The Reinvention Mindset with Aidan McCullen

In this episode, Francis Gorman speaks with Aidan McCullen, host of "The Innovation Show" and author of "Undisruptible", about reinvention, innovation, and what real change demands. Aidan reflects on his journey from professional rugby to becoming one of Ireland’s leading voices on transformation, sharing lessons from injury, identity, curiosity, and hundreds of conversations with world-class thinkers.

Together, they explore why people and companies often wait until crisis hits before adapting, why superficial change rarely works, and why mental models must shift before business models can. From Nokia’s failure to respond to the iPhone to the personal grief of letting go of an old identity, this conversation is about preparing for change before it is forced upon you and finding the resilience to build what comes next.

Key Topics:

• The importance of mental models in change
• The analogy of the caterpillar and butterfly in transformation
• The role of curiosity in innovation
• Lessons from Nokia's decline and failure to adapt
• The concept of creative destruction and proactive change

Sound Bytes:

"You can't waterboard a horse."
"Snow always melts from the edges."
"You can't force a horse to water."

You can find Aidan's book here: https://www.kennys.ie/shop/-9781119770480

Transcript

Francis Gorman (00:02.014)
Hi everyone, welcome to the Entropy Podcast. I'm your host, Francis Gorman. Before we dive in, if today's conversation challenges you, sparks a new idea, or sharpens how you think about the world, don't keep it to yourself. Subscribe, leave a review, and share this episode with someone who enjoys staying curious. 

Today I'm joined by Aidan McCullin, host of the Innovation Show and the author of Undisruptible. He's one of the most thoughtful voices across the technology sector on reinvention, innovation, and human change. Aidan has gone from elite professional sport to interviewing some of the world's leading thinkers. He helps leaders and organizations understand how to adapt before they're forced to. Today we'll get into what real reinvention takes, why so many people and companies resist change.

And what he's learned from hundreds of conversations with brilliant minds. Aidan, it's lovely to have you here with me today.

Aidan (01:06.69)
Great to be with you, Francis. Looking forward to our chat.

Francis Gorman (01:09.566)
Yeah, so am I Ed. And you know, as I as I've been looking at your background and listening to the innovation show, you've had some really clever people on. But I have to ask, you come from the rubby background. Is w when that career ended, was that the infliction point where you said, What do I do now? How how did this path start from professional sports into what you're doing today in the reinvention innovation space and through your consultancy?

Aidan (01:33.646)
So I've had to reframe this one, Francis, but I I got injured quite a lot in my career and I got injured right at the very pinnacle of my career. So right at the very top, playing for Toulouse, the best, arguably the best club in the world, certainly the best club in Europe. And I was playing for that team, didn't expect to get into the side, which is probably not a great thing, but I I I got in the side, was the starting number eight for many, many games, didn't hurt my knee.

And after that, I had an operation and I went to a much lesser club, which was a club in London, London Irish. And when I was there, I was struggled with injury so much. Whenever I did get back from injury, I was fighting for my place. And it was then I started to read. And one of the interesting things was I used to go to a now disrupt a disrupted business, which was borders. You remember the old bookshop?

And there was one in Kingston which was over the road from where I lived. And I used to go there, there was a Starbucks inside it, sit down and pick up books. And I picked up one day a magazine and it was on the cover it was about four Nokia. It was a Forbes magazine, night two thousand and seven. And the article read T f five hundred billion five hundred million customers. Can anyone catch the cell phone king? Something like that.

And I remember going, this is a really interesting company. I'm gonna start following them. And then a few months later their f stock was on the floor. And I was like, what the heck happened there? So it was just I got interested and I just started following businesses, understanding what was coming down the line, understanding where businesses were going. So I really got into it then and dedicated any spare time I had to prepare for the future, the inevitable end of a career.

Francis Gorman (03:24.338)
That's that's super interesting. I I love the I love the bookshop angle because I think most of my great ideas came from someone else. You know, when I when I pick up a book and and read it, I I often say that the the podcast was born out of reading, Never Read Alone by Keith Ferrazzi. I'm not sure if you've ever if you've ever read that book by Keith, but it's a it's an amazing kind of guide to your net your your network is directly linked to your net worth is kind of the premise of it and you know, building building that social muscle.

is is is really important. So, you know, that's kind of I I thought about the podcast. You obviously have the innovation show and I was reading Bill Gates as one of your advocates. How how did that how did that come about?

Aidan (04:00.781)
Well, he just shared actually one of the episodes on LinkedIn and I was like going, that has that must be a mistake. So a few years ago, that was now about seven years ago. Interestingly, I I sat beside Keith Farazzi at a an event not so long ago and he he dropped me a l line afterwards to ask to come onto the show and I hadn't read the book, but I was familiar with that line, Never Dine Alone. And I I I as you said there

The biggest thing you you said in the introduction how I'm I'm fascinated about how people leave it until it's too late to do something about the future. In in rugby, for example, where I was, many people wait till the end to start preparing. And that's why I was saying I was lucky, because I got this kind of glimpse of the future before the end was upon me, which is the biggest opportunity because when you're in a moment of crisis, you're not gonna think straight. And

To your point about the network, if you don't do the work on your network when it's not important, you don't have a network when it is important. And for me that's the pattern everything. It's a pattern in health. It's the pattern in fitness. It's the pattern pattern in your relationships that if you leave it too late, it's almost too too too hard to prep to repair it. And there's a Spartan Warrior mantra that I live by, which is the t the

The more you sweat in times of peace, the less you bleed in war. So you do the work before it's necessary to do the work when and it's absolutely always the best time to do it.

Francis Gorman (05:37.162)
That that that's super interesting, Nathan. I I also love the the acronyms and the the the different phraseology from from old Greek methodology that you can bring through. I I have to ask, like what's the difference and and I I see this a lot from from reinventing yourself versus kind of running away from the version you no longer like in the mirror, you know, the the I want to be someone different but I'm not really committed to it. So I'll make some let's call them facial change, so I'll grow a beard, I'll you know, I'll I'll pretend I'm doing something else but not really committed to what what do you see

takes real kind of gusto to actually reinvent yourself, to really commit to to to get to be that person you want to be, rather than that imagery that you've perceived of of who you should be.

Aidan (06:19.255)
So there was a really interesting book I read. we we could talk to all day about books that we've read, Francis, but there's a book called Cyb Psychocybergenics by a guy called Maxwell Maltz. And Maltz was this guy who was he he basically did like facial surgery and nose transplant you know, nose str restructuring and all this kind of stuff. And what he noticed was

That he'd do work on a patient and they'd be back again looking for more work to be done in the future. And he just always saw that there was an underlying want in them for some type of bigger change. And that was one of the books I read in that period of my own transition. And the big thing I took from it was that you have to you have to start with a a the the way I think about it, you have to start with a to be list before you start with a to do list. So what do I what do I want to be?

How do I want to show up? Like what do I want people to say about me when I'm not in the room? That kind of way of thinking about things. And I work with a lot of heads of innovation in particular coaching them. And this is something I always say when it comes to their personal change is you have to have some type of fuzzy vision, even. It doesn't have to be a clear vision, but some type of feeling about what you want to be.

before you start to go and start to do small, mi minor work, like you said, like maybe get the haircut or shave the beard. So I and I think that's exactly the same that happens in in in innovation inside companies is that they they do the cosmetic work. They they'll have the event, they'll bring in the keynote speaker. And it it doesn't change a thing because actually until you start to change real habits, you start to ch change how people are when they're at home.

not just where they're at work, and you start to get inside their heads, you start to give them a vision for the future, nothing really changes. So it's it's real that's why I'm so fascinated by how similar any kind of organizational change is to personal change, is to health change, anything in life, because it's it's just always the same dynamic. And if you can if you can crack that dynamic and use it, for me that was the transferable skill from sport was that

Aidan (08:38.633)
One, I was disciplined. I wasn't the most talented player, but I'd always show up and outwork anybody. And that was the thing that I brought across into the working world then. And reflected now in the reading and the podcast and any kind of writing that I do. It's the same thing. And that's the hard thing inside businesses because there's a famous story, and that was a book that was called Change or Die. And

Essentially i one of the big studies it pulled out was that people who had had some type of heart transplant or a stent put it in their heart, some type of really bad heart instance, that out of thousands of people that they studied in the US, where a doctor sat them down and said, Look, Aiden, you're gonna have to change how you live or you're gonna die. That out of those thousands of people, only nine percent of people would make the changes to to live so on a personal level.

And then we wonder why seventy five percent plus of transformation efforts fail, billions of dollars are wasted every year inside companies. And it's because you don't change what people do until you change how they think. Or the way I put it in the book is you don't change business models until you change mental models. So y so that's the difficulty. And and that's that's a hell of a lot of work. That's sustained work.

It's not this big event. It's an ongoing habit that an organization needs to adopt.

Francis Gorman (10:06.174)
No, I w when you said that when you were talking before you used the example, I was thinking the very same thing. I I saw a podcast recently, I think it was on Diary of a CEO where a doctor was on talking about this this very thing and it maybe it maybe the doctor that made that reference, but you know, they he talked about, you know, the percentage of people that, you know, chose debt. But he said it didn't they didn't mindfully choose debt. They were hard coded to choose debt. You know, the the

the habits that they'd built up over a lifetime that their father did before them, that their grandfather did before him, you know, that was this is who I am. I smoke forty cigarettes a day and drink ten points and eat eat a hamburger, you know, for for dinner, you know, this is this is who I am. So is there is there a part of reinvention and part of that mental model that you need to re envisage? It's like the Phoenix. Something has to burn down before you can can rebirth. Does something have to break even personally or within a company before you can see that change?

Aidan (10:56.373)
I love that you asked that actually and I'm in the midst of a new book at the moment. And this is one of the things I talk about in the book is that there's a term in the innovation literature called creative destruction. And creative destruction is exactly what you're saying, is that say for example there's a recession or now we have all the ge geopolitics that

many, many businesses will struggle with that. Or or world, you're very much involved in technology and AI now rewriting the rules of business essentially, and certainly with technology, that there'll be lots and lots of losers out of that, but there'll also be lots of new winners. And that's creative destruction. It was a term coined by Joe by Joseph Schumpeter, an economist, and he talked about this thing called Schumpeter's Gale. And this was the term behind it. But

One of the ways I kind of think about it is that you can be the instigator of that. You can be the person who actually kind of goes, you know what, I'm gonna do something about this. I'm gonna forge the I'm gonna set the fire. I'm gonna be like the Phoenix. And to your point, the idea of the Phoenix is every five hundred years this mythical creature willingly walks into the flames, burns itself up and from what it used to be gathers what's still useful. And that idea of being proactive.

about creative destruction that you go, okay, let's go for a pint because I'm going off to the fire now. I always picture the Phoenix down in the local bar and, you know, the reluctant Phoenix and it's like going, Hey Phoenix, it's time, you know, the fire's right it's going out there, man. You better go. And it's like, no, no, just one more point. One more floor road and you're gonna no, you gotta do it. So there's obviously gonna be reluctance about it, but you're better off ripping off the band aid and just going for it. And in there

Of course it's gonna be difficult. Like I think that's the thing we have to acknowledge is that you have to be cognizant that this is gonna be difficult because you're breaking apart familiarity, what you're used to. And and this both for individuals and organizations, the exact same thing. And what happens is you're basically resetting everything about the comfort that you have got used to. And the brain loves comfort the comfort of the normal and the familiar.

Aidan (13:13.621)
And that's the real difficulty. And there's a term that I talk about in the book called the S curve, but there's another curve called a J curve. And if you think about the letter J, and you remember when we had l ruler r rulings on the page and you were learning to write and the J would go below the line. So essentially the whole idea is it goes back before it goes forward. So you take up a new skill. Or again, in your world, Francis, you're

Getting people to lean into new technologies, to adopt new technologies that everybody talks about there's technology, techno technological debt, so old systems, but there's also psychological debt, which is the old mental models that actually hold people back. So th they have to get used to the fact that and be be supported here as well, that you're of course you're gonna be terrible at this thing at the start. You're learning a brand new skill. So you're gonna go backwards before you can go forwards.

We know that as an organization, we got your back. And I think again, when anybody who's listened to us has gone through any kind of personal change, sometimes the very people who think you think will support you are the very people who don't, and actually t try and talk you out of it kind of going, Hey Phoenix, don't don't bother going into flames. Stay here with us, have a few more points. And you're going, nah, no, kind of made my decision. No, don't do it. And I say this to the I I lecture in Trinity College, Francis and

I say this to the students all the time that you have to let go of that as well. And you have to be aware that if you go and make some type of personal reinvention strategy, that you're gonna lose some friends, like because you're gonna become a different person. And sometimes the people who are are most resistant to that are your friends because they don't want you to change. And anybody who's traveled knows that you go away.

You experience a different culture, you come back and you feel a little bit more lonely because you've grown and those people who have stayed around haven't grown as as much. And organizations are no different. That you may go and learn a new skill. A lot of other people inside the organization may be jealous of that skill and actually hold it against you. And the status quo, by its very nature, is gonna resist the change. People who are at the top of the organization today are

Aidan (15:34.582)
are there because of skills that they learned yesterday. And now comes a now comes the CTO and goes, Hey, we're gonna introduce a whole new ways of working, whole new set of technologies. And people are gonna go, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, what does this mean to me? Does this mean that I still have my corner office? Does it still mean that I can still have my commute and drop my kids to school the way I do every morning? And it's all that messy, messy middle that we call it in innovation that

When you're in between this phase transition between the old and the new, things fall apart. And in there, new relationships have formed, old ones are lost, and people struggle with that.

Francis Gorman (16:15.548)
super interesting. I almost feel like there's a there's a level of grief, you know. It it you you have to you have to experience loss before you can look at what's next, you know, you need to come to terms with with that, whether personally or or in business. Is is that what you would see, Aiden, when when you come in to companies 'cause I

I talk to a lot of kind of business owners that still are in control of their of their company and you know, they'll often say their biggest weakness is to reinvent what works because it's always worked. You know, this is how I made my first hundred thousand, my first million, my first whatever, you know? So why would I change? But the world has now changed and AI is drastically undermining sectors. It's, you know, in some cases allowing people to be drastically more

capable and others it's making them drastically less capable depending on how they're using it. So like is there is there this element of grief that has to play a a larger piece in innovation and reinvention when you kind of understand, well, I've lost what it was. I think Nokia example at the start is a is probably a good one from the corporate sense. You know, they didn't they know they never thought the smartphone would take off. They didn't move with the times. They were too committed to what has always worked because that's what will always will work. But you know

It didn't. Th there was a line there that once it crossed over the the exponential drop in value was was rapid.

Aidan (17:36.439)
So there's this is a huge thing, Francis, the grief element that the Peter Drucker, the famous management guru, he said that if you're gonna do something new, you're gonna have to stop doing something old. And that's really difficult for people because usually they're measured on the old. And if you think about in your own organization, or maybe you're a leader of an organization listening to us, that you're trying to bring in some

new model that in a way com competes or undermines the old model in some way, that of course people are gonna they're not they're not only gonna resist it, but they're actually gonna sabotage it. And they're gonna sabotage it not in sometimes it's not in dynamic ways where it's very visible, but they can sabotage it by doing nothing. That's how they can sabotage it. Or one way people sabotage it a lot is like they're too busy. And they're too busy doing the thing that

got them to where they are today. So nobody puts any energy into the new thing. It's a it's a it's a process in innovation that we call resource allocation process, the RAP model. It's a guy called Joseph Bauer, who was Clayton Christensen, the famous innovation guru, his his dissertation advisor and professor in college. And by giving no resource to something, you starve it of resource and it just dies, like anything in life. So that's a huge thing.

Now, to your other point, a way I'll kind of introduce this is another metaphor that I use in the book. This idea of the the great metamorphosis of the caterpillar into the into the butterfly. So it goes through a certain amount of stages. And when I was getting when I when I was doing keynotes first, when I started doing this, I used to have an artist. Now, n no none of us need an artist to that level anymore. I used to pay a lot of money to get these beautiful slides created. Like my slide decks are

She did a magnificent job. And she goes to me, I wanted four slides to kind of map this transition. And she goes, Aiden, there's actually five stages. And I was like, and she's just looking for more work here. So she wasn't. She was actually bang on point. And it was the penultimate stage. So the second and last stage that was so remarkable and spoke to me so much. So I'll very quickly tell you this transition. So and and think here about.

Aidan (19:59.383)
How an organization or an individual goes change. So that idea of the cycle of the Phoenix that you take out of what the last iteration was what's still useful in order to fuel what's going to become in the future. So the very first act when the caterpillar emerges from its shell is it eats it, it uses it as fuel that's going to fuel its future. And then it goes into this stage that we call in innovation incremental growth. So a basically a

Bigger version of what it used to be in the caterpillar's life, what it does is it consumes multiple times its own body weight and leaves, sheds its outer skin, gets bigger and bigger. The same thing, just a little bit bigger. And organizations get stuck in that cycle. And organizations experience exactly what the caterpillar does because next, these cells deep within the DNA of the caterpillar, beautifully called imaginal disks, named after the word imagination.

They come online at a certain period in the life cycle, and they influence the caterpillar to become the chrysalis. And the chrysalis, as opposed to the cocoon, the chrysalis is a life cycle stage. And we know here what happens with the cocoon. But let me tell you what happens just before then. And anybody who's a change agent inside an organization knows this implicitly. So what happens is these cells.

Are so different from that of the organism that the immune system sees them as foreign and quashes them. So just like the corporate immune system does to the change agent, the same thing happens in nature, in one of the simplest organisms we have. And in time, enough of these imaginal disks pile together, they come together, they accumulate, and they overpower the caterpillar to become the chrysalis. And inside the chrysalis,

And enzymes release just like stomach acid to melt down food melts down the caterpillar into this soupy loopy fuel that once again is going to fuel its future. So that's the messy middle. But here's the second stage, the second last stage. When the butterfly emerges from the cocoon, which by the way is the hardened outer skin of what was the caterpillar, change is difficult. It clings to the cocoon.

Aidan (22:21.63)
And when I saw that, this was the stage she was telling me because I thought the last stage would be the butterfly just flies off. And maybe I was being a cheapskate Francis and trying to save myself a 500 euro slide. But when I saw it, I was like on my God, it totally needs this. Because what happens is the butterfly clings to that cocoon. And what's happening is its wings are filling up with fluid before it takes flight. But when I saw it, I thought about exactly what happened.

Just as I still see today, many, many sports people I used to play with, they cling to the identity. That's what I saw. I was like, it's clinging to the past. And the only way they can enjoy that future is by letting go of that past. And that's the final stage where you see the butterfly flying off. Now, to your point about businesses, that's exactly what you see when you have transformation inside an organization. When I work with organizations, I'm sitting with

The leadership team, the board sometimes, and we have these tough conversations and we have this realization that it's time for bigger change. There's a moment of sadness. And actually, what you actually see is just silence. You see a few, okay. And and then you see some people leaving, going and getting a coffee, maybe going and smoking a cigarette or something they haven't smoked in 20 years. And it's a moment of

Total realization that, this is real, this is big, this is gonna be difficult. Because what it ultimately means is not everybody's gonna make it in the organization. And that's what happens at the heart of many, many of these disruptions that we see, the poster children of disruption, like Kodak, for example. Kodak could not bring themselves to let go of so many of their colleagues who would not make it in the transition. Nokia is a bit deeper.

Because you mentioned it, I'll share it. I did a really, really deep dive. And I mean, I don't think anybody's gone as deep on Nokia, and maybe I have history at Nokia going back to 2007, but a load of papers came out, Francis, recently that shared the real stories about Nokia. And one of the people I got on the show, apart from those authors of those papers, was a guy, Timo Partinen, who was the chief information officer. He was head of insights.

Aidan (24:49.846)
For Nokia. He was the guy who presented a paper about the iPhone, the threat of the iPhone. And I interviewed about him. I got my hands on that paper. It was available online. I stumbled upon it. I just reached out. I saw this name on it. I like, I've seen that guy online. Reached out to him. He agreed to come on the show. Absolutely fascinating. Some of the stuff he told me, and again

I'm sure you've seen this, Francis. I'm sure many of your audience have seen this, especially if they're CTOs, because you're at such the the cull face of change today, especially. But he was saying he was presenting this. So they knew about the smartphone threat, by the way. They totally knew about it. Their spec document is absolutely on point. They had seen for years that Apple were hiring people, that it was clear they were going to release a phone. They also knew that a smartphone was a threat to them.

But they thought they were on top of it. And when this guy told me the story, he said, My biggest failure, he said, was I presented this to them and I told them, and they were like going, Yeah, yeah, no, this is a huge threat. We're all over it. And he listened to them. He said, My mistake was I believe that they were doing something about it. He said that was the difference. The other thing was that imagine the O D team were not allowed to use an Apple product. There was no Apple products allowed in the building.

You actually got given out to. It was it was career threatening to have a foreign device inside the company. So they had no feel for it. They didn't know how good it was. They thought they were a better phone and they were a better phone, but the form factor had changed. And this was a computer in your pocket that just happened to be able to make calls. It was that that caught them. And also the fact that they had mortgages on factories in China that only had the capability to build dumb phones.

There was many, many factors. People were afraid of tr telling the truth. People were afraid of sharing how bad their own technology was. And something you'll understand, their platform, Migo and Symbian, which is essentially their OSs that like the OS that you see inside the iPhone or Android in in the Android phones, was terrible. But they thought it was good enough. And it was all these things combined. The fear of talking, the sp fear of talking to the board.

Aidan (27:13.536)
The fear of your losing your career, the fear of losing the identity of the company, because it was basically the heart of no of Finland. All these things coming together led to the decline. And it was a failure to let go of the past. It was a failure to speak truth to power.

Francis Gorman (27:31.69)
You know, when when I knew you were coming on the show and the first episode I listened to was that Nokia episode and it was absolutely fascinating. So I I I'd I'd recommend anyone listening. If you want to go check the one out, head over to the Innovation Show. It's it's it's definitely worth listening. The the insights there are are powerful to say the least and it really does paint a a different perspective of of the insider looking out for versus, you know, the reality of of what was happening around, which which is which is great.

Your your caterpillar analogy also my my five year old is currently learning about caterpillars, so his bedtime story tonight's gonna be very intense. I'm gonna give him the full breakdown of all of the different stages. Aiden, I I have to ask, is curiosity natural or does it have to be trained? Because w when I look at innovation and reinvention, I think curiosity has to be a key, a key part of it. Wha what what have you what have you observed or learned over the years talking to all of these

These brilliant individuals in this space.



Curiosity is the power, I think, behind innovation. And it's very hard to say it could be trained. It's like anybody who has kids, you'll have one kid more curious than the other. And certainly the innovation show was gonna call it the Curiosity Show at the start because actually I was just interested in everything. Like I'd get interested by a story, I'd go looking to interview that person.

Books about everything about health, about nature, about science. And I was going all over the shop. And actually, just eventually I got to a point where I got into the groove of innovation. And I and there's and the thing is, once you discover how much there is in a theme or a topic, you go deep and you you're you yourself get better. And all the conversations you've had before, I'm sure you've had this already, they compound and and you start to draw upon something somebody else said.

And it's such a gift. I I have to say it, I find my own show an absolute privilege to talk to people and learn from them regularly and just hear how I may know what they're talking about, but it's the way they present it slightly different. You start to see a different angle from it. But I do think, like you know the the whole idea is that you can't force a horse to water.

I actually have a an upgrade on that saying you can't waterboard a horse. So, you know, that idea of waterboarding where it's like you stick the head in the like doing a questioning, stick the head in the water and a bucket. But I do find that if you have people forced to innovate, they they actually can't. Like like some people are just very good at execution and some people are very good at admin. Innovators

Aidan (34:06.558)
Are not usually good at admin. They really struggle with stuff like, give me a plan for that idea. They struggle with that stuff. And I don't think everybody has the full gamut of skills. So you you have to lean into where people are really good. And it's really important when you have a when you're putting a team together for transformation that they want to be part of that team, that they have

some skill to bring to that, that they're not just there for what they think is beanbags and post-it notes, but they're there for the r for the real journey that it is. And it's a political journey. Like being an innovator's not what it looks like. It's a lot of political talking to people and getting them on board, trying to find the cynics, turn the cynics around, trying to anticipate where the block's gonna come from.

And one of the most difficult things I think is actually giving the credit w credit away. And you really need support from on high. You need air cover, we call it in innovation. Because you're gonna end up giving wins away. And the the less they look like they and had anything to to do with you, the more likely they are to stick. And it's a real it's a real difficulty. And people who work in innovation know that. And that's why they need air cover.

And they need people to understand that it's them cajoling and pulling strings behind and planting little seeds of ideas here and there. Like it's that whole idea that the best way to sell an idea is make it someone else's and actually do all the work as well. So to your point, curiosity is what gets you there, gets what gets you onto the pitch. And then tenacity and resilience is actually what gets you over the line.

Francis Gorman (35:59.162)
You know, it's fascinating. I see that the whole time, you know, you know, when it's your idea gets torn apart. But then, you know, if someone comes back to the next meeting, because I had an idea, it's the same thing in a different in a different guys, you know, it seems to land, you know, which is which is always humorous to look and win a win win situation. Normally, if it's the outcome you were you were fighting for in, I have to ask because obviously a host this show and I've got to talk to lots of people and I totally agree with you. It's an absolute privilege and.

that knowledge that you kind of obtain naturally through these conversations is fascinating. And it opens so many different paths in your mind to, you know, things you would have never considered or never have measured properly before. You've had a lot of conversations with a lot of very smart people across multiple industries. Is there any conversations that you've had that have just stuck with you or completely changed your outlook?

Aidan (36:53.731)
man, so many. what what I what I actually what I I think the huge benefit I had, so I don't know if you noticed, but I I worked as head of innovation for RTE, the national broadcaster, for eight months. I only lasted eight months. I I knew I shouldn't be there after eight minutes, by the way. But the the biggest gift I had was actually the the show, starting the show. And I

I'll just learn so much from having though those experiences of huge resistance to change. And actually then doing the show and learning to put a language on what I was experiencing. And I think that's the thing. Like the the thing the biggest thing I found was you don't often have a a language to be able to express what you want the organization to do. You don't have

These mental models, and they're just like lenses for anybody who wears glasses, just like a set of lenses. So you kind of go, I see what's happening here. And when you don't have them, you don't you actually you don't know what you're doing. You're drowning a lot of the time. And and it you often feel it's you that you're you've failed in some way. But when you see that these are patterns that repeat time and time again, there's a quote attributed to Mark Twain history doesn't repeat, but it rhymes. And the more I do the show, the more I see.

those rhymes appear. And the biggest thing I did was actually start to write loosely associated to each show every week. So I've never missed a writing or a week in 650 weeks I'm doing the show now. So episode 650 drops today. And it's that it's it's writing about it helps me first consolidate it to memory.

But secondly, put sense make sense of it and make it mine, make it, make it stick to something that has happened to me or some pattern that I've seen. And I've done so many why like in the early days, so many random ones that just sort of kind of gone, what like I did one on DMT, which is the active ingredient of ayahuasca. I did it one of those early. And actually the guy, the guy had rarely been interviewed, which is why I was so surprised. But I think one of the best

Aidan (39:14.387)
And and be just because the guy was so damn amusing is a guy called Robert Sapolsky. And Robert Sapolski is a was a primatologist. He's like, I mean, he's multi multi-disciplined and multi-decorated, but he wrote a book called Behave and it was about human behavior. And he drew on his experience of baboons, basically working with monkeys, living out in the Serengeti or somewhere in the in Africa, living with this tribe.

of of animals, of baboons. And just what he saw and how he described it and how he brought it back then and mapped it to studies of humans. And you can just see all of humanity there, you know, bullying even. Like so it one of the dynamic dynamics he talked about was if you see somebody who is so an alpha male hits a beta male, so somebody who's lower than them in the hierarchy.

The first thing that beta male is going to go out and look for is look for one below. So it takes out the anger on somebody else. You go, well, that happens all the time. It happens in business all the time. And it could be somebody who, you know, has a domineering partner at home and they're a nightmare in work because it's the way they actually take out that anger. They take literally take it out in other people. But out of all the stories he shared, one of the fascinating ones was, and I and I always quote this, and I'd never seen it quoted before. He said,

He talked about a the the origin of type A personalities. So these people who are, you know, have to be the first person into the dentist because they can't be late. they reverse into car parking spots because they won't don't want to waste any time coming out in the morning. So just really hyper efficient type A personalities. And what had happened was the the two guys who discovered this, they had a waiting room.

In their in their cabin, in their office. And as people were waiting, they'd seen that the chairs had just been worn down by people's nails. And they just thought that it would this was normal wear and tear. But an upholsterer came in one day, and the upholsterer kind of goes, he goes, What the hell are you guys doing to your patients? He goes, This is not normal wear and tear. And then they noticed, they started to notice that he turned on this lens for them.

Aidan (41:38.806)
That it was the type A's coming in the morning, and they were so anxious about being late or delayed in any sense. They were just ripping these chairs to shreds. And what Sabolski said, he said, if you want to if you want to know it if the elephant in the zoo has a stomachache, don't ask the vet, ask the cage cleaner. And I was like, that's exactly the analogy for customer changes.

That's exactly the analogy for organizational changes because it's people who are in the field. It's people who are at the edges. It's say, for example, you're in a bank, it's the people who are out dealing with customers, actually out of the building, out dealing with customers, who have the most important information, but often no way to share it back to the organization. And there's a term that we use in innovation literature. It's like it was Andy.

Grove, who's the former CEO of Intel, he said that snow always melts from the edges because that's where the changes first start to happen. And then they come more and more towards the center. And that's exactly what happens in organizational change. Yet those people don't have often a way to share that information, or the people in the center don't want to hear it. And that's often the case as well, which is a huge tragedy when it comes to change.

Francis Gorman (43:01.51)
I love that. I love the analogy again. I've got so many great analogies from this conversation. I'm going to be mulling them over all evening. I have to have 650 episodes. Like that is serious dedication. At what point did you know the Innovation Show was going to sustain? Because I know myself, you start off with maybe three, five, ten, then you hit 50 downloads and then you get to 100 or whatever and you're starting to see traction.

But you don't quite know, but you keep you keep showing up because you have to show up because you don't want to. You don't want to be the one who goes, I told you that wasn't going to work out Francis. You know, what point did you kind of feel that, you know, actually I have something here. This is people are relating to this show. They're they're coming back. My numbers are are growing slow. And I think one thing that always struck me with podcasts is you don't get that instant hit of satisfaction of 50,000 downloads. know, it's downloads are start off kind of low and slow, but you see them repeat and you see them kind of grow.

at a rate that's not exponential in most cases, but consistent.

Aidan (44:00.012)
Yeah, so I always tell people who are doing podcasts, don't ever look at the numbers at this for for like I I don't think I looked at them for well over a year. And the I'll tell you the origin of the show because I was kinda getting at it. I was in RTE and they had asked me to come up with an idea. My boss had asked me to come up with an idea for a show that it would appeal to non Irish natives. So living in in Ireland who would

maybe been here to work in Google or LinkedIn or Facebook or one of these kind of companies. So I had the idea of the innovation show and and I had nothing to do with it. I was purely a piece of paper. And the I was like going, I actually think this would work. There's a lot of change in technology. I was talking about stuff back then like I IoT. This is 2016, IoT, AI, augmented reality, stuff like that. So that was the concept. They said, no, that'll never work.

And I knew a guy down in the radio department. It's supposed to be a TV show, by the way, if originally. And I knew a guy down in the radio department. And I'm like, I'm dogged, man. And I went down to him and I was like, going and I just wanted to make sure I wasn't nuts. I was like going, Hey, he's he's the head of two FM, a guy called Dan Healy, brilliant guy. I said, Dan, he's from down your neck of the woods, I think. Dan is he's a killed airman anyway. And I said, Dan, help me out here, man. Is this crazy idea? And he goes, No, that's he looked glances at the page. He's like

Brilliant idea. He goes, I'll tell you what, we need more we need more talk content. And this was like 2016. So there wasn't as many podcasts or talk shows. And talk, talk, talk show radio shows are expensive because it's not just playing music. You have to have guests and pay for guests and pundits and all that kind stuff. So anyway, he says, This is a great idea. And he goes, What budget do you have? And I said, No, no, no budget. I said, like, it's nothing to do with me. And he goes, Well

And and by the way, then I used to do rook rugby commentary. And he goes, Are you st you still do your rugby commentary, don't you? And I Yeah. And he goes, Well, this is just the same thing. It's just that's just rugby crap and this is just different crap. And I was like, Yeah, all right. And he goes, I'll tell you what, I'll give you a loan of a producer, this guy, Alan Swann. Alan helped me get up and running in six weeks, and then he he was make my training wheels and got me started. So ultimately it came to this, Francis, where my boss was like, Stop the show or we're gonna get rid of you.

Aidan (46:24.649)
And I I just the funny thing was I just passed my six month performance review. It was glowing. Like I got I couldn't have got a better review. And this is like a few weeks later. And I hadn't told them you see I'd started a show. And the show went pretty quickly to the top of the tech charts back then. I don't think it was that hard because there was so few podcasts. But I got an ultimatum and I was like, you know, stop the show, stop your writing. I got that as well. And

I obviously said no. And when I had that decision, it was a tough decision. It was like the caterpillar. It was like the butterfly clinging onto the cocoon. I had to deal with leaving the company. It was i you know, I I did I wasn't happy anyway, 'cause I didn't really didn't feel like I did anything meaningful. And I felt the writing was meaningful and the show was meaningful. It was the way I actually found some type of purpose. So I managed to then bring that I left, I killed off

It was called the RTE Innovation Show, killed it off, started the innovation show. Amazing things started to happen. My first guest was Seth Goden, the famous marketing guru, brilliant thinker. He got behind the show. Because he got behind the show, I got other big speakers, bigger thinkers, and then just did what you did. And I started to focus on books because I found that authors had a great way to articulate what they were thinking and they were great storytellers.

You know, as long as they didn't have a ghostwriter. And the show just started to grow and grow and grow. And then the next kind of inflection point was COVID. And during COVID, I was working for a different organization. I work for myself now and run my own company. But I was working for an organization. I got let go at three weeks notice. And I had time on my hands. So I started to do video. I was only doing audio to that point. Started to do video. And then again, like

The universe delivered, I started to get opportunities to do talks. I I got my book deal to start to do my book. I had I had bought all the equipment and when COVID hit, they were looking for speakers who could deliver high quality content over video. I started to get asked to do video content and it just went on and went on and then

Aidan (48:46.887)
Ultimately last November at the time I was sitting beside Keith Frassi, I was at this thing called the Thinkers Fifty. And the Thinkers Fifty is like the Oscars for management thinkers and books. And I was an author, sorry, and I was invited to come along. Didn't have any concept that I was gonna win. And it was the first time ever a podcast has won. So I won the Global Award for Innovation. And I have to say it's exactly like my rugby career. Wasn't the most talented guy.

But like I just kept showing up, kept going to the gym and eventually they had to pick me. And I think that was a similar dynamic that happened with the innovation show.

Francis Gorman (49:26.374)
credible aid and look, it's an absolute credit where credit's due there. You you endured and you know, it's paid off. Look, I know we're up on time, so it was a real pleasure having you on and thanks a million for sitting down to talk with me today.

Aidan (49:39.069)
Absolute pleasure. I wish you the best of luck. I look forward to seeing episode six hundred and fifty, man. No pressure.

Francis Gorman (49:43.814)
Only 540 something episodes to go, but we'll get there.

Aidan (49:48.265)
Well, you know what? My my son asked me, goes, How many of the innovation show are you gonna do? And I like, Gone, it's kinda trying to calculate my age and I was going, I've got another thirteen hundred in me maybe

Francis Gorman (50:00.455)
That's incredible. We'll bring you back on on show number 3000 and to see see how much you've learned from there. But it was an absolute pleasure. Thank you very much.

Aidan (50:08.374)
Cheers, man.