Episode 117: Master Informal Learning with Patrick Cootes

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Patrick Hoots, welcome to the Club Capital Leadership Podcast.

It's a pleasure to be here.

Excited to have you. So we always start on our podcast with background and origin story. I think that whenever prior to us talking, I read about your story and I thought, you know what, I think he's got a really interesting approach about how he came to entrepreneurism. And so why don't you kind of take people back a little bit and bring us to present day?

Yeah, that'll be a pleasure. So I should explain first of all, as I mentioned when we were chatting before the recording, that I still think of myself as a teacher. I spent nearly 18 years in the high school classroom and I was responsible for the last couple of years, what would be, I think, K-11 and 12 in the American system. So I was responsible for getting these 17- and 18-year-old kids ready for whatever adult life came next. And for my students, more than half of them, that meant university, and, and then for the rest, of course, it was the workplace and work-based training. And throughout my career as the head of that, those last 2 years of British High School, I was acutely aware of the fact that both the system itself was not equipping people well, either for university or for adult life, And also the university system that I was handing them over to was itself also the product of historical forces which were wildly anachronistic, wildly out of date and out of touch with the modern world. So I always had this feeling like this work that I'm doing with a few hundred kids per year, I was limited in the scope of the people I could reach. To the people that I personally taught. But I was also frustrated by the sense that I was helping to grease the mechanism of a machine that itself was kind of broken. And this came to a head back in the summer of 2019. I met my co-founder, a serial entrepreneur, some 10 years my junior, very excited and very excitable guy with big ideas about how he wanted to change the world with his next company, which he wanted to be in education. And he was introduced to me as a guy who could put him straight on some of the basics about education and learning. And something kind of magical happened in that first meeting because instead of telling him, hey, you're wrong about this and you're wrong about that, and him thanking me for my time and muttering under his breath, what a waste of time, he got more and more excited. He was like, this is somebody who knows about education and learning from firsthand. And he wanted to know more. And, you know, we got together for a second and then a third meeting, and I gradually began to pick up on his enthusiasm and his excitement and realize that this is somebody who wants to find out that he's wrong in order to stop being wrong as soon as he possibly can.

Hmm.

And that to me was just like a transformational moment. Because if you think how many times in your life have you met somebody who actually wanted to find out they were wrong? Rare quality. So I got really excited and I threw my lot in with this guy. And I was the first person to join as a co-founder of Mindstone. And we're setting out on this mission to surface and accelerate the world's informal learning. And over the last couple of years, our team has formed around us and we've built our first product, put it out to market, pivoted a couple of times, screwed up a whole bunch of times, which I'll be happy to talk to you about. And all along the way, I have been on this rocket ship of learning, which is a strange thing to say, you know, as a teacher, you get really good at helping people to learn. But by my 18th year in the profession, I think I was getting a little stale. And something, something really transformative for me was just being in an environment where I was a complete beginner around some of the smartest people I've ever met and just learning at this fierce pace. It felt like a rocket ship. And acquiring the skills to become a co-founder, to become an entrepreneur, to become a product manager, a head of learning, and a leader within my little team, my little family. So that's my story of how we got to here.

There's so many things I want to unpack with that. First thing that comes to mind is, I like to say business is hard and gets harder, right? Business entrepreneurship. Well, you chose a really good time to decide to launch a company, spring of 2020, that I think everybody will long remember what happened during that period of time. And so not only were you standing up, this new opportunity, but you were also doing it in the face of a global pandemic and everything that came with that. I guess I want to ask you around first, this idea that you have been learning, and I know myself, I mean, you can see all the books behind me and podcasts that I listen to and programs that I've invested in. I've invested literally hundreds of thousands of dollars, no joke, into my own personal and professional development. But I have to tell you, there's been a lot of that, that I've invested in that I did not get any transformation from because— and it wasn't because of what I was getting, it was because of me. What is the thing that you have seen for you yourself, and maybe, and then obviously for others that you've helped, about not just learning information and getting ideas and putting yourself in that environment but actually doing something with it.

Okay, so there's a couple of really important points there, and you've already touched upon the central thing, which is that learning is not just the acquisition of facts or information. Learning is a transformative process. You incorporate the facts and information into yourself. You hang it on the context of your prior knowledge and your prior skill set. And then if it's to mean a damn thing, you apply it. If you don't apply it, well, you might as well not have learned it. And that for me has been the reason why my journey at Mindstone has been so transformative and so much of a rocket ship is because from day one, we had a team of initially me, my co-founder Josh, we brought on a chief technical officer. So there were 3 of us on day one. And that meant I had to do everything. And if there was something I didn't know how to do, I had to figure out how to do it. And I could ask people, but we were a small team. So I had to be super mindful about asking things that I could find out some other way. So I was thrown back on my own resources to a great extent. And of course you use Google and you find out the facts as best you can, and then you apply it, you screw up, you discover in the screw up what you should have done.

Yeah.

And from there, the second and the third iteration, that's where the real power comes in because you're taking something that is partly formed and misshapen and polishing it and turning it into a machine that works. And this kind of throws my mind back to my days at high school where I would help kids write their letters of application to university. I used to say to them, like, give me a piece of crap and I can help you make it great. But until you give me something, I can't do a damn thing for you because I can't help you improve a thing that's just a blank sheet of paper. Firstly, of course, it'd be cheating, but more importantly, there's no transformation there. So I think that's a great part of that workplace learning for me has been the application and the self-reliance and also ownership of your screw-ups. 'Cause we're gonna screw up inevitably. And I mentioned about my co-founder Josh's mindset of wanting to find out he's wrong. A really closely related part of that is wanting to find out that you screwed up and wanting to screw up fast so you can learn from that and iterate. Of course, that's the tech mindset is get it out there, get it in front of users. And iterate upon it to improve and get ever closer approximations of the right feature or product.

It's been said, I don't know where I heard it from, but if you want to be, do. You can't iterate off of a blank sheet of paper, as you said. I mean, you can't improve off of that. You have to do. I mean, everything— this podcast, I mean, I could have watched a year worth of YouTube videos, um, on how to start a podcast. And, uh, I guess maybe my Tim Colby quick start just got me to say like, I don't know. And, you know, the first 2 episodes I recorded on GarageBand on my Mac, you know, I mean, it just was, you know, and it wasn't very good. And, uh, and so, you know, you, you just, you learn by doing, not by just taking in information. You ultimately have to do something and apply it. I don't think I was going to ask you this question, but I think that you're really just— your transformation from teaching high school to now entrepreneurship is really unique for me to ask this question to. I don't know if somebody has before. Um, in school, you know, my kids right now are 11 and 7, so they're in rising 6th grader, rising 2nd grader.

Yep.

Well, my son Coop, he gets, he gets in trouble if he cheats.

Right?

He gets in trouble. He gets trouble if he reaches over and looks at somebody else's paper and doesn't do the work himself because they want to make sure that he's a— he's learning and applying the information. But boy, when you get to entrepreneurship, when you just mentioned, hey, I can go to my co-founder and I can listen to hear what he is saying and learn from him, you're rewarded. You're rewarded for finding and seeking the resources. There's no, oh wait a minute, you can't You can't cheat, you know, in school, but in business it's encouraged. And so how do you kind of— and it's not cheating, obviously, but it's learning from other people and in some cases bringing other people, literally equity, into the fold to help you. Your thoughts on that?

Absolutely. Well, first of all, I mean, it's so, so true. And this is something that the great British educationalist Ken Robinson said that that if you copy from somebody else in school, it's cheating, but copy from somebody else in the workplace, that's collaboration. It's completely true. I would dig into that a little bit because, you know, the thing that they're trying to capture in school is actually two things, right? There's the, do you know the piece of information? And also, do you know how to do the thing? Do you know how to do the piece of mathematics? Do you know how to conjugate the verb? Or whatever the task was, there's a how and there's also a what. Now, in the workplace, we don't give a damn about the what, because the what is information. And in an age of information abundance, the value of, you know, in what year did the invasion of this country happen, or what is the name of the molecule that performs this function, Those things are simple facts and Google can tell you. That's worthless. So then what was worth— worth— what's valuable in the workplace is the how. Now, to the extent that a school is saying don't copy off your peers because getting the right answer but not understanding how is missing out on the learning, To that extent, the school is damn right. But you know where the school is damn wrong is when your kid reaches out to their peer to say, "Show me how you did that." Because that is exactly the mindset we want to encourage. I should mention, by the way, my twins are just turning 7 in a couple of weeks' time. So I've got a parent very much the same age as your youngest. They are in exactly this mindset right now. They live to please the teacher. They want to get the gold star. They want praise and they want to do, you know, whatever they're told really, because they want to stay out of trouble and be praised. And this is something everybody wants. But we've got to make sure that we're praising the right things and that we can tell the difference between, hey, you copied the answer, but you didn't learn a damn thing. Or you copied the how and hey, keep doing that for the rest of your life. It's a great strategy.

So good. I'm glad I asked that question to you. All right, so let's talk about knowledge management. So I happen to have Chris Ronzio, who is the CEO of Trainual, fantastic software that helps businesses to be able to really curate all of their information. He just came out with a great book called The Business Playbook about how do you capture policies and people and processes, etc. Let's just talk of regarding this is how we sell, this is how we onboard, this is how we do all these things. And so all of that can kind of get into knowledge management. And I happen to be kind of focused on how does the company do it, not just necessarily— we can talk later about receiving information from the outside in. So my question is, Patrick, is it's not It's important to be able to curate it into one place. Obviously Trainual allows that, but it's more, way more important, which is what we're discussing, that our teams and our employees actually learn the thing so that they actually can use it to then go and be better at their job. They can sell more clients, they can service customers better, they can give really a first-class experience. I think you have some really good great insight into mastering knowledge management and actually application to our company.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean, is there anything more tragic? And this is more and more software nowadays allows you to do this. You open up the history of a document and you see that it has sat there untouched for the last 2 years. Right. So maybe you've got some policy, you've got some company values document, you've got some, you know, how we learn as a team, document and you open up the history and you realize, well, this thing is not working because nobody's looked at it.

Yeah, I have to say one thing, you're so right. The only thing that the digital aspect has done differently is that before it literally sat on a shelf and it was dust on it and we just wiped the dust off and you realize nobody's touched it for like 2 years. So that's the equivalent of that.

Oh yeah, absolutely. I remember the first school I taught at, back then I was a history teacher and I walked into the staff room and they had shelves going up like 12, 13 feet in the air all around the staff room. And the head of department said to me, "We've got resources. We've got so many things to help you teach with." And she pointed up to shelves which were 12 feet in the air. And I was like, "Nobody is ever going to look at this. You're insane." You're so pleased about having all of this documentation, but you've put it in a place nobody can get to it. Obviously, that teaching example is kind of a silly one, but we do the same thing very often by putting, putting our policies and our processes in some out-of-the-way place and don't not make them a living document. So to cut to the chase, I want to talk a little bit about, about how you bring those documents to life and how you live them. And there's, there's a couple of components to that, right? There's the culture part, which is the way in which your values are lived by the team and exemplified through leadership. And leadership have to embody the values and, and follow the policies and point people to the policies whenever they're not followed, um, and build, uh, culture by doing. And there is no shortcut, to my knowledge, for that. There isn't any way that you can build culture except by doing culture, not by writing it down in a document and leaving it somewhere. Then on a, on a knowledge management level, how do you bring documents to life? I think that my company Mindstone has done a lot of work on the annotation and interaction with documents. So we've got smart digital highlighters, comments, flashcards, and note-taking that sits side by side with a document. —so that— and all of this exists in a shared workspace. So if you're familiar with Google Docs, you know this flow, right? And I don't want this just to be a sales pitch for my company. You can do a lot of this with Notion or with Google Docs, this idea of having the dialogue sit alongside the resource so that incoming members of staff, new hires, for example, can see not only the source of truth, but also the conversation around the source of truth that informs it. And this puts me in mind of an ancient Jewish Talmudic tradition where the Talmud, the teachings of the Jewish teachers, the rabbis, is then surrounded by further commentary of questions about it. Well, what about in this situation? And well, we think in this situation that. And then around the commentary is a second layer of further commentary, commentary on the commentary. And this is a way in which the Jewish Talmudic tradition has kept the original document alive by interacting and engaging with it. And that sounds, I know, a very highfaluting and somewhat pretentious example, but we do the same thing when we engage with, with content as part of our teams. And of course, digital platforms such as my own, Mindstone, but also, uh, our competitors and fellow travelers like Notion are making that easier and making it easier to ensure that the, uh, knowledge and understanding and process does not get siloed in one brain or in one team or in one department. So I think that we've got massive opportunity at this time with the tools that are becoming available to us.

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Way more than a CPA firm. We've got massive opportunity at this time with the tools that are becoming available to us to disseminate culture and values and process and knowledge and ensure that it's engaged with. One of the things, just to give a simple example that we did, was build in the facility where if you are making your way through a resource, as soon as you finish the resource, a couple of questions about that resource is automatically added to your backlog and they become tasks that you're just, you need to answer those questions. Now, of course, we are a learning platform, so we use our own product all the time. But if you're not using our platform, there's a lot of other platforms out there which allow you to do similar things. And I've mentioned Notion and Google Docs has a lot of this functionality too. But it's all about how you apply it and the discipline that you put in place at the top to ensure that people really do engage with it and not just leave it to gather dust.

Context matters. Context matters. Yeah. Couple things kind of come to mind is I'll add even one to that, that for me, the experience that I love to be able to get things out of my head is with my iPad and with GoodNotes. Oh yeah, and it was transformative, uh, when I realized that I could share and collaborate on a GoodNotes document with my team because it's effectively the way that I like to process things is on a whiteboard or on a flip chart. Okay, I like to do that, that sort of brainstorming. And so what ended up happening was that I would create a document and then I would end up being going out to someone else as a PDF, well then it just, it breaks down the ability to collaborate on that. The second thing I want to say is I have mentioned on the podcast that a couple years ago I wrongly and proudly said that I set a goal out that I was going to read 36 books in the year and then I read those 36 books. Well, that sounds great. But I read a lot of books just to read a lot of books so that I could hit the goal as opposed to actually getting transformation. The number of books that I have read this year, like actual new books, is probably less than 5. But I have read a couple books in particular already 3 times, 3 times this year alone. And every time I go back, I was just reading one this morning on my iPad, I went back and I said, how did I not pick this up on the first 2 times that I read the book. And so it was just almost like, again, I know that's a little bit of a different way to consider it, but it ends up becoming context and where I was at the time to actually hear the information. Because I read something this morning that I thought, man, this is, this is huge. Well, I read the same thing 2 other times, and it didn't resonate with me at all like it does today.

Okay, listen, I got— I'm gonna have to ask you, maybe after we finish recording, I want to know what you've read that's been transformative. I also want to tell you something about our process. Now, in our company, we have a book club. And in the time it takes for me to read a book, usually I only finish a book in a month. And we'd have our book club once a month. So our next book club session is Tony Fadell's Build. And our book club session is tomorrow afternoon. And you know what? I finished reading that damn thing this morning. So I've only just made it. But in the time it took me to read it once, one of my colleagues has read it 3 times and he's taken his notes. And when I go to that meeting with him, he's going to pull out, well, this is what I noticed, and this is what I noticed, and what did you think about this? And I will bring my perspective, and so will the other 4 or 5 people who have volunteered to join that book club within the team. And that way, together, we hold each other to account, because if I show up and I haven't finished it, I am going to be really embarrassed as a co-founder of the company. Secondly, we bring to the table our own insights and perspectives and we contextualize. And I wanted to mention, by the way, you were talking about how when you read it the last time, you didn't get the same thing out of it because of that learning context. And that is a massive insight from the science of learning. The context is king. The things you already know, the place that you were when you encountered this new thing, whether it was morning, afternoon, whether you were hungry or whether you were tired, who you were with, how you felt, all of these things define the parameters of your engagement with and your capacity to hang that new piece of information onto the weave of your prior knowledge. So that's what you found a hack for doing that, which is just read it a couple times, 2 or 3 times, and in each time you're giving yourself additional opportunities to find context. I've got the strategy I'm using, which is read it once but talk to people about it. And through a variety of strategies— taking notes again— if you can stop every time you have that insight and actually do something with it, it's far more likely to be transformative than, you know, you get to the end of a book and you're like, well, I agreed with everything he said, but I don't know if I can remember a word of it. And that can happen.

Alright, so this may be helpful for somebody because I'm actually— this, this is good because I think that we are talking about something for our businesses that really matters here because you touched on a few things. So I will tell you exactly what I was doing. And then you can possibly give me the science behind it. And then you can apply it to maybe outside the context of a book and more to the context inside of knowledge within our companies. Okay, so here's what I was actually doing this morning. First of all, the reason I'm rereading books is because I heard someone say, if I cannot teach or feel like I could teach someone else the content of the book, I don't understand the book well enough. And I thought, okay, that resonates with me because there's actually books I really love, but I could not go back and actually try to teach the information off of that.

Okay, that's number one.

Number two, what I was doing this morning is on my iPad I had Kindle up, I, you know, I had split screen. So on the right side was the book, on the left, left side is GoodNotes. Okay, which is where I'm taking all my notes. The third thing I'm doing, I was listening to the book on audio, Audible. Yep. Yep. So I'm speeding through the book a lot faster. Okay. I'm at— I was at 2x speed. So I'm going through the book, and then I would pause it on my AirPods. This is at like 5:30 in the morning when I'm doing this. And then I would go and write out like, OK, here's these points, 1, 2, 3. And then that's how I was keeping up with it.

OK, this is fantastic. To your first point about you haven't really understood a book until you can teach it, I don't have anything much to say about that apart from that I do agree that teaching is a great way to learn. To really crystallize and communicate an idea allows you to get to the very bottom of it. So that's a great practice. And of course, if you're writing good notes for your team, that is exactly the kind of opportunity to teach, to crystallize, and to really bottom out your understanding. So yes, yes, yes, 100%. Let's just talk about your setup. It's interesting, you've got your notes on the left and the book on the right. Most people would have it the other way around, and on my platform Mindstone, the text would be on the left and the book would be on the right. So I— the notes would be on the right, sorry. But either can work, obviously. But the movement, the reason why we set it up from with the source on the left and the output on the right is because in the English language you read from left to right. So there's a directionality of transfer. That makes sense. That's the way, that's why we set it up that way. But it obviously could work the other way around. But think about this, just to prove this.

I know if you're on YouTube, you can see this, that literally that's what it was.

Oh, that's beautiful. That's beautiful. Yeah.

I'm going to switch it around. I'm actually literally going to switch it around right now because this— that's kind of interesting because I think, I think you're right. And honestly, I think it was laziness. So whenever I swiped up on my iPad and moved it to the right, I think it was just an easier thing to move it to the right than the left. But I do totally understand what you're saying there.

You're holding your pen in your right hand, yeah? So if you're right-handed, then as you reach in to write on the screen, if it's on the right, you're not going to cover the source text with your writing hand. Whereas if you're right-handed, you're going to cross the screen to do that. And let's talk about spatial— yeah, let's talk about spatial embodiment, right? We've all had that experience where you've read a book and you're like, I want to show that page, that passage, to my friend, my partner, my colleague, whatever. And you remember how the book felt in your hand when you read that interesting bit. And in your mind's eye, you can picture that kind of the thickness of your left hand, how many pages were left, and the thickness of the right hand of how much of the book you'd read. That feel, that physical embodiment is bringing sensory context to your memory. Much clearer than that even though is the sense of where it was on the page. Was it on the left side or the right side of the page? You remember that. Was it toward the top of the page or was it toward the bottom? That's the sensory context in which the memory was laid down, and you're accessing that context in order to find the thing later. Now what you've done with your hack of listening to the audiobook at the same time is you've layered in an additional layer of sensory context. The auditory. Now there is a widespread misconception which is completely scientifically untrue that there are visual learners and auditory learners and kinesthetic learners and so on. That's not true. It was a widespread belief but it's been scientifically debunked. Unless you have a sensory impairment You are a sensory, a multi-sensory learner. You are auditory and visual and kinesthetic, and those modalities complement each other. And the more ways you can bring the information into context, the better able you will be to incorporate it into your life. So there's a big lesson from the science of learning there. Don't believe anyone who tells you, "Well, I'm a kinesthetic learner. I can only do it by kicking a ball around." That's nonsense. But the truth, multimodality is good for contextualization, and context is king.

Oh, that's really helpful, actually, because in my mind I was thinking to myself, okay, let's say that you did use a— you did use a platform, whatever the platform is, of where you are wanting to document how we sell, as an example. Ultimately, I think what you're sharing is such good value to say, look, they could read, here's the script that we use, but they also need to listen and listen to a script, but they also need to like see, like visually see maybe a role play happening or something like that so they can do it. And then they actually need to engage in some way through either quizzes or, uh, it may be, you know, some sort of quiz, but then actually do the thing to encompass all aspects of that. I think it's actually really good because I have heard that about people saying, oh, well, listen, they either record their audio, visual, or kinesthetic. And so I love that you said that, shared that. Yeah, absolutely.

And by the way, your point about progressing from the consumption to the doing, for many people, I think that's the scariest step. The move from, OK, so I know what I'm supposed to do. Now I've got to do it. Help. And you can scaffold people across that bridge. You can provide them with steps to break it down and do it one step at a time. So let's say, for example, you're modeling a sales technique. Well, you can model the first 5 minutes of the call. And then hand over to a more experienced person who can show you the middle section of the call and then the close. And so in training, you can chunk it and tackle the stages one chunk at a time. Role play, of course, is absolutely brilliant for this because you've got a safe environment in which you're not going to lose a customer when you're role playing. But yeah, chunking it is a really powerful way of of atomizing the stages of a performative practice and then optimizing each of those stages before stringing them together. If an orchestra is performing a symphony, they don't just, you know, the rehearsal does not go from beginning to end. Yeah. Okay, we're going to pick out some of the difficult bits and we're going to do those in isolation. All right, now we're going to do the first movement. Okay, now we're going to take a look at the second movement. Okay, stop. Let's go back to the beginning. And you rehearse the sections before you string the whole thing together in performance.

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So all of this, I think, has kind of brought us almost to a crescendo of asking this one question around— there's not a single company, Google all the way down to a small business owner with 2 team members. Who wants to get a new hire up to speed faster. They want to take the knowledge that they have, and they want to be able to get this person up to speed faster. I mean, think about it. If it takes me typically 6 months to get someone to a level of competence that they are now a profit center in the business, and I can reduce that down to 3 months, I, I'm infinitely— we're way way more valuable. What typically happens, and I certainly know that I can be guilty of this, is that you start out with the best of intentions. Yeah, we're going to be patient with you. We're going to, we're going to give you all the information that you need. And about 2 months into it, you're like, okay, this person's got to be producing, like, we need to get on with it. And so we start shortcutting, we start, you know, dismissing certain things, processes of things that we would kind of walk them through naturally. What's the right way to get somebody up to speed faster?

Okay, this is a tough one, right? Because you already pointed out that everyone from Google on down wants to get people up to speed faster. And so if I had a magic wand, believe me, I would have more money than Jeff Bezos right now if I could just tell you a trick that solves this problem. What I can tell you is a few of the things that we typically do badly and that we can do better. Firstly, when we're hiring, the, the hiring process doesn't actually track against the skills and attributes which are going to be required in the job. So we very often hire people and then discover that they're not suited to the role because of the way that we hire by interviewing people and asking them how they would do the A better way to hire is to get the person to do the thing. Sit with them and take the time because of course it's going to save you a hell of a lot of time and effort and pain and lawsuits in the long run if you're not having to fire somebody. So spend the time in the recruitment process and to actually work with alongside the person, have them perform the skills that they're going to need to perform in And you may need to contextualize that into a setting where they have shown that they can perform in the past, you know, so some of the skills that they've applied in a previous role, because perhaps they haven't acquired the skills and knowledge they need to apply in your context. Give them a forum in which they are secure and have them do the thing. And that's of course a great opportunity for them also to sound you out as an employer. And maybe they're going to say, "I don't want to work with these guys if this is the way they work." Well, again, that's a great learning for you because you don't want to make the wrong hire. So that's my first point. The traditional interview is just dumb and we should stop doing it. If you can, and of course employment laws vary, your mileage may differ, then you should bring people on in a probationary role, give them a space in which to perform and try and fail I think very often we have this two-stage onboarding process where you have the initial onboarding. We say, okay, you've got a month before you have to start delivering. And during this time, we just want you to learn. We want you to watch, we want you to listen, we want you to read, learn everything you can about the company. And then we're going to flick a switch and suddenly you're going to be a productive member of the team. Well, that's not doing, and therefore it's not a great strategy. Yes. Get people doing from day one, find environments where if they screw up, it's not going to sink your business. So find those contexts in which the, uh, the phrase we used in teaching, uh, is high stakes, low threat. It needs to be high enough stakes that it feels real and they're really performing and they've got the adrenaline rush of delivering, but at the same time the threat is, is low. That's to say, if they screw up they, uh, they're not going to lose their job. Um, and this, I think this is something that in my space, in the tech space, uh, is an area of strength in tech, which is that failure is not viewed as a failure, it's viewed as a learning opportunity. Um, and especially for new hires, the fear of failure can prevent them from trying prevent them from taking risks, prevent them from becoming great. You've got to make an environment in which people fail fast, learn, iterate, and get better faster. You were talking about cutting down the productivity point, the breakeven point from 6 months to 3. And the only way to do that is to allow them to fail and fail and fail fast. Yeah. And it's a great cultural thing in a business if you can have a culture where people are like, hey, I screwed up 4 times this week. Let me tell you how I screwed up. Let me share my screw-ups so none of the rest of you need to screw up in this way. And that kind of celebrating screw-ups is something that if you can build it in a company culture— and I'll admit that's a difficult one to do because you need very high trust. But if you can do it, then you can build fearlessness. You can build a work environment where people aren't afraid to screw up, and consequently they won't cover up their mistakes. They won't hide it from management. And, and, and that transparency can help you be a vastly more productive team. I'm gonna— so those are, those are my, those are my takes on it.

Yeah, I, I, I, I love it. I want to try to give a little bit of analogy. It's something that's kind of going through my head with what you were saying. So my son's really involved in sports, like I know many, many people— soccer certainly big in London— but my son's big into basketball and in baseball. And we just finished up baseball, and towards the end of the season we had tried to get the team to be willing to take risk. In other words, steal second base. Still third, have the catcher. If you see that guy coming off third base on a pitch, throw it. Yes, we understand that third baseman, you may make a bad throw. We understand the third baseman may miss it. And if he does, that guy is probably scoring. We get it. But you know what? Throw it, do it, you know. And at first the catcher is double clutching a little bit, like, I don't know if I should throw it. And then they throw it and kid scores. And then the catcher's looking, saying, like, is my dad or the coach going to get on to me? Because I screwed up. And the reality is, is how the coaches and even that person's parent, that kid's parent, how they handle that afterwards matters, which is what you're talking, which is, yeah, you're saying you want me to throw it and I threw it and I threw it 10 feet over the kid's head. Are you going to get on to me? Because if you do— now, their kids can't process that, they're not saying that— but if you do, I'm going to be a lot less willing to actually throw it next time.

Does that make sense? Yeah, absolutely. And I got to say, as a former teacher, much of the value of sports is exactly this kind of, you know, learning the game theoretical component of life in an environment where nobody has to lose their job or lose their marriage or lose their friendship. It's It's just a game. This is one of the best things about sports, and yet by putting too much pressure on people, we actually make it so, A, they don't enjoy it because it's all too much stress and the coaches is going nuts on the sidelines, and B, they don't learn the lessons that they need to learn about grit and resilience, about picking yourself up when you're down, about every game is a fresh start and a fresh opportunity, and you can draw a line under the previous game and say, okay, well, we messed up that time, time. Yeah, let's, let's do it differently next time. I, I think, I think sports are absolutely wonderful for that, and, and I think that we get them wrong when we, when we fail to, to create that space for, for creative, uh, uh, calamity.

Totally, totally. Patrick, this has been great. Uh, we're gonna go into E9 rapid-fire questions now, but before we do that, People want to know, connect with you, learn more about Mindstone.

Where would you point them to? The web address is beautifully simple: www.mindstone.com. Mindstone spelled exactly the same way as the MCU spell it. I've no idea how we managed to get that trademark, but we did. It's ours, and it's mindstone.com. If you ever come through to the customer support, we're a small team, so that's me. And if you want to talk to me personally on email, then it's patrick@mindstone.com.

Couldn't be simpler. Awesome. All right, here we go. E9 rapid-fire questions.

You ready? Go for it.

What's the last book that you read?

That's an easy one. Build by Tony Fadell.

What's the book that you would recommend the most to other small business owners?

Ooh, that's a really good one. Uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, I'm gonna go Cold Start Problem. What was it again? Cold Start Problem.

Interesting. I haven't heard that one. Okay. Yeah, check it out.

Check it out. The name of the author's just slipped my mind, but it's really powerful for any business that wants to have network effects.

Favorite tech tool or app that you use every day, not native to your phone?

I recently found an app called Excalidraw. It is the simplest, most basic drawing sketching tool, and what's brilliant about it is it's so basic you don't need to be told how to use it, and it looks kind of hand-drawn and crappy, and the wonderful thing about it is the hand-drawn crappiness makes you feel great about your sketch. It's lovely.

You can sit next to anyone on a 10-hour flight. Let's just say you fly from London to Atlanta. Who would you love to sit next to?

Oh man, that's a tough one. I, I, I, they've got to be alive, right?

Uh, no, they could be alive or dead.

Okay, I'd say if they could be dead, I'd sit next to Christopher Hitchens. Um, if they could be alive, I think right now I would say Jacinda Ardern, uh, Prime Minister of New Zealand.

Favorite travel destination?

Wow, these are tough. Uh, Istanbul.

Favorite place you want to travel?

Oh, never been to Hawaii. Like to go.

Go to Maui. Yeah. What was the best thing about the pandemic? For you personally?

More time with my kids, no question. I think for a lot of fathers, it was an opportunity to reset. I got to be a teacher as well to them, and that was, that was really rewarding and powerful.

When you're not working, what do you love to do?

I love to run, play guitar, and when I've got headspace, I write songs. It's interesting that I haven't written a song in 2 years and I've been a startup founder for 2 years. That part of my brain is gone at the moment because all my creativity is in my business. I totally understand that.

Best piece of leadership advice you've ever received?

The chief exec does not sit at the top of a pyramid, but at the base of the foundation.

Mm. Totally agree with that. Patrick, it's been great. Hope to have you back on in the future.

Oh, it's been such a pleasure talking to you. Thank you so much.

So the big question is this: how do small business owners like us grow our leadership, develop our teams, and scale our business in a way that allows us to get our products and services out to the world yet still remain profitable?

That is the question, and this podcast will give you the answers. I'm Bradley Hamner, and this is Club Capital Leadership Podcast.

Hey, before we get into today's episode, did you know that Club Capital is the largest accounting advisory firm for insurance agency owners in the country, providing monthly accounting, CFO services, and tax preparation? Check them out at club.capital.