Expect the unexpected: Future-proofing your organization | with Kevin Mulcahy

Foreign. Welcome everybody to this week's edition of the Shortlist. My name is Johnny Campbell. I'm going to be your host for today's show and also co founder and CEO of Social Talent. This is episode 66 of the Shortlist and today we're going to be talking about Expect the unexpected future proofing your organization. Before we tell you more about the show, we welcome all of our live listeners and viewers on YouTube and LinkedIn. As always, we love to have your questions and comments. Throw them in live and you can direct them to myself or to our guests today and we'll read them out, discuss them, whatever is appropriate based on your comments. And to those of you listening on the podcast, you're also very welcome. Don't forget to subscribe if you like this and want more talent and talent acquisition thoughts and interviews into your feed. But of course, if you'd like to join us live next week, you can find a bit more about our show and see our upcoming shows, previous shows etc etc@socialtown.com forward slash the shortlist. So let's get back to today's topic, Expect the unexpected and how to future proof your organization or your team or your talent acquisition strategies or whatever that might be your business. Well, the world of work's changed. We know this. We talk about it every week. This is the 66th time we've talked about it since the pandemic begun. But as we continue to kind of navigate what are certainly the choppy waters of this seemingly non ending pandemic, it's become ever more important for organizations to plan with uncertainty in mind. If we're certain of one thing is that the future will be less certain after pivoting so quickly in the wake of COVID We have to kind of take stock now and look back at what worked, what didn't, what core elements are missing and how do we adjust our business strategies or our talent strategies talent acquisition strategies to facilitate probably more of the unexpected. And that's certainly been the case of those of you in the talent acquisition and recruiting space. It's just not predictable. It's a weird year. It's for many of us, or most of us, it's one of the busiest years we've ever seen. But it's volatile, it's not consistent and so therefore this is probably, I guess, what the future looks like, at least for the next few years. So joining us today is Kevin Mulcahy and Kevin is the author of the Future Workplace Experience. He's usually knowledgeable about this topic and others And Kevin's going to be giving us insights on how organizations need to future proof themselves and their thinking. And this can be looking at new corporate cultures to creating kind of proactive plans for, as I said, recruiting or talent acquisition in a most likely more volatile business environment. And Kevin, you've got a lot of experience but also interest in this area. Maybe you can give us a bit of insight. Although the accent, our audience will find it has that hint of Irish. You're based most days these days in Boston. You're a lecturer, professor, you write books, you're a passionate person about the future work. Maybe tell us a little bit more about why you're here today to talk about this topic.

Yes, I'm here today to talk about the topic because the future, we've talked a lot about the future workplace. And everybody acts as if the future is something that's going to happen later. And what we often underestimate is the future is now. We have to be planning now. And that, that's my focus here is, is let's not overindulge in far away ideas, but how do we navigate the environment that we're in now and take actions and decisions now to create a better future for ourselves later? And that's really flipping what the future is. The future is now and we'll only get the results later from the plans that we've set in place now. And where I come to that perspective is from and as you can detect, it's an Irish and an Irish accent that's been in America for a number of years. So I spent time in corporate strategy at Sprint in Kansas City in their business planning departments. I've spent time with market intelligence firms in the US on analyzing the practices of competitive firms. And I've spent a lot of time interviewing HR leaders in both talent acquisition and learning in how do you prepare now for the workforce of the future?

So several years ago, Nicholas Taleb wrote a book called the Black Swan. And over the last decade or so, sometimes the art of preparing for the unexpected has been kind of called Black Swan thinking, different to black box thinking, which is another great author. Do you think that Taleb's approach and kind of his piece on black Swan thinking as such was enough? Does it stand up to what we've just seen in the last year and a half? Or maybe you could explain that concept perhaps of the Black Swan and that thinking and how you see it relates to the post pandemic world?

Yeah, I see black Swan thinking as it's akin to buying insurance right buying insurance on what if the house burns down? Well, we all have insurance for our house burning down, but we rarely know anyone whose house has burned down. We have insurance on our car if we're in a serious accident, but we rarely know anyone who has been in a serious accident. So black swan thinking is taking those events that we ensure ourselves against to the next extreme of what if there was a real catastrophe like a tsunami or an earthquake or something that affects all of us that we can't possibly prepare for. So while it's interesting and I think a wonderful intellectual exercise and a lovely curiosity and makes us feel very smart to play with it, I think it's actually quite useless for the purpose of day to day business planning and it's relevant to the rest of us. And I have some different ideas on what we can do instead of planning for those remote hundred to one horses that might come in. And I see that as akin to the black horse that might come in and we make or lose our winnings.

There's I think that makes sense, Kevin, if you think about it, and I like the analogy you've made there to insurance. You know, it's about the catastrophic events. And when you think about catastrophic events, we actually have a list in mind what they are. And we kind of insurance policy, you often actually define those risks, whereas really we're talking about risks that we never predicted, we just didn't know about, we couldn't have predicted. And so therefore trying to insure yourself against or think about the black swan is, is kind of, I guess you're saying futile because you're not thinking about the pink swan or the yellow elephant or whatever other things that are out there. Let me dive into some recent literature on this. I'm going to do this in the background of what we always do. Kevin, on our weekly show is the. So Kevin, I want to try and get you get your thoughts on an article that appeared actually quite, quite a good few months ago. But it's a really interesting one, at least I think it's worth discussion. And that's from McKinsey and they produced a report called Organizing for the Refute for the Future Nine Keys to Becoming a Future Ready Company. We'll share the link out to those of you listening live. You want to check it out and we'll also put it in the show notes in the podcast. But in this McKinsey defines not a kind of way to insure yourself against black swans, but kind of nine core principles that it recommends. You know, if your organization thinks or Acts this way, they call it organizational imperatives. It will hopefully separate, you know, future ready companies from the pack. What are your thoughts on the nine? And maybe you can begin to walk, walk us through them. If you think they have value.

Well, why don't you pick? Let's, let's go through one by one, throw one out and let's discuss it.

Well, let me group them perhaps, Right, because they group them in three levels. Right. Who we are, how we operate and how we grow. Right. So the who we are I think is very interesting. They have three imperatives. One is take a stance on purpose. The second is sharpen your value agenda. And the third is use culture as your secret songs. Quite related, but maybe take those.

Let's, let's go into that. Who we are. So each company now more than ever has to define who they are. And as we've, in the course of this pandemic, being separated from our peers, sometimes we got caught up in who we were. Is the fancy office that we're in or the people that were there, peer group that we, that we associate with. And so one of the key fundamentals on who we are is what is the collective mission of the firm? Why are we here? And I think that's what McKinsey is getting at. And what I wanted to also highlight is companies fundamentally need to know why they exist. I'm not joining in recruiting. One of the appeals that you have to make to a recruit is to join you on the mission that we're mutually setting about to accomplish as part of this firm and join us on this mission. And here's what our mission is and here's who we are and what hill we're trying to take is a very powerful recruiting message. And if you don't begin the conversation about that for your recruits, and indeed for the recruits, their enthusiasm to join you is do they want to be part of that mission? And on your side as a recruiter, you're looking at, is this a person that, that buys into the mission as we do, and would this be a useful team member to help us with that mission? So I think those first three elements that you've outlined from McKinsey there are fundamental to recruiting and fundamental to being able to articulate your value proposition as an employer, and fundamental to getting the right fit between a person who, who believes in the mission as the firm believes in the mission. And those are the types of candidates that we want to bring on board for us. So, so those three are fundamental.

I was thinking on this yesterday as I had a call with a prior guest, Jen Lambert, who's been on the show before and we were talking about a related theme and I'd love your thoughts on this, but my, my idea was, or my theory was that you know, know the reason purposes perhaps come so much to the fore. And this question of what is the mission I'm on is because individually we all had to ask ourselves this last year, most of us in the western world, it was last March, might be in February or January if you're in Asia. But you, you were, it's hard to remember this detail but you were asking yourself what's important to you because you didn't know whether you're parents, your siblings, your kids could walk out the door, catch something that would kill them the next week. We just were so panicked at the time. I think the whole world was forced to really address what was important to them. And now that it's kind of, you know, we're 18 months later and we're going back to work. You're now with a renewed focus, going, well, what's the purpose of this company that I work for, this team and what do they stand for? Purpose has always been important to a degree. My theory is that because every one of us was so forced to ask ourselves what was important to us purpose wise all at the same time, we're now coming back to the workforce saying, hey, tell me, what do you stand for? Company X. What do you think about that?

I think it's spot on and to me I define that as the emotional connection to the company. If you don't win their hearts, you can't bring their minds to work. And we can argue about what's safe to bring their bodies to work, but emotion is, it's not intellect, it's heart, it's passion. It is, this is our mission. We're not a bank. We're a bank here to help people provide a sounder financial future for our customers. That's our mission as a bank. It's not to grow the deposit base in north County Dublin. That's not our mission, that's a mechanism. But nobody will join your bank to grow the deposit base in north County Dublin. But I will join your bank if you talk to me about how you exist. To help secure the financial dreams and aspirations of your customers, to help people, to help young people get mortgages, to help the elderly with their secure financial future. I want to be part of that. So capture me emotionally on where does your mission connect with my interests in the role that I want to play in the world. Because when it comes to our job description, at the end of the day, each one of our job descriptions is to help our company win in the marketplace by fulfilling the mission that's articulated by the company leaders. That is our job, each and every one of us. If you don't catch me on connecting me emotionally to that mission, then we are going to have some tricky and disconnected performance reviews along the way.

I feel like we could stop there, Kevin, and say that's your lesson on how to write job ads, employer branding, messaging on your website, design career sites, and even reach out to a candidate or sell a candidate. All of those applications come from what you just said. So let me take a different trio and see where we go. This is how we operate and there's three areas here. Radically flattened structure, turbocharged decision making and treat talent as scarcer than capital. So radically the flattened the structure, turbocharged the decision making and treat talent as scarcer than capital. What are your thoughts on that trio?

Well, fundamentally underscoring those trio is trust. Right. I can only flatten the organization if I trust that decisions can be pushed down further in the organization. I can only turbocharge if I believe that people are going to make good decisions quickly. And that's what we're getting to here is if we've hired the right people who believe in the mission and we have hired competent people that we trust to make decisions that are consistent with the mission, accomplishing the mission of the business within the budget parameters that were given to them for that time period, then we can trust our people to get together into self organizing groups, into flatter hierarchies to problem solve and execute at the point of the problem and get out of a. Having decisions have to be run up and down the flagpole. So the, the, the, the key thought here for people is what are the biggest decisions that you're willing to let others make and stay out of those decisions. Then as a management team, if you've there's an Irish saying that I grew up with is don't teach, don't get yourself a guard dog if you're going to do all the barking yourself. And we're entering into a management era where it's less bark and more trust. Let the dog off the leash. But you've helped frame what the focus is here and we have in flattened hierarchies we have to trust that we have a different workforce that is able to pull people into project teams and is able to draw people into help, into essentially recruiting people into helping them with the tasks that you've given and no longer are tasks being done within the confines of the old hierarchical department. So I think that's what that's getting into. And the key word of the day is trust. How much do you trust your employees and how can you. I'll say you don't have to trust them fully, but you have to trust them enough to give them the rope to let them do the role and then some.

I hadn't made that connection. It's really observant of you. We've had the last 18 months which was again the biggest test of trust, where most managers who had managed through observation or managed through inputs all of a sudden had to trust and manage through outputs and many struggled. So I do bang on right. Maybe it's an acceleration of that newer phenomenon that a lot of managers had to cope with which was trusting in a, in a distributed world for those who are working remotely. I'm going to move lastly to the third, third point and we could take any one of these and do an hour on it. Gavin. But the last one was how we grow. So we've had who we are which is all that stuff about purpose and values and culture. There was how we operate, structure, the decision making, the focus on talent as scarcer than capital. Now it's how we grow. And the three elements that McKinsey kind of tease out here are to take an ecosystem approach, perspective, build data rich tech platforms and accelerate organizational learning. So you know, ecosystem which is more partners and we don't have to own it, we can work with others. The great Tesla example in the article from that around how they've made open source, their car designs, the data rich tech platforms, data drive data informed decisions and then the accelerating organizational learning. So the kind of Satya Nadell kind of Microsoft perspective on, on having a, a a forgotten the phrase. Now for mindset growth mindset. So ecosystem data and learning how we grow. What are your thoughts?

Great. Fully on board and I think on the, the most important component there is learning where we have to hire learners and it's not and this is a little counterintuitive in the sense that sometimes we use a proxy of look, the leaving search just came out right. And there's people there that have wonderful points to go to college and they're allocating positions based on the points and yes they show that they learned. But a learner is something more than just the subject matter expertise. It's what do you do in your downtime when you're interviewing. And you're interviewing on. On. To establish if somebody's a learner, what are your hobbies and how do you learn outside work? Is a great question. If you look at the hobbies and how much of their hobbies, which of their hobbies require learning. If somebody says, well, I'm, I'm. I'm a woodworker outside, well, that requires learning new tools and new skills. Or I'm a learner, I play football may require learning on how to play a team, but it requires a different type of learning. So when we're interviewing people, we need to pay really sharp attention to how is this person a learner? And secondly, and counterintuitively, how is this person a teacher? Because the best learners serve themselves, but those in. And when you're trying to grow your organization exponentially, you don't just need a bunch of, I think the term is buffins, right? People who are experts, and they absorb and suck up all the learning, and they're great learners and they're great experts. The problem with that is you've now created dependencies in your organization, and you want to also hire for people who are good teachers. Show me how you've conveyed and shared your learning with others. I want to hire somebody who's a scout master. I want to hire somebody who's a sailing coach. I want to hire somebody who's a soccer coach. I want to hire somebody who demonstrates to me that they have shared their learning with others or they are catalyzing or creating learning environments for others. Because if you want to be a responsive organization, you're not building a team of experts. You're building a team of people who can. Who are expert, but who can share their expertise with others. That's number one. And the second element that you're getting at is exponential. And business is going to be done faster and bigger and at different levels of speed than ever before. And we need to have frequent feedback loops in when we experiment with doing new things. An experiment is different than a business case. A business case says we have a 90% probability of succeeding. If you fund this initiative, let's fund it. It's a grand risk. It's a safe bet. An experiment is, we're going to fund this test, we're going to test this new product in the market, or we're going to try this new person, this role. We don't know if it will succeed or not, but we're doing the test to learn something from the experiment. It's not about succeeding or failing. It's about conducting the experiment, learning for the results. And any experiment that we conduct that we learn something new that feeds our future plan is a successful experiment. So you have to distinguish in learning too, which what initiatives do we want to take on that are learning projects that we're willing to learn from success or failure, we're going to learn from it. And when you're doing things at speed, there has to be an expect some missteps that we learn and course correct from and then we move forward even more rapidly. Then the last component you brought up was the data. Are we tracking what we do and are we using when we do activities? Are we tracking learning? Are we tracking how we experiment? How are we using the data in our organization to feedback and course correct and use data to inform our decision making? It's not the same as using the data to make our decisions for us, which is where some of these AI applications are going and we want to outsource it to the machine. We're using data to inform our decision making and at executive ranks and making any business decisions. Most employees face decision making where there's always a degree of uncertainty. In all of our decisions, no decision in our business is guaranteed. But what we hope for in all of the decision making capabilities of our recruits is that they're making a lot more better decisions than poor decisions. And when they make poor decisions, they can course correct. And we've given our employees and the key test here, this is the key one I'll leave you with on this one, is have we given our employees the permission to say I don't think this is working, I'm willing to stop now and let's save the budget and reallocate the budget to something else. And that we reward employees for seeing early that an initiative isn't working and stopping it. Versus in our previous pre pandemic thinking you had the budget to do the project and the employee would spend the budget in the hope that the project pulled itself out of the hole in the last 25% of the time given to the project. But nobody had permission to stop a project early. It was deemed an admission of failure. And now I think if an employee stops the project early, it should be deemed an admission of merit and bravery. And I would robber employees who pull the plug early and tell me I don't think this is going to work and I want to redeploy the capital. I will promote, hire for that and promote for that in the modern world much faster than somebody who always had a series of very successful projects.

Great insights on all three of them. We have a comment from Julie west saying talking about hobbies is often more useful than talking about their jobs. Interesting to think about it in terms of how the person learns. I agree, Julie. I hadn't taken that perspective before Kevin brought it up today. It's a really interesting point, as are the other points you made there. Kevin. Going to move on to our second news, which is a little bit more current and it was published by cnbc. And in cnbc, this author Jonathan Keane talked about this concept. I hadn't heard this of this before. Culture as a service could be the next big thing in the workplace, which I'll summarize for our listeners and viewers. As I see it, what the author is saying is that, you know, culture, which is something that is has typically been something that HR and leadership and people have to drive that this amalgamation of tech tools, including things like Zoom and employee feedback tools and engagement tools, wellness tools, learning tools that really, if you combine them together, they are more culture as a service because they facilitate culture. In fact, just by the very virtue of deploying them to your team, suggests a different culture such as transparency, openness, feedback, etc. I don't know whether you had time to think about this or this phrase was new to you. It was new to me, Kevin. Culture as a service and as it's described here, what are your thoughts about that?

So in my estimation, culture is often misframed and is framed as aspirational. When you ask sometimes people about culture, they point to four or five phrases on the wall and say, oh, our culture, we're innovative, we experiment. We're a learning organization. And they point at these values that they put on the wall. And that is not your culture. That's what organizations wish their culture was, but that is not their culture. So culture fundamentally is the worst behavior you're willing to tolerate from your employees. That's your culture, the worst behavior you're willing to tolerate because if you have a set of values, an employee breaches those values in some way, shape or form and you tolerate that well. Now your culture is, well, we have this value set mostly, but there's extenuating circumstances for not being held accountable to the values set by the organization. The second definition of culture is the behavior that fellow employees hold each other to. What happens when the senior ranking executive is out of the room? How do we treat each other? What happens if somebody says or does something inappropriate in a meeting? Do we all go, well, that's Seamus at it again. Or does somebody pull Seamus up and say, that's not something that we like to be. That's not a behavior that we tolerate in this organization. If I see you doing it again, further steps will be taken because these are our values. So this culture as a service is a critical point to believe in and bring into our organizations and to hire for. And we can talk separately about how you hire for culture. But at the end of the day, an organization is not a set of the latest collaborative technologies or a set of the latest management theories and organization and fast track teams and SWAT teams and everything. That's not culture. Culture is how we treat each other. It's the norms that we hold, the behaviors that we hold each other to. And it's, it's the best definition I heard was from the US Marines where culture is Marines don't let other Marines do X. So what behaviors do we hold each other to in our day to day zoom calls, meetings, emails, informal meetings, how we treat and greet each other, how we behave with each other after work, how we behave in front of our customers, how we behave with our customers. That's culture. And organizations that get that right. That is the magic elixir to grow a company. And then the question becomes how do we hire for culture? How do we know if somebody's going to be a fit to our culture? And that's the element we should talk about next. Johnny?

Well, that was, interestingly, this was the whole conversation I had yesterday with Jan Lambert was about this, the concept of hiring for culture and how it's been misappropriated and used to be higher for sameness and hire for people like me. Whereas, you know, my perspective on this was more it's hiring for values, but what is the definition of values? And again, we used, we came up with, Jenna volunteered a different description for values as a replacement for culture, but values as what we hire for and what we fire for, which I think is what you alluded to. So these are things that we of course will hire for, but we'll also fire you if you don't agree with because too often you only do the first part and you actually won't fire people if they break them.

Let's talk about that. Here's a great interview question that I would have as a bold interviewee is tell me about an incident where you fired somebody at this firm for a breach of culture or values. And if you're a hiring manager, can you proactively talk to a candidate about where people where actually that you have lived your values and actually fired somebody for the violation of those values. Because if you haven't actually disciplined or fired anyone for breach of the values, either you have a superb set of values in your firm or you have no discipline and you're just mounting culture. And it's a great recruiting tool, but you don't actually walk your talk.

I agree, I agree. I'm going to bring it back to one of the core topics we started with in terms of decision making going forward with volatility and uncertainty. One of the methods used by a lot of people at the start of the pandemic was scenario planning where individuals, organizations would build several scenarios and plan for the different scenarios so that they were covering as many bases as possible. Do you have a recommendation, Kevin, on an approach to planning and decision making that will work or more likely work in a potentially more volatile future where there are an unknown number of scenarios? What have you seen that's work or what interests you as a methodology that many of us could adopt?

Yeah, so I've seen two approaches. On one side you have the, oh, let's anticipate the possible outcomes or scenarios and build strategies that are robust enough to withstand the various breadth of scenarios that we can anticipate. And I think that's a common approach and I don't think it's a winning approach. A second approach that I have seen much less frequently, and it's an approach that I advocate and work with people on, is assumption based scenario planning. And at its core, when we make a strategy, any of us, we craft a strategy, we craft strategies to accomplish an objective based on the assumptions that we're making about ourselves, about our capabilities, about our budgets, about our competencies, and to execute that strategy within the budget that we have available. And so people are very good at articulating the objectives and, and making sure there's buy in on the objectives. People are very good in articulating the strengths and weaknesses of themselves versus their competitors on the SWOT analysis for strategies. People are very good at sizing their budgets and go through a lot of wonderful budget sizing exercises of if we spend 10% more, we'll get this. What people are very poor at is documenting and articulating their assumptions and assumptions. Strategies are built in assumptions, assumptions of our competitors, of ourselves, of our budgets, of our capabilities, of the market dynamics. And if any of those assumptions that we have made, if the actual facts change, we should change our strategy. But most companies craft their strategies based on the assumptions they had at the start of the year and by Golly, by hook or by crook, they're going to execute that strategy uphill and downhill for the rest of the year, irregardless of whether the underlying assumptions upon which the strategy was built change. So I advocate assumption based strategy making. And the most important element is to get people to articulate their assumptions, go around the room and go to if our strategy is to grow a 20% and we need to hire 50 more people, what are the assumptions that we have on recruiting? What are the assumptions we have about the available pool for us? What are our assumptions about where we go get those people? What are our assumptions about what rate we can hire people at? What are our assumptions about how much reskilling and upskilling our new hires will require? And documenting clearly those assumptions on what we expect. But here's the other key aspect. Now let's say what do we not expect? What would be our unexpected assumptions? Unexpected would be, what if it's much easier to hire than we anticipated? Do we want to hire 70 instead of 50? What if it's much more difficult to hire than we anticipated? Are we happy hiring 30 instead of 50? Or does that change if we only have to hire 30? What's different about those skill sets? So that's how we get to scenario planning is we lay out the assumptions of what we expect to base our strategies on. And for each of those assumptions we say, well, what would be unexpected about that dimension? And then we document that as unexpected. It would be unexpected that we only had 30 people hired within six months instead of 50. And then when we get to that six month mark and we find ourselves there, we say, well, we're now in unexpected territory. It's time to update our strategies. And when you articulate what you would not expect to happen and you write it down, if anything unexpected actually happens, that's when you revisit your strategy. And if none of those parameters have been breached, then keep executing the strategy you have. And that's the key to scenario. A scenario is our plan is, here's what we expect. We plan for what we expect. And a scenario is something other than what we expected happened. How are we going to react or accommodate or what is different? That's all a scenario is, is a tweak in an assumption we had made about one of the variables in our environment that now is different than the one that we had planned for that scenario way and so on.

I love that approach. It rings true to me in terms of trying to figure out the, the different approaches to, you know, our own Business planning. But I think of a lot of our customers and the senior TA leaders I speak with who represent millions of hires around the world. We're all struggling with what's typically budget time. You go into September time in most companies who run the fiscal year and this is budget time and they're going in, going, we just don't know what it's going to look like. But I think your approach, if you went and said here's the budget I need based on the following 10 assumptions like the metrics you mentioned, plus things like attrition rate, etc. And go, if it looks like that, we'll need this and we'll deliver it this way. But on these 10 different things, maybe let's go all the way to the left and all the way to the right on each of them. I want to basically get the support of the business. Now before we start the fiscal on. If we, for example, as you said, find it more difficult to hire these types of talents because the competition is fiercer than we expect, what's our solution? Is it increased salaries? Is it hire more recruiters, is it hire less people? What's our default position? What if it's easier? To your point, do you hire more folks, et cetera, et cetera. I think that gives you the right to go back mid year then to go, assumption changed, we agreed this just double checking. Can we still execute on that? Do I have the budget and support on the thing we agreed back in September we would do if this assumption changed, which now it has. Whereas I think it's much harder going back in saying I'm not going to be able to deliver on the plan, I need more budget and the business goes, ah, you obviously are doing it wrong, you know, or you may, you've got the wrong assumptions. Go fix. You go, yes, we have the wrong assumptions and we agreed what we do and now can I do it? You're so right. It's such a much better way of doing it. Do people plan this way though? Is this common?

They they do when they're introduced to it and what it does. I'll tell you the value of, of this, that assumption based planning is when you are in a room or on a zoom with folks and you have to say, well, what should our assumption be about the growth of our, let's, let's call it our number one segment. What should our growth be? Should we presume the industry is going to grow at 10%, 20% or 30%? And what it does is it forces people around the Room to say, to expose what their individual assumptions are and to put the number up there. Okay, as a group, we're going to build a plan on the assumption that our segment will grow by 15%. And now we all know that that's our underlying assumption. And if anyone in the management team has then any reason three months from now to say, hey, I've been out talking with the field and it sounds like demand is starting to ramp up. And I think our 15% assumption, we should plan for 20% growth in the market. Let's start ramping up now or times are tough out there. I'd say we'd be lucky that this market will grow 10%. Let's step back on some of our rollout plans. But it's only when everybody is clear that we have built and committed our capital and our labor plans and our staffing plan on a 15% growth. For goodness sake folks, if there's any, anything that you hear out there that indicates something above, significantly above or below 15%, let us know. Because we need to update our strategies. And that's the value of having a clear assumption about customers, about capabilities, about hiring speeds, about factory uptime, about whatever the key elements of any of your businesses are. Put the assumption down, put it, make it visible to everyone, make it clear to everyone that that's what the plans are based on. Because any of us individually, if you ask us what are our assumptions on 10 different things, and if we work side by side together for the last 10 years, we'll have different assumptions about how we believe certain things are going to play out. But we, we are very poor at facilitating a discussion and helping each other put those assumptions on the table. And so that we all commonly have a shared reference for why we put this strategy in place. And that's what it is. It's strategies are made to accomplish objectives based on our budgets and based on our assumptions. And for goodness sakes folks, expose the assumptions, validate the assumptions, test the assumptions. Because it's upon the basis of those assumptions that you're asking your organizations to commit the investment capital and to commit to the budget to hire the people that we're going to need and the skills that we're going to need to accomplish the plan and the appetite of the plan that we've laid out. And if that changes, the variables have to, the inputs have to change. Otherwise we're spending the second half of the year making excuses as to why we couldn't make plan. And nobody wants to hear those excuses. I would rather hear Your updated your assumptions.

We need a new you're so right. I'm going to ask you one last question and we're unfortunately going to have to be brief with the answer but I think it's important question which is in this kind of environment where you are taking the right approach to planning with his assumptions based and it's highly likely that the assumptions won't all be correct and will change and therefore your plan will need to change Change what you think is the most essential ingredient to being able to react to changes in plans to be agile or whatever other word you want to use in a team or organization. What is the most core thing to focus on? Would you suggest or recommend so that you're able to change course, change direction based on your assumptions changing?

I think it's to not regard your strategy as big bets on the future. If you hear your executives say we're making a big bet on this, well, bets are for gamblers, not for investors. And when environments are uncertain you need to the better language is we need to make an experiment in this area or all of our strategies are now experiments and we're testing what's going to work and what doesn't work and we're willing to bring in an element of agile into our behavior and when we see that something's not working as a culture we're willing to admit that this doesn't look like it's working and now we need to be agile and change tack as we enter into an operating environment over the next 18 months that you're perfectly right Johnny. People don't have a crystal ball for what the next 18 months will be like. But we do. We can incrementalize the next 18 months in three or six month increments by making smaller commitments, smaller experiments, smaller investments and being willing to revisit them every time as circumstances dictate and getting used to that iterative progression versus the all knowing bigger bets that we're used to reading about in our management literature and hearing from our executives.

Kevin, I want to thank you so much for the guidance insight usually beneficial for any of us who are looking to make plans our own personal lives, perhaps even as well as our business lives, whether it's organizations or teams or departments we're running. We've several comments I didn't get to Jacob Madsen. Thank you so much for your comp comments as well. Read 1 He says love the term culture is aspirational as well and many others. We're at time. Kevin, thank you so much. I think You've given us a great background and insight, comments on the McKinsey research, which I think is largely supportive, insights as to different methodologies to use and even how to think about executing that and what's necessary in your culture. But we could dig into culture and we should Again, a different day and I hope I'll be able to have you back if you come back. But for now I'd love if you could leave us with one last piece of insight to add to our shortlist. We ask every presenter comes on the show to leave us with their recommendation, their tip, their guidance, their advice that either has been passed down to them or they've got from their own experience that you would give to our audience today that they can walk away with and say Kevin says what Kevin says.

Don'T be so sure of yourself on whether you're right or wrong and be more explicit in sharing the assumptions you hold hold and and and so share your assumptions. My assumption is this or I believe this, but I'm open to hearing what you believe. That type of phrasing is what we need to hear from each other to navigate this future workplace instead of I think this or I believe this and let me try to convince you of what I believe as so so in summary, I will say let's be better at sharing our own assumptions and let's be better at asking others what assumptions do you hold and what do you think? And not being so quick to try to reconcile the two but allow space between what I believe and what you believe and say, well, what experiment can we take to be prepared for either or and essentially to expect the unexpected.

Kevin, thanks so much for joining this week. I really appreciate it and safe travels back to Boston. I know you're coincidentally joining me from Ireland today and I wish you safe travels back and would definitely love to have you on again and let's dig into that culture at peace the next time. Kevin, take care.

Happy recruiting all and thank you to.

You for listening and joining the show live today. We do appreciate that we'll be back next week with another show show 67 and we're looking forward to having join us. We've got Nick Johnson who was on our show earlier this year and it was usually positively received. We probably our number one show for audience and for podcast listeners and we talked last time about quality of hire but this time Nick Johnson is joining us. He's now director of TA at PwC in the Middle east and he's going to be talking about understanding AI Artificial intelligence, intelligence in Candidate assessment, a really, really hot topic that'll be broadcasting live Wednesday 15th of September. If you're in the UK, Ireland, Northwestern Europe, that's at 4pm GMT +1. If you're going to be on the east coast of the U.S. that's 11am your time or 8am on the west coast. Or if you'd like to just tune in and listen to the podcast, you can check it out. Typically Wednesday evening. It's available on Spotify or Apple, or go to socialtalent.com the shortlist and you get links to all of that. Thanks for listening to Show 66. Hopefully that's given you a perspective on planning as you're wrapping up your plans or beginning your plans for 20. Whether it's budgets, plans for your teams, plans for your life. Hopefully the perspective that Kevin has shared with us today around being more more looking at the assumptions than the scenario, planning and addressing and calling out those assumptions when you're speaking to others rather than just giving your opinion, hopefully that's going to guide you and help you into 2022, into whatever world we end up living in. Thanks for joining us. Take care, Sam.