Nigel Paine: Why a Positive Culture is the Key Ingredient of Success

 I've done a few things with Henry, and I usually walk here from where I live. So, I was walking along today, thinking about this conference, happy conference, and what happens to me. And it's happened before when I come towards this building, I don't think about all the good things. I think about all the bad things.

I think about my career. I think of the times when I was bullied, the times that I was intimidated, the times when I was humiliated, the times when I was fired. And I come in, I walk in the door feeling really gloomy, thinking about all those. awful experiences which every single person in this room has gone through.

And I come out of this conference at the end because I suddenly feel a different energy and you realise that it doesn't have to be like that. It really doesn't have to be like that. But so many people live in toxic workplaces and toxic environments. I spent half my life trying to shore people up and also  Helping people leave, you know, we haven't talked about that, but I think there's a great thing if you can actually give people the courage to say, I deserve more than this, because if you get bullied and mistreated you end up believing the bullshit, you think "that's all I'm good for. I'm not worthy of anything more. I'll just have to put up with it", and it's a horrible experience.

So, anyway, that's it.  The second thing I want to talk about is that when I, in Australia, I used to be on the ABC radio, which is the BBC equivalent, but mostly totally underfunded and I, I was the kind of workplace guy. So, when mass layoffs or something awful happened in the workplace, I'd be hauled on to the radio. And I used to do talk ins.  And when people ask questions, and I was having a good time talking about in a great workplace and this guy came on. And in, if you're doing talk back on the radio there's a kind of bloody in process and the bloody in process is they give you some total lunatic.

And you have to deal with that live on air going out all over Australia, and it's a kind of testing and if you can do with that. You've kind of got a bond between you and the people in the box. So anyway, this guy comes on and he starts off and says, I'm a business owner, you know, I employ 150 people. So, excellent, good.

He said, I have never heard such drivel in all my life. I think you just live in cloud cuckoo land. What kind of planet did you get off to come here and talk to us? I run an organisation. What do you know about running a business? People, I know what people are like, you can't trust them an inch, if I don't keep my eye on everybody within an inch of their life, everything will just go, you don't know what you're talking about.

So, I let him ramble on a bit, and then I said to him, can you just consider one thing for me? Yes, what? And I said, just imagine what it's like to get up in the morning and go and work for you. And then I did this, which means in the box it was cutting. So, you never got a writer reply. So, he just disappeared.

Because that's true. You know, we never think about the other side of things. What is it like to actually work, be led by you, to be managed by you, to be in your team? And if you can get that kind of self-consciousness for a second, you’re in the way to moving towards it.  A more compassionate, compassionate and kind workplace.

Now, I'm going to give you two suggestions today, which you may think I'm mad, and I don't care if you think I'm mad, but tell me if you do. I'm writing this book on organisational learning, because I think learning organisations are really important and I think, if you want my opinion, we've gone far too far focusing on individuals, idolising talent, seeing everything as your job, your KPIs, your bonus and not about the community, about the team, about the group.

And we used to, in the 1990s, be focused on learning organisations and it dropped off a cliff in 2000, completely dropped off a cliff. Largely because of IT and the ability to personalise, individualise. We kind of got drunk on the idea that just for you, just now, you're a star. And we forgot about. The organisation, and I believe that if we can put back the notion of a learning organisation, we can do a huge amount more than we do at the moment and we can give people a much better work in life as well. So, this model, this little model I built, what I believe is that I’m not going to go into it massively because we haven't got time, but that notion of an organisational brain building. Thank you. I think that if we see people in an organisation's neurons, just as we have neurons in our brain, and we know that  out of the 80 billion neurons does not make us smart, What makes us smart is the connections between neurons,  and I think that if we can connect people in organisations, we get something that is greater than the sum of the parts.

So it's really important, and when that happens, and I've, I've got some examples from neuroscience and from psychology at the end if we have time to deal with that, but I think you've got to build an organisational brain, and that's about connecting people, connecting ideas, and building the right spaces.

The people to communicate and interestingly, Zoom, who would have thought Zoom when they were trying to lure people back into their offices, Zoom wanted people back in the offices. What Zoom said was rather than say on Monday, you'll be back, or you're fired. They said, let's gut our offices and make them places people want to come to.

And they made them places they want to come to, to connect. So, there are all sorts of brainstorming, learning spaces, communal spaces, and they got rid of all the desks in rows and corrals and laptops in rows, which you can do anywhere. You don't have to travel miles to an office. So, and I think that we need spaces online and spaces physically.

But help connect people and connect ideas. So that that's part of that for a second. And then we're going to look at this as I was researching this book, and I talked to lots of people, lots of organisations. What I found was that a kind of. A whole load of ideas and principles kept popping in my head. So, I wrote these seven down.

I may be wrong, but I'd just like to share them very quickly.  The first is that culture can be, everyone talks about culture as if it's all universally good. Culture can be bad, and it can be good. If you saw in that last model, when the external environment starts to impact on organisations, culture needs to change.

And we need to accept the fact that we're building culture. It's not a thing, it's something, a process that we build. So, pop culture can actually hold people back.  I also believe that we somehow got processes were designed to help people, and then they imprison people. We have to realise that if you're going to do anything in an organisation, look at the processes and change them.

Have the courage to change processes, because bad processes kill innovation and agility and more and more, the more organisations I talk to, bad behaviour is toxic. And what I mean by that is it's not everyone is okay, but apart from her and she's kind of shouty and a bit not, but she brings in the bacon or she really important in this organisation.

I don't think that's acceptable at all. I think you've got to kick out bad behaviours. Full stop. No exceptions. And if that bad behaviour is manifested by the CEO, you give that person a chance to change. And if not, you leave, or they leave the organisation. Bad behaviour destroys people, destroys their aspirations, and destroys their integrity.

Destroys the effort that they would be willing to make. We talked a little bit about discretionary effort. The only effort you can't mandate. You give of that, or you don't give of that. No one can make you do it. And discretionary effort, in my experience, is the differentiator between good organisations and amazing organisations.

So, when you do stuff that you want to do, you go that extra mile.  When we work together, everyone benefits. It's great working with people, and yet we put people in isolated boxes and give them their individual KPIs, and we kind of mitigate against cooperation.  And when we learn together, something special happens in an organisation, that's where you begin to get something that you can call a learning organisation.

And what I believe is that if you can't ask for help, you’re in a really bad place. If you can't admit you don't know something, if you're scared to ever admit something went wrong, therefore you deflect it onto someone else, you shift the blame. If you're not even willing to offer help when there's someone struggling, because that detracts from my performance.

If you don't want to be associated with weakness, then we're in really big trouble in organisation. So, all of those things I'm talking about, the opposite of those, asking for help, admitting mistakes, solving problems cooperatively, they're the essence of getting learning. Moving around an organisation.

And what I believe is that when you do that, you accelerate transformation and you build resilience individually and collectively, and that is, I think there's a link between that and happiness at work. And I'm more and more convinced that if you're miserable at work. You're never going to transform.

You're never going to do amazing things. You're never going to feel fulfilled and achieved. So, happiness isn't a kind of, that's a nice thing to have, isn't it? It's fundamental to building resilience in individuals and an organisation. So, I think it's really, really important. And that's what gets me out of bed in the morning, the thought that There are many, many organisations, many, many people who understand this, but we've got a long way to go to make that widespread.

And this is something else that I believe, and it sounds slightly ridiculous, but it's very true. Knowing precedes knowledge. Knowledge is when knowing is packaged. Put into boxes. And the problem is that knowing that process of knowing is a messy, dirty, fantastic process. You got to be in the site of knowing.

So many organisations kind of cut a line. We do the knowing; you do the knowledge. You know, once we worked it out, we give it to you in a package. And the learning and development people in organisations are often the most guilty. They just deal with packaged, explicit knowledge and say, digest that. Once you digest it, you will be transformed.

Of course, you're not transformed. In fact, you probably can't remember three quarters of the things you were supposed to, to transform or absorb. Whereas if you're in the knowing, if knowing is part of what makes you get up in the morning and go to work. That's exciting because we're all in that process of knowing and there's so much transformation, so much insecurity and instant substantiality at the moment out there.

Knowing is really important, and we need to embrace knowing and make sure because everyone can contribute that. I was talking earlier to someone saying diversity is important Nigel. I said it's absolutely fundamental because if you ever wonder if live in an echo chamber. You just reinforce all the, all the worst things.

That's right. Interesting. Henry, what about those, that font I told you? He said, we fixed the font. Question one, tell me about this. Do you think   that leads to more risk? It's a very simple question. I don't know what's the matter with you all. You can't grasp it. So, what evidence do we have that happy workplaces lead to more organisational resilience, and more individual as well as corporate learning? That's the question, first question. So just take five minutes on, so it's the link between happiness and resilience, which no one ever talks about, but I think it's actually quite important. I think there's something there.

You might come thundering back at me and say, you do not know what you're talking. And I always reserve the right to agree with you because I don't know what I'm talking about. I'm, you know, in the front of my book, it says I wrote this book, not because I know anything, but because I wanted to find out what I know.

And that's the reason I'm not. So anyway, what evidence do we have that happy workplaces lead to organisation, resilience and learning?  Go.  I've got a question. Are they back yet? 

Okay. All right.  Someone want to make a point? Anyone want to make a point while in that minute while they're coming back?

Has anyone got a question or a point? We've got some question online. Does anyone just talk about what you talked about?

Audience Member: I think the biggest piece of evidence was the pandemic, eh? Yes. Places that have been workplaces were just way better when the pandemic was going on. 

Nigel Paine: The opening of my book are two companies in Australia. One went through the pandemic like a dream and really it strengthened the culture. The other company just fell apart. It was all to do with that about empowerment. People are able to take decisions, just get stuff done, whereas the other company just sat waiting to be told. And it was a complete disaster.

So yes, I think that's 100 percent correct. And in some ways.  The pandemic is a big example of all sorts of small examples, which are all going to confront as we go forward and if you just wait for someone to tell you what to do, it’s catastrophic, catastrophic. And when you have that, it implies just as you're saying that the leader is all knowing that person will come like on a white horse and solve all your problems. It's rubbish. It's just that that notion of leadership is completely obsolete now.

Audience Member: I don't actually think companies will survive in the future without this kind of culture.

Nigel Paine: I completely agree.  I think we have God on our side in all of this. I really do.  Yes, I think those companies will wither on the vine.

Because if you can't draw on the complexity and diversity of the workforce, you are, it's like, it's like you're cutting off three quarters, 90 percent of your brain. So, it's that it's that a brain, an organisational brain draws on every connection, you can't just isolate everything. Genius and say the five top paid people in this organisation will come to our rescue because they won't, you know.

Audience Member: can a team be happy in a broadly unhappy workplace?

Nigel Paine: Yes. is my answer. But Glinda Bratton wrote a book and called them hotspots. There are hotspots in organisations which are totally different from the rest of the organisation. And the smart person sees that and then takes the good, yeah, and rolls that out.

The toxic leader destroys that because it doesn't fit. But yes, it can happen. And that is all to do with leadership, cooperation and working as a team. It should be a model, but it's often seen as a threat.  And that is, that is when it's really bad, but yes, it can happen. It absolutely can happen. 

There's a massive crisis in Tesla. They've lost about five or six key people who've been there since the beginning and just given up basically on Elon Musk. They have no idea what's going on, what the direction of the company is, what happens next. And that is, so it's not so much He is a, he is a strange person, and he's not a great leader, and he's very, very autistic in the sense he just has no concept of emotions, he can be brutal, but the real problem is at the moment, he's not consulting, there's no direction.

It's just coming in, it's in his head, that's always dangerous. So yes, it's about communication.  The question was about Tesla. So I repeat the question that  was working, that the question was that when you've got an organisation like Tesla, that is, it seems to be driven by, you know, one person's enormous ego and ability, but one person's enormous ego, the organisation stumbles, stutters.

And I think there's great evidence of that. What's the question online?

Jackie, Jackie, tell us your question.

Jackie: Yes, okay. So honestly, so much of what you said resonated.

I'm slightly dying about my, my lovely little team, who I do love dearly, most of them.  yeah, no, I am going to take on board some of the stuff that Karen said. I'm going to, I'm going to work on that. But so, I've listed all of you. I need to know that I think a few of us want to know the name of your book. Because I think we'll be on online buying that, but much of it resonated, but the one thing that did resonate and it's possibly because we're there now.

So, we've developed a strategy. We've done a lot of consultation. We've updated our values. We've done some work around how we will walk those, what that means to us. All of that sort of stuff. We've done some great stuff, but we're, we're, we're, you know the strategic plan has been signed off. We've developed a really detailed business plan, which just killed us all.

And as a result of that work was, was bottom up as well as top down. It kind of met in the middle. So, we're now at the stage of just finessing, I suppose, the team plans. And we were thinking about going on to individual plans, but you said something, and I only caught it. So, I maybe misheard it, but it was about the idea of cooperation when you were talking about cooperation benefits is all and you were describing that we all have individual KPIs, and we have individual work plans.

Well, I’m at the cusp of doing that now. So, we're finalizing the Team plans. Do I stop there then? Do I not go for individual, because we were moving towards individual team plans with their own key KPIs, they've all got a one-page profile. It was person centred around them, but I wonder whether maybe I just stop at a team plan.

Because they're all contributing to the team plan, and they should be seeing how they contribute to the strategy and really the vision and the outcomes that we want to achieve. So, so that, that was just a thought. I'm not work shy. I'm not trying to get out. I'm doing something.

Nigel: 100%. Jacq, you know, the first thing I'd say is that I believe that we work in context.

We don't work vanilla. And therefore, to say, oh, this is what you should do without any idea of your nature of the organisation. It's a big mistake. And I don't want anyone to go there. It's one of my bugbears with leadership is that we say, Oh, here's our leadership model. It's really good. If you do this, this, and this, and this, everything's sorted out.

No account whatsoever of the context. The context is everything you have. But what I would say is Rather like the values, and if you've got values in an organisation, you don't stop there, you take it down and down through the organisation, so you end up with individuals and teams saying, this is what the values mean for me and how I will behave in this context that I work.

Similarly, there's your team, you've got your team objectives. I would say, ask everyone individually, so what am I going to contribute towards the team's goals? Outcomes and achievements. So, you get every single individual target linked. Directly to what the team tries to achieve, because otherwise you'll end up with, well, I'm going to do this back at the team, you know, I want to get, I want to get this sorted out.

So, if people think in that way, it's really powerful. That's what I would suggest to you.

Jacqueline: Super. Thank you. 

Audience Member: What's your book, Nigel? What's your book? It's, oh sorry, it's, it's called Transforming organisations, the Power of Corporate Learning, Power of Corporate Learning, call it. It'll be out in June or July.

Nigel: It's just edited, it's with the editors at the moment. It's on its way, and I promise you, Henry, you will know all about it. You can put it out into our network and hopefully promote it, help me promote it, because it's a bloody nightmare trying to promote a book, as anyone who's ever done that would know.

Audience Member: Just following on a little bit from that, I think what's interesting about, you’ve got this thing called Theory of Constraints, where you can optimize, for a team can optimize, and each team in an organisation can optimize, but overall, it's suboptimal. So, the example would be sort of salespeople motivated by commission or whatever it is wanting to sell.

Nigel: So, it's a load of stuff.  But the delivery people can't necessarily deliver all the stuff that's being sold, all the short circuit. Delivery people are doing a really good job of not delivering as many things but doing a better job. So, I think the problem that we find, I think other people find as well, is that it’s really difficult for people to be sub optimal within their team.

So basically, you'd say to salespeople, we don't want you to sell everything. You know, don't short, you know, because that actually, we can't deliver it. That actually would be worse in the long run. And getting people to think and cooperate, even as a team, you know, yeah.  You need this overall goal, you know, this overall thing, you know, we want to deliver optimally through this organisation.

I think that's where we see a lot of issues and that comes back to your communication and how you communicate between them and how you align those different groups and their team.

It also comes. into systems thinking. You've got to think system, think big system, not small system. So, one organisation that I work with where that was exactly the issue.

The sales team were really good at selling and they just oversold, and it couldn't be delivered. And so that they changed the mission from selling as much as you can to get your, trigger your commission to giving every customer a great experience. And that was right across the organisation, giving every customer a great experience.

And what the sales team realised is they could not give every customer because they were just forcing people to buy when they weren't ready, when it wasn't the appropriate product, and giving customers a terrible experience, which meant that the support people then had a terrible experience because they were trying to have to unpick the pieces.

And the production people are having a terrible experience because they couldn't deliver. So, I think if you can say, what are we trying to do as an organisation? And if you think big. We want every customer to have a great experience. That then means every team can go and say, for us, what that means, and then it goes right down to, for me, that means, and then you get a joined up organisation where you don't do one lot pushing against the other.

And it's true. How many organisations?  My job is recruitment. I'll get that person in. I'll promise Chris anything he wants. Yeah, you want a five week holiday? No problem, Chris. We'll get you. Just sign on this study line. Chris comes in, day two. What did I agree to? This is absolutely awful. It's nothing what I said.

So, then the onboarding team have a miserable time trying to persuade Chris to stay and then when Chris gets into the job, the team is resentful. Why didn't come here? And so, the whole thing just cascades from someone having the wrong objectives, which is I've got to fill that job as quickly as possible.

I'll give it to Chris. I don't care what lies I have to tell in order to get him to sign on the deadline. So, you have non systems thinking, and you have these knock-on effects, which are catastrophic. Really catastrophic. So yes, you're 100 percent right. But you can solve it. By getting, you know, there are two words that I'm obsessed with.

The first one is fieldwork. We do not do enough fieldwork. Fieldwork means you go and talk to people about what it's really like to be them and what stops them doing great work. And they will tell you, but most people never ever ask. So, great question. What stops you doing great work? I've never been in a group where they didn't say, well, if that did was different.

Mostly they're little things. Sometimes they're big. The second thing is practice. How do I improve my practice? So, if you're working inside as a consultant or in an OD, how do I become better at my job? And what new models, what new ideas do I have to embrace? It's like, you know, my, my physio, who I'm  slowly building his pension for him, my, my physio that every week I, every, not every week, I don't see him every week, practically, whenever I see him, he's always got some new idea because he's got a group of physios who meet on a two weekly basis and they share good, he's like, I've got this great idea.

You know, I used to say that. I don't believe that anymore. I think we should, practice is obsessive. He's really obsessive about practice. Can you hear? Wind up. Okay. Coming.  Sorry.  Thank you, Henry. I've got another six minutes. Six minutes, Henry. Right.

Okay. I just want to share two things. This is from a neuroscientist, Hannah Critchlow. I love Hannah. She's at Cambridge. Cambridge neuroscientist. And this book joined up thinking what she proves.  Is that when we work together in flow, our brainwaves align. So, in other words, when four people are in alignment, you get more than four brains. So, there is such a thing as collective intelligence.

And so many organisations, no one has ever experienced that in the workplace, because they've never been allowed to. It's all about individual performance. So that, so that is really important. Read her book. It's a very simple book, but it's a very powerful message. And it's not designed for organisations, but it's absolutely crucial.

But we can't do it without intelligence, which gives us that edge on everyone else. And the second one is this. This is Robin Dunbar, the Dunbar number. Has anyone ever heard of the Dunbar number? Yes. What is the Dunbar number?  122. It doesn't really matter. But what Robin Dunbar found that by scaling up from apes’ brains, we find the optimum group that human beings can work productively with.

And he's got these different grades. Family is five up to 120, which is the collective group where you, you can know everyone, not as well as you know, your family. But you can work together productively. Above that, it starts to fall apart. And I was talking to the former head of creativity at Electronic Arts, the games company, and he, and I mentioned Dunbar, oh the Dunbar number, oh yeah, we built the whole company around that.

And I said, what? And he said, yeah, yeah, we realised we'd never get creativity if we have massive teams. So, he said, whenever we get close to 200, we split. So, we then put them into separate organisations. So that's a company of 12, 000 people, all in groups of smaller than 200 in order to remain in contact with each other in order to remain creative.

And then they have the agents who move between the teams, finding out the new ideas. So, the whole structure of the organisation is based around Robin Dumbo. He probably doesn't even know that. He's at Oxford, by the way. But what he's saying is that.  If you want to thrive, you need good relationships at work, you need to feel challenged but not fearful.

In a fair system, our key components of thriving, everyone feels seen and heard. Everyone has a sense of autonomy. And there's a wonderful theory called self-determination theory, which is a theory of motivation which anyone's ever heard. It's basically saying you need autonomy; you need competence.  Third element of self-determination theory, community.

You can't be motivated without being in a strong community. It's really important.  So, what I'm saying is that you can't just get involved in your action. You've got to be involved in the process and the culture. You got to work on the process and the culture in order to deliver the results of the action that you choose.

And mostly we never do that. You just ignore process and culture and they're really important. So, I've got three minutes just on trust. If it's so important, we talked about, I remember when I spoke to just say trust is the essence of creating great workplaces. So how it's easy to lose trust and you, you can think of all of you think of examples in your life when you feel betrayed, your trust evaporated in a company, in a person, in an organisation, in a product, whatever it might be.

So how do you build trust? You've got any tips for building trust? Cause that's really important.  Anyone? I'm just, just have a chat yourself.  in your pairs and just throw out a few ideas and I'll finish on a few ideas because I don't want to take my 40 minutes.

Audience Member: The tension between wanting to encourage this kind of interaction that means you're, you're so much more than the sum of the parts. Every meeting being massive or, or, you know, there’s this struggle. We, we sense as an organisation in trying to get stuff done but involving enough people to get that multiplying effect.

Nigel Paine: Back to self-determination theory, autonomy number so that therefore you, one of the problems with, like in the BBC, no meeting had less than 30 people, because there were 10 who were useful and 20 were there just in case anyone said anything that they. Shouldn't, or because anyone tried to get one over them.

So, there were loads of people there just because they didn't trust the 10 people in the room. So, if you trust your say, most three people make all those decisions. Henry built his website by saying to the web developer, just, just build it, deliver it. I don't want to see it until it's launched. That's trust.

So, he didn't, he didn't have the whole staff going through frame by frame of the new website because they trusted people. So that's the, the, the essence of. Being effective is not to tell everyone everything and consult on everything. And now that's kind of academia and it's a disaster always because nothing ever gets done.

It's about trust and autonomy saying, Chris, I know you can do that. You've got three people just go away and do it. We trust that you're not going to, you're not going to screw up, and that actually puts more pressure on Chris to do a great job than if you, right Chris, you know, first idea, put that to the group, and then second idea, well then we would, oh we're nearly at launch, oh put that to, it's just a disaster.

Over consultation.  So have you got a question

Henry? Okay, there's a question from Grace. There's a question from Grace.

Grace: I think you're awesome. And yeah, because you invented iPlayer. I love iPlayer.

Right. So, we're just really happy in this house. Anyway, has anyone ever resisted working with the seven points you mentioned earlier? And also, I want your book. 

Nigel: Right. Has anyone ever resisted? Yeah, I would say every single one of those.  comes out of challenge and, and out of dispute. So yes, I would say every single one of those things is not obvious.

To me, it's blindingly obvious, but to many people, there's the area, but like Chris, you know, that, that are, but that would mean are, then therefore, and a lot of that is all about not being  good, quick decision making, putting overlays of, you know, people have to behave well, you know, how the hell do I get stuff done if I have to behave well?

So, these things are therefore all debates and challenges. And when I work with teams, I don't give them those and say, right, there they are. I say, right, take one and debate it. Get it, get it out there in your organisation. See what people say.  It's really important. So yes, they are all challenged. Always.

Audience Member: Rachel's question, Henry. Yeah, I think Rachel's question was a little bit about interested in finding out what knowing before knowledge means. The reason why that resonates with me as well.

Nigel: Right, okay. Thank you very much indeed, Jack. That's great.

Right, let me just read this quote and then I think that will help answer it. It's from a favourite academic of mine called David Nicolini, who's an academic, so this is academic speak. Practice talking. reiterates that beyond grand constructions like discourses, paradigms, or logics, there is a daily reality of local tactics, pockets of resistance, dialects, collusions, and contradictions.

So let me repeat that. A daily reality of local tactics, pockets of resistance, dialects, collusions, and contradictions. Now, that's messy. I think we need to be in the mess. Not at the paradigms when it's all sorted out. That's the difference between knowing and knowledge. Knowledge is grand constructions.

It's all packaged. It's all explicit. We all know everything. The reality of life in an organisation is in the mess, the dialects, the tactics, the pockets of resistance, the collusions, and the contradictions. We cannot be afraid of embracing that. And the problem is many organisations, a lot of people in HR or learning are terrified, getting involved in the mess of organisations.

But that's how. Knowledge is created. So that is knowing. That's what knowing is Jack. Knowing is being in that soup of trying to understand before we end up with something more formal that we can call knowledge. And knowing is really important. And if you feel you're at the site of knowing, you just feel so much more energized and when you get stuff handed.

That iPlayer meeting was all about knowing. No one knew how it was going to end. It was a big mess. We brought in the thing that we did, which is very naughty. We made movies about aging gamers, people who stole BBC stuff and put it on CDs and distributed amongst their friends, about five different groups.

And everyone's going, oh, this is terrible, who are these people? We opened the doors, and they all came in and they sat at the table. And at my table there's some guy who'd gone through every episode of Doctor Who, he'd put on a CD ROM his 10 favourite episodes. And the guy said, look, you just can't do that, that's our copyright material.

The guy just looked I spent a week making my friends contribute to paying for the TV license. Grow up, mate!

That was perfect, a perfect, that was knowing, moving towards knowledge, a realisation that we had to do something fundamentally different, but we hadn't dabbled in the knowing.  If we'd said to, you know, let's do a theoretical paper, let's bring Deloitte in to give us options, none of that would have happened, none of that would have happened.

That's knowing, Jack, that's what knowing is and why it's really important.