James Hurst: Are we weirding the normal, or are we normalising the weird?

0:05: Welcome along to the Nugget, where we're unearthing business gold for business leaders, and it's with great pleasure that I welcome an old friend, James Hurst, to the podcast.

0:16: , we actually first met when selling our wares in the brick lane markets a long time ago now, which was right at the beginning of both of our journeys into the world of work and entrepreneurship, I guess, because we were selling all of our own stuff, running our own pretty small startup businesses at the time.

0:33: , but now fast forward 20 odd years and you've had an incredibly varied path as a designer, agency owner, stints as a creative leader in some of the most well known brands in the world like Pinterest, Tinder, Google, and now you're the new CEO of ZAG.

0:52: James, what a pleasure to have you on the show.

0:54: Oh, thanks for having me, Rog.

0:56: Nothing beats those backyard market days.

0:58: I still look at them fondly.

1:00: Yeah, we always found that the more wine we drank, the more we sold, that was our sales technique.

1:06: I remember we got really jiggy with magnets because we had loads of screen prints and we would just move magnets under the table and it would just be the best way to stop people to look at a screen print for more than 20 seconds.

1:18: Kind of a, , as they say, the kind of market research that we both did before entering into the world of work, which was amazingly useful, you know, getting started on something where you just got stuck in and tried to sell stuff and, you know, test out everything that was to sell a business, sell some products and get creative with it as well.

1:37: It was good.

1:38: What do you think?

1:40: Well I hadn't really thought about it till we started having this conversation, I do think sitting behind a table with a bunch of screen prints you've made or a bunch of things that you've made and having thousands of people just walk past and say in very unvarnished terms whether or not they like it or don't like it.

1:55: Is one of the best ways to build resilience as a creative person, because you've kind of heard everything from by the time you finished one day of sitting behind that market also.

2:04: I hadn't really thought about it as quite such a formative thing, but it was really quite a formative process that helps stand up whenever I've got to stand up in front of a room full of people and talk about creative work now, I know hand on heart, no one will be quite as bleak as some of the conversations I had back then.

2:20: Yeah, the, , discerning tourists of Brick Lane.

2:24: , I mean, you've had an amazingly varied career, you know, working across agencies, advising founders, being in-house, also founding your own businesses and ventures.

2:35: Can you take us on a bit of a whistle stop tour of your path so far?

2:40: I know it's quite difficult because it's pretty, it's it's pretty varied and pretty broad, but you know, where did you start and what took you to where you are today?

2:49: Where did I start?

2:50: Well, I started an amazing agency, , called Cog Design, , that's still going strong down in Greenwich.

2:57: What I loved about them is they work entirely in the cultural industries, the creative industries more broadly.

3:03: And that was a really important testing ground.

3:06: , Michael, the founder of that agency, I'm really thrilled to still call him a friend today who I'll happily call up if I need advice today.

3:13: And that led into joining a bunch of digital agencies when we were still getting excited about iPhones existing, which is wild to think about that now.

3:22: , then that led into me setting up my own, , company Cure, which would have been around the time that we started doing stuff at the backyard market.

3:33: We set up an illustration agency, Higginson Hurst.

3:37: , which, which got some really fantastic illustrators on board and we got to represent their work in all sorts of interesting ways.

3:43: I set up a type foundry before Google fonts existed, the type foundry, where we were so, oh well, by we, the royal we.

3:50: I was so sort of enamoured by the power and the importance of a really well crafted typeface that 3D printing had just become a thing and you could buy a DIY build it at home 3D printer kit.

4:03: We bought this 3D printer kit in our studio, .

4:06: , in Shoreditch.

4:08: And if anybody bought one of our typefaces, we would 3D print each glyph by hand and send them each of those glyphs.

4:16: So you buy a typeface for maybe 20 pounds and we would spend the next two weeks printing out these things because it was really rudimentary.

4:22: It kept messing up all the time.

4:24: , Needless to say, then Google fonts came along and very quickly nobody ever spent 20 pounds on one of our our typefaces, which is, which is sad.

4:32: Although the ones that did, I think those 3D printed typefaces are still, , , people, people still talk about them with fondness.

4:39: That then led into me joining a company called Fig Tree, which now sadly doesn't exist anymore, but they were famous for rebranding HTC and introducing the sort of the, the drawn by hand, the fact of humanness coming through any global brand.

4:54: What did that that then led to, oh they were acquired by a really big consultancy called Profit.

5:00: And so I got to see behind the curtains of a really big management consultancy and play the role as some sort of like creative idiot in in rooms full of incredibly smart people.

5:11: , then what happened after profit?

5:14: Oh, then I joined the company on Wednesday, who again, still, I think they're still going big fashion house, sorry, I really am I'm going through everything now.

5:23: , then what did I do after Wednesday?

5:25: Oh, then I joined design studio.

5:27: So design studio very, very small, 18 odd people, I think just, just, just under 20.

5:32: And help them grow, , I mean, they had just delivered the Airbnb rebrand and helped so really saw what the impact of a big global brand would have on a, on a studio and saw the impact that a studio could then have if we take the word brand and we stop thinking about a brand or something to sell a product, we start thinking about the brand being the reason that people come to a business and work at a business that the business makes different decisions.

5:57: We really got to Explore the the the very edges of that and there's a very, very formative chunk of time and I was at design studio for a bunch of time and helped take the design studio ethos, I grow it in America, helped grow the San Francisco office, launched the New York office.

6:15: , then that led to me joining Pinterest, which is my first in-house gig.

6:20: So as a global credit director at Pinterest.

6:23: When they were transitioning, they just IPOed and they were transitioning from a place that you could save images on the internet to a place that creators would go and teach other people to do some stuff.

6:31: So how do you make that shift?

6:33: Many lessons learned there.

6:36: And then from Pinterest, I joined Google, had a brand design at Google, which was wild.

6:42: I think they had about 400,000 people, , such an enormously big business.

6:48: Although weirdly, when you're in there you don't really feel like it's that big, you know, my little team was was pretty sort of small.

6:53: We worked across all of the different Google properties and a bunch of the different alphabet properties.

6:57: , so we're sort of the consultants for higher inning at Google.

7:00: Then way back when at Design studio, we'd done some stuff with the Tinder crowd and Tinder got in touch with a really complicated conversation around what's the nature of dating in 2025.

7:14: , or 2024 when we're having this conversation, , what's happening with the world of online dating, what's happening with the world of AI or the, the conversation about why you might meet someone has really, really changed, and that challenge was just too delicious to not sort of roll up my sleeves and get stuck in.

7:30: I'm thrilled that I did work with some amazing people there to rethink that that whole process.

7:35: And then, , in and amongst all of that started about way too many different side hustles.

7:41: And then I was in London and I met this company Zag, and I've never really met a company like them before.

7:47: They're not a, you know, they're born from within BBH a long, long time ago.

7:53: And what's the original crew are still very, very loosely involved.

7:57: Zag's now an independent agency, and we're really trying to define what does an agency mean and what does this sort of consultancy mean?

8:03: How do you add value in today's world, , lots of ambiguity about what that is and how we shape that and how we define that.

8:10: And I feel like we're just getting started, so it feels like it's a brand new adventure.

8:14: Amazing.

8:15: I mean, it's just such a diverse series of experiences that you've had in so many different companies and, and advising companies as well.

8:25: I'm interested to hear your take on whether you've seen similarities between the companies that achieve great success and the companies that maybe don't do so well.

8:35: What are the commonalities between those really successful organisations?

8:40: The biggest thing that I think anybody listening to this will probably hopefully register as well.

8:48: It's the conviction, conviction for change.

8:51: Big, complicated decisions can't be made just by looking at data.

8:57: If you're in a group of people and everyone's looking at data, they're really looking at deductive.

9:01: They're trying to make a decision using deductive thinking.

9:04: And you can't make big confident decisions as a brand using deductive thinking.

9:07: You've got to give yourself the space and the opportunity and the oxygen to take big leaps, and I think you can tell that in the conviction with the teams that you're working with.

9:16: The companies that I've seen and helped take the biggest swings have just had people that have absolute conviction in something.

9:22: Yes, we'll put in place all the measures and the ways of de-risking stuff for a business.

9:27: They've got enough conviction to sort of push something through without having had all of the answers, and I think you can very quickly see the Death by 1000 cuts that can often happen in certain teams because everyone's trying to de-risk everything, get the data, see what the best practise is, , that has gone before.

9:43: And I think when that starts to happen, you can sort of see, oh right, the creative ambition is actually really, really limited.

9:48: Everyone's clipping their wings and taking away the opportunity to do something of note.

9:53: Yeah, interesting.

9:54: So it's really that having that vision and sticking to it almost no matter what, even when.

10:01: It might seem like a risky thing to do.

10:03: I guess it's .

10:05: It's kind of interesting, isn't it, in the work that we both do as creatives and What the role of creativity is in that, , in that mindset of a company and how does creativity kind of tie into that?

10:21: Yeah, I think there are two, the two sort of modes of creativity that I've bumped into enormously are when you're on the agency side of the conversation and when you're in the in the house, when you're part of the the conversation.

10:34: I think creativity plays a very, very different role.

10:37: When you're in-house, when you're working within an organisation, your role is to try to ask and and and develop the right provocations to get people to see what something could be.

10:48: And you've got to throw a lot of, a lot of things at the wall before anything sticks.

10:51: You've got to have real resilience in seeing how you can get something to stick.

10:54: When something does stick, it's intoxicating.

10:56: I think that it's really, really exciting seeing all of the different parts of a business coming together to solve a problem.

11:02: I think that's a really, really fantastic opportunity to, to be part of it.

11:05: When you're on the creative side of the, , when, when you're on the agency side or the consultancy side of the table, actually people have probably gone through some of that discussion already and then they're coming to you with a problem.

11:18: And it's just as intoxicating, but it's a different sort of intoxication.

11:21: You're being asked to solve a specific problem, often the problems, you know, to the left or to the right of the thing that's being talked about initially, but people have admitted they've got a problem and you're helping them.

11:31: You're you're meeting where the rubber hits the road, you're helping them do something, and I think that that can be really, really fantastic.

11:37: I think that the thing that all of us, I think being the creatives in the room, you've always got to fight for your place at the table.

11:45: We used to joke a long time ago that is when can first started becoming so sort of marketing focused.

11:51: We would joke or creative people, we've got to come up with a number.

11:54: So everyone else around around the boardroom, they've all got a number.

11:57: The CFO can say, oh, you know, the financial numbers are looking like this.

12:00: The HR person can talk about the the 360 review numbers and whether or not people are being supportive or not or living by the values of the company.

12:09: The marketing folk in the room can talk about the numbers of the , the impact of a particular campaign and the direct impact that that has on the, the ability for that company to survive.

12:19: In my opinion, as creative people, we shirk occasionally away from those numbers, but I think we need to hold on to what are the numbers that we can actually use and we can hold on to.

12:28: I've, you know, in the world of branding, , I've really mastered the, I think of trying to talk about the short term numbers that we can start to use to measure the impact of the work and the and give people the confidence that branding takes time.

12:40: Now what are the long term signals that they should be looking for and how do they establish the right checkpoints over time to sort of see the impact and see whether that early conviction is right.

12:48: But I think as creatives in the room, we've got to be confident that The impact that we can have on the business can be measured because I think the business has organ rejection if they don't know how they're going to measure the impact of this or see the impact of this.

13:00: So that's the thing I'm always sort of trying to make sure that we do, that we always give people the reassurance that this isn't just a nice idea, but it's a nice idea that's going to impact the business.

13:09: It's gonna help the business achieve its goals because we'll have some sort of ways of putting way markers in the sand.

13:15: And what kind of things do you do you recommend using as metrics to measure those things?

13:20: The short term things, , , social chatter, whether or not people are saying stuff, what's the propensity to actually buy something as a result of something you can measure that really, really quickly, either directly through the sales or indirectly through the stuff that you're hearing if if the brand has enough reach and has enough scope.

13:36: The longer term things are around what are the what are the values that people are attributing to a particular brand?

13:41: How do we, , I wrote a book, use design to design change, and in it there's a whole chapter about lazy listening.

13:47: How can you set a brand up to get just listen as a habit and listen to the things that are happening, , what people are saying about the brand?

13:55: Ultimately, those boil down into the equity that a brand has.

13:58: What do people think that a brand is and how do they, how do you sort of put in place the metrics and the ways of understanding those measures, , to tweak and tune and refine the brand, , over time.

14:09: We, , we've done it before, , before and after a rebrand, run a study with, , a qualitative study with a group of people showing them a brand as it is today and just getting them to, , answer open questions like what does this brand make you feel like, , how does, does it have any associations with anything, really open questions.

14:35: And then run the same exercise, , with the new brand at the end with the same questions to see if overall people's perception has shifted from, you know, one association to another, you know, because I, I think when it comes to at least doing a rebrand, you're trying to change people's perception.

14:52: You're trying to move them from thinking one way about a brand to thinking another way.

14:56: And the only way to measure that is actually to ask people and listen.

15:00: , that's how we've done it in the past, but it's really difficult to Get a company to sort of commit to doing that and understand the value of that because a lot of the time they're just thinking, well, we just need to look better.

15:11: It's like, well, it's a bit more than that.

15:14: Yeah, it's interesting, I think, , so yeah, those pre and post qua qualitative studies are really, really useful.

15:21: The other thing that I lean into an awful lot are semiotic studies.

15:24: So within semiotics there are dominant codes and emerging codes.

15:28: Usually in the upfront process we're getting to know a brand, we'll conduct some sort of semiotic study around what are the things that are going on culturally that are resonant for a particular brand.

15:37: And then through that process, there'll be emerging codes that will be popping up in different diaspora communities.

15:43: Those emerging codes are always wildly different and wildly interesting and fascinating to unpack.

15:47: , and then once the brand is live by codes.

15:51: And yeah, what does a symbol mean?

15:53: So what does it what in culture, is there something that's going on in within Mexican TV that is changing within the Mexican diaspora, what they are seeing within a particular symbol or within a piece of cultural stuff that gets traded.

16:06: So we would, I would define that as a code and then we would say, right, these are the dominant codes.

16:10: So the big obvious ones would be blue is a dominant code for security and safety.

16:15: We then say, oh, what are the emerging codes that people are using to describe or or signal security?

16:20: And are there any, is there anything that emerging in the palette of emerging ingredients that we could start to use to build some sort of brand communication.

16:28: Then once our work is out and out out in the world, if the brand has enough scale, you can then conduct those semiotic studies, you know, over time and every 6 months see, because the semiotics never sit still, they're always evolving and changing.

16:40: , you can say, right, how, how should the, how should we retune and how do we rethink what the brand is doing to make sure if we want to hold on to, you know, insert XYZ brand value or XYZ idea for what the brand should be famous for.

16:52: , how do we then make sure that we're retuning the tools that the brand has to ensure that they're staying ahead of that conversation or owning that conversation?

17:01: Yeah, it's fascinating, isn't it?

17:02: Like because also, , you can, you can make many assumptions when you're doing brand work and especially if you're working on a global brand, those assumptions can really be very wrong and in one country, you know, I imagine Tinder is probably quite a good, good example where people perceive that whole process completely differently and in different countries and how they even think about.

17:26: Dating and, you know, how open it is or how close society is, you know, that would totally change the maybe there's some stigma around using it or that's, you know, that's changed and it might change differently from country to country.

17:39: How did you find working with a global brand like Tinder across different countries and, you know, adjusting the way that the company behaves in different countries?

17:49: Yeah, I mean, Tinder, we did tonnes and tonnes of studies around the what does love and what does dating mean in different cultures.

17:57: You know, even within Europe, it means different things in different countries across Europe, you take that into a global context, it means wildly different things.

18:05: So our job is to make sure that the brand has enough, that there's enough of an anchor that people understand, oh, this is Tinder, wherever they are, but enough flexibility that Tinder can be really different and respond to the codes or the Expectations of love and dating in different, in different societies wherever they, wherever they may be.

18:24: And you, that's a really, really living conversation because the, the idea of of of what love is and how you meet people is an ever changing target.

18:33: So the within culture, even since I've been in England in the last few weeks, you sort of you can see the conversation changing around some really, really key topics.

18:40: , women's football, that's going to really, really change the conversation around sport in a really, really meaningful way.

18:45: If I were working with a leading sports band right now, I'd be really thinking right, what are the semiotics we should hold on to?

18:50: How can we lean into the, the inspiration and the hope that the lionesses have given, given the country.

18:56: But that would be totally different if we were talking to the, the teams in Spain right now and how would we, how we'd approach that conversation there.

19:02: Yeah, interesting.

19:04: What are some of the most common things that you've helped founders overcome in your role as a, as an advisor, creative advisor to different companies?

19:15: What are some of the things that you need to push founders to do or to change or to behave in different ways to, I guess, maybe get the most out of creativity in their company?

19:28: Most people come to somebody like me because they want to, they want more of something.

19:33: They want to scale something.

19:34: They want more people to buy their thing or they want more people to click that thing.

19:38: So they'll come to someone like me.

19:40: The biggest thing that I end up doing is then working out well why aren't people buying their thing?

19:44: Why aren't people clicking their thing?

19:47: And often it comes down to them needing to adapt, but there needs to be some form of adaptation.

19:52: The adaptation might be they need to tell a different story.

19:55: The adaptation might be that they just need to look different.

19:57: The adaptation might be that the world has moved on and the thing is less relevant.

20:02: And that's where the majority of my conversations end up focusing either educating a founder on how can we get them out of their philtre bubble out of the stuff, the feedback loops that that lots of founders and founding teams have built built for themselves where they think, oh, they're the centre of the universe.

20:19: So how can you sort of inject usefully and helpfully the outside perspective and I think that's a real value of bringing anyone external in.

20:27: The hardest part is then helping founders or leadership teams understand that they need to adapt because that means people admitting that they that they didn't quite get it right and I think that's a really difficult conversation to to get right.

20:40: at Google, we ended up building an entire burning platforms team, and the entire purpose of that team was to equip us within the brand team with the right arguments and the right insights to say to people, look, this isn't quite right.

20:53: There's a burning platform, there's a problem here and within a culture of exceptionalism, how do you get people to talk about a problem and admit that there's a problem and solve a problem?

21:01: , so we had to be really directive in that.

21:03: , I think that's kind of the majority of, of brand strategy is helping set up.

21:09: There's a problem here with this brand, there's a problem here with this thing, , but they don't worry about it.

21:13: There's a solution.

21:14: Let's be proactive about getting to the solution.

21:16: The biggest failure that I've seen.

21:18: And you see this an awful lot with people that are a little bit younger in their career or earlier in their career, people race to show people a solution way too early.

21:27: I think unless a founder in particular or a founder or a leadership team understand that there's a problem and are relying on the problem, it's almost impossible to get people to sign off or sign up to advocating for a stewarding some sort of solution.

21:39: So I spent a lot of time in that problem space knowing that once everyone is aligned on that problem, it's going to be much easier to get them to and will end up with a much more ambitious solution that that lots of people will celebrate.

21:52: And, and you touched on it earlier, but how, how do you find, , or how have you found the difference between working in a big institution like Google versus a scale up, you know, is it, it must be much more difficult to instigate change in a larger organisation.

22:10: , how have you gone about tackling that and what are the biggest differences you've seen between those different sort of, , , life cycles of a company?

22:21: Small companies are at the foot of the mountain.

22:25: They, everything is ahead of them and scale-ups are fascinating and fun and wild places to to work with because they'll move heaven and earth to to get something done.

22:37: Like there's also no challenge is too big.

22:39: There's a real desire to sort of to do stuff and it's it's, it's really seductive to work with teams of people who are really engaged in solving that problem and marching to that, that, that drumbeat.

22:50: Really, really big established companies still have pockets where that energy is there, but there are, there are a lot of people and their job is just to de-risk stuff.

22:59: Their job is they're at the top of the mountain, and they don't want to change anything, like the goose is golden, so they don't want to do anything that's going to stop the goose laying eggs and and your job is to show is to equip them with the confidence that you're not going to disturb the, the goose that might be laying the eggs, but you're actually gonna feather its nest if we continue that metaphor or push that metaphor.

23:20: So you end up having these very weird conversations where.

23:23: You're sort of trying to lean into and and acknowledge all of the the success of something, but you're also trying to say if you're doing your job well, there's more, there's there's something else we could do.

23:34: There's a problem that we could address, but you have to be, you've got to have a lot of EQ in the room to understand how to address those conversations.

23:41: I've been lucky to be in the room with some really, really well known human beings, and you, you just have to get really smart reading the room and how do you , , how do you know when to say something?

23:52: How do you know when not to say something?

23:54: How do you make sure that you're not throwing anyone under a bus, but you're supporting everyone?

23:58: One of the best cheat codes that I was taught about how to achieve that is, how do you ensure that everyone understands what your job is gonna make their jobs better.

24:06: You're gonna make them feel like they're doing better.

24:08: You're gonna make them seem like they've hit their KPI or OKR or whatever the, , the, the tool is that they might be using to manage their objectives.

24:18: And if you can be, if you've got good EQ and you can understand what are the things that they need to do to feel like they're seen as successful or to see that they're having an impact on the business.

24:29: If you're sensible about it, you can actually massage the change that you can see as the creative person into the brand, the product or the service.

24:36: You can, you can massage that around the, the other people in the room.

24:40: You do, you do have to be really, really sensitive, , in those conversations to try to get that, that thing out there because 99% of the time.

24:48: Certainly in my experience, those people feel like they might say there's a big problem in here, but really they're all thinking, but we're really naming it.

24:56: We're we're at the top of our game.

24:57: So knowing how to change that conversation in a positive way is something I've messed it up 1000 times.

25:04: , so knowing, you know, but then.

25:07: Being honest with yourself and learning from the times that you've messed it up like oh why didn't that thing happen, or why didn't I quite land that point or why didn't I quite do that?

25:13: It sort of helps you really fine tune your EQ radar.

25:17: And how about the difference between working in-house versus as as an external advisor on brand and design.

25:26: You touched on it earlier, it being, you know, you could come at it from a different mindset, but How have you found in your career the difference between working in those two different environments and, you know, what do you prefer and why?

25:40: When I first So design studio was such a foundational moment in my, in my life.

25:49: Absolutely loved that team, loved the energy of the organisation, was really proud of how I, the, the role that I got to play, play in the organisation.

25:56: When I left and joined Pinterest, so many people came out of the woodwork to say, what's it like going in-house?

26:03: I feel like now the in-house conversation is a little bit more mature, but you know, go, go back 8 or 9 years, it felt like it was.

26:10: slightly less, there were slightly less people that that were doing that and Design studio was, was a really well known or is still a well-known agency, but was a very well known agency at that point.

26:18: And , and lots of people were saying, but why would you leaves design studio?

26:21: Why would you go and work in-house because there's this real perception of the sort of sluggishness.

26:26: What I learned through that that process and the thing that I ended up saying to lots and lots of people is that I realised that and I hadn't thought about it before, but being in a design studio, we were quite literally sitting in the therapist's chair.

26:39: So people would come through the door, amazing organisations would come through the door, and they would give us these insanely challenging projects and really big opportunities to just do great work and make make extraordinary things happen.

26:51: Then I went into Pinterest and I realised I was in lots and lots of rooms with really, really fascinating people.

26:57: But that whole process I was talking about having to know, having to develop the EQ, I definitely hadn't developed that EQ when I first started at Pinterest.

27:05: And so I would just approach each conversation as if I was in the therapist's chair, if I had the solution and I knew the medicine that we should take as a business.

27:13: And of course, most of the people in the room didn't even think they were ill.

27:16: They didn't know that we needed to have any medicine.

27:19: And very quickly I learned, all right, so being in-house isn't like being in the therapist's chair.

27:24: It's like being in the patient's head.

27:26: You've, you've got to understand how do you navigate the conversations around getting people to see that there's a problem, getting people to see that they need to go and get help.

27:34: And just like anybody who's had a friend who needs to go and get help, you need the friend to say, oh, I need to go get help, and you end up having to do that in a sort of a weird sort of corporate setting.

27:43: However, the thing that I find that I love about my job, , sitting in the consultant's chair or in the agent agency's chair, is that you, you get to do stuff.

27:53: You don't have to be part of these conversations, thousands of companies, thousands of conversations are later an organisation knocks on the door and say, help, help us, nobody loves us, and you get to do stuff to help resolve the the problem, the problem that they've identified or work out what the problem really is.

28:10: , the thing that's fascinating thing I got to see firsthand at Pinterest a lot actually, was that if you can get the stars to align, if you do get the maturity and the EQ to sort of get people to see what the problem can be, it is absolutely like nothing I've ever experienced before or since, , seeing an agency.

28:28: I was seeing an organisation, sorry, stand behind something and everybody coming together to solve something.

28:34: I'm really grateful to have seen that that from the inside.

28:37: And of course, there are gazillions of people that come in to make something happen, but being at the centre of that that engine is really, really thrilling.

28:44: So I don't know whether one's better or one's worse.

28:46: They're just different, you know, you have to play very different roles.

28:49: I'm sure for some people they want to play different roles.

28:51: Turns out I'm a very flexible, flexible human being.

28:53: I think they're both fantastic.

28:55: And now at Zag you're working with more startups, you know, how is that different and what are you helping with them with at the moment?

29:03: Well, the interesting Zag story is that it's at both ends of the spectrum.

29:09: So he's the, the big sort of stalwart client that we've been working with for a long time.

29:14: And then we have a whole venture studio, , component part to it.

29:18: And it is the, the flexibility there is yo yoing from the big corporate conversations you might have with the Es, BT's, , and the like, .

29:28: And how do you help them make decisions?

29:30: How do you put in place road maps that mean that they're making, they're taking creative leaps that they feel comfortable with the risks they might be taking, that they're investing in the things that again change them at the scale that they need to change what's equally then turning around and speaking to people who might be part of our venture portfolio, who, , they've come to us with an idea and we think the idea has some things so we're helping them build that idea into something and connecting them with the right people or making sure they've got the right tools at their disposal to to bring that thing to life.

29:58: And I think that that There are lots of agencies that have tried to do that, but I've seen try to do that at both ends.

30:05: Zag is one of the few agencies and it's also the only agency that I know as intimately as I know now, so I'm sure the others have also made a success of it.

30:12: But I think Zag makes a success of it because we need to, we take the learnings from the small scrappy startupy conversations and we then infuse that into the big, the big brands we work with.

30:23: And then equally we take the stuff that we're learning from the big brands and we bring that into the small scrappy startups.

30:28: So it's a symbiosis of both of those, of both of those things, but of course it sounds easier now that I'm just sort of saying it as a sentence.

30:35: The reality is we're always running from 11 to the other and you're always like trying to like manage that, that, you know, the context switching can be exhausting, can be, can be tiring, so it's then having the discipline which I'm still learning.

30:46: To work out right, how do I make sure I've got the right space to focus on this complicated big problem over here and not get sucked into the gazillion on one immediate solutions that need to be had for some of the startups we might be dealing with on the other end of the room.

31:01: , you're a big fan of asking dumb questions.

31:05: Can you tell us a little bit more about that?

31:07: Oh, dumb questions.

31:10: I think the benefit of being the creative person in the room is that we shouldn't be the smartest person in the room.

31:15: And one of the things I love about being on the consultancy side or the agency side of the conversation is we shouldn't have the answers.

31:22: What we should have are the the questions to help people get to the right answers.

31:28: Maybe it's because of my own intellectual sort of inabilities, but I love going into the conversations with a series of key questions that I know will help a business make better decisions.

31:40: Everyone has their own little frameworks or their cheat sheet, and I've got my own little cheat sheet for.

31:45: The questions that I know that I need to ask to get to help a business get smart, and they might be coming asking for a campaign, they might be coming because they need to launch a new digital product, and they might be coming because I want a full on rebrand and I will still sort of probe into the same five key areas in different ways with real childlike naivety and you know, with a real childlike curiosity, and I think that's the thing that I'm always looking for and the people I work with is curiosity.

32:12: I think curiosity will move mountains with things.

32:15: So for me, the dumbest of dumb questions are just asking businesses like what do you want the company to do, what do you do?

32:21: and getting people to say in their own words, what is it that they do?

32:24: And I've asked CEOs and CMOs of some of the biggest brands in the world, but what do we actually do?

32:30: And hearing them in their words describe what it is that they do is such an important way of conveying the emotional thing, the emotional story that that we need to, that we need to hold on to.

32:42: I think creativity isn't rational.

32:44: It's emotional, like really, really good creativity lands in people's hearts and in in people's minds.

32:49: That's why, that's why it sort of sticks with us.

32:51: I think that to get there, we just have to give ourselves the opportunity and the grace to ask really emotional questions.

32:57: So asking, asking, , leaders of a business like, but what, why do you, what is it that you do?

33:02: Why do you do it?

33:03: Why, why do people care about it?

33:04: , helps you as a creative person, say, huh, OK, so that's the story, that's the emotional thing that needs to end.

33:11: I'll then dig into what is it that's going on within the category, what's going on with the competition, what's going on with contextually, what's going on on specific channels, and then critically, what's going on with their community or their consumers or their customers.

33:23: And I'll probe into each of those areas.

33:26: Almost With such muscle memory now that I need to be careful to not sort of skip over things or create weird associations in my own head.

33:36: And through those conversations I'll be able to say, right, because of these dumb questions, I think we're starting to get to some smart answers, and it's our job as a creative people in the room, or my job certainly in lots of the rooms I'm in, is to ask those dumb questions, but to leave the conversation knowing that we've got smarter answers that we can get back with smarter thinking as a result of having asked those dumb questions.

33:55: And is that some of the things you touch on in your book?

34:00: Yes, so the book is a, the book is in its 2nd edition, I think, or maybe no 2nd edition.

34:07: And there is a 3rd edition coming out soon though, which is exciting.

34:10: But it's in its 2nd edition and the journey of the book is kind of wild in San Francisco in the height of COVID, I was Doing a whole series of workshops on how can startup teams like set of what are the core ingredients for them to build a brand and to to know how to hold on to a brand.

34:31: Then someone introduced me to Fuzzy logic, so I used to work with at Pinterest, and I was so excited that you could connect.

34:39: A fuzzy logic for people that don't know, , which I didn't know before someone told me about it, , let's a computer know, oh, if someone is looking for a green thing, they might not be looking for green, the word green, they might be looking for grass.

34:52: Like what's the fuzziness around the thing and how do you use that?

34:55: , and that's how lots of sort of complicated search things are working.

34:58: They've got fuzzy logic in the background connecting the dots.

35:01: I thought what I was running these workshops, oh, wouldn't it be great if we could use fuzzy logic to create a workshop tool that people could come, come along, they could just speak to this tool, and the tool would tell them, oh, this is how you, how you build around after about a year or so with me and a and a friend who I apologise to whenever I see him.

35:19: , trying to build a fuzzy logic talking machine, my friend said, this is absolutely stupid, just write a book like this is insane, that it's never gonna work.

35:28: Then I got a job at Google and someone showed me barred and like every good humble human being, I said, that's exactly what I was thinking of.

35:38: I've invented AI , , and I spent ages at Google trying to convince them to let me use barred for my talking book idea, but that didn't go anywhere.

35:48: And a friend at Microsoft introduced me to something I don't know if it still exists anymore, called Semantic kernel that lets you sort of talk to different language models and me and that that that friend that had gone through that painful year, , we end up building a very rudimentary talking book, but it was so utterly rudimentary.

36:05: It's, I think it's still online somewhere, but I, I, who knows, , and then, , after that failing, I tried to use it in about 4 or 5 workshops and it was terrible.

36:15: It just didn't work.

36:16: Until someone said, can you just write it down in a book?

36:18: So I ended up writing a book of really blunt workshop exercises, but I was so exhausted by the time I wrote the book, it was just imagine a bunch of workshop plans in a book.

36:28: Then I ran a workshop asked everyone to to get a copy of the book, and someone said, but this is a really boring book.

36:34: Like the stories you tell are the interesting thing about this, about how to, how to build a brand.

36:42: So second edition.

36:43: , , I just recorded myself giving a workshop or giving a bunch of workshops, and there's just the stories of why I think these workshop exercises will help people build a brand and a big part of that, those five Cs, , pop up all the time.

36:56: , how do you, what are the questions you should ask your company, what are the questions you should ask of a community, what are the questions you should ask of, , , about a category, and how do you then piece all that stuff together to try to make a book?

37:07: , sorry, to make a, to make a run, and now excitingly, there is, I'm hoping for the 3rd edition going to be a talking book.

37:15: I think some sort of like now chat GPT inspired, , sort of machinery that will be that that someone is working on to try to show that you can now have a natural conversation with it.

37:26: So just, you know, 6 years later, and finally this thing is coming, coming together.

37:30: What's the book called?

37:31: Where can we find it?

37:32: It's called Use Design to Design and Change.

37:34: I think it's available on at all good bookshops.

37:37: , it's, , it's definitely all the links to it are at Rogue School, which is just rogue.school, and that's where the book is.

37:44: There's now in a course, how to use artificial intelligence to build aesthetic intelligence, which is born out of the book.

37:50: , there's a whole podcast that's come out of it.

37:53: There's talking books.

37:54: There's a really funny like snooze talking book where someone whispers the entire book.

37:59: So if you have trouble sleeping or you know someone's having trouble sleeping, get a book on branding where someone just whispers how to build a brand because it's very compelling.

38:09: Amazing.

38:10: And as we close the podcast, , what, what's a key nugget you would like to leave the listeners who are listening to progress into leadership or progress as better leaders?

38:22: What's your, your nuggets you'd like to leave the, leave the world?

38:26: I would say the most the biggest contribution I could give to the nugget of great nuggets would be there's one question that I ask myself and ask teams and ask everyone that gets work with.

38:39: , very, very quickly and very early on, and I think this is the question that unlocks almost every creative decision I've then gone on to make in almost every project.

38:48: So and it's such a blindingly obvious question.

38:51: I always ask, are we weirding the normal or are we normaling the weird?

38:55: And if we can be clear on that, I think it unlocks all of the other things that then fall out of a creative process.

39:00: So are we trying to say, are we weirding the normal?

39:03: So have we got a really pedestrian expected thing, brand, category, product, service, whatever, and our job is just to make it more interesting, but within the category usually.

39:13: So we're just getting people understand the category, but they're just trying to decide if this is the right product or service for them.

39:18: So what do we need to do to weird the normal?

39:20: How do we use aesthetic intelligence to to weird the normal?

39:22: How do you use emotional design cues on our conversational design cues, , to, to wear the norm.

39:28: The thing that's the opposite of that, how do we normal the weird is kind of, , it's much rarer that I've had projects like that, but I've had a few really exciting ones where someone comes to you with a really obscure idea, a ridiculously bonkers product, a fantastically unusual service when we first started talking to the Tinder crew, that was a really weird idea.

39:49: you'd meet a stranger when we first started first started talking to lots of those big platform businesses, it's very weird that you would do that sort of thing.

39:56: So our job as the creative people in the room or what are the semiotics or the signals that we can hold on to that will let people file it in a place they're not just going to reject it because we're all scared of the new thing, but they're gonna see there's going to be a way of us telling the story by people holding on to something that feels familiar.

40:11: So with the normal or normal the weird, ask and answer that question and everything else becomes much more fun.

40:17: James, it's been an absolute pleasure.

40:19: Thank you so much for all of your thoughts and insights and thanks for being on the show.

40:24: Oh, thank you so much, Rog.

40:25: It's been a real pleasure.