Beyond Busy #90, with Olivier Sibony
Graham Allcott 0:04
You're listening to Beyond Busy show where we talk, productivity, work-life balance, defining happiness and success, all the big questions for work and life. My name is Graham Allcott. I'm your host for the show and on this episode I'm talking to Olivier Sibony. He is the author of a new book called "You're about to make a terrible mistake", described by Daniel Kahneman, the author of Thinking Fast and Slow as "a masterful introduction to the state of the art in managing or decision making. And surprisingly, also a pleasure to read." It's honestly one of the best business books I've read in a long time and really talks about biases, how biases distort decision making, what you can do to fight them. And just a really interesting episode. So we're going to talk about some of the nine traps of decision making. We talk about Olivier's background, as a director of McKinsey many his time in management consultancy, and a whole bunch of other stuff. He picks me up on my own biases around Brexit. Lots of stuff that is really interesting here, and I think you're gonna really enjoy this episode. Just before we get into it just worth quickly mentioning my weekly email, it's called "Rev up for the week", it goes out every Sunday evening. And the idea is that in your inbox on a Sunday, will land some kind of positive or useful thing for the week ahead. So "Rev up for the week£. If you want in on that, just go to grahamallcott.com. Fill in the little form on there. And that'll set you going and I'll be sending you something the next Sunday after you listen to this. Unless you listen to this in like 2083 or something I don't quite know how that works. But for now doing every week. There you go.
So let's get into this episode. So really enjoyed this chat with Olivier. And thanks to Ruth Killick for helping set this up. And here's my conversation with Olivier Sibony. Good morning, Olivier 70. How are you?
Olivier Sibony 2:08
I'm fine. Graham, how are you?
Graham Allcott 2:09
I'm really good. Yeah, it's a nice crisp autumn morning as we record this, and where are you? What are you looking at right now just describe your scene, we're doing this down the line, but describe what you can see around him.
Olivier Sibony 2:20
I am I am in Paris in my home office looking at the three screens and two keyboards that are used to do online teaching.
Graham Allcott 2:31
And what's the I know as we were recording this, there's the news coming out of Francis that COVID cases are very much rising. So yeah, how how? How has lockdown been? And how you feeling about the current situation there? Well,
Olivier Sibony 2:45
I'm feeling like most people are a little bit worried. But at the same time, there isn't much that we haven't planned for this time in terms actually at least of work and getting organised and, and teaching and so on. So we have you know, we have contingency plans for most scenarios at this point. Yeah, so other than making sure that we remain individual healthy, there is not much that we can do that we haven't already done.
Graham Allcott 3:15
And I suppose the other thing is you always have to focus on the things that you can control personally as well. Right?
Olivier Sibony 3:20
Exactly. And, you know, we if I if I look at how my school has been handling this, for instance, we've actually put in place quite a lot of plans to try to look at every possible scenario now will we have to shut down the campus, that's a possibility. lots of places have shut down in lots of parts of the world. We're trying not to we're trying to have a mix of online and face to face teaching. But you know, we'll we'll adjust as we go.
Graham Allcott 3:50
Fingers crossed. And so we're going to talk quite a lot about your book, which is you're about to make a terrible mistake, which I loved. I was just actually saying to before we started the call and I must say it No, I loved it more than I thought I would. I think there's sometimes a sense when you read a book that's about psychological biases, that it's going to be heavy going and Thinking Fast and Slow. I love to but found it quite hard going at points. And this one's just written in such a lovely style and with lots of humour and very accessible so yeah, just congrats on Well, thank you very much for writing a great book and your background just to explain for people. So your professor AGC in Paris and as well as teaching other business schools, Saeed in London, you spent a long time as a director of McKinsey as well, the consultant. That's right, yes. So long history and looking at organisations and how organisations perform decision making. And I guess a lot of that, then informs your book you're about to make a terrible mistake. So I thought what I might do to start this off is, if it's okay with you, and if it's okay with the audience, it's beyond busy. And just to focus on COVID and Brexit for a bit. There are two subjects that everybody's very tired talking about, but I wonder if they might be much more illuminating topics, if we, you know, sort of looked at it through the lens of some of the stuff that's in your book, The the nine traps of decision making that you talk about? So should we start with COVID? I mean, I'm dying to talk to you about the
Olivier Sibony 5:35
By all means
Graham Allcott 5:36
French view of Brexit as someone who's very anti Brexit, myself, but let's start with
Olivier Sibony 5:44
if you started with COVID, I mean, I think we've become a little bit more well, slightly more sensible in our way to think about it now. But if you think back, you know, some six months ago how people respond, were responding to this, you could see all sorts of cognitive biases there. And it's, I have to say, it's easy to say, in hindsight, it's always very easy to say in hindsight, but at the time, I remember, you know, speaking and writing on the topic and saying, look, what's really striking here is, how differently countries are responding to this based on their experience. Yeah, which is typical of what I call in the context of business decisions, the set of biases that I've called mental model biases or pattern recognition biases, we think we look at a situation and we think we look implicitly for something we've seen before. So what does that look like when you're in Singapore or in China or in Hong Kong? And you see this bizarre Coronavirus coming up you think, Oh, this looks just like SARS. Let's see here. Yeah, but it looks like SARS. And we should handle it just like SARS. And you get very careful very quickly, and you keep it more or less under control. If you're in France or in England, you say well, this looks like the flu. And we've been there before, and we've overreacted to flu epidemics before. So let's make sure not to overreact this time. And I remember reading articles, even by, you know, people I respect and love quite a bit saying, hey, it must be a cognitive bias if we're responding so much to Coronavirus. We are overreacting to something that is statistically very small risk. Right? So even even the notion of cognitive biases can be harnessed in support of the bias that makes us thing that we knew was going on, which is a pattern recognition bias. Yeah, that was that struck me from the beginning. Another bias that was striking at the time and remains very striking today is the complete inability of people, even very smart people to understand the power of exponential growth. So look at it this way we are in March, and we say, you know we are going to run short of hospital capacity, because the epidemic is doubling every week or something like that. Now, what happens if we managed to double the hospital capacity? How much time do we save? Well, we save one week. And that is something that people just don't get, right. So people now in France, and I'm I'm hoping it's not going to come to the same thing in Britain. But you know, the the dynamics are the same. People are saying now, well, yeah, we find 10,000 new cases every day. But it's no big deal because the hospitals are in school, and they've got a lot of capacity. And of course, that is true at a given point in time. But that forgets the fact that it's in the nature of an epidemic that has an R of more than one we've all become familiar with that number to grow exponentially. Now it doesn't have to double every three days, we're trying to slow it down. Right now in France, it's doubling roughly every two weeks. But we completely lose sight of what it means to double every two weeks, it means that you quadruple in four weeks or multiplied by eight in six weeks. And in two months, you're multiplied by 16. Now, do we have 16 times the hospital capacity that we're using now? Sadly, no. So you add the rhythm at which the epidemic is growing now in France right now as we speak. And of course we hope it slows down and we hope we get it under control and so on. It will be out of hospital capacity in two months. Now that's better than being out in one week. But we will be out into month and if we double that capacity will be safe to month. No we would save two weeks. That's the that's the thing that is mind boggling of exponential growth. And that is completely impossible intuitively to grasp. And everybody made that mistake.
Graham Allcott 10:08
And it's again, coming back to that sense of this is something that we've not seen or experienced before. And I saw you write something about COVID. That said that in the early weeks, there's, there's, there's also like an aversion to being able to picture things that are unusual, right? So in the UK, where we have, we haven't seen something like this, and you know, really take hold, yeah, then we just we don't have the mental capacity to just to actually picture what that would do to everyday life. And
Olivier Sibony 10:44
I remember writing to some of my friends in England, who are, you know, who are writing in sympathy at the beginning of the epidemic and friends who are saying, you know, we're a little bit condescending at the time, I have to say, saying, Oh, you guys manage this so poorly. You know, but implicitly, they were saying, well, thank God, we're not like you, we're an island, and we're protected. And, you know, and and I was telling them, Look, you know, I'm afraid you're not that protected. And if you don't act quickly, and this, this shows another thing that was very striking in this epidemic, which is that how strongly countries responded, doesn't seem to have made much of a difference. What made what made a difference is how quickly they responded. So whether you're locked down was more or less See here, whether you had to actually have permission to go out or, you know, could go out one hour a day or two hours a day doesn't seem in the big scheme of things to make a big difference, but makes a big difference is starting the week earlier. Because when you're dealing with something that doubles every three weeks, every three days, which was the case of the beginning, waiting for a week means it's quadrupled.
Graham Allcott 11:54
And people are people talk a lot about in the UK and the US in particular, I don't know if it's the same they're about the last weeks, you know, so sort of February and March time where people were delaying on decisions. Do you have any, any thoughts about
Olivier Sibony 12:10
how biases and the speed of decision making interact? The the the exponential growth bias that I'm talking about here, that makes us underestimate the importance of acting quickly. biases, also make us underestimate something else, which is the importance of being prepared to change your mind once you've acted quickly. Right. So if you overreacted, and that raises other problems of how you communicate it and how you don't lose face as a leader and so on, which we can talk about as well. But once you've actually made a decision, very few decisions are irreversible, in some are but a lot of decisions are reversible, if you are prepared to change your mind and to tell the people that you've changed your mind and to explain why you've changed your mind and why it's sensible to change your mind. You know, there is this quote, often attributed to Keynes that says, when the facts change, I change my mind, what do you do, sir? and being willing to say that, I think is something that in a situation of great uncertainty like we have now, we would be, we would be well served to have leaders who are prepared to say that more
Graham Allcott 13:25
Yeah, I want to come back to that. And in particular, the idea of humility, which you talked about in the book, but let me let me finish my COVID and Brexit fetish at the beginning. So in terms of Brexit, I mean, I think there's a lot of people like me that look at it as a very irrational thing. And actually, I think very similar to what you just described earlier, you know, the kind of British we're in Ireland, slightly condescending view of everybody else that we know how to do things here and you don't kind of attitude. And I think that informs a lot of the thinking on Brexit, but like, how have you viewed Brexit through your lens with the way that you do?
Olivier Sibony 14:13
I'm going to slightly disagree with you on this one ground I think, okay, here's it's not not Exeter, obviously, but move all my UK friends are like you anti Brexit. Just like when we had a referendum in Europe about the the European constitution. And when we had one about the masteries treaty, all my friends were pro Europe and pro treaty and pro referendum and so on, and yet those referendums lost. What does that tell me that the majority of the people are irrational? I don't think so. I think what this tells me is that they have a different set of goals. They have a different set of them. I used to have a different rationality, which I in my bubble, and failing to see. Yeah, it's, I view it as a problem for me, not a problem of them. That's, you know, 51 or 52% of the people in a given country think something and I haven't met a single one of them, I view them as alliums. Hmm, I have a problem. They don't. They're the majority. Yeah, I have a problem because I have somehow locked myself into a situation where I don't see what they're thinking. Now, what I think when I, muesli, I don't claim to understand the the British voters as well as you do, and certainly not as well as they do themselves. But I think what they're saying is, look, your idea of economic rationality is not what we put at the top of our list of priorities, there are some other aspects of national independence of national glory of, of whatever you call it, that, you know, we we think are more important. And I think in that respect, I mean, I'm going to be even more outrageous now. I actually understand the the rationality of Boris Johnson in handling the way to negotiate with the European Union, what he's basically saying is, look, we voted to get out of the EU, if what it's going to take is a deal in which we have all the downsides of being part of the EU and none of the advantages, then it's probably better not to have a deal at all. And he's being consistent with what the voters voted for. Now, you can say that is crazy. I certainly wouldn't have voted that way, if I was a UK citizen. But that is internally consistent. And you know, that that has a rationality to it. So that we should try to understand
Graham Allcott 16:59
Hmm, but then I suppose if the alternative to what Boris Johnson is rejecting is to either break international law or end up in a worse situation, then there is a bias there, right? Like I, I think quite often that there's, there's, I see playing out, a kind of, and I don't know whether this is a you know, to use some of your language, whether this is a kind of survivorship bias, but we kind of look at, we look at kind of Winston Churchill and the war as these as these kind of emblems of we know how to do stuff and this kind of exceptional attitude. And actually, it doesn't really, you know, it's like it's a story that we're telling ourselves, isn't it?
Olivier Sibony 17:44
Well, two things here. First of all, yes, we look at stories of great leaders who defied the odds and who were loners. And who didn't think like everybody else, like Winston Churchill, and we forget that most people who defy the odds and who are loners, and who think the opposite of what everybody around them things are certifiably crazy. That's generally how you know, someone is crazy is that, you know, he thinks he's Napoleon and the rest of the world doesn't think he's Napoleon. So you say he's crazy. So, survivorship bias makes us focus on the rare exception, who says, You know, I am going to say, friends, and I'm just this little general sitting in London with no army and no friends. And you know, I'm going to say, friends, and my name is the goal. And in in hindsight, of course, we're very glad he was, you know, doing what he was doing. But a lot of people who say, I'm going to change the world and to save the world do not end up saving the world. And we forget about that. So it's not enough to be bold and ambitious to the right. Now, yeah, back to your point about Brexit. More specifically, your point about breaking international law is an issue because that has an element of short term thinking to it that is blatant, it's obvious that you can't, that you will pay your price for breaking your commitments and for not honouring the signature of the great country. So that I think is a problem. I actually think right now, and I'm going to make a wild guess I actually think that's a bluff. And it won't, I can't bring myself to believe that Britain will actually renege on its international law commitments that that I find very hard to do that do I find it difficult to believe that there will be no deal on December 31? No, I think that's a completely reasonable outcome.
Graham Allcott 19:51
Well, and for the sake of both of our economies, I hope you're wrong. I hope I'm wrong.
Olivier Sibony 19:58
By the way, but But right now it looks like the most the most plausible scenario, unfortunately.
Graham Allcott 20:05
Yeah, I like I liked your point before, though, about how, yeah, you can look at something as objectively irrational. But then, of course, you're applying your own bubble in your own biases to that. And I, you know, I know a few people who voted for Brexit. And I think there's Yes, there are a set of values. And there is there is an assumption that a lot of people voted for Brexit in a way that was kind of rejecting their own position within the economy or there or how the economy was working for them. Yeah. And so I think
Olivier Sibony 20:40
there is definitely some writing and something cameras who essentially live off EU subsidies voted massively for Brexit, if I remember right. Now, you might say that is economically irrational, and you would be right, it is economically irrational. But we're not just economic, human beings. All of this, by the way, is why when I'm talking about bias in the context of business decisions, I actually make my own life a lot easier than people who talk about biases in general, because the, when I speak of errors, I define an error as something doing something that someone doing something that is against their own interest. And in the context of a business decision, it's usually fairly simple to define what is the interest of the business, you want to make money, you want to stay in business, you want to create value, now you could have different priorities about how you're going to share that value between the various stakeholders. But you know, before you get there, you want to create economic value, and a move that is going to destroy economic value is unambiguously a bad move. Now, is that true of Britain deciding to vote for Brexit? No, it's certainly a bad move in terms of destroying economic value, does that necessarily make it a bad move overall, not necessarily. Because there are other values and other objectives that you can have. That's why it's a lot more difficult to be fair to apply this kind of thinking to political decisions, and even more so to personal decisions than it is to apply to businesses.
Graham Allcott 22:18
There's a lovely line in the book, which you're talking about. economists who might recognise that fallacy of sunk costs, you know, the idea that you You carry on chasing the thing that you're working on and keep putting more money into, in a business sense, but then that doesn't apply to how they view their own marriage or their own house or whatever.
Olivier Sibony 22:38
Yeah, it's a point about so called d biassing. Right. So there, there are lots of experiments and lots of techniques to try to get people to see their biases. And a well known example is that the sunk cost bias, which is the fact that we we tend to take into account how much we've invested in something when in fact, we shouldn't we should just look forward and move on, is something that can be overcome by economics, training. And economists. There's an old joke that says, if someone steps on your toes to walk out of the movie in the middle of the movie, it's probably an economist who thinks you're just because I've paid for my ticket doesn't mean I should sit through another hour, the items like, right so economists are supposed to be able to recognise the problem with sunk cost and to say, Aha, sunk cost, I'm willing to fall into that trap. But do they actually? Are they actually faster to get out of a bad marriage? I'm not sure it's very hard to recognise sunk cost in situations where you haven't been trained to think about it.
Graham Allcott 23:41
And before we talk about D biassing. Let's talk about the nine traps. And so the book essentially lays out here, here are the ways that you will make bad decisions, and then talks about some of the ways that you can rectify that, which in itself is quite a surprising part of the book as well. And so let's talk about some of these nine traps we taught.
Olivier Sibony 24:05
Yeah, maybe not. Again, because it's a long list, but that people will recognise easily. There is a very well known one, which is the overconfidence trap. Yeah. And, you know, we've all heard by now about the fact that 90% of people think they're in the better 50% of drivers, and every entrepreneur thinks he's going to be successful and so on. And this is a very interesting one, because it actually has a very, very, very important silver lining. It's great to be considered. It's great to be optimistic. It's, it's fantastic to be it helps you be charismatic, it helps you inspire others, it helps you be more convincing. There is a great value to it. So the really hard thing about this is to distinguish the situations in which and the aspects of situations in which we should be optimistic and the ones in which we should not. I take a very simple example of that you're making a plan a business plan? Do you want to be optimistic? Or do you not want to be optimistic? Well, all in all, it depends. There are aspects of the plan where you want to be optimistic, and they're the ones you control. And there are aspects of the plants where you don't want to be optimistic, and they are the ones you don't control. So say you're launching a soft drink, the size of the market is going to depend on whether it's a hot summer or a lousy rainy summer, there is not much you can do about that. Now your market share in that market depends to a large extent on what you're going to do. There's one aspect of your plan about which it doesn't make sense to be confident or optimistic. And one part of it about which is great to be considered, I think the discipline that a lot of people have developed is to very explicitly distinguish the things and to be very bold about what you control, and very confident and inspiring and, and, and all the great things that confidence gives us about those things, but at the same time completely paranoid about the things you don't control. And back to back to the COVID discussion. By the way, that's a great, a great application of that principle. There are aspects of this pandemic, that we control how many social contacts we have, how we socially distance, how we wear masks, and so on and so forth. And they're aspects we don't control. And we should be very, very thoughtful in planning for all the possible contingencies that result from what we don't control. But that doesn't mean that we shouldn't be very optimistic about achieving what we can.
Graham Allcott 26:47
And I'm going to bring in personal productivity here. Yeah, at the same time. So just in terms of thinking about the overconfidence trap, and you mentioned it in the book, the idea of the planning fallacy. Yes. And, you know, essentially, what most people do when they write a to do list for the day is think in a very overly confident way, and a very optimistic way about how much they can get done in that day. And often, when people are picturing their day, they picture a blank space of seven hours, eight hours, whatever their day is, without even looking to the fact that for those hours are in meetings or on zoom calls, and there's an hour for lunch, and there's emails, you know, say like people just naturally have this very overly confident view. So and
Olivier Sibony 27:29
here, you you're at least starting from the assumption that people make a to do list and have a plan for their day and have some sort of concept. That's already, it's already a pretty good place to start from, if you already have a concept of how long each of those tasks is going to take you. And some vague notion that if everything went according to plan, and your calendar wasn't already busy, seven, seven hours would be enough to do it. Wow, you're already in the top 10% here. But he has the planning fallacy is that is a fairly universal tendency to underestimate the time that things will take and the challenges that will come up. And the the mean, there are many underlying reasons here. But the main underlying reason is that implicitly, we're assuming that everything will go right. And for things to go wrong, it's enough for one thing to go wrong. Whereas for the plan to be realised we need everything to go right. It's very hard to remember that one glitch in the schedule is enough to derail the entire plan in general, in a complicated plan, so
Graham Allcott 28:35
I just want to turn this round on to you personally for a moment then. So as someone who spends a lot of time writing and thinking about biases, yeah. How do you start your day? And how does how does that thinking about biases
Olivier Sibony 28:50
impact your own productivity? Not at all, I'm just as bad as everyone that I write about. I'm in the process of finishing a new book that was supposed to take a year and that we started four years ago. I am regularly mean I'm probably not the worst of the authors that my publishers need to deal with. But you know, I'm certainly not on time and, and on budgets in everything I do. So I'm just as bad as everyone
Graham Allcott 29:24
get on so I mean, I think books in general it's kind of like the lore of books that they're allowed to run late on a like authors are allowed to break deadlines.
Olivier Sibony 29:34
Yes. No, I I wish I could say it's just for my books and I'm and I always deliver everything else on time. You know, if I were simple example, you just before we spoke, I got this email saying can you please check this interview and I opened it and I thought is going to take five minutes to 20. And that's typical, you know, it's it's, it's the typical two Do list items that, you know if if I had actually bothered to make an estimate, and to add up the estimates of the times that my to do list items for the day would have taken, I would have said five minutes. And in fact, it took a lot more. And part of the value of doing this is supposed to be that you learn that you become better and that the next day you say, Oh, I need to look at this thing, it won't take five minutes, because yesterday, I thought it would take five and in fact, it took 20. So I'm going to adjust. But in fact, you don't do that. Because it's never exactly the same task. And you don't really learn so no, again, I am I'm just as bad. And that goes to the the principle that I try to explain in this book about how to address biases, how to solve the problem of bias, who's the main As you've seen, Graham, the main point I try to make is, don't think that you're going to get better at it, you are not on your own, you won't improve. And what I'm what I'm trying to illustrate with the example of my own inability to overcome my planning fallacy bias here is not that I am humble in admitting that I don't overcome it, it's that it's impossible to overcome it on your own. Yeah, if if you want to overcome it, you need the system that is going to force you to overcome it. And in that system, you need to have other people pushing on you, and fighting with you and creating some tension to force you to become better at overcoming your biases. And those two ingredients, the method, the process, and the other people the collegiality, all the two basic ideas that I try to develop in the book.
Graham Allcott 31:49
Yeah, so I was gonna ask you about groupthink as well. So maybe we'll come back to groupthink in a second bill. So the point you're making I love, there's this bit in the book where you say, the bottom line, obsessing over our own biases and how to reduce them is a waste of time. Yeah, the way to improve decisions in an organisation is to improve the decision making practices of the organisation. And I love the bit where you talk about a decision maker should really be you know, their job role is really to decide how people decide. So that actually what you're doing is you're setting up these these two things about collaboration process. Yeah, so just want to talk a little bit more about collaboration and process and how, you know, there's there's a, there's the individual biases that we have, but then actually, the only way to really address biases is to forget trying to do it individually and think about collectively, what can we do?
Olivier Sibony 32:43
Yeah, so we I mean, we we're now at the point in this conversation, which is, when I give talks about this, or when I give classes about this, there is a point where people say, Ah, okay, we get it, we understand biases. Now, that was really interesting. And that's when I say, you know, we're now at the point where everything you've just learned is completely useless. Because really, it is completely useless. And, and this is something that a lot of people have trouble understanding and and in fact that a lot of books about biases, you claim the opposite, they say, you know, really is work, and you're going to discover the biases that you have in your game to become able to overcome them by having this mental list of biases, and making sure that you don't fall into these traps every time you make a decision. And that simply does not work. I was giving an example, is it for the planning fallacy in your personal productivity. But it's true, every bias, if it was that simple biases would have disappeared A long time ago. So really, the only way you're going to be able to overcome them is if you have collaboration if you have people who look at the same problem in a different way, and who are willing to share their views with you. And that's a very important and difficult condition in an organisation because organisations have social pressures and have hierarchies and has groupthink, as you mentioned, or come back to that. And then once you have heard different points of view, you need some sort of method, some sort of process to resolve the tension and to decide between those points of view and to come to a final decision. Because otherwise you're going to have an endless debate and analysis paralysis and get nowhere. So collaboration and process are the two basic ingredients. The group thing, for instance, which is one of the nine traps, one of the nine types of biases that I talked about groupthink, we all know it is the tendency that people who are in a group have to converge on a solution to quickly and so typically, you know, if we're in a business meeting and we're making the decision, there is someone showing the meeting who says well, you know, my It's an interesting proposal. And I'd like to hear what we all think about this. And we go around the table and the first person says, Yeah, I think it's a really good idea. And the second person says, Yeah, it's really good idea. And the third person was actually thinking, Well, I'm not so sure. It's a great idea. But now that two people have said, they think it's a good idea. The cost for me of saying, I'm not sure has gone up. Do I really want to die on that hill? Do I want to fight that battle? Maybe not. Plus, the fact that these two people who my respect and who have done their homework and who know what they're talking about thing that it's a good recommendation actually makes me change my mind a bit. It's rational to change my mind when I hear my colleagues say it's a good proposal, even though I was thinking it may not be a good proposal, after all, Only fools never change their mind. Right. So maybe the third person is going to say, Well, yeah, I agree. It's a good idea. And we keep going around the table and we have unanimity there. But that's unanimity is simply the reflection of the fact that people who thought differently have silenced themselves. That's grisly. Now, what's collaboration and process applied to that? How would you create the meeting in which that doesn't happen? There are a lot of things you can do. First, you can create the sort of psychological safety in which you encouraged people to disagree, you can make it a social norm in the organisation, that a good meeting is not a meeting where everybody agrees, because that meeting is a waste of time. It shouldn't have happened in the first place. Meeting is a meeting where people disagree, in fact, base matter with real solid arguments on both sides. And where there is a process to come to a resolution of that disagreements. That leaves everybody feeling that they have been heard, and that they are satisfied with the final decision. Now that is a good meeting. That is a norm that many organisations don't have that some organisations do have, thank God but in a lot of organisations. A good meeting is a meeting that has been prepared and socialised and choreographed, so that it's actually a formality. It's it's all perfunctory, and we pretend to have a meeting, but it's actually a dance that legitimises all the the wheeling and dealing that has happened before the meeting. That's not a good mindset, at least it's not a good meeting.
Graham Allcott 37:36
Are there ways that you can prepare your meeting to set the groundwork, though, for that psychological safety that, that you talked about today? What was some of the things that people can do to really encourage, like healthy disagreement in meetings?
Olivier Sibony 37:51
So I'll give you a few examples. First, as I was suggesting, you have to make it a social norm in the organisation. So some organisations make it an explicit requirement of their people of their leaders that they should disagree. Amazon has one of their leadership principles, as they call them that say, have backbone, disagree and commit, it basically says, you know, if you don't have the courage to say you disagree, when you disagree, you are violating our norms. Here. You are being a bad Amazonia, McKenzie has the same thing. It has something called uphold the obligation to dissent. It's not, you know, you have the option to dissent. It's you have the obligation to dissent. And one of the 12 or 15 values, I forget how many there are, but you're not 100 is that one, you have to uphold the obligation to descend? It's a core expectation. So that's the first thing then practically, you're what's the method? What are the tools you can have to make that happen? Here's a very simple one that very sure organisations use but really, it's costless. Before you do that little exercise where you go around the table, and you ask people to say what they think. Ask them to write down what they think. Take a minute and ask them to write it down. If I'm the third person in that meeting, I still have the option to say yeah, I've been convinced by the two people who spoke before me. But as I say that I'm staring at a piece of paper that says the opposite of 4am, saying that makes it just a little bit harder doesn't say it. Or even better. You can use one of those little voting devices that used to be expensive, but that you can now get an app to do where you can very quickly take the temperature of the room and say, we've got a proposal on the table. There's eight of us around the room. We could go around the table and all see what are the pros and cons but if it's got to be yes or no, what do we all think hit the button? Yeah. And we can all see anonymously that no four people are four and four are against ah Now that means we should have a real discussion, let's take an hour to do it. Now, if we see that seven people are for it, and one is against, you can say, Well, does the person who is against want to speak up? Right? Or is it you? Or does that person not want to speak up, which is fine, in which case, we're not going to spend a lot of time talking about it.
Graham Allcott 40:23
And that taking the temperature discussion is really critical, right? Because you know, you, I mean, in a groupthink situation, you could easily have, let's say, if there's 10 people in the room, all 10 of them end up agreeing with it, or nine out of 10 agreeing with them. And you've got one very brave Maverick in that groupthink environment. But actually, if you were to take the temperature of it, and you end up saying, actually 60% of people are in favour in favour of this, you might come to the same decision, but you will at least be able to explore it much more, you know, bait based on the kind of real way that people are thinking rather than that group thing way.
Olivier Sibony 40:58
Exactly. And, you know, it's, it's To be fair, it's going to be a rare situation where you've got, you know, 8071, and a group of eight people, because most of the decisions that make it to the top management team of an organisation are not trivial, are not easy, otherwise, they would have been solved by someone deep down the organisation. So the reason you are having this conversation in the first place is because reasonable people can disagree. Yeah, you you are implicitly making a statement by putting it on the agenda and having a discussion about it, that it's okay for reasonable people to disagree. All I'm saying here is go from making that point implicitly to making it explicitly make it clear that not only can reasonable people disagree, you actually want them to voice their disagreement. Because in the end, you will have heard the point that they had to make what is wasted as the waste to the opportunity when group thing happens, it's not necessarily that you're going to make a different decision, it's not necessarily that you're going to do something stupid. It's that in my example of the third person deciding to shut up instead of speaking up, maybe that third person had something to say that the first two people to speak up would have said, Oh, that's a really good point. And we should slightly amend the plan to take that into consideration. So it's not necessarily that you're agreeing it you it's not 12, angry NAB, we have this, this stereotype of group thing being 12 Angry Men where one lone person is going to change the mind of the other 11 and bring them to the opposite decision. That only happens in movies. That's why it's a good movie. But it's because because it's very unusual, the more the less than usual situation, and the much more productive one is that you are going to come to the same decision. But with some extra precautions or extra things that you're going to watch for or some milestones that you're going to add to make sure that you're on track three months from now, it's not going to be a radical change, but it's going to be a slightly improved,
Graham Allcott 43:13
I guess a lot of good decisions, they really should be developed rather than made right. So often, what happens in the grey areas is the interesting part. So like you say, you might say, well, we'll carry on with the decision that we thought we were going to make, but we'll also add this thing in or mitigate this, this smaller risk or, you know, slightly change the direction. But you know, broadly it's the same and exactly, I guess, exactly having that sense of collaboration makes that much easier to do. It does.
Olivier Sibony 43:41
And it has another benefit, by the way, which is that the people who are in the minority feel that there's been heard instead of feeling that they've been steamrolled. And there is you win when you talk to leaders about this. They often say well, you know, the reason I don't do what you recommend is because I don't want people who are in the minority to be disappointed that we haven't listened to their opinion and that they've been overruled. And that's actually the opposite of what happens when people are hurt. Right? The new no one who is you have reasonable expects that they're going to win every argument at work, right? But reasonable people do expect that their voice is going to be heard and that their arguments are going to be listened to, and that if they are overruled, there are going to be given good reasons why they are overruled. When that happens when there is due process. Basically, people are very satisfied, they're much more satisfied than when they are, you know, gently coerced into pretending that they agree with something that they actually do not agree with.
Graham Allcott 44:53
And so so we've got these two different things in operation and collaboration and process and You know, the collaboration to help other individuals to correct your biases and vice versa and then process to avoid groupthink. And you talk about checklists, and you reference Atul Gawande, his book, The Checklist Manifesto, which is one of my favourite, you know, business and productivity type books. So tell us about how checklists can play a role, then in terms of providing some of that process and eliminating biases.
Olivier Sibony 45:29
So I'm a big fan of that book as well. And I'm a big fan of checklists in general. And what I find striking about checklists is that organisations use them all the time. For things that don't matter. They so you know, if you, if you go to the restroom, in many, in many places, you will find the checklist that the person cleaning the restroom is supposed to use, to, you know, to show that they've done their work, right, and that they've checked all the boxes, and so on. And if you go to the to a lot of other things in operations in purchasing, there are checklists for all kinds of things. And essentially, checklists are used as a control mechanism as a compliance mechanism to make sure that your subordinates are doing exactly what you told them to do, and not taking any initiative. If not thinking and not cutting corners, obviously, and not neglecting anything that's important. So of course, you know, there's there's a lot of good things to be said about checklist in those contexts, too. But the same people who say yes, absolutely, we should have checklists for our purchasing department, when they are purchasing stationery items would be horrified if you tell them you should have a checklist when you're purchasing another company. And that's what I'm trying to, to push against here is that we should expand the use of checklists, including strategic decisions. Now there are going to be slightly different checklists, there are not going to be Check, check, check checklists where you say, I've done this, I've done this, I've done this. And the answer is always Yes, there are going to be checklists where you check that you've actually discussed everything that needs to be discussed. And when not all the signals are go, not all the lights are green, because they won't be right. It's not like the pre takeoff checklist in a in an aeroplane where you want all signals to be go, when you're making an acquisition, for instance, all signals are not going to be go, it's not going to be perfect. Otherwise, you know, somewhat someone would have paid more for it than you are going to. So it's not going to be perfect. But you want to make sure that the things that aren't perfect that the things that will give you pause, have actually been discussed, and that you are deciding to proceed in full knowledge of the risks that you're taking off the problems that you have spotted, partly because you don't want to delude yourself, and you don't want to pay a higher price for something that actually does carry some risks. And partly because when you are aware of those risks, you are going to do something to mitigate that you're going to do something about them. So the checklist is a way to avoid the overconfidence trap or to limit the overconfidence trap and to limit the group thing trap in forcing people to discuss the bad news, the topics that you aren't all signals go, in addition to discussing the good news, which will always get this.
Graham Allcott 48:41
So I guess having, you know, some of those checklists would end up being a checklist of questions, right? Rather than rather than yes, no, it's like, have we thought about this? I love that bit. Were you talking about kind of what you called it. But it was something about if a CEO is about to go into an acquisition, six weeks or so before, sit down with their team, and they should write a list of all the things that are the deal breakers or the things that need consideration, and then put that list of things in a drawer. Yeah. So that when you're in the in the middle of that, that deal further, and it's all very frenetic and you're under pressure to meet late night deadlines and so on, then you can pull that out the drawer and say, Here's when I had a bit more time to think about this stuff. He here with the issues that I said then were deal breakers, are they still now? And you know, I just really love that idea of them of sort of quality thinking and qualitative thinking once and then being able to then use that a different point.
Olivier Sibony 49:41
Yes, and it's actually the same as you point out is the same idea as the checklist. And it's emphasising something very important, which is that a checklist need not be a bureaucratic routine that is mindlessly applied to every case. In this case, what you're doing is you're creating a checklist for this deal. But the distance you put between yourself at the time you're writing the checklist and yourself when you are checking the checklist the few weeks later, helps you not lose sight of the things that you thought were important initially, which is the same spirit as which
Graham Allcott 50:18
I'd love to get really deep into all the stuff around decision architecture, which you talk about. And we probably don't really have time, but you kind of break things down into, essentially, there's three types of mitigations. So there's dialogue, divergence and dynamics, you want to just talk a bit about, about those, those three DS dialogue, divergence and dynamic.
Olivier Sibony 50:40
Sure. So the, what I call the decision architecture is as you as you briefly mentioned, the the basic idea that the chief executive shouldn't see her role as being someone who makes all the decisions, but should should see her role as being someone who orchestrates and architecture in the organisation that will make the right decisions. If you have the good process and the good collaboration, the right mechanisms and the right culture in the organisation, then decisions will be made right. And of course, as the chief executive, you will end up making the final decision if the architecture is set up for you to make them which usually is the case. But you will have prepared those decisions in a better way, because you will have architected the preparation of the decisions. And those three DS that I talked about dialogue, divergence and dynamics are three categories of things you can do to build a good decision architecture. So dialogue, is what we were talking about earlier, when we were talking about how to run meetings. It's all the things that create a climate in which you can actually have substantive conversations about issues, options, and so on. And most of those are literally meeting management techniques. Like the one I was talking about encouraging people to write things down first, there are many others, I give in total 40 examples of decision techniques in those three categories. One of the one that I quite like is the so called balance sheet option proposed by the permanent venture capitalist who says, When I'm asking people to give me their opinion, I actually don't want them to tell me, yes, we should do this deal, or no, we shouldn't do this deal. I want them to tell me, here are the reasons why I think we should do it. And here are the reasons that will lead me to think we shouldn't do it. And many leaders with the best intentions, in fact, encouraged the opposite of that. They say, Oh, don't come to me with problems. And with pros and cons come to me the solutions, take a stand, tell me what you really think I want you to know to be an opinionated and opinionated advocate for it, you think that's actually not very effective. What is much more productive is to encourage people to recognise how much uncertainty they feel. And by the way to hear when people feel very strongly and when when they feel not very strongly, you know, if I, if I tell you, I believe in this deal. It's, it's valid information for you to hear that I believe in it. 99%, or that I believe in it. 51%. It's not the same thing
Graham Allcott 53:25
as backside grey area versus black and white. Exactly right. Sometimes the the interesting stuff is in the grave, it's
Olivier Sibony 53:30
the interesting stuff includes knowing how grey my judgement is. And by forcing people to say yes or no, which a lot of leaders again, with the best intentions are doing, we deprive ourselves of this very important information about how strongly people feel. So you know, all those dialogue techniques, I'm just giving you an example here. But there's many more ways to encourage real dialogue in which we don't box people into artificially simplistic positions by telling them Oh, tell me Yes or No, tell me black or white. And we actually encourage them to have shades of grey and to have subtle nuanced points of view about issues. Because again, if they were simple, hard and fast black or white issues, they shouldn't have made it up to the level that you're discussing them, they probably are difficult otherwise you wouldn't be spending time on them. So dialogue techniques, or those techniques that actually encourage real dialogue, then dialogue is great, but you know, if everybody agrees, it's a waste of time. So you you need to find ways for that dialogue to have different points of view to have divergent points of view. And you need to encourage multiple points of view multiple scenarios, multiple dialogues. So one technique for instance, that will bring us back to our discussion about COVID Is scenario generation, asking people to develop multiple scenarios and to develop different options for what they will do in those scenarios, is one way to create divergence. There are many other ways what I quite like, which is from my personal experience is, when I was a consultant, very often clients would come to me and we'd say, you know, I'm looking at this, what do you think about it? Right? For instance, I'm looking at an acquisition, this is the target we have in mind, tell us what you think. And of course, we would say, Well, you know, we're going to look at it objectively. And if we think it's a bad idea, we'll tell you. But the truth is, with the best intentions, and even with the best incentives, by the way, this is not about financial incentives. If the clients you trust and respect, and who has done their homework, tells you, I think this is a good deal. Tell me what you think it's very hard to actually start from a blank slate, you are not starting from a blank slate, you are starting from the opinion that it must be a good deal, because your client thinks it's a good deal, the bar for saying no, it's not a good deal is a lot higher than the bar for saying, Yes, you're right. It's a good deal. Now, what else could you do to overcome this problem where I had a few very smart clients? Who would actually say, Olivier, we are wondering if we should enter this market? And if we do, what target we should acquire to enter this market? Why don't you think about it? And tell us what you think? Now that's a much harder question to answer. But it doesn't. It's not a leading question. It doesn't anchor me on a particular answer, it doesn't bias me towards a particular answer. That's a way to increase the chances that I'm going to come back to them with something that says, Well, you should acquire a company B. And they were thinking, ah, we should acquire a company a now that's interesting, we've created divergence, we now have two points of view that we can talk about, as opposed to just one. So everything you can do, to, to create different points of view to create different scenarios is going to be helpful, because you're going to be smarter when you think about two different options. And when you think about just one. Another way to do this is to play a war game, for instance, where you say, well, we're about to do this. Now, let's imagine where the competitors, how do we respond? And in a scenario where the competitors are responding. Now, certainly your plan doesn't look that good. What do we do differently now? Yeah, so there's a lot of ways and again, I list quite a few practical techniques there, that you can generate divergence. But the basic idea is always the same. It's make sure that if you're going to have a dialogue, which hopefully you are, you have a dialogue around options that are sufficiently different from one another, that are sufficiently divergent that you have people who think differently. And by the way, diversity helps a lot. To have people who are different, is not sufficient, because you could stifle their diversity, but is helpful to have some degree of divergence in the ideas that you're going to be discussing.
Graham Allcott 58:20
That's, that's true. Is there like diversity of people, you know, people from from different backgrounds and so on, definitely will help you towards diversity of thinking. But I think sometimes we forget the idea of diversity of thinking, when we think about diversity, right? I think actually, just knowing that some people are naturally optimistic, and some people are naturally sceptical and some people are biassed in this way. And some people bias in another way. Like I think it it's something that we don't necessarily think about when we're building teams as much as we should
Olivier Sibony 58:52
do. Absolutely. We don't think for instance, about risk averse versus risk seeking people, which is a very, which is a personality trait. We also don't think about something very important, which is that many organisations and especially the best organisations, I have to say, are very good at suppressing diversity of thinking even when they have great demographic diversity, because they have a very strong culture. Suddenly, you, you you have red and you probably remember, built to last, a great book about great companies. One of the things that distinguishes great companies is that they've got coastline cultures, they've got very strong cultures. And you know, having having spent a quarter century in one of those great companies, you I remember that we we actively consciously intentionally trained and indoctrinated people into thinking in a particular way, which was the McKinsey way Solving problems, for instance, and the McKinsey way of thinking about what a corporation should and shouldn't do. And we did that for all sorts of good reasons. But of course, that suppresses some of the diversity of thinking that we would naturally have given the amazing diversity of talent that we were recruiting. So it's great to recruit diverse people for all kinds of reasons. But we shouldn't expect that in and of itself is going to generate diversity of thinking, we need to engineer that too.
Graham Allcott 1:00:32
And we've got a couple of minutes left. And I've got two other very quick things I was going to ask you about one was a loved the thing you talk about, as one of the mitigations against biases is just actually humility. And you talk about is it Bessemer Venture Partners saying that, right? Yes. And so very big venture capital firm, and they have listed on the website and anti portfolio, yeah.
Olivier Sibony 1:00:59
They haven't done
Graham Allcott 1:01:00
all the deals that they were close to doing and didn't end up getting through and all the money they would have made and didn't make, and it goes so contrary, particularly in that kind of industry, right? Where it's so much about confidence to kind of put your failures or the things that didn't go well out there on the table. Because most people's instincts it with those things is, let's try and make everybody forget about them and sweep it under the carpet. Absolutely. So
Unknown Speaker 1:01:24
again, this is another example that is more applicable by by every every person who's listening to this podcast is comes from a CEO who you're at the beginning of every annual meeting with all the management's You know, every organisation has that or used to have that when we could still meet, but probably will have it online now. So the CEO usually stands up and gives a pep talk and talks about all the great things that we've all done together this year, and all the great successes we've achieved. Now this guy always makes a point of always saying at the beginning of this talk. Now, let me tell you about a few stupid mistakes I've made this year.
Graham Allcott 1:02:06
Yeah, that's great. And
Unknown Speaker 1:02:07
this is really interesting, because you know, not only does he cultivate humility, and by the way, this is not real humility. I mean, humility is a dangerous is a loaded word. This isn't real humility, this guy is not any more humble than than you are me is, you know, every every bit as conscious of his talent and his skill as a CEO, as every CEO, I know. But he realises something, which is that if you want people to take risks, you need to give them confidence that when they fail, for good reason, they won't be killed. Otherwise, people are going to become terribly risk averse. And that destroys the creativity and the innovation and the risk taking of an organisation. So what he achieves by celebrating his own failures, is you're a reminder that it's okay to fail honourably. It's not okay to do crazy stuff, it's okay to fail for the right reasons. That's very important. And
Graham Allcott 1:03:05
it goes back to that psychological safety. Exactly in meetings that you're talking about. Right? It just creates that culture that that makes that okay to, you know, to exist, I guess. Exactly. And, and I suppose the final question I wanted to ask you, because we talk on this podcast a lot about about productivity asked you about your own approach to productivity and, and whether that was influenced by biases. But the other things that we talked about on this podcast quite a lot is work life balance and happiness. And I wonder whether there's any, I want to I just want to just if you have any thoughts around either of those topics in terms of how they relate to biases?
Unknown Speaker 1:03:45
I do. I'm not sure my views on this are going to be very typical, or, or very, or very popular. You know, I spent the first part of my career I spent 25 years working as a management consultant at McKinsey. And I don't need to tell you that the the work life balance of a management consultant is not exactly what is probably not what people have in mind when they even use the words work life balance.
Graham Allcott 1:04:15
It's a slog, right?
Unknown Speaker 1:04:16
Well, yes. Now why did I do it? Right? Why did I put up with it because I loved what I was doing. And because I found it very exciting. And to me, work life balance was never a concern, because life is work and work is life. Now. A lot of people ask me, so I assume you went to academia because now you have a more relaxed lifestyle and you work less right. And I tell them actually, it's just the opposite. I you when I was a consultant, you know, I used to at least not work weekends, except in exceptional circumstances, but basically, I wouldn't work weekends, and now I probably haven't had a weekend. Where I haven't worked since I've been you writing papers and writing books, and so on and so forth? Because I like what I do, and why wouldn't I work all the time? Now, I totally get that this is No, not me, I'm not recommending that anyone does the same thing that I do. But to me, the the interaction of work life and happiness is simply that, if my work makes me happy, you know, I don't mind that I spend more time doing it. On the contrary,
Graham Allcott 1:05:35
and how do you work out how to make space for the other things that make you happy? Because I ask this question to people a lot. And, you know, I enjoy my work too. But I also enjoy lots of other things outside of work. So I'm always, I'm always curious that, you know, obviously, with work is life is is it is a true statement. But also there are lots of other things that are worth experiencing, and working for outside of it to write,
Unknown Speaker 1:05:56
of course, and you you, you make course time for your family and for your hobbies, and for sports and so on. But, you know, at the end of the day, if I, if I look at how many times how many hours in a week, I spend doing things that are related to my work one way or another, including, including thinking about work as a rug and listening to podcasts as I drive. And those kinds of things, which I consider a work as well. work takes very, very large part of my life. Yeah. And, and I actually think it's fine. I, I get I totally get that, you know, it could be dangerous ideology in the wrong hands. And that I do definitely do not expect or much less require or recommend anyone to feel the same way. Right. But that you asked me for my personal view, and
Graham Allcott 1:06:56
yeah, well, I mean, that's why I love doing this podcast, because you know, people do have just such different perspectives on all this stuff. And I think there's probably a lot of people listening to this, who would be really inspired by the idea that if you're really loving your work, then it doesn't feel like work. And you can you can dedicate a lot to it and and feel really good about that. So I think that's, you know, I, like you said, you said it's a maybe a controversial view, but I would actually say that lots of people have been really inspired by it too. So
Unknown Speaker 1:07:26
I hope so. And I sort of secretly thing that a lot of people think this way, and that it's become a slightly politically incorrect thing to say, yeah, or at least an unpopular one, because you're supposed to be this new, balanced, multi dimensional person who has a lot of interests and hobbies, and commitments, and so on and so forth. And that's fine. Again, I'm not, you know, I'm not making any value judgments. But if you're someone like me, for whom work is a big part of life, I don't think you should be ashamed of that.
Graham Allcott 1:08:00
Yeah. I mean, you might work the same number of hours, as I don't know if you know, Gary Vaynerchuk, the YouTube guide, you know, him, I don't know. So he is a guy who on YouTube talks a lot about hustle and grinding, and in my view, has quite a, in fact, what I'd say about him, to be fair to Gary Vaynerchuk, I think he has a much more complicated and nuanced message around, working a lot of hours. And that's what he does. And it's all about self awareness. But what a lot of younger people in particular hear from him, a lot of his audience are kind of younger entrepreneurs or aspiring entrepreneurs, what they hear is, in order to succeed, I need to work 8090 hours a week. And I just need to, you know, grind my face off until I get success. And I think a lot of people, when they hear that message, become a lot more miserable than you sound, you sound like you're, you really enjoy what you do. And so I think you can, you can work a lot of hours, and it can be, you know, you can have flow and excitement and satisfaction on the one end of that scale. And also, even when you're still working lots of hours, it can be like a grind and difficult. So yes, you know, it's all about the the quality and the motivation of the work as well as how many hours you work, right?
Unknown Speaker 1:09:19
No, exactly. And that's what I meant by you know, I realised this idea is oversimplified and put in the wrong hands can be actually dangerous. Because if you know if it's your employer, now telling you that in order to succeed, you need to have nothing else in your life at work. It's a very different statement than the one I'm making. So I realised that there is a lot of complexity to this issue. Hmm.
Graham Allcott 1:09:47
Well, we've run out of time, and I could honestly talk about this book all day, because it really is fantastic. So just yet, finally, just to say congratulations, and thank you for writing. You're about to make it terrible mistake and it's out now and people can go find it. Thank you. And where can people connect with you find out more about what you do anything else you want to share.
Unknown Speaker 1:10:08
LinkedIn is where I post most stuff. So
Graham Allcott 1:10:11
connect with me on there. Thanks so much for being on beyond busy. Thank you very much.
Thanks again to Olivier for being on the show. And just being such a great guest really enjoyed that one. And thanks also to Mark Stedman, my producer on the show and Podiant our hosts. You can find out links to all the various stuff that we discussed in the episode at getbeyondbusy.com. There you'll find our show notes, you'll also find links to all the the back catalogue of various episodes, we are coming up for 100 episodes, actually, we're going to do a hundredth episode special earlier in the New Year. But we are rapidly approaching 100, which basically means there's over 100 hours of free content of Beyond Busy over the last few years out there. So if you would like to say thank you, for all that free content, then you can do that by buying a copy of one of my books, and preferably do that via https://www.hive.co.uk/, who pay their tax. And hive is basically a website that takes its stock from local bookstores. So check out https://www.hive.co.uk/ and buy from there, not from uncle Jeff. And if you're not on my mailing list, it's called "Rev up for the week". Every Sunday, I send out something positive, interesting and helpful. For your Sunday delectation ready to start the week off in the right way. So just go to Grahamallcott.com. You can fill in the little form on there and sign up for Rev up for the week, I'd love to have you as part of my my weekly little club, sharing a lot of stuff about my new book because I'm starting the research for that and various other things on there. So just go to Grahamallcott.com to sign up for that. Also, thanks to Emilie for all of our help with putting the show together and Lexi, for helping spread the word on Instagram. We're doing loads on Insta at the moment. So follow me there at Graham Allcott or at think productive, really helping to spread the podcast word spread the podcast love on there. And that is it for this episode. We're gonna be back next week with another one. We're really enjoying the the new pace of being weekly podcast. Like weirdly, it sort of feels like there's an easier rhythm having twice as much work to do and we've got some really good guests and that we've just been recording for the last few weeks developing a nice little pipeline. And we're kind of booked in for the whole of the rest of the year and into really into February next year. So lots of really interesting stuff coming down the track. stay subscribed, subscribe if you haven't done already, and we'll see you next week.
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