[Podcast] How to use Systems to Crack Complex Problems with David Benjamin

David Benjamin is the author of CRACKING COMPLEXITY: The Breakthrough Formula for Solving Just About Anything Fast (Nicholas Brealey; 2019). He is the co-founder of Syntegrity and the Chief Architect behind its implementation of the Complexity Formula as laid out in Cracking Complexity.

David regularly guides leaders and their teams through their application of the formula, helping them get to decisions and action in days, no matter the industry, type of challenge, or nature of the organization. In this capacity, David has become a trusted advisor to Fortune 500 companies and government leaders on how to organize for complexity and find traction in the face of the intractable.

He frequently speaks on a wide range of topics related to complexity, effective and efficient problem-solving, and human dynamics in systems. David spends most of the rest of his time and energy on writing, family, long-distance running and cracking cryptic crosswords. David and his wife, Angie, live near Toronto and have three incredibly talented daughters whom he loves equally.

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• Cracking Complexity Book

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Transcript (Auto Generated)

Hello, and welcome to JUST Branding, the only podcast dedicated to helping designers and entrepreneurs grow brands. Here are your hosts, Jacob Cass and Matt Davies.

Well, hello, folks, and welcome to JUST Branding. This time, all the way from Ontario, Canada, we have the amazing David Benjamin with us. David is the Chief Technology Officer and Chief Architect at Syntegrity.

A couple of other quick things he’s famous for, and this is why I’m super excited to get him on. He’s famous for the complexity formula. So we’ll be looking at elements of that in a minute.

And he writes about that in his new book, CRACKING COMPLEXITY, THE BREAKTHROUGH FORMULA OF SOLVING JUST ABOUT ANYTHING FAST, co-written with David Komlos. A couple of other quick things about David before we bring him in properly. He’s worked for massive organizations like IBM, as well as much smaller consulting firms in his past.

And currently, he’s working with a lot of Fortune 500 companies, so a lot of great experience to share with us today. And lastly, really, I think I should just note, you’re a prolific writer, really, writing for Forbes, Wall Street Journal, Harvard Business Review, and more. And I think Jacob and I are really excited to have you on the show, to really come and talk to us today about systems thinking.

Welcome to the show, David. Thank you for coming on and spending some time with us.

Thank you, Matt. Thank you, Jacob. Happy to do it.

Great. Well, I think maybe we usually like to start episodes off by framing our conversation. And I think perhaps the best way to do that is to kind of ask you for some definitions, because I just sort of said a lot of grand sort of buzzwords there.

And if some of our listeners are not familiar with some of these things, it’d be great to hear from you. I guess firstly, let’s talk broadly about what is systems thinking to you? How would you define that?

So systems thinking is really just a term that covers, you can call it holism, thinking holistically about things, whether it’s your family or city or company, wherever there are a lot of moving parts that interact, a lot of component parts that collectively are working towards some purpose or forming some sort of identity, you’d call that a system. So systems thinkers are people who spend a lot of their time thinking about how systems work in general, and because of that can see patterns and make observations through sort of a systems lens, whether they’re looking at a city, a country, a company, or anything else.

Fascinating. So when we come to look at a brand, for example, brands have customers, they have partners, they are connected to a business, they have employees, they sell products and services. You know, this would be the perfect kind of case study, I suppose, in a way to apply systems thinking to, in order to kind of make sense of it.

Right. When you’re thinking about a brand, and often when we do sessions with brands, when we work with them to apply our formula, we’ll talk about what that looks like later on. One of the first important questions we ask them is to think about what is the system that we’re exploring together.

If it’s a pain medication, you don’t want to be thinking about the company that develops and sells the medication. You want to be thinking about the whole system of patients, providers, payers, families, and caregivers, and all the interdependencies, how the decisions you make as a brand need to be looked at through the lens of all those constituent stakeholders, and how all those systems work together.

No, absolutely. Well, let’s talk about the formula, seeing as we’re sort of segueing into that area. So you’ve got systems thinking, as you’ve described it, this way of looking at complex situations with lots of moving parts.

So what’s the complexity formula that you’ve mentioned, that you use?

Well, I mean, again, because of the business we’re in, and really, it’s focused on systems in general. So we work with many different industries on all sorts of different problem types. The common thread across banks and pharma companies and real estate organizations would be that they’re dealing with complex challenges, especially very heavily these days.

And so the lens we take is, you know, how do you navigate complexity in general, whether you are coming at it because you’re trying to grow or because you’re trying to fend off a competitor or because you’re trying to establish your energy in the market. The formula is basically a reverse engineering of what we’ve been doing for nearly two decades, which is helping organizations go from confusion and, you know, lack of understanding and, you know, a sort of a sense of being stuck to finding clarity and making their way through to decisions about what they need to do and how they need to proceed. So the formula has 10 steps.

The first step, and I’m not going to go through all 10 in detail, but the first step is really about recognizing, acknowledging that you’re facing something complex. And believe it or not, I mean, it should bring you into a different frame of mind when you realize that what you’re dealing with is complex. And if you don’t mind me taking a little diversion for a moment, it’s an important definition.

Something complicated is something that is sort of a step-by-step, proven, solvable problem. So something like fixing a car is a complicated problem because you’re dealing with a system that is basically like a machine, right? In the case of a car, it’s literally a machine.

But there is a proven step-by-step way to fix any problem with your car. But what makes it complicated is that you, as an individual, may not have the skills to apply the check-by-check step list. You might have to find yourself an expert who can, and we usually call those experts mechanics when you’re dealing with a car.

For people in marketing, I think there was a time, and we’ve spoken to people in that field, where they would have said, at the beginning of their careers, there was a formula, there was a way to bring a brand to market, and marketeers were experts in that formula, because there was so much less going on in the universe. Television was a finite number of stations, and so on and so forth. So there are only so many ways to spend your advertising dollars.

You could almost say it was complicated, or at least treat it as if it was complicated at the time. But as the universe of media has exploded, as the pace of change has accelerated to levels we can’t keep up with, what I’m hearing from people in marketing is that one of the things they’re trying to come to grips with is that there is no known formula right now. You really have to figure out how to go to market each time you do.

And so you’re into the realm of complexity, right? Where there’s many, many moving parts, many overt and hidden interdependencies, and you can’t know in advance what’s going to work and what’s not going to work. And the way you proceed when you’re dealing with complexities is to try things, amplify and repeat the things that work and shut down the things that don’t and try something else with what you’ve learned.

So again, the formula starts with recognizing, okay, this is complex. And when you recognize that something is complex, it’s got to come with recognition that you don’t know the answers. And you can’t on your own, no matter how much experience you have, no matter how smart your small team is, you can’t know the answers.

You need to get some help. And I don’t mean help from an outside agency, although it may include that. It’s from sort of the next couple steps of the formula, having formulated the right question you’re trying to ask and spending a lot of time really getting clear on what the question is, then tapping into the right variety of people, the right mix of people who collectively, if you can tap into them effectively, you can piece together what the right answer is, or at least a best guess that will lead you into the realm of the experiments you’re going to do.

And so it sort of proceeds from there. You tell me where you want me to go before we start talking.

So I’ve acknowledged complexity. I’ve recognized what I don’t know, right? And focused in on the right questions.

Just run through very briefly the rest of the steps. So we get a bit of an overview for, you know, very briefly, like how steps three plus go.

Yeah. So you’ve got the right group of people. You’ve formulated a really good question that gets at what you’re trying to do.

And so to give you an example, if you’re a brand, you know, you might be looking at sort of year one has been much less performance than you wanted or that the shareholders were expecting. So what do we need to do sort of now and over the next 12 months to, you know, pivot our messaging, our value proposition, our brand personality so that in 2022 we start performing at the levels that were expected of us? A question like that.

Interesting, compelling, a little bit of an admission of vulnerability that we don’t know the answers to these things and some specifics about goals and timeline, et cetera. So that question, right group of people. And if we’re not going to come back to the right group of people, I’ll just say very quickly, it’s probably the most important thing and it really requires you to stretch your thinking about who gets involved.

So we went from a world where there was a small brand team to extended brand teams. And now as people think about, like, where is that requisite variety for my brand? You might be thinking about, you know, partner agencies, experts from other industries and other product areas that have experiences relative to what you’re going through, you know, customer representatives, whatever that looks like and so on and so forth.

So getting a large group of people together. Then you got to bring them together because you got to get them solving together and figuring out the answers to your question. Prior to March of last year, that meant in person for us.

And I devoted a chapter in the book to the importance of getting people together face to face. And then since then, we’ve been proving that face to face, you know, might be preferred, but you can do it pretty well online as well. And then you take them through a lot of discipline and structure so that they can have great conversations about the question you’ve asked them.

So I can’t remember the number exactly. Let’s say it’s step five or six, I think, where it’s agree on the right agenda. And this is really important as an isolated thought, not just embedded in our formula.

When you get the right group of people together to figure something out, the worst thing you can do is tell them what to talk about. You give them a question, then you let them tell you what they have to talk about. And that’s how you’ll discover all sorts of things you didn’t know you didn’t know by what’s on the minds of the stakeholders you brought together.

So they set their own agenda. Now they’re excited about what they’re going to talk about, and they’re interested. It’s on point for them.

You take them into… We use three rounds of discussions on each of several topics. Three rounds because human beings need time to unload and vent and argue and hear each other before they can start to come up with good ideas, before they can finally make strong recommendations.

So three rounds of meetings. And you embrace emergence. You don’t try to guide the conversation to what you think is the foregone conclusion.

You let that present itself to you as you hear from everyone, as you make your way from, you know, stories and issues through to ideas and then recommendations. So by the time you’re done, you’ve got yourself clarity on things that need to be done and they might be complicated things and you’ve got to go hire an agency to do it or complex things that might need another round of the formula. But very importantly, experiments for you to go try and, you know, find your way forward.

And most importantly, the people who’ve been on that journey with you. And really, this is the big payoff. They’re aligned and mobilized and excited to implement.

The more you talk about this, the more I can see how it aligns to branding and strategy in general. Just how you come from this lack of understanding and confusion and you work towards clarity and alignment. It’s just really fascinating to learn how you do it with systems and how much correlation there is.

Just defining the problem, working with people, collaborating, having an agenda. Like, what is the agenda? It’s pretty luxurious to have three rounds of meetings if you can get that many people in the room to figure that stuff out.

Embracing emergence, I love that. So you’re not actually guiding people to the solution. Just letting them go naturally.

That’s interesting.

On the point of getting this large group of people together to set their own agenda, to figure these things out, to do the three rounds of discussion, how do you get them in a room? That’s one piece I always struggle with with my work. You can incentivise, you can pay.

You’ve got to find them first of all. Sometimes that’s challenging. But the most challenging thing I often find is to basically say to someone, can you give up an hour of your time and join this kind of innovation kind of think tank that we’ve got going on for this client?

What are your experiences, David, of getting the right people in the room and having those conversations and motivating them to be there?

It’s not hard if you’re talking about the internal group. So if you’re a large organization and you’ve got a key brand and a senior enough leader who says, no, no, no, guys, drop everything. We need you.

People will drop everything and be there. And they might complain about missing a ballet recital or something, but they’ll come. As you say, it’s when it’s the outsiders, the external people who don’t necessarily have a stake in the outcome.

For us, our track record is once people, once a company has been through this once, there is a real buzz about the quality of the experience, the degree to which you’re actually going to be heard. I’m not asking you to come somewhere where you’re going to sit and listen to people and get asked a question or two or be interviewed. This is engaging, highly interactive.

You’ve been handpicked. That’s messaging we use. We need your perspective there.

And usually that’s real. We’ve chosen you because, you know, you’re 23. You’re relatively new to the industry.

You’ve been pegged as somebody who can listen for a few hours and then present one interesting take on what everyone else has been saying, right? You speak French, whatever it is. The variety that you bring in is essential to the solutions we’re going to find.

And so it’s a bit of persuasion, a little bit of ego stroking and a lot of like genuinely good experience.

Yeah, I love that. So messaging, tiering that up in the way that you’ve said much more specific, as you say, stroking egos, et cetera. Jacob likes his ego stroked every now and again, don’t you, Jacob?

Don’t we all?

Yeah, I was observing that about you. You’re a handsome guy and you clearly…

Matt strokes it a lot.

A lot of photo editing done on these sessions, David. Don’t believe everything you see.

Well, I think the segue into discussions and I guess the collaboration was key here, because I’d love to hear David’s perspective of what actually goes on in these rooms. How does it work? How do you get these people, as you said, when there’s no agenda, you’ll let them set the agenda.

How do you get in the room and actually figure out the problem? I know this is your formula, so could you give us an example of something, maybe a case study or something that you’ve done in the past that could shine some light on that?

Yeah, so the formula is in the book. I’m not at all hesitated to talk about everything that’s there. The agenda setting is, it’s actually our clients, people have used the formula, they talk about it as being sort of the essential moment where we really start to show people that something different is about to happen and where the alignment starts and the empathy.

You’ve got a wide variety of people. There’s something called the cost of codification, which I will explain without you asking me to, that talks about the cost for people to talk to each other if they don’t come from the same specialty areas. So if you’ve got a group of electrical engineers, they can have a conversation that’s almost in code to anyone else who’s listening.

And because of that, it’s really, really efficient. And the same thing happens when you get a group of marketers together who work together in the same company on the same set of brands. They can speak at speed with each other.

But as soon as you start to go after variety and add people to the conversation, the languages are all foreign and the acronyms and the concepts aren’t there. So when the engineer starts to talk about something they can normally say in three words, they have to slow it down and spend a few paragraphs explaining it. So during the agenda setting, you’ve got to get through a lot of that stuff to get people aligned on what matters and what they need to talk about.

So we start with sort of the individual output of ideas and concerns, just traditional brainstorming, nothing too sexy. But then you get people looking through what other people have said and interacting on that and clustering them into themes as they start to discover that despite all our different backgrounds and languages, we’re all seeing a lot of the same things. And from there, you take those clusters and you cluster them further.

And you end up through a lot of contentious arguments about, with the group understanding and the lining of what is most important to talk about. So in a three day session, when we were doing this face to face, that would have been the first half day. That’s how important it is.

It’s not, let’s spend a half hour. It’s been, let’s spend a half day figuring out what we have to talk about to answer this question. So that’s really important.

When you actually get into the topic conversations, I’m going to give you a great technique that is probably the one thing everybody takes away immediately from when they work with us. When you get people into the room, first of all, you never want more than eight people to have sort of speaking authority at the same time, because that’s about the upper limit on the number of people who can have a good conversation. So if you’ve got like 14 people on your extended brand team gathered around the table, there’s no way they’re having a good conversation.

You got to break them into subgroups who play different roles. So what we do is we would designate, let’s say, about eight members from a group of, let’s say, 16. Eight people are members for that topic, for that discussion.

And that means they own the topic. And the responsibility is theirs to take the topic through to conclusion. But in the room with them, you give them four critics.

So these are four other people. They’re going to be members in other topics. But in this topic, their role is to play the critic role.

And as a critic, what you do is you’re muzzled, and muted, and can’t speak while the members are talking. So they’ll talk for 10 or 15 minutes. And you’re the guy who knows more about what they’re talking about than they do, or so you think, right?

But you can’t see anything. And then after that 10 or 15 minute break, it looks like Matt is reflecting on how hard he would find it.

Wow, wow, insults from guests now. Jacob, your attitudes, you know, really rubbing off on me.

You open the floor to the critics, and the critics get about a minute to tell the members what they’re doing wrong, and how they can have a better conversation. And we explicitly tell them, don’t congratulate the team on the great conversations they have. Don’t pile on to the good ideas they’re producing.

Tell them how they can do better, right? And then you go back to the members, and the critics are muted again. Then you go back to the critics another time.

Members are muted, and then the members wrap up. And after each time they’ve heard from the critics, they’re, you know, invited to reflect on what the critics said, but they’re not told they have to do anything with it. They just have to hear the critique.

And what happens is with three rounds of meetings and a lot of topics going on, if you balance the assignments, everybody starts to learn how to be a critic, and everybody realizes you can have at least as much impact on a conversation by saying a few short things at a few key moments than you can by, you know, doing what you normally do, which is to sit and talk and turn off your ears.

Do ideas get shut down during this time? It just reminds me of like Edward de Bono’s Six Thinking Hats, where like you have to… I was just going to say that.

Yeah, you have to go on this like parallel thinking at the same time, and you’re not getting shut down, you leave that to like the black hat. It just sounds like it could have like a negative effect. Have you had that experience?

Or do you think it’s all of a positive… It helps the conversations?

Well, every time we’re in a meeting, besides having a specific topic and a question, you know, the overarching question, you’ve got a topic, and you’ve got these roles. Each of the meetings, depending on whether it’s round one or round two or round three, has a specific purpose. So in…

And this is interesting too. Sorry, I love what I do. In round one, the instruction is to vent and to tell stories and to, you know, express what the issues are, mention what the opportunities are, but don’t try to solve anything.

So we’re actually encouraging them to shut down ideas at that point. We don’t want to hear the ideas yet, because again, they have to learn each other’s language. They have to understand what the issues are through the eyes of other people.

And if you start to solve too soon, you turn off those functions in your brain. So round one, there are no ideas. And of course, ideas come out, we capture them, our moderators in the room will write them down and we’ll move on.

In round two, the focus is explicitly ideas. And everybody is told not to shut down ideas. Let’s get a good volume of ideas going.

And when the critics speak, they don’t comment on the ideas, but they might throw some more ideas in. We don’t want them to shut down the ideas. We want them to help them continue to produce ideas.

They produce great ideas, the members. And then in round three, we say, okay, enough of the ideas, enough complaining. Let’s answer the question.

We force the groups into three recommendations. What are your three most important recommendations to make? And you’ve primed the pump with issues, understanding, ideas.

By the time you’re into round three and everybody plays the roles really well, and they understand what a critic is supposed to do, the teams can produce ideas, sorry, recommendations that integrate everything they’ve heard. And they can do it quickly and they can do it effectively and they can do it with alignment. But it’s a journey, it’s a process to get them to the point of being able to do that.

As my design background is just thinking like how it goes with the design process, like you come up with these ideas and you scratch them. But before you even go into that idea phase, you really have to figure out the problem at hand. And you do that by asking questions and getting everything out on the table.

And that’s what Matt and I often talk about is actually going deep with clients and being curious and staying curious longer to understand the problem, the business goals, the actual problem. Really, that’s it. You have to figure out the problem, right?

Know what you’re trying to solve. And I guess brand is not as complex. Sorry, Matt.

Interrupting again.

I was just going to agree with you. Yeah. I was going to say.

But you know, like what we do talk about, about going deeper with clients and stuff like this, for me, what David is talking about here is perhaps when a client doesn’t know the answers themselves, perhaps even the leadership team is unsure. Like how you started the episode today was when they recognize the complexity of the situation, the complexity of the system that they’re in is so complex that they don’t know. And so then you’re not where do you go?

Where do you go? Well, you have to you have to go outside of, you know, the immediate team that’s actually governing that brand, that business, that organization. You have to then do the work, which is kind of what you’re talking about here.

It’s the research work, but it’s hands on, it’s emotional, and it’s kind of trying to synthesize and humanize all of the thinking in quite a rapid time, really. I know you said it’s like three days, but it’s still a rapid time for a massive organization to understand the problem.

Yeah, and when we do it digitally, by the way, it’s not three days because people get too tired, if you’re staring at the screen for that long all day, every day. We spread it out over, let’s say, two or three weeks. I failed to give you any examples, and I wanted to give you, because the examples, I think, really pull together a lot of the concepts.

So when I was talking about requisite variety, for example, I have a great story. I remember the moment it happened, we were sitting in a conversation with a utility, a 150-year-old conservative utility with all the trappings of that. And we had encouraged them to bring in requisite variety, not just have the executives there to talk this over, but get everybody involved in developing strategy.

So they had sort of a 25-year-old engineer in the conversation, and they were talking about leadership. That was one of the topics that they decided they needed to cover. And the engineer was a critic.

And as a critic, she said, I don’t understand one thing. Like, why is it in this day and age that we still have an executive parking lot in a separate doorway into the building for the executives? You know, isn’t that obsolete?

And this person didn’t know that that’s an askable question. And she asked it. And the first thing the company did when their session was over was the general manager said, like, we’re doing away with the executive parking lot.

And it gave them something tangible that they could do to demonstrate that. No, no, we mean it this time. Like, we really want to change.

Another great example, this is sort of not round one, but round three, when they’re at the point of ideas. And in fact, the team was done. Here we were talking about, I think, women in HIV AIDS.

And there was this brilliant woman sitting in the gallery as a critic who had some really smart things to say. And at the end of the meeting, somebody who was observing came up and said to her, wow, you know, I didn’t know you knew that much about all these topics. You’re absolutely impressive.

And then he left. And she turned to me and she said, you know what, I’ve been in conversations with that guy probably 20 times over the last few years. He’s never heard me before.

I’ve never had a chance to speak and nobody was listening before. So you really change the behaviors and get the right mix of people together. They start to hear each other and everything else can get set aside.

They can do the right things to answer your question.

It’s just dealing with different personality types because they may have so much to say. And I guess that just forces them to just have a voice.

Yeah. And when we’ve worked with brands, again, I mentioned extended teams before. There was a time, I don’t know if it’s still in vogue, where all the planning sessions, you have to have 25 people.

It wasn’t just your core team, but it was all functions in the organization that would have a hand in implementing the plan and they’d all join in these sessions. And everyone would declare it a waste of time. When we did a session in the way that I’m describing, I had people from those extended team functions coming up to us afterwards and saying, you know, for the first time, I feel like I actually have context for everything I have to go do to support that plan.

And I also had a chance to influence it, right? I had a chance to tell them what wasn’t going to work before I was told that that’s what we’re going to be doing. So again, with variety, it’s not just about what people can contribute, it’s also the value they’re getting that they can take away and do their jobs better with.

Okay. So can I ask you about the next stage? Once you’ve had these recommendations made, what is generally the next step?

Well, as I said, you’ll end up with things that are to-do’s. You need good project managers. And I don’t mean the boring side of that.

You need somebody who’s just very capable of taking a committed plan and holding people accountable to do what they’re going to say. You get the resulting plan into the hands of someone like that. They’re going to have three kinds of things to manage.

One is the list of to-do’s. And I’m simplifying because those to-do’s can be massive. But they’re basically complicated things.

And you can hire a partner to do it or you might have the expertise in house and they can go do it. So those are the things to do. The things to try, those are potentially two or three or five potentially game-changing ideas, recommendations that came out of your session.

Really cool things that we haven’t done before. And so as an example, when I was talking about that women in HIV AIDS conversation, one of the things they wanted to do was head into the worst possible neighbourhoods in the South, find the women who are part of populations that didn’t have access to any of the things they need, and pilot some of their ideas down there, under the belief that if it works there, if we can make it work through those populations, then we can roll it out everywhere else. But finding the right things to try and putting them in the right places where it’s a genuine test of whether they’ll work or not.

And then the third type of thing is further complexities that were revealed. And again, because you don’t know what you don’t know, you go into these things thinking of this, and then you realize, oh my God, we’ve got a talent problem. I had no idea.

And that’s the next complexity we have to get after if we’re going to answer this one.

The rabbit hole continues, right?

Yeah. And that’s the extent of the work we do. So, I mean, we’re as excited when there’s rabbit holes for us to continue to help with.

But the other stuff is you want to do, you want to be a leader who’s taking your organization through this kind of thing. You got to set yourself interest aside. It’s going to go where it goes.

You can’t try to guide it to the next set of business you want. And you got to set aside your own beliefs. And when leaders say, like, should I be in the group?

Because if I’m there, I’m going to be suppressing the discussion or I’m going to be overbearing. You say, yes, you need to be in the group. And the process is going to correct for those things.

And then they’ll thank us afterwards after we told them to be quiet. It’s not their turn to speak and those kinds of things.

So I had a question around, you know, the concept of the system that we kicked off with, this idea that there’s loads of moving parts and things coming in, things going out, all that stuff. Do you ever map those out in your process or even as an output, just to kind of visually show, this is what we’re dealing with here? And I just wondered if you had any experience in sort of articulating a system back to an organization, for example, to help them make sense of the challenges ahead?

Yeah, there are tools out there to help you do that. There’s something called the viable systems model. I’m hardly an expert in it, but Stafford Beer, who is responsible for a lot of the early development of this formula, he’s also the guy who invented the viable systems model, which is a general model of any system, again, whether it’s a country, a business, or a swamp, and what it requires to be viable.

And so, yeah, there are tools in that space. And every now and then, I’ll stand with a client at the end of a session, and I will say, okay, let me tell you what I just saw. And I’ll use that tool to sort of sketch out, you know, why the monthly leadership team meeting is such a disaster, and, you know, how they’re not delivering empowerment down to the front line operations in the way that they should, and why they’re not getting accountability back.

And because, again, of that system lens, you sound like you’ve been living in their halls for the last five years watching everything that happened, but instead, you just sort of pattern matched for them to things that are seen everywhere. Because, you know, once you’ve seen a whole bunch of companies that they’re best and they’re worst, a lot of the dynamics are the same. A lot of the patterns are the same.

Nice. So I had another sort of question to really bring this down now to our audience, to brands, to perhaps even smaller brands that might be launching startups, that kind of stuff. What do you think the real value of thinking about a brand through the lens of systems and through the lens of perhaps the complexity formula?

What kind of value do you think that brings to a brand?

Yeah, I think there’s a lot of really good practices out there that are sort of pieces of it and maybe in some cases all of it. But when you start to talk about physician journeys or customer journeys and the personality of the brand and the flows inside the customer organizations and how the decisions are made, you start to get at sort of the inner workings of the system. And the better you can get an understanding of it.

And that’s why it’s so important. If you can, in your requisite variety, if you can bring in the customer, they’ll tell you these things, right? You don’t have to guess at who it is you need to be focusing on if you want to get this message to the right person.

You can kind of see how those parts all connect together. And then having expended a lot of energy understanding, let’s say one hospital for your drug brand, you’ll quickly realize that they’re all different. And each one is its own unique system.

So even having established what might work in one place, you got to start to abstract the pattern from there and make your bets. And that’s where you start to experiment. You try things.

And if it’s not working in this place, let’s try something different. I don’t know if I answered the question fully, but I answered some question.

I think you did. And I think what you’re describing here is a fantastic way that really brands can begin to solve some of the big challenges that they have. Jacob and I often talk on this show about the fact that a brand isn’t your logo.

A brand isn’t a veneer at the end. A brand is really the meaning people attach to you. And so a lot of us struggle managing that meaning.

And what you’ve got here is a process by which some very complex things can begin to be untangled mainly for a business. And so I see this huge alignment, like Jacob said, in what you’ve been talking about and then moving up into the sort of, or moving deeper into the root causes of problems and challenges that brands have.

Yeah. When you think about brands as a collection of values, not just value, but like what are the values? Who are we?

Why do people care about us? Why would people be loyal to us and those kinds of things? What I found fascinating again as a systems thinker is at the beginning of the pandemic, to just, like that was a time when all trappings of everything else were stripped away from people.

And what you saw was who people are and the way they behaved. And there were brands that just sort of said, we’ll figure it out later. Right now, we have to just do what’s right for the customer, whether that meant, you know, giving away some goods that were desperately needed.

And you saw other brands behaving in ways that were completely inconsistent with their value of customer centricity and employee first, laying people off at the first chance, whatever it was. And, you know, your brand is a system. And so you can’t be like telling the market one thing and behaving differently.

And in fact, there’s a really good Stafford Beerism, which is, again, that’s the guy who was, you know, part of the pedigree of what I do. He said the purpose of a system is what it does. And, you know, if you think about it, right, like your brand isn’t what you tell the market it is.

Your brand is what it does. Your brand is the proof of your brand is how people respond to it. So you can be telling the market we’re all about this, but if you’re not behaving that way.

And again, at the beginning of the pandemic, I think it was Jim McKelvey when we spoke to him. He’s the co-founder of Square. He said trust was on sale in the early days of the pandemic, right?

It was a great opportunity to grab trust. And it was also at the same time a great time to lose all the trust you had spent three to five years building up with your market. And so I just found it fascinating to watch the speed at which all of that was happening and how people didn’t have time to get together and figure it out together.

All of the values work and everything else, it either sank into people and they behaved the way the organization wanted them to or they didn’t.

Long term, people will pay the price.

For sure, brands will. Yeah.

No, absolutely fascinating. I think we’re going to start to sort of draw our fascinating episode to a bit of a conclusion. Jacob, do you have any sort of final questions to ask David?

Yeah, Dave. I reckon just if you could leave us with one big takeaway for our listeners, what would you leave?

See, as a systems thinker, there is no one thing. It’s how it all fits together. This is a complex problem.

I don’t want people to hear this as diversity because it’s in collaboration, because it’s so overused and easy to dismiss as jargon and noise. But requisite variety, this notion of really thinking about variety and thinking differently about, we like to say collisions instead of interactions or collaboration, right? People are so afraid of having real conversations and friction in their interactions with each other, especially teams that are really harmonious and have been working together forever and ever.

And you don’t want to bruise the ego of the senior leader. You don’t want to undercut the harmony of the team. But you don’t get anywhere if you don’t collide, if you don’t let that stuff happen.

And we liken it to, you know, if you think about a Sunday drive and the pace of a Sunday drive versus a demolition derby, right, with things just happening and you can’t look away. It’s much better to be in that kind of climate with all the right people in the room, figuring it out together, not hiding behind interviews and focus groups, but just really telling you what they see and what they think. And being open to what emerges from that.

That’s what I mean. It’s not one thing, but get yourself to the point where you think that’s the way to do it and you’ll be far better at your job.

What great advice. Yeah, what great advice. Final thing for you, David, where can people kind of connect with you?

Where can they buy your book? You know, where are you on the web?

Yeah, so our website, you think I would know it, syntegritygroup.com. There’s a resource section with the book page. I’m in LinkedIn.

I just look for David Benjamin. You can read a lot of what we’re saying in Forbes. David Benjamin and David Comlos were contributors there, and we have a whole page of articles we’ve been writing.

Any one of those ways. Be happy to engage.

Thank you. Well, thank you so much, David. It was really fascinating.

I love seeing the… I’ll just get tapping into a different, I guess, way of thinking and just seeing the correlations between that and design and branding is really fascinating. So thank you for sharing your wisdom.

Do you have anything else, Matt?

Well, only that my mind’s been blown a couple of times by some of the things David’s mentioned. So thank you to him for that, although it’s not too difficult, as Jacob finds out from time to time, to blow my mind. But I’ve really enjoyed that, and I think the concepts that you’ve talked about, you can see the huge value from an organization.

And I guess, particularly for those of our listeners being perhaps at maybe with smaller companies, with smaller challenges, you can begin to see how the bigger boys do it, how the big boys and big girls do it. And David, you’ve provided great insight and great examples for us. So thank you so much for you.

We wish you all the best. And hopefully we’ll catch up with you again at some stage.

Great to talk. Great to meet you. Thanks.