Episode 19: Cleve Gibbon on Content Technologies & Designing Agile Systems

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Transcript

Announcer:

Welcome to Surfacing. In this episode, host Lisa Welchman and Andy Vitale speak to technologist Cleve Gibbon. Cleve lays down some fundamentals of web content management and offers some advice about how to think about audiences, content, and technology in design content models. Cleve also talks about his transition from living in the UK to living in the US, and the importance of keeping your professional network alive to support lifelong learning.

Lisa Welchman:

Cleve, honestly, I don't know why I thought of you, this sounds so wrong, I don't know why I thought of you as somebody we should bring on the podcast.

Cleve Gibbon:

Yeah, that's not the right way to lead in, Lisa. That's the way you exit.

Lisa Welchman:

No, no. But I think it was that I saw you, somehow you went by on LinkedIn and it was like this big swoop of Cleve, the absolutely perfect guest. Why wasn't he the number one person in my head in the first place or whatever. So thank you, I appreciate it. I don't think you and Andy have ever met.

Andy Vitale:

No, first time.

Lisa Welchman:

Andy, meet Cleve. Cleve, meet Andy.

Andy Vitale:

Hey, thanks for coming on.

Cleve Gibbon:

No worries, Andy. You're coming through loud and clear and I'm assuming that's the microphone. That is super.

Lisa Welchman:

Is that something else?

Cleve Gibbon:

It is.

Lisa Welchman:

It's really something.

Cleve Gibbon:

I love it.

Lisa Welchman:

And also just on the side, it's really good to see your face, good to see you.

Cleve Gibbon:

Oh excellent.

Lisa Welchman:

I'm glad you're doing well.

Cleve Gibbon:

I'm doing well, and it's good to see your face as well. It's good to say that, welcome to Europe, even though I'm not a part of it anymore. Welcome to Europe.

Lisa Welchman:

When did that happen?

Cleve Gibbon:

Well there's two reasons. I left Europe when the UK was parting Europe, and now you're going back to Europe which UK is no longer a part, which is disturbing. Brexit really did happen. But yeah, I've been here since October 2019.

Lisa Welchman:

Wow. October 2019. I didn't do that. So what are you up to? Where are you? What are you doing? What kind of work are you doing?

Cleve Gibbon:

Oh my word.

Lisa Welchman:

Last time I talked to you, my number one thing about why I really wanted to talk to you and why I always enjoyed talking to you is you are a technologist that doesn't shy away from content.

Cleve Gibbon:

No.

Lisa Welchman:

Right? And that's very unusual. A lot of times people who are building and designing a stack of some sort, they kind of have this arms length away from what's actually going in it, but you're fully embracing all of that stuff.

Cleve Gibbon:

Yeah.

Lisa Welchman

So I thought it would be really great to talk to you. But anyhow, you were about to say what you're up to.

Cleve Gibbon:

Yeah. I came over to the states because there was a job, and it was a pretty exciting job, and it was something that in my previous job at Cognifide, I ran part of this agency and I was the Chief Technology Officer there, and I had a super time there, but we came to an end in terms of we went through an all in/out and then we got acquired by a big company, and at the end of that it was what do I do next? And I could have done the same thing, but interestingly, that same company which is called Wunderman Thompson, which is the parent company, said you know what, why don't you just do the same thing but in the United States, bigger and better, and just go for it. No massive remit apart from make technology work across a bigger area. And I thought why not, and then the CEO of that region came over to London, I met him and it was we just hit it off, and I thought okay, I'd follow this guy. So I decided to come across and help put the technology, the T, back into that part of the agency. I can give you more details on that, but it's been an exciting ride and we've got a lot more to go. But yeah, it's just been an exciting sort of journey and I'm looking forward to doing more.

Andy Vitale:

I think that proves that the personal relationship is so important when you're looking for that next thing. It's about the connection you make to other humans, the people that you'll be working with, more so than even the job itself.

Cleve Gibbon:

Yeah, and I'll go even one step further and say I've noticed this because of COVID there's attrition and people moving and people don't leave organizations, people leave people. And people join people. So there was a cause, I believed in it, I joined, and now I'm looking for the next journey.

Lisa Welchman:

Well, welcome to America. You picked a hell of a time to come.

Cleve Gibbon:

Oh my word. It's been crazy. But outside of work, America is quite the eye opener, particularly around the D, E and I piece, which is something that we can go into later on. It really touched me, because in the UK, if you're a Black person and you make mistakes, your life is never on the line. If you make the wrong mistake here in the States, you can die. And for me that was fundamentally a mind shift in the way I had to behave as an adult within a country that I thought was culturally the same but is radically different.

Lisa Welchman:

Yeah. There was the couple of years I was working with a UK-based company, which is why I think I know you actually, and I met you because I was over in London a lot, and that was one of the first things that I noticed as a Black person was that yeah, there's some black people things over there that aren't quite straight, but it wasn't like that.

Cleve Gibbon:

Yeah.

Lisa Welchman:

Right? It was just a completely different danger level, and so that's really fascinating. I have a, this is completely not about design, but I have a brother that I didn't know who I had until I was an adult because he was fathered by my father when he was in Vietnam as a Vietnam vet, and then adopted by an English family. So you've got a half Vietnamese, half Black kid raised in Plymouth.

Cleve Gibbon:

Yeah.

Lisa Welchman:

So believe it or not, he voted leave in Brexit because he's like a total Torie, right? So we met online, he came over here and I remember having to, he stayed downtown Baltimore at a bed and breakfast because he was meeting everybody and I was like you should have your own personal space, and I was like, "What are you going to do tonight?" And he's like, "Oh I think I'll just walk around." And I had to give him a little talk. I was like you're walking around Baltimore, and he's pretty confident guy, owning his space, he's a grown up, he's in his 40s. And I was like just be careful, go here but don't go here. And he was looking at me like I was crazy, and I was like no I'm really telling you that this is the way it needs to be. So it's been really fascinating having these conversations with him back and forth. So it's a shame that that was your experience, but I'm sure it was also kind of enriching as well in some kind of.

Cleve Gibbon:

Oh there's been so many lessons learned. So I'm fortunate to have actually experienced that, but also off the back of that, as an agency, we took a stand and we looked at this we've gone through a number of exercises, and for me as a technologist, I'm looking at things as making technology so that assets that we produce as a marketing company, which is communications, which is of course content, how do we make our content more diverse, equitable, and inclusive in nature? How to we make it more accessible? And as a technologist, how do we put that in the hands of brands so that it's, what was the word? It is actually adopted. And for me, that aggressive adoption of these tools requires aggressive innovation, and that's where I've been focusing is how do we innovate to shorten the distance between creation and consumption of content so that it can get in the hands of those people that can do good. That's the purposeful aspect.

Lisa Welchman:

And what do you think are the biggest barriers to getting that work done? What's slowing that down? Other than the innovation that needs to occur? So there's a certain level of invention that just takes time.

Cleve Gibbon:

Yes.

Lisa Welchman:

But you and I both know that there are a lot of really great invented but unimplemented things.

Cleve Gibbon:

Correct. Yes. For that, so the T in my title is technology, but the reality, the T is therapy. So you go there and you talk to a lot of people around technology, but technology is where it ends. Everything executes in technology, but before you execute, you need to design. So execution, if you think about it, goes round clockwise, but when you design you have to go anti clockwise. So I am, in terms of innovation, it's really hard to get people to buy into the design, which is to buy into the problem to see how you can solve it. And that's my focus. When I talk about technology, I always start with adoption, I always start with enablement, and I always start with people, which ultimately means I have to understand the entire process. That's what stalls, because people have not got down on a piece of paper or visually, or understand exactly the complications and intricacies of how to do what they do today.

Cleve Gibbon:

That's the way it has to start is how do you do it? Who does it? Once you understand that, how do we enable that with technology? Technology can't start until you have that map.

Andy Vitale:

So Cleve, on the flip side of what you said, what are some of the barriers that you're seeing in adoption?

Cleve Gibbon:

Barriers to adoption are first of all, you have some vendors that are trying to sell software, and that's what they do. So the adoption is if you're given a product from a big vendor, no need to name one, there are many out there, the assumption is that tool has also the processes that you need to work as a business. By adopting the generic processes of a tool, whether its a CMS or a CRM, that's now how the business works. The need to actually move and accelerate because of the growth agenda means that people will just take technologies and assuming that the processes will work for them. So a large part of the barriers of adoption is unpacking or just pulling people back from the edge and saying the tool is not the solution, but if it's not the solution, then what is? And that's where the conversation starts.

Cleve Gibbon:

People don't like to be pulled back from the edge because they need to move and cross the chasm and they believe the tool will get there. Actually telling them that the tool either has to be simplified or it's the wrong tool and is a barrier. And they say if we don't adopt this, then why would we adopt what you're going to actually produce and that's where we have to start in terms of a conversation. It's not a conversation that people are in the position to listen, so you have to demonstrate value without the value being on the table in the first place, and that's kind of hard.

Lisa Welchman:

What I hear the most about tools is just stand it up.

Cleve Gibbon:

Yeah.

Lisa Welchman:

So that was why popped into my head, it was like stand it up how? The work that I do in governance sort of intersects with what you do because I usually go in an organization and say tell me what the scope of your digital footprint is and what are the set of people that touch it, right?

Cleve Gibbon:

Yeah.

Lisa Welchman:

And nine times out of 10 they can't fully answer both of those questions.

Cleve Gibbon:

Yeah.

Lisa Welchman:

Right? And yet they are standing up tools.

Cleve Gibbon:

Stand up tools is-

Lisa Welchman:

For that portfolio-

Cleve Gibbon:

Exactly.

Lisa Welchman:

And for that group of people to use, and they have no idea what ... and I was like how can you possibly engineer this thing and design it correctly if you don't fully understand who's going to use it? It's like well we've got to get it standed up out of the box.

Cleve Gibbon:

Yeah, that's the word. See that is OOTB is the word. It's out of the box. We don't want any customizations. You know what, I fully understand the reason why you do not want to customize something, you want it out of the box, because you want the flexibility to change. But every business is unique and once you look at your processes, you do have to have a certain level of customization, it's just what are you prepared to invest in for the longterm. So it's a return of investment over a two to three year period and not a one year or six month stand up and go.

Andy Vitale:

I hear that a lot with probably through most of my career, it's been let's figure out what's the out of the box solution is and do a gap analysis to what we need and see what the difference is, and then there's the debate over is this customization or is this kind of just matching our process a little bit better or trying to have a solution that's tailored completely to us, is this the right decision? And then we run into a lot of times it's the technology lift. The thought is is that extra effort actually worth doing it? And talking about out of the box solutions and trying to sell people on adopting a process, not a tool. I'm curious how you've been successful in doing that, especially coming in as an agency partner, not even an in house team, how do you, I don't know, move the needle in that situation?

Cleve Gibbon:

It's not always everybody's cup of tea. That's the Brit in me politely saying not everyone is buying into that, not picking up what I'm putting down. And the reason for that is there is a big program of work, and that program of work requires a lot of processes to be written and to be orchestrated and to be working in unison. If you really want this to work, you want to pick off one or two really important processes and then building a technology, stand upon that success, and then pick another one and grow. But it's always we need about 15 of these things orchestrated at work and then all the technology that needs to fit into it.

Cleve Gibbon:

Those organizations that are really looking to stand up the team and a process that goes around, that and with the necessary cast and the technology to train them, to adopt them and then to get another process, they act as a C, split that team and then go again, that is the approach that works, but that requires fundamentally taking the smartest people out of the business to work on something new, and leaving the rest behind in BAU and that is hard. No one wants to be left behind, but also in digital transformation, you look at an organization, there's only 10 to 15% of the people doing roughly 80% of the digital transformation work because they're capable. Getting those people to be in one or other camp is hard. So there's not that many people that can do what's required and that's the hard part.

Andy Vitale:

The only thing worse than that situation is being on the keep the lights on team.

Cleve Gibbon:

Yeah.

Andy Vitale:

The thing that's about to be sunsetted but somebody's got to keep going until that point.

Cleve Gibbon:

I know-

Lisa Welchman:

You've seen the cliff.

Cleve Gibbon:

-and also, on top of that, yeah, you've seen the cliff, but also unfortunately, we're going through a mashup, so there's traditional and then there's innovation, there's reinvention, and there's invention. You've got all of these things happening, you need all of them, no one wants to be left behind, but the reality is some people are. Those people that are willing to adopt new processes, wrap AI, for example, around them so they're augmented so they can make smarter and faster decisions. That's really the people you want to go after, and people used to say, oh AI is going to be replacing our jobs. It's not that, it's those people that are augmented are going to compete with those that are not. That's the competition. So the only way for you to stay competitive and to stay ahead of it is to constantly be learning, to be as [inaudible 00:16:52] said, don't be a know it all company, be a learn it all, because that's what you have to be.

Lisa Welchman:

Yeah. All this is really resonating with me and I just want to change the topic a tiny bit, not all the way, but just a tiny bit. So we had a conversation with Peter Morville, and it was a long conversation and I'm sure you've met Peter and talked to him many times, and one of the founding fathers of information architecture or whatever we want to call it, he enjoys that title and also at the same time doesn't take it too seriously and one of the things that came up was this sort of push with content, right? The sort of rise of content as a thing to be taken seriously.

Lisa Welchman:

So I started in the web early enough where we just wrote some stuff and put it online, and some people still just do that. But now we have content strategy, and there was always the piece that came out of document management which was this highly structured component based content, the sort of work that Ann Rockley does, these very sophisticated content models that are driven by thesauri and controlled vocabularies and these faceted taxonomies and so I would love to just hear you talk about what you see in that range, because I see a very broad spectrum and in particular I'm interested because I think much of the trouble that we get into with personalization and the use or misuse of personally identifiable information or the ignorance of some who do content design in what it takes on the back end and what's going to happen on the back end in order to deliver this experience that they've designed, whether it's content or just overall UX.

Lisa Welchman:

I know it's a really broad question, but I'm wondering what you think the role content folks have and technologists have in making sure that these experiences have integrity, particularly ones where we're using highly personalized experiences that are creating these data logs that get used in unintentional sorts of ways. Everybody's always really surprised, they're like well, it almost seems like this data came out of the exhaust pipe, oh look, it's interesting, it has value. Let's do something else with it. And it just goes.

Cleve Gibbon:

Yeah.

Lisa Welchman:

So I'm wondering where you feel like, that was kind of a rangey question but you're nodding your head, so I'm thinking you're getting what I'm asking.

Cleve Gibbon:

Yeah. I'm picking up what you're putting down.

Lisa Welchman:

You're picking up, you said that a couple times.

Cleve Gibbon:

Oh yeah. This is coming-

Lisa Welchman:

You've been in the US, that's so American.

Cleve Gibbon:

It's so American.

Lisa Welchman:

But Cleve is like the '60s American.

Cleve Gibbon:

Yeah. I know. Really I enjoy it. I had my 50th birthday this year and I'm thinking I'm going to embrace my age.

Lisa Welchman:

That's stuff that my 84 year old dad says.

Cleve Gibbon:

I'll take that. I need to meet him, it sounds like a good dad. So I would say that there is always this confusion between data and content, and I understand that. There are similar challenges across both, and then everyone knows the difference between a nice structured taxonomy versus something that's more flat. We get that. We know the difference between an outlook folder structure, which I don't think anybody does, versus a nice flattened search that is a much easier way of doing things. Now, when it comes to structuring all of this, I used to always focus purely on the content side, because that's the communication, and I used to look at content in the way that it has to be raw so that it's channel agnostic which means you have to take care of which channel it goes into, there was an over indexing on putting things through the web channel, and that used to pollute the content that used to go in, took a step back and made it raw.

Cleve Gibbon:

Then it also has to be self describing, which is really important, so that machines can read the content that you put in. That's another very important property. And the last one, it has to be modular so that it can be assembled and disassembled to go down any channel that's required. That's the C. That's really important. The T is just the plumbing. That's basically how do you do all of that and basically get it from A to B, so the content flows through the pipe. Where we're going now with data is very much on the audience side of things. So how do you structure your data so that it can be segmented and categorized from groups down into categories and cohorts down to the individual you which is personalized.

Cleve Gibbon:

If you look at the words that I've been saying there, audience, content, technology, that's act for me. That is the framework by which people need to come and act. If I have an audience set that I can quickly pull together, the content that then is targeted at that audience and then the technology that drives it there, I have a personalization framework. I know what I need to do in those three areas, it's hard but there's different levels of maturity that you see in organizations around those three areas, the audience, the content, and the technology, and if you read it backwards, it's like I'm going to create the technology for you to enable you to communicate in any way you need to the audiences that you require. That's what you should do when you execute, but when you design, you design your audiences first, that's why there's been a big push for data. You get that right, and then once you know your audiences and their different types you then organize your content and structure it in an architectural way that it can be disassembled and reassembled by machines in any channel that will hit your technology and get it everywhere it needs to do at scale.

Cleve Gibbon:

That's sort of how I think about things in a broader sense and personalization, when I look at an organization, the different levels of maturity in those [inaudible 00:23:11] tells me a lot about how well or how successful they will be.

Lisa Welchman:

So who, I just want to follow on with that because you answered half my question and the act is a really a good way to think about it, I hadn't thought about that in that way or heard about that in that way, so that really makes a lot of sense to me, but there's some intention behind that, right? There's some intention behind what we're trying to do with a particular audience, and there's some boundaries of what you're allowed to do with that information, we've been talking about US and Europe. GDPR versus wide open, was Amazon today sidewalk? I never turn off anything. I'm totally like go ahead, violate my privacy. But I actually went into my app and was like I don't think so.

Cleve Gibbon:

Yeah.

Lisa Welchman:

That one you're not going to do. So that's where in America, the wild west of openness, really blow it up and break it and see what happens versus not the most conservative, but slightly conservative Europe with GDPR. So I guess my question is who's job is it to watch that stuff? Is it compliance and security? Is it the IT teams security chick in the corner going like no thou shall not do that? Is that part of the design team or are the stack design and content strategists all able to be free and about else is supposed to be watching their back, making sure that the things that they're doing are ethically aligned and appropriate?

Cleve Gibbon:

Everybody's responsibility but there are those people that are more on the line than not, and it's the audience side, the data side. You see a lot of the challenges from the data teams to understand this data, where does it originate, when does it cross boarders, when it crosses boarders have I got permission to do that? They goes through all of those questions, and you talk to all the marketing vendors that store data, move data, create data, there is always someone from the legal department in the conversations around data. And why is that? Because privacy is number one. And so they can't be exposed in that space, and we can't be exposed because we will have our lawyers, and also the clients will have their recommends and checklist to go through as well. So it is very litigious out there, and therefore you do need to have the right regulations and the right compliance and all of those pieces and be up to speed with that because it's also changing at a I would say horrific rate at the moment.

Andy Vitale:

I hear you saying that, but I've heard so many times the quest for personalization or in these meetings that I've sat in over the years, hyper personalization.

Cleve Gibbon:

Yeah.

Andy Vitale:

Which how do you even drill it down even more? And I think this drive to have really hyper personalization or any personalization has led to a lot of rushed tactics and a lot of the mistakes that we're seeing. You're describing probably the best case scenario where legal teams are involved. There are some instances or companies or products that are being stood up that the goal is to be the most personalized anything that you can think of, but I don't know that they're thinking about it in a way that privacy is first. So for those companies that are just kind of the quest to get it done and then oh whatever happens to that data, I didn't realize that was also there, like why are they collecting so much information, and do they need to?

Cleve Gibbon:

So I think people collect what they can. Whether it's rightly or wrongly, I'm not condoning the practice, but they can collect what they can. But if you look at data, data is, you break down the word is from datum which is from the Latin dare, and that is to give. It means to give. So if you look at what brands and these vendors out there are doing with data, I actually think that they're taking. And so when you look at that, wow. What should they do? The only way I see is that I have data with a brand, it's got to be transparent, and at any point in time I should be able to see what you hold on me and then if I don't like what you hold on me, I can actually put a stop to it and remove it. That's what brands should be doing. They should be facilitating that, and I think there are things to do that, but it's not as easy to do, to actually find out your digital footprint.

Cleve Gibbon:

Wouldn't it be great if you could go, and it's not just a browser, because your information sits outside of a browser, wouldn't it be nice to have some way, because they've all got access to an app, to be able to press a button that says, "Hi, my name is Cleve Gibbon, tell me where I am. Tell me what information you have." And it comes back to you with a complete report with every piece of data or every piece of data that should show my digital footprint. I don't know anywhere or anything that is anywhere close to that, but if you asked an individual can you show me my data footprint, my digital footprint? I don't know anyone who'd say no to that.

Andy Vitale:

Right. It's like a personal version of a credit report.

Cleve Gibbon:

Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah. I'd love that.

Lisa Welchman:

I was about to say, there's an opportunity if anyone's looking for things to do.

Cleve Gibbon:

Yeah.

Lisa Welchman:

Andy kind of alluded to it a little bit, but I just wanted to go straight down. We've been talking a lot about agility. We did a whole deep dive on is agile worth it, from a development perspective, and we ended up in some really interesting places, and of course the answer is complex. It's not a yes or no answer, and so we're not that naïve in that way. But I guess my question around this is do you believe that we actually need to operate as fast as we do? My perspective is that businesses oftentimes invent urgency, and it's almost like it's some kind of, in the culture, some kind of disease. I think those of us who've worked in the digital spaces for the last 25 some odd years of the commercial web have developed a culture of urgency. Better hurry up, being disrupted, things are going to fall down, blah, blah, blah. So it's not, which might have been true at some point, early on when things really were like what is going on? Like if you were a newspaper early on you're like what is happening? This whole thing is falling apart, and there's a lot of innovation happening, so I'm not begrudging that. But I think things are actually being impacted more slowly than people know and that we actually can take time to be considered in the work that we do.

Lisa Welchman:

So as someone who's actually interacting with folks who are standing up technology platforms, enterprise technology platforms, that have some complexity to it, probably in an agile development environment from time to time, what's your take on all this agility and what's necessary and maybe what's not?

Cleve Gibbon:

That is a very complicated landscape, but I will do my best to sort of break it down. The first thing is, if you take a look at the business and you've said the urgency, that's quite right. There's a lot of urgency. What I don't see is that compared against or measured against importance. So there's an axis. There is urgent versus important. I think most people will put everything in the urgent bucket, and not actually sort of categorize it as important. The important things are your longterm bets that will win, the urgent things are the things that you need to react to immediately. They're not necessarily going to be the thing that are going to drive your business beyond the one year horizon. So being able to categorize urgent versus important, very important.

Cleve Gibbon:

The second thing is that business and technology and agility is different. Engineering agility we've got licked. It's done. We understand it. We get it. Business agility is something completely different. So if I was to tell you that do you know when you used to have the big, massive marketing requirements documents you used to have-

Lisa Welchman:

Yes, I wrote some.

Cleve Gibbon:

Yeah, and then underneath that you had an engineer team with the agility, you saw things that were just out of kilter. So agility within the business realm versus the engineer realm, totally different. What we're trying to do with the urgency is to create the successes we've had with engineer agility and replicate that within the business, and it's not as easy as turning on a light bulb.

Cleve Gibbon:

The third thing is agility itself, it has two parts to it. This is the really important thing, what I've found is that agility is the right combination of stability and speed. Now, what I mean by that is everyone thinks agility is about speed. The speed is useless unless it's built upon a solid, stable foundation. So when we talk about platforms, we want platforms that have the stability, that have monthly releases that you go. You probably want the UX changes to happen every couple of weeks to be done by agencies. But then you want the speed within the content to be intraday, and if you don't have those ideas of tiers of change, as I put it in my head, where you have the real fast intraday content communications versus the stuff that you need to do at a UX level that needs to maybe be every couple of days of the componentry but the platform stuff is solid and stable, getting those two cogs working in unison, that to me is true agility, when you have that right sort of management of stability and speed. Agility requires an understanding of both of those.

Cleve Gibbon:

They used to call it, what was it in Gartner they called it pace layers. They'd call it pace layering. Agility to me is stability and speed.

Lisa Welchman:

That's really brilliant, and I like how you've described all of those three components and this last one is really making me think about well what's broken down? Particularly let's just pick CMS because that's something that a lot of people are familiar with. It's a platform that was going to do some web content management inside the organization. Marketing took that responsibility away from the IT department because they didn't like the choices that IT made and plus the cloud allowed marketing to functionally take on the development, be the key business stakeholder for the development of a technology platform that needs to be stable, yet they really don't have the competency to do it. Now they might be shooting me listening to this, and I'm just wondering, is that off? Because that engineer thing is a thing. Right? And when you push stuff up into the cloud, and I'm all about the cloud, this isn't a criticism of that, but when you make it so that you don't actually have to interact with too many people in your business that have that engineer background, and have that priority and understand the importance of stability, and you hand that off to a group of people who are in those tiers that have to whip it out, they tie the platform into their speed, do you know what I'm saying?

Cleve Gibbon:

Yeah.

Lisa Welchman:

And it's just all, and I'm going yes the content moves fast, but the thing it's moving through does not have to. But they don't see that. So I'm wondering if you have any sort of insights on that or if you've seen something similar in that way?

Cleve Gibbon:

Yeah, I've seen something similar, if you see them as cogs, there's multiple cogs for the speed pieces, and if you were to really double down, what I'm saying here is that who do you think is responsible for speed? That tends to be the business. And who do you think is also responsible for the urgent and which cogs? So if you look at this, mapping it out quite seriously, you have the urgent speedy people at the top, and then you have the slow and steady people at the bottom, and more power and more budget and more authority is given to speed because they deliver immediate fast results, whereas actually the important part, the stability part comes from the platforms and the learnings that provide the foundational capabilities to those that require the speed to advance the business for growth.

Cleve Gibbon:

That understanding, that's the conversations, the hard conversations you have with your brands to make sure that you get that solid bit. As an enterprise developer it's very hard because you have to do an upfront investment to get the important pieces, to get the stability, but you don't see the returns until the speedy urgent parts are delivering those back, but you are not a part, or seem to be a part, of the bit that's of value. That's the conversation that's sort of hard.

Lisa Welchman:

Fair.

Andy Vitale:

So for the people that are on these teams that are hearing we need to move faster, we need to release more, we need to take on more work, speed is the name of the game. What advice would you give them to really make the case for that stability piece?

Cleve Gibbon:

The case that I would make is stability and speed, the cogs need to come together, the people need to come together, and the urgent and the important need to come together. That's what happens. You can't just say I want a cross disciplinary team because you just get a bunch of people together and say okay we're not a cross disciplinary team. Doing what and what are you accountable for and responsible for and do you understand the trade off between something like speed versus stable versus urgent versus important. That is when, it's not always a business person that's speed and an IT person that is stable, you can flip between them, but it's understanding consciously why you're doing that and where you sit at any point in time, that is when you sort of get the true gel between the teams.

Lisa Welchman:

Yeah, and how much stability do you need to stabilize that speed? Not stabilize, that sounded redundant, but how much stability do you need to counterbalance that speed, to allow that to happen? And I think people just don't get that.

Cleve Gibbon:

Yeah.

Lisa Welchman:

So I hope everybody listening hears that part.

Cleve Gibbon:

Yeah.

Lisa Welchman:

It's so important. It's so important, because I think that's how we get all this sort of garbage online and these online accidental things are that people aren't understanding that there's just some fundamentals that you shouldn't skip on.

Cleve Gibbon:

Yeah. And it's not, I know I'm painting this picture, and it's not easy because the business has to grow, because standing still today, you actually are falling behind. It's like inflation. If you don't do something to sort of aggressively go at it, the cost, your purchasing power goes down and so you have to make sure that you're investing in the stable parts, and that you're doing that constantly because you are fighting a market that's pulling you in different directions. You will be pulled out and you will make conscious decisions, you have to make conscious decisions that okay today we need to hit this market, we need to go at this speed, but I do know that we're forsaking this and we're building technical debt, but we're going to do that consciously. But what happens of course is that once you meet that deadline, and it happened with the CIOs across all our organizations, like oh COVID is here, we now need to do remote working. CIO departments said yes that will take us two years, but actually it took us less than three months.

Lisa Welchman:

Yeah.

Cleve Gibbon:

So if you can do that when you have a pandemic, just because the pandemic is gone, why can't you move at the same pace? There were various reasons why's and why for not, but it's the realization that you can move. You don't have to convince people now that technology is important. That's a given. The challenge now is how do you adopt it at the rate that's required to support future growth. That's the challenge I have now. I don't walk into a room and say okay, I don't think we need this technology, Cleve. It's not that. It's how fast can we get that within our organization so it's useful and usable by everyone?

Andy Vitale:

That reminds me, I watched a short video where you said embrace change versus resisting the future. And I wanted to ask a little bit more detail around that. Can you describe that thought?

Cleve Gibbon:

Yeah. So embracing change for me is very much around and we're all, I'm telling you, I am like this as well, my daughters will be on an iPhone or a phone, whichever, and the rates at which they move on that phone and they communicate-

Lisa Welchman:

Stunning.

Cleve Gibbon:

I struggle to keep up. But I have made it my lifelong purpose because as soon as I start falling behind, that's not good. So I forcefully move and embrace the change that I have to communicate in that way because if I call, I used to call my daughter and leave a voicemail-

Lisa Welchman:

Yeah, that doesn't work.

Cleve Gibbon:

Who leaves voicemails?

Lisa Welchman:

Yeah, exactly.

Cleve Gibbon:

That does not work. No one leaves voicemails. And then I used to text, and she's like oh dad you've got three or four lines, you've got sentences with punctuation marks, who does that? So the rules of text and texting, I've learned how to adapt and I constantly do that and I apply that to the business lane. Embrace change. What was it? Resist the future?

Andy Vitale:

Yeah, embrace change or resist the future.

Cleve Gibbon:

Yeah. So the future is pretty much now, and I've actually come to be thinking now is that we are already living in the future, it's just that the majority of us are not aware that we're there. So what I mean by that is I constantly look out for things that are happening, I'm just surprised that I did not know that this is available and so it's about unpacking and opening Pandora's box and seeing what's there, and you know the exponential curve that everybody sees, it's deceptive and it's happening underwater like a shark moves to prey and it's disruptive right at the point where you've already missed the boat. So one of my jobs is constantly making people aware that we're in this deceptive, this is the future, when actual facts, it's tangible and it's real and it's accessible to you today. So that's what I mean. Don't resist, open your eyes and go to people who will teach you, tell you, that you can learn from to apply what you don't know today so that you're already in tomorrow.

Lisa Welchman:

So I don't disagree with any of that, and, see I've learned to say and instead of but, and how much of that, but I have to admit, honestly I hear that and it's very stressful. Right? I'm just ...

Cleve Gibbon:

It doesn't have to be, but I hear what you're saying.

Lisa Welchman:

So there are, we were just talking about stability, and it's a grounding force.

Cleve Gibbon:

Yes.

Lisa Welchman:

So what is it that keeps a business from floating away and losing it's identity if it's constantly grasping for things that it's not? How does it maintain it's core, both technologically and from a brand perspective, and culturally, because I think some of the, not every change or dynamic that's happening underwater is relevant to the organization, to every organization, and I would argue that's an executive's job to sort that out. Often they do, often they don't. Sometimes they're not reactive enough, but what do you think about that? Because it can't be that you're just nervously going and seeking after everything. How do you hold yourself together in that dynamic?

Cleve Gibbon:

Focus. That's another one of my favorite words is focus. If you don't have focus, then what you have is you're open to all ideas, and if you're one of these folks that can't say no or don't know whether to say no, then what happens there is that you'll constantly be spinning plates and then going for the next plate and spinning that. It's focus, and it's not easy, but if you're able to say no and you're able to actually stick to the plan and the plan, of course, it can adapt, because if you start at place A and you want to get to place B, but you also realize that you need to pivot and persevere and the way you really need to get to is over at point C, planning over the plan is the most important bit, but the reason when you pivot and persevere is because your focus and you know what you're supposed to do as a business, and what you're not supposed to do. So that's the bit for me is even though there's a million, trillion things going out there, there's probably only a few things that are core to your business and making that decision to say no and say yes to the things that are is the focus.

Andy Vitale:

Yeah, I'm thinking it's pivoting and it's constant prioritization.

Cleve Gibbon:

Yeah.

Andy Vitale:

And I think that's another area that doesn't always go the way you plan. You talked about the business being pulled in different directions and how does this team face so many different priorities, especially on the technology side, how do you know when to pivot and what is the right thing to prioritize when you're hearing all of that noise of all different, what should be priorities coming at you?

Cleve Gibbon:

I can't answer that question, if I'm honest, I can't answer that question if it's for somebody else. If I'm in that and I'm living it, then there is something that okay I know I can do it for my life, I know I can do it for my business, but it's someone who knows and then someone knows this is what I want to do, this is where I am, this is where I need to be, this is my current path, and what's stopping me from getting there, those are the pivot and persevere moments that only you as a business can make. You can support people in that decision and give them options and make recommendations, but ultimately the decision makers, and this is why it's constantly decision makers need to do that.

Cleve Gibbon:

My mom taught me something very early on and I said oh, I used to get home and say I'm so busy, I'm so busy, and she used to turn around to me, well she said it once, my mom you only have to say it once. She said, "Busy people are those that are failing to prioritize. There's no concept of busy, it's on you to prioritize." And I could apply that to business.

Lisa Welchman:

Yeah. That sounds about right. Your mom sounds great.

Cleve Gibbon:

Yeah, she's good. She's still teaching me and I'm 50.

Lisa Welchman:

That's the job.

Cleve Gibbon:

Yeah.

Lisa Welchman:

So you mentioned earlier in the conversation, you've just gotten to the US, you're having this experience of being a black man in America and how eye opening that is for you, what's your next exciting journey going to be do you think?

Cleve Gibbon:

Interesting. Not sure. So I've had three careers in my life. My first career I was a university lecturer, I used to love teaching, still do. And then I became a sort of technical architect, so I worked in banking, building trading systems. That was a whole career in itself, learning how to do that and build platforms. And then my third career is setting up this company, working with two other founders and we built this thing from scratch and it was more of a CTO role. So I've been a CTO since 2006, and I've got another career in me. I don't know what it is, another career. But I'm very interested in technology. I love where I am at the moment. I want to progress it forward, but I am fascinated by just the level of innovation that I see across the planet.

Cleve Gibbon:

I'm currently [inaudible 00:48:37] in the innovation category, and we've just gone through something like 250 different pieces of work, just seeing what's going on whether it's from sustainability, CO2 emissions, D,E and I, that is incredible. Absolutely incredible and that's, when you apply it to a purpose and it's beyond the passion but the purpose but understanding how people come together to solve a problem that is going to do so much good, I feel as though that is something that I would put my name to and I'm very excited about doing more in that space. Thankfully I'm at an agency that allows me to do just that. We have entries in that area and I am very proud of what we've done.

Lisa Welchman:

Yeah. You alluded to but didn't mention the sort of younger generation, or maybe it popped into my head. What do you think about people coming up in your technology space, what are they bringing to the table that's required and what are areas where maybe they could use some mentoring? Obviously experience counts, I know that's a thing that probably doesn't mean anything in some circles, but I believe that experience counts. So I'm not really talking about that. I'm just talking about just culturally, how is it different? What have they got that's good? How can we have an exchange?

Cleve Gibbon:

You've got to realize that the younger generation are I would say smarter and faster.

Lisa Welchman:

They really are, yeah.

Cleve Gibbon:

Than us. They're smarter and faster. And also, and I can say it because I'm in generational company, we're probably the last generation that's had a food in both analog and digital. And so what we're looking at here is that when I talk to them it's like yeah, we went through a paradigm shift to go from one to the other, to become digital. They have not experienced life before that. So what we can bring to them is that understanding of crafting something because beyond digital, there will be another paradigm shift, there will be something that they will go through, and so what we can prepare them for is don't assume today digital is going to be the only way in which we do things, there's going to be something else. So look for that and be a part of that and move, and when the movement happens, don't be one that stays on one side of the fence, always learn it all and help those come across to the other side. And I've already talked to younger folks, it's preparing them for change. It's change. Don't stand still.

Cleve Gibbon:

Standing still, like anything, keep exercising, keep stretching as you get older, you need the flexibility of movement as well as the strength. So that's really important.

Lisa Welchman:

Yeah, and being receptive-

Cleve Gibbon:

to have that flexibility of mind

Lisa Welchman:

Being receptive and open to things.

Cleve Gibbon:

Yeah.

Lisa Welchman:

I have a common sort of digital governance maturity curve where you're going through organic growth, dipping into chaos, pulling out into basic management, and then getting to a responsive state where your digital capacity is embedded. So as the company turns, so does all of that stuff, and that doesn't happen a lot. Most people aren't there, they're still trying to pull that together, I think we're a good 30 or 40 years before we get that integrated. But the thing that happens, when you get at that big point is that stuff becomes sort of commoditized. That's when you get the I want to get the phone system, and the only thing I really have to wonder about is what color, because they all work the same.

Lisa Welchman:

So we're nowhere near that in our digital spaces, but at some point it will be just that boring, and it's at that moment that things are ripe for disruption again. So I think some of these people who are in younger spaces now are going to be the people to grow it to stability, to grow it to a commodity level where this is so normalized, it's still, even though they know it intuitively because they've grown up in it, it's still not normalized. It's still got all this wacky innovation wildness to it, but it will get this normalization to it and it will also be really interesting because I think they'll live long enough to see, as you said, it turn again. And they'll get bounced out and they'll be having this conversation about, they'll be saying, talking to people, so what about these young people coming up? They're trying to undo our whatever. So it's fascinating, but a privilege.

Cleve Gibbon:

Yeah.

Lisa Welchman:

It's a privilege to work in this space, right?

Cleve Gibbon:

It is a total privilege. And I heard, this is totally off on a tangent, but a friend of mine went to Tel Aviv and saw some technology innovation and there's some great technology innovation, this blew my mind. They had a piece of AI out there that could look at a person's face, take a look at the arteries underneath them, and do the necessarily analysis and determine a stress level. So you can just look at that. So you're on your phone and you're on your phone and you're talking to someone, this program could tell you how stressed you are. Imagine the applications of that. You could use that within your employees, you could do whichever, and if you're talking to someone stressing, even if it's like in the health sector and someone's in their state of stress you could use that. And not only that, you could actually put it as a screen and beam it at a TV and it could look at the TV and tell you how stressed they are from a still image or a TV image, and they did this and they were looking at remember Zuckerberg with, was it Cambridge-

Lisa Welchman:

Yeah, Analytica.

Cleve Gibbon:

Yeah, Analytica doing it at Congress, the app was sitting next to the TV and it was just telling them the stress levels and showing how Zuckerberg was going up and down as it was playing on the TV. Now imagine that's just one small innovation, it blew my mind, but that's the kind of thing I tend to see every two to three days. When you see that, the question of focus is so important because yeah, I could take that, I could use that with my organization, but to what end?

Lisa Welchman:

Right. And is it safe? And is it ethical?

Cleve Gibbon:

And is it safe and is it ethical

Lisa Welchman:

And does it work on everybody? Or is it going to be like those airport things that don't see brown skin, right?

Cleve Gibbon:

Exactly. So we have all of those questions. Any piece of technology that comes in as part of an innovation, there's actually a longer process. It's not like the FDA but it's just getting like that where you have to go through a really ethical due diligence around is this right? What could go wrong?

Lisa Welchman:

Yeah, that's why Andy and I started this podcast which is we wanted to write a book on digital safety and part of my side of the research of that was really looking at consumer product safety and the history of consumer product safety and all the policy and process that goes around that, and so we will get to that level of maturity with our digital spaces, whether people like it or not, and hopefully for good, and hopefully people who have the knowledge of digital technologies like yourself can participate in the creation of that policy so that it actually makes sense and doesn't end up being just nonsensical stuff. But anyhow, this has been such a fun conversation. Andy have you got any additional questions?

Andy Vitale:

My mind went to where are you seeing all of these innovations every couple of days? I'm sure people out there are like how do I stay in the loop of all these things? What websites or blogs, what are you doing to stay learning?

Cleve Gibbon:

Stay learning is build up a network. I had the fortunate, I'm so lucky to be a part of the McKinsey Black Executive Leadership Program, which for me was absolutely, mind bogglingly, amazing. It's like, "Oh, when people ask me what happened in that leadership program what was it about, what did you talk, did you talk about black issues and all of that stuff?" Funnily enough, no. The thing is, when you go to a black leadership program, just like if you go for an all women's program, you don't just talk about women issues, you don't talk about black issues. What you talk about is the important things, but you're doing it in I would say a position of safety, so you no longer have to think about all the things when you walk into the room where you are the minority, when you're the majority, there are certain things where you know you can have conversations openly. And in this [inaudible 00:57:04], we talked about networking, we talked about energy management, we talked about trust, we talked about storytelling.

Cleve Gibbon:

It was absolutely amazing, and in that, one of the subjects was networking. Networking for me was I had a challenge that I actually went ahead of my network, so I was running solo. I wasn't actually letting my network catch up with me and actually engaging with them. So when I stopped running and started engaging, I found out this person was doing that, that person was doing that, that person was doing that, and what tools do they use and which forums do they actually go to, and I found that my network was where I got my information, and what happened was when I started engaging more with them, information was bidirectional. And there was different types. There's the sages, people that know all, there are those people that really want to give more, so there's different types of people in those relationships, and it's investing time in that. There is no one website because websites come and go, it's the network. The network feeds me and I push out and reciprocate where I can.

Andy Vitale:

So how can people get in touch with you and see what you're pushing out?

Lisa Welchman:

Yeah, and be in your network.

Cleve Gibbon:

I've got a website, which is just clevegibbon.com. And every so often I go there and I push something out. I put that on there, the [inaudible 00:58:28] and a few other things. I'm on LinkedIn. I'm pretty happy, just link in to me, I'm good. But I basically if you know me or you want to know me, I'm online. I've got one of those weird names, I can't hide, so you can always find me and I'll respond.

Lisa Welchman:

That's fantastic. Yeah.

Cleve Gibbon:

Google loves me because I'm unique [crosstalk 00:58:49].

Lisa Welchman:

I have a common sounding name but I've never run into another me either, another Lisa Welchman. I don't know about you, Andy Vitale.

Andy Vitale:

No, I feel like there's one or two. There's always this weird YouTube video with these kids, and I don't even remember what it is, but I Googled myself one time and it's like Andy Vitale saves the world or something weird like that, it's just this video of these kids-

Lisa Welchman:

That's good though, but come on, that's better, it could be a lot worse.

Andy Vitale:

It could be worse, right?

Lisa Welchman:

You never know. Anyhow, Cleve, thanks a lot, we really appreciate the time. Thanks for talking with us.

Cleve Gibbon:

Oh thank you for having me. It's been a pleasure. Thank you both.

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