(340) Time
Description
What if most organisational problems aren’t unique at all—and treating them as if they are is exactly what’s holding you back? Mark Earls joins Matt and Lisa to challenge how we think about innovation, time, and human behaviour in organisations.
From why you should prototype multiple solutions before perfecting one, to the critical difference between product thinking (needing 1% of a market) and internal systems (requiring 100% adoption), this conversation offers practical alternatives to the endless search for “best practice” examples. Mark argues that recognising problems as belonging to familiar categories—and understanding humans as fundamentally social rather than individual—unlocks faster, more effective solutions than assuming every challenge is unprecedented genius-level work.
This week’s trancript brought to you by Descript with associated errors…
Matt: [00:00:00 ] Hello and welcome to episode 340 of the WB 40 increasingly erratically produced podcast this week with me, Matt Ballantine, Lisa Riemers, and Mark Earls.
Lisa: Hi everyone, and welcome back if you’re a returning listener and welcome if this is your first time. Very excited about today’s episode. There are a few things that Matt, [00:01:00 ] our guest mark this week and I have in common, and there’s. I think it’s been a long time coming. My, I hadn’t realized how massively overdue this episode is.
But just in our little pre-chat it turns out that I’m much better than Matt at doing these things. And, um, so yeah. Matt, what have you been up to over the last week or so?
Matt: Oh, the last week or so. It’s been 80 since I’ve been on here. Um, the last week has been, it’s quite a lot of book related stuff.
So I, I’ve got the first physical prototype of the full book through from some printers. They’re not the, it’s not the printers we’ll use for the final version, but, um, so that’s quite good fun. I’ve launched what book? The, the random, the book, um, how to Survive in I can’t even remember what the subtitle is.
It’s just random. That’s what it’s called. And uh, we’ve also launched as of [00:02:00 ] last Monday an, uh, a random, the advent calendar. So every other day there’s a new story about randomness related to the Christmas period. So, um, and I seem to be out unsettling certain people, including you by the sounds of it, Lisa, by un uh, unleashing the windows of the Advent calendar in random order.
So today was Advent calendar window number two, even though it’s the fourth one, and that seems to be causing no end of challenge for people.
Lisa: I just find it difficult when I’ve been conditioned to open things in an order over the, over the however many years I’ve been opening Advent calendars for. And I don’t if I’ve missed out a day, I dunno which ones today, I dunno.
Which I, it’s hard enough knowing what day of the week it is now that alone understanding, oh no. It’s okay to unlock any of the windows that are open. Yes. I mean, that’s it. It’s breaking
Matt: out of, of the kind of the structures that we are taught in. And, [00:03:00 ] and you know, being able to feel that that discomfort I think, which is, uh, quite entertaining.
Uh, apart from that, last week was the. Annual WB 40 Christmas meal. I think it was 25 people out this year. A Spanish restaurant in Faringdon, which was great fun. Gotta to see lots of people. Gotta see Chris King, who made it down from Lee Ray, Chris King gotta see Dave Lloyd. He made it over from Wales.
We got to see Sharon Oea. Gotta make it all the way from Amsterdam. We’ve gotta see Lee Cox. He made it all the way from deepest, darkest Kent. And some people, you know, there’s lots of other people as well. So that was about fabulous. Thank you to, um, cypher being the main organizer of that, and to you as well, Lisa.
He did lots of work in the organizing of it, which was fantastic. And then it was our 17th wedding anniversary on Saturday. So we went out to this remarkable restaurant called Alba Dino in in Richmond. That’s Richmond Pond Thames rather than Richmond, north [00:04:00 ] Yorkshire. And it’s basically a restaurant where the meal is themed around a Sicilian wedding feast.
You get what you’re given. It is usually six or seven courses and s and I just basically had far too much to eat, which was wonderful. So, um, that’s, it’s been an entertaining week. How about you?
Lisa: So last weekend I did in my top, it’s my top two events of the year. The first of which was where I actually met Mark in person, where we went to the Speaky Summit in Bavaria, but equally as random and equally as difficult to get to from, from southeast London.
I went to a thing called congregation in the tiny village of Kong in West Ireland, which I found out about by chance at the beginning of November, having a conversation with someone at the IRBC UK Conference in London. But [00:05:00 ] congregation, it’s an unconference that takes place over a weekend and you, to get your ticket, you write a blog post on a particular subject, and this year’s subject was chaos.
It’s like, this is really in my wheelhouse. Um, and so I wrote my blog post. Also realized that my current client, who I’ve not met in person until this point, was gonna be there and is one of the sponsors, but completely unrelatedly to me finding out about it. So I basically went away with 97 strangers, someone I’ve been working with for a few months, someone I met three weeks ago, and the person who’s organizing it, who I’d emailed in advance, um, and we sat in different shops around the village.
The f we were given like a you’d love this from a random point of view. I’d lanyards had like a bingo card on it in the morning where there are eight sessions throughout the day and four, there [00:06:00 ] are eight groups. Running at the same time throughout the day, and then four sessions and you get given a sticker as with your number on it.
And then you work out where you are meant to be at the different sessions. ’cause you find your number on the card. And it was fabulous ’cause it meant that you all got sh you, you knew, you knew where you needed to go next and if you didn’t know, you could talk to someone and ask them. And we had long ranging conversations that covered topics from like really straightforward things to it’s just such a treat to be able to actually take a whole, a day and a half really.
But having a whole day of just talking about the same subject and talking to people and bouncing ideas off each other. I feel like I came back like really restored and thinking about how, ’cause it’s so nice to actually be able to talk to humans who, and you can bounce off each other without that kind of.
The brittleness that sometimes comes when you’re talking [00:07:00 ] online and tone doesn’t travel and then you don’t agree with someone and then you fall out with them when you’re in person and sitting around a table, you can actually continue that. And then we all went to the pub in the evening and continued the conversation.
Uh, that was the main thing. I’ve also been doing a bunch of client work. Saw everyone at the WB 40 dinner, brought a bunch of intra nerds with me that were also coming to town for the day for an intranet conference from Interact. Um. Did an art challenge at the weekend. So it’s been quite a busy week.
Matt: Sounds it. Yeah. You’re gonna need a, a bit of time off over Christmas to recover from all of that.
Lisa: I hope so. I I do feel like I’m probably gonna get ill at some point in December ’cause I’ve seen so many people and there are so many bugs around, even though I’ve had my flu jab and I’ve been taking vitamins and trying to eat well.
There’s a high prob there’s a high chance I’m gonna be struck down soon. But anyway, I’ve [00:08:00 ] talked a lot there. Mark. Hello? Hello? Hello? In England ish. You are? Yeah. You are. Religion? I am in England. England, yep. How are you doing? What have you been up to over the last week or so?
Mark: So the last, last week or so has been, uh, dominated by my band’s annual Christmas charity gig which was the last Thursday, it seems like, both a year ago and only last night.
And as the herd, meister and champion of all things social behavior, I still in a band, been played together more than three decades. And we love getting people to mix with each other and dance around and get overexcited and show those bits of themselves that they don’t normally show. And it’s always great, and one of the, and we’re of a certain age now, so that everyone’s kids are in their twenties.
So, uh, and they’ve now decided on mass that Christmas doesn’t properly start until the big short customer. Do is done. [00:09:00 ] So, um, so that’s it. So that’s what I was doing, rehearsing for that and then getting that done. Also, I’ve been trying to knock out, um, uh, I’ve been working on my next book and which isn’t the time one that Matt wants to talk to me about, but um, is another sort of Hery thing.
And, um, did a bit of client work last week with some lovely mates of mine who have run a, um, a B2B sort of marketing, branding consultancy and bringing the joy of our social selves to them. So that’s what I’ve been doing and realizing that it is two weeks now. That’s it. The panic setting,
Matt: the two weeks.<
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