Shaline's Cancer Diagnosis and the Pivot

On this week’s show, Matt and the team meet Shaline Manhertz and Kristianah Fasunloye to discuss their business partnership, which began formally in 2018 when Shaline’s cancer diagnosis forced a pivot from individual business plans to joint working. The conversation explores how their partnership survived extraordinary pressure by rejecting the conventional 50/50 model in favour of an equitable approach where each partner gives 100% of whatever capacity they have at any given moment.

The discussion examines their practical frameworks for sustaining partnerships: the “MAGIC” model (Make a decision, Attributes, Guidance systems, Intelligence gathering, Course correct) and the four Rs (roles, responsibilities, respect, resentment). They challenge typical business assumptions about productivity and efficiency, arguing that genuine curiosity about people—asking questions beyond task delivery—transforms supplier relationships into true partnerships. The conversation draws parallels with pair programming in technology, showing how collaborative approaches often outperform traditional resource allocation models, even when they appear counterintuitive to conventional management thinking.

You can watch Shaline & Kris’s Ted Talk here: http://youtube.com/watch?v=1dJHi1s2WYs

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The show transcript – automatically generated by Descript.

Matt:  Hello and welcome to episode 344 of WB 40, the really quite erratic podcast with me, Matt Ballantine, Shaline Manhertz, Kristiana Fasunloye, and Chris Weston.

Yes. You heard, right? Yes. You don’t need to worry about Harry Styles releasing albums. No. Chris and Matt are back on the show together for the first time in New. Two years. I’m not sure that I can cope with this excitement. Chris, how are you dealing with it?

Chris: Yeah, it’s alright. You know, we’ve had, uh, it’s two years.

You say you don’t look, you don’t look any different. I think you look younger, Matt. I think that’s, you know, that’s maybe just having that extra, you know, pizazz of some different people to talk to. Is it reinvigorated you somewhat

Matt: that or you really need to get to the optician soon?

Chris: Well, maybe you’ve been dying your beard or something.

Matt: Oh dear. Like, the passage of time is a strange thing when you get to a certain age, isn’t it? Is a whips past. Uh, we, we won’t dwell on the entire two years ’cause it’s, that’s two years worth. But, um, what have you been up to in the last week?

Chris: Oh, I’m glad you hadn’t asked me what’s happened in the last two years?

’cause I can just about remember the last week. Uh, everything else is, is very much a blur. Um, wow, wow. It’s been very busy. Right. And, um, so. I guess the, the big things in the last week or so have been, so at Aztec we, we did our first big event, uh, on our own like, uh, so a big grownup company on Thursday, the something I think, I think it was the end of February, so it was back just every week ago.

And that was really good because it was partly because it’s a good. Team. And it’s nice to see the marketing folk, you know, and put all the effort in to make something like that happen. It’s good to see lots of people, you know, lots of, um, you know, old friends, new friends, whatever turn up and actually for the content to be pretty good too.

And that, you know, that’s always a bit of a, uh, a worry ’cause it can be a. Even with the best preparation, it can go a bit flat sometimes. Um, but we had, uh, Benedict Evan speaking, who’s a bit of a, a, a legend really, really articulate guy in terms of tech and a whole bunch of other people. Um, so yeah.

Yeah, that was good fun. Really, really great. And then I’ve been working with a client the last few days well actually, yeah, for almost since, for the last three weeks really, but for this last week as well, working with a client who works in. In the kind of retail supply chain, which again, very interesting.

You know, I know a lot more about lettuce and beet root than I knew a few weeks ago which wasn’t a high bar if I’m, if I’m honest. But it’s, you know, there we go. I’m, I’m, I’m more informed about the, uh, the supply chain pers of, uh. Fresh produce, but yeah. Yeah. All good. Matt. Can’t complain. It’s been busy.

Busy, busy. How about you?

Matt: I’ve been taking on a new client at work and a, a very well established client for us. Quite a big client in terms of, uh, the number of consultants. So to get my head around it, I’ve been meeting all of the consultants who’ve got working on it. And so over the last. Two and a half, three weeks.

I’ve had something like 50, 55, half hour meetings with different people, which has been really wonderful, but quite tiring I think is the best way to describe it. I mean, some of my colleagues, especially people who are used to sort of sitting writing computer code, are kind of baffled by the idea that you could speak to that many people ever possibly.

But. The, this is where my social science training comes in. ’cause basically I was taught how to do interviews and stuff. So therefore I kind of, I, I, I’m okay with it. And it’s been really interesting and trying to be able, when you’re involved in something new, trying to be able to triangulate some form of truth because there isn’t one.

Truth, there are multiple truths and if you can get to speak to lots and lots of people, you can build up, I dunno, it’s a bit like, you know, there’s apps you can get where you can create 3D scans of things by going around with your phone and taking loads of pictures and loads of different angles. It’s a bit like that.

Nobody

Chris: knows about those things. About

Matt: is it just me?

Chris: People with too much time on their hands.

Matt: Yeah. Okay. It’s me being geeky again, isn’t it? But uh, yeah, so that’s been taking up, quite a lot of my time in work and then out of work because, I dunno if I told you this, I’ve got a book coming out.

See, I’ve got a book coming out. It’s very exciting. I have got a book coming out. I still don’t quite know what the release date is because there’s been so many comical, random issues with getting the book out. But, we are assured it’s now actually being printed and the publisher is, uh, is trying to now work out the logistics of getting two washing machine sized lumps of cardboard and, and paper from China via the Middle East.

Yeah, have all else is going on straight of hall moves, right? They don’t have to go through the straight of hall moves. No, but they have to go the other side. So there’s still plenty of opportunity for more random delays. But anyway, because I’ve got the book coming out, I’ve been doing more experimenting with doing stuff to video now.

I’m a purist when it comes to podcasts. Podcasts are audio only. If you put video on a podcast, it becomes a TV program. Okay. That’s, that’s my view. I, I will not be shaken on that, but I have started to get into the idea of like two, three minute, little videos. And so I’ve been writing some scripts about things that are about randomness which is what the book is about and things that are about randomness in sort of local areas.

So I can go and do some little bits on location. So my son and I, my youngest and I went out at the weekend and we were in. Bushy Park. We started at the house where Alan Turing lived, and then we went to the National Physical Laboratory to tell the story of Donald Davis, who’s the man who partly created packet switch networks, which are the underpinnings of the internet.

And everybody’s heard of Alan Turing, and there’s roads named after him and there’s blue plaques on houses. Nobody has heard of Donald Davies at all. And it’s a story about the randomness of what we remember and what gets told in history. So it’s a kind of interesting story. Got back, terrible mic quality.

Oh, it was awful. And then I realized I kept calling him Ronald Davies throughout the thing rather than Donald Davies. I, you need to learn through making mistakes. I made an awful lot of mistakes doing that, but I’m, we’re, we’re,

Chris: yeah. He must have ended up pretty rich though. Old Ronald or

Matt: Donald? Donald.

Donald Davies. No. He worked, he made

Chris: a packet.

Matt: Oh, no. That’s appalling. So

Chris: you’ve missed that.

Matt: Yeah, I have missed so much. I’ve missed that so much. I’ll keep telling myself so much. So anyway, more short form video coming out. I did one today about how interesting uh, boarding passes are. Because that’s how I work.

There’s a whole three minute video about the history of boarding.

Chris: Three minutes. Three

Matt: minutes. I, I surprise myself sometimes. Anyway, I think it’s time to, have we still got guests? Have they not got bored? You want walked away from Think they’re still here. I think they’re still here. I, it’s a wonderful for us to be back together and we also have two guests rather than one.

So, um, let’s start with you, Shaline. What’s been up in your world in the last week?

Shaline: Well, it’s completely different from yours. That’s specific, definite.

Matt: You’ve not been doing videos about, uh, the importance of boarding passes?

Shaline: No, no, no. Not not this week. Maybe next week I’ll look into it. Yeah. No. Well, we basically been working, I’m, I’m gonna talk about some of the work that I’ve been doing by myself.

So I’ve basically been working on an event that’s pulling together the culmination of, of. About 13 years work of a local community and, um, trying to navigate the politics of the committee. So that’s been very interesting. It’s, yeah, very, very interesting. Very interesting and tiring. And Paul Christiana’s had me downloading and complaining all week.

So it, it culminates on this Saturday and I can’t wait

Matt: in.

Shaline: It’s gonna be very exciting.

Matt: Interesting. Is such a wonderfully multipurpose adjective, isn’t it? It’s got so much bread. It’s wonderful.

Shaline: Yeah.

And when I’m not do doing that, I’ve done a bit of tap dancing just to do something completely different and keep myself a little bit fit because, uh.

Try and keep healthy,

Matt: you know? Yeah. So is this a, a new thing, tap dancing or you’re an experienced tapist or

Shaline: Oh yes. Very experienced. Very experienced. Yeah. No, I used to do it when I was younger like a lot younger, like about 10.

Matt: Okay.

Shaline: And then I’ve. Done it a little bit on and off. And then last year I did went back and did a whole like, six weeks course on just dance generally and performed at a theater.

Did two shows, which I really enjoyed. And so I’m trying to just do it, even if I can’t do it consistently, just do it every now and again just to keep myself fit.

Matt: Nice. And um, Christiana, how are you and what’s your week been like?

Kris: My week’s not been bad actually. I’ve been speaking to my mentees, so I mentor the moment three young people who are basically at the start of their careers all in kind of marketing, comms, pr and it’s quite interesting ’cause I really wish I had that support when I was their age.

You imagine being like 20, 24, 25. And having someone who’s got like 20 plus years experience, being able to shine a light on what you need to do, what you haven’t asked and what you haven’t thought about. I mean, we would’ve gone so far, like if we could have tapped into all of that knowledge. So, and I think what’s quite interesting is people don’t ask enough questions.

They really don’t ask enough. They’re not curious enough. I would say I had a really interesting conversation with one of my mentees last week. And they brought in a specialist company in the organization he works in to review some of the work that they’ve done and how do they engage with people that are either disabled or have a neurodivergence.

And I’m like, well, what have you done before? Oh, I dunno. I’m like, well, maybe that’s where you should start. So Jimmy, you need some kind of baseline. What have you done before to figure out how you can move forward? And then as always I’m one of two sets of twins. One of my sisters is, um, house hunting.

So the in-person and virtual house visits has been a thing. Wow.

Matt: Sorry, just to play that back, you’re one of two sets of twins?

Kris: I am one of two sets of twins. I have a twin brother. I have younger identical twin sisters.

Matt: Wow. Your parents. Wow.

Kris: They think we’re fabulous.

Matt: They can’t have any memory for the time that the, the, the two sets of twins were both small.

That’s Wow. They

Kris: weren’t both small. One was 14 and one was North.

Matt: Oh, okay. Okay. That’s, they’s got plenty child to recover from it then. Amazing. Yes. I’ve got, we, our kids are 13 months apart and that was as closest we got to twins, but it was fairly close to. Being twins and, um, you’ve got twins, haven’t you, Chris?

Chris: Indeed, indeed. Boy and a girl, but we did certainly didn’t, uh, go for another helping at 14 years later, to be fair.

Kris: So, who’s the oldest? The girl or the boy?

Chris: The girl is the oldest boy. A number of minutes, which I cannot remember anymore, but she knows she’s the oldest.

Kris: I’m not the eldest. By a number of minutes.

Chris: I mean, it’s amazing how much it matters. ‘Cause it’s, it’s not something I think about saw, but Oh, yes. It’s very important to the individuals.

Kris: Yes.

Matt: Are you an oldest child though, Chris?

Kris: Yeah, I’m

Matt: one of the eldes. Oh, you, no, no. Yeah. Other crew. Yeah. Okay. This is gonna get confusing.

Chris: We’ll figure it out.

That’ll be fine. I’m pretty sure that, uh, we’ll, we’ll know by context who you’re talking to.

Matt: Now I went to see the comedian Olo Hanlon last night. And one of the things in his set was about order of children, ’cause he’s a third child and basically an awful lot of his set was about how difficult it is to be a third child because basically you’re just forgotten by the rest of them.

And all that thing about sequencing of when they come out and when there’s a bit of distance between the age, you kind of, yeah. Okay. But it still sounds like it’s important when even when you’re twins, whether your first out or second out.

Kris: I think it’s more important to my twin brother than it is to me.

I think also, ’cause he’s the only boy, so he, you know, the only boy and the oldest. So,

Matt: yeah. That’s, um, fascinating. Anyway we are not here to talk about twins or siblings. Uh, we are here to talk about partnerships. So I think we should probably crack on and then I’ll press the stop.

One of the conversations we’ve got going at work at the moment is what it is to be. A partner as opposed to merely a supplier. Partner’s an interesting term, uh, for our organization. Actually also because John Lewis is one of our biggest clients, and so partner for John Lewis, which is a partnership, actually has a whole load of other meanings, which makes it very confusing sometimes, but.

The difference between being seen by your client or customer as a partner and being seen by your client or or customer as a just a supplier can be quite profound. And even more so if you think you are one thing and they think you are another, you can have massive disconnects as a result of that. Now I met you two at an event at the beginning of the year and saw you talking about community and, and partnership.

And I thought it’d be interesting to be able to dig a bit more into those themes because they’re things that we often hear spoken about, but don’t often go beneath the surface of the words. And you’ve done a lot of thinking about what goes on beneath the surface of the words. Maybe as a good starting point though, is.

To talk a little bit about your professional partnership and some of the events that led to you thinking more about all of this and what it means.

Shaline: Well, we’ve been known each other and been working with each other since 2008, which is quite, quite a long time. Nearly 20 years, in a couple of years. And I think from the very outset, we always. So I worked in marketing, Christiana worked in press, and from the outset of that, we always tend to work together in, you know, something’s happening within the council and we’re working together to provide some kind of communication solution.

And that always seemed to be quite different from our other counterparts in the teams. And I think that way of working. Just kind of grew and grew and grew and then we, you know, between the two of us we’re like, oh yeah, I’d like to start a business At some point Chris is like, oh, I’d like to start a business at some point.

And then we were speaking about that.

Kris: We used to have Breakfast Club, so we would, we would come in to work and we’d have like breakfast together. ’cause we do like eight or like six or half, six. We’d come and we’d have like, she doesn’t eat yogurt, but we’d have yogurt, croissants, coffee, fresh food and that.

And that was our brainstorming time. And we’d be like, okay, so where are we in developing? And at this point it was individual businesses. It wasn’t a partnership business. And so Shaline would have her own and I would have my own. And we would sit and discuss and where are we with our business planning and have we thought about the model and services and the pricing and the clients.

And so this went on for years. We incorporated our businesses. And had breakfast club, had lunch club. Were testing like the offer, you know, delivering services, getting paid, commissioned, both while still being fully employed.

Shaline: And then 2017 hit and I was very ill. Basically I went into work one day and then never went back. That was probably in the November. And then by the December I was diagnosed with multiple myeloma, which is a blood cancer. And so at that time I wasn’t in the communications team. I was in a different team, which is a business development team.

It was. It didn’t really work in a partnership or team-like manner. It was very individual, very competitive. Quite different from the comms team. Obviously quite different from when I was working with Chris as well. And, uh, very stressful. So it got to the point where obviously I, it was quite clear I wouldn’t be going back to work for some time and I was like, oh God, what does this mean for me?

And you know, and then Chris said to me, what do you need? In order to be able to, you know, just be happy, be comfortable, and not be worried about work. I said, I just need to pay my mortgage. Lo and behold, two weeks later, Chris comes back and says, I’ve got us a contract.

Kris: And I,

Shaline: so no. Good.

Kris: Well, I think the thing is we had spent a lot of time before Shaline got ill.

I mean, you know, I met Shaline in 2008. And she’d been in the comms team, been seconded out to the comms team, you know, come back to the comms team, progressed up the comms team, I’d been, you know, promoted as well. So we spent a lot of time getting to know each other as people, and also what did we stand for as people, like what really were our values?

Or, or our hard lines. And so when she became ill. You know, this was my friend as well at this time. She wasn’t just a colleague, she was also my friend. And so it was like, what do you need? Okay, you need to be able to say, oh fine, let’s do that. So there wasn’t much thinking that went into it. We had lots of people that we were talking to about what kind of support would they need.

We’ve been testing and trialing this and I was like, okay, so I just need to convert these into a paying client. I’m gonna do that. And I remember having a whole conversation with Shaline about, oh, I don’t like the idea of selling. She’s like, it’s not selling. Just see it as a conversation and you’re telling them what you already do and what I do.

And I thought, okay, I can do that. And so off I went and had loads of conversations and then came back and she said two weeks later, said, yeah, I’ve got us our first contract that will enable you to pay our Mor your mortgage, and we will figure out a way to deliver that with you not being well and you still working full time.

And so we did.

Shaline: Because the, the thing is I didn’t know when, what that would mean for me. I didn’t know will I be ever going back to work? What will day the days look like? But I just knew, and Chris clearly knew I couldn’t have gone back to be working in the way I was working. You know, it was very, very stressful. Very long days.

And also, you know, when you are ill like that, you have to just focus on yourself. There’s not much else you can do, but focus on yourself so that you can shunt back into good health. And having the support, knowing that actually somebody is there supporting me whilst I’m, I’m focused on my health. But also being able to tap in and do some work was, you know.

I, it’s very difficult even to explain even now, like it however very many years on a, the gratitude, but also the relief. You know, the relief of just thinking there’s somebody there that’s in interested and supportive of me as well, and we are working together. I don’t, you know. Even. Yeah, I still don’t have words as you can see.

Chris: That’s interesting though. So I, I think what I’m just, just to pick up on that, when we talk about partnerships, the thing that means partnerships to me in many ways is sustainability, right? So is this something that’s self-sustaining or is, is one party. Benefiting more or is it going to get out of, out of control?

So when you’re actually looking after each other, whether it’s business partnerships, you know, whether it’s supplier, customer relationships, but essentially if you are trying, if you’re always trying to maximize the value you get at you have of the other person, it’s not going to be sustained. You’ve got to be aware of each other’s, uh, needs in that sense so that you can.

But make sure they’re there tomorrow to do the thing they do. And you can do the thing you do. Um, and that sounds exact, like exactly what you’ve been doing.

Kris: I think because we have similar but different skill sets. So we’d always imagined that we were gonna go into business on our own. And then, you know, Shaline got ill and it was like, okay, well we need to pivot.

And I think at that point we made a decision that we were forming a partnership. We always knew we would work together. We didn’t realize that we would be working in partnership together until Shaline got ill. And because we are similar but different, we bring different skill sets. So, you know, there were points when Shaline would have chemo and, and that would be Wednesday afternoons.

So Wednesday afternoons we would manage everything to make sure we didn’t have meetings. Or if needed be, I could pick up those meetings. ’cause in the early days I was still employed as well as trying to run a business with Shaline. And so we were looking at how could we deliver everything on the days that she would be well enough to be involved.

And also I think Shaline was more worried about her not showing up than I was ever worried about her not showing up.

Shaline: I, I think it’s always, you know, it is, it is. It’s fantastic when you have support, but I’m somebody I’ve never been comfortable with allowing other people just to do what I probably think is my responsibility. And so it’s all about, for me, it was about, okay, I’m not feeling well today. Tomorrow I probably won’t feel too great, but Friday I’ll be fine.

And actually if I’ve had the steroids, I’ll be even, I’ll be on, on, on, you know, we’ll get even more maximization. Yeah. So. But just that, um, I suppose the feeling of not wanting to take advantage of somebody’s good nature. I mean, you know, she could find somebody else and do it. Maybe it would be easier. She wouldn’t have to be trying to do everything.

And as, as she said, she’s working and we’ve never been in jobs where, oh, it’s nine to five. She was in ru running a press office. So if you can imagine, you know, she’s crisis queen. Crisis don’t tend to happen between nine to five, they happen after five. You know, and still then be supporting doing this other role, making sure that we are, our partnership is held together.

’cause it, obviously, yeah, I’m there, but sometimes I’m not there. Sometimes I’m thinking I’m there and I’m not there. So

Matt: it is interesting the the expectations we put on ourselves and how much. I, this, this is one of my pet themes on this show over many years now, the, the things like the Protestant work ethic, which is a, a deeply set cultural set of values that we hold.

And for many of us, we don’t even understand where that comes from because the religious part of it for, you know, much of the population is completely gone. But the ideas of if you don’t work hard, you won’t go to heaven, is so deep rooted in. In so much of the culture in the UK so that there’s real guilt if you don’t feel that you’re pulling your weight.

Even if you’re in a position where you’ve got no way to be able to work effectively. I mean, so often you see people at, at, at a kind of less serious end of the spectrum turning up for work, even though they really shouldn’t. ’cause they’re pretty much useless ’cause they should be in bed getting over the flu or whatever it is they’ve got at the time.

So those, those kind of, personal pressures that we put on ourselves as the basis of stuff that is, is outside of our immediate lived experience, I think is really interesting. The, from what you learned through those experiences working, um, together, how have you now then turned that into something that you’re helping others with?

Kris: I think that’s a quite interesting question. I think we did a whole TED Talk on our partnership and

we had always had this kind of framework. I think we just hadn’t named it, and so. I’ll go through it. ’cause it’s really, we call it magic ’cause we like to think our partnership is magic. But it’s make a decision about the partnership you’re going into. What does that look like? What are the attributes that you need?

So are they complimentary? You can’t have two people with the same skills. ’cause two cooks in the kitchen. No front of house. This is from our TED Talk. Your guidance systems. So that is basically your values. How is that, you know, determining how your partnership moves forward, the intelligence gathering, how do you know whether things are working, whether they’re not working, and then they see the course correct.

What do you need to do if your guidance systems is off, your intelligence is showing you something, or you need to change a partnership? What, what, what does course correct? Do you fix it? Do you jump out of it? What does it look like? And I think in every partner that we work alongside, ’cause we see every business that we work with or every person as a partnership, we are a partnership.

You’ll be, you are becoming into a partnership with us. How do you understand what we are offering you? The skills that we bring to the table, what’s important to you and how we are going to continue to show you throughout the length of this. Partnership and when things aren’t working, how are we communicating with you that it’s not working?

And sometimes we’ve worked with, like, we work with two amazing female co-CEOs. They were absolutely fabulous and they were a job share at CEO level. And I think there needs to be more of that because people don’t understand that you get such a breadth of skills when you’ve got two people doing the same role.

You know, they managed to raise 1.7 million pounds in funding for their charity. They did a whole board restructure, brought in new trustees, absolutely amazing. So much respect for them. And what we did was look at their partnership and our partnership as well and how can we best support you and how can we challenge you in a way that you can deliver more for the um, organization that you are basically joint.

We call them joint chiefs.

Chris: Yeah. Do you know what about, about maybe back 2008 sort of time, but I remember I did some work with a.

Did it like a management buyout of a, of a technology company and, and they decided they were gonna be co-CEOs. And I said to them both. I said, look, this isn’t gonna work. Really. I don’t, you know, you, you need to figure out who is the person who’s going to be essentially be responsible anyway about about.

10 years later, they sold it for like loads of money and they’d both been CE through all that time. So it shows you how much I know, right? You can, it looks like you can have co-CEOs and you, you’ve had the same experience of seeing it in, in, in motion. Yeah. And, and what you, you’re right, it does bring a level of resilience and you know, as long as you’ve got that mutual respect, as long as you’ve, you know, again, you are working in partnership and you are interested in the others.

Ability to keep going, you know, then you can make it work.

Shaline: And I think, I think that neatly brings us onto the, for us, so, you know, for us defining the role. So as Chris was saying, I. Although we, we are very similar. We are also very different. We’ve been quite different, distinct viewpoints to things, and so people are like, oh, you’re both, you’re both in comms.

Yeah, we, you know, your marketing, your press isn’t more or less the same thing. Not really, no. And alongside it not being them being different disciplines, it’s also the viewpoint and how we approach things. So, you know, it’s almost, if you think about good cop, bad cop, we’re not really good cop, bad cop. We are more, Chris is more.

You know, forthright, very clear. I’m more journey taking. So generally you’ll find that people fall into one of two camps in terms of what they appreciate. And if you are speaking to a whole team, you know, you’re gonna capture the whole team because. One of them will appreciate the perspective that one of us has given.

And I think when you are solo working, you then have to work so much harder to understand actually how’s that person taking it in. Is that person a numbers person? Okay, I’ll go with the numbers as, but hang on a minute. This person needs more emotive words whilst, because there’s two of us. And we, you know, we’ve also done neurolinguistic practitioner work as well, so we kind of understand how people are thinking.

We’re able to bring all of that to how we work. And then what then sits under that is responsibilities. I mean, you know. There’s not one of us going to go off on holiday and not the other one doesn’t know what’s happening from day to day. We are spoke speaking to each other. Literally, we’re on the phone from about 10 all the way through till about eight some days, you know?

But what that means is we are always continuously talking. We are very open with each other, and I think in order to have respect for people, you have to, there has to be a level of openness that you’re comfortable with because otherwise. You are holding something back and I think that with us, we generally don’t hold much back and I think it being that comfortable to be with each other and understand that means that there is the respect there, there’s the understanding there.

You know, if someone’s going on a holiday, someone’s not gonna be around for whatever reason. It could be hospital visit, but equally it could be, you know, going to a ho a wedding in Greece. You know, it’s all about making sure that we’re. We are, we are clear about who’s responsible for what and how we are handing off.

You know, I think, I think it was Kev that said to us, we are the only, um, partnership that he knows that share an email inbox and have the same

Kris: calendar as well. A share

Shaline: calendar. Exactly. You know, that’s

Matt: interesting. This, this, uh, it, it reminds me of as well have you come across the concept of, um, pairing in computer programming.

Which is the idea, and it’s really counterintuitive to our established models of thinking about what productive looks like, rather than having one person working on one task, you have two people working on one task and they do it at the same time, and it’s not a, a job share. It’s they’re both doing the work.

And what that does is it enables those two people to be able to get through the work more quickly and with a higher level of quality because they’re constantly. Checking each other, suggesting when one gets stuck, the other one can pick up. And that works. Really, I mean, there’s a lot of evidence to show that that leads to much better and quicker results than having the work divvied up one person per task.

But it doesn’t sit nicely with the models that we have about what you should do with using of. People as resource in organizations. It looks like you haven’t maximized your utilization. All of these kind of mechanical terms that are used that are stemming from a world of management, which was about managing machines, not people.

And that, that it feels that, you know, whether it’s the a co CEO at the top of the organization or in a tech organization, the, you know, the pair programming at the Boston, there’s plenty of evidence to show this stuff works, but it feels like so counter-cultural. It feels so much against what it is that businesses should be doing.

Kris: I think many businesses need to feel that they need to manage by site to understand what their staff are doing, and they haven’t moved forward in their practices. You know, we talk about the rise of technology and ai and actually why shouldn’t working practices, you know, most people didn’t work from home before.

COVID, like COVID forced us as a society to look at how. People could work in different locations. Some people have gone back to work full time. Some people still work from home three, four days a week, uh, a week. So if we can dramatically change where we work and still deliver the same level of quality, shouldn’t we be looking at how we work as well?

And I think that hasn’t really seeped through because we always deliver quicker because there’s two of us, we would pick up different elements of the same project, but then. You know, you can never check your own work. So you’ve always got someone to check and proof and bounce an idea off. When you are, when the brain gets kind of stuck and you’re like, okay, brilliant, I needed to bounce.

I’ve got clarity, I can move forward. So I think management and basically organizations are playing catch up. ’cause the tech world is always far, far ahead. Always far ahead.

Chris: I think he’s so. Yeah, the, when you were talking earlier about when you used to go to work and you sit in and have your breakfast club, it reminded me of, actually, I’ve been thinking about this just last week, and I was thinking about the organization I’m working for now.

I’m thinking about the relationships. I was thinking about. Okay. I dunno that person very well. Well, I wonder why I haven’t got to know that person very well. And it’s because this organization’s completely remote really, we’re all, all over the place and therefore we’re not together very often.

Whereas in once Upon a time when I was younger, of course you’d be in the office and you’d be bumping into different people. And as you, you know, as you kind of said, you, you’d kind of, there would be people who were in early, there’d be people who might be in late, you know, the people who take their break at the same time or whatever it might be.

You would, you would, you would not just talk about the thing on the agenda or the reason you’ve had the team score. You would think you’d talk about other things and it would, and things would build from there. And I was thinking to myself about, really about how we make that work today. And we’ve talked about this like a hundred times on the podcast over the years, but I’m just wondering if you guys think that you.

A partnership like yours could have started if you had never worked together physically, if you’d just met online. Do you think that’s possible? Do you think it’s the, those sort of physical sort of connection moments in the having breakfast that that forged that ability to do it? Or do you think it’s possible to start without that kind of,

Shaline: I, I, what I would say is I think it, we started with a really solid base.

And because we started with a really solid base that supported that. Do I think you can start without that? Absolutely. I do think you can. I think it is, it goes down to what are your values and, and taking the time. I think. We’ve often, between us, we will meet people. A lot of our work’s been remote. We’ve been remote before.

COVID, you know, we, we were the first remote people really, that we probably even know, you know, working continuously, remotely, not just, oh, popping into the office now and again. And I think we’ve had to form relationships with people in environments we’ve never seen them before. Um, we don’t intend to see them either, and we’ve worked with them for over a year and being able to work in a partnership way.

They initially, you know, it’s, it’s never, it’s, it might not be a comfortable start because people are like, oh, you know, they’re not comfortable. They don’t know you, but it’s about really thinking about what, what’s important to this person. It goes back to, you know, really having an understanding and putting time into wanting to be interested in somebody outside of work.

Not just, okay, we’ve gotta get this done because that’s great, but if someone thinks that you are invested, and this is how we’ve both managed, I think we’ve got a very similar management style. We’ve both had like large teams. And when we’re, what’s sat beneath our management style is getting to know the person, getting to know what’s important to them, why are they working, what do they want to do in the future?

What’s happening in at home? Because those realistically are the nuts and bolts of starting to understand the person, starting to understand what their values are, starting to understand what’s important to them and why they’re showing up. And I think once you understand that, then a, a partnership can grow and that can grow in any kind of environment, but you have to put the work in

Kris: a hundred percent.

It goes back to the point earlier about not, people don’t ask enough questions, they’re not curious enough about other people. And as Shaline said, we have had clients we have never met. We’ve never met them. We’ve only ever spoken to them on a phone call or on a teams or a Zoom. And they will, they would have us back in a heartbeat.

But that is the effort that we’ve put into building that relationship with them. You know, even though we’ve never had a face-to-face meeting,

Matt: I wonder if one of the challenges for. People in organizations today isn’t the lack of being in the same physical space. It’s that the, the relentless grind of teams meetings, everything is task focused.

You go in and each half hour segment that is back to back for eight hours or whatever madness that it is, that so many people are having to endure now, there’s no point at which you can have the, the breakfast conversation, which is off topic, which is is about what you saw on TV last night or what you’ve got coming up at the weekend or because everybody’s just focused on task, focus on task, focus on task.

And so we did a a show a couple of years ago with. A philosopher called Alice Sherwood and she she wrote a book about authenticity, what it is to be authentic. But we talked on the show about what does in real life mean. And so, you know, when Chris, you say, I’ve, I’ve never met these clients. We have met them because what we’re doing now, we’re talking through the magic of this amazing technology that we have that enables us to be able to talk in real time and see each other.

That’s as real life as. Meeting in person. It is, it’s the conversations that you’re having the show, the chance to be curious. And

Shaline: it’s funny because if you think about it, we used to have pen pals. Remember you’d make a pen pal, you’d never see that person. You might not ever meet them. Or you might meet them like 10 years later, two years later, and you’d have an affinity that would outs span that, that.

Quite easily. So we, we, we are capable of doing it. It’s like we’ve just forgotten. We’ve completely forgotten and we haven’t given ourselves the space because there’s no space. So there’s no space. So there’s no questions. Okay, we, we are here, let’s get on with it. You know, I mean, we’ve what run workshops where we start off by talking just about random things.

You know, what, what did you do last week? Yeah. You know, just what did you, what’s the last thing that you watched on television? Just to get that kind of break, that kind of understanding of we are only here to do work and I think if you, if you’ve got a supplier kind of relationship going on, that’s because there’s been no interest.

On either side, probably of anything else apart from, you know, delivery. But when you are actually curious and interested in somebody, you get far, much. Richer relationship. And I think for us, we enjoy the richness of relationships that we create. So we go out of our way to do that. It’s like when I think back, I used to work at the Department for Work and Pensions back in the day.

And I remember there was one guy, we were based in work, white Hold. He was in Leeds and everyone was like, oh, he’s a nightmare. He’s a nightmare. Don’t like working with him. I’m like, well, I can’t work like that. I don’t like working with people that it’s not fun to work with. And I remember thinking, he’s gonna be my best friend.

So that’s, that’s literally, I think we both go into to relationships. Not wanting a best friend, but go. Going to think actually, if we want to make this interaction comfortable for not just me, but for the other person, what needs to happen, oh, what that might need to happen might be, I need to ask, oh, how was your weekend?

And actually be interested, not just want to say, yeah, it was fine, and move on. Actually building bonds, and I think when you build the bonds, you get so much, you get a rich relationship. But also the somebody will go to here and back 15 times if you ask them if you’ve built that relationship. If you haven’t built the relationship, you might have to ask them 15 times to do one thing.

Speaker 5: That feels like a perfect place to stop.

Chris: Well, that was fascinating and I think. There’s at least, uh, four more podcasts in that we, we barely scratched the surface. It was fascinating to listen to you ladies, thank you. And, um, I think we’d need to look into the future now because this is what we do traditionally at this point, Matt, we find out what we’re gonna be up to.

What are you doing, Matt? What’s the future hold for?

Matt: Uh, the future holds for me. Have I mentioned, I’ve got a book coming out. A book? A book?

Chris: Never.

Matt: Yeah. Uh, security blend book. I thought Nick Strange’s got a book coming out as well. Has got, I don’t hear so much from him. No, I know. But, um, he has got a book coming out.

So I will be going with my publisher. James, um, I’m just holding up a little tiny version of my book that isn that isn’t that cute. That’s our business cards for going to, um, they, I’ll stick a photo of that on the, on the show notes. We are going to the the London Book Fair at Olympia on Wednesday, and I’m going to take the prototype version of the book ’cause it is a hefty tome.

Before. The, the, the, the actual printed versions of it arriving in a few weeks time. Um, it’s not

Chris: minimum viable book.

Matt: It isn’t much. No, it, it is, it is definitely not minimum viable book. It’s maximum viable book. And I’ve got a couple of meetings with people lined up who have people I know. And then I’m just gonna sort of go with James around and see if anybody is interested in it as a concept.

And I dunno what I’m gonna get from it ’cause it’s, it’s definitely one of those, something interesting might happen. Theory, things where if I go to the London Book Fair, taking my book with me, something interesting might happen. So that’s, that’s the main thing I’ve got coming up.

Chris: Excellent. So who should we pick?

Let’s go pick Chris, what’s your next few days? Hold? Well,

Kris: I’m having a chat with the former Olympian about a book. Oh about wins be featured in said book. So she reached out today actually was Shaline that she reached out. So that’s one of the things I will be doing. I can’t tell you the details of the book because I don’t know anything about the book yet.

So that’s hence the chat about the book. And then also having lunch with one of our partners that we work with just to talk about how. Uh, all things are going. They’re very happy. So we’re, we’re happy that they’re happy. And then obviously it’s Mother’s Day coming up on Sunday, so you know, the two sets of twins will be showing mother lots of love because without her, there is no us, as I like to say.

Chris: Quite right, too. Quite right, too. How about you, Shaline?

Shaline: Well, the event is on Saay, so I’ll be very happy once it’s finished. Very excited for that. Um, I’m sure it’ll be a fabulous occasion, so I’m looking forward to that. I’ve also got some birthday celebrations coming up. It’s my partner’s birthday.

It’s one of my best friend’s birthdays and it is also my son’s birthday this month, so got lots celebrating to do. So really looking forward to that. And kind of work wise, I’ve got a meeting with the chair of the NHS Tru Barts Health Trust, um, because I’m on the cancer board there. So I’m actually getting to meet the chair to put forward some of my patient safety partner, uh, recommendations because I I attend the boards every other month, so, yeah.

Chris: Well, this week, well, work-wise, it’s, it’s continues to be busy. I’m still work doing my, uh, client work and prepping for, so next week I’m off to Liverpool. It’s not somewhere I go very often, but it, uh, Liverpool, that’s where I’m heading for a conference called UCI a or it’s a group called UCI and it’s their conference and basically it’s a higher education technology.

Bash where we, you know, meeting lots of, um, again, we, we, we work for quite a few higher education establishments and in my travels around, I’ve met quite a lot of the CIOs and people like that from higher education institutions. So it’s, again, it’s another nice opportunity to bump into a few, um, old friends and, and meet some more and.

Uh, it is a really fascinating sector, right, because they’ve had a lot of problems, a lot of shocks in terms of student numbers, foreign students, the whole Brexit issue, Erasmus and, and of course they all expanded enormously in, uh, you know, 20 years ago. And, and they’re counting the cost. So it’s a, there’s a, it’s a, it’s a sector, which is really important.

Which is, you know, it’s got some, got its challenges, not that there’s not ways random, but it’s just, it’s interesting to see how you can help people sort of n navigate that. But again, can you help ’em work together? Can you help ’em find common things? So yeah, that’s a, that’s a nice event and I’m looking forward to that.

I,

Matt: fantastic. Well that brings us to the end of. The first show that Chris and I have done for the last two years, and, uh, amazing show, thinking about partnership. So, um, Shaline Chris, thank you so much for joining us this week.

Shaline: Yes. Thank you very much.

Matt: Uh, next week we’ve got another show, having not had a show for a few weeks, uh, there is a show next week, uh, we are going to be rejoined by, uh, the wonderful Anne Basca who runs a company called Data Orchard.

And we’re gonna be talking about their. Annual state of data maturity survey that we’re doing, which they’ve now got something like 20,000 different organizations have submitted information about how mature they are on the data front. Uh, it was published a few months ago. Ian’s gonna come in to talk about that.

It’s fascinating ’cause I’ve seen the report and there’s some really interesting insight into their I mean the overall picture is. Not many organizations are very data mature, but we will dig into that next week. So, hope you have a wonderful week and we will be back next week. I.

Kris: Thank you for listening to WB 40.

Shaline: You can find us on the internet@wbfortypodcast.com

Kris: and on all good

Shaline: podcasting platforms.