From artistry to Apple: How to delight customers & win their loyalty

“You really want it to get into people’s heads what the change is. You want it to be their new reality or the new normal. Storytelling is effective because stories are shared from generation to generation, remembered for a reason… because they stick in your brain.”
Agnes So

In this episode you’ll hear about

• Improving support levels & customer satisfaction: How to win customer loyalty through understanding frontline perspectives, fostering collaboration & aligning organisational goals with customer needs
• The power of storytelling: Exploring storytelling as a powerful leadership tool for driving change and how the way you use stories can change how you inspire, communicate complex ideas, and drive cultural shifts within organisations.
• Adaptive leadership: Setting up and managing a team where members are enabled to implement effective solutions and drive positive outcomes and you can remain flexible and free
• Lean approaches in startups: The necessity of lean approaches in startup environments, and strategies to improve resourcefulness, efficiency and flexibility to navigate challenges and foster growth
• Strategic prioritisation: The key to understanding when and where to focus time, energy and resources and identify quickly initiatives that will deliver the most significant impact

Key links

HotDoc

Tino Sehgal

This Progress at Guggenheim

GROW Framework

Good Strategy, Bad Strategy by Richard Camel 

About our guest
Agnes So had gained over 10 years of customer service experience prior to joining HotDoc in 2017. Agnes’ main expertise include developing Customer Experience (CX) strategies, aimed at reducing churn and maintaining high customer satisfaction levels. Her work also informs and leads Go To Market events, ensuring the successful implementation and adoption of products for customers and employees.

By focusing on technology and self-service techniques, Agnes empowers customers to seamlessly utilise and learn new products. Her leadership experience extends to refining customer journeys based on insights, and fostering impactful brand interactions.

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.

Chris considers himself incredibly fortunate to have worked with some of the world’s most ambitious and successful companies, including Google, Mercedes-Benz, Accenture (Fjord) and Dulux, to name a small few. He continues to teach with University of Melbourne in Innovation, and Academy Xi in CX, Product Management, Design Thinking and Service Design and mentors many business leaders internationally.

Transcript

Chris Hudson: Hey everyone and welcome to our next very special episode of the Company Road podcast. Today we have the privilege of talking to someone who’s been part of a startup turned scale up and has witnessed all of the teething problems and has taken on some pretty serious challenges along the way.

And I wanted to bring this perspective into the show and share it with you, our listeners, as it’s really important to know what it’s going to take for your business or organisation to run at speed. When it needs to and also to think around what will either enable it in those moments or will actually stop progress in its tracks and really just get in the way.

So I’m delighted to introduce my next guest, Agnes So, and Agnes, you’ve been working at HotDoc, one of Australia’s leading disruptors in the health tech space since about 2017. And you’re now head of customer experience and you’ve been a specialist in customer experience for quite a few years and also used to work at Apple and we can’t wait to hear your perspectives on how to build and sustain customer centric organisations.

So thank you Agnes coming on to the show. So lovely to have you here.

[00:01:05] Agnes So: Thanks, Chris. It’s a pleasure to be here.

[00:01:07] Chris Hudson: So maybe we just start with you and what brought you into this area of customer experience and how did it kind of evolve into what it is today?

[00:01:14] Agnes So: Yeah, absolutely. I think I always say that I kind of fell into this career. From the moment I was legally able to work I got a job in retail and I held a lot of retail jobs in my late teens and into my twenties across multiple different businesses. And as a result, you really do pick up a lot of those skills.

Obviously at the coalface, talking to customers and being that person that’s trained up on multiple different brand strategies when it comes to how they want you to portray their brand. And the short of it was that a lot of these roles or a lot of these retail jobs that I held were actually always part time because they were there to bolster my full time career at the time, which was as an artist.

So I was an artist from the ages around 18 and 27/28 and, that was a good 10 years of my life. And at the time my art practice really revolved around making the viewer really like cognisant of who they are in a particular space. And a lot of it was really based upon sculpture and performance work, especially work that explored perception and balance and the likeness to everyday object and specifically experience and how these small, sometimes mundane and easy to dismiss moments in people’s lives could be the thing that really frames and experience in a different way.

A lot of these shows I was practicing both internationally and also here in Australia and -I was also working with customers at the same time. And while I was doing that concurrently, I realised that both of them had really similar core principles. As an artist, I guess you’re experiencing, or you’re thinking about the experience of the viewer who might stumble across your artwork and what does that look like?

What does that feel like? And what does that experience really mean for them? And you’re really manufacturing this environment. So you can spend a lot of your time trying to control that outcome to a specific extent. So similarly, I reckon working with customers, you’re doing the same thing and the brand that you work for would have researched a journey.

Your job is essentially to represent that brand and bring the customer along that journey based upon the training that they give you. So specifically when I got into Apple retail, I spent a lot of my time really interested in that training that they gave me because for me, it felt like they thought about everything all the way down to the last detail just to manufacture that best experience for the customer.

So it wasn’t until I got to the end of my art career that I realised I had this real passion for customers and not just customers, but teaching others how to be really aligned to customers too. So even though I’m not really an artist anymore in the traditional sense, I always say that I approach my career like a different phase of my art practice, and rather now I’m thinking more about the perception of a different type of viewer.

One that doesn’t go to a gallery per se, but has an experience with the product, or with the brand, or an experience with the workplace as an employee.

[00:03:57] Chris Hudson: You’ve done a really good job of stitching all those parts of your career together and telling it so seamlessly. I just want to kind of pick up on the art side of things because maybe it’s just how I did art when I was younger, but it just felt like it’s very much within you and within your own expression to begin with.

And I don’t know whether it was because I gave it up before I got to the really advanced stage that you probably got to, where you were able to almost design it with your audience and your viewer in mind a little bit. How did that kind of experience unfold for you of actually designing for the environment in which you thought it might be received?

[00:04:31] Agnes So: Yeah, so I traditionally started as a painter when I was little. All of my art classes revolved around being a painter. I graduated high school as a painter and I went into uni thinking that I would major in painting and I did. But once I got to uni, you are essentially exposed to a bunch of art theory that you don’t get in high school.

And a lot of that is around contemporary art and the seeds upon which that sprouted, specifically within early Duchampian work, which is all around objects and how the viewer is the person that really completes the experience of the artwork itself. So, for me, learning that artwork didn’t have to be painting, it didn’t have to be a physical 2D thing, really blew up my idea of what it means to be an artist and as a result I really took that into my art practice and a really good example of the type of work that I’m really into is my one of my favourite artists is an artist called Tina Segal.

He’s a German artist and essentially his work doesn’t exist in this plane or space. It’s not something that you can hold. It’s not something that you can touch. Even if you were to purchase his work, it’s not a documented piece of work like some performance artists would do, it’s actually an experience of talking to lawyers and also talking to him and him relaying his work.

to you if you want to purchase it. So, one of my favourite works is this work at the Guggenheim in around 2010 called This Progress and essentially you as a viewer walk all the way up through the Guggenheim in that sort of spiral formation and as you do you encounter different actors who are growing with you as you go all the way up to the top.

So you start with a child who poses a question for you, starts to talk towards the script, and you then go into an older child, into adulthood, and also into more of an elderly person. And yeah, that for me is a work that exists only ephemerally. It exists really through, learning about it, reading about it through storytelling and also specifically through, hearing about it from other people, but it doesn’t exist in any other form.

And for me, that kind of really blew up how I thought about my art practice. And as a result, also what I thought about, even something as simple as custom experience industry.

[00:06:47] Chris Hudson: Yeah, wow there’s just so much in that. I think there’s this almost point of realisation where what you’ve been learning about and what you’ve been exposing yourself to in the way of that learning, but also in the way in which, the things are kind of being shared with the world and you’re starting to see what meaning it might carry.

And that feels like it, it came about, various points for you. Did it, did it then kind of spark that curiosity around, wanting to know more about the customer and feeling like that was the starting point for almost building those more meaningful connections with customers and people that are out there in the world,

[00:07:19] Agnes So: I would definitely say yes and even when I was holding some of my earlier retail jobs and when I first moved to Melbourne, I used to spend a lot of my time At work, but especially in downtime, if you’ve worked retail, there’s not always customers in the store all the time. You’re going to have downtime, you’re going to have quiet times.

And I spent a lot of that time really thinking about my work and designing my work that I wanted to exhibit, or really thinking about ideas that I wanted to bring to life. And as a result, I started thinking a lot about the customer moving through space or the customer as a viewer, what does it look like to see a product on display?

What are they thinking? What are they imagining? Are they thinking about it in their lifestyle? Is it hitting them in an emotional way that makes them want to purchase that particular product? And a lot of the work that I was doing at the time, again, it had this similar thoughts and ideas. It was about placing objects in spaces so that your body really reacted in a specific way and it heightened your sense of emotion and as a result grafted an idea to that emotion so that it exists beyond even your time in that gallery.

So I thought a lot about different ways in which brands might consider how they do that in a retail space in order for people to graft that emotion post them being in the store. Maybe they don’t purchase the product at that time, but they think about it for days, weeks afterwards.

A really good example was some of my work was around, like I said, the idea of perception and balance. So I’d spend a lot of time just learning how to balance objects because I realised that if someone was standing next to something that was purely only held together by a wish and a balancing act that the way in which they experienced that product or that artwork actually made them really self conscious of their body and their body in that space.

And the only way I experienced that was even just by thinking about how I might step around a crack in the road or I might step around something that looks broken or somewhat fragile because I don’t want to be responsible for breaking it. So, I did a lot of work that really explored this idea of how better to essentially put a viewer on edge, to put them in a place which makes them feel really nervous in order for them to unearth a different way of their perspective and their perception of their body in a space.

And yeah, that was essentially what I did a lot of my work on. And all the way up until some of my last shows was all around this idea of how do I blow up an object so that you think about it in a really different way, but specifically by using this sense of how do I feel in conjunction with being on the same plane as this object that feels really like it’s on the brink of failure, really.

[00:10:03] Chris Hudson: Yeah. Awesome. Let’s take the conversation onto your time at Apple if we can, because I think there’s some interesting things to kind of bridge here from that experience that you were designing as an artist to the experiences that you may be witnessed, but also were part of Apple.

So how was that for you?

[00:10:18] Agnes So: It’s kind of one of those weird folklore places that you work in. I worked mostly in the retail space, so at Apple Retail, and I worked as a technician in various different forms. So first I was working on mobile devices and then working into Mac. And I worked there for around five years, but I still remember so much of what they taught us, because even from the very first few weeks that they induct you into how they do things at Apple, how they want you to talk to a customer, how they want you to interact with a customer, you can really tell that there is a sense of intentionality into every single part of the customer journey.

So, everything down to the law of how long it takes for you to open a box. So the next time you open an Apple product, I always like to time it. When I get a new one it’s supposed to take seven seconds. And that’s because Steve Jobs thought that was the ultimate time to build suspense for the customer before they actually met and experienced the product, the seven seconds waiting while the box opened.

Other examples to get to the exact details was even down to the tiles they used in the store came from a specific Italian quarry, apparently, and they had to make sure that they were always the same colour. The way in which the ceilings at that time, this was again, like a good six, seven years ago at that time, they had these Chinese silk panels. And the reason they did that was because they knew that the light was diffused in a really specific way so it fell on the products in a way which made the customer really take it in almost like the sense of beauty. So every single part of the store was designed with the customer in mind.

[00:11:53] Agnes So: That’s because they left no detail unturned. And for me, that really inspired me to think about how if I was to work for a brand like that, how I represent myself on a day to day basis. How do I make sure that I’m always taking that journey that the brand in this case, Apple had designed and also made that a really great experience for the customer that I was serving at that time.

So I took that quite seriously and towards the end of my career at Apple, I also did a lot of the training and mentorship there too, because it was just something that I wanted to make sure that others were able to pass on as well and were able to be their best selves at work.

[00:12:29] Chris Hudson: That’s such fascinating insight because not everyone understands that so much because they go there to shop or they buy the stuff online and they don’t always realise the thought that goes into almost creating that stage or that set in a way. I think if you work in film, you’re used to that because you have to make sure the conditions are absolutely right.

Or if you’re putting on a theatre production or anything like that, it’s you know about that. Or if you run a restaurant, it’d be the same thing. But from a retail point of view, you forget that there’s so much that goes into that staging. And it’s really interesting to hear about. I also wonder from what you were saying, what they were saying to the people like yourself that had to kind of make that brand experience and make that really pop into people’s day to day lives how has that kind of set up and what was your experience with that?

[00:13:13] Agnes So: Yeah, absolutely. As someone who was a trainer towards the end, you got to peek a little bit behind the curtain in terms of the training manuals that they had. But like I said, everything was always written in such detail. When I consider the training the main thing that they really focused on was obviously like what they call things like Apple staff service, which I think every retail brand has a very similar way of considering the customer first and that type of behaviour that they want to train their people for.

An example of the things that they would consider that maybe other brands wouldn’t were things such as when they brought out wearables. So Apple Watch was the very first wearable that Apple brought out. They trained us on how close to the customer we should really stand. Because if you think about personal space. If you’re trying to troubleshoot a specifically technically troubleshoot a wearable on someone’s They often will have to wear it in order for you to troubleshoot it.

So they went to the extent of even researching how close we should stand to the customer so they felt comfortable with our presence and asking for consent. So there were a lot of things that I think they were really ahead of the curve on when I consider their approach to customer, it wasn’t just about what’s their experience, but also, what’s the thing that we’re trying to achieve for them, dependent on the device or the problem that they may have had at that time.

[00:14:32] Chris Hudson: I feel like a lot of people could learn from that lesson in more general business context in that there’s a lot of personal space being invaded all the time. And I wondered whether Apple should be sharing some of these pearls, pearls of wisdom with wider businesses as to how close you should be getting to people and when to engage closely and when not to, what do you think?

[00:14:50] Agnes So: Yeah, one thing I always wondered about that training as well was whether it was really regional or not, because if you think about the American market, they want you all up in their grill in the change room. They want you servicing them, they want you giving different sizes, they want to be waiting on your hand and foot, and that’s the experience that they expect there in that particular regional location.

But in Australia, I know we’re much more casual, I hate going to a store and having a salesperson stand outside and go, how’s it fitting? Do you need any help? Because if I need help, I will ask for it. So, even things like I consider when I go into a store and I’m trying something on, do they put the mirror in the change room or do they force you to walk out?

[00:15:28] Agnes So: Any store that forces you to walk out, that’s such an old tactic and they should really reconsider it. But yeah, when I consider like that idea of, personal slash body space, I think a lot about, specifically clothing and buying clothing and my experience of buying clothing.

But yeah, I definitely think also about whether some of that is regionally catered or not.

[00:15:49] Chris Hudson: There are a lot of products that would be very close to you, if you’re thinking about cosmetics or, ones where people do apply things to you and your person. It can be quite intrusive. It might not be comfortable for everybody. It’s a good consideration to have.

[00:16:01] Agnes So: Yeah. One of my favourite, more recent retail experiences, and this is not even from someone who has experienced this in person, I’d love to experience it in person, but I haven’t been to the States for a very long time, is the brand Glossier. I don’t know if you’re familiar with them, but they are a beauty brand and they really invest in their retail space.

They think about it as a sort of part of their omni channel experience and they invest in it so much because they know who their consumer is. They know that their consumer is usually female. They know that they care about how they look, they care about how they, perceive themselves and how they present themselves to other people.

And they know that by creating experiences in their store that are Instagrammable or really unique, it would essentially draw people to their stores in a way that it becomes like an event kind of similar to, I think Starbucks kind of thinks a lot about like their stores being a place that people go to, to chill out and

[00:16:59] Chris Hudson: Have you read the book?

[00:16:59] Agnes So: meetings.

Oh, no, I haven’t. No, but I know the similar theories because I think Apple at the time we’re trying to do something similar with the store became an experience. And that’s why they have people like Maroon 5 playing there, for example, in like a San Francisco store. But Glossier is a really interesting one.

If you want to look it up, they do crazy things such as you don’t take the products off the shelf or whatever. You actually fill in like a little form and then that gets sent off and it comes out in one of these little conveyor belt scenarios. And then it kind of lands at you and then you check out that way.

And it’s such a special way of considering the checkout process to make that really magical for someone. And it becomes a destination for them.

[00:17:35] Chris Hudson: Wow I’ve never heard someone say magical and check out process in the same sentence. I don’t think.

[00:17:40] Agnes So: I think about a lot as a consumer myself and specifically when I, go to, I don’t think you have the same types of retail experiences here in Australia, probably because the market, like I said, is quite different and we invest in different things or maybe different ways of approaching that.

But I would love to, at some point, go and go to a Glossier store.

[00:17:58] Chris Hudson: You’ve seen this from Apple and you see this a HotDoc where you work currently. I think there’s a lot to do with how company runs internally that then connects to the outside world in which it needs to project and be present and connect to people and find relevance and meaning and all the things that go with it.

How do you see that playing out? And obviously you saw it at Apple, I’m sure, but do you feel that’s an important connection to make? So that you’re kind of living and breathing a brand almost from the inside, and then that the outside world then gets to benefit in some way?

[00:18:25] Agnes So: Absolutely. I always refer to customer experiences, customer being an internal customer and an external customer. So your external customer, the people that you often are selling goods to, or you’re selling a service to or software, whatever it might be, but your internal customers are the people that you work with.

And again, this is language I learned from Apple to think about the people that you work with as customers too, because they are experiencing your brand in a very different way. They’re experiencing it as, like you said a representative. And if you don’t think about their experience, first and foremost, then you’re not going to get a great outcome when it comes to the customer.

[00:19:02] Chris Hudson: People that work within an organisation, they’re almost like the steroids version of your brand ambassador or advocate or anyone out there in the public that has been driving an Audi for years or is using Gossier or is doing this or that.

But the people inside the organisation, you come across these characters, right? And they’re really passionate and they just, they love it so much. They want it to be a success so much that actually it’s hard for them to sometimes take other points of view on board, because it’s so ingrained in them.

Have you come across some of these characters on your travels?

[00:19:32] Agnes So: I do think every organisation has values, whether they’re documented or not, whether they’re trained officially or not. Obviously that often depends on the maturity of the organisation as well.

And I think when you consider where you want to work, you should always consider the values of that particular place and whether you rely on them because the business will often set these values as what they see as important above everything else. Like how do you show up and how do you do your job?

Not just through the actual skills that you exhibit or you’re paid for, but at HotDoc, for example, we have a lot of basic values such as take ownership and always making sure that you listen to ego, listening to feedback, these are the things that really make, I reckon the working experience really special.

And you have to really interrogate those values within a business and really ask whether they align with your own values. And I reckon specifically when I consider my experience working, a lot of the times when I moved on or when I decided to move on from a role was when I interrogated the interrogated those values and I realised I had changed and maybe I no longer really aligned with those values in the same way.

And I always knew that would never bring out my best self if that was the case and it was best for me to move on. So I definitely think, as a manager, I’m always talking to people about, interrogating those values. And is this something that you really align with? Is it part of your identity?

Because it isn’t, then you’re never going to do the best work.

[00:21:02] Chris Hudson: Yeah, that’s really interesting because I always think maybe I’m just a bit skeptical about these things sometimes, but I think that a lot of the values are put together in the most generic way possible. And there’s no way a lot of people could disagree with some of those things because they’re so ubiquitous in their definition.

And it just feels like you could make a broadly or loosely defined value sound important and find that resonance, if you needed to, and you could find the link to what you cared about personally, but what you’re saying is interesting because it’s like, well, it may be relevant to a point, but after that, it may not be the right fit anymore as something that you consciously think about.

That was interesting to me.

[00:21:37] Agnes So: Yeah. Sometimes the values aren’t like I said, they’re not documented. They might not be written. The value is actually. displayed through maybe senior leadership or decisions that the business makes. So when I say interrogate your values and whether they align with those of the business, I don’t always mean the ones that the business says that they have.

And I think that it’s always more telling actions often speak louder than words. So I think for me, often I can really chart my experience of making that decision to something that happened as opposed to something that was documented or told that, this was now the value of the business and things have changed.

It was never that it was always, I observed behaviour and I went, you know what, that doesn’t actually align with my own personal values of how I want to show up to work. And maybe that’s something that I should consider when it comes to whether that makes me happy in my day to day job.

[00:22:29] Chris Hudson: Yeah, for sure. I’m so I’m doing some similar work to you probably, but also at a transformation level where you’re thinking about how adoption is going to be received in one way or another and the values are really important. And you’re thinking about, both the teams that are there, but also people coming in and joining the company and the organisation and you’re thinking, okay, well, if they read about one thing, and then they see another thing happen, then the doing is actually what your organisation may get judged by in a way.

And it also gives a clue as to what level of speed of change or manoeuvrability within the business is actually possible. So, for the listeners, it might be that, one thing on the website, these are the five values. But actually, if you’re seeing something else, then that might tell a different story.

[00:23:07] Agnes So: Yeah I think you see it a lot as well in more recent times, people talk a lot about brands being cancelled or you see a lot of it happens specifically on social media or within social networks when a brand has a bit of a misstep. If that misstep is fundamentally misaligned with what they portray themselves when it comes to their values that they document, then that’s really damaging.

So when I consider a lot of recent businesses that might’ve gone through this type of experience where they would have lost the specific type of trust that they had with their customer, that’s essentially what’s happening there. And that trust is lost, not just with the customer, like I said, the external customer, but I bet it happens a lot with the internal customer too.

[00:23:50] Chris Hudson: Yeah. It’s almost like unexpected behaviour. It’s uncharacteristic and you see it kind of play out in the world in an experience. And that’s why complaints come about in the outside world. I mean, you see people talking about the things they’re unhappy about, in relation to businesses and brands all the time, but it’s also internally, if you saw somebody acting out a line that was totally unexpected then that would really jump out to you as well, wouldn’t it?

[00:24:11] Agnes So: Yeah, absolutely. And I think specifically now I think we’re talking more about maybe something different, which is my experience as a woman in businesses as well. A lot of the time we’ve been taught to just accept specific types of behaviour, but I think when I first moved to HotDoc, it was the first time that I realised that I didn’t have to, and that’s probably why I’ve stuck with the company for, well over six and a half years now.

I realised that I didn’t have to, and as a result, speaking up and saying what you’re observing and really holding the mirror up to people and asking, is that behaviour, right? Specifically as a woman is encouraged. And I’ve definitely done that more than once I reckon in my time at HotDoc.

And I definitely feel really supported by the company and speaking up and, staying true to my own values. I would say, all the things that we just talked about is something that, I’ve considered even in my current employment, why do I stay? Why do I feel empowered to do anything within my current business is because I know my business trusts me and listens to me.

And that’s not just because of me as an individual, but they care about everyone who works for them.

[00:25:20] Chris Hudson: Yeah, thank you so much for sharing that. I think it’s really important. It’s a really important point to make around trust and just feeling completely comfortable with it within the environment in which you work which is a luxury, it feels like in some cases, because sometimes the very construct of the business, the organisation just feels like it’s been going a certain way for so many years and everything is just overlooked wouldn’t be called up in the way that you describe.

And I think it’s really refreshing to hear that is happening. If you’re comfortable to share what was some of the experiences that you were comparing that to from the past?

[00:25:52] Agnes So: I would say over the last like 10, 15 years, there’s been a huge shift in how women in the workplace are perceived. There’s been more international woman’s day posts than ever before. There’s been more, probably more research into a lot of this stuff as well.

A lot more around how we close the gap. And I know just a few weeks ago, for example, the WGA just released the gender pay gap data in Australia. And that was really interesting to see. I think when I compare previous examples or like previous ways in which I might not have felt empowered as a woman in the workplace, In a retail environment, especially when you’re talking to customers and if you’re in a position where you are a technical expert, so you’re essentially people coming to you for advice, I felt like I couldn’t really lean into my femininity as a result of me being in a position of that type of power. So I think that there was definitely some work that had to be done to unlearn that.

I for a really long time, even when I worked at Apple. I made sure I always wore pants rather than skirts because I felt that there would always be a bias if they came to me and they were assigned me as their technician and I was the one who was supposed to be giving them You know expert information. I always thought there was a bias if I was wearing a skirt or if I wore my hair in a specific way or if I wore too much makeup.

So I think a lot of that didn’t really necessarily come from the business so much as it came from like experience, but it kind of shaped a lot of how I thought about where I wanted to work next and also how I wanted to show up and how I thought that wasn’t okay. And over time, I think we’ve been lucky enough to have a lot of power, a lot of new research come out and a lot of businesses really get behind making sure that we’re always uplifting women in the workplace. But at that time, especially when I was working, random retail jobs that, that wasn’t always the case. So I think we’ve come a long way, but we still got a huge way to go.

[00:27:47] Chris Hudson: It’s such a big topic and one that’s not only important but just very hard to solve. It feels there are people that respond to it in different ways. And obviously the publicity surrounding it is one way to go about it. But I think To come back to your previous point around, the doing versus the saying, it’s actually how people act within the workplace and taking on some of these micro behaviours really on a daily basis rather than it becoming a big thing, once a year, potentially, but yeah, it’s a tough one.

If we’re talking about business and the way that the people work and the way that they grow up maybe through different, they’ve got a, say, a parental figure who’s been in the world of work and they see things work a certain way and also the media and everything that you see on TV in relation to how business is portrayed is another influence, obviously.

And then you get into the world of work and you’re kind of led to believe that the people at the top are the ones to idolise in a way, and you’re observing their behaviours as maybe being the correct one. You kind of take on some of those behaviours yourself to try and get ahead in that work environment.

So there are all sorts of weird dynamics of, followership and leadership and an influence that actually quite hard for people to judge and re-navigate along the way. What do you reckon about all that?

[00:29:00] Agnes So: Specifically if you’re working in like a corporate environment you really do have to think about your leadership team having proper representation because you’re right. They are the ones that are responsible for making, the soundest decisions or steering the strategy for your company.

And a lot of the time, if you don’t have that diversity in thought, you’re only going to have groupthink. You’re only going to have the same types of conversations being had. You’re only going to have the same types of experiences being pumped into the business because they’re the main ones that make the decisions for us. So I do get really excited when I see female leaders I think that they are best positioned to disrupt a lot of that thought process and obviously diversity happens in lots of different ways, not just with a woman in the workplace, but this is something that, I hold pretty close to my heart as someone who is a woman leader in a tech business.

We’re pretty far and few between in a lot of different tech businesses specifically in the industry of tech. So I do think it’s a privilege to be where I am and I think a lot about how I represent that privilege to others and show them that they’re capable too. I think a lot about how I promote internally or try and push for internal promotion.

I think a lot about how I spend time making sure that I have skip levels with all of my skip level reports. And, there are 30 plus of them. And I try and do this on a really regular cadence because it’s the only way in which I know what their motivations and their intentions are. And if I know those things, then I know how I can best support them.

Specifically if they’re thinking about how I get to the next step in the career ladder or the next thing that I want to do, whether that’s a sidestep or a step upwards. So I do try and think a lot about like my own control. And the reason for that is because if I think about the things outside of my control they make me really mad.

The gender pay gap makes me really mad and it’s not easy to solve for. These things will take years and years for businesses to want to invest in. And they take money as well. They take finances to invest in but starting at least with a business that says this is not okay.

We need to do something about it. I think that’s very admirable, but then what’s your action plan beyond that? How are you making sure that women are getting into the upper quartiles of the pay brackets? How are you making sure that you’ve got a really fair and equitable hiring process?

How are you making sure that your own internal bias isn’t getting in the way of the decisions that you’re making? These are all the things that I think about when I consider some of the maybe better places to work for and also even like my own current workplace too.

[00:31:37] Chris Hudson: That’s really interesting. I mean from the point of view of Being a leader, but also, an employee that goes through the same things that everybody else does really if other women are in the same situation, then the things you mentioned, the things to be watching out for, right?

You can pick up on so many cues and signs in relation to whether it’s set up in the right way from what you just described, I think.

[00:31:58] Agnes So: Yeah, absolutely. And I think as a woman you always have a vibe. These are specifically now, I think there’s a lot of education out there. There’s a lot of people that are, having their come to Jesus moments of oh this is not okay. Having to be the person that always sets up the meetings or always does the notes or always brings the water into the meeting room. Like these are just like small little micro bits of work that really add up to the bigger picture. I try my best now specifically to have a little moment of protest in those when I see those things.

So for example, note taking, I try and make sure that we do round robin when we do notes because I don’t want it to be a thing that maybe I just do, or the other female who’s really capable does every single week. So, even doing something as simple as making sure that we have a round robin system for taking notes is something that I consider.

[00:32:47] Chris Hudson: Yeah. I guess it leads me on to a question around who the people were that inspired you to think in that way and to take that perspective? Interested to know whether it was female leaders or male leaders as well.

[00:32:58] Agnes So: I think it’s a mix of the two. I always feel there’s kind of inspiration or the people that you look up to. I don’t always think about gender as much as I’m passionate about gender politics and what’s happening with women in the workplace right. But for me, some of the characteristics or some of the unlearning comes from observing male leaders that I’ve had in the past, or I have currently, because they remind me to not be in my own head.

They remind me to ditch imposter syndrome, I hate the words imposter syndrome, but to ditch that and get rid of it because not many of them will wake up and think about the things that I think about. Not many of them will hyper fixate on what I sounded like in that particular meeting or whether my idea was stupid or silly or I shouldn’t have voiced it at all.

Not many of them, when I asked them those, the questions of, do you think about these things that have said yes. I think for me, that becomes like a behaviour to emulate is that these people can go through life, not thinking about that, then maybe I should too. But at the same time one of my female leaders more recently, who was the previous head of customer experience at Chris, you know, Herlou Lasset, she mentored me through four years or so HotDoc. And I became the head of customer experience in her place. And we used to have a lot of conversations about this and she comes from maybe a slightly different generation where she approaches it in a different way, but she was always someone who really believed in my passion for this cause and was always there when I had a problem around this area to just sound it out and hear what I had to say and come at it with a sense of logic, because I think a lot of the time you can get really emotional about these things, but she was really good at, coming at it from a really logical perspective and going, well, what are we going to do about it? What are the things we can really change?

What are the things in our control? Who are the people we can talk to? Who are the people we can influence? And she would always remind me that. It’s one thing to have an opinion, but if you don’t do anything about it, again, actions speak louder than words, right? If you don’t do anything about it, then that’s all it is.

And you limit your potential for making a difference as a result.

[00:35:04] Chris Hudson: Yeah, absolutely. Right. That’s really cool. I think that, as you’re talking the comparison that springs to mind is actually around reading a book. So when I was at uni, you’d read the literature, and then you’d read some secondary text to basically describe the literature.

People would offer a different point of view on that, but at least there was some debate around it. And I think, in the day to day business there’s a lot of that’s missing because when you’re in the book and you’re in the story and you’re in the meeting and the business is just running through the usual routine, that’s what you feel like the work is.

But actually it feels like there’s an increasing agenda now to basically talk around that and actually analyse it a little bit. I know within design thinking, you’re thinking about running retrospectives and that runs an agile too, but it just feels like there’s a more healthy and open discussion around what’s actually happening and what’s working and what’s not working.

And there’s usually a consequence to that too now too, which is that you have to take action in some way. Otherwise we’ve moved on and we’ve not learned anything. Are you feeling that?

[00:36:00] Agnes So: Yeah, I definitely feel that working at HotDoc and working in that sort of startup scale up space where we run retros all the time, a really good example is even recently with some of the incidents that we’ve been experiencing that have affected our customers. We always will run a retro post the incident to see what we could have done better.

If we’re thinking specifically around some of the ways in which woman in the workplace can be uplifted more recently, we had a really good discussion around that as a steering team. And where we actually went into it, not so much as a retro, but more with retro characteristics in the sense of no blame, right?

We were analysing some data specifically gender pay cap data. And a lot of that conversation was really insightful because we all decided, and we all said prior there was this expectation that was set that when we go into this meeting, we were going to do it with no blame. And as a result, you have a much more interesting conversation because the people that you work with, they’re saying things with positive intent.

You know that in doing so you’re creating a more comfortable space for people to say what they truly think and what they truly feel that we could do. And as a result, we got more concrete actions than perhaps maybe some previous times when we tried to work our way through that conversation. So, yeah, I think some of that sensibility is really important, specifically that, if you’re thinking about a retro, I love the idea of no blame. I just think that’s just something we should always, be bringing into a lot of meetings, but specifically when you’re trying to digest some pretty serious information and come to an action point, no blame and positive intent is such a thing that I lean on.

[00:37:39] Chris Hudson: Yeah, a lot of people say no judgment, no blame is an interesting one because it probably brings up the cause but it’s without attaching it to particular, step or a person probably. Is that how it works?

[00:37:51] Agnes So: Yeah, pretty much so.

[00:37:52] Chris Hudson: But yeah healthy to kind of go into those exercises. And I think just within the context of work, it feels like it’s a bit of indulgence at times to actually run those sessions and think back, but they reveal so much usually. And it depends a little bit, I think, on how you run them as well.

Some of them are very public and some of them are very anonymous or asynchronous even, and it just feels like you get a mixed bag and sometimes people try and hide the truth a little bit because it’s run a certain way, they just want to move on, to formality. We’re just going to get it out of the way and do it.

So I think people can be aware of that too. If they can see that it’s totally transparent, then that would say quite a lot about your culture as well, don’t you think?

[00:38:32] Agnes So: Yeah, absolutely. I think like a slightly different way in which I’ve seen this happen more recently in my team is every Monday, we have a leadership meeting specifically within customer experience. So we call it the CX leadership team meeting, and it’s a great way to kick off the week, but I force us every week to start the meeting with going through our vital signs.

So just where’s everyone at? What’s our CSAT like? What’s our volumes like? What are our SLAs? What’s our churn looking like? So all the basic data that shows that we’re a healthy and operating at our best type customer experience team. And for months and months and months for a really long time, we got really comfortable with the idea that our service levels were not being met.

And I, for those of you who don’t know, I started in the support team when I first moved to HotDoc from Apple. So I grew up in that space and it’s a space that I’m really, passionate about as well. But for me, this idea that we weren’t reaching the service levels that we used to reach and not just for one month, but for multiple months in a row and for that to be okay, started to feel like that was a bit of an early warning sign that maybe we were getting a little bit complacent as a team.

So, I did more recently sort of bring the team together, specifically the support team, and I went this is a goal. We need to turn this around. I don’t think this is good enough anymore. And we need to change something in order for us to turn the ship around.

The conversation was not so much around blame. So, you know, like, one of the main reasons why I guess we’re in this position was there are a long list of action items that we didn’t have any time to do, and that’s because we’re working as a reactive team. We’re guided by our volumes, right?

And for us, the reason we weren’t getting any better was because the things that we knew that would make us better just weren’t being done. So I said, hey, cool. There’s no blame there. I understand time is short and we need to make the most of it, but let’s make a compromise. If I say as the head of this department, as the leader of this team, that it’s okay for us to spend intentional time fixing these problems.

Even if that means that we’re worse for maybe a month or two when it comes to our service levels. How does that sound? Is that something that we can do? Is that something that we can achieve? And I think simply, but just by putting that on the table with no blame, no judgment, as you said it was more easily accepted.

People went, yeah, like these are the things that I think would actually make a difference in terms of turning these metrics around. I think we can do it in this order and it would take us this amount of time. So, I spent a lot of time making sure that each individual had a project. One of these tasks was assigned to them as a project.

I asked them how much time they needed. I asked them what resources they needed. And I said, it’s okay if we’re worse for this period of time, as long as we get better. And that happened over the course of four to six weeks from the beginning of the year. And since then, into March it’s the first time in a really long time that team is now meeting their service levels. And all of that was because we just identified the problem without pointing fingers at anyone. We all knew that everyone had no time, but also that we followed through with the action and we had the discipline to follow through with the action as well.

So I think that for me, that was a really recent win, which kind of highlights why that value is really important.

[00:41:43] Chris Hudson: Yeah, absolutely right. I mean it’s a lovely story. I think that some people would find it hard to almost accept that that could be done, particularly when there’s so much else usually going on, they might have other things on their plate and BAU just gets in the way, and if you’ve tried something in the past, it hasn’t worked, then you’re always kind of thinking, well, I’ve got to try something new for this to be, a radical shift away from what we’ve got already.

I’m doing some work in the coaching space at the minute with Uni Melbourne at the minute. And they’ve got this framework that it’s all about grow. So I don’t know if you know the framework, but it’s grow. So you talk about the goal basically of the thing that you’re trying to achieve and your line on that.

And then you move into the reality and you discuss the situation and what’s happened. It’s all quite independently facilitated and people just put their points of view forward, what’s happening, how do you know it’s happening? Is it accurate? And then you’re getting into, well, what can we do about this?

What would the options be to fix this? And then you kind of result in it closing, it kind of converges. And then you end up actually wrapping up on a tangible set of actions that you all agree on. But I think that sometimes the path to an alternative is harder to forge.

And that sort of thing can just really open up the conversation. It takes somebody like you, as you were describing, just to say one day, actually, it’s not okay. Let’s think about how we can change it. Because otherwise it’s going to be the set, the line item on the report that’s just going to be skipped past and then you’d be on to the next thing that people feel more comfortable about reporting on. Because it’s probably something that they’ve achieved for themselves as well.

[00:43:05] Agnes So: Yeah, I think the secret sauce maybe in the example that I provided you is not just like that grow framework because it sounds exactly like what we did, even though we didn’t really follow that framework was a little bit more organic. But I also think it’s enough for me to think about my experience leading a support team or my experience designing support journeys and what I think as a leader and the head of the department would actually fix the problem.

But I knew going into it that I hadn’t been servicing customers for a really long time. So I’ve been in leadership for a fair amount of time. I hadn’t been on the ground as much as the people that I was asking the question to, the people I was going what’s happening why are we not meeting our service levels?

Why are we disappointing our customers this way? And the way in which I approached it was I went, these people, they’re going to know what we should do in order to fix it, not me. So all I really focused on was once we went through that growth framework was giving each person agency to actually step up and fix it.

Because when I did, they came up with the most incredible ideas and they had the most interesting insights as well. And a lot of that meant that when they had the insight and I went that’s interesting. Tell me more about that. Let’s validate that. Let’s go through a process where we figure out how we fix that issue based upon that insight.

And how about you are in charge of doing it? Because it was something that they thought of themselves because it was something that their leader backed. And because of something that they actually ended up fixing themselves, the outcome was better than if I came in and said, I’ve analysed all of our metrics.

I’ve looked at the insights, I’ve listened to the calls and I think we need to do steps one to five in order to get out of this trouble. No, I didn’t think that I had the right insight there. I actually really had to listen to my people and make sure that they were the ones that went in and fixed it because I didn’t think I was the right person anymore to do that.

[00:44:52] Chris Hudson: Yeah. You raised an interesting point around alignment because I think you can often fall into the trap of basically issuing your point of view and asking people to agree and sign up to that. But what you’re talking about is more suggestive. It’s actually around asking the right questions that help people get to that outcome for themselves.

Have you been quite deliberate in asking and framing those questions? How has that helped you?

[00:45:15] Agnes So: I think obviously we often will use tools like Miro to do the initial workshopping for a lot of these problem statements. So that’s probably like a thing that we do quite regularly. We started with. A really intense look at those metrics. And I even brought in a few insights from the industry and what was happening in the industry just to give people a bit of an idea as to, oh this isn’t like a problem that’s unique to us.

It’s actually a problem that everyone’s trying to solve right now. So how do we make the service levels of our customers the same? It’s just call centre slash, inbound support team 101. Yeah I think falling back on some of those more collaborative tools and collaborative ways of approaching the problem, like I said, was really the secret sauce here and it doesn’t just get buy in, but, I talked a lot before about understanding people’s motivations, doing skip levels and trying to figure out what each person’s individual career pathway might be and how I could support that.

A lot of these skills are things that they might only be doing for the first or second time. So especially a lot of the people that I was tasking with fixing this, they were actually, in the support team. There were people who were currently, helping step up to lead it slightly, but also they were functioning members of the support team themselves.

So I think to give them the agency and the problem statement of going, hey currently you guys are experiencing a problem. How do you want to fix that? Was really something and also not just how do you want to fix that? How can I actually physically help you fix that without doing the work myself, without getting in there and telling you what to do?

How do I connect you with people within the company that can help you do that? Who are the people that you’ll need to be introduced to? What is even the budget you might need? Here’s a bit of money, for example. I don’t mind if we spend a bit of money here in order to fix this.

That is absolutely doable. So there were all these options that I just put on the table once we got past that collaborative stage. And then once they got more into that individual stage where they were approaching each problem themselves, it’s like the DRI. And I think for me, that’s how I prefer to approach a lot of these problems.

I know that you don’t always get to decision by committee, but I think you do get to decision by collaboration in some way. And as the leader, you still have the final say in what we actually end up doing, as long as they’re the ones that are bringing the ideas to the table, they still respect obviously my opinion.

You do need to step up and give direction when they need it. But a lot of the time, if I can make that space for that collaboration to occur first, then I get much better outcomes as a result.

[00:47:42] Chris Hudson: Yeah. I definitely think from what you’re saying, there’s an interesting point around decisioning and what decision by definition actually is and when it should happen, because a lot of people in business, feel like a meeting is not a meeting without a decision.

There has to be some kind of forced discussion around it. And we’ve all kind of agreed on that and great. We’re going to move on to the next one, but actually you can think about when to introduce that and how to introduce it. And I like that you’ve opened it up and actually not placed the decision on the end outcome but more around the problem space.

So if you can agree on the problem space to think about, then actually the decision from that becomes easier if you’ve shown that there’s a problem and you fix that. It’s like a pairing, cheese and wine pairing. You can basically agree on the thing that you’re trying to solve before presenting the solution that solves for it.

[00:48:28] Agnes So: That agreement is really important. I’m glad you raised that because in that exercise, you’ll also find out if anyone isn’t aligned or if they see the problem very differently. And as a result of surfacing those people who might be challenging that problem, you then have a different, you then have to think about it differently as a leader.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Especially if you’re pretty adamant that this is the problem space that we should be solving for. If someone is truly against that, you really have to get to the bottom of why. And a lot of that time you’ll probably learn a lot about not just their motivations, but their perception of what might be happening in the business as a result.

That’s when I think you have to be more of that leader that influences and really starts to bring them along for the journey and a lot of the time when I’ve experienced this myself more recently, it’s because they might have lacked specific knowledge or context that you have as a leader.

So a lot of the time I think about transparency as well. Once I get to the crux of what it is that’s causing them to disagree, I go, how do I influence? And a lot of that influence actually comes from just being really transparent about the context and the thing that maybe they didn’t understand to begin with, and then asking them, do you agree on this problem space now?

So yeah, I think alignment’s really important because you can’t solve for something if there’s someone who fundamentally disagrees with the reason that you’re in that problem to begin with, or even the ways in which we might look at solving it together.

[00:49:51] Chris Hudson: That’s a great point. I think there’s a really interesting challenge more broadly within business that, you’re unsure as to what is concrete or what is actually, a given or what is a strategy fixed and do I have to take that on board and do I have to run with it or is there any wiggle room in here for that to be influenced in some way?

And I think traditionally that would have been defined, at a pretty senior level and that’s why people get paid a lot of money to do those things. But actually now there’s a real shift towards a culture of empowerment and enablement and collaboration as you were saying. And so that blurriness is kind of creeping in, there’s a bit of framing up front from the leadership, but actually it’s the people’s problem to solve.

How are you going about doing something like that?

[00:50:31] Agnes So: You’re not going to win everyone. So as much as I want to be like, yeah, like we all agree on the problem space. We’re all gonna combine our own move forward and, shift the flag together. I also know that there will be, especially if you’re the head of a rather large department and I have under me around 40 people.

You know that there’s going to be people who will disagree with that because they’re not able to see things from your perspective. They don’t have the context that you have, and you might not be able to surface that they don’t have that either. Like there’s only so many conversations that I can have in the day.

So the way that I kind of approach this is when I consider programs to change or when I consider fixing a specific problem space and putting in place a strategy for that. I think not just about the end result, but also what can I bring forward as a moment of truth sooner rather than later.

And we talk a lot about moment of truths being something that we design in a customer journey for our customers. I think the same thing for our people. Remember they’re internal customers, right? So I think about what is the moment of truth that I can bring forward. And a lot of like a different language in which you might say that is what’s an easy win that I can bring forward sooner rather than later.

So a really good example of this was over the last 6 to 12 months we’ve been working on this rather large piece of work that is essentially re-segmenting a bunch of our customer base. And that sounds really simple and straightforward, but it actually wasn’t, and it still isn’t.

But there were a lot of different reasons we wanted to do that. Firstly, we had just gone through a pricing change. We were going through some of our highest churn. That we’ve ever had historically and obviously some of the poorest service levels that we’ve had historically as well. So we weren’t in the best place as a customer experience team.

And we also knew that by resegmenting our customers it was something we had to do operationally purely because we had a new pricing structure in place. So we had to realign our customer base as a result, but we also knew that we could take this as a time to redesign new journeys for them. Now, I know that any program of change, specifically customer journey mapping, getting the insights all the way from end to end is going to take a really long time for you to see that impact.

And a lot of the time, minimum, it will be 12 to 18 months, if not much, much longer. So in order to balance that need or that desire for instant change, which you often will get as well, in a startup scale up environment versus that reality of that really long live change. I think about bringing forward the easy way and I think it’s in Good Strategy, Bad Strategy by Richard Ramel.

He talks about the idea of a proximate objective where you consider this objective that’s close enough at hand to the other objectives that you have. And with that, what I considered was what is the proximate objective here that I can weave into the strategy? What’s the thing that I can bring forward to my people that will actually make a difference that will give them something that changes how they feel about the work that we’re doing.

And the thing that we actually ended up doing was I know this might sound really weird at first, but I’ll explain in a second. The thing we ended up doing was getting rid of a tool that didn’t service them. So we spent a lot of time over the last few years embedding a new tool into the customer experience team.

And we realised that this tool just wasn’t actually being utilised to the same extent. And not just that people had a really negative experience with it. When you ask them how they felt about this tool, they had this really visceral response to it, which was, I hate this tool. So I knew that just by getting rid of this tool not only would I get really early buy in from the people that I’m servicing my team, but also I was saving the business a whole bunch of money, anywhere up to about 100k a year. So, for me, that was my proximate objective. I went if I can weave that into this strategy, if I can focus on getting there first then people would understand that the rest of what we’re doing is worthy of doing.

And it will make sense because you’re kind of getting really early buy in. So, that’s what we did. We ended up, creating the strategy. We put down all of our plans on paper, but one of the things that I wanted to prioritise first was getting rid of this tool. And we ended up doing that.

And it became like this moment of truth, like I said, not just for the people in my department, but also, fingers crossed, for like my stakeholders and the leadership team too.

[00:54:37] Chris Hudson: I love it. Was there any kind of ceremony involved in getting rid of this tool? Was there a public binning or something?

[00:54:43] Agnes So: A little bit. We have these things called like a monthly gathering, what we call the custom experience monthly. And we had it in person towards the end of last year. And that was where we announced that we were getting rid of it. And people were just like, yes. This just needed to happen.

Oh my goodness. Yes. And it’s not like a it wasn’t the tool itself so much. It just was the wrong tool for us in the stage at which we are at as a team. So, no shade to the tool, but it was just such an odd feeling that people had. It definitely goes to show that enablement for your people goes beyond, obviously, how much the tools that you give them.

These are the things that they interacted with on a daily basis. And if they don’t work for you, then they’re going to have really bad time and they’re not going to enjoy working. So that was what was happening. And just by doing something as simple as yeah, publicly binning the tool everyone threw their hands up in the air and went, yay, yeah, let’s go forward, let’s do this, let’s do this wider program of change, but I love that we’re starting here.

[00:55:39] Chris Hudson: And just with, with the wind in your sails, you can basically just go forth and tackle any of these things. You’re unstoppable when the thing that’s taking you the most time has been taken away from you. So that’s a really amazing initiative. I think there’s a lot in that story which we could unpack.

But the one that also springs to mind is around the fact that in business or innovation or products, we’re always thinking about new things that we have to make and do, and it always feels like a really hard concept to grasp because you’re still doing your day job and you still, you’re then being asked to do more and more to layer on top of that.

And we always feel like the answer is something new, but actually even just a simple start, stop, continue list, or something that you can drop actually is incredibly liberating.

And that’s exactly along the lines of your story.

[00:56:21] Agnes So: Yeah, start, stop, continue, is a framework that we use quite a bit actually. Weirdly though this tool didn’t make it on any one of those lists so much so, but that’s interesting. I think also working in this sort of startup slash scale up environment, specifically now with the business, we’re at the stage where we’re hovering around breakeven.

When we really want to grow, we want to be one of those businesses that just, grows 30 percent year on year. We’re just like super profitable doing, doing the best thing that we can, like creating innovative products, really servicing our customers. We want to do all the good things. But we are at our core, a hundred person company.

So you really have to think about the leanest way in which you can operate and sometimes that means not just stopping things, but also what services is double duty? What can you pack into roles? How can you redefine roles so that they can bring greater value? These are all things that I’m always considering as well working within this environment.

Very different to Apple, which is like a different trillion dollar company and didn’t really think about servicing in the same way. They saw it as a cost that was important. And even if it costs them money, they knew that it would create incredible lifetime value for them down the track because it kept people in the Apple ecosystem.

But they can do that because they’re a trillion dollar company. Whereas, HotDoc is a very different type of company, very small, and you have to really be scrappy with how you approach these problems.

[00:57:42] Chris Hudson: So much gold you’ve shared with us today, Agnes. Thank you. You’ve talked a lot about what you’ve done and how you approach certain situations and there’s so much value in that. I wonder if you were to put your finger on what your superpower was how would you describe that?

[00:57:54] Agnes So: It would be storytelling. So, this probably harks back a little bit to the creative nature or my artistic roots, where you’re really, like I said, manufacturing that experience, but in the same way you’re also trying to tell a story. And the reason why I think storytelling is not just my secret weapon, or like my, what was it my superpower as a leader is because I understand that if you don’t have people understanding your narrative and what you’re bringing to the table, then they’re never going to buy into what you’re doing.

And that is from a 360 perspective in a company. So whether that’s your manager that manages you, whether it’s your stakeholders and your peers, or whether it’s the people that you’re leading, all of them need to understand your narrative. Or else they’re all going to be misaligned and they’re all going to do different things.

And I think this is becoming a bit of a theme of what we’re talking about. But I learned pretty early on in my leadership journey that storytelling was a really powerful tool to get people aligned. And if you can tell the right story it will not just get them aligned, but they’ll think about that ongoing and they’ll remember it ongoing.

And that’s the most important part of change is that, you think about different change frameworks. Repetition is a really important part of it because you really want it to get into people’s heads, what the change is. You want it to be then their new reality or the new normal. Storytelling is effective because, stories are shared from generation to generation, remembered for a reason, it’s because it sticks in your brain.

So, for me, I rely on a lot of storytelling tactics in order to think about, what is this high level strategy, this really complex strategy that we’re trying to do? What is the change? What is the reason for that? And how do I communicate it to a one to one, one to few, one to many scenario? What do I change as a approach?

What kind of language do I use for these different types of environments? And what’s going to really hit? Because when you are trying to explain why maybe churns important to someone who answers phones and just is more of a frontline employee. They probably care less about that than they do about their own day to day problems in their role.

But, if you align it with a story that makes sense for them, if you make it really relatable, and if you make it really digestible, They’re going to remember that ongoing and the secret sauce is also making sure it’s really hitting an emotional nerve or a humorous nerve, or it has some sort of level of not just facts and figures and logic, but emotion and human nature with the story as well.

So I would say that would be my superpower, the storytelling.

[01:00:25] Chris Hudson: And I reckon actually I don’t know whether you did this deliberately or not probably, but it really links very closely to what you’re saying right at the start of the interview about being an artist and actually creating that sense of connection to somebody else. Because, ultimately you might have a concept that you’ve come up with or, you put out there into the world, but you’ll still needing to connect it to the world in some way or another. I think storytelling is incredibly powerful for that, but is that what you had in mind?

[01:00:49] Agnes So: Yeah. I’ve been thinking or reflecting a lot on why I think that’s important. For me, especially storytelling is, my go to. Anyone who I lead will tell you that I’m always throwing out an analogy as well, because I call them little stories. They’re essentially little tiny stories that you can pepper into your day to day approach.

But an analogy just makes things so much more simple for someone to understand. Again, something that I learned at Apple actually was they used a lot of analogies or they taught you a lot of analogies to explain the technical nature of the device and what was happening with it in order for you to explain that to a non technical person.

So again, these are all the bits and bobs that you weave throughout your throughout like my experience into what I do now, but the part that also I think is quite relevant is when you’re an artist, you are essentially a business for yourself. So, no one knows about your art. You can hole up in a corner somewhere and make artwork, for days, for weeks, for months.

But, If no one sees that work, remember that Duchampian idea, like the artwork isn’t full, it’s not complete until the viewer sees it, and that viewer isn’t you, right? It’s gotta be someone else. For you to get that work out there, you have to hustle, you have to be really good at a whole bunch of different skills, but more importantly, you have to sell yourself.

You have to be able to write your story and sell that to people in order for them to give you grants. And in order for them to allow them into your exhibiting spaces. So for me, I learned a lot of that skill as well and how to be really good at it when I was an artist, because you really had to market yourself in order to get your work out there.

And you also had to really think about the different people that you were telling that story to, because if you’re going for a government grant, you might need to use very different type of language to maybe a more local university grant, or even if you were just applying to exhibit at an artist run space versus maybe government funded space.

So there were so many different ways in which I think about, the seeds of the skill where it started to really coalesce when I saw it being done intentionally and then how I apply that to my role now.

[01:02:47] Chris Hudson: Yeah, I think that’s right. You’ve got to find a way to make self promotion okay in some way. It’s not something that comes out, comes naturally to everybody, but you want to do it in a way that doesn’t kind of just put people off, it needs to be connecting to their world in some way and you’ve got to find the link.

So empathy is obviously incredibly useful for that. But you have to make that formula work in some way otherwise it’s just you versus the world.

[01:03:11] Agnes So: Yeah, and especially if you want to make it as an artist as I was trying to do back then. You can’t be alone in that journey. You really have to put yourself out there and be okay with it. Be okay with people rejecting you as well. You learn that a lot, being an artist.

[01:03:23] Chris Hudson: Which is the same in business, right?

[01:03:25] Agnes So: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.

[01:03:28] Chris Hudson: Gotta be okay with the criticism. I reckon we’re at that point now, I think we’ve kind of, we’ve gone through a load of stuff today and I really appreciate the chat and just the kind of breadth of different parts of your life that you’ve been able to draw from to kind of stitch together a really cool narrative around what business leadership and participation within business and intrapreneurial behaviour is really all about. So really appreciate your time on the show.

Thank you so much for coming.

[01:03:50] Agnes So: Well, thank you so much for having me. It’s been such a great time reliving my art career past, my Apple retail past, and really reflecting upon my current present.

[01:03:59] Chris Hudson: Excellent. Thanks so much Agnes.

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