Strategic School Design - A Conversation with Ewan McIntosh

Welcome to the Future Learning Design Podcast.

You can do strategy in a very light, agile way with very little paperwork, actually, but it sits in people's memories and it sits in the front of people's minds as well. If after 6 months of working together on a collaborative strategy and the leadership team isn't tuned into why working in shorter sprints with earlier goals than the 9 months of a school year— they don't get that by then, they're probably not going get it anytime soon.

Welcome back. It's a real privilege today to be speaking with Euan McIntosh, who has been leading projects around the world for clients in education and industry for decades. Euan is the passionate and energizing tour de force behind Notosh. As the name suggests, Notosh is a jargon-free but game-changing strategic consultancy with a passion for learning and a conviction that innovation and creativity can change the way people think, the way they learn, and the way they work. A highly regarded keynote speaker at events around the world such as the iB conferences, Euan is also the author of How to Come Up with Great Ideas and Actually Make Them Happen. Euan's professional career started as a French and German high school teacher in Scotland back in the '90s. His classes were among the first in Europe to podcast and blog as part of their daily learning. Euan then became the National Adviser on Learning and Technology Futures for the Scottish Government, and in 2006, with some friends in a pub in Edinburgh, he began TeachMeet as a way to enable teachers to network and learn from peers and disrupt the traditional model of prescribed professional development. In 2008, Euan became the Digital Commissioner at Channel 4, and it was there that he became fascinated by the strategies and tactics that creative colleagues were using to create imaginative and engaging digital services. So he founded Notosh in order to make similar impacts for young people in education. You can connect with Euan on the social media links in the show notes and check out the Notosh team's new suite of online offers at learn.notosh.com. Hey, Euan.

Good morning. How are you doing?

Yeah, I'm all right. How are you?

Good.

Great. So it's a fantastic pleasure to be talking to Euan McIntosh today from Notosh. I wanted to just begin by thinking about, obviously we've been living through this rather strange period. Unprecedented seems to be a word that's being used at unprecedented frequency now. And with Notoch as a strategic design agency, how has the COVID situation affected your plans or what you're offering?

So we've had a distributed team for a decade or more, and we've never had an office. I've never been a fan of offices because you go there to get interrupted, not really to do serious work. And so much of our work was in the places where we were asked to go. And then when, before all this happened, working from home was a real treat. And you had all that time, it felt like you had, you know, never quite enough time. But when you were on the road, you would crave that desk time to do your research and to do some serious thinking. And then after 2 or 3 days, you'd be craving getting back on a plane or a train or a boat to go and learn again. So not traveling and having those fresh kind of experiences, and I can only call it otherness, just bumping up against people, smart people, because all of our customers are super smart. So being able to brush up against them, something I think that the whole team misses. And of course, in the case of my colleague Jeremy down in Melbourne, he, along with many friends, is still in a pretty severe lockdown. So we've all had to try and find that otherness, go out of our way to read new stuff, to listen, to view things that we wouldn't normally, just to get that kind of infection of new ideas that you get when you're out traveling. And I think I could safely say that up until very recently, the working days have actually been a lot more intense than they ever were. Where we used to have that kind of downtime, waiting, a lot of waiting in our jobs, so waiting for things to start, waiting for a plane, being alone in a hotel room. We've lost all that. And so what you replace it with is that, that kind of intensity of work at the desk, which is not necessarily a good thing. I've done my back in. I'm pretty sure it's actually partly due to not moving enough in my day. I think we've all enjoyed being at home with our kids a lot more, and it's taken a bit of time to fit into that new routine, actually, after the decade of not. And the challenge, I think, of everyone finding private time and finding some kind of routine. And in business itself, I think we've had— it felt like we had 3 phases. There was this March to June, we actually, we were super busy. We had so much work to deliver on that we had started. So a lot of wrapping things up, a lot of dealing with projects to get them to a point where we're happy with them. And all of these things like learning design and space design as well, and in strategy. And then through June to July, there was definitely a pause and a rest. I actually took off, I and left things behind a bit. And in that, particularly in July, I had a wee bit of a renaissance almost. We had ideas for doing what we do online about 4 years ago. My good colleague Ian Stewart, who's now working over at Microsoft, he and I sat in a pub in Edinburgh one winter about 3, 4 years ago talking over how it would be great if we could do a kind of masterclass.com style thing but without the $90 million that they've invested in their platform, if we could take what we do and do online. The problem was that there wasn't one school, there wasn't one business that wanted that. They would insist almost on us jumping on a plane halfway around the world to do a thing. And in the space of those 3 months where we were very busy, attitudes changed. And so we were very quick. There are a lot more people launching online courses and launching coaching online and all the rest than us. But I think the quality of what we are now launching. So from August, September into October, we're launching a lot of online platforms, online coaching. Yes, the kind of old thing done in a new way, but we're also doing new things in a new way with an amazing platform of courses that will launch in October, learn.nutosh.com. And that's a chance for people to have some magic, but for a fraction of the cost you would have paid.

It's interesting. I mean, the concept of value has kind of shifted quite dramatically. I think, I mean, there's been a glut of content out there online, and, you know, to some extent people are realizing or thinking that they want to have that for free. But also I think it's shifted people's notion of value that, like you say, you don't have to be there in person in order to deliver added value to a strategically or in a coaching capacity.

Yeah, I think that value question actually stretches to the quality as well. We launched yesterday with a— we always prototype ideas with partner clients who are up for the challenge, and so they get it maybe a little bit cheaper than the general public so we can test ideas out. But the feedback yesterday was just that it looks so professional, it looks so valuable, and of course the content is, it always has been. But like you say, when it's online, people assume it will be for free, and they're right. You know what, they're right to assume it should be free because the vast majority of stuff that's published is okay. But to have something that's coherent and that guarantees a value is quite different. And that's what we're trying to do.

Brilliant. And is that part of that, this idea of transition design?

I mean, that's one part. It's actually, I'd say it's quite a short-term pain that people have, but it's a short-term pain that will be relived a few times over the years to come. Transition design just means from the ashes, can you find some diamonds in there and build on them? And we've always done that. But very often we've had the new diamond that you discovered in the ashes along with quite a lot of the old wood. I think this past 6 months has given people a sense of perspective on what matters, and we've been helping a lot of schools who've been doing strategy work. We've always said, you know, why not just lean on your mission? And most of the time, because the mission is nonsense, it doesn't really help any. And they've discovered it's not helped them in the, in this crisis. So helping them reshape their mission. Those whose mission we've the purpose we've helped to redefine through our collaborative strategy kind of approach. There was a tendency then to say, well, that's great, but actually for accreditation and for the inspection services or whatever system it is, we need to have a plan and it needs to look kind of the way they are used to seeing it. And we would always be pushing against that, saying not really, it doesn't have to. Maybe the accreditation agencies don't know what they don't know and are looking for something different. And we've proven that time and time again that you can do strategy in a very light, agile way. With very little paperwork actually, but it sits in people's memories and it sits in the front of people's minds as well. And it's much more effective, it gets stuff going on.

It comes to life.

When you're in a crisis, you need it to be alive, otherwise people begin to worry and they think, hold on, is our school have a future? Where are we going? The politicians aren't helping us, they're not giving us an endpoint in sight because they don't know. So in school, we can create a microcosm of stability by saying for the next 6 months, we're going to concentrate just on this one thing, or just in these two things at the push. And then the 6 months after that, we're going to see, and we're going to do it together. And that brings people in rather than becoming a them and us, which is what we've got with our politicians at the moment in many countries. Them and us. Let's make sure we don't repeat the same mistakes in school.

It's an interesting one because one of the things I wanted to talk to you about was this idea of strategic design. So Dan Hill from the Helsinki Design Lab, and I've been really enjoying some of his work about the marginal role often that designers have in the process. So, you know, he's talking about the fact that they're involved in maybe 5% of the process, but actually upstream where the decisions are really getting made, that's where the designers need to be involved. He talks about the culture of decision-making being the design challenge. And like you're saying about accreditation organizations, actually they don't know what they don't know, and there is some design work, I would say, that needs to be done at that level as well.

And you've got the same kind of thing going on with the end game, the universities that are— the universities want this, universities want that, and this year we've proven that the universities don't need IB scores in order to do their job of giving students places. It's in the interests of organizations like the IB, the group in charge of the A Level C, or the Scottish Qualifications Authority, it's in their interest to retain the status quo, to retain the old way, because again, they don't know what they don't know. But also what they don't know is that the alternative does them out of business, which is not a particularly great position to be in. So in education, education's filled with those kinds of conundrums. And you know, the Helsinki Design Lab was— it's a funny one because it existed way, way back in the '60s. It kind of died a death, and then it came back in the late noughties and then it died to death again. And there's a problem with that, because the reason it died is that no one believes in that idea. If you go to school architecture, for example, or any architectural project, the brief is the most important document in the whole thing. What is it that you are wanting? Now, if you look at most school briefs, they say, here's the footprint of the building, it's this number of meters squared, this is the budget, and this is— here are all the things it needs to do. And by the time that that brief has been given, there is absolutely zero wiggle room for the architect to design anything different really from what they did the last time, right? We've been challenging that really successfully in Nanjing International School, which is probably very well known in international school circles for the design work that they've managed to achieve as a result of that. We've just done a similar project in partnership with an architect at International School of Kuala Lumpur. And I own a presentation college in Australia. There's actually quite a few great projects where we didn't let the architects ask people, what do you want? We told the architects to be quiet for a minute, and instead we asked educators and we asked students, what kind of experience do you want? What kind of learner experience do you expect? What kind of moments? The moments is an idea that came from our partners at Amicus, which is a— they work in offices mostly, and they describe that, you know, actually these experiences are many moments. So when you start thinking about moments where things don't quite work the way they should, then it's quite easy to come up with a brief that says, I would like this moment to not be that, a sort of anti-brief. Or you can say, I'd like the moment to feel like this. Then a good designer can actually take that brief and design. Where I disagree with Dan is the idea that designers should be everywhere. And there's quite a lot of evidence that shows that doesn't work. IBM hired, I think Dell as well, have hired thousands of designers to sit at various points, including right at the start of projects. It doesn't really make them design better. There's still no Apple. The problem with designers, and this is where every designer sends in their hate mail, but the problem with designers is that they want to solve. So although, you know, the idea is a noble one— let's get designers in at the beginning because they help to find and shape problems— that's the premise that Notosh was founded on, that problem finding is actually more important than problem solving. It's a noble one, but it needs more than designers. Designers are not the answer. The other challenge that designers have to, I think, get over and work out how to get themselves out of this— they tend to put themselves at the center of problem-solving, so they take the work off the people who should be doing it. There's a little sizzle tape for the Helsinki Design Lab where he says, um, that, you know, we deliver real value. Well, the designer shouldn't be delivering real value. Actually, the people in the organization should be delivering real value and then they have ownership of it. They have ownership of the design work themselves because they've had support. And I think the difference between a design team, a design group like Helsinki Design Lab and a team like Notoš is that all of our guys and gals are teachers by trade. So we're teachers first and we might be designers at a push second. Our solutions might be less elegant than a designer's. We are not going to produce the polish that IDEO produce when they produce a concept for school. But I can tell you this. Our concept for schools are better for the learning experience than IDEO's, hands down. And it's not us saying that, it's our customers who've had the experience of both. Why? Because we don't throw designers at it. We help the people, the protagonists in the organization, understand how to identify the problem for themselves and how to design good enough ideas to test them out. Then you can pay a designer or an architect to make it look beautiful and operate well.

Interesting. Yeah, the idea of Good enough is quite an agile idea that I'm coming across a lot. It's just planning enough to get going and then iterate and adapt as you go.

That's it. And good enough is actually what most of us can manage when it comes to design work. So I think a lot of people get put off having a go because they're worried about how beautiful it will look or something. And Bill Moggridge, who is the guy who designed the mouse as we know it for Apple, and very much an early face in IDEO, you know, so here I am criticizing IDEO, but Sometimes you look at what I do, I've done in education, and you think, hold on, but we're not really designing for interactions here, we're still designing stuff. And Bill Moggridge was all about designing the interaction. That's what, in our work with Steve Collis down in Australia and the team at Amicus, we've called moments. And those moments that get in the way of learning might not be anywhere near the classroom, and they might have nothing to do with the physicality of space. It might not be an architectural fix, for example. It could be something that's actually to do with timetabling. Or learning design, and that needs to be resolved first before you can design a learning complex.

It's interesting, that idea of a series of moments into an experience. I've been kind of using that language as teachers in a way, as experience designers, in parallel with what you were saying, a move away from the idea of delivery and transmission to designing experience that facilitates the outcomes that you're looking for. I just would love to just pivot back to what you were saying earlier about the strategic process, because maybe you could talk us through that idea of trying to do a strategic process for a school development in a more agile and short-term way. So you're talking about this idea of short cycles. Iterations and, you know, limited focus. I'd love to just dig into that a bit more because this idea of strategic planning like a waterfall project of, you know, you spend a year or two years planning everything out to the nth degree and crafting the wording, and then by the time you start rolling it out, it's out of date anyway.

As John Zürfler in Warsaw said, that he reckons in all his life they probably got through 20% of those kinds of plans. And every time I've cited that figure to other directors, they've all kind of quietly nodded, yeah, probably. So I think to some degree it's a paper exercise for school boards. There's a weird fear sometimes between director and leadership teams in the boards. I find most boards actually have the best interest of school at heart, but they think that it's this blunt instrument of a 5-year plan that's required. So one of the first things that, that we do is a board session. We sit with the board and we actually talk about what the need is, not what should be done. When we talk about needs of schools and how complex they are, how they're more complex than the businesses that a lot of board members work for. They get that, they're not daft people, far from it. So then they'll say, well, what's the answer? Now, the planning part, the collaborative strategy, working out where you want to head and how you're going to do it, that's relatively easy. It's a wonderful experience as well for bringing community together. That's why actually it's a great thing to do at this moment in time, because your community has been scattered to the four corners. We'll bring them together, and we're doing that with BEPS in Brussels, kicking off off in the next few weeks. You know, it's a small school that's growing, it's got a mission in need of some TLC, so we're going to focus on that. We're going to think, what's a mission-led strategy going to look like? What a great way to bring a community together. The hard bit is once you've done it. So you say, right, here's what we're going, here are goals, here are our key projects for making that happen. Now what? And I can, I can put my finger on two strategy projects where we actually did a really great job on the collaborative side But the director underestimated how much heavy lifting it would take to move people from that waterfall 5-year, 10-year plan into something more agile. And in those two occasions, we had to just kind of give up. We had to say, well, we're not going to get agile with this crew. And the thing is, you need the right crew in place. You need the right people. If after 6 months of working together on a collaborative strategy and a leadership team isn't tuned into why working in shorter sprints with earlier goals than the 9 months of a school year. They don't get that by then, they're probably not going to get it anytime soon. So twice we've failed, but that's twice out of maybe 60 strategies that we've produced over the past 5, 6 years. It's not a bad number. We've seen one of the biggest challenges is middle leadership, that middle leadership is actually largely middle management. It's a pretty thankless job for a lot of middle leaders. My dad was one, and When I look at what he was talking about over the kitchen table in the '80s, I don't see a lot of change between that and what middle managers talk about today. Yeah, so we're launching a new middle leaders or peer leaders program this autumn and winter, and its goal is really to create the kind of leadership schools need because it cannot fall on the shoulders of senior leaders. It's not they've got too much, it's that the cost of change for them is so high that something will break in the process of making the switch. So they need more people with them at the start to start making that switch over.

Yeah, and do you see many schools open to the idea of actually rethinking that whole structure itself? I mean, you know, that concept of senior and middle leadership is by definition hierarchical and industrial.

Absolutely. I'm not just seeing senior leaders, I'm also seeing middle leaders coming to the aha moment for themselves. I'm not going to name particular schools, but we did an online workshop with 30 middle leaders in a school in in Western Africa, and some of their senior leaders. We did a couple of workshops, in fact, online. They were all over the place, all over the world. And through those workshops came a realization that this is a big beast to try and change, but actually there's a desire to change it. The middle leaders want to lead. They don't want to be pushing paper and managing. Some of them do, so there's maybe a role there for, you know, if you want to be an administrator. There's an American word that describes the problem.

It does.

If you want to— an administrator costs a lot less than a skilled teacher.

Yeah.

So I would I would hire more administrative staff and I would insist on leaders leading more, whether wherever they are in the system. And I think the other thing is aspiring leaders, you know, I was as a 20-year-old teacher wanted to lead projects. It was monumentally hard to do so. And my first big boss was fantastic at it, Don Leadingham in East Lothian Council, was very much, here's how you set a project up, what's your goal, 'What do you need? Any hurdles I can remove? Off you go.' And you trip up and cut yourself sometimes, but most of the time you would be able to make things happen. And the key was make the goals small enough that you can actually reach them and have an idea of what the goal behind that's going to look like. Yeah, but those skills are not ones that are taught in teacher training college. There is a dearth of support for middle leaders to learn how, and senior leaders even don't really learn how until much later into their career. So that's why we're providing this program. And I think that although the program is for peer leaders and middle leaders, I think it's actually just as useful for senior leaders at the top of organizations because it's refreshing or informing them of new ways of thinking about running projects.

Absolutely. But that, I think that what you say there exactly is the issue for me, is the idea of leading projects rather than leading a section of the organization.

Well, they realize that we do project-based learning for kids, but we don't run the school as projects. And so there was that realization, hold on, we're going to lead by We're going to be an inquiry-led organization. Imagine that. And then there's a couple of schools have had that lightbulb moment for themselves, but it seems so logical when you say it. If we're doing that for the kids, why are we not doing that as an organization?

And that's where I think I'm doing a lot of work with the Agile in Education emerging movement, if you want to call it that, but I think there is, there's definitely a lot of symbiosis there with, with what you're saying, teaching and supporting teacher leaders to learn more about agile process, you know, ways of working, because that again, all of the things that we're asking the students to learn how to do, but actually we adults also need a bit of support to learn how to do that as well. The other thing I see is a lot of schools are integrating the ideas of design thinking into their processes or teaching it to students and, you know, using it as part of project-based work? Because obviously, you know, you were saying the idea that designers are not the solution in themselves, but at the same time there's a domain of expertise around design. Is it okay to be kind of fully opening it up and democratizing it to all to just have a go and get stuck in as a way of thinking?

Absolutely. The idea that it's somehow such rocket science that mere mortals as teachers can't understand how to design, that is daft. There are skill sets certainly, particularly around production, there are skill sets that do take expertise and you need to do a lot of them to get good at them. There's expertise around synthesis, so making meaning from lots of complex data. That expertise is something you get through practice. Now, say we're running a strategy process in a school, the collaborative part of our collaborative strategy is where it's human-informed. We always say human-centered design, it's human-informed. Because we're trying to understand from the people in the situation what works, what doesn't work, what's the secret sauce of their school, what makes the school special, what makes it a nightmare depending on the school. And asking people the right question is something great teachers do better than mediocre designers. So asking the right question in the first place is a teacherly skill. And kids, I mean, 5-year-olds ask the best questions of all, whereas we adults have to remind and relearn how to ask questions like a curious 5, 6, or 7-year-old. They've already got that superpower. So there are elements that, that part there, you can teach someone in a very short period of time. They can go off and they can gather valuable data while learning the skills themselves. Synthesis is something people need a hand with, and that's definitely where it's worth paying for someone to come in and help do it quicker, because it's not particularly fun when you're learning how to bring 5,000 stories together in a room and spend 16 hours reading every one of them and then expanding on them, dissecting them. Finding those headlines. Ideation, again, it's something that you can do and you can learn how to do better and better. When we're doing strategy, we are very well practiced at it because we do more strategies in a year than a director would do in a lifetime. The experience of and the knack for distilling that quickly into plain English is something that we have a can— Leon Dorr winning copywriter who's our creative director. He's been in the business for the best part of 45 years, and that's quite hard to be beat, but that's a very specific skill and I doubt he would call himself a designer. He's a creative, but when you get it right, people cry with joy when you hear it. If you get it wrong, they forget it before they've left the building. Most of the time we get it right. So I think a lot of the skills, a lot of those designerly skills are actually things that schools are actively learning about. Thinking about thinking, learning about learning, all of the work that Ron Ritchart and Ron Berger are doing in schools is actually the same skill a skill set that designers spend a lot of time relearning for themselves.

Absolutely. I mean, as you're talking, I'm just hearing a list of skills that actually that we want for the students at the end of the day as the kind of long-term impacts that we leave them with as a result of their learning experiences with us in our school.

I think that the idea you mentioned, design thinking for learning, actually something which we pioneered. We were taking design thinking wholesale into high school literature classes, into the social sciences, into mathematics 10 years ago before frankly anyone else was to the same degree. There was a lot of maker stuff keeping design thinking within the realm of design, but taking it into realms where it never really touched was something quite innovative, quite daring at the time, really hard to do as well, if I'm honest. It takes a skilled teacher to make it work. Why? Because you need to have a solid understanding of all those formative assessment strategies or design strategies to be able to plan and deliver and kind of execute it well. Yeah. But when I was at, before I started Nootosh, I was at Channel 4, and that was where I had my lightning bolt moment because all the creative people I was commissioning to create digital products, to create things for the telly, they all talked about their work with a similar kind of vocabulary, which meant they can meet up with each other, talk about projects, and no one was arguing about what they meant. They all knew what they meant and they were just talking about the ideas. I thought, why do schools not have that? It's education conferences. We spend days defining stuff rather than talking about how to really do something great. And that was why I created No Tosh, to cut through that defining nonsense and get to the point. So that's the one thing designers do have, is a common language, and it would be great if education could have that common language too.

One of your projects was specifically about where teachers go to learn, and obviously there's a big piece here about about supporting teachers developing some of these capacities and, you know, open this conversation up to involve teachers to engage with some of these ideas and processes that will enhance the experience for young people that they're serving. Maybe you could just talk a little bit about that project where you were using the designers then to answer that question of where do teachers go to learn.

This project was the Mayfield Project, I think, in Australia, and it's a, uh, every 2-year project. We're doing it at the moment, in fact, with 30 architects who are are relatively young in the profession, if you like, new into the profession, but who want to also level up and want to create a real specialism in education and think about how they design better for education. And the idea of where teachers go to learn is a really broad idea. One of the biggest challenges when you are an architect designing spaces is that the people that you then go and consult with, that you try and understand, they've never built a building before, or maybe they've maybe they've done it a long time ago. And so the consultations can just be pretty brief and pretty shallow. So there were, there were a couple of things around that. One was, how do we make richer, deeper experiences for any participant, including teachers, to learn about the impact of space on what they're doing? So one of the things is, where do teachers go to learn about physical environments? So when those changes do come around, they're more informed. But then the second thing is in schools, schools are a bit like offices, you go there to get interrupted. It's really hard for teachers to find a place to radically rethink what they're doing. They don't have enough time at the right time with the right people having the same time free to work together. So where teachers go to learn is, is 3 or 4 times a year traditionally in these ridiculously high-pressure days of professional learning. Where the agenda is not set by them. A bit like going back to your, your discussion on the brief. The brief has been defined somewhere by someone but not them, and if they're lucky, they might get to go to a conference where they choose which sessions they go to. But again, it's very surface, it's very skimming the surface. I think we've actually got, in the 2 years since that project was done, where the emphasis was very much in the physical space and the time constraint and how we might be able to change that to make learning better for teachers, Now, actually, online we might have answered the question, which is you've got limitless choice. Finding quality is still hard, and finding the right budget is hard as well. A lot of these, a lot of quality online is actually quite pricey, and the question is whether schools see enough value in that to invest in it.

Yeah, so how can people access the online courses?

Well, we're— they're not even launched yet, but we start on Monday actually with our first one. And it's quite nerve-wracking for us. We don't know if anyone will turn up. It's like having a kid's birthday party. So learn.notosh.com, and we've got the Transition Design, which is about senior leadership teams coming together to think short to midterm and how to get themselves out of the firefighting that they're inevitably in at the moment. We're going to run that once in 2020. We may revisit it in 2021 depending on how the storm around us.

Exactly.

And the peer leadership, although we're trialing it with one group of schools at the moment, that will get launched towards the end of October. And we've got a really exciting partnership that we'll announce in the next few weeks to make sure that international schools not only have access to it early, but they have a pretty massive discount on the program. So we want to see people do it, we want to see it make an impact and generate some great stories. And we've got some great other courses more about learning and teaching coming out. We're going to make sure that they're really accessible for teachers, that at a push, if you're on a relatively decent international school salary, that you could credit card it and write it off your tax return. We want it to be accessible and make a difference to kids' experience. So yeah, lots of development going on, and we're going to try not to bamboozle people either by putting too much out at once. But what we're producing is real quality. They're also, all of them, live. So none of these courses are the pre-recorded, them kind of motivational videos you see on Facebook. This is live and involves a degree of coaching as well in between those sessions. So good. Really excited.

Yeah, that sounds fantastic. A huge resource for people, clearly, with the NightOsh brand and maybe some other brands coming Yeah, yeah, we've thrown a decade's worth of no-touch experience into it.

So our problem is what we cut out, not what we put in.

That's usually the problem though, right? Not trying to do everything all at once.

Yeah, absolutely.

Brilliant. Amazing. Thank you, Euan. I really appreciate your time and it's just a real pleasure to talk to you.

It feels the same way. It's fun to talk through and it's fun to remember that these 6 months, going through them has not been particularly easy for anyone. But actually, a couple of years down the line, we'll look back on them and think it was the making of us all. Yeah, a little bit of positivity, a little bit of optimism. I think the multiplying effect of it is immense.

Brilliant. Yeah, amazing. Thank you so much. We hope you've enjoyed this episode. Please feel free to continue the dialogues with our guests, with us on our blog or on social media, or within your own networks.