Strategy Meets Reality Podcast

Critical Thinking as a Strategic Weapon: Marcus Dimbleby on Red Teaming, Engagement, and Execution

• Season 1 • Episode 18

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Engagement isn’t a soft skill—it’s a strategic advantage.

In this episode of Strategy Meets Reality, Mike Jones is joined by Marcus Dimbleby—former RAF, red teaming expert, and founder of Effective Direction—to explore how critical thinking and challenge cultures sharpen execution in complex environments.

Marcus explains why most organisations suffer from self-inflicted complexity, why outputs are mistaken for outcomes, and how empowerment without clarity or capability leads nowhere. From psychological safety to adaptive planning and human-led strategy, this is a grounded conversation on execution that works under pressure.

🔍 In this episode:

  • Why red teaming unlocks the best ideas—not just hierarchy-approved ones
  • The ROI of engagement and the real cost of quiet quitting
  • Why complexity isn’t the enemy—but confusion is
  • How psychological safety enables challenge, not comfort
  • The problem with planning theatre and faux empowerment
  • Critical thinking as the foundation of execution

🎧 Keywords: Red Teaming, Strategy Execution, Critical Thinking, Leadership, Organisational Complexity, Psychological Safety, Empowerment, Engagement, Mission Command, Organisational Design

📘 Learn more about Marcus’s work: https://www.effectivedirection.com/
📬 Connect with Marcus: https://www.linkedin.com/in/marcusdimbleby

Send Mike a Message

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🔗 Full episodes, show notes, and resources: https://www.lbiconsulting.com/strategymeetsreality-podcast

📺 Watch on YouTube → https://www.youtube.com/@StrategyMeetsReality
🎧 Listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and Buzzsprout

💬 Connect with host Mike Jones → https://www.linkedin.com/in/mike-h-jones/

Marcus Dimbleby (00:00)
So the best idea that day sat in Mike's brain,

Mike Jones (00:00)
Mm.

Marcus Dimbleby (00:03)
but we never got to hear it because the system never allowed it. Red teaming enables that.

So focus on ROI, people go down, but if you focus on people, ROI will go up because that will be the outcome you achieve by looking after your people.

this organization is killing itself. She said, we've stated the regulation is X. What you've done is wrap that in barbed wire.

stick a big red flashing light on it, cover it in concrete and sink it at bottom of the ocean where nobody can access it.

Mike Jones (00:57)
Welcome back to the Strategy Meets Reality podcast. I'm glad to be joined today by Marcus Dimbleby. It's a pleasure to have you on Marcus.

Marcus Dimbleby (01:05)
Always a pleasure, Mike. Been looking forward to this conversation for a while now, so great to be here.

Mike Jones (01:09)
Me too. Just so people understand what your background is, do you mind giving a bit of background about yourself and a bit of context about what you've been up to lately?

Marcus Dimbleby (01:18)
Yeah, sure. So my background, 20 plus years in the Royal Air Force, retired in 2013. Since then, I've been working in large scale corporates really doing transformation, digital, agile, all the latest buzzwords. And then last five years plus we've been really focusing on the people element of all of that. So how do you enable people to become the central capability? So unlocking that human capital in organizations. That's what we do now with organizations across the globe.

Mike Jones (01:45)
Awesome. And I think that's, well, it's a weird one, isn't it? A lot of people talk about people and, know, we must think about people and bring, but then when you really look at it, they don't, they sort of forget the people and then negate that for, processes and, fancy branding. But yeah.

Marcus Dimbleby (02:02)
They do. I always

call people the lead singer of the trio of the band, which is people, platform and process. And for like the last decade plus maybe 20 years, people seems to have gone. So you've now got a duet of people and process, platform and process, and the people have become the forgotten entity. And I think there's a realization now that that needs to become back to the primary focus of business. Otherwise we're just not going to succeed and AI is not going to cut it.

Mike Jones (02:06)
Yeah.

No, no, we do need to unlock the cognitive capacity of our people. And I think that brings nicely, because a lot of your focus and lot of your background is in red teaming. So that's why we really want to pull out. for our listeners, what is red teaming and why is it useful for leaders?

Marcus Dimbleby (02:33)
Yeah, for sure.

Sure. So red teaming, I'll go back one step before that. So first thing is what is critical thinking and certainly applied critical thinking. So apply critical thinking is the deliberate engagement of our brain to think differently, to solve problems and make better decisions. So through doing that process, we look at things more logically, we get different perspectives, we get different outcomes and understanding, and then we work out how that is. Red teaming is the deliberate application of that capability on a specific problem.

Mike Jones (02:52)
Hmm.

Marcus Dimbleby (03:17)
strategy or plan. So I liken it to say that every day we should be critical thinking in everything we do in our lives, in our problems, in the workplace, at home. And then once in a while, there'll be a single issue that we need to physically red team. So what that means is we're going to get a group of people, ideally a diverse group, so we get different perspectives. We're going to have a specific problem to look at either 2026 strategy or new competitor in the market or our consumers are doing X. We're going to focus on that problem. We're going to

apply critical thinking and we're going to use a set of structured tools and techniques that take that group of people through a series of convergent and divergent thinking to ultimately come to an outcome that's going to be a set of recommendations or actions and make better decisions to go forward against that problem or strategy they've got. That's it.

Mike Jones (04:06)
Yeah, that's good because I've mentioned this before, I think that red teaming sort of been hijacked by the cyber world at the moment. you know, people think about red teaming, they think it's about just pen testers coming in to try and hack your system. Where actually the root of it, as we know from our military background, is really about testing assumptions in our planning process. Traditionally, I know you've moved on quite a bit.

Marcus Dimbleby (04:13)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Mike Jones (04:33)
But what I really like is that the different perspectives and actually inviting these different perspectives and really getting us to think differently. Where have you seen that it's worked really well for organizations?

Marcus Dimbleby (04:36)
Yeah.

This is key, this different perspective option as you talk about because in most organizations we think we all bring ourselves to work and we're all allowed to speak up and there's psychological safety everywhere and everyone's got an agile mindset. We know that's not true. Group think is far more paramount than critical thinking. So everybody's thinking alike for many reasons. They want to get along, there's fear factor, there's fitting in, there's conformity. So where you get that, you start to see what we call the organizational dysfunction. Organizations will start to

Mike Jones (04:55)
Yeah, yeah.

Hmm.

Marcus Dimbleby (05:14)
behave in a certain way, the bigger they are the older they are, you get more of that group think and that kind of dysfunction.

So if you bring in red teaming and critical thinking and make it a core capability, so first off, you're given permission for this to happen because everybody says, hey, I'm the CEO, I'd like my team to challenge me. And then when somebody does either they disappear or they don't get the bonus. So we all know that considerations always in somebody's mind. But when you make this a core capability, it's physically something you are going to do. So it's just to me a toolkit. So company X has red teaming and critical thinking in their toolkit.

Mike Jones (05:34)
Hahaha

Marcus Dimbleby (05:49)
along with agile, lean, decisive leadership, whatever they want to call it. So you're to say, right, we are physically going to do this. We have the permission. We've all been trained to do this. And then when you do physically enable that capability, the difference you're going to see is A, all the ideas get surfaced rather than Mike, who's the quiet guy who sits at the back. Every time he speaks up, he gets shut down by the alpha in the room. And Mike's just like, why am I bothering? So the best idea that day sat in Mike's brain,

Mike Jones (06:16)
Mm.

Marcus Dimbleby (06:18)
but we never got to hear it because the system never allowed it. Red teaming enables that.

And it's not that then Mike's idea becomes the best. It's now that we've heard 20 other ideas.

Mike Jones (06:24)
Yeah.

Marcus Dimbleby (06:29)
And invariably what happens is that group then collectively comes up with a hybrid solution. Because that little bit that you did was amazing. The markers built on the thing you did. And Steve came in with another and then Sharon came in and collectively we came up with a far better outcome. And there's a great old proverb that says, you know, none of us is as smart as all of us. Two heads are better than one, et cetera. So if you get a group of people.

Mike Jones (06:47)
Yeah.

Marcus Dimbleby (06:51)
And that's the problem. Most groups of people are groups of people. They're not a team. And they're certainly not a red team. So again, going back to sports, military, how do these small groups of people achieve such high quality missions, outcomes, wins? It's because they're a team. So they work exceedingly well together. They understand each other's dynamics.

Mike Jones (06:56)
No, no, yeah.

Marcus Dimbleby (07:12)
where I'm strong, you know where I'm weak, you know, so we can counterbalance those things. And what you're gonna then see in an organization when you do that is, engagement's gonna increase, because everybody's now coming to the forefront. And we know that the Gallup latest report for 2025, engagement is still going down, now at 21 % globally, 10 % in the UK, shocking. So you're gonna increase engagement. If you increase engagement, you're gonna increase productivity.

Mike Jones (07:15)
Yeah, yeah.

Mm.

Yeah.

Marcus Dimbleby (07:38)
You're going to increase innovation. You're going to increase quality of your output and you're going to make better decisions. And the best thing of all that is you're doing it internally. You're not relying on the big four coming in and pulling your trousers down and charging you a fortune to not deliver what you want. So you're unlocking that internal human capital. We call it unleash your people because you've got great people. You've recruited great people for good reason.

Mike Jones (07:52)
Yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

Marcus Dimbleby (08:03)
Why not unleash them to do what they're capable and physically want to do? So once you do that, you will see these organizations and we've got all the statistics with those we work with, where you start to see what I call not the vanity metrics, not the numbers that they chase every week, but the actual increase in engagement, lack of attrition. So people aren't leaving, lack of sickness. People aren't going off sick. People want to come to work and do that. And I've got a little equation where it says, if you focus on ROI, your people will go down. You if you're just constantly on the

Mike Jones (08:08)
Mm.

Yeah, yeah.

Marcus Dimbleby (08:33)
them

for the numbers every week, every month, every quarter. They're going to get frustrated and you won't hit the numbers. So focus on ROI, people go down, but if you focus on people, ROI will go up because that will be the outcome you achieve by looking after your people.

Mike Jones (08:36)
Yeah.

And you bring up some really good points and there's a few things that just jumped on my mind. You you talk about, you know, Mike quiet in the background, clearly not me, cause I'm a gobbler, that's an element of psychological safety people don't really think about. Cause they're always thinking about psychological safety is this, I don't want to say anything cause of fear of retribution. But there's the other bit that no one really talks about is the, well, I'm not going to say anything cause why bother? Because

No one's going to listen. And I think that red teaming, like you said, it's really useful in many ways. And I love the fact that you brought up engagement and, you know, big four, because normally typically when people think about engagement, they're going to, you know, give out Amazon, you know, gift cards, and they may bring someone in to do some yoga top, desktop yoga or something. So I'm really bone when really, when you think about engagement, you want people to have a voice, have agency.

Marcus Dimbleby (09:29)
Yeah.

Mike Jones (09:41)
you know, give them freedom of action to just do their jobs and actually, and the final point that you brought was really good about the ROI. And I have a big challenge with OKRs and KPIs and all these things. Yeah. But they forget the actual outcome. What are we trying to achieve? What's the outcome? And that's what I want people to be observing. Are we actually achieving? Because I can measure all I want, but if I'm not achieving the outcome, what's the point? Yeah.

Marcus Dimbleby (09:55)
Yeah, me too.

Yeah, and that's what one

of our tools is called. So what? And I became famous with this one a few years ago when I was in Lloyd's and we had some executives stood up and getting on the numbers and he was focused on output. This month, our team has doubled their output of widget X, you know, by 42 to 84. And I just put my hand up and I went, so what? And he was like, well, doesn't matter. And I knew the fact that operations were sending those widgets back.

at a rate of one in three because the quality was so low because it inspired them to play the numbers game. So again, if you say, hey, hey, Mike and Marcus, you guys go out and get me, you know, 25 things. We're going to go and get 25 things on me, whatever it takes. Doesn't matter if the quality of are they the right fit? Are they what the customer needs? We've done 25. Do I get my bonus now? And then you realize afterwards that it was the wrong thing. So as you said, you've got to focus on the outcome.

Mike Jones (10:40)
Mmm.

Yeah.

Marcus Dimbleby (11:02)
And that's why one of our tools is, again, it's sort the bone question of, what? We've done X, so what? What's the outcome of achieving that? How did that impact the client? How did that impact the environment? How did that impact your staff?

Mike Jones (11:07)
Yeah, so I like so well. Yeah, so well.

Marcus Dimbleby (11:16)
And when you ask that question, you get this blank look of, I haven't thought of that. Well, surely that's why you, that's your first question. You know, what, what problem are we trying to solve? What challenge are we facing right now? What puzzles are stopping us achieving X? And if you don't consider these things and go to the outcome rather than that, but it's, it's, it's going back to measure what matters, isn't it? And people tend to measure what's easy and numbers and output is easy. And we saw this in the detriment to the agile world of, you know, creating story points. Oh, I've

Mike Jones (11:30)
Mmm.

Marcus Dimbleby (11:46)
a thing with a hundred story points and I've delivered this many this week, well that team just doubled their number of valuation of a story point so they did 200. So what? You you've both built the same thing there's just a different perspective on what that thing looks like but the outcome nobody can still provide that. So you're constantly battling and again giving people that perspective to question and challenge is something sadly seriously lacking.

Mike Jones (11:55)
Yeah, so what, yeah?

No.

Yeah, this is why that the underlying thing of Red Team about the critical thinking is really important because in organizations, they don't blame them because there's so much orthodoxy around, around, you know, how we should do things, what should be in place. You know, you've got all these big consultancies saying you must have this framework in place. You must use these OKRs or KPIs or whatever fads going to be next. And it, it almost becomes so

Marcus Dimbleby (12:32)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Mike Jones (12:39)
much that they lose their inability to be able to critically think. Because they're just swamped by stuff. than taking that, yeah, like getting that. And I think that red teaming and that critical thinking creates that space to actually challenge and go, well, say what? Why are we doing that?

Marcus Dimbleby (12:45)
Yeah, it's overload.

100%.

We talk about complexity, gets thrown a lot. It's the word that gets thrown around now, that the world we're in is hugely complex. Yes it is, right? And a lot of the complexity though is self-generated. And when you go in and when you start looking at people's workload, people's diaries,

Mike Jones (13:01)
Mmm.

Yes.

Marcus Dimbleby (13:14)
You're like, you are drowning in self-created complexity. And when you start to break it all down, and because once you're in that position, you know this and I've been there, once you've got so much on, you obviously can't attack anything because it's all overwhelming. So I've got 10 things to do. I don't know which to do, so I'll do none. Rather than focusing and simplifying, go, right. And we've got tools again that simplify. What's the most impactful? What's easy to do? All right.

Mike Jones (13:32)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Marcus Dimbleby (13:40)
what's most likely to get success. So you break all those things down, then you can go into what we call prioritization. There's a novel word that we don't see. I went into an organization and they were like, right, Marcus, here's our top 10 things. I said, great, are these your top 10? One through 10. No, no, no, they're all top priority.

Mike Jones (13:47)
Yeah, I know.

Marcus Dimbleby (13:57)
I was like, so you've got no priorities. So which ones are your teams focusing on when they don't know which to do, which is the order? That's why nothing's getting done because you're a tenth of everything all the time and finishing nothing. So you don't have that prioritization. You've got overwhelm, which is often self-generated in this world of having to look busy. You know, if the boss sees that I'm busy at meetings, et cetera, again, what's the outcome?

Mike Jones (14:16)
Mm.

Yes, yeah, yeah.

Marcus Dimbleby (14:21)
I've got lots of output.

My output is I was at 25 meetings this week boss and I did this many things. So what goes back to what's the outcome you're trying to achieve here? And the psychological safety piece you referred to earlier, to me, psychological safety is a double-edged sword or two sided coin, whichever way you look at it. It's all very well having an organization that can speak up. Right, so first you've got to get over that hurdle. Can Mike and Marcus going to work and physically speak up and challenge? Yes, we can. Great.

Mike Jones (14:27)
So yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

Marcus Dimbleby (14:48)
Is that challenge accepted and actioned? Well, no, they just get ignored.

Well, what's the point of having psychological safety? So you have to have this is called I call it the leadership contract that I as a CEO I as leader say yes, I want you all to challenge me and the guy that's great But it's like crying wolf, isn't it? If you keep challenging me and I go yes great idea Mike But we're gonna do it my way then you're just gonna go. What's the point? I don't have psychological safety because there's no outcome of my execution here. So Tie that in with something. We're also we really do a lot of folks on this psychological capital

Mike Jones (14:55)
Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, was fun.

Marcus Dimbleby (15:22)
So psychological safety is the sort of enigma that outstrips most organizations capabilities. But if you can create psychological capital for the individuals, so that boosts your resilience and optimism, but while doing so, counters that stress and negativity that we've got mainly preying on us all the time because of all this stuff. And they've got a great little acronym, they call it HERO. So it's hope, is there a will in the way, efficacy,

Do we have the confidence to do this effectively? Resilience, so can we bounce back and not just bounce back, but can we get and go beyond where we were? And then the final one is optimism. So are we being both realistic, flexible, but also we're not doomsaying. It's like, oh, we can do this rather than, oh. So hero, hope, efficacy, resilience and optimism. And I find that when we're coaching people and individuals, if you get that internally squared away.

Mike Jones (15:53)
Mm.

Marcus Dimbleby (16:20)
And what's lovely about this is it's different for where you are. So when I go to work, my hero levels might be, you know, 80, 20, 40, 30. When I go home, they might all be 90. When I go play sport with my guys, it's all different. So it's just understanding both the context of the environment you're in and then where is your brain, body, heart, know, gut feeling.

in the position you're in. So to be told you've got psychological safety, straight away your hero concept is going to go, no, I don't. I have an ability to speak up, but Marcus won't listen to me. So I'm not going to waste my time. Or...

Mike Jones (16:50)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Marcus Dimbleby (16:56)
everything I say, Mike goes off on and does without thinking it through. again, there's not that real clarity and the efficacy of understanding of what these things really mean. And that's what I find frustrating is we've been overburdened by, and there's always the buzzword bullshit bingo isn't there in businesses that, know, synergies and all that stuff. there's so many phrases out there and psychological safety is one of them that gets thrown around like a cheap round, you know, who wants psychological safety here? Have some on me. But they don't really understand the

Mike Jones (17:07)
Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Marcus Dimbleby (17:25)
depth of what it means. They're not thinking about it.

Mike Jones (17:27)
Yeah, and yeah,

I know, and you just suddenly have all these pliferations of these consultancies, it's only going to say, I can sell you psychological safety. Well, it's not really something you can just sell. It's an emergent property of all these things you bring in. And you highlight a really good point around that listening. I will say to leaders that the most important thing that's in your business,

Marcus Dimbleby (17:36)
Yeah.

Mike Jones (17:52)
is what's implicitly held in your people. Like, if you can get that out of them and you can then get it explicit, then you can see the difference between what you believe to be true and what they hold to be true. And nobody's right or wrong, but it's useful. It's really useful. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah.

Marcus Dimbleby (17:56)
Correct.

That's the thing, isn't it? It's stuff you don't know because it's not in

your head otherwise you'd be using it. It's in Mike's head or Mark's head. If you're not able to extract that, then you have no use. You have no useful information. It's sat between someone's ears and it's going home with them at five o'clock at the end of the day. Why are you not doing that? And that's one of my endless conundrums is why is this not happening? Why are people not wanting to do this more? And that's the question I always ask.

Mike Jones (18:25)
Yeah, yeah.

Yay! ⁓

But

I sort of think that, you know, stuff like psychological safety gets hijacked by something else, you know, they mean well, but they, you know, I think they confuse what we were talking about then about how do we make that space so we can get what's implicitly held? And because that's useful not only to the organization, but to the individuals, because then they feel valued that have been listened and acted to. I think it becomes a sort of captured in this sort of

HR tick box that, oh, we've got it now, tick, we've done. But to what end? think, yeah, back to your point, say what? Well, say what? Say what? We've got psychological safety. I can have psychological safety, it doesn't mean I'm going to achieve anything.

Marcus Dimbleby (19:02)
Yeah. Yes. And it's back to the numbers game. Yeah. Back to the numbers game. Yeah.

Correct. Yeah. And that's when we do a lot of work in transformation. That's sort of been my bread and butter for many years. And he's like, what, you know, I always, it's that trick question. What type of transformation are doing? Are we doing digital transformation? We're doing agile transformation. We're doing all that. I said, you're not. What do mean you're not? I said, we're doing people transformation. We are looking now to transform our people because the way the world has shifted, you know, we've gone from the sort of industrial era of mechanical, you know.

working on the line into this knowledge management, we have to shift the way people work. We have to transform and in doing that we have to shift.

Mike Jones (19:42)
Hmm.

Marcus Dimbleby (19:48)
mindset and culture and you can't do that as you say companies come in consultancy is promise we can change you can't right all you can do is change behaviors so you need to transform people's behaviors how they operate on a day-to-day basis how do they behave how do they speak how do they think how do they interact collaborate when you do that that will change their perspectives so we will train a group of people we'll go in a room and we'll know what they all think and believe at the beginning we'll then take

Mike Jones (20:12)
Mm.

Marcus Dimbleby (20:17)
them

through a suite of tools and techniques and they will learn those things themselves. They will unearth. I don't tell them what the problem is. They will surface that problem themselves and they'll see it, they'll feel it, they'll witness it, they'll create it. So you've got ownership but they've done it and at the end of it their perspective will now have changed because their behaviors were changed by the tools and techniques. Doing that, change their perspective and then when you get the collective change you'll start to shift the mindset of the company.

Mike Jones (20:46)
Yeah, yeah.

Marcus Dimbleby (20:46)
And then when the

mindset shifts, then you start to see the culture. So it's that virtuous circle of, will change my, me and Mike will change our behaviors today. And in doing so at end of the day, our perspective on what we thought in the morning will shift by what we think at the end of the day. And then tomorrow, Mike and I are going to go back and our teams are going to do this with us. So we've now affected 25 people. So now we start to see a mindset shift in that community within the business or department.

And then, wow, that department gets replicated by someone else's thinking. Before you know it, it's a competition game. So everybody's boosting their own capability. And then that's how you see culture shift. you walk in and depending on the pace, you want that to happen. If you've got the leadership behind, if you've got the top down saying, this is what we're doing, this is where we go, and this is how I want you to do it. And they are witnessed in behaving that way as well. So, you know, not do as I say, do as I am doing. Then that can happen exponentially quickly. I mean, we're talking weeks

Mike Jones (21:17)
Mm.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

Marcus Dimbleby (21:40)
months versus years of enduring shift. So I think that's one of the things that transformation, why is transformation failing at what is it McKinsey's 70 % rate? Because people don't, again, what's the outcome you're trying to achieve? You don't understand what transformation is actually about and what you're trying to do. You're just doing the latest digital buzzword or Agile this week.

Mike Jones (21:54)
Yay.

Yeah. And

again, it comes back to that thing earlier around, it becomes the process and like we've got this tool we need to bring in and they bring it in, but they didn't realize that when you go through this transformation change, by the time you've done your bit, you've done your project management part, you think, and you've got that in. That's just the start because you've got to have people to utilize it. But if you're, if you

Marcus Dimbleby (22:06)
correct.

Mike Jones (22:24)
all your people have been neglected and not being brought on the process, being involved in it, then they're to get to that start line and they're going to want to leave. They've got no commitment to it. They've got no change adoption and it could fall apart without the people. I think it's a crucial element that we're in there. When you bring to culture, always say, I flippantly always say, what culture do you want?

Marcus Dimbleby (22:34)
100%.

Mike Jones (22:49)
And they'll come up with some nice buzzword for it. really, I'm going to say, what behaviors do you want to see? What behaviors do you want to see? What behaviors ideally you don't want to see? And let's focus on that. Let's brand this as a, you know, we're going to have a safety culture. We're going to have this psychological safety culture, whatever you're going to call it. Actually, let's get to the, what is it that we need? then how do we then...

Marcus Dimbleby (22:53)
Yeah.

Mike Jones (23:18)
support our people to do that but also make sure that all the existing structures, policies, all that stuff, they're now aligned to what we're trying to do rather than misaligned still because we've got about those.

Marcus Dimbleby (23:29)
Yeah,

because if you don't do that, what you end up creating is lipstick on a pig. mean, there's so many these pros, it's like rules, isn't it? Certain rules are just meant to be broken because they're obsolete now. But no, no, we have to stick to the rules. And by sticking to the rules, it's dangerous. By following certain processes that haven't been challenged. I remember I was in one of the banks and...

Mike Jones (23:34)
Mmm.

Mm.

Marcus Dimbleby (23:47)
We wanted a digital outfit, so we were really fast tracking, we pushing the edges. And then you go to compliance, and oh no, you can't do that, you've got to provide me a 54 page document, and this is going to be requiring. I was like, dude, that's going to take longer to do than it took us to create the product in the last two weeks, you know? And then this kept going on, and I was getting frustrated. said, you know what? Show me the, I'm a bit of a dick when I need to be. I was like, show me the regulation that states that.

Mike Jones (24:02)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Marcus Dimbleby (24:11)
All right, I'll come back tomorrow and I'll find it for you. And they come back and they're quoting me something that was 2004. You know, even pre the big crash. So I'm like, that is obsolete. Yes, but it's what it states it is. And so therefore I said, we don't have to follow it. Go back. All right. Where's that come from? Is it a regulator? Is it internal? I ended up bringing in a regulator and she stood up at the front of the room and she said, this organization is killing itself. She said, we've stated the regulation is X. What you've done is wrap that in barbed wire.

Mike Jones (24:18)
Yeah, yeah.

Marcus Dimbleby (24:41)
stick a big red flashing light on it, cover it in concrete and sink it at bottom of the ocean where nobody can access it.

You have made it doubly, triply, quadruply, overly secure to protect yourselves. But in doing so, you've actually created an opening that's going to be, as you said, to the red teamers. Cyber wise, someone can penetrate and get in there.

Mike Jones (24:53)
Yeah.

Marcus Dimbleby (25:03)
And because people are so frustrated, they're going to cut corners and leave things open. you've got to really question the principle of a process. Is it valid? Where's it coming from? Why are we doing it? Start with why, you know, why are we doing this? What purpose does this thing create for us? And is it the right thing to do? My rule number one in life, do the right thing. Is this the right thing to do? No, because it's stupid. It's time consuming. It's out of date.

Mike Jones (25:07)
Yeah.

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Marcus Dimbleby (25:27)
So what? What's next then? Well, we challenge it. We red team it. And we've done that before. We're going, we're doing this thing, but we don't understand why. Well, let's red team it. Let's properly red team it. Take it apart, analyze it. And then we can go back with, we've looked at this. Here are some concerns. Here's the impact it's having. And here are some recommendations to make it better. And we've had policies changed. We've had regulators come in.

Mike Jones (25:47)
Yeah, yeah.

Marcus Dimbleby (25:50)
and take on board those regulations and recommendations and gone back and changed things. So none of these things are impossible. You just have to be willing to do it.

Mike Jones (25:57)
Yeah,

you have to and you know, it's that internal entropy people make so like you said earlier, so much self-induced complexity that they spend all their time trying to or energy fighting internally that they forget actually we're there to serve value to an external environment and they can't do it. So I think it's great to challenge because there's always constraints.

And you must understand when, when do you need to challenge those constraints and when do you need to operate within those constraints, but they need to be challenged. Um, cause some of them are, you know, archaic or come back to your critical thinking point is that someone has created a belief that the constraint exists, but in reality it doesn't exist. It's, it's, it's crazy self-created.

Marcus Dimbleby (26:27)
Correct.

100%.

No, that's why I asked for it. Show me the source

document because it's the old, isn't it? It's your longevity bias. Oh, and I love that. I've seen this. Oh, Marcus, we've always done it this way. Don't come here with your fancy ideas, lad. I'm like, OK, here's a brick wall that we're going to break down because that attitude is why you are where you are. And I love this sort of, like you say, self-induced complexity. And a lot of this then leads to people, what I call willful blindness. It's like they know this is going on.

Mike Jones (26:54)
Ha ha ha ha ha.

Yeah, yeah.

Mm.

Marcus Dimbleby (27:12)
But, and this goes back to the engagement and the quiet quitting, they're like, do you know what, I just can't be bothered. I know it's there, it's too much effort.

I alone can't change this. I saw Marcus and Mike try last month and they got nowhere. I you know what? I'm going to let it roll over me. I'm going to do the bare minimum, get away with what I can without getting targeted and just cruise along. And this is almost the situation that Gallup is out there saying this is the problem. This lack of engagement is getting this mediocre acceptance of behavior. So even when you do get, and we had a client, really good guy who came in and said, I want my team to challenge. I want them to do this. I want them to do that. They won't.

Mike Jones (27:32)
Hmm.

Marcus Dimbleby (27:48)
And was like, okay, let's just go and do some investigations. And they just, they'd learned this learned helplessness over time. That's just like, what's the point? Because they'd never had the support. And now they have the support they were worried like, this is a trap. Mike wants us to challenge him and come up with good ideas. Why would Mike want us to do that? Because the last guy did that, Steve got fired and Marcus got his Christmas bonus taken.

Mike Jones (27:56)
point.

Yeah, yeah.

Marcus Dimbleby (28:12)
you've got to have this, and this is where the understanding comes in. And one of the first things we do with organizations, we just do a diagnostics. Couple of days, let's do some surveys, questions, coffee chats, and just really see what's going on. Because what Mike and Marcus might think is going on in their organization.

because that's what we've been told by our senior management, that's what our surveys tell us. When you physically start talking to people in a safe, secure, and often anonymous, if you want truth, you've got to have anonymity. Rule number one, once you start to get that truth, then the reality of what is actually going on versus your perception often pulls apart. And that's when you can then start on the conversation to make a difference.

Mike Jones (28:38)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah. ⁓

Yeah. No, I had a recent recently with a client, a big client and they're saying, we want this mic, we want that mic. And I said, well, we can't have it. And they were like, why we want it? And I said, you can't because you've created an environment where it's easier for your people not to do work than it is to do work. And that sentence just like blew their worldview apart. They were like, you know,

Marcus Dimbleby (29:14)
That is it. Good, look at the numbers mate, it's all there.

Mike Jones (29:14)
That can't be possible. And I said, go, go check. said, go, yeah, yeah,

yeah. And go have a look. I said, get out of your office and go down and go, go spend the day with the team and you'll see how hard it is to do what you're asking to do. And it's not because it's what you're asking is, you know, on the surface impossible, but you've constrained your people so much that it's impossible.

Yeah, and you want them to be engaged at the same time. Yeah.

Marcus Dimbleby (29:40)
Massive problem.

Massive problem. Some statistics for you. So 85 % of problems across any organization, whether you're government, military, commercial, public sector, charity, are the same. 85 % of problems because they're all people related. 70 % of the problems you face are internal.

Mike Jones (29:58)
Mmm.

Marcus Dimbleby (30:02)
But what are most organizations focusing on? They're looking outwards and it's, oh, it's the competition, oh, it's the market, oh, it's Donald Trump, oh, it's the global politics, oh, it's a Fortune 500 company, or whatever it is, there's always something external to look at and blame, where the reality is if you look inside at your people, 70 % of the solution of the problems you're facing is right there.

Mike Jones (30:25)
Yeah, yeah.

Marcus Dimbleby (30:25)
And as you

said, go and have a look, get away from your bloody top office desk, go and mingle, go to the Gemba, as Toyota would call it, go to the workplace and see what's going on. You know, back in the old days of the military, generals out on the front line, walking the battle line, saying, right, what's going on, Corporal? What do we need to be doing different back at HQ? Listening.

Mike Jones (30:42)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Marcus Dimbleby (30:45)
Active listening, you know instead of just talking all the time at what point do you sit down and go right? I'd like to understand this. What can you all tell me and then shut up and listen? Actively listen and just absorb what tender and you might get ten different answers. That's okay But take note probe for the questions this goes back to Socrates the granddaddy of critical thinking You know, I've got no answers, but I will probe and ask questions and by you and I having good dialogue and Questioning each other which is the Socratic method

Mike Jones (30:55)
Yes.

Marcus Dimbleby (31:14)
Okay, tell me a bit more about that. Why do you think that's happening? Well, Mike thinks it's happening for this reason, but I don't think that I think it's happening for this reason. Could you both be right? Could you both be wrong? I don't know. Let's have a look. And it's that exploratory expansion of the mind almost. But in a double busy world where everything's complex, nobody has the time to do that. When we're the instruction on our training programs, people will sit there like end of day one, they'll go.

Mike Jones (31:23)
Yay.

Mm.

Marcus Dimbleby (31:39)
Marcus, I know all this stuff. I'm like, I know you do. I told you when we started, this is nothing new. I call it face palm coaching, because they're like, I know all this. And I said, none of this is rocket science. None of this is what I've made up, because I'm a Deloitte consultant trying to sell you something new. This is as old as time. It's basic stuff. said, but my other question is, when did you ever take the time?

Mike Jones (31:49)
Yay.

Marcus Dimbleby (32:03)
get the right people and go in a room and lock yourselves away from the external busyness and focus on the thing using these tools that you already know. And again, we never do that. Well, there you go. That's it.

Mike Jones (32:13)
Yeah. That's the same,

same mom. Like I'm not invented this. I'm not creating anything new. I'm, I'm talking about stuff that, you know, sun, time. but again, it comes, I think comes back to that. Early you said about priorities and you know, it was only a modern language that we, we change priority into a plural. it was always never a plural. It was just priority. And we forgot that, you know, we forgot.

good old things around main effort, like what's the main effort? What do we need to resource and focus on first? And we don't, so you've got all these leaders that, now, when they haven't got time, because they've got so many different things they're trying to do at the same time, and you've got to ask, you know, are those things just outputs or are we actually achieving an outcome? And secondly, they're normally operating at the decision rights that they've got people

that can make those decisions. They've hired those people to make decisions, but they didn't allow them to. And I suppose it comes back to our engagement point. You've got these people there for a reason. Use them, give them the freedom of action to make those decisions. They don't need you to make the decisions. Otherwise, why do you need them? So yeah.

Marcus Dimbleby (33:23)
I said, push authority

to where the information's at. Great quote from David Marquet from Turn the Ship Around on the Submarine Commander. You know, if you're sat at the top of the chain, how long does it take for information to get to you? Point one. And there's a minimum of seven layers from the front line to the top, a minimum. Working with an airline recently, 13 levels they had.

And again, when I asked, how many have you got? And they're, oh, I think we've got six markers. Okay, I'll get back to you. It's 13 levels. So if you've got to make a decision at the top and the individual at the front line is ready and he's got the information and they've passed it up, how long is that taking? Oh, it's got to go through the steer code. When's the steer code? Well, that's six next October. What? You know, Sarah can make the decision tomorrow because she's got the information. Why aren't you passing the authority down rather than waiting for information to come up?

Mike Jones (34:08)
Bye.

Marcus Dimbleby (34:11)
Because in a complex world where it is naturally complex and high speed is required, that's not high speed. That couldn't be any slower. And that's just a great question anybody listening. How long does information take to go up, decision to be made, and to come back down to execute? So request to execution. How long is that in your organization? You can physically measure that. And it's not the time it should be. We know this.

Mike Jones (34:29)
Yeah.

Yeah, and they tie themselves up with so much, so such confusing governance processes. And it's just, all it is is sense is decision rights. And they do have information and resources to make these decisions. Yes, make these decisions there. Otherwise, again, you you're going to take too long. And I think that's where, you know, that critical thinking is really important to challenge these because it's that...

orthodoxy creeps in where it's just like, we've always done it this way. And that's how, that's how we were told we would do it last time we got someone in. Yeah.

Marcus Dimbleby (35:08)
Exactly.

And that's the process, isn't it? So if you're the leader at the top, I make all the decisions because I'm fearful of handing it off. But if I know I have upskilled and trained all of my people in critical thinking, in adaptive leadership, and they are a team, and they are given the information and the capability to operate within that environment that I have fostered and enabled, then I am now confident in handing off and delegating the decision making.

Mike Jones (35:35)
Mm.

Marcus Dimbleby (35:35)
And the only

reason why organizations don't and senior leadership, know, there's fear factor, there's the delegation of authority responsibilities that they don't like to do. There's a lack of trust. Well, okay. So what? So why do those things exist? Well, my teams don't engage. They're not trained. Okay. I get that. So I'm not going to hand you control. Why don't you train them and upskill them all? yeah. I never thought of that. It's easy for me to make the decisions. Well, no, it's not because here's the impact of you doing that. And I think this is one of the conundrums that lot of organizations are struggling with.

with is your people just don't naturally evolve. As time evolves, as tech evolves, as AI comes in, as the nature of the market changes, your people are still doing what they did one, two, five, 10 years ago. If you want them to shift.

as that pendulum swings, you have to train them, you have to invest in them, you have to give them the capability, the environment in which to do that and it's going to cost you money. But the money will come back tenfold in the outcome that you will achieve by doing that rather than the output that you're getting right now.

Mike Jones (36:22)
Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, that's what we look at, go, well, freedom of action. So how do I empower people when they need intent? What are we trying to achieve? Intent. Oh, yeah, no, yeah, yeah. That's the thing. Well, this is the thing I've got a fellow with Conversation View, we oh, we just want our people to be empowered, Michael, we want to take the initiative. And you're like, yeah, yeah, I told them, Ma, but that's the thing. You've got to a clear understanding about what the outcome is, the intent.

Marcus Dimbleby (36:42)
another great word isn't it? Empowerment. Throw that around like another psychological safety buzzword. Yep.

⁓ I told them they are. ⁓

Mike Jones (37:03)
There is constraints because everyone has constraints at some point. And there's requisite knowledge, skills, and experience. that's the thing you're going at. If they don't have the requisite knowledge, skills, and experience, then you can bring those constraints in and they'll still feel empowered. But you've got to build up that knowledge, skills, and experience because then you can have them to take the freedom of action, to make decisions. But you can't just...

to go, well, I've told them they're empowered. And they go, well, they haven't got the, well, one, they haven't got any information for what you want, because you didn't give them the information. You're not clear on what you want, because all you're doing is saying you're measured by these KPIs, not actually what we're trying to achieve. So they've got no, there's no construct then for them to take decisions.

Marcus Dimbleby (37:52)
No, none at all. We talk about the six C's of which the first two are clarity and capability. And it's like, the first question asked, well, I want them to make decisions Marcus. Okay. Have they got absolute clarity on who you are, what you're doing, where they're going, why they're going there, blah, blah, blah. yeah, I've told them. And you go and talk to them, no they haven't. Have they got the capability? Are they up skilled? Have they got the physical capability, the tools, what they need to do the job or no? So how do you expect them to do anything?

Mike Jones (37:58)
Mmm.

Hey.

Marcus Dimbleby (38:20)
You know, don't forget the rest of the season, the six C's. The first two, clarity and capability. Most organisations just sit there with a blank face when you ask those. And it's that problem of, as you mentioned earlier, same as your vision, same as your values. It's just buzzwords. It's just a few, we have integrity, honesty, transparency. Do you really? Do you? Or is it just a nice thing on the website and the wall as you walk in the office, you know? So there's lots to confront.

Mike Jones (38:20)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Mm.

Yay.

They're like,

yeah, and they go, but we've got a vision. Everyone knows our vision and purpose. Our vision is to save the world, but you make widgets. I don't get the connection. And they're like, well, you know, they try and make it this inspirational thing, which it doesn't need to be. But I suppose this is where the red teaming and that critical thinking really helps because I've got, for the military, you've probably heard this saying as well, which is,

Marcus Dimbleby (38:49)
stop.

Mike Jones (39:08)
The plan is nothing, planning is everything. having them involved in that makes them adaptable because we're not only clear about what we're trying to do, what the problem is, we're also going, well, what if this happens? And they go with the, yeah.

Marcus Dimbleby (39:11)
Eyes on how I won, I won. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, how often do you get handed a plan? Right, and this is the problem is that

it's like, where's the planning done? Oh, the strategy team do all the planning. So a strategy group lock themselves in a room and create the plan, then hand that off to the execution team. And then it suddenly starts to go wrong and you blame the execution team for not knowing. Hang on minute, how does that work? Why weren't they involved in the planning?

Because if they were, then we have Plan A, but we know to pivot to Plan B when issues happen. We know the constraints that are proposing to allow us to pivot to Plan C. If you're not engaged in the planning...

then the execution will always, always fail. And there's another great quote, know, no plan survives first contact with the enemy or the customer or the client or the market. So again, that plan is going to hit a brick wall at some point. And if those people driving that plan forward weren't involved in the and weren't allowed to think critically about that plan, then they will go into stasis and they'll sit there waiting for a decision to be made while things are going wrong, while nothing's coming down from the top. Often people won't even be aware the wheels are coming off until it then comes off

Mike Jones (40:00)
Yeah, yeah.

Yeah,

yeah.

Marcus Dimbleby (40:27)
all four come off at the same time. You don't see that loose wheel nut, you just suddenly realize all four wheels have gone. What happened?

because you're trundling along, not paying attention, and then boom, these things happen. So a lot of this goes back to, as you said, it's the empowerment done well, it's psychological safety, not a buzzword, it's critical thinking enabled as an actual capability. Most people think they're critical thinkers, they're not. Less than 10 % are by default. You have to physically learn it, and then when you learn it, you have to physically engage your brain to do it. Same as reg-teaming. It's then engaging that brain to do something different. And most of us,

Mike Jones (40:38)
Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Marcus Dimbleby (41:03)
Don't. Our brains are lazy by default. We want to cruise along doing the minimum. If we can take a shortcut, we'll take a shortcut. We'll cut around and circumvent the problems. And then we see the wheels come off and we wonder why. And that's one of the big problems today. think fate, especially in the high speed complex world we are living in, where it's not double busy, the real complexity, then that's where organizations struggle.

Mike Jones (41:15)
Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I just, I remember all this. you know, when I was in, in that system, I didn't realize this is what we were doing. but we're on reflection, you're thinking, wow, we use so much of this stuff. Cause I remember being, you know, a young soldier, every three o'clock in the morning, it's absolutely raining. He's hammering it down and I'm cold and I'm sat there and the corporals taking us through the plan. He's like, yeah, we're going to go through here. And that's the plan. And like you said, we know the plan will not survive.

contact with the enemy but then he will stop and he would go, Jonesy, if we get contacted here or we get casualty here, what would you do? And I'm like, you know, cold thinking, don't answer me. but then I'll be like, yeah, we do this. And that's the thing because the plan is the plan, but those questions enable us to adapt. And I don't know, I've always wondered why, why do you

Why do organizations not take this time upfront to think about this and go, well, this is what we're trying to achieve, but what's plausible? Well, what if X customer does this or what if X regulator does this or what if this competitor does this, what we're going to do?

Marcus Dimbleby (42:28)
Yeah, they just don't. Because I

think there's two things there. One, arrogance and hubris. They think they know the answer so we can crack on with the answer. And two, we're too busy to do that. I one of my favourite quotes is Wyatt Earp and he said, in a gunfight, you need to take your time, but in a hurry. know, said, fast is fine, but accuracy is everything. You know, I can throw a hundred darts at a dartboard in a minute.

Mike Jones (42:37)
Mm.

Yeah, yeah,

Yeah, yeah.

Marcus Dimbleby (42:53)
Right? But if none of them hit the target, what's the point where I can take my time and get one projectile perfectly where it needs to go. So all that quote I just boil down into is slow down to speed up. If you and I take, know, if we've got to create a strategy for the next six months, right? If we take a couple of days and get the right people in a room, lock the door, go through some tools and techniques, get all that information, get different perspectives, challenge each other, riff off of each other's ideas, and then solidify that plan.

Mike Jones (43:04)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Marcus Dimbleby (43:23)
and then red team that plan, and we've had those who are going to execute involved in all of this, and then we hand that plan off, that's got an 80 to 95 % success rate of delivery. If you just write that plan on your own today and mean you guys, it's the plan, Marcus and Mike's plan, hey everybody, Mike and Marcus knocked this out in afternoon, aren't we so clever because we've done this before, that plan is not going to work.

Mike Jones (43:33)
Yeah.

No.

Marcus Dimbleby (43:45)
And so that slowing down of two days means that plan stays on track and delivers in six months. If we throw it out after afternoon, that plan is going to go, the wheels are going to come off constantly and you're going to six months, nine months, 12 months and mazilians off, you know, off track and off budget. And you see this, I go into organization and say, I'm not here to show you how I can get you on time. I'm here to save you all the time you're wasting right now. Show me your plans that have delivered on time, on track, on budget for last five years.

Mike Jones (43:51)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Marcus Dimbleby (44:15)
Oh, we don't have any. Of course you don't. Nobody has. What I'm going to do is reduce all those. So that plan for six months took you how long? Three years and four billion over. Right. I'll get that down to whatever, 18 months or whatever it will be, but it won't be anything close to the wasted time and effort because it's all about being more effective and efficient at what we're doing. Because the minute you try and achieve that goal, the minute you're trying to hit the bullseye, you're going to miss it because you're rushing and you're not taking the time to get the right people in there with you.

Mike Jones (44:38)
Yeah. Yeah.

And they just solidify this plan that's like immovable. And again, then just goes back onto predefined KPIs that, they've got, and they wonder why then it doesn't survive contact reality because things will move. We're not, we're not trying to enact anything on static parties. They are.

living breathing things, entities, yeah, yeah, they're gonna move, they're gonna respond in ways that we didn't expect, they're gonna see what you've done and not like it in responding ways. And we're not trying to eradicate uncertainty through this process, but we're just trying to make people adaptable to the inevitable changes or inevitable things that are gonna happen or go wrong. Yeah.

Marcus Dimbleby (44:59)
Nothing static. That's the thing.

Yeah. That's it. It goes back to, we

have to transform our people. Because right now, people, generic, are not adaptable, are not resilient, are not thinkers, and are not flexible. We're not by default. And we've become less that. And now where they are, we've become an even more reliant. I need to make a decision. Put it in ChatGPT.

So that is actually killing your, you know, your brains. You know, you're removing that capability to think and challenge even more so. So there's a real dichotomy of how do we physically enable this to be done well going forward, which we need to take the time to think about, I think.

Mike Jones (45:42)
Yeah.

Yeah. And

I'm seeing the dangerous trend of people trying to get AI to do strategy for them. And I think that's great. know, if you want to save some time and, you know, get it to write an email for you, fine. when it comes to strategy, it's very context driven, but also it's not even just context driven. Strategy is an emotional process. You want people to act.

Marcus Dimbleby (46:18)
Correct.

Mike Jones (46:19)
So you need people in that room to really grasp and understand it, not just go a print off and go, here you go. ChatGPG said that our vision is now this, all that crap. It does the same thing. You know, I've played around with things to see what it would come out with on strategy and I've tried all different things and it still comes out with the same orthodoxy that I've created this podcast, a challenge is it comes up with a vision and all this other crap that is useful, useful artifacts.

Marcus Dimbleby (46:40)
I'll see you guys.

Yeah, it's just a very clever, very

fast scraping machine. so this is what we sell our clients. If you want to use it, just use it as another person in the room.

Mike Jones (46:50)
Mm.

Marcus Dimbleby (46:54)
give it a seat at the table, and we've done this. We've actually got a laptop open and put, we've got a chat ACT that we built, so we use that with a client. They say, right, let's go around the room, and that's just, these are ages called the 10th man. It's that 10th person's opinion in the room. So we'll just say, okay, what does chat GPT say? I've asked Mike the question, I've got Mike's answer, I've asked Marcus's, I've got his answer. What does chat GPT? And then once you do that last as well, go, oh, it hasn't told us invariably anything that we as a collective haven't come up with.

Mike Jones (46:54)
Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah,

Marcus Dimbleby (47:23)
Now what we

can do is put our collective solutions into it to refine it. Then what do we think? So you're constantly challenging and all you're using that is another capability, another voice in the room, but any idiot and you are an idiot, if you just type in your finger, I want this, give me the solution and you print that off and go and execute.

Man, that's just commercial suicide, isn't it? When you think about that thing you've been given has got no input from a human, it's scraped from everywhere. And I think one of the consultancies got bit by this in Australia. It made stuff up. It wasn't even true. They trying to use it as a law case and it made up. The president's been set by Mike had this case in the UK in 1985 and it just made it all up. And when they did the research, it was like that never existed.

Mike Jones (47:46)
Yeah, yeah.

See you.

I had Matt Mullin on here and he was talking about futures and he mentioned about AI and he had a great thing that really stuck with me. said that the most dangerous thing with AI is that we think AI is correct.

Marcus Dimbleby (48:12)
very dangerous.

Mike Jones (48:25)
And yeah, yeah, and that's the thing that lot of people do. They just get it and go, that must be correct because it's advanced.

Marcus Dimbleby (48:26)
ever think that. Don't ever think that.

Okay. Well, it's the biggest,

it's the most clever marketing thing right now, isn't it? Think about it. The AI hype of how amazing this thing is, people are buying it, people are falling for it. And we know what happens when you don't check your work. That's the dangerous thing to be in. Yeah.

Mike Jones (48:36)
Yay. ⁓

Yes. Yeah. Yeah. And that's the thing. I think,

you know, this whole, you know, this whole thing around critical thinking is really important. And I think you really highlighted it here. And it's not just, you know, I think we slightly gone off, you know, in a different direction. I thought we would, but it's a really good direction in the sense of thinking around actually, yeah, we were talking about red teaming and critical thinking and how that helps us be adaptable when we're trying to, you know, execute in this.

really volatile environment, but also it's about how do we create that engagement of our people? know, how, you know, how do we set the context? So our people actually have a voice, have agencies, have decision rights, and we don't create this learn helplessness. And I think that a lot of people can take away from this, that if you want to truly engage your people, let's move away from the, the, the faddy things that people are trying to chuck, chuck at you to try and boost engagement. How about we just go back to.

getting humans back into the business and get them thinking and get them to have ownership and accountability and you'll see that engagement will skyrocket from there. So I think you really highlighted that point clearly.

Marcus Dimbleby (49:41)
That's it.

Brilliant. That's the intent

is helping people realize this capability is there. It's been around for centuries. It's there, it's under your nose, it's in your business, it's next to you. Don't think AI is a replacement for that. By all means use AI. AI is great.

Mike Jones (50:02)
No.

Marcus Dimbleby (50:03)
but teach those people to use it effectively rather than be replaced by it because it's never gonna replace critical thinking. can't. That's the one thing that is yet to be capable and I don't think it ever will. But don't let your people become learned helplessness, as you said, lazy by using it rather than incorporating it into a part of their critical thinking and red teaming. Why would you not?

Mike Jones (50:18)
⁓

I think, imagine having an organisation full of people that are willing to critically think. It'd be tough as a leader then because trust me, yeah, yeah. yeah, it'd be amazing. It'd be like a tidal wave of something. ⁓

Marcus Dimbleby (50:33)
Right, it's amazing. It is hard, yeah, but the outcome is amazing. Yeah. Yeah. If you look at our website, in

front of our website, we've got a list of words of how do you feel after doing our training. And there's a whole list of words of, you know, engaged, and I do it with the class, and I'll just say, we did one last week with a Canadian leadership group, and they put all the words up at the end, it's like enlightened, engaged, energized, reinvigorated, and I just said, now imagine...

if your whole organization felt like that. And they were just like, wow. I'm like, that's the trigger to make a shift in your organization. I said, that's what gets your organization to next level capability. Your people feeling that that will deliver awesome stuff. fact, anybody who feels that way, you just go out and you do great things. And that's how easy it is to do that.

Mike Jones (51:04)
Mm.

Yeah, we'll do.

Yeah,

and in the long term, it's far cheaper than buying all these extra stuff that you don't need. So thank you for this, but what would you like listeners to leave and think about from this podcast?

Marcus Dimbleby (51:30)
Yeah.

I'd like to have you go away and think about how you think. Are you, as Daniel Kahneman says, system one or system two? System one is quick, instinctive, reactive, but invariably wrong. And that's how 95 % of us think. Or are you system two, reliable, logical, rational, a little bit slower, but more likely to be correct?

Mike Jones (51:44)
Mm.

Marcus Dimbleby (52:07)
So it's really consider and there are times when we need to be system one without a doubt, but in a complex world, the more system one you are, the more dangerous your likely decisions are going to be if they're wrong. So just go away, think about thinking, think about how you analyze. Do you get other people's opinions? Do you ask for another perspective or are you always the right, know, my answer is the best. And just consider that. Take some time out, slow down to speed up and think about how you think.

Mike Jones (52:17)
do.

Yeah, I think that's great. Definitely taking time to slow down and actually get people thinking, get people involved in the process. And, know, I'm a firm believer in it. So I want you to get on the, on the podcast that, you know, if you want your strategy to meet reality, you need to have critical thinking. You need your people to have the freedom. Exactly. Yeah. Um, and get your people to adapt and you can't do that unless you utilize a lot of stuff that we speak about today. So thank you very much, Marcus. been an absolute pleasure.

Marcus Dimbleby (52:53)
Bring reality to it.

Absolutely.

Mike Jones (53:04)
having you on. Yeah, and I look forward to having further conversations with you. Good, cool. And that's right. And if you like this episode, please share, subscribe to your network so that they can get the value from this podcast as well. So thank you very much Marcus and I look forward to seeing you soon and see you all again next week. Cheers. Sorry, stop that.

Marcus Dimbleby (53:05)
That's a mic.

Look forward to it sir. Take care. Thanks for having me on.

Take care, thank you. ⁓