Designing Workplaces & Companies with Alicia Grimes

Gerry Scullion: [00:00:00] Hello everyone. Welcome back to the podcast. My name is Gerry Scullion, and today we speak with Alicia Grimes, co founder of The Future Kind in the UK. Now their tagline on their website is designing companies that work as hard as you do, motivated employees, better rituals and reliable systems that facilitate your best work ever.

Gerry Scullion: When we get your culture and strategy in the shape to make it happen and we discuss and unpack All of these strategic things that Alicia and their team at the FutureKind does to help organizations transform around human centeredness. It's a fantastic conversation. Let's jump straight in.

Gerry Scullion: Alicia, I'm delighted to have you here on the podcast. We have been chatting back and forth the last couple of months in the lead up to this podcast. So, um, let's kick off, let's tell us a little bit about yourself, where you're from and what you do.

Alicia Grimes: Thanks, Jerry. It's great to [00:01:00] be here. This is very exciting.

Alicia Grimes: Um, so I'm Alyssia Grimes. I'm co founder of the FutureKind and we are a culture consultancy that designs company operating systems to effectively make sure that startups, scale ups and organizations are putting their culture and strategy into practice, whether that's through rituals, behaviors, organizational structures, everything that can enable a bit of smooth scaling as you grow your company.

Alicia Grimes: So

Gerry Scullion: that is what you would probably call your value proposition is what you do. Yeah,

Alicia Grimes: just pitched there, didn't I? That

Gerry Scullion: was a pitch. But what would you do in a day to day basis? What does an engagement look like for the future kind? Because when I'm on your website, and I've been on your website a couple of times in the last couple of weeks, you do lots of different things.

Gerry Scullion: And I'd love to know what kind of problems you help organizations solve, and how do you go about doing that?

Alicia Grimes: Yeah. So I guess to speak to that problem, we solve, we [00:02:00] spend over 90, 000 hours of our lives at work, and that's a lot of hours. And. You know, we are so focused on designing in our companies, great products, great services, but we often neglect to think about how do we design experiences for the people who are designing those products and services, because ultimately we should be designing better companies so that we can design better products and services.

Alicia Grimes: And. We saw this as a problem as a need from working within startups and scale ups with big organizations on their digital transformation journeys. And we said, how can we put the same effort focus into designing our people experiences so that ultimately we can ensure that our companies can thrive, that our products are great, that our customer experiences are phenomenal, but also that our people who [00:03:00] deliver our culture and strategy.

Alicia Grimes: Can actually thrive as well. So in order to do that, we engage with companies in a number of ways because we need to meet them where they're at. And we use something that we call the company operating system because culture is a word that's thrown around a lot in terms of what it means, what it looks like.

Alicia Grimes: Some people think pizza parties. There's on a Friday, but actually we need to put something more concrete around that. And when we talk about culture, it's about understanding what is the problem or challenge you have within your organization and which part of your culture or your company operating system do we need to look at and sort of put a bit of work into.

Alicia Grimes: So that could be working with an organization to really refine a bit more. Their strategy. What does that look like? How do we get really clear on that? And what the metrics of success are, or do we need to work with a team on defining roles and responsibilities, your org structure, your accountability [00:04:00] chart, or is it actually about defining those rituals, like how you do things around here, so actually have you got meeting overload, how can we help you communicate better, collaborate better, effectively unlocking different components within that company operating system.

Alicia Grimes: So that your team can show up and do their best work and ultimately then design those products and services.

Gerry Scullion: Yeah, there's lots of things that you just said there that, um, I've got questions for her in the operating system and the company operating system. Um, I love when you, when you say that on your website, I was like, actually, this is a nice way of framing it.

Gerry Scullion: But let's take it from a perspective of, say, you've got an institution or an organization or a government that has been in existence Transcribed for some cases, hundreds of years. Um, they form their own ways of working. They've got their own internal politics, their own cultures, their own subcultures.

Gerry Scullion: Where do you start if you're leading that [00:05:00] organization and you know that there's toxicity and there's dysfunction happening about how they actually achieve their goals? What, that's probably a scenario that's very common for someone like you. Where do you even get started?

Alicia Grimes: Yeah. Well, it's one of the reasons that in terms of the teams we work with and what that looks like, typically they are in that startup to scale up space.

Alicia Grimes: They were actually codifying what they've created in sort of recent times, and they're on that journey of taking it from what's a nice feeling into something that's more structured. But we do work with bigger organizations as well. And I think. Like you say, there are subcultures in there. There is sort of legacy in there of how things are done and what that looks like.

Alicia Grimes: And I think the first question is, why is this change happening? Sort of what's causing this change to happen? Why are we part of these discussions and what is it, the type of company you're now trying to be? [00:06:00] Like, what is that vision of the company you want to be? Because ultimately this is where. We do get brought in because companies are suddenly going because a lot's changing in the world right now.

Alicia Grimes: Oh, we've been this for about 20 to 25 years, but if we wanna survive, we need to be this and therefore our strategy needs to look this way. But how do we make sure that we get our people around it and that they can deliver and work in the same way 'cause it's currently not working. And ultimately we need to shift that quite significantly.

Alicia Grimes: I think you have to start with that diagnostic. So as any designer would, it's like diving in there and doing kind of a real discovery piece of what does this look like? Because often people can come to us and say, we've got a performance problem. And we're like, well, performance isn't the problem. Like actually what's the root cause here and what's actually sitting behind that and really delving into that.

Alicia Grimes: Is it performance or is it that people aren't clear on their roles and responsibilities, or they have no idea what your strategy is. And really delving [00:07:00] into kind of those core areas and then prioritizing them, because ultimately you can't do everything at once. And change is significant, especially in those big organizations.

Alicia Grimes: But what is the most pressing element within that? And how is that going to enable you once we unlock that to deliver on this new strategy and this new way of working, but finding that key component, first of all, Like you would in any design process is really core to what we do to break it down and get on there, get started and to build that trust as well.

Alicia Grimes: Because ultimately if you come in as an external person and say we're doing culture change, there's already a lot of, Oh, are we doing this maybe again? Um, and that sort of

Gerry Scullion: stuff is culture change. You mentioned there that there can be a, like an ick factor to, you know, a culture change. What is that? Like, you know, is that a new yogurt?

Gerry Scullion: Um, what I want to understand a little bit more is have you framed it [00:08:00] in other ways that might have had less of an ick factor? Like what, what are the other ways that you've seen? That might increase the, uh, the interaction or the, the quality of the initial feeling of when you walk into the building.

Alicia Grimes: Yeah. So I think it depends who we're speaking to, right? A lot of the time, culture is not associated with the bottom line. And that is often. We often talk about culture as a feeling and what that looks like. And I think, well, not, I think I know that you have to bring this conversation to really speak to those business metrics and also those outcomes, right?

Alicia Grimes: So it needs to be that balance of business needs. You know, we've got revenue targets. We've got a strategy we've got to deliver on. We've got certain metrics and the people needs, and we're sitting at that intersection of making sure that we're speaking to both of those needs. So for, [00:09:00] you know, leadership teams, they may be thinking very much about.

Alicia Grimes: That business side of things, they've got a lot of pressure on them, but you've also got to think at the team level because it's got to be top down, bottom up. You've got to go both ways on that, and the team will be feeling those pressures. They'll be feeling the stress, they'll be feeling the misalignment, they might be feeling the lack of connection, whatever those core issues are, we need to be speaking to both of those.

Alicia Grimes: But if you do either of those in isolation, it's unlikely to work, or at least it won't stick for long.

Gerry Scullion: Okay, so, um, Let's talk about, you mentioned they're top down and bottom up. Um, so typically it's the top that gets to create the strategy and creates the principles and so forth. How does all this hang together in terms of Um, making sure that when principles of strategy are redefined, that it's not just lip service and, you know, the bottom up, so to speak, have absolutely no visibility in terms of what that looks like and [00:10:00] how it's going to change their ways of working.

Gerry Scullion: What do you see as being one of the main factors in introducing new strategic directions and enabling the bottom up to start engaging with it?

Alicia Grimes: Yeah, so early on in a lot of our conversations, We talk about who need to be your champions in this work and how do we bring people on the journey? So people call them culture champions, culture advocates, whatever name feels right for their organization.

Alicia Grimes: But ultimately it can't just be leadership team around these conversations. It needs to be thinking about who are the people Who is seeing how this is impacting our teams also our customer experience and how can we bring those voices into the conversation and then how do we establish those rituals.

Alicia Grimes: to effectively make sure that those voices are heard throughout the process, but also how do we establish those behaviors so that we make sure that those voices are listened to. [00:11:00] Because ultimately you can say, Oh yeah, all you do is you just bring some other people in from those teams around the organization and it all goes swimmingly.

Alicia Grimes: But we all have perceptions of the role of leadership of the role of teams and participants. So you have to be very clear on this is the way we're going to show up and how we're going to act and those behaviors that are associated, whether that's to existing values or what needs to be surrounded around this particular project and how you're going to make that change.

Alicia Grimes: But those voices are really, really important. And often we ask that it's not just asking for necessarily popular people within the organization who might have a bit of influence, but who are your biggest cynics as well? Bring them into the conversations because if you can get them on the journey with you, the impact of that is phenomenal.

Alicia Grimes: And we've seen that work several times. It's like, bring those people who have high levels of influence in the team. Doesn't matter what level they're at or anything like that, but also we want to bring in your cynics and we want to see that evolution because if we can do that, this is going to be a lot more successful.

Gerry Scullion: So [00:12:00] you mentioned, I love culture champions. People, you know, who are really integral to making stuff happen within the organization. How do you identify those people? Because. In my world, um, when I used to work for businesses as full time, I was, this is going to come as a shock to people, but I was quite loud.

Gerry Scullion: Um, I know it's kind of, it's kind of hard, but anyway, um, it's kind of hard, like I was loud and I was, I was kind of like always talking about design and all that kind of stuff. Um, But yet there was probably other people there who were much better in terms of being integral to the culture champions. How do you avoid selecting the loudest people in the room

Alicia Grimes: and

Gerry Scullion: ensuring that you're actually finding the true culture champion?

Alicia Grimes: Yeah, I think it's such a good point you raise because we often, Continue to get the loudest voices around the table, and actually that the quiet observers, those that sort of [00:13:00] actually, um, may not always speak up, but they are definitely observing what's going on, uh, really super important to make sure that we bring them into the process and the journey as well.

Alicia Grimes: I think there's a, There's a couple of parts to this. Having, making sure that there are, sort of, people can put themselves forward and being very clear on almost like the role description of what this looks like and what that will take in terms of participation and making that super inclusive to that.

Alicia Grimes: But also, Making sure thinking about where are they placed in the organization? What is their role? For example, if someone works very closely in a customer facing team, they may not always be the person that's speaking up in a meeting, but they're going to be very close to some of the problems to solve potentially.

Alicia Grimes: And how do you bring them in? Some times these people won't necessarily nominate themselves. But I think if you can be very clear on sort of the criteria that's involved in this and [00:14:00] what that looks like to bring them on that journey, we also sometimes recommend that team members recommend who is nominated for it, essentially, because they'll also see who's the person that actually kind of views this in a maybe non biased way or kind of has a, you know, super valuable voice to bring to the table.

Gerry Scullion: I love that because the risk there is in an organization that you know needs change, you can end up perpetuating the, the, The sort of the old norms and the old behaviors, so to speak. So having a kind of a nominated system is a great way of doing that. Do you have some sort of decision making process that you kind of lean towards?

Gerry Scullion: Like what are the factors that are more heavily weighted and so forth and being able to determine? Because getting that right is obviously so important to making sure that you're identifying the right people to [00:15:00] come on the journey.

Alicia Grimes: Yeah, I think there's a, there's a few different factors that come into this.

Alicia Grimes: I think it does come back down to what's the vision for the company that you want to be, because that will play into the voices you need around the table. I think it's also making sure it is a good mix as well. You know, it's, um, sometimes you might default to going to certain teams for these types of people because you can get caught up in, you know, again, that who has the loudest voice and what does it look like.

Alicia Grimes: But, you know, a lot of the time we need to make sure that we have representatives from the tech team. Um, who may not always necessarily have that voice in, in certain, uh, around certain tables, you know, also having that from a maybe marketing perspective. It's also the sales, the product, all of those in operations, all of those areas are really valuable because every single one of those elements.

Alicia Grimes: Is impacted by your culture and it [00:16:00] will become go from an internal element to an external, because your culture shows inside and outside. So having all of those representatives and how culture impacts them, because we're talking about their ways of working. Right. And so. Everyone should be involved in that process in their own teams, but also across teams as well.

Gerry Scullion: How do you stop, um, and this is probably a more of a contentious question, but how do you stop imposing your own perspective on what a good culture looks like into an organization? Because, you know, most people probably figured out that I'm pretty left leaning as regards my view of the world. And, you know, that's how I believe, you know, I wish more people were like that, but I'm not alone.

Gerry Scullion: So, it's sometimes it's not appropriate for me to impose those kind of perspectives. So, I'd love to know how you go about kind of parking your own perspective and what you think the organization should do.

Alicia Grimes: Yeah, it's such a good question. And, um, it's, it's a challenge [00:17:00] sometimes, right? Because as people, we all come with strong views and opinions of, of how things should be.

Alicia Grimes: There's a couple of things. The first one is, We stopped talking about good cultures. We talk about strong cultures because good cultures is subjective. Good cultures is a feeling strong cultures is actually you're set up in a way that's going to deliver on your strategy. And it's strong for your organization because what's good to one person, a good culture won't be good to another person.

Alicia Grimes: And so that's been an important factor for us to remember. And then we started talking about when we talk about strong culture, what are we actually talking about? And if we don't have some principles around that, and we call them our design principles, we're going to bring our bias every time as to what this should look like.

Alicia Grimes: So we did a bunch of research. We have our own scorecard where we actually, um, make sure all of our clients or collaborators go through this scorecard to kind of sense check where they're at in each of these various principles and areas. And we kept testing that and [00:18:00] refining it. And then over projects, we'd see what data was missing, what we need to think about, and what we were seeing from a strong culture perspective.

Alicia Grimes: So we have that element. So there's these 10 pillars that, um, or principles, I should say, that speak to what we see in strong cultures, and they should be there for every organization. So even if you are a rapid, super fast growing, um, startup tech startup, these principles should be there as well as if you are a older government agency, for example, those principles should be there.

Alicia Grimes: And then to add another layer to that, to prevent, make sure that that stood up and was true. That's when we brought in the company operating system of how you do things around here. And that's almost like our blueprint for designing these strong cultures. So you've got your principles and your blueprint to help us stay true and our clients stay true.

Alicia Grimes: And then also to measure it because culture can be seen as fluffy. It's not very [00:19:00] tangible. It's like, Oh, you do off sites and Christmas parties. And actually we do do off sites. Um, but

Gerry Scullion: future. co

Alicia Grimes: Thank you very much. But it's also like, actually, how do we make this really tangible and how do we measure it?

Alicia Grimes: And then you can remove that bias because then you start to bring in those metrics and it shows up what a strong culture is.

Gerry Scullion: So, Let's look at that strong culture, um, not strong culture kind of scenario. How do you evaluate? A culture, like if you're asked to, to work within an organization on, you know, potentially there's an area there that needs to be understood a little bit more.

Gerry Scullion: Um, what's the disconnect that you're looking for and how it kind of intersects potentially with the strategic direction of the organization. What would your first. Step B in that situation where you have to evaluate what is essentially a subculture as part of the larger culture in the organization.

Alicia Grimes: Yeah, [00:20:00] I love your use of the word subculture as well because that is such an important element to bear in mind because what the leadership team might see as your culture, what that looks like there versus what it looks like in a team are two very different things. Because you can have an amazing team culture within a wider culture.

Alicia Grimes: You can also have wobbly team cultures within a wider team culture. And so, this is why we have to run sort of diagnostics or discoveries, each of those levels as well. So, for example, leadership team, what does this look like for you against those core principles? Then for this team over here, sales, what does that look like for you?

Alicia Grimes: What does it look like over here in the tech team? How do we get a strong view of what that looks like in all of those different areas? And where are the discrepancies? Because that might work really well in each of those teams. But when those teams have to interact, there could be a shortfall in terms of what that looks like.

Alicia Grimes: And there often is right. Because you've created these [00:21:00] brilliant team cultures and then suddenly they have to interact. And the way we communicate over here is we love 10 meetings every day over here. They're like async, please. You know, I don't want to chat to anyone. So how do you. balance that between that and having to do those diagnostics across those different areas is, is really important.

Gerry Scullion: So when you say diagnostics, tell me, tell me a little bit more what that is. Is it a survey? Is that what

Alicia Grimes: it is? Um, the word survey always gives me the ick.

Gerry Scullion: That's why I went, survey.

Alicia Grimes: I went, survey, let's not say that word. Um, I mean, I, I can't, there is part, part of a survey in there, but, um, it's, yeah. We call it a scorecard because we don't like talking about surveys, maybe that's what it is.

Alicia Grimes: That's one part of it. But the way people talk about your organization in a survey will not give you true answers. People talk about what their employee engagement survey looked like and I'm like, but how much [00:22:00] information did you actually get from there? And I know how I've responded to an employee engagement survey in the past tends to be rapid clicking and that's, am I really being honest with it?

Alicia Grimes: Am I worried about the impact it might have? Are they watching me? Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So there's that part. Um, what does that look like? I think the really important, there's a step before this, there's us building trust as an external facilitator of these conversations. And how do we make sure that there is people can share their, like their, their voice, their opinions with a level of anonymity, or I can't say that word today.

Gerry Scullion: It's all right. We all understand, but

Alicia Grimes: also how do we, um, make sure that we're really honest about the information we're gathering. So it's then taking that information from the scorecard, then having those one to ones and those conversations, but also thinking about what are [00:23:00] these mechanisms for us to really reach the kind of core problem to solve.

Alicia Grimes: And I love the approach where you actually start to think about how would people talk about our culture to a stranger? How would they talk about it to someone joining our organization? Like how, how would we talk about how we do things around here? Like who is hired? Who is fired? Like how people are treated?

Alicia Grimes: That's what we want to get to the core of because that's when the stories start to come out. And it's from those stories and people's experiences that you really start to understand. Where there's those breakdowns across culture, subcultures, and what that looks like. So it is about those one to ones as well.

Gerry Scullion: So it's, it's design research, it's triangulation, it's multiple methods used to try and get a picture. This is groundbreaking. I, everyone listened to this. Wow, groundbreaking, who knew? Who knew you don't do a survey? Um, just on that, some people were like, what's wrong with the survey? And [00:24:00] let's talk about it briefly, because, you know, some people out there might be scratching their heads and why are they, why are they dissing surveys?

Gerry Scullion: Surveys is done, you know, when done well can be, can be quite good, but I want to hear your thoughts on like, why, why not a survey to do this?

Alicia Grimes: Surveys have their place, right? They're a foundational element. But if you, if I think about all the times, if I, in a design project had only focused on the survey data and how wrong I would have focused on the wrong problem for the wrong amount of time for far too long.

Alicia Grimes: Yeah. That for me is the stuff that means that surveys are a foundational element of where I can potentially dig deeper. But they are not all the information because of what happens in terms of how people answer surveys, how surveys are set out. Like there's a whole user experience in surveys themselves, right?

Alicia Grimes: So I think if you're great at designing a really awesome survey, that's super engaging, that kind of gets the right answers [00:25:00] to a certain level, that's great. But you can't, well, you may be able to, and if anyone's done this, we'd love to hear from you, where are those stories in between? Where are those human behaviors that a survey just won't Get that's my experience.

Alicia Grimes: But what about you? Where's your

Gerry Scullion: I mean, it's the same. Um, I always like in the survey to be like a flashlight in the cave to really identify where to go to next. Um, and that cave has to be very dark with the way and working to rely on the survey alone. Um, but it's it's mixed methods. It's lots of different stuff that I'm working congruently because, um, you know, In isolation, it'll only give you a snapshot.

Gerry Scullion: And I remember just on a really kind of side point years ago, I used to work at Myspace way back in Australia and I loved it. It was still one of my favorite places to ever work, but I do remember conversations around like, you know, how we could interpret user behavior and how we could slice that data, you know, for, for kind of marketing reasons and stuff like that.

Gerry Scullion: And [00:26:00] I was just like, Oh, I see it completely different. And then everyone else, you know, the data scientists would be like, Oh, we see it this way. And also we can reshape it to be this way. And I'm like, Wow. Okay. So suddenly that was a really eye opening moment for me, or in terms of that data that you capture from a survey.

Gerry Scullion: Isn't even a whisper. It's just a scallop into the problem. You've no understanding of what, what else is going on. So that's hopefully we've covered that off you there cynical person about surveys walking along with your dog. Uh, yeah, that's right. We're talking to you and when you're joking, um, So we've covered off some of the aspects there and how you approach those kind of, uh, dysfunctional subcultures within an organization.

Gerry Scullion: How do you track the behaviors? So, there's, I've definitely experienced this first hand. Um, I know people are out there as well, who have been in a similar position. When the strategic [00:27:00] document has been created by the organization, and they do a town hall, and everyone's like, Oh, I'm really excited about this.

Gerry Scullion: And, um, it might be on a Friday at three o'clock. It says, everybody here, like, this is going to be with the future is bright. Like, you know, don't leave your jobs. It's going to be cool. And then Monday morning they turn on the computer and there's like 300 emails and you're back to the ways we're working.

Gerry Scullion: So it's kind of the, the strategic document is almost like the future. And then the person who's working is in the present. How can they manage that workload? That is impending that their KPIs are set against,

Alicia Grimes: I

Gerry Scullion: need to get this stuff done. Otherwise I'm going to be in trouble and people are going to think I'm doing a bad job, but yet it's competing against this future strategic document, that vision that the CEO has painted the picture.

Gerry Scullion: How do you, as a practitioner in that world. Contest that.

Alicia Grimes: Hmm. Yeah. In

Gerry Scullion: 50 words or less. So this year.

Alicia Grimes: Yeah.

Gerry Scullion: I'm joking. [00:28:00]

Alicia Grimes: Thanks for this. It's an easy question. Um, the, the first thing. around that strategy piece is that strategy can often be created in isolation. Yeah. That person who is in that team over there, maybe remotely working remotely, like doesn't have any input to it.

Alicia Grimes: And that's the first. Yeah. challenge and problem. There are, there is such a lack of feedback loops in a lot of organizations and the, that needs to be a core part of what that strategy looks like. And often an announcement, a town hall, for example, be like, this is our strategy. And it's like, that's it. You know, and everyone's got to deliver on it.

Alicia Grimes: And that first part of having that strong culture is thinking about how does that strategy then sit across the [00:29:00] organization who is accountable for what as well. A lot of the time we talk about accountability and the lack of accountability because this big strategy has been announced at this level.

Alicia Grimes: Yeah, this person over here doesn't know how are they meant to measure their success against that strategy? And what is their role in delivering that 100%? And that's the biggest thing that can be a massive stressor for people. I've been in organizations before where I'm like, Okay. That's the strategy.

Alicia Grimes: What do I do within that? And again, this is why that roles and responsibilities and that org structure side of things is not just a nice structure on a piece of paper. We need to know what that role is, what's their metric of success, and then how are they going to do that and do that successfully, we need to move from that set up of announcing or.

Alicia Grimes: delivering or designing the strategy at that top level, and then just hoping it trickles [00:30:00] down. It needs to be really clear on what that looks like. And therefore it can, can it be team leaders who then take that responsibility of that? But are they empowered enough to do it? And so it's As I said, thanks for the easy question, but how do you break it down into those different areas?

Alicia Grimes: So it becomes so tangible.

Gerry Scullion: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, that challenge is one of the biggest challenge, not only for yourself, but for designers and for people who really want to improve the situations and improve the likelihood that people are going to want to stick around and, um, Be part of the journey of moving the organization forward.

Gerry Scullion: There's no one answer that's going to solve the problem. It is a complex problem. There's lots of experiments required. But it's the rigidity of those strategic, you know, kind of papers or whatever you want to call it, the mandates and how they're set in stone and they're revised every five years, usually done in isolation.[00:31:00]

Gerry Scullion: with no opportunity for feedback or revisiting in those five years. Am I right in saying that that's a potential, um, pitfall?

Alicia Grimes: Yeah, absolutely. And I think that I was discussing this with someone the other day about what's the mindset that we need or the skills we need for the future of work to help shift this, because we need to do it.

Alicia Grimes: Sharpish as well, because if we want to keep up with the way in which our environments are changing, technology is changing, then as leaders, as organizations, we need to keep up with it. And we were talking about it, like, what's the mindset we need, the skills we need, and this is where systems thinking is going to become even more important, because we can't be thinking in isolation, we have to be thinking in this system set up, and how Everything is interconnected from an organizational level, but also from that internal perspective to external as well.

Alicia Grimes: And I think that's the way we need to start thinking as leaders, but also within teams and [00:32:00] thinking about that impact that we have across the board.

Gerry Scullion: Yeah, absolutely. It's these aren't cardboard cutouts. Um, these are people's lives and, you know, Everything that we do will have an impact in the system at some point, um, for anyone who hasn't listened to Professor Neil Thies and this complexity theory conversation they've had over the last couple of years, we discussed this, um, it's super important, like, you know.

Gerry Scullion: But let's, let's take it a little bit more easier because I realize I've grilled you in a couple of toughies there in the last couple of minutes. You're like, Oh, thank God. Thank God. Be kind. Um, how did you get into this? Because I know when I was, you know, snooping around your LinkedIn there in the last couple of days, you did this services on Zoom with Stickthorne and Marcus and Adam Lawrence.

Alicia Grimes: Yeah.

Gerry Scullion: What's your background and why? Why did you move like into this world? Like, I guess you could call it an employee experience if you want. [00:33:00] Tell us about your journey to this point. Cause it's inspiring by the way. It is like, I found it very inspiring being on your website and reading about you and stuff.

Alicia Grimes: Thank you. Um, yeah, for me, it has been an interesting journey in terms of, and I won't take you right back through my CV. No one needs that. But for me, the process was. I've always been so interested in, in human behavior and doesn't explain necessarily why I did an art degree, but it started with an art degree.

Alicia Grimes: And I think it was this kind of creative thinking. That's just how my brain worked. But the journey that that then took is I started off in more of a sort of marketing role and was very much focused on that. Customer experience and then I worked at design council was marketing there and then everything started to slot into place in terms of, uh, I know why I'm so interested in human behavior and this, you know, way of thinking the double diamond, all of that.

Alicia Grimes: This makes sense [00:34:00] to me. My brain was clicking. I was like, great. And I was like, okay, marketing was fine, but I think there's, I want to delve deeper into this customer experience. And what does that look like? And went on that journey. Um, really. Got into design thinking in that space, worked with a lot of organizations and then building out their service design and design thinking capabilities and design programs around that so that they could become more focused around customer needs, customer problems.

Alicia Grimes: And then did a stint in consulting with big organizations and Be the kind of lead service designer on large digital transformation projects. And it'd be like the, the kind of brief is we think we need this big investment in some new tech. If you could come in, map out what that looks like, how that would all kind of fit into place, do that service design blueprint thing, and then present it back.

Alicia Grimes: And then we're good to go and [00:35:00] kind of secure the investment for this technology. I was like, okay, cool. Really enthusiastic. And then you get into the organizations and you'd spend that time doing the research on sort of validating if that was a technology and there's all these conversations constantly around the tech.

Alicia Grimes: And I'd be watching, observing the teams or interacting with the teams. And. Probably became less and less popular over time reporting back. Hey, I don't think this is going to be a tech solution. I think it's a team solution we'll be looking at. And I think we need to be looking at how your teams work together before we then think about how they'll work with this technology.

Alicia Grimes: And that for me was kind of a constant problem I was coming up against. I kept Seeing that, great, I get that you think this is the tech solution, but you have incredible people here, but they are not reaching their full potential because you are not setting them up for success. [00:36:00] They are not clear on their ways of working.

Alicia Grimes: They're not clear on how they do things and work together. And so I became, and still am quite obsessed about that because I think we can only. create design, great products and services. If we have our people set up for success. Yeah, I wanted to apply my service design knowledge and the way that we can build those capabilities within teams to solve that problem.

Alicia Grimes: And that's where I am today.

Gerry Scullion: Excellent. Like the future kind is an interesting, um, name for the business. Um, where did all this come about? Like, you know, the future kind of you mentioned you've been doing it for a couple of years now.

Alicia Grimes: And

Gerry Scullion: you do off sites and this is not a sales pitch folks, the off sites have got some, um, really, it's just, they, they look really cool in terms of some of the statistics that you're throwing out there.

Gerry Scullion: I think it was 27 percent alignment or I can't remember what the exact statistic was, but, um, What's the benefit of taking people [00:37:00] outside of their organization and going away to a physical location to try and resolve some of these issues?

Alicia Grimes: So I love the fact that we work in a remote world and that we have that flexibility to work where we want to.

Alicia Grimes: And I think it's important. We also, it's super important that we have that connection in that time together. Companies can spend a lot of time. On those retreats, a lot of time and money, I should say on those retreats. And then they all go back to their respective places and very little can change sometimes.

Alicia Grimes: And so when we think about how we design retreats, we actually say kind of what's the. biggest challenge for you right now. And how can we use that time together to co design as a team, how you can solve that challenge, establish new rituals or ways of working in that time together and start to embed that whilst you are all together.

Alicia Grimes: And then what is that kind of [00:38:00] roadmap, that backlog for you to then put it in place post that. And Sometimes, you know, when we say we do off sites, people go, Oh, great. So that must be a lot of fun. You do some quizzes, you might do a good cooking class. And that's not what we do. That's a lovely thing to do for a sense of belonging and building those human connections.

Alicia Grimes: But we actually have done things like, uh, for one team, we worked with. over a week, we did a hackathon, a culture hackathon. And we actually started with their new values. We made sure it was a, it was a tech team. We made sure that we spoke that tech language and we came up with what are the use cases, the user stories, kind of what are the behaviors, but then talked about them in terms of what are kind of our acceptance criteria.

Alicia Grimes: We very much with the view that we wanted to embed the values and Really kind of enhance their collaboration and they co designed what those rituals would be. And then by the end of the week, they'd actually establish those into those ways of working so that when they went back to their respective [00:39:00] locations and various countries, that was in place in terms of actually how they were going to work together better across teams.

Alicia Grimes: And that for me is where it's really powerful because that time together and an offsite can mean that I think it might be around. It increases connection engagement by potentially around 27 percent when you have that time together.

Gerry Scullion: Yeah, absolutely. So, um, we're coming towards the end of the episode here, um, Alicia.

Gerry Scullion: So, if people are looking to get in touch, obviously, if they want to engage, thefuturekind. co is the website. Um, but if they've got questions for you, what's the best way for people to get in touch with you and what that might look like?

Alicia Grimes: So sad this is coming to an end, but if you would like to get in touch, um, I'm on LinkedIn a lot.

Alicia Grimes: I talk about a lot of what we do on a, on a regular basis there. So if you can check me out at Alyssia Grimes on LinkedIn, which is forward slash Alyssia Grimes.

Gerry Scullion: I'll put a link to that [00:40:00] in the show notes, folks. If you're watching on YouTube, it's in the description. Um, And generally speaking, I wrap up every episode by thanking people, especially you Alicia today, because it's just you on your own.

Gerry Scullion: You know, it is kind of, you know, hard to be put on the spot and asked, you know, questions left and right. So thanks for your vulnerability and coming on and, um, you know, allowing me to do that because I know sometimes it can't be easy, but you were absolutely brilliant. Um, you know, whenever you're up to the writing a book or whatever it is you're doing next, you're always welcome on the podcast.

Gerry Scullion: So thanks so much for your time.

Alicia Grimes: Thanks, Jerry. I've really enjoyed it.