Neil Usher: Elemental Change

We talk to Neil Usher about the change needed in modern organisations.

Author page: https://www.linkedin.com/in/neilusher
Book on Amazon: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Elemental-Change-Making-Happen-Nothing/dp/1912555859

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Transcript

Marcus Kirsch: 0:16

Welcome to the wicked podcast where we read the business books you don't have time for. I'm Marcus Kirsch.

Troy Norcross: 0:22

And I'm Troy Norcross.

Marcus Kirsch: 0:24

And we are your co hosts for the wicked podcast.

Troy Norcross: 0:30

You said you wanted to trampoline. So I decided I'm trying to give you a trembling. But I'm not. Yeah, I'm not going very far. Why did you enter ambling? You want some energy? You want some energy in our opening? Didn't you Marcus,

Marcus Kirsch: 0:42

I watched the documentary about what's his name? JOHN, Tom, whatever that six foot nine guy who does self help or whatever?

Troy Norcross: 0:51

Tony Robbins? Yeah, it

Marcus Kirsch: 0:53

was a very big kick a particular character, and he's Jesus Christ. He's got a trembling. So before he steps on stage, he jumps on the trampoline, and say, Ma, I want to be psyched up.

Troy Norcross: 1:07

Right? Well, we don't have a trampoline. But I'm gonna do a small segue here on our opener, all right, I really want us to talk more directly to the people who are making the time to come and spend with us and actually listen to the show, we are getting up into, you know, more than 40 individual episodes that we've done, we're headed towards 50. We're not getting as much engagement from you the listeners as we want. So if you've got books you want us to read and authors you want us to talk to let us know if you've got a book that we know is coming up and you want to ask particular questions. Give us the questions. So this is a huge call for you who are out there a saying thank you and B. Get involved?

Marcus Kirsch: 1:54

Yeah, I think it's really good, good, good thing to say. And I think we probably have to do a bit of work on that is to bring books forward, which ones we're going to be looking at next. And then actually just the opportunity to do something about I think your thing is also about we hear a lot that we ask great questions, but I think we could be better. So you know, if you have if you hear requests, you go like, yeah, there wasn't there was a lowball or something or too simple. Just challenge us and go, Why don't you ask about this? In particular, why don't you ask more about examples? Why don't you more like drill deeper into the subject matter? Because there's too many podcasts out there who just gamble on and no one gets anything out of it. And we don't want to be one of those. So, Tash

Troy Norcross: 2:41

right on on the on that note Marcus, who's on the show today.

Marcus Kirsch: 2:46

So today we're talking to Neal Asher and his book elemental change with a lot about change and transformation.

Troy Norcross: 2:53

Right, and what were your big takeaways today, or at least one takeaway, because we did the opening ramble? Yeah, I

Marcus Kirsch: 3:00

did. one takeaway, I think it's one takeaway, this time. It's about emotional, psychological and physical safety in organisations. So interestingly, at the very, very last question, we got quite a bit into that. And it's a very important aspect of the future of organisations. And we sure had a lot of that last year to see that a lot of organisations are not dealing with this in the right way. So and the safety, it covers everything, from feeling that you can speak up to feeling that you can bring yourself in to the workplace to have more fuel more purpose, and obviously, to be as a baseline safe and not feel threatened and not feel, you know, to take your life or your health or your mental health is threatened at your workspace, which should never have happened. But we've seen that there are certain places where similar organisations are not aware enough off that to that be in place in a right way. So I quite liked his answer on that, that we should really look at this should just call it safety. And it should really cover everything. Everyone should know what it means, without explanation. That's my tech. And

Troy Norcross: 4:14

there's a lot of people that are talking about UBI universal basic income as providing a financial safety net that allows people to think more clearly and more creatively, because they don't worry about losing their job. They don't worry about not making their house payments. So it's an it's an interesting that a spin off, in addition, that's outside the enterprise that governments and societies could indeed do. Now, I'm not saying it's good or bad or right or wrong. But I know it's another topic. But for me, the takeaway was all about vision. And if you're going to do big transformation within a large enterprise, you need to have a shared vision. And his interesting take on that was it's not a vision statement. It's a vision question. Because if you can come at it with a vision question, then everybody gets to answer it and you're engaging people in the truth. transformation journey. So I think it was a really good kind of way of positioning it. And he talks a lot more about it, of course during the interview. And speaking of the interview, what should we do Marcus,

Marcus Kirsch: 5:12

go. Hello, everyone. Today we're here with Neil ATIA. Hello, Neil, and thanks for being with us.

Neil Usher: 5:29

I'm delighted to be invited. Thank you.

Marcus Kirsch: 5:32

So as usual, we started top. So please tell us a little bit about who you are, and why you wrote the book.

Neil Usher: 5:40

Okay, well, I've been in what sort of loosely termed corporate real estate for almost 30 years, leading large scale, workplace transformations, leading real estate projects in a number of countries around the world. And in the context of all of that leading large scale change projects as well. I've written two books, the first of which was the elemental workplace that came out in 2018. And elemental change came out late late last year. my current role is I'm the chief workplace and change strategist at Ghostface. Ai, which is the first application of artificial intelligence to workplace planning. What's interesting about that, really, is that my last qualification was a master's in it in 1991. So it's taken me almost 30 years, but I've finally got a job.

Marcus Kirsch: 6:36

Wonderful. So quite early in the book, there somewhere where you mentioned something along the lines of that success is often somewhat random. Because it's quite a complex thing. So it's the success of change really random?

Neil Usher: 6:52

And it's a good question. I don't think it is. But what I think we need to be is better prepared. And that's sort of one of the key pillars of the book, if you like. And I think what's also really important is to always retain a sort of learner's mindset in everything we're doing. I think that helps us deal with this, but unique characteristics of every situation we encounter. Very easy. Sometimes when faced with a challenge, I think I've done this before, I've done something like this before. Therefore, all of the things that were previously true are going to be true this time around, which is, which is very rarely the case. So I'm not necessarily sure it's to do with it sort of the success has to do with his randomness, I think it's more to do with the uniqueness of the situation we're facing. And that's why I argue that preparation is the is the key.

Troy Norcross: 7:46

And I think preparation is really important. But one of our favourite expressions is to love the problem, not the solution. And getting the objective framed correctly, in my view is, is the thing that most people fail to do efficiently, like, really define Why are we changing? What are we trying to do? And what's the outcome that we're trying to achieve? before they start off in the process? Too many times I've worked for digital agencies, and they're leading a digital transformation project for some enterprise, which means building an app. How do you help enterprises start by defining what they're trying to do? Before they really started, how they're doing it.

Neil Usher: 8:29

One of the the six components of the change operating system, which I offer is the sort of preparation tours opportunity. Opportunities, obviously are time bound, that they're not gonna last forever. We sense from the sort of the movement of the pieces in front of us that there may be a gap, there may be somewhere that we can sort of move into to seize that opportunity. But something I rarely see in any organisation is any kind of attempt to map out opportunities when understand, you know, how do we get there? tracking some of the history, most things that have happened in the past has been a reason for them, what were those reasons? Why are we are where we are today. Looking then at that opportunity in the future, understanding the present but looking at mapping the opportunity in the future, in an inverse way that we normally map risk, that most organisations are risk averse, they're they're really intent on driving uncertainty out out of the organisation. So they focus on mapping and mitigating risk, that we actually flip that into the opportunities that we're facing and start from that opportunity in the same way. I think we do some vital work before we start getting into defining what it is we're about to change defining what it is we want to do. So often, understanding the opportunity and mapping that opportunity, I think is a critical part of being prepared. We wouldn't we wouldn't sort of go into the kitchen and start cooking before we decided what it is we wanted to eat. Going into that kitchen, we need to prepare ourselves, we need to have the ingredients an idea of how we're going to get there the timescales involved. Does anyone else need to be involved? You know, we, we do a little bit of thinking before we just start getting all that stuff out and crack on.

Marcus Kirsch: 10:18

So, and everyone loves an opportunity, I'm pretty sure. And often when we go into the context of transformation, or generally any organisation you look at at any given time, has issues. And then Troy, earlier mentioned, there were problems. And you mentioned it before their problems before there's a reason why change needs to happen, because things are not quite working in the right way. So how do you balance the difference between dissolved things, there might be problems that might the organization's not fully aware of. And at the same time, you're starting trying to do new things? How do you balance that? Are you thinking, are you saying this needs to first be fixed before you can do something else or what's what's sort of the balance you need to strike in order to to move on on change and transformation and dissent?

Neil Usher: 11:09

I'm not sure that all teams needs to be considered as a response to a problem that I've seen. And I think you know, where we're brought up from a very early age, take a sort of problem mindset, which is identify what's wrong, somehow define that problem, look at a face look at an implementation and then do some sort of review later. methodologies like six sigma are sort of taking that on. But I think the danger is, if we see if we start to think that the only things we change our problems, then we're not necessarily taking advantage of the opportunities that presented themselves, because sometimes it might be, it might be something new entirely, it might be a sort of a new new opportunity, it might be due to that those sort of, you know, that describe that as sort of moving parts in front of us with the gap opening, there might be just something that interests us or excites us that we want to pursue, that we think is potentially sort of missing, but it might not necessarily be fixing a problem per se. You know, I don't think our role in organisations is just is just to fix things that are breaking or, or already broken. They're actually been taken volunteers for situations we see opening up in front of us, sometimes we push those a little. But you know, many of the ideas we have for for things are all sort of new creations, new new services, new products, within organisations, new applications within that sort of digital environment you described rather than necessarily just trying to sort something that's broken. I don't think we necessarily see ourselves as some sort of institutional and obtained or some sort of institutional maintenance programme. I think it's more about discovering and seizing on those opportunities, we may in the process, fix something that's broken, or we may move our way around it, or what was going on before that wasn't working effectively may no longer be needed in the process of civil war, that opportunity. But but but I think we need to sort of liberate ourselves a little from that sort of problem oriented mindset if that's possible.

Troy Norcross: 13:14

Yeah, but if we look at my history with organisations is what you're describing happens in, in the Innovation Lab, which is filled with a brightly coloured beanbag chairs and, and lots of interesting agency people. And all of this kind of exploring opportunities and new services and things like that is sequestered and hidden away and and hived off, as you say, to avoid the risk to the rest of the business. And I would love to see enterprises more broadly look at opportunities, and not just their innovation departments, well, how can we help them understand that everything isn't always so risky? And yes, you can involve the entire organisation.

Neil Usher: 13:56

Now, I think almost particularly as I've been involved in workplace design, I think almost the last, last place that an innovation is ever likely to happen is a row with innovation written above the door. Most best ideas come from, usually from individuals and their own particular places that helps them think whether that's the shower or walking the dog or going out for a run or whatever it is that sort of you usually involve in some degree of movement, because movement seems to stimulate that sort of innovative process in our minds. And we then need to bring people together to try and make that into reality. But I think innovation comes from potentially from everywhere in the organisation. I've done some research a little while ago has something to do with change around some of those innovations that have come from the sort of the shop floor effectively where where someone has hit upon a really interesting idea and, and, and usually it's hiding in plain sight. A lot of these amazing ideas Not something that are a group of people gathered around the whiteboard trying to solve a complex problem, you know, these are very often just, you know, just those moments of clarity that we all crave, really. And we will try to try to see where suddenly you realise that something could be different from the way it is now, or an idea that you think he's in today. And I think the art for organisations is to make sure they're receptive to that degree or thinking that they have channels for those suggestions that they have, but they're able to harness that collective sort of the creative power of the whole organisation, and not rely on an agency or a particular physical space or a combination of the two, to be the people that think of the ideas they can come from everywhere. And most of the time, those people are actually engaged in that activity are best placed to point out where something might be better might be improved, or, or might be

Marcus Kirsch: 16:05

down. And when we take that, that gets us likely straight to enablement and empowerment, because in a lot of organisations, teams, people don't feel necessarily empowered to bring ideas anywhere and into fruit fruition, or that they have time to be able to explore that because guess the business as usual, yes, the day to day tasks and so on. So tell us a bit about empowerment and enablement in organisations and how that plays a role in that context.

Neil Usher: 16:38

empowerment, it's quite the buzzword really have been using it over actively for the last decade or so. But having effective communication channels with an organisation for the sort of surfacing of ideas and innovations, is absolutely vital. But I think that just that goes for the organisation across the board, really just having that degree of openness, having the ability for, for for ideas to surface and ideas to be to be channelled. I can't see that there's a downside necessarily to that. Sometimes that could be some sort of platform that enables people to communicate in particular ways, different organisations, that could be more of a sort of culturally engineered solution, but sort of open communication feedback loop, it's part of as part of the whole idea of perpetual beta, which which is borrowed from software development, the idea that nothing is ever finished, that is always a work in progress. And that everything that's created really has been co created with the with the consumers or the users of that particular product or service. So if we think about our workplace in the broadest possible sense, we're all involved in some degree of CO creation. So the mindset becomes one of experimentation. What we're actually saying is that we're nothing in this organisation is ever finished, it's all a work in progress. It's a version number. And what we're going to try and do is we're going to try and improve it continually trying to update those those, that numerical sequence to keep keep moving everything in that sort of experimental way. We have a, I mentioned earlier about the sort of desire to drive uncertainty in our organisations, you know, certainty creates static situations, which are never going to lead to innovation, they're never going to lead to the ability to identify and drive change. So it's all it's all linked together the the welcoming of uncertainty, the welcoming of those spaces, we can move into the opportunity for co creation, the whole organisation, being able to work together in that way. It's all part of a, it's all part of a sort of way of a way of living away free within an organisation that this this sort of notion of experimentation, I think is critical. And I think coming out of the pandemic, in a lot of situations organisations are I think beneficially are going to find that they're in a, they end up moving into much more of a, an experimental situation in an experimental mindset. Because many of the challenges that we've been facing by virtue of being out of our workplaces at home, when we start to work together again, when organisations start to have to almost sort of recreate themselves to a significant degree in new ways, then they're never gonna work straight out of the box. This is gonna have to be a process of trial and error, open communication, open engagement with across the whole workforce with an experimental mindset, which means effectively then organisations will be sort of living breathing Vehicles for Change. So I can see this is actually quite a quite gonna be quite interesting and I think really sort of optimistic period of time

Troy Norcross: 19:59

and What you're really talking about is some level of evolution. And you make the point in the book that Mother Nature has the luxury of time, and the permission to experiment and that Mother Nature is in a perpetual state of beta. Can you say a bit more about that and how Mother Nature succeeds, even when enterprises don't?

Neil Usher: 20:20

Yeah, I was I was sort of looking at the difference between transformation and evolution. And it was interesting to discover that sort of in kind of biological terms of transformation, there's actually quite a small but often often unsuccessful event, but but when it does happen in terms of one cell consuming another, on the odd occasion that it doesn't end up in a sort of playful outcome, it can actually be quite quite interesting because something new is created. But you know, just write everything in an organisation has to be a transformation. And we like to, we like to sort of flag it up as being something significant. And we looked at one evolution, there's actually been something fairly ponderous and sort of uninteresting. But actually evolution can be passed and evolution can be. Evolution is much more the way that on our on a day to day basis, we and our organization's change ourselves. I think the difference really with nature is that we have a consciousness of that occurring. Whereas in nature, none of none of this is it doesn't necessarily have the luxury of time, but but none of it is necessarily consciously driven. And that's, that's really the only difference here. And probably in nature, the biggest threat to nature is humanity, really. So if nature doesn't have the benefit of probably our fault, the day, we're probably the biggest risk in that sense. So I think, you know, as long as we make sure that as we were talking about sort of, you know, empowerment and enablement, then we can actually ensure that evolution continues to flow and take an evolutionary mindset but I do in the book tried to sort of try to say that, you know, evolution isn't, isn't isn't something that is to be sneer. Evolution is actually the basis of change. There's something that can happen quickly.

Marcus Kirsch: 22:18

And it's, it's quite a nice notion to think that potentially, the future shape of organisations might be just an inch a bit closer to what how nature actually works, because organisations seem to be very artificial forms of bringing people together and doing things. But if I look then if we're looking at the enablement or parliament, or we want to call that what I've often found is that when you start enabling people, teams and individuals to do certain things and bring bring certain things to the table, what often seems to then get blocked is on on prioritisation. So, and that goes back again, to organisations already have things that are going on? How do you then actually shift into saying to make space? Right, just some new ideas come in, we want to do something new? How can we prioritise the new new 200 things that we found? Or someone else found something? And how do you enable teams to come up with new ideas all the time? Sort of how can we balance them that in terms of where an organisation should be going, and things that are maybe on lower priority or that need to be resolved in different way? what's what's what's the balance strike that?

Neil Usher: 23:34

It's, it's a, it's a fascinating change within organisations, as you say, there's always something going on. I think that part of the I don't really address it in the book, but part of the difficulty really is that we are, you know, we're brought into organisations as individuals, you know, we're always expected to have a team mentality, you know, we always get asked at our interview, a team player shows he was a being a team player. But at the end of the day, in coming in on our own, we're still assessed on our own, you know, what is it that you've done? what's what's, what contribution Have you made individually? Well, the team has done a fantastic job with this. And other teams that are fantastic job with the new playbook. So we're, we're constantly asked about, you know, we're constantly assessed on our own personal contribution as an individual within an organisation that actually wants his people to work together and work together productively. So consequently, in in that kind of situation, you know, we're always looking to be involved in things everybody has to have something going on, because that's how we prove our worth and our value to an organisation. You know, I've been involved in this project is this project and this one's been really successful and I had a part to play in all this. I think that makes working in teams hugely complicated. I think it makes prioritisation, hugely complicated. think the more that organisations can organise themselves on the basis of purposeful teams, and it could actually, if it wants people to work as teams can actually assess the contribution that teams are making collectively, the easier it will be to understand where priorities should lie. I guess you know, if we look at, we probably look at most of what is actually going on on a day to day basis, these particular initiatives and projects that are being driven, we would probably actually, if we took a much more team oriented approach, and purposeful team already posted, probably scrapped a lot of them because they weren't really making a significant contribution Overall, we will also probably find that a number of them were either duplicating that effort or actually conflicting with other projects. It's one of the one of the questions I always asked when I sort of started engaging with any organisation is, well, you know, what else is going on at the same time, what was about to be going on at the same time that might actually, you know, overlap with duplicate will conflict with what we're talking about doing here. It's usually not particularly offered and the more digging you do the morning, find out that actually there is a complex web project is running at different speeds, different priorities. Stripping that back, I think, is part of the process of sort, of course, d, d individualising. The corporation and creating it and managing it much more as a as a series of interlocking teams with with a particular purpose or particular priorities.

Troy Norcross: 26:41

I've worked for some really large corporations. I mean, very, very early in my career, I worked for McDonnell Douglas, which was eventually purchased by Boeing. I've worked for Nokia, we did a partnership with into it. So I understand these kind of big, huge organisations, many of which are multinational, or global corporations. And yes, the concept of teams and, and multiple projects and multiple priorities kind of going on in the background, competing for attention and competing for resource. I think one of the other things that I've seen, that's a real challenge is clarity of vision. From the leadership, a team needs to absolutely understand where we're going, it needs to be communicated. And all the teams and all the other areas also need to agree, this is where we're going. And yet when I look at, you know, KPIs, or okrs, or whatever it is, too often, they do not roll up, they do not make sense because at some point, there's a breakdown in the organisation where somebody is trying to build a fiefdom where they're trying to do a power grab or or something else. Can you talk about the importance of leadership and vision in these kinds of projects, especially for larger enterprises.

Neil Usher: 27:54

And leadership and vision are two of the components of the six making a change operating system. But just pick up on vision for a moment, because there's a lot of talks about leadership and vision probably doesn't get quite the attention it needs. And I agree with you in terms of its importance. Okay, rather fascinating, really, by the idea of vision, being a question rather than a staple. And then started really looking into sort of what what a question does for us what a question does to our brains? And this notion, that question kind of hijacks the brain really, once it's asked, you can't help it, but you have to try and answer it. But we're very familiar with vision statements, this is going to be the case where this is our target. This is what we're going to do in the next two, three years, we're going to be the number one provider of vacuum cleaners. Supposing, you know, we actually ask that as a question. And we actually engage people in thinking about the contribution that potentially can be made to that. And whether that actually is is is is that target achievable at all? Or is it even too easy to target to achieve? Can it be pushed beyond that? But actually to say, you know, how can we become the world's premier producers of vacuum cleaners, rather than saying we will become this? Actually, dancers were involved? It actually says to everybody in that organisation, you've got a role to play in all of this. And suddenly, we were asking people, well, what do you think? How do we get that? What can you do? What can your teams do? What do you think we ought to do? It's First of all, a call for a call for contribution, which is a great thing in terms of the insight and something we talked about earlier with the sort of the sort of ideas that people have been harbouring for some time, it might surface some of those. But mainly, it's it's a sense that we're all included, and we're all in this together. And actually, it's sort of galvanising in that way. So the idea of a vision being pitched as a question Is that I think is a is a fantastic way of showing this. And I see very few vision questions, I see a huge number of vision statements. But I think if we could move it in this direction, we would we would really see some actual sort of various levels of the organisation, a lot more willingness to be involved in the initiative. And a lot more willingness to give up insight and show that I've really from from experience, where where they think that contribution. So agree entirely, that our vision is important. But I don't necessarily think it's a case of just telling people what we're expecting them to do, I think asking is a great way to do.

Marcus Kirsch: 30:46

I think it's a good it's a great notion to talk about vision more as a questions. Great, great point. And talking about questions we're at, we're at a point again, where we have more questions than time. So I'll have one last one before, we unfortunately have to wrap up. And I'd like you to give us your view a little bit on the role of emotional safety. Because we know about we talked earlier about individuals and value to the organisation and teams and the dynamics. So emotional safety is a big, big, big theme that pops up everywhere. what's what's your view on that, in particular,

Neil Usher: 31:25

please, what I picked up on a lot before writing the book was that was the notion of psychological safety, which includes the emotional component really centres around that this sort of this idea really that that that where we're actually not in a safe space, is a safe space tends to be where we bury things, and we don't want to actually, we don't want to actually engage. But we can, we can freely feel certain things, we can say certain things without fear that we're going to be unnecessarily judged or prejudiced in any way. But actually, it's a, it's a place for, it's been described as a place for sort of safe conflict, rather than just being a safe place where we don't engage with our colleagues. The thing I really struggle with, I think, is that, you know, it's a term, it's 14 years old, and it really hasn't resonated much outside of either sort of academia or sort of certain pockets of HR. It's something that you know, feeling that way and feeling that we are in a in a safe environment where we can think we can feel and we can act in a safe way in an organisation is absolutely vital. If we want, if we want people to engage if we want them to be involved, if we want them to give us our insight and all the things we've been talking about this point, they need to feel that they can truly do that. But if we're struggling with a with a with a concept, and we've been struggling with a concept for two years to land that to make it understandable, then then we've got a problem with that we're not we're not getting anywhere. And I find every time that psychological safety is mentioned, it needs that it needs an explanation, or given an explanation. Now I'm sure some people listening will have heard it and saw that for some, it's new, it shouldn't be new, because everybody should be in an environment such as this in their workplace on a day to day basis, so everybody should be able to refer to it. And we've also seen that physical safety has been excluded from that, or talked about differently. physical safety is something for the Health and Safety Department or facilities department, it's, you know, it's operating procedures that will keep people safe. But we've seen through the pandemic, you know, people didn't used to know what people used it for everybody knows that personal protective equipment is now is now sort of, you know, an everyday term, whereas it used to be a very niche term in a niche part of the organisation. For me to movement brought to light the the physical threat, a lot of women felt in the workplace, and they were able to start there, I will start talking about calling this out. So I've also worked in a few fairly remote communities at times with with large corporations where there are particular sort of production or sourcing centres in different parts of the world where we're in a very different experience in those locations, because the whole community virtually works with a particular plant or factory concern. And so any sort of initiatives that are mounted from the sort of Central corporate sort of organisation really and are brought to some of these communities you can feel very different thing in these places and you would ordinarily fail in the city centre in the corporate HQ is very different environment. So things a whole raft of physical safety considerations going on as well. So I suggest in the book that if we really struggled to land, psychological safety and we've excluded physical Safety from most of our considerations and disrespect, but actually, it's time we just called it elemental safety, it's time that it actually Actually, we could actually draw around not just feeling not just thinking but acting and, and being physically safe in a working environment at all times. And really where that's headed is we should drop any prefix. So it's elemental, because it's a basic safety, we should all expect. But at some point in the near future, we should just be able to call it safety. And then everyone will actually understand what that means they'll understand that they can expect that in any working environment they go into. And they then know that it is not safe in every one of those respects that they will be, they will be legitimate on their part to call it out to raise it. And, and to make sure in the future that it is. So I think really, instead of using difficult, complex terms, it's the entire length and breadth of safety that we should expect.

Marcus Kirsch: 36:05

That's a really, really important and great notion and a wonderful wrap up to this one. So thank you so much for that. So Neil, thanks so much for your time and for your insights and for spending some time with us. Thank you very much.

Neil Usher: 36:20

Thank you. It's been a pleasure. great to talk to you.

Troy Norcross: 36:26

You've been listening to the wicked podcast with co host Marcus Kirsch and me Troy Norcross,

Marcus Kirsch: 36:32

please subscribe on podomatic iTunes or Spotify. You can find all relevant links in the show notes. Please tell us your thoughts in the comment section and let us know about any books for future episodes.

Troy Norcross: 36:45

You can also get in touch with us directly on Twitter on at wicked and beyond or at Troy underscore Norcross also learn more about the wicked company book and the wicked company project at wicked company calm