Latest / Cutting Through with Natasha Plowman / Cutting Through with Dr. Carrie Goucher
Transcript
- 0:14Welcome to Cutting Through with Me, Natasha Ploughman.
- 0:17Today I'm joined by doctor Carrie Goucher.
- 0:20Carrie and I crossed paths probably about 10, just over 10
- 0:22years ago on Twitter when she was sharing some really
- 0:25interesting work she was doing with scale ups and start UPS.
- 0:28In the intervening period, she's done so much work for a
- 0:31marketing to her PhD and we'll hear more about that.
- 0:34I'm really looking forward to this conversation.
- 0:36So welcome, Carrie, and give us a little bit of about who you
- 0:40are or like what makes you tick. Well, warm hello.
- 0:44I think the thing that unifies all the different threads of
- 0:47work I've done over the years is around how to move organisations
- 0:53into the 21st century, out of the industrial era, into faster,
- 0:58more agile, more purposeful ways of working.
- 1:02And central to that is adult to adult, very human communication.
- 1:06That's where I started 20 years ago.
- 1:08My business was 20 years old last week.
- 1:11And in the 2000s, I did loads of work with organisations who
- 1:16would literally come to me and say, Carrie, we want you to
- 1:19Google if I company. Well, people don't say that so
- 1:22much anymore, but that's what they wanted to do then.
- 1:26So I did tonnes of work on how to bring your strategy to life
- 1:31for employees, how to communicate in more human ways
- 1:36with your customers and clients, how to introduce new ways of
- 1:40thinking working. So that was really the 2000s in
- 1:44the 20 tens that translated into doing a lot of work, investing
- 1:50in startups and trying to accelerate purpose LED business.
- 1:54And that's how we met all the same principles and of course a
- 1:57very different canvas on which to paint with those those
- 2:04faster, more agile ways of working and also to learn from
- 2:07what startups are doing to bring that back across.
- 2:10And a lot of the work I did was bringing the startup world
- 2:13together with the corporate world.
- 2:15And then that tipped me into a whole world of how we meet and
- 2:21collaborate. So I remember somebody saying to
- 2:22me, if you want to work on our culture and how we communicate
- 2:26our strategy, you have to look at our meetings.
- 2:28They are diabolical. And that was kind of a theme for
- 2:31the next 10 years. And that's really where I find
- 2:35myself today is working on how we meet and collaborate.
- 2:38But I've got some interesting stories to share from throughout
- 2:40that journey. Brilliant.
- 2:42And we will absolutely talk about meetings because I know
- 2:45having worked in big companies and smaller companies, that is a
- 2:48fundamental pain point for everyone.
- 2:50But we are about cutting through and the role communications can
- 2:54play in being a lever to solve business problems.
- 2:58So it would be great to get stuck into kind of some of those
- 3:00examples that you've got around where culture, communications
- 3:05and the way people and organisations work together has
- 3:09been solved. See, there are some really
- 3:12fascinating highlights from like your big projects.
- 3:15I worked on that. I think at the time we brought
- 3:19something quite fresh and different to and we were of
- 3:22course, that completely depends on working with somebody that I
- 3:25always call a magic person. So that's somebody who gets new
- 3:30ways of thinking and working and is open to very, very fresh
- 3:35ideas of how to solve traditional problems.
- 3:40But they are sufficiently credible that they've got the
- 3:43ear of the senior leadership team or the exec or the board or
- 3:47whatever. And they're where that group of
- 3:49people will say, look, Beryl, Sandra, Bob Ahmed, go please,
- 3:57will you go and you go away and solve this.
- 3:59We trust you. And then they come and work with
- 4:02me. So I wonder if how many people
- 4:05on this, listening to this, are themselves magic people, and
- 4:08whether they've ever thought of themselves like that.
- 4:10But if they haven't, I encourage you to cultivate your role as a
- 4:13magic person. Yes, well, maybe describe a
- 4:16little the attributes because I think that's a really nice thing
- 4:18to kind of people to self reflect and also say well, that
- 4:21person's a magic person. That's what I need to work with
- 4:24and all drive change because it is fun.
- 4:26If you're not one, you need one. You need one, yeah.
- 4:28And recognise it in other people if you're not going to be that
- 4:31person. Yeah.
- 4:32So I think they are, they are the perfect hybrid.
- 4:36So they understand and embody enough of the old school world
- 4:43that they can bridge across successfully for the people who
- 4:48hold the money in the pound. So the thing I found throughout
- 4:51my career is this is particularly true for meetings
- 4:53actually, that the people who have the money to solve the
- 4:56problem don't experience it in the same way.
- 4:58For them, it's not a problem. So I find execs are interested
- 5:02in my work on meetings, very interested, but often they
- 5:07struggle to find the place that it fits and they struggle for
- 5:10that, to find the kind of burning platform to unlock the
- 5:14money and the resource and the effort, the sheer effort it
- 5:16takes. But it's all the people who work
- 5:19for them who are on my LinkedIn posts all day everyday telling
- 5:23me about their negative meeting experiences.
- 5:25And when I do a discovery survey, for example, or
- 5:29discovery interviews, I find it it flooded with people who want
- 5:33to talk about this. So there's a big mismatch there.
- 5:35And a magic person bridges between the two.
- 5:39And often they are, they're really curious, they're going to
- 5:44interesting conferences, they're reading interesting things,
- 5:48they're trying things themselves, but they're not the
- 5:52really wild outliers or Mavericks who's I have worked
- 5:57with some people who set up an office that had loads of glitter
- 6:01in it and had one of those like like silver streamer entrances
- 6:08and so on. It was set up in a really
- 6:09traditional organisation, loads of stickers and sweets and that
- 6:12kind of thing. And it was super cool, but it
- 6:16was too far from the organisation.
- 6:18So it it fulfilled its role, but it needed a magic person to to
- 6:22legitimise it and I don't think they quite had that.
- 6:25Probably around the time that we met in the kind of 20 tens,
- 6:28there was a real focus around having these in big companies,
- 6:33having these startup type of forms.
- 6:36So Unilever had one, HSBC kind of did it slightly later around
- 6:40kind of setting up a separate team off site.
- 6:43Yeah, and work within a startup way.
- 6:46And it was almost like the an assumption that this agile way
- 6:51of working or this would suddenly only change legacy
- 6:55businesses by infiltrating them from the outside and from the
- 6:59inside out. And but like you say, those
- 7:02links weren't always made around really understanding what the
- 7:05legacy business didn't delivered and then what disruption they
- 7:10actually really wanted. So have you seen any examples of
- 7:13some big companies who have been able to kind of blend those two
- 7:17areas together? Yeah, I think there are
- 7:19different models for doing it. So I think the model you
- 7:21described where it's really kind of hived off that is that's
- 7:24really designed to isolate a group of people from the
- 7:28unhelpful influences in the main organisation and to allow and
- 7:32often that the purpose of that is less about changing the
- 7:36culture of the original organisation, but developing a
- 7:38product that they need. And, and that was the prevailing
- 7:43logic. And also the feeling was people
- 7:46were very precious about agile. So, you know, there were very
- 7:49derogatory terms like wagile. That was a, that was a slur.
- 7:54Obviously the idea that corporates try to kind of smush
- 7:57together waterfall, IE very traditional kind of gate based
- 8:03innovation, kind of smush it together with having some stand
- 8:07ups and like, oh, here we go, we're doing wagile.
- 8:11And I think I do think thinking about that has changed
- 8:14massively. So, you know, things have
- 8:16matured that kind of thinking, you know, the agile way of
- 8:18working. Firstly, some holes have been
- 8:21poked in the pure it's purest format.
- 8:24And secondly, people are much more aware of what it is and why
- 8:27you would use that or lean startups.
- 8:29It's people are more ready to to assimilate it, but I think,
- 8:35yeah, go ahead. I think the the fundamental with
- 8:38all of this is human behaviour and human actions and how humans
- 8:41work together. I suppose because I do feel as
- 8:45if we've lost we've, we've moved away from a lot of the
- 8:48terminology around how people work and we're actually getting
- 8:52into real structures. And, and I like the way you talk
- 8:56around, you know, industrial era businesses and the culture
- 8:59around industrial area to kind of moving towards more
- 9:02collaboration and knowledge era. Have you seen any great examples
- 9:07of how people have moved through those in the last kind of
- 9:10probably 1010 years? From using all the words and
- 9:14language but not actually doing the kind of different ways of
- 9:17working to now just removing the language and working
- 9:21differently. I I don't think there are many
- 9:24organisations who had an outlier innovation agile like factory
- 9:33who successfully integrated that.
- 9:35I think what I do see are, are organisations where a broad
- 9:40range of concepts from design thinking, agile, systems
- 9:46thinking, flattening of hierarchies, all those concepts
- 9:52have started to become a bit more mainstream and companies
- 9:56are really rethinking their systems processes and so on with
- 10:01very, very varying degrees of success and maturity.
- 10:05But I think it's a ladder that most organisations are now on,
- 10:11whether they're on a kind of high up run or a low down run.
- 10:14And I, I think we've lost this idea that agile is the way to
- 10:18run organisations and make stuff.
- 10:22And it's a question of how do you make organisations agile
- 10:26with a capital AI think that that concept has faded.
- 10:30There's a far broader constellation of principles that
- 10:33are becoming becoming more mainstream.
- 10:36So when I interviewed recently, her her focus has been around
- 10:40digital transformation internally and particularly
- 10:43through the lens of kind of the digital tools that people use
- 10:45internally and IE intranets and all of this.
- 10:49And you know, they have often been a catalyst to unearth the
- 10:53pain points people have around culture and the pain points.
- 10:56But the one of the frustrations she shared was that so much the
- 11:00focus around transformation is around the digital tools rather
- 11:03than the human elements that need to change.
- 11:06And that seems to be the maturity where for some
- 11:09companies is there absolutely recognising that you can't do 1
- 11:13without the other. And how do they then get the
- 11:16right transformation happening as a business to operate and
- 11:19deal with the the disruption that they're saying I think
- 11:22there's? A very, very high degree of
- 11:24variation in ways of working in organisations on on levels of
- 11:29sophistication. So for example, if I do a talk
- 11:33with a range of organisations and I talk about things like the
- 11:38trend towards async, first there'd be a number of people
- 11:43there who would say, yeah, yeah, we're all over that.
- 11:47There'd be a middle ground of people who know exactly what
- 11:49that is and are considering it. And then there'd be quite a big
- 11:52chunk of people, maybe 40% who'd say what is async.
- 11:55So, and I think the tools and the mindset or the habits are in
- 12:01reciprocity with each other. So if you don't have the tools,
- 12:06if you're just using email async, like async isn't a thing.
- 12:12The concept of having a conversation river that you draw
- 12:15from rather than a conversation list which you work your way
- 12:20through, which is what email is really, isn't it?
- 12:22It's like A to do list of individual communications that
- 12:27you need to do. I think that shift is impossible
- 12:30to make without the technology. And I remember it's funny, I
- 12:33consider myself somebody who's a really early user of technology.
- 12:36And yet when I first, and this is way back when I first had a
- 12:41mobile phone in about 199798 text messaging came in, I think
- 12:46in about 1999, two thousand. And I remember my friends using
- 12:50it and I was like, how would you do that?
- 12:52Why would you type word? Why would you type like 10 words
- 12:55in people? I don't get it.
- 12:57And of course, very, very rapidly that became a thing.
- 13:00But you know, and initially it was really problematic texting
- 13:03people because you had to do it with numbers.
- 13:06How do you make words out of numbers, which is what you have
- 13:08to do with a phone keypad? In a way, I was right.
- 13:11Like why would you use numbers to make words when you can just
- 13:14call somebody and say the thing you need to do?
- 13:17But that gave way to rapid texting back and forward.
- 13:22Of course, texting costs money. It costs, you know, up to 20
- 13:25pence per text. So again, why would you do that?
- 13:29And you certainly wouldn't go back and forward, back and
- 13:31forward. That would be absolutely
- 13:32ridiculous. So there is absolutely a degree
- 13:35to which technology enables shifts in mindset.
- 13:40However, most organisations are on teams.
- 13:43Thank you pandemic, for one thing.
- 13:45And that is that we do have fair pretty much parity of platform
- 13:51and most people are on one platform.
- 13:53It's not like we've got 10 different platforms and
- 13:55everybody's on a different one. And now what we're looking at is
- 13:59norms. So for example, I'm often
- 14:02brought into the Teams chat channels for clients I work
- 14:06with, which is a very confusing experience for me trying to kind
- 14:09of philtre between work, you know, like be in different
- 14:11organisations, conversations. But there are some organisations
- 14:15where they'd say like, don't bother emailing me.
- 14:18I just, I barely check them. I barely get any and I barely
- 14:20check them. If you want me, you'll find me
- 14:23on Teams. There are other people who say
- 14:24Teams. Yeah.
- 14:26Well, I look at it once a week. It's just like a complete
- 14:28tsunami. So if you want me, you've got to
- 14:30use email. So we've got quite a divergent
- 14:33in what is the normal place that people expect to be contacted.
- 14:38And all of this, all of this needs developing, all of this
- 14:42needs maturing. So we have we focus a lot on
- 14:44individual productivity. So how can you get your To Do
- 14:47List done better and having a problem at work.
- 14:50Here's a course for you to go away.
- 14:51It's a very western model, send you a way to deal to fix
- 14:56something in your world to help towards the collective cause.
- 14:59But what we need, we haven't done a good job is is focus on
- 15:02collective productivity. So how do we together work more
- 15:06productivity? And that's what my current work
- 15:08is. However, there are some
- 15:11interesting stories from the last sort of 10 or 15 years
- 15:17worth of work that I've done, which I think your listeners
- 15:20might find quite interesting, which is allied to all of this
- 15:23around how do you help organisations shift using using
- 15:28comms, which is my tool and your tool from parent child type of
- 15:34dynamic to adult to adult dynamic.
- 15:38My favourite favourite thing I learned from you as well so.
- 15:42Tell me why? Why is it so interesting?
- 15:45Because I think it was the first time it was articulated that
- 15:51that I then understood my frustration with the world of
- 15:54work, my frustration with either not being treated like an adult
- 15:59or my frustration of seeing myself become the child and
- 16:03knowing that's what I'd become. And knowing that's how I was
- 16:06acting. And if I was acting out or doing
- 16:08things and not being able to articulate it well enough and
- 16:11then change the behaviour that I knew I was more comfortable
- 16:14with, which was around being an adult and dealing and working
- 16:17with adults. So it was, it was it was very
- 16:21much a kind of recognition for me of this is what I need to
- 16:25change and work and to recognise for me to have a happier time at
- 16:28work. And since working with you, and
- 16:32I've really seen that because I've been able to call out
- 16:34either a when I become a child or when other people are acting
- 16:38like a child. And I'm kind of like, no, you're
- 16:40an adult here now. You know, you can either make
- 16:42decisions, you can articulate your boundaries.
- 16:45You can absolutely kind of make, you know, work within a team and
- 16:48make sure that that team has an honest, open, transparent
- 16:51conversation about how we work together.
- 16:53But yeah, I love this. So I'm now gonna shut up and let
- 16:56you kind of explain it to kind of people more broadly.
- 17:00No. No, no.
- 17:01Well, I think, I think it, it touches a nerve for so many
- 17:03people, doesn't it? And it speaks to people in a way
- 17:06that very little else. It speaks to people universally,
- 17:09I have found in a way that very little else does.
- 17:11So very Quick guide to transactional analysis, which is
- 17:13where this comes from. So you may well know it already
- 17:17as Eric Burns work You're OK, I'm OK, often applied to 1 to
- 17:24one relationships, partners in adult children, that kind of
- 17:28thing. Or, you know, things we go to,
- 17:32we have therapeutic interventions to to work on our
- 17:35one to one dynamic with people. And the idea is that there are
- 17:39different modes in which we can interact.
- 17:41So we can interact, we can send messages to people in a parent
- 17:46mode, which is often about telling people what to do or
- 17:52withholding information or trying to kind of control
- 17:55something. And we can respond or act as a
- 17:59child as well, which is either complying or rebelling.
- 18:04And the, of course, the two are in reciprocity.
- 18:06So the more I treat you like a child, the more you'll behave
- 18:11like 1 and the more I feel like, well, if you're going to act
- 18:13like a child, well then I'm going to need to spell this out
- 18:15for you and etcetera, etcetera. And the flip of this is we we
- 18:21are also capable of operating in sending and receiving messages
- 18:26in adult mode. So adult mode is treating other
- 18:30people as a whole. We don't need fixing, sharing
- 18:33more information with people and inviting them to a not trying to
- 18:39control other people, but trying to kind of invite them to a
- 18:41relationship of parity. And usually it's applied to one
- 18:46on one relationships, but it applies very well to
- 18:48organisations as well. And it comes from the industrial
- 18:51era where the best way to make a lot of, you know, mechanical
- 18:54widgets very fast was to tell people what to make sure they
- 18:58followed a process. Now the world is different.
- 19:01Now we create value through bytes, pixels, information,
- 19:06knowledge and we and the world we operate in is more complex.
- 19:12So it's not just a case of, you know, following the steps in
- 19:16your job manual and if you do them correctly then you'll get
- 19:20your bonus at the end of the year.
- 19:21We're handling uncertainty all the time.
- 19:23So we need adult to adult mode. And what organisations find is
- 19:29it's very difficult to cultivate this whilst they're still locked
- 19:32in. This like organisation is the
- 19:34parent and the employees are the child.
- 19:37Yeah. And it's also hierarchy and kind
- 19:39of, and it's not about kind of getting rid of hierarchy
- 19:42necessarily, because that gives you guardrails and boundaries
- 19:45around what people do, but it's about a way of interacting with
- 19:48each other, I suppose. But that would.
- 19:49Change, Absolutely. Yeah.
- 19:51So there's a really nice example.
- 19:53I worked with Mondelez, which, if for anybody who hasn't heard
- 19:57of it, is the kind of smacking bit that spun out of Craft UK
- 20:01and Cabbie Tree Ball Bassett. And took all the brands like
- 20:05Philadelphia and Dairy Milk and so on with it.
- 20:11And so while there were big kind of changes, that's a very, very
- 20:15simple summary of a very big change in how that organisation
- 20:19was structured and managed. And that process took about two
- 20:23years. And during that process, what
- 20:26the leaders basically said to the people is don't, don't do
- 20:31anything, don't change anything. Like Grown Ups are working on
- 20:34the big stuff. We'll come back and tell you
- 20:36when we're ready. And of course, when they were
- 20:37ready and they wanted to then like really spin up these new
- 20:41company structures. People had been in in like child
- 20:45mode for too long. So my job was to come and help
- 20:48them reactivate into adult mode. And so, and the, and the, the
- 20:54kind of words around it at the time were like, this is a $35
- 20:57billion startup. That's what we wanted to, to
- 21:00feel like just really, it was a really nice way of putting it.
- 21:03And we use language like the power of big and small and so
- 21:07on. And if we think about the, the
- 21:10comms element of this, so really my job was a comms job.
- 21:16The way in which you communicate that you want people to behave
- 21:19in adult mode can inadvertently completely subvert the message
- 21:24you're trying to create. So the so really people don't
- 21:28hear those words. OK, everybody, you know, great,
- 21:31let's all add operate as adults now.
- 21:34This is how you do this. I need you to do it by Friday.
- 21:37You know, all of that again, is coming from really from a kind
- 21:40of parent vibe. So I had to find a way with my
- 21:44team at the time to offer people to use an adult to adult boat to
- 21:50do that. And we did this in a number of
- 21:54different ways. But one of the things we did was
- 21:56we took a roadshow around the organisation.
- 22:00We invited people to come and to start to build and structure and
- 22:05scaffold the future. We used a technique called open
- 22:10space technology, which is another lovely rabbit hole that
- 22:13listeners can go down but essentially allow it.
- 22:16It's the basis for Uncon conference.
- 22:18It allows people to structure, to plan sessions that they want
- 22:22to to go to and attend. And we use kind of the flavour
- 22:25of open space technology rather than the pure format.
- 22:29There is a pure format that's well worth looking up.
- 22:32And so we asked people to set up a session within that morning
- 22:38about an issue they thought was really important that they were
- 22:40willing to host a conversation on.
- 22:42And then if they didn't want to host a conversation, they would
- 22:45go round to all the other conversations.
- 22:46So it was a fascinating way to allow people to use the law of
- 22:51two feet. So use your two feet to take you
- 22:54to the place where you can learn and contribute the most and
- 22:55leave when you've finished. So very informal settings.
- 22:58And we gave people a bit of structure about how to like
- 23:02discuss things and how to capture the value of that.
- 23:05And then we put them all, all those at the end of the
- 23:07sessions, we put all those nice little single page outputs up on
- 23:12our version of the Top Gear cool wall, which went from bottom to
- 23:19top. Bottom was how close is it to
- 23:23me? Like is it something I can
- 23:24impact? And top it's somebody you know,
- 23:26this is a job for the CEO left to right.
- 23:29Left was how easy is this? Is it a small thing?
- 23:31And very easy, right, very, very difficult.
- 23:34And if possible, and it was a really nice way to create this
- 23:36lovely visual. And then we all stood around the
- 23:38wall, maybe like 40 of us, and we had one of the most beautiful
- 23:41moments I think I've ever, ever had in any workshop or session
- 23:46I've ever run. We saw this repeated all around
- 23:48the country. So we saw people say, well, all
- 23:51the really important stuff that matters to us is really
- 23:53difficult and only so many people can deal with it.
- 23:56And what, what do you think my temptation was as a facilitator?
- 23:59What would you have wanted to have done?
- 24:02Well, I think what I would have liked to want to have done is
- 24:04kind of take control and say, you know, you need to be
- 24:06responsible and you are the, you know, the guidance of your
- 24:10destiny as well. So it's yeah into this as well.
- 24:13Yeah, and that's what I wanted to do.
- 24:14And what do you think I did? I don't know.
- 24:16I'm not going to get caught in that little rabbit traffic.
- 24:20I really wanted to do that. I wanted to say, oh, well, great
- 24:24teachable moment here, you know, you know, what's the, what's the
- 24:28small thing that you could do, etcetera, etcetera.
- 24:29But I didn't because that was the parent voice coming out and
- 24:33I wanted to give people an experience of being an adult.
- 24:36So I said nothing. I just went because I wanted the
- 24:39session to work and I wanted people to think my session was
- 24:42useful and that they got useful things out of it.
- 24:45But I took a risk and I went and then they then they started to
- 24:50talk to each other. So we're all kind of in a group,
- 24:52quite a big group around this wall.
- 24:54And. And people said, yeah, but you
- 24:57could go and talk to IT about that.
- 24:58And I spoke to this person, Brenda, and she was really
- 25:01helpful when I talked about this.
- 25:02And she says, dot, dot, dot, dot, dot.
- 25:04And I think if you told her that was really important, she passed
- 25:07that up. And then people were like, well,
- 25:10yeah, But you know, nothing really happens here until the
- 25:13CEO says dot, dot, dot. So there's never any money for
- 25:16this. And then someone else said,
- 25:18yeah, but what I think I'm going to do is I think, I think
- 25:21there's a fix I could do for my team and or I've seen this other
- 25:24team do something and they basically kind of coached
- 25:27themselves and then they started moving, moving these one pages
- 25:32and moving them to different places.
- 25:33Like, well, actually that's something that's a bit closer to
- 25:35me or that's something that it's easier than I thought it was.
- 25:39So it didn't change the, IT didn't change the kind of
- 25:43overall picture that the course were some things like, you know,
- 25:47they, they were operating 2 IT platforms and that was causing
- 25:51them a lot of problems, you know, like 2 supplier platforms
- 25:54and somebody needed to integrate those two.
- 25:58But it did massively start to shift their perception.
- 26:02And it was, it's a form of like group inquiry and it was a form
- 26:05of Co coaching with each other. And it all throughout this time,
- 26:08I was just standing there going. And then they kind of basically
- 26:12like closed the session out themselves and said, well, I
- 26:15suppose The thing is when you feel like something's really
- 26:18difficult and it can only be handled by somebody really far
- 26:21away, then what you can do is think, or what can I do in my
- 26:24team? Or is there a simpler way or who
- 26:26could I talk to about it? I was like, yeah, there we go,
- 26:28there we go. So it doesn't always work out
- 26:31like that. But that was such a powerful
- 26:34example of using adults to develop adults.
- 26:37Often the art of facilitation and the art of coordinating,
- 26:42convening people is to just enable the conversations to
- 26:46happen and to connect people to kind of then take and rather
- 26:49than having to solve them. And I think that's a really
- 26:52powerful way of, of just giving people permission to because,
- 26:56and you can see in cultures when they just have never been given
- 27:00real permission because it's been on status, it's been on
- 27:03hierarchy, it's been on who's got the loudest voice to solve
- 27:07problems. Whereas that seems like a really
- 27:09powerful example to to shift that behaviour.
- 27:14And do you think it's something that's continued and snowboard
- 27:16from then? Oh, 100%.
- 27:19So they they say Mondelez then came and spoke at our conference
- 27:22the following year about their experiences since then.
- 27:26And I think of course that is just one stepping stone in a
- 27:30number of stepping stones. It also helped that the CEO at
- 27:34the time did some really radical acts of freedom, say for example
- 27:38he like banned PowerPoint in meetings, which was a really
- 27:43nice weather CEO saying you do not need to spend 5 hours on a
- 27:46Sunday creating 7070 PowerPoint slides for your Monday meeting.
- 27:51You just don't need to do that anymore.
- 27:54So what we need is, is every possible strand for, for it to
- 27:58be modelled, enabled, for freedoms to be granted, for
- 28:01responsibilities to be clarified.
- 28:05There have been plenty of scenarios where I've done
- 28:06something similar and it felt like it didn't work.
- 28:09So for the tape, I'm doing like the air quotes, like it didn't,
- 28:14it didn't land or people couldn't get it in the moment.
- 28:19And, and there were somewhere I felt like, you know what, that
- 28:22just didn't work. I didn't do it right.
- 28:25They weren't ready for it. But what I realised is people
- 28:27work in bursts and what I then had is it was one programme
- 28:33where 10 people were on it and by 10 years later, which was
- 28:37last month, every single person on that programme had come back
- 28:40to me and said that changed my life.
- 28:42Well, that's not that programme felt like a total failure at the
- 28:44time that it wasn't. What I really want from the
- 28:47talking to you and this podcast is to plant that seed that
- 28:51things can be done differently. You can have different
- 28:54conversations at work. Communications can not only
- 28:58bring the outside in, but also kind of really start promoting
- 29:02that adult to adult way of working.
- 29:05So I think there's so much from this that people can hopefully
- 29:07take away and be able to open up a different world of work.
- 29:11I mean, we are being disrupted as an industry as as all
- 29:15industries are at the moment from technology, from external
- 29:17world. But there is ways you can take
- 29:20control of that and kind of communicating in a different way
- 29:23is definitely the starting point for that as well.
- 29:27Thank you so much Carrie for for talking to me.
- 29:30It has been really interesting wide ranging conversation.
- 29:33So thank you again for being on Cutting Through.
- 29:37Thank you for having me. Thank you for listening to
- 29:42Cutting Through with me, Natasha Ploughman and brought to you by
- 29:45Spinning Red. Cutting Through spotlights the
- 29:47people solving business problems.
- 29:50Spinning Red exists to help you from strategy setting to
- 29:53advisory and tactical communications delivery based on
- 29:57what your business needs to say and what your audiences need to
- 30:01hear. We bring commercial acumen,
- 30:03communications practise and business.reputationseemore@spinningred.com
- 30:08And don't forget to like, subscribe and share.
- 30:10Cutting through Season 2 is underway.
- 30:13Get in touch if you would like to take part.