Strategy Meets Reality Podcast

The Illusion of Progress: Paul Sweeney on Magnetic Nonsense, Corporate Culture, and Critical Thinking

• Mike Jones • Season 1 • Episode 26

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Most nonsense in organisations isn’t malicious—it’s magnetic.

In this episode of Strategy Meets Reality, Mike Jones is joined by Paul Sweeney—author of Magnetic Nonsense: A Short History of Bullshit at Work—to unpack the rituals, myths, and illusions that derail progress inside organisations.

They dive into the dangers of detached leadership, the myth of heroic CEOs, and why so many change programmes fail before they begin. From performance theatre and wellbeing platitudes to the real impact of meetings, Paul exposes how nonsense embeds itself in culture—and what it takes to replace it with something better.

🔍 In this episode:

  • Why magnetic nonsense is so attractive—and so hard to spot
  • The gap between executive fantasy and frontline reality
  • How buzzwords and best practices become blockers
  • The illusion of change and the truth about transformation
  • What critical thinking really looks like in leadership
  • The importance of autonomy and design that fits reality

🎧 Keywords: Critical Thinking, Leadership, Culture, Organisational Nonsense, Change, Strategy Execution, Transformation, Autonomy, Corporate Myths

📘 Learn more about Paul’s book: Magnetic Nonsense

📬 Connect with Paul: Paul Sweeney on LinkedIn

Send Mike a Message

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

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🎧 Listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and Buzzsprout

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

Paul Sweeney (00:00)
we keep falling for these simplistic explanations because we want to believe that the world isn't messy and unpredictable.

somewhere between half and two thirds of executives with MBAs from business schools. Why is everything still pretty shit for most people at work? You know, and why are are organizations so dysfunctional?

I looked at the effects of power. I looked at why people have poor mental health at work. I looked at why people don't, you know, use their brains at work, you know, their creativity. ⁓ And more and more when you look at it, actually, is such a compelling case for much more autonomy in the workplace.

Mike Jones (00:22)
Mmm.

Yeah, yeah.

Welcome back to Strategy Meets Reality podcast. I'm absolutely delighted to be joined by Paul Sweeney. I've been wanting to get Paul on for a while, but I've had to drag you away from sailing to get you onto the podcast. So thank you for joining me, Paul. It's been great to have you on.

Paul Sweeney (00:52)
Yeah.

It's a pleasure Mike. Yeah, thanks for having me.

Mike Jones (00:59)
That's my, honestly, it's my pleasure. Just so for our listeners, do you mind giving a bit of a context, a bit of background of what you've been up to?

Paul Sweeney (01:06)
Yeah, so I had an early career in aviation, ended up as an accidental management consultant, and then ended up as a chief strategy officer of a FTSE 100 real estate business for three years or so. interesting sort of random career path. My first job was in the lost baggage department of an airline, which was a lot of fun. So I kind of worked right at the bottom of organizations and right all the way through the middle and at the top. So I've kind of seen

lots of organizations from lots of different angles along the way. And that's led me to be sort of curious about them, especially when you see the sort of same stuff everywhere.

Mike Jones (01:36)
Mm-hmm.

Yes, and you wrote your book Magnetic Nonsense?

Paul Sweeney (01:49)
Yeah,

so I, yeah, you know, it took a bit, it took a bit of time out after my last corporate role. And I was just reflecting on for me, the kind of curious thing that I kept seeing, no matter where I worked, whether as a consultant or as an employee, I sort of saw the same nonsense and bullshit everywhere. You know, a bit like that. Remember that movie, The Sixth Sense, where the kids use dead people?

Mike Jones (02:09)
Yeah

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Paul Sweeney (02:13)
⁓ yeah, I kept on

seeing like the same zombie crap everywhere in every business that I interacted with it with. And, ⁓ so I decided to take some time out to go and explore this and see if I could figure out why it seems so universal and how, how did we end up in this place where work is so full of nonsense and bullshit and, and, and, you know, even though we all, I think, kind of know that it's bullshit, we all still play along with it. It's a really sort of curious.

thing. It's what makes things like The Office so hilarious, right, because it's so close to reality and you just think why are we all stuck in this weird kind of dimension of nonsense. That was kind of what I wanted to write the book about.

Mike Jones (02:53)
Yeah, I think, you know, for like most leadership programs, if you just made them watch The Office ⁓ and say, don't do that, I think you'll be quite a bit of the way. I get, and that's why I love the title of the book and I love the book. I've been reading through it. I bought a copy and then before I could even get to read it, I gave it away because I thought someone really needed it before I did. And then I got another copy.

Paul Sweeney (02:59)
Yeah. Yeah.

Thank you.

Hahaha

Yeah.

Mike Jones (03:19)
I think it's great to just flick through and almost like get a bit of a sense check for definitely for someone like me because I go into organisations and I fight this nonsense about what strategy is or isn't and trying to fight those worldviews that are really, really ingrained. how do you, what do you see or how do you overcome this stuff when you're working with organisations?

Paul Sweeney (03:34)
Yeah. Hell yeah.

Well, let's take step back. So, when I was doing my research into why, you know, this seems to be such a pervasive thing, it turned out that there were three sort of cognitive biases that were kind of a hangover of evolution, right? So we, humans, we have a deeper version to uncertainty. And that's an evolutionary thing because in uncertainty, uncertainty used to mean danger probably when we were cavemen.

Mike Jones (03:54)
Mm.

and

Paul Sweeney (04:12)
And women, it's, you know, we, we, didn't like uncertainty. We've, we've, we've evolved to be habit for, you know, habit pattern making machines. ⁓ so, you know, if you've ever driven home from work and kind of never not remembered the journey at all, that's a good sign that your, your brain is working in your subconscious is kind of, recognize the pattern of driving home and kind of done all the heavy lifting for you, leaving your conscious brain to kind of think about things like, who you want to kill at work and stuff like that.

Mike Jones (04:12)
Yeah.

Hmm.

⁓ yeah,

Paul Sweeney (04:38)
So we have this aversion to uncertainty and then we have a deep need for sense making. And you can see that back into most human cultures are all that I could find in their early days had creation myths, which were stories that explained how we got here and what was going on with the sun and the moon and the stars and stuff. So those two things, you put them together, it means that we are really open.

Mike Jones (04:56)
Hmm.

Paul Sweeney (05:01)
and actually crave simplistic explanations of what has happened and simplistic models of the future. probably my favourite one is that Muppet Simon Sinek with his ⁓ start with why. And it's like, all you need is, you know, start with why and everything will be perfect.

Mike Jones (05:12)
Oh god, Oh yeah.

Paul Sweeney (05:19)
And everybody fell for that. you know, executives around the world suddenly decided they needed to have purpose statements, even though they were fine before, most of which were completely

Mike Jones (05:25)
Yes.

Paul Sweeney (05:28)
utter nonsense and bullshit. But we keep falling for these simplistic explanations because we want to believe that the world isn't messy and unpredictable.

And I think it was Daniel Kahneman, you know, the famous economist. Yeah, yeah, he, he in thinking fast and slow, I think he said something like, the, the illusion that we've understood the past feeds the further illusion that we can predict and control the future.

Mike Jones (05:37)
Mmm.

Psychology, yeah, ⁓ yeah, economy sense.

Paul Sweeney (05:55)
And this is the kind of cycle that we get stuck in all the time. And then the very last cognitive bias of the three is something called belief perseverance, which is also an evolutionary hangover. Once we believe something to be true, like the concept of organizational culture, for example, is a good one. Once we believe something to be true, it's very hard to get us to shift our views. And sometimes it takes a ridiculous amount of overwhelming evidence to do so.

Mike Jones (05:55)
Hmm.

Yes.

Paul Sweeney (06:21)
So yeah, so we are, as humans, we're just very susceptible to simplistic nonsense. And once it gets hold of us, it's hard to shake it off.

Mike Jones (06:29)
Yes, and that's what we're trying to battle with. You know, I definitely battle with the belief that the world is predictable, stable and linear cause relationship that we do this. And that's what you see a lot in organizations that very simplistic. If we do this thing, that's going to be the silver bullet to all our problems. Yeah.

Paul Sweeney (06:37)
Yes. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

And it's, I think Rory Sutherland put it really well. He's very funny. And he said something like 90 % of all success in business is messy, nonlinear, know, unplanned, but 90 % of activity in business is about pretending that that's not true. ⁓ And there's some great stories in the business world. you look at Viagra.

Mike Jones (07:07)
Yeah.

Paul Sweeney (07:12)
You know, that was a failed angina drug where the researchers noticed that the side effects during the drug trial was everyone came in with a boner and they would, hang on a second, we got something here. You know, that turned into the bestselling drug of all time. Gortex was originally a material for surgical operations as a way to fix veins. Turned into the most successful outdoor clothing material of all time. Post-it notes.

Mike Jones (07:15)
right.

Yeah.

wow.

Paul Sweeney (07:38)
Another famous failure, the guy designing Post-it Notes was trying to make a super strong adhesive for the aviation industry. It ended up with a quite useless weak glue. And then it took them something like five or eight years before they figured out another use for this product. So the business world is actually full of cases where just pure luck or serendipity. ⁓

Mike Jones (08:00)
Mm-hmm.

Paul Sweeney (08:01)
was much more important than any strategy or great leaders. It didn't make any difference.

Mike Jones (08:05)
Yeah.

I suppose that comes to the point that I've always tried to argue with the, and it comes back to cognitive bias, bias around this belief. Once we know it's true, once you set on this path, we sort of, we ignore any other signals or weak signals. So it's almost like, well, we just see everything, ⁓ that's just a failure, get pushed aside, or that's not what we want to see, so we ignore it. Rather than being open to see.

Paul Sweeney (08:17)
Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Mike Jones (08:30)
different opportunities as they start to emerge or risks or opportunities that come by. Yeah, I see that play out a lot. It's just highly frustrating.

Paul Sweeney (08:39)
Yeah,

Yeah. And then it's kind of this what I think I called it in the book, the kind of disnification of leadership. So this kind of belief that all we need is this great, humble servant leader who will come in and, you know, magically transform our organization all by themselves, even though they're they're only one person and they have very little context half the time and they only last for two years anyway. But, we we constantly have this thing where they

Mike Jones (08:48)
Hmm.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Paul Sweeney (09:06)
this heroic leadership kind of model in our heads that will save everything. you even see the press is complicit in this too, where you'll see a company that's struggling and the article in the FT will be, know, so and so has a, you know, a big challenge to turn around this company, you know, as if the other 10,000 people in the company make no difference at all,

you know. It's all down to this one individual somehow. And it's...

Mike Jones (09:26)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, that's,

that's what you see with most leadership programs. They always just talk about the individual and the individual stuff. And there, there is a point for the individuals, know, self-awareness. I look more self-awareness around their, ⁓ their orientation, how well they, they're open to new ideas and stuff. But, it's rarely looked at beyond there. It's rarely looked at how do you create the structure? How do we set the conditions for others to act rather than

Paul Sweeney (09:33)
Yeah. Yeah.

if you have that.

Mike Jones (09:54)
just that one person that apparently they're going to solve all the problems.

Paul Sweeney (09:57)
Yeah, and then almost all leadership development programs, as far as I can tell, are entirely useless. they, nearly all of them, or all that I've come across, they ignore the context. They just have this generic approach to leadership. But everything, you and you're in that kind of systems thinking world, everything about systems thinking and complexity theory will tell us that context is the most important thing. And you can't just, you can't just...

Mike Jones (10:07)
Mmm.

Yes.

Paul Sweeney (10:23)
take a leader who was seemingly successful in one context, even though it was probably just down to pure luck, and then expect by transplanting that leader into a completely different context that you'll get the same results. It's just, it's absurdly silly.

Mike Jones (10:36)
No.

And this is a lot of the problems in organizations and consultancies. You know, I am a consultant and you are too, suppose still now, yeah, but you're recovering from the big consultancy. But it's that idea of context free solutions. And that's where Simon Sinek and all those lot and you, Bartlett and all those lot surprise because what they're saying

Paul Sweeney (10:48)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

Exactly.

Mike Jones (11:01)
is nice. What they're saying is, you know, you look at it think, well, you know, it does sound nice. It's, you know, it's okay. But it doesn't regard context.

Paul Sweeney (11:08)
Yeah.

It's completely ludicrous. I I mentioned Stephen Bartlett's book in my book, and it's actually hilarious. The fact that he's out there saying there are 33 universal laws that govern everything, you know, and he then modestly says, now and 100 years from now. It's like as if, know, there were these like, you know, there's just no evidence of any kind that there are universal laws or rules that

Mike Jones (11:12)
Yeah.

Yes, yeah.

Paul Sweeney (11:40)
that predict everything. It's just completely not a bollocks, I'm afraid.

Mike Jones (11:43)
No, no, yeah. And that's even like in the systems world. we, people think when you think about systems thinking it's, it's a, an approach. It's not as multiple different, methodologies and stuff that we look and go, well, it's, all about the, the multi-use. It's thinking, well, we've got a bit of perceptual complexity here. We've got some, you know, structural complexity. We can have these things to sense and try and understand the problem, but

Paul Sweeney (12:07)
Yeah.

Mike Jones (12:07)
you've got these people that are just going, yeah, it's these seven steps. Just do these seven steps and you'll be successful. And I'm like, right. Okay.

Paul Sweeney (12:11)
I know. Yeah. And then you

think, well, if it was that easy, why isn't every company perfect? Yeah. I we've had it. We've had I was having this chat with somebody yesterday again, saying, you know, we've had 150 years to study leadership now in organizations. Yeah. We have 50,000 leadership and executive coaches in the UK. That's more than more than GPs.

Mike Jones (12:28)
Mmm.

Paul Sweeney (12:36)
And, you know, we have endless leadership programs. have, you know, somewhere between half and two thirds of executives with MBAs from business schools. Why is everything still pretty shit for most people at work? You know, and why are are organizations so dysfunctional? You

think that is not it's not it's just not the answer. It's it's amazing that we still continue to think that this is some kind of answer in the face of

Overwhelming evidence that it's not.

Mike Jones (13:01)
No, a lot of the stuff, it's like, just reduct it down. It's like they'll do a leadership program without looking at some structure. They'll do, they don't try and match things up with what needs to be done. And people will say, what's the most successful organizations you work for? they're the ones that don't do all this stuff. They're the ones that actually spend their energy focusing on.

Paul Sweeney (13:12)
Yeah.

Ha ha

Yeah.

Mike Jones (13:26)
on the value, output that they're there to do rather than all this secondary noise stuff that MBA, MBA professors and stuff tell them to do.

Paul Sweeney (13:28)
Yeah.

Excuse me. Yeah, and it's...

And I know you're probably familiar with Barry O'Shree's work. And he described those kind of predictable patterns of behavior in organizations. One of them was the experience of the customer who, I'm trying to remember what he called it now, it was kind of outraged or something similar. Customers can never understand why the organization seems so focused on itself that

Mike Jones (13:41)
Mmm.

Paul Sweeney (14:00)
that the customer can never get any service. And certainly if you have ever experience of dealing with big banks or utility companies or insurance companies, you just go, it's unbelievably awful, the customer experience, but how can it be after, know, a hundred years of time to fix it, know, ⁓ endless transformation projects, endless IT systems, billions spent on management consultants and...

Mike Jones (14:16)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Paul Sweeney (14:22)
You still can't get someone to do something really simple when you phone up. It's really, really odd. mean, if aliens came to visit Earth, they'd look at the way we run organizations and go, that's just fucking mad. Like, you know, why would you do that? It doesn't make any sense.

Mike Jones (14:33)
Yeah

Yeah. And, and

it's the, I think that's the point to try and get people to, to sit back and look at the, look at the stories they're telling themselves or the constraints they put in place. And that's the perfect example you said about the, service companies that like, always say they care about the customer, but I can't find a number, you know, like to get hold of them to actually share that got a problem. No.

Paul Sweeney (14:53)
Yeah. Yeah, ⁓ yeah, ⁓ you can't even

call British Airways anymore and there's no email address you can email them on. It's like, here's a great idea. Our service is so bad, we're just gonna turn off any way to get in touch with us. That'll improve our KPIs because now there'll be no unanswered calls.

Mike Jones (15:07)
No, yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Paul Sweeney (15:21)
and unanswered emails.

Mike Jones (15:22)
Yeah, yeah, And that's the perverse

nature of all this stuff. It's like I, I've mentioned this before with on a podcast, but I have octopus energy and he's done a great job of I can actually phone up box and that person can actually solve my problem. And he's like a fast growing. I'm thinking probably because he's, he's not listened to the rest of the nonsense that everybody else is doing.

Paul Sweeney (15:32)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Mike Jones (15:49)
And that's the

thing with a lot of organizations. We talked about context free solutions, but also there seems to be this thing where they want to replicate each other.

Paul Sweeney (15:58)
It's really odd this kind of herd behavior that organizations, it does make me laugh when they talk about best practice. I'm thinking, well, how can something be the best if everybody does it? It doesn't even make sense, right? But yeah, they spend all their time benchmarking themselves against each other. it's kind of, why would you do that? They're even more crap than you probably. ⁓

Mike Jones (16:00)
Mmm.

Yeah.

No, no.

Yeah.

Paul Sweeney (16:21)
Yeah. And, you know, I also, think I wrote an article at some stage recently just kind of questioning, you know, the fact that the more we seem to pay CEOs and executive teams, the less original ideas we get. ⁓ Which is really curious. you know, it's and there's a section in the book like talking about, when a new CEO takes over, you normally get this absolutely

Mike Jones (16:35)
Mmm.

Paul Sweeney (16:44)
ridiculous 100 day plan. Everyone seems to think they have to do that. But it's like there's a pick and mix bullshit list that 99 % of these plans contain. And the CEO will stand up and go, ⁓ yes, we need to do something to transform this business. So we're going to make everyone accountable. Customer centricity will be at the heart. Blah, blah, blah. We're gonna...

Mike Jones (16:47)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Paul Sweeney (17:08)
redo our corporate values and live them. And it's just all the same meaningless kind of bullshit waffle that they, and it's kind of, wow, is there only 10 flashcards in the whole world that you guys can use? And you think, well, why are we paying you, in some cases, hundreds of millions of pounds a year to just churn out this crap that everyone else says? Yeah.

Mike Jones (17:19)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Mm.

Paul Sweeney (17:33)
Wouldn't it be nice

if some of you could have an original thought occasion?

Mike Jones (17:36)
because the thing is, their journey. Because I guarantee you, if you look at lot of these top executives, they've come from a very similar way. Yeah, they come, and I'd argue a lot of them, some of the big ones we're talking about, how much time they actually spend at the edges of their organization. Yeah.

Paul Sweeney (17:46)
Yeah. Yeah.

None is the answer.

the career paths are very interestingly similar. So a lot of them will have gone to the same good universities. They'll have joined the big consulting firms or accounting firms on their graduate schemes. I think if you were a McKinsey consultant, you've got the highest chances in the world of being a CEO of a public company compared to, yeah, that is very worrying. They all went to the same business schools.

Mike Jones (18:18)
That's worrying. Yeah.

Paul Sweeney (18:23)
But more kind of sinister than that is they all kind of live in an echo chamber where the more power and wealth they have, the less they understand what the common person's life is like. And I think it was something that Harvard did, a long research piece over about 12 years tracking the time of CEOs and what they did. And it turned out that they spent on average

over 70 % of their time in meetings and less than a combined 10 % of their time with frontline staff and customers. Yeah. And you just think, and there's this whole, we could probably get onto this as separate conversation, but you know, there's a whole body of research about the effects of wealth and power. And it's really, really interesting and what it does to people, even if they were pretty nice as people.

⁓ over time, it makes you a bit of an asshole, you know, even if you didn't intend to be one. Because the effects of wealth and power mean you get very detached from other people. You become less and less empathetic to those people. You start to think of them as resources to be managed, as costs to be controlled, not as humans. You start to make decisions to favour yourself.

Mike Jones (19:12)
Hmm. Yeah.

Mm.

Paul Sweeney (19:32)
And you don't think about the consequences of those decisions because you start to lose empathy in general. And then over time, that can lead to what we see all the time now is executives making ⁓ unethical decisions and disregarding the consequences. The detachment from reality thing is really interesting. I mean, my favorite recent example was when the chair of Thames Water came out and said that

Mike Jones (19:57)
God.

Paul Sweeney (19:59)
the executive team, the ones that had run the business into the fucking ground and polluted all the rivers with shit while giving themselves loads of money and siphoning off dividends to the shareholders. He said that the executive team were such a precious resource to the business that their bonuses should be paid out of the bailout funds that they were trying to get from investors to keep the company alive. And you just think, what planet are you on, mate?

You know, like, how did you become so detached from reality that you think that's that's a kind of a reasonable thing to say? It's wild.

Mike Jones (20:30)
Yeah,

I know. I wrote about this recently and it's about that thing. call it, well, John Boy calls it incestuous amplification. It's that thing where the loop closes, we get into our echo chambers. We only look for things that we confirm our belief. We only have people around us to tell us what we want to hear. And all that corporate massaging of OKRs and KPIs to make it all look good.

Paul Sweeney (20:43)
Yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Mike Jones (20:56)
But it's

Paul Sweeney (20:56)
Yeah.

Mike Jones (20:56)
exactly that, it gets them disconnected from reality. And some of the best leaders that I've had privilege of work with and still work with now are those ones that have come up through and they're not, they're they're not, business-wise, they're probably not seen as the most popular. They're probably not gonna be seen the ones that are gonna go be the... ⁓

Paul Sweeney (21:10)
Yeah.

Mike Jones (21:20)
the next exec when they probably could do and should be, but they're the ones that they've got that experience and they're still connected and they're not afraid to, you know, they're not act generally. And I say this generally, can speak to people where you see most executives, it's like a, let's do a walkout Wednesday and you know, everyone knows they're coming in. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Paul Sweeney (21:24)
Yeah, yeah.

Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's so patronizing. Yeah. ⁓ the best one

was that I was trying to get some work at one point in a consulting firm I was in. We're trying to land a piece of work in Lloyds Bank. I won't tell you the whole story because we don't have time, but I went to do some mystery shopping as a customer here and I went to a Lloyds Bank on Sheepside or on Fleet Street in London and it was a proper shithole. It was dirty, was grimy, know, it was miserable. And then I went up to the one

on Cheapside, which was really, really lovely. Like it was beautifully, you know, fresh, clean paint, everything looked really great. And while I was chatting to one of the guys in there, I kind of mentioned this and he goes, yeah, do you know why? And I said, no. He said, well, when, when the CEO and executive team want to do a walk around, this is the closest one to the head office in Gresham street. So, and they were, you know, and the CEO was supposed to come the other week. So we, so they painted everything.

and to make it look lovely. I say, what, don't you see the irony of, you know, painting it for the CEO, but your other branch, which looks like shit, you won't paint it for the customers.

Mike Jones (22:35)
Wow.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I guarantee you, I

guarantee you on their values, they print all over the walls and the screensaver says, customer first. Yeah.

Paul Sweeney (22:50)
Oh yeah, customer first. Yeah, but you know,

you just think, wow, like the CEO at the time, think, I don't know if it's still the CEO, but his life must be like the queen. know, everywhere you go smells of paint. Isn't that what they used to say about the queen? It's just so ridiculous. I quite like the German system where I think it's if you have more than 2000 employees, you're legally required to reserve

Mike Jones (23:03)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Paul Sweeney (23:18)
half the seats on the main board for employees.

Mike Jones (23:21)
Wow, that's

Paul Sweeney (23:21)
And I think

this is great because I think you, A, will get some real insight, but B, a lot of the bullshit will be called out probably. And you're probably less likely to try to get away with it if you know that half of your board is made up of workers. ⁓ I'd be in favor of that kind of thing being mandated in the UK just to try to break some of this cycle.

Mike Jones (23:36)
Yes.

Yes, and I just don't get when that happens with leaders because, you know, we're there is we're going to make decisions. And I would like to make sure that my my version of reality is close as possible to what's actually happening and to get yourself that disconnected that you don't know what's going on in that organization that you're meant to be leading.

Paul Sweeney (23:59)
Yeah.

Mike Jones (24:06)
That's a scary thought. I'm from the military and we used to see, you know, we have everything from, we had generally really good officers that saw beyond the typical boundary of soldiers and officers and found a way to connect with soldiers and lead. But then you also had the other ones that were probably from a more privileged background. And that hierarchy was very much there. And you just saw the difference in...

Paul Sweeney (24:09)
Yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Mike Jones (24:32)
in how things were done, how things were actually led. Yeah, it still does blow my mind.

Paul Sweeney (24:39)
You know, and actually when I was doing the research for the book, I looked at the effects of power. I looked at why people have poor mental health at work. I looked at why people don't, you know, use their brains at work, you know, their creativity. ⁓ And more and more when you look at it, actually, is such a compelling case for much more autonomy in the workplace.

Mike Jones (24:47)
Mmm.

Yeah, yeah.

Mmm. Yeah.

Paul Sweeney (25:02)
What we've done over in most big companies, what we've done over the years is we've kind of taken more and more control away from the people doing the actual work. You know, made it more and more rigid, made it more and more focused on compliance. You know, when you call a bank and the poor sucker at the end of the phone has to read this bloody script at you, you know, all this kind of bullshit. And they have very little control over the way they do their work. The people at the bottom of the hierarchy have been oppressed, you know,

Mike Jones (25:20)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Paul Sweeney (25:27)
minimum wages, zero hour contracts, miserable conditions, and all that's really, really bad because it turns out that if you take power away from people, you really affect their mental health and wellbeing. If you subject them to a high level of job insecurity, which many of the workers face now in these organizations, that's one bit of research I read in the States, a big study.

Mike Jones (25:31)
Mm.

Paul Sweeney (25:48)
said that that was more predictive of early death than smoking or high blood pressure. And it also, if you put people in these situations, it activates something called a behavioral inhibition system, which means they spend all their time focusing on avoiding risk and they won't be creative, they won't be innovative. And then you wonder why when you interact with these companies, you get such bad service. Cause you think the poor people like have no, you

Mike Jones (25:53)
Wow.

Mmm.

Paul Sweeney (26:12)
There's no way for them to show what they could do, what they should do. And now to add injury to insult, we're going to try to automate them away with AI. Which means, as I wrote a piece the other day saying, like the big risk of AI that nobody sees is only the bullshit jobs will be left. Because it's all the bullshit jobs in middle management that are making the decisions to try to automate away the workers. And this is not going to end well.

Mike Jones (26:15)
Yeah.

⁓ god, yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah. ⁓

No, there's so much there to unpack. And, know, I wrote an article a few weeks ago about AI won't save your strategy because I was talking about the human because strategy isn't an output. It's the cognitive behavioural and affective emotion that happens in that creation. But you're so right about autonomy. You mentioned earlier about we've been studying leadership for 150 years. But I look now and I don't...

Paul Sweeney (26:42)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Mike Jones (27:06)
really look at anything, this modern stuff, people like Van Molkter talked about proper autonomy and freedom of action, know, hundreds of years ago, got Sun Tzu talked about this need for empowerment so people could be adaptable and all this stuff. And that was 300 years before Christ. I don't know why we're not learning this stuff.

Paul Sweeney (27:13)
Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. And actually, funnily enough,

goes against everyone's preconception, but actually often the military is where you see more autonomy, where it works. And that's because they've learned the hard way that command and control in a high stress, uncertain environment just doesn't work. You have to give people autonomy to react to things.

Mike Jones (27:34)
Yeah, yeah. yeah.

No.

Paul Sweeney (27:47)
So yeah, then, you know, I've done a bit of exploring into that world of self-managing organizations and stuff, and there's tons of interesting stuff going on and lots of interesting organizations that are trying things differently. So there's stuff to be learned there for sure. It's not new, the... Here's one of the other really intriguing things about organizations. It seems like, you know, everything else in our lives is evolving really quickly, right? Compared to 100 years ago.

Mike Jones (27:59)
Yeah.

Paul Sweeney (28:12)
We can put people into space. We've cracked the DNA of human DNA code. We've made incredible advances in medicine. We've built technology that connects billions of people seamlessly together in real time. But somehow, somewhere around 50 years ago, work stopped evolving and got stuck. So if you look 50 years back, even though we...

Mike Jones (28:31)
Yeah. Yeah.

Paul Sweeney (28:35)
We have different tools now like you and I doing this podcast, but the basic kind of thinking about how to structure work, how to lead work, how work is organized, the belief systems, all of that just stopped evolving 50 years ago for some reason. it really strikes me as really curious that if you're a leader in a big organization, don't, know, most of them don't seem to feel any need to experiment with anything.

Mike Jones (28:48)
Mm.

Paul Sweeney (28:58)
You just endlessly repeat the same old crap over and over again. ⁓ it's just a way. Well, I wonder why that's the only facet of our lives that doesn't seem to be doing anything interesting. It's really curious, isn't it?

Mike Jones (29:02)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

No,

and you're right because I like work from Stafford Beer. he talked about a lot, further. When was he in the 50s, 60s, he was talking about this stuff. He was talking about self-organizing, self-adaptive organizations where, you know, teams could manage themselves and all this stuff. But then I was thinking if he had all that great work all that time.

Paul Sweeney (29:24)
Yeah.

Mike Jones (29:37)
And then you go here and you're not seeing it. you're thinking, why isn't people, even though we know that there's a pull, and we were talking about the conference as just being out with system thinking around, actually there is a lot of pull because I think people are starting to get stark realization that the world is complex and uncertain. It shouldn't be a surprise, but is there something? And they need these, but there just seems to be this...

real last bastion of we must hold on to these traditional ways to organize and manage as if humans and every organization is a factory and is a mechanism.

Paul Sweeney (30:13)
Yeah, and

it's, it's propagated. You know, looked, I kind of looked at this in the book, but to see, you know, how does it all kind of stay in place? And it's, there's so many things like there's a whole, there's a whole industry of pseudoscience bullshit management research. You've got, you've got the big management consultancies that everyone seems to think, you know, everything they say is like golden. And despite the fact that most of their research isn't research at all, it's just marketing. And some of it's actually

Mike Jones (30:27)
Yeah, yeah.

⁓ this is...

Yes, yeah, yeah,

Paul Sweeney (30:40)
Some of it's hilarious, by the way. I did a red one. think it might've been Accenture or KPMG and produced a big report saying that the chief HR officer, if they were involved in putting humans at the center of transformation, you could have an 11 % uplift in your profit. So it's this big glossy report and it's gone out to every,

TPO and HR director and everyone's going, yeah, look at this, this is amazing. Look at this, wow. And then, so you go to the back of it and you read the bit about methodology. How do you think that they identified the leading organizations that put people at the center of digital transformation?

Mike Jones (31:18)
I can't even imagine.

Paul Sweeney (31:20)
You couldn't because it was so mental that I nearly fell off my chair. What they did was they took the transcripts of several thousand companies earnings calls with analysts, which are basically just a pure buzzword fest. And they used AI to analyze how often they talked about humans being at the center of digital transformation.

Mike Jones (31:23)
Hahaha.

Paul Sweeney (31:42)
So they used a buzzword counting machine to suggest that these were the leading companies that had done. And if you read the report, you go, ⁓ this is really interesting. And then you read the methodology, you go, I can't believe they published this bullshit. Like, what a load of crap. It's unbelievable.

Mike Jones (31:43)
Wow.

Yeah. And

the irony is, is probably those companies haven't put humans at the center of their thing. It's just, again, it's like the values, but yeah, it's like the values trap, isn't it? Yeah.

Paul Sweeney (32:06)
No, they just talk about it. Yeah, yeah. It's all just marketing nonsense. And then

what people don't seem to realize as well about the consultancies and other firms is that everyone that, know, in every consultancy and in every advisory firm, got people who specialize in things, right? So you'll have, you know, the, well, the metaverse people have disappeared now and they've just done a search and replace for AI in their job titles.

So you'll have your AI expert, you'll have your process improvement person, you'll have your lean people, you'll have your HR people. they all do kind of their separate bits of pseudo research, but they all claim the same benefits. So you'll go, oh, if you do this with AI, you can have a 25 % uplift in profit.

but if you do this in your people practice, you can get a 25 % uplift in your profit. And if your employees are engaged, you can get a 25 % uplift in your profits. And you say, well, but if you add it all up, what, you you could make a business like 10 times more profitable. It's if all these things are completely separate and all of them are big levers that you can pull and they, you know, they give you cause and effect by themselves.

Mike Jones (33:06)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Paul Sweeney (33:16)
in the absence of any other variables. It's just like, the more you start thinking about it, the more your head just kind of explodes and you go, oh my, like, how do we, how do we believe all this

Mike Jones (33:18)
Yeah, yeah, and that's the problem with lot of these. Oh, it does.

I know, it's more that I just beat my head against the wall. It comes to the same point we were talking about those big leaders in these companies about how we've got the similar path. And it's the same echo chamber that's been created by the big four consultancies because it is along with our bastion of wanting to keep the norms. I've noticed that over time, the risk appetite of organizations has gone to zero. And this is why you've got companies like Apple can't.

Paul Sweeney (33:35)
Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Mike Jones (33:54)
can't get themselves away to being an individual again, because they don't want to risk the amount of money they're bringing in to stick to their actual true identity that they created. But it's the same. So you've got the same consultancies offering the same things. And people will just go to them because it's a lot less risky to go to them. Because if they go to those, then if it all goes wrong, well, they're not to blame. But then you're getting the same replication of all these issues, because they're all the same.

Paul Sweeney (33:58)
Yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

It's a very...

yeah. mean,

I did some work in banking when I, in my consulting days and it was hilarious like that, that it was so bad that some banks, you know, they were all running these transformation programs that they bought from the same consultants. And some of them, you know, they hadn't even changed the name of the program on the slides. They had the same program name in two different banks. It's crazy.

Mike Jones (34:39)
Is

that context free solution again, isn't it? ⁓

Paul Sweeney (34:41)
Yeah. then you

also then have, you see, you've got this kind of whole, there's a whole genre of business success literature that everybody reads and thinks is amazing. Like, good to great is my favourite example. So I ripped the shit out of that in the book, because that's probably one of the worst books ever written. It's completely hopeless and all the thinking behind it is incredibly flawed. But everyone thinks it's amazing. The great companies he identified a couple of years later.

Mike Jones (34:49)
Hmm.

yeah.

Paul Sweeney (35:07)
some proper academics did some research and found out that none of them were outperforming the market anymore. So their greatness didn't last for that long. But this is what you have. have this kind of simplistic kind of pseudo research books that everyone thinks are wonderful, like to start with why, good to great, yeah, on almost every executive's bookshelf. Then they teach them the same stuff in business school.

Mike Jones (35:15)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

god, yeah, yeah.

Mm.

Paul Sweeney (35:32)
And you

you won't find a case study in business school that said, hey, look at this. This company was incredibly successful because of sheer look. It's like they never would have guessed this. You know, it's all about strategy and leadership and rational stuff. Right. And then you create, you know, a cohort of people with MBAs who then, you know, go into the business world thinking that they have the answer to everything. And it's all rational and linear.

Mike Jones (35:39)
Yeah, yeah.

Paul Sweeney (35:57)
And then you get the same through leadership development programs. And then you have your recruitment, you know, your headhunters who then go and look for people with those attributes to put into leadership positions. ⁓ then so the whole the whole thing is a kind of a self propagating system. ⁓ And yeah, it's it's that's one of the reasons I guess why it's kind of hard to break, right?

Mike Jones (35:57)
Yes.

Yes.

Mmm.

Yes, you're right. And there's still this myth that there is, there is this type of leader that is, going to do something. You mentioned before about this hundred day plan, because I was speaking to some employees of a company and they're worried because they're getting a new, new executive and they're thinking, Jesus, we're, we're already stretched. Like we've got so much change going on. It's just illogical. And then they're to get a new one in and it just seems it's obsession.

Paul Sweeney (36:30)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Mike Jones (36:46)
that when you come into something that you have to change something or you even know what you need to change.

Paul Sweeney (36:49)
Yeah,

and normally you're changing it based on the ideas of what you thought worked somewhere else. I do in the book, kind of say at one point we talked about the one I've talked about the hundred, the idiocy of a hundred day plans. And then I make a suggestion to say, if you're a board and you're hiring a new CEO, why don't you just tell everyone that nothing's going to change for six to 12 months until the new CEO

Mike Jones (36:57)
Yes.

Paul Sweeney (37:16)
actually has a chance to understand what the fuck's going on. And let them use that time wisely to do something intelligent without having the pressure of having to do something in 100 days. It's just completely mad.

Mike Jones (37:19)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That would be good idea.

Yeah, and I think organizations or leaders, especially traditional ones, don't realize that like organizations have a change rate, is the amount that they can change before they start to destabilize. And there must be a ⁓ settlement rate. There must be a time to let the system settle, actually understand what's emerging.

Paul Sweeney (37:44)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Mike Jones (37:55)
before you do something. And I don't think they ever let it settle enough to emerge to see if anything's actually worked

out of all these things that they've tried. Bonkers.

Paul Sweeney (38:03)
It reminds me of,

do you remember during COVID when we were all locked down, oh no, sorry, it wasn't COVID, it was the last financial crash, 2009. I worked for this consulting firm and a lot of us were on the bench at the time and the leadership team kind of said, well, you know, we're gonna try to ride this out. You know, we're not gonna let people go. We're gonna try to ride this out. so,

Mike Jones (38:10)
yeah, yeah, yeah.

Paul Sweeney (38:26)
you still have to go in the office and to work on sort of business development stuff. And I was in a room for a couple of months with another guy. And I think we went a bit mad in the end. then we spent all our time designing a new consulting approach called option five. And it was basically, you would go into a CEO and say, you know what you should do in the next 100 days, six months and 12 months? Absolutely nothing. Yeah, nothing at all. You should stop.

Mike Jones (38:29)
Mm.

you

Hahaha.

Paul Sweeney (38:50)
all your nonsense change programs, you should get rid of all your consultants and you should let people just get over all the last stupid lot of changes they had to do and let them focus on the customer. You're gonna save millions and we'll take 10%. So he went slowly mad in there like flashing a big PowerPoint decks on this option five thing where we're just gonna tell people to stop doing shit.

Mike Jones (39:03)
Yeah

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I think

that's such a, you know, it's counterintuitive what the norm is, like what this podcast is about strategy meets reality, but it's all about that, you know, that execution. It's hard to, you know, to do anything when I go to some organizations, I say, right, just list me down all the different things that are going on right now. Yeah.

Paul Sweeney (39:18)
Yeah.

yeah. Yeah.

Mike Jones (39:34)
You know, it's not a few, it's hundreds.

Paul Sweeney (39:37)
And generally you'll find that many more are started than finished. Yeah. And then you get a new CEO coming in and like throws out all the stuff, the other guy or girl started and starts with a whole bunch of new crap. ⁓

Mike Jones (39:40)
Yes, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, I've got

a lovely little image that I show people and it's like, get a new idea, tell everyone about it. It never goes to finish it, it always goes to getting a new idea and it misses out that finish part and just goes around in a circle. And as soon as I show people it, you just see their face just sort of just light up and they all just look at each other and nod because they realise that they, I think they start far more than what they can ever actually manage to finish.

Paul Sweeney (39:57)
Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

trying to remember what it was. I'll see if I can find it quickly, it was this thing, the stages of a project. I don't know if you've come across that before. Yeah, I'll if I can find it or send it. But it was something like, you know, the first stage was like, you know, as you said, like get this great idea, share it with everyone. And then as it all started to go wrong, was like, you know, search, search.

Mike Jones (40:28)
No, no.

Paul Sweeney (40:41)
search for the guilty, penalize the uninvolved. And was like this, and you just see the same thing. You do see the same thing repeating endlessly. I mean, I came to the conclusion in my consulting career that as soon as you establish some kind of change or transformation project, you're doomed, essentially. It's never gonna work.

Mike Jones (40:43)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah,

I had a bit of a thing where you pretty count consultancy, but I was asked to come in and look at something to help it. And I looked around and I just bought, I said, just wasting their time. said, there's no way this is going to work. They didn't know what the aim was. Everyone that was on this thing didn't believe it could be done anyway. It's just the people meant to be delivering it.

Paul Sweeney (41:17)
Yeah, yeah.

Mike Jones (41:24)
They were wasting vast amount of money. And I said to the people, was like, you just stop it. And that was just like, well, we can't. We can. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And they sort of just dismissed me and sent me away. But I couldn't sit there of any form of integrity and say, do you know what? I'm going to get you through this. Because there was just no way.

Paul Sweeney (41:33)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. ⁓

I know. And

there's another bit in the book which talks about how meetings are so dangerous, especially in a hierarchy, because what you get, in addition to all the endless bullshit you get, you also get a phenomenon which the psychologists call surface acting. And this is where you'll have your senior person with this brilliant idea for change and the people in the meeting

Mike Jones (41:49)
Mmm.

Paul Sweeney (42:05)
disabordinates, even though they know it's as dumb as shit, they'll all go, yeah, this is amazing, this is great, yeah, let's do this.

I guess this whole kind of approach to transformation and change as well is a really interesting area. One of the better pieces that I've seen on this was it was done in partnership with a consultancy, but it was really Saeed Business School in Oxford. And that was curious because they said, you know, there's all these stats around

Mike Jones (42:16)
Yes. Yeah, yeah.

yeah, yeah.

Paul Sweeney (42:34)
70 % of transformation failing, blah, But in the research that they did, they asked some more intelligent questions and they concluded that based on the responses they had, that 96 % of transformation programs went off track. And hardly surprisingly, given that they were all based on these linear cause effect assumptions and prediction of control over the future. And they called for

Mike Jones (42:37)
Mmm.

Wow,

Paul Sweeney (42:59)
a much more nuanced and intelligent approach to change. they talked, as I've heard you do, they talked about sensing, looking for the small signals. They talked about the emotional energy of the organization and how that needed to be managed, to try to take people's energy kind of with you.

Mike Jones (43:08)
Hmm.

Yes.

Paul Sweeney (43:24)
And they talked about, yeah, I think the way that they described it was a bit like Dave Snowden's work around approach to complex problems being you kind of probe, sense and respond. was was it was something very similar.

Mike Jones (43:33)
Yeah, yes.

But it all comes back to the same point that you make earlier around, I totally agree with, about that autonomy and that freedom to act. That if you don't have that, then you don't have the ability to probe and sense because all the decisions are two, three, four recursional levels away from what's actually needed, where the information is. And that's where you just get people that are just despondent in this area.

Paul Sweeney (43:56)
You're gone again, Mikey.

Mike Jones (44:02)
Hey, are you back? Yeah, you get people that are despondent in area because they can see things are going wrong, but they have no sort of control over it. And the emotional part's really interesting because I say the change that's happening, everyone thinks about the change being complete, but I'll say it's not because the...

Paul Sweeney (44:05)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Mike Jones (44:21)
The change isn't finishing. The change is like just getting people to the start point. And then they still need to carry on carrying the race and all the energy just gets pushed on to try and get to this false sense of an end point. And then they've got no emotional capacity left in their workforce to actually carry out the next part that they need to do.

Paul Sweeney (44:35)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. ⁓

Yeah, yeah. the obviously, you there's a strong theme in the book about the amount of energy that gets sapped with all the other bullshit stuff that they make people do. You know, so you're just told this nonsense about corporate values and purpose and all the shit that goes on with that. The complete waste of time around engagement surveys, which are totally flawed. The whole

Mike Jones (45:03)
yeah.

Paul Sweeney (45:05)
industry of performance management that's a complete waste of time. You know, there's really interesting research that I ⁓ visit in the book about all of these things. So for example, employee engagement surveys are done in pretty much every company. And then there's a whole lot of numpty activity that comes off the back of them, which annoys everybody. But the fascinating thing is that if you look into the academic research on employee engagement,

Mike Jones (45:23)
Yeah.

Paul Sweeney (45:29)
There's very little consensus on what it means, but there's also no evidence, despite what Gallup says, there's no evidence that having more engaged employees increases performance. And in fact, most academics are now coming around to the point of view that says, it's the other way around. Going to work for an already successful company makes you feel more engaged.

Mike Jones (45:50)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Paul Sweeney (45:51)
And

when you think about it, makes more intuitive sense, So if you want to work for a really successful company, they're probably going to have higher quality people, they're going to have nicer offices, they're going to have bigger perks, because they're doing really well. And all that stuff's probably going to make you feel pretty happy. actually, but everyone assumes that the way to get success is to increase engagement, but it's just not true.

Mike Jones (46:10)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

No.

Paul Sweeney (46:17)
The other thing with performance management, there's a hilarious evidence review that was published by the CIPD looking into whether performance management actually does anything. And they found out that there were over 13 different biases on the manager side in performance ratings and three or four biases on the employee side. And it's just hilarious reading it. for example, if...

If a manager was involved in hiring you, they'll give you a better performance rating than your colleagues, whether you deserve it or not. If they like you or fancy you, you'll get a higher performance rating. If they received a bad performance rating themselves, they'll rate their team down. So there's all these biases and a lot of it's to do with their personality as well. So all these biases inherent in the performance appraisal systems.

Mike Jones (46:46)
wow.

Yeah.

Bye

Paul Sweeney (47:03)
And then the CIPD conclusion was one of the best conclusions I've ever read in a report. said, I'm paraphrasing a bit now, but it said, yes, there's not really any evidence that performance management increases performance. you know, but having said that, you know, it, you know, we probably wouldn't support not having it either. It was just like, so wooly. was just like, wow, you know, do you know how many millions of pounds are spent on this crap?

Mike Jones (47:15)
Hahaha!

⁓ This is an

Yeah. And the thing is as well, it's like the CIPD, just like what we think about the big, the big four consultancies. They're just another thing where they just create noise just to be relevant. And then you, then you've got the whole HR community that you can't progress unless you're progressing in CIPD. Yeah.

Paul Sweeney (47:35)
Yeah, yeah.

Noise, yeah. ⁓

I ⁓

I once suggested to a lunch of FTSE 100 HR directors that the CIPD should be proscribed as a terrorist organization for the damage they've done to the world of work.

Mike Jones (47:59)
Well, I bet it wasn't long before you got frogmarched out of there.

Paul Sweeney (48:02)
I wasn't asked

back the next year, let's put it that way. ⁓ And then other things like ⁓ diversity as well. It's brilliant. And this is McKinsey's fault. ⁓ They issued a series of research reports. I think there's four of them now and they're like kids books. go, diversity matters. then you go, diversity matters even more. And it still matters even more. And based on their research, they claimed that having a more diverse executive team

Mike Jones (48:06)
after that.

Mm.

Paul Sweeney (48:27)
in your organization led to massively increased performance. And they kept on banging this drum. that was the reason why every company started hiring chief diversity officers and having all these DEI programs. But their research was reviewed by some proper academics who found no correlation at all between diversity and performance. I think their conclusion was something like we can find

neither a conceptual or empirical basis to support any of these findings.

Mike Jones (48:54)
Wow.

Paul Sweeney (48:55)
And it's absolutely

hilarious. the other really funny one is Deloitte, who invented wellbeing in 2017 and produced a report which is still on there. They're still claiming this. They claim that for every one pound invested in mental health at work, you get four pounds 70 back in productivity. And they were publicly slammed by a guy called Dr. William Fleming who runs

Mike Jones (49:13)
How did he even...

Paul Sweeney (49:21)
the Centre for Wellbeing Research at Oxford University, who actually said really strong words for an academic, like called them out specifically in his report. He reviewed, I think, a massive sample of 40 or so massive companies in the UK with a total of about 30,000 workers who were doing mindfulness apps, all kinds of wellbeing, stress and resilience training, all this usual shit.

Mike Jones (49:45)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Paul Sweeney (49:46)
And his conclusions were hilarious. said, he said, we can find no evidence that any of these interventions ever improved anyone's wellbeing. And then he went on to call out Deloitte for basically saying that their ad hoc selection of studies and inability to identify valid benefits, you know, was basically driving this massive industry of wellbeing nonsense, which it turns out, I think in 2025 globally,

Mike Jones (49:55)
Wow.

Paul Sweeney (50:12)
companies spent $100 billion on wellbeing, initiatives that made no difference.

Mike Jones (50:17)
video. This is the-

Paul Sweeney (50:18)
He

did say, sorry, the funniest thing in the report, did say, he did say, I did find one effect. And that is if you put people through stress and resilience training, it makes them more stressed and less resilient. Which I thought was really funny.

Mike Jones (50:32)
This is the thing, it's almost creating

that syphathic environment where it's just relentless meaning tasks. When we want people to come to work, they want to achieve something, but we don't allow them to achieve something because all their cognitive and emotional, you know, physical energy that they have to bring to work to do their job, hopefully reasonably pay for.

Paul Sweeney (50:36)
Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Mike Jones (50:55)
and, you know, got good job security like we're talking about is they can't because they are so constrained that they can't do anything and it just creates frustration. And then in the limited constraints, they have to do anything. They've now got to then do a million different spreadsheets to report upwards nonsense. They've got to go to God knows how many different governance boards. And then, then they've got to do these other initiatives like ⁓ wellbeing lunches.

Paul Sweeney (50:55)
Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah.

Mike Jones (51:20)
that just straps their time.

Paul Sweeney (51:20)
And it's just,

my favorite is when the Muppets in HR get carried away with the values and then they start like building in the values into the performance appraisal system and start saying things like, know, how can you evidence that you've displayed our value of courage? And the real answer to that would be, well, I stood up and said all the values were fucking bullshit.

Mike Jones (51:32)
Yay.

Paul Sweeney (51:41)
But unfortunately you would be fired for showing courage in that context. But you know, this, this is industries of complete and utter nonsense. And then they are sending people on leadership development programs that reinforce it all. In fact, I, I, I did have a glass of wine yesterday with, which I'm prone to doing occasionally by myself. I'll just go somewhere. had a haircut and I went for a glass of wine in Covent Garden. And I was thinking about leadership development, which I really hate.

Mike Jones (51:49)
Yeah.

Paul Sweeney (52:06)
And then I was thinking, somebody, I don't know if it's me, but somebody needs to design a leadership on development course where you actually just go to unlearn all the fucking bullshit that you've been told before. I think it might be hard to sell, I think ⁓ it's pretty, it would be good.

Mike Jones (52:12)
Hahaha.

Yeah, I know you.

because we do some, you know, mainly around the decentralization, but how do you actually lead in decentralized organization? And a lot of the time it's almost like, I feel for these people because they're gonna come and they're told they're going on to something. And I just hate it because I think they must have this mental model. They're gonna turn up. I'm gonna be there all happy and clappy. We're gonna have...

Paul Sweeney (52:44)
Yeah.

Mike Jones (52:45)
sticks of biscotti and marshmallows and some tennis balls. We're just gonna play games all the time. And it never ends up like that because we then explore actually what all the things wrong. We actually look at constraints and a system and we look, it's less around leadership. It's more about actually how do we get people to think around how organizations actually exist and work and...

Paul Sweeney (52:47)
Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, I mean, de- de- Yeah.

Mike Jones (53:12)
How do we actually trade those into real

autonomous organizations?

Paul Sweeney (53:17)
The lack of critical thinking generally in leadership is, I think, is pretty astounding. know, everyone, in fact, I think it was the Center for Evidence-Based Management, which is pretty good. They did a big survey piece asking leaders, you know, how they made decisions and where they got their kind of information from. And it turned out, I think, that less than 14 % of them had ever read.

Mike Jones (53:23)
Hmm.

Paul Sweeney (53:40)
a peer-reviewed academic paper on any of the topics that they were looking at. So they would go and randomly start talking about performance management or engagement or all this other nonsense. But none of them actually ever challenged the prevailing views on any of these things and step back for a minute and went, hmm, hang on a second. If every company is doing the same kind of stuff, you know what?

Why should we do everything the same? Isn't there a case for actually trying something new here? Sorry, I talked about it a bit in the book. the other thing that struck me as curious was companies will spend a fortune on marketing. And a lot of the marketing will be around trying to segment your customer base into distinct segments that have different needs and desires.

Mike Jones (54:14)
Yeah, yeah. And that's the same move. Sorry, good.

Paul Sweeney (54:33)
You know, that is a pretty universal approach. But then they don't do anything to segment their employee base. Yeah. And you know, the whole DEI disaster was when they allowed a very tiny minority with a radical agenda in some cases to sort of take over all the airspace. And I remember being in my last executive role. I remember being in an executive meeting where we spent an hour

Mike Jones (54:40)
No.

Paul Sweeney (54:57)
talking about how we should or shouldn't have gender neutral toilets in head office. And at the end of the hour, because I was getting a bit bored by then, I was looking on Trustpilot and I kind of said, look, hey, this is really, this is probably, you this is, think we've talked about this enough. There's a guy, there's a customer here whose shower hasn't worked for three months. Do we think we could sort out any of this shit? ⁓ know, because that would be, you know, that would be

Mike Jones (55:19)
Hahaha!

Paul Sweeney (55:22)
pretty good. But organizations kind of lost the plot with this stuff. But if you start thinking about segmenting your employees, you'd go, oh, hang on. Hey, it turns out we have a massive segment of employees who have kids at nursery or school age. And you know what? You know, their life is pretty miserable because they have to run for the train. You know, we have all these meetings that start at 830 or, you know, five o'clock and

Mike Jones (55:24)
Yeah.

Paul Sweeney (55:47)
They're always stressed out because they're running to get to the nursery or get to the school. if you were thinking of making a great experience for those people, you would say, well, let's not schedule any regular meetings to start before 9.30 or finish after four. Yeah. And there's so much you could do if you were intelligent about that. And I'd much rather see people explore that stuff than just issue the mindless Q12 engagement survey every six months and drone on about it.

Mike Jones (56:01)
Yeah. Yeah.

Yes. ⁓

Paul Sweeney (56:15)
Why not be

intelligent about it and do something useful?

Mike Jones (56:18)
Yeah, the thing is, like all these engagement surveys, a bit like what we said earlier, why don't you just, instead of spending all that, God knows how many hundreds of thousands of pounds for Gallup or these other lunacies come along, why don't you just get off your chair, go downstairs, yeah, and yeah, and just sit, and actually sit and spend some meaningful time just engaging with the people that you've got to understand. And it's like...

Paul Sweeney (56:28)
Hmm. Yeah, yeah.

Go for a walk. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah.

Mike Jones (56:44)
And again, it's all this nonsense because you think like we look at strategy and we go, well, you you said about change, 98 % of change, that's the same in strategy. 98 % of strategy doesn't get implemented. But organizations are still changing. So the question always is, so if it's not the strategy that's changing the organization, then what is?

Paul Sweeney (56:54)
Yeah, yeah.

Yeah. Yeah.

Mike Jones (57:07)
And it's, we found it's the, it's the push and pull of, you know, stuff has happened external, internal, but, but we, we ignore all that facts and we just go back to the same old thing of let's create a vision. Let's create priorities. Let's create. And it's the same thing. It's not working, but I think it's, it's refreshing to have you on, to get this. And I don't think there is many voices like this in, in, this consulting world or in general that will.

Paul Sweeney (57:19)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah.

Mike Jones (57:33)
call out this stuff and be critical. And I try to be as well my own practice to think, what traps am I falling in? But honestly, it's a great thing to have you on. And just for our listeners, if you don't mind, is there something from this episode that you'd like to leave our listeners to think about?

Paul Sweeney (57:50)
Yeah, I I would say, especially if you're in a leadership role of any kind, I would say you have a responsibility to kind of think critically about what you're doing. Yeah, don't just follow mindlessly, sort of follow the herd. Step back and do some research. Look at what's happening. You know, question it. And there's plenty of good evidence out there that a lot of these things don't work. So start looking for it. would be my one wish for people.

Mike Jones (57:59)
Mm-hmm.

I think it's great. And like you said, I reiterate that point earlier about critical thinking being such an important aspect for leaders that I think in all the smoke and mirrors of things out there, that's the thing that's And we need to step away from these.

Paul Sweeney (58:29)
Yeah, I

think I've come to that conclusion if you were to say what's the one biggest cause of dysfunction at work? I think it is that lack of critical thinking. Honestly, that's where I would point the finger.

Mike Jones (58:38)
Yeah.

I agree. Thank you so much for joining me on this episode and it's been great. I think if you don't mind, I'd love to join you one day for that glass of wine. I'm more of a beer drinker, so I'll have a lager and then you can have a wine.

Paul Sweeney (58:45)
Thanks, Mike. Yeah, it's been fun.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Let's do that.

Well,

you'll have to have Belgian beer if you want to come with me. ⁓ Belgian beer, not British beer. ⁓ Excellent. Yeah.

Mike Jones (59:00)
please. I don't drink British beer. yeah, yeah, yeah. I definitely have Belgian beer. I'm not a fan of British beer, unfortunately.

But yeah, it's been fantastic having you on. To the listeners, if you've enjoyed this as much as I have, please like and share to people that find this very useful in their practice. And yeah, I look forward to speaking to you again, Paul. Thank you so much.

Paul Sweeney (59:24)
Thanks Mike.

Cheers.