7. Chris Gagné

Chris Gagné is an Enterprise Agile Coach, Meditation Teacher, and Edmund Hillary Fellowship Fellow (LinkedIn). Chris operates through Approach Perfect, as the vehicle for coaching using the agile methods. Previously he has worked for or coached with many Silicon Valley start ups and Fortune 500 companies.

Our conversation covers:
-The similarities and differences of innovation in start ups and large corporates.
-The use of Agile and Scrum techniques to deliver innovation.
-The importance of learning quickly, iteratively and across functional expertise. In innovation the fastest learner is more likely to succeed.
-Not only do you need the ability to come up with the initial idea novel idea but you also need to have the infrastructure to commercialise it and to continue to develop it once launched.

You can get a deeper view on Chris' thinking here.

Chris provides introductory videos to both Agile and Scrum on his website here.

(Apologies for the clunky start and end -- amongst my first recordings!)

This is part of a series of interviews about innovation for sustainability conducted for the UCL Institute for Sustainable Resources, as a contribution to a module in this Masters. You can find out more about these interviews, and the module, here.

Transcript

Chris Gange: 0:00

so that way I'm happy to geek out with people about innovation and how we can build more effective companies and it'll be nice to tie this together with you.

David Bent-Hazelwood: 0:12

I'm just gonna set up a timer so and because I have promised the students that it will not be more than 30 minutes. I've got quite a lot of questions. I think we require a lot of insight shares, so we just got to make sure that we hit that

Chris Gange: 0:37

burst through it. Okay.

David Bent-Hazelwood: 0:39

And before we get started, is there anything I send you through various things, but do you need anything? Because what I want to do is record it as live and not have to do any editing. So is there any questions you have before we get started?

Chris Gange: 0:51

Yeah, so as I get into the innovation story question for it's gonna, it'll dry the behavioural interview is crazy. I can't give you specific examples, largely due to confidentiality agreements. Yeah. I can't talk about everything. What I did for other people in Silicon Valley, for instance. But I can share around it, and I can share the patterns that I've seen,

David Bent-Hazelwood: 1:20

and would it be possible for you when we get to that I realised there's NDAs and things but is there a way of sharing in an anonymized way?

Chris Gange: 1:28

Because I think yeah, so I'm sharing an anecdote that's anonymized. Yes.

David Bent-Hazelwood: 1:33

So I think one of the things here one of the things I want these interviews to do is to bring a bit of detail. So it's a module on innovation in business and the first two sessions have been on the definitions of innovation and necessarily quite big and abstract and something like so I've been putting the grit under the fingernail, so I absolutely breaking no NDAs or commercial sensitivities, but something which gives people a feel of in being in the room

Chris Gange: 2:07

and I'm hoping that I can give you half theory practical. I studied practical theory

David Bent-Hazelwood: 2:19

was it is it mounts there's nothing as practical as a good theory.

Chris Gange: 2:23

There you go. Great. So oftentimes, a lot of what I'm doing is shifting how people see the nature of the problem that they have. Yeah. And, you know, I probably won't get into too many of these frameworks, but for instance, I didn't write it down. But the colours and framework is just absolute absolutely applicable to everything we're trying to innovation and productivity, problem solving. And, yeah, if you can still, if you can follow that framework in your worldview, you're much better equipped to handle the problems that you're solving because the better and just as of course,

David Bent-Hazelwood: 3:01

yeah, I'm just getting on top of I wouldn't be nice, but I do. We can get into this afterwards, but I do like it. I think there's anyway, it's probably my understanding. There's aspects of it which I just go Snowden, who on Twitter, and apparently in real life is quite brusque and direct. And doesn't suffer fools gladly and all the rest of it. Now, one of the things I find a bit woolly about Kevin is, what is the thing that is being placed within those domains? Is it your understanding of the system or is it the system? And I think that I think he bounces between the two and I think he's inconsistent. Or at least I think that practitioners are. So and it's just ironic about how much he takes on other people when they're imprecise that the way the framework is used, even in the official manual, imprecise

Chris Gange: 4:07

Yeah, I think I'll be brief. I think of it as a sense making framework, and understanding the nature of the problems that we're just hoping to solve. And I believe that most people believe they're solving a simple problem when at best or solving a complex one, they're probably in chaos. Standing the nature of the problem want to solve and give someone a better access to the tools that all in there.

David Bent-Hazelwood: 4:31

Yeah, but the thing is, what is the it that changes over time? Is it their understanding of the problem? Or is it the assumption of the problem?

Chris Gange: 4:42

So for instance, and I'll be briefs we can get to our our interview. Device developing software is almost always complex. And is almost always treated like a merely complicated problem. Yeah. Yeah, well and then that almost always results in chaos.

David Bent-Hazelwood: 5:07

Makes me wonder what is the thing to the students in terms of I have three sessions three, but anyway, that's a whole other thing. So alright, so I am going to

Chris Gange: 5:21

and I've prepared notes for you as well. So I can, I'll be able to be concise because big points will feel free to track if you wish.

David Bent-Hazelwood: 5:29

Yes, I might have some bits and pieces of follow up questions. So I want to press record. Now and then the ability to read music and then we can get underway. I didn't even press record today as a foolish thing.

Chris Gange: 5:59

I have a pro tip for you if you get the software, a script Eastery STR IPT. It will do automated transcriptions of your interviews that are good enough. And make editing recording and editing a Word document. Yeah, recording stopped.

David Bent-Hazelwood: 6:18

I use otter, which I think is a similar Yeah, it'll be similar

Chris Gange: 6:23

I think.

David Bent-Hazelwood: 6:24

So it's more getting the different aspects of recording Goldberg Variations to match for you, right. Okay, let's let's start that again. This time actually recording. So here we go. recording in progress. Hello, everyone. This is one of several interviews on innovation business. And sustainability for the students studying for the MSc in sustainable resources at UCL. My name is David bent. I'm an honorary lecturer at the UCL Institute for Sustainable resources, and CO lead for the module on eco innovation and sustainable entrepreneurship. Most of the course gives people the latest academic theory and insights, these 30 minute interviews with practitioners to give some of the grit under the fingernails of innovating for sustainability today, and we're very pleased to be joined by Chris ganja. I'm not sure I pronounce your surname right actually, Chris, I apologise for that. So first off, is a chance for you to introduce yourself what what's your name properly pronounced? And what rules of organisations have you been over your time?

Chris Gange: 7:34

Sure. Thank you. My name is Chris ganja and I am the owner and principal coach approach perfect limited, which is a New Zealand based consultancy and today I'll be drawing on my experience in several companies ranging from 50 Personal startups to Fortune 100 enterprise several years of coaching experience with about 75 teams at several organisations plus nearly a decade of product management and also several organisations. And I can talk often about what I did but not necessarily aware given some of my agreements with people.

David Bent-Hazelwood: 8:16

Thank you and I think those different organisational settings are really important. So can you for those, like it's a big company fortune 100 companies, startups, can you give us a sense of what what your role was within those companies and then what that for those companies what the department was for what people function was in the organisation?

Chris Gange: 8:37

So I started my career in user experience and graphic design, and then, within two years moved to product management. So I spent the most of my career in junior analysts and then ultimately Senior Product roles almost entirely with software companies. Spent a lot of time in double ended marketplaces where the company was creating both the buyer and the seller's market simultaneously. And I even spent a decent amount of time at neat days social ventures division, which was responsible for eBay sustainability and other initiative related initiatives.

David Bent-Hazelwood: 9:17

Cool and for people listening double ended. That's platform businesses. That's ones like eBay which which bring the buyers and sellers together.

Chris Gange: 9:26

Correct. eBay, StubHub, Airbnb, those sorts of businesses credit

David Bent-Hazelwood: 9:31

what sometimes called Platform businesses and are an increasingly important part of our digital world, across those different organisations, at across time as well of course, how was sustainability framed? Were there particular words was there particular improvement aspects which shone out?

Chris Gange: 9:50

Yes, so I again was a product manager for eBay social ventures team and we explored ways that people could use eBay to reduce their footprint as a consumer their environmental footprint. And we saw this primarily as an environmental play based on the idea that eBay was one of the largest marketplaces for US goods on the planet. And certainly any company that's creating platforms or marketplaces that allow people to sell us goods or rent access to expensive resources is likely to help reduce overall consumption. Although this hasn't been an area of my focus for several years. And so I think of sustainability more broadly, perhaps, in products that aren't sustainable in some ways are lower quality products, because it's the access to the quality that we can build or not build into product. And we can have the capability or not have the capability to build a quality product again, if which sustainability is only one quality measured for reproduce.

David Bent-Hazelwood: 10:57

Yeah. And do you remember when he was you're working at eBay on their social venture side?

Chris Gange: 11:03

Gosh, I do. It's been 10 years now.

David Bent-Hazelwood: 11:06

Okay. So I think before that, I was working with eBay in Europe. And I was I was working at Forum for the Future. i What was really interesting there we we pitched them the idea that they could be the enabler of a circular economy because they did the buying and selling. And at that point, the all of the thinking could only it was only really allowed to be done in the US. And they were under a lot of pressure for share price and share price growth and therefore to have growth in revenue and volumes. And at that point, their strategy was to do that through sort of branded shopfronts for big companies. And the idea of positioning themselves as the back office for the circular economy was an anathema. It was eventually thrown out. So that was interesting. I mean, well, that story illustrates is something about the locus of power and who makes decisions and who can do the innovative. And then also how things can go in waves that an idea can be rejected at one time, but maybe have a bit more traction at a different time when there's different people in different contexts.

Chris Gange: 12:15

It you said it very well and I think we've identified is pretty consistent with my experience there.

David Bent-Hazelwood: 12:21

So there's lots of different places you've been big companies, small companies, startups, a lot in software, which is so important in the way our economy works. Can you tell us a story of an example of innovation and especially as innovation for sustainable it really illustrates some of your larger experiences.

Chris Gange: 12:41

Sure, I think I can tell a story of a large organisation it was a division of a fortune 500 company that had created a platform for a few markets globally. And I was a product owner at the time, and I come with a strong Scrum and Agile and Kanban background. So we my team of three developers plus a tech lead got very fast very quickly. And we created an innovative product recommendations surface. It was an API JSON API that can be consumed by other teams with access to the front end, and we practice scrum were able to make notable improvements. Or service offerings at least once a fortnight. And we had an excellent product and real world demonstrations using sort of API for generic API front ends. However, we were just an API team. We built one component that could be evaluated in isolation, but we couldn't deliver any lives the business, let alone the end user unless another team, the organisation consumer very API in their application. And unfortunately, these teams were much slower than ours, and of course, they had competing priorities as well. And so we were innovated, and our product was built well enough that it could have been used in a full production environment, but the other teams had neither the time nor the focus to co innovate with us. And so without us being able to get a recommendations engine in the hands of approval users, we couldn't even collect the necessary data to evolve our algorithms for

David Bent-Hazelwood: 14:21

right so let's let's pause there and just unpack a little bit of the jargon in specific so in this context, when you saying product is like a software ability is like something which

Chris Gange: 14:34

software is truly not actually a genuine product. Yeah, it's like a product not a product that was appropriate for our user persona, right? Our user personas where and consumer buyers products, they're not going to consume an API that I can consume pure technical product,

David Bent-Hazelwood: 14:55

and that's the other thing I just want to make sure people have a chance to understand API here stands for

Chris Gange: 15:02

Application Programming Interface. Yeah. So So is is computers talking to other computers about data or things that they need?

David Bent-Hazelwood: 15:10

And so the equivalent in person manufacturing business which people find easier to visualise, and to think of, is that you had created a better tool or process for one part of the production process.

Chris Gange: 15:27

Indeed, you could say we created the best windshield wiper, but no one knew how to integrate with it. Yeah, we knew how to put it on the car. No,

David Bent-Hazelwood: 15:35

and so and so you had a better something which would, in principle, improve the product as experienced by the end user, the customer, but man on the street, maybe on the street, but there was lots of challenges in getting other teams to integrate it into their product. So the other thing I just wanted, I mean, to unpack for people, you said Agile and Scrum, could you for people who haven't come across those terms before what what is agile and what is Scrum?

Chris Gange: 16:08

So my favourite way of defining agile comes from the Agile Alliance, which is about the most canonical source I can think of. And they define it as, quote, the ability to create and respond to change. It was a way of dealing with an ultimately succeeding in an uncertain or turbulent environment. So, some people think about agile as a framework, some people call it a methodology. I don't agree with either of those. I don't see it as a process. Some people would even say it's a mindset and if you talk to senior salty coaches like me, that's usually the best common answer that you'll get. But from the Agile Alliance themselves, it's not even a mindset. It's a capability. And in some ways, I've started to think of liking of medicine. It is the science of fact capability is the science of organisational health, in the same way that medicine is the science of individual health. And so Scrum is a framework, a tool, a bootstrap system that is compatible with the objective becoming agile over time.

David Bent-Hazelwood: 17:20

And so underneath the the definition there of being agile, if someone is trained in the, in the agile framework and methodology, they would have a set of routines, a set of questions, some guidance on what to do. So it's more than just a sort of instruction to be agile. There are lots of very much things to support for somebody.

Chris Gange: 17:46

Yes, and the way that I see these frameworks is similar to the way that a karate student might see the kata for the series of movements that the sensei is giving to. The series of movements are never going to be the correct counter movements to any attacker you've ever encountered. So why is the sensei teaching the student the content in their dojo? Well, the reason why we're doing it is because it's the fastest conditioning method. And so these agile frameworks are never going to be the best practice or even a good practice for any exact context. But they're the fastest bootstrapping framework for hyper productive teams.

David Bent-Hazelwood: 18:26

And, and so I just want to do the

Chris Gange: 18:29

thing is that there's five things that are going to change one of these transitions, and this is something that really dawned on me. When I was a product manager and pager duty has come Come with me throughout my career is there five things we need to change the terminology that we use? The tools that we use the processes, the structure and the culture. And what I found is that most transformations the executives say Oh, this, this agile thing that's for the developers, so they don't show up. But the problem is, is that structure and culture are owned by senior leaders. Yeah. And so the only things we really have the ability to play with are tools, process and terminology. And that doesn't actually go very far.

David Bent-Hazelwood: 19:10

And the point here being that in order to innovate, followed by the word widgets, things that I suppose we we often associate innovation with coming up with new things that are used in the world, right? Whether that be a new computer programme, or a new widget in your fridge or a new car or whatever else or a new category of thing, like a solar panel, in order for a company to produce those and to produce novelty and adapt that novelty to experience they need to be able to test things against reality. Take that feedback and change what they've done in their processes in the materials they use in the sales channels they use in how they understand the customer need and all of that relies on learning quickly, and most organisations don't learn quickly. And Agile is a way to learn quickly in a way which embeds into the fundamentals of how the organisation works.

Chris Gange: 20:12

Very much so and I think you've really hit on a point that I can elaborate on, which is not only do you need the ability to come up with the initial idea novel idea but you also need to have the infrastructure to commercialise it and to continue to develop it once you've commercialised it it's all well and good to come up with a novel prototype. And they still like any scope work games worth their salt can do that. It's yet even harder to create a viable one point over product. And then particularly if you've managed to create the first product of the category in the market, you're gonna have a very hard time competing against incumbents who are more than happy to take your brand new idea and really turn it into a durable product and we can see for instance, Apple does this all the time. They rarely create the first in anything but the critical first and lovable lot of things. And so I was assisting a labs team at this large global platform company, and they weren't subject to any of the non functional or technical requirements demanded of the teams that who were working on existing products in a production environment. They were immune from the organization's usual annual planning and roadmap review cycle. They could start with a clean slate and implement test driven development and continuous integration and deployment from day one. They were also cross functional they didn't have to depend on other teams. They didn't have to work on the components. They can build everything themselves. And so it was very easy for this team to test new ideas going to minimum testable, it needed a minimum usable state, and they had no technical depth to overcome little planning overhead, few dependencies, clear mission, autonomy and permission from their leaders to focus on just one thing at a time. But of course, this team didn't stand a chance when it came time to commercialise the product because they didn't trust where the product was hosted. It needed to be developed and for migrated to the usual production environment. And now that we're gonna make component competing with component teams, like the API team that I created for their thin slice of the organization's development capacity, and they would inherit all the technical bankruptcy from the legacy but production where they stack and so even within an organisation you can create pockets of innovation, but it's just that innovation is not sustainable towards durable long term market capture and products.

David Bent-Hazelwood: 22:40

And again, just to unpack a few parts of that for folks. You mentioned skunkworks and then labs there. So that's where an organisation will carve out like a separate department or set like a bounded thing. That as you're saying, is not subjected to the same types of controls as the rest of the organisation and let's put a different the normal part of organisation which is often trying to deliver what has been promised to deliver the story get loads onto the shelves or it's trying to get widgets into refrigerators or whatever else it happens to be. So people in the normal organisation have very little spare capacity and are often buffeted by events are about at best, incrementally improving what already exists. When an organisation often when an organisation creates a skunkworks or lab they're trying to experiment with and come up with something which is quite different and is not constrained by the current business. But then the chat and often you give people a budget and a guiding star and a lot of autonomy and you put bright people together and they're not constrained. But then the challenges you say, even if they come up with something great. What happens to it next, how does it get back into the main blood of the rest of the organisation? Have you seen oftentimes that fails? Have you ever seen it work? I mean, have you ever seen a lab or a skunkworks come up with a new product new product category and then it is actually successfully commercialised?

Chris Gange: 24:20

I've not seen it in my own career except in the very narrow sense of being the initial discovery with a team that was already highly functional. Yeah, so I was a product manager for Silicon Valley darling. There was some chatter that there was interest in the product. I were a technical lead and a user experience lead to do early research on their product. But when I brought it to the development team that I ordinarily worked with, they were already so fast and so effective, and had many other qualities that was skunkworks. But guess what, they weren't skunkworks they were one of the ordinary development teams, the organisation and what other companies kind of take for granted, or applying the skunkworks context we took for granted across the entire organisation. And that's why I think we have the opportunity to be successful. It's not in these narrow pockets, but changing the entire organisation. I think that's prerequisite. And we saw this in a car manufacturing context, not me personally. But for instance, Toyota and GM formed a joint venture in Fremont, new me, and NUMMI was heralded for their quality. When when NUMMI engineers discovered him, auto builders found problems with the parts they were using. They could raise concerns about those parts to Toyota and Toyota would address and fix those parts. But when they tried to replicate the experiment with GM at a Chevy plant in Van Nuys, California, they would say, Well, why are you so special? Why should we give you different parts and so you can begin to see that you have to elevate the entire organisation, including the C suite and the board. Yeah, if you want to be able to innovate,

David Bent-Hazelwood: 26:04

and just again for CTS do students C suite here meaning people who are have C at the start of their title so Chief Executive Officer, Chief Financial Officer, Chief Marketing Officer, so the chiefs and in a British context might be called the executive board that we tended to inherit the seat the US term a bit of a reason times. So, I mean, that the lesson you're you're giving for us really is that if an organisation is to be able to consistently innovate very well and innovate here, meaning, come up with new stuff, and then commercialise it so it's not just invent and it's not just to defend and defend against competitive threats, then it needs to be it's not just the terminology and the processes and I forget the middle of the five but it's also the tools or the tools is also the culture and the structure. So it's the entirety of the organisation has to be set up to be able to adapt continuously and put new ideas into practice continuously.

Chris Gange: 27:09

Right. I'll give you a very simple example. So it's a fair statement to make that each time you show an iteration of a product to a customer, you will get some useful feedback, particularly if you show several iterations to several customers for over a period of time. The more iterations you can put in front of real users, and actually get them to use the product, the better your product is going to be. And so if I can get 20 iterations in here versus four iterations that you're going to get a better product. Yeah, I just have more contact with my customer. Now, if I want to get 20 iterations a year, that means that I need to be able to actually complete a piece of work in about three weeks and the end. Yeah, but if I don't have the right structure, let's say that rather than that truly cross functional skunkworks or lab team, I'm following a traditional structure which is based on components or roles. Components are kind of technical responsibility. So maybe I'm building software. Ordinarily, I would want a designer, a front end developer, a back end developer, someone who has Android and iOS experience, and they also have a lot of cross skills, but I have kind of pillars and each of those five or six key functions right? Now if you go to a big company, like your average fortune 500 Each of those is going to be a separate team. Yeah. And they're going to use carefully guarded milestones and phase gates to make sure that it goes to the Business Analysis Team. Then they bring it to the design team, and then they bring it to the architecture team and their front end team and the back end team in the operations pay in the test the theme, and by the time you get through one of those cycles for 13 weeks.

David Bent-Hazelwood: 29:04

At best.

Chris Gange: 29:05

And products spend most of their time waiting around to be developed rather than get actually developed. So just having cross functional, long lived and and value stream aligned teams. That structure is going to run circles around technology stack component thief downs with the individual managers, trying to control all the communications between the team just in case someone gets too much power.

David Bent-Hazelwood: 29:34

So I think there's there's two things to pull out from all of that, which I mean speaks to my experience, both as a executive in a charity which was trying to innovate, by hand, fiefdoms, unfortunately, and also working with big businesses. So very much inspired by experience, then one is, one is the the I think there's a reason why a lot of these methodologies and ways of thinking about innovation have caught on and come into many ways from Silicon Valley's because it is easier to iterate software than hardware. You can yes, you can. It's it's I'm not saying it's easy or it's cheap. It's been through those things. But making new software that sits on an existing computer is harder than innovating the physical chips and the arrangements of the motherboard of the computer. So there's in terms of the pace of innovation, if you have a strong enough digital infrastructure, then you can innovate with the software on top of that much faster. And so there's that and I think that's one of the reasons why people experience the world speeding up and another and why was it software eats the world or I can't remember the exact phrase and I think the second and the second thing would be about why startups have they have some disadvantages because they don't have much resources, but they have some advantages because they have that if they're small, they start off with a cross functional team which is thinking end to end. And they generally only have one priority. They're not being pulled in lots of different directions as we enter our last five minutes is there. So you've spoken a lot about the different like trying to innovate within a big business and the difficulties of that. Could you give us a story from within a small organisation and what so there were some advantages but were there also challenges from from that?

Chris Gange: 31:37

At some point, it just becomes fractal patterns. As you said with small companies you've got better your small, smaller cross functional teams. I once heard the analogy and I wish I wish I remember who gave it to me but it's it's just changed and so you have smaller animals have faster metabolism and big animals because of the surface surface area. to volume ratio. And the same is true of companies. Smaller companies have fast metabolisms and big companies, they just change more quickly if you're able to. Yeah, and there are people at the periphery of those small organisations that are always one or two steps away from a client. And there are people within the bounds of large it. companies in Silicon Valley who have literally never seen the client their entire career. Yeah. And so I think there's a lot to be said about the scale of the company and I think the trick is not scaling when you don't need to. And then when you do scale, do so frankly, so that you can maintain as much autonomy at all levels of the organisation keep decision making when they've mentioned this. Yeah. I think that's a way that we can bring that forward with us. Maintain this cross functional teams. Cost Accounting has been so destructive to

David Bent-Hazelwood: 33:05

Yes. So I want to then move into just the last few questions. So one is, I mean, you're advocating very strongly for organisations to be organised differently to be organised into. He said fractals, but into teams, which can have a sort of a great deal of autonomy and a great deal of the skills that they need and have a huge focus and have this high metabolism a higher clock rate where they can learn faster and, and touch the world many more times and therefore have more data from which to learn faster. If there was one thing that policymakers could do to make that happen, would it be

Chris Gange: 33:49

embrace the avant garde? I think Silicon Valley is often considered one of the most innovative places on the planet. And when I was working at a fortune 500 company, that's really interesting data that characterise the Haight Ashbury, which was kind of epicentre for Silicon Valley and San Francisco tech culture as the most liberal place anywhere in the United States. And I suspect that the region's relatively permission from furnace of social policies and lead a lot to its creative power. Do you look at the Burning Man festival where 80,000 people spend $800 million for a week long party in the desert? Builds innovation? Yeah. You know, just the activities of ripping roots off a 747 with some friends of mine who we're going to turn them into parade float. I'm learning new tools and ways of working that I'm not going to get if I don't have access to those sorts of crazy outfits. And so I think, considering more liberal social policies that embrace the avant garde and artists is incredibly important.

David Bent-Hazelwood: 35:05

And then just the last question, as we enter our last minute is, like, priority What's your priority for the next few years? What are you working on?

Chris Gange: 35:15

So my goal is to reduce human suffering through how we work together work and with my current client, I would like to create a company that they're just so profoundly joyous to work for. And there's so much pride that the people who can't get a job there would never consider working anywhere else. And that will allow us to attract and retain top talent for rates we can afford the market.

David Bent-Hazelwood: 35:44

Wonderful, and does that say anything about what you would want to be working on? So there's something about the experience of working there, but then is there a domain is there an industry is there?

Chris Gange: 35:55

Yeah, so when I made the shift from product to coaching several years ago, I gave up the, what I was working on and replace it with who I was working with. And that's what I've discovered is really made all the difference in the world for

David Bent-Hazelwood: 36:09

me. Okay. And with that, final thoughts about the importance of talent. Thank you very much to Chris Gagnon. This has been one of our interviews for the Eco innovation and sustainable entrepreneurship module. And it's been absolutely fascinating on the role of what the how the pace of all of innovation is driven by the structure of an organisation and with that, we will leave you and thanks very much, Chris. Recording stock. Pleasure is that Neil? You? Don't know what that noise is. It's good though. It's didn't come on until after they're young. Morning I genuinely have no idea what that is. I'll shut out all of my programmes. Have you ever come across that sound before I started Oh, how Wait, maybe I was overheating. Fancy Why would overheat anyway ah, it's the timer. The one that I'd set to speak at 30 minutes so stopped. Beat

Chris Gange: 38:07

30 minutes. I think you did exactly right.

David Bent-Hazelwood: 38:11

I'll know for next time that was a bit off putting. Cool and how is I think last time we spoke you were working very strongly with a software business, which I haven't the exact features of it. Are you still doing that? Or is it are you coaching

Chris Gange: 38:31

a few different companies for subjoined? Ah, I was previously working with another fellow