When consultants stare into the future, we are often confronted with uncertainty. So how do we prime our practises to survive and thrive?

This month, Phil is joined by Tom Cheesewright; an independent consultant, writer, broadcaster — and applied futurist.

Transcript

[00:00:00] Phil Lewis: When consultants stare into the future, we’re often confronted with uncertainty — for ourselves and for our clients. So how do we prime our practices to survive and thrive in an uncertain world? And how do we help our clients to do the same? Welcome to The Consultancy Business Podcast. I’m Phil Lewis, and we are here to champion ethics and excellence in consultancy. This month, I’m delighted to be joined by Tom Cheesewright. I’ve known Tom for, I think, about 15 years. We met back in about 1835 when we were both working in marketing. And since then, he’s built a brilliant career as an independent consultant, writer, and broadcaster, all around the theme of the future. When we talk about the future, what does that mean? How do you advise clients on the future? And perhaps equally importantly, how do you build an independent consultancy business that lasts for over 10 years off a proposition — the future — that’s that esoteric. I think you’ll really enjoy my conversation with Tom. I certainly found a lot of value in it. By the way, just to say, if I sound a little croaky on this episode, it’s because I was. I was battling a heavy cold, but hopefully that won’t put you off too much. So without further ado, here is my conversation with Tom Cheesewright. Tom, welcome to the podcast.

[00:01:32] Tom Cheesewright: Thank you very much, Phil.

[00:01:33] Phil Lewis: I wanted to start by talking about this phrase that you put around your work; applied futurism. So for those of us who are not familiar with the work of an applied futurist, or the concept of applied futurism, perhaps we could start with a short primer.

[00:01:51] Tom Cheesewright: Let’s start with futurist. I’m someone who looks at the future in a structured fashion, largely on behalf of clients who range between charities, bits of government, and big companies. The applied bit comes kind of both from my approach and from what I try and extract from that foresight. The approach being one where I learned through doing quite often. I like to get really involved in the subjects, the topics, the industries that I’m examining. And that leads me to do things, build things, really experiment in the learning. But I also get involved in what follows the foresight. I often tell people that I answer three questions for clients. What does our future look like? How do we tell that story to our colleagues and customers and shareholders? And what on earth do we do about it? And so the, you know, the second bit of the applied piece is answers as well as questions, not just foresight, but solutions to use a horrible consultancy word.

[00:02:57] Phil Lewis: Can we drill down into what you mean by the future in the context of your work? Because the reason that I ask that is it strikes me that one working definition of the future is something like: everything that might happen at any time, which I’m sure is not the definition that you would apply to the future. So what would be the sort of parameters or guardrails or what sort of definitional space would you build into that?

[00:03:23] Tom Cheesewright: So I actually almost never look at THE future. Because I’m, my work’s quite mercenary in many ways. If I’m looking at THE future, it’s for my entertainment and maybe a blog post I’m writing. Most of the time I’m looking at your future, where ‘you’ is the client. And so that immediately adds a level of filtering, a sort of lens through which we’re looking at the future. It is; what does the future look like for you, your industry, your customers, partners, suppliers. From there, we add another few lenses. We add a time lens, you know, when are we looking at, are we looking at the near future, the next sort of two to five years, or we’re looking at the more distant future, 10, 20, 30, 40 years hence. And when we’re looking at will very much define the approach. We’ll use different tools, whether we’re looking near term or far term. And then there’s a geographical lens as well. As sort of globalised and homogenised as we might sometimes feel the world is now, there are very different futures for different parts of the world based on the impact of lots of macro factors, whether that’s economies or politics or climate change. So we zoom in based on time, we zoom in based on geography, we zoom in based on who we’re talking to. And then it’s really a question of answering, okay. What? Why? How? You know, all of the other questions.

[00:04:47] Phil Lewis: I want to come back and talk more about that. Before we get to that, one of the things that really interests me about you, and something I think we have in common, is the fact that — I don’t know whether you would share this definition or not, Tom — but it feels to me like you and I are both outliers in consultancy in perhaps two ways. So the first way is that we’ve both been doing what we do for a very long time. So you’re about a decade and I think… I’m about a decade in. That is not a given in a world where eighty percent of independent consultancies fail in the first two years. To make it to ten years you’re doing really well because you’re outstripping not only the failure rate for small businesses, but actually the failure rate for independent consultancies, which is even higher. So you and I are both outliers in that way, but we’re also outliers in another way, it strikes me, which is that we have over time been able to sell to clients what I would call quite innovative value propositions that there aren’t necessarily huge parallels for in the market, or certainly weren’t at the time we started doing them. So when you came out as an applied futurist, there was, as far as I could tell, no one else in that space. When I launched Corporate Punk as a very human form of change management, there was no one else in that space. I’d be interested in kicking around with you, for the benefit of other consultants who are looking to the long term, what do you think has influenced your ability or defined your ability to make independent consultancy, of the type that you’ve done it, work for you over this length of time.

[00:06:32] Tom Cheesewright: There’s a few answers to that. I think in order to answer it, you always have to go… delve a little bit further back in my history. You know, so one way or another, I have been… at least for some period of time, an independent consultant, since 2005. In 2005, I was working for a marketing agency. I told them I was going to leave and they said, please don’t, please go freelance and carry on working for us. And I said, okay. And we did a deal where I did three days a week for them. And then I had two days a week to do other stuff. And that other stuff became picking up some clients of my own, some sort of, you know, marketing consultancy, strategy consultancy clients, but also starting businesses and trying out propositions with the market. Let’s be honest, most of which did not succeed. But it was my first experience of creating novel propositions and trying to take them to market. So the first one was a business called Eggheads, which was designed to be a home technology support franchise. This is pre-iPhone. This is the year where people were just starting to buy home cinema systems and things like that. And I kept encountering people who wanted these things, but had no idea how to buy them, and lots of broken computers and computers full of viruses because people have been visiting websites they shouldn’t do. And so I tried that and that didn’t work for various reasons. But I then… you know… then my independent consultancy became an agency in its own right. And we grew and then we sort of split off and…. And then, you know, I went back into independent consultancy again, and eventually, you know, landed on being an applied futurist 12 years ago. Immediately before that though, I’d been in a software business that we’d created. Web analytics business. And we’d spent three years at the point that I left trying to sell this novel proposition to the market. And we were really, really struggling. You know, we were really struggling to sell them this web analytics product that was kind of for salespeople, really, it was about, you know, not how many people are on your website, but who are they, and how do you then go on and sell to them. It was a real struggle. It was a lot of friction, a lot of trying to explain things to people, whether they were investors or potential buyers, and it was deeply frustrating. And, you know, part of the reason I left, you know, I took what I call an assisted leap. I jumped out of frustration, but I had the hand of the investors firmly in my back. And I jumped out and I launched this proposition as an applied futurist almost straight away. I’d been writing about the future, I’d been broadcasting about the future, I was being asked to consult about the future by people who knew me and knew what my interests were. And so I put this website out there with the help of a brilliant branding guy, I know called Stuart Aitken. And he actually came up with the term applied futurist to describe what I wanted to do. And we put this website out there and within the first six weeks, LG, Nikon, and Sony Pictures had called up and said, oh, we really need an applied futurist. And so, you know, I’d had these three years of banging my head against a wall, trying to sell this novel proposition to market. And suddenly I’d put a new novel proposition out there with almost no effort, and the market was buying it. You know, it’s not been entirely plain sailing since then, but it does, I do think it highlights that part of that longevity is having stumbled across a good, what in startup land would be called product market fit.

[00:10:09] Phil Lewis: You stumbled across good product market fit, it feels, through a combination of four factors. Firstly, there’s something about building yourself a ramp. So, you know, you… or a runway, I guess, as it would be called in startup land. So, you know, going down to three days a week, having that kind of safety net, I suppose, for want of a better word, mixing metaphors all over the place, but bear with me. Then there’s also trying lots of stuff, which in a sense, the runway allows you to do. There’s also this sort of sense of you as a multi-hyphenate. So actually trying lots of stuff, but also working in multiple fields, albeit all with probably some convergence around technology and intellect and whatever else, and analysis and all that kind of stuff. And then it just feels like there’s another probably quite obvious point, which is that you were super-productive over that time as well. So productive, both in the context of trying things, but also super productive in the sense of, as you rightly said, you were writing, you were broadcasting, you were out there on lots of different fronts. And it just strikes me that that sort of combination of building yourself some sort of ramp, runway, safety net, trying a load of stuff out, working in different fields as well and being as productive as you possibly could be, ultimately meant that what you were actually doing is maximising the possibility of stumbling across something that was actually going to connect with the market. Now, whether or not that was deliberate or not is a different matter, but it does feel like there is a sort of the beginnings of maybe a recipe and all of that for what it actually means to enter this market. And the reason I say all this, by the way, is because 80 percent of independent consultancies fail in two years. It’s a staggeringly high failure rate. So one of the things that I’m interested in is; what is driving that failure rate. And I wonder if it’s the absence of some, or all, of those kinds of things that we’ve just been talking about.

[00:12:19] Tom Cheesewright: Yeah, I mean, I’d highlight a few things. I think you’re right about the ramp. I always knew I wanted to work for myself, but I wasn’t expecting to go self-employed until I was in my 30s. I was going to get, you know, 10 years of experience after university and then think about it. And what actually happened was I got five years of experience and then got a good offer. This offer came out of the blue. And so it sort of funded me to do that experimentation, but you’re absolutely right. I had, I had the mortgage paid. I had the security to go and experiment. And I learned an enormous amount from that experimentation, both the mechanics of how to set up a new proposition and take it to market, but also how to deal with it when it doesn’t work. And what, you know, how to get the appropriate feedback. What all that experimentation also did was it dramatically broadened my network and my profile. So I was interacting with lots of different people with lots of different hats on. So I was building up a media profile. You know, I had a regular slot on 5 Live and I was doing bits of TV and things. I was doing bits of consultancy, which got me in front of, you know, C-suite people in some pretty large organisations. I was meeting loads of small business people as well, because I was, you know, finding partners and supporters and, investors for some of these various sort of startup ideas. I haven’t even mentioned half of them. So, you know, the combination of those things, when it came to actually finally land on the proposition that has been my career for the last 12 years and will be my career for the next, you know, 10, 12, 20 probably, let’s be honest, probably 30 until, you know, I can actually step back from it. I built a narrative about myself that made me very credible to prospective customers, and I think that was really important. I do meet or, or certainly have met, a lot of consultants in the past who maybe don’t have that breadth and depth of, you know, relationships and experience that makes them feel credible, that makes them an attractive buying proposition for potential clients. The last thing though, is what I ultimately ended up doing was something that I’ve been passionate about since I was about three years old. How you turn that passion into a business; you could do it in many different ways. All the things I learned through some of the various successes and, you know, failures, worked out how I turned it into a business. But the core of it was something I just really enjoy and really excited about. I talk about it as an excuse to indulge my curiosity. And it very much is.

[00:14:57] Phil Lewis: I’ve added a couple more to our putative list here. So if you kind of go, well, there’s building yourself a ramp, there’s being quite experimental about what you do, there’s working across different modalities and different industries. Being super productive. There’s also what you’ve just said is network and relationship building, there’s developing a kind of personal profile and there’s working on what you’re passionate about and therefore, if you’re passionate about it, probably pretty good at. And I look at a list like that, Tom, and I think, well, if I go back to 10, 15 years ago, did I build myself a ramp? Absolutely. I did exactly what you did when I set Corporate Punk up, which is; I tapered off from my existing full time role. I was pretty wildly experimental about what we did and how we did it. I was certainly super productive. I was doing something I felt incredibly passionate about. I mean, I don’t care about running my own business. I don’t really care about business at all actually, is the kind of secret. I care about human beings and helping human beings. Just the case that happened to do it in business, in a business context, you know. But I think of myself as more a kind of accidental entrepreneur. I just worked from where I was passionate and just turned out no one else was kind of doing the work I wanted to do. So therefore I had to go and do it on my own. And then there was network and relationship building for me as well. Well, I mean, again, you talk to a lot of independent consultants who, to your earlier point, they may not have those networks and those relationships. And if they’re anything like me, absolutely hate networking. But what I would say is there’s millions of ways of growing relationships with people that don’t require you to go to networking events, you know. And I think, the problem with most networking events and networking in the classic sense is that it feels quite transactional. Groups of people trying to sell to each other. Where actually my approach to it over time has been trying to be nice, trying to be helpful, you know, try and foster conversations with people you actually like about things you’re both interested in and deal with that as a kind of long term agenda. And then over time, I think, that starts to accrue its own form of value. So I guess if I think back over the last 10 years, it sounds like you and I again, accidentally or by design, have done quite a lot of the same sort of things, really.

[00:17:30] Tom Cheesewright: Yeah, I think you’re right. I think you’re part of the approach to networking… there is always a… you’ve got to be careful about where you’re expending your time. You know, because the best approach to networking is to be nice, but also to give value, to be helpful, to be useful. But it’s only worth doing that in places where you think there’s going to be some return. And so, you know, I started… what tends to happen is I’m a solo consultant and every now and again, I start a business. And I swore off it for 10 years after the last… 12 years after the last one and started a new one last year. And as part of that, I’ve been going out networking again and very quickly realising which of those networking opportunities are utterly valueless to me. You know, a total waste of my time. Whereas others I’m very happy to sink my time and effort with no obvious immediate reward because you get a sense of which people are part of the networks, which people are connected to the right networks that are ultimately going to be valuable to you. And which people, which groups will just be a drag on your time for a significant period. And you don’t learn that straight away. You know, when I first moved to Manchester, I went to every breakfast networking event within 20, 30 miles. I got very fat. I ate a lot of bad bacon and eggs, met a lot of men in grey suits and egg stained ties, all trying to sell me, you know, financial services of some description. There were absolute gems, like absolutely brilliant connections I made out of that effort. But you know, 80 percent of that effort was wasted, if not 90%. I just didn’t know at the time, which 90%. And so I think in your, in your early career, particularly if you’ve got that ramp, you can afford to go and waste some of that time, getting a sense of what’s valuable and what’s not. And the later in your career you get, the more experienced you get, the more you can be selective about where you network and where you are, where you give your time and your support. Because by that point in your career, your time and your support is very, very valuable potentially. And so you have to be more selective about where you give it.

[00:19:43] Phil Lewis: I feel as though the other thing that came through very strongly in your story and is kind of there in mine is; to a point, how do I put it… there, but for the grace of god, so, you know, over the course of 10, 12 years, I know it’s been tough at times for you. And it’s been tough at times for me too. And one of the things that I feel a sense of perhaps obligation to talk about, is how difficult it can be for those of us who are in this marketplace. And actually, that’s one of the reasons I do this podcast is because I know how difficult and how lonely it can be for people out there. And the extent to which… what’s that old phrase, the extent to which we all compare our own behind the scenes to other people’s stage shows. I actually feel like the world of independent consultancy would be massively enriched if there was a really honest conversation that said something like; the first two years are going to be incredibly tough and it will take you probably two, three, four years to start building out a reputation that will see you right for the five, 10, 15, beyond that. And that the real job is to hang on for dear life over the course of those first two or three years, but know that things will get better. Now, not everybody’s experience is that bleak, but an 80 percent failure rate would seem, to me anyway, to indicate that a lot of people came into the market with expectations that weren’t really aligned to reality. So I feel as though one of the things I want to say is; no, this is going to be tough, but you’re not on your own. There are resources like the ones that we’ve got at The Consultancy Business to try and help you. And if you can stick it out, over time, what will happen is things do become easier, things do become better. And I don’t know if that’s true of all startups and scale ups. I think it is to a point, but I think one of the things that demarcates independent consultancy is that a lot of that is kind of navigated on your own for most people. Does that resonate at all?

[00:22:01] Tom Cheesewright: It does, and I don’t want to sound even more possibly bleak, but actually, my experience was kind of the other way around. I put this proposition out there, and very suddenly, there was a completely unexpected level of uptake. And, you know, very quickly, was getting in front of some really big brands doing some really fun work. And while it wasn’t plain sailing, you know, it was still a new proposition and I was still… I spent the first six months working out actually how to do what I was being asked to do. The first two years were actually quite good. It was 2015 when everything dropped off a cliff. And I remember this so vividly because it was such a deeply stressful period. I had a… not a brilliant pipeline of work for that year, but a pretty solid pipeline of work, tens of thousands of pounds. And in the space of three weeks, for no reason, I still, you know… for a series of different reasons, I think none of it was connected. It was just terrible luck. A lot of it disappeared. I mean, you know, tens of thousands of pounds of work just dropped off the calendar. I didn’t make any money from February to September in 2015. Any money at all. My savings were completely wiped out. I had a kitchen renovation planned and we had to go cap in hand to the kitchen company and say, we’re really sorry, we need to delay this for a year because we just can’t afford to do it right now. It was a horrible, horrible period. Yeah. I still can’t really explain it. And thankfully it’s not happened since, and I have a slightly more robust pipeline, I would say now, and a slightly more robust proposition. It’s probably more diverse now than it was then. But yeah, you have to be prepared as an independent consultant, because your exposure to the world, however well known you are, however much work you’ve put into building a profile, your exposure to the world is still quite narrow. You’re still only ever going to have a pipeline of so many different bits of work, of so many different streams of income that, you know, sometimes whatever the opposite of the stars aligning, you know, can happen. And there can be a big hole. And so you, you, you have to be prepared for those… I mean, not even rainy days. We’re talking monsoon season. And you have to be prepared for that happening, always. Those are the really, really tough moments. I, you know, I was very seriously contemplating, do I just go and get a job at that point. And thankfully things picked up and turned around and while it hasn’t been plain sailing since, you know, we’re in a, you know, a good, robust financial situation again.

[00:24:46] Phil Lewis: Yeah, I think that’s all so true. Any of us who’ve been in this marketplace for any period of time have had experiences like that. And, you know, there’s always a degree if you turn around to your coaches and your mentors and your peers and your friends, usually with the view of going, what can we learn from this? Right? And just once in a while, you look back at it, you look back at the events or you look back at a period where things were very fallow, and actually you kind of go, the only thing I can learn from this is it’s going to happen sometimes.

[00:25:20] Tom Cheesewright: Yeah. In fact, I remember sitting down with you in that period sharing and sharing that experience with you.

[00:25:25] Phil Lewis: Yeah. And I think it’s the cold comfort, I guess, is it will change. Yeah. You know, like I always say, one of the great gifts, having been an independent consulting for this long, is knowledge that the phone is always going to ring again. I don’t know when, I don’t know who’s going to be on the end of it, I don’t know what the project is going to be, but I know it’s going to happen. And so the job becomes hang on sometimes until that, that takes place, you know, until events have their chance to happen. Now, talking of events, I want to head back into the wonderful world of futurism with you for a sec. And I’m interested, I was thinking about what you’re saying earlier on about the nature of your work. And I guess the question that came up for me, Tom is, what business is a futurist really in? And let me try and explain my thinking behind that question and then you can slap me to my senses or correct me or whatever. So it seems to me that any meaningful analysis of history, and this is where I’m going to talk to you and you’re going to roll your eyes perhaps around Nicholas Nassim Taleb, is characterised by black swan events. What actually hits businesses, us as individuals, sometimes societies, are events that nobody predicted looking forwards, but actually made sort of some degree of historical sense. And so you don’t hold yourself out as being a psychic, you know, you’re not sort of business Mystic Meg, but what you are doing is looking through all those different lenses that you talked about earlier on and helping organisations to think through what could happen. So I guess in my head, if we take the black swan view of the world, you go, well, you’re not necessarily here to predict, because you can’t predict you’re not a psychic. What you can do is help organisations to inoculate themselves, it seems to me. So if you look forward, you could say, well, look, here is the scope of possibility about what could happen, what could hit your industry. If you can even see a black swan, what that black swan might be, or at least what’s within the sort of scope of possibilities for the future. And then encourage an organisation to think about how it primes itself, not only for those eventualities, but also for that level of uncertainty, right? Cause I think there’s a cultural priming to be done as well as a kind of functional priming around, well, if this happens, then this happens, then this happens. So I guess in my head, I was going; does Tom think he’s in the prediction game? Does he think he’s in the inoculation game? Does he think he’s in a different game altogether?

[00:28:15] Tom Cheesewright: The black something has kind of become an excuse for people to bury their heads in the sand. If you… I use cars as an analogy a lot, cause I’m a bit of a car nerd and you know, imagine your business is a car, your client’s business is a car that they’re driving down the road. And, you know, the driver decides that he’s got no chance of predicting when an asteroid is going to fall out of the sky, and destroy the road in front of him. And given that he can’t predict that, he might as well just close his eyes, put his foot down, and just see what happens. And we kind of do that in business. It’s absolutely staggering how little time we spend looking at the future, and even when we do, how badly we do it., I did some research a few years ago with chief finance officers. And they told me the most terrifying thing. They told me that in two thirds of organisations, the annual strategy and the annual report, i.e. the, you know, the numbers, or rather the budget and the annual strategy, either don’t align at all or align only at the top level. In other words, you’ve got the numbers, where you’re putting the money, saying that the organisation is going one way and you’ve got the chief exec in his bold strategy that’s been nicely designed by your marketing agency saying you’re going somewhere completely different. And in many organisations, that annual budget setting and strategy setting exercise is the only foresight that they really do in any structured fashion. And so my mission, you know, that underpins all my work is to convince everyone, to convince every organisation, to devote a little bit more time just to thinking about the future. And in some ways, you know, I’m not fussy about the structure. I obviously preach my own methodology, but if you can carve out 1 percent of your time to focus on the future, which translates to one day, every six months, you’re doing better than most organisations, and that’s slightly scary. And if you do that, if you do carve out that 1 percent of your time, what you’ll find is actually quite a lot of stuff is quite predictable. Your black swan events, maybe not, but lots of times the things that happen, the things that bring companies to their knees, or produce the next big success, are not wildly unpredictable events. They are the intersection of measurable pressures that people will tell you about if you ask them, and trends that are being written about not in sort of obscure niche magazines, but in the national press. And just by creating the time, carving out the time to look at what those trends and pressures mean for you, you can have a fairly meaningful impact on the strategy of your organisation.
And yet it is, you know, it is disturbingly rarely done.

[00:31:28] Phil Lewis: So that feels right to me in the sense of going yes black swans will happen from time to time but there’s a bloody load of white ones we’re not paying attention to. And you beautifully put it there around you the intersection of entirely predictable business pressures. I guess it begs the question, does it not, as to why that is happening. A lot of organisations exhibit a form of myopia. Yeah. They’re very busy on their own psychodramas. They’re very busy on their own internal politics, internal wrangling, people jockeying for position, the business of keeping the business running as well feels all consuming, you’ve got maybe capitalist pressures. They’re trying to do more for less and all of that kind of stuff going on. I also wonder if there’s a degree of just organisational myopia, but that being driven by a set of organisational incentives and on top of that, perhaps a sort of optimism bias as well that says, well, whatever the future holds, we’ll cope with it. We’ve always survived to date, so we can survive the next thing. And maybe a lack of ability to think systemically shows up as well in terms of actually, we can’t really predict sometimes the way that these different pressures will manifest themselves on our businesses. So just interested your thoughts as to why organisations struggle with it, because it’s quite stark. If you say most organisations don’t spend 1 percent of their time thinking about the future, the question becomes why, doesn’t it really?

[00:33:13] Tom Cheesewright: Yeah, and I, you know, I don’t, do I have a great answer to that? I don’t know. When I was writing my first book, High Frequency Change, a few years ago, someone I interviewed from one of the big four consultancies said to me, the age of creativity is over. You know, it has been squashed by the drive for operational excellence, operational efficiency. And I think you’ve already got that reality for most people in a normal job that the day-to-day is more than enough to be getting on with. And then you overlay on that this drive for efficiency that has been amplified by new opportunities for automation, by, you know, comparisons to other parts of the world that have maybe invested more in productivity. And the room for throwing your favourite cliche here, you know, blue sky thinking, open mindedness, you know, I like to compare it to, you know, to in football terms, which I, you know, I know be very familiar to you, Phil. You’ve got your sort of Jose Mourinho teams that are just all about real ruthless efficiency, and sort of aggression and physicality. And then you’ve got your teams that have these sort of, you know, incredible playmakers in the midfield. And, you know, the, what every organisation should have these playmakers who can not just run, looking at the ball at their feet, but look up, and pick out those sort of 30 yard passes that make the magic, and in the drive, you know, as the fashion move towards being ultra efficient and sort of muscular companies, we lost those, those great playmakers and we lost, we stopped creating the space for those playmakers. You know, and actually I look around at some of the, the, the giants of our industries, you know, now, and it feels like they’re making the same mistake again, you know. Stepping back from some of those opportunities for open minded thinking about the future. Broadly, I think the trend is actually quite good. You know, lots of large organisations I talked to now, driven by the recent volatility that they’ve experienced, the sense that they don’t understand the world and that they’re not confident making predictions about profitability in the near term are thinking, well, if I can’t solve the short term problems may be I ought to be investing more time in thinking about the long term and putting this organisation on a solid track for the next 20 years, rather than the next two quarters. And that’s very positive, but some organisations are very publicly and visibly rowing back from a historical investment in thinking about the future.

[00:36:04] Phil Lewis: I was reminded, listening to you talk, of a very memorable conversation I had… this is going back about I’m gonna say 22, 23 years now. And there was this client, he’s long since retired, he was called Laurie. And I remember ringing him one day. Back in the days we used to make spontaneous phone calls, you know if you remember and I said, ‘Hi Laurie how are you doing, are you busy?’ and he said, ‘Not really, no. Now is more a time for reflection.’ And he laughed, and it sort of stayed with me because it is the only time in 25 years I have ever, ever heard a client say, I’m having a think. And what was lovely about it was the fact that he was sort of towards retirement age and everything else, but he clearly just given himself permission to do that. And I think about Laurie a lot, you know, for him a sort of passing joke actually stayed with me for about 25 years. Cause I often think to myself, Oh goodness me, if we had more time for reflection, what would that actually mean? And what would that actually create and how would we use that time? And so if you come back to your work, and I think your work at its best must be prompting reflection, it can’t be doing anything else because you must, as somebody who’s sitting there going, look, here’s what’s coming down the line. You must be getting clients to therefore reflect on what it might mean for them and their organisations. I sort of take the point about the rare individuals that will think 10 or 20 years ahead, but my experience in most organisations, Tom, is they tend to hire and help for cure not prevention. And so I do find myself wondering what are organisations actually experiencing where they think, you know what? We really could use a Tom here. Is it, for example, that they’ve all just lived through a global pandemic and have gone, we do actually need to get a bit better at anticipating what’s coming down the line, or is it that there’s some sort of twitch in the back of their collective minds or memories that says we’re really not paying attention to stuff we need to. And actually we’ve got this itch and Tom’s the guy that’s going to help us scratch it.
What’s your sense of why clients are taking this sort of action where you’re concerned right now?

[00:38:32] Tom Cheesewright: I’ve spent 12 years trying to convince other people to learn how to be futurists. And I keep coming back to the idea that people must want to know how to do this, that I must be able to convince them to carve out the time and teach them the tools to do it for themselves. Because surely if you’re a leader of any description in an organisation, foresight, futurism, strategy’s got to be a discipline that you want to have in your arsenal. You know, it’s got to be a… it’s got to be something that you think you need to be able to do. And yet every time I try and do that, it’s a moderate success, but by and large, they’d rather I did the thinking, the reflection, for them. They’d rather pay me to take the time out to think than do it for themselves. And, you know, what prompts them to ask me to do it is really one of two things. Let’s say one of three, actually. Sometimes it is what you said. It’s that twitch in the back of the head or the milestone that they’ve crossed that says, yeah, we’ve had a really good 10 years or a really bad 10 years one way or another. We really ought to think about the next five, the next 10 in some structured fashion, who can help us do that? And they go to a search engine and they find me, and they call me up and say, is this the sort of thing you could help us with? Then you have your industry level thinking where, you know, someone’s trying to programme a conference for lots of people in the same industry and they’re scratching around for interesting topics and thinking, wouldn’t it be fun to get someone to talk about what the future of our industry looks like? And that’s obviously an appealing gig for me. And that’s interesting. But the third class of work is what I call my jazz hands work. And this is, this is futurism as performance in some ways. And I don’t, I don’t mind talking about it as such because it’s really good fun and it still occasions me the opportunity to go and delve into a sector. And this is where the conversation goes; we’ve not got anything really exciting to talk about from a marketing perspective for the next six months. Why don’t we talk to our customers about the future of our industry? And that’s where I get pulled into going, you know, front a media campaign or write 8,000 words about the future of shoes or whatever it may be. Which I still find really interesting, but it’s probably not going to sway someone’s strategy very much. And so, you know, across those three things where you’ve got that particular occasion, whether that’s strategy setting, or actually increasingly these days, new product development. Whether it’s that, okay, how do I bring a group of people together to talk about something interesting? And they pick the future as that interesting topic to how do I make myself sound exciting by talking about the future of my industry to position myself and, forgive me for using the phrase, as a thought-leader, let’s get someone who knows about it to come and talk about the future.

[00:41:38] Phil Lewis: I think it’s tempting to dismiss the third of those things as jazz hands, but you’re very modest, I suspect it actually underplays the contribution. Because it seems to me that any opportunity for any sort of innovation in any sort of organisation has to be grounded in an understanding of, to take your football analogy, and by the way, this is the only football analogy you’ll ever hear from me, given my world historically low knowledge of football, but you’ve got to be able to understand where the ball’s going, as well as where the ball is. So yes, there’s a degree of jazz hands. There’s a degree of, look, I can say some smart things about the future, but that will be for a lot of organisations, I think, very useful stimulus indeed. And of course, creativity being — of which innovation’s a part — creativity being a kind of hard to understand process. It’s also the thing that we put this kind of work into the ether. And it will be making a contribution, it’s just sometimes quite hard to hypothecate what that contribution is, but it is to say that it’s doing something, it’s shifting a debate forward in the market in some meaningful sense. And the reason I asked that all that, by the way, is I think a lot of us who aren’t applied futurists, one of the things that we can really struggle with, is getting our clients to pay attention to the future. And it really matters to us, or it matters to a lot of us, because I guess one of the things that makes a good consultant is the ability to anticipate what a client might be experiencing, or what a client might be tripped up by, or might be an opportunity that’s coming down the line before it happens. And so a lot of the time you’re there going, look, iceberg, iceberg, iceberg, or you’re there going, actually look, that could be amazing. You know, treasure in that direction, kind of thing. If only we could take action in line with that. And it can be really hard to do that, particularly when you’re dealing with people who were in the middle of some present day suffering. So, as we round out this conversation, I’ve got a couple of questions for you, but the first one is, if you’re somebody who’s trying to get clients to pay attention to the future, whatever that looks like, apart from call Tom Cheesewright, which would be a very sensible move and we’ll put all the links to that in the show notes. What’s the advice that you would give to another consultant who’s trying to get clients to lift their head up in the kind of ways that you’re encouraging clients to do?

[00:44:20] Tom Cheesewright: I actually do it in a really cheesy way, you know. It’s amazing how long… you know, cliches become cliches because they’ve got some, some value or, or use, right? They become trite because they get overused, but they get overused for a good reason. You know, there are frequent examples in the media and probably in your client’s own industry, of people who were driving towards a brick wall and failed to steer, you know, because they just weren’t looking for it. And I think if you can highlight those examples and say, let’s not be them, or, you know, let’s be them, the ones who spotted something coming and took advantage of it. If you just keep presenting with those examples, saying, look, doing that, is an investment of 1 percent of your time is one day, every six months. Let’s do half a day focused on the future one day, every six months or day, every six months, where we focus on the future and let’s make you the people who don’t make that mistake or do take that opportunity. I think that’s a very compelling story, particularly if you present it as just 1 percent of your time. Surely you can carve out 1 percent when you’re not bombarded by emails, meetings or firefighting.

[00:45:33] Phil Lewis: What I heard in that was, effectively, appeal to people’s baseline motivation. So survival, envy of others, personal advancement, all of that kind of stuff.

[00:45:46] Tom Cheesewright: Yeah, make it about their career, not just about their business.

[00:45:48] Phil Lewis: Well, I suspect actually that’s not far wrong in some sense. I mean, the years and years of working with consumer and organisational psychologists has taught me one thing, which is — we are all intensely self-interested, self-motivated, and ultimately quite selfish. And there are good things that come with that. It kind of goes to the realpolitik of how you have to connect propositions like this or connect a desire to have clients look at the future with the baseline reality of where clients are. Second and final question I had for you was back to where we started really. Which 10 years, 12 years down the line, Tom, really impressive track record. You’ve worked with some incredible businesses over that time. You’ve made a not only brilliant, but sustainable career out of applied futurism. And you’ve written multiple books, you’ve been on the BBC more times than most people can imagine. It’s been a tough ride, but I think it’s also fair to say as someone who’s known you for a time, a really admirable one as well. If you were to go right back to when you started, what’s the one piece of advice that you would have given the Tom of 12 years ago or 10 years ago about how to make sure you’re still here and still thriving in 10 years time, with maybe a little bit less of the pain and the heartache than some of those periods might have contained.

[00:47:20] Tom Cheesewright: You never as famous as you think you are. And what I mean by that is it’s a very British thing to be quite… nervous is wrong word… quite sensitive about overexposure. It’s a balance to be struck. You can shout too much, but if anything was going to avoid my dip in 2015, it would have been a little bit more, you know, calculated and modest self-promotion. I do a lot of broadcasting. I’ve done something like well over 2,000 broadcast interviews in the last 15 years or so, 14 years or so. Most people are not listening to 5 Live on a Saturday night. Certainly most people that you’re trying to sell to are not listening. So it’s not enough to do something. You have to tell people you’ve done something. And again, you know, you’ve got to strike a balance. You can’t be excessive about it, but you know, that profile in the long term, particularly a profile in your niche, in your domain, will serve you really well, and it’s worth investing in that to drive the inbound inquiries, not the ones you have to chase.

[00:48:36] Phil Lewis: That profile, also, as again, your own work evidences, is not just about being out there, banging the drum in that sort of sense of self promotion, but it’s also self promotion by means of saying interesting, entertaining and useful things for people rather than say what we see on LinkedIn all the time, which is a little bit more hollow.

[00:48:57] Tom Cheesewright: It’s got to be quality stuff. You know, you’ve got to put the effort into what you’re producing. There’s no point in doing it for its own sake. You know, I go back to, you know, how did I end up on the BBC in the first place? I went around to fix someone’s computer as part of this Eggheads startup, and I explained to her what was wrong with her computer. And she rang me up about a week later and said, look, I’ve got a new radio show starting. You were really good at explaining this. Will you come on and be my tech expert? And so to exactly your point, the value came out of not shouting about myself, it came out of adding value to somebody else’s life, then recognising how that value could be shared elsewhere, and that bringing its own reward.

[00:49:43] Phil Lewis: Tom, thanks for coming on the podcast. A big thanks again to Tom. If he found value in what he had to say, and you’d like to learn more about his work, you’ll see links to his website and to his various books in the show notes. If you’re new to the podcast, just to say there are lots of other episodes that it might be worth diving into, around subjects as varied as the psychology of selling, AI and consulting, and building confidence in pricing. In the meantime, we’ll be back as always on the first Monday of the month with a brand new episode. So we look forward to talking with you then.

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