31. How do you build a business that is smarter than you?

Brandon 0:05

Hello, everyone and welcome to another episode of the operations room a podcast for CEOs I am Brandon Mensa, joined by my lovely co host, Bethany Ayers. How are things going? Bethany? going?

Bethany 0:16

Okay. Thanks, Brandon. So I have a question for you. Do I look any different? Or I maybe could make a leading question? Do I look any better? I mean,

Brandon 0:29

it sounds like a loaded question to me. The answer is yes. Obviously, the question is why those is what you're getting out here.

Bethany 0:36

Well, I'm gonna tell you the why. But I was first, you know, just gonna lead with the Do I look fresher faced than usual? You look fabulous. Are you just saying that? Because you have to

Brandon 0:47

say, because I have to for sure.

Bethany 0:51

But are you also saying it because you genuinely see a difference?

Brandon 0:53

I think so. It's like a skin thing happening with, okay,

Bethany 0:57

there is a skin thing happening. So, over Christmas, I had my cousin visiting. And I can't remember how we got into it. But we were talking. Oh, it was maybe because of the French gym, and the EMS in the French gym, you know, electro muscular stimulation, which is my lazy, Jim. And I was telling her about that. And she's like, Oh, I use microcurrent on my face. And I said you do what? And apparently in America, this is a complete thing. But so far, I don't know anybody else in the UK doing it. So they have these different microcurrent apparatus. I don't know, appliances. I don't know what the right word is. That sends different levels of electricity through your face, and basically gives your face exercise without having to do hours of face yoga, which I was never really understood.

Brandon 1:49

Does your face need to exercise is that what does that? I think

Bethany 1:53

so I had been worrying for a while about my jowls. And I've been going around in the house to Andrew, just lifting the skin kind of from like mid jaw up to the back of my jaw. And just going look, look. Look at that, how clear and lovely my jaw line is now. And I'm just like, I see no difference. I'm like, no, no, you can look no gel gel. No jeraldo. So it's definitely been weighing on me along with I can't remember what they're called, like the marionette lines that come down from your lips, and kind of around your cheeks. I mean, from your nose down like that whole lower from cheekbone down area has been causing me some concern, because I am horrifically vain. Like I'm not going to pretend any other way. I ended up writing a piece in my writing class, about your jowls, not about my genitals about my life. And it was one of those where like, I'm quite good at a final Zinger of a line. And I kept writing a line and to be like man afraid of death. Yeah, whatever, man, this doesn't feel real. No, this doesn't feel real. And then suddenly, out of me came the line where, of course now I'm paraphrasing myself not as well as what I wrote. I don't know who I am, if I'm not beautiful. And so I realised that this is like a major part of my identity. And it's ballsy to say because one then you're owning up to the fact that you're good looking and nobody likes to show off. And then secondly, it's superficial. And it's not the way we're supposed to be I am not growing old gracefully. I am like fighting it tooth and nail except for oddly my hair, but we've talked about my hair and that's a fear of death thing. So, so far from the research I've done, it doesn't appear to cause cancer, my new microcurrent in the face. So I'm using it quite a bit. And now in the same way that I talked about Zoe and the research I've done I'm going to explain why I bought the zip halo over the new face something else new face spelled and you face and my cousin has the new face. But then I of course had to research everything in the world about there's these are like the two top tier electrocuting your face for beauty options. And I went for the zip because it has like an anti acne one. And it has a nano current one. And of course like, who knows, I don't think any of the science is real. I don't know if nano currents actually like stimulate collagen, whatever. But the anti acne one does seem to work I've not really had a breakout since using it and my jowls I think are significantly reduced. So for anybody else who is vain and worried about ageing and becoming irrelevant because clearly like being attractive as part of the world's expectations of women, and you are interested I would highly recommend the zip Hallo.

Brandon 4:55

I'm not even sure what to make of this. Okay, so using electric currents apply to your face to flex the muscles to like, make them more tight or rounded, or what have you make you look younger, basically,

Bethany 5:08

and so totally conflicted. But yet, I actually have to say like in one of these, I'm a feminist, but moments, I'm a feminist, but I enjoy electric hitting my face for beauty

Brandon 5:20

lovers. So we have a great topic today, which is, how do you build a business that is smarter than you. And we have a phenomenal guest for this and Jennifer Sundberg. She's the CO CEO of board intelligence, and also the author of collective intelligence, a lot of intelligence going on here. Before we get to that, Bethany, I wanted to ask you two questions. And the first one is, what is good questioning look like? Because a lot of what Jennifer talks about which we'll get to in her interview, is this question of what is good look like when it comes to questions, because questions are the foundation by which you can actually unpack and unveil what needs to be unveiled within an organisation to drive it forward. So what is good look like for questions? I'm

Bethany 6:01

not going to use my own brain. But Jen's brain on this going to say that simple questions, and the obvious questions are the best, rather than like questions that are set to catch somebody out or show that you're smarter than they are. I was in a meeting the other day, and there was a tremendous amount of what, what they're going to do, what is going to be delivered? And there was absolutely no, why. And there was no context around it. And then they wanted to discuss the what and I was just like, But why, why are we doing this? What's the change in the strategy? Where does this come from? Give me what's in your head before we talk about the what? And for me that was like, and it wasn't even a question. I mean, the question was literally why. And then that opened up a 20 minute discussion, rather than like just getting into the detail as to whether or not there's too many OKRs, or trying to look at too many things about you, Brandon,

Brandon 7:02

a couple things to think about. One is my coach has been very clear with me on this over the years, which is Brandon, you need to come from a place of curiosity, when you approach things like this, because my previous mantra of style, for better or worse was to be much more directive in terms of my line of questioning and much more challenging and confronting. And I think over the years, I've definitely switched gears, I would say into much more of the why questioning and much more of the curiosity mindset. And it just fundamentally delivers better results, I think, to be honest, because what you're trying to do is to get them to think in a different way about things without telling them that essentially, that's really the question of the why in this case.

Bethany 7:38

And another one is talk me through your reasoning, or where has this come from? What is the problem we're trying to solve? And then again, I think it's from like genuine curiosity, taking out the sting of like, I have no time why you've just spent the last four months working on this, when you were supposed to be doing that, which might be what I'm feeling on the inside, but instead was a bit of a breath. What prompted this? The

Brandon 8:07

second question is meetings, which is any hints or tips when it comes to this question of meetings, because, as we note with Jennifer, in our interview, meetings are the bane of everyone's existence, and trying to put ourselves in a better position when it comes to meetings. There's all sorts of tricks of the trade here. But I'm just wondering, from a Bethany perspective, when you think about meetings, what are some useful ways to approach meetings to ensure that you're kind of optimising for the right thing?

Bethany 8:34

It's interesting. I'm not somebody who hates meetings, I'm certainly somebody who hates some meetings, rather than on the whole, I quite like meetings. It's when there's a long meeting with no particular point to it. And you don't know why it's in your diary, but you have to go. Those are the meetings that I think people talk about as hating. And so it's around being mindful, like I definitely, particularly in COVID. And then it just seemed to have happened after COVID is lots and lots of standing meetings to make up for just people you would normally like have lunch with on occasion. And now suddenly, it's booked in one to one or something. It's a revisiting all of your standing meetings and making sure that there's an actual point to it so that you have more space for the ad hoc meetings, which are the ones that were really helpful because you're solving real time problems, or planning for the future. And then thinking about what are you trying to solve with this meeting? And what is the ideal outcome? So that everybody comes in, aligned, and also opening the meeting with like, the point of this meeting is x. Are you the right people in the room for that? And are we all aligned? I've been in meetings where I'm like, the point of this is X everywhere, like, No, it's not. And we've actually spent the first 15 minutes of the meeting, trying to figure out why we've having it and that doesn't mean that it's a bad meeting. It just makes sure that we're all aligned.

Brandon 9:59

That's a good catch, isn't it? Making sure once in a while, whether you call it a retro or not doesn't matter, but once in a while taking that recurring meeting, and have a conversation with that group about the meeting itself, which is does this meeting continued to be useful? Why are we actually meeting? Have we drifted from the original purpose? And if so, does this meeting continue to make sense? If we want to have better meetings going forward? What should that look like based on our past history of this meeting that we've had thus far? So I think just that occasional step in to the actual meeting format itself as to why are we doing this in the first place? Does it continue to make sense? And how do we make it better conversation, incredibly useful, incredibly important, you don't need to do it all the time. But you usually have a gut feeling as either a participant or as the host of that meeting, when that kind of conversation would actually be useful. And then the second piece is, I think, for leadership meetings in particular, are having pre reads that are done for substantial topics that need to be debated and discussed, are incredibly useful to get to actual decisions in that meeting itself. Because oftentimes, in my past, if you don't have these pre reading documents, a couple days prior, what you end up doing in the meeting itself, is having a ramshackle conversation, it's all over the map, because you're not aligned, you're not on the same page, at least from the get go. And pre read allows everyone to get to a place where they're right on the cusp of being able to have an amazing conversation about that material. And then the last little piece that I think about now is more of a ce o 's. Me piggybacking on the CEOs EA is incredibly useful. So when it comes to calendar changes, booking rooms, lunches that need to be had, having the EA be able to access my calendar to make adjustments when it's needed, super, super helpful. Because at the end of the day, you know, you're leaving that business, and you have to be enabled timewise to help run that business and having some of this logistical stuff managed for you is incredibly helpful as well.

Bethany: 11:52

And then going back to your comment on pre reads, definitely agree love a good pre read, what I also really find helpful in pre reads is, in the exec summary, what is the author looking for? Is it just to let us know? Is it an approval? Is it a decision, because there's multiple good ideas? And so which one is the best one? Or conversely, everything is bad, which is the least worst one that we should be going for? Is it a debate? Is it a brainstorm, because without being really clear on why somebody is presenting this to you and the outset, you're going to be reading in lots of different ways. Everybody may have done the pre read, but you're no closer to having a good conversation, because one person is like, yep, read it. Fine, cool. And somebody else is saying, Well, I actually think that, you know, these five things are horrible about it. And I've read the document very differently.

Brandon: 12:53

Yeah, actually, this is a fantastic point. Because every pre read or the pre which we did previously, we're all premised on the basis that a decision needed to be made. That's why we did the pre raid. And that's why we put the effort into the pre raid itself is because we knew that it was substantial, it was consequential. We had to have everyone to weigh in as to what decision was the best choice for the company at that point. And to your point, if prereqs are used more generally, than just deciding what the purpose is of that pre read in this case. And

Bethany: 13:22

it happens a lot in board meetings as well. Because sometimes as a board, you need to read something to for governance reasons, it needs to be approved, you want to understand the background, but in your life, as long as it's reasonable. And you understand the background is a de facto, yes. Or it's for awareness, or sometimes it's like for awareness. And as a board, you have no authority. So actually, it's literally for awareness. And so then it's good to know, and come into it with those types of questions. Perfect.

Brandon: 13:50

So with that, too, why don't we go on a quick break. And when we come back, we will have our conversation with Jennifer Sundberg.

Bethany: 14:00

We're delighted to welcome Jen Sandberg to the podcast. I've known Jen and her co founder Pippa for quite a few years. So it's exciting to have you on the podcast. Welcome, Jen.

Jennifer Sundberg: 14:11

Thank you for inviting me on.

Bethany: 14:13

I loved reading your book, we should also talk about the fact that you have just written a book. And that is part of what we're talking about today is called collective intelligence. In the book is what you're seeing as problems is not unique to boards. It might not be unique to businesses, but it's not unique to boards. So the number of management team meetings I've sat in our leadership team meetings, I should say, where we don't get to the important topics because we're looking at past

Jennifer Sundberg: 14:39

performance. And there's a reason the book is called collective intelligence and not board intelligence board intelligence being the name of our company. And that stems from the realisation that when you look at what the root causes of what I described in that boardroom, that I observed, typically that the information is short in one or more of three areas and So, these shortcomings are not shortcomings of board information. These are shortcomings of skills in the management team. And they have far more profound implications, once you realise that So the three things that we look for in board information, it's first of all, is it full of critical thinking? Is it just great big information dump? Or does it pull out? The why the sowhat? That now what? Secondly, is it well communicated, right? Because you could have the most fantastic quality thinking, but if it's poorly communicated, you're never going to get your message to transmit, right? So secondly, the quality of communication. And thirdly, is it focused on what matters most because again, it's no point having lots of fantastic thinking really well communicated about the stuff that doesn't really matter. But the board information is the canary in the coal mine. And when any one of those three characteristics is lacking, it's typically a sign that one of those three skills is not as well developed as it needs to be within the management team. And that has profound implications, right, far more wide reaching implications than merely the quality of the board. Discussion, important that may be. And so what our work has become these days is much more about working with leadership teams, management teams, right the way down through an organisation to build the skills and the habits around each of those three disciplines, which happens to yield really great Board Papers, and in turn that drives really great board meetings. But in some ways, these days, we think of that as the silver lining. So

Bethany: 16:21

it was interesting. In the book, when you were talking about, we probably don't ask as many questions. But it's not just that we also want to be experts in the way that we asked questions when I was reading it. And for benefit of our listeners, it's basically about figuring out and creating a framework of questions. So it's not just taking a pause and asking questions, or trusting that your team or asking questions, it's to have a set of questions that you figure out are important and consistently ask them and saying this to Brandon earlier, it's like, I suspect, you either sit down, and you do it for five minutes. And those first questions are it and it's just stop. But then you won't just stop because you have to be smart about it. And you'll ask like, all of the questions, and then you'll have 50 questions and none of it will matter. Or you do this iterative approach. And it takes you six months to land on the five questions that I suspect are your first five questions anyhow. So do you see this? And how do you keep people to asking the right questions and not every question?

Jennifer Sundberg: 17:21

Yeah. So how do you land? The right questions? So something you said at the start that was that? It is often the simplest questions that are the best it is the how and why questions it is you know, it's the why there's so often that word. So one of the things we do is we will agree with our clients accept of what we call a QD, I play questions with insight play, which is a set of questions or typically set of questions for slightly different situations that are ready made, lift and drop for everyone in the organisation to use. So if you're sitting down to write a quarterly business review, performance review or plan for next year, here is a set of starter for 10. Some really good questions to get going, which gets you in the habit of thinking about questions, they are not the end of the process, there may be other questions you need to bolt into. But it gets you into the frame of mind of thinking before you start to write or prepare your deck, whatever you're doing, to start by thinking about the questions. Now you're right, there are many questions one might ever ask on any topic. And so we help people to think in terms of tree diagrams, questions, sub questions, sub sub questions, and to try to group things. You can always group in subgroup. And ideally, at the very highest level, you don't want more than about five major questions under which you slot is sub questions, new sub sub questions. That's actually for reasons of parte communication, actually, that when you come to communicate your thinking to somebody else, the sort of the narrative thread that we can hold in our heads is somewhere around seven plus or minus two major points. And if you tried to communicate anything in more major building blocks than that, your receiver will probably lose the thread. Now you don't know whether your receiver is capable of seven plus or minus two, right? So we tend to say target five if you can communicate your thinking in five major building blocks, which would mean five headline questions under which you have sub questions and sub questions, you're probably onto a winner. Rules are made to be broken, right, but it's a good sort of starting points. So useful heuristic to secure what are the right questions we advocate setting out as an organisation sets of starter questions that you encourage people to work with, to help them to build that habit to build the confidence. The number of times we've worked with State Boards of large multinationals receiving proposals from the workforce for many 100 million pound or 100 million dollar investments. And yet, one or more of the following questions aren't being answered. So it could be what is the need or opportunity and why now, what you've got is a great thesis on a proposal for something to be done and money to be spent on but this gets answering the question, the need or opportunity and why now, equally, options are often missing. So need opportunity, why now what options were considered and why they were rejected, with whatever it is you're proposing. You know, what's the inherent risks high propose and mitigate them, the options are doing nothing. What you need to do to progress will be the impact of a delay in taking this decision. There are all sorts of questions that are quite simple but quite universally applicable. Or if you're reporting on performance, very often, it's very backward looking. But you want to know not just what has happened, but what are the risks and opportunities on the horizon? Again, you want to know things like net net? Where does this leave us? What's your confidence in achieving your goals and your aims? And what do we need to stop doing start doing or do differently? Often very simple, fairly obvious questions, but again, the number of performance reports that I've read that only look backwards, or that don't speak to what you stopped start, or where you stopped out, or do differently, getting this right is, is actually quite mentally taxing. But it is actually quite mentally taxing. Because when you sit down and you think, hang on, here's what has happened. But you know why? So what now? What are what are we going to do about it? Quite often, you don't actually have a ready prepared answer to that you've actually got to figure out the answer before you can write the report. And that's where the real value lies, is when the process itself prompts you to think about stuff that you might have otherwise gladly skipped over.

Bethany: 21:07

With or without questions. I find it very painful with teams who can't even add any commentary on the sides of the graphs. And building in that habit. Like, we're not just like forcing everybody to figure out what these mean. But there's a lot of pushback, where it's like, I don't have time I kind of just like, well, what's the point of it if you can't think, but it's in some instances. So in one case, I'm actually on a board, where there's never any commentary. And I've been working with the team if like, we need some commentary here, and they just don't have time.

Jennifer Sundberg: 21:45

With any habit that you're trying to develop, you need to make it easy to do and hard to avoid. And I think part of making it hard to avoid is making visible the evidence that they've done so is in the paper that it's produced, right? And so we build a methodology where you do actually state to the questions that you're answering. So it is very visible, that that's what you're doing. And it's becomes very apparent when the commentary you put underneath a question does not actually get to the heart of the answer explained to you, as the author explained to the reader. So all of that makes it very visible and makes it stick. Dame Carolyn McCall awhile ago now she before her ITV days, she was Chief Exec of EasyJet, she turned up at EasyJet at a pretty challenging time for the business, she quite quickly determined that morale within the workforce was poor. Not surprising, in many ways as a low cost carrier, the cutting costs and cost. And as is often the case, you start to cut away at the bone right? She baked in a question into pretty much every report every plan, every meeting that was how do our people feel? And what are we doing to strengthen the relationship between us and our workforce, she made that the dominant theme for everything, she flipped around a culture that had been focused on profit, customer, people became a culture focused entirely on people, which would yield benefits to the customer, which would yield eventually profits. So she wants to completely flip the focus of the organisation, the culture of the organisation, the preoccupation of every manager in the organisation. And she did it by implanting question about the health of the workforce and the health of variation with the workforce into absolutely everything, which meant that every month, those questions, and coming up with good answers to those questions became the preoccupation of everyone at every level. So

Bethany: 23:32

that's a great story. Great power of a question. We're CEOs here. So do you literally write the questions on every report that you want? Do you make your managers do it? How do the questions land where they're supposed to land? And how do you make sure that they're being answered? He

Jennifer Sundberg: 23:53

or she who controls the questions controls the conversation, and the leadership is to set that direction and to communicate at least some of the questions that are required of management to engage with, we have a software package our clients use, which helps to cascade those questions with the organisation. People log into that software platform when they come to craft their management reports, which helps to make sure that they're working from the correct set of starter questions, and you can easily update them and tweak that focus with them. But even if you're working from pen and paper, right, doesn't matter if you set somewhere in your organization's knowledge management systems that these are the starter questions we want you to use for every quarterly business review every annual plan and proposal or every business case that gets prepared. You can have a place or find a place where you can log a set of questions, because that way you can update those questions. And with that, you can refocus, essentially reprogram what it is that your management teams are going to lock onto and cogitate around. So

Brandon: 24:49

just on that second thesis around communication. I'm very, very interested in good meetings. So what good meetings look like, meetings are critical to ensure that there's accountability organisation where you ask the right questions in those meetings as an example, but I guess my question to you is, how do you create phenomenally good meetings? One is organise

Jennifer Sundberg: 25:10

your meetings around questions. Funnily enough, that's the only answer to many things. That what is the question or questions that for each agenda item you're trying to get to the heart of identifying, articulating the question will force you to achieve that level of precision, that just a standard statement of an agenda item or title of the meeting doesn't quite require. It also, Prime's the minds of the people coming to that meeting to engage their brain in service of helping to answer that question. It helps you to more accurately identify who you're going to need to help answer that question, what information you're going to need to support and substantiate the basis on which which decision in answers that question so try when you can to figure out? What is the question or what are the questions at the heart of the meeting that we're convening on, that

Bethany: 25:57

makes sense to understand the questions you're answering in ad hoc meetings? Is that also the case for your standing meetings? And are you thinking about the question every time? Or is it always the same questions?

Jennifer Sundberg: 26:12

When it comes to things that are maybe a slightly slower cadence, say, a monthly meeting or a quarterly meeting? Then we would challenge even if the standing item is performance review, right? We would challenge the person whose topic that is the person who's preparing the briefing note that they should spend time isolating. What do they think is a question or a few questions that that group could usefully contribute to given the state of whatever it is that you're presenting? And call it out? So you might be speaking to a fairly standard set of information about what your goals are? what's working, what's not working, what you're thinking about the future and where you think this leaves you. But within that body of information that you're preparing? And knowing the skills of the people who are going to convene around that table? What would you like back from them, isolate it, articulate it, spell it out, so that they know where you want value back? It should be a two way process, you know, reporting is often seen as a one way process, it's a burden on the person who's been asked to do it. They pull together all this information, they pass it across, that's where it ends, we'll actually convert that into a it's a two way process. So article, what is the dialogue you want to have with the reader and tell them,

Bethany: 27:25

but it sounds amazing as you're talking like, I want to be in those meetings, I want to have these conversations that will be so much better than so many meetings that end up at, but what I find, particularly not board meetings, but exec team meetings, is the politics. And so I think there's a lot of purposeful lack of clarity, because you're hiding underperformance, or you're like explaining away under performance by adding another metric and another metric. Do you see that? And how do you address the cultural issues that mean that you can't have these open conversations that good questioning problems? So

Jennifer Sundberg: 28:07

the way we tackle that is by building in the QD I play for a standard performance report the question, what's not gone? Well, and making it crystal clear that if you can't answer that question, if you can't articulate what's not got well, and what keeps you awake at night, so both lenses looking back and looking forwards. If you can't answer those questions, it does not imply that you're nailing it. what it implies is that you don't have a handle on your part of the business, or that you're simply not willing to share it, you're not being candid, neither of which are good luck. So making it both normalised so that those two questions are, if they're not being asked and answered, they are conspicuously absent, because it is normal procedure in your organisation to call out those questions and address them head on. But as I say, making it quite understood that actually, this is about how you display your proficiency as a leader by communicating your grasp on those challenges. We

Brandon: 29:01

have our leadership meeting, where it's much more of a formal agenda of things to go through in terms of scorecards and action items and KPIs and thematic things across the business, we need to be debating and discussing and deciding upon, and so on. And then in addition to that, we have kind of a coffee chat at 830 in the morning between three or four of us and have an open ended discussion. And I can see between the two meetings, the value that we have in that coffee chat is phenomenal compared to the more structured one. And the question that arises in my head is well, why is that? What's happening in that coffee chat that's not happening in a leadership meeting? And the one obvious answer to that is just the mindset, you're coming into a coffee chat, to ask a good question at the outset. And then to weave a very natural organic conversation that flows where people are contributing in a way that is very sensible to get to some conclusion, outcome, whatever during that Coffee Chat, where there's a revelation that we've had together collectively, and when that occurs, it's magic. And in leadership meetings, I never see that. So my question to you is, what's happening here,

Jennifer Sundberg: 30:04

you have two jobs to do, you have the job of steering an organisation, and building the business of tomorrow from the business of today. But you also have the job of supervising and making sure that what you think is being done is being done. And it's working. There are two very different modes, two very different responsibilities of any manager, team leader or Business Director. And they demand different types of meetings with a very different tone. I think the biggest problem is when you tried to do the two together, so I think Harar that you have a separate as you've cried bits of coffee chat, which even the name of it caught it quite really did. But it had the word coffee in it, I love coffee, but it sets up an expectation of a much more expansive thinking or collaborative, it's not me versus you. Whereas the other meeting, which is the supervisory, where are we? And you know, have we hit our targets? What's the data tell us? Is the plan working? Is it even being implemented at all, it's much more about seeking assurance, it's much more almost like a policeman's hat. And by necessity, it's very different tone. What we see in some board meetings is agenda item one performance report, agenda item two strategy for next year, agenda item three, a deep dive and performance update from some corner of the business and the board is trying to shift gear between item one, item two, item three and constantly shifting gear, you can't really shift the tone of that room in the way that you need to so we advocate grouping those agenda items into those of a more steering nature. And there's been more supervisory nature, ideally, stick them on different days, but at the very least, have a proper break between the two and come into the room as that other persona that you need to be to fulfil the different role.

Bethany: 31:42

That's really interesting, because at peak, we have done that, but I don't know if we've done it on purpose, we definitely have like the longer quarterly ones, which are more of a steering element, and then the shorter monthly or BI monthly ones that are more of the Supervisory. So just interesting. I like that framework. I have one question, because there was one area in the book that it did not agree with which I did mention we were talking like, and it kind of goes back to the Amazon thing. So you can tell I have some sort of issue. So I have an issue with everybody spending time reading the report. But I also have an issue with the assumption that it has to be prose in a document. And therefore it's better sense of communication. One, mildly dyslexic and don't love reading. And I'm quite visual. And so the graphs give me a tremendous amount of information. And two, I have read very bad prose with no critical thinking. And I have consumed very good PowerPoints with critical thinking. So I think it's not true that it has to be one medium or the other. The

Jennifer Sundberg: 32:44

real distinction in my mind is between whether you're preparing a self explanatory briefing, or whether you're preparing a visual aid to a presentation, that without the verbal narrative to support, it won't make any sense. And I think what we often see is beautiful presentations that would be excellent visual aids with the narrative to support it, that are submitted in advance, they're not read because they're not really readable without that verbal narrative. And so people don't read it. And so it is presented in the meeting, which reinforces no point reading it in advance. And then you waste all of this valuable time in the meeting where you could be progressing the collective understanding of a topic through exchange of dialogue, you're wasting it with a monologue. So for me, the most important thing is preparing something that is self explanatory that can stand on its own two feet be readily understood by the receiver in advance. But I also think there is something about preparing it in a form that is self explanatory, that can force you as the author to be a bit more specific, and a bit less hand wavy, than a few bullet points and a photo might require. And it's when you get more specific that you might uncover that what you thought was clear and made sense isn't actually very clear and doesn't actually make sense. The most value we deliver to our clients is when the process of producing that report, authoring that briefing note, causes the author to revise their plans, because it's in externalising that thinking that they spot the gaps, they spot the flaws, and they correct for that. The silver lining is you end up with a better report at the end of it that is more robust and more rigorous, but it's the silver lining is the fact that that thinking would not have happened otherwise, that we see as the biggest win. Awesome.

Bethany: 34:25

Okay, so then I agree more, if it's a standalone document 100% and hence my request for some commentary on some of these board reports. But I also agree like, for me, at least, it depends because you have reports where it's the same slides every month, and you update the commentary, and then you have something special where you need to think about your narrative, you need to understand what's the point how does it flow? And you know, basically write all of the headlines of all of the slides and then fill it in And then you realise where your gaps are. And probably that first set of headlines isn't the final. But it's still the embedded critical thinking, Well, I just like having more, not pictures, but more graphs that are easy to understand and big enough to see. So we are nearly out of time. Final question is, we've spoken about so many things today, it's been absolutely fascinating. If our listeners were only taking one thing away from the episode, what's the one thing

Jennifer Sundberg: 35:33

ask yourself if I could engage everyone in my organisation? In thinking deeply about one question, one question that will dominate for the year ahead. What's the one question that I think we should all link arms and engage in? We can week out month in month out? What is the question that you think will drive the greatest thinking power in your organisation?

Brandon: 35:58

Perfect. So thank you, Jen, for joining us on the operations room. If you like what you hear, please leave us a comment or subscribe and we will see you next week.