Naughty vs Nice: Getting into corporate mischief, the right kind
“I always thought that part of my job was to get fired, but for doing something I would be proud of. My job was to push the boundaries with a stick, and if I wasn’t getting in trouble, I wasn’t sure I’d be fulfilling that.”
Max Kalis
In this episode you’ll hear about
- Balancing provocation and irritation: Knowing how and when to challenge the status quo and use provocation to your advantage
- Breaking down intrapreneurship: What it means to be an intrapreneur and the positive and negative connotations the title carries
- Reframing challenges: Strategies for readjusting how you view and respond to perceived risks and challenges to extract value from every situation
- Evolving career stages: The importance of checking in with your own motivations, to realign your values with your work as you grow through time and your career
- Working with boundaries and risk-taking: How to fruitfully set, follow and push boundaries within innovation, and remain trusted by higher ups
Key links
Jack Teagarden’s A Hundred Years From Today
If – A poem by Rudyard Kipling
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About our guest
Max Kalis has 10 years experience working in strategy, culture & experience design. During this time he has mentored countless start ups, colleagues and clients.
He is now employing experience design principles as a Career Coach and Playbook Creator to help athletes and other exceptional people to unlock progress, change and satisfaction in their careers.
About our host
Our host, Chris Hudson, is a Teacher, Experience Designer and Founder of business transformation coaching and consultancy Company Road.
Company Road was founded by Chris Hudson, who saw over-niching and specialisation within corporates as a significant barrier to change.
Every team approaches transformation in their own way, also bringing in their own partners to help. And while they’re working towards the same organisational goal, it’s this over-fragmentation that stunts rapid progress at a company-wide level.
Having worked as a marketer, transformation leader, teacher and practitioner of design thinking for over 20 years, both here in Australia and internationally, Chris brings a unique, deep and ‘blended’ skillset that will cohere and enable your teams to deliver ambitious and complex change programs.
Transcript
Chris Hudson: Hey everyone, and welcome to this next episode of the Company Road podcast. I’m going to say that sometimes you do need to ruffle a few feathers to achieve a particular outcome within your organisation. So in this week’s episode, we explore innovation from a provocateur’s point of view.
Things we’ll be exploring are what’s acceptable, what can you get away with, and what could possibly go wrong. A self named agitator for good, let me introduce my next wonderful guest, Max Kalis. He spent over a decade using design and strategy to help businesses and projects to get from A to B in creative ways, and he’s now taking this approach to individuals through career coaching and specialises in supporting athletes to build a fulfilling life after sport.
His experiences include taking Lloyd’s Bank in the UK through its first seven hackathons, setting up Dead Pony Club as part of the innovation labs, founding a charity to save the United Nations, which it didn’t. Doing the world’s biggest research into athlete career journeys and getting fired by a design agency as well as working randomly as a harbourmaster Kindergarten teacher in China and running an off road sound system around extreme sports events for Red Bull. So this conversation is a total roller coaster, so hop in and enjoy.
Thank you. Hey Max. Welcome to the show. Really lovely to have you on as a guest as someone who I’ve known for a little while, but I believe you’re a bit of a master when it comes to adapting to new environments and helping others to do the same, really. You’re a bit of a restless intrapreneur in my view. You’ve had a number of experiences that we’ll
get into, obviously, but at heart, you’ve been able to transform many a traditional institution. And in fact, mindset at the more individual level. You’ve done a lot of work in the customer experience area, in innovation.
You’ve also earned your stripes when it came to getting people together to solve problems in some rather novel and disruptive ways, which I’m sure we’ll get into as well. And now you’re using your knowledge of innovation to help other people find their own pathways within their careers. But let’s start with a bit about you.
What’s been your experience of being an intrapreneur in one way or another?
[00:02:02] Max Kalis: Yeah, thanks, Chris. Great to be here. I’ve got to come out the block straight away. And I just admit that I feel a little bit sick in my throat when I hear the word intrapreneur. I’ve been thinking about this before coming on. And I think it’s an amazing adjective. It’s a terrible pronoun.
Because I think having worked in innovation, I find the word is very divisive and I believe intrapreneur is probably quite divisive as well because it’s hard to scrape off the ego, I think from the word intrapreneur because entrepreneur has that kind of ego and big character about it. So, I’m going to dive right in and challenge the word intrapreneur and say, I choke on it.
And I’m okay with it in a way myself, but I choke on it because I think that other people around the organisation hear entrepreneur, and it’s a bit like the difference with Americans and Europeans and fancy cars I think where in America, you might look at a fancy car and the people on the street go, gee, look at that successful guy.
And in Europe we see someone driving a fancy car and we just think… wanker. So it’s a fair cop to say I have had an intrapreneurial period to my work in design strategy. But I think it’s worth calling out that I I’m trying to move on from the label.
[00:03:14] Chris Hudson: Yeah, fair enough. Have a sip of tea, but without spitting
[00:03:17] Max Kalis: It’s a cold morning, Chris. An Englishman needs his comforts.
[00:03:20] Chris Hudson: That’s it. Well, I’m glad that prompted a reaction in one way or another. I think. Just in terms of the word, if we break it down and what’s his behind, have you got either an understanding of it that you agree with at a different level. Is it just the badge and what it stands for?
Is it more the labelling that you’re taking issue with?
[00:03:38] Max Kalis: I think it has a place, absolutely. And I think it belongs in places, maybe a Harvard Business Review that reflects on the challenges of someone acting to implement entrepreneurial approaches within a corporate structure. It makes sense intellectually, so taking more of an academic view and breaking down, oh, we’re trying to replicate the entrepreneurial spirit within a corporate environment despite the constraints.
It makes sense on an intellectual, basis, but I think we bring in the human nature. Different personalities. And I used to say this thing about innovation projects. The word innovation is very divisive where half the room is going to salivate and get really excited. Groovy, new things. And half the room is going to roll their eyes and go, Jesus Christ.
Here we go again. I just think that intrepreneur is an easy badge for the naysayers who aren’t into change or innovation to latch on to and just, you’ve lost them from the moment that word is uttered. I did come up with a remedy at the time to address this divisiveness of the word innovation, which is let’s find something we can agree on.
So I took Tim Castell’s definition of innovation. It’s got to be new, it’s got to be realised and it’s got to be of value. Those three aspects and I like to dive in immediately and say, forget the word innovation, however you feel about it. We are going to try and do something new and we’re going to try and realise it to a certain level.
And it’s going to try and achieve these things that we can quantify. And by breaking through and going beyond the word innovation, but just clarifying how new is this going to be? What kind of values does it need to add? And how realised, how far are we going to take this, you can bypass that and get everyone on the same page and just say, never mind how you feel about innovation.
This is what we’re trying to achieve and now discuss what we’re trying to achieve. And having parked the divisive question.
[00:05:27] Chris Hudson: And where did that go? I mean you obviously, a reframe is always helpful particularly if it means people can get more on board with it. Did the naysayers come in and welcome you with open arms and minds? Did it go well for you?
[00:05:37] Max Kalis: Yeah they embroidered a red carpet for me after that. No, there’s continual battles. I think there are further levels to this. There are various potholes that anyone, acting intrapreneurially, can try to avoid. I think it’s pretty, pretty interesting to, once we’ve parked the issue of innovation to get into, what does good look like for these people?
So I might just summarise my background where I did design strategy for 10 years. Five of those were in the innovation labs at Lloyd’s Banking Group, where I had a lovely role where my job description was basically to poke the boundaries with a stick. And I was probably known for doing things like running the first seven hackathon series, delivering weekly events that brought in different ideas and different thinking from the outside in, and a license to basically set up projects that tried to change the culture there. It was all about this mantra that the future didn’t necessarily belong to the big, it belongs to the fast. I started off on the strategy and product side, and then I shifted into events and culture side. I think my philosophy in this space is probably about trying to unite strategy and culture.
For me, strategy is more of a masculine thing. It’s more direct. It’s about straight lines. It’s about hard numbers. It’s quite blunt. Whereas the culture and events side, the culture side is more of a feminine kind of approach where it’s a bit more subtle. It’s a bit more curvy. It’s a bit more discreet.
But we ultimately need kind of the two sides here to come together for an organisation to shift, I think. So that’s probably useful context. For a couple of years now, I’ve gone on to do career coaching, specialising in athletes who want to move into life after sport and basically using the same sort of design methodologies and approaches to help people get from A to B rather than helping businesses and projects get from A to B. To come back to your question, no, bashed all sorts of heads a lot. The first mistake I made was that when people weren’t excited by the things I was developing, I made them wilder and madder because that’s what makes me happy. And actually what they’re really looking for is solutions that will solve their damn problems. So a big learning for me that I learned the hard way was if I’m not part of the solution, I am just another problem to these people. So, that was a rookie error as I got into that role back at the bank.
[00:07:57] Chris Hudson: How do you find that balance between provocation and irritation and how do you navigate that path successfully do you believe?
[00:08:03] Max Kalis: I’ve tried to kind of own it and it, it stems from the innovation and culture work plus the coaching work, which is my plan is basically to be, what I said at the bank was my job is to be frightening, but in a good way. And I would say that in the coaching work, my job is to be quite annoying, but in a good way.
So I try and own it and say, I’m likely to be annoying, but it’s worth it.
[00:08:26] Chris Hudson: So it’s this notion of a loveable rogue in a sense. Did you remember the, I suppose the process of getting into that role to begin with at Lloyd’s, what you went through, why you thought you were chosen for that particular role?
[00:08:37] Max Kalis: They had basically said, I was at LSE doing a master’s degree and I had a module in innovation for which we did a project on the future of banking for Lloyds. I wasn’t really aware at the time, but Lloyds, frankly, couldn’t give a crap about these students telling the bank what they should do in future.
But I didn’t, I hadn’t read the script. So I was pestering the bank and saying we’ve invented the future of banking and I’d like to stick around and make sure you do it, please. And I kept pestering them long enough that they said, oh, for fuck’s sake. Right. Come on then. Come and join us.
We could do with someone. annoying like you basically, to help us shift forward. Some of the managers there said actually, having a kind of in house upstart to help challenge what we’re doing, would be useful. So I think some of the more progressive managers would use me to irritate people on their behalf.
[00:09:22] Chris Hudson: Yeah. Okay. So like a secret weapon, you were just pointed at the right direction, at the right problem and you would just uncover all sorts of things.
[00:09:30] Max Kalis: Yeah, it was a kind of reframing project where the bank was really hung up on, ooh we’re very high risk. We’re very high risk. We can’t do anything. We’re very high risk. So I would put on events like innovation in high risk industries.
So I brought in formula one racing, the military and oh hospitals. To come and talk to us about their innovation stories, where if they screw up, people die to try and reframe the idea that we’re high risk. We’re not. Yes, we’ve got to protect people’s money and security and privacy, but let’s stop this blanket Oh we’re high risk. We should, we can’t do anything’. Otherwise I think one of my favourite early projects was, I managed to get some budget to invent a website without any words on it. So a project called Vero I worked with a design agency on it. So the idea that would be that we create something so gorgeous and intuitive that it would be just an absolute pleasure to get around it because banking websites are very wordy. And I just sold it on the idea that car companies have prototype cars. Why don’t we have a prototype bank? That was okay, but I was still in quite an egotistical, younger stage of doing this so I think I made it a bit too much about me. And it wasn’t particularly addressed. It wasn’t tied into anyone’s problem that was keeping them up at night. So yeah, that was a, another learning.
[00:10:45] Chris Hudson: Sounds like a very interesting role and where you took it both from taking on the challenge, but also in applying a fresh perspective and, a new approach to what they were doing. I suppose, where did you spend the most time?
Was it in strategy land? Were you more in that discovering implementation and ideation type space? Were you quite focused around the outcomes and the outputs and what it would deliver? Where was the centre of gravity for these
types of projects?
[00:11:07] Max Kalis: Definitely found my home in the culture and events side of things. The strategy side was full of who could be the most serious person in the room, which is not my natural skill. And in an environment that is drowning in presentations and graphs and decks and all the rest of it. I couldn’t compete on that level.
I’ve always sort of had this idea that I, I kind of like to be the fittest person in the library or the smartest guy in the gym. I think it’s better to be smart about who we’re competing with and how. So, I found in the culture and events side of things really receptive because we were expected to deliver new things.
One of the favourites that came out of that was- and it’s a nice contrast with the wordless website that was early on in my work there. By the end of it, I was doing something called Dead Pony Club, where Lloyd’s Bank, if you don’t know, it’s got a very highly esteemed logo that’s 250 years old, and we have very clear instructions, do not mess with the logo, it will not be tolerated.
So we started Dead Pony Club, which was an opportunity basically to siphon off the after work grumbling in the pub where people would moan and bitch about what’s going wrong and say, well, stop moaning and bitching about it. Let’s go and make something really subversive. So we would basically get together and design the bank’s worst nightmares.
And I would rotate which team were invited along to Dead Pony Club to talk about the problems they’re facing. And then we would design their worst nightmare. It was an amazing experience where it was trying to turn this negative energy into more positive energy. But what we would do is we would break them into groups where each group would tackle it from a different perspective.
One of them would look at what technology would be most frightening for a competitor to have, what would be the most frightening brand to come in. Which celebrities would be behind this, and what animals, animals was the best, sometimes bands, but animals is the best. The most abstract because it stops people thinking about it in a rational, logical way.
A nice example of that is we did Dead Pony Club for the small business banking area. What we identified is that there was open banking was coming in, which meant there’s going to be a lot more competition and fintechs entering the market. We take the results of Dead Pony Club and we turn it into a cartoon.
Because no one else is circulating cartoons at the bank and even bankers are human beings too, that quite like cartoons. So we had an amazing artist who worked with us and he created this picture. You got Daddy Hippo, who’s corporate banking. You got Mummy Hippo, who’s retail banking. And then you got Little Baby Hippo, that is retail business banking.
We had it being attacked by a swarm of digital mosquitoes. This is the onslaught of the attack of new wave of competition from open banking. I mean you actually physically feel sick looking at this baby hippo being attacked by a swarm of metal mosquitoes . It’s hard to quantify. I was always under a lot of pressure to quantify the impact of innovation. What’s the return on innovation? I don’t know, but the small business banking got twice as much money to defend itself following on from that. I can’t take credit for it, but did we contribute? Did we change the conversation?
I think we did.
And that really was a good step forward because it was nice and edgy and exciting and very entrepreneurial, very kind of startup style. But it was much better, much smarter way of being collaborative than my earlier attempt.
[00:14:28] Chris Hudson: It sort of begs a question around what it takes to evoke a response and a positive one at that, that is rooted in participation in one way or another. And coming back to what we were saying before around the naysayers actually, giving the forum for that to breathe and live quite happily, but then to do something constructive with is an interesting way of approaching it.
Because a number of companies would just rule it out in another way. They would just probably issue a directive and say this is not how it has to be. This is not how it will be. Let’s do this instead.
[00:14:58] Max Kalis: Yeah.
[00:14:59] Chris Hudson: And it becomes a bit more authoritarian. Did you find that you’re almost combating against that having been the case?
[00:15:04] Max Kalis: Yeah, I did find if you do something with no budget, it’s bloody hard to stop you.
[00:15:08] Chris Hudson: Or permission
[00:15:09] Max Kalis: They can’t turn the taps
[00:15:10] Chris Hudson: yeah
[00:15:10] Max Kalis: They can’t turn the taps off. And I’ve always thought that part of my job was to get fired, but for doing something I would be proud of, not something crap. I always felt that was partly why I was there.
My job was to push the boundaries with a stick and push them. And if I wasn’t getting in trouble, I wasn’t sure I’d be fulfilling that. But yeah, you don’t want to antagonise people unnecessarily. So a bit of a balance, but yeah, if you do a project without budget, who’s going to stop you.
[00:15:34] Chris Hudson: On the boundaries side of things, how do you work with boundaries? Do you set them clearly in your head? Do you just push until you get a response? What’s your view on risk taking and boundaries?
[00:15:43] Max Kalis: I had thankfully an amazing manager at the time, Sophie, who did a really good job of helping me understand the organisation and the organisation understand me. So I think I had mid level aerial cover and then I had higher level aerial cover. So the highest level was the Head of Innovation who was basically not objecting and, saying, you know, roll with it, see what you can get away with but make sure it serves a purpose.
But I had someone who was actively involved when we would engage and do events and work with, collaborate with other parts of the bank. I think they would kind of explain that, I can be helpful, but if I’ve gone too far, go and talk to her and she’ll sort it out. I had some decent cover and it was useful to have someone who trod more delicate political steps than me, definitely.
[00:16:32] Chris Hudson: How do you think they justified that to the board or the more senior leadership team in and around what was going on if they were quite happy to let you run with it, but were they close enough to be able to really be able to report that on a more granular level?
[00:16:44] Max Kalis: I think what we were basically involved in was more like the theatre of innovation than innovation. And that’s what led to me leaving eventually. I stayed longer than I thought I would, but it was a lot of fun. It was a lot of doing stuff for fun and to stretch our minds about what we could achieve, but it was very hard to get anything truly implemented.
I think we made a good job with changing the culture. And the conversations. I don’t think it was particularly effective. I used to definitely fall back on Einstein’s quote about not everything that matters can be counted and not everything that can be counted matters. And I used to bring that up at the beginning of projects because people are always going to assess it about what’s the return on investment here.
What’s the return on investment? And I would say, okay, well, let’s take the hackathons. We’ve done seven. We’ve had about, I don’t know, 750 people hands on build a digital prototype together. There were three main tribes in the bank, effectively. There’s the business side, the technical side, and the transformation side, all with a different idea of what good looks like.
Technical side is, it doesn’t break. The transformation side is, it changes on time. And the business side is, it makes money. And we start learning how to break down those language barriers and understanding about what good looks like from different areas. So, yeah, with the hackathons, we help break down the language barrier between groups and we’ve got all these people who have hands on experience of how to build in an agile manner. And then if you take the other side where we don’t quantify how many people did this or did that, or, we off the back of it, we would always prototype the best idea off each of them. So seven new projects launched. But actually there’s two stories, which I think are even more compelling on the qualitative side.
One of which is we actually had a kid bunk off school to come and join in one of our hackathons. That’s really cool. Someone bunked off school to come and join in one of the hackathons. And then another one was during an event, one of the designers comes up to me and and says, thanks for letting me join in the hackathon.
I’m loving this. This is amazing. He said but you know what? I actually, I just want to confess something, which is I’m actually not really a designer at all. I work in finance, but I really wanted to come to this. So I’ve spent the last three weeks on YouTube learning how to do graphic design. And you know that these are the kind of things where you can’t quantify that, but if you want to have adaptable people in your organisation, that’s amazing. So I try and preempt a lot of things as you can see. So preempt what good looks like, preempt what innovation is or isn’t, preempting how we’re going to quantify this.
Some of it, yes, we can measure. Some of it we can’t, but it’s still worthwhile. Get over
[00:19:18] Chris Hudson: it.
[00:19:18] Max Kalis: it
[00:19:18] Chris Hudson: I think there’s a, there’s definitely a halo that comes with running initiatives and events like you’ve described where people just want to get involved and it’s just interesting to see how, from a cultural point of view that in itself is divisive. It’s bringing people in based on their skill set or interest or determination or career path or whatever it is. There are reasons that push people and draw people to those gatherings and events, and that’s happening all the time in different parts of organisations,
[00:19:45] Max Kalis: Yeah.
[00:19:45] Chris Hudson: Not always in the same direction or in the, in an orchestrated way, but it’s almost playing to the organic part of how culture works.
[00:19:51] Max Kalis: Yeah, it’s nice to float stuff and see what happens. Some stuff builds traction. Some stuff doesn’t. I’m trying to think I mean, just for the hell of it. We did a cricket match inside a glass atrium just because it’s a glass atrium. So, just the idea of, let’s break things, it’s okay.
So yeah, that we had an indoor cricket match in the atrium. Actually in the early days I got to, I just found where where the speaker system was for the emergency fire exit. And on the day we launched a new intranet called The Grapevine, I went and broke into that and played Marvin Gaye’s ‘Heard it Through the Grapevine’ and played it across the whole building.
Just by sneaking into the, I don’t know what you call it, the AV IT room and just plugging a, a little CD player in there. There was some stupid shit, then we did, these amazing things where on a reframing basis, there was the espressos, digital espressos every day.
Sorry, every Tuesday at 11 o’clock, we would have a guest speaker downstairs in the atrium and we would just invite radical fintech entrepreneurs who were ready to take the bank down. We had a security expert who actually, he did a live experiment that I wasn’t aware of, but he basically hacked a wifi enabled dildo to make a point about why your security digits on your phone should be six letters long, five, not four.
Anyway, so that was a live experiment that we hadn’t seen coming. I got a billionaire in to come and speak, although I think, I think he might have fired his PA after that because he turned up obviously pissed off that he was talking to a cafe full of sort of very mediocre banking employees and not the chiefs.
But the regular talks every day at 11 o’clock, we’d get probably about a hundred people together. And this began as a room of seven people who got together one day and talk about what the hell is Bitcoin. So that got a real momentum and then we did an evening version of that event where we would invite people into the bank.
And actually, rather than panels, I would tend to organise debates. Because panels are crap. I mean, sorry, but panels are crap. You’ve got everyone going, oh, and you’re very nice, and I’m very nice. And the only people who win in a panel are the people sitting on the panel. The audience are given platitudes and niceties.
Whereas if you’ve got a debate, it’s really cool. It’s really good. So we did iOS versus Android operating systems. That got, that got really feral. But it’s cool when people started to learn what happens at the boundaries between these issues.
God, if there’s one thing I could change, I would do away with panel events and have debates instead.
[00:22:14] Chris Hudson: You’ve sat in a few, I’m assuming.
[00:22:16] Max Kalis: Yeah I’d moderated or gone on the teams, but I think it’s just, if you want the audience to actually learn something that with the debate, you really get to the boundaries of the issue. Whereas you get a panel together to talk about things and they’re sort of saying, ooh I hope I get lots of nice things.
Oh, I hope I get some work from Lloyd’s from doing this.
[00:22:32] Chris Hudson: Yeah, I’m picking up on a theme here, which may be around some of the work in the experiments that you ran. Is that there has to be attention in one way or another for that to lead to something else. Do you feel like harmony, inertia? It breeds apathy and it breeds a sense of status quo.
What are some of the forces that can be used helpfully to bring about new fresh thinking really?
[00:22:54] Max Kalis: I think there’s two things there. One of which is, there’s a camo quote on the difference between a revolution and a rebellion, which I’ve always cottoned onto and really highly valued. He says the difference is that, the reason a revolution is respectable is because it’s suggesting an alternative.
Rebellion just says, oh, this is shit. But a revolution says, I think we’ve got a better idea. That’s worth fighting for. I’ve always been interested in people and projects where there is a clear alternative being proposed versus those where people are just whining, moaning, and no time for the whining or moaning.
But if people have got alternatives. Let’s find the smallest possible thing we can do to test it and get on with it.
[00:23:34] Chris Hudson: Mm.
[00:23:35] Max Kalis: I think there’s got to be a purpose behind the antagonism and rattling people. Not with just for the sport of it.
[00:23:41] Chris Hudson: Not all ideas are equal as we know, and they come in from different voices, different parts of the business or the organisation usually, but how do you navigate that?
[00:23:49] Max Kalis: On that subject, we, one of the most effective things we ever did was, our banking app wasn’t basically available to kids, teenagers, and other competitors were making their apps available to younger people. So we organised a day where a lot of the chiefs brought their kids into work, and then we basically ran a workshop where the kids told their parents how shit the app was because they couldn’t access it and all their friends could, and pointed a finger in the way that no one inside the bank could have done.
So by bringing in the customers to point fingers at the executives and say, this is shit in ways that we cannot see on the inside, that was really helpful.
[00:24:27] Chris Hudson: Yeah. I mean, there’s nothing like a consumer voice or an end user voice or, any kind of external voice that is incredibly powerful, obviously to play back those findings more directly from an unsuspecting source, like you say very smart. Just thinking from, looking forward from some of the things that you were doing there and I guess pushing boundaries, experimentation, the things that you’ve been talking about. What have you taken forward as something that consistently works well and what have you left behind and for what reason?
[00:24:53] Max Kalis: I think what consistently works well is look for opportunities where people need to do something, not trying to get people to want stuff. We’re not going to change what people need to get done. What I used to do is get as many coffees as possible to find out what keeps these people up at night. What are their problems?
In a bank, it’s relatively easy. There were always balanced score cards that spelt out and were often public, saying, this is what this person needs to achieve within this timeframe. I used to work with my manager, Sophie, because she would work at a level where she had much kind of clearer access of what do these people need to do?
So I found it useful when she would effectively find the right people for us to work with. And then I would get deployed to go and deal with it because that saved a lot of time pissing into the wind of people who just weren’t interested. So that was really helpful to find places where there was a good appetite to try things out.
And I think in terms of collaboration, I used to encourage that we find the smallest thing we all agree on and get the hell on with it. Why don’t we just write an article together? See if we can do that. Okay, we’ve done an article together. Why don’t we do a workshop together? That went well, fine.
Or if it didn’t, what have we learned? Okay, well, now we’ve done that. Okay, maybe we could do a joint initiative to run an event about, the cloud or something. I think just build a little success and then build a bigger success and then build a bigger one, incrementally building up these relationships rather than steaming in with a, right!
Let’s go crazy. Do a big hackathon. Woo. Like no one’s interested. So I think learning to just build up slowly, build a success on a success. Otherwise I’ve got something actually I’ve pulled it out. I’ve got a minimum viable planning deck, which painfully through experience, I’ve pulled together a deck because we rarely start at the beginning of a project or an organisation or something. We always come in, there’s already stuff going on that we are blind to when we first arrive. So I’ve got a checklist of questions, which guaranteed I will regret not asking if I don’t ask them. So I have a checklist for picking up projects or roles to try and get good visuals on all the things that otherwise is going to blow up in my face.
[00:26:57] Chris Hudson: Yeah, okay. And then during that time you transitioned markets obviously from the UK over to here in Australia. Have you adapted your approach in any way in that respect? Have you felt like you’ve needed to change your practices?
[00:27:07] Max Kalis: Ooh, It’s probably more in a kind of personal way than a professional way in some ways, because although moving here was a big change, I became a parent at the same time. So if this is the difference, the change in moving from England to Australia, becoming a happily free man to becoming a parent, the change of becoming a parent is that big.
And owing to that, probably my priorities in life shifted a bit. I began to care less. Found it much harder to give a shit, frankly, about projects and companies, and found my family’s my priority, and I want a working life that recognises and prioritises that, and also, I like working more with individuals, and I decided a couple of years ago to look back and actually, I haven’t mentioned it, but we used to engage with a lot of accelerator programs to bring startups into the bank and try and foster change that way.
And actually mentoring startups was probably the favourite thing. So I’ve been doing that with Startup Bootcamp in Melbourne, doing some mentoring through Academy XI, which is similar kind of thing. And career coaching is probably the nearest thing to a real job that looks like mentoring startups. So that’s why I’ve been going down this path.
I think probably worth just capping off the Lloyd story. There was an interesting episode that I left in the end. I stayed for five years, which was longer than expected, but there was an interesting case where I’d arranged with a crowdfunding platform.
We were going to give everyone who works at the bank, it was about 80, 000 people. Everyone at the bank was going to get 10 pounds to invest via the crowdfunding platform. Because I figured that if if we really want to change our working practices to be more agile, if everyone had a bit of skin in the game watching startups and if you watch a horse race, yeah, okay, but if I’d given you 10 pounds and I put it on that horse, you’re going to watch that race and you’re going to see what’s that horse’s name, what colour is it, how does it run, who trained it, how is it slower or faster, what’s going on. And suddenly when you got skin in the game, even a tiny token amount, you’re going to start absorbing and taking an interest, build that curiosity.
So I was really excited about this project. And then the legal team at the bank said, we can’t let this go ahead because it would be encouraging irresponsible investing to our employees. And at that point I said, like I’m sorry, like that’s idiotic. I just can’t be part of this. I think I found my limit and said, thanks, but no thanks.
[00:29:29] Chris Hudson: All right.
[00:29:30] Max Kalis: So yeah, that, that was the end of that, but it was, I’d probably look back and say that was the most enjoyable working time, licensed to kind of be the naughty kid in the class, and get paid for it was quite fun.
[00:29:39] Chris Hudson: Yeah, that sounds great. I mean, the dream role for some. Others, I’m sure particularly who were, I guess, a little bit more conservative in their roles within the bank would’ve either enjoyed it or not enjoyed it. As you say, it kinda
[00:29:51] Max Kalis: Oh, totally. you should interview some people who also probably from the technical team, especially. You could get their view on things.
[00:29:57] Chris Hudson: What would they say, do you think?
[00:29:58] Max Kalis: I think the technical team especially would say, and I definitely was guilty of this in the early days. Towards the end, I was better at this.
But I think as the innovation team, we were a bit full of ourselves. We used to swan in a bit like the cavalry in our shiny outfits with our shiny ideas and our clean breachers. We’d arrive in the battlefield and the technical team who had frankly, provided banking to 10 million people quite happily on their own before we arrived and been in the trenches.
And made this happen were understandably fairly dismissive of these punks turning up with ideas. So, I think there was an issue, definitely the sort of cavalry infantry divide. We probably, enthusiasm would come across as arrogance, probably because the early days there was arrogance. That kind of divide where the rigorous detail required, and you’ve got more than 20 computer systems strapped together. You’ve got 50 departments collaborating together. It’s designed to not change.
The bank is designed. To stay safe and keep everyone the hell out and keep it the same as it was yesterday.
That’s brilliant in the short term. It’s just not very good in the medium to long term.
[00:31:06] Chris Hudson: Yeah, I think many organisation or many a leader within an organisation has tried a number of things really. One, one is to set up an innovation arm. It kind of isolates those efforts and then it’s pointed at very specific things. In other cases, it’s much more a change management field where organisations are almost setting higher level visions and objectives and people and teams are almost encouraged to get behind that and that brings about the innovation.
Do you feel like there’s a perfect way for it to work?
Hmm.
[00:31:31] Max Kalis: There definitely becomes an innovation is not my job if I’m not in the innovation team versus innovation is my job and there’s a divide there. I think there’s smarter ways to do it, which is kind of the best of both, which is, I think there should be resources because you may not have them within the organisation.
So an innovation team and getting funded by other parts of the bank who are free to hire externally or internally. I think interestingly, there were different parts within the innovation lab as it grew from strategy and product, culture and events, but then there were different areas such as there was a whole lot of different work streams.
Some of them lent themselves better to being independent bodies. There was a sort of intelligence unit that was scoping out the market, seeing what’s going on out there, especially with the FinTech companies arriving and what they’re doing, how they’re doing it. That stuff’s just brilliant, to share around and should be independent and left to get on with it and share its insights.
But maybe the more hands on stuff, it’s better to get that model of helping to build agency in other parts of the bank.
[00:32:34] Chris Hudson: I think it’s just a question really around what would good look like from an innovation standpoint in today’s organisation? Knowing that. the speed of change, the manoeuvrability that’s required of teams, the adoption the flight risk that’s usually there because teams aren’t perhaps as, as fixed as they once were.
just a lot more moving, or it feels anyway, that there are many moving parts in that arena. So from an innovation standpoint, how could we set that up better? So if you were a leader or, you’re working within an organisation today and it was one of the banks in Australia or anywhere else, what would you start with, do you think?
[00:33:07] Max Kalis: I mean, Initially it’s get the brief and say, hello, why am I here? I need to understand what’s keeping them up at night. What the problem is that they felt the need to reach out and can only customise it built off the back of that.
So you’ve got the strategy and the culture need to do and take an understanding, what is your current strategy? What are you looking to change? What does your current culture look like? I tend to come back to, experience design, that gorgeous formula. Satisfaction equals expectations minus reality.
No one knows who came up with it, sometimes attributed to Morisachi, but I used to bring that in a lot and I do with my career coaching stuff where to get the best results, we probably have to work not just on the reality of the situation, but people’s expectations around it too. So I think taking a stock take of where expectations are out of alignment is pretty critical.
Once I understood the three tribes at Lloyd’s, life became a lot easier. You got business, technology, transformation, everyone’s got a different idea of what good looks like. Okay, we’ll work with that. But prior to getting that understanding, a lot harder. So I think trying to read into the strategy and the culture and then customise off the back of it.
God, you almost make me want to go back and do this stuff
[00:34:16] Chris Hudson: You’re
reliving it? Get on the phone to Lloyd’s , see what they’re up to.
[00:34:20] Max Kalis: See if they’d have me back again. That’d be a
[00:34:21] Chris Hudson: Yeah
[00:34:22] Max Kalis: of that. That’s a good test of whether we did a good job or not.
[00:34:25] Chris Hudson: The 10 pound bet or the 10 pound investment and see if it’s still on the table. We’ve talked a lot about yourself. Maybe we could just pan out and talk a little bit about the teams that you work with and the, maybe the types of attitudes and behaviours, the values that you’re typically trying to instil through the work that you do and what you typically get back.
So what are your methods in getting people behind things in that respect? And what do you expect back from people? Mm
[00:34:47] Max Kalis: I think for a moment, I might just lean on the career coaching side of things for what you’ve said there, because I think we’re talking more about an individual basis and the coaching is really more around the one to one, whereas previously what I’ve moved away from is working on businesses and projects.
I’m seeing there is a kind of big secret around career coaching. Typically, most people who want to engage in, in getting support to progress their career feel they’ve got in a bit of a knot. No one comes to a career coach unless they’ve tried really hard, but ultimately quite painfully to resolve it themselves.
I tend to find there is a kind of secret, don’t tell anyone. But typically these people know what the answer is, but they just don’t like it. I’ve just done a hell of a lot of research into athlete career transitions, and this is my new niche. There’s massive parallels between sport and addiction.
I’ve been to rehab myself 16 years ago to give up drinking, and that was the most educational experience of my life, without doubt, that has shaped my career more than anything, actually. To end up in a rut, stuck in addiction and then the recovery program to climb out of that. Typically within a sporting organisation, and I’d say it’s probably similar within businesses. You’ve got a third of people who know what they want to do and they’re actively pursuing it. You’ve got a third of people who don’t quite know what they want to do, but they’re actively experimenting. And then you’ve got a third of people who don’t know, are inactive. Not sure. And of those who are inactive, it’s kind of in denial about the opportunities they have.
Typically the recovery sort of path would suggest there’s only two reasons for that. One is fear and one, the other is pride. Fear is, if I look at these things, I just get this, like, no, I get fear, I don’t want to go, I don’t want to go there, like, you don’t want to look at a big scary bill or something, or you don’t look at a snake, no, don’t like that, not looking, not engaging. The other one is pride, which is like, yeah, whatever I’m better than this, like, it doesn’t apply to me, I’m special, I’m fine. Fearful ones are easier to work with.
We can rationalise and normalise these fears and go like, God, we all have fears. Probably is the way to go through it. It’s a much smoother path to go through it and accept it. The pride one is harder. But typically I find trying to promote people who are full of pride, and say, you’re amazing, you’re fantastic.
And you should go mentor other people because you’ve got this nailed. Because you’re so amazing. And eventually they sort of go, yeah, I’ve learned so much doing this. Because I think it’s about making a socially acceptable way for people to engage and get towards, that thing that they don’t really want to accept.
[00:37:07] Chris Hudson: How’s it played out? What are some of the results that you’re seeing from, listening to people to that extent and what are they now capable of doing, do you think?
[00:37:13] Max Kalis: I feel, a bit too early days to evaluate. So it’s only nine months into focusing on the athlete side, and I’ve only just released the research last month. So, I’m about to go and pitch that to various clubs and associations as I try to, basically step up and go from working with more random individuals to being part of the sporting establishment in Australia and building my credibility as a useful asset for people, particularly that third who are inactive around their careers. Careers are a big question. I’m often saying we’ve basically only got three options. One of which is we talk to friends and family, which is lovely because we love them and we trust them and they love us.
But they’re also vulnerable to their own bias and bullshit, just the same as we are. Or you can Google it. You can get, quarter of a million answers in .68 seconds if you want. Or you can take a tiny fraction of your salary, and get one to one support to help you find your own solutions and make sure that you don’t look back with any regret and you make the best of the cards you’ve been dealt.
I think there’s a growing trend and less screamishness about working with another person to just step back and untangle, and it’s quite hard to get time and space in our lives to just pause and think about these things. So yeah, without going into a full me, me advert that hopefully provides some context.
[00:38:25] Chris Hudson: I mean, obviously you’ve talked about your previous roles and now what you’re doing currently in the coaching space Maybe we can just look back to you and yourself and what I suppose looking back drove you and motivated you through those different stages.
It felt like the standout and the ego was once there, it then became something else. You had different motivations, but what do you think looking back on yourself? And what do you think you, what was some of the bigger learnings through that time that you reflect on?
Yeah,
[00:38:52] Max Kalis: spot on. I think there were three eras of my career. And something I say with the coaching clients is around, sometimes we’ve got to learn to burn a different kind of fuel. Particularly athletes tend to be high octane human beings who need to learn to burn another fuel, a more sustainable approach.
In my 20s, I was led astray by some terrible advice by my grandmother, which was, Max, you should do what the hell you like until you’re 29, then you could spend a year learning how to be 30. And I took this much too seriously and just, basically grabbed the wrong end of the stick and ran with it very hard.
And by the time I was 29, I ended up going to rehab. So thanks, granny. I think what she means is be a kid as long as you can. And when you can’t don’t, and then I got into my thirties where I did, I found a lifeline through this innovation work, which yeah, the twenties was just ludicrous.
You need another podcast for that. But in my thirties is when I did my masters. I found innovation as a way to engage in the workplace, which I hadn’t previously managed to find very well. It was like, oh I can be sort of entrepreneurial, but within a structure, this really works for me.
And then I guess I became, as I became a parent around 40, there was just a kind of harder to give a crap about these projects. I got a bit weary of the sort of motivational corporate stuff where if I’m basically building a house on someone else’s freehold, this is idiotic.
I’ve got skills, I’ve got experience. I’ve got options and I’m going to explore them. So grateful to all of the experiences, the painful ones, especially actually. I guess what I’ve taken away is there’s a rich floor, full of kind of cut up, lost edits and randomness, which has actually been fantastic, particularly for the coaching stuff now, it all plugs in nicely.
So it does feel like a sort of coherence was eventually found through a lot of pretty crazy meandering.
[00:40:37] Chris Hudson: That’s a great answer. I think that two things that jumped out from what you were just saying. One is probably a theme around optionality and being aware of what options you have through stages of life. And the influence that other people have in you is a great one. And obviously, whether it’s your granny or anybody else that you work with, your manager, your boss, your organisation, what it stands for.
You can often feel like you’re in the wrong place at the right time at the wrong time. Sorry. Yeah so optionality. The other one is probably more around confidence I feel. Sometimes when you’re in a situation, particularly a work or a role. The optionality just shuts itself off anyway, but it feels like to leap or take a sidestep or to move in a very different direction feels very foreign.
It’s becoming easier, I believe, to experiment from a career’s point of view than maybe it once was. It feels like you still need to back yourself to a degree, and maybe there’s some validation that comes in from your peers, like you say, it could be a family or friends, whoever.
But that needs to give you the wind in the sails to propel a change of direction in some way.
[00:41:34] Max Kalis: Yeah. Something I’ve always thought important for entrepreneurs that I’ve struggled with over my journey is trying to keep a low emotional centre of gravity, is what I keep thinking about. The people who I’ve spotted who are particularly… the ones who are more naturally entrepreneurial.
They have this lovely stoic quality of, there’s some story about a monk, I think. There was a family and they gave him a baby because they couldn’t look after it. They had to go off and fight the war. And then the monk just sort of says, nothing says, okay.
And then, I can’t even remember the story.
[00:42:07] Chris Hudson: It’s gonna be good.
You had me on the edge of my seat. I was waiting for
[00:42:10] Max Kalis: I know, who doesn’t like a monk and a baby story?
[00:42:13] Chris Hudson: Never heard a monk in a baby story. Sorry.
[00:42:15] Max Kalis: But it’s basically just, okay, it’s more like Roger Kipling’s if poem, treat these two imposters just the same, victory and failure. It’s the more we can laugh at the absurdity of these little things in life and we lose a job or someone says no or it’s like, you know, at a time they can feel like, ah, freak out. Oh no, this is awful. The ones who have this steady.
Just keep trucking. Just keep trucking. Yeah, I get an arrow in the head, just keep going. It’s okay. At one point I was a kindergarten teacher in China and I had this approach which maybe I should have taken to the other jobs, but the strategy was to get me through this hate them all equally Basically this lovely sense of indifference and I think trying to get a bit more indifference to this stuff, which, Jack Teagon’s song, A Hundred Years From Today, look it up.
It’s a lovely song, it’s all about, like, a hundred years from the, from today, who’s gonna give a shit? So just trying to, like, do what we can And maybe the cleverest thing I’ve ever come across is the serenity prayer from my AA practice and recovery work. The serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.
It was thanks to that. I used to argue with a lot of things, but when I went in to give up drinking and recovery, I came across the Serenity Prayer and I was like I can’t argue with that. That’s so damn good. And that was the hook that helped me get onto a very positive path. And I think that’s a lovely thing because again, with the coaching, people tend to get bothered about things that have nothing to do with them and in denial or ignoring the stuff that actually is their responsibility.
That tiny little prayer nails the whole thing.
[00:43:48] Chris Hudson: Yeah, it’s fantastic. What you’re saying is very interesting one because you’re taking an opposite view or being a bit critical. Critical thinking is often, sometimes it’s applauded, sometimes it’s not, but actually having a point of view is what leads you to whether you feel something is right or wrong.
And people talk a lot about instinctive behaviours and gut feeling and all the things that come about in business. And actually, if you can find something that aligns to what it is you stand for, then you’re more, more ready to accept it, apply it to your practice, but it’s the methodology, I think, you can always ask questions, you can always be curious. Curiosity then leads you to whether something feels right or wrong, but without that, it feels like you’re almost handing your control over to somebody else to take for you.
Did you experience any of those feelings as you were going through your journey?
[00:44:32] Max Kalis: Not sure quite like that, possibly because I’m quite skeptical, verging on cynical, that anyone ever changes their mind. I feel that most of us make a decision before breakfast and spend the rest of the day justifying it.
[00:44:44] Chris Hudson: Okay.
[00:44:44] Max Kalis: not very optimistic about people changing their mind, I’m more optimistic about discovering how people come to the views they’ve come to. I don’t hold out hope to change it, but I have hope to understand it. And that will allow us to find a common ground and work together.
[00:44:58] Chris Hudson: So part of the kindergarten in China story and what you learned from that in accepting everybody equally is to accept all those points of views and everything that goes with it. So
it’s more acceptance rather than needing to understand.
[00:45:10] Max Kalis: A lot more acceptance as I’ve got older. Accepting, letting go.
Less control, and less need for it. I just try and do the best I can. There’s the lovely stuff in the 12 Steps Recovery Program is like, we can’t control other people, other places, other things. All I can do, the only stuff I can control is what’s in this floppy body, which I crashed this morning on my bike with my kid on the back.
We’re all fine. This is all I’ve got to control. And it’s so hard and so cliched, but, all we’ve got is the present. I do get hangups on the past. I do worry about the future. So much time wasted. It is idiotic. And I’d like to make my, I guess my to do list is to do less of that, be more present.
but I try and own my hypocrisies and acknowledge that’s just being human.
[00:45:53] Chris Hudson: How do you feel that people respond to you for being that way?
[00:45:55] Max Kalis: Interesting. I mean, I guess you’re gonna have to ask them. I think it’s good to have an outlet for me with the coaching, which is the point is to challenge people constructively. That’s why we’re here. That’s why we do the coaching. So I feel pleased to have an outlet because naturally that’s how I am.
I like to be sort of antagonistic for good reasons. Yeah, I just enjoy the contrary side of things, the paradoxes. People don’t always have time for it. I think it’s, there is an element of choosing a time when people just want to know if you want a cup of tea, not do you want a deep philosophical debate about something.
So yeah, knowing a time and a place. definitely for meetings, having an agenda and put my hand up and say, can get distracted. So, if you want to achieve something in this meeting specific, if you could help me come back to it, that’s fine. I think just be open and honest. Be ourselves.
I guess I cling onto the idea, being ourselves, is a good way to be. And then If it’s working, it’s working. If it’s not roll on, try and find a place where we do plug in. All right. I was very lucky in the innovation work that I had this amazing role that
fitted me personally and fitted them professionally, in the coaching stuff, I feel very fortunate to have evolved.
I still very torn though, on how much work is something that we have to love and how much work is actually, someone just needs something done. Can you help?
and I think it’s interesting. We’re very overeducated in the Western world, and I think it’s a pity. I slightly wish that university was free, but only if you did something useful. Like, I’m in favour of us doing like philosophy and plumbing. So when the economy is good, fine, go and do philosophy. But when it’s not, go and be a plumber, please.
[00:47:29] Chris Hudson: Yeah. Interesting. Maybe the last question in and around any advice that you would give to other people through their own journeys. But, how do you feel through your career? And what things are you looking out for as signs of something being right in your work or just out of line?
And at what point would you reconsider the working situation that you’re in to consider other options, do you believe?
[00:47:51] Max Kalis: It’s probably a bit like the rule for whether to get out of bed and take a piss during the night. Sometimes you wake up in the night and you think, oh no, I slightly need a piss. I’ve got a rule that if I think, oh I think I want to piss on the third time, I go and have a piss.
[00:48:04] Chris Hudson: The rule of three?
[00:48:04] Max Kalis: I think it’s a rule of three thing. Also, my sister suggested, work probably should be good a third of the time. Okay, a third of the time and shit a third of the time.
Now that resonated for me. Other people may want to adjust it and tweak it and say, no, I want good, I want work to be good 60 percent of the time and okay, 30 and shit, 10%.
Have a think about what is acceptable to you. But if you’re asking yourself the question, it’s it maybe comes back to, I don’t know, like irritating neighbourhood noise. Just put it down in your diary when there was irritating noise because the police will want to see a record. Just keep a note of these things.
And the third time you’ve written down, I don’t like my job. Look at your options maybe, because again, it’s that thing like we, we have you know the answer, you just don’t like it.
[00:48:46] Chris Hudson: Yeah, that’s it. That’s definitely it. I think we might wrap there, Max. I’ve really enjoyed our chat. And just by the virtue of all of the things that you’ve experienced through your career so far and you continue to do. It’s always evolving. It’s always open.
You’re always inspired by the environment in which you’re in. You’re taking all of that on, and you’re applying previous knowledge, experience, you’re applying that to the things that you do today, and it’s obviously opening up more and more doors.
So, so I love it for that, and I love the, the meandering conversation that we’ve had. I didn’t, maybe I didn’t give you enough conversation structure. I didn’t set any clear parameters. I kind of wanted to see how you would run free in this environment, but hopefully you’ve enjoyed it as well.
[00:49:24] Max Kalis: I love it. I love it. It’s bringing back a lot of memories of interviews. I used to do job interviews and without fail, they’d say, this is the most fun we’ve had today. But no, we’re not going to give you a job.
[00:49:33] Chris Hudson: I don’t have to make you an offer, but don’t put me on the spot. I don’t know what I’d offer you.
[00:49:36] Max Kalis: Get
[00:49:37] Chris Hudson: But yeah, thank you so much. Tell us a bit about where we can find you.
[00:49:39] Max Kalis: Yeah, of course. I’ve got a website. Max Kalis which is maxkalis.com. Yeah, that’s the easiest one. maxkalis.com. I’ve also rescored the AFL League to, but with minus one for a behind instead. Just for fun. And
[00:49:54] Chris Hudson: what was the result or is that a spoiler?
[00:49:56] Max Kalis: About one in five games, you get a different winner.
Brizzy would have won the grand final.
[00:50:00] Chris Hudson: All right. There we go.
[00:50:01] Max Kalis: we’re going to change the course of AFL maybe.
[00:50:04] Chris Hudson: There’ll be a lot of other Melbourne team supporters that wouldn’t be happy about that.
But yeah, really appreciate your time again. Thanks so much Max. Thoroughly enjoyed it. Thank you.
[00:50:11] Max Kalis: All good. Take care. Cheers, Chris. Bye.
[00:50:12] Chris Hudson: Okay, so that’s it for this episode. If you’re hearing this message, you’ve listened all the way to the end. So thank you very much. We hope you enjoyed the show. We’d love to hear your feedback. So please leave us a review and share this episode with your friends, team members, leaders if you think it’ll make a difference.
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