EP255: The Seven Elements Behind Every Working Business
Jens Heitland speaks with John Glennane, CEO of Capventis, about why businesses collapse under layers of disconnected technology and what it takes to design an organization deliberately instead of assembling one by accident. The conversation moves through business design, technology alignment, organizational transformation, systems thinking, and digital strategy, and returns often to why understanding a system by hand still matters before anyone tries to automate it.
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The Seven Elements Behind Every Working Business
I spent two days this week with John Glennane, the CEO of the Irish consultancy Capventis, recording a conversation that returned again and again to why organizations keep buying technology before they understand what their business actually needs from it.
John has spent almost three decades inside the same industry, watching companies replace one system with another without ever asking whether the underlying design of the business made sense in the first place. He worked on a systems integration project for Compaq in the late 1990s that spanned more than thirty countries, and it was there, watching an old system get swapped out for a new one at enormous cost and effort, that he began noticing the same pattern repeat itself everywhere he looked afterward. Technology usually arrives promising simplicity, and businesses adopt it because building their own systems from scratch is expensive and slow, which leaves them with what John calls point solutions, tools that solve one narrow problem well but were never designed to work together.
The deeper issue, as John described it, is a question of sequence. Most organizations align their business processes to whatever technology they have already purchased, rather than shaping their technology around what the business actually needs. His current project, called Glue, tries to reverse that order by breaking every business need down into what he calls its smallest components: things, relationships, processes, collections, structures, space, and time, before any technology decision gets made. It is a deliberately unglamorous list, and none of it sounds like innovation, yet the difference between a system that can adapt and one that quietly calcifies often comes down to exactly this kind of groundwork.
He used the image of a radio to explain why this matters. If you want to understand how something works, you take it apart piece by piece until you reach the smallest components, and only then can you reliably put it back together in a new way. He extended that image to artificial intelligence directly: a tool that hands over every piece of the radio in seconds works as an accelerant for someone who already understands how the radio comes together, but for someone who has never taken one apart, it becomes a shortcut around the one experience that would have produced real capability in the first place.
The businesses that struggle, in his experience, are usually the ones carrying what he calls technical debt, the accumulated weight of platforms bought in isolation over years, each solving its own narrow problem while quietly making the larger system harder to change. Maintaining that debt consumes the time and energy that could otherwise go toward genuine improvement. He described this as a kind of inertia, one of four recurring patterns he tracks in his own work, alongside accidental improvement, outright backfires, and the deliberate step change that actually moves an organization forward. Much of what passes for improvement, in his account, is the accidental kind, unplanned, hard to repeat, and mistaken for strategy after the fact.
The discipline underneath John's approach matters more than the technology itself. Understanding a system by taking it apart, whether that system is a business, a piece of software, or a radio on a workbench, takes longer than buying a ready-made answer. It produces people and organizations capable of adapting when the next change arrives, because they understand what they built and why. John examines this same discipline at length in his book, Improve: A Good Idea. I have watched large organizations move in both directions over thirty years. The ones that endure are rarely the fastest to adopt something new. They are the ones willing to understand themselves first.
Human Innovation with Jens Heitland is produced by Heitland Media Group.*
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John Glennane: https://www.linkedin.com/in/john-glennane-bb7496/
Business: https://www.capventis.com/
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Transcript
[00:00:00] Jens Heitland: John, welcome to the Netherlands. Great to have you here.
[00:00:03] John Glennane: Thank you, Jens, and your team for having me. , it's really nice to be back in the Netherlands. You know, I lived here for 10 years, and, , fond memories.
[00:00:10] Jens Heitland: Let's start with Miss O'Neill.
[00:00:14] John Glennane: Wow, straight in.
[00:00:15] Jens Heitland: Yeah.
[00:00:16] John Glennane: Miss O'Neill, , you know, the special thing about Miss O'Neill for me, she was my piano teacher when I was 17 years old, just for one year, and I was doing this, , exam and, , she was the one teacher that wasn't prepared to accept an average performance or a lazy attitude or just, just do the piano lesson.
, so she had a huge impact on me because not only did she get me to do better and to try harder, but she gave me a, a whole different view of the piece of music I was trying to learn.
[00:00:53] Jens Heitland: So from sitting in the room with Miss O'Neill to today being the owner and, and CEO of several companies, what happened?
[00:01:04] John Glennane: She understood people. She understood what it was to be a teacher, a leader. , and she understood what it was all about, which was the student and bringing out the best in the student. And, , it's funny how she was tough, but did I enjoy those lessons.
[00:01:26] Jens Heitland: What- was that the, the early way to get into engineering as well?
Or ca- did, did that came later?
[00:01:35] John Glennane: Well, we, we had career guidance to kind of guide us, or try to guide us towards our career objective. And, , I got into engineering maybe because the engineer who came in and gave us the presentations just sounded like a cool guy, and looked, , sounded like his job was interesting.
But, you know, when you look at something like music, , it's all the same. You know, there's structure, there's harmony, there's counterpoint, there's mechanics, , there's practice. You know, there's good and bad. You know, , it's just a microcosm of, of engineering. So engineering looked like an interesting thing to study in college with no real understanding of where it was gonna take me.
[00:02:17] Jens Heitland: How, how was it at that time? Was it a lot of your friends went into engineering as well? Or were you unique? ,
[00:02:23] John Glennane: none of my friends went into engineering. , none of my family ever were engineers. So f- , but I met lots of friends and made lots of friends who are still friends of mine over, over, , ever since.
, so, , yeah, it was a, a kind of just an interesting voyage of discovery, you might say.
[00:02:42] Jens Heitland: Yeah, it's, it's quite interesting. For me, it was similar to, to, to your case, having this counseling when, when you were, I think, in eighth grade in Germany, at least at that time. You, you kind of need to figure out what do you want to do in the future.
Do you want to study? Do you want to start... 'Cause Germany has this specific education system- Yeah ... where you can start working with 16, and you do an education which is practical and- Yeah ... , theoretical at the same time. So you go to school and work in an organization. And we used computers at that time already, , where you need to answer loads of questions, and then it comes out, "Hey, this kind of jobs will fit to your profile."
And for me, it was electrical engineering that came out, and that's how I ended up being an electrical engineer. At least interested in it as a starting point. Okay.
[00:03:30] John Glennane: So would you say the computer program got it right?
[00:03:32] Jens Heitland: I think so, but I, I think the, if talking about me, it's, it was more the way I think, and it's most probably the algorithm at that time.
I'm not sure if it was that smart already, but it's more my way of thinking is most probably better connected to engineering because today I'm not really working in a normal engineering context. I still apply the way of thinking of engineering, but I'm not working as a electrical engineer anymore, so.
[00:04:01] John Glennane: See, the funny thing is, you know, when, , I, I think, I think it's good when you hear educators say to people that the world is their oyster. They can do anything. You know, the job of the future doesn't exist yet. These are- Yeah ... these are truisms. I, I think, , what, what I've discovered over my life of experience is that it's all the same stuff.
So, , when we say we're an engineering critical thinker, , so is the poet. Yeah. You know? So is the musician, the composer, you know, the carpenter. , I like the system in Germany where it's very focused on apprenticeship. It's very focused on hands-on learning from the masters, , and getting involved and mixing that with the theory.
Both are essential, but, you know, my s- the system I grew up in was all theory and no practice.
[00:04:50] Jens Heitland: Yeah. ,
[00:04:51] John Glennane: so you're missing half. , so I think, , we end up kind of generating the same creative, , skill set in our mindset no matter what we do as a career-
[00:05:05] Jens Heitland: Yeah ...
[00:05:06] John Glennane: if we allow ourselves to, to, to find that vocation.
[00:05:10] Jens Heitland: I, I think the, the, the key part for me, and I see this now with my daughter as well, being in the Netherlands, is learning by doing, not just by the theory. And, , at least for my case, my daughter was in different school system, so she started kindergarten before COVID hit in Denmark. Then we moved to Germany inside of, , COVID for a short amount of time, so she was in a kindergarten in, in, , Germany.
And then we moved to Spain and later on then she started school. , and now she's in a school in the Netherlands, and it's so different, the educational system and how they, let's say, get the kids to ask questions. In Germany, the, it was all about how do you follow the order of the, the teacher, and you were not allowed to question them.
And in the Netherlands, it's almost the opposite. It's like maybe not question the teacher per se, but question to, to understand. And just the training that I see in, in, like, my daughter growing up is the education of asking the question is something I love to see, 'cause for me this is one of the most important things to learn as a, as a han in general, asking interesting questions.
[00:06:27] John Glennane: That's a fantastic point. And, , you know, I do, too, , I do also have a daughter who started- ... in the Netherlands education system. I'm a huge admirer of the education system here and other systems in Europe which, , I've studied, you know, as part of the research that, , I'm doing. And, , you know, - It's, incredible to realize that the very, very young children are full of questions and full of curiosity, and us as parents and teachers, , should be very, very aware of that, and should respond to it in a very supportive way.
No question is a stupid question.
[00:07:09] Jens Heitland: Yeah. ,
[00:07:10] John Glennane: and, , maybe again, as with everything, there's a counterpoint. In school, we need to learn the basics. That's, learn by rs Yeah ... the three Rs they talk about, you know, reading, writing, and rithmetic, is it? Or- ... arithmetic? , we need to learn those skills, so it's not good to have an education system where-
[00:07:33] Jens Heitland: You don't
[00:07:34] John Glennane: do any-
just forget about that ... yeah, agree agree You know? We can't just do what we like- in society. But we, , shouldn't maybe condition ourselves too much in education, and leave plenty of space for creative activity.
[00:07:47] Jens Heitland: Yeah. For, for me it's the how can be different, and that's something I think needs to evolve-
[00:07:52] John Glennane: Yeah
[00:07:52] Jens Heitland: as well with technology. Because- Yeah ... there are certain things where technology might help, but where technology might be as well the opposite. And we have talked about that previously. We have decided as a family, I mean, she's eight right now, she's not allowed to use any screens. She's not allowed to use technology.
She should use paper, pen, and play as much as possible. Obviously, you cannot do this black and white. She, she, she's using the iPad to listen to audiobooks, , but she's not allowed to sit more than half an hour per week on the iPad to watch something.
[00:08:29] John Glennane: I think that's fantastic. I think, , some of the more advanced or enlightened or mature education systems in the world are t- removing technology from- Yeah
schools, like in Sweden and in Finland, , and places like that. And I think it's terrible that we're too, , blown away by the technology. We, we believe it's good. , , I learned this when I was teaching in university in Galway after I did my master's degree. I had mastered this computer, you know, where I could create wonderful data entry and graphs and everything, and I brought it into the lab for engineering students and said, "Instead of drawing on your pen and paper, you can put it in the computer and see the perfect graph."
And I was very proud of myself, until years later I realized what a bad mistake it was- ... because they weren't learning anything. They were just putting the nbers into the computer and just- Yeah, agree ... getting the results. And, , it's quite sobering when you look back and realize all the mistakes you were making.
, but totally believing in the... , I think technology is wonderful, but it has a proper place, and we need to remember what that place should be and maybe rediscover it.
[00:09:43] Jens Heitland: Yeah. I think that's, especially now with the te- the speed of technology advancement-
[00:09:49] John Glennane: Yeah ...
[00:09:49] Jens Heitland: I was just talking with a, a friend the other day, and we were looking backwards.
Because you, you can only connect the dots backwards, not forwards. It was very h- hard to connect forwards. So we, we were, we were just looking at the, the last 20, 30 years that I can still remember how much technology. Like, I, I'm, I think, the last generation that still remembers before we had a smartphone, before we had a mobile phone even, before we had a computer at home.
I still grew up with the old telephones where you need to run to the hallway and, and it was connected to a socket. Was even not a, , like, headless or cordless phone at that time. And now it's so advanced. Now you have ChatGPT, whatever it is, AI on your phone, and you can ask any question that you want.
This, like, extreme and fast movement in just 30 years. But we as hans, we have not changed. Like, our, our basic han needs and everything is still the same, and we just have super computers now if we take the phone as one of the examples.
[00:10:56] John Glennane: Well, I think we should be careful, , congratulating ourselves on how good our technology is.
- I think we should also separate out the different types of technology, , and the role of technology, , especially when we're in an age now which has introduced words like AI and- Mm ... you know, as if, , it's something new or different. It's just, it's just another evolution of technology in my book. , but one of the things that has occurred to me in a career, I've spent my career at the coalface working with businesses and working with technology, , where we've sort of hear people saying, "Isn't the world so much more advanced because of technology?"
, and sometimes I ask, well, is the world being held back because of technology? And people don't think that. , the iPhone is a fantastic invention. It's absolutely brilliant, but it's a point solution that in a sense should be a point solution. Although it's a platform for lots of things it can do, as Steve Jobs told us when he launched it first, "It's not just a phone anymore, it's a device."
, and those kind of things are good and work well, but what's missing in all of that is how we actually run our businesses- way beyond the point solution. And I still find it incredible, or not incredible, but, , is it not a bit ironic that we're still filling out paper forms?
[00:12:29] Jens Heitland: Yeah, very true. Before we go forward, can you explain what a point solution is for those that have never heard about it?
[00:12:37] John Glennane: Well, - Like yourself, I've gone through, but longer than yourself, I've gone through the kind of evolution of the technology age and its jargon.
[00:12:48] Jens Heitland: Okay. ,
[00:12:48] John Glennane: I've also gone through many consulting strategies and models, also with its jargon, and with its, , misuse of some, , good philosophies. So for example, it's good to focus.
Doesn't mean you should have a focused technology solution for every part of your organization, because what we end up with is a lot of point solutions, , which should be working together, but don't. So a point solution for me is the nature of most of the technology we have out there. But of course, the industry calls them platforms.
[00:13:35] Jens Heitland: Hmm.
[00:13:35] John Glennane: But a platform tells me, if I look it up, the meaning of the word is the kind of a totality of something. Like, , I don't put a drama on multiple platforms in the theater. There's just one platform, and it should support the whole stage. It should support the whole play. , in our business environment, we have lots of point solutions.
I call them pointy because they're all different. They're all pointing in different directions, and yet they're trying to enable something which is fundamentally unified
[00:14:11] Jens Heitland: If, if we use that analogy in a, in an organizational context for normal people, so I'm trying to, to find solution that everyone understands.
So on one hand you have, let's say, Microsoft where you have emails and calendar in one application, and then on the other hand you have an enterprise solution which, let's say Salesforce, which, , it's a CRM solution. These are two different things in an organizational context, and they're, if I understand pointy, but they're don't really connect to each other.
There may be integrations where you can, like, send an email and the email will be saved somewhere, but it's not really integrated as a proper solution, if I understand that right.
[00:14:55] John Glennane: Yes. I mean, when I started my career in the wonderful world of management consulting in, back in London, , you know, terms like systems integration were supposed to mean, you know, enabling technology to integrate with s- with business.
[00:15:12] Jens Heitland: Mm.
[00:15:12] John Glennane: Whereas today, people interpret systems integration as connecting things that are disconnected, , interfacing, moving data from one system to the other with a lot of, , things you need to do to get it in a shape to move from one system to the other. , so in that sense, , we persist not in unifying things, but we persist in further fragmenting them.
You know, there's lots of AI apps- Yeah, yeah ... you were telling me this morning, there's lots of AI apps, which are wonderful things, and you can create them yourself, , but they do very, very specific tasks. Yeah. , unfortunately, the world i- in reality, in nature, is completely connected. , you know, , I think John Muir, the American, , guy out in the wilderness in the 1900s or the 1800s, you know, made the comment that every time you look at something in nature, you realize it's connected to everything else, and business is no different.
[00:16:12] Jens Heitland: Yeah. If we take that to loop back to still, like, the mid, maybe, of your career- In 1999, you worked with a gentleman named Declan in a project of, , large integration. What was the result of that integration, and what did you decide then to do?
[00:16:34] John Glennane: Well, it was a, it was a fantastic pro- I was working with, , Pricewaterhouse before they became PwC, , Pricewaterhouse in Amsterdam.
, and, , I was leading up their technology, , practice. , and there was a very, very large, , systems integration project happening, which was to, , support the, , the future direction of a global computer manufacturers called Compaq at the time, I don't think I'm giving any secrets away when I say that, , which was sub- subsequently bought by HP.
, but at the time, we were trying to, , take out an old system and replace it with an entirely new system, , for 36 countries in Europe and a nber of countries further afield, , like Singapore and Curaçao and places like that, and, , in Africa. , and that was an amazing experience. And in that project, I met Declan Shannon.
And Declan Shannon was a contractor. He came into the project. , I made good friends with him. Very interesting guy. , he was a finance guy, , not really an engineering guy, but he was helping us to prepare data and all of the rest of it. And in that time, , in the talking with him, we, we, we kind of said, "Well, you only live once," and, , had this idea of setting up a business, , , that specialized in what we were learning.
, so we decided to set up, , Ventis at the time, myself and Declan.
[00:18:04] Jens Heitland: What was the problem that you started to, that, that you wanted to solve with Ventis at that time?
[00:18:12] John Glennane: Well, we, we, I don't think we were trying to solve a problem. I think we were, at that time, sort of following a trend.
[00:18:19] Jens Heitland: Yeah. ,
[00:18:19] John Glennane: I don't think we were that, , enlightened-
[00:18:21] Jens Heitland: So you have seen it as an opportunity for you to- An opportunity Yeah
[00:18:23] John Glennane: an opportunity to create a business and, and to be useful in, in, in the world of, , business technology and people. , so we-- You mentioned CRM. CRM was the buzzword at the time. So we decided to, , enter this world and, and, and partner with these technologies coming from primarily the, , the United States, , and to help those technologies become successful.
So we were aligning business to technology, which today I think is completely the wrong way around.
[00:18:58] Jens Heitland: Why is that the wrong way?
[00:18:59] John Glennane: Well, - That was the era when the package had arrived. So my era, my early era was about going into businesses or businesses, and usually enterprise, big businesses, 'cause they were the only people who could afford to build their own system.
So banks and government were leading the way, and large manufacturing organizations. The package came along, , promising, you know, you don't need to build anymore. Mm. You can, , you can buy. Why buy, why build when you can buy? , so they would, , create this solution and sell it to the, to the market. , and that's the, that's the world I entered with our own business-
[00:19:45] Jens Heitland: Yeah
[00:19:45] John Glennane: , through the early noughties and, , , up to today. , so the issue is that you are trying to align business to that technology. , we pay lip service to terms like design and the, what the business needs. , and, , really what we're doing is, , or were doing as far as my company is concerned, was trying to make the technology work for the business.
Mm. , I think that's totally the wrong way. I think technology should be enabling the business need, and the business should be in the driving seat, not the other way around. So instead of aligning business to technology, we should be aligning technology to business.
[00:20:35] Jens Heitland: That's an interesting point, and we'll go back to that later.
Before we go into that, as part of you starting your business in the early days, then, then you, you, you transformed it, if we call it that way, to being now Capventis. What, what, what is the difference between the early days and how, how you run it today?
[00:21:01] John Glennane: I think it was, - There was a gradual transition from, , building a team that was trained in the technology we were trying to implement and implementing that technology as efficiently as possible.
Our customers expected that as well because th- they were led to believe we buy the technology, it's very straightforward, in it goes. And as the years went by, I started to realize as well, actually from a very early time, y- you know, it was always about I need to understand the needs of the customer. I need to- Yeah
understand their culture, their business model, what, what they're trying to achieve. I need to understand that and then try to make sense of that with respect to the technology. So gradually we started to say, "Let's forget about the technology for a minute and just focus on the business need and the, and the organization, and create a model or a design," we call it a design or a blueprint, for, for what they need.
And then we should be taking that to the technology and saying, "Can you enable?" Yeah. , and that was the, that was what brought us, , over 15 years, let's say, to where we are today, since, , 2016, 2018, when, , Mike Hawks joined us. Mike Hawks is my collaborator in Next Generation. , he's, , a extraordinary individual, , with phenomenal experience in the world of technology, with a deep understanding of technology, probably because he started his career right down at the machine code level.
Mm. He understands technology down to the bits and the bytes, , the, the, , the, the level where everything is, is founded. And I started to realize that we could, , actually create a technology that would, first of all, enable design- Okay, and then secondly, , enable what was being designed
[00:23:05] Jens Heitland: Yeah
[00:23:06] John Glennane: as, as, as fitting.
You know, that, that's really the goal, the aim.
[00:23:11] Jens Heitland: How was it for your team? So you, you were technology first in the be- beginning, and I guess the team members were all technologists and engineers and deep into the tech, and then you moved gradually towards design and understanding organization as far as I understand.
[00:23:28] John Glennane: Well, actually, actually, because of the package, the team is not-
[00:23:33] Jens Heitland: Mm ...
[00:23:33] John Glennane: deep technical. And that's part of the issue, I think, is that we, we've kind of lost our understanding of what, how the technology works. We just learn how to implement it, , to work with it on the surface. So the good thing about that is we can, it, it suits many, many people to be able to enter that workspace, , and that's a good thing.
, but, , when the business asks to be able to do things, like you said, with the email and the CRM system and we want to make them to work together, things break down a
[00:24:12] Jens Heitland: bit.
[00:24:12] John Glennane: Mm. And, , that's when you want a team that has the faculty or the agency or the ability to be able to work at that level, and that only came for us when Mike joined us.
[00:24:23] Jens Heitland: Yeah. Interesting. How, how did the team members take that? Because they haven't had that view before.
[00:24:31] John Glennane: Oh, the, our, our, our, our, our team, , I think, well, is, it's all about confidence. , , you know, I think, , knowing how things work is one of the most important things for all of us in work.
[00:24:46] Jens Heitland: Yeah.
[00:24:47] John Glennane: If, if, if, if, if, if we don't know how things work, we just get stressed.
, and I've seen a lot of that. , so the team took that added capability really well because it meant that we suddenly were able to work with customers and problems that were way beyond those packages we were helping to implement. Yeah. , and I suppose that in itself helped us to further, , evolve or mature our business design methodology because that's the language of business.
[00:25:20] Jens Heitland: Mm.
[00:25:21] John Glennane: It's the language that we need to become fluent at.
[00:25:24] Jens Heitland: So if I understand you right, is today you understand the business and then help the business to understand what the technical solution is they need?
[00:25:35] John Glennane: Yes, and, , it's another major sort of realization for me i- in the years between 2016, let's say, and now, , is that- It is not of any value and not possible for me to improve your business.
And so we needed to learn the fact that, , the only people that can improve the business are the people in the business. So our job is to realize that and to be there as, , as a advisor. Well, that's a strong word. As, as a help-
[00:26:16] Jens Heitland: Yeah ...
[00:26:17] John Glennane: to that. So we bring skillsets and, let's say, experience across industry, and our knowledge of doing projects or experience of doing projects.
But my major ambition now is to help businesses become s- much more self-sufficient. So bringing those skillsets that we have to our customers, , that's very, very important to me.
[00:26:38] Jens Heitland: Yeah. Let's jp to the next topic. What makes a good idea a good idea?
[00:26:47] John Glennane: Now, that's a very difficult question. , it's a, , it's a very good question.
So what's an idea? First of all, an idea is something which, , springs from thoughts. , maybe an idea is a collection of thoughts or an organized collection of thoughts. , but most of us come up with ideas because we think of something of value that should happen in the future. So an idea is future. It has to be future.
, if it's a real value thing, , or an improvement thing, it has to be something we've never done before. It has to be a new thing. It has to be original. , that's a business concept. If you're, if you're taking somebody else's solution, you're just copying. That's not a great strategy for business, and certainly not a strategy for improvement.
So, , I suppose that the, the, the idea is just the synthesis of something which offers, , value, and that's the start of what I would call the steps of improvement.
[00:27:52] Jens Heitland: Yeah.
[00:27:53] John Glennane: And everything that follows is about setting ourselves up to make that idea successful, you know, a successful reality.
[00:28:01] Jens Heitland: If we take that to, to business, I have not met any company that does not want to improve, but I have met and seen a lot of companies that somehow get stuck.
From your experience, what, what, what is the reason that they get stuck?
[00:28:24] John Glennane: There's a lot of reasons, , , that we might find it difficult to move forward. One of the main paradoxes of improvement is that we want to improve, as you say, but we find it difficult to change. , one of the biggest drivers, it's like gravity, is inertia.
[00:28:40] Jens Heitland: Oh, yeah
[00:28:41] John Glennane: Inertia. And inertia can come in various forms.
inertia can be to do with people's motivations, , people's biases. , , you know, when you have a problem, there's always somebody making a profit.
[00:28:58] Jens Heitland: Yeah true
[00:29:01] John Glennane: and can be difficult to change things because change is a bit unsettling, , and can be a little bit scary so, , the other, the other side of it in business world, why do people get stuck?
, we have this term in the industry called technical debt, , which really is a description of where all of this 30 years of package solutions and point solutions and platforms masquerading as solutions or, , , is, has landed us in, in a world of technical debt. I call it the mess in the basement. , because not only have we put technologies in the basement, but they go out of date very quickly.
[00:29:45] Jens Heitland: Mm.
[00:29:46] John Glennane: So, , , that also causes a change. So, , a difficulty to change, , because we're spending most of our time in businesses just keeping the lights on, just maintaining that debt.
[00:30:00] Jens Heitland: Yeah. ,
[00:30:01] John Glennane: and I don't think that's a good thing, and I think we need to change from that. And the answer isn't to create another layer of sophisticated technology on top of it, which is unfortunately a lot of the, , the industry's, , sort of reaction, is forget about what's there and just look at the new thing.
, and that's okay if the new thing replaces what's there. But if it can't replace what's there, we're just adding to the technical debt.
[00:30:28] Jens Heitland: Yeah. What, what I have seen working inside of super large organizations worldwide was some, some organizations somehow wait until they're pushed to change and some organization are early on, like, I don't know if you want to call them early adopters, but they're on a, almost on a continuous improvement loop to figure out how they evolve over time, and they have that somehow in their DNA.
But others are only moving when, when there's no other way anymore.
[00:31:01] John Glennane: Well, th- that's a very good question and a very good observation, I think. , you know, are, are you changing because you have to, or are you changing because you want to? , you might argue that a lot of organizations, especially the older legacy organizations, we get comfortable, we get lazy, we get, , let's not rock the boat, everything's fine- Yeah
everything's going good.
[00:31:23] Jens Heitland: We have done it always this way.
[00:31:25] John Glennane: Exactly. Well, maybe, maybe. , well, maybe that is exactly how it works. And then, and then what's happening is around that you've got, , the imaginators, the, the, the visionaries, the hang on, the people who step back and say, "Hang on, we, you know, we could create a new market, or we could create a new solution to an existing market."
, so... And I've been asked this question before, and I think, I c- I think, , an answer to the problem is if you're changing because you have to, you've al- you're already too late. - So we need to catch up then and, , that's not, that's a difficult project to be playing catch-up-
[00:32:09] Jens Heitland: Yeah ...
[00:32:09] John Glennane: you know, rather than creating something new.
And organizations where we're creating something new, if we have the right culture, are exciting. , everybody's creative, everybody's energetic, everybody is feeling good about it. , it's a wonderful place to be when you're in that position. So I suppose for the legacy, the, the challenge is to change that culture if possible.
, the things stopping it are the messes in the basin.
[00:32:38] Jens Heitland: But that means it's not a technical problem, it's a han problem.
[00:32:43] John Glennane: Everything is a han problem. Everything is- it comes back to people. , that's why I, , I push back on all this intelligence and artificial this and artificial that. I think we should not forget that we are han and the han, , natural intelligence is incredibly sophisticated and it's all about that anyway.
[00:33:05] Jens Heitland: Yeah. But then, so that means in one hand we all want to improve all the time, but on the other hand, we're basically don't want to change.
[00:33:16] John Glennane: That's, that's the paradox.
[00:33:17] Jens Heitland: At the same time.
[00:33:18] John Glennane: At the same time. There's, there's, there's always a counter-
[00:33:20] Jens Heitland: Yeah ... ,
[00:33:21] John Glennane: to most things. , but how many times in our, you know, , you know...
There is no difference between business and the rest of work, the rest of life. There should not be. You know? , we're always designing. I don't think design ever stops. Yeah. We're always changing. We're always, ... Be- and the fact is it's not that we're trying to make a change, we're changing whether we like it or not, you know?
[00:33:46] Jens Heitland: Yeah.
[00:33:46] John Glennane: So we gotta learn that and maybe embrace it rather than fight it.
[00:33:50] Jens Heitland: One, one of the things you talk about is four biases.
[00:33:55] John Glennane: Yes.
[00:33:56] Jens Heitland: And we have touched on one a- already. Can you explain that so that people understand what you mean with the four biases?
[00:34:03] John Glennane: Well, you know, , - I work with another guy called James.
, James and Mike and a few other people in our organization, and we talk about these things a lot. So, , we kind of sit back and take the time to really think about what is it we're trying to do here, and what is it we're... what's, what's the purpose of our activity? And, , if we call ourselves business improvers or improvers or, , people that help our customers improve themselves, we need to understand what improvement is about.
So out of that discussion, we realized that most improvements, , that people... an awful lot of improvements are accidental.
[00:34:45] Jens Heitland: Hmm.
[00:34:45] John Glennane: You know, they're, , like the discovery of penicillin. It was a complete accident. , so in other words, we're trying to do something, , but realize we... realize something else. , an awful lot of business improvement ends up in backfiring.
, there's a great German word, verschlimmbesserung, , which, , I hope I pronounced that right.
[00:35:08] Jens Heitland: Verschlimmbesserung.
[00:35:10] John Glennane: Verschlimmbesserung. , which, , I was given by a person who understands how to speak German. , and, , it's a wonderful world, , word. So it's like worse betterment.
[00:35:21] Jens Heitland: Yeah. ,
[00:35:22] John Glennane: it's a backfire.
In English, we call it a backfire. Yeah. , and we try something, we are sure about it, we put a lot of energy into it, and we end up making things worse. , so that's, that's the B of BIAS. , inertia, I talked about, is the I. Inertia is the big drag. It's the drag. Accidental is, , a wonderful outcome, but it's a happy accident.
We can't run or define our world by happy accident. Yeah. You know, we can't afford that too much. , when we, when we get accidental improvement, be happy. , the real, , improvement we're looking for is step change, you know?
[00:36:02] Jens Heitland: What is a
[00:36:03] John Glennane: step change? Step, step change is, , a positive effort, positive value.
That's what step change is. And, , it's not as common as we think, , but that's what we're trying to do, is to come up with that idea and, , the effort we put in should produce that value, that real value, and, and, , and, and try to achieve that step change. And only then, only then can we continue that process through what I call...
not I call, which, , Toyota called, , Kaizen.
[00:36:41] Jens Heitland: Yeah. Continuous improvement and-
[00:36:43] John Glennane: Continuous improvement. Yeah,
[00:36:43] Jens Heitland: yeah.
[00:36:44] John Glennane: But, , the problem again is we can't continuously improve something that's fundamentally bad to start with.
[00:36:52] Jens Heitland: E- let's stay with Toyota because I read the Kaizen book, I don't know, when I was early 20s.
At w- in, at that time it was already old. It was not a new book. I, I still remember that because it was, like, I, I only got a used version. I, I still have it in, at home. , what is interesting on... It's the organization that is built in a very specific way. Going back to your earlier point, it's not the factory.
Yes, the factory is built in a very specific way, but they enable the people inside of the organization to, to be empowered to do decisions.
[00:37:30] John Glennane: Yeah.
[00:37:31] Jens Heitland: And so again, it's the c- combination of how do you have a business that is designed in a very specific way, plus including the culture as part of it, like the han element in it.
[00:37:42] John Glennane: Yeah. Well, well, well, Toyota or the Toyota started off in the '30s, , in, in the loom-building- Mm-hmm ... industry. , the concept of Kaizen was developed in the '50s in, in, in that organization, is my understanding. , the idea of lots of small improvements-
[00:38:02] Jens Heitland: Yeah ... or
[00:38:02] John Glennane: lit- little improvements, , and continuously looking to refine or, or, or streamline or make more efficient and all of the rest of it.
, so that's where that came from. Is that the question?
[00:38:18] Jens Heitland: Good. What is interesting about that is it's, it's, it's so logic, but it's still not happening in organizations.
[00:38:28] John Glennane: It's good to be aware... Well, it's... Organizations will do things like have staff suggestions, you know, or, or-
[00:38:37] Jens Heitland: Yeah, like a post box somewhere where you can put in a- Post that, yeah
a,
[00:38:39] John Glennane: a
[00:38:40] Jens Heitland: good idea
[00:38:41] John Glennane: A good idea box. , and, and we have some fun in our company when we introduce these kind of concepts ourselves and we said like, "Give a suggestion." And, , and then we realized it's not good enough to give a suggestion. You know? That usually is a complaint. - Yeah ... or it's a suggestion to do something, but of course, I'm not going to do it, you're gonna do it.
So we realized there's no point having a suggestion unless you've got some idea, , let's say an, , a developed idea of how that suggestion is gonna work and where it's going to improve. So, so that's the empowerment of people side of it. But then on the other side, if somebody's giving me a suggestion, , I am duty-bound to listen, consider that, and to take it seriously.
And as an organization, as or if you call ourselves leaders, to, to not just, , disagree with it or say it's no good, but to actually work in a collaborative way with the team to work out, is this really good? And then it has to compete- Yeah ... with all of the other suggestions. So if we can introduce a culture like that in organizations, that's really, really good, but it's f- not that prevalent.
It's, it's, it's not an easy thing to do.
[00:39:56] Jens Heitland: Yeah. ,
[00:39:58] John Glennane: and you see that a lot in big organizations and private organizations. I hear people, they say things like, , "I know how to fix everything, but nobody's listening to me."
[00:40:07] Jens Heitland: Yeah.
[00:40:08] John Glennane: You know? And I think that's a terrible... And you know, it's not for the consultants to come in.
You know? It's maybe the, the ideas are inside your organization.
[00:40:17] Jens Heitland: They are. I mean, if you take the big... I've been s- through- Yeah ... and connected to so many transformational projects-
[00:40:25] John Glennane: Yeah ...
[00:40:25] Jens Heitland: that are happening now every year in large organization. High, very expensive consultants come in from the Big Four or whoever is chosen to, to, to have that job.
They come in, they interview the internal per- people who all have the answer, and then they're packaging it up in a, in a slide deck with hundreds and hundreds of slides and present it to the management team. All the knowledge is in the organization. It's just that something inside of the organization doesn't allow either people or the organization to take steps to solve that.
[00:41:00] John Glennane: Well, this is, this is a big challenge because it's always good to have help. And, , if, if we're going to provide help or anybody's going to receive help, it's important that the people helping are doing more than just advising. You know, we need... You know, if we're going to help to improve things, we need to, to know what that means and how to do it.
So I put the word design along with improvement. I say it's not just improvement- Yeah ... it's improvement by design. Again, back to the Japanese, it's improvement by design. So now we've introduced the word called design, , and that's what's missing. , I think in our... going back to education, are we learning how to design?
, , you know, as primary school students, as secondary school students, as university students, and in the world of work. And I, I think unfortunately, design is missing, you know? Now, when I mean design, I don't mean product, conser product design. Yeah, I was about
[00:41:58] Jens Heitland: to ask.
[00:41:59] John Glennane: Yeah. , like product design is great, like the iPhone is fantastic product or that chair over there or, or the table or the, the, you know, the camping equipment.
I'm not talking about that kind of design because they're, they are point solutions- Mm ... which, which, which work and can be such. I'm talking about organizational design, how, how we work together, , how we collaborate to create something bigger, you know. And the biggest, , organizations are, are in history.
You know, we look at our history of, of, of major conflicts or, or, , major government initiatives like the Great Depression, like, , , Roosevelt, , what he did for the Americans was to organize a country in its entirety to improve itself i- in, in a situation where he was told, "You can't fix it."
[00:42:54] Jens Heitland: Mm.
[00:42:55] John Glennane: That's organizational design.
, you can't do that, , accidentally, and you can't do that on a bit of a wing and a prayer.
[00:43:02] Jens Heitland: Yeah.
[00:43:02] John Glennane: It needs to be very, very structured. And so my major central sort of point is that we need to apply design, we need to get good at it, , and we need to learn it
[00:43:19] Jens Heitland: How, how does an organization do that? Are there different steps that organizations can use?
Are there different frameworks that you use for yourself and your internal team so that you figure out how to design?
[00:43:32] John Glennane: Well, , education isn't the biggest challenge, but it's the most critical one.
[00:43:37] Jens Heitland: Yeah.
[00:43:38] John Glennane: Everything starts with education, , and being able to do things. , and I said earlier, you know, , the biggest problem in companies is not knowing how to do things and, like, if you go down into the technology, not knowing what, how it works.
Yeah. , and so, so that's, so the, so it starts with learning and development. So we have a framework which I borrowed from years ago- Mm ... , which is, , like a capability skills matrix.
[00:44:09] Jens Heitland: Yeah. , ,
[00:44:11] John Glennane: and I think it's a very good model. It comes from the '90s. , and what I say is that when you attend a training course, you, we do need to train our people.
We need to be teachers to train our people, but when somebody attends a training course, w- they, they are at the level of capable, okay? And now we have to work up the, the capability and turn it into, , what's the word? Competence, and that can only come through practice.
[00:44:46] Jens Heitland: Yeah.
[00:44:46] John Glennane: Like, if you learn a language, I tried to learn Dutch-
and because everybody in Ireland speaks perfect English-
[00:44:53] Jens Heitland: It's very
[00:44:53] John Glennane: difficult ... , I, I, I didn't practice it enough and, and I regret that. I, I should have practiced Dutch- Yeah ... more. , so we need to turn that capability, that training into competence, and then we need to turn that into, , a level of experience.
Now, when we're experienced, we're in a much better position to not just create the change and the improvement, , the, you know, but we're actually having fun. It's enjoyable. It's, it's great doing something- Yeah ... that you're good at doing. , it's, it's no longer a chore or no l- no longer a stressful thing and so you keep going.
I say from experience, you get to mastery, and at the end of the line, some of us, if we're lucky, become a guru. And of course, what's the role of a guru? To teach.
[00:45:44] Jens Heitland: Yeah. That's interesting.
[00:45:47] John Glennane: S- so I would say that the- It's a nice, when you go back to the career guidance, , the class, I would say the best, the best objective in your career is to become a teacher at the end of the day.
And people say, "I don't want to teach in schools." I says, "Doesn't mean you have to teach in schools. Just when you learn all of your skillsets, give it back."
[00:46:12] Jens Heitland: Yeah.
[00:46:12] John Glennane: You know? So, -
[00:46:14] Jens Heitland: That- that's interesting- Yeah ... because m- in, in, in business th- that's called mentorship, as one of the many examples. Yeah. And if I go way back in, in m- in my corporate career life, it was all about what are the mentors that I have and how can I leverage them for my own career?
But for them it was also, they were learning through being connected to the young wild gun that I was at that time. , for us it, it was like a mix of understanding and a mix of experiencing, because what they did well, at least in my case, they, they let me be part of something-
[00:46:56] John Glennane: That's- ...
[00:46:56] Jens Heitland: and drive things.
[00:46:58] John Glennane: That's back to the question about education, teaching, and all of that. , a lot of us end up doing things because we had an inspirational teacher.
[00:47:08] Jens Heitland: Yeah.
[00:47:09] John Glennane: And we end up getting into what they were into. That's why I got into, , water engineering because of- Yeah ... the, the guy who was teaching us in water engineering was just such a great guy.
And, , and developed that, , excitement in me to g- pursue that. , I think, , there's some interesting basic han realities. , when you ask somebody a question, most people love answering. Yeah, true. So most people when they're asked something love giving back. Yeah. , but the trouble is if, if we are not curious enough to ask the question- Then we're missing out on, on, on, on that free advice, that, that free interaction.
, so it's a two-way thing. I can't learn you. That's bad English. , I- all I, all I can do is teach you. Yeah. You can teach me, and I can learn from you. So I can't... You can't force me to learn.
[00:48:06] Jens Heitland: No. True.
[00:48:06] John Glennane: You know? I, I have to want to learn. So I think that's, that's the cultural change we need, where we have an organization where people are genuinely interacting with each other, wanting to learn and wanting to teach, and then that's, that's fantastic.
Is that possible? We have to try to make it happen.
[00:48:27] Jens Heitland: I was about to say, it, it sounds easy when we talk about it, and it's maybe for, let's say, a small group of people, it's, it's relatively easy as well, even though it's, it's hard. But if you take an organization with hundreds of thousands or hundreds o- of people, going from this to this is not that easy.
[00:48:48] John Glennane: No, it's not easy, and, , again, it's back to the priorities of the organization. You know, , you know, is the organization's focus on the, , on the shareholder value, or is the organization's focus on fixing the dilemma that their customer has? You know, what's the reason your organization exists? Must be to do with the, the help you're giving your customer.
, when I looked into meanings of words like vision, , you know, my English teacher said to me, "Vision doesn't mean something for you. It means something for somebody else."
[00:49:22] Jens Heitland: Mm. ,
[00:49:23] John Glennane: and I think that's quite profound. So- We need to remember also, I think, that the organization is not just about the external customer, it's about inside
[00:49:35] Jens Heitland: Yeah
[00:49:35] John Glennane: You know, , and we're all customers of each other, , and we need to understand each other.
And if we create structures in our organization just the way if we create silos of technology, that's all, all that's doing is- Yeah ... it's creating more and more, you know, departments. You know, I think the word department was invented by the first management consultancy company in the world.
[00:49:57] Jens Heitland: Sounds very German.
Guess what, it's not. So let, let's go back to design. One of the things that you talk about is true design. Yeah. And within this you have seven dimension or seven areas of true design. Walk me through them, and let's do that in a way that they can be applied in an organization so that people understand it with an organizational context.
[00:50:22] John Glennane: Okay. , for me it was an amazing discovery. Okay? Not an invention, it's a discovery. It was realizing that, , you know, you asked the question, what is design? And we can talk about it at a high level- Right ... but at the low level, how do you construct a design- Yeah ... is what you're asking me. , , there are seven elements, and I'll describe them.
In fact, there's only one main element, which is a thing
So the world is-
[00:50:51] Jens Heitland: A, a thing ...
[00:50:52] John Glennane: a thing. -
[00:50:53] Jens Heitland: h.
[00:50:54] John Glennane: Okay? A thing, and then people say, "What do you mean by a thing?" And a thing is an entity, you know. And what's an entity? Oh, an entity is a thing. You know, so now we're in a circular loop here. Yeah. , a thing basically is anything or everything. Okay, any entity or every entity, and that actually is what everything is made up of.
So a thing, , , and this is where computer theory kind of, sort of straightaway falls apart. Yeah. It says, well, we have entities and attributes, so we- so I learnt that there's entities and then there's attributes, so I went through 20 years thinking they were different until I realized that an attribute is actually an entity, too.
That's a profound understanding because of how we create new technology. It's, and that if a, if a, if an attribute, which is a characteristic thing of a bigger thing, , we're starting to understand how things are put together. So all things are made up of other things. I don't think there's anything that is not made up of lower level things.
[00:52:02] Jens Heitland: That
[00:52:02] John Glennane: means- Until we get to, from quarks to energy.
[00:52:05] Jens Heitland: Yeah. Maybe. That, that means from an organizational context, it's every person that is in the business, every computer that the business, every asset that the business, , every customer that the cu- Yeah ... the, the business connects- Yeah ... ev- everything.
[00:52:19] John Glennane: Yeah, so if you're trying to work out what is it about this business- Yeah
we're trying to do, first thing I would advise is figure out where all the things are, or the things of interest.
[00:52:29] Jens Heitland: Yeah.
[00:52:29] John Glennane: We have things of interest and things that are not of interest, so we discard the things that are not of interest at our peril, because maybe they are of interest. Mm. We just don't realize it, but just get the things, so like a deck of cards, right?
Write each thing and throw it on the table. Write each thing so you got a stack of things. Mm. The second element of design is relationships. Right? So the s- , that by the way, relationship is also a thing. Right?
[00:52:59] Jens Heitland: Yeah.
[00:52:59] John Glennane: It is, how does that card link to this card connect? So that's the second element. And funny enough, when you look at that and think about it, and it's discovery again, what's more important than the things is how they're connected, because that's what makes things.
[00:53:18] Jens Heitland: Yeah. Of course.
[00:53:19] John Glennane: Right? That's-
[00:53:20] Jens Heitland: The relationship between each other ... the
[00:53:21] John Glennane: relationship. Yeah. So the second thing is relationship. The second element of design is relationships. So now we get a bit philosophical and natural again and realize that in the universe everything is connected. So you need to be able to connect everything.
All right? And that's important from technology point of view.
[00:53:38] Jens Heitland: Mm.
[00:53:39] John Glennane: Can you connect everything in your technology? Not if you've got a lot of point solutions and a lot of the technical structures we've, we've created over the years. So that's the second element is things and relationships. And then we get into more, more things, but they're just higher level things to help us-
[00:53:57] Jens Heitland: Yeah
[00:53:57] John Glennane: to figure out what this is all about. So the third element is process, okay? Which is a bit jargony. , let's say in plain English, process is doing things.
[00:54:09] Jens Heitland: Is like aligning things after each other. -
[00:54:12] John Glennane: It's a doing thing.
[00:54:13] Jens Heitland: Mm-hmm.
[00:54:14] John Glennane: And that's the big change a- agent. Nothing changes unless you do something. It's a bit Isaac Newton.
You know? , , to change something you have to do something. So what we're doing in business, in relationships, in everything, is we're constantly changing things, and things are changing, but most... In the Newtonian world, everything's changing because something else happened.
[00:54:37] Jens Heitland: Mm-hmm.
[00:54:37] John Glennane: Something did something to change it.
So the third element is process. Okay? So we're change- now in a data world, 'cause data is our language here, it's our connection between the real world and the virtual world. Or the, you know, the process is changing the data. I change something, I change my representation of something. Something real that's happening, if I want to ma- if I want to map it in design, I need to represent it as a, as, as something in design.
And then if I want to change it, I need to know what's the process. Yeah. What do I do to change the thing? And I need to record that. Okay? That's the third element. The fourth element, , is a funny one. It's like, , now we're into structural things, collection. Okay? So it's, we're recognizing that a lot of times we're making collections of things.
The world's best experts at making collections of things are two-year-olds Right? Because if you put a two-year-old in this room-
[00:55:40] Jens Heitland: Mm ...
[00:55:40] John Glennane: they'll start making collections. Right? They'll do it- Yeah ... instinctively, naturally. So all the red things will go there, and all the blue things will go there, and all the big things will go here, and all the things that fit into each other will fit in, and they'll, they'll make that tower work- Mm
and all of that kind of stuff. So collection is also what we do every day when we go shopping. You know, we get the shopping cart and then we start putting stuff in it. That's a collection. So that's an element of design. It's a kind of a, an ad hoc thing. It's just a random collection of stuff.
[00:56:11] Jens Heitland: Is that as well collection of knowledge?
[00:56:14] John Glennane: It's collection of anything.
[00:56:15] Jens Heitland: Yeah.
[00:56:16] John Glennane: What's knowledge? It's just things.
[00:56:19] Jens Heitland: Yeah ,
[00:56:20] John Glennane: maybe you might say knowledge is things, but our interpretation of those things is a bit higher level, is this knowledge and then into insight or-
[00:56:29] Jens Heitland: Yeah ...
[00:56:29] John Glennane: whatever words we use, which are also things, that everything we talk about is a thing, and we can represent it in data.
So I've got to four. The fifth element, really interesting. It's the... The fifth is the quintessential element, which in Greek is the fifth, quintessential, the essence, the real thing here. This is, this is where we're getting to the, the, the magic. It's structure. Okay? And, , it's how we put things together in an ordered way, like a triangle, like a hierarchy.
[00:57:10] Jens Heitland: Yeah.
[00:57:11] John Glennane: Okay? , there's a great quote that I came across when I went to see a Picasso exhibition in Dublin in February of this year, and Picasso was fantastic. Exhibition is amazing. I'd recommend anybody to go and look at Picasso, but the quote was from Cézanne, French, , guy, , who is considered the, the founder of modern art, and he had a quote.
I said, "What's this doing in the Picasso exhibition?" And it was because that inspired Picasso and, and Braque, his French partner, in the Cubism Revolution, or whatever it's called, movement, and the quote from Cézanne is this: "Treat nature by the cylinder, the sphere, cone, all in perspective." I thought that was profound, so I took a photograph.
I went home. I started thinking about it, and I said, "He missed square, and he missed circle, and he missed, ..." And then I realized that if you look at a cylinder on its side- Yeah ... you get a rectangle.
[00:58:16] Jens Heitland: I was about to say, yeah. Yeah.
[00:58:18] John Glennane: If you look at a sphere on its side, you get a circle. If you look at a cone to the top, you've got a point.
[00:58:25] Jens Heitland: Yeah.
[00:58:25] John Glennane: If you look at a cone on its side, you've got a triangle. And then I realized how profoundly clever Cézanne was and why Picasso was drawn to it. So everything in design, in business design, computers and data and all of the rest of it, everything in product design is structures-
that work together or work in harmony. So, you know, the honeycomb.
[00:58:50] Jens Heitland: Mm.
[00:58:51] John Glennane: It, it's all natural. The, the, the, the, the, the, the veins in the leaf of a tree. The, the Ishikawa mechanism that the Japanese invent for, , diagnosing problems in manufacturing. These are all structures.
[00:59:06] Jens Heitland: Yeah.
[00:59:06] John Glennane: And, , so that's, that's five.
So the quintessential is kind of cool. It's a big one, but it is made up of the others.
[00:59:14] Jens Heitland: Yeah.
[00:59:14] John Glennane: And then the sixth element is space. So space is like, again, sticking to Newton, I'm not into quant mechanics here. Let's stick to the world as we know it. , space is just location. Where is it?
[00:59:31] Jens Heitland: Yeah.
[00:59:31] John Glennane: Where is it?
And, , 'cause things move around, so the process move things around, so it's gone to somewhere else. So I want to know where things are. And the, the final one, which is probably, , the most difficult one, is time, because then you get into quant mechanics, and you get into what's the meaning of time and relativity and all of that stuff, where space and time are connected.
Everything's connected. Everything's got a relationship. So time, , is of the essence, you might say, in all of our business worlds and our natural worlds. They're the seven elements.
[01:00:08] Jens Heitland: So if we take this seven and look into- The earlier part that we talked about, so if we want to improve a company, how do these elements help me if I understand these elements and, and understand where I want to get to, like, the value that I want to create, how can as a, as an organization...
I me- g- let's go back to the point where, so you're either forced to change from the outside most of the time, , sometimes even from the inside, but most of the time, or you're, you're willing to change. How does that play a role when it comes to design, and how can an organization understand how to design their way out of it if they're in a
[01:00:57] John Glennane: situation?
It's, , , you know, a- again, now, now we're into the faculty of design, you know. , , the definition of des- one definition of design I have is, , is two sentences. One is that design is the symmetry between the smallest piece and the largest structure. That's the symmetry- Mm ... and how they connect. And the second definition is design is the faculty of being able to deconstruct that symmetry and reconstruct it again.
So what I mean by that is if I put a radio on the table and asked you to, , build me a radio-
[01:01:39] Jens Heitland: Mm ...
[01:01:40] John Glennane: you've never seen one before. Now, you're the electrical engineer. What would you do?
[01:01:44] Jens Heitland: I even have built a radio in the past. No, I will take it apart-
[01:01:47] John Glennane: Right. That's the right answer ... and look into
[01:01:48] Jens Heitland: every single piece and-
[01:01:49] John Glennane: Yeah.
So you take it apart.
[01:01:51] Jens Heitland: Yeah. Deconstruct.
[01:01:53] John Glennane: Deconstruct it, and you go down as far as the smallest piece- Yeah ... until you can't take it apart, and you put them all on the table. That's taking the things and putting them on the table.
[01:02:03] Jens Heitland: Mm.
[01:02:04] John Glennane: And you try to understand what's the purpose of these things. So you might see a flappy thing in a cer- disc, and you'll say, "What's that for?"
Now, if you don't know that's the piece through which the sound comes, you've gotta figure out, well, what... why is that there? Yeah, yeah. So, you know- But I'll tell you one thing, if you didn't take the radio apart, you'll never build a radio. You'll never even know what it is-
[01:02:32] Jens Heitland: Yeah ...
[01:02:33] John Glennane: and how it works. , I think it was Steve Jobs said something really profound.
He said something along the lines of, , you know, you know, you look into the philosophy of, of aesthetics. People think, you know, aesthetics is used in the, in the, in the, in the, in the conser product industry as all about the look and the feel. You know, it looks nice, and it feels nice. Jobs says, you know, , it's not just, design is not just what it looks like and feels like, it's how it works.
So to design your business, to, to want to, to have an idea of how your business needs to work or where it needs to be or what you want to achieve with an organization, you have to deconstruct things down to the bottom and then reconstruct them again to figure out how everything works. , one of the best compliments we ever got from a client was way, way back in the early 2000s when a client, after we did this activity with a customer where we said, "Okay, we can create the design and this is how we're gonna do it, but you're gonna do it with us."
[01:03:41] Jens Heitland: Mm.
[01:03:42] John Glennane: There's no way we can... This is not our design, it's your design. But, but we will sit and work with you on this. , we were learning lots. I was learning all about the food industry-
[01:03:53] Jens Heitland: Yeah ...
[01:03:53] John Glennane: and everything. It was really interesting, and people's discussions, and we were building this model. But what was said to us afterwards was, , three things.
They said, "You demystified our business for us." And I said, "No, no, no, you did." "You demystified our business." The next thing was, "You or we articulated where we want to be and what that design is." So we didn't just have it up there. Yeah. We articulated, which means it's on the table. You can draw it.
[01:04:29] Jens Heitland: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[01:04:29] John Glennane: Okay? Because when you... The third thing was the most important thing for me, is they said, "You helped us to agree with each other." Because when you put the radio on the table and everybody constructs it and reconstructs it, and then looks at it, they will say, "That's ours, and we can agree it."
[01:04:53] Jens Heitland: Yeah.
[01:04:54] John Glennane: And if we don't agree with something, it comes out in the, the process.
And of course we won't be in... In fact, there's plenty of disagreement. Which brings me to your first question on that, which was, what's the true design? The true design is the one we all agree-
[01:05:13] Jens Heitland: So an organization needs to take l- literally everything apart to the smallest things to understand how it, how to put it together in, in, in a, in a future context
[01:05:28] John Glennane: Not just to understand it, but to make it happen.
[01:05:30] Jens Heitland: Yeah.
[01:05:31] John Glennane: Yes. There's no shortcut.
[01:05:33] Jens Heitland: And most probably if we, if we take an organization that was fit for yesterday, to get it fit for the future, you need to put it differently together.
[01:05:41] John Glennane: Of course.
[01:05:42] Jens Heitland: And some pieces, some things- Yes ... might be not necessary anymore, or they, they are even more necessary and you need additional things.
[01:05:50] John Glennane: Yes. And, and what's very important in this world of AI doing everything for us is we must do it ourselves because when we do it ourselves, that's when we're making the discoveries and the understandings and the insights.
So like I, explained to you the seven elements of design.
[01:06:11] Jens Heitland: Yeah.
[01:06:12] John Glennane: Like, it was extraordinary when we realized what they were. We kind of went, "Wow, that's, really cool," because we can construct the most complex symmetry out of those elements. Yeah. It's like Lego. It's like the building blocks. We can put it together any way you like.
So now we need a technology to be able to do the same thing
[01:06:37] Jens Heitland: Double-clicking on the AI part
[01:06:40] John Glennane: Hmm ...
[01:06:41] Jens Heitland: and, and taking your radio ana- analogy, if I would use AI to deconstruct the radio, AI has done it. It, , it is as you would do it for me and you put all pieces in front of me, I will still not know how they are related to each other because I have not put it, , , taken it apart myself.
[01:07:03] John Glennane: It's a very difficult thing because, , I think we need to recognize that, ... Okay, let's separate the technology, which is really wonderful.
[01:07:13] Jens Heitland: Yeah.
[01:07:14] John Glennane: I mean, the ingenuity in, in these modern technologies. By the way, AI, like Python is AI, you know? That was invented in Amsterdam, right, in 1994 in the Institute of Advanced Science.
I'm not sure the name of the institute. , and, and that gave us a model for dealing with, , data in a certain way to make predictions, you know? , you know, so AI is a very loose term. , but the most important thing I think is, , for some people, if you are an expert electrical engineer who knows how to build radios, use the AI to speed up.
[01:07:56] Jens Heitland: Yeah.
[01:07:56] John Glennane: You know, because you're, you're using the tools to do something you're able to do. , but if you're a schoolchild in a primary school If you play AI, I think you're... It's an abomination. I think it's a disgrace.
[01:08:13] Jens Heitland: Yeah.
[01:08:13] John Glennane: I see that, , in, in videos of school children are sitting there passively having some iPad talk to them to using an AI language.
I think it's appalling. They're learning nothing. You've just taken away all the agency from the child-
[01:08:27] Jens Heitland: Mm ... and
[01:08:27] John Glennane: g- and given it to this bot, which I think is terrible. So there's a, there's a kind of a, a contradiction there. There's a, there's a, a fight going on, you know, what's good and what's not good.
[01:08:39] Jens Heitland: Yeah.
[01:08:40] John Glennane: , you know, so-
[01:08:41] Jens Heitland: So in, in... A- as I understand it from our conversation is leverage it to im- not to improve, but to accelerate. But first you need to understand and almost master it to be able to use it properly as a tool.
[01:08:57] John Glennane: Absolutely. I mean, I, I, you know, I've learned everything I know because I've done projects-
[01:09:02] Jens Heitland: Yeah
[01:09:02] John Glennane: with customers, and every time I go and meet a customer, I learn something new from incredible people in industry who are at the cold face, managing difficult things in difficult s- industries, and different stresses and pressures and everything. So you learn amazing things. I'll never forget the day when brilliant basics was put on the table.
You know, it was a big food manufacturer, , not manufacturer, food retailer, and like the project was getting very complicated, and the demos were getting very complicated, and the tech was very, very complicated. And this guy walked into the room, he was the marketing director, and he said, , "You know, we just want brilliant basics."
And, and, and I remember saying, , you know, "I've heard the term before, but in this context..." I says, "I know exactly what..." Immediately I knew what he meant. Yeah. Okay? So I've taken that, that term forward since, like, that was like 20 years ago. I've taken that forward since to define this. If you're doing a project, okay, your people should do the project.
They should design it. They should be the people doing it.
[01:10:08] Jens Heitland: Yeah.
[01:10:09] John Glennane: When you go and launch this project, that's not the end of the project. That's only the beginning of it. , so we don't run away and we put the system in, you know? And then that's, that's all, you know... Adoption matters. Adoption is where the real game starts.
So I believe that you should never automate something before the people who are doing that design manually do it 'Cause then they are completely expert- Yeah ... at what it's all about. Then they can make the decision to say, "I'd like this automated, the boring bits." Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, the high vole bits.
Surely we could automate this. Surely we could automate that. The technology should provide for that, not be a hindrance, which is all t- all too often the case. You know, "Can we do this?" "Well, no, you need another technology, technology for that, or you need another solution, or get a spreadsheet." You know? , that's, that's the reality that we're in in business.
But the key thing is that the automation should only happen when the people are experts. But do you know what the problem then is? What about the new people who come later?
[01:11:24] Jens Heitland: Yeah, they don't know
[01:11:25] John Glennane: You've got to be able to deconstruct-
[01:11:27] Jens Heitland: Yeah ...
[01:11:27] John Glennane: what you've automated back to the start. And, , it's like what you were saying, , last night, which is I think is great.
Companies that ask their new employees, their new very important employees, to go to the shop floor and experience what it means to actually do the job manually will win in the end.
[01:11:51] Jens Heitland: Yeah. Agree, and that's, I think, what McDonald's still does today. Yeah. If you want to be a manager in McDonald's, you need to flip burgers for a certain amount of time-
[01:11:59] John Glennane: Of course
[01:12:00] Jens Heitland: to understand how it works.
[01:12:02] John Glennane: Steve Jobs said, , he was kind of an inspirational guy. I mean, Steve Jobs made the point, , it's o- it's on YouTube. There's a video how they hired people, and he said, , you know, "There's no point having managers that don't know how things work." And he, he, he made a very important point.
He said, "Why would somebody want to work for a manager who doesn't know how things work?"
[01:12:27] Jens Heitland: Yeah. "
[01:12:27] John Glennane: I'm gonna learn nothing." I think that was very profound when he said that, so I took that on board.
[01:12:33] Jens Heitland: And it, it w- I mean, I grew up in, in, in a very large retailer.
[01:12:37] John Glennane: Yeah.
[01:12:38] Jens Heitland: It... You directly feel it. If someone comes up from y- i- if, and most people know that at least follow me, I, I worked in IKEA.
So the, the CEO of IKEA has worked in an IKEA store, at least in the past. I don't know, don't know how it is today. But for everyone in the whole organization, if you know that this leader that is the top leader of a, at that time, 40 to 60 billion company, has worked in an IKEA store, they know how it is to work in an IKEA store.
Everyone understands, and nobody can fool them as well because they know how it works.
[01:13:17] John Glennane: I think he is one of the few people who stayed very rooted on the basics of his business, and that's a, that's a good trait of a leader, I think.
[01:13:27] Jens Heitland: Yeah. Agree.
[01:13:28] John Glennane: You know, and, , you know, just getting promoted up that triangular hierarchy-
you know, , , is okay so long as you stay connected to what's really- Yeah ... going on, on the ground.
[01:13:43] Jens Heitland: And that's often difficult as, as larger the organization gets. Yeah. As further you are away.
[01:13:49] John Glennane: Yeah.
[01:13:49] Jens Heitland: And es- especially when you're multi-international, multinational or international organization- Yeah ... as more difficult it gets because you are not connected physically to the people because they're on the other side of the Earth.
[01:14:01] John Glennane: Yeah.
[01:14:02] Jens Heitland: Yeah.
[01:14:02] John Glennane: Yeah.
[01:14:03] Jens Heitland: So le- let's jp to- How do we reinvent technology?
[01:14:11] John Glennane: Deconstruct Start over. I'd say it's interesting, , I was talking earlier on to some people about Carl Sagan- -h ... who's, , known to some of the older people around here. , and he made an interesting point about technology back in the late '70s when he was on some talk show in America, and the guy was saying, "Isn't technology fantastic?"
And all the rest of it. And, and he said, "Technology is only in its adolescence." Thought that was an interesting... He- Yeah ... he was talking about, you know, the possibility of advanced civilizations out in the universe. , and , I think that's an important thing to remember, is that if we're going to try to improve something, like technology, we have to do the same as we have to do with everything else.
We have to kind of ask, deconstruct it. And what we did in our project, we, we decided to enter this crazy project to see if we could make technology better. , and I have Mike Hawks to thank for that. It's a privilege working with him.
[01:15:11] Jens Heitland: Which means you did that in your organization to look-
[01:15:14] John Glennane: We're doing it now.
Yeah.
[01:15:15] Jens Heitland: Okay.
[01:15:16] John Glennane: Yeah, we started it s- five years ago. , and we t- we imagined it 10 years ago. And, , so it was a combination of if only- We could address business problems better. So the first question was, , can we not stop having to say to our customers, "Sorry, you can't do that"?
[01:15:44] Jens Heitland: Mm.
[01:15:45] John Glennane: Or, "You can, but you need some other solution," , which may or may not fit what you really want to do.
So we decided to ask the question, can we make something that, , can truly, , enable the realities of business, which is a subset of nature, okay? So, , so it was a combination of what's the potential of technology versus what's the business need.
[01:16:14] Jens Heitland: Mm. ,
[01:16:15] John Glennane: and design is sitting in the middle of all of that.
, and as I said, my partner, Mike Hawkes, , opened the gate, opened the door for better potential technology. So I would talk with him about things like the design elements, and he'd talk about, well, you know, you need or we need, ... If everything's connected to everything else, then everything has to be small.
[01:16:42] Jens Heitland: Mm.
[01:16:43] John Glennane: Because if I want to be able to assemble things in any way, I can't be assembling big things. I have to assemble small things into bigger things, into bigger things, and then put them all together in a way that's perfectly aligned. So that means that we need to be able to do that with data if we want any hope- Mm
of our computer technologies to be able to enable the, the, that business reality, , for a business and not just for any business, specifically for your business.
[01:17:13] Jens Heitland: So that means it, it's tailor-made.
[01:17:16] John Glennane: It has to be because every design is new, and every design changes. So when we create a design for a business and create a technology to enable that, on day two it's gonna change.
So therefore, if the business says, "I need to change this," then the technology needs to change with it. So that was the going-in objective of the redesign of technology project that we started.
[01:17:47] Jens Heitland: That's inter- And that's a different company, then?
[01:17:50] John Glennane: It's... No, it's all being done in Capventis, but it will become a different company.
Yeah. It's called Glue. , it's just a name we gave it. It doesn't mean anything. , it's, , it's just a cool name.
[01:18:01] Jens Heitland: Yeah. ,
[01:18:02] John Glennane: but, , maybe glue is connecting things.
[01:18:06] Jens Heitland: Yeah.
[01:18:07] John Glennane: That's, that's the fundamental. So, , the business ask in our project was kind of, , the kind of thing that usually technology people might say, , you know, "You need to get real here.
, you know, what data?" I would say, "Any data- Like how much of it? All data. What kind of data? Any kind of data. Back to our thing.
[01:18:29] Jens Heitland: Mm.
[01:18:29] John Glennane: You know, I wanna, I want to be able to represent anything that's relevant to my model without creating a chaos of spaghetti.
[01:18:38] Jens Heitland: Yeah. ,
[01:18:39] John Glennane: but really, , so we spent five years working with existing technologies, trying to find the best shape of these existing technologies, , to work.
, for example, why did we separate operations from analytics? I've grown up in this world- Mm ... analytics on one side, operations on the other. And you say, "Why did you s- why did we separate them?" There's no business reason to separate them. They're inseparable. , the reason we separated them was because the technology forced us to.
Because one database structure works for analytics, for some of analytics, not all of it, and the other database structure is needed for operations, so you gotta separate them, which brings us back to this integration thing again. Yeah. Yeah. So you gotta separate them and then reconnect them all again. So that was our project, was to see, is it possible to create something that's genuinely, , , leading with business and following with the technology?
[01:19:43] Jens Heitland: - That's the opposite way than it is done normally, like you said in the beginning.
[01:19:46] John Glennane: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And, , we've, ... Because of that, we've, , we spent five years going in one direction and then realizing it doesn't work.
[01:19:58] Jens Heitland: Yeah.
[01:19:59] John Glennane: So we go retreat back and as I said, , Mike, and it is Mike, , has the imagination and also the skillset because he started off his career at machine code level.
Yeah. Yeah. He understands technology completely, deeply, and we started to realize that we need to deconstruct the technology down to the individual attribute. So that's the s- the actual central point of the glue technology, is that, , it's right down at that level. And the cool thing is that it means we can create any structure, back to structure again, above that and do it highly efficiently.
[01:20:42] Jens Heitland: That's hardware and software?
[01:20:44] John Glennane: Hardware, the, the, the hardware is standard, , stuff. , you know, hardware is the, the chips, is the, the bits and the bytes. At the end of the day it's down to one or zero-
[01:20:57] Jens Heitland: Yeah ...
[01:20:57] John Glennane: as, , Leibniz told us.
[01:20:59] Jens Heitland: Yeah.
[01:21:00] John Glennane: Alan Turing understood. , it's literally down to one, it's on or it's off.
- Alan Turing added in a space. You know, it's on or it's off, or it's got a space. , and we're at that level now where we're, we're sort of, , realizing, like you said, how can you take all this kind of bits and the bits and things and all the rest of it- Yeah ... and suddenly you could end up with a fully, a fully enabled h- high complex manufacturing organization, and we can show that.
We can do that.
[01:21:39] Jens Heitland: That's interesting. So it's connected... Li- like you said, it's connected to the design part that, that, that you mentioned, but then it's taking that into action in a technology fashion.
[01:21:55] John Glennane: Yes, because digital technology is a mirror of the reality it's representing.
[01:22:01] Jens Heitland: Yeah. ,
[01:22:02] John Glennane: and I think, I think sometimes it's...
People find that difficult to see. How can you get all these things and suddenly you have a TV screen, you know? And, and I suppose it's like the engineers around, you know, the massive stuff on the table means nothing, but when I put it together, it's a radio. And then somewhere somebody will go, "Hang on a second, you've just changed...
You've just taken some metal and plastic, and things like that. How did you make the plastic?" Oh, well, that's actually made of other things-
[01:22:30] Jens Heitland: Mm ...
[01:22:30] John Glennane: called carbon and oxygen and nitrogen, and they're connected to things called chemical bonds. You know, so, so I only had to do a process which is heat something, you know, and, and, and then we work back up again.
So that's the fascination for me, is that we can make, , we can model something in data and then make it fit like a glove-
[01:22:55] Jens Heitland: Yeah ...
[01:22:56] John Glennane: to the, to the, , technically make it fit like a glove, and it's extraordinary. That's cool.
[01:23:03] Jens Heitland: So where does all of this lead us in the future if we, if we look ahead?
[01:23:11] John Glennane: Well, that's like the question, what was your business plan?
, that's another thing. We're in the, we're in the analytics industry and, , , you know, and people say, "Predict."
[01:23:21] Jens Heitland: Right.
[01:23:22] John Glennane: You know, and I say, "It's not prediction, it's guessing." So it's guessing, and we have a direction. We'd like to, , engage with organizations and people to share our discoveries, and to engage with people who have a desire to get their head around this and apply it to their own organizations.
That's what we want to do, and to see where it takes us.
[01:23:56] Jens Heitland: On a person, personal level, one of, one of the things we talked about was vocation. And as far as I'm, I remember, there are four types of vocation. Can you explain what that mean?
[01:24:13] John Glennane: Four types of work, or what we call job or whatever. So, , one of the things is I, I think a lot of people feel that work and jobs are terrible things.
[01:24:28] Jens Heitland: Yeah. ,
[01:24:29] John Glennane: essential things. And unfortunately, a lot of the times they're very right. , but the question is, and this is for young people, and maybe as we're older can we find it ourselves, is can we all have a vocation? I mean, Oscar Wilde said, you know, "You have to be yourself 'cause everybody else is already taken."
Well, apparently he might have said that. We're not too sure. , so- Vocation is the ultimate work because its definition is that you're doing something you love and you'd do it anyway even if you didn't get paid.
[01:25:11] Jens Heitland: Yeah.
[01:25:12] John Glennane: Okay? But of course, as we said earlier on, everything's balanced. We need money to live, and we would like lots of it if we can have it.
, maybe we don't need too much of it, but, , , so the question is can you make Can you either follow your vocation or can you find it, or maybe can you shape it? So, , you know, I refer sometimes to the book Ivan Denisovich. I, I'd recommend all people to read that book if you haven't already read it from, from Solzhenitsyn, because it talks about a guy who is a, an intellectual powerhouse finding himself in a gulag, you know, at, at minus 20 degrees, been given the job to build a, build a wall out of bricks, and he finds his vocation.
He, he wants to build the perfect wall. So he's managed to create something absorbing out of a terrible situation. That's an extreme example- Yeah. Yeah ... but it's a good book to read, and it's an en- entertaining. What's entertaining is han misery. Shouldn't be entertaining. , so I think we need to try to find our vocation, and if we're not finding it, change your job.
But too often we're ready to just change our job, and then we need to remember that we have a responsibility to ourselves to make our job good. It- nobody's gonna make your job good for you. You've got to make it good for yourself. So I think there's too much, , maybe in the world we're in today of people just hopping from job to job and, you know, I want to find experience something else, and not giving enough attention to, , raising our capability to competence, to experience, to mastery, you know.
, , so it's a difficult... it's, nothing is easy. Yeah. It's difficult, and there's no shortcuts.
[01:27:09] Jens Heitland: But it's, it's also sometimes it's you don't know what y- what you want, and that's kind of... If you don't know where you want to go, you just go into the wrong direction, worst case, and that's where you jp from job to job to job.
[01:27:25] John Glennane: Yeah, but sometimes... Absolutely, and sometimes, , we make decisions which bring us in a certain direction- Yeah ... and, and, and sometimes I don't regret that. Just, just, just, just keep, keep making those decisions. Look, the only way to answer that question is to use the word communication. You know, talk to people.
[01:27:45] Jens Heitland: Yeah.
[01:27:45] John Glennane: Explain your situation. , you know, if you're in a job where you don't agree with the boss, you know, get promoted. And-
[01:27:58] Jens Heitland: Agree ...
[01:27:58] John Glennane: change the rules yourselves, you know. So, , and it's easy to say that. It's all too easy to say that. - Also remember that bosses sometimes are, have the same problems
[01:28:13] Jens Heitland: They most of the time, yeah Yeah.
[01:28:14] John Glennane: Sometimes I say to people, "If you have the mindset of your boss, you're in a good place." Understand the boss. We talk about empathy. Yeah. Understand, you know, when you complain about things, it's okay to complain, but maybe sometimes we should look on the other side and look back. We might see something different.
A- again, not for me. I'm, I'm a very imperfect person, you know? But I think it's good practice to do that. So back to your question, if people are wondering, you know, are unhappy or feeling unfulfilled or they want something else, s- keep talking to people and then thinking about what people are saying.
[01:28:56] Jens Heitland: Yeah.
That, that means improve ourselves- Which- ... on an ongoing base.
[01:29:03] John Glennane: Sure. We all want to im- like we all want to improve
[01:29:07] Jens Heitland: But we don't want to change
[01:29:08] John Glennane: But we don't wanna change. But we find change difficult.
[01:29:11] Jens Heitland: So you, you wrote the book Improve: A Good Idea. Why did you write that book?
[01:29:21] John Glennane: That's a, that's a-
It's a very difficult question. I wanted to literally just write down what was in my head.
[01:29:35] Jens Heitland: Mm.
[01:29:35] John Glennane: And I wanted the p- the project to write the book became a project, , an exercise in just figuring out things, okay? And then writing. And I had help, , from my, , business and narrative story and historian and philosophical help from James McCabe, who's another extraordinary in- individual, , who many people know.
, and he helped me write the book by helping me figure the things out. He gave as good as he got.
[01:30:15] Jens Heitland: Mm.
[01:30:16] John Glennane: And the ideas became shaped. So then we st- we, we literally started to write. And then I suppose the other reason is to get a voice, you know? And that's, , maybe like you say with other people, you know, I'm not a big guy.
I'm not in a big company. I'm not an important guy.
[01:30:34] Jens Heitland: You are.
[01:30:35] John Glennane: But, you know, , in our society, people go to people who are in those important positions. And, , so I'm looking for a voice, and I'm looking for like-minded people to collaborate and to share and to make, , make things a bit better than they are now.
So that's maybe why I wrote the book.
[01:30:59] Jens Heitland: The, the thing is, if, if, if you don't externalize your ways of thinking, nobody knows how you think, so they can even not either argue with you, but they also cannot contact you to discuss about something that, that, that you said, so, -
[01:31:17] John Glennane: Actually, that's a good, that's a good point, 'cause another reason for all of this is you can't- In our fast world of impatience and, , you know, you've got half an hour, tell me what you wanna tell me.
, you're belittling not only your own, you know ... Maybe give a bit more time, more consider- We ha- in, in my business, we have a, the rule called the consider rule.
[01:31:44] Jens Heitland: Mm-hmm.
[01:31:45] John Glennane: No matter what anything anybody says to you, consider. You know, don't jp to the first answer.
[01:31:50] Jens Heitland: Yeah.
[01:31:51] John Glennane: So another reason for writing the book is because it's multilayered.
There's a lot in it. There's a lot of perspectives. There's a lot of learnings. There's a lot of experience I'm trying to share from my own experience. It's n- I didn't research this academically.
[01:32:07] Jens Heitland: Yeah.
[01:32:07] John Glennane: It's, I'm just giving you what everybody's told me and what I've experienced. So you can't do that in an hour's discussion, so that's why you write the books as well.
If you wanna understand or you wanna get some value, or maybe it'd be useful, maybe not, maybe it makes think... Maybe you get entertained. You know, it's a funny story.
[01:32:25] Jens Heitland: Yeah. ,
[01:32:26] John Glennane: it's a strange story. , you know, , that's why I write the book.
[01:32:31] Jens Heitland: For whom is this book? Like, who should read this book?
[01:32:36] John Glennane: Ooh, that's a-
[01:32:36] Jens Heitland: If, if, like, le- Yeah
let's asse that some people made it to the end of the podcast and they say, "That's all interesting. What is the, like, who should read it?"
[01:32:47] John Glennane: If you're in a position of authority where you are trying to instigate improvement or positive change, it might be valuable to read the book. If you're a student or somebody starting out looking to find your way, , in a world of consultants and, you know, innovators and all the rest of it, you might find something in there for you to help you get your head around what it's all about.
If you're in your 30s and you feel you're stagnating, , or you're working in an organization that is stagnating or suffering failure, you might find some value in the book. But really all it is is an attempt to lay it out as it is today in 2026 from what's happened in the last 35, 40 years, and in a world full of chronic problems that need fixing.
[01:33:52] Jens Heitland: John, thank you very much taking all the way coming from Dublin to The Hague in the Netherlands to join me on the podcast and having this, , fantastic conversation. I believe you're, you're a person that has so much to give from the knowledge that you have, and you package that fantastically into, into the book.
And I, I really enjoyed the last two days with you, and I'm sure we're staying in contact going forward as well. Thank you very much for the podcast
[01:34:23] John Glennane: conversation. Well, thank you very much, Jens, and your team. , it's been a pleasure to meet you. I definitely think we are like-minded. I think we have a future, , together with other people, and I look forward to it intensely.
So it's been a very valuable trip for me, and I really appreciate the experience.
[01:34:42] Jens Heitland: Thank you very much.
[01:34:43] John Glennane: Thank you.