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00:00:00,000 [Music] Hi and welcome to the Sunday Lunch Project Manager podcast
for, well, Saturday, the 31st of December 2022 and Sunday, the first of January 2023.
00:00:26,000 This is your host Nigel Creaser and I’m going to have a look today. What had happened in 2022 and what, I’m looking forward to in 2023, let’s switch to Zoom. [Music]
00:00:46,000 So, the last show of the year and kind of first show of the new year. It’s
been a busy old year with the podcast. I think it’s well over a thousand minutes of content produced this year.
00:01:07,000 I breached 13,000 downloads, total of 16 guests, moved to every week
in September. And I’ve got interview scheduled now in advance. And it takes me to August. I’ve got recorded already through to the end of February.
00:01:30,000 Which is a lot very different to the, maybe this time last year and
certainly in the middle of last year where it was getting quite difficult to
get guests. So, fantastic that this is moved on. And I’m looking at, in
front of me now, the list of guests that I’ve had on here in the topics we covered from managing time, marketing with project management.
00:01:49,000 We’re listening to the project chat a guys in a bit of their history.
Construction, professors, views of management in general. Had to be a
rebellious PM leading virtually, which is difficult for all of us these days.
00:02:03,000 Talent retention. Being a change in India. And I’ve been to projects, sort 00:02:13,000 of intertwined.
Monsters of team management, project management in fashion. The creator, Agile and beyond, innovation in project management. Horses and management.
00:02:25,000 And in Enneagrams and taking us to the next level of our performance. And the topics when I look back at them and kind of reviewed what
we’ve had there, the guys are so generous to give their time. And so much information.
00:02:39,000 So, if this is your first or one of your early ones, this I really do urge you
to jump back and have a listen to what’s happened over the past year.
So, that’s, it’s been fantastic. I’ve moved from Zoom to Riverside, kind of through my tightness, if you like, in some ways.
00:02:59,000 But that’s given me some more benefits on how I can do the recording.
The YouTube channel, YouTube channel, after I do put a bit of emphasis
on that. Again, still trying to work on improving the quality of that.
00:03:14,000 If you’re listening on the YouTube welcome. And please do share, like, 00:03:26,000 subscribe. No, usual sort of thing.
We… I was very fortunate off the back of the podcast and then the last book. I got invited to speak at the Greek conference for project management.
00:03:38,000 They’re 17th conference, which was great. And that helped me get a
new mic and a new camera. Again, hopefully to improve the quality of what you’re getting here.
00:03:49,000 And I’ve also got asked to host a roundtable panel at… I was working
with Captain Gemini at their business agility conference in November. I talked about Sindatsu.
00:04:05,000 And I will be having a… It’s on my wall actually, it’s at the art of
leadership of the 21st century. And beyond, I have a future guest, Mr. John Kessel fellow, wrote about this.
00:04:17,000 And he was on that panel. And we’re going to delve into that and give you some really interesting tips and tricks. And kind of a slightly
different focus on how we manage and get the best out of our people.
00:04:31,000 So, along with that’s that. I’m jumping into 2023, a little bit there. From a 00:04:43,000 personal point of view, as you know, I was ill last year.
This year has been a really good year of resetting, getting ready to
move forward. And I feel in a much better place than I was last year. I have…
00:04:57,000 Also from… well, as you will know, my exercising has been… is important to me, is what from a mental health. And I’ve got injured earlier in the year.
00:05:08,000 But I am back up to running, so my kind of highlights and my running
has been… amazing really, because it’s just… I’ve built up and I’ve been
running some of the fastest times I’ve run for six, seven, eight years.
00:05:22,000 So that’s coming along well. Hopefully that will carry on into the new year. We had, from a family perspective, a fantastic break in the summer over in Greece.
00:05:34,000 My girls there. And my girls and my wife, Jodie, give me so much support in giving me the time and space to do the podcast.
00:05:45,000 And it’s great. And there is my reason for being in me. I’d also like to 00:05:58,000 thank the organisations that…
through my sporting exploits and quotes. I’ve managed to secure a number of organisations to help me with… an add-on-learn me to be coming in affiliate with them.
00:06:11,000 They include talk, fitness, cemetery sportswear, cycle of good, lucky 00:06:23,000 saint, shocks and brick caps.
00:06:34,000
Along with other organisations, my brothers, always supporting me. So his motorcycle company, Chris’ motorcycle and customs,
Paul Blackchilly for supporting me with the hosting of the website and things like that. And Tamplo, which you will have all seen, was supporting me early part of the year.
00:06:44,000 So all of those guys, thank you so much for supporting me this year.
And hopefully we can continue those relationships through into 2023. So thank you.
00:07:00,000 So that was 2022. What have we got going forward? So looking at the 00:07:18,000 podcast, we’ve got the weekly show.
And that’s going to carry on through the year. I’m hoping that I should
have 20 plus guests and over 1500 minutes of content generated by the
end of the year. As I said, I think earlier I’ve got January, February, Shetel,
00:07:33,000 Greg Offner, Lucy Harrison, Abdullah Al-Malon and Stephen Moidner.
And as I said, the rest are through to August. I think the target for the show really is to try and increase the visibility.
00:07:48,000 That’s always been a battle with the podcasts. I am obviously getting
more visible because I am getting lots of requests from marketers who
are willing to try and give me the visibility and guarantee downloads. I think that I take some of that with a pinch of salt,
00:08:07,000 because I’m not sure that people are just going to be charged me for
running bots against it, so I won’t quality listeners like you. I’m going to
get more focus on the social media side of it and my website SEO. And your help spreading the word would be very appreciated.
00:08:27,000 And actually, you’re listening there. If any of you want to be on the
show, get in touch. If anyone, if there’s anyone you want to be on the show, get in touch.
00:08:36,000 It’s so… I know there’s so many amazing stories out there, so that
would be fantastic to get people on the show. Writing wise, I have the
novel that still needs writing that I’ve talked to you about before. However, my next business, like book, I dictated a lot of it.
00:09:03,000 The other day when driving, safe hands free, etc. It needs collating,
expanding, tidying up, ex-editing, etc and all that sort of thing. But it’s
an idea I’ve had for some time that I’ve kind of want to bring out there.
00:09:19,000 So I might… I kind of got a lofty gold of how to hit both of them. Get the
novel done. I finish the draft at the most minimum and get the other book pulled together and published it by the end of the year.
00:09:32,000 Talking on books, as of the first of January, there is an audio version of the Hacks book. So Product Manager, Productivity Hacks, I have used Google’s AI service to convert the book. I have got a bit of listen through and edit to probably do, but as always, kind of pushing out there,
00:09:59,000 getting it out of there first, very fast, kind of fitting. As I say, it’s available
from the first. It’s going to be interesting, but really great to hear feedback from anyone who,
00:10:13,000 and what they thought of it, and if you spot any little typos on it, hit them and please let me know. So, that’s that, jump along to the website,
NigelPrice.com/productsai. I think I’ve got the URL for that, and you can get a copy.
00:10:32,000 It will be available on other platforms, I’ve pay here and things like that,
but I haven’t quite got round finalising all that. Side of it, or you know,
it’s a window, it’s going to kind of put some comms out on where that’s
gone. I plan to do a couple of speaking aid engagements this year, see if I can expand on what I did in the last year,
00:10:57,000 fingers crossed anyway. Some of it will be local event type stuff, some
of it will be maybe some online, maybe some, you never know, I might get some paid items as well. And if anyone has an opportunity for someone to speak with, it will be on Project Manager,
00:11:13,000 whether it be on the productivity hacks, whether it be on my Alexa skills
stuff, whether it be on podcasting, on how to kick off particular, let me know. I’m open to all conversations, all things like that.
00:11:26,000 I am also piloting a little bit with a, or discussions with a training
platform to be able to put some training out there, paid for training, it
would be, but it kind of bites eyes like the way they’re doing it. So that
will be based off of Project Manager’s hack, hack book, productivity hacks book, and I’ll get that again if that’s out there.
00:11:50,000 So that’s another one to have a look at. And health wise, if I get my London place personal stuff, I’m after a London place to run for
Alzheimer’s research, okay, not yet at confirmation whether I get that, but if I don’t get that, there will be another adventure of some description that I will do try with some funds,
00:12:16,000 and the, with my recovery of my knee now, I can hopefully get back on the due date matter, and move towards my second down. So that’s
what I’m looking for, this from my future, and what we’ve got on here,
00:12:32,000 and there’s some stuff coming through on the podcast, I’m sure that you
will find it. There’s incredible benefit from the four people I’ve got already recorded, and even more to come. So, yeah, so I suppose the final just to sign off here is to say thank you all for listening.
00:12:53,000 Thank you for your likes and your shares. I hope 2023 brings you
everything that you want, and gives you the fun and challenge through the year. And yeah, happy new year, really, that’s it.
00:13:15,000 And if you ever want to drop a message as Navin did drop a message
into the anchor system, and we can Q&A or anything like that, let me know. Finally, there are some bloopers of me doing these recordings over the year at the end of the show.
00:13:34,000 I’m sure you don’t think I’m perfect, but just to demonstrate. So
goodbye, and speak to you in the new year. I also forgot to mention that
at the end of the show have also included all the excerpts from all of my guests.
00:13:53,000 Little one minute bites for you to have a listen to, and just get an
experience of any of the guests you’ve not heard before. Enjoy. Thank you so much, Niger. This is Navin from India.
00:14:08,000 Your efforts are highly helpful for project managers throughout the
world. Thank you so much. Wow, you made it this far. I’m guessing that
you enjoyed the show if you have, or maybe we’ve just left it plain and the background of college on.
00:14:27,000 But if you did enjoy it, and you’re inclined to, I’d be delighted if you
could share the show with your colleagues. It’s a discoverability with
podcasts is quite difficult, especially with a niche one like this. But
sharing with your colleagues and then another chance to listen to these fantastic guests would be brilliant.
00:14:45,000 If you’ve got time, a review on whatever platform you listen to it on
would be great too, especially if it’s a five style of, again, that makes it easier for people to discover the show. When they’re searching on there because colleagues raising up the old search and you know,
some optimization on all the different tools. If you are feeling flush, I have a couple of ways you could contribute. One is Patreon. Patreon/SunnyLunchPM.
00:15:14,000 You can donate some money to the podcast that way. Or you can jump along to my website, www.Lygeocreaser.com and click on the link to
the show. And in there you’ve got all my books that I’ve created in the very different guys in a number of different ways.
00:15:34,000 You can grab a copy of those. And then I’ve got my guests’ books, so
everyone who’s been on here, if they’ve had a book, I’ve got a link to
their book in there. And Amazon will give me a little bit back for a win. Some of my’s from then. But more importantly, if you come back next
time and listen, I’ll be delighted. So I’ll leave you alone and let you get on with your day now. Thank you. Bye.
00:16:00,000 Well, thank you for Victoria. I hope you enjoyed the library. Well, I hope
you enjoyed the library. Well, I hope you enjoyed that. I’m just a new minister.
00:16:18,000 Hi, and welcome to this. Well, it’s goodbye from me, Nigel Creaser, and it’s goodbye from him, the Sunday lunch, PM. Goodbye. Nobody ever
dies with an empty inbox. And I think of it, think of it like laundry or washing dishes. There’s always more dishes because it’s a process that’s happening every day.
00:16:40,000 Your work happens every day. You will you will never be done. You will
never be fully caught up. If you happen to think you’re fully caught up at
one point, you’ll be behind in a week because of other things. So yes,
it’s key then to focus on what’s the most important thing to get done
today. If I could only get one thing done today, what would that be?
What is my largest income outcome that I really want to achieve that I can do something towards today.
00:17:02,000 And a lot of little stuff. Let it slide, delegate it, dump it. You know, I’ve
get it off your off your plate and you’ll be a lot less stressed for it. We
work back from the result. So this is what we want. This is how we think
we’re going to get there. And then we market that into the team on the
on the basis that they then understand why. So we call we call that start with why.
00:17:31,000 So start with why so that that kind of wants in it to make conversation.
Yeah, so we had to very quickly start talking about ideas in terms of
mine and Andy’s idea and start talking about things in terms of his code
breaks idea. Immediately that helps with buying from the off because
they feel like we’re not just doing it to line our pockets or doing it to make our lives easier or whatever it might be.
00:18:04,000 And then. Yeah, the other side of it is what’s in it for me. So very much well, if you can get, you know, for example, if you can do X, Y and
dead. And then we actually shave 30 minutes a day off the time you’re doing grunt work.
00:18:23,000 And we’re not going to ask you to fill that time with anything else. So
you can use that time to read you can use that time to play pool you
can use that time to learn. And immediately people are a lot more into it.
00:18:39,000 And if you want to create clarity and simplicity and if you need buy in
from people from employees from stakeholders, whoever’s on the team.
That clarity just can’t be underestimated just how much easier it is where everyone knows where they’re going. And these are the
checkpoints along the way. So it’s like here’s the strategy and vision.
00:18:58,000 And then we’re going to break it down into bite chunked balls game
plans which are a series of tasks and that’s that’s laid out for people to follow. And like so I mean I couldn’t imagine work on something and how to chop and change every day. I mean, there’s adapting and there’s just.
00:19:13,000 Oh, having the piss taking it over it. I think project management is
another example of a disaster waiting to happen in terms of the gap. So
the projects are getting bigger and the skills gap is getting wider.
00:19:25,000 If you ask that the average PM or PMO person about data or digital.
There’s a very large gap and that’s just for my observations. I haven’t
done any sense of starter on this and you can tell me your experiences.
But I think it’s running away from us and it’s not like they have to
understand it like we can operate an iPhone without understanding how the iPhone works.
00:19:46,000 But we’re not giving them enough interface understanding so they
understand how to operate those machines and those tools. Leadership
is a function. So whether that is inhabited with someone at the bottom,
someone is just coming in working in the industry. If someone is at the
top, then that leadership, you know, raising your standards is relevant
to every single person because of course it does start from the top.
00:20:08,000 I mean, if the fish is rotten from its head, then that will infiltrate to the
body. This is again, goes down to that vision of that leader, that vision
of saying, well, you know, we need to set out people out for success because if you’re getting someone here, as you said, is technically
brilliant to all of a sudden. If you’re not here and talk and inspire people,
then they’re going to falter. They’re not going to be as best as they can.
00:20:31,000 And yes, of course, training is available, but we always have to look at
what is the individual’s natural disposition in order to achieve what they
achieve and what they are naturally good at as well. That’s how you get the most out of people. Sometimes that’s the best. The best is not always the most and vice versa.
00:20:53,000 This is where leadership in organizations again does need to start
seeing individuals as not just, you know, their work personality, but their whole person as leaders. We have a large part, but we also know the
importance of giving recognition where recognition is due. And people
who do this, and it’s not by reducing themselves saying, no, you know, I didn’t do anything or it’s not it’s accepting that, you know, that
recognition, but also when you give that recognition to others, it is a
reflection of the confidence of your own leader that you’re not someone
who is intimidated or threatened because someone else is doing better than you.
00:21:37,000 They’re actually thrive off that when they can see that their team is quote unquote thriving as well. And that is a marker of a confident
leader and that is something that is truly so rare to see. You know, it’s one thing if everybody’s remote, it’s another if you are the remote person, and everybody else is in the office.
00:21:57,000 We remember how during conference calls, you know, you had to be in
China, so you’re calling in for the conference calling everybody ignores
you, you know, you could have been off the phone for a while the line
went dead, nobody knows, right. And it’s important to remember that if
you’re going to be the remote worker, your career will pay a price for
that. People don’t want to hear that, but there’s been a bunch of studies of this, they all show the same thing and ask yourself this mental exercise. I suppose I have an identical twin in my office.
00:22:27,000 We’re doing the same job the same way we’re both equally good at it,
but your twin is going to go back to the office and you’re going to move to Himalaya and be a remote employee. Which one of you is going to get ahead? Well, I mean, we know and what we’re going to have to do
to fix that. Well, there’s nothing I can think of the way organizations work now because it’s so much about access to information
opportunities to shine, you know, to grab the interesting projects early on to know what’s going on.
00:22:57,000 So you can adjust to the whims in the organization. We don’t know how
to fix it. I can tell you where I think things are going. I think, you know, we’ve had an enormous amount of attention around the fact that many employees really would like to keep working remotely.
00:23:16,000 It’s not all employees, interestingly, and by some measures in the US, you know, some surveys suggest about a third want to go back to the
office, more or less the way it was before. If small percentage, you know, less than 20% are really thinking about wanting to be permanently remote someplace. So most everybody wants to be something in between. The problem is we don’t see on the employer side what’s in it for them.
00:23:42,000 We forget the fact that the real stakeholders are much wider and more
varied than you realize. I don’t think you forget that in a hospital because I think I’m sure I’m sure I did an insurance because in
insurance world, you hope people will never use your product because that’s how you rake in the money. But in a hospital when I did my
induction and went to visit a hospital and had a tour and we’re going behind the scenes and stuff.
00:24:08,000 I remember standing at the reception desk and the lady in front of me
was crying. And she was a visitor or a patient and I was thinking, wow,
this is what we do. So if my computers, if my IT project puts computers into a theatre and they break, someone gets the operation cancelled and they have to live with breast cancer for another day.
00:24:28,000 And that is unacceptable. And so in the healthcare environment, it’s
really clear to see and you never forget that the end customer is the
patient is the consultant you’re trying to make it was lives easier. We
did an awful lot of conference calls. In fact, had I written the book five years earlier, this, the leadership book, it would have been called
conference calls made easy and it wouldn’t have really helped at all in the pandemic.
00:24:52,000 Whereas it went a bit nuts. So it used to be that I worked a lot with
people who are doing international projects often in big IT companies or
farmer companies, financial services companies where they had people
scattered around the world just like you described. And then when the
pandemic hit all of a sudden, I had teachers, people from universities, I had doctors, a local government clocks.
00:25:20,000 All sorts of people were picking up my book that I’d written essentially
for international project managers in 2015 and finding it really helpful.
And I was thinking how I’ve spent lots of time thinking through and if
I’ve got this to the right level, it should work really well in this pandemic
and it did, which is really really good. British native mother tongue English speakers, we are as a group, pretty awful to people who are
business professionals who speak English as a second, third or fourth language.
00:25:56,000 There’s a sort of subset of professional English that is used by people
who don’t have English as their mother tongue, which is a much smaller
subset and doesn’t include all those collectualisms and those things
that you were talking about. And we really ought to reduce if we have a wide range of languages, we should make it easy for people, we need
to adapt, we need to facilitate, we need to reduce our language down to that sort of business subset, really, if we can. When it comes to
belonging, it’s not just whether a person feels like they fit in because some people can fake it to fit in.
00:26:31,000 It’s a matter of the fact that they believe that where they’re working is a
special place, they they promote it, they tell people they’re proud of
where they work. And they’re also included so the belonging part not
only says do I feel like this is a special place where I’m working and I’ll
promote and talk about it, but I’ve been included. To make this sense to
those people listening is kind of like this, if I invite you to a party, then
you have a sense of belonging because hey I’m with the cool kids, I got an invitation to the party.
00:27:06,000 But you don’t truly believe that you fully belong until when you get to the
party, I make sure that you know where the food is. If there’s music, I
get you up on the dance floor, it’s part of our inherent DNA, we want to belong, we want to affiliate, we want to make sure that we’re with
someone who has the similar thinking that we do that’s not uncommon. What’s uncommon is that when people isolate themselves, that’s an anomaly, that’s an outlier.
00:27:34,000 But for the most of us, we do want to interact with people and we can
interact either personally and we have a lot of preferences of personal
interaction, but there is a lot of individuals who can interact through
some sort of technology. I mean, I’ll give you in this example, my wife and I will be married 45 years this coming Saturday. We started our
relationship, oh thank you, we started our relationship on the phone because we didn’t live in the same community, we can go to the same school and we were on the phone every night.
00:28:06,000 We have, we use technology 45 years ago to create a relationship that
has lasted this long. So, one, how do you, how do you present things in
a different way that’s going to be interesting and people are going to get
something from and two, I said, I mentioned to Eddie that I’d always wanted to write a book and he says, whatever you do, don’t write a
book, it would just burn up so much time. So that was a kind of go look for me, anybody who gives me a challenge like that, I’m off.
00:28:33,000 And all of a sudden this idea came to me and it was based on choose
your adventure book switch, I don’t know if you read them as a kid. I
did, yeah, I, I, well, not a lot, but a few of them I did read and I did enjoy
them that jumped to another page, isn’t it? Yeah, so you got to, you
know, you’re given a choice, do you go left, you go up the mountain, do you go down the river and you go to the page.
00:28:53,000 So I just thought it would lend itself, the stories would lend themselves
really well to that, so it’s a, it’s a choose your own adventure type book,
I can’t use as choose your own adventure because it is trademarks. I managed to see, there was the film out a couple of years ago, Black Mirror Chaps made, so they sued him for labeling as a choose your own adventure, but it’s a choose your own adventure type book. So there’s a story happens and you have to make a decision and as the reader you decide what you’re going to do, are you going to go into
battle with this person, are you going to give up on this idea, are you
going to take the easy route because that’s what they’re asking you to do or you’re going to fight.
00:29:33,000 So each, each story in the 10 stories and then there’s some other
stories in there as well, just explain in a minute, but each story has a
decision to make and sometimes there’s other decisions further in. And
then you get the outcome of that decision, yeah, you need to carry this
base, I think as well, rule break is probably not a great term because it
just, you know, people want to be rule breaks or disruptors or they’re
against it and it’s not really about breaking the rules, it’s about finding
ways around. There’s a really good book that helps explain all of this,
there’s some really great tools, it’s called the change into handbook.
00:30:18,000 You’ve been practicing your pitching, haven’t you? Well, yeah, that’s it,
isn’t it? It’s like you said, he’s about working within the constraints that you’ve got and pushing sometimes you have to push everything to the
limit. There’s this guy, he’s a former head of training at Facebook and
it’s probably been a couple of years since I interviewed him, but he had
a book on culture, but I’ll say an angel, this, this idea was helpful.
00:30:45,000 I think it’s related to what you said, he, and this is, if this is not a direct
quote, it’s really close, he said something lines of every company sucks
your job is not to make it not suck, it’s to make it suck less. And, and
part of the reason why it sucks is you’re part of it and you suck. So I
almost didn’t interview him because that was like the depth of the book,
but is there some truth to it? Like sometimes we think we think, oh, my
company is so messed up or, or whatever, but I’m part of it. So what am I going to do?
00:31:14,000 And, and I could blame people, I could blame my team, I could blame
the company, I could blame the culture, but what am I doing to make it better? And, and make sure I’m not making it worse. Nobody wants to
share their failures, right? I mean, we’re sharing success stories, right? Of course, like, you know, I wasn’t an organizations where they ran these, what they call the brown back sessions, right? 00:31:39,000 I actually explain all your, how have we done that? How have you
achieved that success story? Right? And, and you tell them all about
them and the entire organization is listening to you of what you have
achieved, right? But then we need the same thing for failures. No, how, how did we run this project against the wall? I mean, what, what
happened there? Right? Please tell us. No, because this is where the
insights are coming from, if we just talk about success stories, we will
not, we will not improve. It’s, it’s not going to work, right? We need to
full picture. But then there’s this problem that people will not, or there
will be at least reluctant to share failures, right? Nobody wants to share fail.
00:32:24,000 And then we will just act out of fear, right? And, and put a lot of contingency on top of it, right? And I mean, I could go on and on because the wall culture behind this, right? In, especially large organizations where you run these performance reviews, you need to
get basically judged on this and or PMO’s with their metrics, right? And
then they punish you and you get basically your run around for meeting
to meeting to justify why is your project, AMBO, or RET, right? And you feel like you’re on some, you know, being processed, yeah?
00:33:10,000 Well, actually, what you need is someone to come to you and assist you
in that you may put together a plan on how to bring it back, but actually,
yes, as an organization in those scenarios, we should be turning around
and going, that guy needs help, that girl needs help. Yeah, and then I found, oh, there’s this job called a project manager and apparently
they’re really organized and I think I can do that. So then I sort of put
the feelers out. And to see, you know, who I knew that might be able to
give me a hand, getting that kind of job and actually, I interviewed for the first one I interviewed for I got that job.
00:33:53,000 I had no experience in project management, had no qualifications,
nothing, didn’t know what Prince 2 was. I’d be like, who’s who’s Prince
2? I think a lot of us did that when we first did it. I didn’t took many years. I mean, to realize what the heck that was.
00:34:13,000 Yeah. But yeah, and that’s where it just went from there. And I
absolutely loved it. I can say about the stroke. Basically, I attribute it to
putting my body through very little sleep, looking after it very poorly for, you know, 10 years.
00:34:40,000 And that career did as much as I loved that career, it did take its toll on
my body. And also, I did, I was involved my very last projects. I was involved. It involved with it.
00:35:00,000 There was an individual who had a reputation for being unpleasant, but
this person made my life a living hell day in, day out. I would say for six months. And that was the tipping point for me. I couldn’t take it anymore.
00:35:20,000 I think it applies certainly as an entrepreneur or employee. And let’s just
do a really quick basic example. Let’s suppose you get a little bit better
at negotiating. And we’re not talking about being the world’s greatest negotiator.
00:35:34,000 I’m talking about being a little better than you are. So imagine if you’re
going for a job and you get a job offer for 70,000 pounds. Instead of
taking it as it is, you negotiate. So you do a quick call or a few emails will take about five minutes and you negotiate for 71,000 pounds.
00:35:55,000 Thousand quid more. That is not a huge lift. We can all imagine doing that. If you’re 30 years old and you do this negotiation and you do
nothing else in your career. If you sit in that same job for 30 years, five
minutes of negotiating just got you a thousand pounds more for the next 30 years, you just got 30,000 pounds.
00:36:18,000 That’s amazing. These skills that we’re talking about, they’re not
learned the way we traditionally teach things. When you were learning
the periodic table, your teacher said, here are the elements. And this is a proton that’s a neutron. Remember it. And you’d remember it and you’d write down on the test. That’s not how we learn leadership networking, negotiating or all these other skills.
00:36:42,000 There is no formula. There’s not simple stuff to memorize. It’s more akin
to learning a sport or learning how to play an instrument. You have to
try it. You have to practice. You have to get feedback and reflection.
00:36:55,000 And so the best way to learn these skills is through peer learning
groups in this program that give away for free is on your organization can do to use it. The hangry snarglow, which has, that’s a monster which encourages a ferocious appetite for work and people taking on
too much. Now the problem with that is, as you’ve said Nigel, is that
often that means critical processes in the hands of just a few people.
00:37:22,000 And ultimately that means the business isn’t really secure long term because if you take away that person, which could happen because
nothing else we’ve learnt from the last couple of years is how volatile
everything is and how things can just change quickly. I had a podcast
interview scheduled two days ago and I was just about to start it and I
had to go to the hospital with my child and my child is fine. But you just
never know when things are going to happen. So if you’re not planning for these kind of random events in your business and for people to
cover for other people, your business isn’t as secure and it’s also not as scalable.
00:38:04,000 Lots of fantastic books out there from, you know, from PMI, Agile Business Consortium in particular around Agile project and program and portfolio management. But even they focus mostly on IT enabled
stuff and I just wanted to get away from that and say let’s look and see
what any project might look like if you apply agility to it. And to my mind then once you’ve done that you can say, ah, you can use that as a model for building an organization that’s friendly to projects.
00:38:41,000 Other models are available but he is one and I think it works. And I have sometimes chanted a few folk on blogs around this is when someone says I’m being agile. Question I ask is what agile are you being or what agile are you talking about? I’ve seen you ask that
question because it’s someone says I’m being agile and I’m doing this that the other.
00:39:09,000 I’m saying are you talking about software development? Yeah, okay,
that’s fine, okay, so we know this. And so for example, then you can
then go off and talk about scrubs and business. If someone says well
actually I’m talking about how we do in the project and then someone says ah, and then they start talking scrum language.
00:39:32,000 Well that’s not right because one is the software development approach and the other one is a project management approach and they’re not
the same thing. Because uncertainty threatens are very survivable so if
you as you talk back to caveman times and if there was uncertainty it
was am I going to get eaten by a tiger or or whatever. Or am I going to
find food to eat today and that actually both of those threaten your very existence and uncertainty creates a threat around am I safe?
00:40:16,000 Can I can I survive this threat in the pandemic was a great example of
that where it was an existential crisis of uncertainty and and there is the
existential psychologists have done lots of research into that and said
that whenever there is uncertainty and levels of anxiety will naturally increase. And that’s certainly what we saw in the pandemic and of course you’ve got different stakeholders who have different perspectives who all want different things. And yeah, that often is
surprising but I don’t know why it’s surprising because of course they have different things.
00:40:56,000 You know the sales director is always going to want something different
from the ops director because they’re encended in different ways and therefore their requirements are always going to be different. And
actually that’s a positive thing because what that does is it creates a
more well rounded and more holistic view this is where. As as project
managers and as leaders we need to be able to develop those skills of
uncertainty and the skills to be able to say okay so if you want that tell
me why you want that would be really curious because what we tend to do is we make judgments really quickly and of course in uncertainty those judgments are based on very little foundation.
00:41:42,000 And I’m in my stressed out situation I move to three and when I’m in my
relax situation I move to nine right and the underlying you know I’ll back
out a little bit you know so even though there’s nine types you can also
think of it as three groups of three. And there’s an underlying motivator
for each one of these groups of three and you know so the driver for the
eight the nine and the one is anger and the driver for the five the six
and the seven is anxiety and the driver for the two three and four is
feelings. So you have these three drivers and then as we are moving to
situations those drivers will induce us to respond in certain ways i’ll tell you the punch line right so.
00:42:44,000 Anyogram is this nine step system and it just happens that there are
also these nine personality types one suited for each step in problem
solving so if you know where you are in in the problem solving process
then you’ll know what personality dynamic is best suited for that and
then I even will go into you know because all all types. And then all
types have access to all the other types meet we all do is just with more
or less ease right and you know so of course i’m a six so I have I know I
have access to my type six and I’ve already told you I have access to
the nine and the three and I and I also have access to what are called
the wings the types on either side of me so I also have access to the
five and the seven and I see the light bulb. And I see the light bulbs go
on and then you just like sense this excitement in the group and then
they start to formulate you know what they want the world to look like when the problem is solved.
00:43:56,000 And then they you know they i move them through you know type in a step two make sure you have all the team members step three come up with some ideas step four choose the best ideas step five you know
validate them step six build a plan. Step six build a plan around them
step seven build a presentation about the plan and show it to the CEO and they do that and and they present to the CEO and the CEOs like yeah go do it. [Music]