Strategy Meets Reality Podcast

Beehives and Viability: Mick Brian on Strategy, Feedback, and Emergent Learning

• Mike Jones • Season 1 • Episode 28

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Viability doesn’t come from vision. It comes from feedback, iteration, and the courage to learn.

In this episode of Strategy Meets Reality, Mike Jones is joined by Mick Brian—a consultant with a military background and a passion for learning systems—to unpack how organisations can survive and thrive in complex environments.

They explore what bees can teach us about decentralised decision-making, how the OODA Loop supports learning under pressure, and why real-time feedback is the foundation of strategic adaptability. From AI adoption to after-action reviews, this conversation connects lived experience, strategic thinking, and practical tools for evolving organisations.

🔍 In this episode:

  • What organisations can learn from bee colonies
  • Why after-action reviews matter more than performance reviews
  • How the OODA Loop supports emergent learning
  • The role of AI, autonomy, and self-organisation
  • Why sensemaking starts with feedback
  • The importance of collective purpose and decision-making at the edge

🎧 Keywords: Strategy, Feedback, Viability, Emergent Learning, OODA Loop, After-Action Reviews, Complexity, Beekeeping, Leadership, AI Adoption, Organisational Learning

📘 Learn more about Mick’s work: Agile on the Beach Sketch

📬 Connect with Mick: Mick Brian on LinkedIn

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

Mick Brian (00:00)
exploit, explore trade-off. they will only exploit

Mike Jones (00:03)
Yes.

Mick Brian (00:05)
roughly about 80 % of the resources that they find and they leave 20 % of the hive to go and find the next nectar source. organizations are very good at getting fixated on over exploiting what they already know and then they don't leave anyone

Mike Jones (00:20)
Yeah, yeah,

Mick Brian (00:22)
to do the 20 % explore

if they took it from a strategy perspective, their strategy is to maintain hive so it gets through the winter and survives into the next year. that's it.

Mike Jones (00:40)
Welcome back to Strategy Meets Reality podcast. I'm delighted today to be joined by Mick Bryan. It's great to have you on the show, Mick.

Mick Brian (00:46)
Yeah, thanks for asking me along, mate. Cheers.

Mike Jones (00:48)
Now that's cool. Do you mind giving the listeners a bit of introduction to you about yourself and a bit of context about what you've been up to lately?

Mick Brian (00:56)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I think like a lot of people that you speak to and whatever on the podcast, I'm from a military background, I joined the army when I was 16. Went into the Royal Engineers, did all that sort of stuff for about 15 years and then I...

Mike Jones (01:09)
Yeah,

Mick Brian (01:10)
sort of like the SOR. So I worked in that sort of SF area for about seven years. Then I got out in 2011, did the usual thing that most people do. Oh, I'll go into, you know, I'll go into like a security type thing. Did that with a load of ex-military people. Thought, yeah, I sort of need to get away from this. Did a little bit of stuff all in gas industry. And then I got really interested in

like the behaviour of people I suppose. I was working with a lot of what you would class as people that had been tradesmen since they were 15. And you had someone like me, okay yeah, I did a carpentry apprenticeship in the Royal Engineers, there's lots of stories about what chippies do in the Engineers, they just build toilets mostly in bits of the world.

Mike Jones (01:46)
Mm.

Yes, it is.

Mick Brian (01:59)
And then you go and have a conversation with these people on a live sort of oil and gas plant. And they're doing some of the most crazy things where they could potentially get killed. And I just thought, blimey, why are people behaving like this? This is mad. And that's how I got into thinking about, yeah, behavioural change sort of stuff. Wanted to get a bit away from project management. And then I started working for company called CMC. And then I've been...

in sort of doing consultancy ever since really. And yeah, I've always had a fascination with bees. And then when COVID happened, thought I'm just going to get a couple of beehives. Yeah, this is the time to do it. So I did that. And when I started interacting with bees, I just found it like fascinating. I was like, what's actually going on here, you know? So I did a lot of my own reading.

Mike Jones (02:34)
As you do.

Mick Brian (02:46)
lot of research. There's a lot of research out there about how bees make decisions and then I thought there's a little hook in here. Obviously you can't take that it's a bee right it's an insect and we're humans but there's some sort of relationship going on here that you could probably tell a story really or an allergy metaphor whatever you want to call it about the decision-making of honey bees and

the sort of organisational set-ups and decision-makings of humans. And so I took that and I did a talk at Agile on the beach a couple of years ago, and it's just something I've ended up talking about. And I find it very fascinating, to be honest.

Mike Jones (03:16)
you

Yeah, I do. And that's I was really wanting to get you on the podcast to talk about it. Cause when you think about bees, they are a complex adaptive system. So it's probably a lot that we could take into consideration how they work and operate because we are also in a complex adaptive system, even though a lot of people don't think we are.

Mick Brian (03:40)
you

Yeah, so I

had a very interesting discussion about that thing, you know, I think, because you're in an organization, aren't you? And you're an individual and, you know, we've all got our own egos and all the rest of it and, you know, everything that we've been through. But actually, an organization is a complex adaptive system, you know, the unfortunate thing is we have...

you know, we bring a lot of baggage with us, don't we? Whereas honeybees don't. So they, you know, they don't know they're a complex adaptive system is the way I think about it. It's like fish that, what's that thing that we talk about to fish talking about, you know, being in water or something, they don't realize they're in water. When they, you try to, you try to bring that and say, the organization is a complex adaptive system. Then you try to bring, I think some of the things that we're both interested in that maybe don't get talked about a lot from a coaching consultancy perspective.

Mike Jones (04:26)
Yeah, yeah.

Mick Brian (04:39)
And these are things that people may not have even heard of. And then trying to put that into like a strategy wrapper, I think becomes quite difficult because a lot of people have never been exposed to thinking in that type of way.

Mike Jones (04:42)
Yeah, yeah.

No, think people are still quite traditional in their thinking. And it was interesting you said about how bees make decisions because that's a real challenging thing in organisations who either go from one extreme where it's completely consensus obsessed and they just don't make any decision unless everyone's on board or it's really sort of control and there's no decision. It's just do I say?

Mick Brian (05:05)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Mike Jones (05:19)
there's no sort of freedom of action in there. So how do bees manage that?

Mick Brian (05:24)
Yeah, that's like a mega interesting subject. There's a really, really brilliant bee scientist. If you look him up online, when he looks like a bee scientist, he spent his whole life, his whole adult life studying bees. it's this book, if you want to get a book on decision making, it's a guy called Thomas Seeley. Absolutely fascinating.

Mike Jones (05:35)
Hahaha

yeah. Thomas.

Mick Brian (05:48)
you know, very briefly, you know, the bees, all their interest in doing, from a trick, Leona, if you took it like, not thinking in this way, but if they took it from a strategy perspective, their strategy is to maintain the hive so it gets through the winter and survives into the next year. Like literally it's like that, that's it.

Mike Jones (06:05)
Mmm.

Mick Brian (06:07)
And the way they make decisions about things like swarming, for instance, so.

What they do is the consensus thing that you say, they don't reach full consensus on those type of things because the longer bees take to swarm and find a new home, the longer it takes, the less chance they have of surviving when they leave the hive. That's basic. So what they do is they have this what's called a quorum method. Again, this is all scientifically researched. So when they go out, they'll send out scout bees.

Mike Jones (06:30)
Mm. Yeah, yeah.

Mick Brian (06:40)
you know, all over the place and they'll find different locations, right? And they'll come back and they're very specific about, they measure the inside of the tree, for instance, I think, I know it's hard to think that they actually do, but this is what they do, Yeah, exactly. So they're walking around and they're measuring these things and they come back and what they do is, I think most people have heard this thing is called a waggle dance.

Mike Jones (06:52)
It could imagine with a tape measure, but...

Mick Brian (07:04)
Right, and they do other dances as well, that's their communication method. And they sort of spread this, yeah, there's a really cool place to go to over here. It's the right size for us. We'll be able to build enough comb. And what they do, they try and gain support within the hive. The thing to think is, this is all in the dark as well, right? Because the hive's pitch black, there's not light on or anything.

Mike Jones (07:05)
Alright.

Mick Brian (07:29)
They're this all through signalling, right? And pheromones. It's mad. And what they do is when they've got, usually, when they've got about 15 to 20 bees going to the same location, you know, it'll be like, Mike, come to this coffee shop with me. It's the best one I've found. And then we go in, you know, we end up with 15 people going there. when they get to like that amount of bees, when there's that amount of bees going back to the hive saying, this is the best place to go.

that's where the whole swarm will go to. So they don't reach consensus. This can take several hours, in fact it can take several days. If people even watch a little YouTube video on how it happens, they actually, over a period, they'll change their minds. Someone will come back with a better place to go and they'll actually knock, the bees knock each other to sort of knock the signal away.

Mike Jones (08:14)
you

Mick Brian (08:20)
And once they get this quorum, that's when they go. And I think that's a really interesting thing because it's like you said, not everywhere obviously, but I think we've got into this position now where it's like, we have to, everyone has to agree. Everyone has to agree. And B's just, it's not like that. They cannot do that.

Mike Jones (08:34)
Yes. Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

No.

And the thing is it just confuses everything and it's impossible to think that you can get everyone on board on an idea. And people just won't like it for different reasons. Even on a sort of behavioral level, people won't like it because they prefer more homeostasis. So they just like what it is now and they're a bit more cautious. So they're going to maybe resist it. But this obsession with...

Mick Brian (08:47)
Yeah.

Mike Jones (09:03)
everyone must be on board or everyone must feel included is crazy because like you said earlier around the bees, they don't have time to mess around because they need to keep viable and that's the same with organizations. The viability principle is still the same. You have to be able to move as quicker than your external environment otherwise you cease to exist.

Mick Brian (09:27)
Well, that's another interesting time, right? Because I got interested, there's people out there that know way more than me on this, right? People have studied this. But one book I'd recommend is like reading John Boyd, wrote that he'd come up with the Oodaloo. Robert, I can't remember the guy's name, but he wrote like a really concise history of John Boyd.

Mike Jones (09:41)
Oodloop. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

yeah, yeah, that's the one with his picture as a pilot on the front. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Mick Brian (09:52)
That's right. And

it wasn't until I started looking into that and then I got introduced to a guy called Nigel Thurlow, he was amazing. And then he put me in touch with, he wrote a book with a guy called Ponch and yeah. then, well, Mark's, so I've been, the podcast they do, I went on there because it wasn't until I was on Mark's podcast,

Mike Jones (10:02)
Yeah, yeah, I know.

punch. Yeah. We've had Mark on the show, Mark McGrath.

Mick Brian (10:19)
that it actually hit me that, blimey, yeah, the OODA loop, you know, Observe, Orientate, Decide, Act, I was like, that's interesting because when I, bees, right, if I move a hive of bees away from where they are, there's a rule in beekeeping, you either move a hive three feet or three miles because the bees have a literal map.

Mike Jones (10:42)
Hmm.

Mick Brian (10:43)
right in their head of their area where they forage. And if you move a hive three feet, what'll happen? The bees will come back, but it will be close enough to where they were previously. When you move a hive more than three feet, it really disorientates the bees because they come back and they go back to where they think the hive was. But if you moved it like, so the rule is if you're going to relocate bees, move them three miles away because what they actually do,

Mike Jones (11:02)
Mmm.

Mick Brian (11:10)
and I've got a video of this and you can watch it, is that they'll leave the hive and they will observe because they realize they're in a different place, right? They then do orientation flights. They literally come out and they spiral. They go back into the hive. They pass that message on. They come out, the spiral gets bigger. They go back in, pass the message on. And then they get to a point where enough bees in the hive understand they're in a new location.

Mike Jones (11:18)
Yeah, yeah.

Mick Brian (11:36)
then they decide what they're going to do and they act. what they actually do then is they go into, right, we need to go into find the next load of nectar, pollen, propolis, water. So they're actually, I looked at it thought, blimey, they're almost like going through an OODA loop themselves. And the amazing thing about what they'll do, Rory Sutherland wrote a book called Alchemy, he's absolutely amazing.

Mike Jones (11:51)
Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

Mick Brian (12:01)
He's Ogilvy sort of vice chairman. I've been fortunate enough to he came and did a podcast with my kids school. He's unbelievable if anyone's ever seen him. He talks about honey bees in a behavioral economics perspective because what bees will do is they're very good at this exploit, explore trade-off. Yeah, they will only exploit

Mike Jones (12:10)
I'll ask it.

Yes. Yeah, yeah.

Mick Brian (12:29)
roughly about 80 % of the resources that they find and they leave 20 % of the hive to go and find the next nectar source. they and I think again from a like organization, strategic perspective, humans and organizations are very good at getting fixated on over exploiting what they already know and then they don't leave anyone

Mike Jones (12:38)
You

Yeah, yeah,

Mick Brian (12:53)
to do the 20 % explore

and then you, you know, it's almost like you're going from, you know, crisis to crisis to crisis because you're not giving anyone the time to say, well, that's the next thing we should be going at and bees are very good at not getting themselves into that situation.

Mike Jones (13:06)
Yeah.

And that's that tension between today and tomorrow, we always struggle with, but organizations are so fixated on today and they probably exploit 110 % of not more of the resources. But because they're then also so obsessed with efficiency, haven't got 20%, well, they haven't got that resource to go off and find the next thing because everyone's still working on today because they haven't got the capacity.

Mick Brian (13:23)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Mike Jones (13:34)
where it's quite good to the bees will take that capacity away to go do the future stuff.

Mick Brian (13:39)
Yeah, they don't get trapped in that because what they have to do is again, the strategy is get through winter, survive to next year, reproduce, right? And that's what they're trying to do.

Mike Jones (13:48)
Yeah.

And that's what I say about, I think strategy, I talk about it slightly, strategy is completely lost. They've gone in this world where it's all about artifacts like vision statements and stuff that's just rubbish, where I'm with you and the bees, that it's about the pursuit of viability. That's what you're trying to do. You're trying to keep viable all the time. And that will, you you've.

Mick Brian (14:02)
Yeah.

Mike Jones (14:14)
it could be the same thing you're doing, just slightly different, or it could be something new you're doing. But I think we lose track on the fact that what we're trying to do is maintain viability for the organization.

Mick Brian (14:25)
Yeah, I mean, this is an interesting time of the year in beekeeping, Because what's actually happened now is, you know, most beekeepers, if they've been lucky enough that all the honey has been taken off and then you go for this thing where you sort of, there's things you can do to treat bees for diseases and all that. There's an awful lot more than involved in beekeeping than like just getting like that jar of that at the end, that jar of that at the end of the year, right? And I'm now,

Mike Jones (14:46)
⁓ that was good.

Mick Brian (14:51)
I always think of myself as like when you're a beekeeper, you're part of that system then. Because I am going and interacting with the bees, right? So now I'm already working out the strategy for next year of what I'm going to do. And I base all that, and again, I think there's real value in this little book I have here, right? It's a little waterproof notebook. All my beekeeping notes from the whole year.

Mike Jones (15:12)
yeah? Good soldier.

Mick Brian (15:17)
from every high, from every inspection, right? And I constantly come back, write these up, and then I make decisions what I'm gonna do on the next inspection. So it's almost like it's like a instant feedback after action review, red team in sort of principle, right? So I really take that forward. No, that's like absolutely paramount to how I think about what I'm gonna be doing.

Mike Jones (15:19)
Wow.

Yeah, yeah

That suckies. Sorry. Yeah.

And this is crucial to what we talk about, emergence strategy, because we've got our intent that we're doing, your intent is along with the bees to keep it viable, actually strategy. But then what normally happens is that just goes in the draw and we just carry on doing stuff. And then at the end of the year, we try and work back to think about, Jesus, how did we get to this point? And we sort of convince ourselves that all the stuff that we've done was conscious choice.

Mick Brian (15:48)
Yep.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Mike Jones (16:04)
rather than it not being we're just dragged by the dynamics. that, but keeping it, and this is the biggest challenge I have with a lot of people talking about strategy, is that strategy is a consistent phenomenon. It's something you do all the time. You're that feedback, you're understanding that feedback, and that feedback then relates to decisions that you're going to make now or obviously next year. But it's a constant observe, orientate that's going on.

Mick Brian (16:19)
yet.

Yeah. I mean, that thing you said there

about, you know, like, I mean, you know, that the phrase we're going to do a lessons learned. I'm like, OK, I'm all for, you know, call it what you want. I'm all for that. The one thing I think is, you know, I think both of us aren't going to sit here and say the military is 100 percent perfect because it definitely isn't right. But the one thing the military are good at is doing this type of action.

Mike Jones (16:38)
Hahaha

Nah. Yeah.

Mick Brian (16:54)
You you think when you used go out, you used to go out and do, you know, whatever job it was, you'd always have a debrief. You'd always have some sort of after-action review on what you're going to do better next time. And the military is good at doing that. I don't know what it is with organizations, but they love to put all that, like you say, in the bottom of a drawer. And then what's the phrase? I don't think this is a phrase Dave Snowden actually uses.

Mike Jones (17:08)
Yeah.

Mick Brian (17:20)
I think it was a guy who used to work with them. I hope I don't get his name wrong. It's Max Bozit or something like that. But he had this phrase, retrospective coherence, which is exactly what you were. So I'm here now and I'm going to join all the dots back to something that happened a year ago and make it fit the map, which doesn't actually exist.

Mike Jones (17:26)
Okay.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's the games that we play. And the thing is that people forget that we're storytelling animals. it's like we have gaps and we fill the gaps with a narrative, but then we then can't decide what's real and what's being made up. So it all just becomes our belief that's true. Yeah. And that's just funny. And another good thing that, you know, we talk about them.

Mick Brian (17:49)
Yeah.

Mike Jones (18:01)
military does well is both, it's that planning beforehand and it's not the rigid planning. It's like, well, what if this happens? What would you do to get people consciously thinking and build that scaffold for decision-making in the stress of the moment? But then also that after-action review, I think, is crucial. So I get a lot of clients going, how do we develop this? And I say, ⁓ you can embed after-action reviews. And they look at it and thinking, that's too...

Mick Brian (18:10)
Yeah.

Mike Jones (18:27)
that's too simple, that can't work. And I'm like, it will work, trust me. So if you do it right, short, consistent, after action reviews will give you so much value back.

Mick Brian (18:27)
Yeah. Yeah.

I think that's one of the problems, isn't it? like them, you know, there's some good things, like the liberating structures stuff are good for doing that type of thing. And then when you show that to someone, they're like, yeah, but that's like quite a simple thing to do. And like, it is, but you're not doing it. And I think what they, some people expect is like, I don't know, some, especially now, some amazing AI thing that is going to like absolutely revolutionize and just like...

Mike Jones (18:45)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Mick Brian (19:03)
No, it's like quite simple things that you can just actually do which will make a big difference.

Mike Jones (19:09)
Yeah.

And that's the thing, I think we're, I had a podcast with a guy called Steve Hersham or even Paul Serrini, who you invited to me. Yeah, thank you. You introduced me to him. They talk about just that nonsense that's around and we're all looking for that silver bullet, that thing, but it's going to be technology that does it. But then they're not doing the basics right.

Mick Brian (19:18)
Yeah.

No, well,

there's been some really good, you know, because what I, for the last two and a half years, I've been involved in like AI adoption, you know, literally. So it's what I do on a day-to-day basis, right? And I find it very, very interesting, especially now, you can, there's lots of reports coming out now. There was a report the other day by MIT around AI adoption. I've just seen something, someone post something and I checked all the references. There's a big.

survey that goes on in the US census around AI adoption. And 95 % of companies at the minute, you again, you have to take this with a pinch of salt, but it's there. They're just stuck in this, they're constantly stuck in this piloting and experimentation stuff with AI. Like the actual transformative thing that everyone's being told it's going to do, they can't seem to...

Mike Jones (20:16)
Hmm.

Mick Brian (20:21)
do it. And one of the things I found fascinating in there was something like, going to paraphrase, a committed individual within a company with a ChatGPT Pro account can probably do more than the majority of the company having an enterprise. And it's like mad.

Mike Jones (20:38)
Well,

yeah. And this is the thing around, ⁓ you know, come back to think about bees, that self-organization. We try to centralize all this where actually we just, if we give tools and allow people, you know, the freedom of action to adapt these tools to what they need it for, cause that's what they're going to go, right. You've got access to this tool. I'm not going to show you how well I'll give you training obviously if you, if you need to know how to do it, but.

Mick Brian (20:48)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Mike Jones (21:05)
I think most people with bit of common sense can work out how chat GPT works or any of these AI tools. They're pretty simple. they just, there's your outcome you want. There's your tools. Go experiment, go do it. Self-organize, yeah.

Mick Brian (21:19)
Exactly.

I think that I don't know how you found this as well. And actually I was at something yesterday and I brought this up and it's not a reflection on anyone. just think it's, you know, is it because of things that went on with COVID and all the, you know, aftermath of how that's impacted work and everything. this, here you go, have this, go off and have a play and work out how best to use it for yourself.

And now we seem to be, I'm going to tell you exactly how you use this thing. It's almost like infantilizing the workforce and you're like, no, like, I'm not, look, I'll give you the minimum thing you need because do you know what? You're going to work out the best way to use this thing to, to, to, you know, make it into your workflow. Cause hell, we're just, you know, hammering it onto people.

Mike Jones (21:52)
Yes.

I think you brought up a really good point there about infantile, I can't even say the words, infantile in organ like, yeah, that's the word. But we do, treat, these people we have at work are clever people, they're clever people because they've got the experience to do what they need to do and actually outside of work, they probably have a life and family that they look after and all this stuff. But it seems like we come from this revolving door.

Mick Brian (22:15)
Yeah, in fantasizing.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Mike Jones (22:36)
We seem to think that they're idiots and we treat them like idiots. And we think that we can only control them by putting more policies and processes in trying to constrain them as much as possible to do what we want them to do. But then we lose all that self-organizing capability. And you imagine that in a beehive, if they couldn't do that, a scout like the scout bee couldn't be trusted to go off and measure a new hive. They wouldn't get anywhere.

Mick Brian (22:59)
Exactly.

No, it's the one thing I like about beekeeping, There's like this thing that lot of beekeepers talk about is, you know, you ask three beekeepers the same question, you'll get 15 different answers. And some people are like, but that's confusing. I'm actually like, no, that's a good, I find that interesting because actually what that shows is there are many different ways to solve the same problem with.

Mike Jones (23:18)
You

Mick Brian (23:30)
within beekeeping. And that means there's many different ways to solve lots of different things that are going on. this, you know, this constant, there must be one right answer. You know, I'm telling you, I'm telling you the way to do this. And I think the real frustration is, we all sort of know that doesn't work, but it just keeps...

Mike Jones (23:31)
Yeah.

Yes. Yeah.

No.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And people are desperate for steps, aren't they? Just as like they're desperate for AI to solve all their problems. They're desperate for simple steps that you come in and there's consultancies out there that will do it for them and convince people that if you just follow these steps, then all your problems will be solved and it doesn't work. And they get bit disillusioned because it is complex and there is no...

Mick Brian (23:54)
Well, we might.

Yeah.

Yeah, it's

Mike Jones (24:18)
Right, we need that critical thinking. There is no one way. There's multiple ways of doing something.

Mick Brian (24:22)
Yeah, 100%. I've just been, again, when you're thinking about different ways of doing things, got a guy called Simon Wardley, Wardley mapping, yeah. just, the last few weeks, he's been doing some sessions, two hour sessions on space, right? That was the thing. And he asked for people to volunteer. what Simon does is he asks people to volunteer. So I said, I'd like to be involved. And.

Mike Jones (24:32)
Yeah, yeah, we'll do maps, yeah.

Mick Brian (24:47)
You know, even looking out that way, way Wardley mapping works, right? Because he goes all the way back to, know, Sun Tzu's and Art of War. That's where he came up with like, oh, this is something's going on here. And the concept he does a Wardley mapping is amazing. And you just look at it and you think, why are people not using the, why are people not using these things? You know, and.

I try my best, I'm sure you try your best when we go into places. When you try the warning mapping, look, Kenev in framework, you know, have you thought about it from a new loop perspective? And yeah, again, you get back into this. Could you provide me with the deck though? That's going to solve it.

Mike Jones (25:11)
Yeah.

Yeah, Solved my problem.

Yeah. That's why I always say I'm here to, you know, get you to how to think about things, not what to do. Yeah, and it's a great tool. A lot of stuff that I talk about is from Sun Zoo and Cloudsvitz and my Molkter. Like years ago, it's not modern stuff because modern stuff is just a horrible regurgitation of that stuff. But they just use a used...

Mick Brian (25:33)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Mike Jones (25:50)
stupid words like bossless organizations and all this crap and you're thinking well no what you mean is self-organization and that's a term and there's a lot to that rather than just thinking ⁓ just get rid of all my bosses and then we think that we can all coexist because it will be a very ordered system to a disordered system very quickly yeah yeah

Mick Brian (25:56)
Yeah.

Yeah, exactly. It's,

yeah, I mean, I always, you can't help it, can you, having been in the military? mean, me and you, I know, you know, we weren't at Sandhurst, we didn't go through the officer path, you know, we went through as, you know, private soldiers, sappers, whatever it might be. Yeah.

Mike Jones (26:28)
The real workers. Yeah.

Mick Brian (26:30)
And I look back now and I think, know, people that go, know, officers that go to Sanders get a different level of understand, you know, they probably get immersed in this type of thing more than, but do you know what? I think it's interesting because from going through like all the leadership you do on the other side, the, you know, on the junior NCO part, a lot of it is like,

It's an emergent thing. Again, you end up getting there. And what, know, I think one of the most satisfying things I ever was, was like a full screw in charge of a section. And I just look back at those things and think, blimey, we were doing, you know, I never heard the word agile when I was in the army, right? And then you come out and everything's agile. I'm like, yeah, it's like sort of doing this. And I was a full screw with a section of.

Mike Jones (27:02)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, that was good times.

Mick Brian (27:17)
blokes and you know and then there was a troop and then we'd all work together and get something done.

Mike Jones (27:22)
Yeah, yeah,

yeah. And this is like, we see a difference because office has given the knowledge, but no experience. But we sort of got the experience, they got the knowledge and it made sense. Cause I remember when I went and done my masters, become an organisation psychologist. I was on there with, I was a very late student. I must've been early thirties, I think when I...

Mick Brian (27:32)
Yeah.

Mike Jones (27:47)
Yeah, yeah, I think so. Or mid-30s. Mid-30s, I think. I can't even remember. I'm getting old now. But there were students on there that were young. Like, they'd literally just finished their degree and then gone on there. So when they were learning it, it was hard for them to reference what that actually means in reality. Where to me, I was just like, oh, yeah, that makes sense because I've lived it and I could build on that. so I grasped the knowledge far quicker and more in depth.

Mick Brian (27:51)
Thank

Yeah. ⁓

You

Mike Jones (28:14)
because I've got all that information, that experience to relate to it.

Mick Brian (28:19)
Yeah, it's I think one of the one of the most interesting sort of relationships in from a military perspective is Like when you're like a troop staffy or you know and you get a new troop commander And and when and when that happens and it works well I had you know, I had some I genuinely did have some absolutely brilliant troop commanders when I was in the engineers and you know

Mike Jones (28:28)
Mm.

Yes, yeah, yeah.

Mick Brian (28:43)
two of them that spring to mind, one of them is called Lisa, she was fantastic and another amazing one was a guy called John Baxter, know, it's absolutely tragic, unfortunately he died a couple of years ago. It was just brilliant because they were just willing to sort of, you know, learn and, but I think again, you go back into an organisation and then, know, someone's like put on some sort of leadership path.

If they take the wrong view on that, it can have really bad consequences if they don't want to learn off the people who are actually doing the work.

Mike Jones (29:14)
Yeah.

Yeah, I've had that same experience. remember my first lieutenant was Lieutenant Cooper and they so keen to learn and that relationship had to be really good because you had to trust each other. ⁓ And it's an odd one because you've got all you've got if listeners don't know about the military, but you've got, you know, the staff sergeant or platoon command platoon sergeant has you've probably been in 20.

Mick Brian (29:27)
Yeah.

Mike Jones (29:41)
not 20 odd years, probably 15 years, probably around that, by that time. You've got all these troops that look up to you because you're the senior, but then you get this new lieutenant and there's always that thing, they're just a new newbie thing. And it's really hard because naturally it's easy for you to take the lead in that because you're the most experienced, but it's not for you to lead. You have to help develop these ones and put them in the position of leadership.

Mick Brian (29:42)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Mike Jones (30:06)
to make those decisions, you've just got to be there to support them. And it's a strange relationship that in to civilian organizations, because I don't think that they, and don't get me wrong, I've seen some left tenants that are completely ignorant and won't want to learn, yeah. But you see it in civil organization, it's almost like they don't have that trust. It's almost a lot of people forget that you've got these people around you that got loads of experience and you should utilize them.

Mick Brian (30:20)
yeah, yeah.

Mike Jones (30:32)
rather than just thinking that you're the boss and that's it.

Mick Brian (30:35)
Yeah, well, it's, think from a beekeeping perspective, I'm not in charge of anything when I go to the bee hive. I am not in charge of anything. And you can, I can give you examples of that from literally like, from my notebook, right, I'm like, oh yeah, the bees are really calm. know, everything was fine. You could see all the eggs and you know, there are plenty of stores and everything. And then go back next week, because obviously taking a...

Taking a hive, inspecting a hive is like, you you're the roof off and mining yours house, you know? So one week, everything's great. And then you go back and you think, well, yeah, I'm all over this. I'm, you know, number one beekeeper. And then you take the lid off the hive and the week before when they were all fine, they literally jump out and try to sting you to death. And actually I think as well there's something to learn in that because...

Mike Jones (31:06)
day.

Mick Brian (31:25)
I think a lot of us, and a lot from a leadership perspective, if you are not interacting on a regular basis and you're gaps, you're missing the invisible things that are going on. And then when you then start interacting with the teams or the other senior people, well, one week they were fine, the next week they're not, and you have absolutely no understanding of what's gone on in this invisible space.

Mike Jones (31:33)
Mmm.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Mick Brian (31:51)
And ⁓

I think that can sort of happen as well. know, people get more and more senior and they get more and more away from, you know, away from what's actually happening. And again, the military, if I was a foe screw, I might have met the brigadier when he was doing a visit or something like that, but I never met the brigadier very often. You know what?

Mike Jones (32:02)
Yeah

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Mick Brian (32:17)
It didn't matter because in the military orders process when he gives his intent to, you know, manoeuvre on a battlefield, that comes down to me as the corporal and I know we've got to cross that gap and I know I have to put a bridge in, but he's not stood on my shoulder telling me where to put it. We all know the intent.

Mike Jones (32:35)
Yeah, exactly.

Yeah. And I think that's a lot that's missing is that it's confusing around what that intent is and what it means because it's, it's, masqueraded as sort of marketing. Um, and it's not clear intent. And it is a good point you mentioned around, you know, that, that, having that view and closing that power distance, that distance between you and the troops. Cause it also comes back to your, you're talking about the

Mick Brian (32:47)
Yeah.

Mike Jones (33:01)
bees in their orientation flights. And that's exactly the same. It's like orientation flights of a leader to go around and orientate to make sure that the ground that your people are working on or the things they're working around, it's congruent with your mental model, your orientation. Otherwise you're gonna miss things.

Mick Brian (33:05)
Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, I've

never thought of it like that. That's a good way of thinking about it. never thought about that before. I'll tell you, mean, even now, so Dave Snowden is just releasing a new approach sort of product and it's called the Swarm Compass. So he's based a lot of it on, so he's got obviously like a sense maker.

Mike Jones (33:32)
Yes, all that.

Yeah, what's that about?

Mick Brian (33:43)
which is for sense making, sort of qualitative narratives which you collect and then map out. Yeah, and the swarm compass thing, think he's doing something similar, a bit of AI in it, you know, Dave's, think, very level on his thoughts around AI. But a lot of it is based on how bees swarm, the decision making bees go through to swarm. That's why it's called swarm compass.

Mike Jones (33:44)
Yeah.

⁓ yes.

⁓ right, yeah.

Mick Brian (34:10)
So it's again, another interesting angle on the honeybees.

Mike Jones (34:20)
Yeah, that's the thing with, I think people miss that connection between the strategy, the conceptual point of strategy that this is what we're going to do, this is our intent. So then the reality where you've got in the bee world, you've got all these bees that are going swarming to go get stuff and or to looking at resources, to go and find a new place. But every time they're going out and interacting,

Mick Brian (34:39)
Yeah.

Mike Jones (34:43)
That's changing something. Yeah. Yeah. And they're not doing that like you've done with your notebook, that feedback. We're not, we haven't got that feedback loop. So the strategy almost comes very disconnected with what all the worker bees are doing because we're not, we're not having those feedbacks to say, okay, this is what's happening. This is what changing. I'm not doing those orientation flights that we just talked about around the bees to see what's going, what's changing, what's happening. So without that.

Mick Brian (34:45)
Yeah, 100%.

Mike Jones (35:09)
it becomes two separate entities.

Mick Brian (35:11)
Yeah, yeah, 100%. I think it's one of the things that you just don't do enough of is like the feedback. I mean, a perfect example of what a lot of places do for feedback where they think it's going to add value is we're gonna do a yearly staff survey. from the yearly staff surveys, we're gonna make loads of decisions.

Mike Jones (35:30)
the engagement survey. Jesus.

Mick Brian (35:34)
But the thing is, and again, I was having a conversation with somebody the other day, they brought up yearly staff surveys, and I literally said to them, I said, I don't work in the company you work in, I've never been there. I'm going to make a prediction before you tell me what was in that staff survey, what was in it. I said it will be lack of leadership, not enough communication.

and there's no vision to draw and they were like, oh yeah, they are some of the things. Yeah, because there's the same things that are in everyone else's yearly stuff. And that's why, I mean, I would like to do it more rigorously, right? But I have in the past, I've it more rigorously in the past, but like micro journaling at the end of each week for yourself, know, there's a lot of value in doing those types of things. And I've tried to do it in an organization, but again, people are like,

Mike Jones (36:01)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

yeah, hugey.

Mick Brian (36:21)
I don't have five minutes on Thursday to do that so it's just too difficult.

Mike Jones (36:26)
I was just chatting to some people yesterday about this, needing to step back from the fog and to do this stuff, to reflect. I have a terrible habit, reflection, because I go smoke Shisha. But it's probably the most healthy way of reflection. just for notes for people who don't know what Shisha is, it's not drugs. It's just molasses, it's tobacco from the Middle East. Just a little warning in there.

Mick Brian (36:31)
Yeah.

Hahaha!

Mike Jones (36:49)
But yeah, I do it twice a week, but you speak to people and they haven't got time. And this is the same with, it's perceived time, I haven't got time for this, but they also haven't got time to go down and orientate around the people. And then they go into what we call strategic drift, where they think they're heading somewhere, but then they end up like way over here and they think, Jesus, how do we get there? And then...

Mick Brian (36:51)
Yeah.

Mike Jones (37:11)
They start scrambling to try and get himself back on track. But if you can step back for a bit, know, reflect on what's going on, take those notes, look at what's going on. You can make those decisions more consciously. Yeah. But I think there's this weird thing in organisations at the moment about time and stuff. we, but we waste loads of time on nonsense stuff like engagement surveys.

Mick Brian (37:26)
Yeah.

Yeah, exactly. I mean, this is again, coming back to the, you know, the AI adoption stuff where skeptical, you have, you know, you need a healthy level of skepticism around all this stuff, even if you're working in it. If you don't, I think you're not being, you're not actually being true. So I listened to all things around that from the people that think it's gonna, you know, be the end of the world all the way up to people that think it's going to, you know, we're all gonna be.

Spend 10 minutes doing work and then we're doing yoga all day. So I try to cover all those bases. But this thing around that type of technology, it's going to save us time. We're going to make all these efficiencies. And I look and I think, I don't think that's the way. It should be all about the value. It's not, do you know what? If you've never used it for a few months, it's not going to save you any time.

Mike Jones (37:56)
safe humanity.

Mick Brian (38:20)
And it's not going to save you any time because you need to understand how to use it. So, I mean, it's like.

Mike Jones (38:24)
Yeah, yeah. it's, it, that's the thing. It's about the value. Cause there's a good question that I asked myself on reflection is what have I been spending most of my time doing? And then from that, looked to discern is that like, that actually helping me add value to what I'm meant to be doing or towards what we're doing? Because even if we got tools to, AI to save time on and efficiency on things, we've filled it with just a crap.

Mick Brian (38:33)
Yep.

Yeah,

yeah, 100%.

Mike Jones (38:50)
We're good at that human beings.

just can't, yeah, just fill it with other crap to do. We'll find out some other weird fad that's come up now that we'd be really good to do. And then before you know it, with all that, because we don't think we have time, we put all our resources and everything just doing firefighting today. And then before you know it, all our resources are gone. And we're thinking, Jesus, we need to move, but I don't have any resources to move. So my workabees are.

Mick Brian (39:07)
Yep.

Well, that's,

yeah, it's, you know, it's like, was listening to the radio this morning, they were going on about, you know, the drop off in like graduate positions, right? And they were talking about it, you know, is some of it down to AI? Probably, you know, there's lots of different reasons, right? It's not just a technology reason, there's some of it, but you look at that and you think,

Mike Jones (39:17)
Yeah, gone.

Mick Brian (39:37)
You starve off that, you take the efficiency out of the system there, because you think you're going to be efficient. What is the unseen thing that's going to happen there? It would be the equivalent of sort of saying in a beehive, yeah, you know the bees, because the bees go through an amazing lifespan, which I'll quickly explain, but it's like saying, yeah, we'll take out.

we'll save time, we'll take half the bees away that feed the youngest larvae. Because it's going to give us more space in the hive, for instance. Yeah, well, that's going to cause a drama. this is like bees, I think as well, I don't know if people understand, but when honeybees are born, they go for an amazing, like they're only in the summer, they're only alive for about, say 35 days, right? But they do...

Mike Jones (40:06)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Alright, okay.

Mick Brian (40:27)
loads of different jobs. So when they're born, the first couple of days they spend, they're like house, house workers. So they're going around cleaning all this, cleaning up, cleaning the cells out. Then they turn to feeding the older larvae first, the little, you know, the eggs that turn into larvae. Then they go to feed in the young larvae. Then they go through producing wax because it's amazing how they do that.

Mike Jones (40:29)
I'll delay it in 35 days.

Mick Brian (40:51)
That's a podcast in itself. Then they go through to being guard bees. Then they go through to actually, it's only the end of their life where they're foraging bees. And it's only the last two weeks of their life. Right? So they go through, but again, the interesting thing is they know their job and the jobs they have to do. And if you map that onto a human sort of 70 years old, you know.

Mike Jones (41:00)
Alright.

Mick Brian (41:15)
you'd be cleaning, I look at it a little bit like an old apprenticeship used to be, right? The first two years, you're cleaning up, because that's what the bee does, right? The next sort of five years is you're helping out the older tradesmen, well that's what they're doing, they're feeding the older larvae, then they're getting involved with the younger larvae, feeding them, now you're, you then you've got enough responsibility now, I'll let you...

Mike Jones (41:21)
Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah.

Mick Brian (41:41)
go and make the wax. this is, know, if you're a carpenter, yeah, I'm now making a staircase and I'm not just, you know, playing in a piece of wood. And it's only in the last, you know, they spend, well, if you've mapped it onto human, they spend about 35 years of their life foraging and collecting pollen. And this is the other thing I think we make mistakes of. it's, again, it's a human being thing. We all have egos, we all want to progress. And I don't think we spend enough time in certain roles.

Mike Jones (42:08)
Yeah.

Mick Brian (42:08)
And you take this to a team perspective, know, churning teams and stuff. And that's the other thing the military do well, think, is one of the things I explained to people, like, do you realize how long the military train?

Mike Jones (42:21)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, a of it, Our promotion course is, yeah, like 18 weeks long. Yeah.

Mick Brian (42:22)
It's like 18 % It's mad, it's like, it's

the amount of training it's like to be a, it's like in, you know, to be a surgeon in it, the amount of training you have to do to be a surgeon. mean, yeah, we want to go in, six months here, a bit bored. Yeah, not quite like this. I'll move on to the next thing. Team disintegrates has to be built back up again. Yeah.

Mike Jones (42:43)
Yeah, yeah.

Mick Brian (42:47)
You know, the hive would die if that happened.

Mike Jones (42:48)
Yeah.

Yeah. And I see it like, yeah, I didn't even think about how much we train just to be doing it. Cause you think junior NCO is probably about eight weeks. Then you got both senior and junior and senior, they're 18 weeks apiece. And that's just your promotion courses. That's not all the other stuff that you have to do in between. And it's crazy. But it's interesting about the hive. We talk about leaders, especially strategy, this obsession with efficiency. They'll probably go, well, you know,

Mick Brian (42:59)
You have.

Yeah.

Mike Jones (43:17)
⁓ the lava seems to just seem to be doing all right. So maybe we removed the resources off that. We stripped that down for efficiency and then, everything would be right. And then suddenly a few years down the line, we've got an issue because we've got no, no lava being looked after and our lava is dying. And then be like, God, let's put those resources in there. And that's where organizations just keep going. Well, we're to put resources in there. we don't need guards anymore. So we removed the guard bees. Yeah.

Mick Brian (43:23)
Yeah, exactly.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yep.

Is it

Mike Jones (43:44)
And

I don't think we really appreciate stability. Like we don't appreciate that when things aren't crazy or we're not firefighting, that's a good thing.

Mick Brian (43:54)
Yeah, 100%, I totally agree with that. It's, again, you go back and you think, God, how long, know, the amount of time you spent with the people in a troupe or something, it's it's mad really when you think back to it. It's, yeah, but we're, you know, everyone wants to, it's like, you know,

Mike Jones (43:55)
And we, yes.

Mick Brian (44:12)
I've got to get that next qualification, I've got to that next badge. know, again, all this sort of stuff, I think it's become terrible now. Don't get me wrong, we've all been through it. this sort of badge collecting almost of, you know, I've got to do a Scrum Master course. Brilliant, I've come off that. I've got to do what I'm doing, but I've got a badge.

Mike Jones (44:26)
Yeah.

Yeah. And now I can go, you see some, I've seen some people that are like, they've done like a basic change course and then they couldn't deliver change in their own organisation. Now they're out, there's change people in, in, in city street thinking they're going to be unlike you're killing yourself. But I think a lot of that is, comes back to that thing around how, how we, we, we don't put enough challenge or accountability to people. Like we talked about early, we treat them like kids.

Mick Brian (44:43)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Mike Jones (44:58)
So they're they're not challenged. Actually, if you gave them, if you look at it go, well, what decisions need to be made and where should they be made and where are they currently being made? You'd probably push a lot of those decisions down. Give proper accountability and ownership to people and people probably feel more fulfilled and challenged in there.

Mick Brian (45:16)
Yeah, I

think that's the thing is people actually want that, don't they? You know.

Mike Jones (45:21)
Yeah.

And I think that's the, you, when you see, um, the bees, like the people that, you know, even the young ones that are just cleaning up, they know what they're doing it for. And it makes sense. And they contribute apart from it. And I do wonder a lot of these organizations why people move around so much is this, this syphophian environment where they just feel like they're just doing tasks, meaningless tasks in no ends. you think, well, I'm not.

Mick Brian (45:33)
Yes.

Mike Jones (45:47)
No wonder I struggled to go into work and think that, you know, it's all great. And I feel a bit, you know, depressed because I'm just doing a lot of hours a day to no ends where if we got back to a bit more like how the bees do self-organization, that's what you're accountable for. You own that. That's your decision. You help us achieve this, you know, keep the hive viable. I think people will feel a lot more satisfied and more engaged into what they're doing. You won't need surveys then.

Mick Brian (46:01)
Yeah.

Yeah.

No, no, 100%. I mean, there's five things that, I know because we'll probably come to the end, that Thomas Sealy book talks about it, because what he does, it's all based on scientific research, but at the end of the book, what I've, and I didn't know this was at the end of the book before I started reading it. He actually takes these five areas that he's found in his own life and then thinks, yeah, this is,

Mike Jones (46:15)
No.

Alright yeah, I'm gonna skip this part.

Mick Brian (46:39)
He makes a connection between all this research he's been doing and actually how this like maps on like people and organizations. And I'm going to purposely just get my notes because it's... So these five lessons that he talks about is one, and I don't think these are going to be like, blimey, never thought of that. But again, it comes back to the simplicity thing that people don't do anytime is...

Mike Jones (46:52)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Mick Brian (47:05)
All the research in bees hives and then onto like human organizations and people shows that people that have got a shared purpose and a mutual respect genuine Generally end up making better decisions right the next one is bees survive collectively there is not you know, I hate the phrase what's in it for me I absolutely can't stand it

Mike Jones (47:17)
Mm, yeah.

Yeah,

We know what we call them in the military, Jack.

Mick Brian (47:30)
Someone said this to me yesterday and I was like, I mean, I don't like the phrase, but what about putting us at the end instead of me? So yeah, this whole thing about the collective, you know, the collective part of the hive, you need alignment around some sort of purpose of what you're doing. Another one is that you need to minimise the leader's influence over the group.

Mike Jones (47:38)
Yeah, yeah.

Mick Brian (47:52)
IE a lot of people think a queen bee is actually in charge of the hive but then it's not, it's the worker. So you obviously interact but you know, the people who are closest to work, let them do the work because they know how to do it best. And then, yeah, the other one, what's the other one he talks about? yeah, and this quorum thing that they use to make decisions, you know, they don't get full consensus in the hive because they would do a...

Mike Jones (47:52)
Hmm.

Yes. Yeah, totally agree.

Mick Brian (48:18)
Did we just die? They haven't got time.

Mike Jones (48:20)
Mmm, that's really cool. Yeah, and I think that's something that's overlooked of the because at least five really good and you can instantly relate and go Yeah, that makes sense. Just exactly what we've been talking about for the last hour and I think that people forget that it's the The Queen's not the leader. Everyone thinks the Queen's a leader

Mick Brian (48:29)
Yeah.

Yeah, and she's not. It's actually, it's the worker bees, you know. What the queen does actually is keeps the hive in a, what's the word, like homeostasis, know, because she is, when she's in the hive, she's given off pheromones and these pheromones are getting spread across the hive and these bees are spreading the pheromones. So they all know that the queen is there.

Mike Jones (48:49)
Yeah, yeah. Yes.

Mick Brian (49:03)
But the Queen isn't telling the worker bees what to do.

Mike Jones (49:05)
Yes. I think that's a really important thing. Same in when you're doing strategy, there's an obsession with straight away, they're trying to go from into the detail to try and direct someone exactly how to do something where it's like, no, you need to think what recursion level you at and you just need to give direction. Like, is what we need to achieve and then allow the people that are there doing the work, the work apiece to go, okay, that's what you need.

Mick Brian (49:23)
Yeah.

Mike Jones (49:31)
right, I need to adapt this, I can do that. But I think it's when we start going into too much detail, we then start micromanaging people and it's not a good place to be. So there's definitely a lot we can learn from the bees.

Mick Brian (49:37)
Yeah.

Oh yeah, and just like your reflective moment mate, to be honest, that's beekeeping, it's like my reflective moment. Because when you go there, you are so immersed in what you're doing with the bees, it just takes your mind away from everything else that's going on. It's just a very good way to get away from things.

even though it's hard work, but it's rewarding.

Mike Jones (50:09)
Yeah, I think it needs that space where they can go and get in the flow, lock out all the noise and just get into the flow. I've really enjoyed our conversation. I think it's fascinating to link the two and think it's so many synergies between how the bees do things and lessons can be taken into organizations. Definitely it's a complex world. But for our listeners, is there anything you want our listeners to take away to think about?

Mick Brian (50:13)
Yeah, exactly.

Well, yeah, the one thing is, know, like beekeeping is my hobby. I think actually we don't bring enough of like what we can learn from other things. Like there's so much like we can learn from nature around, but nature was here, you know, way before we existed. Bees were here before we existed, right?

Mike Jones (50:34)
for this episode.

Mm.

Yeah.

Mick Brian (50:53)
They didn't need a beekeeper at the end of the day for millions and millions and millions, only in the last couple of thousand years that people have been interfering with them. They were fine before that, right? And we did it because we wanted to get that stuff at the end of the day. That's why. So, wherever you can find those things where you can make connections and make sense of stuff, I just think it's worth bringing those type of things into how you talk about organizations, because it just makes it more real for people.

Mike Jones (51:07)
Yeah, yeah.

Mick Brian (51:20)
I don't care what anyone says, there's nothing worse than like, I don't know about you, you have to do it, you know, and it's fine but, there's nothing worse than getting thrown like a 40 page slide deck that you think is going to change the world. those things are not changed, those things are not changed. I'm not saying they're not useful, I don't mean that, but they're not gonna change the world.

Mike Jones (51:33)
Yeah.

No, I'm a big believer. People know they've worked with me. I'm very shy on PowerPoints. I like to say it's because I don't believe in it, but it's also part of my IT literacy. they're like Johnny H's five slides. But yeah, I take you right. And I think it's that ability to communicate. And people aren't going to communicate.

Mick Brian (51:50)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Good morning.

Mike Jones (52:07)
from slides and bees, they've got their way of being able to communicate to everyone so everyone understands. And I think organizations need to find their own waggle dance. What works for them to be able to get that information across as quickly and concisely as possible so people understand. And I think that's the thing that they missed that people actually understand what they required of them or what the information means to them. Yeah.

Mick Brian (52:16)
Yeah.

Yeah, definitely. you know,

if you want to take a little temperature check on that is, you know, again, I think everyone has a love-hate relationship with LinkedIn in some way, shape or form. But the most interaction I ever get on LinkedIn is when I post about bees. Yep.

Mike Jones (52:47)
Is it?

I say I'm gonna go just up his B now.

Awesome. Mick mate, it's been a pleasure having you on and for the listeners, no, no, and for the listeners, if you enjoyed this as much as I have, please ⁓ like and share to your community so they can get the benefit from it. And Mick, I'll be in touch, so hopefully we can meet up in October when I'm next around Bristol, nearer to you.

Mick Brian (52:54)
thanks for having me, mate.

Yeah

definitely mate, I look forward to that. See you mate and you, see you later.

Mike Jones (53:11)
Awesome. Cheers, buddy. You take care. And I'll speak to you soon.