Why do you think it can sometimes be difficult to bridge the gap between learning and behaviour change? It's never just down to one factor, but what have you seen from that point of view?
I'd see myself as a consultant rather than a trainer. I think one of the issues is that it's like a force field analysis. You need constant pressure to encourage behavioural change. I can go along and give someone a model or a tool to work with, but as soon as I leave the office, there's always a tendency for people to revert to things they're comfortable with, things they've tried and tested in the past.
Unless you can make an immediate breakthrough with the logic of what you're doing and the benefits to the business, there's a tendency for people to revert to type.
What kind of training and consultancy does Matchbox Training do?
Matchbox was set up 15 years ago. The idea was to bring big company learning and behavioural technology to small organisations. My background is working in very large multinational businesses, where I might put together a strategy paper that was 50 pages long. That's clearly of no benefit to a small organisation. What we tried to do was take all the good things that big organisations do and distill them into useful, practical things that small businesses could use.
Big companies do a lot of useful things. It's just that their scale and the appropriateness of what they do for smaller companies need addressing.
Let's talk about return on investment. Suppose a CEO has the power to invest a certain amount of money in a training programme, and the trainer has to demonstrate that it's going to deliver a particular impact or ROI.
What does that conversation need to look like? How can a trainer prove the return on investment or demonstrate impact to a CEO?
We'll be very clear at the outset. Again, it's about working with people rather than training programmes per se. Over, say, a 12-month period, we'll look at certain key metrics. Some might relate to behavioural change, while others might involve putting structures in place. It could be developing a strategy, creating a senior leadership team within a business, or managing that team. You can identify the tangible things being done and measure whether they're happening.
Ultimately, most companies want the benefit to be reflected in growth, increased turnover, improved net profit, or a combination of those things. So you've got some hard measures and some softer measures. At the start of any engagement, we'll explain what we're trying to do and how we're going to do it. Essentially, we agree with the client what good looks like.
What struck me there was the balance between quantitative and qualitative measures. You need both the hard and the soft measures, and I think finding that balance is often the challenge. Looking more specifically at the data, would you say those business success metrics you mentioned are among the key things you measure?
Or are there other hard data metrics you use, depending on the circumstances?
It's pretty much on a case-by-case basis. It depends on where we start. There's no silver bullet in the kind of work we do. Every company has different challenges and ambitions, and they're all starting from a different place. We'll always do something bespoke to them.
We use models and tools, but we also talk a lot about having the scars that come from having run businesses ourselves. That experience means we can pull tools out of the toolkit as and when they're needed, rather than simply saying, "We're going to work through these ten things."
We'll talk about leading and lagging indicators. If you look at your profit and loss account, for example, that's great because it tells you what you did last month, but it doesn't necessarily help you next month. So we'll put leading indicators in place, such as the number of sales calls you're going to make or the number of customers you're going to speak to.
If it's a health and safety issue, the indicators might include the number of potential accidents or near misses you're recording. There's a blend of measures, but it's very specific to the requirements of each company.
Feedback mechanisms are important for this because you need to gather results and demonstrate what's happening. Face-to-face conversations can be useful, while some people use peer groups or technology-based mechanisms.
What kind of feedback mechanisms do you like to use at Matchbox?
It's pretty informal because when you're working with organisations for three or four days a month, for example, you're getting hands-on acknowledgement of whether what you're doing is working.
You can see it in the numbers you're generating. If a company is increasing its turnover, that's an indication of progress. It's always a little difficult to trace cause and effect in these things, but if you're consistently doing the right things, chances are you're going to get some good outcomes.
We don't typically use structured feedback. It's more about asking the question: "Is this working for you?"
The other thing is that the issues you identify at the start of an engagement aren't necessarily the issues you'll be dealing with at the end. When you start working with a company, they might say, "We've got a terrible sales force." But it might be the product that needs reviewing rather than the sales force. It's a bit of a movable feast, and you've got to be flexible about your outcomes and therefore your metrics accordingly.
Matchbox covers a few different areas, but focusing more specifically on change management, consultancy and the programmes you deliver, what does that process look like for you?
How do you start the conversation, and are there particular metrics you need to measure to demonstrate the impact of change?
We've got a process that we work through. We always start with the concept of the owner's requirements: what do you need this business to deliver to you? Why are you doing this job rather than taking paid employment with someone else?
The answer might be that I need the business to deliver a certain level of profit. I want to do good things for society. I want to have a happy and satisfied workforce. I want to be proud of the product I'm delivering. Or perhaps I love working in engineering. We work through why people are in business and what their aspirations are.
We then start mapping the route to achieving those goals because the reason someone is in business typically reflects a future state rather than the current state. We'll map the journey towards that desired state and identify the success factors that need to be put in place.
For example, if you're looking for growth, you'll look at the product, but you'll also look at how your branding works. You'll consider your routes to market, how your sales force operates, and so on. It ties the company's ambitions to what's happening in the business and puts practical things in place to bridge that gap.
Are there any case study examples you'd like to share where you've delivered consultancy or training and seen an impact over a period of time?
There's a managed service provider IT company that I've been working with for quite some time. When we started working together, they were just about keeping their heads above water.
Over time, they've reached a point where their turnover has increased massively, and so has their profitability. More importantly, I think they've professionalised the whole business. They've put structures, processes and approaches in place that mean we can identify what position the business is likely to be in over the next six months.
What was almost a hand-to-mouth existence has become a business with the certainty to start planning, recruiting and developing more client relationships. Ultimately, it comes down to the significantly increased turnover and profit, but it's the way they've professionally revisited every aspect of their business that's really pleasing.
You also see the individuals growing in competence. From the outside, we give them the prompts, but they're the ones who do the work. That's a really pleasing organisation to have worked with.
When you follow up to see whether you're embedding these kinds of changes, what does that feedback look like?
Are you meeting in person, giving them prompts, or checking in after a few weeks or perhaps three months? How does that generally work?
It depends on the size of the company and the kind of support they want, but typically we'll meet two, three or four times a month.
My job is to give them the tools to help them through different challenges, but also to be the conscience of the business a little bit. I'm quite obsessive about writing down notes from meetings and then coming back the following week and saying, "We agreed to do this. Has it been done?"
It's about holding people to account a little. They're very busy, and sometimes the kind of work we do through consultancy isn't quite as pressing as answering the next customer call. It's not unusual for something to slip down the priority list.
My job is to say, "We sat there and agreed this was an important thing that needed doing, so let's make sure we do it."
Looking at AI now, it's affecting every industry. How have you seen it affect your work, whether positively, negatively or somewhere in between?
What do you think about how it can be used more generally?
I think it's massively positive at this point. There are simple things such as producing documentation, policies and procedures. One of my clients has used AI quite a lot for interview techniques, for example. He put someone's CV through it and asked, "What are the questions I should be asking?"
So far, I've got nothing but good things to say about AI. In terms of saving time, it's very positive. One of the approaches I often take with people is to say, "Look, if you're the managing director of a company, let's see if we can get 50% of the tasks off your desk and give them to other people, or simply stop doing them, so you can concentrate on more value-added things."
Typically, that's meant delegating tasks to other people, but increasingly AI is becoming a way of taking on those time-consuming tasks. It also gives you access to data that you simply didn't have before.
I'm interested in the idea of learning styles. Some people swear they're real, while others say they're a myth and that the reality is much more nuanced.
What do you think of the concept of learning styles? Do you think they're important, or is it more complicated than that?
I think they're really important. I've got two sons, and I saw it with the boys as they were growing up. They have very different approaches to learning.
You can also see it with the clients you work with. Sometimes you can go through a process and their eyes might glaze over because you haven't got the pitch right. At other times, they'll really latch onto something you've given them because you've presented it in a way that suits their particular style.
I think that's a really important part of our job as consultants: understanding our clients and making it easier for them to take on board the things we're helping them to do.
Looking at credentials, some people might see consultancy as a bit theoretical. I think consultants who've demonstrated results are often less concerned with certifications. To me, it's similar to a coaching mindset, where people might pursue a lot of qualifications to prove their credibility, but in certain markets, what matters is action rather than theory.
What are your thoughts on that? Is it important to have credentials to demonstrate what you do, or does it come down more to the actual impact you've shown?
We purposely didn't go down the coaching qualification route. Going right back to the start of this conversation, we used the experience we'd gained from running businesses.
For the clients I work with, the practical side of things tends to be much more important: how do you do this, and what happens when that occurs? That's significantly more important to them than the theoretical side.
That being said, we do use a lot of tools. We'll use risk registers and financial tools, for example. We use those tools to illustrate and embed something we've worked on with the client.
I think it's part of the way we work. Consider what happens when your client starts refusing to pay, for instance. It's not easy to find a training course that tells you how to deal with that. But if you've been through the process yourself, you understand how to handle it. A lot of this work is about dealing with people, and that hands-on experience is the value we add.
Beyond AI, are there any particular technology trends, or broader trends, that you see affecting your work in training or consultancy?
Is there anything you're excited about, or anything that makes you think, "I'm not sure about that"? What are you seeing at the moment?
I don't see massive changes in technology, although we work with a diverse range of clients, so the technology people use varies according to the sector they're in. In terms of the work we do, I'm not seeing a massive change in the way we're going to work over the next couple of years as a result of technology.
It sounds a bit pithy, but we've got a very people-based approach. That personal input, face-to-face contact, having open conversations and building trust are the guts of where we add value.
How do you keep learning? Do you have any particular styles or practices that help you improve what you do, retain information and then put it into practice?
Because we work with a large number of organisations, every time you work with a client, you take something away. You'll give something, but you'll take things away as well, whether that's learning about someone's leadership style or discovering a particular process or technique they use.
My personal approach is to be aware of what I'm getting out of a relationship as well as what I'm giving to it. There's a concept of lift and shift, where something that works in an IT company might work just as easily in a building company, for example. The same applies to ways of dealing with people. That's how I approach it.
There's also a degree of working through things on the internet and learning from what's available there, as well.