What If You Could Simplify Any Problem? Simon Bowen Shows Us How #132

Honestly, Jeff, I'm shocked. I was shocked that this was not something everybody was already doing. 80% of everything everyone brings to the market is the same as everybody else. 20% is this unique perspective that changes everything about the 80%. And if I think of that as organizational genius. Most companies are bringing products and services to the market, but what the customer is buying is the genius of the company.

Hey, everybody, this is Jeff Duden, and we are on the Homefront today with Simon Bowen. And this is going to be one of the more unique podcast episodes that we have. Just because I've never met anybody like Simon. We've had a wonderful dinner together. We're new friends, and I just couldn't wait to have him on. Simon is a visionary leader and creator of the Models Method, where he solves complex issues and disagreements by creating simplicity, by drawing a model. And the Method is amazing. I only hope one day to see it under real live fire, when there's hundreds of millions of dollars on the line, which is the situations that you find yourself in. And just you've really helped countless governments, businesses resolve situations that were appeared to be complex, but when reduced to a model, you got the job done, which is why you are a global thought leader in this regard and an inventor of the Model Method. Simon Bowen.

Thank you. Thank you very much. I mean, it's great to be here. I'm in Australia at the moment, so we're on wildly different time zones. All conversations are good conversations.

Well, I know what time it is there because I do some business in Australia, so I appreciate you getting up so early. I apologize for that.

No, no, it's a pleasure.

All right. Have you had your cup of coffee yet this morning?

Yeah, I have. I have indeed. I'm good to go.

All right. Well, Simon, you've got an incredible background, and it really sets the stage for how you developed your unique method for solving problems and helping people solve problems. Can you share a little bit about how you grew up?

Sure. Well, I grew up in really small, you know, rural towns in Western Australia. When I. When I say small, I mean 900 people, 400 people, and then farmland around it, you know, and, you know, lived in. In those environments until my early 20s, really. And in those environments, you know, one of your uncles will say, you know, go out, go out to this back paddock, and then they draw it in the dirt. You know, they draw the roads in the dirt, and then they kick it over with their foot and it's gone again. And, you know, you had to acquire and retain Information by what was drawn in front of you. You know, if my father wanted to build something, he'd draw it out on a piece of paper and then he'd kind of go and build it, right? He'd weld it or make it out of timber or whatever the case might be. And then my first working life was in electronics and electrics and electronics. And you can't, you know, I was creating circuit boards and diagnosing fault and. And then ended up in the transport industry, specifically automotive, doing, you know, testing diagnosis for Nissan at the time and other companies. And, you know, I had this. You cannot do anything in electronics if you can't draw and understand a circuit diagram. So here's kind of one of the earliest realizations I had. Everything that humans do and certainly everything we make, this equipment that you and I are on at the moment, all of the tech we're using, everything in the room that I'm sitting in, its first appearance in the physical world is almost always as a drawing on paper or drawing these days on a computer screen, on CAD or some sort of design element. Humans draw. You know, the first thing a child does before they ever write any words is draw pictures. And they're not great, but their parents, you know, that's amazing. And they frame it and they put it up. And we have this, you know, we have our oldest. You know, the Australian. Australia has the oldest living culture in the world with our Aboriginal people 60,000 years old. All their stories passed down through cave art, you know, so we're deeply and emotionally tied to drawing. And when you draw, you draw people in. And it became really obvious. Obvious to me, you know, after industry, I had this slightly distorted view that I'd be a high school teacher until I realized I just can't cope with teenagers. And so, you know, it was after I'd finished my Bachelor of education. I was actually with teen. I need to work with adults, but, you know, teaching physics and chemistry and design and you, you, you can't teach kids if you can't draw it for them. The moment you draw it for them, they fall into the story. So I had this really deep sense of when you can draw something rather than just say it, everything changes about the dynamic of the interaction. And there's some really deep science behind that that I've since discovered. And so it was just the way I communicated as an executive manager for one of Australia's largest companies, responsible for a. A division in. In one half of the country. It was just how I sold, you know, expensive manufacturing Deals to building companies and things like that was. I would draw and people would take, people would say, could I get a copy of that? Right? And I would, I used to carry a camera with me back in the day. And I said, well, I'll take a photo and I'll tear out the page for you. So what, what I realized was I was equipping that person to become a salesperson back into their organization formed. So this forward scout who's digging around whether we could actually help them has now taken my sales tool that I've just drawn for them live back into the organization. We need to talk to this guy, look at what they could do for us. And so it, you know, over a 25 year consulting career with, we had our own management consulting business dealing with, you know, the government would say, we're going to build a $1.4 billion sports stadium. Can you get everyone to agree on what they want in that stadium? You know, and, and that process that I facilitated informed the brief for the architects. That stadium won best stadium in the world the year it opened. You know, we, we, we're a ferry building company. Want to go and build ships for navies. How would we sell that? Well, draw, you know, and, and then every other industry and category and size of company that you can think about. Because when you draw, you draw people in. It's such a basic aspect of how we communicate and it's almost like a lost art. It's, it's kind of fascinating. You know, we've become so word dependent, but words matter. We're the only species on the planet that has to be able to articulate a concept in language to fully understand it. You know, lions don't sit around and say what are we going to call this thing? One of them goes, well, it's hunting. Know like we, we go and hunt, we kill, we eat. That's so aggressive. Could, could we call it acquisition? No, they just like go and do it, right. But humans have to put a word on it. So that's like a layer of communication. But what if you could put the picture on top of that, right. And let, let the mind see it. 83% of the information that we bring in to the brain from the world around us comes directly through the optic nerve. Only 11% through the ears. Why in sales, for example, or leadership or influence, would we just rely on the 11% when the 83% is available to us? So it's an eclectic collection of historical events. I guess that arrived me at this point with this idea of Visual models. But in fact, that 83% channel is not being ignored. If you don't feel the visual field of your audience, they fill it themselves. And they might be filling it with things that you don't need them to fill it with. Where you focus someone's gaze, you focus their attention. So why would you leave to chance where you focus their gaze? I'd rather put it on a visual model that I can draw to tell the story that my words are sharing inside the model.

When I train, I bring up learning styles, visual learners, audio learners, and then kinesthetic or kinetic learners that have to do things by touch. And most people have a dominant learning style and then some minor learning style. But very rarely do I find people that are audio learners as a primary means of learning. Yes, there are people that do need conversation and they do need things explained to them and. But those are generally going to be the, I think the, the kinesthetic people that like to do things with their hands and then to fill in the gaps for, you know, they're, they're going to want to do by repetition. They're going to want to do by getting their hands on things and getting reps on things and feel and touch. And, you know, they're, they're, they're very much about their inner core looking. When they're trying to listen intently to you, they're going to look down in their core and instead of, instead of making eye contact. My son, my youngest son, who's an engineer, he's heavily that way. And the coaches would always say, jack, you're not looking at us. You know, look at me when I'm talking to you. Well, if he's staring you in the eye, he can't hear you. He needs to be looking kind of off and down to the right to be really just focusing on what you're saying, to be able to really get the point. And he just touches everything as a matter of course to it. But I think, I think my other two children are heavily visual. And, and you know, when I try to sit, if. So I have a whiteboard in my office, and the first thing I do is if somebody's sitting in the chair and I'm gonna start explaining something, I go stand in front of the whiteboard and I pick up the pen because I know that as I'm explaining it, if I visualize it even to myself, it's gonna give me a more organized view of. It's gonna help me sort it faster. So I think that's fascinating because it's the, the visual nature of your work really is hitting most of the people right where they need it.

Oh, look, absolutely. And the learning modalities really relate to the sensory system that we use to bring information in through the optic nerves. So we actually have, in simplistic terms, five modalities. Visual, auditory, kinesthetic, gustatory, olfactory, you know, licking and sniffing are not recommended in, in sales or anything like that.

So that's, that's frowned upon in our, in our.

Yeah, yeah, manual. Yeah. So we ignore those. So we're left with visual, auditory and kinesthetic. Right. In education. And, and, you know, I, as I said, I went and studied education and, and then, you know, once I completed my Bachelor of Education, realized school was not the setting I needed to be in. We know that there's at least 12 to 13 different learning modalities that people, that students actually have. And, you know, boys relate very differently to the modalities than girls. I became fascinated with what happens inside the mind once you get past the sensory wall, if you like. And so the modalities were often, how do we bring information in, but what do we do with it in our brain? So if you say to somebody, describe your primary school to me. And they're, let's say they're an auditory receiver, describe your primary school to me. They'll receive your question in auditory. But in their brain, they're not running through a series of words, they're actually getting a picture, they're imagining imagery. And so what happens in the brain is the brain doesn't operate in language, it operates in imagery. You know, so the right hemisphere of the brain is, is an image and holistic making machine. It actually doesn't even separate you, the individual from the universe and the world around you. It has no boundaries between you and the world around you. It's the left hemisphere of the brain that pictures you as a separate entity and deals with logic and structure. And the two halves talk through connections. Basically, they're completely separate hemispheres, but they talk through connections. And so so much of what' going on in the brain, you know, as I kind of unpack this fairly simplistically, is imagery. 55% of the brain's reflex response is attached directly to the optic nerve. You know, animals hear a noise, but they don't run. They run when they see the danger. Right. So we, we, we, we just lose so much of the opportunity when we draw. Now, here's the thing. If you go and stand at a whiteboard and you start drawing a model to explain something, the auditory receivers will sit and listen to you, but you've drawn their gaze towards the whiteboard and so now their heads up and they're hearing what you're saying in the context of the model. The visual receivers are just thankful that you're actually drawing this thing right. So they're actually seeing the model unfold and the kinesthetic receivers are standing right next to you, itching to get the marker off you and start drawing on it themselves. That's the perfect position to be in if you're selling a very high ticket. Complex product or service is to have the people that are buying from you standing around you at a whiteboard helping build this model with you. People find it very hard to disagree with something they helped build. So here, herein lies part of the magic of visual models. Specifically geometric shapes as opposed to, say, stock images or, you know, brochures and visual tools like that. The audience can be facilitated into helping you build the model. Like if you catch some of their language and put it into the model, they've now been a part of the model. Really hard to disagree with that when you felt build it and put the words on it. So in reality, when we teach people how to build models to sell, we do build really specific customized models with very clear language inside it. But what I would say to people is in the sale, if the customer puts a word or suggests a word for the model, or if you're a team leader, your team suggests a word to go in a part of the model, and it means the same thing as what you would use, put their word in. They've now contributed to this thing. And the framework that you've just built has become a product of both of your efforts. And it's way harder for people to disagree with something they've contributed to and been a part of. So, you know, there's layers and layers and layers inside of this style of communication. I, I think the two most important systems in business, in fact this might be true in any, any kind of endeavor, is the system for thinking and the system for influence. You know, a business is only as good as the ideas on which it's built in the quality of the thinking of the leaders in the business and then the ability to influence the choices people make to support you, customers to buy from you, staff to work hard for you, suppliers to serve you, banks to fund you, regulators to give you the license to operate. You know, if we can outthink the market and then out influence the market, most other things will take care of themselves. And I went hunting for what is this system for thinking and influence. And today I really believe, you know, one of the most potent systems for thinking and influence I could actually think of is visual models as a mechanism of communication.

Will you talk us through the time where you realized that helping people solve problems through visual models could be a business for you and could make an impact for so many?

Sure. Well, you know, I'm sure you will relate to this. I'm sure a lot of other people will relate to this. I had been a senior executive manager in one of Australia's largest companies. I'm managing manufacturing facilities and I had a sales team of about 30 account reps taking care of Western Australia. You know, we sold plasterboard and roofing insulation and roof tiles and to building companies and multiple manufacturing facilities. And I just always grew, you know, to explain things and didn't think anything about it. But I was effective. I could sell really well. I couldn't understand why sometimes my sales team or a salesperson couldn't close a deal, a big deal on a builder that was in their account. And I'd go in and close it, but I didn't think too much about it. And then I left that role and I started a management consulting company. And so for about 25 years I was doing a lot of high level consulting work, as you said in the intro, for governments and very large mining companies and things like that. But I got a reputation for being able to facilitate complex, contentious conversations. So the government would hire me and I'd say we're going to put 200 people in a room together who are at war with each other over this issue. But they are absolutely unified in their hatred for us as government. And you've got two hours. Can you get them to agree to this? And my facilitation techniques were pretty simple. I just realized that if you have a group of people who don't agree on something and you. And you've got a defined amount of time because time is actually the great qualifier. If you just frustrate them for three quarters of the available time. Oh, camera's gone. Sorry about that. Bit blurry. That's weird. If you just frustrate them for three quarters of the available time. So you've got them for two hours, you just frustrate them for 90 minutes. They reach a point where no one wants to leave that room until they've actually resolved this discussion now. And at that moment, at that mark, the three quarter mark is kind of magical. At that mark, I'd go to the whiteboard and say, I think I can draw this. And I would start drawing a model. Now, I've spent that 90 minutes figuring out what the geometry needs to be. So geometry is pretty. Pretty magical. I'm listening to the conversation, I'm thinking, if I get one shot at this, if I get to draw one visual model, what's the geometry that's going to unpack this? And I would start to draw the model, and then I would facilitate the content of the model, the words that need to go into it from the audience. And 30 minutes later, we'd have a model that resolves the debate. And they'd go, well, why don't you give this that to us at the start? And they go, I didn't have it right. I had clear thoughts about where it was going to land, but let the room build the model. And so I just. I just knew I could walk into any environment with any group of people on any topic and get to a model. And if I could get to the model, I could get to agreement. So that was just how I worked, and it was how I sold. Every time. I didn't carry a lined paper, I carried a sketchbook with me. And I would draw and people would go, wow, can I get a. Could I get a copy of that model? And it just. I hadn't thought about it, but they're asking me for the artifact of what I've just drawn. They're taking it back as an influence tool. And then one day, someone said, you should teach consultants how to sell using models. I go, don't be ridiculous. Everybody draws models. This is the bit a lot of people, a lot of your listeners might relate to. Everybody draws models. And they go, not like you, not with. Not with the choreography. I developed the art of choreography, of walking through a model, like the pathway through a model, the punch lines where you deliver them and that sort of thing. Thing. And I said, no, everybody draws. They go, no, not like you, you know, so would you. Would. Would you run a workshop? We've got a whole bunch of consultants. It was a company. Would you run a workshop for our consultants on how you sell and consult through models? So I said, sure, you know, but you'll have to pay. And so they hired me to run this workshop. And it was astounding how revolutionary this seemed to me to these people. And then not long after that, someone said to me, I've got a group, I've got a mastermind in California, and I'd love you to do that thing with the models to themselves. Like three o' clock in the morning in Perth in Western Australia. And I'm zooming in and it's probably about at least 10 years ago or more. And I'm just doing the model thing and the room's all quiet. I didn't know if that was a good thing or a bad thing. You know, it's hard to tell on zoom when it's just one camera looking at a room and they're all looking at you on the screen. And you know, I finished and it was just quiet. And then the room erupted. And the person whose mastermind is, you know, came to me after and he said that it was just stunning. People were just stunned at how powerful this actually is and just exploded actually from there because it is such a core way of communicating. And I'm honestly, Jeff, I'm shocked. I was shocked that this was not something everybody was already doing. And then we've developed the craft so much further since then. I thought, you know what, I'm just going to focus on that. I was doing strategic planning, organizational design, salesforce enablement, normal kind of consulting work. And I thought, I'm just going to do the models because I love them and why not? And it's just exploded from there. But I think, I think a lot of people. Well, actually then I became fascinated with the idea of organizational genius. Now what is the genius that people bring to market? And I started recognizing that 80% of everything everyone brings to the market is the same as everybody else. 20% is this unique perspective that changes everything about the 80%. And if I think of that as organizational genius. Most companies are bringing products and service to the market, but what the customer is buying is the genius of the company. And so then I thought, I'm going to build a genius, a company genius model. I'm going to build one single model that can capture the entire genius of a company that you can explain in seven to 10 minutes. So when you're actually selling, you're going, well, first of all, this is how we think about this. You know, good example is a company that came and said, we provide safety solutions for mine sites. We're different to everybody else. We believe risk should be eliminated through design rather than mitigated through processes and practices. And we have multiple products, but it's our approach that is unique. So we built the company genius model for that company. And so their conversations these days with mining companies are, here's how we approach safety. What's your problem? We'll build a solution as opposed to, you know, we've got safe ladder and safe barrier and all that sort of thing. So I started to get really focused on can I capture the genius of a company in a single model? And I've done that. And that model, now that we call it the genius model, has been a flagship model now for many years where we sit down with companies and codify the genius that they bring to the marketplace place. And that got me on a journey looking at the origins of company genius, which has been fascinating. And, you know, you know, one thing led to the other, as it always does. But that moment that I'm sure a lot of people identify with, where you don't understand, you didn't realize everyone else didn't actually know this or realize this or think like this. And what you, what that unique part that is your perspective is the game changer, not the 80% that everybody else is, that you're doing, that is kind of what everybody else does as well. You know, it's, it's an interesting process to go through.

Yeah, you had said that you spend 75% of the time frustrating people.

How did you do that? It's not that hard.

Fair enough.

So if you've got a, if you've got a group of people who don't agree on something, just actively and equally seek everybody's opinion in the room, no one actually wants anyone else to be heard more than them. And so if, you know, if you are equally distributing the listening across the room, everyone's getting frustrated that you're not listening to them more than everybody else. Right. And so you capture everything that everybody says. I'll put that on a bit of white, you know, I'll put that on a flip chart. Yeah, that's a great idea. I'll put them on a flip chart. That's a great idea. I'll put on the flip chart. And it's. Humans are funny. You know, people get frustrated if they feel like you're listening to other people more than you're listening to them and you're placing equal weight on everybody else's opinion as you are on theirs, as opposed to more weight on their opinion. And, you know, opinion is a fundamentally flawed concept. You know, to have and hold on to an opinion. First of all, to form an opinion, you, you, you need knowledge, insight, data, right? And you go, oh, here's an opinion. But then to hold on to an opinion, you need ignorance of all evidence to the contrary. And so you can only believe that the world is flat if you choose to ignore all the Evidence that it's actually a sphere, you know, or a globe. And so, you know, to have, and hold on to an opinion, to form it, you need evidence, data, information, etc. Experience. But then when evidence starts to say to you that might not be totally true, you need to be willing to let go of a part of that opinion. And so to hold onto it, you need a level of ignorance. That's what made Einstein so good as a scientist. He knew that the general theory of relativity would only hold up to a certain point. He just didn't have the rest of the evidence of quantum physics to take it any further. But he knew that's why, and it's why the scientific method really has theories and very rarely laws because we've got to keep testing, you know, So I, I, I would just, I would just be a great facilitator in terms. I'm going to listen to everybody in the room like you're all equal, the client, the, the people engaging me will say we should tell you who's in the room and you know, who are the troublemakers and you know, who, who's got an out there kind of opinion. And I would say, I don't, I don't want to know, I don't want to know who's in the room. I mean the whole room is valid for me. And it's interesting how, how wedded we are to, we should be listened to more than everybody else. And so I would just listen to everyone fairly equally, you know, no, no one gets sacrificed in the room for the sake of making it a point. You know, I'd make sure it was safe for everybody. And then when everyone's kind of confused by everybody else, that's when I got, look, I think I could draw this for you. And if this is a really important, really important observation, I think for Jeff, for people in general, when you become the sense maker, you become the sage in the middle of complexity, when you become the person that goes, think I could draw this for you? Think I could make sense of this for you? Think I could unpack this for you? I think I can get to simplicity for you. In the middle of this complexity, when you become the sense maker, you become the sage. And so many companies are selling from a space of being the hero these days as opposed to let the client be the hero and you be the sage. You know, it's a much, much more powerful position to sit into.

You're consulting and you're really using models because it's your preferred method of sorting information. And you're writing them on a board and it was basically your working papers. It was a means to an end, it was part of your method. But that deliverable of the model became the product, which I think is fascinating.

Yeah, well, it's interesting. That's the system for thinking and influence, right? We use the model to unpack deeper thinking and then simplify it in motion, basically. And then the model itself is the artifact that is actually the product. So when we build a genius model for a company, the model actually becomes the product. We're making the company the product, not the products. The product. And so people buy the company first, right? So if you're a construction company, people are buying you the company, not the constructions. Right. And so we make the company the product through the model. So that people know that they're actually dealing with a company that can solve the kind of problems, challenges or whatever the case might be, you know, that they're actually wrestling with. Then. You know, we've worked across the financial services sector, insurance, banking, construction, mining, engineering, med tech, pharmaceuticals, services based industries, coaching, consulting, accounting, law. We haven't found an industry yet where we can't codify the genius of a company. And it's a different level of conversation where you're saying to the customer, let's talk about who you're dealing with with first.

You know, how translatable, how, how successful have you been able to translate your methods to other people? Because I, I would assume that you need to have a certain amount of talent to be able to do this. You, you know, I've, I've watched you draw. It's, you know, you, you clearly have a, a hand for it. You have an eye for it. There's also a lot of information that is getting simultaneously incorporated into this model. So you've got to be able to have multiple opposing or different ideas running through your head at the same time, which is one of the signals of intelligence. So I, I would think that even, even if you were able to have some, you know, apostles that you taught to do this, that they're not all going to be created equal. And they would have to be pretty good mental athletes to be, you know, to be able to take your work and give it the type of presentation that you would. Is that fair?

Yeah, it's, it's trainable.

Okay.

It is, it is definitely trainable in that because we can teach people choreography.

Okay.

That allows them to, you know, allows them to kind of understand it a bit more.

For those of you listening on Apple or Spotify, or on an audio platform. Check this out on YouTube. It's. We've got a. This is a very. This is a visual exercise that we're going through here. And I will do the play byplay. If Simon starts drawing, it looks like he's going to start drawing something here.

On the screen, hopefully. And just gonna do this for you.

Okay. All right, we see it.

It's starting to get there.

Now, when you're working, do you use an iPad or something like that and then project?

Yeah, I'm using. I'm using an iPad connected, really just connected to the. You know, to the computer. I'm using a bit of software called eCamm Live. OBS is the equivalent to that. That actually gets the job done. So the question you asked, though, was, how transferable is this? I studied. I wanted it to be teachable. So creating a model is one thing, like working through the conversation with people to build a model, capture a model is one thing. But then we needed to turn into a presentation form, right? I wanted to be able to stand on stage at a conference with my iPad and draw on my iPad and have it go up on the screen behind me, with me walking around wirelessly while everyone else is using PowerPoint. And, you know, when I do that, everyone's taking photos of my screens. They want to know, how are you getting that from your iPad up to the screen? It's not magic. It's just software, basically, on your computer. Computer connected to the screen. But I needed to be able to teach people how to draw a model while you're having a conversation with people and while you're unpacking it. And actually, the super skill, Jeff, is facilitation, not selling. And so facilitation is a super skill. Facilitation is the skill to be able to hear and speak at the same time. So to really hear what people are actually saying and also be equipping yourself with the next question to ask. So, you know, it's that duality of incoming and processing and outgoing. Now, there is a certain amount of capability required to do that. But, you know, anyone that's started a company, anyone that's taken the risk, has the ability to be, you know, trained to be a facilitator. And there's techniques and things that make that easier. But I studied stage magic and comedy because I wanted people to be able to walk through a model and have the thing land. And the thing about stage magic and comedy is they both do the same thing. So they both have this. They have a pathway that they. That they want the audience to go through. Okay? And in that pathway, they're building the known paradigm. They're actually taking the person through a known conversation, a known and understood experience, if you like. The joke is the setup, the setup, the setup. And it's a story that the audience knows or the trick that's being revealed. You know, like, as I riffle my finger, tell me when to stop on the deck. And like, it's a known paradigm.

Right.

I just want to check that. That wording what I've written is the right way around for you because it is reversed.

It is. And for people listening, there's a line. It has a perpendicular line to it. At the end of it, the line going across the screen, then the word known on top of the line and the word paradigm on the bottom of the line underneath.

And so this is the setup part of the joke or the magic trick. Right. And the reason why I wanted to study stage matching comedy is because if you want to change people's thinking, if you want to influence people, the emotional state that you need to trigger is curiosity. Curiosity is a very powerful emotional state to put somebody into to get them to want to explore further with you. And stage magic and comedy are two of the most powerful art forms I know of to trigger curiosity. So it's this setup of the known paradigm, but then the joke or the magic trick, collapse at that vertical line, collapse the known paradigm in a heartbeat and replace it with another paradigm, an unexpected paradigm, which is the reveal of the magic trick or the punchline of the joke. It replaces it with a new paradigm in a heartbeat. Now, when you do that, the brain is changed and it can't go back, right? And it's kind of got this new paradigm, and now it's thinking, well, okay, tell me more about that. And you can't slide the new paradigm in slowly. Okay, so here's my magic trick. Here's the deck. I'm going to riffle it with my thumb, Tell me when to stop. Now what's going to happen is I'm going to pull a card out and it's going to be. Exactly. That's not how it works. You've got to be able to collapse it rapidly and replace it with a new paradigm. So I crafted choreography around models. I built a process of choreography around models. So when we create visual models for people, we, you know, we. We always build the choreography of how you walk through the models. So if you think about a sales team, often the founder of a business is the best Salesperson in the business right now. People think that's because they're good salespeople. The owner, the founder thinks that's because they're good salespeople. It's not really because they're a good salesperson. It's because they have two things that their salespeople don't have. One, they have the authority to do whatever deal they want, actually get the deal done. And the second thing is they have deep intuitive knowledge of the genius, right? And so they can just lean in and grab bits. The real test is, are the sales people that are two and three generations down from you still telling the true story? And so that's why we built this genius model. And then we craft the choreography which we record. So people just need to learn how to walk through the model. And so, you know, if we go back to the conversation you had about, you know, you've got an election coming, you know, could we build a model to, you know, maybe, you know, reach agreement on the differences? We need to build a model firstly to get people to believe that they need to reach agreement. And one of the things that we often do in the thinking process is we jump to the solution of a problem that's two or three problems down, right? Let's, let's find, let's figure out what the first problem is. The first problem is, do we even need to reach agreement? And you know, this is not unique to the US of course. Australia has its own political differences and divides and so does Europe and everything else. And so we live in a world where people perhaps should be questioning, do we actually need to reach agreement? And so we might have a model that acts a little bit like this. I'm just going to give myself some boundaries here so I know exactly where I am so that I, not that I'm just, I'm just giving myself some boundaries. So let, so, so, so we might, we might, we, we might, we might draw a square on the left hand side and say, you know, where we are today is actually a pretty, pretty sad place. We live in a world that's divided along political lines, along personal lines. And, you know, it's October 2024 and the one thing that will beat all of us is time. The simple passing of time. However long that is, 2 years, 4 years, 5 years, 20 years, however long that time frame is, we are going to be in our future circumstance. So whatever today looks like will be irrelevant. In 20 years time we're going to be in our future circumstances. Now people say you can't predict the future, but we actually can. We know that in 20 years time we will either be in a green future where the country is aligned and we have a peaceful and powerful country, or we could end up in a red future where the country is divided and we'll end up and we'll have a broken and angry country or a broken and weak country. And the reality is those two futures lie ahead of us. But the problem is the pathway to the future is not a straight line. Time bends everything and compounds everything. It's one of the great effects is compounding. Time compounds good and bad. So time just keeps compounding bad downwards. But time also compounds the good upwards. And so we compound downwards if we just drift. Drift always heads downwards. We compound upwards if we make great decisions and then take action on it. And the reality is, if we continue to drift like we are right now, we are definitely going to end up down here. And the gap between the red and the green just gets greater and greater and greater as time goes on. Here's our real problem. If we drift on the red line and we don't make the decisions we need to make to be on the green line and other countries do, they win and we lose and jumping back to the green line becomes impossible. But here's the thing we all have to realise right now, right now, in October of 2024, if we are on the red line, and Geoff, would you say that around the world we're seeing countries on the red line in terms of. As nations?

I think in great numbers.

Great numbers, right. So if we, right now, we're actually as close to that green line as we're ever going to be. The past doesn't actually matter anymore because it's already happened. The future is ahead of us and everything is going to hang on whether we decide we're going to get onto the green line today or not. Now, the only way we can get onto the green line today is to put aside, you know, put us, put it, put aside disrespect and hatred and violence and everything else and start working through some level of understanding and agreement so that differences can be explored and brought to some sort of resolution. But as long as we, as long as we vilify differences of thinking we're on the red line, it's drift. We just drift down. We just keep doing what we're doing, we're going to drift downwards. So the question is, the only question is, do we want to be on the green line? Because if we don't, if we don't say that we want to be on the green line. Let's just recognize that this is going to happen, accept it, and live with the choice we made, and let's drift down to disaster. But if we do want to be on the green line, we've got to make some decisions. And indeed, I unpacked Martin Luther King's speech with this model, and all he was saying was, you know, his speech, everyone thinks of it as the I have a dream speech, right? But he's actually saying it's 1963, and the great American experiment of democracy and the documents of the founding fathers, you know, promised this green line future for us. But right now we are drifting down this red line of racial tension and hatred and violence, and not, not just one group of society, but all groups of society are on this red line. And we keep moving down. And it's 1963. We have to make a decision. Are we going to get on the green line? Listen to the speech in the context of this model. He's saying, we have to make a decision. We have to make a decision today to get on the green line. Everybody, not just white America, but black, we have to make a decision. Are we going to get on the green line or this experiment of democracy will fail. It will be a red line failure. And then later on in the speech, he says, I have a dream in all of these locations around America, you know, people, children playing together on the rolling hills of Mississippi and something happening in another. And then he just starts laying out the green line in terms of his dream. But this is the part everyone remembers. He starts laying out the accelerated part of the curve. But it can only happen this. His speech, his message was, it can only happen if we make the decision today in 1963 to get on that green line. Now, he didn't have a model and his oratory was so powerful, but, you know, could we resolve the political divide? Could we resolve the social dividend? This one model is such a. I call it the futures model, right? It's a conversion tool. It's a closing tool. It's hard to deny everyone knows that green line and red line are real. Yes, we can actually predict the future. And I can tell you where you're going to land based on what you're doing today. And I can tell you if you're going to land there based on the choice you make today, which is, are you going to get on the green line and are you going to stay there? Now, the problem is no one falls off the green line. We just behave our way off the green line. So we might get on there and then five years down the track, we start behaving our way off the green line again. What leaders do, what great influencers do, is park their own ego for the greater good and make sure with every bone in their body that they can that they are leading people along a green line and that they're holding behavior accountable to that green line. So only once people decide we actually want to do this, would then another model help to say, okay, let's talk about how we could reach agreement, folks. And then that becomes a different kind of geometric shape which becomes a comparative model. This is a linear model. It's talking about what's going to happen if we keep doing two things, one or the other. This has the two major contexts, time and outcome. In any sale, the two major contexts are time and outcomes. Sell people their future, not your features. So time does amazing things. It beats everybody. Time is the great strategic leveler. And then the outcomes, green or red, right? So that's the nature of this geometric shape. But if I, you know, if I was to just let me grab this for a moment. If I was to draw a two by two matrix, we start with dimension A and dimension B with low and high, whatever they might be. I start getting a comparative shape where I might say, okay, so you know, if, if, if the two lows play out, we get this scenario. If we get a low and a high, we get that and we get that. But if we want green, we need to be high on both. And so I could start to work through what these dimensions might be and start to unpack it. There's, there's, there's, there's, there's an endless number of geometric shapes. There's an endless range and way of using them. And then it's choreography. Now there's no, there was no accidents with anything I said as I walked through that. That was all choreographed and it can all be taught to people. So in fact, we, we have hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of companies around the world where people have built their models and then we've taught them the choreography. I had somebody just recently that's been working with us and they got on stage. They've never sold from stage before, but they got on stage and they just drew this model, the futures model, and, you know, closed the room basically. And they, it's interesting when we teach this and then people start to sell it with it, they come back and they go, it's kind of like magic. I got on stage, I'VE never sold from stage before. I drew the futures model and people taking photos and people come out and said, I've got to work with you because models work. Models are that powerful. You know, it's a different, it's an entirely. Ryan Dice, when he was introduced to me at one of his events, said, you know, Simon's created a new vocabulary for business and, you know, I mean, Ryan's a great copywriter, so I appreciate him actually giving me some great copy because it is actually, it is really effectively a new vocabulary for business. So, you know, there's a, there's a, there's just a lot of dimensionality to this that we can think about and talk about. But that's the nature of models. They just work.

Once people agree that consensus towards the better future matters, then it's now moving on to other models of compromise, of course.

Well, maybe compromise if we can agree that the future matters. Yes, you can do this in the air. I went on a, I went on a, an environmental cruise to the Antarctic in March of this year and I was asked to come along to get the hundred odd people on board that ship to talk about, think about and start taking action towards what can we do for better environmental management. Greater, greater kind of impact over climate change. There are many, many issues in terms of the environment. But the burning bridge, the one that's going to hit us hardest soonest, is the amount of carbon in the atmosphere. And I said, we want you to come along and get people to agree. And so on the opening dinner, I had no whiteboard or anything else. And so I stood in front of the audience, I said, so folks, imagine this. We're standing here right now, it's March 2024 and there are two futures ahead of us. You know, there is a green line that heads up to a clear, clean atmosphere where carbon is not the threat that it currently is. And let me get that to work. Or there's a red line heading down. I just made the shapes in the air with my hands where, you know, we are rapidly moving towards the carbon budget being full and, you know, rising temperatures, rising ocean waters and things like that. And these two curves accelerate away from each other as time goes on. And as we stand in this room today, we're on the red line. How many of you think we're on the red line universally? They all put their hands up. How many of you, how far along that red line do you think we are? And most of them felt like we were already three quarters into the distance. Right? So you Know, if we're as close as we're ever going to be, when is the best time to do. When is the best time to do this? I mean, how long should we wait? The answer is right now. Okay, well, as we go on this trip to the Antarctic, I want everyone to stay focused on what can we do to put ourselves on the green line and keep us there? You know, that's, that, that, that, that's the focus. And so it's, it's certainly a powerful, powerful process that we, you know, that we, that we need to get through. One of my daughters said, could you create a model that we could put on social media that would get political leaders to pay more attention to the climate? And I said, well, a, do I want to do that? And B, yes, easy. I would share the futures model with the world. I'd explain it in the context of the climate, and I would just ask people on social media to put your political leaders on that model. Where do you think they are? What line do you think they're on, and how far along that line do you think they are? And share that back into social media and let's get the world's political leaders put on the futures model in the context of a topical issue. Are they on the red line and a long way down the track? Are they on the green line a long way down the track? Are they just at the start, like, let's get the will to do it first. Will precedes action. So let's get the will to do it, get into collaboration, compromise when we need to work our way through that with models and unpack the conversation. So, you know, often it'll be one or two models working together to tell a story. But importantly, you want to facilitate people into it. It is a completely teachable, transferable methodology. And certainly when we build a genius model for a company, we're working closely with the company and unpacking the core genius of that company, which usually starts with an origin story from the founder. You know, if I can just indulge one more time, if we think about company genius, where does it come from? And if you think about company genius, it comes from three things. First of all, it's a whole, which is often the founder of the idea. And that is what is their philosophy about the thing that they do about their life's work? What do they truly believe to be true? And then what is their history or their high story? So what did they learn from the wins and what lessons do they get from the losses? And then what Is their expertise, formal and informal, trained education and experience. And so someone comes up with an idea, you know, a founder kind of through their philosophy, their history, their expertise goes, here's a thing that could help the world. And so then it becomes a what, which is the big idea. And that comes down to what's the context of this thing? Why should it even matter what's the concept? So that's usually product or service design, the thing itself. And then the third thing that people don't really pay enough attention to is the consequence. How repeatable is the outcome of this for anybody? A big idea is only a big idea when it's repeatable, right? And then the third dimension of company genius is how, which is delivery, how we go about bringing to the marketplace, which is speed, ease, and leverage. Everyone wants fast, easy, and valuable. And so here's what happens, and we notice this a lot when I work with heritage brands. As the founder steps back from the business, which invariably happens initially, the founder is doing all the selling. So the founder is selling this whole picture intuitively. But as the founder steps back from the business, usually it's in sales. First, other people start selling, and then as they step further back from the business, other people start driving the business. What happens is the business gets reduced to the what and the how. And the first thing that leaves the sales conversation is context. All the value is in the ambiguity. And context is all about. This is the ambiguity we resolve, and here's why it's important. But context is usually the first conversation that leaves the sales discussion. And so then you reduce to salespeople selling, you know, a concept, case studies or testimonials, and then a whole lot of, oh, here's how we do it. It's this many sessions or it's delivered in this packaging or whatever. And so as soon as the founder steps back from the business, the business instantly becomes commoditized and it suffers this internal dilution. And so I set out to embed the founder into a model, the genius model, so that even without the founder in the story, the genius of the company still held true. You know, look at every great company in the world had a human at the front of it. Steve Jobs and Apple and Richard Branson and Virgin and even, you know, GE and Jack Welch, who was not the founder, but certainly, you know, the key person is Apple. With the greatest respect, but is Apple the same company today since Steve Jobs died? You know, it's a fair question, right? I'm not going to be drawn into the. Into a judgment on that, but it's a fair question, right? So we set out to capture the genius of the founder and embed it into the genius of the company and then bring the what and the how together into a single model. The genius model became this framework that we use. Yeah. And so this framework I created a three circle Venn diagram where the center of the, of the, of the, of the Venn is what I call the million dollar promise for the customer. The one big thing that should change contextually for the customer, the three key outcomes, the, the petals around it. And so right at the heart of the model, at the heart of the business is the customer. And everything they do, we usually tack the customer onto the end of a process as opposed to build the whole business around them. And then the circles that make that center of the model become, they become the delivery, you know, the delivery mechanism. This is our concept. If the middle of the model is context, the customer, the million dollar promise to the customer, the outcomes we must deliver are the context. The three circles are our levers, the concepts. And then the nine segments around the outside is this bridge into reality where we go. These nine things are the capabilities we bring to the table that make the difference. And so I set about capturing company genius into a simple, into a framework that you can walk through Simply in about 7 to 10 minutes on complex products and services. And so, for example, you know, if you're selling software, think about it. Most companies selling software would do a product demo, sit people down to the software and say, let me show you the software. What if somebody walked in and said, before I demonstrate the software to you, I want to walk you through the design model that sits underneath it, and then you walk them through a model. And now when I show you the software, I'll pull out those design features and show you where we built them in the software so you can see the value of those, of that design. All of a sudden, that product demo is wildly different. It's also said to the customer, if you're talking to people, say, in enterprise software sales, and they're not showing you their design model, maybe there isn't one. Maybe this software was spreadsheets that were connected that was eventually turned into software because someone did it for themselves to solve their own problem. Now they've made a platform, which is how a lot of software develops. So it's an interesting thing, Jeff. I mean, I could talk all day about it, obviously.

Well, Simon, this has been amazing. I just, I really want to encourage people to get over to YouTube, you appreciate you pulling these models up and building some live on the fly for us. Really, the futures model is fascinating to me and it just makes so much sense and I can see the applications for that. Simon, before I ask you our final question, would you care to share how people can either get in touch with you or learn more about your companies?

Sure. Our website is modelsmethod.com you know, we have resources and things in there. I have a bit more information, you know, about the genius model there, but I do a 20 minute teaching every month. I literally turn the clock on for 20 minutes and I just do 20 minutes flat out. We have a lot of people come to that. And generally I'm building a model every month that people could use in leadership, in selling, in marketing, you know, in many different applications. And so@modelmethod.com they can subscribe to my weekly emails and communication and they'll be able to get access to that 20 minute teaching. And then from there we're always communicating with our database. There'll be plenty of opportunity for us to interact.

Lovely. Simon, if you had one sentence to speak into somebody's life and make an impact, what would that be?

Gee, what a, what a great question, Jeff. I, I was gifted with a wonderful father who at his funeral, I did the eulogy and I have 45 first cousins on my father's side of the family. And I went and asked them all the same question because I had this thought that I wanted to share in the eulogy and what I realized that they all had, my siblings and my mother and my cousins all had the same experience. So at the funeral, I was able to say that I couldn't remember my father ever getting angry with me in his life, in my life. And I think if I could speak one thing into the world, into people's lives, it's like, don't forget kindness. It may be the most important fabric of society, but we're forgetting. Yeah, don't forget kindness.

You know, we've, we've become a little bit unkind.

We sure have. We sure have.

You know, when you, when you, you know, if you were unkind back in the day, you were doing it face to face and there were consequences. When you're doing it behind the keyboard, the consequences are, are less so, certainly not immediate and sometimes never. So I think people, people would do well to remember that everybody that they're communicating at or if they're tearing something down, those people were somebody's son or daughter. We're all children. We come from a same place. And maybe you could develop a little bit of empathy for people that you haven't yet met.

Yep, absolutely. And even if you can't bring yourself to do that, just don't forget kindness. You know, empathy can come, but just don't forget kindness. So, yeah, different world. The sun's coming up and it's throwing weird shadows.

Yeah. Well, there you go. Welcome. Well, I hope you have a wonderful day there. We're just wrapping our day up here. You're starting yours. Thank you for getting up early and coming on. This has been the incredible, the unique Simon Bowen here with Jeff Duden, and we have been on the home front. Thank you, everybody, for listening.

Pleasure. Thank you. Jeff.

Yes, sir.