Matt Watkinson
Whisky, Writing and the Willingness To Be Wrong
In this episode of Brave UX, Matt Watkinson shares how he’s expanded his luck surface area, why it’s important to slow down and pay attention, and how to fight organisational ambiguity.
Highlights include:
- What did the FBI want to learn about experience design?
- Why is ambiguity the biggest barrier to effective decision making?
- What made you conscious of your own ignorance?
- What gets in the way of people being willing to be wrong?
- Why is it important to be a host and not a guest?
Who is Matt Watkinson?
Matt is the CEO and Co-Founder of Methodical, an experience design agency that helps customer-centred businesses to develop new products and services and to improve their existing programs and experiences, while delivering greater customer and commercial value.
He is also the author of two highly regarded books (soon to be three). His first, “The Ten Principles Behind Great Customer Experiences” put Matt on the map and his second, “The Grid: The Master Model Behind Business Success” was published in 2017, to critical acclaim.
Matt has been described by Rory Sutherland, the vice chairman of the Ogilvy & Mather group of companies, as “One of the deepest and most original business thinkers” he has ever come across. And it’s this depth and originality that has seen Matt invited to share his ideas at events for companies like Microsoft, Volkswagen, Salesforce, American Express, and Google.
Transcript
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Hello and welcome to another episode of Brave UX. I'm Brendan Jarvis, Managing Founder of TheSpace InBetween, the home of New Zealand's only specialist evaluative UX research practice and world class UX lab, enabling brave teams across the globe to dearest product design and equally brave leaders to shape and scale design culture. You can find out a little bit more about that at thespaceinbetween.co.nz. Here on Brave UX though, it's my job to help you to put the pieces of the product puzzle together. I do that by unpacking the stories, learnings, and expert advice of world-class UX, design and product management professionals. My guest today is Matt Watkinson. Matt is the CEO and co-founder of Methodical and experience design agency that helps customer-centered businesses to develop new products and services and to improve their existing programs and experiences while delivering customer and commercial value.
- Here's also the author of two highly regarded books (soon to be three I'm told). His first, The Ten Principles Behind Great Customer Experiences, put Matt on the map and his second, The Grid: The Master Model Behind Business Success, was published in 2017 to critical acclaim. Matt has been described by Rory Sutherland, the Vice Chairman of the Ogilvy and Mather group of companies, as one of the deepest and most original business thinkers he has ever come across. And it's this depth and originality that has seen Matt invited to share his ideas at events for companies like Microsoft, Volkswagen, Salesforce, American Express, and Google. Before all the glitz and glam of his life in California, Matt was a freelance UX designer based in the United Kingdom, where he designed websites, enterprise web applications, and mobile apps for clients such as P&O Ferry's, Land Rover, Vodafone, and IBM. He is an Honorary Senior Visiting Fellow at Bayes Business School in London, a Venture Partner at Tiller Partners in Los Angeles, and a Member of the Royal Chartered Society of Designers. And now he's kindly here with me for a conversation on Brave UX. Matt, welcome to the show.
- Matt Watkinson:
- Well, thank you so much for having me and for setting such tremendously high expectations. With that introduction, see, let's see what we can do about that.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- That was all you, Matt, not me. I just wanna point out all of your achievements. Hey Matt, I was curious
- Matt Watkinson:
- Perhaps being a bit charitable there with his description of me, but he's in marketing himself so he knows how to sell.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yes, he does. Yes. He's a very highly regarded marketer actually. And he's also, I believe, a fellow Englishman. And I found this curious about you. So obviously there's plenty of English people that live in the States and you are one of them. And you're someone, as I mentioned in your introduction, a known for some fairly important books in this field of customer experience. You know, speak at highly reputable events. You've even launched your own strategic design agency and you've been invited to share your insights with America's FBI. And I did wonder you're not actually an undercover kingsman or something of the sort a
- Matt Watkinson:
- No, I'm not. Also one point of minor pedantry. I think Rory is Welsh and I'm not sure that he takes you well to be,
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I'll be in trouble now. He
- Matt Watkinson:
- Described as,
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I hope you're not listening to this, Rory.
- Matt Watkinson:
- Yeah no, I'm I I've just happened to have several pinch me moments in my career, probably as much by judgment. I mean, it's funny when you write a book, a first book in particular, you is 27, 28 years old sitting at your dining table, tapping away, hoping it will see the light of day, hoping that it'll help people and to do a better job or the macro goal of helping people improve their customer's kind of quality of life and all of that. You really have no idea what is going to happen, whether it will die on the vine, whether it will. I mean books, even the best books can be a lottery. As history has taught us, a lot of books have come from obscurity into being million copy sellers. I mean, it's a bit of a lottery, but yeah, you tap away at home and you hope it's going to see the light of day.
- And then I was just fortunate with that first book that it got a great tailwind. It kind of arrived in the right place at the right time. And all these interesting and fascinating organizations from around the world happen to pick up on it. And you get invited to speak at a conference and then there are people in the audience who then wanna hear more of what you have to say. And it just books. What they do really is they expand your kind of luck surface area, they expand your serendipity field, however you like to think about it. And it just creates more opportunity what those opportunities will be. You can never tell in advance, but yeah, I was lucky to speak at the FBI. I was lucky to. But also with conferences and events and these things, you're also fortunate to learn from people who have serious pragmatic business challenges that is helping to shape your thinking. I try to avoid this sermon from the Mount. I'm at the pulpit and you are here to learn from me way of speaking and approaching things and try and make it more, here's what I'm thinking about and here's the challenges or opportunities that I've noticed and I want to hear from you afterwards or whatever, what you have to say about that. And it's as much an opportunity to learn if you approach it the right way as it is to share what
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I wasn't aware that the FBI had customers, what did they wanna learn from you?
- Matt Watkinson:
- Well that's a very good question and you're not the first person to ask it actually, because it does sound a little bit incongruous, but there are entire parts of the agency, which is quite large, that are there to serve other parts. If you think about their IT and technology function, obviously they have a lot of people who depend on them. If you are at a field office or out in the field or whatever, and you have an issue with technology, they're serving their internal customer in that regard. They also have to, they relate with the public. There's a lot of citizen outreach, there's all sorts of things. So yeah, they have a mix of, and also other agencies that they work with or collaborate with. So they're are obviously an extremely impressive organization. I think they have, I mean, it's something insane, like a thousand or 10,000 applicants for every role that's open or something like that. Very impressive, well run, highly professional organization and it was a privilege to be invited to the Hoover building and have a conversation with some of the people who worked
- Brendan Jarvis:
- There. I understand you were also invited to another famous building after that talk.
- Matt Watkinson:
- Yes, the White House. Yeah, which was quite funny. My business partner and I have been put, I've got a photo of it, actually put the White House in the satin nav on our high car and drove over there. It's a very funny thing to [laugh]. Very funny thing to see. Yeah, I mean we just had a run of the mill tour. It wasn't anything out of the ordinary, but it was a kind of surreal moment. I mean, I'm from a crap town in England, pens from Dunedin where in your neck of the woods with these two kind of village idiots, basically showing up at the the Hoover building in the White House. It was pretty, pretty entertaining for us. But
- Brendan Jarvis:
- If people are listening from Redding in England Matt's just described your place of birth or residence as a crap town, you'll never be to go back. Now [laugh],
- Matt Watkinson:
- Trying to think of its redeeming features. I'm sure there are some, but I mean it's just a town mean there's
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Something, it's 30 minutes from Oxford, so maybe that's a redeeming feature.
- Matt Watkinson:
- And there's a rock festival every year, which is amazing. All the best amazing bands have played there. So yeah, I mean reading's just kind of nondescript. It's a bit uncharitable to call it crap. I've heard people call it worse.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- So thinking about Great Britain, and again, sorry Rory, if you are listening, apologies. I used to have a Welsh girlfriend and I know exactly how deep that must cut to be accused of being English. Anyway, back to the uk, clearly some big events have happened in the UK recently most notably the passing of Queen Elizabeth ii. I was interested in your views on the British monarchy from an experienced design perspective.
- Matt Watkinson:
- My views on the monarchy from an experienced design perspective,
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Given what we just saw with the funeral and how this whole momentous and historic changing of Regent has just played out.
- Matt Watkinson:
- Wow. I mean, I really have no idea how to answer that. I didn't typically read the news and I don't have television. I mean it is an incredible, I I'll tell you, I did have a conversation with one of my partners the other night. In fact, the guy who runs Tiller Partners, Csaba Konkoly, who I wrote this slur book with that's coming out about longevity is impressive in any kind of organization or any kind of business or any kind of brand. And might be a bit cynical to call the Royal family a business or a brand or anything like that. I don't mean to
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Well, they call themselves the firm, don't they? So I'm, yeah, vernacular.
- Matt Watkinson:
- Well, I'm not intentionally, I'm not intentionally being disrespectful if it comes across that way, but they have had tremendous longevity and they've continued to try and reshape themselves into being relevant and resonating with modern, the changing of the times. Some people would argue that they've done that very well. I think some people would argue that I don't have a particularly strong opinion on it either way, but they do seem to have maintained their relevance and appeal to people who want to visit the country into huge sways of the population. So well done, well done then.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I can't think of many people in this day and age that could die and attract degree of emotion and the caliber of attendees to their funeral. It really, and I know you said you didn't follow it, I didn't watch it, but I did follow it to some degree through the headlines and it was spectacular. So certainly they're doing something right as far as their positioning in the hearts and minds of people globally.
- Matt Watkinson:
- Oh yeah, yeah, I would concur. I would concur.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- So there's something else that, well, something we share in common actually that is related to the British Isles that are briefly wanted to touch on, and I'm a novice when it comes to this, but I understand that you are quite the expert or at least further on than I am, and I'm talking about scotch whiskey. I understand you're a bit of a collector. How many bottles do you have in your collection?
- Matt Watkinson:
- Well, I've killed a few recently. I'd estimate between, I'm going guess somewhere between 80 and a hundred. So not nothing outrageous, but it captures people's attention when they come in the living room and see the cart.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah,
- Matt Watkinson:
- That's a lot of booze. I'm like, well, that's just scotch or with some Japanese. But yeah, I do am partial to Scott Scotch every now and then.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- What is it about scotch and the culture or the experience that sits around scotch that it pulled you towards it or keeps you engaged with it?
- Matt Watkinson:
- Well, it appeals to me in several distinct ways. Okay. So I think one in a kind of pragmatic, experiential way, I think owing to the kind of complexity of the drink, it's an opportunity to slow down and be a bit present in the moment. You don't kind of glug it. It's not a fuel source. It is an opportunity to just take a beat and savor, savor an experience and be in that particular moment and just give yourself a little bit of you time to just enjoy something. And there's no pretense or pretentiousness with that I should say, because some of the whiskeys that I enjoy are very inexpensive. I don't have anything that's historically expensive either. Another good thing I think as your pallet develops with scotch is that you start to hunt value for money. So there are some whiskeys that are just famously overpriced and there are alternatives that have the same flavor profile and comparable quality that are a fraction of the price.
- And there's a degree of pleasure that comes from that kind of insider knowledge I would say mean. Some people would disagree, but a glenro whiskey as comparable, if not superior to a lot of Macallan whiskeys, but it's not as expensive. So that's not a ding against Macallan. They're tremendous. And their brand building is amazing. They're like the kind of whiskey, I guess they've built this incredible brand. But in terms of pure flavor, if you were to blind taste it, I, it's delicious, but it's delicious and expensive and there are things that are delicious and less expensive. I think also it's a kind of counterpoint to a lot of the things that I like in my life are counterpoints to my work life. So work is can be frenetic and fast paced and everything is ethereal and iterative. Certainly in the digital spaces, there's not a lot that's kind of tangible or real.
- Sometimes I have this dread feeling that you could delete a hard drive in my career wouldn't exist. I dunno whether other people ever struggle with that notion, people who work in the digital space. But I kind of have an analog heart. I'm drawn to real things, to objects, to buildings, to tangible things, machines, I love machines and watches and cameras and all that kind of stuff. And one of the things about whiskey is that it just takes a fucking long time to make it right. It's aged and it's aged because the flavor is imparted through a kind of chemical process of sitting in a wooden barrel that's breathing, an air is passing in and out of it and it's expanding and contracting with the temperature and its physical location. It might be by the sea, it might be in a cave, it might be high up somewhere dry, it might be in the tropics if you talk about distillery like kavalan in Taiwan. And it's kind of slow and alchemical and organic and it's an kind of art. And those things have an appeal for me just as in terms of my own personality or my own persona. I like all of those things about it. And it's sociable and it's, it's fun and yeah, it's just a nice way to end a busy day for me.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- That quality, that analog quality, it almost to me speaks to an old world. If you like things like the motorbikes that you work on, the cameras that you have, the things that exist outside of our screens, which we spend a exorbitant amount of time in front of. Has this pulled towards the analog always been something that's been part of your life or is this something that you've developed as a response to the magnetization that exists around the devices that we spend so much of our day in front of? I
- Matt Watkinson:
- Think I've always had a very well, it's kind of a stupid thing to say I love things but I hate stuff. I dunno if that's even possible here. Here's a way of trying to answer that question. My dad was an engineer and an industrial designer, and he ran a firm that created professional audio products, which he's since sold. But I remember being 12, 13, maybe 14 years old, and going around to his business partner's house, he had one of these banging olive, some stereos where if you put your hand in front of it, look, these glass doors would slide apart and the lights would come on, this warm light would kind of emanate from it, and then you'd press a button and it would lift the clamp. And that's how you put the compact disc in. It actually got one, it's just out of the frame.
- And even though it's defunct, it so of sentimental value for me, I remember seeing this thing and saying how it's behind these doors, how does it work? And he's like, well walk up to it. And I walked up to it and I extended my arm and the glass doors opened and it was like this light bulb went off in my mind that we could be intentional about the effect of a product on the user of it or the customer of it. Like it was somebody's job or somebody's vision or somebody's idea to make this thing playful and to make it engaging and to make it something that just provided a little shot of pleasure during the day. It took something that was mundane and elevated it with this kind of theatrical, kind of slightly whimsical way of interacting with it. And I think when I realized that as a kind of teenager, that was when my love for design was cemented.
- I became aware of it as a discipline, if that makes sense. And I became aware that we had a response to the objects in our environment and the things that we used and the tools that we use and the products that we own. And by being intentional about that, by being thoughtful about that Steven Bailey, who's a wonderful design critic once said, design is intelligence made visible. And I really like that. I think that thoughtfulness is a virtue in product design. So, and I also think that the machines and things which I love engineering, all of that stuff, is it intelligence made visible? And I get a real kick out of it and I love it. And I love that people can say, we're going to make something great and it's going to stand the test of time and it's going to provide years of, if not joy, functional performance to somebody and it's going to solve a need or bring them some kind of joy and delight.
- And I just wanted to be part of that world. And I think everyone who works in design and all the various disciplines thereof are that resonates with them. I think we're all like that. I think a lot of people who are UX UI guides would be really happy as a architect or as some other thing. We're all kind of turned on by the same things, or a lot of us are, at least in my experience. And I was kind of the last generation of people who were born pre-digital being normal. I grew up without the internet, grew up without iPhone, grew up building shelters out sticks in the woods and falling off my BMX and riding around on a skateboard and building air fix kits with my dad and radio controlled Tamir cars. Something I've been, which I still slightly nerdy, but I still love all of that kind of thing.
- I just love making things. I love making things. And I also think that to try and bring that back to a UX UI conversation, when I got into that discipline, there weren't many degrees of separation between you and people who were making things. It was one or it was none. Often you were making it yourself. And I think that one of the things that separates great design professionals and those who perhaps could develop their skills is more of an appreciation of how things are made and more consideration for the making of things during the design process. And that's why you hear people like Johnny. Ive always talking about the art of making, he's a designer, but he's interested in making, mark Newso is capable of making things and is fascinated by materials. And the final thing about this and where this is becoming an extended monologue is that my personal projects, the side projects that I've been involved in, building motorcycles take a lot of photos.
- Obviously writing books is not really a side project, but it's not my day job these days. These are opportunities to indulge things to the quality level that you personally would like to see them done to. And that's not always the case with client work. Sometimes for good reasons, sometimes for less good reasons. But I think a lot of people in creative fields are frustrated by some of these constraints that are imposed on them. And as Scott Besky wrote a wonderful book, the Messy Middle, some of the best projects, many of the best projects are slow cooked. The best food is slow cooked. And so having these things outside of your field of work that you can slow cook, you can slow cook building a motorcycle, you can slow cook writing a book, you can slow cook a personal project and get it to the point where you go, that's just right, that's just right for me and it's my vision and that's all that matters. And I don't have a customer so they can fuck off. They don't like it. Frankly, having that opportunity is fantastic for me and that's why I'm always tinkering or making things on the side.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- You mentioned UX design and as I mentioned in your introduction just 11 short years ago, you were a UX designer and involved in purely from what it sounds like anyway, digital projects. You're also someone who is fairly curious and that I also learned from something that you'd said that you didn't get your university entrance, but you did end up going to university and getting a degree. You're also not a business person. And you mentioned a little earlier on as well that you were around 26 or 27 when you wrote your first book. So I was thinking about these attributes of your person and your history and your experience, and I was thinking, what business was it of yours, someone who wasn't a business person to write a book about customer experience and essentially business at the core of that age of 26 or 27?
- Matt Watkinson:
- Well, the best thing about writing a book when you're 26, 27, 28 is that you already know everything, which makes everything easier.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- [laugh]
- Matt Watkinson:
- Overly suddenly when you get a bit older that you realize that that might not be true.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Anything you wanna retract in the book at this stage?
- Matt Watkinson:
- Oh, well, I mean that's a great question. My take on the 10 principles book, not that I've read it for a really long time, is that the 10 guidelines hold up remarkably well, in my opinion. I think they do. I would change the emphasis of some of them because some of them have shown to be bigger issues or lesser issues than others. And I would reframe some of the business opportunities slightly differently. And I think obviously with a decade of more experiences of writer, I think I'd, I'd find my own writing abhorrent and have to write it from scratch or just heavily, there'd be so much red pen flying around that thing. If I went into do a second, I was going to say version then addition. If I was going to do a second edition of it, I would maintain the core of it because it's helped a lot of people and it's done really well.
- I mean it won. I think it's still the only book on customer experience to win a major award sworn management book of the year. But I've learned and grown and I've been wrong as often as I've been right in the 10 years since. So yeah, there's a load of things that I would change, but I probably wouldn't change the 10 core tenets of it. I think they've held up remarkably well. So I'm proud of that. That worked out well. But to answer the question about, well, did I have the right to write it, I guess, and that's a very good question because I just observed, and this came again from growing up with my dad, that every serious discipline had a set of principles that allowed people to make decisions more efficiently and more effectively, or guidelines that you wouldn't expect someone at Boeing who's an engineer to not know that forces mass times acceleration.
- I mean, you'd expect them to know that and several far more complicated things that I wouldn't understand, but I just thought, look, here we are, we're trying to get the experiential component of products or services or the customer experience. And if we just had these simple universal guidelines that we could use as a mental scaffolding, which is a term I use a lot to describe how I like to approach things, then we could not guarantee success. Cuz you never can, but we'd have better hypotheses to work from or we'd have better guidelines to help us make decisions. So we know the trajectory of products and services is easier, tends to win. It doesn't always win, but it tends to win. If you think about commu, how communication has evolved in the last 15, 20 years and the fax machine through to WhatsApp, and we don't even text anymore, we just emoji or Siri does it for us, whatever it's in, it's in the direction of convenience and needs no denying that.
- And almost every product or service is in that trajectory. So launching something that is functionally identical but noticeably harder to use an alternatives is the odds of success are much diminished. I think we'd agree with that. But knowing these principles around error prevention, feedback, choice paralysis, reducing time on task, all of that kind of stuff allows you to be structured and intentional in the design of those things to achieve that goal and not leave it to chance perhaps so much. So yeah, that was why I did it because I saw the opportunity to make that kind of thinking accessible to a very broad audience. And I put the yards in to do the research. I did about three years of research to come up with this set of principles. And I think that's given it this kind of evergreen quality that people still, I mean even up until last year, people, I mean, I haven't looked at the numbers now, some people ordering a thousand copies at a time for conferences or events or things. So yeah, maybe I didn't have the right to write it, but it worked out pretty well anyway.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Sure did. It sounds like you might have been a little sick of having the same kinds of conversations with people.
- Matt Watkinson:
- What about the book?
- Brendan Jarvis:
- No, not about the book, more about the way in which we approach the design of these experiences.
- Matt Watkinson:
- So I mean, the way that I thought about it is, and I still use this when I talk about the book, I read this book by Miyamoto Muhi, the Book of Five Rings, which is a kind of samurai training manual. Not that that's necessarily relevant to my day job, but he was talking about the difference between a strike and a hit and a strike being something that's a conscious, considered and deliberate action or technique that's kind of been mastered to the point where you can perform that with a consistent outcome and a hit is kind of swinging your arms around hoping that you're going to land that knockout blow on your opponent. And I just felt that the way that we were approaching this whole CX thing felt a lot more like hitting than striking that there was an opportunity there to bring some kind of body of theoretical knowledge to it in an accessible non-academic format. So that's what I set out to
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Do. You've said, and I'll quote you now, my practice has been shaped by a conscious awareness of my ignorance rather than a conscious awareness of my strengths. What was it that you experienced? Maybe someone said something to you or you did something. What was it that made you conscious and aware of your own ignorance?
- Matt Watkinson:
- I mean, everything would be the easy answer. And let me give you one example of this. So the way that my well career has played out is that I've tried to solve a problem through things like let's just talk about the first book for example. I tried to solve a problem by writing that book, and what that did was unintentionally, it kind of put me in this position where people would contact me and they'd be much more senior than the people I'd normally be used to dealing with, and they'd want me to talk about much more kind of strategic matters or big picture matters. Nobody wanted to pay me to sketch frames anymore, they just wanted me to drink coffee fee and pontificate and point at slides, which was an extremely disorienting and uncomfortable time in my career because I didn't have a plan for that.
- I just thought, I'll carry on doing what I'm doing and maybe I'll earn a little bit more and it'll be cool and I get to say, Hey, I wrote a book, but that, that's not really how it shook out. But what came out from those conversations with people as people would say, well, we're going to spend this money on this CX program and we have this CX problem. And I'd be like, well, what makes you think that you have that problem? How do you know don't have a product problem or a pricing problem or an awareness problem, or it just seemed to me that they'd arrived at the solution without realizing the problem. So that then set would set me off down a different kind of intellectual trajectory of wanting to learn, well, how do we go about doing that? And realizing, I don't actually know how we do that, but how do we diagnose the problems that we have in the first place so that, again, in solving every challenge or attempting to solve a challenge, you become aware of the boundaries of your knowledge and then you start to expand it and doing progressive cycles of, oh, okay, I think I've cracked this.
- Oh shit, that's revealed. This is bringing into your awareness continuously the limits to your knowledge and understanding. So that's one aspect of it, which is that your own personal growth, if you read a lot and you study a lot, is always, you are always going to be butting up at the edge of your capabilities and competence. So that's part of it. The other part of it is that occasionally you come across something that upends your worldview and the antibodies in your mind want to reject it, right? They're like, that can't be right. That's got to be nonsense. How can that possibly be true if this is also true? And I believe that, right? So a great example of this would be, it's probably on the shelf behind me. Oh, it's just one shelf up. You can't see it. The work of the Ehrenberg Bass Institute and Byron Sharp captured in the books how brands Grow Part one and two, where, okay, we've got far too much of a focus on loyalty and not enough of a focus on acquisition.
- Typically, there's all these concepts like the heavy bio fallacy, double jeopardy, blah, blah, blah, blah. Differentiation is kind of questionable. All of these concepts. And I was like, this cannot, I was raised to believe exactly the opposite, but that is book for sure revealed my ignorance because they have the strongest evidence, and I believe them to be right for one of a better term, I believe them to be correct. And I've been applying those principles in my own work, and I've seen the results from it right now. A lot of people in the customer experience space don't want to change their mind about that. Literally. In fact, some people who I've had conversations with about this where I've said, you almost can't in good conscience continue with the way in which you're operating your business if you know this to be untrue and that this is true.
- So you need to read this book. And it's like, but I don't want to, so I'm not going to. Yeah. And there's a lot of that. I think strong beliefs loosely held is a good way of approaching things. I've been wrong so often, or I've had my eyes open to new ways of doing things. So often where I've had colleagues of mine that I've hired point out better ways of doing things in our own company so often that I have all the evidence that I need to assume that I might be, I well be wrong about what I'm talking about and be open to somebody saying, no, no, no, that doesn't work. Mean my new book coming out with Csaba, who I mentioned earlier, I mean learning from him. This is a guy who's backed 27 startups, five of which are worth a billion each now seven of which are worth a billion in aggregate.
- He's tremendously successful entrepreneur and in an investor, the way that he makes decisions totally different to mine. And I couldn't put my finger on it until I eventually realized that it was his relationship with uncertainty. I was just trying to always continuously analyze risk and uncertainty out of the picture to make better decisions. That's what I thought. Making better decisions looked like. He was always, it doesn't work like that. The future's unknowable. The world is unpredictable, everything is uncertain. What you need to do is play a numbers game and know work on the basis of affordable loss instead of trying to guarantee a return on investment. And as I started learning about all these concepts, it just exploded my brain.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And you, you've said about this, I'll quote you again. You've said there's no harm in changing your mind. We're all learning every day. I spoke with Christina Vodka a couple of weeks ago and she echoed a similar sentiment to me. She basically said that changing a position that you've previously held is not a sign of weakness, it's actually an indication that you've learned something. Now this is what you've talked about here, this aspects of what you've talked about. So things with being more comfortable with risk, being willing to be wrong, being open to being coached. These types of attitudes or mindsets or behaviors are not ubiquitous. They're not things that everybody is comfortable embracing. What is it that you think, from your observations of other people and perhaps your own observation of yourself, what is it that you think gets in the way of people taking this posture and unlocking more potential for themselves?
- Matt Watkinson:
- I think there are several factors involved. I think one of them is our general in, at least in terms of my experience of my upbringing in education, the belief that there are in terms of our education, we go through curriculum and we we're examined on things where right and wrong answers. And you score points for getting good answers and you lose points for getting bad answers. So you're inculcating a mentality in people that there's a correct answer and I must find the correct answer. And that's where I get a pat in the head. And if I don't get the correct answer, I get a red, okay, the red pen. Well, business and the real world is not like that. It's not taking a geography exam or a maths test. There are often many, many right answers and there are often many, many wrong answers. And there are often factors in the environment that can mean that even if you answer it wrong, you still win.
- And even if you answer it, you still lose, right? So first of all, having that mindset of there's a right and wrong answer is unhelpful in business. And people aren't ever taught that, right? When I think about people who go for job interviews, and I've raised this several times with people, if someone doesn't get the job, they assume it's because they weren't good. But when you think about how many factors are in your control versus aren't in your control with a job interview, well what mood the interviewer is in, have I got good chemistry with them? If they already decided on an internal hire, and this is just a dog and pony show, what's their exact hiring criteria? What's the politics? Who else was I interviewing against? The list of factors beyond your control vastly outweighs the factors within your control. So the rational thing to do would be to say, well, this was a numbers game and my numbers didn't come up.
- And if you prepared well, and if you gave your best shot and you weren't late and you weren't vaguely cogent and you weren't drunk and all those things that you should do for an interview, don't beat yourself up about it. But people's concept of success and failure is so fucking binary. That's the first thing. I think the second thing is that there's definitely a kind of ego dimension to it. In my experience, we all have one, nobody loves to be criticized or nobody loves instinctively for it to be pointed out where we got things wrong or where we can improve. I mean, you can learn to love it. I think I've learned to love it, which is why I literally have coaches and mentors for everything that I'm interested in. Partially because I'm too lazy to learn everything the hard way, but partially because I believe the easiest way to get better at something is to find an expert, ask 'em what to do and do it not find an idiot, ask 'em what to do and do it or find an expert, tell them what to do and do it or find an expert, ask 'em what to do and do something else.
- Those things just don't work. I think that's how I learn. I find an expert, I ask 'em what to do and I do it. But I think there's an ego component to it, which is, wow, that hurt. But rather than saying, okay, that hurts, but I can live with a little bit of pain and just move on. It's like, no, that hurts. And I don't wanna be hurt, so I'm not going to put myself in a situation where it hurts. It's fine. Just toughen up. You'll get through it. And then I think the third thing is just fear. Fear, a kind of sense of fear. And I don't know whether it's real or imagined because I don't, I'm not employed, so I don't have that much exposure to what employees go through. But it's like how are people going to react when they discover that I'm wrong or if I admit that I made a mistake or if I, it's, it's more like the forward thinking aspect of how you're going to be judged, I think can terrorize people.
- And that comes down, I think, to issues around culture and leadership and management and that kind of thing. I actually think Ray Dalio had something really good to say about this, where in terms of their culture Bridgewater, I think it's called, it's like it's okay to make mistakes, but it's not to learn from them. And it's definitely not okay to cover 'em up. You, you're going to get in trouble for those, but you're not going to get in trouble for making the mistake. So I think those are the kind of big components of it. And also some people just don't want to get better at things like they're happy in their, and that's cool. They're just happy doing what they're doing the way that they're doing it and they're happy. And if that's what they're after, cool. No, everyone's gotta live life on their own terms in the way that they find fulfilling.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Are you familiar with Marshall Goldsmith's work?
- Matt Watkinson:
- I'm,
- Brendan Jarvis:
- There's a book that he wrote probably over a decade ago now. So he's a leadership coach for some of, as you can imagine, some of the world's most hard charging types of people, like the head of the World Bank, the CEO of Pfizer, these kind of people. He wrote a book called What Got You Here Won't Get You There. Maybe it's 15, 20 years old now. And I heard him recently interviewed and he had this interesting thing to say about the stories that we tell ourselves, particularly when we fail at doing something, the beat up that can happen in one's mind the beration and how that limits our ability to accept future risks and to learn and to grow. And he's a practicing Buddhist, not a spiritual Buddhist. And he has this practice of basically just every time you breathe in and you breathe out, it's a new you.
- And I've found that internalizing that has been really useful, particularly in those moments where, meaning me in this case where I've caught myself having that unhelpful conversation and recognizing and getting some objectivity on the outcome. And you talked about that you don't always have control of all the circumstances. In fact, you probably never do. So it is, there are these things that people can do, these practice practices they can pick up that can help them with becoming more okay with the fact that things aren't going to play out perfectly and that life doesn't work like a test.
- Matt Watkinson:
- Sure. And one thing that's really helped me with some of that, there's a wonderful book actually. I really love this book. I call Josh Wait, skin, the Art of Learning, where he says, actually often it's not the first mistake that causes the problem, it's that if you can't get a hold of yourself after the first mistake, things unravel, you make a second mistake and a third mistake. And that's when things really start to go awry. And one of the things that's really helped me with that is riding bike on the track. Because if you can make a mistake, you have kind of two choices, right? Let's say I get my turning point wrong, or I get my entry speed to a corner wrong, or I pick the throttle up wrong or I run wide on the corner or something. The lap is still recoverable in terms of the lap time or your feeling about it.
- But if your Headspace inner monologue starts talking to you and you're replaying the last corner, you can't simultaneously be clearheaded and focused enough in the approach to the rest of the track. You have to let it go otherwise, otherwise things unravel real fast for you. So just having something, well, hopefully not, I mean, think the track is a pretty safe environment, certainly way safer than the road is, but you need to just find, breathe as you say, let it go look to the next thing. I think having things in life where you have to learn those skills in order to succeed, I mean, I learned so much from building bikes and riding them, cuz high, the consequences are high. You learn patience when you build a machine that explodes petrol between your legs. [laugh] like you learn about patience and you learn, I should check the torque value on that bolt before I tighten it up.
- I should double check that I've put my brake discs on correctly and the wheel is on the right way around. I should check that. I've like you learn. And I'm not saying that everybody should get into building and racing or riding motorcycles. Far, far from it. You do whatever you want. But I think there's something great in that discipline that those disciplines that I've been able to transfer to other parts of my life about, oh, I have to slow down. I have to be patient. I can't rush this, I can't do this in a frame of mind where I can't concentrate because the consequences of it are of failure are really high. And I find that there are so many aspects of life where I've started to just do that. I, I'm pretty sure that I didn't chew my food until this year. I think I just stuck it in my mouth and swallowed it, right?
- And then I met this nutritionist who said, here's what I want you to do. I want you to put your fork down between every mouthful and see what happens. And I was like, okay. And difference is amazing in terms of the taste sensation, in terms of how you digest, in terms of flatulence, [laugh] in terms of everything. Basically just slowing down and not being like, I'm trying to eat this and I'm trying to watch this webinar and I'm trying to get ready for this meeting and I've gotta be out the door and I'm thinking about blah, blah, blah, blah blah. Just slowing down and saying, this is the task at hand and I'm going to focus on a task at hand. Whether that's talking a motorcycle axle or eating a carrot. It is a big change in quality of life and in actual performance of tasks in. And that's something that I'm learning right now in at 39 years old, clear your mind before you tackle something important and give it the time and attention that it requires. And that could be eating a meal or that could be rehearsing a presentation or that could literally be anything.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Or drinking a whiskey. Like we were talking about
- Matt Watkinson:
- Drinking a whiskey. I'm eyeing my cart over there as we,
- Brendan Jarvis:
- It's too early, Matt, it's too early.
- Matt Watkinson:
- It is. And I've gotta actually get on the bike after this. So I definitely wouldn't be having to drink.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- This takes a degree of intentionality to put your fork down in between every mouth to savor the moment when you are sipping on a dram to mm-hmm pay close attention to tightening that bolt when you're building a motorcycle. How close by is your phone when you're engaging in these activities?
- Matt Watkinson:
- Yeah, I struggle with that. I think as much as anybody does. It's funny because when I do, there are some things that just naturally kind of put me in that flow state that we often hear about where I just don't like time flies and I don't even consider looking at my phone. And there are sometimes where it's a real battle cause I'm not really engaged with what I'm doing and I'm bored and it's just constantly there. Bing, bing, bong, distracting you kind of thing. I do, I do try to keep it at arms length or beyond when I'm working on certain things or I just try and set the environment up in a way that I mentally change gears for the task at hand. So in my little garage workshop where I've been building this Honda recently, me and a good friend of mine just putting the finishing tux on this bike and it's the important stuff.
- Wheels, tires and brakes. They're the things where it can be terminal if you make a mistake. And so set up the environment in a very particular way. First of all, invite somebody else as a second pair of eyes to just four eyes better than two. That's a big lesson with anything really important. Just someone to spot you second, take a deep breath when you go in there and get yourself calm and intentionally set a work rate where you're like, I could do this for hours. It, that's something I learned from writing my books as well, is I can write from seven till noon or a thousand good words a day, that's me done. I can't do more than that without compromising the next day. So do that. And then it's put on some relaxing, non-distracting music. I listen to a lot of bark, I listen to a lot of Beethoven people hear it coming out the garage and see these ludicrous superbikes in there and think, who is this? But it helps me just clear my palette mentally, if that's not too mixed a metaphor.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- It almost. And then just like a ritual.
- Matt Watkinson:
- Yeah, I fully believe in the value of rituals, personal rituals to get you into a head space to perform. I have rituals before I speak. I have rituals at kind of conferences and things, rituals in every morning rituals before I start working on anything that's kind of high consequence and a lot of other people do. And I think that I would encourage people to develop those for themselves as a shortcut to getting into the state that you want to be in to perform.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Would you say that it's almost a focusing tool for being present in the moment? This is almost about how do you get outside your head a little bit and just tend to what it is that's at hand?
- Matt Watkinson:
- Yeah, so I probably a billion other people have been drawn into or tangentially heard about these things like the power of now and the mindfulness movement. I've met Andy Putan from Headspace, who's a really lovely, really guy. Met him a couple of times and been fortunate to have some really good conversations with him. I also read recently a wonderful book on this, it's called The Happiness Trap which relates directly to this kind of mental chatter and constantly getting drawn backwards or forwards. I've always thought it's a bit, I dunno, glib for one of a better word, to say, oh, just be in the moment. I'm like, well I can't just be in the moment because I have to anticipate what's going to happen in the future and I can't just be in the moment because I also have to learn from things that have happened in the past.
- And it's like I felt like it was too simplistic. It lacked nuance to say we just have to be in the moment, man it but too California happy. Yeah. And well, okay, I also have to save for the future because I might not be able to work. I also have to have insurance because I might crash my car. I also, it just felt a bit too, okay, whatever. But at the same time I do believe that it's something that most of us are lacking is an ability to be present in the moment either cuz we're like, oh that's interesting. While we're looking at our phones or even just listening is difficult, it's actually a skill. Nancy Klein wrote a great book on this time to think in fact listening, the way in which we listen affects other people's ability to think. Cuz if you are talking and instead of me actively listening to you, I'm just waiting for my turn to talk or I'm trying to interrupt you or I'm trying to complete your sentences for you, that's speeding up your thinking process cuz you're trying to get it out before the bald guy interrupts you, which is and annoys you kind of thing.
- So that's showing, that's affecting your, yeah, it's not chewing your food that's affecting your ability to think as well. So we all think better if we listen better and we can only listen better if we're actually just trying to be there with the person at the right time. I'm not great at this. I'm getting better at it and I'm trying to get better at it. But all of these things about just being present in the moment. I feel like the modern world is set against you and you have to fight for it, but it's a worthy fight. I, so I have one example, I don't have my phone in the bedroom when I go to sleep. It's always in the kitchen, which, because I like Billy and other people would wake up in the morning and go, oh what's happened? Especially cause I've got friends in England or whatever.
- There would be something to wake up to. So having it in the kitchen and not switching it off airplane mode until I've actually done the things that are important to send myself in the morning is a little thing that I found makes a big difference. I feel like I'm straying into self-help guru territory here, which is not at all my sphere of expertise, but those kinds of things, I think everybody struggles with it. I struggle with it and it's something that we've just gotta take ownership of and say like, wow, life is short and do I wanna look back on it and say, wow, I spent seven hours on Instagram today. That's why I don't have any of that social media stuff because it's like catnip for me. I can't control myself. Mm-hmm Like I have to not have it because I know that I can't. I just get sucked in into it. So I have to not
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Have it. It's been designed that way, which I'm sure you knew.
- Matt Watkinson:
- Yeah, yeah it
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Has. Speaking of your expertise, so let's talk about something that is directly in your wheelhouse of expertise and that is this notion of problem solving within organizations. And you've said about this, that coordination is our biggest challenge, not competence. And so when I take this into the context of creating digital products and services, we've got people in product, people in design, people in engineering, and you know, spoke about listening just a few moments ago. People are doing a lot of talking. Perhaps the listening to talking ratio isn't quite what it should be. What have you found through your work with methodical with a range of different large and smaller organizations, but people being the common thread here, what have you found works when helping to coordinate those various areas of specialty to help people to take a breath, to stop talking, start listening and start integrating or understanding before they then start integrating the perspectives of those other experts that are in the room?
- Matt Watkinson:
- Well that's a big question. Also a great question actually. I think. So there is a big difference between a big company and a small company. Big is not small but bigger. Big is fundamentally different. And I think it's because this is all kind of laid out in loon shots. If you've read that book it's because the social structure of the organization is different. There's no payoff for political decision making in a business of methodical size. We're too small. You're not going to get a promotion, you're not going to get a corner office, you're not going to curry favor with the boss. It doesn't work like that cause we're a minnow a startup companies, you're either do a good job or your business dies and you can't feed your family worst case scenario. So everyone is just focused on doing a good job with the product or the service and they're not focused on how's Marjorie going to react to this?
- You know, don't have the option. And that ultimately I think is why big companies are always displaced by smaller ones on an upward trajectory. Because when you're in a large organization, the benefits of as Sahi Kar, I think his name is in moonshot, like the benefits of rank and playing politics and those kinds of things can outweigh the benefits of doing what's in your customer's interest or your business's interest because there's so much insulation between you and your decision making and cause effect and the success of the firm and how people feel about that. And a macro view, it can be more astute in terms of your personal success to be a politician or to be, that might be overstating it to be politically astute in your decision making because the environment rewards that. Right. And that's not, by the way, just to be clear on that, that's not in any way a criticism of any large organization because I think it's a natural phenomenon.
- I wouldn't say that the people who make those kinds of decisions are, they're responding to the environment that they're in and they're making the best decisions in the environment that they're in. I would never criticize somebody for doing those things cuz it's human nature, it's natural and it's the environment that we've created that promotes that kind of decision making. You have a large scale social structure as much as you have an operational one and it's inevitable. I think it's inevitable. Which is why I think a lot of companies that are very design led or are visionary have basically a kind of dictator of the helm who says, this is what we're doing. Oh, you don't like it, goodbye. That's not to say they're not receptive to feedback. That's not, we're saying that they don't want to grow and develop, but they're not trying to have a consensus led organization.
- They're trying to make something awesome and that's what they want to do. I of mean, not that I know any of these people individually, but certainly the jobs I've combo, I would say that there was very strong borderline dictatorial leadership from Steve Jobs. I would say the Musks of the world, perhaps the Dysons of the world. That's not to say that these are nasty people. I'm not talking about their personality, I'm talking about their management style is like, you need someone who says this is what we're doing and this is a direction that we're going in because then you can't, the ability to be political about it is greatly lessened. I think
- Brendan Jarvis:
- There's a lot of nuance in that though. I feel that we could go into, cuz I've also heard you talk about the importance of in your own career development and seeking a plural, plural, gosh, now I'm having trouble, get my words out. Plurality, plurality of opinions seeking. Seeking a broad range of perspectives before making decisions. So when you talk about business leaders that are dictatorial in their approach, I know you mentioned that you're not saying that they're not open to feedback, but that brings to mind certain other characters throughout history that we shall not name, but those characteristics don't tend to lend themselves to favorable views from most people. So what is it that is, what's the subtle distinction here between having a strong vision and being able to weld, wield that in such a way that it negates some of the poorer political instincts of people while still giving them enough autonomy in their ability to make decisions? Because you can't be there to make every single decision for them
- Matt Watkinson:
- Categorically. And perhaps dictatorial is the wrong is not the right word. In fact it's almost certainly not the right word. What I'm trying to convey is a sense that you have very clear direction and you have very clear vision and you have an unwillingness, I think to compromise on the fundamentals of those things. I think I would say. And that could appear, that could appear dic dictatorial, it is perhaps the wrong word, because that word is very heavy with politics and weight and societal issues. And I certainly didn't mean to suggest that that's a virtue in business to be that way. I think one of the points I was making earlier is that there often isn't a right or wrong way. There are ways that work and then something changes and suddenly they don't work or something can appear to be a virtue and then it turns out that it's is actually not.
- And some people are lucky and other people are unlucky. But I do think that there are certain businesses that have succeeded because their leadership is monomaniacal. Perhaps that's a better word about quality or about what they're there to do or about the type of things that they're going to do about what passes mustard and what doesn't. Perhaps that's a better word than dictatorial. I'm not sure monomaniacal is a virtue either to be honest. But it does happen, right? There's a great book on this creative selection by a guy called Ken Kosi who's talking about the design processes at Apple. And he was saying that basically every major feature on the iPhone or every feature on the iPhone iPad was demoed, was done as a demo to Steve Jobs. And he would say whether he was happy with it or not. I mean that's the kind of thing that I'm talking about.
- Other people are making the decisions, but he's taking ultimate accountability for whether it meets their quality or brand or whatever. And I don't think, but he was actually, this is one of the most fascinating things actually about a lot of these companies is that most people massive are wrong all the time. So speaking of which, didn't want to have an app store, it's a good job. They managed to talk him around on that. Otherwise that supports like a trillion dollars worth of trading a year or something. Now the apps all Google tried to sell themselves for a million bucks when they were a fairly early on Xerox Park Innovation lab, basically in invented the graphical user interface, the mouse ethernet and the technology that Adobe took to market and didn't seem to see much value in them. We are all capable of misjudging the value of things and we're all capable of getting that wrong and we're all capable of needing to change DI direction.
- So it is, it's often the case in business. I find that actually you need to hold two opposite concepts and accept that they're both true. You need to accept that you C might be wrong, but you also need to act confidently and a assertively, otherwise you're never going to get anywhere. You need to be humble, but you need to be confident. You need to say it like everything matters, but it's what matters right now in this context that I think is the challenge. And you need to be able to hold two opposing ideas in your mind at the same time and acknowledge that they might both be. And I think that's something that people generally struggle with my all of us struggle with to a degree.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- In part of your work with your book The Grid, I understand that you have run a number of workshops with organizations and that one of the things that has surprised you the most in terms of the largest barrier that you've witnessed people struggle with when using the grid. And we won't go into the specific details of the grid today cuz we just frankly, unfortunately don't have time. But you've said that the biggest barrier that you've observed to effective decision making is ambiguity. So what you clarified there around what you were saying earlier around the monomaniacal nature of some of these leaders made a lot of sense in terms that they have this tension between knowing exactly what they want to achieve but still being willing to be wrong and the pursuit of it. But it's that having that clarity over what we're all here to do, that seems to me at least to speak to solving and part this problem that you've observed of people just not knowing exactly even how to define the problem and where to get going on it.
- Matt Watkinson:
- Yeah, that's certainly true. We've observed that if you go typically go two or three rungs down the ladder in an organization, a vision that might be very clear at the top is nobody has any idea by the time you get down to the middle what they're trying to do. And I think also it's made exponentially harder by trying to do far too much. I think that aren't many situations where people couldn't benefit from doing less, doing far fewer projects or far fewer initiatives, and just concentrating on the ones that are at the highest leverage points in terms of their ability to change profitability or value, customer value or the brand perception or whatever it might be. And just saying, we're not doing the rest of that. We're going to do a good job on five things a year and we're not going to do an all right job on 5,000 things a year.
- I dunno whether that's a pipe dream culturally, but I think that there are so many people over the years who have spoken to the power of just saying no to things. And I think I've worked with a client recently where I observed this phenomenon. We're not working with them we're not working with them now in part because I actually said, I don't want to continue the relationship because I don't think it's productive for you and I don't think it's productive for us. But there's just so they're attempting to change so much simultaneously with so many people involved across such sprawling programs. I just thought it won't work. And I might be wrong on that, they might pull it off, but I think doing less in trying to do it better is definitely a virtue clarity is you can't do that unless you're clear and ambiguity.
- I actually think that back to this idea of politics, I think people thrive on ambiguity because there's so much wiggle room and when you start to get really specific about things, often people can be uncomfortable about that. And I think you notice that in the fundamental language and semantics of business, how many abstract nouns and verbs do we use in business jargon? It's almost all of them. We're going to transform, we're going to be create best in class or we're going to have an omnichannel experience designed thinking all of these terms. I'm not saying that there's no substance to them, but I'm not being critical or cynical, but I'm saying that a lot of the language that we use in our day-to-day lives in business is willfully ambiguous because it leaves margin for interpretation, which to some people is good, but it's actually not that good from the point of view of making better decisions, I think, and actually achieving a goal. I think people should aspire to use the most crystal line and simplistic language that they can and communicate the ideas unambiguously as they can. And if you not possible, then there's work to be done. That's my own, I mean, I've learned that from writing books is that people respond a lot better to, as I often say, feed the hungry dog, not reduce the canine malnutrition deficit. One of those is clear and it's simple that anyone can do it, and the other sounds businessly and important. That is just pretty much nonsense.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah, there's almost this notion that people can hide in that ambiguity and not make decisions. And there's also something in the word decision, it sounds like incision deduce, deduct. It's a process of choosing a course of action and by virtue of doing so, abandoning other alternatives. And I think there's a fundamental insecurity people have in committing to a direction and it's often easier to hide and that analysis. And I think you've spoken about that in the past as well, that, and you used to do this, you spoke about this earlier too, overanalyze the situation where really it sounds like the only place you learn anything is after you commit and take that first step.
- Matt Watkinson:
- Yeah, I think that's true. And again, I'm not in any way critical of, I, in a sense, I'm critical of the situation and I'm frustrated by ambiguous language and direction, but it's understandable. I understand where it comes from and I understand how it happens, and it's not like I'm railing against it. I just think that clarity and concision and learning to communicate effectively is a business skill that almost everybody can improve and work on, whether you're writing a proposal, whether you're delivering a presentation, whether you're setting out a strategy like words matter. And I think having committed my own faux part earlier, talking about being dictatorial, I'm reminded the words matter in saying that words do matter and they, they literally carry our message. So we should be as clear and intentional in our use of them as we can. I think that's hugely important.
- The other thing I would say that is kind of tangential to this, that was a lesson to me, is that in most organizations, actual decision making power is concentrated in a very, very small number of hands. That's something that surprised me if I thought that the bigger the co corporation was, the more discretionary decision making power people in the middle or certainly away from the apex would have. But I'm not sure that that's actually true. And that's something that it was just, another thing that I've learned and been reflecting on is like, wow, almost everybody, almost everyone in an organization is a influencer more than they are an actual decider. And that that's something that I've just learned to be mindful of in terms of how I try and navigate with in my own working practice,
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Matt, just being mindful of something myself, which is the time we have together. I just wanna bring us down to a close now with a final question. Sure. So you actually closed another recent interview with some advice for people and you said, and I'll quote you again one last time. Be a host in life, not a guest, not just in your business affairs, but also in your personal life. So as we bring this conversation down to its close, tell me, Matt, why is it important to be a host in life?
- Matt Watkinson:
- Well, this is a cism that I've stolen from my co-author that's, it's one of his crucial tenets, and I learned a lot from him about that. And I've also learned a lot from observing very successful people, not just successful people, but happy people, that they tend to be hosts in life and not a guest. They're not looking at what's in it for me right now. They're looking at how do I create value for other people? How do I share what I know? How do I make people feel welcome? How do I make people feel valued? How do I listen and tend to people's individual needs? And I think it's because social capital has greater influence than financial capital in the long run and in the short run. And it certainly precedes it, and it almost anyone can build their social capital by being a host in life, by doing things for other people.
- And we also feel good about it. It's in our DNA to want to do that. And I just think it's a really simple concept that anyone can understand that is really, really powerful in terms of your contribution to society, in terms of your contribution to your social groups. And even though it's not a quid pro quo thing, like, oh, I'm going to be your host because then you are going to be my host. It doesn't work like that. It's like, it's just that if you put enough good out into the world, it comes back around. And I fully believe that to be true, and I don't think it's a coincidence that the people that I think of most fondly and the people who I know who are most successful in life are hosts in life, they're not guests. And that that's a really just a simple pithy statement that we can all reflect on and think, how can I be more of a host? How can I put other people together? No, it's not just about me. It's like, oh, I know A and I know B, they might benefit from getting together. Right? Just thinking about yourself as a host is enormously, enormously powerful. I think
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Certainly a good place for us to end and for people including myself to think about. Matt, thank you. I've really enjoyed today's conversation. It's been a great way to close out my week. Thank you for sharing your stories and insights with me today, and also for being such a positive role model for designers, but also people more generally who want to learn, who want to grow, want to develop, and want to also develop a command for business when that might not be their original wheelhouse.
- Matt Watkinson:
- Well, thank you so much. It's been a real pleasure. I've really enjoyed it too.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- My pleasure as well. Matt, if people wanna find out more about you, what's the best way for them to do that?
- Matt Watkinson:
- I'd say just connect on LinkedIn. I'm pretty easy to find. I look like this, but I'm wearing glasses, [laugh] in my picture. I've got a website. It's matt-watkinson.com. The agency is methodical.io. I'm easy to find and get hold of, and I certainly welcome hearing from anybody. So yeah, thank you for the opportunity to be on your platform.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Thanks, Matt, and to everyone who's tuned in, it's been great having you here as well. Everything we've covered will be in the show notes, including where you can find Matt, Methodical, all of Matt's books as well. Everything we've spoken about will all be chaptered. If you've enjoyed the show and you want to hear more great conversations like this with world class leaders in UX, design and product management, don't forget to leave a review, subscribe to the podcast, and also pass it along to someone else that you feel would get value from these conversations at depth. If you wanna reach out to me, there's a link to my LinkedIn profile at the bottom of the show notes as well. Or you can head on over to thespaceinbetween.co nz. That's thespaceinbetween.co.nz. And until next time, keep being.