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.

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 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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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 lines and feed that language back in and creating the context of the work worker or the lower level employee in the organization and synthesize, use the word, synthesize it back to the leadership so that they understand it may be in their own language. What those people are saying in their language. So are these critical components of this, this whole process that you crowdsource the ideas and then you synthesize it and transmit it to leadership and basically help to bridge the communication divide between them, help them figure out the strategy. Is this, how you see it as well? 

Absolutely. I think the best thing I can, I can bring into an organization sometimes is the willingness to ask questions that some people aren’t. But I think the people within an organization, you know, the majority of the time, a high majority of the time, already have ideas on how to do things better, faster, cheaper, safer. If you just ask them. And I think, yeah, I’m willing to go ask, you know, Mike, I’m driven by curiosity. You know, those, those people are highly skilled. Ask ’em, they’re experts. 

Yeah, no,  that’s definitely, and you know, it, it takes some level of humility to ask questions and not lead with answers, but lead with questions and let other people take the credit for the ideas. And that’s often in short supply and. Plus you bring,the objective, they are outsider as well, right?  So you are, you can ask those dumb questions that the inside people would don’t dare ask because of, you know, they might feel being shamed for them. Okay. So you basically connected that. So I think some of the things you mentioned her was talk to the people, listen and synthesize,  give the feedback, help connect the dots and craft a plan. So what does it take to help connect the dots? Is there like an, an approach that you take or some, is it just your experience of several decades of doing this? You kind of do this intuitively or is there a madness to the method or method to the madness, rather, how to connect these dots.

You know, I got 25 years plus of doing this, so there was a little bit of, I have done this a few times, but a lot of times it’s the partnership that I have created with the people in that organization about getting their understanding of what it makes to the strategy the high executives have come out with to make it actually work. The special sauce is being helpful in, again, asking the questions, but you know, how do we take strategy and make it tactical? How do we bring that focus back to the operational implementation and how do we measure it? Those folks tend to know those in that information in greater detail than I possibly could, but I can help create the link between what the corporate strategy plan is and how to make it actually work. And that, I think is where we help connect the dots. And I can go back up to leadership at that point in time and show them, you know, you wanna do this, here are the steps that will get us there. And a part of that is you know, kind of going through and going, here’s the needs and the wants, and let’s focus on the needs that’ll move the business forward, and we’ll put the wants. And if we have extra time and money, sure we can go for those too. 

Yeah. Well. It’s very rare that there’s extra money lying around, but you never know. So you talk about the curiosity of asking the right questions or asking any questions, being curious, what does it take to help an organization be more curious to kind of create a culture of curiosity? 

Oh that’s a great question. And I think this is where it does start with leadership. I think this is where, we, as leaders, have to model the behavior. The way how it was impressed in my brain was you know, my leader at the time, very openly coming up at one point saying, I don’t know. How we find out it to this day, I mean decades later. The power of that statement has resonated with me and I have tried to emulate that through my own journey, along my own professional journey. And I think

this is when you know, you have to acknowledge what you don't know. And get people around you to help figure it out and to show that it's okay not to know, to not be the expert.
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Yeah. So if you make it okay for people to not have to know the answers and you empower them to go and search for it and then share it, then you are essentially creating the structure.

That I think that, and the idea that if they question your statements, you know, that’s the other part too of that is you don’t take offense. It’s okay to say why. You know, why are we doing that? That’s a good question. I think we’re doing it because of this, you know, instead of coming back, going, you know, ’cause I say. So again, leaders modeling behavior, that opens up discussion that increases the chance for collaboration. 

Yes, I’m trying to remember the long time, the name of the long time CEO of General Motors who had this practice that when there was a topic on the board and basically there was a consensus on what to do. He always was suspicious that maybe there wasn’t enough curiosity involved in order to cons to this decision. And then he would adjourn the meeting and say, okay, so gentlemen, don’t come back until you have all the counter arguments against doing this thing, and then we can have a conversation. 

I think that is a very healthy attitude. The same manager that I was referring to earlier had one of his favorite catch phrases at the time was he liked to provoke conversations. And I’ve used that line for years because I think it does, it helps  create a healthy discussion. And, you know, I mean, when you’re curious, it starts exploring the, the possibilities pro and con. And it can start saying, well, if this doesn’t work. What will happen and how will we recover? How will we be better prepared? How can we mitigate the circumstances that that might lead us there in a faster, more efficient way? It’s not only, you know, I think being proactive, but it’s also being a growthful and I think it’s allowing people to start stretching,

to broaden and build them as participants and partners as well as curious workers.
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Yeah, and I think the value of curiosity is just going to go through the roof with all the information being at our fingertips with AI and with all the search engines and it’s not about the information, it’s about connecting the dots and being curious why this is so, does it even make sense? And asking the questions and being a little bit skeptical. Just to reflect on what you said about.  what if it doesn’t work? You know, what’s the worst thing that can happen? How do we recover from it? One of the exercises we used to do in a COP group, I was working with was, you know, let’s put someone out of business. So picked, we picked someone in the group, and okay, we are, let’s put him or her out of business and show them what are the ways that the competitors would come up with to put them out of business and reflect about, what to do about it, how to prevent this happening.

Again, having that chance to ask questions. I think just, you know, having other people to pose you– that’s one of the things I ike about AI, which is actually kind of, you know, associated with this is, is to bring something out and, and have it challenge me. You know, go up and go, you know, poke the holes in, in this attached document, you know, to find out what, what could go wrong and, and, and having again, you know, that intuitive process. And allowing you to broaden and build your own thoughts. But I think that, that the result is, especially as I found with my teams, is that when we had that kind of, you know, pro and con and we had to make a decision by then, it was actionable and it was pretty innovative and we were ready for anything that was, could or might go wrong.

Yeah, it’s good. It’s good to have the emergency plan in the back pocket for sure. 

Always, always. 

So let me switch gears here and ask you kind an unrelated question. You’ve been in this business as a consultant for several decades and you’ve seen a lot of things. So what’s one belief that you hold that 90% of leaders would disagree with?

I think the biggest thing people would disagree with is that learning and development is not an expense. Most people that I work with look at this and say, oh, training, well that’s an expense. So, you know, it’s one of the first things that want, we need to save money, let’s cut training. And I kind of go with them and I go, yeah, no, it’s not. There is a return on learning and I think they would, most people would disagree. But I’ve been able to have conversations where I can at least expand the idea and the viewpoints. But you know, the key is, is that, you know, I think many leaders, and I’ll throw some of my own L and D folks, you know, into this bucket too. We have sometimes measured the wrong things and we’ve measured metrics that really don’t matter and then make it look like we’re an expense. Things that nobody cares about. How many classes did you offer? How many people were there? What were their test scores or quiz scores?

And nobody cares about that stuff. What they care about is, you know, did the people that go through the programs perform better or faster when they, you know, came back? So, you know, did we move the needle on the business metrics? Did we increase retention? Did we reduce on the job injuries? Sick days? Did we have fewer environmental citations or human resource citations? You know, the kind of things that I think are key to the business sometimes. We don’t track them as, as we should. So I think leaders, if I said to them, you know, there is a return on learning, I think they would look and go, it’s an expense. And I go, I disagree. 

Mm-hmm. Yeah. I mean, it’s, it’s all about learning. If you don’t turn your company into a learning organization, then you’re gonna be passed by. 

Yeah. 

By all the other ones that are gonna disrupt you. That’s for sure. So sometimes you have these counter beliefs. So is there, was there a time when you’ve gotten a common advice and you ignored it and it paid off big for you?

I had one in particular that still makes me smile. I was part of an organization with a large call center that was out offshoring and outsourcing some of its work. And I had been tracking the learning and development team, the time that we spent on maintaining the content. Now we’re highly regulatory environment. So a lot of changes state by state, all those kind of things. So to make sure that we were still compliant and up to date, it took a lot of work, both from supporting our performance,  support tools within the systems, the assessments and development of the content. So I’ve been tracking that and I’ve been told for a long time, you know, you’re just wasting your time. Nobody cares about that stuff. And I disagreed. So fast forward all of a sudden we’re getting a big audit and we’re gonna reduce our force and we’re going to reduce our employee headcount because we’re offshoring and we’re outsourcing. And I, you know, obviously we won’t be teaching as many, you know, domestic workers. And I was called into, was told my number, and I said, okay. That’s fine. Our vendors prepared to do the following things, and here, by the way is my tracking for the last couple of years of the time we spent maintaining and updating and keeping us compliant with the laws of this content. I’ve got all the stuff that here, but you know, are they ready to take that over as well? At the end of the day, I ended up getting approval to hire additional staff. 

That’s pretty neat. That’s very interesting. Well, so if people would like to learn more about your Strategy On A Page and how to interview people and transmit the information and connect the dots for leadership and your turn strategy into tactics, or where should they go and where can they connect to you?

I would welcome them to check out my website. There’s a free fill in the blank template of a Strategy On A Page there that they can find too, along with some eBooks and other things. But my website is www.williamjryan, all one word, williamjryan.com and I’m always found on LinkedIn. Or email me at [email protected]. 

Okay, well that’s a great website. No one’s gonna steal it from you. Bill, thank you for coming and sharing your wisdom with us and your frameworks. And those of you listening, if you enjoyed this, please follow us on LinkedIn, on YouTube, on Apple Podcast. Give us a review and stay tuned because every week I come with a thought leader or entrepreneur who is sharing something smart that you can implement in your business. So thanks for coming, Bill, and thank you for listening. 

Thanks for having me. I appreciate it, Steve.