Strategy Meets Reality Podcast

BS at Work with James Healy: Why Organisations Create Nonsense and How to Fix It

• Mike Jones • Season 1 • Episode 36

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Modern work is overflowing with nonsense. Mandatory e-learning that teaches nothing, policies no one reads, collaboration that never happens, and metrics that drive the wrong behaviour.

In this episode of Strategy Meets Reality, Mike Jones is joined by James Healy, applied behavioural scientist and author of BS at Work, to unpack why organisations get pulled into performative nonsense and how behavioural science helps us escape it.

James talks about the realities of human nature, why environment shapes behaviour, and why organisations keep adding more policies, processes and tech instead of removing what gets in the way. From the illusion of collaboration to the seduction of simple solutions, this is a grounded, funny and painfully accurate look at how modern work goes wrong and what to do instead.

🔍 In this episode:

• Why so much of modern work is BS
 • The behavioural science behind human nature at work
 • Why mandatory e-learning never changes behaviour
 • The paradox of human behaviour and herd dynamics
 • How metrics distort decisions and create perverse incentives
 • Collaboration myths and why people do not collaborate
 • Why organisations always add and never subtract
 • Technology overload and the infinite workday
 • Principles over policies
 • Outcomes over activities
 • The do less principle and why subtraction matters
 • Challenging organisational norms and asking why

🎧 Keywords: Behavioural Science, BS at Work, Human Behaviour, Collaboration, Metrics, Organisational Culture, Decision Making, Leadership, Performance, Simplicity, Strategy Execution

📘 James’s Book: https://amzn.eu/d/a1XHcvV

📬 Connect with James: https://www.linkedin.com/in/james-healy-behaviour-boutique/

📬 Connect with Mike: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mike-h-jones

🌐 Full Episodes: https://www.lbiconsulting.com/strategy-meets-reality

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

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

James Healy (00:00)
every organization, no matter what else it does, is a factory that manufactures judgments and decisions.

We assume that if we get two or 20 or 200,000 of those brains together, we can predict it and we can control it. We can't,

Mike Jones (00:15)
No.

James Healy (00:18)
so much of organizational life is based on this kind of strange caricature of human nature that as soon as I say it out loud, everyone listening to this goes, God, no, that's absolutely insane. That's not how people are.

Mike Jones (00:40)
Welcome back to Strategy Meets Reality podcast. It's great to have James Healy on today and he is fortunate, unfortunate, I don't know, to be the last episode of the season. But don't worry, we will be back beginning of February, 2026 for season two. But I'm delighted to end the season on the high with James. So welcome James to the podcast.

James Healy (01:03)
Hello, thank you for having me. It's great to be here.

Mike Jones (01:05)
Cool, thank you. Just for our guest, then, do you mind giving a bit of background about yourself, a bit of context, what you've been up to lately?

James Healy (01:11)
Sure. So I describe myself as an applied behavioral scientist. I'm a consultant, an author, and a keynote speaker. I really focus on applying insights from anthropology, behavioral economics, neuroscience, psychology, to help organizations solve human problems, whether that's adopting new technology, adopting AI.

trying to change culture, improve performance, improve wellbeing, improve safety. Really any of those human problems that could benefit from a better understanding of human nature.

Mike Jones (01:47)
Yes, I know there's a lot of nonsense out there as we get to and I think you spoke about in your book BS at Work.

James Healy (01:56)
I did indeed. So this is the first and won't be the last shameless plug. It's called BS at Work. Why so much of modern work is bullshit and how behavioral science can make it better. Available on Amazon in paperback and Kindle.

Mike Jones (02:06)
Yeah.

Yes, I highly recommend it. You know, it's one of those books where you read through and I don't know if you spent a day in any sort of business, you'll start to nod away and think, Jesus, how have we got to this point?

James Healy (02:26)
Yes, I start the book with a true story, was I'd been thinking about writing this book for years and this particular incident finally tipped me over the edge. ⁓ there we go. There we go. Visuals as well. No, the incident that tipped me over into writing it, I won't be coy about where I was working because you'll just figure it out from LinkedIn.

Mike Jones (02:37)
There we go. There you go.

you

James Healy (02:49)
If

I'm coy I was at Deloitte in Australia. I'd been at Deloitte for about six years prior to Deloitte I'd spent 14 years in big banks in London and Singapore in Deloitte's defense I will say that this incident could have easily happened in any of the big banks I had previously worked for and in many many of the clients across many sectors that I worked with at Deloitte and It was the first afternoon before Easter

and I was feeling quite smug because unusually for me, I was not scrambling around the day before a long weekend trying to get everything done. I had everything under control and I was feeling pretty good. I was gonna leave the office early. And then a reminder came out about the deadline, which was the end of that day for the latest mandatory e-learning that we all had to do. So groan, log into the e-learning system.

And there it is, a 45 minute mandatory e-learning. The topic, the topic of this mandatory e-learning, listeners, how to do mandatory e-learnings.

Mike Jones (03:49)
Yeah.

Well, no. That's the thing, you see all these stuff like e-learning. I was surprised with a client this year actually, we were talking about strategy and I was talking about measures. I how do you know the thing that you're doing is working? What are you looking at? And they couldn't tell me, but I was like, so what do you measure? And I was looking at what they measure and I saw on there e-learning.

James Healy (03:56)
You couldn't make it up. You couldn't make it up.

Mike Jones (04:24)
And I was like, at this point I couldn't care if someone had done the e-learning, if the business is going downhill rapidly. It's the least of my worries at this point, but they were obsessed with e-learning.

James Healy (04:38)
if you think about an e-learning, usually these e-learnings are very easy. And this particular one that I talk about in the book was very easy. It was one of those where you would have to be, no offense to anyone, but clinically brain dead to not pass it at the end. And if you think about what organizations do with the metrics,

Mike Jones (04:51)
Yeah.

James Healy (04:57)
You can say not only have 99 % of our people completed the e-learning, you can say and 98 % of them have got more than 95%. wow, they must really understand this. This must be a really, really powerful and effective e-learning. It's performative. ⁓

Mike Jones (05:14)
Yeah, it

is. And I think that's performative nature that drives me insane about businesses where it's easy to put all these smoke and mirrors up and do all this, but without actually dealing with the root problems that they've got. I suppose, like you said, it's easier to measure statistics how many people have completed e-learning rather than trying to demonstrate if people are actually capable to do their role.

James Healy (05:40)
And so often when it comes to measurement, we don't actually want to measure. We don't actually want to know because you've got a whole bunch of people who's, know, they've got a vested interest in demonstrating either to their management or to the exec or to regulators or whoever it is, well, we have done something about this problem.

We have, we've taken this seriously. And we can show how seriously we've taken it because we've put the entire organisation through this e-learning. ⁓

Mike Jones (06:06)
Yeah.

James Healy (06:12)
The backstory, by the way, to this particular e-learning about e-learnings was that one of Deloitte's competitors, I forget which one now, but one of the big four in the US had got some massive fine because people in their audit division had been caught cheating on e-learnings which actually count towards their professional certification. And basically...

Mike Jones (06:32)
of M.S.T.

James Healy (06:34)
Yeah, so basically what we've been doing was you get one person, the junior person or the assistant or whatever to do the e-learning, jot down the multiple choice answers and then pass them around. And so the problem here is that people are not taking e-learnings seriously. That's the issue, right? People don't value them. They think they're ridiculous waste of time and they're prioritizing other things. So the solution to that is to give everyone an e-learning. It's like, it's madness.

Mike Jones (06:58)
Yeah

James Healy (07:00)
The solution

is to do something else instead because people have demonstrated that they don't care about this. Anyway.

Mike Jones (07:05)
Yeah, you know all

the time people I know for example when I was in the military we had to do e-learning you just split through. Someone gives you the answers and you just sort of go through and to do it didn't really change anything. And I suppose, you know, what you're talking about is in your book is how do you make set the condition so people can work better in what we're trying to do. And that's what fascinates me because you think about execution.

And I'm big on, I want people to have the freedom of action so they can, you know, can sense and understand the options that they have and choose what's best to get the intent. They can't do that if they're distracted with just nonsense.

James Healy (07:46)
No, and the first third of the book is about that nonsense. It's about so many things which are just accepted wisdom. They are the way that we do things. They're probably even best practice. That's personality testing like Myers-Briggs or disc. It's shared values posters on the wall.

Mike Jones (08:05)
Ha ha

ha.

James Healy (08:06)
I have some stats in there about the range of shared values that organizations, I think it's from the FTSE 250, it was a study that was done a couple of years ago, and there's only about, know, 80 % of organizations have, you know, three or four of the same values, one of which ironically is diversity, although there's not much diversity of values. But it's more than that, right?

Mike Jones (08:30)
Yes, yeah.

James Healy (08:34)
technology implementations that promise the world and fail to deliver the benefits. It's endless policies. One of the stories I tell in there is about Bayer, the German pharmaceutical and fertilizer giant, which is 150 year old company. And this is a story that's in public domain. I've never actually worked with Bayer.

Mike Jones (08:40)
Yes.

James Healy (08:57)
Their CEO took over about two years ago and he announced a massive transformation program because in his words, buyer was dying. And the example that he used in his launch speech was the buyer employee handbook, which in his words is 1370 pages long, which makes it

as he put it, slightly longer than war and peace and a lot less entertaining.

Mike Jones (09:26)
Yeah,

yeah, yeah. Yeah, that's the problem. think we create all these policies that just basically saps all sense of intuition or initiative from people. That's very much the thing that they'll have values about. They're we want our people to be proactive or to be empowered, normally one, collaborative.

But then they suck all that away with all these stupid policies and this performative nature to try and minimise any form of risk.

James Healy (10:01)
That's it. And there's a couple of things at play and one of them, and this is where the book is, although the book is written in a very lighthearted way, this is where the serious, behavioral science part comes in. The assumption underpinning vast policies, and it's also the assumption that underpins e-learning to be honest, but the assumption is that humans are basically like computers.

and if you give people information, you tell them what to do and how to do it, they will then do it. And so, I put it to you, how many people can possibly have read a 1,370 page employee handbook? How many people could possibly read a 70 page handbook, let alone a 1,370 page handbook? But how many people have read it, and bear in mind it will be written in...

Legalese, rather than purple prose. How many people have read that, understood it in the way that it was intended to be understood, can remember it, can remember every part of it, and can then execute it in the way that is intended? The answer is zero. That's not the way that humans work.

And so much of organizational life is based on this kind of strange caricature of human nature that as soon as I say it out loud, everyone listening to this goes, God, no, that's absolutely insane. That's not how people are.

But as soon as we enter the workplace, it's like we all tacitly agree.

to pretend that that is how humans behave and how humans work. And it's absolutely not.

Mike Jones (11:37)
Yeah, yeah.

And this is the, always joke with people saying that the employees you've got in your workplace, they have all got mortgages. They've all got lives outside. They make decisions every day for the best of what's good for their family and all their own life if they haven't got family yet. But as soon as they come into the revolving doors of your organization, they seem to lose all ability to make decisions.

I was like, it's not them, it must be something else. Yeah. They can make decisions.

James Healy (12:10)
Yeah, it's not me, it's you. But there's a quote in the book and it's a quote I use a lot. It's a Daniel Kahneman quote and it's in Thinking Fast and Slow. But he says, every organization, no matter what else it does, is a factory that manufactures judgments and decisions.

Mike Jones (12:12)
Thank

James Healy (12:29)
And essentially,

across the behavioral sciences, if I try and simplify as much as possible, environment shapes behavior. Environment shapes behavior far more than we tend to imagine. And your organization is an environment, whether or not you think of it that way.

It is a factory that manufactures decisions and behaviors as Kahneman says. So the combination of so many factors creates that environment and shapes those decisions. So your processes, your policies, your systems, your physical infrastructure, your location, your office layout, your org chart, your job descriptions.

know, the behavior of leaders, the relationships that people have with each other, with their seniors, with their juniors, with their peers, with their customers, with the regulators, with suppliers. It's this huge complex mass of factors. But that's what shapes behavior and that's what shapes people's decision making.

the thing that you've, the five buzzwords that you've put on the poster on the wall, or the legal document that's been written by a committee of lawyers.

Mike Jones (13:30)
That's me.

Yeah, this is the thing that

frustrates me the most, and you're thinking, I gave by the law sufficient complexity. So, you know, if you want to emerge new behavior, you must change the structure of the environment sufficient enough to merge new behavior, otherwise you just get the same old. And you go into organizations and they go, oh, we've got this problem. And they're like, oh, you know, why don't we do, why don't we roll out the Lego or make culture shields?

and you know, all that you'll play games because then we can then create new values that work. And I was like, that is not going to change people's behavior. That is just not sufficient enough. But they play these games and I see all these people that love it. I had a client that had to come and help because they got someone in. They were trying to do a transformation.

It wasn't a transformation, but anyway, they conceived it was a transformation and they expressed what the transformation would be using Lego.

and they wonder why it didn't go well. It's probably people out there screaming now because they use that Lego series play, but if you do use it and you're connected with me, please. I am open up to a conversation to convince me otherwise, but I just don't see the relative relation to this stuff.

James Healy (14:36)
I'm just gonna nod. I'm just gonna nod.

So I'm gonna park the Lego topic. My son is at my son is actually outside this room right now playing with Lego It's a great thing and I'm not sure he's trying to transform the household though But the core of the book is this

Mike Jones (15:00)
Yeah.

Thank

James Healy (15:10)
the contrast between this caricature of human nature and the reality of human nature. And if I summarise that, it's that humans are social, emotional, tribal storytelling animals. But at the core of the book is the paradox that once you understand a bit more about how humans really are, some of these really annoying things make more sense.

Mike Jones (15:15)
No.

James Healy (15:32)
because we are in many ways herd animals. We don't like to think of ourselves like that, but we are.

I vividly remember a conversation, I can't remember if it's in the book or not, but I vividly remember a conversation very early on in my career. I working for one of the big banks and it was about some topic, I can't remember what the topic was now, but some topic was vaguely related to regulations or the regulator. I remember being in this meeting and we're trying to figure out, what do we do about, how do we respond to this particular regulation? And somebody in the room, senior than me, more experienced than me, said,

Well, do we know what the other banks are doing? We should probably find out what everyone else is doing. And me, hopefully not too self-righteous as a 20 something, but probably a bit self-righteous in that 20 something way, said something along the lines of, well, do we think that just doing what everyone else is doing is really the right way to respond to this? I mean, you get in trouble at school if your excuse is, well, everyone else was throwing rocks at.

And everyone in the meeting looked at me like I was completely insane. It's like, well, of course doing what everyone else is doing is the right way to approach this. Like that's how the grownup world works. And that conversation's always stuck with me because we tell our kids that little Johnny doing it was not the ex, is not.

Mike Jones (16:32)
Yeah.

James Healy (16:50)
a valid excuse for you, you need to make your own decisions, you need to do the right thing. And then we enter the working world and no, no, no, we just, if everyone else doing it, must be fine.

Mike Jones (17:00)
Yeah. And that's the thing that breaks me in strategy because people's strategy is either pretty much what did we do last year plus or minus 10 % or they go out to, I forgot the term now that consultancies love to use, but it's not baselining, but it's that where you go out and benchmark, that's it, benchmarking. And I think that's really the wrong thing to do because you're just then in this hyper competition rather than going, what you should do is look at the extended environment and go, well, what

James Healy (17:16)
Benchmarking.

Mike Jones (17:29)
what isn't being done, what is somebody else doing, what's the assumptions that they're making and what's a different assumption to make. And it's always about doing something different.

James Healy (17:39)
And that would be true if the objective were actually to come up with the optimal strategy. But whatever everybody in the room believes or tells themself is the objective, that is actually very rarely the objective. The objective, much of the time, is to do something that is going to be logically defensible later on. Something that isn't going to look totally mad.

Mike Jones (18:04)
you

James Healy (18:08)
when you're standing in front of your exec or your board or your investors or whoever. So doing the same thing that we've always done or doing the same thing as everyone else, yeah, they're pretty good from that point of view. It takes a brave person to say, well, hang on, is that really what we should be doing? Everyone will sit around and nod and go, oh, that makes sense. And I think there is this...

Mike Jones (18:25)
Yeah.

James Healy (18:35)
actually quite small set of accepted things that you can do as an organization. And it applies at kind of, you know, applies at a CEO level for the whole org, but it then applies functionally. And whatever the problem is, if you propose hiring some people, training some people, writing a new policy, buying some new technology,

Mike Jones (19:02)
Thank

James Healy (19:03)
doing some ⁓ &A, cutting some costs, it varies from silo to silo, but fundamentally, there's not that long laundry list of things that are kind of acceptable to do in response to business problems.

Mike Jones (19:18)
Yeah, it's true. Normally it's that, I wrote about this the other week, I call it the false god of efficiency. We all praise that false god and that's it. It's just like cut where we can, save money. But then it makes logical sense in the short term. Well, it doesn't, but in the orthodoxy it does. But then long-term, yeah, it's defensible, yeah. It seems reasonable.

James Healy (19:43)
is defensible.

Mike Jones (19:46)
And I've noticed this with clients and stuff like, know, they go, it's easier for them to go to people like Deloitte or KPMG or to people like that because it's defensible. Doesn't mean they're gonna do anything different and they probably won't, but it's defensible.

James Healy (20:02)
It's an old saying, no one gets fired for hiring IBM.

Mike Jones (20:07)
Yeah, yeah. And you look at, I suppose that's probably where the whole values and strategies going, because it blows my mind. I'm noticing more and more now as well, like the strategies, one, they're not strategies, but they always keep talking in terms of effects, like we're going to have engaged people, we're going to have some sort of a...

We're going to be an inclusive organisation. We're going to be talking the desires of effects. But what outcome are you trying to achieve? But it's easier to talk in effects. It sounds nice. Are we going to be this? And you go, well, that's great. But what are you doing to do that?

James Healy (20:45)
And again, some of it comes back to measurement, right? It's let's set some, know, no one wants to set themselves stretch goals, you know? Like we're gonna set ourselves a target which we can demonstrate that we have achieved because my bonus will be tied to us achieving it, by the way. So we will set some targets which are measurable. Well, we have engaged people because we do a survey and ask them.

Mike Jones (20:53)
Yeah.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

James Healy (21:12)
and they say they're engaged. Is it true? Does it matter?

Mike Jones (21:14)
Mm.

No, that's an interesting one you said there about, and I've seen this a lot recently, with balanced scorecards, people's bonuses are attached to that. And just from your experience, especially in the behavioral science world, does that make sense? Does that get the right behavior?

James Healy (21:34)
So, I think it's indisputable that metrics drive behaviour.

Whether or not they drive the right behavior is a lot murkier because the behavior that they drive is maximizing the metric. So I think it's Goodhart's law, Charles Goodhart, economist, and it's something along the lines of a metric ceases to be a metric once it becomes a target.

Mike Jones (21:47)
and

Yes.

James Healy (22:05)
So

something that is useful as a measurement is no longer useful when everyone is working towards maximizing the measurement. know, organizational life, and I'm sure anyone listening to this will be able to come up with so many examples where a sensible seeming metric, sensible seeming target has caused all manner of unforeseen consequences.

The one that is always used in the literature, because it's a great story, again, whether or not it actually happened is questionable, but during the days of the British Empire in India, there was a problem with cobras. So India has a lot of snakes, and ⁓ the cobras in particular kept biting people, and in Delhi, I think it was. And this was a big problem. So the...

Mike Jones (22:43)
yay.

James Healy (22:56)
colonial administrators, the best of the British civil service, came up with a novel scheme, which was we're going to pay people for bringing us dead cobras. What could possibly go wrong? The enterprising Indian population got wind of this and began breeding cobras that they could then kill and take to the British for the reward.

Mike Jones (23:10)
Hehehehehe

the

James Healy (23:21)
Well, eventually the Brits figured out what was going on and scrapped the scheme. So the Indians released all of the cobras that they'd bred. So at the end, the situation started, because there a lot of cobras. At the end, were far more cobras than there were in the beginning. And you just think of whether or not the example is true.

Mike Jones (23:30)
Yeah

Yeah. ⁓

James Healy (23:46)
how many examples of that there are in organizational life.

Mike Jones (23:50)
Yes, there is loads of that and there's always the incongruence with aim versus what's measured. So like they'll say, we want to be collaborative, but then everything's measured towards individual effort. And they wonder why then they don't get something. When you see it, it's become so obvious thing. How do we get ourselves muddled up in this situation? But I suppose it's again, it's just easier to go.

let's just add this measure and actually solve our problems. But then we don't go back and actually go, well, what's the perverse nature or perverse behaviors that are now occurring due to this measure?

James Healy (24:29)
I don't think I've ever worked in an organization either as an employee or as a consultant and I've worked in very many. I don't think I've ever worked in one that didn't have collaboration as a value, that didn't talk about how we have a collaborative culture. Very few of them actually did. So often, so often as you say, we have collaboration or collaborative or whatever, collaborate on the poster on the wall.

Mike Jones (24:40)
Mm.

James Healy (24:54)
And then we have a bunch of incentives for everyone to not collaborate and everyone to be very selfish. And we have a bunch of systems that make it hard for people to collaborate. Or we have organized things such that the people you're supposed to collaborate with are in another building or on another continent, et cetera, et cetera. And it's just one example of many, many, many.

Mike Jones (24:58)
Yeah, yeah.

James Healy (25:17)
of organisations telling people what we want them to do and then seemingly making it as hard as possible for them to do it and then wondering why it's not happening.

Mike Jones (25:26)
Yes.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then they'll, because it's not happening, they'll then put more initiatives in the way. More stuff.

James Healy (25:36)
Correct, there is always more stuff. the final chapter of the book is some recommendations. It's entitled Prescription. I'm very clear throughout the book that one of the great underlying issues behind all of this organisational BS is the seductive allure of the silver bullet.

Mike Jones (25:59)
Yes.

James Healy (25:59)
and

LinkedIn and business books and business magazines and to some extent MBAs are full of simple solutions to really complex problems.

And so I am very clear in the book that I am not going to spend 300 pages bemoaning this fact and then get to the final chapter and offer my very simplistic set of solutions. So the final chapter is structured as 10 recommendations. They're not commandments, although there are 10 of them. They are designed to be tailored.

to each organization's context. They're designed to be mixed and matched. Some of them contradict each other. That's very deliberate. Some of them...

our intention with each other, one of those recommendations is subtraction rather than addition. Because to your point, our human default for any problem is to add. We talked about Lego earlier. If you give children a Lego model and ask them to improve it, they will almost always put more blocks on it.

Mike Jones (27:04)
Yes.

James Healy (27:05)
very few of them will ever take blocks away. And this is a tendency we all carry through life, almost all of us. And so in the organisational world, if we have a problem, we're gonna add a policy, we're gonna add a process, we're gonna add a control, we're gonna add a system. With the results that everyone is drowning in stuff.

I don't remember the last time I asked someone in a work context, how are you? And didn't get a response that was the word busy or some synonym of busy.

Mike Jones (27:36)
Yeah, yeah. This whole time, I was looking at alternative warfares. So alternative views of warfare. And I came across this document that two colonels from the People's Liberation Army of China had written about unrestricted warfare. And it was about the recognition that they couldn't fight America and win militarily. So they had to find different ways of

defeating them. And funny enough, the main underlying principle is basically disorientating so much by so many different things that then they'll lose the ability to defend the whole because it's too hard. They'll just focus on their individual areas and then you fracture the organization. So it's interesting that actually that's a form of warfare and we do it to ourselves.

James Healy (28:25)
Yeah, and technology particularly in the last 20 years has accelerated this. It's very topical now with AI, but if you look at essentially what has happened with technology since the internet really, so what's that? almost 30 years, more than 30 years, 1993. So over the last 30 years, we've had this explosion in technology, most of which is about communicating. So what do we do? We communicate with each other a lot more.

There was the Microsoft report came out in middle of this year. It was something like Facing the Infinite Workday was the title of it. And it was Microsoft's analysis of their own metadata. And you imagine how many organizations around the world are using Microsoft products. They've got a pretty good data set. And on average, an employee receives 152 emails a day.

Mike Jones (29:13)
Yeah.

James Healy (29:23)
is interrupted by a notification from a Microsoft product approximately every two minutes.

Et cetera, et cetera. And this is terrifying. And then you realize, well, this is just the Microsoft data. They don't have the Slack data. They don't have the SMS or the WhatsApp data. And is it any wonder that everyone is fried?

Mike Jones (29:39)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, and they then just focus internally rather than what we need to do. at, and it's such a good point about the amount of distraction we have, not just by this stuff, but it's self-created distraction that stops us. And it sort of comes onto, I like you talking about your recommendations at the end. My sort of favorites are ask why, measure outcomes, and lose control. Yeah.

is lose control, it? Yeah, lose control. yeah. Like those ones. And I think they help us with that thing is like, in your sense of us, why is that critical thinking? And I suppose it's added to the additive problem, isn't it? It's about, know, why are we doing this? What's really the point? What are we doing? I think it's that critical thinking. I think it's lost a lot in organizations.

James Healy (30:15)
Yeah.

Definitely and you know when you you go through your career and you move around you have different employers you know if you have the same employer you have different roles you might be in different locations in different teams we've all had that experience of being the new person and you know depending on on how new it is there's obviously sort of degrees of newness but we've all had that experience of sitting there in the first day going holy

Like what is this? why are they talking? What is this language they're talking? What is this jargon they're using? you know, why on earth are we running a meeting like this? Or why is this process so rubbish? And...

Mike Jones (31:09)
Yeah.

James Healy (31:25)
For most people, that period of time is limited. And whether it's six weeks or six months later, you find yourself immersed in that context and adapted to that context and used to that context. And you find it very difficult to ask questions because that's just the way things are.

Mike Jones (31:45)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

James Healy (31:46)
And it's about our desire to fit in. mean, you know, there are certain, if I can use the word assholes like me, will probably continue asking why, but it's hard. We want to fit in. We want to feel like we're part of something bigger. And the cost of that is that loss of critical thinking.

Mike Jones (31:54)
Hey.

Mmm. Yeah.

James Healy (32:09)
And

I think, and one of the big challenges is no one ever teaches you how to be at work. You know, unless, even if you're on some grad scheme, there's a sort of level of assumed knowledge, like well, what's a meeting? How do you behave in a meeting? There's all of these things that no one ever tells you and that you never ask, and you just pick up by osmosis from what the people around you are doing.

Mike Jones (32:31)
Yeah. Yeah. No one's really challenging because I feel after working with clients now, you know, I feel sometimes I feel inside me again. Am I going too far because I'm challenging. Why do do what's sense in that? Where did someone think it was a logically good idea to spend 98 % of your day on meetings every day? I think you're going to get anything done. talk a lot of stuff, but it's just it's just assumed, isn't it?

It's just, well that's the way it goes, so that's the way we do it rather than thinking, you know, what are we trying to achieve and how is the best way to organise ourselves to get to that point.

James Healy (33:08)
Yep. And so you mentioned your three favorites were ask why, lose control. The lose control one, I may strike people as, well, people may be slightly surprised by it or it may make them feel uncomfortable and that's deliberate. But what underpins so much of what's wrong with organizations is the desire for control.

Mike Jones (33:15)
Miss.

James Healy (33:31)
and it is the belief that things can be controlled, that this organization of 20 people or 200 people or 200,000 people can be controlled. And one of the stats I use a lot, and I talk about it in the book, the human brain has between 85 and 100 billion neurons, and those are connected by

about 100 trillion synapses. That is more stars than there are in the known universe.

Each human brain is the most complex object that we have ever encountered. There might be something more complex out there in the universe, but we haven't found it yet.

And we assume that we can easily predict what our own brain or someone else's brain is going to do. We assume that if we get two or 20 or 200,000 of those brains together, we can predict it and we can control it. We can't, we can't.

Mike Jones (34:27)
No.

James Healy (34:30)
And the reality is the world is much more complex than we imagine.

I'm not saying lose control as in just chaos ensues, but sometimes we have to just let go a little bit and accept that we don't understand the world nearly as well as we think we do. We can't control the world nearly as well as we think we can.

Mike Jones (34:38)
No.

Yeah. And also we don't need to have all the answers yet. It's like, this is like, we're talking about strategy meets reality because reality, can, we can come up with the best concept we want in the world. But as soon as we verbalize that and give direction, things will move and shift. And it doesn't mean that our concept is false. It just means how we decided we're going to get there. we'll need to, to adapt. And if we try and control it, it will never.

Like I say, never meet reality.

James Healy (35:22)
Was it, you'll probably know this better than me, but was it Klauswitz who said ⁓ no military strategy survives contact with the enemy? Von Moltke, sorry.

Mike Jones (35:29)
No, it's Von Mulkter. Yeah, yeah, Von

Mulkter. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So yeah, no plans to survive contact with the enemy. Yeah.

James Healy (35:39)
And then there's the 1980s Mike Tyson version, is, he was asked about one of his future opponents, I can't remember which one it was, who apparently had a secret plan for how he was gonna beat Mike Tyson. And Tyson's response was, everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.

Mike Jones (35:54)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's so true though, isn't it? He's such a wise philosopher. But it's true with that, you we all can have a plan, but it doesn't mean it's going to meet reality the way we expect it. So we need to adapt. And that's why I love that lose control, because I've been saying it for so long for leaders, is that we need to give people the freedom of action. Otherwise, we don't give them the freedom of action. They can't adapt to the change of circumstances.

and then we will lose and then because then we because we don't achieve the aim we expecting we then just assume it's a performance problem because it's a performance problem and we think we need more training more e-learning more controls you know more processes more things like this and then before you know it we've got we've got all the control and our people have got no freedom no initiative and

wonder why then the life is just sucked out of them.

James Healy (36:52)
But it's like we imagine that...

I draw the analogy of what policies and procedures are to employees, terms and conditions are to customers. And it's this desire, it's this slightly mad belief that if only we can come up with the right combination of words in this policy or in this terms and conditions document, we will have covered all the possible eventualities.

Mike Jones (37:18)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

James Healy (37:19)
And one of the best examples of this is expenses policies in organizations, which are written with the intention of covering every possible scenario that someone might find them in. usually, employees on most trips or in most

scenarios will just inadvertently find themselves in a situation that isn't covered by the policy. So what do you do? Well, you need to tweak the policy. You need to add more clauses. You need to add more rather than shrinking the policy and trying to make it principles-based, giving people some discretion.

Mike Jones (37:54)
Yeah.

Yeah.

James Healy (38:06)
I think I refer in the book to the famous, and people have probably seen this, but the famous Netflix culture PowerPoint, which is available on the internet. It's out of date now. I assume they've updated everything because it's so much bigger, but they have a line in their bags about, I think it's about holidays. And they say, don't have a holiday allowance here at Netflix. We basically treat people like adults and you figure it out, basically your workload, figure it out with your line manager.

Mike Jones (38:14)
Yeah.

James Healy (38:32)
but the line they have in there is, we don't have a clothing policy either and nobody turns up naked.

Mike Jones (38:40)
Yeah, Well, this is I like the idea there. And I had this argument with some HR people a couple of weeks ago and it was about values. And actually, values are pretty useless because really what we're trying to do, we're trying to say we're trying to put something in that mediates someone's decision or helps to make a decision. principles based is a more way to go. Clear principles like in the sense of the the

travel policy is like, you know, don't take the piss is a good principle. And I guarantee most people, you know, that aren't, they are good people and will not do, they are, you've got the couple odd, odd one or two out of a big company that might, but then you just discipline them and sort them out. know, majority of people won't, but we make it so complex. And that thing around the holidays.

James Healy (39:10)
Yeah. Yeah.

Mike Jones (39:36)
I think goes to my other one that I really like out your principles at the end, which is measure outcomes. Because it's the whole sort of nine to five working holidays. Now I've got this big belief and I do it in my own company is the fact that I don't really care how you do it or when you do it, but this is the outcome I want you to achieve.

James Healy (39:57)
Yeah, don't break any laws, otherwise knock yourself out.

Mike Jones (40:01)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, pretty much, you know, that's the thing. It's like when we're in the military, it was pretty much we were governed by the law of armed conflict, which we all knew. And there was my outcome. Now go to the outcome. Let me tell you how to do it. There's the outcome. Yeah, that's the thing out. And I think that measure, because yours is measure outcomes. I think it lines a lot to some of stuff we're talking about and this conversation that

when we've got to be clear of what the outcome is. And then also, once we identify the outcome, how would we know that we've achieved that outcome? And I think that's the thing that we need to concentrate on, not this endless nonsense that we try to measure.

James Healy (40:47)
Well yeah, I take it back to where I started e-learnings. Should we be measuring that people have done the e-learning or should we be measuring whatever the outcome is that we're trying to achieve with that? Obviously the latter. It's harder, but it's not impossible.

Mike Jones (40:59)
Gay.

Yeah.

Then you probably find out that some of it's pointless because some of it's like fraud, the fraud one or thing and you're like, well, how many people in the organization actually conducted fraud? You know, because, yeah, know there will be that again, it's that one odd person, but you you find out you discipline them. But I don't think trying to take everyone through fraud training and then measure the outcome. Well, we've done we've spent

know, hundreds of thousands of pounds on this e-learning to roll out to the whole organisation and the net effect is it's, you know, it's not changed. The outcome of fraud is still one or two people.

James Healy (41:40)
An example I really like for this, so.

you work in banking, if you work in big organisations, you will at some point have done an anti-money laundering e-learning usually. And actually when you look at it, look, anti-money laundering is a very serious issue, right? But most people in an organisation aren't going to be exposed to it or in a position to identify it, identify potential money laundering or stop it, but everyone ends up having to the training.

And the training is usually very detailed and it basically, it often amounts to a kind of how to guide. It's sort of like a money laundering for dummies. Like, you know, I've learned a lot. Like, okay, so that's how you would do it. And you know, it's a bit like having as a sort of anti-drugs training. Here are the manufacturing processes you would need to go through to create your own meth.

Mike Jones (42:18)
I guess so.

Yeah. ⁓

James Healy (42:36)
Like, be on the lookout for this. It's

like, this is just a waste of everyone's time. It's counterproductive. Why are we doing it?

Mike Jones (42:45)
Yeah. And again, it comes to that. suppose it's principally yours about do less, which is that additive thing, isn't it? Why the limited resources we have and the limited focus that organisers or people in organisations have, why don't we just strip it back down to really understand what we're trying to do and maximise the resources towards what's going to make this thing work and be viable. And that's what people want. It's like, you know, you're

you're being there around, you know, making people basically do the best in work, I suppose. people generally want to achieve stuff, but it's pretty hard to get that sense of achievement when you're just doing lots of nonsense stuff and not actually then feel like you're making any difference to the aim.

James Healy (43:31)
So the do less principle.

was about to say this is my favorite. It's kind of like, you know, choosing your favorite child. ⁓ But I talk in the book about the four day work week movement. Not that I'm affiliated with it, but I have some adjacencies to it. A former colleague of mine went on to become the CEO for a couple of years of Four Day Week Global. And you talk to him or others.

Mike Jones (43:39)
Yeah. ⁓

James Healy (43:59)
in the four day week movement, because it's a bit of a movement, about what happens in organisations when they start to pile up this as an idea. And essentially, for anyone who's not familiar, that the four day week, the idea is that you cut everyone's working time by 20%, but you pay them the same amount. Well, what happens is,

Mike Jones (44:19)
Mm.

James Healy (44:24)
people very quickly make some hard choices. So literally, you can have every Friday off for the rest of your life if you can figure out which 20 % of things don't need to be done anymore. And apparently most people in most organizations don't struggle with this. It's not that people are sat around for days and days, my God, how can we possibly stop doing any of this stuff?

Mike Jones (44:42)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

James Healy (44:49)
Everyone instantly comes up, we can kill that meeting, kill that meeting, no one reads that report. As soon as you add in a constraint like that, it forces people to make choices. And I think most organizations could probably benefit from an exercise like

Mike Jones (44:58)
Yes.

I reckon so, it'd be good one as well, because every so often you should just have like a, know, a Guy Fawkes, where they have building effigy, and that's what you've got to do. It's a 20 % effigy of all the stuff. And then you put it on the bonfire and that does not get done again in this organization. That'd be quite good ceremony to be fair.

James Healy (45:25)
Yeah, I like that as a ritual. You could two birds with one stone because it's team bonding.

Mike Jones (45:31)
Yeah,

that's even better because once it's sort of gone out and you've just got the coals at the bottom, then you get a team thing around walking across the hot coals. There you go. HR would love that. Tick.

James Healy (45:45)
Yeah, yeah, I can definitely see that one taking on.

Mike Jones (45:48)
Team building. And it's been absolutely, you know, fascinating and I really like those principles. I think what I really like those principles, the back of the book is that you've done a really good thing there where you're not saying this is a silver bullet, but here are some considerations and they are logical considerations that actually would challenge just by following some of those principles would.

would make a big difference in your way of thinking in an organisation and actually challenge a lot of the waste and nonsense that we have and probably get the organisation back to what it's there for and also give the people that are in there the freedom of action just to do their job, which I think that's what they want.

James Healy (46:33)
Yeah. I think, you know, without wanting to sound like a silver bullet...

think if you could reduce some of this BS, you could have happier, more productive people and more successful organizations.

Mike Jones (46:46)
Yeah, you won't need to throw an Amazon gift card in anger again. ⁓

James Healy (46:52)
Although

if anyone does throw you an Amazon gift card this holiday season, BS at work. Why so much of modern work is bullshit. Available now.

Mike Jones (46:58)
Yeah,

and I will put the link to that in the show notes so people can to grab that But it's been actually fascinating before we go though. Is there anything that you would like? listeners to think about from this this episode

James Healy (47:16)
I would say a couple of things. I would say...

Humans are complex. Organisations are collections of humans. They're very complex.

Simple solutions.

don't always work for complex problems.

And as you've said, ask why. The next time somebody suggests some leadership training or personality testing or corporate values, ask why. Pull the thread. Why are we doing this? Why do other people do this? Where has this come from? Because as you'll find if you read the book, the backstories of some of these accepted practices and organizations are absolutely

wild and there is no good reason at all for us to be doing them.

Mike Jones (47:57)
Mmm.

No, and for listeners, when you get to the book, read the story about the guy who created disc personality assessment. That's a cracker. I don't want to spoil it, but that's a cracker for you. And you will just wonder why, why. You will definitely wonder why after that.

James Healy (48:17)
Indeed you will.

Mike Jones (48:18)
But it's been absolutely ⁓ great to have you on James. I really appreciate it. And for everyone, I'll put the show notes in. So get this book. It really challenged you. And also, I think it's a great reflection tool to think where your organization or you as a leader is slightly straight off the path.

for the listeners. you enjoyed this episode as much as I have, please like and share. again, this is our last one of the season, but don't worry, we'll be back at the beginning of February for season two, which will bring you more great thinkers like James. So thank you very much, James, for joining us today.

James Healy (48:58)
Thank you for having me and everybody, if you've made it this far, thank you for listening.

Mike Jones (49:03)
I'm sure they will and James if they don't speak to you before I'm told I will do because we connect on LinkedIn but have a great Christmas I can say that now because it's the first December is it

James Healy (49:13)
In, no, it's first December, yeah. I'm ahead of, I'm eight hours ahead. So we put up our Christmas tree yesterday. We put up our Christmas lights and it's feeling very festive because today it was 37 degrees centigrade.

Mike Jones (49:15)
I'll wait.

your head comes, yes.

wow, it's definitely not like that here. It's dark and motion-borne and it's raining. for the rest of the listeners, I'll still be around and sharing insights on the page, but wish you all Merry Christmas and I look forward to seeing you all again in February. Thank you very much, James.

James Healy (49:29)
No.

Thank you.

Mike Jones (49:46)
Take care.