One of the more counter-intuitive things I heard from a business leader this week was an argument for selling less. Stephen Connor is the Managing Director of Volvo Cars in Australia. Like most local managing directors of global brands, he has people above him who would quite like him to sell more. Interviewing him for my podcast, StoryWork, never descended all the way into therapy, but he was certainly candid about the balancing act he needs to strike.

Volvo has factories around the world to keep busy, global targets to hit and all the usual pressures that come with running a sizeable business. But Connor has put a number on how big he thinks Volvo Australia ought to become. It’s about 12,000 cars a year. Not 20,000. Not 30,000. Not “as many as humanly possible and then another 15% next year because that’s what we told the board”. About 12,000.

That caught my attention because we spend a lot of time in business talking about ambition, but not much talking about its limits. Growth tends to be treated as self-evidently good. More customers, more revenue, more stores, more users, more market share. Particularly here in the start-up world, getting bigger is not merely a commercial objective but close to a moral virtue.

Connor’s ideal growth curve, in contrast, is definitely not hockey-stick shaped. Beyond a certain point, he worries the system would start to strain. Volvo would risk becoming less premium in pursuit of volumes, dealer economics would tighten, service standards would come under pressure and long-standing loyalists would begin to notice. In other words, the superficial sales numbers would keep getting better even while the things that made those sales possible all started to get worse.

That all sounds obvious when you say it out loud. It’s remarkably easy to forget when looking at a spreadsheet, because spreadsheets rarely reveal the full complexity of a business or brand as a system. Volvo Australia doesn’t simply sell vehicles to consumers. It depends on a network of independent dealers who sell those cars, maintain them, deal with customers and carry the relationship for years after the original transaction. Those dealers need to make money. Their people need time and motivation to understand the product. Existing customers need to be looked after while the business hunts for new ones.

Push too much volume through that system and the consequences turn up somewhere else. A dealer asked to move more units may start discounting more aggressively. A premium experience becomes more transactional. A service department gets stretched. The people who actually meet the customer have less time to tell the story and more pressure to clear the stock. You can hit the number while quietly mortgaging the brand. This matters particularly for Volvo because it has an unusual brand problem: it is almost too famous for one thing.

For generations, Volvo has meant safety. Few marketers get handed an association that clear. The company developed the three-point seatbelt in 1959, gave away the patent to improve automotive safety more broadly and has since built a formidable reputation around protecting people. Connor describes safety as part of Volvo’s DNA.

But cars are now expected to be safe. Safety technology is everywhere, even if Volvo continues to argue with justification that it over-engineers beyond the standards required. New entrants arrive with impressive crash ratings, driver assistance and enough sensors to probably know what you had for breakfast.

Safety then remains the foundation, but it no longer explains everything a customer will value about a Volvo. The broader idea Connor keeps coming back to is care: care in the design, the detail, the materials, the technology and the experience. Volvo can’t afford for any part of the brand or customer journey to undermine that feeling. So Volvo has been trying to broaden the brand around those foundations: Scandinavian aesthetics, intelligent technology, considered materials, uncompromising sound quality and what Connor repeatedly calls a deep “Swedishness”.

One anecdote from our conversation stuck with me. Volvo designers will apparently spend time in Swedish forests studying the light, colours, smells and the way the environment feels, then try to bring something of that into the interior of a car.

Connor jokes that the company could probably make more money by putting a black interior in everything and moving on, but that would lose part of the experience they are trying to create. There is something vital in that nugget of insight.

Brand often gets discussed as a communications problem: position the product, find the proposition, sharpen the message, make the advertising perform. But a great deal of brand is simply the accumulated consequence of commercially inconvenient choices. Use this material, not the cheaper alternative. Spend time on a detail almost nobody will consciously notice. Protect this service standard even when doing so is horrifyingly expensive. Stop growing at this point because going further starts degrading the experience.

Decisions like this are rarely labelled “brand strategy”. They are made at the core of the business and usually appear as arguments about margin, operations, distribution or quarterly targets. But these are decisions where brands are made or eroded. And all of that is before we get to the particularly awkward part of Volvo’s model (frankly, the car industry’s model) where beyond the car itself, much of the brand experience is delivered by people Volvo does not employ.

The manufacturer builds the product, develops the brand and creates the marketing, then effectively hands the keys to a third party. That dealer may represent several different manufacturers. The salesperson talking to you about a Volvo today may be selling something quite different tomorrow.

In an increasingly crowded Australian car market, dealers are being courted by an explosion of new brands, many offering generous financial support to secure space and attention. Volvo may be one of several marques inside a dealership and a relatively small contributor to its overall volume. So Volvo has to create belief in the people sitting between itself and the customer. When new dealership staff join the Volvo network, one of the first things they do is a day of training called “dipped in blue”.

Crucially, it isn’t initially about horsepower, battery range or option packs. It’s about Volvo’s history, values and stories. Product training comes later. The first task is to make the people selling the thing understand what the thing means. Connor described it as trying to bring Gothenburg to Australia.

I recognised that ambition immediately. At Four Pillars Gin, we used to joke that if we could somehow get every bartender and retailer in the world to visit the distillery in Healesville, drink with us, make gin with us and meet the people behind the place, selling the brand would become considerably easier. But of course, you can’t.

Most growing companies eventually confront some version of this tyranny of growth and distance. The founders stop meeting every customer. The people who created the product stop being the people who explain it. Retailers, distributors, franchisees, platforms, account managers and partners start carrying parts of the story.

Growth creates distance. And this is where Connor’s apparently conservative growth target starts to make more sense.

The 12,000 number is not simply a sales forecast. It is an attempt to hold several things in balance at once: exclusivity, dealer economics, service quality, customer experience and the capacity of a century-old brand to remain recognisable while its products and category are changing dramatically. That feels like a more interesting definition of ambition than simply ‘grow more’.

Revenue is easy to measure. Market share is easy to measure. Units moved is a wonderfully easy metric to put into a PowerPoint slide with an arrow heading heroically north-east. But the health of the system that produces those numbers is harder to measure. All businesses have assets that make growth possible and that growth can simultaneously destroy: intimacy, scarcity, culture, service, trust, founder access, community.

So, yes, Stephen Connor’s 12,000 may turn out to be too high or too low. That isn’t really what interested me. What interested me was hearing a leader ask not simply, “How big can we get?” But, much more usefully, “How big can we get and still be us?”

The full podcast here on Substack plus in all the usual places:

Apple Podcasts

Spotify

YouTube

Stephen’s own career has involved a fair bit of reinvention too. After senior roles in the UK and Dubai, he arrived in Australia without a job, living with his in-laws and taking whatever work he could find. It was a period where he left behind the status and ego attached to his previous career and gained a much clearer understanding of what he could contribute.

Our conversation ranged from that personal reset to the practical work of building a storied brand in a brave new world. We talk about why Volvo’s designers spend time in Swedish forests; the challenges of handing your brand experience over to independent dealers; and Stephen’s unusually disciplined view that selling more is not always the same as succeeding. For Volvo Australia, he believes there is a point beyond which greater volume could diminish the brand, hurt dealer economics and ultimately damage the customer experience.

It’s a conversation about the stories we tell ourselves about brand, leadership and change. Perhaps most of all it’s about knowing what you’re really trying to preserve while almost everything around you is changing.

storywork.com.au

Most founders spend the early years of a business desperately trying to make it grow up. After all, we’re all chasing those first signs that we’re onto something, those hints that our random (often reckless) start-up idea might actually turn into a sophisticated business that might even make a profit one day. Most of us want to be taken seriously by the grown-ups in our lives, and perhaps even more so by the grown-ups in our industry.

As a result, we aspire to better systems, more experienced people, proper processes and something resembling financial discipline. We dream of the day when everything doesn’t depend on us, or on the small, exhausted, inexperienced gang we call our co-founders and first hires. We fantasise about a time when our decisions can be based on something more than instinct, caffeine and a strategy that lives in someone’s head and has never been written down.

Then one day, if you’re lucky, the business actually does grow up. Many of the things you hoped for come true, and you realise that some of what you wished for risks extinguishing the fire that got you there in the first place.

I found myself thinking about this paradox while talking to Blaise Witnish, CEO of Funlab, on this week’s episode of my podcast, StoryWork with Matt Jones. Blaise started at Strike Bowling in 1998 as a kids’ party host and, more than two decades later, now runs the company behind Strike, Holey Moley, Hijinx Hotel and a growing collection of live immersive entertainment brands across Australia and overseas.

Along the way, Funlab has become a considerably bigger and more sophisticated business. So what really interested me about our conversation was how much of Blaise’s attention seems to be focused on protecting the behaviours, cultural fire and maverick creative instincts that belong to a much smaller one.

Blaise’s stories of the early days of Strike were exactly what you’d expect from a scrappy start-up trying to get noticed without much money. She talked about bowling-pin mascots turning up on train platforms, promo staff walking into bars wearing sumo suits, tequila-fuelled hospitality nights and people doing whatever needed to be done to get a venue open. Nobody had yet developed a 64-page brand governance document explaining the correct way to photograph a bowling pin.

To put all this in superhero terms (apt given that Funlab celebrates long-standing staff by memorialising them in their own comic book) if the Strike Bowling era was Funlab’s origin story, it was Holey Moley that took it on its hero’s journey. The original inspiration came from a concept Blaise and the team spotted in Manchester in the UK.

Blaise sent her sister-in-law to mystery shop the experience and the Funlab team liked what they heard from her report back. They saw an opportunity to take mini golf somewhere more theatrical, social, adult and ridiculous, brought the idea back to Australia and moved quickly. The concept evolved as they rolled it out, going from idea to first venue opening within six months. No one waited for brand guidelines, focus groups or permission. They built something they wanted to have fun in themselves, then evolved it as they went. Less than a decade later, the Funlab team have designed 289 unique Holey Moley holes.

That kind of behaviour and creative energy is relatively easy when a business is young. In fact, you often don’t have much choice. You don’t have enough money, people or time to build a bureaucracy, even if for some odd reason you wanted one. But success changes the equation.

As organisations grow, they accumulate perfectly sensible things. Specialists arrive. Processes emerge. Reporting lines multiply. Risk needs managing. Investors want predictability. Leaders need visibility. What once happened through instinct and proximity needs to become repeatable across dozens of locations and hundreds or even thousands of people.

None of this is bad and most of it is necessary. A high-profile international business (Blaise personally opened Funlab’s first venues in the USA) cannot operate like a nightclub with bowling balls and putters forever. Eventually someone has to know where the fire certificates are filed and what EBITDA means. The problem is that the things you need to add to make a business scalable can slowly squeeze out many of the things that made it worth scaling in the first place.

So how do you professionalise a business without institutionalising its entrepreneurial instincts out of existence? One of Blaise’s answers was that Funlab has become increasingly deliberate about protecting spontaneity. Funlab has an internal innovation program called FFS (For Fun’s Sake) which allows any employee across the company to pitch an idea. Those ideas aren’t simply collected in an innovation inbox where they can enjoy a slow death. The best can actually become businesses in their own right.

Hijinx Hotel, Funlab’s immersive entertainment concept built around a series of absurd interactive rooms and themed like a grand old hotel, emerged through that process. In other words, a company that once innovated because a relatively small group of people could spot something interesting and run at it has had to create a mechanism that allows a much larger group of people to do something similar.

Funlab has had to systematise its ability to be unsystematic. It might sound faintly ridiculous, but it’s a logical response to the challenge of scale. At the beginning, curiosity, speed and experimentation happen naturally because the founders are close to everything. As the company grows, those behaviours need to survive without every decision continuing to run through the people who were there at the start. Culture might start out as instinct, but eventually it needs the support of its own infrastructure.

The same tension appears in the way Blaise talks about her own job. She has travelled about as far through an organisation as it’s possible to travel, from hosting children’s parties to running the company. The danger in that journey is obvious. The more senior you become, the more your experience of the business is mediated through other people: reports, presentations, dashboards, management meetings and carefully summarised versions of reality.

Blaise talked about the importance of remaining close enough to what is actually happening in venues, spending time with managers and frontline staff (“mother funners”, in Funlab language) rather than allowing the CEO’s version of the company to become detached from reality. That matters particularly for a business selling live experiences.

You can measure footfall, average spend, repeat visitation and a hundred other indicators of performance. But the product is ultimately a human being having a good time. The little interactions that determine whether somebody leaves feeling delighted, indifferent or mildly irritated don’t show up neatly on a dashboard. And at the heart of those experiences is whether the people doing the hosting actually enjoy the act of service to others.

Funlab has an unusual way of testing whether prospective head office employees genuinely understand that. As part of the recruitment process, a candidate might be given $10 and asked to go and buy a coffee. What matters isn’t whether they successfully return carrying a flat white. The exercise is designed to see whether they light up at the opportunity to be of service to someone, or whether they feel mildly put out that their interview for a senior position has suddenly dissolved into being sent out for coffee.

It’s a tiny test for a tiny behaviour, and that’s the point. As businesses grow, culture has a habit of becoming increasingly grandiose in its language and increasingly remote from the behaviours that actually create it. Values get workshopped. Purpose statements are refined. Posters appear. The typography improves dramatically. Meanwhile, culture grows (or festers) in far more everyday interactions and moments: how a manager reacts when something goes wrong or whether an employee feels able to suggest a wildly creative but faintly ridiculous idea.

I suspect that’s where the danger of “growing up” really lies. The corporatisation of a start-up rarely happens because someone deliberately decides to make the place slower, duller or more disconnected from customers. It happens through an accumulation of individually rationalised decisions.

Every founder knows the red flag phrases that signal that cultural change is afoot: “we need a process for that”, “we’ll need approval for this”, “have we focus-grouped it?”, “we tried something like this years ago” or “that’s not really how we do things anymore”. “The problem is that each sentence can sound entirely rational and, taken in isolation, each new policy can be perfectly defensible. But taken collectively, they can quickly turn an organisation that used to ask “why not?” into one that becomes highly accomplished at explaining why not.

Of course, the opposite can become its own form of nonsense. Founders can fetishise chaos because it reminds them of the heroic early days, before an HR executive had to explain which bits of the heroic early days were no longer acceptable workplace behaviour. Chaos stops being charming when it becomes expensive and exhausting. And there is nothing inherently entrepreneurial about poor systems, unclear responsibilities or rebuilding the same process for the seventeenth time. So growing up is necessary. The interesting question is what you refuse to grow out of.

For Funlab, judging by my conversation with Blaise, some of those things seem remarkably consistent across its history: an appetite for experimentation, a willingness to look slightly ridiculous, a passion for how people (especially grown-ups) have fun together, proximity to the customer and a belief that small human moments matter.

The mechanisms protecting those qualities have had to change. What once happened accidentally now sometimes needs to happen deliberately, and what was once kept alive by a handful of true believers needs to survive across a much larger organisation. That’s the paradox of successful start-ups: at first, you’re desperately trying to build a company that can survive without depending on the founder’s instincts. Then, if you’re successful, you spend years trying to make sure the wider company never loses them.

I hope you enjoyed this week’s newsletter. If you did I really urge you to listen to the whole podcast as my reflections are no match for Blaise’s energy and passion.

You can listen to the full episode wherever you get your podcasts. Get straight into the action on Apple, Spotify or YouTube. Or check out my website.

In this episode, we talk about the tiny moments that turn experiences into memories, why the CEO needs to sweat the small stuff, how Holey Moley went from an idea spotted in Manchester to a national brand in 18 months, and the wonderfully strange ways Funlab finds people who genuinely love to make others happy. 

Ultimately, it’s a conversation about the power of experiences, building culture at scale, and why, in an increasingly digital world, making people feel something in real life might be more valuable than ever.

storywork.com.au

Before Phil Morle became one of Australia’s leading deep-tech investors, he was a theatre director. And the more I listened to him talk on this week’s episode of my podcast StoryWork, the more I realised he never really changed careers.

In his early career, Phil spent a decade running a theatre company in the UK and then in Western Australia. Creating experimental theatre productions, Phil learned (like most people in the arts) how to do an awful lot with very little. He also learned how to sell something that didn’t yet exist.

Phil would often secure a slot at a major arts festival a year or more before he knew exactly what the production would become. He had to imagine something compelling enough to make other people see it, persuade them to commit to that imagined future, then assemble the people and resources required to turn the story he’d told everyone into reality.

Twenty-odd years later, that remains a pretty good description of his job. It’s just that now he’s working with laboratories and deep tech innovators instead of stages and needy actors. Which means Phil’s audiences are now investors, customers and employees, and his imagined futures now involve everything from quantum computing to recycling plastics to transforming the global food system.

But the fundamental challenge Phil tries to solve every day hasn’t changed. How do you get other people to see the potential in something that doesn’t exist? Especially when fulfilling that potential requires a technological leap that hasn’t even been made yet.

Phil Morle is one of the co-founders of Main Sequence Ventures, the venture capital arm of Australia’s fabled CSIRO, where he invests in deep-tech companies. These are businesses where the distance between an idea and a functioning commercial reality is often measured in decades, not just years. They work on what Phil and his team call the critical frontiers for society, investing in technologies that will propel great leaps forward health, food, energy, compute and even space (I guess that’s the final critical frontier).

Phil and I talked about the challenge of working in areas where the founder can see where the science might lead in the future, but everyone else is still standing in the present trying to work out whether this extraordinary vision has any chance of arriving. During our conversation, I suggested that the founder’s job is to send a postcard back from the future showing investors, partners and customers what that world looks like, telling them why it matters and, critically, inviting them to play a key role in making it real.

Phil has a more poetic version of the same idea. He talks about a passage from Bruce Chatwin’s The Songlines, in which Aboriginal elders sing as they travel through Country. Phil’s interpretation is that they aren’t simply singing about the world around them, but “singing the world into existence”. It’s an idea that has stayed with him from theatre through technology and into venture capital: stories don’t simply describe a reality once it exists; sometimes they help create the conditions in which that reality becomes possible. To call this manifesting the future through storytelling would be to wildly under-estimate the power of narrative.

This feels particularly true for start-ups, and not just deep tech ones. By definition, a founder is asking people to believe in something for which much of the evidence doesn’t exist yet. If all the evidence was already there, someone else would probably have built it. The narrative therefore matters enormously. And the picture it helps conjure into the heads of other matters even more.

In short, a founder needs to send back such a vivid postcard from their aspired future destination that others lean in to hear how they plan to get there. But, as with so much in this life, that’s only half the job. Because wanting to reach a destination is very different from believing the journey is possible.

Start-up land is awash with beautiful postcards from places nobody is ever going to visit. You might argue that Elon Musk’s SpaceX dream is right up there with the best of them. Whatever your view on orbiting data centres and life on Mars, Phil Morle had something else useful to offer when it comes to turning aspirational postcards into belief and conviction.

Back when he was running Pollenizer, one of Australia’s early start-up incubators, the team would gather on Fridays, share new ideas and pitches over a few drinks and discuss which ones they found most exciting. Phil would ask everyone to nominate the best company they had seen. Then he would change the question. Forget which one you liked. Which company would you take 10 per cent of your mortgage and invest in? Which one would you sell your car to back? In Phil’s words, choose “something that hurts you” and decide which company you would put it behind. Almost every time, people changed their answer.

Phil’s question helps separates two things start-up culture has a tendency to conflate: excitement and conviction. Excitement is relatively easy to generate. A charismatic founder, an enormous (and often utterly theoretical) addressable market, an elegant pitch deck, a steeply climbing ARR graph and a sufficiently dramatic vision of the future can get a room leaning forward. Pitch competitions are essentially designed to reward that ability, and corporate innovation workshops can become particularly enthusiastic versions of the same game.

I’ve seen it myself multiple times. I told Phil about sitting through one such workshop in which a number of fairly ordinary ideas were being treated with enormous enthusiasm. Eventually I asked the people in the room a different question: if the workshop ended now and your bosses offered to sell you any of these ideas for a dollar, would you buy one and invest your own money building it? There were no takers and, unsurprisingly, none of the ideas I saw that day ever made it to market.

Phil framed this as one of the problems with “innovation theatre”. We can become excited about an idea without ever reaching the point where we would put ourselves, our resources and our reputations behind it. A compelling narrative can make somebody see your imagined future. Conviction is what makes them risk something to help create it. That risk doesn’t need to involve selling the family car or putting a chunk of the mortgage on a start-up after Friday drinks. For an investor, obviously, it means capital. For an employee, it might mean leaving a comfortable job. For a customer, it could mean committing budget or reputation to an unproven technology. Each is a small act of belief that takes the founder’s story out of the realm of imagination and begins to make it real.

Phil gave me a good example in Samsara Eco, a Main Sequence portfolio company developing technology to recycle plastics and textiles. Its partnership with Lululemon matters not simply because a recognisable global brand makes the start-up look impressive on a PowerPoint slide. It means somebody outside the company has begun putting something of their own behind the future Samsara is describing.

In Phil’s framing, customers like that can effectively become co-authors of the future, adding credibility to the story for investors, employees and everyone else needed to build it. That takes us somewhere beyond the familiar start-up advice that founders need to become better storytellers. Of course they do. The harder transition is from attention to excitement, from excitement to belief, and eventually from belief to commitment. And this is where having the proof of partners who have co-invested in your vision with you becomes priceless.

Founders inevitably spend a lot of time sending postcards from the future. The destination exists clearly in their heads long before most of the proof arrives. But eventually someone else has to do more than admire the postcard. They have to agree to join them in making the trip, accepting all the personal costs and risks that come with it. And that, more than applause, excitement or a room full of people telling you they love the idea, might be the moment when a start-up story starts becoming real.

You can listen to the full episode here on Substack wherever you enjoy your podcasts. Get straight into the action on Apple, Spotify or YouTube.

What does a former theatre director know about building billion-dollar deep-tech companies? Quite a lot, as it turns out. Phil Morle has spent his career moving between art, technology and venture capital. From experimental theatre and the wild early days of Kazaa to co-founding Pollenizer and helping build Main Sequence into one of Australia’s most important deep-tech investors, Phil has led the way.

In this episode, Phil talks about AI as a “steam engine for the mind”, why the best founders tell stories about futures that don’t exist yet, the difference between an exciting idea and one you’d actually bet the house on, and why the story you tell can become either a navigator or a constraint for your ambitions. 
Ultimately, it’s a conversation about how story fuels our ability to see a different future, persuade other people to believe in it, and then do the bloody hard work of making it real.

storywork.com.au

Allegra Spender’s name has been in high rotation in start-up circles recently as the debate has raged about the right way to tax capital gains in the future. She’s been a tireless campaigner for tax reform, although, it should be noted, not necessarily for the specific CGT reforms proposed by Jim Chalmers and Anthony Albanese.

Allegra joined me recently on my podcast, StoryWork with Matt Jones, and inevitably we touched on the tax debate. But it’s not Allegra’s views on tax that I wanted to share in my column today. What interested me more was what founders can learn from her about the power and the paradox of being an outsider. Specifically, an outsider who has now started up her own political party, Community Strong Australia, with fellow independent Zali Stegall.

In winning and then retaining the blue-chip electorate of Wentworth in Sydney, Allegra has been one of the most successful (if surprising) start-up disruptors of recent times. After a career that began at McKinsey, she entered one of Australia’s most established and entrenched industries with no prior experience, assembled a team in which almost nobody had worked in the category before, challenged a dominant incumbent and built something new around the belief that there might be a different way of doing things. It just happened that the industry she chose was politics.

Even more interesting (to me at least) than her winning the seat of Wentworth for the first time was the challenge of her second term. I wanted to understand how Allegra could maintain her outsider posture even though, by almost any definition, she has now become part of the new Canberra establishment.

Reflecting on her first campaign and first term, she told me that, because she and most of her team hadn’t worked in politics before, they largely trusted their instincts and just did what they felt was right. There was freedom and flexibility in not knowing how things were ‘supposed’ to be done.

Now, in her second term, she has more knowledge, deeper relationships across politics, business and the community, and a much better understanding of how Canberra actually operates. All of that makes her more effective. It also creates new expectations, new habits and new risks. Allegra talked about looking to retain her challenger mentality while also making the most of everything she has learned. Listening to her talk, that tension felt very familiar to me.

Every mature industry develops a story about itself. A story that explains what customers want, what good companies do, how money gets made, which risks are sensible and which ideas are naïve and a waste of time. Spend long enough inside a category and that stops sounding like a story you can rewrite and starts sounding like a fixed reality governed by rigid, non-negotiable rules. No wonder so many industries go stale and are ripe for disruption.

The outsider’s advantage is not simply that they know less about a category. It is that they haven’t yet mistaken the story an industry tells itself for an incontestable truth. I saw this while helping to build Four Pillars Gin. When we started the business, we knew plenty about brands, hospitality and gin. What we didn’t know was how a global spirits company was supposed to build a gin brand.

In hindsight, that ignorance, or more generously that outsider status, was one of our greatest advantages. A lot of what we did wasn’t how spirits brands traditionally behaved. We built the distillery as an experience rather than simply a production facility. We put making and craft at the centre of the brand, not marketing. We made far more expressions of gin than anyone thought was sensible and refused to get side-tracked by other spirits. We embraced social media and ecommerce even though everyone told us it would piss off our retail partners. And we behaved more like a hospitality business in some places and a creative business in others.

We didn’t act this way because we had conducted some exhaustive analysis of the global spirits industry and discovered the strategic white space. I mean, sometimes there was strategy behind our decision, but often it was just a combination of good instincts and not knowing any better. So, like Allegra and her team, we just followed our noses and wrote our own unique story about how a gin business and brand could be built.

I remember the moments of insecurity that came with that. If these were all such good ideas, why weren’t the giant spirits companies already doing the same things? But I’ve since come to realise that this was the wrong question. At times, of course, nobody else is doing the thing you’re doing because they know something you don’t. At other times, nobody else is doing it because no one else inside the category can see the opportunity. But you can. And that, in a nutshell, is the outsider’s advantage.

The complication is that successful outsiders don’t remain outsiders for very long. And here we find the outsider’s challenge. Retailers start taking your calls. Distributors explain how things really work. You hire people who have spent their careers in the category. Your data becomes more sophisticated. Processes emerge and ossify. The bets get bigger and the downsides become more real. And, if you’re not careful, you become better at playing the industry’s game at precisely the moment you need to maintain your difference.

That’s what I heard in Allegra’s reflections on her second term. She didn’t argue that knowing less about politics would make her a better politician. Quite the opposite: the relationships and knowledge she has accumulated are allowing her to get more done. Her challenge is to maximise all the advantages of being a newly-minted insider without automatically inheriting the institutional baggage of the category she originally sought to disrupt.

Growth comes with other challenges too. As companies grow, founders can find themselves spending progressively more time with people who understand the industry and progressively less time with people who simply experience the product. It can put distance between the founder and the front line of people and decision-making.

Allegra’s answer, interestingly, involves deliberately seeking perspectives beyond the institution. She talked about standing on street corners in Bondi Junction listening to her constituents, about the importance of talking openly to people who disagree with her, and about how policy becomes better when you engage seriously with your critics. She also made the broader point that politicians need to stop talking so much about one another and start talking more about the people they are supposed to represent.

There is a lesson in all that for founders. Perhaps the best way to preserve your outsider’s perspective is not to keep yourself ignorant of the industry (that would be naïve), but to instead keep exposing yourself to people who live outside it. The ultimate aim is to preserve the beliefs that made you distinctive while continuing to evolve and elevate the ways those beliefs are expressed.

Early on, founders question conventions because they don’t know any better. The better ones eventually learn to question them even when they do know better. And the very best ones keep going back outside (outside the boardroom or party room, outside the category and outside the circle of people who know how things are ‘supposed’ to work) to listen again and again to the people they are actually there to serve. Because the danger isn’t so much that you become an insider. It’s that you start only seeing the world from the inside. That’s the start-up lesson I’ll take from my chat with Allegra Spender.

You can enjoy the whole conversation here on Substack, or wherever you like to enjoy your podcasts, whether that’s Apple Podcasts, Spotify or YouTube.

TRANSCRIPT

Lastly, if you like to get your favourite LLM to distill learnings and notes for you, here’s the full transcript of our conversation:

Matt

So Allegra, I chatted to you before we record this, I was saying, I think it was 21 years ago, I sitting around in a London think tank called Policy Exchange, and I was writing a sort of recommendation paper on tax reform, and then I sort of lived this completely frivolous life where I end up, you know, building brands and creating a gin business. Whereas you are now in the middle of the Canberra storm driving the agenda in the narrative on tax reform to the extent where it feels like the government has picked up the baton and we’ll talk about how much they’ve got it right and how much they have got it wrong. But where were you 21 years ago while I was trying to pretend to be a grownup?

Allegra

I was actually also in the UK. I was working for a big London teaching hospital and I was working in change management about how you help improve the outcomes for patients, both their own experience and also their medical outcomes, without increasing costs. There are actually lots of ways you can do that in really positive ways that also improve experience for staff. But that’s what I was doing because I loved public policy, but I wanted to see it on the ground.

Matt

So this podcast is called StoryWork and the thing I wanted to interrogate was the role that story plays in growing things, whether it’s growing a business or growing a career or growing a country. Tell me a bit about that work you were doing in that hospital. What was the story of your professional career to that point? What was this story you were telling yourself about what I do and where I’m heading?

Allegra

Yeah, it’s funny, but you know, I think it is, this is really important because we can tell ourselves stories that hold us back and we can tell ourselves stories that can move us forward, as well as the stories we tell externally. I grew up in a family where I worked in business, you know from the age of like 11 or 12. So like, business was kind of core to me, but I also grew up, I’ll be honest, in a fair amount of privilege, which I was pretty aware of. And I was like, look I wanna make a positive contribution to the world. And I think that I’d like more people to enjoy some of the privileges. I’ve had a great education, really supportive family, all those things. And so that kind of drew me to public policy. And so I sort of, and so why I ended up in a hospital was I did some work in, I started work at McKinsey and then I worked for UK Treasury. But because I’d spent all this time in business, I wanted to see stuff on the ground. I wanted it to see how things actually move rather than how they theoretically move. And that’s what kind of drew me to say, how do you make change happen on the ground, not just in theory? So that’s kind of how I ended up in that hospital.

Matt

At what point did you start to think that the change you wanted to make in the world would need to involve you getting into politics? So you’ve described this sort of building this, often see it as like a professional muscle and this kind of muscle where you go, okay, I’m someone who looks at lived experience but I’m also someone who brings lenses and you obviously had the famously analytical kind of McKinsey lens of improving the world and improving how things work. But lenses have to be applied to a problem to create a positive impact. At some stage, you start to think, maybe I need to take my skillset into politics. Do you remember that point? Do you know that trigger?

Allegra

To be honest, I wouldn’t have done it had I not been approached. And the reason is, you know, my dad was a politician. So I did think about when I was a kid, you know, you sort of think, oh, your parents did this. Maybe this is what I do. And then I looked at politics, particularly as I was growing up. And I thought, they all behave like idiots. It looks incredibly aggressive. I don’t think I’ve got a thick skin enough to do it. And I don’t t know what party I would join because I don t like any of them. And so I never thought genuinely I would get into politics. I just didn’t think it was a possibility. And, you know, really was being approached by to say, well, would you consider running as an independent? And then the sense that maybe there’s a version of doing politics that actually is consistent with who I am, maybe there is a version out there and that’s what I decided to try. So that’s kind of what, you now, where I’m my starting, my kind of launching point was to say okay. I might not be successful, but let me give it a shot and the thing, and do this in a way that is authentic to, I guess, how I see the world. My dad, who was a politician, and he wrote me this email, and I still have it. It’s about, it’s an email from three o’clock in the morning, and it gives me a list of, darling, I’m just not sure you should do this. And it came from a big place of love, but it was like, here are the 20 reasons why I think what you’re doing is crazy, not just being an independent, but also going into politics. And so, yeah, there were lots of people. You know, who questioned it.

Matt

It seems in some ways that in politics, we talk about independents. In business, we talk about disruptors. Are we in an age of, of disruption, whether you look at whether it’s, you know, Macron in France and the En Marche movement, sometimes some disruptive movements that are outsiders are maybe less positive, others that are more positive and progressive, but, but are we in a sort of a golden age? Are we at the end of that phase or are we just at the beginning of a days of the rise of disruptive, non-aligned independents. What’s your sense of that direction of travel?

Allegra

This is a disruptive time in politics. I think that’s absolutely true. Now, whether that take, what forms that takes, you know, you’ve got Reform in the UK. You’ve got, as you say, En Marche in France. You know, we have One Nation resurgent again. So, as well as the independents here in Australia. So I think we are at a time of disruption. The world is disrupted, like this is a time of enormous change and evolution. And I’ve read this book. ‘What we owe the future’, which is actually a fabulous book. It sort of tries to take like a 10,000 year view on how to be good now for our ancestors. And one of the things it talks about is that there are times in history which are fluid and there are times in history which are less fluid. And I think we are at a fluid time, certainly in Australian politics.

Matt

You know, I briefly worked as a political advisor in the UK. And one of my frustrations, I, you know, I would say I had 100% losing track record because I only worked in opposition, which is, you’re going well. But I really disliked that term opposition. I always felt like what voters wanted was alternatives. They wanted alternative voices and alternative perspectives. I’m interested as you started to get into the world of politics and sort of trying on this new job and as an independent. What was the gap between what you thought politics would be about and what it actually turned out to be about?

Allegra

So I always say that politics has surprised me because of how much joy I have got from it. And I know that seems like an unusual word to use. So you have these moments where you help people and you give joy. And I didn’t think I would enjoy it as much as I do. Actually standing on the street corner in Bondi Junction, as I was last week, listening to people’s feedback on sort of, you know, government policy and other policy. And, you, know, again, I think most of the time I come away going, people are pretty reasonable, we may end up having different views in the world. But there are many, many good people in Australia. So on that side of things, there’s a lot of upside. I thought politics, however, would be more debate and more contest of ideas. And I think parliamentary debate is desperately, I think, disappointing, even from a low expectation. And it feels like most parliamentary speeches are literally just filling the time and doing clips for social media. So I kind of think there’s not a real exchange in parliament. There’s some exchange in question time, but there’s no real exchange of ideas certainly in the chamber itself, and I think that’s disappointing.

Matt

Just resonates, that’s given me a bit of PTSD, because I remember one of my early mentors in the UK, he said, Matt, the problem with politicians is they’re all fucking lawyers. And so they all think in these sort of procedural terms and these game playing terms, and I’m gonna push this motion and do this and we’re gonna get a win. And he said but the problem is, they think as if the voters are a jury and the doors are locked and they have to keep listening while they stride around the chamber and thump the desk. But the reality is the voters have gone. They stopped listening hours ago, days ago, years ago, and this just doesn’t win people over it. And so to your point, as a result, we don’t end up with a contest of genuine ideas and thinking. It’s just this sort of game being played in Westminster, in my experience, or Canberra in yours.

Allegra

Look, I think what I find most disappointing in politics is, I guess, the personal attacks, and also the, you know, the failure to engage with the real issues. And I think most people I speak to get really pissed off with that too. Because I think they say, look, you don’t want to hear who’s to blame. We would like to understand what the constructive solutions are. We would like you to stop talking about each other. We would like you to start talking about us. And I think that’s where the gap is. Talking about what matters to people, why people are worried, rather than the politics around who’s saying what and why this person is disagreeing or not.

Matt

I was thinking before this chat about the journalist and commentator Walter Lippmann, and he was the guy who coined the phrase, the Cold War. And I think he was really interested in this notion of framing and how, you know, he looked at the world and went, the world is not, it is not patronizing to think that the world is just too complex and too detailed for most people to be taking in all of that detail all of the time. So what all of us naturally do is we sort of construct a worldview, we construct a lens, and then we add new bits of information to that. To what extent have you found that something that you’ve had to sort of wrestle with that everyone you are trying to persuade comes to every issue with quite a sort of rusted on worldview and perspective. So you’ve got to not just offer your alternative but sort of meet them where they are.

Allegra

I think that people do have rusted on views, but I think if you talk to them, a lot of people are a bit more open-minded than you think. You can persuade. I don’t know what the percentage is, but people are persuadable if you bother to engage with them and really understand what’s going on for them. So I think, that is important. I do think, however, probably something I have struggled with is really, it’s not dumbing down, but trying to extract the... The core of what you’re trying to do or say into something that is very short. Because people do have many other things in their lives than they’re worrying about. They want you to worry about the detail. They wanna sort of know things at a principles level. And so, while you may rail against the Tony Abbott kind of three word slogans, it is effective and you can’t just rail against it. You actually need to have a response to that. So I think that’s how I think about, that’s a big challenge in politics, and it’s I think a big challenging in communication more broadly. You have to stand for something consistently and people need to be able to instinctively respond to that as well as, you know, wanna get into the detail with you.

Matt

There’s a choice though, isn’t there? I mean, as I’m listening to you, I’m thinking about a lot of the coaching and advising I do with startup founders because they will sit, and we’re gonna talk a little bit about investment and venture capital in a minute, but they will set across the desk from a venture capitalist that I mentor at StartMate and they’ll take their cohorts over to San Francisco and meet Sequoia and all these kind of big names. And the VCs will say, look, no fluff. You know, we just get straight to your numbers and show me your recurring revenue and all these things. But I’ll say them, well, I’m not sure that’s always great advice, because sometimes the way we cut through is we tell a story. We reveal more of ourselves by telling a story about how we see the world. And by doing that, we create this moment of connection, empathy. So talking of choices, you know, I remember when the first kind of teal insurgency happened, there was very much this strong association with. The need to deal with climate change and sort of bring some proper effective action on environment. You have clearly now, and I’m not suggesting you have left that behind, but you’ve clearly made tax reform and the need, to address the way that our tax system works or potentially does not work for people. You’ve really made that a centerpiece of your agenda. When did that become something that you decided this is going to be a real signature for me.

Allegra

It’s actually pretty early on in the first year of my first term, because it was an area where I think it’s really hard. And I think, you know, we’re having a massive debate about it at the moment, and I think it’s because it is really hard, and also because no one was talking about it then. And so I sort of said, okay, well, fine. If nobody’s talking about, it’s in part, but important. And it is actually about setting us up as a country where we need to go. Then it is the place that someone like me as an independent can play a really important role because I can say things and put things on the table and start a conversation that others can’t. And so suddenly I feel like we started a conversation, we’ve got both major parties talking about it at the moment and my goal is really to help land on something constructive.

Matt

Because if you’re trying to raise funding for policy research and design, it’s much easier to get people animated around healthcare or education, because these things matter, but actually this sort of foundational DNA of our society being how we bring money in and then how we spend it again. And do we as a society slightly undervalue that conversation? Does it just exhaust us? Is it too technical?

Allegra

I think it’s technical. I think people feel, people are worried about it because it hits them personally. They don’t feel particularly competent or informed by it because most people don’t actually spend that much time focused on their tax. And so they, you know, if you ask them how much tax you pay and what’s your average tax rate, most people would not know probably, because we all focus on the other things in our lives that are really important. And so, so I think those are. Doesn’t, you know, this goes to broader economic policy, you know, we can talk about again, another one, sort of regulation and red tape, those are things I’ve really spent a lot of time focused on as well. That’s not going to get people out of out of bed going yay. But you know we do actually in this country need to make it easier for people to grow and start businesses we have put lots of well meaning regulation in that makes things more complicated than it should be end. That’s problematic and sometimes that regulation just serves vested interests as well. So I think these are some of the challenges of the sort of unsexy parts of public policy that aren’t going to get people kind of super excited but except often just on the negative but which are in general terms really important.

Matt

Challenging, isn’t it? Sort of, it’s a little bit like eat your greens and take your medicine. Sometimes you’re like, look, this conversation really affects you. I need to engage you with it. But the reality is a good day is a day that you don’t think about tax, like for normal people, for all of us, not just normal, I’m reasonably normal, I suppose. So let’s talk about, you know, we’re recording this in the shadow of the recent federal budget. Maybe let’s start with the positives. What from your personal sort of your wish list, what made it into the budget, what immediately gave you a sense of this is progress, this is movement forward.

Allegra

Look, probably not. There are lots of things in the budget which I like or dislike. So I don’t know. But let’s talk on tax. And I’m going to do, this is what I think has been missing, probably in the debate, is going to start with why. And again, this is probably the other thing I’ve learned on tax and actually public policy and frankly, you know, in the same in business as well. Why is this important? You know, why do I believe the tax system actually needs some reform? And I sort of say three things. Firstly, We tax people most when they’re youngest, less well off and least afford, is able to pay when they have the highest HECS debts, when they most likely to be renting, when they are most likely not to have money because we tax wages more than we tax CGT, also capital gains, we tax, then certainly we tax super. So what we’re doing is we have a front loaded tax system. And you know, which and you know actually compared to most countries also don’t tax consumption pretty a lot Which also would get people more smoothly. So we have a tax system. That’s very front-loaded I think that doesn’t make a lot of sense Second problem with the tax system is you know tax system he’s very heavily focused on wages We have an aging population And you don’t need to be a pessimist But I do believe that AI is going to disrupt our economy somewhat and that may mean some impact on jobs in the short term which will hurt us and so I think we need a tax base that is more resilient to an aging population, particularly where we now have, just to give you a couple of stats, two families on 100 grand, a retired family pays half the tax on average as a working age family, 27% of retired Australians used to pay income tax, now it’s 17. And the wealth of older Australians has gone up by around 50% in the decade to 2016. Compared to households under the age of 35, where it basically didn’t move. So those are three problems, those are the three examples of where I believe the tax system isn’t working and how it’s playing out. And then the third piece is that we know that young people’s ability to build wealth and build financial security has really fallen behind. Now a big part of that is house price increases. And we know that a lot of that house price increase it has gone to older and wealthier Australians. So that’s the challenges we’ve got in the system at the moment. And then the question is, what can you do? You can’t reverse these things. There are many challenges with the system. And there are many reasons why, for instance, capital is taxed less than labor, and we do need to be internationally competitive on things like capital gains tax and attracting investment, et cetera, et cetera. But those are the problems. So therefore I go to, well, where’s the government trying to go? Well, I’ll say where I was trying to go is lower income tax rates, and then pay for that by reducing concessions on CGT negative gearing. And sort of trusts because I thought you could do, you could sort of balance those things out. I think the government eventually is planning to lower income tax rates, but hasn’t done it upfront, which I think is a mistake and has made their life much harder than it should be. But also I think then they’re now trying to reduce some of those concessions. And then I go to the devil’s in the detail because how, you know, the question is firstly, should you do it? I think in principle, yes. Then how you do, you can do it in ways that are really good. And you know, good for the economy and good for fairness and ways that are not. And I think at the moment we’re going through the unpicking of what the government’s proposed to say, okay, where is it good? Where is it not? And that’s kind of where I’m at at the moment is that kind of really in the detail stuff. Okay, this bit’s not. So yeah, so I’m kind of like, I support the principle of trying to reduce taxes on wages and paying for that by reducing tax concessions in other areas, but I need, you need to get that detail right. And I that’s the job of now.

Matt

And it’s interesting listening to you talk about the principles. You’ve just articulated more clearly, in five minutes there, the principles that should underpin the evolution and the reform of the tax system, that in many ways has come across through the budget, where I feel there’s so much noise around the detail, and clearly not all of that detail is right. So how do we then strike that balance between taking the time and having the patience to go into the depth... Versus deal with this world that just requires us to say quickly and succinctly upfront, this is what we’re doing and to show leadership and to showing certainty rather than to show vulnerability and say, these are the things that we are trying to achieve, we don’t quite know how we’re gonna design it yet because very quickly you’re accused of weak leadership there versus saying, well, actually this is how in business, good decisions get done. A CEO sets a direction and says, right, this is we’re going to evolve, we’re to figure out and we’re not going to announce exactly what we’ll do until we’ve. Really mastered the detail.

Allegra

Look, I mean, I think it’s bloody hard because we could do better if we had a more open consultation about saying, look, directionally, this is where we believe we need to go. And here this is, where these are some of the things that we’re thinking about. Let’s go through a process where people can contribute and you flesh stuff out. Because I think otherwise what you end up in and, you know, we’re seeing a bit this now is. You know, people can be on board in principle, but off on practical because they’re saying, well, I just don’t agree with this design. And so on that basis, I won’t support it. These conversations.

Matt

Are complex, multiple things can be true at the same time. We need to take time to figure it out. How has your experience shifted as you’ve sort of gone from being a sort of a first term newbie, and this is all new and you’re an outsider, to then being the incumbent and having to defend your seat and go, well, now I am a little bit part of the, I’m still independent, but I’m now part of the establishment. Have you seen your, and experienced your sort of, your journey changing that?

Allegra

Yeah, it’s interesting in the second election, we sort of deliberately thought it’s like, you know, we still have to have that challenger mentality because, you know I may be in my second term, but this seat is a liberal seat for decades and decades and decade. So you know it’s a reminder that this is still different for the electorate and it’s still about being a challenger. So I think that’s how I think about it, you still have to have a challenger mentality. And I guess I’m... And the other thing I learned is, you know, one of the things about being new was that we and you know most of my team, I think no one had worked in politics before before we started. So you know you just did what thought you thought was right and you had that kind of like, well, this seems like the right thing to do. So this is what we will do it. This is okay. Well, we want to kind of engage people. Well, let’s try this. And so there’s a lot of freedom and flexibility when you’re an innovator. And I think it’s like, and my question in my second term is how to maintain. That flexibility, how not to just end up in a playbook and go, okay, well, that’s what we did last year. So we’ll just keep on doing that. Like we need to disrupt ourselves in terms of what we do because things change and because, you know, people, you know to engage people, novelty is pretty important. And so, you need, that what people, that’s kind of what you need to do. So you need do that as well as build on the successes that you have had, I think, and in the end of the knowledge that you have gained, you’re particularly in parliament, you work more, you know, I’ve got and have much deeper relationships across the parliament so I can and across the business community other areas so I can be much more effective in a bunch of areas. It’s making sure at that local level that you don’t lose that challenge mentality, you don’t lose the things that people wanted in the first place, but also that you keep on evolving.

Matt

How much do you worry about the algorithm? How much do you worry that we are losing our ability to engage outside of our bubbles?

Allegra

I worry a lot about that. I’ve been actually, I’m a big supporter of Fix Our Feeds campaign from Chanel Contos, which is about saying, how do you make it easier for people to switch off the algorithm so they go back to content that they’re following. And so I think that, I think we all need a moment to break from that. And I think, we need to do more in real life. There’s this group called Brave Conversations out of Monash University. There’s sort of two academics. Who are saying that we actually need to work out how to not find the surface agreement, but actually find the deeper disagreements, have a disagreement and do that well and come away with respect and understanding, even if we continue to disagree. So, and they’re sort of really about how do we teach that structure in our education systems and others. So we’re actually hosting them to do some work in the community, both with. Some of our educators, some of school principals and teams. And then we’ve also opened that up to the broader community as well as invited community leaders because in real life, we need to be able to sit down and disagree and listen to each other and come away with empathy and respect. And if we can do that, then we are stronger. But I think we need, so I worry about the algorithms and I think that, and I worry about that. How AI will change us. And I was saying to, again, the kids last night, I think real life is gonna be more and more important than ever. And so we need to invest in doing it well in real life.

Matt

I could not agree with you more, and I’m just interested in your view, you know, the algorithms and then the compounding impact that AI is going to have. It sometimes feels to me almost impossible to talk about this stuff with appropriate gravity without starting to sound like a conspiracy theorist. You know, I think I was explaining to my mother the other night about this idea that you’ve got to recognize that when all these services and platforms are free, it’s because we and our attention are the product. It’s our eyeballs, it’s our dopamine that’s being hacked, that’s been monetized, and you sort of start to realize you’re sounding like a sort of 1970s raving conspiracy theorist, but you’re actually just trying to lay out the extent to which our attention and our feeds are being hacked and being corrupted. Do you, you’re obviously an incredibly smart person, you’ve got the McKinsey training, you’ve the ability to see things as they are. Do you ever sort of sometimes go, am I? Am I over or under communicating how profoundly our world is changing thanks to technology?

Allegra

Yeah. It’s interesting. I think, cause I think this is, this is the question on AI. Like, you know, for me is that’s a massive, it’s, it’s going to make a massive change. Now I don’t want to be alarmist. And by nature, I’m an optimistic person. And so I go, you, know, I think there are really significant upsides. And I also think that this is not something we can hold back. This is not that, you now, you in, you. Know, if we sort of put in legislation, so you saying, Oh, you can’t have AI job losses. We will just see a whole part of our economy go offshore where they will do everything on AI and they will sell products back into this country. Like, you know, this is an area where we actually have to have a Team Australia moment and really be working constructively in this space. But I think, so, you now, so that’s that, but I think it’s going to profoundly change us. And it’s like, how do you have a conversation that is neither panicking nor, you no, falsely optimistic or sort of say rose colored glasses. Because neither of those two things are right. And the truth is we actually don’t know how AI is evolving and it’s an evolution. And most people don’t want that uncertainty, but that’s the way it is. So I don’t have the answer to that. I’m just alive to the challenge.

Matt

I don’t think Allegra Spender is the only person who doesn’t have all the answers when it comes to AI and what it is doing and what is going to do to our politics, our society, our culture. But it’s great to hear her engaging with the questions, engaging with issues, just as it’s good to hear engaging with complexity and at times the controversy of something as difficult as tax reform. But then there are moments in a political life when you don’t have a choice. And I should warn you, we’re about to talk about the tragic events that took place in Bondi in December of last year when 15 people lost their lives in a horrific terrorist attack targeting Sydney’s Jewish community. At that moment, as a local leader, Allegra didn’t have a choice. She didn’t have all the answers, but she did have to step up. Sometimes you don’t have a choice. And I’m thinking about, you know, particularly the tragedy that occurred in Bondi, which is part of your constituency and you talked earlier in the podcast about the need to lead with both head and heart. When we chatted before we recorded, you talked about the need to balance sometimes being hard and being soft, um, and bringing that vulnerability and that empathy. What did you learn about your leadership style and the needs from leadership in those moments following Bondi?

Allegra

Look, it was incredibly hard. And I think I mean, the community is still devastated. And for the Jewish community, you know, it is it will, you don’t life will never be the same again, for many of the Jews who live in in my electorate on and also in Australia, like it’s shattered what they sense of, of the so this is a it’s very deep, in terms of what has changed. I think what I learned is a couple of things. One was for leaders about showing up. And I think that’s about one of the things I did for, you know, for the weeks, certainly after Bondi was, I was at the Memorial every day, just listening to people. And, you know some people were angry, some people sad, some people angry at me. Some people were frustrated, they were scared, there were all these emotions. And part of leadership is just, particularly at the local level, it’s actually being there and in some level absorbing that. And then it’s, you know. What I got from a lot of people is like, I don’t want people to talk about politicians like a politician. I want to, you know, you got to talk like a real person. And I think this is what people want. People do want you to be a real person first, they accept that you have a job and they do want you to lead, but they do want you to a person, you know, when it comes to it, however, like being empathetic and vulnerable is great, but you actually have to keep people safe. And that’s what I mean. You have to be strong and soft. Like we do need protections. We do need the policing to be right. We do need our security services to be right. We need to look very hard at what happened and what can we do and not everything’s in our control to prevent this happening in the future. But also we can’t leave with all that sort of strength, destroy what it is actually to be Australian, which is that sort of you meet people with curiosity rather than suspicion. And I think that’s kind of the heart of what holds us together as one of the most diverse nations that has ever existed on earth. Like, it’s not easy to be that, but you know, that we need to cultivate that connection at a personal level. And we need to see people as people first before we see your religion, your ethnicity, your sexuality, you know anything else. You know, you’re a human, I’m a human and your choices are up to you and so are mine. And you know it’s that sort of moral responsibility. It’s a very long answer, but I think it’s really, these are hard things. But that is what I learned is you need strength, but you also need humanity. And I think we need to remind ourselves right now to stop dehumanizing the other because that is actually how crimes of terrorism and crimes of hate start is with dehumanization.

Matt

I couldn’t agree with you more strongly. I have no follow up on that other than to say, I think you’ve beautifully highlighted not just the need for humanity and empathy and understanding, but I think you’ve highlighted something really important about leadership as well, which is that we need to look to our leaders. And I think this is true for all walks of life and see people who are like a lighthouse amongst swirling, crashing seas. Like we need to look at them and see strength. That’s why we’re asking them to be leaders. One of the challenges about being a member of parliament and representing an electorate is, it doesn’t matter how many of them voted for you, you need to represent all of them, and you need to make that pivot from winning enough votes to get over the line to now representing 100% of your electorate. How do you sort of strike that balance in your mind?

Allegra

I think it is a really important point that your job is always to represent your community regardless of whether they voted to you or not. And I think, I think if you just remember that, like I think and I think starting with that as a genuine commitment is probably the place to start. And then I think the other side is listening. You know, it does start with listening and then it’s trying to sort of, you know, pull together the threads because you know the noisy, the unhappy ones are always the ones so you know that’s always tricky. So, you know, you hear less from them, not completely from the people who are happy with how sort of direction of travel on a bunch of different things. So, but that’s my probably first point is listen and you’re trying to approach people on the basis of, you know you don’t care ultimately whether they voted for you or not. Like that’s your, you now, because they’re, if you’re not listening to your critics then you’re listening, right? Like it’s not easy to listen to your critics, it’s not to listen to the people who disagree with you, but your arguments will be better, your policies will be sharper if you actually engage.

Matt

What do you feel you have become better at than you ever imagined you would be as you’ve gone through this Canberra journey?

Allegra

I never thought I would be this gregarious. I’m actually, yeah, I used to be quite shy. And Matt, you know, you and I have known each other for some time. I was, I’m naturally quite introverted. You wouldn’t necessarily pick that now. And I do much more on social media. I’m quite shameless, which makes me, because I don’t mind humor. I actually don’t mind taking, you know taking the piss of myself or being slightly comic. And I didn’t know that that’s how I would, but I quite enjoy that aspect. So again, I didn’t expect that kind of pace. But my mom always said, don’t take yourself too seriously. And I think she might be right. I think that’s a very good principle to hold to. You know, when you, I went to some, you know, various networking things. I would literally, if, you know if you’re doing that sort of drinks thing first, sometimes I would just go and hang out in the bathroom until like the formal bit started because I was so nervous about getting, going up to groups of people, introducing myself and feeling like I just had nothing to contribute. Like it was really, it’s, you, that was, And that was in my sort of. Um, you know, I’m not that old now, but it’s, you do, you know, that was very shy about, and you just felt intimidated, felt like, well, what do I have to add? And sometimes your job is just to listen. And that’s what, what I’ve learned through this is that, you know all these people, you know, including politicians who you’ve seen on television and suddenly you’re in the same room as them. People are people are people. And it is, you know, the sooner you internalize that, um, the better. And, and I guess that’s the other side in just in making the choice to run. That was the hardest decision of my life. And then I was really scared. And a big question for me was, am I the right person? Do I have the personality?

Matt

We’ve talked about the importance of detail and complexity, but also the importance of storytelling and vision. You just talked about being an optimist and the importance of hope and ambition. What would you, what do you think our democracy needs a bit more of and what would you like to be responsible for injecting a bit?

Allegra

Oh, you know, I do my best. It’s not easy. Look, I think we, you know, there’s a bit of optimism that we do need, you know, you, I still look at any country in the world, where would you like to be born? I think you’d still prefer to be born in Australia than anywhere else, like in for the balance of things that we have. And so we have a very special country. So I think, we should be optimistic about ourselves. I think what we do need is, you know, what I think we need to invest in is connections across, across difference. There’s this concept of bonding capital versus bridging capital. I’m talking about social capital here. I think it’s Putman’s idea that bonding capital holds a community together. Bridging capital bridges between communities. And you might just call communities, just call them bubbles. And we need more bridges between our bubbles than we have now. And that’s why I think actually local organizations like surf clubs and sort of land care and Things which bring people. Truly, and even more so, the ones that bring people of difference together, that’s the super exciting stuff. So I think more support for those kinds of pieces. More actually, I think responsibility in our education systems around disagreeing well, because we don’t facilitate that. That should be the focus. I mean, universities, if they do nothing else, they should be actually cultivating that. And I don’t think they’re doing enough work in that deliberate cultivation.

Matt

I want to finish with something you said at the start, which is you’ve learned something about how gregarious you can be. And maybe, maybe you’d have, maybe younger Allegra would have told a story about herself, that she wasn’t really a storyteller, wasn’t an out there person. And I think you’ve gone on a journey that I’ve observed in many leaders, which is when you find your passion and when you find your purpose, suddenly you realize you don’t have to be abstractly gregarious, you can talk and you can fill a room with energy because suddenly you’ve figured out what energy you want to bring. Into that room. Is that sort of what you feel?

Allegra

I think you’re probably right, like when I care about topics, and I’ve, you know, that does brings me joy and animates me. So I think, you’re right, I mean, I do love what I do, even on tough days.

Matt

Thanks so much, and we’ll have to end there..

Allegra

Thanks so much, Matt.

 Allegra was a McKinsey consultant with every possible option in front of her. But instead of seeking business success she chose public service.

 I sat down and spoke to Allegra in the wake of the federal budget, and just before she and her colleague, Zali Steggall, announced their plans to form a new political party. I wanted to understand her experience with politics, and look at the roles of leadership and advocacy through the lens of story.

I invited Michael onto my podcast, StoryWork, because I always leave our conversations thinking differently. But if I’m honest, I probably didn’t expect one of the biggest lessons from this conversation to be about start-ups. After all, aren’t I the so-called entrepreneur who co-founded and sold a gin company? As it turned out, Michael wasn’t trying to teach me about start-ups. He was just telling me what he’s learned about what it takes to change people’s minds and bring people with you.

Every founder eventually discovers that building a business has surprisingly little to do with just building a great product. It’s also about building the belief that there is a better way, and changing the minds of anyone who might have doubts about your ambitions. Investors have to back a vision that doesn’t yet fully exist. Employees have to leave comfortable jobs to join you in your moonshot. Customers have to abandon habits they’ve spent years forming. Partners have to trust that your way of doing things is better than the old one.

In other words, building a start-up is one long exercise in changing minds. Most founders understandably assume the best way to do that is through inspiration. Paint a bigger vision, tell a more compelling story and project absolute certainty. But often I suspect we’re trying to solve the wrong problem.

When we seek to change someone’s mind we’re really asking them to abandon a previously held belief and position. This is where Michael’s insight into the human psyche is really important. People aren’t afraid of change, he told me. They’re afraid of loss. Michael explained that when people resist change of any kind, they’re rarely resisting the future itself or rejecting the positive upside you’re offering. Instead, they’re protecting something they fear losing. It might be familiarity. It might be influence. Often it’s simply their pride and the fear of looking foolish as their old worldview is disproven and replaced.

Once you start actively looking for this truth, you’ll start seeing it everywhere. Founders think they’re selling upside. The person sitting across the table is calculating downside. The founder sees an exciting new opportunity. The employee sees the secure salary they’re about to leave. The founder offers equity. The candidate sees shares that might one day be worth nothing. The founder sees innovation. The customer sees a trusted solution they’re being asked to stop using. We’re usually discussing exactly the same decision. But often we’re standing on opposite sides of it.

Listening to Michael, I realised I’ve made exactly the same mistake myself. Probably multiple times. When we launched Four Pillars Gin, I loved talking about everything that made us different. The product. The experience. The possibility of helping create a new Australian gin category. What I underestimated was the importance of reassurance.

For a while it didn’t matter. Our earliest customers were gin obsessives. They actively sought out new brands, new flavours and new experiences. But as we grew, we needed to convince people who were less interested in novelty and more wary of unfamiliarity. Asking someone to buy Four Pillars Gin meant asking them to put back the familiar bottle of Hendrick’s they’d trusted for years. So we didn’t stop telling inspiring stories. But we became much more aware of the need to reduce the perceived downside risk of trying something new.

Michael’s second big insight explained how leaders effectively earn the right to reassure. He argued that the most persuasive leaders don’t lead with certainty. They actually lead with vulnerability. At first, that feels wrong. Start-up culture celebrates certainty. Founders are expected to have all the answers, project unwavering confidence and convince everyone that success is inevitable.

But if the people around you are worried about what they might lose, pretending there is no risk doesn’t build trust. Acknowledging the risk does. It tells people you’ve seen the sacrifice they’re being asked to make. It tells them their hesitation is rational. It tells them they’re understood. And showing uncertainty and vulnerability has a measurable effect on people’s attention: it draws them in and gets them listening more deeply. It increases their receptiveness to what comes next.

The risk of not getting this right is material. We ask customers to abandon years of accumulated habits in favour of our new products. We ask talented people to leave secure jobs for uncertain futures. We pitch investors on exponential upside while forgetting they’re also calculating downside risk. No amount of inspiration makes those fears disappear. Whereas actually having the confidence to say “I don’t know”, to acknowledge their doubts and to share their fears (while never backing away from your bold ambition) might be the things that earn you the right to be heard more.

That’s what I’ll remember most from my conversation with Michael McQueen. That leaders (including founders) consistently overestimate the power of inspiration and confidence and underestimate the importance of vulnerability and reassurance. So perhaps the founders who bring people with them most effectively aren’t always the ones who project absolute certainty. Instead, they’re the ones who are confident enough to acknowledge uncertainty, honest enough to recognise what people stand to lose and generous enough to reassure people before asking them to believe.

Talking of vulnerability, I fear I haven’t done the depth of Michael’s research and thinking justice in this quick snapshot. So I hope you listen to the whole conversation and see what you take from Michael’s extraordinary mind.

I wanted to talk to Michael McQueen, not because he’s an expert at some many things I’m fascinated by (from technology to change), but also because as a prolific author and speaker, Michael knows people.

He is an expert in the field of behavioural patterns and trends and this conversation will give you a clear sense of what you can do to improve both your resilience in the face of change and your leadership skills and ability to drive change. Listen in and learn from one of the smartest and most generous people I know.

TRANSCRIPT

Well, hi, friends. My name is Matt Jones and welcome to another episode of StoryWork. This might be your first time, in which case, welcome, or you might have heard our incredible conversations with Dom Pym and Zara Seidler. Either way, it’s great to have you here. And today we’re going to talk about change. Change is a constant. I know it’s a cliche, but even in a world that is always changing, I still feel like we are going through a particularly changey moment. And how we navigate the next period of business and life is going to be dependent on how well we deal with change, how we handle the changes that will happen to us and how we drive whatever changes we seek to make. Now, whenever I’m trying to figure out what’s going on in the world, I tend to think about Michael McQueen. This is an era of almost endless self-help advice, but I still turn to Michael’s books and listen to him speak before just about anyone else. So today I wanted him to come on the podcast and focus on two of the ideas he’s really thinking about a lot at the moment. The first is about the power of embracing novelty. Michael thinks that curiosity can make us more prepared for change, can make more resilient and more flexible in the face of enormous uncertainty. The second idea is about the power leading with vulnerability. How being vulnerable, not certain, can help you take people with you as you seek to change their minds maybe. Change their behaviours. So from microdosing novelty to rethinking the art of persuasion, here is my chat with the very brilliant Michael McQueen.

MATT

Michael McQueen, I’m very conscious as I sit across the desk, one bald man looking at another, mostly bald man that we have known each other a very long time, more than 10 years. Written 10 books, you’ve spent the last 20 years giving thousands of keynotes and giving great thought leadership. And for me, the common theme so often is this sense of change. What I want to talk about today is this central notion of change, but I want look at it through two lenses. First, how do we deal with it? Because if there’s one thing we’re going to have to deal with a lot in the next few years, it’s going to be even more change than the last few years made us swallow. But then the second thing is how do we create change?

And you said something really interesting to me when we were chatting before this podcast, that actually being open, being open-minded is not something that comes naturally to you, even though you know how important it is. And so you’ve got different ways of understanding openness. So you’ve gotten natural openness. So if you look at the big five personality styles, you’ve got openness as one of the core traits. And on that scale, I’m actually very low. I’m not a particularly open person. I love routine. I love predictability. I love the status quo. And it’s funny in speaker land, and you’ll have seen this over the years too, how often you see a speaker on stage who is speaking with great authority about something that they actually struggle with themselves. And sometimes you can see that because is that a level of hypocrisy or a lack of congruity? I think the reality is we teach what we most need to learn. And so for me, trying to be open minded and curious and adaptable because it’s not natural for me means that I can teach from it, I guess, for the level of authority, because I’ve had to work it out. I’ve got to constantly push myself to do it. And so that I think is better than someone who’s just one of these wonderfully free spirited, take anything as it comes in life type people. And I wish I was more like that. A lot of us aren’t. And I think in corporate leadership, a lot of corporate leaders aren’t the things that made them successful as corporate leaders. They’re linear, they’re methodical, they the A type driven personalities, they like to control all the variables means that their blind spot is that like me, they not necessarily naturally curious. So we need to be open minded in the face of change. We’re also in a world where we need to project confidence. We need to project expertise. Why is it so important to master this ability to change your mind?

MICHAEL

Yeah, I think the reality is, if you aren’t willing to change your thinking, you’re essentially solving yesterday’s problems with yesterday’s thinking, but in a world where yesterday doesn’t exist anymore. And so you’re using a playbook. And the phrase I often use or the term with clients is that you can’t find new treasure if you’re use an outdated map. And if you think about our map being our assumption set, our thinking that the playbook’s worked for years. If you’re just doubling down on what worked yesterday or the year before and trying to execute it more effectively in the future, the landscape shifted. And so the challenge for all of us is how do we keep our thinking fresh and agile and probably as humble as well as curious, like humble to realize that what worked in the past might not work in the feature. That’s confronting. That requires us to lay down some of our ego because some of the very things that have worked well for us, we then attach our identity to. We are successful because of, and then you list out the things that you’ve done. And that worked then, the context has shifted. And so I think for all of us, that constant willingness to be curious and open-minded and humble, again, it’s not a natural posture, especially in this sort of Western corporate, I’m going to project absolute certainty mindset. Interestingly, the research around this shows that actually leaders who lead with some level of doubt, Vulnerability, honesty, transparency, tend to trigger the same things in their teams. It means people step forward, they bring their best ideas to the table. That’s when the innovation starts.

MATT

I wonder sometimes if people think they’re not going to get to that position of leadership, they listen to what you’re saying and go, yeah, I kind of get that if I’m the if I am the authority of leader, like if I find the new incoming CEO of Apple, yeah. Yeah, I’ve probably got permission to stand on a stage and say, I don’t know everything. And everyone goes, well, you probably do because you’re the new CEO. But do people wonder if they’re not going to get that opportunity if they don’t project an absolute sense of certainty and expertise.

MICHAEL

It is tricky because there is a little bit of that fake it till you make it that you often see. And we’ve all been there early in our careers. When you walk into rooms, you’re like, I’m not sure if I’m meant to be here. I don’t know if I, if I am qualified enough to be in the room. And then sometimes that leads into imposter syndrome. The reality is there’s probably a little place for almost leading with the physicality and letting the belief follow. Sometimes you need to walk in with your chest out. I’ve got something to add here. I’m going to own my space. I’m keen to learn, I’m keen to listen, but I also want to, I want to contribute. I’m not going to just stand back and be a weak passive voice in the room, but at the same time, if that bravado then gets to the point where now it’s almost like you can’t listen anymore because now you’ve built this, this solid facade, right? You’ve always got to have the best answers often. And you see this in people where they, they project that sense of flawlessness and it’s actually a very brittle facade. And there’s, there’s a sense of constantly need to defend against being found out or out. It’s not a strong, well-grounded place. I mean, the best leaders and the best humans are the ones who are sure about what they know, their convictions are strong. And in fact, once you’ve got strong convictions, it gives you permission to be curious. It’s when people aren’t sure of who they are, they tend to gravitate toward this projected sense that they’re all over the details, they’re in control, they’re flawless, and then all it takes is one thing.

MATT

But it actually comes across as almost an insecure and brittle sense of expertise. So talk to me about being humble. Yeah, talk about having to change your own mind.

MICHAEL

I mean, it’s something we all have to do. And I, I look back at, there’s a few things I’ve changed my mind over in the last little while. In fact, I was thinking about this morning as I peeled my mouth tape off as I woke up, you know, as I’ve been taping my mouth for the last few months. Have you tried this? I have not. Okay. So mouth tape, if you- Welcome to Mouth Taping, a new podcast about- I know. So when I first heard about it, in fact, doing a segment on the future of sleep on sunrise a few months ago. That’s how I was reading about all the different things, the fads that are sort of taking over the sleep world, the sleep industry, right? That’s the whole industry of sleep. And it’s all these beds that have got, you know, a water that flows through them and changes the temperature as your body changes throughout the night. You know, all very fancy stuff. But talked about mouth tape. And I read and I thought this feels like a massive fad. All the people I read about who were using it were the influencer types who also do ice baths and you know, like keto diets. Well, more so I look at them and think, I’m not that person. I’m not the extreme like ice bath, keto diet human. So just cause they’re doing it doesn’t mean I’m probably gonna be open to it. Until my mother-in-law said, I’ve tried this mouth tape and I’m sleeping better than I’ve ever slept. I’m like, she is not an ice bath, keto diet human. She’s very sensible, very measured. I’m, like, well, if she thinks it works, we’ll give it a try. And honestly, so good. So I’ve started to, like snore, like a lot of dudes at a certain age and it stopped instantly. And I’ve never slept badly. I’ve never been one who’s woken up with that, like that dusty sense of. I’m tired but I slept so much better with it. But it did take that moment of I’m now someone who and then fill in the blanks uses mouth tape and it’s all these little things that you look back and to take on something new you’ve got to give up something old and that’s I’m an example of just something very simple and even the last few months I’ve changed my thinking about I used to diss it I was like who tape your mouth so I wear your muzzle to sleep and then suddenly I’m the person at party saying hey you got to try this it’s really cool. I know that like another thing I’ve changed my mind about. So I’ve always been because I’m from the country. I didn’t grow up in Sydney. And so I prided myself on being someone who doesn’t close or lock their doors at night. I’m like, oh, I’m not one of these neurotic, terrified people who lives with anxiety. I’m just, you know, I just leave the doors unlocked, especially in summer. And I’m chatting with a mate of mine who actually is a cop, but he grew up about five streets away from where we live now, has moved out of the area since, but knows the area well. And I was telling him, cause he’s a real no nonsense, like raps at a cop, he’s just like very pragmatic. And I’m telling him about this and his face just dropped. He went, sorry, dude, what? You don’t lock your doors at night. I’m like, yeah, I don’t knock on my doors. You know, our suburb’s really safe. He’s like, so just so you know. And he started to go through some of the crimes in the last two or three weeks in our sub-urb. I’m, like, are you serious? And it was just something about that conversation. I’ve been a door locker. For the first time in my life. And it’s not even a terrified thing, it’s sort of an anxious thing, it’s just a prudent, sensible thing. And I think what changed my mind, because my identity was rooted in, I’m not someone who does that, to now I am someone who that. What changed my mine? It was the person who communicated the ideas to me. I trusted them. They had credibility. I saw them as being like me. If they are a neurotic person, I’ve had so many people over the years say, Oh, you’ve got to lock your doors, but they’re the neurotic people. I don’t listen because they’re not like me. And that tribalism thing that kicks in.

MATT

So you changed and not just your behaviour. Yeah. But your sense of identity, you went from being I am Michael, a man who does not lock his doors and so do I Michael, I lock up at night. Yeah, that’s a profound shift. Yeah? Why do so many of us get stuck? Why does so many us get stuck and find ourselves unable to make shifts that often would be better for us better for our families better for the planet better for something that matters to us.

MICHAEL

Why do people get stuck? Well, you often hear that the reason for that is because we’re all just afraid of change, whether it’s changing a habit or a process or changing our mind or whatever it is. And we hear that so often we just assume it’s true and it’s not. So we’re not afraid to change as humans. What we’re afraid of that typically causes us to dig our heels into pushback to not adjust as the reality around us changes is a fear of loss. So the moment there’s loss involved in change, That’s when that trigger of reactance or resistance is kicked off in all of us. And for some, it’s stronger than others. And so there are three losses that typically, I mean, I’ve certainly found in the client work that I’ve done around this stuff, but also just the research that I read over the years, three losses. So the loss of familiarity is massive. The loss of power and the loss of dignity. So if you look at those, the loss of dignity is about ego, this idea of again, if I am this person and I need to admit that maybe I was wrong. How do I change my mind without losing face? And so you got to give people the ability to feel right in the process of changing their minds because our brains would actually rather feel right than be right. And so if you’re trying to get people to be open to change, how do you give them a path to save face while they change their mind? The second one, the loss of power is massive. The moment there’s a sense that if I change, I might become less relevant or less necessary, less essential. I’m losing some of the power I’ve currently got. It’s amazing if deep down we know it’s a good idea we’ll dig our heels in. But it’s the first one that loss of familiarity that I think is so often involved, this idea that I know the status quo, if you want to move outside of that, that’s unfamiliar territory. And I can ask her a great example. This recently, I was chatting with a colleague, she’s an exercise physiologist, so she gets called to go in and basically adjust people’s workspaces when their necks are messed up and their wrists are sore. And like, cause they had their monitors too high or their keypads and the wrong thing, or desk, desk hiders all out of whack. So she’ll go on typically by request from the person. Who is in pain. They’re often on a treatment plan for all sorts of injuries. So she’ll go in and it takes her no time at all. She’ll be like, if we just move your monitor here, move your keyboard there, desk down a bit, chair a bit higher. And at the end of the consult, the people will say, oh my goodness, I just feel so different. I wish I’d done this two years ago. And so she’ll often go into an organization and do a series of these all in a row. And then she notices within an hour or two, she’ll walk back through that floor to head back out of the building. And 90% of the people have put their desks back to where they were, the monitors down again. Absolutely, because it’s unfamiliar. And like in this humans, we’ll often, like we’ll even opt for unhappiness over unfamiliarity. Like we’ll stick with things that we hate, but it feels familiar. So we’ll stay with them just because our brains love familiarity.

MATT

I think this is such a critical point and it’s part of a bigger conversation about the gap between things that sound right and things that actually work. We’d all say that we want to be happy, but it turns out what we really crave is the comfort of familiarity. Rory Sutherland is a wonderful thinker in this space of behavioural science and behavioural economics. He wrote a book called Alchemy and one of the points that always stuck with me from his book. Was how when we are asked about decisions, we’ll say, well, I made the decision that I thought was optimal for me. But the truth is often that people make the decision that minimizes the risk to them. So for me, the point about this is whatever we’re doing as leaders, as marketers, as brand builders, as builders of campaigns, movements, whatever it is, we maybe need to focus a little bit less on the things that we think are gonna be inspiring to people and quite a lot more on the things that will be reassuring to them.

MATT

This is such a key thing I think for not just people trying to drive change away from a negative side, we think all of us as consumers, we think we are optimizers, but that’s actually we are risk minimizers. I thought about this a lot with Four Pillars. I’m like, look, as much as I want to believe that someone walks into a Dan Murphy’s and puts back the bottle of Hendricks and picks up the bottle of Four Pillars because they’re excited to try something different. The reality is they’re more likely to put back the bottle of Four Pillars because of the risk that at first sip, they won’t like it. So actually I’ve got to focus much more on reassurance and much less an inspiration. I think it’s all about positivity, but actually a lot of it is about safety.

MICHAEL

Yep. Yep. And so I think for all of us, we’re going to be aware of one of the things that trigger that, that that fear of the new, how often interruptions or disruptions are blessing in disguise, and rather than wait till they hit, how do you try and disrupt yourself a little bit?

MATT

Look, I just got back from a week in New York, as you know, and I’ve used to live in New York and have tried to get there every couple of years. I also for the last three years have chaired the City of Sydney’s Business Advisory Committee. And so you’re thinking, you’re sitting there thinking strategically about urban planning and the economy and how you create a more vibrant hospitality scene and all these things. And then you go to New York and this is a city that just sort of never changes. And yet, the most profound change in New hospitality scene and dining scene is the outdoor dining that was caused by the interruption of COVID. And you’re like all of these geniuses sitting around trying to plan, how do we make our city better? And what it actually took was a pandemic forcing restaurants to create these little cabins for people to dine outside and then one change of the law, then they’re permanent. The whole of downtown Manhattan has this street energy it didn’t used to have because of a pandemic. And so again, to your point, not just as individuals, but our collective institutional curiosity still gravitates towards the familiar until something forces a disruption and a change. I want to come to driving change, but I’ve got one more question about this stuckness. You’ve talked in your work about this idea of identity motivated reasoning, reasoning that helps us reinforce our sense of who we are in the world. What I want ask you is, is this getting worse? Are we in a landscape now driven, I don’t know, by, by the algorithm, by anxiety, by this absolute sense of, of the poly crisis and change is out of control. Is all of this making this, this reinforcedness of stuckness worse, not better at a time when we actually need to get better?

MICHAEL

Yeah, it’d be hard to make a case that it’s not. However, I take comfort in some of the work being done by a couple of groups. One is a research group based in the UK and they’ve got offices around the world now called More In Common and they have looked at tribalism and especially what they call hidden tribes. See, it’s not just polarized like left and right, Republican, Democrat, Labor, Liberal. There’s just all these tribes in between. And their work has looked at how many people are actually in the middle, not polarized and actually really tired. Really sick of it. And in fact, the number of people, J Van Babel, who’s a researcher at over NYU has looked at this as well, he talks about the fact that the vast bulk of the content you see on social media is from a vanishingly small percentage of the population. So you can get the sense that we’re all so polarized, the majority of people are just in the middle, not radicalized, not crazy, just getting on with life. And so even though I think there is a sense that We are more. You know, in our corners, a bit more tribally triggered, there is some encouragement. I think that that’s sometimes a projection online that doesn’t reflect reality. So if we just, maybe the optimists in this can cling to that, maybe we’re not also polarized. However, I do think if you’d sort of set that aside, this limbic response of our brain, this response of, you know what has kept us safe, alive as a species from learning of the fight and flight, reflex, you know this part of our brand that responds to threats. And we do fight and flight when it’s a physical threat, when it is a psychological threat, this notion that people don’t wanna hear what they don’t want to hear. And at the moment I’m exposed to ideas or information from the other side or from a source that challenges my assumptions that forces me to have to rethink. Our limbic system, our limbic response isn’t fight and fight, it’s deny or defend. And how quickly that’s being triggered. And I think there’s a couple of things that are making us more trigger happy, more reactive to things. Partly we’re overwhelmed. There’s that sense of just people when you want this when you’re tired, when you’ve fatigued, your reactions are less measured, your executive function is impaired, the part of your brain that actually tells you limbic system, just calm down, like don’t fly off the handle. So there is that, the sense that we have fatigue, that we’re overwhelmed. The other interesting thing, there was some research I came across during the first lockdown COVID with some research done at the University of Chicago, where they actually looked at the influence of isolation on people’s amygdala. So your amygdala is the part of your brain that is the primary sort of element of your limbic system. It’s where a lot of those fight flight reflexes come from. What they found is the shape of the amygdale changes, depending on a whole bunch of things. But one of the things they tracked was the impact of isolation. So when you are not solidly connected in community with other humans, your amygdala essentially becomes heightened, more sensitive. And so at one time you’ve got like, and we hear so much about probably one of the things that worries me most in society right now is the younger generation who are lonely, isolated. And you can talk about all the mental health risks around that you can talk about the social cohesion, the failure to thrive of 23-year-olds who are in there, you know, at home in the basement gaming rather than hanging out with their friends. There’s a lot of that going on. But the impact on brain function is interesting and really concerning, because it means that amygdala response that limbic reaction When you’re not in community and connected with real humans, I’m not online, I’m talking to real humans in community, your reactions get warped.

MATT

This goes to a really physical understanding of what it means to be open, right? And where, you know, we’re both parents of kids and wrestling with social media bans and all those things, but actually it’s more than that, isn’t it? It’s the Netflix culture, it’s the Uber Eats culture, it’s a culture that means you can stream content online, you can game online, you can pretty much explore the whole world. From your basement, from your living room, which is the antithesis of being open and being out in the world and not being isolated physically, socially, intellectually. So I think that’s a wonderful pivot point to go on a personal level, embrace openness. And I want to talk in a bit about some of the things that you’ve done as a human to be more open. But let’s then shift to the to the leadership perspective. I remember reading Daniel Pink’s book years ago, Drive, where he talks about the positive things that might affect people and his central thesis was once people have enough money, it’s no longer money. It’s about giving them purpose. It is about giving them a sense of autonomy. It about helping them with a sense of mastery. But what I love about what you’ve talked about with the sense of loss and the dislike of loss is they’re almost the antonyms of those things. You’re like, yeah, but actually, they’re not going to do the thing you want them to do. If they’re going to feel it is unfamiliar, if it’s gonna feel they’re gonna lose power, lose dignity. Yeah. So talk to us now, as the leaders we are, because all of us, as we said at the top, we’re all trying to lead some form of change, whether someone’s listening to this, and they want to shift their career and they won’t be able to take them seriously as a professional in a different field. Whether they’re trying to raise investment for a new business, whether they’re trying to get a promotion, whether there are CEO or founder trying to lead a company, an educator. Everyone’s trying to get someone else to change what they think, change what they feel, change, what they do.

You’ve talked about this idea that nothing changes until minds change. What are leaders getting wrong about driving change and changing minds?

MICHAEL

Well, I think probably the first thing, and it’s such a natural thing for many of us to do, especially in a Western context, because we are a product of the enlightenment, this idea that, you know, Francis Bacon, knowledge is power, this idea that if we can just educate people better, I mean, there’s a core assumption in Francis Bacon’s work that if someone’s not being reasonable or seeing logic, then there’s knowledge gap. And so if you can just plug that knowledge gap... They’ll see the light, they’ll change their mind, they’ll shift their view. And that’d be nice if it was true, but it’s not. I mean, it’s never been true, but it is less true now than it was even 40 years ago. We are so sceptical. We are fiercely individualistic. The moment we feel like someone’s impinging on our agency, we push back so quickly, this reflex in all of us. So the things that might have worked for our grandparents’ generation as leaders, where you could just tell people to do something because that’s what was expected.

MATT

That almost deference to authority, deference to knowledge, perceived expertise is replaced by what?

MICHAEL

So typically, it’s got to be start with trust. So trust is vitally important in all this. So if you go right back in 2000 years ago, Aristotle’s work on rhetoric, you know, talked about the three fundamentals of rhetoric. So ethos, pathos, logos. So logos is appealing to those logical faculties. Pathos is about the emotions, but it’s ethos that I think. We undercook the most right now, but it’s the one that gives us the best chance of having someone be open to what it is that we’re going to suggest. So ethos is a function of being credible and being trustworthy. And so as a leader, the core principle is people aren’t gonna listen to you until they like you, until there’s a sense of trust. And so what are the things that cause trust, that trust, reaction, or response in someone else? Because that lays the foundation for them to be open-minded, to be willing to consider what you’re suggesting. So if you look at Paul Zak’s work, so Paul Zak, if you haven’t heard of him, he’s a great researcher at Claremont Graduate University over in California. He’s essentially the first researcher, decades ago, and I have started to study oxytocin. So that social bonding hormone, like how does it function? How does it operate? Now what’s his half-life in our brains? I mean, his work is properly pioneering. So what he’s looked at is how do you trigger oxytocin in someone else? So if you’re gonna have a connection that means that someone’s gonna be open, he’s got some great insights. But one of the most simple insights from Paul Zak is the importance of getting in sync with another person. So synchronicity can be all sorts of things. It can be matching the mood, matching the vibe. I’m showing points of commonality, but even the physical element of being in sync. And so I’m going to be doing a podcast interview with him a few years ago and said, you know, so if you’re a leader and you’ve got someone who’s resistant, this digging their heels in, you know that just giving them more information, more evidence isn’t going to open their minds. It’ll probably call them to cause them to double down. How do you get in sync with that person? So oxytocin flows, trust builds. And he said, well, so we’ve, we’ve done some research. We found that clapping together and singing together is really useful. It’s just like choirs and faith communities have often a strong cohesion because sing and clapping actually gets our brains in sync, but that’s great. Not so useful if you’re a leader with someone sitting opposite, you can be to clap together briefly before we have a conversation. Doesn’t work. So what does? So he said, interestingly, one of the most effective things, go for a walk. So because when you’re walking side by side with someone, you would naturally get in step, you’ll get in sync. You’ll match their cadence. And when that happens, what the brain scans show is that oxytocin is released. They’re far more open, more likely to consider what you’re suggesting. So you can have someone telling a story, but if it’s not their story, even if they’re presenting it in a way that seems so compellingly true, if it not true, unconsciously the other person figures it out. Unconsciously our brains know that it’s no authentic. There’s something about the lack of alignment and congruity. And so they will actually, they’ll listen to it, but they’re noticing fully engaged. Their brains don’t light up in the same way they would be if it was a real story.

MATT

This is something I’m really fascinated about in the world of influencers. One of the things right now that the brands are trying to figure out is who can speak on our behalf. Brands in the 20th century, we spoke for ourselves. We went to the Madison Avenue advertising agency, we made the 30 second spot, we ran it on one of the big broadcast channels that the entire population was watching and away we go. And that world has gone and it’s replaced with this fragmented World Web. Consumers have more power, channels are infinite, and often it feels like content creators and influencers have a louder voice than brands. So you look at something like the last US election, everyone lost their minds when Taylor Swift with her hundreds of millions of followers came out and said, you know what, I think Kamala Harris, people couldn’t believe that Taylor had taken the position, but she did. Then a much less significantly followed person, Joe Rogan, came out in favor of Trump. Now, Taylor Swift’s following from memory is about 10 to one, besides Rogan’s. Yep. But I think it’s pretty clear that Rogan endorsement had more impact on Trump’s base and the waivers for Trump than Taylor Swift endorsement had for Kamala Harris. So I look at your analysis of ethos and then I add a, add a word, which is sort of relevant ethos. Yeah. Does that make sense to you? Yes, we can have this sense of, of shared humanity and ethos and trust. But there’s always this secondary question of, is that feeling relevant to the decision I have to make here? And I’m not sure people felt Taylor Swift’s endorsement was relevant, whereas others thought Joe Rogan’s was.

MICHAEL

I think the interesting thing about ethos and persuasion generally is when someone is an unconventional ambassador, when they hold a position that isn’t what you’d expect them to hold, that’s what gets cut through. I think in the reality is most people assumed Halle Swift would have been a Democrat leaning human. So I think that doesn’t get massive interest because it’s like, well, of course you’d say that because we sort of assume that will probably be the case. When someone says something you’re not expecting and they’ve got a credit profile and credential of being upfront and real, it’s far more compelling.

MATT

What’s a word that leaders should use more when they’re trying to inspire minds to change?

MICHAEL

Oh, what a great question. I’ve never ever been asked this question. It’s a really good one. I want to give it proper thought. Yeah, so I’ve got an answer.

MATT

One word, what is the one word that leaders should bear in mind when they’re trying to change people’s minds?

MICHAEL

Well, I think she probably one word that I learned from Dr. Kirsten Ferguson, I don’t know if you’ve read her book Blindspotting yet? She’d be a great person for the podcast, actually. She talks about the power of the word yet. Yet has such potency in it. So if your instance is a lady, you’re saying, I don’t know, you know, we talked about curiosity and humility and openness. That’s great. But don’t just say, I don’t know, yet, at the end is absolutely critical. Because what yet does is it means I don’t know, but I’m open and I’m keen to go on the journey together. It is like it is at core that sort of growth mindset type thing. And I wonder how often we lead with openness and humility. But if it’s just that complete laissez-faire, like, I don’t now, what do you all think that does lack the hard, strong edge that leaders need yet at the end of that statement is probably the key one.

MATT

Let’s talk quickly a bit more about this notion of people preferring sometimes to feel right than be right. Do we know that that’s what we’re doing? When we are prioritizing the things that feel right rather than necessarily things that are right, are we conscious that’s what we are doing? Or are we also using the big rational part of our brains to rationalize that the thing that we feel is right is also right?

MICHAEL

Yeah, I think it all comes down to self-awareness. There will be many of us who have that ability to know that I’m holding a position right now that deep down I couldn’t really defend, that I know probably isn’t right, that is probably quite outdated, but I just I either couldn’t be bothered changing it or it’s too hard to change or to change in front of this particular person, might be someone who has for years held that position. And finally, again, you know what? I’m suddenly realizing they’re probably right. That’s a moment of ego hit right there. So I think that even the most self-aware amongst us know that we’re doing that, but find it hard to overcome that because it does require us to swallow our pride, to humble ourselves. But I do think the reality is a lot of us, a lot us don’t. And around different issues, we’ll have blind spots. We’ll have things where we essentially have. Contradictions within our beliefs that are never really brought into the light until someone like our kids, kids are a great source of doing this, they’ll challenge you and ask you about a view that you’ve got that doesn’t line up with a value that you say matters to you. And I think we’ve all got those things, whether it’s around social issues or political issues, and they’re often just unexamined assumptions or belief systems we haven’t thought about for years, but they’ve become so a part of us. A muscle memory around them. So we instantly react to it. An article we read or a podcast listen to or a conversation over at a social function out of reflex without actually stopping thinking do I actually really agree with that? I’m not sure if I do anymore. So I think certainly there is a sense in which we can be aware but it’s costly but most of us do operate on autopilot. Those tribal instincts are so strong that I think there is a sense that for a lot of us it’s that reflex and interestingly that highly intelligent people are often the most prone. To it because they’ve got the rational faculties to dig themselves in deeper and self-justify their beliefs. In fact, things like conspiracy beliefs, some of the strongest conspiracy belief adherents are highly educated, highly intelligent people. It’s not a function of ignorance, actually being super smart can be unhelpful.

MATT

I wanna talk a bit about some of the new work you’re doing around not just being open-minded but living a life of curiosity and bringing an approach of curiosity because to me, this is at the heart of it. And I know that at the part of this for you are your INDI experiments.

MICHAEL

Yeah, so the core idea behind this is the best way to retrain your brain to be open, particularly if it doesn’t come naturally to you, because of your personality like me, or maybe your position where everyone’s looking to you for answers all the time. So you, you tend to defer to being certain rather than curious. How do you try and retrain your brain? So the best to do this is to micro dose novelty, introduce small elements of things that are unfamiliar that feel safe to your brain, because it’s almost like It’s almost like exposure therapy for people who’ve got anxiety, for instance, you expose yourself to small doses of the thing that you’re frightened of, the dose is small enough so the amygdala doesn’t, that doesn’t feel too threatening, but just pushes you a bit at your comfort zone. So the INDI experiment idea actually came from a conversation with a colleague of mine. So he’s actually a retired Supreme Court barrister, incredibly intelligent, incredibly thoughtful. And I was chatting with him at an event and I was just reflecting to him that despite his stature and how well regarded he is, talking to him, he is one of the most humble, open-minded, curious people, just full of wonder. And he’d been in his late eighties now. Like, so even at a life stage, from a life-stage perspective, often by the time you get to that point, you are quite fixed in your thinking. That’s often the natural pattern for humans. And I said, how is that a thing? How are you so naturally curious? Is it your personality or have you worked on it? He said one of the things that he and his wife started doing a few years ago that’s been a real help with these INDI experiments and I said what’s that? He said well it’s basically a term that he coined - ‘I’d Never Do It’. So INDI stands for that he said it’s an acronym it’s choosing something to do regularly that you’d never do. So I said every Saturday we’d open the paper we’d look at what was happening in Sydney that weekend what was going on and we think of all the things happening in Sydney this weekend what’s the least likely thing here that we’d ever go to and then we just turn up. And he said, we went to a puppetry, the penis one night, we went into a wrestling match. Like, you know, these are very serious, high calibre, high profile people, just being students, just wandering into life with that sense of what can we discover? So what have I probably got 70, 75 of these INDI experiments and some of them are super simple like. Drinking bubble tea, I’d never have you tried bubble tea. I have I never had a walk past. What is that? Do you eat the little things in the bottom? Do they are they just there for decoration? So things like that, like I just you just small moments like that week before last was at the airport. Rather than walking the normal way that I would go to the gate. I walked the other way. I’m like, I just discovered all these stores. I didn’t know what the domestic terminal and I just, and it’s only little things, but literally what it does is it trains your brain to see new and novel things or uncertainty, not as a threat, but as an invitation becomes fun. I think my ultimate INDI frontier.

MATT

So what have you noticed about your brain? What is what has shifted for you 70 plus INDI experiments later? Have things changed?

MICHAEL

Yes, definitely. So I reckon I would have noticed about probably three months in, I could feel that sense of instead of the INDI moment where I’m like, okay, this is what I’m going to do, I’m just going to grin and bear it. Okay, I want to force myself. Not that it was gruelling at all, but it was just a little bit uncomfortable. It’s like wearing an uncomfortable piece of clothing that was new, it was unfamiliar to the point where it actually became exciting, became fun. And that’s the benefit is you do start to really shift your sense of what they the tolerance of uncertainty. Your tolerance level goes up. And so I have noticed over the last little while, even the last couple of weeks, it’s getting harder and harder to identify an INDI experiment to do because the list of things I’d never do is actually getting shorter, which is sort of the point. There are only three rules that I had when choosing INDI experiments. I had to be something that wasn’t harmful or hurtful, couldn’t violate my values, and it had to temporary. So no tattoos, for instance. But if it was anything else, it was like bring it on. Um, and so I have just found over the last little while, it’s getting harder because that list of things I would never do is getting shorter. Cause I’m just much more open looking like what’s, what’s new? What, how can I learn? It just changes your posture toward the world around you. And as apart from just being a fun and adventurous way to live, what’s interesting about it and the reason it matters is because when you’ve micro-dosed novelty, uncertainty in small amounts, when the proper stuff shows up. Like a restructure at work, or the threat of AI, like making your profession irrelevant, or even the call from the doctor with bad news. When proper uncertainty shows up, instead of freaking out or freezing, it’s almost like you’ve built this muscle, this cognitive muscle to be able to go, okay, I know what to do because I’ve been in uncertain environments, and I can stay calm. I can be clear, I can confident, and the key word is creative. Because when we’re in survival freak out mode, our brains cannot be creative. And that’s often the thing we need most in those moments. But now certainly shows up.

MATT

This whole podcast has been about change, and how we deal with change and how we lead change. And we can be hopeful about the change that AI is going to bring to the economy. But we also know it’s going to bring some profoundly uncomfortable changes. And there are going to be people in what we might call the trades economy who will be maybe less affected. There’ll be people in the care economy. But there are going to be people in the knowledge economy, what you refer to as sort of the white-collar economy that are going do it tough. And potentially my thesis is we are less going to be building what used to look like conventional careers. And we’re more going to be building these personal knowledge sets and personal brands and personal reputations that we carry with us into the future. And we don’t quite know what that future is going to hold but we’ve got to figure out what value we take into that future. How does the story we tell ourselves about what a career looks like, how does that story need to change?

MICHAEL

So I think there’s a couple of things involved there. Firstly, and it’s not new, this idea that having a career for life is definitely something that we will see almost disappear entirely. I mean, our kids and grandkids will talk about long service life. They’ll be like, what the hell was that? Long service life? What an amazing thought. Is that after the first year? That’s right. You’ve stayed for two seasons, winter and spring. So like, it’s certainly that will disappear, but that’s not new, we’ve seen that happening for two generations now. Started with Gen Y on millennials and now certainly Gen Z. To me, the bigger theme is, if we go to a point where, and there was an interview I watched with Jamie Dimon last week, JP Morgan, CEO, we talked about within 20 years, it’s like it’s every likelihood people are working three and a half days a week. So then we fly past the four-day work week, three and half days, a week with probably a lot more AI doing some of the things that are the grant work things we need to do now. If we do see a hollowing out of that white-collar professional class. There is talk about, do we think about careers very differently? Is it necessarily about universal basic income? Do we need to have other support networks involved for people who, you know, wide scale or let go? Let’s say that’s the worst-case scenario. And even if there’s just a period of time, a lag time where we’ve got to re-skill the population to be able to use some of the technology to stay relevant in that lag time, how do we do that? And my concern with all the conversations about universal basic income and it goes back to something we talked about before is that you can make sure people have got the money to live and be somewhat comfortable and self-sufficient but what else does work give you apart from money it’s so much about community purpose and the big one’s dignity that I do that I’m producing something and contributing here and so to me the bigger concern over the next five to ten years especially when you overlay that with some of the stuff we’re already seeing with gen z which is that that level of isolation even the growing level of and this is a strong word but I think it’s an important word hopelessness or sometimes helplessness you see in Gen Z. No matter what no matter what I do I’m never going to be able to buy a house, I’m not going to have the career or the life my parents had. When you see that en masse in a generation of young people that is profoundly worrying for society. Hope is so vital for the human soul and so to me it’s about you can you might be able to have economic stop gaps. What else that was removed when potentially AI disrupts people’s sense of career, because it’s not just about the money, it’s about all the other things around that, that are harder to recreate.

MATT

So you’ve taken us to a huge place, a place of hope and purpose and possibility and dignity and all the things that are potentially going to threaten that. And we haven’t even talked about the planetary and environmental threats to that or the geopolitical instability and the threats to that. There’s a lot to worry about right now. So let’s finish by coming back to things that we can do. And often in the face of challenging situations, whether it’s a politician trying to advocate for tax reform or for a universal basic income, or whether it a activist trying to campaign for positive measures to deal with climate change, or whether a business leader saying, the way that our business has been working is not gonna keep working forever, we need to make change. It strikes me, that they’re asking people in that moment, all of those leaders are asking people to trade one type of loss for another. They’re saying at the moment, loss is happening to us. We are losing the ability to, we’re losing control in some way, we are losing control of our future, but this is happening to. And in order to mitigate that loss, I as a leader, I’m asking you to choose to come with me on this. And now that second loss is a loss that I’m asking you to choose. Yep. And even if I’m raising money for a new company, I’m asking that investor to lose something, which is hand over a check. Well, you lost that money. You might in the future, get it back right now you’ve, how do we get people to value correctly that relationship between loss that’s happening to them and a loss or a sacrifice? Perhaps that’s a better word because all strategy involves sacrifice. Let’s finish by talking about how we get people to lean in and go, yes, I understand that. I understand that there is sacrifice involved, there is pain involved, there is unfamiliarity involved or whatever it is. But nonetheless, I choose to go with you. I choose that.

MICHAEL

I think a couple of things that always help. Absolute honesty, call out the loss, acknowledge that this is going to be difficult. And I understand it. Even just having people feel like someone understands the emotion I’m feeling and Chris Foss’s work around how do you deal with high tense situations negotiation wise, if you call out the emotion of the person’s feeling it somewhat dissipates the power of that emotion. So calling it out and acknowledging that that’s a reality, I think is a really important starting point. There is anxiety, there is fear. Let’s not paper over that or diminish it. Let’s speak to that and be very honest. Then of course the question is, which emotions will you appeal to? And there are some sugar hit emotions that will get you instant reaction and they’re emotions like fear. They’re emotions, like outrage. They’re emotions like disgust. And those will get an instant reaction. I mean, we’ve seen political leaders appeal to them beautifully. They play. The population like a fiddle, they appeal to all those base emotions. Now they’ll get you a short-term impact, but typically it’s a narrowing response. So we’re getting closer and closer in on protection and how do we keep what we’ve got. The other emotions like hope and joy, patriotism, pride, these are emotions that are hard, they’ll give you a longer term impact, but they don’t give you the sugar hit up front. So you can deal with the fear and the disgust and some of those sort of darker emotions, they can get an instant response, their half-life is quick, and the response, the ash of those emotions afterwards is often quite toxic. It takes a strong leader to realize how do we appeal to hope and to joy and to patriotism. That’s where we need to be playing.

MATT

And I think to be really sort of selfish, for me, the way I process what you’ve just said is in the short term, slogans can have an impact. But to have that long-term effect on people, we need to tell them stories. And we need tell stories that are rich and true and real and full of hope and purpose and humility and possibility. And maybe just then, they will go with us on the difficult, uncomfortable change that needs to be made. Yeah, I love it. I thought you’d make that connection because I think it’s so true. Michael McQueen, thank you so much.

The myth of the big idea is one of the things we often misunderstand about business. I’ve long argued there was no one big idea behind Four Pillars Gin. There was just strategic clarity, hundreds of decisions that we got more right than wrong, an obsession with design, hospitality and attention to detail, and (above all) outrageously delicious gin.

Last week, on my new podcast StoryWork, my conversation with Up founder Dom Pym reinforced the thesis that small decisions beat big ideas. Up wasn’t built through one breakthrough moment. It was the result of decades of compounding ideas, relationships and capabilities that eventually came together to create something that barely felt like a bank at all. In the process, Up changed its customers’ relationships with money.

The Up case study proved a second thesis of mine too. Not only is all business is just decision-making at scale, but also we’re all in the same business really: the business of behaviour change. Whether we’re trying to grow a company, build a career or launch a new product, our success depends on somebody choosing us. Our growth depends on our ability to influence the behaviour of others.

When it comes to driving behaviour change, our business culture romanticises the idea of disruption. We celebrate founders who change behaviour overnight and forever. And who doesn’t want to be the Uber or Airbnb of their category, upending decades of category norms in the blink of an app? It’s an appealing idea, but not realistic or relevant for most of us.

The second episode of my new podcast, StoryWork, features Zara Seidler, the co-founder of The Daily Aus. I first met Zara a couple of years ago at an event celebrating ten years of Go-To Skincare and was immediately struck by her clarity of thought around making news accessible, relevant and engaging for the social media generation. Since then, The Daily Aus has gone from strength to strength, and Zara was the first name I wrote down when I began planning my podcast.

Listening to her talk, and despite the extraordinary impact of The Daily Aus, I found myself thinking that she isn’t really in the business of disruption at all. One of the ideas Zara kept returning to was “habit stacking”. The theory is simple. Instead of asking people to build an entirely new habit, you attach yourself to one they already have.

In the case of The Daily Aus, young Australians weren’t sitting around wishing they consumed more current affairs content on traditional news websites. But they were already opening Instagram and scrolling. So The Daily Aus didn’t try to drag people away from social media. Instead, it brought the news to where people already were. It might look like a simple channel decision, but it was actually a profoundly strategic one.

The more we spoke, the more I realised almost every important decision Zara and her co-founder Sam Koslowski made was governed by the same logic of habits. They published at the same time every day because habits are built through consistency. In the early days, Zara posted screenshots from her Notes app because she was creating content on the bus to work. It looked terrible, she laughed, but consistency mattered more than polish. People came back because the facts mattered more than the formatting. And the habit was everything.

When Facebook threatened to remove all news from its platform, they didn’t panic about losing distribution (at least, not for long). They started building an email newsletter that same day. Today, that newsletter reaches hundreds of thousands of readers and has become one of the business’s strongest products. Zara’s philosophy remained exactly the same. Don’t treat email as a marketing channel that demands something of people. Design it to be content they genuinely value and make opening an email from The Daily Aus part of someone’s routine. A positive new habit.

Later in the interview, Zara described how The Daily Aus had begun working with online influencers. Rather than trying to pull audiences away from creators they already trusted, they offered those creators editorial support and fact-checking, allowing them to keep doing what they did best while strengthening the quality of the information they shared. Once again, they weren’t trying to replace existing habits. They were building on top of them.

Zara wasn’t looking for the one brilliant insight that would suddenly transform how young Australians engaged with current affairs. She was making hundreds of small decisions that respected the habits those people already had. None of those decisions was revolutionary on its own. Together, they have helped change a generation’s relationship with the news.

We tend to imagine innovation as disruption. The Daily Aus points to a different model. Instead of disrupting people’s behaviour, they attached themselves to behaviour that already existed. And here is the lesson for all of us in that same universal business of behaviour change. Start with the habits people already have, then make hundreds of good decisions that quietly make your business and your product a part of them.

You can enjoy this full episode now wherever you prefer to get your podcasts (including here on Substack). Get straight into the action on Apple, Spotify or YouTube.

This episode is a window into the process and vision of a brilliant young co-founder who has figured out how to do what everyone is wrestling with: commanding the attention of Gen Z.

Zara and I spoke about the behind the scenes of starting The Daily Aus, from the unplanned chaos of the early strategy to what they’ve built and what comes next.

I walked away with so many insights, perhaps the most profound of which was the idea that behavior change doesn’t always happen through disruption, but instead through the much more subtle and clever process of habit stacking.

This episode is full of rich insights and I can’t wait for you to hear it. Can’t even wait to hear it? The transcript is below…

MATT

Zara, welcome, thanks for joining me. Thanks for having me, Matt. So let’s go back to the very beginning. Yeah. Zara and Sam are sitting, you know, at a dinner table, in a cafe, in the kitchen, whatever, and you’re talking about why don’t our friends care about the news? Yeah. Why did you care that they care?

ZARA

Huh, good question. Why did I care? Honestly, it was probably selfish. I think I cared because I wanted more people to be able to talk about it with and I wanted them to understand why it was so important and I think looking back the distinction I’ll make is that my friends then and my friends now do care. They didn’t have the right language to be talking about these world issues because the news wasn’t written for them, it wasn’t pitched to them. And so when I look back at it then, the frustration was why are people my age not engaged? But they are. It was just kind of the wrong packaging for them and that’s what we’ve been trying to build ever since.

MATT

So as you start to build and you’re trying to solve this challenge of engagement and relevance and trust, how did you process that? Were you thinking from the beginning, we’re building a business here, we’re a building a media empire here, just as one viewer, one listener, one audience member at a time, or were you just focused on how do we solve this creative problem?

ZARA

The benefit of you only interviewing me and not interviewing my co-founder is that we can have very different answers. So had you asked Sam that, he would have said from the beginning, yep, I’m building a media business. I remember he put it on LinkedIn that he was the co- founder of the Daily Oz and I laughed at the time and said, who cares? That’s not a business, that’s not for LinkedIn. I thought of it as just a kind of community project that was gonna get young people involved in the news. I never thought it would be a business. I didn’t believe I was entrepreneurial in that way, and I didn’t know anyone around me who was doing those sorts of things. But over time, I think the mission became so critical that there was a business case to be made around it, but it was only after consistently building that editorial integrity and that trust that we were able to make the business case. It certainly, I don’t think, would have worked had that business case come first. We were solving a really big moral question for young Australians.

MATT

Do you remember some of the things that you were doing in your first year that you look back now and go, we would never do that? But it felt right to try, but your model has significantly evolved from then.

ZARA

I mean, like we posted notes, apps, screenshots as story. Like who wants to read that? That is like the least design friendly thing on earth. But it was all that allowed for when I was on my way to work on the bus and taking screenshots and putting it up. So that built consistency, it built habit. It was something that was important. It looked absolutely hideous and thank God for Canva and thank god for what we were able to design down the track. But no, it was. It was awful, but it was the foundation. And all that mattered at the end of the day was the facts.

MATT

It’s really interesting, something you said before about you don’t ascribe too much sort of brilliance and genius, not your words, my words, to what you did in the early days. It is interesting though, isn’t it, how you sort of start to create these little senses of how things work and how the pieces connect together. So at Four Pillars, we used to talk about social doesn’t sell, and it kept us really honest about the idea that we use social media to create engagement and community to draw people closer, get them into our email list. An email would sell, and social would engage. And I watch all these brands these days just flooding their socials with sales push. And I’m like, you’re not building brand, you’re building audience. I asked you about the battle for attention and your response was basically, we don’t fight for attention, we fight for discovery in social, and then we pull people into this place of these owned audiences where we have their full attention. It’s really important, isn’t it, to have these little visual and sort of mental constructs of how our business works.

ZARA

I mean, the funnel matters for every business, not just for ours, but I think that for us, it’s how can you build an ecosystem? If we’re saying that news is so foreign to so many people, how can we build an eco-system that is kind of all encompassing? And for us that’s bringing people down the funnel, that’s bring people from that rented audience to that owned audience, and I think the same is true for other businesses as well.

MATT I see it a bit more these days, less of fun or more as like a benign death star, that you’re trying to draw people in with this tractor beam and it’s, they may come from many different directions and many different places. And just every time they touch you, you’re tryin’ to bring them a bit closer and a bit closure until at some stage they’re in the middle and they’re almost part and they see themselves as part of you. But I think what.

ZARA

But I think what’s important for us is that the way that other outlets have done that is through clickbait and that you draw them in and then they’re in and they feel trapped and for us it’s like no you know what you’re coming into you have full knowledge like we don’t have a paywall you are getting everything that you want on socials but it’s that you want more and that can have a deeper relationship with this brand and so I think the hesitancy and the trouble there is around clickbait and and bringing people down and attracting them perhaps on a basis that they’re not 100% bought into.

MATT

How important is it that news becomes a habit and how conscious were you that you weren’t trying just to create engagement and build trust, that you were actually trying to retrain people into the habit of becoming news consumers?

ZARA

The most important thing, habit and building routine around news. The number one thing that I heard from people was I’m not a news person. That that’s not a thing. You aren’t either a newsperson or not a news person, it’s just either in your routine or it’s not in your routine, and what we wanted to do was intercept those non news readers or those passive news readers and make them more active news readers. And so that meant showing up at the same time every single day, no matter what I was doing, where I was. And sometimes that was hard, sometimes that was easy, it depended on the day. But it meant that people could start to rely on us and depend on us and build in that consistency into their day. And I think that we were able to then convert a really significant cohort from being those passive consumers to being more active news consumers, which I think is pretty good for democracy.

MATT

It is, and we’re gonna talk about democracy, because ultimately. That’s a small topic. It’s a smaller topic. Some of us think it’s important. But let’s stay on this notion of habit. We buy cars. We’re in the habit of buying a new car every, you know, whatever, four, five, six years. And I start a new-car company, I’m just trying to interrupt your likelihood to buy Volkswagen and buy my car, but I’m not fundamentally trying to change your habits. But then there are people going. No one’s sitting around going, I wish there was more news I could consume, and yet for you to successfully build a business, you have to create a new habit. I’m just interested in what you have learned that if you got dropped into another business, another category tomorrow, what has it taught you about how to build habits that didn’t previously exist? Because fundamentally your success relied on your ability to do that.

ZARA

Well, I think what’s important is that we identified what habits did exist in the cohort that we were trying to target. And what we knew existed was that young people were checking social media all the time. When we started, there was not really any news on Instagram. This was kind of a very novel concept. I remember having an early conversation with Instagram and them saying, we don’t want news on here. That’s not what this is for. So we were able to interrupt and almost collide with another habit. And I... This might sound a bit woo woo, but like this idea of habit stacking. So if you’re on social media and then you’re getting your news, you’re almost stacking the habit of doom scrolling with getting some important information. And I think that that’s a really easy way to bring something that is quite hard and quite limiting to new audiences. And so I think, that’s been important. And that’s being a really interesting learning for me is that you can’t pull people away from their existing habits or their existing consumption. You know, trends, what we’ve seen is that other outlets have tried to say, yeah, you’re on social media, but click out to this link and then click out to that link. Those don’t mimic the natural habits. And what we did was we brought it to them. We want to meet people where they’re at. And I think that works across any industry and any product. It’s, you don’t try to disrupt that. You try to build within the ecosystem that already exists.

MATT

I’m already obsessed with the notion of habits. I will now say, and I will, on the record here, I will credit you every time. Stack onto existing habits.

ZARA

Yeah, it works. There’s a lot of research. It works.

MATT

None of us have enough firepower to persuade people to build entirely new habits, but that notion of stacking, oh my God, I love that so much. Okay, so from habit stacking for your first users to starting to see that next wave of growth, and I can talk a bit about what I experienced in terms of stacking on the existing habits of drinking mostly, to be honest, Hendrix gin and shifting people to four pillars. There was a first group who were relatively easy to convert because they were already. They were so ready to be engaged, they were so hungry. They’re like, you know, the thirsty man in the desert. It’s like, okay, there’s, but then there was this next group that they weren’t waiting for us. And so I realized quite early on, we had to do different things to win them. Did you have that same moment where you’re like okay, the first group we’ve got are not gonna give us all the growth we need. We need to start figuring out how to reach the next growth audience.

ZARA

100% I mean the first so for a very long time it’s very easy to condense timelines when you’re looking back at the last however many years for the first three years no one bothered to care what we were doing we were building habit but it was very slow very minor no one really cared over that time we accumulated some 3 000 followers nothing to write home about But from there onwards, it’s like, all right, so maybe the people I know are connected to 3,000 people at a stretch, but how do we reach those new audiences who aren’t finding us? There’s no discoverability to what we’re doing. Influences turned out to be a huge part of that early growth. So we thought back then that what we were doing was almost a civic duty. We said, you’re all talking about all of this very important stuff on the internet. We’ve got influencers who are being asked to comment on say global conflicts, but have no facts and have no basis for what they’re actually being asked to talk about when they were Miss Universe and are now apparently, you know, a global conflict expert. And so we reached out to these influencers and it was Sam and I DMing people after work, just saying, hey, we can see that you’re being asked to comment on this. If you want an explainer that makes sense. And that other people can engage with and relate to, here you go. And what we saw was that these influences really took to it because there was something there that it wasn’t partisan, it wasn’t going to isolate certain audiences, it was just going to have an explanatory angle. And so we saw just exponential growth, particularly based on female influences who had extremely trusting relationships with people. And they were saying for more, you know, read the daily odds. And that’s where our exponential growth came from during COVID, during the US election, and then beyond.

MATT

And was that a conscious growth strategy? To what extent was it accidental and organic and to what extent, was it, okay, we’ve won this first 3,000 but what got us here isn’t gonna get us where we wanna go. We need deliberately to sort of punch out of our own bubble.

ZARA

Yeah, I I hesitate to assign any formal value to anything we did back then, because it was just like, let’s throw something at all and see what sticks. I think, and what I think has been so fundamental to our success is that I am a young woman who is trying to cater to other young women. I knew where I got my information from. I knew who I trusted and it was these creators. And so we were almost just translating this anecdotal evidence of my friends and I getting our information from one place. Is that a broader trend? And it turns out that part of the value of being the audience you’re trying to serve is that yes, that does have legs.

MATT

It was almost like you had the habit stacking approach, and this was almost trust stacking. You go, these young women trust these young woman, there is a trust-based relationship there. If we could insert our trusted contemporary approach to news into that, again, the habit and the trust, they all start to compound.

ZARA

And it’s unusual, like you don’t usually, I mean, maybe now there’s been a bit of a change and certainly in the last couple of years, but when we started influences and news in the same sentence was not necessarily something you were going to hear. And so it was again, trying to do something a bit different and trying to make the news a bit cool again, which I think it had not been for quite a while for us. We started as. An explainer page. And I think that just remaining true to that mission, which is that we don’t need to be first, we need to right and we need to be able to add value, not add noise to an issue or a problem or a topic. For us, that is where we add value. So we’re not gonna be first. We don’t have hundreds and hundreds of reporters around the world. What we can do is sit with it a bit longer and take the time to actually explain it and break it down for an audience. And so I think we’ve always been able to navigate the tension because. Our audience expects that of us and we know that that is our role and that is how we differentiate ourselves from other players in the game who can be much faster and have a huge number of resources that they can allocate to this sort of stuff and that’s what good journalism is about and that why we need an ecosystem with those legacy players as well as some of the newer players.

MATT

Every time I give a keynote or I give a talk or have like a fast side chat, people want to know this sort of, why did you sell Four Pillars? And had you planned from the beginning to build it, to sell it? And my honest answer is no, we built it to own it. And then I check myself and I go, wait a minute, we did raise investment at the beginning. So in the back of my mind, there must have been this sense that we’re gonna have to get these guys some money back at some stage. Like even if we three founders choose to stay in forever and pass the business down to our kids. There were 20 and then eventually 35 people had invested. So I’m like, in the back of my mind, that must have been there, but I think we were made better as a business because what dominated our minds was always how do we make better gin and how do build a better gin brand, not how do scale this to sell. And the reason I say this might not make it into the podcast is I’ve been thinking lots about this with all the fuss. About the changes or the proposed changes to capital gains. And I’m sitting here going, I don’t think the government’s got the design quite right, but I would never invest in a founder who in the early stages of their business was more concerned about the scale of their exit than the scale of the solution of the problem that they were gonna deliver.

ZARA

100%, and I mean, especially, I mean I don’t know about the gin business. You don’t invest in a media business to make a huge return. This is not a quick money sale, this is not what this business is about. As I said, the same thing is true of trust as it is about building a revenue model that works. It’s really hard and it takes a really long time and we’ve also raised investment, we’ve raised two rounds. And we’ve raised that from people who understand that very reason that it will not be the next after pay or the next Canva. This is something that they have invested in because their kids care about what we do or they can see the value and they believe that they wanna be part of that story. And so certainly not something that tomorrow will be worth a bajillion dollars. But yeah, we’ve we raised investment and that’s something you need to always keep one eye on.

MATT

I’m a big fan of this idea that great businesses are built on doing really difficult things, that this is not a world where ease is rewarded. Difficulty, pain is rewarded, and I think there were a couple of things at Four Pillars that we spotted that were hard to do. It was hard to get up every day and just put all of your folks into making a better product, because the whole world was like, well, just make the product as quickly and cheaply as you can, and then move on to marketing. We’re like, well, no, we’re gonna build a business around making. But the other thing that we saw, and this is a long time ago, I’m tragically old, is social media was just emerging and it was scary and difficult for the big legacy players to jump onto. But for us, we could build social first. What did you quickly sort of see or feel or intuit that you could do that the big legacy media players, the big legacy news organizations just either wouldn’t do or couldn’t do.

ZARA

I think being nimble is something that very few media companies can claim they are. We were able to you know take COVID as an example we were still not a real business then we were kind of still inside hustle phase. We we’re able to pivot we were able to innovate we were able to present information. In a way that we hadn’t previously because there was no red tape. There was nothing stopping us from that innovation. And I think what we’ve seen with media is that there is a disconnect between what audiences want and what execs want and what business models will allow for. And that really has a stifling effect on innovation. And so I think that was our early key and our early success. And I also think that we weren’t afraid to make mistakes which in media can be a difficult thing to own up to, Bye. If something didn’t work, we were audience-led, we were an audience first, and it meant that we could, again, be nimble, be responsive, and iterate, and I think that that’s a very underrated thing in the media, and something that should be adopted more.

MATT

So I want to talk about bothism. And I read something you wrote recently that we can create an environment where news-focused creators can do their own entrepreneurial thing and be their own person and build their own brand, but they can also do that with the support of a structure around them that provides fact-checking and editorial quality. And you ended up in a bit of like a tussle online with people going. I was going to say you.

ZARA

I was going to say, you found my LinkedIn fights. And I’m-

MATT

I find that very fascinating because I see so often in business that the real magic is in the end, is in the fact that we can do this and we can this and I can’t always figure out why other people don’t see that and is it because they’re too purist, they go well if you’re that you can’t be that or maybe it’s just that doing both is hard but I want you to start by talking a bit about bothism.

ZARA

Yeah I love this and I was quite surprised by the feedback to that because I think what I have built and what my team has built is that bothism. It’s straddling the old age and the new age of media and that has been almost a tension point because there are so many good parts of legacy media that need to be maintained, editorial integrity and you know fact checkers and editors. But there is something missing there. There is a huge trust deficit, and that’s what we bring from the new age. And I think when you can merge those to infuse those two together, that’s where the magic lies. You don’t need these things to be mutually exclusive. I think that there is huge benefit to having the best of both worlds.

MATT

But potentially there was an easier business to build that just lent into, let’s just build lots of trust by being engaging and building community and leave the fact-checking behind, whereas you’ve actually built the difficult business, right?

ZARA

Yeah, I mean, can you build trust that way? Or can you build long lasting trust that way, I guess is my question. I think what we decided and certainly what we found over the years of building is that trust is something that is very slow to build and very quick to lose. And we wanted to build the foundation of trust, so that, you know, they could go forward and form whatever opinions and do whatever they want with that information. But that takes a really long time. And sure, it’s certainly very attractive to have a hot take and a nice opinion on the internet, go viral and there’s your business. But I don’t think that has the same longevity as building a trusting relationship with a young audience who come to you for a specific reason.

MATT

When you hear the phrase post-truth, what does it make you feel?

ZARA

Depends what day you get me on. Do I think we live in a post-truth world? I do think that there are some elements to that that are true. I think what we were talking about before, this idea of unless a truth reflects back to you what you believe about the world, then it can’t be true. I think I’m seeing that more and more, and I think that is a really worrying trend. Do I think that we can come back from that? Yes. And I think there are signs that there is appetite for again, just down the line truth, which shouldn’t be controversial. But I think it’s really difficult and I think we are navigating through a really challenging environment, especially on social media right now.

MATT

And maybe gonna get more so. I always reflect on how, I don’t know if you know this, but I studied economics at university and I did both because I was bad at it, but also because of the things it missed out. So the one thing I didn’t study in my pretty not great economics degree, I didn’t study behavioral economics. And I feel all of us should be forced to do like a primer in behavioral economics because what it reveals, are these sort of fundamental weaknesses. Like if the human brain is an operating system, behavioral economics kind of shows you what are the backdoor weaknesses. And one of them is this notion of confirmation bias, that our brains are sort of ravenous for finding little bits of evidence that confirm what we already believe to be true. And you know this, and this is the world that we have. Navigated for a long time, whether it’s the world of Brexit or Trump 1.0 in 2016. This is not new news. When people talk about Facebook breaking democracy, they’re not talking about today. They’re talking about a decade ago. But now we’re heading into this synthetic world of AI and deep fakes and this sort of abundance and speed with which that confirmation can just be manufactured and not even need a human, not even a room full of you know, hackers from whatever country or how does that make you feel?

ZARA

Yeah I’m a little bit terrified. I think that it reaffirms though what we’re doing. I think it for me brings to the fore two main things. Firstly media literacy. I think that we have just as a society skimmed over how critical media literacy is. Every time I say this publicly I have teachers telling me that they are teaching it in schools. I certainly for one can’t recall a comprehensive media literacy module at school. And I think as we move through this very terrifying new world, there need to be the kind of critical analysis skills for people to be able to decipher truth from fiction. So I think that’s the first thing. I think the second thing though is that, and I guess this goes to the creator point before, we need to prioritizing as much as we can the human connection with the news. And so for us that’s, how can we show you the working out behind the story that we’ve done? How can we you show you? What it took to prepare for an interview with a politician. What can it do? All of those sorts of things, I think, bring back the human face of the internet and journalism. And I think that those two things taken together are the best antidote to what we’re seeing, which is obviously a huge disruption, not just to our sector, but to the entire world. And I feel really excited by the opportunity that those things together give us and allow us to do.

MATT

Couldn’t agree with you more on media literacy and the need for education. As things stand, what are you seeing emerge around how young audiences are at the moment deciding or using to decide whether a source or a piece of information is trustworthy or not? What do you think they are looking for? What tools are they using?

ZARA

I think at the moment, and this is probably kind of years in the making, there is just a kind of natural posture of mistrusting the source. So people aren’t coming to something with an intellectual curiosity. I think they’re coming with just a natural posture. This is wrong. This is false. This is AI generated, whatever it is. So I think that’s the starting point, which is an interesting starting point to go back from. I mean, we were always taught that you have to check multiple sources. But again, confirmation bias, that if you can find some verified account on X that is saying the same thing that you are saying, then somehow that goes as truth. So I think that the tools that were once available, especially to journalists, even now aren’t available to the general public. So it’s becoming increasingly more difficult. And for us sometimes, you know, we’ll get messages or comments saying, this was written by AI. And we’re like, no, no this was ridden by a human. But the fact that we have to... Set that out, I think, is the problem. And that the natural assessment is that this hasn’t been done by a human. That’s where the concern lies. That’s the starting point.

MATT

There’s a lot of conversation in the wider world of brand about the need to start to inject flaws almost deliberately, you know, go back to sort of badly overexposed flash photography because even though your product’s gonna look not great, at least people go, look, they took a photograph. They didn’t just generate that. But then you wonder how quickly the AI will be able to replicate that and those signs of authenticity as well.

ZARA

But I do think that taps into another trend, which is that my cohort have grown up on TikTok where that kind of unpolished brand and that authenticity is king or queen on those apps. And so I think that that actually taps into another consumption habit that we’ve seen that brands are certainly leaning into and does lend itself to other things we’re seeing play out.

MATT

Talking of the wider brand world, a conversation I’m having a lot with people at the moment is that we are in the process of leaving the age of search and entering into the age answers. That we’re not gonna say, right, well, I need to buy a house. Tell me who are the best real estate agents or who are best mortgage brokers and ask Google and maybe we’ll look at the first page of results. We’re just gonna go, what’s the answer? Like maximum short list of three, just tell me the answer. To what extent do you anticipate that people will start to consume their news that way, that they won’t seek out trusted sources, they’ll just ask Gemini or ChatGVT or Claude or other options are available, and say, just generate me a primer on this.

ZARA

I’d say that we’re already there. So we’ve seen with legacy media publishers who are reliant on web that they’ve seen somewhere between an 80 to 90% downturn in search traffic and that used to be the kind of prime of the business. And it’s now that young people are just reading the AI overview at the top. And so for us, it’s how are we surfacing there? How can we make sure that there is reputable fact there? Doing things, you know, GEO rather than SEO, that’s part of the equation that like, had you asked me a year ago, whether we’d be doing this, would have not known what GEO was. But I think that we’re already there. And I think we, as a business, need to be keeping up with these trends, not waiting for them to happen, because we need to ahead of them. And just like consumption habits change that put social media and news together, I think AI and news and search and news. Are seeing a huge transformation at the moment.

MATT

I was consulting to Google, gosh, 10 years ago now on the launch of their early hardware and Pixel phones and one of the things we talked about a lot was that Google had started in search but it needed to really understand that in everything it did, it was a search business. It was a, the world is full of too much information. How do you quickly find what you’re looking for? How do search? And I think increasingly, and I was watching some of their IO developers conference this week, they are becoming an answers business. Anyway, it’s a whole. Huge change. So talking of changes, you’ve touched on it a bit, but I want to go a little bit deeper around sort of platform dependency. You know, you start with that brilliant habit stacking and habit hacking and going where the people are and going on social media, but you quickly realize that there is a fragility there. Talk about the moment when that fragility really sort of came home to roosting, like, okay, we need to deal with this.

ZARA

Yeah, so it was day one of being a business because we, so we raised that round of capital, quit our jobs, started our full-time jobs as founders of the Daily Ozz, just Sam and I, and on that day Facebook announced it was taking news off its platform and we had just taken…

MATT

Such beautiful timing.

ZARA

Oh, yeah, look looking back beautiful timing right then didn’t feel very

MATT

Did they send you flowers and champagne as well? I paid as well.

ZARA

It was amazing. We had just taken hundreds of thousands of dollars from people saying, we are gonna build something amazing on social media. And then social media said, no, you’re not.

MATT

And so- Quick sidebar, how many-calls from investors did you get as they read that news?

ZARA

What? They were actually amazing. We were sitting in an investor’s office at the time, because obviously we didn’t have an office. We were kind of sitting on the ground trying to make do. And I remember he poked his head up and was like, what happened now? And we were like, figure it out. And so we sat that day, we went down to the cafe in Paddington and we sat down that day and said, right, they’re gonna take this away from us. At that point, it wasn’t off on Instagram, but we knew that it was kind of a matter of time. And we... Created a newsletter that day. And again, it was just by pure necessity. That newsletter today is, I think, somewhere between half a million, what? Yeah, that newsletter today has half a million subscribers across a few newsletters that we run and brings in the most revenue of any product we have. And had that external pressure not happened, I don’t know that we would have pivoted. We needed that wake up call that, in fact, one call between Mark Zuckerberg and Josh Frydenberg can really blow it all up for us and that that was too risky and we’ve seen that sort of thing happen over the years. We’ve had to double down on those other diversification methods and all of those things I think taken together have been really good for the business and have made us much healthier.

MATT

I think we had a coffee not too long after that apocalyptic or near visualizing death moment, right? And I reckon if I’d offered you then a newsletter that had 100,000 subscribers, you’d have taken it. So to get to the scale you’ve got, and I look at the numbers and I think I saw the other day that The Guardian Australia’s readership has now started to outstrip some of the Fairfax and some of, you know, the traditional links. It’s amazing those shifts, and so to be at those numbers is extraordinary.

ZARA

And the newsletter is the best. Like I, there was this, I don’t know if it’s a myth or if it was just under research. There was an idea that young people wouldn’t take to newsletters because they weren’t on email. It wasn’t as sexy as socials. It is the most intimate form of relationship that you can have with an audience. And that newsletter audience is exceptional. And oftentimes when I run into people on the street they talk about the introduction. To that day’s newsletter. And I think that it is such a different type of relationship as this podcast. This is another very different format and we wanna be for everyone. So if you’re not a reader and you’re a listener, then you can get it somewhere else. We wanna be everyone.

MATT

But podcasts and emails, they’ve got something in common, which is they’re sort of, they’re permission-based, they’re sorta consent-led and they’re intimate.

ZARA

You’re choosing to engage with it.

MATT

Can you just give really quickly for anyone who’s trying to figure out how to use email the Zara Seidler 30 second TED talk on how to make email a positive weapon and not just be something that just gets unopened and chucked into the junk time again because I reckon a lot of people listening to this would be like my business sends emails no one ever reads them no one ever clicks on them and I know I get lots of emails that I never read and never click on.

ZARA

Don’t make it a marketing led tool, make it content led tool. For us, we are not aggregating marketing stuff. We’re not aggregated stuff that’s already there. We are writing this native to email. It reads as if it is written just for you and just for your email. And that is a very different model to just pulling all the stories, having some hyperlinks and taking people off it. Make it intentional because it pays off.

MATT

And make it a gift, not an ask. There’s little gift drops in your inbox every day.

ZARA

Yeah, like how lucky you get to read about how cooked the world is every morning at 7 am. Aren’t you so lucky?

MATT

When you put it like that. Hey, I just want to touch on something and just rewind to that day because you just triggered something in me, which is the importance of choosing great investors. It wasn’t something I planned to talk to you about, but I think it’s just, that moment is so critical because that moment also goes differently had you made different choices about who you would allow to invest in you slash had they invested for different reasons. And if you had had cynical people who’d invested in a business model and a fast path to growth. They didn’t really care about who you were, who Sam was, they just trusted in the model. And then on day one, they see the models potentially got exploded. That’s very different to a world where they chose you and you chose them and people trust people. And they’re like, you got this, you’ll figure it out.

ZARA

So different and I mean we were so lucky when we approached investors we had no revenue model to be spoken of. We had no idea how we were going to make money and again I think because these people were values aligned, they were mission aligned, it meant that they could withstand the pressures that came with investing in a media business and they took a huge risk on us. I mean, we were completely unproven. I was 21 like god knows what who I should have doing or what I would have been doing. And they believed in us and it meant that we could take the risks and try and experiment. Without that, TDA wouldn’t exist, without a doubt.

MATT

It’s kind of amazing, isn’t it? It is. And I look back and go, why did people invest? Would I today, I hope that I would have had the wisdom to invest in Four Pillars or the Daniels. And I looked back and got the only reason for them to do that was because of the people. And because of people and the talents and the energy and the vision we brought to it. Not the business model.

ZARA

No, they believe in founders. And we heard that time and time again, they believed in Sam and Zara, and that is a huge honor and a huge respect. And we just have to work every day to make sure that that was the right investment for them.

MATT

You’re now diversifying quite a lot to the point where you have multiple different newsletters. You’ve also got this sort of new, almost like consultancy arm, where you’re trying to educate businesses and leaders about young audiences and how to deal with them. How are you, what are you doing? And how are you? Not what, what’re you doing, but what are, what you doing and how are choosing what not to do? Because there must be so many tempting paths that you have to say, no, no. That is too far from the mission. That is not gonna help us to get where we wanna go.

ZARA

Yeah I think what we are doing is choosing what is our unique value proposition and as we’ve spoken about at length it’s trust and so we’re building ecosystems around that trust so for us the original business model was advertising um that is how a lot of you know media businesses survive thrive whatever it is um but we realized quite a while ago that we were also building this machine and this vehicle of trusted behaviors, attitudes and ideas of young people that other people didn’t have, wanted to know but couldn’t access. And so with future proof that our way of building that up and having young people’s voices heard is can we spin out a consulting arm that is separate to TDA but uses the insights to really make. What Gen Z is saying and the future generations, and bring it to the C suites at, you know, the biggest companies in this country because they’re trying to make decisions about what the next generation want, both with their wallet and with their employment, but they aren’t using contemporary information. And so we’re just trying to plug that gap because we’ve got so much of that data at our fingertips.

MATT

It’s really interesting, isn’t it? It’s almost anywhere where there is a trust deficit, where there’s an engagement deficit, where there was a relevancy deficit. It doesn’t mean that you’re always going to fix all of those deficits, but you can at least add value and provide a view and a perspective.

ZARA

Correct, we’re not fixing it for the big four, we’re just trying to create again, almost this foundation of fact, it’s don’t work on assumption, work on fact. We can tell you what they’re thinking about AI, we can tell what they thinking about working from home. You don’t need to have these multi-month long surveys, we’ll tell you and then work with that foundation of fact to create good policy at your organization.

MATT

What is the number one thing about the business that exists today that surprises you that you really couldn’t have anticipated when you began?

ZARA

I think the fact that I have close to 30 people showing up and sharing in that mission, I think it felt like a very personal mission to Sam and I. And the fact it is not so personal and that it is shared among people who have taken a huge risk, quit their jobs in very established media, in very establish newsrooms and come to work with us. I think had I thought about that on the day I quit my job. I could have never conceptualized it and I think there is nothing more gratifying than having a shared mission and I thing so much of what we’re trying to do is build community and the fact that we’ve even been able to build community internally at our organization is my greatest source of pride and something I could’ve never expected.

MATT

And to go back to the start, it’s a both community. It’s the fact that you’re pulling in incredible content creators and influencers who want to become more authoritative and trusted, and you’re putting in people from traditional newsrooms and sort of legacy media organizations who wanna join. What do you hope will surprise you in 10 years’ time? Which is a weird, stupid question, because if you can expect it, you can’t entirely surprise you. But what might be the biggest surprise or gift that the future gives you?

ZARA

Well, I think that there is a, there is a fear I think, that we consider around, we don’t want necessarily the audience to age up with us, that we think that, there’s a lot that services older generations and we want to be for everyone, but we think, young audiences are really under represented when it comes to media. And so I think I would just be so thrilled if the next generation of 15 to 18 year olds, who are currently, you know. 10 are reading what we do then and that we have managed to continue to serve as this Incredibly under serviced group. I think I’d be thrilled with that

MATT

And I think you are just a phenomenal example of a leader and an entrepreneur on a mission and doing amazing things. And you happen to also be an extraordinary woman. So thank you, Zara Seidler.

ZARA

Thanks for having me.

www.storywork.com.au

My conversation with Dom Pym was only supposed to go for an hour. We wrapped up almost 90 minutes later, and I immediately knew my decision to start a podcast was a good one. Even if the last thing this content-saturated world apparently needs is another content creator.

I interviewed Dom because I wanted to understand how he built Up bank, one of Australia’s most dynamic fintech start-ups. But the more he talked, the less it sounded like a fintech story and the more it sounded like the culmination of decades of maverick thinking about how to build a category-reshaping business. In fact, key to the success of Up was that Dom never told himself he was building a bank. The story he told himself was instead about using technology to change people’s relationship with money.

Dom is the first guest on StoryWork, my new podcast that explores the role story plays in building businesses, leading organisations and making change happen. He describes himself as a “30-year overnight success”, which is a good line but also a useful reminder about the way we tend to misunderstand entrepreneurship.

Cursed with survivor bias, we focus on the company that worked, the funding round that succeeded and the exit that cemented the dream. We rarely see the decades of relationships, experiments, odd diversions and divergent capabilities that eventually collide at exactly the right moment.

Dom had been at the forefront of successive waves of technology long before fintech became fintech. He built enterprise software, worked in financial markets and built some of the earliest apps in Apple’s App Store. But he also spent years around music and creative culture and, crucially, kept working with many of the same people.

When Dom and his team decided to build Up, they made a decision I haven’t stopped thinking about since our conversation. As I see it, if you or I were setting out to build a new banking business, a start-up in one of the world’s most heavily regulated industries, the conventional wisdom would be to fill the room with banking people. We’d hire people who understood banking products, regulation, technology and risk, and who could reassure everyone involved (especially investors) that we knew how banks worked.

Dom and his team took a different path. They recognised that Up didn’t need to reinvent every part of banking to reinvent the experience of it. The partnership with Bendigo Bank provided the institutional capability, regulatory infrastructure and trust required to operate, freeing Dom and his team to concentrate their energy where they could create the greatest distinctive advantage.

That strikes me as a seriously underappreciated form of strategy. We celebrate founders who want to own everything, control everything and take credit for everything. But sometimes the more powerful question is: what are we uniquely good at, and who is already better than us at everything else?

In Up’s case, that also meant building a team from a wildly divergent collection of worlds. As Dom described it, Up brought together “multimedia, graphic designers, product people, engineers, user experience designers, video production, special effects” and drew on cultural influences including “surfing and skateboarding and music and anti-culture”.

Again, not the obvious ingredients for a bank. But that was precisely the point. The team had deep technological fluency without being trapped by a lifetime of banking assumptions. They understood what technology could do but were equally fascinated by how things looked, felt and made people feel. Dom himself had repeatedly been early to technological change, yet he doesn’t talk like someone besotted with technology for its own sake. He talks about people, experiences, design, emotion, culture and even love.

One tiny story from our conversation captures this beautifully. Dom talked about how, as money has become digital, we have lost much of our physical relationship with it. A $10 note once had weight. You held it in your hand and felt yourself handing it over. Spending money involved a physical act that made its value tangible in a way that tapping a screen often doesn’t.

So the Up team became obsessed with how technology could restore some of that feeling. One of the details they created was haptic feedback that made it feel as though coins were moving around inside your phone like a digital piggy bank. It’s a tiny feature, but it tells you an enormous amount about the business they were trying to build. They weren’t simply digitising banking. They were thinking about people’s relationship with money, then using technology, design and a little playfulness to change how that relationship felt. The innovation wasn’t the technology itself. It was the imagination to ask what a bank could do with it.

Up emerged from a collision of technological possibility, institutional expertise and a deeply human sensibility. Bendigo Bank provided capabilities that would have taken years, enormous amounts of capital and considerable risk to recreate, while Dom and his team concentrated on reimagining what the experience of money and banking could actually feel like. And that led to perhaps the biggest strategic shift in the whole story. Up stopped benchmarking itself against banks.

Instead of comparing the Up experience to those provided by CommBank, ANZ, Westpac or NAB, Dom’s team looked to apps from other categories that people actively chose to put on the home screen of their phones. In the process, they stopped asking how to build a better bank and started asking how to build something people might actually love. And the love for Up is real with Dom telling me that more than 80 per cent of Up’s growth came through word of mouth.

I started our conversation wanting to understand how Dom Pym built Up. I finished it thinking about how badly we tell founder stories. We tell them backwards. Once someone succeeds, every previous step becomes evidence of inevitable progress towards the thing we now know they built. But real careers and real founder stories aren’t that neat. Perhaps that is what makes “30-year overnight success” more than a good line. We notice entrepreneurial success when its financial value suddenly becomes visible. But by then, the more interesting forms of capital (like taste, culture, knowledge, experience and relationships) may have been compounding for decades. Dom eventually turned all of that into Up.

There is so much more to his story than I’ve shared here. Not least how Dom has now invested over $100m of his own money into Australia’s innovation economy (while helping to unlock billions more). I hope you’ll join me and Dom on the podcast to listen to the whole conversation for yourself. And, if my instincts are right, you’ll agree that maybe the world did need another podcast after all.

You can watch every episode of StoryWork right here on Substack (and enjoy my wider writing on the power of story in business, brand, culture, leadership and life). Or you can watch and listen wherever you prefer to get your podcasts. All the links you need are at www.storywork.com.au

In order to avoid the weirdness of me interviewing myself, I asked my old friend and professional journalist Amelia Adams to join me in the studio.

We talked about my career, my experiences, my learnings and where my ever-growing belief in the power of story has come from.

It was the winter of 2013 and we were counting down to the launch of Four Pillars Gin. I remember telling people that the world didn’t need another gin, but we were going to make one anyway, because the world did deserve a better one. We believed passionately that gin made in Australia could be something really special. Fortunately, we were right, and our little gin business went on to be named the world’s best gin producer three times within a decade.

Fast forward to this week and my return to the Sydney winter after three weeks in the South of France (don’t hate me, one of those weeks was spent attending Cannes Lions). Once again, I have something new to launch.

Don’t panic. I haven’t decided to take on Aperol or Whispering Angel, and I certainly haven’t decided to start another gin brand. But I have decided to enter another category of abundance. Yes, I’m dedicating myself to solving one of the least pressing problems of our time: if only there were more podcasts.

Today, the first episode of my new podcast, StoryWork, goes live. It’s a conversation with Dom Pym, founder of Up bank and now one of Australia’s most significant start-up and fintech investors. So I guess I can add podcast host and “creator” to my self-indulgent LinkedIn bio. In my limited defence, one of the most persistent messages I heard at Cannes was that the future belongs to creators. So, at an age when I really ought to know better, I have decided to join the creator economy.

Beneath the apparent opportunism, however, the podcast has allowed me to address two more serious thoughts that have been bothering me. I think of them as the category error and the credibility chasm. Let’s start with the category error.

Story should come before strategy

I’ve spent most of my career working with stories. After a brief and inglorious stint in military intelligence and economic analysis, my career really got going as a political speechwriter. The challenge in politics is helping politicians understand the extent to which words, signals and emotions matter, not just clever policies and being “right”. If you want to make change happen, you’d better be comfortable with storytelling as a key part of your job description.

I moved into brand experience and ended up leading strategy at Jack Morton Worldwide in New York. The main lesson from my time there was that what brands do, and how they make people feel, matters even more than what they say. Story matters, but storydoing is even more important than storytelling.

Then I spent a decade helping build Four Pillars Gin. We used the story we wanted people to tell about Four Pillars to influence every business decision we made, from the gins we distilled to the people we hired and from the partnerships we built to the big bets we made. Through all of that, it has become blindingly obvious to me that story and the clarity it brings belongs at the heart of strategy, leadership, decision-making and culture as well as brand, marketing and communications.

But that’s not how story shows up in most businesses. Usually strategy comes first. Then product development and business modelling. Then organisational design and culture. Then leadership decisions and growth strategy. Eventually, once the serious people have finished doing all their serious things, someone from marketing is invited into the room and asked to tell the resulting story.

This has always struck me as completely backwards. Story is so much more than how we explain what we have done. It is one of the fundamental ways we decide what to do in the first place. We use stories to turn complexity into meaning. To imagine futures that do not yet exist. And to convince others to join us in making those futures real.

Strategy is a story about where we are going, the path we will take and the choices we need to make to get there. Leadership is the ability to make people believe in that story strongly enough to act and align them strongly enough to keep the business on the right path. Culture is the collection of stories an organisation tells itself about what it values and how it needs to behave. And a strong brand is what happens when enough people encounter enough consistent evidence to believe and share your story and make it their own.

A better question

All of this has led me towards a question I find much more interesting than “what story do we want to tell?” A better question is “what story are we trying to make true?” The difference is critical. If your story is simply something you tell, marketing can own it. But if it’s something you’re trying to make true, everyone needs to own it. The product becomes part of the story. The customer experience becomes part of the story. Culture and leadership decisions become part of the story. The things you choose to do, and refuse to do, all become part of the story.

So the first itch I hope my podcast will scratch is addressing this category error: the miscategorising of the art and power of story. I want to unearth lived experience and evidence of its power beyond the narrow marketing and communications frame of “storytelling”, starting today with the brilliant Dom Pym.

A new dynamic around proving good thinking

Which leads neatly to the second itch: the credibility chasm. I have spent much of my professional life writing speeches, strategies, presentations, a book and now this column. For most of that time, good writing was a reasonable proxy for good thinking. If you encountered a well-argued piece of writing under someone’s name, there was at least a decent chance they (or, in the case of speechwriters, someone who worked for them) had done the intellectual labour required to produce it.

That contract has now broken. Today anyone can produce an articulate thousand-word article in seconds. Or a very sincere Linkedin post about the five leadership lessons they learned while assembling an Ikea wardrobe. Sure, the words may be perfectly serviceable. But increasingly they will tell you very little about whether the person behind them can actually think, or what beliefs drive their thinking.

Writing has become less reliable as evidence of expertise and credibility. The world is filling up with content that has no real story or authority behind it. And this matters because, at the exact same time as polished expression is becoming more and more abundant but less and less persuasive, we need leaders to use their powers of storytelling and influence more than ever.

Build credibility before you need it

I thought about this recently when I received a generic-feeling mea culpa email from Telstra CEO Vicki Brady after their latest outage and national outrage. It was hard to know whether the email was really from her, or in her words, because I’d never heard her speak. I hadn’t heard her think out loud. At a time when brands increasingly need to be personified by credible human voices and faces, it’s too late to start building that credibility at the exact moment you need it to do the heavy lifting.

Perhaps it’s no coincidence that the creator economy and long-form content are exploding at exactly the same moment as generative AI is eroding the value of generic, short-form content through endless slop. As content becomes abundant and easy, provenance and friction become more valuable. Show me where it came from. Show me who made it. Let me see the thinking, the craft and occasionally the mess behind the finished product.

This is true at a brand level too. I recently visited the Sydney headquarters of jeweller Fairfax & Roberts and met its recently appointed CEO, Joshua Rogers. Josh walked me past the workshop where Fairfax & Roberts continues to make its fabulous pieces by hand, using tools dating back to the mid-1800s. I was captivated. Within seconds, I went from being an ignorant brand agnostic to a brand fan. Not because Josh had told me a better story about craftsmanship. But because I had seen the evidence. I had witnessed the working.

So yes, I have a podcast to spruik and some seriously fascinating conversations to share. But StoryWork is also an experiment built around these two questions I can’t stop thinking about. What happens if we stop treating story as something we tell after the important work is done, and start treating it as part of the important work itself? And, in a world where anyone can manufacture the appearance of competence and expertise, how do we make the real things more visible and persuasive?

Perhaps both questions lead towards some version of the same idea. Make the story true. Let people see the working behind it. And, in the process, earn a little more belief.

I have no idea whether the world needs another podcast. I do think it needs better ways of understanding who to believe, which stories are worth paying attention to and how those stories become true. So that at least seems worth talking about.

Dom’s story was the epitome of what I wanted StoryWork to shine a light on…

The power of capturing business strategy, vision and purpose in the form of a story that aligns and animates every effort and decision.

The importance of feelings, design, emotions and experiences to business success.

The opportunity to make sense of diverse opportunities, ideas, influences and talents.

The need to look beyond your category to create a different story of what an industry (in Dom’s case, banking) could feel like.

It’s an amazing story and an awesome conversation. Have a watch or listen here, or wherever you prefer to get your podcasts.

And make sure you subscribe to hear every episode (there’s a genuinely astounding list of interviewees on the way) and to get extra bonus content, including a future director’s cut of the full Dom interview in all its extended glory!

Dom Pym, founder of Up Bank (and so much more), philanthropist, investor and visionary. If you want to hear an inspiring and surprising start-up to success story, it's his.

But this isn't just about making money. Listen to Dom for an insight into how his mind works and his bold plan to get more people to invest in risky, worthy endeavours; raising Australia's productivity, championing our innovation economy and creating a world-leading fintech ecosystem.

And all because he’s a tech guy who believes passionately in the power of story, experiences and design.

www.storywork.com.au

Join the conversation on Substack

www.storywork.com.au

Join the conversation on Substack

Ok, so it’s not The Odyssey or the new Spiderman, but it is an epic trailer. At least it is for me. It’s the trailer for my new podcast, StoryWork.

If you’re in the business of growing something, anything…a business, a brand, an organisation, a movement, a career….and you want to learn more about how to leverage the power of story then you’re in the right place.