Justin Spooner of Unthinkable
Are you imagining the future or re-building the past?
"FEARLESS CREATIVE LEADERSHIP" PODCAST - TRANSCRIPT
Episode 345: Justin Spooner
Here’s a question. Are you re-imagining the future or re-building the past?
I’m Charles Day. I work with creative and innovative companies. I coach and and advise their leaders to help them succeed where leadership has its greatest impact. The intersection of strategy and humanity.
This week’s guest is Justin Spooner. He’s the co-founder of Unthinkable - they describe themselves as a digital strategy and digital transformation company.
“I genuinely think leaders were a little bit surprised about how it was possible to transform and change what seemed like an absolute essence of their business and a way that they work. And I think there was this sort of real sense of, ‘Actually the way that we do our business, the process that we do, the thing that we offer, they're actually secondary, probably to our set of values. You know, our values don't need to change, but the way in which we deliver those to the world can change incredibly quickly. And in some cases, quite often we can do better than what we were doing before.’”
Transformation is a word that gets used a lot. It also gets practiced little. Mostly because it’s hard and expensive and, honestly, in some respects it’s frightening.
It’s why so many companies are so focused on facing the future with policies and practices and initiatives that start with the word ‘back.' Back to work. Back to normal. Back to real life.
The truth about life is that it doesn’t and never has worked backwards. You can’t rewind anything. We measure the past, experience the present, and plan the future.
So if the future you’re planning is based on recreating history, stop for a few moments and think about this.
If I could live the past again, which parts would I want to keep - as in really want to keep - and what would I change?
Then do that.
Here’s Justin Spooner.
Charles: (02:15)
Justin, welcome back to Fearless. Thanks so much for coming on the show.
Justin Spooner: (02:19)
Thanks for having me.
Charles: (02:21)
How has the art and practice of leadership changed, do you think, as a result of what we've lived through for the last two years?
Justin Spooner: (02:28)
Well, I think probably the first thing to note is the sort of surprise that leaders, I think, felt when they realized what was possible in the last two years. It started with feeling like everything was impossible, and it was the worst possible nightmare, and businesses were slipping away, and then I think there was a realization that people are unbelievably malleable and resourceful. And not only that, they could do things quite often without you having to tell them to do anything, they could find solutions of their own and in their groups.
I genuinely think leaders were a little bit surprised about how it was possible to transform and change what seemed like an absolute essence of their business and a way that they work. And I think there was this sort of real sense of, “Actually the way that we do our business, the process that we do, the thing that we offer, they're actually secondary, probably to our set of values. You know, our values don't need to change, but the way in which we deliver those to the world can change incredibly quickly. And in some cases, quite often we can do better than what we were doing before.”
Charles: (03:44)
And how has that sense of possibility or that realization of possibility changed your leadership?
Justin Spooner: (03:49)
I think that to bring it into the kind of my lived experience of the last couple of years, just before the pandemic, you know, we were a boutique small, very focused agency delivering digital strategies. And it was mostly always the directors doing that, right? So we would be like directors engaging with senior teams, talking about the future of the business. When the pandemic came along, and this is going to sound awful, we became like beneficiaries of this crisis, right? Our work is about digital and everyone wanted to think about digital all actually in a rush, in a real rush.
So, you know, we got all kinds of interesting clients coming to us saying, "Can you do something, but can you help us think this through in the next two months or three months?" And this quickly expanded into, "Can you bring a team to help deliver this new way of working that we are imagining in four months?" And so on and so forth. And it built and built and built. So quickly we went from a micro team of effectively sort of strategy specialists into a much broader multidisciplinary team of about 30 odd people in no time at all. And of course, the thing that's hilarious about that is that there was no plan for us to do that. That is not what the plan was. In fact, I don’t know what the plan was now. I've forgotten what the original plan was. This is where we ended up.
So one of the things that I had to change almost instantly was, I had to change my mindset from, ‘It's all about me and the directors and our cleverness,’ to ‘It's all about us and it's all about the way in which we interrelate, and it's about the ways in which we as this new team can still feel like we're Unthinkable, even though we're now 30 odd people.’ Hilariously some of the people that are working with us now who are absolutely at the center of our team, I haven't physically met. And they're instrumental to my daily existence. And so the nature of the business, for me, and the nature of leadership became about, instead of thinking almost entirely about the client, I was as much thinking about us and our team and our processes. And in that period of time, over the last two years, we've invented five, six, seven new processes, things that we do for clients that we simply never did before and now feel like absolutely core parts of our DNA.
Charles: (06:13)
So, given the dramatic change of the nature of both of your business and your relationships with your staff, if we were to roll the clock forward a year from now, and if you were to ask the people that work for you, “What was it like to work for Justin in 2022?”, what would you want them to say?
Justin Spooner: (06:32)
Well, I'm quite lucky in that they're actually saying it to me in the present, but let's imagine that they're also going to still say it in the future. The first thing to note is I've become addicted to having a team. I love having a team, right? I love that my day is mostly comprised of having conversations with really, really brilliant people, right? So that's the main thing, it's made my life better, so tick. The second thing is, what people are saying to me now, and I hope that they'll be saying to me in the future is, "We really loved being part of this thing,” you know? “Yes, I'm a contractor. Yes, I've got other things in my life, but I really love this bit of what I do."
I got a message today from someone that works with us, just saying, "You've got incredibly good taste in people." And I'm taking that one to the grave. It's like, yeah, because that obsession with choosing people and plugging them into a culture, for me, has now become the thing. I don't know if you've read Ed Catmull's book yet, Creativity Inc.?
Charles: (07:33)
About Pixar?
Justin Spooner: (07:35)
About Pixar and Disney.
I was doing an audio book over the summer and for me, his focus on people rather than process, it was like my words coming out of his mouth, you know. I was thinking, “Oh, you're saying it, you're just saying it exactly like I would say. Well done, that's brilliant.” This thing of like, we've occasionally obsessed about whether having a sort of clear process that you can describe is the thing, it's not the thing. The thing is that people will work out the process. So basically got to get the people right.
And I think one of the things that I'm hearing from our team and I really hope is what they value, is this sense that there is a space for risk, there is a space for reinvention, there's always a space to say, “Can't we do it this other way instead of the way that we were doing it?” And that there is also real space to not be right all the time. Because one of the things about digital and digital strategy and transformation is it's unbelievably complicated or complex. It can't be right all the time, you just can't. So in fact, what you are is wrong a lot of the time until you are right. And then when you are right, you know, you found that solution that's brilliant, that works for the client, works for their culture. But that might take months and months of head scratching, and looking at each other, and pondering, and wondering what on earth going on, and, “Why does this all feel so vague?”
And I really hope that the team will be saying, “You gave us a space like no other employer did to think, you know, you gave us time and you didn't say, ‘Oh, I just need… I need low hanging fruit.’” No such thing as low hanging fruit. There are some fruit and we're going to have to work out how to get the fruit, and the best ones are a bit higher up.
Charles: (09:27)
So, given that you've already established that reality, or given that you've already established that environment, what do you worry about might get in the way of continuing that over the next year? I mean, you said you haven't met with everybody that works for you for instance. What do you think might get in the way?
Justin Spooner: (09:43)
Well, the first thing to sort out that issue is we're hoping to have a Christmas party, which even just the saying out loud in this current environment almost feels illegal. The idea of us actually meeting almost brings a tear to my eye. I think the second thing is the concept of energy, probably. I think an energy comes. You know that thing you get where you are hanging out with your mates and you are energized by them, by their presence. Well, I've gotten a feeling that the best possible working experience is where you are energized by each other.
And the thing that I am obsessed with trying to maintain is that. And the thing that I fear most is the loss of that, the idea that I might become, in the future, bogged down and that we end up in a sort of more corporate experience. That, oh my God, hierarchy is really crept in, and have we've scaled up to such a sense that we've lost the freedoms that I was just describing a minute ago, and that we've lost the ability to be able to just cut across, oh, that person should speak to that person. There's no such thing as like, oh, this team doesn't really speak to that team, you know. I want that energy more than anything.
And I think the energy, what it fuels is ideas exchange. So the thing that I care about the most is whether ideas can be exchanged and built upon. And that is the thing therefore, that I fear the most in its loss.
Charles: (11:07)
And do you think you'll have any kind of return to office? I mean, I know you've got a different kind of models, so it's less relevant for you. But how will you think about putting together the team in a physical dynamic on a regular basis next year?
Justin Spooner: (11:22)
Yeah, I think that's interesting. So, got two directors and an associate director, and I think we've all got completely different perspectives on how much physical time we should spend with each other. And I've got a weird personality disorder that seems to be something like this. I'm a hermit that loves being with people. So it turns out that being in my shed and engaging with 20, 30, 40 people a day is just perfection for me, right? But it turns out that Matthew and Kathy, you know, that's not their thing, that's my thing, right? So what we've probably got to do, first off, is find an accommodation that works for all of us so that we can have moments of togetherness and moments of separateness.
But the thing that I've noticed over the last period is, I couldn't get the work done if I still had to go on trains and meeting rooms. I just couldn't get the work done. I'm back to back doing stuff all day, which I really like, and I love the context switching. But, you know that idea of, oh, let's get 20 people together to think about an idea, if I wanted to do that in a room, it would take like three weeks to organize, it would take like a Herculean effort to get everyone in the same place at the same time. And there's a real possibility that we'd get less good thinking out of it. For all of the reasons to do with, you know, the convenience and the way that that moment is fitted into people's lives.
I'm finding that the workshops that we are doing with people, honestly, from all over the world, in different companies coming together for moments, are really, really effective. And just, I cannot think of a way of physically doing those things. So my sense is it's like, I really like the idea of small group get-togethers for longer... So like, let's do a whole day thinking about that thing in a small group, and there's absolutely no doubt you get more done like that. And then let's have larger groups generally in the digital realm, but weirdly, in much smaller units of time. So we do large group workshops that have sort of generally only 90 minutes long, and then we do half-day and four-day sessions with tiny sort of fours and fives and six, where you can get a lot done.
Charles: (13:32)
You spent a lot of time, both in and around the education system. And obviously education has been affected massively by this. What do you think are going to be the lasting impacts or implications for education?
Justin Spooner: (13:44)
Oh my goodness. It's probably a podcast unto itself, but I'll see if I can pick out some highlights. The first thing to know is that a lot of parents have gone through the ringer. They didn't know huge amount about digital technology and the education of their kids. Then they knew a lot. The pandemic suddenly was upon them, their kids were over there, quite often stealing their laptops. They were on Teams. They could see all of this stuff going on in front of their eyes. And do you know what happened? It put a lot of parents off.
Now, what was interesting is, schools took, I would say, radically two different sorts of approach. One was, let's create really, really brilliantly designed self-paced learning experiences that each individual learner can go through and keep them busy all day. What did that look like to a parent? It looked like a kid sitting at a screen, not seeing anyone, no sign of a teacher, tapping away and moving the mouse around, right? It didn't look like what they thought education should be. The teachers that were in those schools thought they were hitting a breakthrough. They thought, “Oh my goodness, look at the way we've pivoted. This is amazing.” That actually, parents rejected it quite quickly, "I don't like it. This is not what I think school should be about."
Other schools desperately try to create a kind of mirror of what the physical experience was like, which is, there's a teacher at the center, we're all in it in a highly synchronized way. Listen to the teacher, don't listen to each other, no talking, thank you very much. And you know what? That didn't work very well either, because you try and keep the attention of a kid who's sitting there in silence on their own, in their own room, while some teacher is a little voice in their speaker. That's not a good thing either. So both of these things were quite off-putting. So what it meant was that there was a lot of experimentation, but the net result of a lot of that experimentation was parents thinking, “Ooh, I feel iffy now about the way digital technology works in education.”
So now, obviously we're all in different places in relation to the pandemic now. But this thing that can be said, I think, is that schools and teachers are consolidating what they learn from that period and trying to imagine a more resilient school system and more resilient educational experience that has technology in it, but not in an overwhelming way. And the way that I think that that sort of plays itself out is, instead of technology as replacing teacher, it's technology giving the teacher superpowers, it's technology giving the students superpowers. In other words, it's completely ingrained in the humanness of the experience of learning rather than just facilitated by technology, or taken over, or framed by technology. And I think that's where schools are at. They’ve gone through a bit of an arc on this, and they're like, "There's a mature version of this that we are still seeking to find, but we've got a sense of it now. A hint."
Charles: (16:53)
I want to thank you for coming on again today. I think that you and your business are so perfectly positioned to flex, with the enormous agility into whatever 2022 and beyond looks like. And I think that you guys will actually act as a reference point for a lot of my own thinking and observation about where the world is going, and how fast and well it has to adapt. And I think the balance between the human and the digital world is obviously going to be an ongoing one. And so it'll be really interesting to see how you navigate it and what you learned from that. Thanks so much for coming on.
Justin Spooner: (17:22)
Thanks for inviting me. It's been great.
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