Morning I feel like you're all family now. We've been together for hours.
I just want to say I'm not just playing poker, but I'm actually sitting in front of my window. So it's actually useful to have my, my shades on.
I was actually admiring your setup. I was honestly thinking to myself like that guy gal Dino has balls. I want to pull that off. But yeah, I, I was envying you. You just ruined that for me. Sorry.
It's pure Rockstar.
Yeah, it's like, there's so much attitude packed into that. Like, I just wished you could pull something like that off. But yeah, I,
I must say I must say that I hate to add offence to injury. But I must say that my glasses are actually my speakers. So these are Bose friends. Thank you. I'm hearing your trophies. And I'm just using another mic because it sounds better. But I can hear you from here.
Smoking like
I don't want to be to be too much. But I have this extra Canon camera that I could be using. As my my webcam. Because like what Now the thing is like I work with, we do some online trainings and stuff. So like having a proper setup is part of the deal. And if you see my desk reaches going up and down, plus the standing desk that is on top of this, you would be really offended. I'm sorry.
What's it like?
What's it like living in the future? Oh, yes. Well,
that's my whole deal. If you're if you saw like one of these online conversations recently, like, with the services designers, designers in Scotland, we were talking about how you talk things into existence. And I'm like, so I'm kind of a sorceress. Then if you have, like, I'm casting stuff, like that's how you do it. So like, Oh, yeah, my new job. My new job description should be innovation resources, because I always have the resources. So that's how it's moving in the future.
springs coming and having to put the blinds down to stop the sun in my eyes. That's good news. Good news. I've got two weeks booked in the Lake District in April. Yeah, and I need to be able to do doing the desk walks.
Right.
Okay, we'll get started. So this session is about cruise. Now, I want to do this in two separate sections. So one is the basic theory of a crew as opposed to a team. All right. And then I want to move on to the EU handbook and cruise. Yeah, because that that's a variation on that. So that's where we're going. So the difference between a crew and a team is actually really very simple. A team is an assembly of people who have to, you know, if you go back to the sort of forming, norming, storming, performing and all those sort of things. Yeah, team of people who've got to learn to learn about each other learn, you know, what they're about, they have to actually build expectation. Some teams succeed, some teams don't. Yeah, in terms of the way they work, and they lack efficiency in terms of allocating, you can't just say you're on a team with these people get on with it, because the people may not get on. And the worst thing for you is you tell them they must get on at which point they try and pretend they do. And underneath is getting really nasty. crews working in different ways. And you'll find that crews exist in all military units, and in all civil contingency units, and they've evolved. And one of the reasons by the way these are important is, I mean, I get really irritated with the HR literature, which is constantly talking about how they want everybody to be above average, which, you know, anybody with any background in maths knows is theoretically impossible, right? You can't have everybody above average, but never mind. And, you know, the reality is, if you actually look at it, what military people do is they assume they're recruiting people in terms of the overall population and probably below average, but they make them extraordinary through process. And one of the key aspects of the process is the crew. And a crew has roles and the roles now how they interact with the other roles. Now the roles are predefined. And you see the same in medicine. So if you're looking at operating theatre, you have very distinct roles which people are playing. And if a surgeon holds up a hand in a certain type of operation, the lead nurse will know exactly what instrument to put into it. Yeah, as they go through, even if they have never, ever worked together before in their lives. If you look at an aircraft, right. And I'll give you some examples on this in a minute. So in the Second World War, if the flight sergeants, the flight Sergeant was a pilot who was a sergeant, if they had a Wing Commander, which is kind of like a colonel equivalent in the British Air Force was the navigator. Then Then the colonel was in charge until they put on flying gear and walk to the aircraft. And then the sergeant was in charge until the aircraft landed again, because the pilot role is in charge during operations. You'll find if you look at the Army Today, a weapon Sergeant has authority over a brigadier in respect to certain roles. So crew crews have this ability to delegate authority without loss of status. And you can assemble the crew instantly provided people have been trained in the roles. So if I'm trained in role and it role expectation, I can just slot in. Yeah. And if I get to know you, I can improve it a bit, but it's very different. The other interesting thing is one of the reasons the roles have cognitive capacity, which goes beyond that of the effective the collective individuals is the information efficiency of that process. So I was doing work with the Federal Aviation Authority in Massachusetts. And if you don't know it, one of the things about flying a commercial aircraft carrier is the pilot makes the call. And they'd found three cases of where if the other crew had been able to challenge the pilot, then the aircraft wouldn't have crashed. And the argument was, they should break that rule. And I defended all the experienced pilots, and I got them to investigate it. They said, How many cases how many aircraft would have crashed if people had challenged the pilot? So he couldn't make a quick decision?
All right, and the point the whole point about Cruz is people don't challenge the roles, everything isn't negotiated. The roles do different things in the system, and they pass information between them. doesn't mean you can't introduce more complex check mechanisms, which is what we actually did, in that we created a ritual act, a ritual opportunity to challenge but it was highly ritualised and highly time bound. So it didn't disrupt the process. Yeah. So we created stuff around that. So crews are extremely powerful. And there are various ways that you can build these the problem with crews is that they take two to three years of training to get people to that level of competence. So this is a classic issue if you invest up front to give yourself downstream resilience. And if you don't have vest upfront, you can't get it but when you need it, it's too late. So in knowledge management terms, it's the difference between the tax system over the map user is that the map user is fine because they can use a map. They don't need much training. But if you really want speed, you want the taxi driver and adaptability. So it's not an either or it's it's a both antike function. And Karla was quite interested in is you tend to see with highly mature teams, people who've been together for quite a long time that people start to assume roles anyway, within the team. Yeah, because they stabilise around aspects. Now, I'll give an example on this, and then I'll talk about crew creation. So, as most of you probably know, I'm deeply distrustful of psychometric tests, particularly known pseudo sciences, like Myers Briggs, which is a pseudoscience. UK doesn't produce replicated results, and it works by auto suggestion things you want to believe therefore, you give it mystical significance. I mean, that is a known phenomenon. But one of the ones I use quite a lot when I was first a manager was called beldon blB iron. Now, if you look this up, please don't look at the modern version because Meredith sun destroyed it. Melbourne had seven characteristics. The new Belbin test now has 16 it's just got ridiculous, right. And I still got the Old Seven tests, so identified seven roles, which actually happened in teams. So you can't like have the chairperson function, the person who coordinates other activity, who makes sure people are doing things, you've got the shape, shapers want to dominate the universe, you know, they're aggressive, they they know what should happen. You have plants, I don't know why I called it a plan to have lots of good ideas and content standby, everybody isn't rushing to implement them. You have monitor evaluators who are really scary because they can describe the situation so people can find a solution. Or they can describe the situation. So people give up in despair and commit, collect their acts of suicide. Yeah. You've got the team worker who is really concerned to make sure everybody get on with each other, and they really don't want any of this conflict. And when people please be nice. And then you've got the resource investigator who kind of like doesn't know much, has got huge networks and can always find people who do know things when the team needs it. And then you've got the poor, old completer finisher who sort of picks up on all the pieces that other people don't do. So the reason I quite liked the Belbin test is it doesn't say you are one of these things. It says these are your primary concerns. And these are your secondary concerns. All right, and we actually ran this, I have a high performing team. And we actually ran this for seven years on that team. And you could see that at the start of the team formation. Yeah. Secondary, we had a few non primary roles, but we have people in secondary. After three years, the people in the secondary when our primary bc got so frustrated, other people weren't doing it, it became their role within the team. So to make this personal, my primary characteristics were always shape or plant resource investigator. Which means I want to control the universe. I've got big networks. Yeah. And I have lots of ideas. And you know, you can see the characteristics, I generally surround myself with people who match that capability, particularly monitor evaluators. But if something goes wrong, and somebody else isn't doing it, I switch into monitor evaluator completer, finisher, and it's a phase shift, it happens instantly.
All right, and then I go into analysis complete a finisher, it's why I'm the person in the team who does templates, because anybody who uses carriage returns in Word templates and doesn't use styles should be taken out in carotid and their fingers should be chopped off, because they're obviously incompetent. Because they create a bloody nightmare for people like me, you have to integrate documents from multiple sources. And if they just use styles, I could do it quickly, right. It's actually why I like wikis, because at least you know, carriage returns can be legitimised. So the point is, if somebody else in the team isn't doing something, you end up doing it because you get frustrated first. That's what the thing works on. As a den got ruined, because they added a characteristic in which in a technology, everybody becomes dominant on it, it became a waste of time. But it was actually quite interesting because we ran the test every every six months and people talked about it and what it meant. Yeah, and I'd say you could see the roles switching now within the group. So one of the ways I've actually got people into understanding crews and this is Then as a sort of training exercise, is you do the old Belbin test. And then you give people role cards. And you run through simulation or actor training sessions in which they can only do what the role says they can do. Yeah, so the plan can only have ideas. Yeah, the monitor evaluator can only analyse, but they can't have ideas. And then you play games where the team works like that. And it can be quite fascinating. So that was one of the ways you can tune people in. And it's also one of the ways you can create a temporary crew type structure in the team. Yeah. And the one thing about this is, there's no point in asking somebody to play a primary role if they don't even have it as a secondary, because they just won't understand what it's about. And they won't see the relevance. So you can do those sort of flexes. Yeah. I use this a lot in team training. So if we only have one monitor evaluator doing primary, I'd take them out, and wait and see what happened. Yeah. And video and recorded. So that's quite a, there might be other better tests than this. That was just the one I used. Yeah. So those sort of things are all really powerful, really easy. Yeah, it gets people into this concept that there are roles. And if you interact with another role, and you don't interfere in it, then that works. The most sophisticated way of creating crews is that you actually map the roles which are naturally present in projects. So you go through all the projects, which an organisation is one run or possibly organisations like them as well, yeah. And you identify the roles which were present, and you cluster the roles define the boundaries. And you also critically create ritual entry into roles. Yeah, so if you ever go into an operating theatre, and I've been into operating theatres four times now, I used to say three, but I've now had two holes drilled in my skull. So I've gone up to four. So I, you know, twice, vertically and twice horizontally. And on the two vertebrae, both my children were to quote, you know, Shakespeare from their mother's womb in time the ripped Yeah, there. So they were scissoring operations. And the process of going into the operating there you go through a scrubbing up process, you have to wash your hands, and vigorously you put on the white rubber boots and everything. And one of the things that ritual does is it changes your identity, even if you're not a doctor or a nurse going through it makes you think differently. It makes you aware of the hygiene issue. Yeah, not because you've been told about it because of the process you've been going through. Yeah, and and that that's sort of on top and pant optic in effect, as well. It's visible whether you've done it or not. Yeah. And what that ritual does is it changes from somebody being so instead of being somebody different, so they stopped being john smith, and they become the surgeon for the period, they're in the operating theatre. And actually, what the ritual does is it changes the cognitive and physical activation. So that they're actually literally seeing the world in different ways. If you remember, on the, you know, the grill or on the X rays, you're only scanning 5%. And matching with patterns. What ritual does is focuses you on a different 5% and constraints the patterns that you use.
Yeah, that that that's the kind of like reason this stuff works. So that's actually really powerful. Yeah. But it takes two or three years of training, because you got to define the roles, you got to create the ritual for all entry. You got to run people through training, you got to put them into a mixture of theory and practice. But once you've got the thing established and running, you can assemble a crew across silos and have instant success. Because people don't have to go through any team formation process. And by the way, one of the things I'm really keen on at the moment is starting to create the concept of leadership as a crew, not an individual. So there's actually always a pilot, but who the pilot is can change and that will increase resilience in organisations. But to be honest, that's probably a one or two years experimental stuff or needs a lot of investment to actually build. But actually, the concept of the leader as a crew is a really powerful one, and you can build artefacts and other stuff around it. And it radically increases resilience and it matches reality. Because if you look at you know leaders who are any good, they take people with them as they move between jobs. Because actually they know their weaknesses. I made a key decision at one point, illustration. So I was I come out of three years of World Council of Churches programme to combat racism with a degree in philosophy in theoretical physics, which makes you more or less unemployable. So I ended up in HR and training because they'll take anybody if they've got international experience. Yeah. And I was young and naive, or I thought the role of HR was to look after staff. So we got a new financial director in and he was really shaking things up. All right, and his staff were upset. So I went in to tell him off, sort of 28 This is a 45 year old financial director. And I'm basically saying you can't treat yourself like this is completely unacceptable. And as you probably gather, I got thrown out of the room. Yeah. And next day, got summoned in to meet the HR director and saw him in the financial director sat next to each other. And they said, You've got two choices. Because he, he got he gone to HR and said, Who is this person I want to know about him. And he discovered I was the I actually had an accounting qualification. And I was doing an MBA in financial management. So they gave me an alternative, I could be fired for insubordination, or I could go and work as his deputy. It was, the guy was brilliant. He was one of the best bosses I've ever had. He just had that ability to do things, right. So I worked for him for three or four years and did a huge amount. And then he left and we both of us knew we had to leave this company was going under. And he actually wanted me to go with him. Because I was the ideas generator, I was the fixer of difficult problems. Yeah. And I did the novelty stuff, and he had other people around him do other things. And that was when I made the set. Now I can say this, this guy's number two for life, and have a very comfortable, you know, existence, or I can break out and I broke out at that point. But again, you see leaders do that they find people who compliment them. Yeah, they don't find people who I've always said this, the people I value are the people who've had to argue with me. Not if they do it stupidly, but actually good leaders surround themselves with people who tell them what they need to hear. Yeah, and that was one of my roles in IBM at one point. And it was this is an example of an informal role. There was kind of like a status amongst IBM general managers in having the most disruptive Maverick. It was kind of like, you know, I've got a more disruptive person than you have looked at how many people they've upset. I mean, it was literally a sort of thing which evolved. And, and that was a role I performed with great alacrity for several years until, you know, Lou left and Sam took over. And those sort of things then got eliminated, right. But again, you see the point I'm making about roles and diversity. Yeah. And it's the old thing about Roman emperors, you know, when they have their triumph, the slave stood in the shoulder and just kept whispering in their ear. Remember, you're a man? Yeah. And and that's one of the other functions of crews, it gets rid of the ego issue. Yeah. And actually, you can have less competent people in the roles than you'd need if the roles weren't formalised with the training.
Okay, so what we got there is a way to get people to experiment with the idea, but then a two to three year process to build it into organisations. Yeah. And then this concept that your leadership function starts to become a small crew, rather than individual and that from an HR perspective, gives you huge capability to keep resilience and keep things going. Yeah. And variety within the system. Now what we did in the handbook, because, you know, part of the transcend stages, build crews, but you haven't got that initially. So if you look at the handbook, it identifies effectively, what a teams we call them crews. Actually, we mainly call them teams, I think. So we got things like the Wrecking Crew and the weak signal detection crew. So what we actually did there was to say, well, we can't form a crew, but what we can do is to create specialist teams, which have a very specific function in the crisis. So that's all they're doing. They're not into it yet. And from a leaders point of view, that's key is it means I've got somebody looking at opportunities. I've got somebody gaming, the unintended consequences of every decision before I meet it, and they specialise in doing that. So I'm not going to go through those things, but you can see what we were doing there and say, I can't form a crew, which would do this because I haven't got a two year lifespan. But I can collect people who will be naturally good at this. Yeah, and put them on a team. Oh, and by the way, if you want an innovation team, you don't put innovators on it. That's a fundamental error that people keep making. If you want an innovation team, you want resource investigators and monitor evaluators. The innovators will find them anyway. Right, because innovators have really bad at listening to other people's ideas. So an innovation team needs to be the people who naturally network who haven't necessarily got ideas but are really good at synthesising talking with people and bringing things forward. Okay, so that's kind of it to be honest. All right. So in terms of methods we're looking at, how did you get people into the concept that things like games and scenarios, is a variation on that which I've done sometimes, which can be extremely effective is you actually get a group of improv actors. improv actors are really cheap. Yeah, I mean, the amount of actors desperate for cash is huge in any major city in Europe, because there ain't many places. And you basically that people, people, Coach actors, rather than do the job themselves. Okay. Now, I first did that when I was in HR, because I got fed up of, you know, having to have people video, people being given scripts and saying, You're about to fire somebody, and they got video doing it, and they were criticised. Yeah, so they'll put in roles and it just didn't work for people apart from the amateur dramatics guys who just got histrionic, hysterical. So what I did is I brought in an actor, and the people instead of being videoed themselves doing it, they coach the actor, and then watch what the actors did. And the actors were told to do exactly what they've been taught to tell to do and nothing else. And that actually is an extremely effective technique. Yeah, we did it with a whole bunch of companies on that, particularly with holiday ends. It was fascinating, right? So it takes away the performance, friends stress, but it increases the learning. So that's one of the other ways you can get people into crews, you have five D, and seven actors who are playing to try the seven roles. And then people tell them what to do and see what happens. And then they change the instructions and see what happens. So you get this sort of, yeah, observing other performances is actually better learning than doing the performance yourself. Yeah, unless you're an actor in your own right, then you do do the learning. Yeah. And this, by the way, probably a lot of change people, all actors think that everybody else was actors will will be wonderful. Yeah, all musicians think that if everybody just played a musical instrument problems would be resolved. And all storytellers think everybody should tell stories. And the reality is, none of these things are universal, right? They're all parts of the composite. And I mean, yes, I mean, I mean, actually would apply, I mean, actually, is one of the ways that you structure it. So you would start to look at different action components in terms of defining roles, and actually haven't thought about that. But that's actually a really good idea. You could do the knowledge mapping, and then construct the knowledge mapping across projects, and then construct the roles from the action elements. Yeah, and that will be typically important for things like experience.
Okay, so that's true. So you've got these two things. One is long term. And the other thing is, okay, we haven't got a chance. So we'll create highly specialised teams to do individual functions. So they're the crew is kind of like collective rather than individual. Yeah. Okay.
So do you have like a good like, written down, like maybe you have a blog, a blog post on the difference between a team and a crew that is like, just so I can send to other people actually, because I liked I was trying to find and I saw something like the difference between this team grew and squared. I don't know if that would make a difference. But like, if you have any resource on that would be nice, because
I'm pretty sure I've blogged on it at some stage. But if you can't find something, tell me and I will blog on it. I need some more blogs for the next couple of weeks. Anyway, so I've stopped blogging this week, because I'm, I'm doing sort of six o'clock till 10 o'clock presentations every day and you can't write when you've got that problem. And next week, I'm going to be up probably next week, I'm not going to update Kevin I think I'm switching these in David's day series to updating on several methods so I may start to do a more general update. So this could be one of those.
By the way, if you think about this, if you think about cruise, just think how much energy is wasted in team exercises team testing construction team building. Yeah. And and you can do this quite effectively and I had for seven years or I had the most profitable business unit in data sciences. Now if I confess on this, one of the reasons is the naivety on people on computers. So I remember going to Thorn EMI, which was one of my clients, they wanted me to build a decision support system. I said, Well, I can build it two ways I can build it the way you specified it. Or we could spend 50% more money, and I could build it this way. So everything is parameters. And we could change it if you change your mind next year. And the financial director said, No, I won't change my mind. So to be honest, I thought To hell with it. And I invested and we built it the way I wanted to build it. Next year, of course, he changed his mind. So we said, well, we did tell you it would be a rebuild. And he said, Yes, I understand that. And I said, well, same choices here. Which way do you want me to do it now? I've got my mind. So we charged in the same sort of money, waited three months, yeah, change some parameters and sent him a request to test it. And I feel Yeah, this is fine. We have three clients we get that with all right. And then the first finance director for Tony why came to be financial director of data sciences. And I got some of the and he said there's two things I want to know from you Snowden is why is it McKinsey's are recommending that I invest in you and don't expect profit for the next 10 years he called him McKinsey's. And he said, the second thing is how the hell did you make all that money out of me? And I said, Well, do you want the truth in both cases? And he said, not only do I want the truth, but God help you if you don't, all right. And I said, Well, the reason Mackenzie's recommended it is I actually looked at their manuals, and I worked out how to answer their questions. So my business would appear in the top right hand of the quadrant. I said, it's quite explicit what they're looking for, it's quite easy to get in the evidence, you know, that they they're not really doing any detailed work. So that's why I'm in the top right hand box to the quadrant, he looked at me. They said, Is anybody else doing that? I said, What are the person is because I coached them, but I don't think anybody else's. And then he said, Okay, what about the second one? So I told him the truth. He looked at me and he said, okay, you're director of strategy. Now. I'm taking you out of operational management. So that was, that was it? That was a Korean point. All right. Bye, but I'm making the point, right, yeah, this is kind of different roles, different functions, different points. Different things work in different contexts. But the thing I did with that team is every six months, that was where we were doing the beldam. But I also took them away. So the first time we went to Yorkshire and we spent the weekend walking in the hills, and then we spent three days. Yeah. And we stayed in holiday cottages, and we have food in pubs and I have to make make breakfast and worship afterwards. Yeah, that we built rituals around this. And everybody got lucky. Then we went horseback riding and we went canoeing and stuff like that. At no stage, did we allow any facilitator anywhere near the process to force us to reflect on our learning through act through physical activity. We just made sure that people did something dirty and filthy together over a weekend. So they had stories to go into the session. And that got close to me. And again, you see, what we're doing was we're ritualizing it. And I mean, that from my point of view, that meant I always recruited internally, I never had to recruit externally. There are always people in the company wanted to join that unit, which kind of made this unpopular in another way. But if you're going through that sort of process, you don't want to leave rituals are really important structures important.
Okay, first of all, awesome stories. So I want to as usual take this to start up, I'm gonna, I'm gonna just be very redundant about redundant about under startup. I want to pull this in startup direction. But what you said hit home on so many levels. Specifically, when it comes to coming up with a kind of, I don't know playing card, a set about getting there are there are there specific crews and like in startups, you know that the CTO you got the specialised versus general generalist and specialist. If it's b2b, you got the sales guy. So there are really structured and usually very clean cut in the majority of startups that I've worked with. I was I was a tech blogger at one point. So I was basically going through hundreds of startups in terms of founders investors and the setup. So when I went to like when I'm looking at this, I want to take a whack at putting together a most common setups for for a crew because this actually complements if I may, it complements the distributed decision making aspect that we discussed yesterday. Because with this, the paradox is ended because if the roles are going to be shifting, in essence, it is distributed to roles the decision making is not about individuals anymore. It's role decision making in a dynamic crew that respects the interaction and delivers. Does that make sense?
Yes, he does. And I mean, I've done some thinking about this. I mean, it is quite interesting. We go the West Coast, there's a huge difference between San Diego investors and valley investors in terms of what they're interested in, in their attitudes, yeah. But that that's for a sidebar. I think the thing people get wrong on startups is they they try and the fact that the CEO is the founder, which is always a bad idea. Yeah. I mean, Gary Klein gave me this advice years ago, and I haven't really followed it to be honest. All right. He said, find somebody to run the company. You couldn't care less about the ideas? Yeah, because, yeah, and it's hard. Right. But he did that.
I wouldn't. I would never do it. Just to be honest.
Yeah. Well, I think there are different frames. And I think there are different types of crew based on different types of product. Yeah. Oh, yeah. And, and I think that that's one of the things that we need to start to work on, right? Because I think, yeah, at the moment, what you tend to do is you you get a mature company structure is the kind of like template the lawyers use. And therefore, it tends to get put into startups where it's actually entirely inappropriate. And there are different structures or different crew structures that were clicking at different phases of growth linked to different types of investment. Yeah. And I think that is actually important. And I think it's also one of the ways that you will build experience into startups. Because one of the troubles about proactive investors. I mean, we're thinking about this, in my mind talking with one VC. I know right? Now, one things I've said to them about, actually around stuff around strategy around the battlefield guide, because we want to build a business around it is well, kind of like, you know, I want you to find somebody, you can manage those who couldn't care less about the content, but they don't want to have fights with the content on somebody. But I want to know somebody who could scale this very quickly and make it into a really good business proposition. Right now, that is a sort of, we got the thing now, how do we scale it point. And the earliest stage is when you don't know whether you've got the thing or not, you need a different type of structure. And I think that this is the sort of it would be fairly easy to do, to be honest, to go over multiple historical startups and the maturity and the maturity and identify the actual roles which happened. Or we could just watch Silicon Valley because they're probably all in there anyway. Right now me that's that yeah, that's basically it.
I love it
too. Like the action thing tied in because when I read when I read that blog post on the, on your recommendations here, I believe it was quite a nuclear industry, boatmen fashion, like I remember, I've had a conversation with many of these anywhere where the mainstream media portrays the renegade founder, which that side sidebars, there's amazing research on why they thought why an inconsistent between individual perception and market market perception of founders value creates affluent startups. It's not something neither nurture nor nature. But that's a different conversation.
So what we were talking about Steve Jobs, phenomena and stuff like that. Yeah, exactly. I
mean, it's, it's, it's staring you in the face most of the time, but like, I don't look mainstream literature's very, very different from what's accurate. What's accurate. So the action part for me is, is serial, serial serial entrepreneurs. Like, if you take a case, for example, this extremely, it's a case in point, from my perspective, like, the more startups you did, the more experience you had in a very, like experience means a lot in the startup, because you're not going to pick up a book and read about the pain and suffering of blood, sweat, and tears don't come off as
like, I saw that just but and there's a difference between intrapreneurs and entrepreneurs. And people don't get that. I mean that that's my big problem with the Lean Startup book is just complete nonsense, because it only It only looks at self reported success, and it ignores longevity. I mean, I was actually for most of my life and intrapreneur not an entrepreneur. And the skills of an intrapreneur are the skills to manage a large organisation. Yeah, to handle novelty. And that's completely different. But I think it also links in with infectious curves. So you need different types of crews at different points on that curve. And if you don't make the change, systems don't grow. So many startups don't grow because they don't make the switch. I mean, this was the original work I did in data sciences is how do you sell on the other side of the chasm. Now, if you You can sell without going through the early adopter phase. And we developed a whole series of strategies for that. You actually have a very different investment profile, but that requires a different skill set. Yeah, yeah. So symbiosis is one way to do it.
So the anecdote on the lean startup and this, this is something that that I picked up when I read your post on, on on operational theatres, the homeruns, the blank thread, for those of you who aren't familiar with him, he's the author of the startup owners manual and the four stages to epiphany. He's considered like to be one of the one of the major authors in startup culture. So his his home run was Eric Ries the lean startup, who he literally mentioned, forced to audit one of his Stanford courses. To me, that means that the only way that I'm going to get value out of the startup owners manual is by attending a four month course and Stanford by itself, which makes perfect sense now that when because I've handed out that book to like two dozen founders that I that I was advising, you're investing into every single one of them, you as the most eloquent paperweight I've seen in their, their offices, like they, it was always there very, very marked up and highlighted, but like no one used it. So that ties back into that.
And that's the problem, or I think here is the action thing, you can't codify something which is highly context dependent. What you can do is you can codify aspects of what you do so you get the right sort of emergence. And that's where I think for example, crews come in to startups Yeah. Is there a things you don't do as a start up, and there are things that you do do, but none of them actually relate to whether you'll be successful or not. They're there, their constraint changes. Yeah. And as I said to you on the call the other day, I think too much money goes into early, certainly on software startups, because you need to do far more CO evolution with the market. And evolution doesn't happen. If you've just got money to do market testing. It happens when you've got to persuade somebody with money to give you money to do something that they want. And you have to modify your perfect picture of how things should be to fit that. And once you've done three or four of those come out, you suddenly realise that what you originally taught is not the right thing. You want to do something different. Yeah. And I think that that sort of enforced co evolution. Yeah. is kind of like key. And I think the trouble is what people have done with startups is they've looked at what people did historically. If you take Steve Jobs, for example, I mean, if it hadn't been for the bankruptcy of next. Yeah. And I was partly responsible for that, because we were actually about we had to procure now, the whole of Europe, we wouldn't it's the third time I met jobs. We had all of all the software companies in Europe in agreement that we will use next as the new operating platform. I guess, right, and I went over to negotiate for this, I mean, that this was a safe next, all right, you know, trading revenue, and an advocate, because I wanted an escrow clause. I mean, I just it was, we were negotiating, you know, you negotiate. And they basically said, No, we won't do escrow. And I thought, Okay, this is the total amount than that, right? You You make something which is only important to you important. So when you can see it, at the end of the day, people will throw the kitchen sink. I mean, how many people fall for that always amazes me, all right, but they do. And at the end of the day, I realised that actually, this wasn't one of those they genuinely couldn't. So I said, Look, this is this is actually a great deal, because we work with government. Government require us to have escrow we have diverse grow with you. We all know that nobody ever puts code into escrow and never actually checks it. So it doesn't mean anything. This is just a sort of, I didn't say, by the way, the opposite. He didn't say that. Everybody always does this diner. And I said, it's hard. And they say, Oh, we got to ask Steve. And, you know, they given us all this line about Steve Jobs. He's not in the business side. He's just the Creator, because that was the Steve Jobs myth at the time. Yeah. So he comes in through me every time I met him or him, and he, he says, Why do you want this? So I explained it. And he said, would you ask that from Microsoft? And I got the answer completely wrong. I said, I don't need to and that was all the invective you see in the biographies, and this pile of books was picked up and thrown at me across the table. And the deal wasn't done. Right. So I claimed to have been the originator of Apple from that one incident because you know, you're in your next if it hadn't been for them. I know that the gross exaggeration, but I think is quite interesting is his perception of where next was didn't match the market perception. Yeah, I think one of the things which happened After next is he realised you need to change the market not respond to the market. I think he already thought that anyway. And I think that that's when if you're in a pattern where you're introducing something which will actually change the market, and that's what real. That's what we talked about acceptive innovation. That's what I worked on with UCSD. Right? is how do you take academic ideas to read academic ideas developed for one purpose, and use them to match unarticulated needs in the community. And if you can create those matches, then that becomes a productive business. And if you can radically repurpose existing technology for something completely novel, that's actually the history of technology innovation. Yeah, the big innovations are not primary innovations. They're executive innovations.
Pixar, even even if you take Steve, like the Pixar move, what he basically he was not only educating the market, he was defining a new market. So the TSR, the iPhone, what he was, he was creating a segment in its own cell,
many times the impression, I mean, we created the market for distributed ethnography. Nobody had done it before. It's never even thought of it.
And that's the sorry, that's really Yeah. Like to me, like I actually was talking to a startup the other day. And since maker needs to be a tool for, like, since maker needs to be at the NPS, like it needs to, it needs to be as synonymous In my opinion, as MPs, because there is no, there's nothing that I've seen more compassionate in the in the requirements gathering phase. So like that would be that would be major pillar to tie this into Cruz.
I want to talk about Ahmed, we're always open to conversation.
Absolutely. I just want you to get back from the lakes
website, and he made the right strategy. Now. We want to spin off multiple business.
And you get back from the lakes, and I'll hear whatever. Okay, we can talk about
just just one thing regarding the original crew aspect. Would it be possible to differentiate between crews and teams in terms of looking at redundancy and not in the terms of what basically, yeah, the original meaning of redundancy?
Yeah, crew has high redundancy. crew has higher redundancy, yeah, than a team in the sense that it has, it has it has higher, or we need to get the terms that the point about a crew is the roles are abstract, and the roles are kind of like can adapt very rapidly to completely novel circumstances, whereas individuals can't. Alright, so we may not be using redundancy in quite the same way. All right. So let me do it another way a crew is actually inefficient, which makes it effective. Right, so if you want something to be effective, under changing circumstances, it has to be inefficient. Because if you over focus on efficiency, you remove the adaptive capacity of the system. Yeah, that was a crude does, I think all right. And this is me speculating we we haven't done the research on this yet, is because people play roles, but there are also individuals. And because individuals can swap in or out of roles. You actually have far more diversity in a crew, then you do it in a team, that you have invented the phrase, now you have cohesive diversity, I might blog on that, because it's all coherent diversity, because basically, the roles provide continuity of coherence over time. But the minor variations of the individuals in the roles give you requisite diversity and adaptability. And also, the communication efficiency is so much better. The key thing about crew is the information efficiency is so high because of the expectation.
Well, I was picking up on your idea of well, the military crews, and I'm really struggling to understand that we would have this kind of redundancy within, for example, an aeroplane crew or whatever, tanker crew, whatever you want to take, I think it was at least my my initial idea that those roles would be highly specific, specific and actually not redundant, but only tailored to the specific needs of the situation.
However, if you look at it, if the aircraft is out, it's got a pirate who's got a copilot. And sometimes it's got a spare pilot, right, but he's probably only got one navigator. Yeah, yeah. So and you see this variation in cruise. All right. So, yeah, individual roles. And that's also the apprentice model. So the senior, you've always got Junior co pilots. Right. So effectively, the crew also provides an apprentice model of learning. And that's part of it. Yeah. Then as I say, you know, the interesting thing about crews is that the minor variation of individual behaviour allows you to modify the crew structure or to gain new learning or new insight. And, you know, test pilots, for example, are very different from ordinary pilots. Yeah, I mean, yeah, or fly to fly boys on aircraft carriers, how the hell they take off, and then they never understand they sort of live in a different planet. As I was working with Boeing, and you know, they have world class fly to literally barrel the jumbo jet under the San Francisco bridge. Yeah, I mean, and it's kind of like you're not meant to do that sort of stuff. But test pilots like that. Yeah. And I think that's one of the other things you start to look at this comes back to startup and other questions. Some people actually thrive on drag on danger, some people don't. Yeah, and, you know, they're kind of like differences on this. So, as I say, one of the things you notice about crews is they always involve the apprentice models of learning. And they also train in near, in near real circumstances, it's no coincidence that military units train and the real bullets have because it's different. Yeah. And the same is true of aircraft and elsewhere. And I think we have them in medicine, we also have if you look at it in legal teams and accounting teams. So in the UK, we have two highly specialised roles. One is the barrister, the other is the lawyer. Right now, actually, that was going to be my career. That's where people who are good at debates normally get cold, because the barrister picks up a brief the night before. And their job is to persuade the jury or persuade the judge. Yeah, that advocates, whereas the detailed preparation is done by the lawyer, the barrister is a performance act. So when we were doing the big stuff, when we were, you know, data sciences was going public, right. I was wondering how to brief for the analysts. I mean, I didn't know the detail. I was briefed by the financial people. But my job was to be persuasive and confident in front of analysts. So I didn't know about that many bloody analysts in the universe. I mean, they just kept crawling out of the woodwork. And so different roles in different functions, right. And I think, you know, that that's the ability and the ability to reconstruct crews. And to my mind, you just have to take 10% of the money currently invested in team formation and individual training. And you could actually have cruise for that amount of the cost. Yeah, and then all the other stuff comes with it. Yeah. Because the process creates the learning mechanisms. And this is big switching complexity, you stop talking about individual qualities. And you talk about qualities of interaction. And that was a big debate to have the Sankey one. So when he was prepared to talk towards me mortal signs, which these days he doesn't miss their fans, right? And I said, you can't, you know, you've got to change linkages. And he said, You can't change you, you can only change an individual, you can't change the system. And then I said, Yeah, but then the system will never change. You just got out, you haven't got time to change every individual. Yeah, but you can change the interaction between roles, and you can achieve quite significant changes that way. Yeah. So say, I mean, this is me get onto a belly when I was when I remembered HR departments were an ex military officer and a couple of admin people. And actually, it was a standard route for ex military people because they can like could manage bureaucracy, and they can manage people. And HR became a profession and if you want a proof that there's no real female male difference when it comes to the unreasonable exertion of authority. Look at most HR departments. Yeah, you know, the role determines things more than anything else, you know, nature may deal the cards but nurture plays them, right to take that across. And what you've now got is a whole HR industry to the point where I think the CEO is in a Stockholm Syndrome relationship with HR.
Right, in that there's a huge amount of wasted effort spreadsheets on salary, performance, everything is being made explicit and structured and bureaucratic. To the point when I was in data sciences, I had to employ I had to take on a bad contract and employ bad people to get the salary profile, right. So I could pay my high performance what I needed to pay them. Because we were all given these standard profiles. So I think, yeah, if I wanted to go into an organisation stripper cost, I'd hit HR training and organisational development really fast. Is it like little goat? You know, it's one of these is actually a strategy, how I'll give you two examples. I mean, Lou did it with the accountants. And remember he after he basically took out 20% of the cost, he forced them to fire 20% of the staff, because that's the only way he was going to change the bureaucracy. And He later said to me, we should have made it 50% Yeah, because, you know, the inefficiencies were constantly built into the system that that's that's a drastic intervention, but it does actually happen. We get the same in data sciences. So we were in the turnaround. All right. I mean, we fivers tell the truth to the venture capitalists, I still remember the month where we weren't sure we would compare the wages. Yeah. We had a new CEO and a group of us and we basically had a cultural problem. Instead of hierarchy and status, and people weren't connecting. So what we did one weekend, and this is one of my favourite interventions, I mean, Mike and I designed it and Andy went along with it, is we gave everybody an extra days holiday Easter break, which gave us five days. And we brought in the builders and we removed every wall in the building. We just removed all the walls. And then we watch what happened over the next three weeks. And we left the meeting rooms, right? Anybody who permanently allocated the meeting rooms themselves or rebuilt walls with filing cabinets we fired we sort of made up some reasons for it, we have to lose about 10% of staff. So we decided that was a way of getting this thing to self reveal. We didn't tell me if it was very effective technique, right? Because those are the people who weren't and yeah, and we had some quite surprises in that as to who adopted and who didn't. And we got it wrong. We then wrote reasons. Yeah, afterwards. But one of the ways you change organisations is you make it impossible for them to do the way they're doing things at the moment. Yeah, then they adapt. But there's a massive inefficiency in the HR function in companies it's become it's a problem with admin groups all right, if I mean if you have to face customers and when sales you think like that differently than if you're a percentage of what you do is going off to pay those people all right, and they can keep building and building these they could create the Fear Factory and CEOs crews to my mind with a say could be done on 10% of the current training and HR competence budgets, that would be more effective.
One One last thing at that point as a non native speaker, could you little elaborate on the difference between role and function especially in the context of cruise? Okay, so
a role a role contains functions, but a function does not define a role. Okay, yeah. So effectively what what if you're mapping you might map functions and then you might decide which roles have which function? And you might create redundancy by which the functions which is to a role in some contexts Yeah, but not in others?
Yeah, which is right kind of but they don't take off it's the landing which scares me on carriers. Yeah, I mean that Yeah, I've seen pictures of it. I mean, they're coming in with a little hook on the back in the hope to god they can pick up a wire when they land I mean, that's Yeah, I know. I couldn't do it.
Okay, try
Yeah, no, I then I'm actually I've got a stigmatism It's why I was afforded rugby not a back so that's why I couldn't be a pilot with an astigmatism because I can't quite coordinate that way. is why I was a bowler of cricket not a batsman? Yeah. I sort of Yeah, it was a spin Bella but I was always put a number 11 on the batting order, and kept in there simply for my ability to take wickets but nobody expected me that their score the for a boundary was considered exceptional. And they actually had a cake made for me at the team dinner, which was sarcasm beyond belief. Okay, right. Okay, guys. Thanks very much.
Yeah. see you all again. Thanks, everyone. Thanks, Dave.