Ep 217, The Stories That Build Us: Creating Healthy Workplace Culture

Welcome to Conflict Managed. I'm your host, Merry Brown. This week on Conflict Managed, we welcome Gavin McMahon. Gavin builds things.

Once, it was submarines, sports cars, and steel plants. Big, complex systems built on logic and precise plans. But plans have a funny way of falling apart when people get involved. As Gavin tried to figure out why, one truth became clear.

People don't move without a story. Business is more than just strategy and execution. It is persuasion and inspiration, too. So he switched gears, traded engineering for business, and earned an MBA in innovation strategy and information technology from the Institut of Theseus in France.

Today, as CEO and co-founder of Fast Forward, he helps companies shape strategy, leadership, and culture through storytelling. Over the years, he worked with some of the world's biggest brands and learned that even the best ideas will go nowhere if they aren't told well. Now he's written a book about it, Story Business, Why Stories Rule the World and How They Can Reinvent Your Business. In Story Business, Gavin takes you on a journey from ancient cave paintings to billion-dollar tech unicorns, revealing how storytelling is a powerful and undervalued tool for driving business success.

Good morning, Gavin, and welcome to Conflict Managed. Good morning. It's a pleasure to be here. I know we're going to have an excellent conversation, and we're going to talk about story, which is integral to all of our lives.

And I think it's going to be really interesting. But before we get there, I would like to hear about the first job you ever had as a young person. Okay. The first job I ever had was very formative, actually.

My dad, there was someone that lived down our street called Eric Kilgore, and he owned a company called Kilgore Engineering. My dad was an engineer. And Kilgore Engineering made parts to the aerospace industry. And I was maybe, I don't know, 17, 16, something like that.

Getting into end of high school, beginning to go to university. And I worked there for the summer and I absolutely hated it. I guess my mind wanders so much. Anyway, I'll tell you a couple of stories.

They gave me this machine, a milling machine, and it wasn't an automated one like you would have today where the machine does everything and it's all kind of moving parts. It was hand cranked, which basically meant I was kind of cutting a piece of metal and you're just skimming off a piece at a time, very, very thin pieces. And I was having to kind of turn this crank and then turn this other crank and then do it again and again. It was very repetitive motion.

And I was so bored and I just, and the shop foreman gave me the jig that put all the pieces in that I was cutting and gave me very accurate measurements to do it and said, you must just do this very gently because you'll break something. If you turn the crank too much. So anyway, I was getting bored and I was just turning it more and more and more because I wanted it to go faster and faster and faster because I wanted to get rid of this boring thing that I had to do. And I had thousands of these pieces to make.

Eventually, I kept turning the crank until eventually it was a big bang. Shop foreman came running over. I'd broken the machine and he was like, there was lots of swearing, which I can't repeat now. And then he gave me another job.

And this job was even more boring. And I was sat there with another kid, I guess, who had gone straight from school to this is his actual job. And we were just doing the tolerance testing for a part with a threaded screw. And so basically, I had a key that had a red end and a green end.

And if I could screw through the thing, the widget that I was checking, into the green one, it was good. And if I could not screw it into the, into the red end, it was good. So I had to screw it into both and then unscrew it. And there were thousands of these and I had to do it for weeks and I was so bored.

And I think what that taught me is, I mean, it, it taught me that I'm like, I, I, I'm in my head a lot. And so I, I can't be doing with a job. Where my brain is not occupied. And it gave me the impetus to at least try a little bit when I got to university because I was like, I just definitely don't want to be doing a job like that.

Long story, pretty boring, but yeah, that was my first job. Well, you know, it's a gift to have those kinds of jobs because it can put other things in perspective. Like, why am I going to go to class when I don't want to? Oh, because I really don't want to be doing that for a living, right?

I don't want that to be my fate. I was one of those classic kids where you'd ask, you know, some kids you speak to and you say, what do you want to be when you grow up? And they like, I'm going to be an astronaut. And they definitely know.

I had no clue what I wanted to be, what I wanted to do. I knew I liked some things. I didn't like other things. Mostly I didn't want to, I liked school, but didn't want to work too hard.

I like messing around with my friends. I like, you know, water skiing. We did that in the summers. It was, you know, it was nice, but I didn't really want to work.

That was definitely part of it. So what did you major in when you went to university? So I did engineering, and I think I did engineering. I know why I did engineering.

I did engineering because my father was an engineer, because I had this story running in my head that, you know, I like making stuff with Lego, and engineering must be like that. And so I'll do engineering. And so I did mechanical engineering. I did an honors degree in mechanical engineering at the University of Central Lancashire, which was pretty near to where we lived.

And I quickly found out, I didn't mind quite a lot of it. There's a lot of math. It was really good at teaching you to think, I think. I've been thinking this recently.

I think a lot of degrees, university degrees, there's almost a hidden curriculum. And I don't know what it would be for philosophy, Mary, but for engineering, I know what it is for engineering. I mean, I know what it is for art school. And it's the thing that the people that graduate from this kind of school have this way of being, but it's never taught in a class.

So for engineers, the hidden curriculum, I would say, is the figure it out. I've never met an engineer who doesn't think they can't figure it out and who doesn't want to figure it out because that's the thing. Now, I don't know if engineering school just attracts those kind of people, or you just don't get through it if you don't have that kind of gene. My daughter went to art school, and I think the hidden curriculum in art school, she went to Pratt, and she did information design and things like that.

The people I've met that have been to art school are really, really good at taking feedback without still holding on to whatever it is they're doing. Whereas, you know, as a mere mortal, I am terrible at taking feedback. So I think different universities, I don't know what it is. I almost feel like there should be a book on it, but there should be, especially for parents and for kids that are going into university.

What is the hidden curriculum that is behind the degree that you're doing? Because I'm sure there's one for philosophy. I'm sure there's one for English. Whatever it is you end up doing at school.

What an interesting thought. I mean, what an interesting way to really think about transferable skills and jobs of the future. So, you know, engineering, figuring it out, and art, taking feedback well. I mean, both of those are invaluable skills that most employers are going to want.

And completely polar opposite to each other. Yeah. I mean, that's the problem. And we've been doing a lot of work with companies now around the field of AI.

And I think AI is, most people are approaching it as a technological problem, which I could see why. But I think 90% of it, it's a people problem. And when you think about skills and skill sets we we carry around this burden of a very thick skill set which is all our experiences what we did at university, i'm an engineer i'm a lawyer, all of this stuff and then it gets it gets accumulated over time as you you know you work in hr or you work in legal or any and you kind of grow up through the ranks, so we carry this thick skillset, but we don't really talk about the human skillset, what you call transferrable skills.

I don't love soft skills because I think that gets overplayed and it's, it, soft skills are really hard. So this idea that, that you. You need the skill of being able to take feedback really well, or you need the skill of being able to figure it out, or you need the skill of judgment and nuance or whatever it is that we're going to need in this new AI age, because it's really not expertise. Expertise has become completely, it's almost like if there was a curve that measured the, the price of knowledge, there's a massive decline because the cost of knowledge, the cost of access to knowledge, when I can ask ChatGPT or Gemini something, is almost gone to zero.

Not practically speaking because there's energy costs and token costs and everything else, but it's gone really downhill. The only thing is, can I trust it? And that's where the human comes in. That's really interesting because I think a lot of us are approaching it as a technological problem and even a tech problem when it comes to getting people to adopt it rather than what you're talking about.

And, I mean, the vast majority of any kind of problem in an organization is going to be a people problem because it's people who are working together or dealing with the circumstances and how are they going to deal with, approach, use, and what are they there for, which is always a good question. What are the people doing? What should they be doing? I think people, I can't remember where I picked it up.

I did an MBA in the South of France, a place called Theseus, and it was in innovation and information technology. And I think I picked it up before, this idea of formal and informal networks. It was really about networks. But I think this formal and informal thing is a really good distinction, because formal is the way you should be doing it, the way it says in the book, and informal is what you actually do.

And I think this, you know, the formal definition, let's take technology. If you're the CIO of a company, formally, what you think is, okay, we're going to be on Microsoft and we're going to have the Microsoft suite. Everyone's going to have Office 365 and they're going to use Excel and PowerPoint and all the rest of it. That's the typical traditional thing.

Or you're on Google. That's the other one. Way better by the way but anyway the you know the way you think about that kind of training is okay you can go on powerpoint training or you can go on excel skills training but the way it actually works, it especially pre-pandemic was there was somebody that sat you know three away from you that knew how to use powerpoint really well or knew how to use excel really well and they were really the first tier technical support for the whole for basically a catchment area around them, anyone that knew them.

And that's what they did. And that's the kind of informal network. And I think AI, same thing from a technology perspective, there's going to be a group of people who know and who've got that figured out gene, who want to figure it out. And they're going to become the learning leaders for everything else.

And to be honest, one of the things that the AI companies are working on, the frontier technology companies especially, actually are really working on this accessibility issue. So it used to be, I mean, two years ago, everyone was trying to sell a prompt engineering course because you need to learn how to do prompt engineering. You don't need to, you don't need to know that anymore. What you, the only thing you really need to know is you need to get into the idea of chat, the, the habit that you got into with Google, which is.

Type in a search thing once and then look and then read and then never chat to the thing again, that's the opposite of what you want to do. You want to keep going backwards and forwards. But if you get that, then I don't think you need a lot of technical skills. Yeah, it is really interesting when we think about what is going on in the world of work and I think how it is showing, I think it has the great potential to help us really see people again in the workforce.

And, right, I love the distinction between formal and informal, because we are beholden to the way it's supposed to go, the way it's supposed to go on paper, and we've mapped it all out, versus how people actually behave, what are actual human behaviors. And so if we can think about the ideal on paper, and then think about the actual, what tends to actually happen? How do people find out who are those learning leaders? How do people actually get the business of work done?

And how does innovation come about? If we can spend more time not beholden to, the how it should go structure and look more to how it does go, then we can build up those systems to actually support how people actually behave. I think it will. I think it definitely will go towards people.

And I think... I don't know if everyone ends up realizing this at some point, but essentially all business is the same, and it's all about people. You name a company, and that company is the same as another company in two words. They all sell stuff.

The stuff and how they sell are different. And as soon as the company becomes bigger than one person, that selling of stuff gets done through people. Yes, they've got a lot of technology. Yes, they've got an organization.

Yes, they have a brand. Yes, they have a kind of retail footprint, maybe, or however they market. They've got all those things. But essentially, you know, it's 50 people, it's 500 people, it's 50,000 people who are all coming together and making decisions big and small to sell stuff.

And we don't really think, I don't think people, leaders especially, don't think about that enough, that it's people. And everything that you do is either going to, I'm going to swear on your podcast, it's either going to piss somebody off or it's going to, you know, make them happy. And you, if you want, we, we know it because we have good days and bad days at work and our good days, we, we really feel fulfilled and we really feel like we've got everything cooking and it's all going well.

And the ideal case would be all 50,000 people are all like that every day and they're all pointed in the same direction, but that never, ever happens. But how close can you get to that? That's really the task and the job of leadership when you think about the big system. And it's all about people.

And especially it's going to be even more like that because you don't have to do that with AI. AI isn't going to get pissed off, or at least not yet. Um so you know it's i think it it hopefully will focus people on what the what the real issue is. I really love i love that raising away can it can be so helpful to see what is the basic thing we're trying to sell something okay how do we sell it we sell it the people are going to be selling it i mean that's just so clear, because we can get so lost oh no this is what we do and now all of a sudden we're in the forest and and we're looking around and it's a mystery how are we going to do this but when you put it in such stark relief, this is what we're doing everybody's doing it and we're doing it with people everybody's doing it how do we invest in people so that they're able to show up as their best self so that they can be engaged so that, you know so that we can sell the best right i mean we can make it i would like to make a moral argument that it's good to treat people well.

It is. It also ROI, right? I mean, it makes financial sense to treat people well. And of course, it's human sense because we ought to always treat people well.

But then the question is, what does well mean in different environments? But at least that's a good place to start. Well, it's capitalism and socialism brought together, right? The capital piece is sell stuff and the social piece is through people.

So you kind of need both. And we sometimes, we, we, you know, companies that. It's this idea of moral leadership companies that over index on the selling of stuff to the detriment of people are, um, maybe they win in the short term. And I think in the long term, they tend not to win.

I think a good example, actually, like, let's go back to AI. You know, OpenAI got out of the gates with ChatGPT and was the leader. But recently, Anthropic has almost, I think, taken over, especially in the enterprise space. Anthropic is the kind of, the it person.

You know the the thing that everyone wants and you know even the you know the current administration, so there was there was i think this is about a month ago when the department of defense, basically said we're going to put you on the on the naughty list anthropic because anthropic was refusing to cross a red line it had and the red line it had was, we don't think ai should be used to decide whether to kill people or not. That's a bad idea. And we don't think AI should be used to surveil the Americans.

That's a bad idea. And the Department of Defense disagreed and said, we should be able to do whatever we want because we're buying it. So that's the sell stuff thing, right? And Anthropic had this red line that said, well, we build it and we know what it's good at doing, and we know where it's possibly not so good, and we don't think we should do this.

That's the people side of the argument. And it looked like Anthropik were not going to do well in that argument for a while, but they stuck to their guns. I think Dario Omodai, who's the CEO, went down, did a lot of talking at the Department of Defense, went away, but he stuck to his guns, no pun intended and then and then you know later on. The the the flip side of that was the amount of people i think it became the most downloaded app for a while on the app store because people were consumers saw that and made that switch, and then later and this is where the the technological prowess comes in because they have this model mythos which is.

I think really good at figuring out what are the flaws in your programming, the White House and the Department of Defense have gone back cap in hand to Anthropic and said, oh, okay, you know that stuff that you want us to sell and you have these red lines around it? Well, we'd like to buy it now. And so, yeah, I don't know. Leadership's a funny thing.

But it's an interesting parable. We'll see how it plays out. Yeah. I mean, when the stakes are so high, as you were talking about, with AI making life or death decisions or spying, and so we think about the moral compass of a company, right?

What is the leadership going to stand for? What is the most important? And so we want, and we're increasingly, the workforce is increasingly looking at who do I want to work for, such as what are the values of the company? Outward facing, what are we going to do?

Who are we going to buy or source from? What are the things that we are going to, how are we going to promote our products or not allow our products to be used for? And then we have the inward facing propositions and people have vision statements and they've got value statements. And yet we know that a lot of people experience pain at work, like real pain, difficulties, bullying, all different illegal behaviors or things that aren't illegal but make life miserable.

So I want to talk about conflict at work and this of maybe even moral leadership, but I want to tie it into story. So let's table what I just said, and let's go back just a little bit. And I want to hear about Fast Forward and about your new book, Story Business. So tell us about your company, and then tell us how your book came about.

So Fast Forward, we're in our 25th year, which it went by in a flash. Rose and I started Fast forward. Rose is the fast in fast forward. I like to think that I'm the forward in fast forward, but that's not what we talk about.

Yeah, but I met Rose at Gartner and we left just after the dot-com bubble. So it was a long time ago. And I think, you know, as a. I think that as a consultant, you start out by saying, by just talking to people and then saying, oh yeah, we could do that.

And a few years of we could do that has turned fast forward into a business that really specializes in leadership and storytelling. But more than that, we really help companies through change. And our sweet spot is big companies. So we work with, you know, Mastercard, Verizon, Allstate, companies like that.

So they're all, you know, no one's ever heard of us, but you've usually heard of our clients. And what we found is that it's all people. And if it's all people and you're trying to lead people through change, then okay, leadership, how do I create a following and storytelling? How do I get that following animated and create a movement are two pieces.

And for me, I think leadership and storytelling are two sides of the same coin leadership is essentially the choices i make, and storytelling is the amplification of those choices through stories and again the the it all revolves around people and it's and it's to drive change and, you know we talked we mentioned ai i don't know how many sounds will mention ai in this podcast but. What i think is change change doesn't change it's always happening but I think what we're seeing is this is the the size of change and the rate of change is going to be massive I mean.

Like nothing we've ever experienced it's going to be like I think, five or ten pandemics put together in terms of the the amount of change that we're going to go through and and leaders have to lead through change I have, a pet peeve about the word change management because I feel like, change management is outsourcing your anxiety around change to a project manager. And that project manager will deal with the mess and will deal with the messaging, but you as a leader don't have to do anything.

Well, that's completely wrong. I think leaders need to lead people through change and their job and their responsibility, is, if you imagine change as this kind of roiling river of whitewater and rapids and, waterfalls and all sorts of stuff that's going on, and you just got people trying to swim a little bit upstream, your job is to create this pool of stillness so that they can actually make some progress. That's all you have to do. It's really hard, but that's the job.

And it's much less about the functional stuff and that I'm an engineer or I'm a lawyer or I'm a HR professional. It's about making room for your people so they can do their best work. Sorry, I rambled on. This is my rambly stage of the.

Podcast no that no that was perfect i was just thinking about, you know the i thought that was very evocative of what chain a change is turbulent and it can feel that way and, i imagine the swimming upstream is like we're trying to hold on to what was right but how do we create that pocket that can carry people in it that's as calm as can be, because we're again we're a human person so what do we want? Homeostasis, right? We enjoy things that are predictable. We need predictability for safety, for, you know, how we arrange our lives.

And yet, right now, what is predictable is that things are going to be changing, right? How we're doing work, what kind of work that we're doing. And so the leader, and we find all different kinds of leaders and organizations as helping and empowering people through the change, right? And through story.

Story is just so powerful because it's like, you know, I have a vision, right? So this is where we're going and this is the statement. That's much different than the stories that you can help people imagine and get on board with and really understand what's happening. Well, I think vision statement, I love them, but they're an oxymoron.

I mean. It's a sentence that has no... It's not evocative, it's not provocative, I can't see it, and yet I just put the word vision in front of it. I think companies that do their best, you talk about ethics, and I guess the opposite of a company with moral leadership is a company that has a toxic culture.

And I think every leader shapes the culture around them, and they make a choice about whether they do or they don't. And I think most, most people, and again, this is the kind of the sell stuff capitalism versus the people socialism thing. Tension. Most people think about culture once or twice a year, and it's when their pulse survey came in and they got a bad score.

That's when they think about culture. And then maybe there's a little one-day retreat where they go and talk about it, and then they can go back to their real job. And that is completely false because culture is how you do things around here. Culture are the habits that are ingrained in people, the collective habits that everyone has.

And if you as a leader are not taking care of collective habits. What are habits? Habits are the unconscious routines that we follow. So we don't think about it, we just do it.

And if we don't have good habits, whether it's in our personal life or whether it's in our work life, they're going to hurt us. And so we, as a leader, even if I have a team of four or five people, I'm still shaping the culture around those people and I need to instill good habits. And so everything I do is about that. And this gets into this, this whole thing.

I think that is going to change. We, we so over index on the functional skill. Like I'm going to hire this leader. Who's going to be the, my chief legal officer, because they're a lawyer and they've worked in this place as a chief legal officer and they've worked and they've done all this stuff, but actually what that person is doing is leading a group of 200 people.

Which is more important the leading of 200 people or the i know this thing about engineering or lawyering or hring i think it's the first one, Yeah, I mean, it's just, I see this, it's not a trend, it's just something that happens over and over and over again. Somebody is promoted because they're good, at that skill. They have this skill set, and they really do. And they might even be brilliant at it, but it has nothing to do with whether or not they're brilliant at leading people, or whether or not they know how to inspire others.

And as you move up in an organization, you're doing less of the widget building, right? You are you but you are if you take on leadership of at least one other person management leadership i know they're different but i think they're very very closely aligned you aren't you are not your. Your primary job is you're taking care of these people so that they can do their work and that means that if you don't want to think about people if you don't want to really think about how to empower them and what their best day is and how we can curate what that looks like and these good habits and stealing good habits.

First of all, what is a good habit here, good habits here? How do we set the system up and set people up for success so they can do those things? If that's not what you're interested in doing, then we need to find a different path for going up, moving up in a company rather than managing people. Only people who know how to manage people want to learn those skills to feed into individuals should be doing that.

And a lot of people aren't fit for that well i'm gonna because i'm a bit of a language nerd i'm gonna pick on a couple of words that you do so one is the word empower, and then you put managing people together so i'll start with the managing people, i think it's much easier if you if you lead people to lead people and manage work, because no one really likes to be managed but they do like to be led. So I think when you, when you, and it's, it's a small distinction, but it's the distinction that leads to micromanagement.

It's the thing that I always used to do is I would manage, manage people and their work, which meant I would micromanage exactly what you're doing because I know better. And that usually is the trend that most people, when they first get promoted, they first lead a team, they think they know better or they got promoted because they do know better. And so therefore they apply that everywhere. And then you micromanage people, which ultimately it might work for a while, but you become the hub in a hub and spoke and you You become the bottleneck for everything and you disempower your people.

So now that brings me onto the word empower. The reason I don't love the word empower is because I think, well, number one, it speaks to the fact. It reinforces the power dynamic and the hierarchy in an organization. So I don't love that.

And honestly, when people say they empower people, what they really are doing is politely asking somebody to do something. And the tell of that leader is how quickly that empowerment vanishes when that person does it wrong. So I really avoid the word empowerment because I don't think, I don't, empowerment is like I dub thee empowered and off you go. But then you mess up and see how quickly your empowerment gets taken back.

It would be like, you know, being knighted the Lord and Lady. And as soon as you mess up, it gets taken away. All of that did happen to Prince Andrew. So, you know, it happens, I guess.

It does happen. It's really interesting to think about. And so I hear what you're saying about, you know, reinforcing hierarchy. And yet, every organization is a game.

You are playing a business game. And the game is not negative here, but there are rules. And you are hired and there are hierarchies, even when people say, I bet people, oh no, we're flat, we're all, no, no, no. Somebody hired you and someone can fire you.

Someone can lay you off. And if you don't pay attention to who has the power, then you're at a disadvantage. And so I think there is something to, I think it is interesting though, what you say to empower and you can take it back. But I mean, that is the way of things, right?

If somebody starts not performing, then it seems wise that you would then. Then you would take back some of that power. So, I don't know. I have to think about this some more.

Yeah. I mean, yeah. In the U.S.

, I think you're basically employed at will, which means somebody can hire and fire you at any point. And it's true. There is a hierarchy. There's two types of power, in my view, in an organization.

One is organizational power. So, where are you in the hierarchy that you have the ability to hire and fire. And organizational power is also built around, I think, choke points. So finance has a choke point.

You either get a budget or you don't get a budget and finance controls that. The org chart is a choke point that HR controls. You can hire a person of this type or you can't. HR controls that.

You want a new laptop, see it, the IT organization controls that. So every organization is built around choke points that they control, and there's a hierarchy within that. And then I think the storytelling power, which is your ability to influence the people around you. And...

And then I think that then gets into moral leadership because it's the abuse of power that leads to poor cultures and toxic cultures. And often it's unintentional. I do think people just don't realize because they're so focused on whatever it is that's in front of them, that they're leaving stuff in their wake and they're not really paying attention to things around them. We, we, in our, you know, we're a small company with 30 odd people.

But I often talk about the idea that your job isn't just to do your job your job is to do your job and see if you can make it easier for others around them to do their job I mean that's that because if we can do that that that really helps and I just do think it's really hard anyway so yeah, power empowerment I think it was also working with a lot of CEOs a lot of CEOs don't recognize A, the outsized power they have, because they often will talk about decisions that get made without them that they didn't know about and everything.

So it feels like in some ways they've got this dichotomy where in some ways they have the ultimate power, but in a lot of ways they feel very constrained because somebody painted the building blue and no one told them, that was going to happen. Yeah. So I'm going to talk about your own journey with conflict. And so how have you, when you were a young, younger person in the workforce, how did you deal with conflict and has that changed where you are now as a business owner, you know, 25 years into your organization?

And has story, you're thinking about story for so long, has that helped or changed how you deal with conflict at work? Yeah so i think the the short answer is you know originally not well and now hopefully better the longer answer i'll tell you two stories so, you know i left the uk as an engineer and worked in africa and one of the things that i was doing in africa was building factories and building new production plants and foundries so hot metal, flying about and I was at a running a project in Africa and the company I worked for had bought an a defunct foundry so this is in Malawi I don't know the actual numbers but, maybe there's 10% employment rather than 10% unemployment it's it's not like there's not a lot of jobs and and certainly back then which is the 90s you know.

Everyone wanted foreign currency, not Malawian currency. So if you were working at a foreign company, which a lot of these steel workers were, they were supporting not just families, but extended families and whole villages in some case on what we would consider really dollars a day, not a pittance. And when I went to this foundry, which I had to shut down because we were, it was going to take nine to 12 months to build, to tear it down and build a new one. So a workforce of 200 people, we couldn't just keep on.

I mean, it made no logical sense to do that, but they were, the, it was really run down that there were people working in, in sandals, there were people without protective equipment, all the things that you in Europe or even the US, it would just be a matter of course that wasn't there. People would burn scars all over them because of the hot metal. And these guys, I assume, had worked there for years and years and years. And here's some 25-year-old coming in, escorted by the police because the police thought it would be dangerous, and basically gave them the last paycheck and fired them all.

And because I'm 25 and an idiot, I just did it, and I didn't really think about it. And it was only later that I really thought about, you know, that these were men, because they were pretty much all men who were supporting families and, you know, had just done their best. And then, and, and some, and by the way, the guy that we bought the company from was living his best life in Switzerland and, you know, was very wealthy. Thank you.

And I just thought that just doesn't seem right. It doesn't seem fair. Uh, but you know, I, I carried on, we did the project. Eventually we, we brought a new factory online, probably hired a lot of those people back.

And then my other story is, so there's no moral to that story apart from. Oftentimes it's a system and a kind of confluence of circumstances that gets to a point, but I think it's all the little decisions that are along the way that get you to that point. And I think leadership is often, can you head off the small decision rather than kick the can down the road that gets you to that big decision that fires, you know, 500 people or 3000 people. Then is the other story is when it happened to me.

So I first came over to the U.S. With Gartner. So I worked for McGraw Hill.

The company I worked for in McGraw Hill got acquired by Gartner. I was living in Paris. They moved me to London. They moved me over here.

And I was responsible, this is the late nineties. I was responsible for swapping out basically Gartner.com and building the new. It would be what would now be called a digital transformation project.

So I was running Gartner.com, essentially taking the paper and CD-ROM of how they deliver their research and putting it online. And we had a new CMO. And I remember I was probably the youngest VP in the firm at the time, and he was the chief marketing officer.

And he came in and he talked about what he wanted to do. He was a brilliant guy, talked about the fact that Gartner had a dusty brand and it was going to change and everything else. And of course, one of the things he wanted to touch was my project and what, I was doing. And in my technical brain, it was like, We need to replace all the plumbing first, and then we can worry about what the colors are.

And I said that to him in a much less nice way, something about lipstick and, you know, just wait your turn or something. I can't remember. Because, again, probably I was 30-something then, you know, UK, you can be kind of blunt with people and get away with it. And over here, I got away with it for a time, but I didn't get away with it there.

Eventually, again, another long story short, got fired. And I'm pretty sure it's because of what I said to this guy. Because I went from being in President's Club and look at all the great work he's doing to you're first on the list. So I think those two things tell you that it is a bit of a game, like you said.

There is always a power dynamic going on, and you are often not aware of it. I think I was not really aware of any of that. And I think I genuinely believe that most people are trying to do the right thing and want to do the right thing. But most people, in fact, I would say 99% of people are going to put themselves first, are going to put their safety and security first and their progress first.

But they're also going to try and do the right thing generally. The biggest problem we have is information asymmetry. the way you look at the world versus the way I look at the world. And when those two things come into conflict, that becomes a real problem.

And this is where storytelling is so powerful, because storytelling is a way, of evening out that information so that everyone is basically on the same page and looking at things in the same way. And if you can't do that. It's a really powerful tool, let me say, in playing the game. I love that.

And I absolutely agree. So I've got my understanding of what's going on in a meeting and you have your understanding of what's going on. So we have like, because we come at the world in so many different sorts of ways because of our experiences, temperaments, there's just a lot of different reasons. But story is so powerful because if we have shared story, then it's like a new way of communicating.

And I think that's, I mean, our culture is fractured in so many different sorts of ways, but one way it's fractured is that we don't have common stories. I mean, just a little thing, like we don't, there's not three TV stations, so we're not all watching the same sorts of things. Every single person has their curated, like I'll say to my boys, hey, have you seen this, you know, on TikTok or whatever? They have never heard of it, right?

And they'll say, hey, mom, do you know about this? I'm like, no, I don't. Where, of course, our ages are very different, but there's no these shared narratives. And we don't think about that because I think, oh, everybody has watched this or everybody knows who this person is because on my feed or what I'm consuming, millions of people have.

But the world is filled with billions of people. And so thinking about story as a way to bridge these not only culture gaps but individual gaps about. How i see the world how you see the world if we can talk more about story have shared, story so so do you have any so let's suppose you just have a team and maybe there's some dysfunction there's different sorts of narratives that each person has what are some basic steps to build some sort of cohesive, normative stories that will help the team and organization, so i had i have a the product team that works for me now used to be the design team in fast forward and for the longest time i was telling people.

About how I would like slides laid out or how I'd like work to look. And telling did me no good. And a guy called Brandon Chin, who worked for me at the time and ran the design team, started these meetings that he called Why It's Good. And all you had to do for the Why It's Good meeting, and I attended them because I thought they were fun.

It was half an hour or 40 minutes, And you had to bring in a piece of work. And the first rule, when he first started doing them, the rule was it wasn't your own work. It was something from outside. And it wasn't even other people in Fast Forward's work.

It was from outside. So something you found on the internet. And the rule of why it's good was A, you had to bring something and then you had to say why it's good. And then everyone else just had to say why it's good.

You couldn't talk about why it was bad or what you didn't like about it or how you would fix it or anything else. Just talked about why it was good. And he just did that. And he did it over and over and over again.

And just telling those, I mean, so you use an artifact, a prompt to talk about why it's good. And people brought in their own experiences about why they thought this and what it, what it meant. And those, you know, the, the behavior on the team absolutely changed me telling people to, like, you need more white space on this slide, just a simple thing like that, which I'd literally been saying for five years and had no, made no difference because people didn't think about it or it changed.

And it was literally with this kind of little ritual of, of why it's good. And Brandon invented that little thing and it, and it was brilliant. So, yeah, I think stories can be really powerful when they're used in the right way. I, I, I work with, I work with somebody.

So as a, an executive coach and a thinking partner, I work with somebody who's the head of recruitment of very large organization. And he does, he basically says what's better. And, and it's, and people have to come in and tell stories about what's better this week than it was last week. And so you almost need to pick a thing that yeah, it's it's like being i guess i've never been one but a professional athlete or, something where you're you're you're looking for improvement in inches it's not a huge improvement but you just pick pick one and just keep getting better at that thing and and letting people tell their stories, is a good way of doing that when you don't let them when you do all the speaking and you're just dumping information and telling you won't change any behavior.

I love that so much. I mean, just for a variety of reasons. But I was thinking, as you were talking about why it's good, a lot of times if we're trying to make an improvement, we say, what's wrong? What's wrong with this?

What's wrong with this? And so it trains people in a particular kind of ways to take things apart. So and so now i'm just looking at why something isn't working which is much different than, why it is working what is good with it right and so you're getting closer so you're going to cut away the things that you don't want by looking but what are you focusing on and when you tell you know and so story tells us what to focus on. I love that i think that's it's funny i remember, so i mean professional sports has, has, has borrowed so much from, I mean, because there's so much on the line in, in these moments, there are very few places that you can learn leadership because you can, you can either, you either learn leadership like parenting, I guess, which is, you know, you look at your parents or you look at your leaders and say, I like that.

I didn't like that. And so you either do the same or the opposite. So that's one way of doing it. There's the, The military, which obviously has a way of developing leaders, and they hopefully spend 99% of their time training, not actually doing.

And then, so they have a lot of time and a lot of resource to do that. But I think professional sports and politicians are the other two groups of leaders you can look at. Politicians, we'll put them aside for the moment. But if you look at professional sports, they really have leaned in over the last 20, 30 years to sports psychologists.

And they don't just have trainers on their team, they have sports psychologists. I remember watching a little clip. I think it was of Nick Faldo. This is when he'd retired from professional golf and he was, he was commentator on CBS or NBC or something.

And he was saying about where he picks a target on a green and golf. So he's, he's on the fairway and he wants to hit it to the green. And there's, that's the flag. And there's a big bunker in front of the green, which is, or a lake or something.

And he doesn't want to go there. He said, what you cannot do is you can't say, don't hit it into the bunker or hit it into the lake. Because your brain ignores the don't. And it just does the thing, the hit it into the lake thing.

And I think it's the same. It's very antithetical to me because I am a figure it out, let's take it apart. What's wrong with it? I do start with that.

So this why it's good was weird for me. And I was the first person that wanted to break the rules. But I think it is a very powerful, focusing on what you want to do is much easier than. In any walk of life than it, than focusing on what not to do.

If you, if you try and not do something, that's really hard. If you try and do something, it's a lot easier to be actively doing something. And that obviously fills your time and space. And so you don't do the other thing.

Yeah. It just, it is a kind of training and I, and I can also see it just for the work dynamic. You know, if, if you have a team and you are, picking things apart and trying not to do something like what kind of ethos does that bring in you know versus how does it feel to be, positive and moving towards something that my work as a philosopher is very deconstructive I love picking apart giving any argument and immediately the first thing I do is I say no no no like I take it apart, it's harder for me to construct a narrative but there's so much joy in the construction and it's a different way of thinking and it brings about I think a different a different goal.

And I'm looking at the time. I can't believe our time is getting away from us. And I want to talk about your book, Story Business. So it sounds like this has, come about from your decades of this work.

But tell us about your book. Well, it pretty much has. There's a central theme to the book. Obviously, you know, you get it from the title.

It's about story and it's about business. It's really about the two intersecting. It's different from most books about storytelling in that they're really targeted at marketers and story brand. Story brand is one of the more famous ones out there.

This is really about how to use stories all throughout the business, because I think it's connected. And if there's a central theme, it's that it's not the best idea that wins. It's the best packaged idea. So how are you packaging your ideas?

Because I think idea and story is like chicken and egg. It's very hard to separate the two. And ultimately, you want to be able to transfer ideas, and it's the transference of ideas, the transference of know-how, the transference of knowledge, that's really built civilization. And.

So in many ways, storytelling is a 10,000-year-old skill. It's not new, but there's a lot of stuff in the book that's about how you can get better at storytelling, but also how you can apply it in different parts of the business, product storytelling, sales storytelling, culture storytelling. And it's really all about that. And I think I've been super pleased with the reaction response to it.

It just recently won the Independent Book Publishers Association Gold Award, for business for this year. So that was a great birthday present for me. It happened the day before my birthday. And so, yeah, it was, I've been really pleased with the response.

And yeah, I'm very pleased with it. That's wonderful. And so people can find that online, I'm sure. And anywhere books are sold?

Yeah, anywhere books are sold. Amazon, obviously, my publisher persuaded me to do an audio book. So if you like the sound of my voice, you can listen to the audio book. If you've listened to this podcast and you've had enough, I recommend reading.

So you can get it on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, all those places. It's also, there's a website, story-business.com. So my last question for you is, as you look into the future of work, What do you think needs to happen so that not only will all workers be treated with dignity and respect, but that they will be encouraged to thrive and flourish?

That is such a difficult question. I don't think there's any one thing, but I think AI, going back to AI. If we emerge on the right side of it, will make us more human. And so we need to reach for whatever it is that makes us more human as leaders, as people, as brothers, sisters, fathers, mothers.

We need to be more human and we need to think about how do we, lead other people how do we help other people how do we teach other people how do we do all the things that make us more human i know that's a get that's a real wishy-washy answer but i i can't think of a. It's going to be really messy i know i know that I don't know how it's going to work. And I think in a mess, the best thing to do is to do your best. I love the answer of the humanness because it reminds me sort of as we began this conversation of raising everything else away, right?

What does business do? We're selling stuff. We're doing it with people. Okay.

And so then the closing answer is let's get better at the people, right? Let's really embrace what does it mean to be human. And I don't think that we think a lot about that. You know, we don't spend time.

We build systems sometimes thinking as if we're computers or we're widgets or we're just an extension of the Industrial Revolution, but we're not. We're human persons. And so really, I think if we thought maybe more about human nature and what that means at work, then, you know, then we are, we're going to weather the messiness. I mean, the messiness is here and it's going to get more.

So we know this. We know about the future that it's going to be uncertain and messy. How do we do this messiness together? And humans are already a big, fat mess, right?

I mean, we are messy by nature, which I think is actually glorious with all the diversity that we bring. Yeah. You said it so much better than I did. But yes.

Well, Gavin, thank you so much for your time. What a fun conversation. And everyone, I encourage you to go look at Story Business. Thanks, Merry.

It's been an absolute pleasure. Absolutely. Take care. Thank you, Gavin, so much for a great conversation.

I had a whole list of things that I wanted to talk to you about, but we didn't get to them because we got talking about all things story and business, and I appreciate your work. There's so much more, obviously, that could be said about how, the stories that we tell ourselves influence how we think about conflict and, how the organization thinks about conflict and dealing with conflict and the gift of the messiness of the human experience. Conflict Managed is produced by Third Party Workplace Conflict Restoration Services and hosted by me, Merry Brown.

You can find us online at 3pconflictrestoration.com. Come back. We have new episodes every Tuesday.

And if you would like and subscribe wherever you are listening or watching this podcast, it's greatly appreciated. Our music is courtesy of Dove Pilot. And remember, conflict is normal and expected. Let's deal with it.

Until next time, take care. I got to, run to you, We're gonna suffer you Run to you Run a red light.