in a fixed mindset people think that

success

is all about talent having the gift a

growth mindset is saying

okay talent obviously matters it's a

factor but it's not enough it's what we

do with our talents i wasn't the best

table tennis player in the world i never

got into the top 20 of the world

rankings

but with that attitude i maximize my own

potential

i think leadership counts when it comes

to innovation i mean the way amazon

conducts meetings

then when they start talking the most

senior person always speaks last

you'll get an unvarnished access to the

insights

of your brilliant team rather than

speaking first and everyone basically

converging on

what you as the leader has just said

there are a lot of people with truly

brilliant ideas

huge potential who never

act on their dreams but having the idea

doesn't mean a thing you've actually got

to act on that idea

honestly i think we shouldn't

underestimate how damaging it can be if

[Music]

matthew syed he's written some of the

most important

challenging thought-provoking books in

the self-development self-improvement

team development team building company

building leadership space

and his ideas are original they are

challenging they are

fresh they are important he was an elite

level sportsman and his ideas come from

the world of sport

but also the world of business from

politics from writing

from culture from society he evangelizes

about

diverse thinking about including more

ideas

about challenging leadership about

challenging yourself

about what it takes to start and why

most people

spend their life sitting on ideas that

could potentially change their life

but are seemingly imprisoned trapped and

blocked

by their own mindset he talks about how

some of the most talented people in the

world

can fall short of their potential and

how some people

with seemingly no talent at all can

achieve miraculous things

if you apply the learnings from this

conversation i have no doubt

that it will make you a better person it

will make your teams more innovative

and it will lead you to living a more

fulfilled life so without further ado

i'm stephen bartlett and this is the

director ceo i hope nobody's listening

but if you are then please keep this to

yourself

matthew everyone wants to be successful

everybody i don't know one person that

doesn't want to be successful so i think

it's probably quite important to define

what that word

means under your own definition of that

word the holistic definition not just a

professional

definition but how would you define that

well look it's great to be here steve i

i think that's quite a deep question

quite a philosophical one

really just getting started i know what

kind of opening question is this

i i um obviously as as a former sports

person i was a table tennis professional

for for a number of years

um success was defined in terms of

winning matches

and achieving very uh clear tangible

objectives like winning the national

championships or the

the commonwealth and so the but i think

when it comes to life beyond sport

yeah it's so objective in something like

the 100 meter sprint

you want to be your pb and you can see

it

on a digital readout at the end of a

race how close you've come or whether

you've achieved that objective

in the life beyond sport i have to say

one of the things that is quite

difficult i think for sports people to

transition

is it's more elusive more subjective

more ephemeral and i think it is a

really difficult thing

to define what you personally mean by

success

i'm not 100 sure that i've defined it

for myself yet

have you have you i i well i i'm i'm

getting closer

on a prof in a professional sense i what

i would how i'd answer that question is

i'd say

i think i'm successful if in my

professional life

if i am striving

if i'm taking on a worthwhile challenge

with people i love

so the key terms there are worthwhile

subjective to find out how you like

challenge which i think is um in

integral to

being motivated and getting up in the

morning and you know all the emotions

you need to be

internally uh internally fulfilled and

motivated

and then with people i love which i

think is just a really which speaks to

community and human interaction which i

think is part of our human

yeah and the yeah look that makes a lot

of sense to me i i have to say what one

thing that

given what you've just said you'll

probably agree with i think the narrow

way that success

has sometimes been defined in western

capitalist societies has been

deeply mistaken that it's all about how

much money you have in your bank account

and i think we all know

although you know it's a bit of a cliche

to say that it doesn't provide

happiness certainly not of a sustained

nature

i think that that thing about social

interaction the thing that makes me

happiest for sure

is putting one's heart and soul into a

project

like for example writing a book and then

getting a letter from somebody who

explains

in their own way how it has positively

impacted their life and there is no

feeling like that

for me as a writer and that

really is a powerful engine to motivate

you to come up with a new idea for a new

book

the fact that you know it's having it

has meaning for other people

not that they've paid money to buy it

and that money has been transferred via

a publisher

into my bank account that is much less

significant i mean it's great

if you do get money for it you know you

can look after your kids or you can

do something with it but it's that

feedback that sense of making some kind

of a difference

i mean in a funny kind of a way that

that's why for a long time um

as i came towards the end of my

television squad i wanted to go to

politics i thought that is the place

where you can make the most difference

right you've got the levers

to do something interesting and then i

realized it was

not quite as funner avenue perhaps as

as uh as writing why why is it that

human beings seem to get so much

intrinsic joy

from helping others i think this is a

great and deep significance and you know

just to put a historical lens on this

after the enlightenment the idea was of

human beings as individuals

individualism was the great goal of

political

life and i think we conceived of people

as deciding uh to perhaps interact with

other people

deciding to have families and you might

remember margaret thatcher

once said there's no such thing as

society

there are just individual men and women

and families i mean she had more to say

after that it wouldn't be fair to say

that was her entire philosophy by any

means

i think she was a great prime minister

in many ways

but but if you actually go back deeper

in human history

when we uh our ancestors lived at the

same time as the neanderthals the

neanderthals had

probably bigger brains than us they may

have been individually smarter

but humans lived in tighter more

socially connected groups what does that

mean

it means if somebody learns something

useful they can share it

with one of their kin and therefore

they can also share it with their

children they can get a

cross-pollination of ideas they can

bring ideas together

and then it gets passed down the

generations and it was that

sociality that conferred a competitive

advantage

on our ancestors above neanderthals

it's it is i think our distinctive

quality

we are social beings to an extent

greater i think than any others except

the

insects like uh ants who for slightly

different uh evolutionary reasons

cooperate at scale

and there's an element of virtue

signaling

social media that sort of seems to have

exacerbated this amongst our my

generation in particular who all seem to

want to change the world

but can't necessarily tell you what they

want to change they just want to be a

person that's changed the world

that's interesting that's interesting

because about a decade ago i started

looking at you know

now i'm i'm believe it or not 50. uh

he's a little great

well i was going to say i don't if you

have to remember oil of are you late

no that's probably the slightly older

people will remember i don't use that by

the way but

um i uh started looking at how

aspirations have changed since i was in

my choice so when i was at university

everyone wanted to work for the u.n

yeah that was kind of considered the

great

sort of panacea of life but 10 years ago

a lot of people were saying in surveys

of young people

what do you want to do in life what do

you want to be in life and the answer

was

famous yeah famous you know not not to

have a body of work

that gives you fame you know to walk to

you know you want to walk down the red

carpet having created an amazing film

but no

they just wanted the red carpet and i

thought that was that was a dangerous

thing and i i'm sure there's been a

correction since then but i think the

obsession

there's been no correction and i think

in some respects it's got worse i've

just it's a real phenomenon i've noticed

in my generation where

after i'll come off stage doing a public

speech whatever

kids will come up to me and say i want

to be a public speaker too

i never wanted to be i pursued my desire

to start a business and a byproduct of

that

was they pay me to speak on stage now

and fame also in my view should be a

byproduct of the pursuit of something

that's intrinsically

important to you right absolutely 100

correct and that's why the obsession

with fame is a massive danger i think to

uh

to a culture um the the thing about

speaking

so so a completely unintended side

effect of writing my first book so i'm

finishing table tennis and i'm like you

know what am i going to do with the rest

of my life

uh you know how am i going to define

success and i decided to write this book

in 2000

when does it come out 2010 called bounce

yes and i said this side effect was

being invited to give a speech at a big

corporation an investment bank an

american investment bank

and obviously you know as an

ex-ping-pong player

i'm thinking what is going on here you

know how am i suppo imposter syndrome

and also you know i went to a school i

went to a comp you know we didn't do any

almost no public speaking you know we we

learn

stuff we learn things in the classroom

but the idea of getting up in

and speaking in front of an audience was

kind of very alien

so i wasn't that good right because i

hadn't practiced that i'd never

done it before and i came off the stage

and i thought

you know what i'm just not cut out for

this if i'm invited again to give a talk

to a company i'll just politely decline

then i thought and it took me about i

know 48 hours to think what a ridiculous

way to hijack my own development if you

actually had the right attitude if you

had the right mindset

you can probably learn these skills and

take advantage of these brilliant

opportunities because you always learn

don't you when you go and speak in an

organizer

so i googled public speaking practice

and the first hit was called

toastmasters and this is like a global

network of just

public speaking clubs where other normal

people um

go to the club to develop social

confidence and the one nearest me in

richmond was in twickenham

just over the bridge and there was uh

franco worked at lloyd's on the high

street

just the group you give a speech they'd

give you feedback

and the mentoring was a really important

part of it because you need a bit of

feedback

and you know what you could have done

better and then about two-thirds of the

way through there's something called

table topics

where somebody writes the list of topics

on cards

but no one else in the room knows what

they are so you have to go to the front

you pick it up and then turn around

and spontaneously talk for a minute on

whatever topic the first one i ever did

was the natural history museum

you know that's terrifying right you're

not used to it but you learn and you

develop that skill

um so so learning how to speak publicly

it took me three or four years and i'm

not saying i'm brilliant at it now by

any means but my goodness how much

better when you have a can-do

attitude towards it and that brings us

to the topic of mindset

really nicely you know i've heard you

talk about having a growth mindset and a

fixed mindset what is the difference

between the two

so i think for thank you for what it's

worth i think this contrast is

is so important i mean i can talk about

it through my own life but

you know in a fixed mindset people think

that success

however defined is all about talent

having the gift

uh having the genetic inheritance and

you know having the personality trait in

order to excel

a growth mindset is saying okay talent

obviously matters it's a factor

but it's not enough it's what we do with

our talents so people in a fixed mindset

have two

massive risks one they think they're so

talented they don't even need to try

so think of a young person who's just

been

invited to join the manchester united

academy

and they're suddenly getting money into

their bank account they're able to buy

the fast car

and they think i'm god's gift and they

and the amount of academy coaches who

have come to me and said we don't

understand it we had this hard-working

youngster we invited them into the

academy

and then they just went off the rails

it's a fixed mindset they think their

success is the short so they stop

putting in the hard yards and don't

transition

into the first team so that's one danger

the other danger

is people who don't think they're god's

gift but

like me at goldman sachs you make one

failure

and you interpret that as meaning i

obviously don't have talent therefore

i'm just going to give up

you see what i mean yeah so that's the

negative version yeah so you've got the

i'm super talent is everything and i've

got it so therefore i don't need to try

talent is everything

i don't have it therefore i should give

up they're both terribly

uh damaging i think a growth mindset it

doesn't mean that we think we're all

going to be the best speaker in the

world

i wasn't the best table tennis player in

the world i never got into the top 20 of

the world rankings

but with that attitude i maximize my own

potential

and going back to your thing about

success

that's not a bad definition now i think

about it you know to try and be the best

that we can be

in our own lives doesn't mean we're

going to be the best who ever lived

you know not everyone could be muhammad

ali or serena williams or

or who or albert einstein but to be the

best we can be i think it's so wonderful

and just from my own perspective i think

trying to fill one's own potential going

on a journey that has some meaning

there's something wonderfully um

uplifting something satisfying about

that too

i really like the combination of those

two ideas this idea of being the best

you can be

but realizing that it's a pursuit

towards something that you may never get

to

right so the journey and the journey

towards being the best you can be at

something which has a lot of meaning to

you

maybe maybe that's the definition we

were looking for now i think that that

point you make about the journey is

really really important what was it i

think it was robert louis stevenson said

to travel is a better thing than to

arrive

oh yeah and in a weird kind of way i can

say i talked about trying to win the

nationals but

first of all in the nationals i remember

winning going home i was living on my

own in a flat in

richmond i got home and i thought is

that it you know what i mean it was

the the fun was actually the training

and the

camaraderie with my practice partners

and seeing those small improvements

through time

i mean that's consistent with most high

performance athletes and

um business people and i was reading

this piece and i think it was in the

telegraph about

um olympic depression where you have the

olympians who train for the olympics

they

and whether they get a gold medal like

michael phelps who fell into depression

or whether they lose either way the

outcome is they just

lose orientation in their life yeah and

and this is why i i and also i felt it

myself when

a company came along when i was 24 and

offered to buy my company and i go home

look at right move look at all the cars

i can buy and everything

and i feel this sense of emptiness and

like but then what what's my life

without this

and genuinely that was like an

existential crisis because i was like

i can't sell this thing but the insecure

broke kid in me

thought he was doing this to sell this

thing yeah and it was just this really

you know

it's one i think one of the deep

paradoxes of the human mind i mean

the the sense of anti-climax

when one achieves a long cherished

ambition i want to be a millionaire i

want to buy an aston martin

i want to win the olympic gold medal i

remember talking to victoria pendleton

oh yeah the olympian yeah because you

lit the cyclist

you know you live with this ambition

it's what gets you out of bed

in the morning right i want to win the

olympic gold it's what

when you're on the track she was

explaining you know it's what makes you

push harder

because you've got this this goal this

destination

that's pulling you this magnet pulling

you towards it

then when you get it you wake up the

next day and what on earth is getting

you out of bed

what's causing you to push yourself

that's one of the reasons i think people

who make money very quickly

face massive many not all

and this is well documented psychology i

mean you'll know about the

people who win lotteries whose marriages

can

end who end up in in often depression i

mean that's not a cliche this is well

established

and i think it's because you get

something and then it's like

what is left to pursue in life

i do some interviews for the time sports

stars and i mentioned victoria pendleton

billy jenkins yeah exactly the same

um uh david beckham

um uh ryan giggs

uh i mean i've interviewed you know most

of the the

ronaldo most of the leading many of the

leading sports people and it's the same

story and

i think what i've noticed is that

as you did that capacity to take a step

back

and to say you know what i'm feeling low

feeling empty

i need to find something else that's

gonna galvanize me and

and that's what gets people back on and

i think the antidote

is being aware of that yeah and

because then now when i achieve things

in my life i don't come into those

achievements with this expectation of

exponential joy

and so i can almost enjoy it more

right you know yeah no i totally get

that i i

trying to think you know yeah i think

look just

one of the things that i've noticed from

my own personal lives the more busy i've

got

sometimes you don't take enough time to

take a step back

and to say you know this was a great

thing that happened or

or to be in the moment when something is

happening with

one dude do you have kids no no with

with one's children or

wife or partner or whatever and i think

i'm slowly

you know i write books on this stuff but

i i i'm learning all the time

and that's one of the reasons i want to

do the podcast when i've read about you

i thought you've had

such a different set of experiences to

me i'll learn a lot from you too

we've now had two subscribers come in

and watch from behind the scenes we're

going to start picking more so all

you've got to do if you want that to be

you

is hit the subscribe button let's talk

about failure than something you talk

about at great length

i think um tend to believe that a lot of

the reason why people don't reach their

potential

however we define that is because they

are risk adverse

and failure is something they just can't

their self-esteem just can't bear

i think that's i think that's true my

own sense is that this has been

exacerbated

by the social media so you tell me how

the social media it may have changed a

lot since i

wrote my first book for young people but

at the time

psychologists had come up with this

concept of the curse of perfectionism

and their thesis was

that young people are obviously now on

the social media a lot

and a lot of people when they're putting

together their social media posts they

do it in such a way as to make their

lives look really good

you know this is the holiday i just had

on this wonderfully sunny beach

and um you know they might even airbrush

photos to make themselves look better

and this is my wonderful performance on

the piano and and the problem is

people then start to think that success

is about looking

and acting in a perfect way that's

massively problematic because why would

you want to try anything new

which is inherently a risk because if

you're doing something the first time

you're obviously not going to be perfect

um and if you do mess up you draw the

thing that goes back to the fixed

mindset you draw the conclusion well i'm

obviously not

talented enough because i haven't nailed

it the first time around i think this

was also bolstered by

in your own reality television now i

think reality tell the idea of

instant success instant gratification

overnight elevation into in into the

heavens

and if you you know particularly young

people think that success is like that

they don't realize the incremental steps

you need to take to fulfill your

potential because as you know

most businesses succeed because you know

i don't know whether you're familiar

with the american jargon but you get a

minimum viable product you test the

value proposition early you find out the

inevitable deficiencies in the prototype

or the piece of software

and then you make adaptations in silicon

valley they call it failing fast in

other words they're failing fast in

order to get to a better answer

if you stop the first time you fail or

if you don't try at all you're never

going to get to an answer

if you think of the history of science

science is a success the most successful

human institution

because scientists by and large are

willing to test their hypotheses

you know they test it they look at the

empirical evidence and they change it in

the light of what the evidence is

telling them

that is the basic pattern of science and

and i think the problem is as he alluded

to is that if young people are like

goodness me i don't want to look

anything other than

perfect it destroys their capacity to

grow and and to have

a life of fulfillment because jk rowling

put it brilliantly she said

the only way never to fail is never to

try but then your life is a failure

because you've just stayed in your

comfort zone the whole time

i see that i resonate with all of that

so much and there's specifically this

this idea i love the science analogy

because

seeing it as a hypothesis you write in

science you you start with hypothesis

you're not romantic about it

and then you go in pursuit and you you

agnostically go and test it

right whereas what you're saying is you

know

young people or ambitious people

generally will start with a hypothesis

and they will long in need for it to be

perfectly incorrect and this is also why

businesses fail because

founders just they just do everything

and i i failed in my first business

for many years because of that because i

was

obsessed romantic about my hypothesis

being correct

not romantic about the outcome which was

trying to be a successful person

right look i i think i think that's

really

really significant and i think that's a

great great way of framing it look

by the way some scientists fall in love

with their theories yeah

and they can't adapt it i mean there's

been a few examples during the pandemic

um and and by the way i mean i don't

know listen there's an interest in this

but

there's a brilliant study by philip

tetlock who's an american psychologist

and he looked at forecasters

so people trying to predict next year's

gdp or oil price or other things of this

kind and he found a really interesting

pattern

that the highest reputation forecasters

who are on television the most

on average make the worst predictions

and can you see what

what is an error of ego an error of

prediction is an opportunity to adapt

the model in order to make it more

predictive in the long run

but if you've been on the tv and you're

supposed to be the god of forecasting

you start defending your prior

assumptions

and so people who have an ego that gets

in the way of hypothesis testing

they are brilliant at creative

self-justification

i think the people who are most

dangerous to companies

and innovation are intelligent highly

talented people in a fixed mindset

they're just inveterate obstacles

to making the changes you need to change

in order to get the business to where

you want to go

to or where you want the economic model

to get to

and so on so i think it's the same in

meetings you know i've

as you know i'm very interested in how

how businesses succeed and the the forum

in which we take

most key decisions are meetings because

no one person has a monopoly on truth so

you want to talk to other people

but these can be really ineffective if

people

think that when someone challenges you

they're insulting you

they're not they're testing your

hypothesis we should think of meetings

as mutual hypothesis testing so that we

can collectively get to the best

uh strategy or idea and i think when you

frame it in that way you take the stigma

out of

challenge and dissent and failure

let's challenge that then so if if we've

got a meeting we've got

five 10 people around this table we've

got an intern over there

uh we've got the ceo there got managers

directors around the table

one new person one person's been here

for 10 years you've got all these

different sort of dynamics of people

trying to

get promotions get a payroll oh my god

the ceo's at the table i don't wanna be

an idiot

i don't wanna say anything dumb you know

and all of those like dynamics how do

you

get those dynamics out of the way and

just become focused on

letting the best idea win right so this

is really well studied

um i think the thing to to try and

really convey

is how dangerous the dynamics you've

described can be

because what tends to happen in a very

hierarchical organization

where the ceo or the team leader has

discretion over pay and promotion is

that people don't say what they think

they say what they think the leader

wants to hear

that's fine if the leader knows

everything there is to know because

you're just basically ventriloquizing

but so in a simple environment

you don't need to have a team right you

just have the leader make a decision and

everyone

but when it's a difficult complex

decision in other words the ones that

confer a competitive advantage on a

business the leader needs to hear

the different perspectives to make a

better judgment but the extent to which

this happens a good example is in

aviation

so i'll describe a classic case in

in the aviation is a great area to study

by the way when it comes to team

dynamics

so this is united airlines 173

and it's a flight that took off out of

uh denver colorado

in december 1978 and it's flying to

portland in oregon

and as a plane's coming in on the final

approach the pilot pulls the lever to

lower the landing gear and you know when

you're in the cabin

you hear it go down and clicks into

place

but on this occasion there's this really

loud bang the plane kind of

deviates and the light that should

illuminate on the dashboard to show that

the wheels are down it hasn't gone on

so the pilot doesn't know if the wheels

are down it's pitch black so they can't

ask

air traffic control to look up so he

puts the plane into a holding pattern

above suburban portland

then they try and troubleshoot the the

issue so the first thing is the engineer

so in these days the cockpit had a

captain a co-pilot and an engineer

the engineer goes into the cabin and on

this particular model of aircraft when

the wheels are down two bolts shoot up

above the wings

the bolts are up but they're still not

100 sure right and you want to know if

the wheels are down

before you come in so so the pilot they

they radio to the manufacturer and that

you know they're kind of

explaining what's happened the

manufacturer is like yeah we think the

wheels are down but we're not sure

then the pilot's like i wonder if the

reason that the light didn't go on the

dashboard is because of faulty wiring

so he starts playing around with with

the in the plane still in the holding

pattern

as they're doing all of these different

checks but at this point another

safety critical issue has come into play

the plane's running out of

fuel right and the engineer

knows that the plane is running out of

fuel because he can see it

going down to zero on the dials right

he has a big incentive to tell the pilot

that the plane is running out of fuel

because otherwise he will die so you

have this juxtaposition

of objective information and maximum

incentive

but in the 1970s it was a command and

control

culture you know the pilot was genomic

yeah the pilot was

deemed to be the boss the omniscient

um controller and the other two were

supposed to basically

carry out that controller's instructions

and they called the pilot sir

it was almost always a man right and and

so imagine if the engineer says to the

pilots

now why do we have a team we have a team

because no one person has

all of the information they're narrow in

their perceptual bandwidth other things

are happening at the same time

but if the engineer says to the pilot

you know what we're running out on pu

of fuel the implication is the pilot

didn't know that already the pilot might

get offended

isn't he supposed to know everything and

we know

from this and many other incidents that

in that situation

we don't speak to each other directly we

don't test hypotheses directly we code

our language we mitigate

our speech and from the voice recorder

from the black box

we know that the engineer said instead

of we need to land because we're running

out of fuel

critical information for the pilot to

make the right strategic decision

he said oh we're kind of getting low on

fuel here

and the pilot because of the insinuation

he knows everything wasn't even

listening

so the plane crashes but not just that

plane a number of

incidents in the 1970s of exactly the

same kind happened

because communication was so skewed by

this very steep hierarchy it happens in

surgical

operating theaters famously when nurses

can't speak up

because they're worried if i say

something this is the surgeon

you know the the the big cheese and

we know from you know for what it's

worth from randomized control trial

evidence lee thompson at northwestern

university meetings are a catastrophe

the vast majority of them

absolute disaster because people are not

sharing information they're basically

playing a political game to curry favor

with the boss so what you so that so the

short answer is you need what's called

psychological safety

it's i hate the jargon all that means is

an environment where everyone feels they

can be

candid and they can say what they really

think

and hypotheses are tested when google

did a big data analysis of his

most successful software development

teams psychological safety was

the biggest predictor of success

because it means you're getting that

interplay of ideas that's so important

it's interesting because you know these

big companies well big companies by

by definition i guess have more ideas

right but they are often the least

innovative exactly

and that seems like a bit of a it should

be the other way around you would one

would think that the biggest companies

would be the most innovative because

they have more brains more ideas but

they're just

that's what yeah yeah that's interesting

point you make there so big

you're right so a bit so well let's

think about that

what would generate good ideas it's the

number of ideas

not the number of people if you have an

organization

with a very homogenous culture very

commanding control

a lot of sociological convergence you

might have 10

000 people all thinking the same way i

mean you've seen professional services

companies where you see the senior

leadership team

and they may look a bit different but

they're all absolutely thinking exactly

the same way they've been there so long

that's a big danger for companies see

with cities you increase the size of

cities they become more innovative

companies get less innovative because

they get so much convergence

they have a lot of people but they think

in the state it's an echo chamber

basically right

whereas startups sometimes

a startup might be an idea that's

completely off the beaten track and then

suddenly you've got this

opportunity to scale but even with

startups you know often when they go

public they start to lose their capacity

to

to innovate and i think that's why you

know i've written a book on it you need

a culture of diversity so that you begin

to protect

and and and value the

um like the diverse ideas that enable an

organization to anticipate future

disruptions and come up with new

talk to me about creating a culture of

diversity in your

in your business then if you're starting

a company if you're running a company at

scale how do you increase the diversity

of

right ideas yes so um so the

the most important for me the most

important thing by far

is landing the argument as to why it

matters

a lot of people don't think it matters i

mean i remember going to an hr

conference and the

the the speaker

was talking about diversity is a

wonderful thing you've all

need more of it and it will always help

you do better as an organization

and this really awkward customer at the

back said can i ask a question and uh

like yeah okay

um imagine i am the coach

of an olympic sprint relay team yeah and

suppose

um i've got you said who was the fastest

person in the world at the time was

usain bolt

suppose i've got usain bolt in my team

and suppose

hypothetically i had cloning technology

so i could clone usain bolt to have four

usain bolts in my four by 100 relay team

there's no diversity in that team but

they're all very fast

right yeah if you said you need to

diversify your team

that would mean hiring slower runners i

don't want to do that as an olympic

coach

and it was like the air in the room just

it's like it'd been punctured and

everyone was like that's an

awful thing but he was right that

question was

you know in simple activities cognitive

diversity of opinion cognitive diversity

doesn't help you if it's obvious what to

do

why would you want diversity if you've

already got a solution a can solution

you just need to scale it you don't need

diver

but when there's a complex environment

that logic

turns on its head so if you imagine for

example

you've got five people each one of whom

has

one brilliant idea you might think you

have five brilliant ideas but if they

all have the same idea you've only got

one

yeah all you need is two different ideas

and suddenly you've

tripled 300 increase in the creativity

of that group

that's where cognitive diversity matters

and if your

mission is to solve complex problems

diversity

is the cornerstone of how well you do it

and once you land that argument people

start to

at the moment people say too many people

think

diversity is a politically correct box

ticking exercise

and when diverse voices come in they're

condescended to they're not properly

included

once you realize it's a strength

organization start to harness it

to do the great things that they want to

do i can imagine that organizations

don't

typically organizations don't know what

they don't know and they don't

they don't know what they don't have as

well so if you don't see what i mean

it's like an unknown i know

so when the board when he's like let's

say we've got six

white six-year-old board members sat

around a table of a

company that's really successful and

then they go

you know what's their incentive to hide

they think we've been doing great

we're all very smart you smart yeah i'm

smart yeah you smart yeah i'm smart

yeah and like how do you make the case

to them that

they need to hire a black woman and

that's going to help

when they've just been killing the game

with these six white men right

well it's okay so again you're

absolutely right to ask the question it

depends on the context yeah

let's say for example the organization

is

uh an advertising company and they've

traditionally been selling to

white middle-aged men who uh think

rather as they do the the

if they only want to sell to white men

then there may be no advantage

in hiring somebody with a different

perspective if they're seeking to

broaden their capacity

to sell to people from different

demographics they won't have the tacit

knowledge that they need in order to do

if you think of the cia they hired

brilliant analysts in the post-war

period and they thought they were the

best

intelligence agency in the world but a

lot of the information was

obviously confidential it's only now we

can see how awful they were because

almost

everyone almost 100 of their analytical

team were white

middle class west coast

anglo-saxon protestant

liberal arts graduates nothing wrong

with that background right

but if you're trying to assess threats

emerging from around the world

the soviet union how would you possibly

understand the probability of

a conglomeration of different nations

falling apart

if you've been brought up in a stable

middle class family in america

how are you going to understand tribal

sectarianism and the risks of

radicalization

in the middle east when you come from

that background you know when we invaded

when when the the the uk joined the

coalition to invade iraq you know there

was a genuine view that you impose

democratic institutions and it will work

effectively there was no real

understanding

of the history of iraq and how those

institutions would be hijacked by

sectarian interests because these

guys had gone to university they'd

learned all sorts of interesting things

but they had no deep

understanding of the dynamics in that

country so

if i was talking to the for example the

director general the cia

i would be explaining you know what you

know

but in the complex world there's stuff

that you don't know there's stuff that

people

who think like you don't know be

creative about how you

optimize the diverse insights that can

help you do the job you want to do

now if it was the cia demographic

diversity is critical

you need to have people from different

backgrounds who have had different

experiences in order to understand

emerging threats

for an advertising team it would be

different for a team of economic

forecasters i can tell you what it would

look like mathematically you want

highly accurate individual forecasters

whose models

generate diverse predictions because

when you average them you get an

incredibly

it's called the wisdom of the crowds so

there are ways to do it i mean there are

tools that we use with our clients to

make this

work and for what it's worth the really

you know

obviously slightly self-serving thing to

say but i think most of the innovative

organizations are thinking exactly what

you've just said

we need to figure out what it is that we

don't know quickly

have some tenuous sense so we can start

plugging these blind spots

right and on that point of

innovation which we touched on what are

the so

running a business running a global

business as it scaled i could see that

we were getting less innovative you kind

of get complacent

you build teams you get you know your

teams get more comfortable with

how it's always been done and then just

getting them to disrupt themselves

becomes increasingly difficult

especially when more people get involved

things seem to slow down someone goes on

and you'll leave

and then you say you've got a new

innovative idea you put it on an email

thread it stumbles around the email for

thread for four months

nobody's incentivized to do that because

they're all getting paid to do their

current job and you don't typically have

like an innovation

team so when it's everybody's job it's

nobody's job these are all probably you

know and then these are

then you talk about failure as well

people aren't incentivized to fail in

big

organizations what are the parameters or

the factors or the dynamics

of a team that does innovate

so i think i look i think that's all

right and i i think it's a bandwidth

issue i mean you talked about a team

that's been successful thus far i mean

to take the legal

profession which have you know used the

billable hour for a very long time

have done a particular and they're busy

and they're making money

but i hope that it's not a particularly

unique insight to say that many of these

legal firms will be out of business in a

decade if they don't leverage machine

learning

right and ai in all sorts of different

ways

and start to disrupt their own so you

can carry on being busy

whilst your equity value is about to

disappear right

so unless one is able to say not just

we need to be doing things well for our

clients

and doing what we've always done

effectively but we need to also be

thinking about how we do things

differently and better

you may well be busy you may well have

satisfied customers but it just takes

one competitor to innovate and you're

out of the game

so i think that that is a good way to

focus minds

on sparing some bandwidth to that

question of innovation

so it doesn't just get dropped it's

tough right because

that often means a change in personnel

yeah and nobody likes that idea

in big organizations i think this about

some of the big advertising groups like

they call them the big six

and the big six have been around some of

them one of them in particular has been

around for a hundred years doing

advertising

what are the big things like wpp

publicis those kind of yeah

and i was thinking you know in their

executive teams you've got people that

have been there for

20 30 years then this thing called

social media comes along

and they're thinking oh my god so it's

not billboards anymore on tv

um where does that leave me and i'm not

gonna know what tick tock and snapchat

are

and the threat of having to replace

oneself i think often

and your ego often um means that you go

down with the titanic

yeah and you know for what it's worth

you see this in in um

in in many different areas so i think i

don't do you admire amazon as a company

admirer yeah i mean in some ways not in

others

yeah so they should pay more taxes yeah

yeah

but i mean what they've done is just

staggering right but i mean i think

so i think leadership counts sometimes

when it comes to innovation

i mean he's obviously no longer um ceo

but i think

if you read jeff bezos's letters to

shareholders they're all about

the stuff that we've been talking about

experimentation unbelievable

commitment um you know we talked about

the meetings you know dissent

and then commit um almost all of the

i mean the way amazon conduct meetings

you know

they will as you know they'll they'll

read the the agenda item in silence

so that every single person is bringing

an independent perspective to bear on

what are the risks of this what might

make it how could it be improved what

might make it

fail and then when they start talking

the most senior person

always speaks last you'll get an

unvarnished

access to the insights of your brilliant

team

rather than speaking first and everyone

basically converging on

what you as the leader has just said so

they have a range of ways of trying to

ensure they sustain

but you know amazon will will probably

struggle but they've done well

so far and it's it's i think it's a good

case study of how to

how to sustain it but it's not i mean

but i i've got to say honestly

one of the things that i'm most

interested in is you know i mentioned

i'm 50.

i'm totally bewildered by social media

and you obviously you

you inhabit right that world you know it

you've got a nuanced

granular understanding of the whole

thing yes imagine you're me

right so now what do you know

i i don't know i don't i don't have the

faintest idea of how

to youthfully engage with the social i

came to twitter late my tweets are

rubbish

i mean look if anyone's following me

thank you but i know i'm not very good

at it but i

it's an alien world for me and i'm not

i've never been on facebook

speaking sorry so we're speaking right

so what should i do how do i

learn how did you learn to speak

toastmasters

well it's a similar thing but it isn't

though because is it yeah

it's i when i did my first public talk

when i was 14

and i'm i always say this i was i was

speaking in front of like parents

evening

my i'm shaking my hands are sweating so

much in this paper shaking so much

i realize i'm not gonna be able to read

the piece of paper because it's moving

too much so i just made up the speech

and it's a similar thing with twitter

you just said i've done my first tweet

awful tweets

and then you're like it sounds like you

quit or you stop oh you were

disappointed still there but i don't do

it very much

because i kind of i i say that i've

probably done a few thousand tweets but

i came to it late and i

i still feel that if you

okay let me ask you this if you had to

summarize what you know

yeah about the social media and and how

one

engages with it how one you know one

wants one's

articles to be read you know how would

is it impossible to encapsulate that in

a minute

i would say so i so what i do

professionally

what i used to do professionally is i'd

go and do these talks telling people all

about social media

all the tips tricks techniques

algorithms

all the psychology and really explaining

it to them and then i'd end my talk by

telling them that everything i've just

told them

probably won't be the case in three to

six months because it changes so much

and and what that therefore means is the

only way to know what i know

is to play with the toy as often as you

can and it's and so from this is why i

say to people when they come up to me

and say how do i become a social media

expert

i say to them often like we'll name

something you're interested in they'll

go you know

i don't know cars i'll say go make a car

instagram page and run it

because then it puts you in the trenches

and it makes it puts you in

a growth moment or so

and it's just practice and it's that's

all it is so if you want to become a

master of this thing that's constantly

changing and there's ten updates to the

top

um four social media apps every single

week

then you have to have a reason to be

showing

you've have that life has to be giving

you a reason to show up every day

and open it up and look at it and and

perform these iterative

uh tests which give you this feedback

loop so for me

the real savior for me as a social media

ceo and most of the things i went on to

sell to clients

were learnings that i got from two

places the first is um in my company i

create this thing called ever changing

landscape

very very simple internal group

everybody shares everything they know

every day

oh my god i've just seen tick tock have

launched this new button goes into the

group

we then text it to all of our employees

at 9 am in the morning every morning on

whatsapp

so and it's this constant loop of what's

new what's changing

our mantra as a company became keeping

brands at the forefront of what's

possible

and what but that slogan appreciates the

fact that there's a

marketing director [ __ ] themselves

because it's changing every day

and they want to be at the forefront of

what's possible but they're [ __ ] so

it feels like

two jigsaw pieces i'm [ __ ] myself

because this thing's changing

you're saying you're gonna keep me at

the forefront of what's possible which

is gonna make me look good to the ceo

we're gonna work with social chain and

the second thing that kept me at the

very forefront and made me good at

social media

is i run my personal brand on social

media

which means that on linkedin instagram

twitter

every day i'm either tweet and i've got

a team that helped me now but i'm

tweeting i'm looking at the numbers

doing a post looking in the comments

okay that didn't go well click on the

insights button

loads of people seem to share this one

why is that ah maybe that's because

there's eight posts and

okay the subtitles oh my god look at the

retention number when we did subtitles

yeah the retention so much higher click

on the insights oh my god look so when

we do that at the start of the video

80 of people fall off in the first five

seconds of all of my videos

so i've got to do something special in

the first five seconds and it's that

constant learning over 10 years

then people call you as a expert it's

not i just been playing with a toy

longer yeah and that that i mean

it's great to hear you say that because

i think that's the pattern of

learning in pretty much all fields every

field in all aspects of life

yeah i mean that's science right you're

getting the iterative feedback exactly

and the more granular the feedback i

mean if you know

that people are switching off the video

after five seconds or ten seconds

better than just knowing yeah that 50

dropped off over the total time so

so it's the granularity and speed and

objectivity of that feedback so playing

with do you think that um

so you may think this is a cop-out but

say you're you know it is me now trying

to get

if you if you're a writer yeah and you

obviously got a lot going on

yeah in terms of coming out with the new

but do you think it's outsourcing i mean

obviously you can

you could outsource it to a brilliant

person to do you could outsource it to a

brilliant person to do

a lot of charlatans a lot of snakehole

salesmen so it's fine how do you know

what's good when you don't know what's

good

well that's one of the reasons well i've

as it happens

i have tried to do that and i've had a

number of proposals there that i'll

check with you

okay that's what we'll do in exchange

i'll help you find someone that that is

actually good

um that's the quid pro quo right you

could have a lovely

what i would say is you can learn one

channel one or two channels

with no matter how busy you are um and

if you do learn one or two channels the

impact it will have

on your business your as an author as a

as

as a you know someone that um shares

their ideas with the worlds and

creates blogs is tremendous you only

have to learn one or two channels better

than 95 percent of people

and to do that you just need to use it

every other day and if i was you i'd be

thinking

twitter i'd be thinking

it depends medium is an interesting one

i'm going to give you three twitter

linkedin and medium i wouldn't bother

with instagram if i was you

if you're a writer and you're your your

the audience that you speak to with the

ideas you convey

linkedin twitter super easy to learn

and i i know that sounds like really of

course i'll say that because

like but those two platforms i think

will have a

exponential impact on your business

that's interesting so probably i i

so somebody in my office handles the

linkedin

and and instagram but i've i've not

really been on them enough and learned

so

this is really really really helpful do

you think that social media

has been a force for good in the world

because

it's difficult i mean i don't know if

you you've been following the news on

that the last week you probably have the

last 48 hours

but i see you know we talked a bit

earlier about how

we can converge with people who think

the same as us and we've obviously seen

that on

certain types of social media where you

get these echo chambers

trump trump the filter bubble other

things of that kind but at the same time

you have access if you want it to lots

of different voices and people in

certain types of societies can blow

whistles or things that are going wrong

you know i i think the the the political

consequences of the social media

are among the most important of my

lifetime

um i obviously am not a native and

you know i have a particular analysis

what's your take on that

so the great things to come from social

media the first things that spring to

mind

are important ideas being shared at

scale and change happening faster than

it ever possibly could have

so you think about key movements around

lgbtq rights

um you think about certain causes you

think about

atrocities happening in certain parts of

the world having a window into those

things and those ideas spreading very

quickly

and the consensus being arrived that

quickly therefore actually been taken

quickly therefore changing political

change happenings at

light speed i think is amazing um i

think

one could say being able to make

some type of connection with people in

faraway lands

however on the adverse consequences of

social media the biggest ones for me

are um the the things like instagram

which create which will ultimately lead

you to believing that you're a piece of

[ __ ] and not enough

and how does it do that because

everyone's life looks so good everyone's

amazing

um so that does happen on instagram of

course yeah i mean the algorithm will

show you

um the prettiest people typically

typically the prettiest people

that have the best lives and then

obviously there's this

almost like black mirror-esque ranking

where if i post a selfie and i'm not

looking on my a-game

i'll get less likes so that's like the

the world's going um

five by ten steve today and then i come

back with the filter

and i'm posing and i've done a little

photoshop here and the face tune here

and i come back look at my fake stuff

and it was instagram

oh well done and then it's incentivizing

me

it's you know positively reinforcing me

to live a more fake

more shallow more materialistic life

that's so interesting and and people do

you know they change their phones to

look better i write about this in my

book the the ceo of

an app called facetune said that

um facetune is basically an app that

allows you to very easily without any

editing skills change completely how you

look

you can change your skin color that make

you

make your face have no spots on it you

can suck your face in your hips in and

it

it's so easy to do and um

and on top of and so the ceo of that

company said that he hit a gold mine and

he says openly he says i it was just a

gold mine

the amount of downloads that app has had

from young people who want to change how

they look

is staggering then you have this other

thing now with which with these face

filters where i can put a filter on

and it will just clear my skin up and

suck my face in just a little bit

and now people you know people can't

operate without them i think i'm

probably guilty of it too if i can just

press this button and it's going to

increase my prospects of dating

and i'm going to go back to the stuff if

you don't tell me you're having problems

getting

data i mean that i can't well actually

people can't see you

you've been on it he's been on here oh

has it he's a great guy but he was like

all these that's the two sort of iconic

young entrepreneurs

but this thing about instagram is really

really interesting

really interesting so you think it is

actually

incentivizing people

constructing there is no way it isn't if

you so let me give you some more

information on this so um when

when they did a stack this vast report

on which social platforms

having the most adverse impact on young

people's mental health instagram was

stand out it's a visual platform which

is um

ranking you on how you look and the

algorithm will show you the richest

smart the richest most beautiful most

successful people

you've got the kardashians on there with

150 million followers who are

literally have been in the last couple

of months um

been like a paparazzi person took the

photo

of them on the beach and then you got to

see what they posted

and it's they don't look the same and

you've got 100 million girls

following this person who is lying about

the fact that they don't have cellulite

and

they're not a normal you know because

this is these are normal things we all

have you know

cellulite and this and this and the

rasher and spots here but that

and you think about how we attribute the

value of anything in our lives through

contrast and

in which the context in which we see it

so if you put

i talk about this in my book as well if

you put three tvs on a wall in an

electronic shop

people will think the most expensive tv

is

too expensive and too bougie they'll

think the cheapest tv

is probably gonna break and not very

good so typically they go for the middle

one

whereas if you remove them the two in

which you

the two next to it then they make

different decisions and you've seen this

with like ash's paradigm and you see it

on menus and

the way that we attribute the value like

i would be the prettiest

richest most successful person on planet

earth

if there was nobody else on earth

because it's all a measure of comparison

and instagram is a billion people

measure of comparison

where do i rank you've written about

this in yeah yeah yeah

i'll give you my book yeah yeah i'm

gonna read it

was it how to be a happy millionaire no

it's the title is happy sexy

millionaires and i'm i'm kind of

trying to instagram people instagram

bait people into buying the book right

right right

because much of buying books is

virtually signaling you know you're

right

right so the other thing that intrigued

me on the way here today was listening

to the podcast where you say

this is my podcast you know i'm slightly

embarrassed about don't tell anyone

about it whatever you do yeah

you know i would never have i would

never have thought of that as a way of

having a handle on the part i love that

absolutely loved it

but it's in funny kind of way it's kind

of like as a parent

it's a bit like reverse psychology

vegetables

what getting your kids to eat vegetables

yeah yeah but but you know i think the

true

the truth of human psychology probably

you know i mean you mentioned ashley hey

by the way

you know on psychology and on on the

global reach of twitter you talked about

ash's conformity

uh experiment that's that varies

systematically around the world

so so uh in in western countries

more individualistic countries people

deviate more

from the herd and explain what that is

because yes so um

if i if you're thinking of the same

experiment the lines yeah

yeah so so solomon ash one of the most

famous experiments in

in modern psychology he um

drew a number of vertical lines

um uh which were of

the same length and then a fifth line

that was significantly different in

length to the other four

and then he got people to answer the

question do you think these

i think i've got this broadly right do

you think all of these lines are of the

same length

and if you have people answering that on

their own like 99

say the fifth line is of a different

length to the other four but what ash

did

is he got you know 10 confederates to

come in and say oh they're the same

and then oh they're the same and then

the third person oh yeah they're the

same length and the fourth person

they're the same name

then when it gets to the actual subject

of the experiment they're like oh my

goodness if all these people think that

it must be the same and so they say yeah

they're all the same so they're

effectively

disbelieving the evidence of their own

eyes in order to fit in with the

crowd now that conformity bias which

surprises all the people

is stronger in other parts of the world

than it is in in

western can i just add as well on these

lines when you see these lines

there is no possible way that that small

line

is anywhere near the size of the other

lines but as you say because of

conformity these

these participants just go along with it

and it just it's just beggar's belief

that

that's how human psychology works but

there is a good reason for it if you

think about it

i mean every now well is there a i mean

there's a number of different theories

about why it happens but one of them is

that occasionally

um one can get things wrong that seem

obvious

and if there's a lot of people who are

independently saying the same thing

that's

very good evidence of what they're

saying is true um and so humans i think

that

bias evolved probably to enable us to

take advantage of the wisdom of the

crowd

but crowds if they can i mean crowds can

converge on things

incorrectly but not independently of it

so if you imagine a stock market bubble

that's one person buying another one

seeing that person buying and then

another person seeing those two buying

and they get a bandwagon effect whereas

if

10 people independently say that these

two lines are different

and you have no reason to believe that

they're lying that's a good reason to

start doubting so i think there

but but you know the reason i mentioned

it is there is this global systematic

variation in psychology so you may have

heard of

uh something called the fundamental

attribution error

um where we tend to blame people for

things that are

things have gone wrong because of the

situation that's much stronger in the

west than it is in the rest of the world

cognitive dissonance varies

fundamentally even

visual illusions um vary around the

world

and the reason i mention that is i think

it's helpful for businesses to

understand it but i think it actually

reaches into our deep history

and how human societies evolve which

which is the topic of my next bible i

thought you might be interested

in that okay so you guys know how much i

talk about huel and how much sure has

changed my life and also

how hewlett is the reason why much of

the reason why i'm in the best shape of

my life i definitely think that if i

hadn't had heal ready to drink

i would not be in the shape that i am

and i'm stronger than i've ever been

maybe two times stronger than i've ever

been

but what i want to talk to you about

today is hughes brand new

product which is just launched last week

which is the hule