Episode Transcript
Lisa: So Paul, if you could start by telling us a little bit about Bromford and what Bromford does and who your customers are?
Paul: Yeah sure. I mean Bromford is a social enterprise providing affordable housing and specialist housing support services in the UK. Probably most people would know the phrase a Housing Association or across Europe a kind of cooperative housing or social housing - those would kind of be the sort of phrases that people would understand.
And essentially, you know, it started off as providing homes for people who were quite poor and needed access to housing, but as the housing markets change, that’s expanded. I mean, there’s a huge problem in terms of not just young people but all people finding affordable housing in cities elsewhere in rural areas. So Bromford provides a broad range of housing across the central part of England that incorporates affordable housing, rented housing, shared ownership, and outright sale.
We’re not, you know, people talk about being a non-profit, but we do actually make profit. We make about 50 million pounds profit each year, and the difference is that doesn’t go into shareholders’ back pockets, it actually gets reinvested into doing more social good.
Lisa: And you’ve been with Bromford for quite a long time, over 15 years I think, but in 2014 you founded Bromford Lab. And when I was having a look at how you describe your role there as a coach, and you said it’s your job to develop a lab-based approach to product and service development and ensure a culture of creativity within the business. So what’s a lab-based approach and what’s Bromford Lab about?
Paul: Well, it’s a bit of context. There’s kind of three things going on for our organization right now, but I think this also affects other organizations. One, there’s a huge need to build more homes, so we’re trying to, you know, build, you know, boost our supply by about 60 percent increase essentially. So build about 5,000 homes over the next five years. That’s one thing, that’s one strand of work.
One strand is what we call our “localities and neighborhood coaching,” and that is drawing influence models like Buurtzorg’s asset-based approaches to deal with customers. So rather than looking at customers on an individual level, it’s moving and developing a much more sort of personalized approach to what that means and freeing people up to develop a different relationship. That’s another strand.
Another is really just transforming the way we actually manage ourselves as an organization and imagine what kind of an upgraded sort of 2.0 management upgrade would be across the organization. So there’s three kind of really important strands of work going on.
And tracking back to sort of 2014 when we founded Bromford Lab, that was very much to help us think differently about how we approached some of those challenges, because one of the things, you know, I found in my work is that many of our organizations, even without realizing it, act as inhibitors of innovation. They put rules and protocols in place for very good reasons, but those things ultimately serve to preserve the status quo. And then over time, you kind of get this set of kind of social norms and “the way we do things around here” designed to protect, you know, protect the organization from failing ultimately. So it’s done for good reasons.
But Bromford Lab was set up, you know, I remember at the time we had a new director join the organization, and she asked the question, “Who’s responsible for developing bright ideas around here?” at one particular leadership away day. And everybody was like looking at each other, and nobody knew. And then gradually people’s gaze turned around onto me. And I was doing a bit of that kind of work, but I had functional responsibilities for some large teams.
And that kind of prompted us to think, “Yeah, actually it’s right - how do bright ideas get developed around here? How do we take them from just a colleague or anybody having an idea, and how do we nurture them and how do we protect them from the kind of bureaucracy of the organization?” So that’s where the thinking behind Bromford Lab started.
And it was very much pitched at the time - I remember when I did the pitch to the CEO that actually we need to challenge our perceptions of failure across the organization. And the pitch that I made was that 70% of the stuff that we worked on would fail and that would be a good thing because we would not push into the organization things that we shouldn’t. They’re kind of zombie projects and stuff that shouldn’t work, and we would grow the bright ideas and push those things forward. And even if things did fail, we’d still get a huge amount of learning from them.
Lisa: That’s a real paradigm shift, I think, for so many organizations that failure isn’t something to be, that failures shouldn’t be hidden. You know, it’s like all the research that Amy Edmondson’s done around psychological safety and effective teams. That the most effective teams at Google, for example, they found were the ones that made the most mistakes. And they were confused about that - that can’t be right. But then they realized actually it wasn’t that they were making the most mistakes, it’s that they were talking about them and then learning from them. And that was the difference, that the mistakes were happening in other teams anyway, but they were being buried.
Paul: Absolutely, absolutely. And, you know, with us as well, it’s getting into that mode of thinking about failure, as you say, as a positive but also thinking about what good failure looks like.
So a bad failure, you know, is you’re harming or damaging relationships with customers, you’re wasting a lot of money, you are damaging the reputation of the organization. Good failure is that very, very early stage, quite purposeful failure, and that’s what Google have excelled at in our sense of actually it’s not a bad thing because it’s so safe. It’s safe to fail, and that was the bit we wanted to shift on.
So when I talk about lab-based approaches, that isn’t just about, you know, failing for the sake of it. It’s about being quite deliberate, and it’s about thinking about what your problem is and then exploring different ways of approaching that problem, some of which will absolutely necessarily fail. But it is absolutely about capturing and learning from that and then redeploying and actually building on it.
So, you know, in terms of the kind of our “localities and neighborhood coaching” approach and the relationship with customers that we’re trying to change, that’s been built up over about five years of constant iteration. And it’s still not done, it’ll still be constantly refined. And the lab-based approach was absolutely about shifting the mindset of the organization from delivering big projects and thinking that’s a done deal and that’s achieved, and then just moving it into a constant state of iteration.
Lisa: Yes, like an organizational growth mindset versus fixed mindset almost.
Paul: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean, you know, I’ve been with Bromford a long time, and one of the things that has kept me at the organization is its constant change and the way that it will grow people personally.
And I like to think about, you know, organizational change is very similar to kind of personal growth and personal development. And, you know, in terms of how we achieve things at work and how the world of work needs to ultimately change, is absolutely around, you know, looking at those things as sort of long-term change in constant flows rather than fixed term projects and finite budgets and all of those kind of things. So I think there’s a lot of crossover in terms of how we seek to develop people and how we’ll ultimately develop projects and services.
Lisa: Absolutely. You mentioned before about being inspired by organizations like Buurtzorg and their kind of self-managing teams of neighborhood nurses. What are some of your other inspirations at Bromford Lab, and what are your kind of dreams for the future of work and how organizations and how Bromford might look in a few years?
Paul: It’s a great question. I mean, I think, you know, at the moment there’s just really two levels to it. I think there’s huge opportunities and inspirations in terms of what’s happening with the technological drivers of change. So the huge potential of automation and artificial intelligence, and thinking about how we can actually take some of those very mundane activities that we have to do in the world of work and actually take those away and free up people’s, you know, innate capacity for creativity. So there’s a whole stream of inspiration around that.
The whole use of kind of social networks to kind of share knowledge both internally and outside the organization. You know, I think we’re still in the very, very early days of that kind of stuff as well. You know, if we just think, you know, things like Twitter - I mean, it’s 10 years old and everything, which sounds like a long time, but in terms of our use of it and how we use that to kind of harness and share knowledge, social networks are still at the formative stages, I think.
And then kind of linked to that, collaboration tools and the way now that organizations can be speaking to anybody across the world, collaborating with different groups of customers, linking people together to solve problems. At the moment, some of those things are still quite - it’s not exactly frictionless. You know, making a Skype call is still sometimes beset by tech problems and everything. So we’re still at the early stages of that.
But in terms of the inspiration, I’m trawling for kind of the opportunities to do things differently and to take problems and to bring groups of people together in new ways to solve those problems. That’s why I get a lot of inspiration from, you know, things like Buurtzorg. It’s just a manifestation of that - it’s bringing different groups of people together to solve problems around a person or a community. That’s the first bit of inspiration.
The second thing - and I’m probably gonna go a little bit wider here - but I think if you look at some of the things that are happening to us across the world right now… you know, if you look at things like Donald Trump-ism, look at Brexit, if you look at the UK’s decision to exit the European Union, if you look at the productivity problem across the world and the fact that technology hasn’t really boosted our productivity, if you look at 70 percent of us are not engaged in the work we do, a good third of people say their jobs are meaningless…
You could look at that very negatively, but I actually do the opposite of that, and I think what that shows is that people want change and they’re kind of dissatisfied with the system they have and the way things are working now. And I think that presents us all who are working in this kind of space with a huge opportunity because people are up for doing things differently.
And I think we probably have, genuinely, the first time since the Industrial Revolution, the opportunity to kind of stand back, look at how work is done and look at the activities of work and look at how we can bring new groups together to solve problems. So there’s a huge amount of inspiration out there amidst all the negativity.
Lisa: I think that’s a really positive and kind of articulate way of putting it - that there are these tensions at the moment, these growing pains if you like, and seeing that as a real opportunity to kind of capitalize on people’s appetite for change, on people’s acceptance that things aren’t… that work’s not really working the way it is now, but that means that we can take responsibility for it and reimagine it as we see fit.
Paul: Yeah, yeah. And I think, you know, what I’m always mindful of is that, you know, if you’ve got any sort of desire or dissatisfaction with the way things are, there’s always the chance that, you know, kind of negative forces could move into that and sort of play to people’s fears.
And so things like automation, that’s a great example. You know, automation could be a very, very scary thing where we could start talking about “all jobs are gonna get destroyed” and “robots are gonna be doing this” and “people gonna be out of work.” You can approach it on that level, or you can also approach it on the level that that actually could lead us to do much more creative work, much more purposeful work, much more value-added work than we’ve ever been able to do.
So, you know, I think this is a tremendously exciting period of change, and so I think probably, you know, we hopefully will look back in sort of 20-30 years and think, you know, this was a time when we had to shape things. And that’s what inspires me at the moment.
Lisa: Yeah, I think Umberto Galiano had said that technology is neither good nor bad - it’s how we apply it. And so I think yeah, I think whatever technologies or changes or advances are coming our way, there are always different ways of looking at it, I think.
And you mentioned a little bit about social media and Twitter, for example, and how that’s being starting to be used. And I know you’re very active on social media as well, and I stumbled across the Trello board that you’re using at Bromford, and I thought that was quite an interesting example, practical example of experimenting with new ways of working. Could you tell us a little bit about how you use that Trello board and where that inspiration came from?
Paul: Yeah, yeah. The inspiration, I think, came from a couple of things really. One, I was at an event a couple of years ago in London, and there were people who were working in kind of Innovation Labs, some kind of people who were doing some cool stuff from across the world. You know, they were - and actually there weren’t that many people from the UK there. It was people from Europe, from South America, from Southeast Asia, from Australia - really diverse kind of people all working on the same problems, all trying to do the same stuff, all trying to kind of make the world a better place, and but largely working on kind of four or five main themes.
And, you know, my thinking at the time was usually influenced by that in terms of: why are we hiding what we work on? Why are we actually keeping things behind those kind of organizational borders? Particularly, you know, if it’s not actually threatened by other people taking those ideas and working on them, and actually even if they do, so what?
So there’s the kind of thing about how do we open up the organization? And I was looking at kind of people like Buffer, you know, the social media management platform that was founded by Joel Gascoigne. And I really loved the way they work because they’ve got like, you know, 80 people working across six different continents and cities, you know, 24/7 and everything.
And I like some of their work, and I like their values. And one of their values is “default to transparency,” and they actually publish it and say, you know, “Take pride in the opportunities to share that beliefs, values, strengths, and decisions. Use transparency as a tool to help other people. Share your thoughts immediately. Be honest and share what you’re thinking early in the decision process to avoid kind of big revelations.” And I love that. I love that as a kind of value.
And I was thinking of that when it came to kind of Bromford Lab in terms of what we could do and what Bromford could do. And so going back to Trello, which is just a way of stating what we’re working on, what we wanted to do was just to say, “Look, we will work out loud, we’ll share our work, we won’t keep our best ideas to ourselves on the basis of they’re just ideas. There’s gonna be loads of people out there who can work on and help us work on those ideas.”
So the purpose of Trello was about, you know, just using a tool that encouraged collaboration and sharing and just getting work out there and getting it made public. And that’s kind of just the opposite way our organizations have chosen to perform, but I think it’s - I look at people like Buffer, and they give me inspiration as a different way of doing things.
Lisa: It makes me wonder as well - I know Bromford isn’t a public sector organization, but it’s not explicitly private sector. But for organizations that are public sector or that are kind of highly regulated, I imagine there’d be quite a lot of pushback for that kind of openness and transparency. Did you experience any of that? Or, you know, what are your thoughts about that and how to push through that?
Paul: There is absolutely pushback to doing that whether you are in a, you know, public sector organization, a private sector organization. It’s human nature to push back on some of those things because it’s the way we’ve been brought up, particularly in kind of the corporate world over the past 20-30 years, that actually, you know, “keep your ideas to yourself,” “don’t wash your dirty linen in public,” all those kind of things.
So absolutely, have I faced, have we faced pushback? Absolutely. But it’s not done from a negative point of view. Some of it’s from the point of view that people won’t be interested in what we’re working on. But the way social networks are developing and the way that kind of that connected culture is emerging is that, you know, there’s always going to be more talents outside your organization than is within it. It always will be.
So how can we, as organizations, stop thinking within our kind of boundaries and sort of walls and our intranets, and actually thinking about opening things up? I think, you know, intranets and everything really are just a way that we just harness internal knowledge, but that’s internal knowledge and it doesn’t connect with the outside world. And that’s the bit I’m interested in exploring.
But yeah, I mean, yeah, you’re absolutely gonna get pushback on that, and we adopt a very sort of pragmatic approach to that. In terms of if we’re working with organizations in which, you know, they are developing highly commercial products, or they’re starting up as a business, we’re not going to share things that actually could damage their business model in any way. But that doesn’t mean we can’t talk about kind of problems we want to solve in that sense.
Lisa: Because you’ve talked about boundaries within the organization and interfacing between the organization and the outside world. But what about internally? Because a lot of organizations struggle with silo thinking and departments kind of working in their own bubbles, really. How have you kind of evolved new ways of working that kind of help alleviate that issue of silo thinking?
Paul: Well, you know, you kind of have to learn to embrace silos, I think. And, you know, it’s interesting because I don’t know… You know, I’ve got quite a lot of organizations visit us, and we’ve got silos in our organization, and every organization I speak to admits to having silos. So I think we have to go beyond silos existing and look why they exist.
Okay, so silos exist because organizations have been primed to be efficient, to produce, to be productive, and that’s obviously a necessary activity. So silos, at a basic level, can be a good thing because they kind of harness expertise, they are easy to manage, they build trust in teams, they provide focus.
But they’ve also got a negative side, and they also kind of can become kind of incestuous, they lose this change, they hoard resources, they kind of self-protect and don’t network, and they focus on individual good rather than kind of collective good.
So in terms of what we’ve been attempting to do and what we’ve started to do is to start to harness the power of silos and sort of reconfigure those into kind of small network teams.
So I think, you know, if I explain what the lab-based approach is to working, it’s to actually work across all of those to minimize the damaging effects of them but to actually better connect them. So, you know, if you think around how social networks emerge in real life, you know, there’s no rules that govern them. You know, I can connect to you, you can connect to somebody else, we can share knowledge very, very quickly.
What we need to recreate is that kind of network across an organization, but it can’t be as chaotic as some of our social networks. It has to have some semblance of order. And whether you adopt formal systems such as holacracy or any kind of source, you know, self-organization, it really is then just about how you actually adapt those things to fit your culture.
And I, you know, we kind of resist following set management models because I think those things have got to be the right thing for your organizational culture. Because if you just try and overlay, you know, a prescribed way of working across your culture, it can reject it.
Lisa: I think that’s a really good point. I’m definitely a believer that there’s no one model to rule them all, or no one model that, you know, you can just use as a blueprint and lift off one organization and dump into your own. I think I’m a real believer that organizations finding their own way - I think there’s so much learning in that. And even if you end up reinventing the wheel, it’s your wheel. So I think there’s definitely a value in that.
And it also kind of brings to mind something that challenged my thinking, and I noticed it was an assumption kind of baked into my question really, that silos are bad. And you’re kind of correction, almost, that it’s kind of looking at, well, what purpose do they serve and why do they exist? So it’s kind of moving away from this paradigm of “it’s like a problem to be solved” and more like “it’s a polarity to be managed.”
So you don’t want to have, you know, you don’t want at one end of the kind of polar extremes, you don’t want to have complete silo, knowing inside darkened room, black box kind of thinking. But at the other end of the scale, if everything is open, if the default is, you know, there are no boundaries or no kind of silos at all, then that comes with its own disadvantages. So it’s like finding the right balance and that equilibrium that’s right for your organization and your teams, and not enforcing one or the other.
Paul: Yeah, absolutely. And I think, you know, I kind of view in terms of this kind of force or quad four sort of things here in terms of like, you know, you’ve got leadership on one hand, you’ve got kind of the desire for kind of self-directed work on the other. You’ve got efficiency at one level, and the opposite of that is exploration.
And a lot of those things are kind of opposed, and they’re kind of different things. So, you know, if you look at the desire for organizational efficiency, which is where silos come from, that is around actually not failing. That’s about, you know, high production values, that’s about getting it right time after time.
Exploration, on the other hand, and exploring some of the models that you’re discussing in other podcasts, necessarily entails failure. And so it isn’t about switching from one to the other. It’s more as you say about, you know, finding that balance, and that balance can shift over time. It could depend in terms of, you know, what’s really important to the organization at that time. So I think there’s kind of this model that we’ve got to explore that’s much more kind of fluid than some of the kind of the set models of the past.
Lisa: I think you’ve used metaphors and you’ve mentioned social media quite a lot, and I’ve been following you for a few years on social media, and I’ve followed your blogs and you’re very active on Twitter. And I can see that you’re very well-read and inspired by all sorts of sources and examples and stuff out there, and you go to conferences and, you know, you’re learning a lot clearly.
But for people who who aren’t on social media, who don’t go to conferences and learning programs and things like that, you know, and I think probably that’s a huge population of people and organizations in the world, what can we do to connect to that group, do you think?
Paul: Well, I mean, there’s a few things there. I mean, I feel first of all it’s a huge leadership challenge, I think, in terms of promoting, you know, the value of social networks as part of learning and development.
If you look at way our organizations approach Learning and Development at the moment, a lot of it is still very kind of one-way - even if you’re moving from kind of training courses to online courses. Well, it’s me learning something from the organization imparting some knowledge back, which I think is, you know, the kind of old model that we need to sort of move forward from.
In terms of now, you know, we’ve got to harness the kind of power of networks. And it, you know, the social media thing - just to go back to that, I think is interesting. In terms of I was at a conference the other day, it wasn’t in my sector, and it was very obvious that virtually nobody was using social media as part of their learning at their conference. So nobody was kind of tweeting or on any kind of network that I could see.
However, when asked the question about, you know, do you use social networks, everybody did. And it was a very diverse audience in terms of age. So people are using those kind of networks in their personal lives. What they still haven’t always done is transfer those into their work lives. And that’s where there’s a huge, you know, opportunity for leadership to promote that that isn’t a bad thing to do - that’s about bringing the kind of opportunities we found in our personal lives into the world of work.
You’re absolutely right - we’ve got to connect those people better because if we’re not doing that, we are wasting resources essentially. We’re missing opportunities.
So, you know, this kind of - I’m a huge fan of the book “Team of Teams” by Stanley McChrystal, and I’m sure some of your listeners have read that book. But those that haven’t - in that book, he talks about taking command of the Joint Special Operations Task Force in Iraq. And essentially, he quickly realized that his kind of conventional tactics were failing. And although the kind of the Allied forces had a huge advantage in certain numbers, they had loads more resources and better technology, they were better trained, they were no match for al-Qaeda at the time in terms of that they were much more adaptable and much more networked.
And what he found is that the problem wasn’t one of capability but interoperability. It was, you know, basically each time they gathered valuable intelligence as part of the Allied forces, it took weeks for the data to be distributed. The information had to flow through silos, it had to go through hierarchy. So what he got was loads of teams of individual experts, but actually well-armed and trained beyond the capabilities of their foe, and they’re all meeting their individual objectives. But at the time, al-Qaeda were winning.
And what he talks about was how they had to build a kind of “shared consciousness” through a creation of a network of teams that includes agile interaction, embedding data at a very local level, conducting kind of daily status calls that didn’t follow the kind of hierarchy. And he comes up with this thing about, you know, “it takes a network to defeat a network.”
But applying that to how organizations work, it’s not about defeating things. You know, when we talked about that kind of silo culture, we need to move from those efficient silos by boosting the interactive capacity of small network teams.
So when answering your question about merging those two things, if we can bring that capacity of social networks and the ability to do that and their ability to disseminate information very quickly across our organizations, I think we will just untap resources we didn’t even know we had. So you’re absolutely right in your central question of, you know, how do we bring those people on board? It’s going to be one of the prime focuses of leadership.
Lisa: I’m a big fan of that book too. And I think we’ve talked - that’s been a theme, I think, of this conversation so far about kind of radical transparency in order to empower people and connect teams, this kind of team of teams and networks and things like that.
But on the subject of leadership, one thing one kind of conversation that I’m always really interested in is the conversation of “do we need managers at all, and what is the future of leadership - will management be part of that?” And I saw you’d written a post called “Why do we still need managers?” So what are your thoughts?
Paul: Okay, well, you know, I think let’s have a look at organizational complexity and the difficulty of getting things done. Organizations have gone up almost six-fold since the fifties. The number of procedures and rules to fight the same complexity I’ve seen like a 35-fold increase.
So something’s going on with organizations in terms of - it’s not getting easier to do things, it’s getting much more complex. You’ve got to look at that at the same time as looking at the guise of managers. So we have employed more managers, and those same managers are telling us that they spend 40 percent of their time writing reports and, whoever you want to believe, 30 to 60 percent of their time in meetings.
So but something’s not working - is it fair to blame managers for that? Well, I don’t think it is because I think it comes back to what we’ve just been alluding to in terms of probably fault lines within the organization. Managers are just kind of the expression of that, you know. So if the organizational approach is, you know, “we’ve got a problem - let’s recruit more managers,” then we’re just gonna add to that.
So I think we have to unpick why managers kind of exist, and this is what I’m interested in exploring in terms of what are they there to do? As I said, you know, we’ve all got a desire for kind of leadership and being mentored and all of those kind of things, but we’ve also got this desire to be self-directed in our work.
And as I say, we’ve got to balance efficiency of organizations with exploration and innovation. And I think management exists precisely because of that tension - it kind of operates in the middle to bring those things together. And that’s the bit - picking up what we were just talking about in “Team of Teams” - that I think we need to replace that management with that shared consciousness.
And at the moment, we don’t fully know what that shared consciousness kind of looks and feels like, and it’s gonna look different in one organization to another. But, you know, where I’m kind of going with this is - though I’ve been doing some work on this particularly over the last 12 months - if an organization gets its strategy right and establishes really strong values and principles based on that strategy, and it embeds those kind of principles in really effective automated processes so that the kind of heavy lifting works kind of being done automatically, and then it empowers people to come together and solve problems when they do arise, and it doesn’t restrict that to individual teams and silos, and ultimately it trusts people to do the kind of the right thing in situations where they need to depart from the scripts…
Then if you put all that together, you don’t need managers because it becomes a kind of self-managing organization. Now I know I’ve just kind of painted a vision of perfection there, and doing, you know, any one of those things is quite a difficult thing. But I think we have to look absolutely why managers need to exist, and they’re largely existing in their current form because it’s a throwback to the Industrial Age of efficiency and growth and production. And that’s very different to where a lot of our organizations are right now.
Lisa: Yeah, it strikes me that it’s a little bit like a systems thinking approach that in quite a few of the things you’re saying, you’re talking about not, you know, “don’t just throw the baby out with the bathwater” or “destroy things” or think in terms of “that’s good,” “that’s bad,” but ask why does it exist? What purpose was it designed to serve? And then kind of explore, is, you know, is it still serving the purpose it was originally designed to serve?
What would your advice be to listeners who are interested in their own lab-based approach to developing, exploring new ways of working in their organization? What would a starting point be in your opinion, from your experience?
Paul: Yeah, I mean, I probably took, before we did the lab-based approach, I probably took about 18 months visiting a load of organizations and getting, you know, talking about sort of multinational huge organizations down to kind of small local community-based organizations, looking at the way they worked and the way they kind of developed ideas.
And it’s funny, you know, because it is less about, you know, it’s less about kind of the way they innovate and more about their sort of way they work and the way they sort of adopt ideas. And, you know, the conclusion I came to is we could start this really small and really simply.
And, you know, if I had - if I’m, you know, my advice to anybody who’s embarking upon this, it’s really about not overthinking it and really just starting on things and giving it a go. You know, to tell you a kind of story in terms of that - how I worked to kind of pace the lab-based approach to our executive, and I worked for ages on the kind of top 12 things that we were gonna work on, kind of top 12 problems.
And I remember pitching it, and I was pushing an open door, and people were usually enthusiastic about the kind of things we were going working upon. And I can tell you now three and a half years later, we haven’t worked on one of those things - not one.
So, you know, my advice would be not to spend too much time actually obsessing about how you’re gonna do, what you’re gonna do, and to start very small. And, you know, the principle of a lab approach is: define the problem, test something. And a test could be done in days, it could be done with minimal resource. You don’t need a lot of money to start a lab-based approach at all. We largely do it from sort of existing resources and just redeployed them.
But, you know, a lot of this is like, you know, just getting out there and starting doing stuff. You know, it’s not enough just to think, “if when you’ve got to act different, you could do something.” And that means, you know, that you’ve got to actually take something, you’ve got to experiment, and that hasn’t got to be a massive resources.
We, you know, as an organization, you know, we’ve got a social responsibility, we haven’t got unlimited resources, we have to do things quite discreetly in many ways. And what we found is they go - you can take something, you can bring a group of colleagues together, you can knock things around in a room. As long as you give them the creative space to not be constrained by how they’ve done things in the past, and you can come up with a way to test something, and if that test fails over two days or even less than that, you’ll get the learning from it, you’ll do something differently.
So my absolute advice is to actually start small and not to give up as well. You know, one of the things that I talk a lot about is that, you know, people talk about “change is hard,” but they absolutely - it is hard in one sense because just as our bodies are kind of designed to fight a common cold, most of our organization cultures protect the kind of the organizational DNA from any antibodies.
It is designed that way. It’s designed to be efficient. Something new into that DNA can get rejected. And so, you know, you can have ideal antibodies. I think you can actually have organizations protecting themselves from new things.
And, you know, we talk a lot about strong cultures, don’t we, in terms of that that’s a really good thing? What we should aim for is to have really strong cultures and organizations. But the stronger your culture, the more resistant it can be to change. And that’s something that we’ve had to learn in terms of, you know, if you’re gonna be starting doing new things, you’re gonna get pushback. That’s natural, and it’s right that you get that pushback because if you had an organization that just accepted everything that was kind of counterculture to it, it would become chaotic. It would stop being efficient.
So, you know, what I would say to your listeners is think big, but start very small.
