WB-40

WB-40

By Matt Ballantine & Chris WestonBusinessTechnologyManagement
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WB-40 episodes

  • (115) Innovating
    On this week’s show Matt & Chris chew the fat over the concept of Innovation. Some of the models that Matt talks about can be found in this short thread of blog posts: https://mmitii.mattballantine.com/2019/06/26/innovation-in-4-diagrams-1-digital-architecture/ Chris’s South Park reference is here: -Transcript produced by Otter.ai. You might use it for accessibility, but it’s really here so […]
    0 min
  • (115) Innovating
    https://dts.podtrac.com/redirect.mp3/wb40podcast.files.wordpress.com/2019/07/episode-115-innovating.mp3

    On this week’s show Matt & Chris chew the fat over the concept of Innovation.

    Some of the models that Matt talks about can be found in this short thread of blog posts:

    https://mmitii.mattballantine.com/2019/06/26/innovation-in-4-diagrams-1-digital-architecture/

    Chris’s South Park reference is here:

    -Transcript produced by Otter.ai. You might use it for accessibility, but it’s really here so you can search for things we have talked about –

    Matt Ballantine 0:21

    Hello, and welcome to Episode 150 and of WB 40, the weekly podcast with me Matt Ballantine and Chris Weston, oh we’re

    back? It was a short interlude. But after a week off, where I spend my time being eaten by images in the Lake District, and then doing lots of work with innovation, I’m back, you’re back. WB 40 is back. It’s good to be back.

    Chris Weston 0:42

    It is good to be back. We’re here we’ve got everything that we need in as much as we’ve got computers and internet connections, my squeaky chair, and everything’s as it should be.

    Matt Ballantine 0:52

    And there’s something about that room, isn’t it? Because that isn’t the same chair that used to have the screen has a new chair that went in the didn’t squeak and now squeaks.

    Chris Weston 0:58

    Yeah, I said suspect that it’s probably the crippling cheapness of the chip. It is adding to its creakiness, and I should maybe we should have invested in a more worthy piece of furniture. But I just was too mean. So now it’s me. It’s quite comfortable. But it’s but it’s greatly.

    Matt Ballantine 1:17

    I’m sure you can just charge a new employee a new chair, they go.

    Chris Weston 1:22

    What’s a good idea?

    Matt Ballantine 1:25

    Right is note, Chris isn’t going to be charging his chair to his

    Chris Weston 1:28

    nose. That was a joke. That was a joke.

    Matt Ballantine 1:33

    Anyway, what we’ve been up to?

    Chris Weston 1:35

    Well, I’ve been going to Brussels to see people in the European Commission. I mean, it actually is one of those things that I am still getting to which of the three parts of the European sort of legislature, the Commission, the council and the parliament. And remembering which ones which is probably the

    Matt Ballantine 2:00

    the trick me see if I can remember so the European Parliament is a bit reelect me peace or Yes, the members of European Parliament MEP clues in the name. The Council is the representation of the governments of the member states.

    Unknown Speaker 2:18

    And then the commission is effectively the European civil service. Yeah, what do I don’t understand why people find that so hard.

    Chris Weston 2:25

    I just don’t think of it as three things you know what I mean, you just think of it as one amorphous blob. And it isn’t also the Berlaymont building, which is the European Commission building. There’s an enormous, enormous kind of banner on the side of it, which tells you that it’s the European Commission building, and right at the top of it, and this is just as far as you can see, the top is it says hashtag team Juncker. So presumably that has to be replaced now that all doom has been replaced. But it seems like a big job.

    Unknown Speaker 3:01

    Have you seen that what happened to the

    Unknown Speaker 3:04

    the railway crossing over the 25 just for them 40 Junction that they just need to get

    Matt Ballantine 3:10

    what he called can’t remember anyways, not pizza chance anymore. It’s great shame. I love that boot graffiti. Anyway, that’s enough local knowledge. Good minds could see that you’re just basically travelling backwards and forwards between the West Midlands and the European Union before complete breakdown of the transportation system nation this year, which will prevent you from doing just that.

    Chris Weston 3:32

    Yeah. Well, I mean, that’s always possible. But you know, that remark I just do by them.

    Matt Ballantine 3:37

    Might be by the time HST gets in place that you’ll be able to go back to Europe again Friday.

    Unknown Speaker 3:43

    All good.

    Matt Ballantine 3:45

    Actually, did you go over the weekend, I watched the the BBC series years and years, which if you haven’t seen is worth a watch is interesting there. Yes, the guy who was the guy who was behind the reason writing of Doctor Who, Russell T. Davis, who was it bits and bobs before that, but basically, it’s a series set in the near future. So it goes between now and then over the course of the six shows, it goes out to about 2029, I think is when it stops about 10 years ahead. And it charts the rise of a populist politician. And but it also has a load of themes around artificial intelligence and transhumanism and the refugee crisis and ageing population and genetic stem cell research and, and and is it little bits of it, that will be corny. And there’s some bits who’s very sad, but it’s very interesting sort of thought provoking the way in which kind of technology and politics and stuff is all intertwining. And it’s Yeah, it’s worth a watch. And I play for the next couple of months, I think, fully taken off. So that’s my worth a look. But I also, I’ve started reading a book, which is by a guy called Jamie can’t remember his surname, but I miss my dinner last week. And it’s called the people versus tech, or maybe the tech versus people who have people versus tech. And he’s looking at, again, how social networks in particular, and political systems are becoming increasingly disjointed and the problems that lie they’re in. So all that stuff around that sort of, it’s all a bit going wrong. What do we do about it, which I think is useful conversations to have?

    Chris Weston 5:31

    Yeah, I was listening to the radio the other day. And we’re also listening to it under beyond in a place I was and it was on radio, too. And Jeremy vine was on button. And then this sort of very familiar accent came on talking about how we needed a radical approach to the way that tech is taking over our lives. And we shouldn’t use the automated tools in supermarkets, which I agree with, actually. But lots of other stuff that that was quite clearly a bit bonkers. And of course, I was pulling. Who doesn’t who’s got a big thing about tech at the moment? He, he thinks it’s, it’s going to cripple us all. But he has lost his marbles in recent years. Poor fella.

    Unknown Speaker 6:11

    He has a bit it’s just on the edge of going full David night.

    Matt Ballantine 6:15

    But no. So this time, I think it’s Tony Bartlett, I’ll look it up in a minute. But one of the things he was talking about, he’s talking at the dinner about this stuff, as well as he giving books out and talking about

    Unknown Speaker 6:28

    how

    Matt Ballantine 6:30

    the cultural stuff and this is something that I’ve talked about a bit over the last few years is that this cultural assumptions are built into the software that we use, whether that’s, you know, out of work social networks, or whether it’s in work, communications, and collaboration platforms. And those cultural values that are built into those are a very unique set of cultural values that work within possibly certain parts of San Francisco and community life, but might not necessarily be a place to the rest of the world. And that is coming in spades in the moment with what’s happening with social networks in particular, but also the it’s allowing populism and populist politicians to be able to have direct access to effectively broadcast media for the first time and the scary stuff that’s going on as a result of that. And there’s no diversity in the groups of people who are producing all this stuff. And that so there’s not a set of values or cultural input, outside of a very limited number of people who live in San Francisco that’s really powering all of this stuff that is having a massive impact on the way in which our political systems are kind of creaking under the pressure of all this information around. So

    Chris Weston 7:49

    yeah, we’ve all been doing some stuff on diversity recently, as well. And the whole point about that, which is kind of been accepted. Now in a lot of coding teams. And as much as if you if you have lots people in your, in your development team who are all the same, you’re probably not leveraging software that’s going to be usable by a wide variety of people. And that’s kind of understood and accepted, even though actually changing is difficult. And maybe it’s still in the too difficult box for some. But you also see in in organisations that do provide a service and there and an IT departments a very good example. So you’re not necessarily creating software, but you are producing processes and ways of working and expect managing expectations about how things are going to get done at when they’re going to get done. And who by that are that reflects your, your diaspora in your your in your team. So it’s not just about code, it’s about services. And in your example, there it’s about processes and and access to different types of texts. And now I think that’s a it’s a really valid point.

    Matt Ballantine 8:53

    Yeah, interesting. And we’ve got an interview coming up in a couple of weeks time that it could at Amy Golding. And she spread this and one of the things that she and I discussed was, actually is the encouraging of different groups, particularly women into STEM, science, technology, engineering, and math, actually part of the problem, because what that does is reinforces the idea that technology should be run by stem people, not that technology should have a broader church or people in it and not just scientists and technologists.

    Chris Weston 9:24

    Yeah, it’s it’s one part of the puzzle, isn’t it? And yes, there should be more women girls in STEM. But as you say that that’s a stem is the mechanics of how something works. It doesn’t have to be the entirety of it definitely, definitely shouldn’t be.

    Unknown Speaker 9:38

    Anyway, what have we got on the show this week?

    Chris Weston 9:41

    Well, we’ve got a quiz Matt,

    Matt Ballantine 9:43

    we have. I’m very excited about that. Even though we’ve already just done it, which you shouldn’t be watching on video, you understand. But if you haven’t, you won’t do it, then you’re wondering, this is a podcast, where’s the video and I know that you know, quite frankly, for me in a single video on it is a video not a podcast. Anyway, there’s a quiz coming up. And

    Chris Weston 9:59

    so I’m looking for today, having done that

    Unknown Speaker 10:03

    temple thing, it’s all

    Chris Weston 10:05

    parts possible. We are also going to talk about innovation. But

    Matt Ballantine 10:10

    we are going to talk about innovation. So that’s something that we’ve both been looking at quite a bit recently, and I’ve been running some programmes around. And so we thought it was time for just you and me to have a chat about something. And innovation is on both our mind. So that’s what we’re going to talk about. So that will come up after we’ve gone straight to the quiz.

    Chris Weston 10:38

    So I’m what I’ve got for you is a quiz. And it’s about faxes, faxes. Now, you might think that this is about history. This is some kind of Chris has got some lovely facts about faxes from the 80s or whatever. But no, this is about now. Yes, we know this. It’s a it’s a well known fact. But thank you for talking. So I’ve got this quiz for you. And it’s from a survey by IDC, of course, will be sponsored by IDC. But I have no personally sponsored by IDs. And they do some amazing surveys, in fact, gathering and they’ve done one now this isn’t brand new, this is a couple of years old, or maybe 18 months old, but I think none the worst for that because it’s it’s a bit it’s looking forward over to two years. So I’m going to ask you a question. This is about Western Europe. Right? And the question was in 2017, over the next two years, do your expect you? Do you expect your organization’s facts easy to increase? stay the same? or decrease? Okay. Well, no, no, this is it. This is a this is a business wide survey across Western Europe. So we’re not talking about Africa or Asia or just Western Europe. So out of the hundred percent of answered, I need you to tell me what the percentages were for increase, stay the same and decrease. And I’ll give you on 5% either way,

    Unknown Speaker 12:32

    very generous, very generous man.

    Chris Weston 12:35

    I am a very generous man.

    Matt Ballantine 12:36

    Okay, so this is two years ago, but looking forward to this is before GDPR. But just at the point of which people were starting to pat themselves about GDP,

    Chris Weston 12:48

    GDP was pretty much settled in terms of its the form it was going to be by the Muslim.

    Matt Ballantine 12:53

    So there are some organisations for whom facts would have been seen as a possibly great little trick way of getting around you CPR regulations. So I will say that 10% of organisations across Western Europe said they were going to see an increase in facts. When asked two years ago, I would say that there’s probably very few organisations that actually heavily use facts anymore. So therefore, the majority would say it would stay the same, but because the majority outside of the healthcare industry would have said that it was next to negligible. So if it was zero, it would stay the same. And again, me with only a trick questions. Oh, no. So I will say that 70% of organisations will have said that it would stay the same, leaving a remainder of 20%. Who said it would get less? Okay.

    Chris Weston 13:51

    We’re not far off with the less. Okay. 25%. So they would get less? Yeah. In terms of the increase and stay the same, though, actually, 53% of respondents said it would grow. And 23%. So in when we said that we say the same. And I thought that was pretty amazing. It is. And there are some answers in here. And a lot of people say, but who responded this, that to the facts is more secure than email, because it’s going point to point. And you pretty much know the recipient has got it when you send the

    Matt Ballantine 14:38

    petition here, as long as you know, the point of which is going to is the right point, if it’s the wrong point. Bad things happen. The last facts exchange I had with a bank, they sent me somebody details in depth about a mortgage application have been turned down. And I got a phone call immediately afterward saying terribly sorry about the facts you just received. To which I replied, not terribly sorry, is Mr. Johnson will be?

    Chris Weston 15:04

    Well, I agree with that. And I also remember somebody was thinking I think it was a hospital. So as you say, healthcare, still use these things. And a lot of the faxes would, as you might remember, they would drift off the end of the fax machine, and then secrete themselves under the table that it was on or the or the set, or the filing cabinet, whatever. Managing faxes at the end, bit of an issue. Absolutely. But yeah, they said Top Reasons for fax volume growth, we have integrated with email. So he’s us. So that’s why it takes away the security part. And a lot of it was about customers. Well, our customers still use it. So we need to do it.

    Matt Ballantine 15:47

    Yeah, I heard that a bit in the legal sector, where they said that the land registry still want to do it was always somebody else’s fault. Why they weren’t getting rid of it. Always somebody else’s fault. There you go. But anyway, thank you very much fascinating insight into both the facts is two years ago.

    Unknown Speaker 16:05

    I’ve got an idea for the next quiz. So we’ll be doing that in Episode Two. So look forward to being able to test you on knowledge can’t wait.

    Chris Weston 16:20

    So innovation matters is something that everybody wants to do. There’s always an innovation programme running in a larger organisation. And we’ve seen it done pretty badly. You’ve seen it done badly. And I’ve seen it done badly. And we’ve seen it fail. And a lot of the reasons why it fails is pretty tragic, because people put a lot of good effort into it. It’s not as if they be blocked trying or they’re just being deliberately obtuse about it. Everybody’s trying to do these things. Because they think that if they don’t innovate, they will fall behind their competition. And there’s good reasons to think that’s, that’s that’s true. But real, really, when people try to deliberately encourage innovation, they end up going down one of a few pastor I and and one is, as you were saying to me earlier, is this business of, we want to innovate. Show us how it’s been done before that kind of thing.

    Matt Ballantine 17:17

    Yeah. So that’s a question that I’ve been asked on more than one occasion. And for most of the last 10 years or so I’ve regarded it as an utter oxymoron. And why on earth? Would you want to ask that question? And I realised it wasn’t very constructive. And doesn’t doesn’t win me new work. So I started to think about that question a little differently. For me, I think the starting point, has been actually putting some definition about what people mean by innovation. And the best model that I’ve yet been able to get to, is the play matrix, which I’ve been working on, on and off for about three years now. And that is a way of thinking about stuff that divides the world into two things, problems and solutions. And two states have either problems or solutions been known or unknown. So most at scale organisations are geared and optimised to work with known solutions to known problems. So industrialised production processes, best practice, Six Sigma, all of that stuff is predicated on the idea that we know what it is that we want to do, we know the way in which we are going to achieve it. And we will be able to achieve economies of scale by being able to repeat that way, but doing something ad infinitum, and maybe make tweaks to things to be able to enhance or to better react to the world outside us. But it’s just tweaking. And that’s brilliant. Because as you look around the room in which you’re sitting at the moment, and it’s, you know, you somebody listening, whoever, most of the things that you will see are the results of the production processes that come from how this ability to be able to do things at scale by having known solutions to known problems and is brilliant. The challenge for organisations is that they to optimise to be able to do that, by necessity means that you’re not very good at changing things and dealing with the world when you don’t know what the solutions are to problems. Or even worse, we don’t even know what the problems are, you do see a better known solutions to unknown problems. And I think that there is a value in that and the value is usually to be able to be seen to be able to keep up with your competition. So, for example, any financial services institution at the moment is talking openly and loudly about blockchain is demonstrating a known solution to an unknown problem because none of them doing anything that actually is going to change anything in the short term. But all of them need to be seen to be doing it because of the wise they will not be seen as being competitive in the market, because they’re not being innovative. And even ever, everybody knows that it’s an Emperor’s New Clothes thing going on, doesn’t matter. If you can competition on doing something you need to be doing as well. When it comes to dealing with unknown solutions, it gets harder.

    We’ve had a couple of decades now of Agile approaches within software development entering into organisations and software organisations and also general organisations. And agile at its core is a an approach to dealing with unknown solutions to known problems. And usually it doesn’t work in certainly non software organisations very well, because they’ll frame a project in a way that is completely determined by we know everything, you write a business case, that will be a thing that will determine exactly what will happen when how we spend what we spend, when it will be delivered and everything because you need that to get past the finance people to get approval. And by the time you framed a project like that, your opportunity to be able to be agile and adaptive and be able to iterate on things is really hard. But if theory agile approaches should be a way of being able to allow an organisation to discover what the answers are to problems, where it doesn’t know what the answers are. And the idea of being able to have time and space to be out and work where you don’t know either the problem or the solution, which is a sort of state of tinkering is next to impossible to do in organisations. Because that’s just not what you do. You don’t just sit around playing with stuff, you don’t just ask the question, wonder what happens if, because nobody’s going to sign that off. And it’s really hard for organisations to better my that’s all the time and space. And my thinking about what innovation is, is innovation is having the ability to do that free form thinking the generates ideas, the ideas are turned into experiments that can be tested. And it can be tested and tested until they become products that can be tested and iterated and designed and redesigned entity, but something that you might eventually say, this now is something that is robust enough for a spare to take into the industrialised processes of old and we can scale at that point. If you’re a software organisation, you might these days actually decide that you never get to a point where you’re operating at the sort of industrialised fixed at scale, because you’re constantly iterating the products, but you still got infrastructure and stuff behind it to be able to analyse it, and you might outsource. So Amazon Web Services, for example, or scaled infrastructure to enable you to better run at scale, adaptive, constantly evolving products, some interesting stuff, how that if you’re building a new street lamp, you’re not going to be able to do that iteration. Because once you set the casts, that’s kind of what streetlamps gonna look like you might be to change the bowl maybe or stuff like that. So thinking about that as a framing, and being able to say, innovation is where you are doing things differently, and reacting to the world outside you or trying to be able to develop new markets, it’s really hard to most organisations, because it’s not just not how they get to

    Unknown Speaker 23:21

    operate.

    Chris Weston 23:22

    No, that’s very true. But you’re talking about kind of, in, as you say, industrialised innovation or processes to encourage innovation. And that’s often the people who try to think of it in that way, are often and doing it wrong, because they are, they’re trying to force it in that sense. And it doesn’t come by being forced, not normally. I mean, you got guys go back to your fairly predictable nonsense about blockchain and Emperor’s New Clothes. The reason that banks are making it such a fuss about it and trying to make it look as if they’re doing something is is is very, very valid. And as much as they know that there is a risk and all of their shareholders know that there is a risk that if if a decentralised currency could come along, doesn’t have to be doesn’t have to be the kind of Bitcoin is going to rule the world or anything like that, it’s just going to be a way for people to be able to transfer and money or to transact across across borders, that doesn’t involve them, then they’ve got a serious and potentially existential problem on their hands. So in order to show that their shareholders that they’re not going to going to be under threat from this, they have to show that they’re playing in that game. It’s not that the is not the concept of Emperor’s New Clothes in terms of cryptocurrency, but it’s definitely that their efforts to get into it, our best kind of PR tech. And that’s the problem. So now, that’s it, that’s kind of forced innovation, oh, my God, look at this, it’s going to be if we’re not careful, or maybe it’s not, but whatever it potentially has the potential to, and therefore we must look as if we are on top of it, we can’t just sit there, twiddling our thumbs, otherwise, investors will go and invest in less risky banks that are that pretend they’re doing something about it, when you get to innovation, actually happening in organisations is tends to happen. It just happens. Happens all the time. And we talked about this before me around shadow IT and things like that. But the fact that people will find ways to make things happen that they couldn’t do before, because if they don’t do it, their jobs will be painful, and irritating. So they’ll find ways of, even if it’s a salesperson, for example, taking somebody out for lunch, in order to make a sale, if their corporate policy says that there’s gonna they’re not going to get expenses approved for taking because it was after lunch, then they’ll either pay for themselves, or they’ll charge it something else, you know, they’ll, they will find a way, get the job done. A friend of mine, once upon a time working for the organisation would tell me that he would have to go into a take his team at higher room somewhere, put them all in the room with their laptops, and then put his mobile phone in the middle of the table and switch on his hotspot and get them all to work off the Wi Fi there. And this was a few years ago, okay, were four before you got a lot of mobile mobile data, because that was the only way they could get all the team to focus on something for a whole day. And he said that they will produce five times as much work that way as if they were all sitting in their various offices on that that equipment. He wasn’t allowed to use his personal data. You know, it was a corporate policy that said, No, you’ve got to be on this, you’ve got to be using our network. But he did it because he knew he had a deadline to hit on a certain project, and he needed to get it done. And if that company had an innovation programme that looked for areas of excellence, that all little islands a bit of innovation, they would see some we’re doing that and go, that’s a good idea. Why don’t we invest in personal Wi Fi devices that we are that we can control. And we were happy to have in our network that we can give to our teams and say, yeah, take your teams away, have these have these sessions, and get your work done. That’s how you encourage and develop innovations by looking for things that are happening, because they will happen. People are ingenious, you know, people, people will find a way to do things more quickly feel or find a way to interact with that new customer who has to use Lotus 123. Or in or speak to that customer who happens to be in, in another country, you know, they’ll use Google Translate or something to people will do things and they’re not perfect, and they’re dead. And they aren’t necessarily industrial, industrialised or scalable in the way that they do them. But when you spot them, and you pick them up, you can do that. And I think that’s probably where the most valuable innovation happens is by understanding that it’s already having and I’m finding ways to encourage you and replicate it rather than stomping it down with the telegraph hammer.

    Matt Ballantine 28:06

    Yeah, and it’s the way in which actually, so much of what goes on in organisations is there to mitigate against these things happening. And the challenge also to be able to go between the transit transitions to be able to go between, just mucking around and tinkering with stuff to be able to turn those into, you know, experiments that can be tested and to see whether there’s a good idea there or not to continue, you know, you get these, I’ve worked in organisations where there have been innovation competitions, where they’ve generated loads of ideas, and then spend, literally years analysing to work out whether these are good ideas as a paper based exercise, when they could have been getting on and trying out some of the things and working out what the next step would be to be able to, to test the idea to going from an idea to

    Unknown Speaker 28:58

    a testable

    Matt Ballantine 28:59

    experiment, which validates or invalidates the strength of that idea. I’m working with a technique at the moment, which is called the riskiest assumption testing, which is you if you’ve got an idea, work out what assumptions you have about that idea. And then work out a test that enables you to test the riskiest of those assumptions. And if you can either find a test for that assumption, or you test it and you find that it fails, you can just move on to the next idea. So I’ve got this great idea for a new product. What I need to do first of all, probably is I’m assuming that my customers want that product? How do I go about testing that? Well, I could cleverly ask some of my customers whether they think it’s a good product idea or not. And then from that I’ve got at least have some sort of validation about whether it’s good to move on or not.

    Chris Weston 29:54

    Yes, and what you’re talking about there and and the kind of replication or standardisation and scalable scalability of innovation. It only works if your culture is good. And you’ve got the right way of thinking about these things. If you do, if you take take my the example of my friends, Wi Fi, and setting up his team to use my fi kind of, or Wi Fi on a phone and excited. It Tim would say don’t worry about that will deliver something for you. So you’re not going to do that, because that’s that’s uncontrolled, but will give you a modified device. And they will then put a brand new policy out saying we absolutely under no circumstances which use your own personal Wi Fi and data, you must use this thing that we’re giving you which will do the same job. And they’ll give you something that just half the job is really slow, and only works in half the places in the country. And essentially, it just makes everything worse is that that’s that’s not what I meant. But now that’s what you’ve got to use. And we’re going to stamp on what you were doing before. So people in that case will actually stop bringing innovation to you because you are you are rubbish at making it work. And that kind of culture, the way that people respond to and try to, in that kind of well meaning parents but rubbish out things going away. That’s the thing that will stifle you innovation, because people will actually hide them away, they won’t allow you to see them, they won’t allow you to see what they’re doing. Because they’re worried that your your break it if you see it.

    Matt Ballantine 31:34

    Yeah, this is why it was always such a nonsense when you’d have people in it rolls talking about how they were going to be both innovative and clamp down on shadow it. It’s

    Unknown Speaker 31:48

    madness.

    Matt Ballantine 31:50

    So there is one alternative to this. And this is I think, actually against for the kind of PR tech and the market positioning kind of frowned upon, because we can’t admit to this. But actually there is a very, very direct model for innovation. That actually is what most ASCO and organisations operate. And that is to be able to do your your your innovation through acquisition. So wait until companies whatever have proven themselves, acquire them, pay a lot for it. But you’ve then taken out any the risk of it being a tough product. I’ll give you a really good example of this. I saw somebody tweeting a few days ago about how r&d spend in the last five years has gone for Twitter, Facebook, Google, Amazon, as I think it was those for the gone from about $15 billion a year to about $54 billion a year. And that’s really interesting, except when you know that that first year, when it was $15 billion. Facebook paid $16.4 billion for WhatsApp. So Facebook in one acquisition spend more than itself and three other competitors, total r&d spend on the acquisition of one company. And I’ll tell you why I bet WhatsApp has had more impact for Facebook than all of the rest of that spending over the rest of that time put together, quite frankly, because it’s done to bear to show how innovative you are, it’s not there to bear to necessarily drive out new products you get. Once you get to a certain size and scale. You stop innovating and you start acquiring

    Chris Weston 33:36

    raw, that’s true. But you have to make sure that your culture doesn’t then stop innovation happening and the company have acquired doesn’t, because you can quite easily say Well, we’ve we bought this company now. And we’re going to take all the good bits from you and all the good bits from us. But the bits you think are good about you aren’t necessarily good.

    Matt Ballantine 33:54

    Well, I don’t know. Because actually maybe a certain point No, that’s exactly what you you want to do, you want to take this company that has scaled and often scaled rapidly. And you want to put it into a steady state. So you do want to stop what it was. And that’s also where the risk is, then it’s about being at it. If I can say if you look at WhatsApp, it hasn’t really evolved a huge amount other than see many behind the scenes to bear to get scale into it. But it kind of does the job. And it’s kind of frozen. Now. You know, converse is, you know, as you know, even with this LinkedIn since Microsoft acquired it about six or so years ago, you know, it’s not really, it doesn’t always feel like it’s about to collapse dramatically. When you get some glitches and stuff anything. The architecture under this is now really showing its age.

    Chris Weston 34:43

    I’ve got a I’ve got a LinkedIn, gripe at the moment because somebody sent me it was internally, actually IDC, somebody shared a job that competitor was hiring for or not. So I clicked on it. And now at the top of my LinkedIn feed every now and again, I’ll start getting these jobs, you might be interested. Alright, so I’ll click Hide this, I don’t want to see it. And it’s like, you won’t see this again. Guess what? I will?

    Matt Ballantine 35:07

    Yeah, now there’s, yeah, there’s a lot of stuff in there. But the point is that, you know, Microsoft again, you know, LinkedIn has just plotted on in its own way. LinkedIn was a fairly mature platform, and it was acquired. I don’t know there’s something in that actually, if organisations more since Hey, we do innovation through acquisition, we’re really good at it. And I think there have been a few in the past. I think WP p, the big global marketing agency got to be the biggest global marketing agency purely through its acquisition route. And it actually was very loose coupling type acquisition in that maybe gave a few shared services, but, you know, had its agencies competing with one another, as the way Sarah like to run it. To this, you know, there’s different models that it’s not just about having a big r&d department. And actually, you know, big r&d departments are notorious for the fact that they come up with great stuff that is never monetized by the organisation for whom it has been, you know, dreamt up, you know, Xerox PARC is a massive example of Absolutely. The the Kodak example of inventing digital photography, and then not really being able to do anything with it. The

    Chris Weston 36:18

    other also a counter examples in Microsoft as well on air in terms of Microsoft, as you say, they bought LinkedIn, they also bought Yammer, which they never done anything with, really. And partly because I think they just thought, Well, why did we buy this, it’s not it’s not like us, and also to sit and Skype, of course, which they took from being a fairly mature but but pretty useful tool. And they’ve managed to wrangle it into being Skype for Business, which is, which is probably the worst thing. Worst, I think, not large scale software product product that I’ve used in quite a long time. And I used to take take WhatsApp for an example, if I get a message on WhatsApp, I’ll get it my phone. And then if I can turn it to my computer, it’s on my computer. If I use Skype for Business, and I go on to a chat, it will say, Oh, this chats happening on another device. And I have to go back and sit at my computer to carry on the chat. Even though I’m signed into my phone on my computer, it is painfully rubbish. And the sooner is dead, the better. And

    Matt Ballantine 37:27

    yeah, it is interesting that Microsoft with Skype, were able to acquire a tech brand that had become a noun to become a verb. And they’ve managed to turn it back into being and

    Unknown Speaker 37:40

    people don’t say I’ll Skype you in the way that they used to

    Chris Weston 37:43

    know that’s very true. They do so FaceTime. Oh, yeah.

    Unknown Speaker 37:48

    Did you see sorry, as a complete aside, the new thing is launched in FaceTime.

    Chris Weston 37:54

    I posted it in the group.

    Unknown Speaker 37:57

    Did you see the scary stuff about it?

    Chris Weston 37:59

    But what the say that you’re looking at the shows you look in the camera? Yeah.

    Unknown Speaker 38:05

    As terrifying.

    Chris Weston 38:06

    I think. I don’t think it’s terrifying. I think it’s the future. I think that if you can get to the point where it’s showing me nodding interest, interestingly, at a video conference call was I’m making a cup of tea. That’s perfect.

    Unknown Speaker 38:21

    Yeah. Anyway, the fakes are everywhere.

    Chris Weston 38:23

    Well, and also is that the oldest got to do is watch a few hundred hours, maybe not even a few hundred as given my total response. Library. Watch, if you want some hours of video of me on conference calls, and probably I wouldn’t even have to be there at all it would the machine learning would just be able to respond in the way that I probably would. to anything that’s going on.

    Matt Ballantine 38:45

    It’s I’m sure that will be the future. That’s a complete other side that

    Chris Weston 38:49

    they’re not then so I had an idea. She’ll tell you my idea. Okay. And then me in a box, right? So it’s been a box

    Unknown Speaker 38:57

    in idea I felt about Christmas.

    Chris Weston 39:00

    Well, that there’s the poignancy, it’s mailbox for when you’re in a box. So ml that watches a video of you. And then when you’re dead, it can pretend to be you.

    Unknown Speaker 39:13

    This is transhumanism

    Chris Weston 39:15

    talk, well I do is a bit macabre. But I thought well, actually, we’re getting to the point where somebody will offer that as a service, they’ll offer to record you a whole bunch of videos of you for a few days, maybe in a few weeks. And if you if you’re wealthy enough, you’re paid to go and sit and go through many, many hours of interviews. And then an avatar of you through a whole bunch of deep learning be able to respond to things, depending on the question you answered, and leave a digital kind of AI version of yourself behind. That’s just horrible. But yeah, it seems to me like the next step is really creepy. I’ve

    Matt Ballantine 39:56

    noticed there’s a chat group about water worked with last year, and I knew reasonably well within my sort of working network. And very sadly, he died a few months ago. And every so often, there’s a few documents that he and I had worked on together in the project that we did last year, where there his comments sitting there in Google Docs. And it’s really creepy. Even just a comment like that left by somebody who you know, isn’t now going to be able to respond to it. So there’s there’s some of this is where we get into those questions about the cultural values of Silicon Valley and what have you, and not really thinking about the broader cultural implications of the way the software works glass, a totally different storey for the moment. So innovation is probably not well understood in terms of what it is, and it’s probably not well supported within large scale organisations. What can organisations do to go about trying to do some, but reduce the risk, try to get more success from it?

    Chris Weston 41:00

    Well, I think it’s really important to to understand what you’re going to do with your innovation when you’ve discovered it. So whether you try and mine it in loads of sessions, where you get to everybody sitting down with coloured paper and whatnot, or whether you go and look for it in terms of your islands of excellence, I think you’ve got to have a process, and you’ve got to have time and effort and space available afterwards. It’s a bit like, it’s a bit like drilling for oil, you know, if you if you went out all that, and you spent all your money drilling for crude oil, and you found crude oil, that’d be fantastic, wouldn’t it but actually, if you’ve put no thought into how you’re going to refine it, you’re just left with a whole bunch of black gunk, that you that is not useful to you, you need to be innovation needs refining and processing and, and, and working. And it isn’t useful in its kind of raw form. And that’s, that’s where a lot of organisations go wrong there. They put all their effort into mining it and haven’t got really any time or effort or money left to refine it.

    Matt Ballantine 41:59

    Yeah, that’s I’ve seen happen in a number of organisations in which I’ve worked over the years. And somehow you go from idea to amazing new products or services in market. And there’s a sort of magic thing that happens in between the nobody things through and

    Chris Weston 42:18

    so I thought nobody knew underpants, there’s ondemand, cultural reference, underpants, Christian Mark profit, that’s kind of the collecting on the peninsula, and why but are they gonna make profit out of it? Okay, we’ll get that the young people will get them.

    Unknown Speaker 42:33

    Yeah, nice be on me.

    Matt Ballantine 42:36

    So you’ve got this challenge about actually, if you’re going to do innovation, how much are you willing to invest in it? And then where do you put the investment, and you need to sort of start to better understand a bit of that. And I guess, also for organisations to be able to think about how. So I actually had a conversation with a client today about something on this very point, which is too often, innovation, funding is justified and pursue business cases that are following the known solution model. So they’ll say, we’re going to invest 50,000 pounds into this blockchain project, because it will deliver us a wonderful new solution to be able to save the world, where actually maybe the framing for how you get the right levels of sort of seed investment in new ideas should be we’re going to invest 50,000 pounds in blockchain to work out whether it’s worth as making further investment in blockchain or not, or when the time might be right. So it’s not quite as easy to justify that unfortunate because the way in which many investment process work, but trying to be able to do it on reducing down liability on future investment, rather than trying to do it on a return on investment on something that’s incredibly shaking unknown.

    Chris Weston 43:51

    Yeah, that’s very true. And I guess it comes back to our conversation earlier about if you’re seem to be investing in this stuff that reduces your risk profile to the markets and then go out well, they’re spending money on this. So that will help people to invest in that company. And of course, you’re you know, you’re mitigating your tax liabilities as well. So it’s all good even if nothing comes with it. I

    Matt Ballantine 44:14

    also think the stuff that’s within Eric Reese’s most recent book startup way, haven’t do some we’re raising a generation which is the audience surveys, startup incubator place. and head back with Alex rockers Lee talks a lot about how, by doing experiments in innovation, what you’re able to do is to better remove some of the uncertainty. So if you’ve got a I don’t know, there’s a 10% chance that blockchain will be your company’s future. What can you do to experiment and innovate to take that probability to there’s a 40 or 50% chance or even I guess there’s a zero percent chance. Either way, you’re starting to better resolve down uncertainty, which is usually stuff that you finance people are interested in, even if it’s not a perfect, there will be a definite return on investment.

    Unknown Speaker 45:09

    So there we go.

    Matt Ballantine 45:11

    If you want to see some of my ramblings about this stuff, I will put a link to the little models that I use to better help clients go through some of the stuff around innovation, and I’m sure we can dig out some of the research that you’ve been looking at recently as well Christopher.

    Chris Weston 45:26

    Indeed.

    Unknown Speaker 45:28

    So that will be on the website at wp 40 podcast.com.

    Chris Weston 45:40

    Thank you for listening and getting all the way through this podcast. You can find us as always on Wb 40 podcast.com and Spotify on a cast on all of those places. And you can see us on Twitter at Wb 40 podcast and on our website at Wb 40 podcast.com. If you can leave us a review because we’d love it.

    Transcribed by https://otter.ai

    47 min
  • (114) Social Listening
    On this week’s show Matt speaks with Jeremy Hollow from Listen & Learn Research about social insight. We also have Yin & Yang, and here’s Chris’s scary Yang…
    0 min
  • (114) Social Listening

    https://dts.podtrac.com/redirect.mp3/wb40podcast.files.wordpress.com/2019/06/episode-114-social-listening.mp3

    On this week’s show Matt speaks with Jeremy Hollow from Listen & Learn Research about social insight. We also have Yin & Yang, and here’s Chris’s scary Yang…

    52 min
  • (113) Fire Safety
    As we pass the two-year anniversary of the Grenfell Disaster, on this week’s show we speak with fire safety campaigner Phil Murphy about fire engineering and the role of tech. You can find Phil on Twitter here: https://twitter.com/manccommunities We also quiz Chris on his book knowledge. It didn’t go well.
    0 min
  • (113) Fire Safety

    https://dts.podtrac.com/redirect.mp3/wb40podcast.files.wordpress.com/2019/06/episode-113-fire-safety.mp3

    As we pass the two-year anniversary of the Grenfell Disaster, on this week’s show we speak with fire safety campaigner Phil Murphy about fire engineering and the role of tech. You can find Phil on Twitter here: https://twitter.com/manccommunities

    We also quiz Chris on his book knowledge. It didn’t go well.

    51 min
  • (112) Role Sharing
    On this week’s show Matt speaks to RoleShare’s Sophie Smallwood about all things job sharing. We also see the welcome return of Internet Yin and Yang. If you really must, Chris’s new favourite spreadsheet can be found here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/19gMMn4Wmw3BNLWMojEy7kgrjnjVB2JlMSwd1s-nYyUc/edit#gid=0
    0 min
  • (112) Role Sharing

    https://dts.podtrac.com/redirect.mp3/wb40podcast.files.wordpress.com/2019/06/episode-112-role-sharing.mp3

    On this week’s show Matt speaks to RoleShare’s Sophie Smallwood about all things job sharing. We also see the welcome return of Internet Yin and Yang. If you really must, Chris’s new favourite spreadsheet can be found here:

    https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/19gMMn4Wmw3BNLWMojEy7kgrjnjVB2JlMSwd1s-nYyUc/edit#gid=0

    56 min
  • (111) Data Driven
    On this week’s show Matt speaks to Caroline Carruthers and Peter Jackson about their new book Data Driven Business Transformation. We’ve got three copies to give away. Just tweet us the answer to the question we set in the show – two books for the first two correct answers, and one to the one we […]
    0 min
  • (111) Data Driven

    https://dts.podtrac.com/redirect.mp3/wb40podcast.files.wordpress.com/2019/06/episode-111-data-driven.mp3

    On this week’s show Matt speaks to Caroline Carruthers and Peter Jackson about their new book Data Driven Business Transformation.

    We’ve got three copies to give away. Just tweet us the answer to the question we set in the show – two books for the first two correct answers, and one to the one we judge the funniest. The decision of Matt and Chris is final.

    Transcript (generated by Otter.ai)

    Matt Ballantine 0:20

    Hello and welcome to Episode 111 of WB-40, the weekly podcast with me Matt Ballantine and Chris Weston

    what it seems like an age since you and I spoke to each other in this online medium that we call Squadcast which is how we record these shows. And that’s because it is it’s a month and we’ve had live shows we’ve had visits to the itdf we’ve had shows where I’ve cobbled it together because you guys occupied we’ve had a week off a month has gone summer’s here we’re leaderless rudderless. Watford had a horrific time at the FA Cup.

    Chris Weston 0:57

    How you know, it seems to have been the top flown by isn’t it and I cannot do remember the last time we did one of these it’s almost become almost an agile the habits which you must get back into pretty rapidly. I’m well, I’m okay. I suffered a bit with it with it with a bad back. So my I’m going to be more impatient and and bad temper than usual tonight. And but other than that, yes, I’m very good. Thank you. I’m a bit of a wrap up of various contracts and projects this week before I go into my new adventure next week. And also, we’ve been doing some you’ve been a holiday and it’s been some work on the podcast pad projects and is some feedback from my to do which I’m charger. Yes, sir. It’s all good, really, about you. You’ve been away.

    Matt Ballantine 1:41

    Yeah, I happen to have been in Italy for the last

    10 days, bit of time in Rome, looking at the ancient ruins, and then down to just outside Sorento to have my the lemons and the enormous insects. Vesuvius ducking out majestically behind ominous clouds and an awful lot of ice cream. So it’s very good. And I also on the flight back today, we’re recording on Sunday. And I saw a what I’m assuming father and two teenage children who’d obviously been to the Spurs Liverpool game in Madrid. And obviously, because there was so much pressure on transport, that they had a convoluted route bag by Rome. And that just made me very grateful that I only had to get from Wembley after being asked to humiliated in a cup final.

    Unknown Speaker 2:39

    That’s a normal journey they doing?

    Chris Weston 2:41

    Yeah, there is a bit of a drug, isn’t it? To go to Spain just to play quite, quite, quite poorly. Nevermind. It’s better to have experienced that kind of thing or not. So I guess,

    Matt Ballantine 2:54

    exactly, and it will probably fit with the general spurs psyche. Hello, Chris king of being a bit more is about football. So that’s good. Anyway, onward. We have on the show, a fascinating interview with Karen Carruthers and Peter Jackson, about a book they’ve written called data driven business transformation. And I went to see them a few weeks ago now to talk about the book and also talk more generally about the challenges of donation organizations. So I think we should probably just get on with him to donate. Let’s go for it.

    Peter Jackson 3:34

    So the story started the first book, which is the Chief Data officers playbook, which was published in November 2017. And Caroline and I were both speaking at a data conference in London, and Caroline been presenting on the first 100 days of being a chief data officer. And I’ve been presenting on delivering the data strategy in the cauldron of bu, and over a cup of coffee, we decided be an awful lot easier to do our jobs, there’s a book on how to look at each answer, why don’t we write the book. So that was really the start. And that was a book that was written from our experiences being CEOs, practicing CEOs, collective experiences, our peers, who were very generous in, in leading in and helping us write the book, but very much for our community. We felt that after the success of that, we wanted to write a wider book for business leaders, again, for them to understand the power, the transformational power of data in their organizations.

    Caroline Carruthers 4:32

    So it really is it’s a data book for business people.

    Matt Ballantine 4:36

    And what you say is the barriers in business, people at the moment to

    Unknown Speaker 4:43

    them being able to adopt

    Matt Ballantine 4:45

    more data centric strategies in their organizations,

    Peter Jackson 4:48

    I think there’s a number of different things that we’ve found as we talking to it. One is, and it’s not just with senior business people, but a lot of people have this fear of data. And we’ve created it, because we’ve used maybe some complex terms, we talk about things in an abstract fashion. And what we’ve done is created this idea that it’s much more complex than it needs to be. Well, actually, if you’re looking at spreadsheets, if you’re searching on Google, if you’re using social media, you are interacting with data. So we need to get back to basics and help people understand that this is just an asset. And there are tools to help them use this and make their lives easier.

    think also that a lot of organizations over the past 20 years have been very focused on people processes and technology. The classic triangle, yeah, and forgotten data. And in fact, no designing business processes or building operating models, without giving a mind to data is going to limit your transformational capability.

    We we’ve I think in some cases, we’ve gone far beyond not seeing the wood for the trees, there’s so much of the world, we don’t value it anymore. And that’s what happens with data, we’ve got such a large volume of it. We’ve we take it for granted.

    Matt Ballantine 6:02

    It’s interesting the the last barriers to

    the collection of

    Peter Jackson 6:10

    data and organizations around the cost of storage and pretty much disappeared

    Matt Ballantine 6:13

    yesterday. And so to an extent, I think it’s possible to say that whilst it’s not free, the the storage of data, the collection of data is not incrementally more expensive, no matter how much of it you do now. And of course, with that comes up quite fundamental problems that if I don’t see a cost associated to something, it’s often difficult to associate a value to it.

    Peter Jackson 6:41

    In our first book, we talk about something called the hoarding principle. So the hoarding principle talks about how what we’ve done is overload our organizations with so much data. So where we’ve become like those poor people live in homes, where they’re not homes anymore, they’re just houses because they have to creep down corridors because they’ve crammed boxes full of junk, or they can’t use their cooker, because the 1920s real magazines that they’ve been collecting, and they can’t sleep in a bed anymore, you know, effectively, that’s what we’ve done. For our organizations, we’ve overloaded them, we’ve created fat around the arteries full of data, so we can’t find the data that helps us do our work. Now, I know whenever I talk about deleting or moving data, all the data scientists out there start and have some kind of panic and tell me I’m wrong. I’m not talking about deleting it, but you move it into the bedrock or garbage, so that you can route through it when it’s useful to you. But you free up the organization. So the organization can work better. I guess

    Matt Ballantine 7:40

    there’s there’s a data industry, I think the thing is, specifically in terms of the software vendors, the cloud vendors for whom actually there is interest in you having completely unmanageable levels of data, because it locks you into their platforms into their licensing agreements and all the rest of it. They they see, you know, their their ambition. Often it’s about just being able to have more and more of this stuff, because it means it’s harder and harder for retirement. Yeah. And do you think actually editing down it is a necessity? I’ve heard the obviously there’s the the danger is the new oil analogy, there’s that this is a corollary to that which is danger is the new nuclear waste, which is the more of it you collect, the higher your risk comes to something horrible happening.

    Caroline Carruthers 8:27

    Well, you had a lovely quote about that one, didn’t you? The smelly fish

    Peter Jackson 8:32

    the data doesn’t age like wine, ages like fish. And there’s no point in keeping something that’s going rotten.

    But I think that

    there is that there is a good purpose for editing down.

    I think maintaining the data that is useful and efficient for your business is a wise thing to do. That’s very good technologies emerging that can seek out redundant data and give you metrics on data is being you what demand is around that data. And then they push you to manage the whole bulk of the data better. Yeah, absolutely.

    Caroline Carruthers 9:07

    And also, I mean, you touched on it earlier about the cost of data. And and a lot of times in the past, we’ve talked about the cost of data and the cost of the storage of the data. But really, that is not the cost of your data, the cost of your data, is every single time somebody has to replicate the process because they can’t find the data from where it’s been done before. Or every single time somebody makes a wrong decision, because they had the wrong data in front of them when the right data existed somewhere else in the organization. So what we’re trying to do is to streamline the process. It’s a bit like the multimodal right place, right time. You have

    Matt Ballantine 9:43

    focuses new book on general managers, rather than sort of data professional we have. Do you think there’s a

    fear amongst senior people and organizations at the moment that this might be you know, with all the news there is around artificial intelligence and the rest is it is there a fear that they will be either found

    out or replaced, or

    Peter Jackson 10:07

    it’s a line I came out with the other day in a presentation I was doing, and it was around. I said, those those organizations that get hold of their data and really leverage their data will survive, they might even succeed. Those that don’t. Good luck to them. Because the disruptors, the competitors, the innovators are building from the basis of data.

    It’s an asset, why would you not use it in the same way that why would you have people that work for you? And not ask them to do things? Why would you have buildings that are assets and not use them? It’s an asset you already have access to? Why would you not use it?

    Matt Ballantine 10:48

    So the first question on that would be for me, because we don’t have the skills. We don’t have to say, people capability to be able to, to

    Unknown Speaker 10:57

    one of the sorts of things that is organization should be trying to be able to, to build to be able to start to answer that question.

    Caroline Carruthers 11:05

    Okay. So for me, data literacy should be a skill that we’re actually pushing out through organizations. And it’s something that I’m a massive artifact advocate for. And I know Peter is as well. And, and for me, data literacy is nothing more than helping people learn how to understand, argue with interpret and tell stories with data. It’s a really simple scale that we should be helping utilize at all different levels of the organization. And the same way that we now put people on training courses for information security, and basic skills like that, through to helping boards understand how they can really get the best from their data. Just because somebody is very good with finance, or incredibly talented work with people doesn’t mean they’ve got some of those basic data skills. So we need to put in place things to help them and the book was one aspect of doing this. But there’s other ways and other modes of learning. We just can’t assume that because somebody reached a certain level, an organization that their bios more says have picked up skills on data.

    Peter Jackson 12:10

    The data literacy is a very, very wide thing. I agree with that in there. But it’s also for people in the organization to understand the value chain of data center organization, that was where data is coming in, and how is adding value to the organization as it passes through. I think there’s a lack of appreciation of that people concentrate on business processes and business outcomes out understanding the value that’s being driven by the data underneath

    it. The other thing as well. And it’s something that we’ve seen more is that human beings are incredibly fascinating people, but what we do is naturally fill in the blanks. So if we read something, it’s natural for us to extrapolate what we think it means, will because sometimes reports are written or dashboards are written in a particular way. We think we know what they’re saying. But we’ve lost the art and some cases of actually challenging it. So an example of you and with a few companies recently, is putting up a dashboard and asking what they think they see. And what they tell me they see isn’t actually what the report tells them, because I don’t use any timescale on the report. But they interpreted that that must happen in a day or that must happen in a month. But then forgetting to ask the questions.

    Matt Ballantine 13:22

    Let’s just pick up again, on that that question about the ability to be able to interpret data and this thing about the skills that have been developed, particularly senior level around reading, effectively, Banshee, yeah.

    You know, price to earnings ratios, and all that kind of stuff. That’s a very different skill set to being able to read data about things that are

    Peter Jackson 13:45

    money isn’t that massively different? And, you know, again, we need, we can’t assume that just because somebody is good at one, they’re really good at the other. So it’s making sure that we create an environment around data that it’s accessible. I mean, I was talking to to see a person recently. And they said, Well, I don’t think this is relevant to me, I don’t deal with data, I just look at spreadsheets. For that, you know, there’s a whole wealth of other things that they should be thinking about within their organizations. That’s not just a number on the bottom of the balance sheet. It’s some data centers, walls and the balance sheets. I mean, understanding patterns in data is really important, which you’ll never necessarily see on a balance sheet and geospatial nature of data and time series of data and behaviors reflected in data

    is so much more than the balance sheet. And I think that’s why it’s important that senior execs understand that there’s value in having this sort of data presented to them alongside the balance sheet, and then being able to interpret

    Matt Ballantine 14:46

    that date when people talk about data and organizations. I think there’s also a

    predominant focus on structured

    quantitative data, obviously winning are starting to see the ability for machines to get a very different set of abilities to be able to process in,

    Peter Jackson 15:07

    which will speculative fashion as

    Matt Ballantine 15:08

    qualitative data, whether that’s, you know, natural language processing, or whether that’s some of the stuff around being an interpret images or whatever else.

    How does that fit within? What’s been in the CDO role? And how does that fit within what senior execs should be

    Peter Jackson 15:27

    thinking about, I think the partner system CDO role is harnessing that data and making that data then accessible to other parts of business. I always say CEOs role as being responsible and accountable for data and making it available to the business to make the decisions out of so in the liquid pyramid data. The next layer of information, as I call it, we call it out collected, curated. contextualize data is the CDO role, allowing the rest of the business to do the information and wisdom piece. extrapolating that information that data out of an image or outside of a voice file, and presenting it in a way to the business, they can then use it is the CDO role. And I think

    that just to label the point a little bit more, it’s all data within an organization. So facial recognition, like said geo spatial, audio, these are all different types of data. And they’re all things that could be useful with an organization, the CDO role is the one of the wonderful things about it is that it cuts across the whole organization, it’s not siloed, because data isn’t siloed. With an organization, if you’re using it right, it does flow right through the whole organization. So the CDO role can’t be limited by the silos. And it does mean that you can then find things that may be more innovative within an organization because you’re putting together disjointed parts that maybe necessarily haven’t fit

    together before. Give me an interesting example, sort of from a legal and general situation or any perhaps pension provider, traditional way to perhaps look at at a pension set of data is on contributions and outflows and, and then start thinking about the the geospatial distribution of those pension scheme holders might reveal new and interesting patterns. And so I think that is somewhere where co brings bring your data scientist brings richness to the data and understanding Actually, we take that data and we plot it to spatially or we give it we combine it with another data set, for example, we might actually get new value out of

    that. And the other thing to kind of bring in mind there as well, is when we talk about data scientists and how the present back to the business, part of what we talked about in the book that was actually creating a common language and part of data literacy is making it accessible and understandable. So one example would be let’s pick on retail, for as an example, you know, having a report back from data scientists on bananas, and understanding every single possible connotation of what you would ever want to know about bananas in a 40 page report, that was a wonderfully colorful dashboards, maybe not the most useful things for a bunch of board members who were trying to make decisions based on what they’ve been given. Having a half page on, if you put bananas in green boxes, you will sell more bananas, which is a hypothesis that you can check, try and do something with can create actual, there’s much more value in actually working together for the common language. That

    Matt Ballantine 18:36

    brings us onto

    purpose. And within your book, you’ve got a model that describes the different facets, it’s almost like an extended something about the seven S model thinking about the different facets, you need to consider within an organization to be able to become more of a data centric organization. And you talk about purpose within there. There’s there’s almost two things that you’ve described there that maybe two sets of purposes that might underpin with an organization monster with data, the one is to be able to create compelling stories to be able to use data to be able to give reason to things that you want to do. And then the second is being able to use data to be able to test hypotheses,

    to be able to validate in iterative processes to be able to see what works and what doesn’t. Yes. And obviously from for, you know, the modern

    Peter Jackson 19:28

    organizations who are

    Matt Ballantine 19:30

    totally data centric, the Googles of this

    Peter Jackson 19:32

    world, the, the Uber’s of this world, that’s very much where they’ve put the focuses

    completely. And they would very much be data centric organizations

    Unknown Speaker 19:41

    and just explore

    Matt Ballantine 19:42

    those two different, those two different things and maybe the different approaches that are needed to be able to deliver on them and the, I guess, where organizations might be in their life cycle as to whether they need to do one other or both.

    Peter Jackson 19:57

    And I think that the boss, right, but if I pick on the one does the storytelling one, first. See that one is about really engaging the hearts and minds of people. And creating using data as a way of driving a movement or driving a change or driving engagement within an organization that really is about encapsulating how you get the people on board through the data. And we often use the phrase that, you know, data drives the digital agenda, it drives the machine learning, but actually people drive data without it. Without understanding the purpose without having them on board without getting whole army marching to the beat of the same drum, you’re gonna really, really struggle. But that’s actually a very creative skill. It’s using a lot of passion, empathy, energy, and bringing all that together to create that story. Whereas when you look at what we’re talking about, to test hypothesis and prove or disprove, looking at the much more logical side, you’re talking about more scientific way of utilizing data in a fashion. That is, I guess, more locked down in a way,

    the storytelling side,

    I think also fits more into some of the data science field, and the explaining of predictive analytics know why this might be happening, why this is happening, what the outcomes of these things may be. And I think the the testing of the hypothesis, and the iterative side, fits very much into what you might call data Ops, or an agile approach to delivery because I do have that constant testing, fail, succeed, move on. And I think that that is something that is used that that using data to validate an agile process, and the route from agile processes, very important use of data.

    We do also have to be very, very careful about what we’re talking about, as I said earlier, you know, human beings are really good at filling in the blank. So we’re using our all the relevant data to make the arguments and not just the bits that we like, yeah, was it Mark Twain? statistics, statistics, and damn lies was the phrase he commanded.

    Matt Ballantine 22:09

    There’s the challenge of confirmation biases. And then

    Unknown Speaker 22:12

    suddenly, the,

    Matt Ballantine 22:14

    you know, the inclination, I interesting, I saw

    Rory Sutherland from Ogilvy speak, yesterday’s got a new book coming out next month. And his, his argument is actually quite counter to some of this stuff, which is to say, actually, we are heuristic and gut based creatures, and is that for a reason, it’s because it’s done. It’s very well for evolution throughout. And that is post rationalization that we do a lot of the time. But that can then lead to problems. If you look at say the Brexit debate in the UK at the moment, what you’ve now got is two entrenched groups, who are just basically picking the numbers on their side to try to logically argue with the other and it gets nowhere, because actually, every time you throw up a logical argument, you created a logical counter argument.

    So there is there’s a balance there about being able to use it to paint the vision, as opposed to try to be able to justify against the counter position, which is that can be quite problematic. It is.

    Peter Jackson 23:14

    But I think the interesting part about it is that if you would address it with the the want to learn, then it doesn’t actually matter. So I agree that in a lot of cases, we’ve used data in the past to justify our gut instinct. And in some cases, there’s nothing wrong with that as large of a learned from it. So if it’s a case of our gut, instinct said, x, the data showed us x, then Whoo hoo, our gut instinct was right, and how can we then maybe make it easier for people to learn to walk or instinct, if our gut instinct said x, but the data says, Why? What was correct? And then feed that back into? Do I need them to adjust my extinct? Or do I need to spend more time working with the data, as long as we treated as part of the learning virtuous circle, it’s all useful.

    Matt Ballantine 24:08

    And again, I guess that’s, that can sometimes be one of those barriers to adoption in the first place. I work for a few years for a marketing agency who focused on big experiential stuff, auto shows and the like. And there was this product about 10 years ago product brought to market which is like a pair of glasses, but it would track I movement in 3d space. So you’ve got these sorts of tools for doing user interface design, this could be able to show what was looked at and what wasn’t in a physical environment. And somebody floated this idea in front of the creatives to say, we could be able to get some

    Unknown Speaker 24:42

    very rich data here about what if

    Matt Ballantine 24:44

    your creative works and what doesn’t. And I can leave it to you to use, the reaction of the creators was to back with, they didn’t want to know, because it was broken what

    Peter Jackson 24:54

    they saw as their

    Matt Ballantine 24:56

    magic. And to an extent, when you see, you know, creative is driven purely by numbers, you can understand why there would be that resistance as well,

    Peter Jackson 25:05

    you can because I mean it like if you look at say car design, for instance, no cars that were designed before computers got involved, are many myriad, very intricate that they’re more like piece of art than cars. Now, when you have computers evolved, so we’re looking at streamlining, we’re looking at the best way, cars are kind of morphing into a very similar type of design. So I can completely understand where they’re talking about. But if I’ll swing back around to purpose, is the purpose of a car to get you from A to B, or is it the purpose to be work of art? Yeah. So by understanding what the full purpose of it is, you can then create a better product output service for the customer and the purpose that you’re trying to achieve. Yeah.

    Unknown Speaker 25:49

    So the last section in your model is around the tools. And what certain level Do you think senior people should be concerning themselves?

    Peter Jackson 25:59

    I think it’s very much that the senior people understand that there are a new breed of data tools that are specific to data to, to lead to transformation and changing business processes. For example, swapping out the Excel spreadsheet for something that is more sustainable and operation and organization, a lot of senior people might not realize there is an alternative that is available to them saying it’s really important that seniors x have their horizons broadened that model, calling out data tuning in that way, actually raises that conversation makes an important part of the conversation.

    Yeah, it’s about not having to focus on the detail. Or as Peter said, it’s about then the horizons being broadened the art of the possible and understanding the brave new world that there is and how useful data can be to them.

    Matt Ballantine 26:48

    And if you were to say, this is a very generalized thing, but you know, you need to ditch your spreadsheets and instead move to what sorts of category of product not necessarily name products,

    Peter Jackson 26:57

    but also, what are the sorts of categories products that you think people should be thinking about would be data management products, how to how to combine and blend data together and analyze data in a product that’s not a spreadsheet. So you can do bigger volumes, you can do it in the cloud, you can collaborate over that, that data analysis and that data engineering.

    Yep, data visualization is tools out there now that basically put what we would have traditionally put this basic data science in the hands of anybody. So that there’s different ways of, and one of the things we talked about, we talked about a lot about there being a problem hiring enough data people to surface the type of needs that organizations have now and in the future. Rather than just trying to churn out a bunch more data scientists quickly. If we actually put the hands of some of those tools in the hands of people who are really good in the finance or ops or the marketing zones, so they can do a lot of the base level stuff themselves, then that frees up the data scientists to the really complex political stuff that organizations want them to do. So understand that, that there’s those kind of tools out there that can leverage the power of data, in a more simple way, I think is incredibly useful.

    It’s also important for senior execs to realize and understand the potential of using the right tools for pressure efficiency. That was freeing up people stop throwing bodies at a problem, that’s a data problem trying to fix a data problem by throwing bodies at it. Let’s throw the wrong tools at it. Yeah, don’t

    build a house with screws and use a hammer.

    Matt Ballantine 28:26

    Right to finish up, then, for regular listeners to the show, you have heard me talking about the priority cards I’ve been working on in a number of fields. Now there’s a new set that about to be released. And I thought it’d be an interesting test of how good these cards are. So we’re just going to pick a few of these at random few minutes left, and just see what you make of the match. If nothing else, what ideas they spurs. So this is the date property set, you’d like to pick the first car,

    Unknown Speaker 28:57

    ladies first can

    Peter Jackson 28:58

    thank you so much. Ended up being the experiment phase. Right? So phase one,

    use data science to gain greater insight into customer behavior and improve customer engagement. Yes, next. No.

    I think that’s an aspiration that lots of organizations want. I think they want to serve their customer better get greater customer engagement, think they want to understand full customer lifecycle value and shared and that kind of thing and data science as a huge amount to offer in that space. The trick behind that, though, is tying up all the sources of data around customer is not only digital interface, now it’s experiential is in store. It’s at the station, it’s in letter magazine. If you can tie up all of those data sources, then you can get into this.

    Yeah, I was gonna say it’s making sure you feed the data science in the right way. And I love the focus on customer because I don’t think we’ve got enough focus on customer and

    customer. But I will we say around customer

    is not only what we would think of this first and leisure reaction is customer a lot of our customers are CEOs are internal customers. Yeah.

    And it’s that understanding their needs is really important. their interaction with actor. Okay,

    our The only other thing I would say is, that’s a brilliant purpose. And I love it. But we have to think about the innovative side of things as well. And sometimes let people play with spending too long. And now I’m going to

    use data science to understand employee engagement,

    Unknown Speaker 30:29

    data science.

    Peter Jackson 30:32

    I think that that is really interesting. We’re seeing a lot of employee engagement surveys. And I think that those surveys and themselves can be combined with other data from other data sources to give you a richness that then would be very applicable for data science. I think a lot of HR teams are very interested, it’s important thing to understand succession planning, or an employee’s key employee engagement. As you have all the support from I think HR is the one that is most obsessed

    Matt Ballantine 31:02

    with the idea of analytics at the moment, they’re not sure whether they’re getting anywhere with it necessarily, but the one for whom is highest on the agenda.

    Peter Jackson 31:10

    I think we’ve seen a lot more interest from those kinds of functions. At

    the moment. I think some of the vendors are pushing that some of the vendors around these employee engagement surveys are realizing there’s an upsell to the service if they supply some of the data science

    input. And it really is a win win, isn’t it? If we actually spend a bit of time and attention looking at what makes work a bit more fun for people, then everybody benefits? Okay,

    not too long and care for one,

    right? See from oops,

    oh, establish a set of core principles for the ethical use of data. Yes, complete entirely. And what we talked about a lot is I mean, I’m a complete data geek, I love all things technology. And then I love when we talk about artificial intelligence machine learning where that could take us in the benefits of the human race, which are just mind bogglingly awesome. However, if we do not build ethical principles, into the data, which is what we will be fueling all those things with, we will be causing ourselves problems in the future. So I’m a massive advocate for actually us taking a little bit of time and attention now, to make sure we build the foundations that we need to create the future that we want.

    Matt Ballantine 32:22

    And that very much is something that has to happen at tops of organizations, absolutely.

    Peter Jackson 32:27

    There has to be that culture of just because we can doesn’t mean we should Yes, very important. And that that is a that’s a buffer zone on top of legislation of things like GDPR. Deliver organization wide education to raise understanding of the importance of data, this goes back to our data literacy, I think that if we’re going to drive real value out of data and real transformational value out of data, this is key.

    Yeah, everybody has to be on board. It isn’t about having 10 data scientists sitting in an ivory tower creating some wonderful dashboards, you, you know, having every single person in your organization, or understanding the part they have to play in treating data as an asset. And using it as a valuable tool to drive forward, your organization is so much more powerful.

    Unknown Speaker 33:19

    So thank you to Caroline’s page, again, for making the time to have that conversation is fascinating stuff.

    Matt Ballantine 33:26

    There is a competition. So exciting.

    Chris Weston 33:30

    Exciting, we’re gonna give something away,

    Matt Ballantine 33:33

    we’re going to give three things away, we’ve got three copies of their book, data driven business transformation, how to disrupt innovate, and stay ahead of the competition published by Wiley, we’ve got three copies of that, to give away. We need to question

    Peter Jackson 33:49

    what do people need to do

    Chris Weston 33:51

    to read those books Matt

    Unknown Speaker 33:52

    what what they need to do is they need to tweet us. So if you’re not on Twitter, you need to get onto Twitter. If you’re not on

    Unknown Speaker 33:59

    Twitter, people,

    Matt Ballantine 34:00

    exactly. And then you need to tweet us at Wb 40. podcast with the answer to this question, to win one of these books, which I’m just looking at the back of it on a hold on, is it another thing? I mean, it’s it’s so valuable that haven’t even put a price on it, which is literally priceless. pages. pages, there are some it’s a very high quality public. There’s about 270 270. Exactly, actually, there we go. So anyway, you need to tweet us at Wb 40 podcast with the answer this question, f code, the godfather of relational databases, what are the stand for? They’ll be two prizes for the correct answers. And there’ll be one prize for the person who can come up with the most amusing answer to that question. So there we go. Anyway, let’s stop being like radio one in the 1970s. And let’s switch back to conversations about management technology, I thought was a really interesting conversation. I think that book is really interesting. And I think the book is really interesting, because it puts down in black and white, all the mechanical things you need to consider if you’re serious about your organization becoming a data centric organization. And I will tell you, now, there’s a lot of stuff you need to do.

    Chris Weston 35:24

    Yeah, these are threads, if you pull on them lead off in lots of different directions on and it’s and it’s, it’s very difficult to make anything happen in a fundamental way, if you really want to change your business, if you don’t follow a lot of these threads through to quite important data points and sources. And I guess even the way that people interpret data or the why, why they provide it, there’s loads of loads of really important things to do.

    Caroline Carruthers 35:53

    And I think the challenge with it, and this is something we talked about in the interview, and I talked about with them as well, off my is what they focus on primarily is the mechanical, the hard stuff. And then there’s a whole bunch of the psychological, which is that actually, humans don’t make decisions on a rational basis a lot of the time, in fact, if ever. And interestingly, hopefully soon, I’m gonna be interviewing Rory Sutherland, who takes an almost polar opposite view to the kind of real accolades a day I don’t think actually that Peter Carolina, a massive cultish? You know, data is the answer to everything, people at all. They’re very pragmatic about it. There are a bunch of people, though, for whom data is everything is the New World, etc, etc, etc. And those people, Rory Sutherland is almost like the antidote to that, because what he says is, people don’t make decisions on a rational basis. We are heuristic based creatures that make decisions on the basis of a bunch of things that evolution has given us. That made perfect sense, but they’re not rational. And therefore, you need to be able to use information amongst a number of other tools to be able to help people make decisions on the basis of how we as humans make decisions. But there’s obviously there’s the answer to this sit somewhere in between.

    Chris Weston 37:22

    Yeah, well, that’s true. I did, I was talking to somebody this week about who was considering a CRM implementation. And you’re right, as an experienced person will take information from a CRM, and they will use it to make decisions about how they’re going to manage their sales force, for example, sales team, not not trying to plug Salesforce as a project. And they will do that because they’ll know the context of that data. And depending on the time in a because sales people that one of the reasons CRM projects fail, salespeople don’t really like putting information to CRM, it’s made they make they make them do it. If I, if I’m selling widgets, and I bump into somebody in the Lyft, at a conference, and happen to get talking to them, and I see their name and their company, and I know that they are a potential customer. But all I do is go Oh, hello, how are you? And I’ve got, like 30 seconds conversation out of it, then I’m probably not going to put that in a CRM because even though some people, some outlets might say, absolutely, it’s got to go in the CRM, because we’ve got a conversation with somebody from a target. As a salesperson, I’m probably not gonna bother, unless, unless I’m in the very severe pressure, it’s coming up towards the end of some sort of period. And then not only would I put it on CRM, I might put 500,000 pounds of the potential sales against it, you know what I mean? Even though the conversation was exactly the same, people react differently, and they use that information in different ways. And then the people that have to interpret that data have to think about that as well. Because you need experienced that to manage the data that comes out in the machine. It’s not just something you can you could take face value. And that’s a that’s a learning, isn’t it, not something you have to fit, you have to realize, when you if you’re going to be a zealot about the fact that the data can drive decisions. You also have to understand that the data is not the data is subjective, often, it is not always often.

    Matt Ballantine 39:18

    Absolutely, there’s two things that springs to mind there. The first is old friends, good heart, and the other one whose name will come back to me in a minute, which are the two social science laws about how if you set numbers as being the target for some sort of change, or some sort of activity, then the meaning of those numbers will, will change, the semantic meaning of the number becomes different. So a sales lead once recorded in the CRM and being tracked against sales lead targets for individuals is no longer actually a sales lead. It’s it’s morphed into this thing that has a different meaning. You see this all the time in particularly in in policy matters within but government does, where things get latched onto as being useful measures of something and then they kind of lose their value quite quickly, because they become totemic in a way that nobody quite understands. So in a uniform police officers is a classic example waiting lists, all these things, they’re meaningless because they’ve become so loaded with meaning because of the fact they’ve been set as targets. The The other thing, though, is actually a conversation I have briefly involved with on Twitter a couple of days ago, which was somebody saying about how Wouldn’t it be great if we captured like all of the experiences of startups so that we never had to make the same mistakes again? And I said, you know, the thing, the only issue with that is that actually, it’s all contextual. So a decision that was made that killed startup a, could be the thing that makes startup be a unicorn, and you will never know. And so this idea, everything is logical and rational, it permeates so deep anything, particularly anything to do with the computing community. Because essence, you know, computing is about turning the world wild, Wooly World that surrounds us into something logical and rational. But we all know the reason why computer systems fail is because they can’t deal with the world, even though even with the artificial intelligence stuff, or so called artificial intelligence that we see at the moment. It doesn’t do very well with the complexity and chaos that is the human world around it.

    Chris Weston 41:37

    That’s right. And as you say, people who think that you can boil down these things to a set of decisions. Think you can model the world mathematically, you can what you can create a model and then say, if we did this, that wrong Last time, we did it right next time, then that and you cannot create a model of the world as you say, it isn’t possible.

    Matt Ballantine 41:54

    So what do we learn from all of that? Well, actually, most organizations are pretty crappy some fundamentals of data, I still am amazed. So few organizations are able to manage corporate data models, or any sort of level of sensible and do it in any way that gives them value. But without that, if you don’t understand what the data means you don’t understand what any of it means. Don’t over inflate the hype. If you want to do stuff with data, they’ve got to be rigorous and it’s been down, I think it’s the other bit isn’t it, you need to have some boring process, he that means that you know that your data is valued and valuable and traceable. And you can understand the provenance of it. And you know, where it comes from, and all of that kind of stuff, which is an awful lot of heavy lifting, to be able to get a new dashboard.

    Chris Weston 42:48

    But it’s all worthwhile, because then you can start to use machine learning. And that’s what’s really important.

    Unknown Speaker 42:53

    Well, there is that anyway, don’t forget, if you want to get a copy of the book, which is well worth read, you need to tweet us at wd 40. You need to answer the question, what does the E f f code stand for? One price the funniest answer two prizes for the rightist answers. Although I think there’s sort of there’s a fairly binary state of rightness, in the answers to that question drops a line.

    Chris Weston 43:20

    So what’s up for you this week Matt,

    Matt Ballantine 43:23

    I have got lots of bits. There is a project around innovation that I do for consulting company that there might be some stuff happening on Monday or Wednesday. There’s some stuff that I’ve got for a consulting firm that I might be doing what no am doing on Tuesday, there’s some stuff for podcast projects is definitely also happening on Tuesday. And then the rest of the we’ll see where it goes.

    Unknown Speaker 43:46

    I think I’m supposed to be meeting up with Mr. Ian Cohen this week as well, which should be great fun.

    Matt Ballantine 43:52

    Although I’m bothered if I can remember where that is? Oh, no, there is this on Thursday as well. So yeah, see what he’s doing. Trying to be able to turn taxes into self automating monsters, or whatever it is that he does at assembly. Now you have got a big week

    Chris Weston 44:09

    ahead. Yes, indeed, in that my my career direction changes is now upon me. And I’m going to get go to inside the belly of the beast, and getting located into that. And so that’s looking looking forward to that should be exciting. I’ve got a fairly busy week lined up and lots of meetings and things like that. So yeah, look forward to be able to talk about that next week.

    Unknown Speaker 44:37

    Do you actually know what it is you’re going to be doing in this new role?

    Chris Weston 44:40

    Let’s come back to that next week. And all.

    Unknown Speaker 44:47

    That sounds good. Hey, keep your Facebook.

    Unknown Speaker 44:50

    Super

    Unknown Speaker 44:50

    well. We will be back again next week. I think we’ve got another interview in the Canada can’t remember who it’s with. But I’m sure it’s gonna be awesome. And I’m trying to line up a few more this week as well. So that’s cool. So I hope it all goes well for you with your your new your new career, your new creative diversion, every game will call it that.

    Chris Weston 45:11

    I’m sure it will much. I’ve got high hopes.

    Matt Ballantine 45:14

    Excellent. And we will see you all listen to you or hear you or whatever it is you do and you’re on the receiving end of the podcast. Next week. Use your time use replace and look forward to that don’t forget you can find us at Wb 40 podcast on Twitter there you can send us your answers the question What was the E f and f code standing for you can win a copy of the book. You can follow us on Instagram bizarrely, and I’m so that one day will work out Snapchat to leave us a review if you’re doing that on a podcast platform because we’d like reviews

    47 min

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