Bio

 Brian McDonald, an award-winning author, filmmaker, graphic novelist, and podcaster, is a sought-after instructor and consultant. He has taught his story seminar and consulted for various companies, including Pixar, Microsoft, and Cirque du Soleil.

 Interview Highlights

01:30 The Story Spine

04:00 Proposal, argument, conclusion

07:40 Video games – noodles are not cake

11:30 Armature

16:25 Stories in speeches

21:25 Finding your armature

23:00 Tools and weapons go together

25:30 The first act

27:00 Angels

28:00 Brian’s memoir

28:45 Paying attention

Connect 

·       Brian McDonald (writeinvisibleink.com)

·       @BeeMacDee1950 on X

·       @beemacdee on Instagram

·       Brian McDonald on LinkedIn

Books and references 

·       Land of the Dead: Lessons from the Underworld on Storytelling and Living, Brian McDonald

·       Invisible Ink: Building Stories from the Inside Out, Brian McDonald

·       The Golden Theme: How to Make Your Writing Appeal to the Highest Common Denominator, Brian McDonald

·       Old Souls, Brian McDonald

·       Ink Spots: Collected Writings on Story Structure, Filmmaking and Craftmanship, Brian McDonald

·       Brian's podcast 'You are a Storyteller'

 Episode Transcript

Ula Ojiaku

Hello and welcome to the Agile Innovation Leaders podcast. I’m Ula Ojiaku. On this podcast I speak with world-class leaders and doers about themselves and a variety of topics spanning Agile, Lean Innovation, Business, Leadership and much more – with actionable takeaways for you the listener. Welcome back to the Agile Innovation Leaders podcast, this is Part 2 of my conversation with Brian McDonald. In Part 1 we discussed defining a story, why we tell stories, among other things, and in this second part, Brian shares more of his insights around the storytelling formula, Brian’s upcoming memoir, and building a story’s armature. It’s been such an honour to speak with Brian and I hope you find Part 2 of our conversation as insightful as I have. Everyone is a storyteller, everyone has a story to tell, and we knowing how to structure it is key to making it impactful and helping people to get information that heals, that helps them survive, that helps them navigate the conflicts of this world. So, you, in your book, Invisible Ink, you gave us a storytelling formula, do you mind sharing that with us?

Brian McDonald

So the story spine are seven steps that you need to create a story. So they use it at Pixar, I've worked with them quite a bit so we speak similar language, but they use this too, and I think we basically learned it from the same source. So, they are once upon a time, and every day, until one day, and because of this, and because of this, until finally, and ever since that day. So they are once upon a time, and every day, until one day, and because of this, and because of this, until finally, and ever since that day. And you set up the status quo, this is what happened, this is who this person is, this is what they want, whatever it is, and then something changes. Now you're into the ‘until one day’, and the second act, now that would be the first act, the second act would be the body of the story. It's really what people say the story is about, so that's the longest part. That's why it's sort of split in two in a way because of this and because of this. There are some people who will add more because of this, but I don't, and some people don't like that I'm so rigid about it, but what I find is that the hardest thing I teach people is how to simplify. That's the hardest thing. So, adding more details is easy, simplifying is hard, right, and so that's why I stick with the seven and the because of this and because of this. And then, until finally, now you're into the third act, and ever since that day, because the third act is all about the conclusion or the resolution, but the conclusion, but the way I like to think about the three acts is this, and I had been thinking about it this way, and this is something that I don't know where Hitchcock got it, but Alfred Hitchcock talked about it, but I've never heard it anywhere else. So it's proposal, argument, conclusion. That's the way stories work, and those are the three acts. Proposal, argument, conclusion. Now, it's the way people talk. That's why it works. So the proposal is, let's say, I say Saturday I went to the best party I've ever been to in my life. That's my proposal. Everybody knows what comes next. My proof, this happened, that happened, this star was there, this blah blah blah, whatever it is, whatever my argument is, that this is the best party in the world, right? And then the conclusion, often stories are circular, so you'll come back around to the beginning again. So, that's the best party I've ever been to, then I talk about it, and then I say, oh, what a great party, oh, that was the best party I've ever been to, whatever it is, it's the way we speak, that's why it works in stories, because it's natural. It's the way a legal argument is constructed. Your honour, my client is innocent. Then the trial, which is all proof, and then the conclusion as you can see, my client is innocent, that's the conclusion of that argument, but the resolution is, do they go to jail or not? And that may or may not matter to your story, depending on the story you're telling. So therapists say, well, we tell ourselves the story that I'm not good enough, we tell ourselves the story that I'm not attractive enough or whatever it is, and that's not a story, that's a conclusion that you have derived from stories, it's not a story, that's a conclusion. The conclusion is I'm not worthy, I'm not smart, whatever it is, but there are stories that made you think that or feel that, that's where the stories are, and so the problem is if you have different definitions for stories, I found this when I'm collaborating, if I'm working for a studio or a video game company or something, if we have a different definition for story, then we are miscommunicating from the very beginning of the conversation.  So they maybe will say, well, we should do this, and I say, well, that doesn't fit the story, well, I think it does, oh, well, we're not talking about the same thing. So the thing is, people can take my definition or leave it, that doesn't matter to me, but they ought to have a definition, and it ought to get results consistently, and then you can make sure everybody's on the same page.

Ula Ojiaku

What I'm hearing you say is it's important to take time to define the terms being used because that makes things easier when you're collaborating with people. So how do you then approach it?

Brian McDonald

It depends. Sometimes I come in and my job is to lecture, and that is to give them that shared definition and understanding of story. So sometimes that's my job. If I come in on a specific project to help on a specific project, that's usually because either they've heard me lecture before, or they've read my books and we already have a shared definition. So that's usually how it works, most of the time.

Ula Ojiaku

What would you advise when you're getting into a new collaboration with people, would you say, take the time to define the terms and what exactly generally would you say?

Brian McDonald

Yeah, if we're talking specifically about story, I think I would give them the definition. I would probably let them struggle with the definition of story first, because I think that's an important part of the process, because people have to know they were given something, because it sounds obvious when you say it. So we will fool ourselves and think, oh, I knew that, so the struggle is really important, so I would let them struggle, make sure they understood that they got something, oh, now I have a definition, and sometimes just having a definition elevates what you're able to do. Just having the definition. So, then I would break down story, I would break down armature, which I haven't done yet I don't believe in the concept of interactive stories, I think that's a misnomer, because once you interact with the story, it becomes a game. I don't think they can occupy the same space. Now, the word story comes from the word history, where it comes from, comes from the word history. A story has happened. So for instance, if you and I were somewhere and we had some crazy adventure, as it's happening, it is not a story. It's only a story when we're done and we tell people about it. A video game is happening in the moment, the same way as any other experience. It's an experience, but it's not a story till it's done, and you're telling people that, and so I just don't think they occupy the same space. Now they have a lot of the same ingredients, and that's what fools people. So for instance, it's sort of like, I would say you can use eggs and flour to make noodles or cake, but noodles are not cake, and so because you can have characters and settings and scenes and a lot of the same ingredients as a story, I think people think they're the same thing, but they are not, and that's what's interesting to me is that video game people desperately want their thing to be story, and I don't know why. It's like, no, you have your own thing. They have scenarios. In the old silent movie days, they didn't have screenplays, they didn't write screenplays. So, Buster Keaton would say, get me a fire truck and I'll make a movie, and he would then make it up, Chaplin did the same thing, he would make it up, they didn't write them down. Sometimes Chaplin would shoot and then say, okay, everybody has a week off while I figure out what happens next. He didn't know, so the reason they started writing screenplays, one of them was to budget. Well, what do you want? I'm going to need a truck, I'm going to need this, I'm going to need that. Okay. So they knew how much it was going to cost to make it, that's one of the reasons they started doing it. So you'll see on old silent movies scenario by, so it would be like, what if a guy robs a bank and this happens so that's the scenario. Video games have a scenario, and anything can happen in that scenario because the player has some agency, and that's like being in real life. Being in real life is not a story, it's just not, it's a story later, but I think that when we are experiencing a story, it feels like the present, and so I think it's confusing, and people will argue with me and they'll say, but have you played this video game or that video game or this one? And I'm like, you're not actually arguing. There's a little bit of story, and that stops and then there's gameplay, they don't occupy the same space, they're just close to each other. You have to switch from one to the other, I just don't believe they can occupy the same space, and I think technology has fooled us to thinking that that's the case, because you don't need technology. If there is such a thing as interactive stories, you could do that without technology. Choose your own adventure books were that, so you don't need it. Everybody remembers them, but how many people ever tell the story of a choose your own adventure book? You ever heard anybody say that? No one does, because it wasn't really a story, it was a game. There's nothing wrong with it being a game, I think that's totally fine, but I don't study games, I work with game people. There are people that study games and that's their whole thing. I get that, and there's game theory, and there's a bunch of stuff I don't know, but they seldom study story, and I do know that. So when they say, well, this game has a story, I'm telling you, it doesn't, because that's my field of study. And then an armature. So, I used to work in creature shops in Los Angeles. So I moved to LA in the mid 80s, and my roommate was a special effects makeup artist. And so my first jobs in LA were working in creature shops because he could get me these jobs, and this is before CGI and computers and stuff, so things had to be built. My roommate was working on the movie Predator when I moved there, I remember, it was called Hunter, I still have the script, it was called Hunter at the time, and so they were doing some reshoots. They had gone on location and shot the movie without having a design for the creature. So they came back and they were doing some shoots in studio and stuff with this creature, I remember that vividly. Anyway, but they had to build these things, and so I would work on these movies, I worked on a zombie movie and a movie called Night of the Creeps and all, but you had to make things, and I would watch these sculptors, amazing sculptors, sculpt these little mock cats of whatever the creature was, and they were, I’d never seen in real life, somebody really able to sculpt something that was so amazing, and I was 21 years old, it was amazing to see, and they would make though this wireframe skeleton before they sculpted the clay, and I asked why, I didn't know, and they said, well, we have to make a skeleton, an armature. In fact, the wire is called armature wire. We have to make this armature because clay can't support its own weight, and so after a little while, could be a day or two days or sometimes a few hours, it'll collapse upon itself. So you need to make this skeleton, and I thought, oh, that's really interesting. It's something I’d never thought about, and then when I thought about it in terms of story, I realised that a story has an armature. It holds everything up. Everything is built around this armature. It ends up being one of the most important parts, like with the clay, but it's not anything anybody notices, except when it is in there, it's the thing that makes it work, it's the thing that makes it stable, and the armature for a story is your point. What are you trying to say? What's the survival information you're trying to convey? So, some people would call it a theme, it's a mushy word, people don't quite know what it means. So I usually start with armature, then I use theme interchangeably, but I start with armature because it's a visual idea that people can sort of wrap their brain around, where theme is, I think, almost too intellectual. And the way I like to think of it is this, that a story doesn't have a theme. This is what you always, you hear this, stories have a theme, this story has to have a theme. Stories don't have a theme, stories are a theme, stories are a manifestation of the theme. If you are telling the story of King Midas and you're saying some things are more important than gold, then the story is a manifestation of the illustration of that theme.

Ula Ojiaku

So if a story is a manifestation of a theme and an armature is your point you’re trying to make, so what is a theme then?

Brian McDonald

Well, theme and armature are the same. It's just that theme takes a long time for people to wrap their brains around, it's too intellectual. I think a lot of terms for storytelling and writing and all of that were made up by people who weren't practitioners, but observers, and so their words are often not very helpful. So it's like, well, theme's not a helpful word. I struggled with the idea of theme for a long time, even though I knew what a theme was, I was lucky because of the things that influenced me would always have a strong theme, and so I knew instinctually how to do it. It was a while before I understood what I was doing, and the word theme completely confused me because it was something I thought I had to put in my story, I had to fit it in there, but it's not that way.

Ula Ojiaku

So if I said a theme is the point you're trying to make, or a theme is the message you're trying to pass across would that be wrong?

Brian McDonald

You know, the interesting thing about having a point, is that when we talk, we have no problem with the concept, and in fact, when somebody's talking to you, and it's clear they don't have a point, you lose interest fast, you also don't know what to listen for. So one of the things that often comes up is people will talk about I think mood, for instance, is a trick of literature. So, because you can paint pretty pictures with words and you can do these things, I think that's a trick and has nothing to do with storytelling. It's almost a special thing, and so sometimes people will say, well, what about mood, because you're so into story, what about mood? I go, well, here's the thing, nobody talks in real life about mood. So if I say to you, hey Ula, I have something to tell you, a clear blue sky, seagulls in the distance, the sun beating down on me, salt air coming off the ocean. Okay, I'll see you later. You'd be like, I didn't tell you anything, but if I just add one sentence, if I say my trip to Mexico was amazing, clear blue sky, now you know why you're listening. That changes everything. Armature does the same thing. If you know why you're telling the story, it will all fall together in a different way, and people know they're in good hands, they feel it, they won't know why, but they'll understand why they're listening.

Ula Ojiaku

People in other disciplines have to give presentations and already is an established case that storytelling helps with engaging people, and when you know the point you're trying to pass across, it's a great starting point to know what message you're trying to pass across to the audience. What advice would you give to leaders? What can they bear in mind to about weaving in stories so that it's engaging without losing the message?

Brian McDonald

I've helped people write speeches and I've had to give speeches on different things that were not necessarily story related. And in fact, when I was at the creative agency I was at, we would often be asked to help people write speeches, and all the writers would follow basically the rules that I laid down about how that should happen, and we could do it really quickly and the CEOs were always amazed at how quickly we could do it, but they usually have a story, they just don't recognise it. Most people don't recognise the stories that they have to tell because they take them for granted, and so often we would pull that out of them and say, that's your thing, but I once heard an interview, this is pre-pandemic. So pre-pandemic, there were a lot of people, who were against vaccines, even then, and I heard this doctor talking on the radio and the doctor said, because people were afraid, they were like, well, wait, if my kid gets the vaccines, gets immunised, this leads to autism, that's what they thought,  and the doctors were like, all the research from all around the world does not bear that out, that's not true. So, and they kept trying to provide data that showed that this wasn't true, and I remember listening to this going, they're not going to win with data because we're not wired for data. The reason those people believe what they believe is because they have a story. I knew somebody this happened to, I heard of a person this happened to. You can only win with another story, you're not going to win with data. So the thing is, you find a story, a human story about whatever you're talking about, because there is one, and when you find it, that's what people will latch on to. We're not wired for all that other stuff, we're not wired for charts and graphs, and that's not the way it works. We're wired for stories and we want to know, hey, how is what you're telling me going to help me, that's what we want to know, and so there is a story there, there always is, they just have to find it. How does this thing connect with me? Steve Jobs was good at this, and I've worked with tech companies making pieces for them, and if they have a product, they often want to give you the stats, like it does it's this, and it does this and it does this and it has this many whatever, but do you remember there was a commercial, at least here I don't know if it was everywhere, but there was a commercial for facetime, and when it first came out, there was a commercial for it and the commercial was just people on the computers, or on their phones, connecting with other people. So there was a guy who obviously was stationed somewhere, a military guy, and he sees his wife and their new baby over the thing, somebody seeing a graduation, I think is one of them, all these things that connected people. Now you got, I’ve got to have, that because you're giving me emotional information. I don't know anything about technology, so you're not going to impress me with technology, you're going to impress me with how is this going to impact my life for the better. So they told you those little stories, those little vignettes, and it was a powerful commercial. So an armature should be a sentence, so it should be something you can prove or disprove through the story. It has to be a sentence. So a lot of times people go, well, revenge, that's my theme, that’s my armature. It's like, it can't be. Revenge is sweet, can be. Revenge harms the avenger, could be. It can't be friendship, friendships are sometimes complicated, friendships are necessary, something like that. So companies can have armatures, they're often looking for their armature. What's interesting is that Nike's armature is if you have a body, you're an athlete, and when you have a strong armature, it tells you what to do. So, if you have a body, you're an athlete, which they sort of contextualised as ‘just do it’, but the armature is, so they did an ad with an overweight kid jogging. It's just one shot of him jogging and having a very hard time doing it, but doing it, and that's better than having a star. A lot of times clients used to come to us with the agency and go, we got this star and this song. It's like, yeah, but what are you saying, because it won't matter. That was a very powerful ad, that kid just jogging and just doing it, and you were like, it was more impressive than the most impressive athlete, you had empathy for him, you had admiration. It was amazing, it's an amazing ad, and it's simple, it doesn't cost a lot of money. It doesn't have any special effects. It doesn't have any big stars. What was interesting is that Nike changed ‘just do it’ for a while to ‘be like Mike’, to be like Michael Jordan, be like Mike. Well, guess what? You can't be like Mike. If you have a body, you're an athlete. I can do that, but I can't be like Mike, so they went back. They had to go back, that went away. If you have a strong armature, it's amazing, what it does is sticking to your armature has a way of making your stuff resonate and be honest in a very specific way and feel polished, and so if somebody is giving a talk and they know their armature. I gave a talk, at the EG conference. I was flattered to be asked because James Cameron had spoken there, Quincy Jones had spoken there, they asked me to be there and they said, well, what do you want to talk about, and I said, well I'm a story person, I want to talk about story. They seemed bored by the whole idea of me talking about story and they said, well, what are you working on? Well, I had just started working on a memoir that's not out yet, but I had just started working on this memoir, and they go, tell us about that, and it was a memoir about my brother's murder, and they said, well we want you to tell us about that, what you're going to talk about in your memoir. So I thought, okay, I didn't want to talk about it really, but I didn't want to pass up this opportunity. It was a high profile talk, there were going to be high profile people in the audience, it was an honour to be asked to do it, so I did it. So when I prepare for a speech, or a lecture or anything, the first thing I do is I try to get into that venue as early as possible when there's no one there, and I walk on and off the stage, over and over again, because one of the things that throws you as a speaker sometimes is not knowing how to get on and off the stage. You might trip, so I just do it a bunch of times so I know how many steps. Then I sit on the stage, I just sit there, because I want it to become my living room, so I just sit there, it could be 20 minutes, just taking it all in. I ask them to turn the lights on the way the lights are going to be on during the talk, because sometimes it throws you when you're like, oh, I can't see anybody, or I can see the first two rows, I'm getting rid of all of those things. Then I go into the audience and I sit in different sections. What can these people see? What can these people see? What can these people see? I do all. So that's the way I prepare, and then I do all the tech stuff. Well, the EG conference didn't really let me do that. I got to go on stage for a couple of minutes, but I really didn't get to spend much time up there. I had my PowerPoint. So I had some slides and I had notes, and they said, okay, this is what time you're going up. I go, I’ve got to know if this is working, my slides and my notes and they didn't let me do it on stage, we did it backstage and I go, it's going to look like this. Fine, I get out there, the monitor on the stage is different, and I don't have my notes. I don't have my notes. I had seen people at this conference when something went wrong, they would stop their talk, they would go talk to a tech person. It took the air out of the room, it sucked the air out of them. So I was like, I'm not doing that, I'm up here without a net now, I'm just going to do this. Here's what saved me. I knew my proposal and I knew my conclusion, which were the same. All I had to do was prove that proposal. So as I'm up there, I had prepared some things, but I'm essentially making things up, that I know will do the job because I know the armature. Now this is not to brag, this is about how well the technique works. I got an immediate standing ovation. Some of those people, they know what they're looking at, some of those people are pretty big deal people, and so they came up, I'm friends with some of them now, like we’ve got to hang out, I’ve got to pick your brain, and I was sort of the celebrity of that thing, and there were people who went to the EG conference every year, and I heard from people that it was either the best speech they'd heard, or in the top five speeches they’d heard at that conference, and some serious people had spoken at that conference before. So, but that was just the technique, it's nothing special about me, I just knew the technique, and everybody can learn it, and when I've taught it to people like a guy I used to work with, Jesse Bryan at the Belief Agency, we helped the CEO write a speech, and he's a shy guy, but we found his armature and we said, this is your armature, this is what you have to do this about, and he did it, and we heard back from people who worked with him. It's the best speech he's ever given, he was comfortable, he knew what he was saying, he knew what he was doing up there and he believed what he was saying, because that's key. It's key to believe what you're saying. So it doesn't matter whether you're writing a story or whatever, it always helps. For instance, a lot of times people will write an email to somebody and in the email, there's like 10 or 15 things to pay attention to, and then when that happens, a lot of things don't get addressed. So if your armature is your subject, and everything is dealing with that, and then if you have more to say, that's another email. This one's just about this, now, all of a sudden, I've told people that, and I know other people I've worked with who've told people that, and all of a sudden, people are responding to their emails differently, things are getting addressed that weren't getting addressed, because they started with their armature. Because there's too much to pay attention to. Is this for me? Is this for somebody else, especially if it's a group email, who's this for? Am I supposed to do this? But if it's one thing, hey, Brian, take care of this thing. Oh, okay.  One thing about point, which is interesting. So I've been teaching this a long time now and I don't usually get new questions, but one day somebody had a question I'd never heard before. So I'm talking about having point, and somebody says, what's a point? And I thought it was pretty self explanatory, but I try to honour the question, and so I answered and I talked about armature, talked about having a point, knowing what you want to say and all of that, and anyway, he got it, but afterwards, I went, what is a point? I have to actually know that. So I looked it up, a point, the definition of a point, one of the definitions is the tapered sharp end of a tool or a weapon, and I'm like, that's exactly what a point is in a story, because you can weaponise. As a matter of fact, I actually don't believe that you can make a tool without also making a weapon. I think that they always go together. When we harness fire, that's a tool, but it's also a weapon. A hammer is a tool that can also be a weapon. Writing is a tool that can also be a weapon. Storytelling is a tool that can also be a weapon. I don't think you can make one without the other. It's just what you decide to do with it.

Ula Ojiaku

It's like different sides of the same coin, really.

Brian McDonald

Yeah, the tapered sharp end of a tool or weapon, and that's what a point is.

Ula Ojiaku

So what led to your updating of the Invisible Ink? Could you tell us a bit about that, please?

Brian McDonald

Well, it took me six years to get the book published. I wrote it and it took forever to get published, it took a long time. And so, I learned more, and when the book was finally going to get published, I thought, well, I know more now than I did then, when I wrote this book. Do I amend the book? Or do I put it out the way it is? Well, I had been teaching, and that book was essentially what I had been teaching, and I knew it worked for people, and I knew it resonated with people, so I went, well, you know, this is fine. I'll just put this one out and then later I'll know enough new stuff that I can put that in the book, and so that's what I did. I started teaching things that weren't in the book, and there were enough of them that I thought, okay, this is enough new stuff that I can justify a new book, and also I changed some of the language a little bit, there was some gender stuff in Invisible Ink that, as the years went on, rubbed people the wrong way, and I understand that, and so I'm like, let me adjust that. It took me a while to figure out how to adjust it, but once I figured that out, because I wanted to be honest about the things I was observing, but the world moved on and I didn't want to be stuck. Now in another 10 or 20 years, there might be stuff in the book that people go, I can't believe you wrote that, but there's nothing I can do about that, but as long as I'm around to make changes, I'll make those changes. So that was a less of it than really I had more to say and I found ways of being more clear and over the years I've gotten questions, like people didn't know how to build a story using an armature, so I started teaching that more and so that's in the book, and also I talk about first acts more because I think the first act is so important and it's actually getting lost, particularly in Hollywood. I was told by an agent I had not to write a first act, because they want to get right to the action, but the first act in a story, there's a lot of work it's doing, and one of the things it does is it creates a connection between the audience and the protagonist. So the difference is this. If I say there was a terrible car wreck yesterday. Oh, that sounds terrible. Was anybody hurt? Yeah, your best friend was in a terrible car wreck.

Ula Ojiaku

That changes everything.

Brian McDonald

Everything. That's what the first act does. Oh, I know this person this is happening to. You eliminate that, you get all the spectacle and all that other stuff, but you don't care. That first act makes people care. So I focused on that a lot, and I talk about how to build a story from that armature, how that helps your first act, and how to build the rest of the story using that armature. So that's why I've changed the subtitle to Building Stories from the Inside Out, because that's more the focus of this book Land of the Dead is my favourite of my books right now, because most of what I teach, in some way or another, used to be taught, a lot of it was common knowledge up till about the 1920s. So all I've done is do a lot of studying and reading and all of that. The Land of the Dead has things in it that I haven't read other places, and I feel like it's my contribution, in a different way, to storytelling. I think I've added some vocabulary to storytelling, broadly speaking and there's one thing in particular in that book, angel characters, I talk about angels, not in a religious sense, but in a story sense and how they operate in stories, and I don't know if anybody's ever talked about it. They may talk about it somewhere, but they don't talk about anything I've read about story, and there's some other things too in The Land of the Dead I think I've added to the vocabulary, so I feel proud of that. I feel like I put my handprint on the cave wall with that book. We'll see, I don't know, people like what they like, I like that book, and The Golden Theme I liked too, but those two, I think those two for me, they're actually in a way, opposite books in a way, that one is about the underworld and the information and the lessons we get from the underworld, but they're both, I think, positive. Some of the reviews with Land of the Dead talk about how it's strangely positive, given what it's about, and I'm proud of that. There's just a lot of things, I'm very proud of that book, and the memoir, which will be out who knows when, it takes a long time, it's graphic, so it's being drawn and that takes a long time, so hopefully it'll be out in another year or so.

Ula Ojiaku

Looking forward to that. So where can the audience find you if they want to reach out to you?

Brian McDonald

Well, they can go to my website, writeinvisibleink.com They can do that. They can follow me on Instagram, which is @beemacdee Those are the places where people usually find me and they can write me from the website, and my classes are offered there. So I teach zoom classes.

Ula Ojiaku

Do you have any final words for the audience?

Brian McDonald

I would say, to pay attention to the stories around you, pay attention when people talk, if you learn how to do that, you will learn everything you want to know about storytelling, because it's in the natural world. So you'll learn when you're bored, why you're bored, when you're engaged, why you're engaged, and it's hard for people at first, but if they can learn, I say, observe stories in their natural habitat. So, the problem is when people are in a conversation, they're in a conversation and it's hard to observe and be in a conversation, but if you practice it, you can do it, and it's really interesting to hear somebody talk and they'll talk in three acts, they'll have a proposal, they’ll have an argument, they'll have a conclusion and you'll hear it, and the reason I think that's important is because until you teach it to yourself, you will think, oh, what did Brian say, or I think Brian's wrong about this, or this is his take. When you observe it yourself, you're teaching it to yourself. You don't have to listen to me at all, teach it to yourself. It'll prove itself to you, and then that comes from a different place when you start using it. You're not following my rules and quotes, and so I think that's really important that people have ownership over it and that they know that it's theirs, and they're not painting by numbers.

Ula Ojiaku

Thank you, Brian. Pay attention to the stories around you. This has been an amazing conversation and my heart is full, and I want to say thank you so much for the generosity with which you've shared your wisdom, your experience, your knowledge. Thank you.

Brian McDonald

Thank you. Thanks for having me.

Ula Ojiaku

My pleasure. That’s all we have for now. Thanks for listening. If you liked this show, do subscribe at www.agileinnovationleaders.com or your favourite podcast provider. Also share with friends and do leave a review on iTunes. This would help others find this show. I’d also love to hear from you, so please drop me an email at [email protected] Take care and God bless! 

Bio  

Brian McDonald, an award-winning author, filmmaker, graphic novelist, and podcaster, is a sought-after instructor and consultant. He has taught his story seminar and consulted for various companies, including Pixar, Microsoft, and Cirque du Soleil.  

Interview Highlights  

02:45 The gift of writing

04:00 Rejected by Disney

05:35 Defining a story

07:25 Conclusions

10:30 Why do we tell stories?

13:40 Survival stories

17:00 Finding the common thread

19:00 The Golden Theme

 20:45 Neuroscience  

Connect  

Brian McDonald (writeinvisibleink.com)

@BeeMacDee1950 on X

@beemacdee on Instagram

Brian McDonald on LinkedIn

 Books and references  

Land of the Dead: Lessons from the Underworld on Storytelling and Living, Brian McDonald

Invisible Ink: Building Stories from the Inside Out, Brian McDonald

The Golden Theme: How to Make Your Writing Appeal to the Highest Common Denominator, Brian McDonald

Old Souls, Brian McDonald

Ink Spots: Collected Writings on Story Structure, Filmmaking and Craftmanship, Brian McDonald

Brian's podcast 'You are a Storyteller'

Episode Transcript  

Ula Ojiaku  

Hello and welcome to the Agile Innovation Leaders podcast. I’m Ula Ojiaku. On this podcast I speak with world-class leaders and doers about themselves and a variety of topics spanning Agile, Lean Innovation, Business, Leadership and much more – with actionable takeaways for you the listener. Very honoured to introduce my guest for this episode, Brian McDonald,. He’s an award-winning author, filmmaker, graphic novelist and podcaster. Brian is a sought-after speaker, instructor and consultant who has taught his story seminar and consulted for companies like Pixar, Microsoft, and Cirque du Soleil. In this first part of our two-part episode, we discuss the gift of writing, his experience being rejected by Disney, his book Invisible Ink, that book is lifechanging. We also discuss defining a story, conclusions, and why we tell stories. Stay tuned for an insightful conversation!  Brian, it's a pleasure to have you on the Agile Innovation Leaders podcast and an honour. Thank you for making the time for this conversation.  

Brian McDonald

Thank you. Thanks for having me.

 Ula Ojiaku

 Awesome. So could you tell us a bit about yourself? What are the things that have led you to being the Brian McDonald we know today?

Brian McDonald

 How I got to be, I guess, a story expert or whatever it is I am, the memory I have is of being in kindergarten and seeing an animated film about King Midas, and I was obsessed with it. It was stop motion animation, so it was frightening, it scared me, but I couldn't stop thinking about it. So I got obsessed with stop motion animation and I got obsessed with the story of King Midas and I thought about stories a lot. We lived not very far away from a drive-in movie theatre, and so we would, as a family, watch movies from our porch, and I remember, because we couldn't hear them, I remember piecing together the stories that we couldn't hear, and I would tell my younger brother and my sister what I assumed was happening. So it was an early, early thing for me. I didn't know necessarily that I was studying it, I was just obsessed with it. What made it work and what made people laugh and what made them scared and what made them lean forward, that was fascinating to me, but I didn't know I had any particular gift for it, until I guess I was in the seventh or eighth grade when a friend of mine did a drawing and he said to me, Brian, come up with a story for this drawing because you're good at that. I didn't know I was good at it, right. It was so natural to me, and so I just pursued that path. I wanted to be a director. Before that, before the 70s, not every director was a writer, but in the 70s, it seemed like every director was a writer. So Francis Ford Coppola was a writer, Steven Spielberg was a writer, George Lucas was a writer. So I thought that's what you had to do. And I had dyslexia, so writing scared me, it was difficult for me, but wanting to tell stories overrode that, and I just thought that's what I had to do, so I just kept doing it and pretty soon, accidentally became an expert at it, where people would start asking me for advice and the people who started asking me for advice were higher and higher up the food chain. I remember I was on a plane next to some award winning writer and I happened to be sitting next to him and I was star struck that I got to sit next to him on this plane and we were talking and I thought we were just talking about story stuff and then he said, do you mind if I take notes? So I thought, okay, maybe I've got something, but I didn't think anything I was saying was worthy of taking notes, but he did. Yeah, and then I wrote the book for two reasons. I submitted a screenplay to Disney for their fellowship program, and it was rejected in the first round, and I didn't think that was right, and they also gave me a list of books I could read about screenwriting, and I was so angry and I thought, have you read these books, because I could write one of these books, and so I did. So then I had a student, the first class I ever taught, I didn't mean to be a teacher, it happened accidentally. I needed some money and somebody needed a screenwriting teacher and so, I said, well, sure, I'll try it. It turns out I had a talent for it that I didn't know I had. So a woman in my class said to me, oh, you should write a book, and I said yeah, people say that, and she looked me dead in the eye and she said, no, you're good at this, you're good at communicating it, you have a responsibility to write a book. So those two things made me write the book.

 Ula Ojiaku

 I'm thankful, because when you experienced those things and sometimes they seem negative in the moment. So who would have thought that being rejected for a fellowship with Disney would lead to better things in my view, of bigger, better things. It's really amazing. I'm glad you did because we wouldn't be having this conversation if you didn't. Thank you again. Your work is affecting even other generations. I know my children definitely are big fans already. You being a storyteller and I don't want to read your book out to the audience, how would you define storytelling?

 Brian McDonald

First you have to define story. I noticed that most people who teach writing, who teach anything about story, just start talking about it without defining it, and it has a definition, story has a definition, and I find that people are using the word story, it's become a very hip word at this moment and I'll tell you what made me look it up. I heard an interview with a jazz bassist on the radio and this jazz bassist, I wish I could remember who it was, but apparently if you play jazz, this is the bassist you want, and the interviewer said, well, how did you become that guy? How did you become the guy everybody wants? And he said, well, I was a bassist for a long time and I was pretty good, and he said, one day I decided to look up bass in the dictionary, and he said, a bass is a foundation. Everything is built on the bass, and he said, once I understood that, I knew what my job was, and I became a better bassist. So, I'm like, I should probably look up the definition of what I do. So, I looked up the word story, and one of the definitions, now I've altered the definition and I'll tell you why, but I've altered it slightly. So a story is the telling or retelling of a series of events leading to a conclusion, meaning having a point. So one of the first questions I asked my classes is ‘what a story is’, and I let them struggle with it for a while because, once you hear it, it sounds like, of course, that's what it is. So I let them struggle for minutes, uncomfortable minutes coming up with all these things, because then they know they didn't know. Before they would say nothing. Now I think they've heard some of what I say or read it somewhere and they come back like they're repeating something I said, but without understanding it. So they'll say a series of events and I'll be like, no, it's not a series of events. It's the telling or retelling of a series of events. Right. That's a huge part of it. Right. So also leading to a conclusion, which I think is a huge part of it, and that's the part I added. Now, here's the thing, I don't know if you know how they write dictionaries, but how they write dictionaries is they go around and they ask people they think are smart, what words mean. That's what they do. That's how they do it. What do you think this word means? And then they get a consensus. And so this many people thought this, that's why you have a number one and number two and number three. Well, people who know that stuff are word people. I'm not a word person. I'm a story person. These are different things. We conflate the two things. We think they're the same, but they're not the same. You don't need words at all to tell a story. The first 30 years of movies were silent, ask any choreographer or dancer or pantomimist, you don't need it, right? We put them together, but they don't necessarily go together. The people who define story as the telling or retelling of a series of events are word people, but as a storyteller, I know that stories have a function. So they are leading to a conclusion. So that's the part I added, because they were word people, not story people, and for a story person, that was not a definition for me that worked, but I think that my definition helps people write stories, whereas the other definition does not.

Ula Ojiaku

Can I ask you a question about your definition of a story, because you said it’s leading to a conclusion. Would you say that the storyteller has to tell that conclusion, or is this something that the people being told the story would infer or a mixture?

Brian McDonald

Oh that depends. So a lot of times people will talk about resolution, that a story needs to resolve, happily ever after, but if you look in the east, they don't necessarily resolve, but they do conclude, they do allow you to draw a conclusion. A lot of Zen parables are like that, where it's almost as if it's left hanging, but it isn't exactly left hanging. I talk about this in my book, Land of the Dead, but there's a story about a monk and he's walking through the jungle, he sees a tiger, and the tiger starts to chase him, so he's running from this tiger, and he gets to the edge of a cliff, and so he's got the tiger behind him, and he's got the cliff in front of him, and he doesn't know what to do, he jumps, but he catches himself on a branch, a little branch, and the branch is starting to give way and there are these jagged rocks below. So if he falls, that's it. On the end of the branch, there are three strawberries growing, and he reaches out and he grabs strawberries and he eats them, and they're the best strawberries he's ever had. That's the end of that story, because the conclusion is all about how precious life becomes when we know it's near the end, and we could take that into our lives because we never know when it's going to be over, right, so that's a conclusion to be drawn from the story. It doesn't resolve - does he get out of it? How does he get out of it? What happens when… it doesn't resolve, but it concludes. So I like the word conclusion more than I like the word resolution.

Ula Ojiaku

Thanks for that, Brian. So now that you've laid the foundation for us on what a story is, what's storytelling then?

Brian McDonald

Well, you have to then ask what stories are for. Why do people tell stories? All around the world, in every culture, in every time, human beings have been storytellers. Why? Now people will come back and they'll say entertainment. That's not why you. You don't need stories to entertain. There's lots of things you could do. Think about it for a second. We tell stories all the time. We think we're just talking, but we tell stories all the time when we're having conversations. We don't even know we're telling stories, but we do it all the time. Then we tell ourselves stories. You have an imaginary conversation with somebody, right? Well, then he'll say this and then I'll say this and then he'll say that, and then I'll say…so you're telling yourself the story. You do it all the time, right? And then when you come home and you want to relax, you'll find a story either on your television or your phone or a book, that's the way we relax, so we do it all day long, right? And then we want to relax and we find a story to relax too. Then we go to sleep and we tell ourselves stories when we sleep. Well, that's a lot of energy for one thing, and the only conclusion I can draw is that it's a survival mechanism, because that's just the way evolution works. It had to have been selected for. The people who didn't tell stories are not here, so it has to be selected for, and anything that's selected for has an evolutionary advantage. There's no other animal that would spend that much time doing anything if it wasn't related to their survival, it doesn't make sense. And there are clues to this. So, some of the clues are, first of all, you'll notice with children. If you tell children it's story time, they lose their mind, and I think the reason they do that is because they are new to the world and they need to know how it works, and stories tell them how it works. So they are feeding in a way. I think story stories and food are very close together in terms of how important they are to us. As a matter of fact, if you found yourself in some place or something without food, you would start to immediately think of stories about people in that situation and how they got out of it. So that's one clue. The other clue is that any writing teacher will tell you that stories need conflict, that you have to have conflict in the story, and they would always say to me when I would ask as a kid, well, why, and they'd say, it's more interesting, for me, that's not really an answer. I think because I'm dyslexic, I have to go to the very basic part of it. Like, no, that's not an answer. There's an answer, and it's that conflict is the thing that we're trying to survive. Stories aren't necessarily entertaining, but they are engaging. Sometimes entertaining, sometimes they're just engaging, take Schindler's List. Is that entertaining? No, but it's engaging, so I think that the reason that we find stories engaging, and sometimes entertaining is because nature wants us to engage in that activity. It's why food tastes good. It wants us to engage in that activity. So it's a by-product, entertainment is a by-product of good storytelling.

Ula Ojiaku

It makes perfect sense, and I've watched a few of your episodes on the You Are A Storyteller podcast on your website writeinvisibleink.com and you said something about that stories can heal, can save lives. So it's not just about the entertainment factor. Can you expand on that, please?

Brian McDonald

Now, it's funny, I talk about survival and a lot of times people go immediately to physical survival, but there's all kinds of survival, so there's cultural survival, there is social survival, don't act this way, act that way. There is emotional or spiritual survival, and you'll see that with support groups, 12 step programmes, anything like that, where stories are medicinal, both the sharing of the story and the taking in of the story. Again, nature wants us to engage in that activity, and so we don't even know we're doing it. When I was a kid, we moved from one neighbourhood to another and it snowed one day and a friend of mine said, a new friend of mine, he said he came to the house and he said, hey, we're going to Dawson Hill. I didn't know what it was. What's Dawson Hill? Well, it's a big hill. There's a Dawson Street was the street. It's a big hill, and everybody goes sledding down this hill when it snows. Okay, so I go up there, and when I get up there, I hear this story. I probably told this story later, I don't remember, but I'm sure I did, I heard it retold to new kids all the time. So when you were a new kid in the neighbourhood, you would hear this story. There was a kid about a generation older than us. I actually worked with a woman years later who was from the same neighbourhood, and said she knew that story. She knew the story. She's a generation older than me, she knew the story. So anyway, a kid was going on an inner tube down the hill and he hit a utility pole and he got the wind knocked out of him and everybody gathered around, you know, are you okay, and it took him a minute to sort of recover, and he said, I'm fine, I'm okay, I'm fine, and he stayed for a little while, but after a while said he wasn't feeling well and he went home and took a nap and he never woke up because he had broken a rib and punctured an organ and was bleeding internally and didn't know it. Now, kids tell that story because that's the kind of story kids tell, right, but what were they saying to me? They were giving me survival information. Look, be careful going down this hill. They could have said that, that doesn't stick. The stories are what we've evolved to take in. So that doesn't stick. So, they don't even know they're doing it. This is how natural it is, they're just telling a story they think is creepy or interesting, whatever they think, but what they're saying is, be careful going down that hill, and if you do get hurt, you may not know how hurt you are, so get yourself checked out or let your parents know or something like that. There's two bits of survival information in that story. That's how natural it is. We do it all the time. And we navigate the world that way all the time, we just don't know we're doing it, and that's another thing, it's so natural. It's like breathing, there are people who study breath and how you breathe, but that's a whole field of study because we ignore it, and I think story is one of those things, as far as I know, you can go to school and you can study journalism and you can study medieval literature and you can study French poetry from whenever, you can study all of these things about writing, but I don't know if you can get a degree anywhere on story itself, which I find fascinating.

Ula Ojiaku

Unless you want to change that.

Brian McDonald

Maybe I will. I knew a woman who was a playwright and she would come to me for advice about storytelling, and she had a degree in playwriting. And I said, well, what did they teach you when you were in school? She said, it never came up. So it's interesting to me that we don't study that, which is the common denominator across all those other things. All those other disciplines have story at their core.

Ula Ojiaku

And that's what you were saying, the common denominator in The Golden Theme, I have digital copies of the other books, but The Golden Theme, that was what you were saying, that storytelling is the common denominator, if I remember correctly, but it's like something that runs through all of us as human beings.

Brian McDonald

Well, the thing is this, that stories have a point, they have a reason to be told, and I was looking for the thing that all stories had in common. One of the things, and again, this goes back to being dyslexic, but one of the things dyslexics do well, is see connections that other people miss. I'm bad with details, but I can see the big picture of things. Let's take the movie Seven Samurai was made into the movie Magnificent Seven. So it takes a samurai movie, they make it into a Western. What I see when I see those things is I say, this is about people learning how to stand up for themselves, this is about all these other things, and that doesn't matter if it's a Western or if it's, so I just see that how they're the same. The differences are superficial to me, I don't see those. So when people say what genre, if I'm writing something with genre, I'm like, I know what you mean, I don't know why it matters. I don't say that part, but I don't, because what matters is, is it compelling? Is it true about being a human being? Does it get to a truth? That's the important thing for me, and so I was looking for the common thread. Every story will have what I call an armature and I can explain what that is, but I thought, there's a common armature, there's got to be, that links all stories, and I thought about it for a long time. As a matter of fact, one of the things that got me started thinking about it was, I was walking through a cemetery with a friend of mine, we were working on a project, and it was a cemetery near where I lived, it's actually the cemetery where Bruce Lee is buried, and my mum is there now, which would have thrilled her to be close to Bruce Lee, but I was walking through that cemetery with a friend of mine and I said, you know, if these people could talk, I bet they would just have one thing to tell us. And he said, what? I go, I don't know, but I bet they'd have one thing to say that they would think this is the most, and I thought about that for a long time, so both The Golden Theme and Land of the Dead came out of that walk through the cemetery. So I thought about it for years, and in fact, it's a strange thing, I didn't even know it was happening. You know that sound of a chalkboard and the chalk, that sound, that was in my head constantly like I was working out some kind of equation, and I don't know if I'm synesthetic or something, but I could hear it, and then one day it stopped, and it was quiet, and what I call now The Golden Theme came to me. The one thing that the cemetery said and the thing that stories have in common is that we are all the same. That's what the cemetery tells you. We're all the same. We're all going to die one day. We all worry about the same stuff. We all care about the same things, and the closer you get to that in a story, because that's the underlying baseline, the more that story resonates with people, the more they see themselves in somebody they don't expect to see themselves in, the more it resonates. Wait, that person's nothing like me and yet they're everything like me, right? So that I think is what's underneath. That's what The Golden Theme is, is that recognition, because stories wouldn't work if that weren't true. For instance, if I say to you, I was walking on the beach and I was barefoot and there was hot sand between my toes. If I say that to you, the only way that you understand it is to put yourself there.

Ula Ojiaku

In your book, Invisible Ink, you also delved a little bit into the neuroscience, how our brains work and that our brains are wired for storytelling. When someone is telling a story and we're relating to it, the same parts of our brain are being kind of lit up and active, as if we were the people.

Brian McDonald

Because of the mirror neurons that we have. If you see somebody doing something, your brain does not know the difference between you doing it and them doing it, it doesn't recognise the difference and so the same part of your brain lights up. They'll show people smiling in a picture and have people in an MRI and the smile part of the brain lights up when that happens, and the frowns and all of that stuff. So that's a further proof of The Golden Theme, but also that's how we get the lesson from the story, because we put ourselves there, if we couldn't put ourselves there, we wouldn't get the lesson from the story and we wouldn't get the survival information. We would basically say, well, that happened to them and it would have nothing to do with you. And in fact, there are people like that, and we call those people, we will say, well, that guy, he's got to learn things the hard way. What does that mean? That means they don't listen to other people's stories, that's all it could mean. If there's a hard way, there's got to be an easy way, right?

Ula Ojiaku

The easy way is listening to people's stories and learning from them instead of you going through the experience.

Brian McDonald

Yeah, there's a saying that where there is an old person, nothing need go wrong. What that means is they have all the stories, so when there's a drought, go to them, they've been through five droughts. I think as we get older and our bodies fail and all of that, what we become is a collection of stories, and this is where we get the idea of that's where the wisdom is because that is what, before the internet, old people were the internet. That's the natural internet, the old people who have been through a lot and know things and have seen more patterns as you get older, you see more patterns, you're like, oh, I see where this is going to go.

Ula Ojiaku

And to be honest, you're not by any stretch old or anything, but one of the reasons I have this podcast is to hear people's stories and gather as much from people's experiences, to learn. So it's not really about posting it to the world, it's selfish, it's for me to ask questions of the people. So, like you said, people are a collection of stories, not necessarily just about the age, but just saying that's one of the reasons I want to hear your story. What happened? What made you do this? What made you do that? And I find myself, maybe let's see, tomorrow, a few weeks from now, I'll be like, oh, Brian said he went through this and I'm seeing something, I'm playing out and I'm instinctively knowing how it's going to play out, and then, oh, he said he did XYZ and okay, maybe I should try that and it works. Sorry, it's not about me, but I'm just saying I resonate with what you're saying.

Brian McDonald

It's just a very normal, natural thing, and I think it usually goes, it can go older to younger, but it can often go more experienced to less experienced, which is really the bigger thing. So I used to work with combat veterans that had PTSD, and I used to help them tell their stories to help with their healing, and I would ask them about storytelling in their work, and I'd say, okay, so you get deployed to Afghanistan or Iraq or something, are there stories before you go? And they were like, yes, there's lots of stories, because that's a highly dangerous situation, so people have a lot of stories about that. People who have been before say, make sure this happens, make sure you don't do this, make sure you do that. They said there’s stories when you're going, there’s stories when you get there, and there’s stories about when you're about to leave, because what I was told was, there are lots of incidents where people are on their last few days of deployment and that's when they get hurt or killed, because they get careless. So the stories are saying, be as careful on your last day as your first day, and that's just naturally happening. I think if people start paying attention now, often they're getting that kind of information, it changes how you hear stories, it changes how you listen to stories. There is this idea, this cliche, particularly in this culture, I don't know how many cultures have it, but in the United States, it's big and it's, oh, grandpa and his stories, or grandma and her stories, on and on and on, and blah, blah, blah with their stories. Here's the thing about that, they're just trying to help you survive. That's all that's happening, and if you listen, because you know, those people aren't going to be around forever and then you'll later, you go, why didn't I ask about this? Why didn't I ask about that? That's what happens. So just listen over and over again, even if you heard it 50 times, because there's going to be a time when you're going to want all those details, I guarantee you. If you listen that way, you listen differently. You start listening for how are they trying to help you survive, and it may not be apparent immediately. So I was in an improv class once and there was a woman in the improv class, Melissa was her name, and we're taking a break and we're having a talk and she used to be a flight attendant, and I said to her during this break, well, what was that like, and did anything weird ever happen on a plane or, you know, I was hoping she'd tell me about a UFO or something, but what she said was, well, she said a couple people died on flights I was on. She goes, that was a weird experience, but then she remembered something, and she said, oh, there was this one time there was a kid who kept getting up and running to the bathroom. She didn't say how old this kid was, but a young kid kept getting up, running to the bathroom and then coming back to his seat and then kept doing this, and he was annoying all the flight attendants, but Melissa said I was concerned. So I went up to the mother and I said, is your son okay, and the woman said, I think so, and she goes, well, I'm just concerned, he keeps getting up and going to the bathroom. And then she said, I noticed that his lips were a little swollen, and she said, I remembered a story that my parents had told me about my father having a fish allergy, where his lips swelled like that, his throat closed up, and he almost died. She said to the mother, is your son allergic to anything? And the mother said, I don't know. Melissa said, I think he might be having an allergic reaction. She checked the menu. They had served a salad that had shrimp in it. She said, I think this is what's happening. She's able to get on the phone from the plane to a clinic, they told her what to do, there was a doctor on the flight and when the plane landed, there was a team ready to help this kid. Now, when Melissa heard that story about her father, she did not think, here's information. She was just concerned about her father, but when she needed that information, that story was right there. We do that all the time. We just don't know we do it. It was right there. So even if you think this story is irrelevant, that this old person is telling me, you don't know that yet, it could be really relevant later on.

Ula Ojiaku

Thank you for listening to Part 1 of our conversation with Brian McDonald. Be sure to tune in for Part 2, coming up soon. That’s all we have for now. Thanks for listening. If you liked this show, do subscribe at www.agileinnovationleaders.com or your favourite podcast provider. Also share with friends and do leave a review on iTunes. This would help others find this show. I’d also love to hear from you, so please drop me an email at [email protected] Take care and God bless.

Bio  

 Kerrie, a serial entrepreneur, was introduced to mentoring after her last successful business sale. Realising she had no support or guidance in what she was doing, Kerrie founded the Association of Business Mentors in 2011 to provide mentoring skills and training for those seeking to mentor business owners professionally. Kerrie’s vision for the ABM was to provide reassurance to business owners that they are in the safe hands of a trusted and experienced ABM professional business mentor. Kerrie mentors businesses of all shapes and sizes. She also mentors within the workplace, working closely with HR departments to run mentoring programmes to support the growth and development of their employees.

Interview Highlights

01:30 Give it a go or you’ll never know

03:30 Starting out in mentorship

06:30 The vision or the team?

10:30 Boundaries in business

12:30 The onion exercise

16:30 Mentoring v coaching

21:00 The mentoring door

22:00 Quietening the mind

 23:30 Embedding an organisational mentoring culture  

Contact Information  

·         ABM website (Association of Business Mentors)

·         Association of Business Mentors on LinkedIn

·         Kerrie Dorman on LinkedIn  

Books & Resources  

·         The Mentoring Manual - Julie Starr

·         A Complete Guide to Effective Mentoring (The FT Guides), Dr. Ruth Gotian, Andy Lopata

·         Henley Business School webinars

·         Bounce: The Myth of Talent and the Power of Practice, Matthew Syed

·         The Choice: Embrace the Possible, Edith Eger

Episode Transcript  

Intro:  Hello and welcome to the Agile Innovation Leaders podcast. I’m Ula Ojiaku. On this podcast I speak with world-class leaders and doers about themselves and a variety of topics spanning Agile, Lean Innovation, Business, Leadership and much more – with actionable takeaways for you the listener.  

Ula Ojiaku  

I am very honoured to have the Founder of the Association of Business Mentors, Kerrie Dorman, as our guest on the Agile Innovation Leaders podcast. Kerrie, thank you so much for making the time for this conversation. I've been looking forward to it for ages.

Kerrie Dorman

You're very welcome. Thank you for having me.

Ula Ojiaku

My pleasure. So what's led you to the place where you are today and being the Kerrie Dorman that we've gotten to know and admire?

Kerrie Dorman

Okay, so actually part of my upbringing was being very much around entrepreneurship. My father was a key project manager on business ideas, primarily in Africa, and my stepfather also ran a very large family business. So I had business sort of around me from quite a young age, and I would talk to both my father and my stepfather about why things would happen and et cetera, et cetera. And so I became a serial entrepreneur from quite a young age. I think what gave me the impetus was the fact that I wasn't afraid to give something a go, and actually my motto now is give it a go or you'll never know, and if it works out, amazing, if not, then you learn and you move on. So my first business was in optics, because what I did do was get a profession behind me first, and that was a qualified dispensing optician. And so my first business was in recruitment for people within the optical industry, and I somehow managed to sell that by the skin of my teeth. And I just felt that it was incredibly satisfying, and a great sense of achievement to have been able to build something, even though it was very small, that was attractive to somebody else to want to pay for it. And so hence my entrepreneurialism streak started. So I started all sorts of businesses in all sorts of industries, I saw niches and just as I said, gave it a go. Some work just failed, and some I managed to sell, so I sort of came out vaguely on top at the end of it all, and then of course, there was the Association of Business Mentors, which is still going, and that came about because when I sold my last business, which was probably the most successful of them all, there was a new government funded mentorship program happening. It was an incubation centre, so there were young and bullish business owners wanting to be in this incubation centre to make sure that they had the best start, and so I was asked to come and share all my experiences, the successes, the failures, what I learnt, and I felt that I had a lot to share with these people, and that was my first stab at being a mentor. However, I didn't really know what I was doing, I'd never had my own mentor before, and I felt that I was getting quite frustrated with these young, inspiring people because they weren't running a business the way I had run a business. And I thought that that's what mentoring was about. There was no guidance on this scheme, and I just felt that it wasn't quite right in terms of what I was supposed to be doing. So I looked around for somewhere to hang my hat, find some other mentors, get some guidance, get some training, get some code of ethics, and the whole standard thing was really important to me. And apart from the EMCC, which is very European-centric and it was very coach-centric as well at the time. The European Mentoring and Coaching Council (EMCC), which is still going strongly to this day, and we sit with them on the Global Code of Ethics Committee. They just have a lot of kudos and I'm very, very flattered that we work alongside them. So then I just realised that mentoring was about to explode in the UK. It was very big in the States and we really needed somewhere for mentors to go and be supported and guided and also for mentees, so for business owners to go somewhere where they knew that a mentor had the guidance, had the structure, had the ethics and they were in safe hands, and that was 13 years ago.

Ula Ojiaku

Wow. And look where the Association of Business Mentors has gotten to with, I believe, thousands of members across the country?

Kerrie Dorman

We are up to, I think, two and a half thousand members at the moment. But you know what, Ula, the thing is, is that it's not just been me, it's absolutely about the team and the other people who have helped get it to where it is today. I definitely cannot take all the credit. I can take the credit for having the idea and the initial oomph to get it going, but it's really been down to all the volunteers in all the different regions, the different members of the board. It is really who you manage to bring on board with you and help you get initiatives to where they are.

Ula Ojiaku

Thank you for that. I'm a big believer that as long as you're learning, it's not really failure.

Kerrie Dorman

Yeah, absolutely. So it's only a failure if you don't learn, and so I think my fear of failure meant that I had to learn in order for self preservation, if that makes sense, and although it wasn't always apparent, that's definitely the case. There's a wonderful quote ‘I never lose, either I win or I learn’.

Ula Ojiaku

Now, the vision or the team, which one do you think is more important in setting up a successful enterprise

Kerrie Dorman

The team. Every single time. And do you know why? It's because visions change. Visions can change according to things outside of your control, landscape, you just have no idea where a journey is going to take you, and I think that it's quite close minded to stick to the exact same vision all the way through because you may start an initiative, a business for one reason, and then you end up delivering a solution to something completely different, which needs a tweaked and amended vision. And also, a really good team will help you to shape a vision as you grow, so that's it for me. It's team all the way.

Ula Ojiaku

And in all the businesses you've founded, how did you go about building the teams, the partnerships, the structure?

Kerrie Dorman

For me, it was all about the people that I knew, approaching them first and the like-mindedness about the core reason why I wanted the ABM to exist really was about standard support and guidance, and that was my unique selling point, for a commercial phrase, and I just found that there were lots of people out there who were just as passionate about me as those three things. And so, because I was so passionate, and so were they, it was easy to get the right people, and the people who felt that they wanted to join the movement, but didn't quite have the passion fell away along the journey. And that's sort of been a theme, I think, through all the businesses, it's about the people and about who I knew. So initially, when I would have a business idea, the idea was great, but until I had the right person in mind to help me run it, then it was a no go, but interestingly, and this conversation has been a catalyst for this thought, interestingly, it was having great people in my sort of hemisphere that sometimes often made me come to the conclusion that I needed to set up a business in a particular arena with that person. So sometimes it was the person that was the catalyst, and a great example of that, just to be crystal clear about what I mean is, one of my businesses was a beauty salon specialised in pregnant ladies and mums. So pregnant ladies, and then when they had the babies, they could come back. So it was all set up for massaging and wellbeing for mums who had bumps and boobs that couldn't ever lie on their tummies. So I got these special couches from the States and then they could have proper massages and then there was a creche so that once they had their babies, they could come back.  And so the catalyst for that business was, well A)I had a baby, but B) one of my employees in a current business was a qualified beauty therapist, and she was just having a bit of time out from the beauty world for one reason or another. And so I had my first born, and I had this employee who was really keen to get back and she was passionate about beauty and health. And for me, it then became this no brainer that the concept would work with her running it, and that's how it all started.

Ula Ojiaku

That's amazing. If you could speak to your younger self, what would you advise them to do?

Kerrie Dorman

This is a really great question and it really got me thinking. And I would sit myself down and I would say that I'd really need to ring fence my emotions. One of my downfalls has been to get too close to people that I have employed, and you know that saying ‘familiarity breeds contempt’. That actually really happened on several occasions. Ring fence my emotions, don't get too familiar. When you're in business, you have to have proper boundaries, and also, I can't stress the importance of having your eye on the numbers. You have to have your eye on the numbers all the time, not only just to make sure that you're making a profit currently, but that you have a sustainable business that can grow. So run forecasts and sense check them. Some people can get over zealous with it, but they just have to be there all the time. It's so, so important. And the fourth thing I would say to my younger self is to start delegating earlier. Took me a long time to really understand the power of delegating, and I think there was two reasons for that. A) I felt because I was quite young when I started these businesses, I just felt that I couldn't ask other people to do things for me when I was quite able to do them myself. And B) there was definitely an element of the fact that if I did it, it would probably be better than anyone else doing it. Two utterly ridiculous things, and if I'd learned that a lot earlier, then I would have been more successful, without a shadow of a doubt, and less tired probably.

So when I'm running a training for mentors, I run this little exercise called the onion exercise, and it's all about stripping back and really getting both mentor and mentee down to the nub of the onion, because that's where you feel comfortable, safe, and that's where all the good conversations start happening. And so to get people talking to each other, I get them to pair up into twos and they have to talk about something that's very personal to them, and as an example, I tell the story about the fact that I give blood very regularly and that I have one of the rarer blood groups, and one time, it was about eight years ago, and I was giving blood and the nurse came over to check that everything was working, and she said to me, oh you have special blood. I said, well, it's just one of the rarer types. And she said, no, it is one of the rarer types, she said, but it's healthy enough to go to the neonatal clinic to save the babies. And I thought, oh my God, that's amazing. So I was giving this example in one training, and this  mentor said to me, well, that's great, and it's a really interesting story, but what does that tell us in business? And it tells you actually that I have strong maternal instincts and I allow that to get in the way of my emotions and my professional boundaries, and that's, that's the power of it.

Ula Ojiaku

Now, if you were to define mentoring, what would you say it's all about?

Kerrie Dorman

My definition of mentoring is based on this. So a mentor's job is to ease the pain for the mentees. So we're mentoring because we have a certain amount of experience and skills and ethics and our role is to make sure that mentees look at all the options that are available to them, explore with all the appropriate approaches that they have, and go about their business in a calm and considered manner that's got the best outcomes possible. And as mentors we can do that because we've been there, we've done all sorts of things, we can just make sure that considered decisions are made, with all options having been explored. But not only do we need the experience as mentors, we need the skills, I mean, there are questioning and listening skills and self awareness skills that do not come naturally to a lot of people. We do have to make sure that we practice those. And I know I, for one, have had to practice my mentoring skills a lot in order to get to where I mentor today, without a doubt.

Ula Ojiaku

So did you have to go through training?

Kerrie Dorman

Yep, lots of training, lots of self reflection. I went through an assessment centre twice with Professor David Clutterbuck, who told me that I needed to improve and on the back of that, I got some very special mentoring sessions with Bob Garvey, and I don't know if you've come across either of these gentlemen, but they are absolute experts in our field, and it was an incredible learning curve for me, being mentored by Bob Garvey. He was so giving and really made me look at what I was doing in terms of my mentoring practice, and that's where the real lessons came. Lots and lots of practice taking on board honest, upfront feedback and doing something about it.

Ula Ojiaku

What's the difference between mentoring and coaching?

Kerrie Dorman

The difference is that anybody can actually be a coach as long as they have the qualifications that go with coaching. Coaching is a lot more stringent and structured in terms of the need for supervision and accreditation. Anyone can call themselves a mentor if they have a little bit of experience, well, I know there's a lot of mentors out there calling themselves mentors and they've probably just read a book, but anyway, let's not go onto my rant. So the difference is, is that coaches need accreditation and qualifications, mentors need experience, as well as the training and the qualifications. So the experience is absolutely key. And the other big difference is that as mentors, we can talk about our experiences and our stories, whereas coaches, it’s more about empowering the coachee to build their own stories and use their own experience in order to develop. So actually a mixture of both is what you really want.

Ula Ojiaku

And would you also as a mentor tell them what to do or do you give them the option to choose?

Kerrie Dorman

So the golden rule is that any decisions or any way that the mentee chooses to go forward is the responsibility of the mentee. We can call our stories hindsight, advice, whatever, but actually the responsibility stops, the buck stops with the mentee, and that's very important. So there cannot be a situation where a mentee can turn around and say, well, you told me to go down this particular route, that just doesn't happen. And that's part of being a professional and having our standards, and that's making crystal clear that the mentee is responsible for their own actions and decisions.

Ula Ojiaku

And you said that you now do a lot of work through the ABM, helping, mentoring business owners. Could you share maybe a bit more about this?

Kerrie Dorman

I have a small handful of mentees now, and my focus is all about supporting, training mentors to be the best that they can be, and I also work with bigger organisations and help them to set up mentoring programs that actually provide a return to the mentor, mentee and the organisation. So that's providing the motivation and the training, the know-how, and the monitoring, just making sure that everybody's getting what they want from it, because unfortunately, due to all sorts of things, normally lack of resource and knowledge, mentoring programs are tick box exercises, and so it's my mission to make sure that the majority of mentoring programs provide a value to all stakeholders.

Ula Ojiaku

And what would you say, in the situations where you felt were highly productive, or the mentees seemed to get the most out of the relationship, what was the difference between that and maybe an average mentor mentee relationship?

Kerrie Dorman

To be honest, for me, the difference has been the ego of the mentee. I've only had a couple of frustrating mentoring relationships, luckily. So I have actually reflected on this as to why I couldn't quite break through, why I couldn't provide them what I felt that they needed, what they thought they needed, and actually it was a little bit of arrogance and big egos on the mentees side, and as soon as I realised that I wasn't going to provide any value because of those barriers, then I just called it a day. I didn't say, I can't work with you because you've got a big ego, I just positioned it that we'd come to the end of our relationship and that it was time for them to look at somebody else with a different skill set, because otherwise it's unfair and it's frustrating and we shouldn't be in that position.

I love the analogy of the mentoring door. So when both mentors and mentees turn up for their session, they go through the mentoring door, they're zapped of all the stuff that they're carrying around with them and they turn up and they're both present and they're good to go in that moment in time for mentoring, because we're all so busy and we’re all thinking about all sorts of various different things - the last meeting, the mentee that's about to do this big bid, or whatever it is. We have to be able to learn to leave all of that at the door and be present.

Ula Ojiaku

Are there practices to help you with this?

Kerrie Dorman

Yeah, so I quite like Julie Starr. She wrote The Mentoring Manual. So she talks about quietening the mind, and it's about just taking as long as you need. So everyone's different, someone could walk through that mentoring door and have a quiet mind, just like that. Other people might need five minutes. Other people might need 20 minutes. It's up to you to know your own limitations, but when you walk through the mentoring door, the ability to take a breath and quiet your mind, and be present. That's my question to myself - is my mind quiet? And am I ready to take on the next lot of information that's about to be divulged to me. So that's a key phrase for me, quietening the mind, and she's got a couple of exercises in there actually. And the other one is the one that's just come out by Andy Lopata and Ruth Gotian is the Financial Times Guide to Effective Mentoring It's got some fantastic real life case studies in there and lots of people have been interviewed, myself included actually, I'm in there, and it's really good effective reading for mentors and mentees.

Ula Ojiaku

So, as leaders, how can we make sure that, one, we're effective as mentors in our organisations, and two, how can we make sure that that culture of mentoring is embedded in the organisation?

Kerrie Dorman

Two great questions. So the first one, how do we make sure that we are as effective as possible as mentors? So the only way is to keep self-developing and learning new exercises, having new tools and really getting involved with peer to peer discussions, and learning from each other. I really enjoy the webinars that come out of Henley Business School. There's a whole mentoring library there, and so I try and listen to one every six weeks as a minimum so that I'm just gaining a new perspective, making sure that I am actually on top of my game, but it takes work, because again, we're busy and we've just got to make sure that we do it. So I diarise Friday mornings to do that, and it's very rare that I'll give up that time unless I'm facing a deadline of some sort. It's rare that I'll give up that time to self-develop or network. So it's about giving ourselves the space in order to grow and to keep developing.

How do we shout about it inside an organisation and make sure that it's effective? Well it's our responsibility as mentors to ensure that our time is providing a return, and the only way an organisation can do that is by monitoring and getting the results, and there's all sorts of ways that we can do that, but getting feedback and scoring and making sure that mentors are getting what they need to get out of a mentoring relationship as well as the mentees is absolutely key. So when I'm running an initiative inside of an organisation, I get mentors and mentees to fill out a feedback form at the end and getting quite specific, but also to score one to 10, 10 being highly beneficial, and so we get a hardcore number at the end so we can see and where it's not providing value for somebody, then you go in and we find out how, what we can do to improve. Again, it's just continuous development. So really as mentors, it's about making sure that there is a return and that it's monitored, and if it's not, shout about it.

Ula Ojiaku

What other books have you recommended the most to people and why?

Kerrie Dorman

So apart from Julie Starr's Mentoring Manual, the one I have suggested the most frequently is Bounce by Matthew Syed. So the reason why I love Bounce so much is because he provides an argument that we are not born with talent. It is absolutely something that we have to work at, and the whole book is about his research to prove that. And in my journey as a mentor, I know I've had to put in the hours and the purposeful practice and the self-development to be the mentor that I am today. We are not born natural mentors, and I'm quite happy to be challenged on that, so that's the reason why I shout about his book, because it's all about keeping at it and building up your hours to be an expert in your field, and I feel very strongly about that. The other book is a book that I read during the pandemic during lockdown and it did amazing things for me as a person, not just as a mentor, but as a person, and it's The Choice by Edith Eger, and she's still alive. She is an Auschwitz survivor. She's in her nineties now, and it's her story about the choices that we make, the choices that are open to us and, and how we make them, and she links it to the choices that she had in Auschwitz and as an escapee. Powerful, powerful stuff, but written beautifully, and really resonated with me. So yes, they're my two favourites, Bounce by Matthew Syed and The Choice by Edith Eger.

Ula Ojiaku

And if the audience wants to get in touch with you, how can they do so?

Kerrie Dorman

My details are all over LinkedIn, obviously all over the ABM website on my profile, and I really welcome anybody to get in contact with me for a chat, for discussion, run anything by. I love talking about mentoring, about the power of it, how we can use it to help all sorts of people and situations. So please don't ever hesitate to get in touch.

Ula Ojiaku

Thank you so much for that, Kerrie. Do you have any final words for the audience that you'd like to leave them with for this episode?

Kerrie Dorman

Yes. If you're not mentoring, then get at it, and if you don't have a mentor, then find one, because no one is above having a mentor, and it's one of the most rewarding experiences, that we can experience in life.

Ula Ojiaku

Thank you so, so much, Kerrie. I really have learned a lot and I appreciate the time you've made, the wisdom that you've shared with us. So thank you again.

Kerrie Dorman

Thank you for having me. I've loved chatting with you.

​ Ula Ojiaku

That’s all we have for now. Thanks for listening. If you liked this show, do subscribe at www.agileinnovationleaders.com or your favourite podcast provider. Also share with friends and do leave a review on iTunes. This would help others find this show. I’d also love to hear from you, so please drop me an email at [email protected] Take care and God bless! 

Bio

Uloaku (Ula) Ojiaku is the Founder/ CEO of Mezahab Group Ltd (a UK-based consultancy focused on helping leaders in large organisations improve how they work to deliver value to their customers).     

With over 20 years of professional experience, Ula has board-level experience and has worked in multiple countries, in a variety of technical, business and leadership roles across industries including Retail, Oil & Gas, Telecommunications, Financial Services, Government, Higher Education and Consulting.  

Ula hosts the Agile Innovation Leaders podcast, which features conversations with thought-leaders and world-class practitioners on topics covering leadership, innovation, business, agility, and much more.  

She also currently serves a multinational retail organisation as an Enterprise Agility Strategist/ Coach.  

Connect

Uloaku (Ula) Ojiaku | LinkedIn

Transcript

It’s tempting to jump into new initiatives without proper strategic planning – especially when there is a lot of hype around it and you’re keen to demonstrate you’re action-oriented.  A good example would be the growing focus on genAI with its opportunities and threats . Today, I'll share 5 crucial questions every leader should ask before launching any new project or initiative – including AI related ones.

These questions will help you focus on the right problems, understand trade-offs, and align your efforts with both customer needs and organizational goals and increase your chances of success.

The 5 Strategic Questions

1.     What problem are we trying to solve?

2.     Is it the right problem?

3.     If we choose to solve this problem, what are we choosing not to do?

4.     By solving this problem, how would life be for our customers?

5.     By solving this problem, what impact would it have on our organization?

Now let’s go through each question in more detail

1. What problem are we trying to solve?

"The first question is 'What problem are we trying to solve?' This helps you clearly define the issue at hand. It's crucial to articulate the problem precisely, as a well-defined problem is already half-solved. This clarity ensures that your team's efforts are focused and purposeful from the start."

2. Is it the right problem?

"Next, ask 'Is it the right problem?' This question challenges you to dig deeper and ensure you're addressing the root cause, not just symptoms. It's easy to jump at the first problem we see, but often, there's an underlying issue that, if solved, would have a more significant impact. This question helps prevent wasted effort on superficial solutions."

3. If we choose to solve this problem, what are we choosing not to do?

"The third question is 'If we choose to solve this problem, what are we choosing not to do?' This acknowledges that resources are finite. Every 'yes' to one initiative is a 'no' to others. Understanding these trade-offs is crucial for strategic decision-making and helps ensure that you're allocating resources to the most impactful areas."

4. By solving this problem, how would life be for our customer?

"Fourth, consider 'By solving this problem, how would life be for our customer?' This customer-centric approach ensures that your initiative will create real value. It forces you to think beyond internal metrics and focus on tangible benefits for your customers, which is ultimately what drives business success."

5. By solving this problem, how would it impact our organization?

"Finally, ask 'By solving this problem, how would it impact our organization?' This question helps you align the initiative with your company's goals and values. It ensures that while you're solving customer problems, you're also advancing your organization's strategic objectives."

Conclusion

"By consistently asking these five strategic questions before starting any initiative, you'll ensure that you're focusing on the right problems, understanding the trade-offs, creating value for customers, and advancing your organization's goals. This approach will lead to more impactful outcomes and demonstrate your strategic leadership capabilities. Remember, great leaders don't just solve problems – they solve the right problems in the right way. 

Bio

Darren, as the European Managing Director of Cprime, spearheads transformation initiatives in EMEA, leveraging over two decades of experience in banking and IT leadership. As a SAFe Fellow and renowned author, he drives strategic growth by defining innovative go-to-market strategies and deepening client relationships. Darren is responsible for overseeing Cprime’s consultancy services, implementing complex programs, and negotiating multi-million pound contracts, positioning the company as a leader in organisational efficiency and performance optimisation. 

He co-authored the BCS Book “Agile Foundations – Principles Practices and Frameworks” and "SAFe Coaches Handbook". A contributor to the SAFe Reference Guide 4.5 and "The ART of avoiding a Train Wreck". Finally a reviewer of "Valuing Agile; the financial management of agile projects" and "Directing Agile Change”

Interview Highlights

01:30 Pandemic impacts

04:00 Cprime

08:00 Wooing clients

09:15 Using the right language

11:00 Doing your research

12:30 Mistakes leaders make

15:30 Changing mindsets

16:00 Ingredients for change

17:30 Reading for knowledge

26:00 Three thirds

28:30 Disruption

31:30 SAFe Coaches Handbook

37:50 SAFe frameworks

40:20 Enterprise strategy

Connecting

• LinkedIn: Darren Wilmshurst on LinkedIn

Books & Resources

-          Strategic Leadership: How to Think and Plan Strategically and Provide Direction, John Adair

-          Tribal Unity Book, Em Campbell-Pretty,

-          Drive, Daniel H. Pink

-          SAFe® Coaches Handbook: Proven tips and techniques for launching and running SAFe® Teams, ARTs, and Portfolios in an Agile Enterprise, Darren Wilmshurst & Lindy Quick

-          Agile Foundations: Principles, practices and frameworks, Peter Measey

-          The ART of Avoiding a Train Wreck: Practical Tips and Tricks for Launching and Operating SAFe Agile Release Trains, Em Campbell-Pretty, Adrienne L. Wilson, Dean Leffingwell

-          Industrial Devops: Build Better Systems Faster Dr. Johnson, Robin Yeman, Mik Kersten, Dean Leffingwell

-          Radical Focus: Achieving Your Most Important Goals with Objectives and Key Results: Christina R Wodtke

-          Who Does What By How Much | Jeff Gothelf & Josh Seiden (okr-book.com)

Episode Transcript

Intro: Hello and welcome to the Agile Innovation Leaders podcast. I’m Ula Ojiaku. On this podcast I speak with world-class leaders and doers about themselves and a variety of topics spanning Agile, Lean Innovation, Business, Leadership and much more – with actionable takeaways for you the listener.

Ula Ojiaku

It's a huge honour and privilege to have again with me as my guest on the Agile Innovation Leaders Podcast none other than Darren Wilmshurst, Managing Director at Cprime. Darren is an SPCT and a SAFe fellow. So for some context to the audience, Daz was one of the very first people I interviewed for the Agile Innovation Leaders Podcast and this was about five years ago or so, and I actually wanted to have a way of speaking with Daz, and I didn't know how to, so I said, hey, can I interview you for a podcast? And long story short, I ended up heading on a plane to Oman, but that's a different story. So, Daz, what have you been up to since then? Because when we recorded the first one, you were not yet a SAFe fellow, it was afterwards that you became a SAFe fellow and lots of other things must have happened.

Darren Wilmshurst

Well then the pandemic started, and I think that that changed life for all of us, most of our consultancy work stopped because it was discretionary spend, people were in retreat in terms of trying to buckle down and understand, try and reduce costs as much as possible. I think the biggest impact was then training, because obviously we couldn't do training in person. We weren't allowed by the certificating bodies to train online, so they had to give us permission to do that, which they did, and then we had to think about, well, how are we going to do this online? You know, what conference facilities are we going to use? What collaborative tools are we going to use? And how do we deliver this experience to make it still interactive and engaging? So I think that was a major challenge for us as well, and if I'm honest, whilst we're still doing stuff online, we're starting to see some training, at least moving back in person, but my preference is still in person because it's a different experience. The theatrics in me, the smell of the greasepaint and the roar of the crowd is still really important as well. So I think that's the first thing I think has changed is that we had that period where everything was remote, I think we're back into a world now where we're more hybrid, which I enjoy the in person stuff, but I think we’ll probably never go back to pre-pandemic where everything was in person, both consulting and training. So I think that was the major change, I think for us as well. During that time as well, our major founder wanted to retire, so we sold Radtac to Cprime and that all happened during the early days of the pandemic as well. We had a number of suitors, about six suitors, we decided on Cprime for, for me, two critical reasons and this is quite important, I think as well. Number one is that Radtac felt like a really family firm. We had a set of values and principles, there's a DNA to Radtac and we wanted someone that matched our DNA, I think it was so important for us. We could have gone to some other organisations, but we might have ended up selling our soul to the devil in some respects. Cprime, acquired a company in the US called Blue Agility a few years earlier, almost similar size to Radtac, very similar what they did as well, and what was key for me was that all the people in Blue Agility were still in Cprime. In fact, two had left and come back, so that was a good sign to me that we were aligned in terms of values and principles. So that was number one. The second reason was that Radtac had a heritage of all this training, you know, we're back to 1998. We had all this good training, we'd build up the consulting part of our business, so we're really good in terms of training and consultancy, but we were very agnostic about tooling and technology, because we didn't have the capabilities, or the brand awareness around that part of our business, and it used to frustrate me because, we'd go in, we’d do a great job in terms of way of working, somebody else would go in and maybe do the tooling set up, configure it in a way that wasn't aligned, that wasn’t working and that was frustrating. Now we could see opportunities to improve the continuous delivery pipeline, but we didn't have the capability to sort it out as well, whereas Cprime had all of that heritage. So for me, it completed that puzzle where now we can do the training, the consultancy, the tooling to visualise the work, configure the ways of working as well, and also really help with that continuous delivery pipeline as well. So that was the defining decision. We completed that acquisition in February 2021, so literally 12 months after the pandemic. Cprime was at the time owned by a French company called Alten, massive company, not well known, but massive company. Cprime probably wasn't really core to Alten, they were a project management engineering company and Alten sold Cprime January 2023 to Goldman Sachs and Everstone Capital, so that's been a change. So again, we've had the pandemic, we've gone through the acquisition, and now we're owned by a private equity as well, which brings different challenges to the organisation as well, and actually the reality was that after the acquisition, after the earn out, I was looking to maybe semi-retire, spending a bit more time in Spain, fishing and playing golf, but actually this next phase is really exciting, so a testament to Cprime and Goldman Sachs as well, that I want to be part of the next part of the journey as well. So, I'm still here Ula.

Ula Ojiaku

Well, I am glad you are, and it sounds like it's been a rollercoaster ride and a journey, but part of it is the thrills as well.

Darren Wilmshurst

Look, we're very privileged, aren't we Ula, because I work with great people, I say that genuinely. I work with great clients, I'm very fortunate in that. And although, you know, if I don't want to work with a client, I don't have to do that, but actually all the clients I work with, I really enjoy working with and I love the work that we do. So it's almost like the Holy Trinity, great people, great clients, great work. Why wouldn't I want to carry on doing what I do? So I always think that we're very privileged in what we do. So, I'm very grateful.

Ula Ojiaku

And I'll say that the little I've worked with you, what I know is you are a genuine person and you're a great person as well. I can't remember who this quote is attributed to, but people tend to be mirrors. So if you're good, people mirror what you show to them. And I'll say that based on my experience with you, I've learned a lot in terms of how to treat people, being genuine and caring genuinely about their welfare, not necessarily about what you get from them, and that's key. So, that's the sort of person you are, that's who you are.

Darren Wilmshurst

That's very kind.

Ula Ojiaku

I want say thank you for that, because there are times when I'm in situations and I'm thinking about maybe somebody or potential someone, colleague or clients, and I’ll be like, what would Daz do? How would he probably think about this situation? Now, part of what you do as director involves also wooing, wooing and winning the client and the customer. So, what would you say are your go to principles when pitching, to communicate the value you could bring before an engagement and maybe later on, we can talk about during and after the engagements?

Darren Wilmshurst

Yeah, I'm still Officer of the company, so I'm still Director of Cprime, the UK entity and also the European entity, so I have some corporate responsibilities as well. I'm still a practicing consultant trainer, so I still have to earn my supper every night as well, and that's the bit that I really enjoy. I'm also responsible for developing the capability of our people, and the products or the value propositions that we take to market as well. So that's part of it, but you're right, I do get involved in what we'd probably call pre-sale as well, so pitching as well. And I think the one thing I think I've learned over the last two, maybe three years as well is, is that I'm very conscious of the language that I use. What do I mean by that? We see a lot of stuff on social media about ‘is Agile dead’, stuff like that. It's not dead, but actually if I am talking to a client and I use the Agile word or the ‘A word’ it can create an allergic reaction, it can trigger them and in the same way that, just talking about a framework, SAFe, as well that can create a same reaction as well. So for me, it's not about Agile, it’s not about SAFe, it's about actually what are we trying to do? What is the problem? What are the challenges that you're having as an organisation? And how can we help you overcome those challenges and create value in what you do? Now, what we will do is we will use ways of working, Agile ways of working, lean ways of working, stuff like that to help them, but what I try and do is try and avoid the triggering word, because I've seen it so often where they, well, we've been in agile for ages, well have you? Or we tried agile, it didn't really work, or we spent millions of pounds on agile transformation and we haven't seen the benefit. So sometimes you have to be careful in terms of the context you're going to. So for me, stop talking about frameworks, stop talking about words that might trigger, talk about their problems and their challenges and how you can help them overcome it, and the value that you bring to their organisation to help them overcome that as well. And that's really key for me as well.

Ula Ojiaku

That suggests to me that there would be some sort of background work to at least understand who you are pitching to, understand what their experience had been in the past, to know what those trigger words are. Is that something you could share about?

Darren Wilmshurst

It's an interesting question, because I interview a lot of people to want to come and join our organisation, and the first thing I say to them, can you tell me what you know about Cprime? And if they haven't done the research, it's like, so you've come on here, you want a job at this organisation and you have no idea who we are, and what we've done, and that just really frustrates me. So in return, if I was going on to talk to a client, then of course I'm going to try and understand what they do - what's your core business, there's lots of information on their website. If they're publicly listed, then go get their annual accounts because again, that would talk very much about their last training year and some of their issues as well. Having said all of that, we're still seeing the same problems and the same challenges across all organisations, regardless of the industry they're in. Every organisation, we have more demand than we have capacity. Fact. Everyone has that. We don't know how to prioritise our work. We need to reduce our costs, particularly now. That's becoming more prevalent now, certainly in this last six months than previously as well. Our time to market is too slow. Our ability to turn our ideas into actions needs to be faster. So they're the common problems we're seeing is again, too much demand, not knowing how to prioritise, reduce our costs, and we need to be able to be more adaptive and bring our ideas to the market or to fruition quicker as well.

Ula Ojiaku

What would you then say are the common mistakes leaders spearheading a transformation make?

Darren Wilmshurst

Yeah, it's interesting because again, a lot of the work that we're doing now, if we think about the Law of Diffusion of Innovation, and that's a product life cycle as well. If I take that model and apply it to organisations and their adoption, let's call it ‘of modern ways of working’ rather than agile, I think we're probably in that late majority. Those large legacy, traditional organisations that maybe even tried the agile transformation years ago, but still haven't mastered it or conquered it, and I'm talking about large banks still, telecoms, pharmaceuticals, automotive, and I really fret for the automotive industry, not just here, but in Europe and across America as well, their time to market from design to launch can be anywhere between five and seven years, and yet the Chinese are doing it in two.

Ula Ojiaku

Could it be, because you've mentioned financial services, telecoms, pharmaceuticals, and the common thread is that they tend to be highly regulated. So could that be one of the reasons?

Darren Wilmshurst

I don't think it's regulation. I think they're just such large organisations, the hierarchy within that organisation, is huge, so this is why I come back to the leadership piece as well. Actually, and what happens is the leaders are too far away, they're not connected enough to the organisation systemic changes that they need to make in that organisation to make that organisation more effective. And they need to wake up and smell the coffee because Chinese are coming, they're coming in terms of automotive, they're coming in terms of pharma. True story, my daughter went to university a few years back. She'd been with HSBC for donkey’s years as a student, a youth account, and she said, I'm going to university, can I upgrade my account to a university account? And the response from HSBC was yes, you can, but you need to make an appointment, and the next appointment is in six weeks time. And so my son, who's a bit older, he said, just get Monzo or Revolt, just go online, and if they don't wake up, they will just find that the whole generation will go ‘I will not wait’. Now, she waited six weeks, she did it, but a lot of them won't do that, so I think it's a real threat and I think the organisations are so big that, just trying to get into that leadership space so that we can start to work with them to help understand what they need to do. So back to your original question, I think there's three things, and this is hard. We need to move that leadership from a fixed mindset to a growth mindset. They will be of a generation age of mine, so now they would have been schooled back in the eighties and nineties in ways of working, and they will have seen those ways of working as being successful because that allowed them to progress to the senior positions that they're in now, so I understand that, but those ways of working are not appropriate for the complex, adaptive, changing organisations that we now need to be in.We need to get them to move from a fixed mindset to a growth mindset, and that's easier said than done. However, I was inspired, this was one of the most senior guys in the government organisation and he was having lunch with the CEO of HSBC Bank and they're talking about change, and they agreed that there were three core ingredients to change organisations. Number one, a transformed approach to partnerships, and he said the language is really important here as well. Again, I didn't call them suppliers, I call them partners. If we call them suppliers, they will behave as suppliers. The reality is that we call them partners, because we don't have the capability or the capacity, but sometimes when we bring them in, third parties, we treat them as an alien organisation. They wear different badges. They have different privileges. They can't do this, they can't go here, they have to be accompanied, things like that. So he said, we need, a transformed approach to partners. We need to bring them in, they need to be part of our ecosystem, number one. Secondly, he said an agile approach to problem solving, giving power and capability to those closer to the issue, and we talk a lot about decentralised decision making as well. Now, you need to know those that have the information need to make the decision in a timely manner as well. But this is the one that really, really got me. Most importantly, a learning culture, including their leadership, where those with the most influence must do as much or more learning than anybody else. Now that's unusual, because normally, I'm a senior person, I've got to where I am because I know a lot of information, and I wouldn't be where I am, but we need to understand that that information was schooled in a different generation. So what we can't do, we can't say to you, well, okay, you need to come on one of my training events, they say, seriously, you've not read my badge, I'm an important person, I have not got time to go on a two day training event, and we need to recognise that as well, these are senior executives, and their time is precious, and trying to find two days in a diary is difficult, so we need to, I think, as agents of change for organisations, and to bring leadership on the journey in order to move them from a fixed to a growth mindset, not to put them on a two day training event, but find a way of educating them in a in a smaller, bitesize way, almost like a series of small, interactive workshops that happen over a series of weeks, that sort of stuff as well, and we need to make sure that the content tackles their problems and their challenges, and we mustn't get into too much of our, again, the words that might trigger them as well. So that's the first thing. So we need them to understand that they need to go on an educational journey, but we need to find an educational journey that will meet their needs in terms of content and their time. Number one. Once we do that, then they need to lead by example, and it's all very well educating them. One of my colleagues was saying, would I go on a plane with a pilot that's read a book? No, they need to be able to practice their skill and hone their skills. Now that might be difficult, again, because their team members, their employees might be well schooled in this and they might feel uncomfortable practicing a craft that they're not that familiar with as well. So what we try and do is get them to practice in a safe environment, i.e. let's work as an agile team, as a leadership team, as a leadership group. Let's think about having a backlog of work that we need to do as a leadership team. Let's think about how we prioritise that work. Let's work in a small group and then review that work on a cadence and then just retrospective and maybe have someone that steps up and be a Scrum Master or Product Owner for that as well. So again, getting them to operate and start to learn by experiencing within their own environment is a great way, because if we can do that, now they're educated, and they practice their craft in a safe environment, they are better empowered to lead the change. This is what we need to do, and this is what I’m finding is that we need the leadership to step up and lead the change, because if we're going to make fundamental changes to organisations, systemic changes, organisational changes, the leaders need to be able to do that as well. And this is what I find – it’s great having teams working at a great way, but without that support from leadership, the impact that they will be able to make will be limited.

Ula Ojiaku

Yes, I resonate with the last statement you made about the limitation to the impact teams can have if the leadership isn't bought in and if they are not walking the talk. It's not like, go ye and be agile whilst we still do what we've always done. There was something you said about moving from fixed mindset to growth mindset and the need for the leaders to have that continuous learning as in really that continuous learning culture is that they need to learn as much, if not much more than other employees, and that reminds me of this book by John Adair, Strategic Leadership, and in his book, he was saying that the origin of the word strategy comes from the military, and typically people who rise to the ranks are people who have been there, done that. And if people have the confidence that you know the stuff and you've been there, done that, if not better than everyone else, you'd have more respect you'd have more buy in, it's less friction getting the troops and kind of corralling the troops towards that vision.

Darren Wilmshurst

Yeah, it’s interesting because again, at school, I was definitely not a reader. I was into numbers, I was a maths person. I went to university, did a maths degree, stuff like that as well. So I was one of those kids at primary school where I'd be given a book at the beginning of the week, and at the end of the week, I’d hand it back to my teacher and she would say to me, have you read the book, Darren? I go, yes, I have. I hadn't actually read the book. She'd give me another book and I'd move up the ladders that you did back in the day. Never read. It's interesting now, I read now more than I've ever read in the past. And I think what happened was it almost became a bit of a bug. I think going on the SPCT program, there were certain books that you had to read, but the more I read, the more I wanted to learn. So I think that got me into that habit as well. Secondly, I think that if I'm teaching this stuff, then I need to understand the provenance of what I'm teaching as well, and I can't do that without reading. So again, you can't be leader, a strategy leader without having been there and done it. So for me, reading is really important to understand some of the provenance of what we're doing and also giving some of the narrative as well.

Ula Ojiaku

So what would you say changed? Although you've just painted a picture of you before, back in school, and after, what's changed?

Darren Wilmshurst

I don't know I think I just started reading, it's a bit sad really, because I go on holiday and then I take business books with me and then I'm sitting around the pool reading these books and people say what are you reading, and I’m reading this book thinking that's a bit sad. And I remember one holiday I was sat in on a lilo in a pool reading a business book and my daughter took a picture of me saying dad what are you doing, you're on a holiday and there you are reading Tribal Unity by Em Campbell-Pretty on holiday as well. I don't know, I think when I started this, I wouldn't say it was an addiction, but it was like now i need to learn more now, I need to learn more and more, and so once you started then you don't stop and I'm still an avid reader

Ula Ojiaku

It reminds me of this book by what you've just said, Daniel Pink's book Drive. So for me, it sounds like the intrinsic motivation, you knew what you stood to gain by doing it and you didn't need to have your teacher asking you, did you read it and you'd say yes when you didn’t, but you knew there was something at stake if you didn’t.

Darren Wilmshurst

Yes, I think it was definitely the SPCT program I had to read, but then once I learned stuff, I wanted to learn more stuff, and so you’re right, that intrinsic motivation, you know, I think in the video they talk about, people want to play the piano or guitar and just want to get better at it. I just wanted to really become better as an SPCT and then eventually as a fellow just to understand the wonderful thought leadership that has occurred over the last 20 and 30 years that has informed the way that we think and act and work now.

Ula Ojiaku

Wow. You've kind of nailed it, because Daniel Pink's book says mastery, autonomy, and purpose. So, the mastery bits, but going back to the original question, and thank you for sharing your experience, there is this saying that you can lead a horse to the water, but you can't force it to drink. So, we could have the edict where, okay, all the leaders can make space for those bite-sized workshops or sessions, but once that ends, is there a way we could encourage them to keep at it, because a two day training or maybe six workshop sessions spread over six months probably wouldn't cut it, or wouldn't be sustainable. So is there something or any tips on how to tap into that intrinsic motivation?

Darren Wilmshurst

I think Dean Leffingwell said to me, he talked about the third, the third and the third, and I'll talk about that as well, he said, in an organisation, there'll be a third of people that get it and want to do it. He said, there'll be a third that I would call my sceptics, not sure, need to be convinced, and there's the third that say, no, I'm very happy with the way I'm looking at it, I don't want to do anything else as well. He said, I don't care about the first third. He said, I actually I care about the second third, those sceptics, if I can convince one of them to lead the charge, he said, that's great because then the others then will come along as well, and if I can get that sceptic to change in terms of, I understand it, I want it, they're almost like  a reformed smoker, they become the greatest advocates of change because they say, I get it now. And he said, now I've got two thirds, now I've got a majority, he said, and that's the tipping point that allows me to make that change as well. And what happens is, he said, there are some in that final third will go, okay, I've seen enough social proof that I will make that change, I need you to convince me, I'll do that as well, he said, but there'll be some that go, I'm not happy with that, and they are the people that will either ride off into the sunset with either retirement or a different career or different organisation as well. So you’ve got to find someone in that leadership group that's going to be an advocate. You've got to find that one or two that are happy to lead the charge as well, and someone in the sceptic face is great because they become the reformed smoker as well, but you've got to find it and hope that they will then corral and cajole some of the leadership into doing this as well, but without that it's hard, even though the leadership understand the challenges, sometimes they're just reluctant to make that change, and I find that difficult to understand and sometimes quite frustrating as well, because, for me, there are some iconic British brands that I still worry about going forward as well. You know, we've just seen it recently, Body Shop, an iconic brand, again, just lost their way. I mean, retail is just so hard at the moment, with the stuff online, but we'll see it with automotive as well, we'll see it in some other industries as well, where if we don't wake up and smell that coffee, then I do fear for some real British brands.

Ula Ojiaku

I don't think it's only British brands, I think it's a global phenomenon and the fact is the olden perception of having different sectors or industries is being blurred. So think about brands like Apple. Now they started off building computers, but really they've cut across multiple industries, so before the watch industry, you think about Swiss-made watches with the mechanical things, but the Apple watch, they have this music streaming industry, and one of the things in the strategy course I did from the Cambridge Business School is this, they said, it's really about developing a platform. So if you have a platform where you can get your customers to depend on, it's easy to branch into multiple industries. So Apple, they make watches and their watches serve as healthcare monitoring devices and different other things, there are rumours they're building their own self-driving cars and everything is on that iOS platform, which allows them to branch into anything, they could go into pharmaceuticals, medical. So it's no longer about traditional sectors or segments, and the disruption in life is real and no sector, no country is spared, so it's really about moving from a fixed mindset to a growth mindset and saying, what are the things we're missing, and how can we think differently? How can we reposition ourselves? How do we build a platform that has a fort?

Darren Wilmshurst

Yeah, I think you're right. Apple has disrupted so many industries, in terms of, you know, who buys a torch anymore, who buys a map anymore, other things as well, I just go on. I think at the last count, there was like 24 different industries disrupted as well, and I think about Jeffrey Moore, who I remember presenting with on stage in Washington, I think that was 2019. And he said, what you can do, as an organisation, you can sit here and wait to be disrupted, and hopefully that you can be a fast follower, providing you're nimble enough and adaptive enough, you might be able to make that change. He said, but what might be better is, rather than we wait to be disrupted, be the disruptor. My worry is that some of these large legacy organisations, they are being disrupted, and I just fear that they are not nimble and active enough to be able to respond, they're so ingrained in the way they have done things for the last 10, 20, 30, 40 years that I just fear for them and you're right, it's not UK, obviously I care about the UK because I'm a UK citizen, but I think it's a global phenomenon. I know my colleagues in North America and their industries are having the same challenges as well, right. It's not just a UK issue, it's definitely a global issue.

Ula Ojiaku

I'd really like to just touch on your latest book, the SAFe Coaches Handbook. So before we go into some of the contents, could you share what led to your co-authoring this with Lindy Quick?

Darren Wilmshurst

So it's one of those itches I had to scratch, I suppose is the phrase that you use. I was a very small author of the BCS book called Agile Foundations. Peter Measey was a lead author and there were a number of smaller authors that contributed to that as well, and then I ended up reviewing two books. So again, a recognised review of a couple of books, Agile books as well, one around Agile financial management, one around Agile governance as well, the Em Campbell-Pretty, a fellow SAFe fellow wrote The ART of Avoiding a Train Wreck, which I reviewed and contributed to, so again, I was contributing to that as well, and actually Em’s updating that book because that book's five years old as well, so I’m reviewing that as well. And having reviewed a few books, contributed to a few books, being a part author, I suppose I wanted to write my own book. I think that was it as well. That was part of it. The other part was that I've delivered a number of Implementing SAFe courses since 2017, and for me, it's not just about delivering the education, for me doing that course is about, what are the tips and tricks, what's the stories, what's the narrative, how's the best way to do this, and all those things that I deliver in that course that goes way beyond the slideware what I wanted to do was capture all of that stuff that I deliver in those courses in a book. So I got approached by some publishers at Packt, saying, would you fancy being an author, write a SAFe book? And I thought, yes, I would. Then, we've got another author that's also interested in doing it as well. I'd never met Lindy before, we met and, yeah, we wrote the book. We started October 2022, and it got published June last year. It took a bit longer than we thought, but again, I learned in terms of task switching and refactoring, trying to write a chapter during a working day when you've got meetings and stuff like that and messages coming in, couldn't do that, because in the end I needed that concentrated effort to write. I can't do it with interruptions. So task switching was not great for me, so in the end I said, right, if I'm going to do it, everything has to go off, I just have to concentrate on this as well. So writing the chapter was really straightforward, it didn't take that long in reality. What I found was though, the cost of refactoring took a lot longer, as we talk about as well, you know, doing it right first time, doing the rework is a lot harder, and both Lindy and I wanted to make the book as best we probably can. So I reviewed her chapters, she reviewed mine, her reviews were great. Again, we have some other reviewers as well that are listed in the book as well, and all those reviewers really contributed to making the book better, but having to incorporate and refactor the chapter took me longer than writing the chapter in the first place. So it ended up taking a bit longer than we thought as well. So two valuable lessons. Task switching is real and refactoring takes longer than doing it right the first time as well.

Ula Ojiaku

So with this realisation, would you do anything differently in terms of how you approached writing the book?

Darren Wilmshurst

I don't think so. We were pretty good because again, we'd write a chapter and we'd get it reviewed, and the chapters are not particularly long, so that was pretty okay as well, and then what we found there, even though we had a high level design of the book and the chapters and the content, as we went through there as well, we realised there was some stuff missing as well, so again, there was no concluding chapter, there was no preface, we realised that we split the chapter into part one, part two, part three, part one was all about the team stuff, part two is all about the art level stuff, and part three was all about the portfolio stuff.

Ula Ojiaku

Well it sounds to me like you were following the agile principles, breaking it in small chunks, getting the review, and to be honest, having spoken with other authors that you started, writing in October 2022 and got published in June 2023, that was speedy, maybe not by your standards, that was fast. Typically it takes them like three, five years, and it's just them writing the book with everything else going on.

Darren Wilmshurst

Yeah, I don't think I could cope with that. I think it's great that the publisher had quite a forcing function, if it dragged on that long, I think you lose that motivation and I was on a roll and when you’re on a roll, you want to get it done and dusted.

Ula Ojiaku

And I think the key thing, and what I noticed is, like you said, that the chapters are kind of not too long and easily digestible and it's easy to write, but it's about refining it in such a way that is to the point and, packed with lots of invaluable insights, that's an art and it does take time to refine from just having a mass of words to something that's simple.

Darren Wilmshurst

We didn't want to make it a reference guide, the framework is the reference. You go on the website, that's the reference guide. I suppose our target audience was SPCs that are newly qualified, if you're thinking about training this, here's some tips and tricks, here's some narrative, here's some stories you can use here's some support, and some of the things that we have made mistakes and learnt from as well. So it really is trying to be a practical guide to newly minted SPCs in terms of those that want to be able to train or implement a scaling framework.

Ula Ojiaku

It’s definitely something I wish I had after I'd attended your training. So in the preface, you and Lindy were saying you can't implement SAFe to the letter you don't implement it like a rulebook, it's something you implement with your brain switched on and I was like, yes. Can you expand on that please?

Darren Wilmshurst

I get very frustrated. You see it on social media about SAFe is bureaucratic, it's a prescription, it's overly governed, stuff like that as well, and it's a framework, not prescription. For me, it's a wonderful toolbox, and every organisation we go into is different. They're not the same. They have different project and product, different risk profiles and budgets to plug different people, to create different things. So how can you have something that is an ABC guide, a recipe book, it can't be that as well. So I always say that if I'm putting a picture on a wall, I'll use a hammer and a nail. I won't use a chainsaw, but a chainsaw in the wrong hands can be very dangerous. So for me, it's a framework. So there are some fundaments in there, but you have to understand the context, you have to understand the appetite for change and how much disruption you want to bring, because if you bring too much disruption, you could end up traumatising the organisation. We don't want to do that as well. So, but, and then you think about, okay, what would be the most appropriate tools that I need to bring to change the organisation as well? And then I remember Dean saying this word that then, if you implement SAFe, or the appropriate tools out of the framework as well, and you're doing the same thing a year later, you're doing it wrong because you're not inspecting adapting about how you could then improve on that, and the way that the framework has improved since 1.0 back in 2011 to 6.0 last year as well, is through practitioners and organisations implementing SAFe, finding new ways, and experimenting with new ways and things as well, and bringing that back to the party and that being part of the evolution of the framework as well. And that includes myself, again, this is myself as a fellow, is part of it is bringing my thoughts in terms of what I've done with organisations back to the framework as well. So for me, it's a framework, not a prescription. In terms of scaling, there's some fundaments in there, there are always some fundaments as well, but you have to implement it with your brain switched on and every time I've implemented it, all the validation has always been different, with some underlying principles that support me in that ways of working.

Ula Ojiaku

Thanks for that, Daz. And there is a chapter in your book on enterprise strategy, which I think is interesting, but I have a question for you, which one would come first, enterprise strategy, or the adoption of skilled at being SAFe, which one comes first and why?

Darren Wilmshurst

Look, you've got to have a strategy. One of the things we say as SPCs and even probably SPCTs to some extent, we're not strategy experts. The framework is not there to talk about how you create strategy. There is some guidance on what we expect to see in a strategy but as we go into an organisation, we expect there to be some sort of strategy in place. If not, then we'd highly recommend that a strategy is created, and there are great organisations out there that can help organisations create that strategy as well, because we need to know what’s the strategy of the organisation, and then from that, we can then think about how then we align what we're doing to deliver that strategy, and then when we talk about alignment and scaling the organisation, that is right from the top of the portfolio, through to maybe the teams of teams and the team as well. So that strategy and that works to a point where a person at the team level can understand how the work they're doing is connected all the way back up in delivering that strategy as well. So we need that strategy in place.

Ula Ojiaku

Definitely. I agree, and there are some SPCs who have that training and background in strategy, so it helps if that's there.

Darren Wilmshurst

Yeah. Yeah. Again, as an SPC, if you've got that, that's great. It’s just that SAFe as a framework, that's not what we're looking to, but we expect it to be in place.

Ula Ojiaku

Exactly. So what are the key things then, in terms of the enterprise strategy and making sure that the teams are aligned with the strategy, what are some things when you  are consulting with the leadership and saying, okay, giving them the guidelines of what the framework is saying, what are some key pointers for them to look out for and to be mindful in how they make sure the strategies align with the adoption and the rollout of the framework or the sustained implementation of SAFe?

Darren Wilmshurst

I hear a lot from execs that we have no idea what our team are doing, we have no visibility, we have no transparency what they're doing, so I think there's a couple of things that we need to talk about here as well. We need to make sure that the work that the teams are doing is visible in a way that is consumable by the executives as well. So we need to create the right dashboard. We go into organisations and the number of tool chains that exist in organisations that are not connected, there is no one version of the truth as well, is disconcerting. In a world where we're trying to reduce costs as well, the money spent on licensing stuff like that is phenomenal. So I think for me, having the right tool set that allows that work to be visible from the team all the way up to executive is really important, and so we need to make that work visible, but then also the leadership needs to come to the party as well. I think it’s a two way thing, so we can make the work visible, but part of it is that one, we start doing our reviews of the work that we're doing, either a team level or at a team of teams level or at a large solution level, we need to be able to make sure that the leadership are involved in those reviews, and also in terms of prioritising and directing the direction of travel for the next cadence of work as well. I think that that's important.

Ula Ojiaku

Well said, Daz, I couldn't say it any better than you, you're the expert here. Dare I say that it's also important that the leadership would make the strategy visible to the organisation and in a way that can be consumed at the appropriate layers. So, this for this time frame, this is what we are trying to achieve, and that would help, so it's kind of almost like a virtuous cycle and complimentary, they are making their priorities visible and well in advance, whilst the team also work to make their work visible.

Darren Wilmshurst

You're right. It's bi-directional, isn't it, and we see it so often where a firm will go and create a strategy and then it's locked away in a drawer, no one ever sees it, and that strategy is a direction of travel. So then we think about, okay, what do we need to do to deliver that strategy, but you've got to make that visible and you need the support of the leaders, next leaders down to almost decompose that work into smaller chunks that that can be delivered, that then deliver that strategy as well. But you're right, we need to make sure that that strategy is communicated, again, in a way that inspires the people in the organisation. That's important as well, because you want to be, again, once you're inspired by the organisation and the work that you're doing, and you understand the work you're doing is connected to that strategy, I mean, how motivating is that?

Ula Ojiaku

Thanks for that, Daz. So in addition to your fantastic book, SAFe Coaches Handbook, which I would highly recommend to RTEs, coaches, business owners, what other books have you found yourself recently recommending to people?

Darren Wilmshurst

So the one that I'm really quite passionate about at the moment, we talked at the beginning about that agile and SAFe can create allergic reactions, become trigger words as well, and increasingly, I'm working in organisations that, and Agile is a small part of what we do, Agile ways of working, yeah, it's important, but it's a small part. When you think about, if we're working with automotive, lean manufacturing, something I call cyber physical DevOps as well, we have cyber physical machines building cyber physical products as well. How do we automate more of that as well? And then there’s the whole thing around system thinking and all that stuff as well. So, two of my colleagues from the SAFe world, Suzette Johnson and Robin Yeman, have written a book called Industrial DevOps, and that for me is gold dust. I like the rebranding, it's about industrial DevOps, so it's how do we take all our learning from lean manufacturing, Agile ways of working, cyberphysical DevOps, and bring it together to help those big organisations be more effective. So if I was to recommend one book at the moment, how do we build better, complex, industrial systems faster, then Industrial DevOps, Dr. Suzette Johnson and Robin Yeman, for me, is the book.

Ula Ojiaku

Thank you for that. Any other book?

Darren Wilmshurst

There's a lot of people talking about OKRs, objectives and key results, and on CVs people saying I'm an OKR consultant. I think, okay, well, okay, well that's great, but it's almost like they're saying OKRs, if we go in and implement OKRs, it is the panacea, it will solve all your ills. Look, it's just, it's another tool in the toolbox as well. One I read last year was Radical Focus, really good, talks about yes, it's great creating OKRs, but there's so much more to that than just creating the OKRs. People think if I create the OKRs, then the world would change, no, it doesn't.

Ula Ojiaku

Oh, wow. Thank you for that, and I guess I agree, OKRs is a is a tool, and it's really a great tool for connecting strategy with the implementation, and back to what you said about the transparency of strategy and the work of the teams OKR is a good way of actually helping with measuring, okay, is the work we're doing moving the needle for the enterprise and vice versa. How do we as the leadership team clearly communicate in a digestible way what our priorities are, what the strategy is over a time frame. So, yeah. Another one on that note I would recommend would be, well it's in the pre-release, but Jeff Gothelf, actually he and his co-author Josh Seiden have gone to do what you've just done with the SAFe Coaches Handbook, which is, okay, yes, there's all this buzzword about OKRs, but actually, what does it mean in practical terms, Who Does What By How Much: A Practical Guide to Customer- Centric OKRs, it's highly recommended. Just like yourself, I respect Jeff and the sense it's practical and actionable. And any final words for the audience?

Darren Wilmshurst

Well I think it's tough at the moment, we're seeing a lot of the big organisations, big SIs, laying off a lot of people as well, we're seeing a lot of the consultancy work is discretionary spend, and I think we're seeing a lot of people in the market that have not been engaged, but what I would say is that all these things are cyclical. We've seen it before where, certainly with the pandemic, no one was for six months, things stopped, but then the thing came back a vengeance as well, but if we focus on trying to solve the organisational challenges, if we focus on making sure that we are helping them solve those challenges, and we can demonstrate the value of what we're doing, then we'll be in a good place.

Ula Ojiaku

Thank you for those wise words Daz. And on that note, where can the audience find you if they want to get in touch with you?

Darren Wilmshurst

Darren Wilmshurst on LinkedIn is the easiest way to find it, always reach out to me on there as well, message me on LinkedIn as well. Normally what I do is I ask people to convert to email because I’m a bit old fashioned, email is my inbox is my to do list as well, so yeah, Darren Wilmshurst on LinkedIn. I think I've got a profile picture up there, so if you see this picture here, hopefully my profile picture looks something like this, what you're seeing here as well.

Ula Ojiaku

And if you're listening to the audio version only, the picture on the podcast art cover for this episode, that's the Daz you should be looking for. Well, thank you so much Daz for your time. It's always a great honour and I always learn a lot whenever I speak with you. So thank you for making the time for today's conversation.

My pleasure. That’s all we have for now. Thanks for listening. If you liked this show, do subscribe at www.agileinnovationleaders.com or your favourite podcast provider. Also share with friends and do leave a review on iTunes. This would help others find this show. I’d also love to hear from you, so please drop me an email at [email protected] Take care and God bless! 

Bio

Denise Tilles wrote the recently published book Product Operations. Co-authored with Escaping the Build Trap’s Melissa Perri, the book is the must-read guide technology leaders have been missing.  With over a decade of product leadership experience, Denise supports companies like Bloomberg, Sam’s Club, and athenahealth by strengthening capabilities around: Product Operations, Product Strategy, and establishing a Product Operating Model.  

Interview Highlights

01:00 Background and beginnings

04:00 Product Operations: The book

06:30 Product Operations vs Product Management

07:30 The Three Pillars of Product Operations

08:30 Using Product Operations to Scale

10:20 Leading and Lagging Indicators

12:20 Product Operations in Startups

 21:10 Generative AI  

Social Media

·         www.denisetilles.com

·         Denise Tilles on Twitter X

·         Denise Tilles on LinkedIn

·         Grocket  

Books & Resources

·         Product Operations: How successful companies build better products at scale: Melissa Perri, Denise Tilles

·         Escaping the Build Trap: How Effective Product Management Creates Real Value, Melissa Perri

·         MasterClass with Denise Tilles: Getting Started with Product Operations — Produx Labs

·         Continuous Discovery Habits: Discover Products that Create Customer Value and Business Value, Terese Torres

·         Lenny’s podcast: Lenny's Podcast (lennyspodcast.com)

·         Lenny’s Newsletter: Lenny's Newsletter | Lenny Rachitsky | Substack (lennysnewsletter.com)

·         Pivot podcast: Vox Media: Podcast Network | Pivot

·         Melissa Perri’s podcast: Product Thinking — Produx Labs  

Episode Transcript

Intro:  Hello and welcome to the Agile Innovation Leaders podcast. I’m Ula Ojiaku. On this podcast I speak with world-class leaders and doers about themselves and a variety of topics spanning Agile, Lean Innovation, Business, Leadership and much more – with actionable takeaways for you the listener.  

Ula Ojiaku  

So I have with me here, Denise Tilles, who is the Founder and CPO of Product Consultancy Grocket. She is also a co-author of the book Product Operations, How Successful Companies Build Better Products at Scale. Thank you so much, Denise, for making the time for this conversation. I've been looking forward to this.  

Denise Tilles  

Thank you. Me too.  

 Ula Ojiaku  

Awesome. So who is Denise, so can you tell us how you've evolved to the Denise we are seeing today?  

Denise Tilles  

Yeah. So, I have been in product management for probably 12 years now, both on the operating side, as an individual contributor, and then as a leader, working with companies like B2B SaaS companies, Cision, and a media company, Condé Nast.

And then for the past two-ish years, I've been a product consultant and working with really great companies like Bloomberg and Sam's Club, Walmart, we're helping them with product maturity assessments, product operations in terms of like, does this make sense for a company? How do we stand it up? What is sort of day one look like, you know, day 366 and then so on, sort of building it to scale. And then also co-authoring this book with Melissa Perri, the Product Operations book, and as we talk about the book, folks, I think naturally might say, well, why you, why should you be writing about the book? I have experience with product operations before we really knew that's what it was called, and I mentioned this in the book that I was working at this B2B SaaS and I had just started and my manager, the SVP said, hey, maybe we should get some people to think about managing the data, maybe thinking about understanding what kinds of experiments we should be doing. I'm like, we can do that, well, wow, yes, that sounds amazing. And we were going to hire an individual contributor, we ended up hiring this amazing VP level person, and then she built a small team, and it really was a great compliment to the product, I had a product team of about 10 folks globally and really great compliment, because they understood the product, but they weren't so close to it that they were myopic in terms of seeing what the potential opportunities or challenges were with the data, so they became a great partner and sort of highlighting here's what we're looking at for the month, X shows us maybe there's a challenge with the funnel, maybe we could do some experiments, maybe tests, and anyway, they had uncovered a potential opportunity. It was this sort of add on product and we ended up making a million dollars the first year, it wasn't even sort of like an advertised product, it was kind of just back pocket offering for clients. So after that, I was like, wow, this is great, I love this, and didn't really know that was product operations. Fast forward a couple of years later, I start working with Melissa Perri at her consultancy Produx Labs, she mentions product operations, I'm like, what's that? And she explains it, I'm like, oh, that's what we were doing, cool. And then really started to dig in more about the theoretical aspect and understanding what it could look like to build it at a scale and helping companies at the scale up stage with a venture capital company we were working with, think about what that looks like for them, and does it make sense to implement?

So that's when I really got interested and excited about it, sort of having lived it and then seeing the potential opportunity of the sort of force multiplier it could be. So I was working with Melissa and in 2021, I slacked her and I'm like, what do you think, I'm thinking about writing a book about product operations, I don't think anyone's written this yet and I can't believe it. She's like, yeah, great idea. I'm like, would you like to do it with me? And she was like, yes, I'll do it. She hesitated a little bit because I heard her speaking about her first book, Escaping the Build Trap, and she's like, never, nope, done.

 But she's like, well, maybe it'll be different writing it with somebody. So I'm like, how long does it take? She goes, I don't know, as long as it needs to take, maybe a year, two and a half years. So we kept each other honest and it was, I don't know any other way of writing a book, but it was really great to have a partner and like, I've hit a wall here, can you pick this up? Or I map this out, like, here, does this make sense to you? And challenges, wins, whatever, just having someone to feed off of was really great. And it was just a lot of fun to do. So it was really a great excitement and relief to have it published in October of 2023.  

Ula Ojiaku  

Congratulations, that's a massive achievement, and I couldn't help wondering when you were talking about co-authoring the book with Melissa, whether you applied some of the product operations concepts in getting your book done?   

Denise Tilles  

That's a great question, we had a lot of qualitative inputs. We had peer reviews from folks that were from like a CPO, Chief Product Officer, all the way to an individual contributor, kind of brand new Product Manager, and the questions that they raised were totally different. So it was really great to sort of get those inputs and balance and think about like, who's the archetype we're creating this book for? And I sort of ignore my own advice when I work with product people, like if you try to serve everybody, you serve no one, but we really were trying to think about like, this could be a book that a product person could hand to their CEO. This is the power, here's some great case studies. Or the individual contributor thinking, I've heard about this. What is this? Would this help our company? So we really wanted to, you know, as well as Chief Product Officers, VPs thinking like, I've heard about this, what does that look like? So that was an important aspect.   

Ula Ojiaku   

 Makes perfect sense. Now I know that some of the viewers or listeners would be wondering, then, we might as well cut to the chase, what exactly is Product Operations? Most of us are conversant with the term Product Management, what is Product Operations and how is it, if it is, different from Product Management, please?  

Denise Tilles  

Yeah, great question. That was one of the most common questions, that was another reason we wanted to write the book, because we just kept getting the same questions like, here's a book. Product Operations just so quickly put is really increasing the speed and accuracy and quality of decision making, right? It's about surrounding your Product Managers with all of the inputs they need to make really, truly informed decisions. It's about supporting them to execute on the things you hired them for - building value, growing revenue, and not necessarily writing SQL scripts, because at the end of the year, it's like, well, I wrote 10 of those. Great, but you didn't deliver X product, who won, so that's a big piece of it. And the way that we think about Product Operations, it's really three pillars. So business and data insights, which is the quantitative, right? Customer and market insights, the qualitative. And then the third one is the operating model, sort of process and practices, and we like to think of it that way and sort of broke the book up like that as well, to sort of like focus on that, each section and at the end of each pillar, it's like three things to get you started today. If there was like three things to do, and one other aspect of it is that we think about how to implement it, and that's a question that we get a lot. And as we mentioned at the beginning of the book, don't try to do all three pillars, figure out where the biggest challenge and opportunities are, start there and build out. Some companies I've worked with have just stuck with one of those pillars and that's good enough for them. It really looks different everywhere. This is just what it could look like.   

Ula Ojiaku  

No, that makes sense, and I know that in your book you also talked about, really how Product Operations can help with solving many of the scaling issues companies face right now, because it seems like if we're to go into the agile world, there are some purists or fundamentalists who feel like, oh, it's everything is agile, you know, forget about the money and everything, you just apply agile and everything is all right. But at the end of the day, if you're a for profit business or even if you're not, you have customers, and customers define the value and the only way you stay afloat is you're delivering the value, not that you're following a framework. So could you talk a bit more about how Product Operations can help with companies with, for example, connecting financial metrics to the delivery?   

Denise Tilles  

That's great. It's really about having all of those inputs available so Product Managers can make the informed decisions, and a lot of companies we have talked to and interviewed with, they tend to look at more of the product metrics, engagement, usage, time spent, but not necessarily the financial and that's a huge miss, right? And that's one area we really hammer home in the book, is making sure that you look at all data and not just your product. You want to make sure you're looking at that, but the financials typically are lagging indicators, but so important, right? And if you're doing all this great stuff and seeing engagement, but the revenue is going down, who cares, right? So if you have all of those together, it's a powerful sort of breadcrumb to understand your product health and sort of the leverage you're pulling and whether you're, you know, doing any harm or hopefully doing good. So yeah, that would be one key takeaway.

 Ula Ojiaku

 You mentioned financials, for example, revenue and all that, it's a lagging metric, and there is this innovation, accounting body of knowledge that talks about using leading indicators. With the multiple organisations and teams that you've worked with, are you able to, off the top of your head, share examples, maybe give us an example of where a financial metric is tied to hopefully a leading indicator so that you can see, based on the data you're getting right now, to be able to predict how likely we are to hit the financial targets?

 Denise Tilles

Contract sign can certainly be sort of a leading right indicator, so you're not recognising that revenue yet, but at least it's commitment. Pipeline sometimes can be at least a good indicator. If you've got a nice, robust pipeline and you're comparing it year over year, that's your baseline, that is another indicator. So there's a number of them there, contract value, yield, how much they're purchasing. So there's a lot of indicators, especially with yield. It's like if they were buying seven different product lines and spending, let's say 20 million dollars, I’m making that up, let's say this year they're doing only five product lines, but they're spending 25. What does that mean? Why did they drop those? Where are they spending more money? So there's so much in there that you can be analysing and helping inform what you're doing as a product person.

 Ula Ojiaku

Thanks for that, Denise. And how would you, because in your story earlier on in this conversation, you mentioned you had your team, your product team of about 10 people globally, and someone at a VP level was brought in and seemed to be providing that complimentary set of services. Now, in your book, you give the readers ideas of how they might want to start off, depending on what is their bottleneck, these are my words, not yours, about how to start implementing Product Operations if they don't have that. Now, imagine I'm in a large complex organisation, we have Product Managers. How would you advise the leader of that organisation to go about structuring this?

 Denise Tilles

Right. That's a great question, and earlier you asked a really good question that I didn't get to, which I'd like to talk about now that will lead into that. You asked what the difference is between Product Managers and Product Operations folks. The difference is Product Managers make the decisions, Product Operations enables those decisions. It's as simple as that. It's the enablement. If you have buy in, and one of my clients at Sam's Club, amazingly the CPO was like, here's what Product Operations is, here's the value it can bring my team of hundreds of Product Managers. The CEO was like, cool, sounds great, let's do it. It's rarely that easy. And like, let's build a team out of the gate, it's rarely that easy. A lot of times I'll see companies where there's someone interested and they might do a little bit in their quote unquote spare time and then maybe speak to their manager and say, hey, I'm really interested in this enablement piece, could I divide my current role, from maybe 50% products, 50% product or, and then try to get the quick wins to sort of prove the value. And then does it look like this person moves into that role full time? That's how Christine Itwaru from Pendo, she was at Pendo and started Product Operations there, she was a Product Manager, but saw the pains and started trying to solve it for her team, but thought, oh, this could be really interesting to solve for the whole company, I think I want to do that. So she built an entire team, but made the case for that, so that's one way to do it. You can think about making the case for an entire team, partial, existing resource, or maybe starting with a team of one, deciding what's above the line in terms of what's included that this person can include, what's below the line that they're not going to be able to do, and being very intentional about that, and then starting to build out the capability and showing the value hopefully where they could bring on more people if needed.

 Ula Ojiaku

Thanks for that. So to go back to the three pillars that you mentioned, there is the data and insights, customer and market insights, and the process and governance. Now of the three pillars, which one would you say is fundamental? Are they like a three legged stool?

 Denise Tilles

I mean, they all sort of work together, but if you can only cover one of them, great. If you only had the need for one of them, great, and companies really differ. In my experience it was like, oh, everyone really is challenged in the data and the business and data insights. Not always. I teach a masterclass for Produx Labs and it's a small group, like 25 people, and before we do, it's a four hour course that we offer quarterly, live on zoom, thinking about how we want to do that and it's really about thinking there's a said value, is this really where we want to go? And a lot of companies don't have that challenge. They may have more capability needs with the qualitative, and that's an area I see that kind of gets ignored or they're like, oh, we have a UX research team, but it doesn't have to originate with Product Operations, it's just about harnessing it and making sure that the Product Managers understand how to access it, how to apply it, and maybe even creating an insights database, could be something that UX research has, great, let's make sure that the Product Managers are aware of that. And the process piece, we've seen sort of hybrid structures where we've got a couple of dedicated people within the quantitative and qualitative, the business insights and customer market insights, and then more of a horizontal across the teams for the more process. So that was an organisational strategy that Blake Samic employed at Uber and Stripe when he set those teams up, thinking about more tactical support where needed, and then more of a horizontal type of program.

Ula Ojiaku

Thank you. So another thing I'd like to know, because looking at the title of the book, the second half says How Successful Companies Build Better Products at Scale. So does it mean that if I'm a startup, I shouldn't be bothering myself with Product Operations?

Denise Tilles

Not necessarily. There’s one company I can think of that is probably in a series A, maybe a B, and they have a Product Operations person. So you can decide if you've got the resourcing for it, that you dedicate one person, but typically we see Product Operations more with the sort of scale up in enterprise levels.

Ula Ojiaku

Okay, because typically a Product Manager has a mishmash of all roles and different hats, it's like you're developing the roadmap, you're speaking with the customers, you're making sure that the implementation is going on track, but it seems like it's more about teasing out the operations part and the enablement part and leaving them to focus on the pure product. I'm just trying to get my head around the concept because it's a really interesting thing.

Denise Tilles

Yeah, we make the point in the book that Product Managers are being asked to do evermore, like be strategic, be tactical, focus on delivery, make sure that you're a great partner with cross functional, apply data, oh, you don't have data, well do it, make sure you learn SQL to pull out the data. So there's just so many things, and you think about it, There's something's going to slip, right? So it ends up being, we have to deliver, but are we delivering right things? Are we delivering as much value as we could be doing? And that's typically where the drop off is - we're delivering, but is it the right type of work to really move the needle? I mean, that's sort of what Escaping The Build Trap talks about, Melissa's first book, but Product Operations helps make sure that we are focusing on the right things and delivering the right things.

Ula Ojiaku

So what does it look like when Product Operations is operating, in your and Melissa's opinion, as it should be? What could the organisation look like? What would you describe as a day in the life of a well-oiled Product Operations machine?

Denise Tilles

Oh, that's a good question. I mean, ideally, if I could have anything I wanted, I'd have a few folks thinking about that sort of hybrid model, right? So sort of a horizontal across all of the different teams and verticals, someone thinking about what are the methods, what sort of the systems design we need, not just for the sake of it, but making things easier. This was a challenge that I see a lot where companies and Product Managers spend so much time talking about doing the work rather than doing the work. How do we get rid of that? How can we clear that out, so everyone's aligned, and is there a template we're using for roadmaps, that's always a challenge, great, here we go, people are not usually that wound up about how it should look, just tell me what you want and I'll go, and there's a lot of sort of cycles burned and wasted on things like that. So it's just about helping people understand the rules of engagement and can get going with doing work of value versus talking about it.

And then I think in terms of the hybrid and having more dedicated folks, I would love to see maybe a person more focused on data analysis, ideally with each VP, maybe, and I've seen that, or supporting as much as they can, and also that person being able to sort of harness in the qualitative as well to make sure that the Product Managers have a full view of that.

So that would be where I would start, but if you can start with a team of one, get a few quick wins and then build out, I think that's what you could get to, but in terms of starting out, I think it would be a team of one understanding where the opportunities are, building out a roadmap, proving those out, and then sort of making yourself redundant in areas that could be automated, moving on to higher value work and so on and so on.

Ula Ojiaku

So you know that right now AI seems to have come to the forefront of the news with OpenAI's launch of ChatGPT and lots of courses there. So, when you mentioned automating those things that can be automated, it kind of triggered this question. So what are your thoughts on how generative AI could help with making Product Operations smoother?

Denise Tilles

Yeah. I would think around comms, right? So if we've got release notes that, perhaps Product Operations has put into more, what's in it for me as a salesperson, that's great,

the GR521 release, but what does that mean to me? So let's assume that Product Operations has sort of put that into the ‘so what’ for the entire organisation, let's say they do this three times a month, you know, maybe you'd be able to use ChatGPT and keep sort of feeding those in and being able to create a digest that could come out and be updated each, however you want, or someone could request that on demand, that would be one way of doing it, in implementing AI. It's interesting you mentioned OpenAI because one of the people we talked to is leading Product Operations at OpenAI, Blake Samic, who introduced Stripe and Uber. So they believe in Product Operations, and in spite of them thinking about building these wonderful tools for all of us, and people think, oh, they're going to replace Product Managers, or, it's not, it's more of a supplement and an enablement type of tool. I haven't seen a lot to really think, oh, wow, that's absolutely revolutionary yet, doesn't mean that's not the case, but I think in terms of what I'm seeing right now, it's still people thinking about manually creating those baselines and then automating data, not necessarily through AI. Any thoughts on your part, where that might sort of play in with AI?

Ula Ojiaku

So on the Product Management side, I can see that you can use it as your enthusiastic chief kind of researcher, guide, or someone you're bouncing ideas off to kind of produce a first draft of maybe the vision and all that. From an Operations perspective, you would be the experts here, but I'm thinking again, if it's about the processes, then are there things that are repetitive? You mentioned the comms, you know, as it's coming up, is there a way of pulling together all the information sources and knowing how previous ones were, kind of putting it in a template and a format and pushing it out at regular intervals, but that might need some sort of tooling that could help bring it all together without replacing the humans, if that makes sense. So if there's a tooling for that, from an operational perspective, you're knowing, okay, this is the time you need this sort of data and you pull it all together and you help with producing a first view of what it might mean, but then it helps with the conversation, and when it's time for reporting and all that, you just push it out to the right people. So maybe there's a room to get some sort of tool set that kind of interfaces with, yeah, that's my thoughts. I wasn't prepared for this either, but we're just, you kind of sharing opinions.

Denise Tilles

I know, it's kind of an exciting blue sky moment, right? And I'm all for automating and replacing tasks that can be done just as well and then moving yourself into more strategic things that can't be done by AI or the tool.

Ula Ojiaku

Exactly, for now it's more of a good assistant, but I don't think humans are going to be replaced anytime soon, and there will still be that need to review the output. I was on a webinar on a Drucker Forum and Marshall Goldsmith is a well known Executive Coach, and he's developing an AI version of himself, kind of feeding it with all his works, the books, the articles, and all that, so that if you ask it a question, it's likely to respond the way he should. So this thing was asked, okay, who is Marshall Goldsmith married to, and it produced the name of someone else. I think she was like, his marriage would have been jeopardised. So you know, you feed it, but it's still hallucinates. So in addition to your Product Operations book, which I would highly, highly recommend to the listeners, please go get your version. The links to the book would be in our show notes. So what other books would you recommend to people? I know that there aren't that many Product Operations books, but what other books would you say have influenced your practice?

Denise Tilles

Yeah, definitely Escaping the Build Trap, this almost is a continuance of that because Melissa sort of alludes to Product Operations in there, but you know, here we're really going in deep on that. I listen to more podcasts than read. I probably should be reading more, but I love Teresa Torres's Continuous Discovery Habits, that's a great one. I did that as a book club with a client, but I just listen to a lot of podcasts. So Lenny's, Pivot I love, which is an American one that's more about tech and business in general. My husband is not in product or tech or any software or anything, and he loves it, so it's really appealing to a wide audience. I listen to a lot of comedy and as well and the New York times, and Melissa Perri's podcast as well. So those would be my recommendations. And Lenny has a great newsletter too, there's a free version and a paid, the folks that do the paid say they love it so I'm thinking of investing this year.

Ula Ojiaku

I like that word investing. And would you have any ask of the audience as we wind down?

Denise Tilles

Oh, I love that, just find out what Product Operations is, and does that make sense for your organisation? Is it something that you might be interested in as sort of a segue from your current role? You don't see a lot of people having years and years of Product Operations roles, so now is kind of a great time to think about. Do I want to get into this? And folks that I think really succeed in this type of position are typically Product Managers. They've done the job. They have that empathy, but I've seen really great sort of segues from customer support. There's that empathy aspect again, right, because in the end, Product Operations is about sort of being the PM for the PMs, but people that are Data Analysts, so that I think is important to think about, what does it mean to me? Do I understand it first? What does it mean to me? Would that have any impact on my company? And what would that look like? Where are we having challenges now and knowing what I've learned about Product Operations from this podcast or the book or whatever you've learned, could it make a difference? And we have notes in the book about how to make the case to your CEO or Manager and typical objections you might hear and how you might counter them. So we wanted to make it as tactical and realistic as possible, because there's a number of books out there in Product Management that are just sort of high level and theoretical and very idealistic, and I think people feel badly when they can't measure up to it or actually function that way. So we wanted to say, here are the challenges people have had, we're going to give it to you straight, here's where they've had wins, you can learn from that. So the idea was to have case studies with real companies and real artifacts that we've included in the book, people love seeing other companies, artifacts, so case studies, sort of a fictitious through line with a company that we made up, and sort of highlighting the typical challenges we see. And then the base, core content about Product Operations. So it's sort of three layers, and we've been really pleased with the feedback we've gotten that people are like, this was me, did you hear me thinking, how is this, but really wanting to make sure that we were truly being realistic about what you can expect and hopefully the benefits that you'll see too. So the challenges and the opportunities.

Ula Ojiaku

Sounds awesome, and there might be some listeners or viewers who will be thinking this sounds great, I'm excited, I've already ordered the book, I've read the book, and I think I'll need more help. So how can the audience get in touch with you if they wanted to?

Denise Tilles

Yeah, you can go to denisetilles.com and we'll have a link for that, you can shoot me a note and I'm happy to sort of hear what you're thinking about, challenges. I get emails a lot and sometimes we'll just have a couple of emails back and forth and that's it, or we'll talk about what it would look like to create more support for you. So I do coaching as well with Product Operations leaders, I'm kind of phasing that out, but occasionally I will take on clients, but it's more about Product Operations, how to stand that up, an assessment of whether it even makes sense to your company, assessment of, we'll look at, do you have people there right now that can actually do the work, but where do you have the opportunities and the challenges, and sometimes I'll speak to companies like, oh, it's all about data, and I'll get in there and talk to them like, well, you've got some challenges here, here and here too. Like, oh, great, and sometimes having just that objective viewpoint really helps sort of shine the light on challenges.

Ula Ojiaku

This has been fantastic, Denise. So, any final words for the audience?

Denise Tilles

Yeah, hopefully this discussion has peaked your curiosity, and if you’re interested you can get a digital version of the book, or people love printed versions as well. If you’re not sure you want to commit to that, do some Googling and see what is out there and how people are leveraging Product Operations today. One area, and comments I get a lot, and questions from people, is well, people are tightening their belts, reducing staff, there was probably a lot of over-hiring in software companies, especially during covid, and I have seen a couple of times where people are like, well Product Operations is a cost centre at the end of the day, and it is, you have to be proving your value all the time, that gets cut first, but it’s kind of short sighted, because that’s when you need Product Operations even more, if you’re really hunkering down and making sure that every dollar or euro, or whatever your currency is, is being leveraged and maximised, that’s where Product Operations can actually help. We’ve made these bets in terms of our product roadmap, let’s check in, are we actually executing on them, or are we not? Do we need to pivot? If you’re just delivering and delivering, you have no sense of that, so we may get back to the Build Trap or delivering things that aren’t necessarily creating value for your customers. So I get excited when I hear stories about companies that have had layoffs unfortunately but they have kept their Product Operations teams and to me that’s a smart way of thinking about maximising reduced resources.

Ula Ojiaku

Well thank you so much for that Denise. Again, it’s been a pleasure having you as my guest on this podcast, I’ve learnt a lot, thank you Denise.

Denise Tilles

Thanks so much.

Ula Ojiaku

That’s all we have for now. Thanks for listening. If you liked this show, do subscribe at www.agileinnovationleaders.com or your favourite podcast provider. Also share with friends and do leave a review on iTunes. This would help others find this show. I’d also love to hear from you, so please drop me an email at [email protected] Take care and God bless! 

 Bio: Pete Newell

Pete Newell is a nationally recognized innovation expert whose work is transforming how the  government and other large organizations compete and drive growth.

 He is the CEO of BMNT, an internationally recognized innovation consultancy and early-stage tech accelerator that helps solve some of the hardest real-world problems in national security, state and local governments, and beyond. Founded in Silicon Valley, BMNT has offices in Palo Alto, Washington DC, Austin, London, and Canberra. BMNT uses a framework, called H4X®, to drive innovation at speed. H4X® is an adaptation of the problem curation techniques honed on the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan combined with the best practices employed by successful Silicon Valley startups. The result is a disciplined, evidence-based, data-driven process for connecting innovation activities into an accountable system that delivers solutions and overcome obstacles to innovation.

Pete is a founder and co-author, with Lean Startup founder Steve Blank, of Hacking for Defense (H4D)®, an academic program taught at 47+ universities in the U.S., as well as universities in the UK and Australia. H4D® focuses on solving national security problems. It has in turned created a series of sister courses – Hacking for Diplomacy, Hacking for Oceans, Hacking for Sustainability, Hacking for Local and others – that use the H4X® framework to solve critical real-world problems while providing students with a platform to gain crucial problem-solving experience while performing a national service. Pete continues to advise and teach the original H4D® course at Stanford University with Steve Blank. In addition, Pete is Co-Founder and Board Director of The Common Mission Project, the 501c3 non-profit responsible for creating an international network of mission-driven entrepreneurs, including through programs like H4D®.

Prior to joining BMNT, Pete served as the Director of the US Army’s Rapid Equipping Force (REF).  Reporting directly to the senior leadership of the Army, he was charged with rapidly finding, integrating, and employing solutions to emerging problems faced by Soldiers on the battlefield.

From 2010 to 2013 Pete led the REF in the investment of over $1.4B in efforts designed to counter the effects of improvised explosive devices, reduce small units exposure to suicide bombers and rocket attacks and to reduce their reliance on long resupply chains. He was responsible for the Army’s first deployment of mobile manufacturing labs as well as the use of smart phones merged with tactical radio networks.

Pete retired from the US Army as a Colonel in 2013. During his 32 years in uniform he served as both an enlisted national guardsman and as an active duty officer. He commanded Infantry units at the platoon through brigade level, while performing special operations, combat, and peace support operations in Panama, Kosovo, Egypt, Kuwait, Iraq and Afghanistan. He is an Army Ranger who has received numerous awards to include the Silver Star and Presidential Unit Citation.

Pete holds a BS from Kansas State University, an MS from the US Army Command & General Staff College, an MS from the National Defense University and advanced certificates from the MIT Sloan School and the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

Bio: Dr Alison Hawks

Dr. Alison Hawks is one of the leading experts advancing public sector innovation. A researcher and academic-turned-entrepreneur, she is the co-founder and CEO of BMNT, Ltd., the innovation company that is changing how public sector innovation happens; and Chair of the Common Mission Project UK, BMNT’s charitable partner that guides mission-driven entrepreneurial education in the UK.

Dr. Hawks co-founded BMNT Ltd with (Ret) Col Pete Newell, the CEO of BMNT, Inc., in 2019 to bring BMNT’s proven innovation approach to the UK market. Under her leadership BMNT has become a trusted innovation partner across all single Services of Defence, the Cabinet Office, and the national security community. She has also helped change how real-world government challenges are addressed in the UK, launching the “Hacking for” academic programmes created in the U.S. These courses that teach university students how to use modern entrepreneurial tools and techniques to solve problems alongside government at startup speed. As a result of her efforts, 14 UK universities are offering Hacking for the Ministry of Defence, Hacking for Sustainability and Hacking for Police. More than 480 students have taken these courses, addressing 103 real-world challenges.

Dr. Hawks teaches mission-driven entrepreneurship at King’s College London, Department of War Studies and at Imperial College London’s Institute of Security Science and Technology. She was named the Woman of the Year for Innovation and Creativity at the Women in Defence Awards in 2022. She serves on the Board of Directors of BMNT, leading development of BMNT’s innovation education programs while also guiding the integration of BMNT’s rapidly expanding international presence.

She was previously Director of Research at the Section 809 Panel, a U.S. Congressionally mandated commission tasked with streamlining and codifying defense acquisition. She was also an Assistant Professor at the School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University, as well as King’s College London, Department of Defence Studies where she taught strategy, policy and operations in professional military education.

Dr. Hawks’ doctoral thesis was in military sociology. She received her Ph.D from the Department of War Studies at King’s College London, and her MA in Strategic Studies from the University of Leeds. She holds a BA in Political Science from the University of California, San Diego. She has multiple peer reviewed publications on her research.

Interview Highlights

03:50 BMNT

06:20 Serendipity

10:00 Saying yes to the uncomfortable

11:20 Leadership

15:00 Developing a thick skin

20:00 Lessons of an entrepreneur

22:00 Stakeholder success

25:00 Solving problems at speed and at scale

28:00 The innovation pipeline

29:30 Resistance is rational

34:00 Problem curation

38:00 Dual use investments

43:00 Accelerating change

47:00 AUKUS

52:20 AI

Contact Information  

·         LinkedIn: Ali Hawks on LinkedIn

·         LinkedIn Peter Newell on LinkedIn

·         Website:  The Common Mission Project UK

·         Website: BMNT US

·         Website: BMNT UK

Books & Resources

·         Scaling Up Excellence: Getting to More Without Settling for Less: Robert Sutton, Robert , Huggy Rao

·         Value Proposition Canvas

·         Business Model Canvas

·         Hacking for Defense

·         Hacking for Allies

·         AUKUS DIN

·         Impromptu : Amplifying Our Humanity Through AI, Reid Hoffman

·         Huberman Lab Podcast

·         Allie K. Miller

·         Wiring the Winning Organization: Liberating Our Collective Greatness through Slowification, Simplification, and Amplification: Gene Kim, Steven Spear

·         The Friction Project - Bob Sutton, Huggy Rao

Episode Transcript 

Intro: Hello and welcome to the Agile Innovation Leaders podcast. I’m Ula Ojiaku. On this podcast I speak with world-class leaders and doers about themselves and a variety of topics spanning Agile, Lean Innovation, Business, Leadership and much more – with actionable takeaways for you the listener.

Ula Ojiaku

My guests for this episode are Pete Newell and Ali Hawks. Pete Newell is the CEO and Co-founder of BMNT, an innovation consultancy and early stage technology incubator that helps solve some of the hardest problems facing the Department of Defense and Intelligence community.

Ali Hawks is CEO of BMNT in the UK and also a Co-founder of BMNT in the UK. In addition to this, she is the Chair of the Board of Trustees at the Common Mission Project, and she Co-founded the Common Mission Project in 2019 and drove its growth as a Startup charity in the UK. Without further ado, ladies and gentlemen, my conversation with Pete and Ali, I found it very insightful and I'm sure you would as well.

Pete, thank you Ali, thank you so much for being with us on the Agile Innovation Leaders Podcast. It's a great pleasure to have you here.

 Pete Newell

 Thanks so much for the invite.

 Ali Hawks

 Yeah. Thank you for having us.

 Ula Ojiaku

Right, this is the second time ever in the history of my podcast that I'm having two people, two guests. The first time was fun, and I know this one would be as well, and informative. I always start with asking my guests to tell us a bit about themselves. So your background, any memorable happenings that shaped you into the person you are today?

 Pete Newell

 So I'm a retired army officer. I enlisted when I was 18 and was commissioned when I left college in the mid 80s. I spent most of my career as an Infantryman in tactical units. I spent a great bit of time in the Middle East and other war zones. Towards the end of my career, I ended up as the Director of the Army's Rapid Equipment Force, which is essentially the Skunk Works that was stood up at the start of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars to accelerate technology to solve problems that were emerging on the battlefield, that weren't part of something else, somewhere else.

And in that three-year journey, it probably exposed me to first and foremost, the speed at which new problems are presenting themselves, not just on the battlefield, but in the rest of the world. It exposed me to the speed at which technology is changing, being adopted and then being adapted for other purposes. So it's almost like chasing technology as it changes is a whole new sport, and it exposed me to  the challenges of large bureaucratic organisations and their inability to keep up with the speed of the changes in order to remain competitive, whether it was on the battlefield or in the commercial markets or something like that. Those epiphanies really drove, first, my decision to retire from the military, because I became addicted to solving that problem, and second, drove the impetus to launch BMNT in 2013. And in fact, you are right square in the middle of our 10th anniversary of being a company. So it really is, I think, a big deal because we started with four people on a driveway in Palo Alto, California, now we're a global company with multiple companies and are grateful, but that's the history of how we got started.

 Ula Ojiaku

 Congratulations on your 10th anniversary, and it's an impressive background and story. Ali, what about you?

 Ali Hawks

 So, my background, a little bit different than Pete's, by training I was an academic, so my training and my PhD was in military sociology. I was really interested in understanding people's experiences in the armed forces, both in the US and the UK. That is what my PhD was focused around, my thesis, and I went on to be an academic at King's College London here in the UK. I've also been an Assistant Professor at Georgetown University in the School of Foreign Service. But it wasn't until I then took a job with the US DoD, in something called a Congressional Advisory Panel called the Section 809 Panel, which was tasked with overhauling all of defense acquisition, and that's where Pete and I met. I think one of those formative experiences in my career was meeting Pete and going to the non-profit that Pete started and spun out of BMNT, it’s called the Common Mission Project with a really big program, Hacking for Defense, and Steve Blank also Co-founded that as you know, and Joe Felter. I went to an educator course for this program in Fort Belvoir as a part of my job to understand, could we take these types of methods and put them into congressional legislation or DoD regulation as a way to change how people think about problems? And when I met Pete, it was the intersection of all of the things that I really love, academia, entrepreneurship, defense and national security. I went up to Pete and pitched him and said, I want to take this back to the UK and launch it. That was the start of what has been thousands of conversations about the value that we can add both in the US and the UK.  I worked in some law firms before I did my Master's and my PhD, but mainly my career has been in academia.

 Ula Ojiaku

 Wow. Thanks for sharing. And would you say it was serendipity that made your paths to cross and how are you finding the journey so far?

 Ali Hawks

 I think, yes, I think it's serendipity. I have a really different life journey than Pete. And I think in my career at the time when I met Pete, I hadn't really found what it is, what I felt like my purpose should be, or hadn't really found passion or joy in my work to that day. I found things I loved, I loved academia and I love teaching, but it just still didn't hit all of those things that you kind of get up every day and are like, this is what I’m meant to do. And I had done a lot of work on reflecting of what that would feel like and what that would look like and the elements it had to have.

So by the time I met Pete, it was almost as if someone was flashing a huge sign at me saying, don't miss your turn, this is your turn. So I think serendipity, but also really understanding what it is that I wanted to do and the type of people I wanted to work with and the journey so far. I'll hand over to Pete in a second, but it's been nothing short of incredible. Pete has an amazing reputation, but as a business partner and as a leader, he allows people to truly learn, experiment, make mistakes, and he pulls everyone along by building confidence and empowering people that work for him. So in terms of kind of coming from academia and becoming a researcher turned entrepreneur, it's been the most formative experience of my career. Being able to work along Pete is like being able to work alongside that kind of guide or that guru, and you're like, wow, I can't believe I get to talk to this person every week and learn from them and be in business with them. So that's how it's going for me. Pete, how's it going for you?

 Pete Newell

You know, Steve Blank and I had a long conversation about serendipity when he and I met 2015 and here's my advice in serendipity. It really is if you have an active curiosity and a willingness to say yes to things that you wouldn't normally, and you're not adverse to taking risk, the chances of serendipity smacking like lightning greatly go up. And then I go back to my first trip to Stanford University in 2011. Well, I was still a military officer and saying yes to a number of things that people asked me to do, and just one conversation after another led to a meeting with two guys who were Stanford graduate school instructors who were writing a book. Those two decided to write a chapter in that book about the work I was doing at the Rapid Equipment Force. Now, when Huggy Rao and Bob Sutton decided to write a book and hire a case study writer who spent six months digging into your life, you learn all kinds of things about yourself and about the world, and when that's followed by a chance coffee with Steve Blank, who had no idea who I was, and I had no idea who he was, that 15-minute coffee turned into a four-hour discussion between the two of us. I typically would not have been at the Fort Belvoir thing that Ali was at, and I think our meeting was very brief, but it was, I think, six months later when I found her in the library at Georgetown University at some social event and we both decided that we wanted her to do something, and we wanted to do something in the UK, and we wanted to see something between allied countries come together. There was no strategy or grand business development, there was nothing that drove those conversations. It was simply in the spur of the moment, the curiosity takes over and you start to say I can see where this might work.

Now, Ali will be the first to tell you, it has not been easy, but it has been a privilege to work with her and to continue to work between the two governments and the countries to see absolutely brilliant things done. And so I just say, I come back to, it's that curiosity connected with the desire to, the willingness to accept a little bit of risk, but learning how to say yes to things that you're uncomfortable with and digging just a little bit more. That opens up that opportunity so much more.

 Ula Ojiaku

I could see, it's evident to me the way Ali was talking about working with you, Pete, and your leadership, I'm wondering, could there have been anything about your military background that has influenced your leadership style as a whole?

Pete Newell

Yeah, everything in my background does. I can tell you, even growing up as a kid that the way my parents raised me influenced me positively, and negatively in some cases. My military background, I have been fortunate to work for a group of fantastic military leaders, I spent time in the Special Operations community, I spent time working for Stan McChrystal, I spent time in the Pentagon working for brilliant people. I also worked for some of the absolute worst bosses in the entire world, and I rarely say this about people, they were just bad human beings, and I will tell you in many cases what I learned watching a leader in a just really horrible environment influenced me more than watching the really brilliant guys out there. If you think about it, it's really hard to pattern yourself after somebody who is brilliant and driven and successful and kind and they do all that, but I'll tell you what, you can look at somebody who is really a bad boss and say, I don't want to be like them, and it happens in an instant, that I do not ever want to be like that person. That teaches you a lot about the environment that you want to create that people are going to work in. I have some hard areas, and Ali will acknowledge some of them, in the way people are treated in the workplace. Also as a graduate of the Special Operations community, I have strong feelings about how high performing people should be allowed to perform, and also expectations of how they work. I think the military left me with a high degree of not just respect, but you want to hire people, there's a certain degree of dedication to their success, whether they stay in your company or whether they leave, or they go someplace else, whether they're challenged or something else. And I'll tell you, if there was something hard about transitioning from the military to the business world is, in the military, you're given people and you're told to make them successful no matter what. In the business world, you tend to just fire people who are unsuccessful and not invest time and energy in them. I have never been able to make that change, and it's a bit of a struggle sometimes, because in the business world, you can't afford to hang on to people who are subpar performers, if you want to run a high-performance organisation. So if there's one of the things that I have learned is I am challenged in letting somebody go because I see it as a personal failure if somebody fails to thrive in my organisation, that has been built and imprinted by my past. I think Ali has a very different opinion, because she comes from such a great different place. Here's the beauty of it, the work with people like Ali and some of the others, we can argue and disagree and fight like cats and dogs sometimes, but we still love each other, and it is still an absolutely amazing environment to work in. That's really what, if you get it right, that's what life's like.

 Ula Ojiaku

What's your view, Ali?

 Ali Hawks

So we clearly have different backgrounds, I think that I was a bit of a late bloomer in terms of leadership style. Being in academia, you're not really in a leadership position because you're responsible for yourself, and in a way, it's a really good test bed for being an entrepreneur, because in academia you have to have such thick skin, because you turn in your peer reviewed journal publications, you turn in your papers and people write back and slash, and no one's trying to make you feel good. In fact, they want to help you, but also they're quite competitive. So that was a really good proving ground for being able to develop the thick skin for critical feedback or any feedback and really all of the knocks that come with being an entrepreneur. What I took into starting BMNT here four years ago was, things that I took from Pete and from the U.S. was really allowing people and high performers to work in the way that they feel best. One of the things I hated when I was younger in certain jobs, and working in law firms is punching your time card at 8 am, and you punch out at 5, and an hour for lunch, and it never felt right that that was the way to measure someone's productivity or to really enhance or empower people. And so the way that I approach it is we consider everyone to be an adult and to do their job, and also to be as curious as possible. So on our Standup this morning, with two new team members coming back into BMNT, one of the things that we agreed on is if no one's asking for time off to be creative or to have a day or two days to read a book that will enhance their knowledge or make them a better BMNTer, then we're failing. If no one has asked for that time by the end of this calendar year. So the way that I really approach leadership is how can I empower, but also invest in every single person, because it's not me delivering the everyday work, it’s the people in my company, so they're building it alongside of me. I hire smart young people who will give feedback and we action that feedback. So we change things based on what we get from a 23-year-old, so everyone in the company feels really valued. And I think, learning from Pete, is also being really honest and transparent with everyone in the company when your chips are down and you have to say, guys, this is what's going on, and I found it has built such a strong cohesion in the team that we have now, that this year going into it is the most excited I've ever been about running BMNT. So taking a lot of what I learned from Pete and also my own experiences of feeling really caged, actually, in most of my jobs, and being able to understand that people work in very different ways, and if you allow them to work in the ways that are best for them, you really do get the best of everyone.

 Ula Ojiaku

That's very inspiring and insightful. Now, there was something Pete said earlier on about you, Ali, walking up to him and sharing the vision that you wanted to take back what BMNT is doing to the UK and so what made you go for it, what pushed you towards that?

Ali Hawks

Again, it was a lot of work on my part of really understanding what I wanted to do, and when I approached Pete that day, I was really excited and exuberant and I said, I want to take this back to the UK and I want to run it. And Pete is, as you get to know him, he's very calm and he's quiet, and he kind of looked at me and he said, you should talk to some people. And I thought, okay, I'll go talk to people. So I went out and I talked to people and I got Pete on the phone a few weeks later and I said, Pete, this is my dream job, this is what I want to do. And Pete said, prove it, do a Business Model Canvas. So I then hung up the phone, I googled Business Model Canvas, I watched YouTube videos on how to complete it. I was still working at the 809 Panel, so I was getting up really early to talk to people back in the UK, make phone calls, pulling on all of my contacts because I've been in defense and national security for gosh, since 2009, and I was canvassing everyone I knew, I filled out the Business Model Canvas, I sent it to Pete, he was going to be in DC about a week later, and he wrote back saying we should meet. So we then met and had an initial conversation around what it could look like, but it really wasn't until as Pete said in that library at Georgetown for a reception that we came together and having had both time to think and think about what I put down in the Business Model Canvas, but also how we got along, I think, and gelled as business partners, we decided, let's do it. So when we said we didn't have a plan, I had an idea of what we could do, and I have unfailing determination to make things work, and so I just knew, and I think we both knew if we tried it, that something would come of it, and if not, we would learn a lot from it. So we went from there and it took a while before we got a plan, to be honest, but we got there.

Ula Ojiaku

Well, here you are.

Ali Hawks

Exactly.

Pete Newell

You know, if there's one thing I have learned as an entrepreneur is that the plan you thought you were going to have, is never the one you actually execute. So the faster you begin to test it, usually by talking to people and doing things, the faster you will get rid of bad ideas. And it's not about finding the good idea, but it's about creating all the ideas you could possibly have and then killing them off quickly so that you understand the core of the value that you think you're going to deliver. Everything after that is the mechanics of how to build a business. I mean, that's not easy stuff, when you're launching a company, more importantly when you're launching one in a country you haven't been in in a while, but getting there is really about getting the thought process moving and getting people to disabuse you of the notion that every idea you have is brilliant.

Ula Ojiaku

I mean, I agree setting up a business isn't easy. I can't imagine the additional challenge of setting it up in the defense sector, the Department of Defense in the US, Ministry of Defence here in the UK. What sort of things would you say would be the additional? Do you have to go through hurdles to go through approvals, clearances and all that?

Ali Hawks

From the MOD experience, it's less about clearances and those types of things, it's more about understanding, winding your way through what feels like a maze, to find the right stakeholders that you can bring together at the right time to make a decision. So while there are individuals that hold budgets and can make decisions, there's a constellation of people around them that need to be aligned in concert with that decision. If you went to a business, of course, you'll have to have a couple of people on board, but the time to sale or the cost to sale is relatively straightforward. When you go into the government, you have a group of highly motivated people, highly mission-driven people who experience the pain of their problems every day, and they are trying to fight just as hard as you are in order to change something for the better. So in the first instance, you have great allyship with your customers, because you have a shared mission, and you're both working towards it, which is fantastic. The second is really trying to understand if that person has the budget and they need to sign off on it, how much do they need to care about it, or is it their chief of staff that needs to really care about it? Or is it their engineer? So I would say the difference is the amount of discovery that you do and doing that stakeholder mapping, is fundamental to success, but also knowing that people change jobs in the civil service and the Armed Forces every few years, that is a critical skill as a business working with the government, that stakeholder mapping and that discovery with your customers, customer development never ends. So I think that that is the longest pole in the tent in terms of finding the right people, and sometimes people say that's the person that has authority, you go talk to them and they say, no, I don't have any authority, so it's really trying to wind your way through the maze to align those key stakeholders.

Pete Newell

I would add to what Ali said, is that it's like climbing into a very complicated Swiss watch and you need to understand not just how things work, but you need to understand why they work the way they do, and how they work with other things, and then you need to understand who's responsible for making them work and who the beneficiary of the work is, and who possibly might want to make them not work. So, Ali's comment on stakeholder development, it's at the heart of everything you do -- you talk about more sociology and anthropology than it is anything, it truly is understanding why things work the way they do and what drives people to behave one way versus another. Once you figure that out, then you can figure out how to motivate them to behave one way or another, and where you might fit to help them in their daily job or whatever else. But that stakeholder development and understanding who's in charge, who benefits, who doesn't benefit, why something might be counter to something else is so critical in any consulting business, but in particular, if you are trying to get something done inside a government organisation. It, in many cases, it's archaic, but it still operates underneath a very definitive culture that you can map if you've been at it long.

Ula Ojiaku

So BMNT, you help government organisations to solve hard problems at speed and at scale. Can you expand on this?

Pete Newell

It's both I think. I go back to my experience, way back in the Rapid Equipping Force and 2010 is first and foremost, there are tens of thousands of problems that prevent the government from doing what it wants to do. The government is challenged, first, in being able to identify those problems; second, in translating those problems into plain English that other people might understand; third, in using that translated thing to find ever bigger groups of people, to then redefine the problem one more time, so that it makes sense for the rest of the world; and fourth, creating the policies and process that will attract people to come to them and work with them to solve those problems fast enough to build a solution before the problem changes so much that the calculus is completely out of whack again. And in all this there's a complicated long answer, but the impedance difference between the speed at which you develop and acknowledge a problem and your ability to get people to work on it, if it's out of sync with the speed at which technology is being adopted and adapted, you will constantly be perfectly solving the wrong problem, and you'll be constantly delivering things that are antiquated before the day they land in somebody's hands, so that's really the speed issue. I go back to what I said about sociology. This is the speed of your ability to get people to come together to work on something, and then the scale is determining, scale how fast, and scale how big. The scale how fast is, I can start to deliver a solution to this, but I know the solution is going to change every 6 months. So I don't need to commit to building tens of thousands of these over a 5-year contract, but I do need to commit to changing what I deliver every 6 months, or this is going to scale to some big end and it goes into a much different system, you have to be ambidextrous about your approach to scale, and unfortunately most procurement laws, both the United States and in the UK are not built to be ambidextrous. They're built to do one thing and one thing very efficiently only. Unfortunately, that's not the way the world works anymore.

Ula Ojiaku

Any thoughts, Ali?

Ali Hawks

As Pete said, and as a sociologist, the most often thing, and I think Pete said this a long time ago when we first met, is the government doesn't have a tech adoption problem, it has a people problem, and a lot of our work, a lot of our customers will come and say they have a tech problem, and they have a huge degree of urgency, but the things that get in their way are they have no common language, and they have no repeatable and scalable process in which to think about and work on their problems. And the framework that we developed, the innovation pipeline, is that process for them to do it. It's not complicated, it's methodology agnostic, and so it allows you to develop an entire workforce around a common language of innovating, mission acceleration, agile transformation, whatever you want to do, recognising that people are at the heart of it. The Head of Innovation at UC Berkeley and during one of our Lean Innovators Summit, said something that has stuck with me for several years now, ad he said, and it really hit home with our customers, because sometimes when I first started BMNT here, I was such an evangelist that I forgot to listen to the customer.

I was just so convinced that they needed what we had, and I think the customer was telling me something else and I would get frustrated, and when I heard this, it was resistance is rational. When we go into a room with a group of people, we usually have a customer who is an evangelist of ours, or an early adopter, a huge supporter, and they have a couple of other people who feel the same way they do about change and innovation and moving rapidly, and then 70 percent of the team don't feel that same way. So approaching it and really empathising with the customers and understanding resistance is rational, why would they want to change? Things for them work, the way that they have always done, it works, and that is a rational response. So being able to then develop a service where you're connecting with them and saying, I understand that, and that's a rational response, and then using tools, like one of my favourite tools, the Value Proposition Canvas, to really understand, what are the jobs to be done, and the pains and the gains, and when you speak in that type of language, there are so many times that I have seen this kind of aha moment of like, oh, so if I did that, then I wouldn't have to do this anymore, or I would be able to do this different thing. And this is not complicated, these are not complicated tools or processes we're talking about, but the common denominators of it are discipline, consistency, and hard work. And I think, coming off what Pete said, when you want to get pace and speed, you have to be consistent and you have to be disciplined, and people have to understand what you're saying in order to get over that resistance is rational piece.

Pete Newell

I think Ali’s spot on in terms of the problem with the problem. Oftentimes is, we can put a problem in a room and 10 people work on it and get 10 different versions of the problem,

and so part of the art that's involved in the process is to get a group of people to agree to a common definition of a problem and use the same words, because many times we’re inventing new words. It's new technology, new problem, but the first thing we do is get everybody to say the same thing the same way, and then start to talk to other people about it, because part two of that is you learn that your problem is probably not the right problem, it's a symptom of something else, and that whole process of discovery is a very disciplined, I would say it's a scientific methodology applied to how we communicate with people. You have to get out and test your theory by talking to the right people in a big enough diverse crowd to truly understand that whether you're on the right track or the wrong track. That's hard work, it really is hard work, and it's even harder to get what I would say critical feedback from people in the process who will challenge your assumptions and will challenge your test, who will challenge the outcomes of that. That's what our team does such a great job of, working with customers to teach them how to do that, but listening to them and helping them come together. At the same time, we're looking at the quality of the work and because we're a third party, we can look over the shoulder and say I see the test, and I see the outcome, but I don't think your test was adequate, or I don't think you tested this in an environment that was diverse enough, that you may be headed down the wrong path. The customer can still decide to go with what they learn, but in most cases, at least they're getting honest feedback that should allow them to pause and relook something.

Ali Hawks

I think for this particular reason, this is why BMNT is a leader in this space, is because the kind of jurisdiction around that front end of the pipeline, of are we making sure that we're choosing from enough problems and we're not stuck with a couple of investments that might be bad, so to speak, really validating that problem to decide, is it worth working on, is this even progressible, does anyone care about it, can it technically be done, does the organisation care about it, before spending any money on investment. Now that front end of the pipeline is gradually becoming a stronger muscle, and I'll speak for the UK, is gradually becoming a stronger muscle because of the work that BMNT has done, and both in the US and the UK, there is incredibly strong muscle memory around experimentation and incubation, which is fantastic. There's a lot of structure around that and frameworks and a lot of common language, which is amazing, because when you have that developed, going back to the beginning to refine before you put into the machine, so to speak, that's where what we call curation, really validating that problem, that's a single most determining factor on whether a problem will transition to an adopted solution. Most of government starts in experimentation and incubation, so they don't get the benefit of de-risking investment in a solution, and they don't necessarily get the benefit of all the learning to expedite that into incubation and experimentation. So I think where BMNT comes out and really owns that area is in that front end of the pipeline, and when you do that front end, you would be amazed at how fast the other part of the pipeline goes through discover incubation experimentation, because you've increased confidence and really de-risked investment in the solution.

Ula Ojiaku

Thanks for sharing that Ali, would you say you're applying lean innovation amongst other things to the framework you're referring to, or would that be something else?

Pete Newell

No, I think that it's all part of the process. We use a variety of tools to get to the data we want, and then it's a matter of doing analysis, and this is why Ali's background as an academic is so critical, because she's keen on analysis, and looking at the data and not skewing the data one way or another, and that's an incredibly important skill in this process. Again, this is really the application of a scientific methodology, and you need to be able to do that, but you need to understand how to get the data. So whether it's Lean or it's Scrum or it's some Google tool or something else. We have become really adaptive in the use of the tools and a mixture of the tools to drive a community of people to create the data we need to make an assessment of whether something's going the right direction or not. And that's the beauty of being involved with the Lean Innovation Educators Forum, the beauty of the time we spend with folks like Alex Osterwalder or with Steve Blank or with the folks from the d.school at Stanford or any of those places that are developing tools. It is understanding how to use and adopt the tool to fit the circumstances, but at the end of the day, it's all about creating the data you need to use the analysis that will drive an insight, that will allow you to make a decision. Too often I find people who are just overly enamoured with the tool and they forget that the tool is just a tool. It's about data, insight, and decisions, and you have to get to a decision at some point.

Ula Ojiaku

Data, insight, decisions. Amazing. So, if we shift gears a little bit and go into your Strategic Innovation Project, SIP, I understand that one of the shifts you're driving in the DoD and MoD respectively is about their approach to involving private investment in defence technology. Could you share a bit more about that?

Pete Newell

As part of the innovation pipeline, you have to eventually transition out of the discovery phase and at the end of discovery, you should know that you have the right problem. You have a potential solution and you have a potential pathway that will allow you to deliver that solution in time to actually have an impact on the problem. At that point, you start incubating that solution, and if it's a tech or a product, then you're talking about either helping a company build the right thing, or you're talking about starting a new company, and that new company will have to do the thing. Our work in terms of early-stage tech acceleration is really now focused on what we call dual-use technologies. Those technologies that are required to solve a problem in the military, but also have a digital twin in the commercial world. There has to be a commercial reason for the company being built that’s actually going to solve the problem, and so as we looked at that, we found really interesting conversations with investors in the United States and then eventually overseas who were looking for a way to help defense get the technologies it wanted, but have portfolios that don't allow them to just invest in a defense technology, and they were looking for an opportunity to engage one, with like-minded investors, but two, in honest conversations about problems that existed in the military and in the commercial world so they can make better decisions about the deployment of their capital to create the right companies. I think it's probably been five years now we've been working on the hypothesis around this. we started to develop a very strong language around dual-use investments in early-stage tech acceleration and adoption, and we started to build new tools inside government programs, as well as new groups of investors and other folks who wanted to be involved. All that was fine in the United States, but then we found it was a slightly different application outside the United States, particularly in Europe, which is not necessarily the most Startup friendly environment in the world in terms of investment, but at the same time, understanding that the United States has an unequalled appetite for technology to the point where that technology doesn't necessarily exist within the United States, nor do the best opportunities to test that technology exist for the United States, so we had to come up with a way that would allow us to do the same type of investigation with our allies, which turns into this incredible opportunity amongst allied nations and companies and vendors and things like that. And I know that from Ali's standpoint, watching NATO DIANA and other programs start, that it is more challenging, it's a different environment in Europe than it is in the United States.

Ali Hawks

Picking up there and in terms of the way that we think about investment, and what Pete is talking about is a program we run called Hacking 4 Allies. We currently work with Norway and take dual-use Norwegian Startups into our incubator and accelerator called H4XLabs in the US and we help them enter the US defense market and the commercial market, and one of the things that we're starting to see over here is it is a pathway that doesn't really exist in Europe. So when we think about NATO's DIANA, what DIANA is focused on, which is dual-use and deep tech and what they are overly focused on, and I think is correct, is how do you raise investment in the countries themselves to help booster a whole range of effects around being able to raise money within the country? Ultimately, though, and a lot of what DIANA was doing, in terms of the concept and its focus on dual-use and deep tech, was before the invasion of Ukraine, and so at that time before that, I think in terms of the NATO Innovation Fund and thinking about investment and NATO, it wasn't as comfortable with dual-use and investing in dual-use as the US is, not only is the US comfortable, but you have things like we helped a private capital fund, where people feel a great deal of patriotism, or that it's a part of their service to be able to contribute in that way. That feeling doesn't exist, it exists here, but it manifests itself in a different way, and it doesn't manifest itself as let's invest in dual-use technologies to help our defense and national security. So there's different understandings and cultural feelings towards those things. Now, having had the invasion of Ukraine and now the war in Israel and Gaza and now in Yemen, I think that the change is accelerating, insofar as what are the capabilities that we need to rapidly develop within NATO to be able to feel secure on our borders, and what type of investment does that take? Now, US investment in Europe has dropped about 22 percent in 2023, and so they're a little bit nervous about investing in these companies, and so the strength that being able to change the investment paradigm, which is ultimately, the companies that are going to receive the investment from the NATO Innovation Fund and NATO DIANA, they want to develop in the country, but ultimately all of those companies and their investors want them to get to a bigger market, and that bigger market is the US. So, what we are able to do is to connect real dollars, government dollars and commercial dollars, to those companies. We are one of the only pathways outside of export regimes for the Department of International Trade here in the UK. We are one of the only private pathways that has not only been tested and proved, but that we are able to take more companies year on year, take them to the US and prove that model. Now that's really exciting, especially as we see some of the investment declining, because we're able to identify those companies, we're able to connect them to problems that matter that people are trying to solve, develop the use cases, and then help them on the commercialisation side of things in terms of going into a new market. I think that the way that we think about investment in the US from a BMNT perspective, and the US is a little bit different from Europe and the UK, but the exciting thing is now that we have this proven pathway to enhance and accelerate concepts like DIANA and the NATO Innovation Fund.

Ula Ojiaku

So it sounds to me like it's not just about the localised investment into the innovation, it’s also about BMNT building pathways, so European Startups, for example, that want an inroad into the US, maybe vice versa.

Pete Newell

I think the AUKUS DIN, the Defense Investor Network really is the collection of the US Investor Network, the UK and Australia. All three countries had Defense Investor Networks that had been set up over the last several years and primarily focused on, one, allowing investors to engage other investors about topics that are of common interest when it comes to this dual-use paradigm; and two, being able to engage with people in the government about things the investors were concerned about. I'm very clear when I talk about the Defense Investor Network, it is about defense investors, not about the government's problem. I've had to redefine that multiple times, as this is about enabling investors to be more proactive and participate in building the right kinds of companies, not about the government telling investors what they need to do, or the government telling the investors how they need to do it. It really, it was built from the investor perspective, and then we found is that the investors were prolifically honest about their feedback to senior people in the government, which I think has been hard for people in the government to get that kind of feedback, but when an investor with a portfolio of 30 and 40 companies looks at the government and says, I will never do it the way you just described, and here's why. Until you change that quantity, it makes no sense for us to participate, invest in, do, you'd be amazed. Sometimes it is the first time somebody's been able to articulate why something isn't going to happen, and then people nod their heads, well, I'll quit asking for that, or I'll go back and change something to see what it is we can do. So, we went from Hacking 4 Allies, which started out as a BMNT program with the Norwegians, to Hacking 4 Allies with the UK, Australia, Norway. At the same time, we had set up the Defense Investor Network, but as soon as we started the Allies program in the UK, the UK-based investors raised their hands and said, what you're doing in the United States, we want to do here, and then the same thing happened in Australia. When they made the AUKUS announcement, it just made too much sense to be able to look at, if we really want a free flow of technology and problems across the AUKUS governments, then surely we should be building ecosystems of like-minded people who can help drive those conversations. So it was super, super easy to bring the AUKUS Investor Network together, it was just too easy. The part that I think is not so easy, but we need to do work on is we, those investors need to be fed problems that are of an AUKUS nature, and at the same time, the governments need to listen to the investors when they tell them they have problems investing in companies that aren't allowed to participate in exercise or training or contracting or acquisitions in a different country, and if you really want to make AUKUS a real thing, there are a lot of policies that have to change. There's been a lot of progress made, but I think there's a lot more left to do to, to really get the opportunity to happen.

Ula Ojiaku

And would you say some of the problems would be related to what government officials would call national security, because if it's a dual-use spec, whilst it has its secular or commercial use, in the military, you wouldn't want other people knowing how you're deploying that technology and the ins and outs of it. So could that be one of the issues here?

Pete Newell

My definition of national security really touches public safety all the way up to military, so it's both. I think if you dig into it, it touches everything from supply chain, to access, to raw materials, to manufacturing, to education and workforce development, and you name it. There's a paradigm shift that has to happen if we're going to build more things, more often rather than long term ships and things like that, that as allied nations, we have to be able to attack all of the underlying foundational problems, and that's my supply chain, raw materials, manufacturing, and workforce that's necessary for the future. No one country is going to get that fixed all by themselves, and I think, to me, that's the absolute brilliance of what AUKUS should be able to focus on.

Ali Hawks

I agree, and I think that to being able to co-invest as well, the opportunity for investors to come around and understand what are the opportunities to, not only co-invest and coordinate, but to be able to scan their companies and their deal flow to see where their companies can partner and secure greater work and contracts and scale. So I think that it's a really important initiative in terms of being a steward of an extremely important ecosystem, not only being a steward, but being able to build that ecosystem of support and development. How we look at national security in the UK is really no different than what Pete talked about, and when we think about working with companies and the willingness to work with big tech companies or small tech companies or whatever it is, it's not just simply one transaction where, here's the money and here's your software. So obviously the kind of employment and the skills, but what is the ecosystem around that technology that is necessary? Does it require sensors and chips, and what is it that it requires that's going to bring in multiple different industries to support it, and that's really what the agenda here around prosperity is. How do we invest in these types of technologies and their ecosystems around it to have a more prosperous Britain? So you have a wider spread of skills as opposed to just investing in one thing. I think that's where AUKUS brings three very important allies together to be able to do that individually, but then the option to do it across in terms of the broader strategy and the policy around AUKUS, is a once in a lifetime chance that I think has come up.

Ula Ojiaku

So I think the key thing here is, this is a space to be watched, there's lots of opportunity and the potential of having the sum being greater than the parts is really huge here. One last question on this topic. So you said deep tech, and with Open AI's launch of ChatGPT earlier on last year, the world seems to have woken up to, generative AI. Do you see any influence this trend would have, or is having, in the military space in the Defense Innovation space.

Pete Newell

I think the world has woken up and is staring into the sun and is blinded. The challenge with AI in general, and I would say that it's not the challenge, AI has a long way to go, and by and large, folks are really focused on the high end of what AI can do, but people have to learn how to use AI and AI has to learn. What we're not doing is using AI to solve the mundane, boring, time wasting problems that are preventing our workforce from doing the high end work that only a human being can do, and I don't care how many billions of dollars we're pouring into building robots and other things, it's all great, but we still have government people managing spreadsheets of data that, they become data janitors, not analysts, and it is particularly bad in the intelligence world. I quote the Chief Information Officer of a large logistics agency who said data is not a problem, we have tons of data, it's just crappy, it's not tagged, it's not usable, we have data going back to the 1950s, we have no means of getting that data tagged so it's useful. Now, if we put time and energy into building AI products that would correctly tag old data, it'd be amazing what we can do. In the cases that we have helped develop tools with our clients, they'll save anywhere from a million to 300 million dollars a year in finding discrepancies in supply chain stuff, or finding other issues. So imagine if we put that kind of work in place for other people, but free people up to do more, better, smarter things, how much more efficient the use of the government's time and money would be, so that that money and that time could be invested in better things.

So when I say, yeah, the AI is out there and people's eyes are open, but they're staring into the sun. They're not looking at the ground in front of them and solving the things that they could be solving at the speed they should be doing it, and unfortunately, I think they're creating a gap where legacy systems are being left further and further behind, but those legacy systems, whether it's finance, personnel, supply chain, discipline, things like that, aren't going to be able to make the transition to actually be useful later on. So I would describe it as an impending train wreck.

Ula Ojiaku

And what would be, in your view, something that could avert this oncoming train wreck.

Pete Newell

I think a concerted effort, really just to have the government say we're going to use AI to get rid of as much of the legacy brute force work that our populations are doing so that we can free them up to do other things. Part of this is we're then going to take the money we save and channel that money back into investment in those organisations. Right now, the money just goes away, that's great, you did better, therefore, your budget's reduced. There's no incentive to get better that way, but if you look at an organisation and say, you know, if you can save 10 million dollars a year, we'll give you that 10 million dollars to reinvest back into your organisation to do better and something else. Now, you have some incentive to actually make change happen.

Ula Ojiaku

Any thoughts, Ali?

Ali Hawks

I think the exciting thing for us, the way that I look at it in terms of government is that that government enablement to be able to use AI, here they are building large language models for the government based on the data that they have, and there's a lot of excitement around it and there should be. It's a pretty exciting thing to do. I think where we’re in a really strong position and what I find really exciting is being able to do what we do best, which is help them understand what is the query and how do you validate that query?

So what are the basic skills that you need to be able to interact, and then to be able to retain the skills of critical analysis, so when the answer comes back, you do not take that as the end all be all. It is a tool. So within your decision-making process, it's decreasing the amount of time it takes you to gather a certain amount of information, but just as you would if you were doing a book report, you still have to validate the sources and understanding, and you have to apply your own judgment and your own experience to that packet of information, which is what we all do every day, but it's not really thought about that way. So I think that the way that people are looking at it here is it will be able give us the decision and it will be able to kind of do our job for us, and for some tools, yes, and I completely agree that we need to free up all of the mundane work that hoovers up the time of civil servants here, because it's extraordinary how they're bogged down, and it completely disempowers them and it contributes to low retention rates and recruitment rates. But I think also it’s developing the muscle to be able to do that critical thinking in order to leverage human intelligence to engage with artificial intelligence. And I think that's where we are uniquely positioned to do that because that is the bulk of our work on the front end of the pipeline, which is how are you going to validate what you know, how are you going to get the problem statement in order to query what you need to query and then having the judgment and the analysis to be able to look at that answer and make a decision, based on your own human intellect. That's where I see it playing here. I completely agree with Pete, we have people looking into the sun being like LLMs and they're going to solve everything, but you sit, let's say a hundred people down in front of an LLM and tell me how many people know what to ask it, or how to use it and integrate it into their everyday workflow. There’s a long way to go, but I feel really excited about it because I feel like we have something so incredible to offer them to be able to enhance their engagement with AI.

Ula Ojiaku

That sounds excellent, thank you. Just to go to the rapid fire questions. So, Ali, what books have you found yourself recommending to people the most?

Ali Hawks

So I don't read a lot of work books, in terms of like how to run a company or anything like that, sorry, Pete, but, and I have a 4-year-old and three stepchildren, so I don't actually read as much as I used to, but I have read over in the last few weeks, the book Impromptu by Reid Hoffman about AI, which is great, and I listen to a lot of podcasts on my commute into London, so the Huberman Lab podcast I listen to a lot, but if you're looking for workplace inspiration, I'm afraid I look at Instagram, listen to podcasts, and then I follow Allie K. Miller, who writes a lot about AI, came out of Amazon, and she is fantastic for breaking things down into really bite sized chunks if you're trying to learn about AI, if you don't come from a technical background.

Ula Ojiaku

Thanks, Ali, we'll put these in the show notes. And Pete, what about you?

Pete Newell

I will give you two new books. One of them is a fun one, Wiring the Winning Organization written by Gene Kim and Steven Spear. Steve Spear is a good friend of ours, he's been a great mentor and advisor inside BMNT for a long time, I've known Steve since way back in my early days. The other one is by Huggy Rao and Bob Sutton, and it's called The Friction Project, and it's just like you say, it's all about friction in the workplace. I think both of those books tend to lend themselves to how to drive performance in organisations, and I think, knowing all of the authors, that they are phenomenal books, but I think the experience the four of them bring to the dialogue and the discussion of what the future workplace needs to look like and the things we need to solve will all be buried in those books. In terms of podcasts, I'm all over the map, I chase all kinds of things that I don't know. I listen to podcasts about subjects that I’m clueless about that just spark my interest, so I wouldn't venture to pick any one of them except yours, and to make sure that people listen to yours.

Ula Ojiaku

You're very kind, Pete. Well, because you're on it, they definitely would. Would you both be thinking about writing a book sometime, because I think your story has been fascinating and there are lots of lessons

Pete Newell

Only if Ali would lead it. So I have picked up and put down multiple proposals to write books around the innovation process within the government and other places, and part of the reason I keep stopping is it keeps changing. I don't think we're done learning yet, and I think the problem writing a book is you're taking a snapshot in time. One of the things that we are very focused on for the military, we talk about doctrine, what is the language of innovation inside the government workplace? It's the thing that we keep picking up, we've helped at least one government organisation write their very first innovation doctrine, the Transportation Security Administration of all places, the very first federal agency to produce a doctrine for innovation that explains what it is, why it is connected to the mission of the organisation, and describes a process by which they'll do it. I think within the Ministry of Defence, Department of Defense, there needs to be a concerted effort to produce a document that connects the outcome of innovation to the mission of the organisation. We call that mission acceleration. We look at innovation as a process, not an end state. The end state is actually mission acceleration.

There's probably a really interesting book just to be written about Ali's journey, and I say more Ali's journey than mine because I think as a woman founder of a defence company in the UK, all of the characters in the book are completely unlikely. So somewhere down the road, maybe.

Ula Ojiaku

Well, I'm on the queue waiting for it, I will definitely buy it. So where can the listeners and viewers find you if, if they want to get in touch?

Ali Hawks

We’re both on LinkedIn, so Pete Newell, Ali Hawks, our emails too are on our various websites, bmnt.com, bmnt.co.uk.

Ula Ojiaku

Awesome. Any final words for the audience?

Pete Newell

I'll say thank you again for one, having us. Like I said, it's the first opportunity Ali and I have had to be on a podcast together. Any opportunity I get to engage with the folks and have this conversation is a gift. So thank you for giving us the time.

Ula Ojiaku

My pleasure.

Ali Hawks

Yes, Ula, thanks very much for having us on together. It's been great.

Ula Ojiaku

I've enjoyed this conversation and listening to you both. So thank you so much. The pleasure and the honour is mine. That’s all we have for now. Thanks for listening. If you liked this show, do subscribe at www.agileinnovationleaders.com or your favourite podcast provider. Also share with friends and do leave a review on iTunes. This would help others find this show. I’d also love to hear from you, so please drop me an email at [email protected] Take care and God bless! 

Guest Bio: Mark Schwartz joined AWS as an Enterprise Strategist and Evangelist in July 2017. In this role, Mark works with enterprise technology executives to share experiences and strategies for how the cloud can help them increase speed and agility while devoting more of their resources to their customers.

Mark has extensive experience as an IT leader in the government, private sector, and the nonprofit world, and with organizations ranging from startup to large.

Prior to joining AWS, he was CIO of US Citizenship and Immigration Services (in the Department of Homeland Security), where he led a large digital transformation effort, moving the agency to the cloud, introducing and refining DevOps and Agile techniques, and adopting user-centric design approaches.

From his work at USCIS, he developed a reputation for leading transformation in organizations that are resistant to change, obsessed with security, subject to considerable regulation and oversight, and deeply bureaucratic. Before USCIS, Mark was CIO of Intrax Cultural Exchange, a leader in global youth exchange programs, and CEO of a software company.

Mark is the author of The Art of Business Value , A Seat at the Table: IT Leadership in the Age of Agility, War, Peace and IT and The Delicate Art of Bureaucracy.

Mark speaks at conferences internationally on such subjects as DevOps, Leading Change, Driving Innovation in IT, and Managing Agility in Bureaucratic Organizations.

He has been recognized as a Computerworld Premier IT Leader and received awards for Leadership in Technology Innovation, the Federal 100 IT Leaders, and a CIO Magazine 100 award. Mark has both a BS and MA degree from Yale University, and an MBA from Wharton.

Social Media/ Website:

• Mark's LinkedIn Profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/innovativecio
• Mark’s AWS Executive Insights page with links to all his blogs posts and books https://aws.amazon.com/ar/executive-insights/enterprise-strategists/mark-schwartz/ 

Books/ Resources:

• The Delicate Art of Bureaucracy: Digital Transformation with the Monkey, the Razor and the Sumo Wrestler by Mark Schwartz https://www.amazon.co.uk/Delicate-Art-Bureaucracy-Transformation-Wrestler-ebook/dp/B086XM4WCK/
• The Art of Business Value by Mark Schwartz https://www.amazon.co.uk/Art-Business-Value-Mark-Schwartz/dp/1942788045
• A Seat at the Table: IT Leadership in the Age of Agility by Mark Schwartz https://www.amazon.co.uk/Seat-Table-Leadership-Age-Agility/dp/1942788118/
• War, Peace and IT: Business Leadership, Technology, and Success in the Digital Age by Mark Schwartz https://www.amazon.co.uk/War-Peace-Business-Leadership-Technology/dp/1942788711
• Reaching Cloud Velocity: A Leader’s Guide to Success in the AWS Cloud by Jonathan Allen et al https://www.amazon.co.uk/Reaching-Cloud-Velocity-Leaders-Success/dp/B086PTDP51
• Ahead in the Cloud: Best Practices for Navigating the Future of Enterprise IT by Stephen Orban https://www.amazon.co.uk/Ahead-Cloud-Practices-Navigating-Enterprise-ebook/dp/B07BYQTGJ7
• Engineers of Victory: The Problem Solvers Who Turned the Tide in the Second World War by Paul Kennedy https://www.amazon.co.uk/Engineers-Victory-Problem-Solvers-Turned-ebook/dp/B00ADNPCC0
• The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win by Gene Kim https://www.amazon.co.uk/Phoenix-Project-Devops-Helping-Business/dp/1942788290/
• The Unicorn Project: A Novel about Developers, Digital Disruption, and Thriving in the Age of Data by Gene Kim https://www.amazon.co.uk/Unicorn-Project-Disruption-Redshirts-Overthrowing/dp/1942788762

Interview Transcript

Ula Ojiaku: 

Mark, thank you so much for making the time for this conversation.

Mark Schwartz:

Thank you, my pleasure.

Ula Ojiaku:

Great. Now let's start with you know, the question I usually ask my guests: who’s Mark? What makes him tick?

Mark Schwartz: 

And they can answer that question. It’s not a hard one. where to start? Um, you know, I always enjoy my work. That's a thing about me. I like to think that people have fun working with me because I tend to laugh a lot. And even you know, when the work is boring, I find ways to make it interesting. I just enjoy doing things and accomplishing things.

I think if we're going to talk about my books, and some of the things I've done later, an important thing to realize is that, I started out, you know, when I went, when I was in high school, when I went to college, I was pretty sure I wanted to study computer science and get involved with these computer things. But when I was actually studying, I realized there were all these other interesting areas, I'm just, you know, endlessly curious. And so, I wound up studying all kinds of other things, in addition.

And the result was that when I finished college, I decided to go to graduate school in philosophy. And I spent a few years getting a master's degree in philosophy. And the fact that I'm curious about so many things and read so many different things, I think it enters into a lot of what I do. I like to pull analogies from non-IT related fields and, and, and I'll call upon all the things I've learned in all sorts of different areas, as I'm writing and speaking and working.

Ula Ojiaku: 

It shines through in your book, definitely.

Mark Schwartz: 

Yes, I think it does. That's partly an explanation for what you see in my books. I think, um, you know, I sometimes say that I have trouble reading business books generally. Because I kind of find them boring. They tend to make the same point over and over again, and to be very just so one directional, you know, just on the same subject, and it's a little bit odd because in every other subject, the books tend to refer to other books in other fields and there's this extra dimension and that helps you understand what the author is getting at.

But in business books, they, you know, aside from having a quote now and then from a famous leader or something, they don't tend to do that, they don't, they don't sort of call upon the whole history of literature and writing.

And so, I have a little bit of fun in writing my books in trying to see if I can add an extra dimension just by reference and by bringing in other things that are a little bit orthogonal to the subject matter.

Ula Ojiaku: 

And that kind of, you know, brings home the point that life isn't black and white. It’s actually a complex or a complex kind of, you know, maze and of different disciplines, different ideologies and different viewpoints that make it what it is really.

Mark Schwartz: 

Yeah well, of course, that was part of the fun of my recent book on Bureaucracy. You know, because I know we all, we want to throw up when we encounter bureaucracy, you know, it disturbs us in so many ways.

And one of the things I wanted to say in the book is, well, actually bureaucracy is all around you all the time in unexpected places and it usually doesn't drive you crazy, actually. Yeah...

Ula Ojiaku: 

Well, I have a lot of questions for you on your book, The Delicate Art of Bureaucracy, which is a catchy, catchy title on its own, very clever.

But before we get to that, what do you do when you're not working? I know, you said you love work and you've also said that you're curious about so many things, which means that you read broadly - that's my interpretation. So, what do you do when you're not ‘working’?

Mark Schwartz: 

Yes, I read broadly, is one thing. In the past, I played the guitar a lot. And I don't quite as much lately. I don't know why, you know, I'll start doing it again. I'm sure at some point. But while I was living in San Francisco, I was actually playing in bars and coffee shops, I have a singer, who I performed with.

Ula Ojiaku:

Really? Wow!

Mark Schwartz:

And that was really fun.

And then the other thing I do is travel, I've really traveled a lot. And, yeah, there was one period in my life where for about five years, I was bumming around the world with a backpack with you know, occasional returns to the States to work a little bit and make some money and then go traveling again.

So, one of the joys of my current job is that, I get to do a lot of traveling to interesting places.

Ula Ojiaku: 

So, where would you say is your ideal getaway destination?

Mark Schwartz: 

Oh, let's see. I'm a big fan of Brazil. That, I have good friends there and it's really nice to see them and the atmosphere is always kind of fun there.

Ula Ojiaku:

Okay.

Mark Schwartz:

I don't know what I've discovered so many places around the world that I've really loved being. I lived in Japan for a year and that is a place that I love to go to, especially for the food. Yeah, I like good food.

But I don't know I’ve found so many places that made me feel like I'd like to spend more time there. And of course, you can't really spend more time everywhere.

Ula Ojiaku:  Interesting.

So, let's, let's go to your book, “The Art of Delicate Bureaucracy”. What was the inspiration behind that book?

Mark Schwartz: 

Well, for all of my books, before I wrote, before I wrote them, I was thinking, ‘why hasn't anybody else written a book on this topic?’ People don't write books on bureaucracy, at least not, you know, popular books, there are academic books on bureaucracy.

And the same thing happened to me with my first book, “The Art of Business Value”, where I said to myself, we keep talking about business value in the IT world, like, is it obvious what it means? You know, what, why isn't anybody writing a book about what business value means?

So, bureaucracy is one of those things. I have a lot of experience with it first of all, I was a CIO in a government agency. But it turns out, it's not just the government, whenever I tell people about my government experience, when I speak at a conference, people come up to me afterwards and say, ‘Oh, my company's just like that. I work for a financial services company; we have lots of bureaucracy’.

And I work with a lot of people who are trying to pull off some sort of digital transformation, which is change on a big scale, that's changing traditional organizations on a big scale. And bureaucracy is always in their way because bureaucracy tends to resist change; it strongly tends to resist change.

So, if you're doing a big change, then you're probably going to come up against it. So, I thought maybe with my experience as a bureaucrat, or at least experience in the big bureaucracy, I could give some pointers to people who are trying to cause big change, and yet are facing bureaucratic obstacles. And I can't imagine that there's any organization, at least any large organization that does not have bureaucratic obstacles to digital transformation.

So, that got me started on it. And then as I started to think about bureaucracy and research it, I realized this is actually a really interesting topic.

Ula Ojiaku: 

You had an interesting introduction to the book. You said, “we are bureaucrats all.” Why that claim, you actually were saying, everyone is a bureaucrat, and I know you made a statement that’s similar to that earlier on in this conversation - why?

Mark Schwartz: 

Well, of course, I have to define in the book, what I mean by bureaucracy and all that.

And I follow the generally what's accepted as the academic definition. It mostly comes from the sociologist Max Vabre, who is writing around 1920. And, and he talks a lot about bureaucracy, and it's fairly complicated, but I simplify it in the book.

Basically, what it comes down to is a bureaucracy is a way of organizing socially, that has rigid formal roles for people and rigid formal rules. And that's the essence of it. You know, bureaucracy, there are rules and they have to be applied uniformly to everybody. And there's a division of labor and you know, a hierarchy. So, it has rigid roles of people who have to sign off on things and approve things.

So, with that is the definition. I think it, it connects with the very human tendency to try to structure things and constantly improve them and optimize them. So, if you find a good way of doing something, you tend to turn it into a rule, you know, this is the way it should be done from now on.

Ula Ojiaku:

Best practice!

Mark Schwartz:

It’s the best practice. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And also, we, in, social organization, we'd like people to be accountable or responsible for things. And we know that you can't hold somebody accountable unless they have authority to perform their role.

So, when you put those things together, it's very natural for us to set up these organizational systems, where we assign roles to people, and give them authority, and we make rules that encapsulate the best way to do things. And, essentially, that's bureaucracy.

So, bureaucracy, I find, is everywhere around us in one form or another. But it doesn't drive us crazy most of the time, so we don't notice it.

Ula Ojiaku: 

Maybe if it's serving us, then we wouldn't notice it. But…

Mark Schwartz: 

It does serve. And if you look at the cases where it does drive us crazy, they have certain things in common. And in the book, I say there are three characteristics that bureaucracies often take on which they don't need to, it's not part of the definition of bureaucracy, but they often take on these characteristics. And it's those three characteristics that are what drive us crazy. And so, the goal, ultimately is to eliminate those three characteristics or turn them into something else.

Ula Ojiaku:

I know that the listeners would be curious to know what the three characteristics of bureaucracy that drive us crazy are? Is that so or should I just tell them go buy the book?

Mark Schwartz:

Yeah, go buy the book! Well, let me tell you the three characteristics, and also their opposite, which is what we really want.

So, the first characteristic that drives us crazy, I think, is that bureaucracies tend to be bloated instead of lean, that would be the opposite in my view. There's no reason why a bureaucracy has to be bloated and wasteful. It could be lean, but it's one of those things that bureaucracy tends to become. So that's the first one.

The second one is that bureaucracies tend to petrify, as opposed to learning. So, when I say petrifies, I mean that the rules and the bureaucracy don't change, or don't change as often as they should, or don't change continuously, which is really what rules should do.

Now, that's not necessarily a characteristic of bureaucracy, but the definition, the definition says the rules have to be applied rigorously. You know, once you have a rule, everybody has to follow it. But it doesn't say that the rules have to stay the same forever, they can change.

The opposite of a petrified bureaucracy is a learning bureaucracy, where the rules are constantly adjusted, based on what the people in the organization learn. And there are plenty of good examples of learning bureaucracies out there. And your goal is to transform the one into the other, the petrified into the learning.

The third is, bureaucracies tend to be coercive, rather than enabling. Coercive, meaning that they're there to control employee behavior, to force employees to behave in ways that otherwise they wouldn't want to. They tend to be ‘no’ saying, they say ‘no’, a lot. Your bureaucracy for your expense reporting policy in your company probably says, ‘no that expense is no good because X Y and Z.’ There are plenty of examples of enabling bureaucracies, where the point is not to stop you from doing things or force you to do something you don't want to. But the bureaucracy provides a support structure, provide best practices, as you said, that help you do your job well. And there's no reason why bureaucracies can't do that. So, the three bad characteristics are bloat, coercion, and petrify.

Ula Ojiaku:

Okay, nice. So, it sounds like the way you've described bureaucracy, when you look at it from a positive slant, would it be the same thing as guardrails, putting guardrails in place, or giving people the right degree of freedom?

Mark Schwartz:

Yeah, that's exactly the idea. What I find is that guardrails and automation are ways of implementing bureaucracy, that lead to those three good characteristics rather than the bad ones.

Let's say in software development, in DevOps, for example, it's a good idea to put guardrails, security guardrails, for example, around what people can do, and automated security tests and things like that. Because then the developers or the DevOps teams, they can go charging ahead full speed, knowing that they can't do anything wrong, you know, because the guardrails are there. And they get immediate feedback, if they do something that's going to put them outside the guardrails and they can just immediately fix it.

So, it's very empowering for them, lets them move fast. And it also gets rid of that coercive element of you know, I write some code and then somebody comes in afterwards and says, ‘no, you can't deploy that’. That's annoying.

Instead, I can run the security tests myself, as a developer, see if there's anything that's problematic, fix it right away if I want to, so it's all under my control. But the end result is still the same. The bureaucracy is still there. It's just automated and implemented as guardrails.

Ula Ojiaku: 

It's enabling, like you said before, instead of hindering.

Mark Schwartz: 

And it's lean, because it's very inefficient and wasteful, if you write some code, and then at the very end of the development process, somebody finds a security flaw. And now you have to remember what you were doing.

And, you know, go back and relearn your code and make changes then, so that's wasteful, as opposed to lean. It's coercive, as opposed to enabling. And if you're good at doing these things, then you keep updating your guardrails and your security tests based on new security threats you learn about or new policies or whatever. So, you make a learning bureaucracy as well.

Ula Ojiaku: 

Interesting. In the book as well, you said you want us to be calm, chaos monkeys, knights of Ockham, lean sumo wrestlers, very interesting oxymoron there. And you know, black belt experts, could you tell us more about those terms? Why did you use those terms?

Mark Schwartz: 

Because they made me laugh of course.

Ula Ojiaku:

Well, they made me laugh too.

Mark Schwartz:

So, I thought about what I learned about coping with bureaucracy, especially in my government job, but also from reading and from talking to other people. And I realized I had about, you know, 30 techniques for coping with bureaucracy, I call them plays. And I just grabbed those 30 techniques, but I thought about it, and I realized they divided into three. And the three, I could sort of associate with a personality, almost. You know, that these 10 plays are associated with this personality, these 10 plays are associated with this one. And I came up with these three personalities that I thought describe those plays. And the three personalities are the monkey, and the razor, and the sumo wrestler.

And, you know, I think, I could stop right there, because it's probably obvious why I associate those with these plays, but I will go a little further.

Ula Ojiaku:

Please…

Mark Schwartz:

So, I realized that some of the things we did, the ones that I call the plays of the monkey, the way of the monkey, those things had to do with provoking. You know, monkeys are mischievous, provocative, and sometimes annoying. And a bunch of the techniques had to do with trying to be provocative.

And the razor and I'll give you some examples in a minute. The razor, to me is all about being lean. It's about trimming away waste. And it also refers to the philosophical principle of Ockham's razor. Ockham was a medieval philosopher, right, William of Ockham. And he's generally credited with an idea that something like if you have a choice between a simple explanation, and a complicated explanation, you should prefer the simple one. That's not really what he said. But that's, that's what most people associated with him. That's the principle of Ockham’s razor.

And, and so it's called a principle of ontological parsimony, meaning, you shouldn't presuppose the existence of more things than you need to, in order to explain something. So, you know, don't make up nymphs. And you know, I don't know, water dryads and whatever's to explain something that you can equally just explain through simple physical laws.

Ula Ojiaku: 

Just saying, 'keep it simple...'

Mark Schwartz: 

Yeah, keep it simple, in a way, right? So that's called the principle of ontological parsimony.

And I said, there's a similar principle of bureaucratic parsimony, which says that if you're trying to implement a control, and you can do it in a simple way, or you could do it in a really complicated way, do it a simple way.

And so, it's a principle of leanness because I find that bureaucracies, when they get bloated, they have these really complicated wasteful ways of doing something that they could they could accomplish exactly the same thing, but in a simpler way. So that's the razor.

And then a sumo wrestler. Well, Sumo is the sport where, you know, two massive people sort of bang into each other, right? And the goal is you want to push your opponent out of the ring, or you want to make them fall and touch the ground with something other than their feet. And if you can do either of those things, you win.

So, if you're a big massive person and you're trying to accomplish those things, you might think that the best thing to do is charge your opponent and push really hard. But if your opponent then just either dodges or just is soft and lets you push, well, you're probably going to go flying out of the ring, right?

So, one of the principles in Sumo is you want to use your opponent's strength against them. And if they push hard, now, go ahead, give them a little pull. And, you know, let them push even harder.

And I realized that some of these techniques for overcoming bureaucracy have to do with using bureaucracy actually, on your side, you know, the using the strength of bureaucracy against it. So that's why the sumo wrestler.

So, I'll give you examples now on each one, now that I've described my three personalities. So, the monkey does what is sometimes referred to as provoking and inspecting or provoking and observing, in parallel with the Agile principle of inspect and adapt.

So, provoke and observe, what the monkey does is try something that's probably outside the rules, or at least is, you know, a borderline and watches what happens.

So, an example where we use this is that we have these rules in Homeland Security that essentially said, if you were going to do an IT project, you have to produce 87 documents. And each document had a template, and you have to fill in each section of the template. And these documents would run to hundreds of pages.

And so, using the persona of the monkey, let's say, we started to turn in these documents. But in each section of the template, we just wrote a one sentence, one sentence answer, you know, we're very short answer instead of writing pages and pages. And we wanted to see what would happen if we did that, because there was no rule that said, it had to be a really long answer.

And eventually, we started to provoke even more, we just left out sections that we thought didn't make any sense for what we were doing. And all of this was unprecedented, you know, it caused a lot of fear.

It turned out, and this sometimes happens, that the enforcers of this policy, they were happy when they said, “We've never wanted anybody to write these really long answers to these things, we have to read them. And you know, the intention wasn't to slow people down. As long as you're giving us the right information. That's all we need.”

So, in this case, provoking just it turned out that we could defeat a bunch of bureaucracy there, we could, we could make things a lot leaner because nobody objected. But sometimes people do object. And if they do, then you learn exactly what the resistance is, who it is, is resisting, and that gives you valuable information, when you're trying to figure out how to overcome it. So that's the monkey. You know, let's try something a little playful and mischievous, and see what happens.

The razor, well, that one follows also on my 87 documents, because we then set up an alternative way of doing things that had only 15 documents. And where there had been 13 gate reviews required for each project. We reduced it to two.

And so, all we did, you know, we just used our little razor to trim away all the excess stuff that was in the bureaucratic requirements. And then we showed people that those 15 documents and those two gate reviews accomplished exactly the same thing as the 87 documents and the 13 gate reviews. That's the principle of the razor, that's how the razor works.

The sumo wrestler, also a favorite of mine. So, we were trying to convince the bureaucracy to let us do DevOps and to be agile, and it was resisting. And people kept pointing to a policy that said, you can't do these things. And so, we wrote our own policy. And it was a very good bureaucratic policy looked exactly like every bureaucratic document out there. But it essentially said you must use DevOps and you must be agile on it, you know, it set up a perfect bureaucracy around that it's set up ways of checking to make sure everybody was using DevOps.

And the theory behind it was the auditors when they came to audit us and said we were being naughty because we were doing DevOps. Their argument was we looked at the policy and we looked at what you're doing, and they were different. And that's the way auditing works. That was the, you know, GAO, the Government Accountability Office, and the Inspector General and all that.

So, we figured if we had a policy that said you must do DevOps, and they audited us, well, they would actually be enforcing the policy, you know, they'd be criticizing any part of the organization that was not using DevOps and I thought that's great.

So, this is how you use the strength of the bureaucracy against the bureaucracy or not really, against even, you know, it's perfectly good, perfect…

Ula Ojiaku: 

To help the bureaucracy yeah, to help them to improve, improve the organization. But thinking about the monkey though, being provocative and mischievous, do you think that there has to be an element of you know, relationship and trust in place first, before… you can’t just you know… you're new, and you've just gotten through the door and you start being a monkey… you probably will be taken back to wherever you came from! What do you think?

Mark Schwartz: 

Well, it helps if you're giggling while you do it. But you know, I think the goal here is to figure out the right levers that are going to move things. And sometimes you do have to push a little bit hard, you know, you do need to take people out of their comfort zone.

Usually, you want to do these things in a way that takes into account people's feelings, and you know, is likely to move them in the right direction, rather than making them dig in their heels. But I'll give you a couple of examples of Monkey tactics that are less comfortable for people.

One is simply, you know, there's a status quo bias. It’s a known, well-known cognitive bias; people tend to prefer the status quo or look the other way about it’s failings and stuff. So often, when you're trying to make a change, people say, we're fine the way we are, you know, everything's okay.

So, one of the things the monkey tries to do is, is to make it clear that the status quo is not acceptable, you know, to show people that it actually if they think about it, it's no good. And so, for example, when we decided to move to the cloud, instead of working in our DHS data center, people said - of course at the time it was a big concern, ‘was the cloud secure enough?’ And in the persona of the monkey, the right response is, ‘are we secure enough now?’ You know, ‘don't you realize that we're not happy with our security posture today?’ ‘It's not like, the cloud has proved itself. I mean, we have to compare our security in the cloud versus our security in the data center. And yes, I'm very sure it'll be better in the cloud and here's why…’

But you can't start from the assumption that you are fine right now. In general, when we're talking about the cloud, that's the situation. Companies are using their own data centers. And it's like, you know, we have to teach them that they can do better in the cloud.

But the truth is that they're not happy in their own data centers, if they think about it, right? There are security issues, there are performance issues, there are cost issues. And they're aware of those issues, right, they just look the other way. And because they're comfortable with the status quo, so the monkey has to sort of shake people up and say, ‘It's not okay, what you're doing now!’

Another example, and this is really harsh, and I wouldn't use it in most cases. But let's say that this was in Homeland Security. Let's say that Homeland Security is enforcing a very bureaucratic process that results in IT projects, taking five years instead of six months. And let's say, you know, the process is there on paper, the rules say, ‘Do this’, the people are interpreting the rules in a way that makes things take five years. Sometimes, the monkey has to go to somebody who's in their way and say, ‘We are in the Department of Homeland Security, this IT project is going to make people more secure in the homeland. Are you comfortable with the fact that you are preventing people from being more secure for the next four and a half years, when we could…’ You know, it's a matter of personalizing it. And that sometimes is what's necessary to get people to start thinking creatively about how they can change the bureaucracy.

You know, ‘I hate to say it, but you're a murderer’, you know, essentially is the message. It's a monkey message. And like I said, you know, it's not the preferred way to go about doing things. But if you have to, I mean, the lives of people are at stake, and you've got to find a way to get there.

Ula Ojiaku: 

So how can leaders because your book, The Art of Business Value, in your book, you said that “leaders create the language of the organization, and they set up incentives and define value in a way that elicits desired outcomes.” So, in essence, I understand that statement to mean that leaders set the tone, and you know, kind of create the environment for things to happen.

So, how can leaders implement or apply bureaucracy in a way that enables an organization where, before it was seen as a hindrance, how can they do this?

Mark Schwartz: 

My thought process was, if we all agree, we're gonna try to maximize business value? How do we know what we mean by it?

And I realized, a lot of Agile people, you know, people in our Agile and DevOps community, were being a little bit lazy. You know, they were thinking, ‘Oh, business value, you know, it's returns on investment, or, you know, it's up to the business (to define) what's business value.’ The tech people just, you know, do the work of providing a solution. And to me, that's too lazy. If you're going to be agile, be it you have to be more proactive about making sure you're delivering business value. So, you have to understand what it means. You have to actually do the work of, you know, figuring out what it means. And what it means is not at all obvious. And, you know, you might think it has something to do with return on investment or shareholder value or something like that.

But when you really closely examine it, that is not the right way to define it, when it comes to deciding what its efforts to prioritize and all that that's, you know, the case that the book makes, and I explain why that's true.

Instead, I say you have to think of business value within the context of the business's strategy and its objectives as a business. There's no like, abstract, this has more business value than this because we calculated an ROI or something like that, that doesn't work reprioritizing. It's always asked within the context of a particular business strategy. And the business strategy is a direction from leadership. There might be input from everybody else, but ultimately, you have leaders in the organization who are deciding what the strategic objectives are.

So, for example, if you are a traditional bank, or traditional financial services company, and you look around you and you see there are all these new FinTech companies that are disrupting the industry, and you're worried, well there are a lot of different ways you can respond to those disruptive FinTechs. And how you're going to choose to respond depends on your preferences, it depends on the situation of your company, in the industry, the history of your company, all of those things. But of the many ways you can respond to that disruption, you're going to choose one as the leader of your enterprise.

Well, what adds business value is whatever supports that direction you choose to go. You can't think of business value outside of that direction, you know. That's the case that I make.

So, leaders don't just set the tone and the culture there, they're actually setting strategic direction that determines what has business value. And then the people who are executing the agile teams have to take it upon themselves to make sure that whatever they're doing is going to add business value in that sense.  

So, the role of leadership then becomes direction setting and visioning for the future and communicating the vision to the people who are working and providing feedback, you know, on whether things are actually adding business value or not . And that's the key responsibility.

Now, in order to do that, in order to motivate people to deliver according to that idea of business value, there are certain techniques as a leader that you have to keep in mind, there are ways that you get people, you get a big organization to sort of follow you. And one of the ones that's become most important to me to think about after talking to a lot of leaders about how they're running their organizations, and what's working, is using middle management as a lever for accomplishing those things.

So often, I'll talk to leaders of a business, and they'll say, our problem is the frozen middle, middle management is, you know, they're just not changing the way we want, we want to, we want to cause a big transformation, but middle management is getting in the way. And I tell them, ‘that's pretty much a myth.’ You know, ‘that's not actually what's happening, let's look more closely at your organization.’

Almost always, middle management is still trying to do the best they can, given the situation that they're in. And the way that you get them to align themselves behind the change is, you change their incentives or their role definition, or how you tell them what you're expecting from them, you don't say “change”, you know, and start doing X and Y, you change what success looks like for their position. And then they adapt to it by becoming engaged and finding ways to get there.

So, there's almost always a leadership problem when you have that frozen middle effect. And, and I've seen it work really well that, you know, all of a sudden, you get this big leverage, because you just do a little bit of tweaking of role definitions, and bring everybody into solving the problem.

And actually, there's an example, I love to talk about a history book, like I said before, I like to bring in other things, right? It's called the Engineers of Victory. And it's about World War Two, the Allies realized that they had to solve a set of problems, I think there was six or so problems.

One of them was how do you land troops on a beach that's heavily defended? They realize they were just not going to be able to win the war until they could do that. But nobody knew how to do it. Because, you know, obviously, the bad guys are there on the beach, they're dug in, they put barbed wire everywhere, and mines, and you know, all this stuff. And it's just going to be a slaughter if you try to land on the beach.

So, this book, Engineers of Victory, makes the case that what really won the war, was figuring out those solutions. And who was responsible for figuring out those solutions? It was middle management, basically. It was the, you know, within the structure of the army, it was the people not at the top who had big authority, you know, the generals, and it was not the troops themselves, because they weren't in a position to figure out these things. It was middle management that could see across different parts of the organization that could try things and see whether they worked or not, that, you know, essentially could run their own mini skunkworks projects. And eventually, they came up with the solutions to these problems.

So, I think that's very encouraging for the role of middle management, you know, that a lot of problems have to be solved at that layer in order to pull off a transformation. And it really can be done. And this is a beautiful example of it.

Ula Ojiaku: 

It reminds me of, you know, my experience in a few transformation initiatives. So, the middle, the people who are termed to be in the frozen middle, are, like you said, they want to do what's best for the company, and they show up wanting to do their best work, but it's really about finding out, ‘Where do I fit in, (with) all this change that's happening?’ You know, ‘if my role is going away, if the teams are going to be more empowered, that means I'm not telling them what to do, but then what do I do now?’

So, the clarity of what the ‘New World’ means for them, and what's in it for them, would help, you know, make them more effective.

Mark Schwartz:

And the mistake that's often made is to say to them, ‘start doing DevOps’ or, you know, ‘start doing agile or something.’

Because if you don't change the definition of success, or you don't change the incentives that, you know, then it's just, make work and they're going to resist it. You know, if you say your incentive is to get really fast feedback or you know, one of the other goals of DevOps, because of the following reasons, it helps the business this way, so let's try to reduce cycle time as much as possible for producing software.

Okay, that's a change in the incentive, or the, you know, the definition of success, rather than just telling somebody you have to do DevOps, you know, read a book and figure it out.

Ula Ojiaku: 

So, what other books because you mentioned the Engineers of Victory, are there any other books you would recommend for the listener to go check out if they wanted to learn more about what we've talked about today?

Mark Schwartz: 

Well, I think, you know, obviously, my books referred to War and Peace by Tolstoy, Moby Dick, another great one. You know, you probably need to read my books to figure out why those are the right books to read and Engineers of Victory. As I said, I think that one's a great one.

Within the field, there are some DevOps books that that I like a lot, of course, Gene Kim's books, The Phoenix Project, and now The Unicorn Project, the sequel to that. Because those are books that give you a feel for the motivation behind all the things that we do. The Mechanics of Things, there are plenty of books out there that help you learn the mechanics of how to do continuous integration and continuous delivery.

And then the cloud is I think it's really transformative. You know, it's the cloud itself is a tremendous enabler. I work at AWS, of course but I'm not saying this because I work at AWS, it's more than I work at AWS because I believe these things. And my teammates have written some good books on the cloud. Reaching Cloud Velocity, for example, by Jonathan Allen and Thomas Blood is a great one for reading up on how the cloud can be transformative. But my other teammates, Gregor Hope, has written a number of books that are really good, Stephen Orban did A Head in the Cloud.

So, I think those are all… should be at the top of people's reading lists. And then, of course, I recommend my books, because they make me laugh, and they might make you laugh, too.

Ula Ojiaku: 

Definitely made me laugh, but they've also given me things to think about from a new perspective. So, I totally agree. And so, where can people find you if they want to reach out to you?

Mark Schwartz: 

Yeah, LinkedIn is a great place to find me. If you're with a company that is an AWS customer, feel free to talk to your account manager, the sales team from AWS and ask them to put you in touch with me, is another easy way. LinkedIn is kind of where I organize my world from so find me there.

Ula Ojiaku: 

Okay. Sounds great. And any final words for the audience or for the listeners.

Mark Schwartz: 

Um, I, I have found that these things that you want to do to take advantage of the digital world, and I think we're all sort of pointing ourselves in that direction, there are these amazing things you can do in the digital world. They're sometimes challenging to get there, but it's very possible to get there.

And one thing I've learned a lot at Amazon is the idea of working backwards, you know, you get that picture in your head for where you want to be and then you say to yourself, ‘I can get there. Let me work backwards and figure out what I have to do in order to get there.’ And you might be wrong, you know, you should test hypotheses, you start moving in the right direction, and of course, correct as you need to.

But you can do it with confidence that others are doing it and you can too no matter what your organization is, no matter how much you think you're a snowflake and you know different from every other organization. You can still do it. And with just some good intention and good thinking you can figure out how to how to get there.

Ula Ojiaku: 

Thank you so much, Mark. That was a great close for this conversation and again, I really appreciate your making the time for this interview. Thank you.

Mark Schwartz:

Thanks for having me.

Ula Ojiaku:

You’re welcome.

Bio

David is known for his ability to deliver inspiring and thought-provoking presentations that challenge audiences to think differently about innovation and product development. His keynotes and workshops are engaging and interactive, with a focus on real-world examples and case studies. David’s message is relevant for entrepreneurs, executives, and organizations of all sizes and industries, and he illustrates concepts live on stage to leave attendees with concrete tools and techniques they can use to drive innovation and growth in their own business.

Interview Highlights

02:00 Early Startups

02:45 Dealing with uncertainty

04:25 Testing Business Ideas

07:35 Shifting mindsets

11:00 Transformational leadership

13:00 Desirable, viable, feasible

14:50 Sustainability

17:00 AI

22:50 Jobs, pains and gains

26:30 Extracting your assumptions

27:30 Mapping and prioritisation

28:10 Running experiments

Social Media

• LinkedIn:  David Bland on LinkedIn
• Website:  davidjbland.com
• Company Website: Precoil
• YouTube: David Bland on YouTube

Books & Resources

·         Testing Business Ideas: A Field Guide for Rapid Experimentation (The Strategyzer Series): David J. Bland, Alex Osterwalder

·         Assumptions Mapping Fundamentals Course: https://precoil.teachable.com/p/assumptions-mapping-fundamentals/

·         The Invincible Company: How to Constantly Reinvent Your Organization with Inspiration From the World's Best Business Models (The Strategyzer Series): Alexander Osterwalder, Yves Pigneur, Alan Smith, Frederic Etiemble

·         Value Proposition Design: How to Create Products and Services Customers Want (The Strategyzer Series): Alexander Osterwalder, Yves Pigneur, Gregory Bernarda, Alan Smith, Trish Papadakos

·         The Lean Startup: How Constant Innovation Creates Radically Successful Businesses: Eric Ries

·         Interviewing Users: How to Uncover Compelling Insights- 2nd Edition, Steve Portigal

·         The Mom Test: How to Talk to Customers & Learn If Your Business Is a Good Idea When Everyone Is Lying to You, Rob Fitzpatrick

·         Business Model Generation: A Handbook for Visionaries, Game Changers, and Challengers (The Strategyzer Series): Alexander Osterwalder, Yves Pigneur

·         The Four Steps to the Epiphany: Successful Strategies for Products that Win: Steve Blank

Episode Transcript

Intro: Hello and welcome to the Agile Innovation Leaders podcast. I’m Ula Ojiaku. On this podcast I speak with world-class leaders and doers about themselves and a variety of topics spanning Agile, Lean Innovation, Business, Leadership and much more – with actionable takeaways for you the listener.

Ula Ojiaku

Hello everyone. I'm really honoured and pleased to introduce David Bland as my guest for this episode. He is the best-selling author of the book, Testing Business Ideas, and he's also the Founder of Precoil, an organisation that's focused on helping companies to find product market fits using Lean Start-up, Design Thinking and Business Model Innovation. He's not a newcomer to the world of Agile as well. So, David, it's an honour to have you on the Agile Innovation Leaders Podcast. Thank you so much for making the time.

David Bland

Yeah, thanks for inviting me on, I'm excited to be here.

Ula Ojiaku

Right. So, where I usually start with all my guests, because personally, I am interested in the story behind the person - are there any happenings or experiences that have shaped you into who you are today?

David Bland

Yeah, I think through childhood, dealing with a lot of uncertainty and then ended up going to school for design. I thought I was going to go a different career path and then at the last moment I was like, I want to really dig into design and I think people were sort of shocked by that, with the people around me, and so I really dove into that and then I came out of school thinking, oh, I might join a startup and retire in my mid 20s, because this is a .com craze, everyone was making all this money. Obviously, that didn't happen, but I learned a lot at the startups and I was introduced to Agile really early on in my career at startups because we had to go really fast and we were in a heavily regulated industry so we couldn't break stuff and we had to have kind of processes and everything. I did that for a while and then I realised, wow, there were some people that could learn from my mistakes, and so we kind of switched coasts. So we were near Washington DC for a while, and then we moved to the San Francisco Bay Area, and I started working with companies there, and I was like, well, let me see if I can just really dig in, help people learn how to apply stuff and coach them through it, and that was around 2010 or 2011 or so, and I've been doing it ever since, and I think why I love it so much is that it kind of helps people deal with uncertainty, gives them a process to deal with uncertainty, and at the same time, I have a hard time with uncertainty. So maybe it's kind of a little bit therapeutic for me to help others deal with uncertainty as well. So yeah, I just love what I do.

Ula Ojiaku

And so you mentioned you don't like uncertainty, but helping other people deal with uncertainty helps you, that's interesting. Do you want to expand on that?

David Bland

I mean, I very much like my routines and everything, and I feel like I come at it from a process point of view. So when I'm dealing with uncertainties, like, oh, what kind of process can I apply to that? So I feel a little better about things, even though there’s a lot of stuff outside my control, at least I can have kind of a process. So I feel as if, when I’m dealing with people, I feel all of this anxiety, they’re working on a new idea, they’re not sure if it's going to be any good or not, giving them a process to work through it together, I don't really tell them if their idea is going to be good or not because who am I to judge their ideas most of the time? It's more about, well, here's a process you can apply to all that stuff you're working through and maybe you can come up to some sort of investment decision on whether or not you should go forward with that idea. So I feel as if my demeanour and everything comes off as someone that you're like, oh, I can talk to this guy and he's actually going to respect me, and so I feel like my style plus the uncertainty bit fits together really well. So I have a style where I come into orgs and say, you have a lot of uncertainty, here's a process, you’re going to be fine, we're going to work through it together and it tends to work out pretty well.

Ula Ojiaku

What comes across to me is that you give them tools or a process to help them hopefully come to an evidence-based conclusion without you having to share your opinion, or hopefully they don’t have to have personal opinions imposing on whatever conclusion that is.

David Bland

Yeah, it’s just a process.

Ula Ojiaku

And so what put you on the path to writing the book Testing Business Ideas, I was one of your students at the masterclass you and Alex Osterwalder ran during the covid lockdown, and you mentioned during that session, I don’t know if you remember, that you probably went for a retreat somewhere, or you went on a hike as part of the writing process and that Alex gave you a hard time or something, so can you share your version of the story?

David Bland

Oh yeah, I mean it was a joy writing with him. I think one of the difficult times for me writing that book…So first Alex approached me writing it and eventually, I mean initially it was just going to be me and then I mean he needed to be involved and so he played a big role strategically in helping me kind of think about the book writing process because I've never written a book like this and then also had it published and also did the whole four colour landscape style, very visual book. It's not that you just write an outline and then you start putting in words, it's a very different process. So yeah, he pushed me a little bit during that process, I would say, he would challenge some of my ideas and say like, are you explaining this in a way that where people can understand, you know? And so I feel as if it was a very productive process writing the book with him. It took about a year I would say. I think the way it came about was it was pretty much from my coaching, born out of my coaching, because I was helping companies with a lot of uncertainty, early stage ideas and they would say well we’re now going to have interviews and we're going to do surveys and we're to build the whole thing. And it's like, well, there's other things you could do that are beyond interviews and surveys. And so he and I were continuously talking about this, and it's like, well, if people are only comfortable doing interviews and surveys they're not going to address all their risk, they're going to address a part of their risk, but not, you know, there’s so much more they can do. And so, we started thinking about, well, is there a book that we could put that together and give people a resource guide? So, it's more like a textbook or almost something you would read in a university. My editor, I just spoke to him a couple weeks ago, he's like, this is required reading at Stanford now, and some other places in the university programs. And so it's very much like a textbook, you know, but the reason we wrote it was, you know, to help people find a path forward, to find a way to go and de-risk what they're working on. And so I felt it was very ambitious to put that all into a book, and of course, it has some flaws, but I think for the most part, it does the job, and that's why it's been really successful.

Ula Ojiaku

It is, in my experience, very well laid out. It takes a lot of work to distill these ideas into something that seems simple and easy to follow. So I do concur, it's been very helpful to me as well and the ideas. In your book, in the flap, it says, okay, the number one job as an innovator, entrepreneur, a corporation, is to test your business ideas to reduce the risk of failure. And I think you've alluded it, you've kind of touched on that in explaining how your career has gotten you where you are today. But what, in your experience, do you find leaders and organisations missing the most when it comes to testing ideas?

David Bland

I think it's hard to unwind it all, because it goes back to how do you become a leader. And so, at least in Western, in the United States anyway, where I do some of my work, I feel as if it's very egocentric, it's very about what I can do and what I know. So there's a progression of becoming a leader where you grow up in an organisation because you have the answers, or at least you're able to convince people you know the answers, and then you’re promoted and keep being promoted. And so when I'm coming in and saying, well, we might not know the answers, or we might need to test our way through and find the answers, it almost goes against that whole kind of almost like worldview you've built up or someone has built up over the years where it's about me. It has to be more than just about you as a person. It's like how do you enable leaders around you and how do you create more leaders around you and all that. And so I think where there's contradiction is this idea of, okay, I'm promoted to where I am because I have the answers, but now I want to enable people to test their way through things and find answers, and you almost need a feedback loop there of somebody that's willing to say, look, do you understand how you've unravelled some of this or how you've undermined things by saying, well, I know this is a good idea, so build it anyway. Or, that's not the test I would have ran, I would have done this other thing. You give people almost the benefit of your opinion, but they take it as marching orders, whether you realise it or not, and then it becomes this core of, why am I running tests at all because my leader is essentially going to tell me what to build. And so I think there's just some unpacking a bit of, well, I searched for the right answer in school and I was rewarded for that, and I went into business and I was rewarded for the right answer, and now we're telling you, there might not be a right answer, there are multiple right answers, and different paths and choices. And I think sometimes leaders have a hard time with that because it almost contradicts everything they've done in the past to be successful.

Ula Ojiaku

So, what I’m hearing you say David is that in terms of, even before we get testing the ideas, please correct me if I’m wrong, it’s that there needs to be a mindset shift, a paradigm shift of, you know, what leadership is all about, it’s no longer going to be about the person who knows the way, who knows all the answers and tells people what to do, but moving from that to saying, hey, I recognise I have limits and I may not have all the answers and I empower you all for us to work together to test our way to find what the right path or direction would be.

David Bland

Yeah, it's more about your leadership style and accountability. I think you severely limit what an organisation could do if everyone's relying on you for the answers.

It's going to be really tough to scale that because if all answers have to come through you, then how do you scale? But also, it goes from transactional to transformational in a way. So transactional is, it's very much like, well, I want you to do something by this date on time, on budget, and on scope, and then basically hold you accountable to doing that, and then there's a very transactional level of leadership there. It's like, I asked you to do this thing, or told you to do this thing, you did this thing, so therefore I trust you. Where I'm trying get a bit deeper is, you know, well can you say, well, how do I empower a team to go find out what needs to be built, or if there's a real problem there, and then have them give me an account of, oh, we're making progress towards that, or you know what, we shouldn't go forward with this because this isn't worth pursuing, nobody has this problem, et cetera, and respecting their wishes or at least having a conversation about that. And so I think it does require a little bit of leadership. Looking at your style, looking at the words you use, looking at how you lead teams through uncertainty, which could be a little different than ‘I need this thing by this date and keep it under this cost and this scope’ It's more about, well, we have an idea, we're not sure there's a market for it, can we go test that and see if there is and if it's viable for us and if we can actually do it? And it's a little different leadership style, and I think if you apply a transactional leadership style to trying to lead people through uncertainty, it just backfires, because it's very much like, run these experiments by this date, it doesn't empower the teams to be able to give an account of how they're addressing the risks. It's sort of a learning moment for leaders to say, oh, this leadership style that's worked really well for me in the past may not actually work really well for me here, it may work against me here in trying to drive out the uncertainty of this thing that we're trying to do.

Ula Ojiaku

So if I may just build on your response to the question. What, in your experience, has helped, or could help, a leader who's used to, and has been in the past up until now rewarded for that transactional leadership, to make the switch to a transformational leadership?

David Bland

I think asking them what they’re worried about. I know people try to project confidence like they have the answers, but they don’t, and so being able to be open, even if it’s just a one-on-one, to say hey we have this thing where we think it might be a new business line or something that we’re working on that’s relatively new that we haven’t done before, which is a lot of my clients, they’re trying to do something that they haven’t quite done before. It may not be too far away from what they’re good at, but far enough away that they’re worried, they’re worried that it’s not going to work. And so I try to get them and talk about what's keeping you up at night, what is worrying you about this, and then usually in the back of my head I'm saying, okay, what can I map that to? So I love the desirable, viable, feasible framing. I use it a lot from design thinking, user centre design. So if they're worried about the customer or there's not enough, you know, there's not really a job to be done there, I map that back to, okay, he's worried about desirability or she's worried about desirability. And if they're talking about, oh, we don't know if people will pay enough for this, or if we can keep costs low enough, you know, that's like I map it back to viability, right?

And then if it's more about, I actually don't know if we're organised well enough as a company to do this and really execute on it and I map it back to feasibility.

And then from there, it's more like, well how will we go test that since you're worried about it, rather than just build the whole thing and launch and see what happens.

And so I try to kind of, I'd be really careful of the words I'm using and I'm trying to coach them into a moment where it's okay, just let's be open and transparent that it's not just about executing a bunch of things and then we're okay. It's more about, you know, what are we worried about and then how do we go address those worries sooner versus later. And so I try not to come at them with a bunch of canvases and a bunch of mapping tools and a bunch of stuff that would make them feel defensive because one, they probably have not had experience with those, and two, it's like, oh, this consultant’s more interested in the tools than helping me, you know. So I try to use words that really kind of get at, what are you worried about and then how can we go test that and then kind of back away into the process from there?

Ula Ojiaku

Well, it does seem like you apply quite some psychology to the whole approach, because it's really about meeting people where they're at. And I am, just back to your point about viability, desirability and feasibility. There is a school of knowledge, I mean, you are the expert here, so I'm deferring, but there's a school of knowledge that would add also like the sustainability parts to it. Or do you think it's separate from those attributes when you're looking at ideas?

David Bland

Yeah. Well, I work on a lot of sustainable projects at the moment. Well, even over the last several years I've been working on companies trying to be more sustainable. So companies are manufacturing phones, they want their phones to be all recyclable materials, they want fully recyclable phones let’s say. So I'm working on very cutting edge sustainability projects, but I still don't introduce it as another circle because I'm trying to keep it very simple. And so I know there are different flavours of it. I know some people add sustainability, some people add adaptability, some people add ethics, usability. Before I know it, it’s just, you end up with seven circles and different themes, so I really try to keep it very simple. Even Alex and I talk about adaptability, because that was a theme that didn't quite make it into the book, but he talks about it in The Invincible Company, which is the book he wrote immediately after the one we wrote together. So I have ways of addressing those things, but I don't necessarily want to add a bunch of extra themes, because I feel like it's already challenging people with a bunch of ‘ility’ words. I noticed they get confused even with the three. No matter how well I explain it, I'll see things like, things that are about building it, and reframed as desirability, and I’m like no, no, that isn’t about the customer. I mean yes, of course we have to build what they need, but building it is more about feasibility. So even with the three I see people get confused so I just try to stick to the three as best I can, but basically we go into sustainability projects, still using those three, with sustainability top of mind. So I don’t really call it out as a separate theme but I certainly take it into consideration when we’re working on those projects.

Ula Ojiaku

Okay, just keeping it simple. Okay, thanks for that, David. So there are some instances where the people will consider probably are outliers to the known proven principles of design thinking, of product development, customer discovery. And I can't remember, I mean, I would have attributed it to the person, but I was just reading a tweet from someone who is known in the product development world and he was saying that if, he wouldn't have guessed that with the advent of or the popularity of Generative AI, that ChatGPT, according to his books, you know, broke all the rules of products, discovery products, development in the sense that there, and I wasn't aware that they were, Open AI was doing lots of market research to say, hey, what do you want from an AI assistant or Generative AI? But within months of releasing it to the public, they gained millions of users. So what's your thought on this? Would you say it was an outlier or is it that there were some principles working in the background that we are not aware of?

David Bland

I imagine there's a lot going on we're not aware of. It reminds me of the older conversations about the iPhone. There was this air of, Steve Jobs had this single brilliant idea about the iPhone and then willed it into being and then everyone, it was wildly successful, right? But I look at, even like the first iPhone as, in a way it was kind of a minimum viable product. I mean, the hardware was pretty solid, but the software, the OS was not. I mean, it didn't have really basic stuff that we would expect that we had on other things like Blackberries at the time. You couldn't copy and paste, there were some things that were missing and people viewed it as a toy and they kind of laughed at it, you know, and then they iterated on it. I would say it was about iPhone three or four, by the time they really started to get market fit with it, and then you see, you know, people you wouldn't expect with iPhones with their iPhone. You're like, wait a second, that person has an iPhone. But that took a while, you know. And I think with Open AI, it's kind of a, we're still in the early stages of a lot of this, I feel, and I'm not really sure how it's going to shake out, but I imagine, you know, they seem to be very iterative about how they're going about it, you know. So I don't know how they went about the creation of it at first, but I feel as if at least now they're taking feedback. They're not just building stuff people are asking for, but they're looking at, well these people are asking for this, but why are they asking for it and what are they trying to achieve and how might we achieve that by releasing something that solves for that. And that's kind of your job, right? It's not just to build what people ask for. It's more about getting to the need behind what they're asking for, and there might be a more elegant way to solve for what they're asking for. But there's also some backlash with AI. So I see some things happening where a lot of my corporate clients have just banned it at the firewall, they don't want their employees even accessing it. They want to keep it within the company walls, so to speak, which is going to be kind of challenging to do, although there are some solutions they’re employing to do that. I also see people taking it and, you know, interviewing fake users and saying, I can validate my idea because they asked OpenAI and it said it was a good idea, so I don't have to talk to customers. And it's like, okay, so they're taking some kind of persona from people and kind of building up a thing where you interact with it, and it seems very confident in it. It seems very confident in its statements. Like, that's the thing that I've noticed with OpenAI and a lot of this ChatGPT stuff is that it can be like really confidently wrong, but you find security in that confidence, right? And so I do see people saying, well I don't have to talk to customers, I just typed in ChatGPT and asked them. And I said, this is the kind of customer, what would that customer want? And it can literally generate personas that can generate canvases. It can do a lot that makes you seem like they are good answers. You could also just click regenerate and then it'll come up with really confident, completely different answers. So I think there's still a way where we can use it to augment what we do, I'm still a big believer in that, because I think it's really hard to scale research sometimes, especially if they have a small team, you’re in a Startup. I think we can use AI to help scale it in some ways, but I think we just have to be careful about using it as the single source of truth for things because in the end it's still people and we're still, find all the tech problems, still people problems. And so I think we have to be careful of how we use AI in Agile and research and product development in general.

Ula Ojiaku

Completely agree, and the thing about being careful, because the AI or the model is still trained at the end of the day by humans who have their blind spots and conscious or unconscious biases. So the output you're going to get is going to be as good as whatever information or data the person or persons who trained the model would have. So what I'm still hearing from you if I may use Steve Blank's words would be still get out of the building and speak to real customers. I mean, that could be a starting point or that could be something you augment with, but the real validation is in the conversation with the people who use or consume your products.

David Bland

I think the conversations are still important. I think where it gets misconstrued a bit is that, well people don't know what they want, so we shouldn't talk to them. I think that's an excuse, you should still talk to them. The teams that I work with talk to customers every week quite often, and so we want that constant contact with customers and we want to understand their world, we want to find new insights, we want to find out what they're trying to do and trying to achieve, because sometimes that can unlock completely new ideas and new ways to make money and new ways to help them. I think this idea of, well, we can't talk to customers because we don't have a solution ready or we can't talk to customers because they don't know what they want, I feel as if those aren't really the reasons you should be talking to customers. With discovery, you're trying to figure out the jobs, pains and gains, test value prop with them, continue to understand them better. And if you pay attention to your customers, there's this great Bezos quote, right. If you pay attention to your customers and your competitors are paying attention to you, you're going to be fine because you are, they're getting lagging information, right? You're really deeply connected to your customers, and so I just think we've somehow built this culture over time where we can't bother customers, we can't confuse them, we can't come to them unless we have a polished solution and I think that's becoming less and less relevant as we go to co-creation. We go more to really deeply understanding them. I think we have to be careful of this culture of we can't bother them unless we have a polished solution to put in front of them, I don't think that's where we're headed with modern product management.

Ula Ojiaku

And someone might be saying, listening to, whilst I've gone through your masterclass, I've read your book, but someone might say, well, do you mean by jobs, pains and gains with respect to customers? Could you just expand on those, please?

David Bland

Yeah, if you look at the, so my co-author Alex Osterwalder, if you go back to the book before Testing Business Ideas, there's a Value Proposition Design book where we have the value prop canvas. If you look at the circle in that book, so the tool kind of has a square and a circle, and we usually start with a circle side, which is a customer profile. And with the profile, you're really trying to think of a role or even a person, you're not trying to do it at the org level, you're trying to think of an actual human being. And in that, we kind of break it down into three sections. One is customer jobs to be done. So you can think about, you know, one of the functional, usually functional jobs that tasks are trying to do, you could also weave in, you know, social jobs, emotional supporting, it can get really complicated, but I try to keep it simple. But one way to find out those jobs is by talking to customers, right? Then next are the pain points. So what are the pain points that customers are experiencing, usually related to the jobs they're trying to do. So if they're trying to do a task, here's all the stuff that's making it really hard to do that task. Some of it's directly related, some of it's tangential, it's there, it's like these impediments that are really, you know, these pains that they're experiencing. And then the third one is gains. So we're looking for what are the gains that can be created if they're able to either do this task really well, or we're able to remove these pains, like what are some things that they would get out of it. And it's not always a one to one to one kind of relationship. Sometimes it's, oh, I want peer recognition, or I want a promotion, or, you know, there are some things that are tangential that are related to gains, so I love that model because when we go and we start doing discovery with customers, we can start to understand, even in Agile right. If we're doing discovery on our stories, you know, we're trying to figure out what are they trying to achieve? And then is this thing we're about to build going to help them achieve that? You know, what are the pains we're experiencing? Can we have characteristics or features that address these big pain points they're experiencing? And then let's just not solely focus on the pains, let’s also think about delighters and gains and things we could do that like kind of make them smile and make them have a good day, right? And so what are some things that we could do to help them with that? And so I love that framing because it kind of checks a lot of the boxes of can they do the task, but also, can we move the pains that they're experiencing trying to do it and then can we can we help create these aha moments, these gains for them?

Ula Ojiaku

Thank you, and thanks for going into that and the definitions of those terms. Now, let's just look at designing experiments and of course for the listeners or people if you're watching on YouTube, please get the book, Testing Business Ideas, there's a wealth of information there.

But at a high level, David, can you share with us what's the process you would advise for one to go through in designing, OK yes, we have an idea, it's going to change the world, but what's the process you would recommend at a high level for testing this out?

David Bland

At a high level, it's really three steps. The first is extracting your assumptions. So that's why I like the desirable, viable, feasible framing. If you have other things you want to use, that's fine, but I use desirable, viable, feasible and I extract. So, what's your risk around the market, the customer, their jobs to be done, the value prop, all that. Viability is what's your risk around revenue, cost, can you keep cost low enough, can you make money with this in some way, make it sustained? And then feasibility is much more, can you do it, can you execute it, are there things that prevent you from just executing on it and delivering it? So that step one is just extracting those, because this stuff is usually inside your head, you're worried about it, some of them might be written down, some of them might not be. If you're in a team, it's good to have perspectives, get people that can talk to each theme together and compromise and come together. The second part of the process is mapping and prioritisation. So we want to map and focus on the assumptions that we've extracted that are the most important, where we have the least amount of evidence. So if we're going to focus experimentation, I want to focus on things that make a big difference and not necessarily play in a space that's kind of fun to play in and we can do a bunch of experiments, but it doesn't really pay down our risk. And so I like focusing on what would be called like a leap of faith assumption, which I know Eric Ries uses in Lean Startup, it also goes back to probably like Kierkegaard or something, and then Riskiest Assumption is another way you can frame it, like what are the Riskiest Assumptions, but basically you're trying to say what are the things that are most important, where we have least amount of evidence. So that's step two, prioritisation with mapping. And then step three is running experiments. And so we choose the top right, because we've extracted using the themes, we have desirable, viable, feasible. We can use that to help match experiments that will help us pay down the risk, and so I always look for mismatch things. Like you're not going to pay down your feasibility risk by running customer interviews, that doesn't help you whether or not you can deliver it. So making sure that you're matching your risk, and that's kind of where the book plays in mostly because we have 44 experiments that are all organised by desirable, viable, feasible, and then we have like cost, setup time, runtime, evidence, strength, capabilities. There's like a bunch of kind of information radiators on there to help you choose, and so we basically run experiments to then go and find out, you know, are these things that have to be true, that we don’t have a lot of evidence to prove them out, are they true or not? And so we start then using this process to find out and then we come back and update our maps and update our artefacts, but that’s kind of the three step process would be extract, map and then test.

Ula Ojiaku

Thank you. Would you say that there is a time when the testing stops?

David Bland

I would say it never completely stops, or at least hopefully it doesn't completely stop. Even if you're using discovery and delivery, I find that usually in the beginning there's a lot of discovery and maybe a little bit of delivery or almost no delivery, and then as you de-risk you have kind of like more delivery and then a little bit less discovery. And then maybe if you're in a kind of repeatable mode where you're trying to scale something there's a lot of delivery and a little bit of discovery, but where I get really nervous are teams that kind of have a phase or a switch and they say, okay, we've done all the discovery now we're just going to build and deliver. I feel as if that constant contact with customers, being able to constantly understand them, their needs are going to change over time as you scale, it's going to change things, and so I get really nervous when teams want to just kind of act like it's a phase and we're done with our testing, right, we're done with our discovery. And I feel great organisations are always discovering to an extent. So it's just really finding the balance with your teams and with your orgs, like how much delivery do you have to do? How much discovery do you need to kind of inform that delivery? So ideally it doesn't stop, but the percentage of discovery you're doing in testing will most likely change over time.

Ula Ojiaku

So in the world of Agile, Agile with a capital A in terms of the frameworks that originated from software development, the role of the Product Owner/Product Manager is typically associated with ensuring that this sort of continuous exploration and discovery is carried out throughout the product's lifecycle. Do you have any thoughts on this notion or idea?

David Bland

I think there's always some level of risk and uncertainty in your backlog and in your roadmaps. So people in charge of product should be helping reduce that uncertainty.

Now, it's usually not on their own, they'll pair with a researcher, maybe a designer. They might even be pairing with software developers to take notes during interviews and things like that to socialise how they're paying down the risk. But I think if you look at your backlog, you're kind of looking at middle to bottom and saying, oh, there's a lot of uncertainty here, I’m not really sure if you should even be working on these. So part of that process should be running discovery on it, and so I try to socialise it. So if you're in your Standups, talk about some of the discovery work you're doing, if you're in planning, plan out some of the discovery work you're doing, it's just going to help you build this overall cohesive idea of, well, I'm seeing something come in that I have to work on, but it's not the first time I've seen it, and I kind of understand the why, I understand that we did discovery on it to better understand and inform this thing and shape what I'm about to work on, and so I think it helps create those like touch points with your team.

Ula Ojiaku

Thank you for that, David. So let's go on. There is, of course, your really, really helpful book,  personally I have used it and I've taken, I've not done all the experiments there, but definitely some of the experiments I have coached teams or leaders and organisations on how to use that. But apart from Testing Business Ideas, are there other books that you have found yourself recommending to people on this topic?

David Bland

Yeah, I think there's some that go deeper, right, on a specific subject. So for example, interviews, that can be a tool book itself, right, and so there's some great books out there. Steve Portigal has some great books on understanding how to conduct interviews. I also like The Mom Test, well I don't like the title of the book, the content is pretty good, which is basically how to really do a customer interview well and not ask like, closed-ended leading bias questions that just get the answers you want so you can just jump to build, you know.

So there are some books I keep coming back to as well. And then there's still some older books that, you know, we built on, foundationally as part of Testing Business Ideas, right?

So if you look at Business Model Generation from Alex Osterwalder, Value Prop Design, the Testing Business Ideas book fits really well in that framework. And while I reference Business Model Canvas and Value Prop Canvas in Testing Business Ideas, I don't deep dive on it because there's literally two books that dive into that. A lot of the work we've built upon is Steve Blank's work from Four Steps to the Epiphany and I think people think that that book's dated for some reason now, but it's very applicable, especially B2B discovery. And so I constantly with my B2B startups and B2B corporations, I'm constantly referring them back to that book as a model for looking at how you go about this process from customer discovery to customer validation. So yeah, there are some ones I keep coming back to. Some of the newer ones, there are some books on scaling because I don't, I'm usually working up until product market fit, you know, and I don't have a lot of growth experiments in there.

So there are some books now starting to come out about scaling, but I think if you're looking at Testing Business Ideas and saying, oh, there's something here and it kind of covers it, but I want to go a lot deeper, then it's finding complimentary books that help you go deeper on a specific thing, because Testing Business Ideas are more like a library and a reference guide and a process of how to go through it. It would have been like two or three times in length if we'd gone really, really deep on everything, so I think 200 pages of experiments was a pretty good quantity there. And so I’m often, I'm referring books that go deeper on a specific thing where people want to learn more.

Ula Ojiaku

Thank you for that. So if the audience, they've listened to what you have to say and they're like, I think I need to speak with David, how can they reach you?

David Bland

Yeah, I mean, davidjbland.com is a great place to go, that's me, you can read about me, you can watch videos on me presenting. I have, you know, videos of me presenting at conferences, but also, there's a YouTube channel you can go to where I have some of my webinars that are free to watch as well, and just little coaching videos I make where I'm like, hey, I have a team that's really struggling with this concept and I just kind of make a quick YouTube video helping people out to say this is how I'm addressing this with, you know, with a team. Also Precoil, P-R-E-C-O-I-L, that's my company, and so there's a lot of great content there as well. And then just in general social media, although I have to say I'm pulling back on social media a little bit. So, I would say for the most part LinkedIn is a great place to find me, I'm usually posting memes about customer discovery and videos and things just trying to help people, like make you laugh and educate you, and so LinkedIn, surprisingly, I don't think I'd ever say like, oh, come check me out on LinkedIn, you know, five or ten years ago, but now that's where I spend a lot of my time, and I feel like that's where my customers are and that's where I can help them, so yeah, I end up spending a lot of time on LinkedIn too.

Ula Ojiaku

Yeah, some of your memes there like, I mean, how do I put it, just gets me up in stitches.

Yeah, I don't know how you find them or do you commission actors to do some of them, but yeah, it's good. So yeah, so LinkedIn, social media is the main place, and your websites, those would be in the show notes. I also heard you do have a course, an online course. Can you tell us about that?

David Bland

Yeah, this summer, I finally found some space to put together my thoughts into an Assumptions Mapping Course. So that is on Teachable. I'm going to be building it out with more courses, but I've just had enough people look at that two by two and read the book and say, I think I know how to facilitate this, but I'm not sure, and so I literally just went like step by step with a with a case study and it has some exercises as well where you can see how to set up the agenda, how to do the pre work for it, who you need in the room for it, how to facilitate it, what traps to look out for because sometimes, you know, you're trying to facilitate this priority sort of exercise and then things go wry. So I talked about some of the things I've learned over the years facilitating it and then what to do a little bit after. So yeah, it's a pretty just like bite-sized hands-on oh, I want to learn this and I want to go try with the team or do it myself. So yeah, I do have a new course that I launched that just walks people step by step like I would be coaching them.

Ula Ojiaku

OK, and do you mind mentioning out loud the website, is it precoil.teachable.com and they can find your Assumptions Mapping Fundamentals Course there?

David Bland

Correct. It’s on precoil.teachable.com

Ula Ojiaku

OK, and search for Assumptions Mapping Fundamentals by David Bland. Right, so are there any final words of wisdom that you have for the audience, David.

David Bland

Try to keen an open mind when you’re going through a lot of this work. I feel as if the mindset is so important, you know. So if you’re taking this checkbox mentality, you’re not going to get the results out of following any of these processes, right. So, I think being able this idea of, oh, I'm opening myself to the idea that there's some assumptions here that may not be true, that I should probably test. It shouldn't be an exercise where you're just checking the box saying, yep, I wrote down my assumption and then, yeah, I ran an experiment that validated that and then move on, you know. It's more about the process of trying to, because your uncertainty and risk kind of move around. So, this idea of mindset, I can't stress enough that try and keep an open mind and then be willing to learn things that maybe you weren't expected to learn, and I think all these great businesses we look at over the years, they started off as something else, or some form of something else, and then they happened upon something that was an aha moment during the process, and I think that's, we have to be careful of rewriting history and saying it was somebody, it was a genius and he had a single brilliant idea, and then just built the thing and made millions. Very rarely does that ever occur. And so I think when you start really unwinding and it's about having an open mind, being willing to learn things that maybe you didn't anticipate, and I think just that mindset is so important.

Ula Ojiaku

Thanks. I don't mean to detract from what you've said, but what I'm hearing from you as well is that it's not a linear process. So whilst you might have, in the book and the ideas you've shared, you know, kind of simplifying it, there are steps, but sometimes there might be loops to it too, so having an open mind to know that's something that worked today or something you got a positive result from, might not necessarily work tomorrow, it’s, there’s always more and it’s an iterative journey.

David Bland

It’s quite iterative.

Ula Ojiaku

Yeah. Well thank you so much David for this, making the time for this conversation. I really learned a lot and I enjoyed the conversation. Many thanks.

David Bland

Thanks for having me.

Ula Ojiaku

My pleasure. That’s all we have for now. Thanks for listening. If you liked this show, do subscribe at www.agileinnovationleaders.com or your favourite podcast provider. Also share with friends and do leave a review on iTunes. This would help others find this show. I’d also love to hear from you, so please drop me an email at [email protected] Take care and God bless! 

Bio

Uloaku (Ula) Ojiaku is the Founder/ CEO of Mezahab Group Ltd (a UK-based consultancy focused on helping leaders in large organisations improve how they work to deliver value to their customers).     

 With over 20 years of professional experience, Ula has board-level experience and has worked in multiple countries, in a variety of technical, business and leadership roles across industries including Retail, Oil & Gas, Telecommunications, Financial Services, Government, Higher Education and Consulting.  

 Ula hosts the Agile Innovation Leaders podcast, which features conversations with thought-leaders and world-class practitioners on topics covering leadership, innovation, business, agility, and much more.  

She also currently serves a multinational retail organisation as an Enterprise Agility Strategist/ Coach.  

Connect

Uloaku (Ula) Ojiaku | LinkedIn

Transcript

Can I tell you a story? Once, there was an emperor who loved new clothes so much that he fell for a trick. Two weavers promised him a suit invisible to anyone unworthy or incompetent. The emperor couldn't see the clothes, but he pretended he could, fearing he'd seem unfit for his position.

But here's the twist: His staff, too, pretended to see the magnificent fabric. They nodded, praised, and marvelled at the 'exquisite threads.' Why? Because they thought everyone else saw it! It took a child, honest and unafraid, to point out the truth: the emperor was wearing nothing at all!

Now, let's relate this to high-performing teams and leadership. Just like the emperor's staff, leaders sometimes surround themselves with people who tell them what they want to hear, not what they need to hear. It's comfortable, but it's a trap.

True strength lies in diversity of thought. Imagine a team where everyone nods in agreement—like the emperor's court. It's a room full of invisible clothes! High-performing teams thrive on respectful challenge, open dialogue, and honest feedback.

Unity doesn't mean sameness. It means uniting behind a common goal while valuing different viewpoints. It's about creating a culture where feedback is welcomed and acted upon, where every team member feels empowered to speak their truth.

So, I ask you, leaders and innovators: How do you encourage diversity of thought in your teams? How do you ensure you're not just hearing what you want, but what you need?

Share your experiences and strategies in the comments below. Let's engage in a dialogue about building teams that are not only high-performing but also deeply connected and honest. Thank you for watching, and let's continue to weave the fabric of our teams with threads of empowerment, psychological safety and diverse & honest insights.