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Yiuwin Tsang
Hello and welcome to this week's episode of the beautiful business podcast brought to you by The Wow Company. I'm your host Yiuwin Tsang, and this week we are joined by Dr. Stephen Moffitt. Stephen is a partner at Atmosphere and the idea to have the great shift the four phases of global paradigm shifts. He has been researching transformation and change in both the wider economy and within organisations across all sectors for over 30 years. For his PhD in law, he developed a paradigmatic framework to explain how copyright law was evolving in the face of tectonic technological, economic and social disruptions. The grounded in research, paradigm shifts, adaptability and innovation. His consultancy is always practical. Stephen is focused on helping leaders understand the future and developing the strategies to shape that future. He brings a combination of academic rigour and 25 plus years of commercial experience. He has worked with organisations in the US and Europe, such as Discovery Channel, Penguin Books, the UK National Health Service and UK Parliament. In addition, he has worked with large private equity and venture capital firms such as sovereign capital and the Canadian pension plan to realise value in their portfolio companies. In this episode, Stephen explains how leadership has shifted from the now to the future leader, how we need to be both visionary and relational in our leadership, and how we mesh our vision of the future with those of the younger generations. Let's get stuck in.
Yiuwin Tsang
Stephen, let's start by getting a little bit of background in terms of your work with business leaders. What is it that you do and who is it that you typically do it for?
Stephen Moffitt
So I typically work with senior teams and boards, and my wool is to help them first of all, carve out some space in their work lives, to think about the future, and its implications on the business day. And then to help them develop a set of skills to navigate what is an increasingly unpredictable, uncertain, and rapidly transforming environment.
Yiuwin Tsang
Sounds really interesting. And I imagine that like, the different types of people that you deal with probably have quite different visions of what the future could kind of hold in terms of the different scenarios and certainly the impact that those different scenarios could have on them, both individually. And in a business context as well. I mean, is that the kind of spaces that you would explore in terms of you know, what kind of impact to have on them, as well as the businesses?
Stephen Moffitt
Well, I think one of the things that I find most interesting is kind of the psychology aspect of it, which is that a lot of times, unfortunately, business leaders recognise that their businesses need to change, but they're less clear that they add leaders need change. And so you get, you know, the situation where the business is going to go through a rapid transformation. But I'm going to do things exactly the way that I've always done them. And you can pretty much guess what happens from there.
Yiuwin Tsang
That's so true. It's so interesting, isn't it, like you see businesses, we see these leaders where they recognise that there needs to be a change and recognise that there are bumps in the road and that need to adapt. But the less is it an awareness thing? Steven, is it like a self awareness piece? Or is it like an unwillingness to change themselves? Or I mean, where does that kind of come from?
Stephen Moffitt
I think it's two things. One is part of the makeup of being a leader, particularly, you know, CEO, or something, you're taught, we're educated that, you know, they are the ones that have the answers. They're the leaders. And so they're often in business, and particularly smaller ones, where the leaders are more, have a more prominent role, as opposed to say, like Coca Cola, or Boeing, which, you know, they are the ballot, they're the centre of focus for the business, and to admit that there have to change, and that what they've been doing is no longer as effective as it has been, is quite disruptive, it's quite disruptive for the leader to admit to that, and also potentially, to the business. So it's a delicate balance, right. And it's part of the kind of the working with the leaders to help them and the wider team in business to accept that. You know, we are all explorers at this point. And I think, you know, this a metaphor that I use a lot, you know, there's no certainty here, you know, you think about any explorer or they go off into the unknown, they don't know what they're gonna find. But they have a confidence in themselves, and the people around them that they can manage. And that's the mindset shift that we want to start working toward.
Yiuwin Tsang
I love it. I love that that's a really, really positive. And I really loved that vision of being an explorer, a mindset, because it does, it's almost kind of facing, as you say, the uncertainty, it's accepting the uncertainty, it's embracing it, it's like, you know, my role is is to, you know, face these uncertainties and work our way around them, through them over them, whatever we need to do. Exactly. That's great. I really, that's wonderful. And I mean, this we'll chat about now and future leader. And you mentioned them mindset, Stephen, what is this kind of new kind of leadership mindset? And why is it important for leaders to be conscious of this as because it sounds like there's a shift almost in terms of leadership and leadership traits. And we spoke about this before, around, you know, the old school kind of way of working and how things were done before perhaps the whole kind of, you know, authoritarian kind of leadership and, you know, using these more kind of rigid models into something perhaps a little bit more fluid. What is it that you see, what is this shift?
Stephen Moffitt
Well, I would kind of carrying on from our conversation, this shift is toward embracing uncertainty, but yet still having a clear vision of where you want to go, I mean, an explorer wants to go somewhere. It's how they get there that's open to the investigation, if you like. So part of that is that their renewed focus on vision on what is the direction of the company, but a direction that is adaptive and flexible? So going back to, you know, we did a piece of work a while ago with a business, you know, and their vision was, we want to be the dominant player in Sector X. Okay, well, what happens when vector x doesn't exist anymore. And, you know, we could draw out a scenario where that was quite likely, you know, it didn't take much imagination to figure that somebody would come and eat their lunch and from the outside, and that would be the end of that. So what then the question is, really, then, what are you good at? What is it that you do that nobody else does, regardless. And so what kind of came out of this was that they actually had a very, very deep expertise in a particular subject like they were. And so, okay, so if we are the premier experts in this topic, then whoever is interested in this topic would come to us. So it flipped their model around completely, because they were no longer focused on just serving a very small factor. But they realised that that topic was of interest to a much broader range of people. And so it became less closed more open, they started to develop products, as opposed to services for their old customers. And that's the journey that they went on. And that's the kind of mentality that you know, leaders need to have is that you be able to let go of that past and say, Okay, let's abstract out the best of that, but not be tied to the form that it's always been in.
Yiuwin Tsang
That phase of letting go of the past or letting go of that is really powerful. I think, you know, again, for my background, working in sales, one of the key stages that lots of sales functions kind of skip is getting your prospects to let go of the status quo. And to let go of what they did before, they can't embrace what is new until they let go of what they did before. And that's a process that we've all kind of got to go through. So I guess this is when we spoke before, when we set this podcast up, Stephen, you talked about how leadership needs to be both visionary and relational as well. Is that what you mean by the relational side of that, in terms of like, understanding the relationships between things and being aware of them and better, I guess, understanding where those opportunities and where those threats might come from?
Stephen Moffitt
Definitely. So that's one aspect of it, which is, I think there's a tendency, just in the nature of running your own leading your business is that you're focused on yourself, you know, in your immediate market and your customers, but your business and your customers exists in a larger context of, you know, the industry in which you're in the culture in which that operates in, you know, these kind of global ideas of capitalism and individualism and blah, blah, blah. So that's one sense in which the relationship We need to be more sensitive to those relationships. The other thing goes back to your point of sales, which is at the heart of sales. And what we're talking about is communication. Right? So how do I communicate with somebody? So how do I need to create between where they are? And where we want to take them to? Right? So, like you said, where's that point where they're willing to say, Okay, well, the old way that I used to buy ads, or the old way that I used to do whatever doesn't work, so I'm willing to take that next step. And then you kind of take them all the way to where your service or product or in this case, a more flexible, more adaptive way of being.
Yiuwin Tsang
fabulous. And then this kind of takes us on to the next question around dealing with this change. And you touched on it briefly around, you know, the role of the CEO, the role of the leader is almost to provide that stability, is to give that kind of, I see it as almost giving that safety to your team, that you're going to be there for them that you know, the guardrails are in place, so that they can work to the best of their ability, and you're kind of there to set the direction to offer that kind of, as you said, that kind of vision and a lot of it again, coming back to stability. And I'm thinking this is, you know, from my, I suppose, kind of lived experience and appreciate this is from different times, they're very much different times. But you know, the best leaders I've worked for give you that reassurance to give you that stability that gives you that reliability, I suppose if they're there for you that, you know, they know what's going on there across the stuff. And you know, they're able to kind of take you forward from there, to have that almost kind of vulnerability to say, I don't have all the answers, the other things could happen that are outside of my control, and things might change. And they could change quite rapidly. And that can be quite scary. So how do you, as a leader, take your shareholders, your stakeholders, your customers, as you mentioned before? How do you take them through that? How do you lead them through that?
Stephen Moffitt
You do that, first of all, by acknowledging the situation and this is key, if I don't see what's happening, if I don't share that vision of what's happening and where we are in this great shift, then it's very hard to take people along on a journey, right? So there has to be that common language. And that sense that, you know, those conversations that we mentioned earlier, between boards and the C suite, saying, here's where we're at. The second aspect to that is that there are answers beyond just what I have. And this is the a little bit of humility for senior teams. And this is a hard one, I think for many because of what we were saying earlier about the figure of the CEO, there's an Italian educator by the name of participial, pallette teeth that I've been worked with a long time, and he talks about the expanded neural network, and that expanded neural network is you is all of the people around me who know things that I don't know. And if I can draw from that, and draw the best from them, then the answers that I don't have, somebody else has. And this is the key step. And so I think, you know, going back to what you were saying the confidence, the centrality is understanding the picture, understanding that this is a difficult time, I have to be able to manage my own fears, as well as the fears of the people around me, it's a big ask, but and then help people in the business to draw out the best of themselves and use that to the benefit of everyone. You know, those i One of the things that I've run across a lot is that most senior leadership teams in decent sized companies are closer to my age than maybe your kids. So we have grown up with certain technologies with certain ways of thinking and so forth. And that a lot of the answers and a lot of the things that are needed are going to come from people who are younger than us. But that doesn't mean that our experience are what we know isn't important, but it's how you mesh the two together.
Yiuwin Tsang
That's really I love the concept of expanded neural network as well. That's brilliant. And we often think or when you say that might immediately kind of sprung to mind. Oh, it's gonna be people who got more experienced than me who've lived through more stuff who you know, who are a few years further down the line and that business journey, but the reality is, is that we also need to look to the next generation to include them in our neural network. And we need to look at their experiences what their concerns All right, well, I guess into knowing what their anxieties what are they frightened of what they excited about in order to really kind of get a good idea of what the future could look like what these scenarios could be?
Stephen Moffitt
Well, and I think you have to recognise that it's their world, right? You know, what we're talking about is not yours in my world, there are children's or grandchildren's worlds, that we're envisioning and talking about. So yet they have a stake, we have a role to play in that, obviously, because of where we are what we've seen in our experience. But again, like you said, I think, you know, certainly their perspective, is more in line with where things are going than, say mine. And so it's, you know, how do I, as a leader, tap into that, at the same time drawing from the fact that, like I said, you know, we've been doing this for a long time. We know a lot of things that and have certain amount of social and technical expertise, that somebody who's in their 20s just doesn't have yet. Yeah, and that's fine.
Yiuwin Tsang
It's really interesting is it a kind of pick away of that in terms of the lived experience, but also the circumstances that we find ourselves in an economic sense in the in the social sense compared to, you know, the generation xers or whatever generations coming through next. And certainly some of the pressures and things like this, I remember, we were doing a bit of work for Oxford Brookes University. And what took me aback was, whilst we were there, and we saw how the students were interacting was that the word has many, and this might not be uniform, across the student population, but the word has many of the call them kids going out, getting drunk, and you know, and partying, as I'm pretty sure I did when I was at university. And then when we brought up when I brought it up, I wanted students to Why do you think that might be? And they said, well, because we got to pay 30 grand to do our degree. Now, we can't mess this up, we got one shot at this. And if we do mess it up, that's a lot of money down the pan, whereas I was lucky enough to get a grant to pay for my kind of higher education. So it's interesting how different shifts in society and economics can kind of affect different generational groups. And as you say, the younger generation coming through who've got more skin in the game, arguably, than we do with what happens, you know, 1020 30 years down the line?
Stephen Moffitt
I think if you're looking again, to go back a little bit to the scenarios that we were talking about earlier, part of the thing that we can think about is that there's a potential for you know, backlash, and you see it with, you know, things like extinction, rebellion, the, you know, all of that, which is, there's almost this moment of, you know, like, in the 60s where, you know, don't trust anybody over a 30 year sort of thing. Yeah, yeah. And I think, you know, it's incumbent on us, as business people, as leaders in this moment, to acknowledge this reality, and to be able to listen, to be able to take in, and to then draw from our experience and our knowledge, and help facilitate a world that you know, our children and our children's children would want to live in.
Yiuwin Tsang
We have to bless the reality of it, we have to say anybody say that don't just just got the head in the sand been very selfish as well. So in practical sense, what can business leaders do? How can they as you take on a mesh, those views of these generations to come to to to help supplement and add to the kind of expanded neural networks? What can they do? What would it be giving them see on the board or getting them in? I mean, what kind of practical steps have you seen been done?
Stephen Moffitt
The practical steps, I think, are coming back to a couple of the themes that we've been dancing around here, which is make space for thinking, Okay, make space for real strategic thinking, and, you know, make it a priority. Also, the practical things that I've seen work are for senior teams to actually listen to the innovations and ideas that exist. So people find solutions, right. And we've all seen that is, especially if you've worked in any kind of decent sized company, there are a lot of things that aren't working, and people find ways around it. So it's not that they're not wrong, right? They're solving the problem that is there. So how can you use that problem solving and a lot of times, what we've seen is that people will use technologies that they're familiar with, to solve the problems and that's when you start listening to that and start thinking about okay, well if somebody's suddenly you know, using In their phone to do this stuff, why can't we incorporate that into what we're doing? And what does that then how does that all the implications of that come out. And that's really kind of the basic starting points. A lot of it then is, again, listing up, whether it's a seat on the board, I don't know, that depends on the company on the situation, but certainly, for leaders to get out of their offices in their worlds, and actually talk to the people that are around them, their customers, the people that are working there. See what's happening in many, many years ago, one of my early mentors told me about one of his mentors, this was in Kaiser Permanente in San Francisco. And he was the head of the medical centre there. And every once a week, he would go walk the floors, talk to the nurses talk to the orderlies, everybody could see him, you know, they could buttonhole him because he was around. And it was blocked out in his diary, nobody interfered with it. And that does so much, or building that rapport, that communication, and also for the leaders to get insight and intelligence, to see things to understand what's going on in a way that if I sit with my senior team, and my immediate reports and my board, I will get.
Yiuwin Tsang
So it's about getting those perspectives about getting those insights. And I suppose kind of getting, as you say, on a practical level is baking that into your routine into your habits exposes this, there needs to be a natural kind of curiosity that perhaps we lose as we kind of get a bit older, longer in our teeth. Definitely, yeah. Because, again, it goes back to the comfort zones and being used to how things are and perhaps we do lose that sense of curiosity of what's going on how things where you are, and things like this. So last question I've got for you, Stephen is just is there any other advice that you give to leaders? Who are, I suppose, kind of trying to navigate this journey of change from a personal perspective?
Stephen Moffitt
I think from a personal perspective, the probably the two key things, and we've touched on it already, you know, one is is a sense of humility, okay. It's hard. I know, you know, a lot of it, to say that I don't know everything, and that I need to have the support around me. But it's crucial, because in a situation like this, that we're going through, no one has all the answers. And so to be able to say that in a way that doesn't leave me as a leader, incapable or vulnerable, is a big challenge. And that can be done. You know, that's part of what we do to help leaders make that step for themselves, almost as a kind of a coaching side of what we do. The other aspect is in you alluded to it is the curiosity is stimulate reignite if it's gone, or encourage you if it's already there, that sense of curiosity, because it is I mean, it's fascinating stuff. And you know, I'm slightly biassed because of what I do and what I've been passionate about for the last my entire life, actually. But there's a lot of very interesting, very exciting, very creative things out there that we can start to explore and take in and use. And the last I think the last key then is faith is having faith in myself, and then being able to convey that faith in the business. And this is important because when businesses are faced with the kind of uncertainty and we're exploring, we can't have certainty, okay? But we can have faith in our ability to adapt and our capabilities to manage whatever comes and that's probably the key at the end of the day is that if I'm confident that I've got the people the skills, the intelligence of various kinds, to be able to manage what comes, then that's a great place to be at.
Yiuwin Tsang
A big thank you to Stephen Moffitt from We Are Atmosphere for sharing his knowledge and a big thank you to you, our listeners for listening to this week's beautiful business podcast.