Stories We Tell: The Power of Narrative

Honing The Narrative

Clark: [00:00:00] When I’ve been working the last few weeks you just get snippets of news and things that are going on and the, the general zeitgeist is humming away there in the background, but you don’t really get involved in it. And I’ve been thinking recently that, everybody thinks the world’s gone mad.

Obviously. It is the main topic of conversation. I have thought that, but I’ve just thought to myself, why does everybody think the world’s going mad? ’cause 

Tony: Yeah. ’cause they’re just getting pumped with 

Clark: garbage, aren’t they? Is everything’s there? There’s stuff going on. 

I had a conversation the other day with a couple of the people that I work with. And they were talking about, the stuff that people talk about the immigration, the terrorism and all that stuff. I get sick to death of hearing about it, to be honest.

I said, growing up in Birmingham the Birmingham Pub bombings were a big deal. I said then were the days when terrorists really knew what they were doing. 

These were no wishy-washy terrorists, and I make light of it because it certainly wasn’t light, but some of the stuff that has happened in the last 50 years, horse guards parade the assassination of air even and, Elman, Mount Batten and all of that stuff by the various, groups, Etta, gang, all of those guys, [00:01:00] IRA obviously it’s as bad now as it’s ever been. But we seem to be, as you’ve just said, filled with this narrative and that was the thing that I was thinking about when I was walking the dog. My approach to my work has always been a rhetorical logical one.

What is the process behind this thing? What, what is actually happening? I just dug out a piece of paper when I got back in. It’s just a thing, a little bit of paper that, I has got some notes on it that talks about critical thinking. And there’s not a lot of that about at the moment.

So that’s the thing that’s bothering me at the moment. This whole, I dunno if you guys, I dunno if I’m right on this. I’ve always differentiated between a narrative style of speaking or approach in a situation where you’re telling a story, which is very popular at the moment, or the rhetorical one, which is a sort of logical, process driven, linear type, critical thinking approach to a situation.

Now, I may not be right. Maybe from a a purely academic point of view. There are different classifications, but for me it seems that there, there are always these two approaches to dealing with a situation. The narrative one, the story that you tell [00:02:00] yourself or the logical rhetorical one.

And we seem to be lacking severely on the rhetorical, critical thinking side of things. 

Rob: So I’ve, I’m just started reading Marcus Aurelius but meditations, I’m not sure if you’ve ever 

Clark: Yeah. Come across 

Rob: it. And I recently came across Stoicism, and it made me feel not so weird for saying things that everyone thought I was weird for saying, but as part of stoicism anyway, so as an example, I can’t remember exactly now, but I can remember things and I go, everyone thought I was weird for saying that, but it’s it’s very much focused on, I’m not trying to control that, which you can’t. It’s focused on the key to happiness is being the best person you can. It doesn’t matter what other people do, what other people say, it’s about how strong you stay to yourself. But what triggered me to think of that when you were talking Clark was marcus Aurelius was one of the five good Emper emperor as they call it. He was adopted by the emperor and he was trained in philosophy and his [00:03:00] mentors, told him he could go, he could train him rhetoric and he could say fancy words or he could actually deal with what was being dealt with.

And I think there is, I think there’s a narrative, I think the left narrative of everyone can be what they are. And whatever has gone too far, it’s created a reaction. And the rights narrative is reverting back to the 1930s Germany. I think probably what you’re saying in, when you are talking about rhetoric, you’re talking about actually dealing with the issue, logically.

Whereas I think what made Marcus really a part of what made him a great emperor was he dealt with what is, he didn’t try and use fancy words ’cause he met a deliberate course. Not to be a fancy speaker, not to impress people with his words and his elegant prose, but to actually live and be the example.

So yeah, I think I. I think there’s two lessons from it. A first is not trying to impress anyone, not trying to win the argument, but just dealing [00:04:00] with things as we are and being the best person we can be. 

Clark: Marcus Aelius. I’ve obviously the classical writers and speakers have always been of interest to me and he was trained in the Socratic approach to so you reason on the matter.

And it’s the difference between, I think I saw somebody recently say something really interesting that psychiatrist was saying that she was in trying to find out why suicide was such a big thing in the human race when it’s not something that you see in the animal kingdom anywhere else.

And obviously the ability to talk to ourselves using words that have meaning, depending on the meaning that you give them, has a massive influence over this. This idea of actually taking away your own existence. It’s a bizarre concept really, when you think of, this idea of self murder, suicide, she said, but the one of the main reasons appears to be the fact that we, because we can tell ourselves stories, because we can use words in certain ways.

We can paint a picture for ourselves of a future that’s worse than the [00:05:00] idea of being dead. And that’s why she said we can get over the hurdle because you would think it would be something that’s so counterintuitive to take away to cause selves, to cease to exist.

But she said, because we can paint these pictures for ourselves, we can tell these stories, give ourselves these narratives. The paint a picture that is worse than being dead, then it’s, it becomes such a prevalent situation. One of the things that you just mentioned Mark a Marcus Aurelius.

One of the things I like about him is because as a ruler, he suffered enormously. He had some real setbacks, didn’t he? Suffered plagues and all sorts of things. But he dealt with things, as you say, as they are, without painting a narrative around them.

There are so many stoical memes and idioms that you can use, but my favorite one has always been, what impedes the way, becomes the way the or it’s famously become known as what the obstacle is the way, and this idea that whatever is a problem for you is probably the thing that’s pointing towards a solution as well.

Because where we find issues, very often [00:06:00] they’re pointing back at an issue within us that if we can overcome them will lead to, to not only an immediate solution, but long-term betterment of ourselves and this idea of rhetoric as opposed to a narrative. The thing about stories is whilst they are not exclusively, so most stories are fiction. 

That’s the point of a story, isn’t it? It’s not true. It’s a lie. And by definition, everything that we tell ourselves, we could say is a fiction because nothing we know about the universe around us can be the whole truth about anything. We’re really just guessing from our perspective.

But the idea behind rhetoric, and one of the things that Marcus Aurelius always pushed was this idea of not deluding yourself. Not giving into your own fiction. For instance, people constantly saying, oh, I’m so stupid. Or as you, you just mentioned the left and the right.

They’re bad. They’re this, they’re fascists, whatever. Critical thinking basically says. Is that the whole story is that you’ve told yourself this narrative, but [00:07:00] is that really true? I had a conversation very recently with somebody and I mentioned a particular instance with a boss.

And this lady said to me you have heard of the patriarchy, haven’t you? 

As if that was the answer to the argument I said I have, yes, I have heard of the Patriarch patriarchy. I’ve never been there, I’ve never spoken to any of the members or anything. But I have heard that it’s a thing and whilst it’s a a worldview that holds a lot of truth, clearly look at the world around us. It is not the whole truth. And the problem with that is if we exclude all of the stuff that is true, then the fiction that we paint for ourselves becomes reality. And one of the problems that, that I feel that we’re having to deal with these days is that nobody is telling the whole story about anything.

The reason I was thinking about this on the way walking the dog was because obviously I’m involved in a job now that just deals with helping people sort stuff out. So you just have to deal with the problem as it is. If you don’t, then the problem doesn’t go away and the people don’t pay you.

It’s a [00:08:00] very direct, very simplistic way of working. It’s brilliant because you can just say, there problem’s gone. Gimme my money. Thank you very much. See you the next time. The problem I find though, is when you look at the stuff that’s going on around you in the world, there are times when you think or I certainly think to myself, I should be helping, I should be doing something here.

There’s, I know I dunno how you would do that other than to get on your soapbox and tell the world what you think about stuff. But it does bother me because the lack of critical thinking, I believe is a situation or set of circumstances that’s being encouraged by social media and, the political narratives around us and all the other stuff.

And I dunno what’s really the best way to, to deal with that. 

Rob: Narratives have been weaponized, haven’t they? That’s really what we’re dealing with in social media. Narratives have become a political weapon. 

I was listening to a fascinating book, which was studied 10 centuries of what made the most difference, in each century. And one of the things I’d never thought of, heard or realized before was it wasn’t [00:09:00] until the 13th century that a mirror became within the reach of most or half of the population.

Before that time, nobody had ever seen themselves in a mirror. And so this began, this was when people started having self portraits. People started having portraits of themselves, differentiated. And it was and he was arguing that was the development of the self. Because before that, all we saw was I’m this one son.

I’m from here, I’m part of this village or tribe or whatever it was. And then the other thing was the move to the cities, which again, changed the nature of people, but also the narrative that they worked on. I always think you pick a narrative as a operating principle.

And you work on that as if it’s true until you’re proven it’s not true. But yeah, I just think at the moment, we’ve reached a stage where it is all about narratives, and those narratives have become weaponized for whatever aims they’re needed for. 

Tony: It’s fascinating stuff. It takes me to a course I was [00:10:00] running a lot last year.

One element of which was the Art of Rhetoric. And it used some exemplars like Martin Luther King’s people that gave great speeches, were able to engage lots of people to join a movement, all of that type of stuff. And it talked about the appeal to logic. So I always try and factor this ’cause I’m in a performance environment.

I’m thinking about how do you apply these principles to speaking to your group, speaking to your team how might I apply these principles back to football? And I’ll actually play with a football anecdote. I’ll show them again that I was involved in where we were winning three nil at halftime in surprise.

I put the scenario into the hands of two different groups. One was the opponent’s coach and one was me. They had a very short time window to appeal to the logic, emotions and the ethics of the group. And of course they don’t know who the group is, they don’t know these people, but they have to think about if I’m gonna connect with this one to many, if I’m gonna connect with them.

Some of them will latch onto the logic. Some will attach [00:11:00] onto the passion and the emotion, and some will want us regardless to stick to the principles of what we said we were always gonna be. All of that sort of stuff. And the fourth one is time. That the time pressure or the time constraints, or the time is now, whatever it might be.

So these four things play out in those narratives. At the moment I’m talking Clark, you raised this internal dialogue, this internal voice, this internal ability to tell ourselves stories that are either good or bad. Me, for example, the story that I can, create for myself is delusively optimistic?

I can believe the future is way better than it’s gonna be. And not everybody thinks like that. Some people think my ideas are crazy and as a consequence, won’t buy into it. I create a picture for the future that I think is fantastic, that may just not be possible without getting a few critical thinkers around to pull it apart and bring me a little bit back down to earth.

And then there’s a conversation that will take place about where can we land here? What is possible? What do we agree we could do together? But I do find that whole thing fascinating and I [00:12:00] think I’m just trying to play it through, this sort of global stories that were being told are appealing to people’s sensibilities, whatever their disposition is.

People that voted for Trump, for example, have bought into the rhetoric that bought into the idea, through. This story that they’ve told themselves is the right person to be the right way, to be the right way to act. It’s got a lot of power as we know, going, Rob, you mentioned the thirties and stuff that those stories when sold well, powerful.

Clark: The interesting thing you mentioned there about the idea of rhetoric being mentioned people like Martin Luther King, that the rhetoric as a tool is used for argumentation, isn’t it? The, this appeal to the logos, pathos, or ethos is how you argue a point.

The Socratic method has always been that you say a thing. And then we talk about the thing in a way that strives towards a conclusion, whether it’s a correct conclusion or not. Depends upon the perspective of the person. Because very often even two [00:13:00] people are striving for the truth may be derailed by one person’s bias, pushing it in a particular direction.

The thing about narrative that fascinates me is that I worked a few years ago for a company that was, a large nationwide business that, that franchised businesses out to practical people that were not natural storytellers. These were guys that bought businesses and it was mostly guys.

It was quite a dirty job. And it was, it attracted a certain type of person that, that tended to turn up to work in overalls. These were not natural salespeople. The problem was that these people bought the franchises. They were really good at what they did, but they couldn’t push the business forward.

And so we, I was asked to come in and help, with part of the training about how they become the people that the customers are expecting to see. That was just my reason for being there. And one of the things that I was talking to, so there were other trainers there, sales trainers predominantly.

And one of the interesting things for me I learned from these salespeople, because for them the idea is that you’re [00:14:00] pushing a narrative. From my point of view it was how you become a certain type of person in the given situation so that you can be the person that the customers are expecting to see.

But then once you are there being accepted by the customer. These sales guys were now encouraging them to push a narrative. So it was all about don’t argue with them, don’t reason with them over this product because you’ll never win because you don’t know whether they’re, whether you’re appealing to the logos, pathos, or ethos.

You don’t know where they’re coming from. There are secret agendas going on in these conversations. Yeah. So you need to be telling a story and it’s gotta be a story that starts with you and them sitting in front of each other, but ends up with them being in a place where they need this product.

And I found that fascinating because stories are that powerful that even if you don’t agree with the story, if it’s a good enough story, you will follow it along and you will end up at a place that you would never have logically [00:15:00] rhetorically ended up at and that is for me, is the worrying thing, because whilst I love stories and whilst it’s fascinating to see how storytelling has become so pervasive.

 Political lobbyists, for instance is a big thing in the us.

PR and marketing, we assume that their way of approaching situation logically, but it isn’t pr, marketing, sales and all of that stuff is purely narrative, emotion driven or certainly focused on achieving an emotional decision on the part of the person that you’re talking to.

And that worries me because you mentioned that Germany in the thirties, but history is littered with examples of people being sold a story that ended up in absolute disaster. Walking the dog this morning what I was thinking was, I have not had a chance, I’ve always talked about the 10th man and critical thinking and the looking at the other side of a story and asking people what’s the other side of this situation?

And I’m not finding myself in situations where I need to do that anymore. People are giving me a problem. I’m helping them resolve it. But I feel that the [00:16:00] fewer people involved in encouraging others to be more critical in their thinking, the quicker the problems that we seem to be creating for ourselves will land on us.

That makes sense. I just think there need to be more reasoned voices out there. I literally I’ve not had much time to look on LinkedIn recently, but every time I do look on LinkedIn, I, it blows my mind. There was a the very first thing I looked at this morning when I just opened up LinkedIn, was a story about how the whole Trump assassination, attempt was a fake and it was set up and it was a conspiracy.

Why is this on here? What, why are we being treated to this particular person’s view? , I dunno whether it was or not. But I just find that fascinating that everything is now revolving around pushing a brand, an idea of the truth.

That may be not everybody’s idea of the truth. Pushing it. 

Tony: Yeah, I saw that. I saw that yesterday. It wasn’t on LinkedIn, it was on another platform. I saw the same story. Alright. And I had the same thoughts. What, nobody knows what the [00:17:00] facts are, what the truth is, and here’s this story and the photographs that go with it and how it’s not possible.

That could be a real bullet wound. Who knows? Might be true, might not. I’ve got no idea. But I’m armed with a ton of questions. If I was face to face with the person to say, help me understand how you got to that.

Clark: So here’s the thing, right? This is the the notes that I was looking at this morning. This is not from me. This is something that my wife was working on recently. But he was talking about critical thinking. It just asks a series of questions, right? So you’ve presented with a a story about, for instance the assassination attempt or immigration or UK is heading for, and it may well be, I dunno, but all of this stuff that when we’re presented with these ideas, ask a series of questions.

For instance, who is the person speaking? What are their credentials? What is their point of view? Are they making any unsupported, assertions? Are there relevant reasons or evidence provided? What are the strengths or the limitations of their story? What is fact and what is opinion?

Are there any unreasonable generalizations? And there’s all this to [00:18:00] think about and this is something that we, me and my wife have conversations about this all the time because both of our works revolve around that. It is very rare that we will censor what’s being said to us.

Most of the stories, if it catches our attention, if it’s to do with immigration or if it’s to do with the right or the left or somebody’s rights or whatever it is, if it appeals to us, we very rarely will ask ourselves those questions because we’ve already bought into that narrative. And that’s the concern because there’s so little critical thinking.

I was talking to somebody that I’ve worked with recently who was an operations manager with a big organization, and I’ve hardly ever found myself in a situation to do this. But about six months ago, they were saying they were going through a difficult situation with a company that they were working with, and I broached the subject of them actually leaving the company.

It’s not something that, that I would normally, it’s not for me to say. But from the things that I’d seen and the discussions that they’d had, the company [00:19:00] was telling itself a story that was just so unrealistic. You just talked about being delusively optimistic. Tony, this lad who was the operations manager.

So he was all about making the organization operationally effective, which is why I was working with him. He said they are literally ignoring numbers that I’m putting in front of them and projections based on their ideas that this, that or the other is gonna work out with no proof. We’d been working together for quite a long time and I got to a point where I said, I can see where you’re heading with this.

You seem to be talking yourself into leaving, and I think you’re probably on the right track because these guys are charging headlong towards the edge of a cliff. And I spoke to him yesterday because this was several months ago. And the company is just going from bad to worse. And what’s bizarre is that the guys in charge, wealthy people are just spending money hand over fist, trying to make this idea of theirs a reality, which logically speaking can’t happen. And it just blows my [00:20:00] mind, as I’ve always said. I often say in my training programs that in the months before a business goes bankrupt, there are a lot of people running around. Really busy people, intelligent people doing all the wrong things. 

Tony: Yeah. Yeah. 

Clark: Because they’ve told themselves a story.

Tony: Yeah, absolutely. I think that, you are giving them the awareness of themselves that probably don’t naturally have in those conversations, I think I’m lucky that I recognize that in myself. So I’m not gonna go headlong into chaos perhaps like I might have used to.

But it’s important to know whatever it might be, and situationally where you are on that. So if you are an ops manager and you really don’t have that necessary focus on the efficiencies that the numbers are telling you are right. Then it’s just a disaster waiting to happen. The longer it goes, the wider the gaps are gonna get.

When I first transitioned out football, I trained in lean, trained by Unipar Logistics in leading management, six Sigma, the whole span completely out of my comfort zone, completely out of [00:21:00] my spectrum. I love the learning component of it, but the world that they were operating in, methodology process, time saving methodologies, five wise, all that, and some amazing tools that you were gonna say 

Clark: very useful stuff though, right?

Oh, 

Tony: absolutely. Brilliant tools that I, I learned so much from it. But naturally not aligned to idea of process. I immediately feel constrained by process. My rational mind says if I don’t have process, my ideas will come to nothing. My thoughts would be great, but bonkers, useless.

So at least I’ve got the ability to go, you know what? I need to buddy up with someone here to help me bring this to life. Because without it, I feel for that guy. He’s the probably a good guy in the wrong job. Who knows? He might be better in marketing. It could be a great fit. It says here that the operations manager’s not paying attention to what needs the most attention.

That’s the person you want to be the most effective and efficient in [00:22:00] that role. I would say it’s interesting. 

Clark: Yeah. Lean manufacturing is my background. Yeah. And I love the fact that it’s just so pragmatic. There’s more than a need for dreamers in the world, yeah. If we don’t have people with vision we’re doomed. We have to be able to dream of better things, but then there has to be somebody that rolls their sleeves up and gets it done. And that really is all that processes.

One of the things that concerns me now is I remember reading a historian several years ago talking about the First World War, and he said that so many people in the sort of a hundred years since the first World War have said, how that changed the world.

1914, everything changed. The old order ceased to exist. All of the monarchical structures collapsed. And this whole Republican view perspective started to move in. And, so many things changed. And he said, we look back and think, what if this had happened?

What if that had happened? He said, but he said it’s, it is a pointless conversation because it was inevitable. He said it [00:23:00] was as if we slept walked into this situation. He said the moment Serbia got involved, Russia had to get involved because of their alliances. And he said the way, allegiances and history has set us up in certain stances.

He said there, there was nothing we could do. It was just inevitable. And I do seem to look around. I do seem to think as I look around now that we’re in a similar situation we’re, we are walking ourselves into, I don’t know. I don’t think it’s gonna be the end of the world or anything, but I think we’re walking ourselves into quite a dark place because by demonizing the other side of any story.

You are automatically making yourself the hero slash victim. And neither positions are good. Yeah, 

Tony: it’s inevitable, right? As soon as it’s I’m right, you are wrong. I win, you lose, I’m good. You are bad. You’re starting to get, starting to attack people’s belief systems and identity and all of that.

And that’s when people start fighting back. That’s when they get angry and upset. Going back to the lean thing, I was part of an academy and I piggybacked onto the [00:24:00] rail sector, so really, privatized rail operators were always trying to cut margins and find a way to make these train, what the rail sector’s like at the moment.

If you ever traveled by train it’s not in a great state. So I was working with a rail operator piggybacked on their course. So I was a. Uni part employee piggybacking on the this rail operators course. So we did this exercise where it was a lean simulation.

So we started this exercise. It was a game, you’re on the clock and you had a role to play. And I forget the full detail of it, but it was like a painting scenario. We were like painters that had to paint a number of houses and there was a warehouse where they paint. There were people, there was a head of distribution, all these different people playing different roles.

So the game starts and you have to follow your rules, go and do the roles. And we went down from, I think there was 13 people in the group doing these tasks. And they ended up by the end of the game, everything was getting done more efficiently with three people. That was the beauty of the exercise, right?

But that’s when the penny dropped. These guys who were [00:25:00] on the course from the rail depot are like, that just means. That just means I’m gonna be first off on the chopping block. They, they’re then starting to equate it to heads will roll. The more efficient we get, the better this stuff we get, the less people are required.

And there was obviously a lot of reality in that, but the uni part way was if we create resource, how do we redeploy it into another area of the business to grow it? That was the ethical beauty of it, but of course not every business that’s cut in costs are going to gonna do that.

But it was a fascinating exercise. Then get deployed to a rail. My completion of my training, if you like, was to deliver a standard work project. I think I might have told you this before, but so my first, this is my first big shift outside of football.

So I found myself doing a standard work project in Liverpool. I was there for two weeks. I was with five sets of shift workers who were doing standard maintenance of diesel trains. So I’ve gone from football to being under these big, dirty diesel engines in a hard hat and high-vis vest, trying [00:26:00] to help five different teams with a manager that never came out of his office to see what was going on, improve the consistency of the efficiency of how they did this thing.

It was absolutely brilliant. Had not a clue what I was doing. Had to summon up all of my diplomacy skills. That was a mancunian in an evertonian world, even before we started having a conversation. So it was absolutely, one of the best experiences I’ve had, and let me just cap it off.

I went to the final meeting of. With the CEO of the train operator that I was working on this project with, and I had to deliver the feedback and the presentation, what I’d seen, where the improvements could be. And anyway, cut a long story short, the letter that came back from them to the business was, re: Tony Warmsley.

We don’t think he knows a lot about trains, but we’d have him back in an instant. And here’s the reasons why. 

I don’t know that if I was great at the lean process itself, but I’d impacted them culturally and how they work together, which was really interesting. It was good [00:27:00] feedback for me. It positioned me within the business in the direction where the business was going as a sort of a mediator, a diplomacy type person, mediator.

We had a contract worth $1.4 billion and a very irate client and lots of internal stakeholders who were full of angst. So they’d come together and clash. And I found myself in those conversations and helping reach a better outcome. 

Clark: What occurred to me when you were saying that I’m really interested, Tony, is you got the guys that you’re speaking to on the ground, and then you’ve got the manager up in his office.

It’s an ongoing situation when you find yourself in those types of role where you’re mediating between these two parties and talking about a narrative, again, you turn up, the manager’s got an idea of who you are and why you’re there. Because you are stealing some of his glory, some of his power potentially gonna paint him in a bad light.

These guys are seeing you thinking, because one of the issues with lean manufacturing, which used to be called the old time and motion man, is basically that you’re there to get rid of [00:28:00] people. You, how can we do more with less people? As you say, ideally the real solution is to redeploy because one of the big things of Lean manufacturing is that you are able to even out the workflow.

So where you’ve got peaks and troughs, if you can redeploy resources. I’ve certainly been in situations where we’ve managed to do away with the idea of sacking contract workers at the end of every season and retrain them so that not only do they benefit because they’re not starving to death just before Christmas, but the company benefits because they now have trained people long term.

But when you turn up in these places, one of the first things that you have to do and I think this is probably, one of the reasons that letter was so favorable that it’s not about trains. It’s not even about lean manufacturing, it’s, it is about understanding what those stories are that people are telling themselves about you and why you are there.

Getting underneath those and actually dealing with the issues. I dunno to what extent you are still involved in that line of work, but this [00:29:00] speaks to my concern when I sat down here this morning because I’ve been walking a dog thinking about this stuff and whilst I’m busy helping people and doing my job and getting good reports from clients and stuff I’m not solving any, to me meaningful problems. And I’m looking around the world and thinking, that situation with the train guys is repeating itself all over the world. One of the, one of the issues that I think is, such a big problem at the moment is that there the people that are making the world work, the people, the nurses the fishermen the builders, the sewage workers, the carers in care homes and all of these people are just getting on with stuff.

All these stories about, what you, rob’s just been saying the left to right. All the different factions, these are people that are not really doing much from what I can tell, the social media influencers and the people like Gary Vaynerchuk Simon Sinek and all of these people that, that are are such big names in, in the social sphere.

I’m sure that they’re [00:30:00] helping. They’re not doing the stuff. They’re not the train. They’re not the train workers. They tend more from what I can see to be advising the manager than the train workers. Yeah. What I think we forget is that everything around us has been made by somebody.

The desk that you’re sitting at the building that you’re sitting in, the clothes that you are wearing, these all come from somewhere. Somebody actually had to get up in the morning and make stuff. I saw this argument recently, I think it was Elon Musk was saying it.

And I know he is being demonized massively at the moment. But he had an interesting point when he talked about this working from home. He said, only, there’s only a certain type of worker that can work from home. People work in a, in a factory floor, can’t work from home. The factory is where the factory is.

He says, so this is a divisive thing to talk about working from home. And whilst I understand the idea behind working from home, for sure, he made an interesting point that the people doing the work, and this is the thing that interests me because they make up the vast population of the planet.

The people planting the rice, the [00:31:00] people milling the flower, the people paving the streets the people down, the sewers the people that are the underlying resource that the infrastructure relies upon are just being pushed to and fro by the ebb and flow of the stories that we’re all telling each other.

It worries me that the take train driver types that you worked with are just getting more and more fed up. 

Tony: You can see why it was easy for me with limited, engineering background and all of that sort of stuff.

Completely out of my comfort zone. But given a role of responsibility to go in and, it was a serious piece of work with a serious business. I wanna enhance the environment that people are working. I want them to be having a better experience when they go to work.

I think that’s my start position, regardless of what it is. So for me to go, shift one. It took ’em this long to change the brake blocks and shift too. It took ’em twice as long. It’s an easy thing anyone can see that. What is the standard, what’s the norm? What we gonna accept is the clip that we want to go at to get these things done more effectively.

The guys [00:32:00] that wanted the engine bit, because they love doing the engine and not the other crappy jobs that they always want. The biggest ego, the strongest character would be the one that would go out, I’m gonna do the engines. It might be a little bit unfair to some of these other guys that want to dip on the engine now and again.

So you’re trying to build this shared experience that’s better than it was that you’re hoping that the manager who’s not doing that sort of stuff, ’cause he’s isolated himself Yeah. Could be latching onto some of this and helpful. So you’re starting to build the idea that for all these micro savings that we can do in the process itself and how we can, like you say, bring these different, things to a slightly higher mean. the bigger gap for me was in the way that they were working together, it was a cultural thing. It was less about the process.

The process we could solve. We could do the numbers, we could track the time, we could measure each shift against each other and see where the sort of norms were. But it was behavioral, it was in the shared experience where I felt compelled to add value, which is where I do tend to add value.

Like you say, these [00:33:00] guys however you want to define what their purpose is, whether they knew what their purpose was, they’re actually helping people travel on a daily basis safely. They’re stopping the train coming off the tracks effectively. They’ve got a really, key role to play in ensuring the commuter that wants the train to be on time.

Yeah, that’s one thing. But they actually don’t want it to come off the train. They don’t want the wheels to fall off. They don’t want the brakes to stop when it’s coming into Piccadilly station, they want it to stop. So wherever I go, there’s a ton of improvement in just in that area.

Going back to the beginning of this conversation, all those people are arriving on that day to that shift with whatever good or bad experiences, they’ve just left at home and they’re telling themselves stories about who they are, how they’re feeling, what today’s gonna bring, what are they, what do they want.

Clark: They’re also telling stories about everybody else they work with, aren’t they? A hundred percent. You made a great point there. I think probably your strength there was, you were arriving from a background working in football where you can’t all be the striker. You can’t [00:34:00] all track back all the time.

You can’t all be on the press always. Look at Marcus Rashford at the moment with Villa. How he clearly is telling himself a different story today than he was a couple of months ago. He’s now in the England squad. I’m so pleased for the lad because he has enormous talent and yet he was telling himself a story and the people around him were telling him a story and themselves a story about him.

Tony: Yeah. It just wasn’t true, but it was affecting him. So downward 

spiral, right? So downward spiral for everyone. It’s got an inevitable decline to the point where the only way to go is we separate. 

Clark: And this is the thing that you talk about lean manufacturing and as you said, you didn’t know much about trains.

But when you walk into a situation, I don’t think by and large the processes or the subject matter are not the most important thing. As you quite rightly point out. I think because the culture is the collective, whether obvious or hidden. They’re the collective stories that we tell ourselves and each other.

So for instance, you mentioned the [00:35:00] guy that just wants to work on the engines and you see this very often in 

Tony: He was hard to ma like for me, a real strong, you can imagine the guy, right? A big scouts. A strong personality. Yeah. Dominant within, the clear leader, the self-appointed leader of the team.

I’m the outsider with no knowledge of the business that he’s in, really, limited. And my job is to. Is to facilitate some shift. 

Clark: Also, I think part of your job is to make some of those hidden stories, narratives more transparent. One of the conversations I would often have when working with organizations is that look as a board of directors, as a management team, you have certain ideas about the people that you work with.

These guys on the shop floor who were always safe. For instance, if we were in charge, we’d do X, Y, and Z. They clearly have stories that they tell in themselves about their management. They’re useless, they’ve all got soft hands, never done day’s work in their life, et cetera, et cetera, which allows them.

To then justify or excuse certain behaviors. And if you can bring those stories to [00:36:00] light, when you can say to a boss, they think you’re useless, don’t you? They think that you’re hiding behind your desk because they’re scared of you and you’re actually giving them the confidence to not do their work.

That if you empowered them to have some initiative and got involved with them, you would be helping not just them, but yourself if you can bring some of these stories to light and ask some of the awkward questions. And I think that’s where you were the ideal catalyst to bring those stories out. And this is the thing that was concerning me right back at the beginning of the conversation. I work now in an environment predominantly where people say, this is the thing, can you deal with the thing? Yes, I can. I deal with the thing. Thank you very much.

It’s not resolving anything at a larger cultural level. And, when you are working in a factory, and I think probably I’m perhaps just missing the hustle and bustle of working on factory floors and stuff maybe. But in those environments you can see that by resolving one issue, for instance, with the big guy that likes working on engines, you are actually resolving the issues of lots of other people around him who were too afraid to [00:37:00] say anything.

You then start to see the manager coming out of his office because he feels now that he can get a little bit more involved just starting to speak up more. And all of a sudden, going to, speaking to what Rob talks about, this idea, you’re now unifying a group of people to a point where they can all start to share their own stories about the situation.

And I think in doing that, you’re allowing people to start thinking much more clearly. Stop the lying to each other. Because, there are so many times that you walk into situations like you just mentioned. And I know lying is a strong word, but you very often find people saying, oh, we can’t do this because…

and it’s a total lie. And whether they know it or not, it may be, have happened so far in the past that it is now just become the norm. But actually, this idea that we can’t do this because is absolute nonsense. And you look at it at a societal level, one of the age old lies is these people come over here stealing our jobs, stealing our women, et cetera, et cetera.

It’s a nonsense. It’s a nonsense. Immigrants throughout [00:38:00] history have always contributed far more than they’ve taken. Whereas there are, as always more than one side to every single story. And this is probably where your strength was and certainly, most used in, in problem situations is that your critical thinking allows you to look at something and say, is this really true?

Is that story really, yeah. Really? You’re the only person that can fix the engine, really. And everybody else is happy with this. That’s the key I think, to have somebody that can ask those questions and to go into a situation and say, for instance, what are the credentials of this person saying this thing, telling this story?

Are there any unsupported assertions that you are making? I think there are. Let’s have a look at them. 

Tony: Yeah. And with empathy, right? With genuine care, like you that your interests are that everybody No, no empathy 

Clark: whatsoever. 

Tony: No incremental adjustments compounded, make a huge, make the big difference.

The manager coming out once a week instead of no times in two weeks is better. Is overrated.

Clark: You hear the old saying, if you can be anything. In a world [00:39:00] where you can be anything, be kind or however it goes. Sometimes the real, the true kindness is asking the awkward questions that bring to light the stories that you’ve been telling yourself.

Again, going back to this idea of why humans, and this 

Tony: is gonna hurt me more than is it gonna hurt me more than 

Clark: it’s gonna hurt you. It’s gonna hurt you much more than it’s gonna hurt me. Yeah. But this idea that, humans are the only species that can paint a picture of the future that is worse than being dead blows my mind because how can you tell somebody a story that makes them believe the fact that they shouldn’t be alive anymore? We know the suicide rate is off the charts. Yeah. But really that’s just the tip of the ice iceberg, because underneath that, that, that figure of suicides, there are millions and millions more people who are just unhappy, massively depressingly, unhappy with their lot in life.

You talked a minute ago about your delusional optimism. Unfortunately, there are people infected [00:40:00] with a type of delusional pessimism, I think. 

Tony: The stories that are being Yeah. It’s like the antithesis to that. Yeah. Hundred percent 

Clark: stories that are being told to them are, people are making people think, and I get this all the time, because obviously I still in contact with all the people I’ve worked with over the years.

So many people are saying, oh I’m worried the world’s going mental and what’s gonna happen and we’re gonna get overrun. And, the Russians are gonna invade and, I dunno whether I’m a girl or a boy, or, all of these things are of concern to people.

Whereas just 20 years ago. I had this conversation with somebody recently in a place where I go for coffee. There’s a a person there that has made some decisions about their life, about who they want to be, how they want to present as a person. And they’ve got some real concerns about how that affects other people around them.

And I’ve said why? Why are you bothered? What they think that maybe their behavior towards you will change? People might even call you names. What difference does it make? They’re just telling themselves stories about you that are irrelevant to you. Live your life. Go and live your life.

[00:41:00] This was a a guy that was considering major changes in how he lived his life. And I said, if it’s gonna make you happy, maybe it won’t make you happy, and then stop doing it. Go back to doing the other thing. It doesn’t matter. But, the stories that we tell each other are and are I’ve always assumed that a good story is to be up building and encourage it.

It’s the same as art. I always thought art was supposed to be beautiful. I don’t need art to teach me anything. I don’t need it to make a point. I don’t need to go and watch a dead horse on the floor. I want something beautiful and encouraging and not building. Surely the stories we tell each other are supposed to be encouraging and make us feel better about ourselves and about each other, and the world that we live in.

We’ve gotta stop this giving each other bad news all the time. 

Rob: I think the problem is that narrative is all important now. And so to go back to a point that you said about Elon Musk, about saying about working from home. Actually, the 21st century is the first time we have more knowledge workers than we have manual workers.

So we are at a stage where [00:42:00] people can work from home. And the reason why knowledge workers are important is because we are productive. Even if we don’t do anything just because of the automation, because of the industrial revolution, because of ai, all of this stuff. 

Clark: What’s a knowledge worker, Rob, just outta interest?

Rob: A knowledge worker is someone who works with knowledge as opposed to someone who build things. Someone who’s not on the line. Someone who’s not digging. 

Clark: It sounds obvious, but I just wanted to get my head straight on what that 

Rob: Yeah so a knowledge worker is someone who improves the process, right?

So all the lean management and things like that. As this economy has evolved, we’ve become so productive that what used to take 300 farmers can probably now be done by one. I think those, the industrial revolution, whereas like a hundred people’s work could then be done by seven. And so in all of these ways, we’ve improved productivity.

And so this has led to the class of management and basically the role of a knowledge worker is to improve the productivity further. And the way that we improve the [00:43:00] productivity is, like you say, is finding the lies, is finding ways that aren’t true, finding better ways, finding my creative ways. 

In essence, we’ve moved because we have so much infrastructure, that is the stuff that’s building everything. It’s all about the narrative. Because the more that we can change the narrative, the more productive that we can become. 

So we have more people working on how does the process work? How can we eliminate friction? How can we improve the supply chain? How can we improve accounts? How can we make money flow faster? All of these kind of stuff. And the barrier, the big friction point is lying. 

What happens in politics is lying.

And I, and if you look at Trump, no one lies more than Trump. And the first thing I saw that assassination attempt, I thought that doesn’t look real. But I think what happens is when someone tells lies, and what we are seeing in America is just lie after lie. They’ve shut down the press.

They’re not allowing it to be challenged. They’re [00:44:00] trying to shut down the judiciary which is how you assimilate power. You stop anyone from challenging you. And the reason why it’s all become so emotive, and I think this is the real problem that we have to face, is if you’re looking at why do people commit suicide, what are we all working for is to be happy.

What the level of happiness isn’t about how the GDP is performing. It’s about our narrative about the GDP, it’s about our expectation of the future. And we are basing the narratives of the day on GDP and all of that stuff. 

When people are seeing lies and they know it’s a lie, they’re reacting, and because they’re reacting emotionally and not with logic, then it’s just emotions and it’s polarization.

I don’t know the details of lean processes and that, but I think the fact that you were in with the workers, Tony, is if you put a MAGA and a liberal and you just got them in a room and you got past the [00:45:00] hysterics and you got actually talking, they’d find a connection.

But the problem of today is we have allegiances, Gary Vaynerchuk and Simon Sinek, Andrew Tate, all of these people have developing cults. It’s so much on narrative that it’s emotion rather than logic. 

In that whole story because partly because of working at home, partly because of social media, we’re having less day-to-day contact with people who we disagree with.

And so it’s all become polarized. So I think it’s key about narratives, but we need to be more based in logic. 

When you look at Pep Guardiola, greatest manager spent a week, I read his biography and he spent a week on speech he was gonna give just before the first Champions League bar, the Barcelona’s First Champions League.

And he actually overdid it. He created so much emotion that they went on the foot pitch and the first few minutes they were overall that they actually didn’t play so well until they got into the game. And I think that [00:46:00] is the key is that we have to have processes that work, but we also have to have narratives that are more true, more uplifting and motivate us towards what needs to be done.

But we also need to have the checks and balances to know that where we are wrong and find fault as quick as we can. 

Clark: Just going back to the beginning of what you said, the point about Elon Musk really illustrates what we’ve been talking about, I think because, the idea about working from home being necessary or unnecessary.

The straight away when people see that, people think, oh, he is wrong. Or they may think no he’s right actually. He’s both and my point in bringing Elon Musk up when he talks about working from home, because it’s such a complicated situation depending on the environment that it’s a part of working from home can be necessary.

It can also be counterproductive. It just depends on, and so many times I’ve been in situations, Tony talked about the, these trained guys with the manager up in his office. That [00:47:00] manager up in his office is remote. He is working remotely, and he needs to be not remote. He needs to go and talk because we are social creatures that need to talk to each other.

And I was at an organization a couple of years ago in Yarmouth. Big American organization, not long after Covid, most of the accounting staff were still working from home. Customer service was all still working from home and there were quite a few issues.

That’s why I was there. One of the issues was that the meetings were taking forever. And one of the meetings I asked about because it was a regular meeting, I said to this guy, so before Covid, how did this get sorted? He said I just walked over to that desk and we’d have about two minutes conversation, and then, and I get on with it, and I said, now you have to set up the meeting.

You have to bring other people in. They email. It takes ages. I said, I think that makes a case for that person being on site at least once a week. So that you can have that conversation. But it’s far more involved than that. And, the idea of working from home is neither right nor wrong.

It depends, 

Rob: But that’s the problem. And it’s become [00:48:00] ideology, it’s become people like Elon Musk and a lot of their bosses are, oh, everyone does their best work. You need to be in an office to work. And it’s the same with why we had open plan offices, because it’s ideology. But that’s the thing.

It has to not be ideology. It has to be, some people go into work and never get any work done because they never can never focus because they’re always getting distracted. And some people need to be in the office because that’s where they need to get the ideas and it needs to be based on what the job is.

You just 

Clark: said that Rob, you, you literally just said that when you and you quite rightly said that knowledge workers don’t need to be in a particular place doing a particular thing, which is right. And wrong, yeah. 

Rob: It all depends on the facts of the situation because, but it shouldn’t be like an ideology.

Clark: No. This is the idea, this is the difference between narrative and rhetoric. The amount of times I’ve worked with knowledge workers, for instance my background is lean manufacturing. So often I’ve worked with these people that [00:49:00] continuous improvement managers quality managers who have an enormous say in how the business functions.

They don’t do or make anything but their sole reason for existing within the business is to find better ways of doing things. This was a regular occurrence for me, when they would say the problem is this and this and this.

And I would say how’d you know? Because these are the figures in front of me. I said, let’s go and have a look. Let’s go and stand in front of the person doing it and we’ll verify your figures, ’cause very often figures are just bollocks. That and where do they come from? They’re just made up.

And you will stand in front of the person doing the job and you’ll say to him, why are these figures this? And you are doing that? He said, yeah, because the person that came and looked at what I was doing didn’t know what I was doing. So he was timing the wrong thing. He was looking at the wrong thing.

And I said, therein lies the issue. Working from home is a great idea. It’s also a terrible idea. 

Tony: A hundred percent. And I think in all of those examples, including Pep Guar diola and his [00:50:00] preparation to speak to the group, when we talk about one approach to many, the chances of it landing with everyone.

Some of those people are too gonna be, there’ll be some that really bought into it and were, let’s say 20% of the team absolutely connected with that message. For the others, he might have put too much pressure on them. For some he might have over aroused them. So he obviously learned lessons from that.

But when you talk about working from home, let’s say you’ve got 20 people who are all data analysts and practically they’re on spreadsheets, they can definitely do their work from home on a practical level. ‘ cause that’s what they do. If that person’s gone to make a sandwich at 11 o’clock in the morning when somebody needs the date now in the workplace, they just go in the kitchen and ask ’em and say, look, do you mind coming back and doing it?

But if they can’t get hold of them for half an hour, ’cause they’re on their phone, now that’s a sort of example of some of the fear that exists when people think how do I know whether they’re actually doing what they’re supposed to be doing if I can’t see them?

That’s one thing. But in [00:51:00] some ways, and I don’t want this to be about the score model and the measuring that I do, I could almost predict who would be suitable in terms of diligence dependency and have the capacity to work from home to the level and degree that would satisfy Elon Musk.

They might have 10 people doing the same job. Only two of them really have got the makeup to be on it all the time from home. Everyone else should be where we can see ’em. They’re really good at their jobs, but they’re gonna work better in a collaborative environment or under scrutiny or whatever. So I think there’s nuances.

You talk about ideology, that’s one idea suits everybody and it’s never gonna be true. 

Clark: A lot of these issues come from the idea, and you mentioned it just now, Rob, when you talked about I looking at these things ideologically, we can set up rules and parameters for ourselves based on a narrative. So for instance, if you said to two people you sell the argument for working from home, and then you say to the other one you sell the argument for not working from home.

And they will both make some brilliant points. [00:52:00] But the thing is the real question they should both be saying is working from home, doing what for who what’s the position that we’re talking about? Because as a general narrative, it’s absolutely irrelevant. And it’s the same with all of these things.

Whether it be immigration left or right, politics gender equality, all of these things when somebody says this is right or this is wrong, the question has to be, what are we talking about? Who, under what circumstances? Let’s get specific, when somebody says I think working from home is a good thing for who doing what?

Coal miners can’t work from home, so who are we talking about? Whenever we’re talking about any given issue. Narrative allows us to speak in generalities, and it’s so dangerous because what happens is we take those generalities and we apply them to specifics that, of course, working from home is a good thing.

There are so many people, certainly in the creative sphere, these people work better. Anyway they actually get more done alone. And also there are people, [00:53:00] not necessarily in lean manufacturing, but there’s certainly people that are involved in process engineering that put together situations that allow work to progress better, even work that they’re not themselves involved in but, factory workers and all of those people have to. The danger I think is, and this is going back to what we talked about at the beginning, is that the stories we tell ourselves about these, all of these arguments can often encourage us to apply generalities to specifics and, are all people on the left good?

Are all people on the right fascists? Is, it is a bizarre way. And this is what we were talking about. How we find ourselves sleepwalking into situations, conflicts like the first World war and so on, because people say, the chain of events began with the assassination in Sarajevo.

And straight away people say the Serbs are our friends. We must jump in on their side. The Austro-Hungarian empire is this, we need to help. And hold on a minute, just because we’ve applied these general narratives to our political alliances, doesn’t mean that this is a good [00:54:00] thing for us to be getting involved in.

And one of the biggest problems with problem solving is that we can get lazy. All of us can get lazy. An expert in any subject can say I’ve seen this 20 times before. And I know that the answer is this, but is it the answer? Now in this particular situation, maybe not, go and have a flipping look.

Tony: So let me play this scenario through to you. Imagine you’re both on a interview panel and I was the best candidate by a mile, right? But your Elon Musk, I’ve come to Tesla as one of the top dogs, best in the country, blah, blah, blah. And you’ve got a company policy that says everyone works five days a week in the office and I’m the best by mile.

And I say, look, how’s about, I do three days in, and two days from home. From what? But you’ve set this precedent and this policy. Where do you go with that? How would you manage? How would you sacrifice? And I know it’s hypothetical, obviously the question I’m asking is, would you sacrifice me and take the second best person who will.

[00:55:00] Stick to the rules that you’ve laid down, or would you think about changing the rules to accommodate talent? 

Clark: That’s the question, isn’t it? How you prioritize, if for instance, your priorities is uniformity and everybody, sticking to the script.

You will have to then at times sacrifice excellence. It depends what your priorities are. And I would wanna ask why have you set that policy up in the first place? That’s you’ve literally chained yourself to a flipping concrete block by doing that. 

There’s a program a dramatized program about the SASI think it’s called SAS, rogue Heroes from their formation in the Second World War, when they were amalgamated with the Desert Rats. They got involved with certain resistance organizations.

They were a very ragtag, ad hoc group of people that were basically renegades and mavericks, my sort of people. And there’s a point where they showed David. It is dramatized, but I think they’ve got the spirit of this organization. Perfect. Paddy [00:56:00] Mains played by this brilliant actor who shows him at his nuttiest genius best.

But there’s a point where David Sterling’s trying to give a speech to this small, evolving group of specialist soldiers. In the background, there’s a guy trying to put the flag up. They’ve got this little encampment in the desert and this guy’s trying to put the flag up and for some reason, the flagpole stuck.

And as he is talking, everybody’s distracted by this guy messing around with the flagpole. So David Sterling looks across and he says, I can’t undo the thing. I can’t get it up and tied off. So he goes, oh, for fuck’s sake, excuse the language. But it is very realistic and it’s very raw in the way they present it.

And he walks across and he’s trying to do it himself. And they’re all just stood there watching him. And he eventually climbs up this flagpole onto this sort of battlement. And I think he either just pulls it off or cuts it off or something and runs this thing up. And then he says, look, this is who we are.

Stop fucking about with the with the buckles and the shackles. He said just tie the bloody thing. Just [00:57:00] do the thing. That’s what we do as the SAS You say, we’re not about procedures or policies or ideals, we just do the bloody thing. What’s the thing that needs to be done?

And sometimes, Tony, you went into work with these train guys and there comes a point when you’re looking and you think you’re not doing the bloody thing you’re talking about, you know exactly the manager and you’re talking about the engines and do the just do the thing. Just do the thing.

This is where I get myself into a little bit of deep water sometimes. Because when people talk to me about the office politics and the values and the policies and the procedures, I’m just thinking, what’s the thing. Just, what’s the thing that you’re trying to do?

Let’s do that thing. And very often if you’re trying to do the thing, you end up upsetting people because the SAS they didn’t do things the right way. Because, the story was, this is how the British Army is supposed to operate. We’re supposed to shine our shoes.

We’re supposed to march in step. We’re supposed to salute, we’re supposed to wear our uniform correctly, but [00:58:00] we don’t do the bloody thing. And that’s what the SAS were invented for. This whole idea about the stories that we tell ourselves, the rhetoric that we use to argue our case when we’re putting story forward and so on, at the end of the day I genuinely think that we look around, we’re talking about all these people that are so unhappy with the way the world is.

Just do the thing. Just do the thing. What’s the thing that you wanna do? What is it? Just do it. Work from home. Don’t work from home. Vote left, vote right? Who cares, man? I don’t care whether you vote for flipping the monster Raven Looney party. Be nice, enjoy your life, be kind when you can and just do the bloody thing.

It’s, it is a really simplistic view, I think of life. However, sometimes we can over overcomplicate the stories that we tell ourselves. 

Rob: It is simplistic, but it’s true. The problem is because life has become so complex. That’s why it’s so important that we have narratives.

Because what we are looking for narratives that clarifies, and something that helps us to move forward. That is what leadership is clarifying [00:59:00] something that’s complex to distill it so we have clarity of what is the thing that we need to do that fits into all the other things that need to be done so that the big thing gets done.

The flag is a great example because the point of the flag is not the thing, the point of the flag is the ideal that they’re fighting for the thing that unifies them. The thing that brings them together and that they believe in. Why people react so much is because in human nature is a deep need.

We can tell when something isn’t true. When something isn’t true, there’s enough clues. And that lack of truth means that we stop believing in the flag. It means that we polarize and we react emotionally in the opposite direction. If you’re told to do something you’re not gonna do it.

That resistance that’s inbuilt in humans. And I think the other part is we make trade offs for comfort. So when you’re talking an example of the people in the train, the manager made the trade off that he was gonna let them off [01:00:00] because he didn’t want to go through the discomfort of making sure that they did it under the discomfort of finding 

Tony: how to do it.

Yeah. I had to have the discomfort again to do it. 

Rob: I worked in Kodak my dad always worked there and before I opened the gym, I had about 10 months while I was waiting around. So I worked in Kodak and they had an agreement between the union and the management of how much we would produce and we could produce it in four hours. And so people used to race and you’d never do more, because that would make everyone else look bad and everyone would have to do more. So it was literally four hours of work.

We were there night shifts. It was a dark room. We could sleep, or we could just sit and chat, before we’ve 

Clark: got no car industry in this country, mate. 

Rob: It’s photography 

Clark: for that exact thing that you’ve just said that. Yeah. 

Rob: But, and it’s also what ruined the coal mines, the coal narrative of people being, paid for not being there.

Whether it’s the union, whether it’s management, whether it’s politicians, anything that’s not true is costing us, Trump’s now got his tariff thing that’s costing. 

It [01:01:00] has to be, not ideology, but it has to be based on logic, it has to be tested. Is it true?

Clark: I was just thinking this idea about critical thinking when I was listening to somebody talk recently about storytelling. Because, for me writing and storytelling is an important part of the work that I do and that we all do, I think.

This person that was talking about writing specifically stories, he said, and you can engage people in a story if your writing is good enough, but you have to make sure that it flows from one end to the other. Because if you get it wrong at any point, you suddenly pull the person outta the story.

You suddenly pull the person out outta the narrative, and you could lose them at that point. And when he said that, I thought that’s interesting because very often you will say to somebody, or certainly in my work, you will say to a boss or a worker, why do we do it this way? And they will say the thing is, we need to do it this way.

And then they start telling the story. And there’s always a point because by definition, there’s a problem because the story they’re telling is incorrect. If it was [01:02:00] true, there wouldn’t be a problem if the if the thing worked, then the reason why it worked wouldn’t be an issue.

So when you go to somebody, for instance, a process isn’t work and they say we have to do it this way because duh. And you then start to interrogate it and say but why is this a thing? Why have you had to do this work around to make this work or whatever? There’s always a point at which you go, oh, no, hold on.

No. And I call it the fuck off point, when somebody’s saying a thing, you go, oh, fuck off. That’s wrong. No, all of that you’ve just said was fine until you said that thing. So for instance. We can’t do it this way because when we do it, when we do it the other way, Dave has to walk over there and pick up the thing and he can’t walk over there because he’s doing this sort of thing and you go fuck off.

You can’t walk over there. So you talk about the tariffs, for instance with Trump. The narrative behind that is because whatever story is they tell, when you listen to that story you say hold on a minute. That’s bollocks. It is not necessary that you can’t do business with that country because it’s costing you or whatever.

I dunno what his [01:03:00] reasoning is, but you know there are flaws in that story. And the fuck off point is the point where even when there are people that buy into that story, you can often see and go, that didn’t sound good. That fuck off point is the point at which you always spot the floor.

If, for instance, we were around in the thirties and we were listening to Mr. Hitler giving one of his famous speeches. There must have been points where he thought, fuck off the Jews. Why? Why the Jews why them? Why not the flipping Anglicans or the Methodists? Why the Jews fuck off?

That’s bollocks. There’s always a point at which the story falls down, and the reason it falls down is because they’re pushing an incorrect narrative. And, you see this constantly and time again. The critical thinker that the Tony’s of the world that will stand there.

And the guy said I have to work on the engines because I’m the only person that can do fuck off. These are the people can’t work on engines. You think you can do the engine. It’s always bol. So I remember was [01:04:00] another, a place a few years ago in Coventry, and there was a guy that used to just walk off and I remember approached Scott, his name was, I remember approaching him one day and said, Scott, where do you keep going?

And he said, oh, I have to go and tell the guy on the other line that we’ve got enough wagons here in that to not send anymore. I said, fuck off Scott. You literally have to go and tell this guy. He knows that, yeah. Yeah. That you don’t need anymore because the, they, we stop asking for them why?

And he was just going for a jolly, but there’s always a point in a story where you go. Oh, done a minute. And that to me is what critical thinking is all about. Where you actually say, all the Trump supporters, all the Elon Musk supporters, all the Biden and Kamala Harris supporters must have stood listening to something and thought to themselves that’s Bo.

Tony: Because then they know it. But they know it as well. Yes, because they call them out. They’ve just been dreading for the moment. Somebody actually calls them out over it. Somebody has to say it, somebody’s 

Clark: gotta say fuck off. That’s bollocks. Yeah. And the more that gets done, the more that [01:05:00] happens.

You don’t have to swear, obviously, but you just, you can just say, whoa. Hold on a minute. Really, we have to do that. So what? We can’t work from home. We cannot work from home. ’cause we all have to be here. Really? All of us, but we don’t even need the flipping boss.

The boss doesn’t even need to exist. So he can work from flipping home and if he can work from home, why can’t anybody? It’s there’s always a point at which somebody can turn around and go fuck off.

Agreed. And if you need somebody to do that, gimme a call. 

Tony: Yeah. 

Rob: But that is the problem though, isn’t it? Is it’s the emperor’s new clothes. There is no one that stands up. And so there’s so many things that go on and you think, why is no one just speaking up? The power of Hitler and Trump is they don’t bring their own narrative.

They play on the narrative that’s already there. 

Clark: Just put Trump in the same sentence as Hitler. 

Rob: You snuck that in. Hold on. Yeah. When you man, when, 

Clark: Just made an enemy, I gotta go see you.

Oh, dear you. 

Rob: Yeah, but I think there is part of that where you play into someone’s [01:06:00] existing prejudices. Enables you to make a deal. The whole ghettos came from Germany, from the Jews were kicked out every now and then. And then they were let in, and then they were in a ghetto, but they were second class citizens.

Americans hate government. 

Clark: One of the appeals for the whole Trump camp at the moment and I had this conversation with my wife yesterday is that they are cutting through a lot of the rhetoric that’s, that has come from the left, which can predominantly be helpful for a lot of people is, as you say, too complicated. Too complex. And they’ve cut through that. Again, like so many stories they’re right. They’re wrong. You can cut through it to a certain degree, you don’t want to just suddenly discard all of the progress that’s been made over gender equality and gay rights and all of the other stuff.

You don’t wanna just discard that. But I think probably for a lot of people, and I can’t speak for Americans. Whilst we watch from afar, we really have no invested interest in how that plays out. But clearly a big portion of the [01:07:00] populace is happy to see somebody, apparently giving them the straight story on things.

Whether that’s true or not, I can’t say. 

I’ve always disliked politicians, all politicians. Even good politicians for me are not good people. So whether they’re left or right is of no concern to me. But I think one of the appeals for a lot of people is that, life was getting a little bit too complicated for a lot of people.

All of the considerate considerations they felt they had to make around, excuse me, a around gender, race, sexuality for a lot of people, was hard work. And I think that’s cut through and, which is why a lot of people like Elon Musk, some of the, when he comes out and says for instance, that working from home is not a good idea that appeals to a lot of people.

It’s a simple answer to a complex problem. There are no simple answers to complex problems. Whilst I personally like the idea of just getting the thing done. That can only work some of the time. There are situations in which diplomacy is required and you need to think out, how the processes work, and then apply them [01:08:00] in a way that allows everybody to get something outta it.

So there are no simple answers. But I think that’s where the appeal comes from. Again, and I hate to mention our German friend again but where he appealed to the German population was that he offered simple answers to some complex problems that had been brought about from the monetary system after the first World War.

So you can see why that’s the case, but as always, and as I think we’ve ascertained in our conversation now that there’s neither a right nor a wrong to a lot of this stuff. There’s a lot of it depends. There’s a lot of stuff that, mr. Trump and his team are doing that seems to be really useful.

Whether there’s an underlying agenda I can’t say I’m not a flipping American but I’m sure we’ll all be affected by it at some point.