Your leadership team only thinks it agrees

And thank you for the invite, Nicholas. Nice to be here.

Well, it's a long, a bit of a long story. won't dwell on it too much, but I started my career in theatre. I was a stage manager in London's West End. I was on big musicals for a long time and working for the likes of Cameron McIntosh and Andrew Lloyd Webber. on an awful lot of the shows in the 80s and 90s. And it was in the middle of the 90s that got approached by a global consulting company to help them really challenge the thinking of their partner group. And they really wanted to disrupt their habits and patterns of thinking and really... give them the opportunity to explore their creativity and innovation. So myself and a partner decided that we would invite them to put on their own opera, to sing and dance and perform and tell the story of their own opera. And so we took 400 people at a time away to the Algarve. We built out an open-air amphitheatre to seat 400 people. And over the course of three days with a troupe of 50 theatricals, as I like to call it, we took them on a journey to explore how they could actually create in their own version of an opera, which they did on the third night. And they loved it so much that by the second time we were doing it, our client came to us and said, look, you need to set up a business setting, bring in the creative arts into business. And so that's what we did. X number of years later, but 30 years later, here I am talking to you. But we began in that manner. it took a while. I spent a long time doing both theater producing alongside building up the corporate practice and the corporate business. But really took the plunge after the millennium and set up Just Out Water. 25 years ago now, in order to actually really think about the ways that we can challenge behavior and think about transformation and leadership within large organizations. But we still use our heritage. We still start with the basis that everything can be explored through engagement, interaction, and with a playful twist, a playful manner. but taking on some quite serious and broad topics within organizations. So we're right around the world and have office here in London, office in Singapore, and we explore different topics that are present within organizations. But we use this notion of play and story as the basis of opening up and taking on board some different ideas for people. So that's broadly how I got into it.

The main reasons, I think a very simple one is misalignment of ideas. It's a very, I mean, there's quite a lot of recent academic thinking about this, but the cool thing is the fact that it's very, very, it is conceptually very clear, but it's still very, very hard to do for a group of very senior executives to... concur on a strategic intent and desired output and then go out of that room and consistently put it into practice. And you see it all the time. see leadership actually being challenged around the fact that do they all agree? Do they all accept the direction of travel? And the execution of it can be sort of a little bit misaligned. So I think that sort of sense of false alignment or misalignment is one of the big things. I also think that the world is so moving so fast and is so challenging. There are an awful lot of the time people are just dealing with the here and now and dealing with the present and their long term desired aims and objectives can often be lost in the sort of swirling pool of everyday life, if you like. So I think that's another challenge around it. very simply, know, human beings quite often just go off and do their own thing. So we need to address that. We need to actually help. leadership teams to stay account to each other and to actually deliver what they promise and be consistent, clear, disciplined and focused in their actions. And that, I think, is one of the biggest challenges that any organization faces.

Well, I would agree. mean, I think the one thing is to have a very strong, clear sense of purpose. A North Star is the language often used, but a very clear sense of where you're trying to get to and consistently checking in with each other to ensure that you remain on course for that. I cannot stress enough that I think it's important that leadership groups stay consistently in touch with each other. and are supporting each other. If I take it to the metaphor of putting on a production, a theatre show, that I know very well, you know, when... A writer has a clear idea of putting together a script. They then involve a producer. A producer involves a director. A director involves a creative team. That group of people all know what they're trying to do. They have an desired state, which is an opening night. And then they involve actors and they involve technicians. They involve theatre folk and box office, etc. and the group gets wider, but the core is still the same. You still got an opening night, you still got a core idea, and that group stays, if they're working together and being consistent in their actions and approach, they will deliver that opening night. And I think very often in business, it's really challenging to stay together in that way because the timeframes are longer and also there's an awful lot more that is distracting. So, but it's a good analogy saying if we can maintain a direction of travel towards an opening night that we can deliver and then we look at that as a successful outcome, when's the next opening night? And too often we've got too much going on, we get distracted from what we're trying to achieve and also the focus may be too far away. So it's ensuring that you are consistently hitting small achievable objectives along the way to a bigger target. that's all about the journey, all about the story you're trying to tell, all about remaining together and working together as a team. And I think that's one of the big challenges for a lot of organizations.

Constantly, one step, one step, one step, working today on getting better for tomorrow. Yeah, it's tough. It's tough. I'm not saying it's easy, by the way, at all. think leadership within business is one of the most challenging forms of leadership there is. We always often use sports or other sectors as analogous to business, but I would contend business leadership is still one of the hardest forms of leadership.

I do think it's amazing. I genuinely do think it is probably going to be one of the big leap forwards in terms of technology that we should be embracing. You can look back in time and say when were the great industrial or technological leaps that moved Mancan forward. And I would contend that when we look back, AI this moment in time will be one of those. But I also think it's challenging. One of the key things I would really venture is how do we remain human-centric, being human in this AI tech-enabled world? I think that's a question that we're all grappling with and one we should continue to grapple with. And I think it's particularly hard for leadership and various sectors, various organizations are approaching it in a variety of different ways. There are those who have been rather hesitant and cautious and there were others who are openly embracing it and rushing ahead. I would venture, it's probably somewhere in the middle, who knows, it's still an unknown territory but... It certainly is challenging us all and I think we should embrace the challenge. I always feel that I if I would invite anyone to be really curious about it, but I would also be mindful that putting your putting all of your ideas into one place is not necessarily the way that you're going to grow your organization. So there's lot more to it. I think it's a lot of news, but we should definitely be embracing what it can achieve and. how it can help us grow both our business but grow our society and think about how we can make a real difference to what we're trying to achieve. There's just so much that is out there but AI is certainly going to reshape an awful lot of markets and an awful lot of practices that we've held dear for quite some time.

Well, pardon me. think the couple of things, I may, firstly on the AI thing that you just mentioned there, I think you're absolutely right. We cannot outsource some of the key components about critical human cognitive skills such as critical thinking, such as creativity, collaboration. Those are skill sets that we should actually double down on as human beings. But to your point, allow technology to take away some of the more menial tasks that we do day to day. So I agree with that point. How do we begin a client engagement? It really varies, but predominantly we will have, it will be based on referral. We have a very strong client relationships that are quite long lasting, often over two or three decades. And so we remain in touch and we seek to be good, both good citizens and collaborators with our clients, but also in many ways, good colleagues. And that does mean that we get referred quite a bit. So we'll start with a referral, we'll have a conversation about the required need, the way that we may approach things as just our water. We have a particular process like every single consultancy will tell you. But ours is rooted in the sort of the base of theatre in the sense of, you know, we seek to use play and story as I've outlined already. And also to maintain the very human aspects of interaction and engagement. the playful nature of it, humor, interconnectedness, they're really important. But at the heart of it is about how relevant we need to be for a potential client's business. So we will seek to understand and seek to explore what's important for them and work with them on shared desired outcomes. So that will be the first stage. And then after that, the way that the engagement that we would undertake would be designed in collaboration with the client. So we co-create and we always seek to co-create as we undertake this work. because having people on board from within a client's organisation who have skin in the game, who feel that they've actually been part of the process of design of building out a programme, I believe is really important because they become your advocates, your champions if you like, within the organisation for what you're trying to achieve. So that was the starting point and then it's about delivery, delivery and execution. A program may be as simple as working with a senior leadership group over a period of time in order to actually achieve desired outcomes. That could be a time frame from three months to three years. It really does depend. We'd always put safeguards in there, we'd always put check-ins, we'd always ensure that the client feels that they've got both a collaborator but also a point where they can engage and just really challenge the thinking if they feel it's not delivering what they want. So that's always very present. And then it really is about execution and ensuring that we stay as we seek to upscale the organization through behavior, through leadership, through cultural shifts. At the same time, we are keeping in mind the strategic intent. and the sense of purpose that the organization wishes to espouse to both its people but also its other stakeholders such as shareholders, the public, however it may work. So yeah, so that's generally how we seek to work with clients. In many ways what we see is quite high touch, if you like, so that we constantly looking in terms of calls. online calls, being engaged with people, face to face, whatever. But we do feel that we actually work better as a thinking partner, in that sense, rather than just devising on our own and bringing it to the client. I'm not a great fan of that.

All right, so January will be our 25th anniversary as a business. And I certainly, know, my view, mean, I'm still loving what I'm doing. My partner is still loving what they're doing. So. where and certainly as far as I know everyone who works with us is enjoying what they're doing as well so I don't think there's an intent to change that however at the same time what I would love to see for Just Add Water is a is in many ways a growing of the next generation of leaders within our organization and handing over the baton to some degree in that way so I'm always keen to actually grow the next generation so Yeah, so that would be that's certainly going to be one of the key things for us. I also think that there is so much more work to be done at the intersection of the arts and business and that there is so much the arts can actually provide for businesses, vice versa. But we haven't even we we scratch the surface on that. And I'm not talking about skills exchange or presentational training or anything like that. But I'm really talking about the the base understanding of. that human interaction and that's an area I'm really committed to exploring more and more as we go forward as a business and you know we spent as I say quarter of a century looking at that area and I can see that continuing until I'm a very very old man.

There is always more work. That's so true. They can very simply email me. email is very straightforward. It's jeremy at sewjustatwater.com. Send me an email or send it to swim at sewjustatwater.com and one of the team will answer it. I mean, we're quite open as an organization. We love to engage. We love to communicate. So entering into a conversation about the work, we'd be delighted to do that.

Thank you very much, Nicholas, and good luck in the Czech Republic. I hope things are going well.