Podcasts

Episode 12 - Decoding AQ with Ross Thornley Feat. Tom Cheesewright - Future Proof Your Business

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Intro  

Hi, and welcome to Decoding AQ, helping you to learn the tools, mindsets, and actions to thrive in an ever-changing world.

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Ross  

Hi and welcome to next episode of Decoding AQ. I've got Tom Cheesewright with me today who is an applied futurist. So he's got a great background for those of you who are looking at the video version, and I've been looking for the crystal ball. Can't see it yet. But he helps organizations to see, share and respond to clear revisions of tomorrow. So welcome.

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Tom  

Thank you Ross. Thank you.

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Ross  

And what got us started in the initial reach out, was your recent book called "Future-Proof Your Business". And, you know, couldn't be more topical, couldn't be more of the moment to be able to think about what are we doing right now to make sure we’re still going to be alive in here tomorrow, it's big issue. 

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Tom  

Absolutely. You know, it wasn't meant to come out just yet. It was scheduled for launch the end of July in fact, it’s scheduled to be released in paperback in the next week or so. And but I got a phone call in April as this thing's the lockdown was beginning and Pandemic was really starting to hit from my publisher and said, “Listen here Tom, we think this is really relevant to the current period, we'd like to bring the launch forward. What do you think about, launching it sooner than we planned was?” I said, “That's fantastic”. And this was a Thursday afternoon. And so I said, “When are you thinking of launching it”? they said Tuesday.

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Right, this is about adaptability. How do I turn around a book launch in the space of a weekend basically? So yeah, it but you know, it made a lot of sense because absolutely, lots of people are going through that thought process now. And it's, it's really caught a lot of people's attention, it's very pleased to say it's probably the recommendation of the recommended business books from the FT this month. Because it does feel something. It feels sort of appropriate manual for the current situation.

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Ross  

And I think there's a key difference, you know, between something that is, this sci-fi, sci-fact, you know, futurism which is this intangible thing, just in the vision and imagination of people. And to then, what's the roadmap? What's the manual to get there? And how do we define and design a destination? We'd actually like to go and go and be it.

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Tom  

Yeah. And that sort of tension is really interesting, because you can talk about that tension in two dimensions. Like yeah, sometimes people are quite critical of me, because they've misunderstood the purpose of my role. They think I'm there to lobby for a particular vision of the future, or that I ought to be driving society towards some particular utopian vision. When actually most of my work is quite, it's quite mercenary in some ways, you know, I work with organizations who want to make sure that they don't get taken out of the knees by the next big thing. 

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And that takes you to the second dimension of this challenge is, a lot futurism is kind of thought of as being about you know, jetpacks and brain implants and what's going to happen in 30-50 years time, and I do that stuff, it's really important. It's really interesting to lay out that vision of where you want to be, what are the opportunities? What happens if we don't intervene? 

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But actually, most of my work is at the two to five year range. It is what are those? What are those critical opportunities that we might not have seen? And what are those threats that are coming down the pipeline that, you know, might blindside us if we're not actively looking for them?

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Ross  

And I guess it's much harder now because a two-year or even five-year horizon now is probably the same amount of change and transition, as maybe trying to think 10 or 20 years out a few decades ago, just because of the pace and accelerating change of industry, globalization, technology, all of these things. How do you deal with that?

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Tom

Yeah, it really depends what domain you're looking at, like some domains, things just haven't moved very fast at all, you know. We all sort of, you know, wake up in a bed that's been around for a few centuries, well, not actually your own bed. I'm hoping I change my sheets on my mattress more frequently than that. But, you know, the idea has been around a long time, you know, toilets 400 years old. I mean, not all of us had them until, you know, some people that they ended the last century, but you know, it's been around for 400 years. So, you know, inside the house. I mean I’m in a 140-year-old house now, you lots of things don't change very fast at all.

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But actually, this is a globally connected nature industry these days. The fact that we're augmenting with technology, that I can pull up in a web browser, a 3d design program, or that I can, my kids can and it's that level of ease of use that is augments their design ability to take their sketch in their head for a piece of dollhouse furniture and turn it into reality in the space of half an hour. None of those things were around three decades ago and even if they were, they were accessible to you, the top end of science and technology and these giant corporations, whereas now they're accessible to an eight-year-old kid. And the result is that media, consumer electronics, news, culture politics, lots of these things do move at incredible speed now.

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Ross  

What got you into this area of futurism and a linked question to that, what stimulated the thought to write this book?

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Tom  

So what got me into it, I can't quite reach, it’s just that I’ve reached on my bookshelf over there. But there's a book called "The Book of the Future", “The Usborne Book of the Future”, which my mum bought me at a book fair in about 1981, I still have now and still refer to, it's incredibly tattered and battered, but it laid out in your life in the year 2000 and beyond. And it was such an exciting vision of electric cars and solar panels on the roofs and wrist-mounted smartwatches. And all these things that we have now. Now between that and growing up in the age of Star Wars, and you know, Buck Rogers and Metal Mickey and all these things that are just surrounded by all these influences. You know, I can reach out this way and I can touch 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 the model robots because I'm still a nerd, you know. So there was that aspect to it and I've always been a technologist, I've always been obsessed with technology. I was stripping down broken bits of electronics at the age of seven and trying to understand how they worked. 

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And then yeah, so fast forward to about 2006, I started writing a blog about the future, about technology society and geekeries and the projects I was doing to experiment, the new technologies, some of the ideas I had about that interface between what's coming and what's now and how it affects us. 

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And then fast forward another six years, and I came to leave my last business, which was a tech startup, we founded a software business in 2009. I came to leave that in 2012. And say, You know what, I want to make this blog, this passion of mine, but what's next into a business? And to my great surprise, and delight, people want it. And you know, within the first six weeks, I had phone calls from LG and Nikon and Sony Pictures saying, I hear you're an applied futurist, can you come and help us, man? Absolutely! So again, fast forward, I guess, eight years to today and in this book, I wrote another book last year called “High Frequency Change”, which was really explaining that difference between the things that move fast and the things that don't and why that is. 

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But that was really an explanation as to why these big companies were calling me up, like why these massive global corporations, ones we think know it all, why are they ringing up and asking for help. And it's because there is this sort of sense of destabilization we get from that high frequency change. And so having written the explanation of why we feel like that, I had to write the book of how you deal with it, what do you do. And that's what this book is, it's a sort of three-part guide to based on everything I've learned over the last eight years working with, huge, big organizations and small public and private, you know, 25-30 of the Global 500 in there. What do you do to future proof of business across these sorts of different aspects of the organization?

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Ross  

In terms of things have accelerated, perhaps because of COVID-19, where that was coming anyway, some of the things, and it's almost given permission to many people, many organizations to reimagine, because it's changed from being a burning ambition to being a burning platform for many. 

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And so it's become an imperative survival mechanic rather than a dreamer for the people who like tinkering at strategy or things or whatever it might be, in terms of how your career is shaped through this curiosity as a youngster, you know, probably like me watching Tomorrow's World, you know, enjoying these, these visions of kit and technology and the way we might live, and thinking, Oh, that looks exciting. Let's see if we can get there. To then working with these large organizations that have critical challenges. What would you say, you know, give us an example story of, you know, some challenges that one was facing, and how did they go through the process of even thinking about that change?

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Tom  

It's interesting, because I've been in on evolution over that period as well, from being interested in the mechanics of mechanics, to being interested in the mechanics of people and organizations. And you know, while 10 years ago, so much of my practice was about technology, these days, I find myself talking about strategy and culture and all these things. And it's interesting you know, I still don't think I have the sort of the soft side of that, perhaps, but I'm fascinated by the mechanics of how these things are organized. And my approach to answering those questions is quite an engineer's approach. I trained as an engineer originally, and I have quite this sort of structural approach to understanding these things.

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So you take, for example, you know, one of my favorite briefs ever, which was the CEO of a council came to me and said, Look we're going through austerity, you know, we're losing half our budget, we're gonna lose half our staff, we've got one of the big consultancies coming in doing the salami slicing, you know, just chopping things back, left, right and center. And we'll end up with an operating model that we can survive on. But I know that it's not what we would have if we sat down with a blank sheet of paper, and design the local authority fit for the 21st century. So here's a blank sheet of paper, design me a local authority fit for the 21st century. 

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And so I worked alongside his people inside this big consultancy and looked to what they were doing and interviewed loads of people to understand like what was structurally wrong with the organization, that meant it couldn't respond, that it couldn't operate within an efficiency it wanted, that it couldn't actually meet the needs of the people, they were so desperate to serve, the people in need of housing, the people in need of adult social care. And you look at the structure, you realize that this organization has grown organically, like so many organizations, over years and decades, where it's very sort of siloed, like this very individual siloed, operating side by side and it's been structured from the top down. So that you've got, effectively one leader, you've obviously got a bunch of counselors and one leader, and then 93, different touch points for the most important person in the whole process, which is the service user is the citizen. 

And so we said like, Well, why don't we flip that on its head, we don't really care if we have, you know, lots of independence and autonomy at the edges between these different organizations, as long as you've got a coherent interface for the citizen, who can navigate this easily and in doing so you strip away so much of the cost and complexity from operating this organization. So we created this sort of ring model with the citizen of that middle, a single unified user interface for them between them in any service they might need, a coherent data layer that allows them to share information across the council with appropriate privacy protections and then you're operating bits outside on the outside, which some of which will be public, some which be private as they already are. 

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And now we didn't get to implement that fully, we're talking about a radical, you know, 25-year transformational local authority, but it drove a lot of different decision-making in terms of how things were structured. So one really good example was, they had the skills of communication, distributed across the organization in tiny little pockets and pots, you know, people with, you know, one person with a part-time job, trying to do all the communication for an incredibly complex, difficult and critical part of the organization. And so he said, Look, why don't we build effectively an internal communications agency to bring these skills of copywriting and design and communication together, and treat all of these people like clients, so you build up client expertise, and eventually bring these skills together. 

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And so what we end up with is a slightly better resource for communicating and what the result in the past was, they had they found they had, they did an audit, and there's something like 200 different Facebook pages, none of which had any oversight. You know, and you talk about a political organization here with Facebook, they do with no oversight, no safeguarding practices, all of that can be brought in, you know, under control of a group of people, you've got the expertise, the time, the skill, the legal knowledge, to run it properly. 

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And so yeah, it was a direct example of, you know, we couldn't achieve the full scope of our ambition, we could make some critical changes based on that futurist thought about what does this future organization look like? The drove what you call that your that roadmap, you know, steps along the way. And there are loads of other examples, you know, it's, you get to work with such a variety of organizations. Sometimes it's behind closed doors, and you can't go and talk about it. There are some corporations that I'd love to talk about the work I've done with them but it’s just not allowed, I can name the customer but I can’t say what we’ve done. Google. 

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And yeah, and then you've got, you know, ones where they're really open about what you do. So you're going in and talking to BMW. You know BMW an organization that's built its success based on continuous optimization. How do we do better tomorrow, what we did yesterday, and now he's teaching all of its leaders, this idea of ambidextrous leadership, that actually you've got to keep doing better tomorrow, what you did yesterday, but you've also got to have in the other hand, the idea that what we do tomorrow might be something completely different. You've got to be the person that drives it. And you've got to learn those skills of entrepreneurship and innovation.

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Ross  

I think that's one of the classic conundrums at the moment is the challenge between exploitation and you know, exploration. That you've developed something that is providing value yesterday, and you want it to provide value tomorrow, maybe a bit more and for a longer period. At the same time, there's going to be a disruption point where it's somebody who went and explored something entirely different and brought that back to the mothership. And that's the challenge of all organizations through their various horizons of product and innovation.

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I'm interested, you know, the often the challenge that I've observed is not in the, in the thinking, it's in the when it comes back to reality. When the, you know, you click your heels, and you come back and realize there's so much often legacy. Legacy and thinking in processes, in structure. One of the big things I've been curious about and interested in is the concept of unlearning. I don't know if you've come across a Barry O'Riley’s book “Unlearn” and this view of one of the biggest barriers to big change is past success. And even when it's marginally successful, you're getting a little round of applause from it. You know, if all the applause stops, it's easy to stop it. But Just a little bit, you know, the odd pat on the back,the odd stroke, to say, yes, that still works. How do you think about that challenge? Have you seen it? And what are maybe some examples to break through that?

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Tom  

So I talk about humility a lot. You know, I think most of us when we've been in our careers, certainly when you get to a leadership level you've been in career, 20-25 years. 15 if you are, depends what you call leadership. But really sort of c-level leadership, you've been imposed 20-25 years at least. And you've probably been in or around the same industry a long time, and you feel like you know it. And you're one of the most common things I go in, and I talk to people it says, they'll say, I know you work with that in that industry and that was interesting, but this industry is different. You know, things like that don't work here. Our customers don't want that. And you hear the same things every time. I mean, I literally heard a version of it yesterday, you hear it over and over again. 

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And you've got to break down that thinking and you've got to force people to accept that, however much they know about the world they think they're in tomorrow. It only has limited value in a world that looks completely different. In a market that looks completely different. And you have to teach people, humility, you have to teach people, you have to remind people how little they know outside that narrow aspect of their own domain. The way I do it, the thing I recommend is actually getting a new hobby.

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I was enormously humbled by learning to roller skate a couple of years ago. I and my kids wanted to do it. We started going to the rollerring. And you know, I could get around the rink. I could just about to stand up and move and then there are these eight-year-old kids, seven-year-old, six-year-old kids, you know, shooting round backwards, upside down, doing cartwheels in their skates. And you're like, I'm a 40-year-old man, and I am getting left for dust by children. And not only that, there's like there's a guy in his 70’s over there. You know, sashaying down the rink, looking ridiculously cool. And all of these people you naturally put yourself ahead of when you're inside your own comfort zone are suddenly your superiors in so many ways. And the first thing is that it makes you feel humble. It makes you think, it makes you realize how little you know outside that narrow aspect of your own domain. And the second thing it does is it reawakens those learning muscles. So I don’t know about unlearning, necessarily, but it makes you hungry for knowledge. If you've got any sort of competitive instinct, it starts making you “Well, I want to be able to do that!”.

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And you start getting those muscles going. And it doesn't matter if you're learning to roller skate, or learning to operate a business in a different domain, the learning muscles are the same, that hunger for knowledge, that curiosity, that ability to qualify information to seek out the gaps in your own knowledge and fill them is exactly the same. So the first thing I say to people is, you know, that if I can't hear that a lot, is you know, just go get a new hobby. Go learn to roller skate, go break some ribs like I did, and learn the hard way.

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Ross  

And to do learning, I've had this conversation before a couple of podcasts that the difference of knowledge which brings confidence to learning you have to have vulnerability, because you're, you know, acknowledging that you don't know. And so for leaders that their place of yes, you need humility, but to have curiosity to accept, I need to learn for some is a destabilizing once they start to see it get those muscles going, again of what it was like to be a child or it was like to do things for the first time, it feeds a different reward. You know of that and it's just about replacing those things.

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Tom  

There’s a great example of how slow change come sometimes. So in “Mavericks at Work” was released in I don't know, 20 years ago come about, and it was a long time ago now. And so much of that was about, you know, bit go into, I think it's the Wieden and Kennedy theory, you know, going to work a little bit stupid every day, you know, except that you don't know, the best leaders ask loads of questions, not the appointed direction. 

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And you know, it's only now that that's starting to be adopted more and more by the leaders I meet. And there's a level of self-selection there. If somebody's picking up the phone and you’re a futurist and going, I don't know, they come more and more likely to be the sort of leader who's going to say that to their own staff, but I am seeing it more and more that acceptance that you just have to ask questions. And accept that you don't know all the answers.

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Ross  

And I guess some of this, you know, like life, it's timing, it's contextual. So where a future in a linear space, how much ambiguity or uncertainty there was to one, which is exponential, and everything is uncertain, and it can change in the matter of, you know, days, weeks or months.  And then going, Oh I'll go and revisit what might have been thought of have put you in a padded cell, a couple of decades ago, might be now the very thing that people are holding up at the top of a pedestal at things.

And do you think, what is it that in your opinion, driving why things like adaptability, and those areas are so high on the agenda at the moment for individuals for organizations? What do you think it is that's driving that?

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Tom  

This has been brought back and I've been working on a campaign with the Daily Express actually recently called "Protect Your Future". And it took me back some research I did last year for the launch of High-Frequency Change. And we surveyed 2000 adults across the UK. And 69% said they feel like change happens faster now than it did 20 years ago. And that rises to 75% of over 55’s. So really, when you really gained that board-level territory.

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And so again this sense of sort of uncertainty, the sense of acceleration, even if we can make very coherent arguments that lots of things aren't changing very fast at all, is really widespread. People feel it, people feel destabilized. They feel uncertain. And they want an answer. They want a solution to it. They want to know that, you know, even if they can't, somebody around them is seeing what's next. And that they have got an answer. And they know that their organizations can respond to be able to respond that people are going to be able to respond. 

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And so it becomes into the sort of this corporate zeitgeist, it comes into the mindset, it comes into the conversation. There's a reason words become buzzwords. And it's because of their answers to challenges that consciously or subconsciously we're facing. And for me, really, it's about that sense of uncertainty. You know, I think most people don't understand why they feel that way. I think I don't think there is a particularly strong case we made that everything is changing faster. But I think in some of those things that really count, you know, we are seeing these, these waves of change utterly disrupt certain aspects of our lives. And it happens in lots of different ways, the next thing I'm hoping to write about is about the effect it has on choice. 

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There was a great book, Barry Schwartz 15 years ago about the choice paradox, where he had identified this explosion of choice on the shelves of supermarkets. And you think about how far we've come since 2005, the scale of online shopping now, direct access to the Chinese market where you know, there's 4000 different suppliers of kitchen units you can choose from, you know, it will ship direct to your door in the UK, you think about the array of different media we have access to, versus 15 years ago. I think it's such a, that in itself is quite destabilizing. 

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Ross  

Yeah. Yeah, I feel that's a problem.

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Tom  

Yeah, I used to choose to afford a Vauxhall and then now it's like, I don't even know the names of half the car companies. I wasn't teaching  my eight year old enjoys walking around naming the cars as we walk around, you know, I had to really think really hard about what some of the badges were there's so many on the market now.

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Ross  

You used a school of thought for me in terms of maybe one of the unexpected consequences and benefits of the pandemic that we're going through now can be similar in terms of if we've got this overwhelm of choice to maybe there'll be less choice post, it's a bit like you know a Great Depression in 29 and thousands and thousands of banks after that event, very few you know in lots of places at the moment many won't survive. We're seeing them across retail across every sector you know, travel industries there's going to be less choice perhaps, but at the same time, does it give them spawn new opportunity to new starts a bit like in 2008. You know that spawned, Airbnb is born, Uber, it's born all of these things that we didn't even know or expect to that point. So will it counterbalance itself out or what's your view on that?

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Tom  

First of all, I think about cars now, I’m thinking it’s probably not the best example because there's lots of car companies that don't exist anymore being like, classic car companies, but I think, are we gonna see some consolidation? Absolutely. Are we going to see a whole year probably 10 times as many like a hydro, you know, cut off to heads and fall take their place. 

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Because the cost of setting up something is so low now. I think, again, I started my own first business 15 years ago, I needed the support of my accountant to get registered at companies house, it took me six weeks to get a bank account, building a website, I would have had to either you know, buy a CMS or write a CMS from in PHP, and write the website in HTML, CSS, If I wanted to sell products, finding a supplier would have been literally a ringing up through catalogs or finding, you know, wholesalers. Yeah, and I frequently say to people now, the biggest risk when you've had too many glasses of wine used to be that you'd buy something stupid on eBay. The genuinely is a serious risk now, you wake up in the morning with a bit of a red wine hangover and find you've started a business by accident, because it's just so easy.

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Ross

Half a day, and you can do it.

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Tom

Right 13 quid to register your company and your company's house online, you set up a bank account with Tide, you know, free instant nearly upload a couple of bits of ID, you know, find a supplier through Alibaba separate website through Squarespace. Well, yeah, you're saying so easy now. And compared to what it was even 15 years ago, and people will and they might be micro businesses, they might be absolutely tiny, but it doesn't mean the challenge of navigating them any easier.

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Ross  

No, it brings me to the Jurassic Park quote, you know, just because we could we didn't think whether we should. And, you know, I guess in this, you know, future-ready business where everything is a could and the challenge then often is the filter of what is the should. So in your, kind of this manual, and this how-to guide, what are some of the principles that you use to help people make those decisions of all the noise, all the things that could be done? All the ideas, any ideas of good idea type culture, to what should people be doing? And how can they make those decisions well, in complex teams?

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Tom  

This is a really interesting example of the division between my sort of mechanical approach and a more sort of philosophical approach. Because I don't really tell people how to differentiate, I tell people, what the mechanisms are for making better decisions. 

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And I really talk about two ways to do that in the book, one of them is,  get better information. By one of the things I find consistently going to organizations, is that information moves really slowly, and is generally really poor quality and it quite often gets corrupted as it flows through the organization, by a sort of instinctive CYA instinct, cover-your-ass instinct is where everyone just make… 

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Ross  

The Chinese Whisper.

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Tom  

Right. But it's not corruption, it's just, Oh if I didn't see it like that, I made a slight tweak to the way things were presenting this spreadsheet because actually, that wasn't really a fair representation of the information. But happens three times by the time it reaches decision maker, really doesn't say anything at all. So the first thing you can do is you can accelerate decisions, you know, and improve the quality of the data in the way it's presented. 

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And the thing that you do is actually change who makes the decisions. We are hyper centralized, both politically and corporately, in the UK is a particularly British disease. But it's true globally. But particularly in the UK, where we were sort of constantly passing the buck up the chain until somebody who's good gets paid enough to take a risk takes the decision. 

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And actually, we need to reverse that flow and let people at the edge of the organization take decisions. And this is where we do get more into the philosophical, because when you get to people at the edge of the organization, they're generally closer to the customer. And what you want, in many ways is people making decisions who've got the best interest of the customer at heart. Because you've kind of only got one thing in your control in many ways. As an organization, it's your relationship with your customers, it’s like as long as you are putting the effort into meeting their needs, meeting them quickly, which is something people want very strongly. I want what I want, but I want it right now, meeting a sensible price, and behaving in line with the ethics that your customers expect. And you're kind of going to be in good shape. 

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And I think there's a huge benefit to not necessarily thinking about how those decisions are made, but thinking about who makes them and pushing them out to a generally more diverse set of people at the edge of the organization, rather than centralizing those decisions at the top. And by someone who maybe has the voice of the customer in one ear, but also the voice of the shareholder in the other.

Ross  

It comes to lots of the challenges of data and research. You got to ask the right questions. You've got to make sure that that data doesn't get corrupt through the channels. And sometimes, the customer doesn't know what they actually want or need and so having this strategic or leadership or expertise, to analyze that and the difference between meeting a need or predicting and anticipating. And that's I guess some of the challenges.

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I remember years ago doing a talk and I was explaining about a project that Amazon were doing. And I found it fascinating at the time because they were experimenting, and it was where customers also bought this, or they do behavioral tracking and present you things that they think you might like. In a virtual world, right online, it's in cloudlandia, so the cost to do that presented up is some algorithms and here you are, Tom, I know you're working on 3D printing something to do it, I'm going to present you up something that I know you're going to buy.

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What they were doing was actually shipping stuff before you bought it. So instead of showing you the picture that they thought you'd need the new TV, they’d actually send you one. And then send you one and say, “Hey look, we thought you might like this try it, if you don't let us know and we'll pick it back up again”. So there's kind of this weird balance of predicting behavior and it's like any, behavior it really only changes when we experience something. And so the closer we can get to the experience, we cut down the time of value. And I just found that one, just a fascinating thing. And I wonder whether it went anywhere or not.

But the other part that you were talking about of where are decisions made? So one is how are they made and where are they made, and who? Have you worked with any companies that are running a holocracy or similar kind of structures, which is what you describe of a distributed decision making based on the accountability of a specific area, not a hierarchical sort of structure.

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Tom  

I've not worked with any I would describe as a holocracy. I've worked with is massive corporations who are slowly pushing power out to the edges in really interesting ways. So, I had a great conversation with the CEO of HSBC, who’s quoted the new book, who's going through that process right now, highly centralized, pushing power out the edges and saying to his direct reports, I’m not taking the decision, you take that decision, if you've got your division to look after, you do what's right for your bit the organization, even better, push that decision down the chain again, and let them take the responsibility and is trying to embed that culture now. 

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And I've worked with you the big, big American manufacturing organization who had a great story. And I this wasn't me, this was a relatively young woman in their finance team told me this story, about how she'd been tasked with taking friction out of the sales process. Because they'd been burned sometime in the 1990’s by a customer going under. And so they'd set the thresholds, which salespeople could authorize credit really high as something like three times the average deal value. And so she was tasked with streamlining the space because there's like seven full-time members of staff just processing, like purchase orders basically and getting them approved by someone like you three levels of seniority up from the salesperson. And eventually, the conclusion she came to, she looked to know software to automate the flow and the signatures and everything else. She was like, why don't we just raise the credit limit? Like it was 30 years ago, we’re a much bigger company now. Most of our customers are, do not default on the other payments, let's just raise the credit limit by 50% - 100%. 

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And you immediately just stripped it made them more responsive to customers, you know, stripped friction out the process, empowered the sales people to make better deals. They're just one really, really simple administrative decision. But it's a very, very long process until they get to that point, I don't think they're ever going to get to holocracy, where you know, everything's truly distributed, they're still going to be a leader. But they are recognizing that they have to push power further and further to the edges. And yeah, there's some other stories in there about people, like you know,  lead all doing this, you know. Who've got much more of that shared decision-making culture.

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Ross  

And I guess it's a pendulum, right, you know. We see an observer, a problem or a challenge or an opportunity, and we put interventions to deal with it. And then as a result of that new things show up and we have a squiggly route in any given destination. And there's a reason why things happened in decision making, and structure to have governance, to have control, to have things like health and safety, because at the fringes of that is chaos and risk. And at some point both become risk. Too much in one area of slows process down, means that there's bias, means that there's less innovation at the other end there's lots of chaos, risk and death. And it's just what excites me so much about business, society, human nature, is just this constant jazz and dance between all of these friction points and tension points is just fascinating, I find.

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Tom  

Yeah, absolutely. And in the books, the book has a lot of detail actually, about how you distribute power with that, and minimize the risk in the process. So how you effectively design, define the walls of the box within which people can make decisions and equip them with the appropriate levels of training, skills, you know, autonomy and responsibility, take those decisions and make it clear where those boundaries are. I think that's, that's really important. 

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But you're absolutely right, you look at why our organizations are so centralized in terms of decision making, why we have a lot of very little autonomy, and you know, and repeated action at the edges of our organizations, the more junior members of staff is because that's what allowed us to scale. It gave us repeatability and quality and growth. And it got us to a certain point. And we've got to that point. And but unfortunately, that's not now the recipe for future success. The world's changed, the business has changed, you've got to change the recipe now, if you want to keep that success going for the next 20 years. And because you can't keep going the way you were putting in small part, because actually, it's just commoditized now. Anybody can do that, anybody can replicate that model. We've been doing it for 150 years.

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Ross

If the terrain and context changes, but you haven't changed how you're crossing that, you're going to struggle. It’s a car,  you've got a fantastic Formula One car, it performs super well around Silverstone or on the track. Take it and stick it in the desert, probably won't perform very well. Take it and stick it in an ocean and it's not going to be very good. And I think there's many businesses that have been optimized for terrain and contextual world that now no longer exists. 

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And how do we traverse that in a sort of Inspector Gadget way of being this adaptable, rather than trying to predict and make something solid that's in the future, get a state of mind that whatever there is going on in the future, you're able to deal with it with a smile, you're able to deal with it with optimism, with hope, with positivity, whatever that event that takes place. And the shift of things happening to you but for you irrelevant of whatever the event is, it's your mindset that you bring to there.

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I'm interested in terms of from an engineering background and mind. And you mentioned this almost tension in your own approach between the analytical, mathematical and engineering, and then the human to come in and mess it all up and you know, it's great in theory, it works really well in practice. I've done all the mathematics for it, and then we give it to a human, and it goes off in a completely different direction to where we thought. What are the kinds of human skills you think you're going to be most essential for success in the future?

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Tom  

So it's interesting to use the analogy of a car in the desert. I always talk about footballers, there's they you know, if you took the best Premier League for the best, First Division football from the 1970’s, and drop them in the Premier League, they'd struggle miserably because however skillful they were, they just wouldn't be equipped for the modern game and the same is true of business.

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And the same is true of people. I think you look at them, while I talk a lot about the structure and the sort of components of a future ready business like we feel like the corporate mindset. I think you’re absolutely right, those individual skills are really important. And I focus on three. And we came up with this thing called the three C's in a project research project I did with the Institute of Chartered Accountants a few years ago. And it's really stuck with me. And this really resonated with a lot of people.

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Because the first C is what I call curation, the ability to discover and qualify information. And that starts with the gaps in your own knowledge, but goes on to be what are the basic skills of research in the modern age, the ability to find information, the ability to qualify it, differentiate fake from true and absorb it and telling something you can use. I think that's absolutely critical. And we really should be developing those skills, I'd love to see a much greater focus on those skills of research and qualification at school that I see at the moment. 

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And the second one is about creativity. You got to be able to synthesize something new. And again it's one of those things we seem to think creativity is innate, that you know, there are creatives who can draw and paint and make music, when actually you look at the business of creativity and so much of it's about trying something, failing, learning from failure iterating over and over again. It’s about recombination, it's about bringing different disparate ideas and people together to build new things. And I think if you, if you can create stuff, in whatever form it may be, whether it's words or pictures or products, you know, incredibly powerful and hugely important. 

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And the third one is about the ability to communicate, if you can't sell those ideas to somebody, if you can't listen to somebody about their own ideas and draw them into your own, then you're going to fail miserably. And I think if you can focus on building those three C's, you sort of it takes a critical skill set for adaptability. I can listen and I can learn and I can, and I can see the gaps, I can build something to fill those gaps. And then I can tell people about what I've built. I think that is a very, very robust set of skills for an uncertain future.

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Ross  

I like that. And it's interesting in our early model, we were trying to assess a whole host of different dimensions and see, you know, which ones were noise, which ones actually, you could measure, couldn't measure all of these things and building on a lot of research that had been done over decades. And one that you've just put on there about learning drive, covered this kind of view of how do people seek information? Are they seeking to just in biases qualify what's already known? Do they explore new? And this aspect of mental flexibility? The art of debating to be able to irrelevant and what I might believe in? Can I sit on that side of the table and that side of the table and equally give a good account? And can I do that in myself without going crazy? Can I hold two desperate aspects of a thought, of a solution, of information and explore that without, as I say, being crazy, you know it’s a Fitzpatrick thing.

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And that mental flexibility linked to this curiosity of in a world where we have such volume of data answer to everything, whether it to Google and Alexa, or whichever will be able to know the information, if I had too much red wine, and I want to start up a new business. It will be able to do all the feasibility to say where's going to be the best football? What's the best location? What's the best product? All of those things.

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But what it won't help us do is ask the right questions. And that rigor to train, to educate, to build that skill of asking really good questions, because it was one of the things that I think, to be honest, used to piss my teachers off so much, it’s because I would always be asking questions. And as a child, it was probably with the wrong intent, as a child is probably mixed up with the intent of, I think I know more than you Mr. or Mrs. Teacher, and I want to catch you out rather than a genuine, I'm wanting to know more, but I guess it was probably a mix. As I've matured and evolved, that ability to ask questions, I think has been part of my success and that just continual desire to learn to listen to. That's why I've started this podcast is just to, quite selfishly, be able to speak to people that I can learn from, and, you know, it's a great way of doing that.

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Tom  

It is the best part of this job. I've literally just started a project on the future of health care. I'm now diving into resources about the future of health and how operating theatres are run and how hospitals are run. And then last week, I was writing about the future of work for Polly. You know, they are what used to be Plantronics and Polycom. I often tell people and it's absolutely true. I once went from supermarkets to superyachts in the space of a week. And you know, one minute I'm in the boardroom of a big logistics company talking about how they deliver plastic bags to supermarkets. 

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And three days later, I'm in Kitzbuhel meeting the world's leading super yacht designers, talking about the, what the changes in culture and technology are going to mean for the future of the super yacht it’s just fascinating. And I can be this sort of butterfly, just going on landing on different things constantly.

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Ross  

And it's the mental dexterity, that you've now layered on top and where many who don't experience that, think that’s complex, but it's not actually. There's methods to many but principles are few. And the principles apply to be able for you to show up and add value, irrelevant of whatever the context is, and it all adds to that is, we choose what we do. And each day we get up, give ourselves permission to create a future version of ourselves. I want to pick up on a couple of bits. So, have you come across StartUp Health yet in the US? 

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Tom  

No.

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Ross  

So you need, I wonder if I've even got a copy of one of the, they went old school last year in terms of producing a magazine. Can you believe it? And so StartUp Health, it was founded by a couple of friends of mine. Now, Steven Krein, and Unity Stoakes. They have maybe 400 individual startups as part of what they call a Health Transformer Army. They orbit around 11 or 12, health moonshots and then all of these innovative startups from around the world applied to become part of this community. I was there in California at the beginning of this year at their conference. Absolutely phenomenal about how they are completely transforming what is essentially sick care, not health care, to reimagine that. So I would definitely look that up as an organization StartUp Health. Fabulous. I was fascinated. He went with a another friend of mine, Peter Diamandis, not sure if you've come across 

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Tom  

Yeah.

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Ross  

But they went to the Vatican to discuss the ethics of longevity with the Pope at an event and it was, you know, really quite profound, because you have people like Peter Diamandis, who founded Singularity University, HLI of Human Longevity Inc., doing lots of work in extending our health span. And the other one, have you read the book called "Lifespan" David Sinclair, I think, a fairly recent one.

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Tom  

No. I haven't no.

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Ross  

It's out in my lounge. But he was presenting at the recent A360 Abundance Conference, I was at in January, fascinating areas of what's going on in all of these random pockets around the world that, you know, it's very deceptive and then becomes disruptive.

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Tom  

It's interesting, I've been writing about life extension recently, because in light of the recent news about the speed of population collapse, where we thought population, while the median projections were population topping out at the end of this century, actually, it's going to top out about 40 years before that 2064, they now are the new estimates, say, different as people doing the estimate. So, you're not actually directly comparable statistics, but it topped out about, you know, one and a half billion lower and 40 years earlier than we expected, which means the shift to, you know, to an aging population is going to be much more dramatic than expected. 

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And the populations are based like Spain and Portugal and Italy halving, in the space of 50 years, it's going to be incredibly dramatic. And, you know, one of the answers to that is, what as you to say? How do we increase the healthspan of people, lifespan’s one thing, actually,\what we want is, let's be honest, economically productive years is what we need our people if we're going to manage this transition to a much older population.

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Ross  

Yeah. And I think it's, productive in all senses, economic to actually self-fulfilling, that they feel, you know, we all want to be able to be contributing with your life. 

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Tom  

We can all stay fit climbing Maslow's hierarchy. 

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Ross  

Yeah, could be, could be. So before we go, I have to ask the 3d printer in the background? 

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Tom  

Yes.

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Ross  

What is it that its printing? Tell us about that, because I've been fascinated by it, whirring away in the back.

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Tom  

So I'm building an electric car, well rather I'm converting a car to electric. I have, I can see it on my little window here. A slightly rusty, but very cheap BMW Z3, and I'm replacing the petrol engine with an electric motor. But the tricky bit of that is you've got to couple the electric motor to the gearbox or the rear wheels somehow. So on the 3d printer at the moment is version two of my designed Coupler to link the electric motor out of a Mitsubishi Outlander, to the gearbox of a BMW, Z3. And I'm really, really hopeful that version two work because it's been a 24-hour print to get there.

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Ross  

Fantastic. Like you said, it has shifted from in the hands of the government and large corporates into the hands of eight-year-olds and 40-year-old tinkers who want to have fun playing with their different things that they have to make them fit for the future that they want. 

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Tom  

Absolutely, yeah.

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Ross  

And I guess this is the existential pieces that we've talked about choice, we've gotten in lots of different places. But essentially the opportunity to give ourselves permission to continually ask questions and to reimagine and have fun doing it.

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Tom  

The barriers are lower than they ever have been. If you've got the opportunity, why not, you know, why not jump on finding those answers because that's the most fun thing as far as I'm concerned.

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Ross  

And in all your work all your bits if you could give two tips that would help people have they've listened to this, they've found it interesting. And they go okay, so I get all of that. What do I need to do differently or more of that's gonna help me build a future ready business? What would you recommend they start with doing?

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Tom  

The first one is carve out 1% of your time to think about the future in a structured fashion. That's roughly one day every six months doesn't sound like a lot. But most people I know are horrified when they try and work out where they're going to find a day. 

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But just do it Start with a day, one day, every six months, use a structured process, like one of my book or others just to focus on the future. The second thing is, those three C's, we talked about developing their skills, the ability to curate, create, communicate, as well as giving you humility. Getting a new hobby is a great way to develop a new hobby. Because it does all of those go and get a new hobby doesn't have to be rollerskating. Although that I hear that is very cool these days. But go and get a new hobby.

Ross  

I have to show you one last thing before we go to, is that I was given “40 Things To Do When You're 40”. And what I love about it is you know this concept years ago, I wanted to set up a company, I don't drink red wine. In fact, I'm teetotal, if I had maybe there'd be many, many more companies. But it was around the concept of firsts. What have you done today for the first time, and to keep young, to keep curious. And these these kinds of things are great ways of doing that.

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So a hobby, that there's a difference to doing it once and it being a first to actually going through the dip and the curve to what it takes that you needed some perseverance, you needed some grit, you needed some resilience to be able to bounce back from when you broke your ribs to put the roller skates back on, again, so all of these things that do not do things for the first time, and build some resilience by when you do it the first time and it doesn't work, have a few more goes. That'd be lovely. If people want to get in touch with you, what's the best way of doing that Tom? How can they reach out?

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Tom  

So everything's at TomCheesewright.com. There's all sorts of stuff there. If you want to find me on social media, currently mostly @bookofthefuture. So Twitter @bookofthefuture, Instagram @bookofthefuture. That's the other way. And I do spend a lot of time on Twitter, probably too much.

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Ross 

Maybe more than 1%?

Tom  

Probably more than 1%.

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Ross 

One day every six month. I love it. It's been a real pleasure, Tom. I thank you and look forward to hearing about Coupler of Version 2 and its success.

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Tom  

Thanks, Ross. Thanks for having me.

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Voiceover  

Do you have the level of adaptability to survive and thrive in the rapid changes ahead? Has your resilience got more comeback than a yo-yo? Do you have the ability to unlearn in order to reskill, upskill, and break through? Find out today and uncover your adaptability profile and score your AQ visit "AQai.io" To gain your personalized report across 15 scientifically validated dimensions of adaptability for limited time enter code "Podcast65" for a complimentary AQ me assessment. AQ AI transforming the way people, teams, and organizations navigate change.

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Outro

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