What if most organisational problems aren’t unique at all—and treating them as if they are is exactly what’s holding you back? Mark Earls joins Matt and Lisa to challenge how we think about innovation, time, and human behaviour in organisations.
From why you should prototype multiple solutions before perfecting one, to the critical difference between product thinking (needing 1% of a market) and internal systems (requiring 100% adoption), this conversation offers practical alternatives to the endless search for “best practice” examples. Mark argues that recognising problems as belonging to familiar categories—and understanding humans as fundamentally social rather than individual—unlocks faster, more effective solutions than assuming every challenge is unprecedented genius-level work.
This week’s trancript brought to you by Descript with associated errors…
Matt: [00:00:00] Hello and welcome to episode 340 of the WB 40 increasingly erratically produced podcast this week with me, Matt Ballantine, Lisa Riemers, and Mark Earls.
Lisa: Hi everyone, and welcome back if you’re a returning listener and welcome if this is your first time. Very excited about today’s episode. There are a few things that Matt, [00:01:00] our guest mark this week and I have in common, and there’s. I think it’s been a long time coming. My, I hadn’t realized how massively overdue this episode is.
But just in our little pre-chat it turns out that I’m much better than Matt at doing these things. And, um, so yeah. Matt, what have you been up to over the last week or so?
Matt: Oh, the last week or so. It’s been 80 since I’ve been on here. Um, the last week has been, it’s quite a lot of book related stuff.
So I, I’ve got the first physical prototype of the full book through from some printers. They’re not the, it’s not the printers we’ll use for the final version, but, um, so that’s quite good fun. I’ve launched what book? The, the random, the book, um, how to Survive in I can’t even remember what the subtitle is.
It’s just random. That’s what it’s called. And uh, we’ve also launched as of [00:02:00] last Monday an, uh, a random, the advent calendar. So every other day there’s a new story about randomness related to the Christmas period. So, um, and I seem to be out unsettling certain people, including you by the sounds of it, Lisa, by un uh, unleashing the windows of the Advent calendar in random order.
So today was Advent calendar window number two, even though it’s the fourth one, and that seems to be causing no end of challenge for people.
Lisa: I just find it difficult when I’ve been conditioned to open things in an order over the, over the however many years I’ve been opening Advent calendars for. And I don’t if I’ve missed out a day, I dunno which ones today, I dunno.
Which I, it’s hard enough knowing what day of the week it is now that alone understanding, oh no. It’s okay to unlock any of the windows that are open. Yes. I mean, that’s it. It’s breaking
Matt: out of, of the kind of the structures that we are taught in. And, [00:03:00] and you know, being able to feel that that discomfort I think, which is, uh, quite entertaining.
Uh, apart from that, last week was the. Annual WB 40 Christmas meal. I think it was 25 people out this year. A Spanish restaurant in Faringdon, which was great fun. Gotta to see lots of people. Gotta see Chris King, who made it down from Lee Ray, Chris King gotta see Dave Lloyd. He made it over from Wales.
We got to see Sharon Oea. Gotta make it all the way from Amsterdam. We’ve gotta see Lee Cox. He made it all the way from deepest, darkest Kent. And some people, you know, there’s lots of other people as well. So that was about fabulous. Thank you to, um, cypher being the main organizer of that, and to you as well, Lisa.
He did lots of work in the organizing of it, which was fantastic. And then it was our 17th wedding anniversary on Saturday. So we went out to this remarkable restaurant called Alba Dino in in Richmond. That’s Richmond Pond Thames rather than Richmond, north [00:04:00] Yorkshire. And it’s basically a restaurant where the meal is themed around a Sicilian wedding feast.
You get what you’re given. It is usually six or seven courses and s and I just basically had far too much to eat, which was wonderful. So, um, that’s, it’s been an entertaining week. How about you?
Lisa: So last weekend I did in my top, it’s my top two events of the year. The first of which was where I actually met Mark in person, where we went to the Speaky Summit in Bavaria, but equally as random and equally as difficult to get to from, from southeast London.
I went to a thing called congregation in the tiny village of Kong in West Ireland, which I found out about by chance at the beginning of November, having a conversation with someone at the IRBC UK Conference in London. But [00:05:00] congregation, it’s an unconference that takes place over a weekend and you, to get your ticket, you write a blog post on a particular subject, and this year’s subject was chaos.
It’s like, this is really in my wheelhouse. Um, and so I wrote my blog post. Also realized that my current client, who I’ve not met in person until this point, was gonna be there and is one of the sponsors, but completely unrelatedly to me finding out about it. So I basically went away with 97 strangers, someone I’ve been working with for a few months, someone I met three weeks ago, and the person who’s organizing it, who I’d emailed in advance, um, and we sat in different shops around the village.
The f we were given like a you’d love this from a random point of view. I’d lanyards had like a bingo card on it in the morning where there are eight sessions throughout the day and four, there [00:06:00] are eight groups. Running at the same time throughout the day, and then four sessions and you get given a sticker as with your number on it.
And then you work out where you are meant to be at the different sessions. ’cause you find your number on the card. And it was fabulous ’cause it meant that you all got sh you, you knew, you knew where you needed to go next and if you didn’t know, you could talk to someone and ask them. And we had long ranging conversations that covered topics from like really straightforward things to it’s just such a treat to be able to actually take a whole, a day and a half really.
But having a whole day of just talking about the same subject and talking to people and bouncing ideas off each other. I feel like I came back like really restored and thinking about how, ’cause it’s so nice to actually be able to talk to humans who, and you can bounce off each other without that kind of.
The brittleness that sometimes comes when you’re talking [00:07:00] online and tone doesn’t travel and then you don’t agree with someone and then you fall out with them when you’re in person and sitting around a table, you can actually continue that. And then we all went to the pub in the evening and continued the conversation.
Uh, that was the main thing. I’ve also been doing a bunch of client work. Saw everyone at the WB 40 dinner, brought a bunch of intra nerds with me that were also coming to town for the day for an intranet conference from Interact. Um. Did an art challenge at the weekend. So it’s been quite a busy week.
Matt: Sounds it. Yeah. You’re gonna need a, a bit of time off over Christmas to recover from all of that.
Lisa: I hope so. I I do feel like I’m probably gonna get ill at some point in December ’cause I’ve seen so many people and there are so many bugs around, even though I’ve had my flu jab and I’ve been taking vitamins and trying to eat well.
There’s a high prob there’s a high chance I’m gonna be struck down soon. But anyway, I’ve [00:08:00] talked a lot there. Mark. Hello? Hello? Hello? In England ish. You are? Yeah. You are. Religion? I am in England. England, yep. How are you doing? What have you been up to over the last week or so?
Mark: So the last, last week or so has been, uh, dominated by my band’s annual Christmas charity gig which was the last Thursday, it seems like, both a year ago and only last night.
And as the herd, meister and champion of all things social behavior, I still in a band, been played together more than three decades. And we love getting people to mix with each other and dance around and get overexcited and show those bits of themselves that they don’t normally show. And it’s always great, and one of the, and we’re of a certain age now, so that everyone’s kids are in their twenties.
So, uh, and they’ve now decided on mass that Christmas doesn’t properly start until the big short customer. Do is done. [00:09:00] So, um, so that’s it. So that’s what I was doing, rehearsing for that and then getting that done. Also, I’ve been trying to knock out, um, uh, I’ve been working on my next book and which isn’t the time one that Matt wants to talk to me about, but um, is another sort of Hery thing.
And, um, did a bit of client work last week with some lovely mates of mine who have run a, um, a B2B sort of marketing, branding consultancy and bringing the joy of our social selves to them. So that’s what I’ve been doing and realizing that it is two weeks now. That’s it. The panic setting,
Matt: the two weeks.
Yeah. So the new book you’re working on, the, um, the, her, was it just called Herd? Or the Herd? I can’t remember, but you, it was called Herd. It was called Herd. And that’s how I first got to know of you many, many years ago. Yeah. That’s when I
Mark: first met. Yeah.
Matt: Yeah. Um, and that was all about how you can, I guess, tap into a bit about social behaviors.
Mark: Well, I, I think it’s more about if before we get tap into it, I think the first thing is to accept, um, you [00:10:00] know, the truth of our real nature which is that we’re a social species, a we species of dubbed it rather than a me species and our culture in the, in the anglophone world, it insists that we’re an individual species, you know, hyper-personalization, all that kind of stuff that obsessed people in the digital world for in recent years and now marketing.
I think it’s just completely misplaced because we see it every day on social platforms, what’s become of them, which is how we shape each other all of the time. Um, so admitting that, I think is the first step. Like they say in, in aa admitting we’ve got a problem that we’ve misunderstood what is to be human.
So I wrote that book, I mean, it’s two decades ago nearly now. And I wrote it as a sort of a polemic for that point of view. And, um, I still use it in all my work. That basic perspective and lots of tools. I developed example with some academics to under to, to triage behavior before you start kinda changing it.
So [00:11:00] that kind of stuff. But I’ve realized and indeed my publishers realize that there is still a need in the broader population to accept this is who we are. Um. And so that’s what that book’s about. It’s, if you like, the idea of it is 70 odd field reports, bits of human behavior that we see around us, whether it’s something topical or something seasonal or something we’ve all experienced or I’ve experienced.
And then to explain that that’s not some weird individual idiosyncrasy or some pathology, it’s actually us, just us being. Who we are, we are Weese fishes. So two examples from it, one of which is, you know, that I live around the corner from Amy wine house’s, old house. And so still every day, every time I pass, there’s a teenager either with another teenager or with a parent standing outside the tree that’s draped in.
There’s a shrine to Amy and it’s really interesting to watch that behavior. Why are they doing that? Is it about Amy or is it about themselves [00:12:00] and their world? Is it just a behavior they’ve copied? They go through a whole bunch of rituals which seem to be copied off the tele and off, what they’ve seen of funerals maybe in their life or through various media, films and TV and, um, and they cry properly and they cry.
It’s just really interesting phenomenon and it’s own not explained by the fact there’s something wrong with them. It’s the fact that this is what social creatures do Throughout human history, we’ve gathered together at shrines, even if we never knew the saint or the, the, the holy person or whatever we gather there for.
To exercise stuff together and we do it together rather than individually. So that’s one example. Another example is linguistic. And um, you know, I was sitting this time last year in a cafe in Camden and this very smart young woman in her twenties, I guess in business outfit, came in with, uh, with a colleague.
And she was clearly wanted to vent something. But my inner grammar Nazi was spiked by something she said, a word she used. And we’ve all heard this used, right, ’cause it’s now part of vernacular, London vernacular. [00:13:00] And she said, ax, rather than ask ax rather than us, so the S and the K, are, are inverted.
And that seems to me inside, I just felt this pain. You know, how you go, that’s just wrong. That’s just, how do you not know that’s wrong? And then I went into clearly without thinking it logic, I went through the, that makes her seem, not very well educated or something like that. Uh, grammar Nazi again and judging her.
So I went away and looked it up and it turns out that it’s an entirely acceptable use, both in African American vernacular English, but also in and a number of Jamaican driven Englishes in the uk. So it’s entirely acceptable there. It’s also in a number of English rural dialects went back further and discovered that the Anglo-Saxon word is both Axian and Ian.
So both versions exist there and apparently it’s then also in Shora, and I’m told it exists in, uh, St. James’ Bible, king James’ Bible as [00:14:00] well. So what it revealed to me is how I was acting out as a grammar Nazi to, to police the border of us and them. So it’s two examples of this, you know, our social selves there, just so there’s another 70 odd of those to come, I’m afraid.
But I. So there we are. So that’s what that book’s about.
Matt: Sounds excellent. We will maybe explore that a bit more in, um, in the rest of this show as well.
Mark: Great.
Lisa: Shall we get on with it then?
Matt: I think we probably should.
Mark: You should count us in 2, 3, 4. Isn’t that how guys? That’s, that’s, sorry that was the last week.
Me and the band, 2, 3, 4
Matt: with some.
So as Lisa said at the [00:15:00] start of the show, there’s a few things that connect the three of us and probably the thing that connects the three of us most. Recently is the speaker conference that I went to. I and Mark was there for the first one in 2024. And then Lisa went to where Mark was speaking in 2025.
And then Lisa, uh, asked you to come on the show, which is wonderful. And I’m, you know, as Lisa made quite clear earlier on, she’s far better at asking you on the show than I have been because I’ve asked you never got you on. But, you know, there’s so many things we could talk about this week.
So I think we’ll just sort of see what happens. ’cause I think that’s the best sort of these conversations. But the starting point is the book that you alluded to in that last bit, that I’m slightly worried now isn’t happening or what is happening to it, which is about three years ago you told me that you were writing a book about time travel.
And I have been fascinated by that idea ever since. And I don’t think you [00:16:00] intended it in the, I’m going to invent the new time machine, but more about how intellectually and psychologically we travel in time.
Mark: I think that’s right. I think it’s mental time travel is the easiest way to describe it. And I I, I’ve been fascinated by this for a while.
I’ve been trying to get my thoughts in order for some years. And we got very close to selling it last year to publishers, but they all said went, oh, that’s a bit hard, isn’t it? But maybe that’ll change. Change. Now I’ve got my, um, and I’ve got my time travel show. Um, in the essence of it, as you say, is, is, uh, this ability that we have as humans to move back and forth and sideways in time.
We can do it in our heads. We do it with, you know, the drop of a hat as, as you remember, Lisa, are you. Uses a George. Michael, I’m not gonna, I’m not gonna say the words. Well, maybe I’ll say the words. That doesn’t count as well. Mageddon does it this year. Of last Christmas. ’cause if you think about it, last [00:17:00] Christmas in four lines, he goes back to the past, back to the present, into the future.
He doesn’t like back to the present and then into a desirable future. It’s, you know, last Christmas, last Christmas, I gave you my heart, but the very next day you gave it away. But this year to save me from tears or a nasty outcome, I’ll give it to someone special. It’s really straightforward, right?
It’s time travel. We can do it all the time. We do it naturally. This time of year as we approach this sort of the Christmas break it’s all of us have time rhymes, as I call them. We all of us connect to things that have happened in the past, this time last year, as George says. But also we, we remember, you know, we remember people who were not here.
The ghosts of Christmas past are not scary things some, most of the time. But all of us have these with time rhymes. And every time you go to a new meeting, you’ve been in that meeting before in some way or form or other. Right? We’ve always, we have this experience again and again because it’s the same [00:18:00] context.
And you know, it’s, it’s not that there is some weird loop going on in physics that no one spotted. It’s what happens in our heads that’s really clever. And I just think that having sat through so many presentations when either the project manager on the one hand. Or the person debriefing the debrief.
Debriefing the data uses a time series as the only way to explain something just seems to me, and, and, and misses a huge point about what it is to be human. And also misses the opportunity to use these skills to do useful stuff. Instead of thinking about the future, we can think easily about lots of futures and work our way back from that.
Or we can think about instead of thinking about the past caused this to happen, you go, well, probably it’s a bit more complicated than that. So let’s look at a number of pasts and what would happen, what would change our definition of where we are today if we upped that particular variable, that particular cause, and said, maybe that’s why we’re here today.
If that’s the case, then action [00:19:00] today would be different than it would be if, uh, if another thing was dominant causing today. So anyway, it’s, I think it’s useful in lots of ways. Personally, I think it’s useful. I think professionally it’s useful if I have to never see. Another time series data set. I’ll be really pleased, um, presented back to me.
But also I think professionally in another sense in the organizations that we work with and the organizations that we that we are part of. Thinking about time in this more using this time, mental time travel is the key engine rather than the bloody calendar be. So it’s
Matt: interesting how besotted so much of organizational life in particular, actually, ’cause I don’t think it relates to outside of organizational life, is it’s besotted with the idea of a linear calendar that only goes forward.
And it
Mark: absolutely,
Matt: and,
Mark: and you can see why it is because most management theory and mo management culture is still based on factory ideas. And the factory absolutely needs things going through [00:20:00] in a measurable way into the future, and never look at that. It’s
Matt: interesting as well though, that in some sectors more than others, I think in my sector of technology more possibly than others, there’s also a lack of willingness to look backwards and that’s a, a kind of a myth based on the idea that technology’s always about the future.
I started, um, a new engagement with a client a couple of weeks ago and I had a chance to be able to address, I dunno, 25 people in a room at the kickoff. And so I talked about the coal mining industry in the post, uh, second World War. Post War Britain because. The, and this is a story I might have told on the show before, but the basic gist of it is that at the end of the second World War, the coal mining industry was absolutely on its knees.
It had been massively under invested since probably before the first World War and coal extraction in the UK was a matter of blowing things up and then digging them out with shovels and picks. And there was no more [00:21:00] intelligence in it than anything other than the invention that noble had created with dynamite.
So the newly formed British National Coal Board decided to look across the world to what would be the best. Most effective methods of being able to get coal out the ground. And they looked to North America in particular, and America had massively mechanized the production of coal. And of course at that point, coal was the source of energy for just about everything.
Even gas was from coal. Um, and so they bought all these machines that were the same ones the North Americans were using, and they installed them into coal mines in Britain. And the productivity got even worse. And the point of telling that story to this group of people who we were working with to be able to try and help them improve the way in which they produce software, which is a modern day form of coal, sadly in some ways is using up energy like coal used to as well.
But that, the learning that came out of that experience in the coal industry was that you can’t just push the one lever of new machines and hope that [00:22:00] you will fix your productivity and you know, production problems, it has to be multidisciplinary. It has to push multiple levers. And in the fifties and sixties, the sociotechnical systems thinking movement worked all of this out.
And here we are, 60 years on still making the same mistakes, thinking bit of technology in, and that’ll solve all your problems.
Mark: But I mean, it’s so, you know, we are sitting in a wave of tech technological, I don’t think it’s adoption yet at enterprise level, but you know, the AI wave is, is really interesting because it’s promising Yeah, absolutely.
Matt: Intractable problems solved by magic. But yeah. Yeah.
Mark: But by technological magic.
Matt: Yeah. And that, that we are not able to be able to make that shift back. And I hope that that coal mining story will stick with people because who the hell starts off an IT project with a conversation about. Technological problem 80 years ago.
Mark: But that’s the point, right? That you, if you did them, what they expected, the sensible thing to thinking about today’s technology, they wouldn’t have any, they wouldn’t stop, [00:23:00] they wouldn’t have any, any, not just a memory of it, but they wouldn’t have any change in their natural condition processes for dealing with the problems in front of them.
I, I have a thing that I use quite a lot with my clients, and we developed it a few years ago, which is which is triage essentially. So you ask what kind of thing this is, what kind of problem this is before you go something, it seems really obvious, right? But we don’t, we go, this is a unique problem that no one else has ever had before.
And that, and therefore, and I, I, I, I use the slogan of saying we need to be much less house. What, like as in Dr. House, much less looking for the N point naught, 1% of conditions that only a genius could spot and solve for, and recognize that most of the problems we’re gonna come across, whether it’s in organizational design, whether it’s in in productivity, whether it’s in process, whether it’s in sourcing, whether it’s in hr, whatever it is, most of those problems are a kinder problem rather than [00:24:00] just a unique problem that no one’s ever seen before.
And that I think is really helpful to getting a good grip and moving fast to prototype a solution, which is, I think we all agree is a, is the way to do it. Rather than sitting around going, if I only get the perfect description of this problem, then I’ll, it’ll all, or the perfect data set to support my argument.
This is this is the perfect descrip problem. Then, then we’ll all be better off it. Just, you know, I think it’s just much more useful to, to ask kinder questions. My friend John Wilshire who did the illustrations, my copy, copy copy book, hated it as in my publisher at Wiley’s me spelling it in the American way, but it kind of sticks a bit like, you know, using coal mining in a software business.
Because it’s it, we are not comfortable with it. It’s got a bur to it and kind of what kind of thing is this. It’s just a much better place to start.
Lisa: So if we are being less house, what’s the equivalent saying of it’s never lupus for inner business and their problems?
Mark: Well, you, you go, let’s, let’s look at all [00:25:00] the different ways this problem could be, what are the different ways we could diagnose this and go, okay, let’s shorten the odds and try three or four of them and get a better idea, rather than doing it in series.
’cause doing things in series takes forever and you then you get people stuck in own, invested in a particular definition of the problem and a particular kind of solution that they can see coming out of it. So I think that is part of the answer to it.
Lisa: And so, interestingly also, so probably my least favorite Marvel film was Dr.
Strange’s Multiverse of Madness. Mm-hmm. Like, I found it, I found it infuriating partly because one of the characters just had a very. One dimensional fury That didn’t really make sense. But on a positive note, the way you were just describing it there, thinking about all the different possible outcomes and that kind of, that big beautiful brain trying to [00:26:00] imagine all of those different outcomes.
If you’re thinking, well, this is where we’re starting from and here are some options of where we could go, how do you then explain that in a way that doesn’t need a massive cinematic budget? How do you actually get that across to people? I, I think,
Mark: you know, we are all people who are quite used to making paper prototypes of things, so rather having the perfect PowerPoint or canvas slide that, that describes it in great detail.
You go, let’s make some, let’s get it out in front of us and let’s be really clear what this. Definition looks like, and this definition, this definition, and let’s now engage with them in a different way than we are used to doing when something’s projected onto a wall or a screen. I think that that kind of engagement that we’re used to doing in our work is, I think something that that, that does help get people to see different things.
I also think that very quick, getting a very quick prototype solution, you know, the, the roughest ba most basic thing out on the table [00:27:00] also really helps. Yeah. So it’s not just the problem with, so if that’s the problem, then what that kind of problem then here are some of the solutions we’ve seen from elsewhere, which one of those things.
But let’s just package that together very quickly into a version of it. And now let’s do that for several different definitions of that problem. , If you get both very, a range of definitions of what the problem is, not all of the possible definitions, but get it down to a reasonable, a reasonable lot and then go, so what’s the obvious solution or what the solutions that we’ve seen for that kind of problem before that have worked in other contexts?
Let’s, then you’ve got something that people can respond to and you can start because you’ve got a prototype, you can start, what’s the simplest way we can test that, that hypothesis of problem and solution and uh, that works against how, business culture tends to work in the Anglosphere. Mm-hmm. Which is, oh yeah.
There must be one mighty thing. You know, one ring to rule them all in the darkness behind them.
Lisa: Um,
Mark: yeah,
Lisa: I completely agree with the paper prototypes as well. [00:28:00] I know one of my first, I didn’t realize that other people didn’t work like this, but one of my first content design things that I did when I was freelance, I was working on a big project for a charity looking at the content for their new website, and I had big pieces of paper and pens, and I drew out prototypes of what I thought the pages would look like, because previously I found if you take something that looks even slightly finished to people, they’re like, well, I don’t like the font.
And why is it in black and white? And why, why have you used that picture there? That’s not appropriate. And people kind of get tangented. Or distracted by the details, which are actually just placeholder details. So I I completely, absolutely. Yeah. I love a
Mark: pen and paper job. No, I think that’s really important.
And, and you know, the other thing is that executives aroused from their slumber decision makers aroused from their slumber, and you make them do something and write it down and, and you ban the words that, you know, I’ve got a particular [00:29:00] thing given my marketing background about what I call the B word that dominates marketing as a sort of a general excuse to avoid saying anything particular and to impose the b stuff on the rest of the organization.
So I, um, I, yeah, no, I, I think that’s you get prototypes, get people to express things in simple terms. Make the thing as simple as it possibly can be so that you can test it. And I’m sure you’ve done this with your projects as well, Lisa, that when you have this a paper a paper prototype if you like, it’s really simplest thing you say, what’s the simplest way we can test it this week?
Lisa: Yeah,
Mark: what’s the simplest way we can test it this week? Before we go any further or before we leave the room, what’s the simplest way we could test this? And then you, then you get movement. ’cause executives are used to speculating. Yeah. And, and showing off. I mean, different, different organizational cultures are different national cultures different.
It’s a thing with the French business schools that people tend to hold forth and, you know, just slip a little bit of Dakar in there if you can. Or maybe, maybe something from the 20th [00:30:00] century. Yeah. Boer, let’s have some Boer. Why not? And, uh, but, and German cultures seem to be more mechanical, but it stops some thinking.
So you have to have to find a way to pull people forward with you into this making mindset.
Matt: We don’t like people thinking in work though, do we? ’cause they might come up with ideas that are dangerous or challenge the status quo
Mark: or Absolutely. What’s the rules of this game, Matt? How do I win?
You know, the correct answer here is, and you know, the truth is, as we know from the work that we’ve been doing for years, is that there’s no correct answer. There are lots of different answers, some of which are absolute nonsense, but that doesn’t matter. We’ve at least we’ve got that out and when you’re getting people to generate alternatives, saying the stupid one at least gets that out and it’s not circling around behind individual’s ears or within the group.
Shouldn’t we say that one? Should we, because that’s the thing that we’ve always done, is just say it, get it out. Let’s not be embarrassed anymore.
Matt: So that seems like an [00:31:00] interesting point to then come back to these ideas of herd like behavior because a lot of the ways in which people are programmed to operate within the world of business, you know, if you say, I mean my favorite, my favorite thing that I’ve heard many times now is from people saying, can you help us to innovate?
We’d like to see some people who’ve done it before. Please. And you go, can
Mark: we all have a pound every time we’ve been asked that? Right? Yeah, I know
Matt: exactly. And you know, there’s a bit of me that goes, oh, it rolls my eyes and go, you’re never gonna do this. But on the other hand, I kind of understand it.
And a lot of it is because we have a lot of programming and we have a lot of social pressure about what it is to be work. Like, it’s a lot of pressure. You know, the work I did around play, and if you had a pound for every time I’ve mentioned the Protestant work ethic on this show, but the Protestant work ethic is deeply embedded in our culture.
We’ve lost the religion, so we don’t know what it is, but there’s things that hold us back and make us feel guilty for doing anything that doesn’t feel work. Like, and that holds back. ’cause making a pro in a paper prototype
Mark: that’s not thinking Matt, you see, that’s the trouble.
Matt: [00:32:00] Yeah.
Mark: Making something with your hands and writing it down it and then sharing it with other people is not working.
It’s not like you’re supposed to do when you’re sitting in the executive suite. Exactly that. Yeah. And so, uh, if you take some of that herd thinking King and some of those ideas about how we’re, we’re programmed to be able to act in particular ways, is that basically much of your consulting then?
Matt: Is that just basically trying to be able to disrupt some of that in a way that isn’t Oh, it’s totally countercultural.
Mark: Yeah. No, it’s, it’s partly that it’s partly that because you have to help them. See beyond the programmed ways of doing things and ways of thinking and the map that program gives them the map of the world.
So for example, you know, um, I’ve done, and I’m sure you’ve done this with your, with your tech clients making people in decision, making positions, forced to actually meet customers. It’s just really uncomfortable. It’s really uncomfortable unless they’re senior customers that I can bond with [00:33:00] and not have to talk about any of the dirty stuff that we do.
Oh. Or I know that they’re
Matt: gonna say nice things. Yeah, well, exactly,
Mark: exactly. Yeah. We’d have to select those really carefully for interview. Yeah, so it’s partly that, but it’s also partly understanding how, how human behavior inside or outside the organization actually works. So this thing I mentioned previously about triaging.
What kind of behavior is it when people say. Yes, absolutely. We’re all up for that transformation program. We’ve just got a couple of priorities right now. What kind of behavior is that and where have we seen that before? Rather than saying there are people who are blocking this or they’re saying the right thing in the meetings.
So you’ve, we’ve seen that before in lots of other contexts inside this organization before, but also outside the organization and then in real life. And, and that just gets a much richer toolkit once you’ve triaged it that way. So there’s that. It’s a map that the one that I created with, um, professor Alex Bentley, the map of that I think in, I’ll have what she’s having in copy, copy.
A very simple two, two by two of, individual choice versus social and [00:34:00] informed. It’s a really simple map and just makes you think a bit harder about what it is you are trying to change when it comes to customers. What’s really interesting is I. Is how difficult it is for anybody, whether it’s in marketing or beyond, just to actually plot customers, whether they’re end users or consumers, behavior according to a type of things.
A kind of to categorize them, uh, for in different types. ’cause everything seems to be, ’cause we’re told, and this is sort of the, the terrible cult of the of the lords of strategy. That every problem is unique. Every problem is unique and you really need, if you’re can, it’s a really unique problem and it’s a really difficult one.
And if you manage to solve it, senior executive, then you are a genius. What you need is people, consultants like me, who are also geniuses, who can make you look really good by solving this unique problem. It’s, it’s just a, it’s just a, like a Ponzi scheme, but, but not as rewarding in the end. So, uh, I think what, where I get to is [00:35:00] most of the problems that organizations face.
And this is, this is true in the NGO sector, as it is in, as it is in the corporate sector. Uh, and it’s true in government as well, but that’s another subject. Um, most of the problems people face are to do with people. They’re not to do with the technology. ’cause we can, finding the right answer to technology isn’t that hard.
You know, I heard a terrible stat the other day that, um, someone was telling me that, uh, the ratio. Of all investment in technology that U-K-P-L-C has made in the last 20 years. The ratio between the money spent on design and build of the technology and user adoption and support is nine to one, which is exactly the adverse of what it should be.
I’m,
Matt: I’m surprised it’s still one actually.
Mark: Well, I mean, that’s, that’s maybe 20 years has, has raised that up a bit, but, um, but I, I, that’s the truth, right? Is we imagine [00:36:00] that, that the people aren’t being, aren’t gonna be important and they will do what we tell them. Just put a good thing in front of them and they’ll, and they’ll fall over themselves to use it.
It’s just, we know that from making the number of things we’ve made in our careers that it’s just not true.
Matt: Yeah, and there’s a, there’s a really interesting difference between. A commercial internet site where what you need to do is get enough customers to be able to be either profitable or to have enough customers to be able to make your business look like somebody else will want to buy it.
And it doesn’t mean you have to get everybody and providing a service that is used within an organization where everybody needs to use it for it to be successful and the same is one of the things I’m struggling with at the moment is the idea of product thinking being brought into the world of business systems.
’cause I don’t think it works and it doesn’t work because of that dynamic. Because to make a product that is good enough, you maybe need to get 1% of a market [00:37:00] to get a business system that is good enough. You need to get it used by a hundred percent of the market. And that the, and the, the con, the confusion that product thinking, I think is providing into.
Business systems, and to an extent, some government services as well is blowing people’s brains, quite frankly. I,
Mark: I think that’s right. There’s another thing which the product thinking doesn’t help us with, which is the assumption that actually whoever makes a decision, makes it on the, on the basis that this is, uh, that they’re maximizing the utility from this, that there’s a better or best scale that people are gonna make a decision by.
And mostly, most of our behavior, whether it’s a corporate or whether it’s an individual, it’s not made on that basis. And that come back to my simple map in, I’m plugging all four of my books now. This is marvelous. Um, on, on one podcast, uh, the map we created in I’ll have what he, she’s having in it’s MIT press, it was about 10 years ago now.
Just there’s one box in [00:38:00] that four box, four box map, which is people making considered judgments based on the utility. This particular option gives them. Mm-hmm. And it’s just one, and it’s really rare. In fact, in the academic world in which this model is taken from in the academic world, there’s a huge debate about whether there is a best that you can find in any category.
It’s really rare. And we, we found one in all of the, um, different, uh, consumer categories we looked at to build that model. And that was, that was deodorant format. But it’s not better, best, it’s just preference. So if you are, if you are used to using a roll on deodorant, you will not be upgrading to a different kind of different kind of deodorant.
You won’t be going to an aerosol every year. Some bright spark somewhere in Colgate, Palm, olive, or Unilever or Proctors has this insight that goes aerosols use up twice as fast. They’re higher. Premium for us. Why don’t we get all of our roll on users to migrate over to [00:39:00] aerosols? And frankly, it’s always a disaster because roll on users go from, let’s say they go from Dove to Rex.
It’s just, you know, it’s not ‘
Matt: cause they
Mark: like the format is the thing they’re choosing, not the brand. The brand is sort of much more secondary in that, but that’s the only one we found that the patterns in the data support that. And you know, the, the model I say is based on academic stuff, which looks at looks at archeological data sets, um, as well as modern ones.
And, uh, there’s some great, you know, our history of modern electronic innovation is littered with the best. Really not winning. Yes. This is the B max
Matt: versus vhs. Exactly. And all those. Yeah.
Mark: But it’s also true in the, it’s also true in the past, in Arrowhead, design repeatedly doesn’t go better, better, better, better, and increasing up until it gets the very best.
And then someone bests the best. It doesn’t, it changes changes because people go with that, oh, that looks nice. Let’s have the shape of that arrow out of a different material and then, and and so on. Um, and so [00:40:00] it, it’s just not a escalation to maximum utility, which is what product thinking leads us to.
And I because it don’t, they don’t understand people. They don’t care about the people at the end,
Matt: uh, or they don’t understand evolution. There’s, um, that’s true. A little book a little bit in the random book about why pandas exist. Pandas tell me. That’s good. By any measure should not exist.
They are useless. Useless at reproducing and passing together two days a year when they’re infertile thing if, if you’re lucky. Yeah. And all this sort of stuff and, and, and yet evolution because of the randomness that it goes into it, you end up with things that aren’t optimum by any stretch of the imagination.
Mark: I think. I think that’s right. This is, there’s a huge, so the guys that I, I did this work with describe themselves as being from the world of cultural evolution. So they see cultural artifacts, practices, and and so on as being the spread and the rise and the fall of [00:41:00] them as being best explained by dynamic model, which is essentially Darwinian.
They are really keen, and we come up against this when we, when we consulting uh, as a data business. A lots of people imagine that what Darwin was saying is the best will win out. And that’s clearly something that lives in, in product land as well. The best is gonna win. Whereas in fact, what, as you say, Panda is a great example of, essentially it’s drift.
They, there’s been, uh, there’s been copying and variation over time and they’ve not really had to work that hard. That two, two days a year is enough, probably for enough pandas to keep going. Mostly.
Lisa: This does make me think of there was a lecture at the Royal Institute last year which was talking about cats being perfect, evolutionary.
Their dead ends basically. Yes. Yeah. A small, a house cat is exactly the same. Proportions and ratio as a tiger, but give or [00:42:00] take a little bit. So a tiger is basically a much scaled up version of a small animal. And that’s really, that’s really rare apparently. Like it’s not something like a big dog is different to a small dog.
A small dog can’t jump as high, whereas a tiger’s just like a scaled up version. And basically cats are perfect. They’re evolutionary dead ends, and that’s probably why they rule the internet as well.
Mark: Well, this is true. That is true. That is true. The dogs are pretty cool on the internet too.
Lisa: Yeah, that’s fair.
My
Mark: dog’s very popular. Seriously. She is. She’s great. People love her. Every I walk down the street and people say, well, that’s a beautiful dog. What’s her name? But no, I think you’re right, Lisa. I think you’re right. There’s this misunderstanding though of that, that to survive, to succeed, it has to be the very best.
And that somehow there is inherent in our attempts at innovation, at producing the very best, better than everything that’s gone before. And that is our, that is our, the, the, if you like, that’s the arc of [00:43:00] of innovation thinking. It’s just not true.
Matt: And then, and then there’s just not true those two categories of people we haveI.
Is it optimizers and satisfies?
Mark: Satisfies? Yes. Yes. Well, I think we all are both, but we’re more often, more of us are more often satisfiers than we are optimizers. What are these, can you
Lisa: explain this for me please? So
Mark: optimizers, if you’re thinking, you know, that homo economicus thing as an economic rational creatures, looking at what’s the benefit of this versus the cost of sort of maximizing utility?
For me, that is, um, as a maximizer.
Lisa: Okay.
Mark: A satisfier is someone who goes, will that do? And most of the decisions in most of our lives, including the big decisions that are being made on major investments are, is this good enough? We’ve been through the process to make ourselves feel better that we’ve got getting the best answer.
Is this gonna be okay? Yeah, it’s gonna be okay. Yeah. And we can post rationalize it. Go. You see, we went through the process and it’s really amazing. It’s gonna be really fantastic. It’s gonna be the best it’s ever been, but much of the time the decision has actually made as a [00:44:00] satisfies thing. And I mean, that’s why fame is so important in as much in business to business context as it is in business to consumer context.
It’s just so important. We know, oh yeah. Everyone else knows that this, of this one. So it’s just a short and it must be good if everyone else uses it. You know, that’s, that’s, you know, what you might call the, I’ll have what she’s having syndrome encapsulated there. If everyone else is having it, it must be okay.
Oh no, I won’t get fired for hiring IBM.
Matt: Yeah
Lisa: you’ve just. You’ve just triggered the horrible analogy that I haven’t used for ages about how I think the global financial crisis and securitization and the way things were packaged up and the way everyone was just doing stuff, and there was a handful of people who understood how it worked, feels very similar to how people are just using AI now.
So totally everyone else and how investors, investors are using ai, just got to get on with it. Everyone’s using it, and if we keep putting money into it, then everyone else will [00:45:00] keep using it. And nothing possibly can go wrong with this
Mark: clearly. Well, exactly. That’s, that’s why the bubble in ai in, in spent, you know, it’s, what is it?
Is it 40% of US stock value in the last year? Yeah.
Matt: 20% of gdp. DP in the US at the moment, data, 20%
Mark: of gdp, DP is data centers. It’s ridiculous. It’s absolutely ridiculous. And we all know where it ends. The question is not, it’s a Ponzi schema in that sense. We all know it’s not gonna end nicely for most people.
Yeah. Yes. Meanwhile, some people be over the hills with the money. Well, very few people
Matt: then. That’s the other thing. Very few
Mark: people, increasingly few people, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yes.
Matt: Back to the time thing.
Mark: Yep.
Matt: When’s the book coming? Mark? I’ve been waiting for this for years. Well, I, and I know I need to be able to deal with
Mark: me too. Me too, Matt. Me too, Matt. Well, um, good question. So I’ve, I’m writing the, the heard one with this herd spotting
Matt: book.
Mark: At the [00:46:00] moment, soon as we’re done with that in fact, before I’m done with that, ’cause I’ll get bored, I will be, um, resurrecting that that proposal and getting it to a bunch of new publishers, because I just think it’s really useful.
It’s evolved over time from being something that was quite theoretical to something, which is I think, really tangible the way that you are. Remember Lisa, I was talking about when we met in Bavaria. It was very much about how we live our lives. You know, it started with me talking about, uh, I, I called it Now Stop the clocks.
That, that scene from, um, four weddings. When John Hannah lost his partner, the very loud, very very gregarious Gareth has died a heart attack. And it’s this moment in the movie, which is the turning point that Greeks call it the Agnan Anagnorisis. When the hero realizes what his real quest is, when Hugh Grant’s character realizes what love looks like, John Hannah is standing there in a church in a cold, damp church.
Damp church was in [00:47:00] West Thur. As it happens. That’s a bit of a geek information for you that you’ll never forget. And he’s lost for words like I have been, you know, I’ve had to deliver three eulogies in five years of people who are really close to my wife, my godfather, and my father. Now. Please God, that you don’t have to do that.
And no one listening to this and neither you two has to do that. It’s hard, but it’s also important, that moment in the movie ’cause clocks that dominate so much of our lives that are so important in factory processes and in the way we think about our own productivity in our lives gonna be productive. A clock is just not a good enough container for what it is to be human.
That moments when you’re standing there in front of, there’s a coffee in there and there, the family and I’m broken about it. You know, you a clock and clock time is just not enough. It’s just not enough human life. And what matters to us [00:48:00] is far more important than stuff, than we measure by a clock.
And I think we went wrong some 250 years ago when we still start clocks in factories, that really has dominated all of our culture. It’s just not ’cause time is money. Right. Franklin said that. But so I think it’s really important to accept that other ways of being human and living in time differently will create or allow us to see the real values of what we’ve got.[00:49:00] [00:50:00]
Lisa: Gosh, we have covered some subjects in this conversation. I knew we would, but we’ve gone from time travel to mi We didn’t use the phrase minimum viable product, but I think we’ve basically touched on that. AI got a look in existential crises maybe as well as financial ones. There’s so much to think about and it, it did make, it did remind me also of a few years ago when I was in Sydney at the step two conference.
One of the exercises we did there was. What would you like someone to read about you at your 65th birthday party? Which for some people was in a couple of years time, and in other people it was like, whoa, this is quite a far in the future. Like, not thinking about your eulogy, but thinking about how, yeah, how, how do you want to be currently remembered in the future?
You know, what, how do you want to be celebrated and [00:51:00] how would that cha would that change how you’re living your life? And I, it really stuck with me as well, as well as yours did. Mark. But so thinking about more recently, uh, or not recently, thinking about the future coming back to the present now and then the next week or so, and actually week or so, probably extends to the end of the year.
Given that this is being recorded in early to mid-December, what’s coming up for you in the next week or so? Matt?
Matt: For me this is the week of being sociable. I have got an evening out tomorrow night which has been organized by Julia Hospo. Then on Wednesday I am going to be potentially meeting up with some of my former colleagues at Microsoft and then going to meet my old school and university mates for our Christmas gathering.
And then on Thursday [00:52:00] I’ll be meeting up briefly with. This is at the end of the day, this is, you know, there’s work and stuff as well. We’re reaching up with um, an old student of my father’s who I’ve done work bits and Bob Sco called Richard Hale, who’s one of the leading exponents of action learning in the uk.
So he’s got a group of people gathering. So I’m pop to see him at the RSA and then go to our work Christmas party. ’cause I haven’t made it for the last two years. And then we might be meeting up with friends on Friday, in which case on Saturday I’ll probably not be worth the price of admission. But, um, uh, so that’s, I’m looking forward to it, but I’m also slightly daunted by it.
That’s my week ahead.
And how about. You Mark, what have you got coming up? Well, I’m gonna do a bit of time travel. My ambition is on Saturday, I’m going to go to the Monaco Christmas Fair, monocle Magazine, Christmas Fair. [00:53:00] Um, where’s that? Emma Ne Emma Nelson. It’s in their offices in Marla Band. On Saturday and Sunday.
Mark: Emma Nelson, who we’ve all met at Friend of Marcus’s, she does the brilliant media training there at the Speaky Summit. She is a presenter on Monocle Radio and, uh, so I’m gonna catch up with her there. That’s if I live that long. I think that’s the thing. I’ve got a very busy week and, and this is the last week when any sensible decisions get made.
I think in work, there’s lots of work to do after that. That’s the last time sensible decisions. Yeah. So working back from that, I’ve got my wife’s best friend coming to stay on Thursday night and she will be. Telling me how to decorate my house for Christmas, which is good. She’s brilliant.
Jamie Cooper, wonderful lady. And then Wednesday I’m going to I’m looking forward to, this is again, evening. I’m looking forward to going to the actors carols at the Actors Church in Con Garden. There’s a, something that one of our chums from, uh, the No Names group, Matt is um, is organized there, but tomorrow night is when Christmas, it’s the first [00:54:00] time I get to cry at Christmas stuff and sing Christmas songs.
I’m going to the Old Vic with a bunch of friends. We go most years to see the Christmas Carol Connection. It’s Carol, which is the same production, I think it’s the eighth or ninth year. They’ve actually had the same production. They’d swap in a new star every year. And that will be that will be my moment of going, yeah, Christmas is here.
Matt: Amazing. Lovely. I keep, um. I keep saying to the family, we need to get that on the list for next year. So I, they’re definitely gonna try to make that onto, and no spoilers. It all
Mark: ends well, Matt. It’s fine. That gets together, you know. That’s it.
Matt: Yeah. Um, Lisa, how about you? What’s your, um, week ahead looking like?
Lisa: Well, um, again, the week that’s just gone, I missed Mark’s amazing gig ’cause I had my annual, my new annual newish annual tradition of Crispus, where I host a crisp tasting in my local pub. And it’s Christmas is the best festive limited edition flavor. Crisp, [00:55:00] like potato crisp, not twiglets. That’s for the alternative crisps message that’s coming up in a couple of weeks.
Um, so I had a, I had quite a crispy hangover on Friday because it turns out the salt in that as is as bad as drinking. Even more beer than I actually had. So this week it’s still quite a social week. I’ve got, um, the International Association of Business Communicators monthly year drinks, but the festive version of that on Wednesday, I’ve got a freelancers meetup, which is the festive version, um, in Elephant and Castle on Thursday.
I might, I just trying to survive to the weekend. I don’t think we’ve got a lot on this weekend. And I think that’s probably for the best ’cause there’s still lots of Christmas admin that needs to be done and, uh, yeah, I, I completely hear you about the decisions. Like, there’s plenty, there’s lots of work still [00:56:00] going on, but I, it kind of feels like the week of the 15th feels already, like it’s gonna be a bit of a.
Just a wrapping up or a write off one of the two, maybe somewhere. A writing for
Mark: some of us writing.
Lisa: Yes. There we go.
Matt: Wonderful. Well, I think that brings us to the end of this show the end of, uh, the last show of 2025. And which means that we now have just 10 months of WB 40 until we hit our 10th birthday, which is a remarkable thing.
But that’s in October next year, so you take this to all the way forward to there. We won’t be back next week. We won’t be back until January. We’ve got some guests booked in for January. So before then mark, thank you so much for coming on the shows.
Mark: You’re welcome. It’s been a pleasure. Real pleasure.
Lovely to see you both.
Matt: And Lisa, as ever, an absolute joy to be able to, uh, present with you.
Lisa: Ah, likewise.
Matt: And we will be back in 2026 a year. So Unfeasibly in the [00:57:00] future. That surely by now we will have jet packs. Uh, have a great Christmas end of year break and we’ll see you in the new year.
Mark: Thank you for listening to WB 40. You can find us on the [00:58:00] internet@wbfortypodcast.com and on all good podcasting platforms. Share, share, share.