How managers use data to stop decision bottlenecks

You have to be able to orientate yourself on what you're seeing, what it means to you, what you need to do about it. You need to decide from multiple courses of action and choose the ones that are likely to have the the biggest impact. And then you need to act. And when you act, you need to observe the effects of that action and feed that back into the next cycle. Welcome back to this week's episode of The High Performance Leader, the podcast for leaders working in complex, challenging environments, to gain insights and ideas which help you increase your impact without burning out and to help you build a high-performance culture in your team. I'm your host, Jimmy Burroughes, and if you're new to The High Performance Leader, make sure you subscribe or follow so you don't miss any of our upcoming episodes before you put down your device. Hello, and welcome back to this week's episode of The High Performance Leader. I am so excited to introduce you to this week's guest, former Royal Marine and now CEO of Mission Control, the incredible Ben Ford. Ben has got a wealth of experience, both through the military and then a variety of civilian roles, which means that he has now worked his way up to the CEO of an organisation that is fantastically interesting, and he's going to tell us all about it, where we understand unpack the building of an internal nervous system. And I know you cannot wait to find out what does that mean. But, Ben, welcome to the show. Thanks so much for joining us. Ben: Thanks Jimmy, great to be here. I've been looking forward to this. I know we've had a few rounds of scheduling, so, yeah, it's great to be here. Jimmy: Absolutely. And I was really privileged to get to have a conversation with you a couple of weeks ago where you were doing podcast recordings for your own research, and I'm sure that will weave into our conversation. But before we get into what is an internal nervous system, tell us a little bit about you, and how did you end up where you are now? Ben: Yeah, sure thing. So, as you mentioned, I served in the Royal Marines in my early 20s. Um I got rather bored on the way to Iraq in 2003 and got myself a book on Python delivered to the ship that I was on. And that sort of kicked off my tech journey. Bounced from there into, you know, various different tech roles for everything from sort of environmental startups, all the way up to, you know, working in trading teams and investment banks, lots of different roles, lots of different technologies. And I got to the point where, I don't know, about probably 10 years ago or so, I suppose, you know, up until that point I'd kind of discounted my military experience a bit, and it got to the point where I realised that, you know, a lot of these companies I was working in were spending a tonne of money on head count on technology people like me, but actually didn't have a super good grasp of what was going on and what was happening in their environment. And, yeah, that kind of caught my attention, really. I realised that, you know, one of the things that were really, really good at in the military is, you know, having kind of social technology as I like to call it, that's built up over the years to help us deal with complexity and uncertainty, and that that was largely absent in these tech companies, which ironically, all had access to much better tech than we had in the military. So I spent a bit of time, you know, kind of researching, doing a lot of consulting, you know, dived into lots of stuff that we've talked about before like the ideas behind mission command for the military and John Boyd's OODA loop. And eventually kind of put together this idea of, you know, mission control, which is the internal kind of operating system that you need to be able to centralise all the information that's happening around your business in order to be able to make better decisions, know what's going on. And, yeah, that's kind of morphed into you know, what we now call mission control and what I do these days. Jimmy: Super interesting and you know, it seems incredible to me that somebody who is a Royal Marine suddenly ends up at this consulting end of the spectrum to advise tech companies on how to run their tech companies. So, let's dive a little bit deeper on that, and start talking about this concept of the internal nervous system, because I'm an ex-biologist, so I understand how the nervous system works and how it connects all the dots and passes signals around. And I'm feeling there's probably a bit of an overlap, but I'm interested in your understanding of, what is an internal nervous system when it comes to a leadership team wanting to understand what's going on in their business? Ben: Yeah, so this is a bit of a dicey topic, actually. You can get into a lot of trouble with you know, kind of org designers and people when you start talking about when you when you start kind of over egging the pudding when it comes to, you know, treating businesses like they're some sort of biological creature. But at the end of the day, businesses, organisations, are made up of people. People have nervous systems, and everything that goes on in a business, the decisions that we take, the actions that we try and take to make a difference in the world, and the information coming from the world has to be filtered and processed by people at the end of the day. So, the idea of an internal nervous system is, you know, if you do consider or you take a biological lens to look at businesses, which I think is a good idea because, you know, the alternative is to look at a business like some kind of machine, and look at yourself as a business leader as some kind of mechanic, and really, okay fine, you know, when there's technology involved, you can think like that, but as soon as you get people involved, you know, the machine kind of analogy just goes straight out of the window. And you need to start thinking about this as a you know, biological system with feedback loops. So, in that context, the nervous system of the business is the thing that connects your contact with the outside world, the actions that you take and the observations that you make, and pulls all that together into something that we can, you know, have a model of and make sense of. And, you know, it connects our senses with our kind of processing. Again, you can also get into lots of trouble calling a brain a computer and a processor with certain people. But for the purposes of analogy, you know, you need something to bring all the signals from the outside world into somewhere where the signals can be processed, made sense of, and the next actions can flow from. Does that kind of fit your biological background? Jimmy: Absolutely! Absolutely. And one of the things that I learned in medicine, and I'm sure you'll be able to put some meat on the bones here, no pun intended, is that often when you have a stimulus in a nervous system, there is a reaction, and often there can be a reaction to the reaction, which then causes a subsequent reaction. And I think that's where we start to see some of the complexity in modern organisations where leadership teams and leaders can often struggle, because they're not prepared for, that and they can't measure and sense some of those reactions happening. So, how do you support leaders with really understanding and getting to grips with what is actually going on? What does that look like? Ben: Yeah. So, I mean, that's a really really good point, isn't it? You know, what we see is not always what we get, you know. The map is not the territory. There's, you know, an infinite number of, you know, pithy kind of sayings about this concept. And it's absolutely right. What you expect does shape what you observe. And, you know, you need to kind of be able to filter through all of that. Now and it used to be a lot simpler, right? It used to be, you know, a business would have a leadership team that was, you know, if it was working well, let's say let's say 20 years ago, a business would have a leadership team, that would all be in one place pretty much. Everything would centralise into that leadership team, and you'd all be able to kind of talk and understand what's going on by osmosis, you know, a bit of good kind of leadership principles like, you know, Andy Grove's High Output Management, or what what have now become OKRs. Then you can kind of manage this kind of cycle. But in today's world, you know, you're more than likely distributed, you're more than likely processing way more way more data. Especially if you've got any kind of technology, which is everyone in today's business. You've probably got multiple different pieces of software as a service that kind of integrate to run your business, like a CRM, like an accounting system, like whatever operations platforms you have. And now all of your you know, knowledge, all of your kind of sensing apparatus is all spread out and decentralised. And yet, still somehow you have to decide how to allocate capital, and you have to decide what initiatives to undertake, and you have to decide what's actually going on. So, you know, traditionally that would have been done on a cadence of, you know, people asking their lower-downs what's going on, those people asking their lower-downs what's going on, and that flowing back up. And there's a really brilliant explanation of how that works in a book called The Great Game of Business, which was written 40 years ago, and, you know, the cadence in that business was 2 weeks, and it was a factory. And that's great. You know, it worked really well for them. But nowadays, you know, if you're in any kind of technology or in fact any role, right, and suddenly something like ChatGPT hoves into view or, you know, some competitor starts using a different technology and can move quicker than you. Right, these feedback loops of how quickly you can try things out, make decisions, decide what to do next is much, much faster. And so, I believe you have to have some kind of technological help. I mentioned ChatGPT earlier. Obviously that's the they're they're all the rage at the moment, but it's a super valuable tool for an individual to speed up you know, how they process data, how they make sense of stuff, how they produce new output. And it's just an example of multiple things happening in the environment that make that all happen at once across all different parts of the business. And I think, you know, we've reached a point where it's beyond humans to keep up. You know, it's beyond emails and spreadsheets and a plucky attitude to try and, you know, make that all work at the cadence that it needs to. Jimmy: Amazing. I think you've probably touched on some of the serious concerns of leadership teams right now, and how do we keep up with all of these changing levels of complexity, data sources, inputs, and all the things that we are expected to pay attention to. That can be a real stressor. Can you share with us an example or one of the interactions, engagements, you've had with one of your clients that really reinforced this realisation you've had around building an internal nervous system, and what led you to help them through that? Ben: Yeah, sure. So, I mean, I've got a maybe, you know, one example bottom-up and one example top-down. So, the bottom-up example is it's a fintech business that, you know, deals with tax, very complicated kind of operational picture, and just through the way that the company had kind of developed, it ended up that they had one of their super high-qualified, you know, master's educated tax experts doing one of these manual processes that needed to be done to, you know, just have operational things working, like working at all. And so, yeah, she was basically performing the role of a machine. She was doing the same thing every day, downloading a file, deduping it, you know, doing a bit of post-processing, checking if the data was okay, and then uploading it to, you know, essentially what was a CRM. You know, very little value add, very little use of her experience, very little use of her, you know, very accomplished brain. And also, very, very low-hanging fruit for most businesses to fix, right? What I did was take an automation platform that we use, understand all the different steps for her, understand where the data comes from, the transformation processes that it has to go through, and where it needs to end up, and then I turned it into code, low code, in fact. And, you know, that took me I don't know, an afternoon, maybe a day tops of maybe tinkering back and forth all told, and, you know, what was taking her an hour every single day is now a process that just runs completely transparently in the background in 8 seconds. And she's got all of that hour back to do, you know, tax expert things and, you know, manager things and just be the expert that she should be. So, that's one example of taking you know, easily available tools off the shelf and using it to kind of strip out drudge, kind of dead work that doesn't add any value from the bottom up. And there's, you know, any business has got processes like this, you know, things that have become you know, necessary to function, but, you know, don't really add any value to the person's day doing them, and can be automated. So, that's one thing. There's a, you know, huge tranche of that front-end user-facing stuff that can just be automated away. And then the flip side is, you know, what do you do with that data once you've got it in one place? And, you know, I mentioned, you know, the leadership team needing to make decisions. Well, you know, if your process of getting the information in one place for the leadership team is all of the lower downs going and spending, you know, let's say 3 hours on a Friday afternoon pulling the board deck together, and they do that by going and looking at different pieces of spreadsheet and then they pull that all into a deck that is presented, that is dead as soon as it's been presented, because you know, hardly anyone's ever going to go and look at that again. So the approach that we take is that once we've taken care of some of that automation stuff and given people some of their bandwidth back, we then look at aggregating the data that we've collected into one place, because building reports and aggregations from things that are all in one place in a database is a huge amount easier than trying to do that on the fly as you're pulling things from different platforms. And then we present that data into real-time dashboards, so, you know, you don't need to wait until the end of the week to know what's going on, you've got it there in real time. And that's also relatively straightforward to do with, you know, BI tools. Um you know, you can do it off the shelf, but it's very important that you do it on data that is well-formed, well-modelled, and ideally centralised, and that's the bit that's the challenging part generally. Jimmy: Yeah, I can completely resonate with the idea of having this real-time information. How do you overcome the challenge that many businesses have, and I talked to Paul Teasdale who worked with McLaren, and he said that one of the biggest challenges that he has with organisations measuring things is they want to they either don't know what they want to measure or they want to measure too many things, and then they get this massive data overload of all of this data that they don't really know what's the important bits to pay attention to. So, how do you work with an organisation or what are your recommendations for an organisation that's thinking of going down this dashboarding route to make sure that they're getting the right things and not too many things? Ben: That is a great question. It's a bit of an art form, but, you know, if you again look at an organisation through this kind of biological lens, you can start to get some clues, right? Biological systems like, you know, us, like single-celled organisms, like cities, all have layers, they're all kind of, you know, self-similar at scale. I mean, you can imagine, you think back to our time in the military, you know, you've got three sections in a troop, three troops in a company, three companies in a commando or a battalion. All of those things have kind of self-similar structure. So, your section is, you know, eight people. They need to know what's going on on the ground in their little bit of the battlespace. They need to know that at very high fidelity with huge amount of information, but the higher up in the troop or the platoon doesn't need to know every single thing that's going on. They need to know what's important, right? So, you see this kind of fractal downsampling and filtering and aggregating of information as it goes up or into the organisation. And, you know, organisation is fairly similar to, you know, our that view of an organisation is the same as a business as well, right? So, the art is in deciding what you aggregate and what you pass up, right? So, what you downsample to. So, rather than having a deluge of every little thing that you observe from the environment, I mean in a Formula One car, you know, they're producing an enormous amount of information. I would imagine that they're probably not from the car, they're probably doing some sort of edge processing these days, downsampling some of that because they've only got a certain width of pipe to push all the information back into the ops centre that sits on the trackside. The trackside are probably passing real-time information back to HQ in wherever, Milton Keynes or wherever they sit. And when the race is finished, HQ probably gets everything all in a dump, and then they can do all of their kind of, you know, very whizzy smart data science. But that is out of band, that is not in the real time of the race, right? So, you've got the stuff that you need to know. The people that are sitting on that pit wall have screens and dashboards and real-time data flow that is very, very carefully refined, and, you know, Formula One is a great example because they're really really really good at this. So every person that's looking at a screen is looking at the right filter and aggregate of the data that is flowing from the outside world, producing some of their own data and inputs. You know, the weather person that's looking at the meteorological picture is then adding their own oversight their own insight, making recommendations, and I'm assuming that the, you know, the race strategist, or, you know, let's call them the COO if we want to kind of put that into business picture, is then seeing an aggregate view of that person's take on the data that they're having, but they're certainly not seeing the whole weather forecast, right? They're saying probably something like, "Rain expected in 20 minutes." The minimum amount of information that's at the right level of fidelity for them to make the decision that they need to make. And so, I think, you know, I'm glad that you mentioned Formula One, cuz you know, alongside military operations, in fact, Formula One is probably an even better example because they are so data-driven and because that volume of data is just so enormous. Well, they have to have that downsampling really weighed off, so I think it's a really great place to look. Jimmy: So interesting to hear the analogies, though, between the high-performance business and a high-performance Formula One team and a high-performance military team all being compared and merged into painting this picture. Hey there, Jimmy here, and I just wanted to drop into this episode and let you know we're extremely grateful for all of the incredible reviews and feedback that we're getting about the Ways of Working podcast. We've managed to get ourselves amazingly into the top 10% globally of all management podcasts, which is an absolute dream for me to be able to share the ways of working message across a wider community. I wanted to share a quick review from one of our listeners, because it's absolutely incredible and inspiring to those people that we're trying to reach and communicate with. From Pinnacle Coach, "Jimmy is a great, natural interviewer, and his background helps him to ask some really good questions. I've enjoyed a couple of the episodes from here, and always come away feeling inspired for my own work." Pinnacle Coach, thank you so much for that incredible review. We really appreciate it, and if you haven't already, make sure you subscribe or follow on your favourite podcast platform of choice to the Ways of Working podcast, and we'll see you soon. Take care. Where have you seen a company that you've worked with or an organisation that you've worked with really take advantage of this internal nervous system, and what was the upside for them? Ben: So, you know, I don't think I've ever seen a whole company do it well across the board. I'll share with you an example of a front office team that I worked in an investment bank where they did it locally exceptionally well. So, this was a the front office kind of technology team in Standard Chartered Bank where I worked. And when I arrived, I think the team had been in place for maybe 8 years, it was 8 years. I remember because the code base was born on the same day as my daughter. When I got my Git command wrong, and it spat out a day, I was like, "Oh, I recognise that day!" Anyway, I digress. What this team had done from day one, almost from day one, there was a bit of an interesting origin story that I won't go into here, was they'd been building APIs around all of the other systems in the bank. So, what they had was this core, very well-formed API and library layer, which meant that you as a programmer building tools for a front office trader who needed it yesterday, because they always need it yesterday, you had this very well-formed toolset to go and fetch the data from, and you know the format that that you get the data in, and you know where it comes from, you know the latency, all that kind of stuff. So, that meant that as that team, we could put together these very bespoke screens. I guess, you know, go back to that Formula One analogy, the trader, they don't really like pictures and stuff, they have lots of lots of tables of of things, but we can put exactly the right data in front of them very very quickly. And the difference of having this, I moved from a different investment bank that I will not name, where I worked on a middle office project, so it was a risk aggregation project. So, in an investment bank you've got lots and lots of trading happening, lots of very heavy maths to do the the risk assessment of those trades, and the movement in the books in those different trading desks, and that all needs to be monitored very carefully. So I was working in this middle office team. We'd spent about 2 years, there was about 20 of us split across New York and London, and all we were doing was taking the risk that came out of the risk calculations, aggregating it, and, you know, basically it was like a pivot table. Essentially, it was a pivot table with a lot of data, bigger than Excel. I moved from that team, so what, 2 years, 20 people, probably 10 or 20 million quid give or take, I moved from that team to Standard Chartered, and this is where where my comment about the rest of the business not quite living up to the promise of this team, there was this big compliance rule that came in that the business had left way too late, and it had to be implemented in, well, short order. So, a very similarly scoped project, except in this case they were actually also running the risk as well on demand, so at the end of the day, they were also running the risk rather than just receiving all of the risks from around the desks, and then they were aggregating it, applying measures, you know, checks and balances and analysis and things. In Standard Chartered where they had that library that that I mentioned, and they'd taken this approach of building the the nervous system, or an equivalent, it took one guy 12 weeks. So, you know, an absolutely of, I mean, he was an exceptional guy, you know, PhD, computer scientist, you know, very, very gifted guy, but still, like the approach of one side and the approach of the other side, and, you know, probably several orders of magnitude difference in impact and capacity. Jimmy: Wow, so it sounds like the foundation of building the internal nervous system is almost a self-fulfilling promise that it builds momentum. When you start putting the neurons out, the sensors out through the organisation, then you start to be able to aggregate and collect data more effectively. So, why do you think that more leaders and more leadership teams are not seeing this massive performance upside opportunity and doing this more often? Why do you think that it is often left to the last minute, or it isn't invested in in effective ways? Ben: So, I think there's a couple of things that I've seen fairly consistently. So, one is obviously the journey to being in a leadership position in the first place, so, you know, that takes let's say 10 years, let's say maybe 15 years. So, people that are coming into that leadership position are not necessarily very current on what the state of the art is. You know, if you were a frontline marketing engineer not engineer, but you know, market person doing marketing 10 years ago, and now you're a CMO or or something, you might not be quite current on you know, the latest platforms and the latest things that are coming out and how it all works. That can lead to a couple of sort of, you know, it's a very sort of peculiar western way of looking at leadership that we've looked at before. And I think very often you get into that leadership position and suddenly you feel quite exposed, and in many cultures in businesses, you're not able to express and ask for help. You're not able to you know, decentralise decision making to the right level, which is, you know, potentially a new grad who actually knows you know, less than you about the business, but more than you about kind of state of the art of tooling. I mean, I feel this as a technology leader all the time, you know, kids that have been programming since they're 13, and now, you know, they're on the cutting edge of these emerging technologies, you know, I have to defer to their judgement in many cases, with a sprinkling of, you know, maybe hard-won experience, perhaps. So, that's one problem, lack of currency of where the state of the art is. The other problem, which is in many businesses, that you know, everything I've talked about building these systems is a technology thing, right? The people that build the the Formula One dashboards are technologists, they are, you know, these things are built in code and have to be designed, and you know, programmers are still pretty expensive. And most businesses that have programmers tend to want them to be working on what they consider product. So, you know, if you're a tech business, and you've got a tech team, there's a product manager who is asking for things at a very fast rate and, you know, changes to the product, and very often those people will not be spared to come and work on you know, internals or ops. Now, I think that's pretty misguided. I think I've come to think that you have to have the end-to-end connection for it to make sense. I don't think it makes sense now in today's world to have, you know, the products be separate from the business, which is still what people often talk about. Um so I think, you know, part of it's capacity, which is, you know, one of the reasons why mission control is a thing. It's because if you don't have internal capacity, and you want to do something like this, you need to get it from somewhere. Um and also, it's a slightly different, you know, designing something to be customer- and user-facing as part of a platform that you sell is slightly different than designing something to bite off low-hanging fruit that's causing operational friction in the business, you know, different heuristics, different decision-making process, different priorities. And so, you know, the person that's often in charge of that might be like a COO or a fractional COO, and very often they don't come from a technical background, so they implement process, but they implement process probably with less than optimal kind of technology choices, so they don't have access to people that can build, you know, the Formula One dashboard. So, those are a few, you know, there's probably a few more, but those are the kind of biggest ones off the top of my head of why it's a struggle for businesses to get this done and to start working on this. Jimmy: Yeah, no, I'm so aligned with you here. And I think often what I'm hearing is similar to the arguments around people, investment in people, investment in leadership development, investment in things, but it's not seen as the operational imperative, because the operational imperative is to keep the business going, but if you do these things better, the business runs better. And so it's that sort of where do you spend your money argument. And often, yeah, the money gets put into the operation, the product, the service, not necessarily into the back-office function, which helps the machine run more effectively. Really, really interesting perspective on the argument coming from the technology side. Ben, how do you keep yourself and how can our listeners keep themselves current on the developments around internal nervous system development when it comes to measuring and managing data in their business, because, as you say, they don't need to know the detail detail, but senior leader listeners are going to be interested in how do I find out more about this? What would your recommendations be on what they can do to find out more? Ben: Yeah, it's a tricky one, because, you know, I've gone around the houses on this a lot, you know. I started off, you know, when I when I left the military for the first 10 years, I probably thought, you know, this that you know, the stuff I did in the Marines wasn't super relevant, and I started digging into things like, you know, organisational agility, and software development, and Agile, and things like that, and it wasn't long before I realised that most of it was kind of just repackaged military doctrine. So, there's two questions here, I think. There's, you know, how can you understand the fundamentals? And I think, you know, the biological lens there, reading books like Scale by Geoffrey West, and I guess, you know, you and I can put heads together and put reading list together, I suppose, on the podcast. There are a few very dense sources of information, podcasts, books, things like that, I could recommend to, you know, maybe strip off a few layers of consultification, if we can call it that, of some of these ideas. You know, these things have been packaged in such a way to be sold as consumable ideas by companies who do it for their own benefit rather than for the benefit of the concepts themselves. Um I mean, on the technology side, that is also, I mean, technology is just an incredibly fast-moving target, and it always has been, but it's a fast-moving and accelerating moving target. You know, every generation of technology we go through, especially in this kind of hyper-VC-funded cycle that we sort of seem to be coming to an end of, produces a load of technology that is in turn used to build technology more efficiently, so the pace of development is just astronomical. So, my advice on the technology front would be different than it was maybe 5 years ago. You know, 5 years ago, there was this whole kind of There's always been a an argument between buy and build. And, you know, the argument 5 years ago might be, "Well, just buy something, right? Don't build your own CRM," my argument is probably still, "Don't build your own CRM. Don't build your own accounting system. Buy something off the shelf that's established, and, you know, use that, and then build stuff on top of it." The problem comes when you do that, and you build too much on top of something that somebody else has built, right? That thing that somebody else has built has been built for their benefit, not yours, right? You might be the customer, but, you know, they're the ones that have to please their shareholders. And what's happening a lot at the moment is, you know, these things come along, they get market traction, they raise a lot of money for VC, especially at the moment, they realise they're not going to raise any more money, and all of a sudden they're like, "Ah, crap. We need to, you know, bump up our revenue by a lot." And so, prices go up, you know, they start looking at the bigger end of the market, the smaller SMEs start, you know, being left at the end of the queue for features. So, my kind of advice about buy versus build has shifted quite a lot. I am now kind of in favour and advising people of acquire smaller tools, build the internal operating system to connect those tools together. You can do that with, you know, commercially available or off-the-shelf, kind of open-source commercial open-source, is it this is a new model. So in our mission control stack, we want to maintain as much control as we can possibly have about how we own and operate the build the the systems that we build for our customers, or rather for them, they own it from day one. So we would always choose something that's got an open-source tier, so if somebody did go in a different direction, you could take the hit and build the bits that you want. So, I would say, you know, keeping your eye on the best in class open-source tools that are out there. Many many of these, you know, commercial tools have a free or open-source tier. Um an example is n8n, the um that's n 8 n November out Nove- November 8 November. That automation tool that we use, it's free for end users, it's source-available, which means that, you know, if that company ever did decide to go a different way, you could just yoink the source code and carry on working. Some other things that I've used in the past have changed their business model, and basically, you know, suck it up or get off in an infeasibly short amount of time. So, I would always advise that the bit that you build should be as flexible and as self-owned as possible. Jimmy: Beautiful, really nice insights there around just keeping abreast of what's out there, that open-source element to make sure there's maximum ownership, comparing the build or buy. I like the a lot of the insights that you've shared with our listeners. Ben, if you were to provide a key takeaway for our listeners that encapsulates everything we've spoken about today, what would that be? Ben: So, the place where I've taken the most inspiration is a quite misunderstood concept called the OODA loop. So, many people have heard of OODA, they might have seen a circular, observe, orient, decide, act in a round, you know, stepwise circle. But John Boyd, the guy that came up with the OODA loop, actually spent his whole life refining the deeper concept of what OODA is and what it means. And really what we're talking about when we're talking about all this kind of organisational agility is we're talking about building an organisational OODA loop, right? You have to be able to observe the environment, you know, with good accuracy. You have to be able to orientate yourself on what you're seeing, what it means to you, what you need to do about it. You need to decide from multiple courses of action, and choose the ones that are likely to have the the biggest impact. And then you need to act. And when you act, you need to observe the effects of that action and feed that back into the next cycle. You know, many businesses forget about the observe bit or the act bit, and they bounce between orientation and decision, and they never actually close the loop, especially as the environment changes quicker and quicker. So, a deep understanding of the actual concept of the OODA loop rather than the kind of superficial um understanding is really, you know, is really what we've been talking about the whole time, and like everything in OODA maps to things like neuroscience and organisational design. So I think, you know, if I had to package it up and say, "Here you go, go learn that." I would say, "Go learn about Boyd's OODA loop." Jimmy: Fantastic. And we'll pop a link to the OODA loop in the show notes for this episode. Ben Ford, CEO of Mission Control, such an interesting conversation and coming at high performance from a very different angle to some of the guests we normally have on the show, and I really appreciate you bringing it into an understandable and manageable mindset for us non-tech people to get our heads around. If people want to connect with you, talk more, learn more, what's the best way for them to reach out? Ben: So, I am CommandoDev on socials, so commandodev, all one word, on LinkedIn and on Twitter. You can reach me at missioncontrol.dev, so missionctrl.dev as a website. Yeah, just connect with me, shoot me an email, connect with me on LinkedIn. I'm always happy to chat over this. And I've got to say Jimmy, that part of the art of understanding this is having a good interviewer, and, you know, it's very dense, complex stuff, and you've done a great job of kind of teasing it out of me in a way that doesn't let me disappear off down any technology rabbit holes, so nicely done. Jimmy: Well, I appreciate that. I always try and position it as I'm just interested party who's nerding out with whoever the guest is to try and learn some stuff. So, hopefully our listeners have also learned and will be intrigued to find out more. Really appreciate your time, Ben. Thanks so much. Ben: My pleasure. Thanks for having me on. Jimmy: That's it for this week's episode of The High Performance Leader. If you enjoyed this episode, please drop a review on whichever platform you listened on. We really appreciate it, and it helps us to connect with new listeners. Also, if you haven't already, head to jimmyburroughes.com and download a copy of my latest bestseller, Beat Burnout, Ignite Performance. It's the leader's playbook for building a high-performance culture, and is packed with practical action tips to get you started. Stay tuned for next week's episode of game-changing insights and ideas on The High Performance Leader.