Episode 30 of “What is Innovation?” is live! This time around, Jared talks with Colin Hunter, an Author, Mentor, Coach, and the Founder and CEO of Potential Squared, an international business that specializes in creating playgrounds to disrupt the way people are led. Listen in to know how Colin takes on innovation in the field of VR with Accenture and creating playgrounds for his various clients. You'll also get a sneak peek at how his daughters fell in love with staying in hotels. Clue: stuffed animals!
Colin Hunter, an Author, Mentor, Coach, and the Founder and CEO of Potential Squared shares takes on innovation in the field of VR and creating 'playgrounds' for his various clients
More about our guest:
Colin Hunter is an Author, Mentor, Coach, and the Founder and CEO of Potential Squared, an international business that specializes in creating playgrounds to disrupt the way people are led. Three areas of focus include: Building Leadership Capabilities, Strengthening Functional Capability, and guiding Innovative Cultures. He generates a lasting professional impact with those he works with and is renowned for being what they and he calls refreshingly direct, lighting inspirational fires to drive change.
He facilitates, mentors, and coaches individuals and teams in the areas of leadership presence, personal brand, change leadership, innovation, strategic dialogue, creating board-level influence, and earning a seat at the executive table. With the use of actors, cutting-edge virtual realities, and a new leadership framework, clients have shown award-winning differences in the ways they lead. He prides himself by practicing what he preaches with being wrong more and learning fast from it.
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Episode Guide:
01:58 - What Is Innovation?
3:03 - What is the "real problem"?
4:02 - An Anecdote: Ms. Brown
7:18 - The HUMAN user
8:56 - HUMAN influence
9:39 - Claridge's in London with Melman and Gloria
12:07 - Playgrounds
13:53 - Big Wet Fish Analogy
16:34 - (Really) Effective Actors
17:28 - Getting an Advisory board
21:15 - Joy and Healing: Episode 14
23:06 - 'Playgrounds' response to COVID
25:26 - 3H: Hugs, human interaction, house rental analogy
27:12 - Virtual reality at work and at home
29:26 - Perspective: a religious background
31:25 - Ship out of the harbor
35:35 - 'What does cycling give you?'
39:17 - Advice to innovators
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OUTLAST Consulting offers professional development and strategic advisory services in the areas of innovation and diversity management.
/This transcript was automatically generated using AI; please forgive any inconsistencies. We are working to provide the correct and more concise copy of the transcript. For urgent needs, please send us an email.
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Jared Simmons 00:05
Hello, and welcome to what is innovation. The podcast that explores the reality of a word that is in danger of losing its meaning altogether. This podcast is produced by Outlast consulting, LLC, a boutique consultancy that helps companies use innovation principles to solve their toughest business problems. I'm your host, Jared Simmons, and I'm so excited to have Colin Hunter. Colin Hunter is an author, mentor, coach and CEO of potential squared, an international business that specializes in creating playgrounds to disrupt the way people are LED. three areas of focus include building leadership capabilities, strengthening functional capability, and guiding innovative cultures. Talent generates a lasting professional impact with those he works with and is renowned for being what they and he calls refreshingly direct lighting inspirational fires to drive change. He facilitates mentors and coaches, individuals and teams in the areas of leadership presence, personal brand change, leadership, innovation, strategic dialogue, creating board level influence, and earning a seat at the executive table. With the use of actors cutting edge virtual realities, and a new leadership framework. clients have shown award winning difference in the ways they lead. Collin prides himself by practicing what he preaches with being wrong more, and learning fast from it. Tom, thank you so much for joining us today. Welcome to the show.
Colin 01:29
Thank you, Jared. Good to be here. I need to cut down that intro for you in the future. Because that sounding like I just do a whole long list of things. I need to be more focused. Yeah. Nice to be here, sir.
Jared Simmons 01:41
Yeah, no problem. No problem. It's, it's tough when you got that many talents, man.
Colin 01:47
Probably a lot of people listening, Jared, who are going Yeah, why is this talent? Come on?
Jared Simmons 01:54
Well, we'll we'll dive right in. And we can we can get into it. What is innovation?
Colin 02:00
That's a tough question. Because it's, it's almost an in title about you know, is that word going to disappear. So we've put a different spin on it. And we've put it into the concept of playground. So for me, innovation is about creating a playground, putting the user at the center, the human user at the center. And then it's about experimentation, observation, and learning with the user in mind. So we've taken it to almost the sometimes described as a fifth level of innovation, where you're innovating with your clients in that space working. So it's not about paint by numbers, as some people describe for me, it's about the really fresh ideas, but the live fresh ideas that come through working with the real problem. So that's, that's my passion. It's about diving into the fresh problems with your customer in that space. So that to me is innovation. That's fantastic.
Jared Simmons 02:52
So many things, they I want to impact that the real problem, I want to talk about that I want to talk about what playgrounds mean, oh, and also the human user, I want to I want to unpack that as well. But tell me what you mean by the real problem. What do you see in that space?
Colin 03:07
The real promise is a couple of things in here because the first answer and it's a bit when we're doing coaching as well, the first answer you have so what's on your mind, the first answer we normally give is, well, it's this client or this problem that we've we've got but actually once you get the and what else, which is Michael bungay stanier, his coaching habit question, which I love the old question, and what else? By the time you get the fifth or six, yeah, then you get to the real issue that's on your mind. And it's the same with ideas, you know, when you get to the, the ideas thing, their novel detail is brilliant TED talk in another detail. You know, tigers are great at bears are greater. Have you ever seen a TED talk brilliant, but it's, it's about the 12th or 13th idea. And it's the real issue tends to not be the first issue that customers come up with. It is once you've gone in there, and you expose and you've started to identify and observe people in that reality, the real issue comes up. So if I just you know, for those who can remember a quick story in that there's an old neighbor of mine had a car and she had a gas consumption problem on the car. And she took it into the garbage five, six times. And each time they they tried tested and said No, there's nothing wrong with your your car. The fuel consumption is is great gas consumption. It's great. Right? So eventually one of the mechanics said I'll tell you what, Miss Brown Why don't you drive for me? Why don't I get it and you take me for a drive and so Miss Brown got and said Natalie, later boat 75 she got into the seat. She sat down and she pulled out the manual choke for those who remember them that comes down the dashboard. Yeah, which helps you to start the car right and hung her handbag on the on the now, you know, the real problem was that the car didn't have somewhere to hang her handbag on here, but but the assumption was that you know, she was driving around she was doing so Her answer to that in the business is so many times people say, you know, what's the problem is the problem is my sales people has problems. It's actually once you get into the real problem, and you observe and you gain insight, those are not really the real problems. Now, it might take you a while to get there. But right, but that's what your innovation is about is having the patience to see what the real problem is. Yeah,
Jared Simmons 05:21
man. That's a very entertaining anecdote to illustrate that point. And I love anecdotes like that. Because this is really something that's very close to the heart of people, people who've had tried to guide folks through this part of innovation. You know how hard it is to get someone to let go of that first problem? Yeah, to even get to the consideration that that is not the problem. Yeah. And so I love that you've got that sort of late analogy to talk about it, because it's the heavy lifting. It's the, you know, the grunt work of innovation work is being with someone as they walk that journey of Okay, well, yes, sales are down, but it might not be the sales team that's at fault here. Yeah, just getting that ounce of doubt slit in between the client and that first problem is a huge challenge. I'm sure you've dealt with it more than your fair share of times. I'm
Colin 06:17
sure. The Lilly patients as part of it as well, yeah. Particularly when you're on the clock as a consultant or as a coach, and people have got budgets. Yeah. Or even if they've got time, then you know that curiosity go Okay, we'll go for this one. Because this seems to be the likely problem. Yeah, that's all thing. So I'll give you a million dollars. How much are you willing to bet? So that million dollars that this is a real problem? Then you see them go? 60%? Okay, so I don't think we're ready. Let's Let's spend a bit more time and go into the, you know, it can take us two months to define the How might be statement, as we call it with clients do anything else. So
Jared Simmons 06:51
yeah, powerful. But Ah, that's the unsung portion of the work. And if you skip over that and dive right into, you know, let's get a bunch of people into a room for three days, and some posted some whiteboards and all that stuff. That's the sexy part that everybody talks about. But it's that first couple months of wrestling with the perception and reality. Yeah, and opening the mind a bit. That's the hard work of this of this work is, you talked about the human user, hmm, you made a distinction there. Tell me more about about that distinction, why add the word human to that. I'm a, you know, a
Colin 07:27
great believer in dispelling myths. And, you know, I haven't these things created in my head. So I have this, you know, thought that Amazon, Amazon is going to automate everything and that when you go to an Amazon, you know, office or warehouse, then everything is automated. So there's nobody in there. And there's people in yellow jackets, checking the robots to write this down. And I was having a very large breakfast with a friend on on Sunday, and they were telling me about Amazon. And, you know, I was so surprised that the so many humans evolved in Amazon, but that's my lack of understanding. And the fundamentals, when you come down to is, is the human, that person has a future and innovation has a future in an organization, but as massive future as a customer, and therefore putting the human at the center of whatever you do is an important bit, and I link it to purpose. Because when you think about purpose, you know, Man's Search for Meaning, other books and reading at the moment, you know, around peak performance, they always talked about, if you do it for yourself, it doesn't work. But if you do stuff for other people and have other people involved in that, then the human becomes your focus. It drives behavior. In other words, you know, why would I be more wrong, which is, you know, what I talk about, why would I be more wrong for no purpose, right? And the purpose has got to involve people. So where I'm failing in the path of a direction towards something is an important part. But I'm a strong believer that humans will influence everything purchasing, you know, even just if I go to my experience of buying myself, any products, then I would click on, I get irritated by, you know, being felt like I've been conned or being taken for a ride. I get irritated by service. I do a lot of work in the luxury service area. And when you go on, you pay a fortune in our luxury hotel pay $10,000 a night for a suite Nika, and they give you a cookie cutter service. You're like, Well hold on a second. I'm paying this amount and I'm getting the so we specialize in terms of helping leaders to think so what is the art of the possible putting the human at that? So another little story just a bit to bring to life so we were doing mystery shopping for Claridge's in London and brilliant client, and we took my daughters along and my daughters were with us and nobody knew we were coming in. We were checking in and we were too early to check in. So they said okay, we'll store your bags and we've been shopping and we bought for the girls mail. Wanna glory are out of Madagascar if you know the characters in our area of Madagascar, so yeah, this stuff toys. So we left moment and Gloria with the clarity staff and went off. And we came back later on. So it check in, they took us up to the room to check us in. And as we got towards our room, the lady was leading us that when she put a finger to her mouth and whisper to the girls who are young, I know seven or eight years old, to be quiet. So we got to the door and she opened the door, and the whole room was in darkness. They've gone to sleep maps, I was in the background go This is amazing. But who's gone to sleep in our room? Yeah. That was my adult side. But their kids were mesmerized by this girls. And then they went through to the bedroom. And what they done was they done turndown service, but they'd created a mini bed for Melman agoria. And they tuck them in at the bottom of the bed.
Jared Simmons 10:55
No way.
Colin 10:56
So they put the toys to bed. So hot girls just thought every time your hotel, what happens, they put your toys to bed, they create magic. For me, if that isn't putting the human at the center of an amazing experience that my princesses will talk about, that you know we're going to a hotel that there's no service, you don't get taken the room and our toys and not put a bed that's a human experience that you can be magnified into something special.
Jared Simmons 11:26
Unbelievable. That is that is brilliant. Such a great example and probably some extra sheets from the linen closet. Yeah, a little folding five extra minutes in the turndown service. And it's a childhood memory. It is unbelievable. Great, great story. Great story. Unfortunately, they're probably in for some some disappointment.
Colin 11:48
The caravan in Scotland that we go to at the moment isn't quite cutting it at the moment.
Jared Simmons 11:57
That's great. That is Yeah, so that that's a great sort of, you know, from that that childhood memory into playgrounds, which was the other piece I wanted to talk about from your definition of innovation. So tell me about playgrounds
Colin 12:10
was an interesting concept. Because when we first put it in, I was writing the book and I was getting this concept in my mind, the playgrounds, we realized that the playground sometimes has a negative connotation for some people, the playground was the time they were bullied. But the playground, if we take a wider connotation is the time where you're you're going to play and you're going to have fun and new release and you're whether it's going for a run in the mountains as we go into the Rockies and, and camping or whether it's it's for some people it's you know, doing a an adventure going out the seas, whether it's wind surfing, whatever it is, right. Or even in businesses, I have an ex colleague whose idea of fun and playground was going and doing the night shift at a retail store and seeing how it operated to get an understanding. But that was his passion, right? So when we think about falling out our thinking, we think about having fun, and we think about being ourselves. playgrounds tend to be where we let our hair down, we have a way of stretching ourselves. And even you know, if I was a second last person picked for a team sport at the playground, there was still that energy in that that have a go and that experience or whether it was your friends chatting and talking in the school. So we wanted to get this concept and we'd worked with actors for many years and in the spirit of giving people a playground to play with conversations. So we picked up on Whose Line is it Anyway, that comedy show where comedians interact improv with the audience, right? We took that for a stage further and said, Okay, so why don't we create a space where we get two actors up front, and we give them a scene to run through, and then we get the audience to have a remote control and play with that anxious to hear so they could play with a conversation. So whether it's Yeah, you know, a conversation to deal with a tough client or a conversation to deal with for an internal auditor dealing with an oddity, who's done something wrong, who's trying to cover up something, then we craft that playground, so you know, maybe 10 or 15 people in that space who have 10 or 15 ideas? About to have different conversations. Yeah. So why not give them the chance to go on his tag team and go Okay, you know, Frankie go up and have a go first, Frank has a dough and you know, fails miserably. Yeah. And goes, I don't know. And Loretta, in the corner goes, I have got a better idea. I'm gonna try this or somebody comes in and goes, you've been too tough. Why don't we try a bit softer approach? So that concept of immersion, where the scene is real, where you're playing, where you're falling? Are you thinking where it's almost as a group, you're starting to play with different concepts or different types of conversations. There's no right or wrong answer. But it's that spirit of somebody who says, you know, what we describe as a slap in a wet fish. Their view of conversation shouldn't be a slap of the word fish. Should we slap hard enough with the word fish? They'll get it right. Have a go And our actors are trained to, when they get a slap with a wet fish, the slap comes back with another big wet fish. And then it escalates, right? We talk about the subtleties. So there's a playground where people can feel safe. So I've got Imagine if you know all our conversations that we have problems in the world at the moment, and we had the chance to go into a room and just play. Yeah, with those conversations.
Jared Simmons 15:23
I love that concept. And I think that the playground analogy sounds out of place, initially, if you just describe the scene and what's going on. But the concept like you said, the the ethos around what it means to play and to be on the playground, and to have that freedom. And the, you know, the consequences of what I do are not permanent. Yeah. And I think that that sense of play and freedom and space without the rigidity of responsibility and structure in the traditional sense, I can see how that really creates a playground like atmosphere, as you're doing something as difficult as unpacking human interaction and dynamics. There's nothing more complex than having more than one person do something at the same time. So that I love that idea of playgrounds and the space, just as you describe the approach the physical and psychological distancing of having actors kind of play it out and let people sort of witness that, I would imagine that would be a big part of what makes the magic of that process. It isn't.
Colin 16:30
And what's interesting, though, is that because the character, the actors are so good, then I mean, we did this sort of interaction with the actors for looking at Heathrow and customer service. And we weren't getting actors to play head of customer service for Kenyan Airways, for example, right. And the actors are so good, actually, one of the actors was offered a job by British Airways, so not British Airways Heathrow to go and do this, this role, mainly because they were so good. But the actors make it so good that people don't remember the actor's name, they remember the character name. And they remember how that character made them feels. So you know, you'll see them go into a room do that. And then at lunch, they'll see their character, the actor wandering around, and they'll go, you were you were tough on me today, but I loved it. I loved it. But because they've had play, and never released, right, so I think there's a reality to you got to get into there. But there's a play. If I can give you another example, it's really powerful for here's one of the things I would always encourage people who are running businesses to do is I was advised to get an advisory board for my business. So I'd struggled with my business. And you know, I'd gone through a number of business partners, and then somebody said, Look, as experienced point gems chosen, experienced by a great Canadian organization, he said, you know, she should get an advisory board, and he gave me a bit of advice. So, rather than going to get advisors who had already been advisors for somebody else, we said, okay, so how could we create a playground to create an advisory board with people who had never been advisors before? interest now in the UK, we call them non executive directors. Okay, let's go for senior people to get to the point where they sit on a corporate board, aha, Barclays or whatever else they have. They have some legal accountability. But they're sat there and the reading board papers, and they're revising, and they have a governance responsibility on the business, right. But to get to that stage, where do they play? Where do they practice? So we think in right, and we could identify three people, you have to come in, yeah, who have never done this role before. But they're going to they're going to play with us developing it. And the other thing is great for me, and this is goes back to the innovation pieces, leave your ego and expertise at the door, is we don't know what the right version of advisory board work is in the future. And, and maybe we're missing a real trick. So why not give them the opportunity to craft the role for us and us to play and see what it is. And it's amazing, we talk about two types, there's noses in fingers in we have where the noses in the business, and they can play with our fingers, and they can do stuff for noses getting is out. So we played with the concept of noses in fingers out to start with and worked at, but that was a test. Now there's a few fingers coming in every so often. So there might be a bit of a hybrid role that we're working on. But we've been working with that. I think it's about two to three years now. So in theory, a lot of the stuff they're doing might have been invented before but the way they're doing it about growing whilst doing a role that is, you know, affecting people's lives, roles. Jobs. Money is a powerful piece and it's a great way of putting the human at the center of the experiments of the issue. Yeah, what's the real issue? Why do advisors fail to succeed in the future and play with it? So that's another example.
Jared Simmons 19:53
Brilliant, as a great example, I really like how you took something that is normally extremely parochial, and extremely It's something that you don't experiment with. You can do all these crazy things with your business in this sandbox over here. But then you need to go get a an advisory board needs to look like this and have this many people and they need to do these things. And they've got to be this old. Exactly. Yeah, it's amazing how technical the advice you get for that specific part of running a business. Nowhere else that someone say, yeah, you need a person with this background, that background, this background, that background, and yeah, age, experience, all this stuff is such a narrow box. And so I just love that you just completely obliterated that box and use your own approach to fit for purpose solution.
Colin 20:41
If I ever go to court, though, Jared, I'm not sure I'm going to play around with that, you know, I've never, you know, or I'm under the knife. And so but again, how does surgeons learn how to be great surgeons, and the risky business is a conference that does this, it talks about how we psychologically safety, we can get people to make experiment, have a go at things and learn. But there you go, you're talking people's lives. How do they do that? So I'm joking. But there's a truth to that. Yeah, we get our good surgeons, we've got to allow them to practice. Yeah,
Jared Simmons 21:14
yes, we talked with a brilliant surgeon, I want to say Episode 14, Dr. Maria Luffy, had madariaga. She does transplants and just the joy in her voice talking about what she does. And she plays music while she's in the operating room. And her goal is to make sure that everybody is excited about the healing that is about to take place in the room. Yeah. And just that mindset of asleep, I wouldn't call it play but a freedom Hmm. And of kind of joy in what she does. And all I could see and think about while she was talking about this was the terror and the dress, I would be feeling and she expands in the moment. And I would I think I ended in a moment where someone's life is hanging in the balance. I think I would contract. Yeah. And I think there's, you know, this element of as you're talking about the playground, I think there's this element of that. Probably that exists for people in every domain. I can I can imagine there's an analogue for that and every, every domain for the right person.
Colin 22:14
Absolutely. And how we get leaders to understand how to create it. But wouldn't it be great if you turned over the work and said, we're going to play today? Yeah. But you know, everywhere we go, yeah. But But you know, might be a preview of my next book is how to create playground, I just want to go and just explore different organizations and say, so what are you doing to create playgrounds? what's what's working, you know, in my day was having a basketball hoop in the office was was playing table tennis, right? putting green, putting green, there's nothing more annoying than trying to do a conference call in an office with somebody playing ping pong and background. And that might be your playground, but it's my work in a hurry. So so I want to do some experiments about about what works and what the options are to do playgrounds, but that's a classic space for innovation. Yeah.
Jared Simmons 23:06
If I'm a business owner, and I had an office of 2025 people, and then COVID hit, and everybody went home, and only 12 of those people came back to the office. Yep. And another 12 are in London, or they're in Aberdeen, or they are wherever they are, how do I think about playgrounds in that environment?
Colin 23:27
I love that, because I've just been writing a proposal for a client today just on that fact. And if you look back, you know, 12 to 18 months ago, and we were standing at a carousel in Phoenix, Arizona, just about to go to conference nerves, declared a global pandemic. And we were face to face as a business. So all our work was face to face. And I'd always been one of these people say our work will never be done virtually. Yeah. And then suddenly, it was like, okay, we're gonna do this now. And I think the key thing for me is to create a playground that a lot of the work that happens is leaders go away, and they say, Okay, we've got a problem. I'm gonna go away. So carry on as if you're you were here. And we'll we'll solve the problem for you and come back. Yeah. If you think about what's happened over the last 12 to 18 months is that we've got a view into different people's lives worlds through the virtual, right, we've got a view into the productivity can be increased through virtual work. Yeah, we've also got an insight into the pain points of you know, young families who have to work at home with kids and everything else. So we've got, we've got insights into pain points and successes all the way through. But we've also got a new contract that we need to be talking with, with people about how we engage and if we've had increased productivity. I mean, Accenture is one of our clients, and they paid a bonus to this stuff because their performance has gone through the roof through Kobe,
Jared Simmons 24:53
right? But there's
Colin 24:54
few people I know in there who've really suffered through because of the work life balance of life bounds So I'm a great believer that the playground and this is where design thinking gets. Maybe it's not a playground, but maybe it's a way of sailing the ship out of the harbor and saying, we're going to head to rougher seas as a leader, which is the other concept I have in my mind, which is sometimes, which is we don't want to go back to where we are. Yeah, we want to go to a new place. But could that new place be a bit of good stuff here that we've learned in the 12 to 18? months? the good stuff? I mean, I'm a big hugger. I miss hugs. Yeah. So I want human contact. The first time I met my CEO for six months, the longest hug? Yeah, to do that. Yeah. So we want that connection. But we want to also just learn from everybody else who might not be a hugger? Yeah, who wants something different than they've actually valued the fact that I'm on the other side of the screen and not hugging them? When I meet them? So how do we bring all of that together, but the key thing is, unless we involve our people in redefining and innovating to craft it, then they're only renting that role, they're not owning it. And if you know if you think about a rental house and friend in Australia gave me this and he's probably gonna want royalties, because I keep using it. But, you know, he talks about you think about when you're renting your house, you don't take care of it. Yeah, you'll always ask the landlord to do the repairs, you've got permission and sort of, I'm waiting for my next rental. If you own the house, you start to look after it, you're worried about the pain, the deck or the maintenance of it. And that therefore, it's about saying, so you now own your roles come with us on this journey? How do we craft to be an inclusive piece, and not just for any tick box exercise? The real inclusion is how do we make this a welcoming, caring, innovative, human centric organization, that's going to be a place where we want to thrive, that might be the launch of my career to go out into different areas or be successful. So that for me is where we are with playgrounds. So think about break down five things and think about a pulse in the morning. 915 to 945 is our pulse I get together as a team in the morning, when it's hybrid. Yep. Does the room dominate. So we've got virtual reality as a business. So I know that Accenture are starting to experiment where every leader, whether we're in the office, or at home, will put on a virtual reality headset, and they will go into a virtual reality room with whiteboards to do that. Check it.
Jared Simmons 27:26
everybody's on the same playing field even if you're in the room. Yeah, as virtual environment that is fascinating. So how would you play with that? It's so it's out of the box? Yeah, literally. Yeah. Both the headsets on and the person
Colin 27:40
was talking to me about that. She said she went and bought headsets and our son was in Israel young son in the room, and he was lying in his bed. And he said, what you doing a VR headset? He said, Oh, I'm watching Netflix. You're watching Netflix a headset said yeah, not only doing that, but um, I've got a log fire on. And I'm sad with a view out of Canada out of a log cabin. Yeah. So I'm watching Netflix in a completely different environment. Now. is great for me. But I would never have thought about I would say, Well, okay, I'm gonna trip over something. So rethinking experiments in creating a playground and thinking okay, today, so we're going to be in Canada for our meetup. But it's virtual level of play field.
Jared Simmons 28:20
Yeah. Oh, brilliant. Brilliant. That is that's a that's fantastic. I wonder if it's just the nature of, you know, your experience and your background and your way of thinking that gives you that sort of immediate positive sort of reframing around this challenge and the opportunities. But I do think that is critical to moving forward. But you immediately went to the, you know, the kind of opportunities and the way forward. And I think that's for me, as a innovation, you know, explore, I think it's important that we continue as we're right now. You know, in June of 2021, over a year into this global pandemic. People are still using the word back more than they are using other words. Yeah. I just wonder when that's going to flip. And when people are going to realize, no, it's been, you know, 1516 months of this, there is no back. Yeah, just the park that word, we're not going back. And normal is the other word that still keeps a lot of real estate in people's minds. And I noticed you did not use that phrase, either. You talked about where we're headed forward. Yeah, what the world will look like in the future, and attached no judgment to it and attach no kind of relevance, no connection to the previous world because they're gone. So I really, really love the way you bring that up.
Colin 29:44
That's a learned behavior. Jared said, I'm a Scottish Scottish Presbyterian background
29:50
means that if something good happens, something bad happens. Okay? But I've
Colin 29:54
put a mantra into my head which is I don't do history and therefore histories, you know, If you go to Taleb and his work on anti fragile, all the scientists in the world can look back and try and give us all the evidence to say what the future is going to be. But actually, you can't predict the future. So you can make yourself anti fragile, you can make itself and even the Center for resilience redefine the definition of resilience to be the ability to thrive in chaos, basically, its brain. And therefore, if you think about that, that's that's the beauty of innovation. You know, there's that scene in Monty Python, whether to poor people or dumb in the modern, they're getting nuggets out and the Kings riding past that the code is so all that goes, a king says what? Why is he a king, because he's not covered in dirt. That's the spirit of the dirt and getting down and leaving Rio and expertise at the door and playing. And getting in there and leaving history and finding nuggets. And what we're going through, which can help us in the future? is innovation. Yeah, that's the the pure sense of it. So let's, let's focus on the future. But I think that for all those people who are suffering from mental health issues, there's a lot of work that we need to do I meditate every day, I'm doing a course called positive intelligence, which is amazing. To ensure that my judge, my saboteurs don't get in the way of me being positive to the future.
Jared Simmons 31:18
Yeah. That's such an important statement. Thank you for for saying that. Before we shift gears a bit, I want to come back to the the comment about leaders taking this ship out of the harbor. Hmm. You alluded to it briefly there, it caught my ear. I wonder if you talk a little bit more about that.
Colin 31:35
Yeah, I do a lot of work with leaders and a lot of organizations and my experiences, a lot of leaders and organizations just sail the ship around the harbor. So they're, they're playing a leadership, they're playing it sailing, they wrap it up as management, they do the performance management, they wait till the end of year to give feedback to the team. You know, they wait to get their goals passed down. They wait till the competitors give them their goals by saying we're doing this. So they go. And therefore for me, the analogy goes about and it part of it was inspired by when I was thinking about this, but also my experiences the hero's journey. Yes, yeah. So thinking Lord of the Rings, big fan, Frodo and Sam leaving the village, they gather their group together, they have a guy, Gandalf and they go off and they do things but the ship and getting out the hero's journey means that they need to go into the rougher seas to stretch themselves. That's where they will get the real learning and this great book that we were just briefly talking before we came on about peak performance with stress and ress stress and rest equals growth. So I was inspired when I was putting this together by the story of Chatham, where it's the film with Chris Pine, where he rescues a crew from a boat on past the Outer Banks of a cape cod away. And I was the analogy of going out past the Outer Banks and the leader going into the seas, the rougher seas and losing his compass, all the things the analogies and they're losing the compass are being told not to. And those things about you know, almost breaking the rules stretching the boundaries is the analogy I would have for leaders before you're disrupted classic phrase before you disrupted disrupt yourself, right. But as a leader our definition of it is agitating for the future. So you're not doing your role as a leader if you are not agitating for the future and the only way you're going to add to teach is a degree of stress not too much right but a degree of stress. Then there's a degree of rest which is going to that point of reflection and you know that the ozone viral who wrote think like a rocket scientist he would say I hate fail, fail fast as a mantra and there's a bit in there because unless you're failing and reflecting the reflections the key bit and then learning then you're not you're not growing so right Sally sip in the hardened into the rougher seas. And I add a bit of ad lib onto that and say you know come back with barnacles on your but you haven't because unless you feel you've got money, but you haven't done it unless you've felt that tension out. And you know, as as cyclists unless I've cycled my that bit further unless I'd looked at my system, my core, how I cycle listen less. I've worked and tinkered on my nutrition before I go there a leader tinkering with our systems to improve their performance, the team, then unless they're doing that, I don't think they've got their license deleted. I think they're playing at it. They're they're wasting a lot of people's time to work for them. They're either getting in their way, or they're not releasing their full potential. So that's a strong statement. But that's that's my belief. Yeah,
Jared Simmons 34:41
it's refreshingly direct. Yes. I like it. I like it a lot. That's important. It's important because it doesn't get much play. It's not fun to hear and so people don't say it much. Anytime someone can can make a statement like that, it's important to sort of start to try to balance the equation. So I think that's, that's, that's brilliant and super important. I wanted to ask about cycling. Hmm. Most of the people who do innovation work do this, you know, entrepreneurs out there say to folks, they have a hobby mine is, you know, I played jazz piano and was saying, Oh, I like your hobbies will make you live longer. But I love the intricacies of learning the theory and executing it and the improvisational aspects of once you learn the theory and applying it to express yourself and things like that, what does cycling give you?
Colin 35:36
This is fascinate because I started as a triathlete. And that was where my real insight was. Because I you know, I'm not a small bloke, and therefore, I'm pounding the pavement and pounding the road. So
Jared Simmons 35:49
a lot of punishment.
Colin 35:51
Yes, a lot of punishment your system. And so therefore, I started thinking about three disciplines I start, right, I need to be a good sort of, I need to be a good cyclist, I need to be a good runner. And then I need to think that I'm going to do a half Ironman man, which is my goal, my original was an Ironman, but I realized that but a half Ironman, so I did you know, my first half Ironman, and I realized there had to be resilient survive, but I also had to subdue my ego because my competitive side my ego was getting in the way to think, Wow, I can't do it. You know, my first one was eight hours, you know, but that was a tough one up hills and everything else was the victim coming in. You know, it was in the latest, it's cold lake and Lake District is a mountainous region in the UK. Wow. However, I had to realize that all I was doing was ensuring that all my systems were, were in play. And I started to play with different systems. I started playing with diet, I started to go up dairy. So I was tinkering with that. So that gave me this concept of fit to lead ranking with the diets. Then I started doing a meditation because there's a lady of cycle with me who is just brilliant. She cuz I used to go as a hill coming up, you know, there's a hill. And she would go, nah, he gotta love the hill. So she got the hill, she sped up, but she just went love it. There's a hell she said, I've told myself to go. I love hills. So now what I'm heading towards the hill, might not look it but I'm saying my head. I love hills. I love hills so that that mindset piece came in. So actually, as you built on all the diet, the mindset, the fitness, the core strengths, when you realize your gut, your head, are the two things that impact massively in your life. Then you put a sport and the stress and the pressure and recovery and sleep and all of these things, then put that into leadership. And think about the systems that a leader has accountability for on how subtle variations in those systems either deficits or additions, they have a bad day and they walk in grumpy as hell they bite the head off somebody how that impacts the system psychological. Yeah. And I started to think that so bit like that I love the concept of jazz because I love improv but, but that ability, no, you know, no plan survives first contact with the enemy when you're in there. And you're all prepared for your spontaneity session, the thing that will keep you going is your core strength, your mindset, you're fit to lead pieces. So if you can combine jazz with cycling, you sort of got two analogies you could add in to say those are probably two core skills for leaders being able to tap dance and improv. Yeah, but having the antifragility of all the systems being in the right order to be able to adapt when they're facing whatever they're facing. Exactly.
Jared Simmons 38:33
Well. I love the loving the hills. For me, the piano equivalent will be loving the hand and piano exercises that are they extremely, extremely boring. Yeah. But if you ever want to be interesting on you know, you have to be boring. Yeah. So I thank you for that. I always get so much out of how people like you approach your hobbies. And thank you for sharing that.
Colin 38:57
No, I've already got whiplash in my mind from your jazz thing. It's really whiplash. And I'm just wondering if you're going through that and the bleeding hands and oh, my goodness,
Jared Simmons 39:06
get your dog like, Oh, no. I haven't been able to look at JK Simmons the same way since that movie. My favorite actors. He's brilliant. An amazing job. Yeah. So any advice for future innovators out there?
Colin 39:21
Yeah, it's an interesting one, because I have one of our advisory board is Andrew Webster. So if I had somebody to come in and talk about innovation, be my mentor and my guide, and he's very humble. He's a humble Canadian guy who would always say, Well, you've given me more than I've given you. And we have this conversation go, No, no, you've given all that. But he just has this ability in his mind to think about innovation as transformation. Oh, it's interesting because I know that a previous guests on your show was Heather. And she works with the same tools and and this combination of innovation and change is a massive of why, and the Andrew would talk about this as transformation. And if you think about transformation, then for me, innovation is great, but does it land in a system and whether it succeeds in a system? Tim Brown was at a talk, and I got to ask my question, I said, we go and teach all these people innovation design thinking, and then they get back to work. And it just doesn't work. Yeah. And I said, so what would be the advice for organizations, and he said, to treat your organization like a series of projects. So if you think about project work, how we do that. So my, my big bit of advice is two things. We think about it and transformation. But think about in projects, we've actually changed our mantra in our business, rather than strategic goals. We've got strategic projects, what are the systems that allow us to be successful in strategic projects, but the projects almost give people almost a finite, this is the beginning, and then it's going to be delivered. And then we're on to the next project, the next project. And therefore I can sprint through this, I can do a sprint here, I can do paint by numbers over here. So two things. One is transformation. And the second thing is thinking projects, even whether it's your career, your hobby, just think project structure, break it down in that concept. And I think that's that's the future for me as I think you go back to the hybrid world. And you think about the project structure and how you might get people working at home and in work, there's going to be touch points where there needs to come together, then there's project work, they go off separately. To do that. We'll have to have collaboration tools, but the project focus for innovation, and to get innovation to succeed in organizations is the other bit I would add in there. Yeah. Oh,
Jared Simmons 41:39
that's fantastic. Thank you for that advice, and apply that myself. So selflessly file that away. The time just flew by. Thank you so much column for for joining us today. It was a genuine pleasure. I really appreciate you making the time. Jared, it
Colin 41:55
was a real pleasure to be here. And thank you. I'm going to go off to watch whiplash and I'm going to be thinking about you doing what is the term you said in the jazz? Yeah.
Jared Simmons 42:04
Oh, playing playing hands. Yeah, I'll send you I'll send you a link to that book. So you can see how boring those things are. Lovely to talk to you today. All right. Take care.
Jared Simmons 42:21
We'd love to hear your thoughts about this week's show. You can drop us a line on Twitter at OUTLASTT LLC, or follow us on LinkedIn where we're OUTLAST Consulting. Until next time, keep innovating. Whatever that means.