done?” And I’d take them out and show them the progress. And it was really pretty amazing.

And we did… Now slightly different topic. We did a virtual happy hour, the first one I had ever done, I think it was in April. And so we were all talking about how strange it was to not be able to get together with your friends, and they said, “Let’s do a virtual happy hour.” And, Angela, you know this about me. I don’t like being on camera very much. And I was like, “Can we just do audio?” And they said, “No, it’s not that much fun. We got to do the camera.” And I said, “Okay, we’ll do the camera.” And I thought I was going to dread it. I thought I was not going to have fun. We ended up being on that call for two and a half hours. And we had planned it for 30 minutes or an hour and we were on the call for two and a half hours, probably had one too many drinks and just had a blast. But there were, I think, four of us. One person was in London, one was in Spain and the other was also probably in England somewhere, but not in London.

And we just sat and just talked. I had a gin and tonic. I think my project manager also had one. And I think the other girl had wine and somebody else had, I don’t know what. But anyway, we actually did that and it was a lot of fun and I was surprised. Again, I am a Creature of Habit, but in that case I did stretch a little bit because they made me. They made me turn on the camera. They may be, do a social event, and I enjoyed it. So yeah, sometimes I try new stuff and I have fun.

Angela:

And here you are today with your camera on.

Frederick:

Yes, I do have my camera on. I hope it won’t be shown, but I do have my camera on, yes.

Julia:

So, Frederick, another thing, another accomplishment that you have this year besides building a deck is your Prosci certification. Can you tell us a little bit about what that was like?

Frederick:

The Prosci certification is something I had had on my to-do list for a while, and it worked out pretty well because it was just a good time to get it done. It involved, again, well, I guess it was online. It was online classes. It was interesting, during the class, we had somebody in the Prosci certification sessions that had COVID, that actually had it. So that was interesting to see that she was able to do that. You could tell she did not feel good but she was able to pull it off. She passed the test and all of that. I want to say it was a five-day program. I don’t remember precisely. It was a five-day program, I think. And then at the end there was an exam that takes most of the final day.

It’s something I had had on my list of things to do for a long time and it just worked out really well that we were able to do that. The people I had known that had done the Prosci certification before, which is a change management certification, by the way, had done it in a live environment. And the people doing our training, the Prosci people were, I think had done a few virtual sessions but this was one of the first they had done. And so it was a challenge for them too to get used to doing this virtually. It was tricky because you could tell that when they had done these live training sessions that there would do breakout rooms, literally go into separate rooms or work together as small teams and they had to learn how to use breakout rooms on, I think we were on Zoom, I want to say. I don’t remember which. I think it was Zoom.

But we were able to do the breakout rooms and do everything. They had basically adapted. Of course they’re change management people and they had adapted really well to changes they were challenged with. But anyway, I was glad to get it done. It was a good time for it. And it is, if anyone’s familiar with the Prosci, they know that ADKAR is their methodology, a five-step program for change with awareness, desire, knowledge, ability, and then reinforcement. So you go through those stages for successful change, but you have to be sure you focus on each stage carefully. You can’t like say, “Well, this part’s the easy part. Let’s just skip over it.” Each one is important, including the very last one, which is reinforcement, because it’s so easy to change successfully and then six months later you find everyone has fallen back into their old patterns. People like me, you fall back into your old habit. And so the reinforcement piece is so big.

And I had known a lot about it. Prosci and ADKAR, it’s something that you just are exposed to a lot. It was good to actually hear the Prosci people talk about it and actually put the pieces together from their point of view and understand exactly what it meant and how it worked. Was glad to get that done.

Angela:

Do you see any parallels for the ADKAR model and going through a major home renovation or a major project? The awareness stage when you might say to your wife, “Okay, we’re going to install a pool in the backyard and build a deck.” Is there anything that you have to do to go through the ADKAR process for a big project like that?

Frederick:

Well, I think that anytime you go through a change like that subconsciously you have to go through it. So that’s why I say each step is so important not to skip over it. So the awareness that our backyard wasn’t that great, and the awareness that we do something different, and the awareness that there were mosquitoes, and the awareness that the vegetation back there was out of control and all of those kinds of things. And then of course we had the desire to use the backyard. There’s always a parallel that can be drawn in any change, whether it’s with your home, your family, personal life, work life. Yeah, you can draw that parallel for everything.

And I believe that change management probably began, the concept of change management, and I don’t know the whole history of it, but my thought behind it is it probably began in the ’60s or ’70s as technology was taking off. And I think it really hit when software development came along. And so the concept of change management really was at a huge level. It’s like, how are you going to change an entire corporation, a large, thousands of people doing the same thing? Or even a country to change their culture? But it applies to small things too. It applies to smaller projects in a different way maybe, but I think the original concept of change management was changing large populations of people, but it does apply to anything, even a family.

If you usually do something a certain way, load the dishwasher a certain way and you realize it’s not working, well, then you have an awareness and then you have to have the desire, and your other family members have to be willing to do it. They have to have the desire for the dishes to be, whatever, cleaner or more efficient or something. And then there’s the knowledge and the ability and then the reinforcement to keep it going. So when you think about any change, ADKAR applies to all them, just in a subtle, a slightly different way. But if you miss any piece of it, that change can fail. If you’ve got one person in the family that doesn’t have the desire to load the dishwasher differently or something, then it’s not going to happen.

Angela:

Doesn’t everyone have that one person in the family?

Frederick:

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So somehow or another you have to sell that to them. There’s the carrot and the stick idea that hopefully you can do it with carrots. And every now and then you have to say, “Look, if you don’t do it this way, you’re going to be the one eating off the dirty dishes. We’re going to make you eat off when we don’t get clean or whatever.”

Angela:

Paper plates.

Frederick:

Yeah, exactly. So anyway, yeah, I think ADKAR applies to virtually all changes.

Angela:

So, you just touched on something, and I know Julia’s written blogs about this, about engaging your stakeholders and gaining that buy-in. So that was probably fairly easy with doing a backyard because your wife’s an avid gardener so she probably was very excited about the opportunity to plant some new vegetation and design the landscaping there. But what about in the business world and engaging stakeholders and bringing them into that process?

Frederick:

I think the first thing you would notice is that there’s going to be a lot of different personalities, a lot of different types of people that you’re dealing with. You’re going to have the optimists, you’re going to have the people, the enthusiasts, the ones that are excited about it, and then you’re going to have the blockers and you’re going to have the people that don’t want to do it. And so in terms of stakeholder engagement, it’s got to be done and you’ve got to tackle it. And you jump in head first and start working with it. And the temptation, and I talked about this in my webinar, the temptation is to hang out with the enthusiasts, to hang out with the optimists and to do all-

Angela:

The champions.

Frederick:

The champions. And yeah, you figure if you just hang with them everything’s going to be okay. Well, it’s not going to be okay. You really ought to shift your focus to the tough ones, the blockers. And for a few reasons, one, because they’re going to be there. You can’t just ignore them. You can’t just imagine that they’re not there, that their opinion doesn’t matter or that their attitude doesn’t matter. You need to get them on board too. And if you can change their mind it has a huge influence when other people see it happen. They can be very influential. They’re known as the blockers, they’re known among their group as people that don’t want to do the new things. And if you can sell them on it, then you’re miles ahead in terms of getting other people on board.

But, and also, I mean, stakeholder engagement is tricky because, well, we’ve talked about the whole virtual thing. We’ve had to do some data gathering and some stakeholder engagement projects in the last year during COVID, and doing it virtually is a challenge. I mean, there’s something to be said for that face-to-face contact, that human contact that I was talking about earlier, that when you’re not in the room with the person, yeah, maybe they’re on camera, maybe you can see the body language, but there’s a certain thing, and I can’t even put my finger on it, that you can’t… it’s not tangible. You cannot feel it. But when you’re in the room with the person it’s different.

So, that’s been challenging. We’ve had to come up with new tools and new ways of dealing with that too. But it’s work. I mean, it’s been amazing that the entire year has shifted our way of working so much and some of it will stick with us for a long, long time. And some of it, of course, things will get back to normal at some… Well, normal, who knows what that is anymore? But at some point we’ll get back to working, and I guess with more familiar with what we were more familiar with back then. But some of these habits and these, the ways that we’re doing things, they’re going to be with us for a long, long time now. Almost a culture shift, I believe.

Angela:

Yeah. We were commenting this morning that this is our 11th episode and also the very first one that we’re recording in the office.

Frederick:

Oh wow.

Angela:

Fascinating to think about. We were chatting going back and forth just ahead of this recording about, are you always a blocker? Once a blocker always a blocker? Or can you switch roles? Can you go from champion on one project to a blocker on another? What do you think?

Frederick:

Absolutely. Absolutely, yeah. I mean, I can think of situations you could try and talk me into where I’d be like, “No way. There’s no way I’m doing that.” But I can also think of other situations where I’d be totally on board. It really depends on what you’re trying to convince the person to do. Yes, there are probably, I do know of some people, everyone probably knows some people that are always pessimists, always pessimists.

Julia:

I told Angela that’s my younger sister. She’s always a blocker no matter the situation.

Frederick:

No matter what, yes. It can happen, no doubt. I mean your younger sister may love ice cream but she’s the one that when you say, “Hey, let’s go down to the store and get ice cream,” she’ll come up with some reason why it’s not a good idea.

Julia:

Exactly.

Frederick:

And you’re like, “I thought you liked ice cream.” “Well, but yeah, but today something’s different.” They have to disagree all the time. Some people do that. Yeah, it’s odd. Or you get into those situations, and boy, I’ve been in this place before. I used to be considered when I was much younger, indecisive. And of course my friends hated that and they’d say, “Look, okay, you’re going to have to decide, where are we going to dinner tonight?” And I’d say, “I don’t know, wherever you want to go.” “No, you have to decide.” Then I say, “Okay, so we’re going to have  Mexican food tonight.” And someone will speak up saying, “Nah, I don’t want to do that. Let’s do something else.” So then this poor guy, me, is forced to make a decision but then it’s vetoed immediately. So I’ve also run into that before where someone goes out on a limb to make the decision and then they get totally vetoed right there.

So, like I said, the personality types are just all over the place. And when you’re dealing with clients and groups and stakeholder engagement, you’re always going to run into those different personalities. And I guess there are a hundred percent all the time blockers out there, which is strange. But I think that generally, if someone is on board with an idea, then they’re on board with it, and if they’re not, then they’re not. And they just make it up on the fly. If you tell them, “We’re going to do this differently tomorrow,” they decide yes or no right there. And something in their mind, I think, flips like, “Yeah, that’s a good idea.” Or “No, that’s not a good idea.” And if they say, “No, it’s not a good idea,” you’re going to have a bit of a sales job ahead of you to try and change their mind.

Julia:

So, I’m thinking of an internal project, the switch from Skype to Teams. What role did y’all play in that?

Frederick:

Interesting. Yeah, that’s interesting because the project I was talking about for the entire year of COVID we were using Skype back then. The company we were working with, that’s just what they happened to use. We had Teams and I got really used to Skype. And then oddly, when we did our virtual happy hours and stuff that was not work-related, we didn’t want to do it on the work system so we ended up using Zoom, which at first was a bit of a challenge for me. I’d never done it before, but I liked it. The video was really clear and some aspects of it were really great. And the Skype situation was we weren’t using video and so it didn’t matter. We just had the audio.

I recall with Teams when I came off that project, I think I was told Access Sciences was going to Teams. And I remember thinking, “Oh,” and of course my blocker in me came out. But now I’m so used to Skype and, “Why aren’t we going to do Zoom? Zoom was so clear. And why do I have to try this Teams thing? I don’t even like Teams.” The only experienced I’d had with Teams was that I didn’t like it. I mean, I wondered why as I’d gotten in there, and I had some little issue or something. It was a little issue, but I’m sure I made a big deal out of it and then just decided I didn’t like it. So that was a challenge for me, for our company to shift from one to the other. But I like it now. I love it now. I mean, I hardly even remember what Skype was like.

Once you start using something and you get used to it, it’s fine. But so now if you told me we were going back to Skype, I’d probably be a blocker about that.

Julia:

So, Angela, what about you? What was your role in the transition?

Angela:

Well, I think I gave myself away in the very first podcast episode whenever I said I created my own Teams three years ago. So definitely on the champion team, for sure.

Julia:

You were ready.

Angela:

Yes.

Frederick:

Well, I think it was kind of sneaky, but I think somehow the way they got me on board was to have me help with testing. And so I got to… We got on all, I think, three different platforms. We checked them out. We talked about what was good and what was bad. Of course, I wanted to be negative about Teams, and it wasn’t so bad once I got into there. I think… I forget what we tested. I think we tested Skype, Zoom and Teams, and the idea was going to be, “Let’s compare and let’s see what’s good and what’s bad.” And we tried to be subjective. I mean, objective. I was going to be, of course, very subjective. I found it hard to resist Teams. It just ended up working out better than I expected. And that was probably some sneaky way of getting me on board because I recall thinking, “Why do we have to change? Skype is great. Skype’s always been great. It’s been great for years. Why do we have to change?” But when I saw the video quality differences, I think was the big thing for me.

Angela:

And the collaboration functionality, I think Zoom is a great video conferencing tool. And of course it’s not really like a comparison podcast of Zoom versus Teams. Maybe we could do a blog about that or something, but just being able to really collaborate. We share documents back and forth. We’re editing Word documents. Six people in there editing a blog at one time. So, you don’t really get that with the Zoom platform.

Frederick:

That’s true. Absolutely, yeah. Zoom is not quite as good for business, there’s no doubt about that. It’s better for personal use. Right now, I don’t know, they may be changing things, but Teams has more, just more features for business, no doubt about that.

Angela:

So, before we wrap up, Frederick, I have one last question for you. Are you ready?

Frederick:

Uh-oh. I’m worried. Go ahead. You have that look in your eyes.

Angela:

So, I need to know what’s up with this rare coin that you were rummaging in your attic for?

Frederick:

Oh, wow. Well, word gets around, doesn’t it? I think I drive my wife crazy with the attic thing because I’ve been getting up there and working. And so there’s a little bit more of a story to that whole thing. This house was built in 1922 but my mom bought this house in about 1974. And so it’s kind of a family home and it’s got a ton of history, a lot of history over the years. It was a rental house though for a long time and then when she passed away I inherited it. I just came in and did this renovation about six years ago. So the attic is an interesting place because it has things from many, many, many years ago. Things are in there from when I was a kid, things are in there for my kids when they were kids. And then there are things that are even older than that up there.

So, the coin story, the interesting thing there is when I was probably 12, I started collecting coins and got in and out of it over the years. But for some reason or another, I recently got back into generating a little bit of interest in it. And I started wondering, what happened to… I had one particular prize coin that I had saved for years and I wondered whatever happened to that. And I knew where it was for the longest time. And then I put it somewhere really safe, and it’s so safe I can’t even find it. I don’t know where it is. I don’t know if it… It should have been in a drawer. It should have been in a box. It should have… I have this big memory of about six years ago putting it away and that’s the last time I saw it.

I’ve told my kids before, “Boy, after I’m gone, you need to look through everything,” because I do some really strange things and I hide stuff in the weirdest places. And in books, for instance, I’ll put things between the pages of the books, so God knows what I’ve done with this thing. I found, but in the process over the past week of looking for this thing, I have found every other coin related thing I’ve had since I was probably 12 years old. I’ve opened up boxes that have been sealed since 1976. And I found everything but that, and I just don’t know what I did with it. And I actually found an old book, a very old book and I thought, “I wonder if I put it in this book.” And I flipped it up, and sure enough, two coins fell out. I had hidden them in the book, but they weren’t the one I’m looking for. The one I’m looking for is just stellar. It’s amazing. And I hope I find it, but God knows where I’ve hidden it. I’m really good at hiding stuff and I’ve probably hidden it from myself.

Angela:

Can I just say, as someone who’s gone through the process of having to clean out after a parent’s loss-

Frederick Hall:

You and me both, I’ve done it too.

Angela:

… and having to go through all of that, if I had to turn over every book and open every box, I’d still here two and a half years later. Oh, Frederick.

Frederick:

I hope my kids like looking for buried treasure in the way I do because they’re going to find it here. And it’s incredible that yeah… Stuff hidden in the walls, in the books, God knows. I don’t think I’ve ever buried anything valuable in the backyard, but I’m one of those guys probably would have buried something during the Great Depression, I would have buried my little jar of gold coins. But there’s going to be stuff everywhere. Just in looking, is incredible the things I found. I found just an amazing amount of just really cool stuff that I forgot that I even owned from the ’70s and ’80s. But I did not find what I was looking for.

Angela:

So, did you re-hide it after you found it? Did you re-hide it?

Frederick:

The stuff, some of it, yes. I see all the boxes back up and I’ve stuck them back in the corner of the attic and for another two or three or four decades, and they may or may not ever be found. But yeah, my kids are going to be cursing my name after I’m gone, I think, researching through the attic and going, “Oh, my God, why did he have to save all this stuff?” I’m not a hoarder, but I do have a few boxes of things, a few boxes.

Angela:

As long as they’re warned that things are hidden and tucked away.

Frederick:

Oh, I’ve warned them. And they know my nature too. They know that I do stuff like that. So yeah, for every book they’re going to have to go through and flip through it because God knows, I remember when I was a kid, I know I’m probably going on and on here, but I got in change for a $10 bill that was a really unusual one. It was not a silver certificate. It was even earlier than that. I think it was a gold certificate from like early 20th century.

And I thought it was pretty amazing, and it is in a book somewhere. I do not know which one, but I know that I put it between the pages of a book because I wanted to keep it safe. And I’m sure it’s still around, no doubt. I have no idea which book it’s in. And God knows what it’s worth, I have no idea. But it was very cool. And if I find something cool, I’m like a ferret. I think I take something I like and I put it somewhere thinking I’ll find it someday. And if you’ve ever owned a ferret, and I have, they hide things and then I think they forget that they even have it.

Angela:

That’s hilarious.

Frederick:

We picked up a sofa and in the back corner of a house, our ferret had hidden a bunch of stuff that I know he had a new hiding place and he had probably forgotten that he had that hiding place.