Jennifer Sundberg: Collective Intelligence: How to build a business that's smarter than you

Welcome to this episode of Leadership Bites! In today's conversation, Jennifer Sundberg, co-chief executive of Board Intelligence, delves into the transformative power of collective intelligence in decision-making within organizations.

She emphasizes the need to move away from the superstar CEO model and instead focus on empowering every member of the organization to think more and think better. The three themes of collective intelligence are critical thinking, clear communication, and focus. 

Jen explains the importance of creating a culture of questioning and normalizing behaviours that support collective intelligence. By doing so, organizations can tap into the full potential of their workforce and drive better decision-making. 

The conversation explores the principles of collective intelligence and how to build a business that is smarter than its leaders. It emphasizes the importance of creating a positive reinforcement loop and taking behaviour out of the boardroom to encourage decentralized decision-making. 

The discussion also highlights the significance of effective communication and the need to unlearn ineffective communication habits. 

Additionally, it emphasizes the power of using simple and clear language, owning your message, and being authentic in communication. The conversation concludes by discussing the superpowers of focus, alignment, and the ability to pivot and adapt to change.

Takeaways

• Collective intelligence is about empowering every member of the organization to think more and think better.
  
  
• Creating a culture of questioning and normalizing behaviors that support collective intelligence is crucial.
  
  
• The three themes of collective intelligence are critical thinking, clear communication, and focus.
  
  
• By embracing collective intelligence, organizations can tap into the full potential of their workforce and drive better decision-making. Create a positive reinforcement loop to reward desired behavior and encourage repetition.
  
  
• Take behavior out of the boardroom and replicate it at every level of the organization.
  
  
• Unlearn ineffective communication habits and replace them with clear and authentic communication.
  
  
• Use simple and clear language to come across as smarter and display accountability.
  
  
• Focus and alignment are superpowers that drive organizational success.
  
  
• Be willing to pivot and adapt to changing circumstances.

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Transcript

Guy Bloom (00:00)
So, okay, so listen, here we are. And Jen, it is really, really fabulous to have you on this episode of Leadership Bytes. Welcome.

Jen Sundberg (00:10)
Delighted to be here. Thank you for inviting me.

Guy Bloom (00:13)
So I start off every episode the same. I clearly know who you are, but there will be people that don't. So imagine you're at a barbecue and somebody said, Jen, what do you do for a living? What's the answer, Jen?

Jen Sundberg (00:31)
The answer I'd give it a barbecue. I struggle with actually but the answer I can share with your listeners who I imagine are tuned into this kind of stuff. So I co-run Cotube exec of a business called Board Intelligence a business that has about 3,000 clients about 30-40,000 directors around the world who log into our various software products every week every month And our business as the name would suggest is about how to help boards to operate at full pelt But that's not why I'm here. I'm here because we have

Myself and Pippa Begg, co-chief at Deck, we have published a book called Collective Intelligence, How to Build a Business that is Smarter than You. Aha, there we go, you have a copy there, thank you. And so I'm here in the capacity today as the author of said book.

which sets its sights somewhat broader than the boardroom, sets its sights beyond the boardroom. So it is purposefully not called board intelligence, it is titled collective intelligence for a reason, exploring how you can help every member of your organisation at every single level to think more and think better.

Guy Bloom (01:34)
So let's get a little bit of context before we dive into the book about you as an organisation that would just set the scene for why people would listen to what you have to say because the world right now is full of gurus and you know you can work from your beach doing one day of coaching a week people and then I come across people like you Jen who I know to be credible.

but it's not answering the question, why are you credible? But in essence, what is the day job? Expand on that a little bit. Who's paying attention to you? And why do you have the, I'm gonna say the right, maybe the wrong word, but why are you credible in this space?

Jen Sundberg (02:12)
Yeah, absolutely. And sitting here on a very gloomy January morning, I'm trying to get out of my mind, thoughts of sitting on a beach, coaching people once a week, which sounds really quite lovely. So as a coach of that board intelligence, it has given me, it has given the team access to boardrooms around the world, boardrooms of many of the most demanding organizations in the world. And that access,

in of itself is not widely available. You know, boardrooms, they are by necessity very separate, very secretive, let's say confidential. And the innermost workings of a board.

is not something many people get an insight

into. And it's, I suppose, a quirk of the career paths that myself and my colleagues have taken. We've had this insight into what goes on. And it's given us an opportunity over the past decade or so to also experiment, right, with having understood, through working closely with our clients, understood what we've made of the challenges in the boardroom, what the challenges of trying to take really good decisions about really important issues with ambiguous information.

of doing that well, we're very familiar with. And over the last decade and a half, we've had this opportunity to try awful lot of things, to see what works, what makes a difference, and to essentially build our thesis through that journey with our clients. To build that thesis of how do you help a board to take more and better decisions? How do you help a board to operate at full pelt?

And it's those insights that the experience set that we want to now share with the wider world, because what we came to realize is that actually many of our most successful clients were the ones whose decision-making center of gravity was as far away from the boardroom as possible. Because we all know for every decision taken in the boardroom, many, many more decisions are taken outside of it. And in fact, if your most important decisions always have to surface up in the boardroom, these days,

you're just not going to be able to move fast enough. So I suppose what gives me the right to be here is that playbook that we have developed through that somewhat privileged access that we've had to boardrooms around the world.

Guy Bloom (04:42)
Okay. So that's great. And I think that is relevant because it does set the scene for why I should pay attention. I'm blessed as well to work with executive level to do exec coaching to work with senior teams. And I think we're operating in different places and spaces. But I think there's enough of an overlap for my interest here.

There's a great, well I think he's the UK's probably leading keynote speaker, Jamil Quresh. He's a fabulous speaker and he quotes former Hewlett-Packard CEO Lou Platt who says if HP knew what HP knows, we'd know everything that we need to know. Right and I wonder within that is, I had a sense when I was reading your book about this is

Jen Sundberg (05:29)
Right, yep.

Guy Bloom (05:39)
I mean, I very much focus on behaviors and the dynamics of teams, etc., which is, you know, not relevant. But there is something here about knowledge and about the capacity to work with it. And I just would really kind of like that kind of lead into your book as to why is it about collective intelligence and not about, in essence, just being a b****.

a better board.

Jen Sundberg (06:09)
Yeah, yeah. And I think it goes back to, yeah, just briefly touching on the realization that even...

those organisations that we had the greatest success with when we were focused firmly on the confines of the boardroom. Even the work that we did that we were most proud of wasn't enough. One of our clients, I remember, not exactly but 1500 board, he said to us one day, I feel like I need a horizontal board agenda for all of my so-called number one priorities. Boards are overwhelmed, boards of large multinationals in particular, I'm talking about here, they are overwhelmed with the expectations on them.

and the remit and the work to be done. It is extraordinary.

It was just simply the capacity of a board. In a modern, in the world we live in today where it's not the big that eat the small anymore, it's the fast that eat the slow. So if you operate in an organization where all of the really critical decisions have to very slowly wind their way up to the top of an organization, it's simply too slow. And on top of that, no one group or person can be everywhere all at once solving every problem. If they try to be, they just create this monumental bottleneck.

power concentrated in any individual or any one group, in the end we know that makes you not just corrupt but stupid, right, as history bears out time and time again. So I think we just became more and more...

aware of the limitations of focusing the effort to improve quality thinking, quality decision making in the boardroom, that was actually just not enough. And it's helping to create the conditions, not just in the boardroom, but create the conditions at every level of the organisation, for everyone to think well and think more and think better. That's how you really unleash the power of the human being.

the potential of your organisation and really unleash that collective intelligence. One of my clients actually, I can go a bit further, I remember we were pitching to Sir John Timpson of the shoe and key repair fame and he came into our boardroom, this was quite a long time ago.

much earlier on our journey, he came into our boardroom one day and we were thrilled to have this opportunity to pitch to him and we'd got this nice deck ready and we were feeling pretty good about it. We'd pitched this deck at the boards of the likes of everyone from Rolls Royce, World Bank of Scotland, you know all sort of easy jet and it had gone down pretty well and you know feeling that this was gonna this was gonna fly and the fact that he'd taken the meeting at all

And he let us get about five slides in before he held his hand up like he was trying to stop the oncoming traffic. And he just couldn't take it anymore. And he said, stop. He said, I don't need a better board. The important decisions in my organization are not taken in my boardroom. They are taken as close to the front line as humanly possible. And he introduced us to his methodology, methodology that I think others subscribe to you as well, but one that he was very, very proud to have taken into Timpsons, what he called upside down management.

and this idea that it is the role of every level of the organisation to support, enable and empower the level below. And that gave us pause for thought in the early days and then as I say we then saw this play out in our clients boardrooms that even a board that's really high functioning, really high performing, in itself it will just create a bottleneck if it tries to take all of the important decisions all of the time.

So you've got to look to build the right skills, capability, the right conditions outside of the boardroom to not just create the capabilities that you need, but to build the confidence in the board to let go of some of that control. And you need to know that if you're going to let other parts of the organization take more decisions, you need to know that authority is going to be well discharged. And for that, you need to have put the right systems processes in place.

Guy Bloom (10:05)
So there's something here about when...

at the moment, a phenomenal organisation and three of them started the business 20 years ago, it's now a billion pound organisation, so you know, hanging on by the seat of your pants for a massively success story. But guess what? When there was three of them in a porter cabin

and it grew a little bit. They could control everything, they could know everything, they could be on the pulse. And just talking to Simon, one of the partners yesterday, he was, you know, I used to know everybody. Now there are people walking around my organisation and I don't know who they are. So there's something here about, if I'm hearing you correctly, about the capacity, the capacity of any one board to make all the decisions that really do need to be made.

really doesn't exist because it's too much, too fast and too big.

And just almost at the starting point, you intellectually have to accept that that's a truth. Because all the processes in the world, if it's just to shore up... Yeah.

Jen Sundberg (11:16)
Yeah, at a certain time, I suppose if your business is five people.

But yeah. No, indeed. And I think, and I think I said it goes beyond that. So part, I think part of our, part of my motivation is indeed driven by sheer expediency of what works best. And this is what works best. There's another part to it as well, which is just what a waste to employ all of this human capital and then not to tap into it. Just what a waste. And in this day and age, you can afford waste.

As long as there are jobs to be done that can only be done by human beings, and that territory may be getting smaller by the minute, not going to lie, right? We all know we have some fierce competition there from AI. But for as long as there is work that can and should only be done by human beings, tap into it. If you're going to hire a human being, tap into that grey matter. Help to build that grey matter, exercise it and extract the value from it.

Guy Bloom (12:15)
So there's something here about this fallacy of the superstar CEO and the one person who's the figurehead and makes all the decisions. That feels very much like a thing of the past.

Jen Sundberg (12:31)
Right, and yet never have we had it.

you know, that the media is full of it, right? You know, I mean, we all love the, what's the latest thing Elon Musk has been up to, you know, what's going on in Bezos land. And, you know, these stories of these larger than life characters dominate the headlines. And, yeah, I enjoy reading about them as much as the next person. But you reference the word fallacy, and I think this is the crux of it because, you know, the, I suppose the opposite of collective intelligence would be

a superstar CEO and then get out of their way so they can make, you know, move fast and break things, make all of the important decisions, and everybody else's job is just row behind them and execute. But the truth is that even those characters who appear to be these superstar CEOs taking all of the big calls themselves, when you peel the onion, when you dig below the surface, what you find is going on is something very, very different, at least for those that are enduringly successful.

decade after decade, it's not quite as it appears. So if I take some of those examples I was talking about, let's have a look at, you know, where Apple is a great one, right? We all know Apple led by, you know, for many years, Steve Jobs, extraordinary visionary leader. But he did not come up with the iPhone. In fact, it was not his idea to enter the mobile phone market at all. It was colleagues of his who had to drag him, kicking and screaming to embrace that idea. Equally, Warren Buffett, another incredible leader, incredible brain, very smart man.

like that. Their single most successful investment to date was the decision to back Apple, which again was not a decision that he supported, but he empowered one of his lieutenants to take that call. And it's turned out extremely well. And then Bezos, right? Again, phenomenal guy, incredible entrepreneurial leader. Amazon wouldn't be Amazon without him.

he didn't come up with the idea for Amazon Prime. That was one of many things on their journey that really changed the way we shop. That was an idea of a junior engineer. And I was chatting to Jeff Bezos' former chief of staff who went on to then work with Eric Schmidt at Google. And she said to me, you know, these larger than life, super-star CEOs, unquestionably, they have incredible vision, incredible confidence.

but they've also thought hard to help others to think well, and that is what has made them as successful as they are.

Guy Bloom (15:02)
It's that capacity to be free to make decisions because other people have done the hard work of the thinking. And actually what I'm really doing is selecting from the fruit of intelligent people having done the thinking without fear and offering me potentially things to reinforce but also things to challenge.

Jen Sundberg (15:20)
Yeah.

Guy Bloom (15:27)
and I'm free not to necessarily spend my day worrying about the minutiae because I trust you've done it and what I'm being offered is something I can rely on and I can be free to have those more strategic decisions. And there's a confidence there isn't there? There's something there about the individual's capacity to...

Jen Sundberg (15:40)
Right. Exactly.

Guy Bloom (15:49)
And I always think there's a difference between the team that you get and the team that you've got. Which is, you know, when you inherit a team on day one, well, that's the team that you've got, right? But the team that you deserve is the one that a little bit later you've got to own it and go, after a certain amount of time, this really is me, right?

Jen Sundberg (16:08)
Yeah, yeah, exactly. And it's about, you know, how do you create? Yeah, and it's about what do you do to create the conditions to get the very best and the very most from those people?

Guy Bloom (16:11)
And there's something about that forming that.

Jen Sundberg (16:21)
And I suppose that needs to begin with the core belief that the potential is there, that given the right conditions, that the people that you're working with and the people that you may not even be able to see within your work is not as easy. You need a certain belief in the potential of your workforce, given the right tools, given the right environment, to do good thinking. So I mean, another, I remember reading about the educator Sal Khan, and he made the point that a few hundred years ago, I think it was four or five hundred years ago,

about 15% of the world population could read.

And if it had been, if you'd asked, you know, or polled, you know, what percentage of the world population do people back then believe have the potential, have the mental capacity to read, given the right education and opportunity, then he said, you know, that it would be about 30%. It was widely considered that maybe 30% of the world population had the mental capacity to be able to read, given all of the opportunities to learn how to. Now, we know that not to be true, right? We all know that, you know,

almost everyone, not everyone, but almost everyone, given the right education opportunity can read. And you have to have a similar belief that given the right, that the human potential of your workforce, given the right environment, given the right education and the tools and the confidence to use them, that they do have this incredible thinking power that's just waiting to be unleashed and our book sets out how you do that.

Guy Bloom (17:53)
So let's get into the book.

talk about the three themes I think of collective intelligence and it would be great to maybe just set the foundational tenants for what that is.

Jen Sundberg (18:09)
So I can now hear the coffee machine in the background starting to clean itself. Okay, I'm hoping that's not interacting with the podcast. Right. Right, yes. Yeah, not so smart of me. So three themes are right. So I'm going to start with the first one.

Guy Bloom (18:16)
I know. That's fantastic, isn't it? Don't worry. It's the beauty of real life that pre-COVID, we'd have to edit it out. Now post-COVID, we go, it doesn't matter. Nobody cares. Don't worry. Buh-bum. There you go.

Jen Sundberg (18:32)
Yeah, I'm trying to think how to feed the coffee machine into our thesis and I suppose you know, I drink a lot of coffee, I've got a lot to do with all of our looking today. So, yeah, collective intelligence, how do you do it? Right, so our playbook is called The Question-Driven Insight Principle and there are three parts to it. It's all about skills and habits that you can build around critical thinking, clear communication and focus.

But like a lot of the so-called answers to problems we face, it's very easy to say, but how do you do that, right? How do you help everybody to do more and better critical thinking? How do you help people to communicate more clearly? And how do you help them to focus on what matters most? If it was just a matter of saying, do it, you know, we wouldn't, well, there wouldn't have been a book to write and there wouldn't be a problem to solve here. It's that this stuff is seemingly hard, right? And the answers are not obvious. And so what we've set out is all of the ways of making this both easy to do

and hard to avoid, or easy to do well and hard to avoid, that we then set out and have to take it through.

Guy Bloom (19:37)
Please do. Let's go.

Jen Sundberg (19:38)
So, right, okay, we'll start with critical thinking. So this will make someone clear why our playbook is called The Question of an Insight Principle.

questions are the spark and the fuel of critical thinking, curiosity. Pretty much every major discovery or invention of mankind stems from someone somewhere thinking, spotting a question that nobody else had thought to ask. And thankfully, this is a capability we are born with. We are all born questioners. There's research, Harvard research showing that small children will ask over 100 questions a day.

but something happens to us through our formal education that beats this out of us. And by the time we reach the workforce, we've all just stopped asking questions. And there's a great emphasis and value in formal education placed on knowing the answers to the questions, not on isolating the question he's asking. And it's not just knowing the answers to the questions that we place value on in education, it's actually knowing the very specific answer that the examiner has in the back of their booklet. Go find the scope for, you know,

or imagination in that, right? So we're born questioners, but we have it somewhat beaten out of us. And so what we have developed is ways of weaving questioning back into all sorts of rituals and routines that are already present in an organization to make it habitual, to spend more time thinking, what is the critical question here? Not the answer. There was a great Einstein quote that I love. He says, if I had an hour to solve a problem and my life depended on it,

spend the first 55 minutes isolating the real question because once I've identified the question I can solve it in five minutes. So I suppose what we're doing is partly helping to remind people of this, the value of questioning, and then it's looking at how and where and when in one's working routine can you create the space for this.

What we've identified is that there are those rituals that already take place in the working calendar, management reporting, preparing for board meetings, quarterly business reviews, annual planning cycles, investment cases, and getting the green light to fund new projects. These are all pre-existing routines that happen throughout the annual calendar. Currently, often seen as a time sink, seen as a brake on progress, they are perfect opportunities

for deep questioning and critical thinking. And so what we set out is how you do that, how you turn those activities into questioning activities.

Guy Bloom (22:14)
And just before we move forward on that, one of the things I notice about boards is that you have people generally who are in charge of vertical work streams and they have an overarching responsibility for their place and space. They then come together as a inverted commerce leadership team and there is an element of the majority, in my observation, of that activity being transactional.

Jen Sundberg (22:23)
Mm-hmm.

Guy Bloom (22:43)
we are reporting or we're doing resource allocation or whatever it is that we're doing. If I actually look at the amount of time that is spent, what you would class as being leading the business, then often it's a relatively small amount of time. Because if you started to talk about talent, if you started to talk about culture, if you started to talk about what are we going to look like in three to five years. And of course,

Jen Sundberg (22:56)
Mm.

Guy Bloom (23:11)
definitely and a lot of the organisations I work for are private equity backed and they're on a three year sprint and whatever it is. And so actually long term thinking is actually very much curtailed by process and commercial expectations and just being, guess what, very often which

Jen Sundberg (23:29)
I'm busy-ness.

Guy Bloom (23:35)
we're trying to turn something around, there's been major acquisitions, we got that at a price because we've now got to put it right, so a lot of work's got to go into it, it's like a fixer-upper of buying a new property, whatever it is. So you've got the stuff of life let's just call it going on. So intellectually I very much doubt, it's like saying to somebody fitness is good right, and everybody goes yeah, but I can't find time to go down the gym.

Jen Sundberg (24:02)
Exactly.

Guy Bloom (24:03)
So there's a metaphor and an analogy here, both at the same time, that I'm interested in. What's the stepping stones to? Because there's a discipline, I think. There's a discipline involved in going to the gym. There's a discipline involved. in... Intellectually, I understand. And, you know, I may even be personally motivated to do it, but I may not have the habit or the discipline. So how do you make that bridge? Because I don't imagine that many people disagree with the argument.

Jen Sundberg (24:25)
completely.

Guy Bloom (24:33)
but the fear of the reality of it is significant, I would imagine.

Jen Sundberg (24:38)
Yeah, no, completely. And I think that's the thing. I mean, you know, we can all buy into the idea of, yes, we should be, we should spend more time isolating what's the critical question that we should be grappling with and thinking deeply in response to it. But that's very nice, but very unrealistic. And have you seen my calendar? And that's why we see this, this

almost not quite trojan horse, but the act of all of these rituals that we already go through that are not adding much value. As I say, that most people think about preparing for board meetings, preparing for courtly business reviews as a hassle, as an intrusion in their, you know, in trying to get, it's an interruption to their job and getting on with the stuff that they're trying to tick off their to-do list. When you completely change the way those things are done and you create new,

tools and new rules around how they should be done, suddenly it becomes the most valuable part of your working month where you work out what am I even trying to do with it, even the right thing to do and how should I be better doing it. And I mean, I know myself, you know, I will sit down to prepare our...

board meeting materials, I would sit down to write the strategy paper and I am very clear what our strategy is. In fact, I've stood up already and I have talked to the whole company about our strategy. I sit down to prepare my paper and it's not just a process of writing it down. It's a process of writing it down, reading it and discovering that various bits of it don't make any sense and identifying the wrinkles and then ironing out those wrinkles and then having done that, having to rewrite it. Because by the time I have prepared that

the tools and the principles that we advocate, I end up with a different strategy to the one I started with in my head. It is the process and the act of externalizing some of this thinking and writing it down that enables it to stand up to inspection to you yourself. And by adopting these methodologies around questions and answers, identify first of all, what are the critical questions I'm trying to answer in this, for this strategy, spending time really nailing down those questions, and then really digging deep

answers to those questions, going through that mental discipline of doing this, it's not just a communication exercise, it's a thinking exercise. And it's one that I kind of have to do anyway, right? Which is why I think this is such a golden opportunity and often a missed opportunity to repurpose, refactor existing activities in the calendar and to turn them into something very valuable, purposeful, useful.

Guy Bloom (27:17)
So there's something there about you're going to be making a certain amount of effort anyway, the reality would be why don't you do it better. So it's not about more time, it's about doing it in a better way. So give us an insight then into that element of what are some of these, if somebody's made the intellectual step and they've gone, Jen, I get it, I'm bought into this or we as a team, we're with you, but I don't think we don't know what we don't know.

Jen Sundberg (27:22)
Hmm.

Yeah. Right. Exactly.

Guy Bloom (27:45)
We've got habits, new habits that probably need to be created. And there are probably some templates and tools that we need to get used to and familiar with and break in what Jen take us start leading us down that path.

Jen Sundberg (27:45)
Yeah.

Sure, so we recommend what we call QDI plays. So the methodology question driven insight QDI. And a QDI play is a set of questions that are frequently almost universally valid and valuable. And by starting with a QDI play.

prepackaged set of good questions, you can start to build this habit of approaching a problem from the perspective of what are the questions I first need to, what are the questions I need asking, right? And these QDI plays, these sets of questions.

are not the beginning or the end of the process. It just gets you going, gets you started. And I think one of the other truths that we've learned along the way is that the most powerful questions most of the time are the simple ones. And that complex, clever questions are often a...

a distraction and often it's the questions like why, so what, now what, those are the questions that will often yield the greatest truths, which is why we've been able to package up these sets of questions that can be so universally applicable for people to get started with encouraging colleagues to work with these initial question sets as the starting point for framing their thinking.

and getting this questioning habit back. So if I give you some examples, if you're writing a performance report, this is all going to sound incredibly obvious and that's kind of the point. It is incredibly obvious, it's just not the way we often approach it. What am I trying to achieve? What's gone well? What's not gone well? Why, so what, now what? Looking to the future, what are the critical risks and opportunities that I see? And where does this leave us? What do we need to stop doing, starting, or do differently? And what's my confidence in achieving those goals? I said I'll start very easy, right?

simple, kind of obvious. But very often you will find that a performance report sets out tons of stuff looking back, nothing looking forwards, tons of information but no so what, now what. Loads of information but not at the end of the day where does this leave us? So all of these, all of it sets out all of the good but none of the bad. Here's everything that's gone swimmingly well and let's not dwell on the tough stuff.

Guy Bloom (30:13)
Thanks for watching!

Jen Sundberg (30:18)
Sharing with your colleagues, here is a set of questions, here's a QDI play, it's a really good start of a 10. Engage with these difficult questions, simple to say, hard to answer. Engage with these questions, try and really root out and unearth the real insight in response to each of them. And in the course of it, keep thinking, what questions am I missing? What other important critical questions do I need to raise to truly get to the bottom of what I'm trying to share here?

Guy Bloom (30:45)
There's a few things that resonate with me, which, and tell me how this sits with you, Jim, because I notice that, let's just say I'm working with a team, and I often focus on running meetings. And it is never ceased to amaze me where I can go in with an exec team. And I'm not there to help them run a coherent meeting. I'm there, in essence, working on team effectiveness, but it comes clear relatively quickly that they can't stay on point.

Jen Sundberg (31:13)
Hmm.

Guy Bloom (31:13)
just something as simple as that. So I have a meeting methodology, how to run a coherent meeting. Now, not gonna run through it now, but well, we'll do it in due course, but the point is it is in itself not complex. Now, but there is a, what I think I'm hearing and what you're saying is what I identify in that space, which is there is a difference between the intellectual

Jen Sundberg (31:21)
Ooh, I'd quite like to hear it.

Guy Bloom (31:42)
understanding of a thing, the competence of application of a thing, and then the craft of the skill of a thing. And those are three levels. Because if I say to any one person, do you know how to run a meeting? They'll go, yeah. I mean, they intellectually know there's a topic and we talk about it. Then there's, but there's something about discipline and the repetition of it to understand what I think sports people understand, which is,

I don't play football, but you're playing football, I'm playing football. The only difference is I play it. I do six hours of training a day and you play occasionally at the weekend. Now, because I have the discipline and the craft and the dedication that my skill on the craft is significantly more to yours. So when you say simple questions, that resonates with me, but actually the complexity is in the simplicity of the craft and the seeing it through to the end.

Jen Sundberg (32:24)
Mm.

Yeah.

Guy Bloom (32:41)
and not jumping to action rather than actually reflection. So there's something in there that when you say simple, yeah, but it doesn't mean easy, right? Yeah, bingo, bingo.

Jen Sundberg (32:49)
Just be easy. Yeah. Just be easy.

Yeah, no, completely. And yeah, doing it, yeah, it's beguilingly simple to set out some of the how it's surprising you. It can be harder to do it.

Guy Bloom (33:02)
That's a lovely phrase, it's beguilingly simple, I love that.

Jen Sundberg (33:05)
which is why we overlook it, right? Because I'm, you know, a sucker just as much as the next person for things that sound complicated and, you know, that must, that's, you've imbued it with more value for that reason. Whereas, you know, I say very often it's asking the question why that we overlook, like why are we doing this? You know, that goes unasked and unanswered. And one of the other things I'd say about the discipline is that it's, because it is, to your point, hard, you know, engaging with difficult questions is hard, right? And it's, and that's very tempting to not do it

And so you kind of need to make this stuff cultural and just the way you do things around here. So as I say, on the one hand, it helps by hijacking pre-existing activities, not trying to carve out magic time and not trying to load up new activities into a ready overburdened calendar, right? So hijack what's already there, repurpose it, but make it the way you do things around here. And if you party, party because it drives compliance, right? You sort of, you know, it becomes, you know.

you're at odds with the organisation if you don't then apply these principles. But it's also in some ways the only way to make it work. But I'll give you a good example. I suppose an example of why you can't really do this stuff in pockets and why you need to get everybody engaged. So, Harry Markopoulos, fund manager, a few decades back, he was challenged by his boss.

go check out this other hedge fund that's doing really well and it's making us look bad. I'd like you to go find out a little bit more about what they're doing, how they're doing it, and I want a bit of that. So he did his instructive, he went and checked out this fund that seemed to be punching the lights out. And this fund was run by a man called Bernie Meroff. And he took a look at it and he said, it took me about four minutes to figure out this was a fraud. And he said, took me another four hours of mathematical modeling to prove it was a fraud.

He wrote up his findings as a memo, 21 page memo, and he called it, the world's biggest hedge fund is a fraud. He sent it to the SEC. Now, critical thinking, tick. Clear communication, tick. Focused on what matters most, tick. He did everything that we would recommend. Did it work? No. Did the SEC respond and take it seriously? No. And...

Which is really inconvenient for me and for us at Board Intelligence and our thesis, right? Because the real world is messy, you know, and these inconvenient stories would appear to fly at odds with it. But what was going on here was...

strongly held beliefs present at the SEC that even smart people, and let's assume the SEC are not for the dummies, right? Even smart people find it very difficult to let go of strongly held beliefs. It's the term given in psychology, belief perseverance. It's this innate human quality that we have, cannot want to let go of strongly held prior beliefs. And if you...

If you try to do this in pockets, if you don't create a culture where everyone that you're interacting with has also bought into this idea of question everything, question, then you're going to risk good thinking, well communicated, falling on deaf ears.

So making it cultural, making it the way you do things around here is both important for compliance, for making it, for creating that sense of, I better get with this, this is the way that we work here. It's also important for your ability to have impact. Because if you're trying to do this alone, uncovering uncomfortable truths, sharing difficult insights that really gets in the number of something, but that do cast a fresh light on an old situation. If you try and do that alone, it can be quite difficult to really cut through.

Guy Bloom (37:00)
Yeah I think I really resonate with that. We've had that Sam Bankman. Is it Bankman or Fried? What's his name? Yeah Bankman. Yeah Bankman Fried. Yeah that's right.

Jen Sundberg (37:04)
Freed, yes. Fried. Yes, SPS, as he's known. I know it's sort of hilarious as ever, jiving, yeah, his name.

Guy Bloom (37:18)
And why did everybody buy into it when a lot of people were suspicious of it? So there is an element of human greed, there is an element of fear. We've got it with the postal scandal at the moment, you know, which is why have people kept quiet? Well, because actually I'm fearful, I'm scared. It's all very well saying put your hand up, but...

you know, I'm going to, you know, the repercussions of that are potentially huge. For some it's the fear I'm low down the food chain. And what will that mean to me? Others it's, there's a lot of money here potentially if, if I let this get, so as all there's the human dynamic. So there is something here about the intellectualization of this is very important, but

I talk about TRUST, ACCOUNTABILITY, BRAVERY and CONNECTION and this idea of bravery, there's a bravery element here to what you're talking about which is, okay intellectually you've got to make the first step to agree with the principle but then you're going to have to be brave enough to be accountable to start to create, to do the discipline.

Jen Sundberg (38:15)
Yeah.

Guy Bloom (38:21)
of the pain of shifting your behaviour and going through that threshold like wearing in a new pair of shoes almost before they become comfortable.

Jen Sundberg (38:22)
Yeah.

Right, and truthfully, yeah, exactly, and truthfully it's not going to work if it depends on huge amounts of bravery, because optimistic though I am about human nature, even I would recognise that, you know, in a large...

multi-thousand personal organisation, you can't just hope that you've hired a whole ton of brave people, right? So you need to normalise it so that it doesn't depend on bravery. And so that actually the opposite becomes true. It's conspicuous not to do it. So if I give you another good example, because of our heritage in the boardroom, there's a lot of focus on candidness and fear in the boardroom of being blindsided, for which you need management to be really upfront with you about things that aren't going well or risks and challenges on the horizon.

Now we all know that it's human nature to want to look good to the people who determine your future career progression and not to want to air all your dirty laundry and all your mistakes, you know, if you can avoid it, right? Like we all feel the same. So if you introduce the question that everyone has to answer month in, month out from your report to the board, right the way down to your meeting with your boss, you know, any level, not just the question what's gone really well, but what's not gone well.

And you make that normal, that in fact, that question is conspicuously absent if you are not answering or posing and answering in your report to the board, what's not gone well, why not, so what, now what. That makes it a lot easier to be forthcoming about the challenges and risks because it normalizes it. And in fact, you start to build this understanding that

If you can't answer that question, it is not because you're such a superstar leader, there are no problems in your part of the business. It's actually because you don't have a grip on your part of the business. Because business, as with life, is never plain sailing. So if you can't articulate what's not gone well and what you're gonna do about it, then it's actually a poor reflection on you not having a proper grip on what's going on in your part of the organization. So make it easy. Don't depend on too much bravery. It does, however, you do build confidence over time.

you build confidence at sharing a point of view in response to these questions and provided everyone's on the same page supporting and encouraging that behaviour then it gets easier both mentally to do it and the confidence to do it with.

Guy Bloom (40:46)
I think that's really important. The act of bravery to break the chain of behaviour doesn't then mean that this only works on us being constantly brave. I like that. We've got to normalise this. We may have to have some brave primary actions but we've got to get to a place where actually this is the way we are around here. So almost if somebody joined in six months or eight months or a year they would see it as the way it...

it is. So that's, you know, with certain size of businesses, that's a that's a fine thing when you've got businesses with 10, 15, 20, 30,000 people in them. That's that's a that's an interesting conversation.

Jen Sundberg (41:14)
Mm.

And that's where it's even more important, right? Because if you are responsible for the behavior of those 30, 40,000 people, then you're gonna need some devices that do not depend on you being personally present and scrutinizing everything that's going on, right?

There's a quote I heard years ago, it was attributed to Warren Buffett, but I'm not sure if it was him, so I've never quite traced it back to myself, but said something like, the only thing I know is that someone somewhere across the Berkshire Hathaway estate is doing something they shouldn't be. It's the only thing you can do. And when you're dealing with these normal, you're dealing with such a large population in these very large organizations that you've got a normal distribution curve, right? Of really, really good people and not so good people, and then the people in the middle. And you've got to, what can you do from...

50,000 feet to create the conditions that skews that curve in the in the right direction. There's a you know that the vast majority of people will be probably somewhere in the middle of that distribution curve and There's a great quote that I can't completely remember this way of Franklin Roosevelt speech around 19 38 where he said something along the lines of the easy job of government is dealing with bad people The much harder job of government is dealing with all of the really good people behaving badly

quite really said it was along those lines. If I had a better memory, I'd give it to you verbatim. And it's, what can you do to create the conditions for the good people to behave well? Because for a lot of us in the middle of that bell curve, we are heavily influenced by our environment.

And whilst it's very difficult, I don't know, tackling the tails, tackling the really bad people, intent on doing bad things, I'm gonna put my hands up and say, that goes beyond my skillset. But where I have learned an awful lot over the years of working with our clients in the boardroom and helping to drive behavior through an organization, is what can you do about that great bulk in the middle to create the probability that they behave.

in light of their best selves. So there it's creating a habit and normalizing the idea that you share early, immediately what's not gone well, what's on your mind, what's keeping you awake at night, creating an open information culture through a device like that. It's actually quite simple, incredibly effective at helping to shine a light on what could otherwise be little dark shadows in an organization that needn't be.

Guy Bloom (43:40)
And what are those stepping stones then that say, you know, let's just say we've got 5,000 people in our organization, whatever that number is, and we've got a distribution curve. We've got people that will embrace this. We've got people that will maybe struggle with it, but then we're gonna have that group in the middle who will, to a greater or lesser degree,

wait to see what they're being rewarded for and wait to see what they're being punished for. And it's easy to put out a document that says, hey, new world order. But the reality is I'm going to see how I'm gonna be managed on a daily basis. So it doesn't matter what the rhetoric is, I'm gonna wait and see, when I have my weekly reviews, what I'm getting a kick up the butt for. And...

Jen Sundberg (44:13)
Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, no, absolutely. Yeah, it depends on almost an unwritten contract between both parties that the more candid the communication, the more candid people are in sharing early, the bad stuff, the concerning stuff, the more people dare to put an opinion across for how they propose to solve a problem and apply judgment.

to a situation to make sense of the situation, not just go here's a whole dump of information, you figure out what to do with it, but here's my take on what this means, what the so what and the now what is. You need the positive reinforcement, the positive reinforcement loop to reward that behavior and then encourage repetition from them and from those observing that. So quite often we start at the top, we'll often start in the boardroom and model these behaviors with the chief exec and the senior execs behaving in that way in the boardroom. But then our point is that

is effective.

but not enough. It's then how do you take that behaviour out of the boardroom and replicate that at every level. Starting with the boardroom helps an awful lot. When it's understood that this is what the chief exec is reporting to the board, it is then much easier to defend why that is the way that chief exec then expects other people to behave as well. And it is visible. This stuff is, you know, it is through the, I suppose, you know, with...

And here's that phrase, with great freedom comes great responsibility, right? If you're going to give people the latitude to take more decisions, which is what we advocate for, a more decentralized, federated decision-making model, in return for that, it is a trade. In return for more freedom, it is expected there is more accountability. And by writing down the thinking that leads you to your conclusions, it is auditable. It can be reviewed and challenged, which gives you then confidence that thinking is being done, right? Because you can see it.

Guy Bloom (46:13)
And how much of this process for you is hinging on the ability to write well.

Jen Sundberg (46:23)
So the second of our principles, communication, for this very reason, right, I think communication is called the silent killer for large companies and we can all imagine why. And again, having spent, you know, over a decade now reading board papers, even at the very top of multi-billion dollar organisations, communicating well is a skill that is vanishingly rare, right? And so part of our challenge over the years has been helping how to help

execs, managers to communicate more clearly. And what's going on in the first place? Why do we find it so hard? And we route this back again to education and five tenets that we boil down in the book, five tenets of how to communicate well, that we're taught at school, and that are wholly unhelpful in the workplace.

And so the trick is to unlearn them. So what we spend a lot of our time doing is helping to train management and execs to unlearn some of the core beliefs they have about how to communicate well in the workplace, and then to replace them with five new tenants. I can give you an example, simple one. We often, you know, many of us are led to believe that formal matters demand formal writing, or we would say.

that write like a human, no matter what you're writing about. Time and time again, there are studies all around the world. In fact, I found a study just recently from a Japanese university. So, you know, this crosses cultures, languages that shows that where we use simple words and simple language, we come across as smarter.

Various studies show that if you give a same passage of text, one that uses lots of long, sophisticated words, one that uses lots of short, simple words, and you ask the recipient to rate how smart they think the author was of those two separate words, they will rate the author as smarter that uses the shorter, clearer, simpler words. But it goes further than that. When we are asked to write something,

for an audience that may be a senior audience about a matter that's considered quite weighty. Naturally, we want to reflect our respect for the reader. And we find ourselves using these often quite long and convoluted words and sentences. What also happens is we find ourselves often writing in the third person, that's quite dehumanized, quite robotic style. And that puts distance between your message and yourself.

and your reader. So, if I were to say, it is necessary to, or sales targets were missed, passive tense, very much sort of third person. If I flip that around and said, we missed our sales targets, first person plural, I'm owning that message, it's a much more human tone of voice, and it displays accountability. So the use of formal language is not just,

not necessarily making you sound as smart as you think it does and doing the opposite. It's not just hard to read, which it is, you know, and hard to stay awake through. It's also failing to display accountability for your message. And what your reader is looking for are signs of leadership and accountability. So own your message, whatever your message. Own it. Use your voice. And your reader is much more likely to root for you.

But again, that goes against a lot of what we're taught at school, right? You know, even in terms of using your voice, you know, starting a sentence with and, starting a sentence with but. You know, if that is the way, if that communicates your voice, and if that's clearer and more compelling, that's the right way to communicate.

Ooh, I think you're muted. Or have I muted you?

Guy Bloom (50:18)
know what I was a little bit muted there for a second so I think that is interesting because when I started out I wore a suit and I wore a suit because I was trying to show my professionalism and everybody else around me wore a suit and then I got to a level where I noticed or somebody actually said to me do you know Guy all the people that have suits report to people that don't wear suits and I was like oh that's interesting and I know that's not always the case but the metaphor was there but there's something about when you're coming up

Jen Sundberg (50:19)
Thank you.

Guy Bloom (50:48)
the hierarchy, what you're trying to do is show your knowledge, show your professionalism, show that you can operate at that level. But then there is something about getting to that level and then recognising that actually, I mean though it may still be old school, but actually when you move into that more senior role you may not be wearing a suit, you may not need to talk in that formalised way because when you are now in that different...

Jen Sundberg (50:58)
Yeah.

Guy Bloom (51:15)
tier actually what we need is just conversation, we just need you being genuinely human, we just need you to own your thoughts and so the charade or the pretense or the mechanic of being professional probably it may have served you to get there to a greater or lesser degree but it won't serve you when you are there is what I seem to be hearing to a greater or lesser degree.

Jen Sundberg (51:38)
Yeah, I guess I'd struggle with this idea that it's unprofessional. Because I think, and I know what you mean though, I do understand your point, but I think I'd say that it is, that A display of leadership is inherently professional, but a display of leadership does combine with accountability. And whenever a board member or a manager...

is reviewing your plan or proposal or report, they are really asking themselves.

Two questions, right? They're asking themselves the question, do I buy into what's being presented here? They're always asking themselves a second question as well, which is, do I buy into the team beneath it? Do I think I've got the right people in place to prosecute this plan? Right, that question's always in the air, even if it's not explicit, it's there, it's implicit. In fact, in the boardroom, very much so, because boards, think about it, what decisions can boards, you know, boards can say yes or no to stuff. but mainly what the board can do as far as the chief exec. Right, that's like probably the most,

single most decisive thing a board can do that's at their discretion and not dependent somewhat on management. So there's always that question in the air do we have the right people here?

If those people don't use their voice, you can't really get to know them. How do they think? And if they won't use their voice and they don't display judgment or thinking, you start to question whether you have a thinking team beneath this or simply a team surfacing lots of facts. But who's taking the judgment calls here? Do we have a team capable of pulling signal from the noise and taking a judgment call here and then articulating it and owning that judgment call?

by use of their own voice. So I think it's a highly professional behaviour, but I know what you mean, there can be an informal element to it that could be confused as being somehow less professional, which it's not.

Guy Bloom (53:31)
No, I see it as being incredibly professional, but I think there's somebody wants it to be, you know, the thing is...

humour for example, you know, if you're confident enough in yourself then humour is okay. You can you can be professional enough to be relaxed and I think at that senior level the professionalism isn't in the caricature of professionalism, it is in the ability to just, you don't need to use the big words, you don't need to necessarily wear a suit, if you want to wear a suit crack on, that's not the issue, but...

Jen Sundberg (53:40)
Yeah.

Yes.

Guy Bloom (54:04)
you don't have to fulfill a caricature to speak plainly. Own your statements and actually, do you know what? When you're challenged it doesn't mean your career's at an end, it just means that I'm offering you where I am, what my thinking is, and you may have to hold ground on that when it's challenged. And I think there are a lot of people that write in a professional

I wouldn't say neutrality, but even when they're offering a perspective, they're offering it on a spectrum, because if people don't agree with them, they can go left or right, as opposed to owning an idea and going, listen, there's many roads we could travel here, but I'm offering you this one. And I think that's what he's often missing. Yes. Yeah, yeah, okay.

Jen Sundberg (54:47)
Yeah.

Exactly. And that's the leadership trait the reader is looking for. Exactly.

Guy Bloom (54:55)
Bingo. So in terms of, you know, we spoke about critical thinking and clear comms. In terms of focus, is there, is there more to be said on that? Just to bring that to life a little bit.

Jen Sundberg (55:06)
So,

I'm sure many people listening will be thinking, well hang on, if you delegate decision-making and you encourage everyone to think more, think better, and communicate that thinking clearly, you're just going to have people running in a hundred different directions and utter chaos. And that is why the third piece there is so important. You need to make sure that all of that great thinking power, all of that energy is being channeled towards a flag on the hill, a shared and common purpose and goal. There was a Roman historian called Virgitius who once said, the Romans were poorer, weaker, shorter.

and in many ways less intellectually capable than their neighbours. But they conquered the lot of them. You know, how did they do that? They had the ability to get organised. Organisation, alignment, it's a superpower.

And this methodology absolutely relies on it. Let's say for the reasons I just gave you, you end up with chaos. So making sure you have very clear focus alignment on what that flag on the hill is, is vital. I mean, many organizations struggle with this, right? You know, what is the flag on the hill? Well, you know, I'm not too sure. It's kind of vaguely in that direction, but you know, having it really well articulated and understood at every level is essential for this. And then again, like surfacing it. So, and then it's not just about having really clear focus, but also being able to pivot when you need to, right? Because

you know, your focus may be appropriate for a period of time and then the world changes and again, history is littered with businesses that had a very clear focus, very valid focus, the world changed, their focus didn't and those businesses are no longer with us anymore, right? So you know, Netscape, Nokia, etc. You name it, like, you know, very successful organisations that failed to pivot at the right time. And so how do you do that? You know, it's hard enough to communicate your focus.

really clearly and make sure it's understood by tens of thousands of people around your organization or even in small teams, frankly, you know, it can be really hard. But let alone how do you pivot and again, you need to move fast these days. How do you get everyone to stop thinking about what they were thinking about and start thinking about this new thing? You know, you can't lobotomize your organization. How do you engineer that? There's a, somebody once said to me, you know, it's a, he who asks the questions controls the conversation.

So again it goes back to lots of questions and building a way of working in your organisation that involves regularly engaging with...

sets of critical questions and then from time to time changing those questions. So we use software for this, we're a software business, so our clients use our product called Lucia which is their management reporting platform. They log in, management execs will log into this platform when they come to write their management reports and they will pull from this system sets of questions and then iterate around them and make them their own right. But you know when you need to change

a quest, when you need to change the focus, change the questions that everybody engages with month in month out, and it makes it much more real, right? So if you help your management team to, if you require that your management team engages with a set of questions when they report each month, each quarter, each year, those questions will start to become their preoccupation. They will start to agitate around a different thing, because it's a different thing that's being asked of them each time they come to prepare these reports.

One of our clients, EasyJet, working with them for over a decade now, I think it must be, or about a decade, right in the early days of our journey with them, they'd taken on a new Chief Exec, Caroline McCall, and she wanted to engineer a pretty major pivot from an organisation that had always been profit first, customers second.

people, employees third, she wanted to pivot that to people, customer profit, massive transformation, right? This is an organization where you had to take your own stationary. If you're an employee, you visit yet, but back in the day, you take your own stationary into the organization. And she wanted to pivot this culture from where actually the workforce was number one. She believed that if you could help make sure that everybody felt valued, appreciated, and group, that would translate into greater customer satisfaction, which would translate

slated into better profits that take care of herself. So it's a pretty major pivot that she wanted to engineer. She took over a really tough time for the organization. Oil was spiking at over 100. There was the dust cloud covering Europe and planes were grounded. There was, as it probably always is, there was a lot of industrial action taking place all over Europe. And what had been the stronghold of EasyJet, the low-cost carrier, suddenly the genie was out the bottle and everyone was playing that game and they lost their unique selling point. Wasn't so unique anymore. So this was a really tough time. The headwinds were pretty epic.

And she wanted to engineer, in the context of what it is, a massive pivot. And she did it, and she did it, and she pulled it off, and it was extraordinarily successful and Easy yet. She created over 50% value during her tenure, and yeah, absolutely pulled off a turnaround. One of the things we did was made sure that every time anyone in that organization sat down to think about performance, the number one question on their mind was, what have I done to help?

the people in my team feel valued and developed. And putting questions around the people front and centre of everything they did at every level became really important. So developing data dashboards where the first question that the data dashboard would answer would be questions around people engagement. And uh...

and satisfaction and that helped to drive that change. So she had a very clear change of direction, change of focus, but she followed through by helping management pivot their attention through this similar device.

Guy Bloom (01:01:00)
I know, I know. I've just been just a little bit of interference. I've just been turning the microphone off so I don't know where it's coming from. So there we go. So I'm alert to time and I just I recognize I say this to everybody that I have on, you know, with a bottle of wine and a Chinese takeaway, I could spend the whole weekend having a conversation with you. So

The book that you have is called Collective Intelligence, I'm just holding it up, and it's How to Build a Business That's Smarter Than You. And I think that's the bit, isn't it? That how to make the business smarter than you are. I love that. It's available on Amazon, I presume, and other places.

Jen Sundberg (01:01:31)
Thank you.

It is indeed. It is. Yep, it's made on Amazon, at HSmiths, all the usual major booksellers. The title of the book, we had a bit of help from our colleagues with that. We put it out to the team to help us come up with the title, which probably be a bit offended that was the title of a book that they thought we were qualified to write. But yes, indeed. Do go buy copy.

Guy Bloom (01:02:04)
And as an organisation, if I wanted to check you out as an organisation, where would I go to Jen?

Jen Sundberg (01:02:10)
www.

Guy Bloom (01:02:14)
Okay, fabulous. So listen, you've been an absolute rock star. Thank you for taking me through, you know, I think with all of these things, it's enough to interest people, it's enough for people to have a sense of you and to have a look. You've really done a lovely guided tour. I'll bring us to an end. I'm going to get you to stay on just for a little bit longer, just to make sure that everything uploads. But from me and everybody that's listening in, thank you so much for giving me the time.

Jen Sundberg (01:02:42)
Thank you, lovely to meet you.