Ostrich politics | Warning Signs 2

We’ve all experienced those ‘everything’s fine’ moments in a team, where issues go unspoken and problems bubble under the surface. Over time, that denial will wreck trust and stall progress.

In Ostrich Politics, the second webinar in the Warning Signs series, we’ll look at how you can spot these red flags early and guide teams back to open, productive conversations. If you’re a senior leader tired of watching teams tread water or ignoring growing issues, it’s crucial to make sure nobody’s burying their head in the sand when it matters most.

If you couldn’t make it on the day, or if you’d like to revisit the subject, here’s the full recording:

If anything from the session hits home and you’d like to talk it through, I’m happy to make time for a confidential conversation. Get in touch here.

The Warning Signs series takes an expert look at the different ways organisations can signal that something isn’t right — long before anything goes obviously or disastrously wrong. Spotting, diagnosing and addressing these warning signs can save time, money, stress and potentially jobs. So keep an eye out for Warning Signs 3, coming soon.

Transcript

Just so you know a little bit about me and the work that I do. So those of you who haven’t met me before, I’m a coach and consultant. I work with leaders and teams to help them solve seven- and eight-figure business problems. So fundamentally my work orients around a really simple belief, actually, which is that all business problems are human problems. So fundamentally, if something’s going wrong in a business, it’s usually because there is something going wrong with or between the human beings who are working in that business. And if we can solve the human issues in the business, normally what happens is actually business performance will take care of itself.

And so therefore, you know, I work in resolving issues of leadership, issues of board performance, strategic alignment, sometimes structuring and restructuring organisations and change management as well.

This is the second of the Warning Signs series. We are going to be doing several of these throughout the year this year. And the idea is ultimately to look at what the human problems are in business, with a view to helping give new insight and hopefully some practical actions that leaders can take so that ultimately they can see off some of the issues that might be happening in their organisations before they actually become overwhelming. That’s the principle of this.

Not interested in doing a webinar series which is just about sort of lecturing people on what to do. It’s not, in my view, a particularly helpful mode. Webinars sometimes lend themselves to that. What I am interested in, and I think what is more helpful for people, is a kind of open and empathic inquiry. So, not actually ultimately trying to have all of the answers, but ultimately trying to open up something to think about. Give you some psychological, emotional, practical insight that hopefully means you’re walking away from something like today with several lines of inquiry that are going to be useful to you in terms of how you are leading and managing things hereon in.

So, let’s talk about Ostrich Politics. I work, as I say, in situations and environments where big issues have often come home to roost in businesses. There are big seven- or eight-figure business problems going on. One of the characteristics that, or one of the stories you often hear, when you are going into organisations to deal with that kind of thing, is that whatever has happened has happened all of a sudden. Something’s gone very, very wrong. It feels like some sort of big existential event has happened in the business that nobody could have foreseen beforehand. And yet there’s a truth, actually, which is that there’s no such thing as all of a sudden in business. Even events that we experience as completely unprecedented — COVID would be an example of this — did not happen all of a sudden. And it didn’t happen all of a sudden in two ways. The first way was that… pandemics, for example, repeat generally in society. Every 30 to 50 years a new pandemic comes along. So if we take a kind of view of history, you could take the view which is actually there’s no such thing as all of a sudden because we knew that we were due one. The second thing is that it hit us in the UK a few months after it started to show up in China, for example. So again, there’s no such thing as all of a sudden there either. So this is really about: what are we paying attention to in business and how are we paying attention to it. So the quality of our attention, the quality of where our attention goes is a really, really important question. And so you hear this thing about there’s no such thing as all of a sudden, but then actually what happens is as you go in and you start to scratch away at the history of the issue, if you do the kind of work I do, you’ll often hear a similar sort of set of complaints as you start to talk to people. And they’ll say things like: ‘No one’s been listening to me. I’ve known this has been an issue for a while, but no one’s been listening to me. We’ve been busy fiddling around while Rome burns.’ I hear that quite a lot. ‘We’ve been making the same sort of mistakes for 10 years, 15 years. We didn’t quite realise what was happening until it was too late.’ All of that sort of stuff you hear a lot. So it’s often not that it’s been all of a sudden. It’s actually been that some part of the business, or some people in the business, were actually ultimately completely blind to what was going on in the business, or appeared to be that.

And so that gets us into this question about ostrich politics. What’s actually really going on? Why is it that we pay attention to some data, and don’t pay attention to others? Why is it that actually we can get sideswiped by things that have been there all along? All of that. We’re all guilty of this. So I would encourage you to think about ostrich politics as a kind of collective behavioural phenomenon. So in essence, like it’s not… we’re going to talk a lot about this today, actually — it’s not about somebody else and just what’s going on for them. It’s actually something that we all experience in one way, shape, or form. And the behavioural phenomenon of ostrich politics, it seems to me anyway, has two core characteristics.

So the first core characteristic is that there’s some sort of unwillingness or inability to engage with an issue that could be having, or is already having, a negative impact. So there’s something going on that says I am, you know, we haven’t got this kind of willingness or ability to engage with it though.

But the second issue, which is where the politics bit comes in, is that there is a use then of status or dominance hierarchy as a defence mechanism against dealing with that issue. So in really simple terms, it’s: ‘I don’t think this is a problem and I’m the boss.’ Or, if you watch the brilliant Apple TV show Severance, which if you haven’t watched, I would really encourage you to watch as a sort of amazing exposition and riff on the realities of corporate life. You will hear: ‘The board, the board decides what goes on.’ It’s always abstract and removed. ‘The board has disconnected from the call.’ In other words, we’re not interested in having this conversation anymore. So status and dominance hierarchy, which is to do with ultimately who’s more important here, who’s more senior here, whose opinion carries more weight, is the other aspect of ostrich politics.

So there’s some form of not being willing to look at something, but then the kind of status dominant stuff, the hierarchy of the organisation, actually reinforces that dynamic. And there also tends to be some element of what we call collusion being present. So in other words, because it’s political in nature, it tends to be about more than one person. So you might see that in a form of groupthink, for example; a whole group of people simply don’t believe that to be an issue, and will make it an in-group versus out-group question about whether or not you agree. The second thing will actually be, you know, there can be kind of enabling behaviours.

I had a brilliant example of this only a few weeks ago. So I’ve been working with a client. I’m going to, as always, anonymise this and protect the names here. I’ve been working with this particular client, and there was a really important conversation that needed to happen about some of the dynamics that were going on in that business. But that conversation was being ultimately prevented from happening, because actually the people around the individual concerned were so concerned with protecting their own reputation, were so concerned with protecting their own status, they wouldn’t dare to have the conversation that was necessary. And they wouldn’t let anybody else, including your humble consultant, have a conversation with the boss in question. And all the language was: ‘We need to manage Dominic on this.’ Right? That was all the language. We just need to manage him. We just need to manage him. We just need to manage him. So basically, then, you have an issue where there’s a kind of collusion going on that means important conversations aren’t happening. Dominic is not engaged with the issue at all, and the people around him actually are in a form of denial about the importance of it, and also just not really wanting to face into the consequences either. So heads in sand moment. On we go. And that will continue, by the way, until the organisation hits a moment of absolute crisis. So that’s kind of how it works. Now we need to then talk about, well, what’s going on then? So, well what’s going on is a form of denial. Right? It’s a form of denial of reality. And, you know, that can be conscious, that can be unconscious. As I say, groups can reinforce it. There’s all sorts of stuff we need to dig into here. I had a great quote I was going to read to you, actually. ‘It’s not denial. I’m just selective about the reality that I accept.’ And that is right at the heart of any conversation about ostrich politics. Right at the heart of the conversation is that there is this kind of unwillingness to accept something unpleasant to be true. That’s really what’s going on. We as human beings psychologically are wired in a really simple way, which is to say, we are wired to move towards things that are pleasant, and away from things that are unpleasant. That’s all of human behaviour in a single sentence, right? So we have an unpleasant thing going on here, and actually we have a deep unwillingness sometimes, or an inability sometimes, consciously or not, to accept that that unpleasant thing is true. And then on top of that we pile all the organisational politics and all the structural stuff and everything else that tends to cloud our judgment. And we’re all, most of us, pretty clever human beings. So when that denial starts to hit us, and we’ve also got jobs to preserve and roles to preserve in the organisations that we’re in, well, what then tends to happen is we need to start getting really good at justifying our own behaviour. We need to swerve these difficult topics and play the game of avoidance and everything else.

So, actually, people in organisations, and I’ve been guilty of this many times in the past myself, will do a number of things. Will intellectualise. So, we’ll simply start to make the argument that black is white. And, you know, you can see a lot of that sort of stuff going on with the cursory read of most PowerPoints will start to rationalise. My friend and colleague Steve Hearsum has a brilliant phrase about PowerPoint being a container for anxiety, which the more I reflect on as the months go by, the more I think I think it’s one of the great truths of work, actually, to be honest. But this idea that, you know, we can avoid the difficult subject, but we’ll rationalise it; we just need more slides, we need more data, and we can do all that and rationalise what’s going to happen. Displacement, which is really a way of saying; actually what we’ll do is we’ll just literally draw attention somewhere else. So don’t look over there. Let’s look over here. Or undoing, which is really just a way of saying what we’ll try and do is get into campaign mode and see if we can undermine somebody else’s argument, try to undo what it is they’re trying to point us to. And I think if you walk into a lot of different boardrooms or you walk into a lot of different work environments, you will see some form or other of that going on, all the time. Now, of course, not all of that is ostrich politics. Some of what we’re talking about here, we’re talking about rationalising something, or we’re talking about challenge, for example. That is the normal course of business, and that is just good quality conversation that may be taking place around something. What we’re talking about here is where there is a difficult subject, there is an unpleasant thing that collectively we’ve decided not to look at, and so we’re going to scaffold a load of behaviour around that, that fundamentally means we don’t actually need to spend the time looking at it.

So, ostrich politics then, is basically a form of avoidance. Which is down to some really human stuff. We don’t like unpleasant things. We don’t like having to face into unpleasant things. We’re status conscious. We’re hierarchy conscious. All of that, right? And then that meets the grim realities of the world of work. And fundamentally, what happens is we’re not paying attention to the things that we need to pay attention to, and the car ends up at the bottom of the ravine upturned with smoke pouring out of it. (For want of a slightly less visceral analogy, but honestly, in some of the environments I walk into in terms of my day to day work, not too far wrong.)

So, the question then becomes: Where to start? How do we need to think about this? If you’re sitting here as a leader and you’re experiencing some form of challenge in this space, so if you’re thinking; oh, my colleagues are just not listening to me on something. Or if you’re thinking; I’m really concerned that actually the board is going to be in denial about a really important thing when we have our meeting next month. Whatever’s going on for you, this will hopefully help in terms of where to start. And in order to kind of get to really what we need to be doing in all of this, it’s helpful to understand a little bit of how we end up in this mess in the first place. So how we actually end up in this kind of world where denial is going on, right? And also if we start to understand the basis for it, it gives us some… hopefully some insight that we can use to work with ostrich politics in a different way.

So starting with some basics. So I talked about human psychology already being about: we want to get away from unpleasant things and get towards pleasant things. That is the most fundamental building block of all human psychology. There are other things that work in terms of just basics and understanding how we’re all wired as humans that can really help us though. So for example, there’s the concept of the empathy gap. Don’t know if you’ve come across the empathy gap, but the empathy gap basically says: ‘I’m going to find it very hard to understand how I’m going to feel in the future.’ So if you’re in pensions, one of the reasons that people really struggle to save for pensions is they don’t understand and can’t empathise with how they’re going to feel when they’re 75 and destitute, basically. So you see this in alcohol, drink consumption as well actually, the empathy gap exists. I can’t empathise with how I’m going to feel when I’m really genuinely hungover tomorrow. So when we’re talking about ostrich politics, one of the things at work in the most… in a sort of really fundamental sense is it can be hard for us to empathise with a future state. But we have to go back even further than that in terms of understanding the roots of all of this. Now, if you look at NLP, for example, what it’s going to tell you is something very, very fundamental. That actually what we all have are brains that process information in different ways. And we process that information through the lens of our values. Our beliefs, our experience, our past experience at work, for example, our experience of life in general. And scripts that we’ve built up over the course of our lives about how we believe the world works and our role within the world. And all the time what’s happening is we are deleting information, we are distorting information. We are generalising information, so constantly we are just these sort of beings that walk through the world being absolutely confronted by this massive data that’s coming at us all of the time, every which way, and as a result of that massive data, we have to start having filing processes in our brain. It’s very, very hard for us to walk through the world otherwise. So the example that I had for you this morning actually was look at if you go down to your local supermarket and you just walk down an aisle, just pause at the top of a supermarket aisle and just look at that aisle and the sheer amount of information that is present on the supermarket aisle. You’ve got all of those products, all of the colours, price points, you’re trying to work out, is the thing that you need at the end of the aisle. You’ve got people coming at you. You’ve got all sorts of stuff going on just in a simple supermarket aisle. That’s one aisle of a supermarket. So we have to be able to edit in the world, right? We have to be able to edit reality. We have to be able to filter what’s going on around us. And actually, by default, most of us ignore most things. Right? So if you walk down that supermarket aisle, you will find that you’re actually ignoring 98% of the data that is available to you at that one moment. Right? So we’re constantly ignoring and filtering. So, so, and we are all doing it all of the time. And because of the way that our brains are set up, my filtering criteria are fundamentally really different to your filtering criteria. Fundamentally really different to everybody else in the world’s filtering criteria. We all inhabit separate realities. We all process data fundamentally in different ways. Think about that in the context of what we’re talking about here with ostrich politics. The data that you have received in your life tells you that something is important, in effect. The data that somebody else has received in their life may be telling them, in some way, shape or form, that the data is not important at all.

That is absolutely at the heart of understanding what we’re talking about here. All of us do this. All of us exist, in denial, about things that we need to be looking at and paying attention to that could be holding us back, and may indeed already be holding us back. It’s a natural consequence of this editing machine we’ve all got in our heads. And a natural consequence of things like the empathy gap, and also the fact that we are psychologically wired to not want to look at unpleasant things. So this is a really human problem. that we’re talking about with all of this. Uh, the philosopher Lao Tzu said that a wise man does not argue. And the basis for that was something like this, right? That the wise man, or woman, but it says wise man in the translation, I think we can broaden that out… the wise man accepts that he has a set of data, and that somebody else has a set of data, and because of everything I’ve been talking about, actually, the data that both people have will almost be completely different in every conceivable respect, but, and this is the key thing, most people together would recognise that they have only access to about 0.0000001% of the available data at any available time, right? So in essence, it’s pointless to argue because we’re all clueless, right? Not only are we all informed by what has happened to us in our lives, but we’re also absolutely and completely clueless when we look at the total amount of available data.

So I’m saying all this because what I’m trying to encourage us to do is to think in a really empathetic way about how we process information, how others process information, and to understand that what we often experience as challenging behaviour in others, we can be completely guilty of ourselves. And I include that in my own mind, my own thinking, my own working life, all the rest of it. And it’s important to internalise this because it lights the path to a way through it. Ostrich politics is not a ‘them’ issue. So when we talk about ostrich politics, what can happen is a sort of judgment. ‘The world won’t listen’ in the immortal title of the Smiths album, right? So there can be this sort of form of judgment going on. I’m jumping up and down as the sane one and everybody else is a lunatic. You know, this is how it is. But it’s not a ‘them’ issue. It’s actually an ‘us’ issue. We’re all doing it all the time. We’re all living in denial about things that we should be paying attention to. And actually it’s entirely possible that somewhere else in your organisation at the moment, somebody else is wondering why you’ve got your head in the sand about something that you need to be looking at, or they think you need to be looking at as well. So I’m saying all this is a kind of a ‘you and me’ issue, an ‘us’ issue, because actually that again lights the path to an important understanding that can help us work our way through ostrich politics and help to address ostrich politics where we’re encountering them.

So I want to just talk about human relationships. We’re getting towards the end of this, but I want to just talk about human relationships. And then I’ve got three practical tools for you that I hope will be useful. And then we can go to some Q& A. So in terms of all human relationships, so if we think about ostrich politics, right, let’s just take an example. I, a human being, I’m experiencing you, another human being, as being in denial of something that I, a human being, think that you, the other human being, need to be looking at. For your own benefit, for our collective benefit, whatever it is, right? And so, what is immediately obvious when we think about that? And I, by the way, am frustrated with you for not doing that, and you are disillusioned with me because you keep… you’re feeling like I keep banging my head against a kind of brick wall or whatever. Right? So what we see going on is that the issue is not isolated to the other, right? We have a human relationship going on in which the dynamic is creating this experience of ostrich politics. So if we think about all human relationships are co-created in essence. So what’s going on here is I have everything that I’m bringing, all the stuff I was talking about, my values, my beliefs, the way I look at the world, the data that I’ve received in my life. I’m bringing that into the world. You are bringing everything that you’re bringing into the relationship as well. And the relationship is something that we’re creating between us. And at the moment, we seem, in my example, to be creating a relationship in which you’re not listening to what I’m saying. I’m experiencing you as being in denial about an important issue. You are frustrated with me because you think I’m talking about something that is a complete waste of time, for example. And so we together are creating a relationship in which things aren’t moving forward in the right ways.

Now, the important thing to hang on to here is, I cannot change you. I can’t change your neurology. I can’t change your scripting. I can’t change anything that’s happened in terms of your life experience, the way that you look at the world. But what I can change is me. So I can change myself, how I show up, what I bring, the way I make a case, all of that sort of stuff. And time and again, in the coaching practice and the consulting practice that I run, we see something really powerful happen. Which is that when we work with leaders and leadership teams to change what they are bringing, regardless of how somebody else or another group is behaving, when we work with a leader or leadership team to change what they’re bringing, then it will change the relationship and it can change the sort of way that the other engages in the relationship as well. And sometimes, a lot of the time, in changing what we’re bringing, actually it becomes possible to help other people pluck their heads out of the sand. So the important thing, if we’re trying to address ostrich politics, isn’t to get into the blame game of the other, it’s to ask for ourselves. What is it that we need to do differently in order to be able to get this message across? What is it that I need to be bringing which is different? We have to quit othering in effect. Othering is when we basically project onto others total responsibility for the issue that we’re experiencing.

So here are three simple ways in which you can do that. And these are not intended to be comprehensive, but if you’re interested in that, if you’re interested in changing what you’re bringing into the dynamics of the relationships that you’ve got going on, there are three techniques that at least you could start to explore. So the first is this. Working with energy rather than against it. So, I say this to a lot of clients actually. My favourite business book, and it really isn’t a book about business at all, is, Bruce Lee’s… uh, sorry, The Warrior Within: the Fighting Philosophies of Bruce Lee. If you haven’t read this book, you can buy the audiobook, which is how actually it’s worth reading, on Amazon for about 15 quid, right? And I’m not remotely interested in martial arts, I should say that, but what I am interested in is Taoism and the applications of Taoist philosophy in the context of business, right? And what this book talks about is working with energy. So in the context of jiu jitsu, you do not resist a punch, what you do is you roll with it. So you actually let the punch run out of energy. You let it work its way through. And then you can effectively reassert the boundary, right? So what this means in the context of a work conversation, is if we’re dealing with people who we are experiencing as being in denial, or resistant to something they need to be looking at, rather than taking a position, mounting a case against, you work with what they’ve got going on. So for example, you would start to ask them in a kind of coachy way to examine the impact of what they’re talking about. So let’s talk about a given situation. So it might be that somebody is refusing to look at declining sales performance in the organisation, right? And they’re deeply resistant to it. Defense mechanisms are up. ‘It’s not a problem. We’re fixing it. Don’t need to talk about it today.’ Right? That’s the kind of form of defence that we’re encountering in that moment. Great. Work with it, then. So really useful construct: ‘Help me understand.’ So help me understand then, what that’s going to look like when it really turns around over the course of the next three months. Help me understand what’s the absolute best case scenario that we should be planning for here. Help me understand, actually, what are your concerns? Is there anything going on for you that you think we might need to collectively get right to make sure everything you’ve got planned is going to work? Literally, working with the energy, getting somebody to talk, at some length sometimes, it must be said, and really explore for themselves what’s going on for them in their planning, what’s going on for them in their implementation. And helping them to think through the full extent of that, and the full implications of that and helping them to think through are there any risks or associated sensitivities from a position of support and empathy, not from a position of defensiveness and positioning which is how a lot of this stuff is done, actually, can really lower barriers to defensiveness. And people, when you move them into a reflective space, will often for themselves start to identify issues, start to express worries, start to kind of open up a little bit about where they’re really at with it, and then it becomes possible to often have a much, much more collegiate conversation about what needs to be done. So non-resistance effectively as a means, not trying to win a discussion, but as a means of finding a collaborative solution that might just allow you to bridge the gap between where you are and where somebody else is.

Second technique, really simple one, very different in style and approach. You want to change what you’re bringing into a relationship that you’re experiencing has got some ostrich politics going on with it, then a really helpful way of doing it is just to establish some objective distance from the issue, right? So there’s a technique, I think I first talked about it about 15 years ago. You may have heard of it called the premortem. Premortem technique is incredibly useful. What it does is it basically asks everybody in the space, can be you and somebody else or it can be a group of people, to just work with a hypothetical. And that hypothetical is that this thing that we’re talking about has been an absolute disaster, a complete waste of space, over the course of the next 12 months. Everything we dreaded and feared has come to pass. Now let’s talk about, how did this thing die? What killed it? What will be written on its tombstone? And critically, what should we have done to save it? Now, one of the things you’ll find when you do a premortem is that most organisations are incredibly, incredibly good at forecasting their own doom. Because patterns, for reasons we’ve already kind of alluded to in this webinar today, have a wonderful habit of repeating and repeating and repeating because the wrong lessons get learned, or no lessons get learned. People often understand what their organisation’s weaknesses and blind spots actually are. The wonderful thing, though, is that the problem we’re talking about, the failure we’re talking about, hasn’t happened yet. And that can make it easier, more accessible, and safer for people to have a conversation, therefore, which says; well, this is all the stuff we’re going to get wrong. And as soon as we do that, we’ve got some objective distance from a problem, and we can start understanding what it is to fix it. So again, we don’t have to go to war about the fact that you think something’s going to, going to fail and somebody else thinks it’s going to succeed. What we can do, similar sort of thing, work with the energy, but the energy this time is, well, let’s just imagine it failed and then let’s look at what we need to do to get it to succeed. And that collaborative, more objective approach, which is usually based on a lot of latent insight into how organisations think, feel, and act, can be very, very helpful.

And the third thing is this, which is, if you’re thinking about how can you expand your capacity to bring new things in relationships? Well, the other way of doing it is to get some help in doing it. I alluded earlier on to some work we do in coaching and consulting. There can be tremendous value in coaching, in mentoring, certain forms of training, certain forms of advisory work, just in helping you expand your capacity in the relationships you’ve got in your working life to bring a new dynamic and a new energy in them. And again, you may be experiencing this as: ‘These ostrich politics are not my problem.’ I would just offer up a couple of things. The first thing is if you’re a leader in your organisation, it’s always your problem. And the second thing is that in allowing those dynamics to perpetuate, actually, there is not only potentially a failure of leadership going on, but actually in terms of your own contribution as well, you can be enabling that difficult situation. In not expanding your capacity and not bringing your best self into that situation, you’re actually effectively allowing it to perpetuate. Which means, if I can be that blunt, you’re colluding in that car being at the bottom of that ravine. So there are options there. Working with energy. Premorteming. Getting some objective distance, sometimes getting some help is really useful.

So, to try and summarise all of that, and this has been without slides, so I hope it’s sort of felt like a good, if kind of, relatively pacey overview. In essence, ostrich politics, what happens when we’re not paying attention to the things that we should be paying attention to in business, creates all sorts of crises, all sorts of challenge, all sorts of problems start to accrue as a result of that. Very rarely is it because nobody in the organisation has seen what’s happened, it’s because actually that voice or those voices weren’t listened to in the right way. We need to understand why that is. And that’s to do with the fact that, as human beings, we’re all selective editors, we’ve all got too much data to process, we all rely on our brains to help us process that data, and a lot of the time, we cut a lot of stuff out. And if you bring that together with the fact that we are deeply psychologically incentivised not to have to look at unpleasant things, then we start to understand the basis for that behaviour.

In terms of shifting that behaviour, it’s not about projecting everything onto others. It’s not about saying it’s all their problem. It’s about saying, actually, I have a responsibility here as a leader. I can own some of the resolution of this. What I need to do is to be able to resource myself to do that. If I understand that, if I bring something different into a relationship, I may see the relationship move forward in different ways, and I may get different outcomes from that. Then I can resource myself hopefully to do that and give myself a shot — because it is only ever a shot, we can’t predict the future — at making things better. And I can do that by, perhaps, moving into a more collaborative, empathic space with people, and also, with tools like the premortem, and also sometimes by engaging coaching and consulting help where it is necessary.

So that’s what I wanted to talk about. Quite a lot there. I shall make sure that you all do get a copy of the slide deck on the back of today. My final thing before we go to Q&A though is this. Which is if you’re sitting there wondering, well, this all sounds fine Phil, but it feels really complicated to me. I’m sat inside an organisation where I’ve been trying everything I know how to try. Nobody is listening to me. I’m really concerned about where things are going. Then there is something which is hopefully a helpful place to start. A really simple diagnosis process that we can go through together. We can examine together why and how ostrich politics might be holding you back, and actually talk about what it is that you need to be doing, or what it is that you might want to consider doing in order to bring about some sort of shift in state. That’s done at a £1,500 price point. We will communicate that in a follow up email to all of this, but it is a very simple, very accessible place to start on something like this. And even that process might affect a shift in thinking that itself can bring some sort of breakthrough. There we go.

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