Fintech Focus TV COVID-19 SPECIAL
In this video, Toby Corballis speaks with Toby Babb of Harrington Starr about transformation in times of Covid-19. Toby discusses why, not just because of Covid, it’s important in the digital age to reassess the way we approach new technology. Having been in the Fintech industry for years prior, Toby also shares his attuned insights and the plethora of ways he has made a tangible impact on the community and the benefits for organisations in deploying Systems Thinking whenever embarking on complex organisational change initiatives.
Full Transcript
Introduction
Toby Babb: Hello and welcome to another episode of Fintech Focus TV, with me Toby Babb. Today I am absolutely delighted to not give you not just one Toby but two. Toby Corballis, how you doing?
Toby Corballis: Hey I’m well how you doing toby?
Toby Babb: Really good thanks, really good. The two Toby’s, The Two Ronnies… It’s got all sorts of permutations this, and maybe we make it a regular thing or wait and see. Toby, listen thanks so much for joining us today. I’ve known you for you know for a longtime across the Capital Market space. You’ve got a long track record of multiple areas of consulting you’ve done, and recently, most recently started StoryPositive, which sounds fantastic and couldn’t probably be better timed with with everything you add to it about the new age of of technology and everything that’s happening in the digital world at the moment, particularly around Capital Markets. But, not to steal your thunder, please give us a little bit of an intro about what you’re doing and the StoryPositive story.
Toby Corballis: so story positive was set up basically in February last year [2020] and the whole ethos of the of the organisation is that there’s a lot of negativity when people think about new technologies and new ways of working and I’m thinking particularly things like Public Cloud and Agile ways of working and – and they’re very good bed fellows by the way… we’ll come on to that maybe in a bit – how there’s a lot of negativity about that and actually, if you get it right the story is positive, right? That comes out of that and what you get out of that is the ability to to really respond to change rapidly and to, you know, pivot where necessary, and do it quickly, and be able to respond not just to market events but also to client demands, which obviously themselves change very quickly, with with rapidly changing markets.
Toby Babb: And i think that’s, as you say, it couldn’t be better timed at the moment because you know this was a pre-Covid launch and you saw this as an issue already and I think if we look through last year people were posturing and talking about all of this this sort of stuff and you know we saw a huge growth in the Agile marketplace. We saw, you know, increasing adoption to both that and Cloud, as you say, but there was still a little bit of, you know, the reigns being pulled back by the traditionalists and the conservatives amongst everyone who were just not quite ready to give everything. This has been called the sort of uh fuel on the on the fire of Digital innovation over the last last six months. Tell us a little bit about what you’ve seen there and why it becomes you know StoryPositive – and I love their name, by the way, because i think it’s… you know the whole theme of this Fintech Focus TV series that we’ve been doing is to say that there are positives that can come out of this and negative news fills every sort of, you know, space, but particularly in this Capital Markets and technology space. I think there’s so much good stuff that can come out of it and is… if i look at one sector that i think has been really robust through this, this is it, but the StoryPositive piece about seeing this sort of… and this last six months helping you and your message sort of improve a little bit, tell us a little bit about that side.
Toby Corballis: So i think you’re right. I think in the sense of there’s a lot of… We respond negatively, I mean we all love negative news, in a sense. That’s what drives a lot of newspaper sales and so on. That’s why they’re negative, and actually we crave positive results and we all want our businesses to do well and balancing that dichotomy is quite important – that there are always going to be people who are resistant to change. But actually change is a very good thing. It’s been it’s been with us since the very beginning, and I do mean the beginning, like the big bang. “Change is the only constant” as Heraclitus said, and it’s true, right? And the fact is that, that the rate of change has been accelerating and if you read a lot of Chris Skinner’s stuff, you’ll see he mentions this a lot, right?
Toby Babb: Yeah
Toby Corballis: And you have to be able to respond to that change, and it used to be that you could respond quite slowly because change was quite slow and we all had these monolithic systems and we just did what we did and that was fine. But, you know, along came Cloud. It really came along in the in the kind of 90s but it wasn’t called Cloud until the naughties and it’s matured hugely and what we have now is this sort of bricolage type functionality where we can just pick and choose the things that we need, slot them together, rearrange that quickly, and make it immensely secure. I mean, there’s a lot of talk that people come up with sometimes about how Cloud isn’t secure – absolute tosh. It’s very, very, secure. More secure than most legacy systems, right, and then you’ve got this sort of Agile ways of working which is a really powerful way of working. When you have problems that need to be addressed continually and there’s change happening within those continually, so if you’ve got systems requirements that are coming up that are changing because the market’s changing, client demand is changing, that’s happening rapidly, as we’ve seen with Covid, and you’ve got the ways of working in the whole Agile side of it; you’ve got the Cloud; and the whole technology side of it. You can really bring those together in a sensible way. If you can do that you will get a very positive outcome and StoryPositive is about positive outcomes, right, for the clients and that’s… I just think it’s critical. And I mentioned pivot there. It’s that sort of… In agile it’s called “Fail Fast,” right, and it doesn’t mean fail. It means recognise that the direction that you’re going in may not be the right one. Recognise that early pivot, move to something that’s more aligned and measure continually. Measure to make sure that you’re going in the right direction.
Toby Babb: That pivot word is one that sort of caused mass derision at various stages, and suddenly has become on trend. So, if you look at the last year, I think people would talk about pivoting and saying look if you’re pivoted it means you haven’t had the right strategy. In the first place, right now we’re looking at pivoting as being a sort of genuine success strategy. You’ve been in the camp where it’s probably been that all the way through, right? Tell us a little bit about your take on the big pivot debate?
Toby Corballis: Well i’ve been in both sides of the story. In fact, I’m guilty of years ago believing that you shouldn’t pivot, you know, and i’ve come away from that perspective, and i think it’s a really good thing now, and i think that i think one of the best stories of pivoting that I’ve ever come across – whether you like or don’t like Twitter – Twitter is a pivot story, right, because, Twitter was originally set up to be a podcast listings platform and iTunes came along and the guys at Twitter went, “oh that’s going to completely kill us, what can we do?” And they had an internal system that they used which was a hundred and forty six, hundred forties… Whatever the characters and they used that to communicate and they just said, “well, we’ll let’s see if we can turn this into a product,” so that’s what they did. They pivoted away from what they’d done and on to that, and that became the success and you could say well if you have to pivot you didn’t get your strategy right but as Nicholas Talib says, you know, Black Swan events happen right, and you can predict some but you can’t protect others, and therefore you can’t necessarily have the right strategy all the time, years in advance. I don’t know what’s gonna happen in five years time. What i do know is that in fact the further into the future I look the more opaque is what I can see, right? And so, I’m more likely to be able to predict what’s gonna happen in three months – and even then probably not – than i am about what’s going to happen in one year, two years, five years, ten… So, I need to have… If you think about it, what I really need is a strategy that allows me to respond to those changes as they come in and that’s where I think if you have that flexibility both in the technology and in the way you work, that you can really keep those positive outcomes coming, and coming steadily.
Toby Babb: Yeah, I think that’s one of the key parts of this. You talk about five year predictions and strategies around that. If anything that we’ve been taught over the last five months is it’s almost impossible to predict five weeks, let alone five months, at the moment. I think we spoke before this, and said, look if you had thrown the net back six months ago and said, you know, when I remember when we were you know evacuating the building for the, you know, for the for the final time here, and I thought right this, you know, this would be an extended Christmas sort of break from it and we’ll probably be back in three weeks and you know five months later, you know five- six-months later, none of our clients are back in, and people are slowly starting to edge back into the city at the moment and speaking now, second week of September, you’re slowly starting to see it fill up a little bit, but it’s still far from normal and that sort of, you know that that’s the world we live in at the moment and and for the foreseeable. I think we’ll be seeing, you know, very similar sort of piece. So, this whole thing of long-term strategy making becomes almost impossible, right? It becomes, as you know, not worth the paper it’s written on, so how do people get that right and with so much volatility and uncertainty and literally economy – you know chief economists, some of the best economists in the world, are sat there with an you know sort of pin the tail on the donkey sort of scenario, at the moment. Why does this become even more important to have this this sort of Agile change based, and you know, transformative strategy so robust in your business, right now?
Toby Corballis: Because I think if you don’t, what one of the scenarios I was thinking about before Covid, right, was that if you didn’t get this right now… because you’ve got you’ve got large players who are starting to get this right, you know. They’ve been tinkering at the edges for a while now. They’re getting it. They’re getting it right, right? I’m talking about people like Goldman Sachs. I’m talking about people like Citi, you know? JP Morgan. Those people, they have a lot of resource that they can put into this, which is great, you know, and if they’re getting it right now and you’re waiting in the wings and just gonna watch the market and see how it goes, you probably haven’t got five years. Now, I thought that we’ve pre-Covid. I think you probably haven’t got three years now, because the rate of change is accelerating and it’s been accelerating for a long time as we said earlier, but it’s really, I think, that rate of change is going to accelerate far faster and you can have a lot more to deal with because when Covid happened, don’t forget, people broke all sorts of corporate norms and rules, right? I’m thinking about things like you know well they suddenly had to get a load of people laptops that they didn’t have necessarily; they had to get those they had to maybe break some corporate policies around allowing them to be on home networks, which, you know, maybe not allowed.
Toby Babb: It’s almost unheard of before, isn’t it?
Toby Corballis: Yeah, so all of… but all of these things have to be addressed because if you don’t what’s the security profile of that? Just as one example! Then, if people are now used to working in… like we’re on Zoom now. If people like Zoom, Teams, whatever it is, do they really just go straight back to working in an office? We’ve got Blue Team, Green Team, type scenarios that going on where you’ve got half the team in one week half the team in the next week, with the rest, you know, working remotely. People aren’t traveling by air. There’s an all sorts of different ways that people are working that’s driving… because don’t forget also that my staff are somebody else’s um client, and your client or somebody else’s staff in the world, so actually that client that drives client demand as well and client ways of new interpretations of how they want their products to be, right? So if you can’t keep up with that demand, I don’t think you’ve got the luxury of saying, “I’m going to wait eight years or five years and just see how it all goes and I’m going to come in as…” I think it’s… is it… I can’t remember who it is, but the guy that did the sort of Bell Curve where you’ve got the the Laggards at one end, you know, you’ve got the early adopters at the other. Well, you don’t necessarily want to be one of the very first early adopters but you don’t equally want to be in the Laggards and the time horizon across that bell curve is shortening and so it’s really important to start thinking about and acting on now: how you’re going to get that strategy right for being able to pivot and possibly pivot frequently. I talk about… I’ve got a book out, but I talk about in that not the new normal but a series of next normals because we don’t know which way this is going to go and and, you know, who knows what’s going to happen? Are we going to have another lockdown nationwide? Hopefully not, but what about local lockdowns? And how’s that going to affect businesses? And… And… So, we need to be able to respond to those and those things have further repercussions. You only have to look at the distribution of the volatility of Fixed Income over the last… or Derivatives, you know, during Covid to see it’s had an impact, right?
Toby Babb: Yeah.
Toby Corballis: And if firms can’t react to that impact, then where are they?
Toby Babb: Yeah, absolutely. It’s interesting you mentioned the book Digital Leadership Delivered, I believe and available on all… I imagine Amazon?
Toby Corballis: It’s not on Amazon yet. It’s on LeanPub.
Toby Babb: Okay, fantastic. Yeah, so we can find it there and soon to be best selling in in all airports, I imagine as well.
Toby Corballis: Absolutely. I can’t imagine anybody who’d go on holiday without a copy! Actually, I can’t imagine many people going on holiday.
Toby Babb: Not yet, not yet. So, we’ve talked a little bit about all of your thoughts. You sort of poured it into this sort of manifesto in the in the book at the moment. What prompted that and what are some of the key messages to come through from it?
Toby Corballis: So what prompted that is if you look at the literature around cloud technology and you look at the literature around Agile ways of working, there’s an awful lot that’s directed at practitioners, right? So, the guy who’s actually the Scrum Master, if they’re using Scrum. Or the guy who’s doing the Project Management, in some other variant; or the guy who’s the database engineer; or the architect; or whatever. There’s a lot of books and a lot of literature on that… Very, very, little that is aimed at people in Management, in Leadership positions, or who want to be in those positions who are thinking about these things and wondering whether they’re right. What tends to happen is those people tend to get their information from consultants some of whom will be absolutely on the button and giving them the right information, but that isn’t guaranteed and sometimes they’re not giving the right information, for various reasons, and some of which I do go into in the book, but, and what I felt was, that that was missing there’s a lacuna in that literature, so I thought I’d have a go at plugging the gap, right? I mean who am ? But there you go [Laughter] and so the book goes into, without trying to get too technical about anything and you know it’s trying to keep the concepts at a level that is relevant to leadership, right because it’s not relevant to go into the minutiae of the technology. People don’t need to know that when they’re running a business, right? They’re busy people, they’ve got limited time for reading a book or, you know, but they need to be able to digest some of those concepts, and I think it’s really important to give you one example: people often will say, “you know security of cloud is not secure.” Absolute nonsense, right? It’s as… obviously if you don’t make it secure, it’s not secure right?
Toby Babb: Yeah, yeah.
Toby Corballis: But you can make it more secure than most legacy systems that i’ve ever come across. And then people talk about, “Well, you know we’ve tried Agile and didn’t work for us.” Well maybe that’s because you didn’t actually do it the right way sometimes what people do is they send somebody off on a Scrum Master course and then they expect that that’s going to make the entire organisation Agile they forget to do the the bit for Leadership because it changes the way that the Leadership interact with their own people and…
Toby Babb: that’s part of the mindset – from the top first, isn’t it, surely?
Toby Corballis: Top down, all the time, yeah. If it’s not bought into at the higher-levels, then it’s not going to get implemented at the lower levels, and that’s true of all change, really. So, yeah. I thought I’d put together something that explained it all and hopefully I’ve covered everything but not gone into too much detail
Toby Babb: Give them enough to call you to come in and be the cavalry. I like the style, I like the style. Listen, you’ve touched on an interesting point there as well because look some some of the issues, in fact probably a lot of the issues, around the sort of I guess the laggard nature of Capital Markets in transformation as a whole has been down to that word “legacy” and there’s big legacy systems and the market or the scene is still probably dominated by some of those big enterprise players within the Capital Markets trading technology space with what we’re seeing at the moment and that appetite for digital evolution. There’s still this big, big numbering problem of huge costs to take out systems, and then all the security that’s there with stuff that probably is pulling back the industry at the same stage. But we’re seeing an awful lot of innovation an awful lot of agile companies. Your position, I imagine, and I’m putting words into your mouth here, is to come in there and show people, showcase to these organisations how they can utilise this new technology to you know to, I guess to fight against the sort of sluggish legacy systems that have come through there? Or is it conversely to work with the late, you know, the big legacy systems to help them evolve as well?
Toby Corballis: More the former. I mean, I think it’s great when legacy organisations transform, and I think it’s a necessary thing, and we all probably know the story of Kodak and how that fell apart because they didn’t – they could see the market falling away from them but they were still milking the cow that was feeding them and they didn’t want to give it up, right, and that can happen all too often, but look, there are right ways to do this and wrong ways to do this, and you know if you’ve got a legacy system but you’ve still got lots of years left on there and it’s not costing you that much and it’s not actually doing anything to onerous, well maybe you should keep that, actually, for the moment; that’s you know, I’m not saying change everything and do it all now, I’m saying, change your your mindset and your approach and in the course of doing that evaluate what’s right to change now and work now to do it don’t leave it and one of the points I make in the book is that – and i think this is a really serious point, by the way because we talk about capital markets, we talk about a lot of organisations as being very conservative in their outlook, and that because they’re conservative they’re risk averse, and, I think, and I really do, I spend a lot of time talking about this and exploring it because risk aversion in my view is actually a form of risk creation, and the reason for that is if I standstill, right, and the water’s rising around me but i don’t want to move because I’m frightened, that if i if i reach out and grab the branch the branch will break; I will in fact drown at some point as the water comes up above me and so that’s creating a risk now – it might be that you have to assess the risk on each side and say actually i’m better off just standing here because I don’t think it’s going to go above a certain level and somebody will come and rescue me, or it might be that you can see that the water’s coming up too fast and you do have to grab that branch and you have to pull yourself out, and if you don’t go for it then you are definitely a goner, and if you do go for it you may not be, so the… maybe that’s not a great analogy but the point that I’m trying to make is that you can create risk by standing still, yeah? And so when people say they’re risk averse, I think it it it behooves them well to just take a moment of reflection and think to oneself when I say that, am I creating risk or am I actually reducing risk, and sometimes the answer is that you are creating risk and that’s what I want to help people visualise, understand, and then work through to get a positive outcome, as I said.
Toby Babb: You’ve had a sort of stellar, you know, track record all the way through the industry for for a long, long time now, and seeing various different sort of forms from small company to large, et cetera et cetera, and added value to all sorts of businesses all the way through. Who are you focusing in on at the moment who are the people who you think you can really help through this and add considerable value to right now?
Toby Corballis: I think really it’s the… I don’t like to to classify that much as Tier One, Tier Two, etcetera, but some sort of Tier Two. I think a lot of the Tier One guys are actually getting comfortable with this, but if they’re not i’ll be “Hello, I’m happy to come and help you out,” but yeah, and I think a lot of the the sort of FinTech start-ups, when they’re in their initial startup phase, and my experience has been that they are actually quite agile, they’re quite open to using Cloud, et cetera, et cetera, and then they tend to… it’s the sort of, I think it’s Greiner’s model of corporate development [Greiner’s Growth Model] where you have these different crisis of leadership. As the corporation expands, and it’s really at that second tier where you’ve gone, “we’ve been nimble… we’ve been outwith… there’s only three of us… we can do a lot,” and then suddenly there’s thirty of you, and then the bureaucracy starts setting in, and the different ways of thinking come in, and, by the way, different ways of thinking are great, but what you want to make sure is you don’t fall into traps like “groupthink” about old ways of working in old legacy systems because somebody saw it work twenty years ago or is afraid to take the plunge so I like to work with with startups that are not necessarily in their very first phase but are getting to that point where they’ve actually got the need for some structure, but they also need to understand how to be to remain nimble; and I also like to work with those sort of uh banks and so on or exchangers who want to become more nimble want to be able to respond to change, but don’t know how to do it and want to be able to get their heads around it, but it’s no fault of their own. In either situation, you know, you don’t know what you don’t know. You’re constrained by the knowledge you have and that’s why people like me come in and help you out.
Toby Babb: I think that’s really interesting, isn’t it? In the particular that sort of scale-up phase, because on big principles there’s a lot of press around that at the moment. Jeff Bezos and, you know, the day one thinking sort of mentality he puts into all of his his annual reports, Reid Hastings – he’s got a book out tomorrow as well, and I think there’s been quite a lot of press around around that it’s going to be… the two books are, probably yours and his, are going to be vying for the top of the-
Toby Corballis: Exactly
Toby Babb: But he there was an interesting piece written in the the times this weekend, actually, where he said, right, they had in 2001 there were about 120 people and they brought it down to 80 and kept, you know… and were probably more productive than when there were 120 people, and that was it, he said: His road to Damascus sort of moment. Fast forward, you know, 18 odd years and they are 8,000 person organisation that probably could be a 15,000 personal organisation. He’s kept those sort of lessons tight from that as well. That’s a big part of what people are talking about, isn’t it? Maintaining that sort of, not just culture, but this sort of thinking and thought as they go from that very… And it is difficult. I’ve been in there, for you know 30 to 50, is probably the most difficult part of any of any business, I think as you grow and contract.
Toby Corballis (25:47): It really is. It really is. And it can form structural logics within the organisation that persist, right?
Toby Babb: Yeah.
Toby Corballis: … for decades. Even after people have gone, it’s the old, you know, if you have one gorilla in a cage or several gorillas, sorry, and occasionally you put a banana up there, the gorilla goes out, you you hose it down. I know it’s not a real experiment that happened, but it’s a great thought experiment right?
Toby Babb: Yeah, yeah. It’s an incredible video that, isn’t it?
Toby Corballis: Yeah. And then, over time, you introduce more gorillas until… and you take gorillas out, until none of the original gorillas are there, but none of them will go near the bananas, and that’s it’s a good metaphor for how these sort of, and you said the word actually, which I think is a magic word – culture – how the culture of organisations can develop and persist even when some of the original people that created that culture are no longer there, and the, you know the… in some sense, I always say the technology, right, that’s the easy bit, right? If i want someone to build a database for me, I can just go out and hire somebody and… But I can tell them sort of what I want at the database. I don’t need to know anything about how databases work. They’re going to build it for me, if they’re an expert. That’s kind of the easy bit. I can get that person off the shelf. I might have to pay for them, but I can get them. The difficult bit is the culture, right? And again, it’s that whole… We talked about it earlier… It’s got to be somebody at the top saying “this has got to change – I’m bought into it, I’m going to walk and talk this, as is my leadership team. We’re all going to buy into this, and they’ve all got to buy into it, by the way ,and we’ve got to go on that journey.” And you won’t always get everyone buying in, by the way, and there’s some great… There’s a great book by John Kotter and Holger Rathgeber, who wrote Our Iceberg is Melting, and another book called That’s Not The Way We Do It Here, which are really worth reading on the cultural side yeah of things. So, you won’t get everybody on the journey but it is really important – and that doesn’t necessarily matter by the way – and when when I say that, that’s not me saying “and everybody who doesn’t you’ll have to fire” – that’s not it at all, but you do need to get that buy-in from the top and you do need to make sure that the people at every layer are also bought into the journey and that cultural piece is the difficult piece, yeah, and that forms a lot of the focus of my work actually.
Toby Babb (28:23): So when you sit there and say that, you know, that you don’t have to, as you say, you know fire everyone and get rid of them, but there are people there who are actively resistant to the change that you’re talking about, you know? There’s… I’m sure you’ve read Matthew Syed’s most recent book, Rebel Thinking, which talks a lot about all the things you’ve been speaking about here, as well, and the power of diverse thought, and such like. So, tell me a little bit about how you see that improving and how you manage that as someone who’s driving change and as you say look that? This is the time, the perfect time, for Agile and Cloud to coexist and there is that sort of pull. What the right way to deal with that?
Toby Corballis: There is no one right way. Okay, so you will have… First of all, you need to understand why people are resistant to it, right? So, there’ll be lots of different reasons – sometimes people are afraid that that means that we’re going to change, we’re going to do things differently, it means my job’s going to go. I’m going to be resistant to it because I’ve got a self-interest in maintaining the balance of things as it is. A great example of that is that, you often, if you’re introducing Cloud technology. For example, you talk about Infrastructure-as-Code, right? So suddenly you de-materialise the infrastructure, It doesn’t exist as a thing, so the technicians who would go into the data centre for you, who would rack up all your stuff, make sure the structured cabling’s in place, all of that stuff, cage it, whatever, go and service it every now and again, make sure the disks are, you know, everything’s working, but they get terrified that they may not have a job. But actually, they’re still important people because Infrastructure-as-Code, it just it means that they’re changing the way they implement things, because they have to learn how to do that Infrastructure-as-Code, perhaps, and once they do that very often, in my experience, has been that they actually get very on board with the technology because suddenly they don’t have to keep trying, you know catching the train out to somewhere a long way away to go and service a disk drive and then come back, and you know their day could be more efficient and productive for them, and they can do a lot more and the sort of… the immutability of Infrastructure-as-Code, by which I mean the ability to make sure that it’s all exactly as you want it that it’s all as secure… You can roll out policies to make sure things are secure and safe, and all the rest. Once they get their heads around that and they understand how to do it, very often they’re on board with that, and they become the champions of it. So understanding why people are resistant is really important. Understanding what you can do to help break down that resistance and inculcate in them a feeling of positivity, that’s really important. Very occasionally you’ll get people who just don’t want to, you know… For them, it’s a cognitive dissonance, maybe. Now, actually, when you talk about changing an organisation, sometimes you’re gonna have to run the old with the new, right? But you might have a contractual reason why you don’t want to get out of a certain part of what you’re doing, doesn’t make financial sense, whatever it is. Those things are still going to have to run. So, actually some of those people that don’t want to change can be allowed not to change, right? So… But it’s a question of making sure that they’re doing what they need to be doing or what they should be doing, what’s, you know, valuable to the company, whilst also not prohibiting what you need to go forward into the new world, because you know that stuff will burn down over time, but that time might be ten years, right? As I said before, if you’ve got a mainframe process that’s just firing off reports every now and again, but you know it’s going to be expensive to shut it down, you might want to leave it running, but you’re still going to need people to service that, right?
Toby Babb (32:12): Yeah.
Toby Corballis: So you can use some of those people who don’t want to change to do that, if they’re happy to do that, and you can bring other people on the change journey who are happy to go on the change journey. In terms of how do you make sure that you have a good momentum going, it’s about often, you know, you break down change into those people who are resistant those people who are your champions, your helpers, and those people who are your fence sitters – people who sort of don’t really care; they just want to do a day job and they want to do it well, but they don’t mind if it’s, you know, they couldn’t – maybe they use it and they’re entering data stuff, entering data on a screen and that data they couldn’t care about what the machine is behind that, you know – but sometimes people just want to come in and do some, you know, whatever work it is anyway, the point being that it’s these people you really want to persuade, right, because they will help you build the momentum, yeah, and so that’s another aspect of it.
Toby Babb (33:18): And then when they become champions, even more. So it becomes that the draw that they have with them becomes even greater, right?
Toby Corballis: Absolutely, yeah. Absolutely.
Toby Babb: I think there’s a really fascinating piece there about momentum, isn’t there? Momentum is one of my favourite words in business, full stop, and I do it from my love of sport, and I see just these massive swings in momentum. In tennis, you see it all the time. In football, rugby, any sort of sport, you see momentum being this great shift of just what the impact it has, very demonstrably on everyone on the pitch and how their mentality just changes straight away from it, and it’s exactly the same in business – you see forward momentum in terms of a successful sales month, you see forward momentum in terms of a project, or a change process that’s sort of happening and the exact same thing works in reverse as well, right? And it’s really important to keep and build that momentum with the right sort of process to allow it to happen.
Toby Corballis (34:15): it absolutely is, and in fact one of the things you should do is celebrate your wins, right? Constantly. So you’re going to have successes on the journey. Keep celebrating them because, yeah, everyone loves success, you know, and if you show people a success and you showcase it, and you, so and I don’t mean, you know, the opening of an envelope, but if you have genuine successes, right, celebrate them, because, actually, it demonstrates, and it shows, that you’re moving in the right direction; that you’re going to get stuff done, yeah, and that the change is working and that’s also important, because otherwise, if you don’t, what happens is people go, “oh well it’s not working, I haven’t seen anything,” yeah?
Toby Babb: I think that change is working is, it’s something I’m just writing down, scribbling a note there there as well, it’s sometimes, I think, in business we can be bad at celebrating forward momentum and just be concentrating on the next thing, as well, and that sort of those sort of landmark areas, I think, are so so important to get right. I’m realising that we’ve been talking for ages. I knew we would do with all of this, and it’s gone by as predicted, as probably suggested, like that and, as a man, as I said beforehand to you, that now has your Wicked Problems Podcast, you know how quickly these things go… And that’s going well by the way?
Toby Corballis: It is, it is, yeah. Always keen to, you know, if anybody’s trying to solve one of the world’s more pernicious problems, I’m always keen to hear from them, but yeah-
Toby Babb: Yeah… So listen, you’ve got the consultancy work, you’ve got the book, you’ve got the podcast. Who should be reaching out to… Who should be talking to you? We’ve spoken about, you know, these growing startups, we’ve been hearing about the sort of Tier Twos or Tier Ones, if they’re ready for it, as well, but there’s so much value that I think you can add to people at the moment. Who do you really want to be be helping right now?
Toby Corballis (36:04): Well, I mean, those people that I| talked about. People who genuinely perceive that they have a problem, they want to get it resolved or solved, or they want to look at it in a fresh light.
Toby Babb: Yeah.
Toby Corballis: Basically, three sets of problems that you’ve got: critical problems, problems that have to be solved now – when people left for Covid, that was a very good example, haven’t got time to plan to get everyone laptops, or how the best way to do that is just let them buy them, whatever, so that’s the first problem; second type, tame problem – problems you’ve seen before, you know how to solve or somebody you know knows how to solve it; and then Wicked Problems – and wicked problems tend to have several characteristics and one of them is, you know, they don’t have a stopping condition, and that’s very true in business right? Very often people think about, I’m going to have a change project. Change was just going to take me a year, then it’ll be done, and we can all move on to something else. But actually, product development isn’t like that, right? And the world isn’t like that. The world changes constantly, over and over again. Heraclitus again – you know, change is the only constant – and it’s really people with those Wicked Problems who maybe don’t understand how to deal with problems that… or change that is constant… that’s happening over and over and over. Product development cycles that need to be… they don’t come to an end, you know? One day they will but they don’t come to an end in six months or a year there’s no finite time on those things, and inculcating that into the culture of the organisation I think is really important. So, those are the sorts of people I love working with. Now obviously there’s limited capacity here in the company but those, you know network of eighteen people, we all work together, but again I come back to that sort of stage two startups, maybe stage three – the medium-sized bank – those are the ones I love working with because those are the people that really know they need that help more than the you know the Goldman Sachs’ of the world. They’ve got people in place to do that generally, you know? They’ve got the resources. They they may do it in a way that maybe I wouldn’t do it in that way… that doesn’t matter, because they’re doing it in their way, so it’s more that sort of medium and smaller organisation
Toby Babb: They should definitely reach out. What’s the best way of reaching you?
Toby Corballis: Via my website which is storypositive.com or via email – if i say the email here, will I get spammed to death?
Toby Babb: I can’t promise it.
Toby Corballis: I never put it on the website because… so it’s always a contact form for that reason, but it’s [redacted] so that that would be perfect.
Toby Babb: Well, let’s let’s hope for not spam, but loads of loads of useful content that comes back for you as well and I love what you’re talking about here at the moment and, just as a byproduct, if I’m looking at where’s been the busiest area over the last six weeks or so, Product has been something that’s just gone up like that and, you know, Product, Product Management has been probably the the buzz, you know, requirement that’s been coming through our desk over the last weeks and i think that’s probably no surprise with everything you’ve just been speaking about.
Toby Corballis: No surprise at all, no.
Toby Babb: Well listen Toby, it’s been an absolute pleasure. I’m so pleased we managed to catch up and hear everything about StoryPositive. I wish you nothing but utter success with everything. The best with all of it going further forward, plus the book. I should be looking forward to dipping it into myself and get a signed picture with it as well at some sort of stage, I’m sure.
Toby Corballis: Excellent, and i’m sure the BBC will be in touch about The Two Toby’s Show.
Toby Babb: It’s only a matter of time, only a matter of time. Toby Corballis, absolute pleasure. To everyone else who’s been watching, thank you so much for tuning in and we’ll see you soon on another episode of FinTech Focus TV. Thanks a lot.