Alchemy in the Workplace with Rory Sutherland

+ Notes

Rory Sutherland is Vice Chairman, and heads up the Behavioural Science Practice, at Ogilvy UK. In this weeks episode he shares stories about the power of #autonomy

In his three brilliant CREATE stories you will find out why we:

should spend more time understanding the problem before designing the solution are more likely to do nothing than the sensible, innovative or imaginative thing Had better get clever about what we measure should scrap the senseless “9 to 5” BONUS EXTRAS: Find out why Unilever created "Dress Down Friday" and potato farmers soak their potatoes before they sell ‘em

+ Transcript

Katz Kiely 0:49
Welcome to Humans Leading Humans towards the future of work that works for people. A smorgasbord of snackable stories to help you be a more effective leader. So today's guest is the infamous Rory Sutherland. So Rory is the vice chairman of Ogilvy UK and he also heads up their behavioral science practice. And he is believe me 100% Human and 100% imaginal and a wonderful storyteller. So I'm very, very excited about this. But before I introduce you to Rory, you will know by now that most of the people that I invite to be a guest on Humans Leading Humans are senior leaders from big, complex companies. And I've explained why in previous podcasts and Rory is a leader in a big complex company but he is also a behavioral expert. He helps clients move past assumptions of what we should be doing to really understand how the human brain operates, the cognitive biases so that they can move beyond the 32nd bound to work with the way our brains work so they can design better and more effective behavioral interventions that work the way that humans work. And you know that every week I share the Creative framework with my guests and challenge is to share three leadership stories that are triggered by the framework, but a couple of people have come back to me and asked, what is the Create framework? So let me just reiterate this. So in the Bible, according to beep, a leader's only job is to create environments where humans thrive. These environments and culture sits on particular pillars, if you like or conditions. So the Create framework after 20 years of helping companies through change, and pull together all of the conditions the core elements of what a really good culture looks like, you know, productive culture and efficient culture and agile culture whatever. So C stands for things like communication and collaboration and community. R stands for reward and recognition and respect. E is for empathy and empowerment and encouragement. And A is for autonomy and accountability and trust and transparency. I'm not going to go through all of them. If you want to go and find out more about the Create framework go and check out a katzkiely.com. But the point is that create leaders know that if they nurture cultures, that tick all of these boxes they will get the very best from their people. People in these cultures are more innovative, more creative than less change resistant. And all of this is based on behavioral science. So in the coming weeks, I will be inviting and we'll be having some incredible guests, people who are my guiding lights, people like Amy Edmondson and Dan Ariely and more and so that they can explain why Create framework works. Because once you understand the way the human brain works, once you understand our biases, once you understand why we've got these ingrained resistance to change, etc. It totally changes the way that we need. Before I introduce you to Rory, I just want to as always say a really massive thank you, massive thank you to all of those people who reach out to me on LinkedIn and on katzkiely.com and send me feedback and suggestions for what you didn't understand what you really liked. What I'd like to see more of your feedback is really important to me, it energizes me and remember, I believe that everything can be better, always. So your feedback helps to keep improving this so I can make sure I'm giving you what you need to be better. Enough of all that, meet Rory Sutherland.

Rory Sutherland 5:59
Rory Sutherland I'm so chuffed that you are a guest on Humans Leading Humans. Now, a little ritual in Humans Leading Humans is I always have to remember how I've met somebody. A really amazing woman called Nicola Shan, who used to work at Ogilvy introduced me to Rory some time ago. And when I'm in conversation with Rory about anything, he always reminds me of a jazz musician. It's like we start somewhere we're expecting it goes somewhere completely not somehow, he'll managed to bring it back to exactly where it needs to be. So I invite you dear listeners, but I'm really excited about today's conversation. So Rory, just so people know if they don't know who you are already. How did you get to where you are?

It's a long story. I can't really call it a career path because it's simply not that linear. I joined Ogilvy. I was a teacher for a time a trainee teacher. And I had a kind of a special kind of panic attack, which is I realized that if I left university and went straight into teaching again, I would end up having spent my entire life in educational establishments. And I realized I had a kind of claustrophobic attack. And I realized that even if I taught eventually I'd have to do something else first. And that was during a term spent teaching actually at a school where I saw having been to university we will now go back to discipline in people who had been caught smoking behind the bike sheds, which almost felt to me regressive. By the way I was, in some ways, I was a terrible teacher in the sense that I could never really bring into my own myself to punish people for smoking behind the bike sheds because being a bit of a maverick, I found the maintenance of those levels of discipline, kind of uncomfortable actually, because I wouldn't have been the person smoking behind the bike sheds. So I applied to various ad agencies. I think I got second interviews with three got a final job with possibly by chance. One of the best places you ever could have got a job at that time, which is 1988, September 1988, which was only made the direct a great guy still alive still the guru of direct marketing copywriting really called Drayton Byrd. He was the chairman and executive creative director. And there are various people there, Steve Harris and Randy Hand Feld, Mike Sim, but it was a bit like being in a Paris cafe where everybody really interesting would have appeared in the building at some point and they always said if you sit or go or whatever it is, you'll eventually see everybody. And that would have been true, I guess in the 1920s. This was kind of true of Ogilvy and Mather Direct them. And I I joined as a graduate trainee I was supposed to be an account man, I was terrible at it. I was briefly a planner where I was okay. But when we did our first induction into the agency, you spent two weeks in the creative department and I did two weeks as a copywriter with a great guy called Jerry Handfelder. And I just decided then and there that that was ultimately what I wanted to do. And so eventually I got fired, which was actually very fortunate, although it didn't seem so at the time, because it forced me to reapply to the creative department as a copywriter. And because to false to be honest, far more promising candidates than me dropped out. I ended up getting the job and then over time, became Head of copy, Creative Director, then Vice Chairman of Ogilvy, I was present in the IPA 2009 to 2011 where my agenda was getting in the agency world far more ofay with behavioral science and psychology, almost redraparising the business. I think we need to bring some of the Don Draper stuff back to be honest. And then ..

Katz Kiely 9:54
Ok let me just stop you there for a second just in case the people who are listening to this don't know who Ron Draper is, can you justexplain.

Rory Sutherland 10:03
Don Draper is the character in the wonderful series called Mad Men set in American advertising from the 1950s to the late 60s. And it's enjoyable simply for the period detail. But it's doubly enjoyable, of course, if you work in advertising. And my point was that back in the 50s and 60s, agencies would have contained psychologists on the payroll for a variety of complex reasons this stopped happening. I think part of it was they made so much money making TV commercials, they didn't really worry that much about the other aspects of how you could be using creativity to add value when TV commercials were more or less a license to print money at the time. But my contention was that actually now were paid by the hour. We need to bring that back there are far more ways you can be creatively valuable than simply within the narrow straitjacket of bought media solutions. And so I made that my IPA agenda really for 2009 to 2011. And then when I returned to Ogilvy, they asked me to start a behavioral science practice within the agency, which is what we've now done, it's now about a little over 20 people, mostly, but not exclusively social science graduates of some kind, whether it's behavioral science, or for example, Organizational Psychology. Or evolutionary psychology, we've got a bunch of mostly younger people in their 20s and 30s, some older, whose expertise essentially an academic background lies in this area, and we do it what we might call Applied Behavioral Science using the insights from behavioral science to solve real world business and social problems.

Katz Kiely 11:45
Excellent. I didn't know I didn't know your history of teaching, so I'm learning something about you now. This is great. Okay, so I sent you the Create framework, and asked you to tell the three short stories and in your case, and she talks about probably the science behind some of those stories. What is your story number one?

Rory Sutherland 12:08
Well, first thing is this, I think, was probably predicted by my failure at account management. I'm not very good at management. I wouldn't claim to be. I can do leadership, and I can do encouragement. And I can do direction setting. And I can broaden people's area of inquiry fairly effectively. But if I'm a very hands off manager, you have to remember I probably, to be honest, post rationalizing this. I'm not only a hands off manager because I believe it pays to a great deal. Particularly in a creative environment where after all, if people come up with a solution, you would have come up with yourself. You're not really doing your job as a manager. Your job is to get people to produce things that you yourself probably wouldn't have done. But it's also if you like making a virtue of necessity. I'm just not very good at micromanagement in particular. I find the administrative side of management, rather as I found the disciplinary side of being a schoolmaster. I think I'm a kind of a narco libertarian in some respects, and so I'm also grew up in Wales, and I'm part Welsh, which tends to have a much more horizontal social structure. The Celtic cultures, like New Zealand, like places like that tend to be less hierarchical in a case. So I'm just instinctively not very comfortable bossing people around. I'm very happy to make suggestions. But I'm not really very happy issuing edicts. And it only occurred to me later that actually in a creative setting, to a large extent, that's the right approach. Because the best thing you can do is help someone define a problem. But leave them to solve the problem. And actually, that's a lesson I think, I've come down to, I think Einstein himself. It's been, quote Einstein and not all quotes are genuine. But I think he said something like if you gave me 100 hours to solve a problem, I'd spent 99 hours defining the problem, or indeed redefining it, and then an hour solving it. I think that's actually an important lesson, which is, I think, probably Peter Drucker, who said there's nothing more depressing to see an organization doing efficiently that which it should not be doing at all. And quite commonly we see enormous examples and organizations have misapplied efforts, where everybody is assumed that the logical way to solve problem X is typically by doing the opposite of x i tackling the problem head on. Whereas in many cases, if problem X persists, and the logical response to x doesn't seem to be working, well, the likelihood is that the logical solution just doesn't work in any case. So you've got to try something different and you've got to try something oblique, maybe you've got to try something at a different scale to the scale at which the problem becomes apparent because one of the problems with business hierarchies is that problems get defined and decided by people at the top, who then assume that the problem has to be solved at the top. And quite often, the scale at which a problem becomes apparent is different to the scale at which it can be usefully solved. So handing off to other people, and specifically people more junior than you who are much closer to the where the tires hit the tarmac is not only an act of delegation, it's actually an act of creating a more diverse cognitive approach. Because the person on the ground might be able to tell you that the problem originates from something entirely different to that which you assume. And so that business of diversity where I'm quite generally bullish about the prospects for video conferencing, because one of the unintended consequences of video conferencing, is it's easier to hold meetings with a range of people present and from a range of departments. You know, we got into this habit, I think, where marketing meetings happened in the marketing department and you invited a lot of marketing people and there's a great book actually by Gillian Tett called the Silo effect on how businesses are divided into different compartments, often semi watertight compartments, driven by the need for both measurement and clarity and focus.But when you do that, there are various hidden prices that you pay for that focus and clarity, which is that in many cases, the problems that need to be solved, perhaps require coordination between one or more departments, or problems that are merged in one department are actually being caused by another. And so an attempt to solve it internally is to some extent doomed to failure. As a wonderful example of this kind of complex example where people with conflicting metrics can end up essentially destroying economic value, which I think used to happen in the potato crisp industry where the main cost of making crisps was heating the fast enough effectively to make the crisps crispy by boiling off the water. But the people who sold potatoes to crisp manufacturers were paid on weight. So before they delivered the paid potatoes, they used to spray them all down with water in order to in order to increase the weight of the payload when it was weighed on arrival at the factory. And so you had an absolute case where you had to incentives essentially operating at loggerheads. And so I'm quite optimistic about Zoom in anything that first of all, replaces written communication with chat or talk, which is much less focused and actually much more tangential and often irrelevant, which is sometimes the digressions that happened when you talk, which don't happen when you write are actually where most of the value of the information that's contained. And so the fact that Zoom conversations like this, a slightly ill disciplined you use the metaphor of jazz isn't necessarily a weakness, it might be a strength.

katz kiely 18:12
I could not agree with you more and also going back to your point about two things, one about with refining challenges, it's a problem that we see over and over again, actually, people even leaders, even as VP, level leaders see that the problems in front of them are so huge. Yeah, there's nothing we can do it has to be done by the board. It's structural. Well, if you actually stop for a second and look at the bite size elements of the bigger problem, and especially if you bring a bunch of people from different silos together to actually find solutions. It's amazing what you can do. So ..

Rory Sutherland 18:55
It's a beautiful advertising story from that, which I think involved a planner at AMD BBDO when they were repitching successfully, as it turned out Sainsbury's, and they were told the company's financial targets which effectively enrolled a billion or more revenue increase year on year. And the planer in the room looked at that thought that it was impossible but divided it by the number of store visits per year and said effectively if you can get everybody who pitches through the door of Sainsbury's to spend an extra pound, you've met your targets per visit. And that's a case where you make an intractable problem, which you assume has to be solved at the senior level. Those of you who are interested in anarchism, there's a great book called "Seeing like a state" by James C. Scott, which makes this point, which is that the very information that aggregates and therefore the information that reaches the top is riven with things like averages and aggregates, and it loses a huge amount of nuance on the way up. And so, the state attempts to issue instructions to people on the ground in accordance with its really peculiar view of the world. And so the example was, for example, in forestry, you measure the value of the weight of trees per acre, and you measured foresters on that, but you didn't measure the undergrowth. Now, it turns out if you try and maximize trees per acre, and you get rid of all the undergrowth after about five years, the soil becomes peculiarly unproductive. Yeah. And so the thing that was actually making the trees grow in the first place wasn't included in the calculus of the people at the top who are looking at a highly aggregate view of trees per acre. Okay, and therefore, they neglected and then unintentionally destroyed the very thing which was driving productivity to begin with. Yeah, I think that happens with culture, by the way, which is that the aggregate view of employees is a narrow function of time versus cost. Okay, so if you look at labor economics, it's essentially the reason we call pay compensation is it compensates you for your loss of leisure. So the general way in which employees are looked at is how many how many of the buggers we have, how much they get paid and how long they spend working for us, on the assumption that hours spent are proportional to value created, for example. And on the assumption that wider cultural matters don't matter, and on the dangerous assumption that the only way to incentivize these people is to give them more money or less work, because that's the foundational assumption of labor economics. And what I found very interesting when the pandemic came in, and that's one of my other stories we'll talk about this is I've been experimenting with Zoom and remote working and flexible working before the pandemic happened because a very astute person in Ogilvy IT had taken on an Ogilvy Zoom account, I think, technically, breaking WPP regulations, but he'd signed us up for a Zoom account, and being a bit of a nerd I'd experimented with it and found it was disproportionately better than any technology I've used before. To a point where I thought it could be a game changer. And what suddenly occurred to me through doing this was that people don't necessarily want more money, although they do. People don't necessarily want more free time, although they do. But that's not the limitation of their ambitions. If you give people free wear and free web, and also a colleague of mine, Brian Featherstone. You must interview by the way for this podcast. He also added to that free whom he said, if you're working where you want to if you have freedom of a degree of freedom of place, and you have a degree of freedom of when, which is yes, you have to work eight hours a day on average, but it doesn't have to be between nine and five, you can pick up your kids that you can, you know, go and work in the evening, for example, people value that even though it doesn't actually change the number of hours worked or the amount they're being paid. That autonomy has a value of itself. And I learned this before I even started experimenting with Zoom was very interesting thing. I had a PA who was a single mum. And I said to her look, very simply, I keep very eccentric hours myself I'm not remotely interested in your precise timekeeping. And I knew she was a single mom. So I thought well, let's have a conversation about how we can enable you to be the best mum you can while also being the best PA you can without starting from the assumption that you pinch up at the office at nine o'clock, which is exactly when your son would start school. So the first thing I say this, to be honest, if you take your son to school in the morning, at 9 o'clock, let's say I'm trying to find a client's offices and I'm confused. Okay. I'd much prefer you to be on a mobile phone above ground taking your son to work than on the tube and completely inaccessible. So I don't really care what time you turn up in the office. And we ended up with an arrangement where she would sometimes go home early, but then she'd work in the evenings and that suited me because I work in the evenings so I could get an instant response to her. She was working when her son had gone to sleep. I get then get an instant response from her at 10 o'clock in the night. Be able to bring her at 10 o'clock in the evening without feeling guilty is quite valuable. But then other things started happening. So I used to post all my expenses to home and she could do that then while watching telly or looking after her son rather than having to do them sitting in the office. And so the point was that there's a tendency, I think, among hardcore kind of people who consider themselves capitalists to view any kind of perk as a concession and therefore, somehow an impurity to this complete process of optimizing efficiency through conformity. My argument is that capitalism is a discovery process, and its discovery process between employer and employee about how we can actually maximize value created for employer and shareholder and customer at the same time as maximizing value and minimizing unnecessary cost on the part of the worker. And this should be an exploratory and experimental process. Now, I'll take this a bit further, because we've got a marketing audience. Right. Now everybody's asking the question. This shows how our need for control dominates things should I allow my staff to flex, okay, because you control your staff, you're responsible. You're responsible for maximizing their productivity, as you see it. But there's another question I'd like a marketer to ask which is, do I want my customers to work flexibly? Because the answer there is a definite yes. Because if you think about it, the typical young London employee 50% of their after tax salary goes on accommodation costs and transport costs. If you take a third of the British population and move a chunk of their aftertax salary, away from non discretionary expenses, like accommodation and transport, commuting in particular, and put that money into their pockets, okay. Then there isn't a single consumer goods company, with the possible exception of the Duke investments if you're a major London lab, or Transport for London, okay, who wouldn't benefit from an explosion in the amount of discretionary income available to employees?

katz kiely 26:34
Absolutely.

Rory Sutherland 26:36
Somaybe, there's a rumor I don't think it's true, but there's a rumor that Unilever crazy dress down Fridays so that people would wear more laundered clothes, and fewer. There's always this rumor that Unilever instigates dress down Fridays kind of promoted because if you wear chinos, white shirts, you put them in the washing machine, whereas if you were assumed everything that the shirt and pants dry clean, okay. Unilever created this. There is a bit of truth even if Unilever didn't do this. Henry Ford gave his staff a two day weekend because he thought that if workers had longer weekends they'd be more likely to buy cars. And in the same way, there's an equally important point, which is that there is some evidence that the state of Hawaii created Aloha Friday. To help the local Hawaiian shirt industry. visible wear Hawaiian shirts to the office on Fridays in the in Hawaii, and I think the 1950s because it was Friday, and that was there to help the indigenous church. That question is important .If you're Unilever, yuo should be encouraging flexible working in your staff. Not only because it may well lead up to either ourselves and it also means they weren't. Which is not an irrelevant factor. But also because if that behavior spreads to your customers, you're in for a bonanza.

katz kiely 28:06
Yes. As always, all right. Story number two.

Rory Sutherland 28:12
Excellent. Story number two is related to this. It's a lesson I learned about all business decision making, and it worries me a lot. Now, obviously Ogilvy has always been quite a big b2b agency. And you always get these two schools of thought, one of which is that marketing and advertising don't work in b2b because everybody makes a complete rational decision based on you know, the optimization of utility to cost. It's a simple equation. And the other school of thought is actually people making business decisions are just like consumers. They're as much affected by emotion, presentation, and so forth, and framing as everything else. And there's bit of truth to both points of view and definitely business decisions tend to have more requirement for self justification than consumer decisions do. I've never asked to face a board and explain why I bought KFC flavored crisps. Okay? It's also true to say that business decisions involve a high degree of emotion but the emotion is slightly different. And the way I was framed this as a kind of aphorism, it's not strictly speaking perfectly true, but it's convenient phraze. Is that when consumers make a purchase decision that tries to minimize the risk of regret. And when business people make a decision, they're trying to minimize the risk of blame. By which I mean that in business, it's more important that you can defend your decision as one that is seemingly rational and inescapably logical that it is that you make a good decision. So doing something which you think instinctively might work, but which is seemingly counterintuitive or logical, is career threatening, even if it works, because the in the event that it fails, you lose your job and the event that it works, you don't get the credit, because everybody says well, they're succeeding because of our superior supply chain management. They're always attribute success to the rational component of business, not the emotional component, and if anything goes wrong, they're always attach blame to an emotional decision, not to a rational decision. So when you're trying to minimize blame, you have a very strong behavioral bias, which is either to do something that seems blindingly obvious, or to do what everybody else does or what you've always done before, because you're then minimizing the chance that anybody notices that you've taken a decision at all. And now even is that's why the four big accountancy firms that have I noticed this in the office this extraordinary bias, which is technically called defensive decision making. It happens in medicine, by the way, where people know that if I intervene, send this person for exploratory surgery. If the person dies I won't get sued. If I do nothing, I might get sued. Therefore, even though I think the best course of action is to do nothing and wait, I will send them in to go and see somebody else to avoid the risk of litigation or blank. And the thing I noticed at work is whenever I need to fly to New York, which is sort of once a year or so, I'd always go to the company travel agent or you go to your PA, they'd always come back with a list of flights from Heathrow to JFK. And I said, yeah, the thing is here I'd say is our office is closer tied was placed in Newark, that's JFK. It was on the west side of Manhattan. I prefer Newark Airport anyway, I think it's better airport. I live a lot closer to London City and Gatwick than I do to Heathrow. So why are you just giving me Heathrow - JFK flights and I had to go and say, please tell me about flights from Newark flights to London City flights from elsewhere. And then eventually because I told them to they'd come back with those flights and then I realized what's going on here. Okay. If you put me on a flight from JFK to Heathrow or vice versa, everything goes right I blame British Airways because you haven't really taken a decision. You've just gone with the lazy default, right. Bloody air traffic controllers you know there's fog at Heathrow. Bloody hell, I've been delayed or bloody well, British Airways didn't get the plane ready, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But the person who books the ticket is completely absolved from blame. Okay, if you book your boss from London city, or Newark, okay, it might be a much better decision overall. But if anything goes wrong, you're now in the firing line. Because you put your boss can't ring up and say if you hadn't booked me on a flight to the world's second busiest International Airport, I would have arrived by now. But your boss can ring up from Newark or from London City and say, if you hadn't booked me for this sodding tiny town airport, I'd have landed by now, right. And so the extent to which once you understand that human behavior is driven by the fear of blame, then you realize that for business people and your staff to do anything imaginative or interesting, or to ask questions or to make decisions, you have to provide a degree of air cover and confidence, which is that they don't feel that they've got your back and if they don't feel they have permission to fail. Basically, nobody will do anything at all. Now, I'm telling stories of this which I think is relevant which is that Daniel Kahneman, the Nobel Prize winning psychologist who won the Nobel Prize for Economics. He once went to a board of directors. And he said, this is what I'm finding. He said to each one, because they were the heads of the various divisions and what I think was, although Daniel never left the company. So he leaves the CEO to one side of the head, the huge thing was division, of the finance division, of the lighting division, of the electronic division. And he says, I can offer each of you an option. Which gives you a 50% chance of increasing your profits by 50%. But it comes with a 30% chance that next year your profits will fall by 20%. So 50% of the time, you'll be better off by 50% something like 20 or 30% of the time, you'll be worse off by 20%. And you know, the rest of the time, nothing will happen. Would you take those odds? And all the two of the boards of directors, department heads said no. Because there's a 20 or 30% chance I get fired. Okay? If my revenue goes down by 20 or 30% of the year, I'm going to lose my job. So even though on balance, we're going to be richer, if I do this, it comes with the risk of catastrophe, and therefore it's totally unacceptable. The chief executive at the end of the room spots disparity, and he says, but I want all of you to do this. Because yes, we're going to have two departments which underperformed by 20% Okay, but half of the rest of you are going to be 50% better off. So, net the company is going to be i richer. And that's what happens when you divide responsibility. When you divide responsibility, you make people more and more risk averse as you go down to a point where they're incapable of exercising intelligent autonomy.

katz kiely 35:20
So what do you do? What's your advice to people? What how do you get over that bias?

Rory Sutherland 35:26
Well with the airline one that you have to say I want you to bring me Gatwick and Newark flights. And if I choose it, you have to say if you choose this you won't get blamed for doing something eccentric or interesting. Because the whole purpose of this is to do something eccentric or interesting. Yes, people taking penalties tend to always try to kick to one side or the other. Because if you kick straight down the middle of the you're more likely to score and the reason for that is the goalkeeper knows that if he stops in the middle, although he's slightly more likely occasionally to save the girl by standing in the middle. If the ball goes either side of him, he looks useless against play. So he has an over welding tendency to die. And equally the person taking the kick has no welding tendency to try left or right is failing when you shoot straight down the middle makes you look worse. The worst case scenario has a greater level of shame. Now, one way you can get around that as the manager of the team. You could say player one and player five. I want you to wag the ball straight down the middle and if you miss you can say afterwards, I told you to kick the ball to framing something, because what's happened is the digital marketing should be as much used for experimentation as it is for optimization. But because the person is the digital marketing supremo who is bonused only on the efficiency of conversion that he obtains with digital marketing, the far more valuable role he could play in discovering things which reviews in the wider organization. Okay. Is minimized because he doesn't get any credit for that, in fact, to his boss, according to the his job of definition, that looks like waste. So you've got to say to this guy, I'm only measuring you on the performance for 75% of your budget on the other 25% or whether you come back to six times a year and we've discovered this really interesting ship which could make us a fortune. If you don't actually ring fence or firebreak different forms of responsibility and say you're partly responsible for this guys and let's face it, you know, we go back to the company because you're doing the day job. We're all gonna lose our jobs anyway. I don't expect you to do to maximize the day job exclusively to the eradication of far more valuable discoveries that might have emerged through ancillary activities. So demanding that people focus exclusively on one manual, which is standard measurement technique is a disaster because everything's a trade off.

katz kiely 38:18
Yes. Brilliant. pragmatic, actionable. Yeah, yes. Story number three, Rory.

Rory Sutherland 38:28
That's an interesting one, which is, when I first started experimenting with Zoom, I said to my staff, look, we've got the Zoom thing. I'm really happy for people to work flexible. I said, you know, you want to go away to Ibiza for a week and you work you know, you join all the meetings, you come and join us. I'm not that bothered, you know, I'm not gonna say what are you doing in Ibiza, that you have to take five days vacation? Because if you're coming to meetings, you know, replying to your emails, doing all the remote stuff. I've used to annoy me that people used to get into the office early to do emails. I don't know if you've noticed this I said if sellers during the night before, or get up early in the morning, do your emails and then traveling to work later.

katz kiely 39:06
It is almost like a cultural badge of honor, isn't it? Heading in early leaving later.

Rory Sutherland 39:11
Presenteeism and that kind of costly signaling. Because the thing you got to realize is that most people, the old joke is that people spend 30% of their time on that job and 70% on their career, you know, and there's a huge danger. I think, that we engage in signaling behaviors that are just there as proof of intention, which are actually costly and not revalue. In proof of commitment, proof of enthusiasm. You know, that Japanese business where nobody can leave the bloody office until their boss goes home. So everyone is there until 11 o'clock at night. You know, that kind of nonsense. And the trick there by the way, which apparently they learned in the city, you know, this is when you buy a suit you buy two jackets, and you leave one of them over your chair. Assume you're there when you're not.

katz kiely 39:59
I know people who do that.

Rory Sutherland 40:04
But the point about that activity is it's not economically valuable. It's not valuable to the company. It's valuable to the individual. And stamping on that is really important. Because I said no emails the same wherever you are, what why are you coming into an office to look at a screen which would look exactly the same? You know, and if you genuinely believe it was urgent, I'd rather you stayed up till 1 o'clock in the morning and then came in on 11 o'clock. And what I noticed is when I said to people, you could do this, nobody did. And I realized they saw it as a perk. And they thought, well, I'll save that up in reserve. You know, I'll save up these brownie points so that when I really need a bit of flexible work, I can call in the favor. I said, this isn't the favor. I actually want you to do this. And we've created zoom Fridays, and I said, by default as if you want to come into the office because your flatmates a psycho or because, you know it's because you're lonely, you can come into the office, but on Fridays The default is going to be work from home because I want to see how well this works. It was only when I said no no, you don't understand me. This isn't a privilege and the PERT I actually want this to be a norm one day a week so we can see what happens. Now the the unintended benefit of this was we were all online. Because I'd like people to work from home. They didn't grumble that much because it can't Can you join an online meeting with spirit and California that the Wednesday don't make anybody? free not to I'm not gonna do that. But if you're free you have this kind of meeting which I'd say if you don't want to. The net net effect of this is we started winning, you know we want a few million dollars worth of business from parts of the world where we never envisaged there was any business potential. And part of the reason was because you created this, you know, a part that I think the Silicon Valley firms they brought me to screen the face to face because they tend to be slightly reverse by temperament but also you see, we were was free at eight o'clock in the evening. Six o'clock in the evening, typically. So if they call call and ask for a meeting and short notice we can always be free in the sense, but it was fascinating to me this because I realized that nobody Why did it take a pandemic before use this technical change? We know the answer that question involves signaling and involves norms involves defensive decision making. It involves presenteeism. It involves a lot of taking the pandemic for us to start to experiment with this and the fact that it did I think should be to our everlasting shame.

katz kiely 42:38
And so much as I think is for you know, the kind of leaders that were trying to help people be not well I find it hard to trust there. I mean, it did you know, you're right people talk about bring your whole self to work, be 100% yourself. But work from nine to five is saying no, no, no, we're all different. It's like personally, I get up at six o'clock in the morning and between 6 and 9 I'm on fire.

Rory Sutherland 43:08
Overcoming those toxic behaviors. Defensive decision making is one extreme of it. And the other extreme is what you might call presenteeism, which signals your eagerness and commitment, but which actually is ultimately economically wasteful. I mean, the number of business trips which are just there, you know, I to prove a care. I'm going to get up at five o'clock in the morning and fly to Frankfurt. Okay, as evidence of commitment. Well, I you'd be more environmentally friendly to how to hold a Zoom call and to burn 50 pound notes. To prove how much you care.

katz kiely 43:42
Yeah, yeah, I'm like you I was using Zoom way before because I think globally, I was using Zoom years before.

Rory Sutherland 43:51
Let's look at the application to people who live in London now have greater access to things reasonably if they have disabilities. What about retirees? Okay, how many people have retired because they work they were talking to they want to stop commuting. Okay. Potentially if we can find it useful or whatever it is. Just it was Liam Neeson, isn't it? Yeah. Okay. But then, okay. There are a bunch of people they've retired as accountants. They're retired as accountants cause they want to spend two months of the year in Portugal. They didn't want to get up at 7 o'clock in the morning and get on with credit. They're still going to cancel. It's absolutely going from 40 hours a week or 50 hours a week to zero is probably unhealthy anyway. Yeah. But also to a huge amount of money back into the productive economy, away from the landlord. Seems to me to be really present

katz kiely 45:06
in the process, make people feel better about

Rory Sutherland 45:13
Autonomy, autonomy is amazingly valuable to people for its own sake.

katz kiely 45:17
Yes. Because it makes you feel trusted.

Rory Sutherland 45:20
And one of the nicest things in the summer by the way, and this is I'll end on a tip for your listeners. If it's a nice sunny day and you've got a Wi Fi range extender that stretches into your garden. When you work outdoors, it doesn't really feel like work.

katz kiely 45:34
Yes, one of the little tricks that I've found since COVID has happened is I do walk and talks. So I'll walk for an hour and I have a business meeting. My thinking is so much better my creativity, my ability to aggregate. I don't I never want to change that. This has been the most extraordinary time of experimentation and future work, necessary too. So the very last thing I need to ask you is what would you like your episode of Humans Leading Humans to be called?

Rory Sutherland 46:04
I suppose you could just call it Alchemy in the workplace.

katz kiely 46:08
Alchemy in the workplace, brilliant. Not surprisingly. Thank you so much for your time and your and your expertise. I'll see you sooon, Rory.

Rory Sutherland 46:18
I'll see you soon. It's a pleasure.

katz kiely 46:26
Oh, thank you, Rory. I could genuinely talk to you all day. I do love doing these interviews. Guys, it doesn't matter whether you are a CMO or a CGO or a CHRO or a CEO. It doesn't matter what C you are, your only job is to create environments where people thrive. That's it. It's really simple. I hope you enjoyed that. As much as I did. You have been listening to Humans Leading Humans towards a future of work that works for people. This podcast is brought to you in partnership with the Marketing Society. If you are a senior marketing leader, and you need the know how, and the networks and the inspiration to succeed and you're not already a member I suggest you get over to their website and become part of that tribe. I would 100% recommend it. A massive, massive thanks to the fantastic Super Terranea for the magical sting of stings. Go to wearebeep.com to find out more about the Create framework and how we support companies to unlock the problem solving potential of the humans. If you love this podcast, pass it on to a friend recommended to a colleague. Anyone you think might need a shot of inspiration. Thank you so much for joining me. Please subscribe. The links are in the notes. Please don't miss any more of this storytelling magic. Be inspired. Be imaginal be more human. And I look forward to seeing you next week.

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