[00:00:00] Scott: Hi, I'm Scott Fulton, the host of the Rebel Diaries podcast. This show will help you learn how to make work better for you, your colleagues and the organization you work for. I believe the modern workplace is broken for too many people with leaders and their teams, drowning in corporate complexity, information overload, and unnecessary levels of stress. 

[00:00:18] Scott: Having spent over 20 years leading disruptive high-performing teams who have won international awards for their impact. I've now dedicated my career to helping coach and train leaders and teams to deliver more value and impact at work whilst reducing the risk of burnout, overload, and wasted effort. 

[00:00:34] Scott: This podcast is dedicated to you and thousands like you who know work can and should be better.

[00:00:39] Scott: You'll get tips and insights from me as well as the amazing guests I invite to be the show, many of them have disrupted their industries and are thought leaders, speakers, and authors who have fascinating stories and advice to share. 

[00:00:50] Scott: Thank you for listening. I'm Scott Fulton and welcome to the Rebel Diaries show. 

[00:00:55] James: You haven't really got a hope if you land in a business where there isn't that understanding of that value permeated across the organization or the leadership in place to do so.

[00:01:06] James: I'm delivering something better for the customer, better for the employees and staff, better for the shareholders, and a lot of that just becomes lost in these big organizational changes

[00:01:19] James: So somebody will say "okay it's clear that team A and B are not working together. We should restructure, We should bring together team A and B". Yeah. What's that done? It's just broken a connection somewhere else. 

[00:01:31] Scott: James works with large organizations to change their approach, to developing strategy and delivering change. He has worked with many large investment and retail banks, utilities, and central government to build successful strategy and architecture teams. James holds a PhD in systems architecture and robotics. He uses many of the techniques he developed in the robotics domain to drive changes in large organizations. 

[00:01:53] Scott: I met James many years ago when we worked together in a previous organization, I've always known him as what is called an enterprise architect, which is where this episode kicks off.

[00:02:02] Scott: James. Welcome to the Rebel Diaries podcast.

[00:02:05] James: Thanks, Scott great to be here. 

[00:02:06] Scott: So for people who don't know what an Enterprise Architect is, would you mind just giving us a bit of an overview?

[00:02:11] James: It's an interesting job description because there are so many enterprise architects that I see that are very down into the weeds in terms of actual software development. And then there are other enterprise architects I work with who are very much at the top table, C-suite helping shape the business and the direction of the business and I think that the sheer fact that you see this such breadth of where enterprise architects sit is by the nature of their job, which is basically to help businesses work out the direction that they want to go in and then execute that all the way down right into the software development side. Or the hardware or the people change or whatever it might be that you're changing to realize that value right up front, and therefore, it depends where the organization is and it's maturity as to how that role fits in the organization.

[00:03:11] James: More often than not, you'll find enterprise architects in an IT department. Trying to bring together and break down the silos in the IT department and connect it to the business. But in reality, what you're trying to do is look at right across the chain of the, all the portfolio of change and make sure it's all connected together.

[00:03:30] James: So you're trying to break down silos right across the space, basically. But fundamentally, for me, it's about helping guide organizations in what their strategy is, what their outcomes are. How they deliver value to their customers, how they deliver value to their stakeholders, and how all of that translates into whatever changes there might be on the ground, and some of that might be through the delivery of new software.

[00:03:59] James: It might be through people change, et cetera, cetera. But yeah that's where I see the enterprise architect role.

[00:04:05] Scott: And what are the typical challenges that you see day to day? I, you've obviously worked with a lot of companies over the years. What are the common themes that you see that need to be overcome? 

[00:04:15] James: Probably the biggest one and we've seen this kind of as a shift across the industry over the past few years is how people treat IT and technology in their business. So for a lot of businesses they see that IT provision as a really, a backend service or an enabler to their organization, and therefore they think about the business as being, "Okay, what's the process?

[00:04:40] James: I've gotta follow what's the customer journey?" But without bringing that IT piece to the top table, . What we are seeing in industry is a lot more roles around Chief Strategy Officers Chief Design Officers, for example Chief Data Officers who are bringing that technology design thinking right into the csuite room to make it as important or more important than IT has been previously. It's not about, for example putting in a request for a new laptop or putting in a new request for a microphone. You can't operate IT and technology in that same space in that same way anymore. So there's very much. a, a shift that organizations are going on towards bringing technology and technology based decision making into the boardroom. The problem is that a lot of organizations just dunno how to do that, they've been ingrained in this thinking of the boardroom is very much a. " What's going on strategically, long term, what's going on in operations? Okay. And then how does HR and data and IT, and all those enabling services fit in that picture?" So that bringing those enabling services right up front, because they're really core if the vast majority of businesses that we work with on a day to day basis, be it either a customer to business or business to business, for example.

[00:06:08] James: IT in technology is really at the forefront of how we interact and collaborate. So it doesn't make any sense that it's down there in the weeds, and we've gotta bring it right up front in terms of decision making.

[00:06:20] Scott: And that's a bit like that classic, IT stuck in the basement kind of mentality, isn't it? And I call it the supplier mentality. And I've seen it in companies where we've worked in around. Or it, you've been given a load of actions, just get on with it rather than, what do you think? How can you help us solve that problem together?

[00:06:38] Scott: What I've seen is sometimes I don't think it, Does it solve any favors either? Cuz it behaves like a supplier in terms of, Oh yes, we'll do everything you ask, rather than actually we don't think that's feasible. We don't think that's the right thing to do. Is that fair comment as well? Do you see that in companies you've worked with, or are they just trying to be heard? 

[00:06:56] James: absolutely. And I think the only problem is that people try and look for that silver bullet in trying to be heard. I if you're trying to make yourself, important and useful to the business, you want to come along with some something shiny that is going to change that business, and that in itself is a problem because, Those chief execs, those businesses are looking for ways in which to solve these challenges that they face.

[00:07:24] James: How do I turn my business that might have been operated in a certain way for years and years? How do I make it more flexible, more agile, more responsive to the market? And what they tend to do is then look quite what are those silver bullet changes I can make? Okay, . If I want my business to be more flexible or more responsive, it might be I'm jumping on the bandwagon of saying I'm gonna be agile with a big A across my business and scale that effectively.

[00:07:54] James: But then they become very stuck in the mindset of executing that change in the same way they have previously. 

[00:08:02] James: So then you get challenges of basically, kind of situation of not really ever. Get into the crux of what the business problem is. There's lots of musical chairs changing, new ways of working, new processes trying to break down silos between the business departments by doing big organizational restructures, but they're not really thinking about what are the underlying collaboration challenges and how do whatever you do, how do you trace it back?

[00:08:34] James: To, I'm delivering something better for the customer, better for the employees and staff, better for the shareholders, and a lot of that just becomes lost in these big organizational changes because they're looking for, "Okay, we need to go for a data analytics rollout, or we need to go for a scaled Agile rollout, or we need to go for a cloud hosting transit."

[00:09:00] James: None of those things just by name, deliver value to the business. Without doing that groundwork as to, what really is it we're gonna change? How is it gonna improve that experience? What kind of mindset change do we need to get there? Not just go through the kind of motions of, Okay we change the organizational structure, therefore we need to move people X, Y, and Z.

[00:09:20] James: Therefore, the departments are gonna be this process. It really is about changing the mindsets of those staff, those of not just your staff, but of how the customer operates with you as well..

[00:09:30] Scott: Yeah, it's. You touched on the why and the problem to be solved. It's like working right to left, isn't it? Saying, what's the outcome we want, What's the benefits we want, What's the problem that we're trying to solve rather than starting with, or we just sh I, I've heard the term you might, I might have heard it from you before, like re rearranging the chairs and the Titanic.

[00:09:50] Scott: It's just if we shuffle it around, oh, another change cycle in the organization, thinking somehow that'll fix things without actually understanding what the root of the problem is. And actually it can have a worse effect by introducing these, this change without, knock on effects and to other people.

[00:10:05] Scott: And it's that, that you try and take that helicopter view of if we move this here or this affects this, or those knock on effects,

[00:10:12] James: yeah. So part of what I do as a job is really to understand what are the impacts of those changes. Everything is highly connected, you're talking about Who is the stakeholder? What are they trying to achieve? How are they gonna derive value from that? What kind of processes do they follow?

[00:10:31] James: How is that process underpinned by data? Where is the application that's storing it hosted? How is the application connected? Something else where's the physical kit linking in? It's very hard to deal with any one of those things in isolation because they're all interconnected in some way, and that problem is ubiquitous.

[00:10:51] James: And as we move to a situation of. More IOT devices, more intelligent system thinkings become even more and more connected. I've got a mouse here. You can effectively say that's a computer in itself these days. And so it becomes very hard to change one thing without having a knock on impact on the other.

[00:11:08] James: Now where. Organizations start to struggle with that is that sounds really complex and hard. You're suddenly thinking," Okay, I've gotta manage all of these connections, or I can go away and buy this new fancy thing that will solve my problem", basically. But it's. It's not a case that you need to boil the ocean that way.

[00:11:29] James: It's really honing down on what's that kind of chain all the way through the business that you want to change. You don't have to convince it. Every impact is what the big hitters effectively that, that are going to be. The blockers, the inhibitors to you changing in the way that you wish.

[00:11:45] James: Fundamentally trying to change mindsets. I'm gonna bring into play here a bit of my previous experience and how I ended up being an enterprise architect. I started out my career working in robotics as a robotics engineer.

[00:11:59] James: And what we were doing was looking at how do you create a swarm of robots. Effectively to do a task. It might be, for example, mine clearance. It might be inspecting a business, lots of individual agents, but working together and there's, in robotics there's fundamentally a couple of different ways you can do this.

[00:12:22] James: You can have what is very, a very top down control approach. Everything's driven from the center. You go and do that, you go and do that, or hierarchical situation where you've got a leader and you go to the middle management and so on and so forth. Effectively middle management robots is, if you wish, and that is very good for highly predictable environments. Very top down very structured. Yeah. And. So if you've got, repeatable, doing exactly the same in operations, you know that's okay. But when you're working in an environment that is highly changing, The requirement that one person sees somewhere may not be the requirement another sees, cuz it's half an hour later or an hour later, a few years later, whatever it might be.

[00:13:10] James: So the change programs that you got behind that have gotta be reactive to that kind of cadence. And so in robotics, what we were looking at the time, and this what a long time ago now, 50 odd years, is how do you create self organizing teams? That are reactive in their environment, but still able to meet the goal of collective, effectively, how do you bring about what is called a complex adaptive system.

[00:13:39] James: Yeah. And so it's very much shifting from that hierarch command and control to lots of self organizing teams, but linking together where there are key touch points. To do the particular task. Now, if you translate that into a real world business, it's exactly the same scenario.

[00:13:59] James: You're talking about self organizing teams agile teams, self organizing teams. Yeah. The key here is that bit where I said about the touchpoints and the linkages. That's the backbone as to how the team operates. So one team relies on another team to do something else. What are those kind of ticky touchpoints between them?

[00:14:18] James: And so the most effective change that I've seen in businesses, it's not the kind of looking at what does a team do in detail and say, "You should be following X, Y, Z process". Yeah, because then there is no ability for that team to change. If you look at it another way, which is, really quite straightforward in terms of how you engineer a system.

[00:14:42] James: You think about that team as what's the deliverable, what are the key touch points, and then it's really over to the team to self-organize, as I said, to actually work out the best process for that, the best way of working for that. And that actually might be quite different to another team who's doing a similar task. 

[00:15:01] Scott: Yeah. 

[00:15:01] James: Yeah. But if you are going about it in a kind of typical change scenario, what you're trying to do is okay, what's that process? Boom, Let's really force it down in there. And that's a very painful experience. and then it that blocks the ability to innovate effectively, to be adaptive.

[00:15:22] James: And so therefore, your organizational restructuring, as I said is moved the chairs around, but hasn't made you any more connected to the customer or any more connected to the value that you are, you're trying to deliver. And just to add to that, there's. A guy called Conway, he came up with what is now term Conway's Law and Conway's Law.

[00:15:46] James: Basically if I interpret it correctly, it basically says that whatever your organizational communication structure Yeah. If your team in that organization is designing a system, that communication structure will be reflected in the design of the system. You. . So if you'd have, for example, two teams in your business that are not operating together and their role is to design new software, new hardware, new kit, their design will inherently be siloed as well.

[00:16:19] James: So it's absolutely crucial that in your design teams, you look at these interactions, really structure teams effectively understand what the collaboration is. Because if you don't. However clever they are, the design will be locked down and siloed. And that's how I think about most organizational challenges.

[00:16:39] James: It's not imposing a new process. It's trying to work out really with that team, what are the key touch points. So it might not be that the team is aware that there's a part of the organization over here that's doing something that's very, that if you brought the two together would be highly valuable. And that's where I see that enterprise arch role is knowing where all these pockets of value are. And if you then brought those teams together and connected them better. Then you'd reap a lot more reward and be a lot more connected to the customer than you, you currently might be.

[00:17:11] Scott: Yeah, that, that imposed top down approach is about trying to get control or feel in control, isn't it? But actually, what they're doing quite often in this world is increasing the risk of significantly by limiting those teams who are, I always say, the smartest ones in the room, closest to the customer, know how best to solve the problem.

[00:17:32] Scott: and just ty the hands behind their back by someone in a boardroom coming up with a solution and saying, This is what we want, without really knowing why they want it. 

[00:17:41] James: And that question of control is an interesting. Because if you said average business I'll pose you the question. Average business chief exec, C-suite, middle management operation team, who would you say was in control? A very loaded question, obviously. 

[00:17:57] Scott: The ones in control are the ones that are closest to being able to deliver the value or actually do the most damaged potentially. It's the same with like development teams. I used to lead development teams and one of them said to me, developers could or will destroy the world.

[00:18:11] Scott: They're actually the ones with the most power. 

[00:18:13] James: It's the people who are making the decisions on the ground, right? Those are the ones who have most control, as it were. But for most organizations, there's no kind of one person who's in control of this, right? If you break that mindset, this kind of hierarchical approach, what you actually end up with is lots of teams within influence and direction.

[00:18:36] James: So if you've got a team that's developing this thing they're gonna have definitely the most influence over that thing. But if you've then got another team who's looking after, how is that marketed? Of course they're gonna have, a lot of influence over the pricing and how it's advertised and so on and so forth.

[00:18:52] James: If you then think about how the C-Suite sits into this, role in this complex adaptive system is effectively another team that's influencing the dynamics of all the rest. And so at most teams are influencing each other. Yeah. But in terms of control, it's really okay. What have you actually put on the ground yourself to change the organization, build a product, or sell a product, or sell a service, or deliver a service effectively? And that can be quite a mindset shift. Cause obviously the higher you go up in an organization, most people go upwards throughout their career. They might decide to come downwards later on if they get bored of being up on high. But effectively, most, for most, you've got this kind of career path.

[00:19:36] James: And for most of those senior leaders it's then a realization that the further you go along that tree, interestingly enough, the less direct control you have, the more that you have to play and influence a leadership role and therefore far more of a mindset shift role than hands on delivery effectively.

[00:20:03] James: But most change teams are thinking about it in that kind of hierarchical way rather than that complex adaptive system that I mentioned.

[00:20:11] Scott: And that sounds like that's down to. how to encourage those teams to work together, to collaborate, to communicate, to influence, rather than we need to implement a project management methodology that's gonna make sure that we have structure and reporting and documentation coming out our ears and I'm gonna open a kind of worms and talk about Prince, how compatible or incompatible there is that in terms of modern organizations?

[00:20:34] James: Yeah. And it's funny when you talk about things like Prince 2 or any, framework that's got this rigorous process behind it, it's, they come about because the developers of those frameworks are looking for patterns, patterns that have existed in the past. Patterns, that are repeatable. Yeah, so you've got a highly repeatable situation.

[00:21:00] James: Then you're gonna find a highly repeatable process behind it, and that's great. The problem with that is, though, that when you're applying it, the problem that you're applying it to might not be as repeatable as the previous problem it was trying to address. Yep. And it then you changed the emphasis from basically this repeatable way of working.

[00:21:21] James: From actually really thinking about, okay, what is the value here? What is it I'm trying to achieve? And if in your point about bringing two teams together, you've got feeling might be, okay, I've seen this process in the past, I've done it before. I've got this framework. Boom. Okay, this is how we're gonna do it.

[00:21:37] James: It's quite a dangerous situation cause you've not really said," okay, for this particular organization, okay, if I bring together these two teams what is the extra value I can bring about? How does that change the customer experience? "Yeah, so you might have, for example, a security team an application development team.

[00:21:57] James: Yeah. We've all had the situation where you develop a piece of software for a couple of years and then you send it off to the security team. Security team says, "No, basically, we're not gonna install that", or whatever it might be. But that's a perfect example of where. The two teams have not worked together to create shared value, to understand what the collaboration touchpoints are, to effectively deliver that collectively, they're both thinking about it from quite different value mindsets.

[00:22:26] James: One's thinking, application out, the other's thinking, gotta be secure. Nobody's thinking what's the best for the customer in the middle. 

[00:22:34] James: And that's the shared value piece. And that's, that tend to be what's missing. 

[00:22:38] James: If you can help those teams identify that shared value, you're immediately onto a winner.

[00:22:42] Scott: And I've picked this up before and seen it myself, and it just seems bizarre that teams within organizations almost forget. Why they're there. It's like, forgetting, as you said, the end customer. How is everything we do better for the customer? Do organizations just get so big or they're just so distracted with internal noise and politics that they actually forget why they're even there.

[00:23:07] James: Yeah I and it's very hard to. to break down. And that really does boil down to my point about leadership influencing and changing mindsets. That's where the key leadership role comes in to help the teams understand about where they're playing, who they're working with. If you land, an organization of a hundred odd thousand people, And you don't know how to connect to the customer and you're just part of that process that equally you don't have an influence over as well.

[00:23:41] James: Cause it's locked down. It requires you to work with a network of people who do know that. The leaders around you effective, and I say leaders in the kind of small l it's not leaders who have that position in their job title, but leaders in that organization who are thinking in that way in order to help you as an individual connect.

[00:24:02] James: You haven't really got a hope if you land in a business where there isn't that understanding of that value permeated across the organization or the leadership in place to do so.

[00:24:13] Scott: Yeah, I can see how, cuz some roles probably never come in contact with the customer, but they need to. Understand their part in that bigger piece and how they contribute and, try and get some exposure to the customer. So I would get my developers to go out and pull them out of the equivalent of the basement and say, go out and meet the customer, see them in their environment.

[00:24:34] Scott: Get that empathy towards, the problems that you're trying to solve for them. Not just, here's a document you need to work to, to solve a problem that's very different. Yeah, I guess it's all, Yeah. And that's hard in a big organization of the scales that you're talking about, but the leaders can help that, can't they?

[00:24:47] James: Absolutely. It's quite fascinating when you look at different ways in which organizations do this. Some will then put things on SharePoint and so on and expect that to land with the business. But you'll know this, you were working on content management systems that people then don't feel connected with that cuz they can't find the information. So you're leaving it up to the individual to then source that.

[00:25:13] Scott: And it makes assumptions that they're bored at their computer. Oh, just read all this stuff cuz I've got time and I care . Yeah.

[00:25:20] James: And then you get, programs and initiatives around what's your business values, for example. But most of those end up being too fluffy and wooly in some way. Okay, we've got our organizational values. If you go from one business to another business, they look always, look kind, similar, basically.

[00:25:42] Scott: Fluffy management words.

[00:25:44] James: So it's, how do you build that real connection in something that you truly do value. Yeah. But that tend to get lost a lot of the time. And there has to be, a real drive from the business. Want to change that mindset rather than, that silver bullet approach that I mentioned before around this new technology, this new thing will do it.

[00:26:06] James: This new way of working will be adopted. If you look across all the big organizations in the UK for example, you'll see that they probably have the. If they looked at their change programs, they'll be the same top 10 change programs, roughly speaking, and I mentioned some of them already, data cloud transformation, et cetera.

[00:26:26] James: These are all good things, absolutely, but only when connected to the specific value of the customers for that particular business, which is it, which ends up being very different for each organization..

[00:26:40] Scott: And do you think the C-suite are the ones missing that, or that's getting stifled by middle management? The message isn't reaching the troops on the ground for one of a event description because ultimately middle management can kill anything can't they?

[00:26:52] James: It, it has to come across the business because people don't just miraculously appear in the csuite one day. They've gotta come from somewhere and most of the day, most of the time they aren't, straight from Uni and land in a CEO is a footsie 100, for example. They'll come from, the ground up of working in those teams, being middle managers and growing into that role. So it it, it really is organization wide and a lot of this boils down to simple human nature, as I said before, around trying to find repeatable ways of working predictability there's a natural bias for us to want to say, Okay, this is how it's done. It makes us feel

[00:27:39] Scott: Feel safe. 

[00:27:40] James: And safe.

[00:27:40] James: Yeah. But unfortunately that natural tendency is then an effectively, our Achilles heel because in looking for that safety, we. then effectively stifling our businesses. So it really has to come from the individual. It can't, whoever's on this podcast, basically, be it a very junior consultant or a junior operation manager, whoever you might be it really starts with you. 

[00:28:07] Scott: Hmm. 

[00:28:08] James: You're not, and at some point, you might find yourself in the C-Suite as well operating or thinking in this way.

[00:28:15] Scott: Yeah. And that's why the, And it's the whole being comfortable with change and. The whole startup culture around test and learn rapidly and being comfortable with, that didn't work. We'll try something different. Pivoting versus, that's why, these big banks are getting disrupted by the smaller startups.

[00:28:31] Scott: Cuz they just have that different mindset, don't they? Do you think that's an age thing? Can I be stereotypical like that? Do you think that's a generation mindset that comes?

[00:28:40] James: I don't think so. I think a lot of this thinking has been around for a very long time. If you talk about rapid prototyping, for example I, I don't exactly when that term was termed, but around the sixties and so on and before that, there, there's I don't really think it's a generational thing.

[00:28:58] James: I think it is just pure human nature and bias and. We really have to think about, what in designing and working with these businesses what are our personal biases? I know for example, a lot of enterprise architects who are working across the business, they're dealing with a very complex business.

[00:29:19] James: Their natural bias is to gather more and more information. Yeah. but they then never get to the point of being able to translate that information into something useful because they're in that sort of mode of, " Okay, this is a really complex business. I've gotta keep on going, get to a lot of granular detail."

[00:29:40] James: And so that, that's one type of bias that change bias, that process bias, that repeatability and safety bias as well. We really happen to think as individuals, but where we place and temper or be conscious of the biases that we've got in order to bring about change in the most effective way. Are you gonna take risks? If you are gonna take risks, what the likely impacts rather than some who might be playing it safe, others who are not.

[00:30:08] Scott: You've mentioned human nature a couple of times. One of those challenges must be around that siloed nature of teams and certainly in big organizations where you've got say an HR team versus an IT team and there's just like tension and "oh, they're always late delivering stuff" and you hear those kind of conversations permeating throughout the organization.

[00:30:31] Scott: How do how do you fix that. You must come across that in your work in terms of it's a, this is a human problem rather than a structural problem necessarily. Other than disciplining and sacking some people, of course.

[00:30:43] James: Yeah, it very much is about shared value and ownership. If you've got one team blaming another because they haven't done something, that's typically because they're not seeing, the other team is not seeing it from your perspective in the same way. They've not prioritized that work, They've not understood that work. They've not understood what the requirement is, cuz maybe there isn't the communication there.

[00:31:10] James: So there's either gonna be something about misunderstanding, the flow of information, the flow of understanding hasn't been there. That can be down to, personal relationships. It can be down to systems and data that you're storing and the quality of data. But a again, it boils down to the fact.

[00:31:28] James: Whatever that touchpoint between those two teams, nobody's managing that touchpoint. Nobody's understanding that touchpoint. Nobody's owning that touchpoint. And as soon as you can get some shared ownership over the connection, 

[00:31:44] James: Yeah, that's where then you can bring about change in the teams. But you invariably won't get that by looking upwards in the organiz. 

[00:31:54] James: So if you say " Hey, I've got one team over here". The other team is over in US East Coast doing something for you. The line management chain might be, 3, 4, 5 steps above you. And for most people are saying okay, so we're gonna, we're not working with this team effectively. We're gonna escalate it, We're gonna escalate it to this person over here who had literally no idea what's going on.

[00:32:19] James: They're disconnected from both. Rather than saying, between the two teams, how do 

[00:32:24] James: we 

[00:32:25] Scott: Yeah, let's just get 

[00:32:26] James: that collaboration together? 

[00:32:28] Scott: Yeah. 

[00:32:28] James: Yeah. But that, that boils down to ownership. It's very hard to pin down who owns these gaps in the organization. This is why we that starts to then lead towards organizational restructures.

[00:32:41] James: So somebody will say "okay it's clear that team A and B are not working together. We should restructure, We should bring together team A and B". Yeah. What's that done? It's just broken a connection somewhere else. 

[00:32:53] James: Effectively, whatever organization structure you've got, you're always gonna have these collaboration lines. So solving the, you're not gonna solve the organization structure. Your organization structure is always gonna be problematic. In some ways. Somebody's not gonna like it somewhere. Therefore you really need to solve how you collaborate first. Cuz without that, as I say, you're just playing the musical chairs game.

[00:33:17] Scott: And as you said, that's linked into everyone feeling they're on the same team, going in the same direction with the same values, same principles. Yeah, that makes sense. 

[00:33:26] Scott: Brilliant. 

[00:33:27] Scott: One of the things I ask all my guests is, if you could take one book with you to a desert island, what would it be?

[00:33:32] James: Ooh, quite a fan of Sophie's world. 

[00:33:35] James: If you've come across that? 

[00:33:37] Scott: No, I haven't, No. 

[00:33:37] James: So Sophie's world is basically it's a story of philosophy and I think why I'd take it is because it takes you on a journey of how people think over time. How people change their mindsets based upon what they think of the world. Fire the elements of fire, water and ice, for example.

[00:33:58] James: It's that is the mindset of X thousand years ago. Now we think about atoms and we think about quarks, and we think about the world in different ways. and it takes you on that journey. And that's what we've been talking about really. It's that change of not just mindset in a business, but changing a mindset of society.

[00:34:18] James: Are we on a flat earth or around earth, et cetera. So yeah, I think that's the book I'd 

[00:34:22] James: take. 

[00:34:23] Scott: Brilliant. Thank you. And if anyone wants to get in touch with you, what's the best way to do that? 

[00:34:28] James: Yeah, just drop me a line on on LinkedIn. I dunno whether you'll put my 

[00:34:30] James: link up

[00:34:31] Scott: I will, yeah, I'll

[00:34:32] Scott: put your link in the show notes. 

[00:34:33] Scott: Thanks for being on the show. 

[00:34:34] James: Cheers Scott.

[00:34:35] Scott: A big, thank you for listening to the Rebel Diaries show your time is precious so it is appreciated. The show has a Facebook group for you to engage with others, discuss topics, get access to exclusive content and let me know what you think of the show. There's a link to the group in the show notes or search Facebook for "Rebel Diaries community". 

[00:34:52] Scott: Until next week take care be a rebel and deliver work with impact.