Facilitating Alignment, Strategy Skeptics whilst Protecting your Energy

“When you were doing the intro, you know, you can just hear how diverse and broad the different types of roles or experiences and industries I’ve had were. I think you know some parts have been serendipitous right. Where you’re just kind of following your instinct around what you enjoy like this constant search in your work for things where you feel good you know you’re getting joy out of it you’re learning you’re collaborating with really clever people. That’s like everything to me.”
Sam McCallum

This month’s theme

Sam McCallum shares insights from her extensive industry experience and strategic design background. Key topics include the importance of team alignment, the application of hypothesis-led experiments to address strategic scepticism, and maintaining work-life balance. Sam also emphasises the value of diversity, iterative feedback, and practical strategies for preventing burnout and ensuring effective project delivery.

Gain valuable insights from industry expert Sam McCallum on strategic design, team alignment, and maintaining work-life balance. Listen now to elevate your business strategies and achieve successful project outcomes.

In this episode you’ll hear about

• Sam’s background in strategic design and diverse industry experience
• The differences between consultancy and in-house roles
• The importance of strategic design in aligning with market trends and customer needs
• The role of strategic designers in enabling executives and product teams
• Why it’s important to bring people together for key project moments
• How hypothesis-led experiments can be used to address strategy skeptics
• The benefits of diversity and inclusion in teams
• The value of iterative feedback in strategy development and the practical steps for implementing iterative processes
• The importance of self-care and work-life balance
• Ways to avoid burnout and maintain energy

Key links

Outfoxed.co
Sam McCallum LinkedIn

About our guest

Sam brings 19 years of diverse experience from consultancies, digital agencies and client-side leadership roles. Known for CX, strategic design, business design and innovation, Sam has a track record of successfully delivering new products and business models to market.

Sam’s industry experience includes Finance, Media, Telco, FMCG, Grocery, QSR, Retail, and Government, with roles including; Head of Experience Design at Latitude Financial, Head of Marketing at Fairfax Media, and Strategy Director at R/GA.

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: 0:00
Hello everyone, and welcome back to the company road podcast, and I’m very excited to be kicking off our second year of the company road podcast. And the journey so far has been nothing short of incredible really. And as always, I’m appreciating the support we’re getting from you, our listeners, as we dive even deeper into how we can help intrapreneurs or current and emerging leaders like yourselves build greater positivity, influence, and impact into your careers in some way or another. So. Let’s think to what’s lying ahead. So what new challenges will you be taking on this financial year? How do you prepare for what’s coming up and some of these things are kind of front of mind, particularly in Australia as we flip into the new financial year. So let’s get into some things to help us explore ways of overcoming challenges. And we’re still talking about challenges in this month’s theme, thinking about how we can break barriers and navigate financial challenges and budget constraints and, various other things. I want to explore these topics a bit further with intrapreneur turned entrepreneur, and welcome Sam to the show. Thanks very much for coming on.

Sam McCallum: 1:03
Thanks, Chris. Thanks for having me.

Chris Hudson: 1:05
Awesome, so you’re currently running your own strategic design business, Outfoxed, and you bring 19 years of pretty diverse experience from consultancies, digital agencies, client side leadership roles, marketing. You’ve done business design innovation. You’ve got a huge track record of successfully delivering new products and business models to, to market. And you’ve worked across the industries as well. So finance, media, telco, FMCG, grocery, QSR, retail, government. It feels like the list is. It’s pretty extensive, so you’ve been a head of experience design and latitude financial, head of marketing at Fairfax Media, and strategy director at RGA in previous roles, but I’m really delighted to welcome you to the show. I know that we just recently finished a project in the innovation space and I know I’ve seen firsthand how you operate and in particular when it comes to managing change at scale and with complex stakeholder groups and management on this project, we were on a really tight timeline and we needed to really dig in to get results we needed and it’s probably the first time we’ve seen each other. In a few weeks since then now, so it’s really good to see you again. So maybe we start with yeah, a bit of a kind of intro into you and the time that you spent in some of those in house roles that we were talking about and tell us about some of the, the usual projects or now some of the projects and maybe some of the challenges that you were looking at along the way.

Sam McCallum: 2:19
Yeah. Well, thank you. I mean, a lot to kind of, lots of little hooks to kind of sink into there. Well, let’s start, how did I get here? When you were doing the intro it, you can just hear how diverse and broad the different types of roles or experiences and industries I’ve had, which has been, I think some parts have been serendipitous, right? Where you’re just kind of following your instinct around what you enjoy, like this constant. Search in your work for things that, where you feel good, you’re getting joy out of it. You’re learning, you’re collaborating with really clever people. That’s like everything to me, but inevitably, you move around. I think when you’re consulting, you get this beautiful opportunity to see different industries and different businesses. Firsthand helping them with a defined scope and timeline, but then the in house roles. I like to mix between the two and you’ll see that throughout my resume that allowed me to, actually see what it means to push something through to it’s, inevitable delivery and success and how you navigate an organisational structure and collaborate with the right people to do that. So they’re different kind of skills.

Chris Hudson: 3:36
Yeah, it’s interesting. I mean, I remember if you work in the agency or consultancy, often the client side is like referring. This is not fair, but it’s basically the dark side and obviously in house roles are kind of thinking about consultancies in, similar way because they want to, they obviously want to, to have ownership of their strategies and products and services and innovation and, it feels like there’s always this sort of tension. I think where it does work obviously well is when those things are in harmony, when there’s partnership. But yeah, you’ve been fortunate enough to see both sides of it. So it’s great that you talk about the balance. And I think, for those that have only either been in one world or the other, it feels like a hard one to describe. But what are some of the, what are some of the differences in, working either side that you’ve experienced?

Sam McCallum: 4:18
Look, when your client side, you are going to need to think about your relationships, right? So relationships when you’re in a consultancy is about. Are we going to continue this relationship with, is it a revenue generating relationship? How do you maximise it? And I think there are lots of people that approach that in a genuine way, right? They’re really great at forming deep, genuine relationships. When you are client side, you need, for lack of a better word, you need. People that are going to be aligned to your objectives so that you can be successful and you need to help them be successful in turn and the timeframes are much longer, right? You might be in that business for 1, 3, 5 years and what you can accomplish is going to be the sum total in many ways of those relationships. Yeah, I

Chris Hudson: 5:08
mean, if you think about how impact is framed, it probably feels like it’s different in both of those situations. The short term impact, if you’re a consultant or in an agency world, you’re thinking about, in effect, quite short term measures and, and quite short term efforts to get to some of the outcomes that you’re thinking about. And obviously you’re, you’re reporting back within that business to your leadership and you’re telling them about how well it’s going. The agency or the consultancy might have a thought leadership or, an agenda to kind of push certain, strategies, technologies, and, new, new kind of, fun and whizzy things that can be thought about and experimented with. But yeah, it feels like there’s a, there’s a difference there. The longer term and long lasting effects of, of any initiative taking into an in house role will be different. It feels like you’re, you’re embedded there having to play the long game. You’re building quite lasting relationships and, Every turn, it feels like you’d have to navigate with a bit of precision. And you’re an experienced designer yourself. So I’m wondering, from that point of view, how you’ve gone about, how have you taken yourself and, how have you presented yourself in business to kind of get to the outcomes that you feel have worked?

Sam McCallum: 6:16
Trial and error. I mean, over the course of my career, I’ve definitely think probably like learned the hard way right where you, you come at things with passion and enthusiasm and you see the world a certain way. I’m naturally really like intuitively customer centric. And I’ve always been, even when I was in marketing roles, which, used to make me scratch my head and go, well, why are they doing it like that? Nobody wants it or needs it yet. They’re pushing it from a sales perspective, just didn’t make sense to me, but how you go about. When you do have those moments that you query, how you then connect with people in order to raise it or try to, massage it to a better outcome. That’s, I think the ends up being the success. So, often when you’re an intrapreneur or an entrepreneur and you’ve got big ideas and you’re coming into an organisation, you can be seen or perceived as people that maybe aren’t already aligned to your way of thinking as scary or threatening their ability to deliver on their objectives. But you need to, I think, lean into that. That’s probably what I’ve learned over my career where. When you do find somebody that is thinking differently to you, think awesome, right? What can I learn from this person to make what we’re doing more successful? How can we better strike a balance between what we’re thinking about that might be really North Star and strategic or very, aspirational from a customer perspective, and then, they might be coming at it from a really functional short term time frame perspective, and then you can meet in the middle somewhere. And it ultimately, if you can have those conversations and facilitate them in a really healthy way, everybody feels better at the end of it. And the outcomes are better.

Chris Hudson: 8:15
Yeah, I want to talk about that a little bit more, maybe because it feels like a bit of a dance and a tricky one at times where. Yeah. You’re basically, you’re coming up against people like you’re forced into a kind of dance floor situation, let’s call it, but it’s basically you having to understand how, each person operates, how they move and then what they’re aiming for, really, and I’ll stop the dance analogy just there, but it feels like, there can be a real kind of confrontational moment where those two agendas are coming, coming face to face. And if your understanding is different from somebody else’s, then you’re going to either find out a bit about it sooner or later, but it, it feels like that, that can cause tension to begin with, however, you found the best way is to, to basically unravel and unpack what the, what the situation is and how best to work together with those people in those moments.

Sam McCallum: 9:03
Look, for me personally, I like to bring people together, right? So if I’m running a project. I will plan out, key moments where we want to get people together. I work a lot virtually, right? But there will always be some critical moments where I’m like, this has to happen face to face. But if you’ve got a lot of executives with like a senior group coming together and you know that they’ve got either different perspectives, our different objectives from their, from their job perspective, like to be successful, they just aren’t quite aligned. You need to get them in the room, having the same conversation at the same time, and then you need to, based off whatever your project scope is, get them to do some really targeted specific activities. That are going to help them come through to the outcome that you want, because I think sometimes when you’re an external coming into these things, rightly or wrongly, I think sometimes businesses will deliberately bring in an external to help bubble up some of these misalignments, because it’s easier for us to facilitate that conversation when we don’t already have, we’re not as influenced by the internal politics. But on the flip side, we can also bear the brunt of that, right? We can get people coming at us going, why are you doing this? You should be, thinking about from this perspective. And I, that’s where you just have to, with practice, bring people together.

Chris Hudson: 10:32
It reminds me a bit of like before I got married we, We had to go on this, this course basically, and it was all about like the foundations of a successful marriage and you had like budgeting and you had a how to deal with conflicts. And then you had to get to like rank all these things in life that you know, in order of importance, then compare notes like is having kids or having a dog more important or whatever. And you have a discussion about things that you disagree on. And one of the outtakes from that was that you basically had to You know, resolve things with your partner as quickly as possible, because if you’re in it for the long haul and you’re in it, to be with that person for the rest of your life, then prolonging that kind of disagreement is actually counter, it’s counterproductive because the longer it lasts, the harder it becomes. It’s better just to nip it in the bud and actually, focus on that problem, figure out, okay, accept the differences. Figure out what needs to be done, move on. And, I kind of take that kind of principle into into a few different work scenarios that I’ve been involved with, but where there’s been disagreement and it’s like, it’s okay to have disagreement. Once the disagreement is out of the way, you can actually move on really constructively. And well, I want to talk a bit about strategic design from that point of view, because I think that it’s interesting where, it’s a bit like creative ideas or when you’re talking about products or service ideas or innovation, there’s often a degree of subjectivity that people taking into conversation and sometimes there’s not a. A massive evidence base. It’s like, yeah, we tried that two or three years ago. It didn’t work. This is how we feel. We’d never do it that way. Here’s, you hear some of these kind of attitudes coming up. But when it comes to, strategic design, it feels like it’s, it’s almost, like you were saying, it’s almost as important to show them what it isn’t than what it is. Like, I think that if you just show them what the answer is, then often that can just lead to a critique. When, when actually you’re trying to resolve what people agree on and what people disagree on. And it’s just as important. So has that been your experience as well? Have you got any other, any other stories to tell around situations where that’s been the case?

Sam McCallum: 12:37
All my war stories. Yeah, go on.

Chris Hudson: 12:40
How many have you

Sam McCallum: 12:41
got? I guess there’s a couple of angles to take here. I mean, there’s one just around service strategic design as a discipline. And I know when I was at Latitude and I was leading their design profession, There was a lot of discussion around just how misunderstood designers and different disciplines within design are, and sometimes, it impacts the effectiveness of designers to do their job when the organisation as a whole doesn’t actually get the value that they can deliver or add to different types of. Aspects of a business. So that goes from, delivery environments, right? You get a lot of focus of design in delivering environments, but often, the work I was doing, I’d say I’m probably my core skill is customer experience strategy and that type of thinking does best when it helps enable chief product officers, chief technology officers, GM’s of product. To do what they need to do, right? Execute their strategy in line with the market trends, the consumer needs, the technology that then becomes an enabler to do that as well. So, often, like, I might get brought in to do some work and, if you brought me in at a delivery team space. But my thinking is already about, how do we enable the executives? Then that’s already going to be some friction, right? And strategic designers, I think, as well, depending on their background, if they come from a product design or a UX background or a customer strategy direct background. They will approach a problem differently. And I think you can tell a lot about the maturity of a design function in an enterprise about how they’re using these types of designers. Where are they plugging them in? Because if they’re only using them in delivery, then it’s a clear sign that they’re not getting the benefits in their broader. Strategic thinking that’s driving their products and their experiences.

Chris Hudson: 14:41
Yeah, it’s interesting. I mean, the ecosystem or however you want to do it, sometimes strategic design, there’s this kind of stakeholder mapping step where you. You’re looking at who, who sits where and in the zoo, let’s call it a zoo. It shouldn’t be a zoo, call it something else, but anyway, who’s who in the zoo is the expression. Yeah, it just feels like, you need to be aware of who the players are, where the skill sets are being used. And then I think you can get a pretty good read on that, from your experience. When and how is best to, to kind of get that read to the extent that you can, jump in, frame a plan and, and kind of move forward positively.

Sam McCallum: 15:14
Well, I mean, whether you’re a consultant or you’re in house, I think it’s. Slightly different if I’m coming at it from a consulting perspective, there is an imperative very early and quickly because the sooner you can identify who it is that is going to, who do you need to make successful with your work? Who is an important contributor and that also, looks at who might be the one responsible for delivering the work as well. And who holds the budgets. That’s all. A factor, and then there’s people that are going to input into it. People that might have big opinions. They might not be your key stakeholder, so you just, you listen to them, you take it on board but then ultimately, you need to, identify who it is that you are able to, make successful with the work, and they’re not the same people, they never are, and often, that is, part of the fun, but the quicker you can do that, the quicker you can get your successful. Work on track that part is probably relevant for internal and external, whether you’re in your in house role. Because if you don’t know, who do you need to make it look good then you’re going to be flapping in the wind.

Chris Hudson: 16:30
Yeah. Yeah. You see a lot of that. I want to say. No, I don’t read that in a mean way. I think it’s, it’s more that there’s uncertainty. I think there’s ambiguity in that scenario. Even if you know that the budget holder is this person or the person that’s most interested in it is COO or whoever it is. It just feels like. You know that the temptation or put it this way, if you were having, if you’re feeling like you have to involve more people to get through to the end result, then if you are over accommodating of that and you were just inviting too many people in through the process, then that would slow you down and it would make you look worse because you, You’d taken in all of these people’s points of view you’d, you might feel better about it, but it feels like it’s a hard one to navigate to know who to bring in, who to not, and also, when and how to do it in a way that positions their input is valuable to, to you in that moment. So that they feel like that I was being well spent, you and I both been in the workshop of the meeting scenario where. Two or three of the people in the room have been invited along and that they’re just getting quietly frustrated and they’re tapping away at email. But it just feels like that that situation could be avoided if there’s a bit more signposting maybe around who, who should be in the room and why they’re there and what we’re valuing and what the outcome is. So, so maybe we talk about some of the. The moments of day to day work that we can, in a sense, design for. Have you got any thoughts on that?

Sam McCallum: 17:54
Yeah, I mean, look, I think there’s a practicality to that kind of stuff, which, if I’m honest, like, like, I’m quite intuitive in the way that I work. Work. So, often I will, if I’m setting up a team, I will deliberately try to, uh, fill my blind spots. So, bringing people that may be more detail oriented or pragmatic than me to help me kind of balance some of my thinking. So that’s just a I guess the step there is who do you need around you to be successful with the work that you’re doing? I think that’s step 1 and you don’t have to think that you can do it all on your own. And to be honest, it you always get to better outcomes with a good team, right? And it doesn’t have to be a big team. Sometimes it’s 1 person or 2 people, right? There’s the 2 you working together is all you need to kind of get things really focused. And then from a, when you’re running a piece of work and trying to navigate the whole, how many people do we include you? You want to keep it as small as possible for your decision makers, but I think you can plan a workshop approach where you have these moments of input, collaboration, share back showcasing. And that’s where you get broader feedback. And then these people are heard and you do absolutely take their thoughts on board and you can input that into your final deliverables, but you’ve identified these. 3 or 4 key people that are going to be, your project sponsors and the people that are going to be helping navigate it all the way through to the end. And that’s just how you do it. That’s probably the most practical lens I can apply to it.

Chris Hudson: 19:44
Yeah, that’s pretty good. I mean, it just makes me realise you can be deliberate with it. You can, you can basically have your timing plan, your project plan, you can lay it out and you can design in key moments, as an experienced designer, which if you’re designing for, customer experience, you’re thinking about how do you take that into the world of work in the project environment in which you are situated and, who needs to be involved when, and, when does it make the most sense? I think there’s, there’s always the complaint that comes back if people haven’t been involved soon enough. So how do you get around that? It feels like you can, you can bring people in up front, what, what do you, I guess, like from a narrative point, if you, have you found that certain, certain involvement at certain stages works well?

Sam McCallum: 20:23
I mean, definitely. I mean, there’s a couple of things I do. So when you do really strategic work, one of the challenges that you often come up with is there are strategy skeptics within an organisation. And this can be part of the culture. Yeah. It can be part of a delivery environment mindset, or it can be, I’ve seen some people or some teams operating. Where they’ve just misinterpreted agile and they think that means that they don’t have to plan anything anymore. So when you come in and you’re trying to do strategic work and you’re coming up against against that mindset, you need to, you need to balance it where you. I try to kind of carve out like a hypothesis led experiment approach for that particular, to overcome that mindset, because it means that you can carve off these really tangible, immediate moments that everybody can anchor around that support an overarching end strategy. But it’s now and you’re getting this, harmonious balance between the 2 speed of the future state and what’s happening now. Often, I mean, the delivery of the strategy, what ends up getting delivered is the strategy, right? So organisations, I think, really need to lean into the fact that. The people that are building your products and at the very end of what your consumers, your customers are going to touch and feel and interact with, that’s the strategy that most of your customers are going to know. And if that is really disconnected to the overarching corporate strategy of where these Business sees itself going, then you’re pulling yourself in the wrong direction. So I think that’s where they need to come together and, celebrate the value of strategy, but for the strategy skeptics out there. Show them a better way to do it where you can, put some time and effort and doesn’t even have to be that long. You can actually do a huge amount of work in 2 or 3 months in that space. Then connect what they’re doing better to the overarching purpose of an organisation. For me, like, why I do the work that I do is like. I like my, my secret mission. Don’t tell anybody. It’s really trying to convert the strategy skeptics, right? So, it’s to give them an experience. With the work that we’re doing that helps them see the value and have that light bulb moment of, oh, wow, we wouldn’t have built it like that if we didn’t know this and this. And now I see why we need to do that and put that thinking at the start and getting them involved at every step of the way. So you talk about, people say we’re not involved early enough. They should be so, you need to have a cross functional team. At the start, so you need to think about desirability, feasibility, viability representatives in the business. So those mindsets coming together at the problem definition stage at all the customer insight stages aligned around the macro trends and where the market’s going so that by the time you get to the point where you are experimenting and creating solutions, they’re so embedded in how, how you got to that point. so much. That they don’t say based off their opinion, whether they like it or not, because it’s not a decision around, do they like it? It’s does this feel right based off what we’ve learned? That’s the mindset shift you want people to get to as part of the process.

Chris Hudson: 24:04
Yeah. Yeah. That’s pretty useful. I mean, I, I’ve definitely worked with similar principles in mind and I think that, this, this maybe takes back to marketing days, but, but basically if, like you’re saying, if the, if the strategy was wrong or if the brief was wrong in the brief in those days, but the brief was wrong, then all the work would be wrong, obviously. So like, where did it come undone? And if, if there was a project that basically got derailed in one way or another, how do And it was just wildly out there. It was just like, we’re not going to pay for it. Nobody should do that ever again. And, it’s this massive disaster. Then they’re thinking back to the strategy. And actually that, that becomes your core foundation, your core building blocks for what then follows. And I think what you’re saying is really interesting. It’s particularly interesting and maybe challenging, quite hard actually for Agile teams that are running at speed to kind of bring that connection in at times. And yeah, I wondered if there’s anything there that you felt has worked really well.

Sam McCallum: 24:59
Yeah. From my perspective, Agile teams that are really deep, running at a really tight timeline and they’ve got, their back lobbies full, often there’ll be, a key priority that you don’t want to even disturb. You just don’t want to disrupt or distract a team that’s, that focused on a tight time frame, but there will be opportunities within the, their broader scope. So I would look at kind of unpicking all of their initiatives, right? And then helping them take an outcomes based lens to the work that they’re doing, as opposed to a feature or an initiatives based thing. Lens to the work and then of those outcomes, you then kind of, prioritise and look at the work that’s yet to start and you look at, where does that sit across our outcomes? Some of the outcomes might be really short term connected to what the delivery team’s running at right now. And then the next kind of outcome may give you the opportunity to focus on something that’s a bit more strategic. And in those initiatives that have yet to begin, that’s when you carve out. And you put your thinking, bring the right people around to think about, well, how would we solve that differently? Like, what don’t we know? How can we use that initiative to progress up, our strategic goals a little bit more so that they haven’t lost the momentum of what they’re doing now, and they’re not feeling like you’re going to change what they’re doing now either, but you are kind of course correcting gently and hopefully, like, I mean, I’ve worked with a lot of, solution designers and things that are like solution architects. And they, they often think, see the work really positively because they haven’t had something like an experience strategy that is robust enough for them to understand, like connect what their work, is to what customers need and something that’s a bit more less technology first in the way that they’re thinking about the problems. And it does change the way they come up with their ideas and solutions.

Chris Hudson: 27:15
I think, yeah, a point maybe in there around the metrics as well. So if the strategy is there and there are some clear outcomes and measures, then it just feels like if that can be connected up, then people would know what they’re aiming for and it would inform the design at a future level, of course, as well, because it would need to ladder up. I often find, we’ve been in this situation. Last projects, it feels like there’s, there’s almost a short term priority and focus. And then there’s a longer term need to kind of think about what’s in the distance and how that would connect to the short or midterm initiatives and projects that are in play or planned. Like you’re saying, course correction, making sure that everyone is headed in the right direction. If there’s a leadership imperative to kind of take things from here to there, then in transformation world that, that does have to join up. So how have you felt it’s been, More manageable in terms of, in terms of that process and it joining up, like what’s worked for you and joining the short to the longer term.

Sam McCallum: 28:07
Oh, look, it comes back to the, I think the stakeholders that you’re working with ultimately, because senior, like executive stakeholders are going to have more like of a, like the 30, 000 foot view, right? They sometimes have a. Assumption that what is happening in delivery is actually connected to their where they see either that function or the business needing to go and it can be like, that can be also an interesting conversation to have with them and say, well, actually. It’s not quite right. What they’re doing over here isn’t connected to that at all. If you are thinking about changing something that’s in delivery, I don’t think you can change it from down there. Because the work that’s happening down there is, it’s incremental. It’s, they’ve got a defined path and they’re just chipping away at it. It needs to happen at a senior level, and it has to happen from an alignment of those, those key stakeholders, and they need to have, a view of how they will then manage their teams through it.

Chris Hudson: 29:14
Yeah. Okay. Yeah. I mean, I was thinking it feels like the connection points need to be there. The alignment needs to be there. Somebody has to facilitate all of that. Who do you think the best person to do that is?

Sam McCallum: 29:26
Me, no.

Chris Hudson: 29:29
Yeah, fair enough. But no, in generally in an organisation, I mean, CX is sort of sitting with a lot of different people, a lot of different roles, who, who should be taking the lead, who should we be pointing the finger at?

Sam McCallum: 29:40
I mean, look, whoever is holding the purse for any work that’s happening is obviously a really key one because that’s who people are going to look to. Is somebody neutral? Like, say if I was in there facilitating the process. I would be there bringing out the perspectives, right? It’s much more powerful to hear from, your leader there that this is important to them than to hear that from me. So often, my work is about how do you, make sure you’re aligning people around this common understanding about what the future is. Then we prototype it and we show people what it is, because I think that’s a really important aspect of, any type of alignment. Because when we hear words. You know, we see words on a page to describe, you know, what customers need or a strategy. We then put that through our own filter and bias, right? And we then go, Oh, yeah, that means this. And maybe some people think they already are doing it, right? But when you actually show them what that experience looks like and how, what customers actually expect. Then, of course, you have the ability to align people around a common understanding because we are visualising the same things, we are saying the same things, and we’re interpreting it as intended. So that’s a really important part of the alignment. I think until you’ve got the alignment, it’s hard to, to join the dots.

Chris Hudson: 31:08
Yeah. Yeah. And I think that’s probably where the skill in CX lies in a way. It feels like there’s a lot to bring together, if, if the role itself for the practice isn’t, isn’t as singular maybe as it once was, then, then how did, does that come about? It’s kind of thinking. Okay. Well, the CX outcome is something that we can agree on. We can work back from that. And if you work back from that, then the strategy is where you would start. And maybe you’d look at what was planned or what was, what was in delivery. How does it all join up? I think there’s, yeah, facilitation is the right word. It just, just needs to be brought together as a story so that people can feel comfortable. It can be, it can feel a little bit interrupted. Interruptive, I want to say, because everyone thinks they should be doing something else all the time. So what are some of your strategies for managing? Are, I’m too busy. I think I know the answer already. I don’t need to take part. Those, those sorts of responses and feelings that we get when we’re in these situations.

Sam McCallum: 32:03
I mean, people are busy, especially, I think, in client side roles, but what they’re busy doing is sitting in meetings all day, right? And I think that you get so fatigued. I mean, I’ve done it. I’ve sat there, in meetings all day, racing, when it used to be in the office, racing from one thing to the other. And then when it’s virtual, it’s almost worse because you just don’t get a break in between because they’re back to back to back. So, yeah. So, yeah, they’re busy, but I think, that’s the bandwidth issue as well, right? I think a lot of people, if you spoke to them about, do they feel confident that they’re solving the right problem? A lot of people would say no. And a lot of people would also probably talk about busy work that happens. So I think you have to, if you’re coming in to do the work, you have to take the heavy load, right? I think that if you’re pulling together a cross functional team, that is primarily, the clients. People, you need to be really respectful of their time. And that comes back to how you plan what you’re getting them together for, what you need them to do. If you do need somebody to actually roll up their sleeves and do work, that’s really got to come from within that organisation. There needs to be, a sign off and I guess an agreement that why that’s important to them. So it can be really a challenge, but hopefully. They see the value in what you’re doing, and that’s part of our job as well, to help them understand and see the value in that so that they. Want to participate, even though they are very busy.

Chris Hudson: 33:40
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, I think in that situation where somebody feels either uncomfortable, unprepared for what’s going to happen, or, there’s there’s just a disagreement, they might think that time has been wasted in some way or another. Like they’re saying, they’re sitting there, they’re not sure what was going on. But yeah, I think it’s, it’s hard. I think in those situations where some people are totally on board and some people are kind of questioning it because the minority voice will come out in one way or another and then that’ll unsettle or destabilise the the meeting or the situation that you’re in. So to course correct that in that moment, what have you found works?

Sam McCallum: 34:15
So, I mean, this is going to happen and it’s going to happen all the time. I think the first thing is for people to get comfortable with the fact that you’re going to have differences of opinion there. And you go into those, whether they’re working sessions, meetings, workshops, you go into that knowing it. So you should, if you’ve got some people that are you going to be collaborating with, you need to be having one on one sessions with them prior and get an understanding about where their heads at and what’s going to happen. And then I think if you’re going to have a workshop. Deliberately to tease out those opinions, then you need to facilitate that conversation. In a recent one that we worked with together, 1 of the 1st workshops that we did, it was deliberately designed around facilitating that conversation. And, I would be, I’d like to say delightfully cheeky, but I don’t know where, you do get somebody with an opinion that is just, I wouldn’t say problematic, but it’s more about misaligned to say. The, the purpose of why you’re there and what you do is you get them to voice it in front of everybody to the group so that they get it off their chest. And also they stop saying it in private. They say it publicly and then you have the counter argument, which needs to be, another really important person for that project. But it’s not me and you get them saying, well, what do you think about that? Does that align with your perspective? And then they hear it. From somebody that they respect in the business and often what happens after those sessions is everybody takes a bit of a step towards each other, right? And you eventually meet in the middle. And that’s. That’s the spot.

Chris Hudson: 36:04
Yeah, I think so. I mean, it does sort of, it oscillates, you kind of move apart, you’re diverging, converging in that sense, where there’s agreement and disagreement, disagreement’s okay, you got to get comfortable with it to then be able to move on to the same before.

Sam McCallum: 36:15
Well, it’s also, it’s the ambiguity, right?

Chris Hudson: 36:18
Yeah.

Sam McCallum: 36:18
I mean, as designers, we kind of just live in the ambiguity and we’re really comfortable with it. Yeah. But the wonderful thing about bringing together cross functional teams is you get. People that think very differently, that aren’t maybe really comfortable with ambiguity because their life lives in the certainty of, maybe numbers or spreadsheets or highly regulated kind of environments where, where those rules really help them feel safe and know what to do. And then you’re throwing at them this really different way of thinking that it feels. untethered and you’re dealing with the emotion of that, right? But you just have to create a safe space for them to be able to feel like that and then also coach them through. It’s going to be okay, right?

Chris Hudson: 37:10
Yeah, yeah, definitely. Definitely. I think, there’s a lot to be said for that. And. Yeah. Coaching is the right word as well. You’ve got to make it a safe environment and preferably a fun environment in some way to, you can be a bit more playful with it. And I think if you set it up in the right way, from, from my experience as well, and it just feels like, you can have the workshop in that moment. It might be something you have to handle, but if you set it up in the right way and you’re prepared, and also if the follow up from the workshop then leads to better, more constructive conversations, then it, then it feels that most things can get resolved. The business isn’t going to suddenly just close its doors. After that meeting, because you’ve done the wrong thing, you said the wrong thing, and there’s been a disagreement, you’ve got to sort it out. Otherwise, it’s just going to be a blocker. So, yeah, I think that’s important. Yeah, based on what you’re saying as well, I think, the need within cross functional teams to bring in diversity and inclusion feels like a real strength. And, it will probably bring more ambiguity in a sense that there’ll be differences in points of view. That you have to manage. And I think that, the way in which and the rate at which you can resolve some of those scenarios. efficiently, playfully, constructively, it feels like all of that be, a massive string, string to anyone’s bow. From a CX point of view or from a facilitation point of view, just more broadly in terms of diversity and inclusion in the workplace and its importance for business success, it just feels like that’s, that’s a big theme at the minute. And, in your experience of making that work in one way, what’s, what’s, what’s worked and what’s been successful for you?

Sam McCallum: 38:39
Yeah, I mean, like diversity and inclusions, obviously, it’s a pretty meaty space and there’s a few lenses to apply. I’ll give you a kind of a how it works for me in a team environment. But I mean, look, like, all the data is there around, the more diverse your. Business is, the more, the better the representative across, gender balance and ethnicity for your executive teams, the more profitable you are so that like there is this hard, beautiful reasons there for why businesses should be more diverse. I know just from a diversity of thought perspective, though, how I think it’s critical to the success, to be honest, like, and I mean, you can take diversity of thought, like, think about, in the fifties, a bunch of men standing around designing women’s underwear, right?

Chris Hudson: 39:35
Yeah, yeah. As for the case and women’s toilets. Yeah. Yeah.

Sam McCallum: 39:38
Yeah. Yeah. And, the, the classic obvious thing there is that the people that are impacted by this product aren’t even involved in the process at all. Fast forward to today, I know with the work that I do, when I’m setting up my teams. I don’t, I don’t go into the common trap, which I think a lot of people do unconsciously where they look to recruit people that are like them because they make them feel comfortable, right? And I look to recruit gaps in my thinking as well as my skill sets, right? So you being a bit aware about, your strengths and what you might need to be successful as well and bringing that in. And then when you’re working cross functionally within a business or as a consultant, who do you need to bring in to, that to solve that problem effectively? And it’s going to be a blend because if you only have, Designers, for example, you’re going to miss out on hugely important chunks of your knowledge around, the business model, the financial environment, the corporate strategy, the technology roadmap, all of these things that if you don’t have them, then the end outcome. Won’t be successful, won’t be delivered, won’t be seen as valuable, right? So I think it’s actually imperative.

Chris Hudson: 41:05
Yeah, I mean, there’s no disagreeing with that. It just feels like there’s. There’s still confusion. I don’t know. No, it’s, it’s, I think there’s, there’s never a clear map as to when to plan the projects to that extent. It feels like, because it’s always a bit more organic and, and you’re often having to think on the fly as to who to bring in after the next meeting. And it’d be great to get such and such because she’s obviously, spearheaded this initiative on this and that, that, but you know, up front, it’s hard to know. So I think you have to feel your way a little bit. And, and just be aware of that through the process, because as you say, the bias and the tendency would be to just take a right turn to the person that you know the best, or the opinion who’s, opinion that basically sits most comfortably with your own and it feels like a shortcut, but actually it’s not going to end up in the right direction. In the right space, if you do that. So I think it’s a, it’s a hard one. It’s almost like, yeah, it’s almost, it’s blind spotting. It’s revealing everything that you don’t want to accept is true, but, but you basically got to turn, turn your corner left and actually find, some of this, some of this other input, otherwise it’s going to look like a less than rounded deliverable in the end and a one that won’t be as effective. So yeah, it’s important.

Sam McCallum: 42:16
I mean, I think there are a lot of practical ways that businesses can foster that, though it goes back to the difference in how we approach solving problems now, 15 years ago, it was very much, you’d work on something and you’d want it to be perfect and you kept kept it really close to yourself and maybe just a trusted confidant and then when it was ready, you wanted to share it with the business and rate for the applause. But of course, that’s going to provoke, some reactions and then you need to manage it then versus taking, a more experimentation approach, that fail fast mentality where you are deliberately opening up the thinking early so that you’re getting the input. You’re course correcting, you’re going away and getting some more evidence to understand that. Then you share that back again, and it becomes much more, I guess, iterative by design, but it doesn’t just apply to things that are happening, in a delivery environment. You can apply that to your strategy. Right and I think if even business fosters that way of working and then people get really comfortable with the fact that this is how we do it and I haven’t failed. I’ve learned something new and I’m going to make it better. Failure is a really strong word and I think it frames it probably in, the wrong context. But if you get comfortable with, as part of your process, opening up things that aren’t perfect, deliberately to provoke discussion, then you end up with a better outcome. And I do it all the time in my work. Like, I will put together it can be, you can put together problem statements or you can put together low fidelity concepts. And you do it deliberately to actually just provoke a conversation because maybe you’re not getting the conversation out of that group that you know is there and when they’ve got something to rally around and discuss, then the conversation unfolds.

Chris Hudson: 44:22
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I agree. I think, I think you’re spot on when it comes to that, that shift basically from probably more, projection of thought and performance and, the big tada moment basically as it was once known to, to one that’s much more consultative probably through, through the approach. So it’s almost like. You’re once an actor and you’re delivering a performance and now you’re maybe more like a politician knocking on the doors and, testing out a few messages and having the conversations and, see, see what’s going to get the door slammed in your face the fastest, basically, which can be hard. But that’s kind of the reality of it. You need to address the biggest concern, rather than seek out common ground first and foremost, because you’re, you’re just going to turn, yeah, you’re just going to turn your focus to that and just miss a load of things that you have to solve for usually. And I think, from a responsiveness point of view in business and how, how businesses and organisations need to basically respond to market conditions, respond to consumer changes, then that, that’s becoming really important as well. So you’re thinking about weathering the storm and what can set businesses up, in a way that’s more resilient. And, and sets them up for challenges and, anything that’s happening out there in the market, they feel they need to respond to, then the extent to which you, your team, your business, your organisation is tuned into some of those harder, harder things to solve yeah, as we’ve been describing, the, the faster that you can respond to that, it’s probably going to say a lot, a lot for your business resilience and your team’s resilience in that moment as well. So, yeah, I mean, certainly in my experience, if you. If you’ve been able to work together at speed with a team on a problem that has been really curly, then you can get past that and you can kind of feel like you can get past most things. So I think the more kind of normalising of that that you can do is probably helpful in many contexts. Has that been your experience as well?

Sam McCallum: 46:13
Yeah, I think so. I think you, it’s, I mean, it’s hugely empowering to. Feel like you’ve been able to adapt and solve something. I think that’s kind of why sometimes in my career as well. I’ve worked done this hop stepping between client side and consulting. It is really rewarding to be able to have a defined on a consulting side of defined problem and, and you get to that outcome and you might, it might be 3 months, might be 6 months, might be 12 months, depending on what it is. But at the end of that, you look back and you go, wow look what we did. And I mean, in the way we work, and I, I’ve spoken about it before in that iterative kind of deliberately baking in the moments for feedback and failure and experimentation along the process. I think that does build your resilience because it, it teaches you that with practice. You can navigate uncertainty, ambiguity. You can work with a team to solve something you thought was unsolvable. And there’s like, and that’s really rewarding. I ran a innovation capability program for a university and. We ran it a bit like an incubator and an accelerator and we defined 10 problems. Going into it and their leadership team felt like these problems weren’t really solvable, right? Because they were, they were meaningful problems. There were things that were impacting them. But throughout the process that we took their team through, they could actually see many ways in which they could. Make meaningful change against these problems, and I think the beautiful thing about that is that it has a trickle down effect. Yes, they’re solving things that matter and then moving the needle on key metrics around that. And that can be around, employee satisfaction, staff satisfaction, different experience metrics or other stuff in there. Around revenue but the mindset shift that that has then, brought back to their culture around, yes, we can solve problems if we don’t always need large, expensive technology solutions to come in and solve something. There are things that we can do when we now have a framework in which we can do that in, so they’re feeling more empowered. And, there’s just so many beautiful benefits.

Chris Hudson: 48:54
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think I think what you’re saying is, is absolutely right. It’s almost a teaching how to fish. Aspect. And it’s not like, you have to be, to be a qualified fisherman to do certain things. So, it feels like you, it’s a bit like leadership. People talk about leadership and leadership leader is not necessarily a title anymore, but it’s definitely an attribute or characteristics that you can take in as the most junior middle senior can, can talk at any time and any usual context in business. So. You don’t have to wait for the most senior person in the room to talk anymore. It feels like it’s the case. So you, you can play your role in facilitating a group of people and people will, accept that and, and probably, admire you for it in some way because you’ve spoken up and you’ve been able, you’re, you’re showing willing to basically try and navigate the situation in one way. And obviously even better, like you were saying, if you can, knowledge tools, frameworks, things that people can also, gather around and it’s, it’s, it’s a way of finding common ground basically in those situations and it’s empowering and it gives people that, that safe space or a, it’s a sandpit to play in really, but it’s kind of helpful. I mean it’s an interesting one. I think, Yeah, has this always been the case for you through your career, where you felt like you’ve been in a position? No, this is now thinking back, but in a position to really, shape and facilitate conversation. Did you feel like you needed to be? Of a certain level of seniority or anything like that to, to, to feel like that that was okay. Or have you always been quite hands on and active in those situations?

Sam McCallum: 50:28
I think in some ways it’s a learned skill. Often, there was a desire there and I was curious, but it wasn’t until I kind of, when I left, I was head of marketing at Fairfax. And when I left there, which is probably back in 2013. So it’s a really long time ago. But I left there and I knew I was never going to work in a traditional marketing role again. I was like that’s just not going to happen for me. And I didn’t want it. I was really, I was already starting to think a lot about, innovation and having more of an influence and being able to Add more value in conversations that were around the product strategy and where where things were going in an organisation. So I sorted out because I just had this, desire to do it. And it’s been like that career change and everybody should have, their career change if they, if they get that yearning to do it, but it wasn’t, just like, oh, I changed jobs. And then I was an expert. No, you, you’ve got to go through I mean, I think in many ways, I went through the fire, right? Because you are doing this really steep. Ramp up to master a new craft to do, the reading and any course work that might be required to do it. But of course, that only takes you so far. We learn by doing. So you’ve got to be out there. Doing that type of work to be able to, learn through your experiences, learn from the people around you, learn from your mistakes. So I think it happened over time. I’d love to see more people though, when they’re younger and more early in their career, giving them, like, if, if I was running that team, giving those people the opportunities and supporting them to facilitate those conversations. Transcribed earlier in their careers because it would just make the benefits, not just for the organisation, for that person as well in their career development would be, would be beautiful and compounding.

Chris Hudson: 52:36
Yeah. So setting it up, I mean, is it just like before the meeting you’re asking somebody to basically assign a role in some way and you set an expectation or is that, is that what you have in mind?

Sam McCallum: 52:46
Yeah. I mean, I’ve done it in smaller ways where So if I’m facilitating a workshop or a really, really important meeting, we’ve got, you can carve off moments for people to get some experience in it. And depending on how experienced they are and what they need to learn, how much you kind of carve out for them may change, right? So it might be just, maybe they need, to get some practice in public speaking to a large group. So you make them do. Maybe just an icebreaker, facilitate an icebreaker exercise, right? That really beautiful, simple way to get people in, versus, running an exercise, doing an introduction. You may have guest speakers in and you need to kind of interview them as part of a big session that you’re running, maybe at the right time. They would like to facilitate that conversation. So you just have to build in moments for people to get the exposure.

Chris Hudson: 53:44
Yeah, and I think it all joins up, it’s coming back to that diversity point a little bit and a way to include everybody in the meeting, I think. As we know, it’s, it’s often better to get to a better outcome if, if more people involved and if they’re involved, obviously, they’re, they’re kind of committed, but also on the journey with you a little bit, because they have to kind of learn the part where they have to speak and facilitate and do the things you’re describing as well. So. That can be a good kind of team bonding and a gelling kind of moment where people align because they’ve had to play a part and play a more active role in some way or another. And it’s obviously better to have an active role in the meeting than a passive one because if that happens, then you’re checking your emails or your team’s messages or whatever it is anyway.

Sam McCallum: 54:28
People show up differently when they are physically engaged versus a passenger, right?

Chris Hudson: 54:34
Oh yeah. You can tell a lot, right? Like how they walk into the room. I think. Yeah, I’ve seen this, some people are there five minutes early, other people turn up five minutes late and they haven’t had lunch and then they want to leave the room to go and get some food,

Sam McCallum: 54:45
yes.

Chris Hudson: 54:47
So yeah, lots of that sort of stuff. It’s always exciting. But yeah, I don’t want to finish like maybe on a more personal question is, is probably around you and how you keep motivated, how you maintain resilience and keep up energy for yourself. Obviously the, the world of work can be incredibly, to some people it would feel a little bit challenging, hostile, complex, obviously there’s a lot to think about. There’s a lot of moving parts and you’re having to think about all these different things. Agendas and people, it’s, it’s a big thing to kind of think about. So strategies for keeping resilience, positivity and impact in some sort of way, how do you, how do you realise that? I mean, is there anything that kind of works for you?

Sam McCallum: 55:25
Yeah. I mean, I think it has to be mindfully managed. I don’t think it happens by chance. And I think that’s probably something that it took me again. Like, I think I only learn the hard way. I find work sometimes all consuming because I love it. And when I love something, I will put my energy into that. So sometimes though, not now, but when I was younger, that would lead to things like burnout, right? Because you are so intent and focused, but you don’t realise that you’re really, you’re engaging your fight and flight and you’re burning your adrenals in order to get that focus and energy, which is the wrong way. It’s not a sustained way to be able to, to function and work. So learning through those moments, I think sometimes, when you’re out in the bottom and you’re feeling really burnt out, you can have some thoughts that actually aren’t reflective of what you really want for your career. But you can be thinking things like, this isn’t for me, I can’t do that, but it’s not true. What’s true is that you didn’t take care enough of yourself while you were doing it, right? So I think people need to stop feeling as if it’s a special treat to take care of yourself, whether that is. Meditation, exercise, diet, work life balance, like saying, putting boundaries in place, like saying, no, I don’t work those days or those times because of X, Y, Z and don’t feel guilty about it, whatever it is for you, people should make sure they do that in a way that they can feel just not guilty about it at all. There’s a lot of now research as well, and I kind of had the aha moment when you look at our brains when we are overwhelmed and in fight or flight, they shut down, you’re losing so much the functionality of your brain, your ability to actually think and do your job to its best. High stability, because you’re, you’re not performing in a way that’s healthy. Your body’s not functioning like that. So, if you are feeling guilty about carving out me time or the balance. Maybe get solace from the fact that actually, it’ll make you so much better at your job because all of your brain will be working, not just parts of it that are connected to the fight and flight, right? So that for me is probably how I. Manage my work and my life. Resilience, I think, comes from, your grit, and I think that through that people have to walk through their own little fires and have moments to, to have support, but also pick themselves up and to know that they can do things and build. That in themselves, if you can do it for your kids now, even better, right? But often we were learning it in our twenties and thirties, so, we’re a bit behind the ball, but we’re getting there in the end.

Chris Hudson: 58:30
Brilliant, ChatGPT. I mean, it’ll give you the answers. I mean, that feels like the kind of trend in the last 10, 15 years anyway, that’s, it’s a Google generation and now it’s obviously AI, but yeah, it just feels like the. The kind of shortcut to the answer is often the way, rather than doing the walk through the fire, as you were describing, so you can avoid it as easily as you can, but at least if you kind of find out about it, you’re, you’re in the know you’re taking probably a more like independent view of what the situation is, rather than, Either just running or walking through fire or, feeling a bit more instinctive in that moment, but yeah, there are workarounds, but no, that’s really helpful. That’s really helpful. Cool. Well, I think we might just finish there. I think it’d be great to just, yeah, if you feel like, if there’s a way for people to get in touch with you, how would they best get in touch with you if they want to ask a question? They want to connect with you if they, feel like they want to work with you, which is amazing. And I’d highly recommend it to anybody, but yeah, how would they get in touch with you?

Sam McCallum: 59:25
They can find me on LinkedIn, Samantha McCallum, or they can go to my website, which is outfoxed.co.

Chris Hudson: 59:32
Amazing. All right. Well, thanks so much for the chat today, Sam. I really enjoyed it. And yeah, we went through a lot of things. I’m still relating to. Business and how, how people can, use some of those, learnings really to kind of benefit their own career paths, decisioning, time inside out, inside work, time outside of work and lots of things in between. So I really appreciate it. Thank you.

Sam McCallum: 59:51
Thanks for having me. It’s been fun to catch up.

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