Mark Earls on Herds & Change

Mark Earls is HERDmeister at HERD, his independent behavioral consultancy based in London. He previously served as Chair of Ogilvy’s Global Planning Council, Planning Director at St Luke’s Communications, and Head of Planning at Bates Dorland. He is the author of several influential books on behavior and creativity, including Herd: How to Change Mass Behaviour by Harnessing Our True Nature, I’ll Have What She’s Having, Copy, Copy, Copy, and Welcome to the Creative Age.

I start all these conversations with the same question, which I borrowed from a friend of mine. She helps people tell their story, and I fell in love with the question because it was so big. But because it’s big, I tend to over-explain it—the way I’m doing right now. So before I ask it, I want you to know that you’re in total control. You can answer or not answer in any way you want to. The question is: Where do you come from?

Very good question. Where do I come from? That can be answered in lots of ways, and I think that tells us a lot about how I—and we—are.

So I come from... My parents were the first out of the working class into education in their families. They both worked hard to get us a good education, and I got a scholarship. I found myself actually very lucky to have had that kind of education as a foundation. So that’s where I come from.

Education has been my family’s escape from the working class, and, as it happens, that was probably a good call. The working class that existed at the time my parents were born was based in heavy industry—which is now gone.

And where were you?A family all from South Wales. Coal and steel. My dad had a choice at 14: would he stay on at the grammar school, the high school, or would he take the pair of steel toe-capped boots that his father got him for his job down at the steel mill? That was his choice. He chose grammar school.

Wow.

Right, which was always a matter of tension between him and his family. It wasn’t the proper thing—sitting around reading books and smoking cigarettes. That’s not the proper way. Anyway, so that’s one strand of me.

Another strand is that I was exposed from very early on to other cultures. My mother was a languages teacher, and I spent the time of puberty—before and after—on railways going across Europe to visit friends of the family or to do language courses. I studied languages at university, and I’ve mostly failed to use them—apart from a couple of German girlfriends.

So my view has always been one of curiosity toward people. Not from a psychological perspective, I think—but from a cultural perspective. That’s turned out to be really important to me.

I’ve always been interested in neuroscience. I was the first person who really started talking about Damasio in the ad world. Later on, people like Wendy Gordon started bringing that into market research and insights. I brought some of that through—and, I’m afraid, I introduced Rory Sutherland to Kahneman. That’s on me.

You’ve got the Rory Sutherland-mobile now. But for me, culture is the thing. People are amazing. They live with shared beliefs, practices, and rituals. Culture is what makes us who we are. That’s where I come from—a view of human beings shaped by culture.

There’s a photograph from a family album. I must be six or seven. My younger brother and sister are behind me on one of those fiberglass kids’ slides in the backyard. And I’m in front of them, doing jazz hands.

I’ve always been someone who’s just really excited about the world—very positive. And when I’ve encountered some of the more cognitive-science-based views of human behavior in business and culture lately, I’ve been dismayed. There’s this disappointment at humanity’s inability to be rational.

But we are amazing, extraordinary creatures—even the worst of us. Extraordinary. And that’s how I approach the problems I see.

That’s so—my God, you said so much. So many things. And of course, I remember you putting these concepts forward. It was the first time I ever encountered them. I love what you just said in distinguishing between the kind of—is it sort of a culture of disappointed cognitive psychologists? That framing of our way of being in the world as a failure to be reasonable?

Exactly. Our way of being in the world is amazing. Not all of us get it right, and all of us don’t get it right some of the time.

The world—we are constantly renegotiating it. But we are still extraordinary.

Absolutely extraordinary. If you think of one of the classic desert island questions: if you were marooned on a desert island, how would you get on? Could you build a shelter? Probably it would be a bit crap, honestly. But I could probably knock something together. Maybe it wouldn’t last a monsoon or a tornado, but it could be okay.

Could you catch fish? I probably could. Could you build heating? No. Do you understand how the internal combustion engine works? Yeah, I guess so. Could you make one? No.

All of these things—this know-how—we depend on so many other people to make our lives work. It’s like each of us stands at the front of an army of human history. It’s just amazing when you look at it that way. The stuff that we don’t have to think about individually because humanity—and its culture, its storing and transmission of knowledge across generations and geographies—is just amazing.

No other species does that. It’s amazing.

It really is. And it occurs to me—I’ve struggled with this too—that all the language around the unconscious and irrational... I always return to Lakoff. I think at some point he called it “imaginative reason.” That felt like the one time I encountered a framing of our decision-making, our behavior, as something positive and beautiful and celebratory.

It is amazing. I’ve been lucky enough to do some collaboration with an academic based at the University of Kentucky, Professor Alex Bentley. We did a book together called I’ll Have What She’s Having. He’s an anthropologist and archaeologist. Mike O’Brien is another American archaeology professor. Their take on humanity is that our species is successful because of cultural evolution—our ability to store and spread information, knowledge, and know-how.

You don’t have to think every day, “Now, how do I light a fire again?” You can just look: “Oh, that’s how he does it. Let’s do that.” My shorthand is learned from over there and from here and from my own practice. I don’t have to think about it.

That cultural evolution—culture itself—is the thing that makes us different. Yes, our brains are amazing and our bodies are amazing too. Cognitive abilities are what they are, and they’re particularly suited for the lives we lead. But it’s our cultural capacity that’s the extraordinary bit.

Do you remember a younger you? As a boy, what did you want to be when you grew up?

Very good. I wanted to be a vet—a veterinarian. That’s what I wanted to be. I’ve always loved animals. I have my lovely Irish terrier sitting on the sofa here now, guarding us, making sure no one interrupts our interview. I’ve always loved animals, dogs in particular.

I kept fish as a teenager. I think that was partly a distraction from my parents, partly from the troubles of puberty. Tropical fish—not unusual, is it? I’ve always loved the outdoors. Fishing was something I learned early on, and I loved it. I thought that would be a thing.

My uncle was a chemist, a professor of chemistry, and he was sort of a role model for me. So I must have, in my head, combined the two things. It’s a science-y thing, even though I’m absolutely rubbish at—I struggled. I wasn’t rubbish. I struggled to get what I needed to in those subjects at high school. I was looking for something to combine the two.

Yeah. So what are you doing now? Where are you, and what are you up to now?

I’m based in London. I do a combination of three things. First, I’m writing and thinking—writing and thinking about this amazing thing that is humanity. I’m championing a couple of things right now, to be honest. One of them is my core thesis, which I call the “herd thesis.”

It’s provocatively named because no one wants to be part of a herd—unless you’re a fan of that U.S. college football team called The Herd. But apart from that, the idea is that we’re not a “me” species. That’s probably where we first made contact, around that idea.

The other thing I’m thinking about is how we think about time. It’s another cultural thing I think we’ve got wrong. I did a TED Talk on that this year and I’m looking to write a book about it next year. That’s a lot of fun. We can talk about that.

Basically, I’m trying to share—I’m trying to tease out better maps of humanity. If you want to navigate the world, you need a good map. But if you want to navigate change, you need a really good map. And I’m trying to help enable that.

So I’m writing and talking about that as well. I’ve also done a couple of really interesting projects this year, including one with an extraordinary contact lens business. I know nothing about that—I love spectacles, and I think anything that goes in the eyes is an abomination. But they were amazing people. And I was helping them understand how humanity really works—giving them better context for trying to solve problems and turning that into things they can test. That’s incredibly rewarding.

So I do that kind of thing too. We talked a little before we started about doing this work in the nonprofit space. What kinds of questions do people come to you with?

I call them tells—like in a poker game. Whatever the question is, people show tells. They say things like, “The innovation pipeline is so dull,” or, “It’s empty,” or, “Why are my people so slow? Why can’t we have good ideas? Why does nothing we try work?”

So I come in as the person who knows about human behavior and explain why things are as they are, and how to unlock that. Not as a personal coach, though sometimes I do that unofficially within organizations. I help people identify and solve their own problems using human behavior.

I’m curious about how you feel things have changed in this regard. I remember encountering your work when the ideas were really new. You introduced them in a very real way in the marketing community. I think I was probably young enough to believe that once we knew better, we’d all shift into a new way of being and operating. But growing older makes you realize that doesn’t happen. But, maybe that’s unfair?

No, I think it’s fair. And I think it’s an opportunity to learn. One of the points I’ve made—perhaps unwittingly—is that telling people the answer, revealing the facts, very rarely creates change. And it’s frustrating because that’s what our culture is coded for—particularly in the Anglo-Saxon world: North America, Northern Europe. We believe if you give people information and data, they’ll clearly do the right thing.

You see this mistake in politics, healthcare, and policymaking. Just tell people the thing and they’ll do it. Or worse, tell them the thing and give them a reason. That also doesn’t work.

Essentially, my creed says that both as individuals and groups—this is a paraphrase of a paraphrase I made of Kahneman, which has now been attributed to Kahneman, which I love—humans are to thinking as cats are to swimming. We can do it if we really have to, but we’d rather not and will do anything to avoid it. So making people think—that hurts.

Yes, it really does.

That’s if we’re talking about individuals. But individuals exist in networks. And those networks, and the relationships between individuals, are what keep things as they are. That’s what sustains the status quo. And we rarely ask that question: Why are things the way they are?

We imagine people are isolated. Give them the right information—about smoking, heart health, whatever—and they’ll change. But we know from things like 12-step programs, despite criticisms of their spiritual side, that there’s some efficacy in the fact that they pull people out of one network and place them into another.

People don’t change because of information. They change because they’re removed from the environment that sustains the behavior and given a new one.

I was a smoker for years. I worked on smoking cessation programs. I knew exactly how damaging it was. Did that make me stop? No. I knew all the information. We’d step outside meetings and say, “That was hard,” while lighting up. It’s just crazy, right?

Yes.

So I think the biggest thing is that when you tell people something, it doesn’t create change. You have to help them change. You have to engage. That’s where a lot of my consulting lies now—helping people understand why the network is as it is and how it keeps things in play. Then we work with the network to change it.

To what degree did social media affect that? Because you were talking about this stuff way before social media. Did it deliver?

We thought it would. I just posted something about what I call “digital medievalism.” We thought the social media revolution—the Cluetrain Manifesto guys, these visionaries—was going to democratize. It would liberate us. It would create a new Enlightenment where facts would matter more than authority.

For a time, it felt like that. But it doesn’t anymore. It feels like a hate factory. That’s partly because of how the tech companies designed it. But also because of us.

We’re not rational calculators. The scientific method is a cultural artifact—a process that allows us not to defer to authority or preference, but to arrive at something more reliable. We need that in the public space. Social media was supposed to offer that, but it didn’t.

Every once in a while, a new platform pops up and promises it will be different and better—Substack, Bluesky, whatever. But absolute freedom creates a torrent of abuse. Group biases kick in quickly. Us vs. them. Selective perception. All of it. That’s where we are now.

So social media has actually failed in its dream and is making the world worse, to be honest.

What does The Herd Thesis have to say in 2025 about where we go from here?

First, we have to accept that this individual-focused idea we have—that individuals are the ultimate unit of human action and value—is just wrong. We are social creatures—first, foremost, and last.

Once we accept that, we begin to see that what matters are our connections: how we’re connected, who we’re connected to, what we share, what we do together. That’s the general policy direction. And we need to be aware that when someone draws a line between “us” and “them,” that’s exactly what they’re doing. We need to see it clearly.

There’s an example in my next book. A verbal tick that appears in African-American vernacular, Caribbean dialects, and some UK dialects—swapping “ask” for “axe.” I was sitting in a coffee shop and heard a well-dressed, articulate woman say, “I resent that I have to effing axe for everything.”

It wasn’t the swearing that struck me. It was “axe.” I realized I had an internal bias—that it signaled lower education, lower class. It made me stop. I went and looked it up. Turns out, it’s entirely legitimate. It appears in Chaucer, in the King James Bible, even in Shakespeare.

Calling it an African-American vernacular feature, or a dialect thing, is just patronizing. It’s how we mark boundaries—who’s in and who’s out. We do that kind of thing constantly without realizing it. If we don’t recognize that, we lose our ability to choose.

We’ve seen this in the UK recently, with a knife incident, for example. People jump over themselves to assert their side’s narrative.

I remember reading The Cluetrain Manifesto too. Didn’t they say that everything was going to become a conversation?

“Markets are conversations” was the great phrase.

But yes, it’s been weaponized. That’s the dark side of the herd thesis.

And we have to accept both the good and the bad. Someone once asked me, “Should we just keep this for the good guys? Should you be selling this to corporations?” No. Everyone needs to know this is how we are. Because it’s not just a tool for corporations or politics to exploit us. It’s something we can use to reconfigure our lives.

I have a provocative question, and I’m going to put you on the spot. Here in the States, there’s a lot of conversation about misinformation and disinformation. And there’s something about that framework that seems really, like, incorrect. Can you help me understand why it feels the way it does?

Yeah, I think the misinformation, I think, is a really, it’s a really interesting thing. And it’s very separate from disinformation.

But misinformation is probably, let’s call it careless sharing of things that are not precisely true, for other purposes—whether it’s to signal to the group that you’re part of it, to point the group towards a particular action, to challenge someone who’s outside of the group, whatever it might be, right? That’s the reasons individuals in the network do it. I think that underneath it is this idea that information is the answer. Which is just not true, right?

Yes.

Yes. Information is not the answer. Information is part of the answer, but information is always colored and flavored.

But it does—and it assumes some world of perfect information. A world where nobody is ever wrong. Where we all agree, implicitly, that we are correct. And you—who are a social being, sharing things to strengthen your relationships—are the one who is supposedly incorrect.

Absolutely.

It’s not incorrect. It’s just a form of cultural behavior.

Yeah. I mean, one of the things I do is, if you turn the sounds down, right, and you go, so what kind of behavior is this that’s going on here? You could do it as god puppets, right, even. And that’s quite—so re-enact a conversation, go, what was going on there? And it’s not because I want people to be psychoanalysts, but to understand that actually this is not about the thing that’s being said.

Oh. Can you say more about this?

Yeah. So very often—so there’s a great guy, Paul Watzlawick, Austrian-American. I think he was a psychoanalyst. And he wrote an almost impenetrable book back in the ’60s called The Pragmatics of Human Communication. I don’t know if you know it.

Yeah, I do.

Okay, so Watzlawick—and I waded through it—but there’s a chunk of it which is really valuable, right? When he says there are broadly two kinds of human communication. There’s what he called digital, which is a bit confusing for us nowadays, but he was in the ’60s, which is information-based stuff. So I’m transferring information from me to you.

That’s a sort of standard kind of thing that we understand. It’s all very powerful and strong in our culture, that idea.

And he said there’s another bit, another kind of communication, which he calls phatic—P-H-A-T-I-C, phatic. And that’s about the relationship between you and me.

And I think that’s the bit we ignore because you can’t easily digitize it. You can’t easily quantify it. And it doesn’t look like information in any way. So it can’t be important. So our culture screens that out. But that is much more important than you think.

I do a thing—and if you see this on my website—I do a talk about how communication really works. And the first bit of it is me standing on stage for two and a half minutes not saying anything.

And the audience feels really uncomfortable. And they then read into me and my standing there all kinds of s**t.

So, I mean, the guy who—Morty, who’s one of—who’s the UK’s leading audience, TV audience research guy. He’s an amazing dude. I looked at my watch and Morty said out loud to the crowd, he says, it’s like you were the teacher telling us off because we were late back from lunch.

Oh, wow.

I was just looking at my watch, to be honest, to check what time it was, how long I’d been standing there. So it’s no big deal. I wasn’t saying anything, but they heard me.

Because the relational stuff is there. They picked up—imagine the information there, which is a whole other thing. We need to think about the audience first. But I think that split between digital and phatic is really, really, really important.

So this is part of the information-heavy world. And I think we know enough about that. It fits neatly with our engineering, factory mindset that has dominated—has built the British century and now the American century. And maybe the Chinese one after that. But information is not all of what it is to be human. It’s only a very small part.

And our interaction with each other and our ability to decide things is not based on information. And that’s part of why we’re brilliant. So ignoring this huge chunk is, I think, a mistake.

There’s something a little torturous about being, I guess, feeling attached to the institutions that I’m attached to, that they are very often run by people who are incapable of accepting this reality. And they really operate in the information space. And I think maybe a generation before it was OK to kind of say, hey, listen, there’s the commercial world out there. They get to do their marketing stuff. But we’re doing the grown-up—we’re doing the grown-up official stuff up here. So we deal in information and facts and that stuff.

That’s been my experience where I feel like they very often—I’ve been—we talked about this before—I’ve been sort of the marketing guy with activist organizations who don’t want to accept responsibility for communicating into an environment, into culture, basically. How do you communicate with them? Does my diagnosis feel accurate to your experience?

Yeah, no, I think that rings a lot of bells for me. So here’s an example. I love the activist mentality because you want to do something rather than just talk about it. And part of what motivates the feedback loop that motivates that is that people talk about what we’ve done. And some of the guys go, yeah, right on. And sometimes you upset your mother-in-law. That’s what you’re trying to do, right? And those stout patrons of the local church will be horrified by what you’ve done. That’s a buzz for you, right? And you as a group of people, look what we’ve done. We’ve upset the past.

So yeah, let’s accept that action is a good thing and the feedback on that is really good. But what’s hard is that if you think from your—whether you’re corporate or you’re an activist organization—if you think about you being responsible for how the world is, you’re being unrealistic. The world is as it is because of things outside, people outside, relationships outside. You need to work with and twist those relationships in order to make the thing happen.

You need to be interested in that to start with. But mostly people in activist organizations are interested in the debate about, would this be the best way to say it? Or would this be the priority we should really go for? Should it be solar over wind? And if so, how do we fund that? We think it’s the perfect way to do it. It’s just irrelevant, honestly.

It’s what them out there think. How can you unpick it for them? How can you help them want to do this, do whatever it is? How do you make them want to embrace this? How do you help them to put it in their hands to make change?

I am curious about—I remember you had the purpose idea, right? In these conversations and talking about two things, brand and then research and the implication. So you had the purpose idea. When did you discover brand? How do you feel about that word in 2025?

Well, let’s see. I think it’s just heavily overblown, like a lot of things in the world of marketing. I suggested it originally as one way to think about how you might pull a community of people inside or outside the organisation together to point in the same direction. That’s what it was, right?

Also, that I recognise that most jobs are what the late David Graeber called b******t jobs. Most people really just carrying on because it’s the paycheck and I’ve got kids in school and I’ve got to make the monthly rent or whatever, my mortgage, you know. It’s not that this is the meaning of their lives. Give people what the Lord John Browne, who used to run BP, used to call—and I worked with him—the volunteer margin. Give them that extra bit of something if they’re inside the organisation to believe in.

Equally, if you look outside the organisation, people are desperate for meaning, as my old buddy Hugh MacLeod from Gapingvoid famously scribbled. They’re desperate for meaning and a sense in their lives and a sense that somebody has a cause that they can be part of or is aligned with their—you know, so they’re desperate for that. So use it if it’s relevant. And that’s the kicker, right? Because it’s mostly not.

You have to choose, is this the time to do this or not? Is this where you’re going to bet the farm or not? Now, when the brilliant Silvia Lagnado and the team at Ogilvy London and Frankfurt reinvented Dove and the Real Beauty campaign way back—20 years ago now—that was an amazingly brave thing. And they navigated both Ogilvy’s internal barriers and the external barriers at Unilever, brilliantly. There was an extraordinary thing. They used purpose there because the brief was, unless you can make this a $2 billion brand—that’s Silvia’s brief—unless you can make it a $2 billion brand, we’re going to sell it.

Oh, wow.

So how can you make it a $2 billion brand? They looked around the landscape and realized—so noisy, hard to tell them apart, blah, blah, blah. And then looked over the other side to consumers, and basically young women felt awful about their bodies because of the way the beauty industry was doing and because of the way they were dealing with each other. So that’s the opportunity. So we can put purpose in there.

It also—then you do it. So it’s appropriate, right? It’s relevant. It’s timely. But if everyone does purpose, then it’s just nonsense. And very quickly, the world sees through it.

Yes.

And it becomes a half-hearted thing. We’re in the first week of November here in the UK, and there’s charity for men’s health. Movember is big here. I don’t know if it is where you are. But men stop drinking and grow a ‘tache for the month of November. And they’re not allowed to grow a beard. You have to have a ‘tache only. I mean, particularly embarrassing. That’s the point. Now that’s something nice to be part of, right? It’s kind of nice to be part of that.

But you don’t want it every day, most people. It’s quite hard for most people to do it most of the time. Even people who work in things like crisis aid or on the front line of things like domestic violence or homelessness or whatever—wherever they are in the world—they can’t live that all the time. They have to have other things in their lives, otherwise they burn up. And some people manage it better than others, but you can’t be the only thing. Lots of people have things that matter to them that aren’t their purpose. I think it’s just overblown and oversold.

Can I just say, if you have a chance though, can I just put this up? This is the bandana that my dog is wearing through November. For Cancer Research UK, we’re walking 60 miles together in this month to raise money on cancer research because cancer is something that affected my life and my family’s life and many friends. Now, that’s a purpose for a small part of my life. If my life was dedicated to cancer, I wouldn’t be able to deal with it. I’m not an oncologist.

You know there’s that terrible thing amongst surgeons and doctors and healthcare workers generally who see death regularly. They just have this strange dissociation from it. Sometimes it’s gallows humour and sometimes it’s just sick. But they have to survive because that can’t be it. So we can’t have a purpose all the time. In business and in behaviour change, it’s useful sometimes. But not for everything all the time.

Yeah, I realise that my question—because I remember the purpose ideas animating brand in a way that was really interesting to me—that my question associated it with the madness around social mission and all the confusion the past 15 years. And that wasn’t my intent at all with the question.

No, no, nor me.

Okay. But do you understand where I’m coming—

Yeah, yeah, no, totally. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Because I’ve—yeah, because—and so, what do I want to ask now? Yeah, it just felt like—was that a conversation that happened a lot? How did you feel over the past several years? I just—it’s just a bit—maybe I’m being oversensitive.

No, no, no, I think it’s fair. I think we need to own up to our mistakes. And I think that I allowed myself to be misunderstood, and the other people took it too seriously. It’s like, you know, that if someone comes to you with a problem, do you give them the same solution every time? I mean, for me, that’d be tedious, right?

Yeah.

I’ve got a correlate with that, which might lead us in a slightly different place, which is I’m obsessed with triage at the moment.

Yeah, tell me.

Asking what kind of problem this is so that you can solve it better. And I find myself repeatedly saying to my clients, don’t be House. Don’t try to be House. You know, the guy in the - the Hugh Laurie character. Don’t be House. House deals with the 0.01% of cases that no one else can solve. The rest of the team very rapidly triage and say, it’s this kind of problem. Therefore, this is the treatment path.

Right.

And they have quite a lot of types of problem they can identify, right? Because they’re really good. We should be doing that when we’re looking at an activist organization, a behaviour change community conversation, or whether it’s in corporations generally. I think we should be saying what kind of problem is this? It’s one of the things that in my change consulting workshops we focus a lot on. And I’ve even created an acronym for it: Why are things as they are? WATATA.

Nobody spends any time bothering to do that. Why are things as they are? Explore that. Spend time triaging, digging around, triaging. So yeah, oh, things are as they are because of that.

Allows us to say we’ve seen that before over here in this other situation. And what we did there, what we learned from doing that was this. Okay, so let’s take that learning and apply back here. Instead, we go, this is a problem that needs a House-type genius to solve.

No, it doesn’t. It needs smart thinking, triaging, and accessing the knowledge of the rest of humanity, to be honest, but there we are.

We have just a few minutes left, and I’m wondering what would you want people to know about your work? Or what does the herd thesis ask of leaders, of marketers, of people wanting to make change?

So one of the interesting—one thing I think leaders need to think about, or anyone who wants to lead change, I think is true, is recognize that change—as status, the status quo—is a product of us. It’s a team game.

It’s not about heroic individuals, which is the way the story always goes, right? After the fact we say, and I did this, and I did that, and all the case studies go, and then the insights team discovered this bit, or then the strategic planners did this, or then the blah, blah, blah, and you go, no, it’s not that. It’s us. We together solve these problems. We together make this happen. We together keep things as they are, because that’s sometimes a really good objective, right? How do we manage this so that we don’t lose? That’s a good way. But we do it together. We come to that conclusion, and then we execute it together.

So I think that’s the first thing, is to recognize that whether it’s change or status, both are team games, and you as a leader there are part of the team. It’s not you. And it not being about you is, I think, really kind of an interesting thing for a leader to ponder.

The second thing I think that—and we haven’t talked much about the time thing in this—but I think the other thing that leaders need to start to do is to help organizations prototype the future repeatedly. Not make it like something you do once a year on the off-site or allocate an innovation team or give McKinsey a bunch of hundred thousand dollars or a hundred million dollars or something. You need to do it yourself.

You need to constantly be going, where are the things that could be better in this organization or outside in its customers or its end consumers? Where are the things that we might solve for the problems they’ve got? Constantly going, would that make a difference? Would that make a difference? Would that make a difference? Constantly doing that, because that is the way to prepare yourself for stuff—opportunities that come.

And opportunities will come that you don’t imagine. You need to get ready for them rather than predict them and sort of eagle-eyed, you know, like one of those—remember from the old, these are those ’80s Superman-type movies—there’d be a guided missile that went upstream.

Literally to the target. Really? That’s not how you get ready for the future. You don’t try and predict it. You identify many possible things and then prepare for it. Work out what you have to do.

So I think that future leadership is a key part of leadership. It’s not an option. It’s not an option. Things keep changing really quickly and they will not change any more slowly and will not become any less difficult to deal with.

So you have to prepare. I tell an anecdote to just land this one. Jude Bellingham, who plays for Real Madrid, an English soccer player—in the England team, always really mediocre at soccer tournaments—you’d think they’d be better, but no. And they’re about to be kicked out by Slovakia, the mighty Slovakia. It was three years ago now in the Euros. And in the 96th minute—so six minutes into overtime—England were one nil down, and a ball came across, frantic, and Bellingham executed a perfect overhead cycle, bicycle kick. Kicked the ball over his own head into the top corner, right? Amazing. A miracle.

Truth is, that was not the first time he tried that in his life. He’d practiced for that scenario. Not precisely that—as in England would be about to go out of a tournament—but that situation: ball comes to him in that position, that he could do that.

And that’s what elite sports people do. They prepare for lots of different scenarios. And that’s what real—that real excellence in elite sport is actually about. It’s preparing so you don’t have to think.

If you have an organization, it takes forever for the organization to do anything. You can’t just press the button in the CEO’s office and go, right, here we go. We’re doing this. That’s the new strategy.

Executing takes forever. So get the organization executing before it needs to. And some of those—it’s like bets, right? Across a horse race. You need to bet on them all. Where you put your money will tell you whether you make any money out of it ahead of the day. And you go, okay, this isn’t working. So let’s rip it out of there and put that money over here, which seems to be working. And now we need something in to solve this kind of—have anyone got anything? Let’s try that then. And you need to do that all the time.

So be a future-forward leader and it will allow you to deal with the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, as somebody once wrote.

That’s the stuff that we—that’s the stuff that leaders need to do. And I’ve got a third thing that’s really, that’s really important for everyone to remember: that in the end, it’s just people.

Numbers and technology and infrastructure and all of that are all great, but they’re all distractions from the basic difficult bit, which is people. Humans are extraordinary, but our world, our culture, and our business culture—and the leadership that we’ve trained through business schools and so on, whether it’s in marketing or in general management—is really good at engineering, information, technology. It’s really bad at humans.

And I don’t mean get the HR department out. I mean humans—how humans work. How do you interact with each other? How do you get a group of people to do something? How do you understand what matters to them? And how do you help the team then to deliver against that stuff?

Again and again and again. That’s really hard because we’re not trained for it. The good thing is, we’re brilliant at it as a species. So let’s go back to that stuff. I’d like to cut business school curricula in half and put half of it on the human stuff.

My next question was going to be about—if you have time—I remember I always tell this story. I’m sure you know Grant McCracken.

Oh, I know Grant very well. Yeah, yeah.

I remember he wrote that book, Chief Culture Officer, and I remember him privately telling me this. I say it out loud all the time, so please forgive me, Grant. But him saying that the corporation—in the way that he uses that term—saw that title and they see the word culture and they think of themselves. Do you know what I mean?

Yeah.

And so there’s a narcissism within the corporation that makes it impossible to see the culture outside, which is what you’re always pointing everybody at.

How do you—if somebody, so a leader says, hey, I hear everything you’re saying, but how do I learn about culture? How do I go out there in order to get the information I need in order to prototype the future? What kinds of guidance?

So there are three or four things that we can do—and I’m not going to mention all our fabulous friends and colleagues in the insights world, particularly. You know, they are great, right? But I’m not going to talk about particular people, and they don’t get the respect that they deserve, I think, in corporations, and that’s a real problem.

One. Now, one thing I do is I teach people to actually meet face-to-face in the real world with their customers. And it sounds really simple. I call it a buddy interview.

Go speak to people. Go stand there. Stand there in the mall. If it’s a, you know, if it’s a healthcare intermediary, like a healthcare professional, go and meet the healthcare professional. Just ask them about what matters to them, what’s in their head, what’s going on for them. Not about you—about them. And just get that.

Then, second thing—and this is to do with all interactions with people—listen really carefully to the words. And note them. We’ll come back to the words in a moment, but also note the body language.

That’s—you know Dave, is it Dave McCaughan? The great Australian researcher, and I’m sure a qualitative researcher. I’m sure you’ve come across him. He’s a fantastic guy. He once told me that he, when he was a junior qualitative researcher doing focus groups across Australia, he was told, look at people’s feet. Look at the feet. Look at the feet. Because the feet tell you so much about what’s really going on.

What is it like to be that person? We have this amazing ability to be imaginatively empathetic. Step into their shoes. How do they feel the world? Listen to that stuff. Watch it. Feel it.

And I will say, when I was running ad agencies, I’d say to my teams, find something to like about our client and their customers. Find something—just something. Because it’s too easy to be cynical and push them away. Find something. What do you like about those guys? What is it that you really get that touches you? Hold on to that. Now use that as a sort of breakthrough point into the rest of their world.

There are ways of formally listening to the language, but write down the words that people use. Jill Arou, who’s a brilliant practitioner in the UK, has written a book called How We Do Things Around Here. And it’s just won a couple of business prizes in the UK—business book prizes. The Way We Do Things Around Here.

And I first worked with her years ago when she was doing great stuff with American Express. The words—she says there are three buckets. The words we use about us in here, and how we do what we do around here, reveal certain assumptions. The way we talk about the words we use and the way we talk about them out there—our customers—reveal an awful lot of assumptions we have about them. And then the way we talk about the way we interact with those people out there reveals an awful lot of assumptions. And that’s just a start point.

But if you listen really carefully—which you, as a great qualitative, you get this, right? Listen. Why is that a word? Why is that word? That’s really weird that you should be saying that. Why should you be so on edge? When I say the word customer, what’s that? What’s that about? Tell me about that. That’s really interesting.

So you don’t have to be an expert, like, in the language before you start. But the buddy interview—go meet people. Have scheduled time with buddies. Make sure that all of your executive have buddies they go and speak to all the time. It’s not a replacement for quantitative research, but it helps you with your empathetic imagination. So that’s that.

And I think the other thing is, bake in feedback really early on. So I do these rapid innovation streaks. Let’s imagine it takes three days. And at the end of three days, a team of 12 people have created six ideas to solve existing problems in the business and prototype them, right? They’ve done that by very early on checking their thinking and their understanding with a buddy in the audience. Everybody should be doing that all of the time. And those might take money out of our market research industry, but I don’t care. Because I think it’s crucial that we take people away from the corporation or the activist community and go, who are the people? And what’s their world like? And how do I make their world work to get the change I want to see?

So that’s that. And I think finally on this subject is—I think the—well, excuse me. Kate, what’s that audio? Sorry, that’s my construction guy. Let me—sorry, let me say that again.

The final thing is that we need to remember it’s not about us, and it’s not about the thing. It really isn’t.

There’s—I’m sure you know—the notion of a social object, which became quite interesting in the early days of the social web. And Malinowski—I think he was Polish—anthropologist, sociologist, did work in Oceania, so the Southern Pacific around the ’20s, I think it was. And he observed that the objects in the cultures he came across that were most prized were not prized because of their scarcity or because of the scarcity or value of the ingredients—their constituent parts—but by the way they were given away.

You know, it was called the Kula ring, was what he—this is an amulet essentially. And he watched that go around. He monitored that, described that.

And I think that’s really important—that many of the things that we think are most valuable and most important, many of the things that shape most of our lives, are valuable not because they’re valuable in themselves or because they’re scarce. It’s because of how they make us—allow us—to interact with other people.

So it’s not about us, and it’s not about the information. It’s not about the thing. It’s about each other.

Beautiful. Thank you so much for accepting the invitation. It was very generous, and thank you so much.

You’re welcome.

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