Why do we do this?

Whenever we join together, there's a sacrifice. We give up time, resources or autonomy. So why would we join?

Humans have always joined together because some goals we can only achieve in numbers.

Once that was to succeed in the hunt or to stay safe. Now it is to achieve increasingly complex goals. Or even to have a stable wage.

We sacrifice something to get something greater together.

At the core of what makes a group effective is clarity in that purpose. When we recognise the payoff, we accept the trade-offs. We accept what we have chosen to sacrifice for the greater purpose we are striving for.

In this episode, Clark Ray, Tony Walmsley and I talked about purpose in groups and tried to relate it to why we gather to talk.

As Tony says, every group needs a clarifying question that guides every decision.

What's yours?

I'm so happy that we get on so well.

And being what would you call him?

Is that a millennial in his late twenties, whatever he is?

There's a massive gulf between us, which I would consider us all to be Gen Xers

growing up in the sort of seventies, falling off stuff, breaking stuff,

the usual and these youngsters today.

He messaged me the other day because he was being asked by

somebody about his political views.

And obviously he has picked them up over the years by some sort of osmosis from me.

And he said, I find it difficult to explain it because you've never

really come out with a definitive political view except that you

hate politicians with a vehemence.

I can't stand them, never voted in my life.

Which I've had some grief about, but, I just can't stand any of them.

They're charlatans and shysters, a lot of them.

So he said, what are your views?

Would you say you're left or right?

And I said, the thing is, mate, I said the political landscape has

changed in the last 20 years or so.

When I was a youngster growing up in Birmingham the vast

majority of people were Labour.

So you would call them left wing.

However, a lot of their views were very traditional.

So a lot of the things that we see now, nowadays, as right wing, being a

little bit conservative in the way we run the country, that we're traditional,

that we like the monarchy and so on.

I said, they are still part of the old school way of looking at things.

And I said, I can't subscribe to this idea of being in one party or in one

group or another because what that does is, It excludes the possibility

of engaging with any of the other good ideas from the other side.

I said, and that's always my job.

My job is to make sure that the organizations and groups of people

are able to do whatever's best for them at any given moment, regardless

of whose ideology that belongs to.

And so I was just wondering, the interesting thing is that this we have

a political culture, not just in this country, in all countries, over in

America, the Democrats and Republicans and so on, it's a culture and I've

always fought against this idea of something called institutionalized dogma.

The minute you join a club, the minute you become left or right

or whatever, an activist about a certain thing your belief system is

institutionalized and then becomes set.

You can't then accept anything from the other tribes.

I was just saying to him, the minute you join a group, and you start to follow

a particular ideology, you're wrong.

By virtue of the fact that you've now excluded everything else, you're wrong.

And I'm just wondering what you guys are thinking about when

you deal with, relationships and organizations and groups.

How do you deal with this?

Obviously the 10th man thing is something that I use, but there are

other ways of trying to step outside of the boundaries of a a group dogma, the

other tribe and how you deal with that.

Because it was interesting for me to see that people like my son, youngsters,

they automatically fall into these categories as if it's just normal.

And, to say I don't have any particular affiliation is, it

seems odd for a lot of people.

So there you go.

It smacks of it's a good start, Clark, that's for sure.

As soon as you tie your flag to the mast, almost by virtue of the fact

that you've done that you limit your outlook to a degree, clark.

If that's what tying yourself to that mask does, I think, for me

personally, I try and shy away from any group identity as such.

And of course, when you're managing a team, you want to build that.

You're managing a team to get to a specific end goal together.

You've got to create some sort of identity.

But I think the individual's sacred.

I think the essence of any work with the team happens between me

and the individuals within that team and my ability to navigate

the relationship skillfully between you and Rob and everybody else in

the team is going to be decisive.

It's not exclusive.

It doesn't exclude left central, anybody.

It includes everybody.

I think what we designed together are things like a code of conduct or a set

of performance standards we're going to hold each other accountable to.

And I think that's different than saying we are one thing or another.

I think we are together in the face of this challenge that we're

going to undertake together.

But we all bring something unique to the table.

And that's not just our characteristics and our education, but it's everything.

It's our origin story.

It's where we came from.

It's our ideals.

It's what we see and where we want to go.

It includes those who are thinking of putting themselves first

over the team first, because the team's full of people like that.

It's also full of people that put the team first before themselves and that can be

problematic in itself as well at times.

It's really complex.

So I avoid where possible typing anyone into a category.

And grouping them together.

And it's, it's like the world divides itself these days on group identity,

if you're not one of us, you're one of them and that's curtains for you.

You canceled or whatever it may be.

And I think that's rubbish because there's, within those thems, there's

a ton of me's and I's and I think it's too easy to put yourself in a bucket

with everyone else and just go along with what everyone else is saying.

It's come on, stand up.

Who are you?

You just nailed it.

I had a conversation last week with somebody in a sort of

a leadership position within an organization about this.

And one of the things that we were talking about was, The culture within

that organization and how you curate that culture, how you continue to

cultivate it and help it to thrive.

Is it the culture that you want?

If it is, can you stabilize it and sustain it?

If it's not, can you change it?

But one of the things that I was talking to them about was obviously as a business

organization, this guy was predominantly concerned with facts and data.

And the point I made, and it hadn't really occurred to me much before

that, was that, with the rise of the Internet, we have an enormous

availability of information nowadays.

There's information everywhere.

You can get data to support pretty much anything.

The problem with that is, all that data and information does

is drives metrics and goals.

So we want to achieve this by then, by this date, this amount,

and that percentage, and so on.

I said what that doesn't take into account.

And if you think about it, the world we live in is very goal orientated.

I want this amount of money in my bank by this time.

I want to be able to pay this and do this and so on.

It doesn't subscribe to any set of particular values.

I said all the things that you've just been talking about, talking to this guy

was the metrics and the data that you want to achieve, where are your values?

If you're trying to create a culture.

How can you transcend the day to day chasing of goals and data

and metrics if you don't have any set of values to subscribe to?

And that's what you just said exactly there when you talk

about ideologies and stuff.

The team, the organization the business, the country even needs

to transcend any individual goal.

The people can go off doing their own things.

It all becomes very self serving.

You get silos, vested interests, personal agendas, and that sort of thing.

Whereas if there are values that you subscribe to and you openly say that

you subscribe to them, as you just said, you can then turn around to any

individual and say, whilst that may be that might be very performance orientated.

You may be driving certain goals.

Does it subscribe to our values?

Because if it doesn't, regardless of all the immediate goals that we're trying

to achieve and all the benefits and the rewards that accrue from that, if it

doesn't subscribe to our values long term, it does us harm and we can't do it.

The conversation I had with this guy revolved around the fact that

what are you trying to create here?

And I think that speaks to what you've just said, that it is rubbish.

If we say that you can do this, but you can't do that, or I believe

this and you don't believe that.

In any organization, I refer back to the military quite regularly.

There are people of all nationalities, all beliefs, believe it or

not, all sexual orientations.

Even back in the 80s and 90s, there were plenty of gay people in the military

and it mattered not one jot As long as you could do your job and that you were

committed to working side by side with your colleagues and that's really the

value that mattered above everything else.

So I think you nailed it there.

Actually,

You get factions within teams, as like intra team.

Me and Clark like each other more than Clark likes, so me and Clark are

stronger together than Clark and Rob is together because we've created a

little, a little faction away from the group that I'm using it as an example.

Both of you against me.

Rob just closes the meeting down, takes us off record, he's out of it.

No, but it, that stuff is there's always a natural connection.

It's like chemistry, but call it chemistry in a, a romantic relationship.

There's a natural but a constant dynamic between some people.

Yeah, some people over others, which needs to be utilized to the advantage

of everybody, but also understood where it can become problematic.

If you get a big rift in a dressing room in football.

It is decisive.

It's terminal for the coach.

I've been there.

It's painful.

It's invisible.

It's insipid.

It's not good.

Nothing good can come of it.

But then in a big organization, you've got the interdepartment us and thems, which is

all the silo based stuff, which is we see ourselves as superior to you in some way.

Some of it might be unconscious, if it's conscious, probably even worse, we

consciously think we're better than you.

You're a bunch of dicks and we're great.

How poor is that?

But who's dealing with it?

Like when you go into an organization that's been allowed to fester,

why is it being allowed to fester?

Why is it not being dealt with?

I think whether it's unconscious or it's actually overt, it

has to be dealt with otherwise

no good

can come

of

it.

Sorry Rob, you were just saying about it being a constantly moving

dynamic, that's an interesting point.

Because at one point, so you and Tony, are going to agree

on something, you're going to feel more connected around that.

What happens in relationships.

We feel more connected when we feel someone is like us.

I can trust them because they're like me.

And then when they're not like me, I think they're not really like me.

And a lot of it is story.

And I think when you look at groups, relationships and groups always break.

I always say relationships always end, either they break or in death.

It's interesting because I've had a, I've always had an enmity

to politicians and politics.

I think politics is parasitic and it doesn't add anything.

I think Clark, you and I are both for the individual.

We believe strongly in the individual.

And I think while you were talking, I was wondering about if it's

to do with an individualistic versus a collective culture.

I remember vividly when I was in probably the equivalent of year

nine at school, when you start to go With the big cool kids and the,

where they all smoke and things.

And you're the younger ones.

And when you come in as the younger one, it's like you become the jester or you

get picked on to get accepted by the older years until you become one of the older.

And I was down there and I was looking at people and I thought you're losing

your dignity to be part of a group.

And I decided there and then that I didn't want to be part of a group and I would

just wander from group to group because I felt there you had to give up something of

your individuality to be part of a group.

I think that's really what you're talking about.

Now when I look at it in teams, I have a more refined understanding that you do

give up something, but you have to have a greater goal that you willingly give up.

The whole point of joining together is because we become stronger

and we become more capable.

So we give up some of our individual wants and wishes in order to

achieve this more meaningful goal.

There's a lot in there about the politics and the trade off of what we're giving up

individually for being part of the group.

When you look at religions where they all splinter, like this 30 odd thousand, 32,

000 versions of Christianity, it's because we're within that group, but then we're

not willing to give up what we give up.

There's that balance.

That's interesting that you you say that about me being about

the individual over the collective.

I've never really given that much thought because the

collective obviously is important.

The community is important and the individuals within it.

One would hope of a certain level of agency and autonomy to act within that

collective, but you just reminded me of a place that I worked few years back.

There was a brilliant HR manager there who got what I was trying to do within

this organization was a very command and control oriented organization,

very old school, very male dominated.

A lot of puffed out chests, table banging, dick swinging, I'm the

man, there's the door if you don't like it and that sort of thing.

This was an organization that certainly at the ground level had

a lot of working class, poorly, not particularly well educated people, a

lot of foreigners, a lot of immigrants certain tensions amongst certain groups.

We were trying to get more females working in the organization, trying

to get a little bit of cohesion.

And she really got what I was trying to accomplish here.

And it was a real battle because there were about four really strong operations

directors, managing directors, and so on.

And she started to realize over a period of time that I had a stock phrase for

any situation that cropped up because in a situation like this, you continue to

putting out fires, and there are certain guys in leadership roles that love the

fact that fires are always cropping up because they can come in and save the day.

Solve the problem, look really good, and then go and do whatever

it is they do in their office.

And we were trying to get rid of this, and she got to the point where, before I would

even say it, she knew what I was going to say, because I would always say, when a

problem cropped up what's the standard?

What were you expecting?

What are we comparing this to?

There must be a standard.

Otherwise, how do you know it's a problem?

If you're just saying it's a problem, you're clearly comparing

it to some sort of end goal that you think there's a gap between where

you are and where you want to be.

This idea of what the standard is, if you're in an organization, let's

say the military I was going to say the police, but I don't think it

actually applies in the police anymore.

It used to.

But in the military, there's a standard by which you can set your stall.

You can say that when I get up in the morning, as long as my boots are

cleaned, my uniform is pressed, I walk in a certain way, stand, speak

in a certain way, address people in a particular way, then I'm good.

I can have a certain amount of autonomy and agency within those

limits, within those boundaries.

There are certain organizations, and I think it seems to be quite clear at

the moment, the way we're policing the streets of the UK, that's not quite

the case, or at least not everybody knows what the standards are, or

the standards aren't clear, because what goes for one should go for all.

Whether that's true or not, there's a certain segment of our society

that's saying it's not true.

And it needs to be clear in any culture.

In any organization, exactly what the standard is, because then when somebody

said, look at him, he's doing that thing.

What are we comparing that to?

What's the standard within, and it goes back to what we were

saying, Tony, about values.

Values and standards transcend any personal preference.

They transcend any dick swinging, chest thumping, table banging

that a boss might come out with.

The great thing about standards is that even in a big organization where

you've got some enormous, great big boss at the top who's all powerful.

If he doesn't live by the standards and the benchmarks and the values,

then he's in trouble because everybody will let him know.

As a leader, I imagine this is the case in football scenarios, Tony, if you

can put into place, a set of values and standards that you are clearly

adhering to, then it's the old saying isn't it, I wouldn't ask anybody to

do something I wouldn't do myself.

If you're adhering to these standards and values, then clearly everybody

else is going to get outside.

As Colin Powell said, the American politician.

There may be dissent within this room while we're discussing what those values

are, but once we decide what they are and we leave this room, we're all on board.

The great thing about that phrase, what's the standard, and I've used it all my

working career, is that I can sit in a boardroom with a load of leaders all

shouting about what needs to be done.

I'm making them sound like idiots.

They're not clearly.

Most of the workers, leaders I've ever worked with have been brilliant.

Egos do get in the way sometimes though, and it is great to be able to say in the

middle of a meeting, hold on a minute, what standard are we talking about here?

You say you want to do this and this, the shareholders or the group

are demanding that we achieve this.

Does that really fit in with our values?

Because if it doesn't, we need to have a conversation with the people that

are making those demands, because if we break this rule, if we go against this

standard, we're setting a precedent for everybody else within the organization.

And the great thing about something like the military is that you are bound

by those rules, however high up you go all the way up to the captain general,

the queen as she was back in the day.

She still had to wear a uniform in a certain way and take a parade in a certain

way and accept a salute in a certain way, because the rules apply to everybody.

That's the great thing about it.

If you have a standard in place, the data is irrelevant.

Obviously it matters in a day to day setting, but the values,

the principles never change.

And once you have that idea in mind what's the standard?

Oh, sorry, I didn't realise we were operating to a completely different

standard to everybody else, you should have told me, I didn't get that memo.

Yeah.

It's like the book, does it make the boat go faster?

It's about the British Olympian rowing team, and their foundational

rule was, doesn't matter where you are in the hierarchy, Bring

all your ideas to the table.

The only question, the only demand that we have is does it make the boat go faster?

If it doesn't, however good an idea it is, it gets kiboshed.

But if it does, wherever it came from, we're going to try and implement it.

Obviously they won what was it, five golds on the spin.

That standard was Was really good.

I use it a fair bit in some of the courses that I run just to

emphasize that setting of a benchmark that everybody can adhere to.

It's a simple sort of analogy, isn't it?

I think the stuff you said, Rob, about purpose, that shared meaning is one

of the hardest things that people actually find to do as a collective.

It's really difficult for some people to conceive what that means.

I can give you an example.

I was working with a group last week, and I was trying to connect

to them on a deeper level, and they were trying to connect to me.

We're trying to get to know each other.

And I use this exercise.

It's like the five minute find your purpose routine.

We could do it ourselves for this thing.

What's the purpose of these conversations that we three have decided to have?

We keep coming back for this something that's driving us to do it and it'd

be great for us to define what that collective purpose actually is.

There's a simplicity about how to do it.

The essence of a purpose is it serves somebody else.

It serves a community of some sort or people of some sort.

So you immediately become in service to something.

So your purpose has to start with not necessarily what you

do, but who you do it for.

So we do this, so we have these conversations for what purpose, for

what community, who is interested, who cares we have to be able to identify.

In some way, put ourselves in the shoes of the audience and think what

value are they going to get from us having these conversations in public?

Because we're learning together in public, right?

It's a pretty vulnerable place to be, which is fantastic.

Anyway, back to purpose.

So we have these conversations, we have these public learning conversations.

I'm playing this through my head and trying to go through the thing.

This is the process.

So we have public learning conversations.

This is us.

I'm doing a purpose statement for us and we can obviously debate it.

For, I don't know, I can't land on the community that we're serving yet, but

we'd have to come up with that together.

It might be we learn in public by, I can't even get there myself now.

Anyway, this is the way it works.

This is what we do for these people.

We're serving these people And then you're only allowed a two

word completion of the statement.

It has to be an ING word by doing something.

So what ours would be?

Investigating.

Refining thinking.

Oh, yeah.

By

refining thinking, for example.

Yeah.

So you get your peg in the ground.

That's what it is.

And there's a point when you reiterate it.

Enough times.

And you go, yeah, that really lands for me.

That is really what we do.

That it really is why we do it.

Now, when we get to that point, we already know we keep coming back.

So there's already that shared sense of purpose for us,

because we keep coming back.

We love what we're doing.

And there's a connection on values and all of that sort of stuff, which is great.

But going back to the core, I ran a course and at the beginning of

this particular course, you're trying to get people to identify.

Everyone comes into a leadership course and they're able to stand

up and articulate what they do.

This is my job.

This is my title.

These are my qualifications.

This is who I work for all this stuff.

I'm thinking, okay, I still want to know who you are.

It's going from doing to being again it's that kind of thing.

So this is the exercise for that.

But when you do it as a collective to help them understand, help me understand them,

help me connect with them better, these people were able to articulate to me they

provide the citizens of country X with national security by securing funding.

It's okay, now I can sense the gravitas and the importance

of what it is that you do.

I don't even think they thought of it themselves in that way, but when they

did, the whole tone of the room changed.

They could see the impact it had on me to go, all right, now I'm connected, the

trust has just gone through the roof.

I'm now connected to your purpose that changes the whole dynamics for

me as a presenter, because everything now that I'm delivering as aligned

to a group of people who've got such a weight of responsibility and

accountability to keep the citizens safe.

These were high level people doing serious stuff that they never thought about why

they do it or for the community that they serve, and it's really powerful.

So an exercise worth doing for us as well, I think.

What did you say it was, by refining

thinking?

For me I've always been clear, I used to call it truth seekers, the people I

wanted to work with, and someone worded it better for me, is people who want to get

it right, there's people who just want to be right and there's people who want to

get it right, and it's for people who want to get it right, and I think it's either

refining thinking or seeking truth it's getting to the truth of what there is.

I don't know what Clark's view is.

Seeking truth.

That's another good one.

Rob.

It's a great exercise you've just done there Tony, because you were

doing the thing while you were describing the thing at the same time.

And by the way, I'm kicking myself because it's such a brilliant

and refined and elegantly simple exercise and there was me bumbling my

way through it like a lunatic and you guys are probably thinking where's he

going with this is No, it was quite clear because it was

a little bit meta, wasn't it?

You were actually doing the thing while talking about the thing.

Yeah.

The key to that sort of situation, what you did there, is

something I think that we all do.

That's our job, is to look at the environment that we're in.

The group dynamic, because the minute you get involved in a situation like that,

you become a part of the group dynamic.

but you then become the person that is able to articulate the

values that you adhere to and the purpose that you subscribe to.

And in doing that, you've literally just crystallized the reason for that group

of people existing in the first place.

You talk about a community that they serve and so on.

One of the things that I was thinking when you were speaking was that the three of

us we didn't start these conversations with any particular purpose in mind,

but that started to happen on its own.

There's a comedian in the United States that I watch his podcasts on YouTube.

A guy called Tom Segura.

He's a good friend of Joe Rogan.

He's a little bit coarse.

He's very down to earth, but he was talking about the fact that when he

first started in comedy he got to know Joe Rogan and some other people.

He was speaking to empty rooms at first, and very often he was asked by friends

and people that, wanted him to get a proper job, why are you doing this?

He said, I have to speak to the empty rooms so that I can eventually

speak to the full stadiums of people.

That's how this thing happens.

You don't just start speaking to thousands of people in a stadium.

There has to be a starting point, and you don't always know the route that you're

going to take to get to that end point.

In our situation and most of the people we work with, similar situation you're just

going along, and at some point, somebody articulates, Is this what we want?

Is it going the way we want it to go?

Are these values that we adhere to the ones that we want to adhere to and so on?

And you articulate where that organization is now going.

And with us three, it's interesting you said that about refining thinking,

Rob, because on my substack page, where I put my writing, on the tagline,

all I've put is an investigation into better ways of thinking.

And actually because a lot of people have said to me, Oh, yeah, but you

talk about writing and business.

I said, but it all starts with the way we think about the things that we do.

And predominantly we actually talk to people and not about the individual,

but about the group, whether that's two, five, ten or a thousand people.

But we're talking about how those individuals exist within the group.

And that's the thing, because however you think about being a part

of that is how you then live it.

And every single person in that collective has a say then in how

the organization moves forward.

But somebody has to articulate what that is.

And very often you can have two, three, whatever people walking

along the road as we are now.

And then somebody says, This is interesting that

we're doing this, isn't it?

That we've been walking this far together.

Where should we go?

Should we go together?

How do you want to do it?

And that's exactly what we're doing now.

My wife said to me recently Why do you sit in those meetings?

She said you keep blocking this chunk of time aside when you've got work to do.

I said for a start, I'm speaking to another couple of weirdos

that I really get on with.

I said, but it's going somewhere.

At the moment we're speaking into the void.

We're shouting into the darkness, but we are starting to articulate a way

of thinking about what we do that, as you say, Tony, will eventually

serve as a community because there are people out there who are striving.

You look at the way the police is trying to deal with this whole idea

of the way they police the country.

They're trying to come up with a way of articulating what it means

to be a police officer in the United Kingdom in the 21st century.

How do they do that?

How do they articulate that?

How do they put that together?

And that's what we're trying to.

We're going to say some daft things along the way.

We're going to get it wrong.

There are going to be times when you feel like you're losing your way, but

I've always been a massive believer in that the answers are all out there.

They're just waiting for somebody to ask the right questions.

And that's what we do.

Yeah.

I agree with all of that, Clark.

There's a beauty in the vulnerability of making those mistakes along the way.

I like the term public learning.

So when you learn in public.

You're put into an environment where we know we're in a

psychologically safe environment.

I don't really like that term, but we know we can say anything to each other.

We're not going to be offended, which is fine.

But of course we don't know if anybody watches it, who might be

offended by something that we say or might disagree or whatever.

That's fine too.

But because we're having open dialogue about subjects we've not prepared

for, There's a vulnerability in that, that I think is a brilliant expose of

thinking out loud tripping yourself up, it's a test case in itself.

And that's what I love about it because I don't like homogeny.

I'd to be tested.

I like to be stimulated.

I like to explore.

I like to grow.

I like to, enhance my thinking, enhance my knowledge, enhance my understanding.

We're all in the same sort of game.

We're in the people game, teams and individuals.

We're all in.

We're all in trying to harmonize, make the place a better place,

whether it's a workplace or whatever.

So the fact that I love the term learning in public, so we've

come together and we're here.

We are sharing ideas with each other and walking away every week or every

time we do it with a sort of a ton of little things that have just

lifted us up a little bit.

I want to ask both of you, Rob and Tony I, you just made me think

of something there which we have done without any prior agreement.

And I think we've all just accepted that this is the norm.

When you work with couples, Rob, or when you work with teams,

Tony, and I spend most of my time with groups of predominantly

managers and senior management.

We sit in a room and they say, we've got this problem, or we have this

issue that we're trying to deal with, or we want to get better at something.

And do you guys clarify?

I'm sure you both set ground rules, obviously, for the conversation and so on.

But one of the things that I found years ago that got in the way of these

conversations was when people come in thinking they know the answers.

And this is going back to what we started at the beginning about this

idea of being a part of a particular group, political sets of ideologies or

whatever, because you then subscribe to this institutionalized dogma.

So you have all the answers because they're in the book, they're in the

manifesto that our group believe in.

For the last 10 years or so, I've been saying is anybody that comes in here

thinking they've got the answers, you need to divest yourself of that idea right now.

Because if you had the answers, we wouldn't be sitting here.

I'll use that at very early in the course.

I'll say, look, some of the stuff we talk about, you probably already know it.

I'm never there to teach people, right?

I'm never there to teach people.

I'm just there to facilitate discussion that we want the collective wisdom in the

room to come forth and everybody grows.

That's the idea.

There are people in the room that do think that they have all the

answers, then there's almost a demand that they share it so that we

can all benefit from their wisdom.

Of course, that gives the chance to soon get found out.

If they start spouting off challengeable subject matter.

But we do that already in this group, don't we?

Without having said it, there is an openness to other viewpoints that is,

probably one of the main reasons I'm happy to be here because I always get something

out of a conversation where nobody's trying to push an agenda or try to prove

a point, because I had this conversation a little while back with somebody.

It got a little bit heated, I must say because the person I was speaking to

was a psychoanalyst or a psychologist, and I said, look, let's face it,

psychology, it's all guesswork.

It's guesswork.

You just guess it.

And that really didn't get a good response.

I said, but look, science is guesswork.

There are no facts.

There are certain heuristics.

Rules of thumb that we can adhere to and say, look we know that

if we walk off the cliff, we're going to fall because of gravity.

There are certain things, but nobody really knows how gravity works.

I was listening to a lecture a couple of weeks ago by somebody that was saying

they don't even know how water works.

They can describe it, but they don't know why it does it.

And so this person I was saying, look, psychology, what are you?

Jungian, Freudian, Adlerian what is your, because you're in a group,

and therefore, because you're a Jungian, don't like certain aspects

of the Freudian beliefs and so on.

I said, but the minute you do that, you're limiting yourself and whilst

you try to maintain this idea of certainty, you're going to have

problems because then anybody that says anything different is wrong and you

clearly then have no common ground.

In this little conversation that we have.

All three of us open to the idea that a lot of what we say could

quite easily be challenged and proven to be wrong or at least dubious.

That's fine, that's how you learn stuff.

But, by having these conversations and moving towards, as Rob says, a

greater refinement of how we think about these things, and in doing that,

you're not excluding anything and you can eventually arrive at what I would

like to think is something a little bit closer to some sort of absolute truth.

That's really interesting because.

So I started off with a gym and then I got a qualification as a nutritionist

and then I thought, what's the point?

No one sticks to their diet.

No one sticks to their exercise.

So I went into therapy.

And I realized how limiting therapy was because they're all

like, Oh I'm this and I'm that.

And it goes back to that when you identify with a group you.

make your understanding so limited.

There's a difference between truth and honesty.

Honesty is what you know of the truth and truth is that which can't be proven wrong.

So to some extent, I like the adversarial, the challenge, because my foundational

principle has been build on truth.

Because when people build on something that isn't true.

It's building on the house of cards and you're just waiting for

the challenge or the circumstance for it all to topple down.

Going back to how we began when you were talking, Tony, about purpose

and that, I think for me, one of the understandings I've had is every

relationship has a different purpose.

And one of the problems that people have in the relationships is they

take these templated versions.

And the problem that corporates have is often that they

don't have a clear purpose.

Because they don't want to say our purpose is for you to make money for us.

And so because they don't have a purpose, they don't have

something that they can say.

You've nailed it there, right?

There is the challenge, right?

That's not a purpose.

Yeah.

That's a business, a strategic objective to get so much EBITDA by

the end of Q4, that's not a purpose.

That's not why people are doing it.

Of course, people are trying to make cash.

They're in a business, they go into business to make money and the

shareholders have got that ambition.

But that's not the reason why people are doing what they're doing.

And if they haven't found that it's unfulfilling.

I saw a statement last week, which I really loved, which was that I think it

might have been even misspelled, maybe it was something you commented on Rob.

I can't remember in the thing.

Anyway, it was about the happiness in pursuit rather

than the pursuit of happiness.

So the pursuit of money is the equivalent of the pursuit of happiness.

That's what we check.

Actually.

No, the purpose is the happiness in the pursuit.

There's some meaning to what we're doing.

Whether we make the pot of gold or we don't there's a reason

why we're trying to do it.

And it's really good that we're doing it together.

And it's really great that, Oh, we just missed out, but you can do your best.

You can have your best ever training week, your best ever game plan and still lose.

By some freak of nature, even.

But, it doesn't mean that the world's caved in.

Because you've just been at your absolute best, and wasn't that amazing?

That reminds me, I think I put this in a reply to a comment where

For me, Klopp's greatest achievement wasn't what he won.

It was the fact they were so in the game and he cared less about winning

because he knew that if they were in the game, if they were doing all the right

things they would win stuff eventually.

He accepted that there's no control over the outcome, but

imagine you can see the the level of engagement and application and shared

intention that those players had in pursuit of these great objects.

They were doing it.

They were in it together.

You could, it was a palpable, visible thing.

I almost think of Team Spirit as it's not a tangible thing.

It's not measurable.

You can actually see it and feel it, it's like an emotion or something, it's

not a measurable thing, but you can see it, when it happens, and they had it.

But you also saw when Klopp finally decided to pack it all in, you, you

realised at that point that it was even more than being in the game, it was even

more than, The team, or even the club, because it became a community thing.

I watched Jürgen Klopp reading some of the letters and emails he'd

received and how emotional he got.

Whilst that almost certainly wasn't his goal when he first started at

Liverpool, he became part of a community that sweeps you along, regardless.

I was just thinking when you were talking there, Rob, about working

within an organization, and you said, Tony, that's not a purpose.

That's just a reason to be there.

The purpose is much bigger than that.

And if you go into the shop floor of a factory, The people working those

machines are not trying to build a community and improve the lives

of all the people that they serve.

They're just trying to put some bread on the table.

Yeah.

But that feeds into the overall purpose of the organization and eventually If the

culture is strong enough, as you say with Klopp, he created something that once it,

it goes over that tipping point you start to then become part of something that's

bigger than you lose control of it then.

It then becomes organic and takes on a life of its own.

And a lot of moaning at the moment in my side of Birmingham

and the Aston part of Birmingham.

Okay.

Because we've played, I think, seven preseason games and lost five.

And, we should have won.

We were in the champion Champions League now.

We should be able to knock over more of these teams more easily and so on.

But that's not the point as far as the manager is concerned.

He wants to see how that team works together, how they gel, how they

work in certain positions and so on.

And the purpose for him was greater than just winning a certain amount of games.

And you can start to see, nowhere near the level that Klopp has achieved.

But you can start to see that he's building around him.

an idea an emotion, a spirit that started to pull in people that

wouldn't ordinarily get involved and it becomes a community thing.

And to me, that's, it is why we do anything right.

Is it literally is all about, eventually the community that you're a part of.

What's interesting is.

I've looked into Klopp because for me he encapsulates the idea of a Unifier.

And he needed that there's something in him that he can do that because

he needs that sense of community.

He was offered the Man United job and they said, you can sign anyone,

we'll have this team of Galacticos and he's no, I don't want that.

When you look at the clubs, he's very clear about what he needs.

And he needs the environment where he can create that sense of community

and that's what he's always done.

the purpose has to come from the people, it has to be a human need.

And I think Martin Luther King the same thing because there

was this need for justice, for equality, for to feel respected.

You can see the intensity of that the sense of.

Responsibility and accountability to those people.

If you genuinely in service to all of those people comes at a cost and

you can see the cost on him after.

an extended period of time.

It's I'm done at least for a while.

I need to step down.

I know that I can't keep doing this because it's, the amount that

you have to give to that cause.

It's a cause.

It's not a football manager, really busy.

They get in early and they go home late and they're doing lots of stuff.

That's just doing, that's just playing football manager.

You can get on a PlayStation and do that for 20 hours a day.

It's that connecting with that community would take a hell of a lot out of you.

I was just thinking about the fact that you look at something

like Klopp's tenure at Liverpool and think that was just a finite thing

that happened over a period of time.

Now he's gone, it's finished, but it isn't because there's an

even bigger picture, isn't there?

And you look at something like the military and sorry to keep bringing

the military, but you can have.

battles and campaigns where certain people become they become heroes and they

establish certain traditions and they create a culture that's very positive.

And then it ends when they die or when they move on or whatever.

But overall you have then this agglomeration, this accumulation

of traditions and ideals that becomes the reason for the

existence of this group of people.

And you look at something like Liverpool now that with the Shankly's and all of

these guys, and now Klopp adds to that, it becomes this enormous immovable object

that people can look to when they want some inspiration for how we do things.

And it goes back to culture again.

This is how we are.

This is how, you've got to Anfield.

And it's, it is overwhelming the atmosphere at that place

because you are looking at over a hundred years of accumulated

traditions and people like Klopp.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

I was gonna go back Clark to the, those gremlins that come into

the room and the know it alls.

What they don't know, as we know, far outweighs what they do know, right?

But then, let's say they know a lot about a certain subject matter.

I think where they fail is that they think that's all they need to know.

They think that's what life's all about.

As a consequence, they struggle with what the real game is, which is uncovering,

as we're doing, More about each other that helps us actually get further

through life gets better at the jobs that we do and If you've probably heard

of the Johari window, you heard of the use the Johari window use that Rob a

little bit It's all about blind space.

It's all about self disclosure feedback shared discovery Self discovery,

so it's four windows basically.

So the open area is we've just met each other The only thing you know about me

is what I prepared to share with you.

So I know what I'm sharing.

You now know what I'm sharing.

That's the limited window that we've got.

It's the only bit, it's the only exchange, it's a bit transactional.

That's like the open area.

We both know what we know about each other.

Cause that's all we're prepared to share.

Now this is the blind spot.

So the guy that comes in and knows everything.

It's got an enormous blind spot because he doesn't know anything about me.

Doesn't know anything about the rest of the group.

Hasn't been bothered to even find out.

So there's room then for feedback.

That guy needs feedback somewhere down the line.

He's going to get some feedback, probably when he least expected

and probably doesn't want the feedback that he's going to get.

So this is all about information that is known to us and known to

other people or not known to us and not known to other people.

So it's a matrix.

It's a four box matrix.

So if what's known to me and not known to others, it's the stuff

that I want to keep close to myself.

I'm not prepared to share that with you yet.

We're not going there.

That's, maybe secrets.

Maybe stuff that I've done that.

I'm not proud of.

Maybe I robbed a bank last week.

Not gonna tell you that just yet until, I think you're on board.

All of that kind of stuff.

So that's an interesting one.

And then the last one is the unknown area where I don't know, and you don't know.

Let's go and find out together.

And all of those windows the small window is what we're prepared

to share about each other.

I know this about me that I'm sharing with you.

You know this about you that you share with me.

That's the only open bit that we know.

Tell me about my blind spots.

I want feedback.

I think I look great in this top.

Everyone else is thinking, have you seen that top he's wearing?

Like we need to find the openness to feedback.

Then as the trust builds, we start to disclose more about, Our past,

our origin story, our heroes, our fathers, our mothers, all of

those things that help grow trust.

And then we're going on this journey together, like we turn up here

on a Wednesday morning and we go, what are we talking about today?

Ooh, we don't know.

Let's go and find out together what we're going to explore

and see where we go with it.

And when you apply this tool you help people realize.

People that think they know it all, if I'm trying to mobilize people to meet

a challenge with lots of unknowns, most of those unknowns are going

to be what are our shared values?

Because they're not visible.

We need to dig them out.

Some people haven't even found out, don't even know their own, nevermind.

What the groups are, or I'll just latch on to what the company says they said on the

mission statement on the wall, when I had my interview that they were proud and they

were happy and they were enthusiastic.

That's that can be that, right?

Let's go do that.

But that's not what it's about.

It's who are we together in, in the face of this big, complex

challenge that we've got?

And it's these people that know it all can't possibly know what's in the future.

They've got no control over it.

They haven't been there.

They can't see it.

So they're talking rubbish.

I want to speak to him right now.

We've already touched upon this idea then of how a group of

people in any relationship, whatever it might be, eventually comes to

some sort of definition of why they're doing what they're doing

and, what's the purpose of that.

One of the problems that we have doing what we're doing, goes back to this window

that you've just spoken about, Tony.

Unlike, for instance, the military, whose overall purpose is to protect

the country and the people at home, their families and so on.

The police, their purpose is to keep the people safe and to make them feel safe.

Business is to serve the customers and the shareholders, et cetera.

We're in a slightly more difficult situation because Each of us

works with groups of people of varying sizes to help them.

And I think all of us are committed to this idea.

Each of us is committed to the belief that, If we could get to grips with how we

interact with each other and overcome some of the issues that come from interacting

on a regular basis, then society as a whole would become a better place to be.

Whilst all of these organizations and groups of people have their cultures

and their ideologies and their beliefs and their purposes and so on.

Whether they know them or not, they are inherently problematic because a lot of

the issues Of how people deal with each other have not been resolved, even in

the 21st century, and I think each of us is as an individual striving to get some

sort of clarity on how we can overcome that and in our own ways of trying to find

solutions that we can pass on to other groups so that just being alive on planet

Earth becomes an easier proposition.

The fact that we're having conversations makes it a little bit

more difficult for us to pin down a purpose because as you've just said,

we don't know what we don't know.

We're literally walking into the dark trying to figure out what

other people have failed to do.

That's the issue that we're facing, isn't it?

There are people all over the world trying to figure out ways of

getting on better with each other.

We're sitting down and saying let's figure it out.

And somebody might say how'd you do that?

We don't know.

We're just trying . But the good question.

It's a great, it's a great framing of who we are and what we do, clark.

Think wherever we end up, the solution will be in the quality of questions

that we're able to ask each other.

And if we're in that unknown area, the quality of questions will be decisive in

how we get to know what we don't know.

And if we're exploring the unknown, we're exploring where we're going and

how we're going to achieve what is a very important thing to all of us.

I think the quality of the questions that we ask will be decisive.

What's the big question we could ask each time we come together?

That is a quest, it's a sense of like I said, it's the happiness

in pursuit of something.

We're happy in pursuit of these big ideas and ideals.

We won't get there.

There's no end.

I don't see that there's a finish line, the way we can go.

All right, we've done it now.

Let's wrap up.

We don't need to meet anymore.

I think it's that continuous exploration of the better and the optimal

environment, the healthy relationship, again, I'm just spitballing, throwing

things to the wall till they stick.

We're going into the unknown on some sort of quest, the quality of questions

we ask on our journey is going to reveal lots of mutual opportunities and growth

that other people can benefit from that's going to fit this narrative.

I had this conversation about two weeks ago with the

person that's helping me.

I think I mentioned John in the States, a creative writing professor.

And we worked together on writing this book.

And we had a conversation middle of last week.

I've been writing stuff about the 10th man for years.

I'm always talking about the 10th man, because I think like you guys,

I look around the world at the moment and I just see opportunities from

improving the way we do things together.

All the time.

Every day, I wake up in the morning and as I go through the day, I see

things and I think I'm constantly talking to myself, I'm just, goodness

sake, why are they doing it like that?

And all day you're thinking if we could do this and you're constantly thinking about

ways of helping people to do things better in the way they interact with each other.

And as we were writing, as we were talking about this book, he said, the

thing is you've always spoken about a thing that you've never really defined.

You've never been able to define because when it was invented way back

in the seventies by the Israelis, this idea of a devil's advocate type person

was never even then clearly defined.

It was just somebody that offered alternative viewpoints, challenged

ideas and assumptions and so on, but it was never clearly articulated

and it never has been since.

When I adopted it years ago, I realized that here was a tool that

an organization could put in place.

Like the court jester, for instance, back in the sort of medieval times,

who challenged the way we looked at things and stopped you from

getting yourselves into bother.

He said, but the problem is when you try to then put that on paper

and describe it to somebody, you're talking about something way

bigger than you originally thought.

This is not a small thing.

A person that challenges the assumptions that we make as we come to ideas

about making decisions and so on.

This is not a small undertaking that you've adopted, he says, so this is

not going to be an easy book to write.

And we were talking about how I put that in place because there

are things that people do together that are positive and they work and

they move us forward as a species.

But the very same thing, the wisdom of crowds that gets us where we're

trying to get to, is also our undoing because when that thing that belief

system that they work into these ideologies, the categories that they

drop themselves into become dogmatic.

You then start to go out and kill people.

Yeah.

He was saying that you are struggling to get this down on paper.

I'm still only a few chapters in because it's so hard to put this together.

He said, but it's a worthwhile thing, even if nobody ever reads the book.

You must write that because nobody has ever actually sat down and tried to

articulate that and that, I think, is what we're doing here in our individual ways.

That's really cool.

I think the struggle is that life is a dynamic moving thing.

And our understanding of it is we try and make it static.

Because something that's moving and always changing like a relationship is a dynamic

thing and how we feel about someone can range from love to hate within seconds.

It's momentary and then when we try and talk about it, we try and

put too much milk in my tea again.

We try and make it, we try and make it so literal.

There's so much to go through from what we've said, but going back to

something before I think happiness when I was studying happiness, what I came

to was that happiness is really the freedom to express who you truly are.

When we were talking about people who come with answers,

that's where I really struggled.

That's where I came up with the concept of truth seeking, because some people

don't want truth because they don't want to engage with life that deeply.

And so the struggle in, in trying to articulate something that's

moving, it's contextual and it changes with the situation.

And then we're trying to put it into a static understanding where we try not

to understand the world in a static way.

All of us is a closed loop.

A relationship is a closed loop.

And I think where the richness of this discussion comes from is we

all have different sources that we, different outlooks, and it's the

diversity of ideas opens up the loops.

Rob, I've got a question for you.

This idea of happiness with it acting with a certain level of autonomy to

fulfill ourselves within the group dynamic, I find interesting because

Whenever I've talked to anybody about Maslow's hierarchy of needs, for instance,

and the ultimate achievement is to fulfill our potential as human beings.

And I've always said that's fine, unless you're a psychopath.

And the ultimate fulfillment is going around chopping people to bits.

Now, that's not too far from reality, because there are people

Due to various traumatic incidents in their life, the upbringing that

they've had, whatever it might be, they want to do some dodgy stuff.

The rest of society would rather that they didn't do all this dodgy stuff.

We've had some stabbings recently around the country.

I heard a story recently, and this goes back to, right back to the beginning

when we talked about the idea of values.

It's all right, people saying, I have my rights, I can live

the way I want to, et cetera.

However, without a set of values that we subscribe to, then we're literally

all going to be just, I'm just going to pinch your trainers off you,

because I like the look of them, and you're going to go and try and chat

my missus up when I'm not looking.

Everything breaks down because there are no values and

principles that we adhere to.

Okay.

I think it was a bit harsh, but that was the point he was trying to make.

Whether you're in the military, police, an ambulance driver or a

fireman, there are principles and values that you would adhere to.

That's your reason for being there, to save lives, to improve

people's lives and so on.

And everybody in society has a responsibility to adhere

to certain principles.

You don't hurt children.

You don't punch people.

You don't kick the walking stick out from underneath old ladies.

There are certain things that we must adhere to.

The role of the 10th man or anybody in a position that we have is that when

somebody does something or suggest something or wants to do something,

you point to this value and say, hold on a minute, your fulfillment as an

individual does not transcend the requirements and the responsibilities.

That to me I think is the difference between, you were talking earlier Rob

about me being for the individual.

I am as long as that individual works for the greater good of the community.

I think that's what makes life infinite.

It's because the diversity and the disagreement of those values is

what creates because ultimately the highest expression of

myself can exist within a group.

It's my understanding of what I want and your understanding of

what you want create conflict.

And the way to resolve conflict is not.

I'm right, you're right, or the compromise, but it's about transcending

them so that you refine your thinking more to a higher level.

So that's no longer an issue.

And I think that is what, that's what we're doing.

And I think that's what the game of life is about.

I agree with that.

When we iron out the tension, we are more energized by enabling that tension

to drive something better for all of us.

I work with what I call a hierarchy of values.

I won't go into detail too much, but, we've all got either achievement

oriented values or their connection oriented values like belonging, that

type of thing, or they're exploring exploration oriented values, either

adventure or personal growth.

So you've got these three.

It's like the hierarchy values is just dependent on which you prioritize.

Do you prioritize achievement, do you prioritize connection, or

do you prioritize exploration.

You can have them in any order fundamentally, once people realize that's

what they do, you start to recognize.

Who takes the risk?

Who's going to jump first?

All of these different things come out.

So it's really low resolution version of capturing.

You can do it in groups that's really good, but I just wanted to share that

because we're talking about values.

I just also wanted to share that I recently applied my score profiling tool

to a group and this relates to because it was collectively the first time for

a long time where I felt that nobody was prepared to be vulnerable enough to say,

you know what, I'm challenged by this.

It was a group full of people that wanted to be seen to know everything.

And what was beautiful about it, the great thing about this team, and the way that

the tool reflected also what I was seeing, was that I could see they had great

cohesion, I could see they were really together, that they liked each other.

They had lots of things in common that they shared.

But I was having trouble with challenging them and then they'd back off.

It was like, they weren't prepared to stick the neck out in any way whatsoever.

Again, that public learning that I've used that term before for lots of people,

it's really difficult for this group.

It's particularly difficult.

So anyway, we did the profile until we got all the data.

Feed it through these different things.

what the tool showed was that they were not going to push each other.

I asked the question, who out of you guys pushes the other

to better themselves every day.

Where's the drive?

There was no real results orientation.

So even in loosely term things like, do you love to win or hate to lose?

The vast majority of the group immediately went, I love to win with, which

suggests a promotion oriented approach.

It's okay.

We accept defeats.

No problem.

So not in the least bit competitive.

We did a little negotiation game where you negotiate for the orange.

It's about, do you negotiate on the position or interest?

Some of them just caved in.

You can have the orange.

They just accepted defeat so readily but the beauty of the tool was what

came out was like pretty telling stuff.

It's like the boss had said, we need to focus on results with this lot.

Here it is.

And now we've got some data to back it up, which was fantastic, but this

team sit around the table all getting on great, but who's going to say.

Hey Clark, I think you can do better, mate.

That was not going to happen.

I think they would get tension.

I think they would get conflict and struggle to deal with the

conflict, but they wouldn't get ahead of it and challenge each other.