Crafting purpose-driven events: Insights from a master builder of inspiration, community and influence
“I think what events should be doing is playing that role of fostering community, fostering connection and really thinking about what they’re looking to do, what’s their mission.”
Grant Show
In this episode you’ll hear about
- Crafting compelling presentations: Exploring the art of crafting presentations that captivate your audience and how to use storytelling techniques borrowed from film and TV to spark engagement in the workplace
- Hosting purpose-driven events: The power and role of events to bring people together, network, turbocharge learning and leverage influence
- Challenging the status quo: How to embrace a mindset and active approach to stepping out of your comfort zone, pushing boundaries and challenging the status quo through innovation
- Radical optimism: The key to staying optimistic in the face of challenges and how leveraging extreme resilience and positivity can transform your workplace adversity
- Creating community and connection: How to foster genuine community in the digital age, maintaining authentic motivations and enabling value for all parties
Key links
About our guest
Grant is a multi-disciplinary design leader, traversing visual communications design, experience and service design, strategy, and development. His style is visionary, inclusive, and brimming with positivity. His passion for action is contagious and he’s famous for getting a lot done.
Grant is Founder of Design Outlook, and was formerly Head of Design at Frog, and Director of Experience Design at Deloitte. He’s also working towards a Masters in Design from RMIT.
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 a very warm welcome to this next twisting and turning episode of the Company Road podcast. It’s really often we think of what it takes to change a company from the inside or with a little help from our good friends, the consultants or our favourite helper these days, which is AI.
But I’ve been thinking about what other influences there are that can have a really dramatic and positive impact on the performance and the aspirations and the engagement of businesses and organisations and their ability to change really. So there’s the business side and obviously there’s the human engine room that powers it.
I think that what inspires businesses as a whole and us as people can be very different things. The business side is very sort of rational, lots of visions, objectives, strategies, there’s KPIs, there’s frameworks, there’s proven methodologies and research methodologies and everything that goes with it.
But for people, we might actually be thinking we get inspired by the stuff, we get inspired by the people, life, family, education, podcasts, mentoring, training, lots of things. And today I want to focus on an area where these two worlds probably do intersect quite nicely. We’re going to discuss the role of events and especially the power of events to really bring people together to network, to leverage influence, turbocharge our learning in some way.
And it usually comes in at the time that you need it. So I know for myself that I don’t always have the headspace to take in information, but when I do it’s kind of like give it to me and give me more of that. I’m quite greedy with it sometimes, but joining us today is none other than the incredible Grant Show, who’s a multidisciplinary design leader and grant you hold a master’s in design futures from RMIT.
You’re the director of experience design at Deloitte previously, and head of design at Frog and you’ve gone on to found what I believe is probably the most compelling and participatory event that’s running in Australia at the moment, which is called Design Outlook for those of you who don’t know.
And that’s getting bigger and bigger each year, which is fantastic. So Grant a massive welcome to the show and thanks very much for coming on.
[00:01:53] Grant Show: Thanks, Chris. I appreciate it. I appreciate it greatly. Just a very quick thing. I haven’t quite completed the masters of design. It’s one of those many things that I pick up and follow the trail. And I think I’ll finish it before 2030. That’s for sure but not quite there yet.
And similar to the conference, it’s like one of those hobbies that I pick up and follow along as far as I possibly can.
[00:02:11] Chris Hudson: Nice. Nice. So we’ll start with an easy question. What’s on your mind today?
[00:02:15] Grant Show: Some of the things that you mentioned in that intro were things that I have been thinking about a lot lately around the role of the conference and what we do as we are starting to hit our third year and we have a, I suppose, a duty of care to our audience, right, and what we’re trying to produce and what we’re trying to do.
And I’ve been thinking a lot about that connection and the community part of it as well. And so I think that really speaks to some of the values that we try to bring to the conference and making that connection as well. I’m a people person. I love being around people.
And so, creating events and conferences is something that comes quite naturally to me. And then I just love doing for the sake of connection and community.
I’ve always liked, actually, I’ve always liked to be a part of community things. If I think back about some of the first things that I organised, I was on the student representative council in high school. And I loved being a part of that committee and growing into, I suppose, a community role and I went from there into my local council, really small rural town in Northern New South Wales. At primary school in year six I was school captain for the first half of the year, and the other boy was school captain for the second half of the year. Sort of small town stuff. But I started this youth committee with the council, and I was the president of the youth committee from around age 14 to 17 and really loved being a part of communities and building community as well.
So, those are probably the two earliest memories. And you can see from my face how much joy it brings me just thinking about how fun that was and interesting.
[00:03:39] Chris Hudson: So you’re telling us a bit about obviously your first moments of being a part of a group in organising things at school and obviously running activities and certain events, presumably back then.
And I was thinking a bit about that and also a bit about how businesses work and the fact that, some people love to observe a little bit. Some people like to speak a lot. Some people love to facilitate and some people like to kind of disrupt in the kindest way possible. They like to shake it up a little bit.
Did you, you know, from that early age, were you always thinking that there’s a different way of doing this in some way or another?
[00:04:09] Grant Show: I mean, I’m the firstborn son. I’ve always felt there’s a different way of doing something and having the confidence to get away with thinking like that, right? There’s not a lot of boundaries for a firstborn son. And so, and I think even about things that I do today. It’s probably more arrogance than it is really considered and thought out ideas.
I guess what I’m lucky about is my value system grounds me in doing things for the right reasons. It’s just the inner energy to move forward. I have been a master facilitator in workshops for a really long time, and so one of the courses I did was Luma’s expert facilitator course, and in it they talk about the kinds of personalities that you’ll see business.
They talk about it in workshops, but really what they meant was business, and there is the people that think out loud, the people that think internally the people that don’t really have thoughts but say stuff anyway and I find, I’m more of the, you know my style, and you would have experienced this in the ways that we work together as well, is that I’m an integrator, I really to just bring people together and trust the system and the process and see what happens and set some expectation and some guidelines around what will happen, but firmly believe that the intelligent people in the room will prevail with the right goals and the right clarity, which is a core, core part of how I run Design Outlook as well, as you mentioned, that volunteer model, it’s, I’m not telling anyone what to do, I’m sort of inspiring and ushering along the way, and we all do it together.
[00:05:27] Chris Hudson: But you must have an inkling, I suppose, around the chemistry aspects. The combination of ingredients that would come together to make for the right formula.
[00:05:35] Grant Show: Definitely. I’m a huge fan of Clifton strengths. Massive, massive fan of, the Clifton Gallup strengths model. And my five strengths of a possible 34 are strategic positivity, include a communication and woo. And then includer and positivity as a combo give me these are natural and strategic, I suppose, in some ways, isn’t sort of natural ability to look inside someone and see what I’m going to be able to get out of them and not in a self serving way. I can just immediately say hey I know what you’re going to be good at and I know how to include you in this and to deploy you to a problem or to a challenge as well And I love it when my leaders do that for me when they go oh, I can see that this would be something that you’d be great at it and apply me to it’s really fulfilling.
So I try to do that as much as I can as well.
[00:06:21] Chris Hudson: Is that sort of a switch that’s actively on a lot of the times It’s something that you’ve had to learn about yourself? Is it through your own professional development that you’ve tuned into that? Or do you feel like it’s something that was there on the radar and it was like a spider sense all along?
[00:06:33] Grant Show: Yeah, is it skill or is it talent, right? Thinking about those sorts of things, like skill being something that you build and talent is something you’re born with. I think probably started off as talent and I was unconsciously competent and then as I’ve really started to pay attention to it and that would be through the strengths based coaching that I’ve had and leadership approach that I’ve had to things as well.
There is an element of in Gallup Strengths, not that I want to make this an advertisement for Gallup Strengths, but there is sort of a phrase of, name it, claim it, aim it right? So be able to label and go, okay, that is something that I’m good at and something that I can do, claim it, acknowledge it as who I am, and this is what I’m going to be projecting from here on out, and then aim it.
I think about really specific things that I can use those strengths for along the way. So I think for me, some of it’s probably stylistic and talent. And then the other is skill that I’ve then started to hone that for and listen to that intuition a little bit better about people and what I’m going to get out of them as well.
[00:07:27] Chris Hudson: I mean, obviously it’s led you to do some great things. I’m sure we’ll talk about design outlook, but is there another story of that coming and coming to fruition that you want to tell?
[00:07:34] Grant Show: Yeah, quite possibly. I mean, one of the sort of career highlights for me was at Autodesk. And when I joined Autodesk, they’re just sort of going through this big restructure. I joined to be design manager of this one smallish team of about five people. And then about a month later, there was a massive restructure and I three teams jammed under me.
So my team went from 4 or 5 to b13 overnight. Some of them indirect reports, some of them direct reports, and they’re across products that are kind of similar, but they didn’t really know what to do. And there’s lots of overlap between some of the roles in terms of products. It’s a bit of competition as well.
And so my sort of natural approach was to explore strengths together and I brought that in and I wanted to help them to understand that they’re not victims in a situation, that they’re actually masters of their own destiny and I don’t say that to say, you own your own career and things like that, but hey, we’re in a team, we’re in a room together, if we are mature and we show up, we can work out, hey, well even though this person has VR, a designer in their title, and so does that person.
It doesn’t mean you’re naturally competitive. You’re going to have different things that you’re going to be good at, because your entire lifetime of experience is different from each other. But come together and let’s park ego for a minute and think about, hey, what are the skills that we can do?
And what is the thing that’s greater than the sum of our two parts? What could we do together that we couldn’t do alone as well? And so sort of pushing through and forging through that experience, it was tough. They were escalating to my manager that they didn’t like the process. There were lots of complaints and it was a really tough environment, but I had all the air cover in the world from my manager, really great leader.
And so after about a year of pushing through it, we went from being this sort of motley crew of people that didn’t really have a common reason to be together to having a really clear defined mission statement. We had our skills heat maps, we had problems that we knew we’d be great at, problems that we knew we wouldn’t be great at.
And so we just worked through those definitions together to just again, to use the CliftonStrengths, the sort of name it. Hey what kind of team are we? And I asked them that question up front. What kind of team are we? And I couldn’t answer it, because I didn’t really know the answer to that, right?
I took them through some frameworks by John Katzenbach and I think it’s Paul Smith on the nature of teams. We went through some of that work and had some And now, actually, one of my favourite workshops to do is with teams, it’s a sort of a self identity, self definition workshop and it’s a got it down to almost a skill now in a half day workshop of coming together and making some choices around what do we do, how will we be successful, what do we value as well.
It’s super invigorating and fulfilling when you see the light turn off or people go, Oh, I can make these decisions, right? I can choose what kind of team I want to be, how I want to show up in that team and what that means for the business that I work for as well.
[00:10:19] Chris Hudson: Yeah, that’s incredible. I mean, and I think the preparation in bringing that together is an important part. I feel like the initiation is also important. I wonder what advice you might give to somebody who feels like they’re in a bit of a toxic team where there are egos and other competing agendas flying around.
What could they do to basically make a start in a way that would be positive?
[00:10:38] Grant Show: I think the first reason that those sorts of competitive types of cultures come about is because of a lack of transparency in the organisation. That’s the first reason that I believe that happens. People then start hiding things. I don’t know what they know about me or what I know about them, so they stop sharing.
And so, the first advice that I have is overshare. Tell everyone your plans. Tell everyone your goals and your ambitions. And you start the process of being vulnerable in that space. Because it is vulnerable. You’re going to be telling people, hey, this is what I want to get out of this role.
This is my career plan. Here are the things that I want to do. It’s going to be really confronting for others because they’re not used to that. It’s going to be very different to the environment. But it’s not offensive. It’s not confronting. What reactions you’ll probably get from them is, well I want that also.
Right? That’s good. That’s a good reaction in some ways because then you go, Great. Well, how can we both get that together? Right? So you’ve got to, you’ve got to realise what you’re going into, you’ve got to have a nice suit of armour because it’s going to be a little bit prickly. Creating a culture of transparency and openness and vulnerability.
You can do it. You can do it overnight. can start that. You overshare, over communicate, think out loud as much as you possibly can and you’ll start changing that culture in your team. The other is being authentic. So when we want to be authentic, so tell stories of challenges that you’ve had.
Be open and honest about what you’re scared about. Be your real self. And one of two things will happen. People will start to meet you where you’re at, and you’re not trying to tease people out, right? You’re not trying to say hey Chris, tell me what are your goals here? What are you trying to get out of this?
And so on, right? That’s like trying to crack the nut through force, and you won’t, you’ll go whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. No, That’s not how it works here. But if I start sharing and I talk about the things that I’m worried about and and so on. And I said, Hey, what, you know, what’s keeping you up at night? It’s a totally different question, right? So you’re, you can start to, it’s one of two things will happen. You’ll lean into me and you’ll start to want to engage and have conversations cause you’re like, Oh, there’s a human there. There’s somebody that I want to work with, or you’ll ridicule me, your credit, make it harder.
And then I’ll know that this is not the place for me to work. Right, so one of two great things will happen so knowing that it’s the place for you to work because people lean in or knowing that it’s not because they’ve leaned further away. Right. And you’re not going to be able to do anything in that environment if someone leans away.
You just can’t. You either have to reset your expectation that that’s the culture I’m in or maybe think about alternate positions.
[00:12:49] Chris Hudson: Do you have any kind of rituals that prepare you for that level of exposure? If you’re thinking about vulnerability and presenting your authentic self and engaging conversation with people that you’re not really knowing as much. I mean, you may have observed them, but you don’t know them that well.
And you’re going to give quite a lot away about yourself. But what’s your method there?
[00:13:07] Grant Show: That’s something comes quite naturally, that sort of o oversharing of fears and uncertainties and doubts. But I have a a situation at the moment actually a real life situation where I’m not quite seeing eye to eye with somebody else on a project. And I want to embrace that vulnerability and embrace that sort of style of transparency with them.
But rather than going in and saying to them, Hey and, advocating for myself, Hey, this is what I want to get out of this, and here’s how I’m thinking about it. I’m going to be delicate. It’s a really wonderful concept of advocacy versus inquiry. I’m going to ask questions or I’m going to pitch my beliefs.
It’s a fantastic framework. If you Google it and read a couple of articles you’ll master it straight away. So for this particular example, I’m going to go in with an empathy map, classic empathy map of them, of what I think they’re seeing, feeling, thinking, and doing, and why and I’m going to sketch that out before I go into it, so that I can break down that initial barrier of us not seeing eye to eye, so I can say, hey, look I’m trying, I’m here, I’m in this space with you and help me to fill this out, is there anything I’ve missed in this empathy map for you?
I’m hoping that it’s a conversation in this as well. To support that, I’ve got my own empathy map of what I’m thinking, seeing, feeling, and doing and I’m going to write down all the doubts and uncertainties and fears that I have and my hope, and I’ve never done this before, but my hope is that by using some of these sort of frameworks my mind and put it on a piece of paper that you can make it a bit more objective.
There’s some other things that I’ve read about in relationship books as well, around sitting next to the person when we’re having a a tough conversation rather than opposite. Writing it down and putting it in front of you so that it’s Grant and Chris versus the problem not Grant versus Chris, those sorts of like small little hacks as well.
But the empathy mount I’m trying that and I’m going to give that a go and see how that works. I feel like it’s got legs, you don’t know until
[00:14:48] Chris Hudson: after.
Yeah. Yeah. The walking meeting is also a favourite for that, isn’t it? Where you’re basically side by side and
[00:14:52] Grant Show: Yeah. That’s right. The West Wing walk and talk.
[00:14:54] Chris Hudson: Yeah. you can pretend you’re
going the same direction, even if you’re not.
[00:14:57] Grant Show: Yeah, that’s right, we’re moving together, we’re not too much facial contact. Sometimes a bit too much facial contact can cause weird sort of relationship dynamics as well, I find.
For me anyway, and there’s no science behind that, I just find sometimes too much eye contact and facial contact can create weirdness.
[00:15:12] Chris Hudson: I’m just making the leap maybe into the event space because I think that there’s an interesting dynamic there. I mean, you and I are talking on screen opposite to each other, but how do you get people feeling like they’re alongside one another in a sort of theatre environment where you’re basically being spoken at, or there’s a keynote or there’s lots going on, but there’s a ton of people and you think you’re with them, but the person on the stage wants you to believe that you’re with them.
It’s kind of an interesting dynamic to think about. Yeah.
[00:15:35] Grant Show: So I don’t think, I don’t think audiences see themselves as being a part of an audience when they’re an active part of an audience and they’re watching a presentation, I think that they are engrossed entirely, that they have that tunnel vision, I am watching the presentation.
There’s something nice about it going to a the movies by yourself, going to the cinema to watch something by yourself, you can do it and it’s okay. But it’s not as pleasant as sitting next to someone, even if it’s a mate, a parent, right, that shared experience is really nice as well.
So I think you get those benefits out of it, but I don’t, I don’t think an audience really sees themselves as part of an audience. They’re really locked they have that intimacy as well. So long as the presenter doesn’t break the fourth wall too much, right, because that’s still a thing in events as well.
[00:16:15] Chris Hudson: Do you want to explain the fourth wall just people who don’t know?
[00:16:17] Grant Show: Yeah, so the fourth wall I’m sure many of you have heard of it from television and cinema. Fourth wall is looking directly at the camera and it’s it breaks the illusion. So it prevents people from suspending disbelief. When you go to watch a movie, see a play, go to a conference, you have this element of suspended disbelief where you’re willing to forego certain realities as a result of the illusion that’s there. And one of the ways that you can ruin that illusion is by looking at the camera. Too much audience interaction can take it a bit far away as well. Too many errors in the presentation, some technical errors and things like that.
It really just causes this sort of stall in the momentum and then people just lose that ability to suspend disbelief as well. So, there’s a lot that goes into creating sort of audience experiences and a lot of thinking about that that we do especially.
I think not a lot of conferences do it, but we definitely put a lot of effort into it.
[00:17:06] Chris Hudson: Yeah I was fortunate enough to be invited as part of the group and just seeing the people that you brought together and we were talking about story and we were talking about some of the unexpected elements of bringing those strands of experience together, really what’s fuelled your curiosity around how to put these experiences together?
[00:17:22] Grant Show: The main reason that I started Design Outlook was it was 2021. We were coming out of the end of lockdowns, right? There was still a few, I think July, My wife and I, we were in New Zealand and we threaded the needle and we flew over and then there was a lockdown here.
They closed the bubble and then we were actually not even sure if we were going to get a flight back from New Zealand home on the last day, but we made it and we went into lockdown for that last one in Melbourne that went forever. And I was really missing, that connection to other people and really missing being out and having meetings like this and I just became really tiresome.
I was pretty glum and gloomy and I started thinking about what I’d missed about community. And also what I was seeing in the industry and I realised that design as an industry and it’s not unique to design, but it’s just as my field of view is around design is maturing in awkward ways.
And everyone was learning. I was working as a consultant, so I was seeing into lots of organisations and I was saying that everyone’s kind of solving the same problem, but they’re not talking to each other about it. They’re not coming together like we would before the pandemic and meetups and industry events and a number of things.
So everyone was learning lessons the hard way. They were not communicating, there was no real community or sense of connection. And I was thinking a lot about that and I was like, you know what, I think we’re not maturing because there’s not enough juniors in the industry. There’s not enough juniors in the industry because there’s not enough managers, like there’s this cycle of leadership, or this vacuum of leadership, I suppose, that happens.
And then if you don’t have good managers, and you don’t know how to build the right structures, and organisations don’t perform really well, and there’s a lot of, known evidence about the impacts of bad managers. And I just wanted to start a meetup. I just wanted to get some people out together and to have a conversation and to talk about what, can you use, normal post its or super sticky post its and Sharpies or J. W. Pens, you know, having this really mundane conversation about design and all the problems that you’re solving and so on and had enough momentum and enough people say yes that I thought maybe there’s something else here. What else do I miss here? And I think that’s that really that coming together, the community, that shared sense of purpose and reason of being, you know, raison d’etre, of industry.
And so I put together an ambition pack it was like eight slides of what I would do if I had the right support for a conference. And there were like 20 presenters that were in it. And then they all said yes. And I thought, well, damn, now I’m going to have to put this thing together. And I pulled together a community of volunteers and we had some early design workshops.
together around some principles of what we’re here for. And so we’re always in person. We’re never online. We’re about great food and nourishment. We want to break bread together. We’re about taking the time to move through something. We don’t want to rush through anything.
And if we can’t do it perfectly, we’re not going to do it. And we’ll be patient with that. And then, we want to be diverse, we want to be inclusive, we want to be accessible, and we want to be affordable. Those are some of the principles that we put together. And all of those are ingredients for community, right?
Those are things that you have. If you want to build community, you need those things. The alternate is being exclusive, being expensive, being elite. And then all of a sudden you’ve just eliminated 99 percent your audience and the community, and a sense of community, right? So, sure it might have prestige, but it doesn’t have meaning is probably my cynic’s view of it.
[00:20:29] Chris Hudson: And what were the early signs of it working? If you remember what could you see happening and unfolding that made you think, oh, this is great?
[00:20:35] Grant Show: Yeah, some of the early signs of it working were I didn’t get a lot of no’s. I genuinely didn’t get a couple of haters from the site, Throwing Stones, and saying, you’re not paying your presenters, you’re taking advantage of people and things like that.
We couldn’t afford to pay presenters, it wasn’t like that. And then we made sure that we had that value exchange that was really high for our presenters. They got a lot out of it and all of them when I’d apologised for not being able to pay them, I felt quite bad after I got that criticism.
They were like, no, we do this for free in a heartbeat. So some of the early signs was how enthusiastic people were about participating and what they wanted to do. And I think, I believe that’s because of the reason that I’m going into it. It’s not to create an events company. And that was another principle that we had, we’re not an events company.
We’re in it for industry and for the community and the benefit of great design. And I mean it. I run a really transparent business. We have monthly calls with our sponsors and presenters and stakeholders. And I share our financial status and the things that we’re doing.
And so, I think the things that I’ve done have created this energy around it and so when I see that energy in people wanting to come and get involved and wanting to do things is where I really thought that there was something there. But I don’t think I really realised that until probably after the second year.
The first year when we had it, it was like 9 o’clock, the MC had just started, and our first keynote Leah Heiss, who was absolutely amazing, had started to tell an incredible story, and I had panic attack. I actually left the conference, and I walked around the city for about an hour and a half, and came back at the break.
I just couldn’t be there. I thought, fuck, what have I done? Is really what I was thinking, I’m like, this is gonna go catastrophically bad, and it’s not. And I came back and people are taking photos, and had filled notepads, and were glued to their chairs and looking forward, and I was like, okay, maybe I have sort of hit something here.
And then in the mid afternoon another presenter Oliver Rhee had stood on stage, and Ollie joined a design studio that I was a member of in Sydney about 12 years ago now, as a sort of junior ish designer, and his presentation was about becoming a design leader, and his coming of age story of that, and I was actually crying at the side of the stage, because I was overcome with the quality of what we put together, the stories that people were able to hear and that experience of community. It was overwhelming in a really positive way.
[00:22:44] Chris Hudson: Oh, that’s incredible. I mean, when the plan comes together and you can see that happening and unfolding it must’ve involved a level of stress throughout that time as well. I mean,
how do you manage that?
[00:22:54] Grant Show: This is not for someone with a weak stomach, right? So, last year we did 60 percent of our revenue. Two weeks before the event so like it was like, last year’s everyone’s getting fired. There’s no money in the industry, but we’d committed and so we went anyway, and we pulled the trigger to go anyway And I was just thinking okay.
Well, we’re gonna have to refinance the house I’m gonna have to you know, sell my left leg and here are the things I’m gonna do and so it was very stressful that sort of, that last few weeks, and when you saw 60 percent of the revenue come in and I was like, Oh how are people this last minute with coming to a conference and so on, and it’s the economy at the time, right?
But it’s incredibly stressful but to answer your question about how I manage that stress I think I’m incredibly lucky in that I don’t really acknowledge stress. Or don’t let it get on top of me. I’m able to label it and I’m able to go, okay, that’s kind of what it is and logically break down the problem and be able to move through it.
And I get emotional in other ways. As I said, I was, emotional when Olly was presenting and so on. So it comes out in other ways. But stress I just, if my head’s on fire, I’m not going to help anyone, right? So let’s keep that cool, calm composure and let’s break problems down.
Let’s write lists of the problem, right? So I’ve got Trello lists for Design Outlook for Do24. Huge list of all the problems that I have to solve and I’m just going to park them over there. Get them out of the head. Don’t really let them consume and just know that nothing’s gonna be so catastrophic that I can t fix it or that I couldn’t reach out to my community, my friends, my peers and say, Hey I need some help here.
And I have done that in the past even with the conference Hey, I need help here. And I know people will come to help as well, so, I see in my peers and friends who stress ruins them, right, they go into this sort of fight or flight mode and it really locks them down and they can’t cope with that.
I don’t envy that at all. I think I’m quite lucky. And I think a lot of that comes from, 20 plus years of therapy now trying to work on myself and do these sorts of things and getting pretty in tune with what the body and the mind are doing or not doing together. And I think that, maybe there’s, it’s a bit more than luck.
Probably it’s a bit more than luck.
[00:24:52] Chris Hudson: Yeah, I mean you work at it. I mean that’s for yourself, but obviously we’re human, we work with other people all the time. How do you deal with other people’s stress when you’re confronted with that?
[00:25:00] Grant Show: As a consultant one of the key phrases that I have and that I work with my juniors or peers probably not about cause it’s a little harder to deliver this feedback is don’t get caught up in the client’s energy. Right, so, think about what steadiness means on the project.
Think about what your own pace should be for the project, knowing if I do these things, the project will be successful. Do that. Stick to that, that cadence and that pace that you have. If you get caught up in the energy around you you’re going to lose focus of the goal, lose focus of the plan and you’re just not going to get there.
And so when I see other people that are stressed, I remind myself of that. Don’t get caught up in their energy. Sometimes you forget. Sometimes it’s just too hard and you just get swept up away, and then you’re like frantically, oh my gosh yes we need to put this fire out, and then you’re like, wait where’s the actual fire, and you start thinking of a book more pragmatically and it’s a tension in my relationship at home, I’ll be like, hey, don’t worry about it. And so on. And my wife is no, this is something I want to worry
[00:25:54] Chris Hudson: Yeah.
[00:25:54] Grant Show: as well. So different dynamics and so on as well. But that’s a tough one.
[00:25:58] Chris Hudson: That’s an interesting point. It really around, I guess, unpredictability or ambiguity within business Because you’re always confronted with it and you can step back to the basics and like you say, stick to your plan or you can observe what’s happening and you, can kind of give your shared understanding of what’s happening in the room. You can obviously relay that back to the rest of the team members. If everyone’s a bit unsure as to where the conversation is going, summarise it and bring it back in some way and play back what you think you’re hearing.
So that’s, it’s a bit of that kind of mediation involved as well but there’s an interesting kind of split between that unpredictability and predictability in business. I think that predictability and the familiarity is almost there. It’s a bit of a veneer. It feels like you basically, you go to work expecting certain things to happen and you’ve got your agendas and you’ve got your meetings and you’ve got your places and you’ve got your drinks, your lunches here or there.
There’s a routine and a rhythm to it. And then all of a sudden, that’s thrown into chaos when something else happens, and it’s usually because of people and it’s usually something that people are unprepared for. So, I’m thinking about that and then I’m thinking about like events because, in an event setting, you might’ve- events are totally unpredictable. Totally, yeah, yeah.
I’m wondering whether one can kind of teach the other about how to deal with things that are unplanned essentially.
[00:27:09] Grant Show: Even going into Do24, we’ve got our plans, things are looking good, tickets are going well at the moment, sponsorships are coming on really well but you can’t rely on it until the money’s in the bank and the things at the end of the day, right? Like, so these signs are promising.
We could fall off a cliff in terms of sales and sponsorship tomorrow. There’s no rhyme or reason for that, right? So I can’t predict what to do about that. I just can only make decisions with the information that I have. And I suppose maybe that’s a core strength of being able to lean into acknowledging that I can only make decisions with the information that I have.
And there’s blog that I read by this guy from the U. S. Charles Lambden, The Lateral Lens. Really fantastic reading. There’s only two newsletters that I subscribe to. His is one of them. He had an article recently about high quality decisions, and he was talking about the quality of a decision.
So a low quality decision with a good outcome was still a low quality decision, right? So you got lucky along the way. A low quality decision with a low quality outcome was still a low quality decision. A high quality decision with a low quality outcome was still a high quality decision, right? You still logically move through it, and so when we’re making decisions at home about things that we want to do, like big decisions and things that we want to do we’ll pause for a moment and we’ll think about the decision we’re making and we’ll agree, hey, this is a high quality decision.
And part of the reason we’re doing that is because we don’t want to beat ourselves up in six months time when the decision that we made was wrong, even though the decision was high quality. So, I think maybe that’s a way that I’m able to navigate the unpredictabilities because I’m thinking intentionally about the decisions that I’m making and labelling them as I call it.
I didn’t know that’s what I was doing until I read the article and I was like, okay, yeah, that resonates a lot with the way that I work and the things that I do.
[00:28:48] Chris Hudson: Yeah. I mean, that’s from managing the event and dealing with everything that’s thrown your way and all things in between. But I’m thinking as well from the point of view of participation and community, like you were talking about. Because in the event space, it’s like turning up at a wedding and not knowing anybody or sitting at a table where you know, we’re going to the cinema by yourself, but having to talk to everybody that’s there or, there are lots of unexpected things about that environment and people get very cagey about networking and some people love it. How do you think people can make that a bit easier on themselves?
[00:29:20] Grant Show: I mean, one, labelling it as this is hard, right? You know, I know you, you’re, far more introverted than I am. And so, I think our approach to social situations is going to be entirely different. And I think being able to just firstly acknowledge that, right? Neither are right, neither are wrong.
It’s just a different approach to social situations. I think allowing yourself that permission, when I go to events by myself, even as an extrovert, if I’ve gone to a conference or something by myself, it’s really less enjoyable because I want to talk about things and I want to have that conversation as well.
And I’ve tried to find ways of doing it myself, but it’s really hard. So, the second point that I’d say is that it’s also really hard, right? So, you have a natural style, is the first one, so, be aware of that. And the second is that it’s really hard to meet new people, especially as an adult.
Making friends is incredibly difficult. I’m, my new way of making friends is talking about kids TV shows at daycare when we’re picking up my daughter or daughter in law from the morning, right? And so it’s limited traction there as well. But, one of the ways that we’re thinking about it at Design Outlook, we’d had that feedback from our attendees before, and I wanted more time for networking.
And I’m like, what are you talking about? It’s like, nine hours in a day, three at the end of drinking what is that networking? And what I realised their request was, I want more orchestrated networking. I want someone to facilitate that for me. And so we have at Do24 this year, we have some speed dating that we’re going to do.
But we’re not going to do it as one to one because that’s also really awkward. We’re going to do it in groups of three or four so that you can have a bit of a chat. And so if it is, too much of a one sided conversation, you’ve got two other people that you can kind of lean into that conversation with.
We’re going to orchestrate it.
[00:30:50] Chris Hudson: Orchestration is going to help, I think, because you never know who you’re going to get stuck talking to that if you’re, if you find yourself, on that end of the table and you like the look of the shortbread and you just want to go and have a look at it and you’re trying it and then somebody else comes along, you might be stuck in that conversation for half an hour and not everyone knows how to disengage from that conversation either.
So,
[00:31:06] Grant Show: That’s exactly right, like you get really jammed into that. So then, part of that orchestration then is time-boxing those conversations to 5, 10 minutes or something like that. So that we can then pull people out. And if you decide that, if I go, hey, Chris is actually a pretty awesome guy and I want to keep talking to him, we can leave the orchestrated networking and we can go and keep having the conversation, right?
But it’s something we can do by choice that you can know that you’re not stuck in that environment, right, but I was at a conference at one of the big banks two years ago, and they put me down on this list of chats with an SME. And so people can, I was the SME, and people came and wrote their phone number down of conversations that they wanted to have.
If they wanted to have a conversation with me, I think they were like five ten minute slots. So five ten minute conversations. And there was no agenda for the conversation, sort of meandering through, and people were sort of wanting to talk nice to me. Wildly different industry, and so I thought the idea was good, but the execution was bad, because I just talked for ten minutes, is all that happened.
And then, times five, and then at the end of the period I was like, Oh my gosh, I’m so exhausted, and, like, Oh my gosh, I’m so exhausted, and not because I didn’t give them an opportunity to talk, it was just, it was really one sided conversation as well, and so I think orchestrating some of that stuff for the sake of community and connection is probably warranted.
[00:32:12] Chris Hudson: Yeah. I mean, is there something beyond the event content and obviously what you’re learning there, but is there something about the collection of people in that space that you think people could learn from? Go into a little bit more actively perhaps, and then also take back to their world of work in their office environment and their organisation and actually do something usefully with, from a social point of view, probably more than anything.
[00:32:33] Grant Show: Possibly, so some of the thinking that we do, not just around that, so we run another event which is for design leaders, and it’s somewhat novel, it’s not entirely novel, but it’s somewhat novel in that there’s a capacity limit of 50 design leaders and we have then a host, and so we break up those 50 design leaders into round tables, and we have a host at each, and the host is still a design leader, it’s just, their role is about equity of conversation, making sure that no one person is taking up too much time, keep the conversation light right, there’s a coach as well keeping it engaging. And then we’ve also done a lot of thinking about group dynamics, so in those roundtables there’s only ever seven people.
We did some reading that if you have more than seven people that the conversation actually wants to split into two, if you have any less you might not feel it’s really a meaningful collaborative conversation. So thinking about meetings that you’re going into, is there someone that’s a host of that meeting?
Is there someone that the old school chair of a meeting, right, that’s gonna gonna do some of that stuff and thinking about how many people are in the room, right, could you do this with a meeting of no more than seven so that it’s actually a robust conversation, no less than five if it’s a meaningful thing, right?
So thinking about some of those dynamics of how you’re going. And then there’s other stuff that we just think about that I think some organisations are just terrible at, like meeting hygiene, of making sure that it’s really a 50 minute meeting and there’s 10 minutes for everyone to let their brains reset and cleanse themselves and go to the bathroom and get a glass of water as well.
So I think maybe there’s some stuff there because that’s actively something that we try to do as well, lots of time for breaks and resets and thinking.
[00:34:00] Chris Hudson: How’d you go about setting those expectations? Are you saying it up front before the meeting, right at the start? Are there any kind of tricks around that?
[00:34:05] Grant Show: We don’t tell anyone, we just do it. And then when we get positive feedback at the end, they’re like, wow, that went really well, or that, that was a really great conversation. I’ll then tell them, the reason is because here’s some studies that we’ve read, and here’s the intentional things that we did to make sure that the dynamics were correct.
And I suppose if you think about it, This is all going back to the start of our conversation where you asked me, do you normally think about people’s strengths and what people are going to contribute? And I suppose this is that orchestration of who’s at the table and how are they going to participate in the thing and thinking about those group dynamics, probably more subconsciously these days than I realise.
[00:34:36] Chris Hudson: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there’s something about events where it’s a bit like meetings on a bigger scale and you’re often paying money, quite good money to go to these events as well. At the end of a meeting, you want it to be counting towards something. You want to be clear on what you leave with as you’ve engaged with it.
You’ve given your time and commitment. You probably engage this conversation and you want to walk away with something at least. What are some of the things? I mean, there’s a massive difference. I see because across all the social media, if you’re looking at LinkedIn and South by Southwest is running and people are just getting their photos taken outside the front gate with the big letters and it’s all a big team thing.
Yeah. There’s that part of it and just being there, but what are some of the sort of more, significant or meaningful outtakes for people that you see from events and how do you see it impacting people at a more personal level?
[00:35:22] Grant Show: I think what you’ve honed into there is some of the reasons why people go to conferences. Some conferences you go as a status symbol. I went to this particular conference, Southwest Austin is like the ultimate conference status symbol, There are others where I’m genuinely going to learn, going to a climate summit or something like that, like you’re really actively going to listen and to learn.
And to others, it’s probably, and like ours is a blend of learning and some pragmatism and some networking and some sort of personal development and just something different, away from the desk for the day. And so when we are putting together, thinking about what we want to do, we have co-design sessions where we bring all of our presenters together in an online workshop because they’re all over the country or the world this year, we’re bringing international presenters down.
And we work together to have a conversation about what are those pragmatic things that we want people to go? What’s the provoc and we use the word provocation. What’s the provocation you want to leave them with? Because that’s really what they’re looking for, right? It’s not a framework or a thing.
Maybe that might be the provocation, but really what is that lingering question that you’re going to leave at the end of your presentation so that they’re left thinking about it. And if you think about great movies, really great movies, you don’t get all the answers from the movie, right?
You’re thinking of it as a moral dilemma, one of the really great ones is Flight with Denzel Washington. Not a great movie, but a really great moral dilemma of he flipped the plane and he saved all of those people, was he in the right or the wrong because he was drunk? It’s kind of a really good provocation, right, that you leave with as part of that.
And it’s intentionally designed, right? So we try to do the same thing with the presentations that we have and the content that we have around the conferences. What’s that provocation that you’re going to leave people with? There’s not always a provocation. It might just be, I don’t want people to feel good after this.
Okay, great. How are we doing that? Or I want people to learn this skill afterwards, which is part of that as well. So those are hard to have a provocation, but a lot of the presentations we go in, what do you want them to be thinking about when they’re falling asleep later that night from your presentation?
[00:37:14] Chris Hudson: Yeah, I love it. I mean, there’s a real craft to that in terms of how you construct, the provocation or the feeling that results. But obviously the people work in film, TV or theatre, they’re quite used to basically establishing a concept, but thinking about how they can tease out that concepts and almost story-tell through different stages of that, provocation in a way.
So it can be that you don’t get the provocation to the end.
[00:37:37] Grant Show: You can do that with the visual language of your industry as well, right? So in cinema and TV, there’s visual language, a gun in the scene, the gun’s going to get used, right? There’s lots of things that you can bring in, there’s affordances that you can bring into your own storytelling to speed that up as well.
And audiences are the same going to a conference as they are going to a movie or watching a TV series, they’ll suspend disbelief. They know the world isn’t perfect, even though you’re standing on stage saying, here’s how great the things that I’m doing are. They know it’s not true. They know behind that veneer that actually it was probably really difficult and you didn’t really do all of those things that you’re doing.
And I’m willing to suspend disbelief that the world is as perfect as you’re trying to pitch it to me. But if you can tell me a little bit of what you did to perceive your world as being that perfect. I’m really going to listen and I’m going to lean in and do that.
So, we actually encourage our presenters to think about that as well. They’re suspending disbelief. They believe in you. They want you to do that, which is also why our style of presentation is not. There’s no truth bombs, there’s no negativity, there’s no sort of calling it what it is, kind of things.
Because it’s really hard to suspend disbelief in that, and so it’s really hard for the audience to feel the momentum of the day as well, so there’s a lot of planning and thinking that goes into the conference and the content that we do. More than I think any other conference that I’ve been to.
[00:38:49] Chris Hudson: It just goes to show how much thought goes into it, and I love that. And I particularly like the kind of, we’re thinking a little about this a little bit through some music writing that I’m doing on the side now, you’re often introducing a theme and or a motif in terms of music, and then it gets to a bit of a tension.
There’s some tension like, and you’re trying to create those moments of a bit of discomfort here and there. And then there’s a resolve at some point. And I think you can apply that to film and we’ll see, you can apply it to the running of an event. There, there has to be healthy tension.
Otherwise you’re not paying attention, really.
[00:39:16] Grant Show: The hero’s journey is a really great framework for telling stories in writing, in music and film, in presentations, right? It’s just a really classic part of having some skin in the game and realising that there’s something at stake is an important part of storytelling and culture.
[00:39:29] Chris Hudson: Talking about story brand. Is that a framework that you’ve used?
[00:39:32] Grant Show: Oh, I’m not, I’m not familiar with story brand.
So it’s basically that. So yeah, it’s all about I know you apply it to UX, you can apply it to this or that, but it’s essentially, one day there was a problem, there was a hero turned up and this is how he solved, how that person solved the problem.
[00:39:45] Chris Hudson: And then it kind of unfolds and you follow them on your journey. And it’s an exercise in empathy a little bit. You have to
step with,
you step with the hero and you follow them as a guide almost.
[00:39:54] Grant Show: I’m not familiar with the specific framework. I mean, that’s part of that storytelling aspect as well is when we’re putting together any presentation, presentations at work, when we’re trying to do really effective communication a presentation story, anything we’ll often skip to, and the princess turned up to the castle and saved the prince from the dragon.
So you’ll get to this point in the story where you’ll save the princess has come to save the prince and she’s rescuing him from the dragon and people are like, okay, I mean, I know a little bit, I know what princesses are, I know what princes are, and I know what dragons are, but I’m not quite, I’m not quite sure why she’s rescuing him, why they’re in the castle etc.
And so the best stories start with, once upon a time there was a prince who was quite useless. And he needed to be saved all the time, and he found himself getting lost in dragon areas and the most effective way of getting him out was the particular princess who had a knack for that, and so, that small bit of context up front makes a huge difference for people to be able to listen, participate and stick with you in the story, and we often just forget that part in storytelling and influencing, and trying to usher people along.
[00:40:55] Chris Hudson: I mean key notes you kind of associate with an hour long presentation on a stage and a ton of slides that go with it. But you were talking about the school pickup or the nursery pickup before and a kid’s TV show. And you can actually, you could do quite a lot with three or four or five minutes, in terms of getting a story across. So yeah.
[00:41:13] Grant Show: That’s right. So we have a 40 minute keynote followed by a 15 minute presentation followed by a 20 minute presentation. And again, everything is on purpose, right? So the timing is that because 40 minutes of concentrating is a really long time. Then we give you your ability for your brain to reset with something really light and 15 minutes and then another 20 minutes.
And then we go to first break because it’s been a long morning already. As well. So, you can tell stories, really compelling stories are often that the shortest, sharpest ones if anything, Oliver who presented his coming of age story about becoming a leader. I think he went for 11 minutes and it was the highlight of the day for everyone that was there.
It was just a really compelling, well told story of what leadership means for him. Very personal stories. It was really interesting.
[00:41:55] Chris Hudson: From From the point of view of somebody who has to present, this is a slight sidestep, but what would you give to people that have to present convincingly and connect with the audience in front of them in the broadest sense. What do you think there?
[00:42:09] Grant Show: An interesting part of running the conference and the festival as well. I don’t get on stage. It’s not about, it’s not about me. I say that thinking about going on stage and thanking the community at this year’s one, which is a little bit of a daunting thing. I feel like if I’m on stage I lose authenticity and so does the event.
There’s a bit of a tension for me to balance there, but the advice that I give to people is get on the stage before you present. And so we do a dry run the day before, the evening before. Feel your feet in the place that you’re going to be presenting. Look around the room, take a deep breath and just know you’ve got it.
We’ll often get to that point of presenting for the first time, and you’ll stand there for the first time, and you’ve got the clicker in your hand for the first time, and then there’s a lot happening, and then all of a sudden you start blurting words out. And it’s because you haven’t really prepared.
Over the Christmas break, I went snorkelling at the Great Barrier Reef and I was on the boat wasn’t quite happy with the fit of the of the fins that I had and I had my gear on, and I leaned back, and as I leaned back, I realised it wasn’t tight enough. Water rushed in and a fin fell off.
I’ve been snorkelling heaps. I’m a confident swimmer and so on, but just that moment, that first shock of something not going right. I was in panic stage, and the guy turned around and he looked at me. He could just see straight away. He said, are you okay? And I was like, yeah, I just, the thing fell off.
And then he’s come over here. Hold on to the ring with me. Let’s just catch our breath. We’ll put the goggles and the snorkel back on in a moment. And so I thought the same thing happened, right? I was like, okay, I didn’t really think about what was going to go. I wasn’t really present in the space.
I just threw myself into the situation and then fight or flight took over. So my first advice to people is if you’re going to have an executive presentation, go to the room an hour beforehand, or go the day before, and just stand where you’re going to be presenting, or sit where you’re going to be presenting, and look around the room.
That tiny bit of preparation will be a huge help to you in your comfort in the space that you have there. Others, read the presentation out loud at least once before you deliver it. Actually read out loud with your script. You might feel a little bit foolish, and you might feel funny, but, having bluh bluh, bloated the words out a few times, it’ll just come a little bit more naturally to you as well.
Most great presenters are great because they’ve practiced. They’re not naturally able to get up and do it. When I’m 60 years old and I’ve done this a lot, I’ll have natural calling, scripts that I’ll remember off my heart that’ll make me feel like a great presenter. But, now a lot of it is, it’s practiced, it’s really well prepared.
Even in conversations like this, it’s quite hard, right, to come across as being well thought through. I’m thinking as I’m talking.
[00:44:32] Chris Hudson: Do think that, I mean, that’s presentations and bigger formats, but do you think that comes into the day to day of business as well in some way, in an organisation?
[00:44:40] Grant Show: Well I mean, where it’s necessary, right? So the difficult conversations, right? I talked earlier about having a difficult conversation next week. I’m going to practice that. I’m going to practice that conversation. It’s a one on one conversation, and I’m going to say the words out loud, and I’m going to think about them.
I’m going to test it with my wife and you know prepare for that sort of stuff as well I think it’s as necessary in those situations probably more necessary. There’s more at stake right then embarrassing myself in a presentation that I’ll overcome.
[00:45:04] Chris Hudson: What are the things that catch you off guard and you have to then respond to in some way or another?
[00:45:09] Grant Show: I have a bit of a wicked sense of humour and so things that usually get me in trouble is my sense of humour will come out of my mouth before my brain has had a chance to catch up and filter certain things out. So if I’m getting in trouble, usually it’s my rather dark and wicked sense of humour.
As people get to know me more and get closer to the sort of inner circle, that filter goes away closer, like faster and faster. So I often have to check that at the door as well. But, the same as for anyone else, if I’m underprepared or I’m rushing that panic. I was at an all day workshop on Monday and my leader said, the meeting was opening and someone was going to do an acknowledgment of country.
The person wasn’t there, and my leader said, Hey anyone want to volunteer to do the acknowledgment of country? And I shot my hand up, something that I love doing, and I said, I’m not going to read the script. And then I talked about it, and I went through it. through my acknowledgement of country and what I was thinking about being there as a team and so on.
And I stopped and I realized I hadn’t been breathing for the whole time I was talking and my chest was so tired, my lower back was so sore because I was like quite nervous about what I was presenting because it means something to me. And it was off the cuff, right? I was underprepared. So I still, I was like in a state of shock actually after the presentation.
My back was like, you know when you have that adrenaline spike and your lower back just seizes up a little bit and I was like short of breath and I didn’t breathe for pretty much that whole two, but what felt like 20 minutes of talking, which is probably less than 20 seconds, right? So I still get caught up in the same things and don’t take my own advice as I just said, well, I volunteered for that one.
So how can I prepare? But yeah.
[00:46:36] Chris Hudson: I know. It’s great. I mean, there’s so many great little anecdotes and pieces of advice that you’ve thrown into this conversation. I’m just super grateful that you’ve been able to join us for the chat. I want to kind of end with maybe a point around events, it’s not just events, really you’re actually creating experiences and you’re building points of connection to community and, you’re bringing people together to a place where they can be totally engrossed in that moment.
In that story that they’re being presented with and time back to a point that I was telling you about before, which is around almost what you take out of it. What do you think events or where you are in terms of these community connections? What can that do for industry?
If you take it back into your work or design industry, or you’re going to energy or into any of the industries, government. What can events do at a sort of macro level, what was the greatest impact that they can have? Do you believe?
[00:47:26] Grant Show: Yeah,
I mean, I think my cynics view genuinely, as someone that runs events, is that events are mostly in it for themselves. So I honestly think that most events, the impact is limited, right? It’s the same as any, anything. If you have one particular team member, where you know that they’re only in it for themselves, that the outcome of that team are limited, right?
And if everyone can perceive it. So my cynics view is that most events are run by for profit organisations whose entire profit is based around that event, right? There’s like big event conglomerates that run these sorts of things. Now, we want to run a for profit event. That’s definitely something that we want to do.
If it’s not profitable, then we can’t keep going. And if it doesn’t make us more profit, then there’s just no point doing it, right? I’m doing volunteer work for part of it. So, it’s not to say that events that make a profit are bad. Events that should make a profit. But it’s the reason for creating the event is the profit, right?
I’m on the board of Purpose Conference in Sydney and it’s a reason for being is also to create community and connection and to overcome challenges as a group. So for me I think that what events should be doing is playing that role, fostering community, fostering connection really thinking about what, they’re looking for, what’s their mission.
Ours is celebrate, support and grow design in Australia. It helps us make decisions about what we’re doing, right? Our value system helps us make decisions around that. And then that also really implies the kind of content and the things that we can do as a result of that. I don’t think most events have a mission statement.
I don’t think most events have a reason for being other than they want to make- and there can be very good money in events, I’ve heard unverified rumours that the New South Wales government paid South by Southwest a hundred million dollars over five years to just to license the brand, right, so there’s great money in events if you get it right as well.
I think those events probably don’t have quite the impact that they could. Again I’m just speaking from the heart and my view, right, so, maybe I’m wrong. Maybe they do have some mission and they are measuring some metric that shows that they are making a difference in their community that I can’t see.
But from an outsider’s perspective, I don’t think that there is.
[00:49:20] Chris Hudson: Cause you said earlier in the conversation that actually bringing the right people together should bring some of that, it takes it to a certain level, but it might not bring the whole package together is what you’re saying. I think.
[00:49:30] Grant Show: Totally, I think that’s definitely true and I’m sure that there are people that are working for these for any event, in every event, that their heart is in the right place and that they are trying to push it towards those things and they’re thinking about probably purpose over profit more than some of their peers and I have no doubt that there’s lots of those people around in every event as part of it as well.
We’re driven by the value system of the machine that we’re in. Right? If you work for a large consulting company, its value system is going to, influence you and you’re going to operate in certain ways. If you’re working for a non for profit, its value system is going to influence you and you’re going to work certain ways as well, right?
So I think it’s maybe the core values of the system.
[00:50:05] Chris Hudson: Yeah, there’s a lot in that, I think in the system and what your role is in either conforming to it or trying to break from it in some way to set a new precedent. And I feel like certain, particularly within business and organisational environments there’s a lot that’s kind of the status quo.
And obviously if you’re trying to reinvent that. Even if it’s in a small way, then that can be incredibly powerful if done in the right way. Obviously, if you’re doing a presentation a certain way, if you’re turning up to work and you’re bringing yourself or you’re doing a welcome knowledge of the country, it feels like there, there are opportunities to, to evolve the concept of the preconception of what’s there already in one way or another.
And just love the fact that you’re doing that with design outlook and just rethinking the kind of reason for why you’re there.
[00:50:48] Grant Show: The training kind of comes back to what I was saying before as well, like the confidence to want to do something differently and to push into a new area as well. And it’s super fun and terrifying at the same time, right? We have not been profitable the first few years and so I feel like we will be this year, but it’s confidence that’s pushing me forward, not fact or knowledge.
So, it’s fun and I feel like doing it differently is part of the reason for its success, for it to be successful.
[00:51:10] Chris Hudson: No brilliant. I mean, that’s maybe finished with a final thought around, what’s great about life and what can people take as inspiration, from the things that you do, maybe. Do you think at a high level, how would you summarise that?
[00:51:21] Grant Show: Well, I mean, I’m a diehard optimist, right? I’ll often joke that it sucks to be an optimist ’cause you can’t complain about anything. And so, I mean, I love the idea that coming together, as I’ve mentioned, and bringing the right people into the room, almost any problem can be solved and with the right intentions, really meaningful impact and connection can happen as well.
And I’m really driven by those things. I love to do that. And then I would implore everyone to think about some of those things, like why are you doing what you’re doing, how can you get more from the people around you, how can you give more to the people around you as well.
[00:51:50] Chris Hudson: Brilliant. I appreciate optimism and that’s exactly what this show needs. There’s a lot of problems that we have to solve out there. And yeah I think that really will help. So yeah, that’s right, don’t get consumed by all of those problems and let them weigh you down, right? Not just say that you should, be blind to the challenges, but yeah don’t overthink it.
[00:52:07] Chris Hudson: Designers would love to think about problems to solve, right?
Well, I appreciate your time. Thanks so much Grant coming on the show and telling us a story. It’s just been really interesting and an insightful as I’d expect, totally expect from you, didn’t get too much of your wicked sense of humour, but maybe we’ll save that for another chat.
[00:52:23] Grant Show: Yeah, that’s right. My pleasure, thanks for having me as part of the show, I really appreciate it.
[00:52:27] Chris Hudson: Thank you.
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