A culture of experimentation: Why pushing for failure can lead to greater success

“When you’re looking at innovation and especially experimentation, the goal is to effectively fail. You really want to be able to push for failure for your ideas because it’s the ones that don’t fail that are the ones that you want to be able to push through.”
Natasha Reidy

In this episode you’ll hear about

• Establishing a culture of experimentation: Strategies to foster experimentation in the workplace and seeing invaluable innovative outcomes as a result
• Setting up innovation processes: Working examples of how to effectively set up innovation practices, the role of leadership in making this happen & the importance of storytelling to convey the value of innovation
• The customer vs business centric approach: Knowing how and when to prioritise business issues vs going all in on putting the customer first
• Formulating a meaningful and impactful business vision: How to align diverse perspectives on corporate values and recognise and combat the interpretive nature of company vision
• Personal attitudes for success: Tips to build trust, respect and positive reputation among co-workers and higher ups and increase opportunities while maintaining agency

https://youtu.be/XjWcwb3U8wU

Key links

Funny Business Pod
PEXA
Exponentially
Mike Dyson Podcast Episode 
Jane Curtain Podcast Episode
Alberto Savoia
The Right IT book
Leslie Barry
Pawel Huryn
Dan Olsen 

About our guest
Natasha (Tash) Reidy is an energetic innovation leader. Having executed over 200 experiments and saving over $7 million by stopping ideas, Natasha’s love language is definitely experimentation!

With a laser focus on solving customer problems, she looks for opportunities to enhance customers’ experience by uncovering the things they love – and the things they don’t.

One of her favourite sayings is ‘customers don’t care about your business problems, they care about their problems’ and sets about instilling customer empathy all along the innovation funnel to idea delivery – taking numerous teams on the journey.

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: Hello Tash and welcome to the Company Road podcast. So this week we’re going to go deep into a topic that I’m personally very passionate about and we’ve worked together on and it’s all about experimentation within business and the things that you do.

But when everything about business feels like it’s a little bit risky and it can be hard to obviously balance innovation, established ideas, legacy systems, processes. The things that people stick to because they feel comfortable in. Today we’re actually going to be talking to a total master when it comes to this and corporate innovation.

And we’ll be thinking about how we can make it a bit easier and a bit simpler for people to understand. So very warm welcome to you, Tash Reidy, yeah lovely to have you on the show. You were mentioned in the Funny Business Pod the other week. And Robbie was talking a bit about the experimentation that you were running and that you were so famous for doing at PEXA. So I’d love to just start with a bit of an intro around that and maybe tell us a bit about the work that you do and tell us a bit about yourself as well.

[00:00:58] Natasha Reidy: All right well, if you don’t know, I’m Tash Reidy and I used to work at a company called Property Exchange Australia, or PEXA, and I actually started there when we were squished into a serviced office at 101 Golan Street. So this was in 2011 before it had even become what it’s become today. Before that, I’d worked in telecommunications, finance and just travelled the world really starting in New Zealand, moving, living in Sydney for nine years and Melbourne for a couple of years off to the UK and then back to Melbourne. So I do tend to try a little bit of everything everywhere and even during my time at PEXA I got curious about, I wonder what it’s like actually kind of running a business.

Gave an e-commerce store on the side a bit of a go, just to see what actually happened in that world, but really excitingly and coming back to that experimentation point, and I can even tie in my experiences around the e-commerce store and how I got some things really wrong, and it was a financial impact, and if I’d known about this experimentation stuff early on, I would have been able to deploy this and probably save myself a fair few thousand dollars in the process.

So during my time at PEXA, I did a variety of different roles. When you actually are in a startup, and this was my personal opinion early on in 2011, the world was far more command and control than what it is now, which is more collaborative, design thinking customer at the heart of what you’re doing, but definitely at the start of a startup, you’re almost like a project.

And you’re basically your whole operational side of things start to cook off once that money starts to come through and people start using your product. And definitely back then while the experimentation was something we knew probably Google did and that was way off, way over there, we didn’t really understand what was going on at that time.

So as the company matured, we really looked for new ways to be able to find things that customers would need. And how can you also find the things that customers need, how do you capture that information outside of the surveys you might do in platform, your user interviews, and also how do you put the processes internally against that as well?

And you’ll have, as you mature as an organisation, you have a broader group of business units or corporate processes that then also need to be addressed. Being in a highly regulated industry as well, you do have a lot of regulatory considerations because that’s a really important factor.

A lot of big corporates as well, you’ve got to deal with quite high risk aversion as well. And so how can you overcome that in an environment? Because at the end of the day, an experiment is always going to be seen as risky. One of the things that I’ve heard really early on is that a lot of companies are actually afraid of their customers.

So they’ll talk about being really obsessed and really excited about their customers and what they can learn, but they’re really scared to do wrong by them.

There are some companies that do this quite well. If you look at say like REA, they don’t really care. They’ll flash up a 500 error page.

They know that they’re going to always have people coming back to their site. They know that pretty much anyone in any room that anyone ever walks into, they have an REA app on their phone. So their concern is slightly different. So while I understand that concern, to be able to roll out something like experimentation and innovation at a corporate level, you’ve really got to be able to plug into those other business areas, make them feel safe and to be able to move at pace. And to be able to action the ideas that come through from everybody, treat them fairly whether it’s from the CEO or someone in the call centre, everything needs to be treated the same way. And you need to assess that information the same way and really move beyond those opinions.

I don’t know about you, but I think every idea that I have is the best in the world and everyone should be using it, but I can tell you now I was not a customer of the PEXA platform. I’m not a lawyer and I’m not a conveyancer. So I don’t actually know what they need day in day out. And I’m not the one interacting with those screens every day.

So my opinions really don’t matter. It’s your opinion. It is your actual needs that do matter to me.

[00:04:25] Chris Hudson: it’s really interesting to think about maybe the starting point at just the words that we use and the language that we use in and around experimentation or innovation, because a lot of it is really, interpretive, I want to say and actually with interpretation comes a degree of comfort of other people towards it because they think it’s shiny and interesting. Innovation is happening in a lab somewhere I want to get involved or they shy away from it because it’s just an ambiguous term that nobody really understands. And experimentation is maybe not used as much as innovation, but it obviously conjures up different things.

In the world of science, it would be totally normal. And expected really that you’d be running research the whole time, both in a lab environment so a closed environment, but also in a more open environment to make sure that things are ready to take to market. If you’re running pharmaceutical business or anything where you’re taking something to market would have to be tested with people out there in the real world.

So I’m wondering at a really high level where the blockers come from and where the hesitation actually stems from. What’s your thinking there? What’s your observation on why people are so resistant to something that sounds a little bit different?

[00:05:26] Natasha Reidy: You made some really good points. So there’s a few things in there. Oftentimes people think innovation is done by the cool kids in the corner. And I’m not a cool kid. A lot of time people think that I don’t ever have any ideas, so I don’t know what to do. You see this quite often when you run hack days as well.

People go, I don’t have an idea, so I don’t know how to participate. Every single person in the organisation has something that they can bring to a new idea. Do not underestimate the value that you can bring, and it could be, you might sit there and think, I’m only on the front line, so I don’t know what to do.

And it’s like, you know what, you talk to those customers can probably find those extra enhancements that might sit offscreen that could be provided. So that’s probably one of the biggest ones that people don’t quite know where they fit in, but also like, how do I do it? I’ve got an idea. How do I do it? What do I do? Am I going to break any rules? We’ll come to the corporate side of things as well. I think that’s a, that’s one conversation that we can have and some of the tips there, some of the things that I did to help overcome that corporate aversion, but more so like where do people feel like they can fit in? So innovation, yes, a lot of people do see innovation as that bright, shiny, sparkly thing. I want to be able to play with shiny new things. It’s actually quite often a process.

And a framework that everything that then gets put through a machine and then a lot of the times innovation teams are managing that machine, putting in whatever metrics they might have sitting behind it and really reporting on those outcomes and making recommendations from what they learn. And ideally, when you’re looking at innovation and especially experimentation, the goal is to effectively fail.

You really want to be able to push for failure for your ideas because it’s the ones that don’t fail are the ones that you want to be able to push through. They’re the ones that the customers really want. So really looking at the things that fail, learning from those. So looking at that framework and really making sure you share that framework with everyone and give everyone that same entry point, so we used a particular tool where everyone would put their ideas on and we set up a process with once a month, we would go through those ideas, assess which ones would put through the machine.

Now, outside of that, we also ran quarterly experimentation training workshops. Now, those training workshops we do with another company called Exponentially. So what we would do with those training workshops were really, really helpful with overcoming that corporate aversion as well. So what we would be able to do is put, for example, it’s a bit cheeky.

I put our risk team through this training because your risk and compliance team are always going to be the people that, and their job is to be able to highlight the risk aversion of the company and ultimately protect the corporate reputation. And oftentimes experimentation can be seen as something that can damage that corporate reputation.

So I pop them through the training. And so then they could see and understand exactly what was going on. You’re never going to be experimenting on 30,000 people on your whole entire customer base. You’re going to be experimenting on, if you’re lucky, 2 to 5 percent of everything per experiment. So you’re keeping that blast radius small.

And then they’re able to go, oh okay. And then you’d better highlight the money you’d save by not putting an idea through. And then oh, so we could have spent three months building that, that no one actually wanted in the first place. I was like, yeah you’re right. So the value of doing that really small contained experiment that you may, depending on if you, if something’s going to cost three months worth of resource effort, you’re going to do a fair few experiments in there to validate it.

And that might take, max three or four days and then you’ve got some really good data from a number of experiments, cross section of segments, customer segments as well, that you can then draw some really good insights from and make a really good recommendation to either go to the next phase or to park it for now.

And then industry changes, two years later, it’s actually time to revisit that because there’s been significant changes in the industry. So it’s a little bit cheeky and use the genuine excitement people would get from that training to help make our biggest naysayers or sort of people that are most averse to change to get them on board early and to really get them across them.

So it’s a little bit cheeky. Yeah,

[00:09:07] Chris Hudson: Sounds good. I mean, there’s obviously a difference between problems and ideas and actually discussion can happen through- ideas can come about from anywhere really but actually, for me anyway, I find what’s really useful is using context to provide stimulus really.

And actually the frameworks that you’re describing is thinking about how do you create the right conditions for creativity in a setting where all people want to talk about is what they do in their day job. And actually what the process can involve is actually a- it’s both of those things.

It’s really listening to them from the point of view of what they want to achieve, going into some of the end user or internal problems or operational problems that exist, thinking about what’s the environment that you’re trying to solve for, in a broader sense, from a human point of view, from a social point of view, there are lots of different dimensions that you can consider.

And then actually context can then spark thoughts, provocations in and around what’s possible, what would happen if, where could we take things? So I think that’s really cool. And the fact that you’re talking about it in the language that people understand, because it’s relative to their context, it makes it actually a lot more easy to understand. It’s a conversation rather than you just saying, hey we’re the innovation team.

And you know, you’re,

[00:10:14] Natasha Reidy: you’re not.

[00:10:15] Chris Hudson: yeah, well, you’re, you’re not, you’re just here for a workshop and you’re going to go back to your day job after that.

[00:10:20] Natasha Reidy: Yeah. Yeah. So we would, we would literally have people turn up with, with ideas, but then run a two week sprint directly afterwards as well for those participants. And we’d get a broad selection of ideas, like it could be a person, a pain point within the team that they just wanted to have resolved. So we’d be like, great, let’s not build a whole process and system.

Let’s see if this actually works. This really quick automated email response could work, all the way through to, but with every single thing that we did, we’d always slip everything into a lean canvas and we’d get really focused on that customer problem because quite often and I know I did this when I first started and I saw this consistently come through on the training as well, quite often we naturally fall to trying to solve for those business problems.

So at the end of the day, customers don’t care about business problems. They care about their problems. So great. I can see that chrishudson.com wants to hit a million dollars in revenue in the next six months. And it’s I don’t really care because I need to consume what Chris gives me. But if it’s not of any value to me, I’m not going to consume it.

So really making sure that you are by focused on those customer problems and by it’s very, by it’s very nature, you will be solving those business problems as well.

[00:11:21] Chris Hudson: There’s a real distance I think that’s created because actually in a lot of businesses that are perhaps not as embracing of innovation culture. It’s basically a corporate strategy and, it’s a set of visions and goals and values and all the things that go with it. But there’s essentially some sort of plan, a strategy on a page or whatever it is, most of the initiatives and the teams are organised around that. So actually from an operational point of view, it makes it hard to break outside of that because the teams are structured, the work streams are set in place, the quarterly reporting rhythms there, the metrics are set, it just goes on and on and it becomes more and more fixed around this set of goals.

So innovation feels like it’s outside of that. It’s like another thing for people to worry about. So when you have both the business as usual and the need to innovate and push on. It’s either expected to happen in that space and it relates very much to the mainstream goals, but if you’re then flying against that and you’re trying something that’s radically different, it just feels like a different set of priorities that people feel pressure to get behind because they’re just too busy delivering the BAUs.

So how do you get some, get around some of those I guess more human challenges of people not knowing really where to allocate their time.

[00:12:31] Natasha Reidy: That’s definitely what I experienced in my last role as well. And it’s something that you say really consistently people want to be able to do things. But when you also get those results, people want it to happen straight away. Great. We get a favourable response from an experiment.

We make a recommendation to pop it in. But there’s no space on a road map anywhere. So what am I taking off to put this on? We can’t take anything off because we need X, Y, Z to create ABC. So nothing can come off. So one of the things I had to learn early on was I’m not actually doing anything for this financial year or for this business plan year.

However, your yearly planning might work. What I’ve got to do is you’ve actually got to look into the future and go, okay, I’m experimenting on this now to learn what we can learn now for next year, and we can start those conversations. You then actually you do need to leverage those relationships that you spend a lot of time building, to either have them involved in what you’re doing, get them on board with what you’re doing and get them excited about what you’re doing.

So I can have an idea, four day work week, I’m going to use that as an example. I think that’s very easy to get everybody very excited about a four day work week but it was really hard to get people across the line, like from a senior level. Again, your executives love the idea of themselves working a four day work week, but when it comes to productivity and business outputs, it does then also sort of go, well, is it five days, four days? You need to continually create excitement around what you’re doing. And effectively you need to be able to lobby for your idea. You can’t let it go. I’ve done external hack events. Actually, I’m going to absolutely dig myself up here on the winning team for the first ever sex tech hackathon here in Australia, because that’s what I do. But there was no option in that hack event to just throw it over the fence for someone else’s team to look after and then say, oh no one’s listening to my ideas. If you are not behind that, no one else is going to do it for you. And it’s hard. It is hard. And you look at all those startup founders, you look at all those people who have to keep pushing forward and here no, not now they don’t give up.

They really believe in their idea. They’ve got the data that can back it up and hopefully they’ve got their own customer data, not just something they’ve read in the market and a few opinions from friends at barbecues, because people do start up businesses like that.

[00:14:32] Chris Hudson: Yeah.

[00:14:33] Natasha Reidy: And then you actually get to do all these other things.

But you, if it’s your idea and you’ve got the right content sitting behind you, and especially for us in an innovation team as well, we can genuinely see based on some market trends that we might be able to identify. Where we can see where we might see five year plans for the business and potential-

I mean, I love looking at parallel industries and seeing how they can work together to create something no one’s ever actually thought of before as well. So you’ve got it and it’s the hardest thing, to sit there and wait.

[00:15:00] Chris Hudson: Yeah. I mean, the timing is everything. Let’s just take a step back. Did you just say a sex tech hackathon? That was a few sentences ago, but i’m wondering like all of a sudden like we shifted worlds, right? We were talking about the world of property exchange and

[00:15:16] Natasha Reidy: And here we

[00:15:16] Chris Hudson: and then

And actually, it makes an interesting point really around you know the maybe it’s a preconception, but maybe it’s also a comfort zone thing in that habitually we’re thinking, okay, we’re experts in a particular area as an employee of a company and as a team member within a company, we’ve got set tasks and objectives.

Now you’re coming in and saying, actually, anyone can do creativity. Anyone can come up with the ideas at a broader level. So what I’m thinking is actually. It’s not so much about what you know but how you can bring not only the right people, but the right perspectives together. How do you get to some of the ideas that work?

So, it could be that it’s more about facilitation than it is about, origination, because if you create the right conditions, then actually the ideas come that they’ll just come naturally. And that means that you can apply it to say, financial conveyancing or you could take it into the sex tech hackathon, it

doesn’t really matter. So, what’s your take on the flex? Once you know the tool set, like how can you apply it in different ways?

[00:16:10] Natasha Reidy: Wow. So I can absolutely share how I failed. And if I had this tool set at the time, like personally, so I did set up an e-commerce store. We’re up and running, it’s about 2016. And I remember there was this one particular line that I was looking at and my friends said, Oh yeah, this is great, oh, that’s really nice.

That’s really great. So I spent a couple of thousand dollars bringing these things in. I’ve only sold about three or four pieces of it and I’ve since shut my store and I’m still sitting on this stock. Now, if I had done this rapid experimentation early on, so quite often you can see something as simple as, a pre order would go up and a lot of the time you do your pre orders to either help get cash in the bank from a business perspective, but it can also help you understand if there’s any actual interest in the market and what you’re looking at selling. And I’d set this up a pre-order before spending that money, which was my own money, by the way, a little e-commerce store on the side of my day job. I would have spent that money very differently. I can tell you now. So what I learned in that moment, I was just like, oh my goodness.

I really wish I didn’t, I really wish I knew how to be able to do this back then. But you can even when you look at your design thinking practices as well, like when I sit there and I think back to that sex tech hackathon. We started really broad with what we were looking at doing. We knew that we wanted to be able to help people with disability.

So just a bit of a precursor as well around sex tech what it actually is so if you’ve ever got a chance, head on over and listen to Briony Cole, who is the founder of the Future of Sex. And it runs sex tech school. So one of her definitions is around using technology to help enhance intimacy. And that isn’t just a sex doll sitting over here.

That is also your dating apps as well and everything in between. And how can you combat loneliness? I’ve seen some fascinating things that you wouldn’t even consider as part of the sex tech realm. So it’s not just porn. It’s not just these other things. It’s these other things that actually can help enhance intimacy and it could be through communication while you might have a long distance relationship.

So how can we make that happen? So, we focus quite heavily on disability when we were looking at this, how can we help people with disability? So that’s a very broad topic. Applying that design thinking, we were able to then come in, narrow it down to one particular, we only had two days to be able to turn something around and stand up in front of a panel of people in the industry and say, what do you think of our idea?

So we really focused in on narrowing down the broad topic of all disabilities and all needs from all of those disabilities to come through. And we actually focused on rather particularly were able to interview somebody who has spinal muscular atrophy. So she talked about her experiences, what made her feel really uncomfortable and how can we help with that?

So we really, we didn’t get to run any experiments at that time because we’re working at pace, but we were still able to use the work and the framework to really pinpoint that customer problem, to be able to look at some potential solutions that would require further validation if we were to take that idea any further.

[00:19:01] Chris Hudson: It’s just interesting anyway, but I think that the other part of it is like you were saying before about bringing the risk team in and getting them trained up early. How do you assemble the right people? And often as a hackathon, I know you’re just thrown into a group with some people and then you find out who you are and what you can do.

And then all of a sudden it kind of merges and gels and it gets a bit interesting because people don’t know each other that well and you’re just coming together to solve a problem. But how do you make sure the right people are around a problem that you’re trying to solve?

[00:19:26] Natasha Reidy: It takes a long time to learn those business processes and who does what. So you do actually need to have a little bit of understanding about how the business runs, why certain things are in place and generally I learned over time, we would actually put every single experiment through a rather broad process to start with and I’ll absolutely share a failure how that happened and why we needed to do that. But we’ll talk about this one first. Yeah, no, we love a good failure. So we actually used to do quite a bit. We used to head up to one sort of panel where we would have legal risk compliance. And regulatory on one panel and talked them through what we were going to do.

But when even before that bringing people in sooner to actually get folks. Are we looking at the right customer problem? Our frontline team and people that really understand the customer problem. So you need to make sure you’ve got a customer facing person and on every single idea that you’ve got.

And even when you’re looking at internal ideas as well, making sure you’re aware of who that customer is and who you’re solving what for as well. So it’s not always just external customers. They are your internal customers too. So bring in someone who interacts either regularly or bring in a customer if you can.

So I always do that and you do need to have a fairly good understanding of the business processes. If you’re not really sure, bring them in. A lot of people do like to be involved in innovation or in experimentation. They do enjoy the energy of this unknown in a structured way. And how can we actually have these conversations as well?

And everyone loves to feel like they can contribute to something that might create something.

[00:20:50] Chris Hudson: I think there’s a massive gap between a preconception or an opinion really within a corporate setting. And the truth a lot of the time because the assumptions are made and the corners are cut, and if you’re in a meeting or if people are just quick to just shoot from the hip, come up with, well, they believe is the thing that their customers want, or, something that, you know, even if an idea is presented around a product idea and you service proposition, it’s not, well, our customers would never go for that, or they, they find ways to critique it from the point of view of the customer and the customers never involved in any of that.

So how do you get around some of that in the moment as well? Because there’s tons of bias that’s just coming in from all angles.

[00:21:30] Natasha Reidy: People get excited about what they can build, right? Because they can. And everyone gets very excited about that. And you can get quite lost in thought land and in solution land that may not be relevant to what actually needs to happen.

It’s really important and there’s always a couple of agitators that you might know. Yes, you may feel frustrated because you feel like you’re stomping on my idea but they will pipe up and say, what customer problem are we solving with this? Let’s come back to the customer problem. It takes a bit of time to get used to asking that.

And I mean, I know that I was very fortunate in the environment that we did have that strong customer focus. That really allowed us to be able to say, what is the problem we’re looking to solve here? And it is very hard to shift people’s mindset from, oh this is the business problem we need to solve, to this is the customer problem we need to solve.

And sometimes, what I’ve learned as well, you need to let it run and get it wrong.

And sometimes what I’ve done is I can still run an experiment and the data might say fail and they might still say, we’re going to put it in. Great. Not a problem. And then you can actually check that real life data as well.

So that can either confirm or invalidate your actual experimentation process if something went into market and it took off and your experiment said failures. Probably, you don’t really see that very often unless if there’s an insight or something that you missed. There could have been a solution design that you missed.

Maybe the market responded differently. There could have been a significant, there are always so many variables that every experiment can’t catch. But quite often, if you do put something in that go, oh we’re going to put it in anyway. Because I really like it and those friends at my barbecue on Saturday said they’d really use it.

And they often perform the same way. So then you’ve actually got real live data that tells you that your process works.

[00:23:01] Chris Hudson: This is the BBQ that everyone talks about where , it’s only ever what people do for their work that’s discussed and then nobody really understands what each other do. And then it’s always a barbecue, isn’t it?

[00:23:11] Natasha Reidy: it’s always barbecue. You should do this. And I was like yeah,

[00:23:13] Chris Hudson: Yeah.

[00:23:13] Natasha Reidy: should do that. Yeah. All right. Good. Thanks.

[00:23:17] Chris Hudson: There are a lot of people out there that are working in roles and within organisations that I don’t feel can change in any way. And I’m interested in some of the real catalysts for making that change possible. So, from an innovation standpoint, and I’m thinking public sector maybe, local government, federal government, or a bank of 10,000 people or places where you think this is regimented, this is running exactly how it has been for many years and people have come in and they’ve tried and they’ve failed.

People are walking out the door every week. I can’t see how I can personally get something to change and work in a different way. So thinking about some of the things you’ve described and maybe stepping back to maybe the earlier days of where you were trying to stand up some of these experiments or set up an innovation function that, what advice would you give around setting that up for the people that would want to make that change?

[00:24:05] Natasha Reidy: I was actually thinking about, we actually tried to set up like a shark tank process, which we thought that would be fun. People stood up, they pitched,

[00:24:12] Chris Hudson: Yeah.

[00:24:13] Natasha Reidy: Didn’t really go anywhere past the pitch. We had, we gave all the executives, I don’t know, 2,000 funny money. They could invest in whatever idea they wanted.

And then we gave, I don’t know, we must have put some executives heads on the, in the middle of the money and said, here you go, here’s 2, 000 from me, but it failed because it didn’t have the process sitting behind it. When you look at trying to implement change in a large organisation, you don’t need to do everything everywhere all at once.

And that’s the hardest thing. So I’m a bit naughty. Sometimes I tend to go a bit grassroots with what I do, and just work with the people around me. First of all, to see if what I’m actually talking about actually has any legs. So when you look at the broader change, and if I look at rolling out experimentation as a way of working, we definitely failed a few times.

And it also came down to the maturity of the organisation at that time. And in larger organisations, it could be maturity within teams as well. Your team might be the right team to start doing that experimentation, but you don’t necessarily know how putting those what is it you wanna measure?

I’ve seen a few variations around what people want about a measure. When it comes to doing experiments, how do you wanna report on it? How do you wanna celebrate it? There are so many different things you can do. We used to bank the money that we didn’t spend to celebrate what we didn’t put in because we thought that was really a really good thing.

Some people might count number of ideas implemented. Some people might count number of ideas put into the framework as well, because that also shows that people trust the framework. And also maybe not the number of ideas that have gone through the framework as well, whether it be past or failed.

But again, don’t feel like you need to solve the organisation’s problems because that’s a really hard thing to do, finding that little thing that makes you really happy to come into work every day and whether it is saying, okay, I’m going to try this little thing out today, then I might get one or two people in and see if they like it, then I might get them to bring them one or two people to see if they like it.

That grassroots movement has a huge impact in the longer term. Then you start to collect that data and it really allows you to start to tell a fantastic story that when you do go to take it any further, you’ve got backing and it’s ready to go. A little bit sneaky. I’m a little bit naughty like that, though.

[00:26:19] Chris Hudson: Yeah.

[00:26:19] Natasha Reidy: But, But at the same time, I know that if I was at ANZ, I’m not going to be able to talk to Shane Elliot on day one and say, we should put this in today because I know it’s going to work. I need to know if it’s going to work. And if people actually care.

[00:26:31] Chris Hudson: So it’s like Tash Reidy PI, you know, you’re kind

of, just sowing plants of ideas, seeds of ideas rather than, you’re- it’s a seed of an idea. Is it going to fly just conversationally? You That could be the easiest way to just gauge people’s interest.

You get a

raised eyebrow

or an eye roll, that’s telling you something already. So it’s data collection, but in a much more interactive based way. And I think that obviously that ladders up to bigger things. Once you’ve got the people involved, you can start to think about, okay well, how do we make this official?

How do we get the funding? Who would your allies be?

[00:27:02] Natasha Reidy: How do you scale it? How do we standardise it? There are the sort of set, change management criteria. Like, how do you scale it? How do you get more people involved? How do you measure it? How do you tell the stories around it? How do you celebrate it? So you then, you could then design out those five points and really start to make a lot of buzz around it.

So early on, we would run quarterly town halls. And if you’d run an experiment, you’d stand up and you’d share what you’ve done. It was really important that what we did wasn’t seen by only being done by two people sitting in the corner, that it was a skill set that every single person could take away.

[00:27:33] Chris Hudson: There’s a point in there around data and actually collecting the evidence, from the first start where you’re picking up on those cues and playing those back to other people. But actually at that point where it’s a town hall presentation or it’s a much bigger piece, shared on the intranet, whatever it is. Actually the evidence that you’ve been able to collect will basically get people convinced of what you’re trying to achieve it may not, it’ll at least show credibility. Whereas a lot of people try and just land ideas in a boardroom on a whiteboard one day and saying, you know I’m the person that stands up quite quickly to draw on the whiteboard.

This is the idea. This is what we’d love to do. And there’s some arrows pointing here and

[00:28:09] Natasha Reidy: Oh, and here’s some quick revenue numbers, here we go, yep,

[00:28:11] Chris Hudson: Isn’t this,

isn’t this brilliant, you know, and, and really understands why, but because they haven’t got a better idea in that moment themselves that they’re not going to shoot it down and then, and they end up going with it.

But actually, the evidencing and, just the data that sits behind it, it’s really important.

[00:28:24] Natasha Reidy: I have had to tell a CEO that one of their ideas wasn’t. And we had to park it for a couple of years. So they wanted us to test something out. And I thought, cool, make sure we put this one through the process. And then you just like, all right, here’s the official paper at the end. This is the methodology we followed.

This, these are the, so I really, really spelt out the data that we collected. And I definitely learned that over time, people are more likely to trust the data. It’s like, great. I had a really strong opinion. And then I go, okay, well, I can’t really argue with that, can I? Don’t get me wrong, you do get some people that will say, I don’t believe the data.

Manipulate the data for me. But you, as long as you’re really firm, and that’s where you actually have to ask that question of what additional insights do you have that I don’t?

There might be additional reasons why they’re pushing for something that goes beyond the data that you’ve collected. So you need to be really brave at actually asking that question. As your experimentation matures, capability matures, over time people will then go, I’ve got an idea. Oh, hang on. I just need to get it validated with data. So you see people naturally hunting out the data before they take it any further as well. So first of all, it was like, I’ve got really strongly held opinions.

And then it’s actually, I just want to see if my opinion’s got legs at the end of the program.

[00:29:30] Chris Hudson: Yeah the way in which you present the data or the evidence actually tells you a lot about who you’re talking to and what they respond to and, on another podcast, we were talking a bit about how it ladders up to their own particular goals, I think was right at the beginning, it was Mike Dyson and he was like, how do you know what they’re trying to achieve and how does the data that you’re presenting in relation to your idea contribute to that in some way?

I think if you can make the link between your story and what you’re doing over here in this cool innovation space and then what this person over here in products or pricing or any of the different areas, marketing, then the link has made you, you’re doing the hard work for them in a way.

Do you find that you’re doing some of that?

[00:30:04] Natasha Reidy: Yeah, you definitely, there’s always this thing of I’m going to be playing with leading edge technology that has no relevance to what I’m doing. You’re normally not, you still need to make sure that what you’re looking at, whether you’re in exploit your core products, or you’re exploring new things outside of your core to help grow the business, they still need to tie back to those business objectives.

And those, the overall plan and your values and whatever it might be, you need to tie those into because if you’re going completely rogue, unless if it is so insane, and it’s not going to happen in the next three months, if it is absolutely insane, it generally requires a fair bit of thinking that would go into it, but you do need to make sure it ties in.

I mean, otherwise, why are we doing it? It’s going to be even harder to get something off the thing. Like it is always quite easy to be able to tie things into your business objectives as well. This requires you to flip your thinking sometimes. And it’s a learned thing to be able to do.

Like early on in my career, I wouldn’t be able to flip my thinking and definitely now it’s okay, so if I need to take this to an executive, what story am I telling them? And why do they need it?

[00:31:02] Chris Hudson: Yeah,

I mean, the quantification of what happens and why it’s the right thing is one area, but I think there’s another broader theme around the fact that if you have an innovation practice with all of this data that’s been collected up and running the whole time, then it’s effectively just like a living and breathing organism of insight in a way.

And without that you’re still a little bit blind. So actually the fact that you’re running all these hundreds of experiments gives you the opportunity to expand your understanding of what can be taken into the core business model a lot of the time as well. Did you find that there was often, revelations through the experimentation process that could be usefully applied in the day to day stuff that was going on too?

[00:31:41] Natasha Reidy: I can sit there and think, I mean, there’s probably one thing I can think about it quite practically. We actually kicked off a four day work week experiment. So I did, it took about three months of designing and stakeholder engagement to win people and to get the right approvals in place.

We had about 40 people go through the experiment and we used to have like meeting free Wednesday mornings, and as I was going through all the data quite often, like when we had a few different variations of the four day work week about how people were breaking up the week, just to test which one would work best.

And what I kept seeing coming up was everyone wanted to take Fridays off. And most consistently when people do put in short weeks, it’s normally a Friday, people do take off. It’s that thing of like, what a meeting for, but quite often people end up having to work that extra day because there are meetings that they have to turn up to.

So, is there relevance and going, okay, the data is telling us this, that most people take Friday off. Would that not be the best day to have meeting free Friday? So people actually get the time that they say that they want. So they get the right balance in their lives. So, there are, or you can learn things, especially when you’re learning about people, that you can actually find those threads that can provide the value organisationally as well.

And interestingly, we’re talking about the bank of ideas and learnings and data that you collect over time. 18 months into building the labs out, we were literally having saying, hey didn’t we do an experiment on an idea like this? So people coming back to us to ask us about things that we’d done, 12 months earlier, I’d be like, okay, well, this was actually what we learned.

If we actually want to have this conversation, let’s run a few more experiments because the market’s changed and X, Y, Z. So people will still come back to say, hey we learned something here. What was it we learned knowing that we’d use the process.

[00:33:13] Chris Hudson: That’s encouraging. Yeah the other one that comes up, which I just thought of was that a lot of companies that run research a lot think about how they can actually package the work that they’ve done. Because every time they run a research study, this is the most brilliant thing that anyone has ever done.

And let’s all get into a boardroom and, let’s pat ourselves on the back because we’d have never got to this level of understanding if we’d not done it and so on. And you might end up with a you research pack that’s 130 pages long and then nobody might look at it again after that.

But in any case, there’s a lot to be said for how to ingrain insight from research or in experiments or whatever it is into your culture and making it accessible for people. And people have been trying out ways to create taxonomies or ways to tag insights and ways to create a library of insights or anything like that.

Have you got a point of view on that just in terms of whether it works, whether to set it up, whether or not set it up, anything like that?

[00:34:05] Natasha Reidy: I actually think it is really important to know that there’s that centralised place for as much as possible. Cause you do you look at what you get from like marketing insights, what you get from CX insights. There are so many different insights that you can get, that, I could learn something from CX and go, okay, well, I never want a battery.

Experiment on this particular segment, again, for at least 12 months because they’ve said X, Y, Z. Okay, great. We’re gonna get more value from this. So if you’re not using that data interactively to be able to continually learn and or even uncover things that you none of us knew before, I think is gonna do you a disservice.

I think a lot of organisations are starting to understand the value of making sure that there’s some kind of forum, whether it be a virtual forum, a Miro board, a monthly session whether it be a town hall, regularity or champions, there are various things that can be done.

But it is making sure that whatever you’re contributing as an expert in your area, you’re also taking something back. So what are you in there to learn? Are you just in there to tell you what I’ve been doing? ’cause that might not actually help you in the future, but you also wanna make sure that you can take stuff back to your team and say, hey we’ve learned these extra three things because I shared this.

And quite often it also helps minimise duplication.

[00:35:15] Chris Hudson: There’s a point there around the relevance to you yourself situation. If you’re hearing a presentation from another team, then what do you take back? And I think that probably comes a lot down to you yourself. I’ve been in organisational environments where people have been sat in meetings forever and ever.

And really, they don’t feel like they’re contributing to a lot of that in the meeting. It can swing obviously the other way where people are over contributing in a meeting and you wonder why they’re saying what they’re saying, but yeah, in the instance where people don’t really know what they’re in the room to do and what they should be taking out of that presentation, how do you get around some of the apathy maybe and presentation fatigue and some of the things that set in because people don’t know what to do with the information that you’re giving them?

[00:35:55] Natasha Reidy: So what we would do early on with experimentation, so this really comes down to pushing ownership onto everyone about how you can take that experimentation capability away with you. So we would tell them, we would hit our quarterly town hall thing we’ll be like, great. We actually did this really cool experiment.

It passed or failed. Chris, can you stand up and present the experiment that you did and what you learned? Here’s the slide. Can you please prepare it? So, what it did, though, is I found that it helped the audience understand that it was everybody that was involved, or they’ll turn up to say, oh I’m my mate’s support, my mate’s talking today.

I’m going to turn up and support them. And they would actually then randomly learn something extra, that they weren’t expecting, but before lockdown, I was also going to secretly make these wonderful chocolate waffles we used to get through catering as part of like this innovation buzz thing and then lockdowns happened for two years.

So that absolutely went and the company that did these waffles are gone. Devastated. So snacks also helped. Yep. Snacks help.

[00:36:49] Chris Hudson: The snack choice is important.

[00:36:52] Natasha Reidy: It was, I was going to make it like synonymous and like, it was this sort of, it was going to over time sort of create this sort of cognitive connection that people would go, oh if I turn up to this I’m going to get these awesome chocolate waffles, we can talk about innovation so I failed, it was a good idea in theory in 2019.

But yeah, and also I mean, I know there’s a lot of talk about innovation heroes as well, and not trying to make innovation heroes through award cycles. But what we would do is we’d have this innovation contribution award. People that would really help with excelling or pushing forward that innovation framework then the culture.

So we would just call out people that, just helped overall. There might’ve been one that executed 10 experiments in that time. They might’ve helped us with a certain piece of UX work. They might’ve just been so passionate and taken it out to their team and really driven within the team and that was always a surprise at the end as well. And then there’s some people turn out, I’ve been really heavily involved in innovation stuff now. I’m going to turn . .

[00:37:48] Chris Hudson: This is brilliant. So yeah, repertoire of sneakiness is continuing

obviously from, From like secret experiments that nobody knows about to gentle bribes with the brownies and the waffles that come in

and, and other, but I think the important point there is maybe one around democratisation because actually if it’s just you and the only person doing it.

Then it’s just you and, in effect you’re inviting criticism, as soon as you can share it, both as at a problem level, at an ideas level, but also at an implementation level, more people get behind it and obviously they’re part of it too. And through doing that, if you can show that they’ve done something that’s absolutely brilliant and you can showcase their amazing work, then it’s not on you.

It’s obviously showing that other people are getting behind it as well so the kind of fragmentation, the atomisation of what needs to happen through an innovation culture is really interesting and where it works well is where it dissipates and people can actually just take on, they know how to run with it themselves and it becomes less your burden, but more of a shared culture really.

And it’s living and breathing like we were saying about the data now as

well.

[00:38:47] Natasha Reidy: Yep, definitely. And effectively, all the team then really ends up doing is, capturing the learnings, looking at the metrics, constantly tweaking, doing your market scan. So there are other things that in the team can do. I literally would have people come out of the training and participate and they’d go oh me and my partner, we’re considering doing a business idea. I’m really glad I did this. It’s really timely. So I’m going to run these experiments before we actually make any investments. And I was like, god I wish I had able to do that. Yeah so I really, I can’t tell you enough about how it’s not just one or two people that own this particular process.

Innovation is absolutely something that everyone can contribute to especially with experimentation, because you can turn it around really quickly. And also remember that your customers aren’t just external. They are also the people that you might work with every day or might be something that’s annoying you within your time, and there might be an opportunity to better optimise something or automate something that can save you time.

So ultimately one of my favourite definitions for innovation, and I’ve seen everything from five page explanations with diagrams and stuff, but it really comes back to that inventium statement of change that adds value. That’s my favourite definition for innovation. it can go anywhere.

Short and sharp, just a few words and it sums up all those pages really quickly.

[00:39:57] Chris Hudson: Yeah, I mean value is another subjective term really, but that’s a whole other discussion.

[00:40:02] Natasha Reidy: I try to like to sit there and say, okay which ideas do you want to work on first? I was like, okay, well, let’s do effort value. If it’s really easy to define, but value, I was just like, I’m out. I’m not going to bother with value. I can’t, we can’t put money against it because everyone’s going to want to spend six weeks trying to determine how much money is against it.

And I’m like, no, we want to push it through the machine much more quickly. So I was just like, how do I define value? And I fell down that rabbit hole for a few months. And yeah, that was awful.

[00:40:26] Chris Hudson: definitely a facilitation technique that might be worth pointing out for the benefit of the listeners here as well, which is around how to bring agreement together, because obviously around value, anything that you feel is subjective, the company might have a vision statement to say that we want to be the best in the world at this or that. It’s all very interpretive and, in the design work that I do, I’m always trying to encourage, teams and people that I teach students to, to really stay away from some of those words that can be taken away and interpreted, in any way really if not everyone understands what it is you’re aiming at, then obviously it’s very hard to all you club together and have that common purpose really crystallised and actually get behind it in a more meaningful way.

So, just thinking about how to create synergies, how to align people, obviously you can run definitions, workshops, and, you other things where you’re bringing together that understanding or exploring what a different understanding of the word value is, or whatever the metric is, but how have you found that you’ve been able to do that?

[00:41:22] Natasha Reidy: Oh, I also cried a little bit when I tried to do this. So it was quite interesting. But it really came down to, I did actually capture this somewhere and I have some, so it really comes down to, so know your team, know what your drivers are within your team. For example, quite often you’re generally looking at a couple of things from a value, but I am just looking at my wall.

So I happen to have this written on my wall from some other work. So it’s

[00:41:43] Chris Hudson: I thought you were pointing at the cat.

[00:41:46] Natasha Reidy: so it’s either from a product perspective, you’re looking at something that might offer growth savings or competitive advantage. They’re probably the quickest and easiest things because I got stuck on the value for quite some time.

And then, there’s that penny drop moment where something suddenly goes past you and you go, yep, that pretty much probably covers how you can measure value across, across a large number of areas.

[00:42:07] Chris Hudson: Yeah, that’s right. And then, and actually joining that to the metrics, you can pin a lot of, existing or very frequently used metrics to some of those areas as well. And then if you can align on what the priority of those things is, then you can actually create that shared understanding. So this is less important.

This is more important. Okay. Let’s focus on the ideas that are going to do some of this for us as an organisation. So yeah really good. Let’s talk a bit about. Maybe at a personal level, if you’re thinking about yourself and the attitudes or the behaviours that you think work really well in a corporate environment or in an environment where you’re trying to bring this change about or innovate in some way, what are some of those attitudes or behaviours that you think work well that people could take into their own situations?

[00:42:46] Natasha Reidy: It’s a really good question actually, because I was thinking about this as well, like how did I get to be successful? Or how did I get people to trust me with what I was doing as well? So, one of the things I’d started to do early on was basically offer a service, especially earlier in my career. You almost offer your service and offer to help quite early on. And that really helps build trust with people because you become a trusted go to person quite early on. And people go, okay, well, I know Natasha can get shit done, so I’ll keep coming to her.

There is, there’s a balance there about not doing too much. So you pigeonhole yourself. So you never get any growth. But then sometimes, you get that. The project that no one wants and it comes across your desk that because, it’s a bit icky, no one ever wants to migrate a file, a bunch of files onto SharePoint.

But I got stuck with doing that. But what I ultimately knew was how people behaved and also I put over the top of that my own behaviours, which was consistent with everyone else’s, and really understanding you’ve got to understand how people behave and really drive that empathy around the people around you takes a long time to build, it always takes a long time to build social capital.

But by consistently offering to help people with nothing in return, you’ll actually build those trust in those relationships quite quickly. Being consistent with your energy and your passion, people can see when you’re passionate about something and they will get behind you because you’re passionate about it.

And if you have a proven track record of making other people feel a certain way about things, I haven’t quite worked out how to articulate how you put feelings into things because I learned quite early on that if I was passionate about something and if I treated you with respect, even if it was a really icky change and I made you feel like, yes, okay, I’m going to be a bit cranky when we go through this change, but you’re going to let me be cranky about it. I know that I can trust you and I know that I can come to you. You made me feel safe. So I will trust you next time you go to put something in for me because you’ve offered me great support. And that energy and that passion remaining consistent with those will get people on board with you as early as possible.

And there’s a little bit extra in there around as well also building those relationships with your senior managers as well. So understanding the way they need to receive that information. You definitely go through, get things wrong a few times. Especially early in your career you go, I need a thing.

And then your boss goes, well, I need these three things from you. And you’re like, how did I not think of that? But it really does it. Ultimately, every single thing we do will always be about people. And we need to be able to always make sure we keep that in mind and whatever we do is always going to disrupt what they know.

In fact, one of the, a friend of mine said to me really early on about change management is that people never behave the way you expect. Quite often the people you think would be your biggest attractors are generally the first people that come on first and the people you least expect end up being your biggest attractors.

So also knowing that and building those relationships early on, knowing that, okay, I expect you to, I anticipate certain feelings from you because I know these other things about you in your life right now. So how can I help you with this change? Those are some of the things that I do. I’m also quite open about being a bit of an idiot, sometimes the things that I get wrong, I’m quite happy to stand up and go, I was an absolute idiot. Like with the e-commerce thing, I spent my own money. I wish I knew what I knew then. Failing in some of the experiments that to a point where we actually did this one, where we experimented on say a hundred people in Victoria, a hundred people in New South Wales, grew the group.

Oh, everything’s passing. Maybe we’ll go to a bigger group. 500. We sent it out from a security mailbox. It’s like our first ever experiment, maybe the second one, Sent it out from a security mailbox. Suddenly the security mailbox was getting all these out of offices and bounces, and they’re like, Natasha, what’s going on?

I said, oh just doing an experiment, not really thinking about it. It turns out, because the way we’d formatted it, Because it hadn’t gone through any sign offs yet, for like branding, tone of voice, anything. It ended up in like an industry newsletter saying, don’t click on this email. It’s fishy anyway. So like, if I can’t laugh about that, I’m also really open and honest with people about like the mental health stuff as well.

So I’m really conscious about how change can impact our mental health on a day to day basis as well. So, I’ve learned over time as well as both as a certified mental health first aider and someone with my own personal experiences, I can read the language and the way people turn up to meetings quite early on so I can help overcome might be going on.

[00:46:48] Chris Hudson: Yeah, that’s interesting. I mean, I think tuning into the people that you’re talking to and obviously the room that you’re in is often not something that you prepare for because you’re thinking too much about what your presentation is or what, what it is you’re needing to achieve from them.

You’re thinking quite outcome first, really, rather than. People first and often the bridge, the link between those people and what needs to happen and the outcome that needs to be achieved is just left behind. It’s interesting what you say about reading people because sometimes passion can be obviously interpreted in different ways, I’m not a very I guess expressive person, so I’ve got a deadpan expression. A lot of people don’t know how to read me a lot of the time. I’ve struggled with that. I think that there’s other things, you know, neurodiversity is obviously becoming more and more talked about in and around how to tune into people a little bit better and how to help people with some of those cues that aren’t always immediately visible either.

So I think there’s stuff to think about in that in terms how you present yourself on, but also how you’re receiving the visual information and the things from the people that, that you’re surrounded by as well in those situations. I mean, it feels like a lot to take in all of a sudden because you’re not just doing the work, but

it’s all of these kind of psychological cues that you’re trying to figure out too.

[00:47:55] Natasha Reidy: I guess at the end of the day, the work is going to happen. If you’ve gone through whatever corporate work you need to get through to get the sign off for that to happen, that’s going to happen. And ultimately, as I said, there are those people at the core of it. So I am, and I know that I personally get a lot of drivers out of seeing people get to where they need to get to, and actually helping them through whatever change there might be. So I do get a lot out of being able to work with that. And if I’m talking to someone and they say, look, I don’t do small talk, great. I know that now I know, I now know we can come and talk about stuff we’ve gotta do and move forward.

I get a lot outta learning, constantly learning from people because they never behave the way you expect. And I really enjoy that. I find it endlessly fascinating.

[00:48:34] Chris Hudson: Yeah, it is fascinating. That’s what people talk about is other people.

It makes it more interesting, obviously, because it’s never the same as you go through the stages of a project or from one to the next. I’m interested in the flip side of the question that I gave you before, which is also around the bad behaviours, what are the toxic behaviours and things that you’re looking for and how do you get around that?

Because I know that in certain situations, it’s been hard to even, think about what I would say to somebody based on the way that they reacted to some work that I presented or an idea that I presented and it really knocks you back. So how do spot those behaviours and how do you work around

[00:49:05] Natasha Reidy: Yeah, sometimes I’ll go off and cry a bit in the corner. Sometimes I’ll ruminate a bit much about, if I know that a particular personality type is turning up for something, I might ruminate too much on it, which could impact the way I might share the information. Not to say that it happens all the time.

So there’s never, it also depends on the mindset you’re turning up in as well. If I’ve ruminated on something too much, I won’t deliver the same way that I would have if I’d come in a far more positive mindset. So a really good example I can think of is my team and I my, one of my team members and I, we were interacting with somebody and coming off that call, my teammate was like, what was that about?

I’ve never experienced an interaction like that before in my life. And I was like, holy shivers. Like in that moment, I thought that the two of us could sit there and really fall down a rabbit hole of quite a negative conversation. So I posed him three quick questions, which I now can’t remember, but they were amazing questions, about what we, I’ve got to flip this into a learning experience.

that could actually, I was like, okay, so there were other people on the call. How did you see the way that they were reacting? Did you get a feeling about this? Or do you think that there was a way that we could have presented something a little bit differently as well? So I really had to turn it because it wasn’t just me.

I had to really turn that whole conversation. So we didn’t fall down a rabbit hole knowing we would still need to consistently work with these people, and not make it a continued negative experience as well. So I was like, quickly, what can we learn? So we know the next time we work together that this is how we’re going to approach it.

[00:50:28] Chris Hudson: Yeah, it ties really well to a point that was made in a previous episode with Jane Curtin when I was talking to her in and around this and actually the fact that you learn from every conversation. No matter what it is, you learn something from a conversation that you have with somebody because you wouldn’t have otherwise had that interaction.

So even in the face of adversity where you’re up against maybe a really unpleasant character, like a villain that you find at work sometimes, or maybe it’s just a reaction that you weren’t expecting. Being okay with the fact that you don’t have to respond in that moment is something to say as well, because, you’re just listening, you’re taking it on board and you can always say, I’d really love to,

get

[00:51:02] Natasha Reidy: back to you on that?

[00:51:02] Chris Hudson: Yeah, I’d really love to think about that a little bit more, we’ll come back to you on that, buy yourself a little bit of time if you need it and don’t feel pressured to just engage. You can disengage too.

[00:51:11] Natasha Reidy: Definitely come back to something, but I also learned and as you said you’re not going to get on well with every single person you meet, but you are still going to have to work with those people to deliver the same thing. So I sat there, there was, throughout my career, there was like one or two people that sort of like, oh that person irritates me for some reason.

Okay. So I would actually actively seek out an opportunity to work with them so I could find out how we could work together. And I knew it was my own personal thing. Because as I said, you’re not gonna love everyone you work with. And I find those sorts of people offer me an exciting challenge and an opportunity to learn something new.

And yes, there are the angry people that like to throw their hands up and throw stuff across the room. There are a whole completely separate thing. And I’ve got over, I’m at a point now where I can’t be bothered with that, and I just turn around and walk out. I’ve got other things to be doing with my time, but those ones that sort of make you feel that little bit, it could be like a challenge where you might and it really comes back to your own self reflection as well. Do I not know as much as what that person is? And I feel a bit threatened or is there something about that dynamic that changes the way that I’m turning up as well?

So how, cause I would actually actively seek out these people just so I could feel that awkwardness and understand what that meant from a delivery perspective.

[00:52:16] Chris Hudson: Well, yeah, I mean that takes the bigger person, doesn’t it? To really jump in

[00:52:19] Natasha Reidy: not every time, didn’t do it every time, but I did, there were a few times that I worked out really well and I actually really enjoyed the outcome that I got from that.

[00:52:26] Chris Hudson: Yeah. It’s a funny place, isn’t it? Work. There’s a slight social circles, but in a really forced setting where some people really, you get the impression that some people really gravitate towards, other characters at work. And you’re wondering why is that? Because from what I could tell, I wouldn’t want to be anywhere near that person, but yet all the people are around them.

So it’s like the school playground all over again.

[00:52:46] Natasha Reidy: It is and then you sort of go, oh, this person’s like this. Then you’re sort of over here and you’re like, but you wouldn’t like that there. Who is this person? Yeah. Workplaces. Ultimately I just find as long as there’s a really good vision and I can get people behind that vision and keep people focused and a really positive outcome, I’m sorry, with a really positive mindset.

It does keep people moving forward and it’s not that I’m into like toxic positivity or anything like that. I know that if I dwell on the things that don’t quite go right, I can fall down quite deeply as well and I don’t really want to do that. I’ve got other things I’d like to be doing with my time.

[00:53:18] Chris Hudson: And what keeps you personally energised or positive?

[00:53:21] Natasha Reidy: So there’s probably a variety of things and there’s that social connection. I do require that sort of brain food. My biggest, my most favourite thing is really being able to help people on their career. Like, I always say the first time someone comes to you and says, oh can you be my mentor?

It’s the most sort of earth shattering, groundbreaking kind of moment where you go, oh my god that person sees me as something that I never saw myself as, and you realise that you’re in a position that you can actually help someone else and really taking that moment to realise the people that have helped you and the ways that it mattered to you along the way.

And sometimes you don’t even realise it’s that indirect help as well. But I love knowing that, probably one of the things I miss the most during lockdown is that connection element. I used to be able to talk to people X, they’ll tell me they were building out certain things in their team. And then people Y would be talking to me about, randomly about career growth or new opportunities. They want to steal some new skills. They wanted to learn and I’ll be like, oh randomly, these two people should absolutely have a chat together. So I really miss that the most in a corporate environment. That’s one of my biggest things is really sort of propelling the people around me forward to make them great as well. It really comes down to the balance side of that is creating great people around you so you can just step back and get out of their way so they can continue building the things that they love to do as well.

[00:54:33] Chris Hudson: Yeah, it’s a really important point and actually a corporate environment can really shut you off, but actually maintaining not only a connection within the walls, but also outside is super important for that balance of perspective, really, because you can go stir crazy in there. And think it’s totally normal, but it might not be totally normal.

So I’d encourage people to obviously reach out and just share stories outside of work. It’s that after work drinks culture as well. It all points into the same place where actually if you can draw connections to other parts of the world and other social circles and other companies, then that, that can really help too.

[00:55:04] Natasha Reidy: It helps you feel okay when things don’t go right. Like when you do get things wrong and you go, oh yeah, I’ve done that five times and I keep doing it and everyone goes, oh okay. It’s actually alright. So that sort of that seeking that normalisation through things that might feel like big things at the time and when they do feel big, they can be quite debilitating.

It’s really sort of making sure you find that connection and that balance point to help you keep moving forward and make you stop and go. So A it’s okay to ask for help and B, what did we learn and how can we take that into tomorrow?

[00:55:33] Chris Hudson: I just wanted to maybe finish with one question. It’s maybe more a practical one, but we’ve talked a lot about frameworks and tools, lots of things that have helped you and the teams that you’ve coached in the area of innovation in the area of experimentation.

What are some of the practical things that people could start with by looking at, what are some of the resources that you think would be worthwhile just starting with if people wanted to get into this area?

[00:55:55] Natasha Reidy: Now I always recommend people check out Alberto Savoia on LinkedIn. So he is the master of what’s called Pretotype. And he does actually have a book out there called The Right It as well. That gives you a really good example of how to look at your experimentation, building out those hypotheses, really getting focused in on the market, designing and building that experiment for $0 in 24 hours, which is great when you’ve got no cash in the bank. Totally wish I’d done that. And it really explains to you why it matters as well. So it really comes down to that. We all love to build things.

Doesn’t mean we should, and he really goes into a great, a lot of great detail about that. There is also an onshore area you can go and check out. You can follow Leslie Barry on LinkedIn. You can check out the Exponentially website, exponentially.com, and you’ll be able to find out some more information there as well.

I also follow, as a couple of other people I follow on LinkedIn. Pawel Huryn. I He does a lot of stuff around the product management space and really ties in a lot of that early experimentation.

And so does Dan Olsen bit of a creator there with some early product management and rapid experimentation as well. All advocates for that, obviously myself Chris Hudson. Feel free to reach out to any of us on LinkedIn. Always happy to have a random chat. If anyone even wants to say how on earth do I get a four day work week experiment off the ground, reach out to me.

I can give you some sneaky little insights. If you’re curious about maybe a startup idea, reach out to me as well. Those are probably my biggest recommendations at the moment.

[00:57:24] Chris Hudson: That’s so useful. Thanks so much, Tash, and yeah, I just want to say what a delight it’s been to have you on the show and to chat through some of these things. I mean, it’s both in an area that we feel really passionate about and yeah, just to explore it and push it into different corners. What actually sits behind a lot of the frameworks and the ways in which, people either take these things on board or they don’t take things, these things on board and actually to explore some of those things has been really interesting today.

So thank you so much for your time.

[00:57:49] Natasha Reidy: I really enjoyed it. Thank you. I hope everyone got something a little bit out of it. And again, reach out if anyone has any questions. Always happy to have a chat about innovation and experimentation. It is my love language.

[00:58:00] Chris Hudson: Brilliant. Thanks so much, Tash. Thank you.

[00:58:02] Natasha Reidy: you. Bye.

[00:58:03] 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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