The Wicked Company | Marcus Kirsch

Today our guest is Marcus. A philosopher podcast or a business application for breaking the mold of the corporate greed system. He advocates for looking out for the employee and customer to help raise morale so much more.

The Wicked Company: https://www.thewickedcompany.com/
Amazon: amazon.com/WICKED-COMPANY-When-Growth-Enough-ebook/dp/B07Y8VTFGY/
Podcast Website: https://www.thewickedcompany.com/podcast/
Apple Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-wicked-podcast/id1509106202
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/311hb2VTu0BVB2oORcki4H?si=W6CuSx7SRLqveGkKAPoz4g
Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLSlD5mgtOqkYtSjECUq90HG0sjcno8wJO

 
my social medias

https://twitter.com/JRBolton_
https://www.instagram.com/jrbolton_
https://www.tiktok.com/@j.r.bolton_
Support the Discussion Dojo
https://www.patreon.com/The_Josh_Bolton_Show


*~# rate and review on podchaser #~*

https://www.podchaser.com/podcasts/josh-bolton-show-1573605?utm_source=podcaster&utm_medium=feedcta&utm_campaign=jrbolton_

Transcript

Unknown: 0:00

No problem because it's saying for doing this I think I'm already on the on the other one. So I think I can go actually on this one second. Just checking the camera now I think actually, this would probably be an easy one. Right to Speaker mic video on Malawi. Yep. Okay. Right. be looking at now. Yeah. All good. Good. Good. Good. Lovely. How are you today? Doing good. Okay. Do you have a little lag there? Or where were you dialing in from where you based? I'm in California. Where you lovely London, UK. Okay, awesome. I was kind of picking that up with your accent. Yeah, well, I'm originally from Germany, but I've been here for 20 years. So I think it rubbed off a little bit. Here, though, I can hear the German in there. Yeah, it's been a while. Right. Okay. How are we? How are we going to do this? Um, I'll just start it. How do I see you last name? cash, cash. Yeah, that's good enough. Okay. So then I'll start the introduction. And we'll just go right into all the stuff. Lovely. Hey, today we have Marcus Krish. A author and fellow podcaster. Yes, indeed. Wonderful. He wrote the book, The wicked company, right? Yeah. Can you go tell us a little bit about the wicked company? Yeah, so my background is in design and technology. And the wicked company is sort of the brainchild of probably 20 years of looking at organizations being often hired as an ideas person or an innovation person. And often finding that companies don't always have the right context to come up with ideas, investigate ideas, and often ideas are built around problems. So to actually investigate the problems themselves, and therefore understand them well enough to come up with the right ideas. And based on those experiences, through projects in various industries, I started to be curious to look at, you know why and why our company is structured in that way? Why are certain places really doing this quite well. And other places are not doing it well at all. So look a little bit in history, and found that we are living under a big, big echo of the Industrial Revolution and how we build companies back then. And we're still doing that yet the problems have changed. So the book is about a bit of that history, that backdrop, and showing based on that are kind of different companies we actually need in order to solve wicked problems or modern complex problems that I think by now everyone will feel quite overwhelmed by. And there's a lot of evidence, they're all around us, and they're quite significant. And so that's, that's my effort. And funnily enough, even so an epidemic is a wicked problem. The book came out just before the pandemic, so it was a bit of a odd Prelude. Yeah, that turned out to be. Yeah, weird coincidence, right there. Or maybe I was just on the right track. Let's say you were ahead of the game before you even knew it. Yeah, indeed. So then you were talking about the Industrial Revolution. I never thought about the companies that way. I've always thought it was more like the 20s, the 20s and 30s. With the World War, it was we had to get everything out as fast as possible, screwed the employee kind of thing. I didn't realize he went that far back. Can you elaborate a little more on the reasons? Yeah, so So I think the biggest reason, so the biggest reason for all of what we're looking at is still focus on production. So if you look at the Industrial Revolution, a lot of what they managed to do there is to establish mass production, meaning that producing much, much more much, much cheaper. And the way they achieved that was obviously there were various technological advances like the steam engine, but one of the things I picked up on that was quite an eye opener was Henry Ford's invention of process called de skilling. And these killing is essentially the idea that on the factory floor, where production is happening, where the main activity of what a company at that point exists for which was mainly manufacturing producing products, you only need it, you only need people with one singular skill. So they're all set up in line in a very linear production cycle. And they will do one thing and one thing only. And on top of on top of them sort of up in the offices, where was management, right. And he basically separate IT management as being having the responsibility of being the smart, good, smart people coming up with ideas and figuring out what to do and where the company's going, and how to shape these processes. Whereas on the factory floor, all they need to do is execution, just do what you're told, there you go. And in order to enable that, with 1000s, of people working in a company, and to really do mass production, the de skilling worked well, because not only made it the worker quite focused, but also that previously, you had workers who were educated in and trained in lots of different skills. Yeah, a craftsman. If you look back at those, they were able to do lots of different things. Yet, with the factory work that changed. The benefit to the owners was that kind of labor was much cheaper, because it only had one skill, it didn't have to be trained, much didn't have to know much just did this one thing, right? So you had cheap labor by the 1000s. And then the thinking and management, that was the back in the days, the structure he came up with to say, this is how a modern company back in the days works. And that is works well for us if our goal is mass production. So if you look at that, it becomes quite evident that we sort of still hanging on to that to a fair bit where, you know, middle or senior management, defined defines the direction and says what, what needs to be done. And further down the line, people are just pushed to execute still faster, right? The trouble today is obviously that the problems that needs to be solved, it's not just manufacturing producing the same object, and product again, and again, and again, it's much more diverse, we have to service industry now we have a lot of complex processes that need to be taken care of. And you can't do that anymore with essentially still these skilled people who are only hired for one skill and one skill only. And that's the thing that one of the biggest differences that then leads to a lot of other connected pieces all the way down to education, for example. Okay, yeah, I can I totally get that. I'm just trying to think like, you're saying there's newer age problems that these D skilling are D scaling, just killing it. Okay. Doesn't correlate, because like, for a tech startup, you will need as many units that know a lot. But if we're going off the old model, it would make no sense. Like you almost you want the cool, General labor to actually have a lot of coding skills, because then yes, you can pay him more, but you also get more done. Exactly. So today's problems look a bit different. And the difference there is and there's a name for it, that I haven't come up with, that's something that is 5060 years old. So it's the differentiation between attainment and wicked problem. Now attain problem is sort of the problem that classic companies used to solve, which is a very clearly defined problem that is very well understood. Let's, for example, build a car with a toaster. And then based on that problem, to make a toast in the toaster, you set a couple of engineers on it, and our builders, and then you replicate, replicate, replicate. wicked problems are defined by that they're so complex, that you often have a hard time gathering enough information about them. And on top of that, what also happens with them is that they evolve while you're essentially looking at them. And they evolve after we deployed a solution. So really great examples. And classic examples for that are things like poverty, crime, those kind of things. So every every time you throw a couple of people into the mix, people evolve around the thing, right? They start behaving differently tomorrow than they did today. Because they get to know the thing better, they get to know each other better, that's not interacting, the behavior, adopts changes, and so on, which means your problem starts to change, and therefore your solution needs to be updated way more often way more iteratively than before. Now, crime from crime and poverty has been around for a while. But through in particular, I would argue, the advent of the Internet. People have started to connect way more differently in ways in a more bigger groups which accelerated shifts of behavior and the way to interact and what to do and how they do things on these new platforms, which means those platforms are now not 10 problems Facebook is not a time problem. Facebook is definitely a wicked problem, because It involves so much people, that it goes off on tangents. And if you're not keeping track of it, if you keep on focusing on just, let's say, which properly did on, hey, let's sell my advertising on it, let's monetize on the data, it's all we care about. And suddenly, you're starting to have problems bubbling up, that you're not built to tackle. And because those problems are also quite complex, you need a multiple different amount of skills in your team. So you don't just have coders in it. And designers, you can have anthropologists, psychologists, kind of people who might know about politics and policies, these kind of things, but different contexts and cultures, because now you're starting to deploy things across different countries, right? So you start looking at those things, when people are involved, people are so multifaceted, that you need a vast, bigger amount of specialists to look at those things and figure out what does it mean? And how can we track that? And how can we measure it? And how can we slightly better predict what's going to happen if we change something on a product or service, right? And this is the world we're living in today. So wicked problems have started to grow a lot, there's way more of them, I would argue, than there were, let's say 4050 years ago. And therefore, organizations are more and more struggling keeping a lid on those things, because they're not built to tackle those things. That's sort of one of the main themes in the book. Okay, so you touched on something that I touch on with people if they they're interested? Would you say that Facebook on its route, intent was actually good in nature, but they realize negatively negativity sells. And if we divide, the people will get more ads kind of thing? Because that's one of the starting to go. Yeah, I think it's bit more complex. And that if you look back at history, and as much as some movies and some, some some, you know, reading some articles tells us, it started as a very simple product, you know, it's about comparing people and then connecting people, and basically just sending a couple of images to sending a bit of text. I don't think that anywhere. Mark Zuckerberg was able to have that in mind when you built it, they built it, they got more money, they tried to expand it to more people, eventually they looked at the business model and said, Well, you know what? We're gonna sell advertising and the data. And that's what we are we monetize this, not thinking it but what's going to happen, then, I think. And this just this surely was going on for quite a couple of years before it became bigger and bigger when you started other things to prop up, for example, government government's approach and government saying, Hey, can we have a look at the user data, because we want to know what the citizens are doing and want to maybe help with crime or terrorism, wherever, wherever you name it, you know, governments like China and so on. And suddenly, and I would wouldn't, you know, I don't know how prepared or non prepared there were, as a company to be approached like that, and suddenly having to figure out, so hang on a second, should we should we raise our privacy levels and how we're going to do that we're going to say about that. And it suddenly must have gotten up into this wicked problem level that probably date didn't fully couldn't fully anticipate. I think, with with maybe one exception, I remember and I don't remember his name, I think there was one guy either working for Facebook or Twitter. And it was a few years down the line where he actually started to look at it. And they were, I think, at the time where they were trying to nudge some of the algorithms towards better marketing, to basically know how to get better click rates, and pick up on ads, and so on somewhat. And he basically said, what he realized is that he started to really manipulate how people feel about the content they're looking at. So it wasn't just neutral anymore. It wasn't just here it is Take it or leave it. But in order to probably that's a wild assumption of mine, but maybe quite plausible, to you know, raised the numbers on how well their marketing and advertising platform was working, you know, in order to raise those numbers to go back to the clients and advertise and say, Hey, we can charge you more for this now, because you're going to have high impact cause when I have an algorithm that places those ads better, you know, you just focus on that. But what actually started to happen is Yeah, exactly. Things like polarization. Because suddenly more and more, it would give people more and more of what they're already into and what works deeper and deeper. And you start to raise even further, the voices that are already loud in order to gain more traction or to accumulate more and more users into the same kinds of viral tap content, and all these all these dynamics. But I wouldn't be surprised if their main thought at the time was are we gonna make the advertising better and more appealing to the people who buy the advertiser. But because they weren't built to look at all the other stuff, no one cared and before you knew it, and they couldn't tackle it. I would also argue that it's not just Facebook, it would be all social medias, even though Facebook's bought up a good chunk of them, like Twitter, there's the the mobs and that in and of itself. But Twitter's also just an echo chamber that repeats a Breathing, retweets and likes. So would you say it's a combination here? The wicked problem itself is it's a combination of everything from Google, YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, where they just have went so long unchecked that now it's like the beast is out, what do we do kind of thing? Yes, um, you know, if you ever read any book about network theory, you will know that networks tend to be exponential in numbers, right? So the power of the network is defined by the exponential number of the nodes, blah, blah, blah, something like that. I'm probably getting a few lines wrong here. But essentially, it's that writes not a linear process exponential, which means small nudge, look at chaos, three can have an immense impact, and scale out of proportion very quickly, unless you keep a very close lid on these things. are you tracking these things enough to to figure that something's starting to bubble up? So things can go wrong? quite quickly? And yes, absolutely. So you have Google, you have Twitter. But also you have things like Bitcoin, of course, right? All of these things exist on these exponential networks, if you throw a few things in moving about, but same, if you look at games, look at game currencies and game dynamics of, you know, magical weapons and whatnot. I mean, it seems to be interestingly, I found that when I read articles about, you know, multiplayer games, they seem to be a bit ahead with building these systems that are made out of currencies and other values and 1000s of players moving things about and trading things. To have looked at that as a problem and say, Look, we need to balance this, we need to keep an eye on it. Because otherwise, if it goes off out of balance, and few players will, you know, throw the system over, and then everybody else not gonna have fun anymore. So you know, from a game perspective, they've been looking at this for quite a while. However, that insight hasn't seemingly seeped all the way into, say how, you know, countries build a look at currencies and how, obviously, Twitter and Facebook and those people look at how their dynamics and content and the value they're spreading over their systems are affected. So I think some are a little bit further ahead. But even then, when you read those articles, you realize it's, it's it's a full time job to keep these things in balance. And from all you know, let's say about Facebook, it's like, they started very late to take care of it, because they didn't consider it a problem. Because if they get more hits, as there's more stuff going on, and about, they went and now they're trying to do something. And obviously, they haven't really fully decided, as far as the numbers tell us to really throw enough people at the problem to tackle it. So I think it's, it's, it's tricky. Yes, it's a bit like a Pandora's box, once you have something going over a certain level, it's really, really hard to to pin it back down. Because these things act exponentially. And that's why it's more and more important to have teams and organizations that are set up that take these steps and grow these things in a more considerable way. And if you know you're dealing with a wicked problem that can go off in various directions, you will build teams that look at multiple angles on the same thing. And you will work iteratively in a way that you're actually risk every step of the way. So but I simply haven't done that. So then you mentioned the introduction, introducing a team to handle wicked problems alone, what would that team consist of? Yeah, so um, if we look, there's some some very straightforward basics there that I think some people might be familiar with. And I think if we're looking at Google's proud project areas total, which was the research to look at the best performing teams, it gives us gives us a couple of characteristics on it, which is about, you want to have a team that's cross disciplinary that has multiple different kinds of voices, you want to make sure that the team's voices are all heard when they're on the table, there's a couple of other things you want to have a look at, for example, you obviously want to move iteratively. But for example, you want to maybe look more at things that are more effectiveness driven, then efficiency driven. And what I mean by that is that if you look at efficiency often and our founders in a lot of projects, when people are organizations to do digital transformations or deploy new solutions, they're often looking at efficiencies and efficiencies is for me is when looked at the way they describe what they want to do is to polish what exists already to take what it is already and just step one up and polish it a bit and do the next variation of it. That when you approach it like that often makes you stay in the same mindset area, you're still looking at the same measurements. Still looking at the same, you know, using the same tools doing the same thing. Whereas if we look at effectiveness, what I found whenever people talked about effectiveness, or when we looked at a problem and say, what's the most effective thing you can do, you're suddenly opening up your, your mindset and your view on things into, Oh, we don't have to use same tools, we can use something else. Maybe there's something further out of that box here. And we can look at that someone else been doing in a similar area. And that helps really well. If you start with that mindset, rather deficiency mindset, you already started looking at the same problem from more on multiple angles, and you are more likely to either find more effective solutions, things that just work way better. And you're actually tackling the problem from various sides, meaning that you will consider repercussions of whatever you want to do as a solution from various angles. So you're de risking at the same time. So you're both opening up the opportunities, the number of opportunities, you have to create a solution. And you're de risking on multiple from multiple sides. So that's a really good beneficent benefit to that. The other part generally is this is iterate and experiment. So consider that you will not think any more in terms of previously what we previously thought is like, you have a problem. How do you create what's the right solution? Right, the right solution, while with wicked problems, there is no right and wrong. Because there it will never quite be solved, it will be either a little bit better or a little bit worse, right? So moving away from right or wrong and moving into a bit better or a bit worse, is also it's a bit of a mindset shift to go, right. That's the next step we're taking, and how do you get what you do experiments. But you don't just do that in terms of variations of code and things, you actually do it in terms of other perception of what your solution does. So it's not just the features, but it might be the context within which the solution can exist, and so on. Right? So three main things is, therefore, multiple voices on the table, that you rather look for effectiveness and you measure so then efficiency, because otherwise you're going to too many things will be out of your sight. And then experiment the hell out of it. And I think experimentation is probably the most recognized one because a lot of companies are doing that already. But how they're doing it is often quite different, because they're often still just focused on features. And these kind of things are quite limited. So I would describe those as sort of three areas you should be looking at when putting those teams together. So you said multiple people at one table talking. So what does that just mean more board members? Or you actually incorporate employees to? Yes, that's, that's really interesting. So great question. So the governance level is quite an important aspect to that. So on the podcast, so the wicked podcast, clever name after the book there. We what we do is we read business books around wicked problems. And we do one a week. So we now me and Troy, my co host on our book number over 40 books, we read and talk to authors. And that gives you a good flavor of so what seems actually in his business books, why are so many organizations struggling when there's so many great business books out there that give you seemingly all the answers? Well, one of the things that really pops out is is governance. So the idea that, and again, that goes back to the scaling, and the management being the smart people in the company sitting up down to officers, which is senior management, still being expected to have the answer stay dangerous, don't you know, if you take a senior manager, they will not have the answers because they're one person with one opinion and one view and lots of biases on this. And what you want to do is a yes, more people. But if you try to scale that and say more board members, or more senior managers on it, you get very management heavy. And you can scale that, because these problems are so complex that you need 20 teams, and you don't have 20 teams of managers and don't want to put them on a problem. So yes, obviously indeed, that means every team on the floor has to start helping solve pieces of that problem, which means the governance idea of that management makes decisions based on the data they are getting, that needs to go out of the window. Teams themselves need to be put into a position where they can make more decisions themselves. Because at the same time, they will gather more data if you have multiple voices on the table and often and that has brought A lot of popularity for things like design thinking and human centered research. The teams nowadays modern progressive teams often day create their own data. So they're going to look and talk to the customer, or the investigative process and what's what's what the organization is doing. And they themselves come up with a solution. And they can measure themselves, they can prioritize themselves. So as a middle and senior manager, you don't need to make the decisions anymore. And that has quite some implications on the governance model, because but that's the only way how we can scale this enough to have a winning chance against the growing complexity of those problems. You can solve that with senior management making the decisions anymore, and senior management will be the first one to admit that they don't have all the answers is too complex. So the role of that will change. And there's plenty of books and people thought leaders talking about management in general should change from a decision maker approach to a enabler type of provoked or serve kind of approach to to leadership. And it's a big wave that a lot of people are talking about. And there's a lot of companies that have shown that that leads to significant increases in productivity, people are happier at work, because this is all about, you know, decentralized and self organizing teams. You're talking about term like to organizations who at the heart tried to address exactly that redistribution of decision making, and enabling teams, and having way less managers with decision making power. But those people being enablers for teams to help them do the best job they can. Okay, so then I have actually, I have a whole string of questions. Now, I'll just start with the biggest one. So you said senior management is just the enabler, not the decision maker, a lot of the CEOs have had on who have been very successful that like, roughly 20 plus years, they've told me that, like, yes, we're the CEO, and ultimately, our heads on the block. But our employees are our asset, if they're failing, we have to fix it kind of thing. And I've not really heard any other tune for CEO. So I'm assuming that is that, like you said, the better the team model. But in general, so the senior management itself, you're saying, they ultimately have no choice, or their choice is not as often. So when I go to what I've seen in so for example, when I look at the most successful transformation projects, or change projects ever been in, I would say that the leadership's role was to set a direction, and sort of, you know, really quite clearly define the mission statement. But how to get there, you leave that up to the teams. The other thing that often changed and as well was that middle management in particular, was either shifted in their responsibility or removed, right. So they either became a more productive aspects of the team, rather than management activities, are never removed and redistributed somehow else. Because in a lot of bigger companies, in particular, you have so many levels of managers that end up grinding everything to hold, and they tend to disconnect senior leadership with the teams through lots of you know, shifting KPIs down arrow key line, and before, you know what the team has very different KPIs than actually leadership would agree with. And then all you're focused on those small details that you shouldn't be, you should align yourself with the top strategic points. That often is not possible, because there's too much management in between. Now, add, sort of best leaders are found, as you said, are the ones that enable set a direction and then support the teams as much as they can. I found really often, therefore, so little. So middle management has therefore a bit of a problem in both ways. So for the teams, it's often that it's a blocker to fully understand, or ask questions to senior leadership on the mission and the direction. Yeah, so there's often a gap in there. And that then can confuse the teams of what they really should be doing. And then the middle management tells them, oh, this is what you should be doing. This is what my boss tells me. The other thing I also saw, and that's for leaders, and you probably heard that from CEOs as well as that when you have middle manager in between as a reporting part, they will tell senior management either what they like to hear or you know, the more positive side of things rather than actually also tell them where the problems are cause to perception is they don't want to hear but problems, they wanna hear about progress, right? So you basically have this Chinese whisper in between of middle management that doesn't serve anyone, really, if you look at it. So the leaders want to know more of what's going on with the teams, they don't really hear the story. And I've seen this in a room where the second, the manager there was in the room, the team would shut up, and they would not speak out. And no, no leadership person wants that. But often, with these classic managerial structures, it's just the culture that gets created. And that's something to solve. So I think for leadership, it's it's, it's really the aim here is to think really hard about how much management in need, and what role the management should be playing. And then the other thing is also, obviously, about that knowledge flow, right? How does the information flow in the organization nicely, the better it flows, the better the organization will be, because everyone is more aware of what they're doing. And if it doesn't, and leadership will not know what's going on with the teams and the team doesn't fully understand leadership? None, you're having a problem on your hands. And I've seen this unfortunately, in many, many organizations. So so the whole thing about management? Yeah, it works. It works both ways. Unfortunately. Yes, Yeah, I would agree, especially with the the middle management like not like district managers in that where they're overseeing the data. And like you said, they can manipulate it to make their boss feel better than their boss's boss feels better. But, so I still I currently work for like grocery store locally. And my, the district manager, he claims he's getting order from the higher ups. Well, and then the funny part is, I'm very, I'm used to talking to people. So I talked to my manager straight out. I'm like, he's just saying that because he wants us to do it. And he just my boss, was kind of like Jimmy's, like, you can't ask questions like that. I'm like, doesn't say it on the wall. I think that's, that's, that's the thing that, unfortunately, is, you know, when you read the books about it, and I'm probably prone to the same fallacy in when you're, I'd end up writing a book and trying to write the right story and say, hey, I've been in these projects. I know, reality's a bit more complex than that, you end up writing something that is a bit more simplistic, in order to bring a story home, but at the same time, you actually know And yeah, your story rings, totally home. And I've been in situations like that as well, where you talk to people and you know, their bosses of bosses, whoever might something else. But you also know, because you talk to the actual, the actual CEO, or to the managing director ever, you actually know that there's something else there. So you go, really doesn't quite feel right, does it? And the tricky part here is that and I think, again, difference between the really projects that work really well, they were quite successful, versus the ones that were troubled from the get go and just couldn't solve their own issues, was clarity, you know, so if the if the if division, and, and, and the direction is set with clarity, and that's, that's a leadership skill, if that's not there, you're already in trouble. If that's not set, right, then all the way down, people start to assume things like, I didn't quite understand that, because it wasn't really clear. And who you're going to ask next? Well, the big the big, the big. Were call it, the big town square meeting is just over. So I don't Can I can ask the CEO anymore, because he's only available 20 minutes every half a year. And so I'm asked my manager, or manager will know right? More than your manager tells you. And then you have to trust that what you hear is the same thing, or he has to interpret things because he might have heard from the CEO the first time in this case, as well, you know, and again, that's that's where I found on especially in like changing transformation projects. 50% of the success of that is the right communication. And that people trust that communication. Because if people regardless how well you communicate, then if they don't trust it, if that's broken, then you having another problem on your hands. So clarity is paramount. In theory, given all the communication tools we have today that we didn't have 100 years ago, this shouldn't be too hard, right? These things should be available. The first day you walk into a company, you should be able to, in your onboarding process, get a very clear idea about what this is about and what isn't what it isn't right, and have places to look things up. And if that isn't again, it's it's you can tell the companies because the production isn't that high in those companies, you know, you'll see that people are assuming things and then they try to eventually safeguard themselves because they don't have to doing the right thing or the wrong thing. Right. So they're getting more careful and if you're getting more careful as you know, you get you take smaller steps and you know, moving at As you know, it's a normal reaction. It's it's, it's you can't blame people on that. Because their jobs on the line at times, right. So yeah, unfortunately the yes of the clarity is important. But it's it's it's it's I seen a lot of senior leadership, being aware of it but not being able to do something about it. And obviously, in the worst case scenario, you don't have leadership that's even aware of that, that that doesn't land, because they might just say, Oh, it's landing. It's fine. Yeah. Or the Town Hall was great. Everyone was so excited about it. But now no one knows what to do, because it's actually still not being clear, clear enough. After what three months of that like, Where's the results? Well, tunnel was great. Why didn't that work? Well, because the communication yet again, is it's not clear. It's not already through, it's reported by managers. And you know, it's it's, it's it's a big issue. There's, there's someone called that at some point. They call it the sandwich between leadership and the teams. I call the gatekeeper sidoarjo. Yeah, exactly. So it's one of those. It's a paradox because, like you were alluding to earlier, the whole structure of the American Corporation was built around the compartmentalised people. Then management was compartmentalised. Then upper management, comer compartmentalised. So it's like, but to outright just break, the whole structure also wouldn't work either. It's like you would, I personally would think it would take at least two generations to get the concept moving. Because like I had a guy earlier talking about how he was running for president, I think he still is, I haven't heard from him. But he was talking about how he was going to use his power to completely break the system. I don't like I don't think personally, personally, personally, I don't think you have that power as a president to completely break the corporate system. But your concept is correct. But it would take many generations, in my theory to get it moving, because we've been so structured one way? Well, it's an interesting one, I think. So there's probably two ways to look at this. One is from a, you know, historical perspective, perspective. And the other one is from a practical perspective. So the historical one, yes, I mean, systems, systems are very strong, and some people like to refer to them as the immune system, right. So you want to bring change to that it will fight back as hard as it can. And that is for someone who works in change and transformation. That's, that's, that's me every day seeing this, when I get hired by a company and come in. Most of the times, initially, I'm not very welcome, because people don't like to change. And, and we've seen this historically, that, you know, a lot of the changes and movements take years to take foothold and a lot of work. not getting anything in return from a small amount of people, and they just grinding it year after year after year. And eventually, suddenly, something happens where the mindset changes, and there's an opportunity, and then it might get enough momentum to actually break out. And suddenly then it can happen very quickly. Right? So there's this threshold moment, but they take years often to to really get there. And often they fail. And then people keep trying, keep trying. So if some of those movements are strong enough, they will eventually happen. So that's the historical aspect. So yes, it's really hard, can take a long time, it can take over a generation. In reality, though, I'm I'm trying to stay hopeful, and I think I am otherwise wouldn't have this job. Is that even in big organizations, that people tend to call all their big tankers, you know, because changing them and course it's just, it's very slow. Exactly. And, but it's actually possible. So I did a great project over at, at bt British Telecom here in UK. And they have 1000s of people working there. And so we were at bt it which is one of five businesses. And within a year we managed to spin up from initially three teams up to 14. So I transitioned out and replaced myself with a bt only p because as a consultant. We grew it by team. So we started really, with three pilots then grew up up to 14. And all the teams ran a completely new process. They had never done design thinking before. They had never written their own business case before. They were doing that. There will be Like little startup teams within the business. And they had really tough goals, like really hard line numbers like, Okay, first few years x million in cost savings and benefits. And they managed to hit those. Right. And that is bt. It's one of the most established institutions here as an organization in the UK, because they own all the landlines and everything. And when I first walked in, I didn't think that's even possible there. Yeah, but you try. And within three months, we had the first teams around on our side, and they were showing the benefits. And they were starting to really embrace it. And it became our biggest biggest sort of gurus and, and, and speakers for the cause. And so we grew it from the bottom, it was a top down approach in terms of program. So the program was sponsored by the managing director, and the current, the CEO at the time. But then we had to build it from the ground up. So we got the money and had our backs. But as a team, we were quite small. And yet, we managed to do so right. And so yeah, so after a year was 14 teams, we had trained over 200 people we had affected about over 4000, people who are familiar with the methodologies we will be using, because a lot of these things, they are quite interconnected. So we had to dip into a lot of different buckets to say, Hey, we're here. And we're doing things differently now. And, but it was doable. And I was quite impressed by that. And now two years later, the same program has expanded to group wide to the other businesses as well, because they saw how successful it was, and and are doing it even in the other businesses, which has further a couple of 1000 employees. Just one of those great examples where it worked. I would argue because all the things I just talked previously, were in place. We had great leadership with great communication, hyper clarity on what's being asked from people. And then enabling people, Dave made their own decisions to pitch their own ideas. They said, Oh, well, this is what we think we can do. Here's how we prioritize and then yeah, okay, go ahead. Now they did it. And it was pretty, pretty impressive. But you know, other places, and it's tougher there, because a lot of those key elements are not there. And then it's nearly impossible to do the same thing. that's doable, right? As I was gonna say to you, because you I would say you got lucky because they all were seeing the benefits from the changing to your methods, but it's like telling someone to give up their money for potentially less money, but everyone's happy. Well, it's it's like the you're inflicting pain on me, but they're getting all the reward. It would be the same like Bitcoin miners there recently, there's going to be a change within the coding for aetherium saying that Bitcoin miners will not get money anymore. Oh, okay. It was a minor, isn't it? But they will make the the whole. That's the whole incentive to say why would we give up the money who don't do this, like, Cool update kind of thing. So that's what I was trying to allude to is like, something like that. We're the middle management, the fillers, the gatekeepers? It's one of those Yes, they do have a point. But like the practically C suite pay, it's like, really, you don't need that much money, kind of thing. And, look, yeah, I think I think the BT job was not about the money, even though it was about business benefits. It was not that anyone had a lower salary or anything like that. I think the main shift for the managing people have, in particular, the teams was that they were just part of the team. So they had to get their hands a bit more dirty. It was not just about reporting, typical management tasks because of what actually producing right. Okay, and also pitch it back. So their data was suddenly on an equal level. It didn't affect their pay. And I think that is important to look at because, and I was just reading a book. I'm reading another book at the moment called 500%. Okay, and it's about a company, which name I have forgotten, but I'm in there. And they, it's a aerospace company. And they were talking about creating self organizing teams, and they have quite a bit of conversation about, you know, what do we do with the how previously sales benefit or any other offers or overtime overtime for somebody to talk about overtime? You know, we want people to be in time still, but don't use up any overtime anymore. So they want them to manage their time better to a nine to five so now we're working our strategy. But what are we going to do about overtime pay so what they actually did was because they knew they're going to get the same outcome, but they kind of have fresher and happier people, is they kept the overtime pay in place. So they negotiated to say it's gonna stay in place. And you can, you can leave when you want, but you can, so you can leave normally and five, you know, if you got your work done, and people started to actually finish earlier and still deliver. So it's just proved that actually the extra time they use, they just were not that well structured with their time and wellness, the second you gave them more decision making power, but how to spend the time and how to structured, it certainly worked better. There were less overworked, and the company didn't have any downside to it, because the quality had been raised because of it. And therefore, keeping overtime pay was no problem at all. Because they were getting better quality in the end out of the whole service. So, you know, it's it's, the payment aspect is an obvious thing. And don't want to give people less money. Because essentially, what you want to do is, you know, you should pay them the same, they can work differently, more manageable. Generally, what happens with the self organizing teams often is productivity goes up. So in theory, you can even pay them more, if they adopted because the productivity would go up, like but 10 20%, something like that, if not good? Yeah, that's really good. Yeah. Yeah. So I think, but that's a risk than to take, right? And that goes back to leadership, you know, are you are you are you ready to try this and, and not do what again, what a lot of other companies are doing, I think that's when you get back to this kind of manufacturing. mindset of, Oh, I just need to pay people less than I need to work harder and faster, you know, let's, let's, let's lose, let's use agile, for everyone to produce faster, it's like, hang on and sell. Like, that's not what you want to do, you want to reduce the risk, you don't want to keep increasing the pace. And if you're also not add to the fact, you know, in terms of problems, that you investigate the problem better spend a bit more time on investigating finding out what, how you really should be solving this, then you're just going to produce the same medium or problematic quality faster. So then you identify having a garbage in garbage out system, and you're not getting the benefits that agile actually provides. You think it's about speed, but it's not. It's about de risking, which is a very different value here. So that's just, that's just me being about agile, really bad. Now, you have a good point, as I've worked many different jobs, that's one thing, if the budget for some reason doesn't work, they're like, well, we're cutting your hours by two hours a day, we expect you to do an eight hour shift in five hours. And it's like, How the hell do you expect us to do that kind of thing? Yeah, I don't get it either. There's something and then we're getting we get, you know, we were going away from a bit from talking about wicked problems, but then really talking about this shift that needs to be happening from this factory approach, just just produce faster and more. And put pressure on people through management so that they perform better. The problem is actually that more pressure will not make people perform better, less pressure will make people perform better. There's plenty of evidence, apart from, you know, some of the psychological effects of self organization is that people feel a higher purpose in their job. You know, they feel that if you're contributing to something in a different way, and therefore, your job just became more valuable. And if you have a more valuable job, you're more happy to go to work, you have a reason to get up in the morning again, and you actually likely perform better. So yeah, so productivity goes up. There's no doubt about it. There's companies who do that. And the other aspect is also that track and even I forgot, so one is blood pressure. I think I think the other is just to think that data is surely to think that, you know, more management solves more problems. And all of all I've seen is that it's just slows things down. And it starts, it starts to help focus on the wrong things. Because everyone's just chasing KPIs and not the actual outcome of what the company should be doing. You just start to focus on lots of small things that are right in front of you to adjust within the next quarter. And yet again, there's tons of evidence there that if you don't have sort of the longer purpose of a company in mind, you know, performance starts dropping, because people are not doing the right things anymore. And that happens to a lot of organizations. Yeah, it does. Yeah. So back to the wicked problem. I actually was interested in your clarity versus communication. So how With the advent of email, automated texting, I actually had a company where the management himself would blast text messages up there. So it was actually one of the best jobs because it'd be like I get a message be like, oh, Rick called, cool. He just wants me to do this kind of thing. And we actually did like a good job. What do you think is holding it back? Do you think it's monetized? monetary? Or do you think it's just it's a new thing? I think it's a tricky one. I think, having worked at advertising, having a trend as a designer, so you know, the comms things, it's close to what I've produced a lot myself. And I know how complex it can be to find the right kind of communication. You know, there's a whole industry advertising, marketing, comms, PR, they're all just specializing on just communicating in the right way. And if you don't do it, if you don't care how you talk to someone, the quality of the conversation won't be great. You know, we all know this. So the question is, do you as a company recognize the power of this. And in theory, we should all know this, and in theory should all care about is that, you know, the power of storytelling, to to tell a compelling story that activates people go are great. That's what I'm part of awesome. What do you want me to do? You know, I sign on. We should all notice through we're living in an era of so much content in media. You know, we talk about podcasts, you talk about TED Talks, you talk about movies, talk about any good movie, a good movie, has a very has a has a clarity and emotional connection to it that you can develop something you can recognize with in yourself, that makes a good story. It's the same for organizations, I think, I think what keeps us from it probably is often when you run an organization and it becomes a bit more complex, you start, you start just talking about things like capabilities and features and delivery dates and tasks. None of that is telling story. It's just numbers. It's an abstraction level that we can't emotionally connect to. So therefore, we are less willing to understand it because it feels cold and not very engaging. So the second, I think leadership invests in that and says, look, we're gonna be a bit better at telling the right story. Because me having someone sit down for two hours figuring out how to write this email properly, will save me 100 hours, having to go up and talk to people and going around and calling up those people having tons of meetings, you know, the question is, Do you recognize that as a value, if don't recognize it as a value, you won't be doing it and you might get it right, and we'll likely get it wrong. There's always room for improvement. If you recognize it, then do that hire some people that help you communicate this in the right way in a human why because most organizations are made out of humans, they're not made out of machines and excel sheets. And I think we're we're getting it feels we're getting closer to really recognizing that because the system is breaking, we're starting to really expose what's getting damaged most and its people and people are going we don't want to do this anymore. We don't be grounded into beds, we don't want to want to be safe, we want to be safer, but people have to talk about again, how to be safe at work, right? Something we shouldn't even be discussing anymore. Back in the days when big machinery was in factories, and people had to work quite close to it. And all these health and safety things weren't in place. Yeah, of course, we've got people. Yeah, exactly. It's quite some time later, and we shouldn't have that conversation anymore. But we do again, which shows us that as organizations, we haven't taken care of that, again, people have been numbers too much. And if all you hire is a skill, one skill, and just you want someone to get whipped into place and do just that, then that's all you're getting, you're not getting more value out of people, if you treat them like a number, you're going to get the number back maybe, but just the fact that you're treating them like that already pushes rejection on people because people want to be recognized as multifaceted as faceted and complex people who care about stuff and if you treat them the opposite way then you're literally not letting them work the way you want them to work which bizarre right? The weird paradox at times that when people do that but it feels like that's that seems to be growing in as a conversation that we realized that you know people culture matters people conscious probably think that will save us the right culture and accompany we don't want to have those old cultures anymore. needs to change and it feels like it's it's we will get taken some steps towards Which is good. It's a shame it took systems to break, and 1000s to die for us to slightly wake up. But we might just about be heading the right way. It's, it's a good feeling at times. It is. So actually, you just touched on it. I was gonna say with COVID do you think it's, it's helped the capitalists to go forward for this concept? It's definitely a really good excuse, in my opinion. I've obviously having plenty of conversations with colleagues of mine and my network, and we haven't would ever our thought is at least one of those questions. And it's a good question, because I think in the end, we'll probably see both things, right? myosin, my hypothesis is that there will be people who just double down and I've seen it already on like, Oh, we just lost a year, let's just sail double with half the people, let's do it. And it will likely break a lot of organizations. The other thing, obviously, is to well hang on a second. Let's step back, let's let's use that time that we have to, when things grind to a halt, to actually have a stop, have a bit of a thing, and then reconsider what else we could do truly consider an alternative to this. And if you go around, you ask people you get all you get all the right answers to what actually should be in place. If people again take the time to look at the problem and go, so what is it? What would you like I would like this, and this and this. And if you then can recognize that actually giving people about a context to work and improves their productivity, they're willing to change, and they're willing to adopt, and they're willing to do everything that needs to be done for an organization, I think then you're on the right track. So I think it's definitely a good moment for these things to thrive to grow and become very, very relevant. And to to to bring in one interesting little data point on that. So we had three weeks ago, we had Jeff Schwartz from Deloitte on on our podcast, and he was talking a lot about future of work and that kind of stuff. And he works in the human capital area and Department of Deloitte to do a lot of research on exactly that. And he said, one of the things that came back was quite surprising is that the percentage that senior leadership thinks of the people in the company who are willing to change, the perception is quite low. When we actually ask the same people who worked in the company, if they're willing to change, the number is way, way higher. So there's a misconception by senior leadership that people actually want to change that people want to learn. People do. They like to take pride in their job. They like to to improve what they know in order to do a better job, because a they don't want to get fired. But also, they take pride in their job, they want to do a good job, people in general want to do a good job. And for some reason, senior leadership often things are no, that's not gonna work. It's like, you'd be surprised. So I think hopefully, we're gonna get a lot of those surprises. It'll definitely be an interesting year, because this is the year now that 2020s damage plays out. Was it good or bad? Yeah, I don't want to see all the numbers on it. No, no, it's gonna be one wicked ride. Indeed, indeed. Hey, I want to end it there. That was brilliant. Anything you want to plug like your podcasts, your book? I'll email you afterwards for some links in the description. Lovely. That sounds great. Sorry, I said any links you want to push like your book, your website, or podcast? Or sorry, of course, I thought you're gonna put them later in the links anyway. So yes, of course. So you have the biggest company, the book is on Amazon. The wicked podcast you can find on on Apple podcast and on Spotify. And you can find it on YouTube as well. And I think those are the two main things. Yeah. And just get in contact and say hello. Wonderful. Yeah. Then Thank you, Marcus. We definitely look forward to talking to you in the future. Lovely, thank you so much. Have a good one. Cheers. Cheers.