Transcript – WorkTogether – Episode 5 - Creative Thinking in Business Benjamin Ellis So welcome Simon. It is great to have you here and a really interesting topic today. I'm just going to get you to introduce yourself because you will do that way better than me. So for our listeners who are you and what do you do? Simon Bird OK. Thank you for having me. I'm Simon Bird and I'm the owner and director of Iclab, which is the innovation and creativity lab. It's a consultancy and I help businesses unlock new opportunities for growth and by tapping and harnessing their own capacity for creative thinking. That's what I specialize in. Benjamin Ellis You set the C word lots of times there. Uh, whenever somebody says creativity in business, I think I, I certainly I for me when I was early in my career the people around me would tend to think “oh now somebody's going to appear with like crayons and paintbrushes” or “oh it's time to get the marketing department.” And so there's kind of very strange view around creative thinking in business. So from your perspective what do we mean when we say creative thinking in the business context. Simon Bird Yeah, I know what you mean. It's those awful sort of one day brainstorming days where the most interesting thing that happens is getting to the bar at the end of it, isn't it? Benjamin Ellis That's the ones. Simon Bird I think creative thinking is a is a sort of innately human trait. You know, it's the way our brains work when presented with problems, and we use this capacity for creative thinking, solving problems, thinking our way through all the time. It's just, it's just natural to us. And it's very playful when we're young and very logical when we're older and in that process we tend to lose things in sort of sticking in the world of just judgment and logic. And so, yes, there are aspects of creative thinking that involve re-accessing, the playfulness of youth and using that to get at new ideas and new ways of thinking. But fundamentally it's about an ability to think and find solutions to, to problems. And I think it's relevant to business because sometimes it can be really hard when you're immersed in your own world and looking at your business and the day-to-day running of it. To look at a problem objectively and to recognize ways out of it that don't just rely on what you've done before, you can be sort of blinded, I suppose, by business and normality and pressure as well. So if you're desperately trying to get out of something, it can be harder to think your way out of it when you're under that kind of pressure. We resist new, even subconsciously, even the most sort of forward thinking people will step back from things that they find difficult or tricky to evaluate because we're using our knowledge and experience from before. And yet when you're dealing with the future and when you're thinking about what's to come and where you want your business to go, you've actually got to try and challenge some of your expectations and your established ways of thinking. And I think there's a big tendency to sort of assume that it's not right to have creativity and or every day in the business, it could be a bit chaotic. So you leave it to other people, you give it to the senior team on an away day as you alluded to with pens and things. Although I will mention pens later. But don't worry about that, coloured pens, or leave it to a creative agency or you'll do a that brainstorming thing or you'll leave it to the marketing team. But actually that's ignoring real opportunity because you've got such diversity of opinion and experience in the business. Different people doing different jobs and roles and you can use it to bring out all of their ideas quite quickly and quite simply. It doesn't need to be chaotic if you’ve got a process around it. And I think the final thing is actually it's a very safe way to start exploring and change. You don't actually have to commit to anything. You can just sort of play it out in your mind, play it out on paper or in a room using creative thinking techniques, so that you can start to see the direction that your business might take and what it might take to get it there. So I think as you say. When you get into creative thinking and you use those words in business, people instantly think of the coloured pens and take a big step back. But in reality, I think that's a missed opportunity. There should be stepping into it and thinking how could we use creative thinking in a way that is right for us and helps us think about the future and the direction we want to take our business in. Benjamin Ellis That is interesting. For people like me who come from an engineering background, we’re kind of educated into very linear thinking for the most part of kind of step by step. Everything's gonna be logical and backed by data. And that's a big part of what we do at socialoptic. But people often don't realize what we do day-to-day, although it's very rooted in data. Actually, we rely on creativity because we have to work out how to communicate what we've found, how to find solutions to really, really hard problems and that linear style of thinking can make that really hard because you follow step by step until you get to the brick wall and then you bang your head against it repeatedly. And quite often we see people stuck in that domain. And what? What gets people stuck like that? Education is kind of one thing. What, what blocks that kind of creative thinking in organizations or employees? Simon Bird I think it's very often hierarchy and that's the most obvious one to me in that you know, you as soon as you start talking about the future and the direction we want to take, you instantly look upwards in the chain of command. You know, what is the boss saying we have to do next? That's there responsibility, not mine. I just come to do my job for the day. There are, even if you're not in very structured or bureaucratic organizations, there are always power relationships at play in that, yes, you defer to the boss. I think it was some American study said that the most innovative companies out there said that they were pursuing loads of new ideas, but 97% of people in those studies agreed that they were all the bosses ideas. They weren't actually ideas that have come through the organization. I think questions of diversity arise that people feel less able to contribute. In some circumstances. And just the sheer pressure, I alluded to it earlier, of time and of delivering and the need to make stuff happen now can get in the way of people actually finding the space to think comfortably and that increases that pressure increases when perhaps performance isn't where you want it to be. So those would be the things that that I would say get in the way of using creativity and creative thinking in business on a day-to-day basis. Benjamin Ellis You’ve reminded me of an incident quite a few years ago now. I’d been kind of called in by the CEO and said if you've got a real problem with innovation in the organization and you know we used to be really innovative and that's kind of dried up. And my question to that to that CEO is what is your attitude to risk of failure? And he said “well that's very clear”. He said “I've really got clear on that in recent years” like “Failure is not acceptable, and we don't take risks.” Simon Bird Yes. And that message will filter down into the organization. And yeah, I get it. You've got to be able, you've got to be financially disciplined about running a business. It's a big responsibility. You've got to deliver on those promises. But actually, as I said earlier, when you get to thinking about the future, you're into a space where you're imagining and reimagining what could be or what might be. And that's when I think the use of creative thinking can help and stepping back from. This view that ‘risk free’ and ‘absolute control’ and ‘hitting the numbers’ and ‘no failure’ is gonna be counterproductive. Benjamin Ellis It's really interesting that you mention planning there because again, planning and creativity I think is definitely one of those intersections where people think, oh, well, those don't go together. I'm trying to manage all these risks and there's a very unpredictable world and I want to build a nice solid plan for us to go and execute on. So, talk to me about how does the creativity work in the planning domain. Simon Bird No, I think there's a difference between planning and forecasting. So I understand forecasting and I used to work in in businesses, large multinational FMCG organizations where I was responsible, as well as planning, for forecasting. So, I had to deliver a 3 month actually a 12 month rolling forecast from any point that we were in. So every month we did this and the next three months had to be firm and the outer months had to be. Not quite best guesses, but reasonable projections of the current run rate. That is what I think most businesses need to operate securely and successfully this quite predictable forecast. What it didn't do was help you when you realized the forecast wasn't going where you wanted it to go or where you needed to take some corrective action because you could see further ahead. Circumstances might or would change. So that's when I think you need to sort of step away from forecasting and say we're not doing this safe, predictable, no failure thing now, we're going to actually look at what's possible and what might be possible and how we want to change things. And I think planning is about. A direction of travel. It's not about “in two years time, we will be 6 times bigger and have this much profit and this many customers in this much market share”, although those are nice indicators of what success might look like. They are not the outcomes that you want. I think planning has to start with customers with what needs you’re trying to serve, how you're trying to meet those, what will be the challenges in doing that and how can you think around those and how you can develop solutions to meet those needs as best you can. So that's where I think the planning. Is different when you, when you look on that sort of scale, it's a little bit longer and it's about trying to say “Well we need to move in this direction, this is the way we want to go. This is consistent with our values and our aims and this is going to stand the best opportunity for us to get to the targets we need or want to achieve.” But quite honestly, we don't control the future. We don't control all those inputs. There's too much variability going on, but at least we know that if we want to go in that direction, we can adapt as we go. So that's how I would suggest creativity fits and creative thinking fits in that box of planning for the longer term rather than the forecasting. “OK, what's what are the numbers gonna be for the next 6 months?” Benjamin Ellis There is often a view from business leaders or managers that when he talked about creativity, that it's somehow it's this very slow process and they want to go really, really, really quickly. Simon Bird Yeah. Benjamin Ellis How do you tackle that one? Simon Bird Well, the good thing is that you put structure around it. I think they're quite right if you just put people in a room and say, OK, let's get creative. But funny enough, it can be counterintuitive too, because you can stick people in a room and say, right, “How can we be 6 times bigger in three years?” Right. Well, you know, if you're making paper clips, perhaps you, perhaps you could make aeroplanes cause you, you know, you know how to bend metal. It's kind of the opportunities when you say, how do we just get bigger, really start to become too wide and too vague. So, I think it's about putting structure around it. You have to have a clear desired outcome that you that you want to achieve and get focused on that and put that as parameters in which to think. So it's not blue sky, it's not entirely out-of-the-box. I think people have described it as stretching the box. So changing the box that you're doing your thinking in so that your perspective shifts. And then it's about making sure you're clear about stages that you're going through and there are stages where you want to go through divergent thinking and encourage lots of ideas, but they don't need to last too long. They can actually last a matter of weeks. So in one of the processes I have, when I work with clients is we sort of set up what the objectives are, we think about the frameworks and the limitations on that. We do a week of working with as many people as possible to generate ideas, and then we review those ideas. So, within three weeks they have a full set of everything from quick wins, right the way through to potentially transformational stuff that makes them really nervous. So I think in terms of the idea stage, right, literally right, we're gonna think this thing through. You could take let's, let's be generous. Let's say it's a month. And I don't think that's unrealistic for a company looking at it and what they want to do. There are further stages then, when you explore and you define and you refine those ideas that you've got and that can take as long as a piece of string, you know you decide what you're prepared to do and how much investigation you want or need to do with any particular direction that you're considering. But really, it's about making sure that you marry the process of ideation and thinking about ideas versus the actual delivery of them. Benjamin Ellis You talk about the creative process. We kind of talked about weeks and months, I think it's probably being clear to people, that doesn't mean like everyone locked in a room for like a whole month, does it? Simon Bird No, no, no, not at all. I mean I purposely try with my process to build in some downtime because you need that ability to walk away from what you're doing and think about it subconsciously and come back. So though I say it takes a month, it's not people sitting in one room doing this for a month. Actually, I think the best thing to do is to give people some work ahead of time, almost like a bit of homework and say work on these things, try and answer this question for me and then bring your ideas out. Usually they need uh, you know, a couple of hours to do that, but we give them a week and so that they can slot it into their schedules easily and then it takes a day in a room to go through stuff for the people who want to look at it and consider it. And then I take it away and review it and present it back. And people generally sit down for a couple of hours and have a look at the results. So yes, it lasts for over a period of time, take three weeks to a month. The first phase of thinking things through and coming up with your inspiration, but it doesn't take you a month of thinking if that's a fair explanation. Benjamin Ellis Yeah. There's a bit of a “do it now”, sometimes in in business and I think it's Amazon has a phrase part of their culture is “propensity to action”. And I think sometimes people get confused between the immediate and the fast. It's kind of a speed velocity thing. And I remember a few years ago working with an organization, very successful with very high growth and working with the leadership team and it was it was a long, intense discussion around what they were going to do from strategic direction point of view is a very heated and eventually having explored lots of options people kind of converge on an option and the CEO went that's good. Let's write that down and we'll look at that tomorrow when we slept on it and see what we think. And it was quite revolutionary for me, this idea of, like, well, we've made the decision and you know, we're just gonna, we're gonna sit on that for a bit and see if we still feel the same way in the morning. So this idea of kind of worked time and elapsed time, the fact that your brain does this background processing and people are often forget or don't understand that you know it's still doing stuff even when you're not consciously thinking about something and that going away from that conversation, you're gonna notice things differently. You're thinking will shift as you process that information. And that whole idea of, like, let's just sleep on this and come back to it sometimes unlocks a different solution or something that people missed or you have the confidence to go “Yeah, that's it. Let's go do that. We're aligned.” Simon Bird Yeah, completely. You're right, I mean how many times have you heard someone say I had my best idea in the shower this morning or out walking the dog? They've been, they've had a problem in their mind for a long period of time and they've found a way to perhaps sort of confront it and come up with ideas, but actually that that fresh idea is popped into their mind, seemingly from nowhere, at a strange point of time. And actually, it's that process of the subconscious is actually working on it for you, so that is why I think allowing some time to mull over things is good. But I would also pick up on the point you made about Amazon. Which is almost the next phase and comes back to what you said about, you know, does creativity just take a long time and sit around and cause chaos and not actually achieve very much? I think Amazon are right too, in order to become an innovation and actually have an impact in the market, you have to take action. So, it is this balance between talking about stuff and talking things through and seeing how you feel about them, on the one hand and then committing, deciding, acting, testing out, refining, evaluating, putting it back in and then reviewing what you've learned. So it's this constant mix between action and thinking. And provoking those two. So that's the way I structure creative thinking is around very clear on what you want to achieve and really getting immersed in the actual creative process in short bursts, giving some time between that and then going off and exploring and coming back and recycling back. Benjamin Ellis So I'm gonna go off on a sidebar here because there's that thing about the active process, and this has parallels in the lean and agile world about, you know, you kind of build the experiments and create data. This is a an interesting parallel lens to that. Now, what people can't see on the podcast is behind you are loads of really wonderful paintings and I'm just thinking for a moment the first time that I sat and watched an artist and people, a lot of people assumed that that process is maybe a lot of sitting and thinking, but actually it's an incredibly active. They're all these kind of prototype sketches, all these bits go off. So I, obviously, well I know you're you are an artist. So how does that that process work in that domain? And are there are things that we can learn from that to bring back into business. Simon Bird Yeah, I think that's a very interesting parallel. Obviously one that's very close to my heart because I do spend a lot of time doing painting and I'm an abstract painter as well. I think the first thing is this idea that you've, I'm a bit thrown by this actually because I didn't imagine you'd say it. So there we are. But this is an illustration of exactly the point you want me to make right? In that I wasn't expecting this, but now I've gotta come up with something that that actually hangs together relatively coherently. So let's call this a sketch, right? First phase is you've inspired me to think about that. So I'm now going to try and do something, but my first few efforts. But my first few efforts at it will be clumsy and I apologise for that, but I think it's fair to say you're not trying to deliver a perfect outcome. I'm not trying to get onto the wall of the Tate Gallery with my first attempt at any painting I make. I think it's about trying to develop an idea that you have, an initial inspiration in such a way that you can explore it and investigate it and find interesting and novel ways of creating that right. If you become very committed to “it's got to be like”, this is what I find when I'm painting. You know, I've got to have this and it's got to be these colours then somehow the end result isn't quite right. It becomes very tight and predictable and actually look at it and after you might like it initially, but after a few days you go. That's really boring. I'm like, I'm not seeing anything in it. I don't feel any connection to it. I want to burn it. That's a typical way that happens. But it's a good piece of learning because then you can go back and try it again. So this process of constantly going around and working on things and working through things and being active in the process is really important. And I think it was Picasso, I mean whether you like the guy or not and you like his work or not, he did know a thing or two about actually creating brilliant new exciting and ground-breaking stuff. And he his approach was, you know, I don't get inspired. I don't sit there and wait for inspiration to pop into my head. I get out and I work. And in his quote is “inspiration does exist, it just has to find you working”. And I think that's what art can teach business actually in the in the process of doing these things, ideas and thoughts will come up. Go out and, as you say, explore them a little bit, test them out. You know, if you think customers are gonna buy something new, then why not sort of create a rough prototype even as a document, you know that you can hand to a few trusted clients and say, what do you think about this? This is our new idea we're scoping it at the moment. What inputs have you got? It can all help. Rather than sitting in a room and debating it and having as you said, these fierce debates about whether it's the right thing to do or not, and yes or no, just go out and make it live and see how people react and how you feel about it. So I think that is that is what arts taught me. It's also about being open-ended and working with ambiguity, but I'll talk for hours about that. You don't want to…which some people find very hard. And you know, put some people will say, why are we doing this? And you know, what's the point? And actually the point is to not have a point. But at certain moments and to be prepared to say. “This might not succeed. We might fail. This might be wrong but we will learn something and we'll move on from that and we'll do the next thing.” So I think it's a, it's a mindset more than anything else rather than any sort of practical. You know, if you if you hold the brush this way, your business will be better. It's not that literal, but the mindset I think is very important. Benjamin Ellis And it’s interesting. I'm thinking actually about NASA and the, you know, the whole mission of put a man on the moon. And the other phrase that people, if you're saying that to that comes into the head, it’s like “failures not an option.” Simon Bird Yeah. Benjamin Ellis And it's really interesting if you look at the Moon landing program. It was all about failure. They didn't say, they didn't start with “ok, I know they did start with “we're gonna put somebody on the moon”, but actually, the way that they got to that was to say that's not what we're gonna try and start with. First of all, we're going to do an experiment of, like, can we get something off the ground? Can we get something off the ground without it blowing up? Can we get something off the ground and get it into the atmosphere? Can we get it off the ground into the atmosphere with the living thing in it and get that thing back safely? It was these small steps of controlled failure and putting failure in the safe place. And oftentimes businesses, in trying to avoid failure, actually put themselves in a place where they're really, really likely to fail, because that failure is going to happen somewhere it matters as opposed to letting that failure happen somewhere where it's safe and it doesn't matter. And ironically, if you're culture doesn't allow those little failures. Simon Bird Yes. Benjamin Ellis And causes people to hide failure. What you end up with is really, really big failures and you know we've seen a few of those in in different industries. The Boeing story has kind of been doing the rounds again recently and you know the whole we've made a small mistake here in a small change to piece of software and this probably requires some training, these sorts of things and how these things gradually get more and more buried as opposed to somebody earlier in the process saying “we're gonna try a few different things here.” “Actually we've done this wrong. Let's do it differently.” Is actually a much lower risk of failure. And I think, yeah, there definitely seems to be a lot to learn from art. If you're going to use a really big canvas and put a lot of time into something that's not the point that the artist chooses to fail, that you choose to fail at that early sketch process. Simon Bird Yes. Yeah. And honestly, you can fail at the large canvas process as well. But yes, or at least I can cause I'm not that professional artist, but yes, it's a good process that you learn your way into it and you build your confidence and your understanding as you go and you develop to an outcome that may not be exactly what you thought you were gonna do in the end, but it might be better. It might be, you know, four times better than you ever imagined because of what you've learned in the process of getting there. Benjamin Ellis Yeah. And again, I think there's the business world is littered with stories of a bit of failure at a bit of creative thinking turning into a really, really big business success or a lot of people forget things like, you know, PayPal was pretty much an accident. If you listen to the story of the founders, they built this app and it didn't really work out the way that they thought. And then there was all these other transactions going off in some weird site they didn't know about. There was, like, selling these collectible things. And in in realizing the mistake, embracing it and saying well, “hey, maybe we can do this different thing.” That was how PayPal found eBay and the whole thing became what it was. It was, in essence, an accident with a bit of creative thinking and based around that. And again, obviously that's not what business leaders want to do as plan A, but it's, it's that thing of if you get into a really tight spot. You're probably not going to logically get your way out of that. And again. Simon Bird Yeah. And I think I think you're right when you say about this aversion to failure, if you have that, then that's so embedded in your culture, then nothing will ever change. You'll spend all your time and effort focusing down on the predictability of what you have today and trying to make sure that you adhere to that. And the problem is the world changes, so you will be becoming less and less relevant and responsive to your environment. And as we know that's darwinianism, isn't it? That means in the end it's extinction. So I think businesses need to be agile adaptive and I think this is one of the best ways that they can do that. And as I said it's all in our existing capability. It's not something you have to farm out you know. In your own mind the solutions, they just need to be drawn out of you and you need to step out of the of the constraints of your existing thinking, which are easy to get into because that's the way business is. It demands that you're focused and you're clear on what you're doing now and the numbers and all the rest of it. But actually, there are times when you have to step out of that and come back in again and recycle. So this process that you're describing I think is absolutely fundamental to sustaining business success long term. Benjamin Ellis That’s a really interesting concept and you, you are going to have failure, it's just choosing where that happens and I, you know, think about some of the organizations we work with you. You don't want the moment of failure to be when the surgeon is in the operating theatre operating on a patient, but you can't drop them into that situation day one and expect that they are going to be a high performing surgeon. They're steps to get there, which actually involve failing lots of times and practicing it on things and practicing the stitching. Simon Bird Yeah. Benjamin Ellis And in environments where it doesn't matter if you get it wrong and practicing doing the stitching without looking, you don't do that stuff in the theatre. But you do do things where you can make mistakes, you can fail and have that opportunity to learn. So that when you get to the moment where it's really important, you don't. Again think about pilots, Benjamin Ellis And yeah, they get dragged back into the flight simulator every few months, and the and the reason is they get put in an environment where you know they can fail and deal with it. So that when the moment comes when you really don't want that failure to happen in the flight, they've drilled that thing. They know actually, yeah. Like the common mistake here is to do this thing. So I'm going to do this other thing instead because I've drilled that even before I've got into the flight simulator, I've kind of practiced that thing through and got the failure modes out so that they don't do that thing again. But it's a hard, hard thing to create those spaces where people can experiment and fail. And yeah, maybe that comes back to the creativity thing aware. Where is the best place for business to start at the kind of like, OK, we realize we need more creative thinking in in the business. What? Where do you start, environmentally or process wise with that as an organization to get those artistic techniques in? Simon Bird Yeah, I think it's as easy as having some time and some people come together to do it. And this capacity to accept a degree of failure that it might feel very awkward. It might feel very pointless. It might feel that the timing’s all wrong. It might feel that you're starting to ask questions about the business for five years from now, but the people in the room are still worried about what's gonna happen next Thursday week. So. That's fine, but it's about making that commitment and saying we don't quite know where this is going to lead yet, but I'm going to step. I'm gonna step into this. So I think from a business point of view, the first thing they need to do to make this happen is say, yeah, I wanna try. So that is it. What I think they'll get out of it is more than they ever imagined. You'll get everything from a quick wins coming out if you do it well, you will see things that you can actually apply to your Business today that will have a positive impact and keep you, I say will “keep you in the game”. That's why I call them quick wins. They're probably things that your competition are coming up with. They're probably things that people in your organization have spotted in your processes or the way you deal with your customers that you could change quickly and to a positive effect and then no brainers when you see them and you're presented with them as a team, you'll go, you know what we should do that tomorrow. So that's good. You'll get stuff that clearly doesn't fit and you don't think we'll have a lot of impact. So you can say, well, to be honest, I don't think that they're even worth considering right now. And then you get another set which are things that you love and think are brilliant and like your example earlier on. That's the stuff you should really park and think about and say, why do we think this is good? Because it could be. We're just reinforcing existing thinking and they'll be stuff that you think is really dangerous and you're not sure about. And that is the stuff that could be really beneficial. It's almost counterintuitive. You have to do it the other way around. You know, the stuff that you're comfortable with, you have to say we gotta, we gotta try and disprove this, right? And the stuff that you're uncomfortable with, you gotta try out and prove and say, well, if it did happen, if it was correct, what? What would we do next? So I don't think it's. I don't think it's a hard process. As I suggested earlier, the way I try and set it up is it runs over a month. I think we've landed on a month didn't we? And I said that it it's probably only three interventions in that period. You'll be your mind will be in the game but you won't be spending all your time doing it. And the way that I think those interactions happen best is through, and this is where the colored pens come out, I told you they would, didn't I? I promised you the color pens. But this is where it gets people saying, “well, why are you doing that?” but actually drawing and art is a great way of communicating. It is so direct. It is so easy for everybody to do it. Now, I'm not asking them to recreate the Sistine Chapel with felt tip pens. But there's something about working with big chunky pens on huge bits of paper with stick drawings that is levelling. it just gets everybody to the same sort of basic competence, and it also gets people communicating and expressing their thoughts in much clearer ways, because it forces you to just sort of say, “right, I've got. I've gotta get this idea across to someone on a piece of paper using a stick man and a drawing of a tractor”, for instance. I don't know. I'm just coming up with some daft ideas. But it's completely immersive and fun, and actually by being immersive and fun you then directly tap into the subconscious as well. So there is something here about not using words and sitting in a room and looking at data that gets people active is back to because of saying, you know, inspiration will come. We just gotta be working at it. What he didn't say was working at it in the in this kind of way that sort of hands on direct active playful way and that's what I think it does. It triggers in us something we've all done as children comfortably, none of us were ever hung up about drawing or painting or playing with mud or doing any of these things when we were little. But we kind of go through our education system, get to the point where we think we're no good at art because we can't accurately, in a photographic way, draw an apple, right. So we drop out because we were much better at maths or science or sport or whatever it else comes to mind, geography, history, whatever it might be. So going back to these things and being and using those tools to get ideas out fast. I think helps that process and suddenly people I found in my experience people really dive into it and I'm talking directors. I thought when I worked with directors they would be the worst. You know, I'm not drawing a picture of how I feel. My business is and I'm not playing a game that says this will happen and that will happen, but actually they're the most committed to it and they love it and great things come out and yes you can get differences of opinion, quite vehement differences of opinion because you're discussing pictures that people have made. People, they're not getting hung up on them. They're not getting. You know, defensive about why they're saying things there. There's a little bit of that, but not a lot. It's a much easier, more, dare I use the word democratic, let's call it a level environment. Even playing field where people can discuss these things in a non-threatening way. So I think that's where the color pens and the other stuff comes in. Early on, so to start, I think it's about taking the step and then being bold in the way that you are dealing with the issues, not presenting a paper on the future and sitting down listening to a presentation and having a discussion, I think that. That's the wrong way to go, you know. And I would say no, actually, if you you've only got, if you've only got a day to do this stuff then then do get the pens out. Benjamin Ellis Yeah, it's making me think of lots of things that are. We have embedded into how we try and work so one of the phrases we have or two phrases, one which is borrowed which is “create valuable artifacts” which is turning thoughts into things and the other one is the idea on the page and this observation that when people just talk and it's just words it's very hard to get convergence to get people to understand the concepts and rally around them. But when you create something on a page, suddenly people can get to a shared idea and it's amusing sometimes cause you look at what's being created and somebody comes into the room fresh. It's like there's just lines and circles. I can't even tell what that thing is, but everyone in the room is like, yeah, no, this is it. This just captures, like, we've got to do this thing. And this is what's important. And we realized that we assumed this thing and it becomes that artifact becomes the thing that the thoughts park around. And reminds people. Ohh yeah, actually you know, we do agree around this. We do have a way forwards and it's an interesting thing that just doesn't happen when it's just words and just people talking together. Simon Bird Yeah, I think you're right. And I can give some examples where people have drawn their company as one person drew it as a village. It was a very happy village, but everybody lived in their own home and never came out that was how they felt about the business. And someone else actually drew it as separate towns in a different country. So the way people, somehow drawing gets feelings out and enables you to express it and creates an image that, like you say, like an artifact on the page. People remember better. And it becomes an anchor point around which you can then group and you say actually we all agree this. Right, we might argue whether the houses in the village have 4 windows or five windows or big gardens or small garden. It doesn't matter. It's the concept of there's something here that we can all agree on and we can picture and we can then start to address whether we think that's an issue or not, right? Do we need to rebuild the village or just have a day where everybody comes out and sits in the garden? So those kinds of things can help you also explore the solutions. Benjamin Ellis That shared understanding is so important, it's interesting. The process you describe as well inherent in that is mini risk. People gonna draw something and maybe looks ridiculous? Simon Bird Yeah. Benjamin Ellis And, but actually people get to fail together and get comfortable with those mini failures, and that builds trust. And I think that's the other interesting part of the triangle that we haven't talked about is that actually that creative process tends not to happen where there isn't trust, but also where the creative process happens, they seem to be high trust environments and that's something that we see a lot that these things do go together. Even organizations you wouldn't think, oh, that's a very creative organization actually in high trust organizations, ideas do seem to spring forward a bit more. Simon Bird Yeah. Benjamin Ellis And yeah, there seems to be an a linkage between those two things. Simon Bird Yes. And we alluded to that earlier, didn't we when we talked about the, the hierarchies, the culture, the, the politics, the power relationships that exist, and particularly for people at the lower levels of any hierarchy this feeling that they're not really empowered to bring ideas forward can all be very, very real factors that that keep that trust. Uh. Contained. But I think you're right. If there is this much broader sense of trust across an organization, then ideas do come up and this kind of thing happens more spontaneously. Benjamin Ellis The interesting so we've come back round to creative thinking really is another linkage with culture. It changes the culture and you need to set up the culture to enable it to happen. Simon Bird Yeah. And I think this is one of the things that when I really start to get going, I think it's really hard to. I've sat through a few of these in my time, presentations where people have said “this is the culture of the company and this is why it's wrong. And this is what we're going to do about it.” And they're always programs and they always end up with, you know, nice words on walls, I call it. and those words actually are painful because they're, like, darts in your flesh because you don't feel that they actually represent what the, what the culture of the company is. It's just like, sort of some sort of strange thought control process. Whereas I think actually taking an action. And action together of some sort. Will help you create a culture and it will be natural because it will be coming from the people who are in that company anyway. So it will be those participants who are making it and culture is what we make. It's not something that is imposed on us. You know, that's just the true of humanity in general. It's fluid, it's dynamic and it has this need to have people involved in it, for it to be a thing, right? And we only, you and I are of a relatively similar age to know how much the British culture has changed in our lifetime, but it's because of that, right? It wasn't something that people set out to create. It's just that it's a dynamic fluid thing and it's now a great asset for our time, you could argue. So I think this is this is the interesting thing about creativity and the human brain and the way and our condition and how we work and can work better by using these tools. Benjamin Ellis I think that's a great note to leave it on. It's that that it is inherently who we are as creatures and we, you know, as kids, you know, you watch children and they can be amazingly creative with the simplest of tools. And somewhere along the way we kind of we get educated out of that. And so there's a bit of a reverse education process sometimes to educate us back into creating amazing things with limited tools. Simon Bird Yeah, I like that. I'll leave it there.