The Failure Gap | A Conversation With Miles Kailburn, CEO of OTM

In this conversation, Miles Kailburn, CEO of OTM, shares his leadership journey, emphasizing the importance of adaptability, service design, and fostering a culture of trust and curiosity within his team. He discusses the challenges of moving from agreement to alignment, the significance of micro-actions in maintaining that alignment, and the role of open communication in building trust. Miles highlights the need for leaders to stay curious and engage their teams in meaningful discussions to drive innovation and growth.

Takeaways

• Answering the call of leadership is a worthwhile journey, even if you don't expect it.
• Pay attention to how micro actions lead to misalignment over time.
• Leaders need to commit to open communication and curiosity to build trust.
• Leaders need to be aware of how ego can hinder effectiveness.
• Persistence is key in overcoming challenges and driving alignment over time.

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If you would like to connect with Miles outside of this episode, connect with him on LinkedIn here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mileskailburn/
or learn more about OTM's marketing agency services here: https://meetotm.com/

Creators & Guests

Host

Julie Williamson, PhD

Julie Williamson, PhD is the CEO and a Managing Partner at Karrikins Group, a Denver-based, global-serving business consultancy. Author, Keynote Speaker, and Host of The Failure Gap Podcast, Julie is a leading voice in how alignment can transform leaders and organizations.

Guest

Miles Kailburn

Miles is the Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder of OTM. With a strong background in IT and passion for marketing technology, Miles translates the fancy tech jargon so that the entire team can stay ahead of the curve. Aside from overseeing all nerdy things, Miles enjoys browsing Amazon for the latest gadgets, riding motorcycles, playing guitar and learning new things.

What is The Failure Gap ?

The Failure Gap podcast is hosted by Julie Williamson, Ph.D., the CEO and a Managing Partner at Karrikins Group, a Denver-based, global-serving business consultancy. Julie delves into the critical space between agreement and alignment - where even the best ideas falter without decisive action. Through candid conversations with a diverse mix of leaders, this podcast explores both the successes and failures that shape the journey of leadership. Featuring visionary leaders from companies of all sizes, from billion-dollar giants to mid-market innovators, to scrappy start-ups, The Failure Gap uncovers the real-life challenges of transforming ideas into impactful outcomes. Tune in to learn how top leaders bridge the gap and drive meaningful progress in their organizations.

Julie Williamson (00:00)
Hello and welcome to the Failure Gap where we talk with leaders about navigating the space between agreement and alignment. We love talking with interesting people and today we're joined by Miles Kailburn the CEO and founder of OTM. OTM is an award-winning creative agency with a flair for business. Miles has a strong background in IT and a passion for marketing technology. He translates all the fancy tech jargon so that the team can stay ahead of the curve.

In addition to overseeing all the nerdy things, Miles has a passion for browsing Amazon for the latest gadgets, motorcycle riding, playing the guitar, and learning new things. Miles, welcome to the Failure Gap. Thank you so much for having me, Julie. It's great to see you. Yeah. You know, as someone who loves learning new things, you're perfect for the Failure Gap conversation. But before we dive into that, why don't you give our listeners a little bit of background on you and your leadership journey, some of the twists and turns

that brought you into being the CEO of OTM? Would love to. So I think one word would be accidental. My wife and I moved from New York 20 some odd years ago to Colorado. And a few years into that, we made the transition to start our own company. And the rest just kind of steamrolled from there. But man, we've had to figure it out along the way and a lot of twists and turns.

you know, we started out initially with Val leading the company, you know, the speaking of, we're talking about a one 80 here. she, she led the company and I was kind of the operations person and it was probably 13 years ago. We read a book having no idea what we were doing, running a business. you know, that book was Traction us from Gino Wickman and our, our leadership team read the book over the weekend and.

unbeknownst to them, they both, the rest of the people on the leadership team wrote an email in and said, hey, you're in the wrong spots. You guys need to shift. And we got two of those emails on Monday morning and Monday afternoon, we made that shift. I moved from operations to leading the company as CEO and visionary and Bell moved to an operations and integrator role. So, you know, we've had to figure it out a little day by day, but

perseverance and persistence has always paid off. You know, I love that story of how you came into this role because it speaks really to that fact that you can agree that something is a good idea. Like you could have spent a lot of time being like, yeah, we should be in different roles and not making it happen. We see that happen with clients all the time, but you and Val, it sounds like just took the bull by the horns and made the change and you've been thriving ever since. Yeah. You know, I don't think any of us had

any egos in it. You know, we had two other people in the leadership team, one of which is still here with us 12, 13 years later. And it was interesting just how matter of fact that came across. You're in the wrong roles change. And Val and I kind of looked at the paper and the other is nice two page emails and you got to the end of both of them. They both made the same points. You're like, yep, sounds good.

I'll go figure out the other side and you'll go figure out this side. And it's been a huge play to our strengths, know, 13 years later, I could imagine doing it the other way after figuring out what makes those roles tick, what works in my role. It was absolutely the right thing. just to have two team members make that recommendation and have the confidence to make that recommendation to your boss that

you're my boss, you should not be my boss, the other person should be my boss. And I have the psychological safety to tell you that. Yeah, it speaks a lot to the environment that you and Val built there. And you also brought up something that often winds people up in the failure gap, which is ego and being able to put the ego aside and say, let's listen to what we're hearing and let's respond to it. Yeah, that, you know, fast forward a decade later, we've, we've tried to keep that

in front of us, knowing that businesses evolve, we've kept expanding and growing during that timeframe. you know, always remembering back to that, whatever day in September it may have been that, you know, none of us had the ego and it was all about the company. you know, we've talked in the past about different leadership approaches around, do we run a co-CEO approach? Do we run more as a leadership group and different things like that?

really just trying to take that ego out of it and maintain, know, if it's best for the company, it's best for us. Yeah. Such a beautiful orientation to have towards growing a company together and also having your own strengths that you can bring into the equation. absolutely. Well, hey, Miles, I am interested, and we'll get back to the professional questions in just a minute, but I'm also interested for you. You love learning new things. What's an example of something that you've tried to learn?

and succeeded at and maybe something also that you've tried to learn and not succeeded at and how would you compare those? Well, you know, we can jump off on the what have I tried to learn and found that and that's playing the guitar. So that is something flat out I am not good at, but you know, we'll jump into more relevant things here. So, you know, as a visionary, I spent a lot of my time looking one to three years down the road and

looking at different industries and different ways that we can bring in tools and different ways to create value for our clients. And so one of the elements we've spent probably the last three years on would be service design. And that's stemmed out of some customer journey work that we started doing close to eight years ago. So we do a lot of customer journey work with our customers.

And one of those pieces, you know, as you kind of learn more and dig deeper into customer journey work, you you can get into service design, which is all around how do we create and design services? You know, we can, there's an experience there, there's a journey. How can we be more intentional about that? And, you know, that just plays to all of my strengths and passions and curiosity. And so, you know, I was just head over heels in that stuff. you know, we spent a while building up the customer journey sections.

deliverables and departments. Then we got into service design and started to look at that more internally and thinking about how do we actually assemble our services? How do we actually design these intentionally? I would say we stumbled or I stumbled on that significantly. That's where I think there's for us, it's a blurred line between failure and success because I think all of our success stories were failures at some point in the process.

you know, for us, it's about the persistence and perseverance to get through that. You we have a lot of trust and faith that this is something we need to figure out. But the service design was interesting because, you know, I championed that for probably about a year. And, you know, as a CEO, it's a little tough to champion that. For someone who brings a lot of ideas and new options and thoughts to the world, it did...

fall into the jokingly and also very literally, our team has a miles folder in their inbox. And they peruse that once a week and go through all the thoughts and ideas and the services I got stuck in there. And so we ended up staffing it with a team member who has a product design background. And so making that shift from what's this little thing that I'm tinkering with and how could we apply it to our world and how do we actually

objectively defined value creation, both internally and externally. That's pretty far down in that road. so we actually, well, I should say I had enough trust and confidence from our other leadership team members that they didn't see the vision for it yet. And they're like, who is this? What are they going to do? How is this going to impact me? And we just kept having those conversations around, I don't know yet.

but I think we could solve problems like this. we're already, you're solving these problems, I'm solving these problems. What if we actually brought somebody that just focused on these things? And so that person has been on with us for two years and it's just been absolutely remarkable what it's been like to have somebody actually overseeing how we actually structure and deliver our services. And now everybody's on board. It's just factored into our DNA, but you know.

starting out at the beginning, it was bumpy. And there was a lot of faith from our leadership given to me to staff it with a full-time person and explore that and change responsibilities of our department managers and things like that. Yeah, know, at Karrikins Group, sometimes we say action precedes clarity. You have to just take some steps and then you get clear over time. And it sounds like that's what you were able to do.

because you had that trust and confidence from your colleagues. Yep. Yeah. The clarity part is the action for me is always the first piece. It's the clarity that I have to focus on very intentionally down the road. Yeah. And I think that often it's easy to stay stuck in agreement that something's a good idea. Like, it would be a good idea to be more intentional about our service delivery. I hope somebody does that.

Yeah, that's the agreement space right and and then when you start to get more diligent around it It does also create constraints for some of your delivery people now They have to meet that new standard and that can be really uncomfortable for people So the clarity of what is what is it that we're trying to create in terms of outcomes? Then backs into the clarity of what does that mean? We actually do differently Well, and I'm you know going through that whole process. I've always looked at

You guys use a phrase agreement and alignment. And I absolutely had agreement. Everyone agreed on it. But then the alignment started to waver. You introduce friction into some of these processes by design. People still knew the old ways of getting around it and things like that. And really, what we started to observe is what I would consider the micro actions.

I'm sure there's a better term for it, but those small little almost subconscious decisions that you make every day that, you know, they don't quite align with what we're doing here. And those started to compound through that process. And we really had to keep an eye on that. You know, is it simply a lack of understanding? it, did we miss something in the design process? know, you know, honestly respecting why they were trying to do that.

so we could actually improve our service design process. But yeah, I mean, those little micro actions, we probably saw those for about a year before it really settled in. I love that construct of the micro actions that keep you out of alignment because we talk a lot about nudges, right? Little shifts that you have to do because all of those small...

misalignments add up to a big miss at the end of the day when you're trying to deliver on something dramatically different. Yep. Yeah. And yeah, just the terminology stuck with me and watching it, was like, you know, this will get away from us quickly. You know, coming from an IT background, you know, we kind of went more of the forced adoption route. You just remove the other option. And if you want to use a CRM, there's only one now. That option doesn't really work with people.

as I found out. we had to start to build systems and processes and a lot of coaching and conversations around that. And it just came down to human behavior and helping people understand that. And also we learned a lot through the process going the other way. I'd say we probably were 80 % spot on. The other 20%, we just kind of had to figure it out and identify the things that we hadn't even considered yet.

Yeah, and again, action precedes clarity, right? You don't figure those things out until you get there. And I think it's the organizations that have the wherewithal to keep figuring out that last 20 % that successfully transform. It's the ones that get right up to that 80 % line, and then they don't take it. They don't figure the rest of it out, and they don't really deal with those micro, what did you call them, micro misalignments? Micro actions, yeah. Micro actions, Either in the right way or the wrong way.

Those micro actions that are that are holding them back. You know, we hear all of this data about transformations not delivering fully and I would suggest that exactly what you're describing happens so often. So I love hearing you talk about the conversations that you keep having because let's face it people are messy, right? They're a lot messier than technology. And you just have to keep talking about it. Keep talking about it over and over and over again. Yeah, and you know for me

That's been an area of weakness. Because in my head, I've been thinking about this for a year. We've been playing with it. I've been tinkering with it on paper. And so I learned early on, I'm coming to the table 80 % of the way through the process already mentally. And had to build some different processes and tinker with some different approaches of how do I actually go back to the team and say, yeah, let's go back to step one and I can walk you through.

a lot of this because I approached a lot of those conversations, 10 yards off the finish line and expected them to be right there with me. fortunately the team also conveyed that. They would use different phrases like, tell me it again, but tell me in a different way. Tell me it again, as if the person was Julie or tell me if it was Bob.

Usually about the fourth or fifth time, they're like, okay, I think we understand the picture. I was like, there's got to be a better way. I am clearly missing something here. And so, yeah, just thinking through how do we bring in the team? How do we enlist them? And again, those are not my strengths. We have other people on the team that have those strengths, but I had to shore that area up for sure. I'm so appreciative that you're reflecting on this because we talk a lot about the power of creating shared meaning.

in order to drive alignment, that people have to have a shared understanding of what those goals are. And it's so easy for a CEO or a leader to just think they can tell people, this is what it is, and people will be there. Like there's magic fairy dust or something. Only it was that easy. Exactly. You wouldn't mind having some magic fairy dust, but it doesn't exist. And so the hard work of staying in the conversation and creating the space for people to develop that shared understanding.

so that you can all be on the same page and you're all connected to it in a consistent way, I think is so powerful as a leader. So I appreciate you shining a light on that. We're learning it as we go. Well, I think that a lot of other people can benefit from hearing your story. So that's great. And I appreciate you sharing it. When you think about some of the things that you see with the team as they've moved from agreement to alignment, I am thinking that you shared that some of the changes are

those micro actions are now the right micro actions. They're getting more consistent around that. You're driving a degree of consistency. What else are indicators to you that the team is in alignment on this service delivery strategy? You know, for us, it starts with trust. You know, from a service design perspective, we're bringing in somebody to help a subject matter expert deliver their expertise. And that's a,

pretty, I don't know how you define it, but it's a complex situation around ego and alignment and how far in the middle do they meet and things like that. so, the trust aspect we had to build. so, the person who leads at our service design and delivery.

you know, they knew they had to build the team's trust in order to get that level of vulnerability and buy-in. And really that buy-in piece is just so key. And so having that baked into that process or in that role and having that individual recognize how to build buy-in, do we even have enough buy-in to tackle this next phase? Even that's been a conversation of we don't.

We're still working through the first phase. They've not seen what they need yet. We need to hold off on the second phase until we can get the buy-in. Once we get the buy-in, just like anything, it's the difference of zero and 100 miles an hour. It just takes off. Because then at that point, they're bought in. We're solving problems for them so that they can have better deliverables, better outcomes, better work-life balance, whatever it is.

it has to have that buy-in process. And I think for us, we tend to build for the long term. I would say we've failed at thousands of things, but I can't think of one that we gave up on. Because there is a thesis behind it. Maybe the thesis changed, maybe it evolved, but that persistence and perseverance

You know, time and brute force has gotten us a fair amount of the way there. We try and do it more with intellect and wisdom, but sometimes, you know, we just need another six months and we'll figure it out. Yeah. And I think perseverance is sometimes the secret sauce when it comes to reading alignment and getting things going. Roger Federer just gave a commencement speech earlier this year where he said,

He's won over 80 % of his matches, I think, in tennis. He's one of the best tennis players of his generation. And he's only won, I think he said 52 % of the points he played. And that's an amazing statistic when you think about it, right? But that came to mind for me as you were talking that you only have to get a couple percentage points over 50 before you're winning a lot. And so sticking with it and sticking through the points that you lose and not getting too caught up in the points that you win is a great way to just keep

moving down the road and keep having those successes build up into a win. Yeah, I think for us, one of the principles and things that's completely built into our DNA is pulled from James Clear, the 1 % better every day motto. We've followed something very similar organically for 10, 11 years.

we ended up formalizing it and kind of adopting the James Clear approach maybe six, seven years ago. And I mean, it is absolutely a staple of our team. It's how we look at everything. Oddly enough, I think we have three team members with it tattooed on their arms. It is not a requirement, but it is. few people do wear the Yellowstone brand. But I think...

You know, just leaving, leaving the place a little bit better than yesterday is, you know, it's kind of the turtle in the race. We don't take huge swings, but 17 years later, you know, we've hit everything we could possibly need to hit. Yeah. And you're continuing to grow and thrive. Yep. Just a little bit better every day. A little bit better every day. You talked about the importance of trust and building trust across the team. Are there any specific things that you do or

moments that you've seen that trust kind of take hold and start to build? think a lot of people would be very curious about that. Well, I've yet to figure out a way to manufacture it. absent of that, I think one of the things that I have just endless amounts of appreciation for our leadership team, but also our full team is, you

We have, you know, full transparent, full candor, hold nothing back. You know, I would almost say not to a fault, but, you know, we're approaching that point where, you know, we've come out of rooms, you know, having some very lengthy, I don't want to say heated, because that would misconstrue it, but very strong debates. Even to the point where, you know, others, partners are things like, hey,

What's going on? You're like, no, we're just trying to solve this thing. And, you know, once we come to an outcome, you know, win or lose, you know, what's best for the company is best for us. And that shared perspective among the leadership team is what I'm so appreciative of. Because, you know, I think for me, not growing up in debate or in high school or anything like that, but

always looking for what is the right thing and my endless amount of curiosity. I have blind spots. I want to know where they are and I want to know if the concept in my head is correct. I want our team to challenge it. And I will be excited to be wrong and to find out, hey, that is actually a better way to do this. Let's do that because it actually does solve the thing I was trying to solve. And so having that level of trust and

openness, I think is key. I think we've built it over time. We've all worked with executive coaches and had open conversations about it. But the fact that we've never walked away from a conversation feeling personally attacked is something I'm so proud of. Because I don't know what it would be like to work in that environment where you're attacked personally or feel that you are.

It just wouldn't be constructive. So how we got there, you know, I think it's just through trust and open conversations and giving people the space to share their thoughts and perspectives and then also spending the time. You know, that's something I'm disproportionately very comfortable with. You know, also it was somebody for two hours for them to understand the model. You know, if they understand the model of whatever we're doing.

Then they can challenge my thinking, my thought, my hypothesis in this. I, yeah. I mean, most of this stuff, I'm pretty confident that I'm about 80 % right. The problem is I don't know which 20 % I'm wrong in. And that's how I approach most of the conversations with the team is I know this is right. I know we need to go in this direction. Here's the concept. Here's the thought. Here's what I want to do. Tear it apart. Tell me, tell me where I'm wrong. Tell me where you think.

We could do this differently. Tell me where an outcome could be different. And the best case scenario is they come up with a better option. They're bought in. It's their idea. It's their concept. We can co-champion it. And I have no allegiance to my thesis. It was just a thesis. Yeah. know, Miles, I'm hearing so many amazing things come up as CEO. I'm hearing that you really work to stay curious.

that you're willing to invest the time to stay in conversation with people instead of just telling them things, and that you're open to your ideas being morphed into different ideas as long as it's in service to the success of the organization and what you're working towards. And I think that takes some of the ego out and keeps you in a curious and generative mindset around it. Would that be fair to say based on that example you were making?

I think you have nailed that spot on and I will pull that transcript so I can think about that later as my own identity. Well, I think it's really, you know, as CEO, it's very easy to get caught up in the badge of busy, right? I'm a very busy person, very important person, so much to do. I don't have time to do these things. But what I'm hearing from you is that for you at OTM, that is the difference between agreeing that something is a good idea and everybody kind of walking around saying, Miles does something about that.

and actually getting the team aligned to work on it together to take it to a better place than you could ever even imagine. What more could be better? Yeah, we've got examples of that where the team has just built something. I'm like, the amount of times where I'm like, this is amazing. You you just sit there and disbelief and then the team's like, this was your idea. like, no, no. I had an idea that was like this. It was nothing like this. You guys built this. You all built this.

That part is so cool. Yeah, it sounds very cool. Can you give me one of your favorite examples or a favorite moment where you saw that spark happen? Yeah. Again, most of ours come with a spark on the front end and then a period of nurture and then an explosion of alignment.

As you know, we're a story brand certified agency. So we do a lot of brand story work messaging. I had come across Donald Miller's book a few years ago, probably seven, eight years ago now. And my background is in IT software development, a little bit of finance. And so I read this book and I thought, my gosh, they brought a relative amount of objectivity to words. This is incredible.

I don't know what to do with this. And so I came running back to the office after reading it and talked to our chief growth officer and said, hey, we got to do this. And she said, what's this? I said, I don't know, but we need to figure out how to do this. And this is early on in my understanding of how to approach this. recognizing that there's been some changes in the process and unfortunately it sat.

with her for a year. I kept checking, hey, have you read about this? Have you really thought about how we could leverage this? And it wasn't until we took a leadership flight to somewhere in Nashville. And she's like, I finally got time to read the book. She read the whole book in two hours on the airplane, got off the airplane. She's like, I get it. This is how we're going to do this. And I was like, my gosh, okay, great.

And then I think after that, it took about four months to get the team tied in, how we were going to leverage this, where we were going to leverage it, how do we build this into our service offering. And it took about four months to build that in. And then after that, we kept going with the agency certification route. So all of our team is now tied into that. And so I would say that that's kind of a failure and a success story. The failure was...

I didn't know what to do with it. I knew it was a thing. I couldn't wrap my head around how do we deliver this? What would a deliverable look like? But I knew we spent a lot of time and effort in that space. And so one of the things I've had to do in that scenario is figure out where is that sweet spot? And we've kind of, I wouldn't say mathematically approach this, but pretty close. How far do you take it?

You know, I've taken that was a very short take. Hey, I read this. This seems really cool. We should do something like this. That didn't go very well. I've also gone to the extreme side and overbuilt things and said, here's an MVP and here's a whole concept again, leveraging, you know, the skills I do have in software development. And they said, Hey, this sounds great. However, you're about 30 % off from where this needs to go. Let us take it and figure this out. You've put too much time into this. And then inversely, they've said,

you know, when I, when I've told, toned it back a little, they're like, I don't get it. Can you take this a little further and show me what a concept would look like? And so we've really had to hone in on what that sweet spot is coming from idea and concept to how do we actually create an MVP for maybe a smaller, amount of our team to take a concept and build something out of it and, know, and let it be theirs.

So it's been an interesting journey. Yeah. And I think the other thing that I'm picking up on from what you're saying is there is no right answer. And that's probably so frustrating for someone who is more in the technology space where there actually can be a right answer, right? Like code it this way and it will work and code it this way and it will not work. Binary and logic are absent. I'll go back to people are messy, right?

I love that you're leaning into that understanding that you just have to try different things to bring people into that conversation and not expect them to just do what you would do or follow the path that you would follow. But how do you meet them where they are and then walk with them to where you want to go? Yeah. You know, and we've had the opposite side where, you know, some people have just taken it as marching orders and then they get far enough along. You're like, Whoa, hold on. No, no, no.

This was a spark to help you generate something. Let's have that conversation. Where do you see this playing and how do you want to leverage something like this? I've had to be cautious of that too, that people will just take my word or a conversation as a pure directive, which is tough as a curious person. Yeah, I share that as CEO of Karrikins Group as well. It can be tough to step out of that

positional authority and get people to really engage in that creative process. Yeah, we intentionally just determine in our meetings, whether it's a decision meeting or a discussion meeting for that reason, especially with personality types. I'm a very divergent thinker. I'm not great at the convergent side. And we have other people on our team who are incredibly good at convergent thinking. And so we found ourselves struggling a lot. I'm still trying to figure out

all of the options and what's the layout and how does this all tie together? And other people in the room are like, wait, I'm just waiting for that last marching order, let's go. And we're like, wow, we're not even aligned in the meeting. And so yeah, we have very intentional conversations of no, we're just looking for a discussion today and then we'll see the decision meeting at another date. I love that as a tip for people, especially who thrive or do well with highly engineered meetings where there's an agenda and it's structured.

That's great for some circumstances and it's completely appropriate. But what I'm hearing from you is there's also a place for that more open-ended conversation or discussion about what is this idea and how do we understand it a little better. And the goal of the meeting is not to come to a conclusion, but it's to really have a rich discussion about what are we all thinking about this idea. And that kind of sharing environment really does help to bolster alignment when you get to the decision point.

but I really like how you're distinguishing between let's have a meeting where we're gonna decide what to do versus let's have a meeting where we're gonna have a discussion about what we're thinking. Yeah, there was a software developer, his name I think was Chris Lemma in the WordPress space, maybe 15 years ago, I went and saw him talk and he had a concept of done, done.

And it related to backlogs of issues and bugs and software development features that his team was working on. And I don't remember how he explains it, but to paraphrase, he would ask a developer, hey, what's the status of this thing? And they'd say, it's done. It just needs to be tested. Or it's done. It's just need this other feature. And so he's like, no, it should be done, done. That's it. And so we've adopted a lot of that.

into our meeting structure. It does play well with the EOS meeting structure, which we still follow pretty decently. But to that point, I am absolutely terrible on an agenda-driven meeting. Even on boards I sit on, mentally, I can't wrap my head around that we are only gonna talk about this critical issue for seven minutes, not get alignment, not have a shared understanding, and just jump to,

Here's what we're gonna do about it. And it is now 106. So we will move on to our next item. To a fault though, I go the other way and I endlessly want to understand something. But once we understand it, once it's done, done, it does not come back on the list. It never circles back or boomerangs. So it was probably a sweet spot in there, but yeah, that structured agenda, especially on boards I sit on,

cannot fathom the value of that, unfortunately. Well, you get the check. We talked about that agenda item, and now we get to move on. But to your point, you're going to come back to it. And that's actually a great signal of misalignment is when you have the same conversations over and over. And you're just sitting there thinking, didn't we make this decision? Didn't we already have this conversation? And you're back in it because you didn't take the time to get that alignment. So that's something we really look for is that signal of misalignment.

Yeah, I'd like to know what the other signals are. well, there's a few. One is when you want to stick needles in your eye because the meaning is where it is. I'm sure you've been there. Hey, I'm happy to share that with you another time, but I would love a couple of recommendations from you for people who find themselves stuck in agreement. keep having everybody sort of nodding and saying, yep, that sounds like a good idea. I hope someone does it. What are some of your

one, two, three recommendations for people who find themselves in that situation? Yeah, I think, you know, one, at the end of our meetings, we have a very clear process of identifying who's championing what. And that process sometimes loops back the conversation because we are not clear on what the takeaway and what the action item is and who owns it. So I think, one, how we wrap up and close meetings is very specific.

And then the other part of it is just going to be playing to the strengths. You know, there's times where I'll champion things and the others will step in and be like, this is not a skill you have. I appreciate the effort, but we'll take it. You'll take this other item. And again, with, you know, leaving the ego outside, you look at it and you're yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Thank you very much for having the awareness to do that. But I think it's just around the clarity of it. you know, unfortunately, a lot of times,

Even now you find out that you still don't have clarity. mean, we'll end up wrapping up a meeting. You're like, well, wait, who's doing what? And they're like, well, someone's going do this. You're like, well, what are they going to do? And by when? And why are we doing that? It all sounded great when it was spoken very eloquently, but when you actually look at the tactical implementation of it or, you know, however you want to look at it, it just doesn't play out. Yeah. Yeah. We see a lot of gaps in that.

you know, theoretical to actual. yeah. Closing that up. Definitely important. Definitely important. Yeah. Well, Miles, this has been such a great conversation. I would love it if you would just share with the audience, if you had the ability, if you did have that magic fairy dust that we talked about earlier, and you could get either like your inner circle or a community that you're involved with, or the world, some group of people aligned to deliver on something. What would that something be?

There's probably a very aspirational answer that I should probably give, but I'm going to stick with curiosity. I think culturally it is something that is stymied. We have a five and an eight year old. have two boys and Neil deGraw Tyson had a video once that talked about parenthood and at some point in your parenting life,

You're going to walk in and find a small child holding an egg in the kitchen. And you're going to run over and just be terrified that, you know, they're going to throw the egg or drop it or throw it on the floor or smash it. And the only reason you're worried about it is because you understand gravity, you understand tensile strength, you understand the entire science experiment behind this egg. And that child does not. And you're taking away the curiosity and the experimentation from that child.

And fortunately, we watched that a month before our first kid and that literal experience has happened. And you do have to take a step back and say, no, no, they do need to understand this. Let's go find an appropriate spot for them to go crack an egg. But I think starting all the way down to that level and then you roll through school and professional careers, curiosity is the thing that

I would love to have more, I guess, alignment around its importance and value. I really appreciate that, Miles, this idea that we want to continue to spark curiosity in children, but also in adults who have been in a workforce where maybe that curiosity has gotten stymied a bit. How do we start to unlock that and really get people leaning in to their own innate curiosity and tapping into that in interesting ways?

So I think that's a great parting comment for this idea of how do we keep people out of the failure gap and moving from agreement that something's a good idea into alignment and actually getting it done. I want to say thank you, Miles, for joining us here today. It's been a wonderful conversation. I love hearing about how as CEO, you're maintaining your own curiosity about what's possible with your team, making sure that you're checking that ego at the door and staying open to where they can take your ideas while also being sure to

set enough of a foundation for them to build on and to build from based on your expertise and the ideas that you have for where you're taking the business. It's a really lovely balance that you're always navigating. And I think that too has really come up in this conversation that there is no perfect answer or solution, especially when you're dealing with people. It's a constant adjustment to make sure that you're moving in the right direction and that you're taking them with you. So I want to say thank you again for joining us and I hope that you have a great rest of your day. Thank you.

for having me, Julie.