Future-Proof Your Career

Lots of people get stuck on the big idea, whether it's for a new business or a next step at work. It’s easy to believe that what separates the successes from the failures is that moment of inspiration. But the reality is that the answer often lies much more in execution. In hard work. It’s that cheesy but accurate Thomas Edison quote: it’s 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration. Loads of people have good ideas. But they will remain just ideas unless you learn how to execute. How to take that idea from your mind, beyond a powerpoint presentation or a business plan, to something real and functioning.

Helping us to explore this topic in this episode, we have someone who has taken their ideas and made them real to great success, not once but twice. Jennie Jonson MBE is the CEO of My First Five Years, the next-generation parenting app designed to combat anxiety and give parents evidence-based tools, knowledge and support. Within a year of founding in 2021, MFFY had raised over £1.5m in seed-funding and is now growing at a fantastic rate. 

Prior to My First Five Years, Jennie founded one of the UK’s largest nursery groups, Kids Allowed, running it for 17 years before successfully exiting in 2020. She was the first female to win the UK Private Business Awards CEO of the Year and was voted UK’s Businesswoman of the Year in 2019. 

We took loads away from our conversation with Jennie. Here are the top tips for making it real:

• Validate your ideas with your personal experience - or someone else's. Sense check: will this work?
• Check what's already there: is someone else already trying to solve the same problem?
• If they are, that doesn't necessarily mean you shouldn't do it - maybe it's validation of the need. But maybe you should work with not against them.
• Find your 'brains trust': who's experience and talent can you leverage?
• Work fast: minimise wasted time and effort by filtering ideas quickly
• Accept feedback: Listen to what people are telling you. You don't have to agree with everything you're told but sometimes you need to accept the weight of feedback and make a change or walk away
• Can you make it real on your own? Or do you need a co-founder or sponsor?
• Make it simple: you need to be able to explain your idea very quickly and in a way that people can just 'get' whether it's in a few sentences or a couple of slides (and maybe even just one line)
• Be resilient: Take feedback, change as needed, but don't be dissuaded if you still believe there is the core of a good idea.
• What's your measure of success? Set yourself some goals and targets that you can benchmark against.

A critical part of the creative process is the ability to refine things, whether your own or others. Whatever it is you are creating, there’s almost zero chance that the first draft will be perfect. It doesn’t matter whether you’re writing, drawing, designing in 3D, making music or a video, the editing process is absolutely critical.

But it’s not necessarily one that comes naturally. We get very attached to our own creations. And it’s not always easy to tell other people that their work needs improvement and change. No-one likes to hear that their baby is ugly! So it’s hugely important that we think and talk about this skill, and train ourselves to improve it as part of our career development.

To help us learn how to refine our ideas, as ever in this episode, we have a real expert. Sarah Butler is the acclaimed author of Ten Things I've Learnt About Love, Before the Fire and Jack & Bet. Her writing has been translated into fourteen languages. She is a part-time lecturer in Creative Writing at Manchester Metropolitan University, and works with publishers and authors, reviewing and developing new work.

We learnt so much in the conversation with Sarah. Here are our key takeaways:

• As Hemingway said, "The first draft of anything is shit." Don't expect perfection first time!
• Get something down on paper or into some form you can mold. As Sarah says, it's clay to work with.
• The creative process is also a learning process: you're not just pouring out things you know. What you know is evolving as you produce, so accept that there will be iterations.
• The creative process can be like farming: sometimes you're sowing, sometimes you're harvesting, but sometimes there will be fallow moments as well. Accept that sometimes you need some fallow days and you can't always force progress.
• For big ideas you probably can't hold the whole thing in your head. Break it down into manageable chunks but make sure you keep a holistic view. Work on individual components but remember how they fit together.
• Appreciate the value of feedback. It can be scary sharing your ideas but the once you overcome that fear the benefits are enormous. Share ideas early with a diverse group - you might get different types of feedback from different people.
• This is much easier if you can grow a culture of sharing inside your organisation, so that everyone gets used to sharing their ideas - and gets practice at giving feedback
• Edit other people's work by asking questions. Don't try to impose your approach.
• Be generous and kind. No-one wants to hear that their baby is ugly!

In this episode of Future Proof Your Career we're looking at recombination: how to bring old things together to make something new.

To help us to get our heads around mixing and remixing, we have a real expert in the studio today. Graeme Park has been one of the biggest names in the house music scene since the late 1980s. Well known for his residency at the Hacienda and long stints on a number of major radio stations, Graeme remixed tracks by the likes of Brand New Heavies, New Order, Eric B & Rakim, and Sophie Ellis-Bextor. 

Graeme has most recently been one of the founding forces behind Hacienda Classical, bringing together classic dance tunes with a full live orchestra. He has even found himself behind the microphone, going back to his musician roots.

Here's what we learned from Graeme:

• Remixing is a creative art! Just because you're working with existing components, it doesn't mean this isn't real innovation. Recombining things can fulfill that creative urge.
• Seperate the technical skills required to remix something from the relevant domain knowledge. You may only have one or the other. For example, you might understand the business processes you're working with, or the industry sector. But you might not know the technology or have the political clout to build something new. Partner with someone who does.
• Play with your tools and components. Get to know the things that are at your disposal. What can you draw on in terms of resources: people, data, partners, platforms? And what can you use to stick them together? Software, systems, or just a telephone and some bits of paper?
• Agility: respond to what the audience wants. Don't set out with a singular vision and keep pursuing it without showing it to anyone. Get it out there early and change direction based on feedback.
• Collaborate. Bring in different ideas, perspectives and skill sets. You don't want design by committee but you're more likely to succeed with two heads than one.

Just before we take a break for the summer, we jumped on a call to chat through what we have learned from the season so far. we're about half way through and we've learned from some incredible people.

Our first segment was all about Curation: how to discover and qualify information.

• The BBC's Chris Warburton joined us to talk about how to ask good questions.
• Psychologist Dr Simon Moore taught us about all the different ways of listening.
• Dr Lauren Kirwan helped us to understand empathy better - what it is, and what it is not.
• Gemma Milne talked to us about the importance of scepticism and our responsibility to challenge and ask questions.
• Elections analyst Professor Rob Ford helped us to understand the meaning in people's words - even when they don't say what they mean.
• Finally, data scientist Caroline Keep taught us how to extract meaning from numbers.

Then we kicked off our segment on Creation: how to make new things.

• Fashion designer Supriya Lele shared where she finds inspiration.
• And start-up investor Jon Bradford talked to us about iterations and pivots.

Coming up we have loads more great guests. Superstar DJ Graeme Park talking about remixing, acclaimed author Sarah Butler on the editing process, and the brilliant Bec Evans on how to write.

Listen in to find out what has really stuck in our brains so far. And what we've got coming up.

Even though this was a very short episode, it had a lot of outtakes. And we thought they were pretty funny. So just as a one-off, we thought we'd share them at the end.

Have a great summer!

In this episode of Future Proof Your Career we speak with Jon Bradford about iteration: how do you take an idea and improve on it?

Jon Bradford is co-founder & managing partner of Dynamo Ventures, an investment fund focused on supply chain and mobility. Jon is one of the most experienced early stage investors in Europe and launched the first accelerator bootcamp outside of the US in 2009. He went on to launch many more start-up programmes, earning him the title “Godfather of European Accelerators”.

Between this work and his own entrepreneurship, Jon has helped to refine many raw ideas into successful businesses, so he’s the ideal person to talk to us about this part of the creative process.

Here’s what we learned from Jon:

• Every proposal, every idea is a promise. You’ve got to make it and then deliver on it.
• Delivering a whole idea in one go is too much. Break any vision down into bite-sized pieces - each of which is a little ‘promise’ you can keep in its own right.
• At every ‘chunk’ there’s an opportunity to do things differently. Separate the objective from the approach.
• People should be measuring the progress of your project on ‘lines not dots’, as per this Mark Suster article. What they’re looking for is progress.
• Steer using feedback - and the most important feedback comes from your ‘customers’ - who will be buying or using your product/service? 
• Your mum doesn’t count as a customer for feedback purposes. She probably isn’t objective.
• Constant feedback will allow you to make small changes frequently and not pursue blind alleys: ‘fail fast’, as the saying goes.
• Don’t be afraid to pivot though: make a radical change of direction. The highest potential team in Jon’s portfolio have done at least two major pivots.
• Make sure you set the bar for testing each stage of progress appropriately. Know what is a stretch goal, but don’t set your sights so low the test isn’t meaningful.
• Sometimes the problem isn’t the idea itself, it’s the market around it. Sometimes - as Tesla did - you have to build the ‘full stack’

This is the first episode in our six part series on creativity and everything that entails. We're starting with inspiration: where do original ideas come from? And how can you have more of them?

We're convinced that inspiration is not something innate. It's a skill that we can develop by exercising it. And we need to. We operate in a noisy market of ideas, where original thinking is required to stand out. Where machines can knock out facsimiles of other people’s ideas fast and cheaply. So we have to keep creating new ideas to stay ahead.

As always, to help us understand the skill we’re focused on, we have a special guest who relies on their skill for their own success. Supriya Lele is a fashion designer described by The Face as “one of the UK’s brightest design talents” and her eponymous label counts Dua Lipa and Bella Hadid as clients. Her style has spanned noughties nostalgia, rave-ready party wear, and inspiration from her Indian heritage.

Here's what we took away from our conversation with Supriya:

Be opinionated!

Creativity is self expression. Don't be afraid to be bold.

Learn through play

Supriya learns through experimentation, deliberately trying new things that might seem odd, like turning the clothes back to front or upside down. Play keeps the brain 'loose and flexible' and stops you being too rigid.

Make mistakes

Don't be afraid to get it wrong. As long as you learn from those mistakes.

Start with research

Inspiration comes from all over the place. Supriya accumulates imagery, sounds and objects that help to create a sense of direction.

Curate your story

Once you've got lots of research, sort it to tell a story. Find patterns and coherence between the ideas. For Supriya it might be common patterns, colours, cuts and shapes, but for you it might be common words, design elements, behaviours etc

Self-reference

Don't forget that you can be your own source of inspiration. Look to work you've done in the past to see if it can be reapplied or inspire a new answer. 

Never stop listening

Research is a continuous process. Keep a watchful eye for things that might inspire a future project and store them away.

Compound effect

Inspiration can be a build up of influences. It doesn't have to come from one thing, but can rather be about the intersections between many.

Separating influence from inspiration

Even original ideas have influences. What's critical is having a good measure for how much your inspiration moves things forward. There's no hard and fast rule but you get a sense of it over time.

Everyone gets blocked

Creative exercises are hard to programme in to a 9-5. Sometimes it just doesn't come. Don't get frustrated. Do something different. Step away and come back fresh.

That said...

Deadlines can be an incredible motivator! Even if they are artificial.

Collaborate

Creativity doesn’t have to be a solo exercise, all about you personal vision. Get other people involved.

Hobbies can help

Don't just have one creative outlet. Do something else you love, but without pressure. You can learn from it and bring that learning to your main discipline. And it can allow you to release pressure when things aren't going well on a project.

Accept vulnerability

Putting your creative work out there can be nerve wracking. Because really great work will usually take you somewhat outside of your comfort zone. It can be a vulnerable moment so prepare for it.

In putting this podcast together, we had a whole range of fascinating conversations, not all of which fitted into the standard format for this series, where each episode is focused on a particular skill. One of those conversations was with Korn Ferry, the global consulting firm. 

Korn Ferry works with companies and leaders to help them put in place the optimal structures, roles, and responsibilities, hire the right people to fill those roles, and advises them on how to reward and motivate their workforce. So as you can imagine, it’s a company that has a huge amount of interest in, and expertise on, the subject of this podcast: how to future-proof your career. And they've kindly agreed to sponsor this special episode as well.

Joining us from Korn Ferry for this episode to share their expertise are Ben Frost, who works with the company’s clients on issues like pay and talent management, and Sue Simonett, who leads the company’s technology practice.

Listen in to find out what these two experts think about:

• What is driving the current skills crunch?
• How employers might respond
• The impact of AI and automation on the present and future of work
• Changing expectations for employers and employees
• What Ben and Sue think of our Three Cs - Curation, Creation, Communication
• How to maximise your future career opportunities

In this episode of Future-Proof Your Career, we speak to Caroline Keep, a data scientist, a teacher, a maker, and a researcher in machine learning. She is the recipient of multiple awards, including the Times Education Supplement teacher award, and a founder of Liverpool Makerfest.

We spoke to Caroline about how you extract meaning from data, and how we can all be more engaged in the effort to decipher the world around us.

Here’s what we learned.

Data is the real world, quantified

Don’t think of data as just endless spreadsheets and numbers. It’s a representation of the real world and the things that matter. Understanding the data is a way to understand the world.

Understanding data is a process

Caroline talked about multiple steps in the ‘data cycle’:

• Start with discovery: play with the data at your disposal to get a feel for it
• Create a hypothesis: what are you trying to test?
• Discuss your idea with other people and gather perspectives, check your reasoning
• Clean your data: the real world is messy and full of bias and noise
• Test your idea: does your hypothesis hold true?

Build domain knowledge 

Understanding the space you’re exploring is critical to give you a reference point. Otherwise you won’t know if the results you find are nonsense!

If the data you want doesn’t exist, you can get it

There are lots of sources of interesting data, but the Internet of Things makes it cheaper and easier than ever to collect data that doesn’t exist. Whether you want to track temperature, movement, light or pollution, or anything for that matter, simple sensors and cheap computers like the Raspberry Pi allow anyone to experiment (see links below)

Caroline referenced some great resources and projects, including:

• Kaggle: a data science community - https://www.kaggle.com/
• NodeRed: a drag and drop IoT platform: https://nodered.org/
• Kettle Companion: A connected kettle that helps carers keep an eye on vulnerable people - https://kettlecompanion.com/
• Rstudio: software for data science - https://posit.co/products/open-source/rstudio/
• Python: a powerful but accessible programming language - https://www.python.org/
• Jupyter Notebook: https://jupyter.org/

In this episode of Future-Proof Your Career, we speak to professor of politics at the University of Manchester and frequent contributor to the BBC and other media, Rob Ford. Rob is the co-author of Brexitland with Professor Maria Sobolewska, and the author of The British General Election of 2019. 

We spoke to Rob about how you extract meaning from people’s words, even if they don’t always say what they mean. Here’s what we learned.

Think of leaders as politicians

Business leaders and politicians have a lot of the same pressures, particularly when they are trying to satisfy multiple audiences. It’s one thing leading - and championing - a single team. You can be absolutely partisan. But when you have to satisfy people across the company, customers, and shareholders, and deal with lots more information, it’s a very different situation. So people in senior positions are likely to be more conservative, more political. 

Who is the audience?

Think about the speaker’s audiences. Who do they need to impress or please? This will shape a lot of their message. If you don’t like it, you might not be their intended - or most important - audience.

Social desirability bias

People moderate their language because they’re trying to appeal to you or because they don’t think you will like what they really think. This might disguise negative feedback, people’s real opinions or positions.

We all have a hidden motive

We’re human beings with lots going on, both inside and outside the workplace. Accept that everyone has multiple motivations for their actions.

Sincerity is powerful - even when it’s faked

While we can’t recommend lying, the lesson from politics seems to be that we believe people who can perform sincerity. So try to be sincere in your message. But keep an eye out for those who might not be quite so sincere as they appear.

Separate the message from the packaging

Flowery language can disguise different intent. Take time to look behind the words and see the meaning.

Repetition, repetition, repetition

If you think you’re missing something, or you want someone to reveal a potentially hidden motive, get people to repeat the message until you get clarity. Use variations on a question to extract all the missing pieces of the story.

Foghorns, dog whistles, dead cats

We talked about some of the terminology of political communication, much of which can be applied to the business world. A ‘dog whistle’ is language designed to appeal to a particular group without making explicit statements that might attract public scrutiny - often where a policy might be deemed racist or otherwise offensive. Business leaders might signal to the markets that they want to downsize a business without explicitly talking about job cuts, though most people recognise what ‘rationalisation’ really means now. 

Sometimes there is no dog whistle and it’s an outright foghorn instead, and the message comes through loud and clear. Some leaders are incapable of subtlety or just choose to avoid it.

‘Dead cats’ are stories designed to distract from the bad news. And we see these in business all the time.

CYA

Often people will be motivated by CYA: Cover Your Ass. They will try to ensure that they are not left responsible if something goes wrong. Be particularly cautious about this if you are an external supplier - I speak from experience!

Personality not policy

Ultimately, remember you’re dealing with a human being and in most cases, you will want to maintain a civil working relationship. You may not like what they’re saying, but they may not like it either. In the long term, it’s the relationship that will count.

In this episode of Future-Proof Your Career we’re talking about scepticism, the willingness, and the discipline, to question what we see and hear. And to have the skills to find the facts amongst the opinions and beliefs. 

As always, we’ve invited an expert guest to speak to us, and this time it’s Gemma Milne, writer and researcher, and author of the excellent book Smoke and Mirrors: How Hype Obscures the Future and How to See Past It. 

Gemma gave us loads to think about, in terms of how we improve our sceptical skills. Here are a few of the key takeaways from the conversation:

The skill of scepticism has never been more important

There’s a lot of misinformation and disinformation out there. And it’s not just on social media. We need a level of awareness to all the places that people through motivation or ignorance might share hype or inaccuracies.

Scepticism is accessible. It’s something we can all do

You don’t need deep expertise in a subject to be sceptical. That’s not to dismiss expertise or experts - this is very much a podcast that believes in those things! But there are some basic questions we can always ask and things we can do to get a sense of truth.

Separate emotion from fact

We have to recognise that a lot of claims and ideas, and the stories around them are designed to play on our emotions. Can we step back from our emotional engagement and ask some logical questions?

Simple questions

We can always ask, even if just to ourselves: ‘What does this claim depend on?’,  ‘How do you get to that conclusion?’, ‘What is the underlying evidence?’

Big claims need big proof

It’s a good rule of thumb that if someone is going to make big claims, they need strong evidence to back it up. How good is the evidence?

Be empathetic

Understand why other people will reach certain conclusions. Why do certain ideas appeal to them? And what makes them so committed? Be sensitive to this when challenging someone’s beliefs.

Scepticism is a responsibility

If we want more facts and less hype and misinformation, then scepticism is a responsibility for us all. Before you share that chart, paper, or meme that confirms your beliefs, do some sceptical checks.