Unknowns to knowns: Questions to grow a growth mindset

“Over the years I’ve built toolkits, ways of processing…sure I still get nervous like anybody else when something unexpected gets thrown at me, but I’ve come to realise that it’ll be okay. I’ve always managed to come out the other side with either success or just a small handful of bruises.”
Amir Ansari

In this episode you’ll hear about

• The unpredictable moments in Amir’s career, his path and the twists and turns along the way. ‘’life’s full of ambiguity and I need to be comfortable with it’’ – Amir Ansari
• How to cope with decisions made out of your control and how to regain control of the situation.
• The positive impact of being able to manage change as leaders in organisation: Being a conduit, remaining unified and connected in the face of change.
• Asking questions to build mental models: assessing the situation and the circumstance to understand the outcome needing to be fulfilled.
• Building situations out by looking at as much core information as possible: assessing who you can go to for advice and mentoring for stories, questions and historical insights.
• Navigating strategic trends in business: going back to first principles, patience and prioritisation.
• Letting go of your pride and reputation: accepting that in certain situations, you might not know all the answers and will need to search for guidance and mentorship.

Key links

Academy Xi

Amir Ansari

Edward de Bono’s Six Thinking Hats

About our guest

Amir is the Chief Experience Officer and Head of Applied AI at Academy Xi – an Australian-owned education company with a mission to transform the world through education.

He has been in the field of product design and user experience for over 25 years as a practitioner and leader, building and scaling design capability and teams with companies and agencies, and delivering award-winning digital products. With a passion for human-centred design, he is well-versed in building functions, processes, and operations to fast-track and grow design maturity for companies of all sizes and operating models.

He is passionate about inclusion and digital accessibility and democratising the craft of design – doing it with a smile and a hug.

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: 0:06
Hey everyone and welcome once more to the Company Road podcast where we bring you unexpected questions and even more unexpected answers around what it takes to drive positive change within organisations. And podcasts can be a little bit predictable, so I’m looking to change that up and keep things fresh. And as always, if you have a question, the more, absurd or more abstract, the better really, as long as it relates to business in some way, then just email me at chris@companyroad.co. And we’ll respond to your question in the show. So I’m thinking of running a Q and A episode at some point in the future. So shoot some questions through and we can definitely take them on. So in keeping with the theme of, unpredictability and keeping things fresh, I’ve been wanting to interview. this. Week’s wonderful guest for some time, someone who’s traversed the lands of consulting and in house roles, and who is currently the chief experience officer and head of applied AI at Academy XI. So let’s give an asynchronous round of applause to the fabulous Amir Ansari. Amir, very warm welcome to the show.

Amir Ansari: 1:02
Yeah, thanks for the lovely intro, probably a better intro that I would have done. And I’m really keen to see how predictable we can make this session.

Chris Hudson: 1:11
Let’s make it unpredictable. So if I say something, then you just give me the opposite to

Amir Ansari: 1:14
give you a random answer and we’ll from Let’s, yeah.

Chris Hudson: 1:18
yeah, that’s good. It’s like a word generator, but we’ll see how we go. so Amir tell us about some of the, maybe more,, unpredictable moments of your career, and we can kick off with maybe a couple of stories about that and, what’s been your path and what’s kind of twisted and turned along the way.

Amir Ansari: 1:33
Yeah, sure. I’ll probably, take a step back even before my professional life. For people who don’t know me, I was born in Iran. I migrated when I was 10 years old. And. I’ll be honest with you, Chris, I think that being exposed to unpredictability happened very early on in my living life where, a country that was born goes into war, we needed to flee, pack everything up in very short notice. So I think, that probably set the scene for me to go, okay, life’s. I was full of ups and downs and often unplanned ups and downs and, obviously at the time I didn’t think this. I thought to myself, holy crap, I’ve got to leave this country. My parents had told me we’re going and just having to go along the ride. And then over time, in Australia, I’ve moved primary schools, number of high schools and most of it out of my control, out of my decision to be honest at the time. But I think that set the scene for. How I then went about living life and treating life. And I think the two, me being a designer was in any way related to, my upbringing, even though I always like to be creative, but. I think it set the scene for me to go, you know what, life’s full of ambiguity and I need to be comfortable with it. And I know a lot of people who probably listen to these podcasts, who come from a design background, appreciate that designers often have a superpower, which is being comfortable with ambiguity. over the years, I’ve been thrown into the deep end, sometimes with no support, sometimes with a lot of support. And a perfect example is, early on. being told that I had to go to UK and, set up and manage a team and this is, early in my twenties, I’ve never managed a single human being and I’ve been told to go and, lead and manage a team and had to go live in another country for the very first time. And again, you just go okay, this is happening. I just need to deal with it. And over the years I’ve built, toolkits, ways of processing. sure, you still, I still get butterflies in my tummy, like anybody else when something gets thrown at you, which you didn’t expect, but I’ve come to realise that it’ll be okay. I’ve always come out of the end. I’ve always managed to come out the other side with either success or. Just a small handful of bruises. And to be honest, I keep repeating that, Chris, every time a new NALI problem is thrown at me, be it at an executive, strategic level, or even at a mundane day to day life level. Sure, the first reaction always is like anybody else, flight and fright. you have that initial response, but then, I’ll take pause and go, no, you know what? I’ve had worse situations. I’ve been in this situation before, or I’ve heard somebody else, I’ve heard Chris been in that situation before, and, through that, I give myself comfort that, I’ll come out the other end. And just talking about what I just said before the toolkit is the collecting of those stories. Sure. Sometimes they’re my stories. But through being, inquisitive and being again, designer and constantly asking lots and lots of questions that not only forms a mental model around what I’m going to be dealing with. So it gives me a little bit more comfort or be able to, address the situation, but also asking others and almost passing on their stories. being in that situation. They’re the sort of things that often I use on a daily basis to tell myself, you know what, okay, this is something new. I need to deal with it. Yep. Chris has told me about this or Jenny over there’s told about this, or I’ve dealt with this in the past 20 years ago, 40 years ago last week. And then that positive mindset of it’s going to be okay. It goes a long way.

Chris Hudson: 4:53
Yeah, nice. I really love that. you’re the perfect guest to have on the show. Because, the show is all about telling those stories and sharing those stories so that there’s a positive sense of, it can be done. And obviously, the more we share, the more we learn, the more we can take that as the accepted norm. And then we can just move on and actually focus our brain power and our headspace on more constructive things. I’m wondering, if you’ve got these bank of stories, what’s your kind of method or, what’s your routine for, getting to the heart of, how do you learn essentially is probably the best way to ask the question. How are you reflecting, how are you taking some of those learnings forward?

Amir Ansari: 5:25
first and foremost, it’s the questions, right? This happened literally half an hour ago. And I won’t go through the detail because I think it’s confidentiality, but I was told a very short notice next week I need to run a workshop in a different state around a topic that I know really well, but delivered that piece of content and the way it was designed by, let’s say another mentor and instructor. So the first thing you do, you go, Ooh, okay. You get that crap next week. Am I ready? Do I need to move things around? So you go through that initial emotional up and down, then my process is, okay what is it that I need to know? Some factual stuff. Who, when, where, how, why, what, all that sort of stuff, right? So I ask those questions of the person who’s giving me or across the other people who are sharing that, scenario with me or situation. So just collect and collect. And often when you ask a question and you get a response, two other questions then pop up in my head. Would I say that’s a learned skill to be honest? Actually I don’t know because when I have this conversation with my wife all the time and hopefully she’s not listening through those thin walls, but she’ll go to a GP and she’ll come back and go, I’ve been diagnosed with X, so I need to take Y. And literally within the time that she’s walked through the door, Chris, I’ll ask 20 questions about,, that situation or what the GP had said, or did she actually ask this question? And she’ll go. Alright, you know what? From now on, you’re going to come to every doctor’s appointment with me. I’m not sure if that’s something thats inherent me or if it’s something we learned. Maybe I’m a designer, but although she’s an architect as well. But regardless, I think I’m just naturally,, prone to asking lots of questions. That’s probably the first thing that I would do. And based on that, I start to build mental models in my head. I go, okay, so this is the situation, this is the breadth, this is the, depth, this is the circumstance, this is the potential things that can go wrong, this is what the outcome and impact is that I need to fulfil. And more, in my head, but sure, sometimes, on a whiteboard, depending, I start to build the situation out. And then I go okay, so I know the core information, I know what I need to do, am I ready or not, that’s a different thing, have I seen this before, has it been done before, who else can I go for advice, coaching and mentoring. So I’m going to put that all in that bucket of learning that you said the learning of that situation, and be it at a very acute situation or a pandemic size situation, just going through that process gives me comfort to go, okay. I’ve gone from unknowns to some knowns, and known unknowns, and there’ll be some unknown unknowns that I’ll never find out until I’m in it. That’s cool, I’m not going to worry about that, but try and cover as much information, learn, as you said, as much information as possible. And then,, the other thing that I’ll just say is, now I’ve done this. I know everything I need to know. Positive mindset. Let’s have a crack at it. Now, what’s the worst that can happen? I might get a bruise, I might get a scar, I might get a client to, give me a negative feedback, but. The risk of that is minimal, maybe because I’ve been around the traps a bit, and I know what to expect and what to predict Often people get that analysis paralysis, right? Or they’re like a deer staring at a headlight. That’s a human reaction. We all go through that. But, it’s just constantly reminding myself, no, stop looking at the headlight. Look beyond the headlight, what’s the outcome and I just progress through and frankly, every single time I’ve come out the other side and it’s so far it’s worked well for me. My nickname, Chris was, hack and wing. Amir just hacks it, or he just wings it. and I think the reason my design teams, or people that I used to lead, used to say that, is because they were expecting a magical framework. Oh, so where’s Amir’s framework? Where is it on the whiteboard? Does he have a deck? And when I say I don’t have it, or I don’t have one, they go, oh, he’s just winging it. It’s just this magical skill he has. But everything I’ve just said today is that framework. Someone can probably capture it and put into a magical matrix and go, here you go. This is one element, right?

Chris Hudson: 9:23
Yeah. I love that. I think the interesting thing there is around adaptability the extent to which you as a person, not you necessarily, but anyone, are happy to let go of your pride to some extent and your reputation and basically accept that in that situation, you might not know all the answers and you’re able to basically navigate that in some ways. I’m interested in, that point of view, but also the point of view of, the people that have worked with you. What do you think? Are they looking scared when you’re looking scared or are they feeling quite a lot of trust? And when of kick in?

Amir Ansari: 9:53
I’ve never been asked that question. Are they scared when they see I’m scared?

Chris Hudson: 9:57
unpredictability we said right?

Amir Ansari: 9:58
It’s a good one. I’ll be honest with you. I’ve led heads of, I’ve led leaders and seniors, juniors. I’ve led the entire, spectrum within a design organisation. But I’ve made sure I come across cool, calm, and collected, right? Now, you probably know me, I can be erratic and then, full of energy and bubbles and things like that. something else that I’ll often, tell people, Chris as well, is I’m a systems thinker. So I do a lot of quick response type thinking and often do my thinking through talking. So I preface everything I say to my teams I’ll go, just so you know, this is how I work. Amir’s handbook. This is the readme file. I think through talking. So as you ask me a question or come to me with a problem, I’ll just start talking. Now, that’s not recommendations, that’s not advice, that’s not a mandate. That’s me talking. And you might see me, Chris, within 30 seconds, I might do a 180 degree flip. Don’t go, oh, Amir has no idea. That’s just my process. And then when I go through that process, there’ll come a point where I go, okay. I’ve done my thinking now and through that thinking, which is verbal, I might ask a lot of questions and it’ll come to a point to go, okay, this is what I really think. But to your point around if I’m scared do I show it, I try not to, because as a leader, I’m responsible to keep the team coherent and confident. And we’ve got a strong direction and that’s a pressure with any leader, right? Not just in the design field, but as leaders, it’s good to be transparent. It’s good to put your hand ago. This is a new one. This is unpredictable. I’ve never faced this before. But I don’t go, holy crap, I go hang on, let’s get together, let’s ask those questions, let’s pick up some stories from the past, if anybody else can share a situation where this has happened, how can we deal with it? If deep down inside, Chris, I might be, my brain and my gut are very heavily connected. My gut might be going all over the place, but I make sure my face is, cool, I’m asking those questions. Because I think it’s unfair to, as a leader, when they look up to you to go this is a holy crap moment team. We’re doomed and we don’t know what to do. So yeah, and it puts a pressure, of course, but I’ve always tried to decouple that

Chris Hudson: 12:04
Yeah, that’s a good answer. One of the things that we’re exploring this month is around setting up, foundations for growth within organisations in one way. So how do you make that solid? And I think part of it like you’re describing, but you almost got to observe the situation you’re in a little bit. And read it, to be able to then build out from there. So I think if it’s ambiguity, then there’s a certain approach. Probably if there are very strongly held opinions and tightly held opinions and beliefs, then that’s another, thing you notice. But in terms of either, Organisational teams, that are working really well and have those foundations set, what are you seeing as some of the key characteristics walking into a building what are you seeing?

Amir Ansari: 12:41
Yeah, it’s a really good point. Often, the research starts before you walk into the building, right? You, ask questions from people in your network around that organisation, that design discipline, the CEO, the CPO, whoever you might be leading or the client that you’re going to be engaging with. You want to have some background stories. I think that’s the first thing. And then, over the years of, building, growing and scale design teams and capability and maturity also inherited teams. First and foremost is again, get the facts right. So what do I mean by that is obviously not just the. The organisation itself and where they’ve come from, where they’re going, but the teams and the individuals, I’ll give a couple of examples, obviously building a team from scratch is a bit easier because you have full control. You have autonomy around who you pick and how you form it, but often the biggest challenge design leaders find is when they’re thrown into. an inheritor team, doesn’t matter what size, right? They didn’t get a choice who they hired, they’re not across the skills and career capability and matrix, bunch of reasons why, decisions have been made that it was outside of your control. So one of the first things I tend to do is Get the facts. Okay, so this team, who are they? It doesn’t matter if there’s 20 people, five people, 200 people. Who are they? Where they come from? What have they done? What have they achieved? And often that’s one on ones, but obviously if the team is big, then I’ll rely on the, their leads and heads and, the other people within my, leadership team to give me that fact and give me the insight. again, doing the research, right? And then, I pride myself on, supporting every individual’s career growth. So I pay a lot of attention to each individual, doesn’t matter what level they are, because I often find, they’ll take solace and can get insights from different levels within their leadership team, not just the direct reporting line. So fact find, understand where they’re at and then now you have your starting point A, Chris is here, okay, Chris has decided or has talked about that they want to get to point B, which is either sideways movement, move up the ladder, whatever that might be, or a particular skill set they don’t have. Great. Once you’ve got point A and point B, the two end points, to be honest, everything else in the middle is pretty easy. Okay. How do we get from A to B? Stepping stones, what are the skills that are missing? And we just go through that process. And it’s. Pretty simple. It works really well. And look, I’m not a people and culture expert, but over the years, this seems to have worked really well. Start with the A point of the individual or the business, decide where they want to go, point B, and then again, using stories, questions, historical insights to go, okay, what are the things we can put into this bucket to get us from point A to point B? It doesn’t matter how short or how long term it is. as part of that, learning is mostly embedded within that process rather than individuals, there needs to be a growth. Often, because I always used to get asked, I work for small organisations, I work for large organisations. In the large ones, there’s 15, 20 ranks in the hierarchy. So career growth upwards is obviously a lot easier. But when you’re working for a small agency where it’s really flat, there’ll be the individual and then there might be me and there’s nobody else. And then you’ve got the founder and the CEO. So working up the ladder becomes a challenge. And the way I’ve managed to address that with individuals is highlight that growth. Doesn’t necessarily mean up the ladder, climbing. Sure, there might be an aspect, especially, if you want to move on. That is one level of growth. But you can have growth at quite a micro level, be it a skill, be it a particular industry that you need to work in, be it that you’re really crap at giving feedback, so you’re going to get better at giving feedback. And in six months time, you can look back and go, Oh, I’ve just grown. I’m now a master of giving feedback. And I use it to tell people that, If you’re in an organisation and. You love the people, you love the work, you love the context. Use it, stay there and look for opportunities for growth, but that’s not always going upwards. It might be going sideways, it might be going, acutely in a particular industry. And just remind yourself that you are growing in that space, you are learning, you are becoming a great person at giving feedback, or you might be a great designer, or you might be great at now looking at over a P& L, or the financial acumen required for designers. Just constantly remind yourself because often people forget that they’re growing and unless somebody reflects and tells them, wow, Chris, you’ve really grown in the last one week, two months, six years, whatever, sometimes when they’re deep in it, they can’t see, they can’t, raise up to the top of the forest and see where they’re going. So they do need that constant reminder.

Chris Hudson: 17:07
Yeah. Yeah.

Amir Ansari: 17:07
I’m going on a bit of a rant here.

Chris Hudson: 17:08
No, ranting is what this show is all about too. I think, the optionality feels like its important because, I feel like, if you’re in that organisation, And we’ve been in this situation that we feel like we’re a bit fixed, We’ve been set some targets. We’ve got the goals. We’re doing the KPIs we’re aiming at one one or a few things, but that feels like it’s a set track but what you’re saying You can also look above the trees and see what’s around you and take a sideways step and that’ll lead to something just have side conversations It feels like you can either have the tunnel vision or you can look broad but yeah, a lot of people fall into the trap just Being too singular.

Amir Ansari: 17:41
And it’s often good to push yourself out of the comfort zone. I actually feel really uncomfortable when I’m too comfortable, if that makes sense.

Chris Hudson: 17:48
Makes a lot of sense. There’s a lot around that and schools of thought these days around the fact that you should be uncomfortable with something major in your life every month, right? Next thing maybe just talk about is around how businesses, so we talked a little about individuals, but how businesses you see a kind of changing well, so in terms of strategies for scaling business, moving, manoeuvring, getting ahead of competition, like anything in that space that you feel you’ve seen as being important to bring up.

Amir Ansari: 18:15
Yeah, good one. Look, I’ve seen a trend. And this is cyclical, right? And you’ve been around long enough to see this, in the tech space, there’s often the cyclical nature of, relying on in house knowledge workers and capability or then outsourcing everything, right? That happens every, three to five years. As company needs to cut costs and so forth, therefore outsource. So then they want to build IP, they bring an in source. So that tends to happen often. Obviously the most recent trend has also been, specifically talking from a design perspective or even product development that, there’s a school of thought. You need to have centre of excellence. So you need to have, leader representing product, a leader representing engineering, a leader representing design, right? Then they’ll run their centre of excellence and capability. And then they might have their teams and designers embedded within squads, tribes, teams, whatever the terminology that organisation tends to use. And over the last 12 to 18 months, what I’ve noticed is When they do that, especially when they’ve got various product lines or products in general, then measuring the ROI on those products becomes really harder because, resources are spread across everywhere. And so I’ve seen in the last 18 months that, P& L has been shifted to we’re going to do a total reorg again. And we’re going to remove these heads of or central, leaders. And we’re going to have P& L accountability per product line, vertical, whatever you want to call it. And so often, leadership levels, get axed, you’ll have a little mini CEO or GM and then you’ve got product design and development in what I like to call silos, unfortunately. And then you tend to see these businesses in effect running little mini businesses within an organisation, not necessarily talking well together. Okay. And you start to get duplication, inefficiencies and so forth. So that’s tends to be a bit of a cycle. So that’s what probably companies have done that set them backwards. Sure. Maybe financially, it makes it slightly easier to report on, but I’ll bet you in about two to three years time, companies go, you know what, we’ll be building really crap products. You know what, we should have a centre of design and someone to lead product and someone to lead technology. And they’ll just go through the process again and again, and I think organisations that, I constantly hear that continue to do well is, I guess it’s easier said than done, is worry less about the organisational structure and transformation and everything else that happens all the time. I just go back to first principles. Who are our customers? What are they saying about us? What are their pains and gains and how we’re going to solve it? And design initiatives to make that happen. Ignoring or being agnostic of the org structure and everything else. Get it right. What are the problems that we’re trying to solve? How are we going to solve it? Prioritising them is really key. A couple of gigs ago, I worked for an organisation, I was part of the leadership team, Sydney leadership team, and it was a global company, Chris. I think we had. Over a hundred initiatives. And then we said, Oh, this is ridiculous. Let’s prioritise. And we prioritise it to 49. 49 is a large number. Imagine an organisation, trying to manage 49 key initiatives that they have to then report on all the way up to the board and shareholders. That’s a shitload of initiatives, right? So I think organisations that work really well are the ones that are really acutely prioritising the core stuff. I won’t mention the number of initiatives, every organisation is different, but just like what’s really important and just let’s nail that and let’s report on that and then we work on the next thing. So yeah. And as part of that, obviously human centred design and design thinking is really important, but lack of prioritisation. I see at enterprise level, Chris, and I’m sure you could probably share your stories is so rife and still around every day.

Chris Hudson: 21:54
Yeah. Yeah. I think I want to bring up the topic Patience within business, because I feel agreed on the thing or the list of a hundred list of the 49. And getting to that alignment point feels like that’s the biggest step, when there’s chaos and you say, okay we’re now going to agree on what the priorities are and let’s focus on that. But getting to that point is big enough. And then you basically got to say, okay we don’t want to prioritise from that point. We want to have it all done. And we want it all done really quickly. So how much of that can we do in the next three to six months? And then you’re into, the rat race again. So you’re basically just trying to get the highest priority things done as quickly as you can. And yeah, I’m wondering whether culture of just racing to the finish gets to the best results either.

Amir Ansari: 22:36
Yeah. Look, not necessarily. You’re a hundred percent because, businesses then make quite rash decisions or make decisions without knowing all the information, right? Not having done the due diligence and research and often are reactive. No, that’s definitely not the right solution. For the past six months, I’ve been using this analogy of one way and two way doors and which I’m sure, many people who are listening have heard of this idea. When you’re trying to make, I think it was maybe a Jeff Bezos quote, I can’t remember, but yeah, it’s a one way or two way doors. What does that mean? It’s like there’s one way door decisions, meaning if you go through that door, there’s no coming back. Door’s closed behind you, it’s locked up, it’s concreted, on the other side. And so using that to go, okay, you know what, let’s put the brakes on. Let’s not be so rash. Let’s put that black hat on, Edward de Bono’s black hat, and let’s look at all the possibilities and risks associated with this decision, or this initiative, or this task, or whatever. So that hopefully allows individuals to put the brakes on and go let’s need to think through. Or it’s a two way door decision, right? And for those two way doors decisions, you go through it, you know what, oh, didn’t get it quite right. Okay, we can go back. Now, obviously, There’s risk associated with that, brand risk, legal risk, commercial risk, custom risk, and that’ll determine if the risk is so high that it becomes a one way door. But just even asking that question in that way, helps people to understand, okay, can we go really quickly? Because the impact of that is, if we get it wrong, it’s okay. We can backtrack or we’ve put mitigates in place to manage the risks. Or if no, this is big, it has, financial risk, governance and, oversight, if you’re, working in a regulatory framework, then obviously you do need to put the brakes on. Getting the priorities first, I think is really crucial. And I’ll talk to many people in the leadership space, not just in design and honestly, Chris, the thing I keep hearing is, man, we are just trying to do so much shit and we’re doing it more badly. And sometimes we don’t know why we’re doing them. And I’ll go, Oh my God, this is a pandemic.

Chris Hudson: 24:38
It is. You think about in particular in the larger organisations, I’m working with one at the minute and the fact that so much time and resource and money is behind a set of initiatives that, in three years, as from what you’re doing in AI, there are things that you can’t. With confidence in a certain corporate environment, say are going to lead to anything better really, all you know, is what’s in front of you and you’re going off the data that you’ve got and the intelligence that you’ve got, and the decision is effectively informed by that, but you can’t actually steer it differently because nobody’s going to buy into something that you think is going to be totally different in three years time. So from an innovation standpoint, it’s short-termist. Like you can’t predict the future, but we’re still going to aim at everything. Cause at least then everyone knows what they’re doing.

Amir Ansari: 25:21
Yeah. And look, I guess I’m lucky at Academy Xi we’re an education company and we’re small enough that the execs are close enough to the leadership team and everybody else. That we can actually make those decisions and we can ask those questions. Obviously, the bigger the organisation gets, you’re often removed two, three, even four levels, and maybe you’re not even directly related to strategy, which sometimes makes those decisions. Yeah, that is hard. And probably one of the frustrations I used to get from a lot of my team members, in previous organisation was sure as a leader, I used to get a lot of compliments and you’re doing great. Thank you very much. But what we don’t understand is why is the company going that direction or they’ve got X initiatives, but we get told by the product managers or the GM of that business we’re working with, and we need to do Y so often the leadership teams of the organisation are not aligned. So the worker bees and the people who are helping to deliver on those outcomes are sitting there going, I have no idea why I’m doing this. And that leads to attrition or lack of confidence. So I think as leaders, the advice would be that no matter where you are, be a conduit. Be a conduit upwards and downwards because at any point, if the glue breaks or the scaffolding falls apart, you need to just try and be able to get your level above or two levels above and two levels below to remain unified and connected. And that’s another role that leadership needs to play, right? Again, agnostic of the discipline of that leader.

Chris Hudson: 26:50
I think so. The difference in speeds or the perception of speed or the perception of change within an organisation is it feels like it’s really important because obviously your leadership might think that things need to move a certain speed, the people that are doing the work actually thinking that’s quite hard, or, maybe they’d love to move faster because there’s some frustration there. I was also thinking, as you’re telling me about the doors, the one way door, the two way door, whether the revolving door is also one to stretch to, where basically there’s change just spinning around the whole time. Nobody knows where they’re at and it’s just like total chaos. And I think I’ve seen organisations like that, where almost so many initiatives about change are in place at once that it’s difficult to know, at a very foundational level that you’re safe in your role and that you know what you’re doing. So have you seen

Amir Ansari: 27:36
Until recently, I didn’t put too much time and effort into it, actively working on it. But I think you’ve nailed it. I’ve observed, even at, at being at Academy Xi, previous company, Iress, and agency work beforehand often organisations, because sometimes they’re in a siloed or different disciplines and functions are doing things. But not realising that it still has an impact on the end user or end staff member. So that’s the staff member gets, exposed to four or five different organisational change things happening in the HR space, finance space, team structure space. that they go, wow, there’s a lot of change here that, they can’t handle. And I’ve come to realise the importance of change management. Now, some people used to think that’s a dirty word, but I think putting enough time to design that change and asking all the questions, okay, what’s the impact? We’re going to do this, but they’re also doing that. And that’s also happening over there. What’s the impact on our staff and our clients and customers? Ooh, is that too much? Or hang on, that’s going to have a negative impact on this thing. In fact, that’s. Actively, you’ve got to discourage this or that change that we’re trying to do. Visualising, I think, is really important. And a good change manager ask amazing questions, and I worked with a few and can really map out and then put steps in place, which sometimes includes putting brakes on certain things, doing things in parallel, or doing things in a series. That requires clear and purposeful thought. And when you, me, whoever within our job are trying to do, juggle a bunch of stuff, You may forget that there’s other change happening somewhere else. I think, yeah, look, you’ve mentioned this, and I feel like I could talk about this for hours as well. Change and managing change in organisations is underrated, but it’s highly impactful when it’s done right.

Chris Hudson: 29:23
Yeah, and I think, in the smaller organisations, it’s obviously hard to bring in that layer of expertise. Sometimes it’s not always, it’s a bit of a luxury, right? I don’t know whether in your organisation, but certainly in ones that I’ve run a smaller consultancies, boutique consultancies and studios. Or even just small teams where the budget’s fixed and, you can’t move on that. You can’t just bring in, it’s like having a project manager and that’s a luxury. You can’t always have the extra resource to help coordinate people and set the velocity. From your experience, is there any more organic ways, through agile or anything else that you’ve seen working well from a design ops point of view that you think is okay, if you can’t get the change manager, these are some of the things you need to think about.

Amir Ansari: 30:02
Yeah, good question. I think you mentioned those two words, right? I think design ops or operationalising things, you’re going to discipline. I think it goes a long way. And what do I mean by that? Again, I don’t know, who’s going to be listening, but no matter what your craft is with design development, legal or whatever thinking about processes, frameworks, tooling. The people and their skills required, just having a view of that, I think is really important and especially processes like mapping and processes for the key top five or 10 things that are important for your discipline, I think is really important. And then for, when you don’t have, change managers or that project manager who can have oversight around your delivery work and whatever. Again, and this goes back to building softer skills within, knowledge workers is asking those questions. Yeah, I used to remember In agency world the biggest barrier we had was clients wanted to pay for project management, right? We got three designers five designers a couple of days, whatever that might be And then when we said I and he’s a project manager. No, we don’t need project managers. We’ll manage it ourselves And we know when a client says they’re going to manage a project, you’re doomed. You’re going to over service because you’ve got a fixed time and material, or which is the worst case, or you’re a fixed price model. You know you’re going to over service, right? And but you can’t bring that person in. So either you put them in at zero cost and you try and build some fat somewhere else, or failing that, you build some of the skills within the delivery teams, some project management skills, some change skills, some Asking the right questions skills. So there’s a team that can go, okay, let’s build a scope together. Let’s build how we’re going to go about this and just fill some of the gaps of what things could go wrong. And almost taking shared responsibility of delivering this outcome and the impact of the decision that they need to make. I think that’s important for Again, everybody not just for the person who just asked the legal question or someone who asked the, the technology questions. I think, again, just thinking about product delivery, everybody, it’s a team sport, right? Delivering a product and outcome is a team sport. And I think everybody needs to be able to just ask those questions, failing having a project manager or a change manager, just so that at least they know some of the moving parts they might not know at all, but at least they’re not going fully blind if that makes sense.

Chris Hudson: 32:25
Yeah. Yeah. I think in that setup stage the planning is obviously key but in terms of how it’s framed, both in the vision, the goals, the expectation, the outcome, the deliverables, there’s often a bit of ambiguity around that sort of discussion particularly when there are multiple stakeholders involved, like everyone thinks they’re getting something different from it. And then the people that are having to deliver it thinking okay I’m not sure really what we’re aiming at here. So alignment there is really key. It feels and then yeah, how you do it. Is like how do you plan for that? I think a lot of work, even if it feels like an it’s an indulgence upfront, but you’re thinking about, your pre-mortems and future spectives. And like some of these exercises that can basically reveal what you think might go wrong. You make your imagination go wild about how badly could this go. And then you step that through to, how are we going to plan for that? Now some of that can help too. But yeah, I think it’s just, You It’s just, getting people to agree feels like it’s hard when you’re moving at speed. And everyone seems quite focused, on the thing they think they’re going to do.

Amir Ansari: 33:21
It’s, it’s interesting in a previous agency that I worked for, we had a, an individual who was from the engineering background and they were always, what’s the right word? They were always, they were perceived to be the negative, the party pooper. The one who always asked the, Oh, but he can’t because of this. So what’s the risk associated with that? And I remember putting that individual aside one day and going, Hey listen, you just, you’re always so negative. You’re always asking, you’re always covering the risks and the doomsday event. We’re trying to progress forward. We’ve got a new client. We were all excited. You just need to, flip it. You need to change and have a positive mindset. And he’s and the person said, yeah, I’m more than happy not to wear the black hat. And again, referencing the Edward de Bono’s six thinking hats, right? The only reason I do is because nobody else does. Nobody else wears that hat. Nobody else asks those gnarly questions, our front and early, the pre mortem type questions. And. I’ve been there long enough, this individual was saying, that I can see it going, screwing off and falling off a cliff. And from that day, I said, you know what, this individual is actually quite right. And I’ve got the Edward de Bono book, it’s probably 20, 30 years old, it’s got a lot of dust on it, but I

Chris Hudson: 34:47
Yeah. Yeah.

Amir Ansari: 34:48
back and go when we set up a team, be it with a new client or a new initiative, either explicitly or implicitly. I’ll make sure within the team, we all put all the six hats on and ask those questions, the positive questions, the neutral questions the what if questions and the attitude that goes with those hats. Just so that we get good coverage. And I think that’s a, again, an under appreciated skill. Recently I just finished off teaching at one of the universities, a Bachelor of Innovation. And I, as one of the modules, I pulled out the six thinking hats. And I said, this is a great framework and skill that every individual needs to have within your teams. And when we talked about it, and again, Some individuals haven’t heard of that maybe because I’m showing my age now, but it’s a forgotten art.

Chris Hudson: 35:38
Yeah. Yeah. No, I agree. I’ve got the book and yeah, the hats are often pulled out. It feels or not often enough in some cases, but yeah, it’s definitely a good one. And yeah, I was thinking as you’re talking just about growth mindset a little bit, and obviously, sometimes it feels very fixed and people are in there. It was like a stereotype of their own self. Everyone’s going to be like, that person’s going to be the villain. That person’s going to be like super detailed on the questions about risk compliance. There’s somebody else that’s going to be a visionary, has no idea how to deliver it. And it’s some of these stereotypes come into play. Like growth mindset is like one of these blankets. Phrases that feels like if everyone can have a bit of an open mind and not hold their own views too preciously, and they’re open to set things, then you can cultivate that and actually build that. But what are the some of the techniques that you’ve used to maybe foster, a degree of growth mindset within your teams or organisations?

Amir Ansari: 36:29
I think The growth mindset or open mindset can be quite confronting right because it requires you again to be open about ambiguity. You’re going to experience something that you haven’t experienced before, but you’re going to keep an open mind. So I can totally appreciate even, and I do it sometimes, where I just go, no, I need the comfort. I need the security in knowing what I know. You put blockers on. But in terms of how I’ve managed to get people to have that mindset is again, I think first and foremost, giving them comfort, but as a leader going, Hey, you know what? We’re going to be just security. You’re going to be fine. We’re going to be fine. Like almost like you opened the door, go, I team, we’re going to be fine. And I think that already puts individuals who potentially combative or wearing the black hat to go, okay. Okay. Okay, cool. My leader says we’re going to be cool. Huh. Shoulders drop, heart rate slows down. Everybody feels a little bit more confident and comfortable, right? So I think just preparing the individual or the teams to go, you know what, we’ll be fine. We’ll come out at the end of it. So I think that’s the first step. I think that’s typically what I tend to do. Then the second step, okay, now, and I’m probably repeating myself, right? Where are we? What do we know? What don’t we know? Hey, Tom, Dick and Harry, Susie, Jenny and Lisa, Share, share your thoughts. Anybody else? Questions. And within this group, a team, just throw all the questions that people have. And again, you could run a design workshop where everybody writes it on sticky notes, but just asking those questions gives everybody confidence. Oh, okay. Also, he doesn’t know and she doesn’t know, but he knows and she knows. Again, raise the confidence of the team. Oh, across the team, we’ve got the, we’ve got the formula, the ingredients for us to, Be okay, or even succeed, right? So that’s often the step two, the questions. And then, you go from, okay, understanding the space to, okay then how are we going to solve it, right? But by then, I tend to find individuals a lot more comfortable. And again, Chris, you and I both work in design and design disciplines. We know how to create, icebreakers and create the space for people to use a different size of the brain, throw some of that in there. People who’ve often worked in a technical space, Get the opportunity to be a bit more creative and brainstorm and not have limitations. Go through that process. And then you often get to the end of it and people just already feel so energised with that process. Now that process might be a two hour workshop. It might be a six month initiative, but when you go through that process off, often you come out at the other end and teams go, okay, we got there. Wow. And then going back to what I said before, Hey, did you notice you grew? Remember at the start of this thing, you were here and you said, Oh, you’re complaining because you want it to go upwards or sideways or whatever. Just looking back, look at how much you’ve grown. And I remember the conversation I used to have with some of my, design leads and heads off. And, they come to me with a challenge, all stressed. I’ll go, my God, I don’t know what to do in the air. We do the walk around the blocks. This is, pre and during COVID when we could, and then, give some guidance, ask a lot of open ended questions. And then, three months down the track, often, again, that’s forgotten, right? They’re going to do their work, they get some praises by their team members and whatever, and then we do another round, around the block walk. And I go, hey remember three months ago when we had that walk? And remember you said X, Y, and Z? What do you think now? And you go, Oh my goodness, Jesus, I was so naive then, or man, I was in that deep end of the pool, but yeah, I’ve come out the other side. And that’s, this is not me asking that because I want the praise, but it’s just getting them to reflect. Chris, people, again, life moves quick, pandemics come and go, people don’t stop to reflect and reflect on their own growth. And so they need people like you and I, or their leaders or their partners or their kids to sometimes tap them on the shoulder and just remind them where they’ve come from and where they’ve been where they are now. And to be honest, it’s this is simple stuff. And that for me has worked time and time again. And I couldn’t put that in a framework, I couldn’t draw it for you. But it’s great. It’s those sort of things, right? Give comfort, give support as a leader. You’re cool. Ask lots of questions, unpack the situation, go from point A, find out what point B is, figure out the steps in between. At the end of it, just turn around and just look back and reflect. That itself creates that I guess the opportunity for growth. Yeah, anyway, now we can go on to

Chris Hudson: 40:59
yeah, and I like it. I think there’s a lot in there to maybe think about. Yeah, it just feels like the human aspect of business is getting harder in some ways. And you’re obviously, we’re talking virtually now, but there’s a lot of that going on. I think having those kind of round the block chats. It feels like the kind of fat’s been trimmed off, the running of a business or an organisation a little bit. So some of that softer time is not always there where, you might turn up and then you spend two hours just having walking the floors and having the coffees. And it’s not really that anymore. It feels to me anyway. But yeah, I like the approach and I think that. Keeping that kind of constant connection or looking for points or opportunities at which you would offer feedback voluntarily and in a way that feels appropriate to that situation and to that person. If you feel like you can bring up, something that you’ve noticed from the past that can then tied to progress as you were describing, then that’s really positive. Always like from my point of view, always. I’ve maybe struggled with some of that when I was managing teams. Like I think that, actually doing it in the right way, can come across a little bit forced or a little bit unnatural because you’re the one that suggested the coffee and then you’re walking them around the block. And, as you got five points that you’re going to raise with them and, it didn’t feel like that natural. At times anyway, it felt like it was a bit forced, but but yeah, you come from, in your bio you talk about smiles and hugs and, some of the softer side, how you work. If have you learned that off some people? Do you think that’s just within you as a person? Not everyone’s geared up for that touchy feely way of working.

Speaker 2: 42:26
Correct. My daughter will hate me.

Amir Ansari: 42:28
I’m not sure she’s going to listen to this, but, um, very tactile person and she isn’t. And to some extent you could argue my wife is, and I’m just, maybe again, it’s a culture, I think it’s probably more of a cultural thing coming from, Middle East. I love a good hug. I love to touch. I like to touch people on the shoulder, just let them know I’m here. And I did find it human, appropriately, by the way, it was all appropriate above the board, very sensible bit. Just that, just even a little bit of a tap I find goes a long way to tell someone that I’m listening, I’m hearing you. Yeah, that’s a really good point you made there, Chris. Tap on the shoulder or tap on the elbow. So I am, I’m just naturally tactile. I love a good hug. I think people in the past have said, look, my superpower is the ability to connect people. And just know, Oh, Chris has got this thing or got an issue or got the skill and Jenny over there needs that. And I’ll just, connect people together and. To connect that, to make that connection happen, I need to know enough about Chris and I need to know enough about Jenny and their stories. Others are going to say, Chris and Jenny meet and figure out if you guys, have something to share. No. So when I ask that question is I’m bonding with you, right? I’m learning about you, your history, your story. I can then paraphrase that story when I’m talking to Jenny. So I think yeah, human connection for me is really great. Have I suffered during COVID? Like at the moment, I’m five days a week from home because Academy excise main head offices in Sydney, maybe I’ll fly up once a month, but Yeah, I do long for that human connection, so when I do get the opportunity to have a coffee, and I don’t drink coffee, so I have to pay overpriced tea with someone around the block just to, yeah, get out there, move around and just get out of the context and the space I’m in, I think it, it really helps look, inherently, I don’t, I hope I’m not swearing here people don’t, I’m not born dickheads, Let’s be honest, right? Children, we’re pure we think creatively, we have the best heart, and so everybody, grows up and, nature versus nurture goes down a path and gets influences and world experiences that then leads them to become, jaded or whatever, but by nature, everybody Initially, it goes out with the best intentions, right? And to be honest I still think about that. So when I come across someone who’s, again, maybe a bit forced, maybe a bit combative or whatever, as hard as it is, I just try and ask myself hang on, why is this person the way they are? And often they’re by, the hug and the tap or the connection and the smile breaks down some of those barriers that allows me to then get deep into that person, go, what’s this person really about? And again, lots of questions, right? I ask people a lot of questions. I’m not sure if they like it or not, but it’s worked for me in the past. Until that backfires, I’ll probably continue to do that.

Chris Hudson: 45:14
Yeah. Nice. Nice. Yeah, seeing the good in people, I think is a great starting point. You’re looking for that, but also looking for some commonality in one way or another, there are various films and scenes that kind of spring to mind with Darth Vader. He’s thinking about how he perceives that, that, that father figure to still be in there in some way or another. Yeah, we could talk about that for another episode, another time, but it’s it’s looking past the media. Challenge a lot of the time it feels like. So if there’s a point of friction or a difference of opinion then you look for the common ground in that situation and start with a connection point, and then bring in other people as you need to as well from what you’re describing.

Amir Ansari: 45:49
Look, I will attest that It’s been a tough two, three years, or four years now, right? Even just as COVID hit, even post COVID and the tech wreck and the, the tech industry going through redundancies and shrinkages interest rates going up, wars across the world. It’s been a tough four, four, five years mentally for a lot of people. As much as possible, I get, I think we all need to just give each other a little bit of slack. And by no means that I’ll say that allows you to be violent and or aggressive, no, but just everyone’s a bit stressed. And I think it’s prudent for us to just reflect on that and be appreciative and just maybe ease off. The questions and requests we ask people while making sure that our businesses are financially viable or our relationships with our partners and families are still, functioning, but just, yeah, I think including myself and I think need to just give people some space at the moment.

Chris Hudson: 46:42
Yeah. Yeah. Have you seen that work out and how have you introduced that into your work?

Amir Ansari: 46:46
Even from the leadership perspective, I’ll often put the brakes on with the leaders who are asking you, Hey, listen, can we just slow down for a second? And the reason I’m asking you this is because of the impact this is having on X, Y, and Z, the number of change that they’re going through, et cetera. Just again, bring that story up the chain. So people who are not directly related can see, Oh I wasn’t aware of that. That’s just, again, Stories, questions, sharing. I think that’s really important. Creates that transparency. But I must admit as leaders, we often under I shouldn’t say undervalued, praise is always given downwards. Very seldom is praise upwards. And also, if you think about CEOs, like I think mentoring coaching is really important. Everybody at all levels needs to have a mentor and coach. But the higher up the chain you get, you go often. You’re doing that role for the first time, or it’s new. Okay, a CEO who’s a first time CEO, they don’t go to CEO school. Maybe they’re the board of directors course, but often they’re in an ambiguous, space. And it’s if they look up, who’s up? The board, the chair, but really, I think everybody needs a little bit of support to do some of the stuff that we’ve talked about today. Because otherwise, I think leadership have a lot of weight on their shoulders and they can often then they drop the ball or fail to deliver. And I think we all at all levels need it, need a bit of support.

Chris Hudson: 48:08
I often found like going through different stages of personal growth within organisations that you know, you’re always thinking upwards in the vertical, in a way, but actually the sideways connections that you make, if it’s a buddy or a mentor or somebody who’s not exactly. Yeah. Absolutely. In your role exactly you’ve got a thing in common and you’re in a similar space, maybe a similar stage of life or, you’ve been from similar backgrounds or, you’ve got something else that you share an interest with. I think those connections are just as important in a way as the other ones that you can pay yourself to from, within your team, but also above.

Speaker 4: 48:40
Correct.

Chris Hudson: 48:42
Yeah. We might leave it there. I think that’s a good place to finish and a lovely sentiment around, I think taking time out to, to really understand the context of where a lot of discussions, are at within business. And I think that, you can slow it down where you want to. It does take a bit of moderation. Obviously it takes somebody with a strong voice to do that sometimes, but as you’re saying, you can do that. It’s the right person. Wear the different hat. Obviously lots of other things that we’ve learned from the chat too. So really appreciate you coming onto the show, Amir, and thanks again for coming on.

Amir Ansari: 49:12
Chris, love it. Love. Thank you. And I must admit, as we were talking, I said, ah, you know what, I need to practice more of what I preach. The stuff that I talked about, some of them I have forgotten and then I go, Oh, you know what? Yeah, no, I need to do more of this myself. So it’s a good reminder. And I’m going to definitely go back and listen to the session again and take some more notes, even though I hate the sound of my own voice, but I think I’ll deal with that because it was a really fruitful conversation. I really appreciate it, Chris.

Chris Hudson: 49:36
Not a problem. And from what you’re saying at the start, if you think by talking and you think, you can look back on what you’ve said, then that’s probably going to be pretty good, pretty useful, right? At some point.

Amir Ansari: 49:45
Exactly right.

Chris Hudson: 49:48
Oh I’ll say goodbye. Thanks so much.

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