How can we best challenge our ideas? Today’s guest, Andrew Webster, shares how Design Thinking has been instrumental in his growth as a leader. As ExperiencePoint’s Vice-President of Transformation, Andy is the leading catalyst for innovation — lending expertise, drive and imagination to ExperiencePoint’s many clients as he helps them champion their transformative journeys. The world-leading innovation capability-building company helps organizations build the skills and conditions for innovation to thrive and become self-sustained.

I had a great time speaking with Andrew and learning about how to think like a scientist, being aware of your biases, test-to-learn approaches and how ExperiencePoint’s Design Thinking has helped deliver social good through their projects.  

Links mentioned

James Clear

‘Think Like a Rocket Scientist’ by Ozan Varol

ExperiencePoint

Hey, folks, and welcome to another episode of the Leadership Tales podcast. I'm Colin Hunter, and I'm delighted to be joined by Andrew Webster today. Andrew Webster is head of the transformation for Experience Point Canadian company. We partnered with, for a number of years. And he goes back way back with myself. He sits on our advisory board at the moment, and the reason he got that seat was of his work with us, whether it was training me in design thinking or whether being a coach and a mentor around those the operating and the delivering of design thinking to our clients and how we do this internally. So, he's been a very strong mentor for me in my thinking and how we operate. And also, now he's starting to work with me to shift my thinking about the different pillars of our business and how we operate. So, I'm delighted to be able to bring him in today to have a chat, and he can. In this episode, you'll hear a number of things about his journey from firstly, being somebody who worked with an investor, a very wealthy investor, he was given accountability for almost as he describes the keys to the candy store and being able to go off and developed new ideas through that investor's money and capital and then into his work with inexperience point, design thinking into the now that work transformation and the blending of design, thinking and change into a transformation project. And he's scaled up so many projects in this space that, you know, he can talk as you hear him today, talk about some of those experiences and his learnings from there. But I think the biggest thing you'll hear is a humble Canadian person who is, who comes from that place that allows others to feel special. And that's what I've always felt working with Andrew. So, I'm delighted to have him in today and looking forward to hearing your feedback on the conversation that I enjoyed.

Delighted to be joined today by Andrew Webster, who is, to me, a mentor we met in Paddington station. So, you can imagine two people meeting in a coffee shop, and I can say fundamentally that meeting changed the way I operate, changed the way I run my business, and changed the way I think. So, I owe this gentleman a lot. But I'm sure that what he's going to do today is share a lot of his sources, his wisdom, with us about what he's been through. So, Andrew, welcome to be more on a podcast.

I'm so happy to be here, Colin, and I must say it's generous to call me a mentor, especially if you consider this que, how much more I've learned from you than you can possibly hope to learn from me. I also consider it generous to say that we met in a coffee shop. I don't know if you're trying to make us sound cool, but it was a Starbucks thing, and it was a little nook, not a place where a table actually belongs in a Starbucks and we have squared away, hunched over isn't even an adequate table, but it was a great meeting.

It was a great meeting. Yeah. And you know, my father always used to say never let the truth get away with the story, but I felt that out.

It was a coffee shop in Paddington.

Brilliant. And I didn't think there's a piece that would be useful because you're a humble man, and that's one of the key things in there, whether it's a Canadian and you or whatever it is. But I'd love to and for the listeners to hear a bit about your background and where you've come from, what you've done. So, talk us through it.

what an impossible challenge call him that I've told everyone. You're humble. Now, tell us about your background in a way we might share. Well, I'll do my best in Canadian fashion to attribute it to an American. So very early on in my career, I was really fortunate. I got my professional path in a different way and was very fortunate to be mentored by a brilliant, brilliant man, John Abele. The time I met him, he was one of the founders of Boston Scientific, one of them, you know, wealthiest, most successful men in the world, and he took me under his wing. I had made a weird proposal to him about how to establish a business within a collaboration institute that he had. And he took me on instead of taking on fees or anything like that. He took on this kid with a weird idea, and he nurtured my entrepreneurial capabilities, let's say, as well as taught me a lot about being more wrong about himself. And this is documented in a semi biography that he's written. He had a condition when he was a child and learned very quickly that doctors, in the interests of saving lives and improving lives, sometimes have to experiment. They have to test and get things wrong. Testing on people taught him a lot about experimentation. I was so fortunate to learn from him. Indeed, I was a kid in a candy store, planting new businesses within his collaboration institute, using technologies for things that they were never designed to be used for, like decision support and audience response technologies using those instead of as teaching tools for collaboration tools that surfaced grievances with strategy meetings and things like that punching way above my weight standing on this person's shoulders so learned a lot there. And because he was so busy for him too, I would get a couple of days a month with him and the general manager of this institute, said, Andrew, you're an entrepreneur. And I'm more of like a hospitality type of person managing the setting that we're in. So, I don't feel I can mentor you, but you need more mentorship. And I do know one entrepreneur, and that she introduced me to the founder of the Experience point, a man named James Chisholm. And so I got to know James. Yes. And eventually, I just decided at; first, I decided this is someone I have to work with James and just one of the best decisions in my life. And then this is something I want to do in the world. I moved over to Experience point. And in just about twelve and a half years now, I've had a different role. About every two years now, I lead our transformation practice, and I have a lot more to say about the Experience point journey. But I think those questions will come up more naturally in our conversation here.

That's great. No, I love that. And obviously, James is a mutual friend, so it's nice to hear that story. I never heard how you got there. So that's great for me to hear. I want to just tap into one of the things you talked about because I talk about playgrounds and in my working leaders creating playgrounds. There was a leader who took you under his wing and gave you a playground to play. And, you know, I would be like a kid in a sweet shop there or a candy store for those who are investing in America. Have a look. But it must have been an amazing experience, an almost too good to be true in some ways. How did it feel?

It was in many ways, so I had access to this individual, but also this individual's global network of thought leaders. So, I just got to interact with people that I had no right to interact with and learn at such a pace, someone that was interested in trying new things. He wanted to change the way people collaborated. Yet he had a very big vision and gave me space to think about how I would contribute to that vision and then provided a lot of feedback on the things that I was trying out, but very much a test to learn approach. You know, there were expectations that I was going to grow and plant scalable, successful businesses, which I also think was an essential part of it. The candy store needs to have consequences of the sweet shop, needs to have, you know, tooth decay or it's not fun. Not. So, I wondered how essential an ingredient that was, but it was a lot of fun to do the work. It was a lot of fun to learn from a network of people I might not have had access to, and my willingness to experiment and make ridiculous proposals I was not qualified to make, I think, is something this individual respected, and I think.

That is amazing. Great. So let's pick that up and go into the Experience point because there's a lot of parallels there, isn't there? I mean, if you look at the design thinking philosophy, then for those who don't know anything about Experience point in the background. Maybe just tell us a bit about that.

Yeah. So, Experience point. When I joined, we were the world's leading simulation company, so we said if experience, experiences the greatest teacher in the world, but it is a flawed teacher in that it takes too long, it's fraught with risk, and we usually extract the wrong lessons. So, simulation helps us to make learning by experience more focused, less risky, and just better. So, you have this vision. Everyone is going to learn this way through simulation and in due course. More and more people are learning this way. It's kind of an expectation. So, what's the next vision and now Experience point? We, are like a workforce transformation company. Our products are used by businesses like Potential Squared. Where they're changing behavior within organizations are tools like our simulations are a part of a solution that you and other consultancies might provide, or if you were to go to like a Harvard Business School, Insead and MIT, etc., they would use our tools within their executive education programming. And we work directly with customers as well to transform workforces. So, help train people in new skills and help them apply those skills to adapt to the conditions of their environment so people will do things differently. So again, great. We work with a global client base to learn from just the most interesting people in the world, and our partners are global as well. But we have some great feedback loops them. There's lots of learning from all directions, and like to say that we create disproportionate impact through products that are going through channels of people like you call them that know better than we how to have an impact in the organizations that you're working with, or the way we set up catalysts within organizations. So, they themselves are having disproportionate impacts on culture. I'm excited about Experience point, but again, I don't want this to sound like a commercial so well.

I'd like to tackle a couple of the areas, the Experience point. It's one of the things two things in my mind. one of the things was the partnership with the idea. And I'm Tim Brown, an absolute hero of mine who loves Facebook. But actually, meeting him and having the ability to engage and see that caliber of a person in terms of their thinking is one thing. I love to explore that. But the second thing is that with ideas and with your experience, I'm aware that you did a lot of traveling. I mean, you were the person who was, you know, probably 300 days out of the year was heading all over the world to different places to China to go and work with different cultures. And I'd love to understand the impact of the idea of partnership, but then the cultural impact. So, let's pick up the idea and just see that from the beginning.

Yes, early in my journey with ExperiencePoint, we partnered with ideas to create in collaboration with them our experience, innovation learns as it's known now simulation. So that is an experience that helps people learn design thinking by taking a sixteen-week project and shrinking it down to four hours. And now that the design thinking wave is kind of cresting, organizations know they need to be more customer-centric and know that design is the best way to get them there. But around 2009, it was clear from an audio and Experience point that organizations, we're going to need to internalize some of these capabilities. We thought we were the best in the world at helping scale capabilities, and the idea was the best in the world that design thinking. And so, there was a natural partnership there. How much do I want to peel back here? The true story is a little more. There is a dogged pursuit by experienced point, and audio did bring us along. They taught us; they helped us transform into an organization that is very customer-centric and design-driven. Understand those methods. And yes, we got to partner with the thought leaders. A Segway into the travel did call, and I've had my ideal passport stamped by every studio from Singapore to Tokyo to Shanghai to London and Munich, etc., etc. So learning from those folks and exposing some thought leaders like Tim Brown, also a mentor of mine, exposing him to people in our networks. That's what disproportionate impact would feel like as well. And that's an exciting thing to be a part of. It's exciting to learn from people like that through the books they create and talks that they give, but also directly to learn from that individual and see how they operate. It's been a thrill, and we've just learned a ton from ideas and connected with many people through their network that has just accelerated our learning, our capability, and the impact we can have on the world.

And I do remember one specific example of that was the year on a session where it was design thinking about you're applying it to the heart and stroke of Canada. Is that right here?

I was fortunate enough so that I got to interview Tim in front of folks during that project, and then we kicked off a project. We partnered with the Canadian Heart and Stroke Foundation, which is exactly what you think. They're an incredible organization of the most wonderful people that are just dedicated to saving lives. And it's kind of the last mile for heart and stroke. So more and more people are conscious of it, and there are medications that mean it's not even the number one killer pre-pandemic cure anymore. But when people do have an episode to get them treated with defibrillators or know how to save, people might have had an experience or incidence. That's the project we're looking at, and brought together some of those folks from the Canadian Heart and Stroke Foundation that were generous to participate in this with us and our global network. We had in that room fallen people from, you know, I think, a couple of dozen countries from as far away as South Africa and Dubai to many of the states were covered there. So, these were business leaders and design leaders within organizations and folks, like you thought leaders, just to apply design thinking, not to a business challenge. But how are we going to help Canadians that weakness or stroke event to save lives? And it is a beautiful design challenge, and there were some great prototypes that came out of there.

And I want to link it back because actually this week just been and we're in the middle of a program where we used to design; we tell you we are applying it to social. A program called Greenhouse this year is called the Greenhouse in the virtual environment because we've shifted everything virtually, but that gives peace as a charity piece. And the idea a lot of the idea for that came from this piece about heart and stroke. Because if we can give back to society, while the people of Accenture, in this case, are learning through that process, then it has a massive impact, and we were doing something else around purpose this week. And if you can connect heart stroke and I have a vivid memory because my father, unfortunately, passed this year as a pediatrician wasn't a pediatric cardiologist, but it was that moment. So, you know, the interviews with the police that we had in that room around, you know, what happens in the accident? And then the interviews with the family, the survivors, all of those things suddenly make the purpose greater than something that you might feel at work, but it brought to mind. For me, these two things. One is that Experience point is a great company for customer service, but engaging in the community. But secondly, how powerful that is as a tool for social, social burden, and work.

You are talking about your book about playgrounds? I have a lot to say about, like how far you take the playground concept, but I'm sorry that you lost your father, a great man contributing in that way. So, I have the greatest respect for pediatric care physicians, and one place where we were kind of like a playground is the SickKids hospital here in Toronto. It is maybe one of the greatest pediatric care facilities in the world, which is a teaching hospital. They're doing cutting-edge research, and the experience that we use with heart Stroke foundation that was experience innovation applied well before we put something into the market; of course, we test the hell out of it, make sure it's bulletproof. And we have our prototyping partners that we do that with Sickkids. It was one of those prototyping partners where they understand some of the technology is a little bit kludgy here, and we're going to need their feedback. And when we consider playgrounds, I'll have to consider where would we love to have a direct impact on a project fence while helping an organization build a capability while helping us sell products? There are ways to manufacture playgrounds that are good for multiple entities and for potentially humankind moving forward. And SickKids is the entity of choice for me.

Yeah, I love that, and you know it's for me; it's that layering on where you can teach, you can learn, create new products. And, you know, we've done a lot of work with clients where we've partnered with them. We've created a playground to learn, experience, and create a new platform or a new way of offering leadership, example, and leadership development, which will resonate. It's for me now more than ever. I'm thinking about the social impact, so I love that story. But also, I want to relate that into the leadership piece because like your role in a transformational experience, playing your role with, working with the multiple clients you do, there's a strong piece about how I remember asking him this question, which is we do all this training and all this development, and then they go back to an organization, where potentially all of that can just die. It doesn't go anywhere because of the culture. What's your views on leadership, on the impact of innovation, design, thinking on leadership?

Right, the code we like is that a changed person entering an unchanged organization is likely to just drown in a pool of frustration. If you've seen what's possible, you developed a new skill, and you're not allowed to flex that skill. That can be really frustrating, and indeed say enthusiasm decays into cynicism very quickly. So, the enthusiastic, not just individual, but groups or organizations of individuals they're excited about. Yes, we do need to be more customer-centric, and we hear it all the time leaders saying, All right, it's cool to fail here now, or we're going to be the sort of organization that innovates within X amount of time. Those leaders have lit the Fuze, and if they don't deliver on that, the promise that is either explicit or implicit in what they've said. People are going to become cynical, and then you're working from a deficit. It's worse than if you've never mentioned anything, to begin with. People will dig in; they get some of that scenario of how we've tried that for right from this before. So leaders can generate a lot of enthusiasm by setting a vision, but it is lighting a Fuze. There's a responsibility that you create, at that moment as a leader, to follow through and for something like a new capability set like design thinking. First of all, the leader has to connect it to a vision. We've been more wrong, Colin; I have too many stories that took us, took me rather too long to learn this lesson that is crystallized for us now. If an organization rallies people around design thinking, that's not a very sustainable movement, and this is a social movement to create change in an organization; design thinking is a means to an end. It is a tool kit. So really, how is design thinking serving us? That is a tool to enable growth behaviors are a tool to enable customer centricity or a digital transformation because our customers are increasingly digital or for us to compete. It's what are we trying to accomplish here and connect the capability to that vision is the role of the leader and then enable the right conditions for new behaviors to thrive. There's also a responsibility of the leader. One way to look at it, and it sounds really clinical, but just a starting place can think of what are the rhythm systems and channels that we can influence as leaders or empower other people to influence; a rhythm is something like we have a check-in with people. What new questions are we asking in those check-ins that suggest, oh, I expect you to be trying new things, channels that people are socializing through yammer, the chatter, some other group. How do we influence that communication there or create permission for people to share new stories, things done differently? Or if you follow Dave Stone like that, when you see replacing old stories in an organization with new stories, the narrative changes. That's how change happens. And then systems. Those are things like performance management systems, structures like infrastructure, and we have a group of catalysts or others that are responsible for saving the culture flags. Those are some of the things a leader can start with, in addition, of course, to the individual behavior that they model.

I love the rhythms, systems, and channels. That's that echoes for me, one of the writers I love as James Clear and systems. You know, we don't rise to the level of goals, we fall to the level of assistance that we're going to get a quorum, but the principle is the same. So, I love that when it just taps in, Andrew, because this is a piece in there that, you know, you and I have connected on this before. I've got a big fan, a big fan of a right called those on Barrow who wrote the book Think like a rocket scientist. And we both talked about Adam Grant and the thinking, like a scientist for a lot of leaders to think like scientists and work in that space. And, you know, Zane Brown talks about the same thing to learn fast and do that. It is very difficult, and there's an argument about failure and whether the failure is good. And a lot of people say failure shouldn't be the measure. But learning fast and thinking like a scientist from me, I can buy into. So, I wondered if you want to talk a bit about your experience of working those too.

True. Yeah, that's an interesting one. I also think that I forgot what gave me an instant publication. It was you mentioned, that, a great leader needs the right amount of humility and hubris. You need to inspire people. You just need to be constantly learning. And the way that Adam Grant defines it is like a scientist is trying to expose how they might be wrong. If we get into talking about how I am most wrong, it's I need to become more like a scientist so fortunate to work with an organization where we imbue people with the instinct to test quickly. But I, you know, the great leader has strong beliefs, very loosely held. The great scientist and the great leader that behaves like a scientist is looking to have their beliefs tested, their assumptions question but, how do we invite in different voices is an important question for me. So, there is something I think I need to get better at. In addition to when I have an idea, how do I test the assumptions within this idea for the design and thinking frameworks? That's instinct. But when it's more decision making or just shaping my beliefs, I can be and have a very specific example of when I've established a belief about what the market needs, for example, have put so much energy into shaping offers and trying to motivate an organization to meet that market need that I can become put the blinders on like any leader can put the blinders on. And with that confirmation bias intact, only really look out for and listen to the perspectives that support this conclusion. But, you know, I attach my identity to it has been there. The great scientists, I would say the great designer is, well, they're looking for opportunities to be more wrong. And the great designer also gets a little bit of a thrill when you achieve insight, and insight is something that challenges your existing way of thinking. So, how to port that skill that I feel I have some capability around going, connecting with people around a project, and looking for ways to challenge what I think I know or inject new insights. How do I bring some of that skill and capability into my daily life and some of the behaviors that I hold is where I think I've built the biggest gap right now. How do I experience the thrill? And wow, I hadn't thought of it that way, or wow, I've been wrong about this the whole time, and now I can celebrate that there is clarity and truth where once I was misleading myself.

I love that concept; I would just almost go off that into touch on a topic there. Because one of the things I struggle with design thinking is is we all struggle for the insight that seeking the insight and, you know, just tense up. What is this insight? We go out and do the observation that we all know. If we do the right type of observation and feel them normally, we will get an insight that will flow from there. But sometimes I struggle with I started with a hypothesis rather than the observation, and then go out and test it. So, for example, I hold a hypothesis that the greatest leaders in the world are introverts. And the reason I think that is because of two things. One is that they have a natural comfort with silence and allowing others to speak. And the second thing is linked to the design thing, which I'm starting to work up the ego and expertize the less worried about their ego and expertize, or perceived to less worry about their ego and expertise at the moment. But that trust is going against some of the principles because you're putting a hypothesis out there rather than actually going and purely observing and working. So, is that what we're meaning about? I think like a scientist is not put a hypothesis out, go observe, or is it? Are you saying the opposite, we're just testing him?

We have hypotheses we carry with us, and that's the reality. So, what to do with those hypotheses is maybe a way to approach this, by the way, that that hypothesis of introverts being better leaders as a Canadian loud mouth that just doesn't serve me very well Colin so that I do have a stake in my ego has been challenged. But one way to think about it is where we do want to go into the world and observe look for opportunities to be wrong. And it is true that at a neurological level, when we have our sense of mastery challenged, then it affects our health, like our cortisol effect. But if we can start to feel a sense of mastery around being wrong, that is, I have an assumption or hypothesis challenged. I'm good at having my hypotheses challenged, and I'm good at accepting new points or bits of data that challenge hypotheses. I think that becomes important in what I see in the best designers and scientists I know is that ability to celebrate having hypotheses challenged instead of kind of feeling that their ego or identity is attacked by those things. And one way to approach this is, I got a hypothesis that's a reality. I need to make myself aware of the biases that could be attached to this hypothesis. So, any time you're doing discovery work of any kind, and we should all be doing more discovery work or consider every action and item of discovery, then it can be useful to consider more useful to even write down what do I expect to learn in this conversation or observation? What do I expect to hear from other people and what insights do I expect to encounter or what user needs or beliefs do I expect to encounter from other people? And if you write that stuff down, like you do a purge or we call it a palate cleanse, call it, then what you're doing is bringing some awareness to your biases. So OK, that's what I think will happen; now I need to recognize that I'm going to work too hard for those things. So let me not look too hard for those things. Let's be sensitive to viewpoints that might challenge those things and celebrate when I have those things challenged and when we're considering what insights we could gather that are useful to us, things that confirm, what we already know are probably less useful. So, let's search for those things that aren't on the list that aren't on my palate cleanser, affirmation as diminishing returns. It is that exploration discovery of something new that's really going to make me smarter and better and more useful to the people I serve.

I love the answer, because it's says crystallized in my mind, you know, it is probably January, February last year, if you'd asked me, would we be a virtual delivery business? And secondly, would we get higher results or better feedback on a virtual business and face-to-face having always been a face-to-face business? I would have almost laughed at you, and the other day I saw the results from the last twelve months, and we did pretty well. There's a face-to-face business, and we got the feedback actually, that the virtual workshops were received better than the face-to-face one for many different reasons. But there's an I was forced to go and test that, but it's been a revelation for me and sends the thinking about how we engage as a business. So I think that's bringing that to life and in beautiful ways.

Much like that forced agility, a crisis is a terrible thing to waste. We think about how carbon emissions have gone down. I don't know if you've seen the research from the Atlantic that over the last year, aggregate happiness has not been affected. It's about steady around the world where for young people who are losing their jobs and freedom, they're less happy in a pandemic. But the elderly that see that other people are putting energy into and limitations upon themselves to care for them, has been a boost to the happiness of elderly folks. So, we're learning all these interesting things at a societal level. What's possible, and you know, how do we keep those lessons and keep those elderly people feeling valued keep carbon emissions lower? But there's also at the individual level. How can we make the most out of this crisis, these lessons that we're learning in forced agility for ourselves? Yeah, I would love to what is the scientists view their Colin. How do we all do better? I'll say in complicity or status quo of just trying to roll with the punches, but haven't invested enough in thinking about how am I going to have these expectations of society? But how am I as a contributor or as a leader going to be better at extracting the lessons from the pandemic and what I've seen as possible from myself and from others? There's an interesting question in there not well for I'm sorry.

No, I think it's resonating for me because, you know, there's a piece sometimes that when we're forced into something, we do that, and then we see benefits. It's is classically trained because sometimes we forget to understand why it's a benefit, which we get to understand how it can benefit. We also all that success. Let me carry on. You know, I've spent more time with us. You know, as a family, we spent more time as a family over the last twelve months, and therefore there's been a connection with my daughters growing up. There's been other things in terms of, as you say, they had the roads and interest in the pandemic going and cycling, just feeling the need to go out and walk and cycle. So there's been a huge amount of benefits, personal benefits. But you're right. How do we sustain some of those, particularly when there? If I remember before and a bit like you, I was traveling so much before. How do I get back there? And if I can't address those challenges myself as a leader, how my expect my people will follow me to do something similar as well. So there's a there's a real challenge, and I know that the new hybrid working is going to be one of the biggest challenges to leaders coming up, which is where we're moving into a different world, coming out about how organizations are working. What's the answer for leaders? And I do think that's where design thinking will come into its own in terms of trying to help shape the new ways of working, the new ways of running a business, and a lot of ways.

Yeah, design is one approach that can give you confidence in times of ambiguity because there are stages of a process, you can have confidence in the process when there is uncertainty and where you're applying the process, and it can help to navigate ambiguity. I remember Colin; when the pandemic first struck, there was a symbol of that tiger team at Experience point. And how are we going to be most useful to the world's better people? Early on, we're setting aside training budgets. No one knew what was going on. So how do you problem solve for a world that's ahead of you, and you don't know what it's going to look like, but it's coming so quickly in this crisis? So, we started with analogous research. Where else have we seen in different contexts a crisis fall upon society, and they come out better on the other end? So, in March of 2020, there was a team at Experience point digging into all of this research around the Chicago Fire, Chicago Fire, famously and tragically, it burnt a lot of Chicago to the ground in the 19th century. But Chicago is this beautiful city. Now a lot of it can be attributed to some of the regulations that were set in place to protect the waterfront after the fire, for example, so, a tangent calling. But sometimes, in a time of crisis, the process can be useful. Tools can be useful. And until we develop instincts to be more wrong, we're in a time of ambiguity when there is only wrong, and you're only making bets; where can we draw confidence from it? Sometimes from the process? And then, within that particular process, where can we get insight from analogous context?

Yeah, I love that. I love that Chicago is just immediately. As you going into that, I was thinking about things that the World War and London know, and everybody talks about, and it has a link to leadership because they talk about, you know, Churchill being a Great War leader. But outside war, he was never, you know, his reputation was less. And there's a piece about the biggest challenges, how we rise to the biggest challenges, and how we deal with my leader as an important thing. But sometimes, you know, we talked for a while, and I guess it's about culture, how he changes the burning platform and this change model. It used to be a leader with a burning platform, and then everything changed. However, when he realizes that, you know, a burning platform was not always there who changed it to, you know, exactly, it's just thinking back in a human-centric way. What are we trying to do? What are we observing, and how we're operating? So, it's an interesting tool for us in the leadership contextóone to just tackle on to your side of leadership because you've been on a journey. You're now running a team around transformation. You've had the pandemic. What have you learned for yourself around leadership and particularly around the context of being your own Andrew?

Well, adding in there the particularly around the context of being more wrong, I'm grateful, Colin, because I have lots of wrongs but wrong to contribute. And you know, here, here's what to do. So leading this transformation team, is a significant change for our business, where success for us has long been defined by a great workshop experience. Was that a great workshop experience for people? And over time, just recognizing we need to take more responsibility? That is, when people are engaging in a workshop, they want a great workshop experience naturally, but they're investing with us because of the outcome. That workshop will help them to achieve. So, taking more responsibility for those outcomes has been a significant change. I've been fortunate to see working with clients over the years to see those clients that are doing incredible work and achieving outcomes versus those that would say best workshop experience ever and achieving great things, but not at the same scale. I've had the opportunity to see what's possible when an organization sets some different conditions. Not everyone on my team or people newer to the team haven't witnessed having that experience that it is a challenge to our identity or what we used to celebrate ourselves for. So, one of the ways I've been wrong is having seen something that feels so clear to me in the market now, how to share that internally, get people excited versus, you know, this classic mistake of let's set a vision based upon what I've learned, kind of set a vision, start operating around that vision internally and then expect people to get on board with that vision. I really slow down what's possible with Experience point by doing that. Then, of course, as you open it up to more people, get more people, more direct contact with our customers, and more ownership and contributing to the vision in the way that we executed. Not only are those people on board, but then you start to see just what limitations I've placed on the solutions we're creating by taking too much ownership myself versus providing in diverse perspectives.

I love that; we've done a similar process of that.

I don't love that, Colin. It was the lesson to learn. But I'm glad it's good for you and your podcast.

Yeah, sorry, Andrew, we're celebrating your pain, but let me share with you a bit of my pain, which is, you know, we worked on. The similar problem is that we've got our stories, but most of the stories are generated by myself or people who've been in the business a while. And we've gone through a storytelling or narrative process recently eating our own dog food, as we would call it, to start to think about that. Actually, what we realize is our team has so many different stories that they could tell that could help us in shaping either way. But also, they've got to go off and have their own stories and their own experiences and be able to relate it back. So, we found the storytelling and the marriage pieces you mentioned before as a powerful way to do that. But it's classically as a leader. I've got my story and a point of view. So, it is back, and let me tell you how I think we should go forward versus letting them experience it and get more value on it. I love it. I love it.

Yeah, I think we suffer from a bit of the same disease there, Colin, and that is it's a great thing that we're easily inspired or optimistic enough to be inspired by things worthy of being inspired by. But when we're so inspired and we expect other people to get the right to where we are by not even the same means, but just by hearing through us how inspired, we are. I wonder if that's how many times I need to learn that that's not the right way to get people inspired and is the objective to get people inspired? Or is that an opportunity to be more wrong? Have people question that about which I am inspired yet, but.

I definitely do. I had a great Francis Ford Coppola quote about his experiences, he said, You know, I spent my whole career being told not to do things and then spend the latter part of my career and again, get the quote wrong, spent the latter part of my career being celebrated for lifelong achievements about doing the same things and wondering who is right and who is wrong. So we spent a lot of our early-career probably doing the right. Things were being told off for them by leaders like myself. And then, you know, as we go through a lot of careers starting to go off and watch more than in theory, increase wisdom, go from trying or we're trying to do things in a creative way or a different way which provide value. It's fascinating to me. So let me end with a question Andrew for you then. If you were to go back and talk to your 25-year-old self, what would you tell them at this point? What would be learning?

It might sound, Pat, and we just said we want to challenge our hypotheses, but this is confirming a lot of what we've been talking about already, but seeking inspiration. I think I was good at seeking diversification like seeking diverse viewpoints, understanding people that have had different experiences in life than me is something we all need to do is something definitely, I would push myself to have done a better job of and just invite in viewpoints that challenge your own viewpoints, match the inspiration that you're drinking in with an exploration of where you might be wrong, where your thinking might need some refining.

Yeah, I can echo without the echo chamber. My twenties was not the most helpful place to be. Whereas now they I think it was a great man. Randy Taylor encouraged a man, aged 21, to start exploring different points of view and different ways of looking at them. He was heavily involved with the civil rights movement in the US, and I look back about that moment at 21 and sitting in a rocking chair on a Montreat, North Carolina, and I didn't really take that hard as a message till I got to my mid-thirties, probably Forties and can I can, I think is a great one, get diverse views and opinions. And if we're like that, then you can understand where diversity, equity, and inclusion have had their barriers right the way through the ages as well. Mr. Webster, Andrew, it's been a pleasure to talk to you. Thank you for taking the time today. If people want to reach out to you or hear more about you, where they can go to get some information.

Experiencepoint.com is the best place to do that and see what we're up to and contact Experience point. Colin, the pleasure was mine. I feel like it's my responsibility to have proven you wrong at some point in the chain. I didn't do it. But next time, I'll get it.

There's a challenge. Yeah, let's do this again and say, you know, it's been really, Andrew. Thank you.

Thank you.

Enjoy the rest of the day. Take care.

Likewise, take care. Bye.

Wow, folks. Great conversation with Andrew always is, whenever it's in the advisory board or talking to him and the concepts that we're talking about today is just it's, it always fills my heart with either hope And also it fills my head with ideas. So, we've heard today about the concept of the broader view with design thinking, looking at workforce transformation, the combination of change in design, thinking in. There is one thing that stood out for me today. But second is just remembering the social impact that design thinking can have and the work we did with the Heart and Stroke Association and looking at pediatrics and how that's that operates in that space. So, it's massive the potential this has for social impact. And thirdly, I just love hearing about the keys to the candy store on working in that space and how accountability needs to be mixed with a degree of humility and a humble approach to what he did. And therefore, I always look at Andrew in that space, and that's why. Lastly, I say humble humility, but a great asset to our business going forward. So, I hope you enjoyed it. I love to hear your feedback on it, and I look forward to welcoming you back and another episode of leadership tales.