Is Change Art or Science?

Tony: [00:00:00] His record is phenomenal. it’s unprecedented, isn’t it? And everyone can say, Oh yeah, what a great crop of players he had, but so called better managers had the golden generation prior and didn’t succeed.

Tony: You could say Pep Guardiola has got unlimited funds so he can buy the best players. Could he get, could he have kept Burnley in the league, for example? Who knows, it’s a completely different proposition, so I think credit where it’s due, and it’d be good for him to, whether he bows out, whether they win or lose it.

Tony: Certainly I think it’s the reaction the players have towards him is quite telling that they use the word. We love him. We love Gareth. I’ve heard a number of players use that terminology, which I find quite rare and telling. 

Clark: Yeah, we know that there are all sorts of different football management types, aren’t there?

Clark: He clearly is a sort of a father figure type. After the game, after every game, he’s gone up to every single player. And given them a hug and clearly, that type of management works for him. Alex Ferguson was never that sort of, was never that sort of manager. And it’s interesting because I remember when Stephen Gerrard was at [00:01:00] Villa, and Unai Enri came in, the change, and you always expect a bit of a change anyway, because of the new management, manager thing, but clearly, there are ways that work for different groups of people, and the key to management, is getting the feel for what’s going on within that group of people, reading the room, and then reacting accordingly, right?

Clark: And he’s clearly got that because when you listen to the after match comments from players like Bellingham, Harry Kane, Olly Watkins, they have not got a bad word to say about the whole setup. So clearly, they’re growing into this competition. Let’s face it, nobody expects him to win against Spain, but nobody expects it, so I think the hard part’s over. 

Tony: Yeah, exactly. The shackles will be off to a degree, because they’ll have to be thinking about we’ve got to dig in here, and if we can keep Spain out, we’ve got a chance. Because Spain are obviously the most free flowing team in the comp. Good to watch 

Clark: Slick. They’re wonderful to watch. The biggest problem I think the English team have always had is and it’s also one of their biggest attributes is the fans.

Clark: [00:02:00] The fans are a wonderful, terrible bunch of people. I remember I think I mentioned this before when David O’Leary said called Aston Villa fans fickle. He was right. We are. We spend our hard earned cash to go and watch These games and we expect something, but good grief, don’t get on the wrong side of an English football fan.

Clark: Yeah.

Rob: It’s been interesting to see, last night was completely different style of football from England. Because they did seem stifled, they did seem like they had a really defensive manager that was holding them back. And yet like you say, none of the players, even the players that are left out seem to be in, when they come on, like Trent came on Tony’s come on and they’ve all done their bit and it doesn’t seem to be that problem of disunity.

Rob: I don’t 

Tony: think they would ever have said to Declan Rice, don’t play the ball forward quickly when the pass is on. I think sometimes he’s adjusted to a new role. He doesn’t play that role as a sole holding midfielder for Arsenal. He’s got players around him that get on the ball and do stuff that he can’t do.

Tony: He’s a galloper. He likes to run and he covers big spaces [00:03:00] quickly. But he does things, it drives me nuts. He slows the game down and doesn’t have the technical ability to get himself out of that situation. He’s not that type of player. So he gets himself squeezed in and then we’re in all sorts of trouble.

Tony: He gets away with it more often than not, but he gets away with it, which is neat. Which is strange. Obviously he’s there because of his attributes, but one of his attributes is not as the playmaker, in my opinion. So as soon as they changed the system and there were more players closer to him.

Tony: So Foden’s picking up deeper and more central and quicker and getting on the half turn. It’s a whole different proposition. He’s got more people to pass to quickly, but every time he slows it down and does a little drag back, he invites pressure that he can’t get himself out of.

Tony: He doesn’t see it quick enough. 

Rob: That was the whole problem last time. I remember they were attacking, they had a corner a short pass and then they ended up getting caught and they had to go back to the goalkeeper in about 10 seconds from attacking and that seemed to be the problem.

Rob: No one wanted to take that [00:04:00] risk. There were a couple like Mainoo, Bellingham, Foden were trying. But yeah, there was, there’s too much, seemed to be too much fear, but I was just thinking like a manager, we all have a different idea and we can never know whether our idea would work or not. As the manager it’s the same in any change, isn’t it? It’s when to make a change, how to make the change, what change to make. And it all comes down to a judgment call, isn’t it? 

Tony: Yeah. All the managers try to do is predict the future. And more often than not, it doesn’t work out and this tournament, it has worked out, the changes that have been made sometimes reactively yesterday, maybe not so reactively, they weren’t playing particularly well at the time he made the subs, but it was like 10 minutes ago.

Tony: Let’s do it’s fairly late in the game, obviously paid off. But all of those decisions you’ve made a conscious and calculated decision to predict that what you’re about to do is going to have a positive impact on the result. Obviously, none of us can know that because there can be stasis or it can backfire as [00:05:00] easily as it can turn around like it did yesterday in the game with when Tony came on.

Tony: As fans who are watching with enthusiasm and high expectation living in the future as well, if he makes these changes, this is what’s going to happen in my head. We’re going to be much better. None of us are right. And none of us are wrong. We just have expectations that and those expectations come with the pain that we feel when our expectations are not met.

Clark: It’s funny how we’ve got onto this subject because we were talking, I was hoping last week that we might talk a little bit about change. And the whole football scenario really lends itself to this idea of change because you both of you guys and myself, we all work in change in one form or another, and very often when you go to work with somebody, a person or an organization or, in Rob’s case, often couples, for instance, and they say something needs to change.

Clark: When you’re watching a football match, you may think to yourself something needs to change. And the question is what? 

Clark: And how do you know that the thing you’re going to do is going to be a change for the better because surely [00:06:00] change implies that it needs to get better. And the interesting thing about as you just said, Tony you predict, the future.

Clark: You’re suggesting that this change that we’re going to make is going to make all the difference and it’s going to improve. What’s that based on? You cannot measure a whole group of people interacting with each other and what happens when you just change one dynamic. So change is as much, An art as a science and having worked in manufacturing for so long certainly in the lean business improvement where things like Kaizen, the words that people love to throw around without really necessarily understanding what that actually means.

Clark: There’s another Japanese word that I’ve always liked called Monozukuri, which means the art of making, craftsmanship. It has to be beautiful and elegant to watch. Otherwise, if it’s clunky, something’s not working. And whilst you can scientifically measure processes and change different things, you know when something’s working.

Clark: That, to me, is the art. And this is where somebody like Southgate, we cannot say that he’s [00:07:00] doing something wrong when we just don’t know all of the ingredients that are going into the recipe that he’s creating. 

Tony: Even when he’s wrong, he’s not wrong. He was just acting on his best intentions with the information that he’s got at that point in time, which is fascinating.

Tony: And the other Japanese thing I love, I use it a fair bit is Kintsugi. Have you seen that? Which is pottery. So broken pot, instead of throwing it away they fix it with the gold in between. So the pot becomes more beautiful in its new state, it’s changed state than it was when it was broken and it’s obviously symbolizes the life journey.

Tony: It’s like saying you might be broken or you might have suffered a big setback, but put yourself back together and be more beautiful than you were before before it happened. It’s a great analogy for change. For me, it’s the demonstration of what can be at the other side of change when, it feels tough.

Tony: A great example for me at the moment, we’ve just moved house and you’re in a new kitchen it’s the classic lean training exercise for me, you’re in a new kitchen, you’ve moved, you’ve been in the [00:08:00] previous kitchen for five or more years. You knew where everything was, you knew where the cups were, you knew where the coffee and tea is, and the the cutlery drawer and stuff like that, but the first week, I honestly, I haven’t felt as stressed in a kitchen, frustrated about where is it, where, and you’re going from one side of the kitchen to the other, looking for stuff that’s not there, yeah, it’s madness.

Clark: It’s a hard thing to bring into such a conversation, but when you’re talking to leaders of organizations, especially people that are perhaps engineers or finance oriented, when you try to introduce the concept of bringing At least the idea of art into that conversation, it’s a difficult one, but I think it’s important because you cannot get art wrong.

Clark: That’s the point, isn’t it? 

Clark: That picture, that sculpture, that painting, that dance, that song, it’s not wrong. You may not be to your taste. And when you look at an organization that’s not functioning as well as you would like, the question then arises, Was it good before and now the standards dropped and you need to get it back where it [00:09:00] was or are you just trying to push on and get better, in which case we need to approach this whole thing radically differently.

Clark: We’re talking about football, but I’m just thinking that we’ve just changed government in this country. In a 

Tony: very 

Clark: British way. Nobody really noticed. Everybody’s touched in and mumbling and muttering about it. But nothing really has changed. And the interesting thing I find is if you were to come from another planet, from another dimension and turn up and say this is how you guys run your country.

Clark: Then there’s 60 million people you’ve clearly just got rid of one group of people that are running the place. So obviously these are new guys are better. Oh no. They’re not better. They’re just different. We just don’t like the old lot. And you say, wow, this is thousands of years of civilization.

Clark: Civilization have gone into this concept where we replace one group of really mediocre people with another group of really mediocre people because that’s change. Yeah. 

Tony: Yeah, it’s fascinating. I was working for a Microsoft tech company, CRM. We, a primary customer were buying big chunky CRM programs.

Tony: [00:10:00] So typically going from manual processes to technological things. So you’ve got people that have built their own shortcuts for years. On how to track customer experience or whatever it was. And you’re promising all of these great changes to the way they function, how much more efficient they’re going to be, how much more money they’re going to save, whatever it might be. But the biggest failure in a big CRM project is user adoption. People just don’t accept the change that they’ve been given and the benefits that they’ve been given because the number of projects we picked up were failed previous projects because they never lined anything up to what the value proposition was.

Tony: What was the business value that this change is going to serve? And the value has to be met at various levels within the business. Of course, the commercial community. There’s a reason why you’re going to spend 150 grand on a new tech product is because it’s going to be commercially viable, but it’s got to meet all sorts of emotional pains that everybody else is experiencing at their own level within the [00:11:00] business where they’re going to interact with this new beast of a machine.

Tony: So there’s a whole heap of work to be done. To onboard people to the idea, readied them for the chain, all of those classic sort of change readiness projects. But it was amazing that the number of projects that had been sold in by other companies who were just selling tech and then leaving them with this big white elephant that no one knows how to use, they just go back to the old ways quickly.

Tony: So they’ve spent a fortune and nothing’s changed. Other than people got very angry for a bit and upset with each other that it’s not how it used to be and nobody likes it anymore. So it was a great example of this predicted vision of the future and the value that it’s going to provide when it’s all working, the value of making the subs in the game it’s the promise of doing this, you need everyone to be on board with it. Otherwise it’s got no chance of working.

Tony: Even when everyone is on board. It’s going to be tough. It’s going to be hard. Everyone we’re looking to tend to look for, ah, this is going to be great. It’s going to be easy, but it’s the bit I think where people need to be [00:12:00] helped. It’s actually going to be really hard to adopt this new way of working. So let’s work together to solve the problem. I 

Rob: think any technology, it’s such an uphill battle to learn anything new. Like things used to be simple, but the more that we have technology to do things, They enable us to do so much more, but there’s that learning curve and it’s tough. It’s that struggle. 

Rob: This is me, I’ve decided that this is something I want to do. There’s that whole change curve, isn’t there, where you’re down at the bottom and it’s Oh, am I ever going to be able to work this? 

Rob: For someone working in a company, it wasn’t their decision. They didn’t have any control over it. They didn’t really want it. It’s so difficult, but I think the other part, because immediately what, when we were talking about football, what came to my mind was the election. 

Rob: Like you say, I don’t think anything really changes. It’s just every 10 years or so we change from labor to conservative from whatever, and they overturn everything that’s been done.

Rob: So we just end up in this stasis. What I always think about elections is I think there’s a [00:13:00] problem with democracy because basically the vote will go to the lowest common denominator. the same in organizations. Most people who are on the front lines aren’t going to understand the full complexities of the reasons behind the decision.

Rob: And sometimes they may know better. Sometimes the decision doesn’t make sense, but there’s that distinction between, understanding, like everyone wants politically, everyone wants a great health service, social service, welfare, all of that stuff for lower taxes and the two can’t balance. 

Rob: So what we end up getting is we get people who are willing to promise something that they can’t deliver. And this is why I think people who are honest and would state what it really takes wouldn’t get voted. Maybe we should bring it before the adoption. So that people understand the thinking behind why it changes.

Rob: And maybe if we got people on board before we introduced the change. 

Tony: That requires telling the truth, doesn’t it? [00:14:00] In order to. Ready people for say a health care change. For me, having lived in Australia for a long time, medicare’s like their national health scheme, but everybody’s making a contribution to Medicare. So it’s already partly privately funded in a way. 

Tony: It’s another taxation element but it makes it sustainable. Whereas in our current state where it’s a provision and we now have obviously a high volume Of more people accessing it and a steadying level or lesser level of practitioners and nurses and all the rest of it to fulfill the increased demand.

Tony: It’s on its knees a little bit, so a change is required, but for politicians in a election campaign to come out and say, actually, we do want to change it, but we need to be really honest with you. And then here it comes. We’re punching the face with the real facts, I think people might find it difficult to come to terms with that because, oh, the impact on me, is it going to take more out of my pay in order to Get something that was getting for free [00:15:00] before.

Tony: It’s tough, it’s complicated. I think the changes that our politicians have to make are enormous right now because of where we’re at. We’re not in a great state, are we? 

Clark: The thing there, Tony, though this idea of telling the truth, I find really interesting because you can imagine, I know you guys both have these conversations on a regular basis, but certainly myself in a factory setting and a manufacturing organization, you very often got a group of people around the table who are putting their point across with regards to how something, and there are vested interests.

Clark: Obviously, there are silos where people are working within there’s a cliques because obviously the engineering department has a lot more to do with operations and say the HR department. So there are all sorts of dynamics going on. 

Clark: This idea of the truth though, this is why I’m just in the process of finishing the introduction to my it’s driven me mad because I’m trying to encompass something that’s actually quite fluid this idea, as I’ve just mentioned, Monozukuri, this idea of bringing a a sense of art and creativity into an arena that gets [00:16:00] extraordinarily messy.

Clark: Change is messy. Sometimes it goes off without too much of a hitch and sometimes it goes completely pear shaped because people don’t buy into the messiness of it. But when you’re talking to a group of people who’ve all got their views on how this change is going to manifest itself, the idea of being honest is a difficult one because not everything is seen. Not everybody knows everything that’s going on.

Clark: For me, a really good illustration of how this whole change process works is a time, and I’ve mentioned this before, where I was stood on the shop floor, it was chaos, they were moving an assembly line, which was a big change, they still had to keep getting product out of the door. The general manager had put me in charge of this change process, and he came down about three days in and it was mayhem. He stood there next to me and I think he was being sarcastic, he said, how’s it going?

Clark: I said, it’s going well, it’s going as well as can be expected considering that this is a major upheaval. He said, it doesn’t look like it’s going well. I said, of course not. All change, there’s a point between leaving one way of doing things and starting another. There’s a gap.

Clark: Sometimes it’s [00:17:00] really small, sometimes it’s massive, where it’s absolute chaos. That’s the key to managing change, dealing with that liminal space between the old way and the new one and honestly telling the truth about such a situation is a very hard thing to do because nobody knows exactly what’s going to happen.

Clark: You’re quite right. You need to be honest with people and say, look, this is going to get messy. I need you guys all on board with this, but the problem with managing that process is that you need to make sure that everybody involved, whether they’re on side or not. Or agree with it or not. I’m not hiding anything and that when you talk about if there are other agendas involved, that’s where you’ve got a real problem in this introduction to the book.

Clark: I’m talking about the 10th man of somebody who is the arbiter of change, somebody that mediates that process and says, listen, you may have something in mind. For instance, you often see during the voting process or the lead up to an election where people are trying to tear their opponents down because they want to win.

Clark: But the [00:18:00] downside of that is that everybody may end up losing. You could end up bringing in a situation where there’s an hung parliament or whatever, and it causes all sorts of problems down the line. So the truth aspect of it, to me, is all about, Everybody needs to get their cards on the table.

Clark: And whether you agree with it or not, I think it was Colin Powell that said, we can argue as much as you like in this room, but once we walk out of that door, you all need to be on side because we cannot have somebody in the background trying to bring this thing down. And that really, I think, is the key to change.

Clark: And that’s what Southgate’s done, isn’t it? Regardless of how things pan out, everybody’s on side. And that probably, I Is the most crucial factor to any change program that everybody wants it to work because everybody wants it to be better for all of us. 

Tony: Yeah, I agree. 

Rob: It’s the idea of British government, isn’t it? Is like the prime minister’s first among equals and it’s every decision is made by the cabinet. That, that’s the whole principle, isn’t it? Argue everything out. You make [00:19:00] a law. You vote for it. And once it’s passed, it’s agreed and that’s it.

Rob: And then everyone’s behind it. 

Clark: There’s a problem with that though, isn’t there? I was writing about this in my introduction, and I wrote it about four or five times because I couldn’t quite nail down what it was that I didn’t like. And it’s this whole idea of an antagonistic approach to solving problems. The problem with it is we tend to come to a solution after two people or two parties or two groups of people have argued to the point where one wins, and we assume then that the person that won is the person that’s right, or they’re the group or the party that’s right.

Clark: However, they may just be good at arguing. They may just be really good at twisting the truth or twisting the facts, and that’s a problem. This whole idea of reaching a consensus by virtue of whoever wins the argument is a massive problem. For me, this is where I think, again, the 10th man comes in, because you may be really good.

Clark: Look at the whole Trump Biden debate. The fact that one of them couldn’t care less about whether he’s bending the facts or not. Let’s put it that way. [00:20:00] I’m not saying that the guy lies or anything like that but certainly he doesn’t let the facts get in the way of a good persuasive argument.

Clark: And then the other person, I don’t think he knows what day it is or what are you up for breakfast? 

Clark: The problem with that is, it’s all about perception. When two people are arguing about the best way to go about doing something, we all have to look at them and think, oh, yeah he made the best argument.

Clark: Maybe. But he might be completely, completely wrong or completely mistaken or misunderstand the situation. There has to be. a better way of doing change. 

Clark: Because I come from a particular perspective when it comes to change, all lean practitioners value this thing called Kaizen, gradual incremental improvements.

Clark: And the supposition behind that is that it’s already okay. So let’s just keep making it better. There’s another thing called Kaikaku, which is Similar to Kaizen, but it means big changes. This clearly isn’t working. We’ll do it a different way. But there’s another thing called Kakushin, which I look for, which really means reform.

Clark: Just throw everything out the window, throw sort of the rule book out the window. Let’s try something else. And of [00:21:00] course, you need to think this through, you really need to do the change on paper before you actually put it into practice. But the idea to me of Kakushin, where you say, look, we keep electing people.

Clark: They’re all rubbish. Let’s face it, none of them are serving the public, they’re serving themselves or other agendas, and we are not benefiting from this. Let’s try a different way. And whatever that might be, and how do you actually make that happen is another thing. This is a revolution, revolutions happen, right?

Clark: People just say, we’re done, we’re taking over. And that’s nearly always as bad, if not worse, than what was already there. But the idea of completely reforming the situation to me is a very interesting one because. How many times you have to do it wrong before you realize that doing the wrong thing more or harder isn’t going to work?

Clark: Let’s do something different. That really is, to me, what change is all about. With regards to Southgate, he put three at the back. That was innovative. It was a big change. He reformed the way he was doing it and it transformed the way the [00:22:00] team played, I think. But certainly, even yesterday, when they went back to a back four, it slowed down again.

Clark: The idea of reform and innovation is fascinating to me because when you talk to a group of people about we want to change things, they nearly always talking about making the same thing better. But why not do a different thing? And that to me is what the 10th man is all about.

Clark: He’s the person that turns up and says, Why don’t we try this? And, it’s a conversation to be had, but most people don’t even have that conversation, certainly not in politics.

Tony: It’s a great subject. I think, for me, when they’re in that state of debate and like some of the examples we’ve used there when I mentioned the truth before, there’s not a lot of truth coming out on either side. They just put a peg in the ground. This is what we stand for. And they say, this is what we stand for.

Tony: And they’re trying to whip up support external, which has got nothing to do with how things are going to work. How well they’re going to work. And it’s never then about a middle ground or a compromise or, cause none of that makes any difference is what is it that we want that will [00:23:00] be.

Tony: And a big step forward that we can agree on. And then what are we gonna do about it? And how are we gonna at least take the first step towards what good looks like? So for me, there needs to be absolute clarity right at the beginning about what it is that we’re debating. What are we talking about?

Tony: I’m telling the masses that this guy can’t remember what he had for breakfast. I’m telling the masses that this guy should be in jail, and it’s got nothing to do with how to run the country, and yet it’s the game that they’re playing. So I think when most people are not in that high stakes game, they’re in a business environment or a sporting environment, and Something’s not working or could be working better and they need to shift change of personnel or change of approach. They sit around the boardroom table or in a team meeting room and start to debate what it is that we’re talking about. And I sometimes think they don’t have absolute clarity on what is the topic of discussion, so they start to exchange opinions and differences of [00:24:00] opinion. Often about without having agreed what is this contentious issue.

Tony: So you end up having dialogue that can quickly disintegrate into right and wrong. I win, you lose type conversations. Everybody leaves dissatisfied. And the real issue that needed to be talked about didn’t get even tabled because it lost it’s way too quickly. So for me, the truth is about getting as much absolute clarity of the situation that we can and absolute clarity about what the next step or the end of this change process looks like. That everybody whether they like it or not agrees is the thing that we’re at and is where we want to go, I think if you can get to that point even in a relationship with two people that are in a state of disconnect and then there’s room for improvement in the relationship. It’s critical to get absolute clarity because not all the relationship is to be thrown out the window. What is it that we’re talking about that needs to be better?

Tony: Can we have a mature conversation about that?

Clark: [00:25:00] Yeah, that idea of what are we talking about? I love that, Tony. That’s, when you’re sitting down with a group of people and you say hold on what, why are we actually trying to accomplish here? Because I do come across sometimes as a little bit paranoid, a little bit cynical and skeptical when I say that there are often agendas on the table that everybody else in the room is not aware of.

Clark: The problem with that, for instance, looking at the way elections are run they tend to be one or the other, this whole line, and I know there are a lot of people voting, for instance, at the moment for people like reform, just because it’s something else. You’ve got this either or situation, and somebody that can come in and look at a situation and say, hold on what’s actually going on here? What are we talking about here? Because, This confusion this frustration that people are feeling in the room is serving somebody’s purpose.

Clark: As long as nothing changes, even though everything changes, then somebody’s benefiting from that. As a British person, I refer back to the Magna Carta. There was a point in time when everybody said hold on, we’re done with [00:26:00] this. You’re just messing us about.

Clark: Nobody’s benefiting. It’s all to your benefit in this case, it was the crown that was benefiting. And they said, no, we’re done. We’ve got to change that. So we want to agree what it is we’re actually trying to accomplish as a country. And I think that was a game changer.

Clark: 700 years ago now, but it was something where people said, hold on, what are we actually talking about? Let’s look at the agendas that are in the room, point them out. I’ve done this myself, I remember being in a meeting a couple of years ago you could see what was going on, it was not something that I could actually say, look you’re up to something.

Clark: So I engineered a conversation during that meeting and eventually that person told me to go and F myself and walked out of the room because they had been unveiled, if you like their true purpose behind the conversation had been made clear, and it was not to the benefit of everybody else.

Clark: It was just to the benefit of this one person. And they don’t like it when the actual truth about the situation comes out. That’s absolutely key in any situation, certainly in [00:27:00] elections. Football’s probably by the by, but certainly when it affects people’s lives and things like the health service.

Clark: These things need to be discussed openly and whoever, it’s the Emperor’s new clothes and when the kid points at the Emperor and says, hold on a minute, what’s going on? He’s got no clothes on. When you can actually highlight what’s really been brought into the conversation, then I think that’s a game changer.

Tony: And there’s adventure in that though as well without it being a game, there’s adventure in seeing where that goes. Because the alternative if you hold back. Is across multiple times of holding back. There’s the accrual of resentment. So every time you leave that meeting, not having said what you said, not having gone on that adventure of I’m going to speak my mind and see what happens.

Tony: You can end up being really resentful. And over a long period of time that can become really toxic. So I think that’s happening a lot. The number of meetings where people have agreed on the surface. Yeah, we all get along great. Whoa. And nobody really spoke their mind, or when they did, [00:28:00] it was about something that was really easy to speak their mind about, not about the real underlying thing that they wanted to have said.

Tony: So they go away feeling, depending who they are of course, to different degrees of accumulation of resentment. And then it becomes I’m going to get them. I’m going to get them. This silo that they’re saying we had, I’ll show them what a silo is. I’ll show him what, I’ll show him how much what engineering knows about how this place is run.

Tony: And the operations guys thinking lean and on this path to divorce. 

Rob: It’s interesting in mediation and in relationships. Most people don’t really know what they’re fighting for. Because there’s I think it’s Howard Markman talked about the hidden issue in relationships, that there’s an eruption and they fight about an issue, but there’s a deeper hidden issue, which is something like control, care, love, respect, something like that.

Rob: I could imagine it being very true in the boardroom because there’s all these kind of underlying. So it’s a lack of self awareness and some of that awareness only comes about through [00:29:00] conversation. Like when we’re having these conversations, it deepens my awareness of what we’re talking about and takes it to new levels. And I think going back to what you said about, Clark, about the competitiveness. The original societies had an emperor or a king and often that king was a god. And so it was a dictatorship. It was the Greeks, Socrates and Aristotle that created the Republic. Basically our democracy is based on that Greek idea of adversarial, so the legal system is adversarial, political system is adversarial because it comes from the idea that the best idea wins. But sometimes it doesn’t. In conflict management, there was some research, I was just looking it up when you talked about it. It was Kurt Lewin and a student of his, Morton Deutch, who were the first ones to really come up with a win idea and they differentiated conflict between when we have a shared goal, which really as a a nation, we have a shared goal. And when our goal is competitive. [00:30:00] So if we’re two different companies, then we don’t really have a shared goal. But when we’re within the same company, we’re two departments, our well being and our health and our future security depends on working together.

Rob: Ultimately have the same goal. And it’s the same thing in relationships. The key with relationships is everyone thinks someone’s just like us. Oh, we want the same thing. 

Rob: 10 years down the line, they want different things. And one’s pulling if they could just do this, they’d be perfect.

Rob: And the other ones if they could just do this. It’s because we have a, it’s like you say, Tony, we have an idea of in order to progress and develop in the relationship or to develop in conflict, we have to let go of that. And we have to recognize that all of us are going out in the world and wanting to make our dream happen. But we’re all the heroes of our own narratives. We clash with other people.

Rob: And we don’t realize that they only see us as a supporting actor. We’re the villain or whatever it is in their narrative. So ultimately it all comes down to, when you’re talking about people have hidden [00:31:00] agendas, it’s because they see their future as being better by them getting what they want, when actually really the best future has come when we let go of our ego and our ideas of what we want to be which comes back to what you were talking about, Tony, in the curiosity of going on the adventure. 

Rob: I suppose it’s the fear that all of us have this idea of what we want and we’re afraid to let that go. But actually we fixate on what we want. We fixate on a certain mechanism. Like money is a typical one. People fixate on more and more money without really knowing what the money is for is why you get miserable billionaires and lottery winners who are more miserable after having the money. So the basis is understanding that we have shared interest and. the personal growth in being able to let go of what we think we want for what could be. 

Clark: I think you nailed that, Rob.

Clark: I’ve been thinking about something the last couple of days. I’m reading a book at the moment by a philosopher. I can’t remember the guy’s name, but the book is just [00:32:00] called Truth. And it’s called A Guide for the Perplexed or something like that. And it’s about the idea of what’s true.

Clark: Clearly because I’m writing this thing about the 10th man who I believe is the person that stands in the middle of a room and says, hold on a minute, as Tony’s just said, what are we actually talking about here? What’s really going on? And as a consequence of reading this book, I’ve been thinking to myself, and I’ve always said this, when people talk about whatever their political, religious beliefs in UFOs, ghosts, fairies, whatever it might be, it’s all just guesses.

Clark: Everything’s a guess. And I was there’s a guy that I, again, I can’t remember this guy’s name either, but he. He’s another philosopher because this whole conversation comes down to a philosophical viewpoint of, why we do what we do. But he basically said that every theory, every religious belief, every political idea, they’re not mirrors.

Clark: They don’t reflect reality as it actually is, just as we would like it to be or the way we think it is. And the problem with that is, when, for instance, let’s say, and I’ll take an extreme example, when the National [00:33:00] Socialist Party 30s decided that they were going to take over the world. and kill half the people in it.

Clark: To a lot of them, they thought this was a good thing. They had a belief that in the end, we would all be better off if we all walked around in jackboots and, Hugo Boss uniforms and all that. And the same for any political ideal, communists all thought that, this is the way we should live.

Clark: It’s a belief that doesn’t necessarily reflect reality because The minute you put anything into dogma, it excludes all the people that live outside of the boundaries of that belief system. And one of the things I, the very beginning, the first chapter of my book, as I go from the introduction out to the rest of the book the title of the first chapter is The Map Is Not The Territory.

Clark: Whilst it’s a representation of what you think is going on around you, it is not actually what’s going on around you. And, you said, Tony. We need to know what we’re talking about in this situation. We need to know, what’s actually going on. And it really comes down to what do people believe.

Clark: You may [00:34:00] believe that if we do it this way, if all the engineers took over, then the place would be run perfectly. But that completely forgets HR, and it completely forgets finance. It completely rules out, like so many belief systems, it excludes a whole group of other people.

Clark: The idea is that there needs to be always somebody that says what if this? What if we do it this way? Interestingly, this whole idea of the 10th Mandate I keep banging on about. The Israelis never called it that. It’s just a Western invention of the name. What the Israelis call it is Ipcha Mistabra.

Clark: Which means, on the other hand, or alternatively, and there always needs to be somebody that says hold on a minute. Yes, communism is great for this. But obviously also democracy is good for these other things. And there are other belief systems that also work. We must not just dump everybody into this one belief system because it is not a reflection of how people actually function.

Clark: And as you said, Rob, even in relationships, the wife may say, oh, you don’t pick up your clothes, you don’t do this, you don’t do that. She has a belief [00:35:00] about why that’s happening. And it’s nearly always wrong. All the beliefs that we have about each other are nearly always completely wrong because it’s from our own perspective.

Clark: And so there needs to be somebody that lays everything bare. And that’s the thing about change, isn’t it? That’s why change is painful, because we have to admit the things. We have to open the doors and let the skeletons out of the closet. We have to make everything transparent. And that’s where it’s really difficult because nobody likes to have their beliefs. 

Rob: It’s interesting that you bring up religion because I think religion just explains it in a, in most wars have been fought about religion. And I’ll, when you look at the currency, what do people get from religion? Why do they believe so fervently in it? It’s because they want some certainty of how the world works.

Rob: They want to believe that the world is a certain way. But when you look at like religion, Christianity has 32, 000 different denominations of so they say even people who believe in Jesus can’t agree on What is the right way and Buddhism is the same?

Rob: But [00:36:00] what’s so interesting about them is Buddha wasn’t a Buddhist and Jesus wasn’t a Christian if you look at the Sermon on the Mount, what Jesus actually said, if that’s a true account, he actually said exactly the opposite to religion. He said, don’t go to the church and do this.

Rob: Don’t pretend to be a good person. Don’t follow the, don’t. mindlessly follow ritualistic words. And what do Christians do? They took something that they didn’t understand. I often think of life is like a river. It’s just flowing and it’s moving.

Rob: What we do is we try and capture a bit of it and put it in a box and siphon it off and say, this is sacred. And we take all the life out of it. We stifle the life out of it. It then becomes stagnant and it loses the vitality and the beauty that it had. And I think that’s what we do with truth.

Rob: Truth is inconvenient, but if we’re not building on truth, then we’re building on a house of cards. At any moment, the truth is going to reveal itself and the whole thing is going to come tumbling down. People don’t seem to understand that if you’re not really building on something that’s [00:37:00] solid, then nothing else can last.

Rob: It’s only a matter of time before everything can crumble. To your point about everyone, I can’t remember exactly what he said, but it came to mind that sociologists, early sociologists thought that the world should be run by sociologists. Whichever viewpoint you have, everyone thinks everyone should think that.

Rob: But all of us have different values for a reason, and we all have different perspectives, but we’re all part of the jigsaw. It’s only by working together that we can get the bigger picture. 

Clark: But Rob, here’s the thing, right? This is a conversation I have fairly regularly.

Clark: Obviously since when I had the motorbike accident, I had to transition across to quite a bit more one on one work. And that was interesting for me because having worked in organizations for such a long time to understand how groups of people and organizations are just a macrocosm of what’s going on within people.

Clark: I always want to know this when I talk to somebody, even just casually, if I’m just having a coffee and talk to somebody, my first thing is, what do these people believe? I want to know what they believe, because believing something is not the same as knowing something. [00:38:00] If I believe in God yeah, okay. You don’t know he exists, though, do you? I believe that if the communists took over the world, we’d all be better, yeah, but you don’t know that, because it’s never actually worked, has it? All of these things you believe, it almost seems to be like a self persuasion.

Clark: I really want this to be true. It’s like a, it’s like a really deep help wish. And, if you can say to a group of people, to an organization, when they talk about their values, for instance, as an organization, the organization is basically saying, this is what we believe.

Clark: And you start to interrogate that assumption and I do this, very often with bosses when you say things like why don’t you devolve more authority and initiative down to the shop floor? Oh they couldn’t handle it. Why couldn’t they handle it?

Clark: What do you believe about these people that make you think they can’t handle it? Are they idiots? Why did you hire them then? All these people that you’re paying good money to, to run your company, why are you not giving them a little bit more initiative and authority? Are you better than them?

Clark: There’s a belief, that people very often are not prepared to face up to. And when you talk to people and they say, oh, this group of people are bad. What is it about those people that you believe that makes them so bad? [00:39:00] Because I think what we’re talking about is not so much them, but you.

Clark: Because the fact that you believe that thing is probably the problem, not them. That to me is the most interesting thing about change. You speak to somebody and they say, we need to change this. It’s terrible. There are too many immigrants in the country. Okay what do we believe is bad about immigrants then?

Clark: Let’s have a look at that conversation first before we decide that this actually is a problem that needs solving. And that’s the thing, isn’t it? When people talk about change, they’re basically saying we have a problem that needs to be resolved. And that problem is based on the belief that we have that this other thing is no good, that you’re rubbish at doing this thing and we would do it better.

Clark: Hold on a minute. I think that really says a lot more about you. 

Tony: It starts with that, doesn’t it? It’s that self reflection piece, which is, okay, I’ve identified that there’s a problem. I’m going to have some agency and take some responsibility for fixing it. So I need to actually understand what part am I playing in the problem that we’re living in at the moment.

Tony: It has to start there. Otherwise it becomes an outward looking problem. It’s everybody [00:40:00] else’s problem. I’ve just got a great idea of how to fix it, but actually I’m in the middle of it. And the more people can actually take responsibility for even the things that out of their direct control.

Tony: I must have done something somewhere that’s had some sort of impact on this thing over here that I don’t like at the moment. What was my role in that? Can I find something that I can at least Give me something to go and take responsibility for there’s so much growth in that so much pain that goes with that as well.

Tony: Actually, instead of it being an externalized set of problems that other people are bringing to the table. Now, I’m going to take that responsibility. And if you do Clark, and if you do, Rob together, we will really take ownership of what the next step looks like. What that vision looks like.

Tony: Once we’ve agreed on the vision we can start to map the journey towards it. And that’s when all of the positive chemicals start kicking in. That dopamine kicks in when you’re in pursuit of something exciting. You don’t get the hit When you win, you get the hit when you’re [00:41:00] playing, you get the hit when you move in towards it.

Tony: And then you set, Oh, we didn’t make it. Let’s go again. When you get another, Oh, come on, we can do this. We’re together. All of that sort of stuff starts, all those chemicals that are relevant to how we connect, how we pursue what we want. All start to manifest in a positive way once we’re clear about the vision and we’re together on it.

Tony: We become that unstoppable force that everybody wants to change project to be. But very rarely get there because it’s your fault. Anyway, it was not nothing to do with me. I think, we could be better. We could be better. But you guys, honestly. this is what we should be doing. This is what we should be doing.

Tony: I’m absolutely adamant of what good looks like through my own eyes, through my own crazy optimistic eyes that people go, yeah, but all the real clinical rational Thinkers will go, yeah, but Tony, don’t you know if we did that would happen to these people over here? Like I need to balance myself out with the collective wisdom in order to get to the place where it might never be utopia but the [00:42:00] place we all believe is worth going through the hardship to get there for.

Tony: Otherwise, we’ll just keep it. We’ve got the shortcuts. We’re at the moment serving my needs to stay as we are. Emotionally, I’m fine. I’ve got security. I got my wage. My relationships are good. I go for a beer on a Friday with the lads, whatever it might be. This is just perfect. What might be around the corner, the uncertainty of that this change project that people are talking about really scares me, but I’m not going to tell anyone about that. I’m too cool for that. So this is what we should be doing. Something that serves me even better than it, than I am. And I’m okay right now. There’s a lot of that stuff going on, I think.

Rob: The problem is trust, isn’t it? Is because communication comes from the root word of making common. And that’s really what we need to do. Put everything on the table. So everyone knows what everything is. But it’s the trust we talked about vulnerability. 

Rob: So the more social media comes across, the more judgment there is, the more social anxiety there is. And so the more fake people [00:43:00] become because they don’t feel able to open up. Especially if you’re in an environment where where it’s very competitive and dog eat dog then it’s very hard to show any weakness.

Rob: Because again, there’s all these ingrained beliefs that not being able to do my job, everyone else is doing better than me. I’m just not doing well enough. I’m not up to it. They’ll find me out. There’s so many doubts that people. It does go back to that emperor’s new clothes thing where people want to go along because they don’t want to be seen.

Rob: And that’s so strong. We saw it in the Nazis and there was a whole lot of research. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen the Asch study where people clearly know something is wrong. And you can see the anxiety that they go through and they’re watching it and watching everyone say what they can clearly see is wrong.

Rob: And almost all of them just go. Yeah, it’s that. And no one stands up and says, no, it’s not. And the same thing happens in in obedience what’s the famous study where they electrocute [00:44:00] people? I can’t remember the study, but. Milgram, that’s it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And basically people will go to the point of killing people and they’re not doing it lightly that you can see their stress.

Rob: But because there’s certain archetypes like authority, like someone in a white coat telling you it must be done. And there’s something in that I think often people like. The comfort of knowing someone else is in charge and I’m just doing what I said.

Rob: But it’s so strong in human groups. 

Clark: I hate to keep bringing up the 10th man, Rob, but it’s, this whole idea of groupthink. We are herd animals to a certain degree. And I think it was Ralph Waldo Emerson that, that actually wrote about the concept of nonconformity. Because when you refuse to conform until you know you’re doing the right thing then you’re in a safe situation because if the herd’s charging headlong over a cliff, and you’re going because everybody else is going you’re going to suffer the same fate as everybody.

Clark: One of the things when I have to make change very quickly. Or when I’m dealing with a group of people and the problems are quite profound [00:45:00] and causing all sorts of problems. One of the things I do is introduce something that I learned years ago, and it’s a sales technique, funnily enough. There was a book, I think the guy’s name was Neil Rackham, who wrote a book called Spin Selling. When I read that, and we were talking a good 20 years ago, it was radical in its approach to how you deal with a problem. I’ve used it ever since. And the idea behind spin selling, because a salesperson, one assumes, is trying to solve a problem.

Clark: There’s a need, they sell the thing that fixes that problem. So it’s about problem solving. And spin selling, basically, it’s an acronym, S P I N. And it asks four questions. What’s the situation? So this goes to what Tony was saying, what are we talking about here? What’s actually going on and when you ask somebody first of all, so just tell me what’s going on like a doctor tell me what’s the problem that gives you an idea of what their belief system is What is their belief about this particular situation?

Clark: And once you’ve asked them that, the next thing you say, that P is, so what’s the problem with that? And the, it’s a brilliant thing because it’s such an [00:46:00] easy thing to teach people. S P I N. What’s the situation? What’s the problem? And the minute somebody says, oh yeah, but it’s because it, P smells.

Clark: Okay why is that a problem? How is that affecting you? How is that affecting production? How is that affecting efficiency? Tell me why you think that’s a problem. You straight away get into the root of the situation and then the next one, I, is what are the implications then of that problem?

Clark: What does this mean? Not what you think it means, not what your religion tells you it means, what does it actually mean? And then the end is what’s okay, so what do we need to do? What’s the need? You can teach it to a group of people in five minutes. And the minute people start saying to themselves, why are we all running for the door?

Clark: What’s the situation here that everybody’s running for the door. I don’t see any fire. I don’t see any crazed ax man. I think I’m just going to stand here a minute. Cause there’s a problem with this situation. And that is. that they’re all going to get crushed in the doorway or whatever. The minute you can help people to start asking themselves, the critical questions that relate to the situation they find and conformity [00:47:00] really basically just comes down to handing over your authority, your autonomy, your agency to a group of people.

Clark: You’re basically saying I don’t know what’s going on. They’re all running in that direction. Clearly they know what’s going on. I’m going to follow them. They usually don’t. 

Tony: Yeah.

Tony: Good old spin. Spin was a good model. Yeah. I did Miller Hyman. Did you do Miller Hyman as well? Have you seen those? With the blue sheets and green sheets. Like spin, for the interface of selling, whereas Miller Hyman was for strategic selling. It’s like stakeholder mapping really. You’re trying to work out what their needs are at each level.

Tony: How you meet those needs and all of those kinds of stuff, but both together really strong set of sales tools. 

Clark: Sometimes it’s really useful to keep things simple, I never disagree with you Rob, but I will take issue with that point that you made about all the wars being caused by religion.

Clark: It’s an assumption that we make, but actually most wars are territorial. The Nazis had no interest in religion. Stalin had no interest in religion. Pol Pot had no interest in religion. It’s [00:48:00] basically power. And the interesting thing about these assumptions is that we buy into them and people say, oh yeah, it’s because of this.

Clark: No it’s not. We all think that it is, and we all agree that’s a paradigm, and it’s true. Things like the Inquisition and the Crusades, which were based on religion were catastrophic for people. But it’s only part of the picture and very often, somebody, and, I get this a lot, for instance in, In meetings where HR nearly always says we need to empower people to do this thing.

Clark: And we all go, yeah, of course we do. We’ve got to empower people. And, when somebody turns around and says, oh, hold on a minute. What does that mean?

Clark: What are you going to do? Do they actually get a say in how things are run? No, I don’t think so. The problem with empowerment and one of the things I take issue with. is that it assumes that you have the power and you’re giving them a little bit. There’s already a problem there, as far as I can tell.

Clark: So why have you got all the power? Oh I get paid more. I’m the cleverest. I’m the boss. I think that’s what we really need to talk about. Not that they need [00:49:00] empowerment. It’s the whole thinking behind that is an issue. And, they’re simple things. When somebody can start to look critically at the assumptions that we made, this whole idea of beliefs, the map isn’t the territory.

Clark: I think that’s when we can really start to, and we all do it. I constantly do. I assume that anybody that supports Birmingham City is an absolute idiot. What’s wrong with them? But, there must be at least one or two decent ones amongst them. Okay. 

Tony: There’s a a great analogy there.

Tony: I think if you think about the term, oh, he’s lost the dressing room. So when a manager’s lost the dressing room, there’s a person who’s been given a key to the kingdom in terms of authority is in the position of power as designated by the board. But it’s the players decide whether you’ve got authority over them or not.

Tony: It’s the same in business authority is given by those people. Who are by decree subservient to you, so you might have the title, but your authority comes from the people that you are leading effectively. They’ll let you know if you have authority over them. They’ll give you the confidence to lead them.

Tony: They’ll let you know that [00:50:00] it’s okay. You can lead me into this situation. I’m with you. Or they won’t. 

Clark: Yeah, there’s no traction, right? I find that interesting because I wrote a post a long time ago based on that old Pirelli tire advert that said that power without control is useless or something like that.

Clark: And the point of it was that their tire is the thing that transfers the power from your car onto the road. The 600 horsepower engine in the world is no good if your tires are spinning. And I actually made the point in the post that, there are some And I see you two as this, I think I said this last week, that you guys are I start the fires, I poke things with a stick.

Clark: Which is no good, if you’re basically just poking a beehive and all the bees come. Somebody then needs to do something about that and that’s the point of this whole this idea of an arbiter or a mediator. He’s the person that is the interface between the power in the organization and the road the organization, the people that, that it’s serving, there has to be some traction.

Clark: As you said, if when you [00:51:00] lose the changing room or you lose the support of the employees. That’s when your tires are spinning. You’re applying all this power, nothing’s happening. And one of the most important things to do is to engage the one with the other. You need to be able to find a way of gaining some common ground where the belief systems of both people are aligned.

Clark: They may not agree with each other, but they’re both going to the same place. And that’s the point, isn’t it? That somebody needs to be that interface. I find you guys are the people that, you’re like the steering wheel, you’re the driver, you’re the people that, that car’s taking off down the road, but where’s it going?

Clark: It’s people with the experience and knowledge that you guys have got that actually make sure it doesn’t end up crashing into a lamppost, that it actually goes somewhere productive. People like me just get the traction and you could go spinning off and fly into a wall, but you need people that have got that ability to steer it in the right direction.

Clark: For me, that really is the key skill. The fact that you guys and people like yourselves [00:52:00] who are strategically minded and are able to guide the situation somewhere positive and useful. I’m useless in a situation like that. I can point things out, but then it’s up to the organization itself to do something with that.

Clark: And if a boss or a manager of a football team loses, the the change room. You might as well just leave since it’s happening from that point. And it’s a 

Tony: classic, and that’s a classic scenario where you only need to hear the rhetoric of the pundits about their own past experiences to understand where that issue lies.

Tony: If in those scenarios the manager’s always blaming the players or the board or the fans or whatever it is, all of the above missing the point. What is it that I’m doing that’s not working? And they’re difficult conversations to have with yourself, no doubt about that. But having somebody To ask the right questions is a massive help.

Tony: I don’t think anybody should be without it. So the 10th man and all of that type thing because it’s not something that, because the in internal people have all got vested interest. They’ve all got a stake in the game. They’ve all [00:53:00] got something to lose if it goes wrong, whereas the independent person that sits alongside you with the same shared vision of what good looks like, but has.

Tony: It doesn’t matter if you can’t fire me I’m not looking for a promotion. 

Clark: Yes. 

Tony: My aim is to co create this, go on an adventure with you. Let’s create together what this looks like. It becomes an absolutely critical piece.

Rob: Yeah. It’s so important. I read some research that the biggest problems CEOs face. Is feeling they’re not getting the right information, feeling that they, there’s too many yes people, there’s too many people telling them what they want to hear. But I just want to go back a minute to what you pointed out about religion.

Rob: I knew this was going to come back to me. No. Not to contradict, but I think it’s a great point. I will not have it. I will not have it. I’m used to this. Anyway, I’ve got to go. In the Bible. No I think you’re absolutely right. I think the point is religion has never really been about religion.

Rob: It’s been about social control. So the way it [00:54:00] relates is that organizations, I think CEOs aren’t getting the full picture because there are so many structures, even if they’re open to it, there’s so many structures that have been typically used. And because we haven’t challenged their assumption, because we haven’t looked into them, we accept them as, okay, that’s just the way it is. 

Rob: There’s a fascinating Psychiatrist called Thomas Sasz, and I think he’s dead now. Oh, yes. And basically, he said that there’ve always been people that don’t fit in. 

Rob: He said, there isn’t mental illness, there’s just people that just are how they are. They are a threat to society. And because they’re a threat to society, we’ve medicalised it and made it a mental illness. We shut them away. 

Rob: I think it was, I think it was Richard Bandler talked about, from NLP, talked about the way you make something unquestioned as you make it sacred, you make it important that you make it something else.

Rob: There’s three things. And basically when you look at like the Royals, the pageantry that we [00:55:00] have of the Royals or when a president visits or something like that, all of that is so that no one will stand up and oppose them. No one will be that little boy in the Emperor’s New Clothes.

Rob: We create all of these structures that make it deliberately difficult for someone to challenge us. So over thousands of years, we’ve created this conformity and I suppose conformities, I think some of it is probably genetic.

Rob: We’re now fighting that tide. When you’re talking, my work is the furthest from working in a factory. I know teams from individuals because I know what works in individuals and beyond a small team. Like where it’s not about relationships and it’s about processes and things like that, like I don’t have expertise to talk, but I understand what works individually.

Rob: Organizations don’t work to the individual. What we need is more from the individual now. Whereas factories, I think you can get away with bad relationships as long as the factory line works. On the [00:56:00] front line, you don’t need people to necessarily to be brought in as long as they’re keeping the factory line going.

Rob: I may be wrong, but that’s my assumption. But where it’s really key is where it’s creativity, where it’s insight, where it’s analysis and where we need real human insight, that’s where we need people performing more and that is where the organizations that we’ve had don’t work. 

Rob: I think we have to challenge all of the structure of our organizations because a lot of them are designed to stop people from challenging.

Clark: I think one of the things that happens in most organizations now, whether it’s a factory or, because I’ve worked in call centers and places like that, and what I’ve found is that most all of the roles within an organization are about what they do what’s your job, so I manage the money I’m in charge of HR, so I’m supposed to make sure that everybody’s happy, but actually where I am is the policeman for the organization, I’m the ops guy.

Clark: I make sure that the stuff comes in and goes out on time. It’s all about what they do, not about what they are. And the [00:57:00] interesting thing, and I may not be right with this, because I’m really just in the process of thinking how this might work. But since I started really investigating this book about the 10th man, it made me realize, because that person has an important, although limited role within any organization.

Clark: If things are going well, you don’t need you just need him to be looking. But I then started to realize that actually, that’s an archetype. It’s interesting that throughout human history, these archetypes keep cropping up. In mythology and in stories and fairytales and all that sort of thing, and we talk about Joseph Campbell and the hero’s journey and that sort of archetypes keep cropping up.

Clark: What I realized was, here’s me been banging this drum for years about the 10th man is just one archetype within a large group, and I’ve actually written down now, I’ve got nine. I was hoping to get 10 because it really fits neatly with my 10th man thing but I can only think of nine. But these nine archetypes are what I’ve thought of. There are people within an organization who are necessary, not because of what they do, managing the money or getting [00:58:00] product out the door, but because of what they are. The 10th man is somebody who is authorized to dissent, to disagree.

Clark: to ask what the alternatives are. That’s what they are as a person. There are people like that within every organization and you want them to be able to speak up. But then there are other people. One of the archetypes that I thought of and then looked into it and started realizing these people crop up everywhere is the sacred fool who is an archetype who basically is the one that when you want change, when you want ideas, when you want innovation, they’re the people that come up with the mad ideas that actually turn out to be brilliant. 

Clark: This person that’s super creative within an organization, you need a pragmatist, who are the sort of the real engineers, they get stuff done. There are the alchemists that are all about change, how we change things, how we make things work differently, the way such as Gareth Southgate did, for instance, with the England team.

Clark: But all of these archetypes, I think, I may be wrong, seem to crop up in organizations constantly, regardless of the type of organization. Business that they’re [00:59:00] involved in. I think I’ve only just really scratched the surface because you were just talking about Tom Szasz there Rob, and I love that guy.

Clark: I find him fascinating. One of the things I like particularly about him is the way he attacks psychiatry and psychology, because, that’s just another belief system. My mom was a psychoanalyst. She had a particular viewpoint. She was very much of the Freudian school and so were most of her colleagues, but she could have easily been Adlerian or Gestalt or Jung or whatever, and they would have had their own belief systems.

Clark: But he attacked them and basically said that, all of these therapies and the psychoanalysis, they’re just talking interventions. Which is a role that used to be fulfilled by priests and pastors. They perform a ministry to people. They’re just perform a talking role and that is necessary within humanity.

Clark: We need somebody that is the person that will listen to us and maintain our confidentiality when they’re dealing with that problem and so on. All of these archetypes keep cropping up and I’m starting to think that we need to change the way we look at organizations [01:00:00] and how they function, certainly within, politics, because all these politicians say we’re going to do this.

Clark: Yeah, all right. But what are you? Who are you? What do you stand for? What are the values that you ascribe to? Because they’re really the most important thing. And I think I’m starting to formulate An idea myself that maybe we need to start looking at things a little bit differently.

Tony: For sure. Interesting stuff. Can’t wait for the book. 

Clark: Nor can I. You’re driving me mad. When you start to write anything, and I know you’re doing that yourself, Tony, and you’ve already done it, Rob. 

Clark: You have to start to examine quite deeply what you really think about a thing, is this going to stand up to scrutiny and, a lot of what I say doesn’t. Certainly I will make comments about things based on certain assumptions.

Clark: When you examine them you suddenly realize, hold on, I have no way of knowing whether this is true or not. And so you have to make that clear or you at least have to dig into it and make it a little bit more robust. So it’s fascinating because for all the research I’ve done on the 10th man, there’s not a lot out there.

Clark: Obviously the Israeli intelligence [01:01:00] used it as a as a device within their intelligence organization, but there’s not much else about it. I’m very fortunate. I’ve been in contact with some people in the Israeli intelligence community that have helped me. with this, but I’m learning more myself in writing it than anybody that ever reads it will.

Tony: Yeah, it’s great. I’m in the same place it’s not the same type of book, but because I’ve been researching for the last probably four years now all of the different psychometric tools and whether they’re good or bad or indifferent, they’re very popular. So I’ve been building my own tool. I’m now finally, maybe six weeks ago, maybe a bit more, I landed on the thing that unlocked everything.

Tony: I’ve been torn for years on, had ideas and kept researching and had ideas and kept researching. I was looking at where these things I layered them all over each other because they’re all trying to do the same thing, right? They’re all trying to put you in a room and say this is what you like.

Tony: And this is how you can get on better. And this is how businesses can benefit. But they all claim to be measuring different things and doing different things. And we know it’s incredibly, it [01:02:00] it’s impossible to really measure psychology in that way. It’s lots of neuroscience now that helps and stuff like that.

Tony: So I’ve been researching this to the hill anyway. I’m in a purple patch. It’s just come flooding out now. I’ve landed on this model and I, I absolutely love it. It’s all validated. It’s great. I can’t wait to share it with you. I shared with Thomas a little bit of it yesterday in terms of how my own profile stacks up.

Tony: And he was like blown away. Thomas comes from that industry. Thomas was in learning and development. He was with insights. There’s so much more granularity The typing systems and the matrix matrices and the putting people in boxes and the labels and all of that sort of stuff.

Tony: So it’s very exciting in terms of that. But anyway, the reason I started talking about that is because we’re talking about books, but I had a conversation with Thomas yesterday touching on archetypes, because out of this stuff that I sent him, prompted one of the conversations that Thomas and I have, and it was from an organizational structural point of view. If you get the [01:03:00] alchemists, you identify who the alchemists are within the organization.

Tony: And it’s not all of the time that they’re going to be creating the right answers and the right solutions, but the time of the structured time when you put the alchemist together in a room, lock them down to create gold. It’s not the fact that they may or may not come up with a brilliant solution on that day or during that time, but the amount of empowerment, the amount of energy that you because they’re in their sweet spot.

Tony: You’re harnessing their individual expression, you’re maximizing their potential. So giving them the room to be who they are in order to do what they do for me is foundational. And this is what my book and my tool is all based on. It’s about giving people the optimal amount of, Opportunity to fulfill a potential if we want to harness individual expression in the pursuit of a team objective, which is what you want Trent Alexander Arnold to be optimal best.

Tony: How do we do that? It’s about that. How do we harness what he’s got in the context of the team structure? For example, he’s just an [01:04:00] example. So we use that idea that creatives are sometimes going to be stifled in the day to day running of a business. Because it’s not asked for, it’s not sought after, it’s not recognized that right now we need it, right now we need to get our hands dirty and fix all this stuff that’s in front of us and get these boxes out by five o’clock.

Tony: However, at the time when we give them their space to be who they are. To do their thing. Boom. 

Clark: Can I just ask Tony does the model that you’ve formulated, does that produce, Outcomes that align with certain archetypes. You just mentioned the creatives. For instance, just as an example, one of the things, one of the models that I like is MBTI simply because it’s a rough and ready, I like things that work quickly and give me a rough idea of where I’m going, but it doesn’t apply in all situations.

Clark: And you do have to get much more nuanced if you want Yeah, but is it something similar to that? That’s what 

Tony: my stuff’s doing. So it’s taking that type of approach. So what happens? So with the big five, which is a very academic [01:05:00] research for years model, because it’s so academic, it’s very hard to make it applicable to the layman.

Tony: So if I try to roll the big five out as a tool onto a football team, it’s talking cackle, right? Forget it. But when you change the linguistics of it, but you retain the integrity of the model. You change the language that’s used, It’s totally different. So it’s also because each of these things, so if you think of MBTI and your extroversion, introversion as a dichotomy, I’m either introverted or extroverted, extroversion is a continuum.

Tony: It’s a measure of positive emotion. On the one hand, how assertive am I, how adept at leadership might I be? On the other hand, is how sociable am I? Do I get energized by being in groups? All of that sort of stuff. It’s a scale and it’s very deterministic in terms of predicting job performance in much more of a profound way than MBTI or DISC or any of those sort of what I would call lower resolution things because you’re asking questions that choose between this and that, choose between this and that, choose between this and that.

Tony: [01:06:00] So you try and take the social desirability bias out of your assessment in the first place to minimize as much as possible and You get this rich output that then the work that I’m doing is okay, so here’s the output and all the granularity that goes with it, how do I package that up to make it as accessible and have as much utility as an MBTI or a DISC?

Tony: How can we make it simple to use, but much more valuable to the leader, to the team, to the individual, to the relationship. And it’s honestly, since one of the elements of the programs that I’ve been looking at for four years now. About six weeks ago it landed and I’m producing a lot of material that’s really exciting. And when I laid it over my own profile, I sent it to Thomas, he was like, wow, that is something else. That’s interesting. 

Tony: Are we going to get to see it? I’ll send you, I’ll send you it’s only a short thing. I’ll send it to you both on LinkedIn.

Clark: Yeah, please. Because you just mentioned that I had nothing like [01:07:00] that in mind when I was thinking about these archetypes myself, just because rather than. Taking a rationalist view, i. e., if I do this and this should happen. My thinking is always what’s actually happening?

Clark: What’s going on out there? And when I look at organizations based on having to write this book about the 10th man, I started to realize that there are people, friends I have one archetype that I was looking at I call Pathfinder, who is brilliant at gaining clarity in a situation, answering that question that we said earlier what’s really going on and finding out what’s going on and being fearless, in gaining clarity in a situation.

Clark: Then I started to look around to see if this is an actual thing. I have no way of measuring this in an organization. I don’t have the tools that you’ve just mentioned, but you see them and you see these people and you think actually these people are necessary within an organization.

Clark: There are people who are important for there’s another one that I call the sentinel, who is a guardian of the belief system. What do we stand for? What are our values? What do we believe as a group of people? And that’s the person that has to stand there and say, hold on a minute, that goes against [01:08:00] everything that we believe in.

Clark: These people exist and they’re not just part of organizations, they’re part of communities, tribes. 

Tony: I’ll tell you what my, I’ll tell you what my tool can do. I think I’ll put a peg in the ground. If you can just give me the broad characteristics of those nine types, I will, I think I can source a 10th type.

Tony: Oh, brilliant. That would make it so much, that would satisfy my OCD massively. And that would be totally new. That would be like Maybe not even, it might exist somewhere else but that’s definitely, because I’ve looked, I’ve modelled so as part of the research, I looked at the Enneagram, it’s got nine types.

Tony: I looked at the Belbin team role, it’s got nine types. And I can map my system against, so the beauty of my system, by the way, is you don’t need this, you don’t need MBTI, you don’t need CliftonStrengths, you don’t need Belbin. It maps to all of those programs. So this is why I’m excited. It’s got a real cut through in terms of cost effectiveness and utility.

Tony: So it’s. 

Clark: I think you’ve got a really good point there, because I remember somebody mentioned to me, I just had my accident and I [01:09:00] was sitting there moping around, feeling sorry for myself. And all these people have been saying to me, these things happen for a reason, which I found profoundly irritating because the reason was somebody cut across in front of me and ran me over.

Clark: But somebody pointed me in the direction of, and I’m not a woo person, but somebody pointed me in the direction of this thing called the human design. And I said what is this? And they said, it talks a lot about how you, your characteristics are imprinted before you’re even born. I said that’s nonsense.

Clark: I’m not even going to look at that, which, and I had to challenge my own belief system because they said, just look at it. And I put the information in that it required of me, and I was shocked at the things that it said about me because I thought, my goodness, and what I realized is that the person that came up with this in the seventies had overlaid, as you’ve just said, things Te Ching, astrology, some other things, and that they’re all ancient ways of trying to understand who we are. 

Clark: I thought what they’ve done is they’ve synthesized because they’re all basically doing the same job, so they must be all operating [01:10:00] according to the same principles, but just according to different templates. And that’s exactly what you’re doing. I think, yeah that’s 

Tony: what my research did.

Tony: My research was how do I create a hybrid of all these things that’s got value. It’s incredibly complex and a hell of a lot of research. 

Clark: But that needs to happen, Tony. I remember years ago, being in the military, obviously it’s a martial environment. It’s all about, fighting and combat and that sort of thing.

Clark: And back in the day, people used to say, which is the best martial art? Is it boxing? Is it kung fu? And then MMA happened which was a synthesis of all of these things, and it’s better than all of them, and you realize that as time goes on, and what will happen, of course, something else will come along to take over, because we’re constantly optimizing where we’re at, but somebody does need to come along from time to time and say, look, all of these dogmatic beliefs and ideas that we have need to be Mushed together so that we can converse in you, which is exactly what you were doing.

Clark: I will be fascinated to see how that actually functions in real life. 

Tony: Yeah, it’s exciting. [01:11:00] Definitely. And I’ve written say written a book. I’ve got all the material that I’ve got. 160, 000 words for the book, which I now need to, I need to pull it into as probably 60, 000 word book is the main book.

Tony: Yeah.

Tony: I’ve done a sports version of it so it’s just flowing now I’ve got it’s got so much applicability so yeah I’m excited I’ll share that with you for sure but if you want to share those nine things I’m sure we can find a tenth Archetype