Exploring Operational Resilience with Shaun Cooney at Splunk — The Somerford Podcast: Middle East

John and James are joined by Shaun Cooney at Splunk to talk about all things resiliency. 

They explore organisational operational resilience, underscore the importance of personal resilience, and share their individual experiences, touching upon both current and previous professional endeavors. 

🇦🇪 Find out more about Somerford in the Middle East on our website: https://www.somerfordassociates.com/somerford-middle-east/ 
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#middleeast #uae #somerford 

Transcript

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Hello and welcome to the second in the series of Somerford Associates Podcasts. Delighted to say we are joined today by Shaun Cooney from Splunk. But before I hand over to Shaun and ask him to introduce himself, I'd like to like to sort of welcome back James Astley. And James, what have you been up to since we last spoke? It's been great. Just through again and helping to get out and continue on from the (Somerford) Executive Forum that we discussed in the last episode. And we've been having some fantastic collaboration with some of the organisations that we met on the day and really just allowing Somerford as an organisation to start getting a bit more presence within the UAE region. I think we touched on the last episode. and for me it's, it's brilliant, you know, it's just a moment just talking to as many people as possible really, and really starting to understand more about the region, what the, the opportunities and some of the incredible projects and programmes of work. And certainly touching on the AI thosee that was discussed very recently. But also what the challenges are and seeing where we could help. so it's been really good! Good to be back. And, Shaun. Shaun Cooney We're joined by Shaun Cooney, one of the one of the sort of shining lights of Splunk, I think it's safe to say, is that right!? That’s a bold statement, John! I feel like I need to say, John Dee! John Dee! John Dee! Yeah. So it's great to be here. Thank you for the invite. Not at all. So tell us about your role in Splunk then, and, please. Yeah. So I'm a field CTO covering Europe, Middle East and Africa at Splunk. It's an interesting role. It's a relatively new role, certainly in Splunk, also kind of in the industry as well. My background is actually in the public sector in the UK, where I left as a a kind of a senior leader in a technology organisation trying to support the kind of the broader government organisation, wider government organisation. And that was that was great. I did that for almost two decades, long time. And then I decided that I wanted a bit of a change. So Splunk was the right place to go. This field CTO role was a fantastic, I think, a real fantastic opportunity to help organisations big and small. My job is really to help the most strategic of our customers across EMEA with their most difficult and challenging problems and those problems whilst they hopefully involve technology. Hence why I work for Splunk. Most of those problems aren't really about the technology, it's about solving business problems and hopefully Splunk can play a part small or large, in the solution to those. Problems. Yeah. Good. Well, we'll, you know, we can come on to that. So you were over here supporting the executive forum that we run, a very successful executive forum. Thank you once again for your support. And it's the first one of those you've done in this part of the world, if I'm not mistaken. And what did you what did you make of it in terms of the the response, the level of engagement, the level of interaction, the questions and the subject more broadly, what were your sort of key takeaways? It's actually my first time in this part of the world all together, not just for a forum like this. So yeah, thank you for the opportunity to come out here again. And that forum in particular I've done a number of them around the world. But that one in particular I found was really interesting because it brought a whole set of different perspectives together, I would say. And you know, the community out here is a broad set of cultures, people way of thinking from all over the world, kind of brought together into this melting pot. So it means that when you talk about technology subjects like we were doing at the forum, you get very, very different views. I really liked it because it was so interactive. You know, you get some of these forums that I've been at and I've spoken out before where, you know, you just you sit there and you do your bit and then you maybe have some lunch, quiet conversation and then you leave. But it really wasn't that, which was nice actually. People were really engaging. Only there for the lunch. Is that what you're trying to? Maybe! Yeah. Yeah. I had to. Apologise to James because I spoke for a little bit too long. It was well received, I mean, I think it was interesting at some point seeing some of the questions being fired at you, Yeah, and then a response and then another fired back, It was great. That's what you want. I really enjoyed it. You know, and so key takeaways, you know, I guess how would you, how would you say that some of the challenges that people are experiencing in this part of the world and how do they relate to other business challenges that you're speaking with business leaders across the rest of EMEA? I mean, how are they different or are they just all the same? The same, but different. Great statement, isn't it? In what respect? You're going to have to expand. Well, I will. I will. So I think because. Because of maybe legislation elsewhere in the world, I would say that things happen for because organisations often pushed to make changes. I think here, whilst the maturity may be slightly behind that of mainland Europe, it's just accelerating so much quicker than I've seen the conversations that I've been having over the last few days. Maybe they have been akin to the conversations I had a couple of years ago in Europe, but every time I have the next conversation with another customer in the space, they've moved so quickly and their way of thinking has accelerated so fast. What is causing that, do you think? What are the drivers for that? I think it's probably because of the that the customer experience, right. That's, that's what this, this part of the world is really all about improving that customer experience, making sure that customers have the best experience in the world. Right. You know, I was saying earlier, I was visiting, visiting. So I'm doing some tourist stuff, right? And they were telling me the tourist guide was telling me this is the tallest building in the world. This is the the building that has the most number of swimming pools in the world. Right. Crazy stuff like that. So I think this part of the world just wants to be bigger and better. And the same thing therefore has to happen with customer experience. I mean, we were talking about this last week when we when we were talking about that level, that innovation, entrepreneurial spirit, that sort of drive to I mean, would that be essentially there's a there's a sort of synergy there? Isn't there, about what we were talking about last week and what Shaun is saying? I think so, yeah. it would be interesting to see, your experiences since being here. But, you know, I think since moving out into the region myself with my family, it was very clear how driven individuals are and the entrepreneurial talent, or, way of thinking is very well cultured. I think that then reflects into technology and the way in which people are very happy to adopt technology, to meet problems and actually, can I do it at speed? and then actually go, okay, well, maybe we need to tweak that or adjust it. And I'd be interested to see your thoughts after speaking to quite a few people through the executive forum whilst you’ve been out here. Couldn't agree more. Right. Just technology seems to be baked into the culture in the way of life here, something that you certainly don't see so much in the UK. You know, it's just the other day when we were talking about identity. Yes, right. And how the identity system works out here compared to in the UK is very, very different. But that can only work because of technology. Yes. Yeah. I think the the innovation and the entrepreneurial spirit out here is, it’s a driver that I haven't seen in a long time. You spoke very eloquently yesterday a lot about Operation Resilience. We dig into that a little bit. Please. What does that really mean for businesses? Yeah. So maybe we'll just touch on resilience for a second because just the word resilience on its own means a lot of things to a lot of people. And then you can kind of repend that with operational, organisation or business, whatever you want to put before that and they mean different things in different industries. That's part of the problem. But resilience overall means being able to, in my mind, at least being able to respond or predict when things are going to go wrong, whatever they may be, respond to them and make sure that you have a, I guess an organisational response that isn't just the technology. Now, the most obvious example of that would be in cybersecurity, and I say it's obvious because that's honestly where the money's been for a long time, right? So that's why we have, you know, CISOs now at board level, mostly reporting to the CEO more than 50% now reporting to CEO. And so it's a board level conversation when it comes to cybersecurity. But cybersecurity, like I was saying just the other day, that encompasses confidentiality, integrity and availability. If we now look at the world of I.T operations, well what do we care about that there? Well, the same thing just the other way around, maybe focus on availability first with a bit of performance maybe and the customer experience all related in there too. So for me it's about making sure that whatever happens in your organisation, whether it be cybersecurity IT operations, DevOps or other things kind of within that technology remit, when anything goes wrong, it's how you can, first, predict that it's going to go wrong and hopefully stop it. But inevitably something will go wrong. Putting enough things in place to make sure that you can very quickly respond to that. Touching on that, something that came up in the executive forum. I thought it was a really lovely analogy that Shaun walked us through, and I think resonated very well. Was the ‘chef analogy’, It would be great if you maybe just if you could just talk about it a little bit again for the listeners. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. So imagine you are in a kitchen, you're a chef in a kitchen, and you're your responsibility is to make sure that your customers are happy, they're fed, they provided the right quality food. That's what you would expect, right? Maybe I can call this a McDonald's versus Michelin star parody, I don’t know if I can say that. But I will! but so you're working in this kitchen. But I'm going to I'm going to place some constraints on you and those constraints are that you only have access to see what the individual cooks in your kitchen are doing. You don't get to see the final product before it goes out to your customers, nor do you get feedback from your customers. You don't get to hear that they may be speaking to you don't get to hear it. Well, that's monitoring, right? You can you can set thresholds, you can measure the ingredients and make sure all of your chefs and cooks are doing the right thing. That's monitoring and that's absolutely needed. You need that to make sure that you have a foundational level. But it's not enough because your customers don't care whether that chef is being the most effective or efficient as long as they get their dish in a reasonable period of time. And it's of the right quality. And maybe you listen to their feedback as well, right? So if you have access, if you're now that head chef that's kind of in between all of your cooks and leaving the dish leaving the kitchen, then that's in my mind. That's observability. You're listening to what the customers are saying. You're taking that feedback, improving your recipes, changing the ingredients, making sure the kitchen is worked, working at its most optimum optimal efficiency. That's observability. And you need both of those to make sure that you're an observable organisation. I think the point being an observable organisation, to raise that point yesterday. Again, we're discussing this. It's a really interesting point that observability, monitoring and evolution. It’s not even that things not being available or haven’t been around, but it would be great maybe if you just touched on that now as well. observability observability means lots of different things to different people and there are certainly a lot of different vendors, ISV's, partners, we're all talking about observability maybe in the same sort of frequency as AI. What’s observability for you? It's a, it's a great question and I would probably say that a few years ago the term observability was a buzz word for marketing purposes more than anything else. And I’d agree. Yeah. I no longer believe that's true. I now think vendors, including vendors like Splunk, have really changed the market. It's now no longer just tooling. It’s an adjective to be to be observable right to make sure your entire organisation and the systems that support your organisation and your business processes and your people are observable so they can predict these outages problems before they happen. So I think the world has changed over the last few years and in a positive way. That doesn't mean that you don't still need monitoring, right? That's that foundational level was still there. And really in my mind at least you have monitoring. And then on top of that you have observability. And on top of that you have business agility, right at different different things. And again, these boundaries massively blurred, but you can't be a super agile organisation, a business unless you have a level of foundational resilience underneath. You get that from observability. And that sort of level of resilience brings with it a few risks, does it? And how do you sort of, how do you manage and assess those potential risks to, business resiliency? to, business resiliency? We've been doing risk management in business for a long time, right? And it would be remiss of me to say that this is any different. I honestly think it's the same thing. The problem is we're now talking a different language. We're now talking technology at board level and those conversations. But you know, about ransomware or about customer experience in a language it makes sense to techies and engineers maybe doesn't resonate particularly well with the board level and nor should it. Right. So, you know, a long time ago we said that we in technology, in IT, needs to be able to understand and and help business leaders understand IT language. That was a mistake. It was a mistake. What we should be doing is teaching our technologists to be able to speak in the language of business. Right. And that's what we're now starting to see. That's why we have CISOs. And whilst the majority of those are still have a technical background, the most predominant skill as required for a CISO these days is the ability to have those conversations at board level about organisational risk through that translation. You touched on language there, it’s quite an interesting point. it’s quite an interesting point. Language, standards, frameworks are starting to shift, quite dramatically, in the use of technology now and certainly I think, we touched a little bit on it on the last episode. Certainly, 7 or 8 years ago I would never expect to see an enterprise software organisation and open source technologies maybe playing together, but it'd be lovely, maybe a little bit product centric, but maybe touch a little bit on observability and actually what the language and protocols of observability is built on and actually how that feeds back into maybe the wider strategy of something like Splunk is starting to adopt that sort of maybe not realisation, but that acknowledgement of if we're going to get the right outcome for a customer, this is what we need to do. It would be great if you could touch on that? Yeah, yeah, sure. So maybe I'll touch on the last bit first and kind of work backwards. So it's, I think it's fair to say, and vendors have started to recognise this now that no one vendor can solve cybersecurity, no one vendor can solve observability. So that means you have a number of choices how you can operate there, right? You can continue, you can move entirely into the open source market and some vendors have done that. You could remain proprietary and and hope for the best and maybe buy out other companies buy out the market. That's an option as well. Absolutely. And then the other option, the option that Splunk has chosen to go down is to adhere to and lead in a whole bunch of open standards, recognising that, you know, we are a proprietary vendor and will continue to be so, especially for the stuff that is our USP at least, but because we have to work with other vendors and, you know, partners and competitors, the only way we can we believe that we can really do that is by pushing the open standards so that we can easily integrate and hopefully customers can pick and choose the components that work for them. And hopefully longer term, more and more of that becomes Splunk, right? That's the idea. And so going back to your first part of that question, what kind of technologies are we investing in in that space? Things like OpenTelemetry, right. Splunk has been known for a long time with its Universal Forwarder to collect particular types of data, and that's great for certain types of data. But there's not just one type of data out there. There's a lot of different types of data. So we should probably understand and respect those different types of data. OpenTelemetry is just a way of doing that. It's been led by a number of vendors. Splunk is one of them. And beyond Kubernetes, which is number one, it's the most contributed to library that's available, a project that's available right now and probably later this year or maybe early next year. If the trends continue, it is likely to be the most contributed project. That’s pretty awesome actually, looking back at the iteration, I’ve personally worked with Splunk long for long time as technology and what Somerford have done with the platform and that definitely feels like a real shift you really feel that within not only Splunk but within the industry as well, and this sort of complete understanding and willingness to work with, as you said, partners, also competitors. Yeah. In order to find the right solution and reduce that continuous of in-fighting that perhaps has been there in the past, the slinging mud. And you know, we can do this or we can rip and replace it, or tool consolidation. Yes, let's jump on that bandwagon! Let's try and be that person that rips everything else because we can do the whole thing. Yeah, but actually, as you said in your point about data, it's the right data. It's using the right standards. The important bit is the right data, the right standards, and therefore using the right technology for the right thing. You just reminded me of when you said tool consolidation there, James. The problem with that approach means that if you choose the right technology for the right thing all of the time, it means that you will end up having a ridiculous amount of technology. And that brings on a different problem, right? Not just managing the contracts and the installation base and all of that good stuff, but the integration between those, products and services and more importantly, the effect that then has on your users, the analysts and the engineers using those tools you now have to train them and maintain that knowledge, which is really, really difficult to do. So that's why I think the integration becomes so important. So you should use the right technology for the right thing, but you shouldn't have to train all of your analysts to use the right technology for the right thing. They should be able to use a smaller number of products. And behind the scenes let the technology and automation, do the grunt work. I’m going to ask the question now that is probably going to be a little bit of rolling of eyes. But, you know, you talk about automation, it leads onto the obvious thing that everyone's talking about at the moment. AI. ML. And you can sort of feel that so whenever you talk about now what organisations and countries are trying to make the most of this, this opportunity I think is more to be said as opposed to something that’s new. Yeah. And your background as a mathematician, that would be really interesting to know your view on what AI is and actually how, how do you approach that not only as an organisation like Splunk but your role as well as a field CTO and you’re having organisations who are probably coming to you and saying, Hey, Shaun. AI, Yeah. What do we do? I was, I was hoping to have a conversation today that didn't involve AI. I'm sorry! Thank you. Okay, so... terminology is important, right? So, AI that encompasses everything within that is machine learning. Machine learning has been around for a very long time. I think it's been in Splunk’s capabilities for almost a decade now. Just just like then. That's kind of like the predictive analytics, threshold management, all that kind of stuff. And within that there's another, another type category, I suppose, which is generative AI. And within that there's large language models and that's where we hear about ChatGPT and stuff like that. The the kind of the buzz around AI at the moment is all around this generative AI stuff. And that's really, it’s got a place, right? Absolutely generative. AI has a place, and we're already starting to see some quite significant changes in the industry. For example, in a few years time, I'd be very surprised if most organisations didn't have an interactive chat bot using AI. It will be akin to not having a website. That's that's really going to be the shift that we're going to see in that space. I suspect. But generative AI is very good at domain specific tasks, but it's not very good at being hugely creative and trying to solve problems that humans are very good at. Yet there will come a time, right? But yet, as it stands today, so often I get asked this question around around cybersecurity or around observability. And I think in those spaces it's a it's a very niche area where you already understand a lot of the domain problem itself. So applying something like generative, AI probably doesn't it's not the silver bullet that maybe everybody is expecting. Now don't get me wrong, you could still get benefits in that space by using generative AI, but I wouldn't jump on the maybe the marketing bandwagon that we often see so much these days. I think where it will help is, like I was saying a second ago, actually helping analysts and users better interact with the system. That's where we're really struggling at the moment, right. With the talent crisis. So if we can make it easier for analysts and users to be able to interact and get more value out of the data that's already in a system, yeah, then fantastic. And you can do that by natural language processing, which can be that made better with LLMs. So when organisations or CEOs are asking their CIOs or CISOs you know, are we ready for AI, what does that mean? Yeah, so Gartner did some research on this and I can't remember the numbers off the top of my head, but it was a staggeringly high proportion of board members, CIOs in particular, saying that their boards don't understand the potential benefits, but also the risks. It’s a balance. What it probably means is I have a model that I like to use, right? So the model is defend, extend, upend, Right. I’ll go through each one briefly, so defend. First of all, what do we do in our business today? What business operations do we have? What processes do we have that we need to keep? But we could make more efficiencies by using AI. A little effort is put into that space at the moment, only a little. Next one is extend what opportunities are there within our existing kind of scope in our organisation to maybe move into a slightly different space, sell more, whatever it may be, right? So extend whatever opportunities are there and then this upend. And that's why most people think there's going to be more benefit and that is let's change our entire organisation and focus on something very different using AI. And that's what you hear in the media, right? That's, that's what that's where the hype is. But actually if you flip that around and make the benefit of or get the most out of AI today in at least category one and probably category two, that's where you'll stand your ground and make most space. Yeah, apologies, because, you know, it's a question ultimately at the moment. That’s so hot and on everyone's agendas, and it's really interesting to hear someone obviously working within technology that has that capability It's been around for a long, long time. And the generative piece you know, how do you understand it? How the businesses make use of it? It's a very interesting approach. Those three buckets and categories. The bit in terms of skill and again just very brief on the skills crisis, skills gap. And that's something that obviously as a as a reseller that's very prominent in our world. That's why we often get bought in to augment capability, sometimes to be a standalone and sometimes to just be the implementation part. It really also comes down to often that the skills aren’t there and there is a huge shortage. And in the UK we're seeing obviously in the UAE. I’m really interested in, you’ve worked for different organisations and different people, but you know, we've spoken before about how we have quite a unique approach and you had a unique approach at one of your organisations where you looked at how you hired and I thought that was a really interesting approach that really focussed on a slightly different model to get the best people and into the organisation to help support you. If you wouldn’t mind touching on that, I know it’s a little bit outside of technology, but I think it’s a very, very poignant topic, I’d be very happy to. It’s one of my favourite things to talk about! So I guess the reason why this started is because of the talent crisis. Trying to get people is difficult, particularly in government, where typically the salaries are lower, but more importantly retaining those people is really hard. So you can put all the effort into keeping and hiring them in the first place. But if they move on after a year, then it's a lot of wasted energy. Right. And also, I guess the final point around that is technology moves so quickly. So there was an interesting stat that came out of maybe a year or so ago, which is by the time you finish university, what you have learnt in the first year will probably be out of date when it comes to technology, right? So university can no longer, at least in technology in the STEM world, can no longer be about teaching people things. It's got to be about teaching people how to learn things and how to be creative. It's a slightly different mindset. So in my old in my old role I was responsible for building up a team of several hundred people, and some of them had to come internal right to keep some of that organisational knowledge. But the majority of them, we wanted to be new hires, external recruits. But we knew that there just wasn't enough people to hire into those roles as quickly as we wanted it to go. So we changed the entire process and actually we looked for three very important characteristics. We looked for curiosity, aptitude and passion. If you could prove to me that you have those three things then I’d hire you. clearly there's some HR stuff around the side of that as well, just to make sure we've been fair and legal and compliant, all of that good stuff, and rightly so. But if you can prove that you've got those three things I’ll hire you, And then I will throw money at the problem by making sure we can train people and give people projects and a safe place to fail. And then after six months, if you can't prove that you have learnt to fail, because inevitably that will happen in the future, right? So that was part of the test, as it were. So proof that you can fail in a safe way and then learn from that and then improve and then help other people do the same thing and also pick up some technology skills that you're on your way as well because it's a technology problem that we're trying to solve. Ultimately, if you can do all of those things, you can continue to work, and if not, then that's the end of your probation and that's okay. That was a major cultural shift in the government organisation. Yeah. How was that received? Very well. So there was the the Civil Service study survey that happens every year and we were a new division I suppose within that and we after the first year were in the top ten out of 10,000. And the majority of those people still work there and still talk very fondly of it. It’s a really interesting approach and I see myself going through a process where often you're looking at hiring people and looking at what the right fit is and as you said, what are those characteristics you're looking for within the organisation and what are you going to take from that experience? If you could then refine it and you talk about adding a layer on top, you know, for your future roles and opportunities as it may, may rest you in the future. Yeah, how would you take that? What would be the next expansion to that? Do you think you would you add? That's a great question, probably for me. So I learnt a lot in doing that and I made many mistakes along with some of the successes that I've just mentioned, and probably in fact definitely more mistakes and than successes. But like I say, that's how you learn. But, probably the one that I would focus on improving in the future is that leadership layer that sits above the majority of our recruitment was really around the entry to maybe five year experience, engineer, analysts, technologists in general. What I didn't say earlier is actually what we ended up is recruiting people that were non technologists. The majority of them were creatives in some way. They were psychologists or musicians, and they bring they were able to bring different a different way of thinking to problems, which was like a melting pot of so much fantastic knowledge just being shared in very different ways. But when I left the organisation, when I left that particular team, what we noticed is that a lot of it was driven by me and my personality and that was fine when I was there, but what we needed to do is kind of bake that into the rest of the leadership team. So probably do some type of exercise around in the future. If I was to have the same opportunity again, I would reconsider how we build leadership teams and how we embed that same culture all the way up to the executive level. Yes, that’s great advise really interesting in terms of how you do that, but also the scalability but legacy at some point in terms of making sure that when you're not there, that is the outcome you want to get to. But if you're not around, that's that framework and that way of thinking still carries on. My philosophy has always been if I do a good job, I'm not needed anymore. I always and always hire people that are smarter than you in some way. If you do those two things you can’t go wrong. Surround yourself with people smarter than you. which I try to do on a frequent occasion But we have to have John sometimes. Sometimes! To just bring you back down to earth. To be fair though John, I think it's an interesting point. Just touching on in terms of leadership and you know, obviously again, yourself coming from a role within public sector and your exposure to leadership and how you approach it, I think would be great. Maybe just as a touch on that as well. I mean, yeah, I spent a long time in the Army where I guess there was a certain style of leadership in certain situations and certainly what I've seen since in the five years since I retired, that you can't apply that same, authoritative type of leadership if you like. If that if there is a style of leadership like that, outside because of course you there are a number of different factors. I mean, you don't have, you don't have other levers like you would do in the, you know, in the Army where you could, you could sort of essentially impose where you have rank, for example, which brings with it a certain level of influence. I think the other factors in outside of outside of and in the private sector, if you like, those those other factors are interesting and I you know, I would always argue that what you've got to do is you've you can't, if you start to impose your position on people, then you've probably failed actually, insomuch as you know, I'm senior to you, you will do as you're told. I think. I think you failed because you've got to take everyone with you. There's an element of, you know, increased collaboration and looking at all those other those other sort of softer skills where you you've got to listen, listen to your team. I mean, we used to say for example, you've got to you know, empathy is a key, key leadership skill, understanding your team, understanding what makes them tick. And, also giving them the responsibility and to a degree, the authority as well. So and encouraging them to fail. And I think I think that is where it's only by failing that actually you become stronger as an organisation. I think the fear of failure stymies organisations and I don't think that's a particularly particularly positive thing at all. So but of course outside the drivers, I guess the organisational drivers are different to what they were in the Army. I mean for example, it's, you know, there's no, there's no costs involved in so much as you're not interested in driving profits or anything like that. And whereas it's a, you know, the operational outputs I guess are, you know, are completely different. So there are definitely similarities. I think it's just making sure that you were able to adjust your style accordingly in order to to get the most from your team. That's what I would always argue, say, and delegation, as you know. James! Delegation. Delegation, delegation, delegation! Different leadership skills apply in different situations completely. And it's understanding that. It would be crazy to apply maybe some of the more modern leadership styles that you see in businesses into the military, for example. Yeah, completely. And vice versa. Have you heard of the Cynefin framework? No, it's a Welsh word meaning habitat. Habitat, habitat. Yeah. And I'm not even attempt to spell it, and it talks about five different leadership styles that you need for different situations. And I really like it because it really makes sense when you talk about the military. So the first the first one is simple, and that's where you can have a playbook, right? If this thing happens, you do this and you often see that in a lot of call centres. For example, follow this pattern the next one and you don't need you don't need the same leadership style in each of these. That's kind of the idea. The next one is called complicated and that's where most organisations think they are. It's what I tell best fits actually. And a lot of their project management best practices that you may see right, and that's where you say so I don't know what be a good example of that. A car, maybe building a car or fixing a car. Overall, I probably couldn't fix a car, but I could probably narrow down the component in the car that has a problem. And then if I know enough about that individual component, I could probably fix that problem. Right? So it's you can take down a whole problem and break it into smaller chunks and then solve each of those individual chunks together, put them back together again. And you probably have a solution. That's the traditional project management fix. The next one is complicated, that's very complex, and that is where most organisations are right? And it's really you can't use the same breaking it down, solving, solving it in the in the same way. So you can't use the traditional project management stuff. It's really about breaking the problem down into smaller time slices. Maybe some of the agile stuff comes into play here and then learning from its probing, learning and then readjusting very quickly, right? So that's when we start talking about the the failing quickly. Your retrospectives that you’re going through? Exactly. Yeah. And some people are put off by the Agile terminology, but most people understand the concept, of learning from mistakes quickly. And then there is a, a final one which is chaos and that is really designed for situations like in the military, operational situations for example when there's a fire and actually in that situation leadership style of being told exactly what to do is the right thing. There is a time and place. You have to know when to move between these different situations. And that's for some people. It's a challenge. I think it's interesting. We've sort of morphed into this conversation now. I thought yesterday when one of the speakers was asked and this company, a big manufacturing company, was asked when they were going through that transformation program, what were their biggest challenges. And he offered it up to the team. And it was the human factors were the biggest challenges change Implementing a change process was the biggest challenge they had. Never mind everything else. You think of a company the size 4000 employees. You gave an interesting sort of way in which you approached it, and I wonder if you could share that. So a lot of this is just psychology theory, right? This is nothing special. But it is, isn't it? It's understanding people, understanding how they tick. Exactly and understanding what's in it for them, which is what I said yesterday. Right. If you can understand what's in it for me as an individual to try and bring them along, adding that kind of empathy, learning what's important to them, then it's easier to convince them, but not always possible. So sometimes you need to think bigger and you need to help the individual to think bigger because maybe doing something that is a bit more harder work for them that, you know, people are inherently lazy. I think people are inherently lazy. So people will always try and do the the easiest thing in their job to get the job done the majority of the time. So if you can convince people actually that if you do this thing that's going to take you a little bit longer, it could be a little harder, whatever it may be. And a way of doing that is by enabling them to think bigger. So trying to share the overall problem with them and get them to hopefully come up with the same solution as you together and getting them to understand why we're heading in that direction together. And if you can do that, giving that kind of authority or autonomy to solve problems themselves. They will probably buy into that and solve that problem. They may not solve it in the way that you expected them to, but it shouldn't matter as long as the problem has been solved. I was going to say, you know, going back to the you know, the Army analogy. You you'd say mission command. Exactly. You’d say, this is what I want you to achieve. These are your parameters. I don't really care how you get there. I'm giving you the authority to get there. Crack on and do it. And people grow, I think they blossom as a consequence. Yeah. You have to have guardrails and all of that good stuff. Right. It's not, there's not just, It's system thinking is how, where this all comes from I suppose. And the idea being in system thinking that you have local problems and global problems and most people focus on their little local problem, but if everyone improves their little local part of the process individually, then that's great. But overall, the process is probably still not massively efficient. If you take a step back and everybody together look at the overall process, the global problem, then you can probably make more efficiencies across the organisation. We started the conversation today about Operation Resilience. We did. It’s been really interesting going to different areas, but actually I think we talk about resilience, resiliency, leadership styles and psychology and actually we're talking about really emotional intelligence, it’s becoming more and more important as key driver and what people are looking for within the organisation, but also how to run a service, how to be a leader, but John, again, going to touch one more point on yourself, given your background as well. It would be interesting, to open it up as well to Shaun about resilience. You know, resilience for you within the workplace, within an organisation we talk about operational being technology, but what are your views on resilience and the importance of it perhaps in the modern workplace, workforce? Yeah, I mean personal resilience, it takes on many forms. I think, you know what? We're all we're all shaped differently. We're all shaped by what's gone on in our past by a variety of external factors. They make you the individual that you are. And and of course, they I guess they therefore build your own internal resilience levels. And for some people, some people have a particularly high threshold and or triggers which are which are initiate certain behaviours and and really deal with them in their own way. And I guess the the challenge, I mean so often the challenges that in certain sectors I guess I mean say you know in the environment that I came from certainly we're expected to have higher levels of resilience, personal resilience, I think traditional male dominated environment as well. That builds in an extra factor. And and if I'm honest, I think we as a society, certainly in the UK now are seeing more of that unfolding where perhaps we haven't given it the necessary levels of attention that we should have done. And more and more males particularly are are having to sort of deal with this in their own ways. And I think, you know, it's it's nice to see, quite frankly, that more of society, more males in society are able to talk about it, because I think that's a really positive thing. And personal resilience for me personally is and I do I do deal with that. I deal with that in sort of focusing on other areas, perhaps outside of work, which are important to me. So physical fitness for me is really, really important. And, and, and actually I think, yeah, it sort of means different things to different people really. You know, I know you we would all look at some people or have looked at people in the past and thought how on earth are they responding like that to that, to that particular event or that particular situation? You know, I don't I but that also that also essentially is all about emotional intelligence as well, because you've got to understand the way people are, you know, as leaders as well. You've got to understand your people understanding those factors that essentially either impact on their own resilience, you know, what is happening to them and why that why that's happening. And how can how can you as a leader perhaps help support, and, you know, I'm not going to say protect because but actually help and give them the level of support and reassurance that they need. And, you know, I think as well as externally, you have peers as well that are there to help, help and you know, and confide as well. I mean, that's always a that's always quite a as well, I think as well. Businesses are becoming increasingly aware that if you have low levels of individual resilience, I guess they need they need to put in place certain certain things that can help build that because otherwise of that sort of negative effect, I don't know. What do you think about that? Does that all make sense? No, it does. And the reason I ask the question is we talk about Operation Resilience and technology, but actually technology and people, a cliché a little bit, but we say it all the time. It's completely intertwined. It talks about thresholds and markers and that points in learning what we do in technology with checkpoints, triggers and alerts. And we're thresholding and we're baselining and we're learning about what is resilience and operational resilience for that business. So actually the human factor is completely intertwined. So as we develop as a modern business or changing to the next iteration of, it's just interesting to know what resilience means from someone like yourself, John, coming from your background and perhaps, Shaun, you want to be elaborate on that slightly. I was thinking, when John was speaking a second ago, he reminded me of This is going to sound like I'm going off topic, but I'll bring it back don’t worry. I gave a keynote in Brussels last year for a military organisation and it was all about personal resilience, but tying it back to operational resilience. So I'll share kind of the highlights of that, which was when I flew over to the US just after COVID, they lost my luggage. May have mentioned some of the story to the you the other day, right? They lost my luggage and that meant that I had to travel across the U.S. for three weeks, done from zero degrees Celsius to 50 degrees Celsius and everything in between, doing a whole bunch of business meetings with with government officials through to small start ups, wearing just what I had on the aeroplane. Right. So for me, my personal resilience that was really tested what and kind of the buffer that I had, I often call this like a sponge. How much change can you absorb? How much can you tolerate before it breaks? Now I could make light of that to the people I was having meetings with and that kind of got me through it. Everybody would have a little joke at the start. It lighten the mood and we could continue. But some people wouldn't be able to do that and that's okay. So the buffer for me was knowing that I could do that, but also that the shops were going to be open the following day. And I had gone by some stuff. You had continuity plan or resilience plans in place. Exactly. Yeah. And maybe Splunk provided some additional organisational resilience as well because they had a travel and expense policy that enabled me to support myself whilst I was out there. The but every individual has to have their own kind of resilience management as well as the organisation. So Splunk and any other company can provide some level of that. But what you the viewers here can't see and listeners can't see is that I'm six foot eight tall. All right. So no matter how resilient I think I am. I’m six foot two! he's really not. So no matter how how resilient I think I am by, you know, the local shops being a macy's being opened in the US, for example. And that's that's great. But unless I can buy clothes that fit me rather than really short shorts for meetings is going to provide a different level of resilience for different people. So I think as a maybe as a leader, bring it back to that for a second, kind of recognising that you as an organisation needs to support your people to make them resilient, which ultimately makes you as a company resilient, but recognising that that level of resilience is going to be different for different people and you may need to put in different support mechanisms for your people and that will vary culturally as well. That’s a very good point. I think we’ve probably run out of time now, have we? I mean we could continue this if we wanted to. I think we have almost at a wrap. But thanks once again, Shaun. Thanks for joining us over here and your contribution as ever has been stellar. Thanks for the invite. No, not at all. Enjoyed it a lot. And thanks for taking part in this in the podcast. No problem. That's a wrap!