Brian Hoadley:
0:16 This is Liminal Leaders, a podcast exploring the changing nature of leadership in business transformation.
Martin Dowson:
0:21 We are your hosts, martin Dowson and Brian Houdly, and not only are we producing this podcast, but we're also writing a book on Liminal Leadership.
Brian Hoadley:
0:30 Each episode follows one of two formats. It's either a drop-in session, where Martin and I discuss various themes in our book, reflecting on health topics that have manifested in our own practice and where we might take our writing next.
Martin Dowson:
0:41 Or Brian and I have a discussion with a guest expert or contributor who we want to interview as part of our research.
Brian Hoadley:
0:48 Either way, these are pretty much the raw recordings of our conversations, with minimal editing, allowing you to listen in on our working and thinking process.
Andy Thornton:
0:58 We need to enable people within those businesses not just sustainability, not just leaders have new capabilities and new ways of thinking about how they show up to work and how they make decisions. And for us, that's about moving from individualistic expressions of how you work and how you maximise profit for your own benefit as a company into a more human, centric expression of how you work with others and how you maximise not just shareholder value but, like, stakeholder values and thinking about the wider system.
Martin Dowson:
1:34 In today's episode, brian and I are in conversation with Andy Thornton, who is the head of regenerative design at the Royal Society of Arts, commerce and Manufacturing, the RSA. This is another wide-ranging conversation, one which covers conversations about Kate Rowe's Donatechonomics how we break the thinking that is paralyzing us from taking the actions that are necessary for us to move society forward. That the role of external forces and the edges of systems in creating the conditions for innovation and change. The role of bravery in leadership and leaders' roles in creating the conditions for that courage in others. Being honest about the fact that change and transformation are actually constant states for most organisations. We cover an element of that conversation about design and systems thinking and those skill sets and their role within business, but also a challenge to let go of some of the attachment to human-centred design and a challenge to the fact that designers being asked to talk more business means that they're actually not providing the role that they should be within a healthy collaborative system to actually challenge and keep business on track for its commitments to both shareholders and stakeholders as well, and the ethics behind design. We're not much in this conversation and actually in reality we're probably going to be inviting Andy back to have another conversation focusing a little bit more on regenerative business as a model itself. We're going to dive in. Brian and I were having a bit of a conversation and Andy then joined us. You'll hear that get started and I hope you get loads out of this. We certainly did, and it's a big part of shifting some of our thinking about where we're going with our research on leadership in minimal spaces. Let's dive in.
Brian Hoadley:
3:46 So, anyway, latour was saying that all design is redesign, and great designers recognise that and they recognise that what they're doing is they're redesigning. So it gets back to that platonic ideal of the thing, and then stages from the thing second degree, third degree, order from the thing. Others are designing from needs, from requirements, so they're designing from something that already exists. So it's fascinating.
Martin Dowson:
4:16 Hello Andy, andy meet, because we're not putting this out on video, people are not going to be able to see that Brian turns up to everything online when it asks him what his name is as Oscar the Grouch. Andy is currently seeing a video of Brian saying Oscar the Grouch and Brian's ring light just to describe for people is reflecting in a picture behind him. It's like a halo that is slightly shifted to the left and fallen down. It's just an observation, not a judgement.
Andy Thornton:
4:50 but Andy, meet Brian Oscar, brian, brian meet Andy, nice to meet you, brian, nice to meet you too. I'm the fallen angel. I suppose we could call it yeah.
Martin Dowson:
5:03 I'm beginning to feel like this might be Brian and I might be good omens series three or something here, but just my current watch Tom, Brian and Andy, thanks very much for joining us. I'm really excited about this conversation. Brian and I both are. I'm a little scared, yeah, A little bit nervous about just the edges of where this conversation could go, and yeah, hopefully nervous in a good way, like an exciting kind of nervous.
Andy Thornton:
5:33 Yeah, yeah, completely.
Brian Hoadley:
5:34 We definitely wouldn't want to do it and the edges of the conversation is a really funny metaphorical point, given things we're talking about.
Martin Dowson:
5:44 Yeah, obviously, andy and I had a bit of a chat before we started to come in on this podcast. I'm a fellow at the RSA and, andy, your role at the RSA is head of regenerative design yeah head of regenerative design. We were discussing at one of the fellow's festivals this whole theme of exploration and, brian, as I shared with you, it was just timely for the conversations we've had about the kind of pivot that we need, the kind of reset we needed to do for this.
Brian Hoadley:
6:16 Yeah, we've talked about. It's funny. We started in that very defined safe space at the core of our thinking, so things that we started with what we knew, what we've been through, and we had even outlined what a book could look like based on that, which, of course, is now in the shredder, as it were. And I think what we've done is we've tried to, with each episode and with each conversation, we've tried to unshackle our thinking to a degree or peel back layers of the onion or maybe try and get to the outer layers of the onion. And I think we've started at the core. We tried to work our way out of the onion.
Martin Dowson:
7:01 So the theme of this exploration that the RSA is doing under its mission of design for life about regenerative business really struck a chord with Brian and I, even though we know that we haven't deep dived into it in the way that you have. Would you mind, just for those listening, just perhaps explaining a bit about the RSA's most recent articulation of its mission, design for life, and then what regenerative business is, how that fits into the RSA's mission and an overview of what that is really deep dive into some of the really interesting areas that has gone into?
Andy Thornton:
7:37 Yeah, sure, yeah, I think there's a lot to unpack there as well. You know we're going straight into the word regeneration and so there's probably a little bit of rewind. We want to do with that at some point as well, just to clarify. But yeah, like the and I'm relatively new to the RSA, so I think that's useful context. So I was actually drawn to the RSA because of the new mission, because of design for life. Design for life is all about how can we make people place in planet thrive and allow people to reach their full potential, and that's a mission that's been, I think, probably bubbling under for a few years, from what I can gather, but has come to sharp focus with Andy Heldane the new. CEO, joining probably somewhere between like a year and a half ago, something like that, there was already a lot of really interesting work going on to explore what is regeneration and what is. What does that mean? What is that topic? What? How do we unpack that? There was a regenerative futures piece of work happening and you could say with the design for life mission it's actually elevated regeneration as a topic to that sort of top level overarching commission of the organization, whereas before it was very much like one strand of inquiry, one thing that we were thinking about, and now umbrella is a lot of the wider mission. So for me it's like a really exciting mission because my background is probably a bit closer to both of you actually to some degree, not necessarily directly evolved in transformation pieces, but my background is in digital. It's definitely very design design, studio design, consultancy, land started off in more sort of user experience and products and service design, human centered design, and I started to lean much more towards how do you embed design as a mindset and a culture within organizations, because and that was always quite covert as well I should say it was never like an explicit invitation, it was much more of that. It's very hard to do some of these things that you're trying to do within organizations unless you have this design mindset and this ability to allow space for things to emerge and all the creating space for ideas and working in really egalitarian ways here to here. So there's a whole heap of stuff that like we're diverging a little bit from the initial question, but I think it's useful to see it as like a lead into why I started off in design. I'm still fascinated by design and I almost think some of the principles that are captured through like thinking about regenerative design, are definitely like the next horizon of design. And then just to come back to your original second half of your question mind so what word is business play a role in our design for life mission? We've got one particular intervention that's called regenerative capabilities coalition. Again, lots of words that we need to unpack a little bit there, but we're basically asking the question what does business has a massive role to play in society for us to shift towards a new paradigm and a new model and a new way of thinking about how the world can be, and at the moment it's probably a little bit stuck. You could just say there's a paralysis in the business landscape around exactly how it does that. Yes, regulation is coming on. That's helping shift the dial a little bit. You've got employee appetites changing around, who they want to work for. They don't just want to work for any old company, they want to work for purposeful business or business meetings and social or environmental positive outcomes. You've got customers feeling the same way. They're starting to only want to buy from organizations that have that meaningful remit. And then you've got these other tensions of like how do you actually decarbonize supply chains and how do you bring that into like company-wide strategy? There's a whole complexity piece there. So that's just about partnerships within your use. You've got to see your business as part of a bigger system and that scope one, two, three type stuff inevitably leads you to have to ask those questions about your place in the system. And then investors and what I mean by that, I guess, is we've got boardrooms. You classically think about short term growth and profit, and we are stereotyping here. Not all boardrooms think like that, but some of them do. And there's investor pressure now in both ways both to see a return on investment quickly but also an exposure to risk within that business. So within the landscape of climate risks. Where am I seeing my long term returns in this organization? And there's this whole. You could just say this is massive. I think you guys like the phrase Gordian knots, so let's just throw that one in there. There's a lot of knots there, right in a way. How do we unpick that? And we see that one way to unpick that, amongst many other tactics that we need to throw in, is we need to enable people within those businesses not just sustainability teams, not just leaders have new capabilities and new ways of thinking about how they shop, to work and how they make decisions. And for us, that's about moving from individualistic expressions of how you work and how you maximize profit for your own benefit of the company into a more human centric expression of how you work with others and how you maximize not just shareholder value but, like stakeholder values, are thinking about the wider system, your employees, your customers and ultimately getting to the point where you have to think about a life centric expression of capabilities and that's being highly conscious of your social impact, your environmental impact, even in these like roles that feel removed from the coal face of those decisions within the organization. We're suggesting that through our intervention, through enabling workforces and people within organizations to build a new set of skills and a new set of capabilities, they can actually influence and nudge the needle on how businesses make decisions micro decisions that accumulate and magnify into significantly different outcomes. So that's in a nutshell. There's a lot more to break down there.
Brian Hoadley:
13:45 And can I ask, is this? So you talked a lot about business and thinking about the environment through the ecosystem as it exists within businesses. Of course, businesses exist within cultures and political systems and geopolitical boundaries and etc. Etc. And one of the examples I really didn't want to even go near but that came to mind both doing some reading this week and hearing you talk now was things like the common systems and thinking that people, that just people on the ground, have come to accept over time as being facts. So we're living in a world now where we talk about fake news and we talk about the validity behind statements that people make and numbers and things like that Boris is 350 million a year or a week back to the NHS number comes to mind. But the thing is we live in a society where people have come to accept that when somebody of some authority or some company of some authority states something, that there's some degree of validity behind that thing they've stated and therefore there's a degree of acceptance of that thing, whether it's true or not. And most people then don't do the hard work to begin to that, to decide whether for themselves, whether it's true or not. We have these systems within systems right and we, while it seems like we could focus on convincing or finding organizations to work in this way and to think in this way, which takes a lot of rethinking about how they currently work and also the systems in which they reside. So it's not just within the organization, but it's moving out to their shareholders, it's moving out to their customers, to the society they sit in, to their competition, who will take advantage of the fact that they've taken a left hand turn somewhere and will want to be quick to step in to fill the void right and there. So there's fear in that as well. When we talk about the complexity of this, it feels like one of these things where you pull a thread and then you start unraveling lots of things. So it must be trying to step back to what you're doing at the RSA and trying to step back to some of the work that you're thinking about. How do you define where you start and who you start with?
Andy Thornton:
16:02 and and yeah, loads of loads of things in there, right, like you say, like it's. I think it's hard to unpick because we are talking about like paradigm shift. If we just go to like systems thinking, which I know you know you've referenced in your work and some of the other podcasts, Donella Meadows leverage points, I think, is a useful place to think about it. So she talks I don't know how familiar everyone is with that, but she talks about places to intervene in a system to have the maximum effect. And you've got things on the lower end of the spectrum which are like parameters. So some of the language she uses is a little bit abstract. But she took like incentives, taxes, things like that. You could nudge those things and they might make a change. And then, in the middle of this scale of around 12 different things, you've got things more like feedback loops, so you can create positive feedback loops, you can create negative feedback loops and these things have an effect. And then, when you get into the top of the scale of influence you're into how do you the rules and the goals of the system like, how do you change the rules, the goals, that sort of system itself? And then you get into the mindset of the system, and then you get the ability to see the paradigm itself and almost think outside of the paradigm as the top leverage point that you could possibly get to you. But clearly so what we're talking about here is was acknowledging the fact that, when it comes to any future vision of a world that is has a net positive effect on the environment, the social sphere and the environmental sphere, we're probably significant factors away in terms of the way our whole civilization is oriented today. right, we have the notion of for profit business, and the clue is in the question to some degree like it's for profit, it's not for social good, it's not for environmental good. So it's very difficult I don't think there's a perfect answer to go as Brian about like how do we know where to intervene? I think probably you know historically as an organization that's existed for 270 years or so. The RSA sort of has this interesting mix of. You need to bring insight and some sort of research to the table about what's happening in the world. You need to then have good connections with influencers so that how can you change policy, how can you start to get people to see some of what's happening? And then I think and probably this is a more recent trend, but it's interesting that this is the way the world is you also need to do some experiments. There's this notion that you can't just be a think tank these days, you have to do tank. Think tank has become a bit of a dirty word, I suspect, within the think tank industry. So you've got to do experiments, you've got to prototype, you've got to play around. But yeah, we are talking like massive system shifting stuff. What is reassuring is there are signals out there that, like, these concepts are being taken seriously, but there's a nervousness about stepping into that uncertainty and maybe this is where you talk about the business landscape is, even when you're doing relatively small scale transformation, like transformation with a lowercase t. People want certainty at the end of that. They want to know roughly where they're going to be in X amount of time and what the benefits are going to be. And I think with all of this stuff it's much more. Actually, the only way we're going to get to this future is if we all take one step forward into uncertainty and we use things like design thinking and design methods to actually help us navigate through that uncertainty, because it's by the doing that we're going to get to the outcome. So that makes sense.
Martin Dowson:
19:30 There was pointed. I think Brian and I have both, I won't say like deeply familiar, but aware of Kate Roberts work on donut economics and, without going into the detail of that model you pointed me towards and I've shared online before we came to this session, her interview with Alistair Campbell and Rory Stewart on the rest is politics leadership podcast and I think a couple of things I thought were interesting about that, because she was challenged by them as to how the political system could be any different and if anybody listens along to that, you'll hear Alistair Campbell going. There's no way that this is going to change on mass with everybody, unless it's dictatorship or he teeters on.
Andy Thornton:
20:16 Oh my.
Martin Dowson:
20:16 God, do we need to dictatorship? You can hear Alistair Campbell panicking at that, even saying out loud. Kate talked about citizens assemblies as a kind of almost like a grassroots movement, and the fact that there were more and more local councils or smaller system units like towns and cities that were doing things, and I remember distinctly that during COVID there was one of the city councils that reached out and Lloyds Banking Group and RSA. We tried to do an exploration to try and see whether or not we could do something about building back better, and although that itself hit its limits, because COVID was such a big impact, the council couldn't actually focus on what we wanted to do right there then because it was such a crisis. I think that's really interesting that there are routes through, but the idea that we would all take one step together at the same time I find challenging because of what you get back to human nature, because you're then asking is a bunch of humans to do something that is? I'm not sure we're wired for the same. All of us the same? Fortunately, we're not all the same, so we've got these people who are wired to take those jumps and some who aren't. Do you think there's a challenge there, that idea of we all need to take one step forward, or is it just to make the step smaller?
Andy Thornton:
21:46 I know there's definitely a challenge there. Like, without a doubt, like I think that's what we're seeing is this we've been ingrained, I think, to all. And maybe let's look at it from the business perspective, because I think it's easier in others parts of society to see people taking steps forward and being bolder and braver. But I don't necessarily think, unless you're like a new star or a new organization that can build your own place in society from scratch, you can embed, like these deeply purposeful values and these sort of outcomes you're trying to do right from the start. I think it's really hard for these incumbent monoliths, the bigger companies that have been around for quite a while, to see what the benefit is of shifting into a new yeah, a new mode of value creation. So profit and loss and again, like it's a useful sort of way of thinking about this We've had Organizations have been trained in profit and loss. For what? 100 years, maybe more? How many years of training have we had with social impact? And then environmental impact Like environmental impact has only really surfaced in any serious way with the business in 20 years. So there is no like muscle memory there for us to start thinking about organizations in different ways. But it's, without a doubt, very hard to get everyone to step forward at the same time at the same pace. The other option is you just system change. I suggest that a lot of innovation comes from the margins anyway. It will just come through the niche. It won't come from the incumbent mainstream and hopefully at some point that the idea is that reaches a tipping point where everyone realizes, oh yeah, like these ideas are worth accommodating and we need to shift. I think there's probably just like unanswerable questions about whether that's a way that we can shift into a new reality, like within the world, or whether we do need to have this like massive. Actually, all incumbent legacy mindsets do need to have a bigger transformation moment where we all accept that the old model doesn't work and we're not back to your original point around. Someone's going to step in and into the space that you've left behind is a competitive space. So how do you reduce that level of risk? And I think one way to reduce that level of risk is to try to get everyone to have this mindset shift and an understanding that maybe the easiest way to do this is to do it all together, but that's no beam for you. We're talking about a huge challenge to do that.
Brian Hoadley:
24:09 Yeah. The issue, though, is that is that, how do we get people to do that? How do we get people to do that willingly without an external force acting on us, forcing us in that direction? So, for instance, the pandemic the pandemic was, was an external force that intruded on our existing systems. Right, and it wasn't really, wasn't really an external force. These things have existed. You know, these things exist on the planet and have existed for a long time. It's just that we got comfortable in our existing systems and then this other system intruded and we. It has changed to a degree some behaviors, but not everybody's behaviors. Some people have defaulted back to pre and pre pandemic ways of thinking. Some people have used it as a springboard to say actually, this is an opportunity for change, let's use it. So the collision, I think, of the pandemic and our existing systems, those edges, I think, in that kind of liminal space that people were in, as things were, were changing and transitioning caused people to rethink how they wanted to live their lives. Then, post pandemic, we end up with arguments over remote versus hybrid versus in office in terms of organizations. Right, we were having those discussions before, but now they have more weight and emphasis because of what we've been through, so there's more conversation about them. Other things have come out of that that. I feel like I've noticed this increase or influx of thinking around wellness being mental health. It feels like that's come out of that. That's gotten a real boost from that period of time. So I think the collision of systems sometimes causes things to form something beyond those two systems. So I think that maybe gets into that, that sense of emergence right. You've got these pre existing core systems that come together and the collision of those two things forms a bigger system. It forms something that the individual parts of that system couldn't really quite do. But now the whole is driving something new behaviors and new ways of thinking.
Martin Dowson:
26:19 We were talking about that before, brian, when we were saying that you were articulating that if you think about a number of systems that exist, then they have this kind of controlling structure. Potentially that's a bit antithetic to the idea of systems, because it's more emergent, but there are these organizations or ways and things that are happening in the world and we've got these kind of control mechanisms within them and I feel like what those, some of those control mechanisms have allowed for is certain things to be subdued. And then what we're now seeing is this, in that collision of these edges, this emergence of stuff that's always been important but hasn't had the airtime, if you like, and a whole bunch of things that have come together at the same time as COVID, in society as well as as well as in business. So that's not gone. That can't go back in the box, which is really great. So that is, I think, what can't go back in the box is it's well being. The only thing that can go back in the box is it's just the deep rooted history of most of business and society in slavery and the reparations that are and the changes that are needed as a result of that, this ability to understand that now, the inequalities that exist. All of those things can't go back in the box now. We can only move forward. It might be two steps, one step, one step, two step back and forth, but the direction can only be forward. So I think also comes interesting.
Andy Thornton:
27:54 Yeah, and I think also, brian, back to your original point, which is the release of external forces that happen to make these bigger shifts, covid being like our most recent example. That, for everyone, was really shocking, but we saw this emergence of new way. The things that were actually important to us emerged out yes, out of that space, because you were suddenly left in a different mode of existence, but I think more of those collisions are going to keep happening. So, if we just take a step back from the data, we're going to say this is coming thick and fast. The word poly crisis isn't relevant for no reason. People are seeing within the business landscape a sort of reeling from one crisis to the next, and at the moment, we're just on the back foot. We're just reacting to these crises and, yeah, if you've got some sort of features and foresight function within your business, you're probably trying to predict the next crisis and somehow build the wall, put the walls up to protect your business from that. It's the wrong mindset, though, so what we need to be thinking about is these things are going to keep coming Like. The next 30 years is not going to be a fun time for the climate, irrespective of where we go from now with the climate Like, even if we, you know, genuinely start to meet some of these pledges that are being put forward the next 30 years is still going to be tough because there's a period of transformation within wider society, within business. But yeah, like, how do we actually proactively move towards a future that we want, rather than react to these things? These things are going to keep coming out as keeps, sort of rolling out as an. I think there's an opportunity for especially businesses to be much more proactive about seeing the fact that they're you're on diminished returns within the current system. And I think there's also just something worth talking about within systems. I think we see them as these kind of big things that were a small actor within and we often, I think, lean into this notion that it's government, there's some overpowering force that shapes the system and word just pawns within the system thing. That's the general stereotype of solar system, and I think we need to see ourselves as small. Actually, systems are like recreated daily, based on patterns of behavior that we do. They're not things that are just set in stone. We all turn up and reinforce the system. And so there are ways that there's a lot more agency within systems. I think that was something and systems like our, nested at different layers. We have these stereotypes of the education system or whatever it is. But you've also got you are a system yourself. I just think thinking about systems in a different way is also like helpful.
Martin Dowson:
30:33 Is that part of what you're doing with regenerative business? Inquiry for the RSA is a part of it, in that there's a narrative that supports certain actors and players within systems that it can't be changed, that it is under control, that some other people have the influence, that, and that narrative supports those who benefit unequally and the system right now, but the more that we. But we don't have to accept that as individuals. So what I was hearing right back at the top of this was that there are a number of kind of experiments and interventions and education pieces that we're doing with regenerative business to try and spread that out a little bit more. I guess. My question is given that we are in these transitional states and given that this is this is podcasts about liberal leadership, when you're operating within liberal space and I think we're in a long there are short and long periods of liberal spaces I think we're in a long space right now, maybe such that many people can't see it. What does it take to lead and to lead change in that with purpose? Genocide business has a purpose as a theme. What are you noticing that it takes to lead and make change when you're in this kind of liberal space?
Andy Thornton:
31:52 I think it is some of the stuff we did touch on before as well, martin. So, like we this notion of bravery. So we talked about this idea that organizations need to step forward together into uncertainty. So there's going to have to be these qualities of bravery and courage, and actually that's. We have a framework we call the 10 Cs, which is these are the capabilities we need for 21st century future fit workforce. One of them is courage. So we definitely need people to be courageous leaders. You don't know where you're going. You have to step into that uncertainty and, to be honest, I think that's the biggest one more than anything within that leadership level. Because, again, we are looking within this intervention to say, yes, systems are complex and let and yes, people within more, with more power within the existing system, can have more sway over how to change it. But everyone does have a role to play and if we enable people, everyone within a workforce, to have a systemic way of thinking, so this is about empowering people to see systems and to think in systems, and some roles will be more conducive to that and others, but everyone should be trained and skilled in systems thinking. In a way, this isn't just like the preserve of a certain type of mindset or a certain type of role. Everyone needs to have those skills. You can make changes. So the good, practical one is and usually these are put up as binaries right, we're only going to change the world if government embraces things and all the rules change. So some degree. And then this usually this argument on the counter, like whenever people are talked about individual actions and footprints that's in a way a perversion to try to take the attention away from the system. Although it's your individual responsibility, I actually think that there isn't a binary there. There is like a spectrum of decisions, like how many of us are vegetarians, for instance? Like, especially in the West, the reason why we're driving deforestation and all of these things is because of the beef industry. That has such a massive impact and you can't like, if enough people did go vegetarian, that would have a sizable effect on the system because there's no demand for beef anymore. So again, one little example and we're straight away from the business case. But I think the idea of yes, it involves both, and I think what leadership need to do is empower. Empower people to think differently, and I think that step of bravery into the unknown is important as well. And then you get into that sort of design space to some degree. I think that's where design is really powerful, because it embraces that element of uncertainty, not knowing, creating space for things to emerge which can be greater than some of the parts, and like bringing the people with different skills together in that sort of uncertain, liminal space. I think there's something really. Oh, go ahead, brian.
Brian Hoadley:
34:42 Yeah, no, I was just. I was curious on that point. Do you think we're creating leaders? Do you think leaders are emerging and naturally and leading those companies, or do you think we're looking in the wrong places for leadership? Do you think we're? Because, if you think about, if you think about leadership coming up through the core of a business, in a traditional business, do you think they've been exposed enough? So when you talk about things like edge effect, abundance, people who've worked maybe at the margins and worked between these clashing, at the edges of these clashing systems and cultures, that probably creates interesting leaders, maybe people who are, who think out of the box. They're not, they're not quite, they're not quite what you would expect in a leader. And I think about leaders who who maybe go into organizations that are really foundering there. They've had a, they've something's happened and the organization is, is going through great difficulty and you bring in people, talk about bringing in a change leader, right, somebody who's used to working in that space, that kind of really tricky, undefined space, to try and lead people through. Do you think we need more of those leaders, as opposed to what we think of as steady state leaders? So the business is running. Let's just keep it running. We're happy with it the way it's running, because we're living in a time where things need to change, and so do we need a lot more. Do we need a lot more change leaders, and do they need to come from different places? And what do they look like?
Andy Thornton:
36:14 It's a really good question, brian. I'd be definitely interested in hearing your perspectives on it within the organizations you've worked with. For me, it's this idea that Even when we frame things as like transformation, like it's quite interesting, right, it's what's happening there within organizations. General project it's. I guess we're drawing attention to the fact that whole bunch of things are going to get changed and messed up and things aren't going to be how they were before. But actually change is always happening. No organization stays in any sort of steady state permanently and actually, I guess, even if you look at isn't there some evidence that shows things the amount of companies that exist for the lifespan of businesses is shortening, basically. So this idea of the companies that we had a hundred years ago, like Ford, and people like that, like they're, they're a rare breed these days. So what's happening in the business landscape? There's some degree of, like, permanent innovation required and this ability to adapt to the times. And I think, like, say, as we see the times change and becoming more chaotic and more uncertain, you could just say, actually we should probably stop calling these initiatives transformation. We should just embrace the fact that, like liminality is a permanent state in a way. And then, yeah, like, what are the quality? I'm interested in what we see as the qualities of leadership required from that, because you could say a traditional business probably has a certain idea of a sort of Promethean style leader I guess a good word to use this like someone who has a lot of individual power and charisma and guides people through and, yeah, valuable. But is it actually that the right set of skills that can navigate all of these sort of weird uncertainties basis? Yeah, I think.
Martin Dowson:
37:53 I've. these comments that I'm going to make now I think are based on certainly based on anecdote, not rigorous survey study analysis, but I can think of a couple of examples of people who've risen to leadership positions in large, complex organizations, who actually have come from the roots of that organization and have maybe been with it 15, 20, 25 years, who, when they get to that higher position of leadership, whether it's CEO had a recent example of Alison Rose is one of the people I'm thinking about who is was her whole career in that West and made a significant difference as a CEO. Current situation aside, without getting into that, there have been others who have seen come into transformation executive positions and made a difference in how they're leading. There was a common factor with all of them, which was that they were not of the stereotype of the system. They were not middle-aged white men. There were men and women but they were not middle-aged white men and there's something in that. I think that that when they got to that position, they were bold and courageous enough to find to take a different approach. Then there's another thing I've observed, just going back to like design, and this is actually going back to customer centricity. You hear a lot about people saying I don't think that company there is cares about customers, and I remember the we think about Royal Bank of Scotland, who I worked with for a while. I remember people being so critical of that because of the actions of some leadership in 2008, 2009. Every single person I met below executive level not saying the executives weren't, but people on the ground they all care deeply about customers because their job was facing off to, and working with and talking to customers and that's the bit they enjoyed about their job. So when you get a leader that does come to the top and does care about doing something differently, they have this immense ability to then suddenly unlock a whole bunch of stuff that people want to do in any case. So I think there's great hope in that, but I do think we need Brian's point. Bringing it back to your point, brian, we need to look for. We need to look for people who are, who bring with them different experience that means that they will take on that challenge, because I also think there is a navigable route to regenerative business. When you go back and look at the purpose of some of these large, complex organizations, they were originally created for more than just profit. And I think it does require that. It's going to take some amazing style of leadership to try and do that. Along with all the competition from the new companies and the new innovation that comes out, that will set the scene for that's the ball. So I see a lot of hope because of experiments in changing how we govern through citizens assemblies, experiments in how new companies are coming out with new standards, although they're battling to then scale into a system that doesn't acknowledge that, and then some of these large, complex organizations. If we can just keep those leaders in place and not tear them down too quickly, I see hope in that.
Brian Hoadley:
41:32 Yeah, I. What I worry about is we've just experienced, and probably are still experiencing, the effects and the impact of covid and pandemic on society, and watching people revert to type tells me that they may have thought about it for a time, but maybe not deeply enough or didn't feel deeply impacted enough to make the kinds of deep level changes in the way they live their lives and the way they see things that would create lasting, long lasting change. So I guess what I worry about is is it going to take is it going to take three more successive covid, each one worse than the next? Is it going to take, in terms of climate, is it going to take not one, but several major, really major climate impacts to steer us in that direction? And then, where's the tipping point?
Andy Thornton:
42:28 Yeah, it's a really dangerous cycle to get into Right, like you say. I think so. This, maybe this is another quality of those leaders that we need right, which is this sort of sense of possibility, like for me, what was interesting about the pandemic beside the horrendous impact on the loss of human life and in a way, in some governments, the lack of care that was taken to protect lives that they trade off again because the system was broken Right Like the trade off is between protecting human life or keeping the economy going, and that's a terrible trade off to have. But you saw things emerge out of that and we saw possibilities emerge about new ways of doing things and to your point, brian, I totally agree. Then we've seen that as a retreat. Since then it feels like actually lots of things happening. We had Black Lives Matter, like flourishing in a more sort of this whole, questions about the role of race in society, and look in the impacts of covid just showed us the hard data of how that affects people. Like I say, different modes of working, different ways of thinking about care. There's a whole heap of new ideas and new possibilities that emerged that do need to be nurtured and nourished, but they show you that those possibilities exist and they're just hidden from view, like our system makes us think that there's no possibilities available, and it's very easy to get this like closing doom loop vibe about this. Oh my God, where are we heading before this changes? So we really need people, actually leaders, like anyone to some degree, to see possibilities. It doesn't mean being like hopelessly optimistic, like I said, ridiculous. It can't be fantasy, but there's so much possibility within the world, in our system. I don't want to go to capitalism, but we've. I'm just going to invoke it anyway. Capitalism is an invention of our own creation. We can invent other things. I don't know if either of you have read the Dawn of Everything by Wengrow and I'm trying to think it was Graeba David yeah, it's fascinating.
Brian Hoadley:
44:20 No, I haven't.
Andy Thornton:
44:21 They just talk about this idea that we have this notion that we went from hunter gatherer societies and then the agricultural revolution came and made us settle down and that created hierarchies and walls and we have that narrative that's so embedded within us of how civilization is migrated towards the state it is today and the reality is, when they dig into it, like actually it's not like that at all. There was no moment of agricultural revolution. There was this whole transitionary period where actually here we go, liminal. There was a liminal space happening where people were existing between different types of social formations. So they were like hunter gatherers. For a while they were agriculture, they were temporary sort of farmers, but they weren't they. There wasn't like this significant shift where everyone was on like a single path to something else. So, just just as a recap, like that means like possibilities are there and some of our narratives that we've believed to be true aren't always true and we need to lean into some of that a bit more.
Martin Dowson:
45:21 Yeah, Gosh, there is just so much.
Andy Thornton:
45:25 Yeah, what's useful to tie in is this is there something that we can tie back into some of your other comments? Because I think the notion here is regeneration is just such a big topic, right, you talking about like paradigm level change and I think straight away you're just getting into these like hard edges of it's really hard to go there and I am conscious I think we talked about this a little bit, martin, before we go, because we could go in lots of directions and maybe there is some things we could ground in One thing that could be useful, like I just as a I saw. I don't know if it's useful to talk about design generally, but I thought I saw design evolve over the last 20 years from something that was initially about the interface and we saw the first emergence of how design was used and manifested within business as this kind of usability, testing and getting stakeholders to see the value of oh, yeah, when you actually listen to customers, you get some useful insights from it. And then it migrated into a field for me that it was more around designer's empathy. So it became a bit more process driven. It was much more about scaling into teams and into existing technology processes and that was about really deeper connection to customers and that sort of thing. And then I think this paradigm we're in with design within business at the moment is more like designer's strategy. So design is a way of thinking. How do you bring design skills to the boardroom to some degree? I? think some of that narrative has been probably like over overplayed.
Martin Dowson:
47:00 I think it's been overplayed in that it's, in that it's, there's still a sense of the reason. The narrative, like that it's coming out of design is to, whether consciously or subconsciously, protect design in the roles. Whereas, brian, we were touching on this beforehand and before Andy joined the the fact that the core approach and mindset of a designer, if you take it all back to route and if you go to design school or college or art school, is one about it is one about a problem problem solving right, yes, with a human centred aspect of that, but to the art of making decisions on purpose and that actually design. Capital D as a discipline and craft, has been deployed to initially design things and now design digital products and services. But from the moment that you had to, from the moment of change from designing a chair which if you go to your industrial design course, you'll design a lot chairs to try and bring form to function, and the function of that digital product and services actually is embedded within the bringing that to life, is embedded within the rest of the organization, and so actually, at that point in time, it what became much more obvious is that it is all of these people and capabilities within a business that bring a product and service to life and therefore it's all of their decisions that bring the product and service to life and make it work and therefore they're all designing right feels like it's in pinging on your role as capital D designer, but in fact I believe they just have to let go of that and what I was hearing earlier, just to bring it back and literally take it away from take this conversation away from designers. Capital D, you were saying right back at the beginning, this is something about educating more and we know as system thinking and critical thinking, but breaking those things down into stuff that people and teams within businesses and groups of people within organizations can pick up on, and the 10 Cs from the RSA, I think is actually really interesting to be able to talk about this. Why won't go through all of them right now? But if we think about what you said about courage and potentially critical thinking, for example, it's been articulated. as for an individual, critical thinking is about criticism, right, but at a kind of human level it's about reasoning and then at a kind of life centric or society systems level, it's about reflexivity and if you took courage, then it was determination as an individual, dedication as a bunch of humans and at a systems level them and society level there may be some sacrifice. So there's a role for everybody to play and I think that's, you know, the design tools, mindsets I 100% believe need to be shared. But I actually think it is wider. I think it's what you've been saying in Regeneration business, it's the systems and critical thinking and when people are still going oh yeah, that's a bit like my service design stuff and shut up, no, it just let it be. It's a bunch of skills and mindsets. If we all pick up on, then we'll see those emergencies and those at the edges will see more things change. Brian you had a great thing about like your writing and how that shifted your thinking about design.
Brian Hoadley:
50:34 Yeah, I was talking to Martin earlier. During the pandemic I decided finally put my MFA in creative writing to use and wrote my first novel. But as I approached doing that, I started from the position of being a designer and as I moved across into being a writer, what I realized was I was utilizing a lot of tools that I had come to see as design tools method, that I'd come to see as design method, and as I crossed the barrier into writing, I utilized many of those same tools. But now they became writing tools. Somewhere in the middle they became agnostic and they became just tools for navigating and helping think and provide structure and that sort of thing, which meant the tools were always agnostic. They were never really design tools or writing tools. They were just ways of doing things, ways of thinking about things, ways of ordering and structuring things. And it's only as you step back and think about those limital spaces. So as you do approach edges between one thing and another and you start to cross that boundary, that you realize many of the things that you do aren't endemic or specific to a discipline or a capability. And I think with designers I think particularly digital designers in inside organizations there's been a lot of fight to keep to keep the tools and the method and thinking within the constructive design, because design has been in some ways so disintermediated over a period of time inside organizations that designers start to feel like they lose identity in that space. They don't know who they are anymore and they don't know that other people understand who they are or what they provide or what they do. And I've become a real proponent for utilizing those underlying skills in a very agnostic way across businesses. So it's not just about designing products and services as they come from the product roadmap down through the pipeline, down through the delivery pipeline, but also about reaching out horizontally across the organization and utilizing those skills to help other teams to support other teams. You can run workshops for HR as they're thinking about new HR systems. You can work with compliance to think about new ways to deliver compliance across the organization. Regulatory all these different areas of the business will benefit from the skills and tools and method.
Andy Thornton:
53:10 Yeah, yeah, I definitely. I totally agree with that. So you could say there's a craft side to design, and I guess we're talking about designers the noun and then there's the mindset side of design as the verb, and I think I tend to agree that the things that we sometimes talk about as design, now actually I don't know, I'm not even sure I would say that they are originating design. I think sometimes, like we over stereotype what design is. So I feel like what gets referred to now as design is and I've heard this even in some of your podcast episodes is this idea of like experimentation, prototyping, learning by doing, and actually when you take a step back from that and just challenge your assumptions for a second, like that is not the exclusively the domain of design. Engineers have been talking about that for a long time. We have agile and we have like concepts like lean. Those didn't even really emerge from a design field, it emerged elsewhere. I think there's a real risk that we've just created these memes of what design is within an organization and it's not actually the essence of what is design. And, interestingly, I have a stance on this, which is, I think, the thing that as design grew and professionalized and became commoditized and industrialized within organizations. So you had bigger teams doing more design work and, yes, some of it was craft, but I think we actually and it became more process driven how do you integrate design within an organization to produce results? It actually lost some of its essence, of what did make it different, and I don't think what made it different was the ability to prototype and iterate and explore. I think that was a general trend happening within these sort of industries and professions as a whole, and I would give more credit to agile than anything else that made that happen. I actually think design space was the emergence of creative thought and ideas. There was this ideation moment that you would create this space where you would fuel lots of thought into things that wouldn't normally be given that space, and I actually personally experienced that. I think that got collapsed through this industrialization process, that actually the space within the design process for creativity has become actually quite narrow. We talk about experiments and learning by doing and putting stuff into the wild. That's how you validate ideas and I'm not against that. But I think actually we're still missing a trick within business that says actually no designs role is to have this moment earlier on which really does open the doors of possibility, and when I just think, trying to bring this back to regenerative design, if we're talking about a big mindset shift, big changes, design is underplaying its role at that stage, which is like possibility, like new possibilities, and not just testing its rate and that sort of thing. So I don't know if that's like a useful setting.
Brian Hoadley:
56:05 Yeah, this is why I think design has to show up in organizations where you don't expect it. I think a lot of organizations have productionized design and moved in that direction over the past 20 years, 25, 30 years at least that's my experience of it. I started in the 90s and just feels like it's made that move from ideation and creation to production and delivery over that period of time. But I think design's biggest opportunity is to show up across the organization in places where people haven't traditionally engaged with it or don't expect it to show up. And so when you talk about this idea of regenerative business, I think if you start exposing some of the precepts behind design so opening up thinking, opening up dialogue, opening up collaboration, opening up co-creation, some of these things if they start appearing in different spots of the organization, different places in the organization, then you're starting to light fires around the organization and you're creating the opportunity for it's not it's not about design anymore. You're creating the opportunity for people to to be exposed to different types of thinking, thinking in new ways, having new tools and skills, to be able to think in different ways, and I think that's the value that design can bring to the organization. Sure, it can shape your product in your service right, it can be part of that process. But it could be so much more than that. If people stopped focusing on the the most important thing is the pinnacle to get a seat at the table and they started focusing on the disintermediation of product and service from skill and technique and process, they could start applying those things in lots of different ways across the organization.
Martin Dowson:
57:46 That's an opportunity for design 100%, and the trick I think there is that is to hold true a couple of things at once. One is that what you might need to do is show up as the people that can help with the outcome that somebody's looking for. Somebody once said to me that they happen to work inside a large consultancy and had a design team that needed to be deployed in other work, and that person would never go around and say I you know, we should put a UX designer or a visual designer on your project, Because somebody would say I've got this project and we need to really make sure the client that we're understanding customers, and so I have somebody who really helps with customer understanding. They just replay the language back or we've got a problem communicating to a client what the value of this project is. I have somebody who's really good at communicating complex ideas visual designer. So he'd just turn up and say I have one of those and then fit the right person in. I also saw the investing in from a design department. So Roger, a hacky at BP, put together an awesome team to work on a 10 to 15 year vision for a city's move to hydrogen, and what that team essentially did was a bunch of visualization and storytelling as the stakeholders were working through, and the result of that, as you say, andy, opened up the thinking. So the all the creativity came out through that facilitation. But they didn't design the answer. It wasn't their work. They held that space for people and the stakeholders that came back from that then turned around and said we couldn't have done this without that team, that leader, roger. Then he pushed an investor in his team to make to be there, make that difference. But they did it in a way that wasn't look at us, look what we did, we're leading this or you need to put us in charge of XYZ. The. That's what I mean by the stepping back from. It has to be us or it has to be about capital D design. And what a Brian. I think what you're saying there is turn up, share the skills and the mindsets, demonstrate them, share them, do them in the way that is it's a small nudge and change that actually. Then you turn around and measure your value by were we useful?
Andy Thornton:
1:00:04 Yeah, I think we helped shift something, without a doubt. I think maybe this is again looking back at the history of design. From it started as a craft, it was more about interface, it moved into empathy, it moved into strategy. You could say what's next or what's now, and I think some of what your internet, martin, is design as a role at that level, or design skills again, like whether we just capital D designers or not. It's that facilitation role, is that space holding role more than anything else. I think there is still a role to play for designers of craft. Like, just to be clear, like absolutely we've made that word a bit too big and a bit too broad. In some ways. We could, it could have, you could use an alternative label there and it would be the same thing. Do we all engineer things or do we do all design things? Like it needs anchoring a little bit. But the only thing I would say I think it's useful to think of as designs moved in and it started to understand the language of business and it started to try to have an effect within business and connect more broadly and be much more of a space holder and a less. I think again, this is possibly a bit controversial but I think I said, lost its idealism or some of its stubbornness through that process, which was did, did need to go. Like the ego centric view of design which is like oh where the people with old skills and will solve all your problems, like, is wrong. But I think human centered design ultimately became coopted. I don't think human centered design is the problem. So sometimes I was sat on a sustainability call with a group we have at the RSA and mentioned human centered design. I think someone in the chat said human centered design is the reason why we're in this mess. I sometimes wonder whether people appreciate what we had before humans had to design, which was bunch of engineers making decisions about what was right for the customer. I think human centered design was a noble intention, but I don't think it ever fully got implemented in within business in a pure sense. I think we started to hear messages that were it's good to think of the customer, but the business is more important, as in it does have to. You obviously need to get product market fit and you have to see that some of it got so diluted that I think it became a little bit tokenistic. Some of the processes worked, but if we could truly step back and say how many organizations that claim to the human centered design or have a human centric process actually do human centered design, where you are saying like actually we don't have product market fit or the consequences of the decisions of this product have a negative impact on the humans in the system. I think usually when those things are trade offs between launch the product, don't launch the product, organizations are still going launch the product and use behavioral shaping to get customers to want to buy that and to me that is a perversion of human centered design. I'm going to go with a strong provocation at the end, which is I do throw the baby out with bathwater and human centered design. There are aspects we do need to move beyond anthropocentrism, but we also need to get businesses to. I think we need more. We do need more activist designers within organizations that hold organizations that are ideals and to the ethics design you cannot divorce design from good or bad criteria is inherently baked into design, like you design something to produce an effect and you have to describe the effect. And if you describe the effect like we want this to happen, not this to happen, it has an inherent ethical quality baked into the whole thing. So like designers really do need to go back to that and make sure that, like we have too many designers at the moment designing things because they've been told speak the language of business don't alienate people. Actually, at some point we do need to have this conversation and say business is not producing societal outcomes are beneficial Not all business. So how do you, as a designer, play a role within your system to legit selling those?
Martin Dowson:
1:04:03 I think, that is the challenge that I think that anybody in their career from zero to even up to 10 years at the moment in terms of design craft is facing, depending which organization they're working within, and I think that the rallying cry is that we're not involved enough in the decisions that mean to determine what we design or what we've been working on. Therefore, we need that seat at the table type thing, but I don't think that logic flow is necessarily deterministic. That's the only answer. I think there's something really interesting in the if we can have more things out there that are helping us provoke organizations and I'll say organizations as well as businesses to think differently about their, the balance of their purpose and what they're doing. Then that will create conditions in which the skills are more useful to navigate, that which will create the spaces in which some of the team who have these skills and mindsets can be put to good use, and we'll find that will be across all levels of skills. So if I think about that project that I saw at BP, there were senior and there were junior people involved in that, which is a brilliant thing, because it gave the juniors an example to see how a very specific craft around visual storytelling, when contextualized inside a project that had a different type of objective that was a kind of city wide environmental contribution on the long term scale and impact you know that their specific craft had value, even if they're not at the leadership level to understand how to deploy that or shape it into that in the first place. But it's this multiple layers of conditions to create. I think and you need to be really aware if you're inside the design craft, you should be really aware that just rallying and knocking on the door and going we should be. There is not necessarily the answer. I do think you need to understand business better in order to understand where there's moments of influence and leverage points might be. But I think there's other organizations that and other efforts that need to be had to change mindset at executive level as well, and I don't think design will be the sole group of people that change that. They can't be, and I felt that's why the regenerative business, as an inquirer by the RSA, I thought was really interesting, because it, yes, you have that background of design and understanding that you're all sorts. The language I'm hearing is that it's about critical thinking, it's about citizenship, it's about creativity, collaboration. We as designers recognize a lot of our mindset and craft in that, but it's not exclusive to us and I think that I thought that was really interesting about regenerative business.
Andy Thornton:
1:06:54 Yeah, no, not at all. Like I say, I think 10 C's is much more of a framework for everyone to embrace and it's less around design explicitly. You could say that's around organizational design. So again, we're using design in the loosest sense of the term there. Yeah, I agree, it's like finding the roles within the organizations that can prod the business in the right directions, and some of that. You can't just speak this isolated language, but we should just be really clear that the language of business to a lot of business is actually quite monosyllabic. It's about growth it's about GDP, it's profit and loss, and we have to start questioning whether there is a future, a thriveable society on earth that can continue to grow with those with that mindset. I think, like growth demands, it's a crazy demand on earth resources to grow at the rates that we talk about growing. If you grow at 2 to 3% of GDP, I think you're like doubling resource use within like 25 years or something, or maybe it's 50 years, but it's shocking right? That mindset that is embedded within a lot of for profit business does have to be challenged, and I don't know almost I don't care who the challenge comes from. Do you think there was a way in with human centered design, to start to challenge that narrative? And if there are other narratives in there to challenge that, then I'd embrace all of them. And we need to throw the weight behind all of those ways to challenge the dominant narrative, which doesn't yeah, like it has a limited shelf life.
Martin Dowson:
1:08:30 I think it's really interesting that it's the narrative about regenerative. It's about a society and kind of planetary centric view, understanding that system level there. If you can do that across our understanding of economics, if you can do that across our understanding of design or understanding of governance of politics local, national then that's the thread that can bring people together or open up a space in which different mindsets can be had. So for sure, I think, when we say understanding the language of business only so that you can understand what is what about it will need to change and what not, what you need to challenge. And as we come to the end of our time together, is there something you'd like to sum up about where we're at with where you are at with regenerative business as an inquiry, with the RSA, or what's about to happen next? And then also, if you wouldn't mind, maybe just one one reflection on what you think it's going to take to be a leader in these liminal spaces going forward. And it would cover a bit of it, just maybe. Just to sum up, yeah, great conversation guys.
Andy Thornton:
1:09:37 I know like some of this is like where do you start, where do you end? so it's always very difficult to down and especially trying to frame it around the context, say liminal leadership within business. As an aspect of this, I would definitely say we all need to become liminal leaders to some degree. So all of those qualities about what it is to embrace uncertainty, discomfort, stepping into the unknown, not knowing the outcomes are going to be like hugely important. If I was going to make a plug for the RSA's work, we are actively seeking business leaders right now who have those qualities and who are brave and want to work with the RSA to explore what these new capabilities would be to embed within the workforce. We're building a coalition at the moment of organizations that want to share their experiences, of their experiments that they're doing with other like minded pioneering organizations, but also the organizations that want to do take a bit of a skunkworks type approach, where you set up a little innovation team, hopefully not too isolated from the rest of the business, but that they have the freedom and the space to start to ask some of these bigger questions. What are the things that are really blocking us and holding us back from delivering more purposeful outcomes within the organization? Are those collaboration related issues are those? There could be a whole host of things that are stopping people, but we're definitely seeking and on the lookout for a group of organizations who want to do those experiments. And yeah, it takes a little bravery and a little boldness, but you'd be working alongside others who are also doing that bravery, excellent.
Martin Dowson:
1:11:12 Really look forward to continue to hear more about what's going on with this learning line of inquiry and yeah, we've got two RSA fellows on the course. Of course we're plugging the RSA, but I genuinely think it's that concept of the word. Fellowship is about a space in which people come together to actually to be okay with existing in that complexity, which I think is a really interesting, interesting idea. So I encourage others just to back, tend to just pick up and even read some of the outputs and see what that develops in your thinking, and he. Thank you very much taking the time to speak with us and to help us explore a bit more. And this, for us, every conversation leads to another conversation, leads to another conversation, and that is the point of these. I hope that's done the same for our listeners as well. Many conversations after this now, but where we go to next.
Brian Hoadley:
1:12:11 Yeah, yeah and Andy, we may circle back and have another conversation with you in the future, because there are so many avenues to go down and explore. It'd be really great to be able to do that.
Andy Thornton:
1:12:23 Yeah, I feel we only actually weirdly skim the surface of the regenerative concept in a way, because we have to get your head into that zone of what the transformation is. So there is this whole field of some qualities of regenerative, specifically the regenerative thinking, that I think are really exciting and inspiring. That, yeah, like more than happy to dig into deeper. Like how do we get inspired by living systems, for instance? Like that's a big part of regenerative thinking. There are things that we can relearn and reintegrate back into the way that we operate as businesses, as individuals, from living systems that will be self sustaining, because the evidence is there for hundreds of millions of years that these things flourish.
Martin Dowson:
1:13:04 So, yeah, I tell you what I think what we do is. I think it would be great to have you back on again in some weeks time or time elapsed for us that might not be time elapsed on the podcast, given the publishing schedule but to talk through maybe some specific examples of experiments and provocations that are going on within regenerative business and space, and it'd be good to dive into some of those examples. I think, having had this conversation that will allow us to have a frame within which to have that and perhaps looking at one of those specific areas will take us to those boundaries and those edges that we were talking about, and I'd really like to explore that with you. I think that'd be a great other thing to do, and perhaps we can invite somebody else into that conversation as well and see where we go with that. I think that would be a great idea.
Andy Thornton:
1:13:47 Andy, for now. Thank you very much for your time today.
Martin Dowson:
1:13:49 I've been really enjoyed this and looking forward to keeping in touch.
Andy Thornton:
1:13:54 Yeah, no, great to connect and glad to be on the podcast. Yeah.
Brian Hoadley:
1:13:58 Yeah, Thanks, Really good to have you. Thanks for listening to Libinal Leaders. We'd love to continue the conversation with you. Our listeners hear feedback about this episode, thoughts about who we should talk to next, pose questions you'd like us to consider in future conversations. There are always suggestions for new and interesting cocktails to get us through the long nights ahead.
Martin Dowson:
1:14:19 If you want to learn more about this podcast, its hosts or guests, go to liminalleaderscom. Thank you for listening.
