Simon: Any business that isn’t concentrating on its resource isn’t going to do so well, and any business that is spending a lot of time on its resources is doing well. So in most businesses, that’s people. And if you look after them in the right kind of way, you tend to do really well — weirdly, often overlooked.
Ben: Hey, thanks for listening. We’ve been starting, growing and leading businesses for over 50 years between us. Along the way, we’ve met lots of amazing people doing the same. We started to collect their wisdom, things they’d seen, real experiences that had taught them something, things they’d read that had inspired, and things they’d learned, the principles they’ve applied in growing their businesses. We call these Founder Hacks — the real experiences of real entrepreneurs growing real businesses. And this podcast is to share them with you. Welcome to Founder Hacks.
Ben: Hello and welcome to another episode of Founder Hacks, our podcast where we like to collate, cogitate upon and ruminate upon the learning of fabulous entrepreneurs. Let me start by saying a quick hello and check in with Antony Enright. Antony, what have you been up to?
Antony: Oh, it’s been a great week this week — a bit of travelling, a great conference on Tuesday evening at Birkbeck University with somebody we’re going to be talking to shortly, and a fabulous day with a team doing really purposeful work in Manchester. So yeah, really good this week.
Ben: Amazing, good to hear. And you are quite correct — we are very, very excited today because we’ve got a wonderful guest. Mr Simon Ursell is a serial founder — he sold his first business at the tender age of 24. He then went on to experience the world of work and business from the biggest PLCs to the earliest-stage startups. Today he is founder and chairperson at Tyler Grange, an environmental consulting company with a team of 120, delivering ecological consultancy to enable development to get done in the kindest way for the planet. A passionate believer in people-led businesses for high performance, Simon embraces even the most contemporary thinking — recently he was sharing with us that a four-day week in his business boosted revenue by 30 percent, which sounds quite impressive. Simon is also a coach, both in the world of rugby, I believe, and to entrepreneurs and business leaders. We couldn’t be more excited. Simon, welcome.
Simon: Thanks very much — slightly embarrassed, I’m going red.
Ben: Simon, you look really comfortable.
Antony: As Ben was doing the intro they’re really comfortable.
Ben: Yeah, well, we like to make a fuss — we’re very privileged to have you.
Simon: Well, you’re very kind.
Ben: Not at all, not at all — we’re excited to have you learning. And I think we were chatting, and there’s a bit of a theme, I kind of mentioned it in the intro — it’s this passion of yours for people-led businesses for performance improvement, for high performance. Do you want to give a little flavour of what that theme is, to wet the taste buds?
Simon: Yeah, well, I think any business that isn’t concentrating on its resource isn’t going to do so well. And any business that is spending a lot of time on its resources is doing well. So in most businesses, that’s people. If you look after them in the right kind of way, you tend to do really well — weirdly often overlooked. I don’t really understand why, but in this day and age it tends to be — get stuff done, not worry too much about looking after people, a lot of lip service to properly looking after people. But when you do, you get unbelievable results. So yeah, that’s what I think.
Ben: That’s dead exciting, it sounds like there’s a lot there, dear listener, for us to put into our businesses, picking over Simon’s brain. I think we’ve had this on Founder Hacks before, haven’t we — that when you think about what a business is, it’s just people, staff, people and things, and people get obsessed with the stuff but often forget about the people, which is a bit of a dangerous thing to do, as it is all you’ve got, really. But look, let’s crack on, because time waits for no one. And I’m really excited to hear, Simon — first of all, what have you seen that has taught you something?
Simon: Well, the first thing I thought of was a YouTube clip from a guy called Mustafa Sarkar, who’s a professor of psychology at Nottingham Trent, and he’s a specialist in sport, world class, goes all over the world talking about resilience — something I’m particularly interested in, when people are dealing with challenges every day, they’re stressed, social media isn’t that great for you, all these kinds of things, a lot of pressure on people. How do we help them perform at their best? Well, Mustafa is literally world class at doing that in sport, and I think it’s very relatable to business. He’s got this brilliant video called ‘The Role of the Environment’ on YouTube — look it up, it’s absolutely superb. It’s one of these matrices where you’re looking at, on one axis, support, and on the other, challenge. Most businesses I observe have either got very high support or very high challenge, but if you provide very high support and very high challenge, it tends to lead to very high performance. My experience of that is with Tyler Grange — certainly in the early days we were all about high support, because we really love our team, we love the people working for us, we want to look after them, so we did loads of great things, helping them out, giving them lots of time off and rewards. But we really did neglect the challenge, and it wasn’t until we started hanging around with psychologists — Mustafa being one, and another lady called Suzanne, our in-house psychologist — he suggested we were missing a big part of a high-performance environment, and actually a fun environment, by not having enough challenge in place. So Mustafa would call high challenge, low support a ‘relentless’ environment — you see that a lot in sport, and they tend to have short-term success that fails quickly, a lot of burnout, staff turnover, it’s quite damaging for people to be in. He says there is no excuse for any individual to stay in a relentless environment, and you should leave — I’d agree with that. And then you’ve got what he’d call a ‘comfortable’ environment, low challenge but very high support — that would be Tyler Grange, where people are just knocking around, having a good time, but not really achieving that much because they’re not being asked to, and people get quite sad in that environment too — a bit lethargic and not really motivated by their work, but sort of stuck because they’re looked after so well they can’t really leave. So it’s quite trapping and blancmange-like and suffocating, that kind of environment. Whereas once we added high challenge, we started really challenging people to do great things, we noticed happiness increasing — and actually we measure our happiness at Tyler Grange, my son’s a computer scientist and built an app that measures fatigue and happiness, we’ve got a fighter pilot called Kev who helped us build it, he wrote the code — a little mini survey that happens every day, backed by science on measuring fatigue and happiness. So we know on a daily basis whether our team is tired or unhappy, and we’ve seen happiness go up once we started putting challenge in, which is interesting, isn’t it. Oh, and then you’ve got the other polarity, the opposite — a stagnant environment, low challenge, low support, which you tend to see in the public sector quite a bit.
Ben: What did the data tell you when you started implementing more challenge — what did the data tell you around happiness?
Simon: Well, happiness went up. We do a simple survey on happiness and it increased — people were telling us they were enjoying the challenge, and I think they do. I’m not a psychologist, I’d just like to say that from the outset, but I am told that humans have a basic need to live a purposeful life — what is it that I’m here to do. By adding challenge to your organisation, you’re giving them a sense of a higher purpose, and that purpose generally makes you happier if it’s bigger than yourself. People like to join movements, we’re social creatures. And when we set a challenge, a purpose bigger than us — I mean there’s monetary value, yes, businesses need to make money, but if you’re saying, we’re going this way, we’re trying to save the planet by building developments in a way that helps rather than hinders the environment, people feel like that’s a bigger purpose. And then we make it really challenging to do that, by going and doing really difficult projects — people feel like they’re doing great stuff, they go home, they boast to their family and friends about the great work they’re doing, and they feel good about themselves. So yeah, high challenge is very important for the environment they’re working in.
Ben: How did you shift from that support to the challenge — because it sounds easy, but I should imagine in practice it’s quite difficult, is it?
Simon: Yeah, a lot of support, funnily enough — but what you do is you tell them what you want to do. We point to the research, we get the psychologist in to talk about why we’re going to do what we’re doing, and then we made it playful — I was hanging out with the guys at the Play Lab in Exeter, shout-out to them, if you’re aware of them, part of Exeter Business School, a purpose-built building about play in business, really fascinating place, quite trendy with Lego, but these guys take it to the next level. If you type PlayLabX Exeter Business School in, you can find some great resources. But I spent a week with those guys learning about play — they mainly look at it towards academics, so it’s quite unusual for an entrepreneur to be knocking around with them, but I learned a lot. So we made it quite playful — our challenge process is called C3PO. It’s a C, three Ps, and an O, and we try to make it an enjoyable process of challenge, and give it to the individual to own.
Ben: So let me get this right — the C stands for challenge, obviously, and then we’ve got purpose, obviously one of the Ps…
Simon: Profit is another one, P is people — how you relate to other people — and O is opportunity, are you taking opportunities to seek out challenges. That is our version of an appraisal. So we’ve made it quite playful and fun, because that helps people access it without feeling too frightened that it’s going to make their lives hard — because it does make their lives hard, but they enjoy life being hard. People do.
Ben: Amazing. So this was worked into effect, like really stretching — did you go stretch goals, or what was the thing?
Simon: Yeah, it was led by them — we gave them guidance, people want guidance, want leadership. So we said, what the business is trying to do, our budget, here’s the thing we’re trying to do, which is solve climate change, biodiversity loss in the UK, and poverty — we’ve got big goals. But then someone’s got to have a go, so that’s a higher purpose with a financial budget, and this is what we’ve got to do, you’re paid this, you need to build this, those kinds of things. But then really with C3PO, it’s handed over to them with — how are you going to achieve these targets, and what support do you need from us. So then they’re able to take ownership over that process, which really helps. The more junior members of the team, in our case graduates straight out of university, need a lot more guidance, a lot more tell. The more senior people, very little guidance, very little tell — we’re very much, you know what you’re doing, this is what you’ve got to achieve, tell us how you’re going to do it, and then do it, and we provide them with whatever resources they feel they need to achieve their purpose. And it works — we’ve made a lot of money out of it.
Ben: Do the senior leaders then bring that to their teams — bringing that same support and challenge?
Simon: Yes, we have a two-day leadership course everyone has to go on if they’re going to be a leader — run by our psychologist Suzanne, by a mindfulness coach called Luke, who Antony knows, and by another guy called Rusty, a world-class sports coach, and the three of them developed a leadership training course which is sensationally good. Everybody in a leadership role at Tyler Grange also has to become a trained mentor — Suzanne and her friend Ellen, two psychologists, run a three-day residential course on mentoring people and doing that effectively. And that’s all linked to C3POs, and another thing we call dream catching, which is the flip side of this, about the individual and what they want, and that can be anything. We actually encourage — we have very, very little problem with staff turnover, we’re Sunday Times top place to work, and we have the lowest flight risk they’ve come across for some time, apparently, because we’re looking after people, which we’re very proud of. However, we do like new people coming in with new ideas, and we don’t want to trap people in Tyler Grange, so the dream catcher is a way of helping people realise what they want out of life — with a trained mentor, sit down and work out what they want to do. We had an ecologist want to become a primary school teacher, so we helped them train to be a primary school teacher. We had a tree surveyor who wanted to emigrate to Australia, so we helped do that. I had a guy the other day who’s an electrician — he was in our admin team but wanted to be an electrician, so we trained him, and he set his own business up and is now a brilliant electrician. So the principle is anyone who leaves Tyler Grange should speak really highly of Tyler Grange — doesn’t always work though, just check out our Glassdoor profile, there’s loads of rude things said about us on it, but that’s because we challenge people.
Ben: But I loved it, and that’s something you mentioned, right, that when we talked about this, of course it doesn’t work for everyone. The organisation I lead at the moment is very purposeful, and I sort of have to sit down with new people, and everyone says, I want to work for a purposeful organisation, and I say, you sure? Because do you know what that means? When you come here, everyone does everything with their whole chest — people really mean it. And I’ve definitely found that can be quite frightening. Do you find that sometimes people come in and go, oh, I didn’t actually mean it, I didn’t actually want a purposeful organisation?
Simon: Yeah, we’ve got really good interviewing — have you seen the Heineken interview?
Ben: I don’t think I have.
Simon: It’s not real, it’s like a sketch, like the best interview ever, quite an interesting video. So we try to do quite — we have a lot of secret missions in our interviews, we have a thing called Five Things — say people bring five things with them to talk about, to try and help them relax and talk about themselves — and we try and find a lot about the person before they join us. So we’re pretty good at filtering those out, but we reckon 5 to 10 percent would hate working at Tyler Grange, and like I say, check out Glassdoor to prove it — but that’s because we really challenge people, and it’s really hard. Four-day week sounds lovely but it’s actually really hard — the deal with our four-day week is we’ve got to be better in four days than we were on five, so we’ve got to be quite intense. That doesn’t mean we do more hours in the four days, by the way, it does mean we still stick to core hours, and you still get paid the same salary as you would for five days, but the deal is you’ve got to be better, otherwise I will stop doing it. So everybody has to find innovative different ways of working to be better, and there are plenty of people who don’t like that kind of intensity and don’t share our purpose and values. The Five Things really attest to see what their values are, to see if they match ours. But yeah, we do things like — we make especially the most senior FD, when I recruited him, make everyone a cup of tea in the office, and I primed everybody in advance to say I was going to do that, so they all had loads of wacky, weird different herbal teas and coffees with different milks and all sorts of stuff, and he had to go around and did a great job, he just persevered and did it, and I wanted to see if he was the kind of guy who’d think that was beneath him, or would be a bit like, this is weird — and he didn’t, he just thought, oh, this is interesting, and they all asked him weird questions, but he chatted to everybody, he’s quite sociable, because a lot of FDs I meet aren’t that great with their people skills, and I wanted an FD who was going to be really good on that. So yeah, we try and design our interviews to help us not bring people into this difficult — I mean, we don’t always succeed, but it’s pretty rare now that we get people in who don’t understand what we’re about. I mean, we had someone leave recently who’d been with us for six months, and it wasn’t going to work out — they didn’t share our values, or their values were brilliant, but they weren’t ours.
Ben: That’s okay.
Antony: Well, I’m a great believer in that, and when you say goodbye to people from your company, which sometimes it’s right to do for them and for you, it’s about fit, isn’t it. And I like to believe — I react sometimes when you hear founders talk about, oh, they were a bad person — going, no, they weren’t, I don’t think that’s a thing. Actually, people aren’t bad, it just wasn’t right for you, and it wasn’t right for them, and I’m sure they’ll go on and fly somewhere.
Ben: But again, we’re going to have to move on, because I think there’s so much more richness to come out here, I’ve got so many questions but we’ll have to do — we’d love to do a part two.
Simon: Absolutely.
Ben: Have to get you back. We’ve got some really exciting stuff to come, which I know, but dear listener, you will discover with us, because Simon has more to say. And I would love to hear, Simon, what have you read?
Simon: Well, what I’m reading at the moment, I haven’t finished it yet, is this book, Navigating Polarities — you can’t see, listener, but I’m holding it up to the camera — it’s by Brian Emerson and Kelly Lewis, and I’m really enjoying it. It was given to me by Suzanne, our psychologist, I think because she recognised this was something that would help me, and it definitely has. What it’s talking about is looking at the other side of things, the polarity — so the example from Mustafa of high challenge, high support, those are polarities. A lot of people would see challenge as one thing and support as another. The sweet spot is when you have both. The subtitle of the book is ‘using both-and thinking to lead to transformation’ — very clever book, really nicely written, has pictures, which is pretty cool. There’s so many examples in here of polarity — another example is doing it right and just doing it. I’m definitely a sort of entrepreneurial, let’s just get it done, let’s go out and do stuff, worry about fixing it as we go, let’s just do it person. But actually I gain hugely from doing it right — the FD I’m talking about, he’s definitely more of a do-it-right kind of person, and I stress him out by just doing stuff, and I’m like, yeah, come on, let’s just get on with it. But actually there’s a really cool, transformational place where both of us are thinking about just doing it and doing it right, and that’s where the magic happens, in the middle of those. There are other examples in here — compete and collaborate. So let’s have a business where it’s competitive, we’re setting targets, challenging people, giving people ladders, saying you’re here, let’s try and beat the next person, let’s compete — that’s high performance, isn’t it, with support, I guess. I feel a bit stressed saying that, but it’s probably true. And then you’ve got collaboration, where you’re working together to achieve a common goal, which again is high performance, but those two things are polarities, opposites in many contexts. But in the middle, where we’re both collaborating and there’s some competition, that’s where the magic’s happening. This is very much led by my sporting coaching background, this kind of thinking, and there’s some great stuff from sport, some awful stuff too, in terms of really relentless environments that aren’t very pleasant, but I think sport does this stuff pretty well.
Ben: Simon, could you give us an example where you’ve seen the competition and the collaboration meet that sweet spot?
Simon: Wow, I don’t think I’ve seen it very often, if I’m completely honest. I guess it’s a total cliché, but the All Blacks would probably be the thing that springs to mind — I assume you’ve read Legacy, the All Blacks book about the culture, very much one of real competition for places but massive amounts of collaboration on how to get better as a team. So individually you’re competing like heck, but you’re also really giving great feedback and support to people — I think that would be a great example. The example I’ve seen the least of recently is from a sort of world of sport where I’ve got involved a little bit — e-sports. I don’t know if you guys are that familiar with it, because I’m not, but there’s a guy called Caleb Cooper who I met, fascinating guy, running an e-sports team in Canada, coaching in e-sports. I didn’t know this — this is a fact from Caleb, so if I get found out this being wrong, it might be, but I’m pretty sure he’s right — more people watch e-sports than watch all other sport combined.
Ben: That surprised me, that blew my mind.
Simon: So this is what the next generation are watching for their competition fix. And in terms of this compete-collaborate, there’s a massive overemphasis on competition, mainly led by the big Chinese franchises, which are the really super big teams, and they’re just burning kids out and throwing them away. Caleb started a real collaboration approach to his team in Canada, and they started beating the Chinese teams. So I think there’s a nice example from sport in the business world — I think you probably do get a bit more collaboration and competition as a norm than you would in sport, so there’s probably less stark examples of it, but there are so many polarities in here, I could just go on and on, they’re fascinating.
Ben: Well it’s really interesting, because Antony, I mean we’ve had this many times on Founder Hacks, where it’s this thing or that thing, it’s oh should we be one polarity or the other, it’s quite black and white. And of course our answer is always, well, you’ve got to balance it, right? But I don’t think we’ve ever had a guest who’s actually said, well, here’s a way to do that, because every entrepreneur is like, how do you balance between the different choices your business needs to make every day, how do you help your people do that? Because they’re all making those choices, but this sounds like an actual methodology to go, yeah, there is a sweet spot.
Simon: Well, the book’s good, but there is truth in it, it’s not the truth. I think you’ve got to be intelligent, haven’t you, and take away what works for you. The key to this — and again this speaks to polarities — there’s no right or wrong, because people are individuals, organisations are individual, and what works for one won’t work for others. I’m always very suspicious of someone who says, follow my tips and it’ll work — I mean, yes, it might, and it’ll help, I would have thought, if it’s well thought through, but you’ve got to be intelligent enough — I guess it’s applied, isn’t it, like in the world of science, you talk about physics, you talk about applied physics, it’s clever, intelligent application of theory to a specific circumstance. There’s a guy I know really well who we use at Tyler Grange to do training on delegation, Justin Reuter, he’s a two-star Air Force general, ran the air war against Daesh, was the last guy in Camp Bastion, fascinating guy — he talks about this kind of approach too, in terms of getting the best out of people, delegation, having a really well set-up team, allowing individuals the power to do things, but also making sure you’re giving clear instruction and leading the way. So it’s that real high support, real high challenge environment you get in the military. The other fascinating thing about going into other worlds — military, sport, business — everyone thinks they’re doing it wrong, which I find fascinating. You talk to Justin and he’s going, oh, we’re rubbish in the military, we’ve got so much to learn from business — and I’m sitting there going, well, business is hopeless, it’s an absolute car crash, I don’t know what you mean. And then you talk to someone in sport and they go, oh, we really want to learn from business and the military, they’re always getting the SAS in, aren’t they, to run around with them. Everyone thinks they’re doing it wrong. There was a guy I spoke to, ex-Special Forces trainer, he talked about looking up, looking over the fence — he was in the SBS, there was a lot of swimming, he said you’re swimming along and occasionally you’ve got to stop and look behind you to see how far you’ve come, and look to see what’s around you. It’s that kind of approach, isn’t it, looking over the fence to see what’s going on in other worlds. And I think curiosity may have killed the cat, but the cat was going to die of starvation if it wasn’t curious, was it. It’s the journey, perhaps, not the destination — what I’m taking from it is, this is not, you know, we often like to look at things and think they’re problems to solve, and actually a lot of things in life aren’t problems to solve, they’re ongoing efforts to manage something, to work at it, to continually explore and review and stay open. And what’s brilliant — how dull would life be if you didn’t have a chance to overcome? I like a challenge, I’d be — my wife gets a little bit cross because I’m always going after challenges, and actually my mindfulness coach is trying to help me sit and just be occasionally, which I am working on. So there’s a polarity, isn’t there — the pause, the centering, the chilling out, being calm, and then the curiosity and interest, looking for interesting things to do. I’m definitely on the trying-to-find-things-to-do polarity, but I am working quite hard to find some balance between that and the ability to wait, to pause, to be calm, because I’m aware that makes me perform at a better standard.
Ben: Very cool. Well, I can’t wait to hear, on the basis of all this wonderful experience and learning — what have you learned, Simon?
Simon: Well, again, what I’m learning — I’m suspicious of ‘learnt.’
Ben: I’m loving the present tense.
Simon: I love the present tense — it’s brilliant. If I ever felt I’d learnt, if I’d found the secret, I’d be a much wealthier guy than I am. Maybe Elon Musk has learnt, but I’m not so sure. But what I am learning is about stories. I’ve been hanging out with a storyteller called Claire Murphy, world-class as a storyteller — she’s an Irish storyteller, specialises in telling stories, unbelievably good at it. She’s got a show at the moment called The Spanking Goddess, which sounds very dodgy, but it isn’t, it’s just a hook. She tells stories where women are the main protagonist, from ancient fables, because generally they’re blokes like Achilles with a sword going off to fight wars, and she tells stories like a goddess — a spanking goddess — which are from ancient times about women. It’s a fabulous show, she was at the Edinburgh Fringe, went really well, so she’s a cool lady. But she works in really challenging teams — she works with the FBI, she’s worked with NASA, worked with the All Blacks, worked in the NHS during Covid, they got her in to help, worked with the UK government, the Canadian government, worked in really challenging places, hostage negotiation, things like that, where people have to communicate incredibly well. And one of the things I’m learning from her is how to tell stories, the power of stories. A great example is telling stories about the four-day week — I’ve spoken a lot about it, there’s a lot of press around it, a lot of anger around it, which I think is a bit weird, but I’m accepting that there’s a lot of anger. So when you say to somebody who’s always done a five-day week, what have you thought about doing a four-day week, they get angry. I was chatting to Claire about this because I get hate mail occasionally, which I quite like, because it shows I’m challenging people — I’ve been on the telly, the BBC, CNBC, doing the four-day week thing, and then I’ll get messages saying, oh, you woke so-and-so, some colourful language, saying, why are you doing this, the country needs to work harder, it’s lazy, all this kind of stuff. It’s not — a four-day week is really about extraordinarily high performance, and making sure we’re supporting people to achieve extraordinarily high performance. By getting people to focus on a task, they’re going to be better at it. Would you expect an American football team, a rugby team, a football team, to play that sport five days a week from nine to five and be good at it? No, of course you wouldn’t, that would be totally mad. Why do you think we can do that in work? And what Claire gave me was a story to tell before I started doing that, and I’ve deliberately been doing this the wrong way around, because I wanted to provoke the fight-flight-freeze response in you guys, because I start talking about that and you start thinking about a five-day week going, oh, that’s old rubbish. I know the response I’m going to get from doing that — because when I stood up on stage, afterwards people would queue up to talk to me, quite a few would queue up to tell me why I was wrong, which I thought was weird — it’s like, well, okay, maybe I’m wrong, but my business is making massively more money on a four-day week than it was on five, so I think I’m right. But anyway, I’m wrong, and it may be down to other things. What people tend to say to me is, well, if you just did a five-day week, you’d do even better, wouldn’t you? And I’m like, that just blows my mind, really, you think that? So I was telling Claire this, and she gave me the story. Do you want me to tell it, do we have time? So, I want to take you back at least a thousand years, to a temple, and there’s a guru in the temple working with his disciples on a mountaintop, very peaceful and calm, and they’re practising meditation. Just as they’re getting ready to start, a kitten comes in and starts messing around, annoying them, distracting them. The guru’s trying to get everyone to ignore it, but in the end he thinks, this isn’t really working, so he gets hold of the kitten, gives it a stroke, puts a lead on it, and whilst they’re practising, ties it to one of the posts in the temple. Anyway, the kitten keeps coming in, so he keeps tying it up, and this happens day after day after day. And every day he looks for the kitten, now a cat, ties it up. Several years later the guru’s pretty old, and unfortunately he passes away, so one of the disciples becomes the new guru, and he thinks, oh, what should I do first? Oh, I know, I’d better tie the cat up. So he goes to find the cat, ties it up. This happens, goes on a cycle, so the cat, sadly, eventually dies, and he thinks, what am I going to do, I haven’t got a cat to tie up, so he goes down, finds the local village, finds a cat, catches it, brings it back to the temple so he can tie it up before practice each morning. Next few hundred years pass, all the disciples go out into the world, lots of temples start tying up cats before practice. And 500 years later there’s a massive conference of gurus, they all come together and talk about the significance of tying up their cats, and why it’s important, and the metaphysical and incredible reasons why tying a cat up is important. But it doesn’t mean anything — he just tied a cat up, there was no meaning. And the metaphor for a five-day week is — well, you’re only doing it because you’ve always done it, you’ve been doing it since you were four years old when you went to school, is it the best way for you to work? Because it isn’t. It’s a cat. It might be — but if you’ve never asked that question, I think you’re doing your organisation a massive disservice, and you have no place leading it. You should be asking those difficult, challenging questions — should we be doing a five-day week, should it be four, should it be six, should it be three, should it be ten? Who knows, ten in seven days would be fun, wouldn’t it. So that story, and the way it’s presented, allows you to get through the fight-flight-freeze response of people when they’re being challenged. Because according to Claire, we’ve been telling stories to each other for hundreds of thousands of years, we’ve only been able to write and spell for about 150 years as a species — before that all our communication was done via stories, and because of that, our brains have evolved to listen to and tell stories. So when you’re listening to a story it switches off pretty much all of the rest of your brain, because you have to have a mental picture in your head, you have to pay attention to it, it’s a really difficult thing to do if you’re distracted, and so your fight-flight-freeze response can’t be switched on because you’re having to listen to a story. So there’s a reason that Buddha, Muhammad, Jesus, all these big historical figures in religion tell parables and stories — this is why, because it allows them to get their message across in an incredibly powerful way. And I think what I’m learning is the power of storytelling, and the ability to tell stories really well, is massive for leadership.
Ben: And Simon, do you see now, you’re telling these stories, do you see a difference in the reaction you’re getting from people when you’re on stage?
Simon: I get no hate — nobody comes up and gives me a hard time, there will be challenging questions and curiosity, all those kind of things, but it’s actually weird, I can’t really explain it — Claire explains it through this idea around your brain having to be occupied, I’m not so sure, but she also works in the NHS as an acute pain consultant, where people with pain that painkillers won’t work on, she runs a storytelling workshop for them, and it’s the only time those individuals don’t feel pain, and the theory is because the bit of their brain that processes pain has to be switched off while you’re listening to or telling stories. I mean that’s pretty — you’ll have to — I mean if I get called out on this, that’s what Claire told me, because I find it hard to believe, we’ll get it wrong, we’ll have her on.
Ben: Simon, this sounds great, it’s fantastic, it sounds fascinating, doesn’t it. And I think for people that have those challenges — I was fortunate enough to hear Simon speak on Tuesday night at an event, and afterwards there was somebody queuing up to speak to Simon, and I got chatting to him, and he’s got a change programme to go through and doesn’t know how to manage that team through the change programme, because he’s getting a lot of negative, and we started talking about the power of storytelling, right through, because of your fable from earlier, and how you can actually change the response from those people — that’s fascinating.
Simon: Yeah, it’s really fascinating — I think when you’re trying to help people go through change, stories, parables are really powerful. Claire’s currently storyteller in residence at Tyler Grange — I managed to persuade her to give us a day a month, which is really hard because she’s a super busy lady, but she likes Tyler Grange because she likes the purpose and mission we’re on. So she wants to help — she’s working with our team, and because we’re consultants, our job is telling stories, we’re writing reports, trying to get a message across about what we’re trying to achieve in terms of a development. That’s storytelling — it’s not once-upon-a-time, like the parable I just did, it’s really about how we communicate and do it effectively. So she’s training our team, but also working on our culture and values — because we think the whole five-values thing, ours are opportunity, caring, belonging, kind of things, they are useful and relevant, but I think they’ve become very trite and old hat. So she’s going to help us develop a storytelling culture at Tyler Grange, a storytelling set of values, so when people come into the organisation they’ll hear stories from people in the organisation, when they come to interview they’ll be told stories — it’s a human-to-human thing, not very easy to do on a video, we’ll probably create a book or videos, but the most important thing, and what I’m learning, is that it’s about two people or a group of people sitting around telling and sharing stories, and that’s what really matters, and is incredibly powerful.
Antony: I love it — I’m reminded of a concept around narrative identity, because we live in a world that’s so complex, stories are our mechanism that we’ve evolved to help us understand it, so it always resonates deeply for me. I’ve always said I think my job leading my company is really to be the person who tells the story — it’s a live story, a living story, one we write together, but I think it’s incredibly powerful. And it loops back around, doesn’t it, because I’m now thinking back to what you said originally, Simon — it’s almost like when you’re working with your people in your organisation, you’re helping them tell their own story about what they’re going to do for the company and how.
Simon: What a beautiful way to loop it around, and it’s so powerful, and you can get so much more engagement with it, people love it as well. I think in a few weeks’ time Claire’s going to do a storytelling workshop for the team and all their family members — their kids, partners, family can come along and listen to her telling stories, the purpose behind that is to start the development of this community, because it’s not just the employees, it’s their family and friends around them as well, they’re part of the narrative and part of the community we’re trying to create as any organisation. I’m just looking in my journal here — I’ve got one, two, three, four, five, six, so it’s eight stories Claire’s helped me learn to be able to tell. They’re so brilliant, because I can pick one out and use it if I want to help somebody understand something. And if there’s one thing people take away from this podcast in terms of learning, it’s — go and find out how to tell stories really well, it will change your life.
Ben: Amazing. Well, look, I think, again, we often say this to our guests — will you come back again, Simon? Because I think there’s so much more we could learn from you, so we would love to have you back another time. But I think we are at time, so I will do my very best to try to summarise some fantastic Founder Hacks. Simon saw a YouTube video from a psychologist that set him on a whole new path, explaining how people perform at their best — a simple model that invites us to offer people both high support and high challenge. Simon engaged the team on this model, and made it playful with C3PO — challenge, purpose, profit, people, opportunity — and laid out the purpose they were serving. He then brought the right questions to help people tell themselves a new story about their performance and their future, realising dreams both for the company and for the people. The book Simon read, Navigating Polarity, gave Simon inspiration about navigating the balance we so often find a need for in our world of leading and growing our businesses. By recognising these polarities — do it right or just do it, collaborate or compete, any of the contradictions we often encounter — Simon was able to make conscious choices to seek the sweet spot to unlock an optimal outcome. Perhaps an answer to a question we’ve regularly explored on Founder Hacks — that the answer is balance. But finally, maybe there’s some method in the madness, and we can find a way to work out what the right balance is for us, across all the contradictions we have to navigate — and noting that’s an ongoing process of challenge, not a problem you’ll ever solve. Finally, Simon is learning about stories, hanging out with Claire Murphy, a storytelling master — bringing her experience from those challenging environments, from the FBI to the NHS — Simon has learned how stories can change the world. Applying this to his passion for a four-day week, Simon has taken that story into the world and found people engage at a deeper and more profound level. So what’s your story? And critically, are there any cats in your temple? If you’ve not asked the most challenging, the most difficult questions of your business that could potentially revolutionise those long-accepted conventions, are you truly serving your business, your people, as you could? Perhaps you too will find that stories can transform your business, your people, and your world. Simon, thank you, I humbly submit my little summary of your Founder Hacks for delectation.
Simon: You did a beautiful job, Ben, well done, thank you, a wonderful thing.
Ben: Well, listen, it remains to say thank you hugely, Simon, for some amazing Founder Hacks. And I think that definitely deserves a little Founder Hacks mini round of applause — now everybody gets a round of applause, Simon, hugely, hugely grateful. And of course thank you to Antony Enright, what a joy to have you on our podcast yet again.
Antony: Thank you both, that was excellent, really good, thank you, Simon.
Ben: Until next time, thank you dear listener, I hope there’s something there that can transform your business and take you to ever greater levels of success and happiness in all that you do. Until next time, I’ve been Ben Thomas, this has been Founder Hacks, and thanks very much indeed for listening. Founder Hacks is brought to you by Atomex — bespoke support for the startup-to-scale-up journey. Editing is by Paul Stevens, and music is by Reuven. Join us again soon for more Founder Hacks.
