39. Agile marketing in action, greige and more

PLEASE NOTE: This transcript has been created using fireflies.ai – a transcription service. It has not been edited by a human and therefore may contain mistakes.  
  

 
00:03 
Dom Hawes 
Welcome to Unicorny, the antidote to post rationalized business books. I'm your host, Dom Hawes. This is a podcast about the business of marketing, how to create value, who's doing it well, and how you can help your business win the future.  

Scott Stockwell joined the Unicorny project last year and he recorded one of our most popular episodes to date. We discussed agile marketing and Scott, being a 10th Dan storyteller, framed his contribution. By telling me everything I know about Agile I learned from it's a knockout. Scott Stockwell is senior brand strategist at IBM. He is one of the most thoughtful, insightful and observant people I've met since we started this podcast. As well as being a well known agile marketing thought leader, coach and facilitator.  

 
00:53 
Dom Hawes 
He spent five years as editor in chief for IBM EMEA after two and a half years as content strategist at IBM's Internet of Things AI and data platform Watson, and he has done much more too. Today, Scott is also b two B council chair at the data and Marketing association and strategy and leadership ambassador at Propolis, the b two B marketing community. Now, in our last chat, I mentioned IBM's partnership with the Wimbledon tennis Championships right near the top of the show, but we didn't get to talk about it and a, it's a great story and b, there's just so much we can all learn from the approach and c, well, you know, I just love chatting to Scott. So we asked him back to the studio and this is how our conversation went down.  

 
01:41 
Dom Hawes 
Hi Scott, thank you so much for coming back to the studio again to talk to us. Specifically today we're going to look at your experience at IBM and how agile thinking and organisational design can impact other businesses. We mentioned last time around IBM's partnership with the Wimbledon tennis tournament.  

 
02:26 
Scott Stockwell 
I had 13 years at Marks and Spencer before I started the consultancy world and then into marketing. I wasn't aware that Marks and Spencer did it, but I certainly was aware that gap did it and it was a way of having the fabric equivalent of magnolia walls, easy to paint over, not very exciting and something you probably wouldn't buy. So greige is literally gray plus beige. It's an almost undyed color that is very easy to take color. So you look at your sales and where you see a color is performing and you need more stock, you've got some pre made material that you can very swiftly dye. And getting into stores now, the way that you would know that had happened is usually if they'd sewn the size labels in before the dyeing, the size label would be the color of the garment.  

 
03:13 
Dom Hawes 
Sneaky. And I guess people are still doing it today.  

 
03:16 
Scott Stockwell 
Look at those size labels. It's going to make people now, I think, look at the size label more carefully. I think fast fashion has actually moved on a lot since those days where things were more smaller number of suppliers with larger volumes of product. So there was more of a need to respond to market demands by recoloring. I think these days it's probably more suppliers and a lot of it coming from farther away that actually enables it to get here much quicker. So fast fashion, I think, has probably changed it. But certainly I'm sure manufacturers know how to take something that is the vanilla and dye it or alter it to fashion very quickly.  

 
03:50 
Dom Hawes 
Yeah, having that kind of. Here's one I made earlier, I guess, works in our world, too. But what else can we learn from the world of fast fashion and apply in the marketing context? You told me one of your other lessons from retail is having to look backwards to look forwards. In agile terms, maybe. Is that retrospective or is it something else?  

 
04:08 
Dom Hawes 
Fashion is often a reinvention of something that's gone before. And in the last podcast we talked about that constant improvement and constant iteration. You can have a very good, radical candor retrospective where you look at how the work was done, who was involved, what did they do, where was the friction, where was the fluidity? It gives you the opportunity to find the things that are getting in the way and move them out of the way and the things that are working very efficiently and do more of them.  

 
04:36 
Scott Stockwell 
So a little bit like fashion, sometimes you have to look backwards to look forwards to find the efficiencies.  

 
04:42 
Dom Hawes 
One area that seems particularly appropriate to me, actually, both in agency and in house. I mean, in agency land, of course, it's probably the pitch process. In house, it's probably the campaign itself. And I guess, I suppose agencies are stakeholders in that too. They don't always go to plan. But it seems sometimes that when you're doing a major bid, a pitch or when you're running a major campaign and it's not working as well as you want. Sometimes there can be a tendency to try and avoid having to go into detail of what went wrong. And as an agency group leader, I hate that because I feel like you never learn and you can't take anything forward.  

 
05:17 
Dom Hawes 
How would you use your agile or design thinking experience to encourage, whether it be in agency land, account directors, or in house, whether it be brand managers or marketing managers, to take that approach where they take us? If you like Matthew side's black box thinking like a forensic approach to what.  

 
05:34 
Scott Stockwell 
Happened or what didn't, a retrospective, I think, is always useful. Sometimes the whole team can be a little bit too close to the work, and particularly when a full project's delivered, not just a sprint or an iteration. Sometimes it's useful to get somebody in that hasn't been involved to almost conduct the retrospective for you. I did this fairly recently for a team who hadn't had the best outcome for the project as a whole, but were struggling to understand what they'd done that could have been done better. In preparation for a project that we're going to start. And there's a few techniques that I would use. The first one I start is asking the team to write a headline for what they think the project is going to deliver. So imagine it's for the sun tabloid headline.  

 
06:17 
Scott Stockwell 
It's a large point size, it's not too many words. You encourage each of the team to write their headline down. A good way to sense if the team has got a clear north star or purpose is to see how close those headlines are. When I ran that with this particular team, there was a lot of difference. The customer in the headline wasn't consistent. The outcome for the project wasn't consistent. So when you've got a team that didn't have a consistent north starter aimed towards, that already starts to set alarms for why this project hasn't gone well. If you look at things like JFK's putting the man on the moon speech, we want to send a man to space and bring him safely back within the decade. Now we're all used to smart objectives, specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, time bound.  

 
07:09 
Scott Stockwell 
Everybody on that project knew we are aiming to get a man on the moon. Now, when everyone is very clear, it makes it easier to look at the work that's being done and determine am I on track or have I deviated? The other thing I like to do with a team? And we talked about social charters in the first podcast is get the team to talk about what do they really want to do on this project? When are they in their flow, what is their superpower, if you like, and then ask the team in the retrospective, did they experience much of that on this project?  

 
07:41 
Scott Stockwell 
Now, you're never going to have the chance to do what you love 100% on any project, but if you haven't had any chance to do it 0% on a project, you're probably not bringing that project the best of you and you're probably not getting the best out of that project. I ask this team that question. So first of all, what's your superpower? What do you bring into this project? And then give me a mark out of ten of how much you feel you've brought that to this project. I didn't get a score above three. Now that tells me that work wasn't done at the beginning and the sort of the bonding of the team and the delivering of the stuff that they really have a passion for wasn't there.  

 
08:20 
Scott Stockwell 
So again, an unclear strategic direction and a team not bringing its best, two big red flags of what could be improved on that team for the next time. Okay, so I'm starting to see how all these threads can be brought together. I mentioned that retrospectives can be unpopular.  

 
08:36 
Dom Hawes 
I think partly because inherent in that process is someone's got to admit a flaw, a weakness. They didn't do something well, and that's not something many people are prepared to do. So when you're looking at agile marketing, how do you build that comfort about admitting errors or sharing weaknesses into the process?  

 
08:52 
Scott Stockwell 
Working with a team from the start. So having those agreements with the social charter, with the Daily stand up, with the periodic retrospectives, you're building that psychological safety and that comfort and that honesty. But it is not for everybody. I ran seven teams in the design studio in London. I had during that time, five people that during that work came and said, this is not comfortable for me, I don't want to work this way. And because were a marketing innovation group and there were other marketing teams that weren't using agile, there was the ability to swap them out for somebody that was working in a more traditional approach. It's not for everybody. I think it's very effective, but it's not everyone's cup of marketing.  

 
09:42 
Dom Hawes 
If you grew up in the United Kingdom, you will know all about Blue Peter. It's a tv show for children. It's been running since 1958 and it excelled at getting children to be creative. Now, one of their earworm catchphrases was here's one I made earlier. And who knew that the tricks of the trade tv presenters used when were little could be the key to supporting a more agile approach in our marketing and communications? Now, if you've got no clue what I'm talking about, I've pasted a link on YouTube on our show notes. But before I go any deeper into.  

 
10:14 
Dom Hawes 
That rabbit hole, I think I'd better.  

 
10:16 
Dom Hawes 
Get back to the subject. Agile marketing isn't just about speed and iterations. You also need to create the ability to be responsive and customer centric. By anticipating needs and being prepared to help us do this, we can take a lesson from the world of fast fashion by looking backwards to look forwards. You already have everything you need to make a start at anticipating your customer needs. Well, maybe not everything, but you are extraordinarily well equipped, whether you know it or not. Firstly, you have enormous experience in your field. If you've done your customer and market analysis properly, you already have a good feel for what your customers are likely to want in the future. That's because your gut instinct is the sum of all of your experience and knowledge, so don't ignore it.  

 
11:05 
Dom Hawes 
Secondly, most things seem to work in cycles, so if you can correlate past customer needs to external or other drivers, you can build yourself tool sets for the future. Building tools and playbooks for the future is also known as war gaming. It's highly likely that you and your colleagues are already doing it to derisk your corporate strategy. And of course you can do it too. Check out the show notes at Unicorny Co. UK to find a marketing trick podcast all about wargaming the future if you like. Here's one we made earlier. And speaking of content from past episodes, we came across the concept of social charters the last time we spoke to Scott. Here's what he said.  

 
11:45 
Scott Stockwell 
So social charter is something that a team will make at the start of a project. They will agree how they want to work. So things like file sharing, the number of meetings, the method of communication. They'll often talk about their practices, what they want to bring to the piece of work and what they want to take from it, and the things that they really don't like doing the things that can't work. Now, we obviously don't get to cherry pick all the things that we like to do, and we obviously don't get to work the way we would love to work 100% of the time.  

 
12:14 
Scott Stockwell 
But when you've got a team that has had those conversations at the start of a project you're building that social agreement, that charter, that gives them that safety to work the way that they want to, and that really enables things like retrospectives, which come towards the end of the work, to be easier to undertake because the teams have been very honest up front how they like to work and what they won't tolerate. So it's easier to go back and say, well, remember at the beginning we agreed we'd like to work this way. Are we now working this way? If you don't have that agreement at the beginning, when you do the retrospective later, things are a bit more surprising and not always in a good way.  

 
12:56 
Dom Hawes 
Now, I don't know about you, but I really liked the idea of the social contract or charter last time we spoke to Scott, but I'm ashamed to say I haven't yet implemented the idea.  

 
13:07 
Dom Hawes 
So my report card is going to say, must try harder. But have you used social charters? If so, I'd love to hear about your experience. Why not connect to me on LinkedIn? So, in today's show so far, we've used fast fashion and the concept of greyge to illustrate how preparing content, campaigns and activities in advance can increase your agility. Let's now go back to the studio to discuss how Scott put these ideas into action.  

 
13:42 
Scott Stockwell 
Scott, we have trailed your next story. For long enough, I think. Why don't we illustrate all of those things we've been talking about by examining IBM's partnership with the Wilmington tennis tournament.  

 
13:53 
Scott Stockwell 
IBM has been a technology partner to the All England Lawn Tennis Club for over 25 years. I think in the show notes we're probably going to drop a link so that you can see the technology that underpins the event.  

 
14:08 
Dom Hawes 
I'm not going to talk about the technology that is a huge podcast on its own or probably an entire series. I was brought in as marketing managers are each year within IBM to run the team that is doing the marketing support for Wimbledon. And the year that I did it, I decided we would co locate the team. We would bring in our agency partners. So the advertising agency and the PR agency sat with us in a not particularly exciting room, which we affectionately called bunker two. No windows, rather stuffy, filled with every strawberry flavored confection you could find to keep us going.  

 
14:50 
Scott Stockwell 
What we decided to do was use design, thinking and agile to underpin the way that went about the marketing. So we started with the fan experience. We wanted the digital experience to be as close to the courtside experience as possible. Now, when you're looking at the scores and the play at Wimbledon anywhere in the world, you're looking at it almost exactly as it is happening. So the need for the marketing to run at that speed, to keep the fans engaged, is as strong.  

 
15:22 
Scott Stockwell 
So how do you do that? What we decided to do, and the reason we called it the punnet, was to mirror the strawberries in the little boxes that you get at Wimbledon. Small, manageable, bite sized pieces of content, roughly 90% prepared before the event. So very quick to then respond to something in the moment. In any championships, you know you're going to get things like the longest rally, the fastest serve. Now, it may well be surpassed by future games, depending on where that happens in the tournament. But what the agency did was create the animations ready to drop in the sound bites when we experienced them live. By watching courtside, were then able to just put the copy on top of the animation and get it into market very quickly.  

 
16:11 
Scott Stockwell 
So whilst you're watching the longest rally, the social commentary has an amanimation that actually is talking about that player and the length of that rally in real time, and the fact that it is very relevant, it's entertaining.  

 
16:23 
Scott Stockwell 
The animations were just really amusing, but it's fact based and you've got a very direct connection between the live action and the digital response.  

 
16:34 
Scott Stockwell 
It's a brilliant way to get the conversation going.  

 
16:36 
Dom Hawes 
Let's unpack that. We got a couple of things going on here. Firstly, you made the decision to effectively create a blended team, both in house and agency people all in one location, working together. Instead of starting and running this as an iterative, long form, iterative process, you broke it down into what the outcomes were going to be and you effectively worked backwards. You then prepared a lot of your content, so you must have done quite a lot of scenario planning as well. So what happens if? What happens if, and I guess in the bunker, was the team debating, as rallies are going on, going, is that the fastest serve? Is this the longest? So is there that kind of real time debate going on as well?  

 
17:17 
Scott Stockwell 
So two things there, the two weeks of the championships, those conversations are going on constantly. So the tennis is playing live in the room. We had teams literally courtside at Wimbledon that were phoning back when they were sort of predicting something was going to happen. So it was very technically connected. We'd done a lot of preparation before, so we'd done a lot of walking through, what is the fan experience, using design thinking, looking at the as is journey, what's happening for a fan currently? What would we like to happen? What is the to be journey? Where are the pinch points? Where are the potential wow factors? Where have we got the opportunity to intervene? So we took all of that learning then into the two weeks of the championships themselves.  

 
18:04 
Scott Stockwell 
Because we'd worked with the agencies up front, most of the work that sort of gray was already there. And then, as you said, it's just down to the timing and the decision. Is this the fastest? Is this the quickest? Is this the thing that we just need to drop into the animation? The thing you also have to counterbalance is we haven't used it yet. It's a little bit like a joker in a card game. Are we going to run out of time to play the joker? Do we need to sort of engineer a reason to use animation? Because we haven't had what were expecting and we had some backup animations for that weren't so tied to a particular activity. So a lot of pre planning, a lot of live decision making and contingency for other events, okay.  

 
18:50 
Dom Hawes 
And a really high pressure environment because it's a global audience and it's in real time, and it's also a subject that a lot of people watching will know an awful lot about. So it's got to have really good quality content going out in real time. Now, that's not an environment that a lot of our listeners will necessarily be in, but they can still learn a lot of lessons from those. If you take that approach and say, this is my end state that I want within such and such a time frame, whether it's six months or twelve months, and you do go and do some pre mortems in effect, and say, what happens if?  

 
19:21 
Dom Hawes 
What happens if we've all got those sliding door moments where the world changes, whether that be interest rates or inflation rates or unemployment rates or Russia invading Ukraine, we could be looking at our.  

 
19:34 
Dom Hawes 
Worlds and pre planning how we're going.  

 
19:37 
Dom Hawes 
To respond as an organization. I know very big organizations probably do this from a corporate communications angle, but do they do it from marketing? Do they have a bench of ready made content that allows them to respond to stuff in real time?  

 
19:49 
Dom Hawes 
I'm not sure, but it may be useful.  

 
19:51 
Scott Stockwell 
I am not sure either, and it definitely is useful. So firsthand experience of Wimbledon, very useful to have that sort of in the can ready to go, if you like. It's like fast fashion. How quickly are you responding to changing customer demands in terms of the audience? Absolutely. Wimbledon has an expectation of the immediacy of courtside play being relayed around the world and interpreted fundamentally what I'd argue is every customer you serve has that same expectation. If you go into a shop, if you go into a bank, if you go for any experience as a consumer, you're expecting your demands to be met there and then you're not thinking, well, the marketing team, I'm not a major sporting championship. I can probably wait two weeks, two months for this. You want it there.  

 
20:46 
Scott Stockwell 
There's very much the best expectation that you've ever had is the one you expect for the next one. And every customer deserves to have that value served, and that is their expectation. So every marketing team, I think, needs to do what it can to be prepared to deliver that.  

 
21:01 
Dom Hawes 
That's a great observation, and I promised I wasn't going to use the AI phrase today. But it strikes me AI might have a role to play in this because presumably we must be able to use AI to be helping us mass customize or accelerate the delivery of that kind of content.  

 
21:16 
Scott Stockwell 
I think AI gives us speed and scale, which we can't do on our own. But working with AI as a partner, we can do fundamentally better than we have before.  

 
21:28 
Dom Hawes 
Let's just tie Punnett back to theme we outlined right at the start, which was using design thinking and agile to do more with less. Part of that story is about eliminating waste. Part is about increasing velocity and responsiveness, as we've just been talking about.  

 
21:43 
Dom Hawes 
And part is also about people empowerment.  

 
21:46 
Dom Hawes 
So if executives listening to this want to reap the same benefits that Scott has been able know, you're going to need to be able to do some of the same design thinking. And I think Scott's story highlights the importance of cross functional working and blended teams, too. But Scott, the real starting point of everything, and you've mentioned this phrase quite a few times.  

 
22:06 
Dom Hawes 
It's the customer journey, isn't it?  

 
22:08 
Scott Stockwell 
Customer first. What is the expectation? What is the emotional payoff? An exercise that we do in design thinking fairly frequently is based on the five whys. Now, the five whys was put together originally by Taiichi Toyota, who founded the Toyota Motor Company as a way of finding the pain point within a production line failure. If you ask the question why five times, invariably you get to the human reason why something has failed. Equally, if you ask somebody the question why five times they do anything, you'll get to the emotional payoff for them doing it. If that's purchasing something, if that's visiting somewhere, no matter what it is, ask that question why five times? By the fifth time you've got to the why, you will have discovered the emotional payoff for the activity.  

 
23:03 
Scott Stockwell 
If you can serve the emotional payoff as a marketer, that's when you're going to get the best results from your work.  

 
23:09 
Dom Hawes 
So relating that back to Wimbledon then, because you've done your design thinking, you knew you needed a certain number of post types and you were then able to prepare them so that as soon as you got the trigger, you were ready to rock.  

 
23:19 
Scott Stockwell 
Absolutely. It's insight into the fan experience. It's keeping the emotional payoff at the heart. It's endeavouring to design for that. The key things it's really looking to be is are you relevant? Are you timely? Are you delivering to that emotional need? And the fourth element, which is probably the hardest one to get, is are you being resonant? Are you entertaining, are you interesting, are you captivating? Are you sticky? Are you going to be remembered for what you've done?  

 
23:58 
Dom Hawes 
Wow, what a story. Now, like me, you may not have the opportunity to work on something as.  

Glamorous as the Wimbledon tennis tournament, but. There is so much in this to take away. Working backwards, Scott just talked to us. About Taiichi Toyota's analysis method called the five whys.  

 
24:16 
Dom Hawes 
It's one way of doing root cause analysis, and we're going to link a short blog from mind tools on our show notes if you want to find out more. Root cause analysis helps teams drill down to the root cause of a problem rather than just addressing the symptoms. It's particularly effective, in my opinion, for marketing teams to identify the underlying causes.  

 
24:37 
Dom Hawes 
Of issues like poor campaign performance, customer.  

 
24:40 
Dom Hawes 
Dissatisfaction, or even things like inefficiencies in your marketing process. By the way, you might also like to look up the Ishikawa or Fishbone method, too. These methods are all useful. In fact, they're great for other things, too. For example, they're excellent tools for team collaboration because they encourage your team to participate and you get to harness the connected knowledge and experience of all of your team members. It kind of gives you a very structured approach to solving problems, but doing it together. Now, if you're dealing with a particularly complex problem, you might feel like you want to visualize the causes on a whiteboard because it's sometimes easier to understand complex problems that way, particularly for those people who, as we're about to hear, like to learn visually. And I think the best way of.  

 
25:28 
Dom Hawes 
Doing that is using a fishbone diagram.  

 
25:30 
Dom Hawes 
Or Ishikawa's diagram, and you can find out more about that on Google. But Toyota's five wise just seems kind of more team oriented to me. It's a great way of digging out the truth without it feeling too much like work. Now, for me, one of the best.  

 
25:46 
Dom Hawes 
Things about root cause analysis is that it helps you think more systematically so.  

 
25:51 
Dom Hawes 
You don't jump to the wrong conclusions. We all have more biases than we know, and we're going to come on to that now. So hold on to your hat because things are about to get funky. Scott, we talked earlier about biases and.  

 
26:07 
Dom Hawes 
The impact that they can have on two things.  

 
26:10 
Dom Hawes 
Firstly, when we are problem solving and.  

 
26:12 
Dom Hawes 
Looking at things systematically, it gives us.  

 
26:14 
Dom Hawes 
The chance to unearth how those biases.  

 
26:17 
Dom Hawes 
Have impacted the work that we've done.  

 
26:19 
Dom Hawes 
And secondly, when it comes to knowing the customer, that works best when the team isn't able to build that perspective rather than it being one person's opinion in a kind of command and control structure.  

 
26:32 
Dom Hawes 
And of course, that's usually the most senior person. I'm sure many of you out there are familiar with the hippo perspective. The highest paid person's opinion rumoured to have originated with Jeff Bezos's Amazon, I think.  

 
26:46 
Dom Hawes 
Scott, was it the firephone?  

 
26:47 
Scott Stockwell 
It was the firephone.  

 
26:48 
Dom Hawes 
Firephone. Okay, great. They put loads of money into it, poured loads of resource into features that no one felt the customers wanted, but they were rationalized because kind of Jeff wants it. Scott, I know you've got some great insight here and some great thoughts about bias.  

 
27:02 
Scott Stockwell 
Bias definitely creeps in. Unconscious bias obviously is unconscious. We're not aware of it. And anything that we can do that gives us a bit of insight, not just in the way that we are doing the work or the work that we're doing, but actually the way that we do the work. We're normally pretty good at skills, capabilities, competencies. We've quite often got t shaped models that tell know we've got breadth and we've got particular depth. We're less good at understanding how we work. And a tool that I've used a few times with a number of different teams is called the HBDI, or the Herman brain dominance instrument. Now, brain dominance instrument sounds quite frankensteinish, and you might think it needs medical probes. It's not. It's a very long questionnaire that you fill in.  

 
27:53 
Scott Stockwell 
Once you've filled the questionnaire in, it gives you a mapping of the way that you prefer to learn. So we're quite familiar with left brain and right brain, left brain logical, right brain creative. What the HBDI does is gives you four boxes. So left brain at the front are the people who prefer to understand why something is happening. Sort of the chemists that like to do a control test something and know if it's passed or failed. Left brain at the back are the people that like to understand how work is done, the process. If you're someone that likes to write a shopping list before you go shopping, that's probably your preference. Over on the right hand side, at the front are the people that like strategic thinking. A big picture, literally a picture. That's their preferred way of learning.  

 
28:45 
Scott Stockwell 
And then people that are right brained at the back are more about who is involved in the work. So what's the community? What are the resources, who is involved? And the reason that this is interesting is once you have some insight into your own preference, you can equally get that insight across an entire team. I inherited a team of content producers, and as we continued the work, one of the challenges we found was getting metrics and measurements and reporting for the whole team was a bit of a challenge. The tools were there, but there was no one that was the natural person that loved that side of things. And it's a bit of a result of one particular person doing the interviewing. Standard set of questions which you would do with candidates to make sure that you're having an egalitarian interview process.  

 
29:37 
Scott Stockwell 
So the same questions applied to the same people. However, the person that was listening to the responses had an unconscious bias towards people that had a preference the same as themselves. So when the whole team was constructed, it wasn't very balanced. One thing to consider here is, and this is a bit of a mythbuster for me, I made an assumption that certain job roles would have a preference in one of those four quadrants. So developers would probably be very left brained and probably at the rear. The to do list, the Gantt chart people, marketers, strategic thinkers, like to work in pictures. Very creative, no?  

 
30:17 
Dom Hawes 
Wow.  

 
30:18 
Dom Hawes 
Okay.  

 
30:18 
Scott Stockwell 
The job itself is common across all, your learning preference differs. So within marketers, you will have people whose learning preference is any one of those four. Within developers, they will have a learning preference that is, any one of those four. As you are constructing a team, although the work they do will be common, the way that they do that work will be different. And the best teams are the ones that have a balance across all four.  

 
30:47 
Dom Hawes 
And this has a profound implication, because.  

 
30:50 
Dom Hawes 
It'S a learning bias, a profound implication.  

 
30:53 
Dom Hawes 
In how we communicate and what we communicate. We all have a bias. You think, oh, I need to run a campaign for a certain type of person, therefore they will be. And actually, your stereotype of that person may be of a particular style, shape, form, list.  

 
31:10 
Dom Hawes 
But how they learn or how they're.  

 
31:12 
Dom Hawes 
Going to assimilate the information that you.  

 
31:14 
Dom Hawes 
Send them is completely different.  

 
31:15 
Scott Stockwell 
Absolutely. So until I'd done the measurement myself, I am a right brained front thinker. I like pictures. I like to talk about things. That's my preferred communication style. I made incorrectly the assumption that because I like that, everybody likes that. So whenever I did a pitch or a presentation or talk to anybody, that's how I did it. I wasn't aware that I was instantly losing about 75% of my potential audience because I wasn't explaining why were doing something to the people that are left brain at the front. I wasn't necessarily showing the to do list or the Gantt chart for the left brain at the back. People that need that, I wasn't particularly talking about who was involved or how they would work together, which is needed for the people on the right brain at the back.  

 
32:04 
Scott Stockwell 
So because I was talking to my tribe of people that have a brain dominance, like me, 75% of the audience was probably checking their phone and checking out.  

 
32:13 
Dom Hawes 
That's really interesting. You can't see this because, thank God, it's audio only. But as Scott was just talking about that, I was sinking into my chair slightly, having made two quite big presentations yesterday, and the feedback's rolling in today. And some of them absolutely got it because I'm presenting in exactly the style that I like to learn in big concepts, but with detail. So we drill all the way down into detail, and I don't mind conceptual things. I quite like conceptual things. So Scott brought me two presents when he came into the studio today. One of them is very conceptual. It's a new kind of model or theory that Scott's working on, and I'm all over that kind of stuff, but other people aren't. So as the feedback started to come in from yesterday's presentations, and I'm hearing.  

 
32:59 
Dom Hawes 
What do you mean, they didn't like it? It's because probably I just assumed that.  

 
33:05 
Dom Hawes 
They like to get things the way I do.  

 
33:07 
Scott Stockwell 
Absolutely. When you do the HBDI analysis, you tend to have least in common with people that are on your diagonal. So if you are a right front brain preference person, strategy, big pictures, you tend to have the least in common with to do list Gantt chart. You're not so interested in how we're getting it done. You're interested in that vision. You want to get people on board. You want to get people energized. You want to get going, you want to leave it to other people to do the actual. How are we going to do that? And equally, the people that are all about the purpose tend to have less in common with the people that are all about the people and the resources.  

 
33:43 
Dom Hawes 
Is the Herman brain dominance, is it.  

 
33:45 
Dom Hawes 
Hardwired or is there some fluidity?  

 
33:49 
Scott Stockwell 
There is some fluidity. The way that you do the questionnaire, it asks you a number of different questions and it gives you sort of like a diamond shape for your regular set of working. It also gives you a. When you are under stress, does your way of working change? Okay, so when I did mine, I had a preference towards the right brain at the front, which was the big picture. When I was under stress, that went completely off the scale in that direction. And my empathy and how I look at the resources and the people and who's doing it really retracted. So I became, this is where we're going. Come on, everyone. This is great. Without really looking back to see if anyone is with me or who is going to join me.  

 
34:29 
Dom Hawes 
I'm ashamed.  

 
34:30 
Dom Hawes 
This is like a podcast of shame. I know exactly what you're talking about and I feel it acutely. Look, I'm just going to stop beating myself up. So, look, not only does this have profound implications when it comes to communicating, but when you're building your own team, I'm guessing it's not one of the more obvious areas of diversity, but, God, is it important?  

 
34:50 
Scott Stockwell 
It's so important. And I think it's essential that you're not on a team with everyone on your wavelength that works the way that you do, because you're going to end up in a direction that you all agree on, but you've probably left 75% of people behind. We're really good at data and statistics and measurements around skills and competencies. We're less good at codifying how people work the way that they work. And I think if you've got something that gives you that information whenever you're constructing a team, it gives you an additional layer of insight so that the team that you build is the best balanced team to get the work done.  

 
35:30 
Dom Hawes 
I really like this because I've had to do the walk of shame already, twice in the last five minutes. We're going to link the Herman brain dominance instrument on the show notes. I'm going to go do it myself. And we can see how to improve, but it's important in how you communicate, it's important how you build your own team. We in b two B will live in a world of complexity where we have to deal with many different things happening all at once. And one of those that I think we've talked about several times is, and actually not just us, it's all over. Anywhere that b two B is debated. The emergence of buying teams and the amount of influence. There's one pitch that one of our agencies did towards the tail end of last year.  

 
36:11 
Dom Hawes 
They had, I think it was something like six to eight people on the core team that they were selling to. When the actual pitch came on, another 20 people appeared. So there were 28 people attending the pitch. Now, given what we just learned about brain dominance and different ways of learning, or assimilating and aggregating information, bloody hell, that's hard.  

 
36:35 
Scott Stockwell 
It is hard. But if you can divide them all into those almost four archetypes, and if you've thought about that before you've started your pitch, you're pretty much going to be talking in a way that anyone in that sort of large panel is going to prefer. So if you're talking about the purpose and the vision, you're talking about the strategy, you're using information that shares resources and people, and you're sharing some of the practical how you're going to do it. You're going to be speaking to the brain dominance preference of everybody in the room. The thing that you're particularly challenged by as a b two B marketer is can you talk procurement? Can you talk finance? Can you talk compliance? Can you talk. There are so many functional different areas that are probably sitting on that panel that are all influencing that purchase.  

 
37:28 
Scott Stockwell 
As a marketer, you not only need to know how people are thinking and consuming that information, you need to know what they care about. Do they care about the finance, do they care about the delivery? And I think as a marketer you have that double challenge. You have to understand other business areas, competencies, as well as being mindful of how do they consume information.  

 
37:50 
Dom Hawes 
It's really hard. I studied NLP for my sins back in the day, and the Herman brain dominance thing reminds me a little bit of the way that as a practitioner, you're taught to think about whether people are auditory or what their bias is, how they like to consume information, whether it's visual or auditory, or if it's olfactory, you're slightly screwed. If it's business to business, unless you're selling something.  

 
38:16 
Scott Stockwell 
If you can smell that sweet smell of success, then that ultimately, I think the NLP is an interesting angle because NLP really trains you to really look at the person you're communicating with. It makes you very observant of their eye direction, their facial characteristics. What I think the HBDI also does is it makes you mindful of something that you're not automatically mindful of. Going back to that bias if you're constantly thinking, does this person need to know about people? Are they talking about the process? Are they someone that is asking questions about the way that we're going to get the work done reminds you need to be thinking about everyone's needs, not just what feels comfortable and easy for you that you assume everyone else will also like.  

 
39:08 
Dom Hawes 
Yeah, it's a really good observation. The four different types we've got, obviously everything is a spectrum and they're not rigid. But is the understanding that the distribution of those four is broadly equal?  

 
39:18 
Scott Stockwell 
Broadly equal. So broadly, 25% of any room that you're in, the people will be in one of have a leaning towards one. As you say, we all have a balance across them. And when you get the feedback back, you get sort of a diamond shape that shows you. And then it is a little bit like a compass. You tend to have one angle which is a little bit more dominant, hence the name of the method, than the others.  

 
39:41 
Dom Hawes 
And I'm assuming also though, that because not that many people are aware of this, when you go and meet a team in the wild, it's likely that they will have been picked and built by someone with a bias. So you may need to identify what that bias is if you want to communicate well with them beforehand.  

 
39:58 
Scott Stockwell 
Yes. And you start to do it a little bit automatically when someone is talking to you start to be thinking, are they a picture person? Are they strategy? Are they asking about people? Are they about the to do list? Are they the purpose? And you sort of make a little bit of a rough guess on which of the four boxes anyone is going to sit in. That gives you the clue, this is what I need to communicate to them so that they understand where I'm trying to get us to.  

 
40:25 
Dom Hawes 
Just tying that back to our story. Punnett Wimbledon back to the main thrust of today's show earlier on. When you're planning an event like that and you are building the tools ahead of time so that you can build in the agility for that type of event, are you bringing things like the HBDI into your planning process?  

 
40:48 
Scott Stockwell 
I'm bringing as much as I can to get as much insight about the end customer as possible, because the better you can anticipate what is going to get your message across to them in the easiest way. It's very much path of least resistance. What is going to resonate the most and the quickest is the thing that is going to get the traction. So anything that you can do to preempt it, estimate it, guess it, and have it balanced is in your favor.  

 
41:15 
Dom Hawes 
I'm guessing also thinking about outputs like, you know, you're going to need some infographics for those people who like something graphical. You know, you're going to be listicles for those people that like something that.  

 
41:25 
Dom Hawes 
Like the shopping list approach.  

 
41:26 
Dom Hawes 
So you can plan your content types to make sure that you are going as shortcut as possible to the middle of the brain of the people you're trying to communicate with.  

 
41:37 
Scott Stockwell 
Absolutely. If you're thinking about those four preferences for everything you create, if you can bake those in now, some assets just lend themselves very naturally towards if it's a photograph on Instagram, you're not going to have a lot of copy, you're not going to necessarily be talking about people, but you might choose to have people in the photograph, which is going to appeal to the people that need to know about the people. So you have to contextualize the product that you're making and the capacity it gives you with the four different needs that you might find in any one member of your audience.  

 
42:11 
Dom Hawes 
Cool.  

 
42:12 
Dom Hawes 
Well, Scott, my mind is blown every time we meet. Towards the end of the conversation, you tell me something that means I need to go do a little bit more study. Thank you very much indeed for coming in, Scott. I've really enjoyed that and the present you brought me today. When the work on that's finished, I'd love to talk about that again. Isn't Scott amazing?  

 
42:33 
Dom Hawes 
So eloquent, so easy to listen to, and so knowledgeable, too. You know, whenever I meet Scott, he says or does something right at the end of our conversation that leaves me thirsty for more. And today was no exception. Throughout my career, I've come across plenty of individual and team analytical tools. There's Myers Briggs, of course, and colorworks and perfect teams and 16 personalities and more. And we'll put a link to some.  

 
42:59 
Dom Hawes 
Of those on the full show notes.  

 
43:01 
Dom Hawes 
Which you can find at Unicorny Co. UK. But I personally had never come across Herman brain dominance instrument, or HPDI, before, and I instinctively love it, so I looked it up to find a little bit more about it. Now, it's different from Myers Briggs and the other personality based tests, most of which seem to stem from Jung theory on psychological types. HPDI is based on the brain dominance model, which identifies four different modes of thinking, analytical sequential, interpersonal and imaginative. So HPDI focuses on cognitive styles and thinking preferences, while the Myers Briggs type tests focus on personality types and inherent preferences in behaviour and information processing. Now, one isn't better than the other, but I think they are different. And by the way, they both come in for a fair bit of criticism too. So I advise you to do your own research.  

 
44:00 
Dom Hawes 
But for me, at the simplest level, we all know people learn differently. You know, in my book, this instrument points us towards more effective teaching and more effective communication, so I'm going to.  

 
44:13 
Dom Hawes 
Look into it in some more detail.  

 
44:15 
Dom Hawes 
So there you have it, another tour de force from Scott Stockwell. And you know, he's got plenty more up his sleeve too, so I'm sure he'll be back in the studio before too long. But for now, I'm off to do an HPDI test to find out why I failed so miserably at school. See ya. You've been listening to Unicorny, the antidote.  

 
44:39 
Dom Hawes 
To post rationalized business books.  

 
44:41 
Dom Hawes 
If you've enjoyed the show, why not hit follow? We'd love you to rate or review.  

 
44:46 
Dom Hawes 
Us on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, and.  

 
44:49 
Dom Hawes 
It only takes a few seconds, but it means a lot to us. Or if it's easier for you, please recommend us to a friend or post on LinkedIn. Tagging at Unicorny. I'm your host, Dom Hawes. Nicola Fairley is the series producer, Laura Taylor McAllister is the production assistant, Pete Allen is the editor, and Ornella Weston and me, Dom Hawes, are your writers.