What if the very thing most leaders try to avoid, friction – is exactly what organisations need most?
In this thought-provoking conversation, host Sue Stockdale talks to entrepreneur, leadership thinker and bestselling author Margaret Heffernan, who challenges some of the most common assumptions about leadership, innovation and inspiration. Drawing on decades of experience leading organisations and researching business success and failure, Margaret argues that progress rarely comes from certainty, speed or having all the answers. Instead, she makes the case for doubt, dissent, curiosity and collective intelligence.
Sue and Margaret explore why leaders are often more interested in learning from failure than success, how organisations become trapped by an obsession with efficiency, and why inspiration alone is never enough to create meaningful change. They discuss the importance of slowing down, asking better questions, listening deeply, and creating environments where people feel safe to challenge ideas. Margaret also shares practical insights from her own creative process, revealing how she develops ideas, writes books, and navigates uncertainty without rushing to easy answers.
In this episode:
- Why mistakes are often a leader’s greatest source of learning
- The difference between inspiration and implementation
- How friction, challenge and doubt improve decision-making
- Why leaders should ask better questions instead of providing answers
- The dangers of prioritising efficiency over creativity
- How collective intelligence outperforms individual brilliance
- The importance of embracing uncertainty rather than avoiding it
- How innovative thinkers create space for reflection and insight
- Practical ways leaders can build more creative and resilient organisations
Key Quote
“The job of a leader is to create the conditions in which great people can do the best work of their lives.”
About Margaret Heffernan
Margaret Heffernan is an entrepreneur, CEO, keynote speaker and bestselling author whose books include Willful Blindness, Uncharted and Embracing Uncertainty. Her work explores leadership, innovation, organisational culture and the challenges of navigating an increasingly complex world.
Connect with Margaret Heffernan website: Linkedin
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Margaret Heffernan Transcription
Welcome to Access to Inspiration. I’m Sue Stockdale, and it’s a great privilege for me today to speak to our guest, entrepreneur, leadership thinker and author Margaret Heffernan. I’ve known Margaret for more than 20 years, and she always has a remarkable quality of being able to bring friction and dissent into a conversation that can lead to valuable insight, new ideas, and beneficial discussion. So when we were putting together this series, which has the theme of the edge, and we wanted to push our edge in the podcast, we wanted to challenge the notion of inspiration and whether it needs friction to be useful at all. I immediately thought of Margaret as the person I’d love to have this conversation with, but I can’t help feeling slightly nervous ’cause we entered into this conversation.
Sue: Welcome to the podcast,
Margaret. Thanks, Sue. And I’m sure you have no need to feel nervous.
Why Leaders Love Failures
Sue: One of the things I wanted to start us off with Margaret is way back in episode 106 on the podcast balloonist and explorer Bertrand Piccard said something to me that really stuck because he’d spoke about when he speaks to senior leaders about his experiences, they’re always more interested in hearing about his failure than his successes. So they don’t want the polished version, they just want the bits that went wrong. You spent your career speaking to leaders, being a leader yourself, and understanding what leaders actually respond to Im wondering whether this response surprises you at all in terms of what he has experienced.
Mistakes And Learning Culture
Margaret Heffernan: It doesn’t surprise me hugely. For years I’ve thought about and on occasion written about mistakes because I think mistakes are, to use a corny cliche, great learning opportunities. And I’ve often tried to get people, and particularly people in leadership positions to talk to me about their mistakes.
And it takes an enormous amount of security for them to be willing to do so. The further away it is in time, usually the easier it is, but it’s frequently something they’re still not entirely comfortable with, even though they’ve gone on to greater fame, glory and success.
But I do think that the more quickly you can identify where you’ve gone wrong, and simply be able to say, I thought this, it turned out that I was wrong. The faster you learn and the faster you grow and develop. And I guess, my big concern is that most organisations attach so much shame and blame to mistakes or failures that nobody does that, which means they don’t learn.
So I think if you want to have a learning organisation, you have to be prepared to say, okay, let’s go back. Let’s do a proper postmortem, let’s figure out where did we go wrong? Because that could be very useful and really great organisations do that. 3M is famous for it because they undo lots of innovation that doesn’t work immediately. But what they’ve discovered is if they do a postmortem immediately, it gives them ideas for how it might work when the context shifts, which it tends to do. I think of course it’s in the nature of drama and storytelling that failures are going to be more exciting than successes. It’s quite boring to say, I’ve set off to do this and then I did it, yay me.
So there’s a lot more drama, but there’s also I think, a lot more learning in the mistakes we make along the way. But to be able to talk about them requires a degree of self-forgiveness and also forgiveness by others. If the mistakes were well intended, but just mistaken, that’s very different from if they were ill intended.
Sue: That’s so true
Inspiration Needs Friction
Sue: therefore, just turning our attention to our theme of inspiration and our intention when we started up this podcast was to inspire people to be able to give them new perspectives on the world. Help them to think about new ideas different possibilities. I would hope that all our episodes haven’t just been motherhood and apple pie. there’s been some mistakes, there’s been some grit in the oyster, but maybe we are going wrong. What do you think is the role of inspiration, Margaret? Is it comfortableness, or does it have to be some sort of friction within it?
Margaret: it depends a lot on context. I think it has to have some friction in it because it has to have some doubt.I’m a very big believer in the value of doubt because most of the organisations I’ve seen go wrong and often go wrong, catastrophically, were organisations with insufficient doubt, an insufficient challenge. And I think there’s a school of leadership, which I would see is much more like cheer leadership than leadership, which is, everything’s gonna be fine.
Let’s just work hard and be cheerful and everything will turn out okay. I think that’s phoney . I think many leaders feel they’re obliged to somehow present that, but I think very few good leaders feel comfortable doing it. I tend to be a bit more bread and butter.
I tend to think that when you’re running any kind of organisation, you need a lot of clarity. You need a culture of generosity and tolerance with each other, and a great capacity to be able to challenge each other on the ideas as opposed to on the people. My book, willful Blindness, is about the failure to do that. The failure to say, yeah, but I think this is dangerous, or I think this is risky, or have we considered this or have we considered that? I think inspiration is great in terms of triggering new ways of thinking, but an inspiration is rarely an answer. It may just point the direction in which the answer might be found.
Sue: So there needs to still be some work done by the recipient of that inspiration.
Margaret Oh, hugely to action or something that’s productive.
Ideas Are Cheap Execution Matters
Margaret Heffernan: I’ve run tech companies I’ve had, and people working for me have had inspiring ideas that didn’t guarantee their success by any manner of means.
It guaranteed better thinking and sometimes it led to tremendous breakthroughs. But the inspiration is just the first step. Actually on some level I would have to say it’s certainly the cheapest part and it’s often the easiest part. Certainly when it comes to innovation ideas are 10 a penny.
And I teach MBA students from time to time, and they’re always very reluctant to share their ideas because they’re so afraid that they’re going to be stolen. And I said, that is really the smallest problem you have for two reasons. One is if it’s a really good idea, I promise you someone’s already had it.
That’s why you often get very similar innovation at the same time, right? Because suddenly other people can see the patterns that you’ve discerned. The big risk you face is that if you don’t share your idea and get input and challenge from other people, you won’t be able to develop it. And if you can’t develop it, then it’s just an idea and the person who can develop it will make progress and you won’t.
And I’m also aware, ’cause I’ve had the good fortune to work with a lot of extremely creative, innovative people, that they have ideas every day. There was a time in my life when I probably had an idea for a new company every week. That’s all well and good. It’s interesting.
It’s much better if you have the discipline to say no to 99% of them. But the inspiration is just the start. And often I think both entrepreneurs will tell you this and so will any creative person, the distance between the idea and the reality is long and slow. And and so you need a lot more than inspiration to keep you going during that period.
You all know this from the explorations that you’ve done. The idea of going to the Arctic is great. The experience of doing it is infinitely more complex. And I think there’s a beautiful parallel between what you do there and what entrepreneurs do you know, they definitely reach wildernesses.
They definitely reach stages where they feel lost and confused and wish they’d never started again. And the ones who succeed are the ones who keep going.
From Inspiration To Next Steps
Sue: So what are we missing within our idea in the podcast? If we are providing access to inspiration for people I would love to hear your critical perspective to say, what, where are our gaps? What should we be doing to make it even more valuable for our listeners?
Margaret: I guess the thing might be to say, okay, so if we have some sort of inspiration, the question then is what next?What if the inspiration is step one, what is step two? And in my book, whether I’m thinking about do I want to start another company or do I want to not write another book, or do I wanna write another play? Or do I want to start some other kind of business entirely? Or do I want to join a business that someone’s invited me to do?
And this will sound very counterintuitive, the first thing I do is I try to ignore it. If I ignore it and it goes away, then that’s a very clear sign to me that it just wasn’t meaty enough. And 98% of them do go away. The ones that keep coming back, there’s a reason, and I often don’t know the reason, but it may be, that now I’m thinking along a certain line.
I’m seeing things that contribute to whatever sparked that first idea. And it’s starting to get some meat on the bones, so to speak. The third thing I’ll do after that, if, for these things that really seem to have some staying power is I’ll start doing some research around it. I’ll start talking to people about it.
And very often at that stage it also fails. It’s either, okay, somebody’s already done this brilliantly, or 15 people have done this already. Brilliantly. It may be that actually nobody’s done it, which can be quite alarming because if nobody’s done anything like it, yeah, it may be the market space is empty, but it may be because everybody knows not to go there.
And I see this in business plans, people write, they say, this is a great opportunity ’cause nobody’s there. You think, yeah, maybe they’ve thought of something you haven’t. So I’ll do research around there and I’ll do a lot of what I think I is quite oblique research, which is I’ll do research around the subject rather than into the subject and see what are the adjacent themes, possibilities and so on .
And I’m very, and then I’ll be pretty harsh with myself in saying, okay, so what are all the reasons not to do this? If this were not your idea, it was someone else’s, how would you pick it apart? And I have quite a lot of friends and colleagues with which I’ll do that because I, I appreciate their experience and advice, but I’m certainly unafraid of sharing what my thinking is because at this stage it’s still too abstract to be protectable or really for anyone else to be thinking about it the way that I’m thinking about it.
And then usually I’ll think about casting it, if I could have anybody in the world to work on it, who would those people be? And what does that tell me about the kind of business it is? So I have a, it’s a very inate process, but it’s all questions. It’s absolutely all questions.
Sue: The other thing that is endemic in what you’ve said, Margaret, is time.
Time And Cooling Off
Sue: and taking the time to go through that process of conversation and questions and so on. And it does seem to me today in the business world that nobody seems to have time. They want to have an instant solution.
Yeah. How important is time?
Margaret Heffernan: Oh, I think it’s essential. I think it’s absolutely essential. I definitely do not subscribe to the move fast and break things school of thought. And that isn’t because I don’t like doing things at pace. I do. But I guess I’ve learned a couple of things. One is if you could do things very fast, and you’re almost certainly doing them the way you’ve done them before, because you’ve got the ingrained knowledge and habits, so you are repeating yourself, at which point you are undermining your own innovation.
When you can do something really fast, the question is, so what’s so different about what you’re doing? If it’s susceptible to an old pattern of behaviour. I also think that and I work with a lot of boards on things like this. I think if you’re taking a big decision, it’s extremely valuable to schedule in some cooling off time.
And it interests me, that you get this in things like insurance policies or mobile phone contracts, and they’re important because when you stop obsessing over something and stop thinking about it, your brain won’t stop working on it. So you will find, without being asked, your brain has recruited different ways of thinking for this project that you are incubating.
And you may suddenly realise that there’s a great reason not to do it. You may suddenly realise that there’s a great person who would be perfect to do it with. All sorts of ideas will crop up, but they won’t. If you are working so fast and furiously that you have no time to do anything except think in one direction.
So I think building in pauses building in cooling off periods is really fundamental. And I would say on many occasions it saved my bacon and on many occasions, it’s made what I wanted to do a lot clearer.
Efficiency Myth And Multitasking
Margaret Heffernan: I feel quite strongly that we have all become captive to an aggressive form of efficiency, which everybody thinks is really brilliant.
That if you can do things instantly, then that’s marvellous. I can’t think of any instant relationships or instant food that I’m, particularly enamoured of. I think, the brain is a pretty spectacular organism and it behoves us to use it well. And we work in many ways, which prevents that.
We try to multitask, which the brain can’t do. So we don’t remember the material we handle as well as we could. We work excessive hours, which means we get tired, which means we make bad decisions because we can’t think very well. We make other people work the same way and we think if we can get it done in half the time, then it must be just as good, which is absurd.
So I think we’ve become rather seduced by this rather adolescent kind of race car mentality. And as there’s more and more at stake in the world these days as that mentality has made the world very much more fragile, I think doubling down on something that has increased uncertainty and risk is an error.
Leadership Divide And Truth
Sue : turning our attention then to the leadership perspective. there was a recent report produced by Hogan on the leadership divide and it looked at : what are the leadership behaviours that executives display versus what people in an organisation actually want to have from their leaders.
Sue: And there was no overlap in those things yet inspiration appeared as one of the behaviours that global executives exhibit. It didn’t come up in what employees and organisations want to see.: I’m just wondering, what you make of that perspective?
Margaret Heffernan: do you make of that from your perspective
I think it’s really interesting because what it suggests is that the leaders think they’re inspiring, but the followers don’t.
And inspiration is in the eye of the beholder, so they may be fooling themselves. I think what people want at work at the moment, and I don’t actually think this has changed enormously. I think they want truth telling. If we’re in a bad place, could we please just say so? They want a sense that smart people are working the problem with good will.[00:17:00]
They want a sense of direction and they want honesty about risk. And those are very banal characteristics, except that so many people at work feel they don’t get any of them. I think the workplace has become a place where fear is very dominant. The rhetoric around AI has not helped the rhetoric around, oh, yay, we can get rid of 5,000 jobs is implicitly threatening.
So I think what people want out of their leaders is a working environment in which they can do their best work and grow. I think what they frequently get is the conditions in which they can just about get the work done as long as they aren’t creative, aren’t critical, and don’t ask too many questions.
So I think the reality is we have a leadership problem in the sense that what leaders are providing, your Hogan research seems to suggest what they’re providing is specifically not what people want, and what people want is specifically not what leaders are giving them. So that’s a real problem.
Isolation From The Coalface
Margaret Heffernan: And it probably derives from a lack of contact with the coalface and a lot of isolation. One of the things I often reflect upon is Richard Fo, who some will remember, used to run Lehman Brothers, and he had a very interesting journey to work every day, which is he got a car to a heliport, a helicopter into Manhattan, a car to his office, and he went in an elevator to his office, which was a private elevator.
In other words, he managed to get from his home to his desk without encountering anything you or I might recognise as real life. [00:19:00] It’s an extreme image, but it’s not that extreme. And for me, leadership depends on being in touch fold was deliberately isolated from the world around him. So for me, leadership has to be not just about inspiration for the future, but a really good visceral instinct for what is the present.
Sue: It doesn’t seem to me that more we use technology in various ways Facilitates that very easily, given that a lot of people are remote working. There’s not always so much face-to-face contact with employees and leaders. Is that realistic? I think it’s realistic.
Margaret : Just before we came together, I was talking to the CEO of a business who’s, mandated that people will be at work four days a week. They are at work four days a week. They do discover that they get quite a lot of value from that. It’s much harder for individuals with childcare issues, but that’s because they were struggling with childcare issues. It’s just the company couldn’t see them before. But yeah, I think, on some level I think this is quite simple, which is to be a great leader, you have to understand the people who you want to follow you, and they have to trust that you know them and understand their capacities and the realities of what they can do.
And if you don’t have and manifest that understanding, then they won’t trust you. And if they won’t trust you, they won’t follow you. And if they won’t follow you, then you are not a leader no matter what your title says.
Sue: You’ve described that very clearly, Margaret, if that’s the problem, what are the possible solutions?
Efficiency vs Innovation
Margaret Heffernan: the solutions are all over the place, and there are a lot of them, but I thinkbecause we’re in a very different working environment than that in which most leaders grew up professionally. I think that it behoves all of us to think quite deeply about what is so different about now.
And there are a lot of candidates for this, and you mentioned one, which is technology for sure. The isolation that technology has imposed upon us the isolation that people developed during COVID, much of which they’ve not broken through enormous complexity and enormous uncertainty.
And in the context of that, I think that what you don’t need is more efficiency. I think what you need is more creative capacity to imagine doing things differently. And that is the biggest lack I see in workplaces today. [00:22:00] Everybody can keep on doing what they’ve always done the way they always did it.
They can harness technology to do it faster and er, but the capacity to come up with different ways of doing it or ways to do better different things, that’s where everybody’s stuck. So that’s an innovation crisis and I think that’s a cultural crisis in the sense that I think most companies aren’t set up to do innovation, which brings us back to where we started, which is everybody’s so focused on efficiency.
Creativity is not efficient, never has been, never will be, because efficiency depends on knowing how to do something you’ve already done before. And innovation by definition is something you haven’t done before. So broadening one’s capacity for tolerance of uncertainty and understanding that you need to have a lot of options rather than the perfect solution [00:23:00] is a very different way of working than was prevalent before.
I would say before the global financial crisis, and I don’t think most leadership concepts or most leaders have really adapted to the radically different environment in which they’re being asked to lead today. I think they lack imagination. I think they lack tolerance for ambiguity. I think the excessive pressure placed on data is dangerous because it means you only pay attention to what you can measure.
There are lots of things you can’t measure that really matter. So I think we’ve become very rigid in a world that needs a great deal of flexibility.
Inspiration Fuels Creativity
Sue: I can start to see from what you’re saying, Margaret, inspiration to be peppered into that solution in some way, shape, or form because for me inspiration is a spark that can generate creativity. Yes. New ideas, whether I’m out in nature on a walk i’m standing in the shower, having the opportunity and setting up the condition to sometimes be inspired or to find inspiration. Yeah. Is as much of an active activity as it is a passive one. Yes. So I’m a bit hopeful here from what you’re saying. there is a space for inspiration in the future to help us develop better leadership.
Margaret Heffernan: I think that’s absolutely right. I think that’s absolutely right. So why would that not happen? It might not happen because the cohort below the sort of C-suite is still pretty much saturated with the efficiency doctrine. I think the reality is there are lots and lots of people in most great companies that are full of creative ideas and creative ways of working who are not being asked to work or to think that way. But I think when the invitation is clear, then the potential becomes obvious.
Ask the Whole Team
Margaret Heffernan: And also, I think it’s quite helpful for leaders to consider that they are sitting atop a mountain of talent, knowledge, and ability. And do they consult it enough?
I once worked with a, a guy who was head the chief data officer at the Bank of England, which is, not known for its great creativity and probably nobody wants it to be too creative.
But he had the insight that and this was post financial crisis, that there’s gonna be more and more data that he wasn’t gonna get any more resources, but everybody was gonna come under a lot more pressure to deliver a lot more faster. And so his first thought was you do the normal thing, you get the org charts and the Excel spreadsheets and you have a, senior leadership team a way day and you rearrange the deck chairs and you come back and you just pray it works ’cause you don’t know.
And and instead at the last minute he thought. Why do I just ask everybody what we should do? And which is what he did. And this is quite a conservative organisation, and he got ribbed about it by his colleagues. He said, oh, great. I kept him, I, I heard you just stood up in front of your whole team and said, you don’t know how to do your job.
God’s cool. But the reality was that the suggestions and ideas that came from the working population as a whole way outstripped in imagination and ambition, what he and the senior leadership team would’ve concocted. Now, I think that’s a really important insight, and it’s one I see over and over again and why it doesn’t happen is articulated by the way that he was ripped by his colleagues.
A sense that I can’t ask everybody who works here how to make the company better because they’ll think I don’t know what I’m doing. That isn’t what it is. It’s actually respecting their knowledge and expertise and asking for them to use it creatively. It’s a gesture of respect, not surrender, but you need a pretty high level of confidence to be able to do it and to realise that the knowledge of the company is not limited to the size of your brain, but the connect, collected and connected intelligence of everybody who works for you. And if you’re not using that, then almost by definition you are not leading.
Sue: Which brings us nicely back to questioning what is the role of a leader or how is leadership seen in organisations? Yeah.
Questions Over Answers
Sue: One of the things I often talk about with my coachees is do they have the right questions they think that they have to have all the right answers.No. As opposed to being able to have all the right questions. And I think having the right questions is, is a skill and a talent.
Margaret Heffernan: I think that’s exactly right. I think the job of a leader is to create the conditions in which great people can do the best work of their lives.
Now, creating the conditions is both about setting hard problems. It’s about culture, it’s about people, it’s about gathering resources, it’s about understanding time. All of those things are fundamental to leadership, but it is not about being the smartest guys in the room. And we’ve seen through corporate failure, after corporate failure, what happens when leaders do think they are the smartest guys in the room, which is they suppress the collective intelligence around them.And it leads to really catastrophic failures. Whether you’re looking at BP or whether you’re looking at Enron, or whether you’re looking at Wells Fargo or Volkswagen or Boeing. At the end of the day, collective intelligence will beat singular intelligence every time.
Sue: AndAnd so in terms of what you uncovered within your book, embracing uncertainty, were some of the qualities that we’re alluding to here that are necessary for leaders to embrace uncertainty
Running Toward Uncertainty
Margaret Heffernan: I think the issue about embracing uncertainty is that most people run away from it. And they hunkered down and cleave to the familiar, that’s how everybody gets stuck. The people who see that uncertainty equates to opportunity, run towards it and try to understand it and understand what new conditions are, creating new possibilities.
And this is true of artists, it’s true of scientists, it’s true of great inventors. It’s true of those for whom the status quo is not something to be maintained, but improved. I’ve been fortunate enough in my research to go to amazing places like cer, to talk to people building amazing things like finishing the grata familia, to start companies doing things that nobody had ever done before.
These are all people who run towards uncertainty. They’re not trying to eliminate the ambiguity, they’re trying to understand the richness inherent in it to identify where the opportunity lies. And this is inherent in entrepreneurs. So these are all a very creative bunch of people who stay highly attuned to the environment in which they’re living and working, who listen to the sort of signals that their brains are sending them who take time to reflect. And when they make a decision in terms of, okay, where are we going? Can then be very decisive. But they’re able to toggle between these almost quasi meditative states and these very action oriented states. And they know when to use which.
Sue: That it is quite a skill.
Margaret: It is very bimodal or multimodal in the sense that it can’t be hard charging all the time. It has different phases, which they understand and are good at navigating.
Sue: how do you apply some of the things we’ve been speaking about to yourself?
Personal Practices and Listening
Margaret Heffernan: I spend a lot of time between books, for example, just wandering around. Sometimes a book will have given me an idea for what I want to do next, but not inevitably. I read voraciously across all domains. I’m shocked by the degree to which business people don’t read books. Absolutely horrified, for a number of reasons. Not just because they need to be well-informed but because reading will give you a very sustained level of concentration, which, all of our devices actively disrupt. And the ability really to follow through on an idea requires that kind of concentration. It requires that kind level of mental focus. So all of that’s very important to me. And being able to be, to wander around in that phase between books is both very regenerative, but it’s also a little bit scary because it makes you think what if I don’t come up with anything? So it takes a certain amount of courage to shoot, I haven’t had an idea this week. What the heck am I gonna be doing for the next two years? But I’ve been in that position often enough that I know it will come. I’ve done it the same thing between companies and between careers.
And if you try to force it, you make it harder. So I trust the organism as it were. And then once I know what, okay, I’ve decided what it is I’m going to pursue, what the book is going to be, or what the company is going to be, then I have a pretty well-worn kind of process for trying to put the pieces in place.
Now I may then discover, actually that’s not gonna work. So you think, okay is there a different way that it will work? Or was this a really good idea for which the time has not yet come? So you have to accept that this brilliant idea you had, it may not be a brilliant idea. It may not be the right time or the right place, but the only way you can find that out is to work on it and see will it go anywhere.
So you have to be able to tolerate that risk. I think I can look back on the seven books I’ve written and I can see that they’re very connected, but they weren’t planned, right? So they emerged as connected. But they don’t depend on one another. They probably build on one another.
But anyway, I think, I think leaders need to have that capacity. To with not knowing and live with it for, a reasonable period of time, confident that they will figure it out. But again, if they instead resort to what they regard as a, a safe solution, then you can guarantee they’re not doing anything really new.
I think most leaders need to listen better. A long time ago I had a relationship with an organisation where I felt I didn’t have great relationships with the people in the company. And I wasn’t quite sure why, but at one, and we met monthly and I remember at some point thinking I think the next meeting I go to, I’m just not gonna say anything.
Often I don’t have anything to say, but I just, I think it’s just gonna listen. I think there’s something going wrong in this relationship. I don’t know what it is, so I’m just going to listen and the only time I’m going to speak up is if I feel that someone said something and they haven’t been listened to.
Or if I think there’s a question that needs to be asked and nobody’s asked it. And I can’t describe to you how spectacularly that improved my relationship with this group. And it really taught me a lesson I clearly needed to learn, which I think most people need to learn personally, which is when you’re very eager to talk, you listen badly because you’re trying to think where can I land?
My brilliant insight, if you go into a meeting determined to say nothing and just listen, you may find that they don’t need you, in which case you can save yourself a lot of time. But otherwise you’ll find that they need the one thing you said. And the one thing is infinitely more powerful than a lot of gab.
So I think there’s a very fine art to listening and it’s something I pay a lot more attention to now than I used to. And I don’t think that the people who add greatest value are necessarily the people who talk the most. So I think that’s a skill which leaders can do a lot to work on that. And the asking of questions.
Sue: Fascinating what you’re saying there. And as a coach, of course, I would concur with what you’re saying there, Margaret, about the skill of listening. To pick up on the point you made about your books and that you feel that there’s a connection between ’em and that one has evolved into the other. if you you were then listening to your gut feel, your intuition What’s the core message you’re really trying to convey to us in all of your written work?
Challenging the Status Quo
Margaret Heffernan: That’s a good question. I think it’s largely about challenging the status quo. Not believing that because something’s always been that way, it should continue being that way. Being very sceptical about messages that the market sends. Having worked in Silicon Valley for a long time and pretty sceptical of its intrinsic wisdom and motivations. I think we hugely underestimate the complexity of everything in organisational life. And because we’re afraid of it and in simplifying it, we reduce it.
And especially right now, that’s really hurting us because we need a level of creative thinking around strategy and innovation That seems really hard to find, and part of it’s because it’s been legislated outta the education system. Them, part of it’s because technology has been rather depleting of creative thinking in many respects, and part of it is, as I said before, just the legacy [00:39:00] of our adherence to efficiency of thinking that As long as everything’s getting bigger, faster, and cheaper, everything’s fine.
Actually, the consequence of things getting bigger, faster and cheaper is why we’re in such a very, very dangerous position right now.
Sue: It strikes me that what you said, Margaret, is that you’re the human grit and the oyster.
Margaret: Yeah. That’s probably a very good description.
Sue : And thats what you are advocating. what I’ve taken away from our conversation today is that employees need to bring that mindset, that skill to the way they are working today.
Margaret Heffernan: Yeah. That it is about questioning, it isn’t about just comfortable familiarity, doing what’s been done before at pace. There is a requirement to have, Conflict, descent, questioning: that’s the very thing that often leaders and people are fearful of is the very thing that we are going to be needing.
Slow Down to Decide Better
Margaret : And as, as you were talking, I was reminded of the second technology company I ran, and we hired a guy to run business development for whom I think a tech startup was slightly alien territory. He was Harvard, MBA very conventional guy in a slightly unconventional environment.
And and he was great for us because we had a phenomenally creative team. And he had a, I would say a much less creative mind, but an excellent critical mind. And because he didn’t really understand where are these ideas coming from and why does everybody think they’re so great? He would ask a lot of very gritty questions.
And he made every decision we made better. That having someone that wasn’t that comfortable in a startup culture made the startup culture very much more productive. And people came to understand that, okay, you may think that will’s questions are a bit of a pain in the neck, but actually if you can’t answer them, they’re great questions.
They’re the ones you should have been asking yourself. And I’m really proud of the fact that we could collaborate with someone as easily as we did that it was easy to find that. However, it might seem to impede our enthusiasm to go charging ahead. It brilliantly refined how we did that.
Closing Reflections
Sue : Sounds like that’s a great message on which to end our conversation today, Margaret. That speed is not always of the essence, and actually there is value in slowing down and reflecting.I’ve had a wonderful conversation.With you over the last 45 minutes.And I think just the way you’re able to concisely and eloquently describe the nature of some of the challenges that leaders face and how they can tackle them
Margaret : Thank you for your great questions and for making me think. That’s what we’ve always liked doing together.
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