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Mastering Uncertainty with Matt Watkinson · Humanity Working

• 0:08
  SPEAKER_01: In reality, a lot of people think, well, if I don't try, then I can't fail.
• 0:14
  SPEAKER_01: But that's not really true.
• 0:15
  SPEAKER_01: If you try, well, you have to try to succeed.
• 0:18
  SPEAKER_01: If you try and you don't succeed, you'll probably learn something that's really valuable.
• 0:21
  SPEAKER_01: If you don't try, you can't succeed and you don't learn anything, so you've kind of failed by default.
• 0:30
  SPEAKER_02: Hey everyone, welcome to Making Remote Worlock, where each episode we take a realistic look at remote and hybrid works.
• 0:36
  SPEAKER_02: What one looks, what doesn't M want to do about it?
• 0:39
  SPEAKER_02: I'm really excited about today's episode.
• 0:41
  SPEAKER_02: Matt Wilminson is the CEO of methodical their customer experience and strategy consultancy.
• 0:47
  SPEAKER_02: But he's also the author of the 10 principles behind great customer experiences and the grid.
• 0:53
  SPEAKER_02: And both of those are terrific books that I thoroughly recommend.
• 0:56
  SPEAKER_02: Early on in our journey of Billion Minds, we actually interviewed Matt to try and understand more deeply the habits that made him really effective on a day-to-day basis.
• 1:05
  SPEAKER_02: Meant something in learn a little bit more benefit in this episode.
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_02: But the main reason we're talking to today is that Mann has an amazing new book.
• 1:14
  SPEAKER_02: And I mean amazing book.
• 1:15
  SPEAKER_02: It's called Monstering Uncertainty.
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_02: And to be honest, it's one of the more interesting books that I have ever read.
• 1:21
  SPEAKER_02: Our discussion has the many Matt went through in the lead-up to this book.
• 1:25
  SPEAKER_02: How his views on life and business have fundamentally changed, and how learning to embrace uncertainty has even had a positive effect on his unhealth.
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_02: Now you might wonder why we're having this discussion on a public list mainly focused on remote and hybrid woman.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_02: But it's important to remember that look environments are non-structured in such a way that they're loaded with uncertainty.
• 1:46
  SPEAKER_02: And it's insulated will help you discover how to navigate that uncertainty as a leader or as an employee.
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, and I should mention that there's a bit of strong language in this episode.
• 1:57
  SPEAKER_02: We decided to leave it in so that you could hear the conversation as it naturally flowed.
• 2:01
  SPEAKER_02: As ever, all the details of Matt's book are in the show notes.
• 2:05
  SPEAKER_02: Alright, let's get on with the interview with Matt Watkinson.
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_02: One of the things that really struck me when I knew you were tackling this area was that in many ways it almost seemed like a bit of a contradiction in terms of what had gone before.
• 2:20
  SPEAKER_02: So I know that in your prior work, you've really been helping individuals, businesses, organizations create models that help create certainty.
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_02: But here you almost seem to be like leaning into uncertainty.
• 2:38
  SPEAKER_02: Is that a contradiction?
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_02: And if it is, how did you get on this journey?
• 2:44
  SPEAKER_01: Well, that's a really good question.
• 2:46
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, and thank you for opening with that.
• 2:49
  SPEAKER_01: Nothing quite like easing me into the uh dialogue with some small talk.
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_01: So yeah, it's a really good, it's a really good, it's a really good question, and and um I'm glad you've mentioned it.
• 3:00
  SPEAKER_01: So yeah, if if we re rewind the clock, I mean the the three books, each of them I suppose, cap a developmental milestone in my own journey or or or trajectory.
• 3:14
  SPEAKER_01: So if we go back to childhood, and I was heavily influenced by my dad, who's an engineer and designer.
• 3:21
  SPEAKER_01: Um, you know, one time I asked him how because he designs pro audio equipment, I asked like, how do you design loudspeakers?
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_01: And he says, Well, you start with knowing how the ears work.
• 3:31
  SPEAKER_01: You know, his solution as an uh electrical engineer, as an acoustician, and those kinds of things is like you need to understand the base principles of the things you're you're you're working on.
• 3:41
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that's true.
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_01: Um, so my first area of of real study when I got into kind of thinking about design was well, what are the psychological principles that can help help you have a higher hit rate when it comes to designing products or services or customer experiences?
• 3:59
  SPEAKER_01: You know, can you try and be more intentional about ease of use and those kinds of things?
• 4:07
  SPEAKER_01: And so that was, yeah, that was capped by my first book, The 10 Principles Behind Great Customer Experiences, which did pretty much what it says on the tin.
• 4:14
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm really glad with how it's held up, unbelievably, it's kind of gone in the blink of an eye, but it's 10 years old this year.
• 4:19
  SPEAKER_01: So principles was was where I started.
• 4:22
  SPEAKER_01: But you know, what happened when that book came out was that people started hiring me thinking I was some kind of consultant or strategist or guru, which couldn't have been further from the truth.
• 4:34
  SPEAKER_01: I'm a I was a designer, I made stuff.
• 4:37
  SPEAKER_01: You know, I was sketching wireframes in my cubicle when that book came out.
• 4:42
  SPEAKER_01: Um and people would call up saying, Well, we want to do this customer experience program, we want to do this project, we need to improve the customer experience.
• 4:51
  SPEAKER_01: And it became very clear to me fairly early on that people were just saying that and they didn't really have an idea of whether that was the problem or not.
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_01: Like everybody was just working in their own little area of the business and uh working on kind of trying to optimize that locally without any real broader appreciation for the whole.
• 5:10
  SPEAKER_01: And at the same time as that was going on, I'd had this kind of knee surgery, arthroscopy on both my knees that hadn't helped, helped kind of heal me.
• 5:19
  SPEAKER_01: And it was only when I found this therapist who started like looking at the body as a whole, and she always said to me, you know, with body pain, uh the victim screams, not the perpetrator.
• 5:31
  SPEAKER_01: Like typically the problem is somewhere else.
• 5:34
  SPEAKER_01: And I discovered that the problem with my knees was being caused by these muscle imbalances in my glutes and hips and stuff.
• 5:40
  SPEAKER_01: I started to think, well, here's a major problem that we have is that we don't think of the business as a system.
• 5:46
  SPEAKER_01: We're not systems thinkers, you know, in an organization that's where there's division of labor and specialism.
• 5:54
  SPEAKER_01: And that's like not only the cause of a lot of stupid catastrophes where people fix one thing and massively break something else.
• 6:02
  SPEAKER_01: Um, it also compromises your ability to succeed because you're not really working on the I guess uh force multipliers, one of a better term, that can um really have the biggest impact.
• 6:12
  SPEAKER_01: Like there's no point in improving your customer experience if nobody knows you exist, for example.
• 6:17
  SPEAKER_01: Like you need to get more people in, or you know, if you've got a great product and nobody's heard of it, stop improving the product and start directing those, you know.
• 6:25
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, it all makes perfect sense when you think about it.
• 6:27
  SPEAKER_01: So the grid was really born of this desire to help people try and think in systems more, which I I is is massively valuable.
• 6:37
  SPEAKER_01: So, how did I end up writing about uncertainty?
• 6:40
  SPEAKER_01: Well, it came about because with the help of my co-author uh who was a a friend before he was a colleague and and and partner, is a very successful entrepreneur and and and investor.
• 6:57
  SPEAKER_01: So one of the things that became apparent to me when when looking at the grid was that there's 27 individual factors that are listed within these kind of nine areas, and you don't really control many of them.
• 7:14
  SPEAKER_01: You know, that's the that's the problem.
• 7:16
  SPEAKER_01: You don't control many of them.
• 7:18
  SPEAKER_01: Uh you don't control what your rivals do, you don't control, at least in theory, what the regulators do.
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_01: You can set your price, but you can't force your customers to pay it.
• 7:27
  SPEAKER_01: You know, even if you look at the inflation we've seen recently, nobody's really in control of their costs.
• 7:32
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, you can cut costs, but you're not really if you've got to pay market rate for something, you've got to pay market rate for it.
• 7:40
  SPEAKER_01: Like you customers can easily think that your product is too innovative or not innovative enough.
• 7:47
  SPEAKER_01: You know, so part A was realizing, like, oh wow, we don't have a lot of control over these things.
• 7:53
  SPEAKER_01: But also it came up in my research on systems and systems thinking and my study in in that area that you know the whole typically doesn't behave as the sum of the parts.
• 8:04
  SPEAKER_01: When you're dealing with a business where there's a lot of dense interconnections and a lot of uh events that can affect your success, those events are often changing unpredictably.
• 8:16
  SPEAKER_01: Right?
• 8:16
  SPEAKER_01: So you've got a lot of things that are out of your control, and you've got a lot of things that are changing unpredictably.
• 8:25
  SPEAKER_01: And this really taught me a hard lesson pretty late on in the game, that was also being mirrored by my experience entrepreneurially, having moved to a foreign country and tried to launch a business from scratch, you know, having moved to America.
• 8:41
  SPEAKER_01: That oh, this um this El Dorado kind of quest that we're on for certainty, for the master strategy, for you know, or this this underlying belief that if we just have enough data, or if we just are clever enough, or if we just are analytical enough, then we can expunge that element of risk or or or certainty.
• 9:11
  SPEAKER_01: It's just never gonna happen.
• 9:14
  SPEAKER_01: And we need to start embracing that uncertainty and we need to let go of that of that delusion.
• 9:24
  SPEAKER_01: And it's uh it's difficult because you've got well, I mean, first of all, you've got consultants and academics who you know don't really like that that message because you know, let's face it, the the concepts that succeed in business aren't the ones that work the best, they're the ones that can be packaged and sold at scale.
• 9:44
  SPEAKER_01: That's the first thing.
• 9:45
  SPEAKER_01: But the second thing is that your own brain doesn't like it, right?
• 9:49
  SPEAKER_01: Like your own brain, your brain has biases that are screening out the randomness and uncertainty of the of the world, right?
• 9:57
  SPEAKER_01: Like we we habitually kind of confuse hindsight with foresight.
• 10:02
  SPEAKER_01: We habitually find meaning in things where there is no meaning, like we post-rationalize a lot of what goes on.
• 10:10
  SPEAKER_01: We we prefer to think of ourselves as being in control.
• 10:15
  SPEAKER_01: And um, so you know, events are kind of conspiring against us, but we can, because this is exactly what successful entrepreneurs and investors and leaders do, we can develop an alternative approach to business decision making where we accept uncertainty as a fact of life and we twist it to our advantage.
• 10:37
  SPEAKER_01: And we treat business as more of a of a numbers game and we think more probabilistically.
• 10:43
  SPEAKER_01: And a lot of the things that we think of as being aberrations and sideshows, like, oh, that was serendipitous, we realize they're not they're not sideshows, they're not they're the main event, and they can be they can be kind of, I guess, manipulated for want of a better word.
• 11:00
  SPEAKER_01: We can set out to operate in a way that increases the likelihood of serendipitous events and and so on and so forth.
• 11:09
  SPEAKER_01: So I wouldn't say that the concepts from mastering uncertainty contradict the 10 principles lessons or the lessons of principles or the lessons of systems thinking.
• 11:21
  SPEAKER_01: Principles work great within a narrow domain.
• 11:24
  SPEAKER_01: Um, systems work great when you're looking to optimize a whole, but uncertainty was like the missing piece of the puzzle for me.
• 11:32
  SPEAKER_01: They like the kind of deathly hallows of business thinking, I guess.
• 11:35
  SPEAKER_01: Principles, systems, and probabilities.
• 11:38
  SPEAKER_01: And what I found is instead that coming to terms with uncertainty and recognizing the kind of hegemony of chance, or however you want to look at it, actually unlocked the full potential of those other ways of thinking.
• 11:53
  SPEAKER_01: In in a very pragmatic and powerful way.
• 11:56
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, it's it's really interesting.
• 11:58
  SPEAKER_02: So, you know, my background's in in mathematics and statistics, so everything you're saying makes a makes a huge degree of sense to me.
• 12:06
  SPEAKER_02: And and as I as I think about it, I'm almost thinking about physics, actually.
• 12:12
  SPEAKER_02: Uh it's funny with your um you're talking about the conversations that you had with your dad and how that uh and how that stuck with you.
• 12:20
  SPEAKER_02: Because when you when you think about it, if you want a complete picture of the universe, then if then a complete picture of the universe, right, uh, you know, as we know it right now, comes from a combination of of um simple descriptions of how things uh of how things work combined with a highly probabilistic view of how things work at a different level.
• 12:47
  SPEAKER_02: As I'm thinking about this, it's almost like like there might be something more fundamental, there might be a more fundamental truth to what you're saying, even than the realm of the realm of business.
• 12:57
  SPEAKER_01: Part of the problem is, and my friend um Rory Sutherland, who wrote a wonderful book that that kind of went into some of this called How can we points out that in business, unlike in kind of science, I guess one of a better term, the opposite of a good idea can be an even better idea.
• 13:12
  SPEAKER_01: And for every kind of precept in business that's established, there's someone who's succeeded by doing the opposite, you know, pretty much.
• 13:20
  SPEAKER_01: Um even with things like profitability.
• 13:22
  SPEAKER_01: Like we think, well, a business must be profitable.
• 13:24
  SPEAKER_01: Well, Travis Kalanik became a billionaire running a business that lost more money than any startup in history.
• 13:31
  SPEAKER_01: So even principles like that don't necessarily hold true depending on what your uh kind of objective is.
• 13:37
  SPEAKER_01: But I think that we Yeah, we generally don't feel too comfortable with that uh as a as a as a concept because we we like I I I have, you know, people always tell me that we like certainty and we crave certainty and this, that, and the other.
• 13:54
  SPEAKER_01: But I have found, and this is straying a little bit more into the philosophical domain, and I don't want to get too much into it, and there are people who are far better qualified than me to opine on this particular aspect of it, but I actually found accepting uncertainty rather than constantly battling against it or fretting about it, like accepting it as a fact of life was a milestone moment for me that saw a very pronounced drop in my stress levels, anxiety and and and blood pressure and all that kind of stuff.
• 14:28
  SPEAKER_01: I actually found it liberating because this insane kind of internal torment and pressure to make perfect decisions predicated on an erroneous belief that like business was an intellectual uh contest or conquest perhaps, all of that just kind of went went away, if you if you see what I mean.
• 14:57
  SPEAKER_01: Like if you believe if you believe that the future is fundamentally knowable right, then and your strategies or your plans don't work internally that's an indictment of your ability.
• 15:18
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 15:18
  SPEAKER_01: Right?
• 15:20
  SPEAKER_01: If you believe that the world is inherently uncertain, there's an element of chance to everything, unpredictability is is unavoidable, everything is a numbers game, well, if it didn't work out this time, that's just the way that the cookie crumbled.
• 15:34
  SPEAKER_01: That's fucking that's liberating to me.
• 15:38
  SPEAKER_01: I think if if you apply for a job and you don't get it, most people I would say go through this process of hand-wringing, of self-doubt, of questioning their worth or value.
• 15:52
  SPEAKER_01: But if you were to write on a whiteboard all of the factors in that process that were in your control, right?
• 15:59
  SPEAKER_01: Like, okay, you could apply for jobs you're qualified for, you could get professional help polishing your resume and interview technique, you could show up on time, you can research the company, you can ask smart questions, whatever.
• 16:10
  SPEAKER_01: And then you wrote down a list of all the things that aren't in your control, the other candidates, whether they think you're a good cultural fit, chemistry with the interviewer, their exact hiring criteria, whether they think you're under or overqualified, the political backdrop in the company went on and on and on.
• 16:26
  SPEAKER_01: You'd realize that the number of or the weight of factors out of your control massively outweigh the ones in your control.
• 16:33
  SPEAKER_01: Why would you beat yourself up if you didn't get the job?
• 16:35
  SPEAKER_01: Maybe your numbers just didn't come up.
• 16:38
  SPEAKER_01: Maybe it just wasn't your time.
• 16:39
  SPEAKER_01: Like you just got to keep trying.
• 16:40
  SPEAKER_01: Or you've got to think probabilistically, assuming that that's gonna be the case, right?
• 16:45
  SPEAKER_01: Because that applies to everything.
• 16:46
  SPEAKER_01: There's no investor who doesn't make bad investments.
• 16:50
  SPEAKER_01: There's no entrepreneur who doesn't have ideas that don't work.
• 16:53
  SPEAKER_01: There's no salesperson who has a hundred percent sales record.
• 16:57
  SPEAKER_01: And as you get to the top of the game in anything, chance becomes more important.
• 17:02
  SPEAKER_01: Like if you watch a series like Drive to Survive, like this show about Formula One, these guys are all amazing drivers.
• 17:08
  SPEAKER_01: Well, someone can just crash in front of you and it's not your fault, and you're taken out.
• 17:12
  SPEAKER_01: You can have a mechanical failure.
• 17:13
  SPEAKER_01: It's not the driver, it just happened.
• 17:15
  SPEAKER_01: Something, some freak occurrence can happen.
• 17:18
  SPEAKER_01: Everything is probabilistic.
• 17:20
  SPEAKER_01: And if you're going through life with this attitude that in fact it's deterministic and it's on you and it's knowable, then you create a lot of unnecessary pain and stress for yourself.
• 17:32
  SPEAKER_01: And and that that's as much that's as important a part of the journey for me in my personal life, which is really why I wanted to write the book, as as the kind of pragmatic, hands-on business stuff that the book is full of.
• 17:48
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I want to jump into that in a little bit more detail.
• 17:51
  SPEAKER_02: I think it's so interesting because um it kind of reminds me of the of the quote, I don't remember which football manager said it, um, or soccer if we're here in the US.
• 18:02
  SPEAKER_02: But the um I think it actually goes all the way back to Gary Player, the golfer, but that phrase, the more I practice, the luckier I get.
• 18:10
  SPEAKER_02: And I think what's what's interesting about that is that there's like you can take it on the surface, which is which is actually a very almost like there could be a deterministic approach to that, as in forget about luck, it's all about practice.
• 18:25
  SPEAKER_02: But there's actually another view of that as well, which is just to say that if you're practicing a great deal, then you're incre you're increasing the number of chances you have of doing something right.
• 18:38
  SPEAKER_02: That's it.
• 18:39
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah, and I I I think that's the I think that is everything that you say, everything that you that that you talked about here, is really centered around um ultimately developing a set of individual skills, or if it's an organization, having the organization have the set of skills, as it were, to mean that in aggregate, with the you know, millions of opportunities that they will have literally over the course of a day, if there are also a whole bunch of different decisions they're making, that on aggregate, those will lead to a good that will lead to a good result.
• 19:14
  SPEAKER_02: But none of it, none of it says that bad things can't happen.
• 19:18
  SPEAKER_02: And bad things do happen, good things happen.
• 19:22
  SPEAKER_02: And to your point, the you need a bunch of things to go right for things to happen in quotes perfectly.
• 19:29
  SPEAKER_02: You've just bought more tickets to the lottery in a sense, if you do things well.
• 19:33
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I think I I mean I'm not in any way uh denigrating the role of technique and and skill and ability and preparation.
• 19:40
  SPEAKER_01: And you know, I wrote two books on this, on this stuff, like uh on understanding the mechanics of your field and on uh understanding the basic principles of what you're doing and of being able to think in systems and of having a broad and deep knowledge base.
• 19:54
  SPEAKER_01: I'm not saying, oh, you know, it's just completely fucking random, so just you know, that's not what I'm saying at all.
• 20:00
  SPEAKER_01: I'm just saying that we dramatically underestimate how probabilistic things are, how much uncertainty we're subject to in the environment, and we have an entire machine trying to convince us, well, two machines trying to convince us that that's not true, right?
• 20:22
  SPEAKER_01: So, I mean, your brain being one of them, but the other one, like if you have uh two consulting firms both pitching for work, and and one of them shows up with a hundred slide deck with all these complex models and frameworks and graphs and ROI calculations and this kind of stuff, and the other one says, Well, we're not gonna promise you a return on investment because that's bullshit and these calculations are never true.
• 20:49
  SPEAKER_01: Uh so why don't we work on the basis of affordable loss where you figure out how much you'd be prepared to spend that you'd feel comfortable losing if it doesn't work out?
• 20:56
  SPEAKER_01: We'll go from there.
• 20:57
  SPEAKER_01: I think we know who's gonna win the work, yeah.
• 21:00
  SPEAKER_01: But but the irony is that if you look at how the world's foremost entrepreneurs and investors actually work, they use the other way.
• 21:07
  SPEAKER_01: They work the other way, right?
• 21:09
  SPEAKER_01: They use affordable loss and and they build real stuff and they see if it works and they see if people buy it, and they do it in as efficient and like as simplistic and low cost a manner as possible, and they know that show me beats tell me, and they don't fall for this stuff, they run experiments and they try stuff out.
• 21:31
  SPEAKER_01: You know, I mean that so it's it's it's a really interesting situation that we find ourselves in.
• 21:37
  SPEAKER_01: And there's an entire chapter on this in the book, chapter two, actually goes into the history.
• 21:43
  SPEAKER_01: It's it sounds a bit dull when I say it out loud, but it's it's actually very fascinating.
• 21:46
  SPEAKER_01: It goes into the history of management thought and how it all came about at this time when the world was rapidly industrializing, and the universities, particularly in America.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_01: We're thinking, how are we going to cash in on this?
• 22:02
  SPEAKER_01: How are we going to attract people to study?
• 22:05
  SPEAKER_01: How are we going to have an academic study of business?
• 22:08
  SPEAKER_01: Because the world is industrializing.
• 22:10
  SPEAKER_01: How are we going to do that?
• 22:11
  SPEAKER_01: And at the time, the entire mindset of the nation was enthralled with science and technology, mechanical machines.
• 22:20
  SPEAKER_01: So this mechanistic approach to the organization was what they based management education on.
• 22:29
  SPEAKER_01: Based on the ideas of this guy called Frederick Winslow Taylor, who kind of invented this concept called scientific management, which was a complete.
• 22:38
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, it was, as you'll find in the book, I he just kind of made up the case studies.
• 22:44
  SPEAKER_01: They didn't even really work, kind of ironically.
• 22:47
  SPEAKER_01: And everything is just extrapolated from this same fundamental idiom from the kind of late 1800s.
• 22:55
  SPEAKER_01: A never really worked in the first place, and B certainly isn't fit for purpose now.
• 23:02
  SPEAKER_02: So fascinating stuff.
• 23:05
  SPEAKER_02: Let's go into a specific area where I think your work will intersect really well with our work.
• 23:14
  SPEAKER_02: And that's how individuals inside organizations and managers can uh can navigate uncertainty more effectively.
• 23:22
  SPEAKER_02: You've already touched on some of the really interesting aspects of this from a human perspective, right?
• 23:27
  SPEAKER_02: You talked about the fact that we, you know, our brains are not necessarily wired in that way.
• 23:32
  SPEAKER_02: Um the things that we read are full of anecdotal information that persuades us that, you know, X has been successful.
• 23:39
  SPEAKER_02: So if you just do your own thing in this way, then this will be successful, right?
• 23:43
  SPEAKER_02: So uh and and our so our brains are working against us, the information that we're presented with is working against us.
• 23:49
  SPEAKER_02: Um let's think about how, let's talk about how individuals can navigate this ostensibly.
• 23:56
  SPEAKER_02: So I want to start with the background climate.
• 23:58
  SPEAKER_02: Do you think that in our lives, and I'm talking about our jobs, the rest of our lives, do you think they are more uncertain and ambiguous than they used to be?
• 24:09
  SPEAKER_02: Has there been a change over the course of the last, let's say, 100 years or 200 years that has made life more uncertain or ambiguous, or are we just dealing with different kinds of uncertainty and ambiguity ambiguity?
• 24:27
  SPEAKER_01: I would say that so one of the one of the kind of theories when it comes to dynamic systems is that you know we had this uh this theory that was uh first discovered by the mathematician Poincaré, which was that uh when you have an error in in a in a measurement, the more in in and you're like measuring one or two things, the more those things interact, or the more their their path kind of changes, the more those errors are magnified, right?
• 25:07
  SPEAKER_01: And Lorentz discovered the same thing with the weather, which was that minuscule changes, like changing a reading from five decimal places to three decimal places, completely changed the forecast.
• 25:18
  SPEAKER_01: Because when you're dealing with dynamic systems where everything is interconnected, errors, initial errors are magnified.
• 25:24
  SPEAKER_01: It's called sensitivity to initial conditions, right?
• 25:27
  SPEAKER_01: So systems phenomenon, which is why you kind of can't predict the the weather beyond beyond a certain point, right?
• 25:35
  SPEAKER_01: Um, I think when we look at the globalized economy, you're dealing with massively dense interconnections that mean that you know unpredictable or uncertain events are bound to happen and have big impacts.
• 25:50
  SPEAKER_01: Um and we're constantly having like we're but I I don't know if in our day-to-day lives we're actually experiencing more or less uncertainty.
• 26:02
  SPEAKER_01: I just think we're not really aware of the uncertainty that we're experiencing, or we kind of go, that was weird, and then ignore it.
• 26:10
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, we we don't I think it's it's more the cognitive delusions rather than the uncertainty is on the on the increase.
• 26:18
  SPEAKER_01: So, like a lot of people, when I wrote the book, they're like, oh, this is perfect timing because we've had this massively uncertain time with COVID.
• 26:26
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm like, well, what you'll learn from the book is that it's always a massively uncertain time, and that everything's predictable until suddenly it isn't, right?
• 26:36
  SPEAKER_01: And we just don't, we just aren't really tuned into it, we aren't attuned to it.
• 26:40
  SPEAKER_01: So I wouldn't, I I would say maybe macro, like on a systems effect level, there's more potential for for kind of black swan events, or there's more potential for like outlier events to to occur.
• 26:58
  SPEAKER_01: And there's probably more unpredictability when you're part of a massively dense interconnected dynamic system, probably.
• 27:07
  SPEAKER_01: But on a personal level, I'm I'm not one of these kind of hyperventilators who's saying we've never faced more uncertainty.
• 27:15
  SPEAKER_01: I don't I don't believe that to be to be true.
• 27:18
  SPEAKER_01: I I think we're facing we're in circumstances that are inherently uncertain and we just don't acknowledge it.
• 27:26
  SPEAKER_01: I think that's my that's my realization.
• 27:29
  SPEAKER_01: Right?
• 27:30
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I think when I look at it in terms of the the interviews we've done, so from our perspective, the way we look at this is like talking to lots and lots and people about how this feels for want of a better term.
• 27:43
  SPEAKER_02: And one of the things that um that we have definitely noticed is that regardless of what actually has happened at a macro level, because I'm very much um with you on this, right?
• 27:55
  SPEAKER_02: You you only have to go back even, you know, 20, 30 years and find extraordinary, uh, extraordinary events that we could never have predicted and go back a little further than that, and things like the fall of the Berlin Wall, right?
• 28:08
  SPEAKER_02: That were that that felt like it would never, things would never be different until they dramatically and and rapidly were, right?
• 28:16
  SPEAKER_02: These these things have always been uh been within our history.
• 28:21
  SPEAKER_02: But regardless of what's happening at a at a macro level, at an individual level, for the individual, um, it does feel um, if you ask a person, does this feel more uncertain and ambiguous now than it did looking back, then those people generally report that yes, life does feel more uncertain and ambiguous.
• 28:44
  SPEAKER_02: Now that could be a that could be about how we tend to look back at how we tend to reminisce and how we tend to uh and for example, how we tend to sort of build in nostalgia into how we think about things.
• 28:56
  SPEAKER_02: But at the same time, it does say something about the um the way people relate to uncertainty and ambiguity and um and all of these kind of interconnected elements.
• 29:12
  SPEAKER_02: But in addition, which I think is uh which I think is really interesting, is that it seems to come, a piece of it appears to come from just, if you like, the optionality of existence these days.
• 29:24
  SPEAKER_02: Um what I mean by that is that in if you look back 30, 40, 50 years, the sheer number of things that you could be doing in the moment was way, way, way less than what you could be doing in the moment now, right?
• 29:40
  SPEAKER_02: So I could pick up my phone and consume one of you know a trillion applications.
• 29:45
  SPEAKER_02: So I'm probably exaggerating, but I could, but I could, I could, I could, I could spend my time, I could spend the next five minutes, 10 minutes, an hour in whatever way pretty much I wanted to.
• 29:57
  SPEAKER_02: And all of this is available to me.
• 29:59
  SPEAKER_02: And all and and what I choose to do, how I choose to navigate that, is um, is a series of tiny little decisions that I'm uh that I'm making.
• 30:07
  SPEAKER_02: Whereas if you go back even, you know, before the Industrial Revolution, if you want to go back a long way, right?
• 30:12
  SPEAKER_02: I'm waking up, I'm tending to the farm, I'm coming in at a certain time based on, you know, based on certain things, like the weather will impact me, but exactly what I do and when I do it, that's kind of defined for me in terms of in terms of the lifestyle that I have.
• 30:25
  SPEAKER_02: And so in that sense, in that sense, this sort of like the number of different decisions that we could make in a moment, that seems to add to a feeling of uncertainty for a lot for a lot of people.
• 30:38
  SPEAKER_02: Very micro, but it's part of the day-to-day existence of people.
• 30:43
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I mean, there's um I hate to do a podcast interview where I'm trying to promote my book and promote another one, but there's a wonderful book written by a guy, um Oliver Berkman, called Time Management for Me Immortals.
• 30:58
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I think it is, yeah, it's very good.
• 31:00
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and he makes this point that there's all there's the like in our modern world, with particularly with social media and everything, there's always a sense that there might be something better around the corner.
• 31:12
  SPEAKER_01: You know, like I mean, he I think he uses the example of talking about like dating apps, where in theory it's easier to get a date because technology exposes you to poor choice of words there.
• 31:25
  SPEAKER_01: Technology makes you available to uh potentially thousands of people in your local area who might be single and it's all very efficient.
• 31:32
  SPEAKER_01: But the problem is that in doing so, you then like you could find yourself in in his example swiping through a thousand people constantly wondering whether the next person is going to be better or more attractive, you know.
• 31:46
  SPEAKER_01: So like it in the same way that um you know email made communication more efficient than a fax machine, but then you just get a lot more emails than you ever did faxes at the same time to kind of offset it, right?
• 32:02
  SPEAKER_01: So all of this stuff kind of breathes on itself.
• 32:04
  SPEAKER_01: When I'm when I'm talking about uncertainty, though, I'm not really talking about that kind of choice paralysis.
• 32:09
  SPEAKER_01: I'm talking about the need to acknowledge that, and in fact, it's a kind of uplifting message rather than a debilitating message about uncertainty, which is that every moment really is pregnant with with opportunity or can be.
• 32:26
  SPEAKER_01: So, like the the most, all of the most life-changing events in in my life, some of which are kind of detailed in the in the book, had completely inauspicious beginnings, like trivial interactions.
• 32:38
  SPEAKER_01: My entire career got started, for example, because I, when I was 18 years old, I got on a train.
• 32:46
  SPEAKER_01: I'd just finished school, I got on a train from my local station to Oxford, and there was a and I didn't hadn't brought a book or anything with me.
• 32:54
  SPEAKER_01: There's a free newspaper that's on a discarded on the seat opposite me.
• 32:58
  SPEAKER_01: I picked it up and I started flicking through it, and I was looking for a job, and there was a job advertised in there.
• 33:03
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, a sales job.
• 33:05
  SPEAKER_01: It's IT recruitment or something that I'm spectacularly ill-suited to.
• 33:09
  SPEAKER_01: Anyway, I applied for the job and I got it, and I met my first career mentor who told me to stop kind of buffooning around and go to university, and he would kind of and then he gave me my first proper contract job out of university, and he also hooked me up with a digital agency while I was at university to get work experience.
• 33:33
  SPEAKER_01: So I came out of university ready to be a UXUI design contractor and straight into my career, which was the starting point that led me to writing this first book on customer experience principles.
• 33:44
  SPEAKER_01: If I hadn't picked up that newspaper, if I hadn't boarded that train, totally, totally trivial interactions, we wouldn't be talking now, and I wouldn't have written these books.
• 33:56
  SPEAKER_01: There's another great story in there about how the first book came about.
• 33:59
  SPEAKER_01: I was visiting a friend of mine who was back from a tour of duty in Afghanistan.
• 34:05
  SPEAKER_01: This is back in the UK.
• 34:06
  SPEAKER_01: Went into the kitchen of his family home, and his younger brother was there, and he made me a cup of tea, and for some reason we ended up arguing about some obscure psychological theory.
• 34:16
  SPEAKER_01: He's pretty truculent, so am I.
• 34:18
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and I said, Look, John, I'm I know more about this than you because I'm researching it because I want to write a book on customer experience principles.
• 34:26
  SPEAKER_01: And he was like, Oh, that's amazing.
• 34:30
  SPEAKER_01: I'm uh I'm interning at one of London's top literary agents.
• 34:33
  SPEAKER_01: Do you have a proposal?
• 34:35
  SPEAKER_01: I said, No, I don't.
• 34:36
  SPEAKER_01: And he said, Well, you'd better fucking hurry up because I'm only there for another week.
• 34:40
  SPEAKER_01: So I went straight home and I wrote like the crappiest business book proposal you've ever read in your life.
• 34:46
  SPEAKER_01: Like 20,000 words of complete garbage, ill-structured, probably riddled with typos, uh, just a total mess.
• 34:53
  SPEAKER_02: And he's this why is this why you got rejected by so many publishers in Italy?
• 34:58
  SPEAKER_01: Probably.
• 34:59
  SPEAKER_01: He printed it off and he gave it to this guy who I think literally sold the foreign rights to Harry Potter.
• 35:04
  SPEAKER_01: Like who read it and he called me in and he was like, you know, there's some good ideas in here.
• 35:09
  SPEAKER_01: You should work on A B and C and he helped me shape it.
• 35:12
  SPEAKER_01: And he actually, if it wasn't for him, I would not have got the publishing deal with FT for my first book.
• 35:19
  SPEAKER_01: And then he himself represented the grid and mastering uncertainty.
• 35:24
  SPEAKER_01: Like, if I hadn't blurted out my literary ambitions to my maid's kid brother over a cup of tea in their family home in Pangbourne, again, I would not have a career as a writer.
• 35:38
  SPEAKER_01: I wouldn't have met all the amazing people, I wouldn't have read all the background reading, I wouldn't have met Matt Neal, who put us together, I wouldn't be on this podcast, I wouldn't have any books, I wouldn't be living in America.
• 35:50
  SPEAKER_01: God knows what I would be doing.
• 35:51
  SPEAKER_01: But the point is that this serendipity, this like being in the right place at the right time, a lot of it is just being open to the possibility that it might be happening.
• 36:02
  SPEAKER_01: Like this could go anywhere.
• 36:04
  SPEAKER_01: And so the more interactions you have, the more people you meet, the more stuff you try.
• 36:09
  SPEAKER_01: Like back to your original point about the more I practice, the luckier I get, like this serendipity stuff can is like if everybody thinks about how they met their the most important people in their life, their best friend, their business partner, their husband, wife, boyfriend, girlfriend.
• 36:26
  SPEAKER_01: If everybody thinks about how life-changing opportunities came along for them, whether it's how their career got started, whether how they ended up in their current job, whatever it is, and you think about the extraordinary confluence of factors that had to have come together to put you in that place at that time, you realize that it's it's serendipity and that that's what we should be working on.
• 36:46
  SPEAKER_01: Like we should be trying to expand our lux surface area, which is one of the key kind of concepts in the book that uh I heard from a developer called uh Jason Roberts, brilliant turn of phrase, lux surface area.
• 36:57
  SPEAKER_01: But all of this stuff that we think of as just being a sideshow, chance, serendipity, good fortune, probabilities, playing a numbers game, we think of as being kind of aberrations that are on the side of strategy and data and analysis and number crunching and clever matrices and everything.
• 37:19
  SPEAKER_01: Whereas actually it's not.
• 37:21
  SPEAKER_01: It's the main event.
• 37:24
  SPEAKER_02: So there's a lot of clues in there about how to approach this from a mindset perspective.
• 37:30
  SPEAKER_02: And it certainly sounds like in the writing of this book, it's had an impact on your own mindset about this from the perspective of individual employees that sometimes just feel like a cog in a in a larger in a larger wheel.
• 37:46
  SPEAKER_02: Um what do you think what what is the most relevant thing that you think people can do from a mindset perspective as an individual employee that helps them become comfortable in living in this way and or become comfortable with this reality, if you like?
• 38:02
  SPEAKER_01: Well, that is a really difficult question to answer.
• 38:04
  SPEAKER_01: Because when you're talking about an employee, yeah, are you really talking about somebody who's a leader, a manager, a decision maker, uh an executive, or just somebody who's yeah, let's start.
• 38:20
  SPEAKER_02: We'll get on, we'll get on to those uh to those uh to leaders and managers and things.
• 38:25
  SPEAKER_02: I think that's very important too.
• 38:26
  SPEAKER_02: But I think also for for any individuals that are listening to this, in some cases, like this sounds very um uh um sounds very interesting, but they're probably trying to trying to relate this to um practically how they go about approach approaching their life, where they don't necessarily feel very much in control of anything anyway.
• 38:49
  SPEAKER_02: Um, what is it that they how does it impact an individual that is just trying to do their job on a day-to-day basis?
• 38:58
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I think if you're just trying to do your job on a day-to-day basis, then you're um you know, your what you're really looking for is the permanence or the continuation of the status quo.
• 39:12
  unknown: Yeah.
• 39:13
  SPEAKER_01: This book's probably not for you.
• 39:16
  SPEAKER_01: Um because I think the the this book is about how your relationship with uncertainty uh fundamentally like has a profound impact on your ability to fulfill your potential, achieve your ambitions, cross shit off your bucket list that you really want to do, but you won't start, and about confronting uh uncertainty head on.
• 39:46
  SPEAKER_01: So if what you're trying to do is say, I don't want to, I don't, I want to avoid uncertainty at all costs and just stay in my in my lane and stick in my groove and all of that stuff, that's cool.
• 39:56
  SPEAKER_01: That's that's you know, whatever makes you happy, like people gotta be happy, that's that's awesome.
• 40:03
  SPEAKER_01: But this is more like, okay, I I want to do something different.
• 40:07
  SPEAKER_01: I want to to like I think most people have ambitions like of some kind or bucket lists or things that they dream of of doing, right?
• 40:16
  SPEAKER_01: So one of the points I make in the in the book that I think is really had a like there's a whole section there on addressing fear of failure, which is something that I myself have spent years being like crippled by, and it's something that people who have read this in advance or people I've talked about in advance, it's really struck a chord with them.
• 40:36
  SPEAKER_01: Is this very simple concept that you know if you you you can't succeed if you don't try.
• 40:42
  SPEAKER_01: Now, that sounds obvious and trite and kind of like a shitty LinkedIn post.
• 40:47
  SPEAKER_01: But in reality, a lot of people think, well, if I don't try, then I can't fail.
• 40:53
  SPEAKER_01: But that's not really true.
• 40:54
  SPEAKER_01: If you try, well, you have to try to succeed.
• 40:57
  SPEAKER_01: If you try and you don't succeed, you probably learn something that's really valuable.
• 41:00
  SPEAKER_01: If you don't try, you can't succeed and you don't learn anything.
• 41:04
  SPEAKER_01: So you've kind of failed by default, right?
• 41:06
  SPEAKER_01: Now, a lot of people understand that intellectually, but if they don't, that can be a big moment for them realizing that.
• 41:12
  SPEAKER_01: But the second thing to realize, which I think is um like it's a phrase that Chabba uses all the time.
• 41:20
  SPEAKER_01: You create momentum.
• 41:23
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, sorry.
• 41:24
  SPEAKER_01: You you build momentum by building momentum.
• 41:26
  SPEAKER_01: So what we have a habit of doing, let's say we have some big ambition, and it can be in your personal life or your work life, like I've always wanted to um surf a barrel at pipeline or something, or I've always wanted to climb Mount Everest, or I've always like whatever it might be, or I've always wanted to write a book.
• 41:41
  SPEAKER_01: That's what I get asked about all the time for obvious reasons.
• 41:45
  SPEAKER_01: What most people do is that they stare off to the finish line and they try and envisage all of the challenges that they might face, all of the obstacles they'll have to overcome, and all of the actions that they will need to undertake to take them from where they are, point A, to crossing the finish line, point B.
• 42:04
  SPEAKER_01: They're like outcome-driven.
• 42:06
  SPEAKER_01: I want to accomplish the goal.
• 42:08
  SPEAKER_01: Whereas all that's gonna do is mean that you never get off the start line because either you're overwhelmed, you're exhausted before you've even started, or you're too intimidated by the task.
• 42:16
  SPEAKER_01: What you need to do is say, what's the one next thing I should do?
• 42:19
  SPEAKER_01: Like Google karate lessons.
• 42:22
  SPEAKER_01: Not if you want to climb Everest, but you know what I mean.
• 42:24
  SPEAKER_01: Like, yeah, what's the one next thing that I can do?
• 42:27
  SPEAKER_01: And then you take that one step and it's invariably something very easy.
• 42:31
  SPEAKER_01: And then you take the second one, and then you take the third one, and like your boulder starts to roll, and then your momentum allows you to steamroll over the over the uh obstacles and and things that you face, right?
• 42:45
  SPEAKER_01: So, like one thing that I think applies to everybody, but particularly to people who who struggle with a fear of failure or who have big ambitions but can't get off the start line, just a lot of people.
• 42:59
  SPEAKER_01: I use the term stiction in the books, like static friction, that initial inertia you've got to overcome.
• 43:05
  SPEAKER_01: Just what's the one next thing?
• 43:08
  SPEAKER_01: It's gonna be low cost, it's gonna be low outlay, it's gonna be low difficulty.
• 43:12
  SPEAKER_01: Like, just do it.
• 43:13
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I built my first bike this way.
• 43:15
  SPEAKER_01: I know you want to talk about bikes a little bit later, but I never built a motorcycle, I had an IKEA toolkit.
• 43:20
  SPEAKER_01: That's all I had.
• 43:21
  SPEAKER_01: I was just like, what's the one next step?
• 43:23
  SPEAKER_01: What's the next step after that?
• 43:25
  SPEAKER_01: And it just happened.
• 43:27
  SPEAKER_01: You know, like people ask me, how do you write a book?
• 43:29
  SPEAKER_01: And of course there are technical things about writing a book, and there's really good advice that can solve you a lot of heartache, but ultimately it's about and this kind of uh dovetails with some of the things that um are a bit more more relevant to to your line of work.
• 43:43
  SPEAKER_01: Like if you have a routine and you're making daily progress, then you're gonna get there, you know.
• 43:47
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 43:48
  SPEAKER_02: You know, it's funny.
• 43:50
  SPEAKER_02: I I I know you said that that this book isn't for you if you fit into the category of somebody you want to get through today.
• 43:56
  SPEAKER_02: I I would I think I would actually argue with the argue with the point.
• 43:59
  SPEAKER_02: Um Because I think you've I think you almost made it yourself, which is that many of the people that are just basically trying to get through the day, that are trying to um to um to basically minimize the amount of of uncertainty around them.
• 44:18
  SPEAKER_02: As they can become more comfortable with the concept of uncertainty, then that gives them potentially the opportunity to see their see their world in a very different way, right?
• 44:27
  SPEAKER_02: And to actually to actually get themselves out of something that feels like they're stuck into something where potentially that they're not.
• 44:35
  SPEAKER_01: So there's one more thing, point that I'd like to make about that, that is profoundly important and probably one of the most important things in in the book, which is that most people try and identify what they want their upside to be and then do what they can to try and lock it in.
• 44:51
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 44:51
  SPEAKER_01: So I want to climb Everest or I want to meet my life partner or you know, whatever it might be.
• 44:58
  SPEAKER_01: A far smarter way of approaching things is to say, what's my downside?
• 45:03
  SPEAKER_01: And then limit your downside and then go from there.
• 45:06
  SPEAKER_01: Like in any given situation where you're worried about what the outcome might be, you're worried about uncertainty, you're worried about fear of failure, and you have a possible course of action, the question to ask yourself is not, is this guaranteed?
• 45:20
  SPEAKER_01: It's what's my downside?
• 45:22
  SPEAKER_01: If the downside is somebody might say no, or I might look a bit silly, or any one of those largely trivial things.
• 45:33
  SPEAKER_01: If there's no major downside, then just get on with it.
• 45:36
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 45:36
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and that that that was, I mean, all of these lessons I don't I don't put these ideas forth as some kind of great pedagogue or or or guru who was blessed with incredible foresight about these things.
• 45:52
  SPEAKER_01: I I am sharing these things as somebody who has suffered with all of these things myself and has learned through painful first-hand experience and the help of an amazing set of mentors and advisors that this is just the way that it has to be.
• 46:08
  SPEAKER_01: And I ended up writing the book.
• 46:10
  SPEAKER_01: I had no intention of writing writing a third book.
• 46:12
  SPEAKER_01: I'd just become a dad.
• 46:14
  SPEAKER_01: Like life was a bit of a mess and a challenge, but I thought this is such so important that people know this stuff that it's got to be written, you know, and then I had to kind of get on with it.
• 46:25
  SPEAKER_01: But yeah, that's where I'm coming from.
• 46:27
  SPEAKER_02: All right.
• 46:28
  SPEAKER_02: So we talked a little bit about um the individuals inside organizations.
• 46:32
  SPEAKER_02: And as you mentioned, um, it's it's slightly different from managers and leaders and things like that.
• 46:38
  SPEAKER_02: So let's let's let's briefly talk about that.
• 46:40
  SPEAKER_02: Um one of the things that we've seen in working with um with individuals and in in managers, there's a lot of um of connection, if you like, between this whole idea as to how you manage uncertainty and people's resilience.
• 46:55
  SPEAKER_02: In other words, their ability by definition, in a sense, resilience is our ability to be able to move forward um in an uncertain, ambiguous world.
• 47:05
  SPEAKER_02: I think I made up that definition, but it's approximately right.
• 47:08
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and so when you think about it from the perspective of a manager, it's a really interesting or a leader inside an organization.
• 47:19
  SPEAKER_02: All of the stuff becomes very interesting because you've got the managed the uncertainty of the business environment in which you sit, all of the external factors that can affect your business that you've already been talking that you've been talking about.
• 47:34
  SPEAKER_02: Um and then, of course, if particularly if people management is in your role, you've also got all of the uncertainty in the work lives and actually the broader lives now that many of us are working in hybrid worlds and our work life and our non-work life are kind of merging together.
• 47:50
  SPEAKER_02: You're dealing with all of that and potentially all of that in one go.
• 47:54
  SPEAKER_02: Um and so I'm curious what you've seen in terms of um how leaders and managers kind of approach this in a way that benefits them, but also benefits their teams and their organizations.
• 48:11
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I mean, there's an entire chapter on this in the book.
• 48:14
  SPEAKER_01: So thank you for mentioning that.
• 48:15
  SPEAKER_01: There's an entire chapter on implications of leadership uh for leadership and management if you're to try and embrace uncertainty in your business.
• 48:22
  SPEAKER_01: And ultimately you're talking about culture there as well, which is a topic that I've always desperately attempted to steer clear of, but but I I kind of couldn't avoid in in this.
• 48:33
  SPEAKER_01: So a couple of big things.
• 48:36
  SPEAKER_01: First is is um this concept um of psychological safety.
• 48:41
  SPEAKER_01: So you know, if people feel like they're gonna be shamed for for for things not going well, if people feel like if they have big ideas, they're gonna be laughed at.
• 48:58
  SPEAKER_01: If people feel like you know, taking risks sounds great on paper, but if those risks don't work out, you're punished for it.
• 49:09
  SPEAKER_01: What's gonna happen?
• 49:12
  SPEAKER_01: You're just not gonna do it.
• 49:15
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 49:15
  SPEAKER_01: So, you know, the the obvious starting point is to try and create, and this is d detailed in the book, like more pragmatic advice on this, to try and create an a psychologically safe environment where everybody feels like they can contribute and where they feel like they can actively question and challenge the way that things are done in the in the pursuit of of a better outcome.
• 49:40
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 49:40
  SPEAKER_01: And that it's okay, it's it's kind of in when you're dealing with an uncertain world, failure might just might just happen.
• 49:52
  SPEAKER_01: So in fact, we found we did we did a project recent recently where rather than the classic kind of business approach of what's the return on investment for this project, we did exactly that affordable loss approach, right?
• 50:08
  SPEAKER_01: Which was we said, we don't know whether this idea is going to work.
• 50:11
  SPEAKER_01: We think it's cool, we're excited about it, everyone's excited about it, but let's not count our chickens before they've hatched.
• 50:18
  SPEAKER_01: How much are you prepared to spend on a on a rough prototype?
• 50:22
  SPEAKER_01: So, you know, we got a little bit of budget from our client and we built this prototype and we put it out to test in some stores, pardon me.
• 50:32
  SPEAKER_01: And um it worked really well.
• 50:34
  SPEAKER_01: But what was really interesting was that we learned a lot of things that didn't work well, and we also got a lot of potential to improve things, and it didn't quite work in the way that we anticipated, and we ended up going down in a slightly different trajectory, right?
• 50:46
  SPEAKER_01: But what was interesting was psychologically, as soon as you're saying we're doing this affordable loss approach, people are more curious, they're less stressed, they're more happy to report what they've learned, they're more happy to report things that invalidate initial hypotheses, and they're more happy to adapt the plan because you're starting from the point of view of our plan might be nonsense.
• 51:08
  SPEAKER_01: And we feel safe in that.
• 51:10
  SPEAKER_01: Whereas if you go into it with, well, we've commissioned a big agency and we've done a 400-slide deck on this and we've strategized and analyzed it to death, and here's what the ROI is going to be.
• 51:21
  SPEAKER_01: If you don't then hit that, all of a sudden you're like, oh shit, now I like, now we look, now we might look a bit silly, now we might have to cover it up, now we're getting into news improvement and we're not really being entirely honest what's going on, and we're kind of not really communicating upwards the reality on the ground.
• 51:39
  SPEAKER_01: Everybody's seen that all the time.
• 51:41
  SPEAKER_01: Like, so this affordable loss approach to innovation is way more powerful and way less stressful, first of all.
• 51:48
  SPEAKER_01: And second, like this psychological safety stuff is is huge.
• 51:52
  SPEAKER_01: Another bit that's huge is um your error culture, right?
• 51:56
  SPEAKER_01: So uh Gerd Gickerens is the guy who's always talking about this.
• 51:59
  SPEAKER_01: You've got positive error cultures like you've got in aviation, where if you make a mistake, you learn from it, and negative error cultures where if you make a mistake, you try and make sure that nobody hears about it, and then you cover your ass as much as you can, right?
• 52:10
  SPEAKER_01: Like you have in in healthcare.
• 52:13
  SPEAKER_01: Like Ray Dalio in his book Principles makes uh explains this uh an annoyingly well, where he says, try to create an organization where it's perfectly acceptable to make mistakes and entirely unacceptable not to learn from them.
• 52:28
  SPEAKER_01: I'm paraphrasing slightly there.
• 52:31
  SPEAKER_01: But you know, if you're dealing with uncertainty, which everybody is, mistakes are going to happen.
• 52:36
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, we're all error prone, outcomes are uncertain, plans have got to change, like as they say in the army, the first casualty of war is the plan.
• 52:44
  SPEAKER_01: But what we often see in big companies is well, we've started the project, so we'll finish it.
• 52:49
  SPEAKER_01: We've got the vision, so we'll see the vision through.
• 52:51
  SPEAKER_01: Like there's this absolute resistance to changing your mind or admitting that things aren't correct, and it and it's a cultural factor.
• 53:01
  SPEAKER_01: So the error culture, something that has to start from the top, is is a big one, and that's goes into incentives and everything else.
• 53:08
  SPEAKER_01: And the third one, honestly, is diversity, uh, cognitive and demographic diversity.
• 53:15
  SPEAKER_01: Because the more diversity you have, the more mental models people have, the more lived experience people have, the more approaches people have, the more like the bigger the cognitive toolkit, the more the bigger your toolkit is, the more problems you can solve and things that you can fix and ideas you can capitalize on.
• 53:37
  SPEAKER_01: So, you know, there is a real and proven benefit to cognitive and demographic diversity because the two go hand in hand.
• 53:45
  SPEAKER_01: And so that's another thing.
• 53:46
  SPEAKER_01: Like, if if all of your experts are very, very clever and they all approach the problem in exactly the same way, the problem is they all get stuck in the same place.
• 53:56
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 53:56
  SPEAKER_01: Right?
• 53:57
  SPEAKER_01: Like that's why Alan Kay said a change in perspective is worth 80 IQ points.
• 54:03
  SPEAKER_01: You know, because if you can approach things in an entirely different way, then you might come up with solutions people had never considered or innovations that just weren't on anybody's roadmap.
• 54:12
  SPEAKER_01: So yeah, uh psychological safety, agriculture, and diversity are three absolutely huge things that leaders and managers should be looking at.
• 54:20
  SPEAKER_02: Thank you, Matt.
• 54:21
  SPEAKER_02: Um, there's just one question I've got left for you.
• 54:25
  SPEAKER_02: Um so many of our listeners know by now, the reset the research that we've done on remote and hybrid work environments is drawn from people who've been sustainably effective for years in what we refer to as unstructured, ambiguous environments.
• 54:40
  SPEAKER_02: Now, I don't I don't know if you remember this, but you were actually one of our interviewees.
• 54:44
  SPEAKER_02: So um, and part of the reason why we wanted to talk to you at that point was that you know, you'd you built a good company, you'd had a, you'd written at that point two very successful books, and you'd also kind of like cultivated some important interests at the same time.
• 55:00
  SPEAKER_02: And one of the things that that struck me from that interview, and I went back and looked at the notes of it from uh just uh just a few days ago, was at that time you spoke about almost these different aspects of your life as almost like part of that bigger picture of the of the whole, and how, for example, having an external interest like your uh like your motorcycle maintenance was actually helping you be more effective and more efficient at the and in quotes the work side of it.
• 55:29
  SPEAKER_02: So um I wonder if you could explain a little bit about that, explain how uh to our audience how these sort of different aspects of your life have worked together in order to help you be more effective at each of those individual aspects.
• 55:44
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, well, I mean, let me start with the caveat that I I do believe that everybody's brain has a particular kind of grain to it, right?
• 55:54
  SPEAKER_01: So what works for me like I have a friend who does his best work from 11 p.m.
• 56:00
  SPEAKER_01: till 4 a.m.
• 56:02
  SPEAKER_01: You know, and uh lives a lifestyle completely different to mine, but he's his output is prodigious, and it he is capable of solving problems that I I wouldn't even know where to begin.
• 56:15
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, he's a kind of gifted engineering type.
• 56:18
  SPEAKER_01: So like the first thing I would say is you've got to find what works for you, yeah.
• 56:22
  SPEAKER_01: And and I think that that's a really important point because we have to acknowledge that we're all different, and our optimum working life or work habits or schedule is gonna be gonna be different, right?
• 56:37
  SPEAKER_01: And I for and and I I'd say that because at times I have felt guilty that I don't work more than I do.
• 56:45
  SPEAKER_01: But I yeah, it's funny.
• 56:48
  SPEAKER_01: I was thinking about this in the gym today.
• 56:51
  SPEAKER_01: I had to do two and a half minutes on one of these Nordic skiing machines.
• 56:58
  SPEAKER_01: I was like, wow, time is elastic.
• 57:00
  SPEAKER_01: Like two and a half minutes feels like an eternity on that thing.
• 57:03
  SPEAKER_01: And if I'm stood around the water cooler, it's gone in an instant.
• 57:06
  SPEAKER_01: Like, it's not really the time, is it?
• 57:08
  SPEAKER_01: It's what you put into the time that that matters.
• 57:11
  SPEAKER_01: And and I have been very, I've just kind of tried to I've been in California way too long.
• 57:17
  SPEAKER_01: I've just tried to know myself and what and and and what works for me and and what helps me.
• 57:23
  SPEAKER_01: I find that my brain works best in the morning, and if I don't win in the morning, I ain't gonna win at all.
• 57:31
  SPEAKER_01: I also find I also learnt through writing that I can write a thousand good words a day.
• 57:36
  SPEAKER_01: And if those thousand words haven't happened by noon, they're not going to happen.
• 57:40
  SPEAKER_01: So I should stop.
• 57:41
  SPEAKER_01: Uh I think like one of the key things for anyone who's in a creative line of work or a deep immersive kind of line of work, programming maybe, is you've got to establish your cadence.
• 57:53
  SPEAKER_01: You've got to you've got to have a work rate that doesn't feel like a sequence of sprints, but that feels like an amble that you could sustain forever.
• 58:03
  SPEAKER_01: So, like cadence is a is a huge thing.
• 58:06
  SPEAKER_01: Timing is a huge thing because I think we're good at different things at different times of day.
• 58:12
  SPEAKER_01: I know at least I am.
• 58:14
  SPEAKER_01: And also for me, it helps to um mix up activities, right?
• 58:22
  SPEAKER_01: Because I find that like, and and this is a common thing, this is is not news.
• 58:26
  SPEAKER_01: Like a lot of people like, you know, I I have a lot of good ideas when I'm breaking the leaves or washing the dishes or I'm in the shower.
• 58:32
  SPEAKER_01: Like, so I'm trying to mix activities that are deep.
• 58:37
  SPEAKER_01: Uh I'm trying to time box them so that they're occurring at the times I'm most effective.
• 58:43
  SPEAKER_01: I'm trying to schedule my day so that I make time for everything that I need to do.
• 58:48
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm, as you mentioned, I'm proactively planning into the day thing, other things outside of work that make my life meaningful so that I don't get to my deathbed and think shoulda, woulda, coulda, or binge on things like I'd rather sustain them.
• 59:05
  SPEAKER_01: So typically I work by seven till one, and that's focused work.
• 59:17
  SPEAKER_01: That's not kind of bullshitting around and checking Facebook, which I don't have.
• 59:21
  SPEAKER_01: That's like focused work.
• 59:23
  SPEAKER_01: Then lunch and a walk or whatever, I do gym and everything before work.
• 59:27
  SPEAKER_01: Two to four typically is motorbikes or hobbies.
• 59:33
  SPEAKER_01: Four till seven, seven thirty is with my kid until bedtime.
• 59:39
  SPEAKER_01: And then evening is just kind of unwinding and and relaxing, or maybe going back to one of those other activities if I get a second wind.
• 59:47
  SPEAKER_01: And what's funny is that when I say it like that, it doesn't sound like I spend a lot of time working, but you get far more done in a focused period of like whatever it is, six hours or five hours sometimes than you do in a working day if you're constantly being interrupted by meetings and chit-chat and slack messages and everything else.
• 1:00:06
  SPEAKER_01: Like that's not me.
• 1:00:07
  SPEAKER_01: I'm when I'm at working, I'm I'm working a hundred percent, you know.
• 1:00:11
  SPEAKER_01: And you can write, you know, if you think about it, if you're if you can write a thousand good words in a morning, there ain't nothing wrong with that.
• 1:00:18
  SPEAKER_01: You've you've written an 80,000-word book in in um I met isn't too good, but like four months.
• 1:00:24
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I mean it obviously takes you longer than that, but you know what I mean?
• 1:00:28
  SPEAKER_01: Like daily, daily progress is is awesome.
• 1:00:32
  SPEAKER_01: And sustainable work rates are awesome.
• 1:00:35
  SPEAKER_01: And finding out what works for you is is definitely awesome.
• 1:00:38
  SPEAKER_01: And I would kind of encourage everyone to try and try and figure out what that looks like for them and not feel bad if it doesn't if it's not what you thought it would be or doesn't fit with societal pressures or conventions.
• 1:00:52
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:00:53
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 1:00:53
  SPEAKER_02: Thank you so much, Matt.
• 1:00:55
  SPEAKER_02: I think that's a great way to a great way to end it.
• 1:00:58
  SPEAKER_02: Really appreciate your time today.
• 1:00:59
  SPEAKER_02: Very good luck with the book.
• 1:01:01
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and I know a lot of people are gonna have a uh a lot of or gain a lot of insights from reading it.
• 1:01:06
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, thank you so much.
• 1:01:07
  SPEAKER_01: It's my pleasure.
• 1:01:08
  SPEAKER_01: Thanks, Paul.
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