Things that get stronger, the more that they're challenged.

There used to be an analogy for that, didn't there?

I remember Years ago as a kid in school they used to talk about how the

Romans had fortifications that were like a double skin of timber, probably

something like our railway sleepers, I'm guessing that sort of thickness,

separated by about six feet of soil.

Basically two walls filled with earth and then what would happen is as these

boulders and what have you came flying at them, as they hit the timbers, the

reverberation would make the soil inside pack down so that it actually became

stronger the more you attacked it.

The only way to defeat it was to either go over it or around it or whatever.

It's interesting.

Do you remember what they were called?

Yeah.

No, it'd be good to know that name.

That's a cool anecdote.

I don't think I was there for the next lesson Yeah, I was

barely there for the lesson there.

It's funny, talking about history, I had a conversation yesterday, I

had a meeting with a customer that I work with fairly regularly, on a

fairly regular basis, and she allows me to annoy her team periodically.

And then she reaps the fallout slash benefits of that, but we were talking

yesterday because I'm quite busy at the moment and she was asking me who my

customer was and when I explained him, she was saying, but you don't really

ever talk about that in your posts.

And I said it doesn't really fit with The perception that people have of me.

Whilst I try to be as transparent and open and honest as I can in

everything that I do, we do have to curate to a certain degree what people

see of us because it needs to tie in with a particular type of narrative.

She said actually from her perspective, she said, it seems to tie in really well.

It just broadens the picture slightly.

And it just made me realize that history is an interesting concept

because it's never what we think it is.

The old story, the old saying that history is decided by the victors.

It's something that I was just reading earlier today about have you

ever heard of the Tartarian empire?

No, most people haven't.

The

Targaryens, but not the Tartarians.

Have you heard of Tartary?

It was a an enormous empire that was based originally in what is now part of Russia.

But after the first and then especially after the second world wars, the Soviet

government completely rewrote the history of the Tartarian empire, which

was quite significant in its day in the I believe 17th and 18th centuries.

But nothing's heard of it now.

Nobody knows anything about it.

I'm fascinated by this idea of history because when you look at an

organization like Adidas or BMW or Nike or anybody, automatically, when

you look at them, you're perceiving what you know of their history or the

history that they've put out to you.

And yet there are organizations who have got some very dubious

histories that we just don't know about or is not made widely known.

So I just found it fascinating that when I was talking to this customer

yesterday, I was saying, my history is.

It's not what it seems to be, although I would love it to be much

more open, but it has to be neat.

That's what people like, isn't it?

A neat and tidy origin story for whatever the brand is.

There's a sense of, how you've shifted as well, even

day to day or week to week.

I'm sure there'll be people out there that knew me 10 years ago.

And still perceive me as being the same bloke that was 10 years ago, without

knowing anything that's gone on in those 10 years since, on the outside,

probably looks a bit older, but wow the difference couldn't be more significant.

I've worked with people on a coaching perspective who are having difficulty

with say boss, one guy in particular.

The boss had gone away.

He'd gone to a more global sort of operational lead.

So stepped out of being the lead of this site where I was working.

And this guy was making big strides in the other guy's absence.

When the other guy came back to reassume his role, he was still perceiving the

same guy that he'd left two years before.

There was a whole personal branding piece that this guy needed to do in

order to win this guy over, who was saying, how come you now, knocking

on the door of the senior leadership team, I just don't see you as that.

Guess what I've been working on for two years, like myself, I'm

very different than the person that you thought that I was back then

I've made some big steps forward.

There was a role to play in him rebranding himself in front of this new guy, having

to shape the new, the guy's perceptions that had been set two years prior, I

think it's a fantastic thing is to, if it's possible, try and see people with

a fresh set of eyes every day, I think is a really good way to look at it,

or to at least see yourself clearly.

Obviously, I've been writing this book for a little while now and it's,

it broadly follows the framework that my coaching model adopts.

And it always starts with the question, who are you?

Who are you?

And, what you just said there about How people see us differently

from one situation to the next.

A lot of people have that problem, for instance, when they go home to

visit their parents at Christmas.

The, I've seen this so many times and I actually have had a client recently

who had this very specific problem that when they go home to meet their

family, they're treated like children.

Or they're certainly talked, spoken to in a way that makes them feel like children.

And because of that, because of the speech patterns that are used with

them, and I've seen this, the person who doesn't like it, Almost can't seem

to control the fact that they fall into then a particular attitude and mindset

when they're talking with these people because they're being treated, as this

young child, immature person, and they suddenly become that person again.

One of the things that this idea in my coaching talks about, who are you,

because most people don't actually know who they are and the concept of

who we are is a, is an ever changing concept anyway it's very fluid.

And when you ask most people, who are you, they'll say I'm Dave

and I'm a bio chemical engineer.

That doesn't say anything that just says that, this is

what you do, not who you are.

Yeah, exactly.

Exactly.

And so when you have that conversation, they then start to talk about I'm a

father and, I'm a husband and I'm a, an Arsenal fan and I'm this and this.

No, that's what you do.

They're the things that you do.

Who are you?

And what I often say to people is, maybe it would be better, easier to

answer the question if you ask yourself.

or say to yourself, I'm the sort of person that does this and acts

in this way in this situation.

And I'm the sort of person that likes these things and approaches

situations in this particular way.

Really the only way you can get to know yourself when you're asking

those questions is to look at the gaps between all the things that you

say you are, because then you start to get a picture of who you are.

And I don't think it signifies any I think it's important in this particular

enlightenment to have a clear awareness of who you are, but it certainly makes

life a lot easier because when you turn up somewhere like this guy whose

boss has just come back after two years, if he hasn't got a clear idea

of who he really is, then he's going to fall straight back into the same

patterns that he had when his boss was.

And this is what happens when people go home and mum, Mum starts saying things

like, why don't you ever eat your greens?

Because I'm 42, Mum.

I use similar language to that, since I started doing this type of

work, which is that the closer we get to knowing how to Our identity, the better

chance we have of reaching our potential.

It's like when you ground yourself in that knowledge, in that deeper

awareness of who you are, you can actually start to say no to more things.

You can actually start to stand up for yourself a little bit more.

You can actually start to move in circles that you are naturally more

drawn to and cut things off that you're not, and all of that lends itself to

just freeing up internal capacity to focus on, focus your attention on what

you need to focus your attention on.

There's a quote by George Bernard Shaw that the only person who takes the

measure of me as I am now is my tailor.

But I've seen that.

dynamic quite often, parents with kids with parents, especially when

people go back home for Christmas.

And I've felt it myself, you go back into a certain dynamic and you change who you

are because there's still the whole thing of your place within the extended family.

And it's a bit, it's a bit like the transactional analysis, isn't it?

Like critical parent and when someone takes that role.

You take a a similar role.

And you hear yourself saying things that your parents used to

say, saying terminology that just one day it comes out and you just

suddenly go, God, I just suddenly sounded like dad or look like dad.

And then you recognize actually, if you understand the TA drivers and

all of that sort of stuff, you know where it came from and you can start

to check yourself and go, okay.

It's the very thing.

Oh don't tell me I'm like my mom.

It's actually, it's

the very thing that you always railed against.

Exactly.

Exactly.

It's funny because without trying to elicit any sympathy

my childhood was quite unusual.

I won't go into it massively, but I've mentioned it in posts as well.

I was given away when I was a baby to an auntie because various things happened.

And then at eight years old, I was given away again to a family

member who needed a worker.

So I worked from the sort of the age of eight, every hour that there was, and

I spent most of my time just working.

So that whole mom and dad thing, I've never had that.

And whilst I suppose that I may be missing out on something, although you don't know

what you miss if you've never had it.

From the other side of that, I find it much easier to spot that sort of thing

when I see it now the we've mentioned incongruence before, when you get to

know somebody and you get a measure of the space that this person occupies.

And then they act out of character and, that doesn't necessarily mean that it's

a lie or that it's they're trying to con anybody or even deceive themselves.

It just sometimes just means that they don't even realize that

there's this other aspect of them.

I had a conversation with a client and we'd been working, I don't know,

we probably had four or five sessions together and we've narrowed this

conversation about who this person was.

And I was just looking from the outside and I could see this incongruence and

I said, there's something there and I've always said I don't do therapy

or counseling or anything like that.

I said, but there's something there that you're not telling me.

And we can't have this conversation until we've got it all on the table.

I'm happy to tell you anything that you want to know from my side, but you're

not saying something that's really important, something that's missing.

And in the end, he said, look, he said, I don't say this.

I've never said this to anybody said, but I actually feel like I'm not enough.

He said, I've never actually said those words out loud.

I said great.

Now we can deal with it.

And I says, enough what?

And he said man enough.

And it was a shocking thing for him to say.

It was a great conversation.

And it was a turning point in the progress that this guy was making.

But there are parts of ourselves that we often don't recognize.

We know the behaviors, we see the behaviors and we justify them in one

way or another, but very often we don't actually put a name to them or explain

to ourselves what they're all about.

And when you look into that, why does a person not feel man enough

or enough of whatever, they're comparing themselves to something.

And that's the conversation that needs to be had.

But, the idea of who I am.

You can be anything you want to be, can't you?

You probably won't have noticed, but, and I haven't been writing

many posts recently, but the posts that I've been writing have all been

about who writes the rules for you?

Who is the person that writes your script?

If you get up every morning and you have a to do list, whose to do list is it?

Is it yours?

Or is it somebody else's?

It's usually somebody else's.

And when you are whoever you think you are, is that for you?

Or is that for mom, dad, wife, whatever?

And it's such a fascinating subject.

And the great thing is I don't get into the psychology

of it because I'm not a fan.

Psychology or psychologists there to, to me it's

. Rob: I'd agree with you, but I think as someone who, my degree in psychology.

Yeah.

That's the interesting thing, my mom was a psychoanalyst and my wife has her

degrees in sociology and psychology.

There's a brilliant psychiatrist from the sort of 70s by the name of

Thomas Zasz I constantly quote who basically just says that it's a load

of bunkum and it isn't of course.

It isn't, the the strides that the field of psychology has taken in the last sort

of 50 or 60 years have been enormous, but like so many things, just a guess,

and it isn't for certain a science.

You can't measure the psychological impact of something on something else.

Whilst it is interesting and there are some useful rules of thumb and

heuristics that you can take from psychology, I do always take that whole

stuff with a massive pinch of salt.

I would agree with you.

And I think there is recently been some talk about psychology,

sociology, and most humanities.

The research is not replicable.

There are certain things like the Zimbados and all of those things that wherever

you do them, that's pretty common.

But first of all, psychology as a field is only 125, 115 years old.

So when you compare that to physics, chemistry, biology, it's nothing.

And the first 60 years were so basic.

The whole Freudian bullshit.

The behaviorist, which is so simplistic.

And then it was all about, intelligence, it was all about things like that.

A lot of that, when you look at research for intelligence, it's pretty

clear 75, -80 percent is genetic in intelligence, but no one wants to say that

because of the political implications.

When I did my degree, I did do a couple of business modules, and I had

no respect for business because when you go to psychology or sociology,

there's study, and you go into an exam and you've got 30 to 40 points

that you're going to make in an essay.

You go into business and there is not, there's just the odd

person that's got this odd theory.

And, there's no research or evidence to it.

So I don't think business is something you can learn academically.

Psychology, I think it needs to develop in a different way,

but what we have isn't enough.

There are some heuristics that work but yeah, I would say it's infantile

in its maturity at the moment.

You two

have hit this call with some big,

Big calls this evening.

Yeah, I think we've got to look at it as it's more an art than a science and

let's not try and make it scientific because What, it's psychology?

Yeah, and sociology and things like that.

It has to be, because people are so complex, there's so many variables,

you can't isolate a variable.

And so when you think you're isolating the variable, you're really not.

So there's a lot of other variables that impact with that.

So you've immediately got the observer effect.

And so we're not always measuring what we think, but just to go back

to what you open with, some say I'm not enough almost always, when I was

working with people, if it's like a relationship breakup or it's something

like that, almost or dating, almost everyone came back to, am I unlovable?

Am I broken?

where people this is where I started to see the thing of relationships

that there's a pattern because Almost everything everyone when they trust

you enough and they go is it me?

Am I broken?

Am I just unlovable and there's this deep fear that people have and I think whether

it's imposter syndrome or whether it's you know, I don't deserve the acclaim i'm

getting Or i'm not lovable or whatever.

I think everyone has there is some deep You transformative, at least

one event in their childhood that drives for the rest of their lives,

how they, everything that they do.

Yeah, but there is an element there.

And this is one of the reasons that I've always just taken a little

bit of a step back from any sort of psychological, analysis of a situation,

whatever I think that might be.

One of the, because By and large the efforts that any anybody from a

psychological background makes to help somebody has gotta come from a good place.

It does come from a good place.

I don't ridicule it the way I've seen some people ridicule it, but then at the

same time, I don't put it on a pedestal.

The way so many do, and one of the things I liked about what Thomas Sass said in

the foreword of one of his books was that from his point of view, when we think

that psychoanalysis basically takes place as a series of conversations, he says

really, then what that is a ministry.

Not a therapy.

And that in, in talking to somebody and listening to their confessions,

you are basically taking the role of a priest or a confessor.

And I found that interesting because in as much as religious.

thought can be divided up into all the different belief systems.

Psychology is the same.

And I always had a real inclination towards a lot of what Alfred Adler

talked about, because a lot of his, thought on psychology was causative in

as much as you are able to cause the, you are the cause of your, of most

of your, problems and or solutions.

Whereas for instance, the Freudian point of view is a lot of stuff

that has been done to you is done.

The trauma is set in stone and you are now marked for life.

Let's say where did the bad man touch you sort of thing.

And there's nothing you can do.

And the problem with that, and one of the things Thomas says about

that is it automatically puts you in the position of being a victim.

And once you're a victim, your entire perspective is from

the point of view of a victim.

And that's why I like to Adler because he said you, you start from now.

In any given moment, at any given day, you can start from

now, whatever you want to do.

Now, that's not to say that we're not marked or affected or influenced by things

that have happened to us in the past.

What I do object to sometimes, and you see a lot of this pseudo psychological

talk from people, I literally heard it the other day, and this is one you hear

a lot when people say, oh, he's just projecting his own feelings of inadequacy.

And I say maybe the person's just a dick.

Maybe they are the person that person thinks, and they're

not projecting anything.

Maybe they just are not a particularly nice person.

And because these phrases sound good, it's so easy for us to

call everybody a narcissist, for instance, or to say that you have

a complex or that you're neurotic.

Actually, if you look at it, if you look at what the definitions of neuroses and

psychoses are, it would be very hard to place that label on anybody or certainly

on most people in your day to day life.

So I'm just very wary of the language that we use around that.

But there's certainly inasmuch as psychology is probably taking the

place for a lot of people of religion.

And as much as you, you have somebody that you can talk to and talk out.

And really just getting somebody to say a thing is usually enough for them to

get an understanding of the thing itself.

And, this is why I'm constantly saying I don't do therapy or counseling or any

of that stuff, because how do I know?

How do I know that the particular brand of talking that I use?

Is the right one, in a given situation, it is Jung right?

It's Freud, right?

Is the gestalt approach the best one?

Who knows?

And everything, as I'm always saying, is just a guess.

Again, as I'm always saying, whatever works, for you.

And that doesn't mean, I'll just run amok and do whatever you like,

because there is a responsibility and accountability to the extent that we can

decide for ourselves how we want to see ourselves and believe about ourselves.

And to the extent that helps us, then do that.

I think Psychology, religion and coaching are three different

frames for the same thing.

And I've always railed against the whole idea of everyone needs a coach,

which used to come from Thomas Leonard.

It's a coaching thing.

Everyone needs a coach.

Everyone is a coach.

And what they're doing is they're putting a frame, which religion put a frame.

And I've always felt you don't need a coach.

You need someone.

You need something, and it might be a minister, it might be a priest, it might

be a psychotherapist, or it might be, it doesn't matter what it is, but all of it

is dependent on how you see the world.

Which is why it's important to have, whether it's religion, some spiritual

element Which is not necessarily about a god or a bigger force,

but how do you envision the world?

How's your place in it?

And from that you'll come to who is the natural person for you to speak

to and I think all of these schools try to frame it within their own.

And it doesn't matter which you use, it's what's relevant to the person.

Psychology in itself is just people curious about how the mind

works, and exploring it, and trying to find some meaning behind it.

I think there's, I think once we label psychologists or priests or

whatever, and we bundle them all up into a type or a thing or a, an entity,

I don't think it helps any of us.

So if we use it any sort of model, we're practicing, if we're in a

helping profession where we're having conversations with someone in order to

help them find their way To somewhere better, let's say we're trying to help

them through a difficult situation, or, if you're a coach, you're trying to help

them get more confidence in their game, whatever it might be, we're practicing

in the field of psychology, whether we like it or not, we're dealing with

what's going on in their minds in order to get them to think differently about

a situation or a thing, I just think it's dangerous to get into the idea

that the label itself is problematic.

I don't disagree with what you're saying, but for example, if I'm, let's say I'm

embarking on, trying to understand the human psyche and whether I've got a

degree or not, I'm going to go out and try and have a thousand conversations

with a thousand different people about the same thing and see what comes of that.

See what patterns emerge, let's say.

That's very different than having gone.

I'm Freud, and this is what I think, and this is the doctrine you should follow.

That's like the dogma and of course, in that embryonic state where there's

nothing else that people can lean on, they're going, okay, oh, this

guy sounds like he knows what he's talking about let's go with him.

Or the priest seems to be in touch with God.

So let's go with him.

I'm looking for some meaning in my life.

He says, he knows where he can find it.

I'm going to go with him.

So I just think like you guys in terms of challenging, all of this, because I'm

in this world of profile, I've been in it for the last four years, developing

these tools and these models and you get bombarded with validate, validation and

reliability and this, that, and the other.

It's like everybody's different.

Why would you expect to get the same result over and over again, from people

who on the day they did it the first time have just had a completely different

two weeks leading up to the second time they did it as part of your study.

It's concept is flawed a little bit, but I get that across enough.

of a body of work in enough numbers, you get patterns that emerge that they go,

okay, this might be, have some reasonable level of validation and reliability.

But it's for me, it's does it work or not?

Are people getting some benefit and use out of it?

Or aren't they?

And I suppose, does it work for that

person at that point in time?

Exactly.

Because to say A particular philosophy or a particular field of

study or religion for that matter is the right one is to say, this type

of music is the right type of music.

Yeah, it might be now because I'm in the mood for this type of music.

I'm feeling sad, so sad music is working for me at the moment, but you

see it on LinkedIn quite regularly.

A person has done some sort of certification in it but they've

adopted a particular field that they now use in their work.

And there's a tendency to suggest or imply that there's other things out there, but

this is really the best of all of them.

I think I'm fortunate because although I am teaching qualifications and

coaching certifications and stuff, my background's in processes and systems

for business specifically manufacturing.

So on any given day, a particular problem may present.

In such a way as to invite a certain set of problem solving techniques.

It's funny that I mentioned earlier that some of the work that I do

doesn't seem to fall into the field of what I present on LinkedIn.

And when I was talking to this person yesterday, what happened was about

30 years ago, I was working, it was one of my first jobs out of the army.

I worked for this factory, and I was part of this factory.

Fortunately, the guy that owned the factory, he was a self made

person, so he was the boss.

I believe he'd actually just recently survived a, what do they call it,

some sort of aggressive takeover bid by his board of directors.

And he'd got rid of all these people, so he was feeling

particularly wary of outside help.

He came to see me one day, and I'd worked for this Guy for not

that long, six months, maybe.

And he said, I've got a problem.

It's a personal problem with my family.

And I've got a feeling you might be able to help me because of the work that I did.

I was basically even back then problem solving.

He had a flat that had been a very expensive flat in London that was worth

about, back then in the early nineties, about a million and a half pounds.

And it was taken over.

One of his family members was there, but she got into a bad crowd and these

people, and they were bringing the value of the entire area down and the

neighbors weren't happy and so on.

And he said, can you go and sort it out?

I said, what do you want me to do?

He said just, Sorted out.

He said, I want her back here.

I want her in rehab.

I want that place fixed.

It took me about a month.

I brought her back home and fixed this place.

Anyway, the long and short it was, I then ended up working for

this person on a personal level.

He had properties all over the country and in different parts of the world and so on.

And whilst I was on the books.

As a particular role within that business, I was actually working for

him and ever since then, probably every couple of years, I will get a contract

to work with somebody in that way.

When you were talking about business earlier, I've been thinking about this

recently, that the approach that we tend to take towards business, because business

is purely a money making methodology, it's very hard when people talk about

being kind and having empathy and so it's very hard to do that in an environment

that's purely all about making money.

I have this advantage wherein a lot of my work, or at least half of my

work, is working for people who I'm dealing with their personal life.

It's family and it's important stuff to them.

So empathy and compassion and kindness and moral choices and dilemmas

are all part of the deal when it comes to working with families.

The approach that I take to that sort of thing bleeds across into my work

within the corporate sector, and, which is why I'm probably quite hard

on most of the people that I work with in the business sector because the,

for all the nice things that they try to say about their workforce and so

on, I find that it's fairly shallow.

People have got shareholders to to look after and so on.

But I have found that in any given situation, whether it's a person with a

problem or it's a business with a series of chronic problems that are causing them

to be less effective than they could, or it's a family, a big estate, for instance,

and these are the people I work for at the moment who looked after me just after

accident and, and I really appreciate The help that they gave me in my work for

them, their problems are just the same as the problems that a corporation has.

So the answers to a particular problem depend on the problem and

the people having the problem and the environment that problem exists in.

So one day the answer might be, some sort of Freudian analysis.

The next day, it must, it might just mean tweaking your systems or your

processes, or it might just mean sacking that person, or it might

just mean changing your perspective.

It depends and no one body of people can say we've got all the answers, which is

why after sort of 30 years of doing this.

I've been able to narrow my approach to this thing to two phrases, what's true or

what's real, what do you think is right, what do you think is the answer to life,

whatever, and how do you know, it's that simple, because the answer to those two

questions give you the approach that you now need to adopt to fix the problem.

Yeah,

it's great to have that clarity.

It's because I'm a really simple person, mate.

I can't deal with complicated.

I know I do come down hard sometimes on, on the way we talk about business,

or the way, for instance, when we talk about leadership, for instance.

Provocative is good, right?

Maybe sometimes, I probably do it sometimes just for the sake of it.

For instance, with regards to leadership.

I do tend to be quite dismissive of most theories that people have about leadership

because I tend to think, for instance, in a family, who's the leader in the family?

It depends.

Sometimes it's dad, sometimes it's mom, sometimes it's granddad.

It depends, doesn't it?

The reason I come down quite hard on business is because for all of the

lip service we give to so many of these they're platitudes, aren't they?

A lot of the things that we, for instance we mentioned last week about how

leaders try to empower their workforce.

That whole paradigm just causes me a headache.

Grind your gears.

Yeah.

Yeah, it does me too.

And these, all these ideas are born out of a set of characteristics that

define, let's say, some archetypal or stereotypical leader in a certain context.

A lot, for me, the question I always ask is, so what?

When is this actually, to whom and when is this useful or relevant?

Because a model in isolation is nonsense.

It sells books and they easy things that we can, hang our hat on, but there's

only one way to do it is get in amongst it and try and lead your way through it.

Try and take charge, try and, and deal with all of the emotions and the

opinions and the needs that are going on.

In the face of this big challenge that you're all trying to take on together.

If you're the boss, if you're the designated leader, or you've got an

ounce of, leadership nouse or intent.

And you feel like taking hold of something and trying to try to do it, then the only

way to do it is do it practice and fail and, get go take responsibility for the

scars that come with sticking your neck out and taking a lead where others won't.

I think it's a really courageous thing to try and take on.

But with that responsibility comes everything that you're

talking about Clark which is.

Know thyself.

That is the starting point for everything.

What are you grounded in?

When you say it's a courageous thing, what are we talking about?

Being a leader?

I'm talking about yeah.

Doing it properly.

Being accountable for everything that goes wrong.

Oh, yes.

Yes.

No agree.

When the decisions, because that's not why most people become leaders, right?

Yeah.

And also taking other people's, taking other people's.

Taking responsibility for

I agree.

And what comes to mind is The Man in the Arena.

The Teddy Roosevelt poem.

And for me, I always love formulas.

I love models.

And I love them for a reason.

For the very reason that when you say like you can't fit to a model, I think

people that have this model and they're going to fit this model, that's a mistake.

And that's trying to avoid responsibility by, Adopting a model

that someone else tells you and it again, it goes back to who's it.

Whose is that?

Whose to do list is that?

Whose model is that?

The reason that I love models and formulas And I've thought because people have

always like you can't put a formula You do and the reason is that leader

Who's making it up for the first time he is working towards a heuristic He

has a model or a formula in his head.

He just hasn't articulated it so if so my Idea of the model is that you get

the subconscious, whole frame that you have, because you have, you already have

this model that you're operating from.

Cause if you're making a decision, what are you making that decision from?

There is a perspective.

There is a model, there is assumptions, there's a whole set of beliefs.

And that is what is, what's driving your leadership or whatever you're doing.

And so by, and so when I talk about models and formulas, it's about

really thinking what am I doing?

Why am I doing this?

How does that work together so that then you have an awareness

of what you're operating from?

And once you have that awareness, you can evolve it.

I don't want to disown the idea.

I love a model.

I love a model that Worked.

It's the model in isolation that doesn't work.

The model is never the answer.

Without context the model is,

A model is a tool.

And it depends on the context, which model you work from, sorry.

I said so are half the people using

them.

I know what you mean.

One of the things we took you we're talking at levels of, because we come

from different directions is that for me, a model is already there,

but it's becoming clearer about it because that's how you can evolve it.

The problem is when someone goes, I've been schooled in this model

and I'm going to apply this model to everything, which is like using a hammer.

But for me making the model is about making conscious Okay, this

is the basis we're working from.

So and when you make that explicit Then we're able to develop.

We were talking about the problems of psychology and research and it takes

years and decades for an insight to be validated and be replicable and whatever

and to feel down into common use.

And I think what's more, useful is the idea of randomized What is

it randomized control trials where you're, getting lots of data quickly.

And I think with models, it's about testing the elements of it.

But being aware on what you're working from.

You were right when you said about a model being a tool the interesting

thing is that if you've got to take a screw out, you don't go for a spanner.

You don't go for a hammer unless you're, from Birmingham.

You go for a screwdriver.

And even when you go for the screwdriver, you then have to decide

which screwdriver I'm going to use.

Or if you're taking a bolt out, you, you grab a spanner and you suddenly

realize, oh no, I need a five sixteenths.

Here, not 616th or whatever.

So you find yourself, it's that old saying of the map not being the territory.

Whilst it isn't the territory, the heuristic is a good enough

representation for you to get an idea of which direction you should be going.

And in any situation, when you just talk about there's somebody having

a fixed idea of what the model should be in a given situation.

It is the psychological equivalent of an English person going into a French

bakery and Saying the same thing louder, just to get heard, you're not speaking

French, so they don't understand you.

Your model isn't applicable.

And, the reason I got into this whole 10th man thing, 10 something years

ago, was because it occurred to me that most bosses that I had worked

with, Because of the cache of being a boss anyway, and the expectations were

placed upon them when presented with a problem, generally jumped to a solution.

Now, when, for instance somebody comes to a boss and says,

boss, I've got this problem.

The boss usually says.

Tell me as if I'm now the oracle and I'm going to have all the answers.

Well to assume that is dangerous anyway But the further you go down that road

the more risky you more risks You're taking with the correct solution of

this problem because the minute he says tell me about the problem the person's

giving you the answer Here's perspective.

Oh, this thing's broken.

How does he know it's broken?

Has he seen it broken?

Did he actually see it break?

Does he understand what happened and why it is what it is?

In interpreting it to the boss has now got second or third hand

information, and he's now going to come up with a prescriptive solution.

He has no way of knowing, and for me, it's an extraordinarily

arrogant approach that doesn't mean that all bosses are like this.

Most bosses, being sensible, common sense people will say, let's go and have a look.

I don't decry the people themselves.

I just really dislike the role of somebody saying, I am now your superior, and I

am going to pass down edicts from above.

There's also a huge benefit in, in, even if you do know the

answer, letting them go and explore and find out for themselves.

Maybe there's no answer.

David

Marquet calls it the know all tell not position.

So maybe there is an answer.

But I'm not going to tell you.

Maybe there is

an answer.

Maybe the answer is something completely different.

I think part of that is the maturity of leadership, is when you

to, to being a manager first time, say they're used to being a performer.

He used to being a doer.

So everything is down to them.

So initially they think it's about, they're going to have all the answers.

They're going to be the ones that have this great strategy.

They're going to be the ones make the difference.

The more mature leader is about, creating the environment, creating

the culture, creating the workers to become more, to take more responsibility

and to come up with the answers.

And I, so I think it's about the shifting identity of what is your role?

Is your role to, to be the one with the answers or is your role to be

the who creates the conditions that the collective comes up with it.

I

don't know if I've ever mentioned this story to you guys before, I, just

tell me if I'm repeating myself, but I remember years and years ago, I hadn't

been in the army very long, and I was down at a place called Fremington, down

on the south coast, It was at that time a guards depot, if I remember rightly,

it was a camp anyway, we were down there on exercise, I was learning a thing in

my early days of being in the military.

But it was a big old place and I remember going into the the place where the

canteen, the cookhouse we called it.

But this was enormous, I've never seen a place this big

for eating, tables everywhere.

And there was all these sort of hot plates and then a queue of guys from

different regiments, so you saw a variety of uniforms, a variety of cap badges.

But there used to be a thing in the military where there would be

what was called a duty sergeant.

So this was the sergeant amongst all the sergeants, but this was the guy

that was, it was his job that day to make sure everybody was behaving

themselves and he wore a red sash.

And he tended to look important.

He was no more important than anybody else, but he had his sash on, and he

had this thing called a pace stick.

It's just a stick, you've seen them in, It Ain't Half Hot, Mum, that stick that he

has under his, and strutted about, and I remember somebody nudging me and looking

across, because this duty sergeant, was doing this, and he was talking to

somebody in the queue for the food.

And basically this guy had a half uniform on.

He just looked like a bag of shit.

But this guy was a unit, he looked scruffy, but he was not

a scruffy person, if and so we all honed into this conversation.

It was basically saying to this guy to get his hands out of his pocket.

As he was saying, he was poking him.

Sergeants in the army, they're very shouty, they're very aggressive.

And he was poking him.

And he was saying, get out of the queue, go back, get changed.

It was clear that this guy was some sort of special forces guy.

And that was proven when he eventually turned around and said, touch me with that

stick again, I'm going to shove it up...

it clearly denoted For me anyway, that there are rules in all areas

of life, and there are people that have to ensure that those rules

are adhered to a certain degree.

However, that guy, I couldn't tell you today whether that

guy was a nobody or a somebody.

Because in his unit, those rules didn't apply, he had reached such

a level and you see this throughout the military and in other areas of

life as well, there are people that reach such a level of expertise, that

leadership is not a concept anymore.

You know you could never see a group of SAS or SBS or SRR people together

sitting at the side of the road and you would never know who the boss was because

none of them's the boss and they're all the boss and this is why I come

at it from a slightly different angle.

If you need a boss It's because the people are monkeys and

they don't know what to do.

Now, for me, most of the people that I've worked in manufacturing,

have all been extremely skilled, experienced, intelligent people.

They're not monkeys.

They know what they're doing.

And to treat them like monkeys to me is a massive disservice, both

to them and to the organization.

And if we can start to adopt, I think this mindset of getting

people, elevating them to a level where leaders not important anymore.

They become redundant.

And yes, you do need leaders in a regiment full of grunts, who basically

don't really want to be there.

And they all they want to do is just go to the pub.

Yeah, of course you need somebody because these people are basically waiting

for somebody to tell them what to do.

But by and large, certainly in an organization, you would like to

think that of course, there has to be leaders of these situations, but

I would like to think that they do it reluctantly, not as a vocation.

So when somebody then starts pushing the idea of leadership as a

vocation, to me, It's an irrelevance.

It's whether a person is a leader is as irrelevant to me as their

gender, sexuality, or religious belief, because I come at it from,

yeah, I come at it from such a different perspective, because I don't

believe that anybody in that role where they're just telling people what to do

is showing any, that's like the model that you're applying to every situation.

It just doesn't work.

These bonkers, right?

It doesn't work.

If there's a group of people that need to be told what to do, then put a

manager in there to tell them what to do.

That's fine.

But that's not leadership.

Leadership for me is mobilizing people to meet challenges

they can't meet on their own.

That they can't meet because they haven't yet developed the capacity to meet

it, either together, emotionally, or the values are not aligned, or there's

something that needs in order for us to succeed at this big complex thing that

we're trying to tackle, needs us all to be operating differently than we are now.

And it's not about doing technical jobs that we're all capable of doing.

We might need to build new technical capability.

We might need to align on even understand how we're going to tackle this together.

I don't have the answers, but I need to mobilize these

people to meet the challenge.

I think that's where leadership comes in and that's where

leadership requires a degree of courage to go you know what guys?

I don't know what the answer is here, but here's what I think.

What do you think?

Can you guys get yourselves together and.

Create that.

Can you three go and do this?

Can you two and come back?

Let's work through this to build the capacity.

We're gonna need to do that.

Do we need to recruit?

Do we need to redeploy?

Do we need to whatever it might be?

I just think it's not about telling.

It's about going, here's a challenge that needs new capacity.

Oh, how well do I know these people?

Do I know how they're motivated to do this?

Do I know how aligned they are?

Do I know, what their values is?

It's a way more complex, adaptive thing that requires leadership than

a set of tasks that people know what to do and should be doing it better.

That's not leadership.

That's just good management.

Get in there and get your job done.

Or you're not going to get paid or we'll get somebody that can

that sort of management for me.

It might be complex work, but the technical prowess is that the skill

is there to do it, whether people are engaged enough, is another matter.

Management needs, maybe a little bit of leadership in that regard.

For me, leadership's about where we're trying to go and build new capacity to

do something none of us have done before.

If I apply that to my life as a football manager, that's what

you're trying to do all the time.

You're trying to build new capacity to be the champion team at the top

of the league with a bunch of kids.

You're trying to build capacity for young players to try and attain the

standards of the game that you're now playing at, but you're going in against

somebody that's way higher than that.

How do we come together to meet that challenge?

You're dealing with motivation, you're dealing with fear, you're dealing with

gaps in technical expertise, you're dealing with experience gaps, you're

dealing with, The difference between players who think they know how it should

be done because they've been there before and others that have got new ideas.

So you're dealing with all of these culture clashes and

language barriers and all sorts of things that requires leadership.

Could you go in and just tell everyone what to do?

That's like saying, I've got all the answers.

That doesn't work.

And mate in, as in most of these things, I take that opposite perspective.

Sometimes just for the sake of it, because I do agree with you actually,

as you were speaking, it occurred to me, there was a guy, I can't remember

his name, he was an English person, who was one of the security people in one

of the towers, one of the twin towers in New York in 2001, and he was In

inverted commas, just a security guy.

These buildings had to have a certain number of security people.

They were well trained in in, emergency procedures and that sort of thing.

But there was one guy that got some sort of posthumous recognition.

I can't remember his name, but he was in a book I read a while back.

In this particular tower when the plane hit, people were just milling

around not knowing what to do.

And so of course, his training kicked in and he started showing people to the

the stairwells and guiding them out.

But there came a point when it became clear, that if he were to

save any more people, he would be doing so to his own detriment.

You wait any longer you're going to die as well.

He actually took that choice and he continued marshalling

people out of the building.

Even when it was obvious that he wasn't going to survive himself, and he did die.

They reckon he saved several hundred people.

Because these were people that were shocked, they were scared,

they were in the dark, they were confused because of the smoke.

And he led them, and that was the point of what I was thinking when

you were talking, that he led them out, he showed them the way.

He directed people that needed.

And you're quite right.

There are situations on a football pitch, for instance, in business, in

emergency situations, there are lots of situations in life families need to be

led, you need to guide your children to grow up in a way that you hope is going

to be beneficial to the rest of society.

So leadership, of course, is massively important.

And even as a vocation, I paint it a lot blacker than it really is

because, I'm trying to make a point.

But clearly as a skillset leadership is something that you would like to think

that most people aspire to developing because if you can help people through

a difficult situation and I believe, all three of us in our own ways, and

I've managed factory shop floors.

I've managed, three factories at one point.

And there was a level of leadership involved in that.

The stance I take is purely taken it in contrast to so many

people that believe they have the answers to what leadership is.

And I agree 100 percent with you.

We've talked about politicians, right?

And this aspiration to have the status.

And the powers that go with the formal authority that they've been given.

or the CEO that's been appointed to run the business, lead the business.

I think there's way more authority gained in informal settings

where we build trust with people.

So if you're working with your clients, they're not going to share

those things that have never been spoken before until they trust you

implicitly with that information.

There's true leadership in that in, in forging those connections.

So when you do that for me, when I think about leadership in an organizational

context, if I'm trying to create it's like a micro culture within the sphere

of influence that I've got with a team, for example, that I think if I can make

those connections with each of these, and it's going to be different person

by person that I can find a way to help them express themselves better, get

closer to who they are in order to do the job to the best of their ability.

That I think I'm halfway to winning that battle, whether I've got

a position of authority or not.

I think that would gain me.

There might be people above me in the hierarchy that feel threatened

by that because actually I've got a bit more informal authority than

they're able to build because they just tell people what to do all the time.

And nobody likes them.

Nobody's going to trust them with any piece of information.

Whereas this guy down here, he's connected.

He seems to be poor.

We're getting into the realms then of, all of those sort of social

dynamics that go on in society.

The need for political intelligence and how do you navigate your way through that?

If you are a good leader without formal authority, how do you

navigate the corridors of power in order to, earn your stripes?

It's not easy.

This goes back to what we were saying at the beginning of our conversation when we

were talking about schools of psychology or any field of endeavor, where you have

a particular model that you subscribe to, and you tend to imply or sometimes

overtly state that this is the right one, it's more obvious in things like

religion, for instance, where they say, my invisible person is far more important

and powerful than your invisible person.

And so you must subscribe to our invisible person.

How do you know?

How do you know your invisible person's real?

That a particular style of leadership that a person may or may not adopt is

again, just another framework, another heuristic that a person is using

to solve a wide array of problems.

Of situations like religion and like psychology and like all sorts

of belief systems, leadership can come in a variety of flavors.

How do you know which is the best one?

You don't.

And the only real solution to that is to adopt an agnostic viewpoint that

tends to suggest whatever the problem is that will dictate the solution.

The way that we look at and, which is why I've always tried to use this

sort of Bayesian way of working.

Let's see what happens.

We'll take steps one and two, before we decide on steps three, four and

five, because only then will we know.

the direction that we should take.

If a leader has that viewpoint or that perspective, that's a

leader that I can subscribe to.

And I don't know whether it was Pythagoras or Archimedes.

I've got a feeling it was the Pythagorean school way back in, in ancient Greece,

who suggested that anybody that wanted Any sort of leadership or power within

the state should also take a vow of poverty because I'd love to see how

many people take up leadership positions if there's no bloody money involved.

Because if you're that good and you really care that much about

people, then forget the money.

You don't need your 400 grand bonus.

Give it away.

Give it away to the poor people.

And there's plenty of us.

Guys, I'm well into my book now.

I've been talking to Michael Ward a little bit.

I've seen you connected with him, Rob.

He comments a fair bit on some of your pieces.

He's an Irish guy, author.

Is Michael the guy who's something to do with the

Buckingham Palace ghostwriter?

He said something to me yesterday which I really liked.

He said people would rather read about the philosopher than the philosophy.

Ah, yes.

So don't tell them what your philosophy is, tell them who the philosopher is.

It's a good one.

He's a clever guy.

He is.

I believe he is also has a background himself in psychology.

Yeah, he does.

And he doesn't like it.

He's antis psychology but

he, his reasons for not liking are far better than mine.

Yeah.

Yeah.

He's really cool guy

yeah, no, I find that really interesting.

I'm really interested in the difference between, what you've articulated

between leadership and management.

Cause, and I think both Clark and I had a anti leadership that it

wasn't something we wanted to do.

And I think Yeah, it's a richer understanding of leadership

rather than a position and

I've only started to look at it that way since I've been delivering,

I've been delivering a Harvard edX course for a lot of clients in different

parts of the world and it, there's some lessons within that, that that have been

quite striking in how they articulate the difference between technical

challenges and adaptive challenges.

Technical challenges might be really complex.

For example, heart surgery where the head surgeons in there, highly skilled, very

complex, the rooms full of anesthetists, nurses, all of the rest of it, but

they're all very well trained to do this.

Years ago would have been an inconceivable that they could do it,

but it doesn't require leadership.

What requires leadership, which the medical profession, not very good at

is getting the patient post surgery to manage their own rehabilitation.

Otherwise all the good work that the doctors have done is come to no good.

So how do they.

The real skill post op is how do they lead the recipient of the surgery?

I'm the recipient of various surgeries and I'm a bit of a recalcitrant.

Recuperate, I try and move too fast, too soon, and it always sets me back.

So how does the profession mobilize me to be way more, focused and

attentive to really maximize the benefit of the fantastic surgery that

I've just had in order to achieve the outcome that everybody wants.

So there's some real sort of leadership lessons in that for me.

So this doctor, brilliant technician, but in no way a leader and not

leading the people in the room, just the person in charge of the

operation, two different things.

So it's, I've got a load of fascinating insights around that.

And I'm playing with those ideas.

And I generally believe that to, an adaptive challenge is something that

requires us to build new capacity.

It might even require us to reassess our values in order to buy into it.

So if you're going to start pushing buttons around other people's values,

beliefs, and what they think is the right thing to do, you're going to have to Lead

them through that map it's a, to navigate that requires nuance and sensitivity

and, it's not the guy, it's not the guy with the stick and the red sash.

Yes, it's really about who's the problem solver in that situation.

So we can see,

and it can come from anywhere, right?

It's not always, it's not always me as the guy at the front.

If I'm a football coach, the player's got the problem when the defender's

gonna kick him up in the air.

He's got to make the decision.

Does he pass it or dribble or turn away or screen it or whatever.

I can't make all those decisions.

So the, those problems that are being posed second by second, play by play,

out of my control as the leader, but I've got to mobilize people to face those

challenges together as optimally as I can.