Clym Stock-Williams on helping people make decisions

[00:00:00] Sarah Abramson: Speak to the Human is a podcast that explores how we build connections with people in their professional work. It's about the human experience at work and about how to foster that connection and belonging to support people and their organizations to flourish. I'm your host, Sarah Abramson, and I'm looking forward to you joining me in hearing from our brilliant guests.

[00:00:25] In this episode, I'm joined by Clym Stock-Williams, Head of Operational Excellence within the Offshore Wind Division at the European Energy Company, Vattenfall. Our conversation focuses on decision-making. Clym brings incisive and innovative thinking to the design of systems which support decision making in organizations.

[00:00:43] He combines engineering and computer science approaches with thinking about real human behaviour and what people actually do. This is a wide ranging conversation, touching on how decisions get made. What operational excellence means, how to align systems with [00:01:00] strategy and how to create value mapping by working backwards from the outcomes you're trying to achieve.

[00:01:06] Clym shares his fascination with behavioural science and how he's been using it with his teams and in his work. Clym is expressing his own views rather than representing the position of Vattenfall. I hope you enjoy the conversation and please do like, share and subscribe to the podcast. Clym it is great to have you joining me in this episode.

[00:01:26] I heard you speaking recently at a conference on operational excellence and really enjoyed your way of thinking, expressing yourself, your way of kinda approaching problems all anchored on people and how they actually think and behave. So I'm really looking forward to exploring that together in this episode.

[00:01:45] Welcome to the podcast.

[00:01:47] Clym Stock-Williams: Well, thanks very much, Sarah. It's uh, yeah, a real honor to be on my first ever podcast. And, uh, looking forward to the conversation.

[00:01:54] Sarah Abramson: Excellent. Well, it'd be great to start with, um, hearing a little bit about the work that you do [00:02:00] and what led you into it.

[00:02:01] Clym Stock-Williams: Of course. Yeah. Um, my role is currently is head of operational excellence at Vattenfall

[00:02:06] Uh, Vattenfall is the Swedish State electricity and heat company, and I've spent my entire career in energy. But I'd say how I got there has been a bit of a winding road. So, uh, if you bear with me, maybe I'll share some of that journey. Absolutely. So I started, I studied physics originally, uh, and I joined Eon or Aon, which is the German, uh, energy giant, straight outta university on the graduate scheme.

[00:02:33] Went into their engineering and science consultancy business, and my job was to solve problems basically for people. So very technical. I was initially thrown into working on wave and title energy, which people thought was going to be the next big thing back then. Um, and actually with hindsight, that was an incredible way to start.

[00:02:52] I mean, I've been very lucky in my career, introduced me to program management. I, I had to actually define what are the things I needed to [00:03:00] research, what are the services I needed to provide. Um, also allowed me to start from scratch. And if I'd gone straight into wind energy, for example, they'd established a lot of the ways of working already.

[00:03:11] So maybe I wouldn't have developed such a critical mindset towards how things are done. Um, and, and, uh, yeah, and, and that's, that's really helped me I think, throughout my career in some ways, to do things that are, are new and a bit different and, and add value in, in different ways, doing stuff that honestly is often quite obvious.

[00:03:32] But people have never dared to dared to try before perhaps. So yeah, after, after Marine Energy didn't take off in the way that was expected, I, I sort of moved my way into wind energy. I realized what I was doing was mostly around statistics and sort of started, I became a manager back in 2012, which is also relevant and set up a data science team and got into decision support software.

[00:03:57] And so not just [00:04:00] answering people's technical questions, but building software that helped them answer them themselves. And I'd say my biggest project back then was, was creating a software for optimizing layouts of wind farms. So you've got giant patch of sea or land, and the question is, how many turbines do you put? Which ones where? Massive trade-offs. And at the time we had different teams all doing different parts of that process. You'd have a civil engineering team saying, well, if you put a turbine here, it's gonna be super expensive or impossible. You'd have a environmental team that was looking, oh, if you put them in this order then looking from this vantage point on the coast, they'll never allow that because it destroys a great viewpoint. And then a electrical team that said, put them as close together as possible to minimize the energy losses. And a wind to energy team that said, put them as far apart as possible so they stopped stealing wind from each other and, and it was this sort of [00:05:00] merry-go-round of, you know, everyone throws their work over the fence and when the music stops, then you've gotta relay out.

[00:05:05] And it was a very sensible way of doing it when you don't have decision support software. And actually, honestly, what we did is a lot of the value came from simply allowing those different groups of experts to talk to each other and understand their different impacts on the design choices. There was some additional benefits from running the optimization program, but I think the biggest part of the work was really pulling up together all those people and standardizing their work and allowing it to be fed into a computer system that displayed those results to people.

[00:05:38] So that, that sort of introduction to decision support, it really brought me out of my technical, technical only mindset, made me realize that process is essential. If you don't understand the workflow that software is trying to sit into, then no one's ever going to use your software.

[00:05:54] Sarah Abramson: Yeah.

[00:05:55] Clym Stock-Williams: So that, that really, you know, brought me into the process side of things.

[00:05:59] I [00:06:00] moved to the Netherlands in 2016, so yeah, a big personal move. Uh, but also I went and joined a research institute, which gave me basically freedom to work on any topic. So as long as I could find someone to fund it. So I did more decision support stuff, for example, daily maintenance decisions. And, and I, this also made me realize that actually how humans make decisions, how people make decisions is, is even more important than the process they go through in a way.

[00:06:32] Sarah Abramson: Mm-hmm. '

[00:06:33] Clym Stock-Williams: cause the question is what are they balancing? What are they trading off? What are they deciding on? It's not always reducible to a single number with a euro or pound sign in front of it. So yeah, this people part this that's really got me into, you know, how do businesses make decisions and what are the process around business decisions.

[00:06:53] I joined Vattenfall 2021 to set up a team to build a sort of data and powered decision [00:07:00] making culture within our offshore wind division. Um, and now I'm responsible for, yeah, the operational excellence, which is even more than just how data enables decisions, but also processes and incentives in general and people, how all those things combine to make a business efficient and effective.

[00:07:18] That's great. But yeah, so that's the journey I've been through.

[00:07:21] Sarah Abramson: Yeah.

[00:07:23] Clym Stock-Williams: It's a bit crazy.

[00:07:24] Sarah Abramson: Yeah, no, not at all. Because what I like there is that you've pulled together different strands and, uh, you struck me straight away just listening to you, you were on a panel discussion, uh, that you bring different ways of thinking to whatever problem you've got in front of you and that, that you were talking about in your first job without, um, developing the critical thinking skills and then bringing the research in.

[00:07:47] It seems that it's given you a much more kind of, yeah. Critical thinking approach to the work that you're doing that's incredibly valuable because you're not stuck in a particular mindset. You're kind of [00:08:00] willing to question yourself and to think a bit differently and to search for different ways that you might approach a problem.

[00:08:06] Clym Stock-Williams: Yeah, I, I do my best. The problem is, once you value critical thinking, you realize that often you fall into the trap of. Failing to live up to your own expectations.

[00:08:15] Sarah Abramson: Well, we probably all do that in all sorts of ways every day.

[00:08:18] Clym Stock-Williams: Absolutely. But, but I have to say that modeling approach and, you know, physics, statistics, this sort of computer science, they do force you to structure and model things and come up with a reason to be doing what you're doing.

[00:08:31] Sarah Abramson: Yes.

[00:08:31] Clym Stock-Williams: And the other thing I say to people as well is trying to teach computers how to solve problems and to, and just simply programming right? If something goes wrong and it doesn't do what you expect, it's, it's normally your fault. Right. And, and so this mirror that you know, that maybe if all you've done is, is worked with people, I think it's quite easy to find excuses for why things aren't working.

[00:08:56] Mm. Uh, or to fail to understand why [00:09:00] things work despite what you did rather than because of it.

[00:09:02] Sarah Abramson: Mm.

[00:09:03] Clym Stock-Williams: You know, with a computer, there's no. Person inside interpreting what you said, you have to explain it in exactly the way that the computer will listen to you. Mm-hmm. So going back to your, speak to the human title of this podcast and speak to the computer, right.

[00:09:17] You, you learn the way that's effective, the ways that make it effective and efficient to Yeah. Reuse that phrase. Uh, and with people it's different, of course, but that's what I'm, I'm really on this sort of recent, more recent journey of trying to, to understand more deeply.

[00:09:33] Sarah Abramson: So combining those two different angles on things of the, the sort of physics, computer science kind of thinking and then having to bring in the, the messier human bit.

[00:09:48] So it seems like a really interesting thread. But yeah, I mean, I'd like to ask you more about the decision support work and, and what you've learned about how good decisions get made and how you've [00:10:00] developed ways to kind of approach. Decision supports with those two strands. So it's the, it's the systems and processes, but it's also bringing in how humans think and what actually happens in the messy human world.

[00:10:12] Clym Stock-Williams: It's such a great question. I remember a few years ago I drew this sort of almost process flow chart for how to get value from a dashboard. As I was trying to explain, I think to an engineering team why the work doesn't stop once there's a dashboard up and running. And I think it went something like this.

[00:10:31] It's sort of objects and arrows, right? So it starts with data on the, on the left, and then you get some analysis and that results in some metrics, some numbers which have more information, content for the job at hand. And then through the magic of data engineering and it, then you end up with some pixels on a screen and then through our eyes that transmits certain information to our brain.

[00:10:55] And then through processing in the brain, we decide what actions to take [00:11:00] and then. Well value hopefully comes from the results of those actions. And if you don't, well, the key point I was trying to make, I think, was around design, which is design flows in the opposite direction to the way time flows. So if you want to design a system, map it in order of what happens, in what order, but then design from right to left.

[00:11:25] Mm. They start with what value you want to create and work backwards from there. What actions do you wanna take? What information does the person need in order to make choices? What pixels would actually make that information stand out to a person? Uh, so, so that was, that's a great way to, I mean, you can talk about any part of that that interests you.

[00:11:45] I mean, I mean, you talk about messiness and I love that. Um, there's a guy on, an American guy called John Cutler always says something about mess. And I basically don't, don't try and reduce the mess. The mess is always there. The mess is what makes the [00:12:00] world interesting and what, what makes you get the results you want.

[00:12:03] So it's, it's not about reductionism what I do. Yeah. It's just trying to sense, making that, trying to understand enough to be able to do something hopefully that's effective and, and provide a basis for learning.

[00:12:14] Sarah Abramson: Well, well let's start there because that's the bit, uh, that's the end of the scale that you've talked about, the, the design from that end of the spectrum, back from the

[00:12:22] Clym Stock-Williams: value value sides.

[00:12:23] Sarah Abramson: Yeah. I, I really love that way of describing it. But, but the, I guess you have moved from something where it's programmable, it's, you can understand it in pixels or in bites or in binary or whatever to, you know, it makes sense in the brain of a physicist to something that is, that is, that is the human brain.

[00:12:43] So if you're starting at the human brain end of things, how do you get hold of that? How do you, given that most people, you know, everyone's different. People are gonna think in different ways. How do you try to get to grips with. That end of things to [00:13:00] design from there and think about maybe the decision that people are making or, or that human part of the puzzle.

[00:13:07] Clym Stock-Williams: It's possibly an extremely deep question and one that I can't answer. Um, I think, well there's, there's two ways one could go about this. One is that, yes, everybody thinks differently and has comfort zones or, or habits, um, ways of approaching problem solving. And if you try to design something that works for either one person or tries to accommodate all of that variety, I'd have never built a piece of software in my life.

[00:13:42] The art of designing something like a product is, is always to say, well, how do you solve most of the problems for most of the people? And, and when it comes to user interface design or you know, dashboard design or whatever, there are some general principles. Of [00:14:00] course there are cultural differences, I'm sure, in terms of right to left and top to bottom.

[00:14:05] And you know, what order people prioritize information. But in, in a business, we are very much into processes, right? And, you know, everything must go in a good order and we must be able to lay things out. And then the decision, you've generally got that decision making protocol in place, right? You've got a, a situation which demands a decision.

[00:14:27] Uh, you evaluate what options you have available, you determine how effective each of those options is likely to be given the situation and you're in and given your objectives, whatever the values are, you're trying to maximize your money or environmental impact or safety or whatever. Uh, and then you make a choice, or someone makes a choice or a choice.

[00:14:48] Yeah. Hopefully someone makes a. Based on that information available. And so I think the big differences when I was building decision support software was how certain is the [00:15:00] information you're using and how many options do you have? And how complicated is it to evaluate the value of each of those options?

[00:15:08] And that really points you into a different direction for what solution methods you use, but also how you present the information, how long you need you're gonna take to make the decision. So wouldn't say this one answer fits all there?

[00:15:21] Sarah Abramson: No, of course. Hopefully I've started to very difficult and unfair question to throw at you.

[00:15:25] Um, I, I'm just fascinated by it. And I think it leads me to a further question, which is, are you trying to make that decision simple for the person making it, or, and there might not be a single answer to this, it might depend on the situation, or are you trying to, uh, reveal nuance? You know, it, it feels like at the moment in the world.

[00:15:50] There's a bit of a death of nuance generally out there. Politics, whatever. I would agree. Yes. Uh, are you trying [00:16:00] to help people to think through some of the complexity and then give them an opportunity to discuss that even more at a, a, a human to human level? Yeah. So you're feeding into discussions. I, I guess probably all of these things can be true in different circumstances.

[00:16:17] Clym Stock-Williams: Yeah. It depends on the type of business problem. So when I was working on daily maintenance optimization, I mean, you want to be making that decision relatively fast. Mm-hmm. And the person's got, it's a very complicated decision to optimize, uh, your maintenance choices for revenue. Right. Um, what I think, and without going into the details of it, it's, it's all based on your weather conditions.

[00:16:44] Mm-hmm. The weather affects how much energy and how much revenue you get. There's market conditions as well. And the weather affects how likely it is you're gonna be able to even get onto the winter turbine or sail out in the first place. Mm-hmm. Right? If you're looking about offshore wind. So [00:17:00] there's a vast amount of statistical uncertainty, which you can try and handle in the background, but no person is capable of thinking through these things.

[00:17:08] That's why you need the talk, why you need the computer. So all of my effort in that case made into to work with the people to figure out what was necessary for them to take a decision and hide everything else underneath. And once they'd made a choice of maybe one option, basically they could then go into more details and have a look at it, look at exactly what's happening throughout the day, for example.

[00:17:33] So I think in user interface design, they call it progressive disclosure. So basically allow people to discover information when they need it, not throw everything at them.

[00:17:42] Sarah Abramson: Love that

[00:17:42] Clym Stock-Williams: at the beginning and, and also I like, you know. If you can make it more flexible such that people can follow their own mental pathways.

[00:17:52] So if you don't say, after this stage you can only ask about these things and then you can only ask about these things. Right? And then they have to play a game of guess [00:18:00] what the designer had in mind to find out what they want to know. It's better if there are multiple pathways and people can choose their own, uh, adventure.

[00:18:07] Sarah Abramson: Yeah.

[00:18:08] Clym Stock-Williams: But in terms of discussions, I think there are good places for discussions, but it depends on the types of decisions. And actually now with the hindsight of spending much, many more years working in a wind farm operator, there's the daily decisions which just have to be taken. You know, you have to make those choices.

[00:18:25] 'cause there's a lot depends on them. There's a sort of organization that needs to be done once you've taken that decision. So yeah. Uh, more information is not helpful, but maybe once a week or once a day, they could spend more time doing a retro retrospective. Mm-hmm. Right. Looking back at the quality of the decision making.

[00:18:46] What didn't I know that I would've liked to have known was it knowable. So also supporting those discussions builds a learning organization that I'm very much in favor of these days.

[00:18:56] Sarah Abramson: Mm, love it. That that was a very interesting parallel in what [00:19:00] you were talking about with the simpler end there, where you wanna make decisions easier.

[00:19:04] What did you call it? Opera, operational.

[00:19:06] Clym Stock-Williams: Oh, operational decisions. Right. Yeah. I did don't think I've called it that, but operational decisions, the ones that you need to make, uh, within a quite a small amount of time and you don't want to overload the information. Yeah,

[00:19:17] Sarah Abramson: it seems like there's a nice parallel there to me with my brain for the things that, the worlds that I inhabit and know about.

[00:19:24] There's a, there's a very similar frame for how you might approach marketing or L&D. So if you're trying to help people discover things, so with marketing, you might be wanting people to make a decision that they recognize meets their need. By removing friction and by making that simple, by identifying to them that you are gonna help them, but to make that discovery of deeper information available to them if they want it in order to support a more complex decision or

[00:19:58] Clym Stock-Williams: yes.

[00:19:59] Sarah Abramson: You know, [00:20:00] uh, I need further information before I am sure that this is what I want to do. Um, so yeah, that just strikes me as a yeah, sort of interesting.

[00:20:07] Clym Stock-Williams: Certainly in learning and development.

[00:20:09] Sarah Abramson: Yeah,

[00:20:10] Clym Stock-Williams: which is something I do have, I've been doing some training, uh, this past couple of years on continuous improvement and getting a little bit into that sort of adult learning environment and learning as I go, as usual.

[00:20:23] Um, but really allowing self-discovery and point of need learning is, as I understand it, the thing that's typically. You know, seen as good practice these days. Yeah. Yes. And uh, it's a similar principle. Definitely. Yeah.

[00:20:37] Sarah Abramson: So you're not trying to bombard people with information for the sake of, you should know this, you should know all of it.

[00:20:42] Here's the entire policy. No, you must know it. It's more like you've got a question, here's an easy way to answer it. And there's more information if you need to access it. Yeah. Here's,

[00:20:50] Clym Stock-Williams: it's the same advice given to management consultants, right? We start with the conclusions and then Yeah. The amount of information necessary to show you've done your work.

[00:20:58] They don't need to [00:21:00] see all of the detail of the Excel spreadsheets and the whatever analysis you've come up with.

[00:21:04] Sarah Abramson: Yeah. Yes.

[00:21:05] Clym Stock-Williams: Yeah.

[00:21:06] Sarah Abramson: Brilliant.

[00:21:07] Clym Stock-Williams: Talk the audience.

[00:21:09] Sarah Abramson: Absolutely. Yeah, exactly. So I, we could talk to you about more broadly about operational excellence and I guess what that term means to you and how you've shaped your role towards it.

[00:21:22] Clym Stock-Williams: Yeah, absolutely. What I would say to start with is that I highly recommend, uh, there's a book by Joseph Paris on this called State of Readiness and nothing I'm gonna say is gonna disagree with him. It is my personal, my personal sort of view on what's important, or at least what's important where I am.

[00:21:39] So operational excellence from me is about a state of alignment between all aspects of how a business works and its strategy. And the question is, what are those aspects of a business that are important? How can we tell if they're in alignment or not? [00:22:00] And if the strategy changes and needs to change, IE desire, you want to change the strategy 'cause you see an opportunity or the outside environment requires you to change your strategy.

[00:22:12] Is the organization ready, able and willing to make that adjustments necessary to deliver on a new strategy? And I have a, a big analogy for this. If, if you are willing Yes. Humor me. Yes, please. Okay. So, so I explain it in terms of a steam ship company from around 1900, let's say. So imagine that you are the owner of a steam ship company.

[00:22:42] You have a strategy for your company, which is you want to arbitrage goods across the Atlantic, between Europe, north America, and South America. So you're gonna sail in a sort of triangle and buy and sell goods at each port. Okay? First thing you need is the asset. That's the first aspect of the company and the asset, the, [00:23:00] the vessel itself.

[00:23:01] If you buy a vessel that won't go over the ocean or will, you know, not be able to cope with the storms, you can't deliver on your strategy, that's the first opportunity for alignment or misalignment. Underneath that you have the people, the people that you recruit. And I would focus now on the chef or the chief cook on the, on the vessel.

[00:23:23] So you could hire someone fresh out of culinary school, no experience. You could hire the former chef to the president of France. There's going to be a massive difference in the quality of food, the variety of food, uh, the confidence of that person, but also the expectations of that person. Which leads me onto the next, uh, structural aspect, which is incentives.

[00:23:50] And normally people talk about people processing technology. I add incentives in the middle. Incentives. I don't necessarily mean money. What I mean [00:24:00] as an example is imagine you took this chief cook and you have two options in front of you. One is you go to the market, you buy some. Big bags of potatoes and you dump it on them and you say, that's what you've got.

[00:24:13] Uh, good luck. Make all of the meals. Or you just give them money and you say, go out and buy whatever you need for the voyage. How that still, that's an alignment with the person that you chose for the chef, because the experienced chef would obviously prefer the second option. They, they'd be able to calculate, you know, how many people, how many, uh, how many calories, how are we going to avoid scurvy, you know, all of this stuff that know all the ingredients, have a bunch of recipes available.

[00:24:47] The person out of culinary school probably want something in the middle. They probably want more structure, more guidance. Next one was processes. Now all vessels have ship bells, [00:25:00] right? So they have standardized processes. For example, how much of the crew and passengers and how often do they come for meals?

[00:25:09] If you didn't have that, it would be chaos. Anybody coming to the kitchen whenever they fancy to pick up some food. So if you have the processes in place and people follow the processes, that makes life easier for the chef to deliver the right number of meals at the right time, the right content, satisfying everyone's needs.

[00:25:31] The last one, of course, technology, you know, is, is the cool room big enough to keep the meat and whatever produce cooled for the period is the machines used to cut up the, are they right next to the kitchen or the other end of the ship? Are they in good shape? You know, all the standard things that we talk about with technology, do we know how to maintain them?

[00:25:54] All of this kind of stuff. So what you can see is that all of these things can be [00:26:00] more or less aligned with each other. These aspects, technology, processes, incentives, people, assets, strategy. Every change in any one of those aspects changes what is in alignment in the other aspects.

[00:26:14] Sarah Abramson: Mm-hmm.

[00:26:15] Clym Stock-Williams: So operational excellence for me is about creating a self-aligning system in the organization where people can tell that something is not working together and they can figure out what to shift to bring those things back into alignment

[00:26:32] Sarah Abramson: or

[00:26:32] Clym Stock-Williams: closer to alignment.

[00:26:34] Let's put it like that. For this to happen, you need information flow. And this is the classic problem you get when businesses scale over 60 to a hundred people, let's say. Right? So before everyone knew what everyone else was doing, you know you're all in the same building. If something needs doing, people notice it and they run to it and they get on with it.

[00:26:56] When you scale and people don't know how, what everyone else is [00:27:00] doing, someone sees a problem and before long you've got five different solutions to the same problem. Everyone with their own preferred workaround, solution. And that's how unnecessary complexity grows in the organization. So the, to try and counteract that, and you need structures and information flow in place so that people know is what I'm doing or about to do, aligned with the current strategy and all the other aspects of the organization that are in place.

[00:27:33] This is easy for me to say, hard to achieve, but I can give some examples.

[00:27:37] Sarah Abramson: That's brilliant. Yeah. I mean, yes, please go ahead. And I, I, I, I love that analogy. It was, it was really helpful to hear that, and I'm glad that you brought that up about size because I was, my brain was wearing with kind of how context dependent it is to have the agility to be able to respond and shape, uh, the way that operations are set up so that they do [00:28:00] respond to the strategy and

[00:28:02] Clym Stock-Williams: in

[00:28:03] Sarah Abramson: a tiny organization, that's a different thing from in a multinational.

[00:28:08] Clym Stock-Williams: Absolutely. Yeah. That's why you can implement sort of processes too early.

[00:28:11] Sarah Abramson: Right.

[00:28:12] Clym Stock-Williams: I've never worked in a startup as such, although I've seen startup e environments and Yeah. You don't need all the gubbins that arises when you are running a giant organization.

[00:28:25] Sarah Abramson: I, I have worked in startups and it would be an yeah, absolute pain to have those. You did your, what placed your strengths is your ability to respond. Yeah.

[00:28:34] Clym Stock-Williams: And so agility at scale, which is, you know, the, the various ways that people have invented to try and create or maintain agility at scale. But it's really about coming back to that feeling that you are in a startup and when you move, you are moving in a direction aligned with the rest of the organization.

[00:28:53] The worst thing that can happen and why, you know, they say big companies are often stationary and tank oil [00:29:00] tankers and you know, not creative, not innovative. All of those things that are said about big companies, it's generally 'cause people are questioning themselves. Am I who's gonna stop me if I do this?

[00:29:13] Sarah Abramson: Yeah.

[00:29:14] Clym Stock-Williams: Who's going to complain?

[00:29:15] Sarah Abramson: Yes.

[00:29:16] Clym Stock-Williams: You know, am I gonna get rewarded for it? Sure. But also it's actually the fear part generally more than the creativity part. That's, that's the problem.

[00:29:23] Sarah Abramson: Yeah.

[00:29:23] Clym Stock-Williams: Am I, am I gonna get told off for taking initiative? And that's what we want to try to enable is people to have that knowledge.

[00:29:33] Where's there a constraint and where's it, okay.

[00:29:36] Sarah Abramson: Right. So I mean, it would be great to hear you. You said you've got some examples and that would be great. But also to help us think about how it can work well in larger organizations that are at risk of being that kind of big dinosaur that's difficult to.

[00:29:52] Difficult to move.

[00:29:53] Clym Stock-Williams: Well, one thing that we've been doing, and actually I was speaking about it this week at a conference, so it's fresh in my mind, [00:30:00] is something we called service mapping, which is, you know, the audience, you've probably heard of value stream mapping, which is this lean tool for understanding how value flows through your organization.

[00:30:11] The issue with value stream mapping is typically done is it assumes that you can, you've got carte blanche to change your organizational structure, right? And I'm a big fan of not doing reorganization too early until you've realized that that really is your problem. That's, that's your constraining factor as your organization.

[00:30:29] So what we developed using ex few existing things thrown together, this is not uh, rocket science as it were, but is, is this idea of service mapping, which is basically to get every supplier customer link in the business, internal supplier, customer link. So every team servicing another team. To sit down and agree what their interface is.

[00:30:51] So what is, what is the definition of quality for the things, the services that are being supplied by the supplier to [00:31:00] the customer? So to agree what that looks like,

[00:31:04] because in general it's not written down and in general there's too much concern about how people are doing the services. And another, if I throw computer science in here again, which is, there was another principle from computer science or it, but when, when you look at the definition of a service, actually being a black box is part of the definition.

[00:31:24] Sarah Abramson: Okay.

[00:31:25] Clym Stock-Williams: So to make an effective system where you basically, you send a request into a service and you get a, the response back, the, the, the solution, the product, the, the result back. To make that work effectively, you need to make sure that service is a black box. It decouples things. It means that so long as you have a standard for the request and a standard for the result.

[00:31:46] The service can actually improve itself in any way it likes. It can change everything about how it works. So long as it doesn't change, this requests and it doesn't change the result.

[00:31:55] Sarah Abramson: Got you. And this is

[00:31:56] Clym Stock-Williams: the human way of doing it.

[00:31:57] Sarah Abramson: Yes.

[00:31:58] Clym Stock-Williams: But basically every supplier and [00:32:00] customer starting at the ultimate customer end.

[00:32:03] Going back to that design principle again, we start the exit point of the company. Mm-hmm. We work back one and we agree who is servicing the end customers? In our case, this is the people running the wind farms, the operations teams on site who is servicing them and agree, what is quality, what is necessary, and what is it that's necessary about that information in order to add value to the company.

[00:32:25] What you often find is that people are doing a lot of stuff that isn't actually valued by the customer. Mm-hmm. It's not going anywhere. It's it's effort, it's work, but it's not creating necessary value. So it allows the supplier to realize, actually I don't need to do this any longer. I'll give you a personal example around talking about other people.

[00:32:49] When I used to work at Eon, this is a long time ago, so it's all changed now, so I'm okay to talk about it. You know, eng engineering, we, we love knowledge. We are very proud of the effort and [00:33:00] the skill and the dedication we've put into solving a problem. So it was in our work instructions that we had to write a full report at the end of every project.

[00:33:09] Wow. How many customers do you think really wanted to read that full report? I

[00:33:13] Sarah Abramson: mean, I know I wouldn't.

[00:33:15] Clym Stock-Williams: No. Um, so we were doing it for ourselves, right? It was our way of capturing organizational knowledge and showing the problems we solved, but forced the customers to pay for it. Of course, it was built into the cost of the project,

[00:33:27] Sarah Abramson: but if it improves the process enough that it benefits the customer longer term.

[00:33:32] Is that, does that reframe it?

[00:33:34] Clym Stock-Williams: I'm sure it could, but we told ourselves that the report was for the customer.

[00:33:38] Sarah Abramson: Oh, okay.

[00:33:39] Clym Stock-Williams: But the customer got no value from the report. They got value from the products of the work. So at some point, I believe we realized this and started to severely compress the amount of effort and time it took to create that end of project report only essential details, et cetera.

[00:33:55] All funded in a different way, not through charging the customer.

[00:33:58] Sarah Abramson: Yes.

[00:33:59] Clym Stock-Williams: But as an [00:34:00] example of, yeah, gold plating.

[00:34:01] Sarah Abramson: Yeah. And I guess, I mean, almost everywhere there is inefficiency, especially in large companies because things have evolved and happened and stayed that way and nobody's particularly questioned it.

[00:34:13] Or two different departments are doing something that overlaps or could replace each other without almost having realized and nobody being in a position to join the dots. So those things exist. Yep. I think in a perfect world, we might want to try and iron them out, but they tend to exist. I, I guess I, I have a slightly different question for you.

[00:34:37] I'm gonna be throwing this at you totally unfairly it. Talking about that, that black box of service delivery. So is the implication that as long as you are giving the customer what they think they want, that it doesn't really matter what happens internally in order to deliver that. And does that stay true in a world [00:35:00] where we are increasingly interested in things like traceability, sustainability, ethics, how something is made, you know, upstream supply.

[00:35:10] Are those, do those things change that shift it? Or is that, is that a very different matter? Sorry, this is a very unfair question just to throw at you.

[00:35:19] Clym Stock-Williams: No, it's an ex, it's an excellent question. I was hoping we're going back, going back to the black box. 'cause it is super important. What I would say is that the black box is a black box from the perspective of the customer requesting work.

[00:35:34] What is important is that it gives the supplier freedom within constraints. Going back to my whole point about operational excellence there So it gives them clarity that so long as I don't change this, this I can do my improvements, I can, I can change the way I work. It doesn't mean that everything's top secret, right?

[00:35:58] To an [00:36:00] organization that then needs to inspect that work for another purpose, right? In terms of traceability and the quality aspects of the product or the service, probably the service you are supplying. One of the quality aspects could be please provide also a trace of everything that went into this, a result that you are providing me.

[00:36:21] So that could be part of the quality and then it's on that supplier to provide the traceability analysis or whatever you want to call it. With the, with the result, they can then pass that requirement back to their suppliers.

[00:36:35] Sarah Abramson: Yep.

[00:36:35] Clym Stock-Williams: And so on and so forth. And if suddenly, you know, the law changes, the EU introduces a new rule about data or environmental compliance or the other things that have happened quite recently, yes.

[00:36:49] That does mean you need to change, but the whole point of this is not that it's static forever, but that it is a system that can be easily updated. So if this external requirement for strategy [00:37:00] change, you now have flexibility to realign your organization, how it works. By adding in a new quality criteria, you find an efficient way to solve the problem rather than having to top down, figure out how to get it done.

[00:37:12] You just feed that requirement into your internal service chains.

[00:37:17] Sarah Abramson: Yeah, brilliant.

[00:37:18] Clym Stock-Williams: That's, that's the vision.

[00:37:18] Sarah Abramson: Yes. Absolutely. Okay, so I know that you have got a strong interest in behavioural science that you're fascinated by that. You talked about it a little bit at the, the conference. I went to. And it would be, I mean, it'd be interesting anyway to hear a bit about what's piqued your curiosity in that, in that space.

[00:37:37] But how might behavioural science fit into what you are talking about here with the creation of systems and services and improvement and the difference? Yeah. For example, between the large organization and the small one, where's the human in the loop and how does the behaviour of the, of a [00:38:00] human agent at different points in this sort of spam, this relationship from customer right.

[00:38:05] Upstream, how does human behaviour affect things?

[00:38:09] Clym Stock-Williams: Well, vitally it's absolutely core and, and honestly, when we presented service apps, um, about a third of the talk was about what I just talked about, and most of the rest of it was about how it's about building relationships. Mm. Productive customer supplier relationships between the managers and between the teams, because understanding others' needs and then responding to them is a great way to gain trust.

[00:38:37] Sarah Abramson: Yes.

[00:38:38] Clym Stock-Williams: So how we designed the workshops that people went through had an element of behavioural science to it, or at least trying to consider how, how to ensure that we didn't just trigger everybody's, uh, fear mechanisms, but honestly, sometimes they were easy discussions and sometimes they were [00:39:00] much less easy.

[00:39:01] And, and it's just important to give people the space and some, a few basic tools to hear each other. Yeah.

[00:39:08] Sarah Abramson: Yeah.

[00:39:08] Clym Stock-Williams: And, and that's honestly more about things like non-violent communication than it is about anything that would classically be called behavioural science, I would say. Obviously everything's related to, you know, they all, they all sort of connect any, anything that seems to work in the real world is probably connected at some point, but that, that was a key point.

[00:39:26] Sarah Abramson: It's interesting that you've brought up the word trust there and is trust a currency that fits in here? How does that relate to systems that feel quite engineering minded or designed? Yep. With a sort of scientific technical perspective, how does trust, which is a very, very human currency, fit in and, and change and affect those systems?

[00:39:53] Clym Stock-Williams: It's a very, very fair question, and this is, yeah, this is tough to explain [00:40:00] Sometimes why I'm doing what I'm doing is generally to help people have a better time at work. I think everyone deserves to go to work and feel like they have agency. Feel like they're doing something worthwhile.

[00:40:14] Sarah Abramson: Mm-hmm.

[00:40:15] Clym Stock-Williams: And that they have the necessary empowerment skills, whatever you want to call it, to do something slightly better every day.

[00:40:24] That gives people meaning, you know, we spend far too much of our lives at work not to enjoy it. Yes. And so, yeah, I'm talking a lot about structures and it's maybe abstract sort of sounding thinking, but really ultimately it's all about people delivering value, recognized value to each other, to other individuals in the company, to customers outside the business.

[00:40:46] Easy. And, and obviously a lot of behavioural science models, the latest and the most popular parts of behavioural science have a core thing, which is if you want a different behaviour, make it easy. Yes. That was always nudge, whatever you think of nudge, but there's a lot of other [00:41:00] ones. So I'd say that's probably the link, which is that this is all about And, and again, sorry, going back to the trust point, 'cause I maybe haven't sufficiently covered that.

[00:41:10] When you are starting out building this kind of team, trying to get people on a journey to making some changes to how they work, it's important to start by building trust that you have their best interests at heart. Yeah. Which honestly generally means solve a problem for them, right? Yes. You want to teach them how to solve their own problems because that's more empowering and so on and so forth.

[00:41:34] But honestly, just start out by listening to something that they care about and finding a way to solve it.

[00:41:39] Sarah Abramson: Love it. Yeah.

[00:41:41] Clym Stock-Williams: And, and that's how I always, that's how I always start and carry on sometimes. And you don't, you don't scale. If you keep on doing that, all you do is build out an effort expanding army of improvement agents.

[00:41:53] Sarah Abramson: And

[00:41:53] Clym Stock-Williams: that's, that's that. What I don't want, what I want is every brain in the business able to improve. And that's where the structures come in again. So [00:42:00] the point of service mapping and other things like it is to break down all these dependencies that we have in the business, gives people power to actually change stuff.

[00:42:09] Because I do remember when I first started, I, I'd changed something and then someone at the other end of the business would start shouting and saying, you know, why have you changed this? I've been relying on that. I can't see how those two things are related, but now I have a language to talk about it.

[00:42:23] Right.

[00:42:23] Sarah Abramson: Not something at one end.

[00:42:25] Clym Stock-Williams: Yeah.

[00:42:25] Sarah Abramson: Yeah.

[00:42:25] Clym Stock-Williams: Because people holding workarounds on workarounds, you know? Yes. Excel sheets that depended on other people's Excel sheets and whatever. Right. Personally, reasonable things to do, responding to inadequate technology or misaligned incentives or whatever. But, but actually it's, the important part is just to decouple stuff first.

[00:42:44] Yeah. Because until you start decoupling things, you can't really change anything at scale, and no one else can either. So trust, yeah. I mean, trust is ultimately, it's still a human business, and, and so trust is is the core, core currency. And [00:43:00] ideally, you don't want to spend it too often, or if you do, you explain that you are running a learning project.

[00:43:09] You agree you really want to solve this problem, but you just don't know how right now. So we're gonna try something and if it doesn't work, then okay, hopefully we've learned something about what didn't work and we can maybe try something else or agree to move on to a different problem. But that transparency, transparency and trust tend to go hand in hand.

[00:43:28] I think.

[00:43:29] Sarah Abramson: Well, that kind of exercise in itself can be trust building because you feel like you've been brought into something and trusted to do it, so,

[00:43:35] Clym Stock-Williams: yeah.

[00:43:36] Sarah Abramson: Yeah. Yeah. That's good. Yeah. Yeah. Love it. But

[00:43:38] Clym Stock-Williams: you, you asked a different question, right, which is, how did I become interested in behavioural science?

[00:43:42] And

[00:43:42] Sarah Abramson: yes, I

[00:43:42] Clym Stock-Williams: did. I dunno if you still want me to ask. I

[00:43:45] Sarah Abramson: do. Yes, please. Okay. I've got all over the place. Yes, yes, please.

[00:43:49] Clym Stock-Williams: Absolutely not. No, because I, I wanted to use this as a bit of a sort of humble, humble moment or whatever, which is, it was basically a couple of years ago and, and you know, we are in the business of running change [00:44:00] projects among other things, and I realized that we were looking at situations where we weren't able to make progress.

[00:44:08] And we had no tools for understanding why we are there, what was happening, or how we would go about getting, getting out of it. And I could have said to myself, ah, this is your job. You know, you have this job, so therefore you are the expert. Therefore, it must be them. You know, it's their fault. They're not, they're not doing the things we've explained and explained, so they should know by now.

[00:44:30] Yeah. Um, but this is a fairly, well, it's an unproductive way of looking at the world, uh, despite being rather common, but it's also, you know, it's not treating other people with respect. So I went and I started looking at the change management literature basically, and I said, I'm gonna, I'm gonna figure this out somehow.

[00:44:49] I'm gonna, there must be something out there that's helpful to answer those questions. So I started diving into the change management literature and all I would say for people [00:45:00] getting into it is it's really, really difficult to find what you're looking for. Okay. So I could understand, you know, either people giving up or getting washed up on layers and layers of pop wisdom, common practices and other things that sort of encrusted on this topic over time, because behavioural science is a relatively new field.

[00:45:25] But eventually after digging and digging and digging, I, I came across, uh, Susan Mickey at UCL.

[00:45:31] Sarah Abramson: I can see her book on the pile of books behind you, by the way. 'cause I recognize the Oh yeah, yeah, yeah,

[00:45:38] Clym Stock-Williams: yeah, yeah, yeah. The, the COM-B logo, you Exactly. It's only the

[00:45:40] Sarah Abramson: spine, but I can see the circle. Yeah, yeah.

[00:45:43] Clym Stock-Williams: But it's, it's, I mean, she, she runs for those who dunno, she runs something called the Human behaviour Change Project, I believe it's called that.

[00:45:48] Which is an, I mean, the title is just incredible, right? You think it sounds like some sort of bond villans, uh, dream or, but uh, but really it's very human centered at the basis of it, which is of [00:46:00] course you can misuse this stuff. Right. And that's the other thing I would say is intention is everything. You can learn these techniques like nudging or whatever, and you can use them to try and force people to do things that they don't want to do and wouldn't do if they understood more about it.

[00:46:14] Or you can use them to help people do things that they want to do but aren't able.

[00:46:20] Sarah Abramson: Yes.

[00:46:21] Clym Stock-Williams: And you know her explanation for why, why you don't persist with the gym or why you don't persist with that diet or, or whatever it is. Right. The how, why habit change is so hard in your personal life. It goes also in organizations and she and her colleagues and, and that network have done huge amounts of work on covering healthcare.

[00:46:40] Why? How you can get nurses to wash their hands or doctors and wash their hands before operating. And it's, it's that point where knowledge is not enough.

[00:46:48] Sarah Abramson: Yeah. Yeah.

[00:46:49] Clym Stock-Williams: Of course. They, I mean, we've known for centuries that hygiene is vital for the outcome, the positive outcome to surgery, and yet people in the 20th century, 21st [00:47:00] century are still not washing their hands.

[00:47:01] Right. Yeah. So it's not about knowledge, it's not about training. So, so really this, this understanding that 50% of our performance, picking a number out, uh, 75% of statistics are made up on the spot. 50% of performance is, is down to the environment.

[00:47:20] Sarah Abramson: Mm. Yes.

[00:47:21] Clym Stock-Williams: And, and the performance is not purely an individual thing is a super important factor hold in your head when you're in the organization, when you're in business world.

[00:47:32] Yeah. Because there's too much of performance management is all about the individual and not enough around the empowering or disempowering structures around. So that whole, it's not just COM-B, right. And there's these behaviour change techniques and so on. That's, it's a vast literature and I would say we're just at the beginning of trying to figure out what, which aspects of it are most relevant to what we're doing and starting to gain some competence in applying those ones.

[00:47:58] So that that's yeah, definitely a, a [00:48:00] journey that we're starting on. The other person that I came across was Paul Gibbons. He's written a book called The Science Organizational Change Track, and through him looked at Scarf by David Rock. That one I've used huge, like massively. That one I've been teaching people quite a lot and I have found it really has changed the way we communicate, especially big change projects.

[00:48:21] I've been working in some big change projects across the organization and just using that as a lens, how do we build this approach? So not just the communication, but also the approach to change in a way that brings people along with us so they feel they are creating, co-creating with us, and that if they dissent or if they, you know, express concerns or they go a bit slower than we would like, that we are not gonna immediately slip into fear mode.

[00:48:51] It's not a forced match with pretend, pretend help and pretend engagement. Yeah, it's real, and you have to accept that not everything can go at the speed you would like. [00:49:00] If you want to be human centred.

[00:49:02] Sarah Abramson: Yes.

[00:49:03] Clym Stock-Williams: And this is a massive tension you have, which is how do you, I used to call it, well, to call it speed and control, right?

[00:49:10] So if you think about a Formula One race, they have speed and they most of the time have control. And most people, or most times, at least in my, my, my experience, you, you think you can either have speed or you can have control. But to get both high speed and high control requires a lot of learning, a lot of practice, a lot of discipline.

[00:49:31] It's something you have to develop. You can't just get it by buying the Formula One car.

[00:49:36] Sarah Abramson: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[00:49:37] Clym Stock-Williams: So, so you need to reach the organization and you need to rethink and do your projects in different ways in order to get speed and control. Otherwise you end up with one or the other. Right. You get speed of on paper implementation with most of the organization left behind.

[00:49:54] Sarah Abramson: Yeah.

[00:49:55] Clym Stock-Williams: The other end of the spectrum, which perhaps I've been guilty of sometimes, which is too much. [00:50:00] I want to hear how you feel about this and you know, open questions and then you, you end up with this giant bucket of requests and complaints about everything under the sun, which people are logistically annoyed about, but has nothing to do with your project.

[00:50:13] Yeah. And then that we've made no progress. So it's how do you balance, I think that's the core skill. When to go slow. When to go fast.

[00:50:19] Sarah Abramson: Yes. And that is all about messy people again, isn't it? Messy, messy human behaviour and all of that. And

[00:50:24] Clym Stock-Williams: there's no rules for that. There's no physics model to do that.

[00:50:27] Right. That's what I've realized. Yeah.

[00:50:29] Sarah Abramson: And Formula One is a nice analogy, but it, but it isn't that because you've got this massive, complex machine team underpinning this incredibly well drilled, well organized, very, very specific roles, responsibilities. They know exactly what they've got to do. At the right time, and there's massive investment that's gone into making that happen so that there's so much of a pyramid that is supporting a driver in a car.

[00:50:56] And if you don't know much about the sport, you might come and watch it and think, oh, that [00:51:00] driver's very clever, brilliant. And of course they are. They're highly trained and they're highly skilled and they're incredible athletes, but there's masses that goes underneath it. And it's incredibly, highly, absolutely organized.

[00:51:12] Clym Stock-Williams: Yes. And that's actually a great example of individual performance, right? Being, being only very small part of the story sometimes. Do you see drivers swap switching cars from one season to the next or drivers switching teams? Yeah. And before they were winning the races and then they're halfway down onto field or even lower.

[00:51:28] Sarah Abramson: Yeah. Yeah. I would like to, if I can get you to help us think practically about how you use, you bring the behavioural science thinking into the work that you are doing, so. You've gone away, you've read loads of brilliant, interesting materials. You've looked at frameworks, you've found fascinating books. I dunno if you've done studies, sort of formal research around it, whatever, but you've gone and done a lot of thinking and the theory [00:52:00] and then in your organization, I mean, you've talked a little bit about, I think there's a lot of complexity in the role that you do.

[00:52:07] You've got an overview of a huge amount of different things. How do you make this real, like work on tangible, should we call them problems, situations where you can sort of bring real thinking to a real problem? And I, I like the example you used earlier about handwashing because it's a, it is one of those examples from behavioural science where very, very often a massive change comes down to something very small that people already know about it doesn't require a massive training course. It's a small, cheap, simple thing that if we do it, the impact is immense. That's probably too cute. But how do you find the more tangible, workable [00:53:00] problems and, and get hold of them, bring together people to tackle 'em and, and sort of make it real so that you're, you are, you are thinking about some sort of intervention or, or, or is it more complicated than that?

[00:53:14] Clym Stock-Williams: No, I don't think so. Um, the only thing I would like to start with is saying it's, it's not theory or practice. And in general, when I'm reading about something, I'm already trying to think about how this relates to a recent problem I've experienced, how I approached it differently. And then I try to start actually using it because you don't understand a theory until you've used it.

[00:53:37] And you really don't understand the theory until actually taught somebody else. Right? As I said, I spent a year or so teaching continuous improvement to a large amount of people. Um, and there are a lot of topics there, which I thought I understood when I started well enough to design the course. But really the levels of understanding I have after teaching several groups of people is much, much deeper and the, the [00:54:00] understanding of the connections between things.

[00:54:01] So, so yeah. Start, I teach people that are gonna use it. That's, that's the first one. So I take it, you know, let's take scarf, right? I know it's, it's simpler than COM-B and honestly people grasp it way quicker because it's much smaller than scarf is very simple in a way. Uh, and so basically I just put together, first was just a simple introduction.

[00:54:24] I compressed the two papers about it into an introduction, and I taught my team. I also taught a few other people who were working in, in, uh, in our sort of process change. Project, they applied it to situ a situation that they had and saw, you know, they brought in situations where things had not gone to plan for them, and then they used that to diagnose what had happened.

[00:54:51] Right. And to then redesign what could they have done and what could they still do to turn that situation around. 'cause [00:55:00] that's what I love about the scarf, is it's not a, you know, it's, it's not this classic, all change has resistance and so we'll view everyone as a potential resistor and then you end up doing things that actually causes resistance in my experience.

[00:55:13] But it's, it's really about both sides. It's the fear and the creation. So how do you hit all those buttons to make people want to get involved in the creation side? That's, that's, that's how you can use it.

[00:55:25] Sarah Abramson: Can you give us a very simple,

[00:55:27] Clym Stock-Williams: I know you want an example, and I'm trying to think of an example that isn't too sensitive to, to talk about, but one, one thing I can talk about actually is.

[00:55:36] We did use COM-B and the entire process, which I tried to condense, right, because if you look at the literature, it takes a year and a half to run this entire process. And I thought, well, no, no one's, no one's got time for that. Yeah. So, so how, how could we turn it into very much a, do you your call diagnoses, use that questionnaire, understand the domains, and then, you know, figure out which, uh, A, B, CT to [00:56:00] try, for example, a behaviour change technique.

[00:56:01] And so we were looking at, look, we teach continuous improvement. And all continuous improvement relies on standards, requires you to have a standard in place a work instruction, whatever word you want to call it, but something that make sure that you do it more or less the same every time. And when you discover a better way, you update the standards.

[00:56:19] So the next time you still do it the same but differently, the same as everyone else but differently. And the question we had in my team, in fact is why, why do we find making an updating and using standards so. We teach people, we know it's a great thing. It's very handwashing adjacent. Yes. We know this is essential.

[00:56:40] And yet it's hard. We have to push ourselves to do it. We have to remember and remember to pull it out of the draw, virtual draw every time. When we move on from one stage of a project to next, for example, we have to remember to reconsult the standard and not just go, ah, we know what we're doing. We're off.

[00:56:59] So [00:57:00] we used used the COM-B framework to sort of analyze what, what are gonna be the effective interventions. 'cause clearly teaching ourselves and training is not the effective intervention right now. Yeah. Uh, we have to make maybe the creation simpler, but we also have to insert reminders in the environment and hold each other accountable.

[00:57:19] Yeah. Was the other thing. So, you know that partly that was down to me as the manager getting better at asking regular questions. That's the other thing I learned actually from teaching Lean for a while, is that. My management style could do with a bit of improvement,

[00:57:32] Sarah Abramson: continuous improvement.

[00:57:36] Clym Stock-Williams: Well of course, of course.

[00:57:37] Actually some serious improvement, which was being more aware of what questions you ask. What and are you being consistent? And are you being, you know, are you asking in them of everybody?

[00:57:47] Sarah Abramson: Yeah.

[00:57:48] Clym Stock-Williams: So habit building or routine building, let's start with our routine building in an organization is often incredibly helped by management, focusing on one topic [00:58:00] and consistently asking supportive questions about it.

[00:58:05] And we underuse that simple skill. Yeah. Hugely in organization. 'cause we get sidetracked by the next thing. There's a million things going on. There's expectations from senior management that are changing the world's, you know, constantly changing. Yeah. A hundred different causes for why our performance is after targets, you know, all of that stuff.

[00:58:24] So we skip around from reason to reason, from request to request. And if we instead we just. Slow down and focused on one thing at a time, stayed focused on it for however many months it takes to fix it properly. We'd actually make progress rather than feeling. Yeah. Like we're constantly spinning plates.

[00:58:42] Sarah Abramson: I really like that. Uh, and I like how you've brought that back to, I mean, what's just strikes me with you is your willingness to self question, your willingness to think of it differently and to stop yourself in your own tracks and say, is there another way? Is this right? [00:59:00] You know, constantly kind of questioning.

[00:59:02] And so you've done that with yourself in your own management style by the sounds of things, but also, you know, right from where you were saying in your early career, you'd had this opportunity to develop critical thinking differently. And, and I think that's marvelous. It's brilliant to hear, and this has been a whiz through a lot of complexity, but I think has had a very strong thread through, you know, bringing in the behavioural science, bringing in the thinking about people about.

[00:59:29] Getting through those little bits in a process that's sticking and what's going on there, and being willing to dig in, explore that, bring together thinking, bring in behavioural science and try to address problem solving in a creative way, which is probably not a word that gets applied very often to physics and systems and operations, but, but, but probably should.

[00:59:53] Right?

[00:59:54] Clym Stock-Williams: Oh, I mean, problem solving is hugely creative. Yes. And it unleashes everyone's creativity. I remember when I was [01:00:00] learning facilitation and, and you know, there's arty things in there, and people would say, I'm not creative. Hate that phrase, you know? Exactly, exactly. Everyone's creative. Yes. What they mean is, I'm not skilled at drawing complicated art.

[01:00:14] Yeah, that's fine. Neither am I. But the question is, are you, is your conceptual creativity and that that's, that's what is important.

[01:00:21] Sarah Abramson: Yeah. I sometimes it helps to call it innovation rather than creativity. If it's somebody that first to think about it that way, but. Amazing. Gosh, thank you so much. This has been incredibly interesting and made my brain hurt a little bit because there's so many, oh dear.

[01:00:37] Sorry. No, no, no, no. The best way. In a, so many, so many interesting topics, and I'm sure we could talk a lot more about, um, many of them to unpack them. But I wanna respect your time, but I do wanna ask you a final question that I ask all of our podcast guests, which is that, um, speaking ha speaking to you as a human Clym was exciting you at the moment.

[01:00:59] What are you [01:01:00] looking forward to or motivated about, either in work or outta work?

[01:01:04] Clym Stock-Williams: Well, since you offered me the opportunity of not talking about work, um, it's not that I'm not incredibly motivated and excited by many things going on in work, but we've talked about that a lot actually. One of the things that's going on in my life at the moment is that my wife set up a company

[01:01:16] Sarah Abramson: Oh wow.

[01:01:17] Clym Stock-Williams: Earlier this year. And so it's a real startup. Uh, it's B2C and I've lived my entire life in B2B and I just. I love the startup. I love figuring out what to do. You know, lean Startup is, I've read that book many years ago and I used it with internal innovation, but now it's really feel, I mean, it's real, it's a real company.

[01:01:38] You go to these events and you meet the real customers of your product, the people who are either gonna put their hand in their pocket and pay for it or not Right. With their own money.

[01:01:45] Sarah Abramson: Yeah.

[01:01:46] Clym Stock-Williams: And I, I just absolutely love that. Yeah. And, um, talking about Speak to the Human, I mean, listen to the human is also important.

[01:01:53] Yeah,

[01:01:53] Sarah Abramson: no, absolutely. I know. I, I regularly think we should have called it that. Instead,

[01:01:57] Clym Stock-Williams: listen, listen to the Human. In this case is, is [01:02:00] my wife and the owner of the company. So I have to do a lot of that, and that's wonderful. Good. Really try and make her dreams come alive and become more successful in any way I can.

[01:02:09] So I'm really enjoying that at the moment. It's, uh, yeah, given me a different perspective on business and, uh, yeah. It's wonderful.

[01:02:16] Sarah Abramson: Amazing. That's brilliant. I I used to run my own B2C company and, uh, it was a fantastic experience. Absolutely loved it. So I wish you and her all the very, very best of luck.

[01:02:28] It's, it's exciting and thank you so much for your input on this. It's been super interesting and really good to talk. Thank you.

[01:02:37] Clym Stock-Williams: Likewise. I really appreciate the invite and, uh, wish you best of luck with the rest of the series and all your work.

[01:02:43] Sarah Abramson: Thank you. Well, I hope you have all listeners that enjoyed listening to Clym, and please as always, do send me any suggestions for future guests and like.

[01:02:56] Chat and subscribe. Bye for [01:03:00] now.