Dr Dani: [00:00:00] Hey Peter. 

Designer Peter: Hello Dani. How are you? 

Dr Dani: I am good. How are you? 

Designer Peter: I'm very well today. Thank you. Yeah, it's been a while, so it's great to great to see you and chat with you. 

Dr Dani: Yes. We've taken a little bit of a podcasting break. 

Designer Peter: Yeah. 

Dr Dani: What are we talking about today? 

Designer Peter: Today, Dani, we are talking about the age of experience, rethinking how we think.

Dr Dani: Oh yeah. Had several conversations on the podcast about experience.

Keen to get into this topic. So we have a guest with us today who'll be helping us unpack this question. John, do you wanna introduce yourself to our listeners? 

Guest John: Hi. Yes, thank you Dani. Thank you Peter. Great to be here. John Philipps, my name.

I'm British originally hanging out down here in New Zealand and I can tell you as much as me about me as you wish, but I think that's enough for now.

Dr Dani: John is also an awesome writer. So if I will have [00:01:00] to let our audience know about some of your substack writing, John. 'cause it is, 

Guest John: thank you. 

Dr Dani: It's very deep thinking. 

Guest John: Yeah. 

Dr Dani: I've learned not to read John's work at night before bed. I try to read 'em early in the morning. 'cause otherwise 

Guest John: you fall asleep.

Dr Dani: I won't fall asleep because it's very thoughtful biking. Alright, so shall we get into the conversation, Peter? 

Designer Peter: Let's do that, Dani. Yeah. And yeah listeners longtime listeners. I know we like to have deep and meaningful conversations w with some lighthearted touches, so I'm really looking forward to today and hearing what you've got to say to begin with John, and get into conversation.

But yeah, we usually start with the what and anchor ourselves in definition. So I wondered maybe if we could start with this idea of the age of experience and yeah, tell us all about that. Before we get into the second part, which is rethinking how we think. So I 

Guest John: think the age of experience as opposed to the age of reason, so it's a [00:02:00] two-parter is a thesis I've had running for a while.

And it might help a little bit in, in my background. So I'm actually what I'm at the pointy end of business. So if you're in sales, marketing, partnership development, that kind of world, that's where I, that's where I live. And I was talking about customer first before people even knew what the term was and more laterally.

In the past sort of 12, 15 years I've had something which I call people first, which is not just customers but partners, but our own staff, our family, everybody is a person's interesting. On my journey through life, having run marketing teams, sales teams, couple of companies, on the way through I found myself working in London with a company called Group Partners who did something called structured visual thinking and structured visual thinking is quite fascinating.

And I was there about two and a half years, was a good buddy of mine with the challenge with how we deliver structure of visual thinking. It was very much like theater. And though it worked for, if you could afford the theater tickets, it didn't, you couldn't actually expose it to [00:03:00] the masses.

So the democratization of that idea was pretty limited. I then moved on, did various other things, and eventually started thinking about all the ways that, that I talked to business and how I try to shape their ideas and thoughts was around the structured visual thinking model. But how do I actually make it easy?

Hence, structured thought and structured thought are many ideas. It's the idea simply of being able to draw a picture much like you guys do within design thinking. Draw the picture, build a framework, but the frameworks need to be flexible and adjustable and keep on changing and keep on modifying.

And outta that, a recurring theme started coming together in that a lot of models are based on rigid ways of thinking about business. So you find the books around the saying, here are the 10 things you need to do to become a successful CEO. Here's the 20 things that Joe did to make the startup takeoff and so on.

And it completely ignores the fact that [00:04:00] context is different, country's different, business is different, people are different. There's nothing the same. So there are no such things as those rules. And if you accept that and you take the book is very interesting, but how does it truly help? So that's where a lots of consultants make their work.

How do you turn this book into reality? And what I've been trying to do in the substack that Dani was referring to, and the way that I work is to layer on top of that this shift that's occurring between what I'm calling the age of reason and the age of experience. So we've been talking about customer experience and that kind of thing for a long time now, and we had customer journey maps and this is the route that the customer's gonna talk through and so on.

Again, flawed thinking as far as I'm concerned. A customer journey is 99%, nothing to do with the company that is mapping out that customer journey for you. There are somewhere else and it's quite the wrong way of thinking, but but I understand why businesses do it.

So what I'm trying to do is [00:05:00] say. Even when you do match that customer journey, people are, they're thinkers. They go off and do what they want to do. And so this, again, another missive that comes out to the age of reason is, you have to be agile. You have to plan for things that aren't gonna happen.

And it's if you, it's not gonna happen. How do you think of it and how do you plan for it? There's contradiction going on. So the structured the structure thought of age of reason through to age of experience is really trying to step back a little bit from these, the way that we as people and as businesses for the past 200 years.

I've been , putting things into boxes. We have org charts. This is your job. We have organization things. We have structured documents, we submit to businesses, we have customer journeys, how we sell. All that is going on and we're living in this uncontrollable world. And I think I said in one of my recent substack, San Francisco is built on, I think it's seven fairly significant hills. And is there is a giant typical American grid of roads on there, and you can be driving [00:06:00] along a road and it will stop at a cliff, and then you go around all the backstreet to get to the top of that cliff and that road is continuing.

So that to me is a representation of what we, as a people think about. We look at the world and say, we will bring this together and put it into our own understanding. We'll put things in a box, we'll categorize or have ontologies, whatever, to the point that the one road in San Francisco with curves that actually curves down a hill is now a destination site for tourists.

Oh, let's go and see the curly road in San Francisco and, you are from Yorkshire. We've got plenty of curly roads that don't have anything like that tourist level. So it's that idea of how do we actually try to break free? So that's what the age of experience is about, breaking free of those ideas.

Dr Dani: Wow,

Designer Peter: you took the words right outta my mouth, Dani. Yeah, 

Dr Dani: Mic drop End podcast,

Peter. 

Designer Peter: Yeah. Thank you. So that thank you, John. That was that was fantastically mind expanding. And beginning [00:07:00] where you left off. I really love that that visual metaphor of the San Francisco roads, the grids the human need and desires. We can't help ourselves, but try and, humanize and organize yeah, the natural world .

We align in terms of seeing an organization that is it's like more like an organism than a machine. It's created and has mainly at the moment, at least people in control of it. This trap, I think you're saying that we've fallen into is then applying mechanical thinking, if I can put it that way, to a natural kind of organism.

And that's what's led us to this, it's down some of these traps, some of these paths that are unhelpful. 

Guest John: And it's something that's trained into it from the very beginning. So I'm a maths graduate, right? And I always remember, I always loved pure maths. I really hated applied maths.

I, I like to have pure maths because you can invent shit. Sorry. Am I allowed to say that? You could invent stuff and with that stuff you can say let's imagine what would happen. Yeah. If you actually did come up with a square root [00:08:00] of minus one, what would happen then? How would that open up?

Yeah. Yeah. In applied maths, you say imagine if frictionless plane Yeah. With no wind resistance and down and now solves a formula. Yeah. And it hopeless implies, but, and so many people go into applied mass because they become the scientists. And the pure maths is these weird guys over in the corner.

That actually is what majority of maths and philosophy is about. And eventually, maybe 80 years later, a little bit of pure maths. Oh. If we use the square root to minus one, that will be very useful in the semiconductor industry. Cool. So to me that that's the thing. We spend too much time simplifying, and again, I fully understand why we simplify.

We've got no problem with it, but it's not the be all and end all. And I think a lot of people aren't in the disciplines. Just assume that's it. And that's what I worry about with we've thunder along a path without truly understanding the full form of it. Yeah. 

Dr Dani: The reason that we tend to, as a species categorize things, it's very much how [00:09:00] our brains work, right?

So the way that humans make sense of the world is to categorize things that, because otherwise we would be what? I think the, what the research says that we process 11 million pieces of data per second. That's what our brains are absorbing. So if we had to look at every piece of that information individually, our heads would explain.

So the process of categorizing helps us function in the world. Where we go wrong with this though, is that we tend to apply that to everything. And we don't go, hang on, this is an emerging problem. This is a complex problem. This is not a time to try to simplify and categorize it. We actually need to slow down, turn our systems two thinking on and really think about it in a different way.

And I think where we have trouble is switching between the system one thinking and system two thinking to engage in that [00:10:00] non categorizing thinking, if you will. 

Guest John: Yeah. 

Designer Peter: Yeah. Thanks, Dani. Thank you. John John, you, I know you've listened to a couple of episodes and longtime listeners though, this is about the time that I like to come into definition.

So it's just something about my mind that likes to delve into words and make sure that we're starting you like rules. Language rule. Up to a point. Yeah. Up, up to a point. There's something about cell language anyway, that, that's a maybe a whole other conversation.

But what struck me about the way you've introduced this idea of the age of reason versus the age of experiences you've actually suggested, for example, that, customer experience maps are, belong in the old or to the age to be shed and first to emerge from the age of reason into this age of experience.

And that just caught my attention because when I, first read the, came across this the conversation topic, the age of reason versus the age of experience, I assumed that the age of experience, is based on, for example, customer experience or people experience.

But I [00:11:00] think from what you are saying there it's not just that or not that at all. And I wonder whether you could expand on what is the. Age of experience in relation to, or compared to the age of reason. 

Guest John: So the age of experience the idea, it does include customer experience and by the way, I'm not dissing the idea of customer experience journeys and all that at all.

I'm just trying to make sure that we don't let go of the bigger part. Let me think about a couple examples. If you think about our life of. Our business runs. So I, when I started off in life, I was a I did a year of training as an auditor. It took me that long to realize it was time to get out.

But one of the things I did, and this is going back a while, we would map out business flows inside a business. And part of the audit was you do this, and you say, okay, that's right. And our job, as grunt auditors was to go and talk to Joe on the ground floor. He says, you do this, do you do that?

Yeah, do that. But if you really examine it, they don't. Right? People don't do what we are [00:12:00] mapping out. Because Joe sees something and make a change. Yeah. And there's so much infinite flexibility. And what that person, will he pick up that thing from the floor or not? Yeah. It's not something you can account for.

So you get to the simplicity of the flow charts. And the experience part is just again, if you've ever read a book called Small Creeps Day Pete Car Brown small Creeps Day is about a person who works on a factory floor and one day decides to understand where his widget that he makes every day in day out and where's it coming from, where's it going to, how does it fit?

And it's about the journey through the factory. And too many of us just c carry on doing, we're doing our bit. And we are blind to what's around us. Yeah. And for me, the org chart is a really example of that. You have a cce, CEO at the top, you've got the CXOs below that, you've got the middle managers, the managers, and it's all organized and beautiful.

Yeah. But for me, the age of [00:13:00] experience is, a little bit like Coltrane said, the music's between the notes. Yeah. Yeah. Business is between the org chart, it's the blue water that those boxes all float on. That's where it's going on. And if we're too literal to not my job. And that's that attitude in certain people and certain businesses around for a long time.

It's oh, don't be doing that. That's the, and you. You get that in different industries at different times. Yeah. And again, I understand the need for, that's really marketing and you are a software delivery person, so you might understand marketing, but not like the marketing people.

Yeah. But at the same time, the software delivery person has a major role in what you go to market. Because if you're only about marketing don't actually understand software delivery. Yeah. You're gonna get nowhere. Yeah. So it's just, again, part of this idea of waking up and widening and recognizing also that the rules we have are changing.

So it's a much more macro level, just outta business. So we all know around the world [00:14:00] there's a massive move. Through dive, breaking the world into two parts. The red side and the blue side. And the red and blue sides vary depending on what country you're in. 'cause you and I Peter are opposite to the way that Dani is, for example.

Yeah. But there are strong arguments suggest that particular division is not right. It doesn't matter red or blue left or right. What matters is, are you for the status quo or are you for changing? So if you are happy the way things are going, then carry on going, doing what you're doing. But if you want to survive and really be agile so that when something happens in a, at a macro level across the world, your business is agile enough to change it.

And if you live in a world of business where you don't change, you die. So if you look at, fortune 500 companies from I, random guess totally unresearched, which is the way it all works today. Yeah. I feel my experiences that, half the companies from 50 years ago on Fortune 500 have disappeared 'cause they've gone back from, bought [00:15:00] out, et cetera.

And why did they disappear? Google who was unbeatable when it almost, since it came out, is now under massive existential threat. And it's not that they can't change it, things change around them. So does AI really take away search, et cetera? And the point is that all that change.

It, we're very good at the leading edge of business, but we're not on the whole we're too much thinking. We think about our newspapers. We did the headlines, the body copy, we've got our opinion, we stay, and I think, okay, that's what's going on. What's going on in LA right now? I've got my opinion on there.

And we need to explore more and understand so that's what the experience of fact living in the world almost. Yeah. Rather than just taking it through these various filters that we do. We've always been filtered and now we don't have the gatekeeper. Going back to those 11 millions, a piece of information we process every second.

Yeah. I would say about a good 10.9 million of it is from social media feeds that are meaningless, but, [00:16:00] that's just me. So how do the technology hasn't caught up with filters and how to actually manage all of that. So that's what I'm saying about the age of experience.

It really is a macro thing that's occurring across the world in many different ways. Back in the days in the sixties, the musical hair came out and the song, the Age of Aquarius, maybe The Age of Aquarius, is that, I don't know. But that's what I'm going on about. And I focus in the business world because I can see it loud and clear in there, but it's not something specific to business.

It's something that's going on in zeitgeist to move people along. And some are taking it well, and some are taking it not so well. 

Dr Dani: So a couple of things that resonated with me with what you're talking about, John. 'cause one of the things that I bang on about is we have to stop approaching things from a singular disciplinary approach.

Yeah. And by that if the problem is in sales, you can't just take a sales mindset to fix it. You've gotta look at, and even in our approach at the design Think institute, we look at design thinking, behavioral science, [00:17:00] organizational science. Because we know that the solutions aren't gonna come from one way of thinking.

Guest John: Absolutely. 

Dr Dani: But organizations were never designed for that. And they, our organizations fundamentally today, even though we consider them modern organizations, they still operate the way that factories. We're set up. It's just that now we have cool tech and, funky offices and all of that, and, job titles that take up a whole business card 

Guest John: Yes.

With a flat,

Dr Dani: but we haven't fundamentally changed how organizations operate, how people within those organizations, and we talk about collaboration, but we're not actually collaborating. We're not actually bringing together different ways of thinking and different disciplines. Because if you could bring in, how a finance person thinks and how a sales person thinks and how an engineer thinks like we can solve bigger problems.

Guest John: [00:18:00] Yep. 

Dr Dani: But what that becomes in organizations is that's not my job. My job is to make the widget. Your job is to sell the widget. 

Guest John: That's right. And it gets even worse, right? So there are software companies in Silicon Valley that have a routine. They get rid of the bottom 10% of their salespeople every year.

And going back to your, what I call it, peeling back the onion, the number of times that I've been asked about what they should do about their head of sales because sales are down and I start asking them about the products and the competition. No, we just gotta get rid of the salesperson.

And I always say did you recruit a duffer or did you recruit a really good set? He was really good. I said, so the only thing that's changed is that he's now in your environment, not the other environment. So don't you think it needs you to examine what's going on here? And Oh, okay. So you start pulling it back and it's very easy sometimes to see what's going on but you're right, Dani, you've got to pull back everything.

So it is, it's an old adage to the doctor and, fixing the neck problem by straightening the hip bone or whatever it might be. But [00:19:00] it's, it is no different in business. It really isn't. And it's too easy just a knee jerk, fire the sales guy or get rid of the product developer or whatever else it might be, and the blanket res, not resignations, the blanket firings that are going on at the moment as they resize for the future.

Nobody's actually understands what people do, which is why working from home doesn't work. Working from home is a brilliant way of operating if you could manage for the age of experience. But what's happening is that people are managing people working from home. How do I know they're doing work at their desk between nine and five?

If they're home, I can't see them. Are they doing everything you asked of them? Because if they are, and they can do it in five minutes rather than nine hours, shouldn't you give 'em more work? It we don't change how we operate. That's why I think one of the reasons for pulling everybody back in is because we have middle managers who really don't understand the world that's evolving.

Which is why you get the Gen Z world. And I promised the last time I made any reference to generational [00:20:00] differences. Yeah. But this new generation of people coming through are going, I don't agree with that are absolutely right. Guess what? I'm not Gen Z and I agree with it as well. It's not, it's anybody, you can see that the world is different.

So yeah. With you, all of that is age of experience.

Dr Dani: Reading some of your work, John, it also, there's this sense of urgency around this, right? So why is it that we need to rethink 

Guest John: because it's happening around you. If we can lose five 50% of the Fortune 500 companies in 50 years where nothing changed, imagine how many we're gonna lose when everything changes.

So in business, we've got, young startups, right? So there's a great little kiwi company that I'm talk to a lot, use their product who just moved to San Francisco. It's a very specific thing that they do. They move to San Francisco because that's where the growth is. That's where, as a startup you can survive.

And when you show what they do to people it, to me what they've got is [00:21:00] so obvious and yet to others they go I've got my CRM what? It's just that divided side. It's not just about jumping on the bandwagon of AI 'cause it is an AI solution they've got, but understanding the niche value of what that is to how a business can work.

And you, if you are in your box thinking about, I'm in sales, I've already wrestling with how to do A CRM and keeping that record up to date. Now you need given me some more software and I haven't got time for this 'cause I've got to go and sell. By the way, I'm not selling very well because the all that builds up and you don't have time to look above the parapet.

When they do look above the parapet, the world is full of ai this, AI that or the other. And of course they're swamped with information. So there's a real, there's a change going on at the moment that, two years ago when you looked at what AI was even capable of, then the general consensus was that it wasn't the best.

It wasn't like this, the IBM beating the go champion of the world, right? In those days, [00:22:00] AI was being better than human. Today, AI is being better than the average human, right? Because if you can beat the average, then you're well on your way. And that's what the chat bots are doing, and that's what all of this is about.

Why you can get rid of your quote bottom half of people, is that you, your chat will do something better if the average CEO can't write a business plan. Then when a chat GPT comes along and writes a business plan for you, go, so what do we need that guy for? So it's hitting everybody at a phenomenal pace.

This is an army that nobody's safe in any country, in any business, in any industry. It's all changing. And if we continue sitting in our boxes and going I can see robotics is gonna take over the manufacturing world said, we all said for a long time, but it won't be taking you over the office worker.

Guess what? It's moving on the office worker quicker than it ever was working into the factories because it just, it's empowers and it's a lot easier. 20 bucks a month [00:23:00] get you an ai, your own personal AI to do what you will with. A robotics company requires, millions of investments. So of course it's gonna change faster.

So if we as a people are not moving quick enough to adapt and bring all this stuff in, then it that's why there's an urgency. And it's not just an urgency for a, for a business to think this way. It's an urgency for the people inside those businesses. It, I, there's a, I used to have little John-isms as I called them when I was actually running my people first group.

One of the things I said was, businesses like gravity. In, in that, it's all predictable, but unlike gravity, you can't change it on planet Earth. Business can be, we invented the rules for business. We can change those rules. What's happening is we have inertia that's set in those people that say, I'm used to my boxes.

This is the way I'm safe five years and I'll be retired and out of this, right? If people are watching their clock going five years before I'm out of here. Wow, that's a problem. So that's, that, that's and of course [00:24:00] what's happening in business is people are staying around longer and you've got octogenarians running the countries, you've octogenarians running businesses.

No wonder the youth are frustrated. 

And I'm only 30, you know that, don't you?

Designer Peter: Yeah. You had a hard paper round as we'd say.

Guest John: I did. Yeah. Rain and hail.

Designer Peter: Oh I'd like us to stay in, in the why, but just to let you know I'm really itching to get into the, what we can do and how we, how, I suppose we might start to, to rethink how we think. Some practical ideas, but it's the why that's yeah. I feel like we should just sit in the why a little bit longer.

There's something my brain has got unresolved, and I wonder whether you've got any thoughts on it. Jeremy, you've got this idea of ai this ai, tsunami, as you said we're not sure generally how to deal with it, what to do that you've just described.

Some of those kind of, human responses. And this is where we've got this technology and we've got a choice in how to respond to it. And we could respond to it in a, I suppose a, I'll call it a technological reasonable reason from the age [00:25:00] of reason. We could respond to it and from the age of reason thinking but actually we need to respond to it in a an even more human way, if that makes sense.

Yeah. I, and I can't quite, resolve the, I dunno whether that gives you enough to, any thoughts on that? 

Guest John: So part of the challenge of AI is everybody says, oh, it, you need to get on top of AI because you'll be able to do your job more efficiently. Now, if you look at any typical business, they have a responsibility to their shareholders and their shoulders about profitability and making the share price go up, et cetera, et cetera. If you go into any organization and start doing pain negotiations, they will argue over 1%. The doctors want 1%. No, I can't afford that. What about one and a half? Absolutely not. How about 0.2? That's the kinda level of bargain.

Now, if I can, if I, my AI and my team of 10 can save 10% of my time, I now only need nine people. So the business has an opportunity to keep 10 people and [00:26:00] make them more productive, or do they save the 10% because it'll look better to the shareholders. And if you actually go to the extreme where I've heard claims that, I'm 50% faster, I can do all this.

So half the people, right? So let's get rid of half the team. Or people say No, what we'll do is put everybody on a three day week. Okay. So they put everyone in a three day week. Does that mean you are now getting paid for only three days outta five Or does it mean they can continue to pay you for a full five days even though you're in there for three days?

'cause if you do, that's equivalent of, rough math. 40% pay, pay increase from the companies that argue over 1%. Yeah. Yeah. So there's something that, there's something at odds here as I listen to the arguments being made about what's going on. When we are laying people off and we've got the age of austerity coming in, it's not just New Zealand, it's everywhere.

It's, this is occurring. We, the behavior of corporations on a whole has always had this problem. And governments as a whole aren't [00:27:00] thinking about, or maybe they are, but I don't read about it from the people that write about governments. So let's say in 10 years time, all the businesses have done what they're doing.

And we've now lost, say, 30% of the workforce without an opportunity of getting their jobs back. What's the social net in place that the government's planning for to allow for that? And if it's because everybody's now gonna follow their dreams and passion, then I think that's absolutely brilliant. How do they make a living?

Because the people that are following their dreams and passions, say in the music industry, say in writing novels, say in, in running yoga studios, whatever it is, they barely make livings now. And if you're gonna swamp them with two, three times as many people, and by the way, if you do. Who's buying that stuff because half your audience now don't have jobs.

So this is a, the concept of a wicked problem, right? Yeah. So whichever part of the balloon press another bit pops out. Yeah. But it needs to be studied. There are very [00:28:00] clever people in and around New Zealand government that are capable of doing this. I just don't feel that information is leaking out to the rest of us.

And so you get this uncertainty when you have uncertainty. The, what is it the, rumor fills the void. You're going, okay, we're all gonna be out of a job. I'm not saying we're all gonna be out of a job, but I know enough to go. But for us not to be outta a job, or for us all to be some kind of universal basic income or whatever that might be, and whatever it looks like, I come from a world where I was told to get on my bike.

If you can't get a job, you get on your bike and off you go. Yeah. And that attitude doesn't change. You hear it today in Kiwi government, in the uk government, we're doing all we can, blah, blah, blah, blah. So nobody I don't think has the answers. And so this is, I'm not, this is not a blame on government or business or anybody, but the things that are outta step.

And yes, we all, if in the business world they have their rules for share, the government world got when the people, all this stuff is going on. But as I say, in between that blue [00:29:00] ocean of where all those little pillars sit, there is a swarming mass of stuff that is going to take us down and we have to be ready for it.

And I'm, I don't know the answer. Part of my mission is to just at least have people sit up and start thinking about this and just something as simple as, I can see how to utilize U AI so that we can make our business better. We don't have to lose anybody and give us a competitive advantage against the rest and, whatever that might be.

I I'm one person. I think there's a way through this. Again, I've spent a lot of my life in the us the US social net is appalling, right? And it's about to get even worse because, there are coders in the states that have, got a solid track record of 20, 25 years that are spending a year and a half looking for a job.

It was about four years ago, I think, where Joe Biden was saying to coal miners, you should [00:30:00] go out and learn how to code. Talk about short lived idea. And again, no clear answers, but we have to be aware and not to rebel, not to be Luddite and reject ai, but really think about this holistically about what this means because it is happening and it's not just ai.

There's all kinds of things occurring around the world that the at political levels, at strategic levels and so on and so forth. And interesting when you talking about, just flipping back, there was a Noah Smith who writes on subs fact, came out with great graph the other day, which was a how excited you are on the y axis and how experimentally you are.

I think was on, on the X axis. And it plotted three main things. We, in New Zealand and most of Europe and America and Australia are not very excited. Very worried about where this is going. When you get to the far eastern country, when you get to the Africas incredibly excited and incredibly [00:31:00] experimental.

They're ready to take it on. Now there's a difference in those two worlds in terms of we have everything to lose in the West in terms of our high level of living and how we handle that versus everybody in the far east who just see potential in front of them. Suddenly I have a phone with AI on it, and if I can make that work and code something, or do whatever it is to make a job better and, earn two bucks rather than 50 cents, that's massive.

Two bucks rather 50 cents doesn't go down too far in, in New Zealand. So again, this is something I've said for a long time. If your job or not so much your job, if your value that you deliver to your customers can be delivered through the internet, so too can your competition. So if you are living in a high value country like New Zealand or America, and your job can be done by somebody in the Philippines with a phone, then yes, you're gonna lose out because you're no longer gonna be effective.

And this goes back to Friedman's work. What, when was that flat for? 15 years ago, maybe? Something [00:32:00] like that. So it's not, this is not new, but we are now getting it faster and faster.

Dr Dani: About this John Yeah. Is, I don't think this AI thing is a new, no.

AI displacing human capabilities is not new. And it's something that I always bring up with Peter is, it used to be somebody's job to connect phone calls like they used to. Take the, and put it into a, that's how you made phone calls. That was like a career for somebody. And that went away.

Guest John: That's right. 

Dr Dani: You think about one of the most mind blowing things I've learned was I was doing a tour of of an old bank building and they bought me into this room and they're like, oh, this used to be the typist room. Like the what? And apparently at some point before personal computers, it was, people had a job as a typist and they literally took handwritten memos and typed and then came the laptops and, the personal computer.

And [00:33:00] then everybody needed to know how to type. And because everybody knew how to type, there was no longer a need for typist. And I think if everybody now can code with chat GPT, then that takes away. So my point here is that this evolution of some jobs going away and other jobs coming up has always existed.

The only difference in 2025 and the 21st century, I think is the speed at which it's happening. 

Guest John: It's the speed, it's also the breadth, right? So replacing cashiers in banks with ATMs was over many years. And part of the thing that restricted is that, I think it was Citibank invented the at m back in the seventies, but they had to manufacture all those ATMs and get them installed before they could get rid of it.

So it was a slow process. And it's hitting every level of society, senior through to bottom, every country in the world, every industry, nobody's safe. And then there is the speed on [00:34:00] top of that, right? So it's not that long ago, the gig working economy kicked in. Right now, the gig working economy is horrible, I believe, and I've railed against it for a long time, because what's it's doing is essentially fractionalizing work, right?

So you get employed as a marketeer, or you get employed as a salesperson or a production person. Gig is reducing it down, right? I don't need you to get my cases from the hotel steps into the car. You are gonna bring that yourself, but I'm gonna give you a ride, right? So I'm gonna the ride bit. And then so somebody else says I'll do the carry in cases bit and so on.

We keep on Fractionalizing work in this way. And the whole thing was all the Uber drivers got in there. Now we've now got self-driving cars coming along, right? And we've, go to San Francisco and travel around in a Waymo and everybody's happy they're not, but they are. And it's getting better and better.

So all those Uber drivers are now out and then, but then you go, if you catch a [00:35:00] taxi in London, I find them fascinating. They cost more than an Uber without a doubt. But boy, the entertainment value of the taxi driver is extraordinary. He'll tell me all about what's going on. I'll get a complete political analysis of the world's problems and this will just be just driving down Maron Road.

It's brilliant. And so what we, what the techs are doing is reducing the function of work down to these other steps. We're back to that flow chart back in my auditing days, right? We do this, but the blue mass of the ocean is missing. We used to have something called the water cooler in offices and management never really understood the water cooler.

They all go over there and they're not drinking water, but they're always over there. And somehow or other they come back, they share a joke, they, whatever it might be, that's being lost as we fractionalize work. And so AI is doing that fractional work, right? I can write my proposal and. What people are missing is how long it [00:36:00] takes you to write a decent prompt to get a proposal that actually makes sense to you.

And what's interesting is that the written word is showing up the problems of a faster than the visual world. So when the visual, when mid Journey and those kind of guys came out, what, three years ago, four years ago? Midjourney was great because it just generated these quick little images and nobody was looking at them and they were surrealistic and out there and spacey and they just, a bit of eye candy.

Things like, does the person got six fingers or not? Is comes along later. And even then as a person, a visual thing, going back to those filters that Dani was talking about, we say, oh yeah, we have to really catch the fact It's six fingers. We just, oh yeah, of course it's five fingers. Move on. In the written word, if you are an amateur and reading a business plan, you go, oh, that's fine. But actually, if you're an expert in reason AI generated business plan it is not fine at all. Okay. There are holes that you can drive trucks through. So again, part of the value of what people can do is [00:37:00] get really good at what they do.

If you're a business plan writer, use the AI to accelerate forming the basis of your plan. But trust me, the last 50% is still gonna be written by you, but it's a great ideation spot. So it's, yes, it doesn't get things right. That's your job to check that. And I've probably gone off on a tangent there but the point is that all this is happening at once.

No. And nobody knows. Two and a half years ago, whenever it was that Sam came out with his first chat it hit the world by storm, and yet they were talking about ai. Alan Touring was writing AI tests back in the forties. So it's not a new concept, as Dani says. 

Dr Dani: So I feel like this is we've gone down this path of ai, but the reason, 

Guest John: but can we, sorry for, can we pull back out?

'cause I always Yeah, we can. Please. Thank you.

Dr Dani: I love ai, I love experiments when they're talking about it, but there's a bigger context of what's happening, right? It's not just about a, AI is one of the things That's right. Collection of things. And what's happening is we have [00:38:00] lost the ability to lift up and look at the whole picture.

And one of the things that you're talking about that I'm really connecting with is we've compartmentalized everything to the point that we we've taken people's ability to look at the full picture. And I've seen this a lot in how people are trained. Yes, organizations and actually I think Peter, you might've been talking about this like in contact centers, right?

We teach people, you pick up the phone, you answer the question, you get off the phone, but they don't have a full view of what's they're not taught to look at the end-to-end picture and how some of the things that people are calling about impact other parts of the business. They're just worry about this box and ignore everything else.

Guest John: That, that's exactly the fractionalization of jobs I was talking about just now. So when I started off in marketing all those years ago you were in marketing. When you talk now, it's what do you know about SEO [00:39:00] on the WordPress platform? Yeah. Really? Do you don't want something bigger than that?

No. No. 'cause again, it's let's get it down to the process and flow. Yeah. And by the way, you used the word training. Dny another big bug bear of mine. We no longer educate people in colleges. We train them. And there is a massive difference. And there is an old joke, which I won't get into, the, it, the, it is different.

The universities have lost their way as they try to predict what jobs are going to be needed. In two years time, and I think it was somebody from Harvard I can't remember who exactly said it now, but a university's job is to educate their students to be ready for their eighth job.

It's nothing to do with what the technology is, whatever's going on. And it's this idea of critical thinking and being agile and being ready. And we've done the youth Abba when people reject universities 'cause they can't learn anything, it's because they're being trained, they're not being educated and we've got rid of the classics and all those things.

So [00:40:00] yeah. With you, Dani, with you. All the 

Dr Dani: things that help us think more broadly. 

Designer Peter: Yeah. Yeah. Learn how to learn and then apply that. Yeah. Learning to, that's right. Yeah. That's right. Yeah. 

Dr Dani: And I would even go as far as saying, learn how to learn and then apply and then learn how to unlearn.

Designer Peter: Yes. Yes. Like it's this. 

Dr Dani: Yeah. 

Designer Peter: Nice segue, Dani, I'm mentioning to get, so I think this is my time to move into, so we've talked about the age of reason leaving that behind and stepping into the age of experience, which is upon us already. And I'll love your framing of John. We've talked about.

Why it's important to recognize where we're at. And like you said, Dani still lifts our heads up and take a step back. We rethinking how we think. I think we've touched on some things you've hinted at them, John, but things like first of all having awareness, then starting to think holistically.

Maybe if I can get you to start there if that, if I've landed on, on, on something there.

Guest John: Yeah, no, you have, and I think in my mind a lot of the, how is a lot of what you two guys do, right? So design thinking, I have no, no idea how long the discipline's [00:41:00] been around. But this idea of freeform ideation, the fact that everybody in the room should be listened to the fact that you can have a conversation where you aren't put down, so I've run and been in facilitated sessions where the leader in the real world, tries to tried that two years ago, it doesn't work, right? Hear them out every, just opening up the mind that the hierarchy of the boss, the middle management, whatever. If you can let that go, everybody talks about the flattening of the organization.

What they're flattening is taking out the middle management. You've still got a person at the top, and then some people say, oh, we've got, multiple CEOs. No, that doesn't work either. You've still got the hierarchy people have to be aware of the sound. And again, I think males on the whole are not known for their listening skills, at least according to my partner.

We, we tend to just, we've got the ideas, we know how it goes, and when you actually get other people with new ideas, the fact that somebody's on the shop [00:42:00] floor and knows that's not working that way, this is what we actually do. And if you could just fix that plug down there, that would add to efficiencies.

But you have too many people that don't do that. They don't walk the floor, they don't go visit the stores, right? Sam Walton, when he started Walmart was flying around, going to all his stores all the time. I bet that doesn't happen too much today. So , it's just everybody from top to bottom being aware and giving, allowing everybody to have voice and listening to the ideas in a very real way.

And design thinking allows that to happen. What I talk about beyond design thinking is then that has to be packaged up in a, some way where the journey lives. I've not sat in on one of your sessions, so I'm sure there are exceptions, but an observation just going even back to my structured visual thinking world.

There was this, remember the idea of cartoonists coming in and doing cartoons of the meeting. Yeah. [00:43:00] And the world was full of those at one point. You couldn't move. I think all the cartoons been fired from newspapers and are now making a living in corporate boardrooms. The challenge with most of those I ever saw is that they were great fun at the time.

You you look at the meeting and you see the picture and somebody talks about the explosion that's gonna occur and they draw a little sticker, dynamite and you know what have you, and at the end of the meeting they do it. If you give that cartoon to somebody who wasn't in the meeting and say what happened?

Very rarely do you actually get an answer. That's right. 'Cause it's missed a lot of nuances. So the power of what John Casual used to do with group partners in our structured visual thinking is he had a mental framework in his head. Which was four, actually four frameworks with anything up to 11 pillars in each frameworks.

And the way he'd run it is that you would be listening to the conversation of whoever's in the group up to 20 people, and there'd be facilitator asking questions much like you or guys are doing. And all John would do, he'd stand there [00:44:00] quietly and he'd be drawing on walls all over and nobody would know what the hell he's doing for two, two and a half days.

But he's recording and listening intently and then running to the other side of the room, putting something in. At the end of the two and a half days, he then stands back and then tells the story of the meeting visually, because what he's done, he's listened to the ways that people are talking and said, oh, that's about product.

We'll put that over there. Oh, now they're on about sales and customer. We'll put that over there. 'cause And you've got his pillars, right? So he can tells the story and reframes the entire conversation around the start of a product right through to the sale of a product with all the infrastructure you need to run it.

And on the way through, he says, by the way, you guys are spending a lot of time talking about this particular pillar. But for that to work, you need this and this, you've had no conversation about, so there's a weakness going on here, let's deploy that and so on and so forth now. So you can go through that and he would build frameworks and put it into computer systems and so on and so forth.

And it's that idea that is what struck with thought is [00:45:00] about. It's taking ready-made things. So if you just think of something like Jeff Moore's crossing the chasm, right? There's a framework there, normal distribution, the chasm in there, and so on and so forth. And everybody goes, oh yeah, that's brilliant.

Got it. Love it. Read the book. I must be an expert. You're not because one it doesn't work all the way that Jeff describes it. And two, all that context and nuance and what kind of business, it also changes it. And three, it's very much a marketing model. How does that relate to your sales model?

How does it relate to your product development model, et cetera? So start of thought is about not I've invented a couple of my own frameworks I use for sure, but a lot of them are existing framework that come together. That sort of say, okay, so this is what the chasm means to you in sales, right?

Not a new idea. By the way, there is a Why Killer Products Don't Sell is a brilliant book written by a friend of mine. And what he did when he wrote it along with his partner Ian, they wrote a book which is about how to apply from the Chasm Marketing theory into [00:46:00] how you actually think about selling, not just about the bias culture, but the sales culture.

What kind of conversation does the salesperson have in the four major areas that the Chasm talks about? Simple things like that. Again, with live in a Boxed world. Marketing and sales. We all know they don't talk to each other, right? It's marketing versus sales most of the time, let alone and sales the competition's outside guys go talk to them.

So that's a small example of what I try to do once as Dani saying it, you peel back the onion, you get to the root cause of what you're thinking. You've got mental models building up in your head and you say, okay, so let's get the right people into the room to start exposing. Why firing half the sales force might not be a good idea just because your sales are half down.

Why is your board only got accountants and lawyers and HR people on it? Why has the board not got somebody who can actually help you knock down doors and win business? All those kind of questions to make people [00:47:00] re-examine, oh, we've gotta be compliant. But you don't need eight people telling you to be compliant.

You need a couple, trust them and they'll make sure you're compliant. But all these board people have got lots of connections. Let's get the revenue building. And again, my remembering, my history is not about how you control 100% of your costs. It's how you grow your revenue beyond a hundred percent to a million percent.

That's much more interesting to me. That's the future. But you only do that by breaking out of rigid thinking. You get into valuation models. I ask an investment person in traditional thinking companies, go to a bank and say, I'd like you to invest in my business. And they'd say tell me about your assets.

Tell me what your ideas are on the whole, they're going to invest based on what you've got. Go to a VC in the valet, they'll invest in you, but based on what they, how much they believe and what you are telling them you think you're going to do. And that's a very different equation that thinking changes the landscape of what is possible.

The [00:48:00] first way I get it's valued at a million, I get a hundred thousand, they got 10% of my company, it will be valued at 10 billion in six years time, I can get a lot more money for the same percentage of the company. That's all part of the experience, understanding the enchilada. 

Designer Peter: So that, John, that sounds a bit like the last example you shared there was the, I've heard it described as exploitation.

That's the first kind of versus exploration or needing certainty versus validation. So your VC will seek validation. That their bet is, that's how you get more expansive thinking versus. 

Guest John: So we maybe we'll have another podcast sometimes about the benefits and not of of the VC world.

Yeah. I think it's two different models, right? Yeah. Okay. So a bank is by nature conservatives quite rightly. Yeah. It's just that as businesses and life has grown, I think they creeping into areas that they don't truly understand. So I spent years in Citibank. Yeah. Where we were trying to compete with an investment [00:49:00] company called Schwab.

Yeah. And Citibank had more investment in place and more investment businesses around the world. And Schwab did, and yet Schwab was taking all the money. They had a marketing presence and agility about them. And what was interesting is that it wasn't just the fact they weren't amalgamated, but the thinking of investment people was very bank alike.

Bankers think this is my money. I'm going to give conservative views 'cause we need to do this. Yeah. Whereas the bank, the investment world is very much it could go this way. You go to an investment guidance counselor and he will talk about this, he'll give you the risk.

But if what he's trying to do is get you to invest in that particular stock, and this is that, and it's two different mindsets and both are valid. Yeah. Yeah. But we have to have, we seem to have got institutions that do one or the other and we very rarely get a middle ground. Yeah. But yeah. Yeah.

So I think also the land of opportunity as AmeriCorps once described, it's just culturally they are more traditionally in, in that space. Changing things. New Zealand and the UK have both got [00:50:00] very similar ideas about where things come from. And the other thing is, it's a cultural shift, right?

So when you talk about, let's do our own Silicon Valley here in Auckland, it's like Silicon Valley is into fourth generation VCs. They've been around since the Second World War in one form or another. And they've got a concentration there of that is, they've got more SaS development engineers than the population of New Zealand just in that one little valley.

And it just is extraordinary. But I 

Dr Dani: It's not just saying, because I think we look at this as, let's make Auckland a the next, the Silicon Valley of New Zealand. We're looking at it from a money perspective. Yeah. But the reason that Silicon Valley is Silicon Valley, it's culture, it's mindset.

There's a vibe that's right in Silicon Valley that enables, so yeah, the outcome is financial results. Yeah. But the inputs. And it's a, it's an intangible thing that makes it work. 

Guest John: And it's critical mass they have as well. 

Dr Dani: Yeah. That's the other 

Guest John: thing that, that we, I mean we have a one and a [00:51:00] half million people in Auckland and they're not all doing software development.

So it's just one of those things 

Dr Dani: I do wanna go back to because some of the stuff that you were describing, John, one of Peter and i's pet peeves, is that, design thinking has been bastardized a bit. 

Guest John: Absolutely. 

Dr Dani: And part of the reason that I've spent so much time researching and publishing around this topic is to really drive home, what most organizations do is not design thinking.

They've taken design thinking and made it a version of design thinking that they're comfortable with. Yes. So true design. 100%. Yeah. So true design thinking one requires that you listen to the ideas without judgment. 

Guest John: Yep. 

Dr Dani: True. Design thinking also requires that you go through a process of going, okay, let's test some of these things out.

Not because we're comfortable with them, but because we think they have the most potential. And then actually [00:52:00] testing them out and being okay with some of the things we test are gonna fail and that's okay. Yeah. And second part, most organizations are not willing to do, and the ones that you hear about that are successfully using design thinking, the reason is because they're willing to do.

They're willing to do the hard, uncomfortable things to get those Yes. Branding outcomes. 

Guest John: No I would 100% agree with you. Things like, what stops corporations growing? So Apple I think is an interesting organization 'cause they're not afraid to destroy their current product lines.

They will do it over and over again. Most companies won't, right? So one of the reasons that Google has its problem is that 98% of its profit comes out of advertiser model and through Google search. So if you start doing AI and bypassing that's gonna sacrifice guess what? You didn't do it.

So somebody else is now doing it. So good luck with that. 

Dr Dani: Hold up all over again. 

Guest John: And when you get [00:53:00] into a large organization, another book to recommend, I mentioned Jeff Moore just now, but another book he's got, it's called Zone to Win, which breaks innovation into four quadrants, right? About what kind of innovation is not always about destroying everything and starting again.

Innovation is in how you actually gradually improve process in a, in an organization. And you can do. Break everything and see what happens. Innovation inside a large corporation, it's a very specific quadrant in there, but you have to keep it protected from the others because when times get tough, the guys who are all generating the revenue, say to the CEO, that company over there, that little thing down, you got the bottom left hand corner.

That's not pulling its way, it's not pulling the revenue you need to get rid of that, and so it gets killed. So that challenge of, that's the same people that will not get what you are talking about, the design thinking. And so to me, if you can find those companies, you find them all the time, you help 'em along, you do the good design thinking that [00:54:00] I'm gonna say that you guys do that sort of gets that and people are free.

You map it into something like the zone to win, to allow that framework to take off. You then start exploring and expanding. You move them into the sort of the cash cow world and guess what? There's something else you bring, you come now back to the root and start all over again. It's a virtuous circle and that's why I was interested when we were talking this idea that you've got that design thinking, but there when, and strategy what's strategy and what's that to do with the guy that picks up the thing at the bottom?

What's that to do with culture? What's it to do with performance? All those things are all going on. They work in sync, they don't work against each other. There is one holistic view of the world, but absolutely. So few companies think about this, how you actually tie all that together, that is where, and that, that's the circle, right?

So you design thinking, get the ideas, it's taking off, you put some structure into it, you start growing it, you organize all strategy, you come back down, you [00:55:00] design thinking to feed and so on. And you won't end up with a circle, you end up with a spiral. 'cause it's going bigger and bigger all the time.

And if the world could do that, we'd been in Nirvana. 

Dr Dani: We cannot rely on one way of doing things. Absolutely not. We have to be open to, melding different approaches together to get to the outcomes we want.

Guest John: Yep. Yep. 

Dr Dani: Wow. This has been. Amazing. So I think our last question we want to cover off, which we have been talking a little bit about, so John, for our listeners 

Who want to go on this journey. 

Guest John: Yep. 

Dr Dani: What are a few very practical, tangible things that people can be doing to get started? 

Guest John: Listen to podcasts or read about things that are tangential to me, but you think don't apply to you? So for example I listen to a podcast called Martini Shot, right?

A 10 minute podcast guy called Rob Long, who was one [00:56:00] of the staff writers on Cheers the TV show back in the day and in 10 minutes. What he does is he lays out a scenario from his own personal experience, starts giving you stories about what happened to him at. Applies it to the broader entertainment industry about this is why this is going wrong, and circles it back to here's a lesson for how you could actually do your business differently.

Right now, when you listen to him, he is very humorous. He is a good writer and he is just a nice, gentle, and he's 10 minutes for God's sake. His, sometimes seven and a half minutes. So the point of that is it just opens a mind up to a different thing. What's entertainment got to do with my world?

You'd be amazed and surprised, right? To me, the easiest thing is just, if you read Substack, read a Substack, that you go, oh, what's that one about? Just explore and think differently. Have more conversations and go out more. Don't sit at home and vegetate, just communicate with other people.

Listen to ideas, listen with both ears. Talk with one [00:57:00] mouth. Things like this that my mum used to tell me, and as I've said before, I often forget, but you get to the point where if you, the idea's coming in and it just opens up the synapses, it's it just broadens the mind a little bit for you to think.

I wonder whether that idea, I used to, back in the early days of LinkedIn, LinkedIn used to run something called LinkedIn Labs. And LinkedIn Labs was where you had, there were data scientists behind the scenes looking at the connections between all the people and they would deliver visual maps that showed you how your connections all work.

And most people, you just get a big cloud of people there. But there was something which I called bubbles that started appearing and mine was like a four bubble. Map and what it was is clusters of people that I work with is partly geographical. 'cause I've got UK and the US back in those days. But also I had a significant banking industry and a significant tech industry.

So all these bubbles relate and I the [00:58:00] cloud topping that I call it is an important thing that you'll read about is not a John thing. If you'd listen to really great thinkers, they will talk about how they see something happening in warehousing and go, I could actually apply that to my cafe.

That, it's just a smaller version. So you're taking ideas from something successful and just with a slight twist. You don't write it off and say warehouse would say that, wouldn't they? Instead you go yeah, that actually solves the box problem. I we're moving at the moment, so I'm trying to get boxes from, I used to be able to go into a supermarket and get a pile of boxes to take away.

Can't do that anymore. Why? Because they don't store boxes in supermarkets anymore too. Too expensive. So they're, they've now got carts that go down the aisles as the boxes unloaded. It's broken up on, on the fly, process improvement, storage, not taken, and et cetera. Where does that come from? Warehousing. Who knew that a, countdown, supermarket learns lessons that way.[00:59:00] 

So that becomes efficient. It also means that your your front store have got the full it's not somebody who breaks down the boxes and somebody who stacks the shelves, they're doing other. So we're reassembling jobs for efficiencies and they're learning by looking at other industries.

Dr Dani: As a brainy person, I have to chime in here because Yeah.

See, and I talk a lot about how our brains work against us in the modern world, but this is an example of how we can use our, how our brains are wired to work for us, because our brains are very good at making associations. So the reason that this happens where we see something happening elsewhere, and then our brains naturally, 'cause what our brains are trying to do is it's trying to categorize what's, see what we're seeing over here that's not part of our world.

And trying to relate it to something. That our brain do know. So in this way, that categorization helps because it we're making associations and seeing how something applies to us. 

Guest John: Yep. The other thing that I do just picking up on ideas as well. So I'm very big into music, not as a [01:00:00] performer, but as a listener.

I've always been that way. And I listen to maybe three or four different musical podcasts. And I'm very interested in the history of music and where it comes from and who, not so much about. Yes, of course music produced, but what got them to there and their journey through. And it's quite fascinating when you understand, people look at pop stars or rock stars or whoever they are and think, God, they got there quick and you miss the fact that they were a child actor at 10 and have been, working the boards for 12, 15 years before they became famous.

And, people talk about how successful the Beatles were, and, not many people these days know about Hamburg or the Quarrymen before that, and so on and so forth. Once you start, just again, for me it's music, but whatever you are interested in, do some exploration into how those people got to where they are and what they're doing.

There are life lessons tucked away in there. The people that succeed and get to the top, they, people will say, oh yeah, he's not as good as the guitarist I see around the pub. He might not [01:01:00] be. But what he's got is the broader discipline of how to succeed in business as well as being great at performing right.

One of the best guitarists in the world, in my opinion, is Robert Fripp. And Robert Fit is successful by many measures, but he's not the most successful because his business sense in the very early days wasn't as good as it might have been. So again, holistic view of that learning from people that you know and love and respect because you're interested.

It might be painters, it might be, florist, whatever it might be. There are lessons always to learn by listening to what makes success. Not the book that says, here's the 10 things to become a successful person. Don't care. But what is it that drives your passion and what you are doing to break through the cloud and the noise to get to something that is gonna be meaningful for you then to actually change into something different.

And that, that at the end of the day, is what we're trying to do here. Love that. Love it John. 

Designer Peter: Love it. I feel ending up on The Beatles just about is a great place to to wrap up. Yeah, [01:02:00] those yeah. No, that could be a whole other podcast episode. 

Guest John: We've started five 

Designer Peter: podcasts today, I think.

Yeah. And some of them might fail, but yeah, 

Guest John: that's all right. As long as one becomes the multimillion, we're fine. 

Designer Peter: That's the real lesson, isn't it? It's a real lesson. Absolutely. Just getting started. Excuse me. I'll steal Dani Thunder a little bit here 'cause I've started wrapping us up.

John. We finish up by, sharing some takeaways. And this is a little bit, it's a bit mean actually, I think, but we have, we've established a tradition where we ask our guests to share some takeaways with us to begin with. Then Dani and I share ours too. So do you have a, do you have one or two things that you've taken away from this conversation with us?

Guest John: So one major takeaway Yeah. Is that Dani did give me a heads up. This was a question coming at the end, and I would be the first, and at the time I thought, okay, I'm gonna pay attention. So one major takeaway. Yeah. I have talked too much. Ah, because I haven't listened enough to actually build up solid takeaways.

Ah. But my I would say my takeaway, just listening to both of you talking in your des again, [01:03:00] I'm I know people that call themselves design thinkers but just listening to you talk in a world is absolutely so connected to what I do and yet radically different. You suddenly get a clearer understanding of how the piece fits.

And it fits in different way, and you can turn upside down. It'll fit in that way as well. So just get reaffirms, right? So just stop talking and start listening to what other people do. And it's simple things like down here in one of the buildings around here there's a new security guard. One of my friends just ran, just gave him a coffee, just bought him a coffee, is going through they're best friends, right?

Yeah. They saw that person. So the takeaway is just listen and keep on learning because that's why you are doing this podcast, right? I look at your guest, you're not in a cabal of design thinkers who are saying, okay, how can we control the world? It's about how do you actually make the world a better place and there's no single way of doing [01:04:00] it.

And I say that is the biggest thing that's dawning on me as you're talking now, right? This age of reason to age of experience is I've got my way of doing it, but all I'm trying to do, and what you guys are trying to, and what we all should be doing is breaking down those walls of left versus right, up versus down, customer versus partner.

Get those gone. We are all what? Yeah I think about it. That's why people First was about, it's about people first. Not the customers, not what, so let's, and it doesn't matter who you are, just be friendly to them. Say hi to the bus driver, whatever it might be. Yeah. And you've, you guys have just kept that reaffirming as I listen to your comments through there that I think we're on the same page, but I would say that's the biggest thing.

I try and do more of that. Yeah. 

Designer Peter: Fantastic. Thank you, John. I'm gonna let Dani go last. Yeah, I really appreciate that brings to mind a good Scottish phrase. Where are Jock Thompsons? Barons, John, you're like, we're all people. And it's about people first. It is [01:05:00] always about people first. My takeaways from today will I'm delighted to hear a read that I've got a few book ideas to, to follow up on.

I'll have a good book and a good podcast, so thank you for those. Kinda bring us almost all the way back to the beginning. I really loved that visual metaphor of, the grids applied over the the San Francisco landscape and yeah. The single road that kind of followed the contours of the land is actually sewed different, that it's a tourist attraction.

Yeah. Don't try and lay a grid over everything, actually figure out where the water's gonna flow, for example. Yes. So thank you. I, it was a fantastic conversation. I appreciate it, John. And over to you, Dani, to wrap us up. 

Dr Dani: Awesome. My takeaway is that, John, one of your recommendations about what could we be doing and you said, pursue those things like if you're into art, study the artist if you're into music study the musician.

And I think that goes back to like, when I was a child, I was very encouraged [01:06:00] to pursue hobbies. It's for the sake of hobbies. And I feel like we've gotten away from that. We don't pursue hobbies anymore. So going back to some of those, I was like obsessed with Picasso as a child.

And going back to that, I was obsessed with Mozart as a child and going back to some of those things and and reading about them. And I remember as a child, I was very into the suffragette and anytime I got to pick a topic in history, it was on the suffragette. 

Guest John: Oh wow. 

Dr Dani: So going back and, going back and pursuing some of those things and spending some time and seeing how some of the challenges and learnings that they had would apply to where we are today.

Guest John: Absolutely. Yeah. Thank 

Dr Dani: you so much. This has been an amazing conversation and, we appreciate you making the time to chat with us. 

Guest John: Thank you, Dani. Thank you, Peter. It was a brilliant conversation. Thank you very much for the time. Thank you for letting me onto the show and I look forward to more conversations