#23 Workplace Wellbeing – all we need is ‘Killer Thinking’
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Text transcript
Amy: So welcome, welcome everybody. I’m very excited to be here today.
For those of you that haven’t met me before, I am Amy. I’m Angus, and our colleague Nick is working away in the background to support all things technical. And of course we have our amazing guest, Tim Duggan with us today. I will be introducing you, Tim, in more detail shortly. For those of you as I said that don’t know us here at Headtorch, what we do is we enable organizations to develop a mentally healthy culture.
So we work with all levels within an organization, the senior team, line managers, frontline people working locally, nationally, globally, wherever you are, we can help you out and we’re also happy to offer a one hour free health check. So if you’re interested in that, do put something directly either to myself or Angus in the chat, and we’ll get back to you afterwards.
So let me tell you how today’s session is gonna pan out. First of all, I am gonna introduce our fantastic guest, and then Tim will introduce himself with a mystery object, which even we have not seen it’s so mysterious. And then he and I will move into conversation and then he’s gonna pose us a question. And at that point, I’m gonna open it up and invite you to respond to that question and indeed ask Tim any other questions that might have come to mind through our conversation. He and I will then go back into conversation about his sort of six top tips that he’s gonna drive home today, and then I’ll ask him some quickfire questions before Angus picks up the helm to give more formal thanks to him and tell you what’s coming up next in the calendar.
So let me introduce you, Tim. so Tim Duggan is an author, advisor, and optimist. Tim is a new media entrepreneur and he’s co-founded several digital media ventures, most notably Junkie Media, one of the leading publishers for Australian millennials that was acquired by the Australian Stock Exchange listed oOh! media, in 2016.
His first book, Cult Status, How to Build a Business People Adore was named the best entrepreneurship book in 2021, Australian Business Book Awards. His second book Killer Thinking, How to Turn Good Ideas into Brilliant Ones, explores creativity in the modern workplace, and was named by Apple Books as one of the top 10 books of 2022.
He is chairman of the Digital Publisher’s Alliance and Industry Body that represents. 200 titles from Australia’s leading independent publishers. And he’s currently doing quite a bit of traveling, which maybe he’ll tell us about. And he’s living in Europe where he’s writing his third book on the future of work.
And interestingly and bizarrely, we met him, well Angus met him at a pop-up restaurant, so serendipity. Delighted to have you with us here today. Tim. Please do introduce yourself with your mystery object.
Tim: Thank you very much, Amy. What an introduction to sit through that. Lovely to virtually meet you all.
Thanks for sharing your lunchtime hour with me here. Hopefully we’re gonna make it interesting. So my mystery object, Amy doesn’t even know what it is. I have a relatively small bag to choose a mystery object from cause I’m currently in Majorca. My husband and I arrived here a few days ago. Um, we have been what we deemed slowmads, which is we are slow nomads moving around the world, about one month at a time in different places.
And we are going to base ourselves in Majorca, so we’ve arrived Majorca to look for an apartment and we have but one bag. So I went through the bag this morning. I asked my husband, what object could I use that would describe me. My husband suggested sunglasses because we live outside. I’m always wearing my sunglasses, but I thought that was a little bit too boring.
So instead, the mystery object is this thing here, which for any of you who are outdoor enthusiasts, might understand it to be a wonderful hiking stick. And the reason why I’ve used this is because this is how I keep my mental health in check. Hiking is in fact the exercise of choice that my husband and I do almost every day when we are moving around.
So we currently work a couple of days a week. We work generally in the morning, and then in the afternoons we grab our trusty hiking stick. We don’t always need the hiking stick, depending on the level of difficulty of the hike. And we head out into the hills and we go up as high a mountain as we feel like doing that day and come down the other side.
So this hiking stick was actually a present. It was given to me by my sister for my 40th birthday, and she asked what should she get? And I said, give me a hiking stick. So that’s a little bit of an introduction. I think Amy has kind of very, expertly explained my background. I started out as a journalist, started out in advertising, and then when I was in my mid twenties, I co-founded a community website with some friends of mine that grew over the next 15 years into a company of about 60 or 70 full-time staff.
For me, it was a real learning experience on how to build, lead manage not burn out. Manage a team of primarily, we had younger millennial and Gen Zs and learning how to build that company and then eventually we sold that to a bigger company of about a thousand staff in 2016. And then in 2020, I left that company that I had started and decided to start writing books to share some of the knowledge that I’d learned along the way.
And also to just take really complex subjects and try and make them as easy as possible for people to understand. So my first book was called Cult Status, and then Killer Thinking was my second book.
Amy: Yeah. And what a great job you’ve done of that, certainly, I can vouch for that, folks. It’s very accessible and lots of, lots and lots of top tips to, to grasp and exercises and stories that really help to engage and make all the learning accessible.
And I really liked your hiking stick there, Tim, as well. Would you not call it a slowmad stick now?
Tim: If I called it a slowmad stick, I might be slapped by people, for using a slightly wonky term. ,
Amy: oh, excuse your French there.
Tim: Excuse my French there.
Amy: So Tim, have you always been a writer?
Tim: I have. So writing was this love of mine that I obviously at school quite enjoyed, but never actually.
Thought that it could be a career. So straight outta school, I went into the mail room of an ad agency when I was 18 years old. Male rooms, for those of us old enough to remember were a strange, I don’t think they exist anymore, but the mail get delivered and I would’ve to go around to people’s desks and give them, um, their mail.
And for me it was a really interesting way of learning what I liked and what I didn’t like. And from there, one of the things that I, um, is I liked the creative side of the advertising agency, so the copywriters, the art directors. When it was around that time, I watched a movie called Almost Famous, which most people here have probably seen the movie.
It was by writer director called Cameron Crowe, who loosely based his life story. And there was a young kid there who started working for Rolling Stone, and I was, 19 or 20 I think, when I watched that movie and said, I want to be that kid. So I actually approached the editor of Rolling Stone and said, I want to write for you.
Despite having no experience, despite never formally studied writing. And for some reason I think because I badgered her so much, she eventually gave me a 50 word review to do and I wrote that 50 word review. And then from there she was like, that’s not bad, here’s another review. And then I started writing feature stories and large, long, in-depth journalism pieces for Rolling Stone for many years.
So writing was something I was always really interested. But then when I started my company, the company grew so fast and grew to managing teams of writers that I actually had no time to spend doing that thing that I really loved doing, which is probably a familiar feeling for lots of people. If you get good at a job, you get promoted so much that you stop doing that original job that you’re good at and you start managing teams.
So it was only when I started writing my first book, which I wrote most of it, about four in the morning before work for a couple of years, from four till six. And that was when I started rediscovering how much I love writing, and now I can’t imagine going a day or going a week without getting out my computer and writing my thoughts out.
For me, it’s just a way of trying to take that jumble that exists inside my head and put it down onto paper. Yeah.
Amy: Amazing. What, uh, what drive and purpose and just going for it in terms of, yeah, I’m just gonna write to the editor of the Rolling Stones magazine why not? What’s the worst they’re gonna
say?
Tim: naivety, I think is a part of it.
Amy: Look where it’s got you, right?
Tim: Yes. Yeah, it worked. Uh, maybe bit of hubris, all of those things. Yeah.
Amy: But I think it’s also lovely. What I’m hearing certainly is that it’s been your, your heart’s desire, if you like, that has driven you to where you are today.
Tim: Very much so. I’ve always just really been attuned to what parts of my job and what parts of my skills I really enjoy doing and just gravitating towards that doubling down and deciding to become good at it.
So I only became. Hopefully good as a writer by writing and by doing as much as possible. I now do a lot of speaking and workshops around the world, and I’ve only gotten good at that by practice and by throwing myself into it. So that’s always been one of my guiding forces.
Amy: So tell us what is Killer Thinking?
Tim: So big topic. Killer Thinking is my second book and where it came from and where I think most really interesting books come from is a question. And the question that I started this book with was, what is the best idea in the world? Now, that is a pretty broad question. It’s a great question to spend a few years researching and writing, and the question for me was, what are the best ideas in the world?
And so I looked around and I spoke to lots of different people and I travelled the world, or at the time, I wrote a lot of this during Covid. So I travelled the world through Zoom and through phone calls. A lot of the time I spent exploring, is it ideas that sell, make millions of dollars? Is it ideas that are movements that can raise billions of dollars?
Uh, so some of the ideas I looked at were things like Keep Cup so the idea of having a cup that you literally keep when you go and get your coffee and, started by, uh, an Australian entrepreneur and I went to speak to her and found out how she’d come up with that idea. Is it ideas like Movember, which is where you grow a moustache in November and raise money for mental health and for men’s uh, prostate cancer and things like that, which has raised billions of dollars around the world.
And was started in a pub when a couple of mates talking over a beer about wouldn’t it be funny to grow a moustache during the month of November? Is it Canva? The online design tool that has really democratized design and made anyone be a designer, taking it away from just only experts thinking that they know what design is.
So all of these ideas around the world. Another really interesting idea is called La Ciclovía which exists in Bogota in Columbia, where about 40 or so years ago, a bunch of revolutionaries at the time decided what would happen if we shut down the streets and only let cyclists and humans be able to walk the streets?
And now in Bogota, every weekend on Sundays, the streets are shut down and a couple of million people come out of their houses and really enjoy what a city looks like without cars. So all of these ideas were, in my mind, really amazing ideas that had a couple of things in. And so that got me thinking. I spoke to the founders of all these ideas.
I tried to figure out what they have in common, and that came up with for me a bacronym. Um, so bacronym is where you take a word that already exists and you put meaning into it like an acronym, is that Killer, is actually a bacronym, which describes what some of the best ideas in the world have in common.
And that is K for Kind, um, Impactful, Loved, Lasting, Easy, and Repeatable. And they’re the ingredients that once I started going deep into some of these best ideas in the world. All of them were kind in some way. So whether to the environment, whether to the staff that they’re part of, whether it was to the community they’re a part of, all of them were impactful so that they really had a deep impact.
Sometimes a deep impact with a small number of people, not necessarily a large number of people. They were loved, meaning that there are ideas that not just you know that’s nice and you forget about it. It really spoke to the purpose of what someone was trying to do. They were lasting, which meant that they had this ability to last beyond just an idea that kind of happened once.
They were really easy, which means that particularly when you pass them on to somebody else, the best ideas in the world can be distilled basically into a single sentence, and that sentence can be passed on over and over again and they’re repeatable, which means that they often are so easy and they’re so loved that they can just be repeated through different cultures, through different countries, and that’s what killer stands for.
Amy: Fantastic. What an amazing, the word juicy experience comes to mind to me. To speak to all these amazing people that have created these killer thinking ideas. You, you quoted Jamil Zacki, the psychologist from Stanford University, who said, witnessing kindness inspires kindness, causing it to spread like a virus.
I just totally love that, that sentence. How do we, from your point of view, how do you think we embed that culture of kindness in our organizations today?
Tim: Yeah, kindness is this really fascinating area that I became really interested in and tried to understand as much as possible by reading as many research papers that people had done on kindness.
Kindness is one of those words that sometimes in business we think is a bit wishy-washy or is a soft skill that’s not that important. Whereas a lot of the people I spoke to, they viewed kindness as a strength as opposed to kindness as a weakness. And that research that you’re referring to from Stanford was this really fascinating research where they looked into seeing what happened to kindness when other people witnessed kindness.
So if you live in a culture or society that there’s generally kind people around you, are you more or less likely to be kind to yourself? And they did several different studies. They did studies where they got some participants and observed them tipping other people. And saw the effect that would have on the size of the tips that someone else gave.
And then they also did another study where they looked at people observing people tipping other people, so either generously or stingily. And then what effect that actually had on somebody’s emotions when they’re asked to respond to something like a pen pal. So they confirmed it in multiple different studies, and what they found was that kindness is contagious.
So if you see somebody else being kind, you are more likely to be kind to yourself. And I think that’s a really profound thought because it means if we ourselves can be kind in what we do, and if we can show other people kindness through our leadership, through the way that we treat our staff, through the way that we treat the environment to the way that we treat our customers, then other people will see that.
And the research has proven them Stanford research, that kindness is then contagious. And that is a really amazing insight,
Amy: Isn’t it? Powerful and beneficial when that can be put into practice on a kind of regular basis. Thanks, Tim. Later on in the book, you said you need to prod and probe to try to really understand a problem if you’re going to even think about solving it.
And that really resonated with me. Often when we see organizations. That when it comes to mental health and wellbeing in the workplace, there’s a tendency to plaster over the cracks rather than actually probe and look for that root cause. How does the Head of Wellbeing, let’s say in an organization, how do they go about convincing the senior team that they need to prod and probe and get to the root of the issues in their particular workplace?
Tim: That’s a great question, Amy, because I sometimes think that the reason why we don’t. Probe and prod is because we’re sometimes scared of what we’re gonna find. So if we ask some hard questions, we’re probably gonna get some hard answers back. But the way that I like to think about that is one of the, the ways that I phrase it in the book is that you need to be your problem’s therapist, which is that you need to understand your problem that you are trying to solve better than anyone else.
And the way that you do that is that you ask questions. As many questions as you can, and you should spend about as long thinking about your approach to a problem as you should, trying to figure out the solutions to it. And I think sometimes we tend to dive head first into, Great, yeah, I know what the question I’m trying to solve is, how can we do it?
What are we thinking here? Let’s have a brainstorm about this. Who’s got some ideas? When in fact, if we spent just as long as brainstorming, thinking about what the solutions are, if we spent just as long as what is the actual problem here? Let’s look at it from every angle. Let’s ask questions. Let’s get people in from different departments to answer some of these questions.
It’s often, when you are actually thinking about the problem itself, that the solution will start to arise. Before you even get to the official phase of thinking about what a solution is. So I really like to think of things like the rule of thirds in this situation where you should spend about one third of time thinking about the problem about one third of time individually trying to come up with your own ideas.
So before they get, you get ideas sullied around a boardroom and everyone kind of starts throwing ideas then about one third of the time should be spent as a group thinking about those. But that time of thinking about what the problem is and thinking about it individually, that’s often what gets sacrificed in a timeline in a workplace environment.
Amy: Yeah, absolutely. So that Head of Wellbeing, if they need to convince the rest of their senior team to broaden probe, what should they be doing then?
Tim: Yeah. So I think, taking everyone on that same journey I think is really important where you should be scheduling a meeting to talk about problems. So talk about the problem at hand, not think about solutions.
Just get everyone on board. And there’s a really simple exercise, and one of the ones I, I put in the book. I’m a very practical person. I love inspiring people and kind of giving some of the theory. And then here’s some IRLs In Real Life exercises that you can do. And one of those really simple ones, and this is something that the Head of Wellbeing can do with their team, is getting everyone into a room and asking questions only.
Don’t ask any answers just sit there and let’s gonna spend the next 10 minutes and we’re gonna ask every single question that we need to know about this particular problem. Without jumping to conclusions, without jumping to what the answers is. All of a sudden you get people thinking in a different way.
So their mind frame changes around, oh, I don’t even want to think about what that answer is, because they’re thinking about what the questions that we need to ask are. And that’s a really simple exercise that anyone can do, is spend 10 minutes or so only asking questions, write them down, get everyone to think through all those questions.
And it’s a really, um, different way of thinking about problems by thinking about the questions first..
Amy: Yeah, absolutely. And it ties into, doesn’t it, so you were, it was almost a mantra I felt coming through the book of been the brainstorm Death to brainstorm . Tell us a bit more about, about that.
Tim: I loathe, brainstorms.
I think brainstorms are one of the biggest wastes of time because so many of them are run in the wrong way. I love creative ideation. I think getting people together to come up with solutions is actually one of the most important parts in coming up with ideas. However, it should not be done until you have really thought about the problem first.
Really interrogated it. And should also not be done unless everyone involved in a brainstorm or in a creative ideation session has gone away and has thought of their own ideas first. So it’s a really simple idea. I call this fitting your own mask first, that everyone really in this situation, I know that’s a, that’s analogy that can be used in lots of different areas.
I know it’s used a lot in mental health around making sure your own mental health is looked at first, and I like to apply it in terms of creativity. Of before you get people together to brainstorm, to think of ideas, you really need to think of your own ideas first. And in the book, one of the things I relish and have fun talking about is all the reasons why brainstorms don’t work.
I won’t give you all of them. There’s about six or seven reasons. I’ll give you probably one or two of the most important ones. The idea of group think, where everyone in a room tends to think in similar ways because you all work for the same environment. You’ve all had similar inputs with something that you need to break.
The second one is this concept I’ve called Hippo, and I love the concept of a hippo. And a hippo stands for the Highest Paid Person’s Opinion. And when you get together in a brainstorm, the hippo generally tends to dominate. So people look to see, what does my boss think about that? Sometimes the hippo doesn’t even need to be in the room because people will not come up with ideas or will think
Jenny might not like that idea, or, I know in the past that John has told me that he doesn’t like ideas that cost this much or that take this long. So this idea of the highest paid person’s opinion is something that you need to break if you’re going to do creative ideation, and there’s lots of different ways of doing that.
Amy: Yeah. Great. Thanks, Tim. See, positioning a problem as a question makes it easier to answer, which ties in with, you know, some of the stuff you’ve already said, particularly like that statement, it really shouted out at me because it, it ties in with everything from. How does a whole organization focus on support and promote mental health and wellbeing in the workplace?
How does a team do it? And importantly, how does it help when it comes to an individual who’s perhaps struggling with their mental health, struggling to cope? Positioning a problem as a question can make it easier to answer. How does that help that individual?
Tim: Yeah. Our brains are wired to answer questions and to construct sentences and when someone poses a question to think about that and answer that in that way.
And so I always, whenever I try and think through, What is the problem we’re trying to solve? What is an area that we want more information on? Always just try and take that statement or take the question, uh, take that statement out of the problem and pose it in a really simple question that allows, uh, the respondent to that, the ability to answer that as easily as they can.
It’s just a really neat and simple way of taking a statement and using the way that we’re hardwired to want to answer questions against us or for us in a way.
Amy: Help say if I was struggling it helps me to answer the question for myself almost. Yeah. Magic; or answer the problem for myself. Yeah. I was wondering if you might read just that little paragraph.
Have you got it? Have you got it there? Yeah. I just thought this was an interesting paragraph to relate to the kind of the journey of mental health in the workplace. So as Tim’s reading this, just have a think about how it relates.
Tim: Okay. If I asked you what was the most watched, scripted limited series on Netflix to date, you probably wouldn’t guess it’s a show about chess. The Queen’s Gambit released in October, 2020, saw 62 million accounts around the world watching it in its first 28 days. The most ever at the time .It made the top 10 shows in 92 countries, and number one in 63 countries. Now, it might seem like an overnight success, but it actually took nine rewrites and 30 years of perseverance to get it there.
Amy: Yeah, nine rewrites and 30 years of perseverance. That really resonated with me in terms of what organizations, what people within organizations who really want to drive this agenda of mental health in the workplace. The struggle is to get that message across has been about what can we learn from the Queen’s Gambit?
Tim: Yeah, and this is one of the most interesting stories that I loved because it was, uh, it was actually the chairman of a Scottish whiskey company who writes under the name Alan Scott, who originally purchased the option to the book series in 1989. And he spent all of that time and nine rewrites, multiple different directors.
He became a screenwriter and did all this amazing stuff. He wrote the screenplay for the Castaway and the Witches, the original version with Angelica Houston. Um, and so despite all the success, every time he took the Queen’s Gambit to uh, movie studios, they told him no one wants to watch a TV series about chess.
This is boring. No one’s gonna do it. And so for 30 years he went on and what actually I think is really fascinating about this is that the way that the movie production world works is the options expire after a certain period of time. And he had to continually pay money to keep those options alive every time it expired every few years.
And it’s because he really believed in the quality of what he was doing. He really believed in the purpose and he had a vision of where he wanted to get. And I think that’s been, there’s many industries, in particular, the industry that everyone here works in wellbeing and mental health, where sometimes it might feel like you’re at the start of that 30 year journey and there’s a long way to go and you’re trying to convince people around you.
You’re trying to move mountains. But I think if your purpose is clear, if you have that vision and you stick to it, sometimes it might take a long period of time, but you just have to have faith that it’s gonna eventually,
Amy: Yeah. Perseverance, persistence, rewrites, asking questions. Yeah. Applying killer thinking.
Fantastic. Well, hopefully you have all had a chance to answer that poll question. Could we share the responses to that now? And we were asking you about whether you consider yourself to be creative or not.
Tim: Yes. And so would you describe yourself as creative? 70% of you have said yes, you’re creative, and 30% have said no.
Now, I think this is a fascinating question that I always love to ask because the 30% of you, you may have said that you are not creative, but I do not believe you . I, I don’t believe you. I actually think that. . The, the idea of being creative or not creative is something that as a child, all of us, we sit there with paint, we draw pictures, we make Play-Doh, we are all creative and then something happens around 10, 12, 13 where we get divided up and society says to us, either you are creative, you like writing, you like painting, you can be creative, and everyone else get in that other bucket over there, you are not creative. And I actually think there’s a real shame. Because all of my experience doing hundreds of workshops around the world with organizations of different sizes shows me that every single person has creative ideas to contribute to when it comes to coming up with ideas.
And in fact, the best ideas often come from people that consider themselves. I would not be creative. I’m like, no, I don’t know about that. And so I really challenge the 70% of you, congratulations. You are creative and the 30% of you, you are really creative. You actually just need to work those muscles a little bit more, be included in creative conversations, come up with ideas, and start putting into practice to hopefully move some of you into that other bucket to really believe that you are creative.
Amy: Wonderful. Thank you very much and thank you very much for participating in that poll question. Tim, you have a question for us, and the question is this. When did you last feel creatively fulfilled at work and how important do you think creativity is as part of overall wellbeing? So we’re just gonna open up the floor to everybody.
If you’d like to either respond to Tim’s question or indeed ask him any other question that may have arisen during our conversation, now is the time to give us a hands up or whatever on your using that reaction button, and I’ll ask you to unmute and share your thoughts or your question.
Tim: I would also love to add to this as well, there’s another, is that based on the poll question, if there is anyone who is in the 30% who says they’re not creative, let’s have a chat about it.
I’d love to . I’d love to talk to you about that as well.
Amy: Sure. Who’s got a question? Who’s got a comment?
Angus: There’s a comment there from Lara
Amy: Lara, only when I went out on my own one year ago did I manage to find my creativity again. I think it has profound effects on wellbeing. Oh, how lovely Lara, do you want to just unmute yourself, share a little bit about where, what, what, what you work, what your work is, or where you work rather, and a little bit more about your thinking.
Lara: Yes, sure. Thank you, Amy. In corporate life, I think I was born creative. I used to love to paint and always love to write, but then somewhere in corporate life, didn’t get to use that very much for a long time and began to forget that I was creative. I went out on my own a year ago. Now I’m full-time career coach and help people with personal branding and employee wellbeing as well.
I managed to use my creativity again cause I have to create everything myself, my website, my assets, my branding. So now you know I’m able to flex that muscle again.
Very liberating. .
Amy: Hey, thanks Lara. Tim, do you want to respond at all?
Tim: Yeah, I love hearing that Lara, because the interesting thing about that is that creativity was there all along.
But sometimes in the corporate world, we don’t get the chance to use those muscles because sometimes in the corporate world, there is a lot of bureaucracy. There can be forms, there can be compartmentalizing, but people will say, your job is doing this thing here and the creative over here will give you the copy to put on a website or, and I think that’s actually real learning for us to figure out, because wonderful that you’ve been able to step out on your own and reconnect with your creativity.
But I think the challenge then is how can we actually incorporate some of that creative ability. Into corporate world, and if there’s people in here who work in wellbeing and kind of work for corporate industries, it’s a really interesting question of are you allowing people like Lara to actually flex their creative muscles?
Because nothing about you has changed. Just your environment in which you’re able to flex your creativity has changed.
Amy: Absolutely. What a, what a loss, right? That, that you didn’t feel able to use that when you were within corporate world. Let me Thank you, Laura. Let me and, and Tim, let me bring in Steven McAllister, who is one of our senior advisors, former divisional commander of Police Scotland, amongst many other roles.
Steven,
Steven: many other talents
Amy: that as well. . Yeah.
Steven: Really enjoyed that. You mentioned this part about the time that organisations should spend on assessing the problems. And I understand that, and I think it needs to be part of the organization’s DNA because actually ,time deficient and all the rest of it, you, you didn’t say an awful lot about how you would achieve that, for instance.
And I do some work in healthcare in health they talk about the operational huddles and actually when that goes awry, I think you can see things begin to unwind. Policing hot debriefs, operational debriefs, and it almost becomes part of the organizational DNA. So you’re constantly looking about what the problems are.
You’re constantly reassessing, you’re flipping that, uh, and you know, I coming out from an operational background in policing and in health, but in a commercial environment, how do you build that into the organizational DNA, when people are really time efficient, they’re looking at the bottom line. So how do you do that?
Have you got any advice for us?
Tim: That’s a great question, Steven, because there are some workplaces that appreciate spending time on a problem, and if you look at the differences between workplaces that appreciate that you need to spend time on there versus ones that are time poor or we don’t have enough time to do that.
The difference between them you realize is the ones that spend time on the problem are actually spending time on it because they know how important that is and they can actually see the benefit from that.. So I think the challenge therefore for companies that are time poor, or that might say, we don’t have time to do this, just give us the five solutions straight away, is that you actually need to get some runs on the board and you need to have some examples here that you can actually show.
Look, if we actually spend a couple of hours on this, talking about the problem, asking the questions, getting insights from people in different departments, so we really understand this. Potentially looking at research that’s been done into it, looking at past user behaviour, all those kind of things can feed into understanding a problem, and I think you just need to find a test case to start with. Get people involved in it and try and prove the importance of it. Cuz as soon as you start showing the importance of it and you start, therefore saying, Hey, remember that project over there? And we actually spent a lot of time thinking about the problem before we dived into it.
That was really successful. Let’s use that as a model for future problems. when we’re trying to problem solve. So I think it’s about trying to find a test case and hopefully people on this call can be the ones to be the champions of, let’s do something different when we’re trying to solve this problem at the moment..
Amy: Thanks Tim. Great question. Thanks, Steven. I think it’s that thing of if you ignore a problem, it’s not gonna go away. And it’s the same with, it’s the same in workplace mental health, isn’t it? If you ignore the fact that people aren’t feeling supported or don’t know how to have a supportive conversation, if they see someone struggling, if you ignore that, it’s, it’s not gonna get better for you and you’re gonna lose people. And that means you’re gonna have to spend a lot more time having to find people, which as we know right now is quite a big issue. So, great questions. Thanks Steven. Nick Prudhoe you had your hand up.
Just tell us Nick quickly, sorry. Where it is you work
Nick P: City facilities management. You won’t have heard of it, but you’ve seen the vans in every Asda and M&S car park cause we look after facilities for big retailers around the world. I’ve been in I.T. for 30 years. Started very creative creating computer systems and got a lot from that an awful lot from that. And as you said, Tim earlier, you become the manager of those people, and the manager of the manager. and I’m a CTO now and I don’t create anything other than teams, which I get a little bit from. But ironically, my wife started a business last year as a personal trainer and I built her website.
It’s exciting enough, but it’s a flat five page website. I got more out of that in that week than I’d got out of anything for the previous three months. And just that shows that creativity stays with you, doesn’t matter where you’re going. How high you elevate up. I think you’ve got to try and find that somewhere in what you do day to day if you can get it in your job fantastic. And I’m trying to look and focus on how I get that from people rather than creating teams rather than just creating solutions. But yeah, I just, when you asked the question, I hadn’t thought about it, but that moment of, I finished that website and I like what I did there and it’s helped her and it’s helped other people.
It’s interesting.
Tim: Nick I love that example. That is a really beautiful example of how do you connect to your creativity. Sometimes at a time when your job and your responsibilities might be 80 or 90% managing people or looking at spreadsheets or sitting in executive team meetings or writing reports or doing board packs. All these things which you know, on the surface might not be creative. There’s a real amazing piece of research I’ve been looking into detail the way when I’m writing my third book on the future of work. So looking at where everything’s gonna land at the moment in a post covid world. And there’s amazing research that has come out around, a thing called Job Crafting. Now job crafting is where you’d look at your job. And you might have a job description that your boss has written, or sometimes you’ve written it for yourself and you look at the things that you’re doing and figure out what are the things that really give me some kind of meaning? Whether it’s creatively fulfilled, whether it’s in tune with my purpose, and how can I do more of those and maybe slightly less of something else?
So you can kind of craft your own job description. And it sounds like with you sometimes you can find that within your workplace, and sometimes it’s helping your wife on her website. I, I. Challenge you now to look at that and go, I got so much enjoyment from that. How can I do some more of that? Is there anything that I can do in within my workplace?
Or if it’s not within your workplace in for your side hustle or your wife’s business, turn that five page website into a 20 page website. Start creating content on there. Add a WordPress to it. All these kind of things that you can do. Yeah, and I think this, if you can lean more into that, if you get enjoyment out of that 10% of work that you do, that can be enough to power you through the rest of the day and the rest of your career.
Nick P: Tim, I think what’s really interesting is that the people who work directly for me, if I can get them to do that and get fulfilment through seeing them being satisfied and their mental health, being in a great place, seeing me from that perspective, that would be really good.
Tim: Yeah, a hundred percent. Yeah.
I think that’s great. Great example, Nick. Thank you for that.
Amy: Love it. Yeah. So Being creative yourself and inspiring creativity in others. It’s hugely empowering, isn’t it, for everyone?
Dawn McLean, you say, I think I want to use my creativity, but feels stifled at work. It definitely has an impact on wellbeing as it feels like it should be natural.
Do you want to say a few words, Dawn? Tell us where you work first.
Dawn M: Hi, yes, so I’m Dawn McLean. I am the Health and Safety Manager at Abertay University in Dundee. It’s been really interesting. For me personally, I think that I am in charge of one of those areas that people just genuinely feel is dull. And I try really hard to engage um with the topic of health and safety and do it in a different right, but time constraints and the fact that we’re doing hybrid working now
and all of these things has had a real impact on it, and it just
sometimes feels really difficult to keep
motivated in in that as well. And one of the things obviously from a health and safety perspective is wellbeing.
It’s massively attached to
that over the past few years, but I still think it’s seen as a separate entity and people don’t marry the two and understand that getting the basic fundamentals from health and safety right can impact on your wellbeing. And so, Yeah, I do think that I’d like to get the time to do
more of thinking, but perhaps I just have to time manage myself better.
Amy: What do you think, Tim? Thanks, Dawn.
Tim: Yeah, Dawn, I think the first biggest challenge you’ve overcome, which is you’ve said that you want to use creativity at work, and I think that impetus itself is the first hurdle that most people want to get over. So congrats on getting over that one. I think what you should concentrate on is what are small ways that you can use creativity in your workplace, and this could be something that you can discuss with your manager or discuss with people you work with, or it could be just looking around.
Thinking through the things that you produce working in workplace safety, and is there any creativity you can bring to those? The signs that go up, can they be done creatively or in interesting ways or designed beautifully or using quotes or, I think look through all of the things that you are currently producing or currently your team is currently working on.
And think through, is there any way that I could add some creativity to those? Because there’s different things that sometimes you need permission from other people to add creativity into your work. And sometimes you don’t need any permission. You can just look around and identify something that can be,
with a bit of tweaking, be more creative. Yeah. And I think that you’ve got a really amazing desire at the moment.
Dawn M: Yeah. One or two things that I have managed to get in have been small projects, and I think they’re gonna have an impact that’s yet to be seen. But one of the things was to create a micro credential for first year into university
around health and safety and understanding what that means and what it is.
And I think it was really important to get them at the
very beginning.
No, that’s brilliant.
Amy: I just wanted to add one little thing in before we move on to top tips. I think one of the things is often we think that creativity is gonna, we need to set aside a whole load of time and actually it doesn’t necessarily need a whole load of time, right?
We do a nice exercise where we, where we give people 60 seconds, you one whole minute to write, draw, use words, whatever, and the title of their creation is Joy. Go. And after 60 seconds, it just shifts your head and you’ve been creative in that moment, so I think it’s about exploring different ways, isn’t it? Of putting that into your schedule, not making it, you know, it doesn’t need to be a huge thing.
Let’s move on now to your top tips. Top tips from Tim. So first top tip.
Tim: The first top tip we have covered, which is great because we, uh, tight on time with the last 10 minutes or so of this. So this was, if anyone didn’t have a chance to write down what killer stands for, which is the best ideas in the world, this is the bacronym here.
So they’re Kind, Impactful, Loved, Lasting, Easy and Repeatable. We talked a little bit about that. The second one is really fascinating, and this came from another piece of research that I was studying around Google. Where Google were looking in particular at what were the critical conditions for high performing teams?
And this was really interesting when talking about creativity because it’s a, it’s an interesting area, and they found that psychological safety was the most important factor when it came to high performing teams. And when I think of high performing teams, I think of teams that are creative and coming up with ideas and supporting each other.
And some of the behaviours that encourage this were things like conversational turn taking, you know, taking turns for other people to speak. So when you’re in a group, when you’re doing standup meetings, Making sure that everyone has a turn to do that. Empathy for other people’s feelings, respect for other people’s opinions when they’re giving it.
And so in particular, I think through creativity is probably one of the scariest things that you can ask somebody to come up with ideas or to almost bare their soul sometimes in showing us what’s inside their brain. And so you just really need to make sure that the environment is as psychologically safe as possible. If you are the hippo in the room, make sure that you’re aware of that which is stands for the highest paid person’s opinion.
Make sure that you are aware of that and make sure that you do things like using open language instead of closed language, so don’t shut somebody off. I think that’s really important.
Amy: It’s about saying mistakes are welcome,
isn’t it?
Tim: It’s a part, part of the process. Yeah.
Amy: let’s whizz through these. Let’s whiz through these, uh, final top tips then.
Tim: Fit your own mask first means in particular,
I’m applying this to creativity. So if you are going to ask people to come up with ideas. Give everyone time and space to come up with your own ideas first. So fit your own mask first before you put it on someone else. So when it comes to creativity, plus each other’s ideas is a really wonderful idea that originally came from Walt Disney. Where Walt Disney came up with this idea of plussing, which is adding on top of other people’s ideas.
So this all relates, once again to a bit of psychological safety, but what Disney talked about when he has an idea for something, What is the extra 10% that can make it just that little bit better? And that’s called plussing, each other’s ideas. So it’s a verb. Um, and I only had five tips instead of six, Amy, so this is my last or the fifth.
Amy: We love five.
Tim: The fifth of my tips is around the, one of the most important processes when it comes to creativity and anything in the workplace is listening with open ears. So that by that it means that there’s a big difference between hearing someone and actually really listening to somebody. So this is about active listening.
It’s about processing what someone is saying, but it’s also about when you are talking to people, when you’re getting feedback, whether that’s in a meeting or in the creative idea, is looking at other cues as well. What people are not saying sometimes is just as important as the words they’re coming out of their mouth.
Amy: Yeah. Brilliant. Great. Top tips. Thank you so much, Tim. Just gonna ask you a few rapid fire questions. Tim hasn’t come across these questions before, at least not from me. Maybe you have from other people. What does vulnerability mean to you?
Tim: Oh, vulnerability to me makes me think of one of my favourite authors.
Brene Brown and her research and stuff into vulnerability is really important. I know that being vulnerable and being able to actually share my true feelings is probably one of one of my life’s journeys that I think everyone goes on. So vulnerability to me is an ongoing journey that I am on and that I’m gonna take everyone around me on to open up about how I’m actually feeling about things.
Amy: Wonderful. What’s going to be the killer thinking that revolutionizes workplace mental
Tim: health?
Oh God, these are quite good, killer, killer questions. I think radical transparency is a really fascinating area that I think is, um, you know, kind of ties a bit in with vulnerability and it ties in with, being really transparent about as many things as you can as a business, as a manager.
I’m a big believer in managers sharing all of their vulnerabilities and sharing their, you know,
Amy: is radical transparency. I love it. What message would you give your younger self?
Tim: Um, bigger is not always better when it comes to businesses. I actually think that some of the most interesting businesses that I’ll get to work on are small, really impactful businesses.
It’s not always about going for size.
Amy: Fantastic. And finally, how on earth do we get hold of your books?
Tim: So all of my books are available Amazon and Book Depository in all those places. They’re on Audible as well, I narrate both of my books, Cult Status and Killer Thinking. So you can listen to my dulcet tones for six or seven hours at a time.
But the easiest way is just going to my website and there’s a bunch of links there, which is just tim duggan.com au
Amy: Marvellous.. Tim, what a joy. Thank you so much. Really enjoyed this conversation. I’m gonna hand over to Angus.
Angus: Tim, thank you very much. I said at the beginning, this is going to be wonderful and it you delivered. It was wonderful, fascinating insights. I love the fact that you took the time to decide what you want to do. You worked in the mail room and took that time. And, uh, your, your confidence in approaching Rolling Stone Magazine,
having not written before. Come on guys. I should be writing for you. Yeah. And getting the gig. Yeah. Also that drive to get up at four o’clock in the morning and write before you went to work. Um, you know, there’s, you’re telling us a whole lot here about your character. And um, you know, you talked about the vulnerability and sharing your true feelings.
You shared a lot of what, uh, I think makes Tim Duggan today, which is really interesting. And that quest, the search for the best idea in the world. Man, that is a big quest, but then to look at how those ideas come about and how they’re structured and how you know what’s behind them and all that kind of stuff.
It’s really, really fascinating stuff. Your story about the Queens Gambit, the quality, the purpose, the vision. If you truly believe in it, it’s going to happen eventually. What a big message that is to many of us who are here and maybe struggling with or something that we’re working with, but we truly believe in.
So thank you. Uh, thank you very, very much. On behalf of Headtorch and everybody who’s here and uh, you know, we’d like to, uh, wish you the very best and we’ll keep an eye on the next books that come along as well. Great. So thank you. On the Wellbeing Hour next time Rob Williams, I think Rob’s actually on at the moment as well.
Rob is Head of Talent at Vet Partners and this is vet practice I think pretty much unlike any other vet practice we’ve come across, certainly. They have 12 and a half thousand employees right across Europe. They are huge. You’ve probably never heard of them. They are there sitting in the background. So Rob is going to be fascinating and we’re looking forward to that.
It’s 27th, April again at 12 noon, so please join us if you can. Put that date in your diary. Also, if you would like to hear more about what we do, uh, please get in touch. We’d love to hear what you’re doing in terms of mental health and wellbeing. We have those tailored solutions for senior leaders, people managers, and frontline people.
As Amy said earlier in the session, there is an offer of a free consultation, so I get in touch if you would like to take that up.
So thank you everybody for coming along.
Thank you everybody. Thanks all. Thank you. Happy Thursday. Good to see you
Amy: everybody.
Tim: Bye.
Tim is a new media entrepreneur and author. He has co-founded several digital media ventures, most notably Junkee Media, one of the leading publishers for Australian millennials that was acquired by the ASX-listed oOh!media in 2016.
Tim’s first book, Cult Status: How to Build a Business People Adore, was named the Best Entrepreneurship Book at the 2021 Australian Business Book Awards.
His second book, Killer Thinking: How to Turn Good Ideas into Brilliant Ones, explores creativity in the modern workplace, and was named by Apple Books as one of the Top 10 Books of 2022.
Tim is the Chairman of the Digital Publishers Alliance, an industry body that represents over two hundred titles from Australia’s leading independent publishers.
He currently lives in Europe where he is writing his third book on the future of work.
Guests on this episode

Tim Duggan
Award Winning Author, Advisor & Optimist
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