In part 1 (find it here) I talked about flywheels and doom loops, particularly in the context of my last year at McColl’s. This second part is how I’ve distilled this into learnings I’ll take with me, learnings that are hopefully relevant to others as we enter the impending recession.

Tough times are already here. Consumer facing industries are already finding it tough, and it’s certainly not going to get any easier. Faced with exorbitant energy bills, double digit inflation and slowing economic growth, we’re already seeing customers defer big ticket purchases and manage their food bills by trading down into own-label and trading into cheaper segments of the market (such as Aldi & Lidl).

However, based on what I’ve seen in previous slowdowns and what I’ve experienced over the last year, I think there are actions that businesses can take to support customers and their P&Ls through the impending recession. Let’s not pretend it’s going to be anything other than brutal, so I’ve named the actions appropriately.

(1) Outrun your mate, not the bear – find volume growth as habits change

Let’s start at the top of the flywheel with volume, based on a (terrible) old joke Andrew told at the conference…

“Two men are being chased by a bear. One stops to put on his trainers. His mate says, ‘don’t be an idiot, you’ll never outrun a bear’. Trainer guy smiles, kicks his mate in the shin, says ‘I don’t have to, I just have to outrun you’, and sprints off”

Let’s face it, we’re in recession now so the chances of you fixing the financial structure of your business overnight to give you more cash headroom are about as high as outrunning a bear. The good news for you is that your competitors are running away from Yogi too.

As cash gets tight, more and more doom loops spring up in more and more businesses. As Machiavellian as this sounds, this brings opportunity for others. Not just opportunities as businesses inevitably fail (something we hope happens as infrequently as possible given the impact on lives and livelihoods), but opportunities for your flywheel as soon as your competitors start cutting and impacting customers.

Two things convince customers to change their habits quickly - financial pressure & poor experience. Customers will be feeling both of these, at the same time, by the bucket full – encouraging them to re-think the portfolio of companies they habitually shop with.

This is your chance to understand the shopping missions customers are switching away from your competitors, investing in customer acquisition (being the best choice for these missions) and then driving retention by creating a value exchange where both you and your newfound customers benefit from coming back again and again.

At McColl’s, we achieved a mid-doom loop stay of execution through retention marketing (creating a “value exchange” with customers, via bounce-back vouchers) and acquired significant numbers of new customers as stores converted to Morrisons Daily. But ultimately, we did not have a strong enough acquisition toolkit for the remaining “McColls” part of the estate – relying on passing footfall, a decreasingly effective tool as stock availability fell and CAPEX was prioritised into store conversions and away from maintenance.

As businesses go into the recession, marketing budgets are always some of the first to come under pressure. Therefore, so diverting analytical resource into understanding the most effective tools in your armory for driving conversion now, where possible paying based on trackable action (conversion rather than footfall / traffic or brand awareness) in order to maintain volume momentum in the flywheel will be critical. Controversially, in a world of trade-offs, this could be at the expense of some longer term ATL brand marketing. Afterall, nothing builds a brand like firsthand, positive, experience.

As an aside, I’ve put my money where my mouth is on this one – moving to look after the eCommerce business at Future PLC in the new year, an affiliate marketing model where customers on a considered buying journey are directed from expert editorial content (think “what’s the best laptop?”) to obliging retailers, with a cost to the retailer only if the customer converts. I believe that, even with pressure on high consideration purchases, this will be such an attractive channel for marketeers that we’ll see some exciting levels of growth through recession!

Alongside acquisition has to come retention, although I prefer to think of it as “habit formation”, particularly in higher frequency purchases like food. The key here is to reach as many customers as possible to incentivise them to keep coming back. For this reason, I’m not that big a fan of traditional card or app based loyalty schemes as the proportion of customers it’s relevant for, particularly new customers, is too low. Instead, I prefer (often simpler) intervention at the point of purchase – with 100% reach.

In the end, customers think first about the missions they need to fulfill not the business they’re buying from – they just pick the best business to service the mission they’re on. If this happens often enough, it becomes a habit (and this habit looks like loyalty). As consumers get squeezed and doom loop laden businesses let them down, there’s a chance for you to break these habits and capture these customers – just point your resources at being the best choice for the most important “swing” missions.

(2) Eat what you kill – efficiency, not amputation

Just before I left Sainsbury’s, the re-launch of the strategy had “save to invest” as one of the central pillars to simplify and grow the business. Originally, prior to the re-launch, the same idea had started to gather pace around the business under another name – “eat what you kill”.

The concept made sense – you all want to do fun, exciting and innovative things for customers. These things cost money, so find savings and re-invest in them in the fun. However, the mental image it conjured of chowing down on a squished badger at the side of the A41 just didn’t feel consistent with a values led organisation aligned around a vision of “helping everyone eat better”.

Fortunately, I’m a monster and I don’t want to be accused of copying my former employer’s strategy, so we’re going with eat what you kill…

As we’ve seen from the flywheel, the aim here is increasing efficiency, not simply cutting cost. As such, there’s an obvious hierarchy for how to prioritise initiatives in an “eat what you kill” plan:

(a) Volume driven – these are the holy grail. Cost as a % of sale goes down simply because you’re selling more. You need one central office to serve 10 stores or 100 stores, one TV buyer if you’re £1m or £1bn, one website to serve one or a million customers etc. etc.

(b) Cutting fat – making things cost effective and quicker by improving processes, systems, touchpoints or removing duplication. The best sustainability and ESG initiatives also fall in here – reducing food waste saves the planet and helps your P&L

(c) Robbing Peter – cutting future-facing cost, or investment with a longer horizon to focus on driving volume today. Market insight, innovation, brand marketing etc.

(d) Foot shooting – cutting cost in a way that impacts volume now. Taking out store hours, increasing prices, closing marginally profitable business units etc.

The best companies focus their efforts on (a) and (b), and do this in both times of feast and times of famine to keep the flywheel flowing. Sometimes these are slightly slower to land or harder to get after – but if your balance sheet can sustain it, the investment is worthwhile in the long-run.

I know, that last paragraph is fairly obvious – paraphrased as “have a good cost transformation programme”. However, these are often very finance focused in their administration and often miss the critical people angle, which we know can drive the flywheel or perpetuate the doom loop.

The biggest blocker to customer facing innovation is bandwidth. In the lean businesses of today, everyone is working at least at 100% capacity and the leadership style I grew up with of “just work a bit harder” is finally being challenged by a focus on burn-out, mental health and a growing Gen Z workforce that simply won’t put up with that BS. Just ask Elon.

The beauty of (b) initiatives, focused on process, is that they create the most valuable resource – time. Cutting back on repetitive and inefficient process gives time to invest in innovation and the customer, powering the flywheel. Just as importantly, innovation and newness is fun – I’ve seen recent studies (that I may replace this bracket with the source of if I can find them!) that talk about the ability to be creative and innovate as more important to job satisfaction than culture, working hours or even pay.

The flip side is the brain drain that comes with (c) and (d). If you take away people’s ability to innovate and be creative by cutting future-facing cost, your most creative and innovative people leave. If you freeze recruitment and expect people to simply do more, people leave. Then recruitment becomes harder and harder as your culture suffers, along with your Glassdoor page as an employer.

And there’s the opportunity again – if you invest in your employee value proposition (which doesn’t necessarily have to just mean cost) as your competitors fall into the doom loop, you’ll have access to the many brilliant people in the market that will leave your competitors voluntarily, or involuntarily, over the next few years.

(3) Fire bullets, then cannonballs – invest through the pain

Nothing feels harder than investing through a downturn. The pressure to bring in jam today at the expense of jam tomorrow can be massive, but not investing doesn’t just extend the downturn & doom loop, it stifles the innovation that can deliver quick returns AND makes maintaining the momentum you have now harder.

A guy called Ian McBeth asked a great question during the Q&A at the conference a couple of weeks ago about coping in a recession:

“Do we double down investment in our core business or innovate into new areas?”

The answer to this either-or question is a resounding “YES”!

You have to do both because doing one or the other is too risky. Your “core” business simply may not be relevant in the new world, so you need to innovate. Equally, knowing how and where to innovate is even riskier than usual, so you can’t simply ignore what’s made you successful up to now.

The best way I’ve found to simultaneously have and eat cake in any situation is to reframe the question as a beautiful constraint (see great book by Adam Morgan):

“How might I invest in my core AND innovate when risk and uncertainty are highest, and cash is tightest?”

Uncertainty is the biggest challenge here – in a downturn or shock, the level of certainty you have is even lower than normal. Backward looking data is a much less reliable predictor of the future, and people that claim they can forecast what will happen are lying.

Because you can’t rely on data, you have to create it yourself through experimentation. Back to Jim Collins, you have to fire bullets, then cannonballs.

This means creating the quickest, lowest risk, lowest cost experiments possible – the bullets. You shoot these bullets at the customers you’re trying to catch and work out which ones they like (OK fine, shooting customers is the point that analogy has been beaten to death!).

Once you know what works, fire cannonballs – invest heavily and quickly in the things that deliver the most value.

For McColl’s, one cannonball is Morrisons Daily – a concept quickly tested at pace, then rapidly rolled-out when successful (albeit with a brief hiatus as the administrators and CMA stepped in!).

Time will tell, but my money is on this approach being the difference between a business that prospers post-doom loop and the businesses end up in the history books once this recession is through.

In summary

Simple really - pick up your competitors’ customers as they flee the bear; grow your way into lower cost if you can, simplify before cutting if you can’t; and shoot bullets, then cannonballs.

Hopefully then you’ll be writing, with the benefit of hindsight, about being a “winner” through the next few years…

Surely it’s time for things to calm down & get back to “normal” right? Right?!?

Wrong.

Recession is coming. In fact, it’s probably already here. Thanks Rob. Bah humbug.

But in reality, with COVID (hopefully!) disappearing out the rear window, we needed something to sit alongside Vlad’s megalomania in order to justify Collins Dictionary’s nomination of “permacrisis” as the 2022 word of the year. So here we are.

I was lucky enough to talk at the Retail Bulletin conference last week about “learnings from the last recession” (with Andrew Mann and Julian Burnett) and it made me think – there’s lots to learn from ALL the shocks of the last few years. Whether that’s lockdowns, supply disruption, Brexit, inflation, or (most notably for me) helping lead a business through administration, there’s certainly enough “development opportunities” to reflect on, and get written down.

For a bit of structure amongst the chaos, I’ll borrow some brilliance from Jim Collins and his description of “flywheels”.

At is simplest, consumer facing businesses are either in a “flywheel” (growing momentum – with increasing volumes, driving efficiencies & cash, allowing investment in the customer, driving volume) or a “doom loop” (chasing short-term cash, cutting cost & impacting the customer, leading to lower volume, and increasing the need to chase more cash). Shocks, recessions, and permacrises have a habit of stalling a flywheel’s momentum and often turning it in the other direction, becoming a doom loop.

So that’s what I thought I’d get on paper today, sharing what I can (without breaching confidentiality!) about what I’ve learnt around avoiding the pitfalls that start the doom loop, and keeping momentum in the flywheel.  

As I wrote this, it got long quickly so I’ve split it into two parts – this part will cover flywheels & my recent doom loop experience, and the second part will cover my learnings to hopefully help businesses navigate the imminent recession. In part 2, there'll be 3 key ideas, each with their own tabloidy title:

1. Outrun your mate, not the bear – find volume growth as habits change

2. Eat what you kill – efficiency, not amputation

3. Fire bullets, then cannonballs – invest through the pain

Flywheels & doom loops

Jim Collins is a smart cookie. Bit of fanboy here. “Good to great” is a classic, as is “how the mighty fall”, but my personal fave is called “turning the flywheel” mainly as it’s only 40 pages long and I have the attention span of your typical ageing millennial.

In short, flywheels are all about momentum and are business specific based on your unique set of competencies, capabilities, and your external environment. The key is that if you take an action to drive any spoke on the flywheel, it will create momentum because that action inevitably leads to the next spoke.

To bring this to life, let’s take the classic Amazon example (using a trick I’ve found helpful when making flywheels – bookending each spoke with “…we can” and “and so…” to force the inevitability):

• …we can increase customer visits and so…

• …we can attract more marketplace sellers and so…

• …we can grow the amount of choice for customers and so…

• …we can reduce fixed costs as a percentage of sales and so…

• …we can charge lower prices and so…

• …we can start the cycle again and increase customer visits and so on, and so on…

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how a simple strategy, beautifully executed creates a global monopoly (please don’t sue me, Amazon).

Whilst that is clearly an Amazon (or marketplace) specific example, at its heart you can apply a simpler version it to any consumer facing industry:

Fig 1: The flywheel

Sitting at the top is volume – more customers choosing you more often. Whilst volume is inevitably driven by a strong customer proposition (see step 3 below), as with any segment of the flywheel, you can land initiatives to specifically power this segment. You might intervene here through marketing initiatives, better targeting your range, or building online partnerships to reach more customers.

Next, if you sell more, you drive efficiency – whether this is greater leverage of fixed costs (like the Amazon example) or greater buying power as a result of scale (and therefore lower cost), there’s an element of inevitability. Equally, this is where your operational efficiency initiatives could sit – creating efficiency and releasing cost to invest in the final step.

In this final step, the cash created through efficiency can be invested in customers. Whether this is OPEX investment in the customer proposition (lower prices, better promotions, better service) or capital investment in the fabric of your business (more stores, refurbishment, investment in technology and online), this will make you more compelling to customers and complete the cycle – growing volume.

Sounds simple, no?

Well it would be, if you operated in a bubble where you were the only brilliantly run company out there, in a world of ever increasingly wealthy consumers, fully insulated from the shocks of the outside world.

But sadly, we can’t all be the Co-op store located in Woburn Centre Parcs (how’s that for a middle class reference?). Instead, stiff competition, squeezes on consumer spending, and external shocks can stall, stop, or reverse the fly-wheel. Here’s how:

Fig 2: The doom loop

The vast majority of businesses have to make money. Money to satisfy their debts and (if you’re lucky) money to return to their investors. When profits go down, the pressure to keep servicing debt & delivering returns remains, and the focus can easily shift from growing volume, to paying the bills – short-term cash becomes king.

Just like in a flywheel, this doom loop is driven by inevitability. In the short-term, it’s much quicker to find cash by cutting, often impacting customers. Prices go up, costs are cut, investment is stopped, and re-structures reduce your overall organizational capability from a people point of view.

When you impact customers, you lose volume & profit. Customers vote with their feet. Quickly. Your biggest source of cash, the products or services you sell, declines and the need to chase short-term cash intensifies – the doom loop accelerates…

Doom loops & me

So the action to take sounds easy – drive volume by investing, don’t chase cash by cutting. If only. Made.com, Joules, and (much closer to home) McColl’s have been some of the latest examples of the challenges inherent in trying to do this.

Myself and 16,000 of my McColl’s colleagues have lived both of these cycles over the past 12 months, ending with the pre-pack purchase of McColl’s by Morrisons out of administration. I will say this, never again will I struggle to answer questions such as “give me an example of a time you’ve shown resilience” or “dealt with ambiguity” in an interview.

When I joined in September, the McColl’s flywheel was (and still is!) clear. Built on a foundation of over 1,000 stores near where people live (a structural advantage now more people work from home post-COVID), staffed with amazing colleagues that live in the communities they serve, McColl’s had a strategy to:

• Invest in customers through converting stores from a more traditional “CTN” (Convenience, Tobacco, News) model to a food first convenience store under the “Morrisons Daily” brand

• Grow volume on top of the overnight double digit volume growth from a Morrisons Daily conversion, we had built a new approach to direct marketing & continued to expand into home delivery

• Drive efficiency through a well-established “efficient operating model” programme and a culturally embedded “treat every pound as your own” mentality

It was bearing fruit and confidence was high both internally and externally – analysts universally recommended McColl’s shares as a “buy” and equity investors voted with their wallets, pumping £30m into the business to buy shares in August 2021.

I joined in September 2021 and less than 8 months later, those shares ceased to exist as McColl’s entered administration. What did I do?!?

Prior to the Morrisons Daily strategy, the McColl’s strategy had been to grow through an increasing store presence, which included buying about 300 stores from Co-op for a little over £115m in 2016. Initial signs were positive, with sales growth across the estate. This was followed by incredibly strong performance through COVID, in line with the neighbourhood convenience sector, as customers flocked to stores near where they lived.

However, this strong performance (some of which would turn out to be cyclical) masked a challenging level of debt on the balance sheet and as life began to return to normal through 2021, customers moved some of their spend back to cities, slowing volume growth.

At the same time, COVID self-isolation and the impact of Brexit put real pressure on recruitment in supply chains across the country. With not enough product on the shelves, customers began to shop elsewhere and volume slowed. As volume slowed, cash generation fell and to keep paying down debt, chasing short-term cash had to be a priority for survival. This was enough to start momentum growing in the doom loop.

Life became a sequence of increasing difficult trade-off decisions, protecting the store conversion programme that was central to the flywheel at all costs. Cuts were made. People were put at risk of redundancy, OPEX & CAPEX budgets were cut, pricing & promotions were reviewed, working capital (i.e. the amount we bought) was carefully managed – all in the name of protecting volume whilst continuing to service a lot of debt.

But the flywheel is inevitable & protecting volume simply wasn’t enough. Cuts impacted customers (and it’s much easier to scare them off than win them back!) and volumes fell, increasing the need to find more cash.

The business needed headroom (i.e. a lower cost of repaying debt) to stop the pressure of chasing cash from perpetuating the doom loop further.  Ultimately & fortunately, this came through the acquisition of McColl’s by Morrisons, as a pre-pack administration.

I’m confident that in the months since administration in May (as the McColl’s and Morrisons business were held separate as the CMA had a look to check we weren’t accidentally becoming Amazon-scale) we’ve slowed the doom loop and I look forward to seeing the wheel start turning in the right direction again under Morrisons’ ownership.

Whilst it remains challenging, with 132 stores in the process of closing (and a number of colleagues at risk of redundancy), there are a tonne of learnings that I’ve taken from the experience that I think will be relevant to other businesses as we go through the impending recession. I’ll talk about these in part 2 (which you can now find here).

Whether you're "Impacted" (With a capital "I" - where your job is at risk) or  just "impacted" (change to your role, where it reports or even seeing friends & colleagues affected nearby), it's the most unsettling thing you can face at work. It's also incredibly common. Long gone is the stigma of redundancy implying anything negative about you. In fact, the stark reality is the vast majority of us have been or will be impacted by redundancy at some stage in our careers.

I have had the dubious honour of being involved in 6 organisational re-designs in the last 4 years across various roles. I've designed structures, delivered the news on "announcement days", chaired group consultations, hosted 100s of individual consultation meetings and been personally impacted on more than one occasion.

Unfortunately, that makes me somewhat of an unwilling expert on the subject, so I thought why not share what I've learnt in the hope that it can help people better navigate it now or in the future.

Overall, I think there's three things that are key to getting through a redundancy process. First off, play the game to make the process work for you. In most cases, the process will be clear & there are some good ways, and bad ways you can operate within this. Secondly, don't be a passenger & proactively generate options. It's well known that "denial" is a key stage on the change curve & the quicker you can get through this and act on the things you can control, the better. Finally, going through change is hard & it can take a huge toll on your mental health, so be kind to yourself both in the way you frame the situation & the actions you take.

(1) Play the game to make the process work for you

Whether you're in a large company, medium company or anywhere making 20 or more redundancies (this is a legal requirement), the process & policy for redundancy should be pretty clear & readily available to you. Even in "less standard" redundancy processes (such as voluntary redundancy, or targeted severance) there will be information available & you should find it, digest it & understand what's coming.

A normal redundancy process will have two parts & colleagues will be consulted with in both stages. Firstly, this will happen in group consultation - where colleague reps are elected as the voice of colleagues through consultation on the proposed structure & the process by which consultation will be run (e.g. recruitment principles - will they be by assessment form or by interview?). Then, after group consultation, the new structure is confirmed & colleagues are consulted on a 121 basis around their individual impact.

Two things are really important in here - first, the separation of the structure in the first phase & the individual in the second. This is important (and it plays into tip 3) as it allows you to frame the proposed structure as just that - it's the organisation's best effort at meeting the objectives set (whether strategic, cost reduction or, in most cases, a combination of the two). It is not a judgement on you as an individual or the value you bring. That's an important headspace to be in to allow you to approach consultation in a way that gives you the best chance of success.

The second is that this is a process of consultation - this means that there is often an opportunity to seek a clearer understanding of the proposed changes and (sometimes) effect changes to the proposals before they are finalised.

I think group consultation is one of the most important points of the process, and one that I've most often seen approached in the wrong way. It's incredibly easy to take all of your (totally justifiable) feelings of frustration, anger, resentment and fear into this process and try to criticise, pick holes, argue that the structure is wrong, catch out the people chairing the process & generally "score points". I'm yet to see this be a successful approach.

What I have seen work well is to accept the strong position that you are in & use it to your advantage. You know the objectives of the review (this should be part of any announcement) and you know more about the day to day realities and challenges of your role than the person designing the structure. As such, you can add huge value in designing the best structure that is set for success. That's in everyone's interests.

So how do you do this? Two parts:

• First - ask questions to understand the proposals. Get really clear on the strategic rationale for the overall change. Get really clear on any proposed impacts to your areas & the rationale behind it - how will it work in the future? What's different? If there's a reduction, what stops? Ask as objective & non-emotionally loaded questions as you can. You can either feed these questions through your consultation reps or be a rep yourself.

• Second - counter-propose a better option. Based on the information gathered & what you know about the role, suggest a better alternative. Keep in mind that, more often than not, reducing cost is a factor in a new organisation proposal, so don't simply expect "please add back in [x] roles" to be accepted. Instead, if you can make the proposal "cost neutral" (e.g. save here to put a role back here) then great, if not, then be clear on the business case that comes with a counter-proposal (e.g. adding a role here will allow £xm sales growth / avoid the £xm risk that removing it brings). Again, objectivity is your friend - everyone in the process wants a structure that meets the strategic objectives and sets the new teams up for success in the future.

As you move into individual consultation, this is the point where any selection processes, interviews or applications happen. Assuming a good working relationship, your line manager will want you to succeed & the process is set up to try and reduce the number of redundancies. On top of "generating options" which we'll talk about in a minute, there's 2 things to keep in mind:

• If you're in one, know the selection process - if it's an assessment form, find out how these work, how they're scored & approach accordingly. If it's an interview (and this is equally true for applying for other roles) try to understand the form the interview is likely to take & how it's scored. Seek to understand what the selection criteria are and if you are "at risk" what implications this has (in many cases, it would mean you are offered a role over a higher scoring "safe" candidate, provided you meet a set of "minimum criteria" for a role)

• Understand what support is available to you - many businesses will have colleague support or outplacement support available to you. Use it!

(2) Proactively generate options - don't be a passenger

Whilst you should absolutely play the game & make the process work for you, don't just do this. It's really important to understand your options and, if you're not satisfied with them, do what you can to generate new ones. I think about three things:

• Do the maths - Unpleasant as it is, you need to know your required monthly outgoings, when income could stop & what any redundancy payment could look like. Look at things you could do to make it stretch further (keeping one of Netflix or Disney+, get an interest free credit card, move your mortgage to interest only if you have one - note, none of this is financial advice & I am not a financial advisor!). You can much better assess (and create) options if you're clear on your answers to questions such as - when do I need a new job by? Could I get by for a while by contracting / freelancing? Could I secure a smaller role that pays less whilst I continue searching?

• Internal scenario planning - if you're in a selection process, all the things I spoke about in #1 to try and secure the role are key, but don't just do them. Look at the wider landscape in your business - where are there other opportunities? Where could they be? Who can I find out more from? The last part is the most important - do your detective work to understand what could be out there, and have the conversations to understand if they'd be interesting to you & how likely they are to materialise as options for you.

• Use your network, and other people's - building on the point above, people & networks are critically important. No matter who you are and what role you do, you will either have a great network of people (in and outside the business you currently work in) that can help you spot opportunities. If you don't, don't worry, you will absolutely know at least one person that has a great network (that they'll share with you). Either way, people will want to help you as they have either been in the same position, will have been close to people in the same position or know they more than likely will be in the same position at some point in the future!

Remember - re-structure is a common, organisational decision, not a personal one. As mentioned earlier, the stigma that once came with redundancy is long gone & people will want to help. Reach out and ask for it, and accept it when it's offered.

(3) Be kind to yourself

You may have spotted a pattern in the tips above - they're all very logical, left brain things. Take emotion out of it and propose alternatives in consultation, rationally plan out your options & ask for help from your network.

However, there is not one person who's response to redundancy, restructure or change will be purely rational. You'll feel angry, upset, lose confidence, get stuck in mental doom loops & all kinds of other things through the process. This is totally natural, but knowing that doesn't make it any easier to deal with!

Given this, it's vitally important that you are totally and utterly selfish with looking after your mental and physical health. Not only is this the kind & emotionally smart thing to do, it's also the logical choice. When you're searching for a role & exploring your options, you're selling yourself as much as (if not more than!) your experience. So make sure that person is in as great physical & mental shape as possible!

There is loads written on this subject & plastered all over Google - but for me, I've found a few things work well that I'm happy to share:

• Reset - Consciously eat better. Consciously go to bed earlier. Consciously make 60 minutes for a walk or exercise the first thing that goes in your calendar each day.

• Relax - I remember the first time someone talked to be about meditation. I thought they were mad. I now use Headspace (lots of alternatives around) daily. It trains your brain to separate stimulus from response and this is vital when you're looking to make rational choices in an emotional situation.

• Re-frame - "Because my role has been removed from an org chart, everything I have ever done is worthless & I am worthless". Without exaggeration, this exact thought has gone through my head in the past, as I know it has with many others. Your job is to catch these thoughts as they arise and re-frame them: "the business has changed & this is an opportunity to try something new". Asking a friend to help you catch these "doom loops" and reframe them can work wonders.

So that's it, if it helps one person (even slightly) then I'll be delighted. There's all kinds of material out there to help you (many of you know I love Amazing If and their excellent podcast includes great episodes on redundancy, interviews, confidence & more - https://www.amazingif.com/listen).

If you're currently working through this, just remember to make the process work for you, generate your options and, most importantly, look after yourself.

If I can help in anyway, please just ask.

A lot of my reading, thinking, planning & experimenting has been centred around how I get closer to being the leader I want to be - one that can craft an environment, operating model & culture that develops and unleashes the brilliant people in my team to deliver radical & impactful things, all whilst loving what they do.

So, what better time than 12 months in to do a bit of a retro? A bit of self-reflection never hurts and, in the spirit of Blitzed, it's a great opportunity to try and drag some clarity from the complexity that comes with a lot of theory & some attempts to put it into practice.

Jet skis on a superyacht

Remember the heady days of 2019? The holidays, the hugging, the complete ignorance of the meaning of "social distancing"?

For me it also meant the end of leading my previous team through a fairly hefty and emotionally fraught re-organisation. We were one of the first functions that moved from a channel-led (Sainsbury's, Argos, Habitat) to a functionally-led (operations, commercial, marketing) organisational structure & at the end of it, it meant I took on some new responsibilities.

In looking after "Convenience & Specialist Channels", I became accountable for the end-to-end performance of a number of our channels - responsible for cutting across the new functionally-led organisation to keep sufficient focus on some of our more specialist channels (such as the convenience business & our business in the Republic of Ireland).

Suddenly, I had to get more familiar with operating the matrix than that guy that used to stick wires in the back of Keanu Reeve's head.

What an incredible opportunity - end-to-end accountability for businesses in high growth markets where we have the opportunity to take risks, be agile, move quickly & think a bit more radically.

But equally what a challenge - how do you cut through & access this opportunity in a business that thrives on operational excellence & incredibly efficient processes to compete in a grocery industry famous for it's scale, competitiveness & wafer thin profit margins?

The challenge was clear - we wanted all the agility & nimbleness benefits of being a small business, with all the structural support of a large company. 

How can we be Jet skis that zip around the superyacht?

Time for a bit of research I thought...

Academia, Batbelts & the Cold War

As I've said before, I'm hugely interested in behavioural economics and organisational behaviour, so I decided to sign up to do one of those online courses (Stanford's "Organizational Analysis" course on Coursera - here) & that's what inspired me to write this. It started to help me (with the benefit of a lot of hindsight!) consolidate a lot of what I've been reading, thinking about, and most importantly, doing, over the past 12 months.

As ever with University driven courses, it's a bit overly-academic & theoretical but it does have a pretty useful framework (drawing on work from Richard Scott) for pulling together the schools of thought around Organisational science. It talks about rational, natural and open theories of organisation.

The rational school of thought focusses on a business as existing to clearly define a set of goals and then create internal processes to deliver these goals as efficiently as possible. It's an internally focussed school of thought (i.e. centred on the business, not it's environment) & centred on clarity of purpose and division of resources to deliver against this purpose through clear process.

Natural theories retain the internal focus but accept that goals are ambiguous and that the informal structures that exist in a business (and the goals of individuals) are at least as important as the stated goals. Organisations are a living collection of individuals with differing & often conflicting goals - therefore rather than a focus on clarity & process, natural theories focus on people, their behaviour and how an organisation can affect these to align the internal ecosystem with organisational goals.

Finally, open theories accept that an internal lens isn't enough and argue that instead, an organisation is determined by it's role in the environment - it's purpose in a broader eco-system is what gives it a right to survive. It's about an understanding of customers, stakeholders & society at large - with the objective of survival in this context.

If you're anything like me, your LinkedIn bubble & the articles you read today will be all about customer centricity, purpose & societal contribution. As a result, the open system way of thinking will likely resonate most with many of you.

Additionally, we're increasingly taught that rational systems & the "old" Taylorist view of formalised organisational charts and division of labour are on the way out. However, at the same time, anyone that works in a big (or medium, or even small) business, no matter how "forward thinking", will see at least some of the elements of the below:

• Insist on doing everything through “channels.” Never permit short-cuts to be taken in order to expedite decisions.

• Make “speeches.” Talk as frequently as possible and at great length. Illustrate your “points” by long anecdotes and accounts of personal experiences.

• When possible, refer all matters to committees, for “further study and consideration.” Attempt to make the committee as large as possible — never less than five.

• Bring up irrelevant issues as frequently as possible.

• Haggle over precise wordings of communications, minutes, resolutions.

• Refer back to matters decided upon at the last meeting and attempt to re-open the question of the advisability of that decision.

• Advocate “caution.” Be “reasonable” and urge your fellow-conferees to be “reasonable” and avoid haste which might result in embarrassments or difficulties later on.

It may come as a bit of a surprise that these quotes aren't actually from the "guide to being a great rational organisation" handbook. Instead, they're from the CIA's "simple sabotage field manual" - a guide to disrupting Russian organisations during the Cold War.

If we could so easily articulate the flaws of a rational organisation, even in 1944, why do we still see so many of these pitfalls in organisations today?

It's because for every bureaucratic, over-governed, de-humanising, disempowering con of a rational model; there's an equal and opposite clarity, efficiency or simplicity related pro. It all comes down to the context and the execution.

If I'm manufacturing a car as efficiently as possible or looking to reduce cost in my logistics network, there's a lot to be said for clear goals, set process & single accountability - all the hallmarks of a rational system. Conversely, if I'm looking to relaunch my brand or reinvent my customer experience in a dynamic & changing marketplace, the benefits of simplicity can be outweighed by the creativity stifling rigidity of rational structures.

However, even though the natural & open theories have received a greater focus over the years, they're not universally perfect either.

For all the benefits of a colleague focused appreciation of informal structures & the need to focus on behaviour change articulated in a natural system - there is real jeopardy in the anarchy that comes from competing goals or a lack of process within an organisation. There are also pitfalls in the migration of talented people away from a business that ignores the external environment that you exist in.

Similarly, for all the talk about purpose and your role in the competitive environment that comes with an open view - if you only look at competitors & neglect your internal capabilities (rational) or the game changing ideas that sit inside the heads of people in your organisation (natural), you're clearly missing something.

So I'm choosing not to think about these as competing theories - rather a Batbelt full of tools to draw from depending on the context that we face & the solution we need.

We want goals that are clear enough to align behind but also reflect the ambiguity of the external world; we want process that support pace & efficiency without stifling creativity; and we want an understanding of the environment we're in without losing sight of the core competencies that differentiate a business within this environment.

If finding the goldilocks spot on each of those trade-offs wasn't tricky enough, what I quickly realised was that not only do different organisations have to pick different points on these spectrums, but so too do different business units within these organisations. Not only that, but the choices of the business units had to not be too different as to conflict with the mothership - it doesn't go well for the jet ski that seeks a head on collision with the superyacht...

Don't be a genius with a thousand helpers

What quickly became evident was that picking our spot on the spectrums above was going to be the biggest decision to make for our channels.

To be as agile as we wanted to be, on average, we needed a slightly less structured (rational) model than the wider business. However, at the same time we needed to stay seamlessly aligned with the prevailing culture & processes within it so we could continue to benefit from the incredible resources and capabilities that come with being part of a bigger organisation.

Deciding where to position the channels was one thing, but creating the culture & operating system was the real challenge. Everyone loves a Jim Collins quote, and in Good to Great he warns leaders not to "be a genius with a thousand helpers". Don't be a single point of failure - start with the people in the team & build the culture and behaviours for enduring success. Then build the systems and processes that mean, as the leader, as little success as possible relies on you.

So that's what I wanted to do - with my team, build a small set of principles that set out the behaviours we'd need to have to succeed as a set of businesses within a bigger business & build structures that make reinforcing these as easy as possible. Again, back to the research.

Unsurprisingly, a lot of the more recent books are heavily weighted towards things coming out of the sexy world of west coast tech start-ups. Be More Pirate by Sam Conniff Allende was an interesting read, focussing on what we can learn from how actual pirates organised themselves throughout history - with some great nuggets, in particular, around how to outwardly communicate. Brave New Work by Aaron Dignan shares a great framework (that serves as a useful check list) for things to consider in building cultures & a team "operating system".

On a slightly more leftfield note, I found Turn the Ship Around! by L. David Marquet a particularly interesting parallel, talking about his role of running a single ship (business unit) within the US Navy (big business). He took a fundamentally different approach to how it was traditionally done, with a focus on people & culture. Finally, Sir John Whitmore's "Coaching for performance", read as part of my Master Coach accreditation, had more in it about how to lead than the just the mechanics of how to coach.

In the spirit of distilling & simplifying - a handful of common themes came out of all of this:

• People love Pirates - there is just something in human nature that means we romanticise renegades, underdogs & things that are a bit radical

• Join the club - nothing engenders change more than feeling part of the movement. However, for a movement to be successful, it also needs commitment from it's members (how you behave & what you contribute)

• Redistribute power - if you're bought into a vision & common goal, place the power to make a decision as close to the person that will implement it as possible (typically "lower" in a traditional hierarchy). This will mean you can move faster & make better decisions

• Leader-leader - not parent-child. All conversations are as equals. Focus on the "psychological safety" of your team - the ability to safely challenge, argue, dispute & ultimately support a decision collectively

• Role of the "leader" - coach, mentor, cheerlead, unblock & inspire. Issue challenges for people to rise to, not orders to execute

• Action bias - business plans are dead. Do something, see what happens, learn and adjust - the world is too uncertain to wait for certainty 

• Be visionary - business plans are dead, but the need for an inspiring direction of travel isn't. Be visionary. Talk in principles, not rules. Then "tell tall tales" - because you need everyone to know the vision in order to give everyone the context in which your actions & activity make sense

• Transparency - "managing the message" is dead. Selectively sharing information only breeds suspicion - make data, information and results (success or failure) openly available to all. You'll get better ideas & more buy in

This felt like a great set of principles that were consistent with my values - importantly, this meant that I was confident we'd get to something that I could authentically lead & land.

Engineering small watercraft

With the education part out the way it was time for the hard bit - putting it into action in a way that was authentic to me, bought into by the team & compatible with the larger organisation.

In the end, I decided that the best approach to land it was to build a skeleton set of principles with a small group (my leadership team), share it with the wider team, then collectively build on the principles & collectively build the action plan to bring them to life.

We wanted to answer one question - how can we make this the best team you'll ever be a part of?

We settled on four principles (with the final one added through discussion the wider team) that are packed with meaning and backed by actions - since then we've talked about them relentlessly, tried a number of (successful & unsuccessful) actions and celebrated some great successes (and attempts that ended in failure!)

They are:

#1 We're anyone up for disrupting retail through our specialist channels

When you look after channels in a matrix, you can't define your team by it's organisational structure alone - you need people within other functions to give your channels at least some of their focus. In reality, our team is "anyone" that has an interest in our channels & everyone we need to play a part in running them!

What we also quickly realised was that clearly defined ARCIs, escalation and "legitimate" power weren't going to get us the support we needed from the other teams. We needed these other functions to want to own a part of these channels & want to spend time on something that is smaller than the supermarket giant. We know from earlier that people love pirates & want to be part of the "club" - so this principle is all about setting up our channels as a disruptive, renegade & exclusive "club" - but one where everyone is invited & everyone is welcome. Who wouldn't want to join?

We opened our team meetings out to anyone that considered ourselves part of our team (my proudest moment was when 2x as many people joined our team meeting than there were people "officially" in our team); framed all of our strategies to be inclusive of other areas; majored on our ability to help other parts of the business "trial" as we can move at pace innovate and disrupt; and built cross-functional opportunities to discuss, debate & build on our plans.

What was initially hardest was how we responded when people elsewhere in the business were running projects that were "encroaching on our patch" - an inevitability in a big business & when you're in an area that everyone plays a part in. It's human nature to be defensive - assert that you've "got the A" and they should back down, muscle in on the project or just simply eject toys from your pram. I've certainly felt this way on a number of occasions, but we agreed early on as a team that our approach would be to fight our instincts and instead invite them in - making the team bigger & collectively covering more ground as a result.

#2 We're challenged to make the tough decisions now, then adapt

I have never been the biggest fan of the word "empowered". There's loads of good things about it (it promotes a feeling of ownership, puts decisions closer to the person that will implement them & increases speed of decisions) but to wait for someone to "empower you" has always felt a bit too passive. A bit too parent-child.

We wanted the team to feel more than empowered - we wanted them to grab accountability for themselves. Even more than that, we wanted everyone to feel like they'd been issued a personal challenge to bite off more than they could chew & just make things happen. Equally, we wanted to bring some agile principles into how we worked.

As with "empowered", I'm by no means an evangelist of "Agile" (the official process - "Agile" with a capital "A").

I've seen so many examples of Agile driving a desire to do "stuff" (rather than the right stuff) quickly, or it breeding such extreme resistance to sharing a plan or timeline that the chances of managing dependencies in a complicated organisation are slim to none. However, in this case, we knew that we'd be doing new things where perfect data simply wouldn't exist - we needed to develop the muscle of knowing "enough" to make a decision, trying it and then seeing if what we tried worked.

Bizarrely the "then adapt" part of the principle serves as a way to mitigate risk - we'd take risks and move quickly, but always know how to back out of them if they don't work. We'd know how to adapt after.

For all of the pain, disruption & loss of life that COVID has caused so far, it did bring with it almost limitless opportunities to make tough decisions at incredible speed. We quickly realised, our job as leaders wasn't going to be about creating the opportunities for change but instead was going to be about cheerleading the behaviours we showed as we went after the plethora of opportunities that appeared.

We chose to focus equally on the things that worked and those that didn't. We didn't celebrate that horrible cliché of "failing fast" though - we celebrate when we'd adapted and made the call to change course or reverse out of a decision, and most importantly, learnt from the experience. 

#3 We show our workings, share our plans & welcome others' input

Creating a "club" for an exciting part of a business & an action-biased set of behaviours was great - but I've equally seen enough examples of "cliques" or "renegade" functions within businesses breeding distrust in the wider organisation, attracting criticism & then ultimately being subject to organ rejection (usually, specifically, of the leader!).

We quickly realised that our way around this was to over-compensate with transparency & explicit integration into the wider business strategy. We would have no secrets - actively sharing our work & transparently sharing information. This was particularly important to do if it was unfinished - showing our workings gave people the chance to input & challenge openly & regularly, rather than letting mistrust slowly stew until it led to a more major confrontation.

Again - we did lots of conscious things here. We shared "thoughts" on our channel strategies widely across the business, with an invitation to input, rather than "final" strategies. We created one, transparent monthly update that we shared with anyone - whether it was the CEO or a peer of the most junior colleague in the team. We challenged each other to share the flaws, next steps & imperfections of what we were doing rather than polishing & PR-ing everything.

Of all the principles, this one has absolutely not been without pain. We've had working & discussion documents shared, escalated & heavily challenged - often from senior people in the business where a "normal" approach to communication would have seen only a polished answer reach them after all the disagreements had been ironed out. However, I'll argue until I'm blue in the face that the stress, difficult conversations, confrontations, apologies & time needed to address these challenges was always outweighed by the value of getting the feedback directly & early in the process. In every situation, more challenge earlier has got us to a better answer.

#4 We enjoy ourselves while we do it

This was the principle the team added & by far the most important. We spend far too much time in the office to not enjoy it & we all know we do better work if we're having fun doing it and like the people we work with.

This one needed very little intervention - just a signal that having fun was OK and a few examples of role modelling it and it took on a life of it's own - quizzes, drinks, pranks, riddles, DJ sets, virtual coffees all appeared out of nowhere.

Getting back on the yacht

In focusing on these four principles, we've seen some amazing results. Outside of the things the team have delivered over the last 12 months, our colleague feedback has been great. Engagement, leadership scores, customer focus, development & communication scores in our official feedback survey skyrocketed. More importantly, facilitated by the brilliant Sarah Ellis (Co-founder of Amazing if), we spent some time as a team looking into psychological safety (the one proven common ingredient observed in all high performing teams). As part of this, we asked the team about their psychological safety & recorded some of the highest scores Sarah had ever seen.

But it's certainly not "done" yet - in fact it never is. We've definitely fallen into a couple of the traps & I've seen some of the risks play out - our team's engagement scores with the wider business were less strong than their engagement with our team & there's more we can do to fully integrate with some of the process that exist in the wider business. So now the focus needs to re-dock with the superyacht so we don't lose the momentum we've built & get stranded at sea.

Equally, as we come out of COVID (and Christmas, and Brexit!), into a new financial year, and face into a new organisational strategy, we'll need to go again in making sure what we do is strategically aligned and how we do it is consistent with the wider business culture. At the same time, we need to continue to be different enough to retain the successes we've seen so far. 

It's been an incredible year, incredible role & incredible set of circumstances for broadening how I think about leadership, culture & landing change. It's great to see the "classic" theories taught by academics in business schools haven't become irrelevant just as it's interesting to see that some of the "success is always caused by this" promises of some of the newer titles aren't as universally applicable as the authors would like you to believe. Most importantly, I've learnt a lot more from "challenging myself to make the tough decisions now, then adapting" than I would have from just reading a bit more, and I've certainly "enjoyed myself as I've done it".

So part two has been a long time coming! As I was half way through writing this, the world went slightly mad - not just in terms of life in lock down but also with the pressures of working in the grocery industry. Without further ado, here it is.

Theme 4 - remove the societal barriers to thinking well

Much like the observation that we're not given permission to think strategically until later life, there are many other societal hurdles to effective thinking. We're taught that ideas are no good unless they are backed by data or experts, constraining Independent thinking. We're taught to read in order to absorb the wisdom of others, whereas Reading thinking is more about the thoughts reading can spark than the exact ideas that books contain. We're ridiculed for our wacky ideas, instead of being encouraged to seek the creativity that's in Mad thinking. We're judged and advised against being envious of others, when Envious thinking can actually help us better clarify what we want.

Nobody gets fired for buying IBM - a famous quote that sums up how we're drilled to think that the "best way convince anyone of anything we might be saying is to do our utmost to hide that we may have formulated the idea ourselves". Independent thinking challenges this, telling us that "not all good ideas have yet been had" and encourages us to put more weight behind what we think. Valuing what we think helps us develop out thinking & have better ideas. Even if not completely new, they will be closer to the situation & context that we find ourselves in. The action? Ask yourself what you think. Don't over value external authorities. Realise you're likely to be consciously incompetent when it comes to being confident in your ability to think & work on challenging that.

Reading thinking tells us that reading has two purposes. First, we can piggyback on the good ideas of others. Secondly, and more importantly "reading provides us with the chance to unearth and put into focus what we happen to think". The book talks about how reading helps refine half-thought thoughts and captures the feeling brilliantly of reading when it talks about how "what they [books] present, feels surprising & impressive, yet also obvious and right" as the passage you read either clarifies what you are thinking, or sends your mind off down a new avenue. We need to distinguish between reading-thinking & reading-reading - with the former requiring us to challenge what we're reading & use reading as a departure point for our own independent thought.

We've all been in brainstorms and heard our bosses say "no idea is a bad idea" before they pull that disapproving face at the next thing you say & don't add it to the flipchart. Mad thinking argues that "amid the detritus of dismissed thoughts, there are invariably many that could have been of high value if only we had dared to examine them further".

The secret to mad thinking is to remove the constraints that we subconsciously have in place. Ask yourself what would you do if money was not a constraints? What would you do if you knew you couldn't fail? What would you do if you didn't have to "influence" anyone else? What would you do if there wasn't time pressure?

Run your own race. Worry about what you have not what others have. Envy is a bad thing. These are all beliefs I subscribe to, but some to a lesser extent after hearing about Envious thinking. Envious thinking tells us that we are taught to feel shame for wanting something others have. Instead, if we learn to "think it through with sympathy & skill", we can use envy to help us understand what we actually want. The book argues that is not the whole of a person that we are envious of, just specific things. From this, we can use the various specific targets of our envy to pull together a menu of things that we would like to have, do or achieve.

The actions for Envious thinking are the most prescriptive in the book - write a list of c. 6 people you envy (famous and people you know - e.g. Dr Dre). Write what their main achievements are (e.g. Beats). Write down the "positive bits I don't really want" (e.g. the lifestyle) - this helps you show that it's not all of what they have that you want. Write down the positive bits you do want (e.g. Marrying technology & beauty) - this then gives you a list of things that you do want.

Theme 5 - remove your personal barriers to thinking well

I'm currently sat here worrying that what I've written so far is a boring wall of text. When I'm at work, every time someone has an idea for what my team at work could be doing I immediately assume it's a personal slight towards me and a suggestion that I don't add value. Every time I'm interrupted in a meeting, I assume it's because the other person is an arrogant ass with no respect for other people.

All of these are thought traps and all of these (well, I'll let you judge the boring wall of text one!) are constructs in my head. Flaws in my thinking. The book talks about three ways to approach these - either by examining your own thoughts or better framing the way you think about other people.

Mindfulness meditation is a big thing at the moment. At it's heart, it's the process of pulling your head out of the past or the future & focusing on the moment that you're currently in, usually by training yourself to pay attention to your breathing. Some research suggests that doing this can make you better at holding onto that instant between stimulus & response and choosing to make a different decision. The first time I heard about it, I assumed it was a load of hippy BS, but have since found the Headspace app an invaluable tool for managing stress.

The book, instead talks about Philosphical meditation (the only concept in the book that doesn't have "thinking" in it's title!). This kind of meditation, instead of pulling yourself into the present moment, directs us to actively spend time to untangle & challenge our worries, fears and also ambitions. It suggests we ask ourselves three questions & really spend the time interrogating & accepting what we're feeling. The questions are:

• What am I anxious about? Write down a minimum of 8 single words and think about you you both practically unpack these (What steps should I take? What do I need from others? What happens if this becomes reality?) and emotionally unpack them (Describe the feeling. What does this tell you?)

• What am I upset about? Without overthinking or worrying about how petty or insignificant they are, write a list of everything that's upsetting you. The more the better. Whether it's the length of time your wife takes to choose a sandwich or the condescension shown by one of your peers, it's all equally valid. Pick two from the list. Think through why this bothers you. Then ask yourself what advice you'd give a friend in the same situation

• What am I excited about? You guessed it, quickly list things that have excited you. Describe your excitement (as if to a friend). Think about whether this excitement gives a clue to something either missing or brilliant in your life. Think about what you could realistically do to change your life in response to these excitements. 

If Philosophical meditation helps remove barriers to poor thinking by stopping you avoiding thinking about them, Empathetic and Love thinking help with two other barriers - it's not always about you, and people aren't just out to get you!

Empathetic thinking is based on the idea that "we're often in a position of needing to know what's going on in the minds of other people". Where the book differs from a lot of work around empathy is that it argues that the best way to put yourself in someone else's shoes isn't to completely put your thoughts, feelings and experiences to one side, but instead is to use them to better relate to the other person. Don't focus on you, but seek to really dig into those uncomfortable parts of your brain to try and understand them. If you're trying to empathise with someone that has done something nasty, remember that sometimes you're an ass as well.

Practically, the advice here is similar to any other empathy studies - actively stop & ask yourself what you think they're thinking. What are their needs? Fears? Hopes? Doubts?

Love thinking takes this one step further and is particularly focused on when the red mist has descended and you can only see the person in front of you as a monster, determined to make your life a misery. The thought experiment here is to simply assume positive intent (or, as the book puts it "look only through the eyes of love").

Use your imagination to think about how the scumbag that cut you up on the motorway was rushing his wife to hospital as she went into labour. Think about how a person maybe responding to hurt, rather than out of malice. Think about how we're all (me especially) still children in many ways and do stupid things. Look for their redeeming features.

For me, it's remembering that the person that rudely interrupts me in meetings is just trying to be heard & the buyer that treats me like I'm one of their suppliers that they need to "beat up" to get what they need is only acting on habit & using a skill that is invaluable in other parts of their day to day lives.

Theme 6 - you're always wrong. This is good

For the last type of thinking, I've borrowed one of the sentences that I use when asked what my values are.

You're always wrong. This is good.

Call it growth mindset, call is Sceptical thinking, call it open-minded - either way, this is all about remembering & sincerely believing that absolutely everything you hold to be true could be and might be wrong.

Accept that your brain isn't perfect (the 15 types of thinking that have come before this should help!) and that tomorrow, after some food or once you've calmed down you might think differently - not to mention once you've listened to other people.

Parting thoughts

I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book & felt it drew together a lot of disparate concepts that have interested me for a while - behavioural science, growth mindset, meditation, influence and all those kind of things.

So, in summary. We already knew that we don't think as much as we think we think. But when we think about how well we think when we do think, we start to think about the ways we think thinking is slightly less perfect than we think.

But at least now I think I've got some thoughts to help with my thinking!

I remember first reading Kahneman's "Thinking Fast & Slow" a few years back & being fascinated by the concept of System 1 (automatic, heuristic driven, habitual) and System 2 (considered, deliberate, complex) thinking.

It led me to a real interest in behavioural economics & behavioural science - something that I've tried to bring into my career to complement the data-led Economics education & consulting dogma that I've had hammered into me ever since.

The other part of thinking fast and slow that struck me was the concept that we don't think as much as we think we think. We spend only 5% of time in System 2. If that's true (and it is), then thinking effectively is one of the most important skills out there.

That's why I started reading "How to Think More Effectively" from the School Of Life.

It dives into the mechanisms of how we think - unpicking & unpacking the process of deliberate thought, and exposing that there are just as many pitfalls & traps that plague our system 2 thinking as there are biases within system 1.

The book is very good. It's not just overly academic psychobabble, it's pragmatic & practical. It doesn't just highlight the thought traps, it also gives you the "bicep curls" to help you practice avoiding them. The 136 pages feel like a summary of the huge concepts that sit behind them, with every word meticulously chosen to have the maximum impact. Even so, I've tried to distil the essence below.

When you open the book, you are confronted with a daunting list of 15 mental manoeuvres to guide you towards better thought. In reality, they follow 6 main themes. The firs three cover the more rational aspects of thinking & that's the focus of this post. The second part of the post will cover the more societal, human & emotional topics.

Theme 1 - know what to do before you worry about how you do it

It is intuitively obvious to all of us, that knowing what you want to achieve before you crack on and do it is a good idea.

In reality, humans don't behave that way. I've spent my career so far observing how often we have a plan of action, but when we're challenged on what it's trying to achieve (or even more importantly, why we want to achieve it) we often don't know. But we're doing something, and that's what matters. Right?

It's not surprising that we're conditioned this way. In school we follow the curriculum we're told to follow. In our early careers we follow the processes we're told to follow. It's not until much later (in many jobs at least) where we are given the formal "permission" to think beyond the "how" & devise our own objectives & our own strategies.

Strategic thinking is a simple concept - but arguably the single most important thing we should all be doing. It's asking the right question before you run after the answer.

The advice the book gives is simple. When it comes to strategic thinking, we need to become more conscious of our incompetence.

Bradwell's model of learning talks about how we start off as unconsciously incompetent (we don't know what we don't know).

Before we can become consciously competent (and eventually unconsciously competent - habitually good at it) we first have to become consciously incompetent - knowing that we don't know.

The training suggested, is to actively notice how often you're thinking about "what" rather than doing the "how" and aim to spend more time on the former.

Routinely ask yourself "why does this matter?" before doing a task. Stick a post-it on your laptop. Block thinking time out in your diary. Tell yourself that gazing out a window thinking is as productive as having another meeting.

Theme 2 - accept that quality thinking is hard work

At this point in the book, I felt like an idiot. It's so obvious! Think Strategically! Why don't I just do it?

The reason is that it's hard. Physiologically hard. The energy & capacity we have for thinking & making complex decisions is now know to be a finite resource. Whilst our brain makes up 2% of our body weight, it burns 20% of our energy.

Because of this, the book states that "our minds do not disclose their more elaborate thoughts in one go" & we should accept this and pursue the process of Cumulative thinking.

We beat ourselves up constantly that our thoughts don't arrive in a perfectly packaged way that we can articulate on the spot. But the truth is that every TED talk you watch, every book you read & brilliant idea you hear did not come in one coherent burst. It evolved slowly over time - "a lakeful of ideas had to be pooled together with painful effort from spoonfuls of thinking arduously collected over long days and nights".

Add to that the concept of Butterfly thinking - our more interesting & complex thoughts often seem to sit just outside of clear focus, like a butterfly taking flight as we reach out to grasp it. Again, this is grounded in physiology - those big thoughts that challenging our world view can induce anxiety & trigger our fight or flight response if we choose to focus on them.

Again, the first action the book suggests is to accept our limitations & the develop strategies to cope with them.

If we accept that we can't permanently keep complex thoughts in our memory, a simple notebook & the habit of writing thoughts in it as they arise becomes the essence of Cumulative thinking. We should welcome the prospect of building on these ideas over time. As we'll see later in Reading thinking (all of these concepts are inextricably linked), this also helps us developing our thinking further - as we re-read what we first wrote, our new thoughts will take a different and often better path.

The practicalities behind Butterfly thinking are just as simple. Creating the environment to reduce anxiety is how we can help crystallise & refine the big thoughts. We can keep anxiety at bay by creating a "sufficient but not overwhelming distraction" and allow the thinking to happen. Go for a walk, go for a drive, have a shower, listen to some music.

Theme 3 - use tools to make quality thinking less hard

The strategic, cumulative & butterfly thinking models are definitely foundational. They're about reminding us of what we should do and helping us build habits to do them. However, it's vital that we keep them in mind. Just because they're intuitive, doesn't meant we're following them already. We need to consciously practice.

The next 4 types of thinking - Focused thinking, Analogical thinking, Death thinking & Friend thinking together make up the "Batman Utility Belt" of mind tools. They're a series of techniques that aim to grab the thought that's half-formed in the back of your mind & crystallise it that we should draw upon when we're struggling to think clearly.

Focused thinking tells us that a common problem is that our thinking is often too vague. In everyday life, we are repeatedly slapped in the face with cliches & buzzwords. How many times have you sat in an interview and asked about a candidate's skills or values only to hear integrity, trust, creativity, influence or relationships parroted back?

But what do these words actually mean? Integrity means very different things to different people.

The imprecise nature of these thoughts means we don't truly have a handle on what we truly think or feel and so will find it impossible to accurately act. Focused thinking tells us to break these thoughts into their constituent parts. Dig deeper by asking yourself "what do I really mean?" 3 times; contrast by asking yourself "what don't I mean?"; compare by asking "when have I felt this before?"; and rework by asking "how might I put this in different terms?"

Analogical thinking is about bringing clarity to an obscure thought by putting it in terms that are clear in another context. Drawing analogies. In business we constantly talk about "journeys", "machines" and "war" analogies. Personally, I'm sick to death of Guerrilla marketing, target customers war rooms and battle plans, but they certainly do a job of bringing relatable clarity.

The title of this blog, "Blitzed" is an analogy. However, it's not a war analogy (it's also not an over indulgence in alcohol analogy!). It's an American Football analogy - a blitz is where the defence ignores all the complex X's, O's and wiggly lines in the playbook & instead goes straight for the nub of the problem - that pesky quarterback. A lovely analogy for cutting through complexity.

The action to take to get better at analogical thinking? Build you bank of analogies - if this were an animal, what would it be? If this were a kind of weather, what would it be? If this was a historical event, what would it be?

Death thinking is an approach to surfacing the hidden choices that we don't know we're making. The book talks about how "if we have more or less forever, we don't have to make any tricky changes or reforms". Instead, if we actively face into the terrifying thought of death, it can bring a greater urgency & freedom to experiment with the time that we do have.

The aim of this thinking is to surface the active decisions that we're not taking and the passive decisions that we are. Procrastinating is a choice. Not following what we truly want to do is a choice. The belief is that by actively considering death, we perversely take away some of the anxiety associated with big choices.

As an action, we're encouraged to google the "death clock" (a site that statistically shows us how long until we die) and have that running as we ask ourselves "What is really important?" and "What's the worst that can happen?". I've found Tim Ferris' "Fear setting" TED talk to do a similar job in a slightly less morbid way.

Finally, Friend thinking is a tool for working with someone else in order for them to help clarify your thinking. The view is by listening well & providing the "application of a light pressure from outside", a friend can help us navigate through our part formed thoughts.

What follows, is almost a textbook description of the role of a coach - listening, not judging, asking insightful questions to shape & challenge the thought processes of the coachee.

The advice given can be supplemented by anything you can find on coaching, but at it's essence - find a friend (or be that friend) that will not advise, but instead ask questions to clarify ("What do you mean exactly?") or change the direction your thoughts are taking ("You're talking about what you've done, how do you feel about it?"). Their role is to support the you in clarifying your thinking, not thinking for you.

Part 2

In the next post, we'll explore the social & personal barriers to how we think well, as well as the single most important theme (in my view) - that we're always wrong and need to accept that this is a good thing

Head here for part 2

So much so, that once again business has chosen to borrow (and subsequently overuse) a term from the military. VUCA, an acronym originally coined to describe the tensions of the Cold War, is now being used to describe the (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous) world of business today.

Some of it is true & just something we need to accept. More Volatile, yep. More uncertain, certainly. More Ambiguous, for sure.

“Complex” though, in my view is more FUBAR than VUCA - at least in one sense.

There's two kinds of complexity - constructed complexity and constructive complexity. The former is bad, a problem of our own making. The latter is good, it's progress & it's an opportunity to learn.

Let me explain.

Ever heard people (usually trying to sell you something) fluently spout endless buzzwords like “patented cloud based machine learning technology” or “enterprise agile change management solution”, preying on the insecurities of risk averse executives who don’t want to miss the next big thing?

That’s constructed complexity.

Ever heard seasoned middle managers talk frantically about the “secret sauce” behind the success of their teams or the “black box” in which the magic happens, all as a thinly veiled attempt to justify both their existence & the reasons not to change?

That's constructed complexity again.

Constructed complexity is a defence mechanism, but it’s one that doesn’t work in the long run. 

Instead, the people that thrive are the ones that bring clarity, not complexity. It’s the genius level analyst that can explain complex statistics to an idiot like me and know why it works, not just how it works. It’s the leader that’s brave enough to smash open the black box, seeking to properly understand the question they’re being asked & build the right answer, not just buy a pre-packaged one that's half right.

However, constructive complexity is an entirely different fish kettle.

Every day, millions of times a day, somebody builds on the foundation of knowledge that was there before. We build new concepts almost constantly, and this adds complexity to the world. This complexity, however, is good. It's constructive. It's progress.

As businesses sought to make more data driven decisions, they built “Big data”. From this, the field of data science evolved to help us use this data. From data science, followed machine learning as we looked to improve the speed & algorithms that data powers. And now, machine learning leads to AI as we look to automate the whole process, including how it improves itself. Progress.

Quite simply, there’s more to know now than there was 30 seconds ago. Every new concept builds on the foundations of others that have come before it. This makes the world more complicated and more complex, but constructively so.

Back to the point of this post - why this blog? Rather than choosing to add to the chaos, I’m choosing to try and cut through it. I love leaning into constructive complexity as it gives me an opportunity to learn more. On top of that, I’m pretty good at getting to the essence of a concept and explaining it simply.

So that’s exactly what I’m going to do - learn more, then take what I learn and put it down on virtual paper. It's mainly selfish, something for me to refer back to, but if someone else finds it useful then even better!