EP 83 | Why Founder-Led Companies Struggle to Scale — The Brain Science Behind Better Teams with John Myers and Duncan Austin

Welcome to the ExitEngine Podcast, episode 83. So today we're, we're welcoming Duncan Austin, who is from a company called Enthrive, and together with his partner in this new endeavor from Tributary, is John Myers, and together they are Tribe Thrive. Try to say that 5 times fast. But Tribe Thrive, very interesting work that these guys are doing at Tribe Thrive. John and Duncan, welcome so much to the podcast. By the way, listeners, today John Kniff will be known as John, as JC for the remainder of this podcast, just to differentiate from John Myers, who is our guest today. Okay, just to be clear. So anyway, with that being said, Duncan and John, thank you so much for being here today on the ExxEngine Podcast.

Thank you so much for having us.

It's a joy to be here.

It's awesome to have you guys. What you guys are doing is really, really exciting. So let's just start it off from there. Duncan, tell us a little bit about what Tribe Thrive is, right? And kind of how it came about.

So Tribe Thrive is, as you said, it's John's initiative, which is Tributary, and mine, which is Thrive. coming together. So John can talk more about Tributary, but basically Tributary is helping companies transform and change, change management in companies. What, what Thriven is, is getting to the— it's giving teams and organizations the tools they need to cultivate high-performing, thriving environments where you can 10x performance. So the 2 sides go very well together. On the one hand, you're training people and teaching them how to change and how to adapt. But then on the other hand, you're giving them these science-based tools to pay attention to neural signals and that sort of thing to actually do the change and drive the motivation.

Which is such a huge thing, right? Because we've seen so much in the consulting years that John and I put in the whole thing. You know, one of the biggest complaints, right, about consultants is like, you're like, well, you told me what to do, but now what? And so the ability to be able to come in here and not only say, hey, look, this is what you should do, but now we'll get to executing. And obviously, we believe in that philosophy very much ourselves, because this is obviously what ExitEngine is also all about, right? And this is a, you know, this is the reason to be for today's podcast at all, is because what Duncan and John are doing in this space is incredibly tied, right, well tied to your exit planning, right? And that's because obviously that everything that you do, especially with your people, your process, and your product, as we have said many times before, right, John, JC, that we are, you know, that all of those things are kind of tied together. And the holistic look at your business as you start this exit planning process is really what's necessary. But one of the key things to this is that, as what John Myers works on, is the change management, which again, as you go through this transition period, which is what you're going through when you start to think about exit, this stuff becomes very, very important. But at the other side, the back end, and why this is so important for us today is The, the, the, the Tribe Thrive piece of this, right, is the rubber meeting the road, right? And where you're actually saying, here's the problem, here's the challenge, and now we're coming in and we're going to actually make this change, which is exactly where we see the exit effect happening, right, inside the exit planning world, right? So tell us a little bit more about what your process is and where did this whole idea— first of all, let's go back with you guys. Duncan, tell us— actually, John hasn't spoken yet. John, real quick, give us a little bit about your background on Tributary and how you kind of came, you know, you came to be there.

Yeah, for sure. So the heart of it, as you alluded to, is the people side of change. So the process side of change, the system side of change, completely known and understood. Bain, McKinsey, Boston Consulting, we get that from wherever we want to. But hang on a second, why doesn't that work? Ah, it's the people side. So, so my background is from being an executive coach, but I became very frustrated quite early on with only coaching rich people, often white middle-class males, when what I really wanted to do was to empower the whole workforce. But $2,000 a day is not spent normally on the whole workforce. So my background before that was as a manufacturing engineer, and that means that I used to make these things for a living, and therefore I know that even though we're selling that to you for $1,400, we can make it for $73. Just don't tell anyone that we can do that. So my focus was to take that manufacturing background, that capability into coaching, and say to myself, right, John, there's 8 billion people on the earth. How can you nurture them all to be great at transformation for free? Well, you can't do that. Okay, well, how can you get pretty close to doing it for free? Um, the reason it's relevant for exit is along the way we've done a lot of work with private equity companies and VC companies because of course they are buying companies and they want to, uh, they want to buy them at bottom dollar— brilliant company, lots of things wrong with it— and they want to sell it at top dollar and they want to get there really quickly. But what I found was that they were doing it the wrong way. They were sweating them, they were burning them, setting fire to them almost. And guess what? There was no legacy. By the time the exit happened and the person bought them, the VC or the PE bought them, the people were all burnt out, they all wanted to leave.

Right.

That's no good. And therefore, what you said earlier was beautiful about— in fact, I used to have a sales director who would say, the best way, John, not to fall behind is to start ahead. Start to start ahead. So therefore, 5 years before you're exiting, or 5 months, or 5 quarters, start thinking about how can I sharpen my saw in the area of the people here and the people side of change. Well, we can't do that. No one provides that.

Well, we do.

That's what Dunkle are providing. We're providing that, that fill for that opportunity. And you can cut down as many trees with a blunt saw as you want to. That's what a board normally does. It's normally very blunt. But our approach is to say, let's not do that. Let's put teeth on our saw. Let's sharpen it beforehand. And let's find the absolute gems in this company who are going to pull the transformation. And they're not the ones that you expect. And Duncan will touch on that later when he talks about where Enthriben has come from. It's how do you nurture everyone in the team, the less senior people, the less experienced people, and give them a voice to pull your transformation. So So that's what we're doing. That's where we've come from. Duncan, thoughts to add to that? You good with that?

Yeah, yeah, that's perfect. It's all about— almost all companies today basically rely on knowledge workers. And the question is, how do you get the most out of knowledge workers? And there's a lot of science about how our brains really function very well and how we function well together. But business pretty much ignores most of it. And which is why we can pretty quickly see a 10x improvement in productivity just by doing some basic things right. It's because the status quo is not great, right? As Gallup's Global Survey of the Workforce showed that, I think it's something like 3 in 4 people are burnt out some of the time or much of the time, right?

And that's across the workforce. That's not just leadership.

Yeah, that's across— exactly, that's across the workforce. And when you're burnt out like that, your brain is just not functioning. very well, right? Your performance is going to be low.

And you're waiting to be told what to do by the person who told you what to do before, and they're going to tell you what to do next. And, you know, they're getting very little out of yourself, right?

Or even worse, you know what to do to do it best, and you're being told to do something different, right? Which is soul-destroying. But we're facing, I think, a looming crisis with the younger generation. So under 34s, the stats are even worse. It's Almost 2/3 of people are so stressed they battle to function at work under 34. And just over half are so stressed that they can't function at work, right? Which is just insane. That's according to Gallup, right? All right.

That is insane. Let's stop that right there. Just, yeah, John, go ahead.

Jason.

What's the source, Duncan, of that stress, right? I mean, I can imagine it's all sorts of things, but in surveys, What is the root cause of that stress?

Well, it's largely from millennials and up. A good job is no longer just a job that's secure and pays the bills. A good job is one that you find meaning in. And because we've got used to treating people in companies like we treat machines and assembly lines, we're really bad at letting people find the meaning in the work that they do. And that's what younger generations are craving more than anything else. But we are really good. Like our brains are designed to find meaning in something productive that we're doing. And the trouble is we switch that off. But if we just turn that on and work with that, the results are quite staggering.

Well, that's really interesting. So tell us a little bit about what the kind of process really is because I imagine that what's happening is that the first thing is that you've got to be able to, you know, in order to get into a company to even let them in the door, let you guys in the door, right? There's going to be resistance to this. And I just know it because anything around people? We've, we've interviewed a lot of people in HR, right, JC? A lot of people around this stuff.

And it's the change, right? When you say change management to people, or when we talk about a merger or a, you know, an acquisition, people get nervous because they don't know it's the future and they don't know what's happening. And so, yeah, what is the way that you sort of start this or get in the door at these companies?

So, the key, I think, is not to have a revolution, but to have an evolution, right? If you come in and suddenly change everything, change— people fear change. People see change as a threat because throughout our history, if things were unpredictable, we were probably not going to survive, right? So, our brains are made to really be very wary of change. And when things are uncertain, it uses up our prefrontal cortex enormously, which drains us of energy more than anything else. But also people then withdraw into being very conservative and not trying anything. So kind of counterintuitively, if you want people to really step out and try things and be adventurous, we need to create an environment that's the opposite of that. We need to create a safe, stable environment that's predictable, and then people will step out. But if we create an environment where there's a lot of chaos and upheaval, people will withdraw and performance is going to drop. So change management is really, really, It has to be approached really carefully, and John can talk more about that side of it. But what I would say is, within Thrivent especially, it's absolutely vital that the pilot that happens— it's never rolled out immediately over a whole company.

Yeah.

The pilot that happens is teams that volunteer into it, that apply to come into it. So then you get those who are the most enthusiastic, they're eager for this change. And you need to get that sort of 15-odd percent of early adopters to be adopting it before the bulk are going to even think about changing, right? So it's about getting an enthusiastic cohort, especially if you can get them to try and tackle some sort of difficult problem for the company, almost like an elite force in the company. And that creates a buzz that then more people want to be a part of. So I found in the company I used to work for when I started experimenting with this, You try it in 1 or 2 teams, and the buzz in those teams is so noticeable, and the performance improvement is so quick that senior leadership are noticing it very quickly. Other teams are noticing it, and they want to become a part of it. And so that's how things— that's how change always happens naturally in human society. It never works forced down.

Yeah, right.

There's an organic nature to what you're doing there too, right? Which is to allow it to kind of, you know, to to matriculate— is that the right word? But you want to kind of go out through the organization, but you got to start with these kind of— you got to seed it first, right?

Well, effectively, it's early adopters, right? If you think of the iPhone, right, there's a certain small group of people that are early adopters, and that's analogous to those teams that you mentioned, that 15%.

And how change always happens in society is there's a slow— there's a progress through early adopters, which the the bulk of the group don't really notice that much. But then it reaches a certain point at which there's a sudden change and a sudden upheaval, and suddenly the whole group is different. And it always does that with human interactions, right? There's— it goes and it goes to a tipping point, and then suddenly there's a hockey stick change that happens. And so that's the way I think that is important to approach this sort of thing. Yeah.

And I would add, if I may, that the The change, the change terms that you hear in a company give it all away right away. So if you hear the phrase change management, we're in trouble. If you hear the phrase driving change, we're in trouble. Yeah, now, Duncan and I are used to hearing that all the time because that's the vernacular, that's, that's where we're going. But we immediately know that the change is being done to people because it's been left too late. and it has to happen now. And we don't know if you can do it, so we're going to do it to you. We're going to do it to you. So change where you're managing. Sorry, what are you managing? Why are you managing it? Why do you even need to manage it? It's just gonna— everyone's gonna come to work and do the perfect job. They're being paid loads of money. They're being tasked with brilliant objectives. They are fascinating women and men and children who are coming to work.

I'm the manager!

Absolutely, yeah. But the issue is, but I'm the manager. I'm the board. I'm the HR department. This is all down to me, and I have to So our approach is, and it's an idealistic one which isn't the truth yet, is to find those companies who actually get that.

Yeah.

They don't walk in at home at 6 o'clock in the evening and someone comes up and says, right, thank you, Jo, I'm glad you're home, right, can you go and tidy out the bins, can you go and do this, no, don't sit down there, no, you're not having your favourite meal, no, you can't have a beer yet. That's— we're looking for people who aren't living their lives like that, but instead are running their own lives. And as you know, entrepreneurs are very often like that. The issue is entrepreneurs running a business and thinking about exit are often going to struggle to give that away to other people. They're going to struggle to trust other people. So our trick, the thing that we've tried to work out, is how do we get in? And in a minute, Duncan will talk about how he discovered all this stuff from his side in terms of the measurement. And it wasn't— You know, it was, it was a gift. He, it just kind of happened. He'll tell you how that happened. In my case, we look for a specific person, an executive sponsor, who has been tasked with doing a thing by the board, and they kind of know they have to do it, and they kind of know what date they have to do it, and they kind of know the value of it, and they kind of know the people are going to do it, but they've got no idea whether it's actually going to be delivered. But they think they should be able to deliver it through the people, but, but they get— they take— they don't take the risk of empowering those people to do it. They take what they think is less of a risk of telling them what to do. But we come and knock on their door at that point and say, hey, exec sponsor, are you sure that's going to work? You know that fails 4 times out of 5, don't you? How are you feeling about that? Wouldn't you like something that succeeds 4 times out of 5? Well, John, that sounds a bit new. Duncan, that sounds a bit new. I know, but it's— but as Duncan has said, let's just try in a little pilot. I know, let's split this project up into 6 groups and we'll only work with one of them, and the other 5 you can tell them what to do, and then we'll see. So we're always looking for that exec sponsor. I'm making it sound easy. It is not easy. It's not easy to find organisations who want to exit, who actually want to create a legacy. They're very focused on what they're doing, but the whole concept of, you know, upskilling the team to sharpen the saw and creating a legacy that will hold on to the best performance and the best people after it's been purchased, that isn't in their mind. Why should it be in their mind? They're running the business at the moment. Well, hang on a second. Exit ready means thinking about that stuff earlier. I don't have time, John. Okay, we'll see you next year when you are. But you can't, you know, it's going to be a real knife and fork. It's going to be a car crash at your exit unless you can think about that ahead of time. But Duncan has a lot more to add in terms of how we discovered all of this stuff early on. And it's—

yeah. That's what we're going to get to. Yeah, there's neuroplasticity involved. There's all kinds of really interesting science and stuff in here too. So Duncan, take us through a little bit about kind of like what is the meat and potatoes of this, you know, the kind of root of all of it.

Yeah.

So, so it's, it, it all started with me when I stumbled by accident onto collective intelligence. I didn't even know there was a field of study called collective intelligence, which is quite specific. And it's collective intelligence is to a group of people what IQ is to an individual, basically. And the questions, uh, so, so you can learn things quickly, you can adapt more quickly, uh, you can perform tasks more quickly, you know, the, the normal things we associate with intelligence. And the question researchers were interested in is, is there something that correlates with that with a group of people? And if there is, is it fixed largely like IQ is, or can we change it? And what they found was, yes, there is. And surprisingly, the collective intelligence of a group is only loosely correlated with the IQs of the people in the group. So the IQs of the people in the group is not a driving factor to the IQ of the, of the team. What matters more is how the team is structured and particularly how they communicate. And so a really interesting thing that came out of the research is you can, at a really simple level, just count the number of interactions between people in the group and predict the intelligence of the group, which is really interesting, right? So if you have a team where each person gets assigned their work and they work in their little silo, that's the opposite of collective intelligence. And the sum of— and the team is gonna be less than the sum of the people in the team. One of the teams in— when I first discovered this was one of the highest— what was the most senior team in the company was the lowest performing team in the company. And that was— the guys loved their manager. He was a really good guy. Honest. It was nothing, you know, he wasn't a micromanager or anything like that, but all communication went through him.

Wow.

And really bright people in the team, really great developers, but just the structure of the team. And it wasn't this manager's fault because how is he supposed to know? Right? Nobody teaches you this sort of stuff. But at the same time, I'd been given— I'd been put in charge of a team. It was my first time being a manager, and I had one of the most junior teams in the company. And I stumbled onto collective intelligence. Basically, I was so afraid we wouldn't get any of our features done if, you know, any of our rocks done in EOS language.

Right.

If one was assigned to each person because everyone was new, to the team. So I said to the guys, okay, let's just take our most important feature, break it up into small tasks, get the team to break it up, and then we'll swarm all over it. I won't assign tasks. Let's just at least get the most important thing done. And what happened was immediately the energy in the team went up. There was a buzz in the team to the point where the C-suite were noticing, and it wasn't coming from me, because, as you would have noticed in the pre-brief here, I don't know how to do small talk, right? I'm not, I'm not an engaging person, right?

But Duncan, Duncan, you're the most effervescent, outgoing person out there, aren't you? And you were the most senior person in the company when you discovered this, weren't you?

Not remotely, right? But what happened was everyone, the team, had to quickly self-adapt, self-organize itself. And what happens is it looks like chaos at first, but what was happening is they were— the team self-adapted in the most optimum ways, which is how organic systems work, right? Trees and Everything will adapt in the most optimum way to reach the sunlight, etc. And that's what happens. People are organic. You mentioned organic earlier. So people are organic, which means teams are organic and companies are organic systems. And we need to treat them like organic systems, not artificial systems, right? So, so what had happened—

Interject for a second, Duncan, which is, I think, in the age of AI, right?

Yeah.

An incredibly compelling And kind of interesting discussion to have, right? Because there's so much of this, and there's— I know there's a tie-in to AI and stuff too, but the reality is that we've— John and I've talked about this because this is obviously— AI cuts across every single conversation you're having these days.

Yeah.

But the reality is too, is that we've seen that there's a push towards, you know, there's a way in which AI actually— there's a chance for us to become more human.

Yeah.

In the face of AI.

Exactly right. So, so the interesting thing about AI is the reason it's artificial intelligence is because it's highly interconnected. It's self-adapting to accurate information that's coming in, right? And when you get those 3 things, you get intelligence. That's how our brains work. They're highly interconnected. They're self-adapting to our senses and information that's coming in. It's how hives of bees can make intelligent decisions like where to put the next hive because it's highly integrated. self-adapting to information that's coming in. Whenever you get those 3 things, you get intelligence. Now, the way we structure teams in our companies is very often the opposite of that. They're not self-adapting, they're not highly integrated, they're siloed, and the information sticks with the C-suite or someone. It doesn't really get down to the front lines.

Right.

And that's the opposite of intelligence. If we just switch that around, that's when you get intelligence. So when I had the team swarm all over the this task, we accidentally stumbled onto collective intelligence because they had to be talking to each other about who's picking up what task, what's good, you know, that sort of thing. So we immediately got that they self-adapted. And the information was basically the work that we were doing, right? So we got intelligence. And this team, even though it was one of the most junior, was immediately the highest performing team in the company. And I had the C-suite coming to me saying, what on earth is going on? And then I I have no idea. So then, and what staggered me about that most was I'd been as a new manager trying to figure out and asking everyone for management tips. This was nowhere near on the agenda of anyone, like, get you guys to swarm over something, right?

And you probably would have been given advice of like, no, you really have to, like, accountability and exactly the exact opposite of what actually happened and what was successful.

Yeah, exactly. And so that's what got me thinking that I need to dive into the research. So I went back to university, started studying psychology and found collective intelligence, and then also into the neurology of— because everything comes down, back down to neurology at the end of the day. And it was really interesting to find this field of collective intelligence and that explained it. So, but then I had the C-suite the CEO coming to me and wanting me to figure out how exactly what was working, how can we roll that out across other teams? So I had to figure out how do you measure it in real world of work terms? Because if you can't measure it, you don't know if you've got it and you don't know if you need it. So how to measure it and in a way that can be rolled out. And as a programmer, so I'm a software developer by trade, You can't do complex software if you can't debug your code. And something, speaking to so many managers, the one wish they have, especially engineering managers, is they wish they could debug their people and their teams like they could debug code. So I realized that this was happening, but I had no idea what the dynamics were, what the factors were of what was going on. So how do you know what to change and what to do, what's working, what's not working? So So, to try and get to the bottom of that, I figured if the performance of the team increases so much, and we tried it in another team and they had a measurable tenfold improvement in performance immediately.

Amazing.

If that performance, which proved it wasn't me, right? So, if that performance is so great, what I figured is each person has to be having an impact on everyone else. in the team to raise the performance. So let me measure the impact everyone has on everyone else. And so I developed a series of impact statements that everyone answers. So it would be, so one person will never rate another person. That's always bad data.

Right.

Right? So it would be, if I wanna find out how good Jo is at problem solving, I'm not gonna get somebody to rate Jo on problem solving. Rather, I'll say, have somebody say, When I have a difficult problem to solve, I go to Jo, or Jo regularly unblocks me in my work. That's impact, real-world impact on my work, and that's what matters, because impact is value to the company at the end of the day.

Can I chip in? So what Duncan's done beautifully there is he's created a proxy for those brain chemicals. You couldn't possibly have people walking around in the office with electrodes attached to their head trying to work out A, you wouldn't get very many volunteers, uh, because it kind of damages their hairstyle on the day. And more importantly, it's kind of weird. So what, what he's created is a proxy way of measuring that, which is completely, uh, voluntary. It's completely, um, anonymous from the point of view, only from the point of view of protecting the person from feeling that they have any fear about what they're going to say.

And changing the data as a result.

Correct. And getting, getting bad data because as soon as get any cortisol or any, or any, uh, and, and also there's some clever ways, we won't go into it today, where we prevent people, um, kind of badmouthing each other, you know. Oh great, this is my opportunity to say that I don't like the fact that Jo has worn the same shirt as me today. By the way, the audience is sitting there thinking—

I found a way to work it in.

How, why does Jo wash his shirt and how's all the color gone and why is, why is John so beautiful? I just found a way to weave that in, Jo. But my, my point is it's, it's, there's something going on here about how do you create that proxy of that measurement. And the, um, and the other thing that just came to mind when we talk about artificial intelligence is, um, I would like to venture an opinion, and it's only an opinion at this stage, but the, but the friends of mine in AI, deep in AI, who are guiding me on this, is, uh, are saying this stuff to me, is that, um, artificial intelligence doesn't have a soul. It doesn't have a deep memory, and it doesn't have, um, it's quite shallow. I don't mean that in a rude way. That's a good way to put it. We love AI, but, but the depth that you and I have got, that I know I can take the mickey out of your shirt without you getting upset, that the depth, uh, that I can even remember that our shirt is the same. Yeah, we talked about that, you and I, you know, 32 minutes ago. AI would have forgotten that by now because that's not relevant for the thing. But humans can work out a different form of relevance to a situation, and the people side of change and the way that they get on and react to each other is the absolute critical thing. Go, Duncan.

Yeah, exactly. And so coming back to AI then, right, AI is really good at doing boring stuff, but it's really bad at anything innovative or creative or anything new. It's no good at that. But the trouble is we've been treating people like machines in jobs and job descriptions like they're made for machines for so long Now we're surprised when machines are starting to do them better. But if we treat people like people and really capitalize on what makes people brilliant, a team of a high— with high— that's highly engaged and is working very well together will beat AI every day of the week.

And will never be replaced.

Let AI do those boring things.

Yeah, sorry.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, sorry. Yeah, exactly. So let AI do those boring things, the things that AI is good at. Let people do the brilliant things that people are brilliant at, right? And, but we can do that in a manageable way, right?

And briefly, briefly, there's a thing here about— we talked about boomers and Gen X and Gen Z and millennials and etc. They— the methodologies— do you remember when we thought that a washing machine was going to revolutionize life because it was like a machine that could do the thing that the human does? The the established transformation— we talked about change management earlier and driving change— those established methods were developed for Boomers, you know, Deming creating stuff, Eisenhower sending him to America, Taguchi picking all that stuff up and saying, hang on a second, we need a people, we need a human being to be able to press a button and stop the line. Really? Why'd you do that? So that kind of development, which was developed for Boomers, it is a little bit— what's the word? be rude, John. It's a little bit naive to think that what we developed 70 years ago is still going to be applicable to my children who are 20 and 23.

Not with the way that technology and everything else has gone and the evolution of human beings. The pace of evolution has picked up, right? Yeah. So what happens with the technology— this is just an interesting point because, again, I think there's so many ways that we can look at the last 70 or 80 years and go, what an anomaly it was in like the history of the world in so many ways, but a lot of it's also because of the speed at which the technology and innovation was happening. And then they either— I don't know if it's the, the actual, the lack of our ability to catch up to it, or the way our bodies are just trying now to kind of get used to this speed, right, of doing everything. And of course—

Duncan will touch on this, but beyond a certain age you don't have neuroplasticity anymore as a human or as a team. And that's the issue. So Duncan will cover this, but beyond a certain age, you just keep doing what we've always done. I've been doing Six Sigma for 8 years now. I'm just going to do it. I'm going to change. I'm going to drive. Hold on. How does that work for the 21-year-old where you force them to do Monday in Slack and stuff? And then you say, look, there's a beanbag. What do you mean you're not happy? There's free pizza. What do you mean you're not happy? There's something very revolutionary Just around the corner alongside artificial intelligence. It's almost, it's almost surfing behind it, uh, water skiing behind artificial intelligence is this new thing. And, uh, we don't know enough about it yet, but we think that we are, you know, we've grabbed hold, Duncan, haven't we, of that rope? And we, we're kind of sometimes on our— Don't swear, John. Sometimes on our bottom, We are bouncing along behind, uh, behind the boat.

Well, you have to be in this. I mean, look, this is the forefront of things, and, and being in this whole thing is what it requires, and it requires somebody to be doing that, you know, that, that upfront work. And thank God it's, you know, we have you guys to be doing that. I mean, I, I think what's so fascinating about this to me, and let's just bring it back a second again to like, okay, so this is great, where, where do— where does this fit in, you know, when I'm in it and I'm now thinking about selling my company in the next few years And, you know, and how am I going to now kind of take advantage of this? Because let's just say that, again, I buy into it. I think it totally makes sense. There's this organic nature to it. I think I've done personally done a lot of work on wisdom of the crowd.

Mm-hmm.

So crowdsourcing and things like that, and the ability to see that wisdom come through just on an aggregate level, right? When you've got so many different people kind of coming at it with so many different brains and so many different attitudes and so many different kind of, uh, you know, filters that generally what happens is you get to the right answer because you've got so many people kind of coming at it, right? Which is not the same. It's like, again, it's a, a little bit of a hive, but the real hive stuff is about this, is about the intelligence of this, right? The collective intelligence being its own thing outside of the individual intelligence.

Yeah, well, that actually, Joe, what you're talking about is, is pretty much collective intelligence, right? So that happens when this collective of people are exchanging ideas that a lot of communication going on between them and they can adapt, then you get this intelligence. But if you have a group of people and everything is going through 1 or 2 people with a loudhailer, that's mob rule. And it's very different, right? So it depends on how it's structured.

Right.

And the question is, in terms of work, you mentioned near the beginning, like, so you go to a seminar and then it's, but now what? I'm at work on Monday.

Right.

So that's why everything we do is firmly embedded in the real world of work, right? It's— this is the impact you have on me and the work I do. And then when you— what was really interesting when we did that is you actually discover all sorts of things about the team that you had no idea about before, right? So for example, in one, there was designers and programmers. The designers were scoring really high on, I go to them when I have a difficult problem to solve, and they regularly unblock me in my work. Even the database designer, programmer, right? And the question is, how could that be happening, right? What on earth? So at first, my initial reaction was like, the designers are nice guys, they're being nice, right? So we dove into it exactly, give me examples. And like the database guy would say, like, he's got to make a decision about which way to go, this way, that way. He really needs to understand the user's use case and the user's mindset very deeply. The designers have that information. And so he would go to the designers for that. Now, the way the company worked was to be very efficient. Product managers do the customer research, hand over a brief to the designer who does a design, hand over to the programmers. And we discovered that way of structuring things was really harming performance, right? We broke those walls down. Yeah.

Just for a second, because I think this is an incredibly important thing to start, because if If you've ever managed a project or been involved in any kind of business thing where you're trying to move a needle from here to here, yeah, or whatever, okay, this is the most important thing you're going to hear probably this year right now.

Yeah.

Because we have spent, and we were trained, okay, as I ran a project management office, I had, right, I mean, I was all about the program and a process. I built processes for getting things done. And I can tell you that every single one of them failed.

Yeah.

And right, John. And I mean, what I mean failed means, you know, things were late, things didn't get done on time, things were whatever, you know, whole thing. And because, and I think that what you're saying is that we have looked at this top-down model for information flow for so long that we really believe that the CEO sets an agenda and this is what we're going to do. The individual department heads take that thing and push it down to their managers. Their managers get in, get the work done by the rank and file, whatever. And then the information goes back up this way in this kind of up and down vertical thing. Right.

And I think of command and control. And 20 years ago, I can't even remember the book, but it's like, oh, the command and control. It's like the way— and we promise not to use military analogies, but. Right. Command and control of the army as an example of like, oh, it comes down from the general. And like, even that's changed, right? So it's, it's, it's much more— they're driving it or driving things down. I think you're itching to say something, Duncan, so please, you know, yeah, talk about that a little bit because, because this requires a lot of driving, um, uh, control— not control, but driving thoughts and information down to people so they can make those decisions, right?

Yeah, exactly. And this is when I talk about militaries, this is where it is, because actually militaries, the ones that win wars, are actually very proactive in not being command and control. They're very much about give the information to the front lines, let them— the higher-ups will set the target, they'll set the objective, but they won't tell them how to get there. And then what's—

So I agree with that. It's absolutely key that all the driving and making change happen can be if you need to succeed is the what. Just tell me the what. Don't tell me the how. As soon as you start telling me the how, you're taking away my own personal passion, excitement, joy, my interactive— let me think about the how. You tell me you want us to win the NFL. Win the NFL. I will work out how. And the bit that's really important is when we're on the pitch and we're losing and you're shouting things at us from over there, we can't even hear you, and you're saying, Playbook number 14. Playbook number 14? That's wrong. And can I not even remember what it is? What we need is on the pitch, we need to know what to do. And that doesn't happen overnight. That happens over a period of months of Duncan saying, when I'm in a pickle like this, I go to Jo.

Hey, I'm Jo Stapleton.

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And Joe says, Duncan, just kick it, or Duncan, just give it to JC, he's the fastest runner, or whatever. Are you with me? So there's something about the only driving, driving change, making change, the only part that you can do if you've got your head screwed on is the what. I want to exit this company when? At the end of 2028 with all of my best people on board and empowered and staying here and becoming the chief exec. Oh, now I understand. So how do we do that? I don't know. You guys tell me, how would we do that? And if we can't do that, we won't do that. Duncan?

Yeah, exactly. And so what you really want is information systems, not command and control systems.

Right.

And information systems make information— and don't try and decide who needs to know what. Make it as much as possible available to the front lines as possible. Let them figure out what they, what they need to do with it.

And now here's a place for AI to play.

Exactly. And information systems will beat command and control systems every day of the week, right? So one of the things that Enthriven focuses on is from an organizational level is how do you give the organization the visibility into how the organization is trying to adapt in the most optimum ways and support those? Because the reality is, sorry, C-suite, but CEOs don't drive the company forward. Everything gets driven forward by the people at the front lines. They do the work that drives the company forward. The role of— and this is—

By the way, after exit, they've gone. They've gone anyway.

Yeah.

Yeah. Often because they were the founders with loads of money, loads of effort tied in. And hopefully, but the people with share options are still there and they always wanted— that's why they're working with a founder. They always wanted to be a part of that. They always wanted to be part of the exit. They want to run it forward. Entrepreneurs are so often good at the entrepreneurial bit. They're not very good at the chief exec bit once it becomes a big corporate.

Yeah, so yeah, exactly. And so it's the question is then for the structures in the organization is how do we support those frontline? How do we figure out the environment that they thrive and do the best work? And how do we support that? Almost like, I think organizations almost kind of an inside-out organization, right? Where The frontline teams are treated like startups in a business incubator, and the rest of the company is like the business supports for those startup teams to really do their best work. And then it's about setting the objective really clear and keeping that objective very clear. And excellence needs to be the air that everyone breathes, an atmosphere of excellence. So—

Right.

So what then happens is we take this back. So When you get collective intelligence going, engagement shoots through the roof. And there's tons of research that high engagement means high performance, right? The people— somebody who does something they love every day is the— that's the profile of the top performer in any company. It's— they're the top of their field. It's as simple as that. So I was a bit concerned that the people in the team, the individuals, would start to get lost for the group, right? And it's really important. The collective is made up of individuals. You need strong individuals to have a strong group.

Right.

So what I started to do was to, so it, so what, what I'd been, um, reading up on in terms of neurology and, and John mentioned earlier that from, from about your mid-20s, you don't get neuroplasticity. That's almost true. You don't get it for free anymore.

Yeah.

Whereas younger than that, you get it just by doing something. So you can hate school, you're still gonna learn and grow. But after about 25, that doesn't happen. You, your brain has to produce either dopamine or acetylcholine or oxytocin to get that neuroplasticity to happen.

So—

To interject, Duncan, I'm sorry, just because we do talk about this too. And this is something that personally affects my life and the whole thing. This is the ADHD stuff happening here too. Okay, so just understand that when, when we think about ADHD and kids and stuff like that, right, it is about this kind of neuroplasticity and their ability, their brain's ability at that point to be able to executive function Right. And what happens is, as adults grow, grow, as you get past what you said, like your 20s, you actually get more into that mode and become that more than you were before, right? Like, in other words, you start to become more rigid. You're right. Your thinking isn't— you don't, you don't have this expansive thing. You're not as, you're not as creative in your problem solving because, because of your brain and probably because of how much experience your brain has in trying to protect itself.

Yeah. And if we're not used to finding the love in the stuff we do, then it becomes much more difficult, right? So an ADHD kid can focus intently for a long time on something that they're really enjoying, right?

Right.

And dopamine feels like fun, right? The neurochemical of fun is dopamine. So when we do something that— dopamine is really the neurochemical of pushing us down the right path forward. So it's forward-looking. And if we do things that we think, that's good, this is the right path, I achieved something, your brain produces dopamine, a dopamine spike. But that dopamine spike will go and strengthen the neurons that led to that so that you will be better at that tomorrow.

Right.

You adapt in that direction.

Right. So, that's after 25. You need to have that. If you're not getting any joy and love in work, you're not going to get that and you're not going to grow. And the same is with acetylcholine, is the neurochemical of focus. So when you're really intensely focusing on something, acetylcholine is marking the actual neurons you're using to focus so that later on when you're daydreaming or you're sleeping, those neurons fire very quickly and they prime themselves to be used again tomorrow. So that's, if you've ever tried to practice a musical instrument, you might practice really hard for one day and you make a bit of progress and you feel good. Tomorrow, suddenly you can do it. And that's what's happening.

So true, right? It just—it's that's what we call it. It just clicks suddenly. It clicks.

Learning a language too—the same thing.

So yeah, right.

And acetylcholine is that thing where you say, "Wow, is that the time?" Yeah. Have I been listening to this podcast for that long? That's—that's amazing. Time blind. And that's because your brain is working so fast to make little flags to say, "I must remember that." Oh, I must remember that as well. I must remember that. And then next time you daydream or next time you sleep, it will— your brain, brain to an extent will rebuild that area so that the next day that is beginning to change your approach to that thing.

Yeah.

And you can't always remember where you learned it, but you know you learned it. And then you think, right, what was— it couldn't have been that podcast, could it? I don't know. And you kind of— are you with me? So it's— so this— the beauty of measuring those things by proxy, by cleverly, in an anonymous, safe, voluntary environment, asking how we react to each other. That's the crazy, that's the crazy breakthrough we've made in some ways in terms of the measurement part of it. We can talk about the training part as well, but the measurement part of it is very much that, that whole piece of making that real, Duncan.

Right, yeah, exactly. And so when, when I realized that you You can identify when your brain produces these neurochemicals by how they feel. So dopamine feels like fun. You feel energized afterwards because dopamine is a precursor molecule for adrenaline. So when you have a rise in dopamine, you have a rise in adrenaline. It's a rise in energy. So if you feel energized and like, yes, that was great after you did something, your brain produced. So you can identify it, right? With acetylcholine, you're alert and you lose track of time. So you can identify when your brain has produced acetylcholine. So here's, you mentioned, Jo, like one or two simple things people can do. Like if you're a manager, you've got a small team, here's a really simple thing you can do. Have a short 5-minute one-to-one with each of your people. And in each one-to-one, and ask them for the first week, keep a diary. Every time you do something where you felt energized afterwards or you lost track of time, write down specifically what you were doing. And why you think it made a difference. And then we'll have a discussion and figure out how you can move your workloads to be able to get closer and closer to doing one of those things every day. Now, more than— it doesn't matter how long a day, how much of every day, just some point every day. So it's not like that's all we're doing, but at some point a day, that's the magic pivot point where people are flying and they absolutely take off. Because every single day your brain is growing and that little growth, growth, growth, growth, growth really adds up very quickly.

And what it adds up to, Duncan, just to be clear, right, is that is your, is your overall satisfaction and, and feel like in your purpose, right? So you feel that as you do that every day, just a little bit, right? Even if you've got to do other crap you don't like, which we all do, that little bit is the every day is what's keeping you not only just in it, but actually growing your love for it in a way too, right?

And that's a really good point. If you get 90 minutes per day of that, those feelings, you can get through the rest of the day, the rest of the project. You can, you know, in old-fashioned terms when I was growing up, you know, we weren't allowed to have a pudding unless we'd eaten all of our greens. And we would all, in my family, we would eat the worst greens first when we were still super hungry so that we kind of got them done. And there's There's this thing about the acetylcholine, sorry, the dopamine and the chemicals that we get in the time when we're feeling really valued and respected and appreciated and honored and we're on fire, then just energized, they kind of float around with us for a chunk of time and that allows us to do the other stuff.

Yeah. So then all those other things, the crap that you mentioned that would normally drain you, doesn't drain you anymore because you've been energized. But you're capitalizing on these neurochemicals from that thing you loved. So you're also gonna get neuroplasticity for these other things, which normally you wouldn't get. And so it all adds up and adds up and adds up. Now, when you get collective intelligence really working and the team is humming together, the chances that people are gonna get one of those signals every day shoots through the roof because there's so many different things people are doing. But there's a much wider sample of stuff that you're doing. You're helping this person out with that. You had a discussion with this, you know. And so the chances that people are gonna get a signal every day goes through the roof. And I think that's why the energy in the team shoots up so dramatically.

And this must, this must do incredible things for retention rates too, right? For keeping people, because again, if you're consciously doing this and you're consciously nurturing this, and that might not be the right word, but the ability—

Nurturing is the perfect word. Yeah.

OK. Yeah. Yes. Nurturing and belonging. So if I belong in a team, I will be there for a long time. I know that's a naff wordplay, but there's definitely an element of, I'm longing to be part of this team. What do you mean, you want to be here a long time? Yeah, I'm longing to be in this team. I belong in this team because I feel that I am honoured and respected and valued.

Yeah.

Duncan didn't quite finish his little thing there about a little tool that people can take away, and there's a long story behind this that we can perhaps do another day, but there was, there was a team where one person was having an enormous effect on that team, and it needed to be worked out why. But one of the things they were doing was just getting the team together to not just look at objectives, because that was another part of what they were doing when they were getting together, but getting people together and just, just for 5 minutes a day, kind of asking 3 questions. Yes, the question, the 3rd question about what motivates— sorry, what, when did you feel passion? When did you feel energized? But also 2 kind and caring questions before then to kind of draw them in. The first is, tell me what you're working on. What are you working on, JC, at the moment? Oh, okay, cool, that's great. And how can I help you, JC? How could Jo help you? How could Duncan help you? Oh, that's kind, that's kind. You're thinking of me, you're thinking of what you're knowing now, what I'm working on, you're listening, you're processing that, you're then asking how we can help. And then the 3rd question comes of And JC, when, when did you feel really energized? Right now, actually. Really? I've never had a boss like this. I've never had someone who cares for me. And, and we won't do that whole story now, Duncan. But, but there's, there is this thing about that person in the team being not, by the way, not a very senior person in the team, but they were like the ringleader who was pulling that whole piece together. Incredibly valuable.

And you're talking about the, again, we go back to, you know, transferable value, right? At the end of the day, that person isn't leaving.

Yeah, yeah. If you can get them to feel that they belong, then they will be there for a long time. And in the exit context, do I want to sell a piece of rubbish on and then it dies after I've left? And then I say, oh, look how good I am because the company's died after I've left. Mate, no, that's bad. That's a bad exit. That's a bad purchase. What you wanted to be doing was creating a great company, but creating a great pool of people around you, particularly some of the younger, less senior people who weren't being paid quite so much money, but now they're coming up shining. And then the purchaser comes and buys them, and I have found, uh, kind of slightly reverse out over time, or garden leave, or whatever it is. And yet all of my legacy of these amazing people, um, carry the team forward. And if they don't carry the team forward, hopefully the purchaser says What was it that JC used to do that I'm not doing? Do you really want to know? Yeah. He used to get us together for 5 minutes and he used to ask us what we're working on and, you know, and could he help us. And then he would say, when did you last feel energized? It was simple. It's not rocket science. Please, could you start doing that? Well, we've never done that with any of the other companies we've ever bought. I know. None of them were as good as us. We're great. And you can see how that creates Right. Exactly. That then creates this legacy of holding on to the best performing people. And there's something about that along the way, and we haven't touched on it very much, about upskilling them along the way, sharpening the saw. And that again is a voluntary thing. We don't need to sharpen the saw of every lumberjack in the forest. What we need to do is to ask which of you would like a really sharp saw? And then Claire and Bob and Amelia stand forward and say, well, I'd like a really sharp saw.

Really? Why?

Well, because I feel mine's a bit blunt. I feel a lot of people's are blunt. Why don't I have the really sharp saw? And then when you come to a really difficult problem, hopefully you'll call, Amelia, have you got your sharp saw? And I will come and I will fix that problem. But you're very junior here, Amelia. I know, but I'm the one with the sharp saw. You empowered me. You nurtured me, and I'm going to, I'm going to pull this transformation. I'm going to— we're preparing the workforce here to pull the exit, not to be pushed, to pull the exit forward. Duncan?

So, so, so when it comes down to the nitty-gritty of, of, of how does— how do you get someone feeling like they belong? And Jaci, this, this goes into what you're talking about, retention, is, you know, this conversation, it's not just so that the person feels appreciated, but what we're trying to do is figure out How does your brain light up in the work that you do? And how do we get you to do more of that? So you start to adapt into a role that's unique to you and the most valuable you can have in the team where you're having the most impact possible. And that's belonging, right? If I know I'm an important part of this team, it's not fluff, it's genuine. I'm an important part of this team. That's belonging. Now, the second part of that is, so you're figuring out how each person's brain lights up in a very reductionist way. in the specific things they do in work and allowing them to adapt, but then plan that forward over the next year, not more than a year, but just over the next year. In the next 6 months, in very practical terms, we can see the direction you're going, but what in a year's time, what do you want your responsibilities to be? Responsibilities start to look like a job description. Then working back from that, for those to be responsibilities, what work do you need to be doing to show that you can do it? And then to be able to do that, what change in skills do you need? So we plan 6 months and 6 months change in skill work being done in very specific terms and responsibilities. And that, um, that, that carves a unique, um, career path forward for the person because human excellence is always unique. It's— you can never predict it ahead of time. And we try and manage this by having a uniform box that everyone has to fit in. That's a road to mediocrity. Excellence is always unique. So the question is, how can you practically manage this as a company is scaling? And that's what we do within Thriveman, is give— really give you those tools to be able to manage that for each person. So if someone's showing excellence, they can craft their maximum impact in the company, because impact is value, and who doesn't want to get the maximum value out of their people, right?

And there is a risk, though, that in most organizations, the concept of servant leadership The concept of, if I wear this shirt and Jo's wearing the same shirt, he might look better in it than me. That is the big, big risk at board level, and particularly in HR as well. This concept that nurturing the people, that's what we do in HR. Hold on, no, it wasn't. You used to do that as L&D. You're not doing that anymore. Oh yeah, good point. So who is nurturing them? Well, we kind of hope they pick it up at college, or we hope they pick it up on with some life coaching. No, no, that's not very strategic. Let's be intentional about nurturing a small group of the women and men here to spearhead that. We call that the dog bone. There's a blob of people there, right? Some of them are very effective, some of them are very innovative, but some of them in this bottom-hand corner here are not very either, and we've got a blob here. We create a dog bone Where a first group of early adopters, volunteers, begin moving upwards, regardless of their salary, into that top right-hand corner of being super effective, right, and super—

Innovative.

Whatever word you want to use, innovative or open or, or in Duncan's terms, you know, becoming 10 times better because they're being listened to and involved. Now that's really scary for the business, unless they're the person who made the decision to bring us in. It's kind of undermining potentially where they're at. Well, hold on, what do you want? Do you want to hold the business back and go for a bad exit and put that exit out several years and miss the window and get a low price? What's good for the business?

What's going on?

Why aren't we nurturing the whole workforce to get up in that top right-hand box? And by the way, the reason it's called a dog bone is pretty soon a very thin bridge develops where people are— the last few people are rushing from this poor box here across to the, the positive box before JC— we get rid of them before the exit. We can't have that JC bloke being visible when the, when the purchaser comes to look. We don't want JC here anymore. Or as soon as the business is purchased at quite a low price, unfortunately, because we couldn't get the price, guess who they're going to get rid of first? It's all of those people who are causing an enormous drain on the profit Every pound you pay an— every dollar, sorry, that you pay an employee is a dollar of profit.

Right.

And every dollar that you don't pay a bad employee— please don't take this the wrong way if you're a bad employee, now is your opportunity, by the way, to get over there— is a dollar of profit off of the value of the business. And when you're going for a 4x or an 8x or a 12x, it's all about what is the value we get from our workforce versus the outcome that we deliver? And have we applied any skill to that? Or have we just lived with who we've got? Because, by the way, if they don't belong when it gets purchased, they won't last. They'll leave. And what has the purchaser got then? And the big risk for an entrepreneur is they think, oh, that'll make me look good when the business tanks after I've sold it. No, mate. It's making you look— well, it's making you look good in one way. You were needed. You were needed to drive and tell people. But it's making you look really bad in other ways. And the next time someone comes to buy your business, do you think they're not going to go and look and see how much the previous one tanked after you sold it? So there's a lot going on there that we can bring as a strategic thought ahead of time, if only we can get in early. When do you want to sharpen your saw? Oh, after I've discovered it's blunt and I'm behind and I'm cutting down trees really slowly and I can never cut down all the trees. No, no, mate. Get your saw sharpened ahead of time. But I don't have the budget for it, John. Hmm, really? People are going to get 30% more valuable, every employee, and they're going to do 50% quicker. Why don't you measure for the next few months what 30% more and half as long again costs you, and then tell me how much you wasted, and then come and say, oh, John, if only we'd have done this earlier, we could have But of course they can't see that. And what we've— what we're creating now is the ability to measure it. We can come alongside, measure, predict, upskill, measure again. Wow, that's unbelievable. Someone's measured something wrong here. How can it— how can they be 10 times better? How can that junior person be so good? I don't know. Maybe we're— maybe we've just stumbled on something, or maybe it's— maybe it's a lie.

But John, we're gonna But they're also, they're gonna, the founder feels this in the business. This isn't just a, I mean, the measurement obviously is important, right? We know this and we want to prove what's happening here in the whole thing. But the best measurement is going to be felt, right? It literally in the way that the business feels and operates and in the amount of money that you're making.

For sure. And in most, certainly the most of, I would like to venture the opinion that in the 5 venture capital or private equity exits that I've been involved with, each founder sees a glimpse of this. They see a glimpse for a short period of time. when we opened the new factory and blah, blah, blah, when we developed that bit of code, I saw a glimpse of what it was and I've lost it now, but I'm trying to roll my sleeves up and get that back. Mate, it wasn't about you. It wasn't about you as founder. And by the way, it can't be about you after you've exited. You've got to create these women and men who belong here and who stay here and who— and again, that goes to the sporting analogy. You know, let's hire a great coach. No, we hire a coach who empowers the players. It's the women and men on the pitch. You know, this is not an enormous playbook where it's all about the playbook. This is more like kind of basketball where it's flowing from end to end and end, and there's a few practice things, but a lot of it is about how you react to the uncertainty that unfolds. Yes, we've just gone a basket behind, but what are we going to— how quickly can we get another basket and then defend the next one for a long time and then get our next one really quickly? That's how we get half as many more baskets than another team in a given set of time.

And I think half the reason that managers and people in the hierarchy want to control things is not because they're afraid of being outshone so much. It's that they're afraid of things going wrong and they're going to be held accountable. No manager is held accountable for how much he micromanages his team. They're held accountable for what their team do. And my experience is, if you really enable your team, They will make you famous, right? They will make you famous.

With court notice.

Yeah, exactly. And especially if we can— I found this projecting forward 6 months and 6 months and really in a very unique way tailored to each person, one of the most motivating things, especially for the seniors that I've done this with, of all the things I've ever done. And when it comes to you, JC, you're talking about retention. I think half the issue we have a problem, I think, in Ireland, programmers stay with a company on average 18 months, right? Part of the reason we have a problem is that people are locked into these boxes in their career progression. So 2 years ago, this was a great job for you. Now you've changed.

Yeah.

It's not a great job for you anymore. So you're gonna find another job that suits you. Rather, let the job change with you in, by, by really paying attention to how your brain lights up and being very proactive and planning that forward. And then, I mean, the ideal that I always say, not that you'd ever reach it, but you want to create an environment where people love coming to work so much that if they won the lottery, they wouldn't quit.

Right.

And that's an easy sell, right? If you go to, come, we're going to do this program, it's not, we're going to change everything and hold you accountable. So we want you to work with us to discover the environment that you absolutely love coming to work Every day. Who wants to be part of that? And that's an easy sell, right?

It's so funny because I think we've had a bunch of— again, we've talked to a bunch of HR people and, you know, and I think that one of the things that everybody says is, you know, that people don't leave jobs, they leave bosses.

Managers, correct.

And the idea here is that this is a great example of this, which is where you may not even have it. And this is where, again, I can see it because I've been on both sides of this, you know, why are you leaving? Like, why are they leaving? Like, how are you so unhappy? Like, what, what went wrong? You know what I mean? And the reality is, is that lots of times it's like, it just— this is, this is such organic human stuff going on here.

Yeah.

That we are— we want to overlook it. You know, there's something about us that we've been taught or whatever to try to ignore everything that's human about human beings. And like, as you were saying, like, we've We've had this mentality since the industrial age of trying to make humans into machines. The productivity, the grind bros, the get out there and do more and get up earlier and you're not doing it and do all the— by the way, you know, it's the bugs.

We have 1,000 bugs. You got to fix these bugs and get them done. Yeah.

But the idea that, John, you brought up the thing as a kid where you got to eat your— before you can have dessert, you got to eat your veggies, right? I mean, the idea here is that That we have created an environment in which we have been, in order for us to, as managers, to control what we think, to control the outcome, right? We are, we are basically keeping people in boxes. We are keeping them, right, their hands tied behind their back.

So stop there. Do you hear your words? Manage and control. Manage and control. Do you want to be managed and controlled, JC? No, stop talking. Don't stop smiling. Don't lift your eyebrow. I don't like it when I see that. Don't shake your head. I don't like it when I see that. We don't want that. And, and, and the word leader is a very interesting word. Think of it like a lead. How much lead should we give? We're just going to give you loads of lead. We're going to, we're going to, we're going to play out the lead, John, JC, and you can go wherever you want to go. Okay? I'm a great leader because I give you loads of lead. I'm not a director. I'm not going to tell you the direction. I'm not going to micromanage. I am going to tell you the direction. The what? What? But I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna tell you the, oh, stop there, turn around, right, go left a bit, go, go right a bit. Actually, you can do this in the dark, you know, just, just, just get dark. You know, come on. What we're doing here is we're turning on the lights in that environment. Imagine how much you would bump into Joe if you had to move around a dark room, okay? And imagine how tentative and, oh, oh, hurt my face, you, you would be. What we're doing is we're switching on the light in that room And we're saying, right there, there's everybody. Everyone can see what's going on. We've got a direction. We've been given quite a lot of lead. We're not being managed. We're not being controlled. We're not being driven.

Like horses.

Drive the horses.

You're not being managed. Like, yeah.

What we're being is we're being coached. Although I know the word coach has been a bit kind of borrowed in America. We don't mean a mentor. We mean someone who truly asks, guys, what do you want to do? Oh wow, why do you want to do that? Oh wow, what difference would it make if we do that? Oh cool, so what are the obstacles? Oh cool, uh, can I deal with any obstacles for you? What do you need? What can I give you? And it's all— it's that— it's that empowering approach, yeah, which entrepreneurs and people considering an exit in the future have not necessarily got. I mean, let's be honest, they've not necessarily got those skills. They haven't got where they got by being so always— not in every case, but I could propose the opinion that they haven't always got where they've got by being meek and mild and empowering the teams. But now this exit period is the time where they need to empower and work out how the team reacts to each other and where the strength is in the team, because If you can create that belonging, then toward the end, when you are no longer there, there will be a legacy of everything holding the best performance, holding the best people together, and people will already be used to being accountable to each other, to designing things together. And there is a— this thing that we said earlier on about debugging the people, we've created as well the upskilling capability to debug the people, but in a way that proves that it's not the leader, it's not the manager or the controller who's doing it, because they don't exist anymore. It's the leader who is empowering people in a new way, but their way, by which I mean they take ownership of how they're doing it. Duncan?

Yeah, so I would say like the way we think of leading in terms of managing in companies is not leading, it's chasing.

Right.

But to lead, people want to follow and people want to go to the destination. But we treat people like, you know, flocks of sheep that get chased by a dog that you're calling. That's, in fact, I've seen some videos of Bedouin shepherds, right? It's really fascinating. Look up on YouTube, Bedouin shepherds. They walk along calling and the sheep follow them.

They hear their voice.

They don't chase them. Right? But we have this idea in especially management that leading is chasing, but that's not leading. What you really wanna do, and there's hard research on this, that if you wanna motivate people to really improve, get them to project their ideal self forward and their hopes and their aspirations, what the best version of their self in the future, and plan towards that, people will self-motivate them. And that's what we are trying to do by looking for these signals and be saying, don't just imagine your ideal self, but like, this is literally how your brain lights up. each of those signals is a piece of the picture of where your greater self is. Now, how can we plan that forward, right? And when you do that, people propel themselves. I've actually had interns who in their second week kind of said to me, I'm not sure what's happening to me. I was expecting to kind of do as little as possible and the company's cracking the whip, which is what all my my friends say it about the intern, but I feel myself compelled to overachieve. And they put it down to this, let's figure out what way your brain lights up and give you the freedom to pick up the tasks that, that you want to pick up for what the team needs to do and find your, your role in the team.

Right.

And it is one of the most self-motivating things you can do for people. Like, and the biggest problem I ever had with, with these teams was getting people to take leave because in Ireland, you have to bundle or take leave, right? Um, because people just— they're energized. They're not drained of energy at the end of the day and they need a break. They are energized at the end of the day. They gain energy all the time.

Think about what the impact of this stuff is in the rest of your life. Like, exactly. I mean, we haven't even— we haven't even touched this yet, but the, the idea that when you could be— imagine being so happy at work that you didn't come home and kick the dog.

Right, exactly.

Like, this is the kind of the way that you are, because all of this comes down to how we're treated, how we feel about ourselves, what we're projecting out into the world and the whole thing, right? At the end of the day, that's all it is. And so, yeah, your job is just a way, again, that we've— human beings have created in order to, you know, to, to, to, to run in a kind of capitalistic world that we've decided to do. And these are all decisions that humans have made, and we're all just kind of going along with But what you're describing here, you know, what you've talked about for this last hour, which is so fascinating, by the way, we gotta— we're gonna have to do a whole other—

I was just gonna say, we have to do a second one because there's so many others that come up that are like, we haven't talked about that yet, but we have to. And I think you're right, there's a lot of things we have to talk about that and go into further depth about it.

So yeah, yeah, yeah, no question about it. But, but just to wrap this up where we are right now, I mean, I think that the, the outcome of this, right, is that You're also building— if you've got to go to work every day, which everybody does pretty much, you know, the idea is that— and by the way, every human innately desires to do, like to have a purpose, right?

Exactly. Yeah. The Thrivent sort of vision statement is thriving people, thriving organizations, thriving societies, because it's going to have that wider effect. But like what's really interesting, right, these dopamine signals, That's really the purpose you're getting every day in work. That's also the neurochemistry that drives addiction, right? So cocaine gives you a massive dopamine spike.

Yeah.

You crave more of it. You need to do it better and better and better, or in other words, more and more extreme. But it also strengthens those neural circuits that led to you taking the cocaine. So you want to do more. And that's for every, pretty much every addiction. It's the same neurocircuitry. That is meant for us to do productive and worthwhile things is being hijacked. Now, when you're being micromanaged, and especially when you have a manager who's focused focusing on weaknesses, like don't do that, don't do that, even if it's being sandwiched between two compliments, like people know what what you're doing is you're not getting those signals, and your brain craves that, right? Like you said, we we crave this to be productive. It's part of how we're supposed to work, and then people are going to try and get it. in other things, and that's addiction. So like for me, this is the really the crusade part of this, right? The real cause part of this is if we can get this right, if we can get a movement happening in companies where companies recognize this and are much more profitable for themselves, but also people are loving coming to work, that's going to be transformative on so many. Kids are going to grow up in different homes.

Yeah.

People are going to avoid addiction.

Yeah, in fact, this— it really does. When you align— when, when you— when people get aligned with their purpose, everything changes. It is just— it is— we have purposely taken it out of people. Yeah. We have, we have tried to divide a world that we can control and from— and we can go back to, you know, religion, the, you know, the, the, the— again, and that back to full circle, that last 70 years makes that last 70 years an anomaly. right, of, in the rest of history, right, of human history, the, uh, of being able to, to grow so much and to become aware so much and to become, right, which is why where we ultimately are right now with this stuff is to say, right, where you guys have— think we've all— we're figuring out that if we allow humans to be humans in their human way, understand their individual strengths and weaknesses about it, put them in a thing, not because you've done a thing in the past or because you were successful at a job that had nothing to do with this job, right? Or whatever. It's about where you are now, where your brain is right now, right? Where you are and what you get satisfaction of and what you think your purpose is. And when you can align those things, everything gets better, right?

Yeah, yeah, exactly. And we can look at those in a highly reductionist way in terms of work. Like, literally, when you did this specific thing for this reason with this person, your brain lit up. How can you do more of that? Right? So it's highly reductionist. So it gives the team and the manager and the person the freedom to be creative in how they move forward with this, right? So it's not boxing them into— managers down into little boxes. It's like, bring your brilliance, bring your imagination to it, and try things. But yeah.

One other thing, Jo, to what you were saying earlier is that if you think about There, you could argue there are different facets of our life. On the Tributary program, we've broken those down to what we consider the big 3: my work life, my family life, the community I'm part of.

Sure.

And most people would say, well, yeah, I, I've got something going on at work, I've got something going on at family. It might be I'm creating a family or I'm part of an old family that I've fallen out with. And most people have got some kind of community that they're part of. They play, they play basketball or they play football or they, or they collect stamps or whatever. And then we're asking people which of those 3 areas are most likely to invest in the UK, you know, $4,000 in you becoming 30% more effective and 50% quicker. Well, actually, probably it's my work life who are going to, you know, they're already paying me a chunk per month to do stuff. And now they're trying to create this belonging and this exit engine, this exit outcome, and they're investing in me upfront. But they're doing it with a thing that if I want to, I can apply it to my family and create belonging and purpose and empowerment and nurturing in my kids, in my brothers that I haven't got on with for years, in my parents that I, I keep struggling with, and that maybe I could actually nurture the relationship a bit more. And also in my community. What about the housing estate I'm part of? I don't know about in America, but in, and, and certainly in England, and to an extent in Ireland, a lot of the basic needs of the country are not being met by the government. They're being met by the hostels, by the churches, by the community groups, by the housing estate looking out for each other, you know, and therefore if you can catch someone at work and then ask them, okay, Lazy JC, you've learned this at work, who else are you going to give it away to? Well, I want to give it away to my community. Really? Where do you live? I live in Philadelphia. Which part? Well, I live here, which is quite a nice part, but I live quite close to this part. I drive past the projects every day, and what I've just learned here in only 69 hours and 7 weeks in how to nurture change in people and how to then measure that, I want to offer it to the community leader in the projects. And she ain't going to trust me to start with, but pretty soon she will trust me. And I'll say, please, could I just do it with 3 people? And she'd say, why? I'd say, well, because we've got 3 jobs at our company and we want to kind of give them to people from your projects. And we want to, we want to nurture them before that. And they're simple jobs, you know, one of them is the doorman, another is the night watchman, another is, you know, cutting up vegetables in the kitchen. But we've got these jobs and we want to help people. We want to, we want to create 3 people in that project. in that setting who have learned this from us and then teach it to others. That's a big, big part here. How do we create a methodology that— and a measurement method that people can pass on, not in my way or Duncan's way, but in their own way? But it is— we call that part the tin opener. I don't know if you've got a tin opener at home. You know, there's something about being able to fix stuff. Duncan?

I, I actually do this with my kids. My son is 17 and my daughter's 13. And they pay close attention to where they get into the flow and really try and adapt themselves to that. And my daughter especially tries all sorts of different things. She writes down the next day all the things she's gonna try. And so, for example, she wanted to learn music. So it was so self-motivating for her. She went and spent her own saved up money, bought a keyboard, got the app, taught herself to read music. Like, I don't have to chase her to do music lessons or anything, right? It's because she's figured out— she looks for those things. And my son as well, he's an engineer through and through, builds the most incredible things, things like I can't imagine how he builds those things.

Right.

But it's because he pays attention, both of them, they pay attention to where their brain lights up and where they get into the flow and trying new things to see where they'll get new signals and are proactive about that. And it is so motivating. Like, you can't hold them back.

It's amazing. It's so amazing because again, when you have kids and you're honestly, you know, you're always looking for that, those things. It's like, how am I gonna, you know, how do we just try to, you know, and you're, you try to, you know, the conventional wisdom is you try to have them try a lot of things and be out there and do stuff. And especially early on, you know, my youngest right now is almost 8 and been, you know, ADHD and, you know, autism spectrum, you know, mildly whatever. But the idea here is that the The, the lighting up of his brain is what you're looking for because, you know, those are going to be the things that he's going to gravitate towards whether you like it or not. And he's not going to gravitate towards the things that do not light his brain up. And in fact, yeah, and whereas you would be able to overcome that and say, okay, I'm gonna go brush my teeth anyway, right? He's going like, Brush my teeth sucks, and I'm gonna put up a fight every single time you ask me to do it, no matter what. But yeah, let me draw the Eagles field for the 18th time and watch how my, how, how into it I am and talk about, you know, right.

And, and when your direction there is, I, you, Jo, might say to them, the what I want you to do is go and find the things that really light you up. Right. And, and, uh, the how, I, you know, you, you, you do the how, you work out the how, uh, the, the what I want you to do Is to, um, is to be socially, you know, really happy with all your friends, really happy. The how you do that is up to you, um, you know, and it might be cleaning your teeth, but that's up to you. You decide. You decide what's the go-done.

Right. What's interesting is if, if, if they do that thing during the Eagles field or whatever that lights them up, brushing their teeth is not a problem. Like, they'll happily brush their teeth because they're feeling great, right? It's when you're drained.

That's the carryover effect of having had that joy.

My daughter, I noticed on her desk she had written in her thing for the next day, Morse code. I'm like, what's this Morse code? Why are you writing Morse code? She's— nope, she's decided she's learning Morse code now. And so, but I had no idea, right? She's teaching herself Morse code. Yeah, that's powerful. But there's always something. But that's, but that's that thing, you know, you project your ideal self forward. And especially if that's— you're paying attention to actual signals. So it's real. It's not just fantasy. It is so self-motivating. People will propel themselves towards that. And if we can do that in work, People will propel themselves forward.

And in the exit setting, if you say to people, what we want to do is somehow prepare for exit at the right time, and then they work out the how, like, I've just been jotting down on a paper how I'd feel motivated, what share options I'd like, what freedoms I'd like, what, who I wouldn't like to work with, who I would like to work with. Really? Why are you thinking that kind of stuff? Because you just, you empowered me to work out what, and I'm thinking of the how. And then as time goes on, We're upskilling that team to sharpen their saw. We're upskilling the preparing the workforce to pull the exit. We're not pushing them to exit. We don't know when the exit is going to be, but the more ready we are for the exit, the more we'll be able to. I've got a friend. The only reason they exited was because somebody, a company closely related to them, had a quota to buy ex-companies. By a certain time. Are you ready? Are you ready? We could be— well, we can't get ready for that. But if you'd started like 3 years ago, you'd be ready at any time, and your workforce would be ready, and they would say, yeah, yeah, let's— wow, wow. So my share options get vested, and I'm going to put that into an account because I love coming to work anyway, and I'm gonna— that's the kind of company that I want to be buying, that belonging, that setting.

Exactly.

And we didn't have time to cover it, but some of the private equity organizations that I've worked with, it kind of feels the opposite. It feels like that, and there's a slog.

That's part 2.

Yeah, maybe.

We're gonna have to have you guys back because we are kind of running out of time on this. But gosh, guys, this is so fascinating. It's a— you're right. It is a— I know you try to downplay it as evolution, but— and it probably is in some way, but the reality is it is revolutionary thinking in terms of Of getting— and look, we're seeing—

Just up there, the one— do you know what it was the Wright brothers developed? Do you know what the Wright brothers developed? It was, it was, it was just, it was just an evolution of flying. But what they developed, um, I, I believe I'm correctly saying this, was a thing pretty close to a joystick, which you'll still find in every airplane today. It was an absolute revolution that you could take off, fly into the wind, Turn left with the wind across you, fly with the wind behind you. How do you do that? And then fly again with the wind coming across your left side now, not your right side, and then land into the wind. It was all to do with the joystick. So what we're trying to create here is just that incredible revolutionary evolution that we now know how to control. And I know we talked about control being a wrong thing, but you know what I mean. We know how to feel. Feel what's going on and just make tiny adjustments. And then when we hand the company over after exit, we say, look, let me just fly alongside you for a little bit and then let me let you take control. And that's what happens when your airplane takes off. The pilot isn't, isn't there anymore. It's kind of flying itself from then on.

But especially if after exit, if these are processes in how the company works, it's not just relying on the personality of a leader or two. But it's baked into this is how career progression works, this is how management works in the company, then it's much easier to continue it going.

Yeah, yeah.

And that's at the start of the word procedure is the word proceed, and it's also proceeds, which is what, which is what you get when you sell the company. So, so, so this is how we're going to proceed. It's not, it's not, we're not processing our people and making, processing customers. We are proceeding with each customer to a great outcome. And it's pro— pro is a great way to start any word. And this is the procedure that we've created, and I belong here, so I'm part of this company. And I— we create— we've created these procedures, and we will continue to proceed and create the next procedures at each new venture. And our founder's gone now, but don't worry about that, because with the love and due respect to her or him, it wasn't about her or him anyway. It was about the way that she she created us, nurtured us to be a living, breathing company. And that's what you're buying when you're exiting. Do you want one of those? And that's very different to a lot of companies that you could buy.

And that's what makes— look, and that's the kind of thing that makes a company, you know, what we say is, you know, buyers fight for, right? Yeah. The kind of thing that makes— that's what raises your multiple. That's what makes you stand out in a crowded market. That's what makes people go, I gotta have this one instead of this one. Now, is every private equity gonna love this? No. And the reason is that they—

The really bossy ones, the really controlling ones, they won't get this. Okay? So you have to work out, do I want a really bossy controlling PE or VC buying my brilliant employees and doing things to them that I would never have done and they don't want to? Well, do you know what? If I'm in a seller's market, not a buyer's market, I've created an incredible being here, incredible belonging here. And even if I'm in a buyer's market, I'm going to be the only seller who will say, do you know what? We're not ready to sell yet. We don't like you. We don't like you enough.

Well, selfishly for the seller, they're often getting like an earnout period. So they're not getting all the cash up front. So if the private equity firm comes in and screws up the company that they have built and consciously nurtured to be this specific way, they're going to destroy the value that they're going to get in the future. Because—

Yeah. Imagine sending your kids to university and paying for them to go to college or university or whatever you call it in the States, and the university immediately starts messing them up, even though you're paying for it, you know, that's a pretty horrendous— that's a stressful situation right there. They're not enjoying it, you're not enjoying it. So there's something about beginning with the way we mean to go on. That's a Stephen Covey, you know, kind of let's begin with the end in mind. So that is, if I would leave people now with one thing who are thinking about exiting, I would say prepare this, think about this beforehand, prepare how you can create people who are belonging and look into how the programme and the measuring methodology that we've got could be available to you. There are ways to do it in the UK, you know, we gave away a number of golden tickets last year, we've decided we're going to give away 50 corporate social responsibility golden tickets this year, we're paying for those and, you know, you can check those out on our On our LinkedIn, you know, we, we don't pretend to have all the answers, but we do pretend to be thinking about those and finding, finding the right ways to do it.

And John, that LinkedIn, where's the best place for people to reach out to you, to the two of you guys? Which, what LinkedIn profile is it? Is it yours?

To me, it's John Myers, J-O-H-N M-Y-E-R-S, at Optimai. That's the parent company of Tributary. So, and if you, you know, you'll get the whole me there, I'm afraid. You get a little bit of political frustration. You get, you get free offers. You get, what do we do on Monday and Tuesday? We broke down what is a closed organization? How can you get a closed organization to be close? You just take the D off. I know that sounds easy, but how do you do that? And Duncan?

Yeah. So for me, yeah, LinkedIn is probably the best place as well. So Duncan Austin, A-U-S-T-I-N. Or you can go to enthriven.io. That's E-N-T-H-R-I-V-E-N. So like enliven, but enthriven.io. There's a lot of info there. We also have a podcast that's just a few episodes in. But yeah, just—

By the way, we don't— at Tributary, we don't have a website because we know even before AI came, we knew that it would be scraped and other people would say that they could do what we do, but they obviously can't. Bain, McKinsey, Boston, they can't do what we do. So we, we have a, we have a laughably basic, uh, website, optimi.co.uk, and it's deliberately laughably kept like that so that people say, well, they're no threat, they've got nothing. Meanwhile, for 17 years in the background, we've been developing the most incredible approach. But yeah, catch me on LinkedIn, catch Duncan. Uh, Duncan, can I mention the dev call?

Yeah.

Every Friday at 11 AM UK time, we have a dev call where whoever, whoever's thinking about it at the moment comes on the dev call. Like, it's completely random. And then me and Duncan run that for an hour. And if Jo Stapleton comes, we say, hey Jo, so, uh, what's your agenda? And Jo says, well, I don't know, I don't know anything about you, I want to know what you're doing. And like you did at the start of this call, and then we run that. But that's dedicated to whoever comes to that dev call. Duncan, how many of those have we done? We must have done 20, 30 of those, and we just find, we find it keeps us sharp, it keeps us focused on what the client needs, and we need to know what the obstacles are, and the obstacles are unbelievable that we face to this, but we need to know how to get around them. But going back to what Duncan said, it's all about 3 people initially. who are willing to pilot it and create a 3-person little proof point. What we found is that one person, one little old person in the company knowing this is not good enough. They get beaten, they get screwed, you know, they get—

Too much conventional wisdom.

I wasn't going to swear. I was going to get— I was going to say they get screwed down, by which I mean, you know, they get squeezed out. What we find is that if you have 2 people, they can complain to each other. But if you have 3, that's a triad. And they go to the board and say, there's 3 of you on the board for coming. Thanks for coming. There's 3 of us. We want to roll out the empowerment of the workforce, please. Well, I can't— HR doing that? Well, the L&D part of HR is doing that, but it's only got a tiny budget. We found a way to do it, and we're going to give you 2 promises: 30%, 30% more valuable every employee who does it versus the salary we're paying them, and they do stuff 50% quicker. What's not to like? Let's test it. So that's our initial modeling. 3 people, then 15, then 90, then 450, then 3,000, uh, people over a 9-month period. So we can maybe touch on some of that stuff later. Um, if—

There's going to be lots more coming down, as we, as we know. You know, this is the, the, the guy— as even our audience knows now, uh, you know, this is always just the beginning of, of our relationship and, and what we can do moving forward. And obviously you're going to see a lot more of these guys around here, um, as we move forward, I hope. as we, you know, with the webinars and any kinds of— we are very big believers in this kind of methodology. And the reason is, again, because it ties so directly to value, right? And it is a manageable way to be able to actually take— I don't want to use the word control, but we talk about controlling your own business destiny, right?

Yeah.

And the reality is that the best way to control your business destiny is to empower your people to do the best possible, to be the best version of themselves and to do the best possible job on your behalf and to show up every day, not with a smile on their face because you're forcing them to, but because they genuinely feel like they want to be there and that they believe in the mission and that you've enabled them to be able to be their best, their best selves. And that's the kind of thing that just—

The workforce that is the strongest is the one that you feed. is the one that feels empowered. And, um, back in the day, in Victorian times in, in Britain, in a pub in the evening, they would have 2 dogs there and they'd get everyone to bet on the really strong-looking dog, and then the not-so-strong dog would win and they'd take all the money. Why? Because they knew which one they'd been feeding and watering that day.

Right.

And they knew which one they hadn't been feeding and watering for the previous 2 days. Very muscly, but not not very much energy. That's what we're creating for an exit. We're creating a strong, fed, nurtured team. And if you're a listener out there saying, "I don't want to do that. I want to be bossy. I want to tell them what to do," mate, this isn't for you. But if you're out there thinking, "Hang on a second, there's something here," then we would love well to you guys. Let's see where we go on that. Duncan, last shout.

That's, that's awesome. Yeah, absolutely. Um, John Myers, Duncan Austin, thank you so much for being on this podcast. It's incredible. We're gonna do more with you guys. You're gonna see more of these guys around here for sure. Um, again, we talked about all, all the contact and all that stuff is gonna be in the show notes. Uh, we will thank you so much for being here on the Exit Engine Podcast. We really appreciate it.

Yep, thank you so much.

It's been a lot of fun. It's been a blast. Great fun. Great.