Michael Bartlett on His New Book – The Dark Side of CX

Be Customer Led – Michael Bartlett on his new book The Dark Side of CX

Welcome to be customer lad, where we’ll explore how leading experts in customer and employee experience are navigating organizations through their own journey to be customer led and the accidents and behaviors of lawyers and businesses exhibit to get there. And now your host of Bill’s staikos.

[00:00:33] Bill Staikos: Hey, everybody. Welcome back to another episode of be customer led. Thanks so much for joining us this week. I’m your host bill steakhouse. I’m joined by a really get interesting guests that I think many of you actually know who this is, but I’m going to not pull away the curtain just yet. He’s director of experience innovation at J mark.

And the reason why I think a lot of, maybe you do though is work at J mark, but our guest Michael Bartlett is also the founder. And creator of the CCSP exam simulator. Michael, thanks so much for coming on the show. I’m really excited to have here.

[00:01:05] Michael Bartlett: Thanks for having me, bill. Yeah. I’m

[00:01:06] Bill Staikos: looking forward to it.

Absolutely. So you have a really interesting book coming out and then not too distant future. And we’re going to talk a lot about, a lot about that book because there are some really fascinating principles and ideas and parallels that you’ve drawn from other parts. Of your life and hobbies, as well as just passions.

And you’ve brought them in and really creative ways. I’m just blown away by how you put this book together. So before we get into that though, I just want to first ask, let’s just tell our listeners about your journey. what were some of those like big factors that helped you to where you are today, maybe even drove you to create this sort of the, the, the, the exam simulator even, and now you are now where you are.

[00:01:50] Michael Bartlett: I was listening to a YouTube interview that David Snowden did recently. He’s well-known in the complexity theory field. And he was talking about, when you’re dealing with complexity, you don’t necessarily know where the end goal is. So the best thing you can do is just try and figure out if you’re at least going in the right direction.

And so I have kind of fumbled my way to where I am now. Still not necessarily sure if this is supposed to be where I’m gonna end up or if I’m supposed to carry on. And customer experience is just one step in the journey. but essentially, it started with one of those. And the film business I’d always wanted to direct films.

I’d always been watching movies and think of different ways they could, could be done better. Or even just did that a few days ago. We have a tradition in England called, Mr. James, that goes story for Christmas and every year, not necessarily every year, sometimes they skip a year here or there, but normally every year, the BBC does an adaptation of one of Mr.

James ghost stories and they show it on Christmas Eve. I watched it with my wife and I said, ah, They came so close, but they just totally totally dropped the ball on the ending. So I recut it for them and I sent it, I put it on YouTube, the BBC copyright strike two, and then I wrote to them and said, would you at least allow it because I’m not giving away the full episode.

I’m just giving away just the ending. And all I’m trying to do is use it for educational purpose to show how actually showing. It’s going to be more impactful than showing more. I don’t want to spoil the ending for anybody, but it’s called the president. the message, sorry. And the ending was just, there’s a, there’s some kind of fiend and they just show too much of it.

And it’s so much easier if you don’t do that. So I had this kind of like, in really good instincts for. Editing and fulfilling directing. And so I wanted to go in that direction, but then after being in, I remember when I was at the Cannes film festival, I found when they took me into the back of the sales company, I found the marketing stuff more interesting than the filmmaking.

And I loved how they had all these different posters and they were. They would get like eight or nine done by a big company called stock home design out of Los Angeles. And then once, once they had those, they would go through iterations to work on the marketing. And so that sort of then sent me in a slightly different direction and just slowly through different pieces of luck and through so sort of grit and determination.

I ended up in a situation where I was fortunate enough to get offered a user experience. Right. It wasn’t a UX role. I mean, there was no like justice principles or UI design or anything like that. It was a CX role really. I just gave up a long time and that’s when I found the CX. So this is in 2016 and I took the CCSP exam and I wasn’t happy with the prep materials that I had Lynn on saturation did a really good course.

but there was a series of practice questions that really irritated me. And I said, what? Someone needs to build something like that, but do it properly. And. The PMP at the time, and I’d used the PMP exam simulator by Cornelius Fincher. And so I thought, oh, well, I’ll just adapt what I’ve seen from the P and P world.

[00:04:53] Michael Bartlett: And I’ll just put it into the CX. Well, and that’s how I build that. Now I had to leave my job to do it. So I had to take a risk and I took four months of unemployment out of the school district to get it bell. but it ended up being a good decision because I built the simulator and then I landed straight at mock afterwards.

So it all worked out pretty nicely.

[00:05:12] Bill Staikos: Well, that’s a great story. I’m not, I didn’t realize that you use the PNP simulator to, to create the CCSP, simulator, but it’s really an interesting, just the parallel between you recorded. That film before for BBC and thinking about, you’re almost recutting the PMP simulator in some way, shape or form, right?

Like just that Pearl thinking skill set is really important in the work that we do every day. So no doubt you’re successful at J mark. in part due to that, you got this book coming out, it’s called the dark side of CX. So I’m curious. Why did you write the book? Like what motivated you to do it and, tell, tell listeners a little bit about what

[00:05:52] Michael Bartlett: I’m wanting to write it for a while.

So I actually wanted to write a different book, more on human psychology, but that would be like a big old, like 300 page text. And just trying to find the time to do that. I’ve still got all that. On the other side of this room, I have like eight white boards and they’re stacked with notes. I’m a visual thinker.

So yes, I realize it’s probably dangerous to put things on a whiteboard, but I do it anyway and I have them stacked and I want to put them all around a room one day. Tying it all together. And then write that book. I ended up realizing I was just not going to get that done anytime soon. And I really wanted to write one last year and I had all the, it was like an in-between book, if you will.

And I had all of the illustrations done at the end of 2019, and the plan was to write it in 2020. And of course, 20, 20 ended up throwing everybody a curve ball. So. And then I was getting towards the end of this year, I got to October and I was like, nah, man, it’s a real shame. And Sharon Boyd, who is a CX practitioner in England, mentioned how she was getting ready to do another one.

And I was like, you only just did a book and you’ve got another one. And I just messaged her. I said, how do you do this? Like, where do you get the energy from? And that little conversation. Gave me the energy to start writing the book. Basically, she said, I’ll be your accounted buddy. And I will just check in on you every few days.

And you did the same to me, and it’s amazing how that one little behavioral nudge made all the difference. And within a month, the book was written and the point of the book was. In the CX world. I see a lot of books, all about the customer. So there’s like journey mapping, and then there’s, customer culture, all these kinds of customer books, but I’m like, well, we’re in customer experience.

And like, shouldn’t the way that experiences happen. Like the science behind them. Shouldn’t that be part of the conversation as well? I don’t really see anyone talking about it. The closest I’ve seen is like Colin shore goes into that world a little bit and here. Talk to me about behavioral science too, but I’ve never seen a book just on that.

So I thought, well, what I’ll do is I’ll, I’ll write a book about that. But then what was interesting is I had picked up this idea of proteomes from the, from the world of chess, which is a, it’s a Russian term for. Pam that appears in a chest position, but it also has an associated maneuver. So if you see it, then how to exploit it, to make the situation better.

And I thought, I might be able to combine those two ideas and I can basically lay out the psychological side of CX and then I can actually show patterns where things go wrong. And not only can I just show them, but I can give you an actual explanation for why this infuriates people, why this drives people away.

And it does take, it takes. Paul, because rather than being very fluffy and happy and like most of the X books, it takes the dock side approach.

[00:08:40] Bill Staikos: So I want to get into the pre-owned in a second, but just really quickly, if we just stay on the book, like. What challenges, like I’m always curious.

Cause I’ve, I mean, I’ve had aspirations of writing a book, but I’m like, you’re crazy. Like, I’ve, I’ve got enough going on in my life right now that I just don’t have time. Right. But, and plus it seems like really hard and like, I’m just like, not going to go there yet, but like what challenges did you experience writing this one?

I mean, you wrote it in a month, so maybe not that many. And it sounds like you had, Sharon kind of helping you through the process or maybe a better question. What learning. Or learnings that you get, learn about yourself maybe, or just even CX as a discipline as you were writing this book.

[00:09:21] Michael Bartlett: But I was forced to do a lot of research for the book.

I already knew the general ideas cause I’d seen them elsewhere and I was just combining ideas from different fields. But then when you have to structure them and then put them into coherent arguments, that’s way, I think I learned a lot of things that I’d not seen before. There was one book that I’d read.

Imagine reading this book and the cover of the book is a hand turning the book. And it’s all about the power of imagination visualization. And the author had found a really interesting idea called the equity scale and he explained how fairness works. I’d never seen anything like that before. And I realized when I was writing the book, I might actually be able to incorporate that when I talk about when, because the idea is when you look at a business.

relationship with a customer. There’s always a balance to it. In fact, there’s balance in everything we do. And the concept was that the idea of fairness seems to be tied to our innate sense of physical balance. And so when you, when a relationship becomes unbalanced, it becomes frustrating, but you also, as a customer, you have this urge to right the balance in the same way that if somebody has a knee injury that will throw off their hip a little bit, that will throw off, literally throws off the whole way that the human body staff.

your eyes always want to be balanced, so they will make the rest of your body compensate for that. And that’s why you can end up with long-term injuries. So that was really novel to me. And I found that, and then I was able to incorporate that. And as I just kept reading different books, as part of my research, I realized there were other little ideas that I had not considered really, and I needed to bring those in and, and share those with the audience.

[00:10:54] Michael Bartlett: So, so that was good. And then. The other thing is whenever you undertake anything like this, you will always learn something about the mechanics of it. So when I wrote my first book, I didn’t know anything about publishing on Amazon, but I had to learn it and things have evolved a little bit since I wrote my first book in 2017.

So this time round, now I’m looking at, how do I, structure the word document so that I can have sections and this cause the first document. One of the criticisms of my first book, what, apart from the fact that everyone said it was too small, it was 60 something pages was, there were a lot of negative reviews about the, just the visual.

Everyone said, well, this looks literally, it looks like a word document that was just pasted into which it was, so I thought, okay, this time I’ll, I’ll, I’ll put a bit more effort into trying to make it a little bit more beautiful. Look a little bit more standardized. So there’s a lot of effort that goes into that.

So I was watching a lot of YouTube videos on how to structure books and format books. And I learned a lot of stuff about Microsoft word I didn’t even know existed. So that was really helpful as well. And that’s why I’m interested doing these projects is always a good experience because you learn so much.

I came,

[00:11:59] Bill Staikos: I’m still kind of going back to, like, I don’t understand how you did all this. Well, I guess you do, you wrote the book in a month, but if you think about the research process, that discovery putting ideas together, how long did that take him

[00:12:10] Michael Bartlett: to him? Well, that’s been an ongoing thing, but I would say that for this book it started probably, and 2019, I would say it started at the beginning of 2019.

I know because some of the books that I have, that I reference, Like this one here, this book, let me pull it out my shelf so I can show everybody. So this book, I think I read it in March, 2019. I think I took a week off work so I could read it along with some other books. And then that course, that information just gets archived away.

But you remember certain elements of it, like in this book off the top of my head, I remember one of the things that I learned from it was the way that we process images and if I could find it and show you. Yeah. And we process the. Hand side of an image, much more better than we do the right hand side.

So they show two faces with everything flipped. And I say, which one do you prefer? And obviously you’re seeing this on a flipped webcam, but just little things like that. I make, I make the note of it and I’ll kind it. And then I move on to the next book. 2019 is also when I got really into behavioral science.

So I started reading a lot of really interesting behavioral science books. And I want to show these to you because I think this is all really relevant to your question, but, so for example, one really interesting book. I’ve got it here is, Think tank. So this book is a collection of articles. Let me show for your show that one there and a collection of articles on human experience.

So just the way that we perceive things, the way we remember things. And, this is the 40 neuroscientist explore the biological roots of human experience. So there was a really good learning from this book, which was. what’s the key to happiness in life. And so they look at the perception system and how we don’t have an absolute idea of like black and white, like you’d go into a dark room and everything will adjust.

So they say, great. We grade on a scale. And so they said, ironically, the secret to happiness might actually be unhappiness because at least then you’ve got something to juxtapose it against to actually know when you’re happy. Whereas if you’re someone that leads like the best life ever and nothing ever goes wrong.

From your perspective to other people, they might think that’s great from your perspective. So there’s just loads of really cool things or found. And it was mainly just a lot of reading through 2019 and 2020. That really got me to the point where I was like, okay, I think I’ve got enough of this now. Now I need to give this out to the world in a condensed format.

So everybody else can enjoy.

[00:14:33] Bill Staikos: Really interesting. So by the way, think back think tech was the second book. The first book you referenced, just for folks who are not going to watch the YouTube of this, was neuro design. so folks check it out. If, if you haven’t read it already, let’s take it back to the pre-owned.

Cause I just think that. What an interesting parallel to what we go through as consumers or buyers on, on a regular basis. one of the companies, like Singapore airlines, I’ve noticed it does a great job of understanding the top 10 things that will go wrong. And the customer’s experiences, according to their research and insights and feedback from customers, plus the 10 things that you should be doing for our customers.

Step-by-step. Right. So, and you go to your book, like, this happens, like, think about X, right? It’s not just, you’re not just putting in the book. Like here’s what this premium is. And here’s what it means. Like you’re actually giving guidance to the reader as well about here’s what you can potentially do about it, which I really love and just got, got the juices flowing.

Why do you think that companies maybe have a hard time around. Outside of understanding what the issue is, or maybe what that pre-owned is for their organization. Yeah. Let’s use the kind of the chest reference. Why do you think that they don’t think of what the next move is or the next right move is for the customer in

[00:15:46] Michael Bartlett: that context?

So I think it boils down to, it’s just a lot of noise and I don’t mean that disrespectfully to the customer. I just mean there’s a lot of noise. And how do you pull out something from that noise? So. And 20, what year was it? 20 16, 20 17. I read a really interesting books. Actually. My favorite business book is called predictable success.

What I really liked about the book is at the beginning, he gives three scenarios. They also give three scenarios of these are people that came to me for help, and he sits down with them and he says, how can I help you? And they say, oh my goodness, this is going on. And then this happened and you read it all.

And it’s just like this long chain of four of, of noise. Like. Grab on to, so I can understand this and put it into a framework or put it into a foreign and fix it. And both, they all just seem very noisy. Then he lays out his, his, predictable success framework. And then once you’ve learned it at the very end, he says, now let’s go back to those three and see if they make a little bit more sense than immediately.

You’re like, oh yeah. I can immediately see what’s going on here. And their business is stuck in this phase. Predictable success is really interesting because it talks about the life cycle of a business. So basically you start off with normally a visionary who’s the bigger ideas person and an operator who is the person that likes to just get stuff done.

And of course the, the classic example of that pairing comes from from Apple’s founders. And then what happens is the business starts to grow and everything goes really well. And then they start to grow beyond their means. And he said, that’s what you need to bring the third personality type in, which is the.

Called the processor. You need to be what you need to be careful of those characters because they can become bureaucrats if they go too far, but they bring stability. They bring process to the situation and that stabilizes the organization area. It takes it from what is known as whitewater and it stabilizes a predictable success.

The problem is, if you then get too many processes in the organization, you then round the curve and you end up in something called treadmill where there’s just red tape everywhere. Once he laid that framework out, I was like, okay, now it just business consulting in general seems so much easier. His book isn’t based on science though.

He did say, look, I’ll be upfront with you in the beginning of this book. It’s not based on science. It’s based on my observations as a consultant for decades, but what’s really interesting. He’s I see his ideas reflected in other places. I see his ideas reflected in what’s it called the EOS sphere where they talk about the different roles in EOS and also.

In the culture world, we have the competing values framework, and I noticed that his three personality types slot very nicely into three of the full grids in all sectors of the grid in the competing values framework. So I think that stuff makes it really helps, makes a lot of difference. So I did the same thing for chess.

I looked at chess and I thought, well, the primes are really useful. And if I’ve got that book with me now, I have a particular book where I first learned about. Preamps it’s somewhere here. It’s called, was by an author called Andy Santas. And I want to see if I’ve got it. So I’d love to be able to show it to you.

listeners, I’m going to start my, if I’ve got it handy right now, it’s somewhere in this shelf buried somewhere. but he lists, he lists, I have layers of books on my shelf. That’s only way I can see it. but basically he, he lists out the 25 most. Common pre-owned that you should know. And that I read this book in 2014 and that chapter essentially informed the idea of the book.

[00:19:14] Michael Bartlett: He’s like, okay, look, this is probably an unlimited number of these three homes in the CX world, but one of the most common ones. So I went and I did some research and I went out there and looked to all the different articles that people, customer complaints, all that kind of stuff. And I noticed they tend to fall into a collection of, I think it was like maybe 17 or 18.

There’s other little ones here and there, but. These are the main ones. And I thought, well, what? There’s got to be underlying issues that cause these kinds of things to happen. And so using something called the iceberg model from a systems thinking toolkit for explained to the, to the, reader in the book, I basically say, look, here’s how you can go about diagnosing them.

But from my experience, These are the reasons why these things tend to happen. And so I want to give that to you because now if you’re in a CX role, if you’re in any part of the business and you see these things happen over and over again, now you’ve got something that you can go to that catalogs there.

It’s almost like when you, when you name your enemy, okay, I’ve named you now. I know what you are. I’m not just an ill person. Now I know the specific disease. Now I can look it up and go off to this specific treatment plan. That kind of thing. Very

[00:20:20] Bill Staikos: cool. Are there premiums in your, and the research that you did, Michael, are there premiums that kept on maybe kind of just really surfaced to the top?

Always? Like what did like the one or two premiums you think that industry is maybe most

[00:20:34] Michael Bartlett: guilty? Yeah. So the one I see the most is called confusion. And, the way to deal with that is to have a good understanding of both information architecture and to understand, choice architecture. I think those two fields are very important, but essentially like my wife runs into it so many times, she was trying to do an online order from Hy-Vee the other day and think just kept disappearing from a car.

Then she was on Menards and couldn’t select her own local story, kept changing it off the sheets select today and just confusing the users and you confuse them enough and they’ll drop out and go to another competitor. And maybe it’s because most of our interactions are well, not most, but let’s say a large chunk of our interactions.

And in increasingly. Large chunk of our interactions are digital. Now, maybe that’s why I can feed and keep surfacing to the top so much. But even with like, non-digital interactions, I see that thing popping up all the time. I did a pickup recently. I think I’ve mentioned this in the book, a pickup from my local grocery store and they have these instructions when you get this.

Either you phoned this number up or you text this number and then we’ll be right out. And I found out their process is broken and the text messages don’t seem to do anything. So you have to eventually phoned them up. And I’ve learned this through eight or nine times doing this, but someone who’s brand new, who’s never done this before my texts.

They’re going to sit there for a while and then they’re going to be completely confused. It also has another pattern, which I call the overly long wait, but that really. everybody wants to know me when they happen consistently, but yeah, it’s just, I don’t know. I see this stuff. I still can’t believe that this is happening in this day and age.

So that’s kind of why I wrote the book. I was like, someone’s got to do something about this. And maybe, maybe if we just start cataloging these things and showing how easy they are to fix, maybe businesses will start taking no of their

[00:22:19] Bill Staikos: naming the villain. I love that. I do, I do when I was reading the book and I got to confusion in particular, Michael, my head went directly to.

Pandemic, everybody trying to figure out what is the right online solution for our company, digital, digital, digital, and just created stuff without really the customer in mind, or even going out to them to test cause you couldn’t. And in many cases, which created an enormous amount of technical debt out there in the marketplace, and that’s where my head went first and just like.

Those those organizations that were digital first or just more savvy or had their resources clearly came through, more unscathed than others, through, through the pandemic. But I, I wonder if that confusion and that heightened level of confusion from a digital perspective is a result of the pandemic and this rush to create a digital solution, damage the customer in some level.

[00:23:16] Michael Bartlett: For sure.

[00:23:17] Bill Staikos: So I want to talk if there’s one concept that you brought. Up in there, which I personally have not heard before. And I just found it fascinating. I was like, I’m going to steal this from Michael and use it myself if that’s okay. I’m happy to, to, to, to attribute it to you. Is this concept of social friction versus goal friction, the way you described it, there was like this, this unbelievable, beautiful simplicity to it, but I’d love for you to describe it for our listeners and the distinctions and.

And maybe even the context of customer or employee

[00:23:49] Michael Bartlett: experience. When I started the psychology section of the book, I listed out what makes something a bad experience. And I essentially had to fundamentally go down to what are our core human needs, because whenever one of those gets infringed upon that, It’s a bad sign and that normally will, will cause the bad experience.

And there’s a few other things that go in there as well that are in the book. Like for example, the, the idea of stasis from, or body budgeting, which Lisa Feldman Barrett introduced. So that’s credit to her. She’s the one who, who kind of like made that such a concept. That’s easy to understand for business people layering out.

I wanted this to be something that’s actionable, right. Consultants to have to walk around with all of these needs in their head and then say, well, how does exploration effect with customer experience or how to status? I need to make it even simpler than that. And so to make it actionable, I was able to.

Basically take the concept of a bad customer experience and compose it into two distinct parts. One of which is dull friction. And one of which is social friction. Now, most people probably know golf ration. In fact, Roger Dooley publicized it with his book friction. So that’s a pretty well-known concept.

In fact, if you say friction to anybody in CX, that’s what they often think of, but it’s only one half of the, of the puzzle. The other half is social friction. So that could be the, Everything that you do in your transaction is done exactly to the speed that you expect it. So there’s no problems with efficiency nothing’s getting in your way, but someone talks down to you almost made it.

It makes a nice, a nasty little remark or something like that. And that hurts you. And there’s biological reasons why it hurts you, which is maybe a separate discussion, but ultimately they’re attacking your status when they do that to you. When you have any kind of interaction with anybody. There’s kind of three ways that you interact with them, you interact with them either.

Is there like a mentor or a dominance to you? They’re an equal to you or they’re the opposite? They’re like,you’re mentoring them. You’re dominant to them. So there’s certain, and this goes for software as well. So there could be a piece of software you’re using where you are terrified and you don’t know what to do, but maybe turbo tax is a really good example.

So the tone that you want TurboTax to take with you is more. A mentor is going to guide you through it, that kind of stuff. But like I was driving one of these new cars the other day. I had to take my dog up to the vet, funnily enough, the same, the same vet I mentioned in the, in the book as well. And this car decided that it knew more about my driving than I did.

And it, I think it was just bad idea. And there were times where I drove across the road where it would take control of the steering wheel. It would jerk the car and it stress considerably citizen adrenaline, and shot up you when it happens the first few times. And, and then I got this really patronizing message on the dashboard about stay in your lane, exclamation mark.

And it really annoyed me. And it’s because of. I don’t need my car to be dominant. I’m driving the car, your tool, you do what I need you to do. And, and so that kind of, that made a status attack on me when it did it, even though it was only a piece of technology, it wasn’t just golf, friction, it was social friction as well.

So that’s why those two concepts are very important. And I explained them in the book in detail, but basically, you need to know when you’re delivering customer experiences. How the customers expect to be spoken to and what the nature of the relationship is, are they, are they paying you to do something and you just do it?

You’re like almost like a servant, or are they paying for you to be like a VAR mentor on a dominant force and they’re scared and they’re uncertain and they need your help. So that’s where those two concepts come into play.

[00:27:23] Bill Staikos: Like I said, beautifully simple well-put and. anyway, obviously, part of the reason why I wanted you on the show is I’m really wanna encourage readers to buy your book when it’s out.

You had another one in there, a principle that I really loved the handicap principle. So you described it as sort of an evolutionary idea of costly signaling. So I think you, your example was sort of like a bank, two banks on each side of the street. One bank has invested heavily in. What it looks like from the outside, probably like big columns, the whole thing, what you might expect from a traditional bank.

The other was like a former Peter shoppers. I think the example that you use or something like that. So it, which I thought was really, really funny, but then I was like, thinking like, is this where marketing steps in and influences the experience or the perceived experience of, of you as a consumer?

And do you have any other examples of where you might even see? So a second question and follow-up is like, Where do you see signaling even maybe in a digital PR from a digital perspective today, most prevalent.

[00:28:21] Michael Bartlett: So a good example. I can’t remember who I’m borrowing this from. I heard someone say it might have even been in another one of the books I read, but a good example is let’s say that something goes wrong in your house.

Like, something goes wrong with the lighting in your garage or something, or fuse goes out and it’s just something you don’t know how to fix. And you call an electrician. And the electrician comes in and he goes in and he does a few little things. And then, five minutes later, he goes easy. No problem whatsoever.

$200. And you’re like, oh, but if he’s there for an hour tinkering around and then he comes out and he says $200. You feel that he’s because he’s put so much effort in that it must be worth more money. And so the seat, I’m obviously not advising anybody to, to do that and like just, Connor customer.

But I am trying to explain essentially where that comes from, which is if somebody puts a lot of effort into something, which is of course at their own expense, then they’re normally signaling. That they’re letting that they’ve put that effort in it’s cost them something. So therefore, if you’re reimbursing them, then you’re obviously going to pay them more than if they didn’t put very much effort.

It’s a shame because. I would expect if someone could come in and fix something in five minutes, you people would be over the moon, but not everyone recognizes all of the years of training and all of the experiences that persons had to make them good enough to fix something in a few minutes. And you can use that in the digital perspective as well.

So here’s a good example. I go to a website and I want to, I want to find like maybe some website that has, we’ve got some AI engine and we could find deals that nobody else can find. And they say type in all the things that you want and we’ll bring it back to you and you say, go and it spins.

And then the results come back to meeting. Okay, well, what if it span for about five or six seconds and then the results came back, you think, wow, I must’ve been really chucking through some big data there and do some real analysis. These people are the real deal. So it’s just a psychological thing. Where when, when someone or something expends a lot of effort, you associate that typically.

Quality.

[00:30:24] Bill Staikos: Interesting. I’m just kinda thinking about how much, I mean, I, I put a lot of effort into this show. I’m hoping that that sticks out to people I’m dealing. I think that’s a quality show now. Hey, I’ve got two final questions for you. Michael, this has been really interesting. I’m like, well, one before we get to.

When’s the book coming out. Let’s talk about that really quickly. Like when can people start to see it on, on Amazon or on, on digital shelves or even in a real shelf, perhaps?

[00:30:46] Michael Bartlett: So, the book is scheduled for release in the last week of February. I’ll do an announcement on LinkedIn the week that it comes out and I’ll make sure that everybody is aware of it.

And I’m going to try and get this one out on paperback and Kindle. I didn’t put my last one on Kindle. What I’m going to try and get this one on Kendall for people.

[00:31:04] Bill Staikos: Cool. Well, I will look forward to it as well. So my final two questions there is somewhat related in a sense, but I’m always curious about like where, one, who do you look up?

and maybe that’s in the CX space or whatever, but like who do you look up to? And then number two is where do you go for inspiration?

[00:31:24] Michael Bartlett: So people will look up to right now, people who I could spend just, hours watching their content. Cause I love them so much. Is this there’s a few people. I love rural reseller.

Rory Sutherland is, an expert in behavioral science. And if you just type his name into YouTube and you start watching one of his videos, he’ll blow your mind. But I still remember fondly when he explained that there’s a particular color. I can’t remember which one it was. It might be violet it’s it’s it looks like purple.

And he said that color does not exist. And so when you see it, it’s because your brain is creating that color because of a dysfunction in the way that your eyes work. And I are still remember being blown off. No, that can’t be true. And I went in my research as well. Apparently it’s true. And Rory is full of these really cool little insights about the human mind.

He’s just a really, really interesting guy, a flight fuel, if no one’s ever heard of him. And you imagined. Eloquent like English professor that speaks in that quintessential posh English voice. And it’s full of all of these quotes and anecdotes that span all of these different disciplines and yes, we’ll resell and has all of that information is a fascinating.

I’ve got onto looking at Dave Snowden’s work recently. He’s the guy I mentioned earlier on does a lot of work in complexity theory and the found some of his ideas really, really fascinating, in terms of the new world that we’re in now, where things are changing and exponential rate, and we’re trying to keep up to date.

So I think he’s really into. Yeah, there’s another guy I spoke to him briefly and I’m wanting, I actually want to interview him. I don’t have a podcast, but I’d like to do a YouTube video with him. If your listeners go and go to Amazon prime and type in the word, Jacob J a C O B. There’s a documentary about this guy.

And he is a, I believe he’s a published author. He’s a one, some serious prizes as well for his work. He’s a trained lawyer. he’s a trained ER nurse and can treat people in the ER and there’s a bunch of other things he does as well. He’s like, he he’s like. The perfect fusion of a generalist and a specialist is a specialist to all these different things.

And the documentary is really interesting because you get to like see his perspectives on life and all of the different things. And I always I’m impressed by people that can draw from multiple different angles and pull those ideas together. Cause I’ll often see things the rest of us won’t and he has a really interesting theory about.

And it doesn’t just apply to books like you and I would write like fiction books as well. He talks about the importance of the first line, the first sentence in a book. And so I did some research into what he said, and I found a really good example. So imagine that you’ll read, you’ve picked up a book and whether you want to buy it or not.

And you read the first line of the book and the first line says, what would you pack? If you had two hours to leave your husband? And I thought that was brilliant because it immediately kind of tells you a lot about what the book’s going to be about, but it poses such an interesting question. There’s a, there’s a ticking clock in there, which from my film directing world, I always remember the mid point of a film is a good idea to start a ticking clock.

Cause it pushes. Protectiveness forwards as well. So some of his ideas are just that they really resonated with me. So I would recommend finding that documentary and watching it Jacob. And he’s a very inspirational guy. And then where do I go for inspiration? I mean, YouTube, YouTube, mainly. There’s lots of really interesting people out there on YouTube.

Found him a guy named Dave Sinclair recently claims to have been able to find ways to reverse biological aging. They’ve discovered a new compound AKG, I think it was called and that changed the biological age in mice. So there’s just some really fascinating things out there and fascinating people out there.

And if people are doing their best to try. Sense of them. And I want to watch them even more because they’ve probably got something very interesting to say. It may not be true, but I want to see both sides of a discussion. So I find, I might have to sometimes go to rumble, but predominantly YouTube, I find reading.

[00:35:21] Bill Staikos: Yeah. Yeah. There’s some great stuff from Kurtzweil. I don’t know if you’re familiar with Ray Kurzweil in terms of, of like the longevity scene, but oh, wow.

[00:35:28] Michael Bartlett: No, I’ve not heard of him.

[00:35:31] Bill Staikos: Ray Kurzweil is, is a futurist. And like, I think he is the most. And his predictions out of anybody else. He’s got the most accurate predictions that, of any futurist ever in the history of futurist.

Wow. Like stuff that he was talking about 40 years ago, or 30 years ago is literally like within five years around now coming to fruition, like, and in terms of like the longevity scene, which he’s a really big, he talks a lot about longevity. Now he’s literally said, like probably folks like you or my age, depending on our wealth level, we may have the opportunity to live with.

Our children without a doubt will have an opportunity to live forever, no matter what, no matter wealth level. Right. So really fascinating stuff. but check them out if, if you’ve never heard

[00:36:14] Michael Bartlett: of that. great recommendation,

[00:36:17] Bill Staikos: Michael. It’s great to have you on the show. I’m so happy. We had an opportunity to meet and thank you for writing this book.

It’s really interesting. And I’m excited to do a, to check it out, even deeper when it comes out in, in about a month.

[00:36:29] Michael Bartlett: Awesome. I’m glad you enjoyed it. Were there any particular things in it that you, you liked the best?

for me, I think it was the concept of premiums, for sure, because I’ve started now thinking about not only, I’m starting to recognize them in my own daily routine.

[00:36:43] Bill Staikos: And not just from an experiential perspective, but there are, if you actually look hard, there are problems everywhere. And so like, and how do I, as a human being, how do I react to those? And I’ve just like, do I have biases and unconscious biases? And I’m reacting to different proteomes that exist out there in the world.

And how do I manage that? And be more just intentional. My actions. So that’s one and number two is the social and goal, friction, which I really just love that concept. Like I said, I will attribute it to you for sure. But, I’m going to be using it with our own calls.

[00:37:19] Michael Bartlett: Awesome. I have a funny story for you just to close as well on.

So I do a lot of work with dogs and dog rescue. We brought this, this one dog in she, my wife. So I was actually at Messiah. I was at the Medallia conference in July. I don’t remember which year it was 20, 20 18 or 2019. I was, I think it was 2018. I was at the Medallia conference in San Diego and I get a text message from my wife and she says, Look, I know we talked, we said no more dogs, but this dog appeared on my Pinterest and I don’t even look for dogs on Pinterest.

She’s in a kill shelter and I got to get her out. She’s in Georgia. So I talked to some of my contacts and we got around here and we fostered her for a little while. Problem was she wasn’t aggressive in the sense that if she saw a dog across the road, you’d want to go get them. But if a dog came towards her, she would be willing to go to the death to defend herself.

She was scared of. And her strategy was oldest. Just kill him. So we had this very dangerous dog in our house. And I had read, I don’t know if I’ve got this one on my shelf now, but called yeah, here it is. Let me pull this down for you because I think this is another great book and this is where someone might theories come from.

This is where I learned about the seeking system. So this is a book called alive at work by Daniel. And, I had learned that there is a tension between exploration and wanting to be safe. And we see it through archeological records as well. So tribes will bleak seasons. We’ll hunker down and they’ll just live off of their resources.

But in plentiful seasons, they can expend that extra energy to go out and search new areas, to find new things, because you have to, if you just keep living off the resources you’ve got without trying to find new ones. Your parish in the long run. You, that’s not how to play the long game you have to explore.

This is also by the way, a technique that people should think about an innovation. So you should have the majority of your projects and the business should be at least as close to shore things as possible, but you should always have some. The are just crazy because probably most of them will fail, but one of them might be that one.

And that goes out and finds a food source that no one’s thought about. So I thought about this tension and I said, so what I did is I brought, I had another guy worked with me and we brought this dog name was diva. Funnily enough, we brought diva out. And soon as she saw my dogs, he was teased and everything.

So we kept them at a safe distance and we walked them and Mack, my dog is here with me right now. She walked a little infant. And after a wall divas sense of safety started to take over and then her sense of exploration started to kick in and she wanted to go a little bit close to me, but at her own pace though, she got a little bit closer, a little bit.

Finally, we have the two of them walking side by side, and Dave reishi walks up to my dog, Mac and Alexa face. Now it’s still not a situation where you want to have them together on supervised, but that was one of the things that we did over time. And it helped me realize. It’s called the seeking system, but all of these components, they’re real.

They’re not just theory because I actually thought, well, I’ll try and apply the theory in real world and see if it happens. And it absolutely did. So I know that we can apply this framework to customers. We can apply it to people in general. It’s very, it’s really fascinating. Very

[00:40:24] Bill Staikos: cool. Hey, this, this conversation has been.

Really thought provoking V I mean, I’m so glad we had an opportunity to connect and I can’t wait to follow the work that you’re doing, and I really would recommend all listeners if they’re not familiar with you to check out the stuff that you’re putting out there and certainly to buy the book. Michael, thanks so much for coming on the show.

It’s been great having you here and what a great conversation

[00:40:45] Michael Bartlett: wholesome. Yeah.

[00:40:49] Bill Staikos: Absolutely. All right, everybody. Great show for you this week. Thanks so much for the gift of your time, Michael we’re out.

[00:40:55] Michael Bartlett: Thanks for listening to be customer led with bill staikos. We are grateful to our audience for the gift of their time. Be sure to visit us@becustomerled.com for more episodes. Leave us feedback on how we’re doing or tell us what you want to hear more about until next time we’re at.