Whenever we introduce change we meet resistance.

Every change involves loss of some sort for someone. That person is likely to be the person who most resists the change. How well we address their concerns determines the smoothness of change.

We can push past resistance, but when we don't address these concerns we suffer.

Either we get silent conflict and disengagement. We get loss of trust or active sabotage against us. Or we get outright conflict.

The success of any change over the long term comes from the ability to change old beliefs.

When we leave someone behind. Knowingly or not. We have created a pothole that will eventually cost us.

The key to bringing everyone along is empathy and curiosity.

Finding out where people are. How they feel. And what is behind their resistance.

Links:

Clark Ray’s Linkedin Profile

Clark’s Website

Tony Walmsley’s Linkedin Profile

Tony’s Website 

Rob McPhillips’s Linkedin Profile

Rob’s Website

Going back to pre season, when I was assistant coach at

the Mariners in Australia, Graham Arnold was the manager, he's now

the Australian national team coach.

Did well at the last World Cup.

We played Celtic in a pre season, so we were in pre season and Celtic

were, came over to Australia as they do now to do pre season.

We had a game with them at the Olympic Stadium.

And I was, given the job to go and watch the training, do some analysis before

we played them, see if we could get any intel or insights before we played.

So I've gone there and they absolutely hammered their players.

Like they were playing like four a side on a Massive pitch in Australian heat, and

they were giving it to him, like they were knackered, so didn't get a great deal of

insight into what tactics they would have, but I was able to say, look, these guys,

they're

going to be playing sub optimally in terms of their physical, load.

So they, that was a great indicator to back up what you've said in preseason.

Who knows what loads the players have been put under?

Who knows how much game time they've been given and whether they've been told to

go all out or to play within yourself.

None of us really know that when we're watching.

And I think the smart guys like Unai Emery have, at least proven,

isn't he, over many years in Europe that he's a master at pulling those

things together when it's required.

It's a science.

He's very data oriented and you can tell that you can see this season

things have changed slightly.

It starts to pull players off earlier because they've

got such a long season ahead.

Managing is not just about standing on the sidelines, shouting at the players,

all the stuff that's gone in beforehand.

And they set the ethos, don't they, for the rest of the backroom

guys, that all the things.

They go on with set piece training and all that other stuff.

I had a conversation Friday with somebody about culture.

You set the culture, you decide if you've got a bad culture here, you did it.

Yeah,

yeah, absolutely.

It's funny, I did like a field trip to Hull City.

And there's still a number of more established coaches, shall we say, that

are getting faded out a little bit.

Steve Bruce is an example.

So I went to on a study trip to Hull City when Steve Bruce was

introduced to him, go and spend some days there watching training.

I have a chat to him, I think Mickey Phelan was there as well as his assistant.

I was between seasons at the Mariners when I was the head coach, I've

come in and had this liaison and it was almost the opposite of what

we're talking about to a degree.

And I'm not saying they discounted the sports science, but there's a bit of eye

rolling going on when you talk about, it was more about the influence that sports

science was trying to have knocking on the door saying this, that, and the other.

And the old school manager saying, Yeah, that's fine.

But I've got this type of thing, it's it was a very different outlook,

but Steve Bruce had such a great manner, such a great humility and

ability to connect with the players.

You could see that they like being around him.

They like being part of his group.

It was really interesting dynamic.

But less geared towards the science of it all.

Yeah, they had all the departments, but it's how much heed they paid

to the data and to the eye tells everything school of thought.

It's a funny thing, isn't it?

Because I've come across this fairly regularly, or I did do until recently,

because I've been focusing so much on my writing, and I had a conversation

yesterday with somebody that I'm working with on the writing front.

He was saying that, a lot of your writing is geared towards business still.

And I said that's just really a byproduct of my experience as far as I'm concerned.

As I move into this sort of latter phase of my life, the interest for me is just

about writing, clarifying ideas, getting those ideas across to people and helping

people to inform themselves on subjects.

I said, but when I think about business and the years I've spent in business,

I don't want to go back there.

Because he was saying, do you feel an inclination to just stick

with writing about business?

I said, no there's a certainly in manufacturing, there is

still such an old school.

And this goes back to what you were just saying about Steve Bruce and the Sam

Allardyces and these guys, wonderful people, but they are so old school.

And I remember I gave him an example.

What frustrated me was I was in a a company about two years ago and all the

ops directors and all of the managers were telling me how they were going about doing

things, but they were all at a tactical level and I was interested to see what

the strategy was for this organization.

Big, big organization and the group director for operations

came down from head office and he was visiting for the day.

We got to talk and I said I'm glad you're here because I really wanted to just

have a quick chat with you about the strategy, for the organization, because

I don't see any evidence of it here.

Although I haven't said anything in conversations with the guys, nobody seems

to really understand what the strategy is.

You're gonna have to excuse me because I'm going to swear now, but

he said, I've been in this game too long to deal with fucking strategies.

And I just thought.

This place is doomed.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's almost like the word offends them.

Like it was,

it was

horrible.

You hear pundits on TV when they talk about transition.

Now they use transition a lot, right?

When the ball's turned over, transition to attack, transition to defense.

Now that word would have been alien to Roy Keane when he was playing, wasn't a word

that existed in the football vocabulary.

And there's this sense of all these new uni students coming into our game

and, telling us how it should be.

And it's this lack of appreciation or openness that things evolve.

I've been coaching football, like instructing coaches in football.

So like a instructor for the FAA for many years.

So I saw this evolution of shifting language.

And it was for a period of time, like learning a new language,

all the terminology had changed.

I can remember, I'm thinking off the cuff now, thinking back to

it that I didn't like it either.

I didn't think it was necessary.

I didn't immediately warm to the idea because what I saw was.

a load of inexperienced new coaches going out into the grassroots land, if

you like, or wherever they were trying to apply their trade with a whole set

of new references and new language.

But over time, what I saw was, and we had a Dutch technical director at

the time for the whole of Australia came in to try and implement the IAC's

way, the Dutch system into Australia.

You're trying to land somebody else's culture into a, I

suppose the idea was great.

Dutch football, like known for producing great young talent, let's just mirror what

they do, let's drop it into Australia.

Of course, when you're in Holland, you're two hours away from everybody.

In Australia, you drive two hours, you might not see somebody else sometimes,

like the population is so disparate.

So some of these systems don't.

immediately become apparent.

But what I saw in that process was this shift to new language, new methodologies.

That was almost prescriptively demanded that if you come through our coaching

regime, you will play this way that we're trying to systemize the whole way that

people train kids from grassroots all the way through to the national team.

And, I give credit to to the technical director to actually get that through

and get it landed and get it done.

It took years to.

To do it and think, wow, fair play to him to actually have the balls

to see it through and to stick with it against a ton of resistance.

But it probably didn't quite work.

What was your initial resistance to it, Tony?

I think it was that's a great question.

And I'll have to think about the answer.

There's something about the, is it necessary to change the name of something

if it still means the same thing.

For me, there was little bit of arrogance attached to this

nomenclature that came in.

It's I can feel myself bubbling up a little bit now just thinking about it.

Why do we need to do this?

Part of my resistance is a personal resistance, which is I

don't like being told what to do.

And I like to think I'll approach these people on their merits based

on where they are I'll use a tactical approach that I think suits this

group of players or the opposition.

Let's say, for example, if I'm coaching, and now I'm being told, or because I'm the

instructor, now I'm having to prescribe the way that you, Manage kids to the

nth degree and using this language.

So part of my resistance comes from a resistance of being told

this is the way that we do things.

I have an appreciation for that.

But fundamentally, I don't think that's the only way to do things.

And I think that's where my resistance came from.

Even the language that that governments are prescribing to us now that we have

to use this type of language in order to it's not unlike that to a degree,

I can see why people get irritated defensive and reactive about being

told what they can and can't say.

The language is natural to the culture that it's organically grown

in and there's a different culture come in and the language doesn't

seem natural, but that's a probably A side effect of a culture clash.

You can't just impose because immediately when you said that

you're imposing the Dutch culture, I thought of the way that we've tried

to impose the Japanese philosophy.

He made us all wear clogs.

He made us all wear clogs.

We had sessions in windmills.

clogs and tulips.

It was bonk.

I just didn't understand it.

No, but I hear what you're saying, Rob, and you're absolutely right.

I think I'll give you an example, right?

So they changed the language that they started using letters, like they

would say BP for ball possession, BPO, ball possession, opposition, right?

Don't tell me I have to use that terminology, but we have

to teach that terminology.

I get it.

They wanted a new population that's coming through to have a common language that as

it evolved over time, people would relate to it wherever they were in the hierarchy,

wherever they were in the pyramid.

They would all understand the language that was being used.

You have to remember, think that Australia is such a multicultural melting pot in

the football world, like to the degree that historically some clubs were Croatian

clubs, some clubs were Italian clubs, some clubs were English clubs, Scottish clubs.

They had a national identity built around the football community and

the community that they resided in.

They built football clubs around that, bringing that culture with them.

And there's a lot of passion attached to that.

There was a point where.

the authorities decided to de nationalize football.

You would no longer be allowed to call yourself Sydney Croatia.

So Sydney Croatia became Sydney United.

They still had reference to the flag on their colours.

But what they did was in the interests of homogeny and creating a clean, new

franchise model at the highest level.

They disenfranchised just about every ex pat who'd put their heart and

soul into building the game from its foundations over a hundred years.

So there's been this divide ever since, and they're still struggling To

reintegrate that 20 odd years later.

So then you add this new language on top of that.

It was just too much for me.

There was, I was an English coach within that system.

I grew up really in that system after some exposure in the UK.

But I was class categorized.

Not me personally, but everybody that was a British coach typically had a British

football mentality, long ball, get it in the mix or all that sort of stuff.

Now, I was massively resistant of that generalization seriously was

offended by it, and was not happy about it, and spoke up about it.

Because my cultural football influences were Argentinian,

were English, were Croatian.

I had all of these classic European mentors who showed

me a massively different.

My group in England under the old F.

A.

system trying to remember the name, it had a name and it was

quite scientific for its day.

It was called the winning formula.

There was even a TV program used to be on Saturday morning

with an Elton John theme tune.

I can't remember what it was called.

Anyway, I'm rambling a little bit, but I was put into this bucket with every

other English coach that had ever lived and deemed to be some sort of dinosaur.

By the way, I was in my 20s but my influences were so broad.

I don't think I would have had the same influences had I stayed in England and

done my whole coaching journey here.

But all of this was at play.

So I can understand how people unlike me who'd built the game On their

cultural foundations through a sense of national community and national pride.

I Can imagine how they were feeling.

They were resentful disenfranchised.

Football, it's a love of people.

They're passionate about.

They love it.

It's their community.

It's who they are.

When you have any, if you have any set of beliefs or information, whatever

you do in a given day, Tony you do it because you think that's the right thing

to do, and you're doing it in the way that you think is the right way of doing

it, and you assume that it's right.

Otherwise you wouldn't do it, and you often find when you go into any

group of people, any organization, that the belief system that they

operate by is not malleable.

It's not flexible anymore.

It's become dogmatic.

It's become received wisdom.

It cannot change because this is the only way to do things.

And one of the difficulties I always found working with organizations was to try

and introduce the idea that all knowledge is only relative to the information

that you have available to you.

Every set of beliefs that you have about your organization and the opposition

and so on is constantly changing.

The only solution to that I found was to try to introduce the idea, whether

it be to an individual person or to a group of people about the idea of being

a learning organization or a learning person, you are open to learning.

Once you institutionalize that idea that we are constantly taking in information

you start to change the game a little bit.

I have a real interest in, obviously, you can tell by the things I talk

about, why people do what they do.

I was very interested in, there were some films that came out a few years ago

about a group of people in the States, some years ago, who got into blackjack.

These were MIT students.

All mathematics majors who understood probability and they realized that

there were certain probabilities attached to blackjack, especially that

would enable them to play the game in such a way that over a period of

time they couldn't help but win, and I watched this and I learned about it.

Originally the whole concept for this change in the way people play blackjack

was brought about by a guy called Ed Thorpe, who was a mathematician.

He came up with this thing called basic strategy, and he said, if you play in

this particular way, your edge against the casino increases, or the edge that

the casino has over you decreases.

And so many people were resistant to this idea until they started seeing these kids

winning millions and millions of dollars.

I tried it and you go into places and you play next to somebody.

According to this basic strategy, you watch them and all they're

thinking is, much like our old school football managers.

This is the way I do it.

I have a lucky rabbit's foot in my pocket and I have this

system but they always lose.

And the only way to show people sometimes that their belief system is

incorrect is to do the opposite and show them the fallacy in their thinking.

And it's such a common situation in business.

That it takes overwhelming evidence sometimes for people to start realizing,

Do you know these guys are beating us?

We're getting beat a lot by these data oriented scientific type people.

It can often take something major for people to start coming to.

Old school managers in football are, some people would say, unfortunately, they're

a dying breed because the science and the data backs up the new approaches.

Don't know if you guys use it or are aware of it, but there's

the thing called Bayesian inference and Bayesian statistics.

Thomas Bayes was a statistician.

In leadership, especially, I use the idea of Bayesian inference because you say to a

boss, look, Every time you do a thing, all of the probabilities, all the potential

in all your future actions change.

You can't say we're going to start here and get there.

A route from 1 to 10 is linear.

It changes every time you get to step 2 and 3 and 4, all the

possibilities open up and change.

And people are starting to use these statistical analysis of the way things

are done now, especially in business.

And, if you know that nine out of ten people are going to react a

certain way to a particular type of marketing, for instance, then

why wouldn't you go with that?

The old ways are magical thinking.

The way when old school managers say we've done it in this particular way,

it's magical thinking, this is the way we do it, it will always work.

It's proven to be as inconsistent a theory as there ever has been by

very few won consistently using that method of using that approach, it's

just bonkers to think that my way is the way in a game like football.

It's not easy to sustain success by just doing the same things over and over again.

Football is a good example of that.

By the way, I read the book and watched the movie about the card playing.

I found it fascinating as well.

And I do think you're right.

I think the, and even if you take it down to an individual level, that

ability to be curious rather than judgmental of somebody else's views

or perspective is a game changer.

If you are nonjudgmental, self differentiated and

you ask lots of questions.

You will become a far better leader, far better person, far wiser person.

I had a conversation yesterday with someone who's getting micromanaged

and it's almost like the HR department and the finance department of

this quite a complex organization.

It's almost like they're recruiting like for like through their own process.

You would think that HR by definition would be the most people

oriented people in the business.

This is not the case.

They're the moat in this organization.

They're the most vigilant process oriented take heed of my advice

or there'll be trouble type people you could ever wish to meet.

They seem to be recruiting internally, so this thing is not getting better

anytime soon, and it's a real challenge for the people who are suffering at

the end of that chain and I'm trying to help them with managing the skills to

have those curious conversations and in order to find at first, a level of peace

and sanity within what, what over time will be terminal if it doesn't change,

somebody will leave the business or it'll blow up into being something unpleasant.

How do you have that conversation?

How do you change when somebody got such a fixed view of how things

are done, but that's prescriptive, you will do it in this way.

You don't need to go on LinkedIn and look at any HR leaders, thought leaders

posts on how to best manage your people to actually know that there's a ton of

stuff out there that might be helpful, but oh no we're going to do it like this.

I'm only safe when it's in these boxes that I'm comfortable with,

when it's all in these boxes that I can tick, I'm safe, I'm okay.

And therefore that's how we're going to do it.

I'm going to recruit other people.

who are quite happy to work in that way as well.

I'm just gone.

I am the opposite, right on the opposite end of that scale.

I spend my life, just working in this melting pot in the middle.

That's what I like to do.

I like to recognize that I'm a little bit too far out of this.

Away from the structure.

And I love a big picture.

I love a strategy.

I love a vision, but all the processes in between.

I know how effective they are, but I like other people to do that.

But I don't like to be told what to do.

I like to get curious and think, is there a better way?

So I spend my life positioning myself in and around these different perspectives,

knowing where I sit on that ladder and how far sometimes I need to move in

order to have an effective conversation.

The trick is getting yourself or positioning yourself so that

organizations are that are resistant to change invite you in to mix things

up in such a way that they can start, because all change meets with resistance.

It's a fairly well known fact that whenever something new comes up there's

an initial resistance and then slowly you, you start to get people taking

it on board, then it starts to get results, then it becomes the norm.

And then the new thing comes and so on and so forth.

So it's a constant wave.

The difficulty for anybody that's involved in change management is to

position themselves in such a way that the organization allows them in and gives them

the opportunity to make those changes.

I mentioned it the last time we spoke or probably before that,

a friend of mine that wrote a book about late Soviet Britain.

And she was actually positing the idea that Even at a governmental

level, there's this belief that we know what's best for you.

We know the best way of doing a thing, even better than and when you say

it like that in such simple terms, it sounds extraordinarily arrogant.

As you said, there is a, with old school managers, there is

that perception of arrogance.

But really what it's all about is protecting the people, the

organization the unit you're a part of, and you're trying to protect them

from damaging outside influences.

The problem is in doing that, you're keeping everything outside,

even the beneficial influences.

And so the trick that somebody like you and I and Rob have is to

position ourselves in such a way that they say let's give it a go.

Let's just see what happens.

And, if you can do that in such a way where they feel that it's it's a win

situation and really little harm can come from it, and, we have much more to

gain by trying this, then, I moved across to writing purely because I started to

feel that, If you could get traction in the same way by writing something as you

could when you go into an organization, you can reach a much broader audience.

And that was the biggest thing, because I think in the world today,

this idea of we know what's best for you has become so prevalent,

especially at a governmental level.

We saw it recently with the rioting.

Nobody's listening to these people.

And there's a sense that at the higher levels these people have got no idea

really what's best for them and at some point something will make it change.

I just hope it's not something too catastrophic because it will be as in

all of these situations the evidence eventually piles up so much that it

becomes a tidal wave and sweeps away anybody that stands in their way.

That's often the way with change.

I'm hoping that people like us three can slowly start to incite other

people to have these conversations.

And we rather than just being learning individuals or learning organizations, we

can become a society of people that are all open to listening to other people,

because clearly the fact that they're doing the thing, whatever it is, it must

work for them whether it's the best way of doing it is another matter altogether.

But that's when you have these conversations.

Yeah,

I landed on a really great saying that stuck with me

around change, which is people.

don't fear change.

They fear loss.

They fear pain.

It's the avoidance of pain that they're going through.

It's not the change that they're resisting.

It's their own sense of loss or pain that goes with that what's

going through their minds about it.

What this change may mean.

That immediately shines a spotlight on the change agents or the leaders

who are looking to change or who are trying to push change through.

If they don't have the appropriate amount of genuine empathy for their people,

they won't care a toss about how much pain or loss the individuals are feeling.

They won't be able to get in touch with that.

As a consequence, it can hurt them and hurt the business because they tried

to move too fast, or they tried to move without due care and attention to the

sentiment of the people and not just the people as a group, but the individuals.

There's people are resisting for reasons that we don't know, unless we ask.

What is it that they fear losing or is painful to them?

Having to Move from your own office to we're going to go to an open plan office.

You used to come in every day.

You had your own office, you fairly autonomous, blah, blah, blah.

Now we're going to go with open plan.

This is a great idea.

Let's all do that because it's going to suit everybody equally.

So there's a huge amount of potential loss and pain for some people more than

others in any sort of change like that.

Yeah.

And if that's not being considered, then it's going to be a suboptimal

change process from day one.

It's a brilliant way to look at it, but it requires empathy.

But the change agent or the leader in order to manage

that process with sensitivity.

Otherwise, it's just going to ramp up the tension.

That's a great point, Tony, because there's a hierarchy to every perspective.

When you were talking Clark about, as a coming in as a change agent,

I've often pushed the idea of we have nowhere that we have more magical

thinking than in relationships.

But, mediation, the only time I get called in is when there's a conflict

that they can't sort out anywhere else.

Relationships, no one ever, calls me when relationships are going great.

No one is ever perfectly happy.

It's when there's a problem and it's when that loss or the fear,

the relationships come into an end, or they fear that the cost of a

court fight is going to be so much.

Whenever, we make a change, the people who have the positional authority,

as in the leaders of the organization or the government are potentially

the ones that are going to lose out.

If we change perspective, because they're the ones that have the, by

the nature of having a positional power or authority, the way that

the perspective works best for them.

I look back at the analogy of about 300 years ago, cause I always say that

relationships are, the level of thinking is the same as medicine 300 years ago.

Back then, people were more likely to go to a witch than they

were to a doctor or to a priest.

And now, when we're sick, almost all go to a doctor.

And it's completely upturned.

Witches, it's the odd person.

Priests are, there are still people that go, but they've become much more

irrelevant compared to what they were.

So it's the it's the changing order.

I think that is the struggle that we have to face.

It's really interesting.

I like that idea.

Trust is jumping out me there when you talk about, maybe we used to trust

witches and then we used to trust priests and there are fewer of them

now, and the sort of state of the church in the country or in the world

is changing as as the world evolves.

But now even there's less trust in doctors than there used to be, and people

are now having to self medicate or self prescribe or, the whole the whole thing is

obviously changing a lot more rapidly now.

So I was thinking about the politician, are you suggesting then that Let's say the

Prime Minister in this scenario has got the most to lose, got the biggest stake,

and therefore, holds a position that it's got a much larger degree of sense

of loss or pain should what they want not happen or is that the implication?

I think if you were going to look for me, I don't think politics

works because all it is we have one ideology, some, another government

gets in and they reverse everything.

And what we really need, I think we have a minister for education

that isn't qualified to teach.

We have a minister for defense that's never served in the army.

We have health minister, probably not a doctor.

I know the idea is they're not supposed to have domain knowledge, they're

supposed to know how to manage, but the way the level of how complex

education, defense, finance, all these things, I think you need a specialist.

And I think it's not enough to have someone managing, civil servants, but

to have a body that evolves, that build like a knowledge capital and a domain

where they build and have time enough to test what works and what works

over a longer cycles so that there's a continuous solid foundation rather than

at the moment, labour has one ideology.

A new prime minister comes in with an ideology.

I don't think that works.

I think what we need is domain knowledge.

And then some way of bringing that together.

We were talking last week about having these conversations that sort of

evolve as they're going along and I want to try and introduce a concept that I'm

literally thinking of as I'm saying it.

So you can have to bear with me, but something that has

plagued me for years and years.

And I'm thinking on my feet here, so it might sound a little bit confused,

but I'll try and order it as I say.

If you can imagine, when somebody ends up in court because they've beaten their

kid to death, or attacked an old lady and done unspeakable things, and the justice

system is applied, they go through court proceedings and they end up getting 10,

15, 18 years in prison, they do half of that for good behaviour or whatever.

And people see that as justice has been done.

For me, that's a major problem because the thing I need to see

from that situation is remorse.

I need the person for me to feel happy, to realize that the thing they did was wrong.

It was an act of of evil against another person.

Without that, I don't care how long they spend in prison.

The issue for me is that killer, the rapist or whatever that person is

acting according to a set of beliefs.

That, for instance, these people are just objects and we're going to use, I want to

use them for my own gratification, and I don't care, maybe I'll get caught, that's

the price I pay for living this lifestyle.

We see this so often, as we've just been talking about organizations,

leaders, governments, and so on.

You were talking about the hierarchy of power and authority.

how all governments have something to lose.

It may be, for instance, loss of face, it may be loss of agency, it

may be loss of authority, and so on.

The problem is, when a person believes, for instance, I'm on the right, or

I'm on the left, and the other side is wrong, then everything that the other

person does, like the killer, like the criminal, who is acting according to a

set of beliefs, They will never change until they realize that what they did

was incorrect and wrong and all the other things that everybody else believes.

It's the same with politics and ideologies and bosses that run

organizations with an iron fist.

Until they realize that the things they do, have direct consequences

to the people that they do them to.

Then it's irrelevant what what changes are enacted by law or by Parliament and so on.

And this is where I think that people like us three have the biggest

impact on society, because we are all about changing people's beliefs.

To me, that's the most important thing, that you can get a person

who says, look, I'm the boss.

All of these workers are idiots.

I know what's best for them.

And the people on the front line either suffer.

Sometimes they don't suffer.

Sometimes they get a good boss, but the thinking behind it is exactly the same.

I know what's best.

When I was talking about that book, the late Soviet era, the government for years

and years in this country has decided that we know what's best economically

and financially for the rest of them.

The problem with that is they're all living in their big houses and the poor

people in the two bedroom council houses with no money have to decide, do we

heat the house or do we feed the kids?

The politicians enacting the laws that make these things happen are

completely, they may not even be unaware, they just don't care.

They think that what they know what they are doing is best

and It's a very difficult job.

We were talking about how do you get yourself invited into an organization

so that you can help them make changes?

That's the key, because you're going into an organization and helping

them change their belief systems.

The downside of not having that, not being open to learning and taking

on new ideas, is that you get people like Ceausescu, or Mussolini after

the war, strung up from a lamppost.

Eventually, the people say we're done with this.

We've had enough and change then becomes overwhelming because everybody except

the person with the power to make the changes, everybody sees that it's wrong.

But for some reason, that person will hold on to that belief.

Right up until they're being strung up by their neck with a bit of rope.

And the impact that people like us have is that we can say to somebody,

Do you understand the impact that you're having on the people around you?

Because if you don't, even as a football manager, everyone said how

great Brian Clough was, but he was a dictator, brilliant guy, lovely bloke

by all accounts, but he was certainly a totalitarian leader of his team.

It worked in that particular instance, but in others it doesn't.

And it's the ability to change people's beliefs.

So that people like, for instance, a killer actually understand

that they did something wrong, and they feel some remorse.

They suddenly have that connection with the people that they were doing

wrong to, and that's where I think people like us have have a duty,

in fact to enable those changes.

Prison is a perfect example of this because we have a justice

system that is breaking so we don't have enough places in prison.

So judges aren't sentencing people to prison as much as they would like.

And all the evidence shows that punishment doesn't work, doesn't change anything.

They go into a system, they go into a culture of other criminals.

They learn how to be better criminals and options are cut off.

And I think that there's a set of beliefs and there's a culture and

there's a Environment that someone's growing up in and they've come to

believe that's their best option.

That's their best strategy for living?

What would be more effective is to identify the environment, the

beliefs, the experiences that have happened to that person on then to

go about preventing those situations.

So if you change some of the problems in society and address them then it's

upstream thinking rather than punishing a criminal who's already done something

what you're doing is preventing it.

I was in a school while they had a restorative justice approach.

And the problem is It's not necessarily, the system didn't work in the way that

we did it, but it's not necessarily the ideology, but it's looking

at how do we resolve the problem?

The problem to it is that people have this natural sense of justice

and they want to see the punishment.

And even if it doesn't work, they, that's what they feel that

they need for the imbalance.

So it's education.

There's a good point, Robert, and I think that, again, it's that

balance between judgment and curiosity.

As soon as I make a judgment and decide what the penalty is, that applies without

fully understanding all of the facts.

Then the question is who am I?

I've got an image in my head.

I do part of a presentation says that at the top of the organization where

the big bosses at the top and at the bottom you've got all the people.

So it could be the country, it could be a business, I'm using

this as a business anecdote.

And the reference is that at the top, the big boss in a big organisation sees

4 percent of the work that gets done.

The people that do the work see all 100 percent of the work that gets done.

So if I'm at the top and I think that I know all the answers, wow, how blind

am I to, To what's really going on.

What it's saying to me is that right down at where a lot of the

work's getting done all the best answers that we could possibly ever

know, if we were prepared to ask.

So this idea of a learning culture that, that Clark's talking about I would

also say that the mechanism for that is a coaching culture, coaching being

the ability to ask better questions.

So a coach doesn't tell you what to do.

He explores with you through asking great questions.

What do you think you can do?

Where do you think you can go?

Where do you want to go?

What does good look like?

All of those great questions.

So if you tie those two things together, and through the process,

you identify to what degree.

So the, in the case of the criminal has no remorse.

Who has no feeling, who's just psychopathic, and doesn't

have any of that sentiment.

They can go away forever.

No, they're not going to ever contribute much to anyone.

There might be lots of reasons why they got to that state, but they still don't

belong in a stable, well functioning society where people want to feel safe

every day but worth understanding, worth asking the question, worth

trying to build the, all of that.

But if we can measure along the way.

The amount of genuine empathy people have to give us at least the

parameters of what we're working with.

That's

the answer.

That's the answer.

What you just said there.

I was sitting there thinking, what is it?

What is it?

What is it?

And because if it were only psychopaths that did bad things,

it would be an easy problem.

We just kill them all.

Somebody does something psychopathic, just kill him.

Problem solved.

There's no evil in society.

The problem is That boss that you just mentioned at the top who doesn't

understand what's going on at the bottom.

He's not evil.

He really wants to do good and it's not even that all the

best answers are at the bottom.

It's just that there are answers down there that he doesn't have

access to because he's excluded himself from it because he

thinks he knows better than you.

You literally just said it when you said empathy, how much

empathy does a person have?

Prisons are not full of psychopaths.

They're full of people that just thought that this thing that they

did was the best way of getting whatever it was they wanted.

And the problem that they have is that they don't have empathy with the

person they're committing the crime to.

And I think of all three of us, probably Rob has the best access to

this in face to face interactions.

Because when you deal with couples, and these are two people that love each

other, literally screaming at each other because you're not listening to me.

You're not hearing what I'm saying, or in your words, you're not empathizing

with the issues that I have.

And I was sitting there thinking, whoa, what?

And then you said empathy and I thought, that's it.

That's the job of people like us is to go into an organization and see

where is the empathy lacking the most, because if it's at the bottom and

all the people at the bottom hate the person at the top, there's clearly a

disconnect there that needs to be fixed.

But if it's at the top.

And that person doesn't like all the people at the bottom because he doesn't

understand the pain they're going through, you need to try and open up

the empathy gateways, if you like.

If you can get a criminal to empathize with their victims, How quickly would

crime drop, and it's this idea of trying to get people to empathize with

the people that they're engaging with and whether it's a football manager,

boss of a company or the leaders, for instance, in this country, who haven't

got the slightest clue what the average person has to deal with and how do

you get somebody like Rishi Sunak or Keir Starmer who has got millions

of pounds in the bank to understand because they know it's difficult

when you can't afford to buy bread.

They don't actually get it, they don't empathize, they don't feel

the pain that those people are dealing with, then they don't care.

And the next thing you know, they're strung up from a lamppost and it's getting

that empathy because the minute and you must see it, Rob, the minute a person

actually gets it, shit, really, you've been putting up with this all this time.

Everything changes.

And I think that's the key to what we are trying to accomplish.

When we speak to people because we are naturally empathetic.

We feel the pain that the people that we're working with are going through.

And we're trying to transfer that empathy to the people that have the biggest

influence over the people they work with.

There's a massive difference between me saying, I don't like

the way you're talking to me, or I don't like what you're doing.

That's okay to say that, to saying, I don't understand why

you're talking to me that way.

Can you help me?

Understand what's going on right now.

What are you thinking?

How are you?

I can see your irate how you feel.

You can't give people genuine empathy.

It's a measurable trait.

You can have it to larger degrees or not.

If I'm more self centered and less team oriented.

Naturally, some people are more like that, but where you can upskill people

is in being non judgmental and being curious and asking great questions.

You're not giving them genuine empathy, but you're helping them to

survive and prosper together in ways that they otherwise don't because

they are going off on this singular, I'm right, you're wrong, I know what

I want, and nobody else matters.

That doesn't work in a cohesive unit.

I think the problem is a deficit of communication.

The root word of communication is to make common.

And so that immediately came to mind when you said about the,

the chief executive has 4%.

And the way that we share how we feel is from communication.

And the problem is we don't have that.

I think logistically it needed a different type of communication.

In the past, people weren't that bothered about emotions because we

were until the last hundred years, we were just about survival and now

we're about emotional fulfillment.

We need a refined sense of communication that we mostly don't have.

And it's interesting you say about psychopaths.

Part of the problem is psychopaths over index in power.

Politicians, business leaders, that's where psychopaths tend to do better by

the nature of the system that we have.

And I think that is an indictment of the culture of our society.

By nature, there's

an absence of empathy.

Psychopath is in a complete absence of empathy.

I don't excuse top level leaders for being cold, calculated,

hard nosed business people.

But they need to learn how to connect because they end up, through life,

wealthy and miserable in many cases.

They might not care about their people deep down, probably don't but to the

same degree, they're in families and have got the same sentiment towards

all the people that surround them.

These barbecues that they're having, they're not really connected

to the people that are there.

They've got hollow relationships.

Again, thinking out loud, but it can't be any other way.

You either got genuine empathy or you don't.

If you don't, you take that to work and you take it home.

You can't be two people.

You are who you are.

That's just resonated with me quite strongly that these people

need to be helped to connect.

in order to more fulfillment from the great work that they do.

I think the issue is not the psychopaths because you can't do

anything about them, the sociopaths or the narcissists or whatever.

The problem is in our society people don't know how to deal with them.

They are able to manipulate because there's a lack of truth

generally, because of politics.

They are the ones who, who have the confidence, the audacity to do

the things that no one else will do there, have the ability to manipulate

because they're less self conscious.

The problem is we don't know how to navigate that because there's

so many social conditioning that we should be like this.

We should do this.

And again, it comes back to the same core thing of the emperor's new clothes.

Yes I was just about to say that.

So Tony, you were just saying they need to be helped to connect, they

need to be shown how, why they should, and then how to connect with the

people that there are around them.

In the case of the story of the Emperor's New Clothes, that's exactly what happened.

The kid just said, and because it was out of the mouth of babes, he just said,

you've got no clothes on and everybody said, Oh, my goodness, he's just spoken

what we already know, but you can't say to a boss or a governmental leader or prime

minister, listen, you are a cold, and ruthless bastard, and you need to change.

You can't say that to them.

You can, and you'll be carted off to wherever they take

people that say stuff like that.

The answer to getting that connection that just occurred to me as we were talking

was stories, and they don't have to be long convoluted stories about how, I woke

up one morning, this thing happened at once for a time and blah, blah, blah.

It can be just as simple as saying, I realize that you've just said that about

so and but let's just think for a minute if that was your daughter or your wife.

Quickly you change, and the thing about the connection between stories

and engaging empathy is emotion.

You're trying to elicit an emotion even in somebody who demonstrates

perhaps near psychopathic tendencies.

Because they look as if they have no emotion when they're doing all these

cold and ruthless things, but in everybody's life is a thing or a person

that they feel really strongly about.

And if you can engage that feeling and attach it from one thing to another, so

for instance, if your son or daughter works here, would you want them to

be going home at night worried they may get the sack tomorrow because

they're on a contract that allows you to sack them, for, on a whim.

Would you like that?

How would you feel about it?

How would you react to a boss that did that to one of your kids?

If you can engage them in a conversation that, that takes them to a place

emotionally, They enable them to connect as you exactly as you've just said, how do

you help them to connect with the people?

And it's that for instance, I think for us is the key to what we do.

We are assigned the responsibility of Connecting a person with the people

that they work with emotionally so that we can help them and the way we do it

is through stories, whatever, all the things we talk about involve anecdotes

and analogies and metaphors and all these ways of getting across to people

an idea of what it feels like to be in a particular situation and then hopefully

you open up these people to change, but you have to engage emotions, right?

And the only way to do that is through some sort of story.

And I think there's mechanisms for that obviously some people

find this really difficult.

We talked last week about connecting on purpose.

What is the reason why we exist as a group?

So same for the big organization or what is it that we're all connected to that

gives us the meaning of what the work that we do that if we find that we've

already got people where we want them to start having these great conversations.

Part of that is what values do we share and where do we misalign on values?

Because there'll be tension in that, but that's good

tension once we're aware of it.

We bring it to the surface.

We can look at where that comes together to be even better than it is when they're

disparately clashing with each other.

And then if we teach people or help people to empathize and there's techniques for

doing it, Rob, you'd know perceptual positions, first, second, third position.

If I'm in a conversation with Clark.

You're in third position.

You're watching us have a conversation.

You can see how we're reacting.

You can see who gets angry.

You can hear what words were said that triggered the other person.

So you're in third person in perceptual positions.

you're forced to go through a really empathetic process.

So I have, or I play back a conversation I had with Clark

that, that was inflammatory.

Things were said that we maybe regret or were hurtful or whatever.

Then part two, then I put myself in, Clark's shoes.

What what did he say?

What was he feeling?

What do you think he was feeling?

What were his reactions to what you said?

So you're trying to put yourself in what might I have said made Clark

respond the way he did, for example.

So I'm putting myself in his shoes and asking the same set

of questions through his eyes.

Then the third position is I now take a step outside of that, and I put

myself in Rob's shoes, and I think, what would a bystander have seen?

He would have seen this conversation playing out, he would have seen

one of us have a go at the other one, and the other one responding

badly, whatever it might be.

Through occupying these various positions multiple times, you get a

far clearer picture of your role in the dialogue and the quality of the

conversation that just played out.

So that's almost a technique for understanding each other,

regardless of what degree of empathy you, you naturally possess.

Outside of that, it's then your ability to have great conversations.

If we talk about shared purpose, understanding our values, genuine

empathy, and having great, the ability to have great conversations, job done.

Prime Minister Clark, I'll be on your cabinet, no worries at all.

Don't, we're all, we'll all be in trouble.

I've got a question for you guys on the basis of what

we've just been talking about.

I think I know the answer.

Would you say, Tony, for instance, are you an emotional person?

Yes.

And Rob, are you an emotional person?

I would probably say no.

I would have said no, I would have said no for Rob too, only because of

what he's shared with us in the past.

But I don't know that.

But I'd have been making an assumption based on exposure.

I'm not sure.

So I was just thinking when you were talking to Tony it's really

about fluidity of perspective and that's always been my strength.

I never hold anything too tightly, so I'm able to slip from one to the other.

But for me, it all, it is all about emotion.

But you don't deal with emotion by the emotion, there's a logic that

underpins the emotion and it's changing the logic to get the emotion.

So people think I'm not in touch with emotion, but it's just, I

have a very clear separation.

Self differentiation.

And yes, clearly you couldn't be a relationship expert if you didn't

have that ability to detach from, if you felt the emotion of all

the people that were in the room with you, you'd be a wreck by now.

Yeah that's the key though, isn't it?

So the reason I asked that was because I think I've mentioned to you before.

A story that I often talk about in there's a TV program called Hannibal and

I think it, the guy, I don't know whether it's Mads Mikkelsen or a Scandinavian

actor who looks evil just standing there doing nothing, brilliant actor

but there's a scene because it, the this guy's a psychopath he's a serial

killer, and he works with a police guy, psychologist, who is incredibly

brilliant emotional, very empathetic.

He is an empath.

He feels everything.

And the interesting thing about that was that, I think I've mentioned

it before, where they come in on a scene where there's somebody lying

on the floor, they've just been attacked, they're bleeding to death.

And the policeman, the person who was supposed to save

the woman, goes to pieces.

He's all over the place.

As I've said, Hannibal just steps in because he's cold.

And that self differentiation that you just mentioned, because I would say you

are emotional, Rob and I think we all are, but exactly that we can, under the right

circumstances be completely unemotional.

I have this weird thing that I like to do.

You've seen the program, the voice where singers come on.

And the panel can't see them in the hear the voice.

They listen, and if they turn around, they get to work with these people.

So I watch this, but I don't watch the English one, I watch the Norwegian one.

I watch the Norwegian one because, as Scandinavians are all very

understated, they can appear quite calm, cold, and collected.

I'm married to one.

Are you really?

There's a guy on there called Mat, who is a dj, very well known DJ in Scandinavia.

Very calm, very cool, collected, but he cries quite regularly when

something touches him, he starts to cry, not sobbing, not acting out.

Just an outpouring of emotion.

And the minute he does it, I start crying.

It is a weird thing because why would anybody enjoy crying?

It's not that I enjoy that, but it's an outlet.

It is an opportunity to recognize the empathy that somebody

feels for another person.

Then I empathize with them.

And the minute that program's off, I go back into cold collected, calculated mode.

And I live my life and I am the way I am.

But it's that ability to flip.

From one to the other, because in most situations, most people are either one

or the other and they stay in that mode.

The ability to move between the two or move across that spectrum, depending

on what the circumstances dictate is the ability that you have them

to help people because you can be called when's necessary like Hannibal.

Or you can be empathetic when necessary to show people that you understand

the things that they're dealing with.

When you go into a place and you tell your stories and your anecdotes and

metaphors and analogies and so on, you're basically gauging the level of empathy in

the room and bringing it to a level that suits the situation to solve the issue.

I think the reason I asked that question was because I think we all

are when necessary or when we want to.

But when it doesn't suit the purposes, then we're not, and I

think that, that key ability to regulate your empathy is probably

the key to being a good change agent.

Yeah I I can get a physical.

Reaction to somebody else's pain.

So I can get a physical gut feel reaction to somebody else's pain.

Not all the time.

Not everybody.

Not in every situation.

But I could be pulled up at a zebra crossing and see an old lady

walking past struggling and get some sort of, gut feel, pang of

compassion or whatever it might be.

So I have that, but I can be ruthless as well.

It's that ability to make the adjustments, like those things happen to you, right?

Being ruthless doesn't happen to me.

I don't just suddenly turn out one day and become a lunatic.

Compassion happened, feeling of people's pain happens to me occasionally.

I get that feeling so I go, okay, so I have that I don't cry often but I can,

it can be some music, theater, movie.

I can get in touch with those things, and I like that about me, I like that I have

it and I've had to work with my ability to deal with other people in a harsh way for

those reasons when it needs to be done.

Like in a football environment where you're leaving half your squad

out every week, there's multiple difficult conversations to be had.

I have to steel myself for that and take time to recover from it.

It's just the reality of how I'm made up.

Other people don't bat an eyelid.

They just go in and deliver the news because they don't really

care what the other people feel.

I do.

So I like that about myself, but it comes with its challenges.

As leaders or managers, if we know ourselves to that degree, we can start

to manage ourselves better, manage our if you like work life balance for want

of a better reason to know what the cost of you behaving in a certain way is.

You can then factor in okay, I'm going to go into this set of difficult

circumstances for the next week.

Next week, I might give myself Monday off just to recharge a little bit

and kick back that type of thing.

I think it's important.

It sounds like I'm going off topic here, but I'm not.

The rise in diabetes and Alzheimer's and so on.

These are all metabolic issues related to inflammation, apparently.

And one of the things that this scientist was saying was that historically

humans had something called a metabolic flexibility, which meant that they,

when there was a lot of food, they could eat a lot of food and their body would

use it, but when there was no food they could adapt and the body would start to

run on things like ketones and so on.

Which would enable them to last a long time without actually eating.

And he said, the problem nowadays, we live in a society where there

is almost no metabolic flexibility.

People have been conditioned to eating on such a regular basis, such a rich

calorie dense supply of food, that they are conditioned to eating constantly.

If there's no food, or if there's only a certain type of food, people start to get

ill, and inflammation occurs, and so on.

Because I think in analogies, what we were just talking there about this way you

empathize when necessary, turn it off when necessary, adapt to a particular situation

with respect to whatever is required for that situation, indicates to me a level of

emotional flexibility that I think doesn't exist in the same way that metabolic

flexibility doesn't exist anymore.

The average person, when you throw out an opinion about their politics, about

their religion, about whatever, straight away, bang, they have a feeling about it.

I get this said to me fairly regularly, probably you do too,

I can't help the way I feel.

Why?

What's wrong with you?

Why can't you help the way you feel?

Think about it.

Think about the thing, put yourself in somebody else's

shoes, and then change the way.

No, I can't help it if I feel that way.

I can't help getting angry.

Or flipping it, then we're all in trouble.

If you can't help getting angry.

Yeah.

It's just me, isn't it?

It's oh, it's just me.

But what makes, who you are is a construction.

For me, as soon as you become aware of it, then you have a responsibility

not responsibility, but you have the potential to change it.

I think responsibility itself, Rob, would be a fair thing to say, I think.

Because, I'll use an example, sorry to jump in I had a client.

She's already challenged by being a woman in leadership in a manufacturing

environment so she's in that environment, around a leadership table and, fighting

against all of the other perceptions that can come with that but she would

at times under pressure bubble up.

Emotion would get the better of her and she would be teary.

It is natural, it is what she does, she has to accept it, but it's not

conducive to a high performance environment where people need you

to be on your game and on your job.

So there's a really delicate and sensitive thing needs to take place in order

because she wants to stop doing it.

She wants to stop crying in meetings.

She wants to stop crying when she's under pressure.

There's the acceptance.

First, yes, that is just me, and we accept, we don't

judge let's get on top of it.

That's the thing, isn't it?

Anyway, Rob, sorry, but this was a great example of somebody

that, it gets the better of her.

She's come to me and said, look, this keeps happening, I wish it wouldn't.

And I've asked other people and they're judging.

She shouldn't be doing that.

She shouldn't be, we want her to be.

You are who you are, but you're also what other people say you are.

I think there's almost a responsibility to help them find a way through that

and knowing when it's happening, what situations, when do you feel it coming on?

You don't just suddenly start crying.

What is it happens a minute before or five minutes before or an hour before

that you can start to get control of?

That you can park it, that you can reframe something, that you

can structure the way that you're going to have the conversation.

You can detach yourself from.

the feeling and just deal with the facts.

What have you got written down?

Whatever the tactics might be.

It's a good example of that.

Yeah.

Cause there's a trigger.

And the trigger is creating a conditioned response.

And so where did that response come from?

It's

not biological,

There's an element of probably a better way of looking at it for me

is when you think about anger, when she's crying, clearly there's a feeling

of sadness, whatever that brings out this, and sometimes it's I feel like

a victim or whatever it might be.

A really clear cut example for me is when people get angry because.

Over the years that I've been involved in business the number of disciplin

I've been involved in is enormous.

Anger is often at the center of a lot of these issues.

The fact that I'm there is usually because there's an issue around the

way they deal with these situations.

One of the things that I always say.

It's something that you've just said, Tony, what is the thing that happened

a minute or two or five or 10 minutes before that, you call that a trigger

Robert for me, I think of it as the thing, whatever it was that made you give

yourself permission to do that thing.

You say to a person who's just punched a manager in the nose.

Why did you feel that you were able to do that?

Why did you give yourself permission to do that?

I don't know.

I can't control myself.

So if your daughter your nan said something similar, you'd have

punched your nan in the nose.

Is that what we're saying?

Regardless of who did it, you'd have punched them.

Even if it was the king or the pope or some poor old lady who's,

can barely walk, you'd of punch on the nose when they said that.

No, obviously not.

So in this particular situation, you felt that the circumstances warranted

it and you gave yourself permission.

It's what we three tend to do.

It sounds from the conversations that we've had.

I know I do it myself.

Certainly what is the best and most appropriate response to this particular

thing, this particular impetus right now, regardless of what I want to do,

because I do want to punch that person in the nose, but clearly that's going

to invalidate all of the authority and agency that I've managed to

accumulate, of course, is conversation.

So I'm going to do X.

There is a guy Thomas Szasz I've mentioned him before, a psychiatrist,

who says that an enormous percentage.

Not all of it, but an enormous percentage of mental health issues are just people

giving themselves permission to act out under certain circumstances, because

they've learned that when they do that, people respond in a particular way.

One of the gifts, I suppose you could say we have is the ability to see that,

because you understand the underlying circumstances that leads to a particular

set of acts when a person gets sad or gets angry or does whatever, because

we can see that and you empathize with their reasons, for doing that thing.

I got sad because it made me feel better.

It got me sympathy or whatever.

Because you see that you can then start to help that person understand

different ways of dealing with that particular set of circumstances.

A lot of the issues that we find in the world today, the rioting

on the streets was because people felt that was the only way.

I've had situations in my life.

Relationships where I've said to people, listen, say what you like to me.

You can call me because I am, a lot of the things that you

call me, I am those things.

I know that, but just tell me, you don't need to shout at me.

You don't need to scream at me.

You don't need to throw plates at me.

Just tell me, this is what you think.

This is what you think I should do about it and I will consider it.

But the minute we get into the violence and the aggression or the

crime and all the other stuff, then you're putting something else into

the mix that doesn't need to be there.